Samurai Sanders posted:

Even if someone is all in on tribalism they still have the concept of the traitor right? What would it take for Trump to activate it and turn love into the strongest hate in the blink of an eye?

King Possum III posted:

2

King Possum III posted:

7

Apple Pie Hubbub posted:

Samurai Sanders posted:

Is my mind just completely in the gutter for interpreting this as that he buttfucked all of them, men and women? I'm not familiar with other things having the back of your pants violently torn off could symbolize.

King Possum III posted:

14

F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:

drat hypocrite. Wasn't it just a few years ago when Ramirez's ilk were blistering about Our Brave Intelligence Community because it was "under attack" by Obama (rhetorical question; I think I already know the answer)?

It never ceases to amaze me how easily these people turn from their supposedly deeply held convictions on a dime.

quote:

For example, in July 1977, the CIA reported the following:

The Soviet economy faces serious strains in the decade ahead. The simple growth formula upon which the economy has relied for more than a generation—maximum inputs of labor and capital—will no longer yield the sizeable annual growth which has provided resources needed for competing claims.... Reduced growth, as is foreshadowed over the next decade, will make pursuit of these objectives much more difficult, and pose hard choices for the leadership, which can have a major impact on Soviet relations with Eastern Europe and the West.
[...]
If the documentary record is clear, then why do so many people believe that the Intelligence Community failed to detect the Soviet Union’s social and economic problems in the late 1970s?

One reason may have been that, at the time, the Soviet Union seemed ascendant. It had matched and even surpassed the United States in several measures of military capability, such as numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles. It had expanded its influence through military cooperation treaties with clients in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The popular media (and the Intelligence Community) duly reported these events, and so the zeitgeist was that the Soviets were strong, and the United States was stuck in malaise. Since American officials did not effectively challenge this view in public, Americans logically concluded later that this reflected the intelligence they were reading.

Besides, nothing was inevitable about a Soviet collapse in the late 1970s. At that point, many outcomes were possible. A more ruthless leader might have held the state together for another ten or fifteen years; witness Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and Kim Jong-Il in North Korea. A more flexible leader might have managed a ‘‘soft landing’’ for the Soviet Communist Party; witness the current situation in China. To provide a more definitive estimate fifteen years before the fact was impossible because the future was not yet certain. It never is.

quote:

In April 1991 the Office of Soviet Analysis (SOVA), the office within the Directorate of Intelligence that followed developments in the USSR, told U.S. leaders explicitly that the Soviet Union was in a state of crisis, offered a poor prognosis, and spelled out specific scenarios in which the regime could implode. In a memo titled, ‘‘The Soviet Cauldron,’’ SOVA’s director wrote,

The economy is in a downward spiral with no end in sight...inflationwas about 20 percent at the end of last year and will be at least double that this year...reliance on a top-down approach to problems, particularly in regard to republics, has generated a war of laws between various levels of power and created a legal mess to match the economic mess.... In this situation of growing chaos, explosive events havebecome increasingly possible.

The memo then went on to describe possible outcomes, which included the assassination of Gorbachev or Boris Yeltsin, or a coup by ‘‘reactionary leaders who judge that the last chance to act had come’’—which is, of course, exactly what later occurred.

quote:

Gates believes he gave Bush warning because the CIA had previously established the prerequisite conditions for there to be a coup, and he says that the President’s daily briefing for 17 August indicated that those conditions were present. Bush wanted to know whether any specific datum indicated what might happen or when, but Gates had no such specific datum.

These two different slants on the same material suggest just how controversial an assessment of whether one was ‘‘blindsided’’ can be, and they also highlight exactly where, if anywhere, the Intelligence Community fell short. To reach this last step in anticipating the Soviet collapse, the CIA would have needed first-hand information from the plotters themselves. Analysis alone can never fill that kind of gap, if only because an analysis is at best a probability assessment necessarily based on inference and deduction. The key datum that was lacking was, as Bush put it, the '‘specific information on what might happen or when.’’ This was a very tough piece of information to collect. Even Gorbachev lacked it, obviously.

Doc Hawkins posted:

That was also my first thought, but I think he was going for an image of Trump "beating the pants off" the media; in other words, defeating them very thoroughly.

...I'm disturbed I couldn't find any other replies giving this explanation. Call me the Branco-whisperer, I guess.

King Possum III posted:

8

Apple Pie Hubbub posted:

TheBigAristotle posted:

No mention of intelligence around, say, 2003?

King Possum III posted:

4

TheBigAristotle posted:

No mention of intelligence around, say, 2003?

Trogdos! posted:

Obama is so bad he's there twice

Trogdos! posted:

2

CampingCarl posted:

I wondered what Dees though of bitcoin. I always wanted him to find some crazy conspiracy with it.

NoEyedSquareGuy posted:

Mr. Fish released this "cartoon"

Kurtofan posted:

goddamn do i hate mr fish

Apple Pie Hubbub posted:

Retromancer posted:

The CIA should be shuttered. AGC.

Apple Pie Hubbub posted:

Samurai Sanders posted:

What the hell is he talking about?

Somfin posted:

Goat yoga is apparently a thing.

Tinsley is against it because it is new and different and strange.

I can't wait for the two-week delay to start absolutely biting him in the arse.

logger posted:

The real top-story should be what the gently caress is wrong with his hand.

It's like he drew the microphone before remembering the guy is supposed to be holding it.

Jurgan posted:

Has it been two weeks since Trump announced his travel ban? I would love to see him show Mallard discussing how smoothly and effectively it was initiated.

CampingCarl posted:

I wondered what Dees though of bitcoin. I always wanted him to find some crazy conspiracy with it.

Plan Z posted:

I've got to figure out how to edit this for my twitter banner.

Brother Entropy posted:

garrison believing in pizzagate is certainly a thing

Apple Pie Hubbub posted:

Jedit posted:

Pretty sure the CIA actually warned that 9/11 was in the offing at least twice before it happened. But if you like the taste of Republican dick, Ramirez, who am I to tell you to stop sucking it?

Plan Z posted:

. I just got over reading a book entirely about how American intelligence predicted almost to the month the collapse of the Soviet Union years ahead of time because it was something we were working towards for forty years so that's something he pulled out of his rear end.

Ratoslov posted:

It's the nuclear apocalypse. The rest of the comic is about scavenging for food and meaning in the apocalyptic wastelands of the American southwest, sporadically punctuated by terrible attempts at political satire.