Let us take as a given that Russia interfered in the last US election (though many of the accusations are unconvincing, some appear to be be true).
I’m pushing this back to the top, for what I assume are obvious reasons. Originally published Feb 1, 2018.
Why did they interfere?
They most likely did so because having a President in charge who was somewhat favorable to Russia is in Russia’s self interest. Remember that Russia is under US-led economic sanctions.
There is a case to be made that what Russia did was simply what Russia should have done: Act in its own self-interests. Russia should do what is in its self-interest.
Moreover, it is the same as the US does to other countries, all the time, including to Russia. When the US thinks that a country should have different leadership, it tries to make sure that happens. Such operations include political support, propaganda, and often support for violence. Money is funneled to opposition factions. The color-revolutions were US supported and so were the Maidan protests which overthrew the elected Ukrainian government and caused the most recent big crisis with Russia. There are many, many examples, including extensive support for anti-government forces in Iran.
The US does this because they think it is in their interest. If they think a democratic party is good for the US, they support it, but they have supported dictators and anti-democratic coups as well.
So what Russia is doing has a lot of precedent. The US is not some trembling innocent suffering some unspeakable crime. The better analogy is a serial bully who got his eye blacked by a past victim.
From the outside, Americans screaming about this look like a bully screaming, “How dare you do to me what I do to everyone else. I’m going to bury you!”
This does not induce sympathy.
Still, we can make a strong case that countries shouldn’t interfere in other countries’ internal political affairs, including–especially including–elections.
I think that the Russians might be willing to agree to that.
So the sane method of dealing with this issue, to which which virtually everyone will agree, would be to begin negotiations towards that end.
Americans and Russians get together and have frank talks, which amount to a peace treaty: We won’t do it to you, if you don’t do it to us.
They might even extend the notion to not doing it to other countries.
This is the actual road out, though it’s laughable because it really seems impossible to imagine. Both the US and Russia have been interfering in many countries for a long time, though the US has been the champion for the last 30 years or so–and by a wide margin.
But if you don’t want someone to hit you, perhaps you shouldn’t hit them?
The problem here is that this can’t stand alone. If the US retains the ability to sanction other countries economically, in ways that are so damaging that they kill vast numbers of those countries’ citizens and impoverish even more, which the US does, who is going to agree to just sit there and take it?
And the US does have this ability, for now, due to its control over the world payments system. The US Treasury can unilaterally sanction countries and firms, and no one can stop them, because banks outside the US feel compelled to obey as any transfer that touches on the US triggers US law, and the payment system is US built and controlled.
Most foreign debts are also subject to either US or British law, as the Argentinians learned to their great detriment.
But then, doesn’t the concept of sanctions fall under the general idea of interfering with other countries? Perhaps the US might also wish to stop sanctioning countries. Almost every case has done more harm than good, and the sanctions almost always hit ordinary people harder than leaders, even when they are targeted at the richest.
The way to have peace, is to leave other people alone.
I know that this runs exactly against the American character which is, “Hurt them until they do what I want.” It runs directly against how the US disciplines its own people, which is, “If you don’t cooperate, you’ll be poor and miserable.” (See how felons are treated after their incarceration for the most direct example.)
But perhaps, just perhaps, the best results in this world rarely come from hurting people until they submit, however long that takes. (See Cuba and Iran for how long it can not work.)
Oh, sure, sometimes it does “work.” The US has overthrown many countries’ governments, and they have gotten many other political parties elected. No one can deny this. But somehow, doing so often leads to even worse situations down the line. It seems that if you hurt people enough, they resist and start hating you, act against you, and try to get a government they like that doesn’t like you, and so on.
Sanity is saying “Okay, okay. Let’s stop this cycle of reciprocally hurting people.”
But that has to start and be credibly initiated by the worst abuser. And though most Americans won’t admit it, that worst abuser is the US.
This has been another episode of “Kindergarten-level Ethics for Adults.”
If you don’t like it when someone does it to you, don’t do it to other people.
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shargash
“But that has to start and be credibly initiated by the worst abuser. ”
Russia recently proposed a mutual ban on foreign election interference. The US rejected it, with one official from State saying “We would have to give up democracy promotion in Russia, which we’re not willing to do.”
A while ago (early in this century, iirc) Russia proposed a treaty on cyber warfare. The US rejected it because (at least in part) “attribution is impossible” (heh…attribution for me, but not for thee).
What is a country supposed to do if every attempt to put some mutual boundaries around behavior is rejected, because the other party reserves the right to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants?
Robert Mcneilly
In simple terms:
Don’t start no shit, won’t be no shit.
The Stephen Miller Band
The answer to Russian Meddling in America’s Elections is easy.
Ban all Social Media.
Russia is merely leveraging THIS. Remove THIS, and you remove Russian Meddling. Social Media is not valueless, its value is actually Less Than Zero, meaning it’s highly destructive.
Former Facebook Exec Says Social Media Is Ripping Apart Society —‘No Civil Discourse, No Cooperation; Misinformation, Mistruth.’
I know this will never happen but it should. It will never happen because Social Media is considered Progress and nothing can ever stand in the way of, let alone undo, PROGRESS.
If Social Media is Progress, and it is by conventional standards, the goal of Progress must be the nihilistic destruction of consciousness since consciousness has now been determined to be an unintended byproduct of entropy.
The Stephen Miller Band
Perhaps it can start rebuilding its infrastructure rather than worrying about Russian Ethnics in former Soviet Satellite States.
The Russia Left Behind — A Journey Through A Heartland On The Slow Road To Ruin.
Even The Stalinists were better than this.
I’m sure some Russian Troll will come along and say 98% of Russians are perfectly fine with a crumbling infrastructure if it means “saving” “ethnic Russians” in Estonia by invading it and occupying it.
BlizzardOfOzzz
I take it as self-evident that Russians buying a miniscule quantity of Facebook ads promoting Black Lives Matter is not consequential. Would it crack the top 1000 most important issues? (no) Yet it has been the top covered news story and absorbed Congressional attention for a full year. Interesting isn’t it? What do we make of it?
