there is one small nuisance here - if we start to treat all governments equally skeptic, we should also "fry live" all large corporations too.

How did we come to this imbalance?

<sarcasm>Yes. US government should publish it's nuclear launch codes on whitehouse.gov </sarcasm>

Conflating nuclear launch code secrets with war crime secrets: this is the problem with Americans today.

Truly free people are free to keep all the secrets they want.

The only reason to keep secrets is if they aren't free. Otherwise the secret protects nothing. Freedom is broad and self contradictory. Complete freedom for more than one person is impossible.

That's not true. There are any number of subgroups that view certain behavior with distaste that other subgroups do not. Just because there is social and cultural pressure to do or not do things doesn't mean you are unfree. You are just as free to observe the behaviors or not as other people are to judge you by them.

I mean, I don't like tipping. I think it's horrible in many aspects, not the least of which how it taps directly into racial and gender prejudices monetarily (black waiters make less in tips regardless of service level). That said, I tip. I would rather not be known as the guy that doesn't tip (and wages assume tips as of now, so it's a bit unfair to the service people). I'm still free to tip or not, and others are free to judge or misjudge me for it if I do.

.. and they will forever be ruled by them, so: not free.

In the sense that free people would still be free if all their secrets are exposed? I can get behind that train of thought.

If you allow your government to keep its own secrets, it will use that right to rule you.

In Liar’s Poker, the author said Wall Street would always blame the Arabs for any unpredicted movement in the finance markets.

Zero evidence, but most Americans didn’t know any personally but knew they had oil money to buy/sell investments.

None of the articles you linked offered any proof but rather just accusations mostly more accusations from American companies too I may add. “While the need to protect sensitive sources and methods precludes us from sharing all of this information, our conclusion is based, in part, on the following: Then it goes into some vague details about how it happened proving nothing. So again we have to take their word this is the truth. Perhaps it is but show us the hard truth. De-classify the documents that show the links. Again it is all “believe us we can link it to North Korea”.

You simply gave a summary of the first article's summary and then falsely claimed there were no details.

The articles are summaries of what the government and the companies discovered. Read the indictment linked in the last article or the reports from the companies for details.

I think it is best to take a wholesale view that the news as we know it is a religion. That sounds a bit odd given that a lot that is in the news is fact oriented and a lot of current affairs is discussed. But in a formal church there is mention and prayers for those caught up in actual events.

Fundamentally though the news requires belief. It is there for the 'capitalist flock' who have a world where the government, democracy as we know it and the laws we have define the world.

With normal religion the real things that happen with celestial bodies get interpreted in some narrative that has to do with some carpenter's son who died a long time ago. A whole new world of god is created which is an abstraction of physical realities. Rather than 'primitive sun worshipping' there is this new religion to believe in, the religion accounts for everything in its own special way.

If you could teleport 500 years into the future and learned about TV news and how people believed it then you would wonder how people disbelieved facts they observed with their own eyes and what they knew to be true by the calling of their own heart and their own sense of reason.

Therefore, at least as a thought experiment, see the news and the nasty things said about people outside capitalist countries as 'religion'. It all becomes clearer then.

I'm not really sure how this is so controversial. Even formal mathematical systems contain axioms. And science is largely based on faith in other people's truthfully reported observations. And news is founded on faith in a whole bunch more different things, and there is sectarian tension between the congregation s of, let's say, Fox and NPR. Even the qualia of physical existence can be considered as a matter of faith , but typically it's only practical for philosophers to worry about that. But, it is practical for everyone to consider the matter of faith in news, given human history.

One could also describe it simply as a tautology. It comes with its own simplified, illusory cause/effect chain and line of reasoning based off of itself, without necessitating the same "feeling" or "spiritual" sensibilities as most religions or cult movements.