#121
Post rating: +
Ames: Here is a large amount of hard evidence that you knowingly collaborated with an ISIS supporter online because it suited your propaganda agenda. Also your old handle was genuinely misleading to a majority of regular people who didn't know you were just a pasty british goon eating deep fried mars bars at your mum's house while making your terrible posts.

Higgins: Note my reg date. Baka.
#122
Post rating: +
It's really funny. When he gets caught being wrong about things like chemical weapons, bombings, firefights, government conspiracies, etc etc. It's like, well yeah, he's going to get this shit wrong. He's being fed bullshit, he has no expertise, he's never been on the ground, he doesn't speak the language, etc. etc. etc.

But this is home territory. You're supposed to shine when it comes to social media. Doing his diligence and vetting some dude who was so transparently awful should have been a home run. This is his expertise.... Sitting behind a computer screen and googling shit. The one thing he's supposed to be good at. And he failed miserably. lol. God damn.
#123
Post rating: +

Here is the ShamiWeiss-Landis exchange, in which Weiss tags his ISIS pal to attack Professor Landis’s inlaws, many of whom still live in Syria:



wow huh a geographical in-law connection, how completely unique to Landis

[Higgins] is 34 and has a schoolboyish face, a thatch of fluffy brown hair and rectangular glasses. His wife, Nuray, a slender, dark-haired woman, was getting ready to leave for work. ‘It’s just something I sort of fell into,’ Higgins said, opening his laptop to show me videos that he had studied that morning.

Nuray is from Turkey, and after their daughter was born, in October 2011, they took a family holiday to Istanbul, so that Ela could spend some time with her grandparents. While in Turkey Higgins decided to start a blog.



i had known about the Turkey connection but the fact that the entire blog idea was born there is news to me. really sends the irony over the top, in this context

#124
[account deactivated]
#125
Post rating: +
Thing that pisses me off about BM is that he thinks he's owed something. Like Lister and Weiss are either pathological liars or shameless grifters, their status is earned through the integrity of their fundamental dishonesty. BM really thinks there's a moral dimension to what he's doing.
#126
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
the moral dimension of his wife chasing him with a rolling pin
#127
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

Petrol posted:

Ames: Here is a large amount of hard evidence that you knowingly collaborated with an ISIS supporter online because it suited your propaganda agenda. Also your old handle was genuinely misleading to a majority of regular people who didn't know you were just a pasty british goon eating deep fried mars bars at your mum's house while making your terrible posts.

Higgins: Note my reg date. Baka.


#128
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
Now who's the ironic war criminal!!
#129
Post rating: +
Lol

https://drugstoreculture.com/bellingcat-homo-digitalis/

Higgins was an obsessive player of the ‘massively multiplayer online role-playing game’ (MMORPG) World of Warcraft. It infuriated his wife and bemused his family; it made his workmates titter. But Higgins was learning that he was a natural leader and that he had a gift for strategy. Most of all, he was learning how to manage multiple people online to ensure they could complete a near never-ending array of tasks.

He thought he was whiling away the hours doing something unimportant, if enthralling. He was wrong. He didn’t know it then, but he was in fact training himself to become the foremost amateur sleuth of the digital revolution. He was to become one of the earliest examples of Homo Digitalis, and the effect he, as well as others like him, are having on the world is now indisputable.

#130
Post rating: +
digitalis is the name for the foxglove species and also the poisonous component in it that will fuck up your heart. it's so named because foxglove flowers look like little finger sleeves.

This Summer: Elliot Higgins Is: Finger Man
#131
Post rating: +

xipe posted:



lol im pretty sure i made that original picture lmao

#132
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

Petrol posted:

Ames: Here is a large amount of hard evidence that you knowingly collaborated with an ISIS supporter online because it suited your propaganda agenda. Also your old handle was genuinely misleading to a majority of regular people who didn't know you were just a pasty british goon eating deep fried mars bars at your mum's house while making your terrible posts.

