Maybe in this case you were right. I didn't look into that because I don't care. Firstly, I think you underestimate how stupid and reckless people can be without malice or not much malice. Secondly, even if the guy is as malicious as you can imagine, it diverts attention from the real problem. 50000 SWAT raids per year means the threshold for using them is low and on top of that their threshold for violence is also low. Why doesn't it occur to you that this specific SWAT raid is not far from the norm?
It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.
He said 'as used'. While in fact fascism - and things related - was very much on his mind. https://www.thedailybeast.com/... i shouldn't have used the word fascism, but is that because it has no meaning in common speech or because I'm exaggerating? I'm not exaggerating but I counted factors I'm not mentioning.
If it's for giggles then it does not necessarily make him messed up, but stupid and reckless. That does not justify a long prison sentence. Was the target a friend? In no way am I going to put his fault at equal footing of that of the SWAT team and the whole organisation behind it. If you just get freshly introduced to the subject and the fact sheet shows heavy militarization of police and massive incarceration rates you know the system is in deep shit. You don't have to know the name of the country for that.
The reality is if you arrange for loaded guns to be pointed at people eventually something WILL go disastrously wrong.
Not sure you ment it that way but I fully agree with that! There are. 50000 SWAT raids per year in the US. That's 50000 cases of terror and violence. A society with those statistics has deep systemic problems and is very close to fascism.
The point is not defending this guy, the problem is that there the system is structurally arranged to point loaded guns at people for the slightest reason and yeah this guy is an easy fall guy because he clearly did something wrong. But it's a diversion from the real problem.
And the Weekly Standard and the Atlantic Council are there to guarantee that the population doesn't start complaining on social media that anything would be wrong with that.
Agreed. I had noticed people feeling censored on Twitter and considering the move to Gab. This is an excuse to demonetize Gab. I don't know Gab (not a social media user) but it's likely that it's not just far right wing people who move there.
I think there's a major censorship operation going on but this is not simple to prove because one person's false positives are another person't real targets. There is so much crap on the web that anyone targeting 'serious' dissident content only has to bundle sufficient crap into each censoring operation to stay under the radar. Real freedom of speech protects against this so you don't even have to know which of the two scenarios apply.
If you simply look around you in public you'll see smartphone usage is now epidemic and next to the benefits there are plain addiction issues. It's weird to see all those people looking at their screens and ignoring the world around them. Including in their cars. With epidemic addiction like that you have to consider intervention/assistance of some form.I'm certainly in favor of parents limiting the screen time of their children.
In a way intent is misleading.I mean I can make a case for it, if the Atlantic Council or the Weekly Standard get involved in censoring then this is because they are pursuing their own interests and anyone challenging them will be a target. But if you imagine a simple distribution of 10% of the sites which offer a justifiable alternative view on the world and 90%which have no justification at all, then if you do not take special care the 10% will vanish as unfortunate false positives in any large scale cleanup operation. Since many of the alternative sites are already labeled as 'russian influence somethings' I'm sure there is no special care being taken to protect them.
The famous Vietnam 'napalm girl' photograph is now censored. I strongly believe we are in the midst of a massive censorship enterprise to shut down subversive and activist thought. There is also a massive amount of shit out there on the web, anyone who wants to shut down activist sites and who is subtle enough to want some cover for it simply has to include some of the shit sites into the package so that the activist sites become 'unfortunate false positives' in case they are successful at challenging the censorship.
The banning of pages is also just the tip of the iceberg. There at least they have to come up with some form of justification. For making content less visible and for demonetizing things they have to justify nothing. If Google moves your page ten pages back in a search result they have to justify nothing.
It's not that Facebook wants to censor. They just want to get along with the people that matter.
Hyperbole I guess. There are no highways where cars drive180 on average, even at night, and even for an individual car maintaining an average of 180 isn't easy. But you still get stretches where some people do 300 if the circumstances allow it.You use a lot of fuel above 200.
