This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:
Quality Contributions to the Motte
Contributions for the week of January 30, 2023
Rowliphobia
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of February 6, 2023
Who Teaches the Teachers?
@gog:
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
@naraburns
In the interest of reflecting position better, may I request a re-titling of the link from
To
...thoroughly doubts the Seymour Hersh article claiming that the US wrecked the Nord Stream Pipeline
?
My position for some time that I consider the US among the potential candidates. I do not find Seymour Hersh's claims credible evidence for reasons raised, but it doesn't change the position that I find all the regional actors as credible culprits between motive and capability.
Separately, I'll just add a note that an additional basis of doubt for the Hersh account only now available with a few weeks of retrospect is a lack of corroborating findings driven by the claimed reveal.
When new-and-true leak reports come out, it generally drives follow-on inquiries and reporting by interested/motivated parties who were not previously aware of the revealed information, and in the process validating the claims made in the reveal. Even when the official coverup is maintained, other motivated actors (activists, independent investigators, external government interests) are cued into where to look, and have access to publication channels where the new information is publicized and signal-boosted beyond the influence of the conspiracy. The nature of unraveling a conspiracy is that it unravels it becomes easier to unravel further, as more threads are identified to be pulled upon. With the numerous threads in the Hersh thesis- from the Norwegian complicity, the potential witnesses during the NATO exercise, regional airspace monitoring for the command detonation flgiht, or even Hersh's alleged source providing follow-on information- there should be things that interested parties would find, and there are plenty of people interested in validating Hersh's claims that the US was to blame.
Instead of generating substantiating reporting, however, the dissident-west reporting cycle never really moved past the phase of reporting on Hersh's story. The expected sort of signal boosting occurred, and Hersh attempted a media tour to try and keep visiblity alive and well, and the expected media ecosystem of pushback against pushback occurred with people decrying a coverup, but none of Hersh's supporting media ecosystem found or developed any meaningful new reporting. There were no new reporting or signal boosting of Norwegian media identifying potential Norwegian acting agencies / organizations in the conspiracy, no new interviews by Seymour's alleged source to any other media actor to validate his existence, not even counter-rebuttals to things like the aircraft discrepency issues that were identified in in the initial pushback. Rather than identify and signal boost the sort of reporting that might have justified further reporting, even the pro-Hersh media ecosystem has basically moved on rather than any sort of drip-drip-drip method of new reveals and expansions. This would be bad in and of itself, but is critical given that the immediate counter-Hershe claims regarding things like aircraft flight claims should- but haven't- been debunked themselves by identifying/validating Hersh's claims on the command-detonation flight timeline. This functionally left the media-cycle on expanding the story ending with the rebuttal, with weaker counter-rebuttals such as 'well, the data could be falsified' being utterly non-verifiable and requiring a buy-in to the conspiracy. As is, the media cycle has devolved into just variations of repeating the same initial claims- maybe with the addition of 'this is being suppressed!'- but without actually expanding it.
A conspiratorially-minded sort might point to this as proof of the effectiveness of the conspiracy, that records have been altered and dissident reporting repressed, but this is also the sort of media dynamic we'd expect with a dud story. Given the lack of any supporting follow-on reporting on the key Norwegian connections, including a lack of substantiating reporting to signal-boost to defend against the OSINT claims of the claimed flights not matching up, I wouldn't expect anything significant in the future either.
Done!
Thank ye
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link