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

Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream

oalexanderdk.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 267 posts

Re: Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream

#161

Post by drewcoo »

alienicecream wrote: post #144

Can someone explain why some people here are so agitated over a claim that the US did it? Is it hard to believe that US intelligence would do something like this? Besides, if you hate Russia then it's a good thing right?

It's not about any of the details at all, really.

It's about questioning the mainstream media narrative. Mainstream media is politically affiliated. So questioning it becomes a political act.

Once it gets political, people lose all reason, form up into tribes, and things get rough.

Re: Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream

#162

Post by abracadaniel »

marcusverus wrote: post #116
abracadaniel wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said that in the context of sanctions, and which did end up shutting it down long before it was blown up. It only appears to be a threat of destruction retroactively because it was later blown up. There were no articles claiming he was threatening to blow it up at the time. Everyone knew the context was with regards to sanctions at the time.

> He said that in the context of sanctions Do you have a different transcript or something? There's nothing in the video that provides such a context. Regardless, "There will be no more Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it" is a weird way to threaten sanctions, don't you think?

You're looking at a youtube short that explicitly cuts out any semblance of context. The entire world had been discussing nothing but Russian sanctions for weeks at that point. And no, it wasn't a weird way to threaten sanctions, and no one at the time thought any differently, otherwise there would've been a flurry of articles saying Biden threatened to blow it up. But that never happened.

Re: Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream

#163

Post by mc32 »

throwaway4good wrote: post #136
nkurz wrote: post #50

Good piece, and I think he points out some clear problems with the exact events that Hersh describes. I think the lack of a verifiable path for either the ship carrying divers or for the plane that supposedly dropped off the sonobuoy do make it less likely that Hersh's version actually happened. The author's conclusion is that this is because Hersh's source was making things up, but I think it's also compatible with…

Why does the bombs have to go off immediately when the plane drops the signalling device? If you got through setting all this up, I am sure you can also figure out how to delay the explosion so there would be no obvious connection to a plane flying over.

Maybe to ensure a "bysailing" ship isn't accidentally damaged? Presumably a plan could detect a ship if it was near target and do a go around?

Re: Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream

#164

Post by exolymph »

erentz wrote: post #156

It’s interesting to me that dang overrode community moderation of this story [1] yesterday. Without having first even read it. A story that was based on an unverified anonymous source, by a discredited journalist, and which as we see now contained provably made up parts. Because dang overrode moderation, that literal fake news (fake as in actually made up) was allowed to hover on the front page for a long time and gi…

Dang also constantly gets criticized for not overriding flags on stories. He has to make judgment calls and ultimately that's a flawed human process. He won't always get it right, and furthermore people will often disagree on which instances he messed up (or didn't).

Re: Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream

#165

Post by askheqybewq »

erentz wrote: post #156

It’s interesting to me that dang overrode community moderation of this story [1] yesterday. Without having first even read it. A story that was based on an unverified anonymous source, by a discredited journalist, and which as we see now contained provably made up parts. Because dang overrode moderation, that literal fake news (fake as in actually made up) was allowed to hover on the front page for a long time and gi…

>by a discredited journalist

I'm French and I had never heard of that journalist. Can you share the link to the official list of discredited journalists so I know who not to trust going forward?

Re: Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream

#166

Post by layer8 »

alienicecream wrote: post #144

Can someone explain why some people here are so agitated over a claim that the US did it? Is it hard to believe that US intelligence would do something like this? Besides, if you hate Russia then it's a good thing right?

Not agitated, but I believe it would be incredibly unwise for the US to have done this, in particular regarding the trust relationship with Germany. It’s also naive to think that who did it wouldn’t come out sooner or later. Those things have a way to not stay secret.

Re: Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream

#167

Post by BWStearns »

alienicecream wrote: post #158
BWStearns wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll speak not for, but as one of, the agitated. People are not agitated at the suggestion that the US did it. People are agitated because the claims are coming from Cy Hersh without remotely compelling evidence, who in the past decade or so has turned to spouting off unsubstantiated claims to carry water for Assad and Putin and shilling ridiculous Bin Laden theories and 9/11 trutherism. I'm personally agitated becau…

So should everyone shut up until they have hard evidence to present? That doesn't sound like a very interesting way to live. Even in court circumstantial evidence is a valid form of evidence and plausible scenarios can be presented to try and convince. What is wrong with that?

If you don’t bother to fact check your evidence before making serious accusations then yes, one should shut up.

Circumstantial evidence is still evidence yes, but this is just a bunch of shit that is observably false followed by salacious assertions.

Presenting claims that are trivially falsifiable as true without bothering to apply skepticism because it plays into your favored narrative is not journalism. It’s whatever the hell Hersh is doing now.

Re: Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream

#168

Post by lebovic »

erentz wrote: post #156

It’s interesting to me that dang overrode community moderation of this story [1] yesterday. Without having first even read it. A story that was based on an unverified anonymous source, by a discredited journalist, and which as we see now contained provably made up parts. Because dang overrode moderation, that literal fake news (fake as in actually made up) was allowed to hover on the front page for a long time and gi…

If community moderation worked perfectly, there would be no reason to moderate. dang was clear and consistent in his moderation, even though he received the most backlash I've seen him face in the thread [1].

Seymour Hersh's stories have faced similar backlash every time they're released, including counter-statements by the US government. He has put out more dubious pieces as of late – he could be right or wrong about this – but I'd rather be exposed to his ideas than have them censored.

Anecdotally, I found the Seymour Hersh story intellectually gratifying, and was forewarned of the murkiness of its contents by the HN comments. I think all functioned pretty well on the HN side.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34712496

Re: Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream

#169

Post by askheqybewq »

remote_phone wrote: post #106

I don’t care either way who blew up the pipeline but to me the biggest glaring reason why I don’t think it’s the US is because Russia did not retaliate in any meaningful way. Us peons are clueless about what happened but Russia knows and they would know if it was them. If it wasn’t them then it’s obvious who did It and escalating the war would be justified. The fact this didn’t happen to me suggests it was Russia all…

Russia would only retaliate in a visible way if they played a tit-for-tat strategy. But that's not the only option. That's only how Americans think ("something HAS to be done right now, it doesn't matter if we end up punishing the wrong guy or the wrong country").

From the point of view of Russia, this is just yet another move in the much larger scale game of energy geopolitics. Russia's answer might not be to blow up some random pipeline in Alaska but to do many other things that will secure their energy contracts elsewhere, while harming its adversaries in the process.

Re: Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream

#170

Post by alienicecream »

BWStearns wrote: post #167
alienicecream wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So should everyone shut up until they have hard evidence to present? That doesn't sound like a very interesting way to live. Even in court circumstantial evidence is a valid form of evidence and plausible scenarios can be presented to try and convince. What is wrong with that?

If you don’t bother to fact check your evidence before making serious accusations then yes, one should shut up. Circumstantial evidence is still evidence yes, but this is just a bunch of shit that is observably false followed by salacious assertions. Presenting claims that are trivially falsifiable as true without bothering to apply skepticism because it plays into your favored narrative is not journalism. It’s whate…

I don't understand how it is "observably false". It seems at least like a plausible story, although without hard evidence no one can say for sure. Calling the whole story "observably false" and "trivially falsifiable" seems to way overstate the case, and I wonder what the motivation and emotion behind that is.
Post reply on HN