Trump

[Sandydragon]

It's more reliable than the mainstream media, which helped bring about the genocide in Iraq. In fact, the war couldn't have happened without their government-sourced lies and propaganda.

Disagree. The alt media is more likely to publish without corroborating evidence - sometimes they strike lucky but MSM does at least try to fact check (normally) as they have a real fear of libel action.

And of course, there is a lot of information which never makes it into the public domain, which the intelligence officers can use to try and persuade Trump.

The media completely shat the bed on Iraq and you fucking know it.

And alt media has a record of getting it right every time? You don't have to look far to find complete distortions and downright lies which any basic editorial process would pick up on. Acting like Alt media is the only medium for getting the truth is a recipe for being completely deluded.

[Sandydragon]

It's got all the hallmarks of a smear campaign but considering the crap he has dished out to others, it is rather amusing watching his reactions every single time someone makes a comment about him.

Quite. Sympathy is lacking, particularly when one recalls his involvement in the Birther campaign.

[Sandydragon]

It's more reliable than the mainstream media, which helped bring about the genocide in Iraq. In fact, the war couldn't have happened without their government-sourced lies and propaganda.

Disagree. The alt media is more likely to publish without corroborating evidence - sometimes they strike lucky but MSM does at least try to fact check (normally) as they have a real fear of libel action.

And of course, there is a lot of information which never makes it into the public domain, which the intelligence officers can use to try and persuade Trump.

Alternative media is a very broad field, ranging from the world's foremost political experts, including renowned authors, Pullitzer Prize-winning journalists and former high ranking politicians themselves, contributing to independent media and getting picked up by popular web site domains as well, right down to the tabloids, wacko web sites and Joe blogger, of course. But with the mainstream media you are guaranteed to hear precisely what the state wants you to hear, nothing more and nothing less. So you need to be selective, you need to look at both, as much as possible, and from different nations (and in different languages, if able) - and after a while the benefit of your own experience will guide your judgement. Then it's just a question of how honest with yourself you want to be.

Your last line is interesting. Much of the internet is an echo chamber.

[Sandydragon]

Just watched his press conference. This is going to be an awesome period of time whilst hes in the office.

He cares way too much about what people think of him. I'm fairly convinced he has some deep down phychological issues just judging by what he says and his body language. Neurotic as. And as always he bangs on about how great hes going to make everything and all the important people hes introduced to his following but he never backs anything up with facts, data or numbers.

Did you see how he compared his treatment by CNN to the Nazis? Lol. And then he completely refused to talk to them and dismissed them (like a Nazi)

Compete clown. Fantastic. I'm strapped in and can't wait to see what happens. I hope he tanks. For teh lulz.

Considering he has spent much of his 70 years surrounded by people telling him how great he is, it's hardly surprising how he reacts when facing criticism.

He may well have some psychological and personality issues too. He clearly rates himself as highly intelligent, good looking, a great, nay, the greatest businessman in the world, no doubt a great lover as well as being an all round good guy. As deluded as he is, it's extremely entertaining.

He has been completely isolated from any downside by inheriting tremendous wealth. As you say, he has been surrounded by sycophants for years, is it a surprise that he believes the BS they have been feeding him?

Im not sure whats worse. That somehow this massive orange bellend has managed to convince the republican party members that he was a stable candidate, and then the country at large. Or that the Democrats couldn't see off a challenge from such an obviously flawed candidate?

[Sandydragon]

That press conference was a special needs master class. Referring to himself in the third person, rhetoric clouded by horrendously bad grammar, his little hands making sign language. His fuckwit offspring standing either side of him like lab rats. Profoundly unsophisticated. Sweet baby jesus. WWF is more credible. Buy the ticket. Take the ride. Len is right, enjoy the comedy.

I wonder if any news outlet which paints him in a bad light will be compared to the Nazis and won't have their questions answered in the future? For someone who is so keen to dish out insults and abuse, he is remarkably thin skinned.

[WaspInWales]

Someone on the beeb made an interesting point about the political Henson playing a risking game attacking the people who make a living digging up dirt on people. It's a good point and I can't wait to see where it leads to.

As for him being thin skinned, it's like watching a playground meltdown every time. He just doesn't know how to be an adult. Thinking back to the live debates demonstrated that perfectly.

