IS RUSSIA AN EVIL EMPIRE YES OR NO

ASK A TATAR.

That post brought to you by the letter "A".

russians on this: "we're JUST LIKE YOU, americans. shut up."

Rat ataks, a? Ask a tatar!

we're JUST LIKE YOU, americans

so YES lolololol
ugh

ts: AN evil empire vs. THE evil empire!

there is no monopoly in common sense
on either side of the political fence

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

carry on smearin'

https://theintercept.com/2016/08/08/dems-tactic-of-accusing-adversaries-of-kremlin-ties-and-russia-sympathies-has-long-history-in-us/

Referencing "McCarthyism"' in response to criticisms of Putin/Putin apologists is about the dumbest thing you can do. Like, it's absolutely not a remotely valid response to the questions being raised. Current Russian govt has nothing to do w the left or communism and hasn't for years. Greenwald does this all the time.

OTM

Honestly the amount of left Putin sympathizing/blind reposting of Russian state media articles I see is frustrating and mind-boggling. It's this weird combination of anyone seeming to oppose US Imperialism being viewed as a good guy, plus this weird leftover sympathy for Russia even though the Russia that once inspired American communists is so long gone.

Half the pieces trashing the renewed paranoia have been from strong, consistent Putin critics (Ioffe, Bershidsky, both Gessens, Antonova, etc). These are not criticisms of Putin, they're fantasies invented for domestic political gain. It's not just actively unhelpful in a US domestic context, it gives Putin an easy example of Western governments blaming Russia for their own problems and demolishes the credibility the US needs to be seen to be building up in reflexively sceptical nations. The Russian public needs to see the Clinton campaign / US press being better than this.

The McCarthyism comparisons are not a clean fit but there's a fairly strong line of continuity between the Russia hawks of the sixties and seventies and the Russia hawks today.

the Russia that once inspired American communists is so long gone

tbf it never really existed anyway

doesnt matter, it's RUSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAA.

autocrats is autocrats, no matter what flimsy little papers they claim as their foundation

uh Poindexter you might wanna look up Putin's early career

xxp
A fair amount of US citizens - American communists/economic migrants fleeing the depression did move to Russia in the early 30's. There is a good book about it called The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis. Maybe not a mass migration, but still a significant amount of people who believed communism would give them a more dignified and prosperous life. Obv it ends badly.

Jill Stein went to speak at a conference organized by a Russian propaganda outlet...

^^^^^^^^^whoomp there it is

just like W on Young Bill Clinton

Uhm, no.

Going on a college trip to the Soviet Union is nothing - my dad did the same, actually - but speaking at an event organized by a propaganda outlet?

greenwald logic: questioning a person's connections to putin and russian = out of bounds apparently. questioning a person's connections to israel and zionism = tuesday.

Russia Today, despite being unashamedly biased and self-serving, does give an outlet for alternative viewpoints that relatively few other major stations would. A huge number of those people are cranks or problematic in other ways (and Stein could arguably fit into either category) but they've given a lot more airtime to critical analysis of US anti-racism movements, for example, than a lot of places. They've done several very positive documentaries on BLM and associated groups. It's hugely hypocritical and designed to make the US look bad but for groups with limited options for media engagement, it's not hard to see why they use it as a platform.

XPost Putin's early career isn't relevant. That's not at all factoring into the questions being raised.

It isn't nationalistic fear mongering to question the political motivations of Wikileaks coupled with their absence of Putin and Trump "revelations"/criticisms. People in the US asking those questions aren't concerned that Putin is going to effect their lives beyond the extent of helping Trump get elected.

Also RT has already had a pretty toxic influence. They've been accused of promoting truther narratives in international reporting but a recent example is that they were a huge promoter of "voter fraud" conspiracies during the Dem primary. Trump's pre-emptive undermining of the results of the general election is largely inspired by those comspiracies.

xpost: I don't think that makes it better.

trying to undermine other nation's governments is a v bad thing, true

It isn't nationalistic fear mongering to question the political motivations of Wikileaks coupled with their absence of Putin and Trump "revelations"/criticisms. People in the US asking those questions aren't concerned that Putin is going to effect their lives beyond the extent of helping Trump get elected.

Absolutely, and if it stopped there instead of devolving into 'Jill Stein is a Kremlin stooge!', 'Trump once did business with a man who had a Russian-sounding name! Is he a Putin plant?', nobody would be having this argument.

xpost: I don't think that makes it better.

Perhaps, but you aren't pushing a minority position you believe is incredibly important in the face of almost absolute media disinterest. The likes of Stein could take a principled decision not to appear on Russia Today, and that might be for the best, but she would arguably be limiting the reach of her message. You could argue that Corbyn engaging with platforms like RT helped him maintain a profile when nobody else would interview him.

This absolutism also doesn't help when the US runs its own anti-Russian propaganda network and actively wants Russian liberals to engage with it.

You get that the difference is that Russia is an authoritarian regime, right?

When you're only ally is the propaganda outlet for an authoritarian regime, that might be an indicator that your viewpoints are wrong. So I don't have that much sympathy for Jill Stein (and find Corbyn's comments pretty disappointing as well)

The point is that smearing anyone who appears on RT as a traitor makes it easier to smear anyone appearing on RFERL in the same way. Encouraging a with-us-or-against-us mentality isn't particulalrly useful even if it feels morally superior,

If you genuinely think that failing to find a foothold in the mainstream media means you have no potential for support, Corbyn's shift from the fringe to leading Labour would seem to disprove it, but idk.

Searching this thread for the words 'treason' and 'traitor', you are the only one who uses them. This is not about nationalism, this is about being anti-authoritarian. And I don't think Putin needs any help in smearing people, and we should not hold off on criticism of his propaganda, and people helping him with it, because he might do the same.

The Greenwald article does a fairly comprehensive job of rounding up pieces either hinting at or flat-out declaring Stein and Trump as Kremlin stooges. Nationalism or opportunism, inventing or overplaying your opponents' links to the Russian government has nothing to do with countering authoritarianism.

The point again is that it helps Putin's punches land. The objective should be to convince 'ordinary Russians' that the US isn't the enemy, it's a political model to aspire to. This kind of cheap mudslinging with Russia in the middle is actively harming that effort.

And if you think you have less time for Putin than Masha Gessen...

it's a political model to aspire to

really?

I almost posted (in b4 Morbs posts "lol") after that tbh but, kind of.

it's def one to aspire to and i think the u.s. should continue aspiring to it

Again, nobody in this thread is declaring Trump or Stein a Kremlin stooge.

They're still idiots. And their behaviour should be questioned.

The thread is a discussion of the Greenwald article and the wider discourse around Russian in this election campaign. If we are all on the same page that the narrative is bogus and unhelpful then great.

I agree that calling Stein and Trump traitors and Kremlin Stooges is wrong. I don't think that's what's 'the narrative' of what has happened, despite the Greenwald article. Most people I've seen are legitimately questioning their behaviour.

All the people in Denmark involved in the US election?

stein is quite clearly not a "kremlin stooge" but trump might be. why not? it's not like he cares about this country and the things he does care about -- his businesses -- are heavily leveraged by russian business interests. in any case it doesn't matter: there are a million other reasons not to vote for him. But putin's obvious preference for trump over hillary isn't based on nothing

Trump appovingly cited Putin calling our president the "n" word. You don't need to be a nationalist to take issue with that.

Useful idiots

Trump approvingly cited Putin calling our president the "n" word. You don't need to be a nationalist to take issue with that.

― Treeship, Tuesday, August 9, 2016 12:12 AM (5 hours ago)

trump made this up, though, right? haven't heard about this anywhere else and assume it would be pretty major news if it had actually happened

Yep, it's from his 'Muslims dancing in the streets of New Jersey on 9/11' file. It's also a stretch to say he cited it 'approvingly' - iirc the gist was that it shows how weak and ill-respected Obama is. It's arguably drawing more on the 'shoot Russian planes out of the sky if they buzz US ships' side of his portfolio than the 'let's hold hands and bomb ISIS together' one.

stein is quite clearly not a "kremlin stooge" but trump might be. why not? it's not like he cares about this country and the things he does care about -- his businesses -- are heavily leveraged by russian business interests. in any case it doesn't matter: there are a million other reasons not to vote for him. But putin's obvious preference for trump over hillary isn't based on nothing

This has been covered in the other thread but as Julia Ioffe points out, Trump's business dealings with Russia can be boiled down to trying and failing to build hotels and skyscrapers there - indicating that if he does have backing from any Russian capital, they don't have the juice or the money to sway the notoriously crooked former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, let alone the Kremlin. This was taking place at the same time as rival international chains like Sheraton and Carlson were being given the freedom to build wherever they wanted.

More broadly, there's absolutely nothing wrong in looking for evidence of links between Trump and Putin's inner circle - it's the kind of thing that journalists should be doing. Stringing together a chain of half-baked innuendo for columns, or even worse political attack ads, designed to imply that your opponent is a traitor should be left to 'authoritarian regimes', though. It's bad in a domestic political context, bad in an international context and makes the Clinton camp look far more desperate than they have any need to be.

This stuff doesn't just affect government-level politics - as with Iran, any business or personal relationships with Russia become 'suspect' and it bleeds into how people from across the region are viewed at home and abroad. There have been a few pieces picking out Russian-American eccentrics supporting Trump (or in some cases Stalin and Trump) with a not-particularly subtle suggestion that they're a fifth column. Even on the relatively trivial side, Melania Trump's speech prompted the Washington Post to run a poorly-argued quasi-academic piece about how plagiarism is second nature to Eastern Europeans. Ramping up the rhetoric feeds into a defensive victim mentality (justified or not) that makes it harder to engage constructively with people the US needs to win over abroad as well.

Go back to your defense of RT, that was hilarious

Useful idiots

all the kids are sayin' it!

https://twitter.com/LudWitt/status/762719244341669888

Go back to your defense of RT, that was hilarious

Yes, the "defense" when i described them as "unashamedly biased and self-serving", featuring a wide variety of "cranks", "hugely hypocritical" and implied they were a "propaganda outfit".

The Greenwald article does a fairly comprehensive job of rounding up pieces either hinting at or flat-out declaring Stein and Trump as Kremlin stooges

Greenwald has been a cherry picker par excellence for a long time, yes

I'm not sure he'd argue that he is cherry picking. He's covering a widespread theme not suggesting it's universal.

yeah he never sez ironclad truth like Stein voters prefer Trump over Democrats

(just like the entire DemocracyNow demographic)

I don't know why I'm wasting my time on this but let me try to structure an argument instead of just taking potshots:

- If the bar here is "it's understandable, not unreasonable" for minority viewpoints to seek out appearances on RT, then it is also understandable and not unreasonable for a political campaign to emphasize its opponents relationships with a threatening, authoritarian regime, which by the way also supports policies that the campaign's platform planks are specifically opposed to: violent homophobia, violence against the press, and encroachment into allied nations' territory.

- If none of the above is valid, fine, and if this is just rhetorical and has no substance behind it (which, whatever, the only GOP platform plank Trump's campaign cared about at all was a pro-Russian stance regarding Ukraine and the Crimea) who exactly are we trying to "engage constructively" with abroad, again, and what do they need to see from us? It seems much more likely that Russian-adjacent states and others in the sphere of Russian influence might be just as impressed with strong resistance to Russian attempts to influence our politics, especially since the alleged instrument of that influence is already making a name for himself by publicly complaining about NATO allies not paying up.

- "Useful idiots" is a perfectly cromulent term when people are displaying a bewildering degree of ignorance about Putin's politics and modus operandi in pursuit of tu quoque arguments against the liberal party of the US. I often wonder whether progressive/"green" attitudes about international realpolitik and statecraft are willfully ignorant or not, but I am always willing to give folks the benefit of the doubt because on domestic policies we agree 99% of the time.

You're thinking simply in terms of states and leadership - the objective if the US wants reform in Russia and normalised relationships has to be win over the public and softly encourage a push for domestic change. Positioning Putin as a strategic mastermind pulling the strings of movements all over the world, rather than highlighting the fragility of the government, doesn't help that.

Making a point of blaming Russia for Trump also doesn't help win the trust of people with no great love for Putin but an ongoing distrust of US policymakers, particularly those called Clinton. Russia has been effective in turning pretty much every US action in the region into a conspiracy against it. Giving more ammunition with paper-thin, easily debunked allegations provides more evidence that the Democrats are out to get them.

I am not particularly defending Stein or her decision to go on RT but she has limited options. Clinton is in full control of how she chooses to attack Trump, there are a million and one options, and choosing to focus on a fairly spurious network of unproven allegations doesn't seem smart, especially if it is unnecessarily ramping up hostility between Russia and the US again.

This, from earlier today, is broadly correct '

https://t.co/UozcxQiaYx

I think "blaming Russia for Trump" is a gross exaggeration - I haven't seen anyone actually saying that, just that Trump is himself a useful idiot of the Putin regime.

I believe that highlighting the fragility and poor governance of Russia comes after the election. Right now it seems perfectly sensible to portray Putin as a clod-footed wannabe supervillain, since in this context, the narrative shoe fits quite nicely.

