Interesting! Around the same time, mention of such a dragon fly-shaped/sized drone device came out in a kid's fictional book I read at the time: Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy.
Unclear to me is whether in this case life (the CIA invention) imitated art, or art imitated life (great minds run on the same track); the book came out in 1974...
> According to Eric Bennett, writing at The Chronicle of Higher Education and in his book Workshops of Empire, the Agency instrumentalized not only the literary publishing world, but also the institution that became its primary training ground, the writing program at the University of Iowa.
> Four years after he broke the Watergate story, Carl Bernstein quit the Washington Post and spent six months looking at the relationship between the CIA and the press. The result was a 25,000-word cover story in the October 20, 1977 edition of Rolling Stone called “The CIA and the Media.” The article, still online at carlbernstein.com, remains interesting and relevant.
This struck me as pretty unconvincing - if it's even true then they are no doubt leaving out crucial points around why it was impractical (besides the cross wind point they admit)
Okay, sorry about that. I'll refrain in the future. However, I wonder, at what point should we override single variable optimization (in this case the single variable is intellectual curiosity) if there is truly something heinous to point out? It seems by not doing that, we overnormalize those who will use intellectual curiosity as an excuse to subjugate.
That's a good question, because people who feel strongly about politics or current affairs often want to use this site to battle for what they believe is right. When we ask them not to do that here, on the grounds that HN is not that sort of website, they sometimes respond that what they're fighting for is more important.
They're right, of course. Most of those questions are far more important than most of what appears on HN. The problem is that if we allowed it to, political battle would quickly consume everything it touches, much like the fire that flamewars are named after—so this is an existential issue for HN.
Ultimately the question is: does a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity deserve to exist, even though other things are more important? Is there room for such a place? I think the answer has to be yes. But if so, it needs to be protected for that purpose, because default internet dynamics all point the other way.
There are always many heinous things to point out, and such stories are far more emotionally intense than, say, a new type of superconductor having been discovered, or how work on formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem has been going lately. So I don't think we have much of a choice, if we want HN to survive as a sort of garden. Gardens and warfare can't coexist at the same place and time.
I'd add one bit to your last point though: I don't think "those who subjugate" are really doing that by appealing to intellectual curiosity—they have more powerful forces to do that with. I'd like to believe that in a community where intellectual curiosity is cultivated, subjugation is actually a little less likely. I can't prove that, though, and it may just be wishful thinking.
Fair enough. Regarding your last paragraph though, I do think though that intellectual curiosity is a key tool of subjugation. Oligarchs and tech businessmen have discovered that technology is a key wealth concentration tool and the most effective way to utilize that is to give the technically-minded intelligent a world of wonders to explore and create so that the most wealthy can use those tools to concentrate the majority of the wealth. If we consider that psychologically, many of us (myself included) have used intellectual exploration as a source of beauty and comfort, this method is all the more effective.
Maybe. But the intellectual curiosity I'm talking about is not purely technical, and HN does host a lot of historical, social, and (yes) political* conversation.
What we want to avoid is having the site taken over by the latter and bursting into flames. That's actually the default outcome, so we have to spend a lot of energy avoiding it.
Vouaobrasil speaks the truth here, if forcefully, and it's a truth all Americans would be wise to face up to sooner rather than later. And the hour has already grown late.
"In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent."
- Marwan Makhoul
> Gardens and warfare can't coexist at the same place and time.
Gardens are warfare. There are ten thousand tiny battles daily in each one.
And yet, despite the chaos, the garden thrives. Often all the more with less interference.
It looks like your account is using HN primarily for political battle. That's not allowed here, for reasons I've explained many times (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). We end up having to ban accounts that won't stop doing it, and we've had to ask you about this kind of thing many times.
> It looks like your account is using HN primarily for political battle.
No I'm not. There's no way to interpret that statement as true unless you stretch multiple terms past the point of reason.
I mention the genocide the US is funding, arming, and providing diplomatic cover for about once or twice a month, among many other comments, most non-political. If you feel the need to ban my account for that, go ahead dang.
I'll say it again, if that helps: Vouaobrasil speaks the truth here. Their inspiration is all about spying to enforce the destructive nature of western civilization and global capitalism, and the assertion they 'use nature for inspiration' is an insult to all that is good: [0], [1].
It's not 'starting a flame war' or 'damaging the intellectual garden' to say so, nor is it starting a 'political battle'. It's directly related to the central 'point' of this post. The US military is a bigger polluter than 140 countries combined [2].
This green-washing puff-piece is a twisted insult to the intellectual curiosity you claim to stand in defense of (and are right now attempting to use to subjugate). If people can't rightly call it out as such, any claim to HN being an 'intellectual garden' is perverted.
As for "political and ideological battle", this is the kind of thing I'm talking about:
> Their inspiration is all about spying to enforce the destructive nature of western civilization and global capitalism, and the assertion they 'use nature for inspiration' is an insult to all that is good. That's not really debatable. It's obvious fact.
The louder and more grandiose that kind of rhetoric gets, the more tedious it is. It's not curious conversation and therefore not what we want here.
You cite those comments as if there's something ban-worthy about having a relevant and politely expressed opinion outside the very narrow US Overton window.
I can source any part of those statements that you like. There's whole books about this stuff; and I'd be happy to give you recommendations for any aspect of the cited comments which you doubt.
I'm not rude in any of the cited comments, at all. There's no flaming; there's no condescension. Just patient and polite explanation of valid and important perspectives other than the two dominant US ones.
It's disturbing that you could try and call these statements evidence of "political battling". Have HN's acceptable debate parameters gotten this narrow? (Not a rhetorical question.)
> The louder and more grandiose that kind of rhetoric gets, the more tedious it is.
I read it as factual criticism, verifiable and relevant, and a necessary counterbalance. While it comes across to you as "tedious" and "grandiose", to me what they wrote reads as a necessary breath of fresh air against an obvious attempt at cynical green-washing by a bloody arm of one of the worst polluters on the planet. And I can back that up all day.
It's your house dang, and if you want to ban people for calling out the CIA as 'destructive' and 'harmful to nature' while they pat themselves on the back for their self-professed nature inspiration, then you have the ability to do so. But I don't think it's fair to threaten to do so in the name of promoting intellectually curious conversation, because it's quite the opposite.
I think the main thing is the denunciatory rhetoric. I don't care if you're right or wrong (someone is going to misinterpret that, but it means the same thing as I don't care if I agree with you or disagree—as I've argued elsewhere in this thread, it's not the moderator's job to moderate on that basis). I do care when you hammer hardened talking points indignantly, because those qualities destroy the quality that we want here, quite apart from the content. It's a medium-is-the-message thing, if you like.
Actually, it's even less than that—I mostly just care that you don't primarily do that on the site. A certain amount is tolerable, more than that is not ok, and that word 'primarily' is how we test for that (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). It's not perfect but has proven to work well enough.
