FeeTinesAMady

That doesn't work in real life. In order to know what level of force is necessary, one has to have a perfect knowledge of the opposition. That isn't possible, so you always respond with more force than you think in necessary - overengineering the carnage.

That's exactly the kind of thinking that leads to global nuclear annihilation, and when that consequence became clear, intelligent people finally realized how wrong it is.

But your argument is wrong anyhow. Either you're trying to end the war, or you're not. If you are, you try all avenues, including negotiation. If you don't try negotiation, you aren't trying to end the war, you're trying to prolong it. The US leadership knew they couldn't lose at that point, so they weren't trying to end it.

The what if game is pretty boring.

It sure is when you lose right away, due to the US never trying to negotiate. Earlier you said that it was "risky" to do so. How?

And It doesn't matter that we don't know what would have happened if the US had attempted negotiations with Japan. It only matters that they never did.

watching a frustrated care troll twist

What are you talking about?

Negotiating with irrational actors is risky

They never even tried it.

I'll make this simple. The only justification for the fire bombings and nuclear bombings that has any possible merit is that they were necessary to end the war. However, the US never even tried to negotiate, nor did they try to communicate to the Japanese that they would be willing to allow the Emperor to remain nominally in power. They could have used that to end the war far sooner.

So how could the bombings possibly be necessary to end the war when the war might have been ended by other means? I'm sure you'll say that that wouldn't have worked, but how would you know? The lack of any attempt shows that the US wasn't interested in ending the war: they wanted revenge, and therefore the bombings were not justified.

Yes, they do. See my comment near the top. Nothing disrespectful about it, just opinionated.

So the US killed 500,000 civilians because they didn't weren't willing to negotiate, and you think that that's funny. That says a lot about you.

Mind you, there's a downside to that. An FBI that can infiltrate and dismantle the KKK at will can do the same to any legitimate movement for change, like Occupy, etc.

Such as the US guaranteeing that the Emperor stays in power, which they allowed after the war anyway? http://www.spectacle.org/696/long.html

And what is that smile for, anyway? Do you think this is funny?

Except that Japan repeatedly tried to make peace before the atomic bombings, and if the US hadn't been so determined that it be an unconditional surrender and been willing to negotiate, they could have ended the war before that, without any need to even think about invasion. So it was an evil slaughter.

What else can you assume, though? You have no information at that point.

LibreSSL is doing the first part of that. When it's in a useable state, switch to that and leave OpenSSL in the past.

What did they change, if you don't mind my asking? I've been using it for two seasons now, and haven't noticed anything too annoying, although I have been in public leagues only so far.

There is no tactic

Actually, I've reconsidered. You admit to the realpolitik of the TPP and you admit to how it is try to sabotage China's self-governance (re. intellectual property, which they are MUCH better off without). But you aren't doing so with the point of view of admitting the bad parts of the TPP. You actually think these are good things.

In fact, your entire post is downplaying the negative impacts of the TPP and trying to end on an up note "it's good! It's necessary! "Navigating future global financial and international policy options"! "Major strategic opportunities"! You never list even one! Not even in this response. "I believe that the TPP is important for the future economic viability of the United States." Not a single justification for that. You just keep repeating it, instead. That's the Big Lie method. Keep repeating it until people start to believe it.

I believe that the TPP is important for the future economic viability of the United States. I included some reasons why in that post, and also in other branches of the discussion. I would also be willing to discuss further here.

You included NO reasons in that post, and no reasons in this one, either. Eventually, in another post, you state that you think it will help "the dollar, US bonds and Western financial institutions". Western financial institutions! Those are the people we want to help now? The people who caused the global economic crisis and got away with it richer than ever?

All of your posts in this thread fit a pattern. You respond to some criticism about the TPP, and you say "I agree!" Then you ignore it and say that the TPP is good. Every post. Repeating it. Repetition. The Big Lie.

If you agree with all of these criticisms, how can you then state that you think it's a net positive? Wait, you say right here: "It is, however, a keystone effort to establish a primary trade treaty in the region at a time it may be otherwise denied from." It almost seems like you think that ANY treaty in Asia would be a good thing. Any US influence at all. And you agree with all the criticisms, and they just don't matter to you. Give up democracy and give up sovereignty, and give corporations their power over national governments. Who cares? We get a treaty out of it. And just getting that makes losing everything else worth it.

Certainly I do not provide evidence in the prior post that single issue voting is harmful.

Being a single issue voter, while not without drawbacks, means that you can focus your vote on that single issue. And this issue is more important than anything else right now. So single issue voting on this one issue, if the voting is against it, is actually a very good thing.

You won't agree with any of that, though, and I don't care. This is for the rest of the readers.

