Quote (Goomshill @ Aug 8 2018 12:07pm)

well here I am without a need to write the wall of text I was anticipating

Quote (IceMage @ Aug 8 2018 11:15am)

His arguments are kind of weak sauce... but I think I've made my point and I'll go back to posting GIFs the rest of the day.

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Putin benefits from flaming anti-Western sentiment... so exposing Western interference in elections, especially in 2011 where his party didn't do that well, seems like it would benefit him. It would also help him muddy the waters in the minds of Europeans, and even some Americans.

Quote (Goomshill @ Aug 8 2018 12:12pm)

the non-denial and spin framing from the US after a direct Russian accusation is what makes me just assume the US was doing something.

Quote (thesnipa @ Aug 8 2018 01:14pm)

are you a non-native speaker or something.

"isn't a real attack" (commas are important, and denote a separate thought" "its" (denoting a difference from isn't, it is versus is not, oppisites)

so it's not a real attack, it's a diversionary tactic, such as drop shipping marines to force domestic production in starcraft and lessen the force of a main attack. the purpose of a marine drop isn't to take out a base, it's to take out supply and force it to be dealt with, diverting the players attention and by extension APM from attacks.



inb4'd me.

Quote (Horford @ Aug 8 2018 11:21am)

Opposites* 😉
I guess there's a military reference here i'm not understanding... lol

Quote (thesnipa @ Aug 8 2018 01:25pm)

step 1: say "I don't play starcraft"
step 2" say "starcraft is for nerds, and i'm no virg"
step last: stay smug

Quote (thesnipa @ Aug 8 2018 12:18pm)

this is silly, you think Putin has some verifiable email from Obama saying "interfere in the election"?

no, he'd have some vague clues that the CIA and such made cells of bot farms, just like he did. and the proof wouldn't be all that compelling but would give the unmistakable idea that we did something, without a clear sign of the scope and specifics. and because Putin's a piece of shit no one would care or believe the specifics he could provide.

Quote (IceMage @ Aug 8 2018 11:30am)

Russia is a police state with an extremely capable security service. You don't think they have the ability to bring some evidence forward? America managed to release detailed indictments outlining what the IRA did here and what the GRU did. The least Russia could do is release a report or something.

I'm wondering if Putin even coordinated with the rest of the government to back up these accusations. I wasn't following Russia closely in 2011 or 2012.

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By F. William Engdahl,* author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order
Washington clearly wants ‘finito’ with Russia’s Putin as in basta! or as they said in Egypt last spring, Kefaya--enough!. Hillary Clinton and friends have apparently decided Russia’s prospective next president, Vladimir Putin, is a major obstacle to their plans. Few however understand why. Russia today, in tandem with China and to a significant degree Iran, form the spine, however shaky, of the only effective global axis of resistance to a world dominated by one sole superpower.

On December 8 several days after election results for Russia’s parliamentary elections were announced, showing a sharp drop in popularity for Prime Minister Putin’s United Russia party, Putin accused the United States and specifically Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of fuelling the Russian opposition protesters and their election protests. Putin stated, “The (US) Secretary of State was quick to evaluate the elections, saying that they are unfair and unjust even before she received materials from the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (the OSCE international election monitors-w.e.) observers.”i

Putin went on to claim that Clinton’s premature comments were the necessary signal to the waiting opposition groups that the US Government would back their protests. Clinton’s comments, the seasoned Russian intelligence pro stated, became a “signal for our activists who began active work with the US Department of State.” ii

Major western media chose either to downplay the Putin statement or to focus almost entirely on the claims of an emerging Russian opposition movement. A little research shows that, if anything, Putin was downplaying the degree of brazen US Government interference into the political processes of his country. In this case the country is not Tunisia or Yemen or even Egypt. It is the world’s second nuclear superpower, even if it might still be an economic lesser power. Hillary is playing with thermonuclear fire.

Let’s examine closely Putin’s charge of US interference in the election process. If we look, we find openly stated in their August 2011 Annual Report that a Washington-based NGO with the innocuous name, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), is all over the place inside Russia.

