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Post by miscmisc on Oct 26, 2017 17:50:55 GMT 1
And then, Frontline (PBS) does this:
And I have yet another documentary that I won't ever have to watch.
"Yeltsin, the progressive Russian president"
Yeah, welfare-destroying, parliament-bombing, Chechen-massacring, oligarchy-creating, free-media-destroying, election-rigging "progressive", that Yeltsin.
These people have no fucking shame or integrity.
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Post by miscmisc on Oct 26, 2017 17:57:54 GMT 1
I've said this many, many times, but I would totally watch and enjoy the hell out of a documentary that talks living shit of Putin if it doesn't try to paint Yeltsin in good color. I'm not interested in bollocks. I'm not interested in fake history. It's Yeltsin that started all the bad things, so don't fucking call him a "progressive" or such nonsense only because he was the only Russian leader who bowed down to the US might.
I've only managed to find a little more than a few watchable anti-Putin documentaries, and predictably none of them were made in the US.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 2, 2017 21:09:05 GMT 1
It's getting increasingly hard to see a difference between the Russian Duma and US Congress. They are both circus freak shows with ignorant tinfoil-hat morons, but it's amazing how fucking little it takes to activate the freak-show mode in the US. What a bunch of thin-skinned clowns, or lying fuckers if they are knowingly spewing all that bullshit, those American representatives are.
To be fair, British imperialists were also remarkably thin-skinned when it comes to the other European powers of that time, showing the tendency to (hypocritically) overreact time and time again, but their hysteria rarely reached this level relative to the actual power and capabilities of their rivals.
I suspect the Americans are mentally insecure and weak. Made of incredibly fragile stuff, and the balance between their mental strength and the size of their ego is completely out of whack. How could that kind of know-nothing self-important weaklings ever maintain effective civilian control over the military and intel agencies? No wonder they've already given up on that idea pretty much.
It's absolutely dangerous to be ruled by a bunch of mental midgets with oversized ego.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 3, 2017 17:30:25 GMT 1
US Democrats are once again citing the deficit as a big reason to oppose the GOP tax plan. Those people never, ever learn.
Look, there are approx. 1,254 Americans who actually and seriously care about the deficit, and most of them live in Washington D.C., a place that has very little to do with the rest of the country. Sure, I know your conservative uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner whined about how "our children and grandchildren" will have to "bear the burden of the debt", and how the Chinese will take over America some day, but I can assure you that he's not actually seriously worried. It's just a talking point that people repeat mindlessly, without having a clue about what the "deficit" actually means, and is. Ask him if he cared about that when George W. was the president. I know he didn't.
It's a bogus issue, at least the way it has been framed by politicians and pundits. Most of those people can't even tell the difference between a national economy and household.
Deficit scare-mongering has been the conservative tribal sport, but the biggest deficit cutters in America have been Democrats, such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. On the other hand, pretty much all the Republican presidents ended up increasing the deficit. So, yeah, that's gigantic hypocrisy on the conservatives' part.
But the Dems were never rewarded for that "effort", and the Republicans were never punished for that hypocrisy. And the biggest reason of all for that is that it's a fucking fake issue in the first place. No one gives a shit in actuality. What Republicans care about is tax cut for the rich, tax cut for the rich, and tax cut for the rich. Deficit scare-mongering is above all just a strategy to gut the welfare programs and institutions.
You can't even score a brownie point by pointing out that Republican "hypocrisy". No one gives a shit. It doesn't affect the elections at all. You will get nice columns and articles from those useless conservative/centrist pundits and publications, but it won't do shit for your elections. Only freaks and neoclassical economists truly care, and they are usually wrong.
You get hardly anything from concern-trolling your opponents on the deficit, because no one gives a fuck. You will only end up alienating your base because you're just raising the fake issue that your enemies made up, an issue that was designed from the beginning to harm the things that your base traditionally cared a lot about.
