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Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

 
 
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MontereyJack
 
  3  
Reply Fri 25 Feb, 2022 09:07 pm
@Builder,
stupid on all counts. as usual.
Builder
 
  -4  
Reply Fri 25 Feb, 2022 09:13 pm
@MontereyJack,
Zero evidence for your claims, on all counts.

If this is, as claimed, a battle of the super-powers, then creepy Joe just moved a pawn two paces.

Very brave, considering the consequences.

An ISS landing in Manhattan wouldn't be a good finale, I'm thinking.
glitterbag
 
  2  
Reply Fri 25 Feb, 2022 09:33 pm
This what stupid sites like Twitter have done to us.
0 Replies
 
MontereyJack
 
  5  
Reply Fri 25 Feb, 2022 09:57 pm
@Builder,
There is zero evidence for biden's pedophilia or any other democrat. zero evidence for your fantasy charges of biden's mental decline. all pure conspuiracy theories and qanon bullshit, whether acknowledge it or not. You're a fraud.
0 Replies
 
hingehead
 
  3  
Reply Sat 26 Feb, 2022 06:28 pm
@Region Philbis,
This close to a presidential election?
BillW
 
  3  
Reply Sat 26 Feb, 2022 06:37 pm
@hingehead,
I hope that was meant to be a joke hh?
hingehead
 
  3  
Reply Sat 26 Feb, 2022 10:30 pm
@BillW,
We Australians do to tend go overboard on irony.
BillW
 
  3  
Reply Sat 26 Feb, 2022 11:00 pm
@hingehead,
Well, the next Presidential election is about 2 years 7 1/2 months away.....
snood
 
  6  
Reply Sun 27 Feb, 2022 03:20 am
@hingehead,
hingehead wrote:

We Australians do to tend go overboard on irony.


Thing is, it would be more easily recognizable as parody were it not about the batshit, All-American politics that starts its next presidential campaign before the inauguration of the just-elected president.
0 Replies
 
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hightor
 
  2  
Reply Mon 28 Feb, 2022 06:21 am
Larry Summers Shares the Blame for Inflation

Quote:
"Any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites,” Larry Summers wrote in The Times in 2006. Mr. Summers comes from a family of left-leaning economists who saw Milton Friedman as a “devil figure.” But as he moved into the upper echelons of the family profession, Mr. Summers came to have “great admiration” for the conservative thinker and his work.

The transformation reflects how elite economists in both parties reached a rough accord on the importance of free markets, free trade, and restrained regulation. Each side believed they could harness these forces for liberal or conservative ends. And there was little disagreement about the means.

Virtually every American feels the consequences of this today, whenever we visit a grocery store with empty shelves, or do a double-take at the price of an appliance. For decades, economists like Mr. Summers advanced policies like globalization, deregulation, and markets that valued efficiency over competition. They promised that these trends would deliver lower prices. And they did, for a time. But they also left the system vulnerable. During the pandemic, when demand burst beyond what the system could handle, prices for shipping soared, ports clogged, trucks and railroads lacked manpower, and underinvested companies scrambled for logistics workarounds and warehouse space. Increased shipping and distribution costs have undeniably raised prices.

Mr. Summers has been focused on a different story, warning that government spending could increase inflation. With prices rising at the fastest rate in 40 years, he has been lauded for making the right call. “Does the WH owe Larry Summers an apology?” Politico asked last November.

The problem with this reading is that the economy hasn’t really overheated. Real gross domestic product and employment are still lower than prepandemic projections, according to government statistics. Yes, consumer spending patterns have shifted from services to goods, but that began two years ago; the fact that our supply chains still cannot adjust reflects a bigger problem with how they were designed.

Mr. Summers’s claims don’t express an economic truth. They seem designed to deflect blame. A leading economic adviser in the Clinton and Obama presidencies, Mr. Summers is prominent among the fraternity of mainstream economists who are deeply implicated in building the system at the heart of our current predicament, and setting up our economy for failure. If engineers constructed a bridge this prone to collapse, they’d be fired. But with our accountability-free elites, being an economist means never having to say you’re sorry.

Mr. Summers built an early reputation as an economic wunderkind, earning tenure at Harvard at age 28. Stagflation in the late 1970s had sent New Deal-style Keynesianism into retreat, and thrust into prominence Friedman’s vision of a marketized economics that catered to the whims of large corporations. As Friedman asserted, also in The Times, the sole social responsibility of business is to increase profits. Cut regulations, cut taxes, and allow companies to structure markets, people like Friedman maintained, and watch the economy take off.

