I’m writing with specific guidance on what I’d like for us to do to advance the CECOT story. I know you’d all like to see this run as soon as possible; I feel the same way. But if we run the piece as is, we’d be doing our viewers a disservice.
Last month many outlets, most notably The New York Times, exposed the horrific conditions at CECOT. Our story presents more of these powerful testimonies—and putting those accounts into the public record is valuable in and of itself. But if we’re going to run another story about a topic that has by now been much-covered we need to advance it. Among the ways to do so: does anyone in the administration or anyone prominent who defended the use of the Alien Enemies Act now regret it in light of what these Venezuelans endured at CECOT? That’s a question I’d like to see asked and answered.
- At present, we do not present the administration’s argument for why it sent 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. What we have is Karoline Leavitt’s soundbite claiming they are evildoers in America (rapists, murderers, etc.). But isn’t there much more to ask in light of the torture that we are revealing? Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don’t tend to be shy. I realize we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record.
- The data we present paints an incongruent picture. Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories. We should spend a beat explaining this. We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged? My point is that we should include as much as we can possibly know and understand about these individuals.
- Secretary Noem’s trip to CECOT. We report that she took pictures and video there with MS-13 gang members, not TdA members, with no comment from her or her staff about what her goal on that trip was, or what she saw there, or if she had or has concerns about the treatment of detainees like the ones in our piece. I also think that the ensuing analysis from the Berkeley students is strange. The pictures are alarming; we should include them. But what does the analysis add?
- We need to do a better job of explaining the legal rationale by which the administration detained and deported these 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. It’s not as simple as Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act and being able to deport them immediately. And that isn’t the administration’s argument. The admin has argued in court that detainees are due “judicial review”—and we should explain this, with a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding his authority under the relevant statute, and another arguing that he’s operating within the bounds of his authority. There’s a genuine debate here. If we cut down Kristi Noem analysis we’d have the time.
My general view here is that we do our viewers the best service by presenting them with the full context they need to assess the story. In other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here.
I am eager and available to help. I tracked down cell numbers for Homan and Miller and sent those along. Please let me know how I can support you.
The whole thing is poorly-conceived and obviously false but I just have to call this out-
> Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories. We should spend a beat explaining this.
The story isn't that people found guilty of crimes went to jail, the story is that half weren't even charged with crimes! That's the whole point of the story! We should not be aiming for a balanced diet of criminals and not-criminals in our government-sponsored foreign death camps!
The fact that they exist at all is an affront to humanity, but to say "it's OK because a slim majority deserve it"- I just don't know what to say.
> We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged?
What about charged? What does charged with a crime have to do with anything? Why bring that up at all? Do we send people to prison because they were charged with a crime? Is Bari Weiss a newborn baby who has never heard about the presumption of innocence?
It’s not just that, it’s that the administration knew they weren’t guilty of any crimes and sent them to be tortured anyway.
If you can stomach it, propublica has been covering stories like this since the summer [1].
Meanwhile, the MS13 has been cutting sweetheart deals with Bukele [2] and we have been releasing actual gang members for the privilege of sending innocent people to the torture facilities [3, 4], even in the face of reports of USAID being diverted to the gang for a money-for-votes scheme for Bukele [5].
Even the people who were convicted of crimes don't deserve this. There's this sick belief in parts of society that criminals (which becomes a permanent state of being) are valid targets for unlimited suffering.
People should not be sent to torture camps where they have no hope of every leaving for the rest of their lives for committing crimes.
I understand your argument, but the problem with Bukele is that he is a bad human being, too. A gang leader with slightly less proclivity for torture and rape than the other gangs.
He knows that he has many innocent people locked up in those jails. He knows that his deal with Trump is immoral and unnecessary for the safety of El Salvador, but does it anyway. His social media savvy relishes in his authoritarianism, rather than explains it.
Unfortunately, the dire situation you describe is how Authoritarians gain power: desperate populations struggling for multiple years with widespread societal problems that government has seemed too inept or corrupt to fix. 1930s Germany, 2020s Trump, El Salvador.
I have Bukele for a responsible person, just hard like Lee Kuan Yew was.
But as far as my knowledge goes, he does not execute or kill, just enjailed the gangs.
I could be wrong but I do not have evidence of the opposite so far. Just rumors and things mostly from sources I do not trust. If there is evidence, they should release it.
They also released 8,000 people, they keep reviewing for mistakes.
About the exception state, this came out from an 80 people murder. To innocent people and as a revenge. I think it was justified in this case, sadly.
I do not mean bad conditions, they more than deserve that. I mean if there has been torturing or such things. I would be against that, 100%.
The situation of El Salvador was almost like a war in times of peace. They did not have many options.
Her own excuse is either a complete lie or betrays the fact that she doesn’t understand the story. I invite her apologists here to choose which interpretation they prefer.
I’m into the full meal deal theory. Her own excuse is a complete lie, she doesn’t understand the story and somehow doesn’t even understand journalism. In this case, 60 Minutes asked the White House for comment and they refused. If a party to a story can kill the story by not being involved, that’s not journalism it’s PR.
People who don't understand the press don't get handpicked to run the press by the billionaires who own it.
She understands that she's full of shit, and she's paid to be full of shit. The Ellisons aren't spending billions of dollars on this because they want you to be well-informed.
We do unfortunately send people to long times in jail (sometimes over a decade) before their cases come to trial in the USA. And jails in the USA generally have vastly worse conditions than prisons (as they are "short term" facilities).
CECOT is a whole different beast altogether, though :(
I was a jurist on a murder trial. The defendant had spent 1.5 years in jail awaiting his trial. Then went back to jail after the hung jury did not deliver a verdict.
1.5 years is low for a murder trial. I would suspect the average is somewhere between 2 and 5 years. A lot of the time, if the defendant knows they are cooked, then they are just holding out for a better plea deal.
I've personally met defendants on their ninth year awaiting trial, and during COVID a lot of jails were forced to publish their detainees lists, and I noted some who were over 11 years without a trial.
Sure, that's true. Let's say you file a motion, though. Say the cops beat a false confession out of you. You file a motion to suppress. Now you've stopped the speedy trial clock for a year, maybe two, while the motion is responded to, witnesses and discovery are sought, hearings are had, etc. You're stuck in jail that whole time.
Just like in theory the cops can't steal your stuff. But in reality there are more than enough ways around such little restrictions unless you are backed up by an expensive and powerful legal team.
It's worth highlighting that continually driving focus onto a few spectacular examples of criminal histories is exactly how this regime has been justifying its actions.
> The fact that they exist at all is an affront to humanity, but to say "it's OK because a slim majority deserve it"- I just don't know what to say.
I think you don't understand MAGA mentality. Honestly, that's probably a good thing, but understanding MAGA would help understanding this whole situation.
You don’t hold a story because you want to push the government harder to respond, especially when you have the executive’s official spokesperson giving a reason on the record already.
And what does she mean that we should spend a beat explaining that half do have criminal histories? She wants them to give a cookie for that? And why is being charged relevant? You don’t send someone to prison for life for being charged.
Lastly she misstates the administrations legal justification for deportation. She doesn’t appear to be an unbiased actor here.
The fact she sent that out publicly is a good indication of how prejudiced she will be with editorial content.
> And why is being charged relevant? You don’t send someone to prison for life for being charged.
Yup. I was charged with a felony of which I was materially innocent.
But this is the right's spin on things, the "well even if you weren't found guilty, there was enough of an issue to arrest you and charge you".
I was watching a Zoom meeting of one of our local Superior Court hearings - was a motion to revoke or modify bail conditions.
The Judge actually rebuked the prosecutor, who had tried to explain why the motion should go their way. "Blah blah, in addition, the defendant has shown no signs of remorse or regret for the situation..."
Judge: "I'm going to stop you there. The defendant pled not guilty and at this moment no verdict has been determined. In the eyes of the law and this court, they have zero obligation or requirement to show remorse or regret for their alleged actions."
Basically saying that because the administration isn't cooperating with judicial reviews or even bothering to comment (let alone display a difference in opinions), the story should be shelved. So as long as the government is united in its desire to commit horrible acts and stall justice, I guess we shouldn't bother reporting them? Not sure where the logic is there. And I guess since it's possible some bad apples exist, then we should just take the word of the government that everyone there is a gang member? I wouldn't ever call 60 Minutes cutting edge journalism, it's quality for sure but they are never the first on the scene. Who cares if other media companies have covered CECOT? 60 Minutes got first hand interviews with detainees that have good backgrounds. That's important, it lets viewers empathize with "good" immigrants just trying to create a better life for their families. This letter is weak.
> Basically saying that because the administration isn't cooperating with judicial reviews or even bothering to comment (let alone display a difference in opinions), the story should be shelved.
Which is ironic, considering the actual video that Canadian broadcasters manage to send, it ends with basically "We requested a comment from US officials, but they referred us to speak with El Salvador instead", so even the finish video that got broadcast, acknowledges this basic fact that you need to carry on even if both sides don't want to be interviewed on camera.
> The pictures are alarming; we should include them. But what does the analysis add?
The analysis shows another way in which the government is trying to be secretive about how it's treating people that were within its borders and subject to its laws and protections. I can only hope someone pointed this out because the question suggests a baffling level of ignorance despite the message overall sounding like some reasonable feedback on the story, despite coming far too late in the process to be considered reasonable.
Here are the excuses Bari Weiss gave to bury the story.
The reporters reached out to the govt for comment. They chose not to respond. If you insist on holding off publishing until you have a comment you’ve just given the government the ability to block the story by endlessly delaying comment.
More broadly the problem here is simply that Weiss has no legitimate authority to make calls like this. She’s never worked as a reporter. The 60 Minutes staff have decades of reporting experience. The only reason she has the job is because a billionaire who is trying to curry favor with the administration installed her there. That context hangs over every decision she makes.
> The reporters reached out to the govt for comment. They chose not to respond.
According to the video itself (just finished watching it), that's not true. US officials did respond, telling them to ask El Salvador officials instead, so basically redirecting, rather than "no response". If that's worse or not I guess is left as an exercise to the reader.
For those not familiar: there were five screenings in the prior week that journalists attended to discuss it. She was aware of those and did not attend.
When she did look at it, her feedback was minor, and they made adjustments.
Then she killed it a day after her delayed feedback, on the weekend it was to air.
That context, combined with the response above, is telling.
She is at absolute best, entirely unfit and amateur for this role combined with dangerous arrogance.
More likely, she is the malevolent puppet of a billionaire ally of the current corrupt administration.
That explanation is days late, though. It's attested that she didn't even take a call from the episode producer before killing it. I mean, sure, if you put a bunch of people in a room and ask them to retcon a reasonable-sounding explanation for why you did something embarassing, you can do it! The world is a complicated place.
It's abundantly clear why she spiked it. I know it. You know it. We all know it. She was brought in as a clearly partisan voice to put exactly this finger on exactly these levers at CBS. We all saw it when she was hired and we all warned about this. And she did.
I mean, why bother stenographising the excuse? No one is fooled. "Partisan hack does partisan hackery" is like the least surprising line in this story.
This isn’t the real “why”. Holding the release back is a political decision. Why hold the story specially? Why not just issue any corrections later? It’s already gone through the same approval process other stories would. The choice to do something different here and treat Trump-damaging stories differently is by definition, biased.
To me, Bari’s response is a manufactured cover up. I’ve followed Bari for years and seen the progression from someone who was a balanced moderate to someone who is slowly developing a strong bias and letting the mask off a little bit at a time. The recent Turning Point townhall was the first big revelation of her bias to the public. But as someone who subscribed to her for years, I’ve seen the progression over time. And the language in here feels less like her usual journalism and more like something carefully put together to deflect.
This seems dishonest, she couldn’t possibly think the administration is going to share more useful information here, and if they did it would have no value. These people were illegally sent to life in prison at a brutal torture camp with no charges or trial, at the expense of US taxpayers. There is no possible excuse or rationale that would make it anything but extremely illegal and unethical, and a betrayal of all of the values our country purports to stand for. It doesn’t matter what crimes someone is accused of or not.
Exactly. You give people a reasonable chance to comment, but you can't let them veto your story if they decline. That would be a naive way to be fair and balanced.
Honestly, the argument that CBS buried the piece to protect Trump is difficult to accept because, well, watching brown people being treated like shit or even tortured is MAGA porn. Innocence or guilt is meaningless - Dear Leader said they're all enemies!
All the MAGAs I know on Facebook are posting about how the video is great ("It's about time someone does something!"), so I would think Trump would want the piece to air.
Bari wisely points out that if the deportees are being tortured, then there must be a secretly good reason why if they dig a little deeper. Suggests asking Stephen Miller.
Larry Ellison is using his bags to purchase lies and silence.
No economy can be in true equilibrium when the consumers send profits to be spent in unforeseen and unrelated ways like this. Every purchase carries potentially immense future costs that are almost completely opaque.
Free market maximalists need to confront this fact before praying at the altar of complete deregulation, and every consumer should pay more attention to who they are buying from.
-- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776
More significantly, one of the first discussions within the text of precisely what wealth is (on which Smith has several, and occasionally inconsistent, answers, and which he seems to think of as more a flow than a stock.)
One of Smith's principle complaints in his text was what we now call "market failures" and "regulatory capture".
What's free market about total state regulatory capture, calling the President when your bids get rejected, or setting up wars and domestic police actions to enrich yourself with contracts using taxpayer funds?
There are legitimate criticisms of a pure free market, but this is "state capitalism" not a free market.
The Trump administration is absolutely not pro free market. They're putting fingers on the scale all over the place, taking Federal positions in private companies, taking literal bribes for regulatory favors, influencing the selection of executives and board members, and using the power of the state to attack privately owned companies for platforming speech they don't like (like this 60 Minutes segment, made by a private company). Trump/MAGA looks a lot more like the CCP than anything else.
Of course if you pay attention to the discourse, MAGA and national conservatism are an explicit repudiation of Reagan/Clinton "neoliberalism" and "libertarian conservatism." They explicitly support a large administrative state that centrally plans the economy and culture, just one they run and use to push right wing and nationalist agendas.
I remember saying back during the Bush years: if the right is forced to choose between liberty and cultural conservatism, they will throw out liberty. The right only supports the freedom to do what they think people should be doing. (Yes, there are similar attitudes in some parts of the left too. There are not many principled defenders of individual liberty.)
Edit: I'm really just arguing that we should call things what they are. Calling MAGA's CCP-like state capitalism a free market is like calling Bernie Sanders or Mamdani communism (they're socialists, not communists, these are not the same) or calling old school conservative republicans fascists. Words mean things.
The tariffs are at least partially about crony capitalism if you look how they have repeatedly played out. Announce big, broad, sweeping industry & country level tariffs. Talk to Big Tech execs, quietly delay/rescind specific sub-components or even companies from said tariffs. Rinse & repeat.
The companies left fully paying tariffs are the ones that aren't big enough to have the orange mans ear / "donate" to the ballroom construction.
Tariffs, as with taxes, may serve positive, market-favourable functions, particularly in addressing market failures, uneven regulation (e.g., higher pension, safety, environmental, and/or medical-care burdens in the importing country), as well as anti-dumping or anti-interference actions. British-Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang writes of this, particularly in Kicking Away the Ladder:
And it would quickly be destroyed by competing governments that don’t believe in free markets and actively subsidize their industries to capture market share.
I forgot to put in my comment "until recently". And the US auto industry does such so using that as your argument in favor of tariffs doesn't really work.
You and your downvote brigade can continue to hit my posts but it won’t change the fact the US has been subsidizing our agriculture sectors and oil and gas to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars for a LONG time.
Anyone claiming the US is a completely free market is either uninformed or a delusional nationalist.
Can you give an example of a zero tariff country being destroyed by a super high tariff country? I can give you examples of the opposite. For example Argentina tried to build up domestic industries with high tariffs.
Trump forced the UAE to buy $2 billion of his stable coin in order to avoid tariffs. He is making $80 million a year farming yields off that. The tariff nonsense was 100% just a backdoor for corruption.
Edit: and I forgot he pardoned the binance guy for facilitating this corruption too. Trumps pardons are the most corrupt in american history but MAGA is still yelling about the hunter biden pardon even though Joe was absolutely right that trump would maliciously prosecute him
It’s actually a lot of small to midsize manufacturers importing subcomponents that are getting hurt in the heartland. They can’t lobby for exemptions & don’t have the supplier negotiating power of the megacaps.
The recent defense bill is evidence of this. Who has access to these contracts and massive spending increases? Is it any random startup that is building a good product? Nope. It’s the incumbent companies that are big donors and the various defense tech companies from the Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale ecosystem, who are ideologically aligned to the administration and support them vocally. Same with the new ICE and border agency funding. They’re tripling these agencies budgets. Who’s getting contracts to hire thousands of new agents or to build software profiling the millions they want to deport in 2026? Their friends like Palantir probably.
> There are legitimate criticisms of a pure free market, but this is "state capitalism" not a free market.
Yeah, that's what OP said. I hate these sort of comments where the poster acts like they vehemently disagree with what was said, but then just restate what was said in a slightly different way.
No, OP lectured us about the evils of free markets and how they need to be regulated... presumably by the same corrupt, captured government he's complaining about. The one who's giving Ellison his orders to pass along to Weiss. Because that's who'll do the regulating, in the world OP is implicitly asking for.
The problem isn't the money or the market. The problem is the power.
Trump's and the Republican party's whole shtick is deregulation. The financial tumors in the economy love it when the white blood cells look the other way. That's why folks like Ellison and Elon bought this election. These are the types of orders they are happy to comply with for favorable treatment.
If you don't regulate, you're just opening the door for the free market to birth a tyrant or cabal that makes up their own power structures.
If you don't regulate, you're just opening the door for the free market to birth a tyrant or cabal that makes up their own power structures.
Perhaps, but right now the only tyrants and cabals I see around me were elected democratically. I don't have to use Facebook or Amazon, but I have to pay taxes to Trump's treasury department.
The fact that stupid people can be easily herded into voting against almost everyone's best interests, including their own, is not an indictment of the free market. If anything, it speaks to the apparently-unresolvable incompatibility of social media and democracy. I'm pretty sure we'll have to give up one or the other before long.
Democracy is not the problem, it's a deliberately misinformed populace shaped by undeserved money that's the core issue. Folks who pollute the information in the market or the political field steer the market away from a symmetrical information equilibrium -- they are huge drains on human potential. Trump did both and evaded trial for sedition because of how much he cheated in business and engaged the law in bad faith, and due to favors he promised to others like Elon and Ellison who had more money. Before he was a "democratically elected tyrant" he was a regular free market one.
Money is power. High concentrations of money controlled by few people serve the whims of those people, who use that power to influence politics, in 2024 through one of the most dishonest campaign trails and propaganda operations in my living memory of American politics. I'm surprised you don't see the connection.
Money is power the way religion is power. Traditionally, religion is what the American right wing has used to herd its supporters, but it wasn't enough by itself to capture the entire electorate. More recently they've found that leveraging social media such as Facebook and friendly "news" outlets such as Fox gives them enough influence to take over national politics completely. If such immense power wasn't up for grabs, the money wouldn't matter.
If I said the problem was religion, I'd rightfully be taken to task. But if I were to call out the effects of evangelical subversion and abuse of protestant Christianity in America, you'd probably find room to agree. It's exactly the same with money.
We aren't going to get rid of either money or religion, but we can say that the Federal government -- and yes, the billionaires behind it -- shouldn't have anything close to this level of power.
In a free and unregulated market, you will see cronyism by the wealthiest players who have captured it. The payoff of capture is enormous and therefore investors have incentive to offer up capital to accelerate the capture. Tyrants emerge from anarchy. A corrupt MAGA administration bought by private money is the product of a poorly regulated market.
I think you're missing the implied cause and effect here. Lighthanded regulations allow for ridiculous amounts of wealth to be acquired in the U.S. Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, etc. are so unfathomably rich (and therefore powerful), they can now trivially bend government to their will.
Peel it back even more: how does any State not fall victim to monied interests? This is usually handwaved away by socalists in the sense that everything is handled by "independent commissions" that can totally not be corrupted.
The solution is really to keep the scope of government small so that any corruption isn't detrimental to the populace, and they can handle it in the next election.
> Peel it back even more: how does any State not fall victim to monied interests?
Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate), or the CCP route (clip the wings of the Icaruses who fly too high).
Edit: if the above are too extreme, another approach would be firm and consistent application
of anti-competitive laws, resurrecting the fairness doctrine, and stop pretending that artificial constructs have human rights.
> or the CCP route (clip the wings of the Icaruses who fly too high).
This seems like a great way for the monied interests from WITHIN the party to just take full control.
> Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate)
The reason why this worked is because FDR oversaw the US during a period of incredible change and after the Great Depression. It's not like the tax rate was responsible for his successes.
> > or the CCP route (clip the wings of the Icaruses who fly too high).
> This seems like a great way for the monied interests from WITHIN the party to just take full control.
They already do in the US, so this is a non-response.
> > Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate)
> The reason why this worked is because FDR oversaw the US during a period of incredible change and after the Great Depression. It's not like the tax rate was responsible for his successes.
Once again, this is a vacuous response. If the claim was “high taxes caused the change during FDR’s time,” “There was change” is not an alternative explanation to that claim. If we took the counter-factual claim, do you think the period would have been as transformative if the tax rates weren’t high?
> This seems like a great way for the monied interests from WITHIN the party to just take full control.
Politicians already have political power in every country and political system. The blatantly corrupt ones get the death sentence if their provincial or central committee patron can't save them, and those get culled every decade or so, so you can't go overboard.
That's not a solution, that just removes an opponent of monied interests from the table entirely, it's exactly what they want. The only thing these people want more than a government they can capture is a government so small they can replace it entirely.
But theres a balance to be struck there — keep the government too small and weak and it is susceptible to corruptive forces from domestic and foreign enemies alike.
So imho it isn’t enough to simply keep government ‘small’ —it is also important to keep it the size proportionate to other potential threats.
It’s also important to keep in mind that size is but one dimension and is only being used as a proxy for power which is the ultimate factor that matters — a government of one person with control of WMDs can be much more of a threat than a large government without WMDs.
Small government goes against the original and deepest Capitalist thinkers, who all pushed that strong government oversight was a REQUIRED part of Capitalism to keep it healthy and in balance.
That's a solution. Another would be to enshrine in law independent watchdog agencies whose goal is to win trophies for rooting out corruption, reducing waste, preventing or breaking up harmful monopolies, etc.
How valuable are those trophies compared to bribes, or the tacit bribes of cushy "consultancy" roles? How do you stop lobbyists from gutting those regulators - what use is a fiercely independent regulator that has no resources?
Getting money out of politics is the hardest part.
I am not sure how the US will find the political will short of getting burned badly enough for partisans to align on reform. How bad does it have to get?
That's no solution, since once someone has corrupted said small government, the obvious next step is to use the influence to increase its size and power.
Capitalism by it's design, and as outlined by it's original and deepest thought leaders requires strong and decisive government oversight to keep it in check and keep it healthy. Being against strong government oversight is to be against a working, Capitalist system and against traditional Capitalist thought.
Strong and decisive don't mean huge expenditures and picking winners. Our government does so much more than governing. Capitalism needs a government that sets and enforces rules in the face of market failures. It doesn't mean a government that redistributes trillions of dollars.
There's more than one type of government that can resist corruption, since much that drives corruption is extra-governmental (populace education level, media environment, trust in institutions, wealth equality, etc).
So it's unsurprising there are different optimal anti-corruption government types for different combinations of those qualities.
Yes. But, I don’t think a single one of those “least corrupt” top contenders could be described as:
> The solution is really to keep the scope of government small so that any corruption isn't detrimental to the populace, and they can handle it in the next election.
Which was kind of my point. In reality, the least corruptible types of governments tend to be ones libertarian-skewing Americans would crassly describe as socialist.
Singapore is strange place - aside from being a city-state. You'll get sent to the gulags for being in possession of a joint, but prostitution is legal. I know a guy who once got in a bar fight there, and he immediately packed up and went to the airport.
I wouldn't exactly call it lightweight government.
The graph here can get a bit wonky. And Switzerland is definitely the closest example of “limited government” working, I’d agree. But both of those countries, e.g., have universal healthcare. Switzerland through a more strict version of something like the ACA. Singapore, state-funded. Switzerland has compulsory military service, higher taxes, more gun regulations, etc. than the U.S. I think the U.S. beats these two on having a more conventionally “limited government” design.
I don't entirely disagree, but also note that the extreme wealth of both these guys is at least partly a result of state spending not pure private market forces.
Oracle has always had a huge presence in government. Large companies too, but Federal use has really helped keep them afloat as open source and competing products that are far cheaper have eaten their lunch.
For Musk the case is even more extreme. Tesla's early growth was bankrolled by EV credits and carbon offsets, which were state programs, and SpaceX is a result of both Federal funding and direct R&D transfer from NASA to SpaceX. The latter was mostly uncompensated. NASA just handed over decades of publicly funded R&D.
These two would probably be rich without the state, but would they be this rich?
The same was true back in the original Gilded Age. The "robber barons" were built by railroad and other infrastructure subsidies.
However I do agree that private wealth beyond a certain point begins to pose a risk to democracy and the rule of law. It's a major weakness in libertarian schemes that call for a "separation of economy and state." That's a much, much harder wall to maintain than separation of church and state. Enough money can buy politicians and elections.
As much as I don’t like Musk and think Tesla is overvalued meme stock and the cars suck compared to other EVs (I have driven a lot of EVs during the year that we went without a car on purpose - long story), SpaceX did something that the government couldn’t do - have a lot of failures before it had a success. Politics wouldn’t let it happen.
Let’s remember: Musk bought Tesla. He was already ridiculously wealthy in order to get himself into this position of basically robbing the U.S. government.
Of course. That was also my point, as I think it is yours. There is an event horizon after which an individual can corrupt government and really accelerate their wealth accumulation even faster.
Isn’t the cause that people just happened to elect someone who doesn’t care and is corrupt? Are you implying money decided the election? How do you reconcile this with the fact that trump was outspent?
Sorry what regulation in particular are you thinking about here? There’s no logical anti-trust angle I can think of.
I mean of course I think the outcome here is bad, but I’m struggling to think of a kind of regulation that could have prevented it that isn’t completely insane.
Edit: Listen everyone, it sucks, but there's no "one weird trick" where you can have a congress, judiciary, and executive branch dominated by Republicans, that then governs like Democrats. This isn't a "regulation" problem. It's a "roughly half the country wanted this" problem. Adding more regulations is not going to suddenly make the FTC act right; we have thousands of regulations already on the books and if they wanted to do something, they could.
Your prior seems to be that the Trump administration is operating in good faith and that they would naturally be predisposed to allow the merger, being free market republicans and all.
That's not the accusation at hand. The contention is that the Trump administration is threatening to block the merger (corruptly, in opposition to their republican proclivities) unless the news arm of the merged company is operated in a partisan way.
And the evidence for that is that Ellison walked in, threw out CBS News's pre-existing leadership, and brought in a reasonably-well-known-but-still-not-celebrity-enough-to-be-independent partisan republican voice to run it. And now that she's there, she's clearly operating the news room in a partisan way.
In July 2025, the Ellisons bought CBS (Paramount) through Skydance. This was approved by Trump's FTC.
The FTC is responsible for enforcing regulations that would prevent mergers that negatively impact the quality of services and innovation. They aren't doing their job.
Agreed. Let's also not forget that a large part of the reason that the Skydance/Paramount merger likely went through in the first place was because Paramount paid off Trump to the tune of 16 million USD by settling a lawsuit in which he alleged deliberate deception during his Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes.
The FTC has not done its job since after the Microsoft consent decree and economists have claimed that up is down and somehow preventing market monopolies is bad for the economy.
What existing regulation are you accusing the FTC of not enforcing? Is it illegal for a rich person to buy a company? It's not like he's cornering TV news or something. He's a minority player by any measurement (revenue, viewers, etc..).
Not a fan of Trump, Ellison, or obviously this expose being buried, but I am just trying to understand what the FTC did wrong.
> The FTC is responsible for enforcing regulations that would prevent mergers that negatively impact the quality of services and innovation.
I don't think this is the best summary of either the FTC's mandate from congress nor the antitrust laws in the US.
But whatever, it just seems like what you want is not more regulation (Trump is adding lots of regulation on solar and wind, that's good right?), but different regulators.
It sucks, but there's no "one weird trick" where you can have a congress, judiciary, and executive branch dominated by Republicans, that then makes them governs like Democrats. This isn't a "regulation" problem. It's a "roughly half the country wanted this" problem.
> I don't think this is the best summary of either the FTC's mandate from congress nor the antitrust laws in the US.
Okay well I basically copy/pasted from ftc.gov:
The FTC’s Bureau of Competition enforces the nation's antitrust laws, which form the foundation of our free market economy. The antitrust laws promote the interests of consumers; they support unfettered markets and result in lower prices and more choices.
The Bureau of Competition is committed to preventing mergers and acquisitions that are likely to reduce competition and lead to higher prices, lower quality goods or services, or less innovation
Were you saying the same thing in 2014 and 2015 too?
According to data from Thomson Reuters, 2015 is set to be the biggest year ever (once the planned deals close) in worldwide dealmaking, with $4.7 trillion in announced mergers and acquisitions—up 42 percent from 2014, and beating the previous record of $4.4 trillion in 2007.
The year stands out, not just for the total value of the deals but for the number of so-called mega-deals, which refers to any deal that exceeds $5 billion. Just in the last three months, notable mega-deals include AB Inbev’s acquisition of SABMiller, creating a $104 billion beverage company; Pfizer and Allergan’s announced a $160 billion merger; and the chemical companies DuPont and Dow Chemical Company’s plans to unite as a $130 billion company. Thomson Reuters counted 137 mega-deals last year, which accounted for 52 percent of the year’s overall M&A value.
I have a feeling this will get DMCA-ed off of Internet Archive in an attempt to suppress it. Here's the infohash of the archive.org torrent download for future reference, this should allow the file to be retrieved in any torrent client as long as someone in the world is seeding it still.
Qbittorrent, Transmission etc. The Transmission daemon can be installed headless with negligible system load on a vast number of devices, from Raspberry Pi-like and smaller SBCs to Linux/BSD NASes, then operated from remote through the web interface or a phone app.
Then you probably don't want a free service that costs money to run where they can only make money by converting most users to paid or monetizing your information in a country where you are unlikely to have an attorney whilst operating what amounts to a honeypot for every government on earth.
For desktop use from within Plasma/KDE I'm happy with Ktorrent. Feels very intuitive, and has no problem saturating a 1GB/s pipe, and doesn't slow the system down, while doing so.
(At least not mine, which are old and almost obsolete but have enough RAM)
Otherwise follow the links from there to qBitTorrent, or its mentions from other commenters here. Am not fond of transmission at all. Feels slow and sluggish in comparison.
The timing of this might lead one to believe Paramount’s hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers Discovery is a consideration in their editorial decisions. They and their competitor (Netflix) need regulatory approval for such a merger and the administration has already inserted itself into the deal.
Hard to imagine that's the a core part of it, and pretty naturally in America the clear ongoing and unprecedented (in modern times anyway) corruption on that front is the focus. But it probably doesn't hurt that she appears to just be a really big fan of that particular dictator and torture prison specifically. Earlier this year her site "the Free Press" was all over them [0]:
>"The hottest campaign stop is this Salvadoran supermax: House Republican Riley Moore went to the super maximum security prison in El Salvador to take some photos in front of the inmates. “I just toured the CECOT prison in El Salvador,” he writes, with pictures of him giving a thumbs-up, shirtless inmates standing at attention behind him. Moore gave a double thumbs-up in front of the men, densely packed in their cold metal bunk. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem took the same tour recently, posting a fun video in front of caged, tatted men."
>"After Bukele left the White House, he thirstily tweeted, “I miss you already, President T.” Trump returned the favor, learning to say MAGA in Spanish: “¡America grande, otra vez!”"
Etc. And she's been very positive on Bukele personally as well. Might be multiple reasons she'd gleefully want to spike such a story even if the commands of her owners take precedent.
