At the inauguration, Trump will pull off his mask and be revealed as Mossadegh.
I'd like to see a comedy based around the South Korean intelligence officer assigned to monitoring Trump's tweets.
The CIA has Trump's tax returns, right? And what Putin is paying him and his cronies?
How can you tell that the CIA didn't kill JFK? Well, he's dead, isn't he?
(Or I guess the right way to tell that one is: how do you know the JFK assassination wasn't a CIA plot?)
$12.7 million to Manafort from Yanukovych's Putin puppet party, at least. (Is Manafort still officially involved with Trump's campaign/administration?)
I don't have any faith in the CIA saving us from Trump. Mostly because, on the historical record, they're a bunch of ineffective clowns, and because the main thing I can think of their successfully doing, blackmail, seems as if it wouldn't work on Trump. What sort of unspeakable secret do we think they're going to reveal about Trump? He's a rapist? He's in the pay of the Russians?
8: His Lena Dunham movie collection and life-sized pillow
Some people say the CIA overthrows too many democracies. Some people say the CIA is hardly able to overthrow any democracies at all. Tough crowd.
Some say the CIA, it is a river
That drowns the tender reed.
But I say the CIA, it is a flower
and Trump, it's only seed.
Jesus F. Christ, I know nobody is actually saying this, but I still fret, so: we all agree we don't retreat into just speculating on what unaccountable outside force will save us from Trump, right? We save ourselves.
8.last-1 seems like it's entirely plausible.
I've seen rumors based on nothing that suggest Trump may have been gotten by a Russian honeypot during his visit there a few years ago. Certainly it would make sense for Putin to try to generate blackmail material on Trump. It's the hypothesis I'm running with for now. The FSB has pictures of Trump in a leather harness being pegged by an under age Mexican prostitute. Occam's razor, bitches!
8- Oh man, LB got pwned by an Yglesias tweet.
13- Not based on entirely nothing, Trump was known to be in Moscow at a time period such that it's possible, and he stayed at a hotel that the Russian gov't has previously used when compromising other people (source- Adam Silverman's BJ Kompromat series)
Also, aside from me concern trolling, where did we ever derive this idea that the Deep State has a single clue what it's doing?
Interestingly google will autocomplete "Trump Kom" to "Trump Kompromat" for you.
Lest you think it's a selection bias, the other options ranked lower are Komatsu, Komodo Dragon, and Komen.
I honestly don't know -- have we gotten to the level of CGI where video of someone doing something terrible isn't blackmail material anymore, because it could have been faked? Not for ordinary people, the budgets wouldn't work yet I don't think, but for blackmailing a president, couldn't he just say "Totally faked" and dismiss it?
Whichever pundit it is who says 'think Veep not House of Cards' gets it right.
If Trump is smart he'll preemptively put out sex videos that are detectably faked, like happened with GWB's Guard records.
19: Rogue One had a lot of money behind it and CGI Tarkin was deeply in the uncanny valley. We're not quite there yet, but might be soon.
22- Thank you- I've read lots of gushing compliments about how they brought the actor back from the dead but when I saw him doing anything besides gravely staring out the window I could tell it was obvious CGI.
Which is not to say that uncanny valley Trump genitals are going to be obviously different from the real thing.
Also, blackmail video is going to get away with being lower-resolution and so on than a big screen movie.
What sort of unspeakable secret do we think they're going to reveal about Trump?
Trump was cucked in a Moscow hotel.
You heard it here first folks.
And he's actually a bottom.
That might do it.
Minivet is right in 12 of course. That's why all utterly ridiculous talk of "Hamilton electors" and everything was really annoying me. There's no escape from Trump until we take back power. And in the meantime we resist. Organize and resist.
It's important to organize and resist. But it's also important that the people who are most directly in place to resist his agenda do so--that means a lot of federal civil service employees, including in the intelligence services, who will actually be in charge of implementing his agenda.
Also, aside from me concern trolling, where did we ever derive this idea that the Deep State has a single clue what it's doing?
Its kept itself in business for decades despite showing very little ability to advance American interests?
I'm not even being facetious:
1: Intelligence agencies aren't very good at their jobs.
2: Many people know this, and politicians have vowed to fix things.
3: Intelligence agencies never get (meaningfully) reformed, and nobody ever gets punished for fucking up, even when hostile politicians have power.
