The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby alloneword » Sat Apr 18, 2020 7:22 pm

JackRiddler » Sat Apr 18, 2020 10:57 pm wrote:It will be impossible to convince people in 20 years that #Russiagate involved the most energy and effort ever expended on a US top-down psyop, that it was literally the biggest story in the corporate media near every month solid for three years.


Yep. Even odder that the latest *BOMBSHELL* receives such scant attention.

I still can't help wondering what ever became of Skripal... :whistling:
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Apr 19, 2020 5:08 am

Paywall. Does it have anything in it that isn't in here?

Story, shocker, is that when old MI6 Russia hand Steele was first hired by some Clinton campaign adjunct effort to snoop around among his long-burned or long-dead sources for trash on Trump, some of them had an easy time trolling him for the lulz, feeding false material that went into his bogus dossier, including the invented Cohen visit to Prague (which was already done-in back at the Cohen testimony in 2019; I covered that dud in an over-contextualized way a mere 13 months ago and when I looked that up just now I can't believe that wasn't 2018).

So, once again, final resort, #Russiagate itself is attributed to a Russian disinfo effort. And the effort to minimize that now is to claim that the Steele dossier wasn't the reason for the original suspicions that prompted the FBI investigation -- which, a) who cares and b) even if true would mean only that the pretext was even flimsier. Comey and Horowitz say so, and they're honorable men. Any more than this?

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/16/politics/christopher-steele-footnotes-russian-disinformation/index.html

GOP seizes on newly declassified material to raise further questions about Steele dossier

By Jeremy Herb and Evan Perez, CNN

Updated 2227 GMT (0627 HKT) April 16, 2020

(CNN)Senate Republicans are touting newly declassified information that suggests Russian disinformation, in two instances, may have been passed onto ex-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele when he compiled an opposition research dossier on Donald Trump and Russia in 2016.

The newly unredacted footnotes from a Justice Department inspector general report bolster criticisms of the FBI's handling of the dossier, and two Senate Republican chairmen received the material with the help of senior Trump administration officials skeptical of the FBI's Russia investigation into Trump.

The new information provided to the Republicans this week and earlier this month comes from previously classified footnotes in DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report on the FBI's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants obtained on former Trump adviser Carter Page. The inspector general report outlined 17 "significant inaccuracies and omissions" in the four applications for the Page warrants in 2016 and 2017, including the use of Steele's unverified intelligence reports.

Despite the problems in handling Steele, the inspector general found that the FBI investigation was properly initiated, with enough predication to probe suspicious ties between people associated with the Trump campaign and suspected Russian agents. The Mueller investigation also found evidence that people inside and associated with the Trump campaign welcomed and encouraged Russian activity that they thought could help their candidate win.

The questions about Steele's sources surround two of the most contentious and controversial elements of the dossier: claims that Trump's then-personal lawyer Michael Cohen traveled to Prague and that Russia had obtained kompromat on Trump during his visit to Moscow in 2013. While other elements of the dossier were borne out partially or fully, those two passages were angrily denounced as false and no evidence has ever emerged to substantiate either one.

Republicans, including Trump, have repeatedly seized on the claims made about Cohen and Trump in the dossier in an effort to discredit the FBI's Russia investigation and later former special counsel Robert Mueller's probe.

Steele's report played no role in the opening of the FBI investigation, according to Horowitz, and he found that the most salacious allegations weren't proven.
Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin first sought to have the classified footnotes in the report released publicly in January, receiving two sets of declassified footnotes from the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The footnotes, which were previously classified in the inspector general report and still contain some redactions, show the FBI was warned in 2017 that some of the information Steele received could have been part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The declassified material also shows the intelligence community told the FBI in 2017 that "two persons affiliated" with Russian intelligence were aware of Steele's investigation in July 2016.

"As we can see from these now-declassified footnotes in the IG's report, Russian intelligence was aware of the dossier before the FBI even began its investigation and the FBI had reports in hand that their central piece of evidence was most likely tainted with Russian disinformation," Grassley and Johnson said in a joint statement.

On Thursday, Grassley and Johnson sent a new letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray requesting additional information on the Russia investigation based on what they learned in the footnotes.

In an April 2 letter, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd provided the senators with three footnotes, while keeping a fourth redacted. On Wednesday, acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell declassified additional footnotes, including information that was redacted in the material the Justice Department turned over.

