[Radio War Nerd] In the grim darkness of the near present, there is only war nerd

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E Depois do Adeus: Jun 3, 2012; Nobody has better respect for intelligence than Donald Trump.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

I'm a little vague on the details now, because I'm not sure if the police raiding their offices came before or after this - but the eXile ran a joke insinuating that Putin was gay. There was a story in Russian press about Putin's wife telling the Russian version of Liberace to "stay away from him," so they published the gay joke. One of the more powerful goons in United Russia took that as his cue to try and impress the big man and went on a radio show, where he dropped all sorts of innuendo that sounded like exactly what's said about every other journalist in Russia who ended up being assassinated. So Mark didn't take any chances and fled back to America.

Thanks for the explanation.

In what probably wasn't meant to humanize Putin, one of the Gerard de Villiers books begins with one of Putin's advisors telling him to look at a website because it'll make him mad. The website is designed to piss him off and he indeed gets mad. What separates him from the common man is that he then orders the plutonium-laced death of the oligarch who finances the website

# ? Feb 22, 2022 05:56

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# ? May 23, 2024 06:22

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

i say swears online posted:

it's a blindspot and i'm increasingly frustrated that they do not. north, west, east, central, south, pick a region, contact a professor, set up an interview. again their last biafran expert had a british accent. i want someone to scoff at john as oyinbo

i liked the al-shabaab episode they did

if you just call up a rando professor you risk getting someone with whom you just absolutely don't gel or who has weird crank ideas. may be preferable to tapping whatever affluent expat you can get your hands on, but it's got some risks attached

# ? Feb 22, 2022 10:45

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

There are a few conflicting stories about how The Exile died. From the Vanity Fair article that's over a decade old:

quote:

he demise of The Exile began, as so many demises have in Russia, with an official letter. Faxed to the offices of the newspaper late on a Friday afternoon the spring before last from somewhere within the bowels of Rossvyazokhrankultura, the Russian Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications, and Cultural Heritage Protection, it announced the imminent �conducting of an unscheduled action to check the observance of the legislation of the Russian Federation on mass media.� The Exile, a Moscow-based, English-language biweekly, stood accused of violating Article Four of that legislation by encouraging extremism, spreading pornography, or promoting drug use. The letter scheduled the unscheduled action to take place between May 13 and June 11. This being Russia, it wasn�t faxed until May 22.

An Exile sales director, about to leave for the day, received the fax and phoned an editor, who called the real target of the letter, Exile founder and editor in chief Mark Ames, at that moment a world away in Los Gatos, California. Ames in turn promptly called a few lawyers in Moscow, who warned him he might be arrested if he returned. Someone, apparently, had it out for The Exile.

But who? Ames likes to indulge a grandiose paranoia whenever possible, and did. A functionary? An enraged oligarch? Someone on President Dmitry Medvedev�s staff, or, more to the point, in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin�s circle of spooks? (The Exile�s first cover story on Putin, in 1999, grafted the man�s head onto the body of a latex-clad dominatrix over the headline putin commands mother russia: kneel!) Egotism aside, the possibilities were in fact endless. Since its debut, in 1997, The Exile, which read like the bastard progeny of Spy magazine and an X-rated version of Poor Richard�s Almanack, had pilloried, in the foulest terms possible, almost everyone of importance, and no importance, in Russia, and had made a point of violating not one but all of Article Four�s provisions. But everyone knew that.

So why now?

No one seemed to know that.

The one thing that Ames did know: he was going back to Moscow. Putin�s Russia is an infinitely more dangerous place for journalists than the crumbling country that had drawn Ames 15 years before from the same suburban town where he paced about now, but still it was Russia, and not America, that was his spiritual home. It was not for nothing he�d named his paper The Exile.

Several days after Ames returned to Moscow, the dour Federal Service officials, three men led by a woman, arrived at the paper�s office. When they walked in, a staffer old enough to remember some of the worst parts of the Soviet era, crossed herself and simply ran from the office, Ames says. The officials questioned Ames for more than three hours, going through issue after issue of The Exile, by turns offended, disgusted, baffled. Ames suppressed his urge to start cursing at the officials in mat, Russian�s profane slang, as he watched them thumb through his life�s work, but his restraint meant little: news of the interrogation soon got out, and stories appeared in the Russian press, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters. Ames�s investors broke off contact. The distributors stopped sending trucks. �They worried that everybody would be sent to Siberia,� Exile sales director Zalina Abdusalamova says.