During Mr. Summers’s formative years, this logic became the dominant current of economic thought. Mr. Summers spent a year under conservative economist Martin Feldstein in the Reagan administration; his generation “re-emphasized the importance of markets and the failures of government,” according to Mr. Summers’s mother, also an economist.

As under secretary for international affairs in Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department, Mr. Summers was at the forefront of encouraging developing nations to open their markets, a kind of enforcer of globalization. Later, as Treasury secretary, he helped facilitate China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and argued that the United States should give China “permanent normal trade relations” (or P.N.T.R.) status. Mr. Summers told the Senate Banking Committee in 2000, “It is difficult to discern any disadvantage to the United States” from the policy.

During the Carter era moves were made toward deregulation in transportation services like trucking and rail. In the Clinton years, a little-remembered law called the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 1998 helped carry that over to ocean ships. Mr. Clinton also continued a trend toward economic concentration that began in the Reagan administration. If Mr. Summers opposed the deregulation and consolidation that occurred during his tenures with Mr. Clinton and Barack Obama, I have found no evidence that he said anything about it. In fact in 2001, he stated that “the goal is efficiency, not competition.”

U.S. financial services, which under P.N.T.R. pried open the Chinese market, grew enormously powerful in this period, too. Mr. Summers fought the regulation of derivatives and pushed Congress to eliminate the separation of investment and commercial banks. Where finance accounted for 15 percent of corporate profits in the U.S. economy before the 1970s, it grew to 43 percent by 2002, after this economic restructuring. Later, when runaway financial innovations (including the derivatives Mr. Summers did not want to regulate) collapsed the world economy, Mr. Summers, as Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, pushed for banks to be protected with bailouts, maintaining the status quo.

Mr. Summers was not especially novel in his preferences. He fit within an economist consensus that has largely governed the country since the late 1970s. The free trade consensus enabled corporate executives to chase cheap labor and centralize production. The just-in-time consensus pushed companies to only order what’s needed to pass on to customers, with inventories seen as unnecessary costs. The bigger-is-better consensus encouraged mergers and market dominance. The deregulatory consensus breaks worker power and greases the whole system. The Wall Street consensus lets investors dictate adherence to everything else, demanding ever-higher profits and returns that flow not into reinvestment but to them, in the forms of stock buybacks and dividends.

The gamble of such a system paid off, for a while. In 2005, Mr. Summers’s longtime collaborator Jason Furman best explained the philosophy when he pronounced retail behemoth Walmart a “progressive success story,” in part because of its ability to deliver low prices. “There is little dispute that Wal-Mart’s price reductions have benefited the 120 million American workers employed outside of the retail sector,” Mr. Furman wrote. That seemed to override everything else: low wages, competitors driven out of business, manufacturing jobs shipped overseas, communities hollowed out across America.

The trade-off was clear: sacrifice resiliency, wage security, and community for the promise of a five-dollar pack of tube socks. And the Summers-Furman side initially delivered: Prices for consumer goods, at least, did fall. Assuring these low prices became an important goal; while some liberals wanted to bring back manufacturing jobs to the United States or maintain reserves of vital goods, the threat of higher costs was enough to keep the system in place.

But the adherents of hyper-efficiency do not seem to have emphasized what might happen if there was a breakdown anywhere in the system. Economists spat out their models and assured us that very little could stop the global production engine. But their models did not adequately contemplate the physical world. And that’s why the system Mr. Summers and Mr. Furman helped build was so primed for collapse, and why the low prices, intended to be the compensation for increased inequality and left-behind regions, vanished in a matter of months.

The policies many of these economists championed during the decades leading up to the pandemic are the policies responsible for the supply chain’s fragility. When disruptions hit the center of global production in China, they spread across the entire world. Specialized facilities producing most of a particular good or component can easily produce shocks with even a small loss of output.

Shipping deregulation passed during the Clinton administration helped lead to ever-larger container vessels that can only dock at certain U.S. ports, further narrowing bottlenecks. The twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are responsible for about 40 percent of all seaborne imports in the United States; by early January, 105 ships were awaiting entry offshore, and import volume had fallen, despite the increased demand, for four straight months. Trucking deregulation has similarly contributed to bottlenecks, as long hours, poor working conditions and inadequate wages have made it next to impossible for port truckers to stay in the industry.

The financier-above-all approach Mr. Summers helped entrench made things worse. Preferences for lean inventories meant there were no reserves when things spun out of control as the pandemic hit. Precision scheduled railroading, a Wall Street tactic of cutting back on service and spare capacity to maximize profits, made it difficult for rail lines to handle rising demand.

