Late last month, reports began emerging claiming that Russia had been paying substantial bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops in Afghanistan. A new poll shows that 60% of Americans view that allegation as “believable.”
Claims Russia did something bad are usually easy to sell, and a claim repeated enough usually gets believed by many. Still, the evidence is not at all on the side of this particular allegation, which the Pentagon tried, and failed, to sell to the US intelligence community.
Centcom head Gen. Frank McKenzie says that when he heard the report it was “worrisome,” but that he’s still not clear anyone was killed on the basis of this. Moreover, he says the US did not change its Afghanistan operations.
It seems clear at this point it was never true, but the New York Times ran with the story, and ran hard, and the poll points to Americans buying the story.
The poll shows that they view Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “threat,” and support a new round of US sanctions against Russia. Alarmingly, 9% even supported attacking Russia outright.
This is undercut by the strong evidence that this plot isn’t true, and never was. The danger is, the US could escalate hostilities and the majority of the public is fine with it.
Of course they do. That’s why the propaganda was put out there. Works every time as someone once said about 75 yrs ago.
The Taliban has been killing American troops since 2001 without being paid a penny to do it, so why now suddenly would they be getting paid to do it? This whole thing was just a ploy to keep American troops in Afghanistan indefinitely. And it worked.
If Americans would believe all the lies Trump told to get elected they will believe anything. I don’t think they teach critical thinking in American schools.
Critical thought is subversive.
Americans believed all the lies Obama told to get elected, and Shrub told to get elected, and Clinton told to get elected…
They’ve even closed the schools down under pretext of COVID-19;
Trump is fighting this and demanding schools re-open in September,, but mainstream politics isn’t taking any chances on critical thought even accidentally being taught.
https://in.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-usa-education-idINKBN2492O0
But American sure know how to criticize everyone else. USA, USA….blah, blah.
Yeah, but not a whole lot of critical thought goes into the criticism.
That’s always been a problem, but its so bad now its a reliable exploit.
The purpose of government “education” in America isn’t to teach critical thought, it’s to turn out obedient drones. Keeping the schools closed down means kids get, on average, more real education and less indoctrination.
Agree 100% – and it’s not like this is news, , so nobody has any defence for not being aware.
H. L. Mencken nailed it in the first quarter of the last century –
Unless their useless parents are keeping the news broadcasts on the TV.
I’m not sure how that works; though indoctrination into the system is part of what public schools do, too much of.
That said, Its doubtful that many parents have the time, knowledge, or skills to teach their kids at home or the money to invest in some form off private education.
STEM skills requires specialized teachers, beyond readin’, (w)riting’, and (a)’rithmatic..
Independent thinking, kind of happens on its own, in part as a reaction to the irrational aspects of the educations system.
Right because Trump is the guy who believes in education and is a stable genius. Covid is not a “pretext”. Teachers actually give a crap about not getting the virus, just like you would in their shoes.
Well, to be in their shoes I would have to be (on average) an obese middle-aged woman with cognitive abilities roughly aligned with HousewifeTV audiences (e.g., “The View”, “Dr Phil”, “Dr Oz”… etc).
So you’re right by construction – because if I were in their shoes, I would be innumerate… and thus unable to work out that I faced a mortality risk so close to zero that I could safely ignore all the hysteria.
After all, while teachers are – on average – stupid, very few of them are chronically-ill septuagenarians, and the latter is the only demographic cohort with genuinely significant mortality risk (as I’ve been saying since mid-March… because data speaks louder than politicians and their apparatchiks).
In the same way: if you were in the shoes of a Trumptard, you would believe that #OrangeManBad was #CheetoJesus. If you were in the shoes of a Hillarytard, you would give Bill a pass for his trips on the Lolita Express. If you were in the shoes of a Jeebustard you would believe in a bunch of primitive nonsense.
(Of course, all the foregoing assumes that “in their shoes” isn’t purely as a result of being a shoe thief. Can’t ever rule anything out in Clown World)
“Data.”
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6928e1.htm
Nice to know you’re a misogynist and into fat shaming too. F— you and the horse you road in on.
Nice to know that you’re innumerate and gullible and think that feelz are more important than facts.
Percentages of total deaths (the subject of the paper you think contains relevant data) are irrelevant to individual risk by age cohort; you’re going to need to scurry away and get the population pyramid to convert “%deaths by age group” numbers to “IFR by age group”.
Then you can try to apply your quant skillz to something that has the remotest chance of helping your argument.
