Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez's tweets translation from last night • Hacker News Board

Re: Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez's tweets translation from last night

#51

Post by JVIDEL » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 11:00 PM UTC

wslh wrote: post #36

Fargren wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that assertion by Assange is somewhat out of context. What he said is that of the medium sized Latin American countries, Argentina's surveillance was the most aggressive. He also said it was nothing compared with what's being done in the USA, the UK or China. So calling it "her own NSA" seems a bit disingenuous, at least from this perspective. Link to the interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If7MbOvuEbg

You can't compare the NSA with the Argentinian intelligence agencies because the countries are in a very different scale.

Indeed, Argentina lacks the ability or manpower to launch a worldwide program like PRISM but it has more than enough to do similar things to its That and a set of laws that allow the government to make life a living hell to any dissidents: had Snowden been Argentine getting his passport cancelled would be the least of his problems.

Re: Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez's tweets translation from last night

#52

Post by JVIDEL » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 11:06 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #17

pvarangot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, she is definitely playing with the fact that Evo is acting very calmly and being polite with her despite the situation, and at the same time making a reference to his aymaran descent. Cristina is not known for being frugal in speech nor calm when in adverse situations.

I have spent a lot of time in Argentina. Argentinian people are very into being cute and intimate, even with people they don't know that well. There is a refreshing lack of excessive seriousness in that culture. If you know Spanish and have seen Kirschner speak she almost comes off as a goofball the way she cracks jokes and makes "cute" references to things, but it's really just a reflection of Argentine culture more…

I wouldn't call her chicken dance in Angola "cute", more like deranged

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_dVvgdiiUU

Re: Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez's tweets translation from last night

#53

Post by JVIDEL » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 11:14 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #48

dep_b wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well first of all the Twitter channel of the president is a government propaganda channel, not a news channel. I don't disapprove of them doing that, they need to win another election and this is their stage. > [a word which here evokes the memory of the last dictatorship, which exterminated some ten to thirty thousand of its political opponents, a crime that wasn't successfully prosecuted until Sra. Fernandez and he…

I'm far from a "staunch supporter of the government", but I thought that those bits would be pretty hard to understand if you weren't from Argentina. "Impunity" in English is mostly used in a metaphorical sense in these centuries, for example, and doesn't at all evoke the issue of not "locking up" "those fuckers". Without some kind of note, what I read as Cristina's allusion to her own legal battles would be lost on…

The problem is that she wasn't breaking those big media companies a few years ago when they were pumping the propaganda she wanted, in fact she even let the huge Clarin group absorb Multicanal even though that was against existing anti-monopoly laws.

The wonders of semi-permanent emergency presidential powers...

Re: Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez's tweets translation from last night

#54

Post by JVIDEL » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 11:16 PM UTC

nandemo wrote: post #14

kragen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I thought that might be what she meant, but I wasn't sure. I'm not really sure if "buddy" is a good translation of "compañer@", but it seemed about right. "Comrade" might be an equally good translation if you wanted to prejudice people in the US against her.

"Buddy" sounds really silly. "Comrade" is closer, but at least in Portuguese that would be "camarada", which carries a rather old-style socialist nuance, not "companheiro". "Fellow", "brother" or even "mate" sound better in this context.

Indeed the word is "companero", but its not as formal as comrade which also exists as "camarada", in this context its actually more like partner (in a professional sense) but not as informal as brother or pal in english.

Peron put that word en vogue around here.

Re: Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez's tweets translation from last night

#55

Post by leoedin » Thu, Jul 04, 2013, 9:05 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #41

leoedin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point that the OP and others are trying to make is that there's plenty of places all over the world that satisfy those interests. Just because this site allows un-moderated user submissions and comments doesn't mean it's for general news. The OP and others (me included) are lamenting the fact that the popularist stories about social liberties are replacing the perhaps less popular stories about hardware d…

> The OP and others (me included) are lamenting the fact that the popularist stories about social liberties are replacing the perhaps less popular stories about hardware design or compilers or new research in computer science. Those kind of stories were not that many to begin with. Except if by "research in compSci" one means "My impressions after 1 day with Go", "Node.js cured my dog", "Web framework benchmarks 24",…

On contemplation of Archive.org, I actually do agree with your first point. There wasn't 10 stories about the libertarian case du jour, but equally there wasn't a flood of interesting compSci stories. I guess my memory is selective!

>That makes no sense. Except if you take it to mean: the guys that were there earlier don't get what they like anymore, and more (and newer) people get it. Which is a pretty hipsterish sense ("Oh, that band was cool when only I liked it").

I really can't agree with this. In 10 (12?... Getting old I guess) years of online participation, I've seen time and time again relatively small forums and websites grow in user numbers and the quality of the popular submissions/threads/posts decline.

Perhaps a good example is Reddit. At one point it was a site for submitting links to news articles. The userbase was fairly heavily skewed towards tech and programmers. Looking at Archive.org from 2007 the front page is perhaps 1/3 programming related, 1/3 "interest" articles and 1/3 current events. There's not a single link to an image.

My belief is that when a site grows in popularity, and so the interests and backgrounds of the users expands, the posts that consistantly attract more interest or votes are those which appeal to the largest common aspect of the community - the community itself. Once Reddit was large enough to have its own in-jokes and themes, submissions related to those tended to receive lots of attention. I think many people enjoy belonging to online communities with injokes, and so once it started that shift the demographic of new users changed as well. In 2007 nobody would have strongly defined themselves as a "redditor" in the way that people do today because at that point it was nothing more than a site for sharing interesting news articles.

As someone who enjoys reading thought provoking articles (and sometimes commenting on them), I find it frustrating to see websites I like move towards lowest-common-denominator submissions. I'm no fan of "it was better in my day" baseless nostalgia, but Archive.org provides us a fairly effective window into the past and it is clear that many sites are today demonstrably different than they were a few years ago. I don't think it's elitist (or "hipsterish") to want to maintain the spirit and submission quality that was the basis for this sites popularity.