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

[Sandydragon]

Someone on the beeb made an interesting point about the political Henson playing a risking game attacking the people who make a living digging up dirt on people. It's a good point and I can't wait to see where it leads to.

As for him being thin skinned, it's like watching a playground meltdown every time. He just doesn't know how to be an adult. Thinking back to the live debates demonstrated that perfectly.

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

Any rational person could see at that point that he was incapable of being President. How disillusioned can people be to vote for that clown? Brexit was a kick for the establishment, but at least it was possible to put forward a semi-intellectual argument for life outside the EU (not that we got one in the campaign itself).

But Trump for President? How much do you need to hate Hillary for that to happen?

With regards to the intelligence community, I read elsewhere that he hasn't been receiving the daily briefings a president elect normally would. That is concerning. My only hope is that he has accidentally managed to pick some gifted people who he might listen to.

[Len]

A problem this now presents is they have used the leaked hooker scandal already, which has been bunned off as 'fake news'

Now what happens when there is something they can pin him on and he just buns that off as 'fake news' too.

[WaspInWales]

One can only hope that talk of video or audio evidence really exists...

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

[Sandydragon]

A problem this now presents is they have used the leaked hooker scandal already, which has been bunned off as 'fake news'

Now what happens when there is something they can pin him on and he just buns that off as 'fake news' too.

Even if they had a video, how much would it hurt him? Given the past stories about his antics, I don't think it would damage his core support much.

The only thing that would lose him his support would be not doing what they elected him to do. SO give it 6 months and then reality will set in.

[Sandydragon]

A view from the Times

Things that seem too good to be true usually are. The dossier full of allegations about Donald Trump contains a detail so salacious and Caligulan that I found myself almost yelling “Let it be so, please God!” at the computer. When the desire for something to be true is that strong, you need to step back from yourself.

Indeed minutes after the Buzzfeed website published the 35-page dossier some anti-Trumpers suggested that Trump (and/or Russia) had himself leaked the false information so that his critics would be discredited when the allegations were eventually disproved. This conspiracy theory about a conspiracy theory could have graced the pages of a David Icke book or the fake news agenda of America’s Alex Jones Show.

But, as ever, most of those who should know better didn’t and social media was awash with people discussing the dossier as if it was established fact. Which was something they couldn’t possibly know.

After MH17 no one in their right mind trusts claims from Moscow
Of course, if Donald Trump and Russia really are the victims of an elaborate conspiracy theory then it couldn’t have happened to nicer guys. Trump himself ran hard for many months with the absurd “Obama isn’t really American” theory. This entailed him sending investigators to Hawaii to try and turn up material proving that Obama had been born elsewhere, despite his birth notice having been placed contemporaneously in local Honolulu newspapers. Think about that one . . . Trump was open to the idea that Obama was falsely declared to be American and that countless people were in on the plot. Take this Trump tweet from December 2013: “How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.” That either means Trump believes this unfortunate person was murdered by the Obamites or it means nothing at all.

The second pleasing irony is that Trump then lied about his previous espousal of this theory. Hillary had started it, he later said (she didn’t) and he had never believed it (except he gave every indication that he did). It is, regrettably, a simple statement of fact that Trump lies routinely and blatantly. So much so that we must assume that neither he nor we are supposed to care about what the actual truth is. We’re just supposed to admire the daring and the effrontery of it all. But that meant that when he tweeted “FAKE NEWS — A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” we had no reason to believe him. A Trump denial is worthless. It has no currency.

The third irony is apparent in another tweet from Trump yesterday. “Russia just said the unverified report paid for by political opponents is ‘A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE.’ Very unfair!” But he is asking the reader to believe the same Russia that fabricated evidence of Ukrainian involvement in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which killed 298 people. In fact it was a Russian-made surface-to-air missile that brought down the plane. After that no one in their right minds would trust any claim made by Moscow.

The Trump dossier is said to be part of a report sent to Congress by US intelligence agencies who have investigated Russian involvement in the presidential election. The agencies conclude that hackers, almost certainly acting with Kremlin approval, obtained material from the Democratic National Committee and passed it to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. It certainly fits with the pattern of Russian activity in other countries, such as France, where politicians hostile to Russia are undermined to assist those who are friendlier.