I don't think the principal allegations are paper-thin. The behavior of his campaign regarding the party platform is OTT. The DNC hack is pretty straightforward.
I also don't think Clinton is "choosing to focus" on these allegations - they are part of a wide range of attacks on Trump that the campaign is availing themselves of. Greenwald chose this topic for an essay because it was easy for him to write. Love the part where he pivots and says "you know who REALLY loves Russia - Hillary does!" because he doesn't even care about the issue, he just wants to take a swing at liberals.

By the way, isn't it funny how Greenwald always knows the intelligence community is full of lying liars who lie like dogs up until one of them says something that superficially supports his argument ("we have not found a link between the emails on wikileaks and the Russians")?

Just wants to point out, the intelligence guy didn't say they have no link between the emails and Russia, they're saying there's no evidence of the Russians giving the mails to wikileaks. There's evidence that the Russians got the mails, but who knows, perhaps a completely different and undetected hacking attack were the ones wikileaks used.

I think the way Greenwald puts it is quite misleading.

xps,

If the commentary was limited to "Trump is a sucker who Putin thinks he can manipulate" or "Trump is a liability who Putin thinks will run the US into the ground" you wouldn't have had half of the most prominent Russia-critics in the press lining up to trash it. The theme of a lot, but clearly not all, of the pieces is that Russia is propping up and giving orders to Trump - either directly or via Manafort / the mystery investors nobody actually knows are real or not. The comment i was responding to this morning specifically questioned whether Trump might actually be "Kremlin stooge".

The same Russia critics, who are more invested than anyone else in pushing the idea of a liberal Russian centre taking power, suggesting that this line is actively harmful to domestic Russian politics should give those pushing it pause. Greenwald's motivations are neither here nor there - listen to the people who have literally written the book on Why Putin Is Bad.

I'd be more comfortable if i thought that Clinton was able to redirect to a more nuanced policy when she takes power but, either way, competing to out-hawk the Republicans has the potential to do damage greater than whatever short term gains she believes she can get from it.

At the very least, getting someone to put a sock in Mike Morell would probably be a start:

https://twitter.com/newgreatgame/status/762827567472664576

Iranians need to "pay a price" for supporting Shia militias in Iraq during the war and the US should be killing Russians and Iranians in Syria and "making sure Moscow and Tehran know about it" - btw, vote Hilary! She's not responsible for him but he's not exactly helping.

From the article you called "broadly correct:"

Still, it is striking just how far the same conspiratorial thinking has permeated the West. Commentators see Mr. Putin behind everything from Brexit and the wave of euroskepticism in Western Europe to the rise of Donald J. Trump in America.

"Some people say..."

If the commentary was limited to "Trump is a sucker who Putin thinks he can manipulate" or "Trump is a liability who Putin thinks will run the US into the ground"

This is most of the reasonable commentary, and is also the angle of the campaign. The Manchurian Candidate crap is on the fringe and is not being embraced by the majority of supporters, much less the campaign itself. You and Greenwald are characterizing this as if all but Clinton herself have come out and called Trump a Kremlin plant, when in fact what most people are saying is "Trump is such a jackass, he might as well be acting on behalf of the current Russian government."

Oh, come on. The theme of the attack ad was clearly an insinuation that there's far more going on than that. The New York Times, Slate, Washington Post, etc, etc articles are hardly on the lunatic fringe either.

Nobody disputes that Trump is such a jackass he might as well be acting on behalf of countries that want to disrupt the US' position in the world but that's not why this is drawing such a lot of criticism from Russia analysts.

None of the Russia analysts I know are wasting time criticizing the Clinton campaign.

What is disturbing with the “blame Putin” stance endorsed by serious Western politicians, analysts and news media outlets is that it makes the Russian leader appear omnipotent while making the rest of us seem impotent.

This is absurdly bad. No citations of the grossly exaggerated viewpoint he claims to have seen - but it's endorsed by serious Western politicians! Funny how I forgot all those links to "PUTIN DID THIS" articles on the Brexit thread.

So thinking about this more and trying to understand your perspective better, I get the feeling that *any* angle that portrays Putin as being especially competent or influential, beyond his clod-footed supervillain schtick, is something that Russia experts (especially expat experts) urgently want to push back on, because from that point of view Putin needs to be relentlessly portrayed as the bad joke that he is, not as somebody who can cleverly employ a range of dirty tricks to undermine the West. Am I getting warm?

From my perspective this has very little to do with the portrayal of Putin as a cunning mastermind - he's clearly not - and is instead all about portraying Trump as a readily manipulated jackass etc. as above.

And it's really got nothing at all to do with red-baiting, which is where Greenwald was heading, until he decided to throw his argument out halfway through and turn on Hillary as the REAL Russian stooge in this election.

It varies from expert to expert - some are more keen than others to hype up the international risk Putin poses, most would accept that he has strengths and areas of competence along with the structural weaknesses of the system.

I think there is a fairly broad agreement that, separate from the issue of sanctions, there's an element of truth in the idea that the more unpopular Putin is abroad, the better he does at home. There's a large constituency within Russia that views US policy post-communism as not just designed to 'contain' Russia within its borders but to actively weaken it domestically. It's accepted almost universally that the policy of immediate privatisation of state resources encouraged by the US, and the perceived collusion in handing most of the assets over to organised criminals, wasn't just done out of a belief in the value of capitalism to bring its own civil reforms, it was to weaken the structure of the state so it couldn't pose such a concerted threat again. It's also widely believed that the US had a hand in effectively rigging the 1996 election because they saw Yeltsin as the same kind of easily-manipulated buffoon Trump appears to be. This isn't just hurt pride - there's a perception that the US, IMF, etc contributed to a decline in living standards that took ten years off the average life expectancy. The theme that 'Russia will no longer live on its knees' is a precursor to Make America Great Again, with more justification.

Making out that Putin has brought Russia back to a level where it can pull the strings of everyone from Alex Tspiras to Marine Le Pen to Donald Trump and materially influence the direction of the EU and the US is what a lot of people who lived through those years want to hear.

At the same time, you have a lot of people, particularly in the bigger cities, who are incredibly well-educated, often well traveled, speak English, keep an eye on the international news, etc - the same constituency that a few of the better attempted-reformers in Ukraine come from - who look at the fevered headlines about Russia posing "more of a threat to Europe than ISIS", who see double standards over intervention in Syria, who (and we can disagree on the degree to which it is being done) see America's ugly racist baby, Trump, being pinned on the Kremlin and conclude that nothing has changed since 1991. These tend to be the kind of people i work with - not instinctive Putin supporters, the kind of people who genuinely love the UK, Italy, France, etc, - and who tell me they're ground down by the relentless hyperbole.

tldr, to maintain credibility and not play into Putin's hands the criticism of Russia needs to be credible and proportionate. I honestly don't know how anyone can look at the Clinton video, which was immediately picked up by Sputnik, KP, etc, and suggest that the intended takeaway is 'huh, that Trump guy's a jackass'.

idk if Greenwald is making a case that leftist ideology has a major part to play in the perceived demonisation of Russia. Leftists who do are typically off the mark. Where i think there is a legitimate case for a certain amount of political scepticism (not neglecting the very real domestic and international problems the Russian government poses) is in the use of Russia as a justification for lavish spending on conventional / nuclear weapons (there was a Telegraph article this morning fretting that Britain is "outgunned", for example) and the ongoing willingness to turn a blind eye to some of the appalling people vying to take Russia and neighbouring countries out of the current government's control / sphere of influence. Lauding murderous oligarchs as freedom fighters, downplaying the influence of the far right, etc, is even more counterproductive and deserves as much of a push back as anything else.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/08/12/the_latest_evidence_that_russia_was_behind_the_dnc_hack.html

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/weakness-not-strength

Really good points imo

First is to make what I believe is the straightforward point that anyone who says that Russia poses a huge threat to the United States or that Russia is 'on the march' or outflanking the US or whatever else is simply wrong.

I think his point that Russia is weak is well-taken, but I think there's also an argument to be made that the weakest actors (ISIS, NK) can be the most dangerous. I don't think Russia's weakness necessitates that they are no longer dangerous - and in fact they may be more so than if they felt strong + secure.

Imo another important point often missing comes when people talk about the west being too 'confrontational' towards Russia. But Russia repressed, invaded and cleansed a whole lot of it's neighborhood, and naturally a lot of their neighbors have 'confrontational' impulses towards them. The NATO expansion hasn't been forced through over the head of the eastern european nations.

It's also a bit annoying when articles are written about expansion of NATO and the discussion becomes 'well is it really in the US interest?' There are other countries in NATO...

Presumably, a stable and safe Europe is in the US interest and was always the point of NATO. Any NATO expansion that strengthens the alliance should be sought and any expansion that weakens it should be avoided. Those which are essentially neutral in terms of NATO's strength or weakness as a military alliance may legitimately be viewed through the more parochial lens of national interest.

It's just that there are just other nations in NATO than the US, with other interests.

Sure, but since the USA is the dominant partner in NATO, I would think that, for example, a Danish political writer whose sympathies were with Danish national interests might wish to analyze whether those interests align with US interests, or if on the contrary the US interest was likely to oppose that of Denmark - purely on practical political grounds.

There are relatively few ex-Eastern-Bloc countries where the idea of joining NATO doesn't have some public support, Serbia is probably the main example, but it's usually a fairly divisive domestic issue. The Russian-speaking minorities in Latvia and Estonia, who make up a fairly large chunk of the populations of both countries, have tended to be mostly opposed to membership. It's not such a huge issue in the Baltics as they don't let the Russian-speakers vote the wider benefits of being part of the European bloc have compensated but it has always been extremely controversial in Ukraine. Kuchma and Yushchenko gave clear indications that they wanted to take the country into NATO, and would have done so against the wishes of about half the country. Yanukovich was officially 'non-aligned'. Following the coup/revolution, the idea that the country was going to be bounced into membership contributed to the hostility to the new government in the South and East. There are similar situations in Moldova, Georgia and Armenia. Aside from wider geopolitical considerations, actively courting new membership has the potential to destabilise the countries you're trying to bring in.

the way the ethnic Russian minorities get treated in Finland, Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania is actually kind of astounding.
Fun fact: Finland was briefly part of the Axis in WW2. If that gives you an inkling of how they feel about Russians.

nothing to see here folks move along
https://twitter.com/evanasmith/status/765021374960185344

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439060/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible

Shortly after the commission began its work, however, an incident occurred that reminded Russians of just how mysterious the apartment bombings were. In March, the newspaper Noviye Izvestiya announced the result of its investigation into the fact that Gennady Seleznev, the speaker of the Duma and a close associate of Putin, had announced the bombing in Volgodonsk on September 13 — three days before it occurred. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the Liberal Democratic party, told journalists that same day what Seleznev had said, but they could not confirm it, so it was not reported. On September 16, however, the building in Volgodonsk really was blown up, and on September 17 Zhirinovsky demanded an explanation of how Seleznev had known about the bombing in advance.

“Do you see what is happening in this country?” he said, shouting and gesticulating from the podium in the Duma. “You say an apartment building was blown up on Monday and it explodes on Thursday. This can be evaluated as a provocation.” Seleznev avoided responding, and Zhirinovsky had his microphone turned off when he persisted in demanding an explanation.

In March 2002, however, Noviye Izvestiya succeeded in obtaining the transcript of what Seleznev had said on September 13, 1999. His precise words were: “Here is a communication which they transmit. According to a report from Rostov-on-Don today, this past night, an apartment house was blown up in the city of Volgodonsk.” The newspaper asked him who had informed him about the bombing in Volgodonsk three days before it happened. He answered, “Believe me, not [exiled oligarch Boris] Berezovsky,” who had accused Putin of orchestrating the bombing. In this way, he indicated that he was well aware of who, in reality, had given him the information.

Seleznev then told the newspaper that, on September 13, he had been referring to an explosion on September 15 that was part of a war between criminal gangs and had not claimed any victims. Seleznev’s explanation, however, raised more questions than it answered. It was hard to understand why such an insignificant incident needed to be reported to the speaker of the Duma at a time when apartment buildings were being blown up, with hundreds of deaths. And even if Seleznev had been referring to a minor criminal conflict in Volgodonsk, how was it possible that he had been informed about it two days in advance?

the way the ethnic Russian minorities get treated in Finland, Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania is actually kind of astounding.
Fun fact: Finland was briefly part of the Axis in WW2. If that gives you an inkling of how they feel about Russians.

― El Tomboto, Sunday, August 14, 2016 2:04 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh, that's an interesting way of putting it. they were invaded by the Soviet Union and so went to war with them, as the Allies were, well allied with the Soviet Union, they were pretty much out of options for who to be allied to. Britain actually declared war with Finland at this time - maybe the U.S. too - making it one of the few (only?) times two democracies have been at war with each other - though there was no actual fighting between the two countries.

The Manchurian Candidate crap is on the fringe and is not being embraced by the majority of supporters, much less the campaign itself. You and Greenwald are characterizing this as if all but Clinton herself have come out and called Trump a Kremlin plant, when in fact what most people are saying is "Trump is such a jackass, he might as well be acting on behalf of the current Russian government."

