Ignorance Is Neither Strength Nor Morality
Informed Opinion is All That Matters
Twitter has locked an account called De-Sanitized News for showing photos of dead children.
The account showed the same handful of photos over and over, which is why Twitter locked it for violating the rule against showing gratuitous gore.
I looked at the photos. In all cases except for one, there was no way to tell how the children had died. Only one image showed clearly how the child had died: He’d been shot in the head with a high-powered rifle.
The reason the world isn’t concentrating on Yemen is that the stories are bogus. Going by photos, more than 90 percent of hospital patients are military aged males who are never injured the way we're told they were. The following photo is said to show civilians wounded by stepping on unexploded bomblets from cluster munitions.
How do you step on cluster munitions using your arms? Is he a circus performer who had the bad luck to practice handstands in a field full of unexploded bomblets?
Those are Houthi fighters. There’s no doubt.
If Yemen is nothing but a slaughterhouse, why does De-Sanitized News have to use the same images over and over? Why does Human Rights Watch show us photos of men with injured arms and knees and tell us that these men stepped on unexploded bomblets from cluster munitions?
One of the reasons I stepped away from social media is that too many of the users are irrational. The claim is that the Saudis are using precision-guided munitions (PGMs) to terror-bomb civilians.
Why would they do that? A PGM costs a minimum of six times as much as the “dumb” version of the same bomb. The casualties from these alleged terror-bombings are minimal compared to the unit cost of the munition. If you’re going to terror-bomb civilians, why do you use expensive PGMs that kill only a handful of people at a time?
But nobody asks this question. Instead, people strip the war of its context and baa nothing but slogans. “Four legs good, two legs bad!”
They know nothing about weapons, and they AREN’T INTERESTED IN LEARNING. Their position is that we must stop war. The end. It’s the worldview of a nine-year-old.
The header used by De-Sanitized News is funny.
Through battle-damage assessment (BDA), we can see that a precision-guided munition was used. The buildings surrounding the target are completely unscathed. Note that the destruction EVEN TURNED A CORNER on the left to avoid a structure there.
These are the kinds of munitions that the Saudis are using.
A standard general-purpose free-falling bomb will create blast effect and fragmentation. The steel fragments are incredibly lethal. They’re razor sharp, and they travel great distances—much further than the blast effect. In that video, Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service deputy commander Lieutenant General Abdul Wahab al-Saadi was standing so close to the impact that his hair was ruffled, but no fragments hit him.
The new munitions use fuel-air explosives (FAE) rather than high explosive. Some FAE are more than ten times more powerful than TNT, and the blast effect can be directed. Also, the casings are made of material that doesn’t create deadly fragments. These are weapons for urban combat.
Why hasn’t the death toll in Yemen changed in three years? It would be advantageous for the Houthis to claim that 10,000 people are dying every month. The reason they can’t make that claim is that the Saudi-led coalition is being too careful.
I bowed out of social media for the same reason that I gave up watching present-day movies: I’m not the target audience.
This reviewer feels about the latest Predator movie the way I feel about the non-Trump world at large.
LANGUAGE WARNING. In a British regional accent. Use the CC button if you can’t understand.
I can’t bear engaging people who switched off their brains. So I stopped.
Currently I’m scanning my entire postcard collection. I listen to movie reviews on YouTube as I scan. Doing so allowed me to see something that I didn’t know was happening.
“Citizen reviewers” are FAR BETTER than the professionals. These amateurs know exactly what they’re talking about, and that proves that the current cultural calamities are simply a phase. I need to credit Sam Vaknin for the idea that the best way to view all of this is in epidemiological terms. All epidemics burn out, and the people left alive are permanently changed, for better or worse.
I’m seeing that there’s a huge RATIONAL chunk of society out there, hungering for improvements in everything. That’s why I’ve TEMPORARILY bowed out of commenting. When the time is right, I’ll be talking a lot more. But for now, I’m happy to scan photos and work on another project that was years in the making.
Saul Montes-Bradley tells me that we are at the forefront of a movement.
I can happily be the tip of the spear. I mean, why the hell not, right?
All good things to those who wait.
UPDATE (December 12th, 2018):
Right on cue, the New York Times publishes a totally dishonest piece that makes the claim that the Saudis are carpet-bombing Yemen with precision-guided munitions.
Madness.