Just like that, The Exile�s era was over.

That tends to be Ames's view on how things ended. Some of the investors in the paper had a different take:

quote:

After Taibbi left, Ames became The Exile�s sole editor in chief and its lead reporter, writing investigative pieces on covert U.S. involvement in Georgia and on oil disputes in the Caspian Sea and, in a painful Socratic episode, covering the trial and incarceration of Edward Limonov, in what may be the best work of his career. Jake Rudnitsky filed excellent dispatches from Siberia and the Urals. John Dolan moved to Moscow and started a first-rate literary column in which he was an early outer of faux memoirist James Frey. But The Exile was never much of a business, and Moscow was changing. It had become expensive and clean and was taking on an ominous neo-Soviet flush. The expats had gone home, and journalists, including Americans, were being killed. Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov, whom Ames knew, was gunned down in 2004. �Even the snow seemed archaic and doomed,� says Dolan, who left in 2006. The Exile nearly collapsed in 2007, before a group of private investors bailed it out.

Certain people close to The Exile, including some of those investors, claim Rossvyazokhrankultura did not cause it to fold. They say that Ames was tired of publishing it and that he used the government as a scapegoat. Alex Shifrin, The Exile�s lead investor, whom Ames accuses of abandoning him, would say only, �There are a lot of half-truths as to what happened.� Another investor claims the officials were simply looking for a bribe. �There was no government plot. I think everybody had it out for The Exile to some extent,� he says. But the investors didn�t �want to get involved with a media fight [Ames was] having with the feds.�

Ames flatly denies this.

Nina Ognianova, a program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, who worked on The Exile�s case, says the fact that the Federal Service officials asked repeatedly about Limonov shows �the audit was politicized.� She says, �Now that the mainstream space is cleared, the state has been methodically moving towards auditing and harassing smaller papers and Internet publications.� The irony is that The Exile was always far harder on America than Russia and, by the end, was probably more widely read by Russians than Americans. Finally, politics and finances may have conspired. �The Exile could never be profitable in [Russia],� Zalina Abdusalamova says. �If you want to be profitable, you have to be nice. The Exile was not nice. It was honest, but it was not nice.�

In June, Ames threw one last Exile party. At a strip club. �It was the most depressing party I�ve ever been to,� Yasha Levine says. �It dawned on a lot of people that they were never going to work on something this cool again. The dream had died and we�d be moving on to lamer and more boring jobs.�

So Ames might be embellishing some to ignore the fact that the paper's financials were bad shape. Hard to say, but if you want to read all the dirty details the article is [url=https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/02/exile-201002]here[/url.] One highlight is the author meets up with Matt Taibbi for coffee. Matt throws the coffee in the journalist's face after he tells him the Exile book wasn't very good.

# ? Feb 22, 2022 11:14

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

the basic account seems straightforward, though - ames got visited by the feds, people got spooked, paper died. i can certainly imagine that they didn't really earn enough to justify further investment, especially in the new, more repressive russia and that ames himself didn't handle the stress very well, but it's natural to not want to blame oneself when something one's fought pretty courageously for fails if there are other credible culprits available

# ? Feb 22, 2022 11:21

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Yeah it's really just about the dirty details. Missing context from those quotations (that's elsewhere in the article) is that before that Ames went back to the states to do research for Going Postal, Taibbi took over as editor, got addicted to heroin, and ran the paper into the ground. That's the story anyway.

# ? Feb 23, 2022 03:32

Nothus: Feb 22, 2001; Buglord

quote:

John Dolan moved to Moscow and started a first-rate literary column in which he was an early outer of faux memoirist James Frey.

