felipec
unbelief
Freedom of speech maximalist who is anti-woke, anti-orthodoxy, anti-establishment, and anti-capitalist.
User ID: 1796
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
I didn’t invent it. It’s in the Britannica (and other dictionaries).
No, it's not. Nothing here: https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/education, has your invented definition.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
Simple- find corresponding evidence to support the claims.
I would love for you to try to find the "evidence" of whatever claims you are supposed to be making about Nord Stream 2.
Journalists don't make claims, they simply report the evidence they managed to find.
As the author has in the past engaged in conspiracy theory publication, such as the OBL raid
That's a hallucination. Hersh has never engaged in conspiracy theories, the Osama bin Laden information was confirmed by Obama. Hersh was vindicated, as he usually is.
It is you the one that has a motivated reasoning to distrust Hersh's reporting.
This suggests you are either very young, or very modest checking skills, when it comes to Chomsky.
Neither of which can be falsifiable. Right?
The fact that you have cited events without causal relationships to the Nord Stream pipeline as evidence of a causal relationship indicates that yes, you did do that.
Converse error fallacy.
I said that you treated it as a causal link.
And you are wrong. You are mind-reading based on a converse error fallacy.
Aside from the lack of hundreds, I rather suspect you will, so that you can get the last word once again.
You are wrong again. I said I was done with that particular subthread, I didn't say I was done with all subthreads.
You may notice I didn't address every single weak argument you've put forward in this subthread either.
The argument remains that in addition to the issues that other people have pointed, it retains the characteristics of being source by someone someone unfamiliar with how governments work
False. You have never established that. All your arguments point towards someone who doesn't know how the military works, which I already addressed.
who is supposed to be a highly placed person in the US government
The article never mentioned anything remotely close to that. How many people do you think hold a top-secret clearance in USA?
The streisand effect says hello
Once again I don't think you know what you are talking about. The premise of the Streisand effect is someone trying to hide information. What information do you think I'm trying to "hide"?
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
So you're now saying that 2+2=4 without further context is not the same statement as 2+2=4 (mod 4)?
No, I said (2+2=4 (mod 4)) might not be the same as (2+2=4). I very clearly never said what you claim I'm supposedly "now saying": I said "might not be", never said "is not".
This is a smoke screen though. I'm talking about what YOU said, and you are very conveniently trying to distract from that.
YOU claimed (2+2=4) is just another representation of (2+2=0 (mod 4))... that is 100% false, as you yourself now admitted. They are different statements.
And you also avoided to comment on the obvious conclusion from your misrepresentation, and instead chose a distraction from what YOU said.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
Perhaps they assign their belief a probability different than 1, but they don't consider your evidence very strong.
No, it has absolutely nothing to do with my evidence. The claim is 100% false, regardless of the evidence.
He literally said there was no possibility of X being true: "Do you accept the possibility that X may be true?" "No".
When you say that we should not "assume" something, it is my understanding that you mean that we should not think that something is true with zero possible doubt.
You are forgetting the context of this subthread. In thus subthread we are not talking about what I mean, we are talking about the definition that one random stranger gave you, which I claimed goes contrary to your claim.
You claimed: «most people here were under the impression that by an "assumption" you meant a "strong supposition"».
In this subthread X is "strong supposition", it's your view that most people's definition of "assumption" is "strong supposition", you provided different examples of people you asked, and one of them gave you the exact opposite: that "supposition" was a "strong assumption". This is the opposite of what you claimed most people were under the impression of.
You keep forgetting the context of the claims you are making.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
But you don't know with certainty that it is also going to run on everyone else's machine.
Yes I do, because I follow good programming practices.
I can give you examples where I refactored code and I added unit tests to make sure that any and all changes I did retained exactly the same functionality the original code had. If it worked in someone's machine before, it should work in that machine afterwards.
This is not theoretical, I've done these refactoring, and the result works in millions of machines just fine. I can show you the commits.
My point has always been that writing is not so straightforward
Only if you don't follow good programming practices.
If you follow simple logically-independent steps, the process cannot fail.
My whole point about writing is that we rarely understand what the hell it is doing in the first place, much less what happens when we change it.
