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"conglomerate" may not be the correct word, but the mere fact that they make more money doing other things doesn't really speak to the significance of their media arm itself. That's like saying the Washington Post is no big deal, look at how much money AWS makes.
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Aug 9, 2021 17:40
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Muscle Tracer posted:I find this part of this post particularly interesting in this thread, because it's rooted in an insistence in the truth of something that is not true, but would be convenient for the argument you want to make, namely, that Thomson Reuters is a media conglomerate and that any person employed by Thomson Reuters must therefore be involved with Reuters News. This is not only false, but easily veritably false, and because it's the first argument you make, it colors the perceived validity of everything else you posted. quote:Multinational media conglomerate Thomson Reuters has added Oracle to its roster of cloud suppliers, as it seeks to make part of its tax application portfolio cloud native https://www.marketwatch.com/story/thomson-reuters-to-buy-back-1-2b-in-shares-as-2q-profit-rises-271628161055 quote:The Canada-based multinational media conglomerate said earnings per share were $2.15, up from 25 cents a year earlier. https://www.globalcapital.com/article/b1r10k3tpp4m65/funds-crowd-into-thomson-reuters39-163745m-lseg-block quote:Canadian media conglomerate Thomson Reuters has sold £745m of shares in London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) to settle tax liabilities arising from the UK exchange operator’s acquisition of Refinitiv, the former Thomson Reuters finance and risk business. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/18/technology-202-activists-are-suing-thomson-reuters-over-its-sale-personal-data/ quote:A coalition of activists is bringing a lawsuit against media and data conglomerate Thomson Reuters, accusing the company of illegally selling data belonging to California residents without their consent. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/thomson-reuters-nabs-ex-nab-chief-data-officer-564883 quote:Crisp left NAB in April after three years and relocated to Canada to take on the new chief data and analytics officer position at Thomson Reuters. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/26/ice-private-utility-data/ quote:CLEAR is run by the media and data conglomerate Thomson Reuters, which sells “legal investigation software solution” subscriptions to a broad range of companies and public agencies. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ice-investigation-database-immigration-b1808417.html quote:CLEAR is run by the media and data conglomerate Thomson Reuters, which sells “legal investigation software solution” subscriptions to a broad range of companies and public agencies. https://www.thestar.com/business/20...are-to-ice.html quote:Canada-based multinational media conglomerate Thomson Reuters is moving away from content and into content-driven technology. https://www.forbes.com/sites/cartercoudriet/2020/04/07/from-alibaba-cofounder-to-white-claw-creator-see-canadas-top-10-richest-billionaires/ quote:David Thomson, the chairman of media conglomerate Thomson Reuters, once again headlines the list of Canada’s richest people. With a net worth of $31.6 billion, Thomson is the No. 24 richest person in the world and is more than three times richer than Canada’s No. 2 Tsai, a cofounder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and owner of Brooklyn Nets NBA team. https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/12/media/alessandra-galloni-reuters-news/index.html quote:Reuters News is a well-known wire service that provides financial news as well as a wide array of other coverage. It is a unit of Thomson Reuters Corp, a media conglomerate with other divisions that cater to lawyers, corporations, and accountants. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/jun/23/thomson-reuters-london-stock-exchange quote:Thomson Reuters is to quit the London stockmarket, 144 years after its shares were first traded in the City. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_Reuters?wprov=sfla1 quote:Thomson Reuters Corporation (/ˈrɔɪtərz/ (listen)) is a Canada-based multinational media conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where it is headquartered at 333 Bay Street (Bay Adelaide Centre). Sir, please take up your incredibly incisive and pertinent point with the editorial boards of these various outlets as I have neither the time nor energy to do so myself, but by ostentatiously insisting on the truth of something that can be verified as false with almost no effort, it makes them, as sources, seem impossible to rely on for factual accuracy and this is incredibly bad for the integrity of the News. You can probably correct the Wikipedia article yourself, I would do it but I'm on mobile data so I'm usually blocked from editing it and despite the monumental importance of this point for the sanctity of information I can't really be bothered registering an account. e: I also very specifically did not say that any person employed by Thomson Reuters must therefore be involved with Reuters News, please correct your post posthaste lest anyone be left under any false impression regarding what was or was not said, which may call into question your own factual accuracy. XMNN fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Aug 10, 2021 |
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Aug 10, 2021 01:18
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also just because I thought your PepsiCo/ Doritos/Gatorade thing was an interesting little analogy, as far as I can tell she worked directly for Thomson Reutersquote:Dawn Scalici joined Thomson Reuters in July 2015 to serve as the company’s first Government Global Business Director. She is charged with the responsibility of advancing Thomson Reuters’ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. Government—working across the company’s major business lines and optimally leveraging its vast and unique data, products, and services. In this capacity she develops strategic relationships with government sector constituents and key decision-makers, develops campaigns to promote Thomson Reuters’ business growth, and works with the company’s senior executives to determine relevant strategic goals and plans. So a more accurate analogy to the argument I actually didn't make in my post (I said that hiring her at all was just an indicator they are comfortable with the CIA, which indicates they are probably somewhat aligned with USAian interests) might be that PepsiCo hiring someone would mean they have some influence over Doritos because they're made by PepsiCo, which is slightly less crazy sounding, although still not necessarily true depending on their role in PepsiCo and how much oversight they had over Doritos. Anyway, not particularly relevant to the main thrust of your post which seemed to be the media conglomerate sticking point, I just thought it was interesting you chose PepsiCo because like many US business interests they are deeply entwined with US foreign policy and (very) allegedly might have had some involvement with the CIA coup against Allende. https://www.theguardian.com/business/1998/nov/08/observerbusiness.theobserver posted:In exclusive interviews with The Observer last week, the former US Ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, told the story in - and behind - these and other top secret CIA, State Department and White House cables recently released by the National Security Archives. Korry filled in gaps in the story by describing cables still classified, and disclosing information censored in papers now available under the US Freedom of Information Act.
