sedachv (u/sedachv) - Readit News

sedachv commented on FBI agents accuse CIA of 9/11 coverup spytalk.co/p/exclusive-fb... · Posted by u/VagueMag

I guess I don't understand the writer's, or your, focus on the fact they were Muslim when the CIA, and adversarial intelligence agencies generally recruit opportunistically from any disaffected groups.

sedachv · 2 years ago

Because that is what the book is about. Specifically, about the history of the Islamic Center of Munich, regularly attended by Mahmoud Abouhalima, the 1993 WTC bomber, and Al Qaeda co-founder and bin Laden mentor Mamdouh Mahmud Salim. I don't know what you are trying to imply. As suggested previously, read the book.

sedachv commented on FBI agents accuse CIA of 9/11 coverup spytalk.co/p/exclusive-fb... · Posted by u/VagueMag

Sporktacular · 2 years ago

Thank you for the data, some of which, I'll say with qualification, was new to me. I would say information but it took a lot of wading through unrelated and tangentially related links to find what you are talking about.

sedachv · 2 years ago

I recommend reading the book (Ian Johnson's A Mosque In Munich: Nazis, The CIA, And The Rise Of The Muslim Brotherhood In The West) because it is the first (and, AFAIK, so far only) study where all the "tangentially related links" are explained in context. Johnson did an excellent job of perusing West German and newly declassified CIA documents, as well as tracking down and interviewing surviving participants of the events. It is not something you can credibly explain in one post.

sedachv commented on FBI agents accuse CIA of 9/11 coverup spytalk.co/p/exclusive-fb... · Posted by u/VagueMag

Sporktacular · 2 years ago

What? There is not one mention in that wall of words of any Muslim groups being either Nazis or terrorists. If you knew Hitler's plans for the Arabs you would know it doesn't even make sense. This smacks of far-right Israeli propaganda.

sedachv · 2 years ago

https://archive.org/details/mosqueinmunichna0000john_a7m7/pa...

https://ian-johnson.com/a-mosque-in-munich

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reich_Ministry_for_the_Occupie...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijani_SS_volunteer_forma...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaukasisch-Mohammedanische_Leg...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Caucasian_and_Mountain-C...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkestan_Legion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idel-Ural_Legion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23rd_Waffen_Mountain_Division_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_Waffen_Mountain_Division_...

sedachv commented on FBI agents accuse CIA of 9/11 coverup spytalk.co/p/exclusive-fb... · Posted by u/VagueMag

dj_gitmo · 2 years ago

Well it's a legal defense and IANAL. I think what they are getting at is that the US gov and these groups have a long history and they are allies more often than not.

* 1980s Afgan-Soviet War: Allies

* 1990s Balkins Wars: Allies

* late 90s attacks in Africa and Middle East: Enemies?

* Post 2001: Mortal Enemies

* Post 2011 Arab Spring: Allies in overthrowing the Syrian state.

sedachv · 2 years ago

It started much earlier than that, when the CIA took over Nazi Muslim terrorist networks after WWII, and from that started working with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s. Ian Johnson's _A Mosque In Munich_ is a must-read if you are at all interested in why 9/11 happened:

  Privately, President Eisenhower seemed concerned about how to reach the Muslim world. He wrote to his confidant, the Presbyterian church leader Edward Elson, that Islam and the Middle East were always on his mind. “I assure you that I never fail in any communication with Arab leaders, oral or written, to stress the importance of the spiritual factor in our relationships. I have argued that belief in God should create between them and us the common purpose of opposing atheistic communism.” In White House meetings he was more blunt. Speaking with the CIA covert operations czar Frank Wisner and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Eisenhower said that Arabs should dip into their own religion for inspiration in fighting communism. “The President said he thought we should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,’ according to a memo outlining the conversation. “Mr. Dulles commented that if the Arabs have a ‘holy war they would want it to be against Israel. The President recalled, however, that [King Ibn] Saud, after his visit here, had called on all Arabs to oppose Communism.” The Operations Coordinating Board — the body set up to imple- ment covert plans by the CIA and other agencies — took up Islam. It had already produced a detailed study of Buddhism and how that religion could be used to further U.S. interests. In 1957, the board established an Ad Hoc Working Group on Islam that included offi- cials from the U.S. Information Agency, the State Department, and the CIA. According to a memo on the groups first meeting, its goal was to take stock of what public and private U.S. organizations were doing in the field of Islam and come up with an “Outline Plan of Operations.’ The plan had two main components, both of which were echoed in CIA actions in Munich. First, the United States would shun traditional Muslims in favor of “reform” groups, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Then, as today, the Brotherhood’s radi- cal political agenda of a return to a mythic state of pure Islam was obfuscated by its members’ use of modern symbols, such as West- ern clothing and rhetoric. “Both the Chairman and the CIA mem- ber felt that with the Islamic world being divided as it is between reactionary and reformist groups, it might be found profitable to place emphasis on programs which would strengthen the reformist groups.” In May, the coordination board passed the inventory and plan of action. Its statements were clear and simple: Islam is a natural ally, communists are exploiting Islam, and Islam affects the balance of power. The paper listed a dozen recommendations for strengthen- ing ties with Islamic organizations, especially those with a strong anticommunist bent. As always, the operations were to be covert. “Programs which are indirect and unattributable are more likely to be effective and will avoid the charge that we are trying to use reli- gion for political purposes,’ the report concluded. “Overt use of Is- lamic organizations for the inculcation of hard-line propaganda is to be avoided”

