Recent searches
Search options
why is domestic influence — beyond the act of voting itself, and perhaps very widely direct and decentralized forms of discourse — less problematic than foreign influence?
(to be clear, my intention here is not to exonerate foreign influence ops, but to condemn our tolerance of domestic ones.)
@interfluidity Good distinction.
Incidentally, I don't think that what Jeff Sachs says the US did to Nordstream is an "accusation." More like outing somebody shy about receiving praise.
Jeff Sachs wants to extend his record of being dead wrong about Russia. He is on the right path for that.
@interfluidity Blaming the state of The Discourse on those damn furriners actually looks to me like a way of *avoiding* the conversation about domestic malefactors of great wealth (to steal a phrase from an earlier generation of Democrats, who had ideas for dealing with them other than appeasement and hiding under rocks).
@rst @interfluidity The Modern Day Democrat is truly embarrassing.
@interfluidity I think there are fairly robust (if not sufficiently robust!) safeguards to prevent our intelligence capabilities to be used against political opponents. But as we've seen, it's pretty easy for foreign intelligence to bypass these safeguards, and pretty impossible to enforce "foreign influence is OK, as long as it follows our laws"
@interfluidity it's plausible to imagine that, if Trump had won reelection, the FSB operating unfettered from the Russian embassy as the intelligence collection arm of the the GOP
@stephenjudkins so intellegence collection is a different thing, but your claim is that foreign influence ops are uniquely dangerous because they could enable that bad, different thing, and it's not plausible otherwise-also-bad domestic ops would provoke that particular bad consequence?
@stephenjudkins (it's worth pointing out that corporate/plutocratic intelligence collection and covert ops beyond influence are real things in the world, including by domestic corps, and domestic influence ops have already largely legalized and normalized that!)