maeil

Wanna go bypass some burglary laws to take expensive things out of people's houses?

Assuming you're a cop of course, otherwise we'll go to jail.

(I'm the person you're replying to, in case you might get confused)

It's very unfortunate that all I received was downvotes, without a single substantial reply as to what would be particularly incorrect about the observations I made. This does indeed seem to stem from infallibility tribalism: "I identify with group A, so literally anything that can be taken as pointing out a flaw of group A is an attack on me as a person".

At the same time, this isn't a particular hallmark of the left; it's even worse on the right. In any right-dominated space, my comment, if the roles were swapped, would simply have been instantly removed rather than just being downvoted. r/conservative is a very prime example. Twitter is another one, having become much more eager to instantly abide by requests from foreign autocratic regimes to remove/ban accounts that oppose them after the Musk takeover.

I do wonder if you're going to downvote me for this comment, reaching a new "irony level" world record :)

"Not chipping in" is very different from "Award ceremony set to honor novel by Palestinian author at the Frankfurt Book Fair canceled “due to the war in Israel," and unwavering support. "Not chipping in" implies neutrality.

> Whatever we as Germans say on Israel/Palestine will be taken the wrong way by someone. Critical of Israel? Still an antisemite! Supportive of Israel? Pathological guilt!

Do you think this does not apply to others? Especially the antisemite thing is extremely commonplace in the US and UK.

If Germany had learnt, then yes, they would be voicing strong opinions. That's the thing - fine, do whatever you want, but don't claim to have learnt.

> However, 1 death = 1 coverage is clearly not how anyone expect the media should operate.

In armed conflict far away from the country in question, comparatively for each side, yes, both sides' deaths getting similar coverage is how one should expect the media to operate.

If Chile and Peru get into a war tomorrow, the expectation would absolutely be that coverage of deaths by the BBC would be similar for both.

>How many people die in civil wars in Sudan or Congo, compared to how much coverage are they getting?

The obvious key difference here is that in those wars both sides of those conflicts do still tend to get similar coverage per death; which is almost none. At the very least there's not orders of magnitudes difference. Not sure how you missed this, but it doesn't inspire much confidence.

> Would it be biased if BBC ran more pieces about the sad plight of Ukrainian soldiers compared to Russian soldiers?

No, as Russia is a reasonable threat to the UK whereas Hamas is clearly not.

I'm Swedish. Since I was a child, for decades, I was taught and never questioned the idea that Germany had learnt from their history, in the most admirable way. That it was really ingrained into the German culture to never let anything like the holocaust happen again. That the education system there was very good in really making people understand why it happened, what went wrong, and how to make sure there would be no second one.

In early 2024, I was chatting with a German colleague of mine. Great guy, politically we were the most aligned out of anyone in our team. The genocide in Gaza was already well under way, so the topic came up. He told me, as if it was incredibly obvious "Well of course as Germany we couldn't possibly say anything about Gaza, given our history." For the rest of my life I will remember exactly that moment, where we were stood, the scene, because it came as a shock; this belief that I'd had since childhood turned out to be entirely wrong. It was the exact opposite - Germany had learnt nothing, in fact they'd learnt even less than the countries they had occupied. It was all a complete ruse, and I really lost all respect I had for how Germany has dealt with it all. A country like Japan at least doesn't even pretend to have learnt anything, and I'm not convinced that's the worse option.

I should've known the second news started flowing out of Germany such as "Award ceremony set to honor novel by Palestinian author at the Frankfurt Book Fair canceled “due to the war in Israel,", along with stuff like designating B.D.S as "antisemitic" but I wanted to believe that was just a tiny minority of ignorant people.

Yes, I know that now "the narrative inside Germany has been turning around" but imo it's far too late, and can't possibly be sincere, being entirely fuelled by external pressure rather than any kind of actual realization.

I'm not sure how to phrase this within the rules of HN, but I don't understand how anyone on HN 1. can not understand why Meta and Microsoft aren't fighting this 2. can still be remotely surprised by any of this 3. can act this has a single thing to do with security or even with Israel - neither of which remotely factor into the reason behind this policy.

Genuinely, have people been living in Bikini Bottom? I'm so tired of this cognitive dissonance, not wanting to face the reality. As tired as I am of these developments themselves, really. I'm too tired to still be nice. I thought people here were bright.

> I welcome any tips. Someone here must have cracked the code to be completely unremarkable and "wholesome" to governments.

Don't go to the US. That's the tip.

It's become very hard to tell whether this is sarcasm. I sure hope it is, though.

The title does not do the content justice. Since Snowden it's been known to the entire world, even outside of HN, that the US government has had this capability for decades now, with mass dragnet surveillance of all internet traffic.

What has changed is that now they're actually using this to a degree that even China generally does not do. If a German had written a comment in support of the Hong Kong protests on Facebook at some point in time, they're extremely unlikely to get denied entry to China over this, despite them almost certainly having even stronger capabilities and databases to easily find this out.

So far, the signs are that Trump is likely a worse steward than Xi. He just hasn't had the ability to properly fulfill his wishes.

I strongly recommend going a lot less heavy on the LLM generated writing on HN, it reads far less genuine than when people here right stuff themselves.

Just in case you think it's the em-dashes that do it, it is isn't; it was clear by the end of the 2nd paragraph.

Github -> Microsoft sharing everything with OpenAI sadly sounds realistic.

Or they don't exist in the first pLace, or they're now deleted repos, or they used to be public but went private, etc.