Hackers post fake stories on real news sites 'to discredit NATO' • Hacker News Board

Re: Hackers post fake stories on real news sites 'to discredit NATO'

#181

Post by auganov » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #180

auganov wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Russia (or China) becomes militarily superior to America I would consider that the end of the free world as we know it. As of right now America's capabilities in every domain are vastly superior and I hope it remains so. Again you believe that America's and other countries' nuclear capability is essentially the same and nuclear war means total destruction for everybody. I don't believe that. I think Russia wouldn'…

> If Russia (or China) becomes militarily superior to America I would consider that the end of the free world as we know it. Of course you do! You don't believe that MAD works! But you are avoiding answering my question. What would you do in the scenario I drafted? Would you attack first? > Again you believe that America's and other countries' nuclear capability is essentially the same and nuclear war means total des…

> But you are avoiding answering my question. What would you do in the scenario I drafted? Would you attack first?

I'm just telling you I find the question irrelevant. If you're threatened with total destruction and think you can win of course you should attack.

> Among the permanent security council members, it is essentially the same. The UK's tiny arsenal could trivially kill ~200 million Americans, give or take some. Russia's is fifty times its size.

There are many more variables involved than just the size of the arsenal. The notion that everybody will just fire all their nukes at once is unrealistic. Silos can be attacked, comms can be disrupted, things can malfunction, there are a TON of things at play. Just looking at the nuclear stockpile makes no sense. In every military domain US has superior capabilities. No reason to believe that in case of nuclear war Russia would outperform the US. And after you're done firing nukes traditional military still matters.

Re: Hackers post fake stories on real news sites 'to discredit NATO'

#182

Post by vkou » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

auganov wrote: post #181

vkou wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Russia (or China) becomes militarily superior to America I would consider that the end of the free world as we know it. Of course you do! You don't believe that MAD works! But you are avoiding answering my question. What would you do in the scenario I drafted? Would you attack first? > Again you believe that America's and other countries' nuclear capability is essentially the same and nuclear war means total des…

> But you are avoiding answering my question. What would you do in the scenario I drafted? Would you attack first? I'm just telling you I find the question irrelevant. If you're threatened with total destruction and think you can win of course you should attack. > Among the permanent security council members, it is essentially the same. The UK's tiny arsenal could trivially kill ~200 million Americans, give or take s…

> I'm just telling you I find the question irrelevant. If you're threatened with total destruction and think you can win of course you should attack.

Great. Now, put yourself in Ivan's shoes. NATO has encircled you, militarily and economically. Your military is second-rate, at best. But you do have six thousand nuclear weapons, which mean that nobody is stupid enough to mess with you.

... And then Uncle Sam starts building anti-nuclear defenses on your borders, with the long-term aim of eliminating the sole means of defense that you have.

If you're Ivan, to use your own words - of course you should attack! And what's the overall result? A missile defense system that is intended to save American lives actually ends up ending them, because its existence causes a nuclear war. It completely fails at its stated purpose!

> No reason to believe that in case of nuclear war Russia would outperform the US.

Outperform is completely meaningless in this context. Outperform means the difference between 68% of your population being killed in a thirty minutes, compared to 82% of the enemy's (With two thirds of the remainder dying over the next week). That's not winning. That's not outperforming on any metric that matters.

Once you're done firing nukes, you're country's traditional military doesn't matter because you no longer have a country. What you have is a humanitarian crisis, multiple orders of magnitude worse then whatever stupid geo-political spat your foreign ministries were arguing over.

Re: Hackers post fake stories on real news sites 'to discredit NATO'

#183

Post by rumanator » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:50 PM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #107

seventytwo wrote: post #26

Gee, I wonder what nation could possibly be behind this?

Why are you sure it is a nation. NATO is by no means an uncontroversial entity. Millions of peace activists—including my self—would love to see it abolished. Although I do admit, the content of the fake news articles seem a little crude to be coming from peace activists. Personally I would post simple truthful anti-NATO, anti-military, and anti-nuclear weapons propaganda if I had the will to break into news web sites…

> Why are you sure it is a nation. NATO is by no means an uncontroversial entity. Millions of peace activists—including my self—would love to see it abolished.

I wonder how so-called "peace activists" look at Russia's invasion of Ukraine and still don't quite grasp the importance of NATO.

Re: Hackers post fake stories on real news sites 'to discredit NATO'

#184

Post by rumanator » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:53 PM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #163

Darmody wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that change anything? ISIS had hackers, that doesn't make them good or anything. I don't want to compare you with ISIS, I'm just trying to make a point.

You keep missing my point. It doesn’t matter if they are good or noble or anything (also ISIS is not a civilian group). It matters that there exist civilian groups that are a) capable, b) willing, and c) have reasons to do something like this. Civilian anti-military activists are such a group, regardless of how correct, or noble the cause is. Just to prevent misunderstanding: I am not accusing peace activists of thes…

We can either spend all week coming up with fake suspects, or we could call a spade a spade based on all the piling evidence.

https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2019/04/26/russian...

Re: Hackers post fake stories on real news sites 'to discredit NATO'

#185

Post by rumanator » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:59 PM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #144

jeswin wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Millions of peace activists—including my self—would love to see it abolished. I wonder how Europe will respond when the next Crimea happens? Or if Taiwan gets attacked. It's a real question, and I'd love to hear from a peace-activist. I'd bet Europe will do nothing. Merkel wouldn't even openly criticize China for stripping away democracy from Hong Kong. European models work well in a world without dictatorships. Bu…

We are speaking very much out of topic. The fact that I’m personally against NATO adds nothing in the debate on whether a nation state was behind these attacks. But lets entertain this anyway[1]. Crimea was annexed by a militaristic nation from a smaller less—but still quite—militaristic nation. Ukraine is neighbored to the west with supporting European nation—some with a really big military, and even nuclear weapons…

> We are speaking very much out of topic.

