1y ago

Your source is biased, bro

211 comments

Congrats to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia for making the cut
- That's also the list of countries that have better internet than Australia.
  
  Last I remember, the Baltic states have better internet than most of Europe and the US.
  
  There has to be more than that with better internet
- Cyprus too. The EU's farthest eastern outpost. 100km from Beirut, Lebanon.

Almost like news written in english tends to focus on english-speaking countries and their allies
- The obvious context of this meme is articles that express the "consensus opinion of the international community" on some foreign issue. Like "international community condemns antisemetic criticism of Israel." Or "international community condemns Niger coup, calls for original government to be reinstated so France can keep buying cheap Uranium from the second poorest country on the planet."
- Was about to say. Oh my God the interconnected western world cares about the western world!
  More news at 11.
- Yeah fuck my local news station for covering local news. It should only be coverage about places that I will never go to, issues I have no control over, and be an exercise in guilt and self-righteous masturbation for the people running it.
- oh yeah that must be it.

let's tune into Radio Saudi Arabia and find the real thuth! /s
- why should I pretend like I give a shit about the third world when American media tells me everything I want to hear /s
  
  Hasn't the Israel-Palestine thing dominated American media recently?
- Only Ham operators know the truth.
  
  Personally I find bacon operators more credible.

South Korea is pretty good about pumping out culturally relevant stuff too. Honestly I'd say they do it better than Japan these days (not that I'm personally interested in stuff like k-pop, but it's clearly huge)
- Korea is certainly ascendant but I doubt they've passed Japan in cultural exports. At least in the US, there is anime and Sushi in basically every population center these days, whereas Korean BBQ and chicken are still mostly popular in large urban areas (where sushi is still way more popular).
- Genuine question: How exactly are they more culturally relevant than Japan besides K-pop and maybe Korean novels? When it comes to matters besides entertainment, I guess I'm a little clueless.
  
  Their movie industry seems to be on the rise, too. Not sure I'd say they're outpacing Japan though
  
  Not the OP, but I think that's exactly what they're talking about, entertainment. I don't know if Korea has overtaken Japan in that sphere, but it's certainly significant. I'd also point out that Korea's COVID response was so organized that there was a period of time that it was being looked to and mentioned in the media which is culturally relevant (kinda like pointing out the Finnish education system or the German reputation for engineering).

Basically democracies. It is kind of difficult to consider non-democratic dictators like Putin or Kim Jong-un as representatives of some kind of “community”.
- You know the vast majority of south and central americas are democracies too, right?
  
  Also a not-insignificant amount of Asia, Africa, and Pacific islands.
  
  South America just isn’t really too involved in international politics in general, the whole region is neutral in almost all conflicts since very few directly affect them
  
  I said this about Assad as well, but when someone is a forever ruler, it may not be as democratic as the name implies
  
  Of course. I am not going to defend the particular choice of countries in that picture. Where is South Korea, for example? However. Democracy is greater than just democratic election. Fascists in Germany also come to power in a free democratic election, does not make Nazi Germany a democratic country.
- Never realized South Korea, Taiwan, or other SEA countries are not democracies but dictatorships.
  
  South Korea at least should probably be included in this map. It generally does include capitalist democracies, but it's not sufficient and probably not necessary for the general criteria.
  
  Never heard that they don't generally stand alongside the rest of democracies if you hear 'international community'. All of them condemning Russias attack on Ukraine, China taking parts of the Philippines and the terrorist attack on Israel from the Hamas.
  
  to be fair, South Korea is a company country, fucking Samsung is more influential than the government is many places
- Latin America and India doesn't count because they are full of brown people, right?
  
  And of course Africa does not even exist
- Just so we're clear, you can think of two missing countries?
- What an odd coincidence that primarily white, English-speaking countries have democracy.
  
  Nothing odd about it. There are historical reasons for that. But English speaking? You do know that there are many countries in EU?
- yeah,
  these are the democracies that invaded Iraq/Libya to install a democracy.
  I keep having to remind myself how much good it did to the people of Iraq/Libya.
- Imma be real with you chief none of these are democracy
  
  Just to be clear, you don't understand what that means
- They're only dictators in our minds, because the West has told us they are for years. I've always wondered what's really behind their strategy, but we can't get unbiased news about their countries and the people living there anymore.
  It's really interesting to me because they are dictators, they're also the only countries that managed to give the big finger to the US' meddling and disrupting regional politics. Did they become dictators to stop that or is it a chicken and the egg situation? Need more info.
  
