Is Zangief winning round 1 intentional?
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a - no
b - no
c - More than one. All cited Wikileaks obsessively when I discussed things with them, and all voted green.
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I’d be willing to bet that most Happy Mutants would answer the same way. Like @silkox1, I’m wondering what his point is in asking for this anecdotal evidence. Not that JAQing off necessarily has to have a point.
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Uh, yeah. They are both full of shit? Empire marches on.
I’m not on Twitter because it feels more like a bunch of people shouting at each other than a conversation.
Is there any chance @xeni could have boiled this down to the most pertinent comments and added her own commentary, rather than subjecting us all to a twitterdump? I read bb because I’m interested in what the editors and commentators have to say but personally, I couldn’t give fewer fucks about what the twatterati have to say about anything…
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Nations are dead, almost over with. They have nothing to offer the elites and global capitalists who control a new worldwide empire of nationless wealth and power. Technologically-armed sophisticated elites are not going to let democracy get ahead of them on the next phase, globalism, like they occasionally did over the last handful of centuries in some nation states; they’ve learned from history and have infiltrated and destroyed all of the insitutions meant to check their power. Protest, riot, disrupt all you want, global capital will give no fucks and move on to the next place. To paraphrase Chris Hedges, ‘rebellion (living morally outside of a soulless and vulgar system) is a perpetual act of opposition to power, it brings it’s own moral fulfillment to a life stripped of any other purpose, regardless of whether you ‘achieve’ anything or not. revolution just swaps one group of assholes for the next’.’ I loved your post, thanks for it.
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[quote=“thirdworldtaxi, post:64, topic:91329, full:true”]
Uh, yeah. They are both full of shit? Empire marches on.[/quote]
Well sure, it’s just a matter of degree. But if Obama is saying Russian state-affiliated actors did perpetrate the hack and Putin is saying that they didn’t, I’ll give the word of the former slightly more credibility than the latter (a life-long professional deceiver who’s busy trying to reconstitute the dead Soviet empire as best he can).
[quote=“thirdworldtaxi, post:66, topic:91329, full:true”]
Nations are dead, almost over with. They have nothing to offer the elites and global capitalists who control a new worldwide empire of nationless wealth and power.[/quote]
William Gibson’s adage applies: “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” For those post-national elites to whom the future has been distributed, though, nationalism still serves as a useful tool to distract and control those to whom it hasn’t. I don’t expect the nation-state to vanish within my lifetime.
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I could argue that it is vanishing as we speak. The useful functions of a nation state are foundering before our eyes: social safety nets, regulation and environmental protection, public education, providing communal goals of common good, etc. Those functions have significantly atrophied consistently in my short life, to a point now where the heads of fundamental government agencies will be openly hostile to the agencies they will be chargwd with leading. I can imagine a future in a decade or two where a nation provides nothing, not even land to farm or live on, to the vast majority of it’s people. (Was imagining America).
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The institutions underpinning Western liberal democracy are certainly under assault by both right-wing populists and globalist capitalism, and I see things coming to a head in the US as you describe around 2050 if current trends continue. However, illiberal democracies and theocracies and tyrannies depend on those useful functions of a nation-state to stay in power (even scumbags like Hamas do that to win hearts and minds). They also require the existence of enemy nation-states as boogeymen to justify their hold on power. Unless my lifespan will be decades longer than anticipated (here’s hoping!) they’ll still be around.
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None of those are the central role of a nation state. Through history most nation states have not had any significant role in the creation of social safety nets, regulation and environmental protection. Even public education is iffy, while providing communal goals of common good is usually touted as a national goal, it’s rarely been a real feature.
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I disagree, I believe those institutions (the press, universities, etc) have utterly failed when we needed them most. Most have been taken over by careerists and courtiers to power. Are you familiar with Chris Hedges’ absolutely brilliant ‘Death of the Liberal Class’? Or Hedges’ writing and critique at all? I can’t recommend any of his books enough, they are life changing, and his integrity as a journalist is unassailable.
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The press and academia aren’t all under corporate control yet, and as a liberal I believe we have to support those institutions that are holding the line against tyranny, even if they are flawed.
I’ve been following Hedges since the Bush Jr. administration. He’s too much of a moral scold for my atheistic tastes and too much of a defeatist for my liberal ones, but the harsh truths he speaks about what’s happening to liberal democracy in the U.S. deserve a wider audience.
You’ll enjoy this recent interview with him about his time at the NYT and the Byzantine politics of the place – courtiers and careerists, yes, but also colleagues and bosses with integrity.
Thanks Obama…
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And yet there is still no conclusive proof: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/14/heres-the-public-evidence-russia-hacked-the-dnc-its-not-enough/
and Oblame-a won’t release the “secret” evidence…
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We also need to see the evidence on climate change as well as the suppressed details on the 9/11 attacks. And, while we’re at it, why hasn’t Obama released his real birth certificate?
Personally, I think that Lee Harvey Oswald hacked the DNC.
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Typical straw man response!
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Well of course, Putin isn’t the black guy! /s
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Beats argumentum ad ignorantiam. (Or, in the case of Greenwald and his lackeys, argument ad incredulitas.)
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It’s not inconceivable to falsify such “overwhelming evidence”, but last time an American government did that (Iraq’s WMD), there were plenty of more credible people calling them out on their bullshit, so let’s skip the conspiracy theory for now.
So lets assume that the evidence that Russia hacked the DNC is 100% real.
Now, SO WHAT?
Guys, two minute hate against Putin is over for today.
So, Russia illegally got hold of some embarrassing facts about the Clinton Campaign.
They published it.
The American voters decided in favor of Trump (according to a strange electoral system that was, however, not up for discussion).
Now everyone seems to be assuming that this tipped the scales in Trump’s favor, and that therefore, DA RUSSKIES HACKED THE ELECTION.
Apparently, the Russians deliberately neglected to publish something equally bad about Trump’s campaign. Which makes it evil to reveal evidence of improper behavior. With the leaked DNC emails and an equally bad Republican Smoking Gun both out in the open, American voters would definitely have made the right choice. Yeah right.
Russia seems to have been caught doing what America always does. And I’m not talking about the CIA assassinated elected heads of government; this is more on the scale of the National Endowment for Democracy. This story is not new, except the last 100 times, America was the perpetrator.
So now, formerly reasonable people are talking about Cold War, about The Enemy, painting the whole world as Us vs Them. Being supported by foreign actors is apparently worse than Trump’s other flaws in the mind of many Americans. Scary stuff, if you ask me.
But at least, this particular Cold War is likely to end on January 20th. At which point we’ll be back to worrying about America starting wars against Iran or even China.
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Sure. You can’t get angry at Russia for trying to influence our election any more than you can get angry at a bird for pooping on you.
The focus of the argument should be directed inward, and has been by everyone except for people trying to say it is OK because of the US’s involvement in other elections. If/when we interfere in another country’s election then it delegitimizes their process to the extent that interference has an effect. Likewise the Russian hacking delegitimizes our results. We probably have to live with that for now, but the discussion of what that means for the future needs to happen, and the incoming administration should be made to repudiate this just as they should have repudiated (rather than embraced) their support from the Klan and the Alt-Right. It shouldn’t just go away.
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