251–260 of 279 posts
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At least Wikipedia is supposed to cite its sources, while AIs don’t.
Have you used one recently? The big providers all cite sources if give a research prompt.
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Hollywood and spy movies/series predate the web. What makes the CIA Factbook useful is it reframes learning about other countries.
Americans famously have near-zero knowledge of other countries. Nothing valuable was lost in this aspect. You need something new.
American diplomacy, foreign policy, spying, soft, and hard power etc is obviously primarily targeting non Americans here.
Thus like most things the CIA does this is targeting foreigners or foreign influence, though of course direct impact on Americans is a nice bonus. We don’t want young Americans looking up facts on a Chinese or Russian website.
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> Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources, and to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources. Secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's notability and avoid novel interpretations of primary sources. All analyses and interpretive or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary or tertiary source and must not be an ori…
So, not, not allowed. "The concept of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources originated with the academic discipline of historiography. The point was to give historians a handy way to indicate how close the source of a piece of information was to the actual events.[a] Importantly, the concept developed to deal with "events", rather than ideas or abstract concepts. A primary source was a source that was created at a…
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I'm feeding a troll here, but for the benefit of those reading along: The official numbers are a subset of all deaths: only deaths from direct military action are counted. In most wars, excepting the shortest conflicts, those deaths are a minority of all deaths. Even taking the numbers of Save the Children (and I'll let everyone decide whether they're likely an overestimate or an underestimate), it's difficult to thi…
This is not true. The Gaza Health Ministry published all deaths. You can’t just speculate and make up your own numbers and then complain that sources are not reliable.
That methodology is not secret or subject to interpretation: their numbers do not include the deaths I've mentioned. Not even the deaths of people buried under the rubble!
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Having friends means that you can build bases where if you ask nicely, rather than having to invade. It prevents those friends from undermining you in a lot of cases. It makes them help you when you need, e.g. to get your hands on someone plotting attacks against you. It makes them more likely to trade with you under advantageous terms. I am sure you could think about at least a dozen other cases in a couple of minut…
> build bases where if you ask nicely, rather than having to invade How much of that actually came from soft power rather than "hard power", like USA actions in WW2?
In its own FAQs[0], the CIA previously noted that many third-party companies that once provided free data now require expensive subscriptions or restrict use via licensing. These likely made it increasingly difficult to maintain the Factbook’s rigorous standards for comprehensive global data.
Ensuring the accuracy of thousands of data points for 258 international entities required a "monstrous workload" of vetting and reviewing by highly trained officers. Given the "do more with less" mandate, this is the result.
[0]https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/faqs/
This ending seems fitting for the world where artificially manufacturing consent is rampant.
As Nietzsche once said: "There are no facts, only interpretations"
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Are we remembering the same Factbook? It had summary statistics for every country and some brief blurbs about their history, climate, economy, etc. Strictly speaking yeah it generated some legitimacy to publish a resource like this and I find it hard to believe the CIA can't scrape a few quarters together to keep it running, but most of it's value is sentimental.
Soft power includes positive perception. Every time someone learns that GPS is completely paid for by the American government and then freely available to the rest of the world, that shapes perception. The Facebook being quoted by so many school kids worldwide was a cheap softening of how the world perceived the CIA and America. Now how valuable that is isn’t clear, but when something is that cheap it doesn’t take mu…
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This regime is just following the same path openly. Give Trump some gold points for not being a hypocrite like all of his predecessors.
Not sure I understand this comment. Trump deserves points for being transparent about his disdain for liberal democratic values? Not sure that's a flex. Hmmm.
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The accusations weren’t particularly credible and similar slander campaigns against people like Joe Biden aren’t nearly as prominent. Even notorious dictators like Mao Zedong get treated with kid gloves as long as they’re on the left: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe...
Kid gloves? The cites text literally says: > His policies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people in China during his reign, mainly due to starvation, but also through persecution, prison labour in laogai, and mass executions What's "kid gloves" about that? Let's contrast with the the farthest thing from a leftwing dictator we can find, the quintessential rightwing one, Adolf Hitler. Here's the intro to…
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe...
