personZ

There are certain times of the day when thin content makes a strong showing on HN. Normally that isn't Friday @ 9am, though, so a little surprising to see this. Perhaps it appeals to the "be a better you!" noise that appears following each New Year.

As an unrelated aside, I'm currently suffering under a slow-ban, presumably imposed by dang. A slowban, for those who don't know, is when HN becomes oppressively slow. It is a comically cowardly, ignorant means of suppression, and it helps lead to an HN where a "write your goals" Facebook-style post tops HN.

No one expected the cure to be worse than the disease. I couldn't believe it somewhat recently when I had to use an older laptop to find that simply running Chrome was completely untenable if ABP was installed.

I would be surprised if many would agree with accepting a performance hit for what ostensibly is your browser doing much less.

However why don't you contrast your comment with mine. Are you actually countering anything I've said?

No, you actually aren't. But somehow in these sorts of black/white discussions people think they can find one sort-of thing and then say "aha". Hardly.

I'm sorry, acting emotionally offended by reality (and hurling spurious and misplaced claims like "kinder garden excuses") is the domain of the rank imbecile, and has absolutely no place on HN. This sounds hostile, but quite honestly you should take it as such - your reply is outrageous nonsense. It is a crime against any reasonable discourse.

And FWIW, "my government" is the Canadian government. But remarkably I have an ability to see the world as a complex gradient of shades, where there is no simple right, no simple wrong, and where people who pretend that they are should be mocked into silence.

Firstly, what the British government did or didn't do is not really relevant to conversations about the US government.

Secondly, even if the UK government were at all relevant to this conversation, telling someone to "read up" when providing information that doesn't remotely contradict what they're replying to is terribly boorish behavior. Note that I didn't say that the government had compelling evidence -- I said that they read the tea leaves and got the impression that there were WMDs. Yes, this overriding belief will make intelligence that might be a collage of coincidental and second-hand things perhaps seem more consequential than they should have been. But regardless, the overarching belief was that Iraq legitimately had a WMD program and stockpiles, courtesy of the Saddam regime trying to convince everyone that such was exactly the case.

I don't think the US should have invaded Iraq for purely pragmatic and financial reasons. That does nothing to change the actual complex, convoluted reality that led to the decisions that were made, and then the long and fruitless, but very intense, search for WMDs after the attack.