But you can make a guess, and that guess can be right. That's what writing is.
I would just say that the simplification is a lossy and imperfect form of data compression.
No, not necessarily. Maybe 99.9% of the writers would lose something important in the simplification most of the time, but not all.
If I or others seem "offended" that you claim to be able to write lossless compression of data, then think of it as the same "offense" that physicists feel towards people that claim to have invented perpetual motion machines.
So you accept you consider it impossible.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
it's saying he is not
Yes, that's exactly what the idiom means: the person is literally not a pencil.
If this is not bad faith argumentation, I don't know what is.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
You are not following a definition, you are inventing a definition based on another word.
These are the definitions of the word "education" in the same dictionary you liked:
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1.a: the action or process of teaching someone especially in a school, college, or university
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1.b: the knowledge, skill, and understanding that you get from attending a school, college, or university
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2: a field of study that deals with the methods and problems of teaching
None of the definitions match your invented definition.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
It's a manner of speaking, just like saying he isn't sharpest pencil in the box. Doesn't mean he is literally a pencil.
So it would be accurate to say he very likely has dementia?
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
Not everyone in the US feels the same way about anything
We are not talking about everyone in the USA, we are talking about USA in practical terms.
It literally doesn't matter what USA citizens feel about Germany, the USA government can do whatever they want in regards to Germany independently of its citizens.
So what does the USA government consider Germany? Not an ally.
I'd be interested in hearing about these "betrayals" more generally
Here's a brief list:
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Afghanistan
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The Kurds
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France
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Georgia
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South Vietnam
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Philippines
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
And we generally agree mainstream publications are bad in quality,
Yes, but not because of that.
and that a good indication of trash articles is when massive claims rest on singular anonymous sources.
I don't think you do understand how journalism works.
The story is the story. If the story has a single source, that's the story. What is a journalist supposed to do in that case? Extort a source? Betray him? If nobody wants to talk, then nobody wants to talk. A journalist reports on what can be reported.
If Noam Chomsky is your guiding star on objectivity or insight into government thinking
He has been right since I have been alive, and everything historical I've checked.
Or do you honestly believe USA went into Iraq to liberate the country and fight terrorism?
Only if you want to project a specific interpretation of 'attack' to fit a quote approaching a decade ago well outside of the context of an alleged Nordstream attack.
You are throwing a smokescreen. You said you haven't met an American in government framing the concern in terms of "threat to western dominance", and I showed you one. If USA wasn't worried about Russian influence in Europe, why would they want to attack Russia economically?
I'm not talking about the explosion, I'm talking about your claim about the motive. No mind-reading is necessary to show that USA has always been an enemy of Russia. I can give you many more examples.
And BTW, in 2014 Nord Stream 2 already had 3 years in the making.
People studying Russian vulnerabilities does not mean they are responsible for any perceived attack on a Russian vulnerability.
Straw man.
This is also where I'll note that this actually is an example of the incredulity fallacy. That you cannot see how others would interpret does not mean that others would not do it differently.
Another straw man. I never said I don't see how others could interpret this.
It's clear USA has always been an enemy of Russia.
Not really. Also, consensus building.
How many examples do you need of American bureaucrats interested in hurting Russia do you need? Would 10 do the trick?
Or are you going to dismiss every one of them? Then the claim is falsifiable, isn't it?
Thus diminishing the credibility of the source, whose claimed insight into the military operational dynamic is the crux of the article.
False. The article never stated that.
Only if I was arguing on the basis that I don't see how something is possible, as opposed to arguing on the basis of something not being possible on grounds X, Y, Z.
No. The fallacy applies regardless of how many grounds you have.
Yes, because many people are inclined to blame the US no matter who does something.
Hasty generalization fallacy. The fact that many people did that doesn't mean that all people did that, and in particular doesn't mean that I did that.
The fact that you treat the Biden statement is a causal link
Straw man. I never said I treated it as a causal link.
That's as far as I go. I'm not going to chase hundreds of week arguments on top of dozens of weak arguments.