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Aug 10, 2021 10:24
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Here's a decent look at the news hysteria during the Trump years, by Thomas Frank: https://mondediplo.com/2021/08/06usa
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Aug 11, 2021 03:38
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Setting aside the loaded nature of using "liberal hysteria" as a term of abuse, the article is...deeply unspecific, and does remarkably little to support the overbroad claims it makes or just assumes. While Frank is eager to criticize the "liberal" idea of "credentialism", he doesn't do anything to disprove or justify his rejection of the factual severity of the hazards of the Trump administration, or the legitimacy of critical responses. It is taken as given that everyone with expertise in the press is engaged in misrepresentation of the administration. It's bizarre to claim that Trump's activities were so equivalent to past administrations, or that, for example, the press landscape consisted solely of "bombshell" Trump "outrage stories," "each of them turning out to be misleading in some way". I...don't think it turned out that all press coverage of Trump was a series of false statements about activities that past administrations have conducted. Frank is less than minimizing when he provides evidence; he raises specific, extreme examples and then presents the entirety of critical press coverage as if they are representative. In doing so, he gets remarkably equivocal about the quality of all press sources and all critical coverage of Trump. I have a lot of trouble with anyone saying that members of the public were equally radicalized by Fox News and CNN, or that press coverage that motivates its audience to action against the rise of right-wing authoritarianism represents the suppression of independent thought. Take this quote: quote:My intention here is not to ding Snyder for resorting to the cheapest of political slurs — equating his adversaries with Nazis. Why does Frank find it strange to compare Trump to a Nazi? Why is this a "cheap political slur"? Is it not possible for a comparison to Nazis to be accurate? Frank generally accomplishes his rhetorical goals by a combination of just loading his assumptions into his language ("hysteria-mongers", "dictatorship of the expertariat", etc) and by eliding contrary information. For Frank's underlying critique of the reaction of "elites" (people who aren't Frank) to the Trump administration to hold, he needs to show that 1) Trump and the right made no attempt to seize power, 2) the fears represented by media coverage during the Trump administration had no basis in reality, and that 3) the Democrats (which he equivocates with his notions of the mainstream and the elite) made no sincere effort to reverse the threats Trump undertook. He does this by just...not talking about things like the attack on the Capitol, or Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, or the unwinding of the VRA or, heck, any part of the Democratic platform under the subsequent administration. Contrary information is just ignored. The article acknowledges the vast differences between Trump and the historical examples it provides, but asserts that regardless of all contrary cases or reasons or specifics, quote:...the opposition to all three of them seems to fit a permanent American pattern, right down to the smallest details: the unanimity among certain high-ranking classes, the concern for ‘norms’ and unwritten traditions, the fears of foreign powers, the endless hyperbole, the embrace of dissenting members of the bad guy’s party. This is pretty close to an actual thesis statement, but it's not actually held up to much scrutiny; it requires ignoring the differences in actual facts about what Trump, Roosevelt and Bryan did, or how they were both opposed and supported. The "elites" opposing Bryan and Roosevelt and Trump were different in each case, and each leader also had significant constituencies of support- and not just populistic ones, either. Frank almost gives the game away with this musing: quote:Maybe, for these reasons, hysteria is simply how elections are fought nowadays, and perhaps it’s a good thing that liberals have now figured it out as well. After all, the boring and elderly centrist who led the Democratic ticket in 2020 was hardly able to generate enthusiasm on his own. It took hysteria to put Joe Biden in the White House — and yet Biden is, by any standard, a far better president than Trump. So: perhaps I should be thankful to a culture that deals in constant hyperbole and fascism-fears. The phenomena that Frank attributes to the US aren't some new dysfunction or elite pushback to populism; it's also populism: popular responses to an especially monstrously terrible president, with the usual incentives for media involved. By its conclusion, this article offers no specific conclusion or tool for reading media other than denouncing criticism of/deplatforming the right wing as "liberal authoritarianism"- and there, the embedded line of reasoning is difficult to distinguish from the right wing "liberal social media censorship" canard. Jonah Goldberg could have written this; it should give the reader pause that they're finding common cause with the alt-right in this regard. So let's talk a bit about how the article accomplishes its rhetorical goals, because it's important to understand why it can be appealing to its audience. The article does the following: 1. Loads itself with language attacking "liberals", "educated", "elites" and "experts", which it treats largely interchangeably as a monolithic opposing force 2. Ignores information that contradicts its claims 3. Treats its claims as proven in advance 4. Makes broad, general claims from limited, specific evidence There's a lot of audience self-selection going on here; the target audience already has decided what their opinion of "liberals" is! But there's more to it: because it is criticizing "mainstream" sources of information and begins with its enemy of "elites", the article self-selects for an audience that already agrees with it, and through its rejection of "mainstream media" and "credentialism", gives them a rationale to further reject contrary information or authority. It's tremendously appealing for those who already agree with it, because it's basically ammunition for supporting the reader's prior ideology. For people used to exposure to other viewpoints or outside information, it has nothing to offer. I'm tackling the issue of how this sort of function results in discussion-ending arguments for the next effortpost, on Hirschman's reactionary (and progressive) rhetorics. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Aug 11, 2021 |
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Aug 11, 2021 07:57
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Yeah, i've read Frank and I think, especially in his latest book, he diverges into the polemic at every opportunity, and suggests that when, say, US labor and leftist intellectuals clash over, say, the Vietnam War, the left intellectuals are being elitist and childish for criticizing and working against labor unions who were in the tank for whatever the Johnson administration was doing. Instead of, say, criticizing labor unions for becoming sharp anti-communists, he criticizes left activists for not being 'ideologically patient'. He really wants there to be this united front that doesn't exist, and never really did in his historical writing. Also it's kinda rich for someone who abhors 'language policing' to proceed to police the poo poo out of the term 'populism'. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 11:58 on Aug 11, 2021 |
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Aug 11, 2021 11:45
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Discendo Vox posted:Setting aside the loaded nature of using "liberal hysteria" as a term of abuse, the article is...deeply unspecific, and does remarkably little to support the overbroad claims it makes or just assumes. While Frank is eager to criticize the "liberal" idea of "credentialism", he doesn't do anything to disprove or justify his rejection of the factual severity of the hazards of the Trump administration, or the legitimacy of critical responses. It is taken as given that everyone with expertise in the press is engaged in misrepresentation of the administration. It's bizarre to claim that Trump's activities were so equivalent to past administrations, or that, for example, the press landscape consisted solely of "bombshell" Trump "outrage stories," "each of them turning out to be misleading in some way". I...don't think it turned out that all press coverage of Trump was a series of false statements about activities that past administrations have conducted. This might be one of the dumbest posts I've ever read. Just twisting your mind into a pretzel to not understand really basic facts, never mind just lying about the content of the article or reality itself. The whole point is that Trump was an average President. Yes, a horrible racist rapist who comitted horrible crimes. Guess what, this applies to Clinton and Biden and HW Bush and Reagan and more. Remove the rape and you got Obama. The immigrant concentration camps started under Obama and continue under Biden. You claim he doesn't talk about the Russian interference when he does multiple times. You claim he doesn't talk about the Democrats' opposition when he does talk about it: how they don't actually oppose Trump's agenda. They kept giving him money for his military which wouldn't make sense if he really was a strongman wannabe dictator. And you claim the current administration has undone Trump's work: CITATION loving NEEDED! The current administration has done nothing for months! ICE is still there, the camps are still there, they're still loving up Covid response, etc. And Frank points that out! I'm pretty sure I'm gonna get probed for daring to point out the Emperor Has No Clothes, but I just have to. Discendo Vox, you might be one of the worst person I've ever seen at media analysis and criticism. You'd have been laughed out of my basic english college class for not even trying. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Aug 11, 2021 15:32
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The day the Andrew Cuomo story broke open last week, Chris Cuomo was on CNN, and did not talk about his brother's story at all. The day after, there was a guest host, who also avoided the story. Monday, CNN skipped all news coverage in the Cuomo time slot, rerunning a documentary about AOC instead. Chris Cuomo is on vacation now, with them making the claim that it was planned well in advance. Should be interesting to see if he comes back or if the management tries to sweep him under the rug and forget about Chris as much as Andrew. Meanwhile, MSNBC's Ali Velshi opened his coverage of the Cuomo resignation by pointing out that Trump was accused of rape, which is worse than sexual harassment. "But Trump!" 7 months after Joe Biden was sworn in. Strange that a network that has the motto "lean forward" spends so much time looking backwards.
