Internet Giants Crackdown on "Fake" News After Election.

[slomo]

^^^^ I actually think it's way more complicated than that. I really have no idea what's going on, except something unintended has been revealed about the way media works.

[Iamwhomiam]

Thank you for your reply, slomo. " Ergo, the high-ranking officials of most powerful nation-state in the world (and their controlling elites) must be involved, Ergo, the activity flows through DC. Ergo DC institutions must be involved."

Indeed. I agree that this occurs in every large international city as well as in the back woods.

I really don't know about Alefantis or Comet, either. But if pg was a psyop, it fizzled. Why not go for the throat and throw in Bill, Donald and Epstein if they want a believable operation? It seems to me that Alex Jones & pg has done more damage to discredit future real claims of pedophilia by making outrageous claims about Clinton chopping up and eating babies without some sort of proof.

Mission Accomplished!
Only thing that could mess things up is if a credible CP bust were publicized.
(...and we would have gotten away with it ... if it weren't for those meddling vikings!!)

I really can't be sure, but I believe you're mocking me. It's really difficult for me to find the proper words to express myself, but PufPuf said it much better than I could have:

Note I do not deny that PizzaGate has likely revealed the outline of a pod of organized pedophilia at high places that the controlling elite want to obscure and hence an arena of "fake:" news. The over reach for data points creates a rich tapestry of narrative that unfortunately detracts from the core issue (that there is organized pedophilia among the elite in Washington DC) by creating a cloud of pizza, art, ping pong, Satan, Hillary Clinton cannibalism, maybe some Russian influence, and so on for diversion catapulted as "fake" news. Maybe the "rich tapestry" expands into silliness that distracts from a common want to remove such evil?

(Bold emphasis mine)

This is how I feel about pg.

[slomo]

Thank you for your reply, slomo. " Ergo, the high-ranking officials of most powerful nation-state in the world (and their controlling elites) must be involved, Ergo, the activity flows through DC. Ergo DC institutions must be involved."

Indeed. I agree that this occurs in every large international city as well as in the back woods.

I really don't know about Alefantis or Comet, either. But if pg was a psyop, it fizzled. Why not go for the throat and throw in Bill, Donald and Epstein if they want a believable operation? It seems to me that Alex Jones & pg has done more damage to discredit future real claims of pedophilia by making outrageous claims about Clinton chopping up and eating babies without some sort of proof.

Mission Accomplished!
Only thing that could mess things up is if a credible CP bust were publicized.
(...and we would have gotten away with it ... if it weren't for those meddling vikings!!)

I really can't be sure, but I believe you're mocking me. It's really difficult for me to find the proper words to express myself, but PufPuf said it much better than I could have:

Note I do not deny that PizzaGate has likely revealed the outline of a pod of organized pedophilia at high places that the controlling elite want to obscure and hence an arena of "fake:" news. The over reach for data points creates a rich tapestry of narrative that unfortunately detracts from the core issue (that there is organized pedophilia among the elite in Washington DC) by creating a cloud of pizza, art, ping pong, Satan, Hillary Clinton cannibalism, maybe some Russian influence, and so on for diversion catapulted as "fake" news. Maybe the "rich tapestry" expands into silliness that distracts from a common want to remove such evil?

(Bold emphasis mine)

This is how I feel about pg.

Nope, not mocking you. Mocking the powers-that-be, who are playing these games with us.

I mean, how stupid do they think we are?

[American Dream]

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Pizzagate?

By Sam Stecklow



In the week since Edgar Welch, armed with an AR-15, walked into Washington, D.C., pizza joint Comet Ping Pong and fired off a round in the spirit of “shin[ing] some light” on disturbing allegations he’d read involving Hillary Clinton and a supposed child sex-trafficking ring based at the restaurant, two other pizza places in different American cities reported being targeted in similar ways. Roberta’s, in Brooklyn, received phone calls threatening torture and death after a video consisting of collaged “incriminating” pictures sourced from Instagram circulated on social media. East Side Pies of Austin, Texas, faced lesser harassment, with some redditors claiming that a co-owner’s alma mater, the Culinary Institute of America, equated a past with the CIA. “The dots they are trying to connect are so ludicrous,” the other co-owner told the Austin American-Statesman.

