Russia and US are playing cat and mouse games which wastes time and resourxes. Trump and Putin can now get more things done when not having to fight against each other. Imagine rival mobb bosses declaring a truce through dividing interests.
Putin will take the Baltics in the coming four years.
Trump said he would not protect the baltics.
Putin said Hillary would start WWIII if president- IMO because Putin knew she would stick with NATO and defend the Baltics.
This is just one division of control, we will have to wait to see what else comes from the putin/trump waltz of dictatorship.
What I’m reading - grain of salt and all that - is that the NYT at least has pulled a “reverse Judith Miller” and has not reported on things they’ve been told to downplay the whole thing…
It’s part of a plan to show the home audience that Western democracy is weak and that authoritarian ‘managed’ democracy is the best way forward. Putin’s media can now run stories portraying the American population as weak, divided and distrustful of their system whilst their leaders are corrupt and easily manipulated.
Meanwhile he’s pouring money into anti-EU, nationalist, xenophobic and outright fascist parties across Europe to forment anti-government, separatist sentiments to weaken opposition to Russian actions in Eastern Europe.
Put in has worked out how to make a culturally and ideologically bankrupt country with a relatively small GDP, no innovation, next to no scientific output, few manufactured exports and runaway nepotism into a superpower that has the rest of the world dancing to his tune.
And so long as he can keep the civilised world dancing to his tune, he can keep gorging on Russia’s wealth and distracting his subjects from Russia’s decline.
Russian hackers also got into voter rolls and voting machine manufacturer systems. Who knows what they did with that information.
Well, he has been at every stage - with multiple outright Russia lobbyists in his campaign and now cabinet. Trump has been willing to take pro-Russia stances at the expense of allies to the point of lying about what’s going on. Trump seems to have some direct relationship with Putin’s administration that hasn’t been revealed in its details, but the existence of which has been let slip. Certainly Trump is someone Putin can manipulate pretty easily, and I’m sure there are business issues at play, too - they’ve also been alluded to. It’s just a big ball of corruption, collusion and incompetence.
Hey, comparing Trump to Lord Baelish is not a fair comparison.
One is a greedy, backstabbing whoremonger, who irreparably damaged his country, at a time when a drastic change in weather brings evils that will require a united nation to face, by engaging in a campaign of treachery and violence to obtain power.
You know, sometimes with all the doublethink and the conspiracy theories, the simplest solution is the obvious one. There’s no doubt Putin is professionally paranoid; Ostrovsky mentions him telling someone their daughter should not have taken a taxi at Heathrow in case it was a kidnapping attempt. But, you know, to stay on top of the fustercluck that is present day Russia a certain degree of paranoia is probably necessary. Stalin had the “excuse” that he may have been syphilitic, Putin had the excuse of the 1990s, which were pretty violent with several coup attempts.
After the Wall came down it seems to have been apparent that the Soviet Union thought that the US believed they could defeat them via an invasion through Germany while MAD prevented nuclear countermeasures, while the US seemed to think that the USSR planned to invade Europe - unlikely given the unreliability of their MBTs. Both sides were making a fear-based miscalculation.
The simplest explanation here is that Russian security forces really believed HRC might start a destabilisation which could result in a major war, and that Trump was much more pragmatic (and was owned by neither Israel nor Saudi.) Americans need to read their own propaganda and then imagine how it would read if you were Syrian, Iranian or Russian. Much of it translates as “We’re coming to get you.” How do you explain to someone in the FSB that all those people in the right wing media, Twitter and so on are not US government agents pushing the official party line? Because that’s how their media gets run, and they too will assume the other side is doing what they do.
Nothing at all to do with the success of the banks in increasing inequality and the US in invading Iraq and so leading to a regional refugee crisis?
To be quite honest, blaming the Russian Federation for the failures of capitalism is a bit over the top. They may well be stirring the pot harder - but who created the pot in the first place? Those parties have been around a lot longer than Putin - indeed there have been times in the past when individual ones have been actually stronger than they are now - and the people who bankroll them in some cases have no links to Russia, e.g. UKIP was heavily funded by Arron Banks, who has an interesting business record but no Russian links.
By all means let the CIA investigate, but don’t use Russian interference as a deflection mechanism. The British vote for leaving the EU and the US vote for Trump arose from failures of our very own local politicians, and possibly the lack of regulation of social media, and we must not let them off the hook.
You imagine a lot more sock puppets than exist. I apparently am a Russian sock puppet despite being a 50 year old male of West Indian descent living in nyc.
Apparently I said something about Crimea being historically Russian and only being Ukrainian by virtue of Khrushchev transferring it in the 50s. That was enough to get called sock puppet.
It would be nice if the Russian federation was paying me but sadly they are not.
Skepticism of the CIA is definitely justified. Check the body of evidence also. The CIA’s late to the party on this one, and the initial accusers were independent private security researchers looking at the DNC servers. Since I work in InfoSec the DNC attacks were something I paid careful attention to, and the evidence that Russia was both the attacker and that they passed the dumps to Wikileaks has only gotten stronger over time. At this point alternate explanations involve a lot of things far, far less likely, esp. with the Podesta attacks following the same pattern with better hidden but still discoverable Russian fingerprints all over.
Your skepticism of the CIA seems to have bled into conspiracy theorizing. I’d apply Occam’s Razor and see what looks most likely.
I agree, but social engineering is hacking in the traditional and modern definitions of the word.
It is interfering and manipulating the results, albeit to our knowledge not directly the polls.
Russian state agents did break into US political party computers and steal campaign data which is ABSOLUTELY hacking, and which shifted the election results to their favored end.
Pedantry in the sake of kneejerk dismissal over enlightenment is the least productive form.
You are specifically ignoring the well understood usage of “hack” and claiming that “the election” is only the polls, which ignores the known activity of Russians and their agents in the leadup to the election.
If you’re going to be pedantic, be accurate in your dismissal of someone else’s supposed inaccuracies.
In this case I think Trump’s only interested in destabilising other countries, growing fat by robbing the treasury, and starting wars. Those are the only things he seems to be seriously pursuing with his time while abdicating other responsibilities (well, he’s also pursuing ego gratification through rallies, lying about accomplishments, and attacking enemies on Twitter). Virtually every cabinet member he’s hired wants to invade Iran, and his plan to ramp up attacks on ISIS is going to spill a lot of innocent blood.
This matters not just because of the coming global destabilization, but also because that kind of irresponsibility has serious real world effects. Bush was a joker hiring cronies. When Katrina hit people died out of that irresponsibility and he triggered the largest economic collapse since the Great Depression. Trump’s even less competent than Bush. That part-timer irresponsibility is going to usher in a very, very destructive period in US and world history.
