#Russian Internet Research Agency

[tomorrowusa]

Republicans are very particular about which government is influencing social media.

But with Russian troll master Yevgeny Prigozhin currently deeply distracted, we're not sure who exactly is minding the troll shop in St. Petersburg these days.

[russianreader]

Best Russian Brand

Yevgeny Prigozhin. Photo: Yuri Martyanov/Kommersant Russian businessman, owner of the Concord Group of companies, “Putin’s chef” and confidant of the president, founder of a media empire and the Wagner Group, and one of the most famous people in Russia, Yevgeny Prigozhin now faces criminal charges of organizing an armed rebellion. Prigozhin was born in Leningrad on 1 June 1961. We know that his…

[ms-demeanor]

making my own post because nobody needs my bullshit on their post:

OP:

Reblog 1:

Reblog 2:

My response:

The IRA blogs were here and they were active and they were quite popular; their posting patterns did not match normal tumblr users (i was followed by lagonegirl and followed back only to be put off by the account reblogging the same five or ten posts every hour for a day before selecting another five or ten posts to reblog hourly the next day - it was clear engagement bait).

Tumblr has never been as transparent about these accounts as both Twitter and Facebook were, but several of the accounts had shared names across platforms and you can find a significant amount of data that was released by both facebook (ex: ads purchased by the IRA accounts) and twitter (over three million tweets from IRA accounts). Academic researchers have published papers on the data released from facebook and twitter. Several papers. So many papers. Soooooo many papers. We have a LOT of direct evidence that you can explore for yourself that there were hundreds (possibly thousands) of IRA accounts that were created on Facebook and Twitter. Of those accounts, some shared usernames across platforms, and of those accounts, a few had tumblr accounts that posted the same content on twitter and tumblr.

To quote a buzzfeed news article from the time:

The Russian-run Tumblr accounts used the same, or very similar, usernames as the account names contained on a list of confirmed IRA accounts Twitter submitted to congressional investigators. In some cases, the Tumblr and Twitter account has the same profile image or linked to each other in their bios. Some IRA Tumblrs and Twitter accounts also cross-promoted content between platforms, further linking them together.

Current tumblr user @ alwaysbewoke (who I don't want to tag because I'm sure he's got better things to do) is interviewed in that article and talks about following one of the blogs identified by tumblr as an IRA blog that had a matching account on twitter identified as an IRA account but unfollowing when the left-leaning blog supposedly run by a black creator started rooting for trump in the election.

Dr. Jonathan Albright is heavily quoted in the article; the data review he collaborated on is one of the only reviews of this subject that includes data from Tumblr and Reddit.

One of the claims that I've seen is that tumblr just deleted funny black people, but these were blogs with thousands of followers on tumblr who never recreated, never popped up on another social media site, never started a reddit account after getting banned; nobody ever showed up saying "hey this is 4mysquad, I got banned on tumblr and twitter, follow me to pillowfort". These very popular blogs got deleted and, as far as I know, nobody ever popped up claiming to be a person who was deleted - and it's not like tumblr users haven't figured out how to evade bans.

What you are doing when you make posts saying that the IRA accounts on tumblr never existed is *absolving tumblr of guilt for their utter lack of transparency.*

Tumblr is not the only tech company that has tried to fly under the radar as its larger counterparts face regular scrutiny in Congress and in the press. Earlier this month, Reddit revealed it too had deleted hundreds of accounts with ties to the Internet Research Agency. A WIRED investigation found more than a thousand links to Russian propaganda websites are still live on Reddit, and unearthed two suspicious accounts that Reddit immediately shut down.

So should you believe what Tumblr says? No, because Tumblr has been functionally fucking silent on this issue and the information about this subject aside from the list of blogs has come from the hard work of data scientists, journalists, and researchers.

(For the record; some of those bot accounts that were recorded by Dr. Albright also had Google+ accounts in 2017 - there is every possibility that they had myspace accounts).

Now, the reason that I'm popping onto this post as an annoyed anarchist is that I was tracking a similar group of blogs for a while and was discussing them and I stopped precisely because of the galaxy-brained liberals who are now trying to dunk on communists for criticizing electoralism. One of the people who was following my project was one of the ones who started calling out the "joe biden kills dogs" posts as disinfo and I realized they were using some of the guidelines I'd written up to "identify" misinformation and that is very a rock fucking stupid approach to what was clearly a leftist making jokes and was horrified and realized there was no way that I could continue documenting what I was documenting without someone attempting to call actual leftists russian bots.

I've seen the post that OP is referencing [it's one where someone makes a very obvious joke about the democrat presidential ticket and people jump on to call them a bot and then someone tries to do the "AI tell me a story" thing and OP is just like "I don't want to :(", proving that they are in fact a person and not an AI] and have deeply enjoyed the humor of watching liberals a) not understand a very, VERY obvious joke and b) become the unwitting butt of a joke they were trying to make, but also I am so exhausted by watching normie dems call leftists AI bots after years of watching normie dems call real live actual leftists who hold actual political views that real people actually have, like prison abolition, russian bots.

But I am also so fucking tired of left conspiracism and how stupid it sounds when leftists dismiss a preponderance of evidence that is easily accessible and publicly available for analysis as "lol so you just trust everything tumblr tells you?"

No, dipshit, learn to click a fucking link or twelve.

[creature-wizard]

So I was searching for more of Jill Stein's shitty takes on Ukraine and Russia (she's apparently said that the US shouldn't help Ukraine against Russia), and came across this:

The extent of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election is well-documented and yet still not fully understood. Russian agents were responsible for stealing and releasing emails from the Democratic National Committee. Russia used Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to spread disinformation and sow discord among the American public. This was done to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump.

...

The NBC News analysis found that Russians working with the infamous Internet Research Agency — the Kremlin-linked propaganda outfit with close ties to Putin — tweeted out Jill Stein’s name at least 1,000 times, on a network of fake accounts whose online reach is thought to be in the tens of millions.

...

The environmental activist and erstwhile presidential candidate was in frequent communication with individuals inside Russia, and she herself made a trip to Moscow in 2015 to attend, among other things, a dinner hosted by Russian propaganda network RT, where she sat alongside future Trump campaign aide Michael Flynn and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

So... yeah. Russia encouraged people to vote for Stein back in 2016 to get people to split the vote, and Stein herself sure associates with Russians a lot.

[lurkiestvoid]

You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed.

