I would say that everyone knows this, but that simply isn’t the case. The vast majority don’t know that mainstream media are just mouth pieces for whatever message that needs to be distributed. More often it’s what message shouldn’t be distributed.
Aren’t the major media and news outlets owned by only handful of people? They won’t dare risk pissing off the government.
If you're a newspaper baron running propaganda pieces hyping the CIA's moral righteousness in executing the leaders of yet another elected democracy, you're not exactly going to have doubts about their ability to kill you and everyone you love to the sound of media trumpets.
The more concentrated media is, the fewer families TPTB need to threaten with violence for not keeping the newspapers on message. It's really very convenient.
That's an oversimplification on two points: one, media barons do not need to be threatened to be made supporters of a policy regime that largely benefits them. Secondly, not only the owners need to go along with it, there has to be a cultural thing about agreeing with the line.
Rupert Murdoch fires journalists who step out of line within hours. Doesn't take long for the new editorial culture to emerge within businesses he's acquired.
Most major media news organizations in the US are owned by large public corporations, so ultimately their shareholders. For example CNN is owned by AT&T and MSNBC is owned by Comcast.
I know it's true but I couldn't stop myself laughing. They are two sides of the same corporate media and are especially dangerous when they agree on matters like Iraq WMD and the faked Syria chemical weapons attack in Douma etc.
Yes those magical bouncing chlorine bombs were another fake story that immediately failed the cui bono? test for anyone who pays attention... so, like, 5% of Americans.
I though @1cvmask was arguing that chemical weapons weren't used in Syria. After reading the replies, it seems that they were arguing that the chemical weapons attack was carried out by someone other than Syria. I misunderstood "faked" to mean that no chemical weapons were used rather than that Assad was framed for using chemical weapons.
It's fear, that's part of it, and they know how to rattle them by say talking about Social Security payments getting cut. But they also instigate powerless anger, and a good bit of hatred, too. With the anger, it's about framing it as an inescapable injustice, rather than something you could make a dent in by eg going to jury duty, voting every single time (even blank) because it's so easy, even making a financial contribution to a politician you think very highly of (and with the campaigns I contributed to, pocket change basically, but I'm really happy I did, those politicians truly came through for the common good over their whole career since the contribution).
But CNN doesn't want to talk about actions you can take to fix problems they tell you you have, because if you do you will be carrying out actions and doing verbs instead of watching television. It's basically an attention thing, advertising only works if people are paying attention, and different shows get it in different ways.
Comedians get attention by telling jokes.
Action movies get attention by (generalizing) showing a single hero or heroine take down a conspiracy of over 50 people. I'd estimate 90% of action movies involve a struggle against a conspiracy. The exception that proves the rule is No Country for Old Men, because the bad guy was a lone wolf, but I can't think of any others. In fiction it allows for plots where it makes sense for a single star to be in fight scenes against "henchmen", which is of course a conspirator, especially in fights where he's outnumbered. This gives more drama and sense of risk, over and over again. And I sense that people really find the struggle against conspiracies gratifying to watch, there's some really profound identification there.
And news channels get attention by rankling you. And it also involves conspiracies, without actually using that word because it's super taboo. When Biden went into office the news channels had problems coming up with enough "content" because they could no longer put negative coverage, and fake news, and lies, and occasionally some little nuggets of truth too, about Donald Trump around the clock. He was keeping them in business, very good for their bottom line. There's an element of hatred here, too, they absolutely desire that. They want you to refuse to cooperate, and always oppose, the bad guys of the movie that is CNN, which is really the basic biological function of hatred.
The bigger picture is, what is CNN selling? Well, they barely have any formal ads. I believe their ads in Chile are for that Emirates airline, and occasionally they have a "technology" feature which is pitching some electronics. So what are they selling? I think the viewer's votes. They have ways of measuring how many brain stems they have hooked up to their Matrix, they can give credible estimates of how much they can swing an election. Eyeballing it, I'd say CNN can swing a presidential election by .1%, which is a huge amount.
Just rattling off the action movies I can immediately think of, I don’t believe any of which include a conspiracy in their plot/synopsis. The only action movie I can think of about a conspiracy is the movie Conspiracy with Mel Gibson, got any others?
Terminator is an easy one. The terminator at the beginning has done nothing wrong, and fights a gang[1] of bikers who antagonize him and gang up on him, and fight him together, for being naked after traveling through time.
Karate Kid had the Cobra Cai, I think it was called, the rival school. I didn't see it, but I believe they were bullies. Maybe you're right about that one, although I think Daniel-san triumphs against a bully, there might have been several, or the bully had little supporters. It's a coming of age movie, though. It's also a sports movie, they do Karate-Do, which is for decorative, spirital, and sport purposes, not Karate-Jutsu, the military or let's call it "action".
Robocop, there's that company that makes the robot that Robocop has to fight in the end, there's a lot of people working in that company and together they built an automatic murder machine, which they then set loose. And IIRC they're doing a housing development and have ties to the criminal activity in the city Robocop tries to clean up. And like that evil robot had missiles coming out of its back I think, the special effects were glitchy, which made it look like an even greater monstrosity. Companies are groups of persons so absolutely can be guilty of conspiracy if the facts warrant it, incorporation documents don't give permission to traffic heroin. So it happens to fronts for drug dealing and it almost happened to Abbott Laboratories, also basically for drug dealing, only with a drug patients hated instead of craving.
Rocky does not involve a conspiracy, except of course the conspiracy that Rocky works for, the mob, as a debt collector. Which is the reason behind his conflict with Mickey, while Rocky says "it's a living" Mickey replies "it's a waste of life!" But I think I can hand you this one. One catch: this is a sports movie, not an action movie.
I haven't seen the others.
[1] gang is a well-marketed and very glamourous word for conspiracy, which is the term courts use when there's the formal elements of a conspiracy: meeting of the minds, two or more participants in a crime acting in coordination, there's a third one [EDIT: secrecy, and illegality or bad faith are others] but that's the gist of it, it just means criminal teamwork. Some things you do alone, some things with others, same goes for crime...at any rate, don't accuse someone of being a conspiracy theorist to a judge. Judges deal with conspiracies continually, sometimes multiple different ones per day, and there absolutely are people trying to play that judge by "covering" for each other. You will curry zero favor with that judge by putting the word "conspiracy" in your opponents mouth and then claim he must be delusional. That always works on talk TV, but not in court. Judges simply don't have the luxury of being able to pretend criminals never cooperate, like none of them had a single friend.
