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Are We Seeing Propaganda About Russian Propaganda? (rollingstone.com)
MyFirstNameIsPaul was one of several readers who spotted this disturbing instance of fake news about fake news. An anonymous reader writes:
Last week the Washington Post described "independent researchers" who'd identified "more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda" that they estimated were viewed more than 200 million times on Facebook. But the researchers insisted on remaining anonymous "to avoid being targeted by Russia's legions of skilled hackers," and when criticized on Twitter, responded "Awww, wook at all the angwy Putinists, trying to change the subject -- they're so vewwy angwy!!"
The group "seems to have been in existence for just a few months," writes Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, calling the Post's article an "astonishingly lazy report". (Chris Hedges, who once worked on a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at the New York Times, even found his site Truthdig on the group's dubious list of over 200 "sites that reliably echo Russian propaganda," along with other long-standing sites like Zero Hedge, Naked Capitalism, and the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.) "By overplaying the influence of Russia's disinformation campaign, the report also plays directly into the hands of the Russian propagandists that it hopes to combat," complains Adrian Chen, who in 2015 documented real Russian propaganda efforts which he traced to "a building in St. Petersburg where hundreds of young Russians worked to churn out propaganda."
The Post's article was picked up by other major news outlets (including USA Today), and included an ominous warning that "The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on 'fake news'."
The group "seems to have been in existence for just a few months," writes Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, calling the Post's article an "astonishingly lazy report". (Chris Hedges, who once worked on a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at the New York Times, even found his site Truthdig on the group's dubious list of over 200 "sites that reliably echo Russian propaganda," along with other long-standing sites like Zero Hedge, Naked Capitalism, and the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.) "By overplaying the influence of Russia's disinformation campaign, the report also plays directly into the hands of the Russian propagandists that it hopes to combat," complains Adrian Chen, who in 2015 documented real Russian propaganda efforts which he traced to "a building in St. Petersburg where hundreds of young Russians worked to churn out propaganda."
The Post's article was picked up by other major news outlets (including USA Today), and included an ominous warning that "The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on 'fake news'."
It would be really amazing if someone could show me a single piece of this propaganda they can trace to the Russians. Where is the evidence?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The best part is so far the Wisconsin recount has found a few examples of fraudulent votes - all of them for Hillary. Her vote count is now down by something like 15 in WI.
According to the Allegory if you leave the cave you are enlightened but you can't convince anyone else to leave the cave because they don't understand you anymore and know no better life.
Well, Americans didn't stay home.
CNN right now says Trump has 62,693,993 votes in the popular vote. That's more than any Republican has ever gotten in the popular vote (closest was George Bush in 2004, with 62,040,610). Obviously, these numbers are influenced by there being more Americans than before, and Trump is at 46.3% of the popular vote, while GWB's reelection was 51%. It is off by a few percent only, however- whatever the magnitude of Trump's thing, it still only affected a couple voters out of every hundred.
For comparison, Obama got 69.5 million votes in 2008, and 66 million in 2012, to Clinton's 65 million.
I feel that the solid performance of the 3rd parties this time around is the big thing not being talked about. Gary Johnson in 2012 set yellow team records for a Libertarian with 1.3 million votes. In 2016, he got over 4 million votes- Wikipedia says it is "more votes than the previous eight Libertarian presidential tickets combined", and was over 3%. The Greens got .36% of the vote in 2012, and 1% of the popular vote.
The reason that the 3rd party tickets are interesting is that *both are the same candidates as in 2012*. It is implausible that Johnson and Stein quadrupled and tripled in popularity- it is much more likely that many voters who consider themselves leaning towards the libertarians or the greens, but who usually vote for republicans or democrats, instead did not, driven away by the candidates.
America didn't seem to stay home, is my point- they definitely chose third party options a lot more than normal, though.
It was never one thing. The GOP had 8 years to craft a strategy against HRC. They knew she would be running after Obama and keeping the negative spot light on her was second only to discrediting the Obama administration. Clinton was no "shittier" than any other politician, so the only way for the GOP to win was to indict politicians as a whole. This lead to Trumps win and even thought it was not the way they wanted it, they were more than willing to jump on the bandwagon.
The attack by the globalist order was to advance the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as give Hillary Clinton a foreign policy "success" for her planned presidential run. The Muslim Brotherhood is allied with the transnational Left because the Brotherhood wear ties and suits and call themselves "moderates", and the transnational believe them and are too lazy to look up the Brotherhood's true beliefs in Arabic. We truly have incompetent people running politics (they spend 4 or 5 years in college, never had a real job, and think they are smarter than the other 7 billion people so should dictate what you can and cant do - such arrogance !).
