The reason the so-called "deep state" is totally immune to public pressure is that most of the public likes damn near everything it does. In fact if you actually had a referendum on any aspect of the "deep state" that you personally oppose, you'd almost certainly lose damn near every point. Jack Bauer is the deep state, and he gets great ratings because as far as the American people are concerned, having a badass motherfucker oppress dirty foreigners without having to bother with any stupid paperwork is the ideal situation.
Sanctions are actually an excellent example. Most people want the US to take strong positions on almost every imaginable issue in foreign affairs. They tend not to want actual military action, because a) that costs money, which means taxes, b) American troops could get hurt, and c) any sufficiently large military action will include a certain amount of dead civilians. So you get half-assed bullshit opposition like sanctions. Europe is even worse, because the EU is specifically designed to be unable to do anything that is not hall-assed bullshit.
Then since the American people were told the sanctions would magically make Cuba free, ending the sanctions is unacceptable to them unless Cuba gets free. To them the point of the sanctions was to get Cuba free, and if the sanctions don;t do the trick ending them without replacing them with a tougher option is basically admitting there's no point in fighting for Cuban freedom.
There's only one government, so you really have to vastly over-simplify the demands of the people or it can't function. A first-past-the-post system really aggravates the problem because an asshole with under 40% support can dominate if his opponents are dumb enough to run three candidates against him.
Let me put it to you this way: Can you name a single issue on which most Green party activists actually disagree with most NDP activists?
There are differences in emphasis, but it seems to me that it's remarkably stupid to lose the entire fucking Kyoto treaty because your activists want to implement it at a different speed then some other party's activists. Which is pretty much exactly what happened in the last election. Harper got his majority, so he was able to scrap Kyoto, and if fucking Canada is ignoring Kyoto how can desperately poor Liberia afford to sign on?
A GreenDP with a caucus that had strong internal debates about these issues just makes a whole hell of a lot more sense then having two competing parties.
Back in the day journalists also brought a budget, to hire people who knew what they were talking about. Which meant you had a trifecta -- good writing, experience in the subject matter (beat reporters would stay on the same beat for literally decades), and access to knowledgeable people. They also all had lots of eyeballs, because everyone in their town would read the headline of their paper.
Bloggers generally only manage two of the four, and many only manage one. Quite a few people can write well, but don't really understand what they're writing about./ Quite a few more understand the topic, but are shitty at writing. Some of them (ie: Ezra Klein) manage to earn a budget, but even he has a fraction of the audience that a beat reporter would have had in the 70s. That means it doesn't matter how great Vox's piece on the Afghan War is, 99% of the people who should read the damn thing won;t even know it exists.
As for Iraq, I agree with you.
The problem lay in proving to people who didn't have enough background knowledge of international politics to have said "half a brain," that their President was clearly completely full of shit. Which happened in Canada, because they had a guy with all four of the characteristics I mentioned; but did not happen in the US.
So if there was some way to pay journalists at something approaching 70s-levels, then they'd have a hell of a lot to offer. In fact a lot of them would actually be bloggers, just now with a salary, no need for marketing savvy, organizational support, etc. The problem is that in the current system there's no way to do that.
One of my favorite examples of how good journalism works is the CBC. I just mentioned it to the other guy responding to this post. The day of Powell's big speech to the UN justifying the Iraq War the CBC debunked one of the claims Powell made.
My own wonderful media ignored the debunking totally, which really shows how little they care for accuracy.
I'm not surprised Harper is doing it in. He's an American-style Conservative, convinced a tax-supported TV network is an evil boondoggle. Unfortunately you guys adopted fixed election dates, so you're stuck with him until October of 2015. Hopefully by that time the NDP and Elizabeth May will have merged their parties. There's no sensible reason to have two left-wing parties keeping the main guys honest in a first-past-the-post electoral system. It can only serve to help the Liberals and Tories by splitting the anti-main party vote.
Keep in mind that if we're both on slashdot it's highly unlikely we remember much of the actual old journalism. It started dying in the 90s, and by the time I was 14 in '95 both my hometown papers (Detroit has both the Free Press and the Detroit News) were in full fire-people mode.
Old journalism's real heyday was the 70s. Journalists aren't BSing when they say they forced a President out, exposed the Vietnam War, etc. At that time period they were also the major agents exposing local-level corruption, generally beating the cops to the story. They had a bunch of advantages over new journalists -- since they were part of a large organization they had an entire team working for them, so if the veteran reporter was getting suspicious about the Mayor's new-found wealth they could call in an accountant. And this happened everywhere, even BoringtownUSA874.
With new Journalists you have to depend on a) some new journalist deciding to obsess about the budget of BoringtiownUSA874, and b) he happens to have mad accounting skills. They're freelancers. They only get paid if they get their faces on TV. And accounting classes don;t put your face on TV. It just doesn't happen much. Today I lived through a major corruption scandal in Detroit, which totally blind-sided the media. My current hometown of Cleveland only has one paper, but it's much worse then either Detroit rag. I never thought I'd see a major daily's front page story be about High School sports, but it seems like that's the case once a week with the Plain Dealer.
The Iraq War is a great example. The case against Saddam really depended on the assertion that this one specific Kurdish Islamist group was linked to both a) Al Qaeada and b) Saddam's Ba'athist regime. So during Powell's speech about the justification for invading at the UN he showed a picture of the person who was supposed to be the link. The Canadian Broadcasting Company happened to have a guy in Norway, which was where the leader of the Kurdish Islamists was exiled. He watched Powell's case with this Islamist jackass. The jackass immediately proved Powell's assertion was total BS. He had a much more likely story about who that guy was, including a completely different name then Powell gave.
