▲ | mjburgess 9 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Neither you or I, and esp. not the media, have any access to facts on the ground. All photographs or videos you have seen have been placed there for you to see them. All we can work backwards from are the most reliable facts we have before the war, about capabilities on the ground. We know the rough size of the iranian missile programme, of the country, economic, various military assets and similar. We can work backwards from this to ask, "what would we be able to see had Israel achieved its claim re iran" -- and we're talking extraordinary levels of destruction in iran, across the country, and so on. We don't have any evidence of operations of that scale even taking place, let alone having been successful. It is most likely, at the moment, that at least some alleged air force victories by israel are actual missiles they've issued from neighbouring states on the land. However, either way, all of this is speculation. What can be stated with near certainty is that any picture presented in the media is an extremely careful creation of the propaganda arms of our states, and not a credible military briefing. Our only access to reliable inferences is purely rational and hypothetical: what are X's aims, what are their claims, what are they claimed strategies, what are their capabilities and so on.. and then what would we see *if*... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
▲ | potholereseller 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> All photographs or videos you have seen have been placed there for you to see them. For those reading the above, wondering about this phenomenon, read Baudrilliard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Even if you don't agree with Baudrilliard's overall thesis, the facts he brings up are still cogent (e.g. a photo from the Exon Valdez spill was used instead of an actual photo of the Iraqi military's destruction of Kuwaiti oil fields). The media has been a critical aspect of war since at least the Falklands War. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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▲ | pliny 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
>All photographs or videos you have seen have been placed there for you to see them The source of most of the videos from both sides is random social media users. Even the videos and info from the IDF I would regard as credible, since they released similar videos and info from the Lebanon operation last year that was consistently corroborated by evidence from social media (there was no internet blackout in Lebanon so every IDF strike on an urban area had multiple videos from different perspectives). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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▲ | whynotminot 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I’m sorry in all this noise I’m failing to get to your point. Are you claiming that Iran is shooting down F-35s? Because that would be a pretty important piece of information that a lot of countries who have staked their Air Forces on the F-35 would like to know. It would also be a hard piece of information (damn near impossible) to keep under wraps, given the stakes, and the number of interested parties. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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