Higgins: Note my reg date. Baka.



i still think about this post every time Braun Moses gets dragged. you can take the poster out of the forums,

#133
Post rating: ~
this is one of my favourite threads anywhere on the internet. i still laugh at the "how do you find out about the syrian army's guns/you use wikipedia" gif. he's such a fucking tool.
#134
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
if you ever look at anything on Wikipedia about the weapons of the Syrian army nowadays, all the sources are blogs by sub-Brown Moses types trying to get his job or go to work for him
#135
Post rating: +
A veritable ouroboros of military techo porn.
#136
Post rating: +
bm opened the floodgates for unverified undifferentiated "open-source" evidence as the basis for stories from major outlets. i haven't been keeping up with them because why the fuck would i but it wouldn't be surprising if there's a big expose on dprk prisons based on blurry photos that gets dropped if relations continue to "deteriorate" (read: get sabotaged by the us)
#137
Post rating: +
which wouldn't be a new form of slander but there would be a certain poetry to it. bad journalism based on satellite imagery inspires washed-up basement-dweller to use wikipedia as a source, founds "open-source" outlet, style gets emulated, original propagandists adapt the fun new type of faux-investigation for their credulous readers. time, flat circle, etc.
#138
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +++++
The eXile crew remains fascinating to me even though there's a lot of left-liberal Democrat politics there, because the transmutation of U.S. propaganda combined with their own compulsion to kneecap debate-club nerds has kept their relationship to most big propaganda outlets uneasy at best and openly hostile in a lot of cases.

Like: when the U.S. was trying to remake Russia as a post-USSR bandit state, the eXile team were exposing that stuff to other English-language readers in the country in an angry and honest way no one else could match; then, the United Russia government shut down their paper for rudeness, so they briefly became an after-the-fact cause célèbre for the same noodling dorks in the foreign press that had worked with Michael McFaul to get them shut down in the first place; now, the Russia-conspiracy Twitter police offer up their relatively high profiles as evidence they're secret Russian agents, when half of that exposure came from attacking Russian compradors and the other half came from condescending, unwilling exploitation of their story as propaganda against Russia. The only reason the Russia-conspiracy squad haven't heard of them is because they failed to play the role they were offered years ago.

So, beyond Taibbi's sinecure at Rolling Stone, the ex-eXile team's own work has precluded the sort of lasting reward that would have positioned them to join the current Russophobe insanity (and even Taibbi has been skeptical of it, if largely in hindsight). Besides, I get the impression that they couldn't possibly have suppressed their own personal experience long enough to do it, which is a pretty cool thing IMO. You can see that at work, too, in their recent careers, where they landed jobs at Pando Daily and immediately started blow-torching its target audience, West Coast "tech" nerds, for their fussy local campaigns against everyone who isn't white and rich. Those guys spent high school dealing with those exact types of new-money snobs, and unlike a lot of people with similar experiences, they aren't willing to knuckle under for a piece of the action.

It's especially interesting in Yasha Levine's case, as many bourgeois and petit-bourgeois ex-pats and second-generation kids of similar Russian-Jewish extraction have mercilessly exploited their own origins for decades to ride a wave of anti-Soviet, then anti-Russian, propaganda, something that Levine knows a lot better and a lot more about than I do, I'm sure. The core for a lot of that recently has been those same West Coast "tech" brats, people like Sergey Brin at Stanford-student-project-cum-State-Department-private-arm Google, so it's not surprising that Levine's recent umpteenth renaissance has come out of Surveillance Valley and his related articles where he details how the Internet was created and still exists as a Western colonialist project.

So, you end up with people who just have no reason to turn off their bullshit detectors in a lot of cases, guys who are pretty much straight-down-the-line Bernie Sanders supporters, but then Molly Crabapple and her Nazi buddies try to come after khamsek and suddenly Levine and Ames emerge from the shadows swinging chains like gang members in an '80s movie, because Crabapple is a dingus and happily promoted her Red-hunting ties to names Levine was using at the time to build his nascent story about the nexus of nerd neo-Nazis, the U.S. surveillance state and big companies in Silicon Valley.

