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In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

nytimes.com

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Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#461

Post by selimthegrim »

baryphonic wrote: post #111
automatoney wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Behold, "a noble cause": "On May 26, 1947, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a memo stating, 'With regard to the picture It's a Wonderful Life, [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a 'scrooge-type' so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Co…

At that time, McCarthy had been in the Senate for all of five months, not nearly long enough for him to start grilling people for having associations with the Communist party. Of course, few communists openly come out and say they are making communist propaganda. It's a bit silly to think Capra would have been one of them, or that "It's a Wonderful Life" doesn't also celebrate the banker George Bailey (portrayed by c…

Capra was tarred as one and as a reaction became a right wing sympathizer for the rest of his life.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#462

Post by RyEgswuCsn »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #443
RyEgswuCsn wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can spin this too if you allow me: "genocide" of Muslims via constant war-waging; "ethnic cleansing" of native Americans; natural resource exploitation on a global scale; "modern day slavery" (i.e. extreme capitalism) both domestically by trapping workers into lifetime debts, and overseas by outsourcing to sweat shops; "deadly global pathogen release" by politicising pandemic responses while failing at it. Rivalry…

> no contender for hegemony is morally superior than another. Contemplate Nazi Germany winning WWII, or Soviet Russia winning the Cold War. Your contention doesn't stand up to history's lessons.

That’s exactly the point. Had the Nazis won WWII, the narrative would have been the allies were the one that commit genocides, the morally corrupt, and the war-mongers; the Nazis will boast themselves as the most righteous, and most people would have no problem believing that. Hard to imagine for sure, but in a world where the winners write the history, it would be naive to think only the winners must be just because “justice always prevails”.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#463

Post by pphysch »

dang wrote: post #457
pphysch wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. It leads to repetitive, dumbed-down, nasty discussion. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114691 .

I think it is a reasonable thing to not leave misinformation unchallenged, especially when that misinformation is correlated with a rise in (lethal) hate crimes against Asian Americans.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#464

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

eru wrote: post #435
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two aspects to this: 1. There is a massive amount of propaganda around the situation in Xinjiang. While the Chinese government is extremely harsh in going after separatism and what it views as religious extremism, there is also a huge amount of lying, exaggeration and misrepresentation from Western governments and media on the issue. The Trump administration tried to spin Xinjiang as some sort of modern-day…

> The US' unprovoked (and illegal) invasion of Iraq [...] What do you mean by illegal specifically? I am fairly sure it was against Iraq's laws. Not sure it was against American laws, or at least not in the sense that 'can you get a court to convict'?

International law. The US itself pushed to establish aggressive war as a crime at the Nuremburg Trials.

War is only allowed in two circumstances:

* Self-defense against an imminent threat (for example, a pre-emptive strike against a clearly hostile army gathering on your border for an invasion).

* With UN Security Council authorization.

The US did not fight the Iraq War in self-defense. It was a war of choice on the other side of the world.

The US specifically avoided asking for UNSC authorization, because it was aware that it would be denied.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#465

Post by javajosh »

openknot wrote: post #431
javajosh wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made my comment in light of my recent education about how the government actually functions, specifically its criminal justice system. On the spectrum of outcomes this is actually pretty good, considering the alternatives. Countless men are wrongfully convicted, spend their entire lives in prison, and are eventually exonerated. What do they get? They get released.

I've read similarly from the Marshall Project's Innocence Project [0] about wrongful convictions, so I see more of where you're coming from. My view of justice, however, is that a government should treat its citizens fairly. Taking into account prior behavior of the government, this is extraordinary, but I personally differ in that praise should be reserved when a government acts fairly independent of prior performan…

I agree with you. In fact, I'd go further. If I had my way these kinds of misdeeds would result in sanctions against the prosecution, or the judge if involved. But our justice system is deeply protected from any accountability by layers and layers of both practical and legal moats. It is virtually impossible to sanction a judge[0]. It is difficult to even sanction an attorney. The key problem being no working attorney wants to take on either target, because it will ruin their relationships upon which they make a living. The entire system is "don't rock the boat" writ large. A state mints 20k new lawyers a year, and disbars maybe 4, and each of those disbarments are uphill battles. And literally no one cares about this.

I absolutely hate the way the system is. But that is how the system is.

0. The only exception I've ever heard of was the recall of the judge in Brock Turner's rape case, and that only happened because of lightening-in-a-bottle once-a-century national attention. Judges have incredible power in the US, and virtually no oversight. Almost all judgeships are corruptly acquired by backroom finagling among lawyers trading favors with each other. Do you think they'll allow something stupid like malfeasance ruin the careful spending of political capital it took to install that judge? Hell no.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#466

Post by eru »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #464
eru wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US' unprovoked (and illegal) invasion of Iraq [...] What do you mean by illegal specifically? I am fairly sure it was against Iraq's laws. Not sure it was against American laws, or at least not in the sense that 'can you get a court to convict'?

