With all due respect, I strongly disagree with Wikipedia's assessment of Trump's intentions, taken from ABC and WSJ, two sources that are frankly atrocious. I wrote a long reply to that, but there's also a much shorter response:
The Saudi government invariably gave this money as a bribe and Trump accepted this money, presumably aware he was being bribed. He then proceeded to do things the Saudi government liked. That is, if nothing else, an objective conflict of interest, plain and simple. I cannot definitively prove that Trump accepted this money with ulterior motives, because I am not inside of Trump's head. However, I doubt ABC and WSJ would hesitate to make the very natural assumption that some other world leader had ulterior motives, were they in the same situation. I would also hope it'd at least be clear to you that Hillary Clinton would absolutely be taking that money with ulterior motives, were she in that position LMAO.
Iran and Saudi Arabia have been locked in a power struggle for decades. Iran's foreign objective is to expel Western forces from the Middle East, annihilate the state of Israel and support the rise of fellow authoritarian theocracies that will resist foreign interference. The Saudi objective is to support the rise of Salafism and reign as the undisputed power of the Islamic world, by any means necessary.
Saudi Arabia and Israel have a mutual hatred of Iran, and their goals are also not incompatible. They are also strong mutual allies of the US. Hence they have a very close relationship.
Spoiler : longer reply to WSJ's assessment :
Current politics is the only field I think Wikipedia is absolutely crappy for, sources or not. You just cannot take it as much more unbiased than the people on this forum lol. This also applies to news, but to a lesser extent: they at least have to be neutral in some way or even FAKE being neutral, which is already a good start. Wikipedia doesn't.
Is it all that strange? I'm just saying to be aware that Google will show you different results based on your search patterns.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with machine learning, but Google uses it to determine what to show you. It takes a test set (your search history) and creates a heuristic (a guess) into actual associations of what you would click on. Depending on where you click after it has made its guess, the algorithm revises its next heuristic to better match what it thinks you want.
So yes, Google search results are biased based on your search history.
Let's take my search result for example.
Some of my relevant recent searches are:
opb, intimate partner violence statistics, Uyghur, inflation, oil futures, Kyoto animation fires
I also regularly search for statistics and occasionally read the abstracts of academic papers (I know, boring).
So I don't think it was surprising that Google showed my original sources.
From oops' search results, we can probably guess he reads a lot of news. While you might not have directly searched Corno is bad/hoax, everyone -including your- search results are biased based on what their search history is.
This plays into a growing problem with social media in particular, we often put ourselves into these "info-bubbles" where we isolate ourselves from information that we dislike, and based on these algorithms (in Facebook in particular) you're shown content you're more likely to "like" and less likely to dislike. People tend to "like" content they agree with, thus Facebook shows you almost exclusively information that you agree with. This creates a sort of positive feedback loop, to the point where some people's perception of reality completely disagrees with another person's.
EDIT:
I should also talk about how this plays into the human psyche, humans are tribalistic by nature, we tend to group up with people that we share traits with, whether that be race, gender, political alignment, or interest. Machine algorithms are more than likely exploiting this aspect of the human psyche.
I really don't think your post deserves that spoiler around that juicy, juicy information. The US conflict in the middle east is very complex and that information helps enlighten us about it. I do have two problems with your opinions in the spoiler though..
The US government has been backing Saudi Arabia for quite a long time. Obama and Bush's administrations also sent them weapons and money while not building hotels or whatnot there. While I believe your statement to be true, I don't think this point deserves the same amount of attention as for the other reasons the US backs Saudi Arabia. More prominent reasons are the economic and political ties to that government."It is, in my view, far more plausible Trump is simply swayed by the millions in funds he's personally received from Saudi Arabia"
First, I find that evaluation of their "destructiveness" to be unfair. Considering all of Saudi Arabia and Iran's proxies, I would say that it's about equal. Iran's government also seems more ambitious in its goals and had they more resources, I believe they would create greater humanitarian crimes."The Iranian regime, though terrible in their own right, comes nowhere close to causing the level of devastation in the Middle East that the Saudis do. It should also be noted giving the Saudis weapons to fight catastrophic wars with Iranian proxies has done nothing to actually deter Iran's influence in the Middle East."
Second, supplying Saudi Arabia with weapons does deter Iran's influence. It's true, Iran has nonetheless greatly expanded its field of power, but I think it would have been much bigger had Saudi Arabia had less support from the US government.
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Good post yzb.
Intellectual growth comes from discussions, not arguments. If you are unwilling to change your position and hear the other persons side you are closed minded and wasting your time.
If you can not clearly explain what the other sides reasoning is you can not disagree with their position because you do not understand it.