You didn't see anything about it in the mainstream media. Why would they spend money sending a guy to fucking Norwqay when they can sit in luxurious offices in DC and NYC debating the point with their friends on-air for obscene salaries? New Journalism would not have helped one iota in this instance, because nobody trusts new journalists they haven't watched for awhile; and no new journalist has a following big enough to make a difference.
Back when your town had multiple papers they kept everyone fed by selling lots of ads. Classifieds, obits., etc. were huge money-makers. Actual journalism was a loss leader. The internet changed that by making it super-cheap to have classified ad-type websites. If everyone's using Craig's list for nominal fees then the newspaper simply won't get many classified ads.
So the technology has changed. We simply aren't gonna get a couple great investigative reporters hounding the Mayor in every little 100k area. Peop0le will still pay for news, but it's news they want NOW, such as reports on foreign affairs, or reports aimed at proving Obama is Hitler reborn/a god among men. Fox and MSNBC do better then CNN because this kind of reporting is incredibly cheap. You get a couple Media personalities to burn air-time blaming/praising Obama; then you get a small news organization. You send the news organization wherever the News is. You don't do the real journalist thing the BBC does, and have an actual correspondent in Zambia 24/7 reporting that a Monkey shit on the President in the middle of a press conference because that happens to be the least boring thing that happened in Zambia that week; you have a guy who spends a lot of time in African disaster zones and you send him to Zambia if something sufficiently disastrous were to happen. CNN is pretty bad about this. A lot of their Libya stories are actually reported by people currently in Baghdad, because the entire fucking organization only has one team that speaks Arabic and they have been moved to Baghdad.
This is one potential solution. The trouble is it's really easy to over-come. Google simply refuses to serve links that it has to pay money for. Now instead of having no classified ad money, and sharply reduced business ad money, the papers have none of either. Spain can try to play hardball about this, but unless the EU Bureaucracy gets involved Google will simply ignore that. Pulling out of Spain completely would probably be better for them then agreeing to pay papers for content.
The ideal solution would probably be a BBC-type system in more countries, particularly for local news. The BBC is funded by a special television tax paid by viewers. So perhaps if everyone in Spain had to pay $50 a year per internet-connected device, that would work.
I suspect nobody will try that. Going after google is a lot easier sounding, and even tho everyone knows it won't really work (Belgian papers actually won the right to these payments in Court already, and then immediately decided to stop using it because Google removed them from news searches) they'll waste at least a year trying to make it work. Then they'll blame big, bad google when it fails. Sio what's gonna happen is small towns will continue to be shittilly served by journalists, big towns (ie: NYC) will lose ever more journalism; and we'll just have to put up with a world where partisan hacks bitching at eachother = journalism.
The first lesson in seeing through propaganda is learning to use Occam's Razor in global affairs. There's a pretty fine art to it because you're talking about seeing into people's heads, but that doesn;t mean you can;t eliminate 90% of BS just based on the smell test. For example you are positing that Obama is trying to escalate a conflict with Putin.
He's trying to simultaneously start a war with a nuclear-armed power, that happens to have the second largest air force in the world, roughly 900k more troops then Obama, and those nuclear fucking weapons; while simultaneously proposing to fire 40-50k Army troops? That's ridiculous. Nobody's that stupid.
A much more likely explanation is this: Putin's rebel friends did precisely what the USS Vincenes did. They blew the wrong plane out of the sky. Since Putin's a Russian nationalist, and they're Russian nationalists, Putin can't really walk back his support for them His own support would crumble. Since they killed hundreds of citizens of states the US is allied to we can;t very well walk back from the conflict, either. In a lot of ways this was predictable -- nationalist fervor is a genie that's impossible to put back in the bottle, and Putin unleashed it when he annexed Crimea, but the exact form of the chaos unleashed is always unique.
But when judging whether a pol's statement is true, the best policy is to try to figure out what would be most convenient for him. If he's telling you what he wants you to believe then it's difficult to figure out whether he's lying. If he's saying something completely different, for example he's trying to justify cutting the defense budget he probably wants you to believe the world is a safe place and we have too many troops.
Which is directly contradicted when he says that Ukraine is being attacked by the Russians.
Therefore he's almost certainly telling the truth about the Russian military in Ukraine.
They Nuland videos are quite interesting if you insist that everything the United States does is by definition evil. Otherwise they're good examples of how easy it is to over-complicate things when discussing foreign affairs.
The first, for example, says nothing about subverting anything, despite the fact that is the Youtube headline. It says we've spent $5 Billion trying to prepare Ukraine for the EU. That's not necessarily subversion even if you think Ukraine should not be in the EU, because "ready for the EU" includes a lot of things everyone likes (ie: reduced corruption, somewhat fair justice systems, democracy that only sucks a little, etc.).
It's very interesting that the second video you included was the same woman working around Europcratic ineffectiveness. She's not saying "fuck the EU"because she thinks the EU should go off and die, she's saying "fuck the EU" because she's pretty sure whatever plan they come up with in their ginormous 28-Excellency committee will suck, and therefore the US should go ahead with it's plans regardless of the EU.
Which makes me curious: Are you a fan of the EU?
As for Obama, he's President. He IS US policy. Pretty much the entire reason his job was created was that when we let our ginourmas committee of 13 run it it was a fucking disaster. I'm always skeptical of someone who uses the phrase "Imperialist" because it stopped meaning anything several decades ago, and people started throwing it at any political movement they happened to disagree with. See every political movement has a foreign ally, and if you like the movement the ally is clearly a benign state promoting good things. If you dislike the movement it's all an Imperialist front for the foreign ally.
In this case there is literally no logical reason to oppose Obama's policy on grounds of Imperialism. He has done nothing to Libya's internal politics except blow up the guy who wanted to massacre a bunch of protestors. He doesn't pick a militia leader for Secretary of Defense. He hasn;t gone over their Constitution looking for areas where it differs from ours, and then trying to force them to fix it. He just blew the shit out of an asshole and went away.