Edit: whew, this one sure triggered the technofeudalists and Baristans! From 3 to -3 for her own publication's and her statements.
I'm not sure how you can read that and think it is speaking favorably about the prison.
Here are some parts you left out:
> The El Salvador supermax prison is becoming the new Ohio Diner. It’s the new Iowa State Fair. It’s the new Jeffrey Epstein jet: It’s where every political leader needs to visit, the place to see and be seen if you’re ambitious and in politics today.
> They agreed that there was nothing to be done about the mistakenly deported Maryland man, now in Salvadoran custody. Two leaders of two great countries simply cannot find that one random wrongly deported man, and everyone should move along (I’m assuming that means he’s dead, right?).
Every time I see this video, I feel a strange tenderness for the new generations watching it.
They do not really understand how bad Oracle used to be. This is us, old combat veterans, sitting by the fire, describing unspeakable battles to the youth...knowing full well that they think we are exaggerating. :-)
And the most disturbing part is the realization that the Frankenstein monster itself, Larry Ellison, is still out there. Still roaming free. Still very much alive... An eternal, terrifying, lawnmower wielding zombie of enterprise software and government corrupting rent extraction.
We shouldn’t anthropomorphize any billionaires. They’re not even people at that point, just destructive aliens who undemocratically ruin everyone’s good time.
We need confiscatory taxation for a better future.
It's kind of saying we should only focus on the #1 mass-murdering dictator in the world, so while many of them are actively slaying people, lets just focus on #1 for now.
No, we can have many targets. People who hoard money for the benefit of themselves with the detriment of society and the population at large are all "destructive aliens who undemocratically ruin everyone’s good time" to borrow the words of parent commentator. If just 10% were slightly less evil and egoistic, it would lead to huge improvements, and only a slight reduction to their own lifestyles. That they don't, is a stain on the legacy of humanity.
Fascinating how this got leaked. A TV station in Canada accidentally ran the original episode version, implying that this was pulled super late and the episode was completely in the can.
It was completely finished. There's an article out today that says the main reporter on the story complained that the censor Bari Weiss had not bothered to appear at the previous five earlier screenings and reviews by the editorial team.
Probably as accidental as the people doing the censorship of the latest Epstein files released today that had "accidents" about how they censured stuff.
It doesn't feel like it's suppressing the news. Can you give examples of suppression? I'd say hacker news is very open to contrary ideas and disagreements.
If it's political, there's a good chance it gets flagged. The problem is pretty much everything is political when you have a government that sticks it's grubby little fingers where it shouldn't.
I prefer HN for higher quality discussions. When I say posts which are pure political flame wars I (and many others) flag the post. Reddit is full of low information discussions. There's no need to also duplicate those posts here.
Everything is not political, and this statement itself is flamebait. Take a look at posts on the current homepage. Most are pure tech with no politics. Some are political with a tech angle but not flame wars.
Politics is defined as the way a system of multiple agents (typically humans) with conflicting goals, resolves to one outcome. That's pretty much everything. Almost all of economics, for example, is politics. API design is politics. UI design is politics. Putting /active behind a footer link is politics. Everything any government does is politics (or the government wouldn't have to do it). Every dispute is politics. There are a few things that are not politics, such as the colour of the sky, but almost everything humans make involves politics. The number of spokes in a wheel is politics, since the manufacturer wants as few as they can get away with. All news relates to politics.
Have you actually ever browsed the secret “active” page where you can see what people are actually voting for without the mods putting their thumbs on the scale? It’s constantly filled with dead posts because someone said something that was vaguely unflattering towards Israel, venture capital, capitalism in general, the United States or Apple. Literally happens dozens of times every single day.
It's hardly secret—it's on the /lists page which is referenced in the footer of every page on HN.
It simply isn't the frontpage, for reasons that ought to be obvious to anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. How you guys turn this into sinister suppression continues to escape me.
Edit: perhaps this will help:
HN is designed to downweight sensational-indignant stories, internet dramas, and riler-uppers, for the obvious reason that if we didn't, then they would dominate HN's frontpage like they dominate the rest of the internet. Anyone who spends time here (or has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) knows that this is not what the site is for. The vast majority of HN readers like HN for just this reason. It is not some arbitrary switch that we could just flip, if only we would stop being censoriously sinister. It's essential to the operation of the site.
It's on display in the bottom of a locked homepage footer stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
Footers are very rarely useful and I don't know anyone who habitually reads them. They usually contain useless but technically required legal information. Meanwhile the lists you actually want people to use are in the header.
The level of discrepancy between the rules as they are written and how things work in reality is miles apart. Every day.
Edit: since I can’t reply because my account was throttled for “posting too past” with a whopping 5 comments in the last 24 hours. Allow me to paste it here…
It would probably help if I were to bring a bit more specificity to my accusations here so we aren’t just talking about an abstract concept.
I’m making the claim:
1. The active page (what people are actually engaging with) and the front page (mods choice) regularly are regularly out of sync not just in general but in very specific and consistent ways.
2. There is a small group of people who intentionally use the flagging functionality in ways that have absolutely zero to do with the rules as they are written. People are incredibly open about this on a regular basis.
3. We are left with a de facto situation where that same small group are able to effectively censor what the rest of the community is allowed to talk about.
4. The moderation team seems to operate on the idea that everyone is just acting in good faith despite evidence to the contrary.
5. When the discrepancies between the rules as they are written and how things work in reality occur they are very rarely corrected by the moderation team and I don’t know what other conclusion to draw other than you seem to think that things are going great as they are and there’s no need to change anything.
6. You say the active page isn’t a secret but people are always saying they had no idea it existed. Surely you have some actual hard analytics numbers to show what percentage of logged in users visit the active page? I presume it’s in the single digits percentage wise but I’m open to being told otherwise.
The closest I can give to an account of "how things work in reality" is the 80,000+ moderation comments I've posted over the last 10+ years: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang&type=comment&dateRange.... You're free to decide it's all lies, of course, but if you (or anyone) randomly scroll back through that feed, I doubt you'll find much that's miles apart from the rules as they are written. In fact I'd be surprised if you found anything that could be fairly be described that way, because trying to apply the rules as they are written is a matter of integrity for us. If it weren't, we'd change the rules until it were.
I had to rely inline above because of some questionable circumstances but not here to debate that part at all.
But on the topic of this active page I do find it rather poetic that in this exact thread we have people asking what is this page they’ve never heard of.
When I call it secret, I don’t mean it’s necessarily a coverup or something I mean that nobody seems to know that it exists or that the front page doesn’t actually represent what people vote for.
You might want to use a more accurate word like 'obscure' in that case.
At this point I'm not sure what you're accusing us of, other than HN not being a different kind of site. The mandate of this place is clear (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and it simply isn't primarily to feature political/sensational/outrage stories. That's the root issue. The mechanics of voting, flagging, etc., are in service of that.
From my perspective, you're arguing for a health food store to devote its shelf space to chocolates and pastries. Or, if you prefer the other way round, for a confectionery to devote itself to turnips.
I don’t think that actually engages with literally any of the points I’ve made but sure, I wasn’t expecting anything else. Like I said earlier it seems from where you’re sitting everything is going great and there’s nothing to answer for.
I was hoping however you could at least shine some light on the active page question… what percentage of users actually visit in on any given day? We can play semantic games about secret vs obscure but it’s not a debate about semantics.
If you knew how bad HN regularly makes me feel, you would be attributing very different sentiments than those. The point isn't that HN is perfect or even very good. It's that your objections are ignoring what the site is for. Improving the site means making it better fulfill its mandate, but you're not arguing from that place at all, and in fact are (implicitly) arguing that we rip out that mandate and replace it with a different one.
I haven't looked up the number of users who visit the /active page because I don't accept the premise of your question. Of course fewer users look at it than the frontpage; otherwise it would be the frontpage. This is just another variation of the mandate argument.
I’m not here to try and make you feel bad but if this place doesn’t work for you anymore I hope you’re able to do something about that.
I’m going to wrap this up here. You unfortunately responded in exactly the way I’d expected to just hand wave away everything, find reasons to not respond to any of the points and then seemed to misrepresent what I was even asking for.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.
Life is hard enough already and I’m not looking to make it worse for you. I hope you have a nice holiday season and good luck out there.
You're not making me feel bad! I just mentioned that HN regularly makes me feel bad as a way of letting you know that I definitely don't think this place is perfect.
I'm not disinterested in answering your questions—that's why I've been replying repeatedly! Nor am I interested in making hand-wavey responses; that would be a waste of time. We must be working with different assumptions, though, because I feel like I'm answering your questions and you feel like I'm not.
If you want to try again, I'd be happy to, but maybe we could take a different approach? I would like to know what principle you care about here. What principle are we failing to abide by, that you think we ought to?
People in the US now have to use VPN’s to get access to domestic news from a foreign country. I think it’s fair to say that the wheels have come off democracy and things are badly broken.
Things are bad, but the worst part isn’t hidden/missing principled reporting, it’s that a significant number of people don’t care to attend to it where it exists, domestically or internationally. And a majority of US voters cast their ballot for this outcome, so in a sense it’s democracy working as intended, however horrifying any problems or outcomes.
Plurality of voters, narrowly, but still it's enough.
How many just vote Republican without thought as they have always done, how many are in the fox news cult? So many people just thought they didn't want a female president or Trump would lower inflation. It's hard for me to accept that Trump represents America, but he represents enough of it.
Just wish it was distributed instead of such a US-centric organization. For survival, I hope they're thinking about how to make it more decentralized, because eventually the arm of the law is gonna come after them (again), and probably with less mercy this time.
Still a proud supporter of archive.org for many, many years. Their work is invaluable and I hope it stays around forever.
Too bad the only people that will watch this are people who already understand the terror of what is happening. It might have helped a little if it had aired. My MAGA dad still watches 60 Minutes (no idea why, habit?) This might have penetrated his TDS-addled skull if it had aired. But the takeover of CBS by Trump and Ellison (and his 1980's-college-villain son) with Weiss is complete, and vile.
If you want to break this you have to know the person and ask key questions afterwards. Their distortion field is held together by beliefs and principles, not empirical analysis.
For instance, for my father, the question "how is this treating people responsibly? How can we expect the behavior of those guards to be held accountable?" would pierce this ... but really you have to know how the person doing motivated reasoning thinks.
His Dad will be smart enough to know these questions are trying to set him up. Maybe try having a real conversation and not trying to change his mind. After all, there is a good chance you will be that Dad in the future (no matter how hard you tell yourself you won't be). Tell me how I now.
I'm almost 50. I won't be. I have friends who are becoming grandparents now, still no interest.
I have half a century of talking with my father. If you think this is my first strategy as opposed to one that took years of therapy and personal struggle, I dunno what to tell you.
There's a wide body of social and psychological research on this stuff including multiple university departments (communication, psychology, sociology, management, teaching, etc) because "simply talking to people" doesn't actually work.
Thanks kristopolous. We have a very similar story (I'm a few years older). I think I'm at the "I've given up point" because his glee at others' suffering is just too painful to even address. So: he get's hellos at holidays and that's it.
People have discovered being an open sewer spewing hate and prejudice gets likes, views, reposts and advertisers
It's also a very easy job. You don't need to do journalism, be diligent about citations and accuracy, use robust analysis or careful language.
You don't even need a script. Just hop on a hot mic, blame an oppressed scapegoat and see money roll in.
The content is evergreen, trivial to create and performs great!
Just like you don't have to be a doctor to swindle people with phony medicine or a psychology degree to hustle people as a psychic.
The problem is we've taking the smooth talking performative palliatives of these slick mountebanks and christened their confidence games as sacred free speech instead of the hatemonger hustle it is.
And unfortunately, like Albania’s Nationwide Ponzi scam of the 1990s, these crimes have become institutionalized power and their bullshit is bringing the country down with them.
Other than personal gain, what ought be the consequences of arsonists shouting "fire" on the crowded Internet?
It's a very prevalent form of cynicism, which I find ironic because in high school every student learned to write persuasive essays, but "adults" like to tell each other not to change people's minds. It's a subtle meta-rhetorical move used to undermine rationalism and formal education.
I debated asking, but I talk to him only a few times a year and we both work really hard to avoid politics. I realize it is my responsibility if I want to see change, but I just lack the skills.
I’ve read lots of books on psychotherapy, and the verdict is a hard disagree on that. The idea of positive relationships to parents is a toxic one, and leads to more transgenerational suffering. It’s good to process the past sufficiently to hold no grudge, but it’s still necessary for mental hygiene to set and enforce boundaries. The most important element of this is grief. Like other posters replied, it is not necessary nor healthy to suppress and wait with anger and grief processing till after their death, and plenty of opportunity to work through unfinished business with them ever after their passing (eg with representatives in constellations work).
Unless a Parent/Child was physically or mentally abused (by clinical standards) then I confident that stopping interacting with them over politics alone is foolish.
Maybe, but also maybe politics can be a reflection of a person’s actions in a broader sense, for which it is perfectly reasonable to disengage from them when those actions have a negative impact.
Yeah, I don’t see why one should wait until after the abuse occurs (“by clinical standards”, above commenter says) to begin defending oneself. As you say, politics isn’t divorced from the rest of their psyche.
It’s predictable that a person who e.g. yells slurs and threatens violence against (whoever they perceive as) gay people on TV is going to progress to actual violence against the gay people in their life, more often than not.
This parental situation is sadly repeated endlessly in the US. My dad is a wealthy retired tech executive whose mind was seemingly taken over by Fox News. He's kind of now in an anti democratic cult and he gets angry if he is even exposed to other news sources.
I will feel sad when he passes and I already feel the loss of being able to talk to him about anything. My brother says the same thing. He doesn't even talk to his grandkids much. I think this is sadly common.
Even calling it "deportation" is far too charitable towards what they've done. Deportation involves sending them back to their home countries or, if that's unsafe, to another country. These people were rendered to a prison where they're meant to spend the rest of their lives, without any of the due process even a foreigner who had committed a crime would normally be accorded in the United States under our constitution.
> These people were rendered to a prison where they're meant to spend the rest of their lives
These men were never intended to spend the rest of their lives at CECOT, nor did they. All were released in July 2025 to their home country of Venezuela, and they were in El Salvador for a total of 125 days.
> These men were never intended to spend the rest of their lives at CECOT
Kristi Noem indicated publicly that they should stay there "the rest of their lives."
> nor did they. All were released in July 2025 to their home country of Venezuela, and they were in El Salvador for a total of 125 days.
No kidding. Things did not play out that way because the intention was just for a few months of torture for those people before they'd eventually be deported to Venezuela anyway, it was because of the legal and political uproar over what had been done.
That seems like the least disgraceful part of the whole thing.
Wherever they go, the U.S. taxpayers are stuck footing the bill for their prison stay, food, medical treatment, etc., but why would it need to be in the United States? They have no claim to stay there.
The disgraceful part is sending illegal immigrants without criminal history to maximum-security prisons, sending asylum seekers to prison, or sending anybody to prisons that torture the inmates.
Maybe not - ordinary people have been known to sabotage fascist regimes by making "mistakes". There's also the issue that incompetent people may be promoted well beyond their abilities due to them being "loyal".
Funny how this is timed with the Susie Wiles “I’m an insider trying to do good” nonsense in vanity fair. That coont has been instrumental in so much bad stuff since Reagan…
Looks to me like it’s all damage control/pressure valve release stuff designed to distract from any real change. Because SURELY we will get some real change finally, right?? /s
I'm reminded of the Letter on Justice and Open Debate[1] that Bari Weiss signed only a few years ago, now she's spiking stories like this one on CECOT for showing the current administration in a negative light.
I also wonder if this story will get the type of leeway to stay on HN to collect the 200+ upvotes and 300+ comments of that previous example or if it will be flagged off the front page within minutes like so many other similar stories.
EDIT: No idea how long this post actually lasted, but checking in an hour later to see this has been flagged completely off the first 10 pages of HN despite getting close to that 200 point total.
Weiss got her start screaming about how various college professors should be fired. There has never once been a moment in her career where she seriously cared about open debate.
Literally not a journalist. She went from the opinion pages to writing opinion on substack. And for "some reason" was put in charge of a news organization.
She has worked as a staff editor in newsrooms, most notably at Tablet. It’s not accurate to say her career has solely been in the opinion section.
Also, it’s not unheard of for people working on the op-ed side of the house to become editors in chief. Most notable example I can think of would be Katharine Viner at the Guardian. And in the reverse, James Bennet went from being editor in chief at the Atlantic to running the op-ed page at the NYT.
Her upward trajectory has been facilitated mainly through pleasing select silicon valley billionaires by echoing their views back to them in her ironically named The Free Press outlet, which they also helped found.
This really is the future of journalism. Just make content that a few deranged billionaires like and rise up and up and up and up. CBS doesn't have to care whether ordinary people like it. What matters is the asshole with billions of dollars.
She is more or less an Israeli propaganda agent. She was hired at CBS because, after purchasing CBS from Zionist Shari Redstone, Zionist Larry Ellison and his son needed a reliable Zionist editor in chief. Weiss’ primary qualifications are her extremely pro Israeli career path.
Larry Ellison needed a woman like Weiss because he’s invested in Israel’s success. He’s both a close personal friend of Netanyahu and the number one private donor to the IDF. Netanyahu has declared US public perception of Israel as the 8th front of their war, and Ellison (with the help of Trump) is doing his part stateside.
Why we have so many powerful “Americans” exercising their power on behalf of a foreign country is the real discussion here.
Hundreds of comments and the only one speaking the truth is downvoted. Bari Weiss is unqualified and the only reason she was put into this position is to be a useful idiot for Israel.
You can't understand technology without understanding the people behind it. I always wonder about all these non-bot people who support her: is it that they're in on the grift and everyone understands that she's just there as a wink-wink-totaly-not state censor, or do they genuinely fall for her schtick? Is there something else? I never quite get it.
A once-reasonable friend of mine genuinely thinks RJK is just some dude who tries his best, and doesn't consider him a crazy anti-vaxxer. Crazy
>is it that they're in on the grift and everyone understands that she's just there as a wink-wink-totaly-not state censor, or do they genuinely fall for her schtick?
It's both. That's one of the things that's difficult to suss out and therefore have a plan to engage. There's plausible deniability on both ends of that spectrum. Even in the high positions in the administration, there's a smattering of True Believers in amongst the grifters.
> just some dude who tries his best, and doesn't consider him a crazy anti-vaxxer
As much as it would be comforting for all dudes who’re trying their best to pretend otherwise, the two are not mutually exclusive. (No opinion on whether RFK Jr is in the intersection—I’m not in the US and couldn’t affect his actions if I tried.)
The signatories have spent years attacking free expression. A particularly acute case is when it comes to things like advocating for the end of israeli occupation in palestine, but there are many others. Whining about BLM is a particularly common approach for Thomas Chatterton Williams.
The signatories have generally continued to complain about censoriousness from the left even while the right wing is detaining people for their speech, insisting that media personalities be fired for their speech, insisting that people (including naturalized citizens) be deported for their speech, cancelling grants because they are too "woke", and straight up passing laws banning the teaching of certain topics in secondary and postsecondary school.
Weiss herself is a participant with UATX, a expressly right wing university that has fired people for not being sufficiently critical of DEI efforts.
Weiss also has a long history of efforts to stifle the public debate that the signatories claim to support. The first thing that got her notoriety was an effort to get various professors at Columbia fired for their speech.
I think you're really off base. A quick search about what Williams has said about censorship on the right seems to undermine your one non-weiss example [1]. There were more than a hundred signatories from across a fairly wide political spectrum (and the letter itself was anti-Trump). The handful of signatories that I follow have squarely denounced right wing censoriousness - I'm open to hearing that I'm seeing a non-representative sample, but you didn't provide any useful info on that front.
Notice how this article frames the entire thing as caused by the left and happily ignores the fact that what is happening under Trump is not new. Were the excesses of the left the cause of the Stop Woke Act in Florida? The right has been screaming about firing professors since God and Man at Yale was published. In my opinion, this is not anything resembling a serious accounting of the threats to speech from the right.
And you can compare this article against the entire book that he published about the left's flaws this year. On one hand we've got an article critical of the right that finds the need to smuggle criticisms of the left in constantly and on the other hand we have a complete manuscript. You tell me where Williams is focusing his attention.
In terms of the actual topic, I would be shocked if Williams approved of spiking the CECOT 60 mins story, if it is in fact politically motivated as many suspect. And I'm not particularly a "fan" of Williams or anything, though I've heard him on a couple of podcasts.
But you're also making this point about all signatories being hypocrites because you seemingly have a big bone to pick with the amount of blame Thomas Chatterton Williams portions to each side.
So, can we see him writing about how this was a bad thing?
Williams is a public intellectual. What goes on in his mind is of much less importance to public discourse than what he writes.
Let me be clear. I believe that Williams is a hypocrite and I believe that the large majority of the signatories on the harpers letter are hypocrites. I mention him specifically because he was one of the people who actually wrote a lot of its text rather than just signing it, which makes him of particular interest for this discussion.
> The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the men sent to El Salvador were overwhelmingly violent criminals; Pro Publica reported that the administration knew at least 197 of the men had not been convicted of crimes in the United States, and six had been convicted of violent offenses.
This is an interesting question because it goes to show you just how hard it is to know how or why the government is using its power to deprive people of life, liberty, or property.
I wonder if we could set up a system where the government has an opportunity to share its evidence and the public gets an opportunity to scrutinize it on a case-by-case basis so they can fully understand whether their government is acting appropriately.
does it matter? they were Venezuelans and they were sent to El Salvador. I know that some folks just lump all Latinos into one bucket but Venezuela and El Salvador are, in fact, not the same country.
Hmm maybe walk us through this. If they were convicted of crimes in other countries, is the idea here that they have escaped their punishment? Like thats a significant concern? Seems like a lot of prison breaks!
Or is it that perhaps they were convicted but not punished enough (for us), so we have to correct that?
Or something else? If they were convicted of a crime in another country, it suggests that justice has been doled out already, right?
Watch the video or read this report from Human Rights Watch [1].
> The Trump administration claimed that the majority of Venezuelans sent to CECOT were members of the Venezuelan organized crime group Tren de Aragua.
> Only [3.1% of the 226/252 Venezuelan prisoners in CECOT] had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense.
> Human Rights Watch reviewed documents in 58 of the 130 documented cases of people held in CECOT, and all indicated that they did not have criminal records in Venezuela or other countries in Latin America.
CECOT was already found to violate the UN’s minimum treatment of prisoners rights (aka “The Nelson Mandela Rules”) [2] by a report of the US.
Trump’s administration blatantly violates human rights.
Finally, here is a report investigating why the US can use the El Salavador prison [3].
> It has been clear from the beginning what Trump wants from El Salvador: an ally who would accept, and even imprison, deportees. Less clear has been what Bukele might want from the United States. In striking the deal with the Salvadoran president, Trump has effectively undercut the Vulcan investigation and shielded Bukele from further scrutiny, current and former U.S. officials said.
This, and Larry Ellison buying all news outlets in America. Things should be happening quickly enough so that it's obvious where this is all going, right?
Whoever writes the next "Inglorious Basterds" should have a lot of fun parodying Larry...
Corruption is not merely something someone in power enacts in their choices; it is a rot that eats out the society from the inside.
As individuals realize that nakedly appeasing the autocrat wins favor, they voluntarily corrupt themselves and others in hopes of advantage.
More and more of the society enters the grip of this force and weakens until the truly valuable things—its resources, minds, institutions—are annihilated, stolen, and displaced by a hierarchy of criminals or warlords. This is how nations sink. It’s the story of many in Africa, South America, Russia—and now it is our own.
Corruption is not just the immoral acts of an elite few; it is a parasite that hollows out society from within.
When the mainstream realizes that sycophancy toward the autocrat is rewarded, some willingly sacrifice their principles for short-term benefits, burrowing into the system like worms in an apple.
Yet, parasites cannot survive without a compliant host. To kill the infestation, we must cut off the food source: our passiveness. This begins with everyday refusals—denying the petty bribe, rejecting the convenient lie, and defending the honest colleague. By maintaining high ethical standards in our own spheres of influence, we starve the corrupt hierarchy of the dead matter it needs to grow.
We must also make the terrain uninhabitable for them. These organisms thrive in the dark, protected by silence. Therefore, we must actively expose them: documenting abuses, funding media samaritans, and organizing locally to demand transparency. When integrity becomes the standard again, the host becomes hostile to the parasite, isolating the invaders rather than letting them multiply.
Without this resistance however, the society weakens until its greatest assets—its resources, minds, and institutions—are cannibalized by a regime of criminals. This is how nations collapse. We have seen this story in Africa, South America, and Russia. This plague is now upon us. But history is not destiny. We possess the power to stop it. We only need the will to use it.
> As individuals realize that nakedly appeasing the autocrat wins favor, they voluntarily corrupt themselves and others in hopes of advantage.
> displaced by a hierarchy of criminals or warlords
The problem is that initially it all looks straightforward and easy. Revealing even, because finally solution is not that complicated anymore. Only afterwards things turn unpredictable and violent, but then it's already irreversible.
- deport or jail you without due process
- ignore the law in service of its own ends
- punish its enemies, pardon its allies
- ignore the constitution
- install loyalists in centers of power, oust dissenters
- suppress media which challenges its hold on power
- commit crimes
- enrich its friends
- declare its "plenary authority" to do the above
Brother, you are looking for the deep state under every rock and it is out in the sunshine, smiling at you.
You’re talking about Trump who is publicly demanding certain people be prosecuted, so point 1 is wildly invalid.
Point 2 is highly debatable, and the mass cruelty of the current administration is considered by many to be worse than what it’s replacing. It’s certainly a stretch to call that corruption.
Point 3: again, with Trump you’re talking about a 79 year old man who can’t stay awake through a recorded meeting.
Point 4: there’s nothing, nothing in 21st or 20th century U.S. presidential politics compared to the vast sums of money being directed into Trump’s family pockets.
They would start to pardon criminals that conducted acts they like and fire the people that investigated those crimes.
They would try to bring everybody to jail that oppose or upset them or have opposed them.
They win when challengers become too rare because others are afraid of the consequences to oppose.
What the Trump administration did regarding the Capitol storming on January 6th tells you everything you need to know. They strive for power and nothing else.
I believe you're trying to say the real oppressors were liberals and ideas like people having civil rights that were enforced were somehow oppressing others. Look at what Republicans are doing in reality right now that they're in charge in the us, they're doing all the things that you're worried about.
> As individuals realize that nakedly appeasing the autocrat wins favor, they voluntarily corrupt themselves and others in hopes of advantage.
When I pointed out that this is the work culture in most American corporations, I was told that is a feature, not a bug, because US government and most big tech at the time preached values in line with average white middle-class Californian. Now that this is no longer the case, the mindset of appeasing the leader is suddenly a problem.
The whole situation was preventable, but everyone was too high on ZIRP to notice. We could've used the good times to establish good cultural values, but we didn't. Freedom of speech and other foundations of democracy were already rotting long ago but nobody cared. We could've used the good times to allow better dialogue between different political fractions, but we didn't. At some point democrats honestly believed they would simply never lose power again, making it seem pointless to talk to republicans. Now that the money dried out, people suddenly start asking questions and talking about "muh big values".
> When I pointed out that this is the work culture in most American corporations, I was told that is a feature, not a bug, because US government and most big tech at the time preached values in line with average white middle-class Californian.
It is a bit analogous to many of us worrying about Google and others getting so much power. The arguments were quickly dismissed with: "But these folks are responsible, don't be paranoid". The problem with this kind of thinking is, once the power balance changes, you find yourself in a situation you'd never put yourself now. You cannot make Google unlearn what they know about you. You cannot unsend the photos you privately shared on Messenger and force Meta to untrain their facial recognition models. Now all these things you considered a convenience given to you for free can be used against you, and the extend and direction of the abuse is correlated with who is in power.
I’m curious which specific problematic values do you think were being adhered to and preached in the past, that was comparable to what’s happening in CECOT, and wasn’t opposed?
It's not that it's comparable, but it's rather direct evolution of. US social contract has a huge grey area where you can get royally screwed even though you've done nothing illegal. For example, in most places in the US employees can be fired for expressing political opinions, and most people have their entire lifehoods tied to their employers. As in, saying "I think there are two genders"* was literally a fireable offense in many companies, and you'd be left without income, without medical insurance. So naturally there were a lot of topics that people simply chose not to talk about, effectively voiding freedom of speech unless you're so rich you don't need a job.
This issue was not addressed when democrats were in power. They could've passed laws that protect freedom of speech, but they chose not to, because it allowed them to get rid of problematic republicans.
Now that the machine has turned against democrats and you're not allowed to talk about certain topics important to democrats like climate change or CECOT, it's somehow a big fucking problem.
* I purposefully chose a statement that is highly controversial. It would be really cool if we could have social dialogue about controversial things in order to reach a widespread social consensus, instead of having extremist opinions boil in people.
If I'm understanding your example correctly, these types of firings are possible thanks to Right-to-work laws. Which political party introduced and continues to advocate for Right-to-work? Which has generally opposed Right-to-work and has supported workers unions, which would protect workers from arbitrary firings?
I'd love to hear what others that have seen both think since I'll want to put aside some time to watch this one after all the holiday hustle and bustle are done.
I think it's a great model based on what Nick's tour showed.
stepping outside the (geo)politics, externalizing deportation to a third country has been attempted in the past as well [1], which ultimately did not succeed. this was also partly due to the ridiculous cost per deportee.
Ironically, this might end up being more widely watched now (Streisand). I’ve seen multiple people on my Facebook link to different sources hosting the video. People who never would’ve heard about the story are now watching it through the lens of Trump and CBS trying to kill the story.
I doubt it, around ten million people watch 60 minutes live every week. Maybe that many will hear about the cancellation, but I don't think most will then seek out the full segment online, even if it's easy to find.
Yeah, even those looking for the full segment will have trouble finding it if they are not tech savvy and highly motivated.
A relative in their 60s saw headlines about the cancellation and wasn’t able to find it until I sent them the archive.org link. They are relatively well informed and competent with technology but never go around digging for hard to find media.
I think people on HN tend to overestimate how closely people follow news and how hard they are willing to work to seek out alternative sources of information. I’m with some extended family over the holidays. They might have seen this segment had it aired - I believe it was airing after some football game - but now there’s no chance of that happening. I don’t judge them for it at all, but most of their news consumption is passive through TV or social media. I think a lot of people follow news that way. Life’s busy.
It kind of makes me understand a little better how the censorship regime in other countries is so effective despite it being so easy to hop on a VPN. Raising the barrier to entry even a little reduces the audience from 10,000,000 to a fraction of that, even with the censorship itself being public knowledge.
I found this quite interesting, but I don't understand how the articles claims we can see flesh.
And the author's Substack has 2 videos of Trump kissing and patting Bill Clinton's groin area (through pants). They are likely AI because I couldn't find anything online about how they're real besides the original photo. And if they were real, why is no one talking about it? He claims for one of the videos that it's real. So it kind of reduced the author's trustworthiness a bit.
It's worth noting that the founders of the Lemkin Institute have, between them, held multiple leadership roles in reputable academic departments devoted to the study of genocide, and have also both been on the ground during or shortly after genocides or other crimes against humanity as part of international teams tasked with figuring out what happened and how to hold perpetrators accountable. These are not some lightweight bloggers.
The US government, in particular Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio, are, by the logic of the legal power they themselves invoked, war criminals who rightly belong in the Hague.
The oligarchy is in full effect. This is exactly how it works, ie you scratch my back I scratch yours. Ellison kills this CBS report, he gets approval on buying WBS, or more to the point NetFlix doesn't. Same with Musk, Middle East dictators and all the others lining up for favors from Trump. Also he and his family is enriched in various ways by all the pardons he hands out.
It's nauseating, but this is where Republicans live these days. The midterms can't come soon enough.
Evidence of bad reporting at one news agency is not evidence of bad reporting at a completely different news agency. The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate bad reporting, and vague insinuations don’t count.
