I think the difference with John vs. Assange is that Assange seemed a lot more willing to take political sides/positions, whereas John was more neutral. I have visited Cryptome on/off for something like 25 years now. I have never once got the impression that he is the type of person who would selectively leak information out of political considerations.
Personally knowing people around Assange, I never got that impression about Julian either - until around the time it became personal between Hilary and him - you could then almost see the flip in real time and attacking the Democrats because a personal vendetta.
The Biography I read on him from Daniel Domscheit-Berg seemed similar. The guy was always weird, but the crusade was him vs the governments of the world.
He was proven right about a lot of the shit he was paranoid about. The revelation about the grand jury shut down a lot of lines of criticism.
He says that, but what do you call being aggressive and hostile to allies -- i.e. threatening military force to take the Panama Canal and Greenland -- while aligning with Russia and China, who play the long game and will pretend to be friendly until the moment they see an opening and take it?
1. People think he's crazy, so he's taking advantage of how they underestimate him.
2. He's taking advantage of anchoring bias: he makes a completely outrageous first offer which then makes any subsequent offer seems more reasonable, even if it was higher than you would otherwise accept. He does this all of the time, and it's a standard negotiating tactic in general, but it sometimes works well for Trump because of how people see him (see point 1).
Yes, he's of the opinion that the alliances in security and trade have not been a net benefit to the US. Is that shocking to you? He's literally been saying that for years. And thus, he's acting to change those agreements to make them more advantageous and to stimulate domestic production to compete with foreign labour (that's ultimately what tariffs do). He's going about it in his usual bombastic and ham-fisted way of course, but he's doing exactly what he's always said he wanted to do.
It's completely self-evident that lots of manufacturing has left the US due to trade agreements. This has resulted in certain classes of cheap goods but also made the US vulnerable in key goods (like electronics), and inhibited automation.
It's also not at all obvious that the US has been more secure in its role as world police. Arguably, it led directly to 9/11 and decades of pointless death in the Middle East.
All of the arguments that the status quo was more secure and better economically are weak, at best, given the complexities of the counterfactuals.
I think the arguments in favor of a globalized economy, as well as the transition to a knowledge economy, are abundant and pervasive. I’m not going to argue in favor of them because they are already so powerful and obvious.
If people conflate their current economic misfortune with a US foreign policy of encouraging global cooperation and participation, then they haven’t thought much about cause and effect.
Someone who cared to address the newfound lack of upward mobility in our society would insist on domestic policies that ensured economic surplus was explicitly invested toward the public good.
It has nothing to do with "current economic misfortune". It's simply a fact that globalization makes a country more vulnerable on many dimensions. This was clear during COVID when all of the supply chains collapsed upon countries closing their borders.
While globalization certainly has advantages that have been espoused at length, little thought has been given to their clear downsides, like decimating domestic production and the vulnerabilities inherent to distributed supply chains.
As for the "transition to a knowledge economy", this too entails similar problems. The previous trajectory was simply untenable.
I’m against these vulnerabilities as much as anyone, but if we want to move the world forward as a whole, nationalist protectionism cannot take us there. If every country wasted its resources building up its own fully independent industrial supply chain, and kept it fully modernized abreast of other nations, the average citizen’s standard of living would have a very low ceiling indeed. There’s a reason why corporate mergers happen.
If you want to see truly prosperous societies then you have to maximize peaceful international cooperation through shared democratic values. That takes educated citizenry with post-material values who will be invested in the stability and longevity of such an international system.
And they need to cooperate against authoritarian bad actors like Putin, who seek to divide and conquer.
The most genuinely good person I've known, my wife's very devout grandmother, who belonged to the United Church of Christ and whose husband was a preacher for a United Methodist Church, never once went out of her way to proselytize (in my presence at least.) That's not to say she wouldn't talk about God or her beliefs if it was somehow directly relevant to a conversation, but I never saw her trying to "spread the word" just to do so. She emphasized caring for others and the "love your neighbor as yourself," part. Her favorite scripture was the story of the Good Samaritan and that was what she requested to be read at her funeral. She didn't spend time talking about what Jesus wanted, or trying to convince you to believe, she set the example by living it.
The unfortunate part is, in my 38 years of existence, she is possibly the first "real" Christian I've known: Christian through her acts, not just her words. In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Jesus bases judgment not on religious rituals or verbal professions of faith, but on acts of compassion towards others: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the unclothed, caring for the sick, and visiting the imprisoned. This seems to emphasize practical love and concern for the vulnerable as true evidence of discipleship, rather than one's ability to proselytize.
