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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:And also given that it was done for the benefit of a geopolitical rival like Russia, using their intelligence services, if this had been CIA would you be defending this as much? I’d be just as interested in the information if it was credible. In the end, what you learn is much, much more important than who it comes from, as long as who it comes from is included in your analysis. If we’re thinking from an academic perspective Wikileaks had been enormously useful for students of diplomatic and domestic political history; as primary sources go it’s hard to overstate what a treasure trove they’ve provided.
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Oct 9, 2021 22:19
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Fancy Pelosi posted:Precisely this. It was confirmed that the Russians and Wikileaks were colluding with the Trump campaign. How people can pretend Assange is a journalist is beyond me. This wasn't the Washington Post publishing information that's important for the American people to know - it was a single rogue actor motivated by personal animus working in collusion with a hostile foreign state and a political campaign. All that may be true, but it doesn’t speak to the value of the information he published, much of which was so valuable the Washington Post and other outlets republished it. The criticisms of Assange echo the criticism of Ellsberg, a point Ellsberg himself has made. Reactionaries don’t often know they are reactionaries, but you are perfectly plugged into a reactionary defensive pattern that has a long history.
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Oct 10, 2021 00:56
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:I don’t see what the source has to do with the information—if the claims are true, you have to deal with them regardless of who makes them. It’s not like an issue of framing where a news source massages a meaning into events through analysis and selective focus. Perhaps a person tries to destroy America by telling it something about itself: I don’t see how the ethical response is to ignore that information by saying, “they only want to destroy America, therefore I cannot acknowledge this.” And that reaction is literally baked into the system, thus the admonitions for undergrads who wanted to go into foreign service not to read the cable leaks, despite those leaks being the single greatest archive of their expected work product to be released in the modern era.
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Oct 10, 2021 01:05
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fool of sound posted:Thanks for making the effort ram das. I don't have time for an in-depth response right now, but I'm curious as to what reporting on cointelpro or mkultra-style programs looked like during the period they were active. Literally wasn’t any mainstream acknowledgement of it until a crew of anti war types burglarized an FBI office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens'_Commission_to_Investigate_the_FBI?wprov=sfti1
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Oct 13, 2021 19:15
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fool of sound posted:You've also removed the text that appears when the MLK response is clicked. It was widely known/assumed among organizers and protestors that the feds were spying on them and infiltrating their groups. But that kind of information had far fewer ways to transmit. Paranoia about government surveillance literally predates our country being formed, so in that sense the exposure of COINTELPRO was validation of a much broader conspiracy-minded assumption. Strongly recommend reading The Burglary by Betty Medsger. The FBI was an unrestrained right wing agitprop and terrorism shop for years, and has had a hard time shaking those roots, lol jk they have barely reformed at all.
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Oct 13, 2021 19:39
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It was just not profitable to be against the war. Phil Donahue learned that lesson. Remember when Michael Moore got booed at the Oscars? The evidence didn’t matter, because the decision was made, and it turned out a lot of people prefer that to having to figure it out for themselves. I think the evidence debate was then and is now a sideshow. The “with us or against us” is the real meat of what was going on in this country.
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Oct 19, 2021 17:40
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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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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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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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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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Was Chris Cuomo a journalist? I never really saw him or Wolf Blitzer or any of the presenters as much more than talking heads. Do they have sources? Do they double check stuff with other sources? Do they do anything resembling journalism?
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Dec 7, 2021 16:07
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How are u posted:Russian interference was an actual thing that happened, though. In the same sense that they did end up finding WMDs in Iraq, yes.
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Dec 16, 2021 16:44
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Nucleic Acids posted:Russiagate was a coping mechanism for liberals who couldn’t handle the fact that the incarnation of everything they believed in lost to a racist game show host. Anyone who actively pushed it should not be trusted. It was a fundamental rejection that America is capable of anything so odious on its own, which if you know America you know 1. We are definitely capable of that and 2. We are unable as a society to see ourselves clearly for what we are
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Dec 16, 2021 16:55
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Discendo Vox posted:That all sources of information are imperfect does not actually justify using conspiratorial blogs. It is not possible to apply universal scrutiny to all sources, and it is not feasible to have a discussion in which bad faith mediators of information must be endlessly entertained. The equivocation between sources of information is specifically used by the mediators of this information to justify legitimizing sources that are spreading misinformation, especially information that is ideologically appealing or useable as a rhetorical cudgel. The NYT regularly publishes conspiritorial blogs in the form of op eds. Obama’s favorite, David Brooks, has made a career promoting the conspiracy theory that poor people are poor because they have bad values, not because they have no money. Utterly tinfoil hat garbage.