Economists often seem to assume corporate self-interest will sort this out, that the prospect of more sales will create urgency to move supply. But concentration along key nodes of the supply chain (three ocean carrier alliances control most shipping, two railroads control eastern routes and two others control western ones) have brought skyrocketing profits to the companies at the center of the chaos. The shipping industry earned twice as much in the first three quarters 2021 as it did in the entire period between 2010 and 2020.

Similarly, big businesses are announcing in earnings calls that they are using this opportunity to lock in higher prices, well above rising input costs. Estimated profits for S&P 500 firms rose nearly 50 percent in 2021. Bigger businesses also circumvented supply chain issues by demanding that suppliers fulfill their orders first, raising costs for smaller rivals. The supply chain mess, in other words, has also been a consolidation event, harming workers and communities.

The bottom line is that a system without redundancy and flexibility, which assumes that the corporate executives who control it are doing everything in their power to prevent it from breaking, is simply unsustainable.

The shocks will only continue until we reverse course on this prevailing consensus. Democrats put their faith in an economics profession that is far too distant from on-the-ground realities to grasp the consequences of globalization, monopolization, financialization, deregulation, and just-in-time logistics. They failed to recognize how things could crumble because of the vulnerability they engineered.

No country can be perfectly self-sufficient; imports and shipping will still exist. But we can ensure some stability through bringing back manufacturing of critical goods to our shores, while maintaining productive capacity and strategic reserves. Public utility regulation can ensure smoother flow of goods, and competition policy can eliminate price gouging. And infrastructure investments like we’re currently embarking on can force open bottlenecks.

Economists will howl that losing efficiency will raise costs. Those words ring hollow in the face of the highest inflation in 40 years. Broken systems raise costs far faster than resilient ones.

Mr. Summers seems to acknowledge, at least partially, the extent to which his economic school of thought was responsible for the fragility of the supply chain. In a 2020 interview with The American Interest, he acknowledged the need to develop industrial capacity in the U.S. “In general, economic thinking has privileged efficiency over resilience, and it has been insufficiently concerned with the big downsides of efficiency,” Mr. Summers said. “Going forward we will need more emphasis on ‘just in case’ even at some cost in terms of ‘just in time.’ ”

But it’s not enough for him to simply acknowledge the downsides of efficiency. There is a live debate over how to solve the problem going on right now, as the Biden administration takes the first steps toward prioritizing resilience by attempting to re-regulate shipping companies, encourage competition to weaken corporate pricing power, and support domestic manufacturing. Mr. Summers shouldn’t be an obstacle to this effort or even an interested bystander, watching it unfold; he should be an active enthusiast for cleaning up the mess he made.

nyt/dayen
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  5  
Reply Mon 28 Feb, 2022 07:58 am
Two Republican members of Congress participated in a white nationalist’s conference. Mitt Romney called them ‘morons.’
Quote:
Before introducing Greene, Fuentes addressed the crowd by saying, “Now they’re going on about Russia and Vladimir Putin is Hitler — they say that’s not a good thing.” Fuentes also asked the crowd to “give a round of applause for Russia” and responded, “Absolutely” as attendees chanted “Putin! Putin!”

After Fuentes introduced Greene, she told the crowd they were “canceled Americans,” HuffPost reported.

“You’ve been handed the responsibility to fight for our Constitution and stand for our freedoms, and stop the Democrats, who are the Communist Party of the United States of America,” Greene said.


Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) later defended attending the conference organised by Nick Fuentes, saying she didn't know he has promoted white nationalist ideas.
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  4  
Reply Mon 28 Feb, 2022 01:09 pm
How the American Right Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Russia

Quote:
Last week, before Russian threats toward Ukrainian borders turned into an all-out invasion, one part of the American media landscape questioned why we weren’t supporting the invaders.

“Hating [Russia’s president, Vladimir] Putin, has become the central purpose of America’s foreign policy. It’s the main thing that we talk about,” the Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson said on Tuesday. “It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious: What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?”

Interviewed on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show” on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump described Mr. Putin as “smart” and “savvy.” Then on Wednesday night, as reports of Russian explosions across Ukraine rolled in, Mr. Trump repeated his admiration for the Russian leader. J.D. Vance, a Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio, said during a Feb. 19 podcast interview with Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief strategist, “We did not serve in the Marine Corps to go and fight Vladimir Putin because he didn’t believe in transgender rights, which is what the U.S. State Department is saying is a major problem with Russia.” Mr. Bannon, for his part, hailed Mr. Putin as “anti-woke” hours before Russia’s assault on Ukraine.

