> It requires 200m litres of water to allow the passage of a single vessel along the canal, water that is largely generated from Lake Gatun in the centre of the waterway, which is drying up fast.
> The historical weight of what happens next cannot be overstated; it is time to put a stop to this relentless targeting of Assange and act instead to protect journalism and press freedom.
Assange is not a journalist, nor Wikileaks a legitimate news organization.
How do you define a journalist and a legitimate news organization? One who only publishes what the proverbial "establishment" approves of?
If so, this sets us on a dangerous path where all journalists and news organizations (even those currently on good standing and considered "legitimate") on thin ice where there's an unspoken rule to not publish anything that might rock the establishment's boat.
Not really. It's a lot of disorganized nonsense with a high noise-to-signal ratio. Random excerpts:
> 14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.
> 15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
> 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
> 35. Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort. Hence his boredom and demoralization.
Reading Kaczynski is a little bit like reading the Bible: you shouldn't take everything literally but instead think about what's trying to be said, and you should ignore some bits.
e.g. paragraph "15" is excessive and inflammatory, but he wasn't wrong that some people will try to find fault for anything that happens in the West while ignoring much greater crimes in other countries. See e.g. all the HN posters who trivialize China's problems while attacking the US (I'm sure this thread will have some of those types of comments, too). This point also wasn't original to Kaczynski, e.g. George Orwell also wrote about it, as did many others.
Also remember much of this was written an era when people were literally collaborating with the USSR and East-Germany out of "socialist ideals" and (rightful) anger over the shady activities of the CIA or FBI, while also ignoring that those countries were significantly worse in almost every way.
Are those "random"? It seems like you chose them pretty specifically, actually. You seem like you're inching towards a point here, but not quite making one. Maybe you can expand a bit?
No need to be ominous. Those topics are forever the high-noise, high-politics topics. It's not eyebrow-raising to find them in this kind of manifesto, or for somebody to disagree with them.
> 77. Not everyone in industrial-technological society suffers from psychological problems. Some people even profess to be quite satisfied with society as it is. We now discuss some of the reasons why people differ so greatly in their response to modern society.
> 97. Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what might be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a “free” man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual. Thus the bourgeois’s “free” man has economic freedom because that promotes growth and progress; he has freedom of the press because public criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders; he has a right to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerful would be bad for the system. This was clearly the attitude of Simon Bolivar. To him, people deserved liberty only if they used it to promote progress (progress as conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeois thinkers have taken a similar view of freedom as a mere means to collective ends. Chester C. Tan, “Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century,” page 202, explains the philosophy of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-min: “An individual is granted rights because he is a member of society and his community life requires such rights. By community Hu meant the whole society of the nation.” And on page 259 Tan states that according to Carsum Chang (Chang Chun-mai, head of the State Socialist Party in China) freedom had to be used in the interest of the state and of the people as a whole. But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only as someone else prescribes? FC’s conception of freedom is not that of Bolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble with such theorists is that they have made the development and application of social theories their surrogate activity. Consequently the theories are designed to serve the needs of the theorists more than the needs of any people who may be unlucky enough to live in a society on which the theories are imposed.
> 116. Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth-gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds.
For the most part the underlying observations are hard to disagree, even if you disagree with the conclusions.
14: - Yep this is quite off. I disagree.
15: (Some) Leftists do operate under a slave morality, which does lead them to morally binary modes of thinking, resulting in things like supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine (because America is an imperialist, illegitimate state and therefore NATO is too).
22: Not unique to leftists - the political machine demands conflict to justify it's own existence
35: Mazlow's hierarchy of needs. This is undisputable. Why do billionaires waste money on backyard space experiments and vacuous social media platforms? Existential boredom and ego.
I haven't read it in years, but I think 35 was part of a bigger argument that past a certain point everything in modern life is either impossible or trivially easy to achieve, so people seek outlets in hobbies, etc. Not universally true, as anyone who's ever job hunted or quit smoking knows, but not just thoughtless rambling.
Fun fact: Kissinger has lived for so long that Commodore BASIC, SQL, Apple DOS, and the TCP/IP protocol were all created after he retired from government service. Not after he was born, but after he retired.
> Chairman Mao: They shouldn’t have attacked Moscow or Kiev. They should have taken Leningrad as a first step. Another error in policy was they didn’t cross the sea after Dunkirk.
> Dr. Kissinger: After Dunkirk.
> Chairman Mao: They were entirely unprepared.
> Dr. Kissinger: And Hitler was a romantic. He had a strange liking for England.
> Chairman Mao: Oh? Then why didn’t they go there? Because the British at that time were completely without troops.
> Dr. Kissinger: If they were able to cross the channel into Britain… I think they had only one division in all of England.
> Prime Minister Chou: Is that so?
> Dr. Kissinger: Yes.
> Prime Minister Chou: Also Sir Anthony Eden told us in Germany at that time that a Minister in the Army of Churchill’s Government said at that time if Hilter had crossed the channel they would have had no forces. They had withdrawn all their forces back. When they were preparing for the German crossing, Churchill had no arms. He could only organize police to defend the coast. If they crossed they would not be able to defend.
Mao making fun of the idea of the USSR invading China and getting the Chinese treatment:
> Chairman Mao: If there are Russians going to attack China, I can tell you today that our way of conducting a war will be guerrilla war and protracted war. We will let them go wherever they want. (Prime Minister Chou laughs.) They want to come to the Yellow River tributaries. That would be good, very good. (Laughter.) And if they go further to the Yangtse River tributaries, that would not be bad either.