"I consulted with the Attorney General William Barr, and he has authorized the ODNI to say that he concurs in the declassification insofar as it relates to DOJ equities," Grenell wrote to the lawmakers.

Grenell, a fierce Trump loyalist, was US ambassador to Germany before Trump tapped him to replace the former acting director, Joseph Maguire, last month. And Barr, who has launched his own investigation into the origins of the FBI's investigation into Trump and his team, has publicly said that he has been pushing for more of the inspector general's report to be produced unredacted.

The newly disclosed information raises additional questions about the material Steele provided to the FBI from his opposition research dossier compiled on behalf of a law firm working with Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016. The FBI opened its investigation into members of Trump's team in July 2016 upon learning of a conversation George Papadopoulos had with an Australian diplomat about Russian dirt, but the Steele dossier was used to obtain and renew FISA warrants on Page.

Horowitz's footnotes state that a January 2017 report provided the FBI information outlining an inaccuracy in Steele's reporting on Trump's then-personal attorney Michael Cohen, who was accused of traveling to Prague but did not do so. The report assessed "the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate US foreign relations," according to the inspector general's footnote.

In addition, a February 2017 intelligence community report said that the allegations raised about Trump's activities in Moscow in 2013 were false, and the product of Russian intelligence "infiltrate(ing) a source into the network."
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby stickdog99 » Sun Apr 19, 2020 12:22 pm

norton ash » 18 Apr 2020 15:57 wrote:So it's the final battle between Stay-at-Home-Karen glaring at us over her mask, and God-and-Guns-Cletus in the town square who wants the churches and titty bars open again. Those Russians are diabolical.


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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby alloneword » Sun Apr 19, 2020 3:10 pm

JackRiddler » Sun Apr 19, 2020 9:08 am wrote:Paywall. Does it have anything in it that isn't in here?


Not sure - probably not... but here it is in full (they really need to work on their paywall implementation) - just delete it if there's nothing of note in there:

The Steele dossier just sustained another body blow. What do CNN and MSNBC have to say?

By
Erik Wemple
Media critic
April 18, 2020 at 12:01 PM EDT

Thirteenth in a series on the media’s handling of the dossier. Read the rest of the series here.

So you thought you’d heard the last word on the Russian dossier, did you?

Nope: Freshly declassified footnotes from a 2019 Justice Department report cast further doubt on one of the central documents of Russiagate — a collection of memos compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and published by BuzzFeed in January 2017. The dossier contained extravagant allegations about presidential candidate Donald Trump and was treated to deference in some precincts of the mainstream media.

In December 2017, for example, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow spoke in admiring tones about the “deep cover sources” deployed by Steele.

Well, Steele’s main source might take issue with Maddow’s description, according to recently released material: “When interviewed by the FBI, the Primary Sub‐source stated that he/she did not view his/her contacts as a network of sources, but rather as friends with whom he/she has conversations about current events and government relations.”


That tidbit comes from a batch of footnotes to a December 2019 report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz that were declassified this month in two tranches, one from the Justice Department and one from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The 400-plus-page document pounded the FBI for its handling of applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to wiretap former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, a process that Horowitz wrote was marred by “17 significant errors or omissions.” That said, the report concluded that the dossier did not spark the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and that the investigation — named Crossfire Hurricane — was properly launched.

The FISA applications were powered in part by claims in Steele’s dossier, research funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. As the FBI sought independent confirmation of the Steele claims, it found holes, according to the Horowitz report: “The FBI concluded, among other things, that although consistent with known efforts by Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections, much of the material in the Steele election reports, including allegations about Donald Trump and members of the Trump campaign relied upon in the Carter Page FISA applications, could not be corroborated; that certain allegations were inaccurate or inconsistent with information gathered by the Crossfire Hurricane team; and that the limited information that was corroborated related to time, location, and title information, much of which was publicly available.”

The declassified footnotes lend texture to that grim assessment. They have been unsheathed at the urging of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), two critics of the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. Even a cursory look at the footnotes makes clear why they pushed for sunlight.


For one, the material contains a critical insight regarding the Steele dossier’s allegations regarding Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney who is now serving a federal prison sentence. According to the dossier, Cohen had traveled to Prague around August 2016 to meet with Russians for collusive purposes. “Speaking to a compatriot and friend on 19 October 2016, a Kremlin insider provided further details of reported clandestine meeting/s between Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP’s lawyer Michael COHEN and Kremlin representatives,” the document said.

