4 ms·
While I'm on the same page with you re China, it doesn't mean that actions should not be taken where they could be afforded by political realities. China and R
by varjag 6y ago
While I'm on the same page with you re China, it doesn't mean that actions should not be taken where they could be afforded by political realities.
China and Russia gain strength in network effects of growing illiberal alliances, and taking the smaller fish helps.
- shakow 6y agoI'm afraid the only thing such one-sided actions will do is to throw them in the arms of Russia and China.
- varjag 6y agoIt's quite an assumption they aren't there.
- xfitm3 6y agoRussia is not a modern enemy. Really. It's bullshit rhetoric parroted by the media and citizens who don't know much about the country. My wife is Russian and while there is a lot of poverty it's a great country.
- tuyguntn 6y agoI support this sentiment (even though I hate Putin). Anytime cyber attack, breach or violation happens inside American companies, some how Russian hackers are involved. Is this really true? How come election is manipulated by Russian when Trump elected, but not when Biden elected? Why Twitter is not considered as an enemy of American people when they are censoring content as they wish?
- varjag 6y agoPutin supports Trump as fellow illiberal soul, and is very much opposed to pro-democracy Biden. This is why he is helping Trump and does not help Biden. What Twitter should be considered is irrelevant to the fact that Russia assumes itself at war with United States.
- h_anna_h 6y agolooks at the 1996 Russian election (as well as the other elections that the US has hijacked) I do not know if "Russia assumes itself at war with United States" or if the US assumes itself at war with literally everyone else (they were even caught spying on their own european "allies").
- varjag 6y agoThe outcome of 1996 elections is the result of Russia's own political process, which can sometimes be very ugly entirely independently of anyone else. Although it's clear who America rooted for then they had very little if any influence on the ground. Either way, Putin is Yeltsin's creature. He has no reason to be disappointed with 1996 election outcome.
- numpad0 6y ago"War is merely the continuation of politics with other means."[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz
- f6v 6y agoYou need enemies to control the masses. Otherwise people will be too preoccupied with trying to figure out why their life is so hard and government isn’t doing anything to help them. In his desperate attempts to keep the power, Macron is trying to make Muslims some kind of villains. Just pathetic...
- mhh__ 6y agoThe idea that anyone seriously alleged the election was materially hacked in 2016 is dangerous newthink. The Russians (using wikileaks as their mouthpiece) strategically released information they had gained illegally to damage the Clinton campaign, but they never hacked anything directly related to the election itself. This was widely confirmed by both US 3-letter agencies (generally dominated by republicans) and the private sector at the time.
- dane-pgp 6y ago> [no one alleges] the election was materially hacked in 2016 While the voting machines themselves may have avoided foreign interference, other infrastructure around the voting process may well have been compromised. For example consider this article from last year[0]: > Florida incurred an election-related security breach in 2016 that could have resulted in voter data being altered, Sen. Marco Rubio said Friday. ... Hackers were “in a position” to change voter roll data but apparently did not, Mr. Rubio told The New York Times. If we can take Mr. Rubio's word for it, the Russian hackers went to all that trouble and then decided not to act to change the result of the election, but perhaps they found that the voter rolls had already been subject to so much partisan tampering that any more manipulation would risk backfiring. [0] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/apr/27/marco-rubio-hackers-were-in-a-position-to-change-v/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/apr/27/marco-rubio...
- varjag 6y agoI was Soviet and Belarusian citizen, I don't need your emigree wife opinion on this really.
- orwin 6y agoWell except a small company selling servers and security for data analysis suffered quite a big push from what seem to be a Serbo-Russian group, using one of our client VPN in belgrade and a lot of social engineering (investing 6 month and a fake identity). Incidentally it looked a lot like ATP28 attacks, and probably the data wouldn't even be worth that much, making the operation unprofitable even if it were more successfull than that it was. When Fancy Bear will stop putting their greasy fingers everywhere for no reason, maybe i will stop the "bullshit rhetoric parroted by the media and citizens who don't know much about the country". Until then, sorry but to me tehy will be an enemy. I also happen to have a friend who live in Kiev since 2012 and is now in the "priate security" business . "lot of poverty" is quite nicely put. When a state (city in this case, but well, no one is fooled) is hiring mercenaries from private companies to keep people in order, yeah, seems like a great country. Volgograd, St-petersbourg and Moscow are fine, sure, but border cities?
- SiempreViernes 6y agoEh, since what Snowden exposed seems to have been "normal intelligence activities" it seems weird to make a big deal about the Russians doing the same sort of things. Stick to complaining about the murders.
- nzmsv 6y agoKiev is in Ukraine, and is currently a stronghold of a very pro-US president. Who is hiring those security goons again? So without realizing it, you are actually agreeing with something Russians have been saying for a while now: that the two sides of the standoff in Ukraine are not "freedom fighters" and "evil Russian henchmen" but rather two oligarch clans.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoSure it is: after the cold war there was some debate but in the end then NATO decided they preferred Russia as an enemy rather than as an ally. Russia got the message and are now dutifully playing its role.
- blackcats 6y agoFrom the German perspective there is a country east with loads and loads of nukes and on the west a paper ally Around 2000 they wanted to become part of Nato, but this all changed with the Iraq war. The Afghanistan, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria wars later followed further dividing the two powers. Besides states don’t have friends, only threats. Nothing to do with girlfriends, friends or people. Just the nature of states
- dane-pgp 6y agoNo, after the Cold War, countries that had been under the control of the USSR decided they didn't want Russian tanks rolling into their capitals again. Those countries which joined NATO ended up being vindicated when they saw what happened to Georgia and Ukraine.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoRight, and Turkey is a nice and upstandnding world citizen that hasn't done the exact same thing and in addition funded IS.
- mhh__ 6y agoWho's using all that novichok then?
- pueblito 6y agoSomeone wanting to frame the Russians, or the Russians.
- randomopining 6y agoI read a theory that powerful groups carry out these attacks to gain favor with Putin etc. There is never a direct order from above. It's just done, and if it's done successfully the intelligence eventually finds out, then Putin finds out, and they expect some favor down the road.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoPeople are generally the same all over but that doesn't mean that the actions of their state aren't fundamentally incompatible with the actions of other states. I the average Russian (or eastern european in general) has more common ground with the average American than the average Frenchman or Italian does. That doesn't mean we can get along though.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoRussia has chosen to be our enemy. This comes down to Putin, and has two causes. First, geopolitical. Putin feels threatened by NATO. I suspect he remembers World War II, how the Germans launched an invasion from the middle of Poland and nearly broke the USSR. He fears NATO being nearer than that. But he can't seem to stop meddling in places like the Ukraine and Georgia, so many of the former Warsaw Pact (and even USSR) countries flee to NATO for protection. This puts NATO closer to him, so he fears more and wants to meddle more to make the remaining non-NATO countries more closely tied to Russia. And so it goes. Second, political legitimacy. Putin hates real democracy, anywhere. I suspect that the issue is that parts of his population resent his sham democracy (the "vertical of power") and want a real one (and a free, honest press). Putin therefore wants to destroy or at least discredit democracy. That's the point of his disinformation campaign. It's not just to get Trump elected (though he's in favor of people who are friendly to him). Mainly he wants US democracy to look bad rather than like a shining example to the Russian people.
- AniseAbyss 6y agoThe smaller fish will turn to China to provide them with the technology the West denies them. Every year the old world order crumbles a little more.