It's a sure-fire vote loser in all aspects, but the Dems seem simply incapable of understanding it.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 6, 2017 20:21:28 GMT 1
Everyone has their own criteria or principles for judgment, and so do I. And I truly believe that I'm less harsh on Saudi Arabia than journalists and pundits ought to be, since for one, I have no obsession with "democracy". I tend to operate on a platform that is different from theirs.
Note I said they "ought to be". They've been reporting on the purge that the Saudi soon-to-be-king prince has been conducting as if it were happening in a fantasy land, with loads of stupid Game of Thrones references, as if ultimately it were just a subject of curiosity and therefore not that big a deal. It's strange given the criteria that they apply to most other similar things and events in the world.
It's okay to treat certain things differently as long as you present good specific reasons for that. They could be political, historical or even personal. You state them clearly, and let people judge your stance based on that.
But the mainstream journalists and pundits on that Saudi-Arabia-in-reform-process train give us none. You are given no clue why they consistently report on Saudi Arabia that way, the way that is drastically different from how they report on other countries, and I don't even just mean countries like Iran, Russia and Venezuela by that because the nice treatment that Saudi Arabia tends to receive from those people even goes way above that ally-versus-enemy level.
If you said to them, "So, are you bought? Is that it?", they would deny that vehemently. But they would never give you any good reason for the way they report on the kingdom either.
As long as that's the case, you must assume that they do that for completely non-journalistic reasons such as money and career, or/and that they're essentially US State Department mouthpieces.
Which they are, needless to say.
I know this is the same old rant that you're probably sick and tired of already, but it's just fucking disgusting.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 6, 2017 21:14:54 GMT 1
I know a Jordanian guy who was on the Saudi payroll to pitch in stories for the Western reporters who lived in the invisibly-gated community in Beirut where everyone only speaks English. He's not doing that anymore, but he was once the source of a major anti-Hezbollah story that was bogus. It's just so easy, because most of those people never ever get their lazy asses off the sofa and leave Beirut.
When you saw reports on Idlib, for example, more than 70% of them were written by that kind of people, who have never been to Syria outside Damascus, and would never step into Idlib since they knew they would be kidnapped in 24 hours over there. Imagine writing good things about such a place in your Beirut apartment relying solely on your "source".
I really don't want to paint all the Middle East reports on the mainstream media unreliable or bogus. There are many good ones, by good peeps, some of whom I personally know. But I'm really close to doing so. There's a certain threshold, and it's steadily reaching there. There's just so much bullshit out there, and you need to be educated and well-informed to filter out all the bad ones. But it's foolish to expect regular people to be that well-informed.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 6, 2017 21:39:25 GMT 1
The Guardian is reliably a bullshit geyser when it comes to Saudi Arabia. I don't know for how long it has been, but it is anyway. Even more glaringly so than the likes of the Washington Post. "risk-taker" "reform" "reform" "reform" Mohhamed bin Salman will strengthen the dictatorship even further as he's unusually young for the soon-to-be-king, and will keep most other branches of the royal family out of the decision making for decades to come. That's all the whole thing is about, not the fucking "reform". Ignore whatever the Guardian says about the kingdom. It's effectively a Saudi PR firm at this point. You can guess why on your own.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 7, 2017 6:34:35 GMT 1
BTW, Mohammed bin Salman's first biggest policy as the de facto head of the state (since the current king is a senile dementia case who tends to wander off at random during a meeting) was the war in Yemen. Gives you all the confidence you need, doesn't it?
