Dean
1mo ago
When the style claimed is "increases discord", it's indistinguishable from internal partisans who are unhappy with the current state of affairs, and post their (discordant) opinions on social media.
Absolutely. Or at least, almost indistinguishable. There are occasionally tells- for example, intermixing the awkward fixing of things an internal partisan wouldn't care about that happens to align with a foreign propaganda interest (plenty of Americans don't like the idea of fighting China over Taiwan, but only a minute number do so on grounds of appeals to the Century of Humiliation narrative)- but often it is indistiguishable.
This is why I'm fully sympathetic to people whose ideological immune system is flaring in suspicion.
I guess this is falsifiable if you found some russian operatives posting so as to... increase harmony, but this seems unlikely, and I can't really visualize what "increase discord" looks like on the other end. "Here's some rubles, go stir the shit on twitter"?
Unironically pretty close to that.
One of the origins of the modern Russian troll factory is that one of the more notorious- the Information Research Agency- was founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin. Yes, the Wagner Mercenary guy. Prigozhin was basically somewhere between a front, a fence, and a semi-autonomous vassal of Putin's security establishment. The distinction is that not only did he do what he was told, but he had a degree of freedom to try initiatives on his own. This was/is part of Putin's power structure, where inner-circle elites compete for power and influence and attention... and one of the ways is to do something impressive. Or, in Prigozhin's case, something that appeals to Putin's spy-mentality, while also serving as an excuse to charge the Russian government for services rendered. Other elites began copycatting later, and the American reaction probably justified the investment in Russian views, but IRA was the first (until it's dismantling / repurposing after the Wagner Coup and Prigozhin's assassination).
The IRA began in 2013, and by 2015 it had a reported ~1000 people working in a single building. One of its earlier claims to notice, before the 2016 election and compromise of American political discourse on that front, was back in 2014 when Russia was trying to recalibrate international opinion on its post-Euromaidan invasion of Ukraine. Buzzfeed published some leaked/stolen IRA documents, including a description of daily duties.
To quote-
"Foreign media are currently actively forming a negative image of the Russian Federation in the eyes of the global community," one of the project's team members, Svetlana Boiko, wrote in a strategy document. "Additionally, the discussions formed by comments to those articles are also negative in tone.
"Like any brand formed by popular opinion, Russia has its supporters ('brand advocates') and its opponents. The main problem is that in the foreign internet community, the ratio of supporters and opponents of Russia is about 20/80 respectively."
So how does one counter that narrative mismatch?
The documents show instructions provided to the commenters that detail the workload expected of them. On an average working day, the Russians are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day. By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day. On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and tweet 50 times a day.
...
The trolls appear to have taken pains to learn the sites' different commenting systems. A report on initial efforts to post comments discusses the types of profanity and abuse that are allowed on some sites, but not others. "Direct offense of Americans as a race are not published ('Your nation is a nation of complete idiots')," the author wrote of fringe conspiracy site WorldNetDaily, "nor are vulgar reactions to the political work of Barack Obama ('Obama did shit his pants while talking about foreign affairs, how you can feel yourself psychologically comfortable with pants full of shit?')." Another suggested creating "up to 100" fake accounts on the Huffington Post to master the site's complicated commenting system.
And how does one fund that?
The trolling project's finances are appropriately lavish for its considerable scale. A budget for April 2014, its first month, lists costs for 25 employees and expenses that together total over $75,000. The Internet Research Agency itself, founded last summer, now employs over 600 people and, if spending levels from December 2013 to April continue, is set to budget for over $10 million in 2014, according to the documents. Half of its budget is earmarked to be paid in cash.
So, yes. "Here's some rubles, go stir the shit on twitter" is unironically close to what happened. Reportedly.
And this was back in 2014, when it was still very new and immature as an institution. As internet social media technologies evolved, so did the Russian technical infrastructure and incorporation into information warfare theory, which itself evolved. Note that IRA in the early days functioned as a more message-focused concept (a russian position). However, other parts of the Russian information-proxy sphere were decentralized and took other, even contradictory stances- most notable to western observors in the pro-wagner vs pro-MOD narrative wars before the Wagner Coup.
If you'll forgive an unrepentantly NATO-based analysis, the Irregular Warfare Center has a pretty comprehensive analysis of how the Russian information efforts has evolved over time.
Government propaganda campaigns always have some sort of goal in mind IME -- it used to be "promote global communism", but what is it now?
Other models of propaganda include making you want to buy something (advertisement), go to a specific church (missionary work), think favorably of a specific cause or subject (advocacy), think worse of a specific cause (defamation),undercut a subject's moral authority (deligitmization), spread a cultural viewpoint (normalization), and so on.
For a more typical model, China's propaganda apparatus is much more focused on specific topics where it wants you have a specific position, such as a good view on Xi, the CPC, multipolarism, etc, while having no particular stance and spending no particular effort on others. Arguing both sides of an argument is rarely done, because point of propaganda is seen as to persuade / push to a certain perspective, and playing both sides at the same time is generally seen as information fratricde countering your own efforts. When confusion is the point, it can be pursued, but these are shorter-term and generally the exception rather than the norm. To a degree this is itself a measure of centralization- the Chinese government has a stronger message control over its directly employed propagandists than the Russians imposed on their associated blogosphere and elite-owned influencer networks.
