Other than President Zelenskyy’s address, I want to focus tonight’s post on one thing: the long form reporting today from The New York Times on the information warfare campaign that the Russians – both Prigozhin’s sort of private Internet Research Agency (IRA) and the GRU’s – targeting the Women’s March and the people involved in organizing it. And, of course, your daily Patron because I know what you’re all really here for…
And just a housekeeping note for tomorrow night: I have a Zoom early evening tomorrow. Depending on how far that backs up my evening, I’ll either have time for a brief just the basics post or just Patron.
Here’s President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump:
Good health to you, fellow Ukrainians!
I started this day, as always, with a morning conference call.
The Commander-in-Chief, the Minister of Internal Affairs, the heads of intelligence, the Minister of Defense, the Minister of Infrastructure, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, the Security Service, the Head of the Office, “Ukroboronprom” and some others who are responsible for the most important areas of assistance to our defenders.
This is how my day starts. Often – with the same questions, often – with similar answers. And this is always the time for the most important words for Ukraine.
Izyum, Balakliya, Kupyansk and the Kharkiv region in general are the cities and communities that we have liberated. These words are heard now. They are heard everywhere.
Mariupol, Melitopol and Kherson are also heard, but they will sound even more often and louder when we liberate them.
Donetsk, Horlivka and Luhansk – they will be heard as well. Dzhankoy, Yevpatoriya, Yalta – and they will, too. Definitely.
We do not talk about what’s not ours. Only our words, Ukrainian words, sound.
Every morning, every afternoon, every evening, every night – for 207 days already.
They sound thanks to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, thanks to the Special Operations Forces, thanks to the Main Intelligence Directorate, thanks to the Security Service of Ukraine, thanks to the territorial defense, thanks to the border guards and the entire system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs – from the National Guard and the National Police to the rescuers of the State Emergency Service.
The most important words that are heard thanks to our medical workers and transporters, thanks to energy workers and volunteers, thanks to fighters of the information front and educators, thanks to diplomats and many others who do their job in a way that makes us all stronger. Strengthens our ability to fight and win.
Perhaps it seems to someone now that after a series of victories we have a certain lull. But this is not a lull.
This is preparation for the next sequence. For the next sequence of words that are very important to us all and that definitely must be heard.
Because Ukraine must be free – the whole of it.
And in conclusion, as always, words that sound and will always sound. They are heard by us, they will be heard by our children, they will be heard by our grandchildren. They will be heard in free Ukraine.
Eternal glory to all our heroes!
Glory to Ukraine!
Here’s former NAVDEVGRU Squadron Leader Chuck Pfarrer’s most recent updates about the situations in Izium and Kherson:
IZIUM/2115 UTC 18 SEP/ The cutting of the P-66 HWY has curtailed maneuver options for RU forces. Situation of the roads, and continued use of UKR precision strike munitions, have largely negated what would be the advantage of Russia’s interior lines of communication & supply. pic.twitter.com/nK3B6CCHoq
— Chuck Pfarrer | Indications & Warnings | (@ChuckPfarrer) September 18, 2022
KHERSON/1215 UTC 18 SEP/ The reported crossing of the Inhulets near Mala Seidemynukha would be an important advance. If expanded, this bridgehead would exert extreme tactical pressure on the RU positions at Snihurivka. UKR Air Defense, CAS and SEAD missions take toll on Russia. pic.twitter.com/y9FemZ6NUA
— Chuck Pfarrer | Indications & Warnings | (@ChuckPfarrer) September 18, 2022
And a final battlefield update:
KARMA: The Russian 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade (Military Unit Number 51460) perpetrated the massacre at Bucha. It is now listed as “destroyed” with more than 90% of its soldiers, killed, wounded, captured or deserted. The remainder are now refusing to fight. https://t.co/iVBp9N6O2B pic.twitter.com/PlS1oad7Ws
— Chuck Pfarrer | Indications & Warnings | (@ChuckPfarrer) September 18, 2022
And this will be something to watch:
This puts the Kremlin in a tight spot. Leave this unanswered and you risk letting public criticism spiral.
But Alla Pugacheva is something like a cross between Oprah and the Pope in Russia – a pretty much universally loved figure
— max seddon (@maxseddon) September 18, 2022
Now on to the main topic: The NY Times’ deep dive into Russian information warfare targeting Americans regarding the Women’s March.
Linda Sarsour awoke on Jan. 23, 2017, logged onto the internet, and felt sick.
The weekend before, she had stood in Washington at the head of the Women’s March, a mobilization against President Donald J. Trump that surpassed all expectations. Crowds had begun forming before dawn, and by the time she climbed up onto the stage, they extended farther than the eye could see.
More than four million people around the United States had taken part, experts later estimated, placing it among the largest single-day protests in the nation’s history.
But then something shifted, seemingly overnight. What she saw on Twitter that Monday was a torrent of focused grievance that targeted her. In 15 years as an activist, largely advocating for the rights of Muslims, she had faced pushback, but this was of a different magnitude. A question began to form in her mind: Do they really hate me that much?
That morning, there were things going on that Ms. Sarsour could not imagine.
More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.
They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners. But one message performed better with audiences than any other.
It singled out an element of the Women’s March that might, at first, have seemed like a detail: Among its four co-chairs was Ms. Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist whose hijab marked her as an observant Muslim.
Over the 18 months that followed, Russia’s troll factories and its military intelligence service put a sustained effort into discrediting the movement by circulating damning, often fabricated narratives around Ms. Sarsour, whose activism made her a lightning rod for Mr. Trump’s base and also for some of his most ardent opposition.
One hundred and fifty-two different Russian accounts produced material about her. Public archives of Twitter accounts known to be Russian contain 2,642 tweets about Ms. Sarsour, many of which found large audiences, according to an analysis by Advance Democracy Inc., a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that conducts public-interest research and investigations.
But there is also a story that has not been told, one that only emerged years later in academic research, of how Russia inserted itself into this moment.
For more than a century, Russia and the Soviet Union sought to weaken their adversaries in the West by inflaming racial and ethnic tensions. In the 1960s, K.G.B. officers based in the United States paid agents to paint swastikas on synagogues and desecrate Jewish cemeteries. They forged racist letters, supposedly from white supremacists, to African diplomats.
