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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. Not so much that they let them get a start, as much as ISIS had a useful role to play once they were not an existential threat to Assad. And contrary to their press image, ISIS leaders are fanatics but not berserkers— they were capable of cutting temporary strategic deals. - ISIS was extremely useful as a tool to attack and undermine U.S. forces and U.S. allies in Iraq and later U.S.- aligned groups in Syria. For Russia, undermining the west is always the first strategic imperative. - ISIS was a useful rhetorical tool for many years; Russia got a lot of mileage and influence by claiming that they were all that stood between the “U.S. created” ISIS savages and a regional caliphate; in fact they simply effectively kept the stove at a simmer but never a boil. - ISIS and other jihadi groups are a useful pressure valve to get rid of extremist Muslims inside the Russian federation and make them someone else’s problem, and there is less blowback to killing them abroad than at home. - Russia and Assad could let them slip off the leash a bit and cause an uptick in migrant flows to Europe which has always been something Russia cannily exploits (Turkey is not innocent here either). - At one time Russia liked to hold them in reserve as a bargaining chip to get the West to the table. “Let’s go after ISIS together, and put aside all these quarrels over (Russia’s) Near Abroad.” It’s well documented that Russia and Assad allowed them to operate against common enemies from within the “regime controlled” zone. It’s kind of cliche, but the U.S. vs. Russian view of jihadis sort of reflects the inheritance of Western vs. Eastern Rome (Byzantium). The one likes to bring overwhelming force, wipe them out, completely destroy them, see if you can replace them with something more amenable. The second never wants to fully defeat an enemy because they can always be useful so long as they aren’t an existential threat.
  2. I will again say that I am far from “optimistic” but following these scenes from the prison….Assad was sarin gassing people and had a giant hydraulic press he used to squish people and would dissolve their remains in acid. All the takes about how bad it might get next should go on pause for a bit.
  3. Given that his name is Luigi and not Waluigi we should default to assuming he’s on the right side of things.
  4. How do you fuck up a McDonald’s transaction so badly that you get asked for an ID?
  5. In what I know will shock everyone, we bombed ISIS positions in what was until very recently a Russian/Assad controlled area of the country. Almost like they’d been allowing ISIS to hang out there.
  6. Tbh, it’s going to be really hard to be worse than what left. Syria was a charnel house. I’m not saying I’m optimistic, just that it’s hard to get lower, Assad sarin gassed people and ran the country like the USSR during the Great Terror.
  7. The Russians will likely negotiate an exit, there is nothing left to defend and the rebel groups can only lose by not letting them go.
  8. That monkey’s paw really curled when they asked for tyrannical and bloody oppressors of Arabs and Muslims to fall on October 7.
  9. Israel is mopping up the regime’s chemical weapons stockpiles.
  10. Assad is almost certainly in Russia. The Russian MFA announced definitively that he has left the country.
  11. Likely landed at the military airport near Palmyra, where there are still either ordinary or PMC Russians.
  12. Europe needs to prep for a migrant wave like in 2014-15. The populist anger from that one is still resonating across the continent. Erdogan is likely about to get paid.
  13. One of the effective tactics: 1. Opaque Russia-connected entity approaches popular TokTokers and contracts for a neutral “get out the vote message”— but specifies the use of a few precise hashtags in their content. 2. As the algorithm detects these hashtags are popular with the desired target audience, the unknown candidate dumps his own messaging, often unlabeled as political ads and without any actual political content, into TikTok which gets fed to the people who engaged with the get-out-the-vote content. 3. The network of inauthentic accounts, up to 25,000, jumps on using the same pre-cooked hashtag and injects their support for this prior unknown candidate and/or negative messaging against mainstream, pro-West candidates. I will admit to being uneasy with tossing out an election over this stuff but if the intel is correct and a hostile intelligence service used money and deception to make their guy go viral— I don’t know what the appropriate response is if it isn’t disrupted and revealed in real time. Shake your finger and say you’ll stop them next time (unless their proxy doesn’t let you now that he’s in charge)? X is also really vulnerable to this tactic, FWIW.
  14. The allegation is that there were coordinated inauthentic accounts, payment to influencers, election propaganda unlabeled as such, accounts spoofing Romanian government institutions, and concealed paid promos. https://www.rferl.org/amp/romania-russia-election-interference-tiktok/33227010.html
  15. No one stupid enough to agree to a “set yourself up to take the fall for my fake murder” scheme would be smart enough to get away for even this long. I doubt they’d be capable of buying a Greyhound ticket.