Robby Mook, yesterday:

“There’s a web of financial interests that have not been disclosed,” he said. “And there are real questions being raised about whether Donald Trump himself is just a puppet for the Kremlin in this race.”

Still banging on about this after Manafort has gone.

I think there's a not unreasonable question regarding how much and who has invested in Trump's businesses (esp if they are $650m in debt) and whether that would impact his policy decisions. Making that out like it's a conspiracy theory is even too Russia apologetic for you. If donations to a charitable foundation are fair game than actual investments in his personal assets are certainly fair game. It doesn't mean he's a puppet but it may mean that he doesn't think it's wise to piss off his business partners.

Yes, those are reasonable questions and Trump's investments (none of which are currently linked to Russians, let alone the Kremlin) are fair game. Presidential candidates should be forced to disclose their business investors - as they're not, he should disclose them himself or journalists should work to uncover them.

The gap between that and Clinton's spokesperson making the same Manchurian Candidates allegations specifically referred to as "crap on the fringe" in this thread is rather large, though.

lol I totally knew why this thread came back up. I have to concede / agree that what Mr. Mook said on the teevee was kind of ludicrous

apparently it's pronounced "muhk" instead of "moooook"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vw8t4O9JQM

Trump's investments (none of which are currently linked to Russians, let alone the Kremlin)

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

backtracking to the jill stein on RT conversation - i finally watched it and she literally says that “human rights really resonate here." idk how someone can claim she was just using RT as a platform and it had nothing to do w/ sympathy to russia, unless i guess you think that comment was entirely disingenuous and she was just being polite.

I think she was just being a moron, as usual

I took it as if she meant human rights really resonated at the conference, not in Russia in general. But she was at an RT sponsored propaganda event, she was taking part in a conference organized by the propaganda outlet of an autocratic regime that regularly murders it's enemies.

whereas HRC is just personal friends with such people

Stein is NOT PERFECT (TM)

I don't know Stein, and RT is obviously staffed by scumbags, but I'm not sure appearing on RT (or even being paid to write a column for their website) is the same as endorsing it, just as it is with Fox News or whatever media company.

How about traveling to Russia to participate in an RT organized conference attended by Vladimir Putin?

I don't know. I suppose if you think the possibility of positive change is worth the potential damage to your reputation, then maybe?

He, I was going to write something like that exactly to attack Stein. Because, yeah, foreign policy is messy and ugly and involves getting your hands dirty. Which is why I don't condemn HRC for what happened in Haiti or Honduras, she was forced to act under difficult circumstances. But what on earth could be the potential positive change coming from Jill Stein participating in Russian propaganda? She's a nobody who's elected experience amounts to two terms as a town meeting elective in Lexington Massachusetts, with no foreign policy experience whatsoever. She has no power, no influence, nothing whatsoever.

I'm not sure anyone was forcing Clinton to back antidemocratic regimes in Haiti or Honduras when the majority of regional players were firmly behind the alternatives. She did it because she felt it was in the best interests of the US.

fwiw, the RT conference was primarily about 'alternative' news media and its relationship to power in contemporary politics and had speakers from Telesur, 24 hour news in India and the BBC. Stein was on a panel conversation with the former London mayor Ken Livingstone, the former CDU Deputy Prime Minister of the Czech Republic and the former head of the OSCE (the group currently monitoring the Ukraine ceasefire). The whole thing's online if you have 45 minutes to tip down the drain.

Stein may be a moron and i have an inherent distrust of chiropractors to begin with but it doesn't require much speculation as to why she might be interested in news outlets outside of the mainstream.

Stein was on a panel conversation with the former London mayor Ken Livingstone

... bit of an own goal there.

Yes I edited out the preface 'increasingly odd' before his name. There were crankier cranks there too.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/neera-tanden-2016-election-227494

An HRC policy advisor says Russia are funding all the right wing parties in Europe and it's common knowledge. I do note this seems to be in the context of allowing people to infer Putin is behind Trump.

“If you're in Europe, the Russians are openly funding the far-right groups, from [Britain’s] UKIP to [French political leader] Marine Le Pen ... There is widespread knowledge among the center-left parties that that is a rising development,” Tanden added.

Russia is also accused of funding left-wing parties in Greece, Serbia, Spain, etc, without much evidence as well.

No UKIP ties to Russia have ever been uncovered - the sources of the majority of their funding (and the Leave.EU) funding are fairly well established.

Le Pen got a loan from a Russian bank when European banks refused to lend to the FN.

Russian news tends to be soft on both of them but there's no 'funding' or control established.

The alternatives in Honduras or Haiti were hardly perfectly democratic either. That was pretty much the dillema.

They were, however, elected.

Well, elections aren't everything. Clinton called for elections to end the Honduras coup, and I suspect you disagree with that.

We have discussed this before but realpolitik is neither an explanation nor an excuse for backing the Honduran coup opposed by the UN, EU and OAS.

No, it's definitely an explanation.

"backing the Honduran coup" = this is bullshit, SV, which you know and should be above

It has been discussed extensively in the past but she worked to legitimise the post-coup government - to the point at which she was more or less claiming that the coup never took place. This does not mean she was responsible for, or involved in the planning, of the coup itself.

She legitimized it insofar as she said that what's done is done and now new elections need to be held. Unless you are attached to the word "legitimize" (because it is suggestive?) I think a different term might be in order. Like, she didn't condemn the coup sufficiently, or back the removed gov sufficiently. But that is not equivalent to legitimizing it - or if it is, that's an interpretation of the meaning of State's actions, not an indisputable one.

Ppl say that she legitimized the coup bc that's a v easy paradigm thru which to condemn her + State. But if you state what actually happened - there was a coup w/out State participation and they decided the best course of action was shepherding the country towards new elections rather than fight about the coup - it's harder to condemn them.

And she didn't claim the coup never took place, she refused to use the word coup. Which is still shitty, but a different thing.

there was a good reason for not using the term that isn't v shitty. once something is a coup there are mechanics in place that suspend all foreign aid to that country. if the US wanted to continue to deliver aid, they couldn't officially call it a coup. see also: egypt.

Well, that is a sorta shitty reason. Not giving US aid to military dictatorships is, in theory, a pretty good idea. It is, however, another area where realpolitik explains why the US would react differently than the EU and the OAS.

Her exact words were that there was "a strong argument they had followed the law" iirc.

The call for new elections was never neutral. One of the reasons it was rejected by the EU, OAS, etc was that the coup government couldn't be trusted to run them fairly. As it turned out, this was correct - they were characterised by ballot stuffing and the extensive use of death squads. Clinton didn't just call for new elections, she lobbied OAS states to change their position on them.

It is arguably not in the top 50 worst things done by the US government in the last twenty years but an odd Hill for anyone to wish to die on.

Capitalisation entirely unintentional there.

Nobody is dying on any hill here, nobody thinks the coup was a good thing. But that's an odd thing to say when this discussion began with you defending freaking Jill Stein participating in Russian propaganda...

freaking Frederik

Yeah, that's my punk band.

here is actually what she said SV:

Well, let me again try to put this in context. The legislature, the national legislature in Honduras and the national judiciary actually followed the law in removing President Zelaya. Now I didn’t like the way it looked or the way they did it but they had a very strong argument that they had followed the constitution and the legal precedence. And as you know, they really undercut their argument by spiriting him out of the country in his pajamas, where they sent the military to take him out of his bed and get him out of the country. So this began as a very mixed and difficult situation.

If the United States government declares a coup, you immediately have to shut off all aid including humanitarian aid, the Agency for International Development aid, the support that we were providing at that time for a lot of very poor people, and that triggers a legal necessity. There’s no way to get around it. So our assessment was, we will just make the situation worse by punishing the Honduran people if we declare a coup and we immediately have to stop all aid for the people, but we should slow walk and try to stop anything that the government could take advantage of without calling it a coup.

so yes technically she suggested that they followed the law but as you can see that she places that in heavy context

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/07/kremlin-backed-broadcaster-rt-offers-nigel-farage-his-own-show/

i was thinking how the explanation that trump is a putin sucker is not really satisfactory bc really what we're seeing is an international right emerge much like the international left had years earlier. interestingly both spearheaded by respective russian govs but in the case of the international right w/ much more cache already in the west and so instead of mccarthyism we mostly just get throwaway insinuations that greenwald quickly denounces as democratic red-baiting.

which it is

xo

how is accusing trump of being an asset of a fascist "red-baiting" exactly? do you know what red-baiting means?

or do u think putin is a communist? i want to know what form ur dumbassery takes.

Putin *was* a Communist, fuckface

Dems know most Americans have no idea

lolololol u are so dumb i love it

some ppl on the left went from "free pussy riot" to "all hail emperor putin" so quietly it's like they thought no one would notice

kiss me then, asshole xp

i think it's kiss me i'm irish not kiss me i believe linking putin to trump has something to do w/ fearmongering about communism

The international right being 'spearheaded by Russia' is a ludicrous stretch. Russia's primary involvement is running a TV station that occasionally signal boosts people on the democratic fringes of the left and the right opposed to governments it has a beef with. The international right is spearheaded by racist voters and traditional domestic media.

i guess if you read something besides RT you might be aware of Russian involvement in right-wing movements in the world outside of simple propaganda.

at least in europe i suppose that russian support for right wing movements could be correlated more with the desire to disrupt the current order of a regional rival (see also russian support for tsirpas in greece on the left) and/or some kind of calculation about keeping oil dependencies where they are, but this might be a charitable reading.

so maybe, again for the european case, 'bankrolled by' replaces 'spearheaded by' but the force of the sentiment isn't much changed.

It's not even bankrolled by. The strongest financial link is that the NF got a loan from a bank in Russia when banks in other countries wouldn't lend to them. Neera Tanden might claim that Russia is 'openly' funding UKIP but there is absolutely no evidence of it.

It also completely ignores the divisions with the different nationalist groups. The FN and PVV have traditionally been sympathetic to Russian positions vs the rest of the EU, AfD and True Finns have traditionally been hostile. Sweden Democrats are seen as friendly, the DPP is seen as strongly opposed. The head of hard-right Slovak government has talked about dialing down sanctions, the head of the hard-right Polish government believes Putin conspired with the President of the EU to blow up his twin brother.

UKIP draws its success from the British tabloids, endemic racism and failures in domestic policy. The NF is the same. The idea that Russia has any real influence over either is ridiculous. It's a fantasy for people who want to believe there are easy causes and easy solutions to a continent-wide crisis.

the head of the hard-right Polish government believes Putin conspired with the President of the EU to blow up his twin brother.

Won't find too many Poles, no matter their politics, who are sympathetic towards Russia, or Russians. Not ime anyway.

Yep, and that underlines a lot of the broader divisions. Lots of members of the far-right across Europe see Russia as a bulwark against the EU, lots believe there's an unbroken line between the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia and have carried old grievances across.

Quite a few of the Neo-Nazis who have gone off to fight in Ukraine (both domestic and international ones) view it as a continuation of an anti-Communist struggle despite Russia being in no way Communist at the moment.

Wait, who are the DPP? The Danish People Party? Because fuck no, they aren't 'strongly opposed'.

Things may have changed over the last year but the Swedish journalist Patrik Oksanen mapped voting patterns in the European parliament against what were seen as pro or anti Russian positions and the Danish People's Party came out as one of the least friendly in Europe. DK tended to take the opposite side.

https://eublogg.wordpress.com/2015/01/10/russia-index-11-new-eu-sceptic-parties-added/

Though iirc they were open to the idea of Crimea joining Russia.

That's another factor that splits some of the far-right movements. Some, like Lega Nord, are in favour of separatists being able to reshape borders, for obvious reasons, others are opposed.

DPP in the EU is a shitshow, the main guy just resigned as leader after having misused European funding for personal purposes. Plus they constituted with British tories - while SD are with UKIP - and probably voted like them. But DPP politicians has praised Putin over and over and over. Don't just use one silly stat to make such broad statements, I'm telling you, from Denmark, where I live, that they in no way are strongly opposed to Russia.

I'll bow to your experience on that - but to what extent do you link their popularity to Russian influence?

I don't know, really. There's not a big bank loan as with FN, nor is there an agreement of partnership with United Russia, as with Lega Nord, and to the best of my knowledge they aren't using RT either. I guess it's just that they're moving in an autocratic direction - Danish politicians are openly discussing whether Denmark could use 'illiberal democracy' at the moment - and Putin is a right wing autocrat like themselves. One guy tweeted, as Christiania was in the news again, that Putin would have gotten rid of them in half an hour. They're more and more willing to discard rule of law and order, so Putin seems more and more okay.

I think you have hit the nail on the head with managed / illiberal democracy. I don't think it is easy to place Putin on a traditional left-wing axis but that model of Singaporean corporate autocratic rule is attractive to a lot of parties with no strong ideological commitment to Liberal democracy. That is both in the sense of 'getting things done' and also in relation to the idea that Russia has taken back control of its destiny from the forces of globalisation. Neither of which is particularly true in reality.