If you had any idea what you’re talking about, you would already know the IFR by age cohort.
If you like I can post the cross-sectional data (weekly IFR by age cohort estimates for 15 countries); I’ve been collecting and processing that data since late March.
.
Nice try at pop-psych, too… “remote viewing” of people’s psychological makeup is the hallmark of an ignorant charlatan.
If there was a bit more “fat shaming”, public health budgets would not be stressed by expensive-to-treat chronic conditions that are directly caused by people making stupid food choices and refusing to get off their arses (except to go to the fridge).
I have the same view of obesity as I have of cigarette smoking: people who compromise their own health should not get dollar one from the public purse – it’s as much of a waste of money, as attempting to educate an individual with an IQ below 115.
Likewise: if I was genuinely misogynist,I would not add qualifiers to get from “women” to “the average high school teacher“.
This is a variant of the notion that if you call someone a “stupid woman” you are implicitly saying that not all women are stupid – i.e., that the specific woman at whom the remark is directed, stands out from women as a whole, because of her stupidity.
If you had been taught to read properly, you would understand that… sadly, no.
Now… since you think you know data – go find some data on the age/education/gender profile of US schoolteachers, and let me know what you find out about the median age, educational attainment, and gender.
Here’s something to get you started… US Schools and Staffing Survey: the median age of schoolteachers in the US is 41; 75% of them are women; 80% of them are white.
So at the median, schoolteachers are white women in their early 40s: a middle-aged white woman. So that characterisation of teachers is absolutely in accord with the data.
Someone with that profile (40-something white woman) who contracts covid19 faces an IFR of less than 0.1% (irrespective of underlying conditions). Significantly lower than seasonal flu.
Contrast that with the IFR for 75+ (~4%) and 85+ (~10%) and you begin to see why middle-aged white women have nothing to worry about.
As to their cognitive abilities… well, the first indicator is that they are unable to do very basic analysis of their own risk, when the data to enable this is abundant and free.
Other indicators: the best they could do after college, was get a job as a warden in a child-warehouse; their education is overwhelmingly in the non-discipline of ‘Education’, which has “can fog a mirror” as the primary entry criterion.
School-teaching is where the bottom quartile of graduates in real disciplines go, when they discover that they aren’t good enough to get employment in their main discipline.
That’s why they’re paid peanuts… and it’s why they are a key input into declining educational outcomes (e.g., more than a third of college students require remedial training; the US having the worst PIAAC and PISA scores in the Anglophone world).
As to obesity: the Western data are sparse, because anyone who dares research the matter will get shouted down by a mob of mediaeval peasants.
Nationally in the US, as of 2018 43.3% of women aged between 40 and 59 were obese (based on BMI), and obesity is strongly (negatively) linked to intelligence and socioeconomic performance.
There’s good tendency evidence (from India and Brazil) that teachers are fatter, as a group, than the population.
In which case your own supposition goes counter to your argument. The more obese you are the more likely you are to have diabetes which is a major factor in risk of being in the 20% of people who suffer severe symptoms or die from Covid. You know the IFR but you obviously can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. You’re not the critical thinker and overall superior being you claim to be. Teachers are indeed paid peanuts in your country because education isn’t valued the way sports and other things are. And despite your much vaunted knowledge of stats you can’t even put enough two and two together to come up with why there is a much greater obesity problem in your country than in some others: hint, it’s not because of wealth or the gluttony of individualsl. Hence why it’s called fat shaming, which is the same thing as blaming the poor for being unedudcated and ignorant–in face they are often the same people and it has a common cause beyond the person in their present circumstance. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you. Feel that?
“You know the IFR”
Nobody knows the IFR.
Teachers are worried about their careers and whether or not they’ll have a job in September.
They aren’t all going to be teaching virtual classes. Hundreds of thousands face layoffs, and odds are many will be younger teachers with college debt.
“U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids” – Scot Paltrow, Michael Williams Ed., Reuters, June 4, 2020.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-teachers-insig-idUSKBN23B39R
One would imagine, if schools go virtual, the money saved will go into plugging other progressive state budget holes, blithely ignoring that education was an important economic driver and cutting live ed will only make budget shortfalls worse.
Kids most out of luck and will also just happen to be poor kids and children of colour.
“U.S. public schools, focus of debate on reopening, are unsung economic force” – David Lawder, Reuters, July 14, 2020.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-schools-analys/u-s-public-schools-focus-of-debate-on-reopening-are-unsung-economic-force-idUSKCN24F2AZ
With so many people testing positive and noticing they are alive and asymptomatic, it should dawn on at least a few, COVID-19 is a bust and people like them should not be held back from earning a living.