It’s so immediately jarring that people instinctively try to resolve it by imagining what facts are being withheld. Maybe there is a smoking gun that is too top secret to tell anyone, or is too complicated to explain to laymen. Maybe it is all just a conspiracy by the intelligence agencies to manipulate events. We are all in the dark, where we are likely to stay.
V. Arnold
Are you all really that fucking stupid?
You buy this bullshit meme as real?
Lordy, lordy, we’re genuinely fucked!
BlizzardOfOzzz
V Arnold – it’s required of libs in good standing to believe it (even though “it” is ill-defined and changes daily). It’s not a question of true or false but of religious heresy.
realitychecker
Every society or group needs some rules to set the outer boundaries of permissible behavior..
Every individual within the society can gain an advantage by violating those rules.
Technology has made it easy for bad actors to escape the ‘local’ consequences of shaming, so shame and shunning do not work like they did pre-Internet.
Something more direct and effective is required to make people afraid to break the rules of society. An immediate direct benefit from rule-breaking will never be completely overcome by a weak or unreliable bad consequence imposed by society.
But in the modern enlightened West, we have long agreed that it is useless to punish. Maybe even immoral (Fainting couch, stat!)
Rinse and repeat.
nihil obstet
An easier way to stop “interference” in elections is to set up a fair and open system of elections. The government allows dark money in politics and then shrieks “Foul” when they think somebody they didn’t want to play uses it? I object to the National Association of Manufacturers, AIPAC, Big Pharma, and Goldman Sachs interfering in elections as much as the Russians.
And I don’t even know how the reasoning goes for blocking foreign communications on elections. The SC has ruled that money is speech and election expenditures are therefore protected free speech. Have they also ruled that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech” actually means that the law can protect Americans from speech that the government doesn’t want them to hear by abridging the free speech of non-Americans? Either money in elections isn’t really speech and can therefore be regulated as part of free and fair elections or it really is speech and all can try to persuade.
Whatever we object to the Russians doing to persuade, we should also object to Americans doing. And we should set up a system that does what we claim we want it to do.
Willy
How does one punish when the punisher in chief tries to shame virtually every organization of which he isn’t a part? If it’s always going to be fake news or fake law enforcement, somebody in a position of respect needs to be respectable.
Mandos
But this pre-supposes, he said naughtily, with his tongue buried deeply in his cheek, that Russian election interference and American election interference are actually morally equivalent. If America is the fruiting body of human achievement, then surely a certain moral asymmetry holds here.
Willy
America used to be the fruiting body of human achievement. It’s a rotting mass now. Other players now vie for world leadership. If Trump want’s to make America great again, he may have to first, restore some things to the way they once were.
I really don’t think he’s the guy that’s going to do that. I also don’t think he’s anywhere near smart enough, nor his Republican enablers nearly smart enough, to be able to know how to do that.
BlizzardOfOzzz
“World leadership” is idiotic. Why would you even want that? It’s the whole problem. DC wants to be the capital of a world empire, so US citizens are just an annoyance to their designs.
Willy
Better us than them. Current them is China. Other famous them’s included the USSR, Nazi Germany, the British Empire… I like us better /s.
Actually, I meant “leadership” in terms of a free civil society, where good guys mostly win and bad guys mostly lose. Causing chaos and quagmires isn’t that.
Mandos
*continuing naughty mode* But perhaps it is only so because Russia did not accept its place as resource colony, rebelling as though a root rebelled against the true flower.
The Stephen Miller Band
I wonder if Trump will shell Congress like Yeltsin shelled Parliament when Parliament refused to cooperate and dug in its heels?
I hope so — THAT would be F*CKING AWESOME!!
Bring it on, I say.
LET’S TEAR THIS BITCH DOWN!!!
The Stephen Miller Band
If Trump is Yeltsin, who is the American version of Putin now rising through the ranks?
Spot him and neutralize him before he gets too far, this Rising Star consolidating his power in the shadows as we type.
Synoia
though America is the champion of the last 30 years or so, and by a wide margin
Only since 1987 or so?
I believe your darts missed the double 20. Twice.
bruce wilder
For the most part, those complaining loudest about Russian meddling in the election do so in highly abstract terms. When they get to specifics, the charges become not just hypocritical but ridiculous as to specific means and scale.
The official reports put out by the Obama Administration at the end of December 2016 and early January 2017 complained at length about the news channel, RT. RT is openly doing things that are perfectly legitimate within the theory of American democracy. They cannot be banned by law or policy, and a treaty that stood down U.S. sponsored news operations abroad would be at odds with the same principles.
The attempt to blame the Russians for dirty politics on social media — Twitter bots and Facebook fake news — is based primarily on the activities of a commercial operation based near St Petersburg that apparently hired itself to all comers. Rarely discussed or even referenced are the native partisan operations carried at larger scale during the last election. The scale and sophistication of propaganda operations has grown steadily over the last few decades. That the numbers and pay of so-called PR operatives far outweigh the numbers and pay-scales of journalists is one indication of the problems developing, as is the absorption of “news” operations into giant media conglomerates and networks.
American politics is paid for by corporate business interests and a handful of billionaires. Interfere with that at your peril.
escher
I’ve yet to see a reason to take “Russian election interference” any more seriously than Birthergate. Well, except that this time it’s people I used to respect who are pushing the nonsense, and falling for it.
bruce wilder
@ escher
The most alarming aspect of Russiagate may be what the viability of this narrative reveals about the debility of the institutions of public discourse and the elite that peoples those institutions. There has been an evolution after all, from roots in Whitewater and WMD. Whether it is the capacity to reason or the felt moral responsibility to reason that has eroded most I could not say. This society appears to imagine there are no consequences when an amoral elite gives itself over entirely to grift.
EverythingsJake
So many things to enrage. Not on point I guess, but this one boils my blood and I need to vent. Perhaps somewhat related to indifference to human suffering. Such capacity we have for good, such a disappointment that our overwhelming choice is for evil:
Insulin
V. Arnold
EverythingsJake
February 2, 2018
Vent on; “Insulin” is vent-worthy indeed!
Insulin should be available free of charge to those needing it for their very lives.
Healthcare systems outside the US generally provide good care at minimal cost; mine is about $13 USD per month. My Thai wife’s is free because she’s a retired civil servant/teacher.
