When Oscar Wilde Colluded with Russians
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
Here's the passage near the end of article that struggles to pardon the headline:
In the past, fears of an outside (Russian) agitator were often used to test the loyalty of people who had very little reason to feel loyal in the first place: the Irish in Great Britain, African Americans during the Red Scare. The present-day fears of Russian collusion have an altogether different tinge to them: they are associated with the powerful, not the powerless, a paradigmatic shift that has left many feeling confused as to what to believe.
Yeah, it's a stretch. Then again it was Wilde who wrote:
One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure.
So maybe he'd have something to say in the defense of Donald Trump and his Russian collaborators.
He feeds them with some juicy factual error they can jump up and down on, along with some controversial topic they'd rather not cover.
It works to a certain degree. It also sometimes backfires, "Violence on many sides" about Charlottesville was his attempt to get them to talk about Antifa, IMO, but was spun as he was defending white supremacy.
The problem is that it's become so cliche that he lies, it's worn out its usefulness. It worked in the election, but now everyone is annoyed, including his supporters. It's hard to align yourself with someone who is beaten up so badly every day, regardless if he's hurting his opponents or not.
The only success he had was: Trump Tower, renting out his name because of Trump Tower, a tv-show because of Trump Tower. He wouldn't be anything without his dad's money or a very lucky investment.
He was in a helicopter and thought, hey. I want that big ass tower. I can buy it and he calls his dad.
Are we forgetting that Trump became president without any support from his party. He crashed the party changed the playbook and won. If becoming president isn't a success what is?
PS. Why did he won? He became president because everybody thaught he was a smart business man ( and not a politician), because he appeared in a tv-show ( the apprentice - which is about "smart businessmen" ) because of Trump Tower.
And did you ever look at who "produced" the apprentice? Guess who claims that "Trump" is a good businessman....
Your statement still doesn't falsify mine.
Sorry, I don’t think he’s that slick. People seem to give him the traits of a cunning cheetah. I see him more as a rich brat who lies constantly avoid injuring his pride, or reputation. Occasionally he says something so salacious the media can’t contain it’s self. But there is no rhyme or reason to the lies. They are constant, stupid, and easily fact-checkable. That’s a dumb person. Lie about something that can’t be fact checked, that’s smart. Look at the mess trump created by lying about the crowd size, wiretapping, firing the fbi director, calling dead soldier’s parents,etc. An example of this maybe ‘but the news moved to cover the lie instead of Puerto Rico’... in truth, PR’s story died to the news media a week ago. There’s nothing more to say about it. The lie about Obama not calling parent’s of solders was just a lie of a 5 year old intellect.
In this context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Was_Thursday (1908) makes more sense - as a parody of the genre as much of anything else.
Here, have a Fake Steve of 2011 vintage: http://www.fakesteve.net/2011/01/my-talk-with-a-left-wing-ha...
Same old, but it seems ages ago.
More interesting is the article itself, which I might summarise as: an eyecatching headline (which is of course the one thing all readers will see), 98% of the text being some historical context concerning one of Oscar Wilde's plays, and then the last few sentences straining to relate the headline with the article and the headlines of other modern articles--on supposed "Russia collusion".
Though the effort, this time, - given the headline and closing remarks - seems quite clearly to suggest that 'this whole Russia collusion thing might not be so bad after all'.
Most interesting is how this article has been cobbled together and published within just a few days of the reemerging Uranium One scandal, this time, suggesting collusion between none other than the past Democrat presidential candidate and Russia:
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/355749-fbi-uncov...
Though I've been "very" surprised at the lack of attention this got from many major American media corporations, at least on the first day of its release. Some outlets other than The Hill covered it - Breitbart, Fox News, and perhaps more ("names that shall not be mentioned") - but Reddit, for example, had quite a lot of nothing to say about the matter, at least on the most visible portions of the site.
I suppose some prefer to speak of "Oscar Wilde's collusion with Russians" instead of other, important matters.
This article stands approximately zero chance of diverting the news cycle in the least way, and its 'collution is not a bad thing' line as you describe it has no relevance to Clinton, because it's explicitly about the powerless, not the powerful.
Fair point about the other commenter glibly talking about Russian collaborators, might I suggest a concise reply to their comment?
My contention is nothing of the sort. I do not believe this article could be or was intended to be a distraction or diversion. I'm also unsure of how you extrapolated that. It is, as you say, an obscure literary magazine.
The main relevant takeaway is that I believe a significant portion of the readers of this article - or just the headline - could walk away with the association of 'collusion with Russia might not be so bad'. That's it. You could add the parameter for "power", as you describe, but I believe enough of the reader population will abstract that away, and simply recall the simpler association.
I also provide context on why this association may be more valuable to have, for certain parties.
What I think you could say is "absurd" is how my original comment consisting of: a correction to another user's comment, my summary of the article, and relevant points of context has been treated. It appears at the bottom of the page, below a comment with the full content being "Yawn, this is really getting old and tiring, I didn't really there were so many bigots on hn.", with text slightly darker than the near-white text of that comment, and mine is the only comment that is hidden or collapsed by default. I'm unsure of how Hacker News text shading and comment visibility is set, but are my statements not relevant to the article at hand? I was here for meaningful discussion. (For that last question, Brakenshire, I don't expect you to reply.)