A general 'increase discord by truth and fiction on any topic any time' motive is relatively rare as a result. Not only does that lead to contradictory themes, but doing so is a success on its own standing. Note how Russian sources fed both a source of anti-Trump narratives (the Steelle Dossier), and in anti-anti-trump narratives (social media boosting), or how in the Ukraine context Ukraine was simultaneously a NATO puppet controlled from abroad (attempting to generate nationalist resistance to foreign meddling against European liberalism) and a Nazi regime suppressing locals (a justification for foreign intervention to prevent an antithesis of European liberalism) . If the goal of propaganda was to actually enable a favored manchurian candidate or promote a foreign (Russian) intervention, this would be self-defeating, since you'd still be having primary state-propaganda persuasion of the classical model, but be actively undercutting it with more contradictory messaging.
An implication of this sort of model is not only is it cause-agnostic, but it can take both sides of the same argument at the same time- support Tribe A with social media via venue C, and Tribe B on the other stance with different media via venue D. (In a non-single-nation context, if you ever get the chance, look up the global conspiracy variations of 'who is to blame for COVID.' The US and China are not the only candidates claimed.) I've long since lost the articles, but a personal pet peeve back in the early Trump administration when the disinformation craze was at it's peak was how much of the coverage of 'Russian interference' in US politics didn't actually identify relative partisan themes being boosted.... because it was both Republican and Democratic themes.
Which, as you say, can be indistinguishable from partisan propaganda, even though it has a different intent.
Dean
1mo ago
I have two questions:
Does the hypothesis carry any meaningful content then? If $controversy is spreading, what's the point of bringing Russians into it, if you're not going to make a claim on the spread being a result of their interference?
Yes. The point is raising an uncontroversial example demonstrating the claim that there are motivated actors who will try and shift a public discourse regardless of context, and whether or not that involves lying or truth.
Notably, the controversy here isn't whether the Russians do it, which was the claimed example, but how responsible they are for the effect of discord, which was not argued and irrelevant to the position.
Why the particular focus on Russia? It's not like the US doesn't have a whole bunch of "Cyberspace Wings" and "Test Groups" that spend a suspicious amount of time on social media.
Russia was raised as single example because a single example was all that was needed to demonstrate the premise, a single example from US politics could have been interpreted as an insinuation of relative responsible to the party invoked and insulting to the tribes associated with it, and two or more examples would have been twice or more the work without changing the generally uncontested point that the example was raised to demonstrate.
Writing about a whole bunch of groups seemed unnecessary. Is it?
I think you reversed the order of money allocation...?
If the money is appropriated for a purpose, that means it can't be allocated whenever- it can only be spent for the purpose the legislature appropriated it for from the start, and thus does not come with the opportunity cost of a later allocation decision. The money would not have been there for FEMA for the first place if it wasn't for the purpose it was appropriated.
This is the difference between being given $20 to do what you want and spending it irresponsibly, and only getting $20 to use towards a thing you may / may not care about. Not using the $20 for the thing you do not care about does not convert it into $20 you can use how you want.
You can argue the wisdom of an annual budget for spending on things you don't care about, but the initial appropriate can't send signals that care more about a previously planned thing over a later shortage because the initial appropriation for a fiscal year is on the assumption that it would meet forecasted needs.
Which is why the normal thing for a national government is to later appropriate more money on a more ad hoc basis later in the fiscal year.
Dean
1mo ago
Counter-point, "Remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer."
Which has the merit and utility of being actually useful advice. Overconfidence is a risk factor, and it can take a long time to take detrimental effect. You could dismiss the warning on the same grounds of falsifiability- if overconfidence does get you killed here then you were right and if it doesn't you're just being careful and careful is good- but this ignores that sustaining carefulness is an enduring good in and of itself.
This is a relatively common form of warning for harms that can come with unclear immediate impacts. Don't just eat mushrooms you find in a forest, they may be poisonous. Walk slower on just-mopped floors, they may be slippery. Don't trust strangers on the internet, they might be bad. The fact that these warnings don't have to come in a context where the element of danger is immediate or guaranteed doesn't make them non-falsifiable, and their value can come because the warned against function is rare. When an element of danger is rare, it's easy to ignore the possibility of something that could be prevented with diligence.
By contrast, 'look both ways because a plane could fall on you' has no link between cause of warning and effect of warning. Looking both ways does nothing to warn you of the danger that comes with 'up,' so there's no merit of dilligent reminder. It also an argument of a specific instance (planes crashing into crosswalks is so singular that it can't really be claimed as a trend) as opposed to a trend-consequence of mounting risks (overconfidence may not get you killed this time, but the reoccuring and persistent nature can lead the threat to grow over time).