When the director of US national intelligence published a declassified version of the report last week, it was backed by the NSA, the FBI and the CIA. But, as Russia’s news agency Tass observed, it did not “represent the opinion of the US intelligence community in general” and “the (voting) systems that are suspected to have come under attack were not employed in summarising election returns”. In other words, we didn’t do it and even if we did, it didn’t have an effect on the election result.

The old Russia wouldn’t have wanted Trump in the White House
It’s remarkable that the various populist insurgencies that have swept America and Europe have one thing in common: approbation for the man who has led Russia for nearly two decades. Nigel Farage likes him. Alex Salmond has expressed some admiration for him. Marine Le Pen courts him. Donald Trump has called him a great leader and very smart and has never, as far as I know, criticised him. But there are reasons why insurgents — particularly on the nationalist side of politics — might identify with a man who has “restored pride” to a nation that had previously lost it. And, after all, my enemy’s enemy often feels like my friend. There would be nothing untoward about any of that. It needn’t imply cash or dodgy favours.

That’s why in normal times I’d be inclined to see the Trump dossier as very suspicious. There is every reason to be sceptical when evaluating lurid claims about links between Donald Trump and the Russians, not least because the parties involved would know that they might be discovered. It would be an absurd risk, as the president-elect said at his press conference yesterday. And, as yet, this is merely the uncorroborated account of a supposed former MI6 officer talking to some anonymous Russian sources.

But these are not normal times — Russia has altered them. Russian internet troll factories are not a figment of a sci-fi writer’s imagination but are established fact. A strategy of disruption aimed at Europe and America is discernible and overrides any assumptions about great power behaviour.

The old post-Khrushchev Soviet Union, like the Chinese today, was risk-averse and preferred to operate according to certainties. It would have seen how extraordinarily dangerous it might be to provoke political chaos in powerful but essentially peaceable adversaries. Such a Russia wouldn’t have wanted to see Donald Trump in the White House.

Putin is not Gorbachev. Today all bets are off. If anyone ever argued that Hillary’s emails needed investigating, then they’ll have to scream for a special inquiry into Trump’s links with Russia. And then let the chips fall where they may.

[rowan]

The American presidency is like a good cop, bad cop routine. We all hate the bad cop, but the good cop is just as bad only he lies to your face - and generally gets away with it. So basically we hate the bad cop for being honest.

This is a good perspective on US-Russian relations:

Think about that for a moment. On one level, the long-time NPR commentator is right: US policy towards the government in Moscow has been remarkably consistent — and hostile — for 70 years, albeit with a few brief periods of at least relative friendliness, as during the early and mid 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But that gets to the other point: There was, recall, a fundamental change that happened in 1989-90, when the Communist state founded in the Russian Revolution of 1917 collapsed, and the Soviet Union splintered into Russia and a bunch of smaller countries — former Soviets in the old empire — including Byelorussia, Ukraine, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and a bunch of stans in Central Asia.

The real question is, once the USSR ceased to exist and Russia, a rump country that, while geographically the largest in the world, is less than half the size of the US in population, found itself struggling to restructure it’s centralized state-owned economy into a modern capitalist one, shouldn’t the US have changed it’s “consistent policy” of hostility towards what remained of the old Soviet Union?

Instead of actively helping Russia recover, the US urged on President Boris Yeltsin a destructive “economic shock therapy” program of balanced budgets, open borders for imports and investment and, most importantly, a sell-off of state assets that quickly turned enabled corrupt former commissars into become insanely wealthy new capitalist oligarchs.

While Russians struggled to survive through a period of rampant inflation, economic collapse and epic corruption, the US, instead of lending a helping hand as it had to the collapsed countries of Europe and after World War II (including our former bitter enemies, Germany and also Japan in Asia,), Washington under the Clinton administration began a program of aggressively and threateningly expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (a Cold War relic of an outdated containment policy which should have, like the Warsaw Pact, been mercifully disbanded), forcing an economically strapped Russia to respond by still spending precious resources on restoring its hollowed out military.

Yes, there has been a 70-year consistent policy of hostility towards Russia, not to mention unremitting anti-Russian propaganda in the US, as Roberts says, but that’s because foreign policy in the US has been in the grip of a Republican-Democrat bi-partisan consensus that argues that the US must work to maintain absolute military superiority over all real and potential rivals, forever. And that consensus views Russia as a major potential threat to that superiority.

