Hacker News Reader

Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Bush misused and misled the public on the little WMD evidence that was had:

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02...

Also, Powell: "I'm Not Reading This. This is Bullshit."

http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/44516:powell-im-not-re...

On top of that, your little talking point, which is endlessly repeated on the internet, makes no sense. So Iraq was sold to the public dishonestly, thus all claims from the government are dishonest, but for some bizarre reason the Russian government is unusually honest and truthful? Come on.

View on HN

Reasonable minds can agree both governments have proven to be dishonest, although Russia is almost certainly worse.

I think he's just saying he has some skepticism, which is perfectly reasonable.

But he/she is not making a reasonable argument though, they are making a cynical one that doesn't even remotely make room for a rational discussion. This seems to be a scary new norm where people are so frustrated they cannot see the complexity and nuance of the world, its just all crap and crap crap crap. The only think these people seem to trust is everyone lies and you can't trust anything, and when you can convince enough people of this (who will in turn stay home on election day and leave control up to the extremists who will not be) and you can take control, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The thing that scares me about this the most is the attitudes of people I ran into face-to-face registering voters this year. I ran into quite a few people to would make similar statements and the interesting thing was that after a while I could actually predict pretty well how people would respond to being asked if they were registered to vote from a distance. The people who had very cynical responses looked miserable (from a distance, before I talked to them) and likely were miserable (thinking the world is crap and everyone is lying and we're all being spied on and no-one can stop it, etc) and it leads me to believe many of the people who comment on these stories in similar ways are similarly miserable.

The bad-news flood from our overly connected lives I think is starting to have a serious effect on peoples psychology and it is making it harder and harder to have reasonable discourse. In the end at this rate its going to be a small number of news-junkies and academics and a bunch of extremists and the rest of the population will be tuned out as long as there is enough food and distractions available.

He's complaining about the dishonesty and obfuscation of information from a democratically elected government. How can a democracy survive when they don't even know what's really going on?

It's a legitimate gripe, but delivered poorly.

Well, while I don't necessarily agree with the articulation of the top level post, but I agree with the sentiment. And I agree with your remark that the capability of appreciating nuance is fundamental.

What I'd ask for is this: I'd like a standard by which the government claiming "Evidence of X" from some special committee is no longer treated as carte-blanche.

I see no problem with asking for evidence from every such major government claim, and it seems it could have saved us 1.7 trillion dollars and the last two wars if we [as a public, as a country] had practiced this mentality sooner.

1. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

The environment you describe is also how a third party can get traction. It just needs a few charismatic leaders and good marketing to gain traction and a bot army to flood all social networks. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com