How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
https://theins.press/en/inv/290235 - Lost in translation: How Russia’s new elite hit squad was compromised by an idiotic lapse in tradecraft
https://theins.press/en/inv/287837 - The mob’s humanitarian backdoor: Ramzan Kadyrov’s mafia connections reach deep into German critical infrastructure
I always wonder about Navalny - why did he go back to Russia? Did he really believe that he could do some kind of Nelson Mandela thing? Or that the Russian people would flock to his cause? I believe that the man was an idealist, I don't think you expose yourself to that much danger without being an idealist at least on some level or thinking that the possible personal rewards make the danger worth it, and I don't get the sense from Navalny that he was after personal rewards primarily. But with his experience in Russian politics, I feel like he should have known that the chance that his return to Russia would bring about any serious political change was extremely small. Not returning to Russia would have hurt his chances of causing political change as well, since that would have made him seem like just an agent of the Western powers. But returning to Russia at the cost of his life also did not accomplish political change.
Actually, a lot would change. Each one of the Ukrainian lives destroyed is a whole life destroyed. A damaged car is a setback for a family. There are whole cities and villages razed in Ukraine, fields polluted or rigged with explosives. Countless lives lost; each person's story and potential ended by some Russian's "command-following" drone or missile strike.
No, Russia isn't the only one, but _is_ a cause of a lot of suffering and resources wasted.
ah, here comes whataboutism. And you are correct. It would be great if russia didn't destroy Afghanistan and Syria.
Also, equating conflicts is a very shallow and inadequate manipulation tool. For example, russians razed dozens of cities in Ukraine, establish torture and rape chambers, use rape, torture, execution of POW as policy today.
"all wars are bad" doesn't mean that whatever russia does is way worse.
The whataboutism here elides an important distinction: the conflicts you list involve multiple actors, contested causation, and genuine strategic disputes. Russia's operations in Ukraine are more cleanly attributable to a single decision-making structure. That doesn't make other conflicts less real, but all countries bad flattens a meaningful difference in culpability.
Spent a lot of time with the McLaren report and the CAS hearings. The physical evidence - sample bottles with scratched serial numbers, sodium concentrations way outside normal ranges - isn't the kind of thing you fabricate across dozens of independent labs. The FSB involvement wasn't allegation, it was chain of custody documentation.
Worked with a few Russians in tech who left after 2022 - they're doing exactly that, building useful things. The problem isn't the people, it's that the state machinery actively captures and redirects talent. The ones who couldn't or wouldn't leave are stuck navigating a system that punishes dissent pretty harshly.
Sport fan clowns always say you have to separate politics from the Olympics. Well guess what my own country is sponsoring athletes because the whole fucking show is just a way for countries to show off. Not sure what we are showing off to be honest- although I did clap for the nice Somali ex refugee lady who is now a professional athlete.
Technically this is "on topic" for HN — investigative journalism about intelligence tradecraft and state-run institutional corruption fits the "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" rule. IIRC Dang has explicitly said geopolitics is fine when it's substantive.
I don't condone doping in tested sports, but I think there needs to be recognition that preventing athletes from modifying their biochemistry turns most sports into a genetic lottery showcase.
Here is what I mean:
Suppose that two men are born, with identical brains, but very different bodies. Both of them have a single desire: to be the fastest sprinter in the world.
- Clinically deficient values of Testosterone, Growth Hormone, IGF-1. Prone to musculoskeletal injuries, possibly connective tissue disorders.
If these two men live an identical life, and put the same amount of effort into training, the second man still has no hope of making it to the Olympics.
Even doping would only be able to correct for hormonal deficiencies, not the genome-level disadvantages for power performance compared to the other athlete.
A truly "fair" sport would pit competitors against each other who had near-identical genetic and physical traits.
The Olympics is just watching the people who won genetic lotteries.
> A truly "fair" sport would pit competitors against each other who had near-identical genetic and physical traits.
That's what the Olympics is. The men's 100m final pits against each other the fastest 8 men who are in their physical prime, full of fast twitch muscles, with West African descent. With some minor noise.