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Aug 12, 2021 04:23
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Wheeljack posted:The day the Andrew Cuomo story broke open last week, Chris Cuomo was on CNN, and did not talk about his brother's story at all. The day after, there was a guest host, who also avoided the story. Monday, CNN skipped all news coverage in the Cuomo time slot, rerunning a documentary about AOC instead. Chris Cuomo is on vacation now, with them making the claim that it was planned well in advance. Should be interesting to see if he comes back or if the management tries to sweep him under the rug and forget about Chris as much as Andrew. It's not really reasonable to expect anybody to cover a brother who they are very close to with any sense of fairness, for positive or negative stories. Maybe this means that people whose siblings are extremely high-profile news generators should not have extremely high-profile media jobs; maybe it means the Cuomos have just handled it poorly, I dunno. I think it's indisputably true that on days when his brother is the top news story in the country he shouldn't be on air at all. e: To frame this as "media analysis," I think we can be confident in not trusting the journalism of somebody who is an immediate family member of the person being covered. I mean... obviously, right? Wheeljack posted:Meanwhile, MSNBC's Ali Velshi opened his coverage of the Cuomo resignation by pointing out that Trump was accused of rape, which is worse than sexual harassment. "But Trump!" 7 months after Joe Biden was sworn in. Strange that a network that has the motto "lean forward" spends so much time looking backwards. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some general stupid liberal back-patting about how the Democrats punish sex pests within their own ranks, unlike Republicans who let the even more odious Trump skate by, which is of course ridiculous bullshit. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Aug 12, 2021 |
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Aug 12, 2021 16:11
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Mellow Seas posted:The official CNN policy is currently that Chris is not allowed to discuss Andrew at all, which isn't optimal but is better than their mid-2020 policy of "have Chris do softball interviews with Andrew every night!" I think it's CNN's management that has handled it poorly and compromised the integrity of the network. As you say, Chris C isn't allowed to cover his brother now, but was during Andrew Cuomo's "hero period" when he was held up as a paragon of Anti-Trumpness. They changed their original policy from 2013 to allow for those chummy interviews, then changed it back when the scandals and investigations started for Andrew. "It's OK to report on your brother when it makes him look good, but not when it's negative" is the exact message they are sending, and it is a terrible one. Furthermore, Chris Cuomo faced no consequences when it came out he was consulting with his brother about how to handle the media when the sexual harassment story finally gained traction. CNN is willing to let one of its hosts help an embattled public figure improve his profile. Before that, he was benefitting from his brother's connections, getting priority COVID testing, with state troopers delivering samples. Why are the rules different for the Cuomos?
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Aug 13, 2021 04:52
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Strange to think CNN had any integrity going into this…
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Aug 15, 2021 13:34
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Hirschman's rhetorics, Or: how to poo poo up a policy discussion In this post we’re going to be looking at some arguments used by bad faith actors to short-circuit policy discussions. Identifying and diagnosing bad faith requires interpreting the mindset of the actor, and as a result it can be labor-intensive. This is as true in the press as on the forums. One way to approach this problem is to identify ill-formed arguments that are frequently deployed for this purpose. Trying to grapple with the seeming disconnects that led to the rise of conservatism and neoconservatism in the 1980s, Albert Hirschman attempted to identify the common roots of arguments against social change. This effort was supported by an analysis of historical writing around the time of events such as the British and French revolutions, including some of the classical canonical texts of political philosophy. The resulting book, The Rhetoric of Reaction, is the primary basis for this post (I’ve gone through and given some parts clearer names and more up-to-date examples). Hirschman ultimately identifies three "rhetorics of reaction", common reactionary forms of argument that are specifically deployed to argue against and ultimately derail policies of change. Hirschman also describes how the inverses of these arguments can be used to speciously argue for change, which he refers to as the three "progressive rhetorics". Both kinds of rhetorics are, in Hirschman’s words, “arguments that are in effect contraptions specifically designed to make dialogue and deliberation impossible”. It’s important to emphasize at the start here that although these are called “reactionary” and “progressive” rhetorics, they’re not right and left-wing arguments. “Reactionary” in this case means argument against reform or change- any kind of reform or change. This is a conservative position only in a specific and limited sense. The progressive rhetorics are similarly applicable to left- or right-wing positions, depending on what policies they are arguing for or against. Bad faith sources can mix and match both kinds. The reactionary and progressive rhetorics are useful shorthand, but they should not be confused for complete or comprehensive tools of analysis; these rhetorics aren’t necessarily signs of bad faith on their own, and there are many other indicia of bad faith that can be discussed. Reactionary Rhetorics  Rhetorics of Perversity “Perversity” doesn’t necessarily mean gross or weird; it’s really arguments claiming that a given change will have the opposite of its intended effect. Reactionary positions often involve arguing against a popular movement, and there’s no better way to short-circuit advocacy for a popular idea than by telling its supporters that it will backfire. “If you ban guns, only the criminals will have guns”. “If you give handouts, no one will want to work”. Advocates become forced to debate these claims, and from there the bad faith actor can deploy other methods to distract and derail the effort. Hirschman attributes the rise of these arguments to Burke and the effects of the French Revolution, but he also goes to great lengths to show how they were used to attack efforts to expand suffrage, and in arguments over welfare programs in the United States. In modern terms, these arguments often work by treating the potential limited backfire effects of a policy as if they will overwhelm the positive effects, and can play upon stereotypes about the people involved. A classic example is the 1980s “welfare queen”: a bullshit argument based on a single example that was transposed to the entire population.  