So your argument is that a rebellion that boasted about blowing multiple Ukrainian military aircraft out of the sky couldn't possibly blow an aircraft out of the sky?
That's kinda my problem with all the rebel justifications. They're very clearly reaching, and reaching far.
Yeah, but if we send a battalion or three it'll be even harder to convince the Republicans to go along with force cuts.
More importantly for Obama, if Obama's demanding we fire a substantial portion of the Army while he's mobilizing troops to rattle their sabres in front of fucking Russia, it looks really bad. And in a few months we have a midterm election.
What Obama wants right now if for Putin and Bibi to shut the fuck up, go the fuck home, and stop talking foreign policy so Obama can get everyone talking about how evil the Republicans are for opposing a major minimum wage increase.
The tactic the civilians're describing would only work if Malaysia Airlines agreed to fly right over the Ukrainian Air Force's target area. And if they did that, and the Ukrainians repaid the favor by destroying their plane, why the fuck wouldn't they be all over CNN with the betrayal?
The easiest way top tell the BS propaganda from reality is figure out who has a motive to lie.
In this case a) Putin obviously has a motive to shell Ukrainian military units fighting ethnic Russian separatists, b) Putin would have clear reason to lie about that shit, and c) Obama's trying really hard to convince everyone foreign policy is perfectly fine.
I wouldn't be totally shocked if it turns out some idiot is misinterpreting satellite photos in DC. But I would be totally shocked to learn that the photos themselves are fake.
Great, more Mericans who believe whatever the media-military complex tells them.
I don't believe everything they tell me. But generally when they're making shit up (ie: Saddam's WMD) it's because somebody important has a real interest in promoting the lie.
Putin has an interest in promoting the separatists in Eastern Ukraine. He's using them to counter-balance the pro-Western forces in Kiev. We know this because he actually promotes the separatists. Which means having his artillery nail the Ukrainians who are fighting said separatists is plausible. More plausible then that, some low-level artillery officer who happens to be stationed in the region thinks his boss will be very pleased if the Ukrainian Army has trouble retaking Donetsk.
Obama making this shit up is not particularly plausible. He wants foreign policy to go the fuck away for a few months so he can make an economic case for firing Boehnor to the American people. If Putin is actively operating in Ukraine, bordering Romania (which is in NATO) deserves to know we'll send troops to Bucharest on short notice. But Obama's latest budget includes force reductions. One of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy initiatives was a reset of relations with Russia. That actually worked pretty well, for her term as Secretary of State.
The side that apparently blew a 300-civilian passenger jet out of the sky because they're too dumb to know what a Boeing looks like is getting direct military support from a major regional power which just happens to have nuclear weapons.
Lots of these little privacy tips are like that. They work great, as long as you specifically remember to do them even when it's 3:30 AM and you've had a few too many to drink.
We agreed to support Israel when we made them a "Major Non-NATO Ally" back in the 90s.
So pretty much the only thing we can do is cajole the hell out of them, and pray that someday the EU makes itself a cohesive enough block that the threat of an EU blockade will actually get them to the negotiating table.
On the Palestinian side Abbas would already be at the table, if he thought Netanyahu had any intention of making a single concession. Since all Bibi seems to want is zero terrorism within Israel, and he seems to have achieved that solely by relying on military force, he'll continue to create ridiculous distractions like "the Palestinians won;t recognize us as a Jewish state,*" and invades Gaza whenever the assholes running the place figure out a new chink in Israel's armor.
*This is ridiculous because the phrase "Jewish state" is meaningless under international law. If you're a state you set your own religion. The whole point of Westphalia was that states don;t judge other state's religion Which means if Abbas recognizes Israel as a state, and it's head of government (currently Netanyahu) says ISrael is Jewish, Abbas has already recognized Israel as a Jewish state. This is why no country has ever recognized Israel explicitly as a "Jewish state," in those terms.They frequently go on with long sentences about the Jewish people setting up their own country, but under international law the phrase Jewish state is meaningless BS so none of them will ever use it.
Jordan is majority Palestinian. Lebanon has a huge Palestinian minority.
They don't give the refugees citizenship, but the refugees generally aren't asking for citizenship. They're asking to be allowed to go home. And home is currently controlled by Israel (mostly in Israel proper, but the rest of the former mandate created a lot of foreign refugees, too).
You can say the same about literally any conflict.
If only the UK had been willing to give up six counties, or Irish Catholics had been willing to abandoned those counties en masse; or Lebanese Muslims had not minded that they were second-class citizens, or Lebanese Christians had been willing to recognize that the majority changed; or Iraqi Sunnis/Sh'as were willing to give up everything they hold dear; etc. It's really easy to sit in air conditioning and write peace proposals which would make everyone better off, the trick is convincing them that said proposal is better then continuing to fight. Which is fucking hard because if there was some obvious compromise then neither side would have bothered fighting in the first fucking place.
The intractable issues ion the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are that a) Israel demands an unrealistic level of security in return for peace, and b) the Palestinians really hate acknowledging that they aren't gonna get all of the East Jerusalem. The problem with a) is that all peace deals result in an immediate uptick in terrorism as assholes seek to murder their way back to full-scale war, which means if you want long-term peace you have to put up with an Omagh Bombing. But whenever that happens the Israeli's fire the PM who just signed the damn peace agreement and elect Netanyahu. Which feeds into b), because Netanyahu gets a lot of votes from the 180-190k people who live in territory Israel would have to cede.
The current hold-up seems to be that Israel honestly believes that they can keep virtually 100% security forever, as the rest of the world won;t call them on abusing Palestinians and whenever anybody on the other side figures out a way to break through the bars and kill a Jew they can just "mow the lawn." If you offered Abbas the deal that Arafat took home from Camp David (technically he didn't reject it, he said he was gonna consider it back home) he'd immediately take it, but there's no way in hell Netanyahu would ever make the offer because Netanyahu want's 100% perfect security.
