“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

All: Whether he is right or not or one likes him or not, Hersh reporting on this counts as significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), so I've turned off the flags on this submission.

If you're going to comment in this thread, please make sure you're up on the site guidlelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." We don't want political or nationalistic flamewar here, and any substantive point can be made without it.

If anyone else had written this, would it be significant?

Wouldn't it just be written off as a conspiracy theory that provides little to no evidence for its claims?

If the only thing that gets this on HN is Seymour Hersh's reputation (which has lately become somewhat questionable) then you might want to reconsider. Plus, the quality of the comments has not been very good so far.

No, I don't think it would be. Hersh is inevitably part of the story because of his historical significance and the network of government sources that he's cultivated for decades. It doesn't follow that his claims are true (even if he's accurately reporting, his sources must have their own agendas). That's why I added the question mark to the title above. The story being on HN doesn't imply anything about that—only that it's interesting.

Btw, I haven't gone back and looked at the history but I'd be willing to bet that the same things were said about Hersh's reputation from the beginning. That's standard fare for counterargument.

p.s. It's astonishing how narrow the space is for someone to say they don't know the truth about X but it's interesting. If X has any charge at all, you get pounced on by people who feel sure that they do know what the truth is. But if you think about it, it's a precondition for curiosity not to already know (or feel one knows) the answer—and this is a site for curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So I don't feel that this is particularly a borderline call from a moderation point of view.

It is astonishing how so many people think that others can't read something like this and make their own judgements about it. I guess that they're worried that too many people will just accept this as True, and that will make the world a worse place? I just find it an incredibly arrogant position to take. If there's some other way of justifying that opinion, I'd love to hear it.