But I guess it has to do with that strange and hypocrite ideology that makes some people abuse grammar and employ plural personal pronouns when they fully well know that (a) the guy is singular and (b) the probability of him being female is almost zero as the climate on HN is toxic for women. (Maybe it's a way of pretending it isn't?)

Anyway.

So, my "karma" reached a new high-score, and it means that once again, all my comments are stillborn, dead by default, killed by software (obviously, no artificial or other intelligence involved in any way, not even simple text analysis).

How did this come about? Well, it's the work of bigots. They abuse the "flag" feature, which is meant to stop spam and trolls, to suppress comments, opinions and even facts they dislike or disagree with. I haven't counted, but I'd guess that close to two dozens of my comments have been flagged to death. Not a single comment was spam or trolling. Not a single one.

Even my very long and thoughtful post about my doubts concerning T-rex and, by extension, the science of dinosaurs was flagged (50089549). Why? What's wrong with these people?

While bigots may only account for a small percentage of HN users, they are effectively handed over censorship privileges to limit HN discussions to their narrow-minded vision of the world.

They're not religious bigots, of course. Instead, they're ideological bigots, or even scientific bigots (in as much as science has displaced religion as ideology for the educated classes).

It would be easy to change the effect bigots have on the site and the discussions that can be had here. For example, it seems users can look at other users' "karma", which is seen as a kind of "merit". Well, abusive "flagging" could be punished by negatively affecting "karma". Plus, next to "karma", some "flagging" stat could be displayed so "flaggers" would be seen as such.

HN has been around for a long time, and people with a mindset similar to mine must have shown up now and then and made the same observations and maybe complained about it in some way. I have seen some such comments and complaints. To no avail, apparently. So I have to conclude that the de facto censorship the minority of bigots are allowed to exercise on HN is fully intentional.

Then of course it is not a site for minority views, and not even for curiosity. It's not a site purely for bigotry either, of course, but, sadly, bigotry seems to play a more important role than curiosity.

That's not at all a fair assessment of their work. They aren't trained historians, okay, but that's not unusual for authors of history books; it can even be a plus (unencumbered by institutional constraints and the need for ideological compliance). Docherty and Macgregor also provide lots of detailed concrete evidence, following the prosopographic tradition of Carroll Quigley. The topic of the book is the machinations of a "secret elite" (whose members are well-known high-ranking public figures), so yes, this is akin to a conspiracy. But it is neither a rant nor a theory.

What is surprising about that? The Northcliffe propaganda press and writers such as H.G. Wells had been nurturing the idea of the inevitability of war with Germany for years, so, unless they really sucked at propaganda, at least some "positive effect" would be the expected outcome.

« It's just that the nature and scope of the conflict that caught them by surprise - a land war »

Maybe, in some respect. But they had factored in the armies of France and Russia, hadn't they (in 1904 and 1907 already), so they were certainly expecting some land war scenarios.

The reason they didn't tell their people they were willing to sacrifice them on the order of a couple hundred thousands may have had to do with the lack of popular support for such an honorable prospect.

Such wording is of course an allusion to Australian author Christopher Clark's 2012 book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. The book is very detailed, but still a big lie in the overall narrative, meant to gloss over the fact that a clique in the British establishment had spent at least ten years organizing and preparing this war; yes, with their indispensable associates in France and Russia, but masterminded in London, as explained by Scottish authors Docherty and Macgregor in Hidden History.

The real reason for which is of course that … Dinosaurs are Too Big to Fail. :)

Discovery of a couple large aquatic lizards preceded the invention of the dinosaurs by a few decades. Most notably among these, we find mosasaurus, ichthyosaurus, and plesiosaurus, which looks dubious and which Cuvier thought was a hoax.

I read the German Wiki article on mosasaurus, and even though the creature looks straightforward by comparison, and I find no reason to doubt its existence in a configuration roughly similar to what's presented today, the science isn't settled at all in the matter, and there's considerable questioning and shuffling about of the various specimens and the corresponding taxonomy, which is because the evidence is scarce and sketchy, by the very nature of the fossil record.

Far greater and deeper questions arise when we turn to the dinosaurs. Fundamental things like their posture (wrt to their tail) have been "corrected" in the past decades, and it looks like a couple decades from now they'll actually have feathers to be more in line with how they've been inserted into the evolutionary graph as the ancestors of birds. Other things such as the unlikely (and unviable) anatomy of many of the most famous dinosaurs don't look like they can ever be fixed.

With all the bona fide and even sympathy for such phantastic paleontological scenarios, I simply do not understand how this situation can be a base for any kind of "certainty". Curiosity and fascination, okay, I get it – but certainty?

I asked Chatty for the best book on the history of the discovery (or invention) of the dinosaurs in the first half of the 19th century†, and it came up with The Dawn of Dinosaurs by John R. Horner, published in 2005. The title struck me as odd (I would have preferred Dawn of the Dinosaurs), and it appears the book doesn't exist, Chatty had made it up.

