berntb

Frankly, I trust the US government more than my local ones, to have this information.

What I don't trust is the neutrality regarding company sensitive information and competitors. (I still trust the US government more than I would trust most any other than that, but still not much.)

OK, thanks. I understand that I over reacted.

I have found that I am easily trolled when I have the beginning of allergy troubles. It is better to not comment than to find out the hard way I need anti histamines.

Sorry for wasting people's time and energy.

I'll add a comment here so DanBC sees it.

You have a point, I am easily trolled when people lack arguments and start discussing person.

Regarding earlier comments... I got mainly upvotes, until an hour ago.

I have argued, a year or two ago, that this subject have to much emotional attachments and doesn't work on HN. It is twice as true today, it seems people now often have secondary accounts used for trolling when they lack answers about soemthing they find important.

That was just answering a common bad argument in advance.

I wrote it INSIDE "()", AS AN EDIT. since that was the only thing you could comment on, sad...

EDIT: I used a ":-)" three comments ago as a mark of irony. Well, justin66 have no serious answer, so I end it here.

Edit 2: Justin66 seems to downvote my comments in this old discussion now, with multiple accounts... 15+ downvotes on old and new comments in 20 minutes. That is what happens when people lack both a serious argument and maturity. (Easy to find for HN mods..)

Edit 3: detaro -- The karma is irrelevant. And I should be equally ashamed as justin66 for needling whai I hope is a teenager when he have dearly held wrong opinions. Enough.

"just a matter of degree"? OK, let's look at it then:

Side A is officially antisemitic in their founding document (Hamas) and TV programs (even for children!); they literally took inspirations from the 3rd Reich. They condone murders of civilians (even children) and pay pensions to the family of killed murderers. They have expelled all members of side B. They persecute members of side B everywhere on the planet where both groups live in the same society.

Side B have racism from individuals, which is officially condemned by a democratically elected government. They throw murderers of civilians in jail. 20% (?) of the population in side B are really part of side A, with no expulsions (except once in a bad civil war, when both sides did it, almost 70 years ago).

And so on, there are lots of examples.

You can dismiss this as "just a matter of degree". But then note that there is also "just a matter of degree" in Celsius between Antarctica and Hawaii.

When do "double standards for different sides" go over the limit to the definition of stronger terms?

(Edit: If you're going to argue that persecution and hatred of Jews are excusable because of X, note that more Jews were expelled from the Muslim world than Palestinians that fled from the Nakba. And multiple times more land was stolen from them than the total area of Israel.)

Exactly, reality is boring -- my favorite shooter always was Unreal Tournament. :-)

These days I play an undead thief in Dark Souls 3. (But maybe it is realistic, I have no idea how professional thieves live.)

Richard Falk worked for UNHRC -- infamous for being shanghaied by dictators that don't criticize each others, but instead complain about democracies.

Israel has been literally criticized a hundred times more than e.g. Sudan with a million rapes and a million murders (more?).

See e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Human_Rights_Co...

(Also, Falk have been writing for Counterpunch and so on, you don't do that if you're not quite politically extreme.)

So, on one side you have the Nakba in a burning civil war when populations were thrown out (both Jews and Palestinians). Civil wars are horrible.

The other side is when the Jews were thrown out of the Muslim countries and their property stolen. Not in a civil war, but just from racism -- because they had the same religion as in some other country.

Note here that more Jews fled from the Muslim world than Palestinians in the Nakba. And in the fleeing Jews' stolen property there were more land than multiple times the size of Israel.

Contrast this with that not every Palestinian fled from Israel. They are still a large part of the population today -- the Israeli Palestinians were NOT thrown out as a reaction to when the Muslims threw out their Jews.

And you are really, really upset about Israel -- but dismiss the worse things happening in e.g. your home country Tunisia...

I have to stop here -- any further comment on your opinions, moral and intellectual integrity can't be polite. Let me just say that as a Westerner, I think you should judge yourself harder than you judge others.

You are not contradicting my point. He is still going to jail.

The sympathy for due process of terrorists will wear thin in most democracies. Afaik, most countries with continuous terror problems throw out the law book.

This is a quite logical result, since the point of terror is to get a fear and horror reaction from the civilian population to influence them. Scared voters make politicians hysterical, so everything is done to stop the situation. (Democracies seems to be even worse here, since voters are more important than non democracies.)