  16. Romania’s Constitutional Court has thrown out the results of the first round of the presidential election, won by a virtual unknown hard nationalist, pro-Kremlin candidate. A declassified file presented to the court showed that Georgescu received extensive boosting on TikTok from sources tied to Russia. EU authorities have directed TikTok to retain all its data from that period in Romania. The electoral process resets and candidates all must register again. https://www.politico.eu/article/romania-court-cancels-presidential-election-runoff-tiktok-russian-influence-calin-georgescu/
  17. So I’m staying up to speed, every discreet claim that we’ve looked at from this guy has been bullshit or dubious. Yet we’re still meant to consider his overarching thesis?
  18. I smiled at “buttheads” but then things got really sad. It’s a good letter but the salutation really was a head fake, “buttheads” might fit some sort of fixable billing shenanigans but denying pediatric chemo patients anti-nausea meds earns at the very least “dickheads.”
  19. I guess we are at an impasse because I don’t see a significant upside to constantly exposing the most oatmeal-brained Americans to a steady stream of stupid and fake unfiltered bullshit. It’s hard to tell though, not like we are running this experiment in real time.
  20. The issue here is that given the breadth of topics and Rogan’s audience, none of them have the frame of reference to begin applying skepticism appropriately. Ordinarily we have “journalists” who “prepare for an interview” and “ask informed questions” to help the consumer apply that skepticism. Here’s a simple informed question: “You referenced your role in government working in the online communications space. You were appointed politically in late November 2020 and your last day was no later than January 20 , 2021. The State Department never even posted your biography. Do you think you had enough time in the role to fully grasp the policy and history?” But that question won’t get asked, because Joe Rogan is the info op, not the Atlantic Council. And you’re the target.
  21. That wasn’t in the snippet I went to and I’m done listening to Rogan and Benz’ meandering slop and synthesizing their assertions and arguments. Feel free to do so if you want a response, I left a template up thread. I can’t work off of this and a copy pasta from Wikipedia about a historical event. My gut is to say that Benz opened the podcast with a complete fabrication and he used to run an anonymous Nazi account, so whatever he says is likely bullshit.
  22. I think the subsequent responses (redirecting you to smaller snippets of a podcast) reveals that the answer is “no.” Here is where I will say that the preferred brand of conservative and alt media (hours of audio slop, TV yelling, bloviatkng with no pushback) actually damages consumers’ ability to synthesize information and identify theses and supporting arguments. So I’ll do it for him: Benz claims that at Atlantic Council journalist seminar aimed at training people to recognize and respond to disinformation is part of the U.S. government censorship apparatus. He is concerned that the framework presented, which tells journalists to be aware of how information ops use tactics of Dismissal, Distraction, Distortion, and Dismaying. Benz rejects this framework because none of those tactics involve the deployment of actual “false” information and alleges that Atlantic Council is advocating for censorship of political viewpoints. He objects to the use of a DJT tweet and Brexit slogan a case studies for the framework at the training. A coherent response might be: 1. Rhetoric that uses tactics of distortion, dismissal, destruction and dismaying is a feature of info ops and the Atlantic Council does not suggest banning the tactics. Rather, it is equipping journalists to recognize and probe this type of rhetoric, not to simply repeat it mindlessly. This isn’t censorship, it is the opposite, it is building the foundation for challenging, critical, and open discussion. 2. The audience (journalists and fact-checkers) are not in a position to censor or silence people and Benz does not demonstrate how this session leads to tech censorship. The audience members are only in a position to question people, which is an important element of free speech. 3. Using DJT or Brexit as an example could be seen as ill-considered given that the session is funded with U.S. grants. On the flip side, given that it was filmed in 2019, it could be seen as evidence of grants working as intended: a third party training that equips journalists to ask hard questions and criticize even the U.S. and its allies when warranted, and defending the principles of fee and healthy debate rather than serving a narrow political aim.
  23. A classic of the genre, “can you listen to a 2:45 minute stream of bullshit and refute it point by point?” Benz lies within his opening salvo by claiming that the United States overthrew the government of Ukraine in a coup. An actual interviewer would have interjected— “you say that the U.S. was behind a coup in Ukraine, but that’s far from being broadly accepted as accurate. It’s been denied by the Ukrainian government, by the United States government, and there are multiple well-documented independent histories of the Maidan protests that would reject what you said. Can you speak more to why we should believe you?” Rogan is a good example of how idiots believe a lack of bias should work in media and an example of how broke-brains incapable of thinking confuse assertions with evidence and fact.
  24. Very little special forces training involves prepping to gun people down on city streets and flee via bicycle. When Mossad whacks people in places where they really don’t want to get caught they use teams of a dozen people with fake passports, governments solve things with lots of people and lots of money. There is not a stable of super badass former MI6 assassins out there waiting for clients to buzz their encrypted phones. Consulting pays so much more and you don’t go to jail. Contract killers are just criminals who don’t have other options and usually get caught.
  25. Lots of speculation but we all just need to wait for the explanation of benefits here.
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