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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

#391

Post by tptacek »

mannerheim wrote: post #386
dang wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. For starters, if you had kept "senility" out of it, and just made your case based on what he'd actually reported, you wouldn't have made it so easy for the thread to devolve into a referendum on "ad hominem" arguments. His age and "soundness of mind" --- which you don't know anything about --- has nothing to do with this situation.

It's even worse than that, because really the whole ballgame on a thread like this is dodging what this blogger actually wrote, and instead pivoting to a credibility duel --- Hersh broke Abu Ghraib, and this guy... wrote a blog post? You've lost from the moment you accept that framing. Just read the post and consider what it says! The blogger did the work for you!

On the off chance that getting this feedback from someone on "the same side" as your argument is helpful, that is.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#392

Post by throwoutway »

tptacek wrote: post #223
miguelazo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally every paragraph. Let’s start with this completely unsubstantiated and incoherent section: > The US Air Force officials reportedly proposed “dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely”. One could write an entire post on the reasons why sounds entirely made up by someone with no real grasp of what that suggestion would actually technically entail. During the supposed initial planning of…

I don't think you've picked up the argument being made there, which is that, being a pipeline, the Norwegian Navy wasn't constrained to one particular spot to disable it: it runs seven hundred and fifty miles under the Baltic Sea. The author of this post is saying Hersh doesn't know what a pipeline, not that the USG doesn't. Try another paragraph. Let's interrogate it. For instance: why is the Norwegian Navy allocati…

> it runs seven hundred and fifty miles under the Baltic Sea.

That's not a realistic measurement. Did you mean the length? The deepest part of the Baltic Sea is 459 meters deep. The ocean's deepest point is roughly 7 miles deep.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#393

Post by tptacek »

throwoutway wrote: post #392
tptacek wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you've picked up the argument being made there, which is that, being a pipeline, the Norwegian Navy wasn't constrained to one particular spot to disable it: it runs seven hundred and fifty miles under the Baltic Sea. The author of this post is saying Hersh doesn't know what a pipeline, not that the USG doesn't. Try another paragraph. Let's interrogate it. For instance: why is the Norwegian Navy allocati…

> it runs seven hundred and fifty miles under the Baltic Sea. That's not a realistic measurement. Did you mean the length? The deepest part of the Baltic Sea is 459 meters deep. The ocean's deepest point is roughly 7 miles deep.

The length, is the point.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#394

Post by scythe »

tptacek wrote: post #374
scythe wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>other than that one random, implausibly-well-informed anonymous person told Hersh There is no reason to believe that Hersh is working off a single source. If he were, it would be extremely stupid, and certainly unbefitting a journalist with his level of experience, to admit it, since it would make it far easier to determine who the leaker was — it narrows the list of candidates dramatically. It seems like the whole…

Detection of what? It's not a secret that somebody blew up the pipeline. Do we have a clear theory of what exactly the conspirators were attempting to conceal?

Obviously, detection of who blew up the pipeline. If you can detect the means, then you have a lead for the culprit.

What kind of question is this? All it does is make me think you're being intentionally obtuse. Anyone who blew up the pipeline — or committed any other crime —would try to cover their tracks, unless they were planning to take credit (which they weren't). That's how you always commit crimes!

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#395

Post by scythe »

tptacek wrote: post #242
peteradio wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a "professional" agree to do this work without extensive obvious evidence that it was sanctioned on high? Wouldn't you risk becoming fall guys if you agree to do all this with a minimal crew on a wooden fishing boat? You'd risk being arrested by the local police. I think there is some holistic view on how to get the whole thing to work that might not lead to an obvious minimal solution. Various interests get in…

You don't need to go find the world's best miners like in the movie Armageddon; you can use military divers. You just don't use a carefully tracked warship, one of a single-digit number in its class, as a diving platform. You get the same weird thing with this "camouflage" thing with the C4. Camouflaging from what? They need to make the explosive charges undetectable... for what? Like, the US blows up the Nord Stream…

>Like, the US blows up the Nord Stream pipeline and Russia is like, "oh, shit, we never detected a mine, I guess we'll never know if NATO was behind this, and they're innocent until proven guilty!"

If the US did blow up the pipeline, they would be most interested in keeping it a secret from Germany, not Russia. It would also be important to keep it secret from the voting public, other neutral countries (India, e.g.), pretty much anyone except Russia.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#397

Post by mushbino »

astrange wrote: post #302
mushbino wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were false, it would be Hersh's first false story. He broke My Lai and Abu Ghraib. He's one of the most accomplished journalists in history.

That was 20 years ago. Since then he's apparently gone nuts since he eg believes Opus Dei controls the US military. Though before Abu Ghraib he also claimed the Chicago mob fixed JFK's presidential election.

I can't find anywhere he published those stories. Do you have a link?

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#398

Post by mannerheim »

tptacek wrote: post #391
mannerheim wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes. For starters, if you had kept "senility" out of it, and just made your case based on what he'd actually reported, you wouldn't have made it so easy for the thread to devolve into a referendum on "ad hominem" arguments. His age and "soundness of mind" --- which you don't know anything about --- has nothing to do with this situation. It's even worse than that, because really the whole ballgame on a thread like thi…

Well, I don't know if you noticed, but the part of the thread I responded to was already about discussing Mr Hersh's trustworthiness. And on the contrary, his soundness of mind has everything to do with this.

I would love to discuss the merits of the evidence presented by Mr Hersh. Too bad he hasn't given any! We just have to take him at his word because apparently he's credible and we have to pretend that octogenarians are just as mentally present as the rest of us. Anyone calling this an ad hominem doesn't know what the fallacy even means - it's not attacking the person instead of the argument if the person is the argument in the first place.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#399

Post by halothane »

kurthr wrote: post #370
halothane wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>>Good idea, judge based only on the name of the source, completely captured by narrative and unable to make decisions based any measurable facts they present. Pick a football team and cheer them to victory for surely that's the right way to understand the world, the economy, and geopolitics! Lots of words, but nothing that adds to the discussion that the source of your "new things" is a bunch of Tik-Tokers doing a…

When you're JAQing off the use of chlorine gas in WWI and comparing LRoB to TikTok, ZyclonB and the holocaust are nearby. Since you use the internet I guess you can't know anything, LOL!

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Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#400

Post by halothane »

tptacek wrote: post #289
halothane wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same Bellingcat started by an unemployed man from Leicester, England - "perhaps the foremost expert on ammunitions used in Syria"? I've been reading most of your comments and they all lack details and real evidence, but a lot of character assassination thrown in. I love your writing style, though. Check.

Did you see me call Bellingcat "perhaps the foremost expert on ammunitions used in Syria"? Because I didn't see me calling them that. But you might have a better vantage point than I do.

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