Russian Trolling and US Propaganda

There is a lot to digest with regard to information sent to me by a friend regarding Russia's trolling in social media.  I just finished reading the NY Times piece by Adrian Chen written in 2015.  That doesn't mention Trump at all but instead describes one side of an apparent propaganda war between the U.S. and Russia. I found it quite interesting.  

In response, for now, I'll just provide a couple of points regarding my understanding of the situation with regard to Trump and Russia that are related to the Russian IRA and the NY Times reporting on Russiagate.  

Excerpting The New York Times’ Insidious Ongoing Disinformation Campaign on Russia & Elections, by Gareth Porter in Consortium News, 3/17/2020:

The Times service to the narrative was introduced by its February 2017 story  headlined, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts with Russian Intelligence.” We now know from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign that the only campaign aide who had contacts with Russian intelligence officials was Carter Page, and those had taken place years before in the context of Page’s reporting them to the CIA. The Horowitz report revealed that FBI officials had hidden that fact from the FISA Court to justify its request for surveillance of Page.

But the Times coverage of the Horowitz report in December 2019 failed to acknowledge that the calumny about Page’s Russian intelligence contacts, which it had published without question in 2017, had been an FBI deception.

Two more Times Russiagate stories in 2018 and 2019 featured spectacular claims that proved on closer examination to be grotesque distortions of fact.  In September 2018 a 10,000-word story by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti sought to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans. 

But that turned to be an outrageously deceptive claim, because Shane and Mazzetti failed to mention the fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017), had been engulfed in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people’s news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts.

and

Even putting aside the complete absence of a Kremlin role, the case that the Russian government sought to influence the U.S. election via a social media campaign is hard to grasp given how minuscule it was. Mueller says the IRA spent $100,000 between 2015 and 2017.  Of that, just $46,000 was spent on Russian-linked Facebook ads before the 2016 election. That amounts to about 0.05% of the $81 million spent on Facebook ads by the Clinton and Trump campaigns combined -- which is itself a tiny fraction of the estimated $2 billion spent by the candidates and their supporting PACS.

and

The Facebook ads placed by a Russian troll farm and released on Wednesday show that the Russian propaganda campaign of 2016 didn’t favor either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Instead, it mocked and goaded America, holding up a distorted but, in the final analysis, remarkably accurate mirror.  This directly contradicts previous U.S. intelligence community assessments.

Compare that with the U.S. involvement in Ukraine in 2014:

In 2014 in Ukraine, there was also the circumstantial evidence of NED involvement. Then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland told the U.S.-Ukrainian Foundation on Dec. 13, 2013, that Washington had spent $5 billion over a decade to support Ukraine’s “European aspirations,” in other words to pull it away from Russia.

But there was also a smoking gun. It came in the form of the leaked telephone call between Nuland and the then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in which they discussed who the new Ukrainian leader would be, weeks before the coup occurred.

and

If World War III Happens, You Can Thank Russiagate...   A delegation of US Senators jetted off to Kiev last month in a show of grandiose solidarity, mirroring a previous trip made in December 2013 by a different group of Senators infamously led by John McCain. That earlier group endured the mild inconvenience of appearing on stage alongside an “opposition leader” who was inordinately preoccupied with the alleged threat of “organized Jewry.” For all the recent domestic frenzy over the claimed scourge of homegrown “Nazis,” most US politicians and think tankers at the time seemed conspicuously blasé about backing a government-toppling initiative largely organized by unabashed sympathizers with the actual, historical Nazis....McCain on that fateful trip was accompanied by Chris Murphy (D-CT) — then a freshman senator who now, eight years later, regularly pontificates as a point-person for the Senate Democrats on foreign policy matters. Undeterred by the embarrassment of the 2013 trip, Murphy lept at the first opportunity to make another high-profile jaunt to Ukraine during the current “crisis.” Included in his 2022 bipartisan delegation was Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), who as of December was suggesting the brilliant idea of a nuclear first strike against Russia, as well as conventional US airstrikes and ground troops to “rain destruction on Russian military capability.” This, among other things, raises the question of what exactly it means anymore to “interfere” in foreign countries’ affairs. Because according to the common definition in US parlance, democracy-threatening “interference” can consist of a Russian internet marketing firm dispatching a few absurd Twitter trolls and Facebook memes to mildly toy with voters during election season. But physically going to a conflict hotzone after threatening nuclear annihilation is… par for the course?

Also, it has now been confirmed that the Steele Dossier, which was one of the first and most publicized of the Trump-Russia conspiracy allegations, was produced by agents of the Clinton campaign and then fed to the FBI and mainstream media (MSM).  That the Steele Dossier was discredited was recognized by the Mueller commission and the intelligence agencies early on (but not by the MSM and Adam Schiff, Chair of House Intelligence Committee).  They then shifted to other justifications for investigating Trump-Russia collusion, all of which I believe are untrue and have been silently recognized as such by the MSM (see Joseph Mifsud - George Papadopoulos, for example, which was the justification for the Mueller investigation after the Steele Dossier collapsed).  