The American political right was long associated with Cold War hawkishness. But in recent years the trend has shifted toward fawning praise for autocrats, even those leading America’s traditional adversaries, as well as projecting our own culture wars overseas. Where once Russia and other autocracies were seen as anti-democratic, they have now become symbols of U.S. conservatism — a mirror for the right-wing worldview.

Supporting Mr. Putin, as well as other authoritarian leaders, is yet another way in which the political right is weaponizing culture wars to further divide Americans.

Part of this new paradigm is that foreign policy is now a partisan matter. In 2016, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary offered an endorsement of then-candidate Donald Trump, admiration that was later returned. Mr. Putin’s Russia reportedly meddled in the American election in 2016, and the Russian president has admitted that he wanted Mr. Trump to win. Those amicable relationships trickled down to the Republican voting population, which shifted its views on Mr. Putin’s favorability, which soared from a mere 10 percent in July 2014 to 37 percent in December 2016. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll from January of this year found that 62 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents consider Vladimir Putin a stronger leader than Joe Biden.

“Strong” may be the key word here. In this construction, a strong leader is apparently one who cracks down on opposition, cultural and political, and does not concede. This idea then dovetails with right-wing ideas that liberal elites are actively corroding deeply held traditional values — including traditional gender roles. For those who spend a fair amount of airtime worrying about the emasculation of men, the kind of strength portrayed by Mr. Putin — who on Monday convened his top security officials and demanded they publicly stand and support him — is perhaps appealing.

Many of the admirers of the world’s strongmen on the American right appear to believe that the countries each of these men lead are beacons of whiteness, Christianity and conservative values. On Wednesday, conservative commentator Rod Dreher wrote, “I adamantly oppose risking the lives of boys from Louisiana and Alabama to make the Donbas safe for genderqueers and migrants.”

These comments, from the right, aren’t exactly advancing a new position. In 2018, the political commentator Pat Buchanan said that Mr. Putin and the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko were “standing up for traditional values against Western cultural elites.” He considered the Belarusian Ministry of Internal Affairs to have told a “moral truth” in asserting that same-sex relationships were “fake.” But those traditional values do not include the freedom to political opposition. According to Viasna Human Rights Center, an organization dedicated to keeping track of Belarusian abuses, there are over 1,000 political prisoners in Belarus, many of whom were arrested for peaceful assembly, protesting or daring to engage in political activities.

Russia is neither all white nor all Christian — it is a country that encompasses several regions, religions and ethnicities. Still, it is often perceived as white. The white nationalist Richard Spencer has referred to Russia as “the sole white power in the world.” Matthew Heimbach, a founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party who was involved in the 2017 Unite the Right rally, has expressed admiration for Mr. Putin and ultranationalist European political leaders. “Russia is our biggest inspiration,” Mr. Heimbach told The Times in 2016. “I see President Putin as the leader of the free world.” As The Times reported at the time, this construction of Mr. Putin as a beacon of far-right values began with the ultra-far-right nationalists in Europe and later spread to the United States.

But, as the Washington Post opinion writer Christian Caryl wrote in 2018, just as the halcyon image American Communists had of Stalinist Russia in the early 20th century belied the truth of a brutal regime, the Russia celebrated today by conservatives is also, in some ways, a fiction.

In any event, Mr. Putin is not waging a culture war. He is waging real, actual war, in which real, actual lives are already being lost.

But then, why would that matter? The Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and Belarus of conservative pundits’ imaginations are just that: imaginings. Avatars. Projections of themselves. The Russians and Ukrainians who are living — and dying — do not factor into the picture.

nyt/tamkin
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  3  
Reply Mon 28 Feb, 2022 01:59 pm
The media’s role in the age of deceit

The complicity of the media in disseminating false information is a central part of the modern phenomenon. The lie factories cannot flourish without obedient messengers to carry their deceptions.

Quote:
A plague of lies is engulfing democracy and governments worldwide. It poses a danger far greater than most people imagine.

Perhaps the deadliest pandemic ever to strike humanity is the plague of deliberate misinformation, mass delusion and unfounded beliefs which is engulfing 21st Century society.

Whether generated by the fossil fuels lobby, certain media or other corporate interests, the anti-vaccine lobby, religious fanatics, political cynics, ideological extremists, well-meaning simpletons or nutcase conspiracists, a global deluge of utter nonsense is rapidly inundating the human species.

