Which is fair enough. That said, sometimes the demand for sources drifts into the slightly ridiculous. In a post about the Iran conflict a few days ago I stated that Bahrain was heavily dependent on desalination and as such it was civilian critical infrastructure - a potential civilian target. Someone immediately asked for a source. At some point it gets a bit silly - some things sit squarely in the realm of widely known background knowledge rather than claims that need to be footnoted like an academic paper. Another facet when producing stats is that I can take numbers from various sites and crunch them through Excel to arrive at a set of data that are mutually comparable. The sources of the root information are therefore wide ranging, and listing all of them would take up most of the thread just to quote the base data. These are not publications or dissertations. I’ll quote a source when something is directly quoted, but when the numbers are the result of pulling together several datasets and standardising them, the situation is a bit different. On the fringe sources comment - I get why you draw from them. A lot of what you post is anti-establishment and that sort of information will rarely appear in sources that are more mainstream or widely accepted. Its also why the term “mainstream media” has almost become a slurr in threads like this, as if only information from obscure sites is credible. Which frankly can get just as daft IMO. For clarity, when I say “fringe site” I simply mean lesser known outlets where the information may not yet be widely accepted, independently verified, or even fully proven to be factual yet. That doesn’t automatically mean it’s wrong - but it does mean it probably deserves a bit more scrutiny before being treated as fact. People sometimes forget the internet also has a habit of repeating things until they look true, even when the orginal claim was shaky to begin with.
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