You are using the tactic of trying to seem just like us and agreeing with us that it's bad: "... it comes with certain trojan horses ... such as requirements mentioned in the article for internet service providers to filter and monitor customer traffic."

Then, with us convinced that you're firmly on our side, you make the bold statement: "The TPP is important for navigating future global financial and international policy options, but bundled with it are laws that would otherwise be rejected at the ballot box."

And you say it again: "You can be sure that the TPP is in the interest of the US's strategic financial and diplomatic future. That's not a lie - nor is it fearmongering."

I'm sure it is in the interests of the ultra-wealthy and elite in the US. What's in it for everyone else, though?

This is your fearmongering: "it is dangerous to be a single issue voter."

Nowhere in your previous post or this one do you come up with ONE justification for that, or for your statement that the TPP is important and necessary. Nowhere.

But Github here is in the position where they are the only external party that could do something about this, because the code is hosted on their site.

... Im sure many people don't want GitHub to start arbitrarily banning projects because of a random set of beliefs they have

It wouldn't be unprecedented and it wouldn't be arbitrary. Google Code, for instance, only allows open source projects to be hosted with them. From what I can tell about Github, they allow any license. Doesn't mean that they can't change that policy.

Sure, it's easier to do nothing. But they alone could do something. And Facebook will get the goodwill they want from this without much kickback because nobody does anything.

... I don't believe I need to be punished ...

It's not about punishment. It's not: oh, you did something bad, you need to be punished for it. It's that it shouldn't be easy, and doing it in person makes sure of that. That's all it is. And it sounds a lot like you're rationalizing your desire to avoid that situation by telling yourself that it would be better for the employee, as though you won't let yourself consider the idea that it's all about it being easier for you.

Downvotes? Really? Github could make a stand here and disallow licenses that evil and self-serving. With this license, anybody who even uses this software can't challenge any patents of Facebook's. If Github said no, this is wrong, they would set an example for everyone else and single this out as the terrible license it is.

Github would earn a lot of respect if they simply disallowed that sort of license for anything hosted with them.

The point that all your detractors seem to be getting at, that you won't let yourself understand, is that you should do it in person so that it is hard for you to do it. You will never be able to pretend that you aren't doing a great deal of harm to another human being if you have to actually face them and see it.

freedom123, fyi, your comments are showing up as dead.

It seems pretty counterproductive for Google to penalize the linked-to website for this, because they don't necessarily have any control over the links. This means that now a good strategy would be to make a bunch of spam links to your competitors' websites and have their rankings go down through no fault of their own. While that would be less effective than having your own go up, it's still useful.

What Google should do is make the links have no effect at all, thus preventing this abuse.

It's entirely possible that a lot of people don't know what -CURRENT really means if they're new to FreeBSD. They could be on 10.1 and think that that means that they're on -CURRENT, and thus affected by this bug, but they're not.

Right, because I used his real name.

Not even close. Read the other comments in this subthread.

It might be. But we don't actually know how HN's voting algorithm works (secret sauce), and we do know for a fact that the HN staff will manipulate vote gravity in order to make the content of a thread more accurately reflect 'quality'. So it's not exactly ironclad evidence of government vote rigging, when Hacker News is a black box which is rigged by design.

It's also not out of the realm of possibility that more people who agree with yeahyeah's point of view have upvoted him than people have upvoted other threads. And this is a long thread, so the effect of commenting and upvoting throughout may be cumulative. And some comments in other threads have been downvoted into near oblivion.

So because there's no absolute proof, he's not a shill. How about deciding what's more likely? What is more likely: that this post was voted to the top despite lack of support in the thread, or that a circle of upvoters voted it up? Remember, it is a LOT easier to hit that upvote button than to make an actual contribution to the discussion, so you would expect to find that a ring of shills would operate in that fashion. One posts, as that takes actual thought and effort, and the rest upvote.

Actually, I would argue that is democracy working as intended. The government has the right to present its point of view and try to convince people to agree with it - that is literally how democracy is supposed to work

If they want to convince people of their point of view, then why can't they do it legitimately?

Do you somehow think that this sort of behavior isn't subversive? That it doesn't work? And that makes it okay for the government to manipulate public opinion in this way?

It's okay. I can't believe you think that. There is one hell of a difference between presenting your own point of view and having thousands of fake people presenting the views that they are paid to.

I think a more effective countermeasure would be to examine the evidence of the arguments presented and call out lies when you encounter them. Attack the comment, not the commenter, particularly since you're never going to have more than suspicion and confirmation bias as evidence.

No. Doing both is much more effective. Otherwise they control the first posts, they make a sense of a false consensus in their favour, and these things really can influence how people think. Don't believe me? Research it yourself.

I would much rather people make up their own minds instead of being tricked into thinking what the government wants them to. I still find it hard to believe that I live in a world where the latter is what actually happens.