Which simile is better for "the danger of the Russian style of disinformation" is up for debate, but I'd wager (and right) on the comparison to overconfidence than to airplanes-on-crosswalks.
I think my hiccup is that I think subtle propaganda is synonymous with effective propaganda and that, therefore, a subtle propagandist is synonymous with an effective propagandist for the cause which in turn would translate into signalling value. That is evidently not the case. But why?
Human psychology, the difference between biases and fallacies, and what you are trying to use propaganda to do.
One of the critical points / takeaways of studies of psychological biases like anchoring or confirmation or others isn't that they are a tricky things to be avoided, but that they have an effect even if you are prepared and trying to resist them. You can know what the anchoring bias is, be forewarned that it's about to apply, and your frame of reference is still going to be the first number you hear that you don't reject outhand. This isn't an error of reasoning, it's how the brain works.
By contrast, fallacies are errors of reasoning. They can be dumb and pedestrian, but they can be high-effort as well. In fact, some have to be. It can take a lot of time to develop a compelling fallacy in a way that isn't as obvious as a bias.
The issue with propaganda is that biases can be as good as fallacies, but a lot easier to pump out. Time is money and number of influence opportunities, and fallacies aren't so much better that you'd rather invest in them instead of biases.
When you thus get into a resource-constrained environment- like a journalism sector in the age of zealous activists- with people more interested in audience-impact than the nature of the argument itself- like an activist zealout- then your better tool and the one more available to you is the bias, not the fallacy.
Compare, say, Jon Stewart and Jon Oliver. People here will argue that the former was just as much of a propagandist as the latter, but he was definitely more subtle, and hence more effective. Why do we only get the Olivers now and not the Stewarts?
One argument is that they weren't that different, but you were just younger and didn't notice the nature.
There was a theme in the Jon Stewart era that the Republicans were the evil party but the Democrats were the stupid party for failing what should be slam-dunk conflicts. The theme-evolution would be that when Trump came into office at the end of Stewart's career, that sort of division was untenable- the Trump was deemed to be both evil and stupid, and so the market (and the supporting coverage that keeps the media industry afloat) pressured in that direction.
The counter-argument to that, and to your difference, is that in practice Jon Stewart-era commentary was always that the Republicans were both evil and stupid, and that the Democrats were just sometimes stupid, maybe, if it wasn't actually a Republican fault to begin with. Remember that the most Conservative-leaning persona on Stewart's cast was the man who coined the term 'truthiness' to make fun of... the republicans he was presenting a caricature of for the liberal audience to laugh at. The bias was never subtle, it was possibly just more aggreable to you.
The breakpoint is that tastes changed, both with age and with changes in the audience. The target audience later actors cared about was different from the Stewart-era audience. It was one where Donald Trump was THE thing, and nuance was to be discarded because it might help him. On the other hand, your tastes evolved differently. As such, when presented with something disagreeable, you started to notice more than you would have before, and once you noticed it was no longer subtle.
Dean
1mo ago
Did he claim they were influential, or was he claiming a style?
If he's claiming a style, then that would actually be falsifiable, by establishing a different style is what is actually pursued.
Dean
1mo ago
You're conflating (and changing) the standard of comparison. Competent is not synonymous with subtle, particularly in a context where survival (a screening factor for what is / is not competent) is characterized by exceptionally enthusiastic support for a cause.
Being unsubtle is not a lack of competence in and of itself. Competence is the characteristic of what it takes to succeed. The metric of success in the selection effect to be a modern journalist is surviving as a modern journalist, not being a subtle propagandist.
Dean
1mo ago
I... generally don't associate conformist zeal with subtlety in the same person?
To clarify- the more subtle people were the professionals. The professionals were not the survivors.
You're probably thinking of the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade (CAB), which has one battalion of Blackhawks (1-rotor lift) and one aviation battalion of Chinooks (2-rotor).
(Disclaimer: This is not a counter-argument, but raising some factors you or others may not be aware of.)
There's some policy issues at hand. 18th Airborne Corps is Federal Army, not National Guard. Part of the implications there is not only different authorities to provide support (the US Federal Army has significant limitations on domestic activities following Cold War issues / concerns). This isn't insurmountable, but other policies that matter include aircraft protection. The same storm to cause damage would also have justified flying aircraft out of the storm's path, and thus creating a return-delay, a sufficiently bad storm may have compromised local airfields (such as by flooding fuel reserves), the best airfields and the place where the best supplies may be significantly distant), etc. Even if you were to use those aircraft, that'd probably also contribute to the 'no one else fly where we are' issue that could contribute to a blockage, since military aviators are far more concerned about airspace deconfliction in general (since a lack of it is how friendly anti-air starts shooting down more aircraft than enemy).
A separate issue would be if they were uncommitted and thus available for use in the first place.
82nd CAB is supporting the 82nd Airborne Corps, which is less of a paper formation and one of the Americans' global first-responder units. For example, the 82nd was the American unit sent to secure the inside of Kabul Airport during the final month in Kabul. This doesn't include the regular deployment cycles. Where the forces go or are staged to go, the helicopters are meant to follow.
The so-what there is that since the 82nd's job is to basically be on a plane anywhere to the world on a phone call, if you take the ready forces away from that for natural disaster relief you're taking away a national response force for a period of days to weeks (because after doing the operations the aircraft will need to be returned, inspected/maintained after unusual utilization in more limited contexts, etc.). And given the real-world crisis hotspots like what's going on in the middle east, even if helicopters are around the area it may take an exceptionally important phone call to permit their use.
None of that says that they shouldn't be used, or couldn't be used, or aren't being used, but there may be far fewer of them both literally and practically available than you'd think.
Dean
1mo ago
I’m going to classify both of these stories as “technically true”.
The best kind of true, truly.
There is/was more- one of the reasons that Bush invoked the insurrection act in Katrina was because the Governor was refusing to invite federal troops in unless she could get control of them, there was significant desertion of police at the time (in some cases actual people just not coming in, but allegations I can no longer find reports of that various police numbers were never-show corruption), and even reports that reached NPR of shootings of unarmed civilians- but the general point is that the foundations were generally cracked, and that FEMA as an empowering rather than an overriding agency is always going to do worse the worse the local leadership is..
Dean
1mo ago
20 years ago the American media hadn't had it's back broken by social media and journalism was a profession rather than an advocacy platform.
Part of what makes professions different from trades is their willingness to punish their own for violating standards. Flaws did and do exist, but the economic downturns meant that there was a gradual shift towards the survivors being people willing to work for less (because they were more willing to work for ideology), and these people in turn- many of them more junior entries who had less experience and thus lower paychecks in the first place- were more inclined to punish on the basis of ideological deviation than on lack of adherence to style.
Dean
1mo ago
I'd fully agree on grounds of counter-productive and social trust loss, and I've had similar thoughts for some time. Even here, the point of the original raising of it was an example of an actor that would be present rather than a claim that the actor was responsible, but not being clear enough about that clearly triggered the (justified!) argument-immune system response for some.
Which I think has been more than interesting enough to leave the original lack of clarity in, but I truly do sympathize for those who thought I was implying something I didn't intend to.
In the spirit of an apology- and to maybe remind myself to write on effort post on it later- here's a pretty interesting article from Foreign Affairs last week on how Russian influencer-networks like the Social Design Agency are inflating their roles.
This has some interesting (and effort-post worthy) implications for what it means for western discourse on Russian troll farms, as it can mean that Western leaders are truthfully conveying key points from actual intelligence reporting that accurately characterizes the intent of legitimate Russian influence efforts. It is both a potential example of the limits of deductive reasoning (where all premise must be true, but here the chain of links can be compromised by self-aggrandization), but also in characterizing the head-space of leaders who see these reports of 'we're going to mess with the Americans with lies', try to tell the public of these things, and are... discounted and dismissed by people who then also repeat themese these actors say they're going to boost.
There's more steps than that- the conflation of false and true signal boosting, the role of lack of social credibility, the motivated reasoning to believe the negative effects are the result of a malefactor taking credit for achieving them- but just as intellectual empathy requires understanding why some people can doubt elites for reasonable reasons, the same standard can understand that elites can have their own reasonable reasons to believe things others may dismiss as mere partisan motivation.
Dean
1mo ago
You can personally set the bar wherever you want. But in that case, I'm struggling to understand why people say this like it's some kind of surprise. What am I supposed to be made to think or feel upon hearing that?
That yourself and others should think on what you are feeling, and why, before you act upon what you are feeling, in case someone is trying to deceptively manipulate your feelings to cause you to act in their interests rather than yours.
That the lesson may be unnecessary to you personally does not mean the lesson is not needed for other people. Some people may not recognize that they are being targetted for manipulation. Others may dismiss the existence of relevant actors to focus on other grievances.
Well put it this way then. Anyone who would want to hold Russia or anyone else for that matter guilty of disinformation and not the media complex in the west which IMO is far worse by comparison, has a very hard sell to convince me of some kind of moral indictment, because anyone who wouldn't also hang the whole of CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBS and everyone else from lampposts outside their headquarters for also being guilty of disinformation, is just being a partisan hack.
Noted, but where do you get the belief that flailingace or myself wouldn't agree that those aren't also disinformation actors?
Granted, I don't believe in hanging disinformation actors in general, so I suppose I fail that purity test if that's the standard you want to make.
And RussiaToday can also make similar claims in some of their reports as well as far as exposing disinformation. So what?
So you should consider what, how, and why RT chooses to cover what it covering in the way it does before taking what it says as substantially true, the same as you should have bounded skepticism of any source...
...but also that you should recognize that RT, and countless actors like it, will continue to try and execute their motives in any given case, regardless of how much traction they have in general...
...so that if you start getting a suspicion that your intake of social media on something feels like it's being manipulated to try and encourage an impression, you're not being crazy, you are having a reasonable grounds of wanting to think more critically before you decide how to feel.