Products(and other things) evolve fastest if you can just replace the old ones. That's not just the case for living beings. It's a high-metabolic process, very wasteful but it allows to adapt quickly. Once you start to recycle and repair it slows down product evolution. Not just of the things you use longer but of all things connected to it somehow in higher orders.
We live in the anthropocene. We have large impact on many aspects of the planet and that includes the climate. You can disagree about how damaging and how large the impact is but it's possible to agree on the fact that the rough scale of the impact is now such that you have to take it in account. It can no longer be neglected. So we have to start paying attention to our ecological and economical footprint. Reusing, repairing and recycling is part of that.
Having a military to defend yourself with is the most economically sound way to dissuade a potential invader.
A good deterrence is one where you can hurt the opponent and allow the opponent to be able to hurt you. If you don't allow the opponent to be able to hurt you you break the symmetry and are going for dominance.
https://www.thebalance.com/u-s... says the military spending for 2018 is $874.4 billion. I think that's a very conservative estimate because the militarization of the US runs much deeper than these numbers suggest, but let's accept them. Then how much would the US need for defense? The spending has increased more this year than the total defense budget of Russia. What is the risk the US is going to be invaded? The US being free from invasion is a pretty natural state since it's main competitors are overseas. How many nukes does the US need as deterrence? Very few. 10 should be enough . Or 1 should be enough provided you have the ability to deliver it. North Korea thinks 10 should be enough.
I was thinking how to reply to this but it easily becomes very long. But maybe I can summarize it with a simple rule don't escalate the effort to push out the wrong ideas and don't raise the bar to only keep the best ideas:
Different groups have different ideas of common sense. Sometimes these differences are a matter of taste. Sometimes they are better founded. In hard science they can be pretty well founded. In journalism there are some rules to give some foundation to this common sense. In Wikipedia as well. But there still is a lot of freedom in constructing a narrative. Conflicts between common sense groups are difficult to resolve because arguments lose value when they are placed in the mouth of someone from the other camp. Even when something is accepted as a truth it doesn't mean that you have to assign it importance.
When there are competing commonsense groups you can be more aggressive if the common sense ideas have a harder foundation. In real world issues there is too much room for different cases of common sense. There is no such luxury to restrict yourself to issues where there is a hard foundation. In political issues you also get a lot of efforts to distort your common sense and that makes it even worse.
PR and propaganda is all about tuning people's common sense. It tells you which sources to trust and which sources to dismiss. When PR is involved in a subject you cannot trust dominant common sense and you need to keep the debate open. The Iraq war issue is certainly such a case. This means that even if you feel that you're on the right side you have to be very careful pushing people out because your common sense is being massaged. The West has a democratic tradition, that means the amount of propaganda being put out is immense.
I see Philip Cross as a bad faith actor who played the system. what Philip Cross did was avoid direct confrontation but massage credibility. His aim was to push the dissenters more and more into the fringe, so that readers use their common sense and decide these sources can be dismissed. That they don't deserve attention. Without ever checking out what these sources even say. Cross's opponents are people who opposed the Iraq war. Why are these fringe? And why are the supporters of the Iraq war still so credible? Because of facts? the antiwar people were right overall, and the supporters of war were wrong overall. Because they clearly don't trust the system? Yes, that is likely a major factor.
Instead of aiming to resolve such issues one should maintain a window, to what extent you can allow one side to dominate. The central question from a 'management' point of view becomes how much fringe is acceptable and how much is too much. Do you think these fringe people should be allowed as wikipedia editors? Should they be made more invisible or less? There are systems for this, often based on ignoring this credibility part: some arguments should be treated independently of who says them.
Currently we're in an all out war on fake news. It's framed as a war against Russian influence but that is itself group think and linking to russia is a way to discredit opponents. The war on fake news is a large scale effort to push all dissent into the fringe and more into the fringe. This is more or less independent of whether this dissent is justified or not. It's just a dominant scheme trying to push out the rest.To move dissent from fringe to even more fringe.It becomes increasingly hard to even google it, which makes it more fringe if you tell someone about it and which helps your common sense to stick to the other group. Mainstream journalism has become too aligned with power and will go along with the effort. They already share the same common sense of who should be taken seriously and who not. I fear Wikipedia is also evolving in that direction, that it where it matters it will be dominated by people with 'the right ideas', who know which sources are good enough to refer to, to be quoted, and which sources are not good enough and are not allowed.
