[HN Gopher] Daniel Ellsberg has died
___________________________________________________________________
Daniel Ellsberg has died
Author : lgvln
Score : 342 points
Date : 2023-06-16 19:01 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| jmclnx wrote:
| >But on the eve of jury deliberations, the judge threw out the
| case, citing government misconduct, including illegal
| wiretapping, a break-in at the office of Mr. Ellsberg's former
| psychiatrist and an offer by President Nixon to appoint the judge
| himself as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
|
| Wow, never heard of this, I wonder if a Judge these days would do
| the same?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Ellsberg was very lucky the misconduct happened to come to
| light, as before that the judge had refused to let him offer a
| defense for his actions.
| Metacelsus wrote:
| Funny, I was just looking him up (since _The Doomsday Machine_ )
| was mentioned on another site.
|
| Meanwhile, Kissinger is still alive (and recently turned 100).
| all_usernames wrote:
| Not to state the obvious, but this would be a wonderful time to
| share Ellsberg's story with someone in the younger generations.
| BeetleB wrote:
| When Chelsea Manning was arrested, Daniel Ellsberg would remind
| everyone that the stuff he leaked had a higher classification
| than whatever Manning leaked.
|
| _The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the
| Pentagon Papers_ is a great documentary about him.
|
| Fun fact: Mike Gravel was an Alaskan senator. When he heard
| Daniel had the papers, he convinced Daniel to send them to him.
| Then Gravel went on a filibuster to prevent funding of the
| Vietnam war, and he chose to read the Pentagon papers aloud in
| the filibuster. By doing so, he ensured that they would legally
| be accessible to the public, because they were now part of the
| congressional record.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This sort of political courage is sorely lacking nowadays.
| Instead we get ersatz versions of it, where lawmakers claim
| ignorance of or incompetence to assess facts already in the
| public sphere, while damning their political opponents on the
| basis of documents whose existence is merely rumored by
| unspecified individuals whose whereabouts have been unknown for
| years.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| The major difference is that Ellsberg was a civilian.
| toyg wrote:
| So what you're saying is that anyone in the military loses
| their human rights.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| There's a deep irony in watching the NYT venerate Ellberg at
| the same time they're ranting on and on and on about Donald
| Trump's documents being somehow insecure. It's not like he
| printed them on the front page of a newspaper with a million
| plus subscribers. But we live in confusing times.
| lawrenci wrote:
| There's definitely a difference between leaking secret
| information to the public, and keeping it yourself to use for
| your own purposes. Without getting into which one is worse,
| surely you can see they're not really comparable.
|
| If Donald Trump had declassified the docs and shared them
| publicly, we would be having a totally different
| conversation, and he wouldn't be under federal indictment.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Hello? The purpose of the classification is to keep the
| information secret. Do you seriously believe that printing
| the info on the front page is somehow not as indictment-
| worthy as keeping the documents stashed away?
|
| The reality is that what Trump did by hiding the papers was
| much more consistent with the spirit of classification than
| what the NYT did with the Pentagon papers.
| psadauskas wrote:
| Trump isn't being charged for having classified documents in
| an insecured manner. He's being charged for refusing to give
| them back after being asked, lying about having them, and
| obstructing officials trying to get them back from him.
| derrasterpunkt wrote:
| My favorite story from Daniel Ellsberg is ,,The Limits of
| Knowledge" in this Mother Jones article:
| https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...
| breck wrote:
| Wow, that is super interesting. It amazes me that it's not a
| universal American principle that we should, as a country, at
| least aim for a world where these information asymmetries don't
| exist. We should strive for zero classified documents; zero
| special access programs.
|
| Of course, I need to think more deeply about this, because
| who's to say information asymmetries aren't essential (for some
| reason). But the perspective shared here is very interesting.
|
| Thanks for sharing.
| derrasterpunkt wrote:
| The anecdote is definitely ,,food for thought". It became
| kind of a ritual for me to revisit the article every time a
| new US president gets into office.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| Talk about the butterfly effect. The Pentagon Papers should've
| just embarrassed the Johnson administration but Nixon lost his
| mind. Watergate. Everything. Truly a pivotal historical figure.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Leaving in ",Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers," from the title
| would have been helpful for those that don't know
| px43 wrote:
| If you don't know who Daniel Ellsberg is, you probably don't
| know what the Pentagon Papers are either.
| Karellen wrote:
| I'm not familiar with that many details of USA political
| history, I didn't really know who Daniel Ellsberg is (the
| name sounds somewhat familiar, but I might be getting them
| confused with someone else?), and I didn't know what the
| Pentagon Papers are.
|
| But "the Pentagon Papers" _sound_ important (kind of like the
| Panama Papers or the Paradise Papers, and may even be the
| trope namer?) and "who leaked the Pentagon Papers" sounds
| like an interesting story that I might want to learn more
| about.
|
| "Someone who is famous in some way but you've never heard of
| has died" is a much weaker pull. Yeah, there might be
| something interesting there, and if it's someone whose death
| has hit the top of the HN front page then the odds of me
| finding it worth reading are somewhat higher than if it was a
| headline almost anywhere else (hence why I'm here). But there
| are a bunch of other headlines on HN, and I could have easily
| skipped past it. "who leaked the pentagon papers" would have
| been a much stronger signal that this was someone I wanted to
| read more about.
