some members of the ruling class prefer the brunch kween's cautious, means tested brutalisation of US minorities, the poor, and foreign states. they would like to temper this form of corruption with meaningless, token scraps thrown to us, the shitheads, as and when the need arises. others support the apocalyptic scorched earth approach of the large adult son party. the fbi is functioning as an impartial body aiming to scientifically prove or disprove the relative merits of each.
this is the correct take and it is important to keep this in mind whenever somebody says trump's impeachment (lol) will actually mean anything as we continue our slide into the abyss.
toyotathon posted:the counter-rev was priority #1 and the state-lumpen FBI needed the power to see it thru. this was the same era that the lumpen military class was so fattened w/hueys and soldiers that it bankrupted its "own" bourgeoisie.
this makes a good point that i often forget, that the military is its own organization beside/within the state, and it is bad to forget this
drwhat posted:toyotathon posted:the counter-rev was priority #1 and the state-lumpen FBI needed the power to see it thru. this was the same era that the lumpen military class was so fattened w/hueys and soldiers that it bankrupted its "own" bourgeoisie.
this makes a good point that i often forget, that the military is its own organization beside/within the state, and it is bad to forget this
ya this is what is surprisingly hard to get other people to realise, that the military is effectively a shadow state and operates with bloodthirsty disregard no matter who is in the white house
ghostpinballer posted:as we continue our slide into the abyss.
YEAR TWO: Cha Cha Slide into the abyss
dimashq posted:Anyone find it suspicious that the media fixation on Mollie Tibbet’s disappearance for a month straight ended up being a murder perpetrated by an “illegal immigrant”? I mean people go missing all the time, but this was like national news for weeks.
Exactly my thought the moment i saw the story. An illegal immigrant has "confessed" to police, has he? I see...
toyotathon posted:
lol at that flimsy paper thin obfuscation. gonna be a bumper crop of conspiracy theories this year about who is the real Individual-1, Secret President of the United States
1) resurgence in end times conspiracy theories that Obama is the antichrist and will never leave office: Individual-1 is Secret Eternal President Barack Obama
2) pizzagate clinton murders deep state conspiracies by people who don't understand what the deep state is: FBI wanted Hillary to win so obviously they pledged allegiance to her, codename Individual-1
3)
4) it was me, Austin. it was me all along.
...back at the command center, the event plays out on the big radar screen. The technicians on the floor, their commanders and generals, the dignitaries and VIPs up in the gallery, they’re all dogs in costume. On the screen, the swastika moves along the vector line towards the glowing red circle labeled “BRAIN DEATH”. The two symbols meet, then disappear, and the system plays a big, wet kissing sound and all the dogs start barking and howling.
toyotathon posted:dimashq posted:
What do the state lumpen have against Trump? I think of Trump as already being the white national answer to “neoliberalism” and potential proletarianization, so how do the state lumpen differ from lumpen in, for instance, the fly over states?
if the FBI felt like it could king-make perpetually, i think it'd be happy. i dunno why the bourgeoisie would want to subvert the results of their own election. they invest a lot of potential yacht fuel in the presidential elections, to just allow some cops to delegitimize them for a generation. i think the FBI sensed a political opening thru some dimwit democrats, like it got in '73. i confess to really not understanding any of the scandal they're designing, but also if pressed i don't think most resistance libs understand it much either. just the potential end result, that the FBI does them a solid and puts blue team in charge. just trying to look at the difference of the alliance of dems with the FBI, which crosses a class boundary, than say, dems with like never-trump republicans which stays within bourgeois politics.
edit-- sorry for the Take here's a pic
Edited by toyotathon (Aug. 23, 2018 06:21:54)
at this point, figuring out the Alphabet Boys' motivations is an exercise in hermeneutics, but i honestly feel like the answer is much simpler and much more complex, and definitely much, much dumber
on a pure policy/structural level, the FBI and CIA should love working with Trump. he would make it legal to run down BLM activists in cars if he could. he would deport NFL players for not standing during the anthem. and while i don't think he has the sheer, limitless appetite for "foreign intervention" that Clinton does, he clearly doesn't have a problem with it and would gladly leave all that to the Pentagon and State Department as long as they gave him some victories to crow about.