Fully agreed on the sports movie vs action movie note.
Saying that Robocop isn't about a conspiracy strikes me as bizarre - the whole thing was a government contractor abusing its power.
I think your take on Terminator is a little weird - Arnold isn't the hero, and the gang fight is a complete throw away; that doesn't make it a conspiracy movie. T2 is more so, with the secret use of future tech.
OK so I just watched the clip and no that's absolutely a conspiracy of wastes of a fuck 100%. They do everything. They insult him, they click his fingers at him, sure he asks for clothes in the imperative but if you don't know the rest of the plot it could just be a weird naked guy asking for clothes, I've seen people in tough situations make much worse requests. I saw some in SF for instance, really gritty scene I remember a crack addict at a wondrous and cheap Chinese food restaurant named Quickly. He said crack cures hunger, over and over, like that was what he was going to eat, and he was there because he had no crack, so he needed actual food to cure his hunger. So in SF people ignored him, but in this clip the losers say "Fuck you, Asshole" and then all three take out a switchblade with the camera focussed on the blade opening, and they guy's naked, one of the losers stabs him, at this point you don't yet know how hardcore the Terminator is.
So what this film is doing is using a small wannabe conspiracy to raise the status of the true villain of the movie. But there's no intention of the losers being the good guy, at this point Arnold's the closest to being the good guy.
I didn't say that the "gang" was "good guys". My point was that the film's pitting of the main villain against a group of (extremely minor) villains in a single, throw away scene is unrelated to the upthread assertion under discussion that action movies pit individual heroes against a conspiracy so they can have the heroes defeat individual members of the conspiracy over the course of the movie.
Whether or not we call the group a conspiracy, the scene doesn't make the broader case.
Enemy Of The State is for me the canonical conspiracy theory action movie.
A conspiracy theory dynamic was shoehorned into the Minority Report movie (the short story is very different).
Hydra stuff in recent MCU comes to mind.
Predator is an interesting inversion in that, while there is a bit of CIA backstabbing, the real conspiracy relevant to the conjecture above is actually "our heroes", who are eliminated by the single antagonist until the climactic fight. I guess that's kind of a horror thing, though?
It’s been well established that covid is dangerous for unvaccinated older people. I don’t think cnn is the reason for being afraid of a global pandemic which kills older people, especially if this was before the vaccine was available.
I know more retired people (or people on disability/other state welfare) who watch Fox News religiously.
It's always on in their house.
They are uniformly obsessed with the election and Donald Trump.
Frightened. Paranoid.
They truly believe that the election was stolen by hundreds of thousands of votes from dead people and South American immigrants who have never stepped foot even into the lower bounds of North American Mexico.
That Trump is still, by the constitution, our sitting president.
They truly believe that the majority of liberal leaning college students grow up to eat babies, have abortions for fun, and have regular satanic rituals in their basements (lol, it's funny because they can't afford houses with a basement)
I don't particularly understand the urgency of the nature of your statement. There's definitely some urgency surrounding mine as uncalled for as it is though, as these people openly talk about wanting to massacre their opposition. Your side really just wants people to wear a mask and get a safe vaccination.
Yeah, I'll send you my personal address if you verify your person in some way, and you'll be able to easily look at the county cable television statistics.
And if you'd really like, I can give you my browsing history too. I frequent none of the sites you've mentioned, only really spend time on HN anymore.
Can walk outside and take a timestamped picture of the flying Trump flags and every lawn with Trump 2024 poster signs as well if it would please you. Still some lock her up posters from years back around certain neighborhoods.
Could even put a voice recorder at the local range for a day and give you some good footage of just how often and casually these people openly talk about wanting to murder "the libtards"
You speak like you don't particularly have experience with small conservative U.S. towns. Everybody knows everybody, typically via church :)
But this sort of flame bait doesn't exactly belong on HN.
Wow, you know more than 40 retired or on welfare people who believe majority of liberal leaning college students grow up to eat babies? Those people sound extremely ignorant and unhinged. I'm sorry you have to associate with people who spread such horrible misinformation and lies around. Those type of people are so divisive and hateful.
I vouched for your earlier comment above, for what it's worth. Whoever flagged you may not like what you describe from your local point of view, but it's absolutely realistic. Just today, a pilot for a major airline reportedly called out "Let's go, Brandon!" on the PA.
Many Americans have no earthly idea how much our elections are going to suck from now on. A malevolent personality cult has captured roughly a third of the electorate.
Are you taking into account that the person you are responding to has built a comment which is a mirror reflection of swayvil's comment. Do you have the same suspicions about that comment as well as this one?
This sounds like an absolutely hysterical reaction to someone pointing out the effects of watching CNN who have been pursuing a narrative intended to make people scared. As evidenced by polling in September that showed that Democrats significantly overestimated the danger of COVID.
It's hilarious that people like you will underplay the issue of misinformation when it's disseminated about COVID when there has been no single bigger political issue in the world for the past 2 years. Restrictions put in place are not costless and have real impact on people's lives.
As for your laundry list of crazed conspiracy theories, I have a hard time believing that Fox News has been publishing them. So they don't seem analogous to results of CNN coverage. They sound far more like the sort of thing that propagates from 4chan into social media. Regardless, they can't be that common as you have also said they intend to massacre their opponents. Seeing as we're 10 months into the Biden presidency you'd think we'd have started seeing these massacres by now. Maybe they're like the next Jan 6th the FBI is always warning against, always another month away.
Enjoy continuing to deny reality, I'm sure it brings you some bizarre form of joy in your life.
Most of these people are waiting for orders by their "glorious leader" and grifting ilk. Do you just dissociate from when the last president had a speech telling them to walk across the lawn to the Capitol building and fight their way to overturn the "unfair election" that resulted in an armored police officer beaten to fucking death? JK, he must've gotten paid to be a crisis actor and die, right?
Do you know what is required to beat somebody in body armor to death? Especially when they're surrounded by other cops...?
What was the name of the officer beaten to death? Are you talking about Brian Sicknick, the man who died of natural causes? Since you just browse HN, here's a link you may enjoy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26867634
My criticism of your posts is that you are basing this off of an extreme minority of people. The media would like you to believe they exist in great numbers, to keep you afraid and engaged with their product. You are certainly correct that they do exist; however I firmly do not believe they exist in the numbers that you suggest.
Probably just undercover liberals. Those security forces were trying to give the warmest of welcomes to enter aside from those few crisis actors at the front of the mob.