I don't doubt that there's a propaganda war ongoing, and that Russians participate vigorously and often twist the truth.  Both sides clearly do it, so it's important to take the claims on all sides with a grain of salt, so to speak.  Ex-CIA analyst Martin Gurri wrote a book called The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium which describes our predicament with the torrent of information available via the Internet.  It's harder to coalesce around a set of shared beliefs when elite narratives can be investigated so easily and questioned so broadly.  My personal take is to try to avoid nihilism -- the belief that everyone is corrupt and the truth is not knowable.  I'm looking to be constructive.

A Healthy Attitude in a Dying Empire

I've been dismayed by the recent events in Ukraine, where I believe the United States is in the process of getting outsmarted once again by Russia.  As a U.S. citizen, this is disturbing and I want to shout out our folly to all my friends and family and community.  But that would jeopardize many of my personal relationships, and I've been persuaded by my friend Steve Randy Waldman to pursue a more positive and focused path -- Dreams and kindness are all we have: 

Nothing is broken in the world without something else being born. Any creature’s death at the very least yields a corpse, which yields succor for some other’s hungry mouth, or soil upon which new life may grow. If we do slip the chain of our outworn institutions, perhaps it triggers civil war, famine, holocaust, or autocracy. But it is also possible that we jump to something hopeful, a revision of our constitutional order that is more capable, more democratic, both...

Much of what I do as a writer is propose speculative blue-sky social arrangements, on the theory that with the passage of time or in a time of crisis things that once seemed ridiculous or unthinkable become possible, even inevitable. Please consider joining me. It’s fun! There has never been a better time to imagine and promote any of the huge variety of arrangements that would be more virtuous and functional than our own, but that for reasons of practicality and inertia seem unachievable. We need to build a portfolio of dreams, each one unlikely, but from which some few will perhaps draw us away from cataclysm and destruction as familiarities unravel...

Unmediated, outside of the temptations of commerce, the humans are mostly remarkably good to one another. It’s people being awful that goes viral on the apps, but those videos are absurdly unrepresentative. When our imaginations and conversations are dominated by salacious, mediated events, we become tempted to override our own gentleness, to prosecute cruelties in the service of an imagined cause with little connection to actual humans here and now. The result is rarely just. If we do start killing one another en masse, the killers will be electric with self-righteousness. Don’t be. Be kind.

So that's my message today.  Thanks Steve! 

Men's Groups, Proud Boys, & Demented Warmongers

I'm rereading the article on the extreme men's group.  A few excerpts:

Most men suffer in silence, Keuilian wrote, because they feel disconnected from their larger purpose in life. They gorge themselves on distraction: TV, social media, food, booze, pornography. These vices lead men further astray, jeopardizing their income, marriage, family, and sense of self-worth....  Schmidt is a work in progress, he knows that. Thanks to The Project, he’s trying. But if not for meeting these men, he swears, he’d still be shuffling through life like a zombie, rotting away, dead inside and out. Now he acts like a real man, driven, strong, family-oriented, just like The Project leaders he admires....   Earlier this year, British researchers analyzed data from the 2018 BBC Loneliness Experiment, a survey of 55,000 people around the globe, and discovered that young men living in individualistic cultures were those most vulnerable to loneliness. Likewise, a 2017 study reported that young men aged 18 to 30 from the US, UK, and Mexico said that ideally they’d like to spend most of their time with friends or a romantic partner, but in actuality, the majority spent their free time on their own. When feeling sad or depressed, men from the study most often sought help from their mother or romantic partner...  Suddenly, I understood what Keith Schmidt and all the other Project graduates kept telling me about brotherhood.

“True masculinity is showing love, showing compassion, showing all these things that are traditionally not spoken of as masculinity,” Schmidt told me. “And I think that scares some people.” 

So this seems healthy (if overly expensive).  I'd worry more if the men were finding community via the demonization of others.  

I don't know much about Proud Boys -- All the articles on the web seem to be warning that they are bad.  I can't find anything from the Proud Boys themselves.  They seem to be thoroughly marginalized in our culture. From the NYTimes 9/25/2021:

 As scores of Proud Boys made their way, chanting and shouting, toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, one member of the far-right group was busy texting a real-time account of the march.

The recipient was his F.B.I. handler...  As more and more Proud Boys have been arrested in connection with the attack, the group has been increasingly plunged into an atmosphere of suspicion about the presence of informants in their ranks.  The dark mood started three weeks after the riot when it suddenly emerged that Enrique Tarrio, the group’s leader, had himself worked as a F.B.I. informant well before he joined the Proud Boys.

 

So I think we can rest easy about the possibility of groups like Proud Boys taking over our government.

I do worry about a bi-partisan propaganda campaign aimed at demonizing Russia. My view is that the same group that led us into the disaster in Iraq in 2003 (and Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, etc.) is calling the shots and demonizing anyone who speaks out against their latest demented warmongering.  We're rushing headlong into another losing war.  I'm trying to figure out how I should deal with this unpleasant situation, but haven't yet had time to write down my thoughts.

The Self-Fulfilling Half Full Glass

 Another letter to friends:

Hello Gentlemen,

It seems that a number of us are circling around a similar theme -- Is the human condition hopeless?  Should we therefore give up on humanity and just worry about our narrow corner of the world and the small sliver of time that we have left before we pass on?  Alternatively, we can reject nihilism and make our own purpose and meaning as recommended in the podcast that Glenn circulated (see transcript here):

Chabon understood why a person would feel that way about the world, and, in particular, about the world right now. Chabon had felt that way himself once, too. But he also knew, having lived here on Earth for a while, that nihilism is a dead end — no path out. The alternative need not be false hope, or even the belief that the world is not essentially broken and absurd. The alternative is to make your own purpose and meaning, whatever the situation.