And, by extension, so are other people.
Are people calling for them to be restored to YouTube now on grounds of their occasional fairness?
Yes, and why would you think there aren't any? The topic has died away from public awareness with time and distance, but there were and still are people who would agree that banning RT from youtube was bad on various grounds.
One of the general reasons for maximal free speech stances is that even malefactors can bring up good points and challenge/compel better actors to clean themselves up in ways they wouldn't if the 'better' people could exclude them from the public stage, and that it's easier to hone the counter-arguments / strengthen your own when you can openly engage them.
Even completely unfair media actors have their defenders on why they should be allowed to have a public position. For example, North Korea is one of the extreme examples of 'bad media actor,' but it's youtube presence was (and, to a lesser degree, still is) a resource for researchers trying to understand.
And this doesn't even touch on grounds of national interest, ideology, or various forms of strategy. Russia took a decent black eye in the early Ukraine War when several hosts who had previously been taking the party line that the warnings of invasion were an American russophobic hoax publicly quit / were fired in objection. It was a self-harm / 'even their own propagandists couldn't support it' that could not have discredited the pro-Russian factions in various western governments had RT been restricted from that sort of public awareness earlier.
Meaning what? If they're doing it for a good cause or something they agree with then its okay then?
Less 'okay' and more of 'categorical difference in actor intent.'
Let's stick to 'just' true things, as in someone who never tells a direct falsehood.
If someone says true things because they value truth as an abstract concept in and of itself, we call them a truth-seeker and can recognize their errors may be out of ignorance but not deliberate distortion of context.
If someone says true things because they dislike deception even when it would benefit them, we call them honest, and can take them at their word. Their word may be limited, and unllike the truth seeker they may not be interested in actively establishing context and understanding, but they can be trusted within the bounds of that.
If someone would say true things but only selectively and with the intent to ruin others relationships, we would call them a manipulator, and recognize that they deserve extra scrutiny. Because their intent is what determines what they say and why, it behooves an audience to consider if there is additional context, missing information, or other truths that simply aren't being provided before believing what the manipulator tries to lead us to feel.
And this is before outright lies and other forms of dishonesty are included. A truth-seeker may have a motivated interest in what they focus on and find, an honest person may selectively try to avoid being questioned in certain ways to let a misunderstanding continue, but a manipulator who doesn't limit themselves to just truths can do even more to meet their interest.
Intent matters, and as such recognizing who's intent for what is a relevant piece of meta-context. 'Disinformation' may be an abused term, but 'Russian disinformation' is as good enough term as any other for characterizing a system intent by a coherent actor for information that is ambivalent about truth/accuracy but which is systemically proferred to try and shape public discourse in ways hoped to be systemically detrimental to the national target. This is a categorically different intent of, say, 'Partisan disinformation'- which wants what is bad for the opposition but good for the party- or 'ideological disinformation'- which wants what is good for cause and willing to tear down the obstacles.
You may feel the impact is grossly overestimated- and not only would I agree, but there was a very recent article last week pointing out a Russian incentive to overestimate their own impact which has interesting implications for if western leaders are accurately reflecting western intelligence accurately reporting on Russian self-assessments that are themselves incorrect for reasons of self-interested motivated reasoning- but again, what you are responding to isn't about 'relative' impact.
Dean
1mo ago
How are you defining "disinformation" in this context? That Russia has a project to subvert the liberal international order that the US has ran since the post-war period? They openly admit that all the time and have made formal declarations admitting as much. So presumably anybody who advances a different narrative through their own perception of events isn't pushing disinformation, unless you're setting the bar extremely low.
Why shouldn't the bar be that low for the way flailingace is using it?
Even selectively signal-boosting true-but-non-representative things can have an effect of misleading an audience. This very thread is based on someone taking something that has happened (an accusation of pushback against people wanting to help) in a way that generates outrage (FEMA is deliberately witholding help, partisan motivation?) that plausibly wouldn't exist with other potentially relevant context (the government has an interest in managing airspace, which appears to be the form of pushback being alluded to).
Nothing in it is false, but it's not information structured for building objective understanding either. It is an oppositional / antagonist information presentation, and one that- if done deliberately- can be information to promote discord rather than discourse.
flailingace's position, as I understand it, isn't that it's disinformation on the basis of truth / not truth, or 'their own' narrative, but the intended result of why the information is being presented.
If Russia is this nebulous disinformation fountainhead that some people seem think it is, then their actions prove that they're incredibly bad at it. What Russia 'has' been successful in doing is a form of national rebranding and international marketing to try and attract disaffected people in their own nations to join them. And why would such a measure be aimed at such an end? Because most of the fractious disunity in western nations has come by their own hand. The progressive left in this country has done more harm and inflicted more damage upon itself than Vladimir Putin or Osama bin Laden ever have.
Okay, I don't even disagree with you, but how does this relate to flailaingace's position?
