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illrepute posted:That's right up there with that youtube video of the guy filming his three kids sitting on top of the unexploded bombshell in Homs. I'd say it's even worse, because it's not necessarily intuitive that a bomb that failed to blow up may still be very dangerous. Guns and grenades though are plainly not something you hand to a small child.
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Dec 14, 2013 14:30
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That shotgun doesn't look standard issue 
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Dec 14, 2013 14:47
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Brown Moses posted:The funny thing about the unemployed thing is in 2014 I'm going to be incredibly employed, to the point I'm turning down really well paid work because I've got so much to do already. I'm launching my new website, which is fully funded, wages and all; I'm working on a big consultancy; I'm involved with a big tech project that I'll hopefully be able to talk about at some point in the near future, cause it's awesome; I'm working on bringing together various NGOs and think tanks together for another project I can't detail; and I've been approached by an agent from ICM Partners about writing a book. Add to that various paid speaking engagements I've been invited to, I'm going to be very busy in 2014. So what you're saying is that it's in your best interests for the Syrian Civil War to keep going? Brown Moses, war profiteer. Just kidding, you're doing great work. Half the IR professors at my school are in love with your site.
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Dec 14, 2013 16:20
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I'm trying to get away from being the "Syria arms guy" and focus more on the "social media analysis guy", which seems to be an incredibly popular and largely unexplored field I've found myself at the forefront of. I can't count the number of journalists I've spoken to that talk about it like it's the next big thing, so a big focus on my new site will be talking about different methods, interviewing people about how they've used it, and all other things related to it. The new site will bring together various writers who use open source information and other investigative techniques, but aren't traditional journalists, and write the sort of lengthy articles on very particular subjects that aren't the sort of thing that get paid for my the traditional media. So I've got 4 guys writing on Syria, including the Jihadology team, and Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi; 3 writers on Hackgate, including Peter Jukes and my regular contributor; someone specialising in Nigeria, another in India and Pakistan (with decades of reporting experience there), and various people in other areas. We'll be setting up the contributors with Uncoverage profiles (a new crowd-funding site for investigative journalists), and will encourage people to donate to their favourite contributors to support their work. The best pieces on the site will be republished by another, much larger, website with more traffic, and the hope is more exposure will mean more people supporting those writers who are republished.
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Dec 14, 2013 16:32
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suboptimal posted:Bashar al-Assad is a democratically elected leader (over 90% of the popular vote) who has peacefully presided over a multi-ethnic and sectarian country and ascribed important freedoms to all of the country's citizenry. That was, of course, before al-Qaeda terrorists destroyed the cosmopolitan utopia that was Syria. Is this thread always like this? I mean, can we discuss/debate issues in the Middle East rather than making up strawmen and talking about awesome/not awesome a mod is? ***** Iran has claimed to send a second monkey into space, and recovered it. While Iran does have a space program that has met with some success, this is best taken with a large grain of salt. In any case, the West does not like Iran experimenting with rocket technology, regardless of its payload. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-25378313
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Dec 14, 2013 17:53
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Dec 14, 2013 18:31
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Count Roland posted:Is this thread always like this? I did that because it's basically the logical extension of what seems to happen every few pages- someone wanders into the thread, makes some bizarre appeal to authority a la the most recent Seymour Hersh derail or a sweeping pronouncement regarding Syria or Libya or whatever. It's tiresome and stupid. I know I missed the boat on this earlier, but that Hersh article wasn't a good one. Much like Robert Fisk, Hersh has had a few home runs of scoops, but this is certainly not one of them.
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Dec 14, 2013 18:42
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suboptimal posted:I did that because it's basically the logical extension of what seems to happen every few pages- someone wanders into the thread, makes some bizarre appeal to authority a la the most recent Seymour Hersh derail or a sweeping pronouncement regarding Syria or Libya or whatever. It's tiresome and stupid. "Hersh is a good journalist" does not lead logically to "Assad is awesome and I love him". Its not like you're the only one that's been doing this, but lots of people here seem to treat this as really black and white. Painting everyone that disagrees with you as a dicator-lover (or, for that matter, an imperialist-neocon) not only stupid but it just shits up the thread. I know people are retarded and stuff, but maybe we could try debating what people say instead of arguing over what we know they're really thinking.
