MITIGATION AS HARM

Folks just love flipping everything on its head, applying absurdist euphemisms or simply arguing that what we can all see happening is somehow the reverse. My favourite local examples have been "harm reduction" and "safe supply" which have only ever correlated with far more harm and even whole new dimensions of it. On the international front we've seen the most aggressive form of this phenomenon come out of the war in Gaza.

In the continued insanity surrounding Israel's conflict with Hamas (and thereby Iran and her friends), just this week all our major news outlets, from The New York Times to the BBC and many more, have been found, just one more time, fabricating stories about what's happening. This time press crews in the Strip sought to bring back stories and images of famine and starvation but, unable to find any, offered, as they have a dozen times to this point, photos of children and adults with bodies wracked by cancer, cerebral palsy, other devastating congenital health issues and then publishing those photos on their front pages for the world, misrepresenting their bodily devastation as the acute, primary consequence of an Israeli-induced famine. And when these errors, or acts of mass fraud (what I see as active participation in a war, and in this case in defense of a glad population of legitimate genocidaires), are exposed we never actually see anything like a correction, never mind an apology. They don’t remove their nonsense altogether (just as any respectable academic journal or television broadcaster would) or even just publish their pseudo-corrections on their front pages or otherwise pin them to their social media where they might actually be seen; instead, they quietly offer false amendments, things such as “We have since learned new information…” (pretending that all the details were not known or discoverable previously) or “We’ve updated our story to add context…” (despite choosing to publish initially without that context) and all of those revisions lacking a real accounting of what they were up to, what they've learned, or providing any real context but only furthering their flagrant propaganda (truly a broad spectrum campaign of mis/dis/malinformation on behalf of the folks we all watched delightedly and totally indiscriminately slit people’s throats for the crime of, for example, being a Tanzanian or Nepalese agriculture student working as an intern on a farm in Israel...)

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