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Cynic Jester posted:The issue with your mainstream position is that the allegation reads like a conspiracy theory with no support beyond an unnamed whistleblower who is factually incorrect multiple times in the allegations. Do I believe the US are capable of blowing up NS for their own gains? Sure. Can't see what they gained from it but sure. Do I believe Norway played a key part in the operation and didn't leak like a sieve? Hahahahahahaha, no. Beeswax posted:The Lenin Poster is not saying anything controversial and I have no idea why people are freaking out and making these poor dunking attempts
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Feb 10, 2023 18:52
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Cynic Jester posted:The issue with your mainstream position is that the allegation reads like a conspiracy theory with no support beyond an unnamed whistleblower who is factually incorrect multiple times in the allegations. Do I believe the US are capable of blowing up NS for their own gains? Sure. Can't see what they gained from it but sure. Do I believe Norway played a key part in the operation and didn't leak like a sieve? Hahahahahahaha, no. we've been over this a bunch of times already - the position i'm defending is prior to any investigation done about the facticity of individual allegations. it is asserting that one actually needs to determine the facticity of the allegations before dismissing them or the narrative involved in them. i've laid out a couple of criteria i think are reasonable for weeding out the worst noise (effectively amounting to "can we expect a non-trivial number of reasonable people to believe this as presented"), but i think that allegations of secret service malfeasance should be treated relatively generously because of the history of such services as well as their strong impulses towards secrecy. if this reads wishy-washy and uncontroversial it's because it is, except when it's advanced to entertain an idea people strongly dislike. i got the impression that rust martialis specifically was making an intellectual mistake in dismissing the allegations prior to any investigation of the truth of specific claims in it, and objected to that. and here we are.
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Feb 10, 2023 18:55
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Cynic Jester posted:Can't see what they gained from it but sure. You can't see what the U.S. gains from breaking German overreliance on Russian gas, which Blinken immediately termed "a tremendous opportunity" like three times in the same speech?
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Feb 10, 2023 19:03
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SplitSoul posted:You can't see what the U.S. gains from breaking German overreliance on Russian gas, which Blinken immediately termed "a tremendous opportunity" like three times in the same speech?  (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 10, 2023 19:08
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V. Illych L. posted:
It reads like you were trying to muddy the waters. From the start you were told it was bullshit and why it was bullshit and yet you continued with the "just asking questions" shtick.
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Feb 10, 2023 19:12
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Mr. Nenonen, I realize that your position in this fair community pretty well guarantees banality, insincerity, and a rather irritating method of expressing yourself. Stupidity, however, is not necessarily a inherent trait, therefore, please listen closely. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 10, 2023 19:24
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SplitSoul posted:Mr. Nenonen, I realize that your position in this fair community pretty well guarantees banality, insincerity, and a rather irritating method of expressing yourself. Stupidity, however, is not necessarily a inherent trait, therefore, please listen closely. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. And yet it still feels like Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is with us in this thread...
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Feb 10, 2023 19:34
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V. Illych L. posted:look, even if we assume that hersh is completely mad and just making stuff up, one has to believe that this is so obvious that no significant amount of reasonable people will take his claims seriously for it not to be worth following up. i think that his resume means that a significant amount of reasonable people will take his claims seriously, and that there is therefore a public interest in investigating the claims *even if they're false*.
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Feb 10, 2023 19:49
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V. Illych L. posted:you're being incredibly aggro about an insanely moderate and mainstream position, namely that allegations of state malfeasance should be investigated by a critical press and not simply dismissed out of hand The moderate and mainstream position is that Hersh's article doesn't display the due diligence in fact-checking his source necessary to get it past any editor worth their salt, and no one else is obligated to do it for him instead. https://oalexanderdk.substack.com/p/blowing-holes-in-seymour-hershs-pipe If you read my previous links, this doesn't have a whole lot of new info, but it includes some good charts on the distances involved, and the necessary diving times. I'll also point out that the "critical" alternative media press isn't investigating and attempting to corroborate his claims either. Instead, they're all falling over themselves in declaring how Hersh's article is incontrovertible proof of what the knew all along.