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Dec 14, 2013 19:12
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Count Roland posted:"Hersh is a good journalist" does not lead logically to "Assad is awesome and I love him". Some posters in this thread have been following events in the region closely for years. Then someone who has half read an article which matched their preexisting view drifts in and brings up points that have been widely debunked weeks or months ago. At some point it gets hard to treat them seriously. Of course when some of the thread regulars do it to each other it does tend to get a bit stupid.
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Dec 14, 2013 19:23
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Brown Moses, you said you were approached for a book. Is it about your social media analysis in general or how you are using it in regards to Syria? I'd almost hope it'd be on Syria, a book would be a good way to close this chapter of your career and move on if that's really what you want to do.
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Dec 14, 2013 21:06
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JT Jag posted:Brown Moses, you said you were approached for a book. Is it about your social media analysis in general or how you are using it in regards to Syria? I'd almost hope it'd be on Syria, a book would be a good way to close this chapter of your career and move on if that's really what you want to do. The agent suggested it would be about my own "journey", explaining what I've learnt along the way. A lot of what I plan to do with the new website will be useful research, I'll be interviewing various people about their own experiences with using social media in their own work, and writing about various techniques I've learnt, so that'll be something that features in the book as well. It won't be a textbook, but it won't be the memoir either. Dan Kaszeta has now given his thoughts on the UN report on my blog here. The section on Hexamine is very interesting quote:Hexamine may be the smoking gun Brown Moses fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Dec 14, 2013 |
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Dec 14, 2013 21:40
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Gnoll Pie posted:Seymour Hersh is a journalist who has won a Pulitzer prize for his reporting (He helped expose My Lai) whereas Brown Moses is, as far as I know, an unemployed man who relies on posters from "Goons In Platoons" for his weapon expertise while he aggregates youtube videos and generally piggy backs off other people. I'd really be interested in hearing your response to what everyone posted in response to you.
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Dec 15, 2013 00:45
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Brown Moses posted:I'd really be interested in hearing your response to what everyone posted in response to you. "Obviously they're all misinformed schlubs who will take the word of an unemployed 30-something over the a respected journalist just because the 30-something is a goon.  "
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Dec 15, 2013 01:50
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Brown Moses posted:I'd really be interested in hearing your response to what everyone posted in response to you. Honestly I wouldn't touch the poop here. I'm not someone who regularly praises your work on the boards or elsewhere (not that it doesn't deserve it, I just tend to lurk and I think I once even semi-obliquely criticized you in another thread over not expressing enough humility for all the adulation you do receive), but you are most often very forebearing in terms of responding to willingly uninformed trolls. I mean, Gnoll Pie argued against your literal pages of myriad sources and links and personal correspondences by linking to a single Wikipedia entry and claiming you get all of your information from an SA subforum. Don't even acknowledge that poo poo. Maybe because I read too much of the political cartoons thread, he/she just strikes me as a particularly goony Ted Rall. TheMammoth fucked around with this message at 07:45 on Dec 15, 2013 |
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Dec 15, 2013 04:06
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I'd like to hear more about Seymour Hersh's article about how the rebels gassed themselves. I think the same thing may have happened during World War II with another group of people who were allegedly "victims". Maybe he can also shed some light on those mass suicides in Rwanda in the 1990s where those Tutsis just chopped themselves to bits for no reason.
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Dec 15, 2013 08:50
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Sergg posted:I'd like to hear more about Seymour Hersh's article about how the rebels gassed themselves. I think the same thing may have happened during World War II with another group of people who were allegedly "victims". But don't you see, those were all plots by plants of the literally Hitler West to provoke interventions.
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Dec 15, 2013 08:53
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Has anyone really looked into the possibility My Lai was a NVA false flag ? I mean, look who got the most to gain from all the bad publicity, surely not the US Army.
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Dec 15, 2013 08:58
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I have noticed that many of the people who hate me on Twitter and love Assad also get really angry any time I post anything critical of Bitcoins.