| dang wrote:
| True, but there are advantages to leaving a little work for the
| reader.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20230616192004/https://www.nytime...
| lgvln wrote:
| https://archive.is/fSVmc
| dang wrote:
| It's been years since I watched it but I remember thinking that
| https://www.mostdangerousman.org/ was a good documentary. It also
| included his personal and family life in unusually interesting
| ways.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Is seems like a bunch of old famous/infamous political figures
| all died recently:
|
| Ellsberg
|
| Silvio Berlusconi
|
| Theodore Kaczynski
|
| Pat Robertson
|
| Robert Hanssen
|
| I know it is probably just a mind trick, but it feels weird
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Yet Kissinger is still free and walking about.
| mchannon wrote:
| Perhaps the aforementioned phenomenon is his send-off.
| jdoliner wrote:
| Ellsberg is in many ways to mold from which modern day
| whistleblowers were cast. Edward Snowden said in an interview
| recently that when he was debating internally about whether or
| not he should become a whistleblower, knowing the ramifications
| it would have for his life, Ellsberg was what gave him the
| courage to do so. It was nice to learn that while in exile
| Snowden was able to get connected with Ellsberg and develop a
| friendship with him. Unfortunately Snowden and other modern day
| whistleblowers seem to have suffered more than Ellsberg who got
| off on something of a technicality.
| idlewords wrote:
| This comparison is unfair to Ellsberg, who turned himself in at
| a point when he was facing life imprisonment, while Snowden
| fled the country and eventually accepted Russian citizenship.
| Ellsberg had the moral courage to stand and fight for his
| beliefs at a time when his acquittal was anything but a
| foregone conclusion.
| z3c0 wrote:
| While I don't even agree that Snowden behaved cowardly -
| which is what you appear to be suggesting - it's really quite
| appalling to see that used as a way to undercut the status of
| "whistleblower". Surely, you take greater issue with our
| modern surveillance state than ones decorum based on how they
| perceive their likely ill treatment from the said state?
|
| Tbh it's the rhetorical equivalent of the game of "two for
| flinching", and just as juvenile.
| miguelazo wrote:
| "at a time when his acquittal was anything but a foregone
| conclusion." This is a laughable statement given the
| treatment of several other recent whistleblowers. The power
| of the security state is orders of magnitude greater now.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| This. They were literally torturing Chelsea Manning at the
| time.
| aftbit wrote:
| They were? This is news to me. I mean, the US prison
| system is basically torture, but I assume you mean
| something worse than that?
| jccc wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/31/chelsea-
| mann...
| sneak wrote:
| Yes, they put her in solitary for extended periods of
| time and took away all her clothes and effects as
| punitive measures long before trial.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > while Snowden fled the country and eventually accepted
| Russian citizenship.
|
| You have to be a citizen of somewhere if you want to live in
| most places on the Earth.
| idlewords wrote:
| Snowden was born and remains a US citizen.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Is this supposed to be a retort to the post you're
| responding to?
| 5555624 wrote:
| I believe Snowden is still a US citizen; he never renounced
| it, nor was it stripped from him. He has dual citizenship,
| once he was granted Russian citizenship.
| jccc wrote:
| Ellsberg disagrees with you:
|
| "Snowden made the right call when he fled the U.S."
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/daniel-ellsberg-
| nsa-...
|
| "Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for
| leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing
| trial as I did. I don't agree."
|
| Also, Snowden was trapped in Russia by the U.S. government
| while in transit to South America, enabling the smear that he
| went into the arms of the Russians.
|
| And further from Ellsberg:
|
| "I went underground with my wife, Patricia, for 13 days. My
| purpose (quite like Snowden's in flying to Hong Kong) was to
| elude surveillance while I was arranging -- with the crucial
| help of a number of others, still unknown to the FBI -- to
| distribute the Pentagon Papers sequentially to 17 other
| newspapers, in the face of two more injunctions. The last
| three days of that period was in defiance of an arrest order:
| I was, like Snowden now, a 'fugitive from justice.'"
| ajross wrote:
| > Also, Snowden was trapped in Russia by the U.S.
| government while in transit to South America
|
| Snowden fled to Hong Kong first, then from there to Moscow.
| He was certainly never "in transit" to anywhere else, nor
| was any of this under the control (even indirectly) of the
| US government. He fled to nations which he knew would not
| extradite him.
|
| It's likely true that he had other destinations in mind.
| Nonetheless he couldn't get it arranged, and he ended up in
| Moscow because Putin viewed him as useful and extended an
| offer of residence that China was apparently not willing to
| make.
|
| Let's not spin here. Snowden isn't a Russian stooge (though
| obviously his freedom to speak freely about his host
| country is extremely limited), but let's not treat with
| conspiracy theories about this being America's Plan All
| Along.
| jccc wrote:
| He was in transit to Ecuador, which was going to grant
| him asylum. The U.S. government revoked his passport,
| trapping him in the Moscow airport.
|
| One may believe that Snowden's location at the time the
| U.S. revoked his passport was chance, but it's obvious
| that it was then used over and over to smear him as a
| Russian stooge. And we can see this smearing continues to
| this day.
|
| "Obviously his freedom to speak freely about his host
| country is extremely limited"
|
| Do you think the Russian government would prefer that he
| not say things like this?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/29/edward-
| snowd...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/world/europe/edward-
| snowd...