Angus Calder has a quote I can't recall about the "fight them on the beaches" speech Churchill gave, somebody in the house of commons said something to the effect "well we will be flinging beer bottles at them, it's all we've bloody got" and indeed the home guard was being taught how to make Molotov cocktails by ex Spanish civil war volunteers, and parading with pikes. A three man suicide squad technique was deviced to jam tank tracks with a baulk of wood, climb onto the tank top and set off a sticky bomb or a Molotov cocktail.
Getting 350,000 men and some materiel back from Dunkirk was a big deal.
Mao had similar concerns in the long March. Just surving was half his battle.
The British Navy was intact though, and the Germans did not have air superiority. Had they had air superiority they'd have been able to keep the British Navy at bay and then invaded. It was a close-run thing.
Eric Hobsbawm notoriously said counterfactual history is shit but that said, who knows what a demoralised British government might have done with a successful German landing even if small.
Suppose the germans just forced the local french fisherman at gunpoint to take them over. Would the royal navy lay waste to thousands of french fisherman in the same seas as thousands of british fisherman loaded with their soldiers? I’m surprised the germans also didn’t just lay waste to them at dunkirk with indirect fire.
> fisherman in the same seas as thousands of british fisherman loaded with their soldiers?
Logistically it was impossible to launch an invasion at the same time as the Dunkirk evacuations were happening. Even if they manage to get to England on a few fishing boats what would they do there?
> Would the royal navy lay waste to thousands of french fisherman
The British didn’t have that many qualms about blowing up a significant part of the French navy as a mere precaution. So yes. That not how successful naval invasion work though anyway.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Mers-el-Kébir
I wonder if Mao was truly stupid enough to believe that German could’ve invaded Britain without naval and air superiority or they were all talking in jest.
After all he was the man who thought of killing all the sparrows in China and forcing people to build non-functional steel smelters in their backyard instead of working in their fields..
I don't think he would; it's not anywhere near the echo chamber Twitter was when he bought it. He had a huge army of supporters cheering him driving the company into the ground...Reddit in the last year or two has pretty collectively come to despite the hell out of him and his "fans."
I can't remember the last time I saw an /r/all comment thread where Musk was spoken of in anything approaching a positive way. /r/programmerhumor absolutely eviscerated the man almost several times a day, in threads that saw wide visibility, where programmers explained to non-programmer redditors just how dumb the stuff he was doing was.
>it's not anywhere near the echo chamber Twitter was when he bought it
Are you really implying that the fact that Twitter (as opposed to Reddit) actually had a visible diversity of opinion on Musk as evidence that it's an echo chamber? The seething, petty hostility to Musk that is routinely on the front page of Reddit is so objectively correct to you that dissent from it must reflect echo chamber dynamics? Incredible.
If Reddit slightly disprefers Musk over preferring him, the entirety of the top of the comments will be anti-Musk. (And depending on sub, it's more than slightly.) Comparatively, tweets are more selectively filtered.
The fixed sorting of Reddit comments gives much less chance to come across comments you'll like if you're in a minority opinion.
Yeah, ultimately I think Reddit is structurally much more likely to lend itself to echo chambers because its community-based nature (organized around subreddits) gives it centralized targets of partisan attack: You can effectively disrupt speech not by actioning individual users at the account level but by just banning or heavily censoring subreddits where the disfavored speech is taking place.
This is of course largely what has happened, where subs with substantial right-of-center populations have been either banned (usually under the pretext of not being aggressive enough about policing for ever-evolving standards of "hate speech") or just co-opted by moderators who punish right-of-center speech in various ways (often indirectly, such as simply banning users who upset others by expressing disfavored views for the sake of community harmony.) Twitter cannot be co-opted in this way, really.
That said, it hadn't occurred to me that some people are so hostile to right-of-center perspectives that they would consider this censorship to result in a net reduction in "echo chambers", because presumably these perspectives are all so horrible that surely they can only exist in toxic, tightly-controlled spaces such as a Flat Earther community, etc.
/r/conservative is an odd example because I'm pretty sure everyone knows that the subreddit would be completely overrun by left-wing voices if they didn't enforce guardrails on this. At some point when tribal hatred becomes become sufficiently hot and lopsided in power, then the minority has no choice but to either leave or establish echo chambers. That describes the /r/conservative case imo.
In any case, I'm fully open to the idea that there are still right-wing echo chambers on Reddit. But the whataboutism is a weak distraction. The number of neutral spaces where people are allowed to effectively and openly disagree on hot-button policy issues has declined precipitously since the mid-2010s. Prominent powermods openly dictate what sort of opinions are "allowed" on various issues, and of course these boundaries are far to the left of the actual Overton Window of the populations whose democratic processes actually create policies.
The Tubbs fire did a fine job of this, but it’s always dimmer than the luminosity of HN orange on a typical screen, so it depends on how you define “color”.
Not being exact, but at least 150+ AQI seems to generate a significant impact on sunlight coming through creating that "smoky"/"faded" look. I can't comment on how to get the orange exactly as I think it also requires specific particulate matter to get that.
For context. The geography of the canal: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Panama_C...
And a horizontal cross section of the canal: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258387615/figure/fi...
Gatun Lake sits upstream of the sea, so they can't just open the locks to "fill" the lake.
This stands in contrast with the Suez Canal, which has no locks or elevation. It's nothing more than a long horizontal trench dug through the desert.