International law is pretty vague on whether you actually have to kill every member of an ethnic group in a territory for it to be called "genocide." The reason is pretty simple: if you insist everyone actually has to die for it to be genocide that creates a huge loophole. The bad guy simply has to kill enough of them that the rest know they damn well better run and it's not technically genocide because almost all of them successfully ran.
But since a lot of inter-ethnic conflict involves one asshole threatening to kill every member of another group, succeeding at some much less evil goal (ie: getting them evicted, beating up a couple hundred activists, maybe a mass rape campaign, etc.), which convinces everyone to run away rather then be killed, scholars have a continuum of evil, starting at ethnic cleansing and running up to actual genocide.
What actually happens in Israel is frequently on the low end of ethnic cleansing. There's a lot of unofficial, and officially deplored Jewish violence against Palestinians and suspected sympathizers that the authorities never seem to be able to stop. In '47 and '48 it was really bad. At Dier Yassam 107 civilians were massacred by the Israeli military, which released numerous press releases claiming that was evil, but never actually charged anyone with a crime for it. Similarly the first UN envoy to the region (Count Bernadotte af Wisborg) was murdered by Jews in the Lehi. Their military formation was disarmed, and a couple were charged with membership in a terrorist organization, but everyone was immediately pardoned and sent off to war. It created an atmosphere in which Arabs made the fairly logical assumption that some Jewish asshole would murder them and get away with it when the Israeli Army won, which in turn meant almost all Palestinians living within what is now the Green Line fled the Israeli War of Independence. That's textbook ethnic cleansing. You make an ethnic group feel unsafe, and they go away.
Today it's quite a bit better, but there's still a very influential section of Israeli society dedicated to ensuring that the Palestinian population knows they are non really wanted. Price tag attacks, the Israeli Courts total inability to protect the only Palestinian in the country with paperwork proving he owns land there, etc. prove it. Somebody in Israel wants Palestinians to think moving out is a real good option, the rest of the country ain't stopping them, and if they succeed it will be (by definition) ethnic cleansing.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not claiming that Hamas are wonderful saints, or freedom fighters, or that they would not do worse to Israeli Jews then the Israeli Jews are currently doing to the Palestinians, or even that they wouldn't end up treating Palestinians worse then the Israeli government does. Same with the PA. But none of that has any bearing on whether the Israelis are being honorable.
But it's not new so nobody cares. It may not be right, but that's how it works.
Think about it. In the past year or so South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and the Israel-Palestine-Gaza-mess have all been on the news. Most of these will have annual casualties well above the Israel-Palestine-Gaza-mess, but most of that does not matter on the 27th of July, because only Israel and the Ukrainians are currently new.
More importantly if you;re a Westerner the only one of these crises where anybody will actually care about your call to action is Israel, because Israel is the only one that participates in the global economy. Syria isn't going to spawn a Tesla anytime soon, so if the west threatens to prevent Syrian electric car companies from selling vehicles the Syrians won't give a shit. They'll actually like it, because that gives them one more excuse for when they fuck up.
The fact these comments are banned probably means they're anti-semitic. But the closest thing the French have to a major anti-Semitic party is the national Front, they never get more then 25%, and that high-point only was only after their leader denounced anti-Semitism. Which indicates the Anti-Semitic percentage in France is probably under 5%. They seem to talk a whole lot, but in my experience the more a political ideology talks about itself the less relevant it is to reality. So Anti-Semitism is a problem France has to deal with, but that's true in every western nation and a lot of the non-western ones.
What's extremely unusual is the total lack of pro-Semites. Nobody in France is taking the view that Israel is being totally reasonable in attacking Gaza. Nobody is even taking the view that Israel is a respectable nation who should be allowed to do what needs to be done. They may think Israel's policy of "mowing the lawn" is justified, but clearly they don't like it so much that they'll take 15 minutes and write an online comment saying that.
Israel's core problem is that, while the Israeli people seem to have abandoned the Oslo process as unworkable, and adopted a policy of constant low-level attacks mitigated by occasional brutal offensives into Arab-controlled territory, literally the entire rest of the world is still a fan of Oslo. Re-invading Gaza every few years reminds them that Israel and the Palestinians are not making progress, and it also makes Israel seem like the roadblock. If all you hear about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that two Israelis died, and then Israel started a campaign killing 900-odd Palestinians and a couple-dozen Israeli troops, you ain't gonna come away with the impression Israel isn't the bad guy.
I'm explaining my position because you keep restating yours. Last time I checked the international sign that one was participating in a debate was that one kept restating one's position in response to the other person's position.
If you want to end an internet debate, that's as easy as not getting laid. Simply stop trying to get the last word in.
So you think I'm not acknowledging the government abuses power? I have done that quite a few times. It's just that, unlike you, I'm not basing this entirely on a theory I read in a SciFi book about the UK or Russia, or an 18th-century apologist for slavery's ridiculous claim that he cared about freedom. Note that last sentence? It was an acknowledgement of governmental abuse of power.
My argument is based on the actual track record of abuses the US government has done. This database is a lot less dangerous then almost any other for two reasons:
1) It belongs to the TSA, who don't really have the capacity to go out and oppress people themselves, and are never gonna turn over their information to people who do (ie: th FBI, Border Patrol, etc.). It just doesn't happen.
2) It doesn't contain much sensitive information. The info it contains is a lot less sensitive than the info Census and Social Security have on you, so even assuming that Federal agencies start leaking like sieves and reporting likely Jews to the KKK they probably aren't gonna bother searching for the guy who tried the kosher meal this one time in 2009.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason the so-called "deep state" is totally immune to public pressure is that most of the public likes damn near everything it does. In fact if you actually had a referendum on any aspect of the "deep state" that you personally oppose, you'd almost certainly lose damn near every point. Jack Bauer is the deep state, and he gets great ratings because as far as the American people are concerned, having a badass motherfucker oppress dirty foreigners without having to bother with any stupid paperwork is the ideal situation.