Edited by cars ()

#139
Post rating: +

Guyovich posted:

bm opened the floodgates for unverified undifferentiated "open-source" evidence as the basis for stories from major outlets. i haven't been keeping up with them because why the fuck would i but it wouldn't be surprising if there's a big expose on dprk prisons based on blurry photos that gets dropped if relations continue to "deteriorate" (read: get sabotaged by the us)


my favourite example is the canadian law student hunting for satellite images of re-education camps in xinjiang. not only do western media outlets fawn over him, he is one of the primary sources of 'research' for an australian defence department think tank report on the issue. i'm pretty sure the military has access to better imagery and analysis than some kid on twitter but somehow the methodology is never scrutinised in subsequent handwringing media reports.

#140
Post rating: +
now whenever there is some sort of atrocity committed there always seem to be some sort of bellingcat analysis where they look at open source grainy photos and triangulate their data using a 1:1 scale recreation of the area they made in minecraft in order to answer the who/what/where/when/why (the answer to all five is putin), hell it must be a nice life
#141
Post rating: +

Petrol posted:

my favourite example is the canadian law student hunting for satellite images of re-education camps in xinjiang. not only do western media outlets fawn over him, he is one of the primary sources of 'research' for an australian defence department think tank report on the issue. i'm pretty sure the military has access to better imagery and analysis than some kid on twitter but somehow the methodology is never scrutinised in subsequent handwringing media reports.


that guy is 100 percent angling for a bellingcat job or somesuch. and as if on cue the guardian just put out a story claiming there's an epidemic of mosque destruction happening in xinjiang. total count is 15 structures destroyed. but the XUAR has 25,000 mosques, so we're talking about less than one half of one percent assuming even that's true. and of course this was a partnership between the guardian and — where else? — bellingcat.

#142
Post rating: ~
*puts on the moves in a noisy D.C. bar*

"Yeah, those Polisario Front trench lines intruding past the ceasefire line near Ras Nouadhibou? I found those. The Moroccan government is already using the data to coordinate air strikes."

...

"Boom."

*companions look on quietly while I take the last sip of IPA from my bottle, my fourth so far. Then I suddenly and violently smash the bottle into the ground*

*pretends like nothing happened*

#143
Online
Post rating: +
#144
Post rating: ~
He has taken to blaming the leaked OPCW report on a "disgruntled" former employee. How does he know? Ah, well
#145
Post rating: +
For about a minute here

#146
Post rating: +
An article about Bellingcat complaining about Facebook turning off some functions. The one here is called "graph search" where you can type in hyper-specific neutral language questions like "friends of friends of mine who listen to Beyonce." Now, that can also be automated and manipulated in various ways by custom-made tools and hacks, which makes it a huge privacy risk. What I find more interesting though is teasing out the contradiction between that and Bellingcat's own posturing as the ones who'll bring you the real truth in a "post-truth world" -- but the theory that we live in such a world rests on the thesis that people's data is harvested and manipulated precisely through these exploits that Bellingcat finds so useful.



Anyways, read the article if you want to see Bellingcat express great concern about it becoming harder for cops to spy on people.

Edited by trakfactri ()

#147
Post rating: +
if only twitter had "graph search", brown moses could have known that his pal shamiwitness was an indian yuppie unironically spreading isis propaganda rather than an actual isis guy spreading isis propaganda
#148
Post rating: ~
Was Iran Behind the Oman Tanker Attacks? A Look at the Evidence


*turns to look at the camera* BM stands for Bowel Movement
#149
Post rating: +

ghostpinballer posted:

that brown moses guy dropped his NYT article in the c-spam bit of somethingawful that is like this place (but not as good, mods!) and they laughed him off the internet. anyway yes belingcat are drawing arrows in MS paint for the new york times, what a age we live in.



finally got around to seeing this, not bad

Brown Moses posted:

Seeing you all appear to think my opinion on this incident is so important you can go read it in the New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/opinion/iran-tanker-attacks.html

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)



Who are you?