Linking me to a HN thread in which the first comments are praising a Christian Zionist also isn't a great help to the cause of your reasoning.
You clearly don't want to be a reasonable person and have a reasonable discussion.
> The media would like you to believe they exist in great numbers, to keep you afraid and engaged with their product.
Don't know why you're mentioning this at all. Has nothing to do with the discussion, nor do I believe anybody who frequents HN is unaware of this.
> You are certainly correct that they do exist; however I firmly do not believe they exist in the numbers that you suggest.
If you'd like to get into how many states you've traveled to, what parts of those states you've stayed in, the duration you stayed in them and how social you were during those times, the amount of people/friends you have scattered across the nation in various regions & how often you discuss these matters with them, how long you've spent in/with/around any of the major organized religious sects of the US - feel free I guess.
Aside from that, I'm going to conclude you really don't have the scope you think you do based on what you've already stated.
You have my sincerest sympathies, I can see the onslaught of corporate media coverage and social media engagement has exhausted you to the point where you aren't even able to muster a scintilla of scepticism anymore. Nobody was beaten to death on Jan 6th, Brian Sicknick died of "natural causes". NYT, Wapo etc have retracted this misinformation but as you can see the horse has bolted on that front [1][2].
You respond to a post about CNN, question the 'urgency' of the criticism and then claim that you've made 'no comment' about CNN coverage. Read your own post, you directly claim it is less important than your perceived threat of right wing extremism. The fact that you replied this way shows how mired you are in partisan politics. The opposite to CNN isn't Fox News.
A few tweets isn't going to change my mind about the extent of the threat. Trump was able to rustle up around 3000 crazy people to breach the Capitol in a nation of 300+ million. I would wager Al Gore would have been able to get people to do this if he was as deranged as Trump. It really tells us nothing. As for your tweets showing violence at the Olympia protest, am I supposed to believe this is representative? Because if I am then I'd have to conclude far left extremism is the greater threat considering a counter-protestor shot someone. To be clear, I am not denying the existence of extremists I am questioning whether they are as numerous as journalists are trying to convince you they are.
You can ridicule people for raising questions about the FBI's involvement in Jan 6th all you want but the only people to blame for this are the FBI themselves. They have shown themselves perfectly willing to celebrate foiling plots that they essentially created whether it was after 9/11 or as recently as the Whitmer 'assassination plot' which was 50% FBI agents and organised at an FBI funded event [3]. Everyone should treat what the CIA, NSA and FBI say with extreme scepticism, regardless of your politics.
> You have my sincerest sympathies, I can see the onslaught of corporate media coverage and social media engagement has exhausted you to the point where you aren't even able to muster a scintilla of scepticism anymore.
lol
> Everyone should treat what the CIA, NSA and FBI say with extreme scepticism, regardless of your politics.
Once again, the fact you make the presumption that any HN user doesn't already do this to the extreme is hilarious.
lol @ the rest of your rambling in general
Go touch grass and please get a credible education, it will help you in life.
I can't believe what a cliche you are. You make grand claims of right wing extremist threats from people gripped by misinformation. Post a handful of tweets and Wapo articles as evidence then trumpet myths about people being beaten to death on Jan 6th. You are the thing you're railing against.
You spread lies and then resort to the most generic ad hom questioning my education and telling me to touch grass. Maybe get off Twitter and meet some people in the real world, you might find most of the country isn't trying to kill you as you claim.
Both your comment and the parents can be true at the same time. The extremes on both sides are insane. And I’m not saying the “center” is the best position either. There’s good ideas on both the left and the right, but they’re mixed in with lots of bad ideas, and those bad ideas are the ones that tend to have powerful lobbies leading to the shit sandwich we’re all munching on today.
I have one relative whose house is constantly full of the voice of a right wing angry man and another one whose home reverberates with a left wing angry man.
What’s the effect size of fear mongering on the study population? If you haven’t measured it, would you hypothesize it to be greater than previously observed effect sizes for health-related behaviors and attitudes of older people? These topics are studied by actual researchers somewhere, not only in throwaway conjecture about what one personally thinks about “MSM.”
Not if he wants to live in that country, or at all.
The reason why he's in Russia and not buried in an unmarked ditch is because Russia considers exposing Americas equal hypocrisy to be politically useful.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to give the only country that gave him asylum a pass, and turn a blind eye. He's under no obligation to be a megaphone against injustice in all forms in all places.
He's not giving them a pass. But there's only a few countries right now where he can be alive and well. None of them would be considered free the way you would desire, and so if he wants to remain alive and well, he has certain obligations. It's better for him than being dead.
You just can't make enemies with everyone at that larger-than-life, history-affecting scale. You can't expect to solve all of the world's problems alone by denouncing every country on earth, even though you probably could construct the argument, for every single country on earth, that that country could be denounced for something. He's just one guy, he does what he can, and assassination absolutely on the table for activists who piss off the most powerful people on the planet enough.
Bill Browder talks about what happened to him when he pissed off the most powerful people in Russia. I don't admire the guy, basically he figured out every story he could get into the WSJ or Nytimes made them $41M in preventing stock shenanigans like massive dilution so that his shares actually could appreciate from the rapidly growing Russia economy, so that was his whole angle, shaming those guys in the paper. It's not clear it was truth, or whether it was slander, there was shady business going on, but he's no saint. When a news article is worth $41 million, like how much is that per word, and are you going to get a PR person to review the words, check if you can't get the article to be worth $42M in stock? Are you sure it's exactly $41M? Can't you just give it a little nuance, use a thesaurus maybe? Besides, damningly, he gave up his US citizenship to avoid paying taxes (like he obviously doesn't say that because tax lawyers tell you if you say that you are forbidden from ever setting foot in America for life), and that backfired because that means you are forfeiting America's protection and help because you didn't want to contribute back into the system. And he now can't make political contributions as a citizen, which I'm getting to.
He got kicked out of Russia, which makes perfect sense, like this guy thinks he milk American institutions, totally imperialistically meaning imposing American values on Russian companies, for no other reason but to make billions of dollars, and hoard that wealth with cunning tax evasion (guys like this absolutely don't pay taxes for ten years after you stop being a citizen, though that's the law, and to my understanding they literally value the money they pay in taxes 0%, or even negative). And USA actually is fine with you going to some banana republic and lording it over them, I mean it's perverse, but it's happened many many times in US history. And that's precisely why you still have to pay taxes if you're overseas if you're American, though in practice you only pay if you are upper class in a foreign country, which is by design. Or what, you expect the embassies to evacuate you after you caused a revolution, or you want American marines to force a country to redo an election you didn't like, that costs money that has to come from taxes, you don't want to pay anything for that?
