Especially since not all of the people here on BoingBoing are Americans. I’m from Finland, and I can tell you that living next door to Russia, geographically speaking, makes things like Russia’s illegal grab of Crimea and their actions in Eastern Ukraine look rather more alarming than from across the ocean. Or the things like Russia providing funding for large numbers of European far-right, anti-EU groups, including here in Finland (which makes all the Russian hand-wringing about Ukrainian far right into an exercise in hypocrisy). Or the way that official Russian media and pro-Russian trollies and bots on the social media spread lies about Europe to stir shit up and make Russian people afraid of and suspicious towards the West.
I’m not saying that Russia is going to start WWIII and roll tanks into Finland or the Baltics, or try to do a full-scale invasion of Ukraine (instead of continuing their current course of supporting the “separatists” enough to prevent Ukraine from regaining control over the eastern parts of the country); that would be paranoid.
But I am saying that Russia is very much a bad actor on the world stage, and while their meddling is rarely the cause of anything, they definitely try very hard to create chaos and internal dissension in the US and the EU countries. And a lot of leftists, Americans very much included, seem unable or unwilling to accept this, perhaps out of some kind of a reflexive idea that anyone who opposes America has to be somehow morally in the right.
And if the pro-American candidate was revealed to have been illegally conspiring with US intelligence don’t you expect that the Russian people would be righteously pissed off about it?
Few people are actually advocating war with Russia.
The primary purpose of the Russia investigation is to prevent such meddling from affecting the outcome of future U.S. elections and to bring accountability to those Americans who conspired to undermine the sovereignty and legitimacy of our election system.
I’m not certain what you mean by this, but you seem to be suggesting that the Russia probe is a prelude to war. If so, I’m not sure where you’re getting that.
Securing election infrastructure, prosecuting crooks for financial crimes and operating as unregistered foreign agents, and figuring out how to hold social media platforms accountable for their ability to sway elections is not warfare.
Calling something an “act of war” doesn’t mean “this was really irritating”. It means “this was an act to which we would be justified in responding with mass lethal force”.
As mentioned, troop levels and tensions on the NATO/Russian borders are already rising.
North & South Korea are currently at war. They aren’t currently deploying WMDs at each other. They just aren’t maintaining some facade that everything between them is totally cool.
Bluntly, the Intercept isn’t known to be too careful with their words, and for better or worse in modern politics the words act of war are bandied vacuously bandied about.
I agree, but it doesn’t mean the US is on a path to war with Russia, that makes zero sense even from a geopolitically hawkish standpoint. This isn’t the Cold War.
in this case, they were quoting a number of people who weren’t at the levers of power when they were quoted and most are even farther from them now. like rt, i regard the intercept as about as trustworthy as fox news, possibly more trustworthy than breitbart, but no more so than fox. i also notice that this was from february and the situation vis-a-vis russia is no more dangerous now than it was then.
again, i often regard you as having a very good grasp on the domestic politics here in the states, not just for someone who does not reside here but in general. on this matter you seem to have gotten stuck on a narrative frame and you can’t seem to let go of it, regardless of evidence to the contrary. i really wish you would reconsider your all too hasty dismissal of the idea that a primary motive for the meuller investigation and the pursuit of 45 for his ties to russia stems from a genuine desire to root out and eliminate a profound case of corruption from the u.s. body politic.
The “Russiagate is like Pearl Harbor” nonsense came from Jim Himes. He’s on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
To be clear: I do think that the Russians were probably responsible for the Podesta hack.
But I do not believe that this justifies the militant and obsessive response it has recieved, and I do not think that the subsequent investigations are ever going to seriously impair the Trump Presidency. There are many much more pressing matters [1] than the Mueller investigation, although you would not know it if MSNBC provides your news.
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[1] For example: Puerto Rico. ICE. White supremacy. Open fascism. Murderous police. Water in Flint. Prison slavery. Climate change. Yemen. Etc.
We should certainly keep up the pressure on all those matters. But they’re not likely to get much better as long as Trump is in office, and exposing a criminal conspiracy against the United States that has compromised virtually everyone in his inner circle may well be our means for getting rid of him.
Even if the Mueller investigation doesn’t result in Trump’s removal it’s still worthwhile. The American people deserve to know that “conspiring with a hostile foreign power to undermine the U.S. elections” isn’t something our government is just going to ignore.
Sure, investigate. It’s probably even worth a few minutes on the news every few weeks, or whenever they actually announce anything significant.
But:
a) It does not justify the obsessive blanket coverage it has received, and
b) All of the problems I listed predate Trump, and none of them are going to magically disappear when Trump is gone. Trump is the symptom, not the cause.
the corruption of 45, his family, and his closest advisers represents an important matter as well. certainly important enough to rate a serious investigation like the one meuller is conducting.
in the meantime, i rely on a wide array of news sources that include both domestic and international news media with large, “mainstream” outlets ranging from fox to cnn to npr to the new york times to the l.a. times to the guardian to le monde to the melbourne age to rt to democracy now plus a host of left wing blogs. i try to stay abreast of what’s going on and i have done enough in-depth reading of history and current affairs to have some idea about the forces and trends underlaying the events of my time on earth.
A fever is just a symptom of an underlying disease but you may still need to get a serious fever under control if you want the patient to survive long enough to recover.
