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fool of sound posted:Yeah wow, this is wild. I've been skimming archives and while outright debunking got coverage, basically every paper of note was platforming outright smears of Wilson's investigation or the apocalyptic 'insider' reporting of Judith Miller that were largely just the uncritically repeated lies of an Iraqi opposition group lobbying for a coup. It got much fairer play in foreign press, even in the BBC.
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Oct 20, 2021 01:55
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SubG posted:There's also the whole matter of the outing of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame as a CIA operative officer operating under non-official cover. Which is by itself a huge kettle of fish which I'm not sure should be litigated in this thread, but it's worth reading about if you're investigating media reporting leading up to Iraq. Yeah that's all tied up with Wilson's debunking of the Niger documents and I was well aware of that. I didn't realize the degree to which Wilson debunked the yellowcake story though.
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Oct 20, 2021 02:29
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SubG posted:There's also the whole matter of the outing of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame as a CIA operative officer operating under non-official cover. Which is by itself a huge kettle of fish which I'm not sure should be litigated in this thread, but it's worth reading about if you're investigating media reporting leading up to Iraq. On one hand, what Cheney did was illegal and extremely petty. On the other hand, the CIA is the evilest organization on Earth and must be destroyed if we are ever to know peace.
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Oct 20, 2021 02:36
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MonsieurChoc posted:On one hand, what Cheney did was illegal and extremely petty. On the other hand, the CIA is the evilest organization on Earth and must be destroyed if we are ever to know peace. I mean, that's Intel Agencies in general. They all loving suck because they are all run by sociopaths and psychopaths.
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Oct 20, 2021 02:43
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Probably Magic posted:Perhaps you could explain how maintaining Assad's presence, who was closely allied with Russia, would have "expanded" rather than "maintained" Russia's influence. Sure, I'm Turkish so perhaps I can indeed shed some light on this. While Syria has long been a customer of Russia for military equipment and training, things took a different dimension after the Syrian civil war began in 2011. Around this time, the USA had started to gradually disengage from the Middle East more generally. By directly intervening in the conflict and rescuing Bashar al-Assad's army from the brink of defeat in late 2015, Putin solidified the relationship and reminded both Syria and its other allies/clients that, just like the USA, Russia also has friends and cares about them. In order to understand how Russia expanded its influence, you need to be familiar with the developments on the ground. Specifically, one of Russia's objectives in intervening in Syria was to establish a forward military air base in the Middle East. They did this by converting large parts of the Bassel Al-Assad International Airport in Latakia into an air force base (Khmeimim). This is what allowed Russia to launch intensive air campaigns in the region against both ISIS and the FSA. In 2017 the Russian defense minister announced that both Khmeimim and the naval base in Tartus (which had also been substantially expanded) were going to be permanent. Lastly, one thing that is notable about the way Russia intervened in Syria is that it used much more powerful military assets than needed to fight an insurgency. We're talking about S-400s, cruise missiles launched from the air as well as from ships in the Caspian and Mediterranean, and an air "interdiction" policy over Syria. To maintain these, they set up a complex maritime resupply operation via the Turkish straits in the Marmara Sea. Their goal was/is to showcase Russia's military capabilities to other potential client states in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, where arms sales are highly competitive. This is how Russia's involvement in Syria expanded Moscow's sphere of influence, rather than merely maintaining it. (That wasn't their only objective — they had domestic reasons as well, such as reducing the risk of Islamist terrorism in Russia itself by making sure Russian Muslims, of which a substantial number had joined ISIS, would remain tied up in the Middle East, rather than returning to Russia. But that's not relevant to what you asked.)
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Oct 20, 2021 04:19
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CommieGIR posted:I mean, that's Intel Agencies in general. They all loving suck because they are all run by sociopaths and psychopaths. The CIA isn’t an intel agency.
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Oct 20, 2021 06:24
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MonsieurChoc posted:The CIA isn’t an intel agency. What does the 'I' stand for?
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Oct 20, 2021 14:42
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MonsieurChoc posted:The CIA isn’t an intel agency. quote:The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; /ˌsiː.aɪˈeɪ/), known informally as the Agency and the Company,[6][7] is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT). As a principal member of the United States Intelligence Community (IC), the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence and is primarily focused on providing intelligence for the President and Cabinet of the United States. Sure, sure.
