Russia invades Ukraine

heywood on 16/11/2022 at 22:50

Quote Posted by Starker

It doesn't matter what you say in Russia, because the power of the state is absolute and most of its people are in a state of long-cultivated helplessness and nihilism. There is no point in what a candidate is saying, because it's all shamelessly rigged. Because it's really a mafia syndicate and the opposition gets jailed or killed or disqualified in some other way.

The US still has democratic systems, however flawed and hollowed out they are. US courts may be stuffed with ideologues hand-picked by the Heritage Foundation and groomed by the Federalist Society, but by and large they still work to uphold the law. There are still independent judges who go against people who appointed them and they aren't killed if they do.

The US media is sensationalist and there are a lot of partisan outlets, but there are still independent ones too and, as a rule, journalists aren't murdered for going against the state.

If you take part in an anti-government protest, you might get shot with less lethal ammunition, tear gassed and beaten with batons, (https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34q38/artyom-kamardin-russia-poem) but the police isn't coming to visit your home afterwards to torture and rape you.

The police in the US might be corrupt, constantly lie with impunity, and break the law knowing they have a degree of immunity from it and a union to protect them, but they aren't openly walking around demanding bribes and they might get fired or occasionally even go to jail if there's overwhelming indisputable evidence they did something wrong.

Meanwhile, in Russia, this is what justice looks like:

But most of all, the US still has a political system -- a barely functioning one, but it is there. The US has been moving in the direction of Russia, but it's not there yet. Of the two parties, one may be full of people eager to unfollow democracy and follow the path of Russia, but the other still cares for governing and preserving the US as a democratic state where there is a rule of law, free and fair elections, peaceful transfer of power, and the people get to enjoy at least some degree of fundamental freedoms.

I guess we'll see today whether the US will follow the path of cheering for political violence, election denial, and following a strong leader to rule over them. But, as of yet, it's still a choice.

I think you might have taken my last sentence out of the context of my two posts. I certainly didn't mean to suggest an equivalence between the US and Russia. My point was that I'm seeing two global trends reversing.

The first is information awareness, which expanded globally throughout the 20th century and made everyone better informed, better educated, more worldly. I think it peaked in the early internet years when it was still free and open. But now governments have the best tools for information control they ever had, and most people are guided into limited information bubbles anyway by the tech they use. Propaganda is starting to win. The press is being squeezed in many places. And even where it remains free, it seems to be losing its independence and objectivity.

The other trend reversing is the spread of Western liberal values like democracy, civil liberties, human rights, a strong legal system with an impartial judiciary, free and fair trade, competitive markets, etc. The two most populous countries in the world are going in the other direction. Russia is going in the other direction. Parts of South America and Africa and the Middle East as well. You saw what happened in the US at the Presidential level and hear about the big SCOTUS decisions, but what you might not see are the battles being fought at the lower levels by people with worse intentions than you ever heard from Donald Trump. We're really just a few percentage points of public opinion away from tearing this country apart. Over in Europe, Hungary already flipped, and Poland and Turkey were leaning that way until the invasion. The English went through with a hard BREXIT, and if the trend continues Marine Le Pen may be the next French president. It's hard not to feel like the world is slowly turning away from those values.

Cipheron on 17/11/2022 at 01:21

I don't actually know whether this golden era of the free press ever really existed or whether that's just the rosy history they want to present.

Traditional US news was very much "on rails" and the only real dissent was between factions of the American white collar professionals, over which version of corporate/capitalist paternalism they favored.

For better or worse, we effectively fell off the rails, and we are wandering around in the weeds now. While "overall worse" could be said, I'm not sure how words like "free" or "objective" even fit into this.

Life was simpler when there were less people telling you what to believe and they spoon-fed you with "facts". That's basically the "better before" we're talking about. Also, the 1980s Satanic Panic came to us largely by the corporate media, so it's not even a given that we'd get less of that stuff if there was no internet. Maybe it was even harder to fact-check anything back then.

The thing is: internal policies that get "debated" in the American corporate press represent areas where there's disagreement within the white collar professional cohort as to what's actually the best way forward. Stuff that white-collar professionals all agree on, the ALTERNATVE is not actually debated in the mainstream press, it's treated like some weirdo fringe views, even if 80% of the public actually agrees with it, in surveys. For example, paraphrashing Chomsky, they'll debate whether we should sanction Iran or bomb them, but they never bring anyone on who'll actually ask the question of why it's any of America's business to have military bases surrounding Iran.

Take the New York Times for example. If discussing the internals of US policy debates, they took a sideline, so could be said to be pretty good at giving you the details of what's going on. But ... switch that to foreign affairs, and suddenly they're worse than Fox News, parroting far-right fringe takes on current events in Latin America for example. New York Times would often quote verbatim from Venezuelan papers which were the Fox News equivalent down there for example.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_South_American_Nations)

(https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=UNASUR)

One example is coverage of UNASUR. Basically the New York Times ran a few stories mocking UNASUR, which is basically an inter-gorvernmental union modeled on the EU. UNASUR consisted of 100% of South America, other than states which are existing colonies of European nations. (although some far-right governments such as Bolsonaro's Brazil subsequently left the union).