That one was an all-time banger, given how popular that stupid book was at the time.

http://exiledonline.com/a-million-pieces-of-poo poo/

# ? Feb 23, 2022 04:06

Phone: Jul 30, 2005; 親子丼をほしい。

i absolutely forgot about that, holy poo poo lmbooooooooooo

# ? Feb 23, 2022 04:51

beer gas canister: Oct 30, 2007; shmups are da best come play some shmups they're cheap and good and you like them; Plaster Town Cop

Nothus posted:

That one was an all-time banger, given how popular that stupid book was at the time.

http://exiledonline.com/a-million-pieces-of-poo poo/

quote:

But then Frey is no expert observer, as he proves in one of the funniest scenes from his nature walks, when he meets a �fat otter�: �There is an island among the rot, a large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch. There is chatter beneath the pile and a fat brown otter with a flat, armored tail climbs atop and he stares at me.�

Now, can anyone tell me what a �fat otter with a flat, armored tail� actually is? That�s right: a beaver! Now, can anyone guess what the �large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch� would be? Yes indeed: a beaver dam!

Any kindergartner would know that, and anyone with a flicker of life would be delighted to see a beaver and its home. But for Frey, a very stupid and very vain man, the �fat otter� is nothing but another mirror in which to adore his Terrible Fate. He engages the beaver in the most dismal of adolescent rhetorical interrogations:

�Hey, Fat Otter.

He stares at me.

You want what I got?

He stares at me.

I�ll give you everything.

Stares at me�.�

And so on, for another half-page. You want to slap the sulking spoiled brat. The Fat Otter should�ve slapped him with its �flat, armored tail� and then chewed his leg off and used it to fortify its �Pile with monstrous protrusions.�

lmao

# ? Feb 23, 2022 05:47

TenementFunster: Feb 20, 2003; The Cooler King

can't wait for the next ep lol

# ? Feb 24, 2022 08:11

Pener Kropoopkin: Jan 30, 2013

TenementFunster posted:

can't wait for the next ep lol

It'll be recorded well before today.

# ? Feb 24, 2022 09:43

Stringent: Dec 22, 2004; image text goes here

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

It'll be recorded well before today.

i hope so at any rate. there isn't going to be any good information coming out of there for a few days at least.

# ? Feb 24, 2022 09:47

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

massive four-hour ep on how the cia's increasingly hysterical deadlines and putin's border maneuvers was all posturing; john has a layover in lvov on the way to canada but he's not worried. he's heard the restrooms open and close very sensibly

# ? Feb 24, 2022 09:47

TenementFunster: Feb 20, 2003; The Cooler King

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

It'll be recorded well before today.

no, they said on patreon that there will be an emergency ep, presumably where Mark Ames apologies to all the natsec libs he spent his entire career making GBS threads on

# ? Feb 24, 2022 09:48

Pener Kropoopkin: Jan 30, 2013

TenementFunster posted:

no, they said on patreon that there will be an emergency ep, presumably where Mark Ames apologies to all the natsec libs he spent his entire career making GBS threads on

Mark Ames prepared to offer apology to The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

# ? Feb 24, 2022 09:51

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Mark Ames prepared to offer apology to The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

hasan went loving prostrate today lol

# ? Feb 24, 2022 09:59

Pener Kropoopkin: Jan 30, 2013

i say swears online posted:

hasan went loving prostrate today lol

Yeah, he's a moron. The intelligence community has made the wrong calls every step of the way, even claiming that the peacekeeping mission is what they meant by invasion all along. The Biden admin changed its tune on the peacekeeping mission within a day. Even when they were right they got it wrong. It's incredible.

# ? Feb 24, 2022 10:02

TenementFunster: Feb 20, 2003; The Cooler King

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Mark Ames prepared to offer apology to The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

lol come on dude

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Yeah, he's a moron. The intelligence community has made the wrong calls every step of the way, even claiming that the peacekeeping mission is what they meant by invasion all along. The Biden admin changed its tune on the peacekeeping mission within a day. Even when they were right they got it wrong. It's incredible.

lol

# ? Feb 24, 2022 10:03

Pener Kropoopkin: Jan 30, 2013

TenementFunster posted:

lol come on dude

I will come on no dudes, sir. :colbert:

# ? Feb 24, 2022 10:04

Yadoppsi: May 10, 2009

If you put it all on black and keep doubling your stake each time you lose eventually you'll come out ahead. :crossarms:

doesnt mean you knew where the wheel would stop.

