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Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

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Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#381

Post by dang »

halothane wrote: post #379
dang wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please not (a) post in the flamewar style to HN, or (b) use HN for political flamewar? You're breaking the site guidelines badly here. We don't need you to change your views but we do need you to present them thoughtfully and respectfully, if you want to participate here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd b…

Got it. That's not the intent, but have to call out the comment preceding mine which is ad hominem and insulting individuals without providing any substance for discussion.

I didn't see that comment. I've responded now. We don't always read the threads sequentially.

But in any case, other commenters breaking the rules doesn't make it ok for you to break them. (I don't mean you personally there, I mean any of us.) That's just a recipe for a downward spiral (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Also, you broke them in several places, not just that one.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#382

Post by mannerheim »

dang wrote: post #380
mannerheim wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Personal attacks and name-calling are not allowed here. We ban accounts that do that sort of thing, so please don't, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

With all due respect, in a discussion about Seymour Hersh's credibility, his soundness of mind should be a valid criticism.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#383

Post by maybelsyrup »

XorNot wrote: post #332
maybelsyrup wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying someone's claims don't (yet) have the kind of evidence you demand is pretty different from calling someone crazy (and in so doing implying that those claims are not worth the consideration of the sane). The only thing your bullet points were doing is suggesting "look at the delusions of this maniac! He can't be trusted because of them". But because the completely insane shit in my list turned out to be true, H…

Over 10 years . It's one thing to have a story out there no one can prove, it's quite another to have been continuously publishing things you can't prove and which no one else can find any evidence of despite looking. There are multiple factual claims about verifiable vessels, planes and movements being made and none of them are true. All your saying is, despite obvious factual inconsistencies in the parts of the sto…

> you've already got a conclusion you like

> the real big secret is "it was Russia"

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#384

Post by StanislavPetrov »

astrange wrote: post #305
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CIA narrative on the "Syria gas attacks" have been roundly debunked by the meticulous reporting of Aaron Mate (and others). The even more absurd "Skripal poisoning" incident has completely fallen apart upon only the barest scrutiny. It is sad and disturbing these these completely debunked narratives are still being touted by people as credible. Anyone (rightfully) calling for skepticism and scrutiny into Hersch's…

Aaron Maté is a ridiculous tankie who's currently claiming the US is trying to coup Hungary. (Why as a leftist he's supporting the current Hungary government is unclear, but being a tankie requires you to start with the US being bad and work the rest out from there.)

What's the word that requires someone to start with the US being good and working out the rest from there? Samantha Powers' recent trip to Hungary and her statements about USAID’s "newly launched work to help support democracy in Central Europe, including by bolstering civil society and helping independent media thrive and build new audiences" exactly mirrors the rhetoric from what we pulled in Ukraine in 2014 and the rest of the "color revolutions".

>Why as a leftist he's supporting the current Hungary government is unclear

Why is it so difficult for some people to understand that even if you don't like a foreign government, that you still don't have the right to replace it (whether through invasion or subversion) with a government you favor? It is possible to be both critical of the Hungarian government and also to take the position that the US should not be in the game of choosing who leads Hungary. Believing that we should stay out of the internal politics of foreign countries does not equate to apologizing or making excuses for those countries. It is especially ironic that those who insist that we act as policeman of the world and decide who is fit to run foreign countries also cry loudest about "foreign interference" in our own elections.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#385

Post by dang »

mannerheim wrote: post #382
dang wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal attacks and name-calling are not allowed here. We ban accounts that do that sort of thing, so please don't, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

With all due respect, in a discussion about Seymour Hersh's credibility, his soundness of mind should be a valid criticism.

What you did was against the rules regardless of who you're talking about. It's not a borderline call.

Maybe you don't owe disagreeable elderly journalists better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#386

Post by mannerheim »

dang wrote: post #385
mannerheim wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, in a discussion about Seymour Hersh's credibility, his soundness of mind should be a valid criticism.

What you did was against the rules regardless of who you're talking about. It's not a borderline call. Maybe you don't owe disagreeable elderly journalists better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is there a respectful way of suggesting a journalist is too senile to be reliable?

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#387

Post by bhk »

runnerup wrote: post #347
bhk wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acoustic impedance of seawater varies with salinity.

Sure but that doesn’t generalize to other materials. Salinity matched C4 won’t be acoustically matched. Definitely a red herring point.

"Salinity matched" does not make any sense, and the article said nothing of the sort.

It said "make them appear ... as part of the natural background — something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water". Making something invisible to sonar could depend on the acoustic impedance (which varies with salinity) of the surrounding water and might involve adapting the object accordingly.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#388

Post by IIAOPSW »

Jerry2 wrote: post #339
IIAOPSW wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're entire system of reasoning comes down to choosing what to believe based on how much you like the person saying it. And when you don't like the person saying it you can't even say their name without inserting a stupid insult like "criminal cabal" and "OSINTbro shill". You systematically sidestep all questions on matters of fact in favor of naked tribal social reasoning. Even in this discourse you opted to reaso…

Hersh's report adds up more than "Russia did it" nonsense that's coming out of CIA-approved sources.

Even after I point out your "reasoning" system and its flaws, you come right out the gate with "CIA approved sources". Are you even capable of anything other than bashing the source?

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#389

Post by tptacek »

maybelsyrup wrote: post #383
XorNot wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 10 years . It's one thing to have a story out there no one can prove, it's quite another to have been continuously publishing things you can't prove and which no one else can find any evidence of despite looking. There are multiple factual claims about verifiable vessels, planes and movements being made and none of them are true. All your saying is, despite obvious factual inconsistencies in the parts of the sto…

> you've already got a conclusion you like > the real big secret is "it was Russia"

Yes. The previous comment is also problematic. It does not follow from Hersh being one Smiths song short of a mixtape that the opposite of his conclusions are true. It's indicative of how all these discussions happen: points made to impeach Hersh's conclusions are analyzed as if they are arguments for the purity of US foreign policy. Hersh might be "right" that the US is behind the pipeline attack! But that doesn't matter if he got there by guessing. The real question is: can we learn anything from the story he told, and the answer to that seems, pretty convincingly, to be "only that his sources are fabulists".

It would be handy if you could conclude things like "whatever Hersh said, the opposite is true" from his stories! His journalism would be super valuable if that was the case. You'd just read it and draw the opposite conclusions. But you can't do that, because his stories (at least since 2006) are unmoored from reality.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#390

Post by mturmon »

zmgsabst wrote: post #231
mturmon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're jumping to a conclusion here -- sometimes the journalist does change. Plenty of political journalists go off the deep end at some point in their career. (Prof.) Mark Crispin Miller used to write well-researched essays on the culture of TV, now he believes that Sandy Hook was likely staged and that the standard explanation for 9/11 isn't true. Christopher Hitchens made a significant swerve to the right later in…

Those last two examples indicate you have a tribalistic bias though: Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald changed their politics which you’re implying impacts their credibility because their friends (fellow members of your tribe) said mean things about that. Further, why is Christopher Hitchens changing his politics relevant to a discussion about journalist credibility — and even mixed into a paragraph about hoaxes?

> why is Christopher Hitchens changing his politics relevant to a discussion about journalist credibility...?

Because, unfortunately to those who admired him, Christopher Hitchens allowed his disgust for Islamic fundamentalism to lead him to credulously advocate for a war that turned out to be based on a series of lies? Lies that he partly saw through, but that he decided to ignore in service of what for him was the larger good?

It's an instructive episode.

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