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

Henry Kissinger Has Died

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 673 posts

Re: Henry Kissinger Has Died

#561

Post by jzackpete »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #525
FergusArgyll wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a little known law in the USA which states the following; "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." It's not always followed but it does remain fairly important in the mind of Ame…

The first amendment prevents censorship, by the US government , of the press or individual speech. It doesn't prevent an individual or legal person from suing over something written or said in public about them. What would stop the Atlantic from "getting sued into oblivion" is that the person that the article was about (Nixon) was dead when it was written, and the dead can't be defamed.

> The first amendment prevents censorship, by the US government

How would lawsuits work without the government being involved?

Re: Henry Kissinger Has Died

#563

Post by TheCoelacanth »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #525
FergusArgyll wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a little known law in the USA which states the following; "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." It's not always followed but it does remain fairly important in the mind of Ame…

The first amendment prevents censorship, by the US government , of the press or individual speech. It doesn't prevent an individual or legal person from suing over something written or said in public about them. What would stop the Atlantic from "getting sued into oblivion" is that the person that the article was about (Nixon) was dead when it was written, and the dead can't be defamed.

The first amendment still applies because defamation wouldn't be illegal without the US government passing a law to make it illegal. That means that the US's defamation laws can only restrict speech within the very narrow exceptions to the first amendment that courts have allowed.

The bar is especially high for defamation of public figures like Nixon. For something to be defamation against a public figure, it not only has to be provably false; it has to be intentionally and maliciously false. They would have to prove that the author intentionally was spreading false information to hurt the subject. That is so difficult to do that defamation suits regarding public figures are almost never successful.

Re: Henry Kissinger Has Died

#564

Post by da_chicken »

leobg wrote: post #395
Gud wrote: post #370

I am reminded of Hunter S Thompsons euology for Nixon. Good Riddance! Should have died in jail. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-...

Wow. What a refreshing directness: > He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin. How come they could publish this without getting sued into oblivion?

Public figures, especially elected officials, have a significantly reduced protections from defamation in the US.

Not only is truth an absolute defense to defamation in the US, the plaintiff must show that the defendant's statements were made with actual malice if the plaintiff is a public official. Merely being unsure if something is true or being negligent in determining the truth of it is not sufficient.

Furthermore, nearly all civil lawsuits require that actual damages be done in order to have standing at all. That is, you need a dollar amount because that's basically the only remedy that a civil court can make. That means that if the damage is due to lost reputation and your reputation has already been thoroughly soiled, it will be incredibly difficult to put a dollar amount to it.

So:

1. It has to be actually false as shown by the plaintiff

2. It has to be known by the defendant to be false as shown by the plaintiff

3. It has to be made intentionally to harm the subject as shown by the plaintiff

4. The statements must have actually harmed the subject in monetary terms as shown by the plaintiff

Re: Henry Kissinger Has Died

#565

Post by mountainriver »

philjohn wrote: post #396
ivanb wrote: post #318

On a practical side of things, how did he manage to make it to 100? Did he maintain a nutrition plan, was he physically active? Fun fact: Henry Kissinger was elected an international member of Russian Academy of Sciences in 2016.

Some people just live longer. My grandmother made it to 98, she rode horses when she was a younger woman (in Australia during the war, she was able to follow my grandfather who was an RAF mechanic out there on the last passenger ship through the Suez). She used to enjoy a tipple, never smoked though, but in her later years never really exercised.

My grandma lived to 93 and smoked her whole life. Didn’t die of any lung related illness either. Obviously don’t recommend

Re: Henry Kissinger Has Died

#566

Post by dragonwriter »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #525
FergusArgyll wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a little known law in the USA which states the following; "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." It's not always followed but it does remain fairly important in the mind of Ame…

The first amendment prevents censorship, by the US government , of the press or individual speech. It doesn't prevent an individual or legal person from suing over something written or said in public about them. What would stop the Atlantic from "getting sued into oblivion" is that the person that the article was about (Nixon) was dead when it was written, and the dead can't be defamed.

> The first amendment prevents censorship, by the US government, of the press or individual speech. It doesn't prevent an individual or legal person from suing over something written or said in public about them.

