It is remarkable how an invitation to do a live television interview can change your schedule and concentrate your mind. This afternoon I got a WhatsApp message from TRT, Turkey’s premier English language international broadcaster with whom I had done several interviews a year ago, followed by many months of silence. That is not unusual. Broadcasters rotate experts in and rotate experts out at their pleasure.
“This was not Gilbert Doctorow publishing his travel notes of visits to St Petersburg markets and reaching 10,000 readers; it was Tucker Carlson, with a regular U.S. audience of 40 million or more for his every broadcast, and a peak of one billion views for the recent interview.”
Maybe so, but I’m pleased every time Gilbert Doctorow does a travelogue.
As for who dunnit, your assessment certainly jibes with John Helmer’s, which documented the very strange proceedings in a UK court regarding the skripals, whose lawyer seemed unable to say (among other things) where were they? As usual your assessments resonate.
Of course, you are a conspiracy theorist to have such a thought as your “the Brits did it!”.
It’s the standard rhetorical ploy, useful for a broad range of information management tasks. This, the world we live in; obviously. But, it’s worth noting the ploy is effective. Information Warfare, Non-Contact Warfare, and New Generation Warfare are well-reported elements of modern military strategy, thus, by direct connection, the political goals of all states. But, the duly managed citizenry seem oblivious to such modern (not so modern actually) concepts.
The rhetorical ploy is on the order of a transparent obviousness, but obviousness is relative, and certainly not so if your belief system lacks any conceivable, i.e. zero possible, disconfirmation. The guiding feature of belief, in this case, makes it barely distinct from metaphysics. Epistemological parsimony is therefore advised. Believe the absolute minimum of propositions.
There’s science that informs us that the physical world is so vastly different from what we think it is that its propositions astound our intuition, but it uses logic and mathematics and perception to construct its cosmology. And then there’s government, and associated think tankers and pundits to inform us how to think, and which, when employed to craft a convenient story of reality, blithely offends logic , and cognition, and perception. The cosmology it propounds is based on “if I say it three times, it’s true”. A world not so much a moral one, as it’s the necessary one, but becomes the only possible morality because we determine necessity. So goes the realpolitik weltanschaung.
Truth is as it is. Putin puppet, Russian apologist, anti-Semite, denier etc. It’s good stuff! And, it’s obviously true, right? We said so.
There’s an epic poem yet to be written about these days of blind belief, of real human tragedy, pathos, and ignorance. Evolution is not the same as progress, it’s merely what is now, and we are a point along the arc of evolution, not the end of it. I’m not sure i believe anything, but I can’t help but think it.
“This was not Gilbert Doctorow publishing his travel notes of visits to St Petersburg markets and reaching 10,000 readers; it was Tucker Carlson, with a regular U.S. audience of 40 million or more for his every broadcast, and a peak of one billion views for the recent interview.”
Maybe so, but I’m pleased every time Gilbert Doctorow does a travelogue.
As for who dunnit, your assessment certainly jibes with John Helmer’s, which documented the very strange proceedings in a UK court regarding the skripals, whose lawyer seemed unable to say (among other things) where were they? As usual your assessments resonate.
Of course, you are a conspiracy theorist to have such a thought as your “the Brits did it!”.
It’s the standard rhetorical ploy, useful for a broad range of information management tasks. This, the world we live in; obviously. But, it’s worth noting the ploy is effective. Information Warfare, Non-Contact Warfare, and New Generation Warfare are well-reported elements of modern military strategy, thus, by direct connection, the political goals of all states. But, the duly managed citizenry seem oblivious to such modern (not so modern actually) concepts.
The rhetorical ploy is on the order of a transparent obviousness, but obviousness is relative, and certainly not so if your belief system lacks any conceivable, i.e. zero possible, disconfirmation. The guiding feature of belief, in this case, makes it barely distinct from metaphysics. Epistemological parsimony is therefore advised. Believe the absolute minimum of propositions.
There’s science that informs us that the physical world is so vastly different from what we think it is that its propositions astound our intuition, but it uses logic and mathematics and perception to construct its cosmology. And then there’s government, and associated think tankers and pundits to inform us how to think, and which, when employed to craft a convenient story of reality, blithely offends logic , and cognition, and perception. The cosmology it propounds is based on “if I say it three times, it’s true”. A world not so much a moral one, as it’s the necessary one, but becomes the only possible morality because we determine necessity. So goes the realpolitik weltanschaung.
Truth is as it is. Putin puppet, Russian apologist, anti-Semite, denier etc. It’s good stuff! And, it’s obviously true, right? We said so.
There’s an epic poem yet to be written about these days of blind belief, of real human tragedy, pathos, and ignorance. Evolution is not the same as progress, it’s merely what is now, and we are a point along the arc of evolution, not the end of it. I’m not sure i believe anything, but I can’t help but think it.