[guard-of-terra]

Your nickname suggests you associate yourself with people who struggled for the right of voicing their opinion; but then you actually suggest some opinions should be discarded right away without looking on per source basis.

This is amusingly confusing.

[freshhawk]

The source is Russia Today. Which, objectively, has an extremely poor track record of reporting things that turn out to be true.

Maybe the featured story on mind control weapons that are about to turn us all into zombies that's there today will change people's minds?

Or maybe we do want to discard troll stories from here and The Weekly World News since they aren't opinions but just link bait.

[guard-of-terra]

Funny that you noticed, I went and read the article on zombie rays: http://rt.com/news/weapons-future-zombie-media-486/ and it turns out the article actually tries to debunk the "zombie rays" hoaxes and explain what's actually possible and what isn't when talking about experimental weapons.

[jerf]

Having an open mind does not mandate that one become an idiot.

[maratd]

> This is amusingly confusing.

Not so confusing when you understand that RT is a Putin mouthpiece.

[guard-of-terra]

So what? The real dissidents, ones who were actually heroes and not just fell in love with a nice word for their nick, were harassed because they were claimed to be CIA mouthpieces.

I thought we as a society figured out that this is an entirely wrong reason to shut someone off. First of all, you can be honestly mistaken.

I guess I had this one wrong.

[dissident]

I've been on the other side of the hivemind many times here and on reddit, and I can assure you, I encourage opinions that I may even disagree with or doubt. The last people I would sympathize with are the stubborn, dogmatic kind that refuse to listen to other perspectives.

RT is not an opinion or a perspective, they are a source that lacks credibility. It is not that their opinions are "wrong" to me, or that I disagree with them, it is that they fabricate, sensationalize and mislead people. As is the case with this article and many more.

Those are not characteristics of a debate in which all participants and opinions are given a fair shot -- you know, the ones dissidents fight for.

By the way, this is a private website, not a public space, and I have no problem with Hacker News outright banning whatever they want. Especially if it means I have to read less made-up crap. And if they end up banning legitimate sources, I can go elsewhere. Or if they're like reddit and refuse to police themselves -- letting the community's cynical attitude pervade the entire website's content, skewing the news and making it an unreliable representation of current events -- I can go somewhere else too.

You might have a hard-on for calling me a hypocrite, but really you're just making yourself look like an ass.

[guard-of-terra]

"this is a private website" part is fallable because this is how censorship/spin worked in Russia/Italy: all the big media is private but owned by the local czar. If you try to voice your opinion in those media you are politely told to go elsewhere, i.e. to screw yourself.