This part of the statement is remarkable: “…does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.” This is tantamount to an admission that not only did the Washington Post do no fact-checking, but that it also does not consider fact-checking to be part of its job. And it has the temerity to accuse others of engaging in “fake news”?
I am droning on but I wondered what WaPo was playing at.
Soviet. You weren’t in Russian occupied Hungary, you were in Soviet occupied Hungary. The distinction matters.
Remind me, please, what George Herbert Walker Bush did for a living before he became Regan’s VP?
Now, you might say that the CIA and the KGB aren’t the same, and I agree! KGB has a much higher point value in Scrabble. Aside from that however…
He surrounds himself with similar people. For Christ sake he has a Foretaster, like some medieval King–he doesn’t eat anything which hasn’t been tested in front of him. He doesn’t trust anyone and a number of his associates have died under mysterious circumstances. Some in foreign lands e.g. London. Beresowski or Litvinenko comes to mind.
You do realize that there’s a protocol in place to protect high-value US officials from poisoning, right? I mean, are you saying it is an unreasonable fear? What, the US doesn’t have a history of trying to kill foreign leaders it doesn’t like?
Criticize Putin on policy. I have. But don’t fall into the trap of sensationalism and pretending that he’s some unique tyrant. The difference between the Putin administration and the government in Washington is solely that the former is slightly more competent and the latter a bit nicer to gay people (provided they aren’t in, say, Standing Rock or Pakistan).
And as for the assassinations, of course, those are clearly wrong. A true democratic regime would have dealt to self-assessed threats to public security not by such barbarous methods as poisoning. Goodness know. No, they should have blown up a cafe in London. Not the one Litvinenko was in. No, they’d get that one after a few tries. Maybe. Hard to tell. Better just keep blowing up random bits of London. That’s the democratic way.
But I am saying that it is worth appreciating the fact that such events (spying / interference etc), these government actions are openly debated and discussed in the US while there is very little information on Russia’s covert actions in public domain, Most of those who bring such things to light in Russia seem to have short lives. Yes Snowden and Greenwald (Assange is not a US citizen so his is a slightly different story) live abroad. But I don’t think anyone, even in their most vivid nightmares, thinks that the US government has plans to eliminate them.
No. US politicians have openly and publicly called for Snowden to be assassinated. They have subjected Manning to essentially indefinite solitary confinement, an act internationally recognized as torture. The apparatus of the American intelligence establishment has been used to assassinate US citizens, to assassinate foreign citizens, to industrially spy on pretty much everyone, to institute torture, kidnapping, murder, and interference in the affairs of other nations in clear violation of international law.
The US has no moral high ground. None.
From my point of view the US/Russia conflict is between two would-be hegemons. Nothing more. There are no clean hands, and no high ground.
Please note, that the day after Trump’s election (facilitated by US stupidity and / or Russian interference) the rebel held areas of Aleppo were attacked / liberated (what ever you want to call it) by Russian air bombardment.
Actually they were liberated (considering they are held by Daesh, I think that’s the operative word) by the army of the Syrian Arab Republic aided by the air force of the Russian Federation. And it actually happened a bit later than Trump’s election. Putin agreed to a cease-fire during the US election period, but they were fighting there before and after.
Basically, the outcome of the Syrian war seemed to have changed significantly within hours of the announcement of Trump’s victory.
No. The outcome was set the moment the Russians wheeled in that S-400 installation. That’s when it was over.
And the irony of it is, that this outcome has been facilitated by the US governments / i.e. Obama’s refusal to intervene. While Assad was propped up by the Russians, the Rebels were largely left to their own devices and thus peaceful, democratic protests led to the destruction of a country and the strengthening of an unaccountable dictatorship.
The rebels that, let me just get this right, not even the US State Department can reliably vet? The rebels that immediately turn over materiel sent to them to Al Nusra and Daesh. Those rebels?
