10 days.
I wrote about plausible alternatives to the Russian hacking version of the DNC leaks for Paste.
It’s a lazy, half-baked attempt at explaining away the election of Donald Trump by the outgoing intelligence officials that will leave their offices on January 20. Introspection on the part of the Democratic Party and the broader political establishment must be avoided lest they learn any lessons from their electoral defeat—it’s better to blame the Cold War enemies of the United States. And that fits the pattern on this long running story.Because for all the repetition and chest beating over Russian involvement in the hacking of the DNC and the Clinton campaign, there’s still been very little actual evidence presented. What has been presented is sketchy at best and thoroughly inconclusive. In fact, there’s at least as much indication of any number of other individuals or groups as responsible for the dumps of information from the Democrats. And that lack of evidence is starting to raise questions among journalists.
Carl Beijer, at Jacobin, addresses a recent piece at Think Progress that asserts, basically, that fascism and socialism are two sides of the same white supremacist coin.
Resnikoff notes that Mussollini was a “scribbler for various socialist publications” — but neglects to mention that one of the very first political actions that we can call “fascist” was the 1919 attack on Avanti, the socialist daily where Mussolini had worked as an editor. That incident exemplified Mussolini’s rise to power, and its exercise: his base was gangs of blackshirts who attacked leftists and workers on behalf of the rich, and far from “smuggl[ing] elements of socialist thought” into power, he built an oligarchy that brutally suppressed the influence of labor and radicals.
And Erin Gloria Ryan drops acid and goes to the Consumer Electronics Show for The Daily Beast.
I’d been warned that the drug would make me “sensitive to vibes,” which I interpreted as hippie talk for “overdramatic about liking or disliking things.” This turned out to be true. On my rocket-ship flight through CES, I very dramatically did not like booths advertising new speakers. I did not like cars. I did not like the robots. I did not like the large kitchen appliances. I envisioned some rich idiot who doesn’t know how to cook outfitting his dumb kitchen with them because they’re expensive, because they are a thing to have that tells visitors he has money. He’d never use them. It’d be like buying a racehorse and then turning it into glue. A wasted good kitchen is a goddamn crime. An expensive dishwasher won’t make your trophy wife love you for your personality.
See you Wednesday.