https://twitter.com/iwriteok/status/1308286959937150977?s=21
It's really becoming clear that social media network are an extension of the American empire and it's security state.
Radio War Nerd episode #120: Secret Military History of the Internet, with Yasha Levine
Recorded February 4, 2018
Guest: Yasha Levine, author & journalist
We're reposting a free unlocked version of our interview with Yasha Levine on his new book "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet" . . . Levine dives deep into the origins of the Internet, designed by Pentagon researchers to create an all-seeing counterinsurgency weapon in wars abroad, and against protest movements home in the USA. Fifty years ago, student radicals protested the early Internet as a Big Brother weapon of oppression; today, young "radicals" in the Internet Freedom movement promote this Pentagon weapon as a force for liberation and revolution against the same Big Brother state. Levine explains how these paradoxes came to be—and why Snowden's revelations about government spying on the Internet revealed not a bug in the system that can be "fixed", but rather the whole purpose of the Internet system from the start. Grim, hopeless & fascinating.
Yashas book Surveillance Valley is great. Thinking of the internet as a weapon makes a ton of sense
an extension of the American empire and it’s security state
even without Silicon Valley, California is part of the central geography of the Military industrial complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
Why should Europe give a fuck about Facebook pulling out of their market? There are plenty of alternatives and it's about as far from a necessary service as it gets. I can understand them maybe not wanting to upset a manufacturer or some company that provides jobs, but what does Facebook provide that would affect Europe negatively if it weren't available?
https://thegrayzone.com/2018/10/29/shamiwitness-how-bellingcat-and-neocons-collaborated-with-the-most-influential-isis-propagandist-on-twitter/
Bellingcat is dog shit, they regularly publishes complete BS on Syria paving the way for the wests attempted coup in the country, when they get called out on it they pretend it's nothing and the media stays silent. What ever glimmer of actual "opensource" journalism may have been there during their kickstarter days has been completely subsumed when they sold out to the security state.
their conclusions seem factually correct to me
Whistleblowers that did the on site inspection of the alleged chemical bomb site for the UN have refuted that too.
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/16/syria-scandal-new-whistleblower-claims-un-chemical-weapons-watchdog-buried-douma-evidence/
The Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal attended an Assad-sponsored trade union convention in Damascus the very same year
The "Assad sponsored" is a smear from the liberal security apparatus, he was invited by a trade union and paid for the trip himself. What exactly is the problem with going to Damascus and seeing what the situation on the ground is? He is a journalist after all?
Blumenthal was once supportive of intervention in Syria after visiting a refugee camp in Jordan
He has explained this about face on his podcast "moderate rebels", he initially agreed that Assad was a horrible leader, and cheered it on, but an interaction with journalists he respect, got him to reexamine his assumptions, go back to the books and investigate the situation on the ground, especially what the west was doing. It is completely clear that the Syrian war is an imperial project from the US empire, replacing Assad with ISIS will not bring human rights to Syria. How ever much you might hate Assad the alternative offered by the west is so much worse.
Also you can be anti-interventionist and still acknowledge Assad’s human rights violations.
We don't give a shit about human rights, thats why Saudi Arabia is our friend, a murderous dictatorship that's waging a genocidal war against the peasant population of Yemen, and we just can't stop selling them weapons and military assistance, there's a reason why they call it the Human Rights Industry. It's job is to manufacture consent for war, it always parrots the US / NATO alliance lust for war, and is completely silent on the human rights violations and war crimes we commit all the time.
I think its this episode of the pod (theres a lot on syria): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE-jNckM-zw
Edit: nope wrong its this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Enj89KoLhZI
You don't have to be a chemist to determine that the 'bombs' had been placed there and not dropped from the air. The hole in the roof and the impact craters are simply not consistent with physics.
And I was not talking about biases. You can keep it to yourself.
"all I am saying is Bellingcat is mostly factual I don’t want to assign a moral judgement by saying it is good, I trust everyone on this Lemmy to be an informed consumer when it comes to investigative journalism."
NYT is also "Mostly factual" but they also love every war the US want's to start.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/13/bell-o13.html
"The Bellingcat “research collective” is a web site established in July 2014 by Eliot Higgins. Originally from Leicester in the UK, Higgins is, as of February, a senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and Future Europe Initiative."
"Higgins is one of five authors of an Atlantic Council report released earlier this year, “Distract, Deceive, Destroy,” on Russia's role in Syria. The report concludes by calling for US missile strikes in Syria. "
The guy's on the fucking Atlantic Council a non governmental organisation staffed by unelected weapons manufacturers and propagandist, a 100% pro NATO organisation that sets foreign policy across most of Europe, and just loves endless war.
His connections to the security state are clearly far from over. Stopping one job at the Atlantic Council and starting a new NGO that parrots NATO / US talking point does not make that a "former tie" he still very clearly a propagandist working on behalf of the US / NATO imperial alliance
Here he is promoting ISIS propagandist on twitter:
http://exiledonline.com/shamiwitness-when-bellingcat-neocons-collaborated-with-the-most-influential-isis-propagandist-on-twitter/
