2017 in a nutshell right there.
It really harkens back to much of the Republicans' desire for anti-scientific thoughts, and lack of critical thought. It also explains the overly simplistic thought of "Well, the weather is nice, this climate change must be bullshit".
Don't get me wrong, I think the Democrats have significant problems of their own. For example, they're not able to properly convey scientific thought to the masses, and instead rely on shaming and insulting. That's not exactly a way to engender people to your view.
The BS one hears today (against Russia, etc) are the "WMD"s of 2017.
There's a single superpower the last 2+ decades (Russia is no USSR) and it has a long history of pushing for its "interests" all over the world, starting wars, grabbing resources, overthrowing governments, supporting all kinds of lunatics and dictators.
And covering the whole damage they do with holier than though finger pointing, made up stories, and generally BS they serve a docile and mostly ignorant on anything happening outside their home state, much less worldwide, population. Or, actually, worse than ignorant: mostly informed from mainstream tv news presenting them the "enemy du jour", but with a complete lack of context and history, and with any nuance and details jumbled up in their minds (in a "Go to Austria, see the kangaroos" fashion).
Whether its a Joe Sixpack or a college educated person, in the majority of cases they equally lack context and perspective, and have no real reason to even try to get one, since they have no skin in the game: some other poor suckers will go and fight (e.g. literally poor whites, blacks and latinos going into service) and some remote countries will pay the toll, so no big deal.
Also it's remarkably unfair for you to cherry pick our foreign policy misdeeds while leaving out all of the good we've done over that same time frame.
I wish we cultivated a better interest in world news and culture here. Our natural borders play some (small) role in our isolation. But, yes, the population at large also ignores much of the global news.
Considering the US government and it's MSM propaganda machine tell only one side of the story, I'd think you'd be comfortable with someone telling the other side of that story, if it's fairness you're seeking of course.
Do not trust the people telling you Russia is behind all of these problems for the US. Even if it's true, it's a fraction of Russians that are guilty, and if you judge the whole population by what they've done Americans are guilty of a whole hell of a lot too.
The problem with trying to unravel the truth about Russian hacking is that both sides have similar incentives to play up the drama: For the West to paint Russia as a threat plays straight into an agenda of making Russia seem relevant and powerful. Because of that, there's no reason for Putin to try particularly hard to squash allegations whether they're true or false.
Sure, but at the level Russia can afford, and "puppeteering the US president" is a BS claim way above that, tailor-made for a nation spoon-fed with shows like 24 and Homeland and endless claims about how all the world "plots against it" while itself does exactly that globally (and nobody bats an eyelid).
And while Russia/Putin will use such tactics for their country's (and/or his own) immediate interests/survival (e.g. in Crimea, a place with a huge majority of ethnic Russians, or the middle east), they don't have neither the means or the history of meddling and plundering all over the world.
The claims are mostly a way to invent a present-day Bond villain, an easily identifiable target, like it has been played out tons of times in the past. Russia has too many natural resources and wants to control its periphery, something that goes against the general "interests" and plundering intentions of outside players, hence the pressure, combined with the constant post-Cold-War expansion of Nato to suffocate them.
If instead of Putin there was some friendly dolt selling Russia wholesale to foreign corporate interests (instead to national players that the country can somewhat control -- something which is labeled "cronyism"), like e.g. Yeltsin, it would be all love and hugs with EU and the US, even if they did ten times worse in freedom internally. You know, like those lovable Saudis.
I've noticed, say, that in Poland, where the native tongue lacks articles, people regularly mess up "the" and "a," or miss them altogether. I've never met a French person with the same issue, for obvious reasons.
When I started looking into people's mistakes with tenses in English - dear god, so much about my native tongue that I had no idea about, and yet made particular nationality error combinations really stand out. It's crazy fun.
Edit: and I love my eldest's progress with English. While she's basically a bilingual preschooler, she tends to speak English with polish word order: I like cars red. Her natural instinct is to also use the polish rules for nouns when choosing he/she/it. It's an absolutely fascinating process I feel privileged to observe.
Interestingly, that word order is also valid English, though it has a slightly different meaning than "I like red cars".
Example: "I like [my] soup warm".
"I like soup warm, but you can eat it cold and left over if you want."
"I like having soup warm"
"I like my cookies freshly baked"
"I like men muscular and toned"
"I like my women blonde, so you can go for the brunette"
"I like cars red" doesn't quite work as well but doesn't seem wrong. Add a little context and it seems more normal. "As a buyer of many sports cars, I like my cars red, even despite the speeding tickets I get".
