2y ago

US says Chinese spy balloon downed in February did not collect information. Yet, Biden was referring to it as a spy balloon just this month.

www.theguardian.com

US says Chinese spy balloon downed in February did not collect information

2y ago

US says Chinese spy balloon downed in February did not collect information. Yet, Biden was referring to it as a spy balloon just this month. 🤡

www.theguardian.com /world/2023/jun/29/chinese-spy-balloon-shot-information-biden

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2y ago

US says Chinese spy balloon downed in February did not collect information

www.theguardian.com /world/2023/jun/29/chinese-spy-balloon-shot-information-biden

98 comments

Can we have a policy here of not rewriting/making up titles? I'm not interested on personal takes before reaching the comments section.
- The titles in the articles are themselves editorialized and sometimes even misrepresent the content. I think the post title should reflect what was interesting about the article. You are of course free to make your own community with whatever rules you like.
  
  The titles in the articles are themselves editorialized and sometimes even misrepresent the content.
  How is that a defense for letting anyone rewrite titles? Silly idea, if the source is that bad, how about just not using it?
- i kinda agree with /u/u_tamtam, it's standard practice to not change titles when posting articles to link aggregators, so most users (reasonably so) operate off of the assumption that the titles aren't altered
  this gets esp confusing, when ppl change the headlines only slightly
  
  The only way people would get confused is if they didn't bother actually looking at the article, at which point I don't think they can meaningful contribute to any discussion of the article.
I'm not understanding the contradiction here. They're saying it was a spy balloon for spying but that it failed at its task. Not sure how true that is, no way for me to tell but there's no inherent paradox here.
- US already admitted earlier that this is in fact a weather balloon, and this is further proof that it was not any sort of a spy balloon. The whole drama was completely made up, and the highest US authorities continue to spread lies months after.
  
  Umm, source on an official US statement calling it a weather balloon and denying it was a spy balloon? China's alleged failure to collect data due to mitigations and countermeasures doesn't mean it's a weather balloon.
  You have no facts to backup "US spreading lies". No evidence whatsoever. You have the US' story, China's story, and millions of photos of a absurdly large apparatus floating across the US that looks nothing like a weather balloon.
  
  That part of the story seems yet to be cited. Going by the article accompanying the post title, there's no such admission. Manufacturing international incidents for political reasons is not a new thing and not new to the US either , but purely on grounds of reading comprehension alone there's no contradiction here and no admission of anything either, as a matter of fact the claim the US is making is supposed to bolster their position by claiming the balloon was unable to spy on them despite best efforts. The veracity of the claim is another matter.
- What I understand from the context is that it was a spying device but they jammed the hell out of it while flying over the US then took it down.
  
  That's my point. The original poster is trying to draw a line between statements that the balloon was a spying device and later statements that it did not collect intelligence while it transited over US territory as evidence that it wasn't a spying device and that the former of those statements is therefore inherently a lie. My take, without assessing the truthfulness of the claims, is that the linked articles do not support such a conclusion. One can claim the device was for spying and that it also didn't collect intelligence without contradiction because the claim is that it failed to collect intelligence, not that it did not intend to do so in the first place.
And The Guardian referred to it as a spy balloon right in this very article.
Incidentally, the Pentagon said it did not collect information over the US. Perhaps it was intended to collect information elsewhere.
- Or the most logical explanation that it's a weather balloon that blew off course and that US regime has been cynically lying about.
  
  There have been multiple incidents of Chinese balloons that "flew off course" and ended up over sovereign airspace.
  If China doesn't want its balloons destroyed, it will have to do a better job controlling its "research instruments".
Can’t say I believe that one bit. With how small transmitters can be these days, why wouldn’t it have one? Sounds to me like damage control. Not a whole lot of details in the article anyway.
- Jesus Christ you people are just lusting for war.
  
  I don’t want a war with China, that would be awful. I’m just trying to be realistic about it. Seems silly to go through the trouble to make a surveillance craft like that and it not even have the capability to beam back any data.

98 comments