I'm right now in the middle of another article with a similar theme -- Sneer if You'd Like, But Engineered Solutions Are a Lot More Plausible Than Behavioral Change in 2022.  This is reminiscent of Jerry's writing on transhumanism -- i.e. we've got a better chance of solving problems technologically than politically.  Excerpt:

I have become, against my will, quite fatalistic about solutions to social problems that require any kind of widespread public buy-in. And though I’m somewhat antagonistic to the cultures that tend to advocate for engineering solutions, such as those of Silicon Valley or the finance industry, I feel drawn to such solutions because social change seems so impossible. We’re riven by partisanship and internet-fueled culture war, we don’t trust institutions or each other, and in my anecdotal experience the rise of casual nihilism - the bitter, I’m-joking-but-not-really insistence that everything is broken and can’t be fixed - is rising fast. All of that in a winner-take-all socioeconomic system that incentivizes being selfish. It’s not a combination that lends itself to a lot of hope. So I dream of moonshots.

Reasonable people can have differing opinions on how best to proceed.  Personally, I sense a rising consciousness of the need to be more constructive and less nihilistic.  Let's call it the doctrine of the self-fulfilling half full glass, or something like that.

Hugs,
Dan

Channeling Sorrow -- Insurrection Edition

I've been deeply saddened by the Democrats embrace of Dick Cheney as an ally in the debate over the "insurrection".  I choose not to hate Dick Cheney and the Democrats who have embraced him.  They may be genuinely trying to get society to a better place by joining ranks against Trump the demagogue and his rowdy followers.  With that charitable spirit, let's examine the issue at hand. Here's what a friend said:

In both your 1-4-22 piece titled “The January 6 Non-Insurrection” and your March or April 2021 piece “On Republicans” you opine that the mob that invaded the Capitol on 1-6-21 was “unarmed”.  The police officers and others who were injured by the mob’s hockey sticks, baseball bats, crutches, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bear spray and stolen police batons would surely disagree with your assessment.  Just because guns were not used does not mean the mob was unarmed.

First of all, there was no bear spray and no fire extinguisher used on January 6, in spite of mainstream media reports to the contrary:

Washington (CNN) April 27, 2021  The Justice Department on Tuesday abandoned the idea that pro-Trump rioters had used bear spray against US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick during the January 6 riot, a major change after implying for weeks that bear spray, not pepper spray, had been deployed...  The clarification came a week after Washington's chief medical examiner ruled that Sicknick had suffered strokes and died of natural causes a day after the attack...  The narrative was already muddled by prosecutors repeatedly citing the bear spray, unsanctioned speculation from the former US attorney who led the probe, exaggerated statements from law enforcement and inaccurate early press reports about a fire extinguisher hitting Sicknick.  [CNN]

More significantly, how do riots involving "hooligans" (friend's term in a previous email) who killed no one compare with acts of state sponsored war such as Pearl Harbor and terrorist acts of mass murder (Kamala Harris)?  I guess one can make the case that Dick Cheney's invasion of Iraq on false pretenses was well intentioned, and that the Japanese in 1945 and Al Qaeda in 2001 were foreign actors and therefore somehow less of a threat than homegrown hooligans armed with crutches and hockey sticks, but it seems a stretch.  

With regard to the definition of insurrection, here is another perspective:

No one from a country where these things actually happen could mistake 1/6 for “a coup .” In the real version, the mob doesn’t take selfies and blaze doobies after seizing the palace, and the would-be dictator doesn’t spend 187 minutes snacking and watching Fox before tweeting “go home.” Instead, he works the phones nonstop to rally precinct chiefs, generals, and airport officials to the cause, because a coup is a real attempt to seize power. Britannica says the “chief prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the police, and other military elements.” We saw none of that on January 6th

Glenn Greenwald describes the danger of overreacting to scary news:

The Democratic Party, eager to cling to their majoritarian control of the White House and both houses of Congress ... hopes that this concocted drama will help them win — just as they foolishly believed about Russiagate. With the threat of Al Qaeda and ISIS faded if not gone, and the attempt to scare Americans over Putin a failure, the U.S. security state, always in need of a scary enemy, has settled on the claim that right-wing “domestic extremists" are the greatest threat to U.S national security; though they claimed this before 1/6, casting 1/6 as an insurrection allows them to classify an entire domestic political movement as an insurrectionary criminal group and thus justify greater spying powers and budgetary authorities.

 

Asserting that the U.S. suffered an attempted coup by a still-vibrant armed faction of insurrectionists is a self-evidently inflammatory claim. It has been used to allocate billions more to the Capitol Police and to radically expand their powers; justify the increased domestic use of FBI tactics including monitoring and infiltration; and agitate for the mass imprisonment of political adversaries, including elected members of Congress. Hapless defendants who are not even accused of using violence have been held in harsh solitary confinement for close to a year, then sentenced to years in prison — while self-styled criminal justice reform advocates say nothing or, even worse, cheer. If one genuinely believes that the U.S. came close to a violent overthrow of American democracy and still faces the risk of an insurrection, then it is rational to sanction radical acts by the U.S. security state that, in more peaceful and normal times, would be unthinkable. 

