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Let’s be clear: if the CIA was doing it, then it was not overt and obvious. It was secret manipulation.

Is that the kind of government intervention that you want to get?

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As a general rule, probably not ...

But if I had my druthers, I'd rather the CIA was "manipulating" us more often by subsidizing jazz artists rather than funnelling cash and prisoners to torture sites in El Salvador.

You dig?

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Two Thumbs up!

It's time more people fully understood the meaning of "I don't care what color the Cat is, as long as it catches the Mouse".

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Which is an opinionated rephrasing of the question whether ends justify the means. It’s not clear cut.
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if you have anyone specific in mind, you should email hn@ycombinator.com

if you dont have anyone specific in mind, this comment does nothing except "FUD"

edit: really, getting downvoted into oblivion for this? baseless and general accusations of deepstate actors is really what we want the comment sections of hn to be?

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Absolutely certainly true.

You’re naive if think there is an intelligence organization in the world who can log into the internet who doesn’t scrape analyze and opinionate over the intellectual bastion which is HN.

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baseless and generally-applicable accusations of deepstate activity are worthless as a comment.

that does not mean i dont think governments, corps, etc. aren't scraping data or even attempting to shape narrative. but i dont want to read general, non-actionable, vague comments about deepstate actors while browsing hn.

comments like that are not interesting, they don't pique curiosity, they don't promote good conversation, and there's nothing to learn from them.

they are a net negative on hn.

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I've responded to you in one of the deeper threads below. I'll avoid creating too many open threads. I am disappointed though in your overly critical, quick to judge and dismiss attitude where you are stating your opinions as though they are fact:

> "they don't pique curiosity" > "they don't promote good conversation"

For you they don't. Who are you to judge and proclaim your own opinion as though it's fact for everyone? We call that gas lighting and bad faith on this side. And on hacker news, the community forum you are engaging in here, you agree to engage with good faith. Maybe you should question whether its possible to have a good conversation, learn something from this experience, if you'd retained an open mind.

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>And on hacker news, the community forum you are engaging in here, you agree to engage with good faith.

you should perhaps freshen yourself up on the other rules of engagement here. specifically this part:

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

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> there's nothing to learn from them.

Some people never learn. When the "police" is at their door, it is too late.

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> deep state actors

Can we please not do this here? Can we please not vaguely gesticulate towards some government bogeyman anytime our comments are downvoted or flagged or just because we see something we don’t agree with?

To quote Sesame Street: One of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn’t belong.

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> Can we please not do this here?

Why ? The quality of HN has decreased due to those paid propaganda spreaders. People shall have a minimum of spine.

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>People shall have a minimum of spine.

there is no "spine" involved in writing a generic, vague, one-liner about "being careful".

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Sounds like you are resorting to attacking credibility and Ad Hominem attack when you don't even know me.

I've openly criticized the agency at hand, and faced prior risk and harm and ridicule and embarrassingly the most closed minded to these messages of mine are "rational types" in forums like these. Though as I shared, I'm unsure whether to judge them as legitimate accounts or propaganda/astroturf/deepstate actors.

I'd have been open to sharing some more info rather than being vague, though I think I'm needing a break from being gaslit and receiving hostility from my very own people for pointing things out even if what I shared was vague.

How do you think someone would really go about finding specificity of accounts here being deep state, any experience or advice on that matter? What would you think I could find on this, when this orgs entire premise would be going un-detected and having plausible deniability. Doesn't that mean I can not really provide you what you are asking. I don't have the journalistic experience or OSINT know how to validate these things. Maybe someone else does. Though you and I are entitled to our likes and dislikes and resorting to name calling when we are feeling uncomfortable or annoyed with a topic.

I've already shared my experience in these forums and have nothing to prove to you. For these kinds of matters, you can't even approach the topic without being vague or generic. Have you ever even seen a single thread anywhere where someone specifically shared concerns and wasn't ridiculed, attacked, ad hominemed, dismissed, marked as a crazy person or xyz? Please enlighten me. Help me understand how someone could "prove" to you what you are looking for.

Then again we accept the evidence that conforms to our beliefs. Are you being open minded? I think If you'd be open to hearing it or finding evidence for it, would you have found evidence for it already?

But please treat me with good faith and friendliness, you don't know me so you can't make these claims about me. Unless you looked through my comment history, in which case you'd see I have spine enough. Maybe someone motivated can go through my history, look at specific posts which are very obviously discussing this topic and my experience around it, have the AI go go and vibe code and do the investigation and make some dossiers.

And I'm incredibly vulnerable here. I don't even hide my real identity, I have risked a lot.

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>Sounds like you are resorting to attacking credibility and Ad Hominem attack when you don't even know me.

none of what i said is an "attack", nor ad hominem, nor questions your credibility.

im not asking you to prove anything either.

just don't post vague, non-actionable, generic, "be careful of the deepstate" style comments. that's it. there's many other places for you to do that. hn is not it.

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>Sounds like you are resorting to attacking credibility and Ad Hominem attack when you don't even know me.

And you sound like another sea lion engaging in bad faith and wasting everybody’s time. We all know what’s going on here, just drop the act and move on.

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And for people that know their history, the DoD basically built Silicon Valley as we know, funding research and buying essentially 100% of the output of valley fabs for several years for Radars, then ICBMs, and then flight computers (F14 was arguably the first modern microcomputer) from about 1962-1972. Only when silicon companies scaled beyond this demand did the consumer computer revolution begin to take flight.
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Your tone implies that the same people who freak out about reasonable gov intervention, are also (hypocritically) okay with the shenanigans being discussed.

Who are these straw men you refer to?

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