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Anatomy of a Killing

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Re: Anatomy of a Killing

#171

Post by dingoegret »

zakum1 wrote: post #111

Heart breaking. Congratulations to the BBC for this amazing analysis. But real justice would require telling the story of how these women came to be murdered. This region in Cameroon is a flash point for a regional fight against a Muslim fundamentalist / warlord group called Boko Haram (translates as “western education is a sin”). How and why did these four civilians come to be murdered as a part of this tragic confl…

So I mention the Christian groups committing the atrocities and my post gets flagged because "religious flamewar" but here we see someone freely attributing Muslim to a group and it's all good. You people are vile bigoted hypocrites lol.

Btw recent released reports by Radio France International shows Christians now outnumber Muslims in Boko Haram making Boko Haram now a Christian group. Probably why no one talks about them anymore. You only like shrieking about one specific group of people and selective amnesia for others.

Re: Anatomy of a Killing

#172

Post by x220 »

DC-3 wrote: post #24
x220 wrote: post #19

They should not edit out the end of the video. People should know how harsh the world can get.

It's not like anyone is in doubts as to what happens, therefore to show the killings themselves would be somewhat gratuitous.

It's not about people not knowing what happens, it's about people not understanding the significance of what happens. Watching videos and seeing pictures can make you understand the meaning of murder, massacre, and genocide in a way that headlines never can.

Re: Anatomy of a Killing

#173

Post by x220 »

niea_11 wrote: post #143
cm2187 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In France the far right leader is being prosecuted for “promoting terrorism” for having shown a killing video from ISIS to condemn it. I can see why people would be shy about showing the actual violence.

To be precise, she's being prosecuted for putting graphic (violent) content on a platform accessible to minors. Le Pen, who lost to Emmanuel Macron in last year's presidential vote, is facing charges of circulating "violent messages that incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity" and that can be viewed by a minor. https://m.france24.com/en/20180301-france-marine-lepen-charg...

I think this is France's mistake. Should children not know what is going on in the world? Upon turning 18, do you want new voters to have no idea about the malevolence and potential for massacre in the world?

Re: Anatomy of a Killing

#174

Post by stevenjohns »

megous wrote: post #133
stevenjohns wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are plenty of people doing open source data gathering and investigations. It's pretty interesting. Bellingcat is one of such orgs. Bellingcat is also a great example of what it shouldn't be. Most of what is produced is misleading at best. Some of the core "experts" (i.e Dan Kaszeta) are closer to propaganda generators than genuine researchers or informed sources.

I dunno, I'm exposed to Bellingcat only via the work of Elliot Higgins, so I'm not able to judge other contributors for myself. But it's very frequent to call people's work propaganda these days, just because someone disagrees. So unless you have more info, it doesn't mean much.

Higgins is the person who groomed Kaszeta, together they formed the theory behind hexamine being used as an acid scavenger on the first Sarin chemical attacks attributed to the Syrian government. Together they tried to take on MIT's Postol and others who found it ridiculous (and implausible at best).

If you followed Higgins prior to Bellingcat (back when he was "Brown Moses") you'd know he had a strong bias for the rebellion which has since just turned into a strong anti-government bias, strong interventionalism and explicitly anti-Russian.

A great example of how their bias slips into their analyses is examples like the fake sniper boy[0] which fooled a lot of anti-government "experts" to the point where people like Higgins tried to organise witch hunts against the scene director.

[0] https://journal-neo.org/2014/11/27/what-the-fake-syria-snipe...

Re: Anatomy of a Killing

#175

Post by scrumper »

dddddaviddddd wrote: post #10

It's fascinating to me that all the information required for the analysis is publicly available. This seems like a big shift from an era when only an intelligence agency would have been able to perform this sort of analysis.

Well not really, the first piece of the puzzle was a tip-off from a Cameroonian source. The mountain range match was corroboration.

Re: Anatomy of a Killing

#176

Post by watwut »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #166
watwut wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emotions don't imply moral response. Emotions may be caused also by empathy, fear, threat, gain and so on. Impartial and independent are not the same as insisting that "both sides are the same" either. In here, it is a reported a fact that killed women and children received no trial and no presumption of innocence. It highlights asymmetry between trial soldiers will (theoretically) receive and what they have done. Th…

Impartial reporting does not mean trying to make the reader remain emotionless or avoid coming to judgement. Facts themselves will frequently stir strong emotions. For instance in this incident even the most impartial reporting of the facts is likely to leave most readers with nothing short of disgust for the alleged offenders. The facts speak for themselves. An excellent resource I linked above is this [1]. That's a…

That has only loose assotiation to the rest of thread. Also, new yourk times articles you linked are in opinion section. Literally, opinions.