In December, the Horowitz report noted that the FBI had concluded that the Cohen-Prague claims of the dossier were “not true.”

Newly declassified footnote 350 addresses claims in the dossier regarding Cohen. Have a look at a key part of it:


[W]e identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received from [REDACTED] indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting. A January 12, 2017, report relayed information from [REDACTED] outlining an inaccuracy in a limited subset of Steele’s reporting about the activities of Michael Cohen. The [REDACTED] stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations. A second report from the same [REDACTED] five days later stated that a person named in the limited subset of Steele’s reporting had denied representations in the reporting and the [REDACTED] assessed that the person’s denials were truthful.

The footnote doesn’t specify which Cohen activities are at play here, though it may well bear on significant dossier reporting by the McClatchy newspaper chain. In two earthshaking stories from April and December 2018, McClatchy reported that former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had evidence that Cohen was in Prague in 2016 and that Cohen’s mobile phone “sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016.” McClatchy stood by its reporting after the Mueller report, and then the Horowitz report, raised questions about the veracity of those articles, which were written by Greg Gordon and Peter Stone. “It is important to emphasize that our stories cited evidence — not proof — that Michael Cohen may have made a secret trip to Prague in the late summer of 2016,” reads the opening of a long statement the reporters provided to this blog in December.

The reporters sent a fresh statement to the Erik Wemple Blog on Friday: “We will stand by the information that we reported concerning Michael Cohen’s alleged trip to Prague unless clear evidence demonstrates that it is false.”

We asked McClatchy if this latest disclosure has prompted a reexamination of the reporting. Apparently so! “We are taking a close look at this new information and will update or correct our story based on its merits. Until then, we continue to stand by our reporting,” said a statement from McClatchy.


A footnote to this footnote episode: In January 2018, long before the Mueller report was released, then-New York Times reporter Scott Shane asked in a panel discussion, “If Michael Cohen did not go to Prague . . . if that’s not true, who made it up?” Shane, who retired from the Times last year, went on to say the tale was “probably concocted by Russian intelligence,” citing the level of detail in the dossier’s claims.

Horowitz’s report revealed that the FBI “assessed the possibility that Russia was funneling disinformation to Steele, and the possibility that disinformation was included in his election reports.”

Remember the dossier’s famous allegations that the Russians had kompromat against Trump because of illicit alleged activities in a Russian hotel? A declassified footnote elaborates on the provenance of that story: According to an intelligence community report, a source who spanned Trump’s circles and Russia said that it was false and resulted from Russian intelligence “infiltrat[ing] a source into the network.”


Another footnote, citing a U.S. intelligence report, reveals that two people affiliated with Russian intelligence were aware of Steele’s information-gathering efforts in 2016. An FBI official said, however, that he “had no information as of June 2017 that Steele’s election reporting source network had been penetrated or compromised.” A New York Times story notes the strange adjacencies involved in Steele’s pursuits — getting too close to Russian intelligence created a risk of misinformation, but Steele also sought to know what Russian intelligence was “doing with regard to the Trump campaign.”

Steele told Fusion GPS, the research firm that commissioned his work, that at least 70 percent of the claims in the dossier are accurate. An obvious question arises from that assertion: Which ones? The Erik Wemple Blog asked Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson to comment on the possibility of Russian disinformation. He replied with an excerpt from his 2017 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, in which he outlined how Steele viewed these perils: “I’ve worked on this issue all my life and when you’re trained in Russian intelligence matters, the fundamental problem of your profession is disinformation. It’s the number one issue,” said Simpson, paraphrasing Steele.

Multiple Trump scandals have come along since the dossier was front-page news. The declassified footnotes haven’t preoccupied the coronavirus-obsessed mainstream media, although there have been reports by the likes of CBS News, the Associated Press, the New York Times and CNN. Conservative media organs including Fox News, the Daily Caller and Washington Examiner have covered the developments.


We’ll pause to consider the CNN account, which carries the headline, “GOP seizes on newly declassified material to raise further questions about Steele dossier.” The article’s first sentence reads, “Senate Republicans are touting newly declassified information that suggests Russian disinformation, in two instances, may have been passed onto ex-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele when he compiled an opposition research dossier on Donald Trump and Russia in 2016.”

Factual? Yes. Slanted? Yes, that too. Republicans are “touting” the footnotes in part because media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC and others “touted” the dossier with flimsy corroboration in the early months of the Trump presidency. (The chatter is the focus of previous installments in this series.) One CNN anchor, for instance, went so far as to assert in December 2017 that the U.S. intelligence community has “corroborated all the details” of the dossier.