It's hard not to conclude that they're good at something. You can chalk it all up to inertia and a type of regulatory capture, but it's hard not to suspect that, at the very least, they have some sort of skill at self-preservation.
Now that Trump is fighting them more openly than anyone ever has before, that suspicion gets put to the test.
I've seen rumors based on nothing that suggest Trump may have been gotten by a Russian honeypot during his visit there a few years ago.
Even if it is based on nothing, and completely untrue, its a rumor that should be supported and spread far and wide. For a lesser asshole, I might object to such treatment at the expense of Truth. But this is a guy who brought us 8 years of "where's the birth certificate?" So, it seems fair to me.
I thought it was because they fight dirty.
That's why all utterly ridiculous talk of "Hamilton electors" and everything was really annoying me. There's no escape from Trump until we take back power. And in the meantime we resist. Organize and resist.
I never understood this annoyance. "We must resist Trump." "Here's a way that could prevent him taking power at all." "No, that doesn't count, idiot."
Exactly what actions in the 6 weeks after the election were more likely to stop Trump? More snide essays about safety pins? More smug comments about neoliberalism? More felating of the white working class?
65M people voted against Trump. The issue is not that there are too many resistance tasks for the hands we have, so we need to be really careful which ones are pursued. In the short term, the most vital task is resisting the normalization of Trump. Public challenges to the EC process actually had (a small amount of) that effect.
AFAIC, "You're resisting Trump wrong" is practically an invalid sentence, unless someone is directly counterproductive (by e.g. saying we should support Ryan and McConnell as counterweights, or that we need to throw minorities under the bus in order to win). Even navel-gazey stuff that I find ridiculous has some value if it gives someone a bit more energy/room/confidence to take action as well.
It's hard to design a rumor that would horrify Trump while standing in solidarity with the kind of people that horrify Trump.
I wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would accept me, but most of all that one.
I don't get 32 at all. That Hamilton elector bullshit was completely ineffectual. A bad joke. How many electors defected? I mean defected from Trump, not Hillary which actually did happen. It's pie in the sky wishful thinking. How is that resistance?
I hope there are huge protests during the inauguration. I'm not counting on the media to report them well but I hope that happens.
I'm thinking of going to the inauguration protests. Especially since DC weed activists will be handing out free joints. OTOH, I'm lazy and don't particularly want to get arrested.
I think I found it counterproductive because the tone I took from it was one of fostering false hope and I think that tends toward disillusionment. We need the hope of the forlorn.
I think I'm starting to channel Bob now so I'll stop.
I also need to get up in a few hours for another weekend getaway to Dubai.
And actually, I've been involved in local resistance to an asshole real estate developer for 16 months now, and we've been practicing this principle, and we're winning.
We've thrown every tactic we can at the problem. When we go to public meetings, lots of people are off-message. There have been actions in the park of IMO dubious value. But it's all added up to an engaged, vital resistance that not only saved the park from being shredded to fragments, but has gotten the head of the local development nonprofit, a woman with a strong reputation for developer-friendly compromise, to stand up for us and declare that we shouldn't compromise at all.
We, the handful of people doing most of the work, have tried to be as effective as possible, because we are just a handful with limited resources in every sense, but we haven't dreamed of telling the others that they're doing it wrong.
This fucking fantasy that, if only the million people in the street were more on message, the left would win all the time is ridiculous. Leaders need to be smart, but they also need bodies, and the more bodies you have, the less focused the message will be. Within reason*, that's OK. Because if you tell people they're protesting wrong, they won't protest the way you want; they'll go home.
*and I suppose that's the crux of the argument: where's the boundary? I'm certainly not trying to suggest that e.g. the white folks who were showing up at Standing Rock unprepared to camp out yet hogging camera time should be allowed to proceed without correction. But good leadership is guiding where necessary, not shutting allies down.
I guess the way you get organized is that a million people start bumbling around, and a few seem to have a knack for getting others to bumble in their direction. It's easy to criticize the bumblers but you don't want to alienate a potential person with a knack for organizing.
I want to criticize the Hamilton elector idea and get mad when people write snide essays about safety pins.
1: Intelligence agencies aren't very good at their jobs.
2: Many people know this, and politicians have vowed to fix things.
3: Intelligence agencies never get (meaningfully) reformed, and nobody ever gets punished for fucking up, even when hostile politicians have power.
It's hard not to conclude that they're good at something.
