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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Even back when oil was at $100 Venezuela was facing significant shortages.
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."@JulianLapostat This is just a rationalization. There's nothing stopping the Democratic party from connecting with these people, they just don't want to. For decades, Democrats have been pursuing an agenda that threw rural white working class Americans under the bus, and now they just want to reassure themselves that winning their votes was a lost cause anyway.
@MonsieurThenardier Just what "dumb Socialist economic policies" do you think were responsible for Venezuela's collapse?
One does not shake the box containing the sticky notes of doom!And Stein just most of the respect I had gained for her with this tweet
. In case you don't want to or can't open the twit: a random useless potshot against secretary Clinton for the "public and private positions thing" and participating on the recount.
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Decades? Burden of proof is on the accuser and all that.
Venezuela going all in on oil sounds more like Brezhnev in particular than socialism.
Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say
Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.
Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.
There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.
“They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”
Watts’s report on this work, with colleagues Andrew Weisburd and J.M. Berger, appeared on the national security online magazine War on the Rocks this month under the headline “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.” Another group, called Prop Or Not, a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds, planned to release its own findings Friday showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns.
The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.
Prop Or Not’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, Prop Or Not estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.
Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots” — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts.
Consider these points before sharing a news article on Facebook. It could be fake. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post) The Russian campaign during this election season, researchers from both groups say, worked by harnessing the online world’s fascination with “buzzy” content that is surprising and emotionally potent, and tracks with popular conspiracy theories about how secret forces dictate world events.
Some of these stories originated with RT and Sputnik, state-funded Russian information services that mimic the style and tone of independent news organizations yet sometimes include false and misleading stories in their reports, the researchers say. On other occasions, RT, Sputnik and other Russian sites used social-media accounts to amplify misleading stories already circulating online, causing news algorithms to identify them as “trending” topics that sometimes prompted coverage from mainstream American news organizations.
The speed and coordination of these efforts allowed Russian-backed phony news to outcompete traditional news organizations for audience. Some of the first and most alarming tweets after Clinton fell ill at a Sept. 11 memorial event in New York, for example, came from Russian botnets and trolls, researchers found. (She was treated for pneumonia and returned to the campaign trail a few days later.)
This followed a spate of other misleading stories in August about Clinton’s supposedly troubled health. The Daily Beast debunked a particularly widely read piece in an article that reached 1,700 Facebook accounts and was read online more than 30,000 times. But the Prop Or Not researchers found that the version supported by Russian propaganda reached 90,000 Facebook accounts and was read more than 8 million times. The researchers said the true Daily Beast story was like “shouting into a hurricane” of false stories supported by the Russians.
This propaganda machinery also helped push the phony story that an anti-Trump protester was paid thousands of dollars to participate in demonstrations, an allegation initially made by a self-described satirist and later repeated publicly by the Trump campaign. Researchers from both groups traced a variety of other false stories — fake reports of a coup launched at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey and stories about how the United States was going to conduct a military attack and blame it on Russia — to Russian propaganda efforts.
The final weeks of the campaign featured a heavy dose of stories about supposed election irregularities, allegations of vote-rigging and the potential for Election Day violence should Clinton win, researchers said.
“The way that this propaganda apparatus supported Trump was equivalent to some massive amount of a media buy,” said the executive director of Prop Or Not, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers. “It was like Russia was running a super PAC for Trump’s campaign. . . . It worked.”
He and other researchers expressed concern that the U.S. government has few tools for detecting or combating foreign propaganda. They expressed hope that their research detailing the power of Russian propaganda would spur official action.
A former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael A. Mc Faul, said he was struck by the overt support that Sputnik expressed for Trump during the campaign, even using the #Crooked Hillary hashtag pushed by the candidate.
Mc Faul said Russian propaganda typically is aimed at weakening opponents and critics. Trump’s victory, though reportedly celebrated by Putin and his allies in Moscow, may have been an unexpected benefit of an operation that already had fueled division in the United States. “They don’t try to win the argument,” said Mc Faul, now director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. “It’s to make everything seem relative. It’s kind of an appeal to cynicism.”
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied interfering in the U.S. election or hacking the accounts of election officials. “This is some sort of nonsense,” Dmitry Peskov, press secretary for Putin, said last month when U.S. officials accused Russia of penetrating the computers of the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations.
RT disputed the findings of the researchers in an e-mail on Friday, saying it played no role in producing or amplifying any fake news stories related to the U.S. election. “It is the height of irony that an article about “fake news” is built on false, unsubstantiated claims. RT adamantly rejects any and all claims and insuations that the network has originated even a single “fake story” related to the US election,” wrote Anna Belkina, head of communications.
The findings about the mechanics of Russian propaganda operations largely track previous research by the Rand Corp. and George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
“They use our technologies and values against us to sow doubt,” said Robert Orttung, a GWU professor who studies Russia. “It’s starting to undermine our democratic system.”
The Rand report — which dubbed Russian propaganda efforts a “firehose of falsehood” because of their speed, power and relentlessness — traced the country’s current generation of online propaganda work to the 2008 incursion into neighboring Georgia, when Russia sought to blunt international criticism of its aggression by pushing alternative explanations online.