| ajross wrote:
| > He was in transit to Ecuador, which was going to grant
| him asylum. The U.S. government revoked his passport,
| trapping him in the Moscow airport.
|
| So the American Plan To Trap Snowden In Russia For
| Propaganda Purposes comes down to.... revoking a passport
| for a wanted criminal, something we do hundreds of times
| ever month or whatever? Not much of a conspiracy.
|
| That's not how that works. If Ecuador was willing to
| grant asylum, Ecuador could easily have arranged
| transportation or issued their own passport. They still
| could, today! They didn't, and won't. Obviously you can
| spin that part too as part of a nefarious American Plan.
| But... Ecuador didn't want him either. It's as simple as
| that.
|
| And he's in Russia, equally simply, because Russia was
| willing (frankly eager) to antagonize US influence and
| interests.
|
| (FWIW: your last example of Snowden's seeming
| independence from Russian interference is a _half decade
| stale_. Please. What does he think of the shooting war
| his host country started?)
|
| Just don't spin this. Snowden broke US laws, fled the
| country, and ended up being hosted by an enemy. No more
| complexity need exist.
| stormking wrote:
| Don't kid yourself, by now, Russia is a full-on fascist
| dictatorship. They don't let him say stuff like this
| because they have rules about freedom of speech or
| something, the let him say stuff like this because it is
| more useful to them that he retains some kind of
| credibility. It makes it more effective when he later
| tweets antisemitic caricatures about American Jews
| fueling the war in Ukraine.
| idlewords wrote:
| Ellsberg is a more gracious person than I am. No one forced
| Snowden to fly to Russia, he made the decision himself in
| full awareness of the risk that he might get stranded
| there.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Why does it matter that he flew to Russia? How does that
| effect the legitimacy or the illegitimacy of his leaks?
| BizarreByte wrote:
| There's no value in Snowden returning to face punishment or
| torture. Most people given the option would have chosen to
| stay in Russia.
|
| Near guaranteed freedom in Russia or an unjust likely life
| imprisonment in one of the worst prisons in America?
|
| You don't have to make a martyr of yourself as a
| whistleblower.
| the_only_law wrote:
| It's always funny to see HN's thoughts on that sort of
| cutthroat pragmatism when it's them doing it, but how hard
| they demonize it when someone else does it.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| It's one of the most annoying things about people online
| in general honestly.
|
| It's easy to sacrifice oneself when it's only theoretical
| and you're safe at home behind a screen.
| corbet wrote:
| I got to meet him once at a protest at the nuclear test site --
| back in those days when we were still setting off bombs in holes
| in the ground. Took a couple of pictures...
| https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWl7MdCuvetRLGReEq
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| I think he was a truly good person.
| DaniFong wrote:
| black line
| ejb999 wrote:
| as a society we have moved on from whistleblowers - now we lock
| them up or call them conspiracy theorists - all enabled by the
| corporate media who does nothing but the bidding of the three
| letter agencies who tells them what to say, when to say it, and
| how to say it.
| isx726552 wrote:
| If anyone has not read Ellsberg's 2017 book "The Doomsday
| Machine", I highly recommend it. It covers his work and knowledge
| regarding potential nuclear war within US policy which was the
| main reason he wanted to become a whistleblower. Within the book
| he discuses numerous problems with US command and control
| procedures for launching nuclear attacks and even calls the movie
| "Dr. Strangelove" a "documentary" (tongue in cheek) because of
| its satirical yet accurate highlighting of these issues. It's a
| captivating, informative, and frightening book.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| The really shocking (at the time!) part of that book is not
| just the level of destruction, but the fact that any small
| number of bombers or a rogue commander could have started the
| entire process off. It is an absolute miracle we survived the
| cold war. It's hard to imagine we would survive it twice.
| arethuza wrote:
| Worth noting that UK nukes apparently don't have PALs - the
| crews of the UK Trident submarines have all they need to
| launch. Of course, being the UK the ultimate guidance on what
| to do if Radio 4 goes off air (thus civilisation ending) is
| in the form of hand written letters!
| fragmede wrote:
| Letters of Last Resort is an interesting rabbit hole.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort
| sillywalk wrote:
| For an excellent pseudo-documentary film on a nuclear war in
| the UK (in the early-mid sixties), The War Game[0] is kind of
| terrifying.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game
| arethuza wrote:
| _" The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from
| a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and
| China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.
|
| I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the
| graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist.
| It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere,
| ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever
| existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that
| it referred to."_
|
| https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html
|
| He also notes that Finland would have been completely destroyed
| by the US strike and 100 million would die in _Western_ Europe
| from the effects of US weapons.
| nine_k wrote:
| I think a document like that absolutely should exist, as a
| part of a larger file titled "Why the US is not going to
| strike first".
|
| Full terrors should be exposed for MAD to work.
| arethuza wrote:
| "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost,
| if you _keep_ it a _secret_! Why didn 't you tell the
| world, EH?"
| sillywalk wrote:
| "It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday.
| As you know, the Premier loves surprises."