Rhetorics of Futility Related to argument from perversity is argument from futility- that whatever you are trying to accomplish is destined to fail. Hirshman notes that over time, both of these rhetorics have shifted from appealing to divine order to appeals to human nature; where once a given progressive change was destined to fail because it struck against the “natural order” or would be undone by “providence”, nowadays we’re more likely to blame “people” or “society”. Modern arguments from futility frequently deploy ill-structured, fundamentalist claims about criminality or human nature, and often make the buried assumption that the purpose of any change is to completely solve the problem on its own. Efforts to penalize toxic waste dumping will just make companies do it abroad, or they’ll just pay the fine. Putting pressure on organized crime in one area will just cause it to go underground or change locations, etc. Bad things are inevitable, or “bad” people are fundamentally bad. Efforts at change cannot succeed, and reflect the advocate’s ignorance of reality.  Rhetorics of Jeopardy Tax reform will destabilize the economy. Gay marriage will threaten to wreck marriage rates. [$politician] is going to tear up [$founding document]. The rhetoric of jeopardy argues that even if a proposed change seems desirable on its face, it will have other side effects that will destroy the current order. Note that these aren’t necessarily slippery slope arguments (though they can be). The rhetoric of jeopardy is about more than just a threat to the status quo; it’s about undoing other accomplishments. Hirschman provides, for one example, Friedrich von Hayek arguing about how vesting the government with welfare power could be used to threaten freedom: Freidrich von Hayek posted:Freedom is critically threatened when the government is given exclusive power to provide certain services—power which, in order to achieve its purpose, it must use for the discretionary coercion of individuals. Exercise 3 Identify the reactionary rhetorics in these examples: 1. Immortan Joe on welfare. 2. ”Paul C. Knappenberger” posted:No matter how much you pay with a carbon levy, virtually nothing is received climatically…No matter the level of domestic action that we take, it will pale in comparison to the rapid expansion of carbon dioxide emissions in other parts of the world.(from https://www.cato.org/commentary/carbon-tax-climatically-useless)  Next, I’m going to go over the progressive rhetorics, and cover how to consider, identify and address cases where these lovely arguments are seeing heavy use in media or discourse. Hirschman’s progressive rhetorics Or: yes, these are also bad arguments Rhetoric of Synergy (or the rhetoric of “mutual support”) The new state of Puerto Rico may not vote Democratic. The kids of Latino immigrants in border states may not either- and if you invest everything in getting them a better life, you may be in for a deeply unpleasant surprise when they reach voting age. Inverting the the jeopardy thesis, the synergistic fallacy assumes that any change benefitting or improving any one group or policy area is automatically a net good that will last over time and benefit other policy efforts. This can be a root issue of naïve approaches to intersectional policy change, or of ultimatums for specific policies, often more divisive ones that limit the viability of other actions. The synergistic fallacy often papers over backlash effects, or the presence of intersectional privileges or biases in benefited populations. A policy might truly benefit and lift up a group in need- but that doesn’t mean they’ll vote for other reforms, or that pursuing this policy doesn’t cost other, greater opportunities. A conservative example of the synergistic fallacy might be the interaction of anti-abortion activists with the Republican party, and the assumption that once the cause of an abortion ban is achieved, it will further benefit the broader regressive goals of the party. It doesn’t consistently work out that way, because satisfying the demands of this single-track group can mean they’re not activated to work for the benefit of other conservative goals. Rhetoric of Imminent Danger The jeopardy thesis can also be used to argue against inaction. Hirschman struggles to provide examples of the inverse of this aspect of the jeopardy argument, because the use of a similar framework to demand change is, well, still an argument from a sense of jeopardy (and the historical material he's working with is limited). In the straightforwardly pro-change context, though, this can be understood as a Moral obligation of immediate and complete change, requiring the replacement of prior, threatening sources of order with a new, privileged theory or reasoning. Reasoning from this thesis calls for immediate, no-questions-asked action: building the third temple, killing the nearest police, or invading the capitol building. This concept is also closely linked to accelerationist arguments, demanding the worsening of conditions and direct, immediate effects in the pursuit of transformative change. Rhetorics from this position demand that the audience “immanentize the eschateon”; in other words, hasten the apocalypse. In function, this goes hand-in-hand with the progressive perversity thesis, covered a bit later. In response to the conservative and progressive forms of the jeopardy thesis, Hirschman argues that the appropriate evaluation of policy requires a middle ground: “there are threats in both action and inaction. The risks of both should be canvassed, assessed, and guarded against to the extent possible.” Hirschman also emphasizes that threats aren’t known with the absolute certainty prescribed by “alarm-sounding Cassandras”; those who use the certainty of mutual support, or of a perceived threat, to dictate their arguments don’t want to let a discussion of the uncertainties happen. Rhetoric of Historical Law (“having history on one's side") ”Theodore Parker” posted:I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. This quote from Theodore Parker got abridged and heavily reused by MLK Jr., and has passed from there into a place of fame among the many thought-terminating cliches of history. The belief, frequently a blend of prescriptive and descriptive, that positive change is destined, can take a variety of forms: ”Albert Hirschman” posted:If the essence of the “reactionary” futility thesis is the natural-law—like invariance of certain socioeconomic phenomena, then its “progressive” counterpart is the assertion of similarly lawlike forward movement, motion, or progress. Hirschman is talking about Marx, of course, but this is a broader issue that he identifies in many ideological frameworks. The belief that societies operate according to long-reaching, immutable laws, that a given change is inevitable given the course of time, and that any law or policy that opposes it is futile, can serve to either empower or completely ruin progressive movements, and to dismiss the underlying efficacy of existing policy. The dogmatic belief that your cause is destined for success doesn’t actually inform specific actions, but it can be abused to justify (or excuse) any action or outcome. Rhetoric of Ultimatum ”Albert Hirschman” posted:By