The NED is financing an International Press Center in Moscow where some 80 international NGOs can hold press briefings on whatever they choose. They fund numerous “youth advocacy” and leadership workshops to “help youth engage in political activism.” In fact, officially they spent more than $2,783,000 in 2010 on dozens of such programs across Russia. Spending for 2011 won’t be published until later in 2012. iv

The NED is also financing key parts of the Russian “independent” polling and election monitoring, a crucial part of being able to claim election fraud. They finance in part the Regional Civic Organization in Defense of Democratic Rights and Liberties “GOLOS.” According to the NED Annual Report the funds went “to carry out a detailed analysis of the autumn 2010 and spring 2011 election cycles in Russia, which will include press monitoring, monitoring of political agitation, activity of electoral commissions, and other aspects of the application of electoral legislation in the long-term run-up to the elections.”v

In September, 2011, a few weeks before the December elections the NED financed a Washington invitation-only conference featuring the Russian “independent” polling organization, the Levada Center. According to NED’s own website Levada, another recipient of NED money, vi had done a series of opinion polls, a standard method used in the West to analyze the feelings of citizens. The polls profiled “the mood of the electorate in the run up to the Duma and presidential elections, perceptions of candidates and parties, and voter confidence in the system of ‘managed democracy’ that has been established over the last decade.”

One of the featured speakers at that Washington conference was Vladimir Kara-Murza, member of the federal council of Solidarnost (“Solidarity”), Russia’s democratic opposition movement. He is also “advisor to Duma opposition leader Boris Nemtsov” according to NED. Another speaker came from the right-wing neo-conservative Hudson Institute. vii

Nemtsov, one of the most prominent of the Putin opposition today is also co-chairman of Solidarnost, a name curiously enough imitated from the Cold War days when the CIA financed the Polish Solidarnosc workers’ opposition of Lech Walesa. More on Nemtsov later.

And on December 15, 2011, again in Washington, just as the series of US-supported protests were being launched against Putin, led by Solidarnost and other organizations, the NED held another conference titled, Youth Activism in Russia: Can a New Generation Make a Difference? The featured speaker was Tamirlan Kurbanov, who according to the NED, “most recently served as a program officer at the Moscow office of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, where he was involved in developing and expanding the capacities of political and civic organizations; promoting citizen participation in public life, youth engagement in particular.” viii The National Democratic Institute is an arm of the NED.

The shady history of NED

Helping youth engage in political activism is precisely what the same NED did in Egypt over the past several years in the lead up to the toppling of Mubarak. The same NED was instrumental by informed accounts in the US-backed “Color Revolutions” in 2003-2004 in Ukraine and Georgia that brought US-backed pro-NATO surrogates to power. The same NED has been active in promoting “human rights” in Myanmar, in Tibet, and China’s oil-rich Xinjiang province. ix

As careful analysts of the 2004 Ukraine “Orange revolution” and the numerous other US-financed color revolutions discovered, control of polling and ability to dominate international media perceptions, especially major TV such as CNN or BBC is an essential component of the Washington destabilization agenda. The Levada Center would likely be in a crucial position in this regard to issue polls showing discontent with the regime.

By their deion, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a “private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. Each year, with funding from the US Congress, NED supports more than 1,000 projects of non-governmental groups abroad who are working for democratic goals in more than 90 countries.”x

It couldn’t sound more noble or high-minded. However, they prefer to leave out their own true history. In the early 1980’s CIA director Bill Casey convinced President Ronald Reagan to create a plausibly private NGO, the NED, to advance Washington’s global agenda via other means than direct CIA action. It was a part of the process of “privatizing” US intelligence to make their work more “effective.” Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, said in a Washington Post interview in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”xi Interesting. The majority of funds for NED come from US taxpayers through Congress. It is in every way, shape and form a US Government intelligence community asset.

