[eveningcoffee]

Thank you for clarifying what parts of the guidelines you think I broke.

If you read my comment carefully then you can notice that pointing out comment author possible affiliation is not the main argument of my comment. Author has formed the comment as personal inner reflection and claims that Slavoj Žižek is wrong because he made a bad philosophical argument. My comment calls this claim out.

Either way, I try to be less snarky, as it is indeed not a good practice. I will also send in the future possible suspicions of "foreign agents" to the mentioned email address instead. I think that in this case HN has failed to sneak out such account despite the claim being good at it. My personal take on this agrees with HN as it indeed is very likely that people can sincerely hold differing views, but this case clearly stands out as different.

[goatsneez]

I am very late to this party. Lets suppose that I am a Russian agent for the sake of argument (ooh the tingles I get just to consider that), although I do not really know what you imagine that means or how does that invalidate my arguments? (I read of times when witches held a similar status and were just as strongly imagined to hold evil-superpowers as "RU agents on forums" today.) Do you want to live in the world where only your mental model of the world is allowed to be discussed, and as far as you allow discussing it at all, it is only allowed to arrive at a conclusion that your view is all-encompassing and true one? What a boring existence that would be, no?. It would if everyone held me views, I imagine.

I do not really see any significance in you considering me this or that, and the strength of you emotion is generally not a good guide or a judge (of truth or others).

You have to realize that people do objectively read the situation differently using exactly the same pieces of information/evidence. To shield your-self from it, banning it, or worse (I do not know to what level I triggered your aggressiveness) will only lead to "cultism". In other words, only proper cult-mentality with all the negative connotations takes pride in what you are supposing is the best solution for HN to take based on your emotion alone. The religious mentality is more scholarly, it allows ethics, policies and etc to be discussed under different philosophical backgrounds. I think that is what we should have here as well as member of humanity and civilization.

I am trying to engage you constructively, and I judge you to be a young, curious mind that will still grow and develop (I might be wrong on either/both of my judgements). In any case this may be useful for you to get another, scholarly, broader argument on this topic: https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...

[eveningcoffee]

If you are one then you know what it means, but for the sake of other argument and for the others to understand, being a "Russian agent" means foremost being a member of criminal enterprise and by this I mean real a state level criminal enterprise because Russia is built up as criminal organization and not as normal democratic governance.

In the context of HN, it means mainly comments and submissions with the aim to influence overall attitude in this community toward direction favorable to Russia, or more precisely, favorable to its current criminal leadership.

It is important to notice such possible actors as such actors most likely do not act in good faith. They do not provide correct information, instead of actual discussion, they attempt to create more confusion in readers. It is always not necessary (or even possible) to make somebody to believe completely fabricated reflection of reality. It may be simply sufficient to create enough confusion such that the reader could not differentiate anymore between the real and unreal or important and unimportant.

It is important to notice such possible actors not only here but all around, because like it was first explained, they are part of criminal enterprise, their goal is not to participate is mutually beneficial cooperation but to undermine the very core of the value system our societies stand on, replacing transparency with corruption and consensus with division.

In practice it means that possible "Russian agent" in HN community works for Russian propaganda "department", or "works", as being itself an useful idiot, being fooled by it to the level being indistinguishable from the actual "agent".

One of such clear examples is the claim that Patrick Lancaster is an independent and a journalist while neither of these claims is true. In reality Patrick Lancaster is a tool of Russian propaganda who produces scripted falsifications.

An open democratic society is in very unfavorable position against such manipulations while the attacker has strong media and social media control that is provably capable to create completely fabricated representations of very wide scale reality within the society it holds control over.

Therefore the responsibility is on the shoulders of the individuals of the open democratic society to first acknowledge existence of such agents and second notice their presence.

In practice it means that when such individuals are observed, caution should be applied, meaning that the factual claims should be not trusted but verified, their deceptive manipulative techniques should be observed and ignored.

I hope this comment provided enough content about "Russian agents" and also some tools to handle them.

PS. dang I think it is also something for your consideration.