There is truth in that but I think you don't hear much about special interest groups on wikipedia because they won. I followed the Philip Cross case ( https://wikipedia.fivefilters.... ). The people who challenged Cross got exactly the treatment you're dealing out and it was very hard to prevail. The professionalization of Wikipedia always carries a danger. The complex rules allow people with clout to drown out those without. Not in principle, but in practice. People who want to want to take on subjects where big interests are involved quickly find out that it's very hard, especially when the big interests also manage to get their narrative into the reputable sources. And those who disagree, well, they're not reputable.
That's like saying "how is it possible to believe everything Facebook says it's doing and end up disagreeing". As soon as there is a form of coordinated messaging towards a political target it can be called spamming, or petitioning. And for political activists coordinated messaging is one of the few tools they have. There is also a lot of horizontal spreading of news. This is a head on attack on free speech, combined with the usual PR saying everything's fine. But just look at what the indy media are saying, how they experience it. How many followers does a fake account have you think? The Free Thought Project and Nation in Distress had 3 million followers. Anti media: 2 million.Reverb Press,700000. Press For Truth 350000. A lot of the smaller sites are telling. Sites monitoring police abuse are shut down. I wonder who Rachel Blevins is ( https://twitter.com/RachBlevin... )
I won't deny that there is a war on Fake News, it's only that the meaning of Fake News will be filled in on the fly until the result is out and out suppression of free speech until it's limited to people who have nothing to say.
Actually the problem you describe was raised by a a few experiments in the second half of the 19th century which showed that the speed of light did not change if you moved towards or away from the source. Then Lorentz came up with a mathematical formula which allowed light opposite directions still equal to c and not 2c. But it was difficult to give meaning to it. Poincare went quite far in making a coherent 'traditional' model while Einstein made a revolutionary model, even if a lot of the math was the same. The concepts were different. So the first explanation of your problem was given in 1892 but the first decent explanation was given in 1905.
The first question to ask about such a ruling is whether it's a preemptive ruling to avoid stronger constraints. With autonomous or semiautonomous systems there will always be a human be involved in the decision process, the question is how closely. How much information has to be passed on to the human and at what point. If a human confirms that anything in designated area can be shot on sight between 10pm and 5am, is the robot autonomous or not? What if if the area is anything in camera view and within the next minute only? There are no strict separations between computer assisted humans , human supervised computers, and remote human supervised computers. Any drone swarm attack has to have a large extent of autonomous coordination. With an automated machine gun mounted on a watchtower the supervisors really prefer it to work autonomously. 'Cover this area'.Human intervention or not?
I assume the military want autonomous robots for two reasons: more freedom of operations, and taking the humans out of the equation when the operation is unpopular. So that in the end all the military require is your money, not your contribution or approval.
Apologies for the delay in replying. So you're not sure whether I'm a Russian stooge. Maybe I'm some kind of sleeper agent who registered to/. almost 20 years ago(see my id). Or I'm being cleverly lied to. I think the core disagreement is I see the dangers as internal, you as external. And it's a pretty radical disagreement. I'll put it this way. I think you're a bit presumptuous about knowing the Americans. You're dismissing everyone who doesn't buy into the mainstream stories as either a Russian stooge or as gullible and manipulated by the Russians. It means for instance that you'll dismiss every politically aware libertarian. It means, since the job of a journalist as a member of the 'fourth estate' should be to distrust the government, that you disqualify every critical journalist. Well there aren't that many. Some of these journalists have a political orientation towards the libertarian or the paleoconservative side (think Cato Institute or 'The American Conservative'). Others like Glenn Greenwald and Seymour Hersh are left oriented. But they share a distrust of official claims , even if they simply think it's their job as a journalist. You don't have to believe they are right to believe that they have sincere informed opinions. I mentioned Consortium News. There is a lot of criticism there of Russiagate. So are they liars or are they themselves gullible people being lied to? You can even start by believing they are locked up in group think. That happens enough.
