Patrickov wrote:Which makes my first sentence stand: Putin and his team do not manage the situation well.
That may be the case, but NATO, the US and EU haven't managed it well either. Even their own citizenry do not want what their hated leadership is offering. So I do not finding it surprising that other areas of the world do not want it either. I don't remember a whole lot of sanctions being done against individual persons until the Obama administration in the United States. Maybe someone can set me straight on that. I remember some arms dealers getting flagged, like Adnan Khashogi back in the day. It's not that the powers weren't there to do it, but it seems like they embarked on a new experiment in foreign policy that has had a lot of consequences they did not expect. When the actions were against a state as a whole, the group punishment effect, though brutal, ended with the state reigning in the actions of individuals. With the sanctions being against individuals, the state and the population at large are not so interested. I think part of why they embarked on that course is that in fighting Al Qaeda, they were already fighting against an entity in sixty different countries that was comprised of individuals, or non-state actors. So they transposed the model for fighting Al Qaeda--which wasn't going that well by the way--to fighting Russian oligarchs.
So let's say the Russians did hack the DNC servers, for example. We already have on fairly strong suspicion that it was Seth Rich who actually did it using a USB drive from within the DNC. Maybe he was paid off by the Russians. Who knows. I rather doubt that he was killed by Russians. I think that was an American hit against a US citizen--someone with ties to the deep state and the DNC. It's hard to understand the moral outrage of Theresa May, when the US Democratic Party does exactly the same thing for people disloyal to their party. It's hard to understand May's moral outrage when her own "former" MI-6 operative Christopher Steele was trying to influence a US election and get a US president impeached.
Is the UK handling these things well? I mean they recently detained Lauren Southern for fuck sake. This is a country that once controlled 25% of the world's land mass and today in spite of investing in two aircraft carriers the government of the UK is afraid of a 20-something blonde Canadian girl conducting interviews with disaffected political factions in the UK who do not pledge their fealty to Labour, the Tories or the Lib Dems and publishing the same on YouTube. Is that the real face of terrorism today, or do these deep state actors have some real problems of their own? Many of them likely mental health-related and probably struggles with sexual identity and drug and alcohol dependence I would wager.
Today, Julian Assange is effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, because the way the deep state addresses people they don't like is through generally orthogonal collateral attacks like suggesting Julian Assange is a rapist and changing the subject from the fact that he spent time exposing deep state in the West. His method of operation was to use the protections afforded to journalism while other actors such as anonymous and others did the hacking of government servers in the West.
So I find it puzzling how a "former" Russian spy gets killed where the speculation surrounding the motive for his death is that he was a "source" for a "former" MI-6 spy who compiled a dossier that was part of an effort to discredit Donald Trump, which has now evolved into a Trump-is-a-Russian-Agent meme and consumed millions of US taxpayer resources and the only meaningful prosecution thus far is against Paul Manafort who did some work for a Ukrainian politician who was friendly to Russia rather than the ambitions of the US, EU and NATO.
Again, I'm not saying your criticism of Putin isn't well founded, but it seems to me like deep state actors in the UK and the US have fucked up to an absolutely extraordinary degree and do not come in for the same criticism.
JohnRawls wrote:That is kidna my point. Russia knew they would get blamed one way or the other. So i do not see why a retired spy on pension is worth all of this. Even if he helped with the dossier, then what is the point to do it now.
It's just as plausible that it's the American state. Rex Tillerson went along with Teresa May's moral outrage, which apparently doesn't extend to her own "former" foreign agents meddling in US elections.
Atlantis wrote:Exactly, at this point, Jeremy Corbyn is the only politician with integrity in the UK. He was one of a small number of Labour MPs opposing the Iraq war. History has proven him right, yet he is once again vilified by a cross-party campaign of neocon war hawks and the general public that is driven into a jingoistic frenzy by the British press.
Is it the country as a whole? In the US, more than half the population doesn't believe our news outlets anymore. Here in the US, there are a bunch of cranks who think Trump is a Russian agent, but they are people who's tribal identity is the Democratic Party. The biggest political faction in the US today is independents. The Republicans and Democrats are both a minority, and that's why they feign "bipartisanship" once in awhile, and usually in a way that doesn't suit the needs of the American people.
Atlantis wrote:1. If the chemical weapons lab at Porton Down can identify the substance as a Novichok-type nerve agent, then the lab has its structural formula and can produce this nerve agent a mere 6 miles from the site of the incident. Hence, Theresa May is lying. The substance can come from the UK and many other countries.
That much is certain. Heck, even the Syrians can do it.
Atlantis wrote:3. If the UK has Novichok toxins, then the UK is in violation of international law and not Russia, as Theresa May claims.
Again, why I say that trying to base foreign policy on "morals" and "moral outrage" is destabilizing.
Atlantis wrote:6. Neocon war hawks also have a long record of extra-judicial killings by drones and other means.
They have a tendency to do that in the US too. Several DNC staffers died during the 2016 election under mysterious circumstances, and we're all meant to believe that these unlikely and untimely deaths clustered around a political campaign have no correlation, rhyme or reason.
Atlantis wrote:That opposing groups of oligarchs or criminals kill each other is the most ordinary thing in the world.
That is also true.
Prosthetic Conscience wrote:Possibly they later decided they wanted to intimidate other Russians who might work for their enemies. It's not that they have some idea of 'justice', that involves killing him because they think the 'correct' state for him is 'dead'; they want to let others know that they still kill people for going against the Russian state.
Maybe. It might also be the American state for attempting to take down a US president based on a phony Russian dossier. Although, I doubt the US would use chemical weapons like that. He'd probably die of a heart attack from too much cocaine or something.
mikema63 wrote:We will be shown to be largely impotent because we wont and can't take serious actions against the Russian state except at worst more sanctions which he could just threaten to cut off the gas to Europe over.
He already has them over a barrel so to speak.
noemon wrote:...and one would expect from the new breed of American cultural imperialists to show a bit more nuance after the fuck ups in Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Well stated.
mikema63 wrote:5.) It also doesn't make it any less conspiratorial when you ignore the thousands of people who would have to be in on this and that it would necessarily have to be a false flag attack killing someone for the explicit purpose of framing russia to, apparently in your mind, start a war that the west is ill equipped to wage. Just because you are handwaving the evidence as "flimsy" or "partisan" doesn't mean I wont notice the implied conspiracy that would have to exist.
Considering that's the entire purpose of the CIA and MI6, the idea that thousands of people might be involved in some sort of orchestration is not out of the question at all, and it's not even remotely cuckoo. The US and UK spend billions of dollars on this sort of activity.
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden