Tag: Russia

Defending the fraud

From the perspective of normal human psychology, everything about the Trump-Putin interaction seems off. As I remarked before, if Trump were really a Russian agent, you would expect Putin to advise him to be less conspicuous in advocating Russian interests, simply to preserve his usefulness.

On the other hand, imagine Trump as a naive businessman with generally russophile leanings. (I don’t know, maybe he read The Gambler at an impressionable age, and modeled his life on it.) He’s had no significant contact with the Russian leadership, but he once met Vladimir Putin at a beauty pageant, thinks he praised him (mistakenly), and thinks he could do some good for the world by relaxing tensions with the world’s second-largest nuclear power. He is convinced that he deserves to be president, but privately unsure the world will acknowledge his greatness. Now he receives intelligence briefings giving strong evidence that the Russians are attempting to interfere with the election in his favour. What would he do? Before the election maybe he keeps quiet and tries to suppress or discredit the claims. But you would expect him to be seething with fury, that the Russians threaten to taint his election. The help they’re giving is marginal, but the blowback is potentially enormous. It’s like a referee intentionally calling an unwarranted penalty in a football match. It probably won’t change the result, but it makes the favoured side look terrible. To do that without consent is an act of aggression against those you’re ostensibly helping. Continue reading “Defending the fraud”

Assets

Against all odds, all political sides in the US are converging toward agreement. Here was a headline from the left-wing Daily Kos that seemed extreme three weeks ago:

Former spy reports Kremlin cultivated Trump as an asset for 5 years

And here is Donald Trump, speaking yesterday at a press conference:

If Putin likes Donald Trump, guess what folks, that’s called an asset

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(Free parking)

A proposal for a partial unified theory of Trump scandals.

There has been considerable speculation about whether Donald Trump’s $916 million loss from 1995 may be something other than unadulterated “economic genius” (as Rudolf Giuliani called it, because that’s what you usually call it when someone manages to lose nearly a billion dollars in a single year). In particular, some commentators have suggested that these were not real losses, but an example of  “debt parking”: Instead of allowing the losses in his bankruptcy to be written off (in which case, the debt write-down would count as income, cancelling the tax benefit of the loss) it got transferred to an offshore entity controlled by Trump

But here’s another possibility: What if the offshore entity is not controlled by Trump, but by Vladimir Putin and/or the Russian state. Since he hasn’t gone through personal bankruptcy, the debt remains valid, and the creditor can choose to demand repayment at any time. They would essentially own him. That would explain a lot.

Thinking out loud

Trump is now predicting massive voter fraud, usually something you do after you’ve lost. There’s a theory that people tend to accuse others of what they are ashamed of planning or having done themselves. I don’t think he has any shame, or that he’s strategic enough to be planning anything so complicated himself. But his backers? How hard would it really be for a top-notch state hacking operation in, say, Russia, to crack the locally organised election computer systems?

Plus ça change: Partition of Poland edition

If you wanted to refer to a paradigmatic example of wanton brutality in international affairs, the invasion and division of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 would likely spring to mind. That’s why I was struck by the 1903 remark on the Boer War cited by Richard Toye in his book on Churchill’s imperialism:

Bourke Cockran, Churchill’s Irish-born politician friend, thought the war to be “the greatest violation of justice attempted by any civilized nation since the partition of Poland.”

I suppose now you could say, “the partition of Poland was the greatest violation of justice since the last partition of Poland.” You’d leave out the “civilized nation” bit, not exactly because Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union wouldn’t qualify, but because the concept no longer seems to have much explanatory power.

A tricky judgement call for the advertising agency

So you’re the head of the Adobe account, seeking to convince customers that Photoshop is a professional level software tool accessible to the masses. It’s used for important work by experts! It makes news! So now, the question is, do you seek an endorsement based on this news report (from Der Spiegel)?

Russland macht noch immer Kiew für den Abschuss von Flug MH17 verantwortlich. Doch die Fotos, die ukrainische Luftabwehrsysteme in dem Absturzgebiet zeigen sollen, sind offenbar gefälscht. Laut Experten hat der Kreml mit Photoshop manipuliert.

[Russia still claims that Kiev is responsible for shooting down flight MH17. But the photos that supposedly show Ukrainian air defence systems in the area of the crash are blatantly fake. Experts say the Kremlin manipulated them with Photoshop.]

Divorce or start a world war?

I recently read Christopher Clark’s celebrated book on the initiation of the First World War, The Sleepwalkers. There was a lot in it that was new to me. I’ve never seen an account — even a German account — that portrayed Germany as such a passive, almost innocent and peace-seeking, participant in the events of 1914. Although Clark disclaims an attention to fix blame, I felt very clearly that his account put the blame on French and Russian scheming, with Serbians playing a devious supporting role, and the Austro-Hungarians hapless bunglers.

I was struck by his portrayal of the alliance system as reasonably haphazard and fluid, kind of a square dance where nations just stayed with the partners they happened to be with when the music stopped. In particular, the alliance between Russia and the UK seemed to reflect a common pathology in personal relations:

In the light of continuing Russian pressure on Persia and other peripheral imperial territories, there had been talk of abandoning the Anglo-Russian Convention in favour of a more open-ended policy that would not necessarily exclude a rapprochement of some kind with Germany. This never became Foreign Office policy, but the news that Russian mobilization had just triggered German counter-measures at least temporarily foregrounded the Russian aspect of the growing crisis. British policy-makers had no particular interest in or sympathy for Serbia. This was a war from the east, sparked by concerns remote from the official mind of Whitehall.

We’ve all known couples like this. They’ve been together for years, comfortable but never quite committed. Then a crisis comes, and they have to decide: Do we get married or split up. And often they marry, because splitting just seems too frightening. It usually doesn’t end well.

Freedom fries with milquetoast

I was amused to read that Republicans in the US were attacking President Obama for not dropping everything to fly to France and succor our friend and ally in its time of need.

“This is simply no way to treat our oldest and first ally,” [Rick] Perry told The Washington Post. “President Obama should have stood with France in person, defending Western values in the struggle against terrorism and showing support for the victims of this despicable act of terror,” Perry said.[…]

“Our president should have been there, because we must never hesitate to stand with our allies,” [wrote Ted] Cruz.

Because, we know that if there’s anything Republicans care about more than defending scatological satire targeted particularly at conservative religious figures, it’s the centuries-old alliance, built mutual respect and admiration, with the cheese-eating surrender monkeys petulant prima-donna of realpolitik French.

It’s almost as intense as their abiding love of the Ukraine, for which John McCain attacked Obama’s and Angela Merkel’s response to Russia’s invasion of Crimea last year as “playing into Putin’s hands” and “milquetoast” respectively.

The worst of it is, he can’t even get a side of freedom fries with his milquetoast anymore.

Helicopter parents avant la lettre

I’m always intrigued by the eternal present of “nowadays”: Trends that rise and rise like an Escher staircase. Just now I was coming to the end of Anna Karenina — which I had expected would be just Madame Bovary on the steppes, but it was vastly more — and found this passage:

“He assures me that our children are splendid, when I know how much that’s bad there is in them.”

“Arseny goes to extremes, I always say,” said his wife. “If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied. And it’s true, as papa says,—that when we were brought up there was one extreme—we were kept in the basement, while our parents lived in the best rooms; now it’s just the other way—the parents are in the wash house, while the children are in the best rooms. Parents now are not expected to live at all, but to exist altogether for their children.”

“Well, what if they like it better?” Lvov said, with his beautiful smile, touching her hand. “Anyone who didn’t know you would think you were a stepmother, not a true mother… Well, come here, you perfect children,” Lvov said to the two handsome boys who came in…

The time when children knew their place, and parents could enjoy themselves, is just a generation past, and apparently it always was.