That’s true, Bali is by far the most popular destination in Indonesia. It makes sense what you’re saying, like Jakarta is an incredibly dirty city with some pretty visible signs of poverty and corruption. But idk if the government is that concerned with what a handful of tourists think in a country of 250 million, the journalists will still expose everything to the world anyway. That said it I wouldn’t be surprised if they heavily discourage tourists from going to this Aceh place.

What do you mean limited? I took a vacation in Jakarta easily enough, and went sightseeing in the surrounding provinces.

Imagine being a military dictator and not cracking down on dissidents smh. Chalk up another point against great man theory.

Man trying to find the full speech is impossible. You’d think the country accused of controlling the media would make speeches by it’s government easily accessible.

Anyway, it’s not surprising Netanyahu said this tbh, he’s always had this position. That guy fucking sucks. I’m not sure if he wins this next election because the polls make it look like it’s going to be a complete mess, but I’m pretty sure however it ends it’s going to be basically how he described it with no chance of Palestinian statehood.

EDIT: I found it https://youtu.be/StF-7tNX1qM

Does anyone have an article that isn’t trash clickbait? I’ve only found 2 articles talking about this with neither containing a full quote or any sourcing aside from a mention that the quote originates from Al Jazeera on the 29th, but I can’t find anything about it on their website.

Lmao, TIL fascists love the west. I guess we fought that war for nothing. I guess the most fascistic governments around the world like Russia and Iran are buddies with the west. I’d have to be mentally ill to disagree with that! xD

Critical support seems to mean tying yourself into knots defend the indefensible. I think you’d be a lot less angry all the time if you didn’t subscribe to that brain-dead tankie worldview. All that cognitive dissonance just melts away like a spring morning when you aren’t carrying a century of ahistoric cope on your back.

Unless they’re anti-west, then they get your “critical support” lmao

How confrontational, you people really are just the most sanctimonious skin suit wearers on the planet. Makes the fascists look downright noble by comparison, at least they’ll stab you in the front.

Lmao, campism is for losers. Get on board with the west being the best or fuck off to whatever illiberal shithole you prefer.

True, and this country in particular has some of the worst ones to exist anywhere.

That’s hilarious. “We don’t support propaganda and whataboutism, also check out this completely irrelevant claim about my ops” you couldn’t write it.

Tankies don’t acknowledge the existence of time, they still attempt to describe Taiwan as a military junta.

That’s awesome. I mean that article is trash, but at least it’s relevant. It’s about a completely different bill (HR 1157) than the one linked above (HR 7476), but that’s okay, for now we can chalk it up to platform9469’s mistake rather than malicious intent. The latter will be evident after reading the bill, which is only a few pages long.

It’s sad, and quite telling, that you felt the need to link an op-ed rather than the bill itself, but we can use it as an opportunity to teach some media literacy.

From the trash op-ed:

This legislation authorizes more than $1.6 billion for the State Department and USAID over the next five years to, among other purposes, subsidize media and civil society sources around the world that counter Chinese “malign influence” globally.

What other purposes? Activities financed by the bill are detailed in section 2.e in 7 parts, including the “influence campaign”, anti-corruption and anti-crime initiatives, security services(?), and economic development including offering alternative financial assistance for key infrastructure projects.

There’s a lot on that list that will cost a lot more than posting shit on social media. Calling it an “influence campaign” hardly does it justice, this is a wholistic expression of a countries soft power into regions that will benefit from it. That $1.6 billion will go towards more than any terminally online ml has ever imagined.

Speaking of money, let’s see what this opinion slop you posted says about that:

That’s a massive spend — about twice, for example, the annual operating expenditure of CNN.

Well now, that’s just a straight up lie. CNN doesn’t even share it’s expenses because it’s a subsidiary of WB which groups CNN with other networks they own together in their expense reports, so idk how this Harvard genius figured it out. Estimates I’ve seen floating around put their annual expenditure at 1.2 billion. This bill allocates $325 million per year. We don’t even know what this clown thinks the real CNN number is because he doesn’t bother providing one.

He vaguely gestures towards the GEC and USAID so he can frame things as extra bad while saying basically nothing. He’s probably happy that Trump deleted the GEC and USAID a few months later.

The slop slinger then brings up a “vision document”, which as far as I can tell is like fan-fiction for military people, as an example of what this could all look like. A horrible story of honest Chinese capitalists being astroturfed and robbed of their business opportunities. It’s a pity none of the language in the bill describes anything like this. Instead of tearing down the ops, the bill details providing alternative options for a wide range of things to whatever organisations need them so they don’t need to rely on Chinese support.

He ends with something I thought was pretty funny, contemplating the potential for what he imagines the plan is to backfire by eroding trust in anti-china information by virtue of people being aware that the US has an interest in spreading it. Ignoring the fact that China does the exact same thing and we have multiple instances of ml’s, plus myriad other leftist slopulists, who eat that shit up without a thought.

So yea, it didn’t take you much effort to dig up some rando headline with a vestigial op-ed attached to it, but it didn’t get you anywhere. You actually have to read shit and understand it, not just blindly follow every contrarian sock with a world-view throwing headlines at you.

See now that’s a lie, because you implied that guy knows his politics, which is a positive claim that turns on the authenticity of his claim. Now you’re running away from it because it’s increasingly clear he doesn’t know shit and you look like a sock for defending him.

Maybe you should change your original comment to “spreading lies about politics means you’re paid to do so” which isn’t really what I said either, but would at least be close enough to avoid looking completely illiterate.

That’s so true almighty knower of politics. Please show me where your knowledge comes from in the above link. You’ll find the document is organised into many numbered and lettered sections, so just let me know which section supports this guys unfounded assertion about a $1.6 billion budget for an “influence campaign”.

I find this pearl clutching over manufactured consent highly obnoxious and borderline archaic. The days of top-down narratives fueled by restricted access are laughably simple compared to the fractured global media ecosystem of today.

Whatever opinions planted in the mind by manufactured consent are dwarfed a thousand-fold by internet echo chambers that owe no allegiance to the state. To be clear I do not think they cannot align with state interests, only that alignment is selfish, non-ubiquitous across vast swathes of the media landscape, and not the result of a power imbalance in favour of the state.

Unless you want to conflate the two in which case I would ask whether you think the .ml instance “manufactures consent” against support of western interests.

Ironically enough, China is one of the few places where manufactured consent is still able to be effective because of the authoritarian stranglehold they maintain on their media by banning access to outside sources and replacing them with state sanctioned alternatives. Same with Iran, Russia, North Korea, etc. It’s weird ml’s complain about manufactured consent while simping for countries that do it more than anywhere else.

I sure hope you were paid to read that, because why else would you waste your time following a 700 page bill that hasn’t been passed yet? At a glance it isn’t about astroturfing, it’s about sanctioning and charging melign actors as criminals, plus a whole ton of stuff from monetary policy to IP protections. It’s basically outlining the entire geopolitical strategy towards China, which is probably why it’s spent over a year being bounced around 20 different subcommittees.

Idk where you got that price tag seeing as the link you provided contains no budgeting information, but you should ask your handler if that figure is for the entire bill, or for an “influence campaign” specifically. While you wait to hear back from them for that talking point, would you mind showing me where in the bill this influence campaign is outlined?

Caring about stuff isn’t a binary, it doesn’t hinge on whatever insane purity test you think it does.

If you do everything right, and don’t fuck anything up, it just works 💁‍♂️

deleted by creator