Imagine if you treated every (or actually even just any) demonstration that turned to a riot with this level of conspiratorial thinking.
US 2024 Presidential Election
- Thread starter gorfias
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173 revealed to be captured before the news knew that something had gone wrong is totally implausible. Even capturing that many alive is absurd. Now, if it was later to come out that an air operation involving temporarily having boots on the ground ran into unexpected air defense and much loss of life...not impossible. But that's not the same.
what we have access to is not what the news organizations know but what the news organizations choose to reveal.
Ah, yes, important distinction (though I'd argue that what we know is less dependent on mainstream media nowdays). But the overall point, I think, still stands.
Unfortunately, we don't really know what we know or don't know in a lot of cases. We only know what we have evidence for, and we might have some insight into the quality of that evidence, especially if it is low quality.
One helpful approach is often to consider how many people have to cooperate in deception in the case that some claim about a deception taking place is true. This is pretty useful in cases like claims about the moon landings being hoaxes; people claiming hoax were, so far as I know, as a rule not involved in the space program when those landings took place. They're just random folks and so it is reasonable to dismiss them; there were a whole lot of people involved in the moon landings and they were very public-- and the Soviet Union would surely have claimed they were hoaxes if they had even the slightest indication that they were.
But this approach can also be misused: for example, the assertions about chemical attacks in Syria several years ago and the revisions of the OPCW reports about them and their divergent conclusions gave rise to controversies; the argument could be made that there would have to be a number of people conspiring to deceive the public in order for the final report to be falsified; we should expect a number of people involved in producing the reports to raise an alarm, otherwise it is a silly conspiracy theory. There is at least one crucial problem with that: a number of people involved in producing the reports did raise such an alarm. There were whistleblowers who were subsequently ignored and those who publicly raised concerns about this were subject less to counterargument and more to character assassination. This is one of the scenarios that you would expect to find if there were a deception; that doesn't mean there was one, but dismissals based on the difficulty of performing a deception fall flat. If there were a deception, there would be whistleblowers; there in fact were whistleblowers. In the case of a deception, other countries would have challenged the findings; other countries did challenge the findings. In the case of a deception, there should have been more whistleblowers; the people publishing the existing whistleblowers were subject to vile public defamation campaigns and marginalization, surely discouraging other potential whistleblowers from coming forward.
Another instructive example is the immediate aftermath of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Quite a lot of people would have to have cooperated with the deception in order for the claims about Hamas systematically using mass rape as a weapon of war to be a hoax, or the claims about beheading 40 babies or babies in ovens. These claims were published in Western media and repeated by American and other officials. The claims about babies were pretty easy to figure out as hoaxes: there weren't anywhere near that many babies in israel's casualty lists, and those that were had different explanations than beheading or baking: if you agree that knowledge is possible to have at all, it's all but impossible that these were not hoaxes. Of course, the existence of these obvious hoaxes might make other hoaxes easier to believe because of psychological priming and the fallacy of the golden mean. This one isn't as obviously false; maybe it is true?
The claim about Hamas raping lots of women is not as easy to positively disprove, and is still promoted in Western mainstream media as if there is clear evidence for it, and still believed by some because lots of people are a bit racist in their expectations about brown people; the idea that there are hordes of black or brown men eager to act on any opportunity to rape is a common white supremacist trope, and that trope still has power. They're coming for 'your' women (as is so often the case, and revealed at Sde Teiman, this is an inversion.) The New York Times has still not retracted Screams Without Words despite it being written by people with a combination of severe conflicts of interest and no subject matter expertise or relevant investigative experience, the evidence for its central claims (by ZAKA) being discredited in and by israeli publications and television, and no subsequent investigations confirming any of its claims. As recently as this month, articles in American media have treated disbelief about Hamas mass rape as per se antisemitic; skepticism of israeli claims during israeli perpetrated mass murders? It could only be Jew hate! (If anyone is wondering, I'm speaking of Olivia Reingold's article about New York City Mayor Mamdani's wife liking various israel-critical tweets, which is newsworthy for some reason.)
The proliferation of non-mainstream sources is both a help and a hindrance to having any idea what is actually true or false. The truth has an easier time getting out, but it also has an easier time being drowned in bullshit. It is good to be wary of all sources, and especially so of those that dominate your information environment. And don't forget that the establishment is perfectly capable of hiring additonal faces to read their desired narratives, wrapping it all in a lower production quality, and eschewing any recognizable establishment branding.
Why do you not use your reason and understanding in reasonable and understandable ways? You make this well written post of being careful of sources, but then often link singular twitter posts from fake middle eastern "news" accounts with stories that can often be disproven by a single reverse image search. You can hardly blame me for thinking you do it all on purpose.
Related to the consideration of sources, people on the internet are talking about attacks on desalination plants, with two in particular: Bahrain saying Iran attacked one of theirs, and Iran saying the US attacked one of theirs. In the instance of Bahrain, we have multiple claims about it and pictures of the aftermath, there are pictures of smoke in the area and aerial photos of damage from an explosion in the port, and also a couple tellings of the event, with some claims Iran is targeting water infrastructure and others says it was just hit from debris from a drone, which would lead one to believe it was an attack on something else nearby or it was shot down before it reached its target and the damage there was completely unintentional. One of the more reasonable articles I read said that neither Iran nor Bahrain have indicated whether these plants have had their functions disrupted, only claiming that they were targeted.
