So I am about to be banned, I wanted to create this thread in case I don't come back, and I have a couple of debate arguments I will spit out without them being completed, just after I post this. It seems to be confusing to people when I have argued that the government is not always being 100% honest with us, or if I say the media is often less than honest.
So if blindly trusting the government or the media is out of the question, how do we determine the truth. We do this by looking at what possible motives would be in painting a certain lie the way it is. This is just like mafia, where you can determine people's motives by what their actions are. I'm going to start with a non covid19 example of this process of determining truth before I get to the covid19 portion.
There is debate over whether the Branch Davidians or the government started the fire that killed dozens of women and children in cold blood. The government claims they did not start the fire. So we know based on this specific statement, if they did not start the fire, than there would be absolutely zero reason to lie about anything surrounding that event. This includes lies through omission or commission.
1. The FBI admits to hiding the fact they had pyrotechnics launched at branch davidians. https://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/09/01/fbi.waco/
Let's examine possible motives. Well the lie only works to make them look more guilty, so if they were innocent we know they would not make up this lie. However it only benefits them to engage in cover ups of things that actually happened not of things that did not happen. SO the pyrotechnics prove they started the fire. Or more correctly, it proves the only reasonable and logical motive for such a cover up.
2. The government claims it has evidence of the fire started by davidians because of tape recordings of the incident. https://www.wacotrib.com/news/branch_davidians/recordings-may-reveal-fire-s-origin-prosecutors-say-tapes-affirm/article_c8498afc-9471-57ec-b466-58a66021e985.html The problem is nobody has ever heard these recordings. They are not available to the public.
Let's think about possible motives for hiding the recordings. One possible motive is that the recordings are bullshit and don't exist or don't show what the government claims they show. I can only think of a few other motives, but those motives seem silly, illogical and just not the best motivations. SOme possible motivations like "out of respect for victims" is silly and incongruent with their actions in other scenarios where they have no problem releasing footage of victims, so some recording is harmless.
We can see the same things with covid 19 reporting. In other threads I have shown that the media has engaged in sensationalizing things. Like insinuating every hospital is like a warzone when the largest hospital in new york is practically empty. Or the media trying to make a story more engaging by pulling up some interesting stock footage instead of real footage of an event. We have evidence the media sensationalizes things in this case. Even some people who believe the virus is a very serious thing, agree with this.
Now think about why the media would sensationalize a story. There job is to report the news in a disinterested factual way, that is in depth and honestly portrays the story without editing tricks or sound bites or click bait article titles. If the media chooses a story to sensationalize what does that say about their motivations. If there motivations were to spread the truth, than you wouldn't need to sensationalize things to do that. It is only when you need to spread a lie that, that becomes necessary.
TKLDR
p1- people that have the truth on their side don't need to lie or exxagerate
p2- If you you lie or exaggerate, the truth is not on your side
p3- the media and government often lie or exxagerate