Isn't the most important part of the New Testament the Gospels and almost everything that comes after is more about institutional Christianity? Acts, describing the spread of Christianity after Jesus' ascension, with little new information about his teachings. Epistles focus primarily on doctrine, ethics, and church organization rather than Jesus' words and actions. Revelations...well I'll leave that to others to interpret.
If Christianity is built around Jesus, shouldn't his teachings and words be the focus rather than the institution of Christianity itself? I don't think there is anything wrong with proselytizing per se, it's obviously critical to ensuring the survival and expansion of any belief system and from an evolutionary standpoint, ideas that encourage their own reproduction tend to thrive. But it seems misguided to focus on spreading the faith rather than doing all the things Jesus says you should do.
I seem to have dug out quite a few notions on what religion is all about here on HN, from the shout from the roof tops to "a bit of a chat" - obviously my original comment was DV'd to oblivion.
For me, religion starts and stops from within. I am not an evangelist - my God is mine and your's is yours. I'll tell you what I'm about and no more.
"Still small Voice of quiet" not "Hell fire and damnation".
I will dive in with a gentle nudge but never an exhortation.
Subjective interpretation is very fundamental to being human and the way our minds work, but the underlying physical reality -- the wavelengths of light reflecting off the shirt -- can be measured objectively. A physicist might say that gravity is the curvature of spacetime caused by mass, which can be measured and tested.
Trump being a criminal is based on a shared legal and societal context. As a society, we accept that if you are convicted before a jury of your peers, you are guilty and have been convicted of a crime. Jury's get it wrong and the justice system is flawed and has made mistakes. A black man in the 1920s (or even the 1960s for that matter) being tried for murder with absolutely no evidence and sentenced to death is a clear miscarriage and corruption of justice. The testimony of Trump's employees during the trial, who all said they loved working there (most of them still worked there), but weren't willing to lie on the stand about checks and phone calls they participated in, was pretty clear cut. This wasn't random people off the street of [insert preferred liberal enclave here] testifying against him: it was his own people who still work for him.
Some people prioritize political allegiance over legal judgments when it suits them.
If we dismissed facts entirely, science, medicine, and countless other fields reliant on objective reality would collapse.
This exchange is a great example of the subjective nature of our experiences: as I've gotten older -- 38 now -- I've come to accept more and more that some things are objective reality, whereas in my teens and 20s, I questioned reality and society on the structural level, torn down to the studs. From Plato's cave, to brain in the vat, Kant, the Hindu Brahman and Maya, Buddhism, etc.
Your Trump trial example actually proves the opposite of the point you’re making. CNN’s legal analyst of all people wrote an article explaining why the prosecutors “contorted the law” in pursing Trump’s conviction: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-.... Remember, the prosecutor initially declined to bring the case. And those problems with the underlying legal theory are still subject to review on appeal, which very well may result in the conviction being overturned. There’s actually a lot to debate there! Including whether the “shared context” you mention still holds in the circumstance of a blue-state jury trying Donald Trump. And I’d certainly not trust anyone—especially people without a legal background—to moderate people’s statements about Trump’s trial and conviction.
Heck, even lawyers don’t treat legal judgments as god-given “facts” except in specific legal circumstances. The questions at the back of every chapter in a law school textbook will ask the student whether a particular case was rightly decided or wrongly decided and why.
The better way to think about legal judgments is not in terms of “facts” but rather “process.” Even a final decision by the U.S. Supreme Court does not establish god given facts. It merely is the end of the line in a set of procedures that lead to a particular result in a particular case. But even judgments of the Supreme Court are second-guessed every day by 20-somethings in law schools around the country!
I take the "this seems to be true, based on what I know, subject to more information" approach.
I'm ok with not knowing things.
We can measure all sorts of things, and put them in a human context, which is very reassuring. What's a wave? What's a wavelength? What's a unit of measure? These are not universal truths, these are human inventions. Things we've created in order to communicate a shared understanding with each other of things we've observed. It makes us feel knowledgeable, lets us build cool things, and that's a good thing!
It also interferes with learning, and that's a bad thing. For example, (and I'm not taking a position on this either way, because I don't know) I think it's very unlikely, based on your comment, that it would be easy to convince you that Trump is not a criminal. Or, to pick a less controversial topic, to convince the early Catholic church of the heliocentric model of the solar system. Because they already had the "facts."
It's a comfortable position to know things.
It's uncomfortable to not know. As I've gotten older, I've become more comfortable with being uncomfortable.
It would indeed be hard to convince me Trump has not committed crimes, considering a jury found that he had and the whole, "Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck," thing. Tony Accardo ran the Chicago Outfit for 4-5 decades and never spent a single day in jail. I don't think most people would agree that because he was never convicted (or even charged), he was not committing crimes.
If you read a story about a drug kingpin being convicted at trial, do you assume that he might be innocent?