Pushing back on this a bit:
Is it not simpler to conclude that, in fact, intelligence agencies are quite good at their jobs, and that previously-hostile politicians realise this when they get into power? What's your basis for assuming that intelligence agencies are not very good at their jobs? By which, I assume, you mean "not as good as you would realistically expect a well-run intelligence agency would be". Presumably you aren't setting the standard at "godlike omniscience".
As for "nobody ever gets punished for fucking up"... what about Mike Flynn?
"[P]ictures of Trump in a leather harness being pegged by an under age Mexican prostitute," even if not arguably faked, do not seem sufficient to embarrass this man. If he has done a thing, it is, ipso facto, a good thing to have done.
I don't have a problem with 38.1 at all.
In the group discussions I saw about it, it didn't feel like there was too much of that false hope; it was more of a "this is a long shot, but we have to try." As a Kendzior follower, I have zero problem with that.
In the end, it didn't flip any Trump electors, but it got coverage at a time when the press mostly wanted to cover and amplify Trump tweets. The press wasn't going to cover, "people are forming local civic clubs to prepare for more effective GOTV campaigns in 2018." Nor were they going to cover, "people are writing to their Senators about the latest nominee*." They'd cover a general strike, but that's a completely different level of commitment from hectoring electors.
I'd add that the Hamilton elector thing was also one more bit of fuel for the fire we'll need to burn the EC down.
*which, PS, is going to be almost exactly as effective as the Hamilton elector thing was. Pat Toomey just got reelected; there is literally nothing we constituents can do to make him not be a rubber stamp for Trump except on guns, which are the issue that, for whatever reason, he's decided to play independent.
I had a hard time getting into the Hamilton elector thing at the time but in retrospect it was still action. Most of the resistance strategies we pursue will be long shots on their own, we can't say in advance which will end up working.
To 29, that's quite true, I guess I mean do they have ability to do much of anything as strategic political actors besides entrench/perpetuate themselves.
42: Yeah, sorry, I wasn't arguing for my (1) as such; I was saying that that seemed to be a shared premise, but one that didn't nec. comport with their continued existence/growth.
It's interesting to me that the left is so committed to CIA-hating that we won't credit it with having been right, right alongside us, just ("just"?) 14 years ago. It was only 10 years that we learned just how correct the CIA was about Iraq. And of course the only major international terror plot to succeed in the US was because the President ignored the CIA.
All that said, I saw a FB meme about how "patriotic Americans side with the CIA over Russia," and I couldn't quite get with it. The Army has done enough post-Vietnam that I trust it as an institution (too often misused by its civilian bosses, of course); I can't go that far with the CIA.
And of course the FBI can go fuck itself sideways with the Washington Monument.
What's your basis for assuming that intelligence agencies are not very good at their jobs? By which, I assume, you mean "not as good as you would realistically expect a well-run intelligence agency would be". Presumably you aren't setting the standard at "godlike omniscience".
To answer this directly: the CIA's Cold War record is pretty shitty. Even if you want to treat Mossadegh as a successful execution of a terrible order, they couldn't stop stepping on their own dicks in Cuba, and they completely failed to correctly assess the failing Soviet Union.
I don't know that we have any clear evidence of them fucking up more recently, but of course this stuff rarely comes out in a timely fashion.
As for "nobody ever gets punished for fucking up"... what about Mike Flynn?
Punished by becoming national security advisor?
29.1 is ridiculous.
There was an interview with the CIA's brutal point guy in central America posted here pretty recently. The KGB and Stasi successfully implemented a widespread network of semi-pro informants that made effective communication of dissent possible only for people willing to become official pariahs, and which effectively identified and killed huge numbers of the regime's opponents.
I don't know what's coming in US developments, starting from the false premise that the CIA and NSA cannot do much is an error.
The Hamilton Elector thing didn't fail because it was a bad idea, it failed because they never located a viable alternate candidate to be the staking horse. If they had been able to get Romney or Kasich or even some third tier Republican to buy into it, that would have actually been a pretty big deal that would have pulled a lot of press coverage and shifted some votes - plausibly enough to make a difference.
But, no Republican stepped up, or even floated a trial balloon. I think that says more about the willingness of "moderate" Republicans to collaborate with a Trump Presidency then it does about the failure of organization on the elector's part.
we can't say in advance which will end up working
This is true, but we can say in advance that some will not work. Levitating the Pentagon White House might be interesting theater, but isn't going to win anyone over. In the way that banging on conflicts might.