insisting on the perfectibility of existing institutions as an argument against radical change, [Burke’s] Reflections may have contributed to a long line of radical writings that portray the situation of this or that country as being totally beyond repair, reform, or improvement. Hirschman struggles to come up with a name for the inverse of the perversity thesis, so this one's mine. Under these circumstances, any argument that the status quo can be improved by gradual or incremental change (or even just a different change), has to be ignored or rejected in morally absolute terms. Alternatives are consigned as immoral and/or unable to stop the destructive trajectory of the status quo. Where the imminent danger thesis demands immediate and severe action, the progressive perversity thesis rejects the very idea of discussion of alternatives perverse for upholding or preserving the immorality of the present. Exercise 4 Identify the reactionary and progressive rhetorics in these examples: 1. https://twitter.com/galexybrane/status/1430607032403456006 2. George W Bush posted:My fellow citizens, events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision. . . . The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country . . . Instead of drifting along toward tragedy, we will set a course toward safety. Before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be removed. ”Heather Mac Donald” posted:The increasing power of college diversity bureaucrats over academic affairs since the 1990s has been stunning. Diversity vice-chancellors oversee faculty hiring searches, mandate quotas regarding whom search committees may interview, and sometimes even mandate quotas regarding whom they must hire. […] Senior advisors on race and community lead crusades against faculty who have allegedly threatened the safety of campus victim groups through non-orthodox statements regarding race and sex. Now that the fictions underpinning this enterprise are being enshrined as an academic discipline, the possibility that the university will return to its status as an institution dedicated to the unfettered search for knowledge—and even, dare one say it, objectivity and meritocracy—will grow yet more remote. (from https://quillette.com/2021/07/12/almost-four-decades-after-its-birth-the-diversity-industry-thrives-on-its-own-failures/) The short version: identifying the 6 rhetorics in the wild The below basic definitions are modified from a table Hirschman provides. Rhetoric of Perversity: The proposed action will backfire and have the opposite of the intended effect. Rhetoric of Ultimatum: Anything but the proposed action will make things worse. Rhetoric of Jeopardy: The proposed reform or action will undo or threaten previous gains. Rhetoric of Synergy: The proposed action will mutually reinforce past actions and benefit future ones. Rhetoric of Imminent Danger: The proposed action must be undertaken immediately and strictly to address the problem, which is of singular importance. Rhetoric of Futility: The proposed action attempts to change permanent or natural rules; it is therefore bound to be worthless. Rhetoric of Historical Law: The proposed action is rooted in inescapable historical or religious forces; opposing them would be futile and pursuing their course is destiny. Weaponizing the rhetorics The progressive and reactionary rhetorics rarely appear one at a time. Instead, they arrive together in a jumble of attacks and assumptions, creating a powerful draw from which a discussion of reality struggles to emerge. At root, this is because all of the rhetorics involve counterfactual claims; assertions about what will happen in an alternative situation that isn’t presently true. This shifts an impossible burden onto opposing speakers; they must address a shifting hypothetical and, simultaneously, has to deal with the moral freight that the rhetorics provide: the user of the rhetoric is primed to attack them for, e.g., “threatening the American Way of Life” or “not caring about the people this would help”. Disgareeing is simultaneously amoral, futile or ignorant of the nature of the world, and will backfire to cause greater harm. On the other hand, a source making one of the arguments described in this post is not automatically wrong in a specific case; individual policies can be futile! But to work, their argument needs to be backed up by some form of empirical evidence, and the evidence needs to match the strength and breadth of the claim. If the argument uses the rhetorics to make an absolutely certain claim that can’t tolerate alternatives or discussion, it's not a meaningful contribution; it’s someone taking an ideologically motivated sledgehammer to good faith discussion. How to respond to Hirschman’s rhetorics The solution and method for addressing these rhetorics is to break the counterfactual with shades of grey: provide specific, factual information that addresses the underlying hypothetical. If the policy claim can’t be grounded in terms of its effects, and if those effects aren’t clear and limited and capable of falsification, then its claims aren’t really valid. Getting specific, getting details, and determining the actual consequences of a proposed action are good ways to turn a counterfactual into a claim that can be interrogated (more on claims in a future post). People in politics have read Hirschman; you will sometimes see the reactionary arguments deployed deliberately, in sequence, in whitepapers or political coverage. The rhetorics have filtered into broader culture and formed the basis of many people’s identities, dogmatic, thought-terminating arguments they internalize and use to end conversation (the widespread distribution of reactionary rhetorics through new media forms is the phenomenon that drove Hirschman to write the book). Even if they're deployed accidentally, if a writer is routinely falling into a pattern of deploying these arguments, it's a sign that they're either caught up in an ideological framework that makes them immune to countervailing information...or they're doing it deliberately to poo poo up the discussion. Either way, they are not participating in good faith and have nothing to contribute. As mediating sources, they should at best be viewed with massive skepticism.
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Aug 26, 2021 00:11
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Here's a good exercise in seeing how multiple mediation and framing can operate. Here's a tweet: https://twitter.com/JesseDrucker/status/1432486942650814466 What sources and motivations and reframings did the original source material pass through to arrive in its final form? How is the quotation that's prioritized and passed through the process contextualized, or not contextualized? Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Aug 31, 2021 |
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Aug 31, 2021 01:30
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I’m most offended at the crackpot wordpress blog guy using Kolchak as his user image across platforms. If there’s one fictional character who knows the value of education, it’s the guy who always goes to the local university folklore department to learn a monster’s weaknesses before tracking it through the sewers.
