This is obviously a comprehensible framing to anyone following current discourse, but the years of mental groundwork and gymnastics required to get there are truly impressive stuff.
The explosion had very real ramifications for the European continent outside the Western political context of the war.
Why ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713787
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713529
Is there a change to the guidelines and should we expect you to not override the ranking system for opposing view points.
It is neither desirable nor possible to exclude political topics from HN completely. At the same time, it's important that the site be protected from being overrun and dominated by political topics. Lots of explanation of how we handle this can be found at these links, if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
* here's pg making the same point 10 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426
I agree with that guideline. I don't want HN in general to devolve into standard tribal mudslinging.
But I don't believe this is the standard 'breaking news' chum of the day, mostly because of the reputation of the author, though I readily admit the sensationalist title is click-baity.
So far (7 hours after this was first posted) most comments seem to be complaining that the HN users can't flag this away. I found the story interesting, it makes you think about just what the USGov is doing, if it's true or not is somewhat immaterial...the story was an interesting read, whether it was a non-fiction story or not.
I don't actually doubt the veracity of this information. But it's grossly irresponsible to publish "some guy's" claims as facts!!
But also just look at what happened here in the comments. It's totally predictable. Those of us that read the article and flagged the post had prevented this. In this case flagging had worked and was not abused.
I don't think the comments were as disastrous as you suggest. It's true that the majority were negative, but not all—and in any case, it's important that HN's front page not just be a product of majoritarian sentiment. If it were, then we would clearly be failing the core principle of HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Did I pick the right hill to die on at the hands of the majority? Maybe not, but (a) the sentiments would be the same if I had; and (b) we have to take some chances; if we don't, we fail for sure.
b) You chose to override the will of this community who largely did read the article.
You guys seem to be seizing on my saying I didn't read the whole article as if it were a horrifying gotcha. Let me try to disabuse you of that. It isn't necessary to read every word of every article to make reasonable moderation calls, and that's lucky, because it would be physically impossible to do so. I can barely keep up with the titles.
I haven't overridden the will of the community because the community has no single will on this. It's divided, along obvious political faultlines. It's not my job to align with any political view, including my own. The moderation principle on HN is simple and clear: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... Literally anyone with strong political views can expect to occasionally encounter something on HN that outrages them to the bone; if not, then we're doing a lousy job, because one thing's clear: intellectual curiosity ranges across political fences.
Yikes.
Heck, the Baltic states, along with Poland and the Scandinavian countries, have some of the best naval divers and EODs on the planet, virtue of having the priviledge of cleaning two world wars worth of mines, bombs and torpedoes from the Baltic sea...
This piece should be flagged to death, especially since it is, giving it the most (and IMHO undeserved) credit pure speculation.
Edit: Just looked Seymore Hersh up, now I know why the name rang a bell. Well, for My Lai he had proof and sources, didn't he?
Seymour Hersh, famous for his coverage of the My Lai massacre, Project Azorian, and more. You probably should know him.
Either way, you should at least know who the man is if you want to maintain any pretext of knowing modern American history.
I'm not even going to continue down this "argument from authority" path. Completely baffling conspiracy drivel
In fact, the conspiracy is to go as far as OPCW covering things up to blame Assad: https://wikileaks.org/opcw-douma/
In fact, every single one of your comments on this thread have been nothing but hostile. I'm not sure why you seem to think you're in the clear and everyone else is the problem.
The "mainstream" "establishment" position on the death of Osama Bin Laden is that Bin Laden was living in the middle of Abbottabad, which is the Pakistani equivalent of the town of West Point, and no high level Pakistani Army official knew he was there, and no high level Pakistani government official knew he was there.
It is a completely absurd story. The "truthers" are the people who believe that story. The White House gave a lot of information about bin Laden's death, as well as the Pentagon, and the government had to walk back some of their story shortly after. The New York Times reported the government statements as fact, although later another section of the paper printed some of the questions about the mainstream narrative. This caused an internal Times squabble, some of the "memoes" of which were subsequently leaked.
If you want a better account of what happened, read the Pakistani press.
The ISI worked with the US and bin Laden hand in glove in the 1980s. The idea no one high up on Pakistani intelligence, government or military knew he was there is absurd. Yet you call this "truther".
> a advocate of the Syrian rebel chemical weapon conspiracy
Chemical weapons were released in Douma. The rebels and government blamed each other. If the "conspiracy" as you call it that the rebels released it were true, it would tend to have been a mishandling of them - a mistake. Hersh reported on the attack, including information pointing to the rebels controlling it. I have no idea who had control of the weapons - it could have been the government as you imply. I don't have a problem with Hersh reporting on the information he had on that.