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| Why even launch the weapons? Have them in beautiful
| crystal palaces in remote locations. Detonate them on
| your own soil.
| steve76 wrote:
| [dead]
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| > "The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs,
| from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union
| and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred
| Holocausts.
|
| In retort - "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get
| our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty
| million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks."
| arethuza wrote:
| Another scary thing in that book is the delegation of use
| of nuclear weapons to relatively junior commanders - the
| public statement that only the US president can authorise
| the use of nuclear weapons being completely untrue at the
| time.
|
| That is probably why Ellsberg referred to Dr Strangelove as
| a documentary...
| zirgs wrote:
| Were Soviet war plans any different?
| arethuza wrote:
| In the relevant timescale the Soviets were far less of a
| strategic threat to the US than they would later become.
| However, they did have lots of weapons pointed at Western
| Europe.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
|
| In many respect the Soviet leadership was terrified of the
| West and a first strike - later it was Reagan who was
| eventually persuaded of what a risk that fear was and de-
| escalated.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Nope, and this fact _amplifies_ the evil of the system, it
| doesn't mitigate it.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
| [deleted]
| arethuza wrote:
| I know this an odd thing to thank someone for, but his book _"
| The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner"_ is
| the only book I've ever read that actually gave me nightmares.
| vintermann wrote:
| I see that New York Times is careful not to mention Manning, or
| Snowden, or Assange, or indeed draw any of the lines to the
| present day situation - lines that Ellsberg himself tried so
| desperately to draw in the last months of his life.
|
| In the book of Genesis, there is a part where Abraham haggles
| with God(!) trying to save the city of Sodom. If there's 50
| honest people, will you spare it? How about 45? 40? He gets all
| the way to 10. Famously, that wasn't low enough.
|
| I feel like Sodom lost one of the honest men covering for it
| today.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You're misremembering somewhat. God agrees not to destroy the
| city if Abraham can find 10 honest men. In the end it turns out
| there's only 1 (named Lot) and this isn't enough, so God has
| his angels escort Lot and his family out of the city before
| smiting it. Oddly, this determination of honesty is based on
| Lot extending hospitality to two angelic visitors sent to test
| him and defending his guests from the rapacious townspeople;
| Lot offers to let the crowd ravage his daughters instead but
| the townspeople decline his offer. No word on how the daughters
| felt about this.
| jxramos wrote:
| is that right, are you saying the onus was on Abraham to do
| the legwork and locating of good men rather than God
| omnisciently evaluating the state of all the souls in the
| town and determining which side of the balance they landed on
| at that particular moment?
|
| I don't think that's accurate, I just double checked and it's
| God who's doing the evaluating, there's lots of hits for "If
| I find...".
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Yeah, I should have said 'if God can find 10 honest men.'
| I'm not sure how omniscience or omnipotence really
| manifests in the Bible since God habitually delegates tasks
| to angels instead of just teleporting people into or out of
| harm's way, but then again abstractions don't make for
| gripping stories.
| zirgs wrote:
| Back when the Bible was written opinions of women didn't
| matter.
| 1-more wrote:
| This theme of reward/sparing for hospitality of disguised
| divinity is also present in the story of Baucis and Philemon
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baucis_and_Philemon
| nine_k wrote:
| I used to think that Lot knew the townspeople well, knew what
| would happen, and successfully proved the point: "You see?
| They don't care, they need you."
|
| One of my Christian friends offered a different perspective:
| the city was so vile that even a man of slightly dubious
| moral character like Lot was a man of virtue, compared to the
| crowd outside his house.
|
| In any case, that was not enough to save the city.
| jxramos wrote:
| The thing that always struck me most about that passage is
| the determination to fulfill the lust even after being
| struck blind and being undeterred and persisting in groping
| for doorknobs and looking for a way in to Lot's home. If
| that's an accurate representation I can't imagine how
| anything other than getting my eyesight back or figuring
| out what happened to it would not be one's top priority in
| that moment. It may be a figurative use of the word blind
| though, like a mirage, or some other confusion ploy, or a
| mental fog to obscure the entrance somehow.
|
| The throwing the daughters under the bus could have been a
| declaration of his knowledge of the state of their souls
| and whatever corruption overtook it by that point. Or it
| could have been a risky gambit to buy time--when the mob
| comes I'm sure it's a terrifying experience.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| And the lesson we should all take from this story is of
| course...
| iamthepieman wrote:
| Abraham drew near and said, "Will you indeed sweep away the
| righteous with the wicked? 24 Suppose there are fifty
| righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place
| and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? 25
| Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous
| to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the
| wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the
| earth do what is just?" 26 And the Lord said, "If I find at
| Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole
| place for their sake."
|
| 27 Abraham answered and said, "Behold, I have undertaken to
| speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. 28 Suppose
| five of the fifty righteous are lacking. Will you destroy the
| whole city for lack of five?" And he said, "I will not
| destroy it if I find forty-five there." 29 Again he spoke to
| him and said, "Suppose forty are found there." He answered,
| "For the sake of forty I will not do it." 30 Then he said,
| "Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak. Suppose
| thirty are found there." He answered, "I will not do it, if I
| find thirty there." 31 He said, "Behold, I have undertaken to
| speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there." He
| answered, "For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it." 32
| Then he said, "Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak
| again but this once. Suppose ten are found there." He
| answered, "For the sake of ten I will not destroy it." 33 And
| the Lord went his way, when he had finished speaking to
| Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.