If you wanted to seriously defend your position you would have picked your strongest argument and defend that instead of keeping up this Gish gallop strategy.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
This is much worse than consensus building, because instead of moderately annoying some people who disagree with you, you are physically keeping out a lot people don't speak like you.
Ironically what you are doing is negating the effects of that rule. If 80% of the people that disagree with you speak differently than you, then you are using the consensus building rule to defend the remaining 20% of people who do speak like you like, but keeping out 80% of the people who don't.
In other words: you are keeping out most of the disagreeable people.
If your objective is to keep controversial topics out of the discussion, that's precisely the way to do it.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
I'm aware of how refactoring is supposed to work.
And that's how it works, with people who do know how to refactor (e.g. I).
I'm pointing out common failure modes, and your response is that they should just not fail.
It's precisely the exact opposite: I'm saying it can work, especially by people who know how to do it. You responses imply that it's impossible to do it.
I said that people somehow find it offensive if somebody claims they can write a simpler version of something their idol Scott Alexander wrote and not lose anything in the process (like proper refactoring), and you seem to be offended by that notion. I did not even make the claim, I merely pointed out what would happen if I were to make the claim.
Is such notion so offensive that it must necessarily fail?
It's not an authority for anything.
That's a straw man fallacy. Nobody said it was an authority.
But just for the record, the answer is no then.
Finally, it only took you 5 comments to answer my very simple question.
It merely makes 2+2=0 another representation of the same statement.
Do you believe that (2+2=4) and (2+2=0 (mod 4)) is "the same statement"?
No
Therefore you are contradicting your previous claim: (2+2=4) is not another representation of (2+2=0 (mod 4)): they are different statements. (2+2=4 (mod 4)) might be the same statement as (2+2=0 (mod 4)), but not (2+2=4).
I claimed that virtually nobody understands that (2+2=4 (mod 4)) exists, which is not the same as (2+2=4), and you finally accept that they are two different things.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
But I don't think Wikipedia is good enough to do away with the need to memorise historical facts to the point where someone relying solely on it won't be severely limited.
This is a false dilemma. You can use Wikipedia to avoid memorizing certain facts, like the year WWII started, and other stuff you happen to remember.
There's many historical fact that I do remember, but I remember because I keep talking about them, and I keep looking them up. I'm not memorizing them, I just happen to remember them.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
People were just guessing based on their priors
I did not guess based on my priors, I learned about all the instances in which US officials and presidents opposed, sanctioned, and threatened to stop the pipelines:
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Obama administration opposed the pipeline
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Trump administration sanctioned any company doing work on the pipeline
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Biden administration made opposition to the pipeline a top priority
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Biden said he was "determined to do whatever I can to prevent"
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Nuland said "If Russia invades, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 Will. Not. Move. Forward."
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Biden said "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it." and after being questioned "I promise you, we will be able to do that."
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After the attack Blinked said the bombing was a "tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy," and "offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come."
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Nuland said "Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea."
How would this not suggest a very strong motive?
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
I lived in Germany for a while, and I'm aware of the weakness of German bureaucrats, but things change. In Mexico from one administration to the next the government changed from being a USA lapdog to be anti-imperialist.
If there was any spark that would ignite change in Germany, I think learning that USA blew up their pipeline is among the most significant that could happen.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
If you are going to moderate on the basis of how some people might interpret something, then nobody is going be able to say anything controversial. Policing language stifles freedom of expression.
A basic principle of fruitful conversations is to be charitable with what the writer might have meant.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
By the way that comment contradicts your second comment on this sub thread.
No it doesn't.
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You can be educated in a school
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You can be educated in your home (private teacher or family teacher)
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You can learn by yourself by just reading book (no one educates you)
Yes, dictionaries list many words people don't actually use, and that don't make sense. So?
If you look at online trends, everyone says self-taught of autodidact, not self-educated.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
I think this topic is sensitive to Americans, since it basically means they aren't the Good Guys that they were led to believe.
Yes, but reality doesn't care about your feelings. If you follow anti-imperialists like Aron Mate and Max Blumenthal, it's obvious that USA has not been the good guys in the past few decades, and if you read Noam Chomsky you realize that has never been the case. Of course most people from USA are not aware of that.