(This essay was originally by u/walkandtalkk and posted to r/GenZ on Reddit two months ago, and I've crossposted here on Tumblr for convenience because it's relevant and well-written.)

TL;DR: You know that Russia and other governments try to manipulate people online. But you almost certainly don't how just how effectively orchestrated influence networks are using social media platforms to make you -- individually-- angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Those networks' goal is simple: to cause Americans and other Westerners -- especially young ones -- to give up on social cohesion and to give up on learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.

And you probably don't realize how well it's working on you.

This is a long post, but I wrote it because this problem is real, and it's much scarier than you think.

How Russian networks fuel racial and gender wars to make Americans fight one another

In September 2018, a video went viral after being posted by In the Now, a social media news channel. It featured a feminist activist pouring bleach on a male subway passenger for manspreading. It got instant attention, with millions of views and wide social media outrage. Reddit users wrote that it had turned them against feminism.

There was one problem: The video was staged. And In the Now, which publicized it, is a subsidiary of RT, formerly Russia Today, the Kremlin TV channel aimed at foreign, English-speaking audiences.

As an MIT study found in 2019, Russia's online influence networks reached 140 million Americans every month -- the majority of U.S. social media users.

Russia began using troll farms a decade ago to incite gender and racial divisions in the United States

In 2013, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a confidante of Vladimir Putin, founded the Internet Research Agency (the IRA) in St. Petersburg. It was the Russian government's first coordinated facility to disrupt U.S. society and politics through social media.

Here's what Prigozhin had to say about the IRA's efforts to disrupt the 2022 election:

"Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once."

In 2014, the IRA and other Russian networks began establishing fake U.S. activist groups on social media. By 2015, hundreds of English-speaking young Russians worked at the IRA. Their assignment was to use those false social-media accounts, especially on Facebook and Twitter -- but also on Reddit, Tumblr, 9gag, and other platforms -- to aggressively spread conspiracy theories and mocking, ad hominem arguments that incite American users.

In 2017, U.S. intelligence found that Blacktivist, a Facebook and Twitter group with more followers than the official Black Lives Matter movement, was operated by Russia. Blacktivist regularly attacked America as racist and urged black users to rejected major candidates. On November 2, 2016, just before the 2016 election, Blacktivist's Twitter urged Black Americans: "Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it's not a wasted vote."

Russia plays both sides -- on gender, race, and religion

The brilliance of the Russian influence campaign is that it convinces Americans to attack each other, worsening both misandry and misogyny, mutual racial hatred, and extreme antisemitism and Islamophobia. In short, it's not just an effort to boost the right wing; it's an effort to radicalize everybody.

Russia uses its trolling networks to aggressively attack men. According to MIT, in 2019, the most popular Black-oriented Facebook page was the charmingly named "My Baby Daddy Aint Shit." It regularly posts memes attacking Black men and government welfare workers. It serves two purposes: Make poor black women hate men, and goad black men into flame wars.

MIT found that My Baby Daddy is run by a large troll network in Eastern Europe likely financed by Russia.

But Russian influence networks are also also aggressively misogynistic and aggressively anti-LGBT.

On January 23, 2017, just after the first Women's March, the New York Times found that the Internet Research Agency began a coordinated attack on the movement. Per the Times:

More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.

They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners.

But the Russian PR teams realized that one attack worked better than the rest: They accused its co-founder, Arab American Linda Sarsour, of being an antisemite. Over the next 18 months, at least 152 Russian accounts regularly attacked Sarsour. That may not seem like many accounts, but it worked: They drove the Women's March movement into disarray and eventually crippled the organization.

Russia doesn't need a million accounts, or even that many likes or upvotes. It just needs to get enough attention that actual Western users begin amplifying its content.

A former federal prosecutor who investigated the Russian disinformation effort summarized it like this:

It wasn’t exclusively about Trump and Clinton anymore. It was deeper and more sinister and more diffuse in its focus on exploiting divisions within society on any number of different levels.

As the New York Times reported in 2022,

There was a routine: Arriving for a shift, [Russian disinformation] workers would scan news outlets on the ideological fringes, far left and far right, mining for extreme content that they could publish and amplify on the platforms, feeding extreme views into mainstream conversations.

China is joining in with AI

[A couple months ago], the New York Times reported on a new disinformation campaign. "Spamouflage" is an effort by China to divide Americans by combining AI with real images of the United States to exacerbate political and social tensions in the U.S. The goal appears to be to cause Americans to lose hope, by promoting exaggerated stories with fabricated photos about homeless violence and the risk of civil war.

As Ladislav Bittman, a former Czechoslovakian secret police operative, explained about Soviet disinformation, the strategy is not to invent something totally fake. Rather, it is to act like an evil doctor who expertly diagnoses the patient’s vulnerabilities and exploits them, “prolongs his illness and speeds him to an early grave instead of curing him.”

The influence networks are vastly more effective than platforms admit

Russia now runs its most sophisticated online influence efforts through a network called Fabrika. Fabrika's operators have bragged that social media platforms catch only 1% of their fake accounts across YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Telegram, and other platforms.

But how effective are these efforts? By 2020, Facebook's most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were run by Eastern European troll farms tied to the Kremlin. And Russia doesn't just target angry Boomers on Facebook. Russian trolls are enormously active on Twitter. And, even, on Reddit.

It's not just false facts

The term "disinformation" undersells the problem. Because much of Russia's social media activity is not trying to spread fake news. Instead, the goal is to divide and conquer by making Western audiences depressed and extreme.

Sometimes, through brigading and trolling. Other times, by posting hyper-negative or extremist posts or opinions about the U.S. the West over and over, until readers assume that's how most people feel. And sometimes, by using trolls to disrupt threads that advance Western unity.

As the RAND think tank explained, the Russian strategy is volume and repetition, from numerous accounts, to overwhelm real social media users and create the appearance that everyone disagrees with, or even hates, them. And it's not just low-quality bots. Per RAND,

Russian propaganda is produced in incredibly large volumes and is broadcast or otherwise distributed via a large number of channels. ... According to a former paid Russian Internet troll, the trolls are on duty 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts, and each has a daily quota of 135 posted comments of at least 200 characters.

What this means for you

You are being targeted by a sophisticated PR campaign meant to make you more resentful, bitter, and depressed. It's not just disinformation; it's also real-life human writers and advanced bot networks working hard to shift the conversation to the most negative and divisive topics and opinions.