sedachv commented on I have complicated feelings about TDD buttondown.email/hillelwa... · Posted by u/jwdunne

loevborg · 3 years ago

You have got to be kidding. Beck's book - both TDD: By Example and Extreme Programming - are very well written and have about the highest signal/noise ratio of any programming books.

sedachv · 3 years ago

_Test Driven Development: By Example_ certainly had the highest ratio of dumb unnecessary jokes to contrived unconvincing examples of any programming book I have read. My copy of TAOCP volume 3 doesn't even begin to compare. Clearly Knuth was doing something wrong.

sedachv commented on I have complicated feelings about TDD buttondown.email/hillelwa... · Posted by u/jwdunne

JonChesterfield · 3 years ago

It's closer to a repl with save state and replay. A repl will get the code working faster than tests but doesn't easily allow rechecking the same stuff later when things change (either your code or the users of it). I haven't seen a repl with save&replay but that might be a really efficient way to write the unit tests.

sedachv · 3 years ago

You just copy-and-paste the relevant input-output and there is your test. There isn't a need for any extra tools when using the REPL to come up with regression tests (obviously a REPL cannot be used to do TDD).

sedachv commented on I have complicated feelings about TDD buttondown.email/hillelwa... · Posted by u/jwdunne

sedachv · 3 years ago

TDD use would be a lot different if people actually bothered to read the entirety of Kent Beck's _Test Driven Development: By Example_. It's a lot to ask, because it is such a terribly written book, but there is one particular sentence where Beck gives it away:

> This has happened to me several times while writing this book. I would get the code a bit twisted. “But I have to finish the book. The children are starving, and the bill collectors are pounding on the door.”

Instead of realizing that Kent Beck stretched out an article-sized idea into an entire book, because he makes his money writing vague books on vague "methodology" that are really advertising brochures for his corporate training seminars, people actually took the thing seriously and legitimately believed that you (yes, you) should write all code that way.

So a technique that is sometimes useful for refactoring and sometimes useful for writing new code got cargo-culted into a no-exceptions-this-is-how-you-must-do-all-your-work Law by people that don't really understand what they are doing anymore or why. Don't let the TDD zealots ruin TDD.

sedachv commented on Fully Dockerized Linux kernel debugging environment github.com/0xricksanchez/... · Posted by u/0x41534446

yjftsjthsd-h · 3 years ago

> Docker existing shouldn't be an excuse for npm behaving like this ;)

I don't care about the direction of causality, I just want the stupid thing to run on my computer and not pollute my home directory,and docker solves that and solves it well.

Edit: Although actually about the only time I'm touching node is to ship it in a container image for deployment on a cluster somewhere, which is even more compelling.

sedachv · 3 years ago

There are much better tools for doing that, such as Guix profiles and nix-shell, which also happen to be better tools for making container images. Linux container images are a distribution mechanism that does not do anything to address package and dependency management other than shifting the problem somewhere else.

sedachv commented on Wisp: Whitespace to Lisp draketo.de/software/wisp... · Posted by u/signa11

taeric · 3 years ago

There probably is something to the point that whitespace languages need more context to know what is going on? Moving code, in particular, is a bit more tedious with it. That said, I'm curious why anyone would think it can't be just as "mechanical."

sedachv · 3 years ago

Languages where blocks are indicated by indentation are not context-free (you have to keep the current and previous line indentation level as state). Everything about them is more tedious because you can't do structured editing.

sedachv commented on Botanists are disappearing – just when the world needs them most theconversation.com/botan... · Posted by u/susiecambria

adrianN · 3 years ago

I would be surprised if we had fewer specialists, either in absolute numbers or in relative numbers. The fields of specialization might have changed over time. Maybe many people who would've become botanists a hundred years ago now are geneticists or something like that.

sedachv · 3 years ago

From the article: "It has been over a decade since a student was enrolled in a botany degree in the UK."

Botany is a very different specialty than genetics.