Commenters: if you won't resist the temptation to rehash stale political controversy out of respect for a human person, then please resist because it's dreadfully tedious and obviously against the guidelines.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
I honestly think that's giving most publications too much credit. Many opinion pieces seem intended to provoke outrage, much like Facebook's much-maligned newsfeed algorithms.
That's quite recent. Instant feedback, starting with the 24-hour news cycle and ending with social media clicks, brought on the bomb-throwers. In the 80s and 90s it was not unusual to pick up the paper and read an informed, cogent, well-reasoned essay about some topic that few readers might be interested in (and most might disagree with). All that's gone now, however. It's all just clan-based emotion-driven click-bait and grenade-throwing now.
I said I scan a ton of commentary. It used to be (ten years or more ago) that the majority would be, well, opinion pieces. Now only 5-10% or so are actually opinion pieces. Most of the time it's just cheerleading to people with more and more invective about things the audience already agrees with. There's really little value to be had.
That has never been the point of an opinion piece. The point of an opinion piece is to lie, cajole, trick, etc people into accepting your opinion or viewpoint. That's why newspapers separate news from opinion. The point of the opinion piece is opposite of getting people to think. The point of it is to stop people from thinking. It's to get people on your side.
There are surely some people these days who approach things like this, and they come from both political polarities. But as DanielBMarkham points out nearby, it hasn't always been this way.
And even today, there are plenty of people who, I think, strive for finding truth (e.g., Scott Alexander, Megan McArdle)
We can start from a common set of objective facts, but because we all have our own values, we can get to a broad range of different conclusions from them.
A good opinion writer is not, as you assert, lying and tricking people. A good opinion writer is developing from our shared factual foundation through one possible set of values - and hopefully "showing their work" so we know what those assumptions are.
Thus, as DBM says, we can learn alot even from someone who reaches a conclusion different from the one driven by our own personal values. At the very least, we should learn that those we disagree with aren't evil monsters, but maybe trying to get to a vision similar to our own but in different ways.
I don't even want to read the opinion pieces that you seem to hold up as exemplary. I'm tired of the hatefulness and spite. It really is possible to communicate an opinion that's based entirely on agreed facts, to come to a different conclusion than someone else, and to do so without lying and tricking. That is what we should be striving for.
And I maintain that, e.g., Scott Alexander at SlateStarCodex.com is a sterling example of this. If you disagree, I'd love to hear why.
If someone reads an opinion piece and changes their mind, is that not thinking?
Also, what you're saying is your opinion, are you trying to get people on your side? Is your goal in writing a comment here today is to stop people from thinking?
Ha, wait, what? Opinion pieces don't exist simply as a public service to help readers get the ol' brain juices flowing! They are outlets for rhetoric, striving to convince the reader--and often to call them to action. For this reason, opinion pieces have a moral valence!
An opinion piece which competently and cleverly convinces its audience that good is bad and wrong is right is a deeply unethical thing. And Krauthammer's entire career was spent doing exactly this.
They were reasonably well-written but usually extremely poorly reasoned and frequently grounded in convenient inventions (whether about the subject subject matter or the supposed positions of his opponents) rather than facts.
After hearing the news, I found out he's actually been in a wheelchair since college, when he broke his neck in a swimming pool, and he doesn't have much use of his arms. His story is pretty courageous from that stand point.
He did a lot in his life, wheelchair and all. He off to a great career in medicine (chief psychiatry resident at Massachussetts General) before he became a policy adviser to the Carter administration and then later a speechwriter for Mondale, which pushed him towards political commentary. A life well-lived.
This seems to be an understated danger. Whenever I hear about a young person confined to a wheelchair, it seems as likely as not that their mistake was diving headfirst into unexpectedly shallow water.
I regularly scan opinion columns from people all over the political spectrum. I enjoy reading well-reasoned essays whether I agree with them or not.
Krauthammer always provided well-reasoned essays. Whatever the issue, if the public got too far out ahead of it, either for or against, Charles was quick with a "Harumpphh" and a clever one-liner to point out that we should be more circumspect.
I stopped watching cable TV news years ago. Charles Krauthammer is one of a few commentators that I missed watching on a regular basis. He was a grumpy old uncle who had been around the block a time or two and was going to set me clear on how to think about some issue. Most of the time I just ignored him, but it was fun having him around anyway. The world will be a poorer place without his work.