Should have been left-right axis.

flashback Friday

‏@ggreenwald
Check out this awesome 2012 campaign poster from Dems - mocking Romney for Russia-phobia

https://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/obama-camp-mocks-romney-with-fake-rocky-iv-movie?utm_term=.jx0N1yBnK#.qjoNzKAnb

xp SV I think your splitting hairs. The international left wasn't just AstroTurf either - it had real causes and authentic local impetuses. But it found institutional expression and respect in left wing global leadership in the USSR. You could of course be a communist and have nothing to do with the Soviets but that doesn't preclude them from having a driving role in the ideological spread.

the comintern literally directed pro-soviet communist parties' policies tho, there's not really any comparison

not really surprising that the far right are stoked on putin: tough guy irredentist, nationalist, authoritarian presiding over a deeply christian, racist, and homophobic society

Jim otm x 2

My major fear is that Europe and the U.S. are potentially sliding into a mild and very slow-motion version of the post-Soviet crisis in Russia: a decline in living standards, an increase in the cost of living, the decimation of traditional industries, a ramping up of racial animosity, the concentration of more wealth in the hands of a small elite, the concentration of media power in the hands of an even smaller elite, a loss of confidence in the market and globalisation with no ideological alternative on the agenda, a loss of faith in 'experts' and ultimately a lack of belief that voting changes anything. Some of that might be imagined but some is real. These were the conditions that essentially led to Russia turning away from 'western democratic' models and opting for patrician nationalist autocracy in the belief (correct in many regards) that it would work out better form them if they did. Blaming a lack of faith in democratic parties in Russia is like a mild smoker blaming their cough on a chronic emphysema sufferer.

*on Russia*

"i was thinking how the explanation that trump is a putin sucker is not really satisfactory bc really what we're seeing is an international right emerge much like the international left had years earlier. interestingly both spearheaded by respective russian govs but in the case of the international right w/ much more cache already in the west and so instead of mccarthyism we mostly just get throwaway insinuations that greenwald quickly denounces as democratic red-baiting."

dae get the impression that an international ultranationalist consensus might be a bit of a tricky equilibrium to maintain?

the way they currently square that circle is "looking out for your nations interests is a good thing and even if you disagree w Putin you have to respect how he pursues his country's interests" you sometimes see similar sentiments about Bibi. It's like ideological nationalism as opposed to circumstantial nationalism

Krugman all over this today:

www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/opinion/thugs-and-kisses.html

An aside: Weirdly, some people think there’s a contradiction between Democratic mocking of the Trump/Putin bromance and President Obama’s mocking of Mitt Romney, four years ago, for calling Russia our “No. 1 geopolitical foe.” But there isn’t: Russia has a horrible regime, but as Mr. Obama said, it’s a “regional power,” not a superpower like the old Soviet Union.

Finally, what about soft power, the ability to persuade through the attractiveness of one’s culture and values? Russia has very little — except, maybe, among right-wingers who find Mr. Putin’s macho posturing and ruthlessness attractive.

He's absolutely right that Russia has passed up the opportunity for a tech boom but failure to acknowledge that the domestic economic landscape would have been different had the Yeltsin model continued into the oil boom years is pretty silly. Sticking to the line that Putin retains power simply through fraud and intimidation is neither true nor instructive about what drives his popularity - and tells you nothing about what might drive the nascent popularity of foreign
leaders aiming to emulate him.

...and what is this if not the skillful use of soft cultural power:

https://s21.postimg.org/47fnt7esn/3000.jpg

is that Steven Seagal

Hell yeah it's Steven Seagal.

https://s9.postimg.org/ycjxhqhj3/1044636661.jpg

^ tasting Lukashenko's personal carrots.

Posting largely as an excuse for another Seagal pic but the more i think about the Krugman article, the more it annoys me. The critique he, and everyone else should be making, is that Russia would be in a much better economic position than it is without the ongoing tolerance / promulgation of cronyism and corruption. That's about as clear-cut as it can get.

Attempting to argue that the only thing that changed between the point at which teachers were being paid in vodka because there was literally no money in regional budgets, people with PhDs were dying of malnutrition for lack of employment / state support, etc and now is the price of oil is beneath Krugman and i suspect he knows it.

'Hand oil rights over to a gangster? Expropriate them for the state? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, doesn't really matter either way if the price of oil is going up' is not the kind of argument you'd normally find Krugman making.

Pretending that the only defining characteristic Putin has is his badness - and therefore any attraction to his leadership must be because of that badness (as though autocracy is a new invention the likes of Trump have only just heard about) is the same kind of analysis that leads to the quasi-racial-science of 'unlike the true European, the Russian needs a brutal leader to be happy', which gets trotted out on the reg to explain why conventional liberal politics has such a weak grasp outside of Moscow and SPB (or even inside them).

Either there is a growing fear about the ability of globalism / capitalism to maintain prosperity or the country who's biggest PR coup of recent months is getting the star of Die Hard to fondle Belarussian watermelons secretly controls some of the most effective political machines of the new right and the new left.

https://s15.postimg.org/baukaeqez/seagal_watermelons.jpg

I suspect it's the former, which is why it's positive to hear Clinton talking more over the last week about the need to appeal to the section of Trump's support that wants radical change, irrespective of where it comes from, and less about how the Kremlin is trying to lure kids to the dark side with the rarest of Pepes.

https://s15.postimg.org/baukaeqez/seagal_watermelons.jpg

Appalling typos throughout that post, apologies.

Not least mistaking Under Siege for Die Hard - it's early.

lol, he's thinking about thos carrots

"Steve Seagal At Russian arms fairs" also yields some good returns on google image

https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-s-intel-officials-probe-ties-between-trump-adviser-and-kremlin-175046002.html

This is an interesting profile of Carter Page, or rather non-profile:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/the-mystery-of-trumps-man-in-moscow-214283

Almost nobody seems to know who he is, in Russia or the U.S. He looks like a total chancer.

As for the FBI investigation, well, it’s unclear. A State Department official who works on Russia sanctions but was not authorized to speak on the record told me that, for one thing, there is “no prohibition meeting with a designated sanctioned individual.” Moreover, sanctions violations are not criminal in nature and not enforced by FBI. OFAC runs them.” He added, “the story doesn't add up.” What does seem to have happened is that various U.S. intelligence agencies were looking into Page’s time in Moscow, then briefed Senate minority leader, Democrat Harry Reid, who wrote a letter to FBI Director James Comey asking him to investigate, among other things, “whether a Trump advisor who has been highly critical of U.S. and European economic sanctions on Russia, and who has conflicts of interest due to investments in Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom, met with high-ranking sanctioned individuals while in Moscow in July of 2016, well after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee.

heh! those Fancy Bears hackers should get some kind of award for outing Wiggins as a cheat. The way some go on about the Brit sense of fair play and how their athletes are clean as a whistle. Time to return some golds then, you fucking paragons of fair play.

he can't be a cheat he likes The Jam

I was thinking of that famous Clough line to the Leeds '74 squad.

Wiggins followed the rules. I hate the guy, but he didn't cheat. Russians hacked and leaked personal data of fellow athletes, and at this point the country quite honestly needs to be banned from international competition. They're a danger to athletes in other countries.

me and calzino constitute a kangaroo court outside of international law and we say Ban Wiggins

If we're discussing British cycling cheats, how about the crash Mark Cavendish caused in the Omnium? He should have been disqualified for that. Yeah, no special sense of fair play from western athletes, but there's still a bit of way from that to state sponsored doping scheme and using cyber orgs to retaliate against other athletes.

i'm sure Cavendish is just awful but he doesn't have a Weller haircut and collection of union jack themed underwear

IS WELLER AN EVIL EMPIRE YES OR YES

I don't care if Cavedish is having weekly blood transfusions to cover his doping, as far as I know he hasn't jammed with Weller.

The British press has definitely got the knives out for Wiggins - Newsnight practically called him a cheat, The Sunday Times said that his 2012 Tour de France win should have an asterisk placed after it, described his response as "laughable" etc. It sounds like they have been waiting to get this one started for a while. he doesn't seem to be well liked, separate from the allegations.

As Team Britain stacked up medals in track cycling, I read people questioning why the brits did so much better there than they did the rest of the year. The defense was strategic training, but we now know that strategic - 'legal' - injections has a lot to do with it. I guess most in the sport always knew, and that there's build up resentment.

US accuses Russia of 'barbarism' in Aleppo:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-37468080

Zbigniew Brzezinski
‏@zbig
In its waning months, Obama admin should privately reiterate to Russia that any Baltic incursion would mean war. Not a threat, simply fact.

@DougHenwood
Dems are hot to go to war with Russia. Nuts.

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/chechen-leader-accused-of-child-cruelty-after-entering-preteen-sons-in-televised-cage-fights-35111673.html#-/web/-1475840635130-trackingCode-l8TGeQ69BeNyeYeWN/nX2fel4BLVnZvK2r9qbEIVsgQ=-articleId-372714925-vv-7ff13765-61dc-4069-8a08-c3ab1ef5da15

“Little Adam proved that he is a real lion!” Mr Kadyrov wrote under one Instagram video of the fighting.

"World Star!" Mr Kadyrov wrote under one Instagram video of the fighting.

As someone who lives on the coast of the Baltic sea, I would really really like a security commitment in this area...

There is a small security commitment called NATO that you may be familiar with. idk if hyping up a risk that pretty much only exists in the minds of pundits would make a great deal of sense - particularly with a live and real risk of conflagration over Syria on the horizon.

This stuff isn't neutral. Russia isn't going to invade Estonia but continually emphasising the idea that Russian Estonians are a nefarious fifth column is going to have an impact on their already appalling treatment.

A very good friend of mine is a Russian Lithuanian, and she would like security commitments as well. I'm familiar with NATO, but I've also seen people, including a presidential candidate, say that it perhaps shouldn't really count with regards to the Baltics.

given putin's demonstrated imperial ambition i think it's understandable for people in the region to be anxious, and especially in the context of this american election wherected nato commitment has been something of a talking point

If Trump got in, I'm not sure what assurances Obama gave now would be worth. Russia invading the EU would and should lead to an armed response from NATO - it isn't a matter of serious discussion and is one of the many reasons Russia isn't going to invade the EU. The commitments are already in place. The rest is hot air. If Obama wanted to send a strong message, making the same commitment to Georgia, where there is an existing territorial dispute, would have more substance.

Weeeelllll let's not get carried away...

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/10/russia-and-the-2016-campaign

...And then Trump happened, and suddenly a massive vulnerability of the Democratic candidate became a significant asset. Just as suddenly, the Russian state suddenly had an ideologically sympathetic candidate to support. Crazy. To all appearances, this opportunity seems to have just dropped into Russia’s lap; to my mind, there’s little plausible evidence to indicate that Russia played any significant role in inspiring Trump to run, or in helping him prevail in the GOP primary. But given such an opportunity, the Russian intelligence services are running with it. Allies such as Wikileaks (I still think it’s wrong to refer to Assange as a Russian proxy; he has his own reasons, personal and ideological, for disliking Clinton) have actively supported this effort.

As an aside, it’s worth discussing against this backdrop the still-puzzling affinity that some leftish outfits (the Nation, obviously, but others) still have for Russian state propaganda. The reluctance in these quarters to grant that Russia has preferences regarding the 2016 US presidential election, and that it is actively pursuing those preferences, is genuinely odd. Part of this (paging Stephen Cohen) can be ascribed to the long-term habits of the Cold War, and a failure to notice that Russia had ceased to be even a rump revolutionary state, and had become an activist reactionary power. Some undoubtedly results from the fact that Putin was, indeed, on the correct side of the Iraq War debate, and that Russian media outlets in the United States (RT most notably) actively took an antagonistic stance towards the Bush administration. Some surely stems from residual gratitude for Russia’s role in promoting Julian Assange and harboring Edward Snowden, even as it has become apparent that Assange, at least, is more reactionary crank than progressive force. And related to this, there seems to be an implicit, undercurrent belief in some quarters that any political actor capable of resisting US foreign policy, even one which has become as actively pernicious and anti-progressive as Russia, is worth offering at least measured support. In any case, it sure would be nice if one of the flagship magazines of the American left was capable of noticing what the Russian state has become.

What would the main three or four flagship magazines of the American left be, in this context?

Other than cranks like Stop The War, most of the high-volume pushback i've seen against the Trump / Putin narrative has been from people who have also been historically critical of Putin, as has been discussed in the past. I don't think i could name a single credible left-wing outlet that genuinely seems to think that Russia is part of the international left.

Counterpunch, maybe, though idk if they're particularly credible.

Intercept?

Intercept is owned by the guy demonised in Russia for working with USAID to foment the Maidan uprising. It also publishes one of the most extreme of the mainstream Putin critics, in Masha Gessen, or has in the past:

https://theintercept.com/2015/09/08/how-putin-controls-the-russian-internet/

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/15/putin-doesnt-need-to-censor-books-publishers-do-it-for-him/

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/19/for-russia-censors-only-suicide-is-worse-than-homosexuality/

etc, etc

Greenwald himself has been critical:

https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/whats-behind-obamas-ongoing-accommodation-of-vladimir-putin/

The Intercept has also published a hell of a lot of softball pieces on Al-Nusra and ex-Soviet fighters in Syria.