And then there's the claim of an attack by Iran, and I won't say whether than claim is truth or lie, I don't have any evidence either way because that's all it is, a claim. There aren't pictures of a smoking aftermath or satellite images of damage, there aren't multiple accounts with differences to consider, the entire story is that Iranian officials claim the US attached a desalination plant. There are, of course, many good reasons we would not have the same pictures and accounts coming out of Iran right now as we do from Bahrain, I don't think that makes the claim suspicious, but I don't like the uncritical way it's being reported. Most places are just spreading the claim and then talking abstractly about how important desalination plants are, without any further consideration of the specific claim being reported. Outlets that express skepticism are mostly being skeptical that the US did it, which seems to me a rather silly jump when we still have no independent validation that the desalination plant Iran said was attacked was even damaged. At least one news site put an unrelated picture of a bombed out warehouse in the desert at the top of their article, captioned "representative image".
Like, at least Jill Stein got bamboozled by AI images, the entirety of Reddit can be hypnotized by a single Iranian official claiming something with no evidence at all.
Hear, hear, The President's wants trump all.
Considering all bills the MAGA regime or their cronies in congress puts forward are bad wouldn't it thus be good if he doesn't sign them?
Interviewer: "Do we have any overt or covert forces inside Iran now?"
Hegseth, smirking: "I wouldn't tell you if we did."
Interviewer: "Only reason I ask is because earlier this week you said, 'No.' Is that still the answer?"
Hegseth: "Yeah, that's still the answer."
Later...
"They've been killing us for 48 years. 47 years."
Asked how they're gonna fulfill their promise of getting ships through the Strait of Hormuz again, he doesn't answer the question. Brags about how they've destroyed Iran's navy. "It's still early. It's six days..."
Still won't take responsibility for the girls school. Trump's (and John Bolton's) claim that Iran hit the school is so moronic on its face. Trump blames it on their inaccuracy (rather than them destroying it intentionally to bring more people to their cause). But America and Israel already claimed destruction of the military buildings by the school. What are the chances of Iran hitting the school at the same time that USA/Israel hit the nearby buildings?
Late in the interview, 23 minutes, Hegseth calls Iranians religious fanatics who want to bring armageddon (projection), then goes on to say, "There's no atheist in a foxhole.... We lost a lot of that through self-help, self-esteem nonsense, and that's not what our soldiers need. They need a better connection with our almighty God."
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I mean, he tried every way he could think of to become POTUS despite losing the election. The "demonstration" as you put it was part of that. "Hang Mike Pence" was part of said "demonstration", because Pence refused to cooperate with a previous one of Trump's attempts to retain power (using the invalid elector slates) and a dead VP was a more guaranteed way to get there than just disruption. Trump is excellent at delaying things in the courts, and he'd only need to delay for 2 weeks over violation of the Electoral Count Act (the goal of Jan 6) to create a constitutional crisis.
Do you believe that they were storming the Capital to appoint Trump as president?
If so, do you think people mobbing up outside of the White House and setting a church on fire were storming the White House to remove Trump from the presidency? Or when people were beating on the doors of the Supreme Court, were they toppling the court?
People have asked for recounts before. People have prepared alternates in case an election got flipped before. People have sued over alleged election crimes before. People have had rallies at the Mall before. Rallies and protests have turned to riots before. Not a single part of what happened is terribly unique or worrying, except maybe that Republicans were involved this time.
As long as he doesn't Veto the Bills and just ignores them, they'll become law after ten days ( excluding Sundays ) as if he had signed them anyhow, according to some person on Reddit.
From the yanks' Constitution;
The Constitution of the United States: A Transcription
Note: The following text is a transcription of the Constitution as it was inscribed by Jacob Shallus on parchment (the document on display in the Rotunda at the National Archives Museum). The spelling and punctuation reflect the original.
www.archives.gov
It works just the opposite. If he doesn't sign or actively veto a bill, it gets kicked back to Congress. If Congress isn't in session, it gets killed. That's what's known as a pocket veto.As long as he doesn't Veto the Bills and just ignores them, they'll become law after ten days ( excluding Sundays ) as if he had signed them anyhow, according to some person on Reddit.
From the yanks' Constitution;
The Constitution of the United States: A Transcription
Note: The following text is a transcription of the Constitution as it was inscribed by Jacob Shallus on parchment (the document on display in the Rotunda at the National Archives Museum). The spelling and punctuation reflect the original.
Even Master Chief (voice actor is a cool guy in real life, so no shock here) is telling the wannabe biatch god king to fuck off.
www.videogameschronicle.com
Master Chief voice actor demands his voice be removed from the White House’s ‘disgusting and juvenile war porn’ | VGC
A clip of the Halo character was used in a propaganda video celebrating Iran airstrikes…
www.videogameschronicle.com
I mean, there were plenty of riots that Republican did in the two months leading up to Jan 6. This included burning Black majority churches
When we talk about Jan 6, we are talking about that specific riot being worse than all the other MAGA riots. If you want, we can dredge up all the other ones too like you are doing
Yeah... you've gotta show me where they actually care about Law and/or Order. There are many EOs that are explicty banned by the constitution that are still in effect now
They arent following the constitution. They are rewriting it. Just like they did to the Bible
That video was so gloriously dumb that I can kinda respect it as a testament to idiocy and bad taste.Even Master Chief (voice actor is a cool guy in real life, so no shock here) is telling the wannabe biatch god king to fuck off.
Master Chief voice actor demands his voice be removed from the White House’s ‘disgusting and juvenile war porn’ | VGC
A clip of the Halo character was used in a propaganda video celebrating Iran airstrikes…
Also completely missing the point in many instances. Iron man becomes against wars in the Middle East and Beerus is a loony god destroying things over a temper tantrum.
I don't recall Clinton fans trying to hunt down Biden and force him to install her as president nor create a whole alternative reality of of whole clothe.
Say what you want about Bush and Gore but it was close, and the supreme court did have to get involved. This unlike Biden and Trump where Trump just blindly insisted he won because he just really wanted to win.