  Are they only dictators in our minds or are they dictators? You don't seem to be sure.
  
  🙄 we get it, everything is the US governments fault.
  
  Not everything relates to the US
  
  No, they are actual dictators IRL too.

Idk, I feel like Al Jazeera gets quite a bit of visibility and has a good amount of credibility, but Qatar isn't on this map.
- Credibility? It's Qatari state media
  
  It is, so you definitely want to keep that in mind when consuming their content. On the flipside, they have access to sources in the Middle East that your big mainstream western media organizations can only dream about, so you don't want to ignore them entirely either. There are ways to be smart about it.

South Korea tends to make the cut also
- The person who made this super accurate informative map must hate kimichi
- Damn those Samsungs man, I need to get me some of those along with those cars...

I like to call this "The Commonwealth and Friends"

!mapsWithNZ
- All Kiwis celebrating rn!

- I still don’t know where they got cigarettes in that movie.
  
  edit: forum link
  Great question!
  Random video and forum with question:
  https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/38872/how-did-the-smokers-have-all-of-those-cigarettes-in-waterworld#38884
  WaterWorld, How many Cigarettes did the Smokers have? [6:06 | historicalnerd] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pDZK9JGJEeE
  
  I feel the same about the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Was there a cigarette ship in the fleet or something?

no dictators, no worries.
- "no dictators"
- America is a dictatorship of money disguised as a democracy, and the others are vassal states in lockstep with American foreign policy. Most of them have colonized and exploited the rest of the world for centuries and they're still doing it now, to the tune of over $10 trillion a year in net extraction from the global south.
  https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
  Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X
  Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.
- yeah,
  these are the democracies that invaded Iraq/Libya to install a democracy.
  I keep having to remind myself how much good it did to the people of Iraq/Libya.
  
  and we all remember what a paradise those countries were. man, that time gadaffis son killed a waiter because he spilled soup. you miss him?
  
  Iraq is absolutely a functioning democracy and not a dictatorship right now.
  Libya would be if it actually got invaded, which 100% should have happened. UN forces not taking control of the situation is a huge stain on the UN.
  
  Yeah, Iraqis miss saddam so much don’t they? Especially the Kurds.
  
  Japan invaded Iraq and Libya?

New Zealand is happy to be included

Is this post done in relation to some news story that just occurred?
Or is this just a generic First World versus Third World post?
It's the ladder, then they missed a few First World countries on that map.
- I think its pretty close to a map of countries that don't recognise Palestine, or who continue to benefit from colonialism or globalisation.
  
  I think its pretty close to a map of countries that don’t recognise Palestine, or who continue to benefit from colonialism or globalisation.
  Ah, okay.
  For what it's worth, as someone who lives in the US, don't just believe what you're hearing on CNN (etc.), that is very one-sided Pro-Israeli.
  There are plenty of people who want to see Hamas destroyed, but not the Palestinians. They want the Palestinians to live free like any other Nation on this Earth, and in happiness, and absolutely hate seeing what's happening to them right now.

I guess I should be less surprised how this meme is sailing over people's heads in here
- I’ve had to stop myself from replying “woosh” to a lot of comments.
  
  If a comedian gets up and no one laughs it isnt the audience's fault.
  
  Me reading this comment a second after replying "whoosh" to a comment: face -> palm.

"US liberals would be far right anywhere else in the world!"
The world:
- They absolutely would not be far right in Japan and a few more on this map, but they would be right to far right in a lot of countries not on the map too.
  
  I'm mostly poking fun. Some people will say rest of the world and really just mean Western Europe. You're mostly right though. I think economically, yes, definitely right or at least right of center. Socially though, very left. LGBT rights and civil equality and refugee acceptance are sadly not the norm. We've still got serious conservative parties pushing against them.
  It's honestly a hard thing to distill down to one metric. And if you want to consider the cultural context too, it gets even more difficult. People like using the whole world in comparisons, but it's rather complex to accurately do that here.

