271–280 of 349 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stop being a joker, what you're saying isn't true. CSPAN's coverage is right on YouTube and anyone can look it up and make you look like a fool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JemWkV2Vcic&t=967s
Did you post the wrong link or something? I clicked the video you linked, and most of the speech is Biden with red walls and marines to either side of him.
Do you think those chickens will never come home to roost? Do you think their training and equipment and tactics wont soon come to border patrol, and then your local police department?
Sure, this agency with a carte blanche now is 'only' targeting people who don't look like you or speak your language or share the same values as you. But how long do you think the US can go before its departments are weaponized by someone who has dreams of being dictator of the US? 20 years? 50? 100?
Rather than just writing Snowden off because he would rather live in the relative freedom of an authoritarian nation than rot in the cell of a 'free' one, maybe take his argument at face value and recognize the real danger of unaccountability.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah the real photo with the full background is much more mundane but this is how politics will always be.
At least he didn't do something really despicable, like wear a tan suit.
Has everyone on Hacker News lost their minds? I come here to read and sometimes participate in rational discussions. These comments are some of the lowest effort, least rigorous, paranoid bullshit I’ve ever seen on this site. We’re a step above Facebook comments on NPR articles, here. Partisanship, viciousness and lazy conspiracy theories are not a good look for this site.
Snowden is absolutely a hero for what he did to expose US surveillance. It is also right for people to be suspicious of anything he says at the moment given his current situation. There’s no contradiction between the two. As I wrote elsewhere in the comments on this story, the atrocities of the CIA are sadly well known. There’s nothing new here. The beginning of Snowden’s post is a surprisingly poor take on Biden’s r…
I would urge you to consider just how completely obsessive politicians are about every single aspect of appearance: the color of one's tie, the lapel of choice of the day, how you hold your hands while speaking, even the tint of your skin. That his speech evoked the worst of imagery was, unfortunately, not just an unfortunate accident.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they meant the one with the unprecedented violent riots in the Capitol that resulted in some folks dying. Could be wrong.
On the off chance you weren't aware, the story about an officer being bludgeoned to death by a rioter wielding a fire extinguisher was completely fabricated. [1] He was uninjured during the riots, and died the following day of a stroke due to a preexisting blood clot. Kind of interesting the massive propaganda campaign following his death that was maintained for months, even though the coroner's report on his death w…
Unarmed rioters that were ignoring LEO instructions to stop trying to breach an area containing a number of politicians. There is every reason to believe that, had they breached, violence would have occurred. Acting as if their violent behavior was not the direct cause of their death just because they were unarmed is not reasonable, in my opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which one? 2000? 2008? 2016? 2020?
I definitely remember a bunch of democrats being convinced that 2004 was stolen. Amusingly enough, they blamed Diebold too. 2000 is probably the one for which the strongest case exists, but people don't care about that one anymore.
Has everyone on Hacker News lost their minds? I come here to read and sometimes participate in rational discussions. These comments are some of the lowest effort, least rigorous, paranoid bullshit I’ve ever seen on this site. We’re a step above Facebook comments on NPR articles, here. Partisanship, viciousness and lazy conspiracy theories are not a good look for this site.
Or perhaps we don't need HN exceptionalism? Intelligence isn't translated universally onto all subject matters. Just because someone is good at writing code doesn't make them well-suited to understand any non-programming topics to have a well-informed or rational discussion about it. There's no reason why HN should have a higher quality discussion on these subjects than some generic subreddit or FB comment sections.…
It is though!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seeing as how he's stuck there with nowhere else to go except prison in the US, and owes what little freedom he has to them, I think it's fairly obvious and smart to not speak ill of your host, especially considering what they're capable of. I'm quite sure he would have a LOT to say about it were he not stuck there. Yes, we know, if it were you you'd be condemning them to their face.
> he's stuck there with nowhere else to go except prison in the US, Meanwhile Chelsea Manning is walking the streets of the US as a free person. Why do people pretend that Snowden's only option was and is to live in Russia, a country that is diametrically opposed to everything he ostensibly stands for?
Snowden ended up in Russia by accident. He was flying from Hong Kong to Ecuador, and his flight happened to be laid over in Moscow when the US government cancelled his passport. He spent a month and a half living in the airport before he gave up trying to leave Russia and asked for asylum.
If he could have gone anywhere else it seems likely he would have done so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CIA being a nasty organization that does nasty things has been well-known for decades. What makes (most) Americans tolerate this is the same reason anyone tolerates such nasty things -- they're being done to other people. Drone strikes in particular have been discussed since the Obama administration. It's not okay, but as Snowden himself points out, it is normal. What did alarm me was Snowden mischaracterizing Bi…
Sincere question: what's the alternative to drone strikes when dealing with organizations like Al Quaeda, Taliban or ISIS? It seems that in the past less targeted weapons would have been used causing even more damage to civilians in the vicinity. Drone strikes, raids (which still ended up killing a little girl) or just giving up and withdrawing are the only real options I can see.
This is not an issue I pay a lot of attention to, so you should probably find other summaries as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A bit hypocritical of Snowden to criticize the USA while holed up in Russia. So you have no problem with the substance of the article, only with the author's place of residence? The article itself references several instances of the CIA toppling governments and starting wars - those are not invalidated because Russia also did similar or and worse things. Plenty of people in the Middle East and Central America could…
> Plenty of people in the Middle East and Central America could justifiably feel the same about the CIA as you do about Russia. (The USSR, not Russia.) It's pure fantasy to argue that the CIA, even given their sordid history, ever partook in anything even remotely comparable to the scale of the USSR's destructive regime[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_the_Sovie...
Regardless, my statement holds - there are plenty of people that justifiably hate the CIA. It wouldn't surprise me if plenty of proud Americans hated it - it has dragged their country into unnecessary wars, and subverted their democracy. Why this desire to protect a rogue agency that seems hostile even to the US itself, just because Russia is bad?