Yet Greenwald keeps describing claims of ties to Russia as McCarthyite, which is pretty nonsensical.

The term "McCarthyite" has been used pretty extensively for the last fifty years to describe irrational political witch-hunts irrespective of whether leftism is involved.

There is also a line of continuity with that irrational paranoia from the 80s, even if Russia has changed. The perception that Russia never actually de-Communised and the Soviet government just morphed into the present one is more common on the liberal centre-right than on the left imo.

that is not an opinion i've ever heard. i think the conventional liberal wisdom about russia is that after the fall of communism it devolved into an oligarchic society w/ a strongman fascist leader.

if you can find a liberal pundit who says that today's russia is just a new form of soviet communism i'd be very interested to read it

I think the thinking is more that the late eighties Soviet government was more authoritarian oligarchy anyways, so no difference there? Putin being a KGB officer and all that.

feel like that's substantively different from communism as an ideological threat

Joy Ann Reid described Putin as "communist" fairly recently, but that's beside the point.

Not so much a new form of Soviet communism but there are two fairly mainstream views about the continuity of power. The starting point for both is that late-era communist Russia was never actually communist - it was a vehicle to feed privilege and power through to a small elite. The first, put across in a well-reviewed academic book that i can't remember the author of at 2am, is that the whole process of the breakup of the Soviet union was stage-managed by the KGB. The oligarchs are KGB tools and all post-Soviet leaders have been effectively reporting back to them, with Putin the first to step out from behind the curtain and rule directly.

The second is that there was a brief experiment with democracy but the post-KGB intelligence services and siloviki, headed by Putin, siezed power and have embarked on a kind of Soviet revanchism. In both theories, the nature of Russian political thought, and the threat posed by Russia, is pretty much the same now as it was in 1982.

Aside from that, and a much weaker thread, is the idea that Putin's protectionism, the limited redistribution that has taken place, the return of the idea of the paternal state and a hostility to some forms of foreign capital constitutes a kind of return to Soviet orthodoxy.

Communism was never much of an ideological threat from the 70s onward. The threat was military and in the race for influence over client states.

the two mainstream opinions you're citing seem pretty reasonable and not like irrational paranoia but what do i know

McCarthyite as a descriptor always had two main points, but as a term now it makes little sense because it's referring to one or the other. McCarthy's ostensible purpose in his demented crusade was to ferret out Russia sympathizers within the public sphere, but he did so with the assumption that any group advocating for socialist/communist political stances was inherently allied with the USSR.

I can't imagine any of the people who had those stances being allied with today's Russian state, nor can I imagine many of the people who like to deal with the oligarchs advocating communist causes.

as much as I want to keep Trump's name out of everything, I have to say that his recent debate shenanigans where he denied any Russian influence, cast Russia as a power to be worked with, and then lamented the fact the US was falling behind in developing nuclear weapons (?!?) was really o_O

Having to appeal to one set of Republicans who want to team up to fight ISIS at the same time as another set who are still hypersensitive to any potential challenge to US dominance is always going to create a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.

His position that US jets should fly alongside Russian ones in Syria, but Russian jets should be shot out of the sky if they fly too close to US warships, is another example.

a certain amount of cognitive dissonance

the same thing that Clinton's been accused of with claims that she's somehow two-faced when the majority of things cited are her presenting the same situation and proposed action to different groups with arguments that appeal to that specific group

Keeping Russia from expanding its influence as a stance can be supported with arguments about sovereignty, humanitarian rights, and economic influence, among others, but not everyone buys into all of those points. Telling Wall Street that we have to make sure the ruble isn't the default currency for oil pricing sounds gross and sets off all my internal "war for oil" alarm bells but it's something they'd listen to.

The second is that there was a brief experiment with democracy but the post-KGB intelligence services and siloviki, headed by Putin, siezed power and have embarked on a kind of Soviet revanchism. In both theories, the nature of Russian political thought, and the threat posed by Russia, is pretty much the same now as it was in 1982.

this is my impression, w "experiment with democracy" qualified of course by the destabilizing inequity and churn following from the public-sector fire sale, "shock therapy", a sudden new class of warring gangsters, etc.; arguably democracy cannot function under these circumstances but of course the period is different from the authoritarian-monopole systems that precede and follow it and share a lot of staff.

had never read about the literal-conspiracy possibility! it seems unnecessary to me from an occam's perspective but of course unnecessary stuff happens all the time.

would set the point at which the cold war became solely a great-power game about spheres of imperial influence back even further than the '70s tbh. maybe all the way. even when the ideological war is at its hottest, its actual expression is still as a jockeying over influence. a peculiar nuclear-age interest in projections of strength arguably distinguishes the cold war from balances of power past but that's not ideological either. i guess, earlier on, you did have more american leftists who thought the ussr was still part of the struggle. but idk that they were ever a threat to anyone.

(well spies are a threat. what i mean is despite people's personal reasons for recruitment i don't see much difference between a soviet spy in postwar america and, like, an austrian spy in fin-de-siecle france.)

I kinda want to set the demarcation line as when Stalin came to power, and exiled Trotsky. From then on it all became about Soviet imperialist interests first instead of any ideological worldwide revolution. That's obviously an oversimplification, but it feels good. Then in fifties-seventies there's a period of third-world socialism, but a lot of that isn't controlled by Soviets, and even back then was mostly called Maoism (right?) which is a bad name as well. From the mid seventies, after the failure of first May 68, the violent repression of leftism in Latin America, Asian communism failing with Mao meeting Nixon and Pol Pot turning insanely murderous, and the Arab world turning to either terrorism or impotent oil diplomacy, it's over.

Then in fifties-seventies there's a period of third-world socialism, but a lot of that isn't controlled by Soviets

yeah -- USA reacts to it as if it is, but underneath the grand ideological conflict the prime motives for these reactions seem to be, if not about corporate profit (as in latin america), about demonstrating "will" so as to preserve the MAD balance (as in vietnam) -- classic great-power motivations, if in the latter case inflamed by nukes. so even when there is a US/USSR proxy conflict that involves actual ideologically battling capitalist/communist forces within a state, there's plenty of impetus for the proxy war that has nothing to do on either imperial side w angels vs demons.

dunno that i'd put the shift right at the moment of stalin's ascension but agree that the events of his reign -- the terror and the war, one of them straight from his brain and the other merely under his management -- are what transforms the country. arguably similar tho not as dramatic or grim is the transformation the war effects on the US, which comes out the other side in the national-security-state form we know today.

I think Stalin's Socialism In One Country was a nice little pep-talk slogan for his gruelling 5 year plan and good bait to troll his party enemies to make the first move against him. But I don't think it was a watershed of ideological abandonment, the awkward temp capitalism of the NEP and lots of other shit during the civil war had already shown they were broadly a party of pragmatists or least could be bent that way when necessary.

oh if you wanna fix the point at which the party lost its Soul you can make a case for kronstadt or even for the menshevik split. (tho not saying pragmatism like NEP is a loss of soul; referring here to the party's growing tendency to antidemocratic authoritarianism.) but ussr as a reincarnated russian empire whose foreign policy is about imperial power rather than global revolution (lenin wants more of europe than he gets in the civil war, but that's toward the explicit end of supporting the german revolution he expects and requires) prob dates to stalin imo -- the reabsorption of the baltics (in collab w communism's worst enemies); the conquest of eastern europe; the kind of state that's left when that's all over.

this is my impression, w "experiment with democracy" qualified of course by the destabilizing inequity and churn following from the public-sector fire sale, "shock therapy", a sudden new class of warring gangsters, etc.; arguably democracy cannot function under these circumstances but of course the period is different from the authoritarian-monopole systems that precede and follow it and share a lot of staff.

There are points of commonality, for sure, but - as you say - the context is important. Not just the trauma and ongoing scars of shock therapy but all the other things that have happened in, to or around Russia over the last twenty-something years - the oil boom, the return of the orthodox church as a political power, the ongoing positives and negatives of a deregulated market, the opening up of Russia to the world and vice versa (both through freedom of travel and, importantly, the internet), the solidification of a liberal middle class in the major cities vs a perceived growing social conservatism elsewhere, Chechnya, issues of national identity, NATO expansion, Serbia, Iraq, etc, etc.

Some of the major players in Russian politics - like Putin and Fradkov - do have a security / military background, others like Medvedev don't. Even if the personnel hadn't changed, the country and the rest of the world definitely has. A lot of the commentary, particularly from journalists who haven't paid much attention to Russia until the recent election cycle, misses that.

It also has a bearing on what kind of Russia western politicians and commentators want to see in the future - whether the objective is isolating and containing Russia as-is, pushing for the further democratisation of the country - so Putin winning fairer elections, or a wholesale 'regime change'. The suspicion in Russia is that Clinton favours the latter. Context is important here too - the perception is that the main turning point in relations with the US (having ignored war crimes in Chechnya, etc) was the renationalisation of Yukos and the interference with international business interests which, in combination with fawning over people like Khodorkovsky, leads a lot of people - particularly on the left - to think the democratic / human rights focus is largely a sham. It's that, rather than sympathy for Putin himself, that drives most of the pushback imo.

Oh good now we can view all this through the lens of Robbie Williams and his uncompromising insistence on the meaninglessness of language

http://www.nme.com/news/robbie-williams/96877

I remember when everybody bashing on wikileaks right now loved wikileaks

that's til their Hil hack revealed "nothing," like her reassuring of Goldman Sachs

https://twitter.com/opendemocracyru/status/785966283871236096

"Presidential administration recommends officials to return their children, studying overseas, to Russia."

I remember when everybody bashing on wikileaks right now loved wikileaks

― punksishippies, 12. oktober 2016 08:37 (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, all you hypocrites! I bet you also liked Bill Cosby before you found out he was a rapist. How dare you!!

xp, the university thing is overstated and has been going on for a while.

Russia has a goal of getting 5 universities into the global top 100 by 2020 and part of that is trying to encourage high-performing students to stay within Russia rather than looking to go to the US if they're wealthy or Finland if they can get good entry grades. The other risk is that when they go abroad, as with students from a lot of countries - particularly in tech / science, they might not come back. There's nothing much they can do to stop people but the idea that future employment in state industries might be easier if you go to MGU or MGIMO rather than LSE is one of the things they can potentially hold over them - and there's an expectation that people within government should lead by example.

The interesting thing is that high-achieving, relatively wealthy people are actively competing for prestige jobs in state industries rather than going to work for Microsoft or w/e. There's a similar trend in China and, to some extent India, of the best domestic universities being more competitive than high-profile foreign ones and an easier access point for good domestic jobs in the future.

after how many rapes did you stop liking Bill Clinton, Fred?

In all honesty I never particularly liked Bill Clinton... It was, like, an example, maaaaan.

How is the university system in Russia run (mostly)?

If you want 5 in the top 100 (in the very near term) shouldn't the focus be on faculty recruitment and retention first? I suppose student retention and career opportunities are in parallel, not competing priorities, though.

Russians probably get more higher education than anyone outside of Germany - iirc over 50% of people have degrees and there's a strong bias towards either traditional five / six year diplomas or three-year undergraduate degrees topped up with MAs. There's a huge number of universities, so quality varies, but they tend to be good and the best state institutions are of a very high international standard. When they figure in the international rankings it will usually be for hard sciences, engineering, maths and comp sci, though, rather than overall quality.

Partly due to the way in which the rankings are compiled, there's a perception that you're at a disadvantage if post-grad courses aren't taught in English (research citations contribute significantly and it's much harder to get cited if you are publishing in Russian) so there's a push to deliver more programmes in English - which, in theory, will also make courses more attractive to foreign research students.

Academics tend to be fairly badly paid in an international context - which is why there are so many Russians teaching in the US - but i think they're trying to look at retention at the top institutions at the same time. I'd be surprised if they get more than two (Lomonosov is hovering just outside already) but the target is pretty arbitrary. It's really just an excuse to get universities to internationalise and to avoid a research brain drain.

XP Some Russian universities are trying to recruit international faculty to boost their research portfolios. I almost ended up going to one, since the academic job market is so difficult!

I hope my really verbose coworker who immigrated from russia is in the office sometime soon so I can wind him up with a couple questions and hear some long-form ranting

I was kind of a dick a couple years ago because apparently he has a brother doing some russian armed services stint and kept asking "So you're suuuuure he's not in Ukraine?"

Ideal Christmas gift

Nick Butler, ex of BP, with an unusually honest statement on where a lot of the international / business community would like to go next:

https://s16.postimg.org/ipa45ldlx/Russia.jpg

Rigging the 1996 election was good. Disbursing most of Russia's state assets to organised crime in return for that assistance was good. Democracy is problematic. Let the 'businessmen' rule by fiat.

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvRQhPHWcAAH8aM.jpg:small

Someone was reading that at work today.

