This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
And we generally agree mainstream publications are bad in quality, and that a good indication of trash articles is when massive claims rest on singular anonymous sources. Bad practices don't stop being bad practices when they conform to your prejudices.
The statement still applies that there are still reporting requirements and oversight channels.
If Noam Chomsky is your guiding star on objectivity or insight into government thinking, you might as well take the government at face value. Likewise, if government motives were never true, you wouldn't be quoting government persons like Condoleezza Rice for motives.
Only if you want to project a specific interpretation of 'attack' to fit a quote approaching a decade ago well outside of the context of an alleged Nordstream attack.
Competently. People studying Russian vulnerabilities does not mean they are responsible for any perceived attack on a Russian vulnerability.
This is also where I'll note that this actually is an example of the incredulity fallacy. That you cannot see how others would interpret does not mean that others would not do it differently.
Not really. Also, consensus building.
Thus diminishing the credibility of the source, whose claimed insight into the military operational dynamic is the crux of the article.
Only if I was arguing on the basis that I don't see how something is possible, as opposed to arguing on the basis of something not being possible on grounds X, Y, Z.
Yes, because many people are inclined to blame the US no matter who does something. The fact that you treat the Biden statement is a causal link is precisely the dynamic why it would work as a covert operation by anyone else- because, in lack of evidence, people will project.
And also because your response is irrelevant to how covert operations are categorized, which is the argument you are responding to- that the person claiming to be a government source is mis-using a government term in ways that it does not actually mean.
If everyone already suspects the USA did it, it would be much easier for someone else to pull off a covert operation.
It is obvious. Hence why the lack of verifiable evidence despite all the eyes significantly undermines the claims of the story, as do some of the factual inaccuracies.
Also, argument by incredulity again.
I'm sure it would seem so to someone operating from motivated reasoning.
This, again, assumes the characterization is the argument, as opposed to the other points.
Counter-productive and against the earlier limitations that prioritized secrecy.
You can be secretive or you can facilitate with more actors, but you can't use both arguments simultaneously.
So do conspiracy theories, which regularly rely on inconsistent timelines to create context from unrelated events and then ignore related relevant context that inconveniences the theory.
The author of this article is a past conspiracy theorist. This is a matter of record, and does shape the level of scrutiny their reliance on various techniques might imply.
No, argument that the author doesn't know what he's talking about, and is bad at inventing capabilities.
I'll leave in my original text here in quotes just to emphasize that this is neither a counter-argument for the quote or relevant to what the quote was pointing at.
Then the aircraft's presence isn't a secret, which means it's proximity at the time of command detonation wouldn't be a secret, which defeats the purpose of a secret operation secretly placing explosives.
The theory simultaneously requires the US government to care about secrecy to go to exceptional lengths to maintain it, and not caring about it.
Strangely, no. Now, admittedly, it might look that way if you cut out the supporting arguments, but this is the sort of removal of context typical in conspiracy thinking.
Not much. You'll continue being wrong for the wrong reasons, continue to discredit your general position in the contrast, and continue to undermine your favored associates by contagion of ferverently pushing a weak conspiracy theory as stronger than the evidence supports. By contrast, I'll get a wry amusement.
When there are many weak elements in an article that demonstrate a trend, the volume is the point.
Also, irony.
Certainly. I wrote it days after the initial posting, when it was no longer in the automatically expanded part of the browser, when new sub-topics had already buried it.
Thanks to your re-post trying to put it back on visibility, some might actually be curious enough to follow a link. No promises, since you were buried pretty quickly.
Yes, well no. You certainly did reply. If it weren't for you also re-posting this, I wouldn't have a reason to link to it either.
The argument remains that in addition to the issues that other people have pointed, it retains the characteristics of being source by someone someone unfamiliar with how governments work and with inconsistent claims of the level of secrecy entailed, of which many examples were raised, which undermines the validity of the single claimed source who is supposed to be a highly placed person in the US government who stated that secrecy was a priority.
Yes, but not because of that.
I don't think you do understand how journalism works.
The story is the story. If the story has a single source, that's the story. What is a journalist supposed to do in that case? Extort a source? Betray him? If nobody wants to talk, then nobody wants to talk. A journalist reports on what can be reported.
He has been right since I have been alive, and everything historical I've checked.
Or do you honestly believe USA went into Iraq to liberate the country and fight terrorism?
You are throwing a smokescreen. You said you haven't met an American in government framing the concern in terms of "threat to western dominance", and I showed you one. If USA wasn't worried about Russian influence in Europe, why would they want to attack Russia economically?
I'm not talking about the explosion, I'm talking about your claim about the motive. No mind-reading is necessary to show that USA has always been an enemy of Russia. I can give you many more examples.
And BTW, in 2014 Nord Stream 2 already had 3 years in the making.
Straw man.
Another straw man. I never said I don't see how others could interpret this.