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Aug 31, 2021 02:02
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Here's a great media analysis example from a recentish USNews discussion. Here's the original post, from a user who I'll leave anonymous to start, which had the following text: https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1430607689831301122 The Hill posted:Cajon Valley Superintendent David Miyashiro alerted school board members on Tuesday that he would be meeting with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to discuss the situation, the Times noted. quote:I know thread rules say I'm supposed to add my own take or analysis here but, honestly, I really, really can't think of anything intelligent to say about this. I'm not even sure there is anything intelligent to say about this except "What in the goddamned gently caress?!" Tracing the story back So the mediation analysis, tracking back the claim, is something like this: 1. The user posts the tweet with the framing quote and response above. Outrageous! why were these kids visiting Afghanistan?! Who let them?! What a pointless, outrageous crisis! What were these kids doing, were they missionaries or some poo poo? Have I said outrageous yet? 2. The tweet from the Hill itself (bear in mind that tweets are limited, reframing mediations of the linked story, and few people click through to read the story). 3. The story in the Hill. A word on The Hill: it was once, alongside Roll Call, a sort of Capitol Hill Daily newspaper (I can write these things up sometime, it's a short post), and has always leaned conservative, but with the advent of the internet has become an outlet that often runs stories with either a conservative bias or with deliberately misleading edits intended to drive traffic and, often, cleave off support for Democratic issues. The Hill runs original reporting, but loves regurgitating stuff from other sources with selective editing. The lede for this story was "Dozens of California students and parents are stranded in Afghanistan after taking a summer trip to the country.". Little other explanation or context was provided. One paragraph to note: quote:Mike Serban, who works with refugee families in the district and heads the Family and Children Engagement program, was the first person to hear about the students’ predicament. 4. The Hill story is almost entirely derived from (and, to its credit, cites and links) a story in the Los Angeles Times. The lede is mostly the same, but look at this different sentence: quote:Mike Serban, who heads the district’s Family and Children Engagement program, which works with the district’s many refugee families and provides interpreters, was the one who first got word about the students’ plight. Here we learn that there are actually a lot of refugee families in the district and what the Family and Children Engagement program is. Helpful, but still pretty heavily obscured. 5. But this story isn't actually from the LA Times. It's a cut down version of a story by the same author, Karen Pearlman, originally written for the San Diego Union-Tribune. Describing the students, the following paragraphs are all in the original story: quote:Cajon Valley Superintendent David Miyashiro and Mike Serban, the district’s director of Family And Community Engagement (FACE), said the children range from preschoolers to high school students. They said the students went there on summer break with their families to visit extended family members. This paints a dramatically different picture of the how and why of this event; it's less dramatic, and it provides clearer context and motivation for those involved. The original poster, Vincent van Goatse, deserves full credit in this situation- after their initial outraged post and the first couple replies, they, on their own, went all the way back through the chain of mediation, edited their first post, and discussed what happened in several following posts, correcting themselves and the record. What can we learn from this? 1. It's almost always worth tracking a story back as close to its original source as possible. It's more than just stopping when you reach as far as you can, or when you find an author you hate or agreement. (Once you get as far back as possible, you should also scrutinize the composition and choices that go into that piece of information). 2. Mediation of information includes the user that posts the information on the forums. We were lucky Vincent Van Goatse was so cautious! 3. We are not immune to the effects of how a story is initially presented. The Hill tweet that started this framed the issue a particular way, specifically to outrage and draw attention...but the tweet wasn't all that outrageous. Other tweets or stories, from similar sources, can latch onto deeply held beliefs and manipulate our sense of moral outrage such that even the idea of challenging the initial impression seems offensive and grotesque. We should be sensitive to these sorts of approaches. 4. Mediation and sourcing is not separable from content. A story never just "is", it's always influenced and framed by mediation, and this mediation should always be considered. If you find yourself going "who cares where I got it from?!", it's a strong warning sign to take a step back and reevaluate. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Aug 31, 2021 |
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Aug 31, 2021 04:32
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Man this thread takes me back to my media studies minor in the 90s. loving thing took a bright eyed optimistic kid and spat out a half paranoid communist out the other end. Stuart Hall made me the husk of a man I am as surely as my dear mother. I thoroughly recomend it.
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Aug 31, 2021 09:24
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your high school librarian was right: sometimes, even Wikipedia can be wrong
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Sep 1, 2021 22:19
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https://twitter.com/RollingStone/status/1433922442850930696 A shocking story about how rural Oklahoma hospitals are so backed up by ivermectin overdoses that gunshot victims are lined up outside of them. A story that was a failure on every level. It has a single source who was not directly working at any of the hospitals, no hospitals in the area were contacted or named. Rolling Stone picked up the local story and from there, Racheal Maddow re-tweeted it, and the Business Insider and Daily Mail for a start. Since their original publication, Rolling Stone learned that there are only 459 ivermectin overdoses in the entire country. RS later amended it to "One Hospital Denies It." But not "Rolling Stone Fails to Confirm Facts" as they admit "Oklahoma-specific ivermectin overdose figures are not available, but the count is unlikely to be a significant factor in hospital bed availability in a state that, per the CDC, currently has a 7-day average of 1,528 Covid-19 hospitalizations. " https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/gunshot-victims-horse-dewormer-ivermectin-oklahoma-hospitals-covid-1220608/ A little quick research shows that the county has less than 100 aggravated assaults of all sorts per year, so a dozen+ gunshot victims at one hospital on one day as seen in the photo seems a little odd. https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1434581638923620360/photo/2 But that photo RS ran with is not of gunshot victims, or at a hospital, or current. It was from a US News & World Report story about people getting vaccinated at a church back in January. So apart from the lack of any visible injuries, the fact that everyone in there is bundled up in coats when it's in the high 80s in the area, and the trees in the background are dead are certainly suspicious. "We were fooled by a bad source" is one thing, but falsely captioning an unrelated photo on top of it is beyond mere bad journalism. I think this falls under "Too good not to be true" reporting.
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Sep 8, 2021 01:50
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Wheeljack posted:"We were fooled by a bad source" is one thing, but falsely captioning an unrelated photo on top of it is beyond mere bad journalism. I mean, sounds like the story is bad, but media use "representative" images of a given location or item all the time. Those little tags like "file photo" tend not to get copied over into social media, especially twitter, though. The process by which the pull images like that one get chosen for the social media share blobs would be a fascinating topic to explore in itself. Headline writers rarely being the authors themselves is one thing, but this is another level of anonymity that gets even less spotlight because few people talk about it, and sometimes it gets chopped up from the article by automated scripts. That image does not appear in the article itself, for example; it did in the older "Gunshot Victims Left Waiting" version of the article, where the caption explicitly addressed everything you mentioned: People wait in line to receive a COVID-19 vaccine at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2021, in Oklahoma City. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki). So, at the time that tweet was made, that image was explained in the article; but the tweet is now out of date, and the header image has been replaced in the article.