Sanctions are actually an excellent example. Most people want the US to take strong positions on almost every imaginable issue in foreign affairs. They tend not to want actual military action, because a) that costs money, which means taxes, b) American troops could get hurt, and c) any sufficiently large military action will include a certain amount of dead civilians. So you get half-assed bullshit opposition like sanctions. Europe is even worse, because the EU is specifically designed to be unable to do anything that is not hall-assed bullshit.
Then since the American people were told the sanctions would magically make Cuba free, ending the sanctions is unacceptable to them unless Cuba gets free. To them the point of the sanctions was to get Cuba free, and if the sanctions don;t do the trick ending them without replacing them with a tougher option is basically admitting there's no point in fighting for Cuban freedom.
There's only one government, so you really have to vastly over-simplify the demands of the people or it can't function. A first-past-the-post system really aggravates the problem because an asshole with under 40% support can dominate if his opponents are dumb enough to run three candidates against him.
Let me put it to you this way:
Can you name a single issue on which most Green party activists actually disagree with most NDP activists?
There are differences in emphasis, but it seems to me that it's remarkably stupid to lose the entire fucking Kyoto treaty because your activists want to implement it at a different speed then some other party's activists. Which is pretty much exactly what happened in the last election. Harper got his majority, so he was able to scrap Kyoto, and if fucking Canada is ignoring Kyoto how can desperately poor Liberia afford to sign on?
A GreenDP with a caucus that had strong internal debates about these issues just makes a whole hell of a lot more sense then having two competing parties.
Back in the day journalists also brought a budget, to hire people who knew what they were talking about. Which meant you had a trifecta -- good writing, experience in the subject matter (beat reporters would stay on the same beat for literally decades), and access to knowledgeable people. They also all had lots of eyeballs, because everyone in their town would read the headline of their paper.
Bloggers generally only manage two of the four, and many only manage one. Quite a few people can write well, but don't really understand what they're writing about./ Quite a few more understand the topic, but are shitty at writing. Some of them (ie: Ezra Klein) manage to earn a budget, but even he has a fraction of the audience that a beat reporter would have had in the 70s. That means it doesn't matter how great Vox's piece on the Afghan War is, 99% of the people who should read the damn thing won;t even know it exists.
As for Iraq, I agree with you.
The problem lay in proving to people who didn't have enough background knowledge of international politics to have said "half a brain," that their President was clearly completely full of shit. Which happened in Canada, because they had a guy with all four of the characteristics I mentioned; but did not happen in the US.
So if there was some way to pay journalists at something approaching 70s-levels, then they'd have a hell of a lot to offer. In fact a lot of them would actually be bloggers, just now with a salary, no need for marketing savvy, organizational support, etc. The problem is that in the current system there's no way to do that.
One of my favorite examples of how good journalism works is the CBC. I just mentioned it to the other guy responding to this post. The day of Powell's big speech to the UN justifying the Iraq War the CBC debunked one of the claims Powell made.
My own wonderful media ignored the debunking totally, which really shows how little they care for accuracy.
I'm not surprised Harper is doing it in. He's an American-style Conservative, convinced a tax-supported TV network is an evil boondoggle. Unfortunately you guys adopted fixed election dates, so you're stuck with him until October of 2015. Hopefully by that time the NDP and Elizabeth May will have merged their parties. There's no sensible reason to have two left-wing parties keeping the main guys honest in a first-past-the-post electoral system. It can only serve to help the Liberals and Tories by splitting the anti-main party vote.
Keep in mind that if we're both on slashdot it's highly unlikely we remember much of the actual old journalism. It started dying in the 90s, and by the time I was 14 in '95 both my hometown papers (Detroit has both the Free Press and the Detroit News) were in full fire-people mode.
Old journalism's real heyday was the 70s. Journalists aren't BSing when they say they forced a President out, exposed the Vietnam War, etc. At that time period they were also the major agents exposing local-level corruption, generally beating the cops to the story. They had a bunch of advantages over new journalists -- since they were part of a large organization they had an entire team working for them, so if the veteran reporter was getting suspicious about the Mayor's new-found wealth they could call in an accountant. And this happened everywhere, even BoringtownUSA874.
With new Journalists you have to depend on a) some new journalist deciding to obsess about the budget of BoringtiownUSA874, and b) he happens to have mad accounting skills. They're freelancers. They only get paid if they get their faces on TV. And accounting classes don;t put your face on TV. It just doesn't happen much. Today I lived through a major corruption scandal in Detroit, which totally blind-sided the media. My current hometown of Cleveland only has one paper, but it's much worse then either Detroit rag. I never thought I'd see a major daily's front page story be about High School sports, but it seems like that's the case once a week with the Plain Dealer.
The Iraq War is a great example. The case against Saddam really depended on the assertion that this one specific Kurdish Islamist group was linked to both a) Al Qaeada and b) Saddam's Ba'athist regime. So during Powell's speech about the justification for invading at the UN he showed a picture of the person who was supposed to be the link. The Canadian Broadcasting Company happened to have a guy in Norway, which was where the leader of the Kurdish Islamists was exiled. He watched Powell's case with this Islamist jackass. The jackass immediately proved Powell's assertion was total BS. He had a much more likely story about who that guy was, including a completely different name then Powell gave.
You didn't see anything about it in the mainstream media. Why would they spend money sending a guy to fucking Norwqay when they can sit in luxurious offices in DC and NYC debating the point with their friends on-air for obscene salaries? New Journalism would not have helped one iota in this instance, because nobody trusts new journalists they haven't watched for awhile; and no new journalist has a following big enough to make a difference.
