Pravda!

[IndyDave1776]

I deliberately selected the name of the old Soviet official newspaper since the name literally means "truth" while the only truthful content was usually the date.

I would like to explore a number of issues.

1. WTF is a conspiracy theory? So far as I can tell it is nothing but weasel words used to dismiss issues that the potentially and probably guilty parties don't want to address on merit. Why do we tolerate this? Why do we accept it even when the arithmetic will allow no other conclusion? We accepted a dread plague without corresponding dead people. We accepted a rigged election with vote counts being dropped at a rate several times the mechanical limitations of the tabulation machines. We accepted seeing on video the same ballots run through the machines repetitively. WTF?

2. As a corollary, why to so many demand confirmation of a lie being told or lawful conduct being violated from the usual media suspects who are clearly partisan before believing anything is wrong. This is like refusing to believe there is anything wrong at the henhouse unless a fox (red animal, not Tucker Carlson), mink, or weasel reports it to you.

3. Debunked. This supposedly means that clear facts have been presented to disprove an accusation. In reality it is a weasel word that means the accused person or persons denied it and that settles it. Why do we accept this?

4. Fact checking. Snopes is perhaps the worst offender but certainly isn't alone. Snopes has a hard left political alignment and no investigative capacity beyond doing internet searches and declaring what is Pravda. No boots on the ground. Why do we even consider what these tools have to say?

5. Why in the universe has "because Simon says" become an acceptable accounting for anything? Has the average American gone braindead?

6. Why are so many so resistant to accepting the possibility of corruption, even among those one would expect to know better, even in the absence of a plausible alternative?

 

[jwamplerusa]

IndyDave1776, I think you are preaching to the choir; excluding of course the usual suspects on this forum who voted for the scum.

However from what I can tell we are increasingly seeing the results of 50 years of social manipulation. The closing of mental institutions and putting the mentally ill on the streets to live amongst us. The increasing use of the term cruel and unusual punishment, to turn incarceration and punishment into three hots a cot and a gym.

We are seeing the ramifications of the Soviet Union's effort to undermine the West. If you haven't go watch Yuri Bezmenov's interview. If you consider the last 50 years, he's basically describing it.

Our society was degenerating and slowly moving in a socialist direction even as early as the 90s, however the real accelerant was social media. Increasingly as I look at my children and their friends I am amazed at how few have any degree of adequate curiosity, suspicion, or will put in the work to independently check data. Most of the time their idea of independently checking data is clicking on the next link.

Social media had to be the former Soviet Union's absolute wet dream! Imagine every propagandist and every communist country seeing a system whereby borders were neutralized content was turned into indecipherable distributed bits, and could be beamed directly into the hand of mushy brains!

Amongst my children's age group there are precious few who seem to see through it. So far I have not been able to put my finger on what makes them unique. Some have parents who appear to be quite left leaning and others have parents to the far right of me. What those youngsters do have is a healthy suspicion regarding what others tell them, curiosity, and a willingness to actually go look at things different than what they may believe or they are being told.

Unfortunately the number of those with that healthy level of curiosity in my experience is so low that it doesn't matter.

I have found it interesting that on more than one occasion when speaking with one younger than I, young enough to not have known the existence of the Soviet Union, when I mentioned the Soviet Union they immediately dismiss it and say they're gone doesn't matter. When I explain that the intelligence and propaganda organizations of the Soviet Union didn't magically cease to exist when the Soviet Union fell but were often self-funded and simply went looking for a new master; a few seem to have a dimly lit light bulb moment. I have often found it amazing even amongst my generation who watched the Iran-Contra trials live Don't get it. The organizations and effort that Bezmenov describes I do not believe magically went away with a dissolution of the Soviet Union. Rather they went about their business using their Western funds from their shell and front companies, while their senior management went looking for new state sponsors.

I don't see North Korea, the Chi-Coms, the Venezuelans, or others walking away from that offer. Why would any communist state walk away from what was almost certainly the largest and best funded and organized entities focused on undermining the West?

As essentially stateless entities post Soviet Union you just sell your services to the highest bidder!

 

[IndyDave1776]

IndyDave1776, I think you are preaching to the choir; excluding of course the usual suspects on this forum who voted for the scum.

However from what I can tell we are increasingly seeing the results of 50 years of social manipulation. The closing of mental institutions and putting the mentally ill on the streets to live amongst us. The increasing use of the term cruel and unusual punishment, to turn incarceration and punishment into three hots a cot and a gym.

We are seeing the ramifications of the Soviet Union's effort to undermine the West. If you haven't go watch Yuri Bezmenov's interview. If you consider the last 50 years, he's basically describing it.

Our society was degenerating and slowly moving in a socialist direction even as early as the 90s, however the real accelerant was social media. Increasingly as I look at my children and their friends I am amazed at how few have any degree of adequate curiosity, suspicion, or will put in the work to independently check data. Most of the time their idea of independently checking data is clicking on the next link.

Social media had to be the former Soviet Union's absolute wet dream! Imagine every propagandist and every communist country seeing a system whereby borders were neutralized content was turned into indecipherable distributed bits, and could be beamed directly into the hand of mushy brains!

Amongst my children's age group there are precious few who seem to see through it. So far I have not been able to put my finger on what makes them unique. Some have parents who appear to be quite left leaning and others have parents to the far right of me. What those youngsters do have is a healthy suspicion regarding what others tell them, curiosity, and a willingness to actually go look at things different than what they may believe or they are being told.