That’s why we have a military budget of $600 billion, nearly three times as much China ($215 billion, much of that for domestic control purposes), another country that poses no threat to the US, and as all the rest of the world spends, while Russia’s budget is just 11 percent of that amount at $66 billion, ranking it behind third-ranked Saudi Arabia ($87 billion).

While Obama Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and others in the Washington elite maintain that Russia poses an “existential threat” to the US, presumably because of the number of nuclear missiles it maintains, it’s important to note that Russia has those missiles because the US has a similar number, most of them pointed at Russia–the main difference being that the US has many of its nuclear-tipped missiles located just minutes away from Russia at sites in Eastern Europe, while Russia’s nukes are all on its own territory, thousands of miles and at least a half-hour’s flight away from the US mainland — a difference that means one country, the US, has the ability to launch a first strike and take out the other country’s ability to respond to an attack, while the other has no ability to make such a first-strike threat.

This is all by way of getting to a larger point. The hysteria about Russian hacking of the US election — an action which while it might have happened, is by no means proven — is a meaningless diversion, because there is no evidence at all that Russia is an aggressive nation. While the US is moving Abrams battle tanks and nuclear-capable mobil artillery up close to the Russian border in the waning days of the Obama administration, forcing Russia to respond by beefing up its own national border defenses, no one could argue seriously that Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin, have any interest whatsoever in invading any country of Europe, however small and weak.

What possible advantage could come to Russia from such an action? Even if Russia could succeed in invading Poland and grabbing a piece of that country, or invading one of the Baltic countries that were former Soviets, such an action would make developing trade relations with the rest of Europe impossible, and would force Russia to engage in a costly occupation which it can ill afford.

Why, one has to ask, would Russia be building, with up to $100 billion in Chinese financing, a bunch of super high-speed rail lines from eastern China and eastern Siberia all the way to rail hums in Germany and other European countries, to facilitate vastly expanded trade overland, if it were also secretly planning to conquer and occupy parts of Europe again, as it did in the pre-1990 era?

A cynic — or realist — might suspect that it is precisely this goal of economic integration of Europe and Asia, with Russia at the center, which lies at the root of US antipathy and hostility towards both Russia and China. If the US continues to cling to the insane, megalomaniacal idea of maintaining strategic dominance — military and economic — at all costs over all current and potential rivals around the globe, there is a certain logic to trying to ruin this grand plan for economic convergence on the Eurasian continent.

But let’s at least demand honesty about it.

Donald Trump has said, famously, that people who say the US should not be trying to develop friendly relations with Russia are “stupid.” He might not be eloquent, but he is absolutely correct.

Some of my liberal friends, who have drunk the Kool-Aid of anti-Russia hysteria, argue that the US should not even contemplate acting friendly towards Russia and its leader President Putin. As one put it, “We certainly at least must be in agreement that Putin’s cruel kelpto-capitalist-KGB rule has harmed tens of millions of innocents in the former USSR, no?”

Well, actually, no, we are not in agreement. Where do otherwise intelligent liberal-minded people get these tales of Putin evil? Nobody’s saying that he is a Jeffersonian democrat, but let’s at least get the history right. The “harm to tens of millions in the former USSR” and in Russia proper was done not during Putin’s tenure but during the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, between 1989 and 1999. That was when the entire Soviet Union was strip-mined by former Communist apparatchiks who enriched themselves by cutting deals to take over former state assets at fire-sale prices, or for nothing, robbing the Russian people, and the workers in those former state enterprises blind. The US encouraged this process, and Boris Yeltsin, a notorious drunk, oversaw it for two terms as Russia’s president. Vladimir Putin began his rise to power in 1999 when Yeltsin made him prime minister before suddenly resigning the presidency on New Year’s Day 1999.

GDP during Boris Yeltsin’s catastrophic first term as head of the new post Soviet Russian state collapsed by 40% between 1991 and 1996 — a worse disaster than the US Great Depression. By 1997, Russia, a huge agricultural producer, was importing one-third of its food. Nothing improved during Yeltsin’s second term, with GDP remaining flat through 1999. Remember, most of the ‘90s was a period of economic boom throughout the rest of the world, meaning that Russia, even standing still, was losing ground to everyone else.

