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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

#401

Post by dang »

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?

You could start by editing out swipes, as the site guidelines request. By what logic did you think it was ok to post nastiness like "He's clearly cuckoo for cocoa puffs" and, worse, "time to send him to the nursing home"? That's an outright slur. Please don't do such things on HN.

As tptacek correctly pointed out, it also discredits your argument, so it would also be in your interest to edit out. Either way, though, we need you to stop posting flamebait and/or snark to this site.

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

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#402

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #389
maybelsyrup wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

[deleted]

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#403

Post by mannerheim »

dang wrote: post #401
mannerheim wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You could start by editing out swipes, as the site guidelines request. By what logic did you think it was ok to post nastiness like "He's clearly cuckoo for cocoa puffs" and, worse, "time to send him to the nursing home"? That's an outright slur. Please don't do such things on HN. As tptacek correctly pointed out, it also discredits your argument, so it would also be in your interest to edit out. Either way, though,…

Well, I can't really edit that anymore as it's been too long. And I simply used a bit of colourful language to describe relevant points to a discussion of Mr Hersh's trustworthiness: he is senile and old.

Now, if you think 'The man is 85, he gets basic facts wrong in his articles, he takes a single anonymous source's word as gospel, and either won't do fact checking or fails to do so competently. He is senile and old.' is acceptable, I will stick to such less colourful language in the future.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#404

Post by Gud »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #338
Gud wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You repeat “the worlds most advanced military “ like it makes them infallible.

I didn't repeat it :) First time I said: "World's largest military" Second time was "most advanced". I'm not saying they're infallible, but they're not exactly the Keystone cops, either.

Ok, fair enough!

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#405

Post by pvg »

mannerheim wrote: post #403
dang wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could start by editing out swipes, as the site guidelines request. By what logic did you think it was ok to post nastiness like "He's clearly cuckoo for cocoa puffs" and, worse, "time to send him to the nursing home"? That's an outright slur. Please don't do such things on HN. As tptacek correctly pointed out, it also discredits your argument, so it would also be in your interest to edit out. Either way, though,…

Well, I can't really edit that anymore as it's been too long. And I simply used a bit of colourful language to describe relevant points to a discussion of Mr Hersh's trustworthiness: he is senile and old. Now, if you think 'The man is 85, he gets basic facts wrong in his articles, he takes a single anonymous source's word as gospel, and either won't do fact checking or fails to do so competently. He is senile and old…

The whole point is that namecalling/internet diagnosis is not acceptable. You can't 'it's just colourful language' your way out of that.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#407

Post by IIAOPSW »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #363
IIAOPSW wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mice have a gestation period of about 8 weeks. (your response is an irrelevant non sequitur)

All politics threads on HN are full of shillbots, and very likely bots now that GPT-3 is big. It's not as well moderated or as complex as reddit w/r/t brigading, fighting obvious shills, or obfuscating upvotes, etc. Not that reddit is particularly immune to this, either. I wouldn't trust jack shit about politics on HN. Details about the latest implementation of systemd? Absolutely. Anything not STEM? Dubious at best.

This is a very dangerous line of thinking because it lets you dismiss any comment you don't agree with as a bot or a shill without having to address the merits of it. Its an unfalsifiable yet plausible suspicion to have, which makes it dangerously tempting to believe on spurious evidence. The way I see it, our only good option is to engage with it anyway (provided they aren't gaming the platform itself via spam or similar). An argument isn't inherently bad or wrong because GPT3 wrote it, and the volume of these types of comments isn't insurmountable.

Maybe the guy I was replying to was a bot. Maybe he was a human who fails the Turing test. In either case it was worth the time I spent pantsing him for the benefit of the discourse.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#408

Post by foverzar »

lispm wrote: post #312
lispm wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pipeline is not completely destroyed. It could be repaired. Putin attacked the Ukraine and used Energy Dependence as a weapon against Europe. Russia bought energy companies. Russia influenced energy politics and politics in general in these countries. Russia reduced the storage and flow of natural gas before the invasion and prepared it to be used as a political instrument in this war, which is not just a war aga…

Let me add: the blown-up pipelines were three of four newly built. One of the four is not damaged. The damage to the other three pipelines was only in a small area. The pipelines are repairable. The pipeline was mainly a project of Russia and Germany, meant to supply natural gas to German markets (and beyond). The pipelines were not in use, yet. There was zero chance that the pipelines would go in use in the next dec…

> The pipelines are repairable

That is really doubtful, especially at this point when they've been full of seawater for so long.

> The pipelines were not in use, yet.

NS1 was operational for years, and NS2 was technically too: all the equipment was running and the pipe was pressurized - just turn the tap on.

> There was zero chance that the pipelines would go in use in the next decade, given the political situation.

I don't think that's fair. Political situation can change easily. Lap journalists could just dust off the ol' narrative of "Ukraine is full of nazis", which was prevalent in pro-western media before the war gone hot and all of this suddenly became "Russian propaganda"

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#409

Post by foverzar »

debatem1 wrote: post #225
thoeiu4oi234 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you, but I find these "pro-West" side to be quite specious in their arguments. What idiot really believes that Russia of all people would want to kill their own golden goose ? The argument these geniuses are implicitly making is that either Russians (or more euphemistically "Putin") is a raging lunatic, or that their readers so utterly dim-witted that they'll believe any shit that they'll spin. OTO…

I'm really surprised to hear people talking about the US, UK, Russia, etc but not talking about Ukraine.

This is actually a very good point. As much as I love sticking it to the US, it's hard not to notice how much Ukraine benefitted from this.

The whole goal of NS1/2 was to avoid dealing with Ukraine, but now there is little threat to their gas transportation system and Russia has to pay extra to Ukraine for pumping gas to Europe (and they even raised the fee recently).

Still, I doubt Ukraine could have done it alone, but I expect it would make a perfect scapegoat if things get too dangerous for the real mastermind.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#410

Post by foverzar »

rurp wrote: post #229
thoeiu4oi234 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you, but I find these "pro-West" side to be quite specious in their arguments. What idiot really believes that Russia of all people would want to kill their own golden goose ? The argument these geniuses are implicitly making is that either Russians (or more euphemistically "Putin") is a raging lunatic, or that their readers so utterly dim-witted that they'll believe any shit that they'll spin. OTO…

> What idiot really believes that Russia of all people would want to kill their own golden goose ? Putin killed his own golden goose by invading Ukraine. Starting this war has been a disaster for Russia's economic future. Putin either doesn't care about that, or drastically miscalculated. Blowing up the pipeline would be consistent with either mindset.

> Starting this war has been a disaster for Russia's economic future.

Or maybe not. I feel like a lot of this comes from misjudging sale of crude resources as "economic future" and a wishful thinking that us Russians are just brainless dummies, incapable of anything else.

I've seen the same rhetorics back in 2014 when the first sanctions kicked in, and that lead to automatic protectionist policy and economic growth - new projects, new businesses, new supply chains.

One has to realize that current globalized supply chains weren't benefiting Russia at all

But that's just my 2 cents.

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