It's why some topics seem to go from non-issues to constant controversy and discussion, with no clear reason, across social media platforms. And a lot of those trolls are actual, "professional" writers whose job is to sound real.

So what can you do? To quote WarGames: The only winning move is not to play. The reality is that you cannot distinguish disinformation accounts from real social media users. Unless you know whom you're talking to, there is a genuine chance that the post, tweet, or comment you are reading is an attempt to manipulate you -- politically or emotionally.

Here are some thoughts:

Don't accept facts from social media accounts you don't know. Russian, Chinese, and other manipulation efforts are not uniform. Some will make deranged claims, but others will tell half-truths. Or they'll spin facts about a complicated subject, be it the war in Ukraine or loneliness in young men, to give you a warped view of reality and spread division in the West.

Resist groupthink. A key element of manipulate networks is volume. People are naturally inclined to believe statements that have broad support. When a post gets 5,000 upvotes, it's easy to think the crowd is right. But "the crowd" could be fake accounts, and even if they're not, the brilliance of government manipulation campaigns is that they say things people are already predisposed to think. They'll tell conservative audiences something misleading about a Democrat, or make up a lie about Republicans that catches fire on a liberal server or subreddit.

Don't let social media warp your view of society. This is harder than it seems, but you need to accept that the facts -- and the opinions -- you see across social media are not reliable. If you want the news, do what everyone online says not to: look at serious, mainstream media. It is not always right. Sometimes, it screws up. But social media narratives are heavily manipulated by networks whose job is to ensure you are deceived, angry, and divided.

Edited for typos and clarity. (Tumblr-edited for formatting and to note a sourced article is now older than mentioned in the original post. -LV)

P.S. Apparently, this post was removed several hours ago due to a flood of reports. Thank you to the r/GenZ moderators for re-approving it.

Second edit:

This post is not meant to suggest that r/GenZ is uniquely or especially vulnerable, or to suggest that a lot of challenges people discuss here are not real. It's entirely the opposite: Growing loneliness, political polarization, and increasing social division along gender lines is real. The problem is that disinformation and influence networks expertly, and effectively, hijack those conversations and use those real, serious issues to poison the conversation. This post is not about left or right: Everyone is targeted.

(Further Tumblr notes: since this was posted, there have been several more articles detailing recent discoveries of active disinformation/influence and hacking campaigns by Russia and their allies against several countries and their respective elections, and barely touches on the numerous Tumblr blogs discovered to be troll farms/bad faith actors from pre-2016 through today. This is an ongoing and very real problem, and it's nowhere near over.

A quote from NPR article linked above from 2018 that you might find familiar today: "[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we'd surely be better off without voting AT ALL," a post from the account said.")

[xclowniex]

So a post just came on my dash which I think everyone should read and it is very much still relevant to this day.

It is about the Russian IRA, internet research agency, and how tumblr caught out a bunch of propaganda blogs which helps spread pro trump propaganda.

The most important part of it is this.

---------------

‐--------‐--------

And this sounds very similar to what is going on this election year.

You have recently had a whole lot of blogs post pro Palestine content to gain followers, before starting to shit on Kamala Harris and telling people not to vote for her and to just not vote at all.

Whilst it probably isn't Russian propaganda meant to get people to vote trump as they're telling people to just not vote, it's definitely propaganda to try and skew the election through voter turn out. Republicans have a higher voter turnout than democrats.

And it's likely that trump hasn't even signed off on these bot or farm accounts, there are many countries like Russia and Iran who benefit from Trump becoming president, enough so that they could be doing this of their own volition.

Here is the original post

[triviallytrue]

Were there Russian Chaos Agents on tumblr in 2016?

First things first:

Things I got wrong in earlier posts on this:

@ms-disinformation didn't identify these accounts ahead of time, this blog started posting in 2019 and is focused on accounts that are likely to be bot-run

Relatedly, the accounts accused of being Russian state actors were accused of being trolls, not bots - they were almost undoubtedly human-run

Tumblr didn't announce the mass ban of these accounts until several months after they did it - they banned the accounts in fall of 2017 and announced them in March 2018.

What actually happened?

The Internet Research Agency is a Russian company accused of creating fake social media accounts to attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. On March 23, 2018, tumblr posted a list of accounts they claimed were linked to the IRA that they had terminated the previous fall. On November 16, 2018, they posted a second list of accounts given to them by law enforcement of other IRA-related accounts (unrelated to any election interference) that were also terminated.

How did tumblr identify these accounts?

tumblr has been extremely vague about the methodology used to find these accounts, but we do have another source: the Buzzfeed News journalist who wrote about the termination of these accounts back on February 6, 2018 (over a month before tumblr's post) identified them by cross-referencing tumblr accounts with twitter's list of IRA-affiliated accounts, finding similar or identical usernames and profile pictures.

Unfortunately, this only kicks the can further down the road - how did twitter identify these accounts? These sites don't want to reveal their methods, but this study offers some insights into the behavior of these accounts and possible tools used to identify them.

Why should we believe tumblr's narrative?

There are a lot of reasons I'm convinced that tumblr is being honest with us about this, the simplest of which is that they don't have a good reason to lie about this. tumblr nukes accounts all the time without disclosing its reasons - if they wanted to get rid of an arbitrary list of accounts they dislike, they could do that and none of us would know. They deleted these accounts months before posting any explanation at all, and the only backlash they received was in articles like the Buzzfeed News article above slamming them for not talking about the Russian troll problem, instead of accusing them of terminating activists.

It's also not like this is some tactic that tumblr has employed frequently - the list of IRA-affiliated accounts has been untouched since 2018. This was a once-off, not part of any organized strategy to suppress certain types of posters.

Moreover, tumblr users with similar post content were left untouched, including many that reblogged heavily from the IRA accounts - the Buzzfeed News article identifies one such blog (alwaysbewoke) who posted more or less the same type of antiracist, pro-Sanders activism (albeit without the eventual support for Trump) who wasn't deactivated.

It's also worth noting that the IRA is a real company and not a US boogeyman (even if some subsection of liberals use the phrase "Russian bot" as such) - recently, the leader of the Wagner group came forward and confirmed that he founded it and still finances and runs it, and he's relatively direct about the fact that it was used to interfere in US elections:

“Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere,” Prigozhin said in November, one day before the US midterm elections.

