Um... could this be "it"?

[rich]

this is all well and good but when the devil is at your door, you do need
to prioritize. No one here is under the illusion that the intelligence
agencies are not to be trusted and the democratic party is deeply flawed or
the trillions spent on defense, etc. we know all this. but there's no doubt
if Hillary was prez we wouldnt have the bozos running the various govt
agencies we have installed now, nor the decimation of the state dept, nor
the drop in world leadership, nor a thousand other things. these are worthy
fights but not when we have the existential risk that Trump and company
represents. anything I say anything that makes Trump look good or supports
him is a fool. there's no gray area here, I'm afraid.

rich

On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 8:04 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20180220/9ace40b9/attachment.html>