i suspect that this is really about the US failing in Ukraine and Syria... ESPECIALLY Syria. the post-9/11 years have been as much about the empire experimenting with different means of empire-building. the Iraq Invasion was another stab at the old way of doing things -- actually occupying a country with troops on the ground. it was such a destabilizing event in American politics that it lead to a black man named Barack Hussein Obama being elected President. the Libya Invasion, otoh, was a roaring success, and showed a clear way forward: get a bunch of surplus jihadists from Gulf countries, give them weapons and CIA training, aim them in your target's general direction, call them a "liberation movement" and start carpet bombing in the name of humanitarianism. no fuss, no coffins with American flags flying home, fawning bi-partisan support, a sycophantic media cheering the whole time. that's what they tried to do in Syria, and it absolutely did not work. as messy as the Iraq Invasion was, they got rid of Saddam Hussein. Syria was the biggest setback for US foreign policy since Vietnam.
and we can debate how much Russian intervention saved Assad's bacon, but i guarantee you that they're sitting in their CIA offices positively fuming, telling anyone that'll listen that Operation Assad Must Go would have 100% succeeded had it not been for Russia. and with Ukraine, that's two plots foiled, two major setbacks, two bunches of careers that have stalled.
so now you tell everyone in the Georgetown alum meetings, your contacts in the press, your foreign think tank buds that you drink with in K-Street bars: Putin is no longer just a Yeltsin capo turned strongman, he's now a James Bond Villain, the octopus whose tentacles reach everywhere. i doubt that even they imagined it would turn into what it is now, with Paul Krugman speculating that the "simplest explanation" that Lindsey Graham now supports Trump is "the Russians have kompromat on him." just like i doubt that the Koch Brothers never quite imagined the depths of lunacy that the Tea Party would unleash. but hey, at least they're on message.
if Trump had just been a little bit more cunning, he probably would have been fine. even if the Alpha Boys thought the Russians threw the election for him (and who knows what they actually think anymore), Trump could have played ball, gone all 'tough guy' on Russia, try to regroup on Syria (or Venezuela, or Cuba, or any other pet projects), and they would have gotten over it.
but Trump is too goddamn stupid to play along, too emotionally stunted to entertain even the notion that his election was anything but a Flawless Victory. and it's that refusal to play along, to defer and revere like every other president the last 30+ years, THAT is what they cannot stand, more than any specific policy.
Instead, after that closed-door meeting, Trump called them a bunch of liars, in public, which is something no one in his position has ever done, and he kept doing it and never stopped. Like, I don't think the underlying agenda of the deep state has changed so much as they suddenly found themselves in a headline turf war with a rival criminal gang in Washington, when they probably thought they were going to bring the new administration's public statements to heel in its first six months.
Petrol posted:the Probably-but-also-Who-Cares dialectic
thesis: probably
antithesis: who cares
synthesis: DYTD
All of that changed when the CIA & FBI "notified" Obama and Trump in closed-door meetings that the file was "about to be released", which gave Buzzfeed and other outlets the go-ahead to publish its most dubious claims as truth, because that was when news outlets knew some of the most powerful groups in Washington, groups that a president of either party would need to depend upon to do their job, wouldn't challenge those claims, however ridiculous, and would probably tacitly support them. In other words, the file was created as Clinton-campaign opposition research, it failed utterly in that regard, and then the CIA, FBI and company used the file to attack Trump, because a lot of people in the U.S. news press were already familiar with it behind the scenes, and those people understood that a file full of garbage would be laughed off if it were leaked by the Democrats during Clinton's campaign but would be taken seriously if it were pushed by the intelligence & security agencies and their retired luminaries, because they form a persistent and established power in Washington that is a lot more influential and difficult to challenge than even the Democratic Party establishment.
my favourite thing now with this russia stuff is to just imagine its actually true. imagine russia actually took over the republican party by stealth measures like buying apartments in trump tower and posting fake news on facebook. its extremely funny to imagine not only that america is so fragile that this strategy worked, but that their response is to make really shitty documentaries about it. im imagining it all right now and lolling.