Perhaps a linguist could explain how this phrasing works.
(That said, of course I advocate teaching her to speak fluently and to use that word order only when she intends its subtlety of meaning.)
What do you want? - I want tea. How do you want your tea? - I want my tea hot with sugar.
Perhaps, besides the fun of imagining someone having to explain to McCain what a "double dutch rudder" is, the language serves a higher purpose of increasing virality and impact.
They could be haven trying to disguise themselves, maybe fearing a grammatical analysis or somehow exposing some fingerprint in how they construct sentences.
And as throwaway claimed, if you speak both English and Russian (I do), and have heard many others who speak both English and Russian for a many years you start to pick up patterns and understand when someone is speaking with a fake-make-it-sound-Russian style.
Or it is Russian and they intentionally formulated this as cartoonesque Russian, so that everyone says "this can't possibly be Russian, it's someone who tries to put the blame on Russia".
The problem is that if this comes from a government power, it is likely that they have the resources to use some professional translators and/or linguists to make it look whatever they want it to look like.
Anything here that is not backed by other data is just pure speculation.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detai...
>since they can't just say "I work for Russia and we're reminding America that they're not invulnerable."
But the person who replied is saying how the grammatical obfuscation doesn't look like something that's done by a Russian but by an English speaker who is trying to sound like a Russian with bad English. Because a Russian with bad English wouldn't make those mistakes.
It's weird to me that you're trying to push this to blame another group so quickly, especially with an 8 day old account.
does not imply it was done by a Russian.
that's not exactly hard for anyone that payed even a little attention during the very controversial US political season in 2016. Same with Brexit. The terminologies and crux issues have been widely debated on the social web. I would say it has actually been very difficult to escape
What a weird thing to say. Even the most native of idioms can be learned, and there are plenty of fully bi-tri lingual people in the world.
Mining the text for cultural clues is a fool's errand.
the parent's point though was that there's a mismatch between the level of idioms used and the broken grammar used (which is, imo, pretty obviously intentionally obfuscated; it's just… not how a non-native speaker would write it, esp russian)
Whatever's written in that blog post, and how it's written, is neither enough to convict nor exonerate.
But when the Shadowbrokers leak appeared, the community response was more like "wat."
Are you saying there's some letter written in broken english that's being used as proof of Russian involvement in the DNC hacks?
No, but since you're obviously confused let me explain which thread we're in. The common topic, stretching back to the top comment, is armchair linguistic "analysis" :
>> (throwaway71958) Well, there's no Russian first-language bias in that text for sure. Another argument in favor of the opinion that this was written by an American: the author seems to be well versed in the memes of the US political discourse. Someone from outside the US is unlikely to even know or care about Trump's "movement", or who "Bannon" is, or "drain the swamp", or "white privilege" etc. They're also unlikely to abbreviate "New York Times" as "NYT". The telltale signs are all over the text.
>> (atemerev) Yes, exactly. While those are still somewhat plausible (I am Russian, and I might have occasionally used all of these ironically), it was "POTUS" and "SCOTUS" that made me 99% sure that this text was written by an American (or at least a US insider). You guys love your acronyms.
>> (doktrin) I honestly don't know why you guys are trying to divine identity based on textual clues like this. It's safe to assume every stylistic and linguistic choice is deliberate.
>> (throwaway71958) Sure. But if that's what you really think, then you don't get to assume that the DNC was hacked "by the Russians". Agreed?
>> (doktrin) Are you saying there's some letter written in broken english that's being used as proof of Russian involvement in the DNC hacks?
>> (jessaustin) Now that we know the "tools used" "proof" is worthless because CIA uses those tools too, is there anything else?
>> (doktrin) What does that have to do with my point about inferring identity based on textual clues in this blog post?
Which brings us back to the present - as you can see, it's you and throwaway who are trying to derail the thread at the last minute with red herrings about the DNC hacks. I'm not sure why you feel like it's super relevant here.
> Bonus points: you've used the phrase "paid shills" twice!
Again : you're confused. I used the phrase once (the other "use" you're thinking of was obviously a citation)
It would vary depending on the meaning in English, too.
The kind of caucus that nominates candidates would be "выборный съезд".
Congressional caucus is actually trickier, just because there's usually no close equivalent in other parliamentary systems (including the Russian one). It's like a political faction, but 1) its platform is not all-encompassing, and 2) its membership is not exclusive (i.e. people can, and normally do, belong to several different caucuses). For that, I don't think there's any good word other than loaning the English word directly.