| [deleted]
| teddyh wrote:
| "Have you ever heard the story of the 36 tzaddikim? They say
| that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints--36
| unselfish men and women. Because of _them_ the world continues
| to exist.
|
| They are the secret kings and queens of this world."
|
| -- Death, _The Sandman_ , issue 31, _Three Septembers and a
| January_ (1991)
| [deleted]
| timeon wrote:
| If we feel that analogy was necessary here... So it seem that
| present time seems to reward citizens of Sodom. Maybe God is
| different than the one from Genesis.
| mynameisash wrote:
| > I see that New York Times is careful not to mention Manning,
| [...]
|
| I'm curious how common it is for that kind of connection to be
| made in an obituary. Not that I have a strong opinion one way
| or the other here, but in my understanding, obits typically
| cover the life of the individual and the direct impact of their
| work -- notably, not the impact of others inspired by their
| work?
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| >Famously, that wasn't low enough.
|
| Why would god save Sodom if there were LESS honest people?
| ljm wrote:
| I think they're saying that an honest man doesn't cover for
| anything, so there were no honest people left in Sodom. They
| couldn't even find 10 honest people.
|
| Similarly, an honest journalist doesn't cover for their
| newspaper, so there are no honest journalists left in the
| NYT.
|
| It's a flawed premise when you look back on the past 100
| years where the concept of 'honesty' really meant 'loyalty to
| your government'. Hitler, Stalin, McCarthy, Nixon...
| ekam wrote:
| It wasn't low enough in the sense that Sodom had less than
| 10. Abraham was negotiating with God for a lower amount for
| that reason
| [deleted]
| troutwine wrote:
| It's less 'save' and 'not destroy' although that's maybe a
| fine distinction.
|
| In Genesis God is drawn to do something about Sodom as the
| din of shrieks from that city has spurred him to action,
| shrieks either from people of the city oppressed in it or
| visitors to the city oppressed by it. Considering the Lot
| story later and God's intention to destroy Sodom presumably
| shrieks by visitors. Anyhow. Yes, Abraham haggles. Just prior
| to this we hear God's internal monologue where he decides,
| for the first time, to include a human -- post Adam,
| depending on how you read the naming of things -- in the
| decision making process that governs the world. Abraham is
| presumably horrified -- the narrator of Genesis does not say
| -- and haggles God down from destroying the city outright, to
| 50 etc etc daring to go as low as 10, a number that, just so
| happens, to be a later minimum administrative unit size in
| Jewish society. In the narrative structure of Genesis we have
| already seen an attempt to eradicate evil through destruction
| -- the Flood -- and that does not work, to the point where
| God promises not to do outright, global destruction like that
| again. So it's clear in the narrative -- though perhaps not
| to Abraham who may or may not have known about the post-Flood
| promise -- that God has a maximum upper bound on the amount
| of people that can be destroyed in response to evil: all.
| Abraham brings this maximum upper bound down to 50 as an
| opening gambit, then etc etc. It is worth noting that
| Abraham, at this point in the story, is elderly and rich, so
| he's presumably used to negotiation as a way of life.
|
| Why would Sodom not be destroyed if there were less honest
| people? God's intention before consulting Abraham is to
| destroy the whole city but it is Abraham that bargains the
| number down to a minimum. If ten can be found, the threshold
| for destruction isn't reached. An entirely reasonable read
| here is that Abraham couldn't bear to see an entire city's
| worth of people destroyed and God was willing to be convinced
| otherwise. In itself that's a remarkable thing for a Near
| Eastern deity and is one sign that Genesis as a piece of
| literature is in conversation with and opposed to other
| contemporary Near Eastern literature.
|
| Anyway, that's not the only read here -- there are millennia
| of commentary on this very text -- but it is worth pointing
| out that the Genesis text comes from the Mesopotamian
| culture, one that is both distinct from our Greek-derived way
| of thinking/being and has also gone extinct outside of
| literature, so norms that may have appeared self-evident to
| the original audience might not come through to modern
| readers so easily, or at all.
| explorigin wrote:
| We can only speculate but Abraham is pleading with God more
| for his nephew necessarily than Sodom itself.
| gwd wrote:
| The question was about the _minimum_ number of "righteous"
| people required for the city to be saved. Abraham started at
| 50, then 45, then 40, 30, 20, and finally 10 -- at each
| point, God said "OK, if there are that many righteous people
| in the city, I'll spare it."
|
| https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+18%3A20.
| ..
| kelnos wrote:
| Thank you for explaining that much more clearly.
|
| It boggles my mind that, given stories in the Bible like
| this, anyone would think worshiping such a cruel and
| vengeful god is a moral thing to do.
|
| Granted, the New Testament tries to paint a much more
| compassionate picture. Just goes to show you that the
| church will do its best to change its marketing when the
| need arises.
| gwd wrote:
| > It boggles my mind that, given stories in the Bible
| like this, anyone would think worshiping such a cruel and
| vengeful god is a moral thing to do.
|
| We're getting far afield from Ellsberg here, but let me
| just point out the logic of this statement:
|
| 1. There is a universal standard of morality -- a
| standard so universal that it would apply to God himself
|
| 2. "kelnos" knows what this universal standard says, at
| least well enough to judge the actions of "God" in this
| story as violating it.