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Dec 15, 2013 11:20
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Brown Moses posted:I have noticed that many of the people who hate me on Twitter and love Assad also get really angry any time I post anything critical of Bitcoins. "Since libertarians have more freedom of action in countries where traces of liberty survive, libertarians can act more effectively against liberty than for it. Objectively the libertarian is pro-tyranny." - George Orwell 
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Dec 15, 2013 11:58
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Brown Moses posted:I'd really be interested in hearing your response to what everyone posted in response to you. It doesn't matter that Hersh's more recent work is journalistic equivalent of "  chemtrails", he's saying what some people want to believe so those people will stick by him.
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Dec 15, 2013 16:40
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Gnoll Pie posted:Seymour Hersh is a journalist who has won a Pulitzer prize for his reporting (He helped expose My Lai) whereas Brown Moses is, as far as I know, an unemployed man who relies on posters from "Goons In Platoons" for his weapon expertise while he aggregates youtube videos and generally piggy backs off other people. I guess this has been beaten to death already, but as far as weapons expertise goes you should really be aware that most media, particularly the mainstream media, is notoriously bad at reporting on firearms/weapons/etc. Goons in platoons as a forum is a substantially better source of information than the half-assed google "research" most journalists rely on. If nothing else, the forum approach for sourcing information allows a large group of interested individuals to review information being provided and correct/ridicule the source of it when it's terrible. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Dec 15, 2013 |
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Dec 15, 2013 16:53
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Brown Moses posted:I have noticed that many of the people who hate me on Twitter and love Assad also get really angry any time I post anything critical of Bitcoins. That's interesting. My one pro-Assad friend also loves bitcoins.
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Dec 15, 2013 17:29
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Discussion forums are good places to find leads and to try out leads on. Swedish journalists use the Swedish equivalent (sort of) of SA all the time in their work, and sometimes contributes too. The posters in one thread were even awarded the annual prize for investigative journalism for their posts. Journalists don't possess some kind of magical quality which gives them spiritual contact with facts, anyone with a sense of reason can do it. edit: a professional will obviously still do a better job 9 times out of 10 ideally but still Svartvit fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Dec 15, 2013 |
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Dec 15, 2013 18:51
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Brown Moses posted:I have noticed that many of the people who hate me on Twitter and love Assad also get really angry any time I post anything critical of Bitcoins. Ignorant people support ignorant things. You'd probably find they are also likely to support very fringe economic and social policies, believe in conspiracy theories, and support other anti-US leaders who go around torturing their own citizens and dumping them in the gutter.
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Dec 15, 2013 20:06
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Dan Kaszeta posted:I consider the presence of hexamine both in the field samples and in the official stockpile of the Syrian government to be very damning evidence of government culpability in the Ghouta attacks. 7 weeks of research on this subject reveal no public domain evidence of hexamine being used in this way in other Sarin programs. The likelihood of both a Syrian government research and development program AND a non-state actor both coming up with the same innovation seems negligible to me. It seems improbable that some other actor wanting to plant evidence would know to freely spread hexamine around the target areas. Hate to be yet again the "just asking questions" guy but why would anyone think or write stupid poo poo like that. Weren't most of the current non-state actors state actors previously who "might" have some intricate knowledge about Syrian military's research and development programs?? Points like this are the ones that drive my perspective into towards "conspiratory nutcase" corner. It's civil war out there, people change sides for god's sake! PleasingFungus posted:The problem is that there's a bottomless well of lunatics and liars spewing misinformation & lies. You need some kind of filter if you aren't going to waste 90% of your time on idiots! I agree 100% but I hope that I am not the only one that consider some people just a little bit too trigger happy when it comes to labeling people conpiratory nuts, racists, imperialists, useful idiots etc... Maksamakkara fucked around with this message at 13:23 on Dec 16, 2013 |
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Dec 16, 2013 13:16
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I'm just listening to your interview on The Current right now, Brown Moses. Good work.