You do understand we're talking about NATO and Russia, right? I mean, there is no clearer example of why NATO was created and exists up to this day that Russia's attack and invasion of Ukraine. The reason why Russia dedicates itself to weaken NATO is precisely that as well. You cannot talk about NATO without discussing Russia's historical aggression and expansionist agenda towards all its neighbouring states.

Knowing that, and as you are a self described peace activists with an axe to grind against NATO, why do you intentionally turn a blind eye to the very core of the problem?

Re: Hackers post fake stories on real news sites 'to discredit NATO'

#186

Post by runarberg » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 11:03 PM UTC

rumanator wrote: post #183

runarberg wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you sure it is a nation. NATO is by no means an uncontroversial entity. Millions of peace activists—including my self—would love to see it abolished. Although I do admit, the content of the fake news articles seem a little crude to be coming from peace activists. Personally I would post simple truthful anti-NATO, anti-military, and anti-nuclear weapons propaganda if I had the will to break into news web sites…

> Why are you sure it is a nation. NATO is by no means an uncontroversial entity. Millions of peace activists—including my self—would love to see it abolished. I wonder how so-called "peace activists" look at Russia's invasion of Ukraine and still don't quite grasp the importance of NATO.

This is answered below. In short: NATO did not stop the annexation of Crimea.

Re: Hackers post fake stories on real news sites 'to discredit NATO'

#187

Post by auganov » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 11:12 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #182

auganov wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you are avoiding answering my question. What would you do in the scenario I drafted? Would you attack first? I'm just telling you I find the question irrelevant. If you're threatened with total destruction and think you can win of course you should attack. > Among the permanent security council members, it is essentially the same. The UK's tiny arsenal could trivially kill ~200 million Americans, give or take s…

> I'm just telling you I find the question irrelevant. If you're threatened with total destruction and think you can win of course you should attack. Great. Now, put yourself in Ivan's shoes. NATO has encircled you, militarily and economically. Your military is second-rate, at best. But you do have six thousand nuclear weapons, which mean that nobody is stupid enough to mess with you. ... And then Uncle Sam starts bu…

Again, as I said, I don't believe Russia has a reason to believe they'd win hence further advances in anti-nuclear defense only lessen the chance of them attacking not increase it.

If one side ends up controlling the other or there's a favorable truce to one side that side wins. All war is nasty and results in terrible destruction. Doesn't mean there's no winner at the end of it. I can throw random percentages around too. According to one simulation ("Crisis Relocation Program 2B") from the 80s given a few days of advance notice up to 80% of Americans could survive a nuclear war with Russia. One should strive to reduce potential casualties as much as possible. Do relocation programs, shelters etc "violate MAD" in your book too? Because they certainly lessen the D part.

We know of at least two instances where Russians were close to erroneously launching nukes . Only stopped due to personnel disobeying procedures. It's almost inevitable one day someone somewhere will launch a nuke for whatever reason. Better be ready when that happens. Your strategy only kicks the can down the road and provides no way out. While in the meantime giving Russia and other adversaries all the reasons to keep continuing with their aggression. Is nobody allowed to ever attack Russia because of "MAD"?

Re: Hackers post fake stories on real news sites 'to discredit NATO'

#188

Post by smegger001 » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 11:16 PM UTC

openasocket wrote: post #123

HenryKissinger wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is a level of pettiness at work in this recent decision. What they want to do is shift to a rotational force model and deploy another Armored Brigade Combat Team to Poland every 9 months instead of having an SBCT in Germany. Meaning you have to move 2 ABCTs(~4500 Soldiers and all their equipment) in/out of the theater. The main tactical problem with that is that those forces don't have standoff distance fr…

I think the defense spending reasoning particularly ironic, given that half of the troops being moved out of Germany are going to Italy and Belgium, which spend a far smaller share of GDP on defense than Germany. I think the move is really poorly thought out if the goal is to penalize Germany and discourage their behavior. Because what is Germany losing? The political embarrassment of having troops leave? Is that rea…

Correct me if I am wrong but wasn't Italy having economic problems and struggling with austerity measures back before covid? If a state is on the edge of bankruptcy comparing it to the strongest economy in Europe that isn't exactly a fair comparison is it?

Re: Hackers post fake stories on real news sites 'to discredit NATO'

#189

Post by rumanator » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 11:19 PM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #186

rumanator wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are you sure it is a nation. NATO is by no means an uncontroversial entity. Millions of peace activists—including my self—would love to see it abolished. I wonder how so-called "peace activists" look at Russia's invasion of Ukraine and still don't quite grasp the importance of NATO.

This is answered below. In short: NATO did not stop the annexation of Crimea.

What? Are you serious? Do you also believe everyone should just disband their local police force because a neighbouring town experienced a crime?

I would understand using Ukraine's example to argue the exact opposite, but for some reason you believe that a first sign of aggression justifies dismantling all defenses.

Re: Hackers post fake stories on real news sites 'to discredit NATO'

#190

Post by runarberg » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 11:22 PM UTC

rumanator wrote: post #189

runarberg wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is answered below. In short: NATO did not stop the annexation of Crimea.

What? Are you serious? Do you also believe everyone should just disband their local police force because a neighbouring town experienced a crime? I would understand using Ukraine's example to argue the exact opposite, but for some reason you believe that a first sign of aggression justifies dismantling all defenses.

Yes I am... What is the point of having a military alliance to protect against foreign invasions if that military alliance won’t protect you from invasion?