Back when your town had multiple papers they kept everyone fed by selling lots of ads. Classifieds, obits., etc. were huge money-makers. Actual journalism was a loss leader. The internet changed that by making it super-cheap to have classified ad-type websites. If everyone's using Craig's list for nominal fees then the newspaper simply won't get many classified ads.
So the technology has changed. We simply aren't gonna get a couple great investigative reporters hounding the Mayor in every little 100k area. Peop0le will still pay for news, but it's news they want NOW, such as reports on foreign affairs, or reports aimed at proving Obama is Hitler reborn/a god among men. Fox and MSNBC do better then CNN because this kind of reporting is incredibly cheap. You get a couple Media personalities to burn air-time blaming/praising Obama; then you get a small news organization. You send the news organization wherever the News is. You don't do the real journalist thing the BBC does, and have an actual correspondent in Zambia 24/7 reporting that a Monkey shit on the President in the middle of a press conference because that happens to be the least boring thing that happened in Zambia that week; you have a guy who spends a lot of time in African disaster zones and you send him to Zambia if something sufficiently disastrous were to happen. CNN is pretty bad about this. A lot of their Libya stories are actually reported by people currently in Baghdad, because the entire fucking organization only has one team that speaks Arabic and they have been moved to Baghdad.
This is one potential solution. The trouble is it's really easy to over-come. Google simply refuses to serve links that it has to pay money for. Now instead of having no classified ad money, and sharply reduced business ad money, the papers have none of either. Spain can try to play hardball about this, but unless the EU Bureaucracy gets involved Google will simply ignore that. Pulling out of Spain completely would probably be better for them then agreeing to pay papers for content.
The ideal solution would probably be a BBC-type system in more countries, particularly for local news. The BBC is funded by a special television tax paid by viewers. So perhaps if everyone in Spain had to pay $50 a year per internet-connected device, that would work.
I suspect nobody will try that. Going after google is a lot easier sounding, and even tho everyone knows it won't really work (Belgian papers actually won the right to these payments in Court already, and then immediately decided to stop using it because Google removed them from news searches) they'll waste at least a year trying to make it work. Then they'll blame big, bad google when it fails. Sio what's gonna happen is small towns will continue to be shittilly served by journalists, big towns (ie: NYC) will lose ever more journalism; and we'll just have to put up with a world where partisan hacks bitching at eachother = journalism.
The first lesson in seeing through propaganda is learning to use Occam's Razor in global affairs. There's a pretty fine art to it because you're talking about seeing into people's heads, but that doesn;t mean you can;t eliminate 90% of BS just based on the smell test. For example you are positing that Obama is trying to escalate a conflict with Putin.
He's trying to simultaneously start a war with a nuclear-armed power, that happens to have the second largest air force in the world, roughly 900k more troops then Obama, and those nuclear fucking weapons; while simultaneously proposing to fire 40-50k Army troops? That's ridiculous. Nobody's that stupid.
A much more likely explanation is this:
Putin's rebel friends did precisely what the USS Vincenes did. They blew the wrong plane out of the sky. Since Putin's a Russian nationalist, and they're Russian nationalists, Putin can't really walk back his support for them His own support would crumble. Since they killed hundreds of citizens of states the US is allied to we can;t very well walk back from the conflict, either. In a lot of ways this was predictable -- nationalist fervor is a genie that's impossible to put back in the bottle, and Putin unleashed it when he annexed Crimea, but the exact form of the chaos unleashed is always unique.
He is a politician. So no.
But when judging whether a pol's statement is true, the best policy is to try to figure out what would be most convenient for him. If he's telling you what he wants you to believe then it's difficult to figure out whether he's lying. If he's saying something completely different, for example he's trying to justify cutting the defense budget he probably wants you to believe the world is a safe place and we have too many troops.
Which is directly contradicted when he says that Ukraine is being attacked by the Russians.
Therefore he's almost certainly telling the truth about the Russian military in Ukraine.
They Nuland videos are quite interesting if you insist that everything the United States does is by definition evil. Otherwise they're good examples of how easy it is to over-complicate things when discussing foreign affairs.
The first, for example, says nothing about subverting anything, despite the fact that is the Youtube headline. It says we've spent $5 Billion trying to prepare Ukraine for the EU. That's not necessarily subversion even if you think Ukraine should not be in the EU, because "ready for the EU" includes a lot of things everyone likes (ie: reduced corruption, somewhat fair justice systems, democracy that only sucks a little, etc.).
It's very interesting that the second video you included was the same woman working around Europcratic ineffectiveness. She's not saying "fuck the EU"because she thinks the EU should go off and die, she's saying "fuck the EU" because she's pretty sure whatever plan they come up with in their ginormous 28-Excellency committee will suck, and therefore the US should go ahead with it's plans regardless of the EU.
Which makes me curious:
Are you a fan of the EU?
As for Obama, he's President. He IS US policy. Pretty much the entire reason his job was created was that when we let our ginourmas committee of 13 run it it was a fucking disaster. I'm always skeptical of someone who uses the phrase "Imperialist" because it stopped meaning anything several decades ago, and people started throwing it at any political movement they happened to disagree with. See every political movement has a foreign ally, and if you like the movement the ally is clearly a benign state promoting good things. If you dislike the movement it's all an Imperialist front for the foreign ally.
In this case there is literally no logical reason to oppose Obama's policy on grounds of Imperialism. He has done nothing to Libya's internal politics except blow up the guy who wanted to massacre a bunch of protestors. He doesn't pick a militia leader for Secretary of Defense. He hasn;t gone over their Constitution looking for areas where it differs from ours, and then trying to force them to fix it. He just blew the shit out of an asshole and went away.
So your argument is that a rebellion that boasted about blowing multiple Ukrainian military aircraft out of the sky couldn't possibly blow an aircraft out of the sky?