I also think the truth often comes out. But that doesn't mean you'll believe it. What if you consider it Russian Propaganda? https://consortiumnews.com/201... The article says the devastating claims of the Department of Homeland Security 2 years ago were bogus. They were believed though and they lent credibility to a lot of followup claims, including additional claims by DHS themselves.
If Russian propaganda is not entirely stupid they'll take the arguments of these people and amplify them. But nobody does all out propaganda like the US. That's one thing you got right overall but I'll rephrase it for you in a way that probably makes more sense to foreigners. Americans are very nice, but it's very easy to manipulate them into supporting aggressive policies by danging an external threat in front of them. Frankly though, I don't see why that should be limited to Americans.
Does that mean there is no threat at all? Not necessarily. Does that mean the adversaries are actually nice people? Not at all. But it means that in a functioning democracy internal distrust is essential. When the mainstream press is starting to trust official sources it's dead. So in a functioning democracy it's not easy to get the people lined up behind wars and foreign aggression. Apparently your priorities are different.
I agree. I recall Seymour Hersh said he made a career out of finding the people who made the distinction that they should be loyal to the constitution first and that they should put loyalty to their boss second. But he also said there are a lot of decent people in government - and in the military.
I have an informed opinion, whether it's right or not, and you are calling that something which is wrong with our democracy. I guess I should be happy at least you're not calling me a Russian stooge. You think the problem is we are not mobilizing enough against the external enemy? I have definite ideas about what's wrong with our democracies and Russian interference is a mere drop in the ocean. What do you think the budget of the Russians in this is and how it compares to the whole?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe in this case you were right. I didn't look into that because I don't care. Firstly, I think you underestimate how stupid and reckless people can be without malice or not much malice. Secondly, even if the guy is as malicious as you can imagine, it diverts attention from the real problem. 50000 SWAT raids per year means the threshold for using them is low and on top of that their threshold for violence is also low. Why doesn't it occur to you that this specific SWAT raid is not far from the norm?
He said 'as used'. While in fact fascism - and things related - was very much on his mind.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/...
i shouldn't have used the word fascism, but is that because it has no meaning in common speech or because I'm exaggerating?
I'm not exaggerating but I counted factors I'm not mentioning.
If it's for giggles then it does not necessarily make him messed up, but stupid and reckless. That does not justify a long prison sentence. Was the target a friend? In no way am I going to put his fault at equal footing of that of the SWAT team and the whole organisation behind it. If you just get freshly introduced to the subject and the fact sheet shows heavy militarization of police and massive incarceration rates you know the system is in deep shit. You don't have to know the name of the country for that.
Not sure you ment it that way but I fully agree with that!
There are. 50000 SWAT raids per year in the US. That's 50000 cases of terror and violence. A society with those statistics has deep systemic problems and is very close to fascism.
The point is not defending this guy, the problem is that there the system is structurally arranged to point loaded guns at people for the slightest reason and yeah this guy is an easy fall guy because he clearly did something wrong. But it's a diversion from the real problem.
And the Weekly Standard and the Atlantic Council are there to guarantee that the population doesn't start complaining on social media that anything would be wrong with that.
Nor should they need to , if domestic law enforcement is sufficiently militarized and outsourced.
Agreed. I had noticed people feeling censored on Twitter and considering the move to Gab. This is an excuse to demonetize Gab. I don't know Gab (not a social media user) but it's likely that it's not just far right wing people who move there.
I think there's a major censorship operation going on but this is not simple to prove because one person's false positives are another person't real targets. There is so much crap on the web that anyone targeting 'serious' dissident content only has to bundle sufficient crap into each censoring operation to stay under the radar.
Real freedom of speech protects against this so you don't even have to know which of the two scenarios apply.