 

Where is this “insurrection"? What happened to it? Where did it go? The January 6 protest barely lasted four hours until it was easily subdued. Copying the Bush/Cheney model of keeping fear levels high by constantly issuing vague warnings of looming violence and doom, the Department of Homeland Security issued at least six separate "heightened threat” warnings last year, not a single one of which materialized. There were no violent protests in Washington, D.C. or in state capitols on Inauguration Day; no violent protests materialized the week after Biden's inauguration; no violent protest erupted once COVID lockdowns were eased due to social media provocations; none happened on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack; there was no right-wing violence perpetrated in connection with the commemoration of the 100th year anniversary of the Tulsa massacre. Each time such a warning was issued, cable outlets and liberal newspapers breathlessly reported them, ensuring fear levels remained high. 

This is really important to me.  I want to cry for my country. Have we come to a point where hooligans armed with crutches and hockey sticks are equated state sponsored war costing millions of lives and mass murder of thousands of innocent people carried out by terrorists?  Do we dehumanize tens of millions of Americans as violent racists based upon a minority of hooligans (probably egged on by the FBI)?  Let's love another and not assume the worst about our fellow humans.

The January 6 Non-Insurrection

 The January 6 Non-Insurrection

It's now clear to me what happened with regard to the riot on January 6.  I am indebted to Darren Beattie of Revolver News for providing a coherent explanation with a ton of supporting evidence including video from the capitol area on January 6 and in the days leading up to the riot.  Informants and operatives connected to the FBI removed the barriers around the capitol and herded people leaving a Trump rally into the capitol building.  This was captured on video and the leaders have been disappeared from public view, including one who was on the FBI most-wanted list until his identity was revealed by Beattie.  The people were unarmed and had no intention of overthrowing the government, despite widespread news reports to the contrary.

There may have been other legal, political, and military intrigues about, but the riot was designed to discredit these, not implement them.

Restrain Technoloty or Die

 Restrain Technology or Die

A friend of mine wrote an interesting paper on transhumanism: Trans or Not to Trans, Accompanying Slides.  He asked for my thoughts, and here is what I wrote:

I just got around to reading Jerry's Transhumanism paper.  The slides shared previously make a lot more sense now!

This is a great paper, describing as it does human evolution, our current position, and prospects for the future, using a scientific and technological perspective.  With regard to the ultimate question -- "To Trans or not to Trans – That is the Question. What do you think?" -- I would reply that the question is "How should we proceed in the direction of transhumanism?".

As well documented in the paper, the process is already well underway.  While many are recommending we proceed with caution or try to put the cat back in the bag, how can we do that?  The paramount goal must be the same as in natural selection -- survival.  Genes survive which are most well adapted to their environment.  Our environment is changing at breakneck speed and the genes / human technology will not be able to keep up.  Therefore, we need to slow down environmental change.  Above all, this means clamping down on technological change.  

To address one issue with this mentioned in the paper -- "any effort in the West to regulate implementation of the TH agenda will largely fail because the Chinese will never agree to conform to Western ethical values".  I don't think this possibility should be dismissed out of hand.  The Chinese are probably better placed to control technology than "the West" because they have a more top down government and are not as subject to capitalist anarchy.  To the extent that "we" have any power with regard to transhumanism, "we" need to control our own behavior.  That means strict regulation on technological development.

Just my 2 cents.  Thanks for writing this and sharing!

P.S. The book I'm "reading" now (on Audible) is discussing the evolutionary and genetic basis of feelings such as goodwill and guilt (the conscience).  Let's get working on increasing those.

 Revolt of the Public, FBI Edition

My world view is that the CIA assassinated JFK and RFK, and the FBI assassinated MLK.  I now know these things to be true following a lifetime (~ 50 years) of uncertainty.  I believe that it is much easier to uncover the truth in the Internet era.  Whereas in the 20th century it was possible for the elite to control the discourse, this is now impossible as discussed by former CIA analyst Martin Gurri in his book The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.

Another thing that has changed since the 1960s is the ubiquity of the cell phone camera.  Imagine if these had been available during the assassination decade (the 1960s).  Well they are available today and we have extensive video evidence indicating the the so-called January 6 insurrection was actually a riot orchestrated by the FBI.  See:

• Meet Ray Epps: The Fed-Protected Provocateur Who Appears To Have Led The Very First 1/6 Attack On The U.S. Capitol - Revolver 
• Meet Ray Epps, Part 2: Damning New Details Emerge Exposing Massive Web Of Unindicted Operators At The Heart Of January 6

This seems to me to be conclusive evidence of how the FBI orchestrated the riot.  This sort of documentation was never before possible, and people still can't believe it.  

The larger issue is how we, the public, make use of this new power.  Do we ignore the evidence before our eyes in favor of ratcheting up tribal warfare?  Or do we expand our horizons to understand that our  democracy is not what it has seemed to be according to the conventional wisdom?  I advocate the latter, accompanied by renewed dedication to improving our democracy, and improving our public discourse.  Perhaps if we recognize that our understanding of the world has been flawed, we will be more understanding of one another, and better able to engage in civil discourse.  