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Feb 10, 2023 20:20
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Alhazred posted:It reads like you were trying to muddy the waters. From the start you were told it was bullshit and why it was bullshit and yet you continued with the "just asking questions" shtick. i have long since given up having controversial positions in D&D which are not either important to me or i am confident that i can ground in some basically very unobjectionable and uncontroversial position. as a general rule, with stuff relating to the war in ukraine people tend to dispense with a lot of principles which are both important to me and which are, when it comes down to it, supposed to be uncontroversial. i think that is bad, because those kinds of attitudes are not good in general and tend to lead to an erosion of our societal expectations of various things. in this case, we should have a baseline skepticism to secret services for various reasons and be willing to entertain the idea that they're up to seriously illegal stuff. so when i say "i don't think that what you're doing here is defensible because X" and people insist that X either doesn't matter or that my opinion is, in fact, Y, i do not think that arguing either of those points are bullshit. in this case we're suddenly engaged in a discussion about when a claim should be substantively engaged with before one may dismiss it - which i happen to think is another important point of principle - and whether thinking that a claim should be substantively engaged with is the same as endorsing that claim, which it clearly is not. this could've been done with very quickly as a kind of pedantic quibble (which was nonetheless in the service of an important point of principle) if people hadn't gotten very invested in me being some kind of idiot and/or horrible person for making the quibble and projecting a bunch of opinions on me, some of which i explicitly said that i wasn't endorsing. at that point there's a personal element in this as well for me (in hindsight my attempt at a rhetorical inversion at nenonen was silly and unnecessary, and it was motivated by this). BlankSystemDaemon posted:"Well, this thing and that thing that happened in the past proves that this persons claim should be treated more credibly" applies to every single conspiracy theorist, because it's statistically improbable that they've never done something agreeable. most conspiracy theorists haven't got several prestigious prizes for uncovering actual state conspiracies, though. i stand by the criterion i laid out in the quoted post, pretty much. Hannibal Rex posted:The moderate and mainstream position is that Hersh's article doesn't display the due diligence in fact-checking his source necessary to get it past any editor worth their salt, and no one else is obligated to do it for him instead. if it's being boosted, that only makes it more important to engage with it substantively, even if - or especially! - if it's wrong, because if it is not engaged with substantively then reasonable people will believe that it is true. you are not arguing against my position here. i've tried to be very clear about what my contention actually is here previously and earlier in this post V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Feb 10, 2023 |
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Feb 10, 2023 20:41
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V. Illych L. posted:if it's being boosted, that only makes it more important to engage with it substantively, even if - or especially! - if it's wrong, because if it is not engaged with substantively then reasonable people will believe that it is true. you are not arguing against my position here. I don't think your position is unreasonable, but our standards of credibility are apparently different. As far as Hersh's claims are verifiable, they have been debunked. I've shared all such efforts I could find that I consider worthwhile. How much more engagement with the story do you expect at this point? Maybe we should consider why a genuine whistleblower would choose a 85 year old has-been with a tarnished reputation for the biggest scandal in NATO history? And then fail to provide him with any documentary evidence? Personally, I'd have picked Chotiner. Every nation and personell that took part in Baltops will already know whether any of the parts that are not as easily disproven by OSINT hold any water. If you're wondering why the German government and other NATO members aren't responding to the story, that'd be my explanation. But I don't expect that to be expounded at length in public. And even if it were, it wouldn't matter one whit to the conspiracy mongers.
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Feb 10, 2023 21:53
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Hannibal Rex posted:Every nation and personell that took part in Baltops will already know whether any of the parts that are not as easily disproven by OSINT hold any water. If you're wondering why the German government and other NATO members aren't responding to the story, that'd be my explanation.
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Feb 10, 2023 22:02
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Neither Norway nor the US would risk such a massive diplomatic disaster on the related personnels ability to keep quiet about it. This is an operation requiring dozens of mid to low level people.
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Feb 10, 2023 22:14
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Feliday Melody posted:Neither Norway nor the US would risk such a massive diplomatic disaster on the related personnels ability to keep quiet about it. This is an operation requiring dozens of mid to low level people.
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Feb 10, 2023 22:16
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Jet fuel can't melt steel pipes.
