It's not really you, it's the ideal pushed by the U.S. media, state dept and so forth. For instance, the "Assange is effectively a Russian agent" story never would have risen if not for people in U.S. media pushing the narrative and blurring the lines. Which they almost always do, they're usually gung ho to accept whatever U.S. intelligence says.

I mean, the whole thing we have going on with Trump and the alt right is worse, it's just curious that the Democrats have become much more conservative in many regards. Which is extremely worrying, because there may be little hope to counter the nationalist streak in America if the response from "the left" is "America is great, let's fight a war with Russia".

On a personal level, I'm fine with criticism of Putin, as long as it's not being leveraged into a position that says "the United States is the Batman of the west" or something.

I've never read it before, but I know enougg about Harris and Chomsky to know it was probably Sam losing his **** about Islam and acting retarded while Chomsky is flatly reasonable

Check above. I'm sure we could argue about it, but you got it backwards. Each email is Chomsky insulting Harris by pretending he doesn't know who he is and claiming Harris distorted him for five paragraphs, followed by a paragraph of substantive debate.

I think Trump is staying at Mar a Lago so often because he thinks he will be a popular president and it will cause people to come and stay. Like I really think you're right, he's just a lizard brain who saw an opportunity to grab some quick cash regardless of the damage he causes, like when junkies rip out copper wiring. I really think he's too stupid to even comprehend his own task as president.

Considering Iraq to be a mistake is not far from calling Ukraine a goofup. The war was pushed under false pretenses and resulted in 100000+ civilian deaths. Iraq posed no considerable threat to the U.S. or any neighboring countries. And many citizens harshly disagreed woth the war even then, but that doesn't matter in America, because political decisions are almost entirely up by the business class. Like there's considerable polisci research done on this, average Americans have no choice in policy, and thus had no choice in the Iraq war.

And for the ones who were deceived, well, the moral accountability lies on the deceiver.

As far as who destabilized the Middle East, well that in the past hundred or so years has pretty much been entirely the doing of Western powers. That includes Russia. You can't fight endless terror wars in a country without causing long term instability.

Interesting, outside of the debate though, I have no respect for Harris and quite a bit for Chomsky.

Chomsky absolutely slaughtered Harris during that substantive portion, which I think is probably worth more attention than Chomsky's tone.

This way of talking generally makes assumptions that are misguided. It presupposes that Russian interference (or some other thing) didn't occur, and then gives media collusion with government as the reason why the "false" belief that it did is so widespread. I'm not sure what "blurring the lines" means. It seems that the press reported a story based on official government documents released by intelligence organizations.

This isn't like Iraq. The intelligence community released a public report. As we discussed recently, that didn't happen with Iraq. The intelligence used to justify the war was largely concealed from the public. More importantly, unlike Iraq, in this case, there is widespread consensus amongst the intelligence communities that it happened.



I'd like to see an example of a Democrat making that argument -- specifically, advocating war on Russia as a response. Retaliation, in some form or another, is not the same as war.

It's a real problem that US credibility vis-a-vis deterrence was so greatly diminished during the Obama administration. If Obama had enforced his red line in Syria, maybe Putin wouldn't have thought he could get away with invading Crimea and annexing it.

Which is to say if there was effective deterrence, maybe Russian interference wouldn't have happened.

I've come across a skeptic or two of Russian interference (can't remember where?) who's argued that Russia would've had to have been stupid to interfere, given what the response would surely be.

But that only makes sense if you assume Russia didn't hack the election. Alternatively, look at Obama's weak response. The Russians knew they'd get away with it.

Is there any actual analogy here, aside from "one country invaded another country and it was bad?" Because the stated goals are different from the real interests that drove the war? How is Ukraine a "goofup"? Seems like you are pretty preoccupied with this equivalence thing.



Complete nonsense. And just to be incendiary, I'll throw in that it's reflective of a imperialistic, racist, condescending attitude that's prevalent on the left. Middle Easterners have agency too, y'know!

TIL someone born under a Wahhabist tyrant propped up by American guns and money has political agency.

Or is that part of the joke? I'm confused.

The idea that the US has some exceptional, moral character that gives it the exclusive right to enact regime change seems like an odious view. But the observation that the world is made more stable because America is the only superpower, and that the world will become less stable as China and Russia become more powerful and try to assert themselves over their historical "spheres of influence" seems less morally impoverished.

Of course you are!

If such a person doesn't have a lot of political agency, then they aren't producing much of the instability and change within their society or in the Middle East more broadly. So I'm not really talking about them.