The world is always a poorer place without people with minority opinions, no matter how immoral or heinous.
Separate your politics from your rational mind. Freedom of speech means people making well-reasoned essays for things you might find horrible. That's the entire point, peaceful persuasion through reason and civil discourse. And if it were only things we found comfortable, we would stagnate as a species.
Running around with your head on fire in a moral panic constantly doesn't accomplish much for your side -- and it makes for horrible public policy. We should mourn the loss of any civil person who makes a reasoned and rational case for anything. Even if they are wrong, they raise a new generation on understanding why they are wrong and being able to think their way through the issues. In fact, the people who are the most wrong -- as long as they are civil, rational, and make well-reasoned arguments -- are the most valuable protector of a free and moral society that we have.
I swear I'm getting an inflatable copy of "On Liberty" and start beating people over the head with it. Western society went over this ground 200 years ago. Nothing has changed since then.
Sadly, the counterexamples we see to DanielBMarkham's point is our neighbors cruelly assassinating each other's character, people "defriending" one another, and so on - and doing so in the name of goodness and peace.
Thanks, but I'll take DBM's world, where I can listen and make up my own mind.
Hmm... it is unfortunate. I always remember him for pushing super hard for the invasion of Iraq and thus partially responsible for the deaths of 100,000s at least and also more than $T of funds used for that war:
"Time is running short. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. He is working on nuclear weapons. And he has every incentive to pass them on to terrorists who will use them against us."
Democrats and Republicans alike pushed for it based on the intelligence available at the time [0]. To call him partially responsible for 100,000s of deaths is very unfair and not very classy considering he's dying soon.
I hear this argument a lot, and I just can't agree with it. The biggest miss was about chemical weapons, which even if true, would have been an entirely inadequate justification for the war that followed. The nuclear argument was never well supported and clearly looks fabricated in hindsight. To talk about bad intelligence is to accept that invading a country to preemptively to remove a dictator is a moral action, which is repeatedly demonstrated to be the exact opposite when viewed as a whole.
The results of the Iraq war were foreseeable by those that pushed for it. I can't accept that we should just politely not mention it because someone is dying of cancer. This is a war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. It's a big deal.
Yes, I agree, it's not right that you can screw up the world and get away with it because of ignorance. It's not a good excuse. If you have power and influence, ignorance is a crime.
I hope that humanity will one day become immune to this kind of individual-tragedy rhetoric and save their hearts for the stats.
And the current disastrous result is just as predictable and evil as Iraq. Maybe more-so because we have such a recent example of why it is such a bad idea.
Europe spearheaded the Libyan intervention. The U.S. came along for the ride, not because of some strongly held policy objective. The roles are usually reversed, but by 2011 Obama was already deeply skeptical of intervention. European powers have always had a keen interest in Libya, particularly Italy and France, and the U.K. was still pissed about Lockerbie. The U.S. wouldn't have gotten involved otherwise, no matter how much Hillary pressed.
That doesn't excuse the U.S., but we shouldn't equivocate culpability.
Sure, Bernard-Henri Levy deserves his share of the blame too. But how do BHL and 40K get on the same page about something like this? Do they stalk/roll around the same intellectual salons? No they don't. They do both, however, sing for their suppers. The masters had better like the song. The song sounded pretty good when DPRK pointed out what HRC's bayonet really meant. [0] The music buffs might be a bit nervous now, but few would be surprised if Trump gets a new high-pressure sales pitch that totally changes his mind before anything gets signed.
> To call him partially responsible for 100,000s of deaths is very unfair and not very classy considering he's dying soon.
He definitely pushed that war and thus has some responsibility for the consequences. I do not wish him ill will and it is unfortunate that he is dying of cancer, it is a loss for his friends and family. That said, just because he is dying does not make him a saint nor do I have to pretend he is one, he clearly wasn't.
When it comes to the War in Iraq, there are not many saints in Washington. Less we forget, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama executed the War in Iraq for many years and issued countless drone strikes. Does that means we should all be saying "Obama is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people!" ?
That Nobel Peace Prize for Obama was just so wrong. It was a Norwegian (Not Swedish) small celebrity/exposure hungry group of elderly people who abused the power of the brand for their personal gain.
(Liberal-minded americans downvoting this: please think twice. Not everything that seems to go against your instincts is downvote-worthy if you don't know the details. In this case the details matter.)
