Damore, Putin, Trump, Steele: Essential Context in Four Long Reads and Change

Stuck in an airplane, I was finally able to catch up to my reading list. There’s some good long reads worth sharing, and one I’m rather conflicted about. Discuss :)

1. Tribalism, Polarization, and Other Bothsiding Bullshit

Andrew Sullivan starts his essay “Can Democracy Survive Tribalism?" with a valid concern about letting political polarization devolve into tribalism, but my ability to agree with its reasoning came to a screeching halt at “brilliant coder, James Damore." Google employs tens of thousands of people, not every one of them is brilliant, and most of them are not coders. Damore is neither, he’s a mediocre data scientist (a fancy Silicon Valley title for a computer literate statistician). I get that you want your examples on both sides of the divide appear balanced, but if you have to stretch the facts to fit your story, your whole story is a lie.

“fired from Google for airing civil, empirical arguments against the left-feminist assumptions behind the company’s employment practices” – read Erin Giglio’s “The truth has got its boots on: what the evidence says about Mr. Damore’s Google memo” for a good thorough debunking of this statement. Damore’s manifesto was not empirical, was not objective, and disputed the facts established by scientists, not the assumptions made by “left-feminists”.

“Obama ramped up deportations to levels higher than Trump’s rate so far” – another known alternative fact. Comparing Obama era numbers to those before and after him is not apples to apples. Before, many deportations were not counted as such because of lack of due process for people turned away at the border. And now, Trump’s throwing people who have been lawful and productive members of society into concentration camps does not equal to turning people away before they settle.

“today’s Democrats must believe that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism” – what a twisted way to imply that someone’s financial worth (because that’s the outcome feminists are challenging) is an objective measure of their value to the society, and is entirely unaffected by society’s subjective perception of that person.

“white supremacist … is now routinely used on the left to mean, simply, racism” – it has always meant simply racism. The only difference is that it is more specific and reconciliatory in that it recognizes that there are other, non-white, kinds of racism. It’s just that those other kinds are much less of a problem right now.

“when actual white supremacists march in the streets, you have no language left to describe them as any different from, say, all Trump supporters” – do we really need to describe differently the people who march in the streets under Nazi and KKK banners and the people who support them from the safety of their homes?

“antifa activists would be proudly extolling violence as the only serious response” – the only response? Only if you artificially narrow down your definition of antifa to just those who actually use violence, and where would that tautology leave your concern for “white supremacist” being applied to Trump and his supporters? Even this year, cases of antifa violence remain few and minor, and constitute a very small fraction of what antifa movement does to limit the reach of neo-fascists.

I’ve seen this kind of arguments before, so I’m not even surprised that it leads to a conclusion that we all have to obey Trump or there will be civil war. This is not how democracy works, and authoritarianism is not how you achieve lasting peace. Don’t confuse choosing a lesser evil with submitting to greater evil out of fear.

2. What Putin Really Wants

Julia Ioffe’s “What Putin Really Wants” shows how Putin and the rest of Russian leadership, such as it is, thinks about the West, how the Panama Papers exposing Putin’s cellist $2 billion piggy bank have provoked him into ordering a retaliation against Hillary, and how the chaotic operation of multiple Russian agencies stepping on each other’s toes was misjudged by the Obama administration to be a lot narrower and limited in scope than it really was.

It is very obviously missing out on Seth Abramson’s discovery of where Comey’s letter realy come from, and dismisses the success of the Russian propaganda campaign on social networks as blind luck, probably because it largely ignores the American players that were involved in both. But that’s not the point of the article, it is all about Russia. The point is to understand motivations of Putin, his inner circle, his followers in Russia, and his mercenaries in the war he’s waging against Western Democracy.

It goes through all the staples of the Russian anti-West sentiment: NATO expansion, Iraq War, Putin’s Munich speech, Arab Spring, NGOs, Maidan, to paint a picture of an increasingly paranoid dictator, obsessed with the story of Qaddafi’s death, in a country balancing on the verge of collapse. What makes him dangerous is not his resources nor his strategic prowess, it is his desperation of a cornered rat. He has no exit strategy and he is determined to take the world down with him.

3. Trump’s Private Russian Connections

“The Curious World of Donald Trump’s Private Russian Connections” by James S. Henry is a detailed account, with meticulously recorded references to legal and financial documents and other sources, of the long relationship between Trump and the Russian business, government, and organized crime (which in Russia is mostly the same people at different stages of their career), going as far back as the 90-s, published by The American Interest, a conservative magazine led by Francis Fukuyama. Its importance in this series is to show how Trump appeared on Putin’s radar to begin with.

It is the most comprehensive enumeration I’ve seen of Trump’s Russian deals, with most of them connected in one way or another to Semion Mogilevich and the Solntsevo Bratva, to Russian, Ukrainian, and Kazakh oligarchs, to offshore shell corporations and corrupt Icelandic banks. And yet, it looks like just a tip of an iceberg that took decades to form and is going to take decades more to fully uncover.

4. The Steele Dossier

Luke Harding’s “How Trump walked into Putin’s web” is a narrative on his compatriot Christopher Steele, his history with Russia, his track record investigating the Litvinenko assassination and FIFA corruption, how his reports on Trump came to be and how they, along with more signals from GCHQ, BND, SIS, and other European intelligence agencies, were received and largely ignored by their US counterparts.

Now we know that Obama administration’s ability to act was paralyzed by Mitch McConnell’s threat to declare any investigation, no matter the evidence, a politically motivated witch hunt, and Comey was paralyzed by the threat of leaks from his own subordinates in New York. For fear of looking like deep state trying to install Hillary Clinton, which undoubtedly would have severely damaged public trust in American Democracy, they had allowed the real deep state to help an openly hostile foreign government to install an international disaster of a president committed to destroying American Democracy altogether.

If you haven’t yet seen Jane Mayer’s Steele profile in New Yorker, take a look. Covers everything there is to know about him so far, and adds quite a few new details I haven’t seen before:

1. Steel not only tracked down the FSB agents that killed Litvinenko, and uncovered the corrupt FIFA officials (including an embezzler with a luxury apartment in the Trump Tower) who among other things sold the 2018 world cup vote to Russia, he also helped FBI take down a Russian mob’s gambling and money laundering syndicate (also operating out of an apartment in Trump Tower). Furthermore, the fugitive head of that syndicate, despite having an Interpol red notice on him, was seated right next to Trump during the 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow.

2. Steele’s previous project before looking into Trump was investigation of Russia’s interference in EU politics, where he saw the Russian troll factory in action, and uncovered connections between Kremlin and Berlusconi, Le Pen, and far right nationalists in UK.

3. Clinton campaign wasn’t even aware that Steele contacted FBI, nor that FBI was already investigating Trump even before they heard from Steele. Nobody except the law firm they hired even knew that a former MI6 expert in Russia was engaged. Even Obama didn’t know about it until January 2017.

4. In August 2016, GCHQ briefed CIA on illicit communications they intercepted between Trump campaign and Moscow. The intercepts have not yet become public, but have convinced the CIA Director, also before he’s seen the dossier, that Russia is working to get Trump elected.

5. Steele wrote a follow-up memo in November 2016, reporting that be Kremlin told Trump not to nominate Mitt Romney as Secretary of State. In December, Trump stopped considering Romney and instead have the job to Tillerson, an oil exec with a vested interest in lifting sanctions against Russia.