Afaik, this goes for USA, Germany, Israel, Britain, Spain, etc. (I saw claims from some English guy that they did it different regarding IRA, then some other GB guy contradicted and listed some English laws. Let's call that example uncertain.)

So the basic problem is that the Jews and/or the democratic country are evil? Sigh... :-(

Arafat got at least two offers for a Palestinian state (at Camp David and once later), with about 91% of the West Bank iirc.

The later offer was when Barak needed Arafat's support of a peace agreement before an election (so the Palestinian side had a good negotiating position).

Arafat didn't accept either -- which was one thing. But there was no counter offer like "Give us XX and YY and customs advantages ZZ and ...". Instead Arafat started a terror campaign.

But there is no blame for all that refusal to even give a counter proposal; it is all a big Israeli conspiracy.

(Seriously, I feel a bit sick when I chat with hateful people.)

What I've read, is that the border to Gaza was open enough for commuting and shopping trips -- until the systematic attacks on civilians.

You had no problem with that description in your previous comment.

But good references to non partisan sources would be interesting?

(AGAIN: If the ones controlling an area -- including doing elections, defense, police and taxes -- put all their economy into rocket artillery against another country's civilians, the reaction will not be mild... And Gaza is not part of a city, it was a free area.)

You don't contradict that you were aware of my points..?

If e.g. Finland or Estonia started to shoot rocket artilleri towards St Petersburg, the reaction would certainly be much worse than Israel's at Gaza...

(And because of Karelia etc for Finland and generations of slavery for Estonians, they have as good reasons as the Gazans.)

The situation is:

Side A attack side B's civilians. You only complain about side B's quite moderate defense against A's attacks. (Again, installed to stop the attacks.) Then you motivate that further attacks from A are understandable, because of B's defense.

It is such a sad case of hypocritical and hateful circular logic I get vertigo. :-(

As far as I know, the walls came up as security measures because of the second Intifada. Before that, people lived in Gaza and worked in Israel and people travelled between for shopping, etc. (This isolation gave serious economic problems in Israel too.)

So the isolation and security came up because of violence, the terror against civilian Israelis is not an original reaction to the wall.

But I suspect you know this.

You can't get 99% of a population to leave their homes where they grew up without hard push factors.

Especially since their assets were confiscated...

Regarding the killed children -- wasn't the people doing a revenge murder of a Palestinian teenager sentenced to long jail sentences when they got caught?

The Palestinian terrorists are declared martyrs, mural paintings are done, their relatives get a pension from PLO -- while caught Israeli murderers are sent to jail..?

It do seem like equivalent sides, as you claim... :-)

dragonwriter know that Serbia wasn't a stable democracy at the time. He just refuses to discuss it because he is trolling.

Also, Croatia/Bosnia/Serbia were civil wars.

Anyway, how many free elections had Croatia and Bosnia had at that time, to be defined as democratic? :-)

How many peaceful transitions of power had there been at the time (the real gold test)? :-)

If just one reasonably free election is needed, then Hamas in Gaza is a democratic government... :-)

To start with, 30% of the 2015 asylum seekers in Sweden were from Syria -- so that is not really the reason for the flood wave. The politicians opened the gates, it was possible to get to West Europe.

The consensus is that the Assad junta is responsible for much more death/torture than even ISIS. They have the ability to use barrel bombs and artillery on civilians.

And I do think you know both points above.

That was yet another long list of extreme claims without references!

Edit: No references in the answer to this, as expected. (I can only blame myself for arguing with what looks like an extra account created to troll people someone don't agree with.)

(At least about modern, mainly international, politics -- what the Brits did before WWII seems quite irrelevant to anything by now.

Edit: WWII started almost 80 years ago for <vulgarity>'s sake, there is some time limit when even people in the Middle East have to stop blaming GB...)

AGAIN: You claim that Yugoslavia was democratic before the civil war, since you claim that exact Balkan war (?) is a counterexample to the claim that democracies don't wage war.

How many free elections did they have? :-) How many free transfers of power did they have? :-)

(The next point here is that the democratic peace theory didn't say anything about civil wars?)

EDIT: I am NOT going to comment on Dragonwriter's answer to this and for a THIRD TIME ask for references about how Yugoslavia and Serbia are stable democracies that have been doing transfer of power after free elections AT THAT TIME PERIOD. :-( I am disappointed over a 30+K karma account for this bullshit.

I think most people believe their own country's propaganda. :-)

In Sweden, since that is the subject, we really used to be naive and trust what we were told.