U.S. healthcare is a criminal enterprise…
The Stephen Miller Band
It should at least be as inexpensive as High Fructose Corn Syrup (and the like) and all the products that use it.
In otherwords, the cost of treating the symptoms of Diabetes should match the cost of the nutrition-less Diabetes-inducing precursor products the Evil Marketing Geniuses coerced people into consuming.
And no, when it comes to Advertising & Marketing, it is not Free Choice, especially when these Evil Pedophiles market & advertise to children and they do.
How much is Insulin in Russia? Surely if Putin isn’t evil, it should pretty much be free. Right?
Health Experts Urge Facebook To Shut Down Messenger Kids
The Stephen Miller Band
Nothing Earth-Shattering will come of Russia Gate. Perhaps a smattering of Plea Bargain Deals, that’s about it.
It was always for political purposes so the Dems could retake Congress in 2018 and the Presidency in 2020.
Justice has never been the goal, but rather it has always been intended as a Smear Campaign for political purposes (whether there is any Truth to any of it is irrelevant).
THESE PEOPLE, ALL OF THEM regardless of which side of the Political Duopoly Coin they feign to represent, are PURE MACHIAVELLIAN EVIL.
Braindead Eternally & Blindly Faithful Dems, Don’t Get Your Hopes Up
Hugh
Everybody spies on everybody. Everybody interferes (if they can and as far as they can) in everyone else’s affairs and elections. This is the world as it is. We can take sensible steps to protect the integrity of our elections.
Public financing.
Third party access to the ballot.
Strict limitation of purging voter rolls.
Anti-gerrymandering district drawing.
National voting on a Sunday or as a holiday.
Paper ballots that can be counted mechanically and checked and recounted manually.
Far, far better political coverage of the issues and much less of the horse race,
nihil obstet
@Hugh
A little too modest on some of the steps.
Not just public financing, but reducing the cost of campaigning. Any media organization that sells political ads should be required to provide political ads free of charge — I’d go for requiring the issue of vouchers that can be redeemed by a candidate at current advertising rates, so the candidate can choose whether to blow the whole wad on 15 mins. of Superbowl or run a bunch of 30-sec. spots.
Stop the first-past-the-post electoral districts. Use proportional representation instead. Gerrymandering then becomes a dead issue and third party candidates become viable.
The Stephen Miller Band
Even if it’s the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians or the Islamic State purchasing the ad?
bruce wilder
Maybe tax all advertising heavily enough to reduce its volume and undermine the viability of “advertising-supported” “free” media. And, do not have political advertising of the thirty-second spot variety?
bruce wilder
It is the reflexive nature of the spiral of the attention economy that sucks up all the intelligence out there. Russiagate is not about Russia; it is about Trump — and not about Trump as anything other than a character from reality-teevee, a televised car wreck you cannot take your eyes off. Nothing else gets any attention, any deliberate consideration.
When the bottom falls out, the inability of any political institution to respond intelligently will be manifest.
nihil obstet
@The Stephen Miller Band
Maybe the context of providing free political ads wasn’t clear enough. The point is that public financing should not be necessary for an essential public purpose of use of the airwaves or the government-produced internet. The free ads wouldn’t go to the purchaser of the advertisement, but would be provided to candidates under the same kinds of rules that govern public financing of elections now. And yes, if the medium accepts money for political ads from any source, that medium must provide a free platform to candidates according to the rules for campaigning.
The Stephen Miller Band
Thanks for clearing that up, nihil.
I agree with your assessment then, with a caveat. The populace needs to be sufficiently educated, meaning the capacity for objective & critical thought & analysis is engendered, for any of this to be effective. Otherwise, it’s pearls before swine if the candidates and the process is on the up and up and let’s face it, it will be a long time coming before that’s the case.
Currently, the media — to include social media coupled with a woefully inadequate, in the least, educational system — have rendered a dumbed-down, easily-manipulated citizenry.
rangoon78
Maybe it’s like Ray Charles said “Georgia, the road leads back to you’
Watching this new round of cyber-attribution hysteria, I got a queasy feeling. Even Dmitri Alperovitch’s^ name sounded familiar. I looked through my notes and remembered why: he was one of the minor online voices supporting the idea that the cyber attacks against Georgia were some kind of Russian plot. Back then, he was in charge of intelligence analysis at Secure Computing Corporation, a cybersecurity company that also made censorship tools used by countries like Saudi Arabia. He was now not only running his own big shop, but also playing a central role in a dangerous geopolitical game.
In other words, the election-hacking panic was a stateside extension of the battle first joined on the ISP frontiers of the Georgia-Russia war. Impressionable journalists and Democratic party hacks who ignore this background do so at their peril—and ours.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/from-russia-with-panic-levine
^Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, the firm that first identified Russianhackers as behind the DNC …
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/01/wanted-a-firewall-to-protect-u-s-elections/
John Bumgarner, member of the United States Cyber Consequences Unit* did a research on the cyberattacks during the Russo-Georgian War. The report concluded that the cyber-attacks against Georgia launched by Russian hackers in 2008 demonstrated the need for international cooperation for security. The report stated that the organizers of the cyber-attacks were aware of Russia’s military plans, but the attackers themselves were believed to have been civilians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberattacks_during_the_Russo-Georgian_War
*The United States Cyber Consequences Unit
THEY’RE JUST A Beltway think tank, but what a great name. Also, their boss is a guy named “Scott Borg.”
https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2017/09/united-states-cyber-consequences-unit/
Blissex
«I’ve yet to see a reason to take “Russian election interference” any more seriously than Birthergate.»
My impression is that the russian fantasy is payback from the democrats for birtherism, and especially for Trump’s birtherism. Which may or may not have been a fantasy, but it was about an insignificant point, symbolic of the feeling that many Usians felt that because of his ethnic origins and childhood abroad Obama was not a “real american”, while instead his life was pretty much the epitome of americanism.