> If you read a story about a drug kingpin being convicted at trial, do you assume that he might be innocent?
That's a very fair question.
To answer: I try as hard as I can to not draw any conclusion from something like that.
I'll be 50 this year. I've seen so many examples of media manipulation, "spin", crooked prosecutors, etc... that I try very hard not to jump to a conclusion. Especially with outrage stories like "child pornography was found on his laptop". There are countless examples of police and three letter agents getting caught red-handed planting this stuff, so I'm always skeptical of news stories like that.
Then there's the whole argument of "what's a criminal?". It's frequently the ethical choice to violate an unjust law. Was Ghandi a criminal? If someone broke a law, but then the law was changed or removed, are they still a criminal?
What kind of drug kingpin? (I'm purposefully being pedantic here for rhetorical purposes) Were they "dealing" ibogaine? Maybe for injured vets, but the news is just calling him a drug kingpin? It's strange to me that ibogaine is schedule 1, and I probably wouldn't consider them to be a criminal for doing that. Or maybe they were doing some combination of things, some good some bad. Or maybe there's a good reason why it's schedule 1, and I just don't understand and they really are a bad guy.
My point is that there's usually nuance. I don't trust stories like that, I don't "believe" news articles. I read them, take them in, and reserve judgement. Really. My initial, unconscious reaction and inner voice immediately says "are they framing him? What's the other side of the story? If he is a bad guy, does he see himself that way?"
I've just been burned too many times in my life by getting sucked into media stories that I believed were true, and made an idiot out of myself because I didn't think critically about it and jumped on a bandwagon that later turned out to be BS.
> Trump being a criminal is based on a shared legal and societal context.
To think that someone is a criminal, you have to believe they committed a crime. A trial is one way of establishing whether they did with certain standards of evidence and process. But it is very far from the be-all-end-all of the matter.
For example, virtually everyone believes OJ Simpson is a criminal, even though he was found not guilty at trial, and even though plenty of biases worked against him in that trial, theoretically.
For myself, I do believe that Trump was rightfully convicted and is a criminal. But that doesn't mean that "he was convicted" should force anyone else to believe this. It only means that a particular group of jurors believed it given the evidence that a judge found correctly collected and presented to them.
But, respectfully, even you, in your quest to cite facts require pointing out that your "facts" are not facts at all. The person in question, Trump, was not sentenced and therefore not "convicted" of anything. But this false claim is repeated a lot even by supposed "fact-checkers". Even the rest of that same paragraph is not made up of facts but you are trying to support some vague claim with appeals to things like "his own people wouldn't lie for him even though they loved him" or some such; you're bolstering a negative sentiment but not really clearly delineating anything resembling "facts". That's the issue that is being discussed and addressed by Meta at this point. Sure, we can call high schools physics problems as reflecting facts of nature, that's nice, but this is not what all the fuss is about.
"in United States practice, conviction means a finding of guilt (i.e., a jury verdict or finding of fact by the judge) and imposition of sentence. If the defendant fled after the verdict but before sentencing, he or she has not been convicted,"
Not true in New York, where this particular trial took place. From your own link:
S 380.30 Time for pronouncing sentence.
In general. Sentence must be pronounced without unreasonable delay.
Court to fix time. Upon entering a conviction the court must:
(a) Fix a date for pronouncing sentence; or
(b) Fix a date for one of the pre-sentence proceedings specified in article four hundred; or
(c) Pronounce sentence on the date the conviction is entered in accordance with the provisions of subdivision three.
So not only is sentencing distinct from conviction semantically, it's also distinct legally in the state of New York.
This is an instance where semantics are nothing more than, well, semantics.
The people who say that Trump has been ”convicted but not sentenced” actually mean that he’s been ”found guilty but not sentenced”, they just aren’t intimately familiar with legal terms of art.
If they simply say ”Donald Trump was found guilty but not sentenced” instead, they’ve silenced the nitpickers while still conveying the exact same message they intended to in the first place.
Sometimes when people complain ”you’re just arguing semantics!”, the semantics do in fact need to be cleared up, because the words being used are confusing, or wrong in a way that’s preventing participants in the discussion from getting on the same page.
Here, no one is actually confused. Everyone knows and agrees that Trump was found guilty, but that he hasn’t been sentenced. The only sticking point is whether you can use the word ”convicted” to describe someone who is in that situation, and whether or not that’s the case doesn’t have any material effect on people’s understanding of reality. It’s just a matter of arguing over which words should be used, i.e. it’s just semantics.