That's kinda my problem with all the rebel justifications. They're very clearly reaching, and reaching far.
Yeah, but if we send a battalion or three it'll be even harder to convince the Republicans to go along with force cuts.
More importantly for Obama, if Obama's demanding we fire a substantial portion of the Army while he's mobilizing troops to rattle their sabres in front of fucking Russia, it looks really bad. And in a few months we have a midterm election.
What Obama wants right now if for Putin and Bibi to shut the fuck up, go the fuck home, and stop talking foreign policy so Obama can get everyone talking about how evil the Republicans are for opposing a major minimum wage increase.
Are you high?
The tactic the civilians're describing would only work if Malaysia Airlines agreed to fly right over the Ukrainian Air Force's target area. And if they did that, and the Ukrainians repaid the favor by destroying their plane, why the fuck wouldn't they be all over CNN with the betrayal?
Sensor data is really easy to fake.
The easiest way top tell the BS propaganda from reality is figure out who has a motive to lie.
In this case a) Putin obviously has a motive to shell Ukrainian military units fighting ethnic Russian separatists, b) Putin would have clear reason to lie about that shit, and c) Obama's trying really hard to convince everyone foreign policy is perfectly fine.
I wouldn't be totally shocked if it turns out some idiot is misinterpreting satellite photos in DC. But I would be totally shocked to learn that the photos themselves are fake.
Great, more Mericans who believe whatever the media-military complex tells them.
I don't believe everything they tell me. But generally when they're making shit up (ie: Saddam's WMD) it's because somebody important has a real interest in promoting the lie.
Putin has an interest in promoting the separatists in Eastern Ukraine. He's using them to counter-balance the pro-Western forces in Kiev. We know this because he actually promotes the separatists. Which means having his artillery nail the Ukrainians who are fighting said separatists is plausible. More plausible then that, some low-level artillery officer who happens to be stationed in the region thinks his boss will be very pleased if the Ukrainian Army has trouble retaking Donetsk.
Obama making this shit up is not particularly plausible. He wants foreign policy to go the fuck away for a few months so he can make an economic case for firing Boehnor to the American people. If Putin is actively operating in Ukraine, bordering Romania (which is in NATO) deserves to know we'll send troops to Bucharest on short notice. But Obama's latest budget includes force reductions. One of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy initiatives was a reset of relations with Russia. That actually worked pretty well, for her term as Secretary of State.
The side that apparently blew a 300-civilian passenger jet out of the sky because they're too dumb to know what a Boeing looks like is getting direct military support from a major regional power which just happens to have nuclear weapons.
And I thought my hometown of Detroit was fucked.
Protip: Any statement that starts with "I just pointed out" is a restatement of your position.
Hopefully next time you'll be able to switch from debating to insults better, you nabob-faced cogswillet.
That works, when you remember to do it.
Lots of these little privacy tips are like that. They work great, as long as you specifically remember to do them even when it's 3:30 AM and you've had a few too many to drink.
We agreed to support Israel when we made them a "Major Non-NATO Ally" back in the 90s.
So pretty much the only thing we can do is cajole the hell out of them, and pray that someday the EU makes itself a cohesive enough block that the threat of an EU blockade will actually get them to the negotiating table.
On the Palestinian side Abbas would already be at the table, if he thought Netanyahu had any intention of making a single concession. Since all Bibi seems to want is zero terrorism within Israel, and he seems to have achieved that solely by relying on military force, he'll continue to create ridiculous distractions like "the Palestinians won;t recognize us as a Jewish state,*" and invades Gaza whenever the assholes running the place figure out a new chink in Israel's armor.
*This is ridiculous because the phrase "Jewish state" is meaningless under international law. If you're a state you set your own religion. The whole point of Westphalia was that states don;t judge other state's religion Which means if Abbas recognizes Israel as a state, and it's head of government (currently Netanyahu) says ISrael is Jewish, Abbas has already recognized Israel as a Jewish state. This is why no country has ever recognized Israel explicitly as a "Jewish state," in those terms.They frequently go on with long sentences about the Jewish people setting up their own country, but under international law the phrase Jewish state is meaningless BS so none of them will ever use it.
Bullshit.
Jordan is majority Palestinian. Lebanon has a huge Palestinian minority.
They don't give the refugees citizenship, but the refugees generally aren't asking for citizenship. They're asking to be allowed to go home. And home is currently controlled by Israel (mostly in Israel proper, but the rest of the former mandate created a lot of foreign refugees, too).
You can say the same about literally any conflict.
If only the UK had been willing to give up six counties, or Irish Catholics had been willing to abandoned those counties en masse; or Lebanese Muslims had not minded that they were second-class citizens, or Lebanese Christians had been willing to recognize that the majority changed; or Iraqi Sunnis/Sh'as were willing to give up everything they hold dear; etc. It's really easy to sit in air conditioning and write peace proposals which would make everyone better off, the trick is convincing them that said proposal is better then continuing to fight. Which is fucking hard because if there was some obvious compromise then neither side would have bothered fighting in the first fucking place.
The intractable issues ion the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are that a) Israel demands an unrealistic level of security in return for peace, and b) the Palestinians really hate acknowledging that they aren't gonna get all of the East Jerusalem. The problem with a) is that all peace deals result in an immediate uptick in terrorism as assholes seek to murder their way back to full-scale war, which means if you want long-term peace you have to put up with an Omagh Bombing. But whenever that happens the Israeli's fire the PM who just signed the damn peace agreement and elect Netanyahu. Which feeds into b), because Netanyahu gets a lot of votes from the 180-190k people who live in territory Israel would have to cede.
