a quick poll about Russia and Donald Trump

It may just be an artifact of my own little internet bubble, but I haven't seen any liberals melting down because Trump isn't in handcuffs, but I've seen a ton of leftists gleefully mocking liberals for their meltdowns and the nothingburger report.

Also, I haven't seen the actual report, and neither have you.

Yes, it's your bubble.

what libs are freakin out,sounds cheering. who?

literally nobody of importance in the democratic party or on the left here is "putting all their eggs in one basket."

frankly, nobody seems more obsessed with the russia business than idiots like aaron mate or michael tracey who seem to dedicate their entire lives to "debunking" it, 24/7.

Counterpoint: true facts stated guy, mensch, game theory bozo, maddow

All eggs in one basket was incorrect I'll concede. Undue hope of arrest of trump and juridical solution to his reign more accurate

Maddie has been bad for a long time now

yeah maddow probably is the most prominent left/dem person who is completely obsessed w/ this stuff, i find her pretty embarrassing

lol i just looked up the game theory guy and apparently he started his own private twitter channel that he charges ppl $10 a month to read

No one said liberals are “freaking out” about the report *now*. They are doing the predictable thing of quietly slinking away from it.

nobody seems more obsessed with the russia business than idiots like aaron mate or michael tracey who seem to dedicate their entire lives to "debunking" it, 24/7.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Saturday, March 23, 2019 5:30 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is so clearly not true

J.D. absolutely otm

Lol

What exactly does slinking away mean in this context? Reserving judgment until more is known about it?

nobody seems more obsessed with the russia business than idiots like aaron mate or michael tracey who seem to dedicate their entire lives to "debunking" it, 24/7

idk who the first guy is, and fuck Michael Tracey, but c'mon, there's plenty of obsession to go around

In memoriam of Russiagate
(July 24, 2016 - March 22, 2019)pic.twitter.com/xnvpW44b8c

— Thomas! (@ThomasIsOnline) March 23, 2019

I mentioned my internet bubble up thread. I think a big part of that is that I only follow people on social media that I enjoy reading, I don't do hate reads. If someone has consistently bad, overheated, or incorrect things to say, and their followers are equally bad, I'd just as soon not have time and headspace occupied by them.

That's probably why I find these conversations so baffling.

I wanted to believe

yeah, i don't know how you measure these things, but i don't see the people "obsessed" with russiagate really driving much of anything politically. maddow is a cable TV personality. cable news is (sadly) very important in total but i think one or two hosts don't a movement make. ted lieu and maybe one or two other elected national politicians talk(ed) about it a lot. and then there are the weird twitter grifters and kooks. i don't know how to measure their influence, but i suspect it's minimal b/c every poll that tries to measure the real-world influence of various twitter trends tends to find that most people just don't give a shit. when politicians are asked about this, especially those actively running for office, their answers tend to be versions of what buttigieg is quoted as saying up above, namely that the corruption of this presidency and his vulnerability to certain kinds of foreign influence is troubling, but that we shouldn't hope to be rid of him this way.

it seems like for certain folks, the need to demonstratively shame people "obsessed with russiagate fanfic" is out of all proportion to how prevalent that sort of magical thinking is. i know a few people whose entire social media pages are all sharing tweets and links etc. dunking on dems and "liberals" for supposedly being so irrational about russia and mueller, and relatively infrequently acknowledging the odious shit that the GOP is up to. some of these folks are activists genuinely engaged in struggles over the direction of the Democratic party; others just seem like they are endlessly stroking themselves -- a sort of narcissism of small differences.

the bottom line is that we should all get of the internet.

people who tend to circulate in all-liberal milieux (whether that means their actual in-person contacts w/ other human beings or just who they "talk" to online) might have a tendency to do this sort of performative dunking more often, since it seems like a more proximate or possibly lower-hanging irritant than the fascist administration, whose actions may or may not have begun to directly affect their lives and livelihoods.

that's just my speculation though, i haven't done a scientific survey.

oh one other thing

the people i know (whether i "know" them IRL or online) who do the most of this dunking tend to be miserable, self-hating folk (who sometimes happen to also be very interesting and smart people). so there's some way that this just seems like an outlet for negativity more than a pure righteous anger, which explains why it can get so obsessive and tedious.

Counterpoint: true facts stated guy, mensch, game theory bozo, maddow

thx jim. i know of mensch, never read/followed tho, and i'm familiar with maddow, who will always be known in my heart as the "gym-teacher-type morbs fuckin HATES." i'm like, incapable of not smiling in my heart at that, even when she perseverates smugly.

I know a lot of people who are sad about Trump not getting indicted and they all seem like very well meaning left leaning people, not “liberals”

Oh for sure, and I don’t have any grudge against those people for it, because Trump is a dangerous president and it’s natural to hope for any possible way out. But the media have whipped people into a frenzy about it and built completely unrealistic expectations.

yep. doing what they do best!

We're all sad that Trump isn't getting indicted/stroking out while taking a dump but it did take a certain kind of credulous liberal to think Russiagate was going to amount to anything real.

i don’t get why someone has to be “liberal” to believe that though.

