61–70 of 267 posts
When the evidence is thin, it's best to avoid committing to a belief either way, despite the temptation. Related Paul Graham essay, "Keep your identity small": http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
Well, somebody blew up that pipeline. And the list of possible suspects is very short. Germany, Denmark and Sweden have not yet blamed Russia.
One of the pipelines is still operational. Weird, eh?
While interesting, the author appears to be nitpicking. It does not really refute Hersh's story, because these minor inconsistencies appear in any news article, including the NYT. It is irrelevant whether Hersh gets all details right, the important thing is whether his source is correct on the big picture or not. It seems to me that the veracity of Hersh's claims cannot be decided by textual analysis, but rather by a…
Asserting that “[Jens Steltonberg] was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since.” when he was actually born in 1959 is not a small thing. It’s simply making things up.
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> Russia dismisses the accusations, claiming the charges could be set by terrorists. The pipelines were eventually fixed.
Russia dismisses the accusations, claiming they are not going to invade Ukraine. https://www.rt.com/russia/540121-russia-denies-plans-invade-... Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov: “We have repeatedly said that the movement of our armed forces on our own territory should be of no concern to anyone. Russia poses no threat to anyone.”
What's your point? That the Russian gov't is capable of lying, therefore they blew up the pipelines? What if I said that the US lied about weapons of mass destruction, therefore the US must have blown up the pipelines? It seems like a non-sequitur. State governments can deceive, especially about their plans for war.
That said, I'm not supporting Russia in this war, nor Ukraine. So I'm not going to participate any further in this other debate about the war that you appear to want to have.
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Until someone else can corroborate Hersh's story, or Hersh provides hard evidence, this is whole thing is a nothing burger.
Until someone else takes credit for it, I'll take President Joe Biden's threat as evidence. Video link: https://youtube.com/shorts/FVbEoZXhCrM?feature=share
I'll take that little smirk as evidence any day of the week
This text doesn’t really disproof the Hersh story beyond nitpicking some details and incorrect use of technical languages. (Admittedly it would be hard to disprove; and it is the accuser that has the burden of proof.) However the big issue is the complete shutdown of media coverage and that the governments of Denmark, Sweden, and Germany all keep their investigations secret.
Not quite. Any person who makes an assertion either positive or negative has a burden of proof.
This simple misunderstanding is one of the most dangerous beliefs out there if you ask me, and it is a broadly distributed belief.
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Until someone else can corroborate Hersh's story, or Hersh provides hard evidence, this is whole thing is a nothing burger.
Until someone else takes credit for it, I'll take President Joe Biden's threat as evidence. Video link: https://youtube.com/shorts/FVbEoZXhCrM?feature=share
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Abu Ghraib was over 20 years ago mate. Journalists during Bush Jr's era were solid. Post Obama, the entire profession couldn't handle not being the under dog. And now we're paying the price with untrustworthy or outright made up "anonymous sources".
And he got exactly the same reaction when he published the Abu Ghraib story. The Pentagon called it nonsense.
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I think it's overwhelmingly obvious that the US, or US-aligned forces, were responsible. It's not clear to me who else even has a motive to do this. US has capable forces in the region at the time, a clear motive (remove the temptation for Germany to use the pipeline). The other possibilities are Russia, they could just turn off the pipeline rather than blow it up, Germany, they could just turn off their end of the p…
> It's not clear to me who else even has a motive to do this. Putin. Blow up the pipeline so no-one can offer cheap gas in exchange for being recognized as the next legitimate leader of Russia behind his back. It's one of the simplest explanations and falls into the overall pattern. False-flag terrorism[1] is how Putin got into power in the first place. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings
It's also not the case that Putin needs false flag terrorism. For one, he is already in power and has already started the war. Two, if he needed an example of US or Ukrainian forces blowing something up to galvanize his position - he has plenty of real world examples of Russian things getting destroyed - he doesn't need to manufacture a new one.
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Until someone else takes credit for it, I'll take President Joe Biden's threat as evidence. Video link: https://youtube.com/shorts/FVbEoZXhCrM?feature=share
Like I said, until someone can provide hard evidence, which that is not, I'll continue to hold reservations as any reasonable person would.
Stating one's opinions on social media is generally fine, but stating them in the form of facts is dangerous in that it can cause other agents in the system to have incorrect state, which can have very serious causal consequences, up to and including death, which most people claim to be "a big deal".
It is counterintuitive to think in this way, but many useful things are counterintuitive.