xnull2guest

I'm talking about American law where American law applies.

I would appreciate if you deleted your comment and engaged in respectable commenting.

It was my understanding that 18 U.S. Code § 871 included depictions enticing or encouraging such acts. I will look this up and come back with more information at a later time.

And to be clear here I mean a depiction of an actual US president. Not a fictitious president.

> Full stop, no it doesn't. Where the heck are you getting such misinformation? It is not just wrong, it is bordering on libel.

The mainstream news media is where I am getting this information. I remember it being reported on during the Pearl Harbor film some years ago (Bush Administration). Though I see it all the time: the SONY Leaks disclosed how the State Department and CIA helped to influence "The Interview" so that it would both depict the assassination of their president and to encourage civil unrest.

I take the libel statement seriously. I will pass it by my attorney. Difficult to discuss here, as neither of us are lawyers.

> There is an audience for those films.

Not a point.

Indeed, it's hard to find a place on American social media where dissenting opinions can be argued. There's either an administrative agreement to shut the ideas down, or places (such as HN) don't like the idea of having opinions on their site for whatever reason (harmful to the community) so they shut it down.

I'm certainly not getting thrown in jail. But you won't hear any dissenting opinions.

More and more, social media platforms have been telling me - or using their algorithms to tell me - that my opinions, as educated and well argued as they are, are not welcome on their sites.

I did not expect to see this from Hacker News. Indeed, after the experiment banning political conversation, I had thought that the opposite decision had been made.

And finally, to be clear, I use HN for far more than political chatter. I read the technical content, and use it as a general news feed (one of my many). I comment where I am inspired to. I did not realize how often that ends up being of a political nature. I care deeply about individual freedoms and the technology that enables and disables these.

Can we find a mechanism whereby my nationality is confirmed? I would like to do this for the sake of my own vindication, as well as clarity to those who were/are suspicious.

There's a downvote brigade on my posts right now and anything I want to contribute gets detailed into accusations of my being some kind of agent.

Please also check xnull, xnull3guest, xnull4guest, etc.

I have another account jwtadvice.

These are all on different computers. I was lazy and created different credentials for all of them.

If you have questions, whatever, let me know.

I understand why people are afraid that other commentators may be intelligence agents. I too suffer from this thought. The truth of the matter is that governments around the world participate in social media propaganda (US, Russia, and China included, don't kid yourself).

Regarding "pro-China" accusations. I'm pro-American. I love American values. And that's why I will criticize America when it does not live up to them.

I am one person. I am an advocate for decentralized systems, including in Russia and in China.

I've given advice to people on HN in these various accounts about where I get information. If you feel that I am well educated, I recommend finding one of those comments and looking into those sources. They include all open source information channels - and many of them are US official outlets (such as State Department press briefings).

Anyway...

I tried to post actual Snowden documents (that means PDFs hosted on the internet, on CDNs, on mirrors and on news websites).

I also tried to post articles about Snowden documents (Der Speigel articles and Guardian articles).

Public repository of Snowden Documents: https://search.edwardsnowden.com/

There's actually a few of them, for example Cryptome had them hosted.

Libya is a failed state. There is no recognized, coherent government of Libya.

> It's an air campaign against an ISIS stronghold, and it's pretty black and white in that most people agree that it should be done.

I don't think this is the case. But if it were, it would be an argument ad populum - a logical fallacy.

> So yes, America can be horrible. But America can also be the world's largest source of good, especially when other governments can't step up to the plate.

I think this is exactly right. It depends on how America chooses to use its power.

Today, it looks a lot like containment, of aggravating and funding extremist elements, of playing proxy war, of pursuing its interests behind a cloak of public relations.

The American incentive at this point of world history is to prevent, at all costs, other countries from becoming influential enough to challenge American decision making.

That's not just on the battlefield. America has been trying to block countries from lending money, from industrializing, and even from building independent news media industries. It has refused to join international institutions of law, such as the Convention on the Law of the Sea and the International Criminal Court, it has an overt first strike nuclear policy - the only of its kind in the world.

The United States faces a choice:

A.) allow other nations to grow, in a completely peaceful and benign manner, wealthy and strong enough risking that it will no longer a hegemon capable of making unilateral global decision making.

OR

B.) disrupt the growth of regions of the world, delaying the growth of competitor states, guaranteeing America maintains its 'critical leadership role' in the world.

Judging by actions rather than words, America chooses, and will continue to choose B. America is the country with the incentive to start wars.

The world should be multi-polar, and where it there is need for violence to rectify or prevent violence, it should be under international leadership with international decision making.

Please don't appeal to me as the rest of this comment is not to you.

I'd like to address the HN community. Note the above authoritative assurance this commentor is giving, with one sided accusation of the Chinese and a complete pass on US aggression and social media propaganda. This is exactly the kind of playbook used by those operating out of the US military propaganda center Fort Bragg.

He might be just a HN commentor who is nationalistic and affected by the propaganda of his media bubble who coincidentally is charging people who dissent from those opinions as being foreign propagandists. He could.

But either way, this conversation has moved on.

;)

What a horrible place the internet has become...

I condemn the Chinese for all of their civil rights infractions, watch: China has a serious problem with gross human and civil rights violations.

Anyway. People tend to react to accusation that the United States government commits serious human rights attrocities with a knee jerk - accusing the other person of being employed by other governments, etc.

This is not the case.

Let me put this out there, because I think it's important to understand.

China has been drastically improving in the field of human rights over time. It's trajectory is UP.

America has been drastically devolving in the field of human rights over time. It's trajectory is DOWN.

Is that concerning? Why do Americans feel that China is even a metric for comparison?

No government gives their people rights. Rights are inalienable.

The United States government has been taking away their people's rights.

Articles such as the above make China seem like the problem, or the most important problem.