The CIA is bad at covert operations, but are they bad at intelligence? They gave us advance warning of 9/11, after all. I guess they overestimates the capabilities of the Soviet Union in the 80s, but less so than the fantasists in the Republican party.
53: If I'm remembering The Best And The Brightest correctly, the CIA also basically got it right on Vietnam. They estimated that winning would require much more blood/treasure than the US would ever be willing to commit.
(1) The original flaw of CIA was in handing it over to former OSS types, who were more interested in the transformative power of clandestine operations than in the work of building up a true human intelligence apparatus (in which field we were decades behind the British and Russians).
(2) The record of CIA clandestine operations directed at inserting spies and agents provocateurs behind enemy lines is atrocious and numbing in the body count. During the late 40s and 50s especially we attempted to get hundreds of operatives into the USSR, as well as China and North Korea; almost to a man, they were captured and either killed or subverted.
(3) The CIA record of mucking with other countries' governments is decidedly mixed: we successfully bought a lot of elections and successfully supported the overthrow of half the governments in South America, not to mention Iran, but also failed a lot, most notably in Cuba and Indonesia. Whether these interventions were a good idea is another question altogether.
(4) Unless the CIA, which has declassified an enormous amount of material relative to the Cold War, continues to hold back some pretty shocking secrets, we have to conclude that the Soviets kicked our asses at human intelligence, largely but not entirely due to their head start (in addition to Kim Philby, many prominent informants in West Germany had been developed and turned well prior to WWII). The record post-Cold War is less clear, but we've clearly paid a price by not developing language skills to the needed level. Considering that CIA's original purpose, per Harry Truman, was to tell him what was going on in the world, there's a long record of failure to provide accurate intelligence in advance of major events.
(5) As communications technology developed, signals intelligence became an increasingly dominant strength of the American intelligence services, though much of that is concentrated at NSA and not CIA. When their source was successfully concealed (as with the first few decades of Radio Free Europe) CIA propaganda initiatives also had a lot of success.
Another one: Big Black. Even just going by what's public, the NRO has achieved some truly startling things.
If one is to believe Ben MacIntyre, not the least of Philby's achievements was to drive James Angleton mad. When your Chief of CoInt is exhibiting symptoms of paranoia, it can't be good for the effectiveness of your organisation.
Plus, he was the Eater of Souls.
And Ivy Bells still sounds like something out of a bad technothriller. They sneaked into heavily defended Soviet territorial waters in a specially modified submarine and tapped the telephone line between two major Soviet naval bases, and kept the operation going for a decade, sneaking back in every month to collect the take. Unbelievable.
I guess they overestimates the capabilities of the Soviet Union in the 80s
I feel like this was largely a result of a political decision to tell the administration what they wanted to hear. There was the same problem with the WMD in Iraq. That's certainly concerning, but it doesn't necessarily impugn their ability to collect intelligence.
I'm annoyed that it took me several books to notice that "Angleton" is a multi-dimensional joke (given the references to the "many angled ones"). And yes, JJA's personal collapse (and the culture of paranoia he created) were deeply destructive to the agency. I also have a pretty terrible opinion of Allen Dulles, to the degree that I wonder if swapping out a very small number of individuals in CIA leadership in its early decades could've made a massive difference. (And while I've not yet broadened my reading on this topic to take in analysis of British intelligence, I should acknowledge that the Russians did a pretty fantastic number on the UK services as well, which had their own subsequent episodes of paranoia to a seditious degree. But this leads to another provocative turn: how much did the Russian advantage in HUMINT even matter? It cost a lot of individual lives, but it didn't win any lasting victories.)
My post at 55 is overall pretty negative, and I don't want to overlook that as others have pointed out there were numerous successful intelligence gathering operations, and the CIA was capable of generating accurate intelligence assessments (as with Vietnam) that were unpalatable to the powers that be and therefore sidelined. But the picture of them as near-omnipotent, while useful propaganda, is radically far from the truth; perversely, it contributes to a certain kind of leftist dismissing CIA claims out of hand because they are seen as inherently sinister, tentacles manipulating everything everywhere for their nefarious purposes, the dark reflection of the way the agency would like to be seen.
AFAIK only small groups within CIA called the Soviet collapse accurately, based actually on open sources.
