Raziel
18d ago
Could you elaborate with actual concrete examples how mainstream media did it? My memory is hazy, but if I recall correctly, even some of the more liberal magazines like NYT specifically mentioned that they couldn't corroborate certain allegations against Kavanaugh with other people they questioned.
Raziel
23d ago
In what universe are NYT journalists higher on the totem pole than a chemical industry executive? And even if they were, they don't have some magically independent power to conjure life-screwing facts out of thin air.
Raziel
27d ago
How do you think people could actually deal with them practically though? Most of the time these people are invited to podcasts by hosts who are completely out of their depth, either being actually ignorant or pretending to be ignorant. God forbid, I am not in favor of deplatforming someone, but I find it otherwise rather frustrating that most of the discourse co-opted largely by people on the right tend to just devolve into circle jerking each other off or some dumb podcast host going "huh? why don't they talk about this more?" to every inanity that is spewed.
Raziel
27d ago
I don't know, I haven't seen the level of absolute lying and bullshit in other media sources. Might be the perspective if you only live in some Tucker-style right-wing echo chambers.
Many of the things he tweets out don't even require enormous amount of fact checking, simple heuristics about how the world works are enough to sense that something might be bullshit. There's no need to be charitable to someone who is one of the richest guys on the planet and blasts out nonsense to millions of gullible readers.
Raziel
30d ago
This is what Trump and his people (Colby in particular) are worried about. While the liberals have been starting and losing stupid wars in the Middle East, China has been building industry. While the liberals were bitching about Russian spying or taking towns nobody's ever heard of in Donbass, China has been building ships, missiles and planes. They produce more manufactured goods than the next ten countries combined. Now they're getting ready to go in on places that matter (chip producers, high-tech economies, sea lanes that dominate world trade) and the liberals want to prioritize helping Ukraine keep the maximum number of towns nobody's ever heard of in Donbass? Over the fate of the entire world, the decisive final battle for dominance?
Those things are not mutually exclusive. Aid to Ukraine has been a drop in the bucket as far as US military spending and budget is concerned. There is nothing in that spending that has stopped US from preparing for your so called vision of a decisive final battle for dominance with China. The reason why you have a big hole in the budget is not because of military spending, it is because of Social Security and Medicare. However, to be frank, if US was actually interested in mobilizing the will for standing up to China, you would actually fix all of that by raising taxes.
Dislodging Russian and Chinese co-operation on current terms is frankly delusional. As a Russian or Chinese leader, you would have to be frankly stupid to allow US to create a wedge between the two only because seemingly US has now warmed up to Russia.
What current situation has created is that for Europeans it is indeed better to be much more autonomous (and I have always agreed with that as an European), but furthermore, it is now better to build pragmatic ties with China rather than just follow whatever US dictates. Don't see how that benefits US if US is actually interested in taking on China.
Raziel
1mo ago
What outlets in Western media mischaracterized what happened? What distortions did they make in particular?
Raziel
1mo ago
Marty Made is largely a clown (actually thinks chief villain of WW2 was Churchill), although I haven't bothered to do that much of a deep research to understand if it's from some earnest place or he just does it for the sake of grift.
There isn't anything overly hypocritical in US conduct post-WW2, unless you subscribe to some fantasy world where everyone can and is willing to fully commit to idealism. Imperial Japanese era political foundations were dismantled to form a liberal democratic order and country was demilitarized. Yes, you can argue that there was too much of a rehabilitation of certain figures and families who were involved with Imperial Japan, but that was a pragmatic choice to contain the Soviet & China axis. Even if one casts suspicion on the moral intentions of establishing liberal democracy in Japan, feeding Japan fully into the rule-based liberal democratic capitalist market order was beneficial to US. At the time it made perfect sense thus to ally Japan.
Also, dude seems to be critical about invading countries and overthrowing governments when it comes to making a shining example of a country that does not do it (China), but then seems to be awfully warm about Russia. I at least respect left-wingers of the Chomskian vein for trying to build carefully crafted cogent arguments against US-led NATO world order, but god damn these silly right-wing amateurs who peddle in dumbed down versions of it.
That is the crux of the problem. At the end of the day, there's no problem for Elon (really) to run SpaceX or Tesla into bankruptcy. Sure, huge loss in net wealth, but at that level you are not motivated by equity in a company being your comfortable safety net for retirement. So there's no issue in also taking risky bets.
When it comes to government (that is not some banana tier republic), you can't really operate with that mindset.
Same problem actually with Trump and doing deals as if everything is just zero-sum one-period (no long-term co-operation) real estate deal.
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