In the short run it may seem irritating, even occasionally amusing. In the long run, it lays the ground for the collapse of civilization and the failure of governments to arrest it, in the face of spreading public ignorance of the risks we face and what must be done to overcome them.

“This wanton disregard for science and the large-scale embrace of conspiratorial nonsense—often driven by political figures and partisan media—undermined the ability of responsible national and global leaders to protect the security of their citizens,” warned the authors of the Doomsday Clock’s 2021 report. The dissemination of lies increased the danger from established threats like nuclear weapons, climate change and pandemic disease, they added.

“Misinformation has reached crisis proportions,” Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom declared in a recent study. “It poses a risk to international peace, interferes with democratic decision making, endangers the well-being of the planet and threatens public health. Public support for policies to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is being undercut by misinformation, leading to the World Health Organization’s “infodemic” declaration .”Ultimately, misinformation undermines collective sense making and collective action. We cannot solve problems of public health, social inequity, or climate change without also addressing the growing problem of misinformation,” they concluded.

Disinformation is murder: world statistics show that Covid death rates are far higher among the unvaccinated, many of whom are influenced by lies spread by others. Some researchers describe the flood of nonsense as a new form of warfare, declared by one part of humanity against the whole – including themselves – using the global internet. “Cyber-enabled information warfare has also become an existential threat in its own right,” says Herbert Lin. Dr Steven Novella, editor of the journal Science-Based Medicine, adds “It’s also clear that social media has given psychopaths and con artists the keys to the kingdom. It now pays, big, with little upfront investment, to spend a lot of time and energy crafting and spreading misinformation online.”

Production of misinformation has attained global industrial scale, with the fossil fuels industry funding a worldwide campaign costing hundreds of millions of dollars to mislead the public and governments over the dangers of climate change and the role of fossil fuels in it. Through purpose-built ‘lie factories’, the $7 trillion petro-sector (coal, oil, gas and petrochemicals) has sought to misinform, manipulate and sabotage world efforts to rein in climate change by corrupting governments, distorting public discourse and circulating falsehoods. Its methods, adopted from those of the tobacco industry, are detailed in a report by researchers from Harvard, Bristol and George Mason Universities. A study by Oxford University revealed evidence of formally organized social media manipulation campaigns in 48 countries, describing it as “a critical threat to public life” that was now “big business”.

“Antiscience has emerged as a dominant and highly lethal force, and one that threatens global security, as much as do terrorism and nuclear proliferation,” warned Dr Peter Hotez in a Scientific American article calling for a global effort to combat anti-science.

The complicity of the media – world as well as national and local, traditional as well as social media – in disseminating false information under the false flag of ‘balanced reporting’ – is a central part of the modern phenomenon. The lie factories cannot flourish without obedient messengers to carry their deceptions.

Some media have even made the spreading of misinformation part of their business model, gambling that a flood of exotic nonsense will attract ‘more eyeballs’ (audience share) to their TV and internet platforms, which the corporation then converts into money by attracting corporate advertising. Thus, the C21st media have made the remarkable discovery that misinformation is more profitable than telling the truth. Over time, they cultivate huge, loyal audiences who either love conspiracy or are just more credulous and ill-informed than most people about what they are told.

Of course, humans have been lying about one another for millennia – the spreading of nonsense is nothing new. What has changed is that human civilization as a whole is now at risk from ten catastrophic threats – and that the media tools for spreading misinformation are very much more powerful. Specialist data firms now analyse mass audiences in detail in order to target the most gullible with the most attractive misinformation for their mindset.

For around 300 years, science has sought to dilute the human tendency to delusion by presenting an objective, tested view of the world and how it works – and constantly re-testing it to make sure it is correct. No other belief takes such an approach. That groundwork of fact and understanding, ushered in by The Enlightenment, built the greatest achievements of civilization. Now, in a new Dark Age, fantasy, superstition, delusion and denial are in the ascendant once again.

The motives behind the spreading of lies and conspiracies are many, chiefly monetary greed, political advantage, malice and ruinous ignorance. Russia, for example, stands accused of using misinformation to sabotage American politics , while the US Republican Party appears to have embraced misinformation because its voters are so open to it. By such means democracy worldwide is being paralysed, with governments unable to move for fear of offending large minorities of the misled.