He's a twat.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 8, 2017 12:44:36 GMT 1
British MPs call on gov’t to recognize Holodomor in Ukraine as genocide www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/unian-british-mps-call-govt-recognize-holodomor-ukraine-genocide.htmlEr, does Britain really want to go there? Stalin's justification for that horrendous "agricultural policy", which starved millions of Ukrainians (and Russians and Kazakhs, whom people hardly ever mention for some reason) to death, was frighteningly similar to the British ones for India, Ireland, Iran, Burma, etc. where an astronomical number of people starved to death due to the imperial "economic policy". The only difference was that one was done in the name of communism, while the other was in the name of free-market capitalism. Oh, and the latter was on a much bigger scale, obviously. I don't know. Are they sure they really want to go there? I wouldn't mind calling ALL of those "policy outcomes" genocides, especially the British ones because of their highly racist nature. I hear that part of history is nearly completely wiped off the official hard drive in the UK, but I'm trying to make sure that they really want to go there, and that they wouldn't mind the huge boomerang to hit them incredibly hard in the back of their head.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 8, 2017 13:29:05 GMT 1
The wild turn that the whole world took in 1945 can't be stressed enough, really. History was revised and reborn that year. The Winners wiped the slate clean and dumped all the garbage onto the Losers, as if Nazism and fascism (and Communism later) were singularly unique in their awfulness in the pre-1945 world. As if they weren't largely inspired by many of the Winners.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 8, 2017 13:55:44 GMT 1
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 8, 2017 15:21:37 GMT 1
This is as American as an apple pie: The dude won the Virginia state election, though. Very un-American! Seriously, though, you kinda feel that this oppo leaflet helped Carter if anything. They laid out Carter's good policy stance very plainly, and he even looks like a goofy fun dude there. American conservatives can be really, really dense.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 10, 2017 19:11:36 GMT 1
So, you guys are now catching a glimpse of what kind of a dangerous dickhead that CNBC/Guardian/Economist darling, Saudi "reform" prince Mohammed bin Salman (aka MBS), is.
On top of that, he's a fucking fool too. What else did you expect from a pampered 31 year old who has never, ever seen the real world? Look at his so-called "Vision 2030" comedy, and the Yemen atrocity, where the cholera epidemic, on top of the mass starvation caused by the blockade, is a real thing now, and where the Saudis are still nowhere near winning the war. He's a competent machiavellian domestically, but a walking talking policy disaster. His swiss-cheesy brain is so fucking full of hubris.
We would've been better off with the senile old man as the king. The Reform Prince will wreck the Middle East and beyond. It's a certainty. I guess that's some sort of a "reform".
One of the worst disasters of the Trump administration is that the clown president is in the pocket of the Saudi/Israeli alliance, and that a certain big faction of the State Department will try to milk it to the fullest extent.
And again, fuck the Western (Japanese totally included) mainstream media.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 10, 2017 19:39:45 GMT 1
The problem with the media is not exactly that it's "corrupt", but that there's little diversity of opinions to speak of in actuality. It's absolutely ruled by the herd mentality, and they constantly self-censor to comply with the dominant current. You don't have to be on any Gulf Arab payroll to puff up MBS and soft-peddle the crap that Saudi Arabia pulls; You see a guy in a big publication do it, and try not to deviate too much from his stance. And the same happens with one after another, ad infinitum. Meanwhile, major websites like Facebook and Google effectively shut out indie publications from people online with their "algorithm" to supposedly prevent "fake news" from spreading. The Russia Freakout has been a godsend for the mainstream publications in the US and many other Western countries.
It's absolutely hopeless, man, I'm telling you. It's fucking bleak.
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Post by miscmisc on Nov 21, 2017 17:48:50 GMT 1
The nerve of the US media is truly astonishing. Finally they began to talk about the plight of Yemen caused by the extensive blockade by the Saudis, led by the "Reform Prince", who deliberately destroyed/blocked the only seaport and airport for the Shia provinces after months of being unable to beat the Houthis (all the great super-expensive weapons, air force, and no goddamn army to speak of can't win you any fucking war, you know), but very, very few of those reports mention the role that the US/UK have played to support the Saudis materially and logistically.
It's propaganda in the true sense of the word. The average Joe would never know that his country has been actually assisting Saudi Arabia to implement the starvation strategy. All he gets is the assumption that his country is once again on the side of "human rights", and that it's once again a humanitarian "savior".
I don't even want to use the word "hypocrisy" here. It's something much worse than that. Gross, gross people.
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