US Politics

Tl;dr Mainstream media caught outright lying and completely distorting facts to fit a narrative, we only found out because social media exists and gives a voice to people who were actually there and know the facts. I don't believe they only started doing this when the Internet came along.

If you've not followed it, Owen Jones summarises what we know here:

I don't claim to be an expert on Pravda but would welcome any evidence you have of anything they did that was this dishonest.

Well neither am I, but Pravda was the official state media of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1920-1990 or thereabouts. Just for the period prior to 1953, consider how they reported on the 800k executions, 1.7m deaths in the Gulags, or the 6m or so in the famine of the 1930s?

Comparing a bit of lazy reporting / politically biased spin about football violence seems jejune at best. Call it out for what it is, there's plenty of ammunition to criticize western institutions, media and otherwise, without making specious parallels.

Maybe this might give a better view of some of the recent topics around US foreign policy etc:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bl6_MAhg_4

CAMBRIDGE UNION
Professor Jeffrey Sachs delivers a speech and Q&A at 6pm in the Debating Chamber on Tuesday 22nd October 2024.

Jeffrey gives a short speech about “whether there can ever truly be a liberal international order?” followed by a few questions from Speakers Officer Alex Mitchell and then further questions from members of the audience
PROFESSOR JEFFREY D. SACHS

Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016.

He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Co-Chair of the Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition, Commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development, academician of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences at the Vatican, and Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah Honorary Distinguished Professor at Sunway University.

He has been Special Advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary General António Guterres.

He spent over twenty years as a professor at Harvard University, where he received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees. Sachs has received 42 honorary doctorates, and his recent awards include the 2022 Tang Prize in Sustainable Development, the Legion of Honor by decree of the President of the Republic of France, and the Order of the Cross from the President of Estonia.

His most recent books are The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions (2020) and Ethics in Action for Sustainable Development (2022)

Russia still annexed Crimea in 2014, along with parts of the Dobas, Zelenskey didn't become president until 2019.

But didn't you know, that was part of a CIA coup to install the famously anti Russian Poroshenko

install the famously anti Russian Poroshenko

Is this irony? Poroshenko's policy was pro-NATO and EU accession. I am probably misunderstanding something.

It was you who introduced the 'xxx is pravda' metaphor. As I said at the time, I don't think it was particularly helpful.

Obviously worse things happened under the USSR than post-match violence, and even more obviously, that wasn't my point!

2023 was a typo

Yes, will correct. Should be 2022

Maybe this might give a better view of some of the recent topics around US foreign policy etc:

Not listened to the vid but Sachs is worth listening to. He's a former insider who made his name selling off anything of value in Russia post USSR collapse to the oligarchs. As a former insider he has massive credibility when he says how things work.
It would definitely be a better use of your time to listen to him than read what all of us have written!

Thanks for all the comments above. Obviously not everyone agrees with my analysis but I respect the people who explain where and why their views differ, and have sympathy for those who lack the understanding to do anything other than name calling.

Let's not go round in circles with Ukraine. I won't say anything more about it for now anyway. But let's see how it turns out, whether Trump can snap his fingers and bring peace, force the Russians to withdraw from everywhere and Ukraine gets welcomed into nato, or whether the US and Europe cut and run and throw zelensky under a very large bus.

Have we talked about de-dollarisation yet? That is the biggest thing that the American political class will have to tackle, IMHO.

This is the first I have heard of him. It seems that his opinions diverge from those of his peers in many ways. Is his credibility massive in respect to those of his peers that disagree with him? If so, why?

Dunno.
He's a professor at Columbia so he can't be that stupid.
But you could always listen to what he says and form your own views, rather than looking for gatekeepers to tell you what to think.

I was wondering about your opinion. You stated he had massive credibility, it follows that his peers who disagree with him may meet any criteria put forward for his credibility so I wondered, how does Frank decide what is credible.

My guess is he meets your world view so you have backwards engineered the credibility. Credibility you wouldn't suggest he had if you didn't agree with him. Is this right or is there something else that sets him apart from the consensus?