Unfortunately the number of those with that healthy level of curiosity in my experience is so low that it doesn't matter.

I have found it interesting that on more than one occasion when speaking with one younger than I, young enough to not have known the existence of the Soviet Union, when I mentioned the Soviet Union they immediately dismiss it and say they're gone doesn't matter. When I explain that the intelligence and propaganda organizations of the Soviet Union didn't magically cease to exist when the Soviet Union fell but were often self-funded and simply went looking for a new master; a few seem to have a dimly lit light bulb moment. I have often found it amazing even amongst my generation who watched the Iran-Contra trials live Don't get it. The organizations and effort that Bezmenov describes I do not believe magically went away with a dissolution of the Soviet Union. Rather they went about their business using their Western funds from their shell and front companies, while their senior management went looking for new state sponsors.

I don't see North Korea, the Chi-Coms, the Venezuelans, or others walking away from that offer. Why would any communist state walk away from what was almost certainly the largest and best funded and organized entities focused on undermining the West?

As essentially stateless entities post Soviet Union you just sell your services to the highest bidder!

I agree that i am preaching to the choir. My point is to encourage the choir to really stop and unpack it rather than just accepting it as an addendum to the current political scene.

Thank you for an excellent post!

 

[BugI02]

I deliberately selected the name of the old Soviet official newspaper since the name literally means "truth" while the only truthful content was usually the date.

I would like to explore a number of issues.

1. WTF is a conspiracy theory? So far as I can tell it is nothing but weasel words used to dismiss issues that the potentially and probably guilty parties don't want to address on merit. Why do we tolerate this? Why do we accept it even when the arithmetic will allow no other conclusion? We accepted a dread plague without corresponding dead people. We accepted a rigged election with vote counts being dropped at a rate several times the mechanical limitations of the tabulation machines. We accepted seeing on video the same ballots run through the machines repetitively. WTF?

2. As a corollary, why to so many demand confirmation of a lie being told or lawful conduct being violated from the usual media suspects who are clearly partisan before believing anything is wrong. This is like refusing to believe there is anything wrong at the henhouse unless a fox (red animal, not Tucker Carlson), mink, or weasel reports it to you.

3. Debunked. This supposedly means that clear facts have been presented to disprove an accusation. In reality it is a weasel word that means the accused person or persons denied it and that settles it. Why do we accept this?

4. Fact checking. Snopes is perhaps the worst offender but certainly isn't alone. Snopes has a hard left political alignment and no investigative capacity beyond doing internet searches and declaring what is Pravda. No boots on the ground. Why do we even consider what these tools have to say?

5. Why in the universe has "because Simon says" become an acceptable accounting for anything? Has the average American gone braindead?

6. Why are so many so resistant to accepting the possibility of corruption, even among those one would expect to know better, even in the absence of a plausible alternative?[Because they are terrified of the alternative. The people who are doing just fine don't want the boat rocked]

Fact-checking the fact-checkers

It is time for the news business to admit that “fact-checking” is a tiresome, misleading, and dishonest blight on actual reporting.

www.washingtonexaminer.com

“Fact-checkers,” often employed by full-time “fact-checking” organizations, are widely granted weighty authority they haven’t earned and don’t deserve. Members of the fact-checker species are no more likely to be right than the reporters whose work they presume to judge. They are themselves often merely former reporters who reached their ceiling in real journalism, or else young novices who have still to learn how it’s done. Yet they’re accorded outsize gravitas. That’s why shallow would-be rebuttals that are really nothing more than opinion pieces are often labeled “fact checks.” Their stolen authority conceals rather than exposes the truth.

Scratch a fact-checker and he’s just another guy lugging around his prejudices and thinking (like a grumpy reader) that a story is flat wrong just because it isn’t written the way he’d have written it. It’s more than a decade since I told my reporters not even to refer in their stories to fact-checkers’ findings. Because they’re irrelevant. That a fact-checker concludes X, Y, or Z usually reveals nothing useful.

Yet fact-checking has spread like a nasty rash over the nether regions of our profession. The people conferring “pinocchios” and “pants on fire” ratings are as likely as not to base their decisions on criteria less related to accuracy than to personal taste, ideology, or slavish acceptance and imposition of a tyrannical orthodoxy.

The currency of “debunking” is so devalued that one can now say reliably only that it denotes something the supposed debunker disagreed with. Actual debunking admits of no compromise. A story cannot be undebunked. A story from which a fact-checker withdraws a “pants on fire” rating, as PolitiFact did recently after the New York Times broke ranks on the Wuhan lab theory, is one that was never shown to be wrong and was instead simply defamed. The people checking the facts made faulty assumptions and sloppy decisions of exactly the type they profess themselves suited to guard against. It’s that bad.

 

[NKBJ]

I'll say it again, much of it reminds me of the knee jerk reactions you'd see in people when the topic of UFO's was brought up. But that's changing now isn't it?
Why, because people are being taught to consider it differently!


Hey, where'd the UFO thread go?
Did a search and the threads that came up wouldn't open.
Oh well.

 

[AtTheMurph]

"Conspiracy Theory" was developed by the CIA to smear news stories they did not like. It is a tactic in disinformation.

So too "debunked".

 

[NKBJ]

And so now many everyday people are unable to resist...
(insert scary music)
Dunt, dunt, dunt, dunh-h-h-h!
The dreaded jiffy pop syndrome!



OK, just having fun with this.
What's really happening is that a lot of people just don't go look at what they have an adverse reaction to.