Finally, and most convincingly in my opinion, no one behind any of the over a hundred accounts on the tumblr IRA list or the thousands on the twitter one have come forward in the past six years to claim that they were wrongfully associated with the IRA and banned as a result.

Isn't that fascinating? Can you imagine what a story it would be, if social media sites were not only terminating activists but lying about why they were doing it? Do you think that not a single one of these hundreds of alleged activists thought of calling a sympathetic journalist, showing them their US driver's license, and asking them to a run a story? What about messaging their old mutuals, or making a new account, or finding a federated platform that won't delete them on sight? I can't find a shred of evidence that any of this ever happened, and that's pretty telling.

The funny part is, there's no real evidence that these accounts ever achieved anything, and indeed, reasons to doubt that they did. They operated in preexisting echo chambers and circulated mostly true stories with a specific slant to them, with the occasional dash of outright lies. Certainly, it's hard to argue that they were less reliable or more biased than your average Fox News article. But arguing that they weren't Russian propaganda seems pretty difficult.

[traegorn]

Tangential bit that has me headscratching WRT this 'pointing out IRA psyopping US voters=anti-Asian bigotry' thing: so far as I've read, 'whitebread' Russians don't treat Asian Russians any better than the US treats Asian-Americans. Putin's regime flat out uses Russian minorities as cannon fodder for invading Ukraine, and is now apparently accepting North Korean troops to that end. Blowing wind like defending Russian trollfarms' honor is somehow pan-Asian solidarity just seems fucking deranged.

(Quick clarification for those not deep in this: IRA refers to Internet Research Agency -- the company Russia used in 2016 for their psyops)

You're thinking to hard about this. H-R was trying to put me on the defensive. They were dragging in other people who weren't even involved. It was either a disingenuous ploy or there's something seriously wrong with them. If you're looking for a rational explanation, it does not exist.

[aahsoka]

The best vaccine for propaganda is developing critical thinking skills. This is NOT flat out ignoring anything that goes against your opinion, or believing that anyone who holds a dissenting opinion from your own is a bot programmed to interfere with the election or an idiot. Frankly, even right-wing voters are not idiots. There are logical reasons that they vote the way they do, even if you do not agree with their logic.

I want to talk about the 2016 Russian Election Interference on Tumblr specifically:

In 2018, 84 blogs were deleted by Tumblr after a joint investigation between them and the Department of Justice determined they were linked to the IRA (Internet Research Agency) an organization indicted for running troll farms for the Russian Government. Here is the post made by Tumblr

Now I am going to ask you some questions:

What is the difference between a bot and a troll? Is that difference important to acknowledge?

Do we as users/citizens have a full understanding of why these blogs were determined to be connected to the IRA? Do we know the process the DOJ and Tumblr used to determine their link to the troll farm?

Supposedly many posed as Black Activists. But how do you decide who is a Blackfishing Russian troll and who is a genuine Black American? Were some of these blogs Russian trolls, and some that were deleted for reblogging from them actual Black people who genuinely agreed with their posts, regardless of its origins? What was the functional difference between their posts and the posts made by actual Black users about Black issues? Do you think a Russian agent is capable of effectively pretending to be a Black American? What about today: how do you know if the person with a dissenting opinion is a disgruntled US citizen or a troll? “But even if some of the information posted was false, It is impossible to know if that was done with malicious intent or by mistakenly re-sharing fake news.”

One post shown in this analysis includes a headline posted without a link; are you taking the time to investigate the claim a post is talking about? One post was reposted from an actual Black user on Twitter; How much of this ‘trolling’ were reposts from real Black users on other sites? What is the functional difference, especially if the original user is credited?

Do you think this strategy would be as easy to implement now that most sites know to watch out for it?

Do you understand why some people do not trust government investigative bodies to be fair towards Black activists?

How effective was this election interference on tumblr and elsewhere? Are there other reasons for a lack of votes from certain demographics related to the US electoral system itself?

When you talk about the Russian Election Interference are you approaching it in a way that frames everyone who has a dissenting opinion as a bad actor employed by the Russian government? Do you understand why this makes some people extremely uncomfortable? Do you understand why it can read as red scare-type propaganda?

What are Russia’s actual current political goals? How are Russian citizens different from their government?

How and when has the US committed its own psyops within itself and in foreign states? Are you just as wary of propaganda that originates within the United States?

Do people have the right to voice extreme opinions about their government?

Are you getting your information solely from tumblr? Do you believe others are? Why?

I don’t want you to reblog and answer (that would take forever). I just want you to consider what your own opinions and thoughts are on these subjects, to research where you lack knowledge, and to consider how you can approach people with dissenting opinions with sympathy when they are acting in good faith.

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week - January 09, 2023

1. Top British universities offer Afghan women free courses until Taliban lift learning ban

Afghanistan's ruling Taliban announced last month that women would no longer be able to study at universities and higher education establishments. Institutions were told to implement the ban as soon as possible.

Now, a number of British universities have teamed up through FutureLearn to offer the women in Afghanistan free access to digital learning platforms. Girls and women with internet access will be able to study more than 1,200 courses from top institutions at no cost to themselves.

2. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs extends protections to LGBTQ+ state employees and contractors

Arizona’s newly elected Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) signed an executive order extending employment protections to state employees and contractors who are LGBTQ+.

As the Human Rights Campaign reports, the executive order, signed on Hobbs’s first day in office Tuesday, directs the state’s Department of Administration to update hiring, promotion, and compensation policies for all state agencies to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and include provisions in all new state contracts to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

3. EU Carbon Emissions Drop To 30-Year Lows

It was supposed to be a dirty autumn and winter, with European nations scrambling to replace Russian gas with high-polluting coal. But according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, the cold seasons so far have been the cleanest in more than 30 years.

4. Critically endangered rhinoceros gives birth to calf at Kansas City Zoo on New Year's Eve

The Kansas City Zoo got a special start to the new year: A critically endangered subspecies of rhinoceros gave birth to a calf on Dec. 31, officials announced. The calf is walking, nursing and even playing with its mother, Zuri, animal specialists said.

5. Cancer Vaccine to Simultaneously Kill and Prevent Brain Cancer Developed

Scientists are harnessing a new way to turn cancer cells into potent, anti-cancer agents. A new stem cell therapy approach eliminates established brain tumors and provides long-term immunity, training the immune system to prevent cancer from returning.

link to the paper …

6. The US has approved use of the world's first vaccine for honey bees.

It was engineered to prevent fatalities from American foulbrood disease, a bacterial condition known to weaken colonies by attacking bee larvae. As pollinators, bees play a critical role in many aspects of the ecosystem.