"goddammit guys, please lie less obviously. i'm not a fucking wizard"

your greatest career aspirations are as the middle management ideas guy in the marketing department of brushfire wars of opportunity, you trifling piece of shit.

You can read about my opinion in the perfectly credible New York Times.

you should be ashamed of yourself for publishing in that rag and instead you puff up your chest and waddle in here like a prize pig, expecting us to kiss your feet like the cretins in d&d. fuck off forever you sanctimonious little shit.

lol, BM is pissed that people are not super impressed with his google search high school report



etc

#150
Post rating: ~
i left a brown moses in the potty this morning
#151
Post rating: +
cspam feels like reddit, ie appalling. how do we install bhpn as mod?
#152
Post rating: ~
Stage a cspam revolution. No mods no masters!
#153
Post rating: +

kinch posted:

cspam feels like reddit, ie appalling. how do we install bhpn as mod?


I'm fine with this if bhpn leads a campaign against the "Four Olds." Old Mods, Old Avs, Old Threads, and Old Memes

#154
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
I'm not going back to the old country but I'm happy they now agree with tHE r H i z z o n E on Brown Moses and he's owned online.
#155
Online
Post rating: ~
They all see themselves as revolutionary socialists and staunch anti-capitalists in C-SPAM, and they also all support Bernie and AOC. You'll frequently see them explain the difference between Bernie and Elizabeth Warren as "Elizabeth wants to save capitalism, Bernie recognizes capitalism is the problem." They'll go off against intervention in Venezuela or Iran though, which is good and interesting. It's wild.
#156
Poronto
Post rating: +
why exactly does anyone need a less funny carbon copy of the chapo subreddit
#157
take a shit on the floor
Post rating: +
i know you paid ten dollars but you can stop looking at it now
#158
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

ilmdge posted:

They all see themselves as revolutionary socialists and staunch anti-capitalists in C-SPAM, and they also all support Bernie and AOC. You'll frequently see them explain the difference between Bernie and Elizabeth Warren as "Elizabeth wants to save capitalism, Bernie recognizes capitalism is the problem." They'll go off against intervention in Venezuela or Iran though, which is good and interesting. It's wild.



Yeah... that’s the funny part about the podcast snots scrambling to defend their United States Gentleman Senator from anti-imperialists: the Bush/Iraq legacy, even among those too young to know why, guarantees many of Sanders’s younger supporters are marginally closer to, say, tHe r H I z z o n E on those issues than they are to Sanders’s record (or the DSA platform).

Wherever else they may be reactionary, DSA kids are still knee-jerk suspicious of conveniently “pragmatist” right-wing posturing on U.S. foreign policy, and Sanders himself is scrambling right now to paper over his bloody Congressional record with a bunch of public statements against his own votes.

It’s maybe also a way to appeal to non-white, left-wing voters, intentional or no. Back around 2016 I said on here that if Sanders had come out swinging from the left on these issues, with an aggressive critique of U.S. foreign policy as racist and imperialist, he would’ve done a lot better among people in the U.S. who aren’t white yuppies, people experiencing domestic colonialism and xenophobia who can’t afford to treat foreign and domestic issues as separate... and in exchange, Sanders would have been mercilessly mocked, vilified and smeared by those in the U.S. court press who entertained his candidacy as an adorable fluke. He couldn’t win.

Who knows, maybe that trade-off is even worth it by this point for the Sanders campaign, though it doesn’t mean that Sanders would or even could bring the Washington bipartisan murder machine to heel as president.

#159
Post rating: +
#160
bb bourgeoisie
Post rating: ~

littlegreenpills posted:

why exactly does anyone need a less funny carbon copy of the chapo subreddit



Ironically, the chapo subreddit was quarantined earlier this week. What that means? I pray I never learn enough about reddit to find out.