Clearly, there is not a nationwide conspiracy of linked pedophile-run metropolitan pizzerias, as some poorly edited videos and unhinged Reddit posts — themselves largely sourced to some of John Podesta’s emails about food — would have you believe. This revelation in and of itself has led many to label the incident as one involving media bugbear du jour “fake news”; as Welch himself put it to the Times, “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.” But it doesn’t look or feel much like the “fake news” that we talk about proliferating on Facebook, the mindless right-wing babble spat out of the Balkans by teenagers, or even the two decades of shrieking information warfare overseen by serial sexual harasser and paranoid monster Roger Ailes. It feels much more like coordinated mob harassment, exemplified by previous incidents like Gamergate.

[guruilla]

Thank you for your reply, slomo. " Ergo, the high-ranking officials of most powerful nation-state in the world (and their controlling elites) must be involved, Ergo, the activity flows through DC. Ergo DC institutions must be involved."

Indeed. I agree that this occurs in every large international city as well as in the back woods.

I really don't know about Alefantis or Comet, either. But if pg was a psyop, it fizzled. Why not go for the throat and throw in Bill, Donald and Epstein if they want a believable operation? It seems to me that Alex Jones & pg has done more damage to discredit future real claims of pedophilia by making outrageous claims about Clinton chopping up and eating babies without some sort of proof.

Mission Accomplished!
Only thing that could mess things up is if a credible CP bust were publicized.
(...and we would have gotten away with it ... if it weren't for those meddling vikings!!)

I can't tell if your "Mission Accomplished" statement is meant to be ironic or not, but IMO it really should be.

My best guess for why the NYT, etc, decided to bury the Norway piece is that it lends way too much credibility to Pizzagate. Even just having that as context in people's minds makes it a lot harder to mock & deride the Comet Ping Pong allegations, not to mention kind of insensitive. The thing is, to make fun of Pizzagate depends to some degree on a prior agreement that high level pedophile rings operating behind a cover of respectability is in and of itself absurd (not at RI, admittedly, there is a "higher level" or mockery going on here). But really, as far as I can see at least, that's the only thing that makes the CPP allegations absurd, as opposed to just, unsubstantiated and in need of further investigation before concluding anything.

I think we can all agree that Pizzagate, if we include Welsh's reaction, has been used to fast-track the Fake News narrative; as to whether that's a reaction against Pizzagate or Pizzagate was always intended as a "psy-op for this end, or a bit of both, who knows? What I see is a massively coordinated campaign to push the FN narrative that includes players as widespread as NYT, Wash-Po & Stephen Colbert, all the way down to previously legitimate conspiracy researchers like Peter Levenda (who takes more of an RI-friendly line of derision, i.e., that its distracting from real child abuse problems).

I'm a semi-skeptic on PG. Meaning I don't know what the hell is going on with Alefantis and Comet. But here's the thing: the most lucrative businesses are the sale of weapons, drugs, and humans. It stands to reason that the only people who can purchase such commodities are elites and state actors (i.e. they are certainly on the demand side). It also stands to reason that elites and state actors must participate on the supply side of such activities, otherwise how can they keep up with the Joneses? Ergo, elites and high-level politicians and military officers are involved in CP (and weapons and drugs). Ergo, the high-ranking officials of most powerful nation-state in the world (and their controlling elites) must be involved, Ergo, the activity flows through DC. Ergo DC institutions must be involved.

Well-said, tho I'm not sure why, knowing this, you'd be a "semi-skeptic" about CPP; agnostic OK; but what you're describing is a large, tightly knit organization, or collection of organizations, firmly embedded in Washington culture. So even if there were nothing at all on Alefantis besides his connections, his high-status, and the fact that CPP is used for political fund-raising, wouldn't that itself be a reason to suppose he would have some knowledge of these operations? (I mean, you & I know about it, and that's just from reading the internet, right?)