The CNN footnote story abridges the findings of the Horowitz report this way: “Steele’s report played no role in the opening of the FBI investigation, according to Horowitz, and he found that the most salacious allegations weren’t proven.” That’s a convenient formulation, considering that the Horowitz report said the FBI determined that the dossier was a mix of uncorroborated, inaccurate/inconsistent and publicly available information.


The Erik Wemple Blog asked CNN and MSNBC whether they have reviewed their coverage of the dossier. We will update with any response. Until then, we’ll continue to “tout” the journalistic breakdowns surrounding the dossier.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby liminalOyster » Sat Apr 25, 2020 1:00 am

Screenshot_20200424-235650_Twitter.jpg
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Apr 25, 2020 1:10 am

.

Abramson, the 'collusion' disinfo peddler. Is that image meant as satire or an homage to (what now seems like) another reality ago?
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby liminalOyster » Sat Apr 25, 2020 1:13 am

At this point I'm almost sure he's a satirist. Right?
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Apr 25, 2020 1:26 am

.

Right - Satire is dead. Replaced with what we -- or consensus -- call reality.

When the emperor parades before his subjects in his new "clothes", no one dares to say that they do not see any suit of clothes on him for fear that they will be seen as stupid. Finally a child cries out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!"


We need that child to call out the absurdity and awaken the masses from their trance-like stupor.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby alloneword » Sat Apr 25, 2020 6:17 am

*Doing a 'Hilary'*...
Christopher Steele told a British court last month that he no longer has documents and other information from his meetings with the main source for his Trump dossier, suggesting that the former British spy has no way of backing up his side in a dispute with the Justice Department’s inspector general (IG), according to a deposition transcript obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Steele also told the court that his communications regarding the dossier, including with Fusion GPS, were “wiped” in December 2016 and January 2017, the transcript shows.

The former MI6 officer made the disclosures during a March 17-18 deposition in a defamation case related to the dossier. The DCNF obtained a transcript of the deposition.

Steele suggested in a Dec. 10 statement that he had evidence that would shed light on what his main dossier source told him back in 2016, when Steele was working for the firm Fusion GPS to investigate the Trump campaign. (RELATED: Christopher Steele ‘Meticulously’ Recorded Source Who Disavowed Dossier, Lawyers Say)


https://dailycaller.com/2020/04/23/chri ... ls-source/

(Sorry, this should maybe have gone on the 'Onion' thread).
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Apr 25, 2020 2:11 pm

Belligerent Savant » Sat Apr 25, 2020 12:10 am wrote:.

Abramson, the 'collusion' disinfo peddler. Is that image meant as satire or an homage to (what now seems like) another reality ago?


liminalOyster » Sat Apr 25, 2020 12:13 am wrote:At this point I'm almost sure he's a satirist. Right?


Belligerent Savant » Sat Apr 25, 2020 12:26 am wrote:.

Right - Satire is dead. Replaced with what we -- or consensus -- call reality.


This guy? Who knows how he understands his schtick. He thinks it has a niche, but he's a bottom-dweller. Everyone in his line gets by on some mix of believing and performing their own bullshit.

Going on 40 years I've been thinking satire is dead, life overtakes it. A lot of people say this.

I saw the Westboro Church "GOD HATES FAGS" protest near Ground Zero on 9/11/2004, and I'd never heard of them, and the sight from afar was already so absurd I persuaded myself it was a local gay theater troupe mocking Christianists from Kansas. We got nearer, absorbing the scene. They looked like several families with children, in worn rainbow-hippie outfits. Reaching the public's side of the police barricade, still struggling with denial, I asked one of them: Is this a joke? Are you doing a performance? He pointed at me like the judge on judgment day, and turned to scream to the rest: "Here's a jackass who's never read a word of scripture!" Yep, actual Christianists from Kansas.

Or were they?! I mean, given why I was at Ground Zero on 9/11/2004, how could I not further come to wonder: Were they cooked up in a psyops lab?

Fast forward through 16 years of RI history, as it were.

More recently it's been occurring to me this should be more than a sigh, or a joke, or a means of coping. If it keeps happening, there's a logic to it.

