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> Always amazed at the sympathy people have for criminals who needlessly endangered dozens of lives.

People who receive downvotes can sometimes believe that anyone who is downvoting is doing so because they must support the opposite of what the poster believes. This, in my experience on HN, isn't necessarily (or even often) the case.

Yes, there may be those who sympathize with Manning. However, there are plenty of other reasons one might find a comment worthy of a downvote: Is it substantive? Civil? Productive? Factually correct? On-topic? Charitable? Thoughtful? More likely to promote good, quality discussion rather than adversarial arguments? You may feel strongly about your position and feel that the subject of your comment is not worthy of charitable discourse (and it may very well not be), but the HN community is worthy of charitable discourse, or at least that's goal. Please help make it so, which includes following the guidelines.

>People who receive downvotes can sometimes believe that anyone who is downvoting is doing so because they must support the opposite of what the poster believes. This, in my experience on HN, isn't necessarily (or even often) the case.

Bingo. The majority of the time when I downvote anyone, it's because they are trying to seem more intelligent by overusing linked academic articles or by overusing vocabulary that doesn't really fit. Anytime I see someone using something as an excuse to "talk" when they really have nothing to say, they get downvoted. Yes I realize that's subjective and not perhaps what the downvote is for, but that's also my choice.

Contrarion types on the other hand (and I don't mean the intelligent rhetorical folks who provoke good discussion) get a downvote immediately. I have no time for anyone who wants to disagree just to disagree so that they can make themselves look more philosophical or "deep".

I know this makes me an asshole, but at least I'm not treating the downvote as an "I disagree button"

Exactly. It's a personal attack that doesn't engage with the substance of the article, and the subsequent whining about downvotes makes it clear the comment is from someone who hates Manning irrespective of the topic at hand.

I downvoted this one because of his sour grapes around downvoting ... community moderation means that there are lots of reasons for up/down voting - when I get downvoted I simply accept it, even if I don't agree, it's something that raises the signal to noise around here which is a good thing

> It's impossible for me to believe she wrote this article on her own based on her public Twitter timeline

It's quite easy for me to believe it based on her Guardian columns (she's started as a contributing writer for Guardian US in 2015, and wrote some op-eds before that.) I'm not sure why you'd expect to be able to judge someone's newspaper column writing style from their Twitter style; while some writers might show similar styles between the two, I'd expect most would radically differ.

I know this may be a shock, but the writing style people practice on a highly constrained platform like Twitter may have ever so slight differences from the one they use in forums that actually allow for more than one and a half complete sentences.

It's a stretch to argue that someone with an unprofessional personal Twitter is incapable of writing professionally, especially as this isn't the first thing she's written professionally.

Why is that a stretch? Isn't that indeed the typical expectation?

Whether it is a typical expectation or not, I believe the point is it is incorrect.

Your comment edit reveals your bias.

"... for criminals who needlessly endangered dozens of lives"

Me too, just I'm pretty sure we don't think about the same group of people...

> Ahhhh yes. Thanks for the downvotes. Always amazed at the sympathy people have for criminals who needlessly endangered dozens of lives. Great job HN.

It's not sympathy: it's just that most people only have the mental space for a couple bits per issue, so they need to immediately sort everyone into black and white sides. If you don't like some of the sleazier things the govt does, then you consider the leaks a good thing, and saying anything even slightly negative about someone on the "side" of the leaks _must_ be wrong.

For my part, I think the issue is complex enough and I'm not well informed enough on it that I don't really know what to make of Manning personally.

the government admitted that her leaks endangered no one

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonleopold/secret-government-repo...

What a great opportunity for a lesson in fake news. Let's get to the meat of the claim in the article you link to (https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonleopold/secret-government-repo...):

Regarding the hundreds of thousands of Iraq-related military documents and State Department cables provided by the Army private Chelsea Manning, the report assessed “with high confidence that disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former U.S. leadership in Iraq.”

How strange! The article is trying to give the impression that Manning's leaks IN GENERAL harmed no one, but when they get to the heart of the matter, they only reference the situation in Iraq. Manning's leaks included information about our diplomacy around the world. Iraq-related material were only part of it.