Please. The country-destabilization dance is well, well known at this point. Syria was meant to be another one in a long line of countries torn apart into eternal war by CIA manipulation. Didn’t quite work out this time. I can’t really mourn the result.
So there you go for non-intervention.
Yes. Because it worked so well in Iraq.
And Afghanistan.
And Libya.
And Yemen.
And Ukraine.
And I am not even saying the US should have intervened. I am merely pointing out that non-intervention also has consequences, especially, when your opponents follow a different logic.
The US has intervened. The US hasn’t stopped intervening in the Middle East sine 2001. We don’t know what the consequences of not intervening would have been because the US will not leave the region alone.
I’ll remind you that Russia for its many and sundry faults has a handful of foreign bases, mostly built by invitation. Nobody knows quite how many US military installations are on foreign soil because a few are secret, but I’ve heard estimates of up to a thousand. The US is in a constant state of intervention the world-over.
EDIT to add this little gem on the rather sophisticated manipulation of US public opinion:
Secession movements in America are nothing new, and Russia talking about them as if they were a thing that exists doesn’t count as manipulation. And a right-wing separatist movement working in California which went damn near 70% for Clinton is a… unlikely contingency. As for Texans, hell, they’ve been talking about seceding since they joined up.
But if we assume that it is being aided and abetted by Russia with money and, hell, with weapon shipments, too, how is that different than the intervention in Syria you spoke positively about? Countries either can or can’t interfere in such matters.
Is there an ethical imperative to allow unreined self-determination even when that determination is top-down, undemocratic, and fundamentally opposed to our putative (no pun intended) ideals? To what extent should people be allowed to make their own mistakes regardless of those mistakes’ effect on the rest of the world?
If American voters decide that preserving obsolete coal jobs is more important than a 3M sea level rise (number pulled out of my ass, hypothetical) and some foreign government with green energy interests interferes with our dumbass process, isn’t that a net benefit?
Obvs I’m not suggesting Russia currently has such high-minded egalitarian motives, but take it as a thought experiment.
Currently, theoretically, the rules are that internal matters are, well, internal (Westphalian sovereignty, basically), and that interactions between sovereign states are subject to international law. This is not ideal, obviously, but I think it is much better than what we do in practice.
Why? Well, the thing is, we tried meddling in internal affairs in an unrestricted fashion and in Europe this experiment led to the thirty years’ war. And note, please, that even then it was over high ideals: after all, should you stand idly by and let those bastards in $OTHERCOUNTRY be led to hell and damnation by those Catholic/Protestant bastards.
Now, this does fall down in certain situations. For instance, ecology is a big one. Natural processes don’t give a toss about national borders. That said, you do get a lot of options under the framework of international law: you can impose sanctions, for instance, and if the UN wasn’t a joke, you could use that to even sanction intervention in certain circumstances, again, according to international law. I can see this law having a ‘eco-disaster’ proviso, certainly.
Garland starts his magnum opus with a promise: He’s going to combat the idea that Obama and Clinton are “doing nothing, just gave up” in the face of Trump’s victory. “Guys,” he writes. “It’s time for some game theory.” Game theory, for the uninitiated, is a branch of mathematics that uses computational models to predict the behavior of human beings in potentially conflictual situations. It’s complex, involves a lot of formal logic and algebra, and is mostly useless. Game theory models human actions on the presumption that everyone is constantly trying to maximize their potential gain against everyone around them; this is why its most famous example concerns prisoners—isolated people, cut off from all the noncompetitive ties that constitute society. One of its most important theoreticians, John Nash, was also a paranoid schizophrenic, who believed himself to be the target of a vast Russian conspiracy.
But we digress. Eric Garland keeps up this attempt at game theory for precisely two tweets. “ACTOR ANALYSIS: The Russians enter the Game with a broad objective, flexible tactics, and several acceptable outcomes,” he writes. There are no further ACTOR ANALYSES. That’s it. For Eric Garland, game theory means describing something as a Game, with a capital G; you don’t get $25,000 speaking fees for nothing.