A general guideline seems to be that defensive CIA isn't bad, offensive CIA sucks balls. Is someone going to fuck us up (Bin Laden- yes; Saddam- probably not even though Cheney didn't like the answer; Putin- trying to) seems like a decent track record. How can we fuck someone up (Cuba, Central America, Iran) they shit the bed.
They finally got Castro with their most subtle plan ever. Instead of accelerating him to near the speed of light, they kept him at rest with respect to America.
62: I've heard that as well. The more a given CIA analysis of the USSR relied on "intelligence", the less accurate.
A general guideline seems to be that defensive CIA isn't bad, offensive CIA sucks balls.
This seems well-put. Why is there even an offensive arm?
Because Guatemalan peasants don't understand capitalism properly.
66. Allende's widow might have had ideas. Similarly anyone fleeing from Rios Montt, or the survivors of those who failed to flee. Honduras is a solid US client.
Walter LaFeber's Inevitable Revolutions was I thought well-written.
Argentina recently bought a few Chinese-made fighter jets.
66: As far as the actual commando stuff: because the OSS boys wanted to relive their glory days, or the glory days of the guys they looked up to, and that set the institutional culture. They started with a great belief in their ability to do exciting things by dropping people into enemy territory, but as it turned out the US had a much higher ability to select, train, and insert operatives into Nazi-occupied France than to do the same into Russian-occupied Russia.
More generally, the Dulles brothers, between their positions at CIA and State, set a precedent for being extremely aggressive and extremely suspicious of foreign democracies; the attempted coup against Indonesia, for example, was not only a failure of execution but almost certainly a massive failure of intelligence: the idea that Indonesian leadership was willing to let a leftist party occupy seats in the legislature was taken as a sign that the whole government had become subverted by Communist stooges.
Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, touted as the first CIA history sourced entirely with declassified documents and on-the-record interviews, is pretty fascinating in this regard. (The CIA's official position is that it badly distorts the Agency record.) The title is a direct quote from Eisenhower, directed at Allen Dulles, at the last meeting of Ike's security council - thanks to Dulles, Ike was leaving JFK "a legacy of ashes" in terms of foreign intelligence. Notably Dulles appears to have outright lied to JFK about the details and prospects for the already-in-planning Bay of Pigs operation in order to secure the go ahead order. The depressing pattern Weiner establishes is that every President from Eisenhower to Reagan enters office, eventually decides that they're horrified by CIA overreach in terms of clandestine ops, but is eventually seduced by the potential they have for effecting change (JFK's reaction to the Cuban fiasco was to put RFK in charge of clandestine ops, which is maybe not exactly in the AG's job description; the Kennedy administration went on to conduct a hell of a lot of mostly failed operations).
Interesting. Thanks for writing all that out!
The idea in 61 (that Kim Philby, who knew Angleton well from Philby's time as Stewart Menzies's representative in Washington; IIRC they had a weekly working lunch, leaked evidence of a non-existent mole to JJA and used him as an unwitting tool to cripple the CIA) is the thesis of Ron Rosenbaum's "The Shadow of the Mole", if you want to read about it but don't want a book-length treatment like Wilderness of Mirrors or Declare.
Though Declare is much more fun to read.
the US had a much higher ability to select, train, and insert operatives into Nazi-occupied France than to do the same into Russian-occupied Russia.
Nitpick - I think it was more Russian-occupied Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Ukraine, Albania etc etc than Russia itself.
One of the most consequential Soviet HUMINT things was the Walker spy ring in the 1980s. Up until then the Soviet Navy thought its submarines and submariners were good - actually we'd invented narrowband passive sonar and were following them around everywhere without being counterdetected, because the first thing we did with it was to listen to our own subs and ships and fix the noises it picked up.
Walker gave away both the sonar technology and what the NATO submariners were up to. They improved, enormously, almost overnight. So much so that their newer subs were nicknamed the Walker-class. Not that it won them the cold war or anything, but it was certainly a HUMINT breach that had big consequences.
it was certainly a HUMINT breach that had big consequences.
Well, was it, though? The immediate effect was presumably that Soviet boats started being built to be a lot quieter and more difficult for NATO boats to follow. But, so what? Did anyone actually die as a result?
Yes, there has been a lot of sneaking around and following each other and deterrence, but in terms of actual actions the NATO submarine fleet has done exactly two things of any importance since 1945:
1) the involvement of British boats in the Falklands War; this was critical war-winning stuff that depended on their ability to defeat a fairly sophisticated ASW threat, but the Walker spy ring had no impact on it.