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Oct 20, 2021 17:03
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Raenir Salazar posted:What does the 'I' stand for? International Crime Syndicate. Edit: Pretty much all literature on the CIA shows that it is very bad at it's supposed job of gathering intel, but very good at murder, drug smuggling, funding death squads and just crimes against humanity in general.
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Oct 20, 2021 18:12
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MonsieurChoc posted:International Crime Syndicate. That's pretty much what most Foreign Intelligence agencies do, yes. Please name a "Good" foreign intelligence agency.
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Oct 20, 2021 18:30
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CommieGIR posted:That's pretty much what most Foreign Intelligence agencies do, yes. Please name a "Good" foreign intelligence agency. No, it's not. Most intelligence agencies focus on intelligence, spying, and not world-wide mass murder. One of the reasons the KGB was way better at knowing what the West was doing than the reverse is because they actually focused on that stuff. No need to name a "Good" intelligence agency becaus there's no such thing and because it's also a very obvious and dumb deflection from the fact that the CIA does not function as an Intelligence Agency but as a Crime Syndicate. You REALLY need to read up on your history of the CIA to get an idea of what you're talking about.
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Oct 20, 2021 19:16
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MonsieurChoc posted:No, it's not. Most intelligence agencies focus on intelligence, spying, and not world-wide mass murder. One of the reasons the KGB was way better at knowing what the West was doing than the reverse is because they actually focused on that stuff. quote:very good at murder, drug smuggling, funding death squads and just crimes against humanity in general. Emphasis on the murder part.
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Oct 20, 2021 19:24
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Soviet intelligence services. Notably not proficient in mass murder.
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Oct 20, 2021 19:27
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MonsieurChoc posted:No, it's not. Most intelligence agencies focus on intelligence, spying, and not world-wide mass murder. Intelligence agencies are basically the modern-era spy networks, and a lot of spies have historically performed assassinations within their spheres of influence — targets were often other monarchs, but not always.
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Oct 20, 2021 19:44
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Surely the KGB never did crimes against humanity either.
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Oct 20, 2021 19:46
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This is whataboutism. The KGB historically was much better at human intelligence than the west. US couldn’t keep a spy alive in Russia except by accident, whereas we regularly lost family jewels to them. The US vastly outpaced them on signals intelligence, though at times (like the Great Seal bug) they outwitted us even there.
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Oct 20, 2021 19:49
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Do you guys want a list of books on the CIA? Cause I got a lot of literature on it. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 20, 2021 19:52
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selec posted:This is whataboutism. It's not whataboutism, it's specifically in response to MonsieurChoc claiming that the CIA was not an intelligence agency and was rather a "Crime Syndicate", because the KGB "actually focused on that stuff".
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Oct 20, 2021 19:53
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Equating the CIA to any other foreign intelligence organization is literally whataboutism. Nobody else even comes close to the CIA’s body count.
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Oct 20, 2021 19:54
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selec posted:This is whataboutism. That's not what whataboutism means. They brought up the KGB in the first place, not me.
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Oct 20, 2021 19:54
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Discendo Vox posted:It's not whataboutism, it's specifically in response to MonsieurChoc claiming that the CIA was not an intelligence agency and was rather a "Crime Syndicate", because the KGB "actually focused on that stuff". I think there’s something to that. The KGB knew it didn’t have the resources that the CIA did—after all, the CIA counted among its assets both foreign and domestic organized crime syndicates, militia and rebel groups of varying legitimacy, exile groups of aristocratic outcasts of various post-colonial states, and huge corporations willing to loan equipment or fund operations outright. The KGB had far fewer resources, and so was forced to truly serve as a hand of a political arm, rather than the CIA which by Eisenhower’s terms end was becoming an arm of the state unto itself. The KGB had to be more mission focused because they didn’t have the luxury of mission creep that the CIA did.
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Oct 20, 2021 19:57
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The CIA as Organised Crime by Douglas Valentine Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner Both of these books are good starts about why the CIA fails utterly as an intelligence Agency and is in actuality a Crime Syndicate/Terrorist Organization.
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Oct 20, 2021 20:07
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The Kingfish posted:Equating the CIA to any other foreign intelligence organization is literally whataboutism. Nobody else even comes close to the CIA’s body count. The claim is that CIA is not an intelligence agency because it does more than just intelligence gathering.
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Oct 20, 2021 20:08
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MonsieurChoc posted:The CIA as Organised Crime by Douglas Valentine Strong endorsement for both of these. The CIA’s response to Legacy of Ashes is also hilarious quibbling fluff, which I think they since deleted.
