On the junk science and excellent PR of Cambridge Analytica

[Wanderfound]

@GulliverFoyle

All evidence that mounts against him and/or his campaign and associates is valuable. A non-trivial segment of the Americans who voted for Trump were independents and disaffected conservatives. To them, he was the Bernie of the GOP, and they voted for him because they believed he wasn’t accountable to other rich people. That was all a load of horse hockey obviously, but a lot of them swallowed it anyway. Getting them to stay home or vote for an independent is just as important as getting progressives to vote against the GOP in both the mid-terms and 2020. And as 2016 demonstrated, every little bit counts.

My issue with that is that I don’t think that the Russia story is having much influence on anyone except for MSNBC Democrats.

Folks who aren’t Democratic partisans are unlikely to much care about the Russia investigation. “Trump is corrupt? Same as all the rest of 'em. He used dirty tricks during the election? Who doesn’t?” Etc.

@GulliverFoyle

I agree with you insofar as the media and Dems should be more focused on getting true progressives elected instead of moving further to the right. But I disagree with the sentiment that they should take the heat off the investigation. At some point Trump is going to do whatever it takes to the DoJ brass to get a lapdog to fire Mueller. At that point the pressure needs to be on Congress to reappoint the special counsel.

Drop the investigation? No; the Congressional committees should continue to investigate as hard as they can, even though it is unlikely to ever produce anything beyond some not hugely effective political ammunition. Mueller fired, Mueller not fired: either way, Trump is still president and you still have Nazis killing people in the streets.

The Russia story does not justify the media focus that the Democratic establishment are giving it. Maddow has reported on almost nothing else for a year now; it’s beyond parody.

It’s an important issue that would justify an occasional update and maybe even a main segment if there was a truly major development in the story. But the saturation coverage it’s been given is completely over the top, and is displacing reporting on the many much more important issues that are currently relevant.

And also:

1. Describing Russian involvement as an “attack”, or even “worse than Pearl Harbour”, as assorted Dems have done, is (a) stupid, and (b) really fucking dangerous. Propaganda and espionage are not war, and the militaristic posturing of some of the Dems is seriously out of hand. They are deliberately attempting to maximise hostility between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

2. In a time of fascism, the neo-McCarthyite nonsense coming from some Dems is also really fucking dangerous. A lot of them are ignorantly or deliberately blurring the line between modern Russia and the Soviet Union, and then turning their renewed Cold War anticommunism against the American left. I long ago lost count of how many times I’ve seen centrist Dems accuse Bernie of being a Russian agent. Masha Gessen also gets that accusation fairly regularly these days.

3. An age of fascism is also a very bad time to enthusiastically promote the idea that the secret police are paragons of virtue and justice. The FBI-worship coming from the centrist Dems is horrifying to leftists aware of the history of that agency.

4. Corporate Democrats are actively using Russia as a scapegoat to obscure their own corruption and incompetence.

5. The delusion that the courts or Congress are going to magically make Trump go away and return everything to how it was before is the main factor discouraging the middle class from meaningful resistance to fascism.

@GulliverFoyle

Also, while it may not be material, I doubt very much happens in Russian intelligence without Putin knowing about it.

I don’t think anything major happens in Russia without Putin’s approval, but I also doubt that he spends his time micromanaging the FSB.

It is still uncertain that official Russian intelligence officers had any involvement at all; much of the existing circumstantial evidence is also consistent with a gangster-based operation.