cld8483

Yes, if they hand you the evidence then it should be obvious.

> A gut feeling is all you need to tell. It's the "quiet kid in class" energy.

If they handed you the evidence, then you don't need a "gut feeling", which is nothing more than a manifestation of your personal biases.

Heh, in red states where unconditional support for Israel among white evangelical protestants is more popular than in the Jewish-American community itself? Where every other car seems to have a bumper sticker featuring the Israeli and American flag depicted together in unison? Hating Jewish people is very fringe in any American state, the mainstream will ostracize you for it anywhere in the country. Obviously so in blue states, but also in red states as well. Speaking out against Israel is a good way to get yourself banned from most red state businesses, and as many red states as blue states have passed anti-BDS laws.

Where is that narrative coming from? It doesn't seem to be what the article is pushing.

The perp seems like a nutjob who had a violent melt down, no need for a grander narrative. This sort of thing happens thousands of times a year all across the country, the only reason this case is on HN is because of who they worked for. If this were about a Redmond retail worker stabbing another, in the same town, it wouldn't be here.

Why should anybody believe otherwise? Principle of charity? Please.

Only after several days of failing to resolve the balloon matter diplomatically. Shooting it down was not their first resort, and that's probably because diplomatic considerations with China were being weighed against the domestic political situation. When the diplomatic situation can be kept relatively smooth and normal by keeping the public in the dark, that's the 'rational' choice.

The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years. Allow the development of vaccines for extant viruses, but completely ban all Dr Frankenstein activities with viruses. No more "invent a virus in a lab to beat nature to the punch" horse shit, with is flagrant weapons development under the cover of civilian research. As soon as the virus started circulating through the population, did these researchers share their knowledge and help develop a vaccine? No, they buried their involvement and covered up everything they knew. They were no help at all, and never intended to be. Burn their books which describe how it is done, and silence the people who already understand it with the threat of criminal imprisonment for sharing their knowledge. Encourage major religions to amend their rules with strong taboos against this research, and institute harsh economic sanctions against any nation that doesn't participate in this ban.

Does this seem extreme? It shouldn't. This field of research has the power to kill billions and no demonstrable upside. It is even more dangerous than nuclear weapons; because at least a technician at a nuclear weapon production facility would be hard pressed to release his work on the global public of his own initiative. Smuggling a virus out of any lab is trivial, all it takes is a single madman's willingness to sacrifice himself as patient zero.

We're the villagers in an "evil wizard" scenario. The wizards have been meddling in dangerous forces beyond the understanding of common people, and it's getting people killed. The solution is to storm the wizard's tower and throw the wizards off the top of it.

> Can't imagine there's any conflict of interest there.

Pro-nuclear bias you figure? Does the DoE have another reason to dislike corn?

But ownership in any sense irrelevant. Being the owner of a work does not preclude censorship. If the author himself censors his work, as Roald Dahl did do, that is still censorship.

Or take Shakespeare for example; he wrote for the unwashed masses yet his writings are considered sophisticated and challenging today. I have an anthology of English renaissance drama from various playwrights that I revisit from time to time. The stories are usually quite crude and funny (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Tis_Pity_She%27s_a_Whore), but understanding them well enough to appreciate that humor can be a chore. I don't think these stories were considered difficult originally, but became so over time.

Perhaps it is the reason why the Reichstag still today has a mailbox with Hitler's name on it.

But what the publisher did in this case was not like that; these modifications weren't designed to make the books more accessible to people with low reading skill ('fat' is not a hard word.)

Modern book "cancelling" is not (yet?) so effective as that. Huckleberry Finn is a popular target for cancelling, yet is still widely available. Being in the public domain gives the book relative safety; even if one publisher gets cold feet, another will jump in to fill the demand. The real threat is to books which aren't in the public domain and won't be for a long time.

That doesn't surprise me at all, I'm sure 20th century teachers found the same trend in 20th century students trying to read 19th century books. It's a shame, but it is what it is. I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from this, except that we should do what we can to encourage kids to read the classics despite (or even because) of the difficulty.

Exactly. If they weren't artless hacks they'd write their own books instead of butchering others.

But yes, to say that somebody is a "Guardian reader" is say they are somewhere in the left to center-left part of the spectrum.

If they were following public demand, then why did they get so thoroughly blindsided by public opinion? They were clearly listening to a handful of fringe nuts and didn't actually have their finger on the pulse of the mainstream zeitgeist.

They have now realized their error and are trying to backtrack from it.