Russia invaded in Feb 2022 and it has clearly been planned for months

To address your points in turn:

1. When did the US last invade a country that it wanted to subsume? The same can be asked for the UK. Putin is looking to expand Russia to include some of the previous USSR-era countries. If he succeeds in Ukraine, what will stop him looking at Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and beyond?

2. My view is that we should let the population of the Ukraine decide if they want to remain a sovereign nation, or return to being part of Russia. I think the answer to that question would be clear cut: since the fall of the Iron Curtain, many of the former 'satellite' states have voted to move out of the control of Moscow.

On the Russian economy, it's clearly overheating as labour shortages, directly caused by the invasion of Ukraine, bite. Russia may have found other buyers for their fossil fuels, but the sanctions imposed by the West are having a real impact on their economy, especially on the elite that prop Putin's regime up.

credibility

What I said was he has credibility because he has been an insider.

He has been in the meetings, the conversations that normal people never normally get to see. He has dealt with the people with power who make the big decisions, in fact he has been one of them. When someone like that says something it carries a lot more weight than when some random says it.

It's not a question of whether I agree or disagree with his opinions. His opinions have value but the real value is in the facts, the information that he has that he chooses to share. Unless he is lying, which is always possible but very risky for credibility, you have to put weight on what he says happened.

Putin is looking to expand Russia to include some of the previous USSR-era countries. If he succeeds in Ukraine, what will stop him looking at Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and beyond?

How do you know that?

What I have read is he wants is to roll back nato to where it was before Poland, Romania, etc joined, so no missiles in the old Eastern Europe, as per the James Baker promise to Gorbachev.

I don't know if he'll get that, but I can see the logic for trying.

I've not heard any convincing argument why Russia would want any territories where there is not a majority Russian population in favour of joining Russia. Occupying a people who don't want to be occupied is too much work and too expensive - why would Russia try it?

I'm open to being persuaded but I don't see a good argument from their point of view.

we should let the population of the Ukraine

We are not in a position to let or not let them do anything.

On the Russian economy, it's clearly overheating as labour shortages, directly caused by the invasion of Ukraine, bite. Russia may have found other buyers for their fossil fuels, but the sanctions imposed by the West are having a real impact on their economy, especially on the elite that prop Putin's regime up.

As I posted above, their economy is growing - faster than most western economies - and the sanctions are clearly not having an impact on it.

Apparently one consequence of the sanctions was that it forced the oligarchs who had taken their wealth abroad to bring it back and invest in Russia - which is exactly what putin had wanted but previously been unable to do.

Prisoners of Geography is a good read on this

Ah, ok, so government advisors are credible. Is it just the advisor of post communist states or all government advisors?

Actually I said

Mainstream media has told some whoppers over the years but it's hardly Pravda

To which you replied,

I disagree with that, I think mainstream media owned by oligarchs like murdoch is horrifically propagandised and new media actually opens things up a bit. Sure there are risks, but I think that, rather from coming to a bad place from a good one, we are coming to a bad place from a horrendous one.

As far as voting in the US goes, most Trump voters get their news from Cable and Social Media, most young men in particular from a combination of X, Youtube and Reddit. How would you rate that content for balanced reporting, fact checking etc vs traditional media?

My point was, while you can find flaws in western mainstream media, they tend to be self correcting, albeit sometimes over a longer time line than is ideal. At the other end of the spectrum, is Pravda (or any autocratically controlled state media,) where ALL reporting is spun in service of the government and glaring events are airbrushed from history, without recourse.

I tend to think that a media environment with people like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg as effective Nomenklaturas, is inherently corrupted. That Michael Tomasky article is really worth a read, as he says:

"It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.... right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win."

Actually I said

It was your previous post: 'Wsj is pravda, nyt is pravda', etc.

I agree, there is a massive problem, and I don't know what the solution is.

What I disagree with is that mainstream media is a lot better as I've seen enough to know it is horrendous. I didn't used to believe that but experience has changed my opinion.