Nihilism, the Web, and Grandchildren

 A friend of mine shared a short story he has written, asking for feedback.  It was a good story in a haunting post modernist style.  Here was my response:

Thanks for sharing your story, Jerry   Quite evocative and somewhat descriptive of our lonely times.  It brings to mind the book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber:

He contends that over half of societal work is pointless, and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labor with virtuous suffering is recent in human history

I looked up Maus and it fits well with your story:

it depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodernist techniques and represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, the English as fish, the French as frogs, and the Swedish as deer. Critics have classified Maus as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992, it became the first (and is still the only) graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize (the Special Award in Letters). Spiegelman depicts these experiences, from the years leading up to World War II to his parents' liberation from the Nazi concentration camps. Much of the story revolves around Spiegelman's troubled relationship with his father, and the absence of his mother, who committed suicide when he was 20. Her grief-stricken husband destroyed her written accounts of Auschwitz.  

Life is good these days, while it lasts.  Technology is amazing and infinite knowledge is just an Internet connection away.  My current interest is in combating nihilism.  

Nihilism (/ˈnaɪ(h)ɪlɪzəm, ˈniː-/; from Latin nihil 'nothing') is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects general or fundamental aspects of human existence,[1][2] such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values or meaning.[3][4] Different nihilist positions hold variously that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities do not exist or are meaningless or pointless.[5][6]

I followed up with this personal reflection:

Jerry's check-in and short story inspire me to do the same.  I will build upon one of my comments in response to Jerry's short story:

infinite knowledge is just an Internet connection away

Here are a couple of examples of this in my life from the past two days:

1. I replaced a 3-way light switch on Wednesday, something I had never done before.  I looked it up on YouTube and instantly found a couple of videos showing how to do this, making it relatively easy.  I followed up later with another video that included an animation showing the mechanism, giving the why it works in addition to the how to do it. 
2. I picked up Lawrence's kids (ages 7, 9, and 12) from school yesterday and they wanted to play math and geography games in the car.  They were able to answer most of my questions.  It turned out that Chase was using his cell phone to get the answers with a calculator or Siri lookup.  Sean ratted him out for using the cell phone in the back seat, but I think it's impressive that a 10 year old can instantly find the answers to many basic questions.  It reminds me of the wisdom of the old proverb:  "Give a person a fish, (s)he eats for a day.  Teach a person to fish, (s)he eats for a lifetime."

I find creative works such as your "On Watch" meaningful, in something of a paradox.  The fact that you write this and share it with friends demonstrates a desire to find meaning in life, in my view.

Sports Fan Life Lesson

 I don't want to make this about me, but rather a life lesson for us all.

I was banned from MGOBLOG after Michigan's dramatic 3 OT comeback victory over Rutgers in 2020.  I was somewhat drunk and compared McNamara to Brady.  I called a poster who diminished our victory an ASSHOLE. 

I feel somewhat vindicated.  McNamara has indeed proven to be an exceptional QB and a remarkable leader.  The team has fought back to being ranked #2 in the country after beating OSU convincingly.  We didn't get to this point by giving up on the team in 2020.

The larger life lesson is that friends should not give up on friends when they are down and out.  Being a sports fan is somewhat analogous to being a friend.  We support the team, and the team tries its best to reward the fans.  When the team is having a bad year, it's more important than ever to be constructive and supportive.  Small victories, such as the Rutgers 2020 game, should be acknowledged in the same way that large victories are acknowledged.  

Anyway, I'm the biggest fair weather fan in the world and am being somewhat hypocritical here.

Go Blue, beat Iowa...

Public Health and Nihilism

Here's a very long article from 2016 showing how public health was politicized before Trump and covid:  

U.S. Public Health Professionals Routinely Mislead the Public about Infectious Diseases: True or False? Dishonest or Self-Deceptive? Harmful or Benign?

For me, this article shows why the covid crisis has been such a political nightmare.  As with the viral lab leak, the chickens are coming home to roost for the medical/scientific establishment. 

It should be noted that I have basically the same attitude towards all of our establishment institutions: military, intelligence, Wall Street, Pharma, media, ...  I'm currently reading The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, by former CIA analyst Martin Gurri, which describes this phenomenon.  The Internet, if left uncensored, exposes a lot of previously hidden information about our authoritative institutions, and can engender nihilism in the public.  I'm against nihilism and recognize the need for authoritative institutions, so I try not to be overly alarmist.  There's a lot of good as well as a lot of bad and I want to support the good.

Culture and Politics

I've just finished reading an article describing the Chinese government efforts to promote Chinese culture and reject (neo)liberal nihilism.  The effect this article had on me is remarkable.  Putin just gave a speech with a similar theme.  These views highlight the essential question of our times.  How can we regain common societal values? 

I just wrote a piece advocating changes to our electoral system has a step in the right direction.  The problem with liberal democracy isn't the democracy part, rather it's that we're not doing it well.  This is not some pie in the sky ideal. Other countries have multiparty democracy today and have stronger societies.  I can't prove the correlation, but it seems logical and this book provides some supporting evidence.

Can we solve our cultural problems by doubling down on liberal democracy?  This is only part of the answer, in my opinion.  We need to respect and promote the good things in our inherited cultures.  In other words, we need conservatism as well as liberalism.  We need shared cultural values and institutions in addition to liberal democratic ideals.