Clearly, the people threatened by this the most are the United States. So how did nytimes deal with this? By mocking it as never going to happen, but as soon as it DID happen, they basically enacted a ban on mentioning it, and the term UNASUR didn't appear in print in the times, for the next 4 years (2008-2012) after the union was ratified. After that, 13 stories mentioned UNASUR at least once, in the span of 2012-2019, more than half of which only mentioned it when Chavez died in 2012, and they haven't mentioned it again since 2019.

I mean, UNASUR still exists, but they basically have a news blackout on it, unless something real bad happens in Latin America and it might get an offhand mention in the side notes of the story. To put that in perspective, imagine if the New York Times had only mentioned the very existence of the European Union 13 times since 2012, and not at all since 2019.

What does that actually suggest about free and objective press just informing Americans and letting them make their own minds up? They're able to black out the existence of large chunks of reality, if the corporations all decide that it's inconvenient for the public to be aware of it.

So UNASUR got mentioned 21 times, ever, in the New York Times. Maybe they think readers of the Times just aren't interested in economic unions in Latin America. Perhaps, however they'd have to explain their slavish coverage of Mercosur, the smaller but US-backed trade zone, which they somehow mentioned 324 times:

(https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=Mercosur)

Pyrian on 17/11/2022 at 02:23

Quote:

UNASUR consists of 100% of South America...

You didn't actually look at that link you posted, did you? :laff:

Starker on 17/11/2022 at 08:33

Quote Posted by heywood

You saw what happened in the US at the Presidential level and hear about the big SCOTUS decisions, but what you might not see are the battles being fought at the lower levels by people with worse intentions than you ever heard from Donald Trump.

I'm generally aware of the (https://www.propublica.org/article/heeding-steve-bannons-call-election-deniers-organize-to-seize-control-of-the-gop-and-reshape-americas-elections) strategy to take power at the local level as envisioned by the likes of Bannon and co, and I occasionally get snippets from things like school board meetings, etc, but yes, it's very hard to follow local US politics due to the sheer size of it and also due to the level of local reporting having declined in the past decades, even as it became more accessible for the international audience.

Cipheron on 17/11/2022 at 14:53

Quote Posted by Pyrian

You didn't actually look at that link you posted, did you? :laff:

I should have said 'consisted'. That's the only correction. This is the map from the link. Green are members. Are you going to tell me that this doesn't count at basically the entire continent being members:

Inline Image:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f0/Union_of_South_American_Nations_%28orthographic_projection%29.svg/520px-Union_of_South_American_Nations_%28orthographic_projection%29.svg.png

The lone holdout is French Guiana, which is still part of France, so not eligible to join.

So when I said it was 100% of South America, I meant that.

I am perfectly aware that in 2018, a bunch of right-wing governments left. But that doesn't change that this was a full treaty and in force for 10 years.

==========================================================

BTW, they're also not telling you about CELAC. CELAC has almost three times as many countries as UNASUR did. Part of why UNASUR is obsolete is that they made a much bigger version:

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_Latin_American_and_Caribbean_States)

32 countries. It was 33, but Bolsonaro left in 2020. Most likely, Lula will rejoin however - since he had a hand in creating this in the first place.

So all those nations which made a big noise about leaving UNASUR in 2018: they ALL stuck around in CELAC instead.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_CELAC_summit)

Quote:

During the VI Summit, the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, proposed the creation of a multilateral organization resembling the European Union to resolve conflicts in the region, promote unity in the Americas, and negotiate with other regional economic blocs. The succession of the Pro Tempore president of CELAC was also to be decided ...

So they're still calling for a Latin American version of the EU, but this one goes right up to the US border. You'd think that was newsworthy, but it seems the US press would prefer people to be ignorant that stuff like this keeps happening. The point I'm making here is how incredibly inward-looking US media really is, and they definitely do NOT give you the full picture of what's going on in other nations, if that conflicts with US interests.

I looked up the 2017 summit report, and got this:

(https://web.archive.org/web/20190710163528/https://eulacfoundation.org/en/news/fifth-summit-celac-concluded-approval-santo-domingo-declaration)

Quote:

the progress made in CELAC's relations with the European Union, the First Meeting of CELAC-EU Foreign Ministers held in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on October 25 and 26 2016, where the Declaration of Santo Domingo and the Assessment of Programmes and Actions were approved, and the Constitutive Agreement of the EU-LAC Foundation was signed

I mean, CELAC literally has formal diplomatic relations with the EU.

WingedKagouti on 17/11/2022 at 17:03

Quote Posted by Cipheron

It probably has more to do with the amount of economic power these unions wield on a global scale than some sort of secret cabal of media companies wanting to keep the existence out of the public concious. If they were as important to the global economy as the US or EU, they'd likely feature more in US media. Even if that coverage would likely be along the usual lines of "Foreign union doesn't want to bend over and accept <name of trade agreement that is horribly skewed towards benefitting the US> without alterations."