The same tactics, researchers said, helped Russia shape international opinions about its 2014 annexation of Crimea and its military intervention in Syria, which started last year. Russian propaganda operations also worked to promote the “Brexit” departure of Britain from the European Union.
Another crucial moment, several researchers say, came in 2011 when the party of Russian President Vladimir Putin was accused of rigging elections, sparking protests that Putin blamed the Obama administration — and then-Secretary of State Clinton — for instigating.
Putin, a former KGB officer, announced his desire to “break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams” during a 2013 visit to the broadcast center for RT, formerly known as Russia Today.
“For them, it’s actually a real war, an ideological war, this clash between two systems,” said Sufian Zhemukhov, a former Russian journalist conducting research at GWU. “In their minds, they’re just trying to do what the West does to Russia.”
RT broadcasts news reports worldwide in several languages, but the most effective way it reaches U.S. audiences is online.
Its English-language flagship You Tube channel, launched in 2007, has 1.85 million subscribers and has had a total of 1.8 billion views, making it more widely viewed than CNN’s You Tube channel, according to a George Washington University report this month.
Though widely seen as a propaganda organ, the Russian site has gained credibility with some American conservatives. Trump sat for an interview with RT in September. His nominee for national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, traveled to Russia last year for a gala sponsored by the network. He later compared it to CNN.
The content from Russian sites has offered ready fodder for U.S.-based websites pushing far-right conservative messages. A former contractor for one, the Next News Network, said he was instructed by the site’s founder, Gary S. Franchi Jr., to weave together reports from traditional sources such as the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times with ones from RT, Sputnik and others that provided articles that often spread explosively online.
“The readers are more likely to share the fake stories, and they’re more profitable,” said Dyan Bermeo, who said he helped assemble scripts and book guests for Next News Network before leaving because of a pay dispute and concerns that “fake news” was crowding out real news.
In just the past 90 days — a period that has included the closing weeks of the campaign, Election Day and its aftermath — the You Tube audience of Next News Network has jumped from a few hundred thousand views a day to a few million, according to analytics firm Tubular Labs. In October alone, videos from Next News Network were viewed more than 56 million times.
Franchi said in an e-mail statement that Next News Network seeks “a global perspective” while providing commentary aimed at U.S. audiences, especially with regard to Russian military activity. “Understanding the threat of global war is the first step to preventing it,” he said, “and we feel our coverage assisted in preventing a possible World War 3 scenario.”
Correction: A previously published version of this story incorrectly stated that Russian information service RT had used the “#Crooked Hillary” hastag pushed by then-Republican candidate Donald Trump. In fact, while another Russian information service Sputnik did use this hashtag, RT did not.
edited 26th Nov '16 4:30:50 PM by Krieger22
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot
He means Chavez's stupid populist policies, like price control.
I assume you said that with ironic self-awareness. Because that op-ed is as lapidary as it is useless. Give me actual research.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.-Nationalization of oil companies.
-PRICE CONTROLS. These have never been a smart idea in Venezuela.
-Giving oil subsidies to buy off people and heavily preventing the economy from diversifying.
-Huge social programs without regard for whether the country could actually pay for them. So Venezuela just printed money.
-Driving away foreign investment and technical expertise.
-Dismantled the large productive farms and redistributed the land in small parcels to a bunch of peasant farmers who apparently have no idea how to run a farm. As a result Venezuelan food production dropped and they are forced to rely ever more on imports. Under a capitalist system, there would be no such land redistribution, and thus no food shortage and food riots.
edited 26th Nov '16 4:32:15 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."I'm just curious, who here actually LIVES in a small town?
Because come on, if you want to talk about them being ignorant your own is showing badly.
We don't live in some kind of 50s time capsule. We know plenty of minorities, our tv stations show most of the same programs as you and quite a few of us have high speed internet.
The crisis in Venezuela has absolutely everything to do with socialism*. There is no major problem here that wasn't started or didn't get much worse under the socialists and their policies.
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Mostly right, but, Chávez didn't nationalize the oil industry, the state oil company has been there since 1976, the industry was nationalized by the president whose family Chávez tried to kill. He did, however subjugate it to the Executive, fire much of its staff and politicize the shit out of it. Also it was completely capable of refining our oil just fine.
To add to that, currency controls, expropriation of (non-oil) companies, lack of judicial security, parafiscal funds, extreme budget deficit, the dissolution of the macroeconomic stabilization fund, and corruption, loads and loads of corruption. Plus whatever else I'm forgetting.
[*] "Socialism" here meaning "the socialization of means of production".
edited 26th Nov '16 5:00:40 PM by Stormtroper
And that's how I ended up in the wardrobe. It Just Bugs Me!![]()
Still not really the case: breaking up land into small owners, for instance, is not socialization. Price controls are orthogonal to private property.
It was "dumb socialism" in the sense that it was "socialism" done dumbly, not that it was dumb because it was socialist.