2) various launches of cruise missiles against various Middle Eastern nations; the enemy in each case had pretty much zero ASW capability, and so this could have been done just as easily with any submarine with a few tubes. The US Navy could have built nothing but enormous noisy U-boats since 1945 and its submarine fleet would still have achieved exactly as much.
In fact, presumably "bozhe moi our boats are all really noisy and therefore useless" was followed by "quick we must build lots of new boats" and so the Walker ring actually damaged the USSR and hastened its collapse by forcing yet more unaffordable defence spending.
Well, was it, though? The immediate effect was presumably that Soviet boats started being built to be a lot quieter and more difficult for NATO boats to follow. But, so what? Did anyone actually die as a result?
Well, the sailors on the Kursk did.
Kursk was a pre-Walker design, and AFAIK its sinking had nothing to do with efforts to be quieter - they had a dodgy torpedo which exploded. I can't see a link to the Walker ring at all.
That said, building a lot of noisy submarines isn't free.
The Russians also had a spy embedded at NATO headquarters in 1983 who advised them that the US was not actually starting a nuclear war, despite indications (Operation Able Archer) to the contrary. Given that we are all still alive today, that seems like some pretty damn successful HUMINT.
Acoustic quieting is one of the things that makes surface warships much dearer than merchant ships, but I'm not sure the baseline is comparable for submarines. However, a lot of it comes down to careful industrial quality control (can't have any pipes that rattle...), something the USSR really struggled with.
However, a lot of it comes down to careful industrial quality control (can't have any pipes that rattle...), something the USSR really struggled with.
One of the things that made the AK-47 so durable is that it was machined with very wide tolerances. That may have been out of necessity, but probably somewhat also reflects Russian engineering sensibilities. I don't imagine a manufacturing culture that embraces wide tolerances makes for particularly quiet equipment, though.
It was deliberate, to make it less likely to jam or foul. Big moving parts with plenty of space around the edges, and that huge gas tube coming off the barrel, so the working parts go all the way back with a tremendous WHACK every time rather than jamming on some random bit of grit or carbon that's got in there.
(Also, just "AK". Avtomat Kalashnikova. No "-47".)
75: Consequences would have been very major indeed had the war ever turned hot.
85: true, but that's the point, isn't it? It didn't. In the actual course of events, the Walker ring had zero effect on anything that actually matters. They didn't save a single Soviet sub which would otherwise have been sunk, or drown a single American sailor who would otherwise have lived.
85, 86: I tend to think it wouldn't have mattered then either. If the war ever turned hot, we would have all been toast either way.
87: Not necessarily. India and Pakistan have been in fairly constant low-level conflict for twenty years without going nuclear.
JRoth is right in 32 and 39 about the benefits of a scattershot approach to resistance, especially in these early days. We need people, especially non-activists, to get engaged one way or another while we're building a bigger movement.
I hope we (for complicated values of "we") don't put a lot of resources into White House levitation, but the absolutely most important thing is that people are mobilized. The biggest danger is people overinvesting in a specific activity, like the Hamilton electors, and then being disillusioned when it doesn't work.
We're in for a long, long fight and we should be open to every tactic in the book: large protests, civil disobedience, prayer vigils, community meetings, donning individual symbols of resistance, letters to the editors, dogging legislators by phone and e-mail, and showing up at town hall meetings, one-on-one education of neighbors and co-workers, weird political theater, getting religious leaders to speak from the pulpit, organizing for the 2018 mid-terms, etc. and ad infinitum.
We need to prioritize issues and develop strategies, not just tactics, but this how we get started.
89: essentially, you're saying you need a new Manhattan Project.
In the actual course of events, the Walker ring had zero effect on anything that actually matters.
I don't think you should look solely at the final outcome to judge weather an endeavor was worthwhile or not. You have to look at the range of possible outcomes, of which what actually happened was just one instance. A more appropriate evaluation would be to run a Cold War simulation 10,000 times, and then measure the percentage of instances in which the Walker episode had an effect.
91: that's not what I'm saying, though. I was disagreeing with Alex's description of the Walker ring as "a HUMINT breach that had big consequences". I don't think it had any significant consequences. That's not the same as saying it was worthwhile. Lots of things that had no significant consequences were still worthwhile.
(Loving the CIA discussion but sticking to what's in my own wheelhouse.)