The vaccine could serve as a "breakthrough in protecting honey bees", Dalan Animal Health CEO Annette Kleiser said in a statement. It works by introducing an inactive version of the bacteria into the royal jelly fed to the queen, whose larvae then gain immunity.

7. Cat missing for nearly 6 years reunited with owner thanks to microchip

West Sacramento woman got the surprise of a lifetime Saturday when she was reunited with her missing cat after nearly 6 years thanks to microchip. 

- - -

That's it for this week. If you liked this post you can support this newsletter with a small kofi donation:

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[apas-95]

Lenin was secretly an agent of the IRA.

[theculturedmarxist]

Being labeled a Russian propagandist all day every day for criticizing US foreign policy is really weird, but one advantage it comes with is a useful perspective on what people have really been talking about all these years when they warn of the dangers of “Russian propaganda”.

I know I’m not a Russian propagandist. I’m not paid by Russia, I have no connections to Russia, and until I started this political commentary gig in 2016 I thought very little about Russia. My opinions about the western empire sometimes turn up on Russian media because I let anyone use my work who wants to, but that was always something they did on their own without my submitting it to them and without any payment or solicitation of any kind. I’m literally just some random westerner sharing political opinions on the internet; those opinions just happen to disagree with the US empire and its stories about itself and its behavior.

Yet for years I’ve watched people pointing at me as an example of what “Russian propaganda” looks like. This has helped inform my understanding of all the panic about “Russian influence” that’s been circulating these last six years, and given me some insight into how seriously it should be taken.

That’s one reason why I wasn’t surprised by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files revelations about Hamilton 68, an information op run by DC swamp monsters and backed by imperialist think tanks which generated hundreds if not thousands of completely bogus mainstream news reports about online Russian influence over the years.

Hamilton 68 purported to track Russian attempts to influence western thought on social media, but Twitter eventually figured out that the “Russians” the operation has been tracking were actually mostly real, mostly American accounts who just happened to say things that didn’t perfectly align with the official Beltway consensus. These accounts were often right-leaning, but also included people like Consortium News editor Joe Lauria, who’s about as far from a rightist as you can get.

They played a massive role in fanning the flames of public hysteria about online Russian influence, but while they did this by pretending to track the behavior of Russian influence ops, in reality they were tracking dissent.

One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being brainwashed by western propaganda into panicking about Russian propaganda, something that has no meaningful existence in the west. Before RT was shut down it was drawing a whopping 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according o Facebook. Research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.

Russia exerts essentially zero influence over what westerners think, yet we’re all meant to freak out about “Russian propaganda” while western oligarchs and government agencies continually hammer our minds with propaganda designed to manufacture our consent for the status quo which benefits them.

All this and we’re still seeing calls for more narrative management from the western empire, like the recent American Purpose article “The Long War of Ideas” being promoted by people like Bill Kristol which calls for a resurrection of CIA culture war tactics like those used during the last cold war. Every day there’s some new liberal politician sermonizing about the need to do more to fight Russian influence and protect American minds from “disinformation”, even as we are shown over and over again that what they really want is to shut down dissident voices.

That’s what we’re seeing in the continual efforts to increase online censorship, in the bogus new “fact-checking” industry, in calls to increase the output of formal US government propaganda operations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, in the way all dissent about Russia has been forcefully purged from the western media in recent years, in the way empire-amplified trolling operations have been shouting down and drowning out critics of US foreign policy online, in the way censorship via algorithm has emerged as one of the major methods of restricting dissident speech.

They claim there needs to be a massive escalation in propaganda, censorship and online psyops in order to fight “Russian influence”, while the only influence operations we’re being subjected to in any meaningful way are only ever of the western variety. They just want to do more of that.

Our rulers aren’t actually worried about “Russian influence”, they’re worried about dissent. They’re worried the public won’t consent to the “great power competition” they plan to subject us to for the foreseeable future unless they can exert massive influence over our minds, because they know that otherwise we will recognize that our interests are directly harmed by the economic warfare, exploding military spending and nuclear brinkmanship which necessarily accompanies that campaign to reign in Russia and stop the rise of China.

They’re propagandizing us about the threat of foreign propaganda in order to justify propagandizing us more. We’re being manipulated into consenting to agendas that no healthy person would ever consent to without copious amounts of manipulation.

[mariacallous]

Over nearly a decade, the hacker group within Russia's GRU military intelligence agency known as Sandworm has launched some of the most disruptive cyberattacks in history against Ukraine's power grids, financial system, media, and government agencies. Signs now point to that same usual suspect being responsible for sabotaging a major mobile provider for the country, cutting off communications for millions and even temporarily sabotaging the air raid warning system in the capital of Kyiv.

On Tuesday, a cyberattack hit Kyivstar, one of Ukraine's largest mobile and internet providers. The details of how that attack was carried out remain far from clear. But it “resulted in essential services of the company’s technology network being blocked,” according to a statement posted by Ukraine’s Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT-UA.

Kyivstar's CEO, Oleksandr Komarov, told Ukrainian national television on Tuesday, according to Reuters, that the hacking incident “significantly damaged [Kyivstar's] infrastructure [and] limited access.”

“We could not counter it at the virtual level, so we shut down Kyivstar physically to limit the enemy's access,” he continued. “War is also happening in cyberspace. Unfortunately, we have been hit as a result of this war.”

The Ukrainian government hasn't yet publicly attributed the cyberattack to any known hacker group—nor have any cybersecurity companies or researchers. But on Tuesday, a Ukrainian official within its SSSCIP computer security agency, which oversees CERT-UA, pointed out in a message to reporters that a group known as Solntsepek had claimed credit for the attack in a Telegram post, and noted that the group has been linked to the notorious Sandworm unit of Russia's GRU.

“We, the Solntsepek hackers, take full responsibility for the cyber attack on Kyivstar. We destroyed 10 computers, more than 4 thousand servers, all cloud storage and backup systems,” reads the message in Russian, addressed to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and posted to the group's Telegram account. The message also includes screenshots that appear to show access to Kyivstar's network, though this could not be verified. “We attacked Kyivstar because the company provides communications to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, as well as government agencies and law enforcement agencies of Ukraine. The rest of the offices helping the Armed Forces of Ukraine, get ready!”

