drwhat posted:

so what is up other than america's inability to project power to match its rhetoric being demonstrated

i don't think they're bragging about what they're doing in syria atm. it's like these news stories about how the u.s. government is mysteriously doing nothing to stop hundreds of americans from going to fight against assad, i mean "for ISIS". well yeah, sure, probably, but what's the massive material support the u.s. has already provided to ISIS c/o the years-long western anti-assad operation vs. a handful of awkward beard farmers? answer: a little place called the rhizzone.

aerdil posted:

even at the heyday of the red scare and the cold war, the cia wasn't funding & supporting slightly-wrong socialist publications to fuck with the communists,

http://www.theawl.com/2015/08/literary-magazines-for-socialists-funded-by-the-cia-ranked

fwiw I don't think you need CIA funding to explain jacobin or snowden

drwhat posted:

speaking of spookies, there's no reason to believe Limited Hangout Snowden isn't one, right

he's dropped himself onto twitter with fanfare and nice pictures and now he's up to 1.1M followers

of all the reasons to be suspicious of snowden i don't think that's actually one of them. he has made a handful of journalists a heck of a lot of money, why wouldn't his twitter debut be slick

aerdil posted:

but what would be the point if he was, i still can't buy conspiracy shit like that yet about programmatic false flags that hurt the american image but are REALLY concocted by shadowy ops in the CIA to misdirect attention about bad stuff to other... uh.. bad stuff.

the first part of this sentence is good because it asks a pertinent and difficult question, because every op has to have a purpose. the second part of the sentence is bad because it misunderstands the nature of "limited hangouts", which make good sense in theory and are known to exist in practice. a limited hangout is not necessarily about misdirection per se. it is about getting out ahead of a situation (usually a potential scandal) in order to shape discourse and political outcomes. there is an argument to be made that snowden is a limited hangout because of the nature of the material leaked, the framing of the leaks, and most importantly the effect. i'm not going to make that argument because it's boring to me. snowden is an archetypal reddit libertarian whose every second word is "patriot" and greenwald is a self important blowhard. as casey kasem once said of U2, "these guys are from england and who gives a shit"

aerdil posted:

its like someone on twitter blowing up about the jacobin being some sort of nefarious psyops run by shadowy forces to make us all into trots and liberals instead of just being exactly what it is, a tepid social democratic publication run by earnest people who haven't fully embraced the tenets of marxism-leninism

aerdil posted:

even at the heyday of the red scare and the cold war, the cia wasn't funding & supporting slightly-wrong socialist publications to fuck with the communists, they funded pro-american anti-communist left-liberals who all ended up becoming neoconservatives for the most part.

well this is just fucking stupid, sorry mate. first, not all psychological operations are comparable. second, the cia was doing exactly what you say it wasn't doing, as the link cars shared should make clear. the fact that a bunch of left-liberals ended up going full reactionary had nothing to with the CIA, it is simply a function of liberalism.

cars is correct, the CIA is not necessary to explain jacobin. however, i would like to stress that the whole point of what happened with the old Congress for Cultural Freedom was to cultivate an anti-communist left in the west without the main figures knowing or caring where the money was coming from. the leaders were ex-communist and/or anti-stalinist academics and writers who for the most part had no direct contact with the US govt. the one or two who did were dealing ostensibly with State. ongoing funding was provided through third parties, notably the Ford Foundation. if anything similar were happening now with e.g. jacobin, it would happen the same way. hardly anyone actually working on the publication would ever need to know. as i said before, i agree that it doesn't really matter, but note that we can't be sure exactly which wealthy liberals and foundations are propping up jacobin financially, and to what end. there is much about jacobin to make you go hrmmm

aerdil posted:

there's appropriate skepticism over where funding is coming from over left-liberal projects that obviously support american empire by attacking anti-imperialists, like molly crabapple or whatever,

funny you should say this because when i was looking at something on the jacobin site just now i noticed this in the sidebar


ultimately i don't believe jacobin is a psyop as such but rather it is the product of a broken and bankrupt american culture ravaged by decades of psyops. it represents the belief that the path to a socialist future is paved with the good intentions of the left bourgeoisie.

http://newleftreview.org/II/90/bhaskar-sunkara-project-jacobin posted:

It’s true that we wouldn’t see liberals as our enemies, and we’d envisage common action with them where possible. It’s also useful to make a distinction between the Democratic Party and a section of its base. The mainstream of the party, as represented by Obama, as well as the more technocratic DLC types, hold economic views diametrically opposed to a substantial part of the base, who still largely buy into the New Deal, the Great Society, welfare, social goods and so on. If we want to build a socialist or even left-liberal opposition movement today, one to the left of the mainstream Democrats, its votes and support will have to come from some of these people—they’re the ones we need to be engaging with and directing our activism towards.

from that position it's just a hop skip and jump to partnerships with RLS and the further entrenchment of the socdem brand of "anti-imperialism". a shame because i get the impression sunkara et al probably did mean well when they started. they do publish some decent stuff but the framework, ay caramba

babyhueypnewton posted:

Petrol posted:

OSg7L-xrrCY

fuck this dead gay earth

Interesting discussion from the other day on Star Wars, propaganda, and fascism.