US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3546

On March 15 2022 04:14 JimmiC wrote:

Opinion articles tend to be dramatic, for ratings and clicks. The issue is many people can not seperate fact from opinion. Take lots of the stuff you write, you will say something did not happen with Trump when it did but he was not arrested or senatw decided not to impeach.

On March 15 2022 04:35 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


Could you please give a few examples of conservative non-MSM news sources that are more reputable than MSM news*? I'm unfamiliar with many of those conservative non-MSM sources, but I'd like to be educated on this, because I'm hoping you're not saying that Alex Jones and OAN are more accurate than CNN.

*MSM news technically includes Fox News, which is far and away the least accurate MSM news source, so I'd like to temporarily remove Fox from comparison, as that would set the bar much lower for overall MSM reliability.

On March 15 2022 08:13 Mohdoo wrote:
One thing that has been fascinating about Russia getting hammered by this ordeal is seeing them call in their compromised folks like Gabbard. The bat signal couldn't be any more obvious. Calling in the favors in a time of need is as clear as day. Weird to see, but also encouraging to know they are sweating.

On March 15 2022 10:51 lestye wrote:


stuff like this

On March 15 2022 09:30 WombaT wrote:

See my previous post/theory. Dan and Jimmy provided stuff that I think ties in/augments it, although I’d diverge a wee bit personally too.

I’m in a fair amount of real hard left tacking pages and insofar as my anecdotes prove anything there’s a ridiculous amount of tankie support.

I use the word support quite deliberately. As a quite distinct phenomenon from ‘its complicated’ thru to ‘but what about the West equivocation’, full on ‘this is a good thing’ nonsense.

There is choice in the matter, sometimes, or to varying degrees. A Chinese person may be functionally restricted in accessing certain information, a Russian person may have pathways still open, but is more immediately surrounded by misinformation, or particular angles in the surrounding culture and mainstream media. Someone in the West is reasonably free to pick and choose.

What guides those choices? Certainly an ability to personally curate your sources of information, a wider distrust of the mainstream feed into it.

Even when I was a teen politics nerd. Which isn’t THAT long ago, mainstream narratives were considered largely ballpark accurate, or at least a springboard for subsequent ideological divergence. My left wing interpretation of x event may be different from whoever I’m talking to, we tended not to disagree on the event vaguely happening as reported. Conspiracies/theories were a fun, almost detached thing from the issues of the day. Yeah we’ll share what pet theory as to who shot JFK we subscribe to, and then we’d talk about the ‘real politics stuff’, they were more discrete whereas nowadays they seem rather blurred boundary wise.

It’s frustrating as I’ve alluded to it a few times here, have yet to find it again a rare non paywalled paper! In this instance shared traits/rough psychological profile of people who tended to be attracted to conspiracy theories.

It’s a bit old, so I think the blurring I referenced kind of comes into play, but the vague ideas remain, IMO solid. Swap out the reasonably small subset of people into the ‘classic’ conspiracy theories about a Flat Earth or the Moon landings being faked into a wider group of people who seek ‘alternative narratives’

From memory, and adding of my own takes

1. Not everyone’s that bright, interconnected geopolitics is complicated. Rather than accept its complexities and ‘I don’t know’, some folks seem to prefer to have the surety of being a confirmed idiot rather than admit to knowledge gaps.
2. The kind of pathological contrarian streak some people, as I mentioned before.
3. Kind of ties into 1. You see this with anti-Semitic conspiracies, to take one example, a conversion of a complex world of competing poles of power, ethics and conflicting vested interests into quite simplistic top-down narratives. Easier to mentally process despite being well, wrong.
4. The capacity to find holes on the internet where almost anything has enough other adherents to reinforce whatever it is you believe.
5. Ties more into conventionally intelligent/bright people, who would seem to be outliers in these wider trends. In terms of peer interactions though they’re used to being the smartest person in their primary/secondary school environment, or up to that. But eventually you’ll end up in an environment where you’re no longer at the top of the relative pile. So depending on how one is wired, you either accept this state of affairs or go into the world of ‘alternative facts’ where you can be an expert.

I mean it’s crude and I’m generalising hugely but I hope my bollocks sparks some convo

On March 15 2022 12:53 ChristianS wrote:
I’ve never been clear on the definition of “tankies” but I think a few people on the far left fall into a similar trap. They tend to think of themselves as immune to propaganda because of their leftist analytical tools, but then they wind up at conclusions like “Stalin was Good Actually” or some shit, and it seems obvious to me they’re not actually seeing through propaganda, they’re just contrarian.