And that guy is an activist now, he got some other citizenships, he lobbied all kinds of governments to punish a few of Putin's, like, he calls them henchmen or something, maybe they are, I don't know, it's always the same 7 guys and nobody else so they can't get bank accounts, they're the ones who seem to have beaten his lawyer to death. And he says, he's gotten 7 red notices from Interpol from Russia, it's a huge problem if you get just one.
It's realistic for him to expect to be assassinated, he says in his book he could have 1000 bodyguards and it wouldn't matter, Putin could get him anyway, and he has other strategies to protect himself. And several assassinations have been attributed to Russia in the last ten years, in London a few times, I think in London repeatedly, the nerve gas some years ago was attributed to them, some polonium in someone's tea, it's a realistic outcome if you're enough of a thorn in a powerful someone's side.
So you're saying he betrayed the United States for a far worse, criminally oppressive regime? Everything in your comment makes him out to be a far bigger piece of shit. He betrayed the world for Russia, and now has far more deaths on his hands.
Damn you made me think even less of Snowden. You should tell more people about Bill Browder's story.
I don't know...well Bill Browder definitely betrayed both America and Russia, he was playing them off each other all the way. He was living in Russia and was actually married a Russian woman, and says he loves Russia, who knows. I believe the death of Sergey Magnitsky, a lawyer, was surely fucked up or countries wouldn't agree to pass a law called the Magnitsky Act, though in either case Russia would still both oppose the act and, according to Browder try to get it called something else. But I distrust his testimony.
He just spent too much of his life doing nothing other than serving his true nation, his pocket. So he grows up in America--that's already a privilege in my book. I think he went to Colorado, then Stanford for Business School. This was in the 80s, so Stanford was earning huge amounts of funding from the Department of Defense for all kinds of crazy cold war tech, and there was so much trust and mutual benefit in this relationship that the DoD...I don't know how to communicate it, but let Stanford charge "overhead" which went to the school in general. So the electrical engineering students in particular would make a breakthrough, and they'd get paid well, but then the money sloshed around the whole school. The Cold War was when Stanford went from a respectable, but second-tier school to a first-tier school, and it could really make its huge campus look like a billion bucks. So Browder goes to Business School in Stanford, and then the Cold War ends, so he goes to Eastern Europe and then Russia, like he himself said because his parents and grandparents were the most famous communists in America, he'd become the biggest capitalist in Russia. So, would he become Russian then? Would he stay in Russia and learn Russian? Will deriving a fortune, we're talking billions, from Russia, help Russia in some roundabout way? Because additionally, IIRC he gave up his US citizenship in the early nineties, like right away, he did not want to get caught dead paying taxes. And he didn't pay shit. He made billions, his fund was one of the fastest growing in the nineties, and apparently he flew from Britain, where he had become a citizen (I think you can't just not have a citizenship, I think you can't drop a citizenship without securing another one first). He flew to Russia all the time.
And I consider credible that Russia was a gangster-driven economy. This is actually not that surprising or, frankly even evil in the specific circumstances, it's just a consequence of the black market being the only market, so a return to market economics would have to come from the black market expanding and part of it getting split off into a gray and a white market.
It's just not realistic to expect hard-line Communists to adapt to a market system they've been fighting their whole lives and expect them to have the combination of skills needed to address all the challenges that face a capitalist.
Whereas the black marketer actually has those skills right now, they're not meaningfully worse skills because he was selling Beatles's records or passports or rare books, the point is he's selling, he's bargaining, he's negotiating, he's in the market and getting a feel for the market, he's sometimes speculating, and you need that too, and that's a really tricky thing, and the market needs good speculators in order to smooth out the booms and busts. Keep in mind, under the thesis that Russia is run by gangster capitalists, it still puts a very high price on its national security and isn't selling itself out to other countries, it preserved a huge degree of autonomy and sovereignty to the point Russia could take in Snowden despite America's pressure against it. So at the very least, there's some patriotism. Moreso than Browder for sure.
Further, when the government basically collapsed people needed to eat, and the arrangement was they had all this stock, perhaps entitled to dividends, but nothi...
I read my comment again and I'm not sure how you got from my comment to writing what you did. I think we have a communication problem or a comprehension problem.
It was a deliberate plan by the intelligence agencies to discredit him ("he's in le russia"). His passport was cancelled specifically when it would leave him stuck in that country.
No. He was actually heading to Ecuador but US Admin specifically cancelled his passport while he was in transit at Moscow Airport from Hong Kong. He ended up having to stay at that airport for a while before he got asylum in Russia. And then this became the talking point on how "he's a Russian agent". The administration specifically intended this to happen.
This may be a dumb question, but why does that matter? At this point, he’s a famous political refugee; it’s not like he’d be flying commercial. If both Russia and Ecuador wanted to send him to the latter, why should they care that his US passport was revoked?
1. US warned every country in both Europe and South America said to be considering shelter for Snowden of grave consequences should they offer asylum to the whistleblower. Without his US passport, Snowden couldn't go anywhere and Ecuador reversed their safe passage.
2. This also gave political fodder for the establishment cronies to call and label anyone who would defend Snowden a "Russian Agent".
I would recommend reading these two by Glenn Greenwald (he was the journalist who worked with Snowden to publish the docs):
> Led by then-Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. officials warned every country in both Europe and South America said to be considering shelter for Snowden of grave consequences should they offer asylum to the whistleblower. Threats to Havana caused the Cuban government to rescind its commitment of safe passage they had issued to Snowden's lawyer. Under Biden's pressure, Ecuador also reversed itself by proclaiming the safe passage document issued to Snowden was a mistake.
I would also recommend the Citizen Four documentary:
I understand 1 and 2; I just don’t understand why his passport is relevant. The threat is what made them withdraw the offer of asylum, not the revoked passport.
Related, I also don’t understand why, if the US was able to pressure other countries into withdraw their commitments, they wouldn’t just wait until Snowden was in one of those countries so they could pressure for extradition.
Equal hypocrisy, you say? So what universally accepted scale did you weigh the entirety of US and Russian societies on finding them equal? Maybe it might make sense to look at some metrics with an agreed-upon methodology.