Once Libya fell the massive arms stores there were transferred via Turkey to Syria - again to advance the Muslim Brotherhood agenda, and also to counter the expansion of Iranian influence. Of course, the exact opposite has happened and Iranian influence has increased massively.
The arms coming via Benghazi, as well as the $11 Billion of arms the Obama Administration sold to Qatar went to groups like Al Nura (AL Qaeda in Syria), Muslim Brotherhood groups, and eventually to the Islamic State. Arms also sent to Lebanon are used to equip Hezbollah.
A proper investigation of the activities in Benghazi, which was highlighted by the disgraceful lack of leadership and outright lying about the cause of the attack, would have exposed the Obama/Clinton policy of arming violent jihadis with Billions of dollars of arms.
The Benghazi scandal is not propaganda - the suppression of the facts around it are the propaganda. Besides the obvious propaganda of repeated memes the most invisible propaganda are the facts that the propagandists work to distort or outright hide from you. You are being lied to about Benghazi and its massive significance as the Obama/Clinton Administration tried to hide its involvement in the moving of weapons to arm Al Qaeda in Syria and eventually the Islamic State as they battle Iranian influence at the behest of the Saudis.
If these facts are new to you then your news sources have been feeding you propaganda and pretending Benghazi was less significant than it really was. Don't stand for this ! get news sources that will tell you the whole story - or else you will continue to be propagandized.
No, not every piece of right wing journalism is fake, but enough that stories from them should be suspect.
Further, neither did I say anything about Russian spies. I said Russian trolls who, as you pointed out, deliberately try to insert enough fake "news" or falsify factual stories to divert attention or obscure facts. As I pointed out in my original post, Russian trolls will mod me down to try and prevent people from seeing the truth of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. When confronted with the truth they go into overdrive in St. Petersburg in attempt to do everything to discredit the facts, most specifically going after either the person posting the facts (me) or where the story comes from.
Even when Putin admitted he sent Russian troops into Crimea to steal it, Russian trolls still denied their dear leader's own words. They made every excuse for why the story was fake EXCEPT for the fact those are Putin's own words. In other words, even facts coming out of Putin's mouths are lies in the world of Russian trolls.
And that is what this about: countering blatant lies with the truth. Using facts to pummel trolls, get them to twist themselves into such a ball of anger they climb over themselves in a vain attempt to extricate themselves from the ball of lies they've spewed. It's quite funny to watch them first deny the facts, then attempt to deflect, then finally come full circle and deny their own words. What's especially funny is they're so simple minded it's very easy to get them to admit they're Russian trolls. Since they're all using the same script handed to them from their handlers, they use the same words and phrases in every post so their comments stick out like a sore thumb.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"So you mean The Right will support a woman's right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy?"
No, she can do what she wants to HER body, but killing another human being (her baby) is an entirely different matter. Incidentally: the right ALSO opposes an y father murdering his kids too.
"Or my right to consume mind-altering substances?"
Actually, most on the right would be fine with you using your drugs IN PRIVATE, as long as you do NOT endanger any other person AND you do not render yourself incapable of supporting yourself and then start demanding government checks (OTHER PEOPLE's HARD-EARNED MONEY, TAKEN BY FORCE)
"Does it protect the rights of individuals to worship their own god (or worship none at all)..."
Sure. The right in America DEMANDS this, and that generally also includes the idea that government cannot force you to support somebody ele's perversion of the thousands-of-years-old definition of "marriage"
"...by not placing icons of particular religions on federal buildings or force students to acknowledge a particular deity or by plastering worship of a particular deity on our currency?"
Sorry, but government acknowledgement of the religious beliefs of the majority and historical/cultural associations does not in any way force you to worship some particular entity nor does it prohibit you from having your own beliefs. You are free to worship, or not, and only an SJW snowflake thinks that having the national motto ion the currency is "oppression"
"Do they protect the right of two adults of the same sex to enter into a marriage contract with one another?"
Every right winger I know is perfectly fine with two gay people having a contractual relationship with each other - but it's another thing entirely to have government demand that people abandon their Judeo-Chrisitan religious beliefs and accept the re-definition of the word "marriage" and the inversion of 2K+ years of morality that converts an "abomination" into a "blessing". You pretend you do not want government pushing somebody else's religious beliefs down your throat, but then you assert exactly such an act as a good thing. If government has the right to force Christians or Jews to accept "gay marriage" then it has the fully-legitimate right to force you to be a Christian and even to force gays into gay-to-straight conversion therapy....it's just at that point a matter of who is in power and what they choose to force. That idea that people have the freedom to believe as they will either goes both ways or it does not - and in the Obama era we turned a corner and started asserting that it does not as government sued nuns to force them to fund abortions, which they are unlikely to ever do, and sued Christians to force them to accept the re-definition of marriage, which they cannot do.