«I object to the National Association of Manufacturers, AIPAC, Big Pharma, and Goldman Sachs interfering in elections»
According to the Supreme Court you are objecting to free speech…
Anyhow you mention AIPAC, which is nominally an USA pressure group, but the russian fantasy is the more ridiculous not compares to corporate pressure groups, but to the “realpolitik” of the situation, where the biggest foreign sponsors of USA politicians are the governing families or parties of Saudi Arabia, Japan, Israel and China, via various fronts or nominees, and usually with the device of providing gigantic post-retirement rewards.
But they don’t need to be post retirement, this is the word from the Supreme Court:
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/12-536_e1pf.pdf
«In a series of cases over the past 40 years, we have spelled out how to draw the constitutional line between the permissible goal of avoiding corruption in the political process and the impermissible desire simply to limit political speech.
We have said that government regulation may not target the general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford. “Ingratiation and access . . . are not corruption.” [Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm’n, 558 U. S. 310, 360 (2010)]. They embody a central feature of democracy — that constituents support candidates who share their beliefs and interests, and candidates who are elected can be expected to be responsive to those concerns.
Any regulation must instead target what we have called “quid pro quo” corruption or its appearance. [See id., at 359.] That Latin phrase captures the notion of a direct exchange of an official act for money. [See McCormick v. United States, 500 U. S. 257, 266 (1991).] “The hallmark of corruption is the financial quid pro quo: dollars for political favors.” [Federal Election Comm’n v. National Conservative Political Action Comm., 470 U. S. 480, 497 (1985).]»
The Supreme Court the ruled that large monthly payments by corporations to *serving politicians* were perfectly legal ways to “support candidates who share their beliefs and interests”, as long as they did not ask for any specific favours.
bruce wilder
@ Blissex
Presumably, the one red line left is to deliver income or substantial gifts directly to a serving official with specific discretion over the donor’s distinct material interests. As we have seen with Senator Menendez, even that is not a bright line anymore.
Revolving doors, expectations along a career path and ideological coincidence of views are all fine. Hillary Clinton, between gigs, “earning” millions with her scintillating wit and soaring rhetoric is fine.
It is not just Republican justices who have lost their moral compass.
different clue
@Blissex,
This anti-Russianitic McCarthyism may be more about revenge for Birtherism. It may be payback for the Rs using McCarthyism on the Ds for some decades. So now the Ds will use McCarthyism on the Rs for a while.
Duncan
Willy: “America used to be the fruiting body of human achievement.” Oh, really? When was this? When we were driving the pre-Columbian inhabitants off their land, perhaps, and herding them into reserves, which we then stole from them all over again? Even a casual look at US foreign policy over the years belies your claim. It’s not a secret, it’s just that we’ve always celebrated our bad behavior, rather than seeing it as a problem.
And what is “fruiting body” anyway? Mandos strikes again.
Willy
Maybe “fruiting body” was his sarcastic nod to the conservatives here who believe the good ole USA is/was the flower of human civilization? If they’re talking about things like opportunity or technology, they may have a point. But quite obviously, projected concentrated self-interested power has been a very bad thing for many.
‘The fungus’ appears to now be consuming itself. In my view, Trump isn’t doing anything obvious to change this, very unlike what he’d promised. Unless I’m mistaken, and the swamp really is the FBI, the big media, academia, and whatever it is Trump doesn’t like, the swamp remains.
Blissex
«the one red line left is to deliver income or substantial gifts directly to a serving official with specific discretion over the donor’s distinct material interests. As we have seen with Senator Menendez, even that is not a bright line anymore.»
I may be remembering it wrong, but that red line has been breached already in the case of the notorious Chris Christie of New Jersey:
http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/09/why_are_we_still_letting_christie_grab_lavish_gift.html
Mandos
A fruiting body is the spore producing organ of a fungus. So if the USA is the fruiting body, of what body does it fruit? LOL.
Sean
I think one place to start is to repeal Citizens United.
Hugh
After the Mueller indictments and the Trump-Putin meeting, it is clear that Trump is a Russian stooge. This is something that even Republicans and Trump’s base can’t get around. And it is really there that we should look for the reaction. You can’t “make America great again” and be Putin’s butt boy at the same time.
Putin is a dictator and the only agreements he is likely to keep are the ones he is forced to. And despite our chaos President, the US and Russia are not equals. Russia is a third rate power with lots of nukes, but still third rate. Putin was able to seize Crimea because it is a near island with a large Russian population and a large Russian naval base already there. But beyond that he has not been able to act so decisively in Ukraine’s Donbass. At the same time, he has turned virtually all of his European neighbors into enemies. He remains under sanctions. He has managed to intervene in Syria, but the war there is not over. And Syria is and will remain a destroyed country, this due in large part to Russia’s activity there.
NR
I can’t wait for the Trumpers to show up here and push the lie they always do whenever Trump steps in it in the foreign policy sphere, which is that the only two options are either whatever Trump is doing, or a nuclear war with Russia/China/North Korea/whoever.
Hugh
BTW after Trump’s performance in Helsinki, here is 18 U.S. Code § 2381 – Treason:
“Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”
Trump was always going to betray all of us, and that includes Republicans and his base. There is really no going back from this.
someofparts
I think Congress would be the fruiting body, which would make the U.S. the fungus, right?
Although calling a nation a fungus when it obliges someone who is only 26 to die from lack of insulin seems much too gracious.
different clue
Allow me to toss an Apple of Discord into this friendly discussion.
Colonel ( Retired) Patrick Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis has just offered us an interesting possibility as to “hoo diddit”.
* * * * * * * * * * *
16 JULY 2018
Editorial – China hacked Clinton’s e-mail
I have some inside information.
Looks like a hacking operation by China. They nailed Clinton’s completely unprotected system and then inserted code that gave them all her traffic over e-mail subsequent to that. That included all her State Department classified traffic which she had her staff illegally scan and insert in her private e-mail. We are talking about 30,000+ messages. Strzok was told that by the Intelligence Community Inspector General WHILE he was running the Clinton e-mail investigation and chose to ignore it. pl
Posted at 07:54 PM in As The Borg Turns, Current Affairs, Russia | Permalink | 6 Comments
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Willy
Another POTUS might’ve been a bit miffed about this turn of events and shown some concern. And of course Hillary would’ve tried to blame somebody else. But it sure looks like Trump enjoys being Putin’s bitch.
