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Notes -
60 minutes recently released a big investigation on Havana Syndrome basically saying that the cause is real attacks by Russian intelligence agents and not some sort of psychosocial mass hallucination (which many have believed since these incidents first began to occur). They identify specific Russian agents and link their movements to occurrences of Havana Syndrome aka AHIs (anomalous health incidents). As someone who was unsure about what was going on here this seems pretty convincing: Russians have been using some sort of weapon to target US intelligence personnel.
The culture war angle to this is twofold. First, the US IC has seemed unsure whether these AHIs (which usually take the form of some sort of brain injury) were the result of Russian attacks. If this article is legit then these reporters managed to do a better job than the people we pay and give access to classified information to so that they can find out exactly these sorts of things. This is an enormous failure on the part of US intelligence services, its agents have been getting attacked, many have been forced to medically retire, and the organizations they belong to haven't even been able to determine whether an attack happened at all. To be fair, some organizations seem to have said these were likely attacks, others have said the opposite, so not every organization failed to the same extent in this respect.
The other culture war angle is that if this article is true, Russia has been attacking members of the US intelligence community for a decade. What will be the retaliation for this? US relations with Russia are already pretty bad, but this is quite a big provocation. Russia occupies a spot in the US culture war, I wonder if this will change that position very much. Is Putin still strong and trad? Can he get more reviled by the people who hate him? Most people seem uninterested in/uninformed about spy stuff so maybe this won't really register in the public consciousness.
This isn't as culture-war-y a topic as some, but I think it's interesting.
The US is already engaged by proxy in the hottest interstate war in decades with Russia. Even if true (X), this is totally eclipsed by the Russo-Ukrainian War - Russian allies in the US still think Putin is the based defender of Christian civilization against the homosexual globalists, people worried about escalation are probably more afraid of Russia exercising the ultimate veto than espionage bullshit, and anti-Russians still want to bomb Russia.
What % of Americans do you think this is? Above or below lizardman constant? I'd guess way below, like OOM less than "literal Nazi," but maybe it's my bubble.
Yeah I've run into semi-literal Nazis (at least Nazi apologists) but never Putin defenders.
I've had the opposite experience - Nazis are an entirely online phenomenon for me, but I've encountered multiple right-wing Putin apologists in meatspace.
I've run into teenaged Putin apologists in meatspace, and adults who want nothing to do with an eastern European shithole regardless of how bad Putin is. What I haven't seen is adults who are actively pro-Putin.
I've run across a few antisemitic open white supremacists. All of these people were blue collar and male(amusingly, not all of them were white), so it seems like maybe a filter bubble issue. Definitely less common than adults who don't care where Ukrainian bribes eventually wind up but not notably more or less common than teenaged Putin fans.
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I think I might get labeled “Putin defender” but I would disagree with the label.
I don’t think the Ukraine invasion is a morally good war, especially from the perspective of Catholic Just War doctrine, but I also don’t think it’s all that unusual given the history of how great powers pursue their interests.
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