I believe information wants to be free, and should be free, even when I don't unanimously agree with the information, so I will start by re-sharing the torrent magnet link for the video, which I am also seeding right now, and will continue to do so until at least a full month passes with zero activity:
That said, there seems to be lots of conspiracy-adjacent talk in here. Has anyone considered the impact of the previous Trump lawsuit against CBS over the Kamala Harris edits, or the Trump-BBC lawsuit, whereby CBS made a business risk decision to avoid a story that might have some individual aspects of questionable factual accuracy that could come back to bite CBS in a courtroom, like how BBC's selective edits of Trump came back to bite them? Paramount/CBS settled Trump's lawsuit over the Kamala Harris "60 Minutes" edit for $16 million in July. BBC is getting sued for $10 billion. It's not economically irrational for an organization that has already settled lawsuits for selective presentation of political information in the past to be more worried about $10b lawsuits than $16m lawsuits.
Resisting these economic threats, these lawsuits, is something that major media needs to do, otherwise they just get compromised step by step by the wealthy oligarchs.
I tried to make the title fit the guidelines and the character limit, then changed it when the community explained why it was important for A16Z to be in the title.
Why do people think we're motivated to “suppress” negative stories about A16Z? They've been criticized forever here and we've never had a problem with it. All we care about is whether a topic makes for an interesting discussion on HN.
And I believe that the mods thinking that a16z was the least critical part of the headline such that it could be cut for space reasons is a huge concern. I'm glad that you changed your mind. But the fact that it was needed worries me and the fact that you can't understand why people were upset is worse.
There doesn't need to be an explicit effort to protect vc firms for your blind spots to shape conversation on this website away from criticizing them.
This argument amounts to an assertion that an editorial judgement about a title that differs from what you consider is most important is axiomatically evidence that we either (a) consciously make decisions to benefit VCs, or (b) unconsciously make decisions that benefit VCs. It allows no room for any other explanations, such as (c) that these actions are of no consequence to VCs, and (d) that we are just focused on our job, which is to uphold the guidelines, keep discussions curious, and avoid repetitive flamewars.
It's noticeable in this subthread that the accusations rely so much on sweeping, unfalsifiable claims and presumptions about our incentives or blind spots, and Kafkaesque logic that allows no space for simple, benign explanations.
Meanwhile, nobody seems to have examined the core assumption; that a title on an HN discussion thread has any consequence or concern for a firm like A16Z. Can anyone explain, specifically, how title changes like this on HN would benefit an outside VC firm?
To answer your literal question of "why do people think..."
For a while there was a widespread standing principle to not assume malice for actions that could be explained as a simple mistake. If only one person follows this policy, it's great. However, so many people were following this policy that it created massive incentives to disguise profit motivated malice as explainable accidents. We're in the midst of a massive backswing against this.
So, there is very little taste for patience when agents of ycombinator make mistakes that benefit a16z such as accidentally removing them from the title of a negative article, due to the billions of dollars entangling ycombinator with the reputation of a16z. This is not because it wasn't an accident- it's because any culture of patience with this will lead (and has led) to an explosion of copycat whoopsies.
> Why do people think we're motivated to “suppress” negative stories about A16Z?
I think a more charitable interpretation of this kind of argument is that the money and power that entities like A16Z have make the possibility of corruption of endeavours like HN trivial.
In light of the ease in which a wealthy entity like A16Z can exert influence over an entity like HN and the track records of various A16Z adjacent/similar people doing similar things to other HN-like entities it's very natural that people are concerned about the possibility of similar things happening here.
Like it or not as an editor at HN you're in a position of power and influence and others with far greater power would certainly leverage what you have here if suited their interests.
Avoiding even the appearance of impropriety is no easy task especially in this medium and I don't envy you in taking it on, but it's an essential part of something like HN. If the users in aggregate don't trust the moderation process or the administrators then this all sort of falls apart and the interesting discussion suffers.
> money and power that entities like A16Z have make the possibility of corruption of endeavours like HN trivial
What does this mean? Why would a VC firm like this "corrupt" HN and how would they do it? And why would we allow them to do it? What would be the motivation of us moderators to allow it?
I don't believe that you got a call from Marc Andreessen to organize a moderation approach that benefits them. Instead I believe that your blind spots created moderation decisions that limited discourse. And it worries me that the reaction is to complain about kafkaesque logic.
Headlines are important. And given that HN has a policy of moderators editing headlines it is really important that mods do a very good job not distorting headlines. This means that your evaluation of the importance of each word in the headline is really important. It concerned me that in your mind the reference to a16z was the least important material in the headline when I suspect that a typical HN participant would see it as among the most important material in the headline.
The title change was consistent with the guidelines, which it’s my job to uphold. Then I changed it when the community made its feelings known.
You’ve continued with the unfalsifiable claims while avoiding the one question that matters:
How does it materially benefit an outside VC firm if the title on an HN post about one of their portfolio companies excludes their name? What is the tangible economic impact?
This is false. Nothing was done to your account at that time, whereas rate-limiting was active on your account at least two weeks ago. Rate limiting is applied to accounts that do things like use HN for political/ideological battle, or post too many low-quality comments, both of which you've been doing. Here are some of the worst of the comments you've been posting in recent months.
The A16Z title issue was no great scandal. It was bog standard moderation, with attention and responsiveness to community sentiment and feedback. That kind of thing happens all the time.
Meanwhile, you post too many comments that break the guidelines and use HN against its intended purpose. HN is only a place people want participate because others make an effort to keep the standards up rather than dragging them down. Please do your part to make HN better not worse if you want to participate here.
We actively intervene to ensure posts that are negative towards YC companies are not affected by usual downweights, and give them extra prominence on the front page. That has happened multiple times this week, including yesterday. We've never considered that the policy should also apply to other investment firms.
> all of my most recent comments received one downvote
From what I can see, in the most recent handful of comments, there were some downvotes but not by moderators and not by the same community members (patterns of unfair downvotes get detected and dropped on HN). And I think at least one comment that was downvoted when you posted your edit has now received enough upvotes to be back in the positive.
Of the first two pages of comments (60), covering most of the past 3 days, only 9 have any downvotes and they're from different users. The "most recent" comments are mostly unaffected by downvotes; prior to this one, only two of the past 23 comments had any downvotes.
> including the one that just straightforwardly answers someone's question
That one was odd, and it seemed like an unfair downvote so we've reversed it. But that just one of only two of the past 23 comments that was downvoted.
But really, why do people keep coming up with these false/exaggerated claims to try to cast doubt on our integrity? (Also, in the case of this claim, users can tell if comments have been downvoted from the comment text's shade of grey.)
My own experience is that they've been solid throughout. Certainly better than many other options, at a time when the technical press has been generally disappointing.
I asked last year and was told 404 is the source of too many copycat low quality posts and they have a paywall. In the year since, a bunch of their original reporting has hit the front page and driven interesting discussions.
Just to clarify for anyone reading. 404 does not have a paywall. They have an account wall. Some articles require you to be signed into a free account to read.
As a noob here on HN, that's what I gathered from your previous comment:
> In the year since, a bunch of their original reporting has hit the front page
So, a year ago, before my time, 404 media was moderated in a way that seemed like a ban, but now it no longer appears to be shadowbanned, is that what I'm learning?
If a 404media article makes it to the front page, it's because enough people happened to vouch a [dead] article, which is quite unusual and involves a lot of luck (since most people don't have showdead enabled). Nothing has changed on the mod side as far as I'm aware.
You should probably revisit the guidelines, as your flagging policy doesn’t align with HN guidelines:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
When we say "interesting" we mean intellectual interest, not all kinds of interest or curiosity. For example, there is social curiosity (the sort that powers celebrity gossip). There is political curiosity (wanting to know how one's side is doing against the other side). There is sexual curiosity (no comment needed). These things all have their place, but not here. On the other hand, there can also be overlap with intellectual curiosity, in which case it's fine, though the bar is higher in some cases than others.
The qualifier "most" is very important there. Certainly opinions can differ as to what should fall under "most" and what shouldn't. But citing that line to justify flagging a politics-related story isn't a good argument.
Yep - I totally got that from your original comment.
I did think to myself "I hope they're using the Richard Feynmann/MIT Model Railroad Club sense of the work "hacking" there, not the "dude in a hoodie in front of a green on black terminal" sense. HN, for me, for over a decade, has been a source of intellectual curiosity provoking links, not just software/computing related stuff.
My attendances at DEF-CON have been mostly grey-hat [0]. I don't really care about downvotes just here to spread knowledge on topics I find interesting.
Thanks for the sanity/perspective.
[0] I'm in the XX documentary, and have been on stage (as have many friends), but never as an official speaker. In a former digital life, I ran a lockpicking youtubey with millions of views.
Pretty sure HN has discussed porn, the porn industry, sex work, sex workers, etc tons.
For example you can find in my history on posts about how porn access is being restricted that the "They have more fraud" claim is likely false and claimed in bad faith, and in fact Pornhub has been so removed from the payments industry that they now seem to have grafted themselves onto the internet gambling industry to make money, which is just awful. They have not turned to crypto payments because they just don't work, which is interesting to discuss.
But you would never see any of those discussions if you banned from the front page anything that mentioned porn.
Do you see how that works? Interesting discussion is about who is discussing, not about what is being discussed.
IMO the topic guidelines are entirely the wrong way to ensure meaningful discussion. All they have done, as clearly evidenced by the time HN tried to outright ban politics, is provide ample fodder for people to shut down discussions they were never going to participate in and contribute to anyway, and force people to have less interesting discussions about "Does this belong here", despite the guidelines themselves saying "If it's here, it belongs here"
HN also bans a lot of meta discussion which is crap, as talking about the sneaky and intransparent parts of HN, like the Orange Nametag cohort, would be interesting to the constant influx of new accounts.
I for one would also find deep dives into moderation or site meta information to be very interesting. I deal with abuse prevention in my day job, so seeing how others experience that abuse and deal with it would be not just interesting to me, but downright educational.
Meanwhile, HN is full of "I slapped an LLM into someone else's open source code" as if that is interesting at all. The entire point of vibe coding and agents etc is that anyone else could do that just as easily. So it seems "being interesting to hackers" just isn't the actual desired content.
>All [the guidelines] have done ... is provide ample fodder for people to shut down discussions they were never going to ... contribute to anyway, and force people to have less interesting discussions about "Does this belong here"
Absolutely. See /u/grey's comment above, which /u/DanG responded with saying ~"no personal attacks"~ (I don't think grey got personal, and I don't think DanG's response was appropriate/warranted).
But as DanG and you have pointed out (in response to my other comments in this thread), porn does have a place on /hn/ — I truly believe the porn industry is the major driver of consumer tech.
Respectfully submitted, and thanks for all the great discussions among ALL users, oranges/admins/®ulars.
I think people might be missing the hack here, because the front story is such an ongoing political (and moral) football.
The hack is in the leak, and the sudden availability, of the video segment, across international borders, against the Weiss will (and apparently against the Ellison and Trump will), rebounding back to us in the US via the good graces of https://archive.org and via some true journalistic (or political) chutzpah.
That's what drew me to this page, to learn more about how presumed underhanded corrupt billionaire-sanctioned censorship was defeated by an innocent premature distribution.
There's also some other relevance to tech here, given the role of the Ellisons in all this. It's quite possible the decision to pull the episode came from them. Paramount is trying steal Warner Bros out from under Netflix and is working the Trump admin hard to prevent the deal, even supposedly by telling Trump he can decide who gets hired/fired from CNN.
Andreessen was directly involved in the rise of Bari Weiss too.
I hate to attack HN and especially any particular moderator. But I agree in the abstract that this is an unacceptable performance. When you have Larry Ellison's son appoint a political figure over a news organization and start axing things, that's Tech news-worthy.
And once any degree of censorship is involved by mainstream media the burden of open-ness goes up 10x in my opinion. At least I personally hadn't seen this article until today, and then the one I saw disappeared from the front page. I'm sorry but this story is more important than source code for photoshop 1.0 or whatever currently has the top slot.
I say this not because I think "Oh other people need to know this" I say this because I think "I need to know this" stuff and I almost didn't. I'm sure there are many well-read people on here, but for me this site is my main/only(?) news source.
Personally I'd recommend a post-mortem into this (exactly how many flags, by who?, is political news susceptible to getting falsely flagged and if so is there a way to rework that system? Perhaps let individual users disable "political news" on their own accounts? Can people "kill" a story by baiting a bunch of stupid comments on it to get its discussion number too high?)
I understand HN wasn't started as an attempt to make some free press democratized web 2.0 news. But in the current news climate where there president is personally doing shit like getting Jimmy Kimmel axed I think HN has had a greater role thrust upon it than mere startup news.
[I can't imagine it would be considered, but implicit in this frustration is a willingness to volunteer my own time to contribute toward fixing this issue as an engineer - be it gathering/analyzing the data or whatever form]
It's a bummer, but discussions about the intersections of politics and tech are especially important when many prominent figures in SV are inserting themselves directly into politics or are funding inherently political projects. It's clear, for many of them, their values are misaligned with many core democratic values and sometimes even human rights.
Musk and DOGE killed an estimated 600,000 people, mostly kids under 5, and the death hasn't abated yet. Tech workers helped him do it.
If you'd rather not be the kind of useful idiot who helps a megalomaniacal tech billionaire rack up the body count of an early 20th century despot, politics are unfortunately unavoidable.
It's almost assuredly paid actors, the kind who brigade every single comment section no matter how piddly the outlet anytime there's a peep of pro-Palestinian, pro-abortion or whatever the culture-war generals are focusing their troops on.
Tbh HN does a _lot_ better dealing with this than pretty much anywhere. Yes HN has the flagging feature so of course it will get abused but as evidenced by this article sitting now at the top of HN, it gets addressed by moderator intervention, regularly.
It's partisan hacks who are somewhere on the spectrum between full support of this barbarity, and finding all the other shit that's being done useful enough to them to be worth compromising their values.
The latter can be identified by 'Well I don't agree with everything this administration does, but I will throw my full support behind <one of the many wedges they are using to turn this country into a corrupt single-party autocracy>.'
(They won't push you onto the tracks because they hate you, they'll push you because it means they'll see a 0.7% drop in their expected tax rate. They are in most ways, worse than the former, because they can tell the difference between right and wrong, and still carry water for the latter, because they see personal benefit in it.)
>> I've been watching this 60min piece, and there's nothing wrong with is
It's not even that good of a story IMO; leading to full-on Streisand effect when it's easier than ever to find things on the interwebs, and double-impossible to suppress them. About all this has done is prevented the 60 minutes demo from viewing a story they would have immediately forgotten, and prompted a far more dangerous to the status quo & resourceful segment to go find & view a show they never watch.
It only takes a few flags to be effective and there are definitely more than a few Trumpists on HN so theoretically yes. Could also be the likely much larger contingent of people who flag all "political" and "non-technical" content by default.
Like it or not Hacker News has never been (and will never be) a platform for free and open debate. It's designed around aggressive curation for quality over quantity and that makes it very easy to brigade by design.
> Could also be the likely much larger contingent of people who flag all "political" and "non-technical" content by default.
It could, but that'd be odd. We've seen oodles of structurally similar posts hang out on the front page unflagged before. There are even past examples of major posts criticizing the journalistic integrity of 60 Minutes. Only once the material becomes critical of the regime does it become flagged.
As an American whose mental health struggled for a while after the election, I now thoroughly curate my media diet so that I only get "just enough" political news. So I understand your desire.
However, HN has huge sway over tech culture, for better or worse (probably worse). Many of the wealthiest and most influential fascists in America also run companies that HN users might work at or strive to work at. Probably not because they're fascists, but because they mostly care about the cool tech they use or just want a better job.
Applicants and employees of ̶I̶B̶M̶ Palantir, ̶I̶G̶ ̶F̶a̶r̶b̶e̶n̶ Tesla, and ̶K̶o̶d̶a̶k̶ Oracle should know what they're supporting. If they take the job anyway, at least we know whose side they're on.
I don't know if it's so much about making sure these people know what they're supporting but it's definitely significant that this is one of the few places where you can have a dialogue with the people who work at these companies.
There is a strong ideological lean on HN towards not necessarily the trump ethos, but more toward the technofeudalist ideal, which is currently broadly aligned with trump on many issues. It's also trumpisim in a more sophisticated hat, but it's adherents don't seem to think so.
Everyone here tries way too hard to emulate the Musks of the world as if their political beliefs were the reason those guys initially got so rich and successful.
It's even more craven and intellectually bankrupt than Trumpism, which at least has the simple honesty of "say good thing make good thing happen" and is broadly believed by people too stupid to know better.
Don't forget the very right wing fake "free speech" insistence, where speech you agree with is free and speech that criticizes your failures is "An attack".
Or the huge cohort who insist that Joe Rogan talking to another guy about how it's not that big a deal that the very existence of gay people is yet again under attack is "Two people having a calm debate of their difference in beliefs" despite that not being true.
There are tons of people on HN that would have done better to spend more time in English class learning about persuasive writing and the pillars of rhetoric and media literacy and all that "critical thinking" they claim school didn't teach them and are currently angry when people rightly call out their poorly supported arguments, and they don't actually seem to know what an "argument" even is.
It's so frustrating their faux "debate" beliefs. It's worse than a decade ago when they thought "debate" was screaming at your ideological opponents a hundred outright false claims that can't be countered in a reasonable time frame.
Nevermind that we HAD calm debate about most of this shit decades ago. But these people only believe a "debate" happened when their beliefs are validated. Otherwise it's "canceling" that thing they still scream about despite doing it all the time.
Also the idea that we should have "calm debate" about the government sending you to another country's prison without trial is insane when that was specifically one of the exact reasons the founding fathers decided to start shooting people over. Thomas Jefferson would not be calm in his rhetoric.
Lets be more accurate: none of the powerful & rich are strong supporters OF trump; they support him strongLY because of the direct pay-offs they personally gain. I think it's important to differentiate between the Andreessens and your core MAGA supporter who I actually believe he is a god, because strategies for defeating them are very different.
I get the irony, but its a bit meaningless since we can't compare the quantity of these (yet) uncensored posts with those that have been taken down, and thus aren't visible.
More importantly, other commentors here have already admitted to flagging this entry. The way flagging exists now rewards one-sideism and partisan behaviour - all it takes is a relatively small group of discontented people to take down a story that is otherwise interesting to the vast majority of posters. A counter-flag option would balance things.
> all it takes is a relatively small group of discontented people to take down a story that is otherwise interesting to the vast majority of posters.
That's not accurate, because if a story is interesting to the vast majority of users, it will get lots of upvotes—and lots of upvotes is enough to defeat a small number of flags. In that sense, we already have the counter-flag option you're arguing for.
That's good to know, thank you for the explanation.
Stories don't always get the chance to gather the sufficient amount of up votes before being nipped in the bud by dissatisfied flaggers though, depending on the time of day. Some of them, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357887, clearly had great interest here and got a large number of upvotes that was, nonetheless, insufficient to prevent the flagging.
That's true. Then again, however, if a story is important enough to the community, it will get reposted—sometimes many times, either with the same URL or a different one. It's not so easy as people assume for flags to suppress that kind of story.
The submission you linked to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357887), however, was not that kind of story (i.e. one which the majority of users want to see on the frontpage). Rather, it was the kind of story that some users want to see on the front page, but not the majority of users*.
It's the latter class of story which is more vulnerable to flags. That's generally what we want in a flagging system, and I think most HN users would agree with that in principle (though not of course in specific cases where the story is something that one personally finds interesting).
I think they were all flagged to varying degrees. That's partly why I asked for clarification - there are so many things your question might mean that I wasn't sure which one to answer!
It’s a holiday, so I’ll just pose this as a rhetorical question to you and let the matter rest:
What’s your level of confidence that these threads aren’t getting flagged as part of a coordinated effort? Be that a lone MAGA nutter running 20 sock puppets through resnet proxies, or a paid covert influence campaign?
If there were theoretically a common cluster of accounts all repeatedly flagging political posts unfavorable to the Trump admin within a few minutes of each other, do you currently have the tooling in place to see that happen?
I certainly don’t speak for everyone on HN, but I think the allegations of censorship here have more to do with the specter of bad actors abusing the flag system to limit the reach of certain posts, rather than you or anyone else affiliated with Big Ycombinator (TM) putting your thumb directly on the scale.
The accounts that flag these stories are almost always established accounts, so I'm not too worried about them being sockpuppets or paid influencers.
From everything we've seen, flags on political stories are a coalition between (1) users who don't want to see (most) political stories on HN, and (2) users who don't like the politics of a particular story they are flagging. In other words, users who care about the quality of the site, and users who care about a political struggle.
This dynamic shows up on all the main political topics.
There are some accounts that abuse flags in the following sense: they only ever flag political stories, and their flags are always aligned with the same political position. When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights.
This, so far, seems sufficient to me. If we start to see indications that it's not sufficient, we'll take more action.
I know there are many users (actually a small-but-vocal minority of users) who complain that flags are being abused to suppress political stories. What these complainants never seem to take into account is that we want most political stories to be flagged on HN, for a critical reason: if they weren't, then HN would turn into a current-affairs site, and that would not be HN at all.
From the point of view of HN fulfilling its mandate (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), the status quo around flagging is not so awful—it is within (let's say) a standard deviation of the desired state: most (though not all) political stories either fail to make the frontpage or get flagged off the frontpage.
That's the desired outcome, not because such stories are unimportant—often they're far more important than anything that does stay on the frontpage—but because HN is trying to be a particular kind of site. Food is more important than toys, but that doesn't mean there's no place for toy stores, or that toy stores should dedicate more shelf space to food. It doesn't mean that toy stores are suppressing food! or that toy store proprietors don't care about food or don't think people should have any.
When we become aware of a political story that is being flagged off the frontpage even though it fits HN's criteria for being on-topic (e.g.: contains significant new information, has some overlap with intellectual curiosity, has a chance of a substantive discussion, and there haven't been too many political stories on HN recently), then we turn off flags. This is the best strategy I know, so far, for balancing the frontpage according to HN's mandate.
If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but any HN user) want us to change how this works, you'd need an argument that engages with why we don't want most political stories on HN's frontpage. That is, your argument would need to proceed from what kind of website HN is trying to be, and trying not to be. That's the fundamental point.
Instead, most arguments I hear are concerned with the behavior of flaggers, whether they're "politically motivated" (i.e. are against the political causes that someone personally identifies with), whether they are "unfairly suppressing discussion" or not, and so on. None of this engages with the fundamental point. I don't want to say we "don't care about any of that as long as the overall outcome is achieved", but I do think (1) it's secondary, and (2) we would be foolish to make changes that made HN do worse by its mandate. I'm only interested in changes that make HN better for its intended purpose.
After many discussions with users making such objections [1], I get the feeling that they have a mistaken idea of what principles HN operates by, or think it should operate by different principles. The principle they seem to favor is that submissions should simply be ranked according to upvotes. The stories that get the most upvotes are the ones that people care most about, and those should be the ones on the frontpage. Anything else is unfair — is censorship, putting a thumb on the scale, and so on.
There are a ton of reasons why HN doesn't work this way and indeed is designed not to. The most important is simply that if it did, it would be a different site. The frontpage would consist of the hottest and most sensational/indignant topics, and yes, plenty more would be political. But it wouldn't be HN. We're optimizing for something else entirely, and there's no way that this kind of site can work by upvotes alone. [2]
Flagging on HN is part of this optimization effort, so if you want to change how flags work, you'd need to show how it would move the site closer to this optimum—the goal we have, rather than some other goal that we don't have. HN is far from that optimum, so there is room for improvement. But we can't optimize for two things.
I think part of what makes this site special (on the modern web at least) is that the moderators like yourself think thoroughly and deeply about all of this. It’s pretty awesome y’all do that.
How is this emotionally driven? It seemed like a dispassionate presentation of factual material to me.
Of course, no presentation of facts is without bias of some sort (if only via their choice of which facts to present), so don't ever stop thinking critically. But flagging/censoring any presentation of facts (even biased) never helps, regardless of your viewpoint. If you disagree, write or promote a thoughtful take that explains why.
I'm politically very conservative, and I'm super grateful for this. The intense political polarization in the US tends to allow party-line adherence on either side to substitute for accountability to the truth, and that is a disaster regardless of which side is currently in power. Whatever side you're on, please have the guts to hold your side's leaders accountable to the truth, not just the opposite side's leaders. We will all suffer if just one side fails to do that.
The point being, it's not hysteria if it's just true. What's going on is bad thing are happening, and some people would rather force themselves to be delusional than acknowledge reality.
You could say that, because anyone can say anything, but you'd just be wrong.
Obviously, "fine" is subjective. Serial killers are just fine with eating Cheez-its out of a bowl crafted from a human skull.
But when the topmost officials are routinely doing very illegal things, we have at least some metric - they're illegal. When they just gloss over the illegal things they're doing, that's bad.
People are really missing the broader context of CECOT and the trump administration as a whole. Who cares if a few hundred not-criminals get tortured overseas? That's a statistical drop in the bucket.
And it is, but the broader implication is what matters. The implication that due process is merely a suggestion, the implication that this administration does not give even a single fuck about the american people, the implication that suffering is a price this administration is willing to pay for a prize they cannot quantify.
Whether these things are happening or not is, again, not up for debate. The debate shifts to apathy. Do you care about America or it's citizenry? Or, in a pursuit of correctness, are you willing to burn it all down?
Such foolishness, selfishness, and naivety is only observed in very young children. Those with developed brains under the cost of actions, and their lasting effects.
> Whether these things are happening or not is, again, not up for debate.
Of course it is. And when, in a few years, everything is fine, the sky hasn’t fallen, and in fact we’re doing better — you’ll just be shrieking about whatever the next thing is you’ve been told to be upset about.
> Those with developed brains under the cost of actions, and their lasting effects.
Is this the reddit-tier self-congratulatory slop that passes as an argument in your circles?
Well you ignored my entire argument, so me implying you're stupid worked out, didn't it?
To reiterate my argument, which you have reinforced: the question is NOT are these things happening, because they just are. So we won't debate it.
The question is what are the lasting effects. Which you actually alluded to right here:
"And when, in a few years, everything is fine, the sky hasn’t fallen, and in fact we’re doing better — you’ll just be shrieking"
See, so you DO understand that these things are happening. Where we disagree is the lasting effects, the implications.
You believe our president fucking the American people up the ass doesn't matter, or is secretly a good thing. As I've said, apathy, or naivity - the sight of a goal with no understanding of its cost or even it's gain.
I can become the richest person on Earth by killing everyone else. But what value did I create? None, I only destroyed value. That's the separation between a goal and it's cost and it's path.
You're probably thinking "well I know that, even a child understands that", but evidently you don't, or the cognitive dissonance is so strong you're willing to override everything you've ever known in pursuit of correctness.
Even if you're right, at what cost does it come? What will the world be worth when law no longer matters, when we have a monarch? Even if you like the monarch, will serfdom make you happy?
This is not me being melodramatic. As we've both already established, laws are being broken, and due process is being thrown out. A few broken eggs, no?
But it's not about the broken eggs and it never has been. Those are a canary. The broken eggs get useful idiots like yourself to advocate against your own best interests. To advocate that it's okay to break the rules, so long as you win. But what you're really saying when you say that is that you plan on winning forever. Very bold, no? Very naive, no?
I strongly disagree with your assessment. Are you unhappy that it's discussing how the wealthy people are getting control of the us? Please make dispassionate arguments to support your views.
That's a dumb take. Burying your head in the sand won't change reality.
If you cared to even watch the content you flagged, you'd have seen one of the former prisoners was a young college student with no criminal ties. I'm from south America and also went to college in the US. It could've been me.
Note that the accused TdA member claimed to be a college student in Venezuela. He was not enrolled in any US school.
Not saying he deserved to be deported to a third country, just that there's nothing publicly available that substantiates his side of the story. Part of not burying one's head in the sand is acknowledging when someone might not be the most reliable narrator.
How is that germane to this discussion? I already made it clear I didn't think the Venezuelan migrant in the segment should have been deported to a third country under those conditions.
This feels like an attempt at a setup instead of an actual discussion of the thread's subject. That's especially glaring since you went trolling through my post history, a signature of Reddit users looking for a 'gotcha' moment more than HN users engaged in dialogue.
This is a factual discussion of the president sending undesirables to a concentration camp in a foreign country. It's certainly not hysterical.
If this is emotional slop to you and you feel the need to complain about it, maybe you SHOULD be on r/Conservative or Xitter where you will find lots of likeminded people saying that this stuff is no big deal. Ironic.
They may not be completely objective, but you're probably not either. We'll all do best to listen to opposing points of view (especially those that are directly critical of our side) as they will likely have truth in them that our side doesn't.
Lots of hackers find porn very interesting. In fact, my first "real job" as a hacker was for a company with ties to the 1-900 industry that had decided to expand out onto the internet (not just to sell porn). Stories about porn would be interesting, submissions of nothing but pornography itself ("because it's censored!") are not.
I would be more sympathetic to the argument that this is relevant if the submission was an article about media censorship, or CBS's audience or leadership, and how said censorship, audience, or leadership relates to technology or emerging trends in media.
But this is literally just a controversial TV news broadcast, that people of one political persuasion say was "censored" and people of another political persuasion say was held off the air "temporarily" until it met network fact-checking standards. That sort of political bickering is most uninteresting, and is most definitely not why I've been reading HN for the past few decades.
This seems similar to the "Is Github Down?" submission problem, where the submitter simply links to github.com.
That's a poor submission, because by the time most people click on it, Github will no longer be down.
There might be an interesting discussion to be had about outages at Github, but the better submission would be an article or blog post about the outage, not just a link to the site and a three-word title.
If someone wants to write an article or blog post about this news broadcast, which links to "hard facts and analysis not available through popular channels," that seems like it might be a worthwhile submission. But just a link to the broadcast by itself is not leading to interesting or on-topic conversation—the top comment right now is an ad hominem attack against Larry Ellison, without any supporting facts or analysis that he had anything to do with this story at all.
The very first subheading is entitled "What to Submit." I quoted it in my initial reply as rationale for why the people flagging this submission as off-topic were justified.
The answer to this question is always that enough people find it interesting. If you don't find it interesting, then please refrain from posting questions like that.
Because this is a very public example of the high level attempted censorship of us news media by people who support the current government. Disastrously, most of the major us media outlets have been bought by wealthy oligarchs who are politically aligned with the president and there's an active process of censorship.
It's actually true that at CBS News Bari Weiss was installed as a political minder to make sure that reporters don't do anything conservatives don't like.
This is also relevant because plenty of these would be censors are wealthy silicon valley conservatives.
> It's actually true that at CBS News Bari Weiss was installed as a political minder to make sure that reporters don't do anything conservatives don't like.
Are you able to provide any proof to back up that outrageous claim ?
The "existential threat to Russia's security interests" is a bit of a Russian propaganda thing. No one was out to attack Russia. They have the world's largest nuclear arsenal. Ukraine was peaceful, hadn't joined NATO and wasn't formally planning to.
I think it's more the "Russian Empire grew by about 50 sq km per day over 400 years" thing and they are behaving now as in the past. Times change though. Empires are a bit nineteenth century.
A citizen of the west saying what you just said is analogous to a Soviet citizen saying:
The "existential threat to the USA's security interests" is a bit of an American propaganda thing. No one was out to attack the USA. They have the world's largest nuclear arsenal. Cuba was peaceful, hadn't joined the Warsaw Pact and wasn't formally planning to.
regarding the Cuban missile crisis. The only difference is that Cuba was more than twice the distance to DC that NATO nuclear warheads are from Moscow and nuclear missiles travelled much slower in the 1960s than they do today. You are welcome to have your perspective, just remember that your perspective is shaped by a media landscape that is just as partisan, just as biased, and just as shaped by propaganda as Russian perspectives are.
Further, consider that NATO's 2008 Bucharest declaration stated Ukraine would become a member. It's not like Russian concerns about Ukraine NATO membership came to them in a fever dream, these were concerns rooted in real, credible, public diplomatic discussions.