So long as the lands are the private property of the farmers, it is still capitalist. Land redistribution was in fact a key element in the transition from feudalism in several countries, especially the commons and the properties of the Church. Smaller farms are not inherently incompetent: the UK had a whole model built around farms that one family could handle. There's nothing stopping farmers from forming co-operatives and hiring agrarian engineers and other qualified help. I can go on. The point is, the policy wasn't inherently bad, or socialist for that matter; the details of the execution were awful. Which is typical of Chavez's regime.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.![]()
I can relate.
When I was a senior in high school, my total class for 9-12th grade was 800, of which there were 14-15 students who were not caucasian of british, french or german descent-and I attended in the third largest district outside a metropolitan area. My home state of Maine is almost 95% caucasian, down from nearly 99% in 1990. I grew up in a bubble essentially devoid of overt racism and bigotry because there were maybe 60 people inside 5 miles who could be classified an ethnic minority. Instead, most of the bigotry I found first was that roughly half the population was of french descent, and most the rest british or german. The fact that there are no real physical differences was irrelevant-some people grew up fluent or partially fluent in french, and that was enough.
edited 26th Nov '16 5:18:37 PM by ViperMagnum357
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Redistribution is not socialization? I guess technically that's true. However, expropriation definitely is, and indeed that's one of the many socialist things they did. That they also redistributed land is besides the point.
And yes, price controls are orthogonal to private property, that's the point.
And, if it was a bad execution or socialism done dumbly, why did socialists agree that it was being done greatly and everything was going to be fine?
Somehow, I get the feeling that whether something is really socialist or not has more to do on how well it's going.
edited 26th Nov '16 5:24:48 PM by Stormtroper
And that's how I ended up in the wardrobe. It Just Bugs Me!How so? Other than the social programs one, everything s/he mentioned is about expropriations or command economy.
Also, I'm getting the feeling you all are delving too much into lands. It's not a negligible concern, but all things considered it's only one small part of the problem at large. The agricultural sector could be doing fine and we'd still be deeply in crisis.
edited 26th Nov '16 5:29:24 PM by Stormtroper
And that's how I ended up in the wardrobe. It Just Bugs Me!Expropriation is definitely socialist? No, it isn't. It's state-ist. Or would you call King George III a socialist?
As for how socialists praised it and said it would be fine, I'll just point to all the times Capitalists applauded their dictators and their drastic IMF austerity policies ("restructuration") and claimed it was all fine despite disastrous tangible consequences. People who divide themselves along tribal lines get fucking stupid about defending people in their tribe, and selectively rigorous in the scrutiny of the other.
edited 26th Nov '16 5:33:28 PM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.@The Handle: You forget that a lot of that land redistribution that heralded the transition from feudalism to capitalism was from the peasants to the landlords. Lets face it, if we are talking pure production a smaller number of large farms will beat a larger number smaller farms, especially when fully industrialized.
Anyway, a lot of the bad things that went down in Venezuela can certainly be ascribed to "socialist" policies, at least in the broadest sense of the word. After all, socialism encompasses everything from Scandinavian Social Democracy, to Maosim, to Anarcho-Syndicalism.
As for Chaves' Venezuela, it's frankly rather standard populist command economy mismanagement that you saw in many communist regimes, the fact that they failed in Venezuela after they have failed elsewhere should not be surprising.
edited 26th Nov '16 5:37:36 PM by Mio
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I imagine it's more rooted in tribalism than ideologically driven. Never criticize your own or air your "side"'s dirty laundry because it might make you guys look bad, whether or not these people actually represent your ideology properly. Always side with them against the opposition and if you don't you lack sufficient party/ideological loyalty. While "moderates" may or may not be tolerated to a certain extent, the mindset definitely views self-policing as anathema. Very common among the more authoritarian half of the two-axis political map, which most communist socialist governments during the Cold War would fall under.
My school's teacher's union was like that sometimes. Good teachers who truly cared about educating the youth defending bad ones known by the whole school to be abusive assholes who weren't doing their jobs properly and trying to act like the accusations were baseless slander because they felt more obligated to defend their fellow union members than to help the students by letting these teachers being sacked.
edited 26th Nov '16 5:47:24 PM by AlleyOop
>land redistribution
>further nationalization of industries
>ruling party was literally called the Socialist Party
>not Socialism
I've been waiting to use this gif for a while.
The fact is, Chavez was the darling of both the "Socialists" and "Democratic we're-totally-not Socialists" the world over. He's only suddenly being declared "not a real Socialist" because he once again demonstrated that Socialism fails. As happens to every Socialist government after it fucks up. No True Scotsman and all that.
edited 26th Nov '16 5:39:01 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."

This article
makes clear why finding common ground with rural voters is next to impossible since there's absolutely nothing to be found in common:
The problem isn’t a lack of understanding by coastal elites. The problem is a lack of understanding of why rural, Christian, white America believes, votes, behaves the ways it does by rural, Christian, white America.
....and some I suppose are good people.
As for Pa and Ma Kent...I am reminded of this article by Lance Parkin
...which deals with speculation on what Clark's rural origins imply about the voting patterns of his parents...
edited 26th Nov '16 4:08:12 PM by JulianLapostat