The Spectator getting in on the act as well - A+ use of vaguely Asiatic facial features:

http://cdn.spectator.co.uk/content/uploads/2016/10/cover_spec_22-oct_issues.jpg

How's The Economist triangulate on this whole thing?

I was talking to a friend who, after reading a few articles, introduced to me the idea that Russia's actions in Syria might actually be partially to encourage the emigration of refugees to Europe to destabilize support for those governments and I'm not sure what to think of that

Oh that theory has been doing the rounds for a while.

I probably had heard it but it never really sunk in.

i've heard that theory before too. seems more likely that his involvement really is about russia's military assets but that might be a little side bonus

damn, forgot to ask my russian-american coworker about this when he was in the office this week

I reject any theory that requires the Russian state to have a good understanding of second- or third-order effects, because they don't.

uh

https://s15.postimg.org/a3kpv035n/russianembassy_homophobic_gaybear.png

The Paul Robeson style US renaissance man and friend of Putin, Steven Seagal has been given Russian citizenship, the Kremlin says.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVezEEMXsqo

Moscow Times pointed out it was just in time to get his $80 pension.

Jeff Monson, the odd MMA fighter, got citizenship recently too.

Top marks for O'Neal for the headline and overall jokes in the bit:

http://www.avclub.com/article/russia-takes-responsibility-hacks-granting-steven--245331

"Russia takes responsibility for hacks by granting Steven Seagal citizenship"

Image used for illustration purposes... Is this the most redundant sentence ever?

They started adding it to all their images when someone pointed out that one of their pictures of ISIS tanks came from Metal Gear Solid, iirc.

Damn, DIRNSA

http://theslot.jezebel.com/nsa-head-openly-accuses-russia-of-using-wikileaks-to-ge-1789051302

I can't wait to see what Greenwald has to say about this

Sad lol that this bothers absolutely 0% of the GOP

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/world/europe/russia-withdraws-from-international-criminal-court-calling-it-one-sided.html?_r=0

http://www.theweek.co.uk/europe/61498/russia-funds-french-national-front-is-moscow-sowing-european-unrest

It would be great if Russia was funding the FN as it would be a clear breach of French law and could probably get them barred from fighting the next election or bankrupted. Unfortunately it's not true - they took a loan from a Czech bank owned by a Czech-Russian businessman in 2014 and have been paying it back at standard commercial rates. They said last year that they were hoping to get a loan from another Russian bank for around €27m as they'd run out of money but this doesn't appear to have been successful. They seem to be trying to hit up banks in the UAE now.

idk why this canard has been repeated in the press for two years and nobody other than TASS and Sputnik seems to have bothered reporting that Marion Le Pen is currently in Moscow meeting with low-level Russian politicians. I'm not sure it would have been mentioned at all if she hadn't met the cuet Crimean prosecutor, Natalia Poklonskaya, inadvertent darling of anime Nazis everywhere, to confirm that the FN doesn't believe sanctions should be maintained.

It follows on from Marion claiming to have received positive overtures from Steve Bannon and Marine doing a BBC interview last week. I assume that she wasn't in the country just for that and probably met with UKIP, if not the government, in secret.

Anyway, Julia Ioffe has just done a better-than-average piece about Russia beyond the big cities for National Geographic I don't agree with all of it but it's pretty good and has some great photos.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/12/putin-generation-russia-soviet-union/

what is it about the russian weltanschauung that makes an apartment furnished with ikea furniture so vexing?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html?utm_campaign=digest&utm_medium=email&utm_source=app

cbb to go through this in much detail but it's worth noting that the sites the anonymous 'propaganda' monitor lists as being responsible for the spread of 'fake news' include Counterpunch, Zerohedge, Naked Capitalism, Black Agenda Report, Truthout and, rather wonderfully, The Vigilant Citizen.

Why?

Because an anonymous and accountable website and the RAND Corporation are not necessarily a reliable guide to whether left-leaning outlets are disseminating 'Russian propaganda'.

The article more or less takes on trust their definition of 'fake news', where that 'fake news' becomes 'propaganda' and where that propaganda originates. It's entirely probable that Russian troll factories were actively pushing stupid stories but whether they are any more influential than a bunch of Macedonian teenagers or domestic idiots like the guy boasting of millions of Facebook shares on pro Trump nonsense is unclear.

I don't think the point is whether or not it's more influential than Macedonian teenagers, and, really, if we're being honest the most influential fake-news-padders are still Fox News, Limbaugh, et al, and the focus on Eastern Europe are obscuring the fact that Western media is in a breakdown all of it's own making. But the meddling by Russia in this election is pretty obvious at this point, and the vulnerability of Western media to it kinda incredible. From old people by the millions taking in fake news on social media, to left wing activists spending the final months poring over hacked emails to find fodder for their personal attacks on people slightly more centrist than themselves, the whole US, and probably western, media system is broken all over.

The focus on Eastern Europe isn't just a distraction from the bigger problem, it gives an opportunity to maliciously lump everything from leftist critiques of the Democrats to Alex Jones to a guy who, bless him, genuinely seems to believe Beyonce is an illuminati high priestess as seditious and anti-American when they could barely be anything other than American.

I am sympathetic to the problem of fake news but who gets to decide what counts as fake is of critical importance when we are looking at Facebook, etc, effectively being asked to censor content.

Um, no? What's American about using stolen emails to embarrass/harass people you disagree with like Lee Fang from the Intercept did?

Facebook isn't just being asked to censor content. Many people would more like them to verify what is obviously fake, but it runs into problems because so much of right wing media is fake anyway.

Lee Fang, Russian proxy or simply a malicious foreign influence...you be the judge!

There is a paper thin line between censorship and arbitrary verification of what is 'obviously fake'. The Prop Or Not web plug in being boosted in the WP article shows how it can potentially be abused. Idk what the solution is other than better education.

Lee Fang is just an asshole. But what's specifically American about that?

And no, the line between censorship and a verification system is in no way paper thin, that's a really weird thing to say.

Lee Fang is an American working for an American outlet in an aggressively undeferential way that is pretty unusual outside of US social media fuelled journalism at the moment. Whether or not he oversteps the mark at times is beside the point.

Facebook determining what / who can be verified as true and what gets pulled or branded as officially fake is a minefield. 'Clinton had three months to live!' is obviously fake. 'Trump has secret email server to the Kremlin!' was also pretty transparently fake at the time but would presumably be verified as true?

It would be verified because it came from a real news source, yeah. Slate was vouching for it, and they should have taken a hit for publishing that - and frankly, many other stories. Fox news stories would would be verified as well. But the fake news scourge doesn't come from those places - though historically, they are the ancestors - but from clickbait fake news factories, who would be the ones hit by a verification procedure. It's not a process that would eliminate falsehoods from the public sphere, it would just throttle an industry that does real damage.

Again it comes back to the question of what is a legitimate news source though - which is why it matters when you have the WP promoting a service that seeks to make that distinction for you on partisan grounds. A Twitter style verification service has issues but isn't particularly dangerous. Extending the definition of fake news that needs to be countered to, to use an example given in the article, explanations of the 2008 conflict with Georgia that present it as more complicated than naked Russian aggression clearly is.

To be honest, beefing up libel laws would probably do more good but I can't see anyone being up for it, other than Trump.

The verification process that was done by facebook employees but not implicated was automated. Like, do you think we're talking about hiring Ayn Rand devotees to sit around and decide what's a real news source?

That's not really what is being discussed by Zuckerberg afaict - it won't be an automated service, it will be stronger community policing and working with trusted third parties primarily. Snopes, for example, is a trusted third party. The WP positioning RAND and Prop Or Not as legitimate arbiters in this sector and bringing disagreement on the interpretation of facts into the discussion of 'fake news' is actively dangerous if anyone takes it seriously.

The proposals he is discussing are generally OK but it is positioning Facebook as closer to a curatorial service than it ever has been and the way that is implemented does need to be properly scrutinised.

Fred I think proposing a verification system as simplistic and subjective as you are doing will only make things worse. Easy for you to say Slate and WP are "obviously" trusted sources, but is Fox? Is Breitbart? You may not think so but lots of other people do. A curation squeeze on those won't solve a thing. Are you proposing FB should deliver a be all and end all 'verifier of the verified? Because hoo boy.... As SV said, FB is the worst curator and they should stay far away from that.

Meanwhile there's this little nugget from yesterday: These maps show how Russia has Europe spooked

https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/files/2016/11/russianmissiles-1122-4-855x1024.jpg

Spain it will be.

Kaliningrad is a curious little WW2 remnant. I have read loads of history from that period but am embarrassed to say I didn't know shit about it until clicking on a different link to this yesterday. Probably one for that things you didn't learn thread...

I almost got deported from there once! Not for anything interesting though.

Moving back to my Mum's I think... just about. (xxxp)

Fred I think proposing a verification system as simplistic and subjective as you are doing will only make things worse. Easy for you to say Slate and WP are "obviously" trusted sources, but is Fox? Is Breitbart? You may not think so but lots of other people do. A curation squeeze on those won't solve a thing. Are you proposing FB should deliver a be all and end all 'verifier of the verified? Because hoo boy.... As SV said, FB is the worst curator and they should stay far away from that.

If I understood it correctly, the problem wasn't that breitbart and fox news got unverified, but that they often relied on unverified sources, so a lot of right wing news got attacked. The fake news verifier would go after obvious fake news factories without a shred of journalistic, which in and of itself should be uncontroversial - google is attacking them as well, by refusing to run ads on these sites - but the whole right wing news sphere has begun relying on them. And btw FB should be the curator because it's their feed and it's their problem. They want their site to function as a news and discussion forum, and the stream of fake news is giving FB a bad rep.

Come on, though, FB has always been a sewer. I have no idea how we got to the point where people rely on it for news.

I'm guessing Cornwall, Tom. D? :)

If I understood it correctly, the problem wasn't that breitbart and fox news got unverified, but that they often relied on unverified sources, so a lot of right wing news got attacked. The fake news verifier would go after obvious fake news factories without a shred of journalistic, which in and of itself should be uncontroversial - google is attacking them as well, by refusing to run ads on these sites - but the whole right wing news sphere has begun relying on them. And btw FB should be the curator because it's their feed and it's their problem. They want their site to function as a news and discussion forum, and the stream of fake news is giving FB a bad rep.

You still need some entity to verify. I wouldn't want FB to be the verifier, wouldn't want an international panel as verifier. So WP gets verified and fake news sites don't? *tumbleweed* Being unverified will become a badge against "msm"/"elite" as fast as you can say Yiannopolous. It doesn't solve the underlying problem. It only gives FB an excuse to "prove" they are doing what they can.

And no, FB's feed isn't "theirs". It is the users', or should be. You know, I deleted my FB account for privacy concerns and Farmville overload in 2008. Back then it was simple: you see the things your friends post. That is how it should be. If a friend would post batshit insane stuff he'd be called out on it. I had to rejoin FB for business purposes in 2015 and boy, the trickery, the tinkering, the "you might like this" stuff is in your face all the time! I do not see posts from friends sometimes because of the fucking algorithm. FB is monstrous. And it's their own fault. I wouldn't trust a penny with them, let alone further tinkering/curating/verifying/upgrading/downgrading stuff. It's become a bullshit machine.

Xp well yeah.

no idea how legit this is: https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/kremlin-prepares-large-scale-provocation-ukraine-belarus.html

@Reuters
JUST IN: Kremlin says nearly all communication channels between U.S. and Russia are frozen: RIA

@ggreenwald
Do Democrats regard this as a good or a bad development?

greenwald is braindead

i'm just callin' you Howard Dean from now on

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/811613450426286080

believing the intercept is funded by russia gives greenwald more credit than he deserves. i don't think he's a subversive agent. i think he's a moron, and if my opinion of you wasn't already as low as an opinion could possibly be your enjoyment of his dumbass twitter snark would lower it even further. he's like dennis perrin with a following. you're like dennis perrin but w/out even a solitary morbius to appreciate you.

thanks!

https://twitter.com/DennisThePerrin/status/810499040437817345

What's the point of this nuke nonsense we don't all have enough already?

Obviously it's a bad development but Kremlin shit stirring is barely news at this point in the year

"all our communication channels with the US are frozen!" lol climate change amirite

It's just so dumb that we are still doing this nuke proliferation dumbassery surely there are more up to date ways to saber rattle?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM01v_vVnbg

Surely a hardmanning Putin is like catnip to Trump, he'll want to top it.

yeah he already did http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/us/politics/trump-says-us-should-expand-its-nuclear-capability.html?_r=0

well idk top it but obv they're both enjoying themselves very much

I assume that the Putin comments on upgrading the nuclear arsenal to ensure that it's future-proofed against missile defence systems is partly because Israel has just announced that it's selling Iron Dome to Azerbaijan and Czechia. Whether they'll actually bother to do it, given that all three countries are friendly atm and only one has nuclear weapons, i don't know.

The Iron Dome afaik has no capability to stop nuclear weapons - it's a C-RAM system for things like rockets and mortars. There are other systems in testing for more sophisticated ballistic weapons like the Arrow or David's Sling.

