even official pentagon sources are admitting "we don't really understand why they would use a balloon to spy on us" but everyone -- even outlets that aren't breathlessly repeating the government line -- is still treating the idea that it's a surveillance balloon as indisputable fact. and after allowing the balloon to complete a leisurely three-day overflight of the central US, with the government asserting that they didn't want to bring the balloon down in a heavily populated area for safety reasons1, we dropped it into the Atlantic Ocean effortlessly. (the government, to avoid appearing weak, is also now reporting that they were also able to keep the balloon from reporting intelligence back to China, which must have been a sophisticated hacking feat.)
every article about the balloon contains the following facts, without displaying any cognitive dissonance:
- you could theoretically use balloons to conduct surveillance without being visible on radar;
- you could theoretically use balloons to move more unpredictably than a satellite in a fixed orbit;
- you could use active control of a balloon to station it over a city for days or weeks at a time;
- none of these things are relevant to what we've just seen, a balloon slowly drifting on the wind for several days in full view of everyone in the country;
- China has spy satellites which would be more than capable of gathering all of the intelligence this balloon would have been able to gather on their own;
- China would have known that sending a surveillance balloon over the US in plain view would be interpreted as a threat to American sovereignty;
- they still definitely did it on purpose because we've never seen a weather balloon that big before
like, come on, man, I know that the mass media is just a propaganda outlet but you gotta at least try
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I need to repeat here that this story occurred IN THE CENTRAL US; the state the balloon was discovered over has a population density of 7 people per square mile
but hey the important thing is the good guys won, and you can tell we're the good guys because we took a fuckin balloon and 'SPLODED it, which is a thing that good guys definitely do