Sometimes the joke is framed in a flipped, more prophetic version: effective satire turns into a plan for imposing the visions it opposed. How many people, considering the state surveillance and propaganda complex, have remarked that 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a manifesto? Dr. Strangelove dissects the superpower drive to nuclear war with more understanding of its underlying social psychology than anything from the RAND Corporation. It's brutal and simplistic, but analytic and precise. Does it also serve to defuse horror, indirectly make nuclear war more likely? It's in the title, isn't it? "How I Learned to Love the Bomb."

Apropos, how often have I thought that Wall Street players, Davos-Trilateralist planners, FT writers, and corporate rationalization consultants are the Reverse Bolshevik elite, the groups who, at least after 1917, have been the most persistent and professional in the real-world application of the Marxian theory of capitalism?

Self-parody seems to work as a strategy for winning ends more extreme than one initially intended, or could have rationally hoped for. Not always, not for everyone. Talents, contexts and outcomes vary. There are limits, there are ceilings. Alex Jones doesn't get to be Caudillo el Supremo. It can occur on small scales, like with the "careers" of the #Russiagate twitter-warriors, or on national and global scales, with the omnipresence of car-insurance advertising. Trump is far from the first example of actors becoming president, or clowns who performed TV versions of dictators actually being taken seriously and winning office. Berlusconi preceded him, Zelensky has followed. There are dozens. This has a history. To some extent, Mussolini and Hitler were themselves examples of men "who played Mussolini or Hitler on TV" (in their cases in texts, on radio, and at rallies) before they became the fulfilled monstrosities of their tenures in power. Doubtless you can go back through millennia of political rhetoric, theater, and marketing, looking for cases to frame as examples of this.

I haven't systematized examples of the thought, but I guess it has happened a lot, and according to a few rough principles that can be divined and dissected. Some first thoughts: An ad-absurdum but winking performance of one's self short-circuits a skeptic's defenses and allows entry to hearts and minds in situations where you might have expected a "serious" fascist, someone more dedicated and fervent and genuine in their faith. Maybe this is why Trump's the god-president of the Christianists, and the actual Christianist is his side-kick? But it's also happened in reverse, right? It's not the killer formula for all situations. Sometimes the base wants the real thing. Or they get a taste from the clown in preparation for the firebreathing destroyer (who could also be the same one).

Has anyone put together a proper set of terms for this? There should be a theory for it, synthesized from elements like kayfabe, bread and circuses, the Overton window, old conservative thinkers' essays about thow much they hate crowds and demagogues, Butler's naive ideas on drag as resistance, social psychology of charisma and bureaucracy, etc.

.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Apr 25, 2020 3:02 pm

.

Sparkling rumination. Will need to return to it once more at a later time.

For now, i simply type that i laughed while reading your initial presumption Re: the Ground Zero Westboro Church episode. Perfect example.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sat Apr 25, 2020 11:48 pm

JackRiddler » 26 Apr 2020 04:11 wrote:
Belligerent Savant » Sat Apr 25, 2020 12:10 am wrote:.

Abramson, the 'collusion' disinfo peddler. Is that image meant as satire or an homage to (what now seems like) another reality ago?


liminalOyster » Sat Apr 25, 2020 12:13 am wrote:At this point I'm almost sure he's a satirist. Right?


Belligerent Savant » Sat Apr 25, 2020 12:26 am wrote:.

Right - Satire is dead. Replaced with what we -- or consensus -- call reality.


This guy? Who knows how he understands his schtick. He thinks it has a niche, but he's a bottom-dweller. Everyone in his line gets by on some mix of believing and performing their own bullshit.

Going on 40 years I've been thinking satire is dead, life overtakes it. A lot of people say this.

I saw the Westboro Church "GOD HATES FAGS" protest near Ground Zero on 9/11/2004, and I'd never heard of them, so I was sure it was a local gay theater troupe mocking Christianists from Kansas. Got nearer, absorbing the scene. They looked like several families with children, in worn rainbow hippie outfits. Reaching the public's side of the police barricade, still in denial, I asked one of them: is this a joke? Are you a performance? He pointed at me and turned to scream to the rest: "Here's a jackass who's never read a word of scripture!" Yep, those were actual Christianists from Kansas. Or were they?! I mean, given why I was at Ground Zero on 9/11/2004, how could I not further come to wonder: Were they cooked up in a psyops lab?

Fast forward through 16 years of RI history, as it were.

More recently it's been occurring to me this should be more than a sigh, or a joke, or a means of coping. If it keeps happening, there's a logic to it.