I was initially put off by the idea of the women's march for multiple reasons and still think it's problematic, but huge protests have a way of radicalizing people, and organizing your kids' friends' parents or fellow church goers to rent a bus -- not to mention long conversations on the bus ride about what's at stake for them -- create networks and excitement for future activism.
Ditto for planning the sister marches across the country. If even 50% of them actually happen, that's thousands more getting their first taste of mass protest.
I'm not always so optimistic, but in my more hopeful moments I choose to believe this is the beginning of the next great progressive movement.
The time energy and enthusiasm of potential recruits are limited quantities. I don't really want to waste any of it on 'you're fighting Trump wrong' arguments, but God I wish the time energy enthusiasm spent on trying to get some senators to object to the qualifications of some of the Trump electors was instead spent on getting in touch with Planned Parenthood and asking 'how can I help.'
There's a vast store of experience and expertise out there in various issue organizations. And all the motivation you can imagine. But instead, we have enlightened amateurs who'd rather think up their own strategies, because 'who knows what might work.'
IMO Trump is needy and personally weak. His personal agenda is also very fluid. Looking for ways to make him see that what Ryan wants to do won't be popular with Real Americans has a high chance of working. Virtue- and enthusiasm-signalling among people already among his 'many enemies' isn't going to help, and only digs him in. Obviously, there's an amount of wearing team colors on game day that we have to do for esprit. But the successes are going to come from highlighting places where the GOP's agenda and the hopes of Real Americans diverge.
I have been following Greg Palast for years. This is a good explanation of how the election was stolen.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/5504
http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/5505
The March is great, and I think the companion women's demonstration at the capitol in Helena is a very good thing.
There's a vast store of experience and expertise out there in various issue organizations. And all the motivation you can imagine. But instead, we have enlightened amateurs who'd rather think up their own strategies, because 'who knows what might work.'
The thing is, the DNC had a vast store of experience and expertise that ended up being for naught, while Trump himself was an amateur who came up with his own strategy.
98: With that track record in national elections I think we might be getting a little loose with the meaning of "expertise".
Exactly my point. A lot of traditional expertise and methods don't work anymore.
But the successes are going to come from highlighting places where the GOP's agenda and the hopes of Real Americans diverge.
I agree with this but have no idea how to do it. And, all due respect, I'm not convinced that PP or a lot of other, comparable orgs do either. They know how to A. actually help Real Americans, and B. rally Fake Americans. But I think that one thing November's outcome shows is that plenty of Real Americans are willing to avail themselves of PP* and the like and then turn around and vote for Trump, despite PP being a very, very prominent part of the campaign.
My point being, I couldn't agree more with the quoted line; I'm not at all sure than there's actually a ton of untapped expertise in doing it.
*how many of the 53% of white woman who voted Trump have used PP? More than a handful, I'd wager.
plausibly up to a third will have/have had abortions in their lives, after all.
Yeah, but they had good reasons, not like those other sluts.
I remember reading some quotes from women Trump supporters that were sure he wouldn't do anything to illegalize abortion since he had been such a playboy and they were sure he had paid for a few abortions himself. I find it puzzling that they had enough insight to figure that out, but didn't also see that he's a completely shameless hypocrite.
Yeah, I've seen stuff like 104 as well. A ton of motivated reasoning among his voters, no doubt.
Indeed, I said this on FB
Why did coal miners (and the like) hear the following:
A. I'll bring back mining jobs
B. I'll kill Obamacare
and believe A but not B? I think this is actually where the racism/sexism are most salient: it was a marker of "I'm on your side." That is, they weren't voting for racism/sexism per se; they just viewed the racist/sexist guy as someone who'd look out for them. A sort of affinity fraud.
"You got your racism in my willful delusions about a polluting energy source!"
"You got your willful delusions about a polluting energy source in my racism!"
96 is, unsurprisingly, crazy. Yes, Clinton got the nomination by suppressing black votes. Roger, please try to exert some critical thinking once or twice a month. It builds character.
107: For what it's worth, ajay is saying Greg Palast is crazy when he says Trump, the Koch, Kobach of Kansas and Crosscheck buried thousands of black votes in getting Trump elected. Wait? Maybe Greg Palast is smart and honest in Part one and a lying psycho in the second link? Roger helpfully divided them in two so you can choose your poison.
Timothy Burke on the Anatomy of Anti-Trumpism. Don't read this one either, cause you will have to rip this evil mutha from your own sidebar.