Add to that the fact that he's a creep with some highly questionable sexual predilections and some pretty disgusting Instragram buddies, and well, even being agnostic seems a bit fence-sitty to me. I get that, if this was a court of law we'd want to keep our opinions to ourselves and that we don't want to encourage any lone gunmen to act out their uncontrolled outrage, or anything like that. But still, we are just talking here, and the context is one of a conversation among two moderately self-aware and sensitive souls (right now, I mean, not speaking for everyone on the board). Anyway, Alefantis is kind of a side topic at this point, I'd agree about that, except as a case study for how this sort of hidden exploitation culture might look when it starts to peak through the surface of its concealment.

Regarding Jones, you do know he's backed away from Pizzagate right? So how does that fit into the PG psy-op angle?

I don't see PG as having discredited or rendered absurd the subject of high-level organized pedophilia at all; I think there's a concerted attempt to use it that way, including (in a way) at this forum. But I think that has more to do with dishonesty, on the one hand, and on the other, a deep, perhaps mostly unconscious, aversion to seeing how these realities are bleeding through into the ordinary everyday aspects of society and our lives, and recognizing how they have always been there. Very few people want to, or even can let themselves, see this, because it entails moving a horrifying reality from the abstract, intellectual, investigative level to a directly experiential one. & that's true even if we don't live in Washington DC.

[Iamwhomiam]

I hope you understand I meant no personal offense, guruilla, but to claim some here are trying to silence any story about pedophilia is a step too far. I believe we all find the practice abhorrent. I know little about Alefantis, but I surely believe pg will be raised to discredit future claims. These are some damning claims to lodge against anyone due to their associations alone, and not all that easy to repair should the claim be false.

All this story has done is to muddle the field for future claims, with no justice found for anyone suffering such abuse. Alefantis will wear this forever, regardless its truth.

[MacCruiskeen]

Further bizarreness and another meltdown. Haven't listened to this yet, and probably never will, but I guess this is the right thread for it (because: "Fake News" / "Hillary's attack-dog" / the Brock/Alefantis connection):

Michael Tracey ‏@mtracey 2 hours ago

David Brock went on the POLITICO podcast to identify all the actors to blame for Hillary's loss

https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/808502781501960192

Michael Tracey Verified Account
‏@mtracey

I recommend listening to the full podcast. It's pretty disturbing. At one point, Brock breaks down in tears.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pol ... =378857971

[OP ED]

I hope you understand I meant no personal offense, guruilla, but to claim some here are trying to silence any story about pedophilia is a step too far. I believe we all find the practice abhorrent. I know little about Alefantis, but I surely believe pg will be raised to discredit future claims. These are some damning claims to lodge against anyone due to their associations alone, and not all that easy to repair should the claim be false.

All this story has done is to muddle the field for future claims, with no justice found for anyone suffering such abuse. Alefantis will wear this forever, regardless its truth.

Frankly I have little sympathy for Alefantis even if he is innocent. "Innocent" I mean.

Don't hold fundraising events for war criminals, (at best) and make jokes about child abuse on your Instagram (especially if you're a semi public figure listed as VIP in grocery store rags) if you don't want to experience the joy of karma the way only 4chan can bring.

[Iamwhomiam]

I really never before heard of Alefantis and still know next to nothing about the man, but if as you say he's done these things, he is indeed a loathsome character.

I really have no interest in visiting 4chan. ever.

[OP ED]

He does have friends with very strange and/or disturbing content on THEIR Instagram. Including a couple of folks peripherally related to the Epstein debacles.

(And I don't mind people calling me a Satanist, so my "and/or disturbing" meter is calibrated toward the limits of socially acceptable)

...

He also makes at least one, maybe two, depending on how you read them, jokes about pedophila using accepted gayslang which I have heard before. In extremely poor taste, at the very very least. He did that. No 4chan trolls made that.

He also dated a former neocon operative turned Clinton money launderer, so his personal judgement is debatable. Or is still dating. Or. Hard to tell because they started editing and privatizing this stuff as soon as the trolling began.