I'm not going to ban you because you might not have seen that other comment, but please look at it now and please stop posting like this. Regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are, you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
That being said, Woodward and Bernstein didn't publish verbatim what Mark Felt (aka Deep Throat) told them; they used his tips as starting points to look for corroborating evidence, which they published to great accolade.
The WaPo and other mainstream media were also institutions of far more integrity at that time: their mission was to publish truth regardless of the implications, and they weren't under the kind of pressure the press is under today. Also, society (and media outlet owners) trusted truth itself to result in societal good far more than they do today.
But beyond the article itself, it's worth explaining my priors. The first is that the shifting finger-pointing is a classic Russian disinformation campaign. The second is that America would incur enormous risk by doing this and gain nothing; while Russia would risk nothing and had everything to gain. Both of these deserve further explanation.
Disinformation campaigns, especially false flag operations, are a hallmark of KGB operations. If you haven't already, I highly recommend you read The Sword and the Shield, by Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Mitrokhin archive is probably the best primary source the West has about KGB active measures and internal politics. The Mitrokhin archive confirms that disinformation false flags are a common theme of KGB destablization operations, such as fomenting the degradation of race relations in the U.S. by forging hatemail. Most experts agree it's highly likely Putin himself used this domestically, by staging the 1999 apartment bombings that killed hundreds and injured a thousand people, and blaming it on Chechens; the resulting fear and hatred rocketed him to popularity when he then mercilessly persecuted Chechens, gaining him the Presidency for the first time. To this day, the real facts are unknown, but what is known is this: Achemez Gochiyaev rented basement facilities to an FSB officer for storage; those basements had bombs; after the first two explosions, Gochiyaev called police, who found and disabled the remaining bombs; after Putin's ascendency, the official narrative became that Gochiyaev didn't call, but that an unnamed real estate agent turned him in; that Gochiyaev later disappeared without a trace; and that the Russian government refuses any independent investigation. Other examples of Russia flooding the information space with competing false narratives include the conduct of the 2014 Ukraine invasian (little green men); the build-up before the 2022 Ukraine invasian; and the 2016 Presidential election. Their goal in these cases, according to Mitrokhin, is to overwhelm the populace's ability to critically examine every narrative and "give up," distrusting everything instead. Russia officially blaming the U.K., while getting a senile but formerly respected journalist to claim it was the U.S., perfectly fits their SOP.
In addition, there would be no reason whatsoever for the U.S. to do something like this. The cost is enormous: already concerned about disunity in NATO, the risk of doing something like this and it being discovered would be enormous within NATO, not to mention the risk of Russia viewing it as an act of war. The benefit is nil: Germany had already halted Nord Stream 2 on 22 Feb 22, well before the September 2022 explosion, and their gas reserves were over 90% at the time, minimizing Russia's ability to weaponize NS as an incentive for Germany to oppose Ukraine aid. By contrast, there are multiple reasons Russia would do this. It's essentially zero-cost: destroying their own pipeline is unlikely to bring any retribution from any other country, and certainly wouldn't warrant direct NATO involvement. And the benefits are immense: (1) claim the West did it and galvanize the Russian population, just as Putin did in the lead-up to the bombing of Grozny; (2) make it socially unacceptable to continue the then-current protests against mobilization of reserve units; (3) undercut any later claims against Russia for cutting off fuel supplies, as now it would be impossible for Gazprom to perform on its contracts; (4) now that it appeared the war in Ukraine might drag on longer than Putin expected, make it impossible for any successor to back out from Putin's chosen course of action and resume business as usual.
Bottom line is this: Russian disinformation is the KGB/FSB's modus operandi. We saw this all the time in Iraq: a news outlet would make a claim that the U.S. had caused civilian casualities. We investigated every allegation of CIVCAS. But most of the time, when RT would make a claim of CIVCAS, it wasn't even in a location we had performed a strike. All they were doing was flooding the information environment with the narrative that the U.S. was killing civilians.
This post by Hersh is deeply disappointing. It would hardly be a clearer case of Russian propaganda if it had a giant Z plastered above the fold. It doesn't deserve any credit, and—with respect to dang and the decision he has made—it doesn't deserve to be on HN.
Further reading:
https://www.amazon.com/The-Sword-and-Shield-audiobook/dp/B00...
https://www.amazon.com/Winter-Is-Coming-Garry-Kasparov-audio...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/08/07/u...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings
The article has an anonymous source. Your comment complains about “propaganda” and “nationalist flamewar” (unfounded) and asks for moderation. The submission is more substantive than your comment.
You mean like most mainstream news that parrot state-sponsored talking points? It seems counterpropaganda propaganda pieces are the only way to balance out state propaganda these days.
You repeat, above, that HN is not for nationalist flamewar, and requires substance. But this post is nationalist flamewar and isn't substantive. Allowing it while shutting down similar content from the opposite perspective is... unsettling.