Very well put. It's important that we recognize the history that led us to where we are, even if it's not a super beautiful history.
I remember this particular period relatively clearly. There was intense debate everywhere, it was the most polarizing issue for a very, very long time. I was on the dove-side of the debate. I remember having some extremely heated debates with "hawks" (all online - these hawks somehow just disappeared after the invasion when it it got more and more obvious that there actually were no WMDs...).
> Democrats and Republicans alike pushed for it based on the intelligence available at the time
No, they didn't; there was a bipartisan (but more Republican than Democratic) group that supported a hard line with war as the ultimate resort based on the unclear intelligence being put forward by the Administration, but the Administration (and, even before it existed as such, the element of the neoconservative movement from which it's foreign policy and defense leadership was largely drawn) was actively pushing for war for much longer, and deliberately engineered the intelligence (which was not merely spun, but actually falsified) presented to others, including in Congress, to build support for the war.
> To call him partially responsible for 100,000s of deaths is very unfair
It's entirely accurate, just as it is for the bipartisan group that supported the war in Congress, even though the administration did lie to them to build that support, since the information about the pre-existing intent of the Administration was readily and publicly available, and the debunkings of enough of the intelligence to make clear the administration’s absence of good faith was likewise available.
All Americans are partially responsible for the costs of the Iraq war. That is irregardless of their support of it. This is how a democracy works, or to a bit lesser degree a psuedo-democracy republic as is the case here.
A citizen's level of responsibility increases for those who advocate for such actions, and the level increases with a wide and strong advocacy.
To attempt to wipe the slate clean of such responsibility is grossly unfair for everyone involved and must involve some deeper issues of which I will not speculate. The fact there was an appeal to eminent death as a reason to not call this out is absurd. A terminal condition doesn't retroactively absolve responsibility.
This is coming from someone who thinks the Iraq war was needed however it was done so in the height of incompetency.
You still think "the Iraq war was needed"? That really destroys your credibility in making this "spread the responsibility" argument. I'll accept some responsibility for the fact that I was duped and completely wrong about Iraq, but there were people against the whole venture at the time. It ain't their "responsibility".
"But -- oh, I forgot, he's American. He's a white guy. He's part of the elite. He gets to wash away his mistakes. We all know that the only people in America who are accountable for their mistakes are the poor minorities."
This is the type of comment that goes against the spirit of HN, not what mychael posted. If the above quote doesn't sound needlessly inflammatory and discriminatory to you, you need to get some perspective.
It's disappointing to read this kind of curt dismissal here, and I feel that it goes very much against the spirit of the Hacker News forum. Instead of directing people to other venues, please take responsibility for your own actions and do your level best to elevate the conversation.
Unless you're alleging that he knew the statements about WMDs in Iraq were false, and you have evidence to support that claim, you're lying when you claim:
> He repeatedly lied, over and over, before, during and after the war to enable the greatest crime of the 21st century.
Whataboutism (also known as whataboutery) is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument, which is particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda.
It's really astonishing how many liberals in the west will defend the middle-east's version of Hitler. Go and tell an Iraqi Kurd it would have been better to leave Iraq under Saddam's rule. Also so convenient to absolve any of the half dozen other actors involved in the conflict of any blame. The deaths are all Bush, Wolfowitz's and so on fault (now also Krauthammer's according to you). Things are definitely not as simple as that.
If the war was promoted based on facts and logic, it would have been different. I was not against the first Iraq war nor against the Afghanistan war -- those were straight forward and not based on lies. The Afghanistan war didn't go much better than the Iraq war either, thus it isn't about the after effects.
The Iraq war was sold to the public based on lies and Charles Krauthammer was one of those key promoters pushing those lies. For a good segment of the population at the time it was very obvious this was being done.
How many liberals? Convenient that the US propped Saddam up and provided him with chemical weapons for use against Iran and his own people. When it was no longer in Bush's interest he was toppled and then the provisional regime bungled the rebuilding of the infrastructure that the coalition destroyed, by putting in incompetent political cronies and party loyalists in charge of reconstruction. Conservatives invaded and destroyed the country and were so outrageously ignorant of the society, and breathtakingly stupid about fixing what they broke. Go and tell ANY Kurd how Turkey, Syria and Iran want no Kurdish state and will grind the Kurds down to prevent it. Then answer for how well the US will support the Kurds given Trump's love affair with Erdogan.
