Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Julian Assange in Limbo

lrb.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 177 posts

Re: Julian Assange in Limbo

#111

Post by jerkstate »

netsharc wrote: post #91
phkahler wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snowden is like a thorn in the side to some people in the US government. Putin probably like him right where he is.

Sadly Snowden is in a position where Putin can use him for a trade. One possible scenario I thought is Trump getting desperate and asking Putin for Snowden to be extradited so Trump can rah rah about being the man that got "the traitor". Meanwhile Putin would get whatever it is Putin wants from this trade, because as we know Trump is an unparalleled genius in deals...

Come on. Trump's base thinks Snowden is a patriot. Do you even know Roger Stone?

Re: Julian Assange in Limbo

#112

Post by dang »

jsf01 wrote: post #100
dang wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you didn't routinely break the site guidelines you'd find it easy enough to participate. Note that this thread is on the front page.

Seems common here that many interesting discussions are also controversial and therefore result in a lot of downvotes. It’s a pain to read downvoted comments because of the low contrast despite them sometimes being insightful yet unpopular. I also catch myself automatically taking a harsher stance towards grayed out messages before even reading them. I wouldn’t be surprised if many downvotes come in after the initial…

If you click on a grayed-out comment's timestamp, it should take you to the comment's own page and the text there should be readable.

There's no approach here that doesn't suck. The fading of downvoted comments has downsides, but I think not doing it would have more downsides. It's really important for there to be visual signals of when the community doesn't support something, because in the absence of such signals, people will routinely jump to the conclusion "Hacker News agrees with this". That's not only a non sequitur, it's a category error, but that makes no difference.

Re: Julian Assange in Limbo

#113

Post by ephemeralism »

dang wrote: post #112
jsf01 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems common here that many interesting discussions are also controversial and therefore result in a lot of downvotes. It’s a pain to read downvoted comments because of the low contrast despite them sometimes being insightful yet unpopular. I also catch myself automatically taking a harsher stance towards grayed out messages before even reading them. I wouldn’t be surprised if many downvotes come in after the initial…

If you click on a grayed-out comment's timestamp, it should take you to the comment's own page and the text there should be readable. There's no approach here that doesn't suck. The fading of downvoted comments has downsides, but I think not doing it would have more downsides. It's really important for there to be visual signals of when the community doesn't support something, because in the absence of such signals,…

Could this not be achieved in some other way that doesn't hurt the readability? Or at least a choice to turn it off or down in settings.

Squinting your eyes, highlighting the text or going to a separate page really breaks the flow of reading.

Re: Julian Assange in Limbo

#114

Post by belorn »

netsharc wrote: post #91
phkahler wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snowden is like a thorn in the side to some people in the US government. Putin probably like him right where he is.

Sadly Snowden is in a position where Putin can use him for a trade. One possible scenario I thought is Trump getting desperate and asking Putin for Snowden to be extradited so Trump can rah rah about being the man that got "the traitor". Meanwhile Putin would get whatever it is Putin wants from this trade, because as we know Trump is an unparalleled genius in deals...

Simple solution: the US give Snowden his passport and guaranties that they won't go after him while he fly to a any other country that is willing to offer him asylum.

The Evo Morales grounding incident showed what happens if Snowden tries to leave russia. The US pressured France, Spain, and Italy to forced the airplane of the Bolivia government on the mere suspicion that Snowden may had been onboard. Afterward all three countries basically said "ops, sorrrrry, we was ordered by the US to do this".

Julian Assange later claimed that it was he who told the US about the flight in order to distract the US agents, which resulted in the Bolivian ambassador to Russia demanding that Assange apologize for putting their president's life at risk. Illustrates nicely how the game of politics works.

Re: Julian Assange in Limbo

#115

Post by jariel »

AndrewBissell wrote: post #46
jariel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sounds like the NSA who couldn't point to a single instance of stopping any type of terrorist attack/operation despite collecting anything they could get their hands on." This is kind of a misrepresentation of the situation. Manning leaked mostly diplomatic cables, the contents of which he was unaware of, thereby harming his whistleblower credentials. The contents were not what we would regard as 'intelligence infor…

> That gigabyte of private information was released and there wasn't a single scandal of it shows how tight the operation was, moreover any reading of the cables demonstrates how well the US diplomatic corps were actually doing their jobs. No, it just shows how subservient to U.S. foreign policy the American press is (they did not undertake any widespread publishing of embarrassing details from the cables), and how u…

"No, it just shows how subservient to U.S. foreign policy the American press is "

This is demonstrably false.