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Dec 16, 2013 16:48
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Maksamakkara posted:Weren't most of the current non-state actors state actors previously who "might" have some intricate knowledge about Syrian military's research and development programs? Members of the rebel movements can know all they want about Syrian chemical weapons programs but they can't create the infrastructure to manufacture very large quantities of Sarin gas, don't seem to have stolen any from the Syrian military. It would almost certainly be incredibly difficult spraying vast areas with hexamine to make sure that the chemical weapons inspectors found hexamine samples.
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Dec 16, 2013 16:53
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Sergg posted:Ignorant people support ignorant things. I'm assuming you are talking about people supporting assad and not simply against intervention, because it's actually interventionists who are in the fringe, what with only 20 ish percent supporting.
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Dec 16, 2013 16:55
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enbot posted:I'm assuming you are talking about people supporting assad and not simply against intervention, because it's actually interventionists who are in the fringe, what with only 20 ish percent supporting. Uh, I think people who genuinely support Assad are probably an even smaller minority than that. In the West, at least. The dichotomy is between people who want to intervene and topple Assad, and those who want to stay out, not between haters and lovers.
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Dec 16, 2013 18:51
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I apologize if this has been brought up already, but what do you all think of Seymour Hersh's allegations concerning Syria? http://news.yahoo.com/seymour-hersh-alleges-obama-administration-lied-syria-gas-204437397.html Yahoo News posted:"Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has dropped yet another bombshell allegation: President Obama wasn't honest with the American people when he blamed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for a sarin-gas attack in that killed hundreds of civilians. In early September, Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States had proof that the nerve-gas attack was made on Assad's orders. "We know the Assad regime was responsible," President Obama told the nation in an address days after this revelation, which he said pushed him over the "red line" in considering military intervention. But in a long story published Sunday for the London Review of Books, Hersh — best known for his exposés on the cover-ups of the My Lai Massacre and of Abu Ghraib – said the administration "cherry-picked intelligence," citing conversations with intelligence and military officials." It's hard for me to dismiss Hersh as a crackpot or a conspiracist out of hand considering his record.
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Dec 16, 2013 18:55
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King of Hamas posted:I apologize if this has been brought up already, but what do you all think of Seymour Hersh's allegations concerning Syria? Brown Moses posted:Here's a round up of all the articles responding to the Hersh piece, which seems to cover everything he talks about in one way or another. You don't have to be a crackpot or a conspiracist to be wrong.
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Dec 16, 2013 19:01
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We went over it a page or two back. The information Hersh cited in his article is pretty tenuous.
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Dec 16, 2013 19:01
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El Scotch posted:I'm just listening to your interview on The Current right now, Brown Moses. Good work. To follow up to the above, here's the link to Brown Moses doing work..
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Dec 16, 2013 19:29
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I'm on CNN International's Amanpour in 20 minutes too, which is also repeated later.
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Dec 16, 2013 19:39
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JT Jag posted:We went over it a page or two back. The information Hersh cited in his article is pretty tenuous. I'm loathe to wade back into this, and I know I'll get accused of all sorts of stuff, but Hersh and these other peeps are making points that are not mutually contradictory. Hersh wrote the article in a way that its easy (indeed I think a bit lazy) to read it as saying the rebels were responsible for the attack. He never says this, but he beats around the bush a bit. I find it very annoying when anyone, but especially journalists do this. If you have a claim to make, make it, and back it up. If it is controversial, then back it up even further. Making readers read between the lines for lack of evidence is sloppy. I read Hersh's article, I read the response from Brown Moses, and I read this thread. I didn't see Hersh being proved wrong anywhere. Hersh said the range of rockets used meant that they couldn't have been fired from the Syrian military base, as the White House claimed. He said the munitions were improvised. He said rebel groups (al-Nusra specifically) had access to and experience with sarin. He said Obama's narrative of events and the intelligence refereed to was cherry-picked and cobbled together after the fact. And so forth. Range of the rockets was too small? Brown Moses points out the Syrian Army controlled territory at the time that was in range of these rockets. Improvised munitions? Assad's forces were seen using them. The counter points don't discredit the first claims. The chemical weapons experts refute nothing specific, but complain about the use of anonymous sources. The White House denies it all, as the original article makes clear. Everyone is arguing against the claim the rebels were responsible for the Aug 21st attack, even though this is not a claim made in the article. Its the fault of Hersh that he did not say definitively that Assad's forces were responsible for the attack. He's mostly talking about how Obama formulated the case to intervene in Syria, which the article does quite well and I haven't seen refuted in any serious way. Of course this article is likely even now being used as "proof" that the chemical attacks were a zionist conspiracy or something, because Hersh allowed it to be written in that way. It is a shame, because it makes the many valid points almost impossible to bring up, because citing the article will get you lumped into the same category as the nut balls, as responses to this post will likely show.