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Feb 10, 2023 22:17
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V. Illych L. posted:i have long since given up having controversial positions in D&D which are not either important to me or i am confident that i can ground in some basically very unobjectionable and uncontroversial position. as a general rule, with stuff relating to the war in ukraine people tend to dispense with a lot of principles which are both important to me and which are, when it comes down to it, supposed to be uncontroversial. i think that is bad, because those kinds of attitudes are not good in general and tend to lead to an erosion of our societal expectations of various things. in this case, we should have a baseline skepticism to secret services for various reasons and be willing to entertain the idea that they're up to seriously illegal stuff.  You were given plenty of reasons why the article was wrong and you still kept going.
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Feb 10, 2023 22:30
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V. Illych L. posted:so your answer to these allegations is that seymour hersh is a russian op? that's a pretty serious allegation on its own. have you any evidence for this? He was promoting the movie alleging that Magnitsky stole russian taxpayer money himself and then died in custody without medical care to spite the Russian police and oligarchs accused of being the beneficiaries of said laundered taxpayer money. This is a fairly easy tell because the russian government was using every asset in their pocket to promote the same stupid narrative against the Magnitsky act because the oligarchs are very close to the kremlin Now I know there are some stupid as poo poo people out there but defending oligarchs laundering tax money and killing people revealing their schemes is too much for most unless they are getting paid Somaen fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Feb 10, 2023 |
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Feb 10, 2023 22:40
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Alhazred posted:
His posts are way less annoying than whatever KM impression you're doing with these gifs
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Feb 10, 2023 22:53
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The problem is that Sy's been churning out bullshit for a while now. So the reason to not take it seriously is because, well, past performance *does* tend to be an indicator. It doesn't mean party A or B did/n't do it, just that Sy's word vomit shouldn't be the reason (not) to.
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Feb 10, 2023 22:59
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V. Illych L. posted:if it's being boosted, that only makes it more important to engage with it substantively, even if - or especially! - if it's wrong, because if it is not engaged with substantively then reasonable people will believe that it is true. you are not arguing against my position here. i've tried to be very clear about what my contention actually is here previously and earlier in this post Ok. What's next?
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Feb 11, 2023 00:25
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Randarkman posted:Ok. well ideally a robust and honest investigation into the claims made and, following the conclusions of such an investigation, a discussions about its implications and the path forward you know, ordinary discursive democratic processes following ordinary discursive democratic rules.
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Feb 11, 2023 00:52
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Alhazred posted:
that was never the discussion, unless you hold the view that the position that the article requires substantive engagement and an endorsement in full of the article's content are identical positions, which is wrong in a very unfruitful way.
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Feb 11, 2023 00:54
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V. Illych L. posted:well ideally a robust and honest investigation into the claims made and, following the conclusions of such an investigation, a discussions about its implications and the path forward alright. I'll get right on it.
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Feb 11, 2023 00:55
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When the teenagers passing in the street call you a "dumb loving nerd" that needs to "get dunked in the toilet" you have to debate them and prove them wrong. Them's the rules of our society 
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Feb 11, 2023 01:07
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Feliday Melody posted:Neither Norway nor the US would risk such a massive diplomatic disaster Right, the senile septuagenarian that keeps repeating the word "Armageddon" and prodding the world's largest nuclear arsenal is really risk averse. Edit: Christ, he's 80 now. SplitSoul fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Feb 11, 2023 |
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Feb 11, 2023 04:13
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Beeswax posted:His posts are way less annoying than whatever KM impression you're doing with these gifs
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Feb 11, 2023 06:42
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Since when is spamming image macros what passes for debate and discussion?
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Feb 11, 2023 07:24
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Yeah that's kinda annoying even though I think the Hersch story is an obvious conspiracy theory without evidence. I'm perfectly willing to the US blew up nordstream 2 however. But I guess my response to whoever blew up that crime against the planet would be... thanks?
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Feb 11, 2023 07:48
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Nenonen posted:I know fuckall about him nor do I care to know. But for some reason he is essentially serving Assad's and Putin's propaganda machinery. I don't know why you are ignoring his shortcomings and promoting him so eagerly. I have learned that it's a fool's errand to try to explain to a believer why GWB didn't order the 9/11 or why it's unlikely that Obama was born in Kenya, so I will leave it at that. Lol, it's faktisk.no up in here.
