Fake News and Society

[sidd]

I'll kick this off with two posts i made to the "RussiaGate And The Media: Examples of Good AND Bad Journalism " thread, since I think now they are too general for that topic.

--
An analysis of fake news from a broader viewpoint: Richard King on deeper societal issues:

" ... expertise has a centrality it didn’t have in an earlier ‘era’, or with the possibility that its frequent deployment in the name of everything from politics to diet may be a cause of increasing resentment amongst people whose knowledge and education is below the level required for success in a postindustrial, knowledge society."

"We need another heading, therefore, one stressing less the distrust of power than its unequal distribution in postindustrial societies – an inequality that turns increasingly on education, knowledge and cognitive ability "

"a category mistake – on a confusion between ‘objective facts’ and ‘personal feelings’ – is itself a reaction to a category mistake – to a confusion between politics as a site of conflict between different views of society and politics as a managerial enterprise on which experts should have the final say."

"politics is always about values, and that the liberal obsession with expertise is bound to instil resentment in those whose lives are neither materially improved nor morally relevant in the current liberal mix."

"rightwing populism is an illiberal but democratic response to an increasingly undemocratic liberalism"

"We’ve brought fact-checkers to a culture war."

Read the whole thing carefully. King has thought more deeply than many he cites. You may not agree, but i suggest you think about his argument.

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/peak-bullshit-post-truth/
--

[sidd]

Andre Damon on the loooong history of fake news:

"Every predatory war launched by the United States against a weaker country has been waged under false pretenses. The Mexican War of 1846 was begun with the lying declaration by President Polk that Mexico “invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil.” The Spanish–American War, which led to the bloody conquest of the Philippines, was egged on by the Hearst press in the textbook definition of “yellow journalism.”

The escalation of the Vietnam War was justified by lie that an American ship was attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin."

"After years of shameless lying to justify predatory wars, the mainstream media has lost the public’s support. According to a recent poll by Monmouth University, “More than 3 in 4 Americans believe that traditional major TV and newspaper media outlets report ‘fake news.’”"

"This is what accounts for the US media’s hysteria, over the past year-and-a-half, on the need to block what they call “fake news.” "

"As former Obama administration official Samantha Power noted last year, “During the Cold War, most Americans received their news and information via mediated platforms. Reporters and editors serving in the role of professional gatekeepers had almost full control over what appeared in the media.” It is to this halcyon past—when the Western governments and their flunkies in the mainstream press were able to lie with impunity—to which the media propagandists are seeking to return."

"The real target of the censorship campaign is not “fake news,” but true news—that is, genuine journalism and independent reporting, which by its very nature contradicts the lies of the war-mongers in Washington, London and Paris."

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/04/13/pers-a13.html

sidd

[Neven]

Thanks for opening this thread, sidd. I find fake news as a subject highly stimulating intellectually. I think about it a lot, but am not really able to say anything substantial or interesting about it. Except perhaps that, as horrible as it all seems, there must be an upside as well. I'm trying to figure out what that upside is, and how it can be used. Ideally, one should have a world view or view on life, where it doesn't matter whether information is true or not.

I've already said too much. 

[DrTskoul]

I really deslike the term "fake" used indiscriminately. A lot of misinformation is passed along without a malicious intent. It is the malicious intent that poses a danger.

Also, I wonder, what is a view on life worth if it is based on falsehoods?

[johnm33]

Since the rise of civilization the only people able to manage, for any length of time, the intrigues and machinations of those with agency have been sociopaths/psychopaths, they interbred, here we are. As a child I used to think 'the whole land was under an enchantment' meant some kind of occult/supernatural power was being excercised, it was in reality merely the discrete management of the overton window.
 It may be the case that civilization by which I mean, living in groups larger and more unrelated than we are genetically adapted to, has a dynamic of it's own. Leading eventually to a single all powerful ruler who acts solely in their own interests, much like the social insects, only in our particular primate case memes are the controlling force in place of pheremones. Even our religions, and curiously the opposition, in the west, are modelled on this ideal, democracy/populism or people acting and co-operating and spreading information which serves their own interests is the countervailing force.

