I think by saying "Russia thing lets people continue to be lazy", you ought to mean "social media lets people continue to be lazy".

In the case of #BlackLivesMatter, they just needed to get the attention of the media to shame police departments into changing. The Russia thing is similar: they just need to get the attention of Congress (and until the Democrats gain a majority, the voters of the next election) well enough to express that they'd like to see Trump removed from office.

Is it really that people are lazier than they already were before, or just that social media has made slacktivism easier for larger numbers of people? And if so, why is that bad if it leads to some kind of change in areas where there didn't even used to be a pulse? (Ditto the sexual harassment stuff with my other two examples.)

In context of the #resistance, sure. I would think that, the Russia narrative generally allows people to circumnavigate a complicated set of causes and arrive at a simple conclusion, i.e. intellectual laziness. Same how people love to peg the rise of the Nazis on the Reichstag fire and ignore the other causes.



I think BLM has done a bit more than just draw attention to police departments, and for some reason I'm skeptical that retweets are going to convince the Republican-majority congress to act? You could maybe credit the #resistance with doing.. something, in terms of the people who follow might also be pushing their politicians, but otherwise I don't think the movement has accomplished much.



I don't have an opinion as to whether people are more or less than before, the only thing I'm concerned with is that people aren't politically active enough, period. Don't need a historical commentary to make that complaint.

Only on my mind since:

https://harpers.org/archive/2017/07/the-reichstag-fire-next-time/

I read this, which is pretty good.

From that:



The implications are pretty astounding, really, given that the United States has a history of suspending rule of law in times of crisis. We tend to offer ad hoc justifications - and love conspiracy theories to explain why evil regimes gained power.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/930510825617543173/photo/1

As already said, not a huge fan of Greenwald myself, but he raises a good point here. How quickly people just eat up any headline that sounds spooky and Russia and like a House of Cards plot, but then ignore the details which realize it as a nonissue.

Speaking of which, Russian intelligence apparently showed the "troll armies" House of Cards as their way of introducing Russians to American politics. You see, this is part of the whole Russia conspiracy too - people build up Russia and the FSB in the imagination as some sort of superintelligence, mega-talented genius hackertopia, but the reality is every bit a parody of itself as American politics were in the 2016 election.

If anything should give people hope, it's that there are actually many good Americans who were politically charged by the election and are working hard. These aren't the people retweeting stories they didn't read on Twitter, though.

Note that I mentioned elections.

I suppose I'll share something that happened on Reddit which helped set this tangent off.

Recently Eversor shared that article about the DMs between Wikileaks and Trump Jr. That was posted on Reddit, and everybody was going total ape**** about Wikileaks being an FSB cover, or whatever. At some point I made the same mild suggestion I did here: that people were too eager to accept the DMs at face value, that they could be construed another way, but overall the messages were still damning.

Besides being downvoted, someone replied to my post with just a number. I was curious by this, and so investigated their profile. Turns out, the person goes around "numbering" Russian trolls they spot in Reddit comments, to keep track of Russian operations on Reddit.

Like, it's a ****ing parody. How do these people actually exist and take themselves seriously? It's all cosplay, it's people trying to live in a Baldacci novel. It's seriously insane, just think about the kind of person who actively reads comment threads to identify Russian operatives and imagine someone who's not stuffed to the eyeballs on Xanax.

Pretty hard to win elections when your base is gerrymandered into one district.. no?

Like, how does voting fix voter suppression?

Though I will say. Wikileaks DMing people on Twitter to beg for information is pretty goddamned hilarious in comparison to the image they try to affect.

Doesn't #metoo indicate clearly that social media can be used as an effective platform for activism? I can't imagine that Kevin Spacey would've been fired from House of Cards, or that Weinstein would've been fired, or that Louis CK would've been fired, if large companies didn't think continuing to employ those people would be a liability for them, largely because of social media activism (i.e., the online mob).

If you hang around on corners of the internet where people are dumb you're going to see lots of dumb ****.

Yes, my only caveat is that, these same large companies actually care about their image on Twitter - what everyday Americans think of Netflix matters to Netflix, what Americans think of Putin and Trump doesn't seem to have relevance to how they act. So, yes, in some cases, social media activism can be influential, but it has limits.

Pretty hard to change police departments when they are full of white supremacists.

So I guess #BLM should just put a sock in it.

That's true. It also seems to me that this sort of person is dominant - well, not particularly the dumb conspiracy guy, but people who take the Russia conspiracy thing to the next level, they're pretty mainstream in political discourse right now. Of course it's not a representative sample by any means - but look at what topics are upvoted on /r/politics in Reddit, and the conversations in the thread. There's tens of thousands of people reading this place who think this way - it represents something mainstream in political discourse, though exactly what it is and to what extent it exists are debatable.

No! I refuse! Reddit rots minds. Really, it's the last place I'd go to get a read on what "people" are thinking.



Yeah. And there are 330 million Americans. What's it representative of? It's representative of what weirdos who spend too much time on the internet think.

You should personally call each and every one of the thousands of the people who during the Obamacare repeal debates telephoned their senators and congressman every day for weeks under the banner of #resistance and demanded that they don't repeal Obamacare (in part or in whole), and you should tell them how lazy they are.

I don't think #resistance is primarily framed in terms of resistance to foreign influence in American politics. It's much more often evoked in relation to social issues, such as draconian immigration laws, the clampdown on and deportation of immigrants, rolling back gains for women's rights, and Obamacare repeal. Foreign policy issues are pretty low on the totem poll.

Really? How then do you estimate what's going on in popular culture?

Wait, please tell me that was sarcasm.

