The New Russophobia 2

I thought that was odd coming from you. However, I notice that you claim "sarcasm" AFTER a complaint about the egregious cultural racism of the post.

Here's one that I find particularly funny. Notice how I precede the humor indicating my purpose. You might want to try that sometime.

He's actually right, ikosmos. It was pretty clear that he was being completely ironic.

Timebandit wrote:

I don't think English is ikosmos' first language, kropotkin. That can make sarcasm harder to pick up on.

If that is true then I will cut him some slack. It was obviously sarcasm and meant as a dig against people who are vilifying Russia. 

I didn't know that Russians were a race. It is amazing that the person I was trying to support is now attacking me for a little humour to highlight the absurd Russophobia that is prevalent in the media, especially on the CBC.

ikosmos I didn't apologize because it was intentional and instead I explained it was sarcasm. I will go back to letting the NATO cheerleaders rant and rave against the stuff you post and butt out of the conversation. It is apparent you have no desire to see anything except anti-Russian sentiment no matter what is posted so I'll leave you to it.

 

News story:  "Unarmed black man shot 32 times by police".

Some babbler:  "Well, clearly black lives DON'T matter".

You:  "THAT'S RACISM!!"

clap clap. That's quite an insightful expression, "the cowardice of bad sarcasm".

ikosmos wrote:

This guy Putin is amazing. Not only is he responsible for virtually everything, including sick walruses at a zoo (!), but he also runs his own Manchurian candidate in Donald Trump.

You seem to have forgotten a sarcasm alert when you posted this nasty insult against the democratically elected leader of Russia. Hypocrisy is a wonderful thing to behold.

I get it now. Me, as a bad person, should not be using sarcasm because you think I believe that Russians are evil by nature. You on the other hand see yourself as a good person whose motives could never be questioned so you can use sarcasm.

If you want to complain about the use of sarcasm please refrain from using it yourself. It is sort of like saying, "what I really hate are people who fucking swear."

Follow-up to non-ban of all Russian athletes at Rio ...

journalists turned activists ...

Quote:

The UK’s Times newspaper, for example, took it upon itself to organize a letter to the IOC. It wrote: “We ask that you ban the entire Russian team from the Rio 2016 Olympics. It is time to take a stand against the institutionalized doping that would otherwise pollute the Games. Now is not a time for half measures.”

The letter was published on the Times’ website not even as an editorial, but under chief sports reporter Martyn Ziegler’s byline with the headline: “Please ban Russia from the Rio games.” It’s like a chief foreign affairs reporter for a British newspaper organizing a letter to the UN calling for sanctions against another country over the wrongdoing of certain individuals in that country and the unproven wrongdoing of others. In other words, totally unprofessional and nothing whatsoever to do with journalism.

But Germany’s Bild tabloid, which is notoriously biased against Russia at the best of times, went a step further, with its chief sports editor Walter Straten announcing that if Russian athletes were allowed to participate in Rio, Bild would have them “exempted” from its medal count and declare all Russian athletes results “null and void”. Yes, all of them. A mature approach, to be sure.

On the same day, the UK’s Guardian published an editorial arguing there was “no place in Rio for cheats” which is absolutely fair enough, if they hadn’t also been calling for clean athletes to be punished along with dopers in an “across-the-board” exclusion of Russian athletes.

Furthermore ...

Quote:

Excited by the prospect of a Russian ban and the opportunities for gloating that it would present, they were perhaps also becoming jittery, worrying the IOC would rule against them and refrain from an outright ban, which in the end it did. In a concerted effort to avoid that and put some more pressure on the committee, they ran stories the day before the IOC decision claiming exactly the opposite outcome in advance.

Not very professional, huh?

Quote:

The Daily Mail, for example, ran with the premature headline: “ENTIRE Russian team of 387 athletes will be banned from competing at the Rio Olympics as punishment for their country’s state-sponsored doping program.”

This, the Mail said, was according to “well-placed sources” which obviously were not that well-placed at all. The Sun ran with the same story, adding a “good riddance” to their headline and claiming underneath that 387 athletes would certainly be banned. Both papers have since reported on the IOC decision, but neither original story has been updated to reflect reality.

Whoops. I bet they're apoplectic with "justifiable" rage now.

Russia: Off With their heads!

 

p.s. for k. Notice the scare quotes. That's a dead giveaway for satire, etc.

 

Russia Did It!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A handy review of the idiocy follows.

Quote:

BBC, CNN, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, every neocon/neo-liberal publication and almost all of western media is blaming Russia for absolutely everything.

