written in Russian, in Cyrillic characters, which I translated with "Google Translate".

It was too easy. America has been ripe for foreign intervention ever since Lyndon Johnson assassinated Kennedy. Robert helped us a lot by creating the Living Zone. We have dealt with it for several decades. Thanks to Robert, we were able to hack Hillary's server and the DNC server. The long chain of bought presidents naturally ripped off the US public and made Trump our perfect vehicle for total control.

Conservatives or liberals don't matter.

Of course, this proves nothing, he could have used Google Translate to compose this message. But it shows that he knew exactly what I was implying. At any rate, after that, he just disappeared...

This is my post...the one he responded to with his Russian Language text.

Could the Techster have been a Russki hack? by ER February 20, 2018 7:51 pm

I often used to speculate SDAI wasn’t what he appeared to be, a fundowacko Right winger, at all, but a Left-wing black flag operation designed to discredit the Right by pretending to be a really obnoxious Conservative. I never had any real evidence, of course, other than the tenor and color of his posts, and his lunatic meditations on mirror principles, cosmic travels, multiple universes, reincarnations and so on. Remember how TB tried to convince and persuade us using logic and research, and Gbaike and Lee often slipped and let us glimpse the dark underbelly of the Conservative soul? The Techster was different. I was just smart enough to see that he was a lot smarter than he let on, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on just what he was up to.

SDAI was balls to the wall crazy, and came up with the most outrageous mental non sequiturs and pseudo-mystical rants. The trouble is, he always seemed a bit too articulate and clever to actually believe any of the nonsense he spouted. It almost appeared to be deliberately designed to make his persona, an extreme Right wing cryptofascist ideologue, come across as ridiculous, or maybe make US look ridiculous by believing him and engaging him. Its like he was playing some sort of Stephen Colbert game, coming off as the crazy wackofundo, but also keeping the conversation (in an otherwise sober and respectable science chat room) erratic and confused. And eventually, he succeeded in helping wreck the Zone’s effectiveness as a centrist and relatively neutral space/science website and converting it into a political snakepit, driving off many of its most noted contributors. And yes, I must confess, I fell for it. Whatever contribution we could have made to space, science, and the nation, was effectively neutralized. The Zone was no longer an asset to the national dialogue.

Now that we’ve had the opportunity to study some of their PSYOPS and political warfare, isn’t it clear that that’s what the Russian internet warfare and fake news operation has been designed to do all along? They have sought to exploit existing fissures in American society and exaggerating them, driving wedges into the American political and cultural fabric. The result, political paralysis and ideological warfare, and a distrust of all institutions: politics, government, the law, the press, intelligentsia, the arts, sciences, academia, and the intellectual life of the nation itself. Oh, I know we can’t blame it all on Putin, the US has no shortage of its own banalities, crazies and sociopaths. But you have to admit that most of the mechanisms for debate, compromise and progress that America has evolved over the centuries, and the common sense and decency of its people, has been systematically undermined by someone who appears to know and understand us extremely well. Its applied Asimovian Psychohistory, not implemented as an academic discipline, but weaponized and targeted; the Kremlin has unleashed this weapon not just on us, but on all the democracies of the West. The goal has been to weaken Liberal Democracy and to cause the peoples of the West to distrust their own civilization and values. And when Trump came along, he was just what the doctor ordered. Putin and his psychowarriors had hit the mother lode.

America’s propaganda efforts have always been an attempt to show others that our system was better, and therefore worth emulating. The Russians have chosen to base their attack on the idea that ALL systems are corrupt, and they’re all pretty much equivalent. Sadly, its a proposition much closer to reality, and one which most people can be persuaded to accept, particularly in troubled times, an epoch dominated by scapegoating, demagogues and conspiracy theories. We’ve been played, by real masters, and I wonder if SDAI was one of them.

I miss him, I miss his humor, his outrageousness and his impenetrability. I wish he’d come back and satisfy my curiosity, once and for all. His mission has already been a success, he has nothing to lose by taking a little credit for what he and his colleagues have accomplished. He could afford to come back and tell us just how he did it.