Uh... Assuming that by "popular culture", you mean, what people think about politics, my answer is: I read different newspapers/website coming from different ideological perspectives and assume that what I read in each paper/site is at least somewhat reflective of what the audience of that newspaper/website thinks, knowing that my impressions of "what people think" are a hazy guess at best?

To estimate what's going on in popular culture, I turn on The Apprentice.

Then, once I've talked myself out of suicide, I turn the goddamn thing off and head outside and take a stroll.

Then I go on Reddit to read /r/NeutralCulture

You know what's also pretty mainstream in politica discourse these days?

****ing Breitbart.

Or hell, how about Fox News for starters.

The Masha Gessen article is so dishonest. It's *surprisingly* dishonest. For example, she says:



But if you go to the article, its content is in prefect agreement with its headline:



If CNN's report is accurate, Russia's efforts to influence the election were not "a god-awful mess" or a "cacophony".

There's not really a complete parity between what people believe and what journalists say, nor is there a parity between people's opinions and the opinions of journalists.

This is exactly the sort of pedantic ****flinging you do that so often that misses the point. Having a few paragraphs at the top of an article explaining the headline doesn't "disprove" her point or whatever, the point is that, the CNN article cites no evidence, it doesn't even really say much - it kind of asserts the point, and then talks about other things.

Masha Gessen at least, you know, cites the senate report and seems to be based in more grounded evidence. In fact, you'll often find a disparity between people like her and purely American reporters on Putin - it's the outspoken Putin critics, the people with more intimate knowledge of Russia who are more prone to pump the brakes on how nutty America gets over Russia, whereas it's American "Russia experts" that are going ape****.

Huh. Well, okay, if you want to lash out at me and disbelieve this article and the four anonymous sources the article cites, for no other reason than because it's inconvenient for you and your political point of view, go on ahead. It's the world we live in these days and no one can stop you.

I suppose, after all, that it's totally possible that CNN fabricated this story out of whole cloth for some sinister reason or another (but you probably wouldn't call that a conspiracy)!

Yep. Hence my skepticism that "my impressions of 'what people think' are a hazy guess at best".

Oh, like Julia Ioffe?

Masha Gessen's perspective is shaped more by her far-left political commitments than by any kind of sober thinking about Russia that comes exclusively from her familiarity with the inner workings of the Russian government and sensibilities of Russians.

What's more trustworthy - a thoughtful investigation of freely available evidence, or anonymous sources?

Is this really up for debate?



Fair enough, I wouldn't claim to know more - I give an attempt, yet it could be even further misleading.

All I know is /r/politics sucks.

I don't know, her take seems entirely palatable and fact-laden. I had zero objections to any of the material?



Oh, okay. Everybody who disagrees with you is blinded by bias.

Is there freely available evidence that contradicts the idea that "Russian-linked Facebook ads targeted Michigan and Wisconsin"?

So I guess the Washington experts aren't that bad.

Also, her sources are anonymous.

No, the point is that, outside of "anonymous sources", there's no freely available information either way, yet, if you look at what is freely available, then you come to the conclusion that Russian disinformation is hardly coherent and not the omnipotent, evil genius narrative that people make it out to be.

In other words, CNN's report is as trustworthy as CNN is - you don't even have the potential to evaluate yourself.

Nope. People are only biased when their conclusions are established at a priori the outset based on their assumptions and their ideological commitments. Someone on the far-left, approaching the world with a certain set of assumptions, isn't incapable of being correct. I don't even fully disagree with some points in Massen's article. But sometimes its clear that a persons prejudices are driving their conclusions, and conditioning how they interpret evidence, which prevents them from engaging in a disinterested "thoughtful investigation of freely available evidence", to borrow your words.

That article didn't have "sources", and you're again getting pretty pedantic.

What's the point again, here? Do you have one?

Right - it's Mr. Eversor, the clear-thinking rationalist - he isn't prone to bias, it's people on the political extremes who are.

If you ever stopped to take a moment in the mirror - you might realize how far your head is up your own ass 90% of the time about this stuff.

Are you familiar with any of Facebooks advertising products? If you wanted to spend $20 on targeted ads on people in Michigan and Wisconsin you could probably figure out how to do it in about 10 minutes. It doesn't take "omnipotence" or "genius". Even from Massen's article, it's abundantly clear that Russia devoted significant resources and money to intervening in the election. Does the article prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Russia targeted Wisconsin and Michigan? No. But there's also no real reason to doubt it. Plus, the anonymous sources have reasons not to make stuff up for no reason. They have to worry about their own credibility with reporters.

From Ioffe's article:



But, aside from that: the article did have sources, otherwise Ioffe wouldn't have had any information to publish. But they aren't named. Hence, they're anonymous sources.

Not sure what you even think a pedant is. Someone who can cite evidence reliably?



1. "Washington experts" (or people with more conventional perspectives than Massen) aren't categorically "going ape****". Many of them are doing good work.

2. You cast skepticism on anonymous sources only when it's inconvenient for you.

Did you take a look at Massen's math? Russian ads anounted to a fraction of a percent of the content on Facebook. Even in the most targetted of targetted demographics, it couldn't have amounted to much, and quantifying its effect seems really hard.

Nobody at all disputes that Russia was involved, specifically I'm talking about how much people are blowing it out of proportion into a huge, deviously clever conspiracy, when it wasn't. It becomes a tool to deny the underlying problems in American politics - whatever effect Russia had, it had on a country with an already massively ****ed up political scene, and all this attention given to just Russia displaces the more important analysis of how Trump won via American politics itself.

You've said yourself you don't know where I fall politically so I guess I do an alright job.