They did not invent these social divisions; America already had them. Ladislav Bittman, who worked for the secret police in Czechoslovakia before defecting to the United States, compared Soviet disinformation programs to an evil doctor who expertly diagnoses the patient’s vulnerabilities and exploits them, “prolongs his illness and speeds him to an early grave instead of curing him.”
A decade ago, Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, oversaw a revival of these tactics, seeking to undermine democracies around the world from the shadows.
Social media now provided an easy way to feed ideas into American discourse, something that, for half a century, the K.G.B. had struggled to do. And the Russian government secretly funneled more than $300 million to political parties in more than two dozen countries in an effort to sway their policies in Moscow’s favor since 2014, according to a U.S. intelligence review made public last week.
What effect these intrusions had on American democracy is a question that will be with us for years. It may be unanswerable. Already, social media was amplifying Americans’ political impulses, leaving behind a trail of damaged communities. Already, trust in institutions was declining, and rage was flaring up in public life. These things would have been true without Russian interference.
But to trace the Russian intrusions over the months that followed that first Women’s March is to witness a persistent effort to make all of them worse.
In early 2017, the trolling operation was in its imperial phase, swelling with confidence.
Accounts at the Internet Research Agency, an organization based in St. Petersburg and controlled by a Putin ally, had boasted of propelling Mr. Trump to victory. That year, the group’s budget nearly doubled, according to internal communications made public by U.S. prosecutors. More than a year would pass before social media platforms executed sweeping purges of Russian-backed sock-puppet accounts.
For the trolls, it was a golden hour.
Under these auspicious conditions, their goals shifted from electoral politics to something more general — the goal of deepening rifts in American society, said Alex Iftimie, a former federal prosecutor who worked on a 2018 case against an administrator at Project Lakhta, which oversaw the Internet Research Agency and other Russian trolling operations.
“It wasn’t exclusively about Trump and Clinton anymore,” said Mr. Iftimie, now a partner at Morrison Foerster. “It was deeper and more sinister and more diffuse in its focus on exploiting divisions within society on any number of different levels.”
There was a routine: Arriving for a shift, workers would scan news outlets on the ideological fringes, far left and far right, mining for extreme content that they could publish and amplify on the platforms, feeding extreme views into mainstream conversations.
Artyom Baranov, who worked at one of Project Lakhta’s affiliates from 2018 to 2020, concluded that his co-workers were, for the most part, people who needed the money, indifferent to the themes they were asked to write on.
“If they were assigned to write text about refrigerators, they would write about refrigerators, or, say, nails, they would write about nails,” said Mr. Baranov, one of a handful of former trolls who have spoken on the record about their activities. But instead of refrigerators and nails, it was “Putin, Putin, then Putin, and then about Navalny,” referring to Aleksei Navalny, the jailed opposition leader.
The job was not to put forward arguments, but to prompt a visceral, emotional reaction, ideally one of “indignation,” said Mr. Baranov, a psychoanalyst by training, who was assigned to write posts on Russian politics. “The task is to make a kind of explosion, to cause controversy,” he said.
When a post succeeded at enraging a reader, he said, a co-worker would sometimes remark, with satisfaction, Liberala razorvala. A liberal was torn apart. “It wasn’t on the level of discussing facts or giving new arguments,” he said. “It’s always a way of digging into dirty laundry.”
Feminism was an obvious target, because it was viewed as a “Western agenda,” and hostile to the traditional values that Russia represented, said Mr. Baranov, who spoke about his work in hopes of warning the public to be more skeptical of material online. Already, for months, Russian accounts purporting to belong to Black women had been drilling down on racial rifts within American feminism:
“White feminism seems to be the most stupid 2k16 trend”
“Watch Muhammad Ali shut down a white feminist criticizing his arrogance”
“Aint got time for your white feminist bullshit”
“Why black feminists don’t owe Hillary Clinton their support”
“A LIL LOUDER FOR THE WHITE FEMINISTS IN THE BACK”
In January 2017, as the Women’s March drew nearer, they tested different approaches on different audiences, as they had during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. They posed as resentful trans women, poor women and anti-abortion women. They dismissed the marchers as pawns of the Jewish billionaire George Soros.
And they derided the women who planned to participate, often in crudely sexual terms. In coordination, beginning on Jan. 19, 46 Russian accounts pumped out 459 original suggestions for #RenameMillionWomenMarch, a hashtag created by a right-wing podcaster from Indiana:
The Why Doesn’t Anybody Love Me March
The Strong Women Constantly Playing the Victim March
The Lonely Cat Lady March
The Cramp Camp
The Bearded Women Convention
Broken Broads Bloviating
The Liberal Trail of Tears
Coyote Ugly Bitchfest
In the meantime, another, far more effective line of messaging was developing.
But 48 hours after the march, a shift of tone occurred online, with a surge of posts describing Ms. Sarsour as a radical jihadi who had infiltrated American feminism. Ms. Sarsour recalls this vividly, because she woke to a worried text message from a friend and glanced at Twitter to find that she was trending.
Not all of this backlash was organic. That week, Russian amplifier accounts began circulating posts that focused on Ms. Sarsour, many of them inflammatory and based on falsehoods, claiming she was a radical Islamist, “a pro-ISIS Anti USA Jew Hating Muslim” who “was seen flashing the ISIS sign.”
Some of these posts found a large audience. At 7 p.m. on Jan. 21, an Internet Research Agency account posing as @TEN_GOP, a fictional right-wing American from the South, tweeted that Ms. Sarsour favored imposing Shariah law in the United States, playing into a popular anti-Muslim conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had helped to popularize on the campaign trail.
This message took hold, racking up 1,686 replies, 8,046 retweets and 6,256 likes. An hour later, @PrisonPlanet, an influential right-wing account, posted a tweet on the same theme. The following day, nearly simultaneously, a small army of 1,157 right-wing accounts picked up the narrative, publishing 1,659 posts on the subject, according to an analysis conducted by the online analytics firm Graphika on behalf of The Times.
Vladimir Barash, Graphika’s chief scientist, said the pattern of interference was “strategically similar” to troll activity targeting the vast anti-Putin protests of 2011 and 2012, with sock-puppet accounts “similarly trying to hijack the conversation, sometimes succeeding.”
“There is some circumstantial evidence that they learned in a domestic context and then tried to replicate their success in a foreign context,” Dr. Barash said.