I mean I appreciate the value of questioning the American narrative and I try to hear out anyone who’s telling me my assumptions are wrong, but at the end of the day, if you don’t have a problem with an unprovoked war of conquest by a European nation, I don’t know how you can be called anti-imperialist.

On March 15 2022 21:12 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Here in Norway, I've seen attitudes change towards NATO-membership among many who used to be skeptical. NATO membership hasn't ever really been a contentious issue for Norway - it has had widespread support, but our two leftmost parties with parliamentary representation have been negative. One such party - the socialist left party separated from our labor party in the early 60s over just this disagreement; the socialist left faction wanted neutrality through the form of a Nordic alliance with Sweden and Finland, while the labor party (and every other party at that time) wanted continued NATO membership.

I've seen debates the past two weeks however, indicating that this point of view has now changed. Significant elements of the leftmost groups in Norway have come to accept that NATO membership is overall beneficial. Now, this has for the past 50 years been a fairly dormant question. The leftmost parties in Norway have never been in a position where they can influence Norwegian foreign policy in any significant manner. I've voted for this party despite not wanting to leave NATO in every election, knowing that they're not going to have any real influence with regard to this question. However, that we now see many prominent members of said party publicly state that they're on the verge of changing their stance/have already changed stance is fairly significant in terms of indicating a change in mentality; this is a party that had 'leave NATO' as their initial raison d'être.

Putin's tactic of disinformation campaigns aimed at sowing discontent and disagreement, supporting authoritarians throughout Europe, or the more sadistic Belorussian 'push middle eastern refugees towards the polish border', all seemed successful to me in terms of fragmenting Europe and the west. But there also seems to have been a gross miscalculation in terms of how successful this had already been, and in terms of how horrified we've all been by the invasion, and so far, it has worked as a great unifier for all of Europe. There's a whole ton of big, important questions that cause massive disagreement and potential for fragmentation. As a Norwegian leftist, I've had a hard time finding points of agreement with many of our right wingers - be it regarding climate change responses, taxation rates, immigration or issues of being socially liberal. Now, this issue, seeming more important than those other ones (aside from climate change but I digress), unifies us. I have a friend who has been a bit of a Putin-bot - who has not taken covid vaccine, liked Trump, enjoys internet trolling, is skeptical towards the 'extreme social liberalization of the west' and certain western values, essentially, a guy who has consistently been somewhat drawn towards fascist ideals for the longest period of time. Even he, last time I spoke with him, was on a 'what the fuck is Putin thinking' line of thought, because he's appalled by the abhorrent unfolding crisis. This invasion has undone 8 years of sowed discontent and fragmentation, not just in Ukraine, but for much of the western world.

On March 15 2022 13:16 lestye wrote:

I don't think she's compromised, but she is certainly a Russian asset.

On March 16 2022 01:05 LegalLord wrote:

I don't think you're right about that last sentence, even if it may seem so right now. If things don't escalate into something larger - and though we all hope and think it won't, there are many aspects of the situation where things already crossed some alarming lines - the perspectives will shift significantly after things settle (and there are several very different perspectives that I've seen take hold). No, I don't think there will be any sort of "Russia is actually good" shift, largely because as you kind of allude to that was never really a thing in that part of Europe, but look at the things that you noted as wedge issues and you'll find that Russia has very little to do with them, and the little influence it does have is overstated; the actual cause is internal political and economic problems facing Europe that are very real but also hard to pin blame on.

I think it's also worth looking at an important "unity event" in the US and how it played out - the 9/11 terrorist attacks. How that started, with a powerful sense of overwhelming patriotism, and how it played out after the first few years, at the very least shows that what may seem like deep unity now may end up being something very different after some thought is put into it.

We'll see what happens here, but I strongly doubt that the feeling of "overwhelming unity" will last more than a couple years, if that.

On March 15 2022 21:47 Belisarius wrote:
Absolutely.

I've always seen the rise of authoritarianism as one of the biggest challenges of our times, and anecdotally, this has done more to convince people of the danger than anything else could have. It's awful to say it while Ukraine burns, but in the long run Putin's gross miscalculation may end up being one of the least-worst outcomes for the whole world.

People to my right seem suddenly much more aware of the monster they've been in bed with, courting sketchy fringe groups and cheering on domestic baby-tyrants who attempt the same attacks on democracy that made Putin's rule possible. Now they realise it's not a game.

To my left, this has shattered people's illusions of a world where this can't happen, where military spending is wasteful imperialism and realpolitik is selling out. They're realising that the peace and security that allows us to dream about UBI and free college and universal healthcare is as brittle as glass if we can't protect it.

Putin has squandered authoritarianism's element of surprise. It's a really scary time, but in a weird way, I'm more hopeful than I have been in years.