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Feb 11, 2023 09:04
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You have to substantively engage with every claim made and approach it in good faith!!! "Ok, heres the guy participating in an obvious op to defend murderous oligarchs that arrested and killed a guy in pretrial detention in a Russian prison after being tortured, beaten and denied medical care for a loving year. Then promptly forgot about it as no one bought the story" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Magnitsky *crickets*
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Feb 11, 2023 09:19
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V. Illych L. posted:this is not an investigation, this is a guy calling people and asking them whether they or the people paying them did serious crimes. this looks more like a stitch-up than it does a follow-up, from the headline to the conclusion, which mentions germany's investigation but fails to mention that germany's pretty much ruled out russia as a suspect. quote:why? there really are not that many people with hersh's career merits, and i've addressed the substance of this (the difficulty of discerning genuine madness from character assassination seems most pertinent) in other posts. there's no great systemic inefficiency to giving people this kind of credibility as a career achievement award if you place the bar anywhere near hersh's level.
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Feb 11, 2023 11:21
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true.spoon posted:Germany has decidedly not ruled out Russia as a suspect. quote:German investigators currently have no evidence that Russia is behind the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, German Attorney General Peter Frank told Die Welt. your mileage may vary, but i think this is about as close as an official ruling-out as we're ever going to get. i don't see any clear reason for frank to say this unless he's pretty sure that russia was not involved - it would be trivial to say something like "we're considering all options, not going to comment on specifics". i am, however, open to other interpretations if you've got them quote:Note that you are not taking the position "I think Hersh should not be dismissed outright no matter how many times in a row he publishes nonsense" you are taking the position "It is unreasonable to dismiss Hersh outright no matter how many times in a row he publishes nonsense". This is a much more extreme position and certainly not uncontroversial. if we go back to my proposed metric for this, "can we expect a non-trivial number of reasonable people to believe these allegations as they stand", i think it makes the case pretty well. hersh's record is mostly determined by his successes in a lot of people's minds. those make him credible to a fair amount reasonable (maybe low-info, but reasonable) people. as a general rule, then, it's dangerous to dismiss prior to substantive engagement, because it narrows the discursive democracy in an unnecessary way. i can modify my position and say that if hersh has an obvious breakdown and starts dancing naked in the streets or becomes clearly incapable of coherent thought then one can probably point towards that, but what he's doing here is formally fairly similar to the times where he blew the lid on genuine state conspiracies. of course, this doesn't mean that he's right. even if his source is genuine, that source could be playing him - as one gets older, one gets crankier and loses a bit of the intuition and energy, and so it's entirely possible in my mind that hersh has been taken for a walk by his source. however, that also has implications - what interests are served by leaking this story in this way? because of the guy's resume one could be reasonably sure that this was going to be a story. it may be a russian information operation (this would be a genuine revelation and very much worthwhile of an expose of its own) or it may be some kind of inter-agency slapfight or something. in this case, if the source is genuine, that source is willing to burn norway in a very casual way. why in the world would that be the case? the source could just be a crank, of course - plenty of those have worked for intelligence through the years - but these questions really do bear exploring, and that requires taking the story somewhat seriously. another reason i'm reacting in this specific case is that i think that extending the benefit of the doubt to secret services is something of which we should be extremely skeptical. this is not an uncontroversial position socially (e.g. https://www.nordnorskdebatt.no/angr.../o/5-124-190792), but it's one i'm confident i can ground in fairly basic bourgeois-democratic principles.
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Feb 11, 2023 12:30
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V. Illych L. posted:https://kyivindependent.com/news-feed/german-top-official-says-no-evidence-of-russian-sabotage-of-nord-stream-pipeline Translation: This [i.e. Russian involvement] can at the moment not be verified, the investigation is continuing. No matter your mileage you cannot turn this into "germany's pretty much ruled out russia as a suspect". quote:if we go back to my proposed metric for this, "can we expect a non-trivial number of reasonable people to believe these allegations as they stand", i think it makes the case pretty well. hersh's record is mostly determined by his successes in a lot of people's minds. those make him credible to a fair amount reasonable (maybe low-info, but reasonable) people. as a general rule, then, it's dangerous to dismiss prior to substantive engagement, because it narrows the discursive democracy in an unnecessary way. i can modify my position and say that if hersh has an obvious breakdown and starts dancing naked in the streets or becomes clearly incapable of coherent thought then one can probably point towards that, but what he's doing here is formally fairly similar to the times where he blew the lid on genuine state conspiracies. That doesn't mean that no newspaper or journalist should follow up. A newspaper can absolutely take the gamble and that's fine. But dismissing them out of hand would also be reasonable and not stupid. That is all.