There follows a video of the Clinton campaign animal droppings claiming Russia coordinated the DNC hack, etc.

Quote:

The list of lies is never ending, but what is truly depressing is that lots of people actually believe the lies, which only makes the spin doctors use the ‘Russia did it’ card more often.

• Russia invaded Ukraine because twitter told us so, and a BBC journalist saw 5 Russian guys in fatigues cross over the Russian Ukraine border…which makes for a huge military invasion not seen since US and UK tanks rolled into Iraq.
• Russia annexed Crimea against the wishes of the majority 3% that voted to stay in bankrupt, chaotic, Ukraine…while the minority 97% voted to join the Russian Federation where stability makes life so dull, compared to the US coup installed government in place in Kiev.
• Russia is planning to invade Estonia and overrun Lativa, because what country does’t want to rule over the oil rich, gold rich Baltic nations.
• Russia is moving towards NATO, as tectonic plates under Russian soil magically shift Russia’s borders closer to Europe.
• Syria is Russia’s fault, because they just would not stand back and let the US bring the wonderful neo-liberal life to secular, stable Syria.
• Libya, Russia’s fault for not helping NATO bomb the country into democracy.
• Clinton email scandal…a Russian plot to destroy honest Hillary.
• Trump…born and trained in Moscow from early childhood, and planted in New York for the sole purpose of winning the Presidency and destroying America.
• Russian athletes…all dopers, every single one of them.
• Rain in London…Putin’s fault. US mass shooting, Russia did it. Ebola, Russian virus. Zika, Russian mosquitoes. LGBT bullying, Russian laws. Black Live Matter, Putin organised campaign to destabilize US.
• Having a bad day…blame Russia, blame Putin.

And, wait, there's more. Anytime the narrative falls apart, and the establishment gets caught with its pants down, then it's "Putin's useful idiots" who are responsible.

The Federalist: "Edward Snowden is Vladimir Putin's Useful Idiot."

National Review: "Donald Trump, Putin's Useful Idiot".

The Guardian: "Alex Tsipras looks to Moscow but risks becoming Putin's useful idiot".

The Guardian: "Is Jeremy Corbyn Putin's latest "useful idiot" in Europe?"

Politico: "Is Juncker in danger of becoming Putin's "useful idiot" ?"

Forum: "We're all Putin's 'useful idiots' ".

The first Cold War was not like this. One needs to watch Dr. Strangelove to really get this fucking nuts.

bekayne wrote:

ikosmos wrote:

 

The first Cold War was not like this. 

Correct. Both parties' nominees having had financial ties to the USSR would have been considered treasonous.

Only one is in debt to the Russians. Only one has promised to weaken NATO. Only one party's files were broken into. And its file on its opponent stolen. A lot of smoke. We'll see if a fire develops.

ikosmos wrote:

bekayne wrote:

Both parties' nominees having had financial ties to the USSR would have been considered treasonous.

If you think this is relevant, then by all means show us some evidence of "financial ties" to present-day Russia by either of the nominees. 

https://www.google.ca/search?q=clinton+foundation&rlz=1C1CHWA_enCA626CA6...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-trumps-financial-ties-to-...

 

ikosmos wrote:

If you're not able to summarize any evidence in your own words, then you don't understand the "evidence" well enough to confirm it.

(grabs another mouthful of popcorn)

You keep saying it's worse now than it was then. Could you imagine a US presidential candidate during the Cold War who:

-had a campaign manager had worked as an advisor to the leader of a Warsaw Pact country?

-a foreign policy advisor who regularly appeared as a commentor on Soviet TV?

-another advisor who had worked with the Soviet Ministry of Chemical and Petroleum Industries (Министерство химической и нефтеперерабатывающей промышленности)?

I'll get my popcorn.

 

bekayne, ikosmos has to stick to the script. His boss wouldn't like it if he didn't.

 

Not a bad summary ...

Trump and Those Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Russians

Quote:

This is a re-run of American establishment paranoia that dominated the Cold War decades, when any political challenger for high office in the US could be blackballed by mere assertion that he was a fellow-traveller of the Soviet Union. Today, “communism” is replaced with allegations of being friends with Moscow “tyranny”.

A factual summary:

1. The e mail leaks were by Wikileaks.

2. The leaks show how "Democrat party leadership has from the outset sought to make sure Hillary Clinton becomes the presidential nominee by crushing her populist rival Bernie Sanders."  At least one key DNC leadership person was dismissed (then promptly hired on by the shameless Clinton campaign).