Over 136 000 people dead and you say that. Cases surging out of control in three of your states to the point where they were sending adults to children’s hospitals weeks ago never mind what’s going on now. And you say that. Half a million people dead worldwide and you say that it’s a bust. Guess what? We’re still only just getting started with this. You go on and on about the experts using the wrong graph or the wrong this or that–not that you actually know what you’re talking about–you are worried about being killed by your doctor and yet you don’t give a flying f*** about your country’s teachers or their parents–or most likely anyone other than your damned self.
If your schools can’t go virtual, that’s no-one’s fault but your governments, years of neglect of POC communities. If poor kids and POCs are disadvantaged for not having access to the internet at home, it not being recognized by your governments that education is a right and so therefore is access to information, that is the fault of your governments.
IF ****forcing people to go back to an unsafe work environment**** (I am stressing this to you because it goes against liberty which you all supposedly believe in) with no effing plan for what to do when the first teachers get sick (I can’t believe you think that “most” of them are young college grads and therefore it’s all good as you’re basically saying f-you to anyone above the age of 25, not that there haven’t been any Covid deaths of people that young and younger. Do you even know your own country’s basic demographics and epidemiological factors? Do you know how many of you have diabetes and other diseases that make you immuno-compromised compared to say Europe?). Another conspiracy: to stop kids from critical thinking. Yeah. Right.
In my little part of Canada, our schools went virtual months ago. We didn’t just shutter everything and sit on our thumbs as Thomas likes to say. Our universites were being told then to make two sets of courses one for online, one for with classes in person so we’re prepared.
People are being forced by the government not to work, and, the work environments were no more dangerous than before, for the vast majority of people.
Most people are asymptomatic to COVID-19, and many who do fall ill shake it off without hospitalization.
Therefore, you’re apparently fine with condemning billions to poverty, mental illness, starvation and death for no other reason than they can’t go to work, socialize normally, and participate in society unless they are of the ‘government approved’ class of worker with the resources to live and work comfortably online.
Countless people including teachers as well as children have died from exposure to influenza since the 1919 outbreak; people carried on. We have the influenza vax, which is accepted despite being far less than 100% effective.
You should be free to stay at home and shelter in place all you want, and people who want to work, should be free to do so. No one was ever forced to work before COVID-19 with the exception of prison labour. There are lots of people living on welfare who don’t work.
Those sheltered at home, will obviously be temporarily safer from any cold/fly/alphabet virus whether people are working normally or not. Eventually, though, the toll of living like that will catch up to them, in the form of reduced herd immunity and/or mental illness from isolation.
The majority of people who need to work, are also from the majority asymptomatic population.
Your position is fundamentally irrational. Add to that, politicized and driven by partisan anti-Americanism.
80% of Canadian COVID-19 deaths came from nursing homes, versus around 42% for Americans living in nursing homes. In the U.S., it can be callously said, you get what you pay for.
Canada’s socialized system has no excuse, at all, but a direct lack of political and public will to be aware of the ongoing medicare crisis that existed even before COVID-19 and fund hospitals and care homes.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursing-homes-assisted-living-facilities-0-6-of-the-u-s-population-43-of-u-s-covid-19-deaths/#703d7f2074cd
https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2020/05/07/82-of-canadas-covid-19-deaths-have-been-in-long-term-care.html
There is a misunderstanding about propaganda, that it works because people are stupid and gullible. Many people are neither. Nobody is gullible towards Russia or China. Why is that? Everyone is critical towards them. There’s a competition about who can be the most critical about them.
People are critical about what has a bad reputation and not critical about what has good reputation and as a basic mechanism that is acceptable.
There are some basic mechanisms which everyone uses when judging claims: we rely in part on our own thinking but we rely mostly on sources we consider credible. We have to, because we don’t have the time, the resources or the capabilities to figure out everything ourselves. So we figure out who is reliable instead. It is a massive timesaver. Propaganda works because it targets those we consider reliable (enough).
The second part about propaganda is that we also consider how our judgement reflects on us. If you believe Putin’s claim on XYZ then how to you look to your peers? It drags down your credibility. You won’t be taken seriously after this. There are sources that are safe or good to be associated with and others which are not. Mainstream journalists consider it safe to be associated with the NYTimes and unsafe to be associated with dissident journalism(conspiracy theorists!). The NYTimes is ‘common sense’.
