[run4yourlives]

So let me get this straight:

You feel that the entire article asked all sorts of people in these professions their opinions but when it came time to ask a soldier they couldn't find one and so the opinion was supplied by the US Army Public Relations Office?

Or maybe the whole study is a propaganda stunt? The US Army itself went and interviewed all these people so that it could plant a two line sentence about how its soldiers could think for themselves! (Gasp!)

Frankly, I think what's most likely is that your absolute hatred for the military and its members is clouding your cognitive ability, causing you to see conspiracies where none exist. Sadly, I have no doubt that my comment will alter your thinking in any way.

[Alex3917]

Whether or not this particular quote happens to be true is largely irrelevant. The fact that the military is paying people to use sockpuppets to post pro-military opinions on social news sites makes me not trust pro-military opinions I read on social news sites. What exactly is irrational about that? How does that represent clouded cognitive ability?

I would trust the military a lot more if I didn't see shit like this on a regular basis:

"One use that's confirmed, however, is the manipulation of social media through the use of fake online 'personas' managed by the military. Raw Story recently reported that the US Air Force had solicited private sector vendors for something called 'persona management software.' Such a technology would allow single individuals to command virtual armies of fake, digital 'people' across numerous social media portals.

These 'personas' were to have detailed, fictionalized backgrounds, to make them believable to outside observers, and a sophisticated identity protection service was to back them up, preventing suspicious readers from uncovering the real person behind the account. They even worked out ways to game geolocating services, so these 'personas' could be virtually inserted anywhere in the world, providing ostensibly live commentary on real events, even while the operator was not really present."

Toppling of Saddam statue? Fake. Pat Tillman? Fake. Jessica Lynch? Fake.

They have spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars producing fake TV segments alone which have been broadcast on the U.S. media as independent news: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/16/opinion/16wed1.html

[Helianthus]

while you have obviously abandoned our other thread, I should point out that the toppling of the Saddam statue is not so much fake as much as it is ambiguous, a sort of dreamlike happenstance between media, military, and Iraqi civilian all preying on each other's expectation.

In other words, it is exactly the sort of delicious nexus of unpredictable behavior that makes for an interesting symbol--but such subtleties of intent on all parties involved is lost on your black-and-white thinking.