Um... could this be "it"?

[Mark Kohut]

He's just a stringer not a full-time journalist, is why.

On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 1:07 PM, Atticus Pinecone <atticuspinecone at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Why is Morris the only person who can string sentences together?
>
> Or is this some big ironic joke?
>
> On Feb 20, 2018, at 12:05 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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