All this sort of stuff is claimed under Manufacturing Consent. Chomsky's point is often why don't we hear about these other incidents .. because the news isn't balanced and the government is trying to fashion a narrative and they use the media to do this by selectivly choosing what we hear and see.
Essentially, if you're a media outlet, you'll try hard to not piss off the hand that is feeding you, and Chomsky's assertion is that this is how the media manufactures consent (for all the horrible things the government does to defend the interests of those advertisers abroad).
Essentially, if your opinions are significantly different from those of most politicians (on the important topics), you're unlikely to rise up through the ranks in most major institutions.
Not only negative news about some countries don't emerge in the Western society, but also positive news debunking the falsehoods and stereotypes about the "blamed" countries don't show up neither: https://theintercept.com/2019/08/14/trump-iran-worst-lies
A major problem of our global society is that public perception is biased towards the "winners" and we learn the truth, if we are lucky, about their negative impact long after the damage was done. Example: the US invasion on Iraq was based on the false narrative about the weapons of mass destruction. Again, there were some news outlets that were telling the truth, but it was ignored.
Though with the Syrian conflict dying down, I'd expect others like Yemen to get more attention by filling the "war" slot in media.
The US tends to come out with almost no bullet holes from SA and Israel but when one is found it's a howitzer. Every time something related to them really blows up you get to how deep they went and it becomes almost unbelievable to assume there were no signs whatsoever to the US and no reporting could have been done by the media.
WaPo has a vested interest in covering SA especially after Khashoggi and the Bezos blackmail incident. But the US and rest of the media are not as vocal as say when talking about anything related to China or Iran, where every piece of gossip is news, where every allegation becomes a sanction. The point to take from here is that "punishment fitting the crime" seems to be a very fluid concept also at country level and the questions to worry about are "Why are some getting a free pass? What are the strings?".
[0] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/09/counterintuit...
Oh, and they both use the strength of their relationship with the US to make certain parts of the world unlivable for people they don't like.
Israel is pretty much the only Democratic, liberal country in the middle East, with Western level women's rights/empowerment, LGBTQ protections, legal protection for minorites, etc. And a land of massive innovation. US universities aren't partnering with Israel because it's politically convenient, but because Israeli universities breed world leading research in many areas. Which is why most high tech companies have an Israeli division, and which is also why Israel has one of the world's highest per capita entrepreneurship, patents and peer reviewed scientific publications.
Contrast that to Autocratic Saudi Arabia where women weren't allowed to drive, or move about in public without approved male company until a year or two, where the LGBTQ are punished by death, where every non Muslim is systemically discriminated with a religions tax [1], where critical Tweets about the establishment routinely land people in jail, where the actual law of the land [2] is a throwback to the middle ages, with almost no scientific or cultural output of significance!
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizya
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_system_of_Saudi_Arabia...
It's like Apartheid era South Africa arguments again. A shining beacon of civilization among the barbarians, yada yada.
first-world countries should be held to higher standards of jurisprudence (among all things) than rando third-world nations. if you can't deliver justice, then really are you first-world at all?
do you really think Israel delivers appropriate due process to its occupied territories? Let alone actual representation?
iirc Israel just rolled over and occupied Jerusalem within the last couple years. The US rubber-stamped it, not sure that changes anything.
I'm not defending Saudi Arabia, which is indeed as backward as it gets, but in the case of Israel, if you want to talk about discrimination and human rights abuse, you cannot ignore (like you did) the way the indigenous population is treated, in what is effectively an apartheid state.
The differences are more about superficial local colour than political dynamics, which are becoming depressingly consistent across the board.
It's becoming less and less surprising that there are high-level links between all of them which converge through the use of social media and other tools of influence.
If we cannot hold Saudi for human rights violations & let the enabler like Israel go scott free.
But this doesn't mean Russia and China aren't doing bad things. This doesn't mean that they aren't bad actors that don't need to be dealt with. This is whataboutism, and it detracts from issues instead of productively extending the conversation. If one problem is mentioned, people like you jump out of the woodworks exclaiming, "NO, that's PROPAGANDA! listen to my favourite problem to talk about instead!".
All of these countires. USA. Israel. Saudi Arabia. China. Russia. They're all bad in their own ways, doing bad shit for shitty reasons and they all need to be talked about. But just because one of them does something bad doesn't mean you can't talk about the other ones as well. It doesn't excuse any of them. That's just moral relativism and it's destroying public discourse.
I do mind pretending it's not happening.
I do mind that any one who points out the emperor is naked is shouted down, labeled a kook, gets eviscerated.
This is a self contradictory statement. Calling someone's argument "whataboutism" is itself a logical fallacy designed to prevent extension of the conversation into a larger context
The statement is bullshit on its own though.