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Oct 20, 2021 20:10
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The KGB (well the FSB but let's be real) is still carrying out the most outrageous poisonings and assassinations in the world, perhaps only overshadowed by the literally hacksawing to death of Jamal Khashoggi by MBS's thug squad. I don't much see the point of trying to decide which state intelligence agency is 'the worst' because boy, they're all pretty drat awful.
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Oct 20, 2021 20:13
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Stop discussing the relative crimes of state intelligence agencies in this thread.
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Oct 20, 2021 20:33
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:The claim is that CIA is not an intelligence agency because it does more than just intelligence gathering. No, it's because they do not do intelligence gathering. How are u posted:The KGB (well the FSB but let's be real) is still carrying out the most outrageous poisonings and assassinations in the world Lol not even close. CIA still beats it in body numbers by far. fool of sound posted:Stop discussing the relative crimes of state intelligence agencies in this thread. Aww, ok. I was having fun with it but I guess this will be my last post on the subject.
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Oct 20, 2021 20:43
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MonsieurChoc posted:Aww, ok. I was having fun with it but I guess this will be my last post on the subject. If you want to do an intelligence agency body count comparison thread be my guest.
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Oct 20, 2021 21:30
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https://twitter.com/CJR/status/1450181889789251589 here is an article showing that, with enough ownership of local papers, you can just copy paste the same article hundreds of times over to give a talking point a veneer of legitimacy. quote:The lenders hovering over the pandemic distressed properties "are well within their legal rights" %LOCAL_BUSINESS% General Manager %FIRSTNAME% %LASTNAME% said in his April 2 letter to %LOCAL_FEDERAL_REPRESENTATIVE% fill in the blanks, ship to hundred of different local news sites, done
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Oct 21, 2021 02:12
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Craig K posted:https://twitter.com/CJR/status/1450181889789251589 Not a particularly new tactic for writing articles. I've seen dozens of cases of a bunch of 20th century local papers running more or less the same story with a few words changed around, usually because the original story came from a wire service or a press release. The scale of this is alarming as gently caress, though. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Oct 21, 2021 |
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Oct 21, 2021 04:43
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CraigK's burying the lede, which is that this entire thing appears to be laundering material from different organizations principally funded by the Kochs.
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Oct 21, 2021 07:13
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Discendo Vox posted:CraigK's burying the lede, which is that this entire thing appears to be laundering material from different organizations principally funded by the Kochs. That's a far more alarming aspect, I agree.
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Oct 21, 2021 08:54
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Josef bugman posted:Do you think that stuff like the below opinion piece is an example of "not giving our owner preferential treatment"? This ties into a repeated misrepresentation of what should be extremely obvious, where people will be like "owners aren't dictating everything their companies do" when that isn't how these things usually work. There's rarely a need to directly enforce this kind of thing, because managers/employees are generally going to avoid attempting to publish things that might anger shareholders. People keep acting like journalists must be completely independent if you can't find the written commands of Jeff Bezos himself telling them what to write, when there's no need for such a thing in the first place. Anyone in such a position who cares about their career is naturally going to be incentivized to avoid things that might draw the negative attention of the owners of the organization they work for. This also ties into why media is frequently untrustworthy when it comes to issues related to the US government. Media organizations directly benefit from a positive relationship with the government. It gives them access, and they risk losing that access (which they need to continue to be viewed seriously by broader society) if they anger those who grant it to them. The only exception to this is situations with a clear partisan angle - a media organization might be willing to anger a Republican/Democratic administration if it's in the interest of their preferred political party (since they'll still be assured a high level of access through their positive relationship to one of the two major parties, which will inevitably be in power again at some point). This same (extremely basic) understanding of conflicts of interest also applies to politics, where people will make absurd arguments like "unless you can prove quid pro quo, there's no problem." If a politician is receiving money (or any sort of support) from an industry, there's no need for the industry to explicitly say "we're going to cut you off if you don't do what we want." The politician will simply understand that it's in the best interests of their career to behave in ways that don't jeopardize their important connections (this is also an effective way to determine the limits of what our political parties are willing to do - they will never take actions that will jeopardize one of their major industry relationships). The same applies to businesses, including media ones. Over time, there becomes less of a need to directly enforce anything, since you simply end up with organizations staffed by people who share the perspective of their owners. And not just businesses, but also other organizations that directly rely on donations (if anything, those are often even more vulnerable to this). fool of sound posted:Confusing opinion pieces for actual reporting is indicative of poor media literacy and is one of the things that this thread specifically discusses. The whole fact that people confuse these things is proof in and of itself that they're just as relevant in terms of displaying the biases of the news organization! The fact that people shouldn't treat it in the same way they do reporting doesn't change the fact that they do treat it that way, so it's absolutely relevant if you're discussing the motivations of the media organizations in question.
