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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28511 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I find the timing of this alongside the Russia Today fake indictments of Russians who will never face a real trial to be suspicious. The DOJ has lost its presumption of objectivity, and it really feels like they are trying to say, "pay no attention to the fact that the DNC of our second largest state was severely compromised by the PRC. A few right leaning youtubers got paid a few million dollars by a media company secretly financed by Russia!"

Frankly, one interpretation of this whole affair is that Lauren Chen and her husband were scamming the Russians, because the Russians don't seem to have got anything they wanted out of this. They paid a lot for very little. Still, it would be a foolish thing for Chen to do.

These influencers are mostly just regular conservative culture warriors, and half of them are only reluctantly voting Trump. They're not especially pro-Russia, although they're not especially keen on the US's role in the conflict either. They mostly don't talk about it. Matt Christiansen, in particular, strikes me as a relatively fair-minded and moderately conservative libertarian type--no rabble-rouser by any means. The views these people express seem relatively normal among online right-wingers, the kind of people and views which are being systemically excluded from mainstream channels and outlets. While I don't expect it to be part of Russia's intent, I am reminded of how Western governments have in the past funded outside or underground media organizations to counter state-controlled media in foreign dictatorships.

I wonder if the reason the Russians targeted these influencers is because they actually believed the left-wing claims about all the right-wing grifters being pro-Russian, and so they decided to capitalize on that by actually funding them. They then discovered that the influencers weren't really all that pro-Russian at all, and then they felt like they had been cheated (and maybe they were?). However, the whole funding scheme is then exposed, and it has now seemingly confirmed the original left-wing claims that these right-wing influencers were all just pro-Russian grifters. Ironies abound.

Of course, if it was more like a scam to take Russian money but then just do whatever, then it has now backfired quite badly on them.

Maybe its 4D decision theory chess?

Now that people know that it is Russian policy to throw large amounts of money to vaguely pro-Russian influencers with no-strings attached, people with large platforms will be more willing to sprinkle in anti-interventionist rhetoric in the hopes of getting that sweet sweet kremlin money.

Frankly, one interpretation of this whole affair is that Lauren Chen and her husband were scamming the Russians, because the Russians don't seem to have got anything they wanted out of this.

I think this is pretty common in intelligence work, the CIA routinely pays huge sums to large numbers of people who provide shitty, fake or useless information in the hope that some day, one of them might be in a position to hear something or accidentally find themselves in a useful role. It was the same in the Cold War (on all sides).

A few billion a year on human intelligence that is 99% useless is chump change.

I guess $10 million sounds like a lot, but it's not really in this context, especially if they were spending $100,000-$400,000 per month on multiple influencers for a handful of hours content that didn't really include anything in the way of Kremlin propaganda. It sounds like the Russian agents were none too happy with how things were going. Is that because Chen was just bad at her job or did she just not care? Of course, it gave those agents blackmail power over Chen and perhaps others, but what good is that? These are quite marginalized figures who have little or no instituational knowledge or pull to do anything for Russia. It all seems so absurd. But you're right, governments piss away money like this all the time.

Of course, I presume there are similar shenanigans going on elsewhere, but the DoJ likely has less interest in exposing them. These influencers are politically safe targets, but that just makes the Russians even more incompetent.

I'm curious to see how this plays out.

As of now Pool seems to be turning on his handlers

I know nothing about the guy, what's his deal?

As of now Pool seems to be turning on his handlers

Is he though? Russia doesn't give a shit if we think they suck donkey balls or that Putin is a scumbag. They care that we keep funding Ukraine and sanctioning their economy.

what's his deal?

It's a long story but basically: street journalist millennial covers Occupy Wall Street, gets into the burgeoning journo outlets of the era (Vice when they were hot shit) doing real investigative journalism, leaves them exactly as they go woke because he can see the writing on the wall, plays the youtube game hard (and I do mean hard, the guy used to publish news videos every day essentially by himself) at the right time. Makes a ton of money by catering to disaffected liberals, libertarians and other people thrown out of the left wing that aren't straight unadulterated MAGA and ends up at the head of his own small media empire, which includes his own news website and a couple of podcasts.