If you want to watch people from other genotype buckets run 10-50% slower, you can watch the women's event or the Paralympics or, like, the All-Vietnam U-16 event. It seems churlish to complain that not every bucket is on TV at a convenient time for you.
No, the olympics are a doping competition, and a meta-competition of “who is better at not getting detected.”
In general, the statement “if they got a medal, they cheated” is true so much of the time that it becomes a sensible default assumption. And it sucks for the few that didn’t cheat.
So the olympic games do pit near-identical competitors against each other.
> The Olympics is just watching the people who won genetic lotteries.
So? The olympic games should be the pinnacle of human performance (fed by their nation's interests). Of course it is lotteries all the way from the genetics, to what country you're born in, right to the national lottery putting money in to sports.
Your alternatives are either a proliferation of categories or random people assembling every four years to roll dice to determine the winner. Neither is exciting.
> preventing athletes from modifying their biochemistry turns most sports into a genetic lottery showcase.
Genetics are necessary to a point, and are not at all sufficient.
Any follower of a sport knows of athletes with incredible genetic blessings who accomplish little or nothing because they lack the hard work, discipline, focus, skill, emotional management, teamwork, etc. to succeed. And that sample omits far more athletes whose non-genetic limitations caused them to drop out or fail out before making it to the level where public is aware of them.
At the same time, the GOATs (greatest of all time) in many sports were not particularly blessed genetically, relative to other top atheletes:
* Football / soccer: Lionel Messi: 5'7", ~160 lbs., and had growth hormone deficiency [0], and is small, and not particularly fast or strong. "Messi’s “software” is what often gives him a head-start on those who physically should have the better of him." If you're interested, this article describes it in some detail: [1]
* American football: Tom Brady was notoriously unathletic, setting records for poor performance in the NFL's scouting 'combine' where draft prospects are compared in standardized tests. Also didn't have a strong throwing arm.
* Basketball is an exception: Michael Jordan was supremely athletic.
* Baseball: Babe Ruth was overweight, not known to be particularly fast or athletic, and played a position for relatively poor athletes who could hit: right field (gets the fewest plays, usually doesn't require more than running to a spot and throwing).
* Hockey: Wayne Gretzky was relatively small, not very fast, didn't have a hard shot.
* Tennis? Boxing? Cricket? Rugby?
These people are far more athletic than ordinary people, of course; I'm comparing them to other professionals in their sports.
What's the point of this post? You're missing the forest for the trees. It's like saying racing is driver against driver, not driver and car against driver and car. Motivation has NEVER made up for physical fitness, never will, and never should. The olympics are about the human body first.
I don't see the Olympics as a particularly "fair" sport in the first place, in the sense of "fair" meaning "without favoritism" because physical capability is a vast spectrum.
At least that produces tangible value for the rest of us this way.
Current idea of sports is that athletes wreck themselves for mere performance value (and money to the people who set it up, with a bit trickling down to athletes for enabling it all). As far as I understand, nothing they directly do is otherwise reusable to anyone else.
I’d rather watch a live commercial for human enhancement industries. At least that’s something that eventually becomes available to everyone.
1. How stupid do you have to be to believe that a three-letter agency from any country isn't capable of delivering a lethal dose of poison to eliminate its target?
2. To this day, it remains unclear who actually slightly poisoned Navalny and to what end.
3. As of last week, we have an on-camera confession [2] from Leonid Volkov of Navalny's FBK [1], in which he states that it is very disappointing that USAID funding is no longer available. The videos are in Russian, but you should at least care and be capable of translating them with AI. If not, don't even bother raising your propagandized, brainwashed takes.
I have nothing to say about the OP-linked site other than that it is a trashcan of lies.
The institutional overlap here is being treated as damning, but it makes structural sense. A state running both covert operations and doping programs would naturally route them through the same intelligence unit. The more interesting question is whether Western sports bodies ever had plausible deniability, or just chose not to look.
Obviously something a bit more on the hyperbolic sensationalist side, but closer to the truth than the simplistic ignore-your-own-eyes contrarianism peddled by Russian propaganda. FWIW your comment is the type that makes me go back and upvote GP.
https://meduza.io/en/news/2026/04/16/report-fsb-unit-linked-...
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/04/15/russian-websites-b...