[zizek]

The idea of fake news isn’t something new. But everything is falling apart. there used to be decorum, responsibility, and elegance when spreading propaganda.  Powerful people would exert huge amounts of effort to control the narrative.  I’ll start by mentioning a quainter example of the ultra-rich old-money family of Atlantic Canada, the Irvings:

The Irvings bought out almost every single newspaper in Atlantic Canada. Sounds nefarious, and it is, but they never really exposed themselves. They didn’t write hit pieces of their competitors, or constantly fellate themselves.  They kept the paper at arms reach, so to avoid conflict of interest accusations.  They were subtle in their control. If an editor allowed scathing pieces about political collusion, or environmental damage done by the Irving’s, that editor would find themselves finding other work.  The Irving’s didn’t control the narrative by what was said, but what wasn’t.

Now, subtlety isn’t rewarded. It’s a free-for-all and every single MSM outlet is accusing each other of fake news. Nothing is true anymore. Anything can be said.
https://twitter.com/Deadspin/status/980175772206993409

Powerful corporate interests can buy as much control over they media. Hell, they’re even getting a bail-out here in Canada:
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/01/26/newspaper-bailout-ottawa-preparing-financial-assistance-for-print-media_a_23344657/

-----

The expansion of the American Empire used to be a long-winded process of controlling media figures and supporting friendly foreign institutions.  CIA would go through so much trouble providing ideological and material support to prop American capital in foreign countries.  The CIA supported media would have no trouble controlling the narrative, because they could report on actual change and movement.  The Chicago boys and Latin America, Israel & the Arab world, the Shah, Indochina. http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

Now they’re just getting lazy. I suppose the first Iraq war was the last time the west used significant pre-invasion coverage to justify war.  The weapons of mass destruction, you’d hear about it night and day.  Now look at what we use to justify war:

The Libyan war. Just purely bizarre shit.  Viagra to commit mass-rapes
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/29/diplomat-gaddafi-troops-viagra-mass-rape

The racial undertone of Gadaffi using ultra-violent black mercenaries that went on murderious civilian rampage killings
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/22/gaddafi-mercenary-force-libya
None of it was true.


Now we don’t even need journalism. Open source data. We’ve lost trust of the media, So we’ve moved on to the blogger. Bellingcat. He’s not Arabic, he doesn’t speak the language, he’s not a journalist, he doesn’t have an academic background, he’s never been on the ground. but he’s one of us. He’s not a part of the establishment, so he must be telling the truth. The pictures, the videos, the analysis. How could he lie?

[sidd]

Gareth Porter excoriates Ken Burns' Vietnam as fake history:

https://original.antiwar.com/porter/2018/04/08/what-ken-burns-left-out-of-the-vietnam-story/

sidd

[sidd]

Selling the Iraq war: St. Clair retrospective

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/20/how-they-sold-the-iraq-war/

sidd

[sidd]

What is not covered is important: Barzoud on media ignoring Gaza:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/04/19/media-cover-up-shielding-israel-is-a-matter-of-policy/

sidd

[sidd]

Retosective on Parry: how news is suppressed:

"If they couldn’t win on the battlefield, they would at least create the illusion of winning. They called it perception management."

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/04/16/it-started-over-lunch-and-ended-with-the-exposure-of-one-of-the-greatest-scandals-in-u-s-history/

instead of a pulitzer, he got fired.

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/04/17/instead-of-a-pulitzer-he-was-fired/

sidd

[Neven]

Also, I wonder, what is a view on life worth if it is based on falsehoods?

I had to think about what you said yesterday, while showering (yes, I thought about you, while under the shower  ).

This is indirectly getting at what I might consider an upside of fake news as a pehnomenon. You see, in my view most people who are living in the west, are living a life based on falsehoods. It's called consumer culture, and most of us aren't even aware how much we have been conditioned by it. To make our lifestyles possible, all kinds of atrocities against nature and our fellow human beings are being committed, but we gladly accept the explanations from those powers who tend to profit most from the lifestyles that have been imposed on us. But the rot doesn't stay on the outside, it moves in.