But that turned my attention to Jack Horner, a very important figure in paleontology (at least in the USA), who has discovered various T-rex skeletons and dinosaur eggs and whatnot, and so I watched a couple minutes of a lecture he gave in 2001, which left a peculiar impression (I mean his personality), and then I read his Wiki page and was not disappointed to find my impressions totally confirmed by the article …

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Horner_(paleontologist)

Can't fault him for liking young girls, that's human nature, and he had the money to be a customer of Jeffrey Epstein; but isn't it curious how he didn't allow dyslexia from stopping him to rise to the top of the field? And what does it say about a field (at least in the USA) if such characters somehow manage to rise to the top? Could it be there is a (well-funded) system that facilitates their ascent? Because they have just what it takes to fulfil the role?

That, of course, should not reflect negatively on whatever paleo findings were made on the lands of your grandparents.

† Chatty next suggested The Dinosaur Hunters by Deborah Cadbury (Terrible Lizard for the US edition), which I found on AA and which seems to do a proper dive into history as is essential to find the truth of the matter.

Exactly. I remember opening a Metro/TIFKAM app for the first time on my new Windows 8 connected to my new 27" QHD monitor, and then staring in bewilderment as it went fullscreen and 95 % of the screen was just monochrome with nothing on it at all.

Wtf were they thinking? That I would enjoy vanilla sauce on my roastbeef because they weren't serving strawberries yet?

Still puzzling to me how such a multi-billion $ company can fuck up so hard.

Don't know about you specifically, but people here clearly "flag" things they disagree with, which is part of why what could be an interesting discussion often ends up being a dull CJ style chorus between affirmative and know-it-all. As if there was no middle ground between that and a "flamewar".

I've read comments to the effect it would be easy to change to the better by administrative means, but apparently there's no will, so "smug-flagging" seems to be in line with the purpose of the site, and that's it.

Now I'm wondering whether HN uses some sort of language model to infer semantic similarity and thus kill content automatically. Frankly, whether this is automatic or by consensus of certain users, there's not much of a difference. It is dystopian, especially given the mountains of meaningless one-line comments that abound here (probably “too little substance to be worth killing”).

Once upon a time the Internet was the realm of free thought and free speech. I get it that spam etc needs to be fought and suppressed, but frankly, none of my comments that have been killed (quite a couple of them already) come close to that category. Rather, it seems the ruling HN mindset is about as narrow-minded (if not more so in certain respects) than your typical mainstream forum.

The Mesoamerican advanced Stone Age peoples who had an ongoing encounter with the Spaniards certainly did have conscious thought, despite their gods. Why would Bronze Age peoples have been different in that respect?

At any rate, suppression of such comments is to be expected for CJ style groups but not for open-minded discussions.

Same applies to my dead comments 49953689, 49954141, as well as 49938615 and 49941900, on the subject of Hiroshima. If you cannot even quote top experts and administrators with first-hand knowledge (such as A. de Seversky and general C. Sams) just because they contradict the prevailing narrative, then what kind of discussion is that? And the flavour of "curiosity" involved must be very peculiar.

Frankly, my impression is that some people are using or abusing the "flag" feature and perhaps other features they may have at their disposal to remove opinions and facts they don't like or don't even want to see published.

Shouldn't this more correctly read zero or non-zero ?

Just as the moniker for the administrative status of occupied Poland, Generalgouvernement, was explicitly copied from British practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor-general

  > auto m2 = m; // implicit too
  Taking a copy requires making an allocation.

« A cover story for what ? » — To cover up dozens of heinous mass-murdering crimes with veneration of “the Bomb” ?

« We have eyewitnesses of Hiroshima. » — Yes, we do. You'll find some in the Palmer book (link in the dead comments). You'll also find some in chapter 19 of the Rhodes book (The Making of the Atomic Bomb), where they're more numerous but less interesting, as the book serves a different purpose: it's not an investigation, but a narrative. About 60 % of the eyewitnesses Rhodes quotes were children, and what we have is their recollection decades later. Let me quote this:

  A five-year-old girl: The whole city … was
  burning. Black smoke was billowing up and we
  could hear the sound of big things exploding.

« We have videos of atomic bomb tests. » — Those are separate incidents.

« Multiple countries … Why ? » — You're rushing to ulterior questions, if not to conclusions. Palmer focuses on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki evidence. And there is more than enough in there already that is “puzzling”, to reuse your expression. So I'd prefer to stay focused.

« lab leak theory » — Doesn't matter whether you adhere to the lab leak theory or the bat market theory. I'm sure there is a theory for some fringe group that points to “clear signs of extraterrestrian origin”, or “generated by AI”. Any crap will do. The only thing that matters in this business is that you believe there is some new-fangled and dangerous “CoVID” out there to get you.

It is usually stated, however, that the X-rays go first, and at the speed of light. Plasmarization, OTOH, would be subject to some inertia, however little, wouldn't it. So there'd be a delay before plasma formation, and the X-rays would already be “over the horizon” (joke – they wouldn't follow Earth's curvature, would they).