Do you have an argument to make other than whatabouting Snowden? Don't you think that being forced to seek exile in Russia makes it difficult for him to say anything about the media there?
The whole enemy thing is being encouraged by those who make money off it. The arms suppliers sell to everyone, the idea of countries as enemies is good for business, and keeps everyone in line. It's a systemic issue for the world that needs to be addressed, sure there are underlying ideologic differences, but without the war machine actively fanning the fires we could no doubt find more common ground.
This is a flimsy, transparent propaganda technique. Decry the person for not "speaking out" about some unrelated issue then act as though that has settled the debate. Their point is invalid, and anybody questioning that edict must also be a collaborator who supports that unrelated issue (and is therefore similarly invalidated and must not be allowed to speak). Much the same as when Assange was demonized for not "speaking out" exactly the necessary-but-unspecified amount against Republicans when wikileaks published damaging things about the Democrats (after having just spent years exposing Bush's war scandals, among other things).
I'm not accusing you of deliberately spreading propaganda, perhaps just repeating what I suppose must seem like an important and logically sound rebuttal to the enemy, known Russian agent Snowden.
Why would Snowden have anything to say about Russia? Do you think he knows or could say something that has not been said by a thousand others? Do you believe he would have knowledge and experience of the state security apparatus in Russia that would give him a unique and important perspective on things? Do you think he is in a better position to criticize Russia than other people?
Yes, the issue in which Snowden is commenting on here and has expertise and a unique position to offer insight into is the US intelligence apparatus, which is unrelated to Russia, France, or Bolivia in this context.
Just because he has no expertise in it doesn't make it unrelated. If you're living a country that regularly murders journalists, that's relevant to taking positions on journalism in other countries.
Indeed, why he would say anything about a place where he lives and that provides him with both income and legal protection. Snowden is not my enemy and I’m not spreading propaganda. All I’m saying is that a person under complete control of one country does not offer a trustworthy perspective of the strategic adversary of said country. He might be right, he might be wrong but you and I will never know if and how deeply he is being influenced.
That's the same for everybody, nobody is above suspicion. Snowden exposed the US intelligence apparatus at grave risk to himself before he even knew he would get stuck in Russia. He already has much more credibility than the journalists and news corporations who are being deeply influenced by US government and intelligence agencies.
As I said, it's a propaganda technique. Do we screech at US journalists about why aren't they denouncing the US every time they publish a story about Russia? No.
As a Russian, this is the reason I can’t support Snowden or take him seriously.
He keeps his trap shut about our suffering or plays softball at best which effectively makes him a great weapon in FSB/Russian oligarch hands and a RT mouthpiece.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame Snowden or Russia for the asylum situation. Why should Snowden make a martyr of himself and why shouldn’t Russia point out the hypocrisy of the US? The US government could, you know, drop his charges, thank him for the risk he took in an attempt to improve his country, acknowledge the overreach of the intelligence agencies, and stop doing shady, illegal shit to its own citizens.
Interestingly, I find Google news more polarizing than Apple news. Like I feel like the way Google suggest articles, the title/headline is always aimed to promote some sort of emotional response. Where as Apple news titles are more about the topic.
Depends on where you read Apple News. I can only access Apple News via the Widget, they still haven‘t released a proper app here after like half a decade, and the Widget headlines range from sober to yellow press
I wish Google News would stop prioritizing cable news sources. They already provide links to other articles covering the same story if you click "View Full Coverage," all they need to do is stop making the cable news outlets the main ones.
Sounds zen but I don’t think that’s really how it works. The media may manufacture political opinions for the mass, but they are not the locus of power. The difference between a democracy and a more openly totalitarian state is that democracy affords power the benefit of the average citizen feeling that they are “bought in”; that they too have a slice of power by participating in the bureaucracy, which to a limited extent is true. Instead of a king with royal garb, a palace, a court, etc. so obviously distinct from the nobles and peasants, in a democratic state power takes on an ephemeral form. It’s no longer obvious who or what really has sovereign authority. When citizens are “bought in” rather than being dragged along, power has more room to grow.
Where is Snowden and who is paying his bills? Russia. Sounds an awful lot like the common whataboutism message Russia is pushing out to justify their media abuses. Yes, western media and US in particular could be much better. No, they are not even in the same order of magnitude in terms of control, manipulation and propaganda than Russian media.
Basically a guy is sitting in country A and criticizing media of country B while getting both legal and financial support from country A. While he keeps dead quiet about the media practices of country A. While country A sees country B as a strategic adversary.
This thing quacks very much like a duck and, since we should be mindful of the media we consume, shouldn’t we take his messages with a pinch of salt?
Snowden is not an honorable person. He chose to work for US intelligence agencies as a low level unix admin, agreed to keep information private, attesting to that in employment agreements. He obvious is a sniveling liar. He's not a hero He's trash. If his was a case of conscience he would have turned himself in but he didn't. He took refuge in Russia. The guy is scum.
Piss off. He's a "sniveling liar" for violating BAH's corporate contract?! Are you even serious because you reek of a paid shill troll. When you think breaking a corporate contract is tantamount to high treason while the government and it's surveillance state illegally spying on its own citizens (and worse through the 5/14 eyes agreements) is totally doing the right thing then you need to end yourself please.
Yup I do think he's a sniveling liar and a coward. He fled to a country where person privacy isn't even a right to hide prosecution for all intents and purposes being a spy himself. The guy is slime. His hypocrisy has no bounds. When he turns himself in I'll have respect for him. Only childish 20-something's, liberals, and Russians think he's cool. Actually the Russians just like that he's spying on their behalf. Only children have Hero's.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadAren’t the major media and news outlets owned by only handful of people? They won’t dare risk pissing off the government.
The more concentrated media is, the fewer families TPTB need to threaten with violence for not keeping the newspapers on message. It's really very convenient.
They are uniformly obsessed with the pandemic. Frightened. Paranoid.
They work hard to keep you afraid or angry and tuned in.
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/04/18/at-un-aaron-mate-debunks-...
But CNN doesn't want to talk about actions you can take to fix problems they tell you you have, because if you do you will be carrying out actions and doing verbs instead of watching television. It's basically an attention thing, advertising only works if people are paying attention, and different shows get it in different ways.
Comedians get attention by telling jokes.
Action movies get attention by (generalizing) showing a single hero or heroine take down a conspiracy of over 50 people. I'd estimate 90% of action movies involve a struggle against a conspiracy. The exception that proves the rule is No Country for Old Men, because the bad guy was a lone wolf, but I can't think of any others. In fiction it allows for plots where it makes sense for a single star to be in fight scenes against "henchmen", which is of course a conspirator, especially in fights where he's outnumbered. This gives more drama and sense of risk, over and over again. And I sense that people really find the struggle against conspiracies gratifying to watch, there's some really profound identification there.
And news channels get attention by rankling you. And it also involves conspiracies, without actually using that word because it's super taboo. When Biden went into office the news channels had problems coming up with enough "content" because they could no longer put negative coverage, and fake news, and lies, and occasionally some little nuggets of truth too, about Donald Trump around the clock. He was keeping them in business, very good for their bottom line. There's an element of hatred here, too, they absolutely desire that. They want you to refuse to cooperate, and always oppose, the bad guys of the movie that is CNN, which is really the basic biological function of hatred.
The bigger picture is, what is CNN selling? Well, they barely have any formal ads. I believe their ads in Chile are for that Emirates airline, and occasionally they have a "technology" feature which is pitching some electronics. So what are they selling? I think the viewer's votes. They have ways of measuring how many brain stems they have hooked up to their Matrix, they can give credible estimates of how much they can swing an election. Eyeballing it, I'd say CNN can swing a presidential election by .1%, which is a huge amount.
- The Last Action Hero
- Robocop
- Karate Kid
- Baby Driver
- Rocky
- The Revenant
- Mad Max
- ConAir
- Terminator
Karate Kid had the Cobra Cai, I think it was called, the rival school. I didn't see it, but I believe they were bullies. Maybe you're right about that one, although I think Daniel-san triumphs against a bully, there might have been several, or the bully had little supporters. It's a coming of age movie, though. It's also a sports movie, they do Karate-Do, which is for decorative, spirital, and sport purposes, not Karate-Jutsu, the military or let's call it "action".
Robocop, there's that company that makes the robot that Robocop has to fight in the end, there's a lot of people working in that company and together they built an automatic murder machine, which they then set loose. And IIRC they're doing a housing development and have ties to the criminal activity in the city Robocop tries to clean up. And like that evil robot had missiles coming out of its back I think, the special effects were glitchy, which made it look like an even greater monstrosity. Companies are groups of persons so absolutely can be guilty of conspiracy if the facts warrant it, incorporation documents don't give permission to traffic heroin. So it happens to fronts for drug dealing and it almost happened to Abbott Laboratories, also basically for drug dealing, only with a drug patients hated instead of craving.
Rocky does not involve a conspiracy, except of course the conspiracy that Rocky works for, the mob, as a debt collector. Which is the reason behind his conflict with Mickey, while Rocky says "it's a living" Mickey replies "it's a waste of life!" But I think I can hand you this one. One catch: this is a sports movie, not an action movie.
I haven't seen the others.
[1] gang is a well-marketed and very glamourous word for conspiracy, which is the term courts use when there's the formal elements of a conspiracy: meeting of the minds, two or more participants in a crime acting in coordination, there's a third one [EDIT: secrecy, and illegality or bad faith are others] but that's the gist of it, it just means criminal teamwork. Some things you do alone, some things with others, same goes for crime...at any rate, don't accuse someone of being a conspiracy theorist to a judge. Judges deal with conspiracies continually, sometimes multiple different ones per day, and there absolutely are people trying to play that judge by "covering" for each other. You will curry zero favor with that judge by putting the word "conspiracy" in your opponents mouth and then claim he must be delusional. That always works on talk TV, but not in court. Judges simply don't have the luxury of being able to pretend criminals never cooperate, like none of them had a single friend.
Saying that Robocop isn't about a conspiracy strikes me as bizarre - the whole thing was a government contractor abusing its power.
I think your take on Terminator is a little weird - Arnold isn't the hero, and the gang fight is a complete throw away; that doesn't make it a conspiracy movie. T2 is more so, with the secret use of future tech.
So what this film is doing is using a small wannabe conspiracy to raise the status of the true villain of the movie. But there's no intention of the losers being the good guy, at this point Arnold's the closest to being the good guy.
Whether or not we call the group a conspiracy, the scene doesn't make the broader case.
A conspiracy theory dynamic was shoehorned into the Minority Report movie (the short story is very different).
Hydra stuff in recent MCU comes to mind.
Predator is an interesting inversion in that, while there is a bit of CIA backstabbing, the real conspiracy relevant to the conjecture above is actually "our heroes", who are eliminated by the single antagonist until the climactic fight. I guess that's kind of a horror thing, though?
- The Island
- The Truman Show
- Capricorn One
- Alternative 3
- The Parallax View
- The Anderson Tapes
- THX 1138
edit: depending on how you look at it
- Contact
You need to calm down and read what's actually written, otherwise you're going to make liberals look like uneducated, unhinged, lunatics.
I can be critical of CNN without praising Fox News....
You equally took my comment out of context. Maybe you should calm down? :-)
It's always on in their house.
They are uniformly obsessed with the election and Donald Trump.
Frightened. Paranoid.
They truly believe that the election was stolen by hundreds of thousands of votes from dead people and South American immigrants who have never stepped foot even into the lower bounds of North American Mexico. That Trump is still, by the constitution, our sitting president.
They truly believe that the majority of liberal leaning college students grow up to eat babies, have abortions for fun, and have regular satanic rituals in their basements (lol, it's funny because they can't afford houses with a basement)
I don't particularly understand the urgency of the nature of your statement. There's definitely some urgency surrounding mine as uncalled for as it is though, as these people openly talk about wanting to massacre their opposition. Your side really just wants people to wear a mask and get a safe vaccination.
And if you'd really like, I can give you my browsing history too. I frequent none of the sites you've mentioned, only really spend time on HN anymore.
Can walk outside and take a timestamped picture of the flying Trump flags and every lawn with Trump 2024 poster signs as well if it would please you. Still some lock her up posters from years back around certain neighborhoods.
Could even put a voice recorder at the local range for a day and give you some good footage of just how often and casually these people openly talk about wanting to murder "the libtards"
You speak like you don't particularly have experience with small conservative U.S. towns. Everybody knows everybody, typically via church :)
But this sort of flame bait doesn't exactly belong on HN.
Many Americans have no earthly idea how much our elections are going to suck from now on. A malevolent personality cult has captured roughly a third of the electorate.
It's hilarious that people like you will underplay the issue of misinformation when it's disseminated about COVID when there has been no single bigger political issue in the world for the past 2 years. Restrictions put in place are not costless and have real impact on people's lives.
As for your laundry list of crazed conspiracy theories, I have a hard time believing that Fox News has been publishing them. So they don't seem analogous to results of CNN coverage. They sound far more like the sort of thing that propagates from 4chan into social media. Regardless, they can't be that common as you have also said they intend to massacre their opponents. Seeing as we're 10 months into the Biden presidency you'd think we'd have started seeing these massacres by now. Maybe they're like the next Jan 6th the FBI is always warning against, always another month away.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-misinformation-is-dis...
Most of these people are waiting for orders by their "glorious leader" and grifting ilk. Do you just dissociate from when the last president had a speech telling them to walk across the lawn to the Capitol building and fight their way to overturn the "unfair election" that resulted in an armored police officer beaten to fucking death? JK, he must've gotten paid to be a crisis actor and die, right?
Do you know what is required to beat somebody in body armor to death? Especially when they're surrounded by other cops...?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/10/27/when-do-w...
_
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-police-tex...
_
https://mobile.twitter.com/PDXzane/status/142960643503006105...
https://www.opb.org/article/2021/08/22/far-right-activists-c...
_
https://mobile.twitter.com/mxtaliajane/status/14343079853591...
https://mobile.twitter.com/AlissaAzar/status/145283865870521...
https://mobile.twitter.com/AlissaAzar/status/143467974340884...
https://mobile.twitter.com/AlissaAzar/status/143467974918442...
As for the rest of what you've mentioned, it will be addressed in a lower comment at a later time in which I'm not so tired.
p.s.
Notice that I made absolutely no comment on the coverage of COVID by CNN or anybody.
My criticism of your posts is that you are basing this off of an extreme minority of people. The media would like you to believe they exist in great numbers, to keep you afraid and engaged with their product. You are certainly correct that they do exist; however I firmly do not believe they exist in the numbers that you suggest.
https://imgur.com/a/PJoqdjS
Oh yeah - can't forget this one either. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QrrrX5oBADA
Probably just undercover liberals. Those security forces were trying to give the warmest of welcomes to enter aside from those few crisis actors at the front of the mob.
Linking me to a HN thread in which the first comments are praising a Christian Zionist also isn't a great help to the cause of your reasoning.
You clearly don't want to be a reasonable person and have a reasonable discussion.
> The media would like you to believe they exist in great numbers, to keep you afraid and engaged with their product.
Don't know why you're mentioning this at all. Has nothing to do with the discussion, nor do I believe anybody who frequents HN is unaware of this.
> You are certainly correct that they do exist; however I firmly do not believe they exist in the numbers that you suggest.
If you'd like to get into how many states you've traveled to, what parts of those states you've stayed in, the duration you stayed in them and how social you were during those times, the amount of people/friends you have scattered across the nation in various regions & how often you discuss these matters with them, how long you've spent in/with/around any of the major organized religious sects of the US - feel free I guess.
Aside from that, I'm going to conclude you really don't have the scope you think you do based on what you've already stated.
You respond to a post about CNN, question the 'urgency' of the criticism and then claim that you've made 'no comment' about CNN coverage. Read your own post, you directly claim it is less important than your perceived threat of right wing extremism. The fact that you replied this way shows how mired you are in partisan politics. The opposite to CNN isn't Fox News.
A few tweets isn't going to change my mind about the extent of the threat. Trump was able to rustle up around 3000 crazy people to breach the Capitol in a nation of 300+ million. I would wager Al Gore would have been able to get people to do this if he was as deranged as Trump. It really tells us nothing. As for your tweets showing violence at the Olympia protest, am I supposed to believe this is representative? Because if I am then I'd have to conclude far left extremism is the greater threat considering a counter-protestor shot someone. To be clear, I am not denying the existence of extremists I am questioning whether they are as numerous as journalists are trying to convince you they are.
You can ridicule people for raising questions about the FBI's involvement in Jan 6th all you want but the only people to blame for this are the FBI themselves. They have shown themselves perfectly willing to celebrate foiling plots that they essentially created whether it was after 9/11 or as recently as the Whitmer 'assassination plot' which was 50% FBI agents and organised at an FBI funded event [3]. Everyone should treat what the CIA, NSA and FBI say with extreme scepticism, regardless of your politics.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/us/who-died-in-capitol-bu... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/brian-sic... [3] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/michigan-k...
lol
> Everyone should treat what the CIA, NSA and FBI say with extreme scepticism, regardless of your politics.
Once again, the fact you make the presumption that any HN user doesn't already do this to the extreme is hilarious.
lol @ the rest of your rambling in general
Go touch grass and please get a credible education, it will help you in life.
You spread lies and then resort to the most generic ad hom questioning my education and telling me to touch grass. Maybe get off Twitter and meet some people in the real world, you might find most of the country isn't trying to kill you as you claim.
We shall see.
Cable news is trash.
The reason why he's in Russia and not buried in an unmarked ditch is because Russia considers exposing Americas equal hypocrisy to be politically useful.
This is why nobody takes him or his supporters seriously.
Who are you trying to convince?
Even in the tech community, the most sympathetic group possible, half the people revile him as a self-serving traitor.
Nobody takes him or his supporters serious. Hard to hear, I know.
Bill Browder talks about what happened to him when he pissed off the most powerful people in Russia. I don't admire the guy, basically he figured out every story he could get into the WSJ or Nytimes made them $41M in preventing stock shenanigans like massive dilution so that his shares actually could appreciate from the rapidly growing Russia economy, so that was his whole angle, shaming those guys in the paper. It's not clear it was truth, or whether it was slander, there was shady business going on, but he's no saint. When a news article is worth $41 million, like how much is that per word, and are you going to get a PR person to review the words, check if you can't get the article to be worth $42M in stock? Are you sure it's exactly $41M? Can't you just give it a little nuance, use a thesaurus maybe? Besides, damningly, he gave up his US citizenship to avoid paying taxes (like he obviously doesn't say that because tax lawyers tell you if you say that you are forbidden from ever setting foot in America for life), and that backfired because that means you are forfeiting America's protection and help because you didn't want to contribute back into the system. And he now can't make political contributions as a citizen, which I'm getting to.
He got kicked out of Russia, which makes perfect sense, like this guy thinks he milk American institutions, totally imperialistically meaning imposing American values on Russian companies, for no other reason but to make billions of dollars, and hoard that wealth with cunning tax evasion (guys like this absolutely don't pay taxes for ten years after you stop being a citizen, though that's the law, and to my understanding they literally value the money they pay in taxes 0%, or even negative). And USA actually is fine with you going to some banana republic and lording it over them, I mean it's perverse, but it's happened many many times in US history. And that's precisely why you still have to pay taxes if you're overseas if you're American, though in practice you only pay if you are upper class in a foreign country, which is by design. Or what, you expect the embassies to evacuate you after you caused a revolution, or you want American marines to force a country to redo an election you didn't like, that costs money that has to come from taxes, you don't want to pay anything for that?
And that guy is an activist now, he got some other citizenships, he lobbied all kinds of governments to punish a few of Putin's, like, he calls them henchmen or something, maybe they are, I don't know, it's always the same 7 guys and nobody else so they can't get bank accounts, they're the ones who seem to have beaten his lawyer to death. And he says, he's gotten 7 red notices from Interpol from Russia, it's a huge problem if you get just one.
It's realistic for him to expect to be assassinated, he says in his book he could have 1000 bodyguards and it wouldn't matter, Putin could get him anyway, and he has other strategies to protect himself. And several assassinations have been attributed to Russia in the last ten years, in London a few times, I think in London repeatedly, the nerve gas some years ago was attributed to them, some polonium in someone's tea, it's a realistic outcome if you're enough of a thorn in a powerful someone's side.
So one viable strategy is, piss people off less.
Damn you made me think even less of Snowden. You should tell more people about Bill Browder's story.
He just spent too much of his life doing nothing other than serving his true nation, his pocket. So he grows up in America--that's already a privilege in my book. I think he went to Colorado, then Stanford for Business School. This was in the 80s, so Stanford was earning huge amounts of funding from the Department of Defense for all kinds of crazy cold war tech, and there was so much trust and mutual benefit in this relationship that the DoD...I don't know how to communicate it, but let Stanford charge "overhead" which went to the school in general. So the electrical engineering students in particular would make a breakthrough, and they'd get paid well, but then the money sloshed around the whole school. The Cold War was when Stanford went from a respectable, but second-tier school to a first-tier school, and it could really make its huge campus look like a billion bucks. So Browder goes to Business School in Stanford, and then the Cold War ends, so he goes to Eastern Europe and then Russia, like he himself said because his parents and grandparents were the most famous communists in America, he'd become the biggest capitalist in Russia. So, would he become Russian then? Would he stay in Russia and learn Russian? Will deriving a fortune, we're talking billions, from Russia, help Russia in some roundabout way? Because additionally, IIRC he gave up his US citizenship in the early nineties, like right away, he did not want to get caught dead paying taxes. And he didn't pay shit. He made billions, his fund was one of the fastest growing in the nineties, and apparently he flew from Britain, where he had become a citizen (I think you can't just not have a citizenship, I think you can't drop a citizenship without securing another one first). He flew to Russia all the time.
And I consider credible that Russia was a gangster-driven economy. This is actually not that surprising or, frankly even evil in the specific circumstances, it's just a consequence of the black market being the only market, so a return to market economics would have to come from the black market expanding and part of it getting split off into a gray and a white market. It's just not realistic to expect hard-line Communists to adapt to a market system they've been fighting their whole lives and expect them to have the combination of skills needed to address all the challenges that face a capitalist.
Whereas the black marketer actually has those skills right now, they're not meaningfully worse skills because he was selling Beatles's records or passports or rare books, the point is he's selling, he's bargaining, he's negotiating, he's in the market and getting a feel for the market, he's sometimes speculating, and you need that too, and that's a really tricky thing, and the market needs good speculators in order to smooth out the booms and busts. Keep in mind, under the thesis that Russia is run by gangster capitalists, it still puts a very high price on its national security and isn't selling itself out to other countries, it preserved a huge degree of autonomy and sovereignty to the point Russia could take in Snowden despite America's pressure against it. So at the very least, there's some patriotism. Moreso than Browder for sure.
Further, when the government basically collapsed people needed to eat, and the arrangement was they had all this stock, perhaps entitled to dividends, but nothi...
But yeah, I agree with your point about the Russian government political motives.
1. US warned every country in both Europe and South America said to be considering shelter for Snowden of grave consequences should they offer asylum to the whistleblower. Without his US passport, Snowden couldn't go anywhere and Ecuador reversed their safe passage.
2. This also gave political fodder for the establishment cronies to call and label anyone who would defend Snowden a "Russian Agent".
I would recommend reading these two by Glenn Greenwald (he was the journalist who worked with Snowden to publish the docs):
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/ben-rhodes-book-proves-obam...
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/as-anger-toward-belarus-mou...
> Led by then-Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. officials warned every country in both Europe and South America said to be considering shelter for Snowden of grave consequences should they offer asylum to the whistleblower. Threats to Havana caused the Cuban government to rescind its commitment of safe passage they had issued to Snowden's lawyer. Under Biden's pressure, Ecuador also reversed itself by proclaiming the safe passage document issued to Snowden was a mistake.
I would also recommend the Citizen Four documentary:
https://youtu.be/EDhB-A23IUk
Related, I also don’t understand why, if the US was able to pressure other countries into withdraw their commitments, they wouldn’t just wait until Snowden was in one of those countries so they could pressure for extradition.
The closest we have to state-owned is NPR, and if you think NPR is the lapdog of the government, you don't listen to NPR very much.
I'm not accusing you of deliberately spreading propaganda, perhaps just repeating what I suppose must seem like an important and logically sound rebuttal to the enemy, known Russian agent Snowden.
Why would Snowden have anything to say about Russia? Do you think he knows or could say something that has not been said by a thousand others? Do you believe he would have knowledge and experience of the state security apparatus in Russia that would give him a unique and important perspective on things? Do you think he is in a better position to criticize Russia than other people?
As I said, it's a propaganda technique. Do we screech at US journalists about why aren't they denouncing the US every time they publish a story about Russia? No.
He keeps his trap shut about our suffering or plays softball at best which effectively makes him a great weapon in FSB/Russian oligarch hands and a RT mouthpiece.
Fixed it for you.
Basically a guy is sitting in country A and criticizing media of country B while getting both legal and financial support from country A. While he keeps dead quiet about the media practices of country A. While country A sees country B as a strategic adversary.
This thing quacks very much like a duck and, since we should be mindful of the media we consume, shouldn’t we take his messages with a pinch of salt?
Look at the current state of surveillance. It's sickening.