How many examples do you need of American bureaucrats interested in hurting Russia do you need? Would 10 do the trick?
Or are you going to dismiss every one of them? Then the claim is falsifiable, isn't it?
False. The article never stated that.
No. The fallacy applies regardless of how many grounds you have.
Hasty generalization fallacy. The fact that many people did that doesn't mean that all people did that, and in particular doesn't mean that I did that.
Straw man. I never said I treated it as a causal link.
That's as far as I go. I'm not going to chase hundreds of week arguments on top of dozens of weak arguments.
If you wanted to seriously defend your position you would have picked your strongest argument and defend that instead of keeping up this Gish gallop strategy.
Well that's a shame, because I do criticize the western media for running shakey and often wrong stories on singular anonymous sources. If you do not, that's on you.
Simple- find corresponding evidence to support the claims. A single person making claims is not news to report, it is rumor-mongering. More importantly, it's a known type of journalistic failure that's prone to confirmation bias where reporters report the things they want to be true in order to impact the world, as opposed to questioning things that might undercut the narrative.
As the author has in the past engaged in conspiracy theory publication, such as the OBL raid, this isn't just a hypothetical concern, but a known weakness.
This suggests you are either very young, or very modest checking skills, when it comes to Chomsky.
I absolutely believe that many American government people who advocated the Iraq War thought they were, in fact liberating the Iraq War. I think they were incompetent and arrogant, but not insincere that they thought that the Iraqis would be better without a tyrannical dictator who suppressed a majority of his own populace.
I have met other people whose frank assessment was that they fully expected radical islamic group attention to re-focus onto Iraq and not on AQ-style projection attacks into the US.
I also find credible that the neocons thought Iraq was but the first step in a broader campaign to topple multiple regimes in the middle east, especially Iran, which was and is a state-supporter of terrorism, and that while incredibly condemnable it was a sincere interest to go after past and present state sponsors of terrorism.
I also believe the USA had many overlapping interests to go into Iraq, in addition to its views on Iraqi liberation and the war on terror plans of the neocons.
You didn't. Your own quote didn't frame it terms of "threat to western dominance." This is precisely the sort of 'unable to use their own terminology' I accused the article of lacking.
And this is a shift in claims to a strawman. The claim isn't that the USA wasn't worried about Russian influence in Europe. The claim is that the Americans in the American government don't frame the implications of Russian influence in Europe as "threat to western dominance." Government bureaucracies have their own sub-cultures on how they view and describe the world, but characterizations like "threat to western dominance" are how people outside of, and generally opposed to, the US government frame the US government concern, not how the US government views its own position.
Thus, an alleged highly placed US government person who uses turns of phrases and sub-cultural memes typical of outside critics of the US government lowers the credibility of the claim that they are a highly placed US government person.
And many examples would not support a totality argument, or a how the US government viewed the Russian government. As open for criticism as the Clinton administration was, characterizing its Russian policy as viewing Russia as an enemy is more than a stretch, and even the Bush 2 government had more than a little internal debate on how to approach Putin, hence the criticism of Bush by members of his own party.
The fact that you think 10 examples could represent the totality of American government of perspectives on Russia over thirty years is rather indicative of your lack of understanding of the US government.
Different Administrations over the post-Cold War period had different perceptions and prescriptions for Russia policy. The Clintons thought neoliberal reforms and supporting Yeltsin would help Russia. He may have been wrong- but the failure of neoliberal reforms with Russia is not evidence of ill-will as opposed to part of the general critque of the Clinton-era neoliberalism. Bush II was pre-occupied by the Iraq War, and governed over internal party splits between old-guard Cold Warriors who were suspicious, the religious right which was more interested in domestic items and the war on terror, and the then-nascant base rebellion that would manifest in the Tea Party and later trump that doesn't really care about Russia. Obama tried his own anything-but-his-predecessor, and infamously sent Hillary Clinton for an attempted 'reset' and reframing. Trump was infamously not a NATO-Atlanticist, and both he and his faction of the Republican party regularly accused of being soft on Russia.
The claim is falsifiable because it claims a totality that doesn't exist no matter how many examples are provided, because totalities are disproven by the existence of counter-examples, not proven by supporting examples.
That different people in the US government had different views of how hard (or soft) Russia policy should be, and what is or is not an anti-Russia action, just means there is dispute, not that the people who wanted a hardline were somehow the consensus of the US government.
The article sites the source for a number of military operational dynamics that serve as demonstration of both the source's access into the conspiracy and to explain claimed means and requirements of the conspiracy over time.
This is not true, and is an extension of the fallacy of fallacies.
The fact that you have cited events without causal relationships to the Nord Stream pipeline as evidence of a causal relationship indicates that yes, you did do that.
I did not say that you said you treated it as a causal link. I said that you treated it as a causal link. Your stated position on the manner is irrelevant.
Aside from the lack of hundreds, I rather suspect you will, so that you can get the last word once again.
