“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift
Welcome to basic news headline etiquette. You probably missed the class where we discussed why news outlets call people who aren’t convicted “alleged” criminals – in this case, Patrick Wintour and Sinéad Campbell of The Guardian are not an international law tribunal here to adjudicate what the FCDO investigated.
You think I think I care what Singapore thinks.
I think Tharman Shanmugaratnam should be tied, blindfolded, and walked into the Port of Singapore over a plank covered in faced-up used heroin needles.
Here’s what you’re talking about since you didn’t cite it.
FYI, The Straits Times is basically a step down from a state mouthpiece. If you don’t believe me, just read the article:
The cannabis seized from Omar is sufficient to feed the addiction of about 144 abusers for a week.
Here’s a Human Rights Watch article from five days ago not flagrantly trying to justify the state-sanctioned murder of a man convicted of an entirely harmless crime. Fuck TST for this journalistic swill.
Agreed it makes him an accomplice to fascism inasmuch as hopping on the bandwagon and materially supporting for self-enrichment. I wouldn’t object to people saying that makes him straight-up fascist; it’s a close call for me, where he doesn’t give a shit about the fascist ideology itself and cares exclusively about money, but that’s still doing a fascism™ at the end of the day.
But, you know, they kind of accused him of being an avid neo-Nazi. “Nazi” and “card-carrying” have meanings. Like we really want to pretend the person who called him a “nazi fascist” knows fuck-all about Bessent? Even the tidbit you just shared about how he got here?
a […] nazi fascist
I can expect you know literally anything about Scott Bessent given this acute political insight. I didn’t know non-fascist Nazis could be a thing, but now I’ll be on the lookout.
So is he a “card-carrying Nazi fascist” exclusively because this disgusting, wealth-stealing, crony capitalist vermin supports Trump and is in his cabinet for self-enrichment, or did you have a complaint that makes him a “Nazi fascist” outside of that?
Genuinely curious what else you think this man has done to make him a literal, avowed Nazi; I’ve cut the snark for this part.
The original Reuters article instead of this dumpster fire of a source. (Canned explanation whenever I’m not so lazy.)
Also, the IB Times (as usual for this piece of shit outlet) is citing a quote from over a month ago as if it’s new news.
The time to read the Grayzone source? I mean I could just dismiss it out-of-hand for what it is (again, like if someone linked to Breitbart), but it’s still sometimes casually interesting to read what fringe conspiracy websites write. As for the “research” (quick and shallow; I won’t dignify this by not using scare quotes) and writing, I type at 110 WPM, I’ve been writing as a hobby for 10 years (okay, this one doesn’t show very well), and I’ve been researching as a hobby for 10 years. Quickly perusing an article, seeing what its sources are, and seeing what else has been written about the article’s focus elsewhere is very straightforward. What I did isn’t nearly on the level of research I’d normally do. That’s not a brag; that’s saying I’m not wasting real time on this nonsense.
The fact that it is so disputed and the details are not fully known
Oh, you’re trying to end this in a draw because you know your position is unspeakably awful and indefensible to sane people, so backing down from “the rebels did it and it’s effectively impossible the regime did it because muh 2 km”, you’re now pivoting to it just being oh so murky and will we ever truly know?
No. Bashar al-Assad perpetrated it. Serious organizations don’t equivocate about this. Goddamn spineless that you’re pulling this “uwu it’s just too hard for anyone to say” bullshit. I could at least half-respect (as stupid and awful as it is) that you had an outspoken belief, but now it’s clear you’ll just say whatever muddies the waters the best because you value propagandizing over the truth. And here I thought the opposite might be true when you came out with unequivocal “al-Assad did nothing wrong” rhetoric (albeit with an objectively fucked version of “truth”). But no, you’re just really bad at it.
If you read the reporting from Grayzone, you’d have seen that the study done by MIT
Oh hey, good news: I did! And it’s bullshit. It funnily links to a NYT article covering it (I guess they’re credible if and only if they’re supporting your side). It also leaves out that credible organizations like HRW (which I’ll say, preemptively, I know you’re going to dismiss, but you’re going to dismiss anyone against your war crime denial in bad faith, so I don’t give a shit and neither should anyone else) pointed out at the time rebels didn’t have the means to do this.