This is a counter-argument of relative effectiveness, of relative harm done, but flailingace wasn't making an argument of relative harm / culpability / etc. Flailingace is making a point that russia will attempt to promote discord, to a person who has dismissed russian trolls as a reasonable hypothesis, to another post that also does not rest on relative effectiveness.
Remember that this branch of the conversation itself started over someone saying they felt there was a bit of an effort to manufacture an issue. Not that the issue was entirely manufactured, or that the dominant cause or concerns were manufactured.
On the other hand, it’s a very very useful tool to hide incompetence and grift. Everything the government doesn’t want people talking about seems to be “Russian Trolls” and it’s become a sort of go to excuse for why people are saying things the government doesn’t want to hear on social media. Sure, sometimes it’s trolls, but by this point, enough ultimately true stories were officially dismissed as misinformation until they were shown to actually have happened that I no longer find the “Russian Trolls” story to be a sensible hypothesis.
Are you even dismissing the right hypothesis?
No, seriously. I think you mis-read what was claimed, and projected previous / other experiences onto it. The hypothesis is not that 'the coverage is the result of Russian trolls.' The hypothesis is 'no matter what happens, there will be Russian trolls trying to make it worse.' Whether the Russian trolls succeed in significantly shaping the conversation, or originated the talking points, or are fallaciously conflated with legitimate grievance is irrelevant to a characterization of their (a) existence and (b) attempts.
If you want to dismiss that, sure, but you haven't actually provided a grounds of disputing either supporting point. Which do you find non-sensible- that Russian troll farms like the Internet Research Agency exist?
Very directly- what do you think the Russians use the Internet Research Agency for? Not how influential it is, not whether it's fair to tar Americans with guilt by association. What do you think the Russian IRA does, and why?
In fact, I’m trying to think of a story told in the past 2-3 years where it’s actually traced back to a real Russian whether working for the government or not.
What does 'traced back' even mean in this context? If you mean 'originated with,' one of the more famous was the Colombian Chemicals Plant Hoax in 2014, and more recently the 2021 the pre-Ukraine War propaganda justification/narrative blitz, which included claims of genocide of Russian-speakers to justify Russian intervention.
But if 'traced back' means 'shaped / signal boosted,' which is the claimed level involvement here, then by definition any Russian social media coverage of any topic counts, especially since you said 'for the government or not.' Unless you intend to argue that the Russians don't use social media...?
I can't speak to the state of actual relief efforts, but there does seem to be a bit of an effort to manufacture this as a mirror image to Bush's Katrina response, which dragged on Republicans for a long time: see Kanye's infamous "George Bush doesn't care about Black people" line.
Now adays, any time there is a disaster in the United States, you should assume that there is a Russian social media effort to try and inflame and twist it. Sometimes a disaster doesn't even have to actually occur, and they'll just fake-news one. This is just one of the things they do, independent of any truth to any criticsm.
Which is funny to me because in hindsight it's less clear that it was purely the Bush administration's doing. Much can be said about the (blue!) city and state leadership not taking the imminent storm seriously even as the National Weather Service issued extremely dire warnings, but Mike Brown's leadership of FEMA wasn't exactly a "heckuva job" either.
This is underselling the culpability of the democratic city and state leadership. There wasn't merely a 'not taking the imminent storm threat seriously', but actively delaying and hindering federal support responses including by not actually asking for various types of assistance from the federal and other states until days later, instigating a posse comitatus policy freeze disrupting federal military assistance, and of course the police not merely abandoning duty roles but partaking in the looting.
When the local police are joined in on the looting and a state senator is diverting national guard assets to get material from his personal home, there's not terribly much an organization like FEMA can do.
At least that's how I see it under the "politics is unprincipled conflict" lens. I suspect there are real challenges to providing useful aid with so many roads inaccessible (as there were in 2005), and I doubt anyone is actually slow-walking aid, even if they are trying to play political football ("FEMA is running out of funds" "that's because you spent it all on migrants"). Personally, I don't know much more to do than pray, although I'm open to suggestions.
The steelman is that airspace is dangerous if uncontrolled, and so in a disaster a government doesn't want to be competing with airspace. This is especially true when rescue agencies would be further diverted if they had to rerout resources to help someone who got themselves into a mess- like, say, by crashing aircraft into a town.
On the other hand, this administration is the heir to the one that repeatedly targeted religious medical charities if they didn't support abortion-enabling policies. There is an established vein of 'our way or not at all' in some parts of the US government.
I have no insight into this specific circumstance, but 'stop getting in our way as you try to help' is a real, and sometimes even valid, thing.
hypersonic missiles
I'm just going to note that hypersonic is generally used as a buzzword in the Iranian context, not the 'uber weapon to fear' of cutting edge missile technology. It's the difference between categorizing by speed or by form-function.