To me, fake news itself, as well as the uproar over fake news, are attempts by those powers to keep in control of the narrative and thus maintain the status quo (them feeding off us). This narrative is being questioned more and more, as the rot moves inwards more and more.

It's all very confusing, of course. One is easily misled into believing there are only two choices, the truth or the fake news. But hey, the 'truth' may be fake as well! So, what does one do? How does one supersede or transcend all that? Is there a third option?

If there is, it will probably be based on two things: Universal truths and a deeper understanding of problems. That's what I meant when I said: One should have a world view or view on life, where it doesn't matter whether information is true or not. The point you want to reach, is one where situations are prevented that lead you to choose between imperfect or manipulated sources of information, and thus confuse you.

Jiddu Krishnamurti explains it in this short video:



My hope is that the phenomenon of 'fake news' is another tool that helps enough people to wake up from their conditioning. Not everyone needs to wake up, which is impossible anyway. Just enough people to steer things in a more positive way.

[Martin Gisser]

https://climatecrocks.com/2018/04/18/in-case-you-wondered-yes-the-internet-selects-for-bullshit/

MIT News:

A new study by three MIT scholars has found that false news spreads more rapidly on the social network Twitter than real news does — and by a substantial margin.

[...]

Moreover, the scholars found, the spread of false information is essentially not due to bots that are programmed to disseminate inaccurate stories. Instead, false news speeds faster around Twitter due to people retweeting inaccurate news items.

“When we removed all of the bots in our dataset, [the] differences between the spread of false and true news stood,” [...]

[...] false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories are. It also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people. When it comes to Twitter’s “cascades,” or unbroken retweet chains, falsehoods reach a cascade depth of 10 about 20 times faster than facts. And falsehoods are retweeted by unique users more broadly than true statements at every depth of cascade.

[...] Why do falsehoods spread more quickly than the truth, on Twitter? Aral, Roy, and Vosoughi suggest the answer may reside in human psychology: We like new things.

“False news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information,” says Aral, who is the David Austin Professor of Management. And on social networks, people can gain attention by being the first to share previously unknown (but possibly false) information. Thus, as Aral puts it, “people who share novel information are seen as being in the know.”

[...]

And then there’s YouTube.

[...] [...]

(my emph.)

So, fake stuff is a very internet phenomenon. The remedy is also there: Check the damn stuff with google before you spread it. Reporting fake as fake might make you even look better than just spreading it uncommented: Now there's twice the novelty value.

-----------------

I wonder how the Iraq war bullshit of GW Bush and friends would have played out with today's internet: First a big wave of Rumsfeld's fake evidence spreading - and then a big wave of debunking it, making them look stupid, the whole world (not just France and Germany) laughing at the "mobile bioweapons labs", the joke about Saddam's field kitchens going viral... Perhaps the warmongers wouldn't have it as easy as back then.

[bbr2314]

I mean you people all seemingly believe we are somehow going to end up +5C in 100 years so I would say the reach of fake news is nothing new. It is a byproduct of unbridled liberalism.

[zizek]

https://climatecrocks.com/2018/04/18/in-case-you-wondered-yes-the-internet-selects-for-bullshit/

MIT News:

A new study by three MIT scholars has found that false news spreads more rapidly on the social network Twitter than real news does — and by a substantial margin.

[...]

Moreover, the scholars found, the spread of false information is essentially not due to bots that are programmed to disseminate inaccurate stories. Instead, false news speeds faster around Twitter due to people retweeting inaccurate news items.

“When we removed all of the bots in our dataset, [the] differences between the spread of false and true news stood,” [...]

[...] false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories are. It also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people. When it comes to Twitter’s “cascades,” or unbroken retweet chains, falsehoods reach a cascade depth of 10 about 20 times faster than facts. And falsehoods are retweeted by unique users more broadly than true statements at every depth of cascade.