No, it's still a fallacy. Just because you feel the need to deflect attention towards your personal targets it doesn't mean your argument is sound.
Two state solutions have been offered multiple times. What you're really claiming is that Jews should evacuate the land that they're living on after fleeing consistent mass murders and persecutions throughout history. What you're really claiming is that Jews should either exit to countries that have empirically turned hostile to them over time or be unprosperous.
I am not in any way for citizens of Israel (Jewish or Arab or Christian or whatever else) evacuating the state. However, illegal Israeli colonies on what is universally agreed as Palestinian land are not acceptable. Opening fire on crowds throwing rubber wheels at a wall is not acceptable. Bombing civilian buildings in retaliation for terrorist activities is not acceptable. Blockading humanitarian efforts to deliver food, water, and building materials is not acceptable.
Every gram of Palestinian resistance is met with a kiloton of Israeli aggression, almost as official doctrine. This is not acceptable.
And all this from the only state in the world which illegally holds nuclear weapons without being a signatory of the non-proliferation agreement, but constantly threatens going to war against a different state for building civilian nuclear infrastructure (which is all the international inspectors have found in Iran for years).
That has nothing to do with Judaism. Most people don’t claim it does.
It's "antisemitic". And it doesn't mean what you think it does.
For shame.
This is Hacker News. If there's a new story about Israel you want to draw to our attention, you can submit it just like everyone else.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/14/israel-...
Like it or not, US interests are inextricably tied to those of the region. Don't believe me? Most scholars attribute Trump's election, at least in moderate part, to the massive influx of Syrian refugees to the many countries they went to. If we had done a better job stabilizing the region, perhaps Trump would have never even sniffed power.
Note: I'm not claiming Iran is some tortured paradise. It is still a brutal regime, with horrible regressive views and which is acting tyranically towards its own population. It is much worse than Israel in that regard (though at least Iran is not waging a war of aggression on a neighbor sattelite state, and defying UN resolutions and international law in doing so). But it is still significantly better than Saudi Arabia in almost everything to do with human rights.
Israel could've been a much better product of creative thinking. Now it's an apartheid state with the indigenous kept in an open air prison that is regularly used for international weapons testing.... The unwise think in very short terms...and it comes back to bite them shortly after.
I thought you were serious if not for the closing line... :)
to be fair, they didn't just doctor history, they actually changed their ways.
Everything else they've done is pretty much PR management.
Here's a list of their open source projects.
https://opensource.microsoft.com/?sort=Stars&keyword=&tag=
(Microsoft may be the world's largest open source contributor
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/microsoft-may-be-the-wo...)
(Microsoft becomes 5th largest contributor to linux core https://www.ukfast.co.uk/microsoft-news/impressive-microsoft...)
Not saying that they didn't change their ways, but they are a long way from proving that this is not another EEE cycle. Not to even mention "breaking even" on the damage they did directly (and deliberately) to open source effort.
[1] - https://www.linuxfoundation.org/2017-linux-kernel-report-lan...
Microsoft could open source Windows and people will still mention EEE. Impossible right? But, open sourcing dot net was inconceivable just a few years ago.
You're talking about EEE. In fact, the organization that's actively performing the EEE strategy is Google. It's quite easy to spot if one isn't blinded by fandom.
E.g. webkit -> blink, rss, bundling of apps on android prevent manufacturers from using forked android, chrome OS has only one browser - MS didn't even do this to get in trouble, AMP project, and then experimenting with removing urls from the search page.
So whatever floats your boat.
That MS has made some projects OSS is just recognition they needed to up their game or be left behind.
It in no way means they're suddenly "good guys" (etc).
When their actions are those of "good guys", then perhaps they could be start to be viewed as such.
>Am I out of the loop, what have Microsoft done to support open-source?
That's what I responded to.
Now lets look into israel and their spying/influence in traditional and social media.
It was amazing the amount of "news" and social media spam we got about russia ( We were always at war with eurasia ). It's amazing the amount of "news" and social media spam we are getting about china ( We were always at war with eastasia ).
But one hardly ever hears a peep about israel or saudi arabia. Considering what is happening to the palestinians, yemenis, etc, you would think you'd hear a lot more "news" about them. Especially about saudi arabia from the feminist/lgbt traditional media considering the saudis probably treat women and the lgbt as badly as any nation on earth.
How come the "news" industry isn't going apeshit over more than half of the state and the US house of senate pushing unconstitutional anti-BDS laws?
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/rights-protesters/new-...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-house-overwhelmingly-passes...
A country founded on boycotts banning its corporations from boycotting a foreign country?