Any sort of praise or tacit approval for the NSA reduces people's anger towards them. Any reduction of anger towards them helps breed complacency. This is why they would make a post like this at all. People need to be mad at them in order to want change badly enough.

What kind of evidence do you expect to find?

I'm not attacking someone just because of his opinion, nor am I advocating that. I'm calling out a shill. Look at the facts. One post before today. A pro-NSA post that reads like rhetoric. This post is voted up to the very top comment of the discussion, DESPITE the lack of "warm and fuzzy feelings about the US". Now, in a conversation where the sentiment is so anti-NSA, why do you think this has so many upvotes? That's evidence of rigged voting. That he has failed to sway opinion here does not at all mean that he isn't a shill.

That's enough evidence to convict.

Look, here's an article where you can start reading about these kind of psyops: http://ultraculture.org/blog/2014/02/26/reddit-shills-tried-... Discussion forums like this one need to be aware of this sort of thing going on. We have to talk about it. We have to try and point out people whose job it is to steer conversations to their liking. It is the right of a free people to associate and freely converse with their peers and make up their own minds free of malicious interference and cointelpro. If government agents actively manipulate public opinion in favor of them, and the public opinion is different from what it otherwise would be, then there is no democracy. That is wrong.

What can we do, when there's no proof? We can use our brains and examine the evidence. We can call out obvious shills to try and stem the tide. That is what I am advocating for. We should point out obvious shills so that discussions have more of a chance at reaching their natural conclusions. You seem to be advocating that we do nothing at all, and that is what I disagree with.

You think I am accusing him of being a shill because I don't agree with him? Have you seen his posting history? That's pretty much the definition of a shill who isn't trying very hard. Much more dangerous are the ones who actually make normal posts on stories throughout the year and only turn on the propaganda when the discussion turns to the NSA and government activities. Those ones you can't detect.

I don't understand why you're more upset with me for pointing out propaganda than the propaganda machine itself.

But the pro-government shills ARE here. That's not paranoia, that's fact, unless you think they'd target Reddit only for some reason, which makes no sense. So why can't we talk about them? If we don't face up to the reality of this kind of propaganda, we won't be able to have proper discussions about important topics like this one.

As the other responder to me pointed out, this account had ONE post to its name almost a year ago before the post I responded to today. I don't think they got their money's worth out of this one due to how easy it was to spot, but all the other ones upvoting it are earning their pay.

the United States post WWII is downright benevolent

You must be joking. Read what ex-CIA agent John Stockwell has to say about that: http://www.serendipity.li/cia/stock1.html

The CIA went into foreign countries and purposely destabilized them and started civil wars. It continues to this day: see the Arab Spring. The Soviet Union's actions were quite tame by comparison.

For every Soviet or Russian invasion, there's a corresponding US one that is just as bad: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the US interferes with the internal politics of many more nations to boot. See Pinochet in Chile, the Shah in Iran (although the British had a big part in that too). Russia threatens its immediate neighbors, yes. But at least they oppose the US. Think they are all bad? They keep Snowden safe and sound. The US threatens any nation in the world that doesn't fall into line. When they thought Snowden was on board an official government aircraft, they had their cronies in Europe force it down in violation of international law. Think that the European nations make their own decisions? Think again.

This is the threat that the US poses to the world, and most of the world is already under their control. Iran isn't, so they are threatened with war. They've been threatened with war since Bush's idiotic "Axis of Evil" speech. Since before that. You think they don't have the right to try to defend themselves? To prevent that? Nuclear weapons, in this world, bring freedom. See how North Korea has never been invaded. See how the US knows better than to engage Russia in outright conflict. Nations that have nuclear weapons can have actual independence.

With the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they are trying to force their laws onto the entire world, and that is just one of many such agreements. Canada is already a puppet state of the US. The current state of the world is that no nation can try to free themselves of US influence without getting an internal revolution or even an outright invasion, and that is a much bigger threat than Russia is, or China, or Iran, or anyone.

Not right. If the US was peaceful, there wouldn't be much of an argument for developing nuclear weapons, but the US is the most aggressive nation in the world, and nuclear weapons are the only thing that give them pause. The actions of the US since the end of World War II - invading other nations at will, interfering in their internal affairs, starting secret wars - give legitimacy to nations who want to develop nuclear weapons for their own defense. Nuclear weapons bring safety from you.

This statement is the most upvoted piece of propaganda I've ever seen on Hacker News. I think the shills that Greenwald told us all about are all over HN too.

There's no point in praising anything the NSA does unless you are perfectly happy with them destroying security for the entire world and spying on everybody at all. The NSA has the power to blackmail politicians and run the country. They lied to congress. They are a completely rogue agency. And you praise them!