International law. The US itself pushed to establish aggressive war as a crime at the Nuremburg Trials. War is only allowed in two circumstances: * Self-defense against an imminent threat (for example, a pre-emptive strike against a clearly hostile army gathering on your border for an invasion). * With UN Security Council authorization. The US did not fight the Iraq War in self-defense. It was a war of choice on the…

Thanks. Yes, I thought of that possibility of International Laws, but left them out for simplicity.

Keep in mind that the US did not declare their invasion of Iraq to be a war.

I did a bit of Googling on the legality of the Iraq War. Not so much to figure out whether it was legal in some objective sense, but in what the various parties involved see as the legal underpinnings of their doings.

See eg https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#467

Post by FpUser »

dang wrote: post #459
FpUser wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're happily killing people or sponsor killings in the rest of the world. There are countries that can attest to that.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. It leads to repetitive, dumbed-down, nasty discussion. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114691 .

May be it is just me but it feels like posts that present the US in less than favorite light are getting special attention from moderators. I do not see nearly the attention to the posts of the opposite nature.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#468

Post by known »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #116
sigmaprimus wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>Ethnic Chinese already face unfair hurdles by the current push against standardized testing. Please elaborate on this argument.

Asian-Americans (in particular ethnic Chinese and Indian) have, on average, far better ACT/SAT scores than white or black applicants to good US universities. It is an open secret that in order to balance admissions (i.e. racially discriminate) against the former and in favour of the latter, most universities downweight test scores in favour of other subjective categories like "personality" scores where Asians magical…

No post body was provided.

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#469

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

eru wrote: post #466
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

International law. The US itself pushed to establish aggressive war as a crime at the Nuremburg Trials. War is only allowed in two circumstances: * Self-defense against an imminent threat (for example, a pre-emptive strike against a clearly hostile army gathering on your border for an invasion). * With UN Security Council authorization. The US did not fight the Iraq War in self-defense. It was a war of choice on the…

Thanks. Yes, I thought of that possibility of International Laws, but left them out for simplicity. Keep in mind that the US did not declare their invasion of Iraq to be a war. I did a bit of Googling on the legality of the Iraq War. Not so much to figure out whether it was legal in some objective sense, but in what the various parties involved see as the legal underpinnings of their doings. See eg https://digital-co…

> the US did not declare their invasion of Iraq to be a war.

That's a purely domestic issue within US law. The full-scale invasion of another country constitutes "war" for the purposes of international law.

The Iraq War is one of the clearest examples of an illegal war of aggression in modern times.

The US faced no serious threat from Iraq. Even if one were to believe all the claims about WMD (which were made in bad faith), Iraq would still not be an imminent threat to the US. Defensive wars have to be in response to an imminent, concrete threat, like an enemy force massing on the border. The mere fact that a hostile country possesses weapons does not justify a pre-emptive strike. If it did, the ban on aggressive war would be meaningless.

Of course, as is now known from leaked memos, the entire WMD issue was viewed by the Bush administration as a convenient pretext for invading Iraq.[0] Many people (myself included) already saw through the WMD propaganda back in 2002-2003, despite it being relentlessly hyped by major media (from the New York Times on down). I personally was surprised, however, by just how cynical the WMD claims of the Bush administration later turned out to be: for every claim they confidently made in public, they knew the evidence was thin to non-existent.

If the invasion of Iraq - a non-defensive war, sold using a dishonest media campaign, waged without UNSC authorization by the world's most powerful country against a comparatively tiny country - isn't an illegal war of aggression, then nothing is.

0. Downing Street Memo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_memo

Re: In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist

#470

Post by dang »

FpUser wrote: post #467
dang wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. It leads to repetitive, dumbed-down, nasty discussion. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114691 .

May be it is just me but it feels like posts that present the US in less than favorite light are getting special attention from moderators. I do not see nearly the attention to the posts of the opposite nature.

From my perspective, having received a great many of these perceptions across the entire spectrum of HN users, I can tell you pretty confidently that the dominant variable here is your own feelings on the topic. That's not a criticism! It seems that all of our minds work this way.

I just mean that, when one's passions are engaged on a topic, there's a tendency to see the moderators as lined up against one's view. Meanwhile, people with the opposite view see the mods as lined up against them. It's the same mods in both cases; the variable with predictive power here is the passions of the perceiver. That is, if you tell me that someone's unhappy with the mods and you tell me what that person is passionate about, I can tell you what they think the mods' bias is.

I believe that the explanation for this is that we're all much more likely to notice the datapoints we most dislike or disagree with, and to weight them more heavily. If you had opposite priors (that is, if you disliked and disagreed with the opposite sort of story), then you'd be noticing and/or weighting more heavily the datapoints with opposite valence, and you'd feel like the moderators were favoring those instead. Indeed, people with the opposing view to yours do feel exactly that about the mods—just as the hypothesis would predict

Past explanations here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

p.s. From my perspective also, we're definitely not consulting the direction of someone's views about the U.S., or any other country, when evaluating whether their comment is breaking the HN guidelines. I realize that's not necessarily easy to believe, and of course unconscious bias is still a thing even when one is consciously trying to be even-handed. All I can tell you is that we're consciously trying very hard at that, and we at least have many years of practice at it.

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