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Comment by schizo89 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

> They have blood on their hands and history of silencing and oppressing dissidents such as Aaron Schwartz.

I guess what you have in mind is that Aaron Swartz was arrested by the MIT Campus Police (together with a Secret Service agent). This is not oppression by MIT. The MIT Campus Police received the arrest warrant from a federal prosecutor (Carmen Ortiz) and they needed to carry out the arrest. They did not have a choice in the matter.

If anything MIT was the opposite of what you portray them to be. They had an open campus policy at the time (they stopped that during Covid). Anyone could wander inside the campus and walk through the MIT buildings, and in some cases could access computers, which Aaron Swartz did in order to download articles. Actually, MIT helped Aaron in carrying out his mission.

As for MIT helping the US military, yes, they did and they do that. I'm proud of it. If you think the military is bad, you haven't been paying attention lately, especially in the last one year and a bit.

Just because other militaries are bad doesn't make the US military good. It's perfectly analogous in its wars of agression, and supporting it is morally bad, no matter how hard you whatabout it.

Ukraine has great fighters and great spirit. But fighters and spirit can take you only that far. Without the Javelins and Himars, Ukraine would have collapsed in a matter of weeks. Without a doubt some of the tech that goes in those Javelins and Himars was invented at MIT.

This is not whataboutism. This is how you stop tyranny.

Do you think the outcome of the war matters when evaluating the actions of the international community in Ukraine? For example, if millions of people die in Ukraine as a consequence of war that was only possible because NATO decided to arm Ukrainians, will it be justified, because they were fighting for democracy? What if Ukraine loses anyway?

The weapons you're talking about killed over a million people in tyrannical wars and terrorism. They are weapons of tyranny.

I understand that you'd like to live in a world where everyone loved each other and there are no weapons, and people walk around carrying roses and tulips.

That world does not exist. The world we are living in is a world where Putin exists. A world where a disarmed US and Western Europe would be conquered in less time than it would take you to sing Kumbaya.

I prefer to live in a world where MIT helps the US military complex come up with better missiles than a world where Putin kills millions of men, women and children in the name of "denazification".

I'm telling you that your argument if it was valid would justify the people at the Moscow Institute of Technology (MIT) making weapons for the Russian military because they were used by {choose country criminally invaded by the US} to defend themselves against invaders.

Your position is hypocritical unless you think that it's morally good to make weapons for Putin.

MIT has a lot of great students, staff, and faculty. The MIT Open Courseware and other publicly shared instruction videos are of great benefit to the world. Boycotting any of that sounds silly.

What happened to Aaron Swartz is tragic. Afterwards, there was an internal push to investigate what happened, and the report was made public. I think you'll find a lot of MIT affiliates who share good qualities with Swartz.

Marvin Minsky sadly died in 2016. People interested in the big picture and history of AI might do well to read some of his writings.

There are many valid criticisms, concerns, and opinions about MIT. But MIT is a big place, which attracts people from around the world, for various reasons. If you boycott people due to association with MIT, you're depriving yourself, and also depriving the world of the benefit of collaborations/synergies.

Might as well be complete, and filter out websites based on MIT developed programming languages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News (Note the programming language, and find what it's based on)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)

That user name though

Exactly, and it has something to do with Ken Kesey. Learn about what they did to Aaron, and you will see the parallels

Exactly. Unfortunately hackernews these days is huge fans of the military and the richest classes without much question.

Psyops don't exist, research journalism is tinfoilhattery and all science is awesome science.

Question one state and you're apparently fan of another, it's become the perfect setup for the status quo.

In reality the US intelligentsia is tiny and unfathomably powerful, an octopus with its arms deep in everything "academia" and technology, this is apparently mind boggling even after a myriad of leaks over the last 30 years, and no one dares to do even the simplest network analysis because of an enormous amount of media controlled shitcoating.

There's absolutely nothing "hacker" in hackernews anymore.

Leave then.

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