Solntsepek has previously been used as a front for the hacker group Sandworm, the Moscow-based Unit 74455 of Russia's GRU, says John Hultquist, the head of threat intelligence at Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant and a longtime tracker of the group. He declined, however, to say which of Solntsepek’s network intrusions have been linked to Sandworm in the past, suggesting that some of those intrusions may not yet be public. “It's a group that has claimed credit for incidents we know were carried out by Sandworm,” Hultquist says, adding that Solntsepek's Telegram post bolsters his previous suspicions that Sandworm was responsible. "Given their consistent focus on this type of activity, it's hard to be surprised that another major disruption is linked to them.”

If Solntsepek is a front for Sandworm, it would be far from the first. Over its years of targeting Ukrainian infrastructure, the GRU unit has used a wide variety of covers, hiding behind false flags such as independent hacktivist groups and cybercriminal ransomware gangs. It even attempted to frame North Korea for its attack on the 2018 Winter Olympics.

Today, Kyivstar countered some of Solntsepek's claims in a post on X, writing that “we assure you that the rumors about the destruction of our ‘computers and servers’ are simply fake.” The company had also written on the platform that it hoped to restore its network's operations by Wednesday, adding that it's working with the Ukrainian government and law enforcement agencies to investigate the attack. Kyivstar's parent company, Veon, headquartered in Amsterdam, didn't respond to WIRED's request for more information.

While the fog of war continues to obscure the exact scale of the Kyivstar incident, it already appears to be one of the most disruptive cyberattacks to have hit Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022. In the year that followed, Russia launched more data-destroying wiper attacks on Ukrainian networks than have been seen anywhere else in the world in the history of computing, though most have had far smaller effects than the Kyivstar intrusion. Other major Russian cyberattacks to hit Ukraine over the past 20 months include a cyberattack that crippled thousands of Viasat satellite modems across the country and other parts of Europe, now believed to have been carried out by the GRU. Another incident of cybersabotage, which Mandiant attributes to Sandworm specifically, caused a blackout in a Ukrainian city just as it was being hit by missile strikes, potentially hampering defensive efforts.

It's not yet clear if the Kyivstar attack—if it was indeed carried out by a Russian state-sponsored hacker group—was merely intended to sow chaos and confusion among the company's customers, or if it had a more specific tactical intention, such as disguising intelligence-gathering within Kyivstar's network, hampering Ukrainian military communications, or silencing its alerts to civilians about air raids.

“Telecoms offer intelligence opportunities, but they're also very effective targets for disruption," says Mandiant's Hultquist. “You can cause significant disruption to people's lives. And you can even have military impacts.”

[perrysoup]

Been seeing stuff about the Green Party and one part has me worried.

Jill Stein

Now, I want to say that I have a hard time fully understanding all propaganda I get shown. That's literally the point of it, confuse people into thinking it's right.

(Note: this is using Propaganda as the following definition: information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.)

With that, I remember not knowing who she was until 2020 came around, and the key thing I was shown over and over was her apparent (I say that because I'm genuinely curious if what I was shown was evidence or lying by omission) ties to Putin and the Russian Oligarchy.

I'm gonna just Copy/Paste the section from Wikipedia so I don't miscommunicate what it shows:

On December 18, 2017, The Washington Post reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee was looking at Stein's presidential campaign for potential "collusion with the Russians."[90] The Stein campaign released a statement stating it would work with investigators.[91]

In December 2018, two reports commissioned by the US Senate found that the Internet Research Agency boosted Stein's candidacy through social media posts, targeting African-American voters in particular. After consulting the two reports, NBC News reporter Robert Windrem said that nothing suggested Stein knew about the operation, but added that "the Massachusetts physician ha[d] long been criticized for her support of international policies that mirror Russian foreign policy goals." Windrem reported that his publisher (NBC News) had found that in 2015 and 2016 there had been over 100 favorable stories about Stein on Russian state-owned media networks RT and Sputnik.[92] In 2015, Stein was photographed dining at the same table as Russian president Vladimir Putin at the RT 10th anniversary gala in Moscow, leading to controversy.[93][94] Stein contended that she had no contact with Putin at the dinner and described the situation as a "non-event".[95]

In an official statement, Stein called one of the reports, the one authored by New Knowledge, "dangerous new McCarthyism" and asked the Senate Committee to retract it, saying the firm was "sponsored by partisan Democratic funders" and had itself been shown to have been "directly involved in election interference" in the 2017 US Senate election in Alabama.[96]

By July 31, 2018, Stein had spent slightly under $100,000 of the recount money on legal representation linked to the Senate probe into election interference.[97] In March 2019, Stein's spokesman David Cobb said she had "fully cooperated with the Senate inquiry."[98]

In October 2019, Hillary Clinton said that Russia's ongoing efforts to influence U.S. elections included a plot to support a third-party candidate in 2020, which could either be Jill Stein, whom she described as a "Russian asset," or Tulsi Gabbard.[99] A few days later, Clinton's comments were clarified to indicate that she thought that it was, in fact, Republicans who were behind the plot.[100] Stein denounced Clinton's comments on both herself and Gabbard, describing them as "slanderous".[101]

So the question is, is she a Russian asset? Does she genuinely have a history related to Putin? I believe there is a photo of her at a dinner with Putin and some other GOP people, but is it taken out of Context? Is it a meeting where she realizes she doesn't agree with them stuff? Legit I don't know, I want information, with sources please.

[starblightbindery]

Editor's Note from my bind, Designs of Fate, an anthology of Star Wars stories by Patricia A. Jackson.

Patricia A. Jackson is a criminally underrated Star Wars author.

I’ll explain.

Growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was challenging to be an adolescent Star Wars fangirl, particularly an Asian American one. Back then, fandom meant negotiating male-dominated online message boards where identifying as a teenage girl meant inviting a ‘fake geek girl’ grilling at best and sexual harassment at worst. Most of the published Star Wars books were about Han, Leia, and Luke. Han and Leia were in their thirties and the parents of three children...not super relatable for preteen me. As far as character development was concerned, our “Big Three” had established characterizations coalesced firmly on the side of good. For our heroes, there was no moral ambiguity as, novel by novel, they tackled the galactic Threat of the Week.