Much, much, much more at the link!
The reason I want to focus on this tonight is that these types of Russian operations didn’t start hesitantly in 2014 and then really ramped up in late 2015 through 2016 when Trump announced he was running for president and climbed to the top of the GOP primary field and kept hovering either just below being in first place as the other candidate pushed to the top before flaming out or in first place in the polling. Rather, these information warfare operations began several years earlier against Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. Then, when the Maidan movement began to gain strength, they were revised, updated, and directed against Ukraine. When they failed to actually prevent the Maidan revolution, or to roll it back, they continued in the attempt to undermine the post Yanukovych governments, including that of President Zelenskyy, while also further building out the efforts against the US, as well as Britain in regard to Brexit.
In all of these lines of effort, the goal was not to create new divisions amongst the targeted populations. Largely because that isn’t really possible. The goal was to identify the political, social, religious, economic, urban/rural, sexuality grievances and cleavage lines within a society and between and within its various demographic groups, political parties, social movements, and religions and religious denominations, and then enflame them. And not just enflame them, but widen them and make the most mundane disagreements seem like existential crises.
You’ll notice that one of the IRA employees quoted in The NY Times reporting has a degree in psychoanalysis. I don’t think that’s a coincidence any more than I think that Cambridge Analytica’s employing behavioral psychologists was a coincidence. These people take the psychological in Psychological Operations (PSYOP) far too literary. While it is true that the purpose of a PSYOP campaign or an information warfare campaign is to influence people and, ultimately to manipulative decision-making, there is far too much literality in how this is both popularly understood and how it is pitched.
I have no doubt that there is an effect on cognition and emotional states. As the article correctly states, the point of a lot of these campaigns is to focus on negatives to create angry and/or disgusted responses. However, the simple reality is we don’t actually have a good way of measuring any of this in real time, let alone its specific effects on decision-making and other actions and activities. We don’t continually monitor people’s brain chemistry, we don’t have people continuously hooked up to brain scanning equipment to measure their neurochemical reactions and responses. What we can measure are the social behavioral responses. How much engagement each message gets, how many times it is retransmitted across the original and other platforms, how many positive versus negative responses, and if the message ultimately gets lifted in whole or in part and retransmitted through much more mainstream channels without any attribution to the operators that initially seeded it.
You’ll have noticed in the article that there is a reference to testing different themes and messages to see which ones did better on all of the indicators I just detailed. Those that did the best were refined further, built out, and used. Those that weren’t were jettisoned. Once the message is seeded, the entire process is straight down the line social learning. People seeing/hearing the message from either primary or secondary affiliations; people internalizing the message, which either promotes or retards certain behaviors – in this case activism and support for the Women’s March and its goals; then people continuing to retransmit and act on it as they see people they admire get rewarded for doing the same.
This we can measure!
As we know, the Russians have not stopped. Right now they’re busy seeding messages in regard to Ukraine; in regard to undocumented immigrants and/or asylum seekers in the US; in regard to inflation and the cost of food, gas, and housing; and, of course, about the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election. We can document that they’ve given boosts to both white supremacist groups and to anti-white supremacists groups at the same time around the same events. They were running both the bogus Ten_GOP account and a local Tennessee Black Lives matter related account at the same time! They’ve been boosting QAnon and Rufo’s agitprop faux moral scandals regarding K-12 education and issues surrounding gender and sexuality too. And that amplification has definitely had an effect! Despite the one critique presented in the reporting of these efforts efficacy, they are, in fact effective. What we are unclear on is just how effective. And we’re also not fully clear on all the behavorial correlates and their directions. But just because we haven’t figured it all out yet, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take it seriously.
As the PSYOPers like to say: sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will really hurt you!
That’s enough for tonight.
Your daily Patron!
Hey. I have a little bit of free time on Sunday. So, I think to myself: how did the Maya disappear? Is it possible to repeat this with one another nation? But it is difficult to call them a «civilisation»🤭 pic.twitter.com/mkMMY6FaIQ
— Patron (@PatronDsns) September 18, 2022
Just as a public service announcement for those still worried about what happens when we get to the end of this Bakhtun, the rest of the calendar is on the back of the stone and all that happens is the Backtuns reset!
If you were waiting for a sign – here it is! Holy ducks and I say to you: «Do it!»
And if you just wanted to join my Patreon today — «Do it + please»https://t.co/U5SKtrKTfK pic.twitter.com/hI8uT4REOp
— Patron (@PatronDsns) September 18, 2022
And a new video from Patron’s official TikTok:
@patron__dsns ⚠️Fake fire⚠️ Якби про рятувальників знімали кіно – то трейлер був би таким. З Днем рятувальника! #патрондснс #песпатрон
The caption translates as:
⚠️Fake fire⚠️ If a movie was made about rescuers, the trailer would be like this. Happy First Responders’ Day! #patrondsns #dogpatron
Open thread!
Lapassionara
Thank you, Adam. The Women’s March was so impressive and seemed like a great starting point for organizing and activism, and then pfft. The impetus and enthusiasm seemed to just disappear. Now we know more about the possible causes.
I don’t know how to fight a concentrated enemy social media influence campaign, especially when many people believe the lies so readily.
zhena gogolia
I never know what to believe, but I just watched a Radio Svoboda interview with a Russian journalist, and he said his sources tell him they’re going to announce that Putin is ill and that the security council is going to take over and end the war. He said the siloviki hate Ukraine and would love to destroy it, but they’re more interested in trying to keep their money. FWIW, as the kids say.
ETA: The Pugacheva thing is interesting.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Lapassionara:
I never noticed this at all? There were more Women’s Marches in later years
dnfree
@Lapassionara: my right-wing friends and family immediately portrayed the women’s march as characterized by violence. No matter how often I told them how many people, how overwhelmingly peaceful—their social media and news told them otherwise. I don’t know how much the Russians were involved in that.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
I agree with Patron. They cannot be called a civilization by any stretch of the imagination.
I want to believe the statement from Alla Pugacheva is real and sincere, but I now have a knee-jerk reaction to anything like that from a russian where my mind just refuses to believe it. But I will be quite happy to be proven wrong. Oprah + Pope would indeed be a powerful figure.
Thank you as always, Adam.
