Syria War: Putin’s Mission Accomplished:
Yes, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. They are leaving victorious - except for the permanent air and naval bases.
You’re aware that Tomas Piketty (a liberal social democrat, hardly a communist sympathizer) estimates that the poorer half of the Russian income distribution is actually worse off (in purely material terms, relative to the three big western European powers) than they were under Brezhnev, right? That’s not ‘success’.
Putin’s Russia is better off than Yeltsin’s Russia, but given that Yeltsin’s Russia involved a 50% collapse in GDP, serious collapses in life expectancy and fertility rate, and the dismantling of Russia’s economic and intellectual institutions, that’s a really, really low bar. The economic growth after 2000 was probably just a result of Russia ‘recovering’ from the 1990s, and would have happened under most other leaders, nothing really attributable to Putin.
Incidentally, his KGB superiors during the 1980s apparently considered him a ‘dumb jock’ and assigned him easy postings because they didn’t think he was smart enough for tougher ones.
How did that work out for them?
Not quite as bad (yet) as for Germany with a certain corporal of limited ability and a funny mustache. Slightly better (so far) than a failed seminary student and a guy who Lenin and others felt was too stupid and brutal to lead. And certainly not as bad as a certain psychopathic pedophile who ran China into the ground and slaughtered millions.
So, Putin is ahead of the game, to be sure, and he sure showed those KGB apparatchik, right?
There is a motte and bailey claim being made about Russia and the election. The defensible claim is that Russia tried to influence the election through buying facebook ads and the use of an intelligence asset, Wikileaks. They did this to try to sow confusion and undermine whoever the winner was, to get revenge on Hillary for sanctions, and to make themselves look powerful to the Russian people.
The non-defensible claim is that Russia hacked our election and installed a puppet to do his bidding. It is non-defensible because the expenditure on Facebook ads was $46K-$100K, which is a tiny fraction of the 1.2 billion Hillary spent on her election. If Putin bought the election with $100K then he is a super genius destined to rule the world. As far as Wikileaks, they found some embarrassing stuff about how far the DNC was in the tank for Hillary but they did not make it up. We should not true information just because we do not like who uncovered it.
One of the defining dynamics of Russian politics is soviet nostalgia. Most people were worse off during soviet times but at least the country was powerful and feared. Putin’s public image as a sambo champion, macho man who rides horse shirtless is an attempt to project the image of power and strength to a country that feels that they have lost their power and have been emasculated. Having the US be obsessed with Putin empowers him by making him seem more important and powerful than he really is. This is great for him and awful for reformers who look small and powerless in comparison.
Indeed. You could almost call his populist/election strategy ‘Make Russia Great Again’.
Yeah. While Americans long for the good old days of the 50’s the Russians apparently are nostalgic for gulags, press suppression and the heavy hand of the party when they think of making Russia Great Again(tm…arr)! And Putin is the man to bring it to them, much more than Trump has been able to bring back the 50’s with all those great low skill high paying manufacturing jobs and when brown folks knew their place…
It always interests me how people try to minimize what actually happened.
First, I’ve never heard anyone claim Putin is a genius or that he “won” the election. Only that he mucked around with it and it may have had an effect. I don’t doubt that some people speak so absolutely, but I don’t think “liberals” as a group believe that.
As far as ads go, the money claimed to have been spent, $46K-$100K, is an odd figure for someone to claim. That’s the amount spent by two Russian entities, $46k for one, $100k for the other, so it’s a little odd to see someone put it as “$46-$100k”, but whatever the motivation, that’s an extreme minimization. Twitter says one Kremlin linked organization spent $300,000 on ads on their platform. So that alone is three Russian entities who spent nearly $500k. But, these are only figures for ads that were paid for with Russian Rubles. There certainly were more, but how many or how much was spent, we don’t know.
Some of those ads costed as little as $50 and reached a hundred thousand people. So, even if the number were only $500k, that would be a massive campaign. Facebook testified to congress that Russian ads reached 126 million people. So, no big deal, I guess? I’m not on social media and ads don’t interest me much, but that seems like a lot of people. Certainly less than the ads Hillary had, but is that how we measure it? As long as one candidate has more ads, whatever a foreign country does is ok?
puddleglum says Wikileaks “found” some emails and astorian doesn’t mention that part of the election at all, only that there were “hackers playing silly tricks and planting bogus stories on social media”.
That really minimizes what happened. There was a Russian military intelligence operation to hack the DNC. Emails were stolen in that operation and given to Wikileaks to be slowly released in the closing months of the campaign. Russian bot operations on social media were used in conjunction with Russian ads to amplify those releases and make them seem scandalous. To a person who wasn’t watching closely, it would appear that a new scandal involving Hillary was being uncovered every few days and everybody was talking about it, when the truth was that more mundane emails that had been stolen by Russian intelligence were released and all those people talking about how scandalous it was were fake Russian bots.
