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by jonloldrup
3276 days ago
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Actually, it's pretty easy for people in power to avoid the truth revealing effect that 'common knowledge'presents: simply label your less powerful adversary as a 'conspiracy theorist', and nobody will want to deal with that matter again. Nobody likes being labeled, or associated with, a loony.
Simple social dynamics tricks can mitigate the 'annoying' liberating effect that the internet poses.
Want an example? The content of this article by journalist Seymour Hersh will never become public knowledge. For reasons pertaining to simple social dynamics.
https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article165905578/Trump-s... |
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The portrayal of incompetence and worse at the nexus of the Trump administration is horrifying, but entirely believable, and even predictable at this point.
It also seems fairly plausible to me that the US military might have ultimately attacked Syria even though it knew Syria had not actually used chemical weapons in their attack. That wouldn't be unprecedented.
However, it didn't seem at all plausible to me that such knowledge, if it could be substantiated/corroborated, wouldn't be a major, stop-the-presses, huge-font-headline story in most of the many newspapers we still do have that do real journalism (e.g., the Washington Post, New York Times, or many many others).
It's pretty hard to believe that such news wouldn't get out, regardless of social dynamics. Not knowing much about it beyond the articles (and horrific photos of dead kids) I'd seen in the papers, I googled it a little more.
But there seems to be pretty compelling evidence that it was, in fact, a sarin gas attack perpetrated by Syria. I mean, the OPCW has issued a report concluding that[1].
So it strikes me that the content of the article by Seymour Hersh might not become public knowledge simply because it's one guy's anonymous sources vs. various entities that seem pretty credible, even if you entirely rejected the US government itself.
[1] https://www.opcw.org/news/article/opcw-fact-finding-mission-...