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Dec 16, 2013 20:21
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A time-delayed bomb lands rather close to a cameraman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvK03izrBwM The opposition released dozens of videos today showing their ongoing campaign in Eastern Ghouta, which have been collected here. There's some interesting stuff, for example, dummy Shilka and SA-6 anti-aircraft systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPQrzIJLm_Q Brown Moses fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Dec 16, 2013 |
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Dec 16, 2013 22:50
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Count Roland posted:Of course this article is likely even now being used as "proof" that the chemical attacks were a zionist conspiracy or something, because Hersh allowed it to be written in that way. You didn't mention that there were claims that it would've cost upwards of $50 mil and required a full production facility to produce as much sarin as was used in the attack. So I think it's fair to say CW experts actually had some solid rebuttals that contradicted Hersh's version of events. Most of the older stories were claims that the rebels had possession of CW by stealing it from the regime, and those jihadists caught with antifreeze in Turkey were used as a citation. Hersh's claim was different, so it's been addressed differently. Meanwhile, in Russia. quote:michaeldweiss @michaeldweiss 25m
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Dec 16, 2013 22:56
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Volkerball posted:You didn't mention that there were claims that it would've cost upwards of $50 mil and required a full production facility to produce as much sarin as was used in the attack. So I think it's fair to say CW experts actually had some solid rebuttals that contradicted Hersh's version of events. Most of the older stories were claims that the rebels had possession of CW by stealing it from the regime, and those jihadists caught with antifreeze in Turkey were used as a citation. Hersh's claim was different, so it's been addressed differently. Hersh's claim is technically not that the rebels perpetrated the attacks, but that the Obama administrations specific reasoning for thinking that Assad perpetrated the attacks was flimsy. That's what Count Roland is defending: Hersh's literal argument, not the obvious implications of that argument.
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Dec 16, 2013 23:03
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Count Roland posted:I read Hersh's article, I read the response from Brown Moses, and I read this thread. I didn't see Hersh being proved wrong anywhere. Hersh said the range of rockets used meant that they couldn't have been fired from the Syrian military base, as the White House claimed. He said the munitions were improvised. He said rebel groups (al-Nusra specifically) had access to and experience with sarin. He said Obama's narrative of events and the intelligence refereed to was cherry-picked and cobbled together after the fact. And so forth. quote:The New York Times, again relying on data in the UN report, also analysed the flight path of two of the spent rockets that were believed to have carried sarin, and concluded that the angle of descent ‘pointed directly’ to their being fired from a Syrian army base more than nine kilometres from the landing zone. So how is a NYT argument based off the UN Report that came out much later proof Obama lied? Hersh's "I'm not saying your mothers a whore, but people pay money to gently caress her" journalism is not a beside the point issue.
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Dec 16, 2013 23:34
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Hersh is wrong, plain and simple. This is a no-brainer. Assad gassed his enemies with weapons that only he possesses, using munitions that only he possesses, from locations only occupied by his soldiers, combined with 3 days of conventional artillery/air/rocket strikes from the same military bases onto the exact same towns, followed up by a ground assault backed by armor. Any idiot with two brain cells to rub together can see this narrative clear as day. Everyone who matters knows that this is how the events played out, which is why Assad is being forced to give up his chemical weapons. The people of Ghouta know who gassed them. The same guy who bombed them, and shelled them for months before that. It's not rocket science, no pun intended. EDIT: Well maybe a little bit of rocket science involved but you get me.
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Dec 17, 2013 01:05
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