That might still bother Putin especially if he wants to keep the option open of using less sophisticated equipment in an engagement (esp if he's conducting an action through proxies) but developing his nuclear arsenal would have nothing to do with the Iron Dome sale itself.

xp this is off topic, but is "Czechia" actually caching on now? (i.e. as an alternative to "czech republic"

if i were going to do putin apologetics on this the tact i'd take is that MAD only works if both parties are able to inflict nuclear damage on each other and therefore the US development of anti-ballastic missile systems w/ Israel inherently undermines world stability and Putin's attempts to refine his arsenal to bypass current technology is returning the world to a state of equilibrium and peace. i mean i doubt i could say it with a straight face but here it's free for the taking.

Iron Dome can't stop nuclear missiles but the technology is improving and Israel is developing excellent arms trade relationships with countries in Russia's orbit. Any upgrades would be years away, by which time other systems (Magic Wand?) might be up for grabs. I don't think it's a stretch to think that public comments made about negating missile defence systems made 48 hours after two neighbours bought missile defence systems might have been made with the sale in mind.

In practice, Russia already has far more nuclear weapons than it could ever practically use or any missile defence system could ever stop so, as with Trump, it's likely to be more for public consumption than a major policy shift.

xp, i don't know but my Polish colleagues have started saying it so i kind of feel i should give it a go for a while to see if it sticks.

www.nytimes.com/2016/12/27/sports/olympics/russia-doping.html

But even as he and other officials signaled their acceptance of the fundamental findings of Mr. McLaren’s investigation, they were largely unconciliatory, suggesting that cheating to benefit Russia had served to offset what they perceived as preferential treatment for Western nations by global sports authorities.

“Have you seen the Fancy Bear records?” Mr. Smirnov said, invoking medical records hacked by a cyberespionage group believed to be associated with G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence agency suspected of hacking computers at the Democratic National Committee. The medical records revealed that hundreds of Western athletes had been given special medical permission to take banned drugs for legitimate therapeutic reasons.

“Russia never had the opportunities that were given to other countries,” Mr. Smirnov said.

“The general feeling in Russia is that we didn’t have a chance,” he added, acknowledging that anabolic steroids like those taken by Russian athletes have never been deemed medically excusable by regulators.

The supposedly tamper-proof bottles that held Russian athletes’ doping samples in Sochi were manipulated — enabling officials to switch out their steroid-laced urine. Mr. Smirnov and his advisers suggested that the same thing had happened at other Olympics.

“It’s lucky that the WADA had Rodchenkov,” said Victor Berezov, a lawyer for Russia’s Olympic Committee. “Maybe in China, London and everywhere — maybe the same things could happen. Because the system is broken.”

Was in a bar in Edinburgh last night when a fight broke out - well, one guy took a swing at another guy and broke his glasses - the aggressor standing up and saying to the other guy, "Right, ya Putin bastard, ootside noo!" before being bundled out.

So, yes, definitely evil.

lol!

David Neiwert certainly seems to think so, re: thread question

More on the Burlington Electric nonsense:

https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/01/03/the-russians-are-coming-the-russians-are-oops-no-russians/

As federal officials investigate suspicious Internet activity found last week on a Vermont utility computer, they are finding evidence that the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility, according to experts and officials close to the investigation.

An employee at Burlington Electric Department was checking his Yahoo email account Friday and triggered an alert indicating that his computer had connected to a suspicious IP address associated by authorities with the Russian hacking operation that infiltrated the Democratic Party. Officials told the company that traffic with this particular address is found elsewhere in the country and is not unique to Burlington Electric, suggesting the company wasn’t being targeted by the Russians. Indeed, officials say it is possible that the traffic is benign, since this particular IP address is not always connected to malicious activity.

Afaict, the problem is that the White House report on hacking used as evidence a set of IP addresses not specific to Russia and not used exclusively for malicious purposes - along with details of a malware tool that is widely used, freely available and, ironically, Ukrainian in origin.

https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/12/russia-malware-ip-hack/

Cross reference the IP addresses and the tools against suspicious activity and you will get countless hits - including the IP the Burlington worker connected to. Using this as evidence of state hacking seems bizarre.

http://www.robertmlee.org/critiques-of-the-dhsfbis-grizzly-steppe-report/

The White House’s response and combined messaging from the government agencies is well done and the technical attribution provided by private sector companies has been solid for quite some time. However, the DHS/FBI GRIZZLY STEPPE report does not meet its stated intent of helping network defenders and instead choose to focus on a confusing assortment of attribution, non-descriptive indicators, and re-hashed tradecraft. Additionally, the bulk of the report (8 of the 13 pages) is general high level recommendations not descriptive of the RIS threats mentioned and with no linking to what activity would help with what aspect of the technical data covered. It simply serves as an advertisement of documents and programs the DHS is trying to support. One recommendation for Whitelisting Applications might as well read “whitelisting is good mm’kay?” If that recommendation would have been overlaid with what it would have stopped in this campaign specifically and how defenders could then leverage that information going forward it would at least have been descriptive and useful. Instead it reads like a copy/paste of DHS’ most recent documents – at least in a vendor report you usually only get 1 page of marketing instead of 8.

This ultimately seems like a very rushed report put together by multiple teams working different data sets and motivations. It is my opinion and speculation that there were some really good government analysts and operators contributing to this data and then report reviews, leadership approval processes, and sanitation processes stripped out most of the value and left behind a very confusing report trying to cover too much while saying too little.

We must do better as a community. This report is a good example of how a really strong strategic message (POTUS statement) and really good data (government and private sector combination) can be opened to critique due to poor report writing.

@jeremyscahill
Interesting comment from President Obama on Wikileaks and Russia:

https://twitter.com/jeremyscahill/status/821829756236787717

https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-set-move-closer-decriminalize-domestic-violence-071739318.html

Danish media reports a cyberattack on Sweden, on a program the military currently uses to plan a big NATO military exercise.

I had a dream last night where I was at an informal hush-hush meeting with Putin and my whole family was there and we were at like a cabin in the woods, and I realized nobody had gotten out little water bottles for all the people at the meeting so I went in the garage and got some. I forgot what we all talked about but at one point Putin was like, if the USA was utterly destroyed, that would make me happy. What if my country was utterly destroyed, how would that make you feel? And I was like "I DGAF about Russia dude I've never even been there"

Are there any good Russian-language news sources that aren't government-owned/slanted? I'm not concerned about whether they're from the country of Russia. Just Russian-language and reliable.

Dozhd is pretty good: https://tvrain.ru/

Meduza is worth a look. Not entirely reliable but presents an independent take: https://meduza.io/articles

Novaya Gazeta as well, I guess:

www.novayagazeta.ru

Thanks!

7 theories of Putin

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/22/vladimir-putin-killer-genius-kleptocrat-spy-myths

Definitely one of the better pieces about him.

https://mobile.twitter.com/hannahgais/status/835178401963126784/photo/1

lol, Louise Mensch softly floating the theory that Russia bumped off Andrew Breitbart.

I feel like cocaine 'bumped' off andrew breitbart

someone sassed on Twitter that "Putin" is Brit for coke

another Putin critic murdered in Ukraine, I see

Russia and China both tried to hack my Instagram.

hunting for compromising WDYLLs

Russia hacked the US and made them bomb that school in Syria

Putin must be annoyed they hadn't bombed that one yet.

This is great

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-russian-journalists-think-of-how-american-reporters-cover-putin-and-trump

I completely agree that the mental model most western intelligence agencies have of the Russian cyber apparatus is probably shit. We project our own capabilities & force structure onto our adversaries - which worked / works when we talk about the Chinese PLA - but when you apply it to a state so alien to Western institutional structure as Russia, it's kind of dumb and has tons of blind spots. That is not to say at all that I don't think their various shops deliberately and, in their own way, systematically, fucked with the election and will proceed to do the same to every other similar event they think they might be able to influence in their favor, I just think the journalists in this article are on point that Russia's not that good at stuff - echoing, sort of, what ShariVari has frequently argued on this thread and elsewhere. But not being "good" in the sense of professionally managed, focused, trained, etc. doesn't mean you can't accomplish the goal.

^ last sentence is urgent & key

Yep, it's a very good article.

To expand on that wrt hacking, the article echoes what I've always heard about Russian methods:

Still, Turovsky is suspicious of the level of specificity in U.S. reporting on Russian hackers. For example, the way that the terms “Fancy Bear” and “Cozy Bear”—nicknames for hacking units linked to Russian intelligence services—entered the American journalistic lexicon gave him pause. “As I understand, there aren’t really groups, just a lot of different people who do this work; it’s pure conjecture to think they form into discrete, particular squads that you could call this or that,”

Also, aiui, a lot of state-linked hacking is more or less outsourced to commercial hackers - which is also the idea behind the arrests of Nikulin and Belen and the placing of non-state actors on the hacking-specific sanctions list. This isn't done just to maintain plausible deniability, it's because the commercial hackers are better - which is why there is a lot of scepticism when newspapers say X, Y or Z is 'so sophisticated it could only have been a state attack', or w/e. In terms of attribution, there is a theory you're better off relying on traditional human intelligence rather than trying to work it out from the kind of tools used. Given the reluctance to publicly outline human intel, it also makes it harder to give everyone slam-dunk evidence, which is why a lot of analysts were underwhelmed by the US reports released ahead of the sanctions.

The last sentence is nonsense. Most analysts believed Russia did it from the start, though not because of US reports.

don't say things are nonsense before you're sure you've understood them properly, fred

It was clear from the beginning that the Russia DNC hack was uncoordinated. Both the Bears intruded, and while one had apparently been there for close to a year, they were only kicked out because the other entered, and was discovered. Then when the mails were released, they only covered the time period of the second hack. So it should have been clear it was fairly incompetent early on. But media gonna conspiracy, if they can.

Most analysts believing it was a Russian state hack before the reports doesn't contradict the idea that the reports themselves were lighter on definitive evidence than a lot of people expected. Everyone seems to pretty much agree that people linked to both the FSB and GRU were accessing the database but the questions around whether 'Fancy Bear' exists as an entity, whether it was state employees or stuff outsourced to external hackers, etc, is still opaque. The detail in the Crowdstrike report looks a lot stronger taken in concert with statements on the strength of human intelligence than it would in isolation.

Yes, a lot of people don't understand why there are two "extra" words in nation state sponsored

Also the reports we released ahead of the sanctions were shredder bag filler hastily shoved out the door by a very angry NSC that was counting down seconds until their resignations imho

The whole Fancy Bear / Cosy Bear was just an easier way to frame it, it seemed pretty obvious to me. Two different methodologies, often overstepping each other. Both seemed connected to Russia. Something, something, bear. They should have called it Fancy Boris and Cosy Boris to make it 100% clear it was a western coinage.

One of the most tragicomic pieces of evidence was that the attacks always seemed to come during Moscow office hours. Makes me think cyberwarfare is basically just the sadder parts of John le Carré with a few more computers.

uh, yes.

and to think, we get all this excitement because the koch boys and their ilk A) don't want to pay taxes and B) don't want to miss out on cashing in their oil/coal reserves before rising temperatures / oceans destroy human civilization. what a way for us to go out :)

indeed

A+ display name

qualmsley did u forget this country was started to not pay taxes

i don't recognize this as a country. we are a confederacy of 50 sovereign states. the federal government is the problem

rolling explain ShariVarism, by ShariVari:

I'm aware that i probably sound like i'm being fairly dismissive a lot of the time but it's not so much a 'both sides do it' / 'eh, it's business' approach, it's much more a case of 'this isn't far removed from business as usual, and that's terrifying - so looking at it in isolation as part of a unique conspiracy and not unpicking how similar stuff underpins business and political relationships all over the world is just papering over the cracks'.

OTM

Rob Goldstone,
Emin Agalarov,
Aras Agalarov,
Natalia Veselnitskaya,
Rinat Akhmetshin,
Anatoli Samochornov,
Irakly (Ike) Kaveladze,
Christopher Steele,
Aleksej Gubarev,
Webzilla B.V.,
XBT Holdings S.A.,
Alfa Group,
Dmitry Peskov,
Vladimir Putin,
The Ritz Carlton Moscow Hotel,
Paul Manafort,
Carter Page,
Igor Sechin,
Sergei Ivanov,
Igor Divyekin,
Sergei Millian,
Dmitry Medvedev,
Michael Flynn,
Jill Stein, [SERIOUSLY?]
Michael Cohen,
Konstantin Kosachev,
Viktor Yanukovych,
Corey Lewandowski,
Sergei Kislyak,
Yuri Ushakov,
Anton Vaino,
Mikhail Kalugin,
Andrei Bondarev,
Mikhail Fridman,
Petr Aven,
German Khan,
Oleg Govorun,
Sergey Lavrov,
Rosneft,
Sergei Kiriyenko,
Oleg Solodukhin.

they're pretty good at this psychological warfare thing, yeah?

http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/31/media/russia-facebook-violence/index.html

^^ this is a rehash of old news but got me thinking anyway

rolling explain ShariVarism, by ShariVari:

I'm aware that i probably sound like i'm being fairly dismissive a lot of the time but it's not so much a 'both sides do it' / 'eh, it's business' approach, it's much more a case of 'this isn't far removed from business as usual, and that's terrifying - so looking at it in isolation as part of a unique conspiracy and not unpicking how similar stuff underpins business and political relationships all over the world is just papering over the cracks'.