It is frustrating that Western audiences accept framings about US security interests that they dismiss as propaganda when applied to adversaries. It's a double standard that betrays a lack of principled willingness to apply "defense" philosophy equally and impartially. If your application of principles isn't impartial, that's not principled reasoning, that's just cheer-leading for your own team.
Of course, this isn't to deny that Russia was still wrong to invade Ukraine, or that the Russian military's actions are most accurately described as an invasion. Like I said before, two wrongs do not make a right. It doesn't matter whether Russia or the US refers to their military activity as "special military operations" rather than an invasion, it doesn't matter whether or not they have cited legitimate security interests before starting the invasion, invading another sovereign country, "firing the first shot", is a clear violation of the non-aggression principle.
As this relates back to the original discussion, I'd further add that even if you don't care about principled consistency whatsoever, the US/NATO (essentially the same thing, NATO without US troops and ISR capabilities is mostly bureaucrats disseminating .pptx files in Brussels) track record on regime change (Iraq, Libya, etc.) doesn't inspire confidence that "taking down" the Venezuelan government would even be likely to produce good outcomes. Principled reasoning, consequentialist reasoning: the logical conclusion is the same: the US should not invade Venezuela for regime change.
I admit to bias in that I don't see aggressive dictatorships and peaceful democracies as equivalent. The Cuban missiles were a problem because of that in a way that Ukraine being democratic isn't.
Ironically the Russian Federation is probably creating much more of an existential threat against itself by invading Ukraine. Before it was doing fine, now a good part of the globe opposes it and the economic sanctions and loss or Russian lives may cause it some issues.
This comes down to realism versus wishful thinking. In the real world, force is used to resolve geopolitical problems - as we’re seeing in Venezuela now and saw previously in Iraq, Serbia, Grenada and countless other countries with US. The alternative is pretending that every country can act however it wants without repercussions. Ukraine deliberately instigated conflict with hope that Russia does not react militarily instead of playing both sides like Kazakhstan, etc.
On no one was out to attack Russia - that's probably true today but Ukraine and broader Eastern Europe realignment is more of 50-100 years project and nobody knows what happens in 20-30 years. US is on a brink of invading Venezuela and blockade is already borderline act of war (that was casus belly for US declaring war on Germany in WW1) so it's not like NATO/US are some peaceful paradise.
And on “not formally planning to”: Ukraine literally wrote its intention to join NATO into its constitution. That doesn’t get more formal than that.
The NATO thing is justification that even Russia has not applied consistently. Putin is on record saying that Ukraine is part of the Russian sphere of influence, which means, according to him, they get to install their crony of choice. If NATO was their real concern, they could withdraw now in exchange for promises not to join NATO, but they also refuse to give up territory they've occupied or to allow any security guarantees from the west, all but setting up the next stage of their invasion.
> The US has to stop. The US is not the world's policeman, and the US had no legitimate right to declare itself such.
The US has the largest military on the planet, and the (relative) peace of the last 80 years is largely based on a credible threat of our willingness to use it. That power can be used for good; at the moment, we are simply not choosing to do so.
Was dropping two atomic bombs on civilian populations good?
Was the US's role in the Korean war good?
Was the US's intervention in the Chinese civil war good?
Was the US's massacre of Puerto Rican freedom fighters, nationalists, and independence-seeking rebels during the Jayuya uprising good?
Was the US's invasion of Vietnam good?
Was the US's covert military operations in Laos using the paramilitary arm of the CIA good?
Was the US's overthrow of the legitimately elected leader of Iran to install a US puppet good?
Was the US's actions to destabilize a laundry list of Latin American countries to seize control of raw materials and commodity production and place it under American corporations good?
Was the US's invasion of the Dominican Republic to quell mass democratic uprisings against a military coup that seized control from a democratically elected leader good?
Were the US secret bombing campaigns against Laos and Cambodia good?
Was the US invasion of Grenada good?
Were the US's attacks against Iranian-owned offshore oil drilling platforms good?
Was the US occupation of Panama good?
Was the US invasion of Iraq good?
Was the US bombing of Serbia good?
Was the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan good?
How about the drone strikes against civilian weddings - good?
How about illegal humans-rights-violating extrajudicial rendition, detention, and torture programs, good?
Is this all "peace"? Is intentional mass murder of civilians "good" when we do it? Is Trump the first president to abuse US military capabilities in the last 80 years, or are you being selective and partisan in your recollection of one of the world's most prolific purveyors of incomprehensible violence against civilians, interference in the democratic processes of other nations, and violators of human rights in the last century?
We're getting far off track from the important point here though, which is that the US should not invade Venezuela, just as Russia should not have invaded Ukraine (the latter being a point of comparison for the former, not the subject of the conversation).
The answer to your question "are these last 80 years really peaceful?" is yes, in context. Look at the horror of the world wars, or the preceding ~1000 years of barbarity and wide-scale religious wars. The US does not always use its power wisely, but the alternative is to cede that power to someone else: nature abhors a power vacuum.
Modern anti-vaccine nuts have spent so long living without measles that they've forgotten the good that vaccines do and take their good health for granted. Anti-US-power nuts have lived in a world largely without large-scale conflicts, held in place by our NATO allies and the credible threat of force, and you've forgotten what a world without that stabilizing effect looks like. Spoiler: it looks like the 30 year war but with nukes.
I'm not "Anti-US-power", I'm anti-genocide, anti-terrorism, anti-war-crime, anti-torture, anti-invading-sovereign-nations, and pro-democracy. It's not my fault that the US has systemically made deliberate attacks against civilians, war crimes, rampant human rights abuses, invasions of sovereign nations, and overthrowing of democratically elected leaders the basis for US foreign policy and military doctrine for the last century or so.
When you ask me to look at the horror of the world wars, does that include the horror of the only country to ever use atomic weapons in conflict deliberately dropping them on cities they knew were full of civilians? If that's what the American version of "peace" looks like, I'm not interested in the American version of "peace". The Soviet Union never deliberately nuked New York. China never deliberately nuked Taipei. North Korea never deliberately nuked Seoul. Iran never deliberately nuked Jerusalem.
You propose a hypothetical future where you guess that a world without US "stability" involves nuclear weapons, while ignoring the fact that the world with US "stability" already involved them. History speaks louder than hypothesis.
There has never been a time in history devoid of crime, torture, genocide, and authoritarianism. But the last 80 years have seen those things at a low ebb in favor of democracy and peace.
Please tell me what the last 80 years would have looked like with an isolationist US, weak or no NATO, and an unimpeded ascent of dictatorial regimes. Answer: even more of all those things you purport to hate.
The US is the worst superpower, except for all the other ones. The choice is not between good and evil, it's between evil and less evil. (Just like presidential elections.) Don't be naive and empower the greater evil just because you're displeased with the lesser.
I'm not saying you should stop pressuring the US to act morally, but asking it to leave a power vacuum is dangerous.
Is saying "The US should not invade Venezuela" asking the US to leave a power vacuum? Because that's been the only assertion I've made in this entire conversation about what the US should do, as opposed to what it has already done.
"Isolationist" means the US abandoning NATO and our allies, which is what the current "America First" movement supports, and is exactly what Russia and China want.
But Putin himself didn't see that promise as binding and relevant. He publicly stated that Ukraines relationship with NATO was solely a thing between NATO and Ukraine and none of Russias business. Only later had this always been different.
What's next?
Let's revive the treaty of Westphalia?
Plus, any treaty takes bits of the sovereignty of a nation and limits the will of the voter. See how the US never ratified UNCLOS. But a pinky swear by Baker should limit the US forever?
The idea that those seasoned soviet diplomats got somehow hoodwinked is also a bit silly.
Are we only accepting the public declarations of Russian leadership as credible when we like and agree with them, or are we being selective and ignoring the things they say that don't match the boogeyman in our head?
Notice how they offer to put it in writing, to reduce the room for ambiguity and misunderstanding that the west disingenuously exploited when doing diplomacy with Gorbachev?
We're getting far off track from the important point here though, which is that the US should not invade Venezuela, just as Russia should not have invaded Ukraine (the latter being a point of comparison for the former, not the subject of the conversation).
When the west negotiated with Gorbachev the Warshaw Pact was still existing. Everybody had big problems on their hand and nobody thought about NATO membership of nations that still were part of the Pact.
It is not about agreeing/disagreeing. If you publicly cancel a claim you no longer have it.
But just listen to what local Russian politicians/media tell their people and what Russians think. They are very comfortable with their imperial/colonial agenda and all these discussions/arguments we are having are primarily for western consumption. Read the propagandist narratives that Russia put out for the winter war or Hitler with the Sudeten Germans. You could just change the names and many pamphlets would fit right in current Russian propaganda.
Russia will always say everything and let people in the west sift through it to find things that fit the various agendas. In the end Russia will have more than it did before like in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Donbas and the invasion they are running right now.
Takes too long and too much effort to figure out which men are rapists and which aren't. Time to forget about due process and just assume they'e all the "worst of the worst".
If you're interested in the ancient Maya, El Salvador doesn't come close to Guatemala or Mexico (followed by Belize and Honduras). These are also wonderful places to visit, IMHO.
It's actually a far less effective enforcement scheme than even Obama used both in absolute numbers and in priority.
The Trump admin is stuffing the processing queue (which is normally overwhelmed with high-priority cases) with thousands of low-priority cases, which actually has the effect of keeping dangerous people (always been high-priority) in the country longer.
Just what you'd expect from a totally braindead manager. Looks great if you're a malicious moron though!
And what do you call it if you slow down the processing, fill it with innocent people, and also get yourself bogged down in thousands of extremely costly (time, money, and focus) civil rights lawsuits?
In our country, someone who hasn't been convicted or otherwise adjudicated of a crime is called innocent. There are thousands of innocent people being deported.
Perhaps these people committed crimes or administrative violations, perhaps not, but until they've been determined as such, they're correctly called innocent with no quotes.
GP is speaking specifically about that subset of people when they use the word innocent.
>In our country, someone who hasn't been convicted or otherwise adjudicated of a crime is called innocent.
Total nonsense. This only applies to the state. Individuals are totally free to believe that a person not convicted of a crime or even proclaimed innocent by the state, is in fact not innocent.
If your legalistic fiction of innocence was correct, then individuals would have to believe that the law is the infallible representation of morality, which is an abhorrent claim. What I meant by the quotes around innocent is that the state has not yet deemed them criminal, but I disagree with the state on that assessment.
I am sorry, but "you are dumb" is not an argument. I just do not care about the law at all+. Far too often have I seen justice abused in the name of the law. Any appeal to some supposed legality just rings entirely hollow.
Either the government acts justly and I support their actions or it acts unjustly and I will oppose that action. Whatever some piece of paper says or does not say I do not mind.
+ Of course I care about it in so far I have to understand how getting into conflict with the prevalent interpretation of it will have consequence for me or my family or my friends. I pay my taxes, after all.
> There are thousands of innocent people being deported.
Right, the only crime they committed was entering and remaining in the country illegally. And now they’re facing deportation by this unjust administration.
The Cato article says specifically that nearly half the people they were able to get in touch with didn’t seem to enter illegally OR otherwise violate their immigration status
Huh? Do you think the possible legal statuses of people in the US is either “here illegally” or “US citizen?”
My claim is quite clear: legal immigrants who have not committed any crime or administrative violations have 1) been deported, 2) without due process, and 3) to a foreign torture camp.
Any ONE of those elements is illegal with regard to legal immigrants, and items 2 and 3 are illegal even with regard solely to illegal immigrants.
Btw this is not including people whose TPS was canceled and were “made illegal” overnight, of which there are hundreds of thousands now.
There are plenty of people the administration is trying to deport who neither entered nor remained in the country illegally.
For example, Rumeysa Ozturk who was arrested for engaging in 1st Amendment protected speech and put into deportation proceedings despite entering the country legally, staying in the country legally, and breaking none of our country's laws.
Do you think that such a deportation would make the US more or less appealing for immigration? After all, every immigrant has to suspect that they might become a target of such an enforcement action as well.
Of course it would make the US less appealing, which means the immigrants with the most optionality of where to go (like researchers, engineers, and high value contributors in general) are disproportionately likely to seek other destinations.
It would have the least deterrent force on those who are already criminal and otherwise lawless or desperate.
Back to your claim about this being an "effective" immigration policy: no it's not.
I think it is pretty dishonest how you are asserting that I am making arguments, which I never made.
>which means the immigrants with the most optionality of where to go (like researchers, engineers, and high value contributors in general) are disproportionately likely to seek other destinations.
>It would have the least deterrent force on those who are already criminal and otherwise lawless or desperate.
Completely agree. But I want the "researchers, engineers, and high value contributors" even less than the rest. Those groups are actually harder to remove, they often have institutional support in the form of corporations and other associations and might feasibly be positive fiscal contributors. With "the rest" the argument for deportation is far simpler and has far more support in the population. Also my labor competes with the "researchers, engineers, and high value contributors", while "the rest" only depresses the wages of the proletariat who now have to compete with black market labor.
Notably, deporting US citizens would also make the US less appealing for immigration. Would you agree with that? Since fewer people would want to travel to a country where even its own citizens are not safe living there.
Considering your other arguments above, I assume you are also volunteering to be one of the people deported from the EU for the sake of making it less appealing for immigration?
Sure, if you can think of better deterrents for migration and better ways to deport more people, then those should be tried as well.
Right now I think these measures are extremely effective, especially at deterrence and I do not see what your arguments against this being an effective deterrence really is. One good step from the legislative would be removing the legal basis for the civil rights lawsuits, so they can be thrown out immediately.
> One good step from the legislative would be removing the legal basis for the civil rights lawsuits, so they can be thrown out immediately.
You mean the Constitution's 5th Amendment? No thank you, I'll keep that one around.
> Sure, if you can think of better deterrents for migration and better ways to deport more people, then those should be tried as well.
A little known fact is that the Constitution is actually meant to make life difficult for the government. It is not up to the rest of us to come up with Constitutionally valid alternatives to the administration's preferred course of action. That's their job.
As a European I am not particularly invested in how the US legal system wants to protect non-citizens "rights". I just hope that the EU learns how effective immigration deterrence looks and can make the appropriate legal changes, here in Europe we do not have attachments to centuries old legal concepts, so I think this issue just does not appear here.
One idea which should be explored, both in the US and the EU, is that all lawsuits against immigration decisions have to be paid, either ongoing or up front, by the person who would be affected by the immigration enforcement.
I'd advise finding his real identity and torturing and abusing him if he is found anywhere. We must support people in how they wish to be treated and abusing him physically with disregard to the law is in accordance with his own wish.
Post your identifications so I can tip the relevant authorities in all countries other than yours to deport or jail you on sight. I wish to help you achieve your goals so I hope you post the details. If you don't then it is safe to assume youare a spy and terrorist and should be executed on spot. Don't cite pointless legal bullshit, you dont believe in that crap.
Surprised to see that you are unaware of the literal shit ton of rich immigrants in the US. A majority of them escaping their home countries after robbing and destroying them. This is so common that it’s an easy and repetitive plot in 2nd/3rd tier action/drama series.
And that the US populous not only despises these people, but people from both sides of the political spectrum actually want the opposite types as immigrants.
You heard of outlawing? It works so well. People immediately stop doing things that are outlawed.
(You are talking about deterring from legal immigration as you have explained in a sibling comment as well, and I am recommending outlawing legal immigration)
I am not against immigration. Though I am not for illegal immigration, nor do I see the need to spend so much money and energy on deportations, while destroying innocent lives, where a standard border many countries maintain every day would suffice.
The difference is the show's audience and its perceived weight and impact. I, a millennial, will watch stuff on youtube and already know about what's happening. That's not relevant. This is about the boomer generation who watches sixy minutes and what they see and perceive.
I don't see a rebuttal to his point that you are okay with people getting put into secret prisons as long as you're not inconvenienced. Are you just complaining that you were called out?
I think most people come to HN assuming folks are discussing their viewpoints in good faith with both an honesty of thought and the willingness to listen to opposing viewpoints. You've shown neither.
I don't know enough about El Salvador's politics to know whether the mass imprisoning brought down the gang murders and improved stuff on the street, but why, once you've got people trapped and unable to do harm, can't you go back through them using officials you audit for gang influence or whatever and have individual trials? Instead, they did a farcical hundred-person-at-a-time show trial for the people they imprisoned, so who knows what portion were guilty. What it makes clear to me is that there's no interest here in identifying the innocent or guilty, but plenty of interest in keeping the undistinguished mix caged up like dogs in a kennel for the rest of their lives. What excuses do you make for that?
How about caring for both? How about that as an idea? It’s impossible for you to accept that you can arrest and jail all those people to protect the lives of regular citizens but also not torture them while they are in jail?
Of course there is. Freedom is a pretty fundamental human right. We don't mind taking it away from some people, sometimes permanently. Then of course the death penalty is a thing.
Now organised abuse, or even not taking steps to prevent such abuse is accepted to be a bad thing by most of society so that shouldn't happen. But my concern isn't directed in any way towards violent gangsters that held an entire country hostage.
Reasonable? They ALL boil down to "we need to get official comments, rationale and explanations from the administration". They refused to comment on the story, so you wait because if they CHOOSE not to participate you don't get to publish? That's never been how reporting works. Her comments about a lack of detail regarding the criminal records & charges? The administration is the party that refuses to share this! They are not even forthcoming with WHO EXACTLY has been deported.
Bari Weiss bending over backwards to accomodate an administration that has never shown any sort of honesty or humanity is exactly why she was rewarded so handsomely. "They seem reasonable" is not even remotely close, when comparing "evidence-based truth" reporting with the president's "I speak the truth".
If you wait for the administration to comment on a story before you publish it you’re effectively giving them the right to veto it. You ask, give them a deadline. If they don’t respond or say no comment (as they did in this case) then you publish.
> The person doing this 60 minute segment has also pushed false stories in the past
You’re going to need to elaborate on that. If it were true why wouldn’t Weiss just fire them?
The arguments are nonsense. A summary is Weiss wants to make a case for the administration, which already has the largest platform in the world. If the administration wants to make a case for itself, it has (and has had) ample time to do so. As it stands, there is already a lengthy paper trail of arguments the administration has made in court. These arguments should take precedence over throwaway statements an admin rep might make to a news program.
Briefly, on a couple of them:
- "We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged?" In the US, those people are known as "innocent," whether or not Weiss likes that fact.
- Holding a story until the administration is willing to go on record is exactly the same as giving the administration a veto over a story. We would not have adversarial journalism under these circumstances.
- "The admin has argued in court that detainees are due "judicial review" —and we should explain this" These men were sent for indefinite detention to a concentration camp outside the US borders, and then the administration argued in court that it could not affect any change in their status. This argument from Weiss is transparently false.
Bari Weiss is not a stupid person. She knows she can’t just openly say “I killed this because it’s critical to Trump”; she has to come up with some plausible fig leaf, which is what you’re posting here.
There's something about Ron desantis COVID shots at Publix. I didn't look into it but saw it on the right winger sites. You'll have to look into it yourself
Here's why Bari Weiss delayed the story:
Hi all,
I’m writing with specific guidance on what I’d like for us to do to advance the CECOT story. I know you’d all like to see this run as soon as possible; I feel the same way. But if we run the piece as is, we’d be doing our viewers a disservice.
Last month many outlets, most notably The New York Times, exposed the horrific conditions at CECOT. Our story presents more of these powerful testimonies—and putting those accounts into the public record is valuable in and of itself. But if we’re going to run another story about a topic that has by now been much-covered we need to advance it. Among the ways to do so: does anyone in the administration or anyone prominent who defended the use of the Alien Enemies Act now regret it in light of what these Venezuelans endured at CECOT? That’s a question I’d like to see asked and answered.
- At present, we do not present the administration’s argument for why it sent 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. What we have is Karoline Leavitt’s soundbite claiming they are evildoers in America (rapists, murderers, etc.). But isn’t there much more to ask in light of the torture that we are revealing? Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don’t tend to be shy. I realize we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record.
- The data we present paints an incongruent picture. Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories. We should spend a beat explaining this. We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged? My point is that we should include as much as we can possibly know and understand about these individuals.
- Secretary Noem’s trip to CECOT. We report that she took pictures and video there with MS-13 gang members, not TdA members, with no comment from her or her staff about what her goal on that trip was, or what she saw there, or if she had or has concerns about the treatment of detainees like the ones in our piece. I also think that the ensuing analysis from the Berkeley students is strange. The pictures are alarming; we should include them. But what does the analysis add?
- We need to do a better job of explaining the legal rationale by which the administration detained and deported these 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. It’s not as simple as Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act and being able to deport them immediately. And that isn’t the administration’s argument. The admin has argued in court that detainees are due “judicial review”—and we should explain this, with a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding his authority under the relevant statute, and another arguing that he’s operating within the bounds of his authority. There’s a genuine debate here. If we cut down Kristi Noem analysis we’d have the time.
My general view here is that we do our viewers the best service by presenting them with the full context they need to assess the story. In other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here.
I am eager and available to help. I tracked down cell numbers for Homan and Miller and sent those along. Please let me know how I can support you.
Yours,
Bari
The whole thing is poorly-conceived and obviously false but I just have to call this out-
> Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories. We should spend a beat explaining this.
The story isn't that people found guilty of crimes went to jail, the story is that half weren't even charged with crimes! That's the whole point of the story! We should not be aiming for a balanced diet of criminals and not-criminals in our government-sponsored foreign death camps!
The fact that they exist at all is an affront to humanity, but to say "it's OK because a slim majority deserve it"- I just don't know what to say.
> We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged?
What about charged? What does charged with a crime have to do with anything? Why bring that up at all? Do we send people to prison because they were charged with a crime? Is Bari Weiss a newborn baby who has never heard about the presumption of innocence?
I feel sick.
It’s not just that, it’s that the administration knew they weren’t guilty of any crimes and sent them to be tortured anyway.
If you can stomach it, propublica has been covering stories like this since the summer [1].
Meanwhile, the MS13 has been cutting sweetheart deals with Bukele [2] and we have been releasing actual gang members for the privilege of sending innocent people to the torture facilities [3, 4], even in the face of reports of USAID being diverted to the gang for a money-for-votes scheme for Bukele [5].
[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/venezuelan-men-cecot-inte...
[2]https://www.propublica.org/article/ambassador-ronald-johnson...
[3]https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/news/press-releases/ran...
[4]https://www.npr.org/2025/10/21/nx-s1-5580555/why-the-state-d...
[5]https://www.propublica.org/article/bukele-trump-el-salvador-...
And Bukele joked about it on TV, even as he knew these innocent men were being beaten, raped, and tortured.
Even the people who were convicted of crimes don't deserve this. There's this sick belief in parts of society that criminals (which becomes a permanent state of being) are valid targets for unlimited suffering.
People should not be sent to torture camps where they have no hope of every leaving for the rest of their lives for committing crimes.
> There's this sick belief in parts of society that criminals (which becomes a permanent state of being) are valid targets for unlimited suffering.
Only poor criminals. They are all protective of rich white collar criminals, vote for criminal president etc.
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bringing down the murder rate doesn't excuse the torture of innocent people (or anyone for that matter)
I do not have any data about people being tortured.
Where are those reports? I am not in favor of torturing even those animals.
But they should repair the damage done working for the community, building houses for example, which is something I have witness it is done.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/11/12/you-have-arrived-in-he...
there's an abundance of evidence of torture
I understand your argument, but the problem with Bukele is that he is a bad human being, too. A gang leader with slightly less proclivity for torture and rape than the other gangs.
He knows that he has many innocent people locked up in those jails. He knows that his deal with Trump is immoral and unnecessary for the safety of El Salvador, but does it anyway. His social media savvy relishes in his authoritarianism, rather than explains it.
Unfortunately, the dire situation you describe is how Authoritarians gain power: desperate populations struggling for multiple years with widespread societal problems that government has seemed too inept or corrupt to fix. 1930s Germany, 2020s Trump, El Salvador.
I have Bukele for a responsible person, just hard like Lee Kuan Yew was.
But as far as my knowledge goes, he does not execute or kill, just enjailed the gangs.
I could be wrong but I do not have evidence of the opposite so far. Just rumors and things mostly from sources I do not trust. If there is evidence, they should release it.
They also released 8,000 people, they keep reviewing for mistakes.
About the exception state, this came out from an 80 people murder. To innocent people and as a revenge. I think it was justified in this case, sadly.
I do not mean bad conditions, they more than deserve that. I mean if there has been torturing or such things. I would be against that, 100%.
The situation of El Salvador was almost like a war in times of peace. They did not have many options.
Sooooo... why are we sending people there?
Maybe someday you'll have a chance to torture me to death.
Her own excuse is either a complete lie or betrays the fact that she doesn’t understand the story. I invite her apologists here to choose which interpretation they prefer.
I’m into the full meal deal theory. Her own excuse is a complete lie, she doesn’t understand the story and somehow doesn’t even understand journalism. In this case, 60 Minutes asked the White House for comment and they refused. If a party to a story can kill the story by not being involved, that’s not journalism it’s PR.
People who don't understand the press don't get handpicked to run the press by the billionaires who own it.
She understands that she's full of shit, and she's paid to be full of shit. The Ellisons aren't spending billions of dollars on this because they want you to be well-informed.
We do unfortunately send people to long times in jail (sometimes over a decade) before their cases come to trial in the USA. And jails in the USA generally have vastly worse conditions than prisons (as they are "short term" facilities).
CECOT is a whole different beast altogether, though :(
You have to waive your right to a speedy trial. You cannot be held for years without trial
Yes, but it does happen a lot. The case of Kalief Browder was one of the reasons for all the reforms around bail. [1][2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/nyregion/kalief-browder-c...
I was a jurist on a murder trial. The defendant had spent 1.5 years in jail awaiting his trial. Then went back to jail after the hung jury did not deliver a verdict.
1.5 years is low for a murder trial. I would suspect the average is somewhere between 2 and 5 years. A lot of the time, if the defendant knows they are cooked, then they are just holding out for a better plea deal.
I've personally met defendants on their ninth year awaiting trial, and during COVID a lot of jails were forced to publish their detainees lists, and I noted some who were over 11 years without a trial.
Sure, that's true. Let's say you file a motion, though. Say the cops beat a false confession out of you. You file a motion to suppress. Now you've stopped the speedy trial clock for a year, maybe two, while the motion is responded to, witnesses and discovery are sought, hearings are had, etc. You're stuck in jail that whole time.
Just like in theory the cops can't steal your stuff. But in reality there are more than enough ways around such little restrictions unless you are backed up by an expensive and powerful legal team.
Just fyi, this is from 2021, not could, but did, some up until the day they were pardoned never had a trial.
https://www.newsweek.com/accused-capitol-rioters-could-spend...
Or, does this not count for ideological reasons? There are at least some people out there that may be consistent despite tribalism, I suppose.
It's worth highlighting that continually driving focus onto a few spectacular examples of criminal histories is exactly how this regime has been justifying its actions.
Well said, absolutely ridiculous framing keeps happening and you kept it grounded.
> The fact that they exist at all is an affront to humanity, but to say "it's OK because a slim majority deserve it"- I just don't know what to say.
I think you don't understand MAGA mentality. Honestly, that's probably a good thing, but understanding MAGA would help understanding this whole situation.
That's why I don't know what to say.
[dead]
This is an embarrassing response.
You don’t hold a story because you want to push the government harder to respond, especially when you have the executive’s official spokesperson giving a reason on the record already.
And what does she mean that we should spend a beat explaining that half do have criminal histories? She wants them to give a cookie for that? And why is being charged relevant? You don’t send someone to prison for life for being charged.
Lastly she misstates the administrations legal justification for deportation. She doesn’t appear to be an unbiased actor here.
The fact she sent that out publicly is a good indication of how prejudiced she will be with editorial content.
You had a good run 60 Minutes.
> And why is being charged relevant? You don’t send someone to prison for life for being charged.
Yup. I was charged with a felony of which I was materially innocent.
But this is the right's spin on things, the "well even if you weren't found guilty, there was enough of an issue to arrest you and charge you".
I was watching a Zoom meeting of one of our local Superior Court hearings - was a motion to revoke or modify bail conditions.
The Judge actually rebuked the prosecutor, who had tried to explain why the motion should go their way. "Blah blah, in addition, the defendant has shown no signs of remorse or regret for the situation..."
Judge: "I'm going to stop you there. The defendant pled not guilty and at this moment no verdict has been determined. In the eyes of the law and this court, they have zero obligation or requirement to show remorse or regret for their alleged actions."
Which jurisdiction was this? The behavior of the prosecutor is atrocious.
Basically saying that because the administration isn't cooperating with judicial reviews or even bothering to comment (let alone display a difference in opinions), the story should be shelved. So as long as the government is united in its desire to commit horrible acts and stall justice, I guess we shouldn't bother reporting them? Not sure where the logic is there. And I guess since it's possible some bad apples exist, then we should just take the word of the government that everyone there is a gang member? I wouldn't ever call 60 Minutes cutting edge journalism, it's quality for sure but they are never the first on the scene. Who cares if other media companies have covered CECOT? 60 Minutes got first hand interviews with detainees that have good backgrounds. That's important, it lets viewers empathize with "good" immigrants just trying to create a better life for their families. This letter is weak.
> Basically saying that because the administration isn't cooperating with judicial reviews or even bothering to comment (let alone display a difference in opinions), the story should be shelved.
Which is ironic, considering the actual video that Canadian broadcasters manage to send, it ends with basically "We requested a comment from US officials, but they referred us to speak with El Salvador instead", so even the finish video that got broadcast, acknowledges this basic fact that you need to carry on even if both sides don't want to be interviewed on camera.
> The pictures are alarming; we should include them. But what does the analysis add?
The analysis shows another way in which the government is trying to be secretive about how it's treating people that were within its borders and subject to its laws and protections. I can only hope someone pointed this out because the question suggests a baffling level of ignorance despite the message overall sounding like some reasonable feedback on the story, despite coming far too late in the process to be considered reasonable.
> Here's why Bari Weiss delayed the story:
That is not accurate. It's her excuse for spiking the story.
Having watched the documentary yesterday, the questions Bari raises are suitable for a follow-up. There is nothing wrong with the piece as it stands.
Here are the excuses Bari Weiss gave to bury the story.
The reporters reached out to the govt for comment. They chose not to respond. If you insist on holding off publishing until you have a comment you’ve just given the government the ability to block the story by endlessly delaying comment.
More broadly the problem here is simply that Weiss has no legitimate authority to make calls like this. She’s never worked as a reporter. The 60 Minutes staff have decades of reporting experience. The only reason she has the job is because a billionaire who is trying to curry favor with the administration installed her there. That context hangs over every decision she makes.
> The reporters reached out to the govt for comment. They chose not to respond.
According to the video itself (just finished watching it), that's not true. US officials did respond, telling them to ask El Salvador officials instead, so basically redirecting, rather than "no response". If that's worse or not I guess is left as an exercise to the reader.
Thanks for posting.
For those not familiar: there were five screenings in the prior week that journalists attended to discuss it. She was aware of those and did not attend.
When she did look at it, her feedback was minor, and they made adjustments.
Then she killed it a day after her delayed feedback, on the weekend it was to air.
That context, combined with the response above, is telling.
She is at absolute best, entirely unfit and amateur for this role combined with dangerous arrogance.
More likely, she is the malevolent puppet of a billionaire ally of the current corrupt administration.
That explanation is days late, though. It's attested that she didn't even take a call from the episode producer before killing it. I mean, sure, if you put a bunch of people in a room and ask them to retcon a reasonable-sounding explanation for why you did something embarassing, you can do it! The world is a complicated place.
It's abundantly clear why she spiked it. I know it. You know it. We all know it. She was brought in as a clearly partisan voice to put exactly this finger on exactly these levers at CBS. We all saw it when she was hired and we all warned about this. And she did.
I mean, why bother stenographising the excuse? No one is fooled. "Partisan hack does partisan hackery" is like the least surprising line in this story.
>I mean, why bother stenographising the excuse? No one is fooled.