[guruilla]

Frankly I have little sympathy for Alefantis even if he is innocent. "Innocent" I mean.

Don't hold fundraising events for war criminals, (at best) and make jokes about child abuse on your Instagram (especially if you're a semi public figure listed as VIP in grocery store rags) if you don't want to experience the joy of karma the way only 4chan can bring.

RI is nothing if not full of surprises, not all of them unpleasant. Suddenly I'm agreeing with everything OP ED posts....

Liminal times indeed....

[Nordic]

From activist Peter Cohen on FB:

You know what scares me more than a Trump Presidency? A public that uncritically embraces anything their government and mass media tell them without a shred of evidence.

In the post-Iraq, post-Snowden era, post-NDAA 2013 era (or didn't your media tel you that propaganda is now legal in the US?), there is no more excuse not to demand proof from our leaders and major corporations of their statements to us. In the post-Rovean world, there is no excuse not to notice when narratives are self-servingly spun and disseminated to serve obvious political aims.

Citizens in a democracy need to be able to make judgments for themselves and it's the role of a truly representative government and a free and independent press to give them the information to be able to do that. When people willingly refuse to question institutions that have systematically lied to them, they are already abdicating their own sovereignty. If we don't start developing truly independent critical minds that evaluate analyses on evidence, rather than on their emotion appeal, Dictatorship will be the inevitable result.

[slomo]

I can't tell if your "Mission Accomplished" statement is meant to be ironic or not, but IMO it really should be.

Kind of, for the most part.

My best guess for why the NYT, etc, decided to bury the Norway piece is that it lends way too much credibility to Pizzagate. Even just having that as context in people's minds makes it a lot harder to mock & deride the Comet Ping Pong allegations, not to mention kind of insensitive. The thing is, to make fun of Pizzagate depends to some degree on a prior agreement that high level pedophile rings operating behind a cover of respectability is in and of itself absurd (not at RI, admittedly, there is a "higher level" or mockery going on here). But really, as far as I can see at least, that's the only thing that makes the CPP allegations absurd, as opposed to just, unsubstantiated and in need of further investigation before concluding anything.

I think we can all agree that Pizzagate, if we include Welsh's reaction, has been used to fast-track the Fake News narrative; as to whether that's a reaction against Pizzagate or Pizzagate was always intended as a "psy-op for this end, or a bit of both, who knows? What I see is a massively coordinated campaign to push the FN narrative that includes players as widespread as NYT, Wash-Po & Stephen Colbert, all the way down to previously legitimate conspiracy researchers like Peter Levenda (who takes more of an RI-friendly line of derision, i.e., that its distracting from real child abuse problems).

I agree.

I'm a semi-skeptic on PG. Meaning I don't know what the hell is going on with Alefantis and Comet. But here's the thing: the most lucrative businesses are the sale of weapons, drugs, and humans. It stands to reason that the only people who can purchase such commodities are elites and state actors (i.e. they are certainly on the demand side). It also stands to reason that elites and state actors must participate on the supply side of such activities, otherwise how can they keep up with the Joneses? Ergo, elites and high-level politicians and military officers are involved in CP (and weapons and drugs). Ergo, the high-ranking officials of most powerful nation-state in the world (and their controlling elites) must be involved, Ergo, the activity flows through DC. Ergo DC institutions must be involved.

Well-said, tho I'm not sure why, knowing this, you'd be a "semi-skeptic" about CPP; agnostic OK; but what you're describing is a large, tightly knit organization, or collection of organizations, firmly embedded in Washington culture. So even if there were nothing at all on Alefantis besides his connections, his high-status, and the fact that CPP is used for political fund-raising, wouldn't that itself be a reason to suppose he would have some knowledge of these operations? (I mean, you & I know about it, and that's just from reading the internet, right?)