Chetan Murthy
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: As someone put it over on Twitter: “when you think of Russia, don’t think of Dostoevsky; think of Stalin”.
That’s about right.
Anonymous At Work
Bad news on the war against the IRA. Fifth Circuit in Texas upheld Texas’s anti-anti-censorship of social media law that prevents TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (pretty much exclusively) from “censoring” any viewpoints, including terrorism recruiting, slander, disinformation, etc. in the name of “preventing ‘more’ censorship of conservative voices”. Supreme Court has stayed the ruling, for now, but how this plays out is anyone’s guess. Thomas and Alito have been salivating at the idea of rewriting the First Amendment to strike back at the WaPo and NYT. They only need 3 of the 4 Federalist sock-puppets to back them (Roberts probably won’t), so it might get interesting.
Gin & Tonic
“Рятувалники” may translate literally as “rescuers” or “lifeguards” but I think it works better colloquially as “first responders.”
Adam L Silverman
@Lapassionara: I’ll try to get to the counter information warfare this week. A great and current example is the Fellas/NAFO. What they’ve done is rapidly respond en masse. This disrupts the ability to seed the messaging and then promote it into the target audience because it surrounds and walls off the messaging with the overwhelming response.
Also, they have Bonkerizer 9000s!
Jay
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: Fixed!
West of the Rockies
I really hope that Russia’s troll farm cyber-ops industry gets further exposed and diminished because of the war. Their meddling in the affairs of other governments and industries and such needs to be crushed.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Chetan Murthy: Yep.
Bill Arnold
If you’re fixing, “Inflitration” -> “Infiltration” in the title.
(Assuming “inflitration” isn’t some specialist word.)
Thanks for covering that NYTimes piece. I’m hoping it (the NYTimes piece) will open a large number of eyes.
Chetan Murthy
@Adam L Silverman: I wonder about NAFO, and what lessons they have for us going forward in our own country. B/c I haven’t seen much work to combat the info ops of the bad guys in our country. Lotta normies gettin’ taken, hook, line, and sinker.
Villago Delenda Est
Oh, I don’t know. Oprah gave us “Doctors” Oz and Phil. This isn’t to her credit at all.
CaseyL
@Lapassionara: I remember it not going “pffft” so much as quickly descending into factionalism, particularly the progressives v. liberals.
I remember reading the comments (I was still on FB back then) and wondering where all the hostility was coming from.
I had so much hope for Indivisible and felt incredibly sad when I had to de-subscribe from them, because the bile was overwhelming.
Adam L Silverman
@Bill Arnold: My inability to spell should be classified!
smintheus
Interesting analysis by Jack Watling in The Observer, “Russia’s underperforming military capability may be key to its downfall”. This part is reminiscent of the archetypal mentality of those who used to live under Soviet domination:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/18/russia-military-underperforming-ukraine
Princess
The Women’s March thing is interesting (in a bad way) because I saw all those bits of propaganda picked up and mouthed by people who were not Allie’s of each other. The Sarsour stuff was amplified here by some people.
Bill Arnold
OTOH, the academic subcommunity that specializes in mocking denial of the effectiveness of these methods is essentially working for the propagandists, IMO. E.g. elections that are decided by a few thousand votes are quite influenceable.
I agree with your point made in #9 with Fellas/NAFO as an example; one key is very early identification of seeding operations and communication of the identifications; it is exponentially easier to spike viral spread when it is spotted very early.
Looking forward to your discussion of this.
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: I’m pretty sure I remember some of the “white feminism”-based attacks on the Women’s March, also the attacks on Sarsour as supposedly being an antisemite and pro-ISIS.
Adam L Silverman
@Bill Arnold: My discussion will be misspelled.
Margaret
Adam, thank you for highlighting this issue – it’s one I’ve long been concerned about. These activities are having a profoundly negative effect on our democracy, yet we seem to lack an effective strategy to counter them (well, except for #NAFO!). I’ve read that NATO countries are cooperating closely on cybersecurity in response to the Ukraine war – do you think that this might lead to new joint initiatives to better counter this type of trolling/disinformation?
phdesmond
the BBC reports Pugacheva’s remarks.
justinb
I mostly lurk, so probably mostly unknown. I feel very alone tonight, and it would make me feel a lot better to know there are people I “know” (but definitely respect) are pulling for me and mine.
My oldest son hasn’t had any food for going on five days now, and can’t even keep water in. He’s severely dehydrated, fainting, and obviously wasting away. He’s currently in the hospital for fluids and such, and they’re keeping him, and there’s NOTHING I CAN FUCKING DO ABOUT IT.
Adam L Silverman
@Margaret: You’re welcome and I don’t know.
Villago Delenda Est
@justinb: You’ve done all that you can do, as of now. He’s being cared for by those who can help the most. Just keep beaming good thoughts at him.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@justinb: I’m so sorry to hear this–you must be terrified right now, and your son must be too. Sending lots of love your way, and prayers if they are welcome.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@justinb:
I’m so sorry you and your oldest son are going through that. It sounds absolutely awful and I hope your son gets better soon. As others have said, you’ve done all that you can and he’s good hands now. The best thing you can do now is keep him in your thoughts. I’ll be keeping your family in my thoughts
Adam L Silverman
@justinb: We’re here! Keeping good thoughts for your son, you, and your family!
Jay
@justinb:
Will keep you and yours in my thoughts,
do they know what is wrong?
Villago Delenda Est
@smintheus: Any good modern military has a strong NCO corps. Russia lacks one, which is why they fail. The officer corps is utterly corrupt. The civilian “leadership” hollows out the military for their own personal gain. It’s a bad situation all around.
phdesmond
@Adam L Silverman:
define Fellas/NAFO?
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Matt McIrvin: I remember it too
Chetan Murthy
@phdesmond: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFO_(group)
Chetan Murthy
@phdesmond: Literally a Twitter horde of posters using cartoon dog (Shiba Inu) memes as their avatars and in memes. Shitposting to shut down RU and RU-adjacent disinfo.
Remarkably successful, to the point that actual UA officials credit them.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@justinb: If your son is in the hospital, you have done all you could. Sending you good thoughts.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@phdesmond:
Is the reason why celebrities like Pugacheva who speak out against the war don’t fall out windows that it’d produce too much public outcry? Putin has no problem murdering his “allies” the oligarchs who criticize him
Jay
@phdesmond:
Fellas/NAFO are the online activists that swarm Russian trolls and agiprop with cartoon Shiba Inu dogs dressed in various gear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFO_(group)
Gin & Tonic
@justinb: Hoping for a successful medical intervention for your son, and a modicum of peace for you. Watching our children suffer may be the hardest thing we, parents, do.
phdesmond
@Chetan Murthy:
interesting and cheering. thanks!
phdesmond
@Jay:
this forum is a great source of information. thank you.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Matt McIrvin:
White feminism is a real thing, though:
phdesmond
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
according to the BBC writeup, she and her husband spent quite a number of months in Israel from March on. that was prudent.
Ksmiami
@justinb: oh no- do they know the cause?
Margaret
@phdesmond: Here you go. NAFO (group) – Wikipedia
Martin
Reading that Russia has largely depleted their defensive ammunition around other parts of the country to keep pouring it into the Ukraine hole. Their other borders with NATO/NATO aspirant countries are increasingly defenseless. Probably true around their non-NATO borders as well. No wonder the vassals are getting restless.
West of the Rockies
@justinb:
Very best wishes, justinb. This cyber community is very empathetic and you may find that you can forge real connections if you are so inclined. Worrying for your child (or adult child is the worst).
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): the term could just as easily have “increased in use” due to Russian trollfarms. I’m not sure that it really amounts to anything more than the usual “whatsboutism” that can be trotted out to undercut anything, here to undercut any feminist point.
And “increase in use” is the explicit purpose of Russian trollfarms, isn’t it?
Bill Arnold
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
An ideal wedge for use by malignant propagandists to damage feminism, yes?
phdesmond
@Margaret: thanks!
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Bill Arnold: It may be useful to bad actors, but that doesn’t mean the concept itself is fake. I say this as a white woman who identifies as a feminist–a lot of us suck. A lot of white women seem incapable of, or else intentionally averse to, applying an intersectional lens to their feminist praxis, and only want to talk about it in terms of “women” – which often not only may exclude women of color and their specific concerns, but also trans women.
A good example of this is the wage gap. If a woman or an organization only talks about in terms of “a woman makes X for every Y a man makes” and doesn’t mention that for most women of color, it’s even less than X, then they are not telling the whole story, and often it’s because they don’t really care about the whole story.
White women can still uphold white supremacy even if they are on the left, and that is how you get White Feminism. Just because some shitheads used the concept to their evil advantage doesn’t mean the whole thing is suspect.
Martin
@justinb: So sorry to hear that.
I can’t offer much other than there are a few childhood illnesses that cause that which are very treatable.
You’ve got him where he needs to be. Not eating for 5 days isn’t great, but people can easily go much longer than that without eating. Sounds like the dehydration is the biggest issue, and you have him where he needs to be – getting fluids. Having a kid in the hospital is rough (been there a few times) but so far what you’re describing is more common than you might think.
What always helped me was staying there, holding their hand, doing something together be it watching video, reading a story, etc.
Hang in there.
Geminid
@Lapassionara: Refinery29 and Tablet Magazine published two good articles on the evolution of the national Women’s March organization.
Refinery29’s article “Who Owns the Women’s March Brand” May 9, 2018 describes opposition from local Women’s March organizations to efforts by the national entity, Women’s March Inc. to trademark the “Women’s March” brand.
The article in Tablet Magazine is titled “Is the Women’s March Imploding?” December 10, 2018. It’s a long and detailed account of the initial organization of the Washington march and the subsequent history of the national entity, and how Bob Bland, Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour consolidated control of it early on.
The last three women had previously worked together for a non-profit called The Gathering for Justice, which became the “financial sponsor” of the national outfit and handled the money.
The Tablet article includes criticism of the leadership by some of the other early organizers, including Mercy Morganfield, who at the time headed up the AARP’s DC office (and also happens to be Muddy Waters’ granddaughter). It’s an interesting article and worth reading, I think.
hotshoe
Seeing the tweet about the brigade responsible for Bucha massacres: dead is fine, captured is great: Ukraine — when they finally get time out of war — will be able to prosecute specific crimes of those captives.
But it makes me question: what about the wounded (safely back in Russia?) the deserters (now where are they? hiding in Russian territory?) and the supposedly remainder of 10% who refuse to fight (also, where are they? just sulking in the trenches?)
How is the civilized world / UN war crimes commission / Ukraine going to lay hands on those criminal soldiers to prosecute?
I know, nobody has an answer yet; Russian government hasn’t surrendered yet, so it’s impossible to demand that the war govt hand over soldiers for their crimes. But should I be able to hope that some agencies are now laying plans for following the tracks of each man who was enlisted in that brigade?
Does anyone know if there is planning for this at UN level, or is UN handcuffed by Russian presence in its agencies?
Jay
@Bill Arnold:
While it is often used as a pejorative to create division and malign,
it is an actual phenom, (eg. TERF’s) amongst some feminists.
justinb
Thank you all for your kind words, it really means a lot. The two sets of bloodwork (one last week w/ ultrasound) and one with CT showed a couple things abnormal, but nothing earth shattering. Imaging so far has been inconclusive. I will post more as I hear more, it’s soothing to read your responses.
Grumpy Old Railroader
@justinb:
Vent some more. Let it all out. We’re here
Carlo Graziani
@justinb: One day at a time. I wish you a night’s rest, and a hopeful morning.
Bill Arnold
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛:
Such very public identification(/even construction of) fault lines is very common on the left. I don’t see it as much in the right wing. The US right wing does have many fault lines but opposition-to-the-right-wing people don’t exploit them much; not sure why. Squeamishness?
This story comes to mind. A story of revenge. My notes say I first saw it 10 Nov 2016… A bit cartoonish (but note the spooky backstory revealed at the end), but does feature an information attack on a feminist conference.
Eris (Undated, C J Paget, first seen by me 10 Nov 2016, linked by C J Paget’s now-inactive twitter account, may be older) (web.archive.org copy, https) (reminds me of Philip José Farmer, but edgier.)
Jay
@hotshoe
Does anyone know if there is planning for this at UN level, or is UN handcuffed by Russian presence in its agencies?
Yes.
CaseyL
@justinb: Sending good wishes and positive thoughts your way – do please keep us updated!