The problem of mass delusion is compounded by accumulating scientific evidence that humans are today less intelligent than they were a generation or two ago. Recent research has found that human IQ has declined by around 13 points since the mid-1970s. While the cause is still uncertain, the fall in human intelligence coincides with a sharp increase in nerve poisons in the living environment, leading to a surge in mental conditions, especially in the young. This suggests that humans today, due to their chemically-damaged brains, may be more easily misled than were their parents or grandparents.

If humans are losing lost the capacity to reason, or have become addicted to fantasy, then there is no saving them in an existential emergency – because so many will not grasp it is real or do anything to prevent it. Indeed, they may actively seek to undermine attempts by humanity to save itself.

Global misinformation may seem a modest threat in comparison with, say, all-out nuclear war – but it is no less deadly in the long run because it disables the very quality on which humans most pride themselves. The ability to think, understand and act rationally. And thus, to save themselves.

cribb
blatham
 
  3  
Reply Mon 28 Feb, 2022 07:41 pm
@hightor,
There's little if anything I would disagree with in that piece.

I've spent the last month or so (since the convoy phenomenon and more recently in regards to Ukraine) studying the comments (and interacting with commenters) on Global TVs Facebook pages. Global TV is Canada's second most watched TV network with provincial and national versions. Editorially, it demonstrates little bias of any sort and is really rather anodyne.

What I've found in those last weeks is not encouraging. Disinformation and misinformation are rampant. For example, commentary on Ukraine is about 50% pro-Putin. Some of this appears to be fake accounts but the majority comes from Canadians. And these Canadians are almost always the same individuals who were supporting the trucker convoy. The anti-government (by which I mean anti-Trudeau) and anti-mainstream media sentiment is extreme. There's no significant difference with what we're used to on A2K with posters like Builder. Conspiracy theories are completely commonplace with these folks - eg "the World Monetary Fund has bought and controls Trudeau" or "international bodies like the EU, WMF, or NATO or run by pedophiles". Trudeau is commonly labelled a fascist and Canada is said to be on the very edge of loosing it's freedoms to a corrupt weakling dictator. Zelensky is often held by these folks to be a corrupt leader and Ukraine the real evil player in the story with Putin merely trying to gain back territory unjustly stolen from Russia. Commentary on Trump is more mixed but what he just said at CPAC about Canada being a fascist dictatorship and Canada a ruined democracy get many thumbs up and/or laudatory comments. I've never seen anything like this before here.

These people are almost always very poorly educated and, like Americans who feed on Fox News or talk radio, have been trained to reject any media or information source which is nuanced and sophisticated. Few know how to debate or discuss and insults to other posters fill their commentary. "Fake news!" is repeated over and over. Anti-vax conspiracy notions are a staple amongst these people.

But here I have to impress that these phenomena, in this sort of frequency, are not a part of my daily life offline here. I have still, in two years, seen no one in a store without a mask or kicking up a stink about masking. I have seen no vehicles sporting a Canadian flag, though my brother has seen two. Still, this trend of seeing so many fall into a world of misinformation and so many caught in culture war thought and cliches, borrowed from the modern US right is somewhat terrifying.



blatham
 
  4  
Reply Mon 28 Feb, 2022 08:56 pm
Politico has a very good piece up on this story HERE
0 Replies
 
blatham
 
  4  
Reply Mon 28 Feb, 2022 11:31 pm
Politico also has an extraordinarily bright and comprehensive interview with Fiona Hill on the present situation in Ukraine and on Putin's history. By far the best thing I've found, if sobering.


For many people, watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine has felt like a series of “He can’t be doing this” moments. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has launched the largest ground war in Europe since the Second World War. It is, quite literally, mind-boggling.

That’s why I reached out to Fiona Hill, one of America’s most clear-eyed Russia experts, someone who has studied Putin for decades, worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations and has a reputation for truth-telling, earned when she testified during impeachment hearings for her former boss, President Donald Trump...
BillW
 
  3  
Reply Tue 1 Mar, 2022 12:13 am
@blatham,
A lot of talk I have been hearing is from Russian experts that believe Putin has begin very isolated from everyone for a number of years. Because of this and who has been in the past, he has become more and more erratic, taking less and less council. He maybe borderline if not full blown crazy!
Albuquerque
 
  -1  
Reply Tue 1 Mar, 2022 12:27 am
@BillW,
The "experts" you are talking about must be paid by the west or are looking up for his chair, no third option here!

To state that the most arithmetic, frivolous and informed Russian Leader in the past 50 years is going crazy is not only stupid and patently false but displays intent of misinforming and manipulating public opinion!
 

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