The current hold-up seems to be that Israel honestly believes that they can keep virtually 100% security forever, as the rest of the world won;t call them on abusing Palestinians and whenever anybody on the other side figures out a way to break through the bars and kill a Jew they can just "mow the lawn." If you offered Abbas the deal that Arafat took home from Camp David (technically he didn't reject it, he said he was gonna consider it back home) he'd immediately take it, but there's no way in hell Netanyahu would ever make the offer because Netanyahu want's 100% perfect security.
International law is pretty vague on whether you actually have to kill every member of an ethnic group in a territory for it to be called "genocide." The reason is pretty simple: if you insist everyone actually has to die for it to be genocide that creates a huge loophole. The bad guy simply has to kill enough of them that the rest know they damn well better run and it's not technically genocide because almost all of them successfully ran.
But since a lot of inter-ethnic conflict involves one asshole threatening to kill every member of another group, succeeding at some much less evil goal (ie: getting them evicted, beating up a couple hundred activists, maybe a mass rape campaign, etc.), which convinces everyone to run away rather then be killed, scholars have a continuum of evil, starting at ethnic cleansing and running up to actual genocide.
What actually happens in Israel is frequently on the low end of ethnic cleansing. There's a lot of unofficial, and officially deplored Jewish violence against Palestinians and suspected sympathizers that the authorities never seem to be able to stop. In '47 and '48 it was really bad. At Dier Yassam 107 civilians were massacred by the Israeli military, which released numerous press releases claiming that was evil, but never actually charged anyone with a crime for it. Similarly the first UN envoy to the region (Count Bernadotte af Wisborg) was murdered by Jews in the Lehi. Their military formation was disarmed, and a couple were charged with membership in a terrorist organization, but everyone was immediately pardoned and sent off to war. It created an atmosphere in which Arabs made the fairly logical assumption that some Jewish asshole would murder them and get away with it when the Israeli Army won, which in turn meant almost all Palestinians living within what is now the Green Line fled the Israeli War of Independence. That's textbook ethnic cleansing. You make an ethnic group feel unsafe, and they go away.
Today it's quite a bit better, but there's still a very influential section of Israeli society dedicated to ensuring that the Palestinian population knows they are non really wanted. Price tag attacks, the Israeli Courts total inability to protect the only Palestinian in the country with paperwork proving he owns land there, etc. prove it. Somebody in Israel wants Palestinians to think moving out is a real good option, the rest of the country ain't stopping them, and if they succeed it will be (by definition) ethnic cleansing.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not claiming that Hamas are wonderful saints, or freedom fighters, or that they would not do worse to Israeli Jews then the Israeli Jews are currently doing to the Palestinians, or even that they wouldn't end up treating Palestinians worse then the Israeli government does. Same with the PA. But none of that has any bearing on whether the Israelis are being honorable.
But it's not new so nobody cares. It may not be right, but that's how it works.
Think about it. In the past year or so South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and the Israel-Palestine-Gaza-mess have all been on the news. Most of these will have annual casualties well above the Israel-Palestine-Gaza-mess, but most of that does not matter on the 27th of July, because only Israel and the Ukrainians are currently new.
More importantly if you;re a Westerner the only one of these crises where anybody will actually care about your call to action is Israel, because Israel is the only one that participates in the global economy. Syria isn't going to spawn a Tesla anytime soon, so if the west threatens to prevent Syrian electric car companies from selling vehicles the Syrians won't give a shit. They'll actually like it, because that gives them one more excuse for when they fuck up.
You're about half right here.
The fact these comments are banned probably means they're anti-semitic. But the closest thing the French have to a major anti-Semitic party is the national Front, they never get more then 25%, and that high-point only was only after their leader denounced anti-Semitism. Which indicates the Anti-Semitic percentage in France is probably under 5%. They seem to talk a whole lot, but in my experience the more a political ideology talks about itself the less relevant it is to reality. So Anti-Semitism is a problem France has to deal with, but that's true in every western nation and a lot of the non-western ones.
What's extremely unusual is the total lack of pro-Semites. Nobody in France is taking the view that Israel is being totally reasonable in attacking Gaza. Nobody is even taking the view that Israel is a respectable nation who should be allowed to do what needs to be done. They may think Israel's policy of "mowing the lawn" is justified, but clearly they don't like it so much that they'll take 15 minutes and write an online comment saying that.
Israel's core problem is that, while the Israeli people seem to have abandoned the Oslo process as unworkable, and adopted a policy of constant low-level attacks mitigated by occasional brutal offensives into Arab-controlled territory, literally the entire rest of the world is still a fan of Oslo. Re-invading Gaza every few years reminds them that Israel and the Palestinians are not making progress, and it also makes Israel seem like the roadblock. If all you hear about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that two Israelis died, and then Israel started a campaign killing 900-odd Palestinians and a couple-dozen Israeli troops, you ain't gonna come away with the impression Israel isn't the bad guy.
I'm explaining my position because you keep restating yours. Last time I checked the international sign that one was participating in a debate was that one kept restating one's position in response to the other person's position.
If you want to end an internet debate, that's as easy as not getting laid. Simply stop trying to get the last word in.
So you think I'm not acknowledging the government abuses power? I have done that quite a few times. It's just that, unlike you, I'm not basing this entirely on a theory I read in a SciFi book about the UK or Russia, or an 18th-century apologist for slavery's ridiculous claim that he cared about freedom. Note that last sentence? It was an acknowledgement of governmental abuse of power.
My argument is based on the actual track record of abuses the US government has done. This database is a lot less dangerous then almost any other for two reasons:
1) It belongs to the TSA, who don't really have the capacity to go out and oppress people themselves, and are never gonna turn over their information to people who do (ie: th FBI, Border Patrol, etc.). It just doesn't happen.
2) It doesn't contain much sensitive information. The info it contains is a lot less sensitive than the info Census and Social Security have on you, so even assuming that Federal agencies start leaking like sieves and reporting likely Jews to the KKK they probably aren't gonna bother searching for the guy who tried the kosher meal this one time in 2009.