Further, it is widely believed that Manning's leaks contributed greatly to, if not sparked the flames of, the Arab "Spring", which has most certainly been a disaster for America (and the people in the region too).

> Arab "Spring", which has most certainly been a disaster for America (and the people in the region too)

Wait, how so? Asking out of ignorance - I thought the Arab Spring was a good thing for the region.

In Egypt, Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was elected to power and tried to turn Egypt into an Islamist dictatorship. The military stepped back in and saved the day. So they're right back where they started, a military dictatorship that is at least not an Islamist dictatorship, PLUS years of senseless death, destruction, and economic calamity.

Syria is a complete hell hole now. Since the Arab Spring started, they've suffered total societal collapse, occupation of large swaths of the country by ISIS and al-Qaeda, and a mass exodus of young men to Europe. Years later, they are still engulfed in a bloody civil war.

Libya is also at civil war and is mostly ruled by roving gangs. Islamist violence is on the rise.

Tunisia is the only place things have gone anywhere near well. It is also a very small country.

The military stepped back in and saved the day.

OMG that's hilarious. The only problem USA media had with Morsi was that he wouldn't inspire as much "military aid". Also the economic calamity is entirely the creation of the previous military dictator who was so popular among the war pigs. If Mubarak hadn't taken farm land from small family farmers and given it to his cronies, Egypt would still be able to feed itself as it has for millennia. (Interesting fact: agriculture flourished in Egypt thousands of years before it did so in many other parts of the world!) The main reason Arab Spring found such fertile ground in Egypt was they were already starving under Mubarak. Still the episode was entertaining: "We really care about democracy in the Middle East! Except when we don't!"

Your explanation of Syria is similarly without rational basis. ISIS was not created by the Arab Spring. It was directly created by catastrophically stupid military actions taken by USA next door in Iraq. Even after USA created them, ISIS wouldn't have menaced Syria to nearly the extent they did, if USA hadn't continually given them weapons. Also, news flash: now that the new administration has decided "Syria is boring, let's go play with DPRK!" that war is swiftly wrapping up. Assad won, USA oil shenanigans be damned. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth may be heard in the halls of power.

Actually, if we're being honest, can we blame Libya's awful state on the Arab Spring either? Did the problems start when some people read a diplomatic cable, or was it rather when we jammed a bayonet up the ass of the dude who had ruled there in frequent isolated barbarity but overall relative peace? When Libyans are polled now, there is a marked nostalgia for old Muammar. In five years, does anyone really imagine life will be better in any of the nations we destroyed by killing their political class, than in Syria where we failed to do so even though we really wanted to?

> Your explanation of Syria is similarly without rational basis. ISIS was not created by the Arab Spring. It was directly created by catastrophically stupid military actions taken by USA next door in Iraq.

Your rationale is as ignorant as the person you are replying to. The Arab Spring, which resulted in the rise of Syrian & Libyan revolutionaries, was absolutely a major factor in the rise of ISIS.

To suggest that it was exclusively one or the other is ridiculous.

Without guns, "revolutionaries" are just political opponents. Which certainly existed in Syria prior to Arab Spring. USA provided the guns that made these into "freedom fighters" (an ambiguous phrase if ever there were), apparently under an "it worked so well in Afghanistan in the 1980s" rationale.

I agree. The writing style is just completely textbook NYT commentator style. Either she spent her 7 years in jail studying and practicing NYT writing style, or she wrote the bones of this article which was heavily edited by a NYT editor, or she didn't write this at all and just put her name on it.

It's largely irrelevant though, because this article has nothing to do with the reason behind her popularity. This article could have just as easily been written by Joe Blow from Minnetonka without materially changing the article(cf. Edward Snowden articles, where he writes specifically about the system which he became famous for defying)

> The writing style is just completely textbook NYT commentator style.

She's been writing op-eds for the Guardian US since 2014 (as an official “contributing writer” since 2015.)

That she is, in 2017, able to write an op-ed like a practiced writer of major media op-eds is unsurprising, since, you know, she is exactly that.