It's not stupid. All governments and militaries use propaganda. You'd be a fool to believe anything they say, no matter which country it is. The absolute truth of what happened is unreachable to us, we can only try to piece together a coherent version of the events after the fact. Government narratives are notoriously unreliable sources to base such an understanding upon.
Propaganda doesn't mean its necessarily a lie or misleading. Its just government marketing. It can be truthful or deceitful.
Back to the core issue of accidental shootdowns. I think its important to note that while these tragedies have continued to happen after the US incident in the 80's, none of them involved the US military since. That does lead credibility to their claim it was a UI and procedural problem that was fixed. Both Iran and Russia have shot down civilian air liners in the 21st century. In Russia's case it was 2014 in Ukraine and was judged a war crime by the courts. The man responsible, Igor Girkin, is wanted and likely will never leave Russia for fear of arrest. In Iran's case they accidentally shot down their own airliner in their own air space a few years back. I don't know what became of that.
> Propaganda doesn't mean its necessarily a lie or misleading.
> Its just government marketing.
All marketing is inherently a lie or misleading due to inescapable conflicts of interest. They have every reason in the world to want you to believe certain stuff. Therefore you should be skeptical and disbelieve them by default.
> That does lead credibility to their claim it was a UI and procedural problem that was fixed.
I don't doubt it was. The author of the mastodon posts this thread is about made very convincing arguments as far as I'm concerned.
>All marketing is inherently a lie or misleading due to inescapable conflicts of interest. They have every reason in the world to want you to believe certain stuff. Therefore you should be skeptical and disbelieve them by default.
What? No it isn't. The easiest marketing is when you don't have to because the good act stands on its own. Marketing is often a lie but it doesn't have to be.
>I don't doubt it was. The author of the mastodon posts this thread is about made very convincing arguments as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah I was familiar with the incident before this post and it seems pretty open and shut to me. These things have happened a few times in the past but this is as far as I know the only case of a US air defense system accidentally shooting down a civilian aircraft. It was taken serious at the time and hasn't happened since. What I find more troublesome is that the details of the investigation and the actions taken were made public yet other nations didn't take similar steps so similar mistakes have been made by other parties since. Notably, Iran themselves.