As the British newspaper the Guardian, points out, in a way that you will be hard-pressed to find reported honestly in the US corporate media, Putin, during his decade and a half of running Russia, rebuilt the Russian economy, improved the lives of average Russians immensely, and equally importantly, restored a once great nation from the status of global basket case to a major international power again. Not surprisingly, he is now one of the world’s most popular leaders.

While wild swings in the exchange value of the Russian ruble vs. the US dollar make the figures a little squishy, Russian GDP in 1999, when Putin took over the government, was $196 billion, and rose to over $2 trillion in 2011, hitting a record $2.2 trillion in 2013. With oil and gas exports central to Russian international trade, the crash in oil prices in 2015 knocked Russia’s GDP back down to $1.3 billion, but it needs to be pointed out that for most Russians, who primarily buy goods from food to clothing to housing on the domestic market, unaffected by exchange rates, this has had little impact on their standard of living, only raising the cost of imported goods. Without question, in the view of most Russians, Putin has done a good job of managing the Russian economy.

That’s not to say he isn’t an autocrat. He is, and he’s got a nasty record on freedom of the press and on gay rights, but that begs the question: when has a country’s being headed by an autocratic leader or even a tyrant deterred the US from having friendly relations with it? There’s no room in this article to run a list, but let’s just mention the Shah of Iran, the Chilean military-dictator Augusto Pinochet, the Brazilian and Argentine juntas in 1964 and 1976, Salazar and Franco in Portugal and Spain, and then the dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and other countries of the Middle East. In comparison to these disturbing examples of American “friends,” Putin seems absolutely a paragon of democratic values.

In any event, let’s hope that the mostly liberal Democrats who are being taken in by the media-induced hysteria over an imagined Russian plot to destroy American democracy and to ensconce a Manchurian-candidate Donald Trump in the White House, will come to their senses soon. There are myriad reasons to organize resistance to Donald Trump as we head into a very challenging four years of reactionary Republican control of all the levers of power in Washington, but fear of Russian control over our next president isn’t one of them. In fact, let’s hope that he at least makes good on that one campaign promise to improve US relations with Russia!

Honestly, we just went through eight years of insane non-stop Republican paranoia claiming the Barack Obama was a secret Muslim plant in the White House, or a secret Communist, or, incredibly, both. Some even thought that he was a secret fascist too! We on the left, including liberal Dems, used to laugh at the naive inanity of it all. Yet now, how different are the liberal Democrats who are breathlessly claiming that this new president is a puppet, wittingly or unwittingly, of the evil Russian puppetmaster Vladimir Putin?

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/11/ ... on-russia/

[Sandydragon]

Hang on, are you accusing Trump of telling the truth? Really?

Trump is disliked for being a fucking idiot, not because he isn't Hillary Clinton

[morepork]

Disagree. The alt media is more likely to publish without corroborating evidence - sometimes they strike lucky but MSM does at least try to fact check (normally) as they have a real fear of libel action.

And of course, there is a lot of information which never makes it into the public domain, which the intelligence officers can use to try and persuade Trump.

The media completely shat the bed on Iraq and you fucking know it.

And alt media has a record of getting it right every time? You don't have to look far to find complete distortions and downright lies which any basic editorial process would pick up on. Acting like Alt media is the only medium for getting the truth is a recipe for being completely deluded.

I'm not. But Iraq was the mother of all failures by the established "4th estate".

[Sandydragon]

The media completely shat the bed on Iraq and you fucking know it.

And alt media has a record of getting it right every time? You don't have to look far to find complete distortions and downright lies which any basic editorial process would pick up on. Acting like Alt media is the only medium for getting the truth is a recipe for being completely deluded.

I'm not. But Iraq was the mother of all failures by the established "4th estate".

Some media were against the war on principle. The issue of Blair 'lying' still hasn't been resolved despite a full enquiry costing millions. If I were to clique the British media in general it would be that they rarely explore issues in depth.

[Len]

If Russia is trying to destabilize American democracy, they've done quite well thus far. Pearler of a job in fact.

[Digby]

If Russia is trying to destabilize American democracy, they've done quite well thus far. Pearler of a job in fact.

Getting a republican candidate into office seems quite a normal thing. And since that party has put for Bush Jnr and Palin for high office in the recent past even what seems a retarded, lying, narcissist candidate can't be that much of a surprise

[morepork]

And alt media has a record of getting it right every time? You don't have to look far to find complete distortions and downright lies which any basic editorial process would pick up on. Acting like Alt media is the only medium for getting the truth is a recipe for being completely deluded.