Bildungsromans, those books were not. When Jackson started writing Star Wars in the 1990s, there were no women Jedi or protagonists of color. If you wanted stories with original characters coming of age, your primary recourse was the West End Games’ Star Wars Adventure Journals and their published anthologies, Tales from the Empire (1997) and Tales from the New Republic (1999). I remember avidly poring over my dogeared paperback copies and stalking the internet for scans or transcriptions. Although I never played the D6 role-playing game, the short stories from the Star Wars Adventure Journals helped me envision that a character like me—a young Asian girl coming into her own—did have a place in Star Wars after all.

As evinced by the vitriolic reactions towards John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran during the production of the sequel trilogy, Star Wars fandom can be a hateful environment for proponents of diversity and inclusion. A small but irritatingly loud faction of fascist-leaning, cishet, white male fans are actively hostile towards fans who advocate for change; they are more troubled by the presence of queers, women and BIPOC than our absence. Because of the ubiquity and popularity of Star Wars in America’s cultural milieu, the sentiments from these self-appointed gatekeepers have been—and continue to be—amplified by right wing extremists, and, to some extent, even by the Internet Research Agency as tools of Russia’s psychological and cyber warfare against the United States. During his Ph.D. candidacy with the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, Morten Bay, PhD., studied negative tweets about The Last Jedi and found that 50.9% of negative tweets were “bots, trolls/sock puppets or political activists using the debate to propagate political messages supporting extreme right-wing causes and the discrimination of gender, race or sexuality.”

“Russian trolls weaponize Star Wars criticism as an instrument of information warfare with the purpose of pushing for political change,” he wrote, “while it is weaponized by right-wing fans to forward a conservative agenda and for some it is a pushback against what they perceive as a feminist/social justice onslaught.”

The creation and inclusion of characters with minoritized identities in Star Wars is, therefore, an act of resistance. As far as I’m aware, Patricia A. Jackson was the first woman of color and Black author to write for the Star Wars expanded universe. Jackson has described the fan environment in the 1990s thusly; like many minoritized fans of color, she would be given pithy justifications such as "Well, there’s no Africa in Star Wars, so there are no Black people." Jackson noted, aptly, "That was just translation for “’You don’t matter. You don’t need to be here.’” Jackson's work for West End Games, particularly her sourcebook The Black Sands of Socorro, is a subversion of those expectations.

Before anyone else did, Jackson showed fandom that dominant mayo masculinity did not have to be the only way to tell Star Wars stories. Her stories existed before the prequel trilogy and three decades of Star Wars publishing, before FanFiction.net, Archive of Our Own, or Wattpad. She is the forerunner for BIPOC writers in Star Wars, followed by other luminaries like Steven Barnes, Daniel José Older, Nnedi Okorafor, Rebecca Roanhorse, Ken Liu, Greg Pak, Alyssa Wong, Sarah Kuhn, Saladin Ahmed, C.B. Lee, Justina Ireland, Alex Segura, Zoraida Cordova, Greg VanEekhout, Mike Chen, Charles Yu, R.F. Kuang, Sarwat Chadda, Sabaa Tahir, and Renée Ahdieh.

Jackson had and continues to have an incredibly prescient understanding of what makes a good Star Wars story. Any of the stories in this anthology could find a home as an anime short from Star Wars: Visions (2021). Ideas from Jackson’s Star Wars short stories have appeared in later media, sometimes decades later. Whether convergently evolved or directly influenced, the parallels are astonishing: Kierra, the snarky feminine droid consciousness who inhabits Thaddeus Ross’s ship, is a spiritual predecessor to L3-37, Lando Calrissian’s snarky feminine droid companion from Solo (2018) who ends the film uploaded to the Millennium Falcon. Jackson addressed concepts like slavery and Force healing predating the prequel and sequel trilogies. In “Idol Intentions,” she created an adventuring academic on the hunt for artifacts long before Kieron Gillen brought Doctor Aphra to life. Squint and the upturned red salt on the planet Crait in The Last Jedi becomes flying red soil on the planet Redcap. Dark haired, dark side tragic emo boy starcrossed with a fiery girl Jedi?—I think Jackson understood intuitively the appeal of this trope to a woman-dominated contingent of fandom well before “Reylo” topped Tumblr’s fan favorite relationship charts in 2020.

Jackson’s work is also significant for deepening world building. Much like how Timothy Zahn introduced analysis of fine art to Star Wars with his villainous art connoisseur Grand Admiral Thrawn, Jackson’s stories introduced concepts such as the evolution of Old Corellian, the acting profession, and Legitimate Theatre. These elements added verisimilitude to the expanded universe; it makes sense that different cultures in Star Wars would have archaic languages, folk songs, and old stories of their own from even longer ago in galaxies far, far, away. More recently, the franchise has started to flesh out in-universe lore in Star Wars: Myths and Fables (2019) by George Mann. Still, Uhl Eharl Khoehng in “Uhl Eharl Khoehng” (1995) remains the finest example of mise en abyme in any Star Wars related work.

Themes from Jackson’s Star Wars works, particularly around Drake Paulsen and Socorro, also connect contemporaneously with our real world. When the Seldom Different is essentially ‘pulled over’ by Imperial authorities in “Out of the Cradle” (1994), stormtroopers lie about Drake Paulsen having a weapon as a pretense to terrorize the teenager. It’s a collision of space opera with Black youths’ past and current experiences of police brutality and state-sanctioned violence. Accordingly, this capricious encounter is the rite of passage that jars Drake out of his childhood. I cheered when I read The Black Sands of Socorro (1997) and saw that the Black Bha'lir smuggler’s guild is named for a bha'lir, depicted in the book as a large...panther. Few Star Wars expanded universe authors—particularly in the 1990s—leveraged their influence to center characters of color or to allude to racial justice movements. Jackson did both.

For this anthology, I have copy edited and also taken the liberty of, when applicable, substituting some gendered or sanist language with more contemporaneous wording.17 The stories are otherwise intact. It would be remiss of me if I did not note; however, that one of the stories, “Bitter Winter” (1995), has sanist and ableist tropes that could not be contemporized without making dramatic changes to the story. In this story, the fictional disease brekken vinthern drives those impacted to violence; while it’s real world correlate of major neurocognitive disorder can include symptoms of aggression and agitation, extreme violence is rare and people with this condition are also at great risk of being harmed by violence. The tropes “Mercy Kill” and “Shoot the Dog” are depictions of non-voluntary active euthanasia, typically from the perspective of the horrified “killer” placed in an impossible situation. These tropes frame murder and death as “putting someone out of their misery” while downplaying any alternatives (ie: sedation to alleviate suffering, medical attention, or, say, ion cannons to render a ship inoperable without killing.)