It's surprisingly not that uncommon a route, in retrospect I can think of two other guys who fit the bill. But Tim's special sauce is that he's a shrewd businessman from the school of hard knocks. He's got the most boring inoffensive content relative to how political commentators usually are but he knows how to position and market it very well.

This makes this particular thing a bit surprising because if there's anyone I would expect to properly vet funding sources it's him. He's been cultivating his reputation over the years to appeal to a particular demographic and he had some run ins with shady people in the past (who can forget the Jack Murphy drama?).

You can see him in this tweet executing a very competent defense in my opinion, but someone in his org fucked up, this is going to do permanent damage to his brand.

As for whether he's bought and paid for, I doubt it. Tim isn't the sort of person you can buy with money. You can fund him because he's useful for you to be around and you can nudge him towards particular things because he will follow algorithmic trends and rabbit holes of conspiracy theories and propaganda, but the guy that sacrificed his entire career to build his own thing for independence's sake isn't going to so directly sell out.

I used to like his street journalist content a long time ago, but he turned into the single worst thing you find on Youtube outside of Elsa/Spiderman content: "read alongs" w/ commentary on news articles. Louis Rossman also turned to the same, to my chagrin. I imagine it's a steady source of easy and cheap content that can be churned out daily, but my god does it feel dumb and insulting to me. It reminds me of school and reading along a text with the teacher.

The sirens of slop are hard to resist. He got from living in a van to owning a compound out of it, so while I do find the click bait titles cringe and his commentary and guests mediocre, it's easy to understand why he did it. You can't really fight the algorithm if you want to make money.

I do miss the old YouTube free for all where people tried the wildest things just to see what sticks.

Remember that one girl that did reply videos to every single popular thing with barely any other content than her cleavage in the thumbnail? People look dumber playing NPCs on TikTok but the game was rigged from the start.

The reply girls are arguably a big part of the reason why modern YouTube isn't what it used to be--the company changed the algorithm to punish reply girls, but it also punished non-garbage content in the process.

I don't exactly respect Tim Pool's political commentary, but I respect him a lot as a person and take this as a demonstration of how easy it is to be caught up in accusations of foreign influence, spying, etc.

Yeah, I know nothing about him. I'm just surprised to see an apology so fast, when anyone familiar with the dynamics here knows that denial is typically the dominant strategy.

I don't think "You can eat my Irish ass" is really an apology.

Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims. I cannot speak for anyone else at the company as to what they do or to what they are instructed.

I guess apology might not be the correct term, but he's not denying that it happened, merely that it influenced him in any way. Nowhere in there does he actually deny that it happened, he throws his handlers under the bus.

So yes, he's an edgy boy using naughty language against journalists. But he starts by basically admitting the allegations before backtracking to say that they're just allegations. He doesn't defend against them or deny or go on the attack.

My first thought was that the funding probably didn't have that much influence on the content produced (certainly it resulted in more videos and podcasts, but this doesn't nessesarily imply coercive editorial influence), but this clip from Tim Pool seems well beyond typical America-first isolationism. Does anyone know if there is context I am missing?

The rest of the program is the context. It's easy to clip out Tim shouting impotently at Ukraine being a slavic shithole of money laundering for his political enemies and say that he's a Russia shill, but he shits on Russia and China too. They're just not involved in the conspiracy narrative of red tribe.

It is in fact really just America-first isolationism. I'm sure you can find Alex Jones doing the same rant about how [country the US funds who lobbies for it] is actually an enemy of the American people. Be it Ukraine, Israel, or what have you.

Yeah. Given how many prominent Democrats still believe in and repeat false assertions about Russia-gate, my capacity for caring is very low.

But it is a valuable NPC detector.

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