It turns out I've thought of this before, and the culture wars are being extensively discussed by many other people.  So I'm using this occasion to review my previous writing and to highlight some other thoughts on the subject. Then I'll draw some conclusions.

My previous writings:

• Authority, Common Sense, and a New Mythology
• Thoughts on Unitarian Universalist Principles

Anti-woke thoughts by others:

• Ruth Bader Ginsburg on kneeling athletes and flag burning
• Dave Chappelle's language and views on LGBTQ and race

In my view, the zeitgeist is changing.  America's neoliberal surge to sole superpower status is on the way out.  The (former) Communist superpowers are rebounding with more conservative nationalist platforms.  The American left is splintering as the anti-Trump "woke" consensus falls apart  The enduring points which we on "the left" should get behind are:

• Technological restraint in the face of global warming, weapons of mass destruction, etc.
• Intercultural cooperation.
• Greater economic equity.
• Support for families and cultural traditions. 
• Human rights, including freedom of speech and limits on "intelligence" agencies.

To me, the Green Party does this best with these ideas at the present time, but I am open-minded.

Being Constructive in the McCarthy Era

 The current era has been replete with hyperbolic comparisons:

• 9/11 and 1/6
• RussiaGate and Pearl Harbor
• Leftist critics of environmentalists as white nationalists
• Texas Abortion law and Fugitive Slave Act
• Trump campaign and Nazis

While I disagree with all of the above, here is one that I agree with: McCarthy era and January 6 investigation (by Glenn Greenwald).  As Greenwald puts it:

With more than 600 people now charged in connection with the events of 1/6, not one person has been charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government, incite insurrection, conspiracy to commit murder or kidnapping of public officials, or any of the other fantastical claims that rained down on them from media narratives. No one has been charged with treason or sedition. Perhaps that is because, as Reuters reported in August, “the FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.” Yet these defendants are being treated as if they were guilty of these grave crimes of which nobody has been formally accused, with the exact type of prosecutorial and judicial overreach that criminal defense lawyers and justice reform advocates have long railed against...

So many of these controversies were, or at least should have been, resolved when the Supreme Court twice intervened in the congressional hearings during the McCarthy era to conclude that Congress was exceeding its authority in its targeting of private citizens. There are some who believe that the domestic threat of communism which the McCarthyite committees cited was more dangerous than the ideology that drove 1/6, while others believe the opposite. But those debates are completely irrelevant to the legal principles governing limitations on congressional investigative authorities; these limitations do not change based on how grave the threat one believes Congress is confronting.

Indeed, the argument made by Congress in the 1950s to justify its investigations into private citizens is strikingly similar to the one advocates of the 1/6 Committee offer now. As the Supreme Court summarized that rationale in its 1957 ruling in Watkins v. U.S.: “The Government contends that the public interest at the core of the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee is the need by the Congress to be informed of efforts to overthrow the Government by force and violence, so that adequate legislative safeguards can be erected.” But in both of the McCarthy era cases decided by the Supreme Court, that rationale was rejected as an invalid basis for Congress's investigative tactics... 

My challenge is to speak out against injustice and erosion of basic human rights without just adding to the general noise and hysteria being generated by so many hyperbolic claims.  Of course, the facts matter and truth is the most important factor in evaluating the relevance of such analogies. For example, RussiaGate has been disproven to my satisfaction and the claim that "hacking the 2016 elections was an act of war" is absurd.   A better analogy is that the RussiaGate claims are analogous to the Cold War era claims that were used to justify the arms race, intervention in 3rd world countries, and intervention by the CIA and FBI in domestic politics.

But moving forward, I suggest that we consider how to deal with extremist threats, or alleged extremist threats.  To the extent that violent acts are advocated involving terrorism or the violent overthrow of legitimate government, then such speech is and should be against the law and prosecuted accordingly.  It's important to distinguish between protestors who enter the capitol and protestors who commit acts of violence including especially bodily harm.  To equate 9/11 with 1/6 is thus to ignore a very important distinction.  Nonviolence is key, and not all acts of violence are equivalent.

So how do we deal with extremists who don't advocate violence?  This category would include many of alleged Communist sympathizers of the 1950s as well as many of the Trumpian protesters of the current era.  My recommendation is that we:

1. Protect the right to protest without retaliatory prosecution and removal of civil rights.  Just as gas pipeline protestors are arrested and then released without prejudice, so should those who went into the capitol but did not otherwise commit violent crimes be released without excessive retribution.
   
   
2. Encourage non-violent extremists to participate in the democratic process by transitioning to multiparty democracy, in place of current two-party system.  This is the thesis of a book that I have just read -- Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, by Lee Drutman, 
   
   Drutman makes a good case, in my opinion, that countries which support multiparty democracies, including left and right extremist parties, do a better job of handling extremism and diffusing potentially violent tendencies.  Government is then executed by coalitions of parties, and the extremists often moderate to get a place in government, while the mainstream parties take extremist concerns more seriously so that the smaller parties may support the larger parties to form coalitions.  Ranked choice voting is a related democratic procedure which can have a similarly constructive effect in channeling dissent through the democratic process and reducing polarization.

Democracy is one of my core values, and one of the core strengths of the United States.  Let's work to improve it rather than to dismantle civil rights in the name of partisan struggle.

