Careful there. You can only propose such surveys when it serves the narrative and in certain places and not all, see southern/eastern regions of Ukraine.
I hate the stupidity of this bullshit. Of course catching sars-cov-2 is going to provide a broader profile against which your immune system can develop matches: the vaccine only has the spike, while the virus has the spike plus other key proteins and signals. No shit Sherlock! BUT AT THE SAME TIME the virus is orders of magnitude more dangerous. The only people playing pretend are the ones who keep FUDing about the vaccine.
Remember when we were assured that the vaccine’s spike protein would remain mostly in the injection site at the shoulder muscle or local lymph nodes? And only for a very limited period of time? This was by the experts.
> I want pharma and medical innovation to be huge money makers. I want founders and early employees in companies that innovate in these spaces to be fabulously wealthy.
Sure, in an utopian world that would work. But, here on planet Earth, that would massively increase the incentives of fraud. There are already huge issues with this. Increasing the payout by x100 would do more harm than good in this context.
Perhaps this is already forgotten history, but for all the talk about desperate despots the US is still actually the only country to have ever used nuclear bombs in combat, twice. On civilian cities mind you. And the circumstances were anything but desperate for them.
The US also refrained from using that weapon to further conquer the world though. I've read somewhere that the US generals were pumped to use that super weapon to further advance their military interests but the political class opposed it.
There are many sins of the US but overall I'm inlined to believe that the US is much more rational superpower that ultimately brings more good than bad because the US interests are in peaceful world that play on their rules. The relative world peace since the WW2 is known as PAX Americana and the moment it falters wannabe warlords start regional wars, causing big tragedies and any conflict happens wherever the US can't project it's force over the regional powers. The weaker the US the more wars happen.
You can argue that US rules are not fair and there is quite a lot of American exceptionalism but I'm not convinced that the proposed replacements are any better, thus the wars to change the system are wars fought in vein. IMHO, working with the US is much better any given day. The only risk is, the US itself changing into something bad or retreats voluntarily and leaving vacuum.
Of course it's not a german invention. But very few people know that the germans improved upon the British ones (say that publicly and you risk being labelled a conspiracy theorist). And on and on with the chain of history. I was just trying to make a point about hypocrisy, double standards etc.
> I have trouble with the idea that all of the members of this group – the mainstream media – whose membership is so ambiguous, could establish a shared agenda.
> If you’ve ever worked for a big company, you know how many different people work there, all with different opinions, different goals, different everything. News agencies are no different.
> Multiply that by the sheer number of news agencies, and add in the tight and unforgiving deadlines and you can see how improbable a broad, coordinated agenda would be.
When interests converge you don’t need to gather around a table to set the agenda, as George Carlin used to say.
> When interests converge you don’t need to gather around a table to set the agenda, as George Carlin used to say.
Sooo.... what is this converged interest of the MSM? Why do some people feel so threatened by it, why do they hate it so much? It's unclear to me what the actual accusation is: the term MSM feels like a shibboleth, an accusatory phrase that doesn't inform, but only keys in those who already feel a certain way. But it's unclear to most I think what basis this hatred & disgust stems from.
I think most of us can broadly agree that a lot of news media is not super fantastic, is somewhat problematic for a variety of reasons. But it feels like there is a radical & extremist faction that has frankly incendiary opinions about almost all media is in cahoots, is diffusing some unseen truth, without anyone ever pointing to or saying what that truth is. (I want to give it more credit, not be uncharitable, but: sometimes the unseen truth feels like it's just whatever D.J.T. says the truth is, facts be damned.)
I can broadly allow that most media is to some degree a tool of a capitalist system, that there is some influence from those at the top on what happens at the generally well-meaning-ish news-rooms in the mass-audience moderate, left, and right leaning markets. It's been a bit distasteful to me across my whole life that there's kind of a simple shallowness, a simple-minded bland Americanness that hides the darker substances, but it's never felt particularly conspiratorial or vile, more a product of what the market wants, a product of the mass-market nature.
But the various news medias recognizably have varying flavors & textures, and it's certainly not something I could lump into a single evil category; there are clearly many involved, aware, caring people who have a chance to report the simple truth of what's happening & what's going on. And there's no clear signs that there is a concerted converged interest- there feels like real dynamic tensions expressed, many sides with different stakes. It's hard for me to imagine what vector might guide & direct so many different view points, hard for me to imagine the specter of convergence lying to us always. It feels like a dark fantasy to think that way, driven by dark forces, to fabricate an image of media that is all somehow so very very fallen. And to so deliberately imprecisely never say how or why or what the real threat is: to only allude, in broad strokes, to convergence: it feels like propaganda, a desire to believe something beyond the simple reality of what is known.
> Peter Daszak is pictured leaving the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China on February 3, 2021, as a members of the World Health Organization COVID origins investigation team.
You can’t make this up. Then they wonder how/why the people lost the trust in the institutions.
It's actually much simpler for most Americans. The US is the leader of freedom and democracy. The US supports and defends those ideals beyond its own borders. Is the US perfect? No, but what would the world look like today without their leadership? Who would stop the authoritarians from taking over their neighbors?
The numbers are misleading, 8% budget increase is less than inflation and a large part of the aid package to Ukraine is hardware sitting in storage that's already been paid for, but they use the original sticker price.
Meet some Tibetans and ask them if America is as bad a place to live as China. Or ask Somalis or Ethiopians who live in America, or Russians and Ukrainians who live here, or Chinese dissidents, or anyone from Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia who fled to America, just how terrible America's actions were considering the final realities that befell their relatives in those places. Heck, ask Afghans, Lebanese, Iranians, Cubans, Venezuelans who live here. Do you think that other powers don't do much worse things in the parts of the world they control? Have you visited any countries that the US accepts refugees from?
> most people accept that out of 8,000,000,000 people, there are 35 that need to sent to a facility like Guantanamo.
Most people do not accept that most Guantánamo detainees have been/are being held without ever being charged or tried. The terrorist in this case is the US as harsh as that sounds.
> Most people do not accept that most Guantánamo detainees have been/are being held without ever being charged or tried.
People are right not to accept that because it isn't true. Of the 35 Guantanamo Bay detainees, 3 are being held without charge. https://www.closeguantanamo.org/Prisoners
Worth pointing out that Sabri al-Qurashi, like most Guantánamo detainees have been/are being held without ever being charged or tried. The US is the terrorist in this case.
It is worth noting that Sabri al-Qurashi was released in 2014 --- not to his home country who refused to accept him.
Technically, the detainees are prisoners of war --- aligned with a terrorist organization who still considers itself at war with the USA. They can't be tried under US civilian law because they aren't citizens and haven't broken any laws in the USA.
Those who can be tried under military law have been. Those who can't be tried but have renounced their allegiance to a terrorist organization (such as Sabri al-Qurashi) have been released if/when some other country is willing to accept them.
Those who by their own statements maintain they are still enemy combatants aligned against the USA are still being held as prisoners of war.
Please relate how your country treats such individuals in a non-terrorist manner?
So your country has never been attacked by terrorists? That makes it easy to criticize those who have.
One of the problems of becoming a "terrorist" is that no one will negotiate your release. The home countries of many of these individuals don't want them back and refuse to accept them.