Plausible deniability, so that people on one side have something they can use.
(Obviously we believe it isn't plausible, but that doesn't matter in these sort of things)
A CYA letter full of illogical rationalization.
This isn’t the real “why”. Holding the release back is a political decision. Why hold the story specially? Why not just issue any corrections later? It’s already gone through the same approval process other stories would. The choice to do something different here and treat Trump-damaging stories differently is by definition, biased.
To me, Bari’s response is a manufactured cover up. I’ve followed Bari for years and seen the progression from someone who was a balanced moderate to someone who is slowly developing a strong bias and letting the mask off a little bit at a time. The recent Turning Point townhall was the first big revelation of her bias to the public. But as someone who subscribed to her for years, I’ve seen the progression over time. And the language in here feels less like her usual journalism and more like something carefully put together to deflect.
As for the actual reason - here is what was shared by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Stelter
https://x.com/brianstelter/status/2002943384499925159
This seems dishonest, she couldn’t possibly think the administration is going to share more useful information here, and if they did it would have no value. These people were illegally sent to life in prison at a brutal torture camp with no charges or trial, at the expense of US taxpayers. There is no possible excuse or rationale that would make it anything but extremely illegal and unethical, and a betrayal of all of the values our country purports to stand for. It doesn’t matter what crimes someone is accused of or not.
See also: Gleichschaltung.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
Bari Weiss is a liar doing Trump's bidding
TLDR:
Bari thinks the government should be able to quash any story it wants by simply refusing to "present the administration's argument."
Exactly. You give people a reasonable chance to comment, but you can't let them veto your story if they decline. That would be a naive way to be fair and balanced.
Honestly, the argument that CBS buried the piece to protect Trump is difficult to accept because, well, watching brown people being treated like shit or even tortured is MAGA porn. Innocence or guilt is meaningless - Dear Leader said they're all enemies!
All the MAGAs I know on Facebook are posting about how the video is great ("It's about time someone does something!"), so I would think Trump would want the piece to air.
Bari wisely points out that if the deportees are being tortured, then there must be a secretly good reason why if they dig a little deeper. Suggests asking Stephen Miller.
Larry Ellison is using his bags to purchase lies and silence.
No economy can be in true equilibrium when the consumers send profits to be spent in unforeseen and unrelated ways like this. Every purchase carries potentially immense future costs that are almost completely opaque.
Free market maximalists need to confront this fact before praying at the altar of complete deregulation, and every consumer should pay more attention to who they are buying from.
"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes said, is power."
-- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776
More significantly, one of the first discussions within the text of precisely what wealth is (on which Smith has several, and occasionally inconsistent, answers, and which he seems to think of as more a flow than a stock.)
One of Smith's principle complaints in his text was what we now call "market failures" and "regulatory capture".
<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...>
<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/>
What's free market about total state regulatory capture, calling the President when your bids get rejected, or setting up wars and domestic police actions to enrich yourself with contracts using taxpayer funds?
There are legitimate criticisms of a pure free market, but this is "state capitalism" not a free market.
The Trump administration is absolutely not pro free market. They're putting fingers on the scale all over the place, taking Federal positions in private companies, taking literal bribes for regulatory favors, influencing the selection of executives and board members, and using the power of the state to attack privately owned companies for platforming speech they don't like (like this 60 Minutes segment, made by a private company). Trump/MAGA looks a lot more like the CCP than anything else.
Of course if you pay attention to the discourse, MAGA and national conservatism are an explicit repudiation of Reagan/Clinton "neoliberalism" and "libertarian conservatism." They explicitly support a large administrative state that centrally plans the economy and culture, just one they run and use to push right wing and nationalist agendas.
I remember saying back during the Bush years: if the right is forced to choose between liberty and cultural conservatism, they will throw out liberty. The right only supports the freedom to do what they think people should be doing. (Yes, there are similar attitudes in some parts of the left too. There are not many principled defenders of individual liberty.)
Edit: I'm really just arguing that we should call things what they are. Calling MAGA's CCP-like state capitalism a free market is like calling Bernie Sanders or Mamdani communism (they're socialists, not communists, these are not the same) or calling old school conservative republicans fascists. Words mean things.
The tariffs are at least partially about crony capitalism if you look how they have repeatedly played out. Announce big, broad, sweeping industry & country level tariffs. Talk to Big Tech execs, quietly delay/rescind specific sub-components or even companies from said tariffs. Rinse & repeat.
The companies left fully paying tariffs are the ones that aren't big enough to have the orange mans ear / "donate" to the ballroom construction.
Tariffs are not free market. A true free market would have zero tariffs.
Tariffs, as with taxes, may serve positive, market-favourable functions, particularly in addressing market failures, uneven regulation (e.g., higher pension, safety, environmental, and/or medical-care burdens in the importing country), as well as anti-dumping or anti-interference actions. British-Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang writes of this, particularly in Kicking Away the Ladder:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang#Kicking_Away_the...>
Recent US tariffs fall rather short on most of these points, of course.
It is still not a free market thing.
And it would quickly be destroyed by competing governments that don’t believe in free markets and actively subsidize their industries to capture market share.
The US has been largely tariff free since the 1900s and it's the largest economy in the world.
Remind me where I can buy a Chinese EV?
And I assume there’s no government subsidies to allow US private sectors to compete globally because free market right?
Right?
I forgot to put in my comment "until recently". And the US auto industry does such so using that as your argument in favor of tariffs doesn't really work.
The 1960s+ chicken tax would like a word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
Yes, trucks are one of the few areas where there have been tariffs. And unsurprisingly American automakers are now completely uncompetitive.
You and your downvote brigade can continue to hit my posts but it won’t change the fact the US has been subsidizing our agriculture sectors and oil and gas to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars for a LONG time.
Anyone claiming the US is a completely free market is either uninformed or a delusional nationalist.
Can you give an example of a zero tariff country being destroyed by a super high tariff country? I can give you examples of the opposite. For example Argentina tried to build up domestic industries with high tariffs.
Trump forced the UAE to buy $2 billion of his stable coin in order to avoid tariffs. He is making $80 million a year farming yields off that. The tariff nonsense was 100% just a backdoor for corruption.
Edit: and I forgot he pardoned the binance guy for facilitating this corruption too. Trumps pardons are the most corrupt in american history but MAGA is still yelling about the hunter biden pardon even though Joe was absolutely right that trump would maliciously prosecute him
It’s actually a lot of small to midsize manufacturers importing subcomponents that are getting hurt in the heartland. They can’t lobby for exemptions & don’t have the supplier negotiating power of the megacaps.
Sorry widgetCo. Shoulda been a billionaire!
I've said this before, but Trump's form of tariffs are basically a firewall and paying tribute opens specific ports and addresses.
Bribe knocking?
The recent defense bill is evidence of this. Who has access to these contracts and massive spending increases? Is it any random startup that is building a good product? Nope. It’s the incumbent companies that are big donors and the various defense tech companies from the Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale ecosystem, who are ideologically aligned to the administration and support them vocally. Same with the new ICE and border agency funding. They’re tripling these agencies budgets. Who’s getting contracts to hire thousands of new agents or to build software profiling the millions they want to deport in 2026? Their friends like Palantir probably.
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> There are legitimate criticisms of a pure free market, but this is "state capitalism" not a free market.
Yeah, that's what OP said. I hate these sort of comments where the poster acts like they vehemently disagree with what was said, but then just restate what was said in a slightly different way.
Yeah, that's what OP said.
No, OP lectured us about the evils of free markets and how they need to be regulated... presumably by the same corrupt, captured government he's complaining about. The one who's giving Ellison his orders to pass along to Weiss. Because that's who'll do the regulating, in the world OP is implicitly asking for.
The problem isn't the money or the market. The problem is the power.
Money is power.
Trump's and the Republican party's whole shtick is deregulation. The financial tumors in the economy love it when the white blood cells look the other way. That's why folks like Ellison and Elon bought this election. These are the types of orders they are happy to comply with for favorable treatment.
If you don't regulate, you're just opening the door for the free market to birth a tyrant or cabal that makes up their own power structures.
If you don't regulate, you're just opening the door for the free market to birth a tyrant or cabal that makes up their own power structures.
Perhaps, but right now the only tyrants and cabals I see around me were elected democratically. I don't have to use Facebook or Amazon, but I have to pay taxes to Trump's treasury department.
The fact that stupid people can be easily herded into voting against almost everyone's best interests, including their own, is not an indictment of the free market. If anything, it speaks to the apparently-unresolvable incompatibility of social media and democracy. I'm pretty sure we'll have to give up one or the other before long.
Democracy is not the problem, it's a deliberately misinformed populace shaped by undeserved money that's the core issue. Folks who pollute the information in the market or the political field steer the market away from a symmetrical information equilibrium -- they are huge drains on human potential. Trump did both and evaded trial for sedition because of how much he cheated in business and engaged the law in bad faith, and due to favors he promised to others like Elon and Ellison who had more money. Before he was a "democratically elected tyrant" he was a regular free market one.
Before he was a "democratically elected tyrant" he was a regular free market one.
Whatever. He wasn't bothering me until the deliberately-misinformed populace gave him power over me... twice.
Again: the problem isn't the money, the problem is the power.
Money is power. High concentrations of money controlled by few people serve the whims of those people, who use that power to influence politics, in 2024 through one of the most dishonest campaign trails and propaganda operations in my living memory of American politics. I'm surprised you don't see the connection.
Money is power the way religion is power. Traditionally, religion is what the American right wing has used to herd its supporters, but it wasn't enough by itself to capture the entire electorate. More recently they've found that leveraging social media such as Facebook and friendly "news" outlets such as Fox gives them enough influence to take over national politics completely. If such immense power wasn't up for grabs, the money wouldn't matter.
If I said the problem was religion, I'd rightfully be taken to task. But if I were to call out the effects of evangelical subversion and abuse of protestant Christianity in America, you'd probably find room to agree. It's exactly the same with money.
We aren't going to get rid of either money or religion, but we can say that the Federal government -- and yes, the billionaires behind it -- shouldn't have anything close to this level of power.
This should be higher, absolutely right
In a free and unregulated market, you will see cronyism by the wealthiest players who have captured it. The payoff of capture is enormous and therefore investors have incentive to offer up capital to accelerate the capture. Tyrants emerge from anarchy. A corrupt MAGA administration bought by private money is the product of a poorly regulated market.
I think you're missing the implied cause and effect here. Lighthanded regulations allow for ridiculous amounts of wealth to be acquired in the U.S. Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, etc. are so unfathomably rich (and therefore powerful), they can now trivially bend government to their will.
Peel it back even more: how does any State not fall victim to monied interests? This is usually handwaved away by socalists in the sense that everything is handled by "independent commissions" that can totally not be corrupted.
The solution is really to keep the scope of government small so that any corruption isn't detrimental to the populace, and they can handle it in the next election.
> Peel it back even more: how does any State not fall victim to monied interests?
Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate), or the CCP route (clip the wings of the Icaruses who fly too high).
Edit: if the above are too extreme, another approach would be firm and consistent application of anti-competitive laws, resurrecting the fairness doctrine, and stop pretending that artificial constructs have human rights.
> or the CCP route (clip the wings of the Icaruses who fly too high).
This seems like a great way for the monied interests from WITHIN the party to just take full control.
> Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate)
The reason why this worked is because FDR oversaw the US during a period of incredible change and after the Great Depression. It's not like the tax rate was responsible for his successes.
> > or the CCP route (clip the wings of the Icaruses who fly too high). > This seems like a great way for the monied interests from WITHIN the party to just take full control.
They already do in the US, so this is a non-response.
> > Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate)
> The reason why this worked is because FDR oversaw the US during a period of incredible change and after the Great Depression. It's not like the tax rate was responsible for his successes.
Once again, this is a vacuous response. If the claim was “high taxes caused the change during FDR’s time,” “There was change” is not an alternative explanation to that claim. If we took the counter-factual claim, do you think the period would have been as transformative if the tax rates weren’t high?
> This seems like a great way for the monied interests from WITHIN the party to just take full control.
Politicians already have political power in every country and political system. The blatantly corrupt ones get the death sentence if their provincial or central committee patron can't save them, and those get culled every decade or so, so you can't go overboard.
That's not a solution, that just removes an opponent of monied interests from the table entirely, it's exactly what they want. The only thing these people want more than a government they can capture is a government so small they can replace it entirely.
But theres a balance to be struck there — keep the government too small and weak and it is susceptible to corruptive forces from domestic and foreign enemies alike.
So imho it isn’t enough to simply keep government ‘small’ —it is also important to keep it the size proportionate to other potential threats.
It’s also important to keep in mind that size is but one dimension and is only being used as a proxy for power which is the ultimate factor that matters — a government of one person with control of WMDs can be much more of a threat than a large government without WMDs.
Small government leads to big capitalism which is its own kind of tyranny. Our current problems are not because government is too big.
Powerful regulation which answers to the people is the answer.
Small government goes against the original and deepest Capitalist thinkers, who all pushed that strong government oversight was a REQUIRED part of Capitalism to keep it healthy and in balance.
That's a solution. Another would be to enshrine in law independent watchdog agencies whose goal is to win trophies for rooting out corruption, reducing waste, preventing or breaking up harmful monopolies, etc.
> win trophies for rooting out corruption
Many a corrupt government has touted their anti-corruption activities that inexplicably seem to snare almost exclusively their political opponents.
How valuable are those trophies compared to bribes, or the tacit bribes of cushy "consultancy" roles? How do you stop lobbyists from gutting those regulators - what use is a fiercely independent regulator that has no resources?
Good governance is hard.
Getting money out of politics is the hardest part.
I am not sure how the US will find the political will short of getting burned badly enough for partisans to align on reform. How bad does it have to get?
The apt question is 'How bad for whom does it have to get?'
Because the 00s+ US government is in no way propped up by all stakeholding groups in equal amounts.
That's no solution, since once someone has corrupted said small government, the obvious next step is to use the influence to increase its size and power.
This solution is anti-capitalist.
Capitalism by it's design, and as outlined by it's original and deepest thought leaders requires strong and decisive government oversight to keep it in check and keep it healthy. Being against strong government oversight is to be against a working, Capitalist system and against traditional Capitalist thought.
Strong and decisive don't mean huge expenditures and picking winners. Our government does so much more than governing. Capitalism needs a government that sets and enforces rules in the face of market failures. It doesn't mean a government that redistributes trillions of dollars.
Which countries on the planet do you think are the least corrupt? What does their system of government look like?
There's a lot of these lists, but it's interesting the differences in who tops the list:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/least-cor...
There's more than one type of government that can resist corruption, since much that drives corruption is extra-governmental (populace education level, media environment, trust in institutions, wealth equality, etc).
So it's unsurprising there are different optimal anti-corruption government types for different combinations of those qualities.
Yes. But, I don’t think a single one of those “least corrupt” top contenders could be described as:
> The solution is really to keep the scope of government small so that any corruption isn't detrimental to the populace, and they can handle it in the next election.
Which was kind of my point. In reality, the least corruptible types of governments tend to be ones libertarian-skewing Americans would crassly describe as socialist.
I'm not an expert, but aren't Switzerland and Singapore pretty lightweight governments?
Singapore is strange place - aside from being a city-state. You'll get sent to the gulags for being in possession of a joint, but prostitution is legal. I know a guy who once got in a bar fight there, and he immediately packed up and went to the airport.
I wouldn't exactly call it lightweight government.
I have heard the policing is very strict, but I thought on the business side they were extremely laissez faire.
The graph here can get a bit wonky. And Switzerland is definitely the closest example of “limited government” working, I’d agree. But both of those countries, e.g., have universal healthcare. Switzerland through a more strict version of something like the ACA. Singapore, state-funded. Switzerland has compulsory military service, higher taxes, more gun regulations, etc. than the U.S. I think the U.S. beats these two on having a more conventionally “limited government” design.
> The solution is really to keep the scope of government small
Of course. Politically active billionaires are always famously lobbying for large government and more regulations.
I don't entirely disagree, but also note that the extreme wealth of both these guys is at least partly a result of state spending not pure private market forces.
Oracle has always had a huge presence in government. Large companies too, but Federal use has really helped keep them afloat as open source and competing products that are far cheaper have eaten their lunch.
For Musk the case is even more extreme. Tesla's early growth was bankrolled by EV credits and carbon offsets, which were state programs, and SpaceX is a result of both Federal funding and direct R&D transfer from NASA to SpaceX. The latter was mostly uncompensated. NASA just handed over decades of publicly funded R&D.
These two would probably be rich without the state, but would they be this rich?
The same was true back in the original Gilded Age. The "robber barons" were built by railroad and other infrastructure subsidies.
However I do agree that private wealth beyond a certain point begins to pose a risk to democracy and the rule of law. It's a major weakness in libertarian schemes that call for a "separation of economy and state." That's a much, much harder wall to maintain than separation of church and state. Enough money can buy politicians and elections.
As much as I don’t like Musk and think Tesla is overvalued meme stock and the cars suck compared to other EVs (I have driven a lot of EVs during the year that we went without a car on purpose - long story), SpaceX did something that the government couldn’t do - have a lot of failures before it had a success. Politics wouldn’t let it happen.
Let’s remember: Musk bought Tesla. He was already ridiculously wealthy in order to get himself into this position of basically robbing the U.S. government.
This is true but he was nowhere near as wealthy as he is now, not even close.
Of course. That was also my point, as I think it is yours. There is an event horizon after which an individual can corrupt government and really accelerate their wealth accumulation even faster.
What you see as “corrupt government” others see as a “virtuous cycle”…
The main problem with your thought process is that your conflating “wealth accumulation” with “wealth creation”!
Isn’t the cause that people just happened to elect someone who doesn’t care and is corrupt? Are you implying money decided the election? How do you reconcile this with the fact that trump was outspent?
"Outspent" is a nebulous concept, post-Citizens United.
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Sorry what regulation in particular are you thinking about here? There’s no logical anti-trust angle I can think of.
I mean of course I think the outcome here is bad, but I’m struggling to think of a kind of regulation that could have prevented it that isn’t completely insane.
Edit: Listen everyone, it sucks, but there's no "one weird trick" where you can have a congress, judiciary, and executive branch dominated by Republicans, that then governs like Democrats. This isn't a "regulation" problem. It's a "roughly half the country wanted this" problem. Adding more regulations is not going to suddenly make the FTC act right; we have thousands of regulations already on the books and if they wanted to do something, they could.
The whole point of granting limited liability is that it enables things that benefit society.
So if something doesn't benefit society, don't extend that grant to it.
Your prior seems to be that the Trump administration is operating in good faith and that they would naturally be predisposed to allow the merger, being free market republicans and all.
That's not the accusation at hand. The contention is that the Trump administration is threatening to block the merger (corruptly, in opposition to their republican proclivities) unless the news arm of the merged company is operated in a partisan way.
And the evidence for that is that Ellison walked in, threw out CBS News's pre-existing leadership, and brought in a reasonably-well-known-but-still-not-celebrity-enough-to-be-independent partisan republican voice to run it. And now that she's there, she's clearly operating the news room in a partisan way.
Seems like a pretty convincing theory to me.
In July 2025, the Ellisons bought CBS (Paramount) through Skydance. This was approved by Trump's FTC.
The FTC is responsible for enforcing regulations that would prevent mergers that negatively impact the quality of services and innovation. They aren't doing their job.
Agreed. Let's also not forget that a large part of the reason that the Skydance/Paramount merger likely went through in the first place was because Paramount paid off Trump to the tune of 16 million USD by settling a lawsuit in which he alleged deliberate deception during his Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes.
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/02/nx-s1-5290171/trump-lawsuit-p...
The FTC has not done its job since after the Microsoft consent decree and economists have claimed that up is down and somehow preventing market monopolies is bad for the economy.
What existing regulation are you accusing the FTC of not enforcing? Is it illegal for a rich person to buy a company? It's not like he's cornering TV news or something. He's a minority player by any measurement (revenue, viewers, etc..).
Not a fan of Trump, Ellison, or obviously this expose being buried, but I am just trying to understand what the FTC did wrong.
> The FTC is responsible for enforcing regulations that would prevent mergers that negatively impact the quality of services and innovation.
I don't think this is the best summary of either the FTC's mandate from congress nor the antitrust laws in the US.
But whatever, it just seems like what you want is not more regulation (Trump is adding lots of regulation on solar and wind, that's good right?), but different regulators.
It sucks, but there's no "one weird trick" where you can have a congress, judiciary, and executive branch dominated by Republicans, that then makes them governs like Democrats. This isn't a "regulation" problem. It's a "roughly half the country wanted this" problem.
> I don't think this is the best summary of either the FTC's mandate from congress nor the antitrust laws in the US.
Okay well I basically copy/pasted from ftc.gov:
The FTC’s Bureau of Competition enforces the nation's antitrust laws, which form the foundation of our free market economy. The antitrust laws promote the interests of consumers; they support unfettered markets and result in lower prices and more choices.
https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/bureau-competi...
The Bureau of Competition is committed to preventing mergers and acquisitions that are likely to reduce competition and lead to higher prices, lower quality goods or services, or less innovation
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/merger-review
Were you saying the same thing in 2014 and 2015 too?
According to data from Thomson Reuters, 2015 is set to be the biggest year ever (once the planned deals close) in worldwide dealmaking, with $4.7 trillion in announced mergers and acquisitions—up 42 percent from 2014, and beating the previous record of $4.4 trillion in 2007.
The year stands out, not just for the total value of the deals but for the number of so-called mega-deals, which refers to any deal that exceeds $5 billion. Just in the last three months, notable mega-deals include AB Inbev’s acquisition of SABMiller, creating a $104 billion beverage company; Pfizer and Allergan’s announced a $160 billion merger; and the chemical companies DuPont and Dow Chemical Company’s plans to unite as a $130 billion company. Thomson Reuters counted 137 mega-deals last year, which accounted for 52 percent of the year’s overall M&A value.
whataboutism
No one should have a net worth greater than $1 billion
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I have a feeling this will get DMCA-ed off of Internet Archive in an attempt to suppress it. Here's the infohash of the archive.org torrent download for future reference, this should allow the file to be retrieved in any torrent client as long as someone in the world is seeding it still.
8105370ed7dba50dc7ec659fd67550569b4dd8a0
here it is, in magnet link form:
(exported from my currently-seeding torrent client, then pasted into a separate torrent client, to verify that it works correctly)I left the high seas many years ago, but I'm down to seed for a cause.
What's the best torrent client nowadays?
Qbittorrent, Transmission etc. The Transmission daemon can be installed headless with negligible system load on a vast number of devices, from Raspberry Pi-like and smaller SBCs to Linux/BSD NASes, then operated from remote through the web interface or a phone app.
qbittorrent is still regarded as independent and safe, I think.
https://www.qbittorrent.org/
I’m still using it happily on windows/linux.
Don’t forget your vpn!
That brings me to the next thing: Taking VPN suggestions. What's the best? I like secure.
Edited to remove being a moron.
Mullvad. The only VPN company I actually trust.
It's important though that Mullvad doesn't do port forwarding; you won't be able to seed effectively
Then you probably don't want a free service that costs money to run where they can only make money by converting most users to paid or monetizing your information in a country where you are unlikely to have an attorney whilst operating what amounts to a honeypot for every government on earth.
That said protonvpn seems reputable
That's a fair point that I arrived at once I put half a second of thought into what I was actually asking.
I pay for proton. It works. I’m not as security conscious as I should be but it’s pretty much a set and forget thing aside from changing ports.
Proton VPN has port forwarding that lets you seed torrents.
Mullvad
proton
For desktop use from within Plasma/KDE I'm happy with Ktorrent. Feels very intuitive, and has no problem saturating a 1GB/s pipe, and doesn't slow the system down, while doing so.
(At least not mine, which are old and almost obsolete but have enough RAM)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KTorrent / https://apps.kde.org/ktorrent/
Otherwise follow the links from there to qBitTorrent, or its mentions from other commenters here. Am not fond of transmission at all. Feels slow and sluggish in comparison.
qBittorrent
I’m of the opinion that would be mullvad.
RTings recently updated their reviews and seems to agree:
https://www.rtings.com/vpn/reviews/best/privacy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i_BB2uFYYA
mullvad is not a torrent client
Hey there seed buddy... I'm about to become the fourth web seed.
We're not going anywhere.
—Hydra
I'm seeing 1813 seeds right now
It's ridiculous that this has to be done.
I'm honestly speechless. But thanks for the magnet link.
Senator Corey Booker’s YouTube channel posted the archived video about 9am EST. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiehEMlNiCI
Senator booker is a grifter who supports his corporate donors over what’s right for the people.
It will be a second dose of Streisand if they do.
r/DataHoarder is already on it
Yup, reddit subreddit sure seems like a good place for "anti-american" discussions.
Where are the independent and non-VC fueled discussion forums when you need them?
Seeding :3
The timing of this might lead one to believe Paramount’s hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers Discovery is a consideration in their editorial decisions. They and their competitor (Netflix) need regulatory approval for such a merger and the administration has already inserted itself into the deal.
It goes deeper. The Ellisons want to replace Murdoch as the state media for Republican administrations.
I'm sympathetic to this idea but Larry Ellison will likely be dead in under 10 years and David Ellison has only ever been a Democrat.
It seems more plausible that David Ellison will bend in whatever direction the wind is blowing.
Plenty of dem-leaning rich folks have abandoned their "convictions" when they got a whiff of what sitting atop a real kleptocracy could be like.
The Ellisons are friends of Netanyahu
Hard to imagine that's the a core part of it, and pretty naturally in America the clear ongoing and unprecedented (in modern times anyway) corruption on that front is the focus. But it probably doesn't hurt that she appears to just be a really big fan of that particular dictator and torture prison specifically. Earlier this year her site "the Free Press" was all over them [0]:
>"The hottest campaign stop is this Salvadoran supermax: House Republican Riley Moore went to the super maximum security prison in El Salvador to take some photos in front of the inmates. “I just toured the CECOT prison in El Salvador,” he writes, with pictures of him giving a thumbs-up, shirtless inmates standing at attention behind him. Moore gave a double thumbs-up in front of the men, densely packed in their cold metal bunk. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem took the same tour recently, posting a fun video in front of caged, tatted men."
>"After Bukele left the White House, he thirstily tweeted, “I miss you already, President T.” Trump returned the favor, learning to say MAGA in Spanish: “¡America grande, otra vez!”"
Etc. And she's been very positive on Bukele personally as well. Might be multiple reasons she'd gleefully want to spike such a story even if the commands of her owners take precedent.
Edit: whew, this one sure triggered the technofeudalists and Baristans! From 3 to -3 for her own publication's and her statements.
----
0: https://archive.md/dcPkJ
I'm not sure how you can read that and think it is speaking favorably about the prison.
Here are some parts you left out:
> The El Salvador supermax prison is becoming the new Ohio Diner. It’s the new Iowa State Fair. It’s the new Jeffrey Epstein jet: It’s where every political leader needs to visit, the place to see and be seen if you’re ambitious and in politics today.
> They agreed that there was nothing to be done about the mistakenly deported Maryland man, now in Salvadoran custody. Two leaders of two great countries simply cannot find that one random wrongly deported man, and everyone should move along (I’m assuming that means he’s dead, right?).
Bryan Cantrill, "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728
The specific lines about Ellison and a lawnmower start at 38:28 in the linked video; the entire Oracle rant starts at about 34:00.
Every time I see this video, I feel a strange tenderness for the new generations watching it.
They do not really understand how bad Oracle used to be. This is us, old combat veterans, sitting by the fire, describing unspeakable battles to the youth...knowing full well that they think we are exaggerating. :-)
And the most disturbing part is the realization that the Frankenstein monster itself, Larry Ellison, is still out there. Still roaming free. Still very much alive... An eternal, terrifying, lawnmower wielding zombie of enterprise software and government corrupting rent extraction.
We shouldn’t anthropomorphize any billionaires. They’re not even people at that point, just destructive aliens who undemocratically ruin everyone’s good time.
We need confiscatory taxation for a better future.
Whilst true, it’s important to focus on the worst ones first, as with everything there is a scale.
It's kind of saying we should only focus on the #1 mass-murdering dictator in the world, so while many of them are actively slaying people, lets just focus on #1 for now.
No, we can have many targets. People who hoard money for the benefit of themselves with the detriment of society and the population at large are all "destructive aliens who undemocratically ruin everyone’s good time" to borrow the words of parent commentator. If just 10% were slightly less evil and egoistic, it would lead to huge improvements, and only a slight reduction to their own lifestyles. That they don't, is a stain on the legacy of humanity.
Nice straw man, I argued for nothing that you are arguing against.
Nope.
We need to bring the entire extraction class to heel. They are degrading, even destroying, society.
_sigh_ I didn’t say we shouldn’t.
The Ellison Cabal represent the primary enemies of freedom all over this earth. It's imperative to defeat them.
Don't tell that to Paul Graham.
Fascinating how this got leaked. A TV station in Canada accidentally ran the original episode version, implying that this was pulled super late and the episode was completely in the can.
It was completely finished. There's an article out today that says the main reporter on the story complained that the censor Bari Weiss had not bothered to appear at the previous five earlier screenings and reviews by the editorial team.
Was it an accident?
Narrator: It wasn’t
Probably as accidental as the people doing the censorship of the latest Epstein files released today that had "accidents" about how they censured stuff.
That was Global News, you can read about it here:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/cbs-news-says-global-mi...
If by 'ran the original episode' you mean on TV: no, they didn't, but they did put it on their 'app'.
Considering how much Trump is screwing with Canada, maybe it was someone's small act of revenge.
I recommend everyone bookmark the archive.org link or download via the magnet link since HN is disappearing these.
Also, any recommendations for a news site that doesn't suppress news? Asking for a friend.
It looks like mods manually removed flags for this one (it was flagged).
It's still already low on the front-page, when usually posts with that amount of upvotes would stay at the top for multiple days in a row.
With enough karma users can vouch for flagged posts to unflag.
> Also, any recommendations for a news site that does suppress news? Asking for a friend.
HN?
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It doesn't feel like it's suppressing the news. Can you give examples of suppression? I'd say hacker news is very open to contrary ideas and disagreements.
If it's political, there's a good chance it gets flagged. The problem is pretty much everything is political when you have a government that sticks it's grubby little fingers where it shouldn't.
I prefer HN for higher quality discussions. When I say posts which are pure political flame wars I (and many others) flag the post. Reddit is full of low information discussions. There's no need to also duplicate those posts here.
Everything is not political, and this statement itself is flamebait. Take a look at posts on the current homepage. Most are pure tech with no politics. Some are political with a tech angle but not flame wars.
Politics is defined as the way a system of multiple agents (typically humans) with conflicting goals, resolves to one outcome. That's pretty much everything. Almost all of economics, for example, is politics. API design is politics. UI design is politics. Putting /active behind a footer link is politics. Everything any government does is politics (or the government wouldn't have to do it). Every dispute is politics. There are a few things that are not politics, such as the colour of the sky, but almost everything humans make involves politics. The number of spokes in a wheel is politics, since the manufacturer wants as few as they can get away with. All news relates to politics.
From what I've seen, they let the important stuff stay. just use reddit for the rest. i'd rather it be more focused here.
Reddit is even worse at this.
Have you actually ever browsed the secret “active” page where you can see what people are actually voting for without the mods putting their thumbs on the scale? It’s constantly filled with dead posts because someone said something that was vaguely unflattering towards Israel, venture capital, capitalism in general, the United States or Apple. Literally happens dozens of times every single day.
It's hardly secret—it's on the /lists page which is referenced in the footer of every page on HN.
It simply isn't the frontpage, for reasons that ought to be obvious to anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. How you guys turn this into sinister suppression continues to escape me.
Edit: perhaps this will help:
HN is designed to downweight sensational-indignant stories, internet dramas, and riler-uppers, for the obvious reason that if we didn't, then they would dominate HN's frontpage like they dominate the rest of the internet. Anyone who spends time here (or has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) knows that this is not what the site is for. The vast majority of HN readers like HN for just this reason. It is not some arbitrary switch that we could just flip, if only we would stop being censoriously sinister. It's essential to the operation of the site.