Because Russiagate was about being sad that Obama wasn't President anymore and Hillary got cheated out of the Presidency by external forces rather than America itself being the problem - from the Electoral College to voter suppression to evangelical Christianity in the hinterlands.

isn’t the ilx US politics thread chock full of actual leftists, many of whom aren’t even particularly dull witted, who were cautiously cheering on Mueller?

Yea but milo and man alive would rather post this boring take ad nauseum

Russiagate was about being sad that Obama wasn't President anymore and Hillary got cheated out of the Presidency

imo, Russiagate was about having a criminal and con man elected president by a minority of the popular vote, and attempting to establish whether this was a result of a hostile foreign power manipulating public opinion in his favor through a covert campaign of disinformation and propaganda, and whether the winning candidate actively conspired with that foreign power.

it was also about having undeserved faith in legacy institutions to hold rich, powerful people accountable for their extremely likely crimes

it did take a certain kind of credulous liberal to think Russiagate was going to amount to anything real.

There's a big difference between it being real (it was quite real) and it resulting in Trump removed from office and the Republicans who supported him being disgraced. This is as stupid as saying contending that Irangate wasn't "real" because Reagan stayed in office and many of those indicted were pardoned with minimal public backlash as a result.

"amount to anything real"

that only makes sense if only a very limited set of consequences are defined as "amounting to anything real"

yeah that's exactly it. we don't even know the full extent of what Mueller et al found yet. and he's already put a few people in prison, and dredged up seemingly a ton of general malfeasance from the trump org. it's not mueller's fault if the republicans have made it so anything short of trump tearing out the heart of an unborn child with his bare hands means that he suffers no consequences whatever and his administration stays in place.

but that said, the iran-contra stuff is a sobering analogy. nobody even remembers that shit now, and the Republicans have deified St. Reagan. they even named an airport after the POS.

that only makes sense if only a very limited set of consequences are defined as "amounting to anything real"

'In any way act as a constraint on the Presidency of Donald Trump' isn't particularly limited, and the Mueller investigation hasn't done that. House investigations might.

and attempting to establish whether this was a result of a hostile foreign power manipulating public opinion in his favor

have u established this yet, or is there still some awful chance our country might be responsible for itself

in retrospect it's clear that watergate wasn't so much the "system working" so much as it was a glorious anomaly that would never be repeated

gore vidal once told a story about talking to a well-known newspaper publisher in the late 80s (i think it may have been katharine graham) and asking why the media hadn't gone after reagan for iran-contra as hard as it had gone after nixon, and the response was "oh, we couldn't go through that all over again"

'In any way act as a constraint on the Presidency of Donald Trump' isn't particularly limited, and the Mueller investigation hasn't done that.

That would depend on whether the Mueller investigation's series of indictments and convictions affected the midterm elections. I think they did.

is there still some awful chance our country might be responsible for itself

this seems like a rather un-nuanced perspective. do you think that psychological manipulation, through carefully feeding susceptible people misinformation has no effect on their decisions?

even if carefully feeding susceptible people misinformation were on the top of the list of things i want to stop happening so we can have democracy, "the russians" would be near the bottom of the list of people i'd want to stop doing it

and not only because they'd be the furthest from my reach, but it helps

like, do you think "psychological manipulation" is why we are in an emergent fascist situation? no, you'll say: there are many Nuanced reasons and the political sophisticate must engage all of them. but if only we could find a pie chart, where one slice was "russian psyops" and another was "white supremacist oligarchy" and a third was "no functioning workers' party" and-- on that psychological tip-- maybe another was "decades of fascist propaganda from domestic media outlets", we could allocate our engagement accordingly and decide what to do, or at least what to post about.

if the new line is "actually we don't even post about the russia stuff that much", that's great, but i think if we tried we could still post about it less. it is unpolitics.

do you think that psychological manipulation, through carefully feeding susceptible people misinformation has no effect on their decisions?

as a non-yank, I always wondered how this is different from what limbaugh/fox are doing 24/7. the fact that it came from "outside" seems inconsequential to me

What if what came from "outside" was stolen information and it was provided in exchange for foreign policy favors?

*downloads peepee tape*

What if what came from "outside" was stolen information and it was provided in exchange for foreign policy favors?

then literally nothing-- about my obligations, my assessment of correct political strategy, or my expectations-- would change

What if what came from "outside" was stolen information and it was provided in exchange for foreign policy favors?

This should supply even more motivation to mobilize for more decisive popular victories from the left to help enact laws (or at least establish norms) to disincentivize influence from foreign powers (or non-foreign special interests). Electoral victories that are presumably easier to mobilize if people aren't idly waiting around for Republican lawyers to save them from reality.

or....what dlh said

if it were actually my technical job to protect "america" from precisely these sorts of attacks, i suppose i would have to be more interested-- but i hope i wouldn't be egotistical enough in that case to think i was a particularly vital part of the country's antifascist defense system, or that, the rest of it having failed, i'd have any hope of saving us