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Showing posts from November, 2022

What preceded the attack on Yelenovka prison on 29/7/2022

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This video was published on Telegram on July 28. In it, Azov member Dmytro Kozatskyi (you may have seen some of his photos ), who is being interviewed in Yelenovka prison, claims at 0:40 that Oleksiy Arestovich, advisor to President Zelensky and avowed admirer of ISIS , had requested before Feb 24 that video of Russian POWs being violently killed should appear online. Arestovich later requested they disappear, when they didn't have the desired effect on Russian or international opinion (3:02). Within 24 hours of the publication of the Kozatskyi video, the prison was hit by missiles fired from the much-hyped HIMARS launcher - which could only have been done with US assistance - leaving 53 Ukrainian POWs dead and 70+ injured, and delaying the release of any more such embarrassing revelations. Arestovich himself, of course, was quick to blame Russia for the attack. This conflict, going as far back as 2014, makes much more sense if you understand it as a proxy war being fought again

The impossibility of proving a negative, and the abuse of trust

As mentioned previously, the western media's coverage of Russia's Special Military Operation in Ukraine has been the catalyst for my complete loss of trust in said media. But it seems that I am still in a tiny, if growing, minority. Many people that I know and care about (and many more that I no longer care about) think that I have taken leave of my senses, their reasoning being that it is simply inconceivable that the news is either lying or ignorant on the scale that I claim it is . It's hard to convince people of this, when the entirety of the western media - supposedly free and independent - reports the same facts. Some things get repeated so often, that the sheer volume of repetition forms a kind of proof in itself; this technique of relentless reinforcement is what some people (including a certain *cough* Adolf Hitler *cough*) have called The Big Lie. Discussing Russia's 'potential use of nuclear weapons' Something that I've heard repeated as if it wer

Why I no longer trust the BBC

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As a Brit, I grew up watching the BBC (it comprised 2 of the 4 terrestrial TV channels available for most of my youth), and the BBC News was generally considered to be trustworthy. We pay a license fee for it so it should be, right? Although I haven't watched BBC TV News in years, I still check in on the BBC news website, and this conflict has disabused me of the notion that it is trustworthy or impartial. Want to know why? Snake Island Here's the story the BBC published on February 25th about the Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island, who were initially reported dead: Snake Island: Ukraine says soldiers killed after refusing to surrender Notable quotes from the article: '"On our Zmiinyi Island, defending it to the last, all the border guards died heroically," Mr Zelensky said' 'The official Russian account of the incident differs dramatically. Moscow said the 82 Ukrainian soldiers on the island surrendered it to them voluntarily and made no mentio

It's not you, it's the MIC talking

Why do people repeat talking points they've heard or read on the news and in op-ed pieces, even when they can't back them up with anything except more rhetoric and talking points? To state the bleedin' obvious: the talking points they've heard come from sources that carry authority. But what gives these sources their perceived authority? One argument would be that their authority derives from the continued existence of the source (be it a traditional newspaper or a newer website), which is proof in itself that their content has proved popular enough to remain economically viable, which presumably means that it has proved to be true. Equating popularity with truthfulness is an obviously shaky assumption, but in the case of 'serious' journalism (as opposed to, say, The National Inquirer in the US or The Daily Sport in the UK) they certainly purport to be offering the truth. Another possible reason why they have retained their positions of authority is the cont

The quest for identity, or Why people take the news so damn personally

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In April I posted on Facebook about the conflict in Ukraine, and some people got really upset with me. I'd like to share why I believe that was. Since a few weeks before Russia launched its Special Military Operation in Ukraine, I had become somewhat obsessed with the situation in Ukraine, specifically on the enormous disconnect between what the mainstream news was saying about it and what I was seeing and hearing on independent media outlets (a couple of podcasts and some channels on Youtube ). Around the time the SMO began, I created a Telegram account and started following channels there too. It quickly became clear to me that I had not been paying enough attention to the conflict in the Donbass since it began in 2014. Our news has done a good job of almost not mentioning it for long periods, giving the strong impression that it was not happening, or at least that developments there were nothing newsworthy. Like a well-trained media consumer, I had not looked into it further.

A blog for sufferers of Ukraine Brain - where to begin?

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Hello. Thanks for looking at my blog! I started it as a means to vent my own frustrations about the inconsistencies and outright falsehoods I see constantly in mainstream reporting on the Ukraine conflict, and I hope that it might help other people to see this reality for what it is. Getting over the huge stigma of talking about it objectively and honestly, is the first and biggest step. As you might imagine from the name of the blog, for me the final break with mainstream news came in February 2022, with the coverage of Russia's Special Military Operation in Ukraine. To give a little context: in August 2019, the podcast Chapo Trap House coined the term 'Epstein Brain' to describe the inability to think about anything else when confronted with the reality that Jeffrey Epstein, about to testify in federal court and potentially incriminate lots of celebrities and politicians in a child sex trafficking scandal dating back 30 years, suddenly dies in what is immediately ruled