(copied from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46366656)
It's on display in the bottom of a locked homepage footer stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
Footers are very rarely useful and I don't know anyone who habitually reads them. They usually contain useless but technically required legal information. Meanwhile the lists you actually want people to use are in the header.
The level of discrepancy between the rules as they are written and how things work in reality is miles apart. Every day.
Edit: since I can’t reply because my account was throttled for “posting too past” with a whopping 5 comments in the last 24 hours. Allow me to paste it here…
It would probably help if I were to bring a bit more specificity to my accusations here so we aren’t just talking about an abstract concept.
I’m making the claim:
1. The active page (what people are actually engaging with) and the front page (mods choice) regularly are regularly out of sync not just in general but in very specific and consistent ways.
2. There is a small group of people who intentionally use the flagging functionality in ways that have absolutely zero to do with the rules as they are written. People are incredibly open about this on a regular basis.
3. We are left with a de facto situation where that same small group are able to effectively censor what the rest of the community is allowed to talk about.
4. The moderation team seems to operate on the idea that everyone is just acting in good faith despite evidence to the contrary.
5. When the discrepancies between the rules as they are written and how things work in reality occur they are very rarely corrected by the moderation team and I don’t know what other conclusion to draw other than you seem to think that things are going great as they are and there’s no need to change anything.
6. You say the active page isn’t a secret but people are always saying they had no idea it existed. Surely you have some actual hard analytics numbers to show what percentage of logged in users visit the active page? I presume it’s in the single digits percentage wise but I’m open to being told otherwise.
That's inevitable, because consistency is impossible: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... How to interpret the inconsistency is a different question, of course. I'm curious what you see that seems most discrepant to you?
The closest I can give to an account of "how things work in reality" is the 80,000+ moderation comments I've posted over the last 10+ years: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang&type=comment&dateRange.... You're free to decide it's all lies, of course, but if you (or anyone) randomly scroll back through that feed, I doubt you'll find much that's miles apart from the rules as they are written. In fact I'd be surprised if you found anything that could be fairly be described that way, because trying to apply the rules as they are written is a matter of integrity for us. If it weren't, we'd change the rules until it were.
I had to rely inline above because of some questionable circumstances but not here to debate that part at all.
But on the topic of this active page I do find it rather poetic that in this exact thread we have people asking what is this page they’ve never heard of.
When I call it secret, I don’t mean it’s necessarily a coverup or something I mean that nobody seems to know that it exists or that the front page doesn’t actually represent what people vote for.
You might want to use a more accurate word like 'obscure' in that case.
At this point I'm not sure what you're accusing us of, other than HN not being a different kind of site. The mandate of this place is clear (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and it simply isn't primarily to feature political/sensational/outrage stories. That's the root issue. The mechanics of voting, flagging, etc., are in service of that.
From my perspective, you're arguing for a health food store to devote its shelf space to chocolates and pastries. Or, if you prefer the other way round, for a confectionery to devote itself to turnips.
I don’t think that actually engages with literally any of the points I’ve made but sure, I wasn’t expecting anything else. Like I said earlier it seems from where you’re sitting everything is going great and there’s nothing to answer for.
I was hoping however you could at least shine some light on the active page question… what percentage of users actually visit in on any given day? We can play semantic games about secret vs obscure but it’s not a debate about semantics.
If you knew how bad HN regularly makes me feel, you would be attributing very different sentiments than those. The point isn't that HN is perfect or even very good. It's that your objections are ignoring what the site is for. Improving the site means making it better fulfill its mandate, but you're not arguing from that place at all, and in fact are (implicitly) arguing that we rip out that mandate and replace it with a different one.
I haven't looked up the number of users who visit the /active page because I don't accept the premise of your question. Of course fewer users look at it than the frontpage; otherwise it would be the frontpage. This is just another variation of the mandate argument.
I’m not here to try and make you feel bad but if this place doesn’t work for you anymore I hope you’re able to do something about that.
I’m going to wrap this up here. You unfortunately responded in exactly the way I’d expected to just hand wave away everything, find reasons to not respond to any of the points and then seemed to misrepresent what I was even asking for.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.
Life is hard enough already and I’m not looking to make it worse for you. I hope you have a nice holiday season and good luck out there.
You're not making me feel bad! I just mentioned that HN regularly makes me feel bad as a way of letting you know that I definitely don't think this place is perfect.
I'm not disinterested in answering your questions—that's why I've been replying repeatedly! Nor am I interested in making hand-wavey responses; that would be a waste of time. We must be working with different assumptions, though, because I feel like I'm answering your questions and you feel like I'm not.
If you want to try again, I'd be happy to, but maybe we could take a different approach? I would like to know what principle you care about here. What principle are we failing to abide by, that you think we ought to?
I appreciate the offer, I actually have somewhere else to be in a moment unfortunately so I’d have to take you up on that offer another time.
Another time, then - and sorry that this time was so frustrating.
> The active page [...] and the front page [...] regularly are regularly out of sync
That's kind of the point of having different pages; if they were expected to be the same thing, there would just be one page.
I had never really looked at the /lists page, which one is the one that you were thinking is secret actives page, best or probably active?
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
Lemmy.zip
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> Also, any recommendations for a news site that doesn't suppress news
No such thing.
>Here is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her ‘60 Minutes’ colleagues in full:
https://x.com/grynbaum/status/2002943084322287815
Some more details:
https://x.com/grynbaum/status/2003109023705387478
https://x.com/grynbaum/status/2003209942057255073
For those of us without Twitter accounts:
https://xcancel.com/grynbaum/status/2002943084322287815
https://xcancel.com/grynbaum/status/2003109023705387478
https://xcancel.com/grynbaum/status/2003209942057255073
Direct Download link if anyone needs it is https://archive.org/download/insidececot/60minutesCECOTsegme...
People in the US now have to use VPN’s to get access to domestic news from a foreign country. I think it’s fair to say that the wheels have come off democracy and things are badly broken.
There was a PBS doc about it too, CBS is just comprised
Frontline: https://youtu.be/Lku5h9xjrqc
PBS funding has been cancelled.
Federal funding has been canceled for now. PBS still lives on and who knows what will happen with the next administration.
Things are bad, but the worst part isn’t hidden/missing principled reporting, it’s that a significant number of people don’t care to attend to it where it exists, domestically or internationally. And a majority of US voters cast their ballot for this outcome, so in a sense it’s democracy working as intended, however horrifying any problems or outcomes.
Plurality of voters, narrowly, but still it's enough.
How many just vote Republican without thought as they have always done, how many are in the fox news cult? So many people just thought they didn't want a female president or Trump would lower inflation. It's hard for me to accept that Trump represents America, but he represents enough of it.
first step to beat china, be china.
It's fair to say that, but first please verify your age to access these sites if you're located in the UK
As a companion piece, here is ProPublica's recent report trying to determine who exactly was sent to this torture camp: https://projects.propublica.org/venezuelan-immigrants-trump-...
Another good piece from right-leaning Cato Institute: https://www.cato.org/blog/50-venezuelans-imprisoned-el-salva...
Here's the magnet URL to the torrent, can't hurt:
This is why we need archive.org.
Just wish it was distributed instead of such a US-centric organization. For survival, I hope they're thinking about how to make it more decentralized, because eventually the arm of the law is gonna come after them (again), and probably with less mercy this time.
Still a proud supporter of archive.org for many, many years. Their work is invaluable and I hope it stays around forever.
Too bad the only people that will watch this are people who already understand the terror of what is happening. It might have helped a little if it had aired. My MAGA dad still watches 60 Minutes (no idea why, habit?) This might have penetrated his TDS-addled skull if it had aired. But the takeover of CBS by Trump and Ellison (and his 1980's-college-villain son) with Weiss is complete, and vile.
In any media, people only see what they want. There's a psychological term for this, Motivated Reasoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning
If you want to break this you have to know the person and ask key questions afterwards. Their distortion field is held together by beliefs and principles, not empirical analysis.
For instance, for my father, the question "how is this treating people responsibly? How can we expect the behavior of those guards to be held accountable?" would pierce this ... but really you have to know how the person doing motivated reasoning thinks.
His Dad will be smart enough to know these questions are trying to set him up. Maybe try having a real conversation and not trying to change his mind. After all, there is a good chance you will be that Dad in the future (no matter how hard you tell yourself you won't be). Tell me how I now.
I'm almost 50. I won't be. I have friends who are becoming grandparents now, still no interest.
I have half a century of talking with my father. If you think this is my first strategy as opposed to one that took years of therapy and personal struggle, I dunno what to tell you.
There's a wide body of social and psychological research on this stuff including multiple university departments (communication, psychology, sociology, management, teaching, etc) because "simply talking to people" doesn't actually work.
Thanks kristopolous. We have a very similar story (I'm a few years older). I think I'm at the "I've given up point" because his glee at others' suffering is just too painful to even address. So: he get's hellos at holidays and that's it.
People have discovered being an open sewer spewing hate and prejudice gets likes, views, reposts and advertisers
It's also a very easy job. You don't need to do journalism, be diligent about citations and accuracy, use robust analysis or careful language.
You don't even need a script. Just hop on a hot mic, blame an oppressed scapegoat and see money roll in.
The content is evergreen, trivial to create and performs great!
Just like you don't have to be a doctor to swindle people with phony medicine or a psychology degree to hustle people as a psychic.
The problem is we've taking the smooth talking performative palliatives of these slick mountebanks and christened their confidence games as sacred free speech instead of the hatemonger hustle it is.
And unfortunately, like Albania’s Nationwide Ponzi scam of the 1990s, these crimes have become institutionalized power and their bullshit is bringing the country down with them.
Other than personal gain, what ought be the consequences of arsonists shouting "fire" on the crowded Internet?
Real conversations cannot involve one or more persons trying to change another's mind?
It's a very prevalent form of cynicism, which I find ironic because in high school every student learned to write persuasive essays, but "adults" like to tell each other not to change people's minds. It's a subtle meta-rhetorical move used to undermine rationalism and formal education.
So does this apply to every single person all the time?
Nothing does.
It's about successful communication of authorial intent.
60 Minutes is not trying to say "Justice Served!" and shake pom-poms here. But, someone could read it that way, and it would be unintended.
I wasn’t aware that CBS’s Ellison is Oracle Ellison’s son.
TIL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ellison
Maybe suggest he watch? Maybe he's interested in what CBS's leadership refused to tell him.
Streisand Effect and all.
I debated asking, but I talk to him only a few times a year and we both work really hard to avoid politics. I realize it is my responsibility if I want to see change, but I just lack the skills.
Your (positive) relationship with him is way more important than trying to change his mind politically.
I’ve read lots of books on psychotherapy, and the verdict is a hard disagree on that. The idea of positive relationships to parents is a toxic one, and leads to more transgenerational suffering. It’s good to process the past sufficiently to hold no grudge, but it’s still necessary for mental hygiene to set and enforce boundaries. The most important element of this is grief. Like other posters replied, it is not necessary nor healthy to suppress and wait with anger and grief processing till after their death, and plenty of opportunity to work through unfinished business with them ever after their passing (eg with representatives in constellations work).
You don’t actually know this. Plenty of parents have stopped interacting with their children over politics, and vice versa.
Really think you should consider not giving advice to people from a place of ignorance regarding their individual family situations.
Unless a Parent/Child was physically or mentally abused (by clinical standards) then I confident that stopping interacting with them over politics alone is foolish.
Maybe, but also maybe politics can be a reflection of a person’s actions in a broader sense, for which it is perfectly reasonable to disengage from them when those actions have a negative impact.
Yeah, I don’t see why one should wait until after the abuse occurs (“by clinical standards”, above commenter says) to begin defending oneself. As you say, politics isn’t divorced from the rest of their psyche.
It’s predictable that a person who e.g. yells slurs and threatens violence against (whoever they perceive as) gay people on TV is going to progress to actual violence against the gay people in their life, more often than not.
This parental situation is sadly repeated endlessly in the US. My dad is a wealthy retired tech executive whose mind was seemingly taken over by Fox News. He's kind of now in an anti democratic cult and he gets angry if he is even exposed to other news sources.
I wish I could get your viewpoint on this when he passes, if you still feel the same way.
I will feel sad when he passes and I already feel the loss of being able to talk to him about anything. My brother says the same thing. He doesn't even talk to his grandkids much. I think this is sadly common.
<https://www.muellershewrote.com/p/watch-the-60-minutes-cecot...>
This is disgraceful [0], whatever your opinion on illegal immigration.
[0] deporting non-citizens to 3rd-party countries/prisons
Even calling it "deportation" is far too charitable towards what they've done. Deportation involves sending them back to their home countries or, if that's unsafe, to another country. These people were rendered to a prison where they're meant to spend the rest of their lives, without any of the due process even a foreigner who had committed a crime would normally be accorded in the United States under our constitution.
Great point and I'll add, by "would normally be accorded" you of course mean "is legally entitled to by our nation's foundational document."
Just to clarify - a prison without due process is more accurately called a "concentration camp".
"Prison" is for people convicted of crimes.
> These people were rendered to a prison where they're meant to spend the rest of their lives
These men were never intended to spend the rest of their lives at CECOT, nor did they. All were released in July 2025 to their home country of Venezuela, and they were in El Salvador for a total of 125 days.
> These men were never intended to spend the rest of their lives at CECOT
Kristi Noem indicated publicly that they should stay there "the rest of their lives."
> nor did they. All were released in July 2025 to their home country of Venezuela, and they were in El Salvador for a total of 125 days.
No kidding. Things did not play out that way because the intention was just for a few months of torture for those people before they'd eventually be deported to Venezuela anyway, it was because of the legal and political uproar over what had been done.
> [0] deporting non-citizens to 3rd-party countries/prisons
See perhaps United States Declaration of Independence:
> "For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses:"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievances_of_the_United_State...
In this case there wasn't even any trial, here or abroad. Just sent to the torture gulag with zero process whatsoever. So its even worse than that.
> In this case there wasn't even any trial, here or abroad.
Above is #19; see #18:
> "For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Jury trial:"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievances_of_the_United_State...
Ah, but you see, they're not us. They're them.
That seems like the least disgraceful part of the whole thing.
Wherever they go, the U.S. taxpayers are stuck footing the bill for their prison stay, food, medical treatment, etc., but why would it need to be in the United States? They have no claim to stay there.
The disgraceful part is sending illegal immigrants without criminal history to maximum-security prisons, sending asylum seekers to prison, or sending anybody to prisons that torture the inmates.
Funny how it leaked out by sending it off to their Canadian distributor
Sadly, that's the kind of mistake that only happens once.
What, me worry? Plenty more creative mistakes still to be made…
They’re going to increase intern pay? Surely you’re joking.
Maybe not - ordinary people have been known to sabotage fascist regimes by making "mistakes". There's also the issue that incompetent people may be promoted well beyond their abilities due to them being "loyal".
Just another data point in the 'fascists are incompetent' trend. It's pretty lucky that one bug in the human firmware is moderated by another.
Funny how this is timed with the Susie Wiles “I’m an insider trying to do good” nonsense in vanity fair. That coont has been instrumental in so much bad stuff since Reagan…
Looks to me like it’s all damage control/pressure valve release stuff designed to distract from any real change. Because SURELY we will get some real change finally, right?? /s
I'm reminded of the Letter on Justice and Open Debate[1] that Bari Weiss signed only a few years ago, now she's spiking stories like this one on CECOT for showing the current administration in a negative light.
I also wonder if this story will get the type of leeway to stay on HN to collect the 200+ upvotes and 300+ comments of that previous example or if it will be flagged off the front page within minutes like so many other similar stories.
EDIT: No idea how long this post actually lasted, but checking in an hour later to see this has been flagged completely off the first 10 pages of HN despite getting close to that 200 point total.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23759283
Weiss got her start screaming about how various college professors should be fired. There has never once been a moment in her career where she seriously cared about open debate.
Indeed. Weiss came up as conservative troll and engagement farmer, and was hired as such by Ellison.
Or journalistic principles.
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She was hired following the acquisition of Paramount to do things exactly like this. She's not a journalist.
Literally not a journalist. She went from the opinion pages to writing opinion on substack. And for "some reason" was put in charge of a news organization.
She has worked as a staff editor in newsrooms, most notably at Tablet. It’s not accurate to say her career has solely been in the opinion section.
Also, it’s not unheard of for people working on the op-ed side of the house to become editors in chief. Most notable example I can think of would be Katharine Viner at the Guardian. And in the reverse, James Bennet went from being editor in chief at the Atlantic to running the op-ed page at the NYT.
She's never been a reporter, and even in the kindest interpretation of her actions, it's starting to show.
Ok, so with charity she's a marginally qualified 150 million dollar aquihire? In journalism?
Are you actually arguing that she was a qualified choice for this role at CBS?
You’d have to know the qualifying criteria to know for sure.
I suspect she was hired at least in part because she would be willing to take the heat for stuff like this,
Her upward trajectory has been facilitated mainly through pleasing select silicon valley billionaires by echoing their views back to them in her ironically named The Free Press outlet, which they also helped found.
I suspect her bosses are very happy with who they hired. The chances that they now regret her are about 0%.
This really is the future of journalism. Just make content that a few deranged billionaires like and rise up and up and up and up. CBS doesn't have to care whether ordinary people like it. What matters is the asshole with billions of dollars.
I wouldn't exactly use James Bennet as a successful example here.
> most notably at Tablet
She is more or less an Israeli propaganda agent. She was hired at CBS because, after purchasing CBS from Zionist Shari Redstone, Zionist Larry Ellison and his son needed a reliable Zionist editor in chief. Weiss’ primary qualifications are her extremely pro Israeli career path.
Larry Ellison needed a woman like Weiss because he’s invested in Israel’s success. He’s both a close personal friend of Netanyahu and the number one private donor to the IDF. Netanyahu has declared US public perception of Israel as the 8th front of their war, and Ellison (with the help of Trump) is doing his part stateside.
Why we have so many powerful “Americans” exercising their power on behalf of a foreign country is the real discussion here.
Hundreds of comments and the only one speaking the truth is downvoted. Bari Weiss is unqualified and the only reason she was put into this position is to be a useful idiot for Israel.
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A similar post with comments linking to this thread just got marked as a duplicate, taking it off the front page.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361571
You can't understand technology without understanding the people behind it. I always wonder about all these non-bot people who support her: is it that they're in on the grift and everyone understands that she's just there as a wink-wink-totaly-not state censor, or do they genuinely fall for her schtick? Is there something else? I never quite get it.
A once-reasonable friend of mine genuinely thinks RJK is just some dude who tries his best, and doesn't consider him a crazy anti-vaxxer. Crazy
>is it that they're in on the grift and everyone understands that she's just there as a wink-wink-totaly-not state censor, or do they genuinely fall for her schtick?
It's both. That's one of the things that's difficult to suss out and therefore have a plan to engage. There's plausible deniability on both ends of that spectrum. Even in the high positions in the administration, there's a smattering of True Believers in amongst the grifters.
> just some dude who tries his best, and doesn't consider him a crazy anti-vaxxer
As much as it would be comforting for all dudes who’re trying their best to pretend otherwise, the two are not mutually exclusive. (No opinion on whether RFK Jr is in the intersection—I’m not in the US and couldn’t affect his actions if I tried.)
Everyone who signed that letter was either a dupe or a fraud.
You gotta give us more than that
The signatories have spent years attacking free expression. A particularly acute case is when it comes to things like advocating for the end of israeli occupation in palestine, but there are many others. Whining about BLM is a particularly common approach for Thomas Chatterton Williams.
The signatories have generally continued to complain about censoriousness from the left even while the right wing is detaining people for their speech, insisting that media personalities be fired for their speech, insisting that people (including naturalized citizens) be deported for their speech, cancelling grants because they are too "woke", and straight up passing laws banning the teaching of certain topics in secondary and postsecondary school.
Weiss herself is a participant with UATX, a expressly right wing university that has fired people for not being sufficiently critical of DEI efforts.
Weiss also has a long history of efforts to stifle the public debate that the signatories claim to support. The first thing that got her notoriety was an effort to get various professors at Columbia fired for their speech.
I think you're really off base. A quick search about what Williams has said about censorship on the right seems to undermine your one non-weiss example [1]. There were more than a hundred signatories from across a fairly wide political spectrum (and the letter itself was anti-Trump). The handful of signatories that I follow have squarely denounced right wing censoriousness - I'm open to hearing that I'm seeing a non-representative sample, but you didn't provide any useful info on that front.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/woke-right...
Notice how this article frames the entire thing as caused by the left and happily ignores the fact that what is happening under Trump is not new. Were the excesses of the left the cause of the Stop Woke Act in Florida? The right has been screaming about firing professors since God and Man at Yale was published. In my opinion, this is not anything resembling a serious accounting of the threats to speech from the right.
And you can compare this article against the entire book that he published about the left's flaws this year. On one hand we've got an article critical of the right that finds the need to smuggle criticisms of the left in constantly and on the other hand we have a complete manuscript. You tell me where Williams is focusing his attention.
In terms of the actual topic, I would be shocked if Williams approved of spiking the CECOT 60 mins story, if it is in fact politically motivated as many suspect. And I'm not particularly a "fan" of Williams or anything, though I've heard him on a couple of podcasts.
But you're also making this point about all signatories being hypocrites because you seemingly have a big bone to pick with the amount of blame Thomas Chatterton Williams portions to each side.
So, can we see him writing about how this was a bad thing?
Williams is a public intellectual. What goes on in his mind is of much less importance to public discourse than what he writes.
Let me be clear. I believe that Williams is a hypocrite and I believe that the large majority of the signatories on the harpers letter are hypocrites. I mention him specifically because he was one of the people who actually wrote a lot of its text rather than just signing it, which makes him of particular interest for this discussion.
Additional context:
> The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the men sent to El Salvador were overwhelmingly violent criminals; Pro Publica reported that the administration knew at least 197 of the men had not been convicted of crimes in the United States, and six had been convicted of violent offenses.
https://www.404media.co/archivists-posted-the-60-minutes-cec...
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This is an interesting question because it goes to show you just how hard it is to know how or why the government is using its power to deprive people of life, liberty, or property.
I wonder if we could set up a system where the government has an opportunity to share its evidence and the public gets an opportunity to scrutinize it on a case-by-case basis so they can fully understand whether their government is acting appropriately.
Just a random little thought I had...
does it matter? they were Venezuelans and they were sent to El Salvador. I know that some folks just lump all Latinos into one bucket but Venezuela and El Salvador are, in fact, not the same country.
Hmm maybe walk us through this. If they were convicted of crimes in other countries, is the idea here that they have escaped their punishment? Like thats a significant concern? Seems like a lot of prison breaks!
Or is it that perhaps they were convicted but not punished enough (for us), so we have to correct that?
Or something else? If they were convicted of a crime in another country, it suggests that justice has been doled out already, right?
Watch the video or read this report from Human Rights Watch [1].
> The Trump administration claimed that the majority of Venezuelans sent to CECOT were members of the Venezuelan organized crime group Tren de Aragua.
> Only [3.1% of the 226/252 Venezuelan prisoners in CECOT] had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense.
> Human Rights Watch reviewed documents in 58 of the 130 documented cases of people held in CECOT, and all indicated that they did not have criminal records in Venezuela or other countries in Latin America.
CECOT was already found to violate the UN’s minimum treatment of prisoners rights (aka “The Nelson Mandela Rules”) [2] by a report of the US.
Trump’s administration blatantly violates human rights.
Finally, here is a report investigating why the US can use the El Salavador prison [3].
> It has been clear from the beginning what Trump wants from El Salvador: an ally who would accept, and even imprison, deportees. Less clear has been what Bukele might want from the United States. In striking the deal with the Salvadoran president, Trump has effectively undercut the Vulcan investigation and shielded Bukele from further scrutiny, current and former U.S. officials said.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/11/12/you-have-arrived-in-he...
[2] https://www.unodc.org/documents/justice-and-prison-reform/Ne...
[3] https://www.propublica.org/article/bukele-trump-el-salvador-...
For context, this report was suppressed by CBS News' new leadership, most likely to appease the US government.
A little more context if needed (free link):
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/business/60-minutes-trump...
This, and Larry Ellison buying all news outlets in America. Things should be happening quickly enough so that it's obvious where this is all going, right?
Whoever writes the next "Inglorious Basterds" should have a lot of fun parodying Larry...
Using the torrent, you should be able to pull it down in a few minutes.
No matter what your politics are, this is a pretty dark turn for the United States.
I’d bet $40 that no conservative will agree with that, and $60 that very few conservatives will agree with that.
Corruption is not merely something someone in power enacts in their choices; it is a rot that eats out the society from the inside.
As individuals realize that nakedly appeasing the autocrat wins favor, they voluntarily corrupt themselves and others in hopes of advantage.
More and more of the society enters the grip of this force and weakens until the truly valuable things—its resources, minds, institutions—are annihilated, stolen, and displaced by a hierarchy of criminals or warlords. This is how nations sink. It’s the story of many in Africa, South America, Russia—and now it is our own.
Expanded and unbleakified:
Corruption is not just the immoral acts of an elite few; it is a parasite that hollows out society from within.
When the mainstream realizes that sycophancy toward the autocrat is rewarded, some willingly sacrifice their principles for short-term benefits, burrowing into the system like worms in an apple.
Yet, parasites cannot survive without a compliant host. To kill the infestation, we must cut off the food source: our passiveness. This begins with everyday refusals—denying the petty bribe, rejecting the convenient lie, and defending the honest colleague. By maintaining high ethical standards in our own spheres of influence, we starve the corrupt hierarchy of the dead matter it needs to grow.
We must also make the terrain uninhabitable for them. These organisms thrive in the dark, protected by silence. Therefore, we must actively expose them: documenting abuses, funding media samaritans, and organizing locally to demand transparency. When integrity becomes the standard again, the host becomes hostile to the parasite, isolating the invaders rather than letting them multiply.
Without this resistance however, the society weakens until its greatest assets—its resources, minds, and institutions—are cannibalized by a regime of criminals. This is how nations collapse. We have seen this story in Africa, South America, and Russia. This plague is now upon us. But history is not destiny. We possess the power to stop it. We only need the will to use it.
Well said.
America isn’t used to corruption. It hasn’t seen societal level rot that corruption can bring since at least WW2.
It’s a deeply damaging phenomenon.
> As individuals realize that nakedly appeasing the autocrat wins favor, they voluntarily corrupt themselves and others in hopes of advantage.
> displaced by a hierarchy of criminals or warlords
The problem is that initially it all looks straightforward and easy. Revealing even, because finally solution is not that complicated anymore. Only afterwards things turn unpredictable and violent, but then it's already irreversible.
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An all-powerful uniparty can do things like this:
Brother, you are looking for the deep state under every rock and it is out in the sunshine, smiling at you.Yeah, just look at Hungary or Slovakia how that can happen.
[flagged]
"No, you" is a bit of a lazy cop out.
I ask this kindly: you don't really see a markedly increase in corruption across your government the past year?
Not saying it wasn't corrupt and it became now, just that it increased in level and degree.
[flagged]
Name it. Name the corruption that you think has been cleaned up.
[flagged]
You’re talking about Trump who is publicly demanding certain people be prosecuted, so point 1 is wildly invalid.
Point 2 is highly debatable, and the mass cruelty of the current administration is considered by many to be worse than what it’s replacing. It’s certainly a stretch to call that corruption.
Point 3: again, with Trump you’re talking about a 79 year old man who can’t stay awake through a recorded meeting.
Point 4: there’s nothing, nothing in 21st or 20th century U.S. presidential politics compared to the vast sums of money being directed into Trump’s family pockets.
They would start to pardon criminals that conducted acts they like and fire the people that investigated those crimes. They would try to bring everybody to jail that oppose or upset them or have opposed them.
They win when challengers become too rare because others are afraid of the consequences to oppose.
What the Trump administration did regarding the Capitol storming on January 6th tells you everything you need to know. They strive for power and nothing else.
I believe you're trying to say the real oppressors were liberals and ideas like people having civil rights that were enforced were somehow oppressing others. Look at what Republicans are doing in reality right now that they're in charge in the us, they're doing all the things that you're worried about.
> As individuals realize that nakedly appeasing the autocrat wins favor, they voluntarily corrupt themselves and others in hopes of advantage.
When I pointed out that this is the work culture in most American corporations, I was told that is a feature, not a bug, because US government and most big tech at the time preached values in line with average white middle-class Californian. Now that this is no longer the case, the mindset of appeasing the leader is suddenly a problem.
The whole situation was preventable, but everyone was too high on ZIRP to notice. We could've used the good times to establish good cultural values, but we didn't. Freedom of speech and other foundations of democracy were already rotting long ago but nobody cared. We could've used the good times to allow better dialogue between different political fractions, but we didn't. At some point democrats honestly believed they would simply never lose power again, making it seem pointless to talk to republicans. Now that the money dried out, people suddenly start asking questions and talking about "muh big values".
I have zero empathy.
> When I pointed out that this is the work culture in most American corporations, I was told that is a feature, not a bug, because US government and most big tech at the time preached values in line with average white middle-class Californian.
It is a bit analogous to many of us worrying about Google and others getting so much power. The arguments were quickly dismissed with: "But these folks are responsible, don't be paranoid". The problem with this kind of thinking is, once the power balance changes, you find yourself in a situation you'd never put yourself now. You cannot make Google unlearn what they know about you. You cannot unsend the photos you privately shared on Messenger and force Meta to untrain their facial recognition models. Now all these things you considered a convenience given to you for free can be used against you, and the extend and direction of the abuse is correlated with who is in power.
I’m curious which specific problematic values do you think were being adhered to and preached in the past, that was comparable to what’s happening in CECOT, and wasn’t opposed?
It's not that it's comparable, but it's rather direct evolution of. US social contract has a huge grey area where you can get royally screwed even though you've done nothing illegal. For example, in most places in the US employees can be fired for expressing political opinions, and most people have their entire lifehoods tied to their employers. As in, saying "I think there are two genders"* was literally a fireable offense in many companies, and you'd be left without income, without medical insurance. So naturally there were a lot of topics that people simply chose not to talk about, effectively voiding freedom of speech unless you're so rich you don't need a job.
This issue was not addressed when democrats were in power. They could've passed laws that protect freedom of speech, but they chose not to, because it allowed them to get rid of problematic republicans.
Now that the machine has turned against democrats and you're not allowed to talk about certain topics important to democrats like climate change or CECOT, it's somehow a big fucking problem.
* I purposefully chose a statement that is highly controversial. It would be really cool if we could have social dialogue about controversial things in order to reach a widespread social consensus, instead of having extremist opinions boil in people.
If I'm understanding your example correctly, these types of firings are possible thanks to Right-to-work laws. Which political party introduced and continues to advocate for Right-to-work? Which has generally opposed Right-to-work and has supported workers unions, which would protect workers from arbitrary firings?
You meant at will employment? So called right to work laws are about relations of unions and non members.
Ah yes. You're right. I've mixed these terms up in my brain.
“Both sides!” guys should be taken about as seriously as Homer Simpson. Their political commentary is completely vibes based. No basis in reality.
Anybody watch Nick Shirley's tour and interviews at CECOT? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrK9nVLAqwk
I thought he did a great job.
I'd love to hear what others that have seen both think since I'll want to put aside some time to watch this one after all the holiday hustle and bustle are done.
I think it's a great model based on what Nick's tour showed.
stepping outside the (geo)politics, externalizing deportation to a third country has been attempted in the past as well [1], which ultimately did not succeed. this was also partly due to the ridiculous cost per deportee.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38275396
Ironically, this might end up being more widely watched now (Streisand). I’ve seen multiple people on my Facebook link to different sources hosting the video. People who never would’ve heard about the story are now watching it through the lens of Trump and CBS trying to kill the story.
I doubt it, around ten million people watch 60 minutes live every week. Maybe that many will hear about the cancellation, but I don't think most will then seek out the full segment online, even if it's easy to find.
Yeah, even those looking for the full segment will have trouble finding it if they are not tech savvy and highly motivated.