|
| Now, for the most part I agree with you (except the
| conclusion); and in fact, that truth -- that the
| immorality of killing innocent people applies to God
| himself, and that mere mortals like Abraham (and kelnos)
| can be said to know what it is -- is implied by the story
| itself. But those are pretty big philosophical
| propositions, and I don't think most people are aware
| they're making them when they make statements like this.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Why didn't god just state that there were none after
| Abraham thought there were 50?
| gwd wrote:
| You could start by asking why God mentioned his
| intentions to Abraham at all. What the text says about
| that:
|
| > Then the Lord said, "Shall I hide from Abraham what I
| am about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and
| powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed
| through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will
| direct his children and his household after him to keep
| the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so
| that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has
| promised him."
|
| That is, Abraham's idea of justice, and how authorities
| act, will have a big impact on a fairly big chunk of
| humanity.
|
| Abraham obviously knows that Sodom isn't a great place.
| But just how bad is it? Obviously _part_ of Abraham
| thinks even 10 people should be enough to spare the city;
| but some other part of Abraham may be more
| "realpolitik". Abraham thinks this Elohim person is more
| than just some local tyrant god; but is he really?
| Abraham thinks that even God should be open to having his
| decisions measured by justice and morality -- but that's
| not exactly a common attitude for gods of that time.
|
| God affirms all of Abraham's intuitions. Yes Abraham,
| you're right: killing the innocent with the righteous is
| not OK. Yes Abraham, you're right: even my actions are
| guided by morality. Yes Abraham, you're right: The "judge
| of all the earth" won't be offended if you check him.
|
| This experience changed Abraham as a person, and affected
| not only how he ran his own show, but what he passes on
| to his kids and their kids.
| plemer wrote:
| Abraham basically bargained God down to save the city if it
| had ten honest men, but there were not even ten. So even ten
| wasn't low enough of a standard for Sodom to be able to pass.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| That makes sense, Thank you!
| iab wrote:
| What is god factorial
| [deleted]
| rapnie wrote:
| > I see that New York Times is careful not to mention Manning,
| or Snowden, or Assange, or indeed draw any of the lines to the
| present day situation - lines that Ellsberg himself tried so
| desperately to draw in the last months of his life.
|
| The Guardian does a better job in that regard.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/16/daniel-ellsb...
| kfrzcode wrote:
| As per usual.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| "By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that
| there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war
| should not be continued. And that came to be the majority
| view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came
| out."
|
| And yet Nixon handily won in 1968 (even with Wallace
| kneecapping him in 5 states) and 1972.
|
| While not well covered, Ellsberg would mention in person that
| his early issues weren't that it was a bad or immoral war but
| that the US wasn't committing the forces/effort required to
| win it. That's one of the reasons he waffled for so long.
| CalChris wrote:
| Johnson had escalated the war, created it really, from the
| Gulf of Tonkin 'crisis'. By 1968, the war had failed and at
| some level everyone knew that. Johnson was not running for
| re-election and Nixon had a 'secret plan' to end the war.
| Nixon ran on that and that's why he won handily. He even
| conspired with Anna Chennault to sabotage the peace talks
| and get the South Vietnamese to believe they'd get a better
| deal from Nixon.
|
| After winning, Nixon continued the war even after Congress
| reversed the Gulf of Tonkin war powers resolution. He even
| signed that reversal but then cynically claimed the power
| to defend the troops and remained.
| [deleted]
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Why mention Manning, or Snowden, or Assange and not the former
| POTUS? Doesn't he also stand accused of violating the Espionage
| Act, in a way that's regarded by many as politically-slanted
| persecution?
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Oh my goddd....
| MarkMarine wrote:
| It's a ridiculous law, originally used as a cudgel against
| anti WW1 protesters and socialists. A real horseshoe that
| it's looped around to Trump, but let's look at this
| critically.
|
| Was Trump exposing the classified information he took to the
| broader populace? No. Was there a public good to be had if he
| did? Probably not. Taking the nuclear secrets and making
| those public? Not good.
|
| There is no intent in the espionage law, so from a legal
| standpoint that doesn't matter, but I don't think Trump
| belongs with the whistleblowers. Sounds like he wanted to
| keep this information secret, for himself. He's on tape,
| saying as much.
| ilc wrote:
| [flagged]
| oilchange wrote:
| [dead]
| 317070 wrote:
| OK, the media overwhelmingly mentions his activist achievements.
| But, can I point out it is the same Daniel Ellsberg as in "The
| Ellsberg paradox" [0]?
|
| I have an urn with 30 red balls and 30 green balls. You can pick
| a color, and you get 10$ if you guessed the next ball I pull out
| of the urn correctly. Alternatively, I have another urn with an
| unknown amount of red and green balls in them. You could also
| choose to use this urn with a color of your choice, if you want?
|
| Which of these 4 options do you pick?
|
| It turns out that people overwhelmingly prefer the first urn.
| They have an aversion to epistemic uncertainty, even though from
| utility theory, all 4 options are equivalent. Even weirder, if we
| would have played this game repeatedly, the second urn is clearly
| preferable. Then why do we have this intuition?
|
| The experiment from his paper is slightly different and (in my
| opinion) harder to understand, but the sketch above illustrates
| the same paradox between what utility theory tells us is the best
| decision, and what we intuitively decide.
