Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

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I have a hunch that a lot of division in the US atleast has some role or interference from Russia/China. No proof, but to me it makes sense and it is so easy to do, we've seen it happen in the past (Cambridge Analytica), and if I were an adversary of the United States, I would be trivial to sow discord amongst the populace. We're currently witnessing some fractures in the US military leadership as well.

I don't mean to sound conspiratory, but I guess I kinda do. We're going to have a hard time getting along with each other in the future. It is going to get worse. :-( I also fear closing down our open platforms, so it is a lose-lose situation.

Reminds me of the white doves and hawks analogy from Richard Dawnkins' Selfish Gene. Until there are too many hawks, the doves suffer. Btw, this has nothing to do with good/evil, just exploitation of social settings where trust is the default state. Too many hawks and the population starves so it reaches an equilibrium, but also oscillates over evolutionary time scales.

Here's some evidence to support your hunch about Russia:

> Across our interviews, our respondents [former and current RT journalists] agreed that the goals of the channel [RT] since 2008 have been and still are as follows. First, to push the idea that Western countries have as many problems as Russia. Second, to encourage conspiracy theories about media institutions in the West in order to discredit and delegitimize them. This is clearly adherent to the channel's “Questions More” slogan. Third, to create controversy and to make people criticize the channel, because it suggests that the channel is important, an approach that would particularly help RT managers get more funding from the government.

-- “Anything that Causes Chaos”: The Organizational Behavior of Russia Today (RT), https://academic.oup.com/joc/article/70/5/623/5912109

I haven’t looked at RT recently, but I didnt see conspiracy talk. I never saw a truther debate there. RT doesn’t have to lie at all to document many of the problems in the west. It was usually what should be Capt. Obvious stuff, stories not covered in the US media, Syria/Iraq/Afghanistan coverage, Snowden and Assange (take off the RT logo and the HN crowd would be orgasming to it), stories of racial inequality, financial fraud, crazy defense budgets, etc.

I suppose giving Commies like Chris Hedges and Noam Chomskys of the world a platform (that they can’t get in US media) is some noxious evil compared to mainlining on MSNBC or Fox.

Propaganda can be 100% true, and from what I remember, they were quite good at it.

> The channel [RT] has provided the likes of Alex Jones, Webster Tarpley, David Ray Griffin and Jim Marrs with the opportunity to promote, to an international audience, their ideas about the New World Order, 9/11, the Bilderberg group or the climate change conspiracy, all while being treated with absolute deference by the channel's journalists. Embedded video clips of appearances on Russia Today have become a regular feature on the websites of American conspiracy theorists, where they are brandished as a sign of credibility and mainstream recognition.

-- Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Conspiracy_Theories/e0i...

Here’s an RT op-ed on the internet censorship of Alex Jones - similar stories written by acceptable sources have been at the top of HN in the last couple of months re Trump, etc.

Except this is from 2018. It’s good that HN is catching up to RT:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/435466-alex-jones-ban-internet-cens...

I don’t know the others, but LaRouchite (lol, that pro-Soviet org) Tarpley was a regular when I watched and I dont remember 9/11 stuff, but he was on all the CIA, Assange, Color Revolution stuff. Here he is on that other Putin channel, C-SPAN:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLB1umCHaqw

All it took to "debunk" the lab leak hypothesis is to call it racism. So easy. I'm sure someone from China must have realized by now how convenient of a "get out of jail free card" this is.

Really it's a classic boy who called wolf situation.

If you blame everything on china, people won't want to believe you when there are legitimate things

Surely journalists and fact checkers shouldn't claim something is fake just because the person making the claim has said fake things in the past. If they do then they should be fired for completely failing at their job.

This is my unscientific hunch as well. It's easy for hordes of fake accounts to add gasoline to hot issues online and people fall for it. Get things trending that otherwise wouldn't. It's cheap as hell too compared to a military industrial complex.

It's interesting you're being downvoted along with the parent post about foreign propaganda.

In 2018, I was one barraged by about 200 comments in the span of less than an hour in reply to my reply to a story on r/news about someone hitting a protestor with their car. For reference, I objected to violence against protestors.

The hundreds of replies were a variation of about three talking points: that people should be afraid of protestors, that the protestors will kill you, and that killing them first is justified. They were posting things like "What if the protestors drag you out of your car?", "If protestors bang on my windows trying to kill me I'm going to run them over" and or "If you stop your car, the protestors will kill you" etc. They also replied to other posts about the same topic on Reddit with the same talking points.