A relative in their 60s saw headlines about the cancellation and wasn’t able to find it until I sent them the archive.org link. They are relatively well informed and competent with technology but never go around digging for hard to find media.
I think people on HN tend to overestimate how closely people follow news and how hard they are willing to work to seek out alternative sources of information. I’m with some extended family over the holidays. They might have seen this segment had it aired - I believe it was airing after some football game - but now there’s no chance of that happening. I don’t judge them for it at all, but most of their news consumption is passive through TV or social media. I think a lot of people follow news that way. Life’s busy.
It kind of makes me understand a little better how the censorship regime in other countries is so effective despite it being so easy to hop on a VPN. Raising the barrier to entry even a little reduces the audience from 10,000,000 to a fraction of that, even with the censorship itself being public knowledge.
I didn't even know 60 Minutes is still on the air, but you better believe I watched the shit out of this segment.
But who will believe it? Or just mass report it off the platform?
I expected a piece titled "Inside CECOT" to have a part where the principal journalist actually goes there.
Don't think she could
Why not? Many journalists have already been there.
EDIT: See, ABC's Matt Rivers was /inside/. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol0dcwHCb8Q
Something I hadn't heard yet about CECOT: https://www.lemkininstitute.com/single-post/mass-grave-compl...
I found this quite interesting, but I don't understand how the articles claims we can see flesh.
And the author's Substack has 2 videos of Trump kissing and patting Bill Clinton's groin area (through pants). They are likely AI because I couldn't find anything online about how they're real besides the original photo. And if they were real, why is no one talking about it? He claims for one of the videos that it's real. So it kind of reduced the author's trustworthiness a bit.
It's worth noting that the founders of the Lemkin Institute have, between them, held multiple leadership roles in reputable academic departments devoted to the study of genocide, and have also both been on the ground during or shortly after genocides or other crimes against humanity as part of international teams tasked with figuring out what happened and how to hold perpetrators accountable. These are not some lightweight bloggers.
The US government, in particular Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio, are, by the logic of the legal power they themselves invoked, war criminals who rightly belong in the Hague.
Archive links are all good in the comments, but let's make the submission url one of the story links with context:
CBS defends pulling 60 Minutes segment about Trump deportations
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrnv3keeneo
or
‘60 Minutes’ Pulled a Segment. A Correspondent Calls It ‘Political.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/business/60-minutes-trump...
The story is exactly that you can watch it on archive.org, most people already heard that it was pulled
everybody involved is evil.
This should NOT be flagged.
The oligarchy is in full effect. This is exactly how it works, ie you scratch my back I scratch yours. Ellison kills this CBS report, he gets approval on buying WBS, or more to the point NetFlix doesn't. Same with Musk, Middle East dictators and all the others lining up for favors from Trump. Also he and his family is enriched in various ways by all the pardons he hands out.
It's nauseating, but this is where Republicans live these days. The midterms can't come soon enough.
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Evidence of bad reporting at one news agency is not evidence of bad reporting at a completely different news agency. The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate bad reporting, and vague insinuations don’t count.
No
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Pattern of… what? Misrepresenting the administration? Or immigrant (and others) detention?
On the other hand the thin-skinned fascists in the admin have a history of trying to silence the truth about them.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/cbs-news-bari-w...
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The only one being hysterical is you.
Please tell me what’s the appropriate label.
60 Minutes suddenly drops in quality when reporting on Trump? They had a fine reputation before this incident and paying Trump $16 million.
Whats the BBC got to do with CBS?
They both have B in the middle - obvious irrefutable link between them. If you can’t figure out how that makes sense, OP doesn’t have anything to say!
/s
Yes? BBC had a fine reputation too
I believe information wants to be free, and should be free, even when I don't unanimously agree with the information, so I will start by re-sharing the torrent magnet link for the video, which I am also seeding right now, and will continue to do so until at least a full month passes with zero activity:
That said, there seems to be lots of conspiracy-adjacent talk in here. Has anyone considered the impact of the previous Trump lawsuit against CBS over the Kamala Harris edits, or the Trump-BBC lawsuit, whereby CBS made a business risk decision to avoid a story that might have some individual aspects of questionable factual accuracy that could come back to bite CBS in a courtroom, like how BBC's selective edits of Trump came back to bite them? Paramount/CBS settled Trump's lawsuit over the Kamala Harris "60 Minutes" edit for $16 million in July. BBC is getting sued for $10 billion. It's not economically irrational for an organization that has already settled lawsuits for selective presentation of political information in the past to be more worried about $10b lawsuits than $16m lawsuits.If they were worried about business then Bari's email would have read differently
Not to mention that these lawsuits are completely frivolous and it just a way to bribe the president
Resisting these economic threats, these lawsuits, is something that major media needs to do, otherwise they just get compromised step by step by the wealthy oligarchs.
There are other links here as well: https://www.404media.co/archivists-posted-the-60-minutes-cec...
404media is shadowbanned from HN for nebulous reasons. The mods should really revisit this policy: they've been doing some great reporting recently.
A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote (404media.co)
so some slip through.But: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=404media.co sure has a lot of [dead]
I believe they all start out dead, and enough people have to vouch to make the article visible and commentable.
Don't forget that the mods tried to remove the reference to a16z from the title on that one.
I tried to make the title fit the guidelines and the character limit, then changed it when the community explained why it was important for A16Z to be in the title.
Why do people think we're motivated to “suppress” negative stories about A16Z? They've been criticized forever here and we've never had a problem with it. All we care about is whether a topic makes for an interesting discussion on HN.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
And I believe that the mods thinking that a16z was the least critical part of the headline such that it could be cut for space reasons is a huge concern. I'm glad that you changed your mind. But the fact that it was needed worries me and the fact that you can't understand why people were upset is worse.
There doesn't need to be an explicit effort to protect vc firms for your blind spots to shape conversation on this website away from criticizing them.
This argument amounts to an assertion that an editorial judgement about a title that differs from what you consider is most important is axiomatically evidence that we either (a) consciously make decisions to benefit VCs, or (b) unconsciously make decisions that benefit VCs. It allows no room for any other explanations, such as (c) that these actions are of no consequence to VCs, and (d) that we are just focused on our job, which is to uphold the guidelines, keep discussions curious, and avoid repetitive flamewars.
It's noticeable in this subthread that the accusations rely so much on sweeping, unfalsifiable claims and presumptions about our incentives or blind spots, and Kafkaesque logic that allows no space for simple, benign explanations.
Meanwhile, nobody seems to have examined the core assumption; that a title on an HN discussion thread has any consequence or concern for a firm like A16Z. Can anyone explain, specifically, how title changes like this on HN would benefit an outside VC firm?
To answer your literal question of "why do people think..."
For a while there was a widespread standing principle to not assume malice for actions that could be explained as a simple mistake. If only one person follows this policy, it's great. However, so many people were following this policy that it created massive incentives to disguise profit motivated malice as explainable accidents. We're in the midst of a massive backswing against this.
So, there is very little taste for patience when agents of ycombinator make mistakes that benefit a16z such as accidentally removing them from the title of a negative article, due to the billions of dollars entangling ycombinator with the reputation of a16z. This is not because it wasn't an accident- it's because any culture of patience with this will lead (and has led) to an explosion of copycat whoopsies.
> make mistakes that benefit a16z
Specifically, how does that title change make any difference to A16Z?
> Why do people think we're motivated to “suppress” negative stories about A16Z?
I think a more charitable interpretation of this kind of argument is that the money and power that entities like A16Z have make the possibility of corruption of endeavours like HN trivial.
In light of the ease in which a wealthy entity like A16Z can exert influence over an entity like HN and the track records of various A16Z adjacent/similar people doing similar things to other HN-like entities it's very natural that people are concerned about the possibility of similar things happening here.
Like it or not as an editor at HN you're in a position of power and influence and others with far greater power would certainly leverage what you have here if suited their interests.
Avoiding even the appearance of impropriety is no easy task especially in this medium and I don't envy you in taking it on, but it's an essential part of something like HN. If the users in aggregate don't trust the moderation process or the administrators then this all sort of falls apart and the interesting discussion suffers.
> money and power that entities like A16Z have make the possibility of corruption of endeavours like HN trivial
What does this mean? Why would a VC firm like this "corrupt" HN and how would they do it? And why would we allow them to do it? What would be the motivation of us moderators to allow it?
I don't believe that you got a call from Marc Andreessen to organize a moderation approach that benefits them. Instead I believe that your blind spots created moderation decisions that limited discourse. And it worries me that the reaction is to complain about kafkaesque logic.
Headlines are important. And given that HN has a policy of moderators editing headlines it is really important that mods do a very good job not distorting headlines. This means that your evaluation of the importance of each word in the headline is really important. It concerned me that in your mind the reference to a16z was the least important material in the headline when I suspect that a typical HN participant would see it as among the most important material in the headline.
The title change was consistent with the guidelines, which it’s my job to uphold. Then I changed it when the community made its feelings known.
You’ve continued with the unfalsifiable claims while avoiding the one question that matters:
How does it materially benefit an outside VC firm if the title on an HN post about one of their portfolio companies excludes their name? What is the tangible economic impact?
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This is false. Nothing was done to your account at that time, whereas rate-limiting was active on your account at least two weeks ago. Rate limiting is applied to accounts that do things like use HN for political/ideological battle, or post too many low-quality comments, both of which you've been doing. Here are some of the worst of the comments you've been posting in recent months.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46347561
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46335424
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46300618
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46272934
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148458
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45821460
The A16Z title issue was no great scandal. It was bog standard moderation, with attention and responsiveness to community sentiment and feedback. That kind of thing happens all the time.
Meanwhile, you post too many comments that break the guidelines and use HN against its intended purpose. HN is only a place people want participate because others make an effort to keep the standards up rather than dragging them down. Please do your part to make HN better not worse if you want to participate here.
[flagged]
We actively intervene to ensure posts that are negative towards YC companies are not affected by usual downweights, and give them extra prominence on the front page. That has happened multiple times this week, including yesterday. We've never considered that the policy should also apply to other investment firms.
I was gonna comment a minute before I read your edit. Thanks for the heads up.
> all of my most recent comments received one downvote
From what I can see, in the most recent handful of comments, there were some downvotes but not by moderators and not by the same community members (patterns of unfair downvotes get detected and dropped on HN). And I think at least one comment that was downvoted when you posted your edit has now received enough upvotes to be back in the positive.
Of the first two pages of comments (60), covering most of the past 3 days, only 9 have any downvotes and they're from different users. The "most recent" comments are mostly unaffected by downvotes; prior to this one, only two of the past 23 comments had any downvotes.
> including the one that just straightforwardly answers someone's question
That one was odd, and it seemed like an unfair downvote so we've reversed it. But that just one of only two of the past 23 comments that was downvoted.
But really, why do people keep coming up with these false/exaggerated claims to try to cast doubt on our integrity? (Also, in the case of this claim, users can tell if comments have been downvoted from the comment text's shade of grey.)
My own experience is that they've been solid throughout. Certainly better than many other options, at a time when the technical press has been generally disappointing.
Because they've literally been creating stories about A16Z.
I've posted about some and they just get instaflagged or hidden.
Has there been any mention of reasoning behind it?
I asked last year and was told 404 is the source of too many copycat low quality posts and they have a paywall. In the year since, a bunch of their original reporting has hit the front page and driven interesting discussions.
Just to clarify for anyone reading. 404 does not have a paywall. They have an account wall. Some articles require you to be signed into a free account to read.
For comparison, the Wall Street Journal does have a paywall but is not a banned site.
And 404 is also not banned, right?
As a noob here on HN, that's what I gathered from your previous comment:
> In the year since, a bunch of their original reporting has hit the front page
So, a year ago, before my time, 404 media was moderated in a way that seemed like a ban, but now it no longer appears to be shadowbanned, is that what I'm learning?
If a 404media article makes it to the front page, it's because enough people happened to vouch a [dead] article, which is quite unusual and involves a lot of luck (since most people don't have showdead enabled). Nothing has changed on the mod side as far as I'm aware.
Don't forget that complaining about paywalls is actually against the rules. So how did the site get that ban in the first place?
There's nothing nebulous; there's no workaround for 404media's articles.
Tell HN: Paywalls with workarounds are OK; paywall complaints are off topic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 - Sept 2015 (160 comments)
It seems to work for me? https://archive.ph/sr0sd
Maybe that's new? Either way, great to know.
[dead]
How long before Hackernews takes this one down?
It's wiped from the front page already
And it's back.
[flagged]
You should probably revisit the guidelines, as your flagging policy doesn’t align with HN guidelines:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thank you for those guidelines.
>anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity
So, porn, then? Surely there must be limits.
----
From those same guidelines:
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime
> So, porn, then? Surely there must be limits.
Believe it or not, this mod comment from 5 years ago addresses just that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23087737 (May 2020)
The, er, money quote would be this:
When we say "interesting" we mean intellectual interest, not all kinds of interest or curiosity. For example, there is social curiosity (the sort that powers celebrity gossip). There is political curiosity (wanting to know how one's side is doing against the other side). There is sexual curiosity (no comment needed). These things all have their place, but not here. On the other hand, there can also be overlap with intellectual curiosity, in which case it's fine, though the bar is higher in some cases than others.
There's a lot from @dang about how the site goal is optimizing for curiosity and what that means in practice.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The qualifier "most" is very important there. Certainly opinions can differ as to what should fall under "most" and what shouldn't. But citing that line to justify flagging a politics-related story isn't a good argument.
To be clear: I have not flagged this post
Yep - I totally got that from your original comment.
I did think to myself "I hope they're using the Richard Feynmann/MIT Model Railroad Club sense of the work "hacking" there, not the "dude in a hoodie in front of a green on black terminal" sense. HN, for me, for over a decade, has been a source of intellectual curiosity provoking links, not just software/computing related stuff.
¿Porque no los dos?
My attendances at DEF-CON have been mostly grey-hat [0]. I don't really care about downvotes just here to spread knowledge on topics I find interesting.
Thanks for the sanity/perspective.
[0] I'm in the XX documentary, and have been on stage (as have many friends), but never as an official speaker. In a former digital life, I ran a lockpicking youtubey with millions of views.
>So, porn, then? Surely there must be limits.
Pretty sure HN has discussed porn, the porn industry, sex work, sex workers, etc tons.
For example you can find in my history on posts about how porn access is being restricted that the "They have more fraud" claim is likely false and claimed in bad faith, and in fact Pornhub has been so removed from the payments industry that they now seem to have grafted themselves onto the internet gambling industry to make money, which is just awful. They have not turned to crypto payments because they just don't work, which is interesting to discuss.
But you would never see any of those discussions if you banned from the front page anything that mentioned porn.
Do you see how that works? Interesting discussion is about who is discussing, not about what is being discussed.
IMO the topic guidelines are entirely the wrong way to ensure meaningful discussion. All they have done, as clearly evidenced by the time HN tried to outright ban politics, is provide ample fodder for people to shut down discussions they were never going to participate in and contribute to anyway, and force people to have less interesting discussions about "Does this belong here", despite the guidelines themselves saying "If it's here, it belongs here"
HN also bans a lot of meta discussion which is crap, as talking about the sneaky and intransparent parts of HN, like the Orange Nametag cohort, would be interesting to the constant influx of new accounts.
I for one would also find deep dives into moderation or site meta information to be very interesting. I deal with abuse prevention in my day job, so seeing how others experience that abuse and deal with it would be not just interesting to me, but downright educational.
Meanwhile, HN is full of "I slapped an LLM into someone else's open source code" as if that is interesting at all. The entire point of vibe coding and agents etc is that anyone else could do that just as easily. So it seems "being interesting to hackers" just isn't the actual desired content.
>All [the guidelines] have done ... is provide ample fodder for people to shut down discussions they were never going to ... contribute to anyway, and force people to have less interesting discussions about "Does this belong here"
Absolutely. See /u/grey's comment above, which /u/DanG responded with saying ~"no personal attacks"~ (I don't think grey got personal, and I don't think DanG's response was appropriate/warranted).
But as DanG and you have pointed out (in response to my other comments in this thread), porn does have a place on /hn/ — I truly believe the porn industry is the major driver of consumer tech.
Respectfully submitted, and thanks for all the great discussions among ALL users, oranges/admins/®ulars.
[flagged]
Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
See the funny part about those guidelines is the part where it says "If it's on the news, it probably is off topic"
Which is funny, see, because this video wasn't on the news! How nice of CBS to ensure it didn't hit the news so we could talk about it here.
The story here isn't about immigration, it's about government censorship pressure on US media companies. Which I think fits that guideline.
> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon
State-controlled media in the US is a new phenomenon
Did I miss sarcasm here? I honestly can’t tell.
I think people might be missing the hack here, because the front story is such an ongoing political (and moral) football.
The hack is in the leak, and the sudden availability, of the video segment, across international borders, against the Weiss will (and apparently against the Ellison and Trump will), rebounding back to us in the US via the good graces of https://archive.org and via some true journalistic (or political) chutzpah.
That's what drew me to this page, to learn more about how presumed underhanded corrupt billionaire-sanctioned censorship was defeated by an innocent premature distribution.
Stand with me as I rise to sing O Canada!
There's also some other relevance to tech here, given the role of the Ellisons in all this. It's quite possible the decision to pull the episode came from them. Paramount is trying steal Warner Bros out from under Netflix and is working the Trump admin hard to prevent the deal, even supposedly by telling Trump he can decide who gets hired/fired from CNN.
Andreessen was directly involved in the rise of Bari Weiss too.
[flagged]
I hate to attack HN and especially any particular moderator. But I agree in the abstract that this is an unacceptable performance. When you have Larry Ellison's son appoint a political figure over a news organization and start axing things, that's Tech news-worthy.
And once any degree of censorship is involved by mainstream media the burden of open-ness goes up 10x in my opinion. At least I personally hadn't seen this article until today, and then the one I saw disappeared from the front page. I'm sorry but this story is more important than source code for photoshop 1.0 or whatever currently has the top slot.
I say this not because I think "Oh other people need to know this" I say this because I think "I need to know this" stuff and I almost didn't. I'm sure there are many well-read people on here, but for me this site is my main/only(?) news source.
Personally I'd recommend a post-mortem into this (exactly how many flags, by who?, is political news susceptible to getting falsely flagged and if so is there a way to rework that system? Perhaps let individual users disable "political news" on their own accounts? Can people "kill" a story by baiting a bunch of stupid comments on it to get its discussion number too high?)
I understand HN wasn't started as an attempt to make some free press democratized web 2.0 news. But in the current news climate where there president is personally doing shit like getting Jimmy Kimmel axed I think HN has had a greater role thrust upon it than mere startup news.
[I can't imagine it would be considered, but implicit in this frustration is a willingness to volunteer my own time to contribute toward fixing this issue as an engineer - be it gathering/analyzing the data or whatever form]
It's a bummer, but discussions about the intersections of politics and tech are especially important when many prominent figures in SV are inserting themselves directly into politics or are funding inherently political projects. It's clear, for many of them, their values are misaligned with many core democratic values and sometimes even human rights.
Musk and DOGE killed an estimated 600,000 people, mostly kids under 5, and the death hasn't abated yet. Tech workers helped him do it.
If you'd rather not be the kind of useful idiot who helps a megalomaniacal tech billionaire rack up the body count of an early 20th century despot, politics are unfortunately unavoidable.
* * *
Why all those articles on HN are "flagged"? And by WHOM?
I've been watching this 60min piece, and there's nothing wrong with is. It's journalism well done.
Do Trumpist minions have their ways on HN?
It's almost assuredly paid actors, the kind who brigade every single comment section no matter how piddly the outlet anytime there's a peep of pro-Palestinian, pro-abortion or whatever the culture-war generals are focusing their troops on.
Tbh HN does a _lot_ better dealing with this than pretty much anywhere. Yes HN has the flagging feature so of course it will get abused but as evidenced by this article sitting now at the top of HN, it gets addressed by moderator intervention, regularly.
It's not paid actors.
It's partisan hacks who are somewhere on the spectrum between full support of this barbarity, and finding all the other shit that's being done useful enough to them to be worth compromising their values.
The latter can be identified by 'Well I don't agree with everything this administration does, but I will throw my full support behind <one of the many wedges they are using to turn this country into a corrupt single-party autocracy>.'
(They won't push you onto the tracks because they hate you, they'll push you because it means they'll see a 0.7% drop in their expected tax rate. They are in most ways, worse than the former, because they can tell the difference between right and wrong, and still carry water for the latter, because they see personal benefit in it.)
Why do you think "paid"? These people are acting on their honestly-held ideological beliefs. Don't give them the out.
>> I've been watching this 60min piece, and there's nothing wrong with is
It's not even that good of a story IMO; leading to full-on Streisand effect when it's easier than ever to find things on the interwebs, and double-impossible to suppress them. About all this has done is prevented the 60 minutes demo from viewing a story they would have immediately forgotten, and prompted a far more dangerous to the status quo & resourceful segment to go find & view a show they never watch.
It only takes a few flags to be effective and there are definitely more than a few Trumpists on HN so theoretically yes. Could also be the likely much larger contingent of people who flag all "political" and "non-technical" content by default.
Like it or not Hacker News has never been (and will never be) a platform for free and open debate. It's designed around aggressive curation for quality over quantity and that makes it very easy to brigade by design.
> Could also be the likely much larger contingent of people who flag all "political" and "non-technical" content by default.
It could, but that'd be odd. We've seen oodles of structurally similar posts hang out on the front page unflagged before. There are even past examples of major posts criticizing the journalistic integrity of 60 Minutes. Only once the material becomes critical of the regime does it become flagged.
I upvoted the story itself, but the endless comments discussing flags on HN are a bigger nuisance than the occasional community-flagged story.
I am tempted to go over each such complaint on this page (there must be a couple dozen so far) and reply "Quiet, please! People are reading."
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As an American whose mental health struggled for a while after the election, I now thoroughly curate my media diet so that I only get "just enough" political news. So I understand your desire.
However, HN has huge sway over tech culture, for better or worse (probably worse). Many of the wealthiest and most influential fascists in America also run companies that HN users might work at or strive to work at. Probably not because they're fascists, but because they mostly care about the cool tech they use or just want a better job.
Applicants and employees of ̶I̶B̶M̶ Palantir, ̶I̶G̶ ̶F̶a̶r̶b̶e̶n̶ Tesla, and ̶K̶o̶d̶a̶k̶ Oracle should know what they're supporting. If they take the job anyway, at least we know whose side they're on.
I don't know if it's so much about making sure these people know what they're supporting but it's definitely significant that this is one of the few places where you can have a dialogue with the people who work at these companies.
That won't change anything.
Those companies are quickly becoming majority Asians and they don't care at all and never will.
And the Americans laid off by Big Tech? I suspect even some of the left-leaning ones will take a job at Palantir just to not lose their house.
There is a strong ideological lean on HN towards not necessarily the trump ethos, but more toward the technofeudalist ideal, which is currently broadly aligned with trump on many issues. It's also trumpisim in a more sophisticated hat, but it's adherents don't seem to think so.
Everyone here tries way too hard to emulate the Musks of the world as if their political beliefs were the reason those guys initially got so rich and successful.
It's even more craven and intellectually bankrupt than Trumpism, which at least has the simple honesty of "say good thing make good thing happen" and is broadly believed by people too stupid to know better.
Don't forget the very right wing fake "free speech" insistence, where speech you agree with is free and speech that criticizes your failures is "An attack".
Or the huge cohort who insist that Joe Rogan talking to another guy about how it's not that big a deal that the very existence of gay people is yet again under attack is "Two people having a calm debate of their difference in beliefs" despite that not being true.
There are tons of people on HN that would have done better to spend more time in English class learning about persuasive writing and the pillars of rhetoric and media literacy and all that "critical thinking" they claim school didn't teach them and are currently angry when people rightly call out their poorly supported arguments, and they don't actually seem to know what an "argument" even is.
It's so frustrating their faux "debate" beliefs. It's worse than a decade ago when they thought "debate" was screaming at your ideological opponents a hundred outright false claims that can't be countered in a reasonable time frame.
Nevermind that we HAD calm debate about most of this shit decades ago. But these people only believe a "debate" happened when their beliefs are validated. Otherwise it's "canceling" that thing they still scream about despite doing it all the time.
Also the idea that we should have "calm debate" about the government sending you to another country's prison without trial is insane when that was specifically one of the exact reasons the founding fathers decided to start shooting people over. Thomas Jefferson would not be calm in his rhetoric.
and unsurprisingly, this is getting downvoted, despite being extremely accurate
Marc Andreessen is a strong supporter of Trump.
Shut up or they will send you there ( by mistake for a year or two )
Lets be more accurate: none of the powerful & rich are strong supporters OF trump; they support him strongLY because of the direct pay-offs they personally gain. I think it's important to differentiate between the Andreessens and your core MAGA supporter who I actually believe he is a god, because strategies for defeating them are very different.
> none of the powerful & rich are strong supporters OF trump; they support him strongLY because of the direct pay-offs they personally gain.
A distinction without a difference.
"I stabbed you in the back because I wanted to steal your watch, not because I disliked you personally."
Nah, I genuinely believe that Andreessen believes much of what Trump believes.
Thanks for sharing. The way things are here, this will soon be censored - sorry, I meant flagged - here as well.
Attentive readers will note how often the "this will be censored" comments appear in threads that spend many hours on HN's frontpage.
I get the irony, but its a bit meaningless since we can't compare the quantity of these (yet) uncensored posts with those that have been taken down, and thus aren't visible.
More importantly, other commentors here have already admitted to flagging this entry. The way flagging exists now rewards one-sideism and partisan behaviour - all it takes is a relatively small group of discontented people to take down a story that is otherwise interesting to the vast majority of posters. A counter-flag option would balance things.
> all it takes is a relatively small group of discontented people to take down a story that is otherwise interesting to the vast majority of posters.
That's not accurate, because if a story is interesting to the vast majority of users, it will get lots of upvotes—and lots of upvotes is enough to defeat a small number of flags. In that sense, we already have the counter-flag option you're arguing for.
That's good to know, thank you for the explanation.
Stories don't always get the chance to gather the sufficient amount of up votes before being nipped in the bud by dissatisfied flaggers though, depending on the time of day. Some of them, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357887, clearly had great interest here and got a large number of upvotes that was, nonetheless, insufficient to prevent the flagging.
That's true. Then again, however, if a story is important enough to the community, it will get reposted—sometimes many times, either with the same URL or a different one. It's not so easy as people assume for flags to suppress that kind of story.
The submission you linked to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357887), however, was not that kind of story (i.e. one which the majority of users want to see on the frontpage). Rather, it was the kind of story that some users want to see on the front page, but not the majority of users*.
It's the latter class of story which is more vulnerable to flags. That's generally what we want in a flagging system, and I think most HN users would agree with that in principle (though not of course in specific cases where the story is something that one personally finds interesting).
* This is predictable from its skeleton, btw: "person X says provocative thing Y about divisive topic Z" is usually not significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...)
What was the ratio of upvotes to flags when this thread was taken down last night?
What do you mean by taken down?
One of the archive.org links to this story was flagged a few hours after taking off last night. Might’ve been this one?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361571
I assumed this thread had been axed and manually reapproved. Probably likewise for some of the other people posting inb4s.
I think they were all flagged to varying degrees. That's partly why I asked for clarification - there are so many things your question might mean that I wasn't sure which one to answer!
It’s a holiday, so I’ll just pose this as a rhetorical question to you and let the matter rest:
What’s your level of confidence that these threads aren’t getting flagged as part of a coordinated effort? Be that a lone MAGA nutter running 20 sock puppets through resnet proxies, or a paid covert influence campaign?
If there were theoretically a common cluster of accounts all repeatedly flagging political posts unfavorable to the Trump admin within a few minutes of each other, do you currently have the tooling in place to see that happen?
I certainly don’t speak for everyone on HN, but I think the allegations of censorship here have more to do with the specter of bad actors abusing the flag system to limit the reach of certain posts, rather than you or anyone else affiliated with Big Ycombinator (TM) putting your thumb directly on the scale.
The accounts that flag these stories are almost always established accounts, so I'm not too worried about them being sockpuppets or paid influencers.
From everything we've seen, flags on political stories are a coalition between (1) users who don't want to see (most) political stories on HN, and (2) users who don't like the politics of a particular story they are flagging. In other words, users who care about the quality of the site, and users who care about a political struggle.
This dynamic shows up on all the main political topics.
There are some accounts that abuse flags in the following sense: they only ever flag political stories, and their flags are always aligned with the same political position. When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights.
This, so far, seems sufficient to me. If we start to see indications that it's not sufficient, we'll take more action.
I know there are many users (actually a small-but-vocal minority of users) who complain that flags are being abused to suppress political stories. What these complainants never seem to take into account is that we want most political stories to be flagged on HN, for a critical reason: if they weren't, then HN would turn into a current-affairs site, and that would not be HN at all.
From the point of view of HN fulfilling its mandate (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), the status quo around flagging is not so awful—it is within (let's say) a standard deviation of the desired state: most (though not all) political stories either fail to make the frontpage or get flagged off the frontpage.
That's the desired outcome, not because such stories are unimportant—often they're far more important than anything that does stay on the frontpage—but because HN is trying to be a particular kind of site. Food is more important than toys, but that doesn't mean there's no place for toy stores, or that toy stores should dedicate more shelf space to food. It doesn't mean that toy stores are suppressing food! or that toy store proprietors don't care about food or don't think people should have any.
When we become aware of a political story that is being flagged off the frontpage even though it fits HN's criteria for being on-topic (e.g.: contains significant new information, has some overlap with intellectual curiosity, has a chance of a substantive discussion, and there haven't been too many political stories on HN recently), then we turn off flags. This is the best strategy I know, so far, for balancing the frontpage according to HN's mandate.
If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but any HN user) want us to change how this works, you'd need an argument that engages with why we don't want most political stories on HN's frontpage. That is, your argument would need to proceed from what kind of website HN is trying to be, and trying not to be. That's the fundamental point.
Instead, most arguments I hear are concerned with the behavior of flaggers, whether they're "politically motivated" (i.e. are against the political causes that someone personally identifies with), whether they are "unfairly suppressing discussion" or not, and so on. None of this engages with the fundamental point. I don't want to say we "don't care about any of that as long as the overall outcome is achieved", but I do think (1) it's secondary, and (2) we would be foolish to make changes that made HN do worse by its mandate. I'm only interested in changes that make HN better for its intended purpose.
After many discussions with users making such objections [1], I get the feeling that they have a mistaken idea of what principles HN operates by, or think it should operate by different principles. The principle they seem to favor is that submissions should simply be ranked according to upvotes. The stories that get the most upvotes are the ones that people care most about, and those should be the ones on the frontpage. Anything else is unfair — is censorship, putting a thumb on the scale, and so on.
There are a ton of reasons why HN doesn't work this way and indeed is designed not to. The most important is simply that if it did, it would be a different site. The frontpage would consist of the hottest and most sensational/indignant topics, and yes, plenty more would be political. But it wouldn't be HN. We're optimizing for something else entirely, and there's no way that this kind of site can work by upvotes alone. [2]
Flagging on HN is part of this optimization effort, so if you want to change how flags work, you'd need to show how it would move the site closer to this optimum—the goal we have, rather than some other goal that we don't have. HN is far from that optimum, so there is room for improvement. But we can't optimize for two things.
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[1] I had a long, unfortunately unsuccessful, exchange with a user about this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46367653
[2] If anyone wants to understand this better, here are some entrypoints to past explanations:
We're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
HN can't operate by upvotes alone - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
HN is not a current affairs site - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The job of moderation is to jig the system out of its failure modes - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I think part of what makes this site special (on the modern web at least) is that the moderators like yourself think thoroughly and deeply about all of this. It’s pretty awesome y’all do that.
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How is this emotionally driven? It seemed like a dispassionate presentation of factual material to me.