Then again, that would just be a spin-off of the usual media spiel of "Our ways are superior to everyone else's, why can't those dumdums see the inherent superiority of our ways?" that happens in every nation (and religion/political view/etc.).

And you could substitute US with EU for this entire tangent and it would (mostly) be just as true. My tribe is better than your tribe.

heywood on 17/11/2022 at 19:15

Cipheron -

The NYT is an example of how things have gotten worse. I don't believe in a golden era of journalism. I think good journalists are still being good journalists and bad journalists... Anyway, I'm talking about people's information awareness not journalism.

Wind back to the beginning of the 20th century. Information traveled by telegraph, mail, and/or courier. If you lived in a smaller town, you got all your news from one local newspaper and word of mouth. If you lived in a major city, you'd have a couple of major papers and some tabloids. I don't know what the papers were like in Europe and Australia back then, but in the US a lot of major papers were basically mouthpieces for a city boss, and the tabloids were outlets for the muckrakers.

Then came newsreels, piggybacking on the latest and greatest entertainment trend, the cinema. People loved getting their news that way, and governments and advertisers took notice. Newsreels were quickly hijacked to serve propaganda during WWI and thereafter.

Shortly after came radio, which greatly accelerated the rate at which news could travel around the world. When AM broadcasting started, suddenly you could reach a big audience without having to produce and distribute a printed product, and you could do it in real time. New stations faced low barriers to entry and gave people new sources of news that wasn't filtered through the editorial slant of the local newspaper(s).

And after that came television broadcasting, then satellite communications, then cable TV, then the internet. Each new technology expanded information awareness. At the end of the 20th century, the internet was still relatively free and open and not in the hands of governments yet. But the open internet is too big of a fire hose for anyone to consume, so people naturally sought information aggregators, and then grew to want a curated news feed. Social media solved that problem, but greatly exacerbated the problem of filter bubbles. Along the way, governments also grabbed control of the internet and do their own filtering. Because of those two things, I think most people are more narrowly informed and more vulnerable to propaganda than they were two decades ago.

heywood on 17/11/2022 at 21:47

Quote Posted by Cipheron

You shouldn't assume CELAC conflicts with US interests. Quite the contrary, the US would benefit from a Latin American common market, just as the US benefits from having the EU as a common market. We're traders and working with larger trading blocks is more efficient than having separate trade policies with lots of individual countries. The US would also benefit if CELAC can handle regional security matters in a manner similar to the African Union. South America is the only continent in the world that doesn't have any US military installations, and there's really no appetite remaining among the US populace for any sort of military intervention or peacekeeping there.

Latin America needs another organization besides OAS, which has been a walking corpse ever since the Reagan administration. We kind of ruined OAS by trying to turn it into an anti-communist alliance, and even now we don't seem to have an interest in rehabilitating it. Biden just hosted the first OAS summit since 2018 in LA and it was handled fecklessly, giving the perception that we don't care. The message to Latin America is that we only care about what's spilling over our border. Which means, we care about the drug cartels in Mexico and the gangs in Central America. If CELAC can clean those up, we'd be overjoyed.

Cipheron on 18/11/2022 at 01:42

IDK, keep in mind i'm not saying there's an overt conspiracy here. However, corporate interests align with foreign policy, so they shape the Overton Window. And Latin American integration is just too far outside the Overton Window for US discourse. You can read Chomsky for an overview of how the media narrative is shaped in the USA using soft-power methods, compared to the hard propaganda of dictatorships and "managed" democracies like Russia.

Coverage of stuff like CELAC is an example. Just googling "CELAC" i got sources from the official websites of the EU, ASEAN, United Nations, China, co-summits with the Indian government, Endless amounts of pages from the UN and EU about CELAC partnerships and initiatives. Australian department of foreign affairs

Like, this is happening on YOUR doorstep (Americans only), but I can go to the Australian government's website to get a detailed explanation as to what it is, but the US state department mentions it zero times.

The first media coverage was from Al Jazeera.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq5aido4m9I)

A new regional bloc that includes Cuba and explicitly excludes the USA, and is meant to replace the US-run OAS has surprisingly little mention in the USA compared to the rest of the world.

Pyrian on 18/11/2022 at 02:51

Searching Reuters, there's 5 pages of results, so 21-25. (https://www.reuters.com/site-search/?query=celac)

State department, just three. (https://findit.state.gov/search?query=celac&affiliate=dos_stategov)

Quote:

...the US state department mentions it zero times.

:weird:

Anyway, I also want to point out that the "CELAC is EU for SA" is... Aspirational. It isn't that yet, and it's kind of hard to see how it becomes that in the near term, given the various economic tensions and actors involved. They get together annually, have some talks, negotiate incremental trade agreements (mostly based on pre-existing trade blocs), bitch at each other and basically everyone else, go home for the year.

It's important. I'm not going to say it's not. But I don't think it's going to hold anyone's attention without the BS hyperbole you feel the need to drench it in. We could hardly get anyone to pay attention to trade disputes in a Star Wars film.