Um... could this be "it"?

[Mark Kohut]

I had read it already and I think it is wrong....as with 'sourcing' news
stories, he relies on diciness of reporters and is being proven wrong.....

But, I may be wrong and, yes, it is nuanced...I thought about it for a
number of days...and reread...

I have read some of his history and learned.

This current world crisis creates deep epistemological problems, imho.

On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 7:54 AM, Thomas Eckhardt <
thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:

> For a more nuanced take on the war against dissent, the media etc., see
> this article by Jackson Lears, historian and Democrat:
>
> https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/jackson-lears/what-we-dont-tal
> k-about-when-we-talk-about-russian-hacking
>
> Some excerpts:
>
> "A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect
> resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into
> the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing
> emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning speed, a new
> centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and
> the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has
> attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In
> its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass
> opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of
> anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s."
>
> "The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief
> that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by
> ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The
> story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters
> are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil
> twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy.
> Responsibility for the absence of debate lies in large part with the major
> media outlets. Their uncritical embrace and endless repetition of the
> Russian hack story have made it seem a fait accompli in the public mind. It
> is hard to estimate popular belief in this new orthodoxy, but it does not
> seem to be merely a creed of Washington insiders. If you question the
> received narrative in casual conversations, you run the risk of provoking
> blank stares or overt hostility – even from old friends. This has all been
> baffling and troubling to me; there have been moments when pop-culture
> fantasies (body snatchers, Kool-Aid) have come to mind."
>
> "It’s hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt
> scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and
> the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth."
>
> "Yet the Democratic Party has now embarked on a full-scale rehabilitation
> of the intelligence community – or at least the part of it that supports
> the notion of Russian hacking. (We can be sure there is disagreement behind
> the scenes.) And it is not only the Democratic establishment that is
> embracing the deep state. Some of the party’s base, believing Trump and
> Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about ‘treason’ like a
> reconstituted John Birch Society."
>
> "Flagrantly false stories, like the Washington Post report that the
> Russians had hacked into the Vermont electrical grid, are published, then
> retracted 24 hours later. Sometimes – like the stories about Russian
> interference in the French and German elections – they are not retracted
> even after they have been discredited. These stories have been thoroughly
> debunked by French and German intelligence services but continue to hover,
> poisoning the atmosphere, confusing debate. The claim that the Russians
> hacked local and state voting systems in the US was refuted by California
> and Wisconsin election officials, but their comments generated a mere
> whisper compared with the uproar created by the original story. The rush to
> publish without sufficient attention to accuracy has become the new normal
> in journalism. Retraction or correction is almost beside the point: the
> false accusation has done its work."
>
> "We can gauge the corrosive impact of the Democrats’ fixation on Russia by
> asking what they aren’t talking about when they talk about Russian hacking.
> For a start, they aren’t talking about interference of other sorts in the
> election, such as the Republican Party’s many means of disenfranchising
> minority voters. Nor are they talking about the trillion dollar defence
> budget that pre-empts the possibility of single-payer healthcare and other
> urgently needed social programmes; nor about the modernisation of the
> American nuclear arsenal which Obama began and Trump plans to accelerate,
> and which raises the risk of the ultimate environmental calamity, nuclear
> war – a threat made more serious than it has been in decades by America’s
> combative stance towards Russia."
>
> Highly recommended.
>
>
>
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