The titanic report has assumptions in it and its introduction is designed to evoke feels. Not much emotional, but hardly less then topic at hand.

Re: Anatomy of a Killing

#177

Post by dang »

dingoegret wrote: post #170
dang wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religious flamewar is not allowed on HN, so please don't bring it in here.

What flamewar? I'm just mentioning the facts of the case. When ISIS was around this board lit up like a pinball machine about islam. Now that it's christianty suddenly it's hush hush. Haha what a bigoted shit hole

Actually we've banned many users for anti-Islamic religious flamewar and have warned many more. Your description is not accurate.

Re: Anatomy of a Killing

#178

Post by dwd »

megous wrote: post #59
mherdeg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "open source intelligence" report on the MH17 incident -- where people found social media videos of the Buk missile proceeding through the countryside before being used to down the passenger jet -- was super interesting in a similar vein: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/10/08/mh1...

There are plenty of people doing open source data gathering and investigations. It's pretty interesting. Bellingcat is one of such orgs. You can find a lot of individuals and small orgs on Twitter doing stuff like spotting military ships and their cargo, spotting drones on satellite imagery, collecting lists of destroyed heavy weapons, listing ATGM attacks, airstrike victims (airwars.com), geolocating videos/pictures…

A lead investigator on this is also with Bellingcat

https://www.twitter.com/Yaolri

Re: Anatomy of a Killing

#179

Post by megous »

stevenjohns wrote: post #174
megous wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I'm exposed to Bellingcat only via the work of Elliot Higgins, so I'm not able to judge other contributors for myself. But it's very frequent to call people's work propaganda these days, just because someone disagrees. So unless you have more info, it doesn't mean much.

Higgins is the person who groomed Kaszeta, together they formed the theory behind hexamine being used as an acid scavenger on the first Sarin chemical attacks attributed to the Syrian government. Together they tried to take on MIT's Postol and others who found it ridiculous (and implausible at best). If you followed Higgins prior to Bellingcat (back when he was "Brown Moses") you'd know he had a strong bias for the r…

While I agree I see personal bias in what he writes on Twitter, I'd hardly call it pro-rebel. Anti-government (more like anti-syrian regime), sure. It show in the choice of topics. But the question is how much it shows in the analysis itself.

As for Hexamine/Sarin attack/Postol issue: Hexamine was found in Sarin attacks by OPCW, it was declared by Syria to OPCW. Postol is not a chemist, nor CW expert, nor on the ground, nor very credible wrt his claims about Syrian chemical attacks, as several of his claims were already rejected by OPCW, who found Syrian regime responsible for the April 4 2017 attack (Postol had all kinds of theories about this attack). I prefer OPCW's conculsions to some random profesor's taking sides and judging from a distance.

https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Timeline-of-Syrian-Ch...

You quoted Partisangirl, and I just can't take her seriously as an unbiased source either. Just one recent example of clear bias: Despite big civilian protests last few weeks in Idlib, she only tweeted one picture of some marching jihadists. She's very clearly pro assad-regime, at the expense of truth, accuracy, and peoples lives for that matter.

So yeah, Higgins is biased, but quoting other biased, non-expert sources doesn't really improve the matters.

Re: fake sniper. The experiment can be both revealing of reporting bias and highly irresponsible. People criticized the irresponsibility angle at the time. Witch hunt seems to be your interpretation.

Re: Anatomy of a Killing

#180

Post by stevenjohns »

megous wrote: post #179
stevenjohns wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higgins is the person who groomed Kaszeta, together they formed the theory behind hexamine being used as an acid scavenger on the first Sarin chemical attacks attributed to the Syrian government. Together they tried to take on MIT's Postol and others who found it ridiculous (and implausible at best). If you followed Higgins prior to Bellingcat (back when he was "Brown Moses") you'd know he had a strong bias for the r…

While I agree I see personal bias in what he writes on Twitter, I'd hardly call it pro-rebel. Anti-government (more like anti-syrian regime), sure. It show in the choice of topics. But the question is how much it shows in the analysis itself. As for Hexamine/Sarin attack/Postol issue: Hexamine was found in Sarin attacks by OPCW, it was declared by Syria to OPCW. Postol is not a chemist, nor CW expert, nor on the grou…

I cited that article about the existence of the fake sniper video, just because "fake sniper boy" doesn't mean much on its own. That's it. I could have used any other link.

I appreciate that you might have issues with the author of that article but it's not what I was going for. It's unfair to suggest that I'm quoting biased sources when I didn't quote them, just merely wanted to provide context of which video I was talking about.

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