Like in our society, the societies in Star Wars have consistently framed mental illness pejoratively. There are certainly valid critiques of the utter inadequacy of health care in Star Wars. Ableism is ubiquitous in entertainment media, and even with it’s problematic tropes, “Bitter Winter” remains one of the more humanizing depictions of a mental health condition in Star Wars fiction. I have included it in this anthology as a rare example of moral ambiguity in the franchise.

With the exception of “Fragile Threads” and “Emanations of Darkness,” the stories here are presented not in published order, but in chronological order as they would have occurred in the Star Wars universe. Ordering the stories chronologically helped clarify timelines; it also allows the anthology to begin with “The Final Exit,” which was a fan favorite back when it was first published. I’ve interwoven the Brandl family stories with Drake Paulsen’s coming of age adventures, as the Paulsens are such a strong foil to the Brandl family.

Since “I am your father” dropped in 1980, Star Wars has been big on Daddy Issues—intergenerational trauma, parental relationships, broken attachments, identity development, and initiation into adulthood (or, as Obi-Wan Kenobi would put it, “taking your first steps into a larger world.”) With Drake, we see that Kaine Paulsen is a father who is gone but ever-present. With Jaalib, we see that Adalric Brandl is a father who is ever-present but clearly far gone. Drake knows his Socorran roots; he has community and found family. Fable’s identity is adrift; she was torn from her roots after her fugitive Jedi mother’s death. Jaalib’s roots are scaffolded by disingenuous artifice. There is a diametric interplay of identity formation and parental legacy in these short stories that captures classic themes from Star Wars. And, the stories challenge readers to consider how we interact with shame, guilt, and obligation. Through the morally ambiguous dilemmas that are her oeuvre, Jackson’s characters discover who they are and where they stand.

While the thrill of having an Imperial Star Destroyer drop out of hyperspace is pure Star Wars energy, Jackson’s stories also disrupted what fans had come to expect. Published online as fan fiction, “Emanations of Darkness” (2001) polarized fans of the previous Brandl stories, particularly with Fable’s decision to throw her lot in with Jaalib and his father. At the time, Star Wars fan commentator Charles Phipps noted how the story dealt with the insidiousness of the dark side by taking potential heroes and crushing them. “Star Wars, I've never known to leave a bitter taste in my mouth,” he wrote, stunned. “I don't like what it's brought out in my feelings or myself...Bravo Brandl, you have your applause.” Although the Brandl stories were written and published before Revenge of the Sith (2005), Fable and Jaalib’s relationship mirrors the relationship between Padmé Amidala and Anakin Skywalker, down to both Jaalib and Anakin selling their souls to the same Emperor in hopes that will spare the women they love.

The prequel trilogy introduces the Jedi Council’s detached approach to attachments—don’t feel it, emotions like fear or anger are to be shunned, else suffering will follow. Anakin Skywalker’s broken attachments to his mother and Padmé lead him to turn against his values; his inability to integrate or tolerate his attachments is his downfall. It’s the same in the Brandl stories where, trauma bonded, Fable and Jaalib cannot let each other go. While Jaalib credits this as how he was able to preserve a bit of himself while under the Emperor’s thrall, his inability to extricate himself from his father’s influence or to let go of Fable ends up dooming her.

This is why I was thrilled to discover “Fragile Threads” (2021) on Wattpad twenty years later. In this story, Drake Paulsen helps his lover Tiaja Moorn save her sister, at the cost of losing their relationship when she decides to remain on her homeworld. Drake doesn’t fight her decision, he accepts it. He can hold onto that connection to Tiaja, just as he knows he will always be connected to Socorro, his father, and the Black Bha'lir. Drake can love freely because he knows what Luke Skywalker told Leia in The Last Jedi: “No one is ever truly gone.” He is able to straddle the fulcrum of attachment and love without letting it consume him, and that is balancing the Force.

Contemporary fandom discourse is also a struggle with attachment; the parasocial relationships we form with characters and stories are similar in process to how we attach to the important people in our lives. We imbue with meaning and carry these stories with us. As Star Wars storytelling enters its fifth decade, the divide between affirmational fandom (allegiance to manufactured nostalgia) and transformational fandom (allegiance to iterative and transgressive fan engagement) has factionized fandom. When Star Wars is seen as a totemic object, right wing fans have agitated for a return to a mythic past where white men were centered and morality was Manichean. From where I stand, at the heart of this debate is whether or not the reader or Star Wars is permitted to “grow up”—to leave the cradle, to evolve new identities and explore shades of grey.

To me, Jackson’s stories are a reminder that characters of color and complex moral dilemmas have always been a part of Star Wars. We have always been here. No other Star Wars author has been as exquisitely aware of the significance of storytelling; how it can help people challenge existing beliefs and discover themselves. Since the beginnings of the expanded universe, Patricia A. Jackson has spun yarn, and those fragile threads have tethered readers like myself to a galaxy far, far away.

Ol'val, min dul'skal, ahn guld domina, mahn uhl Fharth bey ihn valle. (Until we next meet, may the Force be with you.)

[partisan-by-default]

When Putin wanted the Central African Republic (CAR) to give him multiple gold and mineral mines in that resource-rich country, the first thing his agent, Yevgeny Prigozhin, did was to buy a radio station and start running propaganda about the benefits of the CAR creating closer ties to Russia.

Similarly, when Putin wanted to put Trump into the White House, he had Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency — a massive, well-funded troll farm based in St. Petersburg — use swing-state polling and other internal RNC confidential information to send more than 100 million targeted Facebook impressions to swing state Americans.

Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016 and a former employee who took over $10 million from one of Putin’s favorite oligarchs, handed that data off to Russian intelligence, leading in part to his going to prison (Trump pardoned him and is now talking about bringing him back into the 2024 campaign). Twenty-six of Putin’s IRA people were similarly indicted by the Mueller investigation, although American law has not been able to reach them in Russia.

Another example is Russia’s Putin and Hungary’s Orbán: in both cases, they used — just as Trump is promising to do here if he is reelected — libel laws to drive “normal” and progressive radio, newspapers, and TV out of business and replaced them with the equivalent of Fox “News” owned by friendly oligarchs, proclaiming the wonders of Putin and Orbán all day, every day.