V
Willy
July 17, 2018
LOL, Trump couldn’t shine Putin’s shoes, and he knows it.
Trump obviously recognises a true leader/statesman; good for him.
It tells me Trump isn’t stupid; a good thing.
And, just wtf is wrong with peace?
Oh, right, it bankrupts the MIC…oh damn!
The U.S. needs to grow up; and fucking quick!!!
highrpm
yes, wtf is wrong with peace?
(the church down at the corner billboards its mantra, “live for him who died for you.” just where would the commoners be w/o thoughts of death thrown at us daily?)
Tom
For all the calls about Trump being a traitor, his Administration has actually enforced sanctions against Russia, is trying to kill Nordstream, and sanctioning and going after Russian Banks doing business with Iran.
Trump’s rhetoric and actions don’t mix.
https://www.dailysabah.com/history/2018/07/17/worlds-oldest-bread-found-in-jordan-far-predates-agriculture
Well this is big. Each new discovery is opening up new insights into early city-dwelling cultures.
Combined with the revelation that Uruk in 3300 BCE had a working sewer system and clay pipes providing running water for flush toilets and hydroponic gardens used as sacred groves, is just amazing.
Also 3300 BCE also had Otzi who we lucked out in finding. New research on him continues to blow the minds of Scientists who have studied his DNA, Copper Axe, Stomach Contents, and other effects.
V
highrpm
I repeat; we need to grow up damn quick; Usian’s are infants in a world of war, slaughter, and propaganda; 24/7/365!
Which is unbelievabley remarkable given their very own government is the one responsible.
Rather beggars belief, no?
Find what’s real; damn hard if you’re not diligent and unrelenting in your search.
Trust and believe nothing…nothing!!!
Willy
I see. Putin is the one who will make America great again. Putin is real the prince of peace. American democracy was overrated anyways.
V
Willy
July 17, 2018
Wow, that is really profound;
profoundly ignorant.
How’s your reading comprehension?
Willy
Maybe Putin can help drain the swamp? Lock her up? Pay for the wall…
Hugh
Actually back in April Administration officials announced sanctions against Russia for a chemical attack in Syria, which Trump then walked back. In March, Trump had placed sanctions on Russia for its cyberattacks during the 2016 elections, but those sanctions had been okayed by the Congress the previous August and Trump refused to act on them for six months.
Meanwhile in a totally bizarre press event today, Trump facing major backlash for his treasonous remarks in Helsinki yesterday tried to worm his way out of his predicament. He said he meant to say in one place “wouldn’t” instead of “would”, as in he wouldn’t be surprised about Russian interference in US elections. He then went on to say that he accepts the assessment of the same intelligence agencies he dismissed the day before. So Trump savages US allies for a week, then slavishly sucks up to Putin after a one-on-one meeting that the rest of the US government was excluded from, and we are basically being told to ignore the pattern of Trump’s actions with a “nothing to see here, move along.”
NR
Trump yesterday: I don’t think that Russia tried to interfere in our elections, I believe Putin.
Trumpers: Exactly the right thing to say, sir!
Trump today: Actually I MEANT to say the exact opposite of that.
Trumpers: Exactly correct again, sir!
Heliopause
“though many of the accusations are unconvincing, some appear to be be true”
Not saying there’s zero truth to the accusations, but could you specify which ones you think are probably true? I’ve found that there is tremendous variability in what people find convincing, and not many have a firm grasp of what kind of evidence, other than bald assertion, lies behind all this.
Jib Halyard
Forget about the horseshoe theory. This blog is where the political spectrum doubles back upon itself and disappears up its own ass…
Hugh
Maybe the political spectrum doesn’t exist or is just bafflegab for tribalism. Given the narrow, parochial, and biased views of our political tribes, not being a member in good standing is a good thing. Take for example the Naked Capitalism tribe and its “useful fool” views on all things Russian. All that does is destroy its credibility with all the non-members.
someofparts
“Given the narrow, parochial, and biased views of our political tribes, not being a member in good standing is a good thing.”
Quickly becoming the only people I trust.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/trump-putin-press-conference/245958/
and this, because I’ve seen it nowhere else so far and it relates to one of Ian’s previous posts
https://www.mintpressnews.com/ocasio-cortez-palestine/245950/
NR
That article praising Trump for siding with Putin over the United States really hasn’t aged well considering that Trump just turned around and said that he meant the exact opposite of what he said at the press conference.
I eagerly await their article praising him for that, too.
bruce wilder
Caitlin Johnstone writing at Medium did a really good job of summarizing the case for skepticism::
Five Things That Would Make The CIA/CNN Russia Narrative More Believable
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/five-things-that-would-make-the-cia-cnn-russia-narrative-more-believable-bd8187b601c0
NR
“Five Things That Would Make The CIA/CNN Russia Narrative More Believable”
Wow, she got absolutely destroyed in the comments. That’s gonna leave a mark, I think.
different clue
Here’s something interesting. Another post from Colonel Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
17 JULY 2018
Page confirmed China penetration of HC e-mail.
“Former top FBI lawyer Lisa Page testified during two days of closed-door House hearings, revealing shocking new Intel against her old bosses at the Bureau, according the well-placed FBI sources.
Alarming new details on allegations of a bureau-wide cover up. Or should we say another bureau-wide cover up.
The embattled Page tossed James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Bill Priestap among others under the Congressional bus, alleging the upper echelon of the FBI concealed intelligence confirming Chinese state-backed ‘assets’ had illegally acquired former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 30,000+ “missing” emails, federal sources said.
The Russians didn’t do it. The Chinese did, according to well-placed FBI sources.
And while Democratic lawmakers and the mainstream media prop up Russia as America’s boogeyman, it was the ironically Chinese who acquired Hillary’s treasure trove of classified and top secret intelligence from her home-brewed private server.
And a public revelation of that magnitude — publicizing that a communist world power intercepted Hillary’s sensitive and top secret emails — would have derailed Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes. Overnight. But it didn’t simply because it was concealed.” True Pundit
————
A woman scorned? Maybe, but Page has done a real job on these malefactors. And, who knows how many other penetrations of various kinds there were in Clinton’s reign as SecState?
