Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "Experts Can't Prove Nerve Agent Came From Russia Or Is Novichok" video.
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I don't see how any of those reasons are plausible motives that relate in a logical way to the crime. "To cause distraction" is so vague it's meaningless—literally every scandal or disaster could be blamed on the government wanting to cause a distraction; and you toss it off so casually without providing any shred of evidence: just speculation and assertion.
Note that there is also a huge difference between taking advantage of a distraction, which world leaders are wont to do, and actively causing one. I'm sure May could love to get some of that Brexit heat off her; doesn't mean her government ordered the assassination of a—to them—random person, their ally, no less.
That Russia wants to punish defectors not only makes for a more logical motive; it fits with a decades-long history of covert assassination, Litvinenko, Nemtsov, Yeshenkov, and many others, political rivals, journalists, spies, lawyers—anyone who didn't fall in line.
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I'm neither a tory nor a republican. I guess you'd call me a left libertarian or anarchist. Whatever I am, I hardly need a sermon on the evils of the capitalist state.
I do, however, believe in having something even approaching evidence for claims. You not only don't have evidence; you don't even have a logical, causal connection between the crime and the alleged motive. Blair works for an oil company, so Theresa May had murdered some ex-Russian spy no one's heard of so that she can rally NATO (presumably) to attack Russia. In what cockamamy world does that jumble make sense? The explanation you provide—that the West wants a war with Russia and to deflect attention from its own problems—not only doesn't make sense; it also doesn't match what's actually happening. To date, no member of UK politics has called for war with Russia in response to the poisoning. What they have done is eject Russian diplomats and call for increased UN sanctions.
You also don't seem to know what a false flag is since the instigation of the Iraq War, while built on fabrications and insinuations, did not result from efforts to fabricate the pretext for aggression by blaming the opposition for one's own crime—that is, unless you're a 9/11 truther who thinks Bush bombed the towers to blame Al-Qaeda so that he could then invade Al-Qaeda's longtime enemy, Iraq, instead of making the attack an Iraqi aggression to begin with, in which case, there's no hope for you. There is no dearth of examples of politicians taking advantage of events to obscure their own activities. To give one recent case, the conservatives, led by Trump, went on the warpath against NFL players who took a knee during the pledge of allegiance. Conveniently, this coincided with with the passage of their tax cuts to the rich and corporations. They took advantage of a controversy, if it can even be called that, magnified it, and benefited from it because it diverted attention from their nefarious acts. That does not mean that they called up Colin Kaepernick and told him to take a knee to get the thing whole thing started. To suggest that, I hope, would sound ridiculous.
Conspiracies do happen, but in order for the public to be aware of a conspiracy there has to be evidence—not just a ranting list of unconnected bad things governments have done in the past, or evidence of its present corruptions. Without evidence, conspiracies remain merely conspiracy theories, abstract and impotent frustration directed at power.
I also don't understand how in your mind (and Jimmy Dore's mind) it's a certainty that the West is inventing a bogeyman while (tacitly) assuming that there's no way Russia, a society even more oligarchic and corrupt than our own, which has a pretty well documented recent history of doing just this sort of thing to its own people—there's just no way they could've done it. I think both you and Jimmy Dore are making the lamentable mistake of, in many cases, correctly identifying the hypocrisy of Western imperialism only to fall hook-line-and-sinker for the propaganda and self-regarding hypocrisy of other state powers, and that stance comes off as a kind of naive, reflexive contrarianism, which may have once been founded on substantial critique, but over time has eroded into a mere formula of dissent. Why distrust one state actor only to trust another?
The Iraq War, along with so many other instances of the crimes of the US government, are invaluable lessons to learn from. Their specter should rightfully cast a shadow over every discussion of state action internationally, lest the public relapse into a complacency toward state atrocity. But those lessons are also not to justify, in a straight forward, all or nothing way, every single opposition to the state's narrative. Skepticism is a fine thing, but dogged cynicism is the cancer of critical thought. So by all means, if you don't trust the UK's explanation of the Skripal poisonings, don't trust it. Wait for more evidence. But don't be so daft as to, from your armchair, invent a vast conspiracy totally out of scope with the actual available facts. Don't build your case on what amounts to the most tenuous of circumstantial conjecture.
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Your posts are such a hodgepodge of accusations and random threads it's hard to follow any thought through to criticize.
For clarity's sake, you aren't just saying that the British government is dissimulating about who attacked Skripal and his daughter, which is at least a defensible position; you're saying that it was the British government itself that orchestrated the attack. That's radically different. That takes you from being a skeptic, past being a cynic, and into being a conspiracy theorist making unfounded claims because, essentially, it just feels right.
The atom bomb was a hundred times stronger than any conventional bomb, and people survived it. Therefore there was no bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. That's what that argument of yours is saying. Obviously there are going to be other factors at play, beyond the potency of the toxin, that affect its lethality, such as the dose or the way it was administered. It's not as if Skripal and his daughter are walking around fine. She's out of critical condition, but we don't know what if any lasting damage she'll have. Skripal is still critical and very well may not recover.
I honestly don't understand what that last part about Bush and Cheney has to do with the present situation. I for one never bought their warmongering bullshit about WMD and thought it was obvious from the beginning that they were manufacturing a conflict to fulfill geopolitical and financial ends. The same can't be said regarding an alleged British attempt on Skripal's life, in my opinion. If you can lay out a concrete case for why it is, I'm open to it, but so far all you've done is say that US and UK governments are liars (as is the Russian government, it should be noted).
Right now, the most plausible scenario seems to be that Russia was behind the attack. That may or may not change as more experts have time to assess the evidence. Have the last word, because I really don't think there's anything else for me to say unless you can be more concrete.
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