3. The "source" of the claim is the Atlantic Council - a xenophobic, Russophobic institution closely aligned with NATO.

4. "The claims made against Russian state hackers are unverifiable. They are simply assertions from a partisan source, which are then amplified into seeming fact by the dutiful Western media."

5. Trump's recent indifference to "sacred" NATO fictions are the issue here. The proponents of war are apoplectic with rage.

In conclusion,

Quote:

It is a disturbing sign of how brainwashed Western public discourse is that when someone questions Washington’s reckless war beat towards Moscow, then that person is summarily dismissed as a Kremlin tool.

This is the practice of a totalitarian system, ironically under the illusion of a free-thinking, independent media.

Yup. American politics is a sick joke. A circus.

U.S. politician says that Putin is a racist:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-elections/donald-tru...

No major US politician during the Cold War would have dared urge the USSR to interfere in US politics - cold war hatred of the USSR was too strong. 

Today, a major party nominee for president can urge Russia's government to interfere in US politics, and even praise the Russian leader, and there is no political cost to him. Because most Americans don't give two shits one way or the other about Russia, so there's no real political cost to praising its leader. 

What would have been "treason" during the cold war is now routine - the image of Russia in the USA is much improved from cold war days, in pther words. 

How bad is it? All criticism of the US regime is treated as treason.

 

Quote:

In the past few days, a number of Democrats have revived a long-dormant practice: accusing those to their left of being Kremlin operatives, and discrediting their political opponents with allegations of grand KGB conspiracies. As questions are raised over whether the Russian government hacked the Democratic National Committee’s email servers, certain political elites have used the opportunity to revive an eerily familiar political tactic, one with its roots in the 1950s.

All of this is very ugly indeed. By conspiratorially positing that those who disagree with them are either intentionally or unintentionally serving the interests of the Kremlin, liberals are reviving the some of the darkest aspects of 20th century political discourse. Just as the movement against the Vietnam War was once accused of being run out of Moscow, and just as the Civil Rights movement was supposedly filled with Communist agitators, liberals have once again revived one of the nastiest traditions in the history of American political smear tactics: the McCarthyist innuendo. Throughout the Cold War, members of the political establishment attempted to discredit those on the left through invocations of the specter of the KGB.

Franklin Foer has a reply to those who accuse him of red-baiting. Because the Russian government is no longer communist, he says, he cannot be engaging in McCarthyism. But the harmfulness of the method is not affected by changes in the political form of the Russian state. The 1950s witch-hunt would have been just as damaging even if the Soviet Union had been an entirely imaginary entity. By inflating Russia’s evils to absurd extremes, and then accusing others of enabling them, one directly recreates the Cold War means of silencing dissent. By treating Russia as an all-purpose bogeyman, even when the U.S. routinely engages in similar behavior, one replicates an atmosphere that allows all criticism of the U.S. to be treated as traitorous.

But the issue here is not really whether the Russian government was behind the DNC hack. It’s that liberals are using the hack, plus a lot of wild, speculative theories about Trump, to avoid substantive criticisms from both their left and right. They have complained that the hack is “clearly intended to do maximum political damage to Democrats on the eve of the convention” and that the Russians are “trying to sabotage an American election.” (Although it was evidently Julian Assange, rather than Vladimir Putin, who chose to time the email release to coincide with the DNC.) These lines leave something unacknowledged: what the “damage” and “sabotage” actually was. In fact, the DNC emails were damaging because they disclosed true facts about the inner workings of the party. Thus to complain about sabotage is to complain that the public found out the truth. If searching my partner’s phone reveals evidence that they have been constantly cheating on me, they may well be right to complain that I should not have looked at the phone, or that what I have done is “worse than Watergate.” Ultimately, though, the search is less important than what it has turned up.

 

Democrats are Red baiting like its 1956.

ikosmos wrote:

How bad is it? All criticism of the US regime is treated as treason.

 

Quote:

In the past few days, a number of Democrats have revived a long-dormant practice: accusing those to their left of being Kremlin operatives, and discrediting their political opponents with allegations of grand KGB conspiracies. As questions are raised over whether the Russian government hacked the Democratic National Committee’s email servers, certain political elites have used the opportunity to revive an eerily familiar political tactic, one with its roots in the 1950s.

