well I never … what an absolutely fantastic, startling & profusely enlightening exposé of hard-boiled & stoic investigative reporting at its finest.

riveting & brilliant, this fervently bold bombshell is delivered with a classic Rusky dispensation, terse, frank as fuck, cold fact & point-blank wryness with a habit of delicious deadpan humour.

“Privacy isn’t just about what people know about you” – “it’s about how that knowledge gives them control over you.” – Allesandro Acquisti

“Without solidarity, activism becomes difficult. Russia’s agenda was not to emphasize the differences between women and men any more than to incite women and men to quarrel with each other; instead, their efforts were directed at shredding women’s common goals by utilizing preexisting, legitimate causes fro criticism. The operation focused on three storylines: feminism is too white to advocate for Black women, feminism is too liberal to advocate for conservative women, and feminism is too affluent to advocate to poor women. All these topics are substantive; however, there is no chance of productive discussion if Russian military intelligence [the GRU & Glavset] and internet troll armies with fake chatbots and tweets on a scale possible only for state level actors.”

“Far-right activism takes many forms. There are sophisticated, educated and resourceful campaigners working towards ridding the country of anyone not considered white and British. I became close to well-funded, well-connected extremists who sought to widen the Overton Window – the range of ideas acceptable to the mainstream – to include race science and eugenics. Some of them enjoy the support of American tech tycoons and Conservative policymakers, work in the right-wing think tank scene and, in one case, write policy papers for downing street.”

“As law, the Tokyo trial had grand ambitions to establish international principles for a safer postwar world – a revived international law that outlawed aggression and atrocity. It sought to reestablish the battered authority of the old international laws of armed combat, such as the illegality of killing innocent civilians or abusing prisoners of war. It insisted that powerful persons had to face individual judgement for war crimes committed under their commands, rather than claiming immunity as generals and cabinet ministers. And like Nuremberg, it made a revolutionary attempt to enshrine aggressive war as the cardinal international crime, the one war crime that led to all the others.”

“ – after every crisis, power seems to become more concentrated in the hands of the people that caused it.”

“everything you know about capitalism is wrong.”

“Nobody planned for the financial crisis. But the response to that crisis was determined by a tight-knit network of financiers and politicians deciding amongst themselves who would be saved and who would be sacrificed.”