Neoliberal free markets are only free for corporate business. The rest is just free to leave or shut up.
If you simply look around you in public you'll see smartphone usage is now epidemic and next to the benefits there are plain addiction issues. It's weird to see all those people looking at their screens and ignoring the world around them. Including in their cars. With epidemic addiction like that you have to consider intervention/assistance of some form.I'm certainly in favor of parents limiting the screen time of their children.
I still hope this is intended as over the top parody but these days I don't know anymore.
'corporate media' is usually not indented as praise though.
In a way intent is misleading.I mean I can make a case for it, if the Atlantic Council or the Weekly Standard get involved in censoring then this is because they are pursuing their own interests and anyone challenging them will be a target. But if you imagine a simple distribution of 10% of the sites which offer a justifiable alternative view on the world and 90%which have no justification at all, then if you do not take special care the 10% will vanish as unfortunate false positives in any large scale cleanup operation. Since many of the alternative sites are already labeled as 'russian influence somethings' I'm sure there is no special care being taken to protect them.
The famous Vietnam 'napalm girl' photograph is now censored. I strongly believe we are in the midst of a massive censorship enterprise to shut down subversive and activist thought. There is also a massive amount of shit out there on the web, anyone who wants to shut down activist sites and who is subtle enough to want some cover for it simply has to include some of the shit sites into the package so that the activist sites become 'unfortunate false positives' in case they are successful at challenging the censorship.
The banning of pages is also just the tip of the iceberg. There at least they have to come up with some form of justification. For making content less visible and for demonetizing things they have to justify nothing. If Google moves your page ten pages back in a search result they have to justify nothing.
It's not that Facebook wants to censor. They just want to get along with the people that matter.
Hyperbole I guess.
There are no highways where cars drive180 on average, even at night, and even for an individual car maintaining an average of 180 isn't easy. But you still get stretches where some people do 300 if the circumstances allow it.You use a lot of fuel above 200.
Products(and other things) evolve fastest if you can just replace the old ones. That's not just the case for living beings. It's a high-metabolic process, very wasteful but it allows to adapt quickly. Once you start to recycle and repair it slows down product evolution. Not just of the things you use longer but of all things connected to it somehow in higher orders.
We live in the anthropocene. We have large impact on many aspects of the planet and that includes the climate. You can disagree about how damaging and how large the impact is but it's possible to agree on the fact that the rough scale of the impact is now such that you have to take it in account. It can no longer be neglected. So we have to start paying attention to our ecological and economical footprint. Reusing, repairing and recycling is part of that.
A good deterrence is one where you can hurt the opponent and allow the opponent to be able to hurt you. If you don't allow the opponent to be able to hurt you you break the symmetry and are going for dominance.
https://www.thebalance.com/u-s... says the military spending for 2018 is $874.4 billion. I think that's a very conservative estimate because the militarization of the US runs much deeper than these numbers suggest, but let's accept them. Then how much would the US need for defense? The spending has increased more this year than the total defense budget of Russia. What is the risk the US is going to be invaded? The US being free from invasion is a pretty natural state since it's main competitors are overseas. How many nukes does the US need as deterrence? Very few. 10 should be enough . Or 1 should be enough provided you have the ability to deliver it. North Korea thinks 10 should be enough.
I think my point would be that what you consider fringe should not be fought by any other means than debate on content.
I was thinking how to reply to this but it easily becomes very long. But maybe I can summarize it with a simple rule don't escalate the effort to push out the wrong ideas and don't raise the bar to only keep the best ideas:
Different groups have different ideas of common sense. Sometimes these differences are a matter of taste. Sometimes they are better founded. In hard science they can be pretty well founded. In journalism there are some rules to give some foundation to this common sense. In Wikipedia as well. But there still is a lot of freedom in constructing a narrative. Conflicts between common sense groups are difficult to resolve because arguments lose value when they are placed in the mouth of someone from the other camp. Even when something is accepted as a truth it doesn't mean that you have to assign it importance.