I learned this the hard way when I was homeless at 17-18 years old in the middle of Wyoming winters. I had at least had my old Grand Cherokee to sleep in the trunk space, but not enough money for gas to run the heater. I'd pile all my clothes on top of me, but there were always patches where the cold got through and I'd spend so many nights just shaking from the cold. Spent the Christmas of 2004 this way. You are also correct that when it would be sunny (but still cold) the next day, it was an awesome experience. Almost like a ray of hope, as cliche as that sounds. It's crazy what having sunlight can do to improve your mood. That's one reason I loved living in SF later on, there were so many sunny days and I also wasn't homeless lol.
My brother has had life-long, serious mental health issues, and it's only been because of both medication AND life-long therapy that he has been able to reach a baseline of normalcy and being able to function. I think if you have a serious underlying mental health issue, that it often takes both the meds and therapy. I also don't think most psychiatrists feel they are "playing God." I think most genuinely want to help patients get better, to the extent they can.
> I am pretty sure if I went straight to a psychiatrist instead of investing into long term therapy with a psychologist (that eventually suspected me having ADHD), I would have probably been given an SSRI and sent on my way.
That's probably true, but a lot of hospitals try to push this dynamic onto doctors/psychiatrists. When my dad (was psychiatrist for 43 years) took a job as medical director at a hospital in Wyoming, they told him when he first got there that they only wanted his role to be prescribing medication, and that they would have psychologists evaluate the patient first, and then determine what medication is needed and then his job would be to write them. I assume the previous psychiatrist was fine with this (he was an unusual guy in general but that's another story), but my dad told them he would not operate this way.
But at the end of the day, the "roles" usually end up being the therapists and psychologists doing the more therapy-focused work, while the psychiatrist makes diagnoses and determinations of which medications may work, and prescribes them because of his M.D.
My brother has been bipolar his whole life, major depressive for large parts of it as well, and generally has had a rough time with mental health. It's taken both medication and life-long therapy to get him to a sort of manageable/live-able baseline.
Lol, it seems like everyone on this website has “ADHD” and “needs” a daily supply of amphetamine just to function.
I think the reality is that everyone benefits from amphetamines whether they have ADHD or not, so working backwards, if you feel better on Adderall, that doesn’t mean you have ADHD.
Haven't there been studies that people without ADHD do not benefit from amphetamines? Not to mention, there are meds that aren't amphetamine- Ritalin isn't one!
While not an amphetamine, Ritalin is a stimulant that neurotypical might use and abuse exactly like amphetamine.
That said, GP is talking out of their arse and is perpetuating one of the biggest reasons I waited until I was 35 to get diagnosed: I too thought ADHD was bullshit until I was in a position at looking at my life, my difficulties and how other people were living, and it was pretty obvious I was missing something.
This ignorance surrounding ADHD is widespread, and people think we take amphetamines to write code 80 hours a week without taking a break.
I take amphetamines to have the energy to work 4 hours a day and pick the trash off the floor while not hating myself, so comments like that one feel quite ignorant, yet you can find them in every HN thread offering their misinformed 2 cents.
Not sure how you got that from what they wrote. They said their psychologist suspected ADHD based on their symptoms and then prescribed medication for it.
That is mostly correct: psychologist do not prescribe, psychiatrists do, as they are in fact medical doctors.
In my case psychologist made the suggestion I had ADHD after 2 years of therapy, so they knew me pretty well by that point. It all made sense to me, and I went to a psychiatrist to get diagnosed and medicated.
Had I gone to a psychiatrist directly, they probably would have prescribed an antidepressant without spending 2 years getting to know me.
Out of curiosity, which test/company did you go with? A quick search reveals a lot of options, and I'm hoping you may have done some of the legwork already to determine if one is better than others for privacy reasons etc.?
The printout I have in front of me says "Medical Diagnostic Laboratories". Their website gives no info about the "pharmacodynamics" test other than one PDF about how to swab the saliva for it.
I had read about it and discussed it with my physician. She ordered it.
DNA privacy has already been defeated. In North America it’s pretty easy to find first cousin level relatives by DNA which really shrinks the target pool especially if you find first cousins from different sides of the family.
Doesn't the NSA represent a huge portion of our signals intelligence capabilities as a country? How would that role be filled otherwise? Wouldn't the best people to do many of those new jobs still be the people who used to work at the (now defunct) NSA?
The internal security is doing fine without NSA and when their biggest "achievement" was making everyone less secure via encryption backdoors you gotta wonder about purpose of existence.
Private industries seem to do just fine when it comes to security and nearly none of the progress in security is due to NSA, unless you count "looking real hard whether NSA didn't try to backdoor new security primitive" as progress
I may be terribly naive, but I just don't feel any safer b/c the NSA exists. I also don't believe this country has been under any serious threats since the NSA was created, from which it protected us.
