Hacker News Reader

Comment by krylon | Hacker News Reader

> European Union ministers today admitted that a giant EU-US trade deal is dead in its current form, with drastic change needed to salvage any hope of a deal going ahead.

The devil, as always, is in the fine print - a cynic might read that to mean "TTIP has gotten such a bad reputation we would rather wait a few more years so the public forgets all about it, then try again."

In fact, I am tempted to quote Lovecraft here, except that a few years hardly count as "eternal".

View on HN

There is nothing wrong about trade deals per se.

I am not against any trade deals, but against this particular deal with those particular conditions because of some particular reasons.

With TTIP, I kind of got the impression that the "Trade" part was just an excuse to push various policies politicians know very well are not popular with their voters.

They have realized that multinational corporations can screw the citizens of the EU just as well through CETA, which is about to get ratified on October 27.

Of course, CETA has vital concessions to EU interests such as banning Canadian companies from marketing Canadian cheese as "parmesan-style" to Canadians.

They will just change the name to something else, change a few words and voila, a new secret trade agreement.

Offtopic, but does anyone else find Lovecraft too over-the-top? I know that many people like him, but it gets tiresome that everything is nameless, frightful, indescribable, hideous, hellish, monstrous, indescribable, etc. He's not very subtle at all with his descriptions, even a house that was previously established as super creepy gets an "abominable" when referring to it.

I found him so over the top that I wanted to confirm my hunch experimentally, and made a list of the 150 most prominent words in his opus. It is unsurprising:

https://i.imgur.com/pUUzFCJ.png

>> does anyone else find Lovecraft too over-the-top?

Does anyone find Metallica over the top? How about Slayer? Cannibal Corpse?

It's the form- it's supposed to be over-the-top. And btw, that's not in an ironic way.

Someone once said that Lovecraft suffered from adjectivitis. I'm fond of his writing and have read pretty much all of his stories but I get the point. Especially when reading several Lovecraft stories in quick succession they can seem repetitive.

I'm surprised words like 'mongrel' aren't featured more prominently in that word cloud. His blatant racism really detracts from some of his otherwise great stories. It's particularly annoying in the Call of Cthulhu where it's almost like from the author's perspective the true evil isn't the monstrous, cyclopean abomination but non-WASPs.

Yeah, I saw the word "nigger" show up in the diagram, so I went and had a look. In "The Rats in the Walls" the author has a cat called "Nigger-man", but that was a proper name so I removed it (I removed all proper names).

Also, I think you're spot on with adjectivitis. It explains exactly what I don't like about his stories.

I must admit I cracked up when seeing "PENGUINS" in that word cloud.

An optimist might read that to mean "Europeans found out that trade deals can be a lot better than what TTIP offered. Such as CETA which the EU is about to close with Canada".

CETA is terrible though.

The name escapes me for a moment but they're already working on a new secret deal. (Since 2012, so that's why they're so easily letting go of TTIP.)

TISA? (Though that one isn't EU-US but has a much wider range from what I've read)

Yes, I just looked it up and was about to edit my comment. Here's an article in Dutch about about TiSa: http://sargasso.nl/tisa-bijl-aan-wortel-democratie/

What do you mean by "secret"? All negotations are listed on the information page of the commission.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, said someone pretty famous on one side of the Atlantic.

Well, thats what happened to ACTA too, isn't it?

A lot of the stuff that was in there got reused in TTIP.

You may be thinking of IPRED, not TTIP? IPRED popped up at some point during the anti-ACTA protests and seemed to have significant overlap.

I don't see the overlap of ACTA with TTIP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com