Some of the typical characteristics you saw, all the way back to before written history, is that we are group oriented and do what we were told. This made for a high trust society, which is probably what made the place work.

But no more, the society elites are really destroying this trust now.

That the democratic world supports Saudi A is an extreme example of realpolitik, of course. We need stability in that part of the world.

> the number of available democracy-democracy pairs is so small compared to thr number of pairs of countries that the expected number of wars between them is, rounded to the nearest integer, zero.

There are literally dozens of modern democracies that have been free since WWII, how can that be too few "pairs"?

> Certain, since the wars in the Balkans from the 1990s, the Democratic Peace theory is even less defensible than it was previously.

Uh, Soviet ended 1989. Then the Balkan got free -- and Jugoslavia fell relatively quickly into a civil war. How does that reflect on democracies?

(Are you defining "democracy" as "one free election, no power changes after consecutive free elections is needed"? That is hardly how the term is defined, last I checked either the democracy or the democratic peace theory.)

A revolution is scary, the dice are thrown in the air and you have no clue how they fall. It didn't go well in Libya, so far.

But mainly Putin and his employees seem to think that it was bad to support an uprising to get rid of the previous junta in Libya (and they are probably mostly upset because Gadaffi was a good customer).

And about Syria -- how many tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of civilians have the Assad regime bombed/tortured/etc to death?! That ought to weigh heavily on Obama in the history books.

(Regarding Iraq, I do believe in that it was an honest attempt, but of course it is hard to go to a functional democracy in half a generation. The spectacular failure was extreme, of course...)

> all the time

Uh? What examples [of deposing democracies then invading when the dictator becomes too oppressive] exist after the cold war?

Edit: Point is, there was a war of influence in the cold war; dictators played Soviet/West against each others for support. E.g. South Korea and Taiwan became democratic after the cold war, to not risk being ostracized.

> sabre-rattling coming, frankly, largely from the West

Uh, the Western democracies have started to do wars in Europe for territory? :-)

After Soviet fell, the NATO forces (and the neutral countries) in Europe melted away; the US/Canadian units in Germany went home and so on. This changed after Russia started to rebuild and do wars.

Edit: This was about the new "sabre rattling". Long, long after the Balkan horrible tragedies. (And I'd really argue if the "West" rattled any sabers there, but it isn't relevant anyway.)

Regarding Sweden and WW II: If Sweden shouldn't have been a "lapdog" -- which side of the war should it have joined? With Norway or with Finland? Not a simple choice, neither now nor at the time.

And regarding USA today:

Check the democratic peace theory -- democracies don't fight wars with each others. (Not even USA. :-) ) So it is arguably in the Swedish interest to help all democracies be as strong and informed as ever possible.

That said, I doubt the reason Sweden is such a handmaid to US interests was so philosophical, of course. Every country do realpolitik and lies shamelessly about it. We don't know what the US paid (hopefully not just bribes to Swedish politicians, old hatt/mössa style... :-) ).

Edit: These comments really jumps up/down in votes. :-)

You talk about that Python have just one possible layout standard and so on, I guess? That is a different subject. (And sure, no coding standard is bad for a project, Python removes that discussion to a degree.)

I think the real problem with Python/Ruby/etc is the surprising lack of an analogue to CPAN Testers.

It isn't just all of CPAN that is tested on different OS/Perl version combinations, it also stress test the Perl versions.

Interesting. Is this because the Perl ecosystem is more mature or because of the philosophy of backwards compatibility?

The "backwards compatibility" philosophy isn't so explicit for the ecosystem, mostly the language? Is the test-on-install-by-default making a big difference there?

The article discussed finding targets expressed by different cancers.

The main problem is that a cancer can be quite heterogeneous. You really need multiple ways of killing a given cancer to be certain all is gone.

You are wrong about at least Sweden following a different path.

When Sweden had a high growth, the taxes were low and it was much more of a strict capitalist economy.

When the taxes were raised to be internationally high in the early 70s, the growth crashed and Sweden fell quite a few places in GNP/Capita.

(I am Swedish.)

The Chinese industrialization and growth was mostly based on capitalism. Which is more of a Western economy than the Great Leap. Which was the point you comment on.

(At least, compared to the failure before, with just central planning.)

If you have anything contradicting that, it would be interesting?

(Edit: Ah, I commented on a karma 23 secondary account? :-) )