Basically any form of ballistic missile moves fast enough in the terminal phase to reach velocities of Mach 5 (6100 km/hr or 3800 miles/hr). That's what the Iranian Fattah-1 does. That's what the Cold War SCUD used by Iraq in the Gulf War did. And that's what the WW2 German V2 did. This is basically just the applies physics of gravity on an object high enough and with enough time (distance) to be accelerating. It's not particularly impressive, and it's not particularly hard to defeat in missile defense terms because that speed comes with an increasingly locked-in trajectory that makes interception (relatively) easy because it's pretty clear roughly where a ballistic trajectory is going to end up. And because it is a ballistic trajectory- meaning because it is going high- it can be detected relatively early in the transit process.
Hypersonic weapons in the 'this is scary new technology' are referring more to 'hypersonic glide bodies.' These are the things that are pushing through the air on the power of rockets / scramjets / etc, like, well, hypersonic missiles that are not ballistic missiles. These are far harder to do, because they have to rely on their motors/propellant more than re-entry acceleration, and more significant stresses to critical components. However, because these are taking a far more direct route to the target, and are reaching their hypersonic speeds more as the mode of travel rather than the re-entry criteria, they are doing so considerably faster, and are going to be detected relatively later (and thus with less time to react) due to the reduced ballistic trajectory exposure. This is the scary thing in future wars because of the potential for a hypersonic adversary to first-strike you with almost no-effective warning.
This is a picture from the wiki page on the relative difference. When Iran boasts about its hypersonic weapons, it's using the ballistics but trying to claim the reputation / insinuations of the HGBs. (Such as by claiming that the final-stage re-entry munition is a glide vehicle, and thus furthering the conflation, even though the more relevant capability is the path between launch and final-phase.)
...which is actually one of the reasons the technical claim of yesterday's attack on Israel was met with a relative shrug. It's roughly the equivalent of when Russia boasts about having successfully conducted an attack with a nuclear-capable missile. So many of Russia's conventional weapons are nuclear-capable that it doesn't actually mean anything special. Similarly, when Iran boasts of its hypersonic ballistic weapons, it's generally boasting on the cutting-edge prowess of 60-year-old-tech (hypersonic as a function of speed).
60-year-old tech is certainly still usable, and the Iranian missiles are probably better than anything that could have been built 60 years ago thanks to GPS if nothing else, but it's still a bit of an obvious flex to impress people less familiar with the distinctions.
Dean
1mo ago
The theories of a spectrum of state of conflict rather than binaries goes back a long time, arguably centuries, and has only gotten more polished and refined since. Before today was the countless insurgencies of the cold war, before the cold war was the great game between empires, before the empires were the contests of feudalism, and before feudalism there were constant migratory wars and civilizational collapses.
Non-formal war is practically a constant. What's new is that you can do it with rockets across other countries, not the principles behind it.
Dean
1mo ago
Basic human decency seems compelling enough.
You say that a large group of women all agreed that this was sexual harassment... but what has actually been described is not sexual harassment absent evidence that has not been provided. Even you acknowledged the criticality of body language, tone and context... information that you do not have. If you do not have critical information to justify a judgement of guilt, particularly when that information could establish innocence, you should not presume guilt.
Whether this is a lie is irrelevant to what the facts at hand support. Whether this is all the facts that exist is irrelevant to what judgement you should make from the facts at hand. Whether this came from is a married woman or an unmarried woman or a group of women is irrelevant to the facts on hand. If you think the OP is lying about what the women provided, feel free to accuse them of not providing, and if you think the woman has not provided all the information she could, feel free to request, but either way would be an acknowledgement of the limitations of the information.
There are well established errors in logic and reasoning that derive from deferring to groups of people just because there is a group (bandwagoning), or basing trust off of the demographics of a group (prejudice), and particularly the gender of a group (sexism). This is even more true when dealing with the presentation of information to shape initial impressions, such as priming, the framing effect , anchoring bias, the women are wonderful effect, and so on.
Precisely because cultural and social norms and human psychology are so prone to failures of perception, these seem more than sufficient reason not to presume guilt solely on the basis of an accusation, let alone not invent context not claimed by the accusers to justify the accusation's grounding.
Dean
1mo ago
I fully agree on the point of scale, but I disagree that Katrina-level coverage was driven primarily be scale. Even within the context of Katrina, the primary media focus was on a Democratic political machine city in a form that was used as a political attack vector on a Republican president... which also helped deflect attention and blame from numerous local-level mismanagement issues within the responsibility of the political machine.
Media coverage levels are a function of the political alliances of the media in question. The political incentives in the current context would not support Katrina-level coverage even if there was Katrina-level damage.
Why would you imagine him doing those things in a maximally negative light without reason to believe he did them in a maximally negative light?
It's one thing to update one's understanding of a situation in light of new evidence, but it's another to introduce imagination as a reason for framing a situation as worse than it's even claimed to be. What, in the description, warrants a framing of 'shouwa-era style' sexual harassment? Is this (unlikely) intended to characterize shouwa-era style sexual harassment as tepid of what was actually claimed, or is this instead trying to characterize what was described with extremely pejorative framing to make it seem worse?
I don't agree with that.
Is your agreement required for something to be reasonable?
Early voting would give more time to count votes, thus increasing election security.
