Excellent job criticizing the content of my comment.
I see you’ve decided to use the strategy of an ad hominem attack. This is a really great classic one! I applaud your efforts. Since it’s too hard to refute the substance of my comment you can just point out how I’m some crazy person.
If you’re open to it I invite you to pick just one point I made and see if you can find some kind of logical flaw in my reasoning.
Can you name anything about this news story that couldn't have happened in a non-Israeli context? Or does the Israel angle just draw you in like a moth to a flame, until it's the only word in the whole article you can really read?
And to GP's point: Can you point to one paragraph in your original post that does not cry out that you need to log off? I sure can't.
Imagine it’s the Vietnam war, and there’s an American reporter reporting on missiles/bombs hitting South Vietnam.
The Viet Cong disputes the reporting and furthermore publishes death threats against the American journalist.
Of course, this is a logical response from your enemy combatant, who isn’t going to be in the habit of agreeing with you. The American journalist should expect it.
Furthermore, American armed forces obviously shouldn’t be attacking North Vietnam in the first place. Anyone who is even halfway educated already knows that it’s an unjustified war. This proxy war is taking place among global superpowers and the primary victims are the local people.
I don’t know what’s so hard to understand about this: Israel/USA started the current war in Iran. This is established fact and I don’t even think the US government disputes it.
The only difference with today’s war is that Israel is within missile range of Iran, which is why I said if I was an Israeli citizen I’d be rip roaring mad at my government for being incompetent. Netanyahu isn’t seen as a bumbling fool like Trump but he actually is. Remember that before he was elected he was seen as an extreme candidate. He is escalating war in his region which directly threatens his own people, and it has been largely unnecessary with nothing to gain. I seem to recall the genocide in Gaza being a military campaign that his own generals advised against.
A journalist on the side of the aggressor is whining about getting death threats and reporting it to his local beat cops like it’s a lost puppy. Welcome to the war your country started. Wars tend to involve death threats.
I don’t know what you mean by “log off,” you mean bury my head in the sand and stop following current events? Or turn off my brain and accept the point of view coming from AIPAC, a lobbying organization that spends tens of millions of dollars supporting political candidates in my state.
These are major news stories that I would know about just by tuning in to any news network. I assure you I’m not chronically online. This is my only social media account. No Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.
> The Viet Cong disputes the reporting and furthermore publishes death threats against the American journalist.
So here, your hypothetical already diverges from the story under discussion. As far as I can tell from TFA, it is not someone from Iran / Hamas / another adversary who is threatening this journalist, out of some war-related motivation. It's some clique of bettors on Polymarket, motivated by money. (In fact, they present themselves as Israeli: named Haim, speaking Hebrew. This could easily be an alias, but if they are able to threaten this guy's family, the implication is that they have at least one member on the ground in Israel, and are unlikely to be an "enemy combatant" as in your hypothetical.)
For most of us on here, we're able to set aside the wartime setting of this story, which is a fine topic for discussion in any number of other forums, and look at what is new and novelly concerning about the story at hand. Namely, this story shows an alarming new side effect of prediction markets, which are an exploding new industry with in tech. This is a tech forum, where we occasionally try to be critical about the downstream effects of what we're building.
We are also able to imagine other bets in the future, unrelated to any war, where resolution depends similarly on judgement calls from journalists, and where threats might be inspired. Thus, the war, tragic and important and concerning as it may be, is not the main focus of our discussion here. The journalist was threatened not by Iran, not by any analogue of the Viet Cong, but by bettors.
Now, what exactly do hersko and I mean when we say that you need to log off?
This is where it gets tricky and it might feel "ad hominem" as you say, but I hope that I've addressed your argument itself adequately above.
We're not talking so much about your specific news sources, as your mindset. "Log off" is less about the internet itself, and more a claim that we are seeing symptoms of a hyperfocused and closed mind. Something in your worldview has prevented you from reading this article critically, and understanding what is at stake beyond the issues that already had you animated. Something has mutated this story within your brain into one where the people making the threats were combatants, not bettors.
I also see some tinges of being unable to model any viewpoint that disagrees with your own. I can't see your original comment because somebody flagged it, but within this latest one you write, "Anyone who is even halfway educated already knows that it's an unjustified war". This is inaccurate. There were educated Americans who supported the Vietnam War. Do you understand what their reasons were? Their actual reasons, not just the ones passed down to us by boomer history? Are you even curious?
The world is not all black-and-white.
> you mean bury my head in the sand and stop following current events?
By no means. It is good to stay informed. But be wary that filter bubbles are not contained to the internet. A filter bubble can include mainstream news networks and sources.
Lastly, to throw you a bone:
Maybe there's an argument for how war factors into this story, in more than just an incidental way. Something like, "war generally increases the mood of tension and desperation". Or, "kinetic war is usually accompanied by information war, such that reporting starts to feel subjective among all the propaganda". Maybe this helped the bettors here get tied to their chosen version of events emotionally, not just economically, and feel justified in putting out these threats.
But this is not the argument that you made, IIRC. (FWIW, I don't think you should have been flagged. Flagging gets overused here. You didn't say anything offensive or inflammatory.)