Leave the Mountain People Alone

The following is copied from an email discussion with friends:

Part 1 - How the U.S. Gave Birth to the Taliban

Dear Friends and Strangers,

Cultures are complex and I think that's part of where we went wrong in Afghanistan.  We focused on certain aspects of Afghan culture, but haven't had a good understanding of why their culture is the way it is.  

We are looking at Afghanistan from the perspective of a globe spanning empire.  The Afghan people are on the margins of that empire with a dramatically different perspective.

I don't think that empires are either good or bad in and of themselves.  But the fact that the United States is at the center of a global empire does affect much of our domestic politics as well as our international interventions.  We are blessed and cursed within being the locus of power which is manifest around the world.  How many Americans are aware of the extent to which Afghanistan was changed by U.S. military aid to the mujahedin rebels based in Pakistan during the 1980s: 

In the summer of 1979, over six months before the Soviets moved in, the US State Department produced a memorandum making clear how it saw the stakes, no matter how modern-minded Taraki might be, or how feudal the mujahedin: “The United States’ larger interest … would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.” The report continued, “The overthrow of the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan] would show the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, that the Soviets’ view of the socialist course of history as being inevitable is not accurate.” ...

In September 1979 Taraki was killed in a coup organized by Afghan military officers. Hafizullah Amin was installed as president. He had impeccable western credentials, having been to Columbia University in New York and the University of Wisconsin. Amin had served as the president of the Afghan Students Association, which had been funded by the Asia Foundation, a CIA pass-through group, or front. After the coup Amin began meeting regularly with US Embassy officials at a time when the US was arming Islamic rebels in Pakistan. Fearing a fundamentalist, US-backed regime pressing against its own border, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in force on December 27, 1979. ...

American DEA agents were fully apprised of the drug running of the mujahedin in concert with Pakistani intelligence and military leaders. In 1983 the DEA’s congressional liaison, David Melocik, told a congressional committee, “You can say the rebels make their money off the sale of opium. There’s no doubt about it. These rebels keep their cause going through the sale of opium.” But talk about “the cause” depending on drug sales was nonsense at that particular moment. The CIA was paying for everything regardless. The opium revenues were ending up in offshore accounts in the Habib Bank, one of Pakistan’s largest, and in the accounts of BCCI, founded by Agha Hasan Abedi, who began his banking career at Habib. The CIA was simultaneously using BCCI for its own secret transactions. 

 

The DEA had evidence of over forty heroin syndicates operating in Pakistan in the mid-1980s during the Afghan war, and there was evidence of more than 200 heroin labs operating in northwest Pakistan...  Such were the men to whom the CIA was paying $3.2 billion a year to run the Afghan war, and no person better epitomizes this relationship than Lieutenant General Fazle Huq, who oversaw military operations in northwest Pakistan for General Zia, including the arming of the mujahedin who were using the region as a staging area for their raids. ...

The impact of the Afghan war on Pakistan’s addiction rates was even more drastic than the surge in heroin addiction in the US and Europe. Before the CIA program began, there were fewer than 5,000 heroin addicts in Pakistan. By 1996, according to the United Nations, there were more than 1.6 million. The Pakistani representative to the UN Commission on Narcotics, Raoolf Ali Khan, said in 1993 that “there is no branch of government where drug corruption doesn’t pervade.”  ...  By 1994 the value of the heroin trade in Pakistan was twice the amount of the government’s budget. A Western diplomat told the Washington Post in that year that “when you get to the stage where narco-traffickers have more money than the government it’s going to take remarkable efforts and remarkable people to turn it around.”

In February 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev pulled the Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, and asked the US to agree to an embargo on the provision of weapons to any of the Afghan mujahedin factions, who were preparing for another phase of internecine war for control of the country. President Bush refused, thus ensuring a period of continued misery and horror for most Afghans. The war had already turned half the population into refugees, and seen 3 million wounded and more than a million killed. The proclivities of the mujahedin at this point are illustrated by a couple of anecdotes. ...

In September 1996 the Taliban, fundamentalists nurtured originally in Pakistan as creatures of both the ISI and the CIA, seized power in Kabul, whereupon Mullah Omar, their leader, announced that all laws inconsistent with the Muslim Sharia would be changed. Women would be forced to assume the chador and remain at home, with total segregation of the sexes and women kept out of hospitals, schools and public bathrooms. The CIA continued to support these medieval fanatics who, according to Emma Bonino, the European Union’s commissioner for humanitarian affairs, were committing “gender genocide.”

So there's a lot of history that we don't know about. President Biden said:

American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves...  We gave them every tool they could need... We gave them every chance to determine their own future.  What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.   

But I think the Afghans were right not to oppose the Taliban when it became clear that they would win.  More war was averted, and Afghanistan has suffered too much as a pawn on the front lines of a war between opposing empires.  This context can help us to digest the podcast interview with Brig. Gen. Khoshal Sadat, a former Afghan deputy minister for security. 

Hugs,

Dan

Part 2 - Leave Mountain People Alone

Here's a relatively short and readable history of the Pashtun and Afghanistan as a whole: The Pashtun Will Outlast All Empires, but Can They Hold Afghanistan’s Center?  