[...] Why do falsehoods spread more quickly than the truth, on Twitter? Aral, Roy, and Vosoughi suggest the answer may reside in human psychology: We like new things.

“False news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information,” says Aral, who is the David Austin Professor of Management. And on social networks, people can gain attention by being the first to share previously unknown (but possibly false) information. Thus, as Aral puts it, “people who share novel information are seen as being in the know.”

[...]

And then there’s YouTube.

[...] [...]

(my emph.)

So, fake stuff is a very internet phenomenon. The remedy is also there: Check the damn stuff with google before you spread it. Reporting fake as fake might make you even look better than just spreading it uncommented: Now there's twice the novelty value.

-----------------

I wonder how the Iraq war bullshit of GW Bush and friends would have played out with today's internet: First a big wave of Rumsfeld's fake evidence spreading - and then a big wave of debunking it, making them look stupid, the whole world (not just France and Germany) laughing at the "mobile bioweapons labs", the joke about Saddam's field kitchens going viral... Perhaps the warmongers wouldn't have it as easy as back then.

Syria?

[zizek]

What perfect timing for this thread. The prominent weirdo youtube celebrity @partisangirl was named as a russian bot in the Guardian....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/19/russia-fake-news-salisbury-poisoning-twitter-bots-uk

I thought a bot was a robot. but I suppose our definition of bot has changed... to... Uhhhh.... people who support russia I guess? People who are critical of the UK? I honestly have no idea. Am..... I.... a bot?

Like, I'm not going to defend some of the unhinged people that the UK has named as Russian bots. Their views are bizarre. But why classify them as Russian bots? Are 9/11 deniers Russian bots? flat-earthers Russian bots? The schizophrenic homeless man down the street a Russian bot?

-----

I'm not going pretend that the Russians aren't using the internet to spread propaganda, but I'm not going to believe the claims that everything pro-Russian is a bot.  You'll find wack-jobs and and die-hard patriots everywhere you go.
Look at the united states. Americans will vehemently defend the most atrocious garbage committed by America. They will like, subscribe, & share any nationalist, racist, homophobic, sexist, and violent shit without second thought.  These people aren't robots. They're imbeciles. They're ignorant. And they sure as fuck ain't state-sponsored.

----

Fake news is now firmly entrenched into our modern discourse. And it's clear that the state is  effectively using fake news as a propaganda tool:

2,000%, 4,000% 10,000%. Bot farms. state-sponsored. All fake. All propaganda.  Everything from this state is a lie. Do not believe anything they say.


It's so easy. You don't even need evidence. What was it that they used to accuse twitter users for being bots? Russian I.P.s? hahaha

[zizek]

And I gotta say the russophobia is pretty disgustingly ethnocentric:

"They like russia? Can't be true. Nobody likes Russia. All slavs are dirty disgusting creatures. Only a robot would have the capacity to love a slav"

[Martin Gisser]

What perfect timing for this thread. The prominent weirdo youtube celebrity @partisangirl was named as a russian bot in the Guardian....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/19/russia-fake-news-salisbury-poisoning-twitter-bots-uk

I thought a bot was a robot. but I suppose our definition of bot has changed... to... Uhhhh....

What about a hybrid? If @partisangirl indeed "reached 61 million users with 2,300 posts over the same 12-day period" according to The Guardian, then some of these posts were very likely generated by some system.

That's exactly what I would do as a professional propagandist: Have a bot generate stuff, but supervise its output:
1) to train bot AI
2) give it a human face

[zizek]

What perfect timing for this thread. The prominent weirdo youtube celebrity @partisangirl was named as a russian bot in the Guardian....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/19/russia-fake-news-salisbury-poisoning-twitter-bots-uk

I thought a bot was a robot. but I suppose our definition of bot has changed... to... Uhhhh....

What about a hybrid? If @partisangirl indeed "reached 61 million users with 2,300 posts over the same 12-day period" according to The Guardian, then some of these posts were very likely generated by some system.