The posts used the same few phrases and the same punctuation and style. They would delete their comments if a comment's karma went negative and then reply to me again. Many of the accounts had similar naming patterns, and no other comments in their history, as well. r/news requires a certain amount of karma in order to comment, so they had to have deleted their old comments before replying in that subreddit.

I revisited the post and accounts a few days later and saw that some of the account owners had deleted their accounts entirely, and a majority of them had deleted (and not removed by a moderator) their violence-instigating replies to my comment, too. I figure some of them did this to keep the karma and recycle the accounts, and deleted the comments so they can be used in the future without it looking weird or getting banned.

I suspect it was coordinated in some way, even if it was just a bunch of people in a Discord chat.

But what stuck with me was that there is a somewhat large group of people who want (other) Americans to die. They want people to respond to free speech and dissent with murder. They want people to be afraid of what other people will do to them if they speak up and organize. They want people to fear each other so much that they can justify murder with that fear.

Right. And you can never prove it but it's always posts that fire people up, never posts to deescalate. I'd often try to deescalate and those posts would end up downvoted as well. Arguing with them is no use either- nobody wins arguments on the Internet, the simple act of arguing with bad actor/shill/troll means you've lost. It all feels so hopeless but this is our reality.

It was one of the reasons that I quit using Reddit and other social media (besides this site)- although I do see some of the same things happening here.

Can you elaborate on the fractures in militrlary leadership you mentioned? Or point me to somewhere I can learn more?

Tom Cotton is challenging the CRT take in the military citing some divisions between 'conservates' and 'liberal' members of the military raised by whistleblowers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtgnIXnvxlw

Also, in the recent news, many conservates are calling off General Milley after his rather heated exchange with Gaetz. I am sure you can find the source.

I suppose the parent poster referred to the recent spat related to a navy admiral who advised troops to read Ibram Kendi's book advocating racism under the guise of anti-racism [1]. There have been more such clashes but this is one of the most visible examples. If this divisive ideology really gets a hold on the US armed forces it will be an enormous boon for potential opponents since it will demoralise troops just as effectively as it managed to demoralise police forces all over the USA. The results of the latter can be seen clearly by the number of officers deciding to quit and the increase in crime rates all over the USA.

We can only hope that the former will not become apparent - and I'm saying this as a European. The USA exports its culture quite effectively to our parts of the world, both the good parts as well as the bad. The latter category includes a bevy of critical theory spin-offs which have grown like wildfire in academia from where they managed to escape into the real world where they're wreaking havoc. While it is clear that these movements are self-extinguishing due to their dependence on an ever-increasing number of identity groups vying for a position in the oppression hierarchy the amount of damage they can do - and have already done - to societal cohesion is enormous.

[1] https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-fiery-explosive-challen...

Your hunch is right

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/report-blm-co-founder-l...

The co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Alicia Garza, partnered with a pro-Chinese Communist Party group to fund its lobbying operations in the United States.

Of course Russia and China are spreading it. If they’re not spreading disinformation in the US, then what in the world are their intelligence services doing to earn their paychecks?

The US needs to IP blacklist Russia and China. If you do business in the US, you shouldn’t be able to connect to a network that is connected to Russia or China. Let the European and Asian backbone providers choose, do business with US businesses or Russia / China.

> Of course Russia and China are spreading it.

You know the US has and does do this too right?

Of course - I’m not making any sort of moral declaration. I’m just amused at those who aren’t sure if Russia and China are poisoning Facebook - if they aren’t some apparatchik should be getting fired.

For sure. Facebook is like the Dulles brothers' wet dream.

China has literally a separate Internet, and fines/jails those who use it w/o permission; Russia crushes dissent, to the point of assassinating opposition leaders and incarcerating journos.

The US doesn't seem to be as effective in brutal opposition to infiltration. There's no moral equivalent.

It would be a real bummer to not be able to talk to my cousin in China for the high crime of teaching English in a foreign country.

I’m not sure your desire to chat with your cousin takes priority over national security.

> I have a hunch that a lot of division in the US atleast has some role or interference from Russia/China.

Haha

I have evidences that US interference causes a lot of division inside China. Not a hunch at all. NED, one of the famous 3 letter group.

Then you can imagine, China will do the same to US, eventually... But rest assured, China have not mastered the tactics yet.

What agenda is the US interference pursuing? Some agendas could be positive things for the country, like supporting pro-democracy movements.

Meanwhile, as for mastering tactics, all China has to do is similarly support activists and opposition groups financially by funneling them cash. It's quite likely they do so in all their rivals. There was a scandal decades ago with China giving campaign contributions to US politicians.

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