This is incorrect, and the reasons why are precisely why international election standards focus on consolidating votes received early with strong chain-of-custody measures, but only opening and counting concurrent to election day.
Counting votes in advanced of election day provides increased opportunity and incentive to compromise election security by informing the people who could/would commit fraud that it is either unnecessary (in which case they don't expose themselves to risk), or likely to be needed (in which case they have more time and ability to prepare to act without being noticed, and scale their intervention more carefully). Without the foreknowledge, rigging becomes more prone to obvious abuse, as after-the-fact interventions after delayed revelation are easier to notice and expose due to increased scrutiny on election night and increased reliance on heavy-handed measures (such as freezing counts to insert more ballots before resuming, seizing the records of the talley counts and later releasing unverifiable numbers, and so on).
If you are a party that would conduct election fraud- a position that requires you to have both the interest and the ability to act on the interest with reason to believe you can pull it off (which generally requires already being established and domiannt)- early voting increases your interest (by letting you know you're at risk of losing your positional advantage if you don't cheat) and your ability (by letting you have more time to prepare / act without notice / scale your means of intervention) to cheat.
This is also the reason why long vote-counting periods are bad for election security. Instead of 'taking time to be careful,' it instead allows parties more time to intervene while dragging out public attention and creating more opportunities to act than a shorter time period would.
Photo ID = either it's the person or it's not. There's no reason to be any more restrictive than is necessary to establish identity.
This smuggles in the assumption that a photo ID is sufficient to establish a valid identity. This is incorrect.
A photo ID is simply a photo tied to a set of credentials, not a guarantee that the credentials are valid for all purposes. Particularly when photo IDs are issued across valid and invalid criteria without distinction- such as a driver's license that doesn't actually address citizenship or registration- various forms of ID, photo or otherwise, have no categorical compliance with voting criteria. If you can use a particular ID to vote, but don't need to be able to vote to get a particular ID, the ID itself has no validating function in whether you should be permitted to vote, even if it is actually you.
And this in turn doesn't approach database correlation. A form of ID may not be registered or applicable to a relevant authentication database in a way that provides appropriate tracking and authentication. For example, a driver's license number can only validate against a database of driver's license numbers. Unless that database is actively set up to also note which elections the person tied to the driver's license is actually enrolled in, it provides no indication that the person is a valid registered voter in the state, because all the database can provide is 'this is a driver's license.' Most voting systems are not setup to provide this, which is why ID is used to verify that someone is an individual, but then the individual is checked against a local roster rather than an ID database.
Creating a fake ID to cast 1 extra vote out of 100 million would already be a large waste of time.
This assumes the only reason to create a fake ID production or dissemination process is to cast 1 extra vote, or that 1 fake ID only enables 1 extra vote, or that a fake ID is required for a fraudulent vote, or that 1 extra vote is in a context of 100 million. This would be incorrect, on all ends.
To pick just one example- if you automatically enroll people with driver's licenses to vote, but also issue driver's licenses to non-eligible persons (as Oregon did), then a real ID of a real person would flag as a valid voter no matter how many fraudulent voter IDs were issued.
Also, when I said they only disallowed SOME forms of ID, I mean only the forms of ID democrats would use, like student IDs.
This is not an argument of disenfranchisement, this is an argument that non-standardized partisan-correlated voting IDs like student IDs should be used in the first place.
This is absolutely contestable.
Provisional voting I could see being used for fraud, but that also make it trivially easy to check provisional votes for double votes.
This is incorrect, as many systems do not have means or methods to actually check for double voting across jurisdictions, and this is separate from the desire to on the part of those who would need to.
If your voting station marks down that you voted via a tally mark on a piece of paper, it does nothing to check for double voting unless there's someone else, sometime later, who actually puts it into a system to check against other databases. And if that database does not touch the correct other database that could identify an issue, it still does nothing.
If anything, mail-in votes would be the most likely way to commit fraud, and they were untouched by North Carolina after they found whites used them.
I am always happy to find a new mind reader in the American populace, unless you happened to have some other evidence that the distinction was driven by racism rather than something else.
Like how South Carolina is a ballot harvesting state and thus has a different entrenched political interest setup than non-ballot harvesting states. Or that there might be different legal considerations involved in terms of surviving legal challenges. Or that South Carolina has a significant military recruitment demographic, and so there is a higher than normal socially-accepted basis for significant out-of-state voting.
To the person who originally felt that there may be actors trying to manipulate public discourse, affirmation that there are actors trying to manipulate public discourse.
Someone is learning something for the first time every day. The information is always meaningful for those who weren't already taking it into account.
Except that not all psy-opps run in the Russian style, which was the specific style identified for the example, so claiming that every major world power is psy-opping in the same way would not only be wrong, but a deliberate falsehood.
And if I didn't single out an example, I could be accused of not supporting a claim and doing low-effort posting.
Shrugs
Is there a credible reason to believe a disproportionately refugee population from a state with endemic contemporary food insecurity is not disproportionately more likely to partake in non-traditional dining?
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