“You mean like with a towel?” Clinton mocked a reporter with that question when asked if her servers had been wiped clean. It is difficult to believe that there won’t be prosecutions. pl
https://truepundit.com/fbi-lisa-page-dimes-out-top-fbi-officials-during-classified-house-testimony-bureau-bosses-covered-up-evidence-china-hacked-hillarys-top-secret-emails/
Posted at 01:21 PM in As The Borg Turns, China, government, Intelligence, Politics | Permalink
* * * * * * * * * *
And here again is the link Colonel Lang offers in case it doesn’t come over AS a link in my copy paste.
https://truepundit.com/fbi-lisa-page-dimes-out-top-fbi-officials-during-classified-house-testimony-bureau-bosses-covered-up-evidence-china-hacked-hillarys-top-secret-emails/
What will happen to the credibility of the anti-Russianitic racist anti-Russianites if their RussiaRussiaRussia narrative is exposed as cynical fakery? What if it was really ChinaChinaChina the whole time? That would certainly explain all the obvious traces and tells of a Russian presence on these hacks. I always had trouble understanding just why good professional Russian hackers would leave a trail of smoking breadcrumbs leading right to their own door. But I can easily understand just exactly why CHINA might want to leave a trail of smoking bread crumbs right to Russia’s own door.
I hope the Mueller Investigation grinds on and on and on. But I also hope that any and every other Investigation which might end up being called for . . . also gets under way.
Let ALL the arms of ALL the guilty . . . go into the Garbage Disposal of Justice.
bruce wilder
We are drowning in manipulative narrative. Human beings are clearly much better at creating propaganda than we are at critically resisting it.
This is a legitimacy crisis. Elites have discredited themselves and having sowed the wind, we reap the whirlwind, as the Bible says (Hosea 8:7).
I was watching Fox News tonight. Hannity was reduced to making sense for at least five minutes. It was clearly excruciating for him. But, what could he do, really? The crazy tank was full and overflowing.
If leading media pundits and politicians had acted with any kind of moral conviction over the last 20 years, shown even a hypocrite’s respect for truth let alone justice, we might expect perspective, proportion and a concern for basic reason and factual accuracy. Hah!
I see people try desperately to restore norms that were trashed by Bush and Obama or pretend those norms were not trashed. The U.S. is a deeply disordered body politic, in which the political discourse is carried on as befits an idiocracy, relying on the principles of agnatology.
Willy
It looks like all Johnstone is trying to describe is the degree to which the CIA/CNN has been corrupted.
But who is worse, the current state of our institutions, or the current state of theirs (Putin’s Russia)? Is it easier for average everyday citizens to improve our institutions, than it would be to improve theirs? Or do we just hope that some other corrupt self-serving institution would do the job for us?
It’d be a lot easier if we could just keep the wrong people out of power. Anybody who’s ever seen a single “wrong person” ruin a once harmonious organization would tend to agree with me. But I’d think we first have to quit using words like “stalinist” or “demons” (I’ve never met either) to describe people we disagree with.
S Brennan
There are a number of posters here who must be vying for a WaPo/NYTimes gig; like EZ-rah-Klien, they expunge CW.
If anyone is anyone’s “butt boy” it is they, who, just like Klien, who was one of the bitches that sold the Iraq war to “liberals” in order to fellate the corporate penis…many posters here seek to sell a war with Russia [hot or cold] to the few remaining liberals to obtain the same personal gain…sad how this forum is now dominated by such types.
someofparts
“many posters here seek to sell a war with Russia [hot or cold] to the few remaining liberals to obtain the same personal gain…sad how this forum is now dominated by such types”
Well, YMMV I guess. To me, this seems like a rare place where the war-mongering mob does not get to dominate the conversation.
someofparts
Golly, so Caitlin Johnstone got comments that are gonna leave a mark? It is easier to be a troll than to stand for something, isn’t it.
Meanwhile, Rand Paul may oppose the nomination of Kavanaugh. So while the commentariat are snapping at her ankles, her point about the value of alliances across the aisle is being proved true if we are lucky.
Willy
Is S Brennan suggesting that we all say: “Okay, you get the last tag. We won’t tagback.” ?
But what if they tagback anyways? Worse, what if our Dear Leader said they tagbacked when they did not? Or vice versa? Who do you trust?
Ché Pasa
The Russia Thing has never meant much to me, probably because I don’t have cable “news” and so am not completely infected by the constant yadda-yadda.
But even during the campaign it was obvious that foreign actors and interests were having a field day trolling social media against the Arch-Bitch and eventually (and oddly) for Trump. That never made any sense to me at all. How could they be for a con-man/gangster like that? WTF?
I’m dubious that the WikiLeaks and other revelations regarding Hillary and the DNC and Podesta and so forth had much effect on the election outcome, but I was more than a little curious about the fact that there was no comparable revelation about Rs and Trump and his gangster cronies. Hm. That in itself said volumes about intent, and interestingly that failure to probe the other side of the coin or even look at it continues to this day. There’s a decades-long paper trail as well as huge amounts of legal and anecdotal information about the Trump Organization and its gold-plated head and their many machinations, as well as enormous amounts of compromising information about the Rs and their continuing corruption and hypocrisy, and yet… still it is barely touched upon in the mainstream media. It would be bizarre if it weren’t so obviously intended to maintain a status quo of R ascendancy — even if it means maintaining (while criticizing) Trump as its leader.
Meanwhile The Russia Thing long ago devolved into farce. Yes, Russia was a player in the 2016 electoral shenanigans. Yes, our electoral system is shitty and vulnerable and cannot be trusted to produce valid results. Yes, the Trump campaign worked with Russians and Russian interests to advance their agenda, and so, it appears, did the Clinton campaign.
But the all the hoo-hah and hysteria over it is entertainment. There is something else going on, and it’s not preparation for nuclear annihilation (though that may come by accident.)
And I’ll just say this, if the so-called Deep State didn’t want or wasn’t satisfied with Trump in office, guess what? He wouldn’t be there.
bruce wilder
@ Willy
When bad things happen to good people, or when good things happen for bad people, we tend to want to blame or credit the people — at least some people or persons somewhere: an actor whose virtue, vice and intention explain the outcome. We want a story with meaning. Good guys and bad guys and endings, happy or tragic.