That's exactly what I would do as a professional propagandist: Have a bot generate stuff, but supervise its output:
1) to train bot AI
2) give it a human face

Don't take this as an insult Martin, but I think it's kind of cute that you think that many posts would have to be generated by some system.  It means you don't spend enough time on twitter to know how obsessed people are with tweeting. And that's a good thing. Stay away from that place haha. It's a bad place.

[zizek]

Just for some perspective. @eliothiggins (bellingcat) tweeted 2.5x as much as @partisangirl. 4,455 tweets vs. 1,782 in the last month. Respectively.

[sidd]

Two excellent reviews of selling war and selling peace. Both are extensively well referenced.

Selling war:

"The Preliminary Stage—during which the country concerned comes to the news, portrayed as a cause for "mounting concern" because of poverty/dictatorship/anarchy;

The Justification Stage—during which big news is produced to lend urgency to the case for armed intervention to bring about a rapid restitution of "normality";

The Implementation Stage—when pooling and censorship provide control of coverage;

The Aftermath—during which normality is portrayed as returning to the region, before it once again drops down the news agenda."

"O’Kane notes "there is always a dead baby story" and it comes at the key point of the Justification Stage—in the form of a story whose apparent urgency brooks no delay—specifically, no time for cool deliberation or negotiating on peace proposals. Human interest stories … are ideal for engendering this atmosphere."

"1. The crisis
    The reporting of a crisis which negotiations appear unable to resolve. Politicians, while calling for diplomacy, warn of military retaliation. The media reports this as "We’re on the brink of war", or "War is inevitable", etc.
2. The demonisation of the enemy’s leader
    Comparing the leader with Hitler is a good start because of the instant images that Hitler’s name provokes.
3. The demonisation of the enemy as individuals
    For example, to suggest the enemy is insane.
4. Atrocities
    Even making up stories to whip up and strengthen emotional reactions."

The Mighty Wurlitzer at work: Katherine Graham is quoted: "There are some things the general public does not need to know about and shouldn’t." When you have the owner of WaPo on the side of warmongers, you know who controls the official narrative.

" ...government propaganda prepares its citizens for war so skillfully that it is quite likely that they do not want the truthful, objective and balanced reporting ..."

"a principle familiar to propagandists is that the doctrine to be instilled in the target audience should not be articulated: that would only expose them to reflection, inquiry, and, very likely, ridicule. The proper procedure is to drill them home by constantly presupposing them, so that they become the very condition for discourse." (Chomsky)

"it is far easier to make propaganda at home than abroad."

http://www.globalissues.org/article/157/war-propaganda-and-the-media#PropagandawhenPreparingorJustifyingWar


Selling Peace:

"The first task of peace journalism, therefore, must be to map the conflict, identifying all the parties and their goals."

"In resisting the notion that the number of parties to a conflict is reducible to two, peace journalism must seek out different voices "

"peace journalists must seek out truths even when inconvenient to official information sources or the conventional analysis, they must also be ready to expose untruths on all sides"

http://www.globalissues.org/article/534/the-peace-journalism-option

sidd

[sidd]

I see that the little wet boy who was all over western TV channels as a poster child for nerve gas victim is mysteriously absent from those very western channels once he began saying the attack was faked.

Which is more fake ? coverage or the suppression ?

sidd

[TerryM]

It's amazing how popular the sport of tossing babies, then catching then with a spear has been through the ages.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=Z_o-AQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA324&lpg=RA1-PA324&dq=romans+tossing+and+catching+babies+on+their+spears&source=bl&ots=Gro6reAAPF&sig=BPHqhPk8Pe9zgfpkX8uaF5HQUyQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjE2KKF1d3aAhWC8oMKHdaTCSEQ6AEIXDAF#v=onepage&q=romans%20tossing%20and%20catching%20babies%20on%20their%20spears&f=false

What's even more difficult to believe is that after thousands of years of hearing these lies, some still purport to believe them.
From emptied incubators to dusty boys and foaming babies - it's the same old story of:

"It is faid to have been a common paftime among thefe barbarians, to tear the infants of the Englifh from the breafts of their mothers. tofs them in the air, and catch them on the point of their fpears as they were falling down"

You've heard it, your father heard it, your father's father's father heard it, and recognised it for the lie that it was. Otherwise they wouldn't have survived long enough to have fathered sons.