In the Pashtun world, everything must be decided by a jirga (assembly). They happen at every level – home, village, clan, tribe, whenever necessary. The number of participants varies from a dozen to thousands. I’ve been to a few. It’s a fascinating exercise in direct democracy.

I wish the Afghan people success.  It won't be easy.

In Afghanistan, prior to the latest horrendous four decades of war, the center of the rural political order revolved around landowning khans. As a rule, they were allies of the state. But then, starting with the 1980s jihad, this old elite was smashed by young, self-made military commanders who rapidly built their own political bases. The new generation, who fought NATO on the ground, now also expects to have a future in the new Kabul arrangement. As far as state building goes, this will be extremely tricky to negotiate.

So the big question now is how the old Pashtun breed, having learned the lessons of their dismal governing experience in 1996-2001, will be able to circumvent the inherent weakness of every Afghan central government. The periphery tribal system is bound to remain very strong, with nearly autonomous territories controlled by warlords that are not tribal chiefs, but in fact competitors for regional power and sources of income that should be feeding the state coffers.

Mountainous regions generally resist centralized control as we see around the world in places like the Appalachians (hillbillies), Peru (Andes), Chechnya (Caucasus), the Balkans, the Scottish Highlands, and Afghanistan.  Mountainous regions have low population density and are costly to occupy and rule.  I lived in the Philippines for a couple of years and learned that rebels there hide out in the mountains.  It's a fact of life that geography shapes cultures as much or more so than religion.  In Why Are People Who Live in Mountainous Regions Almost Impossible to Conquer?, T. X. Hammes makes this point:

The English first began serious efforts to subdue Scotland in the twelfth century, but it took centuries of fighting before the Act of Union joined the two countries in 1707. Even this did not end Scottish resistance as the Scots rebelled in 1715 and 1745—and argue about independence to this day. The Russians have been fighting on and off in the Caucasus since the early 1700s, and still struggle to suppress terrorist groups in the region. The Maronite Christians of Lebanon have held their mountains against Muslims for over a thousand years. 

Outside powers can win against mountain people but it takes decades to centuries. Afghans, Chechens, Kurds, Montagnards (which literally means “mountain people” in French), Scots, Welsh, Swiss, Druze and Maronite Christians have all repeatedly seen off outsiders. Although the Scots and Welsh were finally integrated into the United Kingdom, it took centuries to conquer each nation...

Virtually every mountain society has stories of outside invaders turned away. These stories form a central element in the people’s identities. Also central to mountain identities are the long-running internal feuds. Families and clans have engaged in disputes that have lasted for centuries. Inevitably outsiders who enter the mountains get drawn into these feuds although they rarely understand them. In her book No Friends but the Mountains, Judith Matloff takes the reader on an intimate tour of mountain societies from the Sierra Madre to the Caucasus to the Himalayas and Andes. She notes that while mountains contain only 10 percent of the world’s population, they were home to twenty-three of the twenty-seven wars at the time of her writing. She also highlights the blood feuds that complicate governance in the mountains. 

 Switzerland, now seen as one of the most stable, democratic and prosperous nations in the world, took centuries to work out its internal government issues. First formed in 1291 by an alliance of three cantons, it was not until 1848 the Swiss agreed to unify under a single government. Prior to that, there was a great deal of internal conflict. Even today, the twenty-six cantons and three thousand communes (municipalities) retain a great deal of independence in deciding local issues...

Clearly, “Leave mountain people alone” should be a rule of thumb at least as prominent as “Never fight a land war in Asia.”  ...

Even if an outside force does take control of a mountainous region, it will find it very difficult to maintain control. Unlike most lowland societies, mountain societies are physically fragmented, which leads to social fragmentation. While river valleys and plains provide natural lines of communication, which tend to unify a society, often by conquest, mountain ridges separate communities. In particularly rugged terrain, villages as little as ten miles apart by direct line can take a day or more to reach on foot. And during winter, they may not be able to visit each other at all. Just as important, mountain societies do not consistently produce the large surpluses necessary to support a bureaucratic government and thus have only infrequently been able to afford or need a central government to protect that surplus. In contrast, lowland societies have historically produced surpluses, have needed a government to protect those surpluses and developed the stratified social structures to do so. The presence of surpluses and lack of defensible terrain provided the incentive and the resources for strong men to unify these lowland regions. While most lowland societies become unified political entities, mountain societies usually remain fragmented. An invader must deal with each small political entity (family, clan, tribe, etc.) and with the long-term conflicts between them if the outsider hopes to control the mountain populations...

Yet terrain only explains part of the difficulty of “pacifying” mountain people—and the least significant part. Culture is a much greater problem. Mountain people tend to be clannish, inwardly focused, belligerent toward outsiders and tough. Constant infighting among clans and families insures their fighting skills and toughness are continually honed. Between 1991 and 2012, over ten thousand Albanians died in feuding—up to 20 percent of all males in Albania’s mountain communities. David B. Edward’s Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier highlights the role conflict between cousins plays in Afghan society. Edward describes how cousins compete to lead their generation of the family. These competitions are often violent. “The word in Pashto for ‘male father’s-side first cousin’ is tarbur, which is, at the same time, also one way of saying ‘enemy’ in Pashto.” 

Yours in geography and wishing the best for people of whatever ethnicity around the world,

Dan