Propaganda is control of common sense, it targets groups, not individuals.
There is also an ugly aspect about the general population: the claim is people don’t want war but propaganda makes them support it. That is a half truth.
People could put work in it and end up in a dissident position, but why should they if they don’t consider it in their interest? If their country is destroying another country which is much weaker than theirs, the patriotic position is so much more attractive than the ‘truth and fairness’ position. There is little motivation in resisting the indoctrination.
So independent thinking is in part about getting better in finding out who is reliable and in part about relying less on this reliability: be willing to be critical about what you trust. But that means you have to shift your own resources to that subject and away from other things, being aware that you’re only this random guy and the others are experts. If you are stupid and you know it for instance, you just have to figure out who is reliable as well as you can (mainly by asking other people you consider reliable)
True enough, though propaganda also includes conditioning acceptance as to who is reliable and who is not.
The whole ‘fake news’ movement seems geared to vetting politically acceptable sources for the narrative.
They avoid it, as it would undercut the information provided by evangelical Christians.
The vast majority of the so-called ‘American’ people are unAmerican ignoramuses.
I am surprised it is so low. It does seem that the Russians were giving $$ to the Taliban so that isn’t great, on the other hand we give $$$ to the Taliban as well don’t we?
The poll isn’t as bad as it looks; people support more sanctions on Russia in response, not staying in Afghanistan.
The rest of the questions are kind of neutral; Russia as a ‘threat’ is kind of normal for the U.S.; any country that can be non-compliant with the power elite gets tarred by that brush, even military-economic non-entities like Venezuela.
Law of propaganda.
Nazi Joseph Goebbels “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”
People are ignorant and stupid enough to fall for the lies…..every time.
Don’t lay this on Herr Goebbles. Give credit where credit is due…and the winner is Freud’s nephew, the good Mr. Bernays.
Got curious about that quote. Couldn’t find anything like it by Bernays. Goodreads attributes it to Adolf Hitler himself.
So? More than 80 percent believed Saddam had WMDs. And probably the same number believe that Iran wants to be a nuke power.
There is no depth to American ignorance (and lies).
We’re getting better. 80% to 60%. We’re still ignorant but improving.
This is why we are doomed as a country. We reward the liars and this encourages them to keep lying.
As John said, the number seems low. I actually think that 60% is encouraging
I misread it as 80% and found it believable. Lots of morons out there.
That’s why the government uses propaganda.
As our greatest modern essayist called us: the United States of Amnesia.
All those times you were lied to in the past? All those times the agencies fabricated stuff and the MSM, especially the leads in the Times and the Post hyped to promote overseas adventure, forgotten and forgiven.
We fully deserve the crappy infrastructure, health system, and retirement system that this unnecessary empire building begets.
The headline is even more fake. First, to label the bounty story as simply fake is misleading: it probably is untrue, but that has yet to be established. “Dodgy” or “Unlikely” or anything else would be more accurate. Second, 60% of Americans do not say they believe it, but that it’s believable. Having that up there is just going to make new readers believe this is a knee-jerk Trump site.
The only purpose of the hoax is to undercut Trump before the election.
That is a success.
That is much like the “Missile Gap” used by Democrats against Nixon in 1960. It wasn’t true, and they knew it, but they sold it. They used the same outlets, too.
That survey also said only 9% of the people want to move on and 9% want to strike Russia’s military. So we have a total of 9% of the people being sane(move on)and 9% bat shit crazy(strike Russia’s military). How depressing is that?
And they believe that Covid-19 is akin to Ebola. Sure, why would Afghanis want to murder US troops that had attacked, invaded, destroyed, and occupied their supposedly sovereign nation? ONLY with financial prodding for sure. What idiots Americans are.
Any excuse will do for USans to attack an alleged enemy and pretend “national security” is at risk. US troops have NO RIGHT to be in Afghanistan at all, and the USA had NO RIGHT to kill thousands of USSR troops INVITED into Afghanistan in the 1980s, but they did, and Reagan was so proud.
GO HOME YANKS and solve your own huge problems. A bit of truth in the “free media” would help the poor benighted US public to avoid so much ignorance.
Yet another proof, that media owned by private interest — with no concern for public good, is a dangerous business.
The biggest contribution of Trump era — media lies.
I also do not believe in polls — this one may be just another one of those — keep the story in the news. Media lies and polls validating each other.
This election will bring us no good. It will not be accepted no matter who wins.