I don’t think Putin is a genius. These things aren’t very sophisticated and, other than the operation to hack the DNC, they’re not much different than the Republican modus operandi of flooding the media with bullshit and conspiracy theories. The main difference is that this was much more coordinated and it was done outside of the GOP. Instead of a made up scandal coming from some well known Republican conspiracy theorist, it was done by an outside party and then entered the Russian propaganda operation which amplified it. To the casual observer who only heard that new emails were released then saw ads and bot activity making claims about the new scandal revealed by the emails, it would appear to be factual.
I don’t claim that Hillary lost solely because of Russia’s interference nor have I ever seen a single person claim that. I don’t know what effect all this had on the election, but to claim it had no effect would go against common sense. And to claim it was just a few ads and some hackers goofing around with their zany hijinks and shenanigans makes me wonder what the motivation is to minimize what really happened?
Even if true, $500K is not a massive campaign. Hillary had 22 organizations spend more than that on her behalf. Bank of America employees gave more than that to Hillary’s campaign. George Soros gave over 20 times that amount to Hillary’s campaign and he was not in the top five donors. The reason you can buy ads that reach 126 million people for a 50-100K is that they don’t work. Justice League spent 150 million to try to get people to see their movie and it still bombed. Whatever the Russian budget to influence the election was it was a drop of water in a rainstorm. It had no effect.
If these things aren’t sophisticated why couldn’t the democrats do it? They had a budget 2,000 times as large. Isn’t there one democrat operative who knows how to use the internet? Do any democrats have access to the media and can coordinate a response? Given that the communications and electronics industry gave $62.6 million to Hillary you would think that they could find someone to engineer a mass twitter blast.
Cite?
Being a dumb jock isn’t incompatible with becoming president of a country, so I don’t see how that’s in any way relevant.
Putin hasn’t actually done anything to bring back the things people miss about the late-stage Soviet Union (low income inequality, full employment, lots of manufacturing jobs, great intellectual and scientific establishment, low crime, etc.: whatever else one might criticize about communism, and there’s a lot to criticize, these things are pretty difficult to argue with). He’s done a great job of throwing the occasional bone to communists by, e.g., bringing back the (awesome) tune of the Soviet National Anthem, while, you know, trampling on all the ideals that the Soviet Union was supposed to be about.
The reason people who are nostalgic for the Soviet Union tend to vote for Putin (and they mostly do: 70% of self described communists in Russia vote for Putin, not for the actual communist party) is more subtle, and I think it’s something like this: they know that most of the people who disliked the Soviet Union (i.e. Russian liberals, and the governments of the major western powers) also dislike Putin.
“Having the right enemies” is of course a really stupid reason to favour a politician, but it’s also not a form of stupidity that’s entirely unique to Russians.
While I don’t think Putin is even close to being a genius, I’m a little wary of dismissive assessments of the man as well. Russia/former U.S.S.R. is/was not necessarily an easy political landscape to navigate, let alone thrive. I rather doubt that someone who was truly “dim” or a “dumb jock” could have risen to and held power as effectively as he has.
I suspect he’s rather more of a cagey operator. Maybe far from brilliant, but having some native cunning. Either that or very lucky. Improbably so.
Despite my loathing for Putin and everything he’s done, it is an awesome tune. The lyrics are the usual “we are [people of this country], we will prevail, our country is the bestest” gumph you get with national anthems but it’s a cracking tune as anthems go.
You want a cite that the Russians spending one fifth of one percent of the total amount of money spent on the presidential election was not decisive? How about common damn sense?
I want a cite that it had no effect, which is what you claimed. I could point to the fact that Russian ads heavily targeted areas where Clinton lost by a few thousand votes, such as Michigan, but I don’t know what effect they had in those areas. Neither do you. But if you’re going to claim they had no effect, you need to back it up.
But I guess it doesn’t matter because even that ignores the rest of what Russia did and ignores the fact that the amount of money mentioned is only the amount paid for in Rubles. Just as your first post ignored and minimized events surrounding the election, you continue to cherry pick a very narrow information set to claim that it proves Russia had no effect on the election.
I don’t actually know the current set of lyrics, only the ones for the Brezhnev version. (The anthem was written under Stalin, then performed “without words” for about ten years after de-stalinization happened, and then outfitted with new lyrics under Brezhnev that pointedly omitted reference to Stalin, then dropped after 1990 and resurrected with postcommunist lyrics that I don’t know under Putin).
The tune is the same though.
You say “one fifth” like it’s some minuscule percentage.
Putin’s brilliance lies not in his ability to be a charismatic world leader and political global strategist but in his ability to know that a majority of Russian people prefer a strong authoritarian leader to the vagaries of a liberal democracy. This gives him the authority and confidence to troll western democracies while maintaining his authoritarian popularity at home, enriched by the oligarchy he runs like a mob style godfather.
Putin is smart in the sense that he was able to sow chaos in American politics without being too invested in any particular political outcome; havoc was his only objective. Mission accomplished.