When there are competing commonsense groups you can be more aggressive if the common sense ideas have a harder foundation. In real world issues there is too much room for different cases of common sense. There is no such luxury to restrict yourself to issues where there is a hard foundation. In political issues you also get a lot of efforts to distort your common sense and that makes it even worse.
PR and propaganda is all about tuning people's common sense. It tells you which sources to trust and which sources to dismiss. When PR is involved in a subject you cannot trust dominant common sense and you need to keep the debate open. The Iraq war issue is certainly such a case. This means that even if you feel that you're on the right side you have to be very careful pushing people out because your common sense is being massaged. The West has a democratic tradition, that means the amount of propaganda being put out is immense.
I see Philip Cross as a bad faith actor who played the system. what Philip Cross did was avoid direct confrontation but massage credibility. His aim was to push the dissenters more and more into the fringe, so that readers use their common sense and decide these sources can be dismissed. That they don't deserve attention. Without ever checking out what these sources even say. Cross's opponents are people who opposed the Iraq war. Why are these fringe? And why are the supporters of the Iraq war still so credible? Because of facts? the antiwar people were right overall, and the supporters of war were wrong overall. Because they clearly don't trust the system? Yes, that is likely a major factor.
Instead of aiming to resolve such issues one should maintain a window, to what extent you can allow one side to dominate. The central question from a 'management' point of view becomes how much fringe is acceptable and how much is too much.
Do you think these fringe people should be allowed as wikipedia editors? Should they be made more invisible or less?
There are systems for this, often based on ignoring this credibility part: some arguments should be treated independently of who says them.
Currently we're in an all out war on fake news. It's framed as a war against Russian influence but that is itself group think and linking to russia is a way to discredit opponents. The war on fake news is a large scale effort to push all dissent into the fringe and more into the fringe. This is more or less independent of whether this dissent is justified or not. It's just a dominant scheme trying to push out the rest.To move dissent from fringe to even more fringe .It becomes increasingly hard to even google it, which makes it more fringe if you tell someone about it and which helps your common sense to stick to the other group. Mainstream journalism has become too aligned with power and will go along with the effort. They already share the same common sense of who should be taken seriously and who not. I fear Wikipedia is also evolving in that direction, that it where it matters it will be dominated by people with 'the right ideas', who know which sources are good enough to refer to, to be quoted, and which sources are not good enough and are not allowed.
There is truth in that but I think you don't hear much about special interest groups on wikipedia because they won. I followed the Philip Cross case ( https://wikipedia.fivefilters.... ). The people who challenged Cross got exactly the treatment you're dealing out and it was very hard to prevail. The professionalization of Wikipedia always carries a danger. The complex rules allow people with clout to drown out those without. Not in principle, but in practice. People who want to want to take on subjects where big interests are involved quickly find out that it's very hard, especially when the big interests also manage to get their narrative into the reputable sources. And those who disagree, well, they're not reputable.
That's like saying "how is it possible to believe everything Facebook says it's doing and end up disagreeing". As soon as there is a form of coordinated messaging towards a political target it can be called spamming, or petitioning. And for political activists coordinated messaging is one of the few tools they have. There is also a lot of horizontal spreading of news. This is a head on attack on free speech, combined with the usual PR saying everything's fine.
But just look at what the indy media are saying, how they experience it.
How many followers does a fake account have you think? The Free Thought Project and Nation in Distress had 3 million followers. Anti media: 2 million.Reverb Press,700000. Press For Truth 350000. A lot of the smaller sites are telling. Sites monitoring police abuse are shut down.
I wonder who Rachel Blevins is ( https://twitter.com/RachBlevin... )
I won't deny that there is a war on Fake News, it's only that the meaning of Fake News will be filled in on the fly until the result is out and out suppression of free speech until it's limited to people who have nothing to say.