We've never needed stupid people, and spouting memes like the above has proven an effective way to rid our herd of the stupidest and most vicious. They hear it as a clarion cry to rush to war, the rest of us are contented to remain behind and succor the women.

The only problem now is that rather than killing off the young, dumb, and the overstrung, the missiles now seem to target civilians. The bright, peaceful types are killed while the ingoratti live on.

This is NOT how we got rid of the Neanderthal among us.
Terry

[TerryM]

In the (marvelous)? propaganda movies depicting WWII Britain, there would inevitably be a scene where an aged, heavily mustached Air Raid Warden in a threadbare ill fitted uniform, would crash in and remonstrate with the hero to "Turn out that light!", then "Close those blackout drapes".

In Britain's Cold War II, it's the British press that is snuffing out any light that journalists might be shine on whatever occurred in Salisbury.

Apparently there is a British system known as a "D-Notice", now properly designated as a "DSMA-Notice" (Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice), that "officially requests news editors not to publish or broadcast items on specific subjects for reasons of National Security."
D-Notices have no weight of law, and are only "advisatory requests".

These seem to have taken the place of closing the blackout drapes, and while undoubtedly both aim to keep the enemy from spotting Britain's weaknesses, both also make it very difficult for everyone else to form a clear picture of the blacked out area.

Just what has been blacked out, and how could it possibly effect Britain's National Security?

When did Sergei and Yulia's predicament become a matter of National Security?

If they had been stricken with some virulent virus that could spread quickly through the populus, this might be cause for alarm among the lords and ladies that rule the Isles, but by the time the curtain was coming down the 3 victims were already hospitalized, and no one else had been infected.

They had been found on a park bench at 4:41 PM of Sunday, March 4th, and later were admitted to the local hospital - as opposed to the nearby Porton Downs CW facility.

By Monday, March 5, doctors are "baffled by their symptoms" and have no idea what they were exposed to.
The Public Health Service said:

"Based on the limited information available there doesn’t appear to be any further immediate risk to public health.
"PHE understands that those exposed to the substances have been decontaminated, as is standard practice in situations like this.
"Scientists from PHE’s Centre for Radiation, Chemical and Environmental Hazards, will continue to assist the response and review information as it becomes available."

As the names and nationalities of the pair are leaked rumors of Russian involvement are widespread.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson says Britain will "respond appropriately and robustly" if evidence emerges of Russia's involvement in Skripal's suspected poisoning.

By Wednesday March 7:

Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, the outgoing head of national counter-terror policing, reveals that the Sergei and Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent.
He also reveals that a police officer was also infected.
To the world's media he says: “This is being treated as a major incident involving attempted murder by administration of a nerve agent.
“These two people remain critically ill in hospital. Sadly, in addition a police officer who was one of the first to attend the scene in response to the incident is now also in a serious condition in hospital.

By Thursday March 8:

Home Secretary Rudd said that the use of a nerve agent on UK soil was a "brazen and reckless act" of attempted murder "in the most cruel and public way".
She later chairs a meeting of the National Security Council and Theresa May calls a meeting of the government's emergency response coordination unit Cobra.

By Saturday, March 10:

Our brave Sergeant is holding a press conference and assuring the public that "he doesn't consider himself a hero" - seldom have truer words been spoken.

And so we have the first week of our saga, according to those wonderful journalists at the mirror.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/timeline-russian-spy-poisoning-uk-12179195


In that first week the story exploded from a local interest tale of 2 stoners ODed on a park bench to the story that might start WWIII.
Questions arise:

Why no initial coverage of the policeman's hospitalization? - How could any competent journalist have missed this scoop? Is a D-Notice in effect from day one?

How would National Security be compromised by mentioning the policeman's hospitalization as breaking news?

Rather than asking why Boris Johnson knew of 2 Russians falling sick in Salisbury one day after this occurred, perhaps we should determine how he knew that they had been poisoned. Are cabinet ministers regularly informed of every non lethal drug mishap in the country?

