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Comment by xanthor | Hacker News Reader

Can you imagine a journalist who would lie for any possible reason?

Can you imagine hundreds of journalists who would lie to promote a false story that hasn't really been all that effective and harming China (the only possible motivation for such a campaign). And not a single one of the journalists approached by the creators of this campaign leaked anything. If this really was a massive conspiracy theory, that itself is a much much bigger story than the Chinese rounding up people that most of the world don't seem to care about. One of those hundreds of journalists wouldn't have been able to resist such a scoop.

I'm guessing the next part of your conspiracy theory is that the conspiracy group is so powerful that everyone is scared to come forward. But if they are that powerful, why construct such an ineffective anti-china story? Surely such a powerful group could construct something more damaging.

That's a very outdated model for how conspiracies work. Why would it be necessary to bribe and threaten journalists working at these organizations? They genuinely believe in the project of the US financial, military, and cultural empire. They went to the same schools and were socialized with the same core beliefs as the people in US government and high finance or those running the intelligence agencies and military-industrial complex. They wouldn't have the opportunity to work at these 'news' organizations if they had worldviews that were radically incompatible.

Likewise, I don't believe anyone is coercing you to push these ideas online. I believe I could drill down on every single source and claim, and your fundamental beliefs about this question would remain the same.

Proximity to and dependence upon established institutions exerts an inexorable gravity on worldview. It determines one's social circle and path to advancement in every area of life. Those inside the bubble feel themselves to be 'free thinkers', but one who strays outside the acceptable range of beliefs and ideas will immediately experience a sharp discontinuity in this 'freedom'.

You have a group of Swiss journalists who regularly publish critical stories about war crimes in Gaza, the US detaining immigrants, the Trump administration, and waning influence.

And your first thought is that these people have such a hard on for the American Cultural Empire that they are willing to fabricate massive amounts of evidence of Chinese wrongdoing with no coercion required?

They’re just all sitting around writing stories about how fucked up the Trump administration is and how America is over and how the next century belongs to China, and then they think “hey we should probably all work together to make China look bad because America Fuck Yeah! Am I right!?!?”

Please calm down. They might not like Trump — that would be a given for many in these elite circles — but are they really opposed to the prevailing world order? In what material way?

How does being Swiss contradict anything I said? Switzerland is deeply integrated into this prevailing order. It is home to the Bank of International Settlements, the supra-national central bank of central banks whose charter grants it immunity from any national subpoena or inquest.

I understand that being victimized makes you prone to paranoia. Paranoia can be an effective defense mechanism against future trauma.

But in this case it’s just you and me alone in an elevator and you farted. There’s no one else here.

Sure. I can also much more easily imagine pseudnonymous accounts making material misrepresentations for politically motivated reasons, spreading FUD about journalists making things up.

Great. So we can agree we shouldn't take anything at face value.

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