Why I Don’t Trust the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind, #2,386,562

N.B,–not providing links. If you can’t manage to get to the Drudge Report on your own then there’s no hope for you. 🙂

Drudge headliner:

Expand the graphic (just CLICK on it) to also view the link text in the upper left hand corner that reads, “SOLDIERS STRIP, STOMP WOMEN…”

Now, Matt Drudge is pretty much THE editor for internet news conglomeration and generally shows the most balanced, eclectic offering from all points of view. As such, he’s several orders of magnitude more “fair and balanced” than FoxABCNBCCBSMSNCCNN, etc. But I still think he misses the boat on this one.

First, look carefully at the picture, or better yet, this larger version (again, CLICK to expand):

Now, I’m not disagreeing with the characterization offered by the widely-proffered terms, “brutal” and even perhaps “vicious” but the “reports” offer mostly editorializing and downplay the context to the point that no one reading the linked articles can have any way of telling what the women featured in the photos were really doing prior to the sob sister photos. One report has women “beaten” with “poles” when all I could see were standard (for many police and security forces in that part of the world) batons. And the primary Drudge link to the story “Brave women of the Middle east… ” etc., has its lede culminate with, “a man kicks her with full force in her exposed chest.”

I look at that picture and don’t see a man kicking the woman “with full force in her exposed chest.” Indeed, the person preparing the kick/stomp in that photo appears could actually be a woman wearing non-standard garb that shares only the headgear with the men in uniform dragging the woman (from where, why?–we don’t know because the story doesn’t provide that context). Since every other person in every photo I’ve seen of the events (this and other) who is supposedly a member of the military is obviously a man and in uniform, I honestly do not know what to make of what appears to be a woman out of uniform (but in an odd combination of lilac tennies, non-standard cammo and some sort of vest that doesn’t match the other uniformed persons standing around), wearing only one piece of gear that looks similar to the soldiers’ gear… being labeled as one of the soldiers and as a man.

There were other photos that were less ambiguous (though still presented out of context with inflammatory language captions), which is one reason the anomalies are so glaring in this one.

Why use this photo and caption and comment on it with such inflammatory language, while completely ignoring the anomalies and glossing over or completely eliminating the context? Because it fits the narrative the Hivemind wants to present.

Was army response brutal? Well, duh. Armies are for breaking things and killing people. Was it inappropriate? From the information provided (and yes, I watched the video at the end of the main link from Drudge), there’s no way for any honest, thinking person to be able to tell. At least the “horrors” *cough* shown in the photos and video were extremely mild for an Islamic culture.

Skepticism whenever exposed to the Hivemind is not just healthy, it’s become an essential survival response, IMO.