Girl on Fox News Frustrates Neocon Portrayals

[mightypeon]

Its fairly obviuos that the troops in a Kaukasian conflict will come from the North Kaukasian military district, which would be the 58 army with its various divisions.
Support would be granted by the Black Sea fleet and rapidly deployable airborne units.

Its fairly available on Russian sites, that is if you can read Russian, however its more like "division so and so moved to the theater" then "division so and so moved to the theater" so linking that is a bit messy.
The Russian "We honour you for kicking Georgias ass" medals also went to the 58 army.

 

[editec]

Not at all. All I'm saying is that we have adopted a course and it is evolving in a given direction. Without someone acting on it to forcibly change it, it will continue generally in the same direction. After all we've been through changes in party and government and we did not change course. So, that would indicate that more serious commitment is needed.

Agreed. We are entering a period of weak national states and strong international corporations. I think this is inevitable sans something catastrophic happening, to be honest.

I'd like to hear more about what you mean by "media control" I'll assume for now that it is benign.

Hardly. It's pathological. The systematic reduction of the number of independent voices in the media leads to a kind of orwellian group think that is dealy to mankind.

Think of information as power. Now I think every libertarian here can understand that putting power into too few hands leads to a loss of liberty for individuals, right?

Well putting control over information into too few hands leads to the same outcome.

When we allowed media monopolies to develop, as we have in the last twenty years, we handed control over the mindset of the people, to six or eight corporations.

That will be the death of the democratic republic, Tech Esq.

Campaign finance reform is an opiate. It is meaningless and toothless and the SCOTUS will ensure it remains so, probably appropriately. The problem that reveals itself in the "need for campaign finance reform" is structural. We perverted the electoral system and this is the result. The answer is to be found in the Constitution. What would change the paradigm is not finance reform it is not having democracy limited artificially by architecture.

I think campiagn finance reform is absolutely necessacy, but know where you're headed here, and I am in TOTAL agreement, that this problem is ALSO one that needs to be fixed.

At the turn of the century we decided that we would move from an apportionment of representative based on population and fix the number of representatives at 435. At that time, those representatives each represented 250,000 people. Now they represent over 600,000 people and growing. The answer is to weaken the need for outside money. Otherwise they will always find a loophole to get the money they need. If we went back to representatives representing 250,000 per congressional district, their need for money drops considerably. Only in the urban areas would the need be great and even there, a representative could probably shake hands with all 250,000 people they represent in a campaign. (and half wouldn't want to shake their hand anyway). Challengers might actually have a chance. Anyway, this is for another thread. I'm way off-topic.

I propose that Representatives serve no more than 30,000 people. I also think each state should have at least 5 senators.

While I'm on the subject, and this has to do with campaign reform, I would also suggest an absolute limit on the amount of money any person can donate to any party or candidate, and that no non-citizen of any state can contribute to any candidate of any other state (or even House district).

Campaign fiance reform and changing the composition of Congress go hand in hand toward putting more democracy in this DEMOCRACTIC republic, I think.



Almost but not exactly. If they bought "all" or some enormous share of their oil from that someone else then yes. It isn't that their oil is not their own or even how much of it isn't theirs, the problem is they single sourced it (or will if Russia takes Georgia).

I think it a manageable risk. If Russia turns around and offers oil again after a substantial disruption, how long will the Europeans hold out against the offer? It won't be measured in more than weeks. Their fear that someone else will start buying that oil would be too great.

Besides, as a long term plan, what if Russia built a pipeline to China too (or for that matter maybe they are doing just that), so turning off the Europeans just means more sales to China. Then Russia doesn't get hurt.

Don't give sourcing too short a shrift. Securing sources of a rare commodity isn't always that easy. Yes, the world market sets prices, but you still have to find a source that has it available to sell. For instance, OPEC sets production targets for its members. They look very dimly on member states that over produce their targets. So, if Russia stops supplying 55 million bbl per day or whatever to Europe. Now they need to get it from someplace else. Well most of the oil in OPEC would be spoken for already. To get them to produce more to cover Europe would probably require a meeting to increase production and then their would be a lag until that happened. You see the difficulty.

Still, there is a transition from one source to another (assuming Russia starts selling the oil to someone else and therefore some suppliers are looking for buyers and there is no net increased world demand that would reduce supplies) if either of these were not true then Europe would be SOL. Transition could take a month or more to make, by which time the Russians may decide to resume sales.

Your points regarding Europe/russia interdependence do have merit.

I still think that the buyer/selling dependence is more important that you think it is, but clearly each case depends on the buyer and sellers state of being at the moment.

 

[editec]

Its fairly obviuos that the troops in a Kaukasian conflict will come from the North Kaukasian military district, which would be the 58 army with its various divisions.
Support would be granted by the Black Sea fleet and rapidly deployable airborne units.

Its fairly available on Russian sites, that is if you can read Russian, however its more like "division so and so moved to the theater" then "division so and so moved to the theater" so linking that is a bit messy.
The Russian "We honour you for kicking Georgias ass" medals also went to the 58 army.

If you're not too busy, and so inclined, Rosetta Project could always use another volunteer Russian translator, MP.

There's more than one way to win a war, ya know?

Think of this project is our modest contribution to winning hearts and minds away from the seductive lure of international xenophobia.

