Pentagon moves to punish Democratic senator over 'seditious video'
bbc.com
bbc.com
Unless you assume strength and victimhood are somehow on a supply/demand type of curve, which would be logically bonkers.
This is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation, ergo, paradoxical.
There is a large contingent within HN who never want any political discussion.
This appears to be an ongoing dynamic tension. The flagging might not be from the right. Just same old same old HN foosball.
What some folk want to squash is very particular politics which they don’t want to confront. It violates everything it means to be a hacker in the true sense of the word but I have realized a long time ago that these types of people wear the badge of hacker for their ego only
Flagged stories are some of the most active stories on HN. If the goal is to act as a filter on the kinds of acceptable topics to discuss or the kinds of people to attract to HN, it's a failed one, because the "wrong crowd" is still being attracted and commenting on those stories.
If anything, I see far and away the most amount of bad faith flagging/downvoting and throwaways on those threads. Are people getting their flagging privileges taken away? Are the throwaway's main accounts being banned? Who knows...
At least the flagging keeps the noise off the front page and discourages an excessive number of general political/news posts.
You actually can. I have political discussions with people who disagree with me in many social spaces.
What you can't do is have there be zero friction to join the conversation and be overly reliant on user moderation tools to do the hard work of moderation for you.
Since when is government censorship of social media posts[1] not "directly tech-adjacent"?
I adore the mental gymnastics here.
[1] The post with Mark Kelly being discussed: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DRMxZAnlUF9/
Thanks for adding context. No thanks for the “mental gymnastics” snark.
There is a large contingent within HN who are bots, and/or are 100% in-line with Thiel and Yarvin
Yes, I understand that the system is designed for YC to let some people flag posts and to let YC later unflag posts at their privilege.
Go figure.
No, certain people are freaking out because those people are grifters with no motivating beliefs whatsoever other than to enrich themselves, and who will do and say literally anything from one day to the next as long as it benefits them at someone else's expense.
The issue is that service members already know this very well, so when you tell them what they already know, it does seem like they are being encouraged.
Sure, it's encouraging them to obey the law. Encouraging someone to follow the law cannot be sedition.
> Be honest with yourself.
So far you're the one pushing into dishonesty here, or at least disingenuity. The video did not amount to sedition, even though you suggest it did. You can't point out any actual sedition, only hint at the possibility of it and throw out some whataboutism bullshit. Your comments don't speak well of your character.
Congress can't even agree if murdering civilians on boats is legal or not.
But seriously. Should soldiers be refusing to murder civilians on boats? If the law is clear (which I think it is) and they should be refusing why aren't they?
The answer of course is that they're being put in an impossible situation. Pinning the responsibility on them, because they took basic training, to interpret the law and go against the majority of the US govt at huge personal risk is just absurd.
Maybe instead the government should get their head out of their ass and do something themselves beyond trying to pass the buck via a stupid tv ad.
If an order is legal, yes. Not if an order is illegal. If a superior officer orders a private to shoot unarmed civilians or commit some other war crime, the private is supposed to refuse the order. They are not protected by a "just following orders" defense.
"And doesn't their pay and their family's healthcare depend on them remaining employed?"
Sure. But that does not excuse committing war crimes or otherwise knowingly following illegal orders.
Most of the time, the presumption is that illegal orders will be issued infrequently and by rogue elements in the armed forces -- so disobeying may have unpleasant immediate consequences (say, get thrown in the brig) but long-term they should prevail.
Right now? Well... that's the problem. But if significant numbers of the armed forces refused illegal orders, there's little that the administration can do. Which is why they've been cleaning house to kick out anybody at the top who might push back.
And let's be clear: maybe NYC needs that, but pretending that he represents anything in the US liberal mainstream is a joke.
It's not communism to support public-owned public services, even public-owned competitive services where no commercial competition exists. Capitalism in tight spaces, creates monopolies and market quirks that harm consumers, harm renters, harms tourists. These harms are toxic to NYC. He's right to address them.
*To expand, Mamdani is moderate left. Extreme left, at least here in the states, would be actual communists and anarchists.
Or Kamala Harris, who doubled down on support for Israel's genocide, said she wanted the most lethal military in the world, and courted Bush era neocons?
What does a "sane" Democrat look like and why do I suspect it resembles a Republican in all but name?
60% of Americans think gun laws should be more strict. Only 12% think they should be less strict. Source: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx
It's exceedingly unlikely that this survives any administrative or legal scrutiny (and if it does, there's a whole lot of former active-status Trump allies, including GOFOs, who are more than vulnerable under these same standards); the main result, I think, is to elevate Kelly's political profile while turning most of the Pentagon even more against Hegseth and Phelan (the former being an over-promoted PAO, and the latter not even having that experience, having spent his career managing Michael Dell's money).