Actually the problem you describe was raised by a a few experiments in the second half of the 19th century which showed that the speed of light did not change if you moved towards or away from the source. Then Lorentz came up with a mathematical formula which allowed light opposite directions still equal to c and not 2c. But it was difficult to give meaning to it. Poincare went quite far in making a coherent 'traditional' model while Einstein made a revolutionary model, even if a lot of the math was the same. The concepts were different.
So the first explanation of your problem was given in 1892 but the first decent explanation was given in 1905.
If you're Saudi, interest rates are high. They're broke.
The first question to ask about such a ruling is whether it's a preemptive ruling to avoid stronger constraints. With autonomous or semiautonomous systems there will always be a human be involved in the decision process, the question is how closely. How much information has to be passed on to the human and at what point. If a human confirms that anything in designated area can be shot on sight between 10pm and 5am, is the robot autonomous or not? What if if the area is anything in camera view and within the next minute only?
There are no strict separations between computer assisted humans , human supervised computers, and remote human supervised computers.
Any drone swarm attack has to have a large extent of autonomous coordination.
With an automated machine gun mounted on a watchtower the supervisors really prefer it to work autonomously. 'Cover this area'.Human intervention or not?
I assume the military want autonomous robots for two reasons: more freedom of operations, and taking the humans out of the equation when the operation is unpopular. So that in the end all the military require is your money, not your contribution or approval.
Apologies for the delay in replying. So you're not sure whether I'm a Russian stooge. Maybe I'm some kind of sleeper agent who registered to /. almost 20 years ago(see my id).
Or I'm being cleverly lied to. I think the core disagreement is I see the dangers as internal, you as external. And it's a pretty radical disagreement.
I'll put it this way. I think you're a bit presumptuous about knowing the Americans. You're dismissing everyone who doesn't buy into the mainstream stories as either a Russian stooge or as gullible and manipulated by the Russians.
It means for instance that you'll dismiss every politically aware libertarian. It means, since the job of a journalist as a member of the 'fourth estate' should be to distrust the government, that you disqualify every critical journalist. Well there aren't that many.
Some of these journalists have a political orientation towards the libertarian or the paleoconservative side (think Cato Institute or 'The American Conservative').
Others like Glenn Greenwald and Seymour Hersh are left oriented. But they share a distrust of official claims , even if they simply think it's their job as a journalist.
You don't have to believe they are right to believe that they have sincere informed opinions. I mentioned Consortium News.
There is a lot of criticism there of Russiagate. So are they liars or are they themselves gullible people being lied to?
You can even start by believing they are locked up in group think. That happens enough.
I also think the truth often comes out. But that doesn't mean you'll believe it. What if you consider it Russian Propaganda?
https://consortiumnews.com/201...
The article says the devastating claims of the Department of Homeland Security 2 years ago were bogus.
They were believed though and they lent credibility to a lot of followup claims, including additional claims by DHS themselves.
If Russian propaganda is not entirely stupid they'll take the arguments of these people and amplify them. But nobody does all out propaganda like the US.
That's one thing you got right overall but I'll rephrase it for you in a way that probably makes more sense to foreigners.
Americans are very nice, but it's very easy to manipulate them into supporting aggressive policies by danging an external threat in front of them.
Frankly though, I don't see why that should be limited to Americans.
Does that mean there is no threat at all? Not necessarily. Does that mean the adversaries are actually nice people? Not at all.
But it means that in a functioning democracy internal distrust is essential. When the mainstream press is starting to trust official sources it's dead.
So in a functioning democracy it's not easy to get the people lined up behind wars and foreign aggression. Apparently your priorities are different.
I agree. I recall Seymour Hersh said he made a career out of finding the people who made the distinction that they should be loyal to the constitution first and that they should put loyalty to their boss second. But he also said there are a lot of decent people in government - and in the military.
I have an informed opinion, whether it's right or not, and you are calling that something which is wrong with our democracy. I guess I should be happy at least you're not calling me a Russian stooge. You think the problem is we are not mobilizing enough against the external enemy?
I have definite ideas about what's wrong with our democracies and Russian interference is a mere drop in the ocean. What do you think the budget of the Russians in this is and how it compares to the whole?