Sometimes the joke is framed in a flipped, more prophetic version: effective satire turns into a plan for imposing the visions it opposed. How many people, considering the state surveillance and propaganda complex, have remarked that 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a manifesto? Dr. Strangelove dissects the superpower drive to nuclear war with more understanding of its underlying social psychology than anything from the RAND Corporation. It's brutal and simplistic, but analytic and precise. Does it also serve to defuse horror, indirectly make nuclear war more likely? It's in the title, isn't it? "How I Learned to Love the Bomb."

How often have I thought that Wall Street players, Davos-Trilateralist planners, FT writers, and corporate rationalization consultants are the Reverse Bolshevik elite, the groups who have been most persistent and professional in the real-world application of the Marxian theory of capitalism?

Self-parody seems to work as a strategy for winning ends more extreme than one initially intended, or could have rationally hoped for. Not always, not for everyone. Talents, contexts and outcomes vary. There are limits, there are ceilings. Alex Jones doesn't get to be Caudillo el Supremo. It can occur on small scales, like with car-insurance advertising or the "careers" of the #Russiagate warriors, or on national and global scales. Trump is far from the first example of actors becoming president or clowns who performed TV versions of dictators actually being taken seriously and winning office. Berlusconi preceded him, Zelensky has followed. There are dozens. This has a history. To some extent, Mussolini and Hitler were themselves examples of men "who played Mussolini or Hitler on TV" (in texts, on radio, and at rallies, in their cases) before they became the fulfilled monstrosities of their tenures in power. Doubtless you can go back through millennia of political rhetoric, theater, and marketing looking for cases to frame as examples of it.

I haven't systematized examples of the thought, but I guess it has happened a lot, and according to a few rough principles that can be divined and dissected. Some first thoughts: An ad-absurdum but winking performance of one's self short-circuits a skeptic's defenses and allows entry to hearts and minds in situations where you might have expected a "serious" fascist, someone more dedicated and fervent and genuine in their faith. Maybe this is why Trump's the god-president of the Christianists, and the actual Christianist is his side-kick? But it's also happened in reverse, right? It's not the killer formula for all situations. Sometimes the base wants the real thing. Or they get a taste from the clown in preparation for the firebreathing destroyer (who could also be the same one).g

Has anyone put together a proper set of terms for this? There should be a theory for it, synthesized from elements like kayfabe, bread and circuses, the Overton window, old conservative thinkers' essays about thow much they hate crowds and demagogues, Butler's naive ideas on drag as resistance, social psychology of charisma and bureaucracy, etc.

.


I always thought 1984 was a description of contemporary UK politics. The prole aren't under the same sort of observation outer party members are under.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby dada » Sun Apr 26, 2020 2:38 am

JackRiddler » Sat Apr 25, 2020 2:11 pm wrote:Has anyone put together a proper set of terms for this? There should be a theory for it, synthesized from elements like kayfabe, bread and circuses, the Overton window, old conservative thinkers' essays about thow much they hate crowds and demagogues, Butler's naive ideas on drag as resistance, social psychology of charisma and bureaucracy, etc.


Yes, it's called surkovian theory.

Strategic self-parody is a proper term. Haven't heard it used by political theorists, but German philosophy buffs discuss strategic self-parody in Nietzsche. And art buffs discuss it in dada. (Not in me, dada, of course. I'm not that kind of dada. I'm the defense against the dark arts kind of dada)
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Apr 26, 2020 2:15 pm

dada » Sun Apr 26, 2020 1:38 am wrote:Yes, it's called surkovian theory.


Is it, though? Isn't this the thread for making the case he's been overblown? At least as an originator or an influence?

But yeah, a lot of the recent Russian agitprop has applied it, and you're helping me see that more clearly.

Strategic self-parody is a proper term. Haven't heard it used by political theorists, but German philosophy buffs discuss strategic self-parody in Nietzsche. And art buffs discuss it in dada. (Not in me, dada, of course. I'm not that kind of dada. I'm the defense against the dark arts kind of dada)


Merci.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Apr 26, 2020 4:24 pm

Closing of Hougan's Spooks 1978

However difficult they may be to solve, the problems manifested by the private use of secret agents are fundamental to the well-being of a democratic society. If we ignore those problems, we're likely to witness the emergence of a new sort of totalitarianism, an industrial regime of secret agents and manipulators operating within the framework of a state that has become only nominally democratic.

If that happens, it will be too late for any exorcist.
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