Remember Democrat-partisan journals pushed multiple false stories during the election that led to 50+% of Democrats believing Russians hacked voting machines. Widespread beliefs like that are not accidental, it's the result of hysterical, ****ty journalism. They also worked very hard to correlate the Podesta/DNC emails with the Guccifer 2.0 leaks-Guccifer claims to have leaked to Wikileaks, other than that, nobody has anything relating them. Guccifer 2.0 and DNCLeaks is where pretty much the entire Russia theory came from.

You'll also notice ever is clear to call it Russian "interference", not Russian hacking, because interference is vague enough to be vacuously true. The Russians had a stake in the American election, yes, and I believe acted, but to what degree I'm not certain.


I'm actually going to agree directly with Assange on this, but calling that an "intelligence report" is insulting. It's a press release in drag. Having spent a good amount of time reading actual intelligence reports on Cryptome, I agree.

Plus it really contained no intelligence, just confidences and assertions. Maybe true. Still don't trust the CIA enough to call it fact.


Again, interference, yes, but it's generally very hard to pin down exactly who did a hack. Iirc the report explicitly does call out the Wikileaks releases as potentially done by the Russians, but who disagreed?


I was quoting Clinton on the campaign trail, she said military action may be necessary.


When Trump is droning at a higher rate: "maybe he had legit intelligence", when Obama doesn't posture against the Russian military: "what a weakass". Jingoism is a bad foreign policy.

But since we're talking about Wahhabism, I'll go ahead and cite as a counter example the Hillary Clinton email Reid cited a while back. The Saudis (along with Qatar) funded ISIS, presumably, out of their own coffers. The Saudis aren't a very large recipient of US aid; they do lead the world in arms imports.

If you take away the corrupt Flynn abusing his security clearance and the hysterical headlines, the Russia stories aren't amounting to very much. Something may be there but if you trusted the headlines you'd think Trump should be arrested any second. For as awful as Trump is, much of the reporting coming out is far too emotional for how contentless it is. The U.S. media is masterful at being technically truthful but suggestive towards a falsehood to anyone not reading critically.

I'd much rather read interviews of people threatened by NIH or Meals on Wheels budget cuts (which requires on the road, hard journalism) than yet another unimportant headline about some unsubstantial connection between a Trumpkin and Russia.

Where are the sanctions?

If you really lookat Syria, what's going on is two white bullies are fighting a turf war at the expense of tens of thousands of brown people, who gets to have more contrl over the lives of poor people? Oh whoops we meant bring Democracy.

Terrorism exists because white people have been really, really ****ty to people in Middle Eastern countries. And people like Sam Harris are the scum that propagate Medieval-era religious myths.

1) The Russian government interfered in the election
2) The Russian government interfered in the election and the Trump campaign colluded with them

1 and 2 are very different things, and they would call for completely different punishments for completely different groups of people. There isn't much news on 1 anymore. Every now and then there's a new story on 2, but it seems to be taking a back seat to the health care debates. And also this moronic twitter scandal. (Although I know it doesn't look that way to the Glenn Greenwalds of the world.)

I love the contempt, though, and the idea that you are so much better at reading the news/critically interpreting the media than those dumb, sucker center-left New York Times readers.

I should add, the dissolution of the Ottoman empire was also key in shaping current Middle East politics, so you're right to a degree that it's slightly disingenuous to imply it's entirely the fault of white people, but it's the fault of white people.

Then go to the WashPo webiste right now and find one? I found one about Meals on Wheels in 3 seconds. Still can't find one about Russian hacking...

Things would be better if people actually dod read the NYT because it's generally better than the rest. But open any comments section on Reddit and you'll see vast examples of people who have no political or reading comprehension attempting to give opinions; it's not hard to outsavvy most people.

Is that so? That's good, WaPo is generally okay when they talk about domestic policy.

lol I'd rather not :p

Reddit could be either a very representative pool, or not at all.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/03/17/for-the-record-wh-budget-director-did-not-say-meals-on-wheels-did-not-show-results/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_fact-check-355pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.03b32e6cea01

Yeah, I've only begun to appreciate how good Washington Post is. Didn't grow up with it in my house.

Saudi Arabia and the US have been allies for a long time, and they both share numerous strategic interests in maintaining stability in the region. The US isn't going to throw sanctions on a close ally.

It's an incredibly biased sample, but it's large enough to be an important perspective to read. Iirc it's basically liberal young white American men. Some white women and other white minorities like asians. Its interesting to try and guess about culturally, so like, as meta-entertainment, but to actually participate in any debate there is like staple gunning your own feet.

Which is fine, but that implies the U.S. is complicit in terrorism, which undermines the entire anti-Russia platform. Can't have their cake and eat it, too.