The reality of life in a complex society is a series of games we all play, in which we manipulate symbols and participate in rituals and play a prescribed role, expecting programmed rewards. We are trapped inside institutions, in other words, institutions the design of which we probably do not think much about, since we are not individually asked to design them. The social mechanisms of institutions – the rules of the game – channel our individual efforts and ambitions into social cooperation, more or less and for better or worse. And, it is a truism that he who makes the rules gets the gold. (The more often expressed view that he who has the gold makes the rules somewhat misses embedded cause-and-effect — it is pretty rare that someone needs gold; gold is a status and power marker; if possession of something vital mattered, humble farmers would rule us instead of being relegated to the role of often relatively impoverished, hard-working folks. The power to make the rules matters; getting the gold is just a symbolic marker.)
A commenter on some blog in my distant past impressed upon me the important insight that people like the opinions they have. There is some psychic satisfaction in articulating an attitude, joining a braying mob or standing aloof, feeling superior in one’s understanding, even or especially when there is no possibility of controlling anything. In a world of radical uncertainty, left to our own devices, most of us are wrong most of the time in our judgments about pretty much everything, but that’s not a comfortable place to be serenely aware of except maybe in the deepest meditation.
One of the reasons, we play the games institutions prescribe for us is that the virtual reality visible to us in the game insulates us from radical uncertainty about both what we ourselves should do and how we should act and from the terrifying possibilities for how complete strangers might act upon encountering us. We go to the doctor when we feel sick. The doctor may be very nearly completely mystified upon encountering our sickly selves, about whom she probably knows little and cares less. But, we each play our part, patient and physician, trudge thru the rituals of diagnostic tests and prescriptions and advice. And, we hope for a good outcome. A sociologist observing from Mars might note that you probably would recover from many illnesses with little or no intervention, while the most serious illnesses — and the ones of greatest economic significance — can only be “managed”. If the doctor follows protocol and kills you, she will be excused from the consequences of being wrong in the virtual world of the game, while the real world consequences have visited you not her. (Like the rest of us, she’s at least somewhat wrong most of the time.) Much of politics is about keeping the virtual world of the game in at least some tenuous contact with knowable reality — letting malpractice lawyers loose is an institutional check for example, one that doctors naturally oppose.
When an individual thinks of himself as right about everything, he likes what is good, understands the truth of things in his experience, is, in short, a mature adult no longer learning, psychologists call this syndrome of delusional self-regard, “the end of history”. You may recall in the 1990s, a lot was made of a work of fatuous political writing, titled, The End of History and the Last Man. That’s where Western Civilization was at, in the 1990s with the Fall of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of Communism. Just as an individual coming into his own can lose sight of being a product of developmental processes and experience that never ends, I think our civilization lost interest in contending seriously over the contingent choice of institutions and a course of institutional development. We were done. We did not have to think about it, about institutions anymore. We had gotten it right in market capitalism and the Washington Consensus, neoliberalism triumphant.
Thinking about politics in terms of systems, concepts, institutions, social mechanisms, rules-of-the-game is challenging in a way that evaluating the character of an individual from a vignette curated by an Ezra Klein or Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow is not. The actual politics of the New Deal — I am speaking of contemporaneous terms in the 1930s and 1940s — was a politics of institutions and institutional design. People like me are sometimes accused of nostalgia for New Deal politics, but our current, 21st century short-take on the New Deal is likely to be a moral narrative in the shortest of short forms: e.g. the New Deal was racist and did not benefit African-Americans. Or from the right, the New Deal did not end the Great Depression, but rather prolonged it by preventing market forces from reducing prices and wages.
If you follow Brexit at all, then you have an illustrative spectacle at hand for how badly our politics handles the design and choice of institutions. Lurid speculation about how the apocalypse of a Hard Brexit will play out is the soundtrack for a bumbling performance by Tory politicians who clearly have no clue what they are doing. And, much of their Labour or Liberal opposition has very little clue about how the complex panoply of EU institutions works, either.
The wish for angels in office is a dodge. People who want to know if Putin is a good guy or a bad guy have completely missed the point of how he has changed the way the Russian Federation works as a state and a political economy — and in particular how those changes have manifested in much better performance. You will rarely see even something as basic as a discussion of how introducing state companies into dominant positions in key sectors has served to reign in the oligarchs. Instead, you will see pure propaganda about Putin the Dictator as “possibly the richest man in the world” (which seems an odd criticism for the proponents of Western plutocracy to make).
Narratives and slogans are a necessary part of politics. But, “medicare-for-all” represents an institutional program for reforming a large sector of the economy, not a judgement about whether Obama is a good father or Romney is mean to the family dog.
I saw some woman on teevee last night comparing Trump in Helsinki on Russian election interference to Pearl Harbor and Kristallnacht. That kind of absurdity wears itself out — at least I hope so. People who spin out narratives of betrayal, because the credibility and integrity of the Intelligence Community should never be questioned by a President have to know that they are full of shit. The dissonance must echo.
Watt4Bob
Seventy comments so far and no one has mentioned the fact that our elections have been hacked repeatedly, and continually, most recently by the republicans.
The http://www.Bradblog.com is the Gold Standard when it comes to information on electronic vote manipulation.
That is if you care to bone up on the history of the electronic voting scam.
One of the principal arguments against these systems is the fact that in creating them to be hacked, for partisan purposes, you are making them vulnerable to hackers, so you never know who was the last one in the back-door.
Paper ballots, hand marked and counted in public is the gold standard of election security, electronic voting was invented to allow manipulation of results.
The fact that the democrats haven’t moved to outlaw electronic voting indicates election fraud is a bipartisan practice.
Neither seems to ‘get’ that they are not the only players in this ‘game’.
Watt4Bob
To stop Russian hacking of our elections, we’d have to stop election hacking in general, this seems to be something our political parties are unwilling to put much effort into.
Willy
But even during the campaign it was obvious that foreign actors and interests were having a field day trolling social media against the Arch-Bitch and eventually (and oddly) for Trump. That never made any sense to me at all. How could they be for a con-man/gangster like that? WTF?