The hospital doctor has said that the hospital never admitted or treated any patients for nerve agent poisoning. Who then informed Mark Rowley that the Skripals were poisoned with nerve agents? Why was he the first to mention that non-hero Sergeant Nick Bailey.


We haven't even got as far as day 8 when Theresa May announces that it was a "Military Grade Novichok" and had to have been Russia's fault, and already we see evidence of a massive blackout curtain having been spread over the facts.

Perhaps in 55 years, if England hasn't tipped over from the weight of her immigrant population, our sons and daughters will be allowed to view the musty documents and scratchy videos that will solve this little mystery. But I wouldn't count on it.
Terry

[johnm33]

Craig Murray has a post on the D notice. https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/04/probable-western-responsibility-for-skripal-poisoning/
Clive Ponting his source has credibility since he sacrificed his career and pension for the public good in a whistleblowing event, was it in the late seventies?

[SteveMDFP]

The hospital doctor has said that the hospital never admitted or treated any patients for nerve agent poisoning. Who then informed Mark Rowley that the Skripals were poisoned with nerve agents? Why was he the first to mention that non-hero Sergeant Nick Bailey.
 

Again with the ER doctor's letter to the newspaper?  We've been over this.
I think you're seriously over-reading one letter from an ER doc.  He made clear that the point of the letter was to refute the hysteria about rumors of dozens of victims of nerve agent exposure.  He did so with the letter.  He acknowledged that three had been poisoned, without specifically stating that the poisoning was (or was not) nerve agent exposure.  In this context his passing statement that no victims of nerve agent poisoning were treated was ambiguous, and should be interpreted cautiously.  I believe he meant that no other people were treated for this problem.

Or maybe he actually doubted the three actually had nerve agent poisoning, he didn't say.  Unless he himself treated the three, he'd be less competent to judge than those who did. 
The only alternative to the three being such victims, that I can see, would be a large conspiracy among likely dozens of people and several different agencies.  I know of nobody directly involved who has stated the poisoning wasn't a nerve agent.  Modern conspiracies are always far leakier than this.

Regardless, it seems clear the writer was in a hurry to dispel panic.  I doubt her carefully proof-read and edited his letter.  That's my interpretation.

[gerontocrat]

Perhaps in 55 years, if England hasn't tipped over from the weight of her immigrant population

Pardon?
Relevance?

[TerryM]

Perhaps in 55 years, if England hasn't tipped over from the weight of her immigrant population

Pardon?
Relevance?

'Twas one of the fine Republican Lawmakers who feared that Guam might "tip over" from the weight of an additional 8,000 troops.
The 55 years related to the Kennedy in Dallas timeline.
Brexit fears of mass migration are in there too.


Relevance - humor, or rather the attempt. 
Terry

[sidd]

Mighty Wurlitzer:

But some were there and do remember.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/article210234214.html

sidd

[TerryM]

Mighty Wurlitzer:

But some were there and do remember.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/article210234214.html

sidd

"he could be used “as a confidential informant with natural access to information about news companies and personalities.”"


"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."
Thomas Jefferson;

Terry

[Susan Anderson]

Repeating this extract from my favorite news resource here:

This about Hitler hits the bullseye:

“Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.” Yes, it does.

What set Hitler apart from most authoritarian figures in history was his conception of himself as an artist-genius who used politics as his métier. It is a mistake to call him a failed artist; for him, politics and war were a continuation of art by other means.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-racism-influenced-hitler

[Daniel B.]

Interesting that Hitler idolized those American (and British) values of sport, Hollywood, and the frontier.  It appears that these helped form his nationalistic views after becoming the spokesman for the National Socialist German Worker's Party.  It was his penchant for public speaking that elevated him to the top.  I guess you could say that WWII was his [failed?] masterpiece.

[Martin Gisser]

...

complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality

Yes, that's how things increasingly look like to me!

Today my personal Facebook algorithm had to de-friend another friend of mine, as he repeatedly shared (and thus gave a platform for) German Neo-Nazi hate propaganda from the AfD party.