I usually use "interference" for grammatical reasons. Plus, "hacking" sounds ridiculous, and it doesn't quite circumscribe the things they did and didn't do.



Heh, you didn't really "quote" anything. Did you mean this? http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2016/10/20/hillary-clinton-just-say-okay-going-war-russia/




These aren't exactly unprovoked military operation for the sake of some nationalist agenda. They're reactions to facts on the ground. So, what's bad foreign policy? Not using military force when you say you will, and not supporting an ally when another country invades or annexes some of its sovereign land. But Ukraine's a pickle. I'm glad I don't have to be president and make these decisions.

Oh, but wait. Unprovoked military operations for the sake of some nationalist agenda? That sounds familiar. Yeah, that does sound bad.

The US very actively funded Wahhabi jihadists to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 80s. It seems like that's very much the US having its cake and eating it too, if that means advancing an "anti-Russia platform" while also being complicit in terrorism.

But in all seriousness, you'll have to clarify what you mean. I don't see how being an ally of the Saudi's while they fund ISIS means anything vis a vis Russia. There's some sort of hypocrisy there? Again, I don't see it.

Aside from the fact that when it comes to Saudi Arabia the US puts aside values for the sake of its interests. But if that's the problem, then every country in the world is hypocritical, that's great, let's move on.

Russia wasn't part of the Axis of Evil. If you recall, in the beginning, shortly after 9/11, Putin was actually an ally of the US in the War on Terror.

Er... Or the civil war started because as part of a massive awakening of democratic yearning in the Middle East, dissident protesters in Syria wanted more rights from their government, but then their government use excessive force against them? And so people began to take up arms, until it escalating into a civil war? And then jihadi terrorists began to pour in from all over the region and formed militias? And then the civil war became a proxy war between Sunni Arab states and Iran, after the Sunnis began to worry that Iran was going to get too powerful in the region, after it was dragged into the war because of ISIS? And then, because Assad had his back against the wall because of the successes of ISIS and the rebel militants, Russia entered the fray alongside Iran to prop up Assad, because Syria has been an ally for decades and Russia has a navy yard in Tartus (and because Iran and Russia are also allies, with Russia providing missiles and nuclear technology to Iran)? And the US is primarily engaged in the fighting by using military advisors to organize diverse coalitions of various minority groups within Iraq and Syria, because it's in their interests to get rid of ISIS as well as western countries? While all along the Kurds in Syria and Iraq take advantage of the turmoil to establish institutions in their respective countries, with the hope that eventually they might create a sovereign state (even though Turkey is opposed, because of worries that its sizable Kurdish population would secede and become part of it)?

Or, yeah, I guess if you really look at it, your story. Just a bunch of undifferentiated "brown people". Certainly nobody trying to master their own destiny.

Nothing condescending about that.

Scope matters.

I may be taking this out of context because I haven't been following this thread too closely, but this caught my eye. There have been a ton of really bad actors in the Middle East over the last century, among them was Ayatollah Khomeini, whose re-interpretation of the Quran (which specifically prohibits suicide), which radically extending the idea of an existing Shia ritual--in which the devout would symbolically self-flagellate, in an act of penance and remembrance of the suffering endured by Husayn ibn Ali--to literally sacrificing one's life, so long as as many enemies are killed as well.

Hafez al-Assad would later use Hezbollah, in order to drive out Americans by sending suicide bombers. (9/11, btw, was just a scaled up version of something Assad made famous, which by 2001 had spread from Shia to Sunni fighters.)

You can blame Western powers for their occupation of the Middle East, but the invention of suicide bombing in reaction to this lies squarely with autocratic leaders who opened Pandora's box by unleashing it on the region (in my opinion). I don't think it was worth it at all, for either side, and it was a huge mistake for them to do this.

It may well have been Reagan who was to blame, for withdrawing from Lebanon in response to the successful suicide attack, basically proving that it was a winning strategy.

Source: HyperNormalisation (2016)

Of course, Middle Eastern territory has been the object of foreign manipulation for centuries (or millennia, remember 7th grade?), which probably has something to do with the bloody and autocratic way their governments do business (to say nothing of the abominable history of Anglo-American intervention in the 20th-21st century).

Europe was similarly bloody both religiously / culturally / nationally for the longest time (and arguably never grew out of it on a national level, with only Pax Americana holding the continent together), but somehow won the race to global conquest.

I did a little more poking around mainstream media news sites. This is completely off base. There are literally no articles about Russian interference on their home pages. There's no new news on the topic; updates aren't being fabricated out of whole cloth.

Again, there are many articles about Trump's twitter storm where he accused Obama of wiretapping him. But that's a different story than the interference. This story is about how our president is an idiot who can't not say stupid things.