# ? Feb 24, 2022 10:48

Pener Kropoopkin: Jan 30, 2013

Good idea. I think I'll call my bank for a little proposition...

# ? Feb 24, 2022 10:52

Yadoppsi: May 10, 2009

The existence of the single green number means this will never work on a long enough timescale. Dunno what that means for the metaphor.

Edit: It means Possad was right, lets drop some nukes baby!

Yadoppsi has issued a correction as of 13:27 on Feb 24, 2022

# ? Feb 24, 2022 11:51

Atrocious Joe: Sep 2, 2011

How's John Dolan doing right now. Are his years studying the Fulda Gap flooding back to him.

# ? Feb 24, 2022 16:47

Plutonis: Mar 25, 2011

John admits he was wrong as well.

https://twitter.com/TheWarNerd/status/1496877833041457155?t=zl_4-xdkOL_6woiZ6nuVQg&s=19

# ? Feb 24, 2022 17:01

StashAugustine: Mar 24, 2013; Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

apologize to the audience not the libs

# ? Feb 24, 2022 17:05

Phone: Jul 30, 2005; 親子丼をほしい。

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

It'll be recorded well before today.

he posted this on facebook on tuesday

quote:

Gary Brecher
Felb8rua0arSpy 22 at n11:t30gt rPMdi � The New York Times �
What is the world coming to when you find yourself sort of agreeing with Thomas Friedman? A big, big 24 hours in Ukraine, and it hasn't fully settled yet. We're preparing a show (recording this Thursday) to try to make sense of it.

i know that mark had a tweet yesterday 10 minutes before poo poo kicked off that was one of his "all of these analysts have been promising this for n weeks", but it looks like it's the rare situation where a big event doesn't happen immediately after the episode gets recorded.

# ? Feb 24, 2022 17:24

genericnick: Dec 26, 2012

Phone posted:

he posted this on facebook on tuesday

i know that mark had a tweet yesterday 10 minutes before poo poo kicked off that was one of his "all of these analysts have been promising this for n weeks", but it looks like it's the rare situation where a big event doesn't happen immediately after the episode gets recorded.

Don't say that. gently caress.

# ? Feb 24, 2022 18:29

Omnicarus: Jan 16, 2006

At the current rate of RWN predictions this will turn into a nuclear conflict shortly after the next episode.

"So John how you doing?"
"Got some radiation from nearly being nuked and my leg hurts but otherwise you know, ok. Got turned away from the fallout shelter for reasons we still don't understand but we're hoping to catch a raft to Galway to pursue the Irish citizenship thing again."

# ? Feb 24, 2022 18:34

Spime Wrangler: Feb 23, 2003; Because we can.

Mark Ames on Facebook posted:

Posted this on twitter, where I've been glued for the last few days. When you're wrong, you're wrong.

I was wrong about Putin's strategic intentions, wrong with a good crowd that's been very useful to me over many years, and continue to be � people like exiled dissident journalists Leonid Bershidsky and Leonid Ragozin, along with a lot of other Russians and gone-native Russia-watchers who got this wrong. We -- I -- held to assumptions based on watching, reporting, researching, living in & thinking about Russia over the past few decades. (I should say that we all disagree on a lot of stuff, the Leonids for example are far more viscerally anti-Kremlin than I, and more sympathetic to the Maidan revolution, but none of us believed this is the sort of thing that fits Putin's profile). Anyway, those assumptions no longer work, and I'm not going to pretend I've already got it figured out which assumptions will work from here on out.
This time it's the very worst ghouls who got it right for once in their sleazy careers, after getting everything wrong without fail since the start of the century. There's Robert Kagan, Vicky Nuland's husband, who just published a big piece a couple of days ago in the WaPo about the impending mass invasion. Normally I'd take that as the final proof that Putin was about to do the very opposite of what Kagan predicted�if Kagan predicts invasion, experience says it really means Putin is about to quit the Kremlin to join Code Pink. The Kagan Clan and the Atlantic Council get paid for being wrong, but I suspect they'll get extra bonuses from their sponsors for getting something right for once (and for helping catalyze the current shitshow by designing Biden's hawkish Ukraine policy a year ago, which we've gone over).