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Sep 8, 2021 02:20
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The Jack Posobiec believer has logged on
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Sep 8, 2021 18:23
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Good article by The Guardian on how oil and gas companies are using astroturfing and concern-trolling tactics to undermine efforts to fight climate change. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/09/big-oil-delay-tactics-new-climate-science-denial quote:Oil companies stopped pushing overt climate denial more than a decade ago. And while conspiracy theories claiming climate change is a hoax may surface occasionally, they are no longer an effective strategy. quote:Of all the messaging geared toward delaying action on climate, or assurances that the fossil fuel industry has a grip on possible solutions, Lamb and other authors agreed that one theme was far more prevalent than the rest: “the social justice argument.” quote:Discourses of delay don’t just show up in advertising and marketing campaigns, but in policy conversations too.
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Sep 11, 2021 19:21
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Here's the article underlying the paper; it's open access. There's a notable overlap with Hirschman's reactionary rhetorics. The figure's a decent summary: edit: A hearty welcome to those coming from our banner ad; sorry, no pedantry here, just critical thinking, very basic principles of communication, and some degree of actual moderation. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Sep 13, 2021 |
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Sep 11, 2021 23:22
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Has this thread covered those awful media bias charts that get put on social media by Ad Fontes?
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Sep 18, 2021 01:08
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Jaxyon posted:Has this thread covered those awful media bias charts that get put on social media by Ad Fontes? What is an Ad Fonte
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Sep 18, 2021 05:06
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This blogpost, which I haven't vetted closely, appears to be a good takedown of the thing; short version is it's a self-promotional scam that got a lot of play during the public discussion of media bias and fake news in around 2016. The thing's more holes than substance; it's not valid in any way and you can basically find red flags on every part of the source organization's site. There's basically no part of the chart that is meaningful in terms of media literacy; it's just designed to go viral and confirm the viewer's beliefs.
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Sep 28, 2022 |
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Sep 18, 2021 05:15
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I can't tell if my favorite part is the Daily Heil being considered "moderate" along with their avowed enemies the also just as moderate BBC. Or that The Root is considered extreme left because they write about black people.
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Sep 18, 2021 18:25
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crossposting from the covid thread, a short barebones primer on how to start reading scientific/academic literature, this ties in with media literacy:Fritz the Horse posted:A short layman's guide to getting started with reading scientific literature
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Sep 19, 2021 05:13
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Hey. How does everyone feel about Information Brokers? IE Julian Assange, Laura Poitras- people who are technically not lying but are real bastards undermining everything?
Quotey fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 05:40
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Individuals who serve as brokers for leaks or information the "mainstream media" or "they" don't want you to know about trade in their outsider status, and have an incentive to continuously present information that supports the worldview, outrage and outsider beliefs of their target audience. Their audiences also self-select for accepting this sort of information, and ignoring contrary sources. People who work leaks like Assange, Greenwald, O'Keefe, etc, are mediators like anything else- they have particular motives and goals and if you don't perform the same scrutiny for context and goals that you would for other sources, just because the provided information affirms your prior beliefs, then you won't be able to tell when they are, as you put it, real bastards undermining everything. Those claiming to speak truth to power as neutral distributors of leaked information can be interested only in certain truths, spoken in the interest of certain powers. To be clear, that doesn't mean you get to totally reject a source that routinely serves as a mediator for leaked information; it means you need to apply scrutiny and understand their methods and interests, and be especially skeptical if you align with the political ideology they're targeting. Not addressing these names in particular, but I am pretty sure either here or USNews there was a breakdown of a case where the Intercept misrepresented information especially severely; they've got a bad rep for it. fake edit: this was the story, looks like it was in USNews as I don't see it here. real edit: as an example of an excellent and legitimate source for leaked information, the ICIJ has just released the Pandora Papers, a successor to the Panama Papers that is many times larger and, even with its first releases, threatens to topple governments. One way to ascertain the difference in intentions from ICIJ is that they're not one-sided in their leaks, and their releases benefit no single party. For example, the reports coming out today include Vladimir Putin and also the king of Jordan, a regional US ally. Upcoming releases will directly target US figures (though it seems the leaked dataset came from firms that mostly had foreign clients). Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Oct 3, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 06:51
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Quotey posted:Hey. How does everyone feel about Information Brokers? IE Julian Assange, Laura Poitras- people who are technically not lying but are real bastards undermining everything? Wikileaks is awesome in principle, but lost its way, long ago. Probably around the time we all realised that actually, Assange is a loving Libertarian, not a progressive. I have a story about Julian Assange. I met Assange as the "Students of Sustainability" conference in Australia about a year after he started wikileaks but before it had really entered the publics eye, I dont think he had any particularly significant leaks yet. We had a project at murdoch university called "Active Murdoch" where we kind of canvased admin staff to leak information about uni plans so we could publish them which I did a talk on. I had talked about how we ended up snagging a lot of info about dodgy tendering which led to some chaos in admin, before the uni pulled our web hosting and effectively killed the project (effectively proving us correct about our suspicions). Assange told me that wikileaks was a similar project but at a much larger scale to leak info from governments. I told him he was an idiot and was going to get people killed and we had an argument about that and I came to the conclusion he was politically naive and sufferable. I never expected that guy was actually going to take it huge though, and it turns out that yes, he actually is an insufferable politically naive idiot. An idiot about to change the world. Oh another story: A friend went on a blind date with him once. Apparently he was super creepy. *footnote: We did end up resurecting active murdoch on private hosting with a forum, but by that point we had largely lost interest due to all of us not really having the time for it anymore. One day, I realised none of us had even looked at the site in months and I went to have a check to see what was happening. The thing had been taken over completely by a weird band of boomers and turned into a Schapelle Corby support group. (shapelle corby was an australian who got caught smuggling weed into indonesia(!) and given a 20yr sentence, a bunch of random people commandeered our abandoned open publishing site and turned it into a "corby was innocent! indonesia bad!" site. We shut that fucken site down the next day. I wasn't happy about spending 50 bucks a month hosting THAT noise. duck monster fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Oct 5, 2021 |
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Oct 5, 2021 06:04
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Wikileaks especially lost its way as soon as Assange started using it as his personal attack platform against things he personally didn't like, and started taking Russian manufactured leaks at face value.