Add to that the fact that he's a creep with some highly questionable sexual predilections and some pretty disgusting Instragram buddies, and well, even being agnostic seems a bit fence-sitty to me. I get that, if this was a court of law we'd want to keep our opinions to ourselves and that we don't want to encourage any lone gunmen to act out their uncontrolled outrage, or anything like that. But still, we are just talking here, and the context is one of a conversation among two moderately self-aware and sensitive souls (right now, I mean, not speaking for everyone on the board). Anyway, Alefantis is kind of a side topic at this point, I'd agree about that, except as a case study for how this sort of hidden exploitation culture might look when it starts to peak through the surface of its concealment.

Eh, I am still keeping to the "innocent until proven guilty" ethic for individuals. Even individuals I find utterly repulsive, such as Alefantis. And even though I wish him due process, I don't have any sympathy for him, for the reasons articulated by Op-Ed, and reasons I mentioned about a week ago in the "It" thread. (Also, Op-Ed, you missed a few Instagrams, e.g. the one with the little girl's arms taped to a table, pretty much prima-facie evidence of child abuse, by CPS standards.)

Regarding Jones, you do know he's backed away from Pizzagate right? So how does that fit into the PG psy-op angle?

"Keeping up with the Joneses" is a figure of speech, i.e. referring to an arms-race among neighbors for conspicuous consumption. I don't give a flying fuck about Alex Jones, never did.

[coffin_dodger]

Imagine the pressures building up within mainstream news media organisations.
At the top, we have the 'business-as-usual' guys, that toe the party line and usually have little problem with barking their orders at subordinates to spin a story in whichever direction is required. These guys are paid enormously well to control a tight ship and keep all 'investigative' journalism on target. This usually involves regurgitating govvie and official corporate press releases verbatim - no questions asked - and spinning the story to match whichever political view the media outlet supports.
There has to be, has to be, a growing pool of average wage-earning, earnest journalists that do the job to support a modest lifestyle or keep a roof over their head. Their disillusionment must be growing daily. They've been told, in no uncertain terms, to keep their noses out of stories that the Editor/boss deems 'unworthy' for their entire careers and - to an extent - the pressure from above has made them unwillingly complicit in the support or suppression of news, dependant on agenda. They must be worried about their personal credibility in the eyes of the public, their families and friends. And worried about their job.
I wonder which news media org will implode first.

[Searcher08]

The MSM still have a lot on their side, perhaps even more so for the Left after the election. There is huge ongoing cognitive dissonance at how Hilary was not elected when she SHOULD have been,dammit. This seems to have been co-opted by the MSM with the "fake news" campaign and I think it is working quite well.

It is very in evidence on RI, with a big migration (not saying conscious or intentional, but it IS a thing) towards regurgitation of MSM talking points and it's broader narrative, which is basically "make every story a fire alarm ringing at maximum volume".

There is no nuance or real analysis whatsoever. It acts as 'signal jamming'.
The messages are

Trump is in Putin's pocket
Putin hacked the DNC and Podesta and hates America
and what's important is to support the people who say this
Trump is Hitler
Trump stole the election
Anything to stop Trump is permissible
Anything showing another point of view is hate speech from a Nazi.
Anything questioning Clinton or Podesta is hate speech

Imagine the pressures building up within mainstream news media organisations.
At the top, we have the 'business-as-usual' guys, that toe the party line and usually have little problem with barking their orders at subordinates to spin a story in whichever direction is required. These guys are paid enormously well to control a tight ship and keep all 'investigative' journalism on target. This usually involves regurgitating govvie and official corporate press releases verbatim - no questions asked - and spinning the story to match whichever political view the media outlet supports.
There has to be, has to be, a growing pool of average wage-earning, earnest journalists that do the job to support a modest lifestyle or keep a roof over their head. Their disillusionment must be growing daily. They've been told, in no uncertain terms, to keep their noses out of stories that the Editor/boss deems 'unworthy' for their entire careers and - to an extent - the pressure from above has made them unwillingly complicit in the support or suppression of news, dependant on agenda. They must be worried about their personal credibility in the eyes of the public, their families and friends. And worried about their job.
I wonder which news media org will implode first.