You never hear about China or Russia?

Unless you're talking about the UN, of course, in which case the map in the picture us essentially inverted.

What do you think "international" means?
- whoosh...

I don't know about US but EU has a bunch of news agencies that are fairly credible. Some local smaller ones don't have a reason not to be.
The international community in the picture is all that matters. Change the size of the countries in the map by the size of their economies and that's all that matters. Change it by the factor of their diplomatic influence and the change would be even greater.
- What a tone deaf world view.
  
  Also the realistic world view.
  
  If you ever talk about an international community, these are the only countries that actually COMMUNE. Almost all the rest are too involved with themselves to have a diplomatic strategy beyond their narrow short-term self interest. That's also why that's the only international community that matters. That's not a tone deaf world view, that's the reality.
- The majority of the world doesn't matter bc no money :(
- The picture is showing most of the Global North (no Russia and China), which is The West. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South
  The international community in the picture is all that matters.
  And is that a problem? I'm asking you a moral question.
  
  Of course it is. I dont think that's a moral question, it's a problem on almost every level of international relations.
- The EU news is real bare bones, that's why you get the feeling they're credible. They only parrot what someone else wrote already. Please put your Google Translate on and look at news sites from countries outside your country or region. And then make up your own mind. It's the only way to evolve yourself.
  
  You are very wrong. Each country in EU has its own news agencies and many of them have reporters all over the world, even in conflict zones. It is simply not possible to push narratives through such an amount of channels, like they do in the US. Of course some news gets parotted, that's how news works, but a Slovenian reporter, reporting from Ukraine doesn't care what NYT said about anything.
  
  You don't know WTF you're talking about and it shows. You obviously have no formal training in journalism or mass communications, but here you are spouting off like the self-appointed armchair "expert" you are. Just consuming news doesn't make you an expert; it makes you a consumer with a poorly-informed opinion. Again, you obviously have no idea how any of this works.

'Western' media is known in the outside world to report the horrific truth AFTER a war has ended. Or they just wait until enough people make a stink about it, look at Ukraine in their second war.
Just look at what happened in the Bosnian war, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Qatar, Africa, Asia... And the atrocities committed there were systematically underreported. Sure, they'll write a few uninspired paragraphs about it and move on.
I'm not saying Eastern media isn't biased, they report more emotional so you have to filter that out. And it's an active war, so they might get some misinformation. But over the years they proved to be more often than not right after everything's done. (Looking at you Srebrenica and all the US wars).
Then the Western media swoops in and makes some documentaries about facts most people with a satellite dish or a second language already knew. Thoughts and Prayers.
After the Ukrainian war started this changed. It's the first time everybody and their mother can follow the war while it's happening.
Now it's happening again in Gaza, but journalists are getting killed en masse because the other side knows about it.
I really recommend everyone to read and watch different sources from different countries/languages and make up their own mind. There's Google translate if you can't speak several languages.
- I don't know what news you read but what you're saying is wrong - there definitely has been extensive news coverage on all the wars and conflicts you mentioned, it's just a matter of reading them.
  For christ sake Bosnian war was ended by the west when the public pressure to stop a literal genocide grew too large, the massacre of Srebrenica being a massive catalyst to it. How "eastern media" was suddenly more right about it than western sources who actually were there is a point I either misunderstand or, more likely, you don't know what you're talking about.
  Also calling eastern media "more emotional" has that little subtle bit of racism, really putting the irony as the icing on this horrible comment.
  There are many reasons to read all media with the assumption that it is biased but this isn't it.
  
  Also calling eastern media "more emotional" has that little subtle bit of racism, really putting the irony as the icing on this horrible comment.
  Yup. Calling Eastern media emotional when Western media is just as bad with sensationalism, especially American news.
- the first time everybody and their mother can follow the war while it’s happening
  You're thinking of the Gulf War. The invasion of Iraq was literally televised (almost) live everywhere on the world. Vietnam also had an extremely high reporting rate which contributed to the anti-war protests and movement in the US and the eventual withdrawal.
  Also, targeting journalist to kill them is an old-time tradition amongst war criminals ever since the journalist profession was defined in the like XVII century.

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