******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
Yes! Where’s the real evidence? Crossing a thread line here, I agree with Louis Proyect, who wrote on Friday 2018.07.20, “Frankly, I don't care if Russia helped Trump get elected or not.” Nor am I convinced that a Clinton victory would have made much difference. Trump has performed a great service to the leadership and backers of both parties: he has provided a highly effective distraction. While various supporters and opponents have vociferously made their views known – and garnered a lot of media coverage in the process – the main event, the looting of the main body of the people, has gone or continued pretty much unnoticed in the press and among the people in the street. It’s all about tweets and abuse of expense accounts and Russian collusion, and not about the deeper story. Yes, Trump represents the ruling class, in the same way that a clown represents a circus. It doesn’t matter whether he does it intentionally or knowingly or not, but he does it anyway. He’s a great distraction. This whole matter of Russian collusion and the purloined DNC files serves as a good example, as a part of the distraction. Whether the collusion issue matters or not in the grand scheme of things, it has resulted in the insanity of just about everyone. Maybe I’m missing something here, so someone help me, but where is the evidence for any version of this story? I looked at the indictment: it has allegations, but no evidence. I looked at the DNI report: the same story. The gold standard for forensic evidence would be Clinton’s server, but, as Trump asked, where is it? (I doubt if Trump really comprehends the significance of his own question here.) Destruction of evidence is a crime, too, but does anyone care? I’m certainly not defending Trump here, but I don’t believe any statements by anyone from the FBI, CIA, NSA, or anyone else in the so-called intelligence community, nor do I have any confidence in whatever Putin or just about anyone else says. This whole thing is just a big show. When I tell someone I can’t accept the official version of this or that story (the JFK assassination, the 2001 WTC demolition, and so on), and people ask me what really happened, I almost always have to answer, “I don’t know, but the official story doesn’t work, it isn’t consistent with the facts”. But people have an extremely difficult time accepting that. It’s as if people demand an answer, even a wrong one, and refuse to be put into a position of ignorance. They’d rather be wrong than ignorant. I’m new to this Marxism thing. Somehow, until the last two years, I’d never been exposed to it. But it works well for my minimalist approach to certainty. It doesn’t matter if Putin helped Trump or if Wikileaks got the DNC files from any specific person or what really was behind any gas attack in Syria: the class analysis subsumes these things. It has been a little like reading Einstein’s General Theory: it encompasses the Special Theory, which generalizes Newton’s laws, and so on. It makes predictions which can be tested. It’s not complete, as we still don’t have a grand theory of everything, but it’s up the ladder. Of course, I get sucked into these ancillary questions, too. It’s fun, I’m a sucker for unsolved puzzles, and I like a good story and appreciate entertainment. Meanwhile, as Michelle Wolf pointed out at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the folks in Flint still don’t have clean drinking water. And, I might add, they’re still dying and otherwise suffering all over the world. I’m not asking anyone to drop these topics. As I said, I enjoy them. I’ve stopped reading some “news” sites since I began reading this list: it’s a great source of links to news and more. So I ask all you old-timers, in all humility, what have I been missing? Where is the real evidence that Julian Assange was or wasn’t duped, that he colluded or participated? While I’d find it hard to swallow a line that the Russian state didn’t fool around with computers and opinions and engaged in propagandizing, is there any real evidence that the DNC files ended up in the hands of Wikileaks because of the Russians and not because of an insider’s leak? Is there any real evidence that Assange knew one way or the other? As far as I can see, we (the outsiders?) don’t really know anything for sure. That’s pretty remarkable, in itself. In fact, that’s probably more interesting than the truth behind the revelation of the files. Just as, the truth behind the lack of a real, independent investigation into the 2001 WTC event is probably just as interesting as, if not more so than, the event itself. It’s one thing to commit a crime, and another thing – usually more difficult – to avoid discovery. It’s possible to create a lot of contradictory stories, many credible to varying degrees, when we have no unimpeachable facts. That seems to be where we are. I imagine that the lack, itself, of our knowledge probably says more about the class and other social structure than do the details of the events. In a very real way, the control of access to facts says a lot about who’s really in power. Yes, it’s consistent with our supposed class structure. And, unlike whether Assange did this or Trump did that, we don’t have to speculate: we know that we don’t know. The extreme compartmentalization of knowledge in the world is a new thing, I think. Back in the Nineteenth Century, the capitalists discussed openly how to create a world safe from the “predations” of the proletariat, they and their allies wrote books and no one cared who read them: they had power and they felt safe. Now there is secrecy, and apocalypse carries the death penalty or worse. Am I wrong, or when was this first recognized? Did Marx, or does Marxism, say anything about knowledge, or lack of it, among the proletariat, and how it would relate to revolution? It seems that holding strong opinions without conclusive evidence results in avoidable division. What that was or is said, applies to the current information and disinformation wars? _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
