Yeah Manchin is in this thread because reasons.
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Isnât Manchin the senator that oil lobbyist like name dropped as an easy senator to manipulate in that âtotally not officialâ leaked video chat?
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Sounds familiar. I think a lot of his wealth is in coal too.
Fuuuck!!
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Weâre screwed. Itâs all important- but without this none of the other programs have to worry about continuing.
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Idk but an insurrection from the progressive side is looking better every dayâŚ
Lets sell W Va and Arizona to the highest bidder.
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It would be less galling if they didnât sell out for so little. $400K is frigginâ chump change as far as bribery goes, especially for something as powerful as a US senator.
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I think that there is something akin to a moral panic about sinister forces from outside lurking everywhere and being the sole reason everything isnât going as well as one thinks it should.
I called it McCarthyism because the American discourse has never really gotten over its anti-Russia stance. Donât get me wrong: Putin is a horrible dictator and there have definitely been attempts at manipulating public opinion going on. But as weâre seeing with stuff like this or with the revelations about fake news sites being run by Macedonian teenagers purely because pro-Trump content drove up engagement and therefore ad revenue, itâs not that every ill that befell the US was being planned in the Kremlin.
The country is very much able to polarise itself and blaming it on sinister outside forces looks to this outside observer like a hangover from the cold war. Losing the vote was a result of misogyny, racism, voter apathy, voter suppression, fake news in the established media, fake news in online media and many other factors, almost all of them homegrown. Some of that fake news in online media originated in Russia, and maybe it was even able to convince just enough people to swing the balance in the election. But that doesnât change the fact that the election is very much a home-grown mess.
In my view this is a bit like conspiracy theories: itâs comforting to think thereâs an external enemy who is responsible for bad stuff. That this is some evil Russian, not your next door neighbour. Note that Iâm not calling you a conspiracy theorist: I acknowledge that these manipulations happened, Iâm just saying that they have taken am outsized proportion of the blame.
I should add another thing: I am aware that this is very much a cultural difference.1 Germany has always been close to Russia. We have a large Russo-German minority and consequently I, for example, used to shop in Russian supermarkets and cook Russian food quite regularly. Hell, several of my family members speak the language and one lives there.
Russians arenât some sort of faceless enemy to me who live somewhere far away. Theyâre nice people that l know. So when I see them being blamed for everything ever, my heckles are up.
And I know that you will, rightly, point out that this is about Putin and his henchmen specifically but that is not the discourse Iâm seeing online. Usually itâs Russia or Russians being blamed. When Trump withdrew from the Paris accords or when he sent Richard Grenell to Germany as an ambassador charged with destabilising us and supporting the alt-right, I never blamed Americans (who, too, are nice people some of whom I count as friends), I blamed Trump. I donât see why that courtesy shouldnât be extended to Russians (or indeed Chinese people).
1 I think it is telling that the other person in this thread expressing similar views to me is fellow outside observer @robertmckenna
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I get that the vast majority of Russians are just normal people trying their best to live their lives in spite of having a government that does everything in its power to make that more difficult. The same could be said of North Koreans.
But the Putin regime is and has been for quite some time involved in a widespread propaganda campaign that aims to create and encourage social strife by exploiting racial and religious tensions, to undermine trust in democracy and institutions and to destabilize societies by (for example) discouraging public health measures. This is something that is happening not only in America, but throughout the West, including Germany (where RT was recently banned from YouTube for spreading anti-vax bullshit). So I am not advocating for mistrusting your Russian neighbors; I just think that we cannot afford not to treat Russia (as a country, under the leadership of Putin) as an enemy.
The effectiveness of the Russian propaganda campaign can be debated (although the 2016 election came down to fractions of a percent of the vote in a few key states), but the campaign itself is the action of a country whose leadership is hostile not just to America, but to humanity (again, the propaganda is often designed to foment racial tensions).
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And Iâm not disputing any of that. In fact I think I acknowledged above that the disinformation campaign might have been enough to make a difference in the 2016 election. The thing is, though: they added on to a huge pile of existing internal problems and division and every time I see someone complain about Russia I see them ignoring that pile of problems that was caused by neighbours, not sinister foreigners.
I know that you and @DukeTrout are far from unwilling to acknowledge these home grown problems, of course. This is more a wider point about this issue.
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Of course, I would put Roger Ailes and Steve Bannon in the same category as Putin. There is plenty of blame to go around. Fascism has become a global enterprise, bringing together far-right figures in America, Europe, Russia and elsewhere. Somebody somewhere is taking all of this propaganda and translating it into every language you can imagine. Russia is a big part of that, but still just one of many parts. And everyone who is a part of that, regardless of how big a part, is deserving of condemnation.
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Then that is definitely where the misunderstanding is. From inside the US (and having traveled extensively outside my own corner of it, even during the pandemic) the primary focus is on the internal sinister forces actively working towards its downfall. That is widely recognized by mainstream Democrats and progressives across the country.
Where Russia (and when I say that, I mean the government, not the people - I also have friends who are Russian immigrants to the US who are wonderful people) comes into play in US politics isnât so much as some unfathomable Boogey Man, trying to eat babies through the internet. Russia comes into play because 1. Putin and his cronies have absolutely worked to influence US politics towards their own self-interest, in ways that have caused clear and discrete harm; and 2. Their coordination with Trump and the broad GOP is a mechanism by which we can actually remove the internal bad actors from power and and hold them accountable for the harm theyâve caused.
So when people talk about Russia, it is to acknowledge real harms but mainly to cling to one of the few legal mechanisms we have to accomplish some kind of accountability for the much greater harms suffered upon the American people by our own internal baddies.
Thatâs why I say itâs not either-or; itâs both. The internal oligarchic bad actors have had a much longer time to screw with our system (just read a few of Heather Cox Richardsonâs blogs to quickly see examples), but they have had constraints that theyâve had to work within that the more recent Russian bad actors havenât had. We have to recognize both threats, and that there is a degree of coordination between them, in order to counter them.
ETA: The term âMcCarthyismâ is really very specific and evokes meaningful reactions from people who lived through it, some of whom are still alive. Like other horrors that have been visited upon people by others, itâs not a term to throw around lightly or out of context. The closest current correlation would be the government and media campaign against trans people in the UK. People in power there, both in government and with societal influence are scapegoating trans people, trying to turn the victims of abuse into the âvillains.â
To see âMcCarthyismâ being used not only when there is real harm by the accused (in the historical case of McCarthyism, the harm was entirely perpetrated by the accusers) but also when the term is being levied against progressives (who were the victims of McCarthyism) rather than conservatives (who were the villains in McCarthyism) is particularly jarring.
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Grand Junction, Colorado
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They are going to cheat the Fk out of the next election.
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Tighten that vice.
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