God knows I don't want to absolve Putin in any way here. It's true that the US and NATO are big partners in this nightmare; they've done all they could to provoke a crisis assuming they could slowly creep and bleed it out, and when the Kremlin gave extra- serious signals last year that something big would happen, Biden responded with the same feckless diplomacy and distracted attention that's characterized his Admin's zombified domestic political program, whatever's left of it anyway. I think Putin, who has clearly built up a volcano's worth of grievances, understood Biden's feckless inertia as an active gently caress you, and Putin was clearly waiting for just that. He wants to bomb big, and Ukraine is the live demonstration board. Putin has all the "agency" imaginable here. He could have chosen a whole range of responses, none of them pretty, but none of them anywhere near as violent and dangerous and widespread as this one. This is what he wants; the US provoked, but it's Putin, and very much not-metonymy Putin but Putin with his supporters, who is bombing the poo poo out of Ukraine. My family has good friends in Kiev; one of my wife's best friends is huddling with her 3 children in their apartment as I'm writing this, too afraid to go out to the nearest bomb shelter, and her ex-husband is too afraid to come help with the children, he's huddling in his apartment building. Most of my wife's close friends from Moscow came from Ukraine, so it's just hard to fathom. Полный пиздец.

The world is going to be a much much worse place for everyone. No lessons will be learned. Or rather, only the worst lessons will be learned, by and for the worst people. US intelligence credibility restored; neocon credibility restored; progressive agendas, such as they were still possible, gone; the GOP is going to pillory Biden and the Dems as weak, as taken advantage of by Putin, turning Russiagate on its ugly head. NATO's gonna get very extra NATO. Ukraine is hosed. The worse, the worse-er, all around.

# ? Feb 24, 2022 18:37

swimsuit: Jan 22, 2009; yeah

mark and John are good men

# ? Feb 24, 2022 23:33

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

being wrong but being able to explain why is a lot more compelling than being right and not having any actual reasons for your claim, which is definitely what most of the punditry were doing.

# ? Feb 25, 2022 03:39

mistermojo: Jul 3, 2004

Dreylad posted:

being wrong but being able to explain why is a lot more compelling than being right and not having any actual reasons for your claim, which is definitely what most of the punditry were doing.

even being contrite about being wrong is more than any pundit has ever done

# ? Feb 25, 2022 04:00

hadji murad: Apr 18, 2006

That�s the thing. To get to the point where they were right, they made a lot of mistakes and were wrong about a lot of stuff.

I think the amount of false alarms they registered overall made people think an invasion wouldn�t happen.

I didn�t think it would happen but I thought NATO and the Americans would make some concession and they didn�t.

That�s the thing this time, they are fighting in a non NATO country so the stakes are lower and the refugees will be soaked up by the newcomers to NATO so the price won�t be paid by the major powers in NATO.

# ? Feb 25, 2022 04:32

TenementFunster: Feb 20, 2003; The Cooler King

Dreylad posted:

being wrong but being able to explain why is a lot more compelling than being right and not having any actual reasons for your claim, which is definitely what most of the punditry were doing.

sure but when you�ve been spiking the ball on other people for getting things wrong, it�s time for a lot of introspection when you are the one who is owned

ames made fun of people for leaving the country just a few days ago!

# ? Feb 25, 2022 05:25

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

TenementFunster posted:

sure but when you�ve been spiking the ball on other people for getting things wrong, it�s time for a lot of introspection when you are the one who is owned

ames made fun of people for leaving the country just a few days ago!

that seems to be what those posts are about, ames and his russian contact circle all have to re-evaluate things.

# ? Feb 25, 2022 05:29

Victory Position: Mar 16, 2004

TenementFunster posted:

sure but when you�ve been spiking the ball on other people for getting things wrong, it�s time for a lot of introspection when you are the one who is owned

ames made fun of people for leaving the country just a few days ago!

I think every single one of them felt like they ran through a brick wall when they heard

# ? Feb 25, 2022 05:35