I'm not. But Iraq was the mother of all failures by the established "4th estate".

Some media were against the war on principle. The issue of Blair 'lying' still hasn't been resolved despite a full enquiry costing millions. If I were to clique the British media in general it would be that they rarely explore issues in depth.

Get off the fence FFS.

[rowan]

Hang on, are you accusing Trump of telling the truth? Really?

Trump is disliked for being a fucking idiot, not because he isn't Hillary Clinton

Both those comments miss the point entirely.

[Eugene Wrayburn]

The media completely shat the bed on Iraq and you fucking know it.

And alt media has a record of getting it right every time? You don't have to look far to find complete distortions and downright lies which any basic editorial process would pick up on. Acting like Alt media is the only medium for getting the truth is a recipe for being completely deluded.

I'm not. But Iraq was the mother of all failures by the established "4th estate".

Not in the UK. Sure the red tops were mainly pro-war but plenty of the rest were either hostile or sceptical.

[Mellsblue]

Someone on the beeb made an interesting point about the political Henson playing a risking game attacking the people who make a living digging up dirt on people. It's a good point and I can't wait to see where it leads to.

As for him being thin skinned, it's like watching a playground meltdown every time. He just doesn't know how to be an adult. Thinking back to the live debates demonstrated that perfectly.

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

My only hope is that he has accidentally managed to pick some gifted people who he might listen to.

We know he has. Billionaires are all incredibly intelligent people. We know this because a billionaire with the IQ and vocabulary of 6 year old said so.

[rowan]

And alt media has a record of getting it right every time? You don't have to look far to find complete distortions and downright lies which any basic editorial process would pick up on. Acting like Alt media is the only medium for getting the truth is a recipe for being completely deluded.

But you're attempting to pigeon hole the alternative media, when the description can be applied to a very broad field of media and commentary. & you seem to have the idea that those who subscribe to alternative media outlets are susceptible zombies drawn like moths to the lamp and lacking both discerning judgement and independent cognizance. Personally I read a lot of books, as well as the columns of experienced, award-winning journalists and commentators such as John Pilger, watch videos of Noam Chomsky speeches and Tariq Ali interviews. But I also run my eye over the mainstream media every day, including American, British, Turkish, Spanish and French publications. In fact, I listen to a little French radio every day, for practice, and also watch the independent Turkish news channel NTV whenever I'm at home. But I don't look at RT or Counterpunch, for example, and while Al Jazeera comes up with some great stories, I ignore everything they print about Syria - because they are a state-funded publication of Qatar, one of the main protagonists of that conflict.

[Vengeful Glutton]

Not in the UK. Sure the red tops were mainly pro-war but plenty of the rest were either hostile or sceptical.

Like?

[cashead]

tl;dr

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/11/ ... on-russia/

But I don't look at RT or Counterpunch, for example, and while Al Jazeera comes up with some great stories, I ignore everything they print about Syria - because they are a state-funded publication of Qatar, one of the main protagonists of that conflict.

lol wut

[Vengeful Glutton]

And alt media has a record of getting it right every time? You don't have to look far to find complete distortions and downright lies which any basic editorial process would pick up on. Acting like Alt media is the only medium for getting the truth is a recipe for being completely deluded.

But you're attempting to pigeon hole the alternative media, when the description can be applied to a very broad field of media and commentary. & you seem to have the idea that those who subscribe to alternative media outlets are susceptible zombies drawn like moths to the lamp and lacking both discerning judgement and independent cognizance. Personally I read a lot of books, as well as the columns of experienced, award-winning journalists and commentators such as John Pilger, watch videos of Noam Chomsky speeches and Tariq Ali interviews. But I also run my eye over the mainstream media every day, including American, British, Turkish, Spanish and French publications. In fact, I listen to a little French radio every day, for practice, and also watch the independent Turkish news channel NTV whenever I'm at home. But I don't look at RT or Counterpunch, for example, and while Al Jazeera comes up with some great stories, I ignore everything they print about Syria - because they are a state-funded publication of Qatar, one of the main protagonists of that conflict.

Ah ok, so we can rely on you to inform us about whose right/wrong, and what's wrong/right about the world.

Grand, so. I'll sleep tonight.