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Oct 24, 2021 23:19
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Great post Ytalaya. I used to rag on the local newspapers crime reporter all the time because he was a stenographer for the cops. Recently he dropped the charade and is now the PR person for the department, a much more stable and better paid job I’m sure.
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Oct 24, 2021 23:40
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Ytlaya posted:This ties into a repeated misrepresentation of what should be extremely obvious, where people will be like "owners aren't dictating everything their companies do" when that isn't how these things usually work. This goes directly against the examples given earlier, where WaPo has frequently published extremely negative stories of both Amazon and Blue Origin. If you are going to claim that the journalists and editors who published/approved those stories simply do not care about their careers... well, I think it would be a pretty laughable claim.
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Oct 25, 2021 00:18
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:This goes directly against the examples given earlier, where WaPo has frequently published extremely negative stories of both Amazon and Blue Origin. If you are going to claim that the journalists and editors who published/approved those stories simply do not care about their careers... well, I think it would be a pretty laughable claim. No it doesn't, they're two different things. The examples given earlier are examples that the WaPo is not explicitly disallowed from being critical about Amazon/Bezos. Ytlaya is arguing that Bezos owning the WaPo poison's them on all reporting about Amazon/Bezos, even critical reporting, because Bezos is at the end of the day their boss and the person they're dependent on for money and human nature says you're incentivized to not piss off the person who gives you money and that will impact your decision making even if their are no explicit rules. And if you're going to claim that people don't think about if something will make their boss happy or not and try to predict that and make decisions around it, even if they were not explicitly told to... well, I think it would be a pretty laughable claim.
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Oct 25, 2021 23:53
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If you’re thinking about it in terms of rhetoric, it would be foolish not to report on or acknowledge things known by other parties or discussed in other spaces—the Post would lose all legitimacy if it appeared to act as a propaganda organ for Jeff Bezos, like Pravda or some gilded-age rag. This doesn’t mean that the people making it are ignorant of the fact that they serve at the pleasure of Jeff Bezos. You might instead look for a consistent editorial attitude toward unionization, climate change, or taxation. To some degree, such a point of view is indistinguishable from the liberal worldview of the end-of-history era, so maybe the specific oligarch controlling the specific publication doesn’t matter very much against the operation of history and pure ideology.
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Oct 26, 2021 00:22
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:If you’re thinking about it in terms of rhetoric, it would be foolish not to report on or acknowledge things known by other parties or discussed in other spaces—the Post would lose all legitimacy if it appeared to act as a propaganda organ for Jeff Bezos, like Pravda or some gilded-age rag. This doesn’t mean that the people making it are ignorant of the fact that they serve at the pleasure of Jeff Bezos. You might instead look for a consistent editorial attitude toward unionization, climate change, or taxation. To some degree, such a point of view is indistinguishable from the liberal worldview of the end-of-history era, so maybe the specific oligarch controlling the specific publication doesn’t matter very much against the operation of history and pure ideology. Yeah, when it really comes down to it I don't think Bezos is dictating on down from on high how articles should be written. There's nothing special about that editorial. Every major American news paper has published some form of that editorial in the last few years. But there's also nothing special about their reporting on Amazon. No one at the WaPo was Upton Sinclair writing the Jungle. They reported the same way most news reported on it. Their voice lines up with Bezos because they live in a world where everything lined up for people like Bezos. The specific oligarch doesn't matter much.
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Oct 26, 2021 00:45
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Its been fun watching each ideology squeeze Squid Game into their respective digestive tracks and either reduce or inflate it. The show was fine I guess, kind of babies first money bad sort of thing. Americans disgust me.
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Oct 28, 2021 19:14
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thehandtruck posted:Its been fun watching each ideology squeeze Squid Game into their respective digestive tracks and either reduce or inflate it. Not having heard of the show, this sentence was a journey
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Oct 29, 2021 15:52
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