article is about how it wasn't actually spying

Constantly refers to it as Chinese spy balloon

Fucking liars are STILL saying it was a spy balloon when the military is like no, actually, it wasn't.

Reminder that the missile they used to shoot this balloon down cost $400k

literal weather balloon and the sensors weren't even on lmao

"freight truck of spy equipment"

Here we go. This is the "retraction" they do 6 months after flooding the headlines with bullshit, this way they can say that they "correct themselves" and are therefore unbiased.

Of course, even this headline is still implying it is a "spy balloon" so they can technically correct wrong information they put out while also knowing that 90% of their audience will never read it, but will believe them when they say they are "unbiased" for correcting themselves.

I can't imagine how anyone with a soul and brain could be a western journalist at this point, you must be lacking one of those two things. They're shadier and more dishonest than lawyers.

For me, the greater takeaway was that none of our political leadership had the maturity or courage to say "we've been operating with some bullshit narratives, some of that is our fault, I know the news loves to stir up a good frenzy but this is just a weather balloon."

Instead, rather than challenge people to stop and think, they spent a week launching missiles at weather balloons. Truly jaw dropping (I'm desensitized to all of the violence they normally do). I'm a communist, so by definition I'm not one of the adults in the room, but at least I'm adult enough to tell the truth when I fuck up at work and just fix it.

I know no less than 30 people I could send this article to, and yet know I would get one of two responses:

1. It actually was a spy balloon and all the media is pretending it wasn't so that the US can hide that they've gained valuable knowledge

Or

2. Okay maybe this one wasn't, but what if it was a spooky Chinese spy balloon?

He tipped off the Billings Gazette, which got its own picture, and he told anybody who asked they could use his free of charge. "I didn't want to make anything off [my picture]," Doak said. "I thought it was a national security issue, and all of America needed to know about it."

Imagine being such a bootlicker that you deny yourself getting that bag for basically no good reason. Plenty of news sites would have been happy to pay for it and all of America would still know about it.

But by then, the damage to U.S.-China relations had been done. On May 21, President Biden remarked, "This silly balloon that was carrying two freight cars' worth of spying equipment was flying over the United States, and it got shot down, and everything changed in terms of talking to one another."

So the article still blames China for damaging relations with the US, not the other way around.

"I would say it was a spy balloon that we know with high degree of certainty got no intelligence, and didn't transmit any intelligence back to China."

I'm gonna be honest, that sounds like it's missing two of the three defining features required to term something a spy balloon.

All of this geopolitical escalation to make sure ~~Tyre Nichols killers avoided national scrutiny~~Biden didn't have a race riot during his term. Can't wait to throw this in libs faces in a year.

Death to America

The hysteria had its intended effect of heightening tensions and further implanting in people's minds the idea that the SEE SEE PEE is an existential threat to our (decaying, miserable, alienating) way of life. All of these little incidents and micro-hysterias are serving their purpose. Consent is being manufactured. It doesn't matter if it's a weather balloon or if it didn't gather intel or whatever. America, like the devil it is, would reign in hell rather than serve in heaven (or at least purgatory).

A spy device they couldn't steer and wasn't spying. How devious.

It doesn't matter, because the damage has already been done. They knew this from the start, but it was useful propaganda for the anti-China narrative, so they let it fester while sinophobic sentiment rose steadily and caused more anti-Asian crimes. Even now, while reading some of the comments to this article on and YouTube, I saw people either changing the narrative into "so the Chinese are incompetent!" or "the government is clearly lying to us! the balloon flew over military installations and you're telling me they didn't record anything??? suuuuure". Really the most propagandized dumbfucks on this planet.

Just do a search for "China balloon [nytimes, washington post, wsj, etc]" and go look at the feverishly stupid coverage from just February of this year. And aside from just the regular shitty media, think back to how furious the reactionaries were whipped into becoming by blaming Biden for just not shooting it down instantly over some country bumpkin's head, but instead allowing it to float off over the Atlantic before shooting it.

Shout out to a fellow worker scamming the system. The balloon is the first air to air kill anyone has gotten in decades so someone is getting a medal for it and it is going in a history book.

Ya don't say

reposting based takes