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Feb 11, 2023 13:32
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true.spoon posted:Specifically if the new claims do not hold up to journalistic standards even on the surface.
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Feb 11, 2023 14:03
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Could you expand on what exactly you mean by this? The story, the evidence, or both put together?
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Feb 11, 2023 14:21
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true.spoon posted:Come on, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. The original statement is: "Das ist derzeit nicht belegbar, die Ermittlungen dauern an." it's just not what's being said, it's who's saying it. i can see no reasonable explanation for frank making that statement unless he was pretty sure that they were not going to conclude that russia was responsible for the bombings, because it would've been extremely easy to simply say nothing - now, with frank having said this, he's in an awkward spot if they do end up accusing russia. this is very basic communcation strategy with which every western official will be familiar. quote:Your metric doesn't make sense to me. Let's take as a concrete example a single reputable newspaper. However the allocation of ressources is decided there, it is absolutely reasonable for it to decide that none of their journalists should waste time following up on claims made by Hersh or anyone if they have produced a row of nonsense claims in the recent past. Specifically if the new claims do not hold up to journalistic standards even on the surface. It is almost the defintion of reasonable to base such decisions on recent veracity. if an individual news organisation decides not to follow up this story, that is not really a problem for me - not everyone can cover every story. i *would* have a problem with it if The Media collectively refused to engage substantively; that would be a failure of the press as a collective institution, in my view. i also have a problem with the apparent instinct that we as a public have to see allegations like this and then say "eh this is nothing, just drop it". that, i think, is legitimately dangerous, because the logical next step is that advocating that substantive engagement should happen is seen as endorsing the article in full and is inherently suspect, on the line with embracing especially outlandish conspiracy theories. for an example of this phenomenon, i can refer you to the past few pages of this thread.
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Feb 11, 2023 14:33
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Who is responsible for Magnitsky's death? Why did Hersh promote a film promoting the idea that it's not the Russian state in who's custody he died after being denied medical care or a trial until he revoked his allegations?
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Feb 11, 2023 14:53
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V. Illych L. posted:it's just not what's being said, it's who's saying it. i can see no reasonable explanation for frank making that statement unless he was pretty sure that they were not going to conclude that russia was responsible for the bombings, because it would've been extremely easy to simply say nothing - now, with frank having said this, he's in an awkward spot if they do end up accusing russia. this is very basic communcation strategy with which every western official will be familiar. Why? People place themselves in awkward spots all the loving time. He (and let's be clear this is one guy, a top official, but one guy), hasn't ruled out anything and the statement in the original is just that they basically can't say anything yet, including anything as regards Russia, probably because that was the specific questions he was being asked at the time. You are making a whole lot of assumptions on this thing.
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Feb 11, 2023 15:49
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V. Illych L. posted:it's just not what's being said, it's who's saying it. i can see no reasonable explanation for frank making that statement unless he was pretty sure that they were not going to conclude that russia was responsible for the bombings, because it would've been extremely easy to simply say nothing - now, with frank having said this, he's in an awkward spot if they do end up accusing russia. this is very basic communcation strategy with which every western official will be familiar. quote:if an individual news organisation decides not to follow up this story, that is not really a problem for me - not everyone can cover every story. i *would* have a problem with it if The Media collectively refused to engage substantively; that would be a failure of the press as a collective institution, in my view. i also have a problem with the apparent instinct that we as a public have to see allegations like this and then say "eh this is nothing, just drop it". that, i think, is legitimately dangerous, because the logical next step is that advocating that substantive engagement should happen is seen as endorsing the article in full and is inherently suspect, on the line with embracing especially outlandish conspiracy theories. for an example of this phenomenon, i can refer you to the past few pages of this thread.
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Feb 11, 2023 16:17
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The best part is that some mod felt the need to probe two posters for not being DnD enough, but this VERY SERIOUS DERAIL can apparently go on forever. Sweden is ruled by idiots. So when no-one wants to build new nuclear power they will simply force Vattenfall to do so by virtue of owning it. Who cares if it bankrupts a public owned company or leads to even more rent extraction from the population, WE SHALL BUILD THE PLANTS!
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Feb 11, 2023 16:39
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