Noskilz
@justinb: Best of luck with a terrible situation. Hopefully things turn out OK.
Bill Arnold
@justinb:
Please do. We are paying attention, and care.
Spadizzly
@justinb: Nothing worse for us parents than to see our kids suffering. Sending positive thoughts for the best outcome for your son and wishing you both good health.
Sister Golden Bear
@justinb: He’s in good hands at the hospital, so you’ve done much for him already by getting him there. Sending comforting thoughts to both you and your son.
Carlo Graziani
Pfarrer’s Eastern map once again shows him hallucinating Ukrainian forces transiting Russian-held roads (presumably with their permission) bound Northwest towards the Sieverodonetsk area. The relative annotation — “UKR units are reported to have staged multiple crossings of the Donets river, and are prosecuting several northern axes targeting Kremenna” — puts a lot of burden on the passive voice construction “are reported”, without actually pausing to credit whoever imposed on his credulity by peddling this bullshit to him.
His maps are pretty frustrating. There could be gold there, but its clearly mixed with shit and it’s impossible to distinguish between the two. In this latest example he displays Starobilsk, with a notation that “RU reinforcements are reported to be concentrated in and around Starobilsk.” Again with the passive voice, so, who, exactly is reporting this? On the other hand, it turns out that I’ve been doing some railroad map reading, and in fact the Russians have one remaining North-South rail supply line that they can run from Belgorod. It runs farther East than the Kupyansk-Izyum line that was cut, and it’s about 300 km longer, and it winds up in… Starobilsk. So, yeah, there could be a buildup there, to defend it. Also, there could be a new logistical railhead being established there to replace Izyum, which could look like “reinforcements”. If we could have some attribution to his RUMINT sources, perhaps we might learn something interesting.
As it stands, I’m starting to think he’s not a very discriminating consumer of the sources at his disposal, and I think he prefers to let his mapping graphics drive his assessments, rather than the other way around.
Kelly
@justinb: You’ve done what you can. Rest as best you can even if you just lie down and close your eyes. Eat. Your heart, mind and strength will be needed later.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chacal Charles Calthrop:
@Bill Arnold:
True, anything can be co-opted by bad actors
JAFD
@justinb: Asking whatever supernatural forces I can influence to help your son get better. Have trust in the doctors and nurses, and try to be calm, and confident he will get well.
Anoniminous
@Carlo Graziani:
Also look at the major roads. Starobilsk has 3 major roads. The P07 and T1302 head east and both hook-up with P66 running North/South and is lateral to the Russian front lines along the Oskil River. The H21 goes south intersecting T1306 which runs to Severdonetsk and then to Lyman, Russia really need to hold onto both cities.
dirge
@justinb: I know so little of your situation that I hesitate to offer more than condolences and sympathy. But at the risk of overstepping, I’ll offer something from my experience, on the off chance it’s of use.
Not long ago, my wife spent a week in the hospital. The issue was about as terrifying as one can imagine. She came home very much herself, much to the surgeons’ credit and everyone’s surprise.
What got me through that terrible week, unable to do anything to help her, was keeping busy helping everyone else who loves her, who were scared and helpless too. Relaying information, or just being someone to talk to.
Others in your son’s life are hurting too. When you’re able, help whoever you can; it may be the best thing you can do for yourself. And allow others to help you; it may be the best thing you can do for them.
Try to get some rest. Don’t forget to eat.
Best wishes for you, your son, and everyone around you.
P.S. Once he’s eating again, bring something better than hospital food as soon as they’ll let you.
VOR
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): There is a Wikipedia page tracking deaths of prominent Russian businessmen in 2022.
Jay
@Anoniminous:
@Carlo Graziani:
According to an AP Report 4 days ago, Starobilsk was liberated by UA Forces. It would make sense that the RU moved forces forward to shore up the retreat and block a further expansion of the UA Offensive.
Anoniminous
@Carlo Graziani:
If you really want to get into this read FM 4-95, Logistics Operations:
IOW — Logistics for Dummies :-)
Roger Moore
@smintheus:
It’s really important to understand this point. Dictatorships have a hard time creating an effective military, because they are at least as worried about the armed forces as a threat to their control as they are a means of defending it. A strong, unified military command can easily overthrow the government if it chooses to. To prevent this, the dictator will create rivalries between the services or even create new fighting forces outside the traditional armed services, like the Waffen SS and the Wagner Group.
MobiusKlein
@justinb:
while caring for you son, do remember to care for yourself. You need to be able to process information, make decisions.
Sleeping tonight is what you can do for him tomorrow
Anoniminous
@Jay:
Saw that. Then I saw a report saying it was a guerrilla group raising flag and the city was still occupied. AFAIK, the Ukrainian military has not officially declared the city liberated.
so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Jay
@Anoniminous:
yeah, there were a bunch of towns along that axis, where RU forces r-u-n-n-o-f-t, (O Brother, Where Art Thou? reference), and SOF and Resistance Forces raised flags, cleared the towns.
Some wound up having RU Forces reoccupy the towns, others, nobody knows. The situation is shall we say, “fluid”.
But it makes sense that the RU would rush forces to that axis to try to block further Ukrainian Army advances.
Jay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_cities_during_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
kalakal
@justinb: Sending all good thoughts to you and your son. He’s in the best place right now. Take care of yourself.
MaryLou
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): If the Russian disinformation pros didn’t invent the term ‘white feminism’ they should have. It’s a perfect example of using labels to divide people who should be natural allies.
Ruckus
@justinb:
They aren’t my kid but I have 2 neighbors with issues, my next door neighbor is in the hospital tonight with a couple of problems and I have to watch her dog and my other neighbor just got out of the hospital. The lady next door sounds more like your son than not from what I’ve been told but I agree with others, he’s getting the help he needs. Best of luck.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
You are correct, without a functional NCO force no military will function well. Officers tell people the big picture orders, the NCOs make the system functional, carry out the orders, operate the equipment. Officers are like big corporate VPs, NCOs are department managers and down. They know those that are better at any particular duty, and make overall orders happen. The other side of this is military equipment, and everyone responsible for it’s design is trying to suck the most money out of every angle possible, without seemingly much knowledge of what can go wrong. This makes for things like tanks that blow off their own turrets and vaporize everyone inside. Against a far less able force they can look impressive. Against a far superiorly motivated force they look like the shit they are. It’s not that they can’t do a dramatic amount of damage, it’s that they can get their asses badly kicked because they aren’t really a military, in the true sense of the word.
bjacques
I was completely unaware of the sustained troll attack on the Women’s March, let alone that it had any effect. I was under the impression that the march had been a success and the networking before, during and after had led to record numbers of women running for office and winning in 2017, 2018, and even 2019, that they were partly responsible for the 2018 wave.