Astroturfing, Cambridge Analytica, fake personas on Facebook, lies about healthcare and medicare… It’s how they roll. Only now does it make sense. “Outsider” Trump has done more for corporate conservatives, at the expense of the common man, than Bush ever did.
Trump is apolitical. He went for the highest bidder. The same could be argued about Clinton, but to a far lesser degree.
bruce wilder
The same could be argued about Clinton, but to a far lesser degree.
Will the politics of the lesser evil never die?
Willy
@ Bruce Wilder
When bad things happen to good people, or when good things happen for bad people, we tend to want to blame or credit the people…
Nothing is certain. But good guys are real. So are bad guys. The two best predictors of another’s future behaviors have never changed: ones past behaviors and ones own basic temperament. And then there is all the complexity, with many variables, for all those in the fuzzy area between good and bad. When one gets stung by bad guy, or more specifically, the worst type of bad guy, one decides to learn more about who or what they are, what they might have in common, what purpose they may possibly have in the larger scheme of things.
A commenter on some blog in my distant past impressed upon me the important insight that people like the opinions they have.
Not everybody. I don’t like my opinions. I want to go back to the naïve time when I didn’t know what psychopathy was, when God was real, when people really did reap what they sowed, when most people could be reasoned with. I was happier then. But I believed I had no choice but to learn truth. While I do play devils advocate around here, that is my primary motive.
I think a big reason for cognitive bias, (besides the feelings of self-importance and power which one gets when they project what works for themselves out onto the world), is a fear of shunning. If one believes differently from their friends and family, they risk finding themselves alone. For most people this is a terrifying thought.
That’s where Western Civilization was at, in the 1990s with the Fall of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of Communism. Just as an individual coming into his own can lose sight of being a product of developmental processes and experience that never ends, I think our civilization lost interest in contending seriously over the contingent choice of institutions and a course of institutional development. We were done. We did not have to think about it, about institutions anymore. We had gotten it right in market capitalism and the Washington Consensus, neoliberalism triumphant.
I’m coming to believe that those who financed neoliberalism knew full well way back then what the risks were for the common man. But they took control of the narrative anyways, with all the “common wisdom” slogans and dogmas. But they had no fallback position. I’ve seen who tends to obtain wealth and power and it usually isn’t the guy worrying about the common man, or any man for that matter. Sure there are a few entrepreneurs who love their employees as family. But when they sell out all that good will can disappear instantly. Been there done that.
The New Deal…
Or something better reasoned and more situationally adaptive could have been the fallback position to neoliberalism fails. If the world was a board game, there would be a price for “winners” to pay all the other players for capitalistic failures. But we don’t live in a board game, do we?
The wish for angels in office is a dodge.
There are no angels. But the dark triad is real. The wish is to limit their kind in positions of power. I’ll take the mess of regular guys honestly debating, over kleptocratic cultists, any day.
Have you ever experienced a dark triad personally, done battle with one, debated about real life with one? If so, and you’ve been able to successfully navigate all the machinating and deceit, I’d love to hear about it, more than anything else you can post. The more cunning they were the better. I like a good personal story, as long as one can gain practical advice from it.
People who want to know if Putin is a good guy or a bad guy have completely missed the point of how he has changed the way the Russian Federation works as a state and a political economy
I would need to know specific policies which he himself enacted. One cannot argue, as Trump does, that he changed all the variables. Trump inherited Obama’s economy, such as it was.
I saw some woman on teevee last night comparing Trump in Helsinki on Russian election interference to Pearl Harbor and Kristallnacht.
The debate should be over the Number One Duty of POTUS, as is the law. The current POTUS publicly declared a single adversary to be superior to people he himself appointed, to people with reasonable integrity credibility, within his own organization… on top of all the obvious character flaws.
NR
Of course, it’s always good to view claims made by the government with a healthy dose of skepticism. But the line the Trumpers are pushing–that a bunch of Republicans would get together and commit a bunch of serious felonies like fabricating evidence and false prosecution, all for the sake of undermining a Republican president and covering for Democratic failures–doesn’t pass the laugh test, and is in fact a thousand times more ridiculous than the idea of Mueller’s charges actually being true.
Willy
My last sentence:
“on top of all the obvious character flaws.”
I meant Trump’s obvious and well documented character flaws. He appears to have a very limited ability to reign them in.
different clue
@S Brennan ( and others of like mind)
The nice thing about a blogthread like this is that the noise-makers cannot reach in and erase the comments of the knowledge-sharers and knowledge-seekers. The ks-ks people can reach/ read eachother and regard the unhelpful comments as visual noise to bypass with the scroll button.
The hi-valu commenters can still leave hi-valu comments for seekers of hi-valu to seek and find and read.
So write to/for the hi-valu community with hi-valu in mind.
Ché Pasa
The correct analysis of The Russia Thing vis a vis the Trump Regime and the general problem of US government and its handmaidens (minus the little problem of voter suppression and election integrity):
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/07/18/medd-j18.html
bruce wilder
@ NR
They aren’t Republicans and they did not fabricate anything; they got the professionals to “assess” the details into existence.
It is traitorous now to disbelieve the assessments of our Intelligence Community. And, it will shortly be a felony to publish truth based on stolen documents. The only truths anyone will be allowed to publish are corporate and government press releases.
NR
Bruce Wilder:
Coats, Rosenstein, and Mueller are all Republicans. You can look it up.
And if you have evidence that they fabricated evidence, by all means, share it worldwide and get them arrested. I eagerly await the news of the charges that will be filed against them thanks to your evidence.
BlizzardOfOzzz
This is heavy, man – especially #4. Turns out that Russia’s influence on our politics is greater than anyone could have imagined in their worst nightmares.
Hugh
It should be uncontroversial, but obviously isn’t, to maintain at the same time that Trump, Putin, and Clinton are all horrible people, that they are all criminals, and that none of them should be trusted, supported, or defended.
Willy
They seem to show up here because they “reason” that since we aren’t satisfied with Clinton or Obama, it’d be just a small push to make us love Trump.
But the evidence tells us he’s worse.
Ever notice how these people never explain in any detail how they got to their particular line of thinking?