Of course, no presentation of facts is without bias of some sort (if only via their choice of which facts to present), so don't ever stop thinking critically. But flagging/censoring any presentation of facts (even biased) never helps, regardless of your viewpoint. If you disagree, write or promote a thoughtful take that explains why.
I'm politically very conservative, and I'm super grateful for this. The intense political polarization in the US tends to allow party-line adherence on either side to substitute for accountability to the truth, and that is a disaster regardless of which side is currently in power. Whatever side you're on, please have the guts to hold your side's leaders accountable to the truth, not just the opposite side's leaders. We will all suffer if just one side fails to do that.
How exactly is reporting on CECOT hysteria?
I guess you have no problem with erosion of liberal freedoms as long as you’re not affected.
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The point being, it's not hysteria if it's just true. What's going on is bad thing are happening, and some people would rather force themselves to be delusional than acknowledge reality.
But the reality doesn't change, it's still there.
I could say the same things about folks like you being delusional, and I do. Things are fine. They’re better than fine.
Sorry that you feel so hysterical about them all the time.
You could say that, because anyone can say anything, but you'd just be wrong.
Obviously, "fine" is subjective. Serial killers are just fine with eating Cheez-its out of a bowl crafted from a human skull.
But when the topmost officials are routinely doing very illegal things, we have at least some metric - they're illegal. When they just gloss over the illegal things they're doing, that's bad.
People are really missing the broader context of CECOT and the trump administration as a whole. Who cares if a few hundred not-criminals get tortured overseas? That's a statistical drop in the bucket.
And it is, but the broader implication is what matters. The implication that due process is merely a suggestion, the implication that this administration does not give even a single fuck about the american people, the implication that suffering is a price this administration is willing to pay for a prize they cannot quantify.
Whether these things are happening or not is, again, not up for debate. The debate shifts to apathy. Do you care about America or it's citizenry? Or, in a pursuit of correctness, are you willing to burn it all down?
Such foolishness, selfishness, and naivety is only observed in very young children. Those with developed brains under the cost of actions, and their lasting effects.
> Whether these things are happening or not is, again, not up for debate.
Of course it is. And when, in a few years, everything is fine, the sky hasn’t fallen, and in fact we’re doing better — you’ll just be shrieking about whatever the next thing is you’ve been told to be upset about.
> Those with developed brains under the cost of actions, and their lasting effects.
Is this the reddit-tier self-congratulatory slop that passes as an argument in your circles?
Well you ignored my entire argument, so me implying you're stupid worked out, didn't it?
To reiterate my argument, which you have reinforced: the question is NOT are these things happening, because they just are. So we won't debate it.
The question is what are the lasting effects. Which you actually alluded to right here:
"And when, in a few years, everything is fine, the sky hasn’t fallen, and in fact we’re doing better — you’ll just be shrieking"
See, so you DO understand that these things are happening. Where we disagree is the lasting effects, the implications.
You believe our president fucking the American people up the ass doesn't matter, or is secretly a good thing. As I've said, apathy, or naivity - the sight of a goal with no understanding of its cost or even it's gain.
I can become the richest person on Earth by killing everyone else. But what value did I create? None, I only destroyed value. That's the separation between a goal and it's cost and it's path.
You're probably thinking "well I know that, even a child understands that", but evidently you don't, or the cognitive dissonance is so strong you're willing to override everything you've ever known in pursuit of correctness.
Even if you're right, at what cost does it come? What will the world be worth when law no longer matters, when we have a monarch? Even if you like the monarch, will serfdom make you happy?
This is not me being melodramatic. As we've both already established, laws are being broken, and due process is being thrown out. A few broken eggs, no?
But it's not about the broken eggs and it never has been. Those are a canary. The broken eggs get useful idiots like yourself to advocate against your own best interests. To advocate that it's okay to break the rules, so long as you win. But what you're really saying when you say that is that you plan on winning forever. Very bold, no? Very naive, no?
You're delusional if you think this is an apolitical take.
I strongly disagree with your assessment. Are you unhappy that it's discussing how the wealthy people are getting control of the us? Please make dispassionate arguments to support your views.
That's a dumb take. Burying your head in the sand won't change reality.
If you cared to even watch the content you flagged, you'd have seen one of the former prisoners was a young college student with no criminal ties. I'm from south America and also went to college in the US. It could've been me.
Note that the accused TdA member claimed to be a college student in Venezuela. He was not enrolled in any US school.
Not saying he deserved to be deported to a third country, just that there's nothing publicly available that substantiates his side of the story. Part of not burying one's head in the sand is acknowledging when someone might not be the most reliable narrator.
Could you tell us your position on CECOT? Do you believe El Salvador has "made a case for it?"
How is that germane to this discussion? I already made it clear I didn't think the Venezuelan migrant in the segment should have been deported to a third country under those conditions.
This feels like an attempt at a setup instead of an actual discussion of the thread's subject. That's especially glaring since you went trolling through my post history, a signature of Reddit users looking for a 'gotcha' moment more than HN users engaged in dialogue.
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This is a factual discussion of the president sending undesirables to a concentration camp in a foreign country. It's certainly not hysterical.
If this is emotional slop to you and you feel the need to complain about it, maybe you SHOULD be on r/Conservative or Xitter where you will find lots of likeminded people saying that this stuff is no big deal. Ironic.
They may not be completely objective, but you're probably not either. We'll all do best to listen to opposing points of view (especially those that are directly critical of our side) as they will likely have truth in them that our side doesn't.
It's off-topic, per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This submission is literally a TV news broadcast.
There are lots of other places on the internet where this is on-topic, I wish people would have their debates there instead.
Since it was censored in some significant parts of the world, including Silicon Valley, it could arguably be on-topic.
Strong disagree.
Gay porn is censored in a lot of Muslim countries, that doesn't make it on-topic for HN.
Generally, porn isn't included in "anything that good hackers would find interesting". Censored news arguably is.
Lots of hackers find porn very interesting. In fact, my first "real job" as a hacker was for a company with ties to the 1-900 industry that had decided to expand out onto the internet (not just to sell porn). Stories about porn would be interesting, submissions of nothing but pornography itself ("because it's censored!") are not.
I would be more sympathetic to the argument that this is relevant if the submission was an article about media censorship, or CBS's audience or leadership, and how said censorship, audience, or leadership relates to technology or emerging trends in media.
But this is literally just a controversial TV news broadcast, that people of one political persuasion say was "censored" and people of another political persuasion say was held off the air "temporarily" until it met network fact-checking standards. That sort of political bickering is most uninteresting, and is most definitely not why I've been reading HN for the past few decades.
Hackers generally appreciate links to hard facts and analysis that are not available through popular channels.
This seems similar to the "Is Github Down?" submission problem, where the submitter simply links to github.com.
That's a poor submission, because by the time most people click on it, Github will no longer be down.
There might be an interesting discussion to be had about outages at Github, but the better submission would be an article or blog post about the outage, not just a link to the site and a three-word title.
If someone wants to write an article or blog post about this news broadcast, which links to "hard facts and analysis not available through popular channels," that seems like it might be a worthwhile submission. But just a link to the broadcast by itself is not leading to interesting or on-topic conversation—the top comment right now is an ad hominem attack against Larry Ellison, without any supporting facts or analysis that he had anything to do with this story at all.
The HN guidelines don't mention a submission's suitability for discussion, only comments.
The very first subheading is entitled "What to Submit." I quoted it in my initial reply as rationale for why the people flagging this submission as off-topic were justified.
"On-topic" and "suitable for discussion" are partly overlapping sets.
That's why the Submissions guideline section addresses being on-topic but not suitability for discussion.
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The answer to this question is always that enough people find it interesting. If you don't find it interesting, then please refrain from posting questions like that.
Because this is a very public example of the high level attempted censorship of us news media by people who support the current government. Disastrously, most of the major us media outlets have been bought by wealthy oligarchs who are politically aligned with the president and there's an active process of censorship.
It's actually true that at CBS News Bari Weiss was installed as a political minder to make sure that reporters don't do anything conservatives don't like.
This is also relevant because plenty of these would be censors are wealthy silicon valley conservatives.
> It's actually true that at CBS News Bari Weiss was installed as a political minder to make sure that reporters don't do anything conservatives don't like.
Are you able to provide any proof to back up that outrageous claim ?
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We are not the world police
I wonder if we'll get another Team America World Police movie after the coming invasion of Venezuela
Certainly not. Police aren't supposed to help the criminals
The US govt seems to be working on that.
> But the overarching culprit here is the Venezuelan regime.
If you truly believed this why not also try to help the regime's victims rather than persecute them more?
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The "existential threat to Russia's security interests" is a bit of a Russian propaganda thing. No one was out to attack Russia. They have the world's largest nuclear arsenal. Ukraine was peaceful, hadn't joined NATO and wasn't formally planning to.
I think it's more the "Russian Empire grew by about 50 sq km per day over 400 years" thing and they are behaving now as in the past. Times change though. Empires are a bit nineteenth century.
A citizen of the west saying what you just said is analogous to a Soviet citizen saying:
The "existential threat to the USA's security interests" is a bit of an American propaganda thing. No one was out to attack the USA. They have the world's largest nuclear arsenal. Cuba was peaceful, hadn't joined the Warsaw Pact and wasn't formally planning to.
regarding the Cuban missile crisis. The only difference is that Cuba was more than twice the distance to DC that NATO nuclear warheads are from Moscow and nuclear missiles travelled much slower in the 1960s than they do today. You are welcome to have your perspective, just remember that your perspective is shaped by a media landscape that is just as partisan, just as biased, and just as shaped by propaganda as Russian perspectives are.
Further, consider that NATO's 2008 Bucharest declaration stated Ukraine would become a member. It's not like Russian concerns about Ukraine NATO membership came to them in a fever dream, these were concerns rooted in real, credible, public diplomatic discussions.
It is frustrating that Western audiences accept framings about US security interests that they dismiss as propaganda when applied to adversaries. It's a double standard that betrays a lack of principled willingness to apply "defense" philosophy equally and impartially. If your application of principles isn't impartial, that's not principled reasoning, that's just cheer-leading for your own team.
Of course, this isn't to deny that Russia was still wrong to invade Ukraine, or that the Russian military's actions are most accurately described as an invasion. Like I said before, two wrongs do not make a right. It doesn't matter whether Russia or the US refers to their military activity as "special military operations" rather than an invasion, it doesn't matter whether or not they have cited legitimate security interests before starting the invasion, invading another sovereign country, "firing the first shot", is a clear violation of the non-aggression principle.
As this relates back to the original discussion, I'd further add that even if you don't care about principled consistency whatsoever, the US/NATO (essentially the same thing, NATO without US troops and ISR capabilities is mostly bureaucrats disseminating .pptx files in Brussels) track record on regime change (Iraq, Libya, etc.) doesn't inspire confidence that "taking down" the Venezuelan government would even be likely to produce good outcomes. Principled reasoning, consequentialist reasoning: the logical conclusion is the same: the US should not invade Venezuela for regime change.
I admit to bias in that I don't see aggressive dictatorships and peaceful democracies as equivalent. The Cuban missiles were a problem because of that in a way that Ukraine being democratic isn't.
Ironically the Russian Federation is probably creating much more of an existential threat against itself by invading Ukraine. Before it was doing fine, now a good part of the globe opposes it and the economic sanctions and loss or Russian lives may cause it some issues.
This comes down to realism versus wishful thinking. In the real world, force is used to resolve geopolitical problems - as we’re seeing in Venezuela now and saw previously in Iraq, Serbia, Grenada and countless other countries with US. The alternative is pretending that every country can act however it wants without repercussions. Ukraine deliberately instigated conflict with hope that Russia does not react militarily instead of playing both sides like Kazakhstan, etc.
On no one was out to attack Russia - that's probably true today but Ukraine and broader Eastern Europe realignment is more of 50-100 years project and nobody knows what happens in 20-30 years. US is on a brink of invading Venezuela and blockade is already borderline act of war (that was casus belly for US declaring war on Germany in WW1) so it's not like NATO/US are some peaceful paradise.
And on “not formally planning to”: Ukraine literally wrote its intention to join NATO into its constitution. That doesn’t get more formal than that.
The NATO thing is justification that even Russia has not applied consistently. Putin is on record saying that Ukraine is part of the Russian sphere of influence, which means, according to him, they get to install their crony of choice. If NATO was their real concern, they could withdraw now in exchange for promises not to join NATO, but they also refuse to give up territory they've occupied or to allow any security guarantees from the west, all but setting up the next stage of their invasion.
> The US has to stop. The US is not the world's policeman, and the US had no legitimate right to declare itself such.
The US has the largest military on the planet, and the (relative) peace of the last 80 years is largely based on a credible threat of our willingness to use it. That power can be used for good; at the moment, we are simply not choosing to do so.
Was dropping two atomic bombs on civilian populations good? Was the US's role in the Korean war good? Was the US's intervention in the Chinese civil war good? Was the US's massacre of Puerto Rican freedom fighters, nationalists, and independence-seeking rebels during the Jayuya uprising good? Was the US's invasion of Vietnam good? Was the US's covert military operations in Laos using the paramilitary arm of the CIA good? Was the US's overthrow of the legitimately elected leader of Iran to install a US puppet good? Was the US's actions to destabilize a laundry list of Latin American countries to seize control of raw materials and commodity production and place it under American corporations good? Was the US's invasion of the Dominican Republic to quell mass democratic uprisings against a military coup that seized control from a democratically elected leader good? Were the US secret bombing campaigns against Laos and Cambodia good? Was the US invasion of Grenada good? Were the US's attacks against Iranian-owned offshore oil drilling platforms good? Was the US occupation of Panama good? Was the US invasion of Iraq good? Was the US bombing of Serbia good? Was the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan good? How about the drone strikes against civilian weddings - good? How about illegal humans-rights-violating extrajudicial rendition, detention, and torture programs, good?
Is this all "peace"? Is intentional mass murder of civilians "good" when we do it? Is Trump the first president to abuse US military capabilities in the last 80 years, or are you being selective and partisan in your recollection of one of the world's most prolific purveyors of incomprehensible violence against civilians, interference in the democratic processes of other nations, and violators of human rights in the last century?
We're getting far off track from the important point here though, which is that the US should not invade Venezuela, just as Russia should not have invaded Ukraine (the latter being a point of comparison for the former, not the subject of the conversation).
The answer to your question "are these last 80 years really peaceful?" is yes, in context. Look at the horror of the world wars, or the preceding ~1000 years of barbarity and wide-scale religious wars. The US does not always use its power wisely, but the alternative is to cede that power to someone else: nature abhors a power vacuum.
Modern anti-vaccine nuts have spent so long living without measles that they've forgotten the good that vaccines do and take their good health for granted. Anti-US-power nuts have lived in a world largely without large-scale conflicts, held in place by our NATO allies and the credible threat of force, and you've forgotten what a world without that stabilizing effect looks like. Spoiler: it looks like the 30 year war but with nukes.
I'm not "Anti-US-power", I'm anti-genocide, anti-terrorism, anti-war-crime, anti-torture, anti-invading-sovereign-nations, and pro-democracy. It's not my fault that the US has systemically made deliberate attacks against civilians, war crimes, rampant human rights abuses, invasions of sovereign nations, and overthrowing of democratically elected leaders the basis for US foreign policy and military doctrine for the last century or so.
When you ask me to look at the horror of the world wars, does that include the horror of the only country to ever use atomic weapons in conflict deliberately dropping them on cities they knew were full of civilians? If that's what the American version of "peace" looks like, I'm not interested in the American version of "peace". The Soviet Union never deliberately nuked New York. China never deliberately nuked Taipei. North Korea never deliberately nuked Seoul. Iran never deliberately nuked Jerusalem.
You propose a hypothetical future where you guess that a world without US "stability" involves nuclear weapons, while ignoring the fact that the world with US "stability" already involved them. History speaks louder than hypothesis.
There has never been a time in history devoid of crime, torture, genocide, and authoritarianism. But the last 80 years have seen those things at a low ebb in favor of democracy and peace.
Please tell me what the last 80 years would have looked like with an isolationist US, weak or no NATO, and an unimpeded ascent of dictatorial regimes. Answer: even more of all those things you purport to hate.
The US is the worst superpower, except for all the other ones. The choice is not between good and evil, it's between evil and less evil. (Just like presidential elections.) Don't be naive and empower the greater evil just because you're displeased with the lesser.
I'm not saying you should stop pressuring the US to act morally, but asking it to leave a power vacuum is dangerous.
Edit: typo
Is saying "The US should not invade Venezuela" asking the US to leave a power vacuum? Because that's been the only assertion I've made in this entire conversation about what the US should do, as opposed to what it has already done.
Imagine thinking that "isolationist" means not repeatedly deposing other countries' governments.
"Isolationist" means the US abandoning NATO and our allies, which is what the current "America First" movement supports, and is exactly what Russia and China want.
But Putin himself didn't see that promise as binding and relevant. He publicly stated that Ukraines relationship with NATO was solely a thing between NATO and Ukraine and none of Russias business. Only later had this always been different. What's next? Let's revive the treaty of Westphalia?
Plus, any treaty takes bits of the sovereignty of a nation and limits the will of the voter. See how the US never ratified UNCLOS. But a pinky swear by Baker should limit the US forever? The idea that those seasoned soviet diplomats got somehow hoodwinked is also a bit silly.
Are we only accepting the public declarations of Russian leadership as credible when we like and agree with them, or are we being selective and ignoring the things they say that don't match the boogeyman in our head?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/lavrov-offers-...
Notice how they offer to put it in writing, to reduce the room for ambiguity and misunderstanding that the west disingenuously exploited when doing diplomacy with Gorbachev?
We're getting far off track from the important point here though, which is that the US should not invade Venezuela, just as Russia should not have invaded Ukraine (the latter being a point of comparison for the former, not the subject of the conversation).
When the west negotiated with Gorbachev the Warshaw Pact was still existing. Everybody had big problems on their hand and nobody thought about NATO membership of nations that still were part of the Pact.
It is not about agreeing/disagreeing. If you publicly cancel a claim you no longer have it.
But just listen to what local Russian politicians/media tell their people and what Russians think. They are very comfortable with their imperial/colonial agenda and all these discussions/arguments we are having are primarily for western consumption. Read the propagandist narratives that Russia put out for the winter war or Hitler with the Sudeten Germans. You could just change the names and many pamphlets would fit right in current Russian propaganda.
Russia will always say everything and let people in the west sift through it to find things that fit the various agendas. In the end Russia will have more than it did before like in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Donbas and the invasion they are running right now.
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The report did not say they were all non-violent criminals. It explicitly said some of them were violent criminals.
And some of them are nonviolent legal immigrants.
“propaganda both ways”
Yuuuuuuup sure is no reason this is happening on archive.org and torrent.
Nooooooo reason the story was Epstein Filed.
No reason at all…
Why don't we round up every single person in America then? Many are violent criminals afterall! /s
The lack of due process is what's at issue here.
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What part of your statement justifies the US sending unconvicted, non violent, non-El Salvadorians to CECOT?
We can pretty much eliminate rape and sexual assault in the US by locking up every single man.
You can lock up all the rapists with the same result and it would be much cheaper.
Takes too long and too much effort to figure out which men are rapists and which aren't. Time to forget about due process and just assume they'e all the "worst of the worst".
If you're interested in the ancient Maya, El Salvador doesn't come close to Guatemala or Mexico (followed by Belize and Honduras). These are also wonderful places to visit, IMHO.
On my recent trip we also visited Honduras. It was an amazing experience.
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It's actually a far less effective enforcement scheme than even Obama used both in absolute numbers and in priority.
The Trump admin is stuffing the processing queue (which is normally overwhelmed with high-priority cases) with thousands of low-priority cases, which actually has the effect of keeping dangerous people (always been high-priority) in the country longer.
Just what you'd expect from a totally braindead manager. Looks great if you're a malicious moron though!
Targeting "innocent" people is the point. It makes sure that nobody wants to come in.
>which actually has the effect of keeping dangerous people (always been high-priority) in the country longer.
I agree. The processing should be much faster. The detentions are so stupid, just get them on a plane.
> targeting innocent people is the point
> the processing should be much faster
And what do you call it if you slow down the processing, fill it with innocent people, and also get yourself bogged down in thousands of extremely costly (time, money, and focus) civil rights lawsuits?
Answer: a very stupid policy.
Why did you remove the quotes around the word "innocent" that implied sarcasm? You can't quote things and modify the contents.
In our country, someone who hasn't been convicted or otherwise adjudicated of a crime is called innocent. There are thousands of innocent people being deported.
Perhaps these people committed crimes or administrative violations, perhaps not, but until they've been determined as such, they're correctly called innocent with no quotes.
GP is speaking specifically about that subset of people when they use the word innocent.
>In our country, someone who hasn't been convicted or otherwise adjudicated of a crime is called innocent.
Total nonsense. This only applies to the state. Individuals are totally free to believe that a person not convicted of a crime or even proclaimed innocent by the state, is in fact not innocent.
If your legalistic fiction of innocence was correct, then individuals would have to believe that the law is the infallible representation of morality, which is an abhorrent claim. What I meant by the quotes around innocent is that the state has not yet deemed them criminal, but I disagree with the state on that assessment.
You disagree in a “none of us are innocent” kind of way?
I struggle to see how you might know so much about these people - whose names we don’t even know - that you can have an opinion about their innocence.
No need to respond if you don’t think you need information to form an opinion. I will assume that.
Is deportation a state action or no?
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I just cannot imagine how gobsmackingly dumb one has to be to consciously advocate for a government unrestrained by laws.
Just true mud-farmer level intellect.
I am sorry, but "you are dumb" is not an argument. I just do not care about the law at all+. Far too often have I seen justice abused in the name of the law. Any appeal to some supposed legality just rings entirely hollow.
Either the government acts justly and I support their actions or it acts unjustly and I will oppose that action. Whatever some piece of paper says or does not say I do not mind.
+ Of course I care about it in so far I have to understand how getting into conflict with the prevalent interpretation of it will have consequence for me or my family or my friends. I pay my taxes, after all.
Yeah, this is the opinion of a very stupid person. Have a good day :)
> There are thousands of innocent people being deported.
Right, the only crime they committed was entering and remaining in the country illegally. And now they’re facing deportation by this unjust administration.
Right leaning Cato Institute’s report states that many had entered legally and had no criminal records in US or in their home countries.
In fact, some were granted asylum.
A VISA overstay is entering legally. Most deportations per year have always been because of overstay, IDK if that is true this year.
The Cato article says specifically that nearly half the people they were able to get in touch with didn’t seem to enter illegally OR otherwise violate their immigration status
If your claim is that American citizens are being deported - say that. Don’t hide behind a source you would never use with a vague non-cited claim.
If you think this is an issue you should easily be able to find dozens of cases.
Huh? Do you think the possible legal statuses of people in the US is either “here illegally” or “US citizen?”
My claim is quite clear: legal immigrants who have not committed any crime or administrative violations have 1) been deported, 2) without due process, and 3) to a foreign torture camp.
Any ONE of those elements is illegal with regard to legal immigrants, and items 2 and 3 are illegal even with regard solely to illegal immigrants.
Btw this is not including people whose TPS was canceled and were “made illegal” overnight, of which there are hundreds of thousands now.
https://www.cato.org/blog/50-venezuelans-imprisoned-el-salva...
There are plenty of people the administration is trying to deport who neither entered nor remained in the country illegally.
For example, Rumeysa Ozturk who was arrested for engaging in 1st Amendment protected speech and put into deportation proceedings despite entering the country legally, staying in the country legally, and breaking none of our country's laws.
Do you think that such a deportation would make the US more or less appealing for immigration? After all, every immigrant has to suspect that they might become a target of such an enforcement action as well.
Of course it would make the US less appealing, which means the immigrants with the most optionality of where to go (like researchers, engineers, and high value contributors in general) are disproportionately likely to seek other destinations.
It would have the least deterrent force on those who are already criminal and otherwise lawless or desperate.
Back to your claim about this being an "effective" immigration policy: no it's not.
I think it is pretty dishonest how you are asserting that I am making arguments, which I never made.
>which means the immigrants with the most optionality of where to go (like researchers, engineers, and high value contributors in general) are disproportionately likely to seek other destinations.
>It would have the least deterrent force on those who are already criminal and otherwise lawless or desperate.
Completely agree. But I want the "researchers, engineers, and high value contributors" even less than the rest. Those groups are actually harder to remove, they often have institutional support in the form of corporations and other associations and might feasibly be positive fiscal contributors. With "the rest" the argument for deportation is far simpler and has far more support in the population. Also my labor competes with the "researchers, engineers, and high value contributors", while "the rest" only depresses the wages of the proletariat who now have to compete with black market labor.
Huh? Your original comment was stating that the Trump admin has demonstrated what an effective immigration policy looks like.
As for the rest of your comment: lol, lmao even
As mentioned in the other thread: mud-farmer zero sum thinking.
Notably, deporting US citizens would also make the US less appealing for immigration. Would you agree with that? Since fewer people would want to travel to a country where even its own citizens are not safe living there.
Considering your other arguments above, I assume you are also volunteering to be one of the people deported from the EU for the sake of making it less appealing for immigration?
I am sure that my vitriol against immigration more than makes up for me (having no "immigration background" at all) continuing to stay in the EU :P
Sure, if you can think of better deterrents for migration and better ways to deport more people, then those should be tried as well.
Right now I think these measures are extremely effective, especially at deterrence and I do not see what your arguments against this being an effective deterrence really is. One good step from the legislative would be removing the legal basis for the civil rights lawsuits, so they can be thrown out immediately.
> One good step from the legislative would be removing the legal basis for the civil rights lawsuits, so they can be thrown out immediately.
You mean the Constitution's 5th Amendment? No thank you, I'll keep that one around.
> Sure, if you can think of better deterrents for migration and better ways to deport more people, then those should be tried as well.
A little known fact is that the Constitution is actually meant to make life difficult for the government. It is not up to the rest of us to come up with Constitutionally valid alternatives to the administration's preferred course of action. That's their job.
As a European I am not particularly invested in how the US legal system wants to protect non-citizens "rights". I just hope that the EU learns how effective immigration deterrence looks and can make the appropriate legal changes, here in Europe we do not have attachments to centuries old legal concepts, so I think this issue just does not appear here.
One idea which should be explored, both in the US and the EU, is that all lawsuits against immigration decisions have to be paid, either ongoing or up front, by the person who would be affected by the immigration enforcement.
> As a European I am not particularly invested in how the US legal system wants to protect non-citizens "rights".
Given that the topic is US immigration policy it sure seems like it is relevant.
I'd advise finding his real identity and torturing and abusing him if he is found anywhere. We must support people in how they wish to be treated and abusing him physically with disregard to the law is in accordance with his own wish.
Post your identifications so I can tip the relevant authorities in all countries other than yours to deport or jail you on sight. I wish to help you achieve your goals so I hope you post the details. If you don't then it is safe to assume youare a spy and terrorist and should be executed on spot. Don't cite pointless legal bullshit, you dont believe in that crap.
Surprised to see that you are unaware of the literal shit ton of rich immigrants in the US. A majority of them escaping their home countries after robbing and destroying them. This is so common that it’s an easy and repetitive plot in 2nd/3rd tier action/drama series.
And that the US populous not only despises these people, but people from both sides of the political spectrum actually want the opposite types as immigrants.
You heard of outlawing? It works so well. People immediately stop doing things that are outlawed.
(You are talking about deterring from legal immigration as you have explained in a sibling comment as well, and I am recommending outlawing legal immigration)
I am not against immigration. Though I am not for illegal immigration, nor do I see the need to spend so much money and energy on deportations, while destroying innocent lives, where a standard border many countries maintain every day would suffice.
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The difference is the show's audience and its perceived weight and impact. I, a millennial, will watch stuff on youtube and already know about what's happening. That's not relevant. This is about the boomer generation who watches sixy minutes and what they see and perceive.
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I don't see a rebuttal to his point that you are okay with people getting put into secret prisons as long as you're not inconvenienced. Are you just complaining that you were called out?
I think most people come to HN assuming folks are discussing their viewpoints in good faith with both an honesty of thought and the willingness to listen to opposing viewpoints. You've shown neither.
It’s saved so over 15,000 lives and protected the human rights of millions of Salvadorans. Truly a great accomplishment.
I’m excited to see what positive coverage CBS has of this great development in human rights in El Salvador.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5:
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Agreed. 15,000 el Salvadorans have not been subjected to arbitrary execution. A triumph of the rule of law.
I don't know enough about El Salvador's politics to know whether the mass imprisoning brought down the gang murders and improved stuff on the street, but why, once you've got people trapped and unable to do harm, can't you go back through them using officials you audit for gang influence or whatever and have individual trials? Instead, they did a farcical hundred-person-at-a-time show trial for the people they imprisoned, so who knows what portion were guilty. What it makes clear to me is that there's no interest here in identifying the innocent or guilty, but plenty of interest in keeping the undistinguished mix caged up like dogs in a kennel for the rest of their lives. What excuses do you make for that?
What's saved that? The torture camp? You know bukele _is associated with_ MS13
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How about caring for both? How about that as an idea? It’s impossible for you to accept that you can arrest and jail all those people to protect the lives of regular citizens but also not torture them while they are in jail?
Sigh… there is no such thing as forfeiting your human rights by committing a crime. You only forfeit your freedom temporarily.
And why mention that inmates have forfeited their human rights if you see no evidence of abuse? Weird thing to pre-argue.
Of course there is. Freedom is a pretty fundamental human right. We don't mind taking it away from some people, sometimes permanently. Then of course the death penalty is a thing.
Now organised abuse, or even not taking steps to prevent such abuse is accepted to be a bad thing by most of society so that shouldn't happen. But my concern isn't directed in any way towards violent gangsters that held an entire country hostage.
How do you know who's a violent criminal without a trial?
Bari Weiss had editorial comments that forced a delay. If you want to read her comments, look for them:
https://x.com/thesimonetti/status/2003142908854313225
They seem reasonable. The person doing this 60 minute segment has also pushed false stories in the past, which make her concern more relevant.
Reasonable? They ALL boil down to "we need to get official comments, rationale and explanations from the administration". They refused to comment on the story, so you wait because if they CHOOSE not to participate you don't get to publish? That's never been how reporting works. Her comments about a lack of detail regarding the criminal records & charges? The administration is the party that refuses to share this! They are not even forthcoming with WHO EXACTLY has been deported.
Bari Weiss bending over backwards to accomodate an administration that has never shown any sort of honesty or humanity is exactly why she was rewarded so handsomely. "They seem reasonable" is not even remotely close, when comparing "evidence-based truth" reporting with the president's "I speak the truth".
They aren’t reasonable.
If you wait for the administration to comment on a story before you publish it you’re effectively giving them the right to veto it. You ask, give them a deadline. If they don’t respond or say no comment (as they did in this case) then you publish.
> The person doing this 60 minute segment has also pushed false stories in the past
You’re going to need to elaborate on that. If it were true why wouldn’t Weiss just fire them?
The arguments are nonsense. A summary is Weiss wants to make a case for the administration, which already has the largest platform in the world. If the administration wants to make a case for itself, it has (and has had) ample time to do so. As it stands, there is already a lengthy paper trail of arguments the administration has made in court. These arguments should take precedence over throwaway statements an admin rep might make to a news program.
Briefly, on a couple of them:
- "We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged?" In the US, those people are known as "innocent," whether or not Weiss likes that fact.
- Holding a story until the administration is willing to go on record is exactly the same as giving the administration a veto over a story. We would not have adversarial journalism under these circumstances.
- "The admin has argued in court that detainees are due "judicial review" —and we should explain this" These men were sent for indefinite detention to a concentration camp outside the US borders, and then the administration argued in court that it could not affect any change in their status. This argument from Weiss is transparently false.
Bari Weiss is not a stupid person. She knows she can’t just openly say “I killed this because it’s critical to Trump”; she has to come up with some plausible fig leaf, which is what you’re posting here.
> The person doing this 60 minute segment has also pushed false stories
[citation needed]
There's something about Ron desantis COVID shots at Publix. I didn't look into it but saw it on the right winger sites. You'll have to look into it yourself