At least now the IRA are getting a dose of their own medicine from NAFO. Shitposting is an art and (so far) beyond the talents of Russian psyops. And I wish penury and obscurity on Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica. If the Fellas had been around in 2016, the election may have turned out differently.
ColoradoGuy
Thanks so much for the NYT article. Food for thought that the internal divisions the Left of the West is famous for have been assisted from the outside by the FSB/KGB.
I remember a low point in the early Nineties when all the US Left could do was create ridiculous giant puppets and wave “Free Mumia” signs … a political movement aimed at assisting exactly *one* person. I was wondering at the time how much of this weakness, absurdity, and uselessness was self-generated, or if external actors were helping it along.
Chris T.
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛:
Poprah?
ETA: Poprah (The Poperah?) should live on Oprahpope Island.
Chris T.
On a more serious note, we really do need to do something about how social media act as a Wedge Issue Amplifier. What, I have no idea.
Sebastian
@Adam L Silverman:
Adam, am I correct in assuming you have already commissioned a Fella with Kamila? heh
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@smintheus: Reminiscent of Machiavelli’s admonition that it’s easier to get your people to fear you than to love you, and that fear may be a more solid basis for getting them to do your bidding, but you don’t want to engender fear in a way that gets them to hate you.
“…A prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred…”
Sebastian
@Chetan Murthy:
We can start bonking gopniks!
Adam L Silverman
@Sebastian: No, because I don’t have a Twitter account. I have bought stuff from St. Javelin, both before and after there were Fellas, but without a Twitter account there’s no way to “join”.
JR
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Just a cursed term.
If you want to call out racist feminism, maybe not calling “white” would be a start. Political movements succeed based on building trust and support.
Booger
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: Poperah, as it were?
J R in WV
@justinb: Way late to this topic, but as many others have said, once you get a loved one to the hospital, you have done the biggest thing you can accomplish. Now try to focus on keeping the medical care consistent, your son comfortable if at all possible…
Modern medical care is pretty advanced, my Wife has been through a lot this year and has been greatly helped by the doctors and nurses who have worked with her. Best of luck !!
ETA: Do please keep us posted with updates on how your son is doing!
daveNYC
@Bill Arnold: It’s perfectly cromulent as an academic term. Once people start using it in the wild though it starts to fall apart. Similar to ‘privilege’.
It basically is referring to intersectionality, same as privilege refers to various systemic biases, but if someone just throws the phrase at someone on Twitter without any actual details, it’s probably not going to go over well. Doubly so if it’s being thrown out there in bad faith.
Geminid
@bjacques: I think the first Women’s Marches were a success, and their impact was long lasting despite the Russian effort. The Women’s March’s national entity may have suffered from the Russian troll attacks (and governance issues as well), but this one organization was not in the long run essential to women asserting concerted political power.
Now that the Times has shown an interest in this area, I’m waiting for the them to report in similar detail on the more consequential Russian effort to suppress the Democratic vote in 2016. But I’m not holding my breath.
Jinchi
Hi Justinb,
Sorry to read of this. It’s a terrible thing to go through. Hoping for the best for you and your family.
Take care
WaterGirl
@justinb: Oh, I’m so sorry. What an awful, terrifying, helpless feeling.
It seems like the hospital can surely take care of the dehydration and then assess which symptoms are related to being dehydrated and which are clues as to the cause.
Hugs.
Carlo Graziani
@Anoniminous: Yeah, but the Russian outlook on logistics is nothing like the US view, or that of any NATO Army. Like, night and day. A good recent overview, which includes updated considerations drawn fom events in this war is in this article published in the Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies a few weeks ago. War on the Rocks had another good review last fall.
The Russians need train lines for any logistical haul longer than about 90 miles (generous estimate), and don’t palletize anything. Their truck haulage sucks, and may be experiencing the kind of parts crisis that the Russian civilian auto industry is going through, due to export control sanctions. So rail lins are absolutely crucial to them.
Cutting the Belgorod-Kupyansk-Izyum line was probably the main objective of the Kharkiv offensive in my opinion, not liberating a lot of territory — the latter was probably a pleasant surprise, when the Russians ran away. Similarly, if the Ukrainians can cut that last North-South line that terminates at Starobilsk, then Belgorod goes back to being a sleepy border town, and the Russians need to scramble to get a new supply pipeline set up over train lines from the East, which takes time. Probably time enough for the Ukrainians to eat the now disarmed Donbas grouping of the Russian army.
The Ukrainians don’t actually need to cut the line at Starobilsk. They just need to get within 80 km of any stretch of track on a reasonable road with good cover and a HIMARS unit. I think Kupyansk is still out of range, but not by much, maybe 20-30 km. Then they can either try for observation of or intel on a supply train — it’s amazing what you can do with a circular error probable of a few meters — or they can just fuck up the track, and any repair crews that approach it. Checkmate in the East.
Geminid
@Carlo Graziani: Have you followed any of the Institute for the Study of War’s coverage? They publish a daily update including maps. I haven’t made a comparison, but their maps might be better than the ones Pfarrer provides.
Carlo Graziani
@Geminid: I do check those occasionally. They are less notional than Pfarrer’s, and ISW provides a bibliography at the end of each update, which I confess warms the cockles of my academic heart. On the other hand the maps themselves are coarse-scale and low-resolution, and on occasion I’ve found, through comparisons with Google Maps, entire cities wrongly placed with respect to geographic features, and weird scale changes at land-water boundaries (so that, for example, inlets at the upper Dnipro that are clearly distinguishable on Google Maps, and ought to be helpful in identifying roads, front lines, etc. simply vanish in the ISW maps).
So it’s a different type of frustration, more of the “why the hell are you allowing your untrained intern’s experiments with your mapping software into your reports” type.
DaBunny
@justinb: My sympathies, I can imagine how terrifying that must be. I hope and expect they’ve been able to at least stabilize him, and you’ll know something more soon. Please do keep up updated.