Forst - the press loves a scandal, it's what they live on. They were happy to talk about Snowden, Assange etc. for quite a long time.

You're literally saying the press is acting against their own best interest and purpose which is upside down.

Second - we don't need the press to find wrongdoing. It's all there for you to see. Where is the scandal?

The cable releases prove that the American diplomatic corpos is doing a good job by any measure.

Re: Julian Assange in Limbo

#116

Post by barry-cotter »

fractallyte wrote: post #105
barry-cotter wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I think of the worst criminal of the modern era (post WW2) the first name that comes to mind is Vladimir Putin. Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin

Yes, and one would think that after all those examples of fine leadership, us 'civilized' nations would have learned a thing or two? Putin's regime carried out these crimes in the Caucasus in the 21st century (and earlier), and they are continuing even as you read this comment...

The Human Rights ideology is a con. No one is willing to make it real, i.e. to wage war to force other nations to conform to it. Absent that it will continue to be internationally irrelevant, window dressing that occasionally effects marginal decisions and never impacts anyone powerful.

Re: Julian Assange in Limbo

#117

Post by fit2rule »

fractallyte wrote: post #104
fit2rule wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he revealed evidence of one of the worst crimes committed by humanity in the last 100 years? 4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lot of blood on the hands of the American people. And, we all know how much they hate to be embarrassed by such things ..

4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lot of blood on the hands of the American people That's very simplistic, and ignorant. Those deaths were the result of the dissolution of a regime forcefully (ie. using terror) to hold together an unstable populace. Sure, it was triggered by US actions, but that's really not the same thing...

Not really, no. This is a common justification that Americans use to excuse themselves for any responsibility for the crimes against humanity committed in their name, but anyone outside the American bubble knows that those refugees and war orphans weren't happening before some kids in Arizona went to work in a strip mall to cowardly drop bombs from robot planes half-way around the world ..

Re: Julian Assange in Limbo

#118

Post by fit2rule »

barry-cotter wrote: post #59
deathgrips wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This implies that there are political motives that justify killing thousands to millions of soldiers and civilians. Can you or anyone here provide a non-exhaustive list of these justifiable motives?

Stopping genocide. More generally the Responsibility to Protect[1]. For a while this seemed likely to have legs but after Libya went from a functioning state that was more or less peaceful to a never ending civil war with open slave markets due to Obama, Clinton and Power Russia and China are likely to veto any similar US actions. Note the US isn’t solely to blame. In Libya and Syria there was a lot of support in Eur…

Cool. I look forward to America using its responsibilities to stop the genocide in Yemen that it has been so far supporting for the last few years in its alliance with KSA.

"But the other kids do it too" is never going to work in the ICC. Which explains why the refrain is so common, and why the USA is terrified of the ICC.

Re: Julian Assange in Limbo

#119

Post by fit2rule »

runawaybottle wrote: post #106
catalogia wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars You've mentioned this number a few times, but I can't find a source for it. Can you point me in the right direction?

I don’t think 4 million will be a verifiable number, but the wiki on Iraq war details somewhere in the half a million via various examinations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War If we include Afghanistan, we could be in the million range.

Physicians for Social Responsibility did a very interesting report on this a few years ago - the figures have risen steadily since, however:

https://www.psr.org/blog/resource/body-count/

Focusing on Iraq alone:

--

"From the relation between the current number given by IBC and the one given for the end of June 2006 (43,394), it concludes that the number of Iraqis killed up to September 2011 is at around 1.46 million"

...

"This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs. And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely."

--

And then .. there is the situation in Yemen. Americans are very, very quiet about that. And there is an evil reason for that. 2 million people have starved to death as a result of American-supported genocide by the KSA.

Re: Julian Assange in Limbo

#120

Post by fit2rule »

asjw wrote: post #53
fit2rule wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he revealed evidence of one of the worst crimes committed by humanity in the last 100 years? 4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lot of blood on the hands of the American people. And, we all know how much they hate to be embarrassed by such things ..

> one of the worst crimes committed by humanity in the last 100 years? As much as I oppose to US military politics, I think that in the past 100 years there have been much worse crimes than US wars in the middle east. If I think of the worst criminal of the modern era (post WW2) the first name that comes to mind is Vladimir Putin. For once: he wiped a tenth of the entire Chechen population, it's like if someone order…

Pop quiz: who is supporting military operations over Yemen right now, resulting in millions of starving victims on the ground?

(Hint: it isn't Putin.)

Post reply on HN