 

[morpheus]

Hardly. It's pathological. The systematic reduction of the number of independent voices in the media leads to a kind of orwellian group think that is dealy to mankind.

Think of information as power. Now I think every libertarian here can understand that putting power into too few hands leads to a loss of liberty for individuals, right?

Well putting control over information into too few hands leads to the same outcome.

When we allowed media monopolies to develop, as we have in the last twenty years, we handed control over the mindset of the people, to six or eight corporations.

That will be the death of the democratic republic, Tech Esq.

Add to this the fact that the media itself relies on fewer sources of information.

News organizations have reduced their number of international bureaus and foreign correspondents, they rely on a small number of news agencies for their news, they also rely on each other (hence something stated by one news medium is repeated by many others), and -as we saw from 9/11 until [and including] the early years of the Iraq war- they rely too heavily on government press conferences without questioning them.

The government also relies on psy-ops strategies to exaggerate a development or even manufacture fake news. These fake or exaggerated news then become propaganda mechanisms aimed at consolodating public support for a particular foreign policy. One way our government has been executing this propaganda effort during the current Iraq war is by sending government-industrial insiders to infiltrate the media as "independent analysts", but with the intention of promoting a slanted "analysis" of developments with the aim of fostering public support for the goverment's position. Another dirty trick which has been used since the 1980s is hiring PR firms to exaggerate or even make up stories which are then picked up by news organizations and spread to the public by the mass media. An example of this can be taken from the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War when the US media was reporting stories of Iraqi soldiers invading Kuwaiti hospitals, taking premature babies out of their incubators, and leaving them on the floor to die. This story was completely made up, and picked up by the US media from a PR firm hired by the US government.

Even regarding the South Ossetia conflict, the American public is being bombarded by a propaganda effort manufactured by hired PR firms. American-educated Saakashvili is no stranger to the way things work in the United States and what it takes to potray yourself as the good guy in the eyes of the American and "Western" publics. Hire a PR firm to construct a narrative that revolves around a power-hungry superpower bullying a small pro-Western democracy, and throw in some buzz words like "ethnic cleansing", and you'll become the US media's darling.

Here's an excellent article from the Guardian:

Georgia has won the PR war
Peter Wilby
The Guardian, Monday August 18 2008

...Not only was it August, when many reporters are on holiday, it was also the Olympics, and the few still on duty were mostly in Beijing. The Financial Times headline, "Georgia says Russia at war", may have seemed strange, but it summed up the state of Fleet Street's verifiable knowledge as the armies moved into action. In the age of 24-hour news, however, the press cannot hang about waiting for reporters to arrive. Readers want bombs, tanks and death tolls. They need to be told who are the goodies and baddies. News, remember, is part of the entertainment industry.

Into the vacuum stepped the Georgian government. Its president, Mikheil Saakashvili, speaks English, wants to join Nato, sent troops to Iraq, got himself educated at Harvard, cultivates a media-friendly style, and sends Georgian university exam papers to be marked in Britain, though whether he expects to get them back is another matter. He took power in the Rose revolution of 2003-04 and professes to be a democrat. He's clearly an all-round good egg. And he has a PR firm, Aspect Consulting, based in Brussels, London and Paris, which also acts for Exxon Mobil, Kellogg's and Procter and Gamble.

Almost hourly over the five-day war, press releases landed on foreign news desks. "Russia continues to attack civilian population." The capital Tblisi was "intensively" bombed. A downed Russian plane turned out to be "nuclear". European "energy supplies" were threatened as Russia dropped bombs near oil pipelines. A "humanitarian wheat shipment" was blocked. Later, "invading Russian forces" began "the occupation of Georgia". Saakashvili's government filed allegations of ethnic cleansing to The Hague. Note the use of terms that trigger western media interest: civilian victims, nuclear, humanitarian, occupation, ethnic cleansing.

It would be unfair to accuse the British press of accepting the Georgian PR uncritically. Most papers dutifully reported that a Georgian attack in the breakaway province of South Ossetia, where most people want to join Russia, started the conflict. But casual readers might have struggled to understand that. The Mail's headline announced: "'1,500 die' as the Russian tanks roll in". Only in the last paragraph of the story did it become clear that the Georgians, not the Russians, were alleged to have killed 1,500.

But Georgia's actions in South Ossetia went largely unexamined, and it was hard to find, from press accounts, what refugees from the province were fleeing from. Again, the Georgians played the PR game more skilfully. Western correspondents were welcomed into Gori and shown areas apparently bombed by the Russians. Saakashvili held international media phone conferences, got himself on TV news channels and even found time, within hours of war breaking out, to write for the Wall Street Journal. Russia, by contrast, allowed little access to South Ossetia. Its government attempted no comparable media offensive. Though it also has a PR agency, GPlus Europe in Brussels (and Ketchum in Washington), it was not asked to issue press releases. As a source wryly put it, "the press release is not a common tool of the Russian government".

The brief war in the Caucasus was a classic example of the situation outlined in Nick Davies's book Flat Earth News. Most newspapers hadn't a clue what was going on and lacked sufficient resources to find out. So skilfully presented PR was at a premium. Most journalists treated it with at least some scepticism, but it inevitably had an effect. If there was a military war, there was also an information one, and Georgia got the better of it.