OTM

― El Tomboto, Thursday, July 20, 2017 7:35 AM (three months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

For example, "Being Patriotic," a group that regularly posted content praising Donald Trump's candidacy, stated in an April 2016 post that Black Lives Matter activists who disrespected the American flag should be "be immediately shot." The account accrued about 200,000 followers before it was shut down.

Another Russia-linked group, "Blacktivist," described police brutality in a November 2016 post weeks after the election, and stated, "Black people have to do something. An eye for an eye. The law enforcement officers keep harassing and killing us without consequences."
The group "Secured Borders" had the most violent rhetoric, some of it well after the presidential election. A post in March 2017 described the threat of "dangerous illegal aliens" and said, "The only way to deal with them is to kill them all." Another post about immigrants called for a draconian new law, saying, "if you get deported that's your only warning. You come back you get shot and rolled into a ditch... BANG, problem solved." And a post about refugees said, "the state department needs to be burned to the ground and the rubble reduced to ashes."

Pretty chilling. Thanks for the link.

I find it more chilling how many Americans express those sentiments unprompted, tbqh.

i agree! it's upsetting. obviously this stuff wouldn't have as much traction if the political divide in the country weren't so bad ... but it does make you wonder ...

the thing is, our perception of "how many americans express those sentiments" is shaped by the russian troll factory too

True. I am increasingly creeped out by the Internet. There is so much unaccountable, violent, abusive speech floating around and it is impossible to discern where it is all coming from.

for a while now i have been in the habit of perusing comment boxes on news articles / facebook links as a barometer for "public opinion" (or even just counting likes and upvotes) but i am not sure how accurate that is anymore what with this troll factory / bot stuff

Like has there been any good research into the people who send sexist and racist threats to people’s inboxes? The phenomenon is widespread, but how many individuals are really behind it? What motivates them? Increasingly social media seems like a sinister hall of mirrors that inevitably leads people to become cynical/exhausted/misanthropic

If you google image search "russian children", you get about 70% fewer smiles than if you image search "american children". Now, I'm not saying that makes them evil, but it just feels like something grim is going on over there.

https://josmarlopes.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/russians.png

xp why would you do that

great piece by julia ioffe

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/putins-game/546548/

read the whole thing

Was watching Icarus, and my God.

there were pictures of naked trump

A man who is critically ill after being exposed to an unknown substance in Wiltshire is a Russian national convicted of spying for Britain, the BBC understands.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43295134

blimey, we were only discussing umbrellas and the Cold War on twitter this morning*

*(and er derrida and rihanna)

He also had a second piece of advice for such "traitors or those who simply hate their country in their free time": "Don't choose Britain as a place to live."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-43330498

Blaring out a cacophony of conflicting denials and 'yeah we did it' innuendo on a daily basis might be what they'll do from here. Guilty or not, it could still be useful for scaremongering tactics.

She also took a swipe at Boris Johnson's warning to Russia this week, saying the foreign secretary was known for his "unpredictable antics" and was "an infant in a man's suit".

i mean say what you like but

Daytime TV hosts are unlikely to know any more than The Sun, tbh, but there is a register of snarky trolling that sections of the media - and the official embassy Twitter account - are apparently unable to break out of even when it is nagl and hugely counterproductive.

Has anything remotely interesting, informed or incisive been written in the mainstream Western press about what Russia *wants* beyond the usual assassinations, hacking and Trump puppetry? Everything I've read has taken malevolence as a given without really expanding on that.

Okay there's one like six posts above this.

They want the 2014 sanctions lifted, is the short answer for anything to lazy to read the interesting, informed and incisive articles :)

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/alexander-litvinenko-murdered-because-he-accused-putin-of-being-a-paedophile-a6824806.html

Putin kissed boy 'like a kitten'

Matt DC, Simon H. shared this on the collusion thread. I even liked it:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/05/im-sorry-for-creating-the-gerasimov-doctrine/

First of all, there is no single Russian “doctrine.” If anything, their campaign is dangerous precisely because it has no single organizing principle, let alone controlling agency. There is a broad political objective — to distract, divide, and demoralize — but otherwise it is largely opportunistic, fragmented, even sometimes contradictory. Some major operations are coordinated, largely through the presidential administration, but most are not. Rather, operations are conceived and generally carried out by a bewildering array of “political entrepreneurs” hoping that their success will win them the Kremlin’s favor: diplomats and spies, criminals and think-tankers, oligarchs and journalists.

This book excerpt that’s been making the rounds is disappointing as fuck imo

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/why-the-hell-are-we-standing-down/

IS RUSSIA A DGAF EMPIRE YES OR NO

"So what if they're Russians?" Putin said of the people named in last month's indictment. "There are 146 million Russians. So what? ... I don't care. I couldn't care less. ... They do not represent the interests of the Russian state."

Putin even suggested that Jews or other ethnic groups had been involved in the meddling.

"Maybe they're not even Russians," he said. "Maybe they're Ukrainians, Tatars, Jews, just with Russian citizenship. Even that needs to be checked. Maybe they have dual citizenship. Or maybe a green card. Maybe it was the Americans who paid them for this work. How do you know? I don't know."

Jews aren't Russians. Nice.

that's a good link, thanks.

A parallel concern for them was how the Obama administration could respond to the Russian attack without appearing too partisan. Obama was actively campaigning for Clinton. Would a tough and vocal reaction be seen as a White House attempt to assist Clinton and stick it to Trump? They worried that if a White House effort to counter Russian meddling came across as a political maneuver, that could compromise the ability of the Department of Homeland Security to work with state and local election officials to make sure the voting system was sound. (Was Obama too worried about being perceived as prejudicial or conniving? “Perhaps there was some overcompensation,” a top Obama aide said later.)

i wish obama would have said SOMETHING. but it really was an intractable problem, and still is in some ways. in fall 2016, in the midst of clinton losing ground and trump constantly talking about how the election was rigged (...), for the administration to say that russia was interfering would have led to a permanent slice of the electorate believing that the elections were really were rigged (by obama/clinton/the deep state). fox news and conservative radio and evangelicals
would make it #benghazi x 100, and clinton would have been a severely damaged president even before inauguration. they all would have been completely wrong (big surprise), but i can understand obama's decision, especially considering that everyone still thought clinton would comfortably win.

so i'm disappointed in obama but at least understand where he was coming from. it's the state election officials/mitch mcconnell that made the indefensible decisions.

Instead, Obama and his aides came up with a different plan. First, DHS would keep trying to work with the state voting systems. For that to succeed, the administration needed buy-in from congressional Republicans. So Obama would reach out to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan to try to deliver a bipartisan and public message that the Russian threat to the election was serious and that local officials should collaborate with the feds to protect the electoral infrastructure.

even after everything he had been through with mcconnell and the GOP, obama still thought they would work with him in the case of a historical national security threat. and they decided to actively work against him instead, so that they could have a chance of taking health care away from poor people, give a tax cut to their rich friends, and ban abortion. so fuck them for life. i hope someday they're buried under headstones featuring incredibly detailed ass pimples and a permanent shitflow pouring out of the side.

(also, as an aside, imagine having this conversation with my dad. he believes that obama's real dad (not kenyan, the one no one knows about except people on email forward chains) was the leader a secret communist party in the US, and that eventually it will be revealed that obama was working for russia the whole time. from his perspective, if obama would have come out in fall 2016 to say that russians were interfering with the elections, this would be proof that obama was working with the russians to elect hillary clinton (also a communist btw). but also from his perspective, the fact that obama did NOT speak out forcefully against the russian interference is of course proof that obama was working with the russians (to elect trump...who is not a communist? i don't even know))

Obama hand-wringing similar to Comey. If only they knew decorum, fairness, honesty and the appearance of objectivity would never matter again thanks to said hand-wringing.

Comey was allegedly put in a bind by campaign(/russia)-linked machinations of the NY field office. I'm not impressed by the Obama handwringing either, but then I wasn't impressed by Gore or Clinton's concessions.

When they go low, we go high!

Here, cop a load o' some Novichok, gerrit down yer neck.

Although they're still alive, I assume this guy and his daughter are goners, they're never going to wake up are they?

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/russian-spy-claims-poisoned-just-12165770

xp. From wikipedia :

Their effect on humans was demonstrated by the accidental exposure of Andrei Zheleznyakov, one of the scientists involved in their development, to the residue of an unspecified Novichok agent while working in a Moscow laboratory in May 1987. He was critically injured and took ten days to recover consciousness after the incident. He lost the ability to walk and was treated at a secret clinic in Leningrad for three months afterwards. The agent caused permanent harm, with effects that included "chronic weakness in his arms, a toxic hepatitis that gave rise to cirrhosis of the liver, epilepsy, spells of severe depression, and an inability to read or concentrate that left him totally disabled and unable to work." He never recovered and died in July 1992 after five years of increasing ill-health.[24]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/06/sergei-skripal-does-revenge-for-treason-lie-behind-harm-to-ex-spy

https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/counterterrorism-police-are-investigating-the-unexplained?utm_term=.vp5NWR4y56#.wgam96q2Nl

Here we go...

Although they're still alive, I assume this guy and his daughter are goners, they're never going to wake up are they?

― Buff Jeckley (Tom D.), Monday, 12 March 2018 18:57 (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

O me of little faith...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/29/yulia-skripal-conscious-talking-nearly-month-chemical-attack/

Amazing: Putin bombs Syrians to aid Assad, precipitating a refugee crisis in which decent people fled for their lives.
Now Putin's RT makes a racist documentary about why refugees should not be welcome in Sweden.
Truly, the pits https://t.co/Qb4hoO9qxq

— teresa smith (@treesey) July 6, 2018

Hardly surprising.

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/21/europe/montenegro-attempted-coup-accusation/index.html

Vlad has his Bond villain pic

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-just-showed-off-a-potentially-world-ending-nuclear-doomsday-torpedo-that-the-us-cant-stop/ar-BBL0a2h

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/world/europe/russia-uk-novichok-skripal.html

Fuck, I had missed the whole part about the people finding the perfume bottle and falling ill/dying.

those two novichok victims are exactly the type of people who the Tory government have been trying to kill off themselves for the last 8 years. But they get upset when other ppl do it!

interesting

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/manhattan-us-attorney-announces-extradition-alleged-russian-hacker-responsible-massive?

those two novichok victims are exactly the type of people who the Tory government have been trying to kill off themselves for the last 8 years. But they get upset when other ppl do it!

OTM, Russians >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> evil fucking Tory bastards.

I find those alleged Russian agents' choice in street fashion 1000% unsurprising in every way

i like how one is in all black and one is in all blue

Putin jokes Russia will "definitely" intervene in the 2020 US elections pic.twitter.com/wY51XTpboQ

— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) October 2, 2019

meh what's the big deal?

just a little surrealism for your wednesday

maybe i'm alone in thinking things like this are intensely surreal

Putin would be good at Cheat

lol

The Russian Federation is possibly evil, but is it an "empire"?

I don't speak Russian and this doesn't have subtitles and I don't know how to get subtitles for it but the translated original tweet pretty much says it all:

Неделю назад, перед публикацией видео об отравителях из ФСБ, я сел за телефон и начал звонить своим убийцам. С одним из них я говорил 45 минут. Теперь мы знаем очень многое:https://t.co/cEi8rbgxO4

— Alexey Navalny (@navalny) December 21, 2020

"A week ago, before publishing a video about the FSB poisoners, I sat down at the phone and started calling my killers. I spoke with one of them for 45 minutes. Now we know a lot"

OK, translation and story apparently here:

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/12/21/if-it-hadnt-been-for-the-prompt-work-of-the-medics-fsb-officer-inadvertently-confesses-murder-plot-to-navalny/

this is just astounding

I can't begin to imagine goig through this and then returning to the country, as he plans

what kind of numbskull is this guy to answer these questions on an unsecured line? It can only be that the virus/fever impaired his judgment that he actually went along with this...just incredible

Amused by the protracted Tomsk/Omsk confusion at the beginning

WATCH: 8 Russian diplomats and their families used a hand-car to cross the border from North Korea to return home as rail service between the 2 countries was suspended due to the pandemic pic.twitter.com/NJlxFHQpJ6

— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) February 26, 2021

damn i was hoping it was going to be one of those ones with the pumping arm

lol yeah that would have been perfect

it's actually even worse that they don't even get the pumping arm!

this is a classic 'what's on your ipod?' situation

Some story this.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/24/belarus-put-on-notice-of-sanctions-over-hijack-of-ryanair-flight

See also https://ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=7990150&boardid=40&threadid=100650

I represented Belarus in the Model United Nations summit in Hershey, Pennsylvania, 2005. AMA.

(xp) Oh right, somehow failed to notice that thread.