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Oct 5, 2021 14:22
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CommieGIR posted:Wikileaks especially lost its way as soon as Assange started using it as his personal attack platform against things he personally didn't like, and started taking Russian manufactured leaks at face value. Can you cite the manufactured leaks?
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Oct 6, 2021 07:45
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Didn't WikiLeaks doxx tons of LGBTQ people in a country where that would get them killed? Not exactly a force for good in the world at that point
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Oct 6, 2021 14:31
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Didn't WikiLeaks doxx tons of LGBTQ people in a country where that would get them killed? Doxxed nearly ever woman in Turkey: quote:In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, WikiLeaks published links to 300,000 "Erdogan Emails", resulting in the doxing of millions of Turkish people. None of the "Erdogan emails" turned out to be from Erdogan or his inner circle.[58] Mostly, they're correspondence and personal information from everyday Turkish citizens, which included the home addresses, phone numbers, party affiliations, and political activity levels of millions of female Turkish voters.[59] Corky Romanovsky posted:Can you cite the manufactured leaks? https://citizenlab.ca/2017/05/tainted-leaks-disinformation-phish/ https://www.wired.com/2017/05/russian-hackers-using-tainted-leaks-sow-disinformation/ https://www.wired.com/2016/07/heres-know-russia-dnc-hack/ Wikileaks got the Podesta and DNC leaks from Russia, pretty much undoubted at this point, as part of the Russian strategy they often slip in more incriminating falsified documents to help spread the fire. While there is no exact, direct link to Russia, there's a lot of overlap, and Wikileaks had a fairly comfortable relationship with the Russian government during the DNC leaks, going as far as to not accept leaks against the Russian government itself. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Oct 6, 2021 |
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Oct 6, 2021 14:43
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CommieGIR posted:Doxxed nearly ever woman in Turkey: To my understanding to this day there hasn’t been a credible accusation of Wikileaks publishing fake data. I did think it was funny that college students who wanted to eventually work for the state department or intelligence services were specifically ordered to not read the source documents or news stories derived from them when the cables were leaked which is a funny kind of self-induced disinformation/ignorance tactic. Kind of bogglingly silly, to insist students of the art keep themselves in the dark of a mountain of useful actual work product to study. selec fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Oct 6, 2021 |
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Oct 6, 2021 21:21
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CommieGIR posted:Wikileaks got the Podesta and DNC leaks from Russia, pretty much undoubted at this point, as part of the Russian strategy they often slip in more incriminating falsified documents to help spread the fire. While there is no exact, direct link to Russia, there's a lot of overlap, and Wikileaks had a fairly comfortable relationship with the Russian government during the DNC leaks, going as far as to not accept leaks against the Russian government itself. If one's concern was actually "is there fake information in the Podesta/DNC leaks," it seems like the part of the article you linked saying quote:"But when the Clinton campaign warned that its hacked emails, posted to WikiLeaks, shouldn't be trusted, it couldn't point to any specific fakes in the collection." might be relevant! It's kind of amusing that people talk about all these devious Russian propaganda strategies, while essentially echoing a perspective of "any leaked information can't be trusted because you can't guarantee it's not part of some foreign propaganda (and no, we can't actually point out the parts that are faked, but some information was faked once before, so really you can't trust anything that isn't printed in government press releases or the pages of the New York Times or Washington Post)" The report cited in two of those links (https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/97197/3/Report%2392--Taintedleaks.pdf) even admits that it doesn't really have any clear evidence of anything beyond "the phishing methods were somewhat similar in these different phishing attempts." It mentions that there might just be a "phishing kit" and that many of the people/groups involved in phishing use in similar ways. The key conclusions seem to stem from "this phishing method is similar to others that have been used from sources in the Russian Federation, and Everyone Else is saying it's probably tied to the Russian government so we also think this is probably the case." So not only is the actual underlying evidence really weak with this stuff (it's never proved anything deeper than "there has been hacking/phishing stemming from Russia"), but the whole point of this exercise should be to determine "is the hacked/phished information true or not" (since it's a lot harder to argue that people should just ignore true information, regardless of the motives involved its release!). And if it supposedly isn't true, it's really weird that no one can seem to point out the falsifications in the major leaks actually motivating this sort of research (like the DNC leaks). It's basically just casting the specter of uncertainty over all information that doesn't come from official sources.
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Oct 6, 2021 21:25
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Ytlaya posted:If one's concern was actually "is there fake information in the Podesta/DNC leaks," it seems like the part of the article you linked saying As someone who works in the Infosec industry: Its almost always impossible to fully lay the blame square on anyone because that's kind of how disinformation works. But its not really an open secret that Assange likely got help and info from the Russians, that the Russians were likely involved in the DNC hack, and that several Wikileaks editors quit because Assange turned it into his personal vendetta machine and sought outside help to do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozy_Bear#Democratic_National_Committee_(2016) Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear were observed operating on the DNS servers, even apparently totally unaware of each other at the time. Its not exactly suprising that the data these groups dug up went right to someone who has an open vendetta to fulfill. The person claiming to be Guccifer, the one who did the leaks, was directly linked to GRU members: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guccifer_2.0 The only one claiming there's no real proof the Russians were behind it is the one who had the vendetta and the motivation to benefit from leaks directly traced to GRU hacking units and individuals. Huh. Odd. Its also odd that Roger Stone and Assange appear to be on the same page. Surely a coincidence. https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee/ quote:Did CrowdStrike have proof that Russia hacked the DNC? See, this was the entire problem when people said "Russiagate was a nothingbuger" because in actually, it wasn't. There was significant pressure by Russian Government groups to ensure enough dirt leaked to make any already unpalatable candidate (Clinton) look even worse, including likely feeding in false info to make it dirtier. And this isn't something new, Russia's been doing this to EU and Eastern European candidates and legislators for years. And Assange has made it openly clear he felt it was his duty to ensure Clinton didn't win CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Oct 6, 2021 |
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Oct 6, 2021 21:47
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CommieGIR posted:Russian manufactured leaks at face value. CommieGIR posted:including likely feeding in false info to make it dirtier. The next post will downgrade the qualifier to "potentially". Stop the gishgallop and cite the false documents.
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Oct 6, 2021 23:27
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Corky Romanovsky posted:The next post will downgrade the qualifier to "potentially". Stop the gishgallop and cite the false documents. That's not a gish gallop it's goalpost moving/misrepresenting 
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Oct 6, 2021 23:34
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