|
| Do note that he was working at the RAND corporation at the time,
| where they were running probabilistic simulations of the cold
| war, the so called Cold War games. (People were literally
| throwing dice all day to run the simulations of the various
| nuclear war scenarios). His paradox was a critique to that
| method, as we don't actually know the probabilities involved in
| these nuclear scenarios, in the same way as we don't know the
| amount of red and green balls in one of the urns.
|
| Therefore, we might want to discredit decisions based on
| scenarios where we don't have good estimates of the probabilities
| of the outcomes, in favour of scenarios where we do know them.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsberg_paradox
| puika wrote:
| I knew Ellsberg rang a bell. I got to know about him from Peter
| Norvigs awesome [jupyter] notebooks: https://github.com/norvig/
| pytudes/blob/main/ipynb/Probabilit.... The probability ones are
| quite fun to go through and it's very expressive Python.
| cubefox wrote:
| > Even weirder, if we would have played this game repeatedly,
| the second urn is clearly preferable.
|
| I don't think that's the case?
|
| Edit: I get it now, under repetition the probability
| distribution of the second urn could be inferred, and the
| gambler could use this information to bet on the more frequent
| color. However, the Ellsberg paradox only says we prefer known
| distributions to unknown ones, and under repetition the
| distributions of both urns would be known. So it doesn't say
| people would prefer betting on the first urn in the repetition
| case.
| [deleted]
| 317070 wrote:
| It is the case if the balls are being put back. As you play
| more games, you would figure out the proportion of red and
| green balls in the second urn. Therefore, you would figure
| out which is the better colour.
|
| Repeated games under epistemic uncertainty actually allows
| you to get an edge by extracting information and reducing
| that uncertainty, in comparison to a game which is guaranteed
| to have no edge for you.
| cubefox wrote:
| Yeah, but that would change an unknown distribution to a
| known distribution. Then the Ellsberg paradox does no
| longer apply.
| 317070 wrote:
| Yes, but why do we intuitively avoid epistemic
| uncertainty, even though it is something which can only
| _give_ us an edge here?
|
| To make clear: playing this game with an urn which has an
| equal amount of red and green balls, is the worst case
| scenario when you get to pick the colour that wins. The
| second urn can only be the same or better, whether or not
| you can figure out any information about the balls in it.
| cubefox wrote:
| It can only give us an edge in the repetition case. And
| the Ellsberg paradox doesn't apply to the repetition
| case. Ellsberg doesn't say anything about people
| preferring the first urn in the repetition case. In fact,
| I see no evidence that they do.
| [deleted]
| fossuser wrote:
| In a one time game it's a 50% known bet vs. an unknown
| bet. 50% is not bad odds?
| peteradio wrote:
| Because the real consequence of losing is not $0, so
| there is (potentially unacceptable) cost to gain
| knowledge which gives you enough edge to win?
| gameman144 wrote:
| Reducing the uncertainty does not give you an edge vs
| having certainty a priori though.
|
| For instance, you are not better off discovering that the
| urn has a 50:50 ratio than you would be if you knew that
| 50:50 ratio ahead of time.
|
| If you're saying that you could discover a _better_ ratio,
| then the thing that gives you the edge is the better ratio
| itself; if you knew the better ratio ahead of time, the
| epistemic uncertainty would only harm you.
| michaelt wrote:
| When the game is repeated, does the second urn always have
| the same distribution of balls?
| [deleted]
| djbusby wrote:
| Can you add any more? Cause, the other theory and Wikipedia
| click hole are pretty convincing. But, I'm not a maths wiz.
| [deleted]
| andrewmutz wrote:
| I think the second urn is preferable in the repeated case
| because for really unbalanced ball setups there is a high
| correlation between the color that gets drawn each time. You
| can just guess that the next ball will be the color that was
| most common among previous drawings.
|
| With the 30/30 red/green urn, on the other hand, you don't
| really have a much greater edge than 50%, at least in the
| early phases. In the later phases, perhaps you could count
| balls to get an edge, unless the balls are put back in the
| urn after being drawn.
| corpMaverick wrote:
| The second option is better. To win you have to bet that the
| second ball is the same color as the first ball. The second
| option could have 30 and 30 (worst case) or it could have 59
| and 1(best case), so almost any ball mix is better or equal
| than the first option when you only have about 50% chances of
| wining.
| gameman144 wrote:
| Why would 30 and 30 be the worst case? You could have drawn a
| statistically improbable first ball, no? E.g. in your 59:1
| example, you could have drawn the 1 rare ball.
| furyofantares wrote:
| The first option makes sense to me. Both choices have the same
| expected value; I understand that, but I also feel it's more
| likely I have misunderstood something about the second option.
| I'm crystal clear on the first.
|
| Literally any tiebreaker for "which of these options with all
| the same value" seems fine, I do have to make a decision after
| all. And I think I'd be slightly skeptical that the
| experimenter is trying to trick me in some way with the second
| option in the unlikely case that I've misunderstood it.
| kepler1 wrote:
| Here's a philosophical (?) topic I would love to hear opinions on
| the occasion of remembering Ellsberg's contributions.
|
| Some would say that the transparency of revealing the Pentagon
| papers caused us as a people for the first time (debatable of
| course) to not fundamentally trust that the government usually
| does the right thing.
|
| (In the general public perception sense. There were and always
| would be groups discontent or not trusting the state was acting
| in their interests on specific issues. But this was a large scale
| violation of people's beliefs, some might say.)
