But we will grow from it, and they will not — over the long run, at least.
Things we need to improve upon and/or rebuild:
Without the doing of some thing brand inappropriate Something unmonetizable Unclickable Untraceable Untradeable | If i don't rend the cloth of this Culture Fit soon i will die Like the coral Like two-thirds of the wild Like the humans on the edge of a rising shoreline In a ceaseless world With iceless poles And icy proles | As the planet heats, Civilization chills; Swallowing our red or our blue pills; Interned into camps of grievers and shills | Grieve i do and for the West Our president the Bigly Best! We'll come and go at his behest Put down your Freedom of Info Requests Baby, you just ain't seen nothin' yet | Joe Walsh got his balls out, and his musket too The Lefties dream of Saskatoon We're all gonna get that Change real soon You'll see when fascism hits High Noon | We'll finish tearing ourselves apart In the streets and in the dark Can no longer recreate in this park Leslie Knope didn't fit the part | She had the mighty audacity To take purview over Benghazi Once Bush and Blair left Qaddafi Those GOP goons would never get off me | My God, all the emails The Chaffetz' anemic security details At least we're swaddled by all this retail Black Friday's never been so beyond the pale | Pale as a ghost White as a sheet Our New Balance host Circle jerks its meat | Of all the PUAs and all the Teas Even the most mundane of these See the female as a tease Hang the browns up in the trees We're all strange fruit upon our knees | Ain't no more reason to appease Already done killed off all them bees Turnt up the thermostat a few degrees TVs blaring back our postmodern sleaze | Found ourselves a favorite scapegoat And a good long length of real strong rope The corruption will be all excised By the 'tubes chock full of Russian spies This revolution will be televised As America just dies and dies
Russian aggression is mercurial — it’s getting harder to tell anymore who is being paid to push pro-Russian messages, and who has just been sadly taken in by them. For all this braggadocio (braggadocious, even!) about “building a wall” to keep supposed Mexican rapists out (although net migration has been falling with our southern neighbor for some time and is now net negative), no matter what the outcome of next Tuesday’s election, the “borders” around the internet will remain difficult — if not impossible — to police for the foreseeable future.
This all makes our breathless, behind-closed-doors hand-wringing over Soviet Communist influence over the population in the 1960s seem like child’s play. No need to train up a double agent over a lifetime and infiltrate the corridors of state power anymore — just fire up Twitter (or Medium).
It thus probably shouldn’t be as shocking as it has been to find the pro-Russian lovefest coming just as hard from the far-left as it has from the far-right. It stems from a good place (for the most part): a heartfelt desire for peace and the youthful misunderstanding of how difficult (read: impossible) that has been to achieve throughout history. Still, we always want to believe we’ve cracked the nut — that Mutually Assured Destruction now keeps us safe from all the power-hungry demons of the world.
Unfortunately, the Cold War is thawing. With the Russian economy reportedly in dire straits thanks to fragile over-reliance on oil and gas production combined with the precipitous drop in oil prices over the past 18 months, Putin is in a state. A state of keeping the angry ailing Russian classes distracted by the drums of war, while aiming to keep the pampered, self-absorbed American classes distracted from the drums of war. So far to great success — at least on the latter front. It’s hard to speak to the former, although all the paid trolls do seem mighty angry.
Since we can barely pull our heads out of our navels in the U.S. to remember there’s a whole other world outside of our Big Orange Terror Bubble (which is by turns understandable and deeply concerning), I wanted to record here a timeline of Russian aggression events in the lead-up to where we are today (re-purposed from this post with some additional backstory on the Green Party candidate’s Jill Stein involvement with Putin):
This doesn’t include any of the Russian aggression “soft” lobs like the cheeky offers to monitor our elections, or the material connections to the alt-right movement here as well as the swell of right-wing political insurgencies around the world.
Perhaps history will one day show that the deepest destruction wrought by globalization was not the disintegration of America’s manufacturing sector, nor its incentivization of capital flight, but its damage to the last pillars of an aging democratic architecture slowly corroded by neoliberal economic policies in fashion since the Reagan years.
If any history still remains.
I still see a lot of denialism on this point about the DNC email hacks from the far-left (or the alt-left, depending on your favored terminology), which is a bit devastating to see as it essentially parrots the pro-Russian ideology of the far-right (both the alt-right and the neo-libertarian flavors). Green Party candidate Jill Stein is an especially pernicious promoter of this myth that Vladimir Putin is a poor, innocent, peaceful world leader who is being bullied by NATO (when in fact, Russia has been the aggressor since its annexation of Crimea in 2014).
Two separate Russian-affiliated adversaries were behind the attacks, according to a post-mortem by cyber-security firm CrowdStrike when the news of the intrusion first broke in early June, 2016. This has since been confirmed by other independent security firms including Fidelis, Mandiant, SecureWorks, and ThreatConnect as well as corroborated by analysis from Ars Technica and Edward Snowden.
At this point the US intelligence community is confident enough to formally accuse Russia of involvement in the hacks, and are currently investigating other breaches of voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois as well as in Florida — the key battleground state from the 2000 election that handed GWB an unfortunate victory. Elsewhere, there is ample evidence of Putin’s extensive disinformation campaign being waged online (including several experiences I have myself witnessed), which is the continuation of a long through line of wielding propaganda as a tool from the former head of the KGB.
Be careful of our barnacled, crusty cynicism and the cavalier rabbit hole it could lead us down — away from the longest-running success story in human rights.
Democracy works only if political leaders put the common good ahead of personal interest. There is zero evidence Trump would even be equipped to deliver on this, should the interest in it ever be made to enter his mind.
Clinton restored the stature of American diplomacy around the world. Trump asked Russia to find her hacked emails and interfere with the US presidential election.
#youdecide
Mike Flynn leading chants of “lock her up!” from the RNC podium was a test for tolerance of persecution of political opponents. We don’t do that in this country. At least, not in modern times we haven’t.
Each new boundary pushed is a test for when we’ll snap, or when the base will have finally gone too far. We haven’t hit it yet. They’re snarling; out for blood.