Oh dear, what tragic little sheeple we must be.As Dave points out, it's ridiculously time-consuming to try and take this stuff apart. It requires time and resource that only a journalist who writes about the subject is likely to have, and it would take them far longer to do than it would for someone to write more bullshit. If the blogger wanted to be taken seriously he could just try not writing like a conspiracy theorist. Instead he loads his writing with little phrases like "NATO funded propaganda website Bellingcat" (a handy way of making you distrust anything they say without actually having to present a counterargument), and "the pariah rogue states Israel and North Korea" (a nice little signal there that this will be a reassuringly anti-establishment narrative - remember, the establishment lie about everything, you cannot trust anything they say).Why on earth would anybody decide to go to this blog for a dispassionate assessment of the evidence?And if he's been right about something before (I don't know what this might refer to), that doesn't mean he's right about everything. A stopped clock tells the time twice a day - that doesn't make it right all the time.
Two thumbs up for The Fault Line.
I thought it was good, solid but largely unspectacular. I think having Dimbleby hosting was a masterstroke as he lends everything an air of gravitas and trustworthiness. There was interesting detail and great access to key figures (helped by Dimbleby involvement no doubt) but I found the format of jumping around chronologically quite wearing and didn't end the series feeling like I'd learned much. Basically I thought it was all a bit 'meh' so am interested that others are raving about it. I'm no 'hater' of Blair in the way that many on the left are incidentally.
Fair comments. I think I may biased due to age here. I can remember most stuff around this fairly clearly and therefore this was more like a nice summarizing without rehashing a lot of stuff that was gone into in huge detail at the time and in the inquiry later.Dave
The current series of the Reith Lectures is very interesting; on BBC sounds. Mark Carney discusses economics, the concept of value and the financial crisis, and gets quizzed on it by quite a few former chancellors.
You can see how the way the evidence was selected to support the war got people suspicious though; I think the main takeaway was that all of the intelligence was fundamentally shit.
Quote from: TobyD on December 13, 2020, 10:38:25 pmThe current series of the Reith Lectures is very interesting; on BBC sounds. Mark Carney discusses economics, the concept of value and the financial crisis, and gets quizzed on it by quite a few former chancellors. Thanks for this, despite his rather dry delivery I agree - very interesting. The issue of price vs value seems to be one of the biggest issues with the state of the world right now and I wonder when we'll next have a Governor with such a clear eyed view of finances' limitations.
One of the things that it did contain in the first episode was a CIA agent whose intelligence was not shit, but essentially the neocons prevented it from reaching the white house. To start with the British government likely was being prevented from seeing the things that indicated that there weren't any WMD, only later when the countries were basically committed, did they become complicit
Quote from: spidermonkey09 on December 15, 2020, 12:22:36 pmI thought it was good, solid but largely unspectacular. I think having Dimbleby hosting was a masterstroke as he lends everything an air of gravitas and trustworthiness. There was interesting detail and great access to key figures (helped by Dimbleby involvement no doubt) but I found the format of jumping around chronologically quite wearing and didn't end the series feeling like I'd learned much. Basically I thought it was all a bit 'meh' so am interested that others are raving about it. I'm no 'hater' of Blair in the way that many on the left are incidentally.I was 12 when 9/11 happened, so the war was something I saw on the TV but didn't completely comprehend. I found that I learned a lot by listening to the podcast.Likewise, I thought it was really good.Probably been mentioned before but I really enjoyed the BBC Radio 5 live- Paradise podcast series. Crazy story.
Quote from: Davo on December 12, 2020, 08:09:22 amChrist. I just spent 5 mins getting lost in that miasma of utter garbage of a conspiracy theory blog by that guy Craig Murray. Had never heard of him before and hopefully never will again. It all just strikes me as typical conspiracy theory garbage that sounds very convincing and has lots of threads all linking stuff together in a seemingly plausible manner. Next minute you start believing that there were no moon landings and that 911 was a conspiracy by the CIA and that the towers could never have fallen down just by being hit by planes.See, this is my issue. Everyone writes him off as a "conspiracy nut", but he's been proved right time and time again. I'm yet to see a definitive case where he's categorically proven wrong. People don't engage as their bullshit radars go off, and they give up. I'd genuinely rather none of it were true, and I could start writing him off like everyone else does. Maybe he's a Russian disinformation shill? If so, show me. I'm willing to admit I'm being mislead. We all can be. I need facts though...
Christ. I just spent 5 mins getting lost in that miasma of utter garbage of a conspiracy theory blog by that guy Craig Murray. Had never heard of him before and hopefully never will again. It all just strikes me as typical conspiracy theory garbage that sounds very convincing and has lots of threads all linking stuff together in a seemingly plausible manner. Next minute you start believing that there were no moon landings and that 911 was a conspiracy by the CIA and that the towers could never have fallen down just by being hit by planes.
That’s very good, thanks Toby.
If you enjoyed The Fault Line you might enjoy Talking Politics: History of Ideas, a series of lectures on key works of political thought likes Hobbes’ Leviathan, Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj or Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom ...David Runciman has the tone and confidence of a hereditary viscount from St John’s Wood, who won an Eton scholarship, and is now a Cambridge professor. If this doesn’t put you off he’s a brilliant lecturer.