Re Linda Sarsour et al, I’m torn. Being attacked by Russian trolls is horrid, but it doesn’t necessarily make someone a good person. Their embrace of Farrakhan is pretty disturbing, as is Sarsour’s anti-abortion stance.
Carlo Graziani
@Carlo Graziani: For reference, I’ll repost this map of Ukrainian lines, and from the Russian collection, this Belgorod section map The remaining Russian rail supply line from Belgorod looks to me to be about 300 km longer and farther east than the older Kupyansk-Izyum-Lysychansk one that is now cut, and runs through through Novy Oskol, Valyuki and Urazovo in Russia, thence to Starobilsk.
If that line is cut, then, I think the Russian’s next railhead option is in Luhansk. The Ukraine msp above leaves to the Esat, heading into Russia, connecting to this map. I have to cryptanalyze the Cyrillic using knowledge of the Greek alphabet, and help from Google maps, but I believe that that line goes to a stop called Millerovo, on the North-South line from Rostov-on-Don.
I think Rostov-on-Don is the “Belgorod” for the Southern theater, fed through Crimea. I’m not sure. As an aside, it’s amazing to me how difficult it is for a non-professional like me to locate actual information on Russian rail logistics in this war by Google searches. I’m sure there are professional resources somewhere, but it’s not my literature, and I can’t find it. The web is flooded with kaboom-war noise, and I’ve found it nearly impossible to extract this logistical signal.
Anyway, the point is: cut that Eastern line in Ukraine, and now the Russians have to (a) abandon Belgorod as a marshalling yard for their supply trains; (b) (probably) divide the supplies and train scheduling in Rostov-on-Don between Southern theatre and the Donbas; (c) set up a railhead in Luhansk at a farther rail distance than the old Belgorod-Izyum run (also, setup time, tick-tock…); (d) run their truck hauls that much farther to and from the front.
UncleEbeneezer
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: What makes all of this stuff so tricky is that there are always legitimate points that Russia (and others) weaponize. So while a swarm of social media posts about White Feminism may be trolls, at the same time you can easily find a bunch of Black women who aren’t trolls, and often are the ones doing the work that trolls want to hinder, who can talk your ear off about White Feminism and all the ways in which it is problematic. And they are the people we actually should be listening to and engaging with on this stuff, because many of their views are ones we don’t see on our own, or will be hesitant to acknowledge due to fragility. I think one of the big parts of the problem is that these psyops/troll efforts take conversations that actually do need to happen, and are very touchy and require good faith actors and nuance and grace, and they invite a mob of people into them. In addition to the obviously bad actors, and even well-meaning but fairly ignorant people who end up just piling on to the points of division. Conversations about tricky subjects almost always collapse into vitriolic extremes and picking-sides as soon as they are opened up to large numbers of people. You can see this by joining any Private FB group on a topic and compare the conversation/engagement to a Public FB group. It’s why most social media pages/groups dedicated to any policy issue usually end up having to go private.
Sebastian
@Adam L Silverman:
We have to establish the Ballon-Juice Fella Battalion!
Brit in Chicago
@Chetan Murthy: Bad news: we have to be able to think of more than one thing at a time. At the moment we are, inevitably, focused on the war, and thus on the aspects of Russia that remind one more of Stalin than of Dostoevsky. When you think of Germany do you think of Beethoven and Goethe and the Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or of Hitler? And when you think of the USA, which Leonard Cohen called “the cradle of the best and the worst”? But the truth is complicated.
Matt McIrvin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): “White feminism” that stumbles on intersectionality is definitely a real thing, but I was never clear on why the Women’s March in particular was an egregious example of it. And it’s interesting to hear that the answer could be “it wasn’t, that was just a Russian psyop exploiting existing intra-left fissures”.
Matt McIrvin
@justinb: If nothing else, just getting an IV in him likely dealt with the dehydration, and that’s a very good thing. Best wishes and I hope he is doing better ASAP.
Chetan Murthy
@Brit in Chicago: I think what was meant by the tweet, is that too many people forget Stalin in favor of Tolstoy. And that that is a mistake. Just as a balanced perspective on our country has to include both our shepherding of NATO, and *also* our gunboat diplomacy (and its progeny over a century). “Too many people think of Russia as sweetness-and-light-except-for-that-regrettable-Soviet-episode” is what I think that tweet was trying to point out.
Matt McIrvin
@Bill Arnold:
I think that on the right, in-group identification and loyalty to leaders are strong enough values that they override a lot of internal disagreement, and this makes it harder to split people apart. Neocons and paleocons, libertarians and fundies may hate each other but they’ll come together to support Republican candidates when Election Day rolls around. On the left, we value being right and doing the right thing over these loyalties, in fact we regard it as an act of particular courage when people oppose their kin or allies over a matter of principle, and it means it’s easier to create or exacerbate internal dissension by telling people their allies are behaving immorally in some way.
There was recently a Twitter blowup that happened just because it came out that some popular left tweeters were employed by defense contractors. They didn’t particularly opine on defense-related issues–they just had an unrelated alignment that some people on the left regarded as immoral. That’s the kind of situation where it’s easy to prod people into fighting or rejecting each other.
wenchacha
@Matt McIrvin: I have to look it up, but I recall Sarsour being linked to Louis Farrakhan, and it caused some issues for people who otherwise would have marched.
And now I wonder.
Geminid
@wenchacha: I don’t think Sarsour’s affinity with Farrakhan inhibited participation in the first Women’s March in DC. One of seven or more principal organizers, Sarsour had a lower profile at the time than she would afterwards as one of the four woman who controlled Women’s March Inc.
Fellow board member Tamika Mallory did cause a lot of consternation when she attended a high profile Farrakhan event some months after the first March.The December10, 2018 Tablet Magazine article I referenced at #55, titled “Is the Women’s March Imploding?,” discusses this and other issues with the national Women’s March leadership and their governance. It’s an interesting read.
wenchacha
@Geminid: Thanks. I know it caused a real rift among a group of friends.
Bill Arnold
@Matt McIrvin:
OK, but this just makes it a more interesting challenge. :-)
I think you’re right about the US left. The saddening aspect is that it has a big attack surface, with many of the vulnerabilities proudly documented.