CarlMarks

What is the bias?

Sounds like whatsboutism. What time is it in Moscow?

It seems pretty clear you just don't know what imperialism is full stop.

The article does not describe any political persecution, it just repeats a vague assertion by one guy and then makes implications about COVID lockdowns

Democrats and university admins just ran a standard PR playbook. They depend on students' naivete to succeed at it, and that worked. Several encampmentd accepted mere promises of consideration to disband while others got stronger concess but without them actually being in hand, which were easy to renege on.

For campus protest to work against something as entrenched as Zionism, these lessons need to be learned and consistently passed on and there need to be strong ties to orgs outside the university that can provide seasoned advice.

That's a process error, not an individual's fault. Sounds like not a single person reviewed the code, they just said, "sounds good, deploy!" on a major production system.

You can be certain that there are tons of other bugs in the system that just have more subtle effects.

There was kabuki theater around this, so far as intelligence was involved. Mostly the official faces quietly did nothing. None actively contradicted the narrative. And of course, Tenet (the CIA director at the time) called it a "slam dunk". Most of them were never under oath about any of this - it's not like the US actually investigates or punishes its own war crimes or violations of the UN Charter. In reality, invading Iraq was a Washington consensus position to destabilize that country further after over a decade of civilian-targeted sanctions. Our liberal hero, Joe Biden, happily laid the propaganda on thick through his position as chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, bringing in hack after hack to testify and make the case via the media apparatus. Very few people in power even publicly questioned the case for a war of aggression, let alone did anything to oppose it, and media narratives were more or less lockstep with them despite record-setting protests. Actually, scratch that: there was a pervasive culture of anti-brown, islamophobic rhetoric that questioned the patriotism (read: right to belong) of anyone who pushed back. Ask anyone that looked vaguely South Asian or Arab at the time.

Of course, I don't want to gice the impression that possessing WMDs has ever been a consistent, valid, or legal justification for being a target of a war of aggression. The only country to use nukes on civilians was the US and I don't see them invading themselves with a "coalition of the willing" since then, though they have certainly been very aggressive.

But I digress. Of course US intel is going to be doing shady things, that's not really debated. The thing I think is most relevant here is the parallel of a lack of media criticism and how easy it is to get folks, and particularly Americans, to absorb headlines and claims without looking any deeper into sourcing, into the history at hand, or even just for now, admitting that there is very little information or ways to get a good handle on the sequence of events, and it's okay to not have a hot take. Opposing a jingoistic fervor is essential to opposing fascism.

It also "made sense" to most Americans that Iraq had WMDs. Colin Powell even said so, and he was greatly respected despite his participation in covering up the My Lai Massacre.

Love to see the immediate certainty that Russia did it based on... UA saying so. Impressive media criticism. I'm sure Iraq's WMDs will turn up any day now, too.