|
| But for the first time (again, debatable), the government was
| shown to be covering up the national disgrace of the very
| important and big topic of Vietnam for face saving, and
| sacrificing lives in the process. And that this was just people
| at the top muddling through really important topics.
|
| And this was important for a people to know, and understand that
| they could check government like this.
|
| So... however --
|
| I wonder, is there something such as _too_ much transparency for
| a country 's people, in the face of the reality of who your
| international competitors are, in a modern information age?
|
| When governments can control information, they are much more able
| to sweep certain things under the rug, unify a people with
| partial information, and embark on war, other issues that dismiss
| or hide the many layers of truth or actions. And every issue is
| always complicated by who it helps and hurts. In a huge
| democracy, there will always be someone hurt by some decision.
|
| When you have competitor countries who are not committed to such
| whistleblowing, sharing of information, freedom of press, and
| their people are able to be unified towards some goals while
| smaller issues are swept under the rug. Is our country by
| comparison paralyzed from doing great things, because any great
| thing will have endless "complainers" once all the details are
| known because of our freedom of information and above mistrust of
| government?
|
| Basically, is there conceivably a bad or unintended consequence
| of so much freedom of the press to check government? Has too much
| democracy been a hinderance (or will it be when some important
| issue presents itself) to the progress of a democracy?
| pphysch wrote:
| In a democratic system, the point of whistleblowing and
| journalism is not to expose secrets that could put lives at
| risk, but to hold powerful people accountable for their
| actions.
|
| The latter people spend a lot of resources conflating the two.
| They manufacture the illusion that they are necessarily
| operating for the public interest, and therefore the only
| reason why their secret operations are secret is to keep people
| safe. By extension, guys like Assange are clearly criminals for
| violating that secrecy.
|
| In reality, in the cases of Ellsberg, Manning, Snowden (et
| al.), we learned that our governments were _not_ operating in
| the public interest. The Vietnam and Iraq invasions were
| _insane and wasteful_ , enriching the pockets and hegemonic
| fantasies of a tiny elite at the cost of real American lives
| (and countless other lives).
| avgcorrection wrote:
| No.
| walterbell wrote:
| Daniel Ellsberg giving advice to Henry Kissinger about security
| clearances, in 1968, from his book "Secrets",
| https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...
|
| _> You will deal with a person who doesn't have those clearances
| only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and
| what impression you want him to go away with, since you'll have
| to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will
| have to manipulate him. You'll give up trying to assess what he
| has to say. The danger is, you'll become something like a moron.
| You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the
| world, no matter how much experience they may have in their
| particular areas that may be much greater than yours._
| er4hn wrote:
| The full quote is much more impactful and is something I come
| back to when I think about more mundane things like moving up
| in roles in a company:
|
| > "Henry, there's something I would like to tell you, for what
| it's worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You've
| been a consultant for a long time, and you've dealt a great
| deal with top secret information. But you're about to receive a
| whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of
| them, that are higher than top secret.
|
| > "I've had a number of these myself, and I've known other
| people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good
| sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on
| a person who didn't previously know they even _existed_. And
| the effects of reading the information that they will make
| available to you.
|
| > "First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new
| information, and by having it all -- so much! incredible! --
| suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will
| feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about
| these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by
| presidents for years without having known of the existence of
| all this information, which presidents and others had and you
| didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways
| you couldn't even guess. In particular, you'll feel foolish for
| having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some
| officials and consultants who did have access to all this
| information you didn't know about and didn't know they had, and
| you'll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
|
| > "You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two
| weeks. Then, after you've started reading all this daily
| intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to
| whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more
| closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there
| ever was a time when you didn't have it, and you'll be aware
| only of the fact that you have it now and most others
| don't....and that all those _other_ people are fools.
|
| > "Over a longer period of time -- not too long, but a matter
| of two or three years -- you'll eventually become aware of the
| limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it
| doesn't tell you, it's often inaccurate, and it can lead you
| astray just as much as the _New York Times_ can. But that takes
| a while to learn.
|
| > "In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to
| _learn_ from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. Because
| you'll be thinking as you listen to them: 'What would this man
| be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the
| same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and
| recommendations?' And _that_ mental exercise is so torturous
| that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I've
| seen this with my superiors, my colleagues....and with myself.
|
| > "You will deal with a person who doesn't have those
| clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to
| believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since
| you'll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In
| effect, you will have to manipulate him. You'll give up trying
| to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you'll become
| something like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning
| from most people in the world, no matter how much experience
| they may have in their particular areas that may be much
| greater than yours."
|
| > ....Kissinger hadn't interrupted this long warning. As I've
| said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He
| seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn't take
| it as patronizing, as I'd feared. But I knew it was too soon
| for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn't have
| the clearances yet.
| sschueller wrote:
| Let us not forget that right now Assange is still roting in a UK
| prison and is about to be extradited to the United States. A
| discusting witch hunt against an individual which the US managed
| to turn into the bad guy in the publics view.
|
| Shame on the United States and it's allies enabling this
| grotesque injustice!
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Assange can leave Belmarsh whenever he wants.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| He is _not_ a US citizen and will be tried under US law for
| things he did _outside_ of the United States. Let everyone
| judge for themselves if that is just.
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