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Comment by konjin | Hacker News Reader

This is a classic motte and bailey argument.

You are holding the factual motte: that Russian intelligence agencies bought some adds on social media and pretending it's the same as the bailey of the larger conspiracy theory: that Russian agents did everything up to an including hacking into voting machines, changing tallies in swing states, having blackmail on Trump, Trump having a Russian handler, Trump being a Russian asset and all sorts of other nonsense.

Russia gate is Qanon for liberals.

We even have a factual Jewish pedophile with ties to Clinton, the British Crown and the CIA who died in 'mysterious' circumstances for the Qanon motte.

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Do we even have solid proof that IRA bought the ads? The last I saw it was "a Kremlin-linked company".

Likewise, you're doing the reverse motte and bailey of: that Trump clearly was not a super-spy being directed out of Moscow as part of a Cold War style operation where a host of right wing Americans were controlled and micromanaged by Russian spymasters: THEREFORE there was nothing Russia could have been doing that would be useful to them, and it's all just made up nonsense, 'russiagate'.

Adam Curtis himself outlined some background for the counter-argument in Hypernormalization: Putin's very successful politics of chaos. This is a practice where Putin supported a number of contradictory political actors to produce 'the Zone', a condition where you couldn't really know who was real and who was being supported by Putin and putting forth fake argument.

THAT, not the Cold War style micro-management, is what ended up doing the real damage, and it's been dismayingly effective. Adam Curtis had observed and reported on it years ago.

Or we did it to ourselves with a media that gave Trump 2 billion dollars in free air time because he was the best thing to happen to ratings, 40 years of falling living standards only buoyed up by more work, mortgages and credit cards, of politicians lies that left 80% of the country sinking while making life at the top better than it ever was.

It is easy to blame someone outside for our problem, much less so to admit that there wasn't an evil master mind smart enough to play 20 dimensional chess yet foolish enough to be brought down by a few plucky reporters with a mac book.

No, Russia is an excuse and if the next Trump is what people lied this Trump was we would be indeed doomed.

It's not 20 dimensional chess. It's simple Chapayev[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapayev_(game)

It is not a reversible relation.

Denial of the totality of Russiagate (shadowy foreign powers are using the scary, technological internet to reach into the minds of innocent Americans who would otherwise be happily eating apple pie and going to work on time in the porn and missile factory) does not imply that the motte is untrue.

It is very possible that Russia, or some element of the Russian elite, have sought to propagandize the USA. But here is zero proof that it was effective, let alone that there was control of Trump, zero proof of voting irregularities, zero proof of a change in foreign policy advantageous to Russia.

Russiagate is irrational. Maybe not as lurid as QAnon, but similarly lacking in support for its major theses.

There's an interesting kind of reverse motte and bailey I've noticed happening with QAnon too.

Motte: Trump was not an undercover operative working to undermine a deep state cabal with patriots who have secretly arrested almost every major politician and celebrity and replaced them with holograms.

Bailey: there's no such thing as elite pedophile rings.

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