Aggressive irrationality on the rise everywhere. E.g.: Literal flat earthism en vogue again - oh poor hippies, as if denial of classical thermodynamics isn't already enough. Sacrificium intellectus - but for whom?

Half of Homo S Sapiens can no longer stand reality.

http://theconversation.com/i-watched-an-entire-flat-earth-convention-for-my-research-heres-what-i-learnt-95887

[...]
A particular point of contention occurred when one of the physicists pleaded with the audience to avoid trusting YouTube and bloggers. The audience and the panel of flat earthers took exception to this, noting that “now we’ve got the internet and mass communication … we’re not reliant on what the mainstream are telling us in newspapers, we can decide for ourselves”. [...]

Flat earthers and populism
At the same time as scientific claims to knowledge and power are being undermined, some power structures are decoupling themselves from scientific knowledge, moving towards a kind of populist politics that are increasingly sceptical of knowledge. This has, in recent years, manifested itself in extreme ways – through such things as public politicians showing support for Pizzagate or Trump’s suggestions that Ted Cruz’s father shot JFK.

But this can also be seen in more subtle and insidious form in the way in which Brexit, for example, was campaigned for in terms of gut feelings and emotions rather than expert statistics and predictions. Science is increasingly facing problems with its ability to communicate ideas publicly, a problem that politicians, and flat earthers, are able to circumvent with moves towards populism.
[...]

A commenter there quotes Carl Bernstein 1992:
http://carlbernstein.com/magazines_the_idiot_culture.pdf

We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.

-- This has now spread from that weirdo United States over much the globe. I'm meeting the weird and intentionally stupid almost every day here in Germany...

[TerryM]

I'm meeting the weird and intentionally stupid almost every day here in Germany...

Increasingly here in Canada also. Not at anywhere near American levels, but it was Canadians that brought Harper to the world stage.
The International Democrat Union - IDU - has been spreading far right ideas and money since 1983. Stephen Harper is their present leader.
Terry

[sidd]

What is not covered is as important as what is:

CBS knew about Charlie Rose for years, covered it up:

"Concerns about Rose’s behavior were flagged to managers at the network as early as 1986 and as recently as April 2017 "

“She looked me dead in the eyes and said, ‘You are going to be working alone with this man and being alone with this man in his hotel, and you need to think really hard about whether you want to do this,’ ”

"And soon after he was hired at “CBS This Morning,” Rose’s inappropriate behavior was flagged to a supervisor — the second time identified by The Post in which CBS News management was alerted to his conduct. "

https://www.washingtonpost.com/charlie-roses-misconduct-was-widespread-at-cbs-and-three-managers-were-warned-investigation-finds/2018/05/02/80613d24-3228-11e8-94fa-32d48460b955_story.html

sidd

[vox_mundi]

'Calling Bullshit': The College Class On How Not To Be Duped By the News 
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/16/calling-bullshit-college-class-news-information

Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World, designed and co-taught by the University of Washington professors Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom, begins with a premise so obvious we barely lend it the attention it deserves: “Our world is saturated with bullshit.” And so, every week for 12 weeks, the professors expose “one specific facet of bullshit”, doing so in the explicit spirit of resistance. “This is,” they explain, “our attempt to fight back.”

... These lectures were recorded using multiple cameras and edited to form a video series. We have divided up every lecture into a set of a shorter segments; each segment should more or less stand alone on its own merits. The full playlist of all course videos is available on the UW Information School's YouTube channel.

Complete lecture series
https://callingbullshit.org/videos.html


Lecture 1: An Introduction to Bullshit   

[ASILurker]

“Our world is saturated with bullshit.” LOL

And where the asif is not immune.

[b_lumenkraft]

A small book everyone should read:

On Bullshit - by Harry G. Frankfurt

Link >> https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946

[vox_mundi]

From the book ...

... bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. ... Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

[Sleepy]

The late Jake Thackray came to mind.
Noticed that some in here never watch videos but what do you say when words are not enough?