The argument- which you once again avoided addressing by this attempted gish-gallop, remains as stated:
The argument remains that in addition to the issues that other people have pointed, it retains the characteristics of being source by someone someone unfamiliar with how governments work and with inconsistent claims of the level of secrecy entailed, of which many examples were raised, which undermines the validity of the single claimed source who is supposed to be a highly placed person in the US government who stated that secrecy was a priority.
Though there is one last thing before I leave you to get the last word once again, just to revist your earlier counter-argument.
Thank you for raising interest in the original posting. The streisand effect says hello, and it has received far more engagement than it would have had you not posted.
I would love for you to try to find the "evidence" of whatever claims you are supposed to be making about Nord Stream 2.
Journalists don't make claims, they simply report the evidence they managed to find.
That's a hallucination. Hersh has never engaged in conspiracy theories, the Osama bin Laden information was confirmed by Obama. Hersh was vindicated, as he usually is.
It is you the one that has a motivated reasoning to distrust Hersh's reporting.
Neither of which can be falsifiable. Right?
Converse error fallacy.
And you are wrong. You are mind-reading based on a converse error fallacy.
You are wrong again. I said I was done with that particular subthread, I didn't say I was done with all subthreads.
You may notice I didn't address every single weak argument you've put forward in this subthread either.
False. You have never established that. All your arguments point towards someone who doesn't know how the military works, which I already addressed.
The article never mentioned anything remotely close to that. How many people do you think hold a top-secret clearance in USA?
Once again I don't think you know what you are talking about. The premise of the Streisand effect is someone trying to hide information. What information do you think I'm trying to "hide"?
The 'evidence' in this report is a series of claim made by an alleged anonymous source with access. Moreover, the claims of the anonymous source are unsupported by corroborating evidence (hence the reliance on argument by narrative), and contradicted by available evidence (flight data that doesn't match the claimed trigger mechanism).
This now begs what you think is a hallucation, as well as what specific information you think was verified versus what wasn't.
Repeating the claim from a position of motivated reasoning neither makes it motivated reasoning or disarms the stated basis of skepticism.
No, you could certainly identify your age and the depth of your checking to Chomsky's more contentious claims which have been critiqued over time.
Misuse of converse fallacy.
Still misuse. The criticism was a characterization. Your rebuttal was that it was false as you never claimed the characterization. The rebuttal to your rebuttal is that it was never claimed you claimed the characterization. This is not a converse error fallacy, this is basic strawman fallacy being rejected.
I am quite correct that you lack hundreds, and remain vindicated in my expectation that you will continue to strive for the last word despite multiple claims you are done.
I note you are also still on the same subthread, and expect you to continue to do so for reasons of predictability and ego.
No, I'm well aware you're not addressing them, but my viewpoint is that you're abandoning weak positions that your deflections could not resolve.
True. This is and remains my argument.
I have made my argument on multiple points. Whether you accept it as established is irrelevant.
All of my arguments were not restricted to the military, nor did your addressing actually resolve or mitigate the criticism. 'Address' does not mean 'defeated,' and you have consistently dropped threads that remained contested, even if you claim to do so because they are weak.
With access to covert operations planning at the White House level for black operations specifically designed to avoid oversight? Very, very, very, very few, and only at high levels of the US government where alleged meetings were taking place with people who constitute highly placed members of the current administration.
This, again, is indicative of someone who doesn't understand the workings of the US government.
Hiding is only one of the causes of the streisand effect. Trying to otherwise draw attention away from information is another form. By placing your particular rebuttal well below the current topic of the day- below the fold in American media parlance- even as you created a new subthread, you engaged in a way to minimize attention to standing counter-arguments.
However, your attempt to re-raise the topic in a different space, and let the previous thread die in obscurity with your rebuttal as the last word in any future review, only drew more attention to the counter-argument... even though you attempted to use a lack of attention as a basis of criticism in the lower thread.
That argument seems to be a little humorous in retrospect, given the unmasked voting ratios in periods where anyone likely read it, but the obvious argument on appeal to the majority is obvious, even as it would be wrong here.
However, as we're sufficiently meta here to note that the scope of discussion is narrowing, and I've made clear my perception of why, I'll let any future reviewers make their judgement as to who is correct. You can have the last word if it will help you feel better, but this exchange has drawn it's expected pattern, and I doubt you'll find any vindication in being predicted.
That is evidence.
Prove it.
I am 40. And you pick a controversial Chomsky "claim".
No, it's not a misuse. You are literally saying because I appear to have done something, therefore I did it. If it glitters, then it's gold. That's a fallacy.
Your viewpoint is wrong. If you want me to address your "strongest" positions, then only mention those.
Simply saying "true" does nothing, you have to substantiate your claim, which you haven't done so far. Therefore your claim is dismissed.
This is a probabilistic fallacy. You are talking about
P(X), we are talking aboutP(X|O). Yet another example of motivated reasoning.More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link