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Dec 16, 2021 18:37
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socialsecurity posted:Has anyone here said to believe everything the NYT posts without any scrutiny? Just making the point that “conspiracy theory” is a thought terminating cliche without actual value in determining truth. It’s an ideological statement about the person who uses it’s feelings, not what they do or do not know. It was a conspiracy theory they the ruling class hobknobbed openly with sex traffickers and pedophiles until it became very difficult to control the information about your Jimmy Savilles and Bill Clintons and Jeffrey Epsteins. Up until quite recently that was all laughable tinfoil stuff. Conspiracy theories are just mental models that upset someone with the authority to challenge them. It has no relation to the truth or falsity of the theory. selec fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 18:43
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socialsecurity posted:So what would describe being anti-vax and anti-lockdown because you think covids all part of some government plot to control everyone? I mean, it’s part of a government plot to control behavior, isn’t it? We want to mandate specific behaviors (which I agree with!) it’s just a question of why, which there are a lot of not-conspiritorially inclined (or so we’d believe) who have these same insane grade of beliefs about other stuff we just don’t consider, like Brooks’ completely unscientific and nonsensical just so stories. Like, I don’t believe there are actual reptilians, but I do believe the lives of the wealthy and powerful are so different from our own they behave as though they are a higher, dominant species over the rest of us. Having known several people who became believers in conspiracy theories (as we understand them, Qanon stuff mostly) they arise from a genuine feeling of powerlessness over some fundamental part of their lives. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) selec fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 18:59
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Coming from the guy who said the Biden administration should kidnap and blackmail Joe Manchin's children until he falls in line, this is definitely very rich. 1. You’ve misread, I was lolling that the Dems won’t do even as much as I listed there, much less actual kidnapping. I was not advocating kidnapping. 2. How’s all that coloring inside the lines working out 3. Please respond to my posts in this thread
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Dec 16, 2021 20:14
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raminasi posted:Twitter’s entire technological thesis is to present content in a way that maximizes the magnitude of its reader’s emotional reaction. That’s the furthest thing possible from “just an index.” It presents me the posts from the people I follow, in chronological order. Are you sure you don’t mean Facebook?
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Dec 16, 2021 20:58
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:And how and why do you choose the people you follow on Twitter? How do you think most people choose who to follow on Twitter? It sure isn't random chance. I started by following celebrities I found interesting (this was long ago) and since just find people who post interesting things. I have a few famous and non-famous people from other ideological tendencies than my own that I follow just to keep up on what the temperature is over there, but a lot of my curation is for locals and informative or interesting (usually) leftist or nerdy posters. What am I almost getting?
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Dec 16, 2021 23:04
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Twitter is great still because you can see literal billionaires getting into fights with leftist shitposters at 3am. It also helps knock a lot of public intellectuals down a few much-needed pegs because they don’t have the self control to not tweet out every dumb idea they have, or become incredibly thin skinned the moment they face any pushback. It’s been an amazing tool to dispel the mystification of the meritocracy by being flattened. When you call Neera Tanden a barred out freak and she blocks you? You know she saw that. It’s a time of wonders that if you’re even a little savvy you can personally insult a White House muckity muck, an NYT columnist, a Hollywood pervert from the comfort of your home and have decent odds that it’ll land over the target. It won’t last, hell it’s not even as good as it used to be, but Twitter democratized media in an immense way.
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Dec 16, 2021 23:51
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:By and large, you yourself choose what you see on Twitter, which means you pick to read things that appeal to your emotions positive or negative. This is different from reading, say, the front page of a newspaper or looking through an issue of a periodical, where someone else chooses what things appear in them. I mean…so what? Editors are not good at deciding what’s important information for me either. There’s this whole section in most newspapers called “Business” and it’s a whole bunch of information relevant to the people exploiting workers, and literally nothing useful in there for those same workers, no Labor section. It’s pretty obvious what ideology almost all editorialized publications subscribe to and their built in prejudices and assumptions from that ideology make their news products pretty useless and oftentimes more emotionally charged reading for me than Twitter is, where I consume news, but also joke around with friends. I would in no way say I’m underinformed, I still read stuff from mainstream publications, but do you think the news about millionaire weddings means the NYT is somehow more credible, editorially speaking? I sure don’t. It’s news for rich people and it’s pretty useless to me by and large as a news product as given. It produces useful news, sometimes, but that’s an isolated incident compared to the vast amount of propaganda they publish daily, like those millionaire wedding stories. selec fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Dec 17, 2021 |
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Dec 17, 2021 00:41
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I would love to discuss if people think this was just accidental or what https://twitter.com/bbcnewspr/status/1476506386964131840?s=21 Because it seems wildly improbable they didn’t know who Dersh is and what he’s accused of
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Dec 30, 2021 15:58
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fool of sound posted:Dersh reportedly has spent more or less his entire career ingratiating himself with various wealthy and important people, and judging by how many op-eds of his get published I wouldn't be surprised to find out he leans on various friends to get screentime/page space. Ok but he’s literally an unnamed coconspirator in Epstein’s nonprosecution deal and is publicly suing at least one of the victims. Like I get that he’s a schmoozer but are you saying the BBC was unaware or just didn’t care?
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Dec 30, 2021 16:25
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Somaen posted:This thread makes really stupid conspiracy theorists mad which is funny and good My favorite conspiracy theories are the ones they publish in the NYT and WaPo: -Iraq had WMDs -China is our enemy -Poor people are poor by choice -Haiti is a problem if its own creation The list goes on. So many weird, ahistorical things floated as stipulations in op eds and articles. You’d be hard pressed to construct an accurate understanding of how our society works if they were all you consumed.
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Dec 31, 2021 18:32
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Could mean that but RT et al habitually stopped having their contributors put RT on their profiles because they realized it was having a negative effect as RT's reputation is, to put it very lightly, lower than dirt and the people that they're seeking to influence are not the people who are already on board with RT (or related outfits). Strong recommendation for The Mighty Wurlitzer: How The CIA Played America for a deeply-researched look at CIA propaganda, infiltration and use of American media.
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Nov 8, 2022 15:13
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