mycorrhiza they/them

Treatment can still help, but yeah, way too much onus is put on the individual and not enough on the society

America has caused the deaths of around 4.5 million people in the middle east since 9/11

excuses what, going on a link aggregation site and posting an article that you find relevant to your perspective on the world?

Russia started the war in the first place because — whether you think the fear is reasonable or not — Russia has loudly proclaimed for decades that they view NATO encirclement as an existential threat, and Ukraine joining NATO would massively expand NATO presence on the Russian border, leaving basically only Belarus as a buffer. And if Ukraine took Crimea with them while joining NATO, Russia would lose access to their only deep warm-water port on the black sea, Sevastapol, a port that is economically significant to them.

it’s not the Ukrainian people who decide, it’s the Ukrainian government that decides, and America basically decides what they decide

the “quickest way to save the most amount of lives” is peace talks. Both armies are locked in a stalemate and the war is going nowhere.

op has an agenda as to why they are linking this specific article

everyone has a fucking perspective, that’s a normal human behavior. do you expect people to just randomly select articles to post?

Is there no western media you can think of which is critical of Capitalism? Maybe even someone you just cited?

Are you saying the west has trustworthy press because Parenti and Chomsky were allowed to publish books?

Please link to your source

accused of being a rape apologist because I was insistent on the presumption of innocence

Good thing to insist on, but be prudent. Keep in mind that, at least on reddit, there’s a tendency for every thread about rape to become a thread about false accusations. I wasn’t there, but in general, sometimes people object not to the presumption of innocence but to people bringing it up.

a restricted and guided tour of some barbershops doesn’t really prove anything though, does it?

You’d think along the way they might pass a pedestrian with a Kim Jong Un haircut

I believe it’s plausible. I give reasons why. You think it’s implausible, and you give no reasons why. You’re also really condescending while doing it.

intellectually dishonest how? I acknowledged it was speculation and gave my reasons.

extraordinary evidence

any evidence at all

much more unlikely

than a disproven story?

at least the haircut story has an anonymous source. You don’t even have that.

actually, yes I do. someone told me. /s

an anonymous source is actually fine

…when they provide evidence.

Wikileaks publishes leaks. Their sources provide falsifiable documents, transcripts, photos, and footage — actual evidence we can follow up on. The Panama Papers were evidence. 2.6 terabytes of data. 11.5 million documents. Edward Snowden gave us evidence. He didn’t just say “the NSA totally spies on you dude, trust me bro.”

absurd conspiracy theory that the CIA actually runs RFA

Conspiracy theory sure, but how is it absurd? They’re state funded, the CIA acknowledges it created them, they print a lot of unsourced claims about America’s enemies, you can’t find any information about their authors, etc. Ultimately I’m not sure it matters. Unsourced disproven bullshit is unsourced disproven bullshit, CIA or not. Either way, we can point to Radio Free Asia as an example of less-than-trustworthy US state media.

That claim includes a source

Yeah, an anonymous source. Did you look at it?

Why not just claim they eat babies or something equally horrific?

They do publish many horrific claims.

gets the same results in the end

No it doesn’t. When your outlet is obvious propaganda, fewer people believe you. RFA’s sheen of reputability was a huge factor in the haircut story’s enormous reach in western media.

Hire a bunch of hatchet job propagandists

…the sort of people who would write this disproven haircut story and dozens of other goofy unsourced claims they’ve published, yes. You can even tell them to write normal stories too just to mix it up.

Convincing journalists to lie seems like a lot of work

Not if some or all of your journalists are US intelligence — Radio Free Asia began as a CIA front operation (google it), and might still be one.

They changed one unsourced claim to another unsourced claim. Neat.

Why did they publish it?

Because it vilifies an enemy state, which is convenient when you want public support for sanctions against that enemy

If you asked an intelligent person, “how would you publish propaganda,” you’d just do it like Russian Times: just straight-up repeat the state’s lies and never bother reporting anything close to the truth.

Are you serious? Is this really what you think?

Could you explain why you think this?

We’ll look at an example from another US state media outlet: Radio Free Asia

In 2014, Radio Free Asia wrote a story claiming North Korean students were forced to get the Kim Jong Un haircut. The story spread like wildfire. It was on all the news stations, all the talk shows, Kimmel, Colbert, John Oliver. TV commercials riffed on it. The whole American media ecosystem was unanimous, everyone believed this shit. Regular people on the street could tell you about it.

Then it came out that Radio Free Asia made it up. Someone at Radio Free Asia sat down and deliberately wrote a false story with the intent to deceive the public, and then Radio Free Asia published that story as fact in order to smear an enemy of the United States.

Radio Free Asia, like VoA, has excellent scores on all the media bias and fact-checking sites. This is because they sprinkle their bullshit carefully. RFA’s hit pieces are mixed in among hundreds of ordinary, mundane, reputable current events stories. You go to the site and you see headlines like you might see on any other site. But when you go digging, you start to find dozens of unsourced claims about China and North Korea mixed in. The rest is just reputation laundering to support the bullshit.

If you asked an intelligent person, “how would you publish propaganda,” RFA is the format they would come up with.