> It's really astonishing how many liberals in the west will defend the middle-east's version of Hitler.
Opposing the war of aggression waged immorally, illegally (under international law and arguably— given the bad faith in the application of the conditional authorization by Congress—under US law as well), and incompetently by the Bush Administration isn't the same thing as defending Saddam Hussein (who is no more the Middle East version of Hitler than many other past or current leaders in the Middle East, many of whom—including Saddam, at the peak of his most Hitler-like actions—have or had the direct backing of the U.S. government, including—again, also specifically in the case of Saddam Hussein—the particular individuals most responsible for military and defense policy in the Bush 43 Administration. )
That's being debated in the privacy community as "consent-or-pay." The short answer is that we don't actually know. There are arguments on each side, and I tend to think (a) the plain reading of the law suggests no and (b) for a number of reasons, regulators will probably decide to rule that it's okay, but the reasoning that gets me there is pretty complicated.
"Consent or pay" sounds so hilariously wrongheaded on its face. I'm imagining someone using that approach in literally any other aspect of their lives and seeing how well it flies.
Well, in most other aspects of our lives, incentivized consent is allowed (and in fact it one of the foundations of contract theory). The GDPR has effectively disallowed it, which is one of the provisions here that actually reduces consumer autonomy rather than increasing it. The GDPR is going to make the internet a more expensive place, whether you think it's a good thing overall or not.
All the stuff I've seen has been on listservs, sorry.
Bundling consent inside a contract is prohibited, but the theory is that by providing a paid option (which wouldn't operate under the consent basis) OR essentially a free version if you allow them to process your data, they come out from under the bundling problem. It's questionable, certainly, but the supervisory authorities could go either way with it. They'll be under pressure to allow it, as without that, WaPo and other companies with similar models will likely find it cost-prohibitive to allow EU citizens to have a free option and will paywall it entirely for them.
Thanks, that seems to be quite on collision course with the intent of the law (in my opinion).
>... WaPo and other companies with similar models will likely find it cost-prohibitive to allow EU citizens to have a free option and will paywall it entirely for them.
I think that would be preferable. We need more incentive to be able to create decent alternatives, as it is now it seems no one can be bothered.
Given that news outlets are struggling to stay alive, I think we are likely to see few alternatives spring up. If a paper needs a marginal $8/subscriber to stay afloat, and they make $2.50/user from tracking/etc, we likely see a model where subscriptions cost $6 with tracking and $9 without. Obviously we don't know the exact numbers, but this is hardly inconceivable -- we know for a fact these companies are mostly losing money as it is.
With decent alternatives I meant alternatives to ads+tracking, which obviously isn't working out despite ruining the internet.
Few people would accept ads if they could pay the pennies that could ever be hoped to be extracted from ad exposure.
The cost to the user are substantially worse than the gains at the other end.
I think particularly at _this_ time, when he is writing his good bye, this is the time to apply the principle of charity, this is the time to remember the good things he's done, and not the bad.
Remember that he's one of the guys consistently disagreeing with Trump (which is still rare amongst republicans).
Trump may be awful, but he's not the same flavor of awful as Krauthammer is. He'll soon be forgotten anyway. It isn't important to the armaments manufacturers just who gets them their wars. For that reason, all the many disagreements that reasonable people have with him should be raised now, so that he might actually see those disagreements. Who knows, he may ask God for forgiveness before he rolls off this mortal coil.
Elsewhere you said The point of an opinion piece is to lie, cajole, trick, etc people into accepting your opinion or viewpoint.
It seems you may be doing that right now. You're calling Krauthammer a war criminal, which is patently false. He may be wrong-headed, but since he never actually acted in the war, never served as an agent of the government, it's flat-out false to refer to him as a "war criminal".
You can have your own opinion, but you've got to build it on some foundation.
stop acting like "war crime" is some universal objective term that we can all agree to. It isn't.
Ummm. Yes it is well defined. And what you're complaining about isn't in that definition.
On July 1, 2002, the International Criminal Court, a treaty-based court located in The Hague, came into being for the prosecution of war crimes committed on or after that date. ...
Recent turmoils in the US and the World in general, has me wonder about a different aspect of this. For those who don't like the current state of affairs in the world (Trump, Brexit, "populist" movements everywhere), it is awful to leave from this world not knowing what will happen to your family and friends. The scene from "The Matrix, not like this..." is what comes to my mind.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html