If you are an American and you are concerned with human and civil rights, you won't win them by fighting the Chinese. You will win them by fighting your own government.

I take the allegation that I am a paid Chinese propagandist seriously. I reject this accusation fully.

I do not know how to address a challenge like this?

How can I - without providing something absurd like my driver's license - prove that I am an American and of American decent?

Note that I was talking the other day about the situation in Cyprus, where I used the terminology 'aggressive' to describe Turkish behavior. I was accused of being a Greek.

Anyway, I fully reject the accusation that I am 50 Cent Party member or paid by any government, including my home country the United States.

I had seen statistics that our school systems were bad. But it wasn't really palpable until I got accused of having the vocabulary and grammatical equivalent of a paid Chinese shill.

It's unfortunately going to take a few days to read this in full.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Human_Rights_Lawyers_Con...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Constitution_Initiative

You read the first Wikipedia article looking for reasons to dismiss it.

There's plenty of Civil Rights activity in China. It's a myopic American view that there is none and "no true Scotsman" all the civil rights law firms, attorneys and court cases should be dismissed out of hand for consideration.

In China, most disputes are resolved without institutional involvement whatsoever. Off the bat it's difficult to point to institutions and institutional processes and claim China doesn't have equivalence.

You are right. China is different. But it's not some wasteland dystopia from a fantasy novel. It has a wide and active civil society. That civil society is uniquely Chinese, and frankly, it's exciting to see it blossom as it has been since the 80s.

The most shocking thing is that the United States thinks China and Chinese society is a country to compare itself to. The ignorance of these comparisons is nearly as shocking.

http://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/uncl...

http://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/uncl...

We're back to pretending opinions are facts, are we?

> There's also an attempt by China to associate the geography "Taiwan" with "China", when it's obviously a separate country.

Interestingly here, Taiwan's constitution and official policy does not claim there are two Chinese states. The United States and world consensus also recognizes the People's Republic of China as a government, but not Taiwan.

Do you explicitly disagree with ROC, PRC and the US about the status of Taiwan as a separate country?

The long and short? The Qing Dynasty had territory over these islands before WWII. It was never a powerful naval power. The Japanese took them and more during WWII. The US (San Fran Conference, Cairo Conference, Potsdam Conference) demanded the Japanese remove themselves from these islands (including Spratlys, Paracels), and give islands back to China (including, notably, Taiwan). China, during the Cold War, traded some ownership back and forth with Vietnam of Pacific islands in SCS in order to avoid their being involved in Cold War disputes.

Now China is seeking, for National Security purposes, to build infrastructure (including civilian, rescue, emergency response, shipping and military) on these islands. The United States sees this as area access/area denial - it could be denied the ability to project naval power into this area. The Chinese want to be able to protect naval trade, and protect themselves from their historical vulnerability (embargo).

US has tried multiple ways to prevent or slow this project. A recent effort to get the Philippines to contest the waters failed when the Philippines backed off of their claim.

Western reporting likes to present the South China Sea as a consensus, but it's not. It's been very difficult for the United States to get Asian Countries - those involved in the area - to side with the United States about the waters and their future.

The point I was making is that across US broadcasting, there has been an attempt to associate the geography "South China Sea" with the term "International Waters."

It's a glaring editorial error to present a dispute as being concluded with your own opinion. That's what the Times has done. Whether its readership is aware of it or not.

I furthermore disagree with the assertion that the average Times reader is no doubt familiar with the context.

I find it troubling you present the context improperly yourself (China v. UNCLOS) in writing your opinion here.

One of the crucial aspects to understanding the South China Sea situation is the dispute of the sovereignty of the waters. The New York Times doesn't provide context on the sovereignty disputes, or provide the Chinese argument. Instead misleads its readership by quoting "international waters in the South China Sea."

This is an editorial error of enormous magnitude affecting the quality of the publication. An non politicized publication would write "disputed waters in the South China Sea."

Indeed, you can read back only a couple of years where US media reporting did exactly this. The recent propaganda push inside US media has been to use the term "international waters" in association with the geography to affect public opinion.

If it's the former, I don't think the US will be joining it any time soon. US military grand strategy depends on its ability to deploy marines with its navy anywhere swiftly in the world. That's why the Panama Canal was built: to allow the US Navy to swiftly move between Oceans to reallocate force posture. This is why the United States rejected the UNCLOS court juristiction over its boobytrapping the coastal regions around Nicaragua - the US refuses to be bound by this international law (the other major one, I would suggest, is the International Criminal Court/Rome Statues).

If you mean the second, the Chinese have argued that this is a territory dispute, in which case UNCLOS itself (article 299, IIRC) agrees it has no authority.

Certainly UNCLOS is a major aspect to understanding the South China Sea situation, and should be linked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weiquan_lawyers

> I have to imagine that in China...

a) Had Washington had its way the documents never would have seen the light of day. They broke international law to ground planes in search of Snowden. They blocked as much of the documents as they could from being shared. They spread rumors about malware on Wikileaks. They worked with the media industry to not cover the contents and to work on the messaging to the American people: "This is bulk collection, not mass surveillance." Their official and public statements on the contents and scope of the programs were repeatedly shown to be false. They passed a law legalizing and expanding authorities and passed this off to the public as their stopping the programs, while the media ran 24/7 news about Caitlyn Jenning. The UK infiltrated the Guardian at gunpoint and destroyed the documents.

b) The laws are in place for exactly this. Snowden, had he been caught, would have been in military prison. His lawyers are arguing today the terms of a trial for him to come home, with senior members of our government calling for his execution. The US government under the Obama Justice Department has compromised on a secret jury-less trial in the Virginia legal subsystem (notable for prosecuting National Security cases, and siding with National Security over individual rights). Remember Chelsea Manning's court case? I don't.