The NED was created during the Reagan Administration to function as a de facto CIA, privatized so as to allow it more freedom of action. NED board members are typically drawn from the Pentagon and US intelligence community. It has included retired NATO General Wesley Clark, the man who led the US bombing of Serbia in 1999. Key figures linked to clandestine CIA actions who served on NED’s board have included Otto Reich, John Negroponte, Henry Cisneros and Elliot Abrams. The Chairman of the NED Board of Directors in 2008 was Vin Weber, founder of the ultraconservative organization, Empower America, and campaign fundraiser for George W. Bush. Current NED chairman is John Bohn, former CEO of the controversial Moody’s rating agency which played a nefarious role in the still-unraveling US mortgage securities collapse. As well today’s NED board includes neo-conservative Bush-era ambassador to Iraq and to Afghanistan, Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad.xii

Putin’s well-rehearsed opposition

It’s also instructive to look at the leading opposition figures who seem to have stepped forward in Russia in recent days. The current opposition “poster boy” favorite of Russian youth and especially western media is Russian blogger Alexei Navalny whose blog is titled LiveJournal. Navalny has featured prominently as a quasi-martyr of the protest movement after spending 15 days in Putin’s jail for partaking in a banned protest. At a large protest rally on Christmas Day December 25 in Moscow, Navalny, perhaps intoxicated by seeing too many romantic Sergei Eisenstein films of the 1917 Russian Revolution, told the crowd, “I see enough people here to take the Kremlin and the White House (Russia’s Presidential home-w.e.) right now…”xiii

Western establishment media is infatuated with Navalny. England’s BBC described Navalny as "arguably the only major opposition figure to emerge in Russia in the past five years," and US Time magazine called him "Russias Erin Brockovich," a curious reference to the Hollywood film starring Julie Roberts as a trade union organizer. However, more relevant is the fact that Navalny went to the elite American East Coast Yale University, also home to the Bush family, where he was a “Yale World Fellow.” xiv

The charismatic Navalny however is also or has been on the payroll of Washington’s regime-destabilizing National Endowment for Democracy (NED). According to a posting on Navalny’s own blog, LiveJournal, he was financed in 2007-2008 by the NED. His Washington NED contact person was Frank Conatser.xv A facsimile of an email exchange between Navalny and Conatser fronm November 17, 2007 is partially reproduced here.

Quote (IceMage @ Aug 8 2018 11:30am)

Russia is a police state with an extremely capable security service. You don't think they have the ability to bring some evidence forward? America managed to release detailed indictments outlining what the IRA did here and what the GRU did. The least Russia could do is release a report or something.

I'm wondering if Putin even coordinated with the rest of the government to back up these accusations. I wasn't following Russia closely in 2011 or 2012.

Quote (Goomshill @ Aug 8 2018 12:43pm)

here's an contemporary example of what was going on at the time around the world;
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/world/15aid.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&emc=eta1
the same groups listed there are among those later banned by Russia during a crackdown around 2015 iirc, like 'International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House', also George Soro's Open Society.
now, its worth examining this from the russian propaganda lens so we can get the other side of the story (you'll probably get put on a list if you actually click this link, so I'll copy it here:)
http://www.warandpeace.ru/en/exclusive/view/65541/

now like I say, that's obviously the russian side making the allegations, so take it with the world's biggest grain of salt, but that might give you some insight
/e also why the fuck are so many RT contributors from Minnesota? This guy, jesse ventura, ed schultz...

Quote (thesnipa @ Aug 8 2018 12:44pm)

its not worth his time, we interfered and the result is the same, we "won" easily, and he has no credibility on the world stage so everything he says not only didn't change the result but comes with a grain of salt. Compared to the US, where the interference has a real effect, could even be swung it given how close it was, and the Mueller team has credibility on the world stage.

if he comes out with a report it will make him look even more Team-Trump, which doesn't really serve him. and he has little to gain from it, if he shows "hey the US did it to me first" he's admitting they did it to us. that last part is important. no one says "heres proof he did it to me, but i totally didnt do it in return".