How many Americans know they are occupying one third of Syria right now to get their oil? I bet not many.
We should also make a distinction between the US Govt and the American people.
Of course.
Instead of grappling with this issue from a structural basis, folks have been trying to personally smear Hersh.
It's always the same tactic. The Hunter Biden laptop story was a "conspiracy theory" and anyone who tried to investigate it like Glenn Greenwald was smeared. Max Blumenthal and The Grayzone wikipedia pages are completely vandalized. They tried to do the same with Seymour Hersh (somebody added that he was a conspiracy theorist), but it seems there was pushback because Hersh is more reknowned.
It will work, because even though Americans know the mainstream media lies, they for some reason believe that when it truly matters they'll tell the truth.
whereas much of the rest of the world will just go on
I don't think the citizens in Germany will just go on, they'll see it for what it is: a supposed ally engaged in clandestine energy sabotage without regards to what would happen to their economy, just to punish Russia for geopolitical reasons, and destroying their industry in the process.
I bet many Germans are realizing just now that USA is not their ally.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
Did their officials and presidents also spent a whole decade publicly in opposition to it, sanctioned it, and threatened that no matter what they will not allow it?
OK, and? It's not like bias matters much here, so long as I still give a short post a chance.
That's the only time when bias matters.
You are pretty much saying the bias of a jury doesn't matter as long as they give the defendant a chance. But it's a biased chance! Their verdict is likely to be wrong. If you are biased it's likely better to not judge at all.
Do you substantively disagree that density has diminishing returns?
Yes. It's completely up to the writer how much effort to put into an article, and a short article shouldn't be assumed to be low effort.
You tried to bring up math, not me, you can't say this is the math of how I think, and then say, "OK, that's completely wrong, but my point still stands".
If we follow your math, then you think it takes 16 times more energy for me to write a great 100-word text, than it takes to write an average 1000-word text. I don't think that's how it works.
The math doesn't work. According to your math it takes 32 times more effort to write a 1000-word text than a 100-word text at the same density: (1000/100)^1.5. That's obviously not true, I think it's linearly proportional, so it's just x^1.
Then, according to you, something with a density of 40 takes 512 times more effort to write than something with a density of 5: (40/5)^3. Again, I don't think that's true. Once again I think it's linearly proportional.
So the right equation is e = density * length. In that case instead of taking 16 times, it takes 0.8 times: (40 * 100) / (5 * 1000). So it takes more effort to write the long average article. Then of course we would need to adjust the equation for quality as well.
The math is so completely off that your point does not stand. You should not assume assume a short article is necessarily bad quality just because it would have taken a "prohibitively" large amount of effort to be of good quality.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
Overall, not impressed or compelled by the claims. People have already noted the singular anonymous source claiming, in an era where anonymous sourcing has been as disreputable as ever, but there are other elements that raise eyebrows.
Most importan stories are broken out with singular anonymous sources, and mainstream publications mention a single anonymous source all the time.
-The claim it was done by the pure navy, as opposed to special forces, to avoid Congressional oversight really suggests someone who is not familiar with the other forms of oversight- and security vulnerabilities- of American military branches.
It wasn't just the Navy, it was remote corner of the Navy.
There's a reason that the US black projects generally don't operate from the conventional forces, but in separate elements.
Yeah, and the reason may not have anything to do with oversight.
-The mind-reading/framing of motives is projection, or at least certainly not how the western military-security types would view items. I've yet to meet an American in a serious position of government responsibility who frames concerns over Nordstream in terms as abstract as 'threat to western dominance,' as opposed to the more concrete concerns of 'energy blackmail' or 'gas turnoffs.'
As if any politician is transparent about their true motives ever. As Noam Chomsky says: the stated motives of the government are never the true motives, therefore you can pretty much disregard the stated motives.
That being said, Condoleezza Rice did pretty much spell it out in 2014:
"But now we need to have tougher sanctions, and I am afraid at some point this is going to probably have to involve oil and gas. The Russian economy is vulnerable. 80% of the Russian exports are in oil, gas and minerals. People say that the Europeans will run out of energy. Well, the Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run out of energy. And I understand that it is uncomfortable to have an effect on business ties in this way, but this is one of the few instruments that we have. Over the long run, you want to change the structure of energy dependence. You want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we are finding"
The first thing she mentions is the Russian economy was vulnerable, suggesting they did want to attack the Russian economy.
There's also this 2019 Pentagon-funded study from the RAND Corporation: Extending Russia.
"Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from Western and Russian sources, this report examines Russia's economic, political, and military vulnerabilities and anxieties."
They want to exploit all Russian vulnerabilities. How much spelled out do you need it to be?
It's clear USA has always been an enemy of Russia.
The proposed plans, as described, don't pass muster in the context of their own paragraph, let alone broader realism. For one, submarines don't "assault". That's the sort of language of someone larping military insight.
Why does the source have to have military insight? He could be part of the CIA, or any number of options.
This is something deserving of /r/credibledefense, but not credibility inspiring.
The fact that you don't see how something is possible doesn't mean it is impossible. That's an argument from incredulity fallacy.
-The argument about no longer being a covert option because of the Biden Administration's public statements on Nordstream are nonsense.
Is it? The exact moment I saw the clip of Joe Biden saying they would put an end to it after it was blown up I put two and two together, and so did many people.
This is a red flag for credibility. Covert options aren't covert because you have a known capability, but rather the secrecy.
But if everyone already suspects the USA did it--as it happened--then the secret would be much harder to keep, because people will not stop investigating--as it happened.
The more eyes, the harder to hide. How is that not obvious? Your desire to not see the obvious seems like motivated reasoning from you.
-The whole Norway angle is just comedic.
Once again this is a fallacy. The fact that you find something comedic doesn't imply that it didn't happen.
The narrative flops between the need for operational and legal secrecy as needed, without actually explaining why informing the Norwegians is necessary to carry out the operation...
It was explained that it wasn't necessary, but it would facilitate the operation. Plain and simple.
-The timeline is also all over the place.
Events unfold that way many times, so what? Things happen and plans change. That happens all the time.
-The argument on Russian mine-detection technology is getting into the military spy-fiction, and not the good kind.
Argument from incredulity fallacy.
This isn't the first part of the article to do this, but it's reocurring enough to note, especially since the 1970s Church hearings drove very significant changes in the American intelligence community... changes that are being implicitly covered over by the appeal to the 70s for narrative continuity.
It wasn't the intelligence community who ordered this, it was the neocon administration. The hatred for Russia runs deep, as anyone familiar with Victoria Nuland knows.
Aircraft are easily observable on a number of sensors or by regional naval traffic.
So? You just pick an aircraft that is going to travel that route anyway for whatever reason.
Once again: argument from incredulity fallacy.
All told, I do not find it credible, and would lower my judgement of someone who found it compelling.
I find all your arguments weak and relying precisely on what you accuse Seymour Hersh of doing: preying on the laziness of the reader. Many of your arguments boil down to "I don't see how this is possible", as if you were an semi-omniscient being. You may not see how X is possible, but I do. So what?
It's also a clear Gish gallop strategy: overwhelming an interlocutor with as many arguments as possible, without regard for accuracy or strength of the arguments. It's no surprise that your comment received zero replies. Who would sit down and read the entire thing, think about critically, and then reply. Well, I just did.
If you are trying to analyze this critically and actually give the article a fair shot, I would pick a single argument against it, your strongest argument, and defend it at depth, not throw dozens which in my opinion are weak.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
I was not trying to build consensus: "anyone paying attention" is not "everyone", it could very well be less than 1% of the people, that's not consensus in the least. And very well could accommodate 99% of the people that as you say "doesn't know it yet".
Wrong. The code I've committed works on OS's you've never heard of.
You keep making assumptions regardless of how many times I've told you the reality.
That world is irrelevant.
No, it doesn't.
But they are real, not hypothetical. The idea-space of human readers is finite.
Only if the convincee was amenable to actually being convinced, and you already conceded you consider the proposition impossible, so there's no way anyone could have convinced you otherwise.
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