All of this is very ugly indeed. By conspiratorially positing that those who disagree with them are either intentionally or unintentionally serving the interests of the Kremlin, liberals are reviving the some of the darkest aspects of 20th century political discourse. Just as the movement against the Vietnam War was once accused of being run out of Moscow, and just as the Civil Rights movement was supposedly filled with Communist agitators, liberals have once again revived one of the nastiest traditions in the history of American political smear tactics: the McCarthyist innuendo. Throughout the Cold War, members of the political establishment attempted to discredit those on the left through invocations of the specter of the KGB.

Franklin Foer has a reply to those who accuse him of red-baiting. Because the Russian government is no longer communist, he says, he cannot be engaging in McCarthyism. But the harmfulness of the method is not affected by changes in the political form of the Russian state. The 1950s witch-hunt would have been just as damaging even if the Soviet Union had been an entirely imaginary entity. By inflating Russia’s evils to absurd extremes, and then accusing others of enabling them, one directly recreates the Cold War means of silencing dissent. By treating Russia as an all-purpose bogeyman, even when the U.S. routinely engages in similar behavior, one replicates an atmosphere that allows all criticism of the U.S. to be treated as traitorous.

But the issue here is not really whether the Russian government was behind the DNC hack. It’s that liberals are using the hack, plus a lot of wild, speculative theories about Trump, to avoid substantive criticisms from both their left and right. They have complained that the hack is “clearly intended to do maximum political damage to Democrats on the eve of the convention” and that the Russians are “trying to sabotage an American election.” (Although it was evidently Julian Assange, rather than Vladimir Putin, who chose to time the email release to coincide with the DNC.) These lines leave something unacknowledged: what the “damage” and “sabotage” actually was. In fact, the DNC emails were damaging because they disclosed true facts about the inner workings of the party. Thus to complain about sabotage is to complain that the public found out the truth. If searching my partner’s phone reveals evidence that they have been constantly cheating on me, they may well be right to complain that I should not have looked at the phone, or that what I have done is “worse than Watergate.” Ultimately, though, the search is less important than what it has turned up.

 

Democrats are Red baiting like its 1956.

The issue is whether the Russian government broke in and stole information from a political party. And if so, why,

You know ikosmos, accuracy aside, the material you post isn't actually a problem. This gratuitous trolling and baiting (and the histrionics, as if you are the only one who has ever been ignored by the mods) is way more annoying. 

Give your head a shake. I don't give a shit how often you want to wear out the word Nazi on me, but kropotkin is actually one of the ones defending your position. Everyone in this room knows you are the one missing the point here.

 

I have done ikosmos, on numerous occasions. Do you even get why I mentioned that? And do you even get that what I am giving you here is friendly advice if you want to be taken seriously?

I am talking about you trolling kropotkin.You think "alternative media" is shorthand for needling people and making personal attacks? Not in my books. And you aren't helping whatever your cause is by turning on people, especially those who are defending you.

You are grossly misreading things here, and frankly you are making a fool out of yourself by trying to bluster your way out of it.

 

 

It was a matter of time ...

Oh look! It's Vlad The Impaler! Yes! He really WILL suck your blood!

Peter Lavelle: "Putin Did It!"

Peter Lavelle wrote:

If one relies on Western mainstream media and those who claim to represent the Western world, it is easy to come to the conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the most evil political figure in the world.

Actually, it would not be a gross exaggeration to claim Putin is responsible for just about all that afflicts the human condition today. One simple sentence says it all: “Putin did it.” The list of his sins is long and repeated endlessly. The fact is the West is infuriated by Russia’s refusal to accept its place in the world assigned by the Washington consensus. And Putin gets all the blame for this (and all the credit at home among Russians).

Lavelle summarizes foreign policy matters, esp. the role of the hegemon in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria since the end of the Cold War.

"Instead of a coherent foreign policy, the West, particularly its media, prefers a narrative in which an invented cartoon figure is the essence of all-evil in the world and “against our values.” This of course is not a foreign policy, but it is a rejection and a refusal to entertain simple commonsense. It is also foreign policy failing to achieve Washington’s goals when attempting to stare down and isolate Russia."

"... a rejection and a refulsal to entertain simple common sense." Yup.

... and, because we can't be serious all the time ...

Quote:

“If you are rooting ­for Trump,
You are a toxic waste­ dump”.
“It’s as if you are r­ooting for Putin”,
“It’s worse than shoo­ting and looting”.
“So if you are trumpi­ng for Trump,
It’s as bad as puttin­g for Putin,
It means that you are­ polluting
The polls from fallac­ious sump.”

 

Russian Propaganda, Multiple Sarcasms: TrumPutin