IS RUSSIA AN EVIL EMPIRE YES OR NO

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