Lenses

Distortions aren't a bug, they are a feature

Now, as part of my weekly read, I do spend some time on the web, checking out some blogs and news aggregators that have been around for a while and some some of the newer blogs here on Substack for contrarian views concerning what is happening in the world.

I figure that my mainstream press offerings by the Economist and the reading of the mainstream (NYT, WaPo) offerings gives me a pretty good idea about how the powers that be think. The sad part of this is that the mainstream seem more interested in crafting a way of looking at the problem that supports a preconceived notion than actually reporting the facts on the ground.

Facts seem to be buried well into the majority of articles. The first part and most voluminous part of any piece of writing (>85% in my estimation) is not laying out the facts on the ground and then working at synthesizing an overarching theory to explain the facts but the 85% of the article spends its time outlining the ideological lenses that the author wishes you to don prior to reading the article and then cherry picking the facts of the ground-truth to support the wearing of those lenses.

Now, having spent time in the military, this is not what is considered “good” intelligence. This is the kind of crap that gets a lot of people killed for no good reason. More people have died from underestimating the enemy and minimizing their capabilities than the opposite.

The media in the west (outside of the “disinformation”) acts more as cheerleaders than news sources. From the beginning, western wunderwaffen have been touted as “game changers” without changing any games. This is just now becoming apparent to most observers. The Ukrainian losses have been minimized and the Russian losses have been magnified. What were once followers of a pseudo-nazi movement were whitewashed as “freedom fighters”.

The Ukie war is falling out of the news cycle to a greater and greater extent almost every day. The reason for this seem simple in my mind. The cheerleaders of the mass media have no intention of showing just how badly their coverage has missed the mark.

In a way, this comes to me a a relief. I never cared an iota as to whether one flavor of Rus wanted to kill another flavor of Rus. It is 9,000 km from where I sit. Its none of my business. So, in truth, I am happy that the media has slunk away from the slap-fest going on “over there”.

I don’t expect them to do this, but I am holding onto the hope that maybe, just maybe, they will start discussing the problems that we have here.