Moreover, it conspicuously fails to mention a later debunking of the notion that the Lloyd and Postol’s conclusion is some kind of slam dunk:
When questioned about this in a recent interview with the Turkish website Diken Hersh dismissed the Volcano rockets, seemingly because he believes a range of “a mile” somehow means they should be discounted as important to his narrative. Hersh refers to the work of Ted Postol and Richard Lloyd who believe the range of the rockets is about 2km. But this range issue isn’t the problem Hersh appears to think.
Video footage from both sides of the conflict has allowed researchers to accurately find the positions of government controlled areas on 21 August. The Russian-language news site ANNA News posted two dozen videos showing “Operation al-Qaboun”, a Syrian government military operation running from June to August 2013. Embedded with Syrian forces, they were able to film the progress of the operation to clear positions between Jobar and Qaboun, a strip of land about 2km away from the 21 August impact sites.
Videos from opposition groups show the other side of the fighting, including attacks on checkpoints and government movements. Based on this information it appears that the front lines were about 2km away from the furthest impact sites of rockets used on 21 August. Only two rockets landed at the 2km maximum range described by Lloyd and Postol, with the reported impact sites of the remaining rockets being between 1.5km-1.8km away. It has been possible to confirm the precise impact locations of some of the rockets by a combination of GPS information, satellite map imagery, photographs and videos, and around a dozen impact sites were reported by local groups in eastern Ghouta. Hersh’s belief that the 2km rocket range is enough to dismiss them from his narrative is clearly misguided.
Despite Hersh’s claims we can clearly see that the rockets were used by the Syrian government, and within range of government controlled territory.
Your funeral if you want to keep denying well-established war crimes only still denied by e.g. the Russian government, fringe, tankie propagandist outlets, and said outlets’ moron readership. Whereas outlets like MintPress and The Grayzone may precede their reputations here with readers who aren’t well-informed about propaganda outlets, they surely do know that someone coming in here with apologia for al-Assad is batshit insane.
I wasn’t sure you’d let yourself get baited this hard into revealing who you really are, but here we are, I guess.
I love how you’re using fucking The Grayzone to support this – understanding that most readers here won’t have heard of it and its well-earned notorious reputation. Yeah, fucking no shit The Grayzone also denies al-Assad’s atrocities. This is like defending a claim by InfoWars by linking to Breitbart? “Get owned, liberal” in both cases.
I removed the numbered citation indicators from that quote for elegance (because they serve no purpose here), but it’s well-referenced, which is why I put it there with a link such that anyone was welcome to trivially check those references.
Sometimes I wish a hell existed so that tankies like you could wind up there for constantly, full-throatedly denying atrocities – famine-induced genocides, cultural genocides, chemical attacks on civilians. You don’t give a single, solitary shit about “anti-imperialism”; you just want a monopoly on imperialism.
info that mainstream media purposely omits
Oh, you mean like denying al-Assad’s 2013 chemical attack on Ghouta? I’m glad they’re telling the real truth that the slimy MSM wants to keep hidden. (Of course I know you do mean that, because you’re a fucking tankie disgrace.)
Regardless of whether this particular article is true or not (haven’t attempted to verify), most people probably don’t know of this source and should. This garbage fire of a source doesn’t belong on a news community.
MintPress News has reposted content from Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik, and is listed as a “partner” of PeaceData, a Russian fake news site run by the Internet Research Agency. A report from New Knowledge includes MintPress News as part of the “Russian web of disinformation,” and the site has published fake authors attributed to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency. MintPress News defended Russia’s invasion of Crimea, stating that Ukraine’s post-revolution government was illegitimate.
Keep your trash in .ml, please.
Sanitized link without the UTM parameter:
Yeah, and if that’s what you guessed “going by the title”, then I’d guess you’re functionally illiterate.
Do you also read headlines about the crisis in Cuba think, “Going by the title, I guess other countries don’t have economic problems”?
Hang on, I’m busy trying to solve another math problem.
Does anyone know what 3 – 1497 is? I’m really bogged down on this one.
Much of the oil from the mostly shut Strait of Hormuz was headed for Asia, hit hardest by recent energy shocks.
Life is so much easier when you expand your consciousness and read a whole 60 words into the article you’re commenting on.
Excuse me, we don’t question Trump’s tac(o)tical genius here. This is only temporary pain while he guides us to a land of oil and freedom.
It’s sad but true: until such a time as the US markets bounce back, Trump really did rape those children and try to cover it up. About 3500 more points to go.
For those wondering where 20x is coming from: