On the Nature of Things | Forum

Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

In this environment, Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once.

When I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin campaign being run by a different administration is something that scares him, he admitted that it does. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” he said, shrugging. “But that’s impossible.”

YMix wrote:I was reading this article about Obama's communication wizard and was struck by this paragraph:

Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

In this environment, Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once.

Nonc Hilaire wrote:So HP is a white girl's club? Ageist, racist, sexist. No surprise there.

Half of all misogynistic tweets posted on Twitter come from women, a study suggests.

YMix wrote:

NapLajoieonSteroids wrote:Isn't it interesting that when we have easy access to technology which allows global networking, the number one problem is a lack of a globalized network?

In East Aleppo, some 250,000 civilians and 8,000 insurgents, are under attack by the Syrian Army allied to Shia paramilitaries from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon and supported by the Russian and Syrian air forces. The bombing of East Aleppo has rightly caused worldwide revulsion and condemnation.

But look at how differently the international media is treating a similar situation in Mosul, 300 miles east of Aleppo, where one million people and an estimated 5,000 Isis fighters are being encircled by the Iraqi army fighting alongside Kurdish Peshmerga and Shia and Sunni paramilitaries and with massive support from a US-led air campaign. In the case of Mosul, unlike Aleppo, the defenders are to blame for endangering civilians by using them as human shields and preventing them leaving. In East Aleppo, fortunately, there are no human shields – though the UN says that half the civilian population wants to depart – but simply innocent victims of Russian savagery.

Destruction in Aleppo by Russian air strikes is compared to the destruction of Grozny in Chechnya sixteen years ago, but, curiously, no analogy is made with Ramadi, a city of 350,000 on the Euphrates in Iraq, that was 80 per cent destroyed by US-led air strikes in 2015. Parallels go further: civilians trapped in East Aleppo are understandably terrified of what the Syrian Mukhabara secret police would do to them if they leave and try to pass through Syrian government checkpoints.

But I talked earlier this year to some truck drivers from Ramadi whom I found sleeping under a bridge in Kirkuk who explained that they could not even go back to the ruins of their homes because checkpoints on the road to the city were manned by a particularly violent Shia militia. They would certainly have to pay a large bribe and stood a good chance of being detained, tortured or murdered.

Egyptian police arrested five people in Port Said, Egypt for making staged "wounded children" photos, which they were planning to use to misrepresent on social media as photos of destruction and injured people in Syria's Aleppo, the Egyptian Interior Ministry said on Monday. The group also made fake videos that purport to show the wreckage of air strikes in Aleppo.

The shooting team, which included the photographer's assistants and parents of the children, was detained in the Egypt's province of Port Said," the Ministry said on Facebook.

[...]

“A 12-year-old boy is also interviewed about what life is like under intensive Russian-backed Syrian government air strikes,” reported The Independent.

Today we don’t need rallies or newsreels because we have the internet and social media, the addiction of our age. It is a dependency on a drug which under the infamous “diversity of perspectives” presents morality and immorality as part of a landscape that spreads out flat to the horizon. Even we humble reporters can see what is happening. To an extent never witnessed before, a lot of people have started believing things that aren’t true. And it is acceptable to do this. And we help them.

So lying is certainly in its bare-faced ascendancy. It floats freely, with no pretence to being anchored in evidence. Oscar Wilde, in his dialogue The Decay of Lying, claimed that the Victorian politicians of his time were not good liars: they merely misrepresented the truth, whereas the true liar is marked by “his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy natural disdain of proof of any kind!”

By these standards true lying has returned to the political mainstream: frank, fearless and superbly irresponsible.

“As of today, US authorities have not found not even one dollar of El Chapo’s assets,” Raul Cervantes told the broadcaster Televisa on Wednesday. “His money hasn’t been found because he didn’t use the financial system.”