Lot of muthafucking crazy going round. Just bout everybody but you, huh.
I just heard an NPR host quote Trump as both offering praise to PP and committing to cutting their funding, and then characterized him as "all over the map" on abortion. That's actually a specific spot over on the right side of the map! It's not your fucking job to soften his position.
That comment was a mess even by my standards. It hadn't occurred to me that the one could use his aberrent behavior to "centralize" his policies.
I've been very pro-anti-normalization but I keep thinking about that essay from after the election by someone in some country describing how they defeated some horrible guy by treating him as a normal politician (I may have skipped the reading). It's going to be tough to energize people in an orderly enough fashion that Trump isn't given cover to indulge his instincts.
I keep thinking about that essay from after the election by someone in some country describing how they defeated some horrible guy by treating him as a normal politician
That was about Berlusconi in Italy, who actually only got thrown out of office because the European Central Bank orchestrated a coup against him.
The link in 108 is quite good.
I continue to feel like Tim Burke is wrestling with interesting questions, and that I'm excited to read his posts, but then, when I finish them, I feel like I don't completely understand why he's picked that particular tree to bark at.
I go back and forth between thinking that I'm just not understanding correctly of that I disagree with him.
I keep thinking about that essay from after the election by someone in some country describing how they defeated some horrible guy by treating him as a normal politician
I think (hope) that might work in 4 years, I'm really not sure it would have worked in this last election.
I read someone complaining about Clinton's decision to paint Trump as outside of the standard Republican tent, rather than emphasizing the fact that he held most of the same positions as the other Republican candidates, and I just thought that Clinton didn't have the power to paint him as a standard Republican. Given how obviously the Republican establishment disliked him, he didn't require Clinton to establish his anti-establishment credentials. Given that, it made sense for Clinton to try to drive a wedge between him and Republican voters -- didn't work, but I still think it was the path of least resistance.
Yeah, I think that was a reasonable strategy.
113: That particular post is sort of an odd mix of his usual moderate, reasonable tone with content that challenges the whole worldview that presumably underlies it. Sort of fitting in context, but definitely hard to know how to interpret.
He said he'd get rid of Ocare and replace it with something way better. If he enacts Medicare-for-all, he doesn't just get re-elected, he gets on Mt. Rushmore. All he has to do is tell that loser Ryan and his cohort that if they don't get with the program, he'll destroy them. He can do it, and they all know it.
How to pay for it? A tax on Exxon that amounts to 80% of what they're currently paying for health insurance, etc.
Swan upping! Not coherent, I think, but boy howdy do I love swans.
Simon Frith, Art Into Pop, ca 1987, SF's favorite of his own work
Pop was thus seen as radical in its exposure of the commodity character of all art (even the avant-garde). It was 'democratizing' in both practice (silk screen printing, for example, offered new means of visual propaganda) and theory - if aesthetics were now subordinate to the capitalist logic of advertising and industrial design then it became possible to 'expose' everyday life through aesthetic analysis. Beuys took up these ideas and added his own 'anthropological' reading of the Pop art argument. Everyone was an artist, in his terms, as producer as well as consumer; what we should be concerned with is how all people (all peoples) work on nature to produce something functional, something human, something new. For Beuys art was, in Hughes's words, 'any kind of being or doing', anything which was or could be ritualized.... Politics as performance art, not only for politicians but for "citizens" in social settings. See T. Burke op cit above on Clinton's "Goffmanesque" performativity vs Trump's performance of authenticity (which is not honesty.)
Joseph Beuys, German; Robert Hughes; It's fun for me to remain curious but unsatisfied as to whether Simon is related to Fred.
118- I think you are right about that, but somehow I don't think Trump will do it. He's never failed to screw the rubes who backed him before in his long career, he's not going to start now.
123: aha, but this time the rubes voted for him on the understanding that he would screw them (by instituting policies that would harm them) so really the way he could screw them most would be to not screw them.
Rubes or not, he's going to screw everybody.
125 Everybody except Ivanka, who he would like most to screw.
Divorce courts are a bitch like that.
That would be Ivana. Ivanka is the daughter he's creeped on publicly for decades.
Consonants, how the fuck do they work.
Something about stopping the air flow?
126 seems like a safe assumption since we all know Trump would never go against laws and social conventions and risk horrifying right-thinking people just for a bit of personal gratification.