It doesn’t prevent them from suing,

It does, within its scope, prevent the US or (because the same rule is incorporated against the states under the 14th) any state government from giving them a legal basis for winning a suit, though, which the target of a suit is free to point out to the court to get the case dismissed. This is why the scope if defamation is much narrower in the US then in the British law it inherited.

And, in some US jurisdictions, the target mught also be able to recover damages from the filer of the original suit under anti-SLAPP. laws.

Re: Henry Kissinger Has Died

#567

Post by allturtles »

acdha wrote: post #549
allturtles wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first article reads to me as totally absurd: > Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger. I don't know how t…

The claim isn’t just that he passed along some dry academic trivia but enough specific details for Nixon to successfully convince the Vietnamese government not to accept the deal on offer, claiming he’d make a better deal of he was elected. Nixon never did say who tipped him off that the peace talks were happening, although he acknowledged how unusual it was, but if true that entire chain of events started on Kissing…

Yes I still find this absurd. So, first of all, here's an article on the Nixon campaign's efforts to prevent a peace deal. [0] It doesn't mention Kissinger at all. If any single person should be 'blamed' for this, surely it's Nixon? But secondly, there's no evidence at all that these efforts actually had anything to do with the failure of the Johnson administration to reach a peace agreement:

> Moreover, it cannot be said definitively whether a peace deal could have been reached without Nixon’s intervention or that it would have helped Mr. Humphrey. William P. Bundy, a foreign affairs adviser to Johnson and John F. Kennedy who was highly critical of Nixon, nonetheless concluded that prospects for the peace deal were slim anyway, so “probably no great chance was lost.”

Even if we do accept that this peace agreement would have happened and that Kissinger was the crucial linchpin in destroying it, U.S. involvement in the war continued for another 5 years, and then there were 2 further years of war without direct U.S. involvement. There were many decisions made by people in the U.S., South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese governments that kept the war going over these years, and they had wide support from their respective populaces. Continuing to fight the war until a peace that preserved South Vietnam could be secured was the orthodox position in the U.S. well into the 1970s. How can all of the moral blame for continuance of the war fall on one person?

Then, finally, assigning moral blame to someone for all the consequent downstream effects of their actions is anyway absurd. If Kissinger is a war criminal for 'causing' all the deaths in Vietnam from 1968 forward, then surely Johnson is a larger one, and Kennedy is still a larger one, since after all the war would have been over years earlier if not for them. Or we could go further and blame Napoleon III for invading Vietnam in the first place, he's surely responsible for every death in the consequent wars since then, right?

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/us/politics/nixon-tried-t...

Re: Henry Kissinger Has Died

#568

Post by [deleted] »

leobg wrote: post #395
Gud wrote: post #370

I am reminded of Hunter S Thompsons euology for Nixon. Good Riddance! Should have died in jail. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-...

Wow. What a refreshing directness: > He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin. How come they could publish this without getting sued into oblivion?

[deleted]

Re: Henry Kissinger Has Died

#569

Post by nojvek »

Guy was a crook and had no remorse for killing millions of civilians and cozying up with dictators. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/henry-kissinger-dies_n_637693...

The world needs less people like him.

No one should ever be complicit in carpet bombing. It's inhumane.

We in the US ought to hold the govt accountable everytime they drop bombs from the sky on civilians.

We're currently helping Israel do that in Gaza with our tax dollars. Hospitals and Schools getting air bombed. That is not who we are.

Re: Henry Kissinger Has Died

#570

Post by quickthrowman »

wordpad25 wrote: post #343
wkat4242 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those wars in Cambodia and Vietnam didn't further the interests of the US at all. They just wasted tons of lives for nothing. Same as with the recent Afghanistan campaign. At least the military industrial complex got even richer of it. That's the only reason.

> Those wars in Cambodia and Vietnam didn't further the interests of the US at all. It's easy to judge history in hindsight. USA bombed the crap out of Japan during WW2, and Japan had amazing recovery. Not to say that Cambodia was at all justified (or Japan for that matter), but that it's more complicated. It's a lot easier to judge a person on objective things, like how effective they were at executing their policy.

> It's easy to judge history in hindsight. USA bombed the crap out of Japan during WW2, and Japan had amazing recovery.

Did you happen to forget that the United States occupied and reconstructed Japan from 1945-1952?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Japan

It helps to be familiar with history before making judgements about it.

Post reply on HN