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If advocating on social media and organizing public meetings in a foreign country is an act of war then America's entire public diplomacy is an act of war against every other nation on earth. If you take that position you've literally taken the position of Russia, China and Iran re:freedom of speech within their borders. You completely destroy the foundations of the liberal conception of freedom of speech by taking that position, and the speed with which liberals have done so is incredibly disconcerting and tells you just how weak their commitment to liberal values is The Podesta hack is another matter entirely, because it was actually illegal and not just in the technical foreign agent registration sense, but you'll notice nobody has said anything about that in a long time. If "Russian government agents posted on Facebook and Twitter without saying who they were" is really the entire foundation for the foreign interference case, and if that's really enough to trigger a full-scale McCarthyist crackdown and censorship regime, I think you can say for sure that Putin is right about the weakness of liberal values, and has won the debate hands down icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Feb 19, 2018 |
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Feb 19, 2018 22:37
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twodot posted:Yo, the English language is a socially constructed object, it's not accurate to talk about whether it's accurate to say whether an object belongs in a category defined by social convention. Describing something as an act of war has nothing to do with the truth of that assertion and everything to do with justifying the response you want to perform. Ooookahy, yeah. Like I said above, this is semantics; more to the point, you're pushing a particular semantic analysis because it fits an agenda (I don't necessarily disagree with said agenda, fwiw). If it makes you happy feel free to accept that I'm a 19th century dinosaur still pointlessly seeking after whatever degree of objective truth can be ascertained. If that makes me counter-revolutionary then I ask for the good wall and the good bullet.  icantfindaname posted:
I have brought it up like ten different times in the past page? Every single point I've made in this discussion has been in reference to either the hacking of election databases or the Podesta DNC hack, explicitly so. The people bringing up the facebook poo poo are just wetting their pants. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Feb 19, 2018 |
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Feb 19, 2018 22:38
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I have brought it up like ten different times in the past page? Okay, that's fair. I wasn't responding to you specifically
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Feb 19, 2018 22:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Ooookahy, yeah. Like I said above, this is semantics; more to the point, you're pushing a particular semantic analysis because it fits an agenda (I don't necessarily disagree with said agenda, fwiw). If it makes you happy feel free to accept that I'm a 19th century dinosaur still pointlessly seeking after whatever degree of objective truth can be ascertained. If that makes me counter-revolutionary then I ask for the good wall and the good bullet. It has nothing to do with being counter-revolutionary and everything to do with supporting indiscriminately firing missiles at human goddamn beings over phishing emails and facebook memes because of some sociopathic calculus being loving horrifying.
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Feb 19, 2018 22:43
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Oh Snapple! posted:It has nothing to do with being counter-revolutionary and everything to do with supporting indiscriminately firing missiles at human goddamn beings over phishing emails and facebook memes because of some sociopathic calculus being loving horrifying. It's really weird how people keep laser focusing in on "facebook memes" no matter how many times I explicitly spell out that I'm not even talking about those and never was. It's like the strawman is just totally irresistible.
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Feb 19, 2018 22:45
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:It's really weird how people keep laser focusing in on "facebook memes" no matter how many times I explicitly spell out that I'm not even talking about those and never was. It's like the strawman is just totally irresistible. Your position doesn't become any less horrifying by removing it.
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Feb 19, 2018 22:47
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:It's really weird how people keep laser focusing in on "facebook memes" no matter how many times I explicitly spell out that I'm not even talking about those and never was. It's like the strawman is just totally irresistible. The media narrative has been almost entirely about the Facebook memes. Like I said the Podesta hack has pretty much gone down the memory hole, probably because there's not enough actual evidence that the CIA will allow into the public to prove it was Russia to satisfaction
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Feb 19, 2018 22:48
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Oh Snapple! posted:Your position doesn't become any less horrifying by removing it. I'm not sure it's possible to have a position on "appropriate" war that isn't horrifying. War is horrifying, even a theoretical "justifiable" or "appropriate" war. World War II was horrifying in every aspect. Again, as I find myself saying so often in this discussion: yes, I agree with you. You're right. There's no aspect of this discussion that isn't horrifying. Russian criminal interference with our election is horrifying. So were prior American interferences in other nation's elections. So is all war generally (even "cold" war).
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Feb 19, 2018 22:50
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icantfindaname posted:The media narrative has been almost entirely about the Facebook memes. Like I said the Podesta hack has pretty much gone down the memory hole, probably because there's not enough actual evidence that the CIA will allow into the public to prove it was Russia to satisfaction OK, maybe that's what I'm missing. I haven't turned on a television or loaded a twitter thread all weekend -- it's been all board games and video games since Friday.
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Feb 19, 2018 22:51
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Lightning Knight posted:Counterpoint: the whole West Coast was taken by force from Mexico, so Mexico should actually nuke us.
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Feb 19, 2018 22:54
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I cannot believe that somebody said that hacking emails and fomenting already-existing discontent deserves a summary execution via high-explosive, with all the civilian death that entails. If anyone hasn't read The Assassination Complex, here's what he's actually saying: I want the Trump admin to sign off on some Russian guy's execution via missile, and then the intelligence community does some SIGINT and when they think they've found the guy they blow up everybody there, and if that doesn't work they do it again and again and again until he finally gets chunked. Oh in the interim we might have gotten his mother, father, cousins, kids, whatever. Who cares? This is what someone considers "reasonable" in 2018. We're hosed.
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Feb 19, 2018 22:54
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I'm not sure it's possible to have a position on "appropriate" war that isn't horrifying. War is horrifying, even a theoretical "justifiable" or "appropriate" war. World War II was horrifying in every aspect. Nobody you're arguing with agrees this is war
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Feb 19, 2018 22:56
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:
Nobody's reading what I said at all, are they? I explicitly said such conduct would be "idiotic," i.e., the opposite of "reasonable." As I've gone over at length above, I was trying to draw the (apparently too nuanced for this forum, which I guess I should have foreseen) distinction between an action that's theoretically justifiable in the abstract, but absolutely not justifiable in the particular or in the real world. In other words, for all the reasons spelled out in the article you just linked (among many others).
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Feb 19, 2018 22:57
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The Podesta hack was a crime, sure. Of course, it was only a problem because it revealed stuff like Hillary promising Goldman-Sachs her public positions were a front and she was privately on their side, and calling "publishing true but embarrassing information about our duplicity and untrustworthiness" an act of war is like calling it an act of war that the Soviets published the Entente's secret treaties to carve up territory after defeating Germany because those evil plans were supposed to be private drat it! VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Feb 19, 2018 |
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Feb 19, 2018 23:00
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VitalSigns posted:The Podesta hack was a crime, sure. That's a fair point, but it's kinda like pointing out that it's really hard to blackmail people who aren't horrible to begin with.
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Feb 19, 2018 23:03
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VitalSigns posted:The Podesta hack was a crime, sure. That was the strangest part in all of this, the arguments ended up being "well, okay, we did say and do these things, but you were never supposed to see our inside baseball and the other guys do it way worse anyway" So the aftermath sounded more like they were whining about getting caught working at cross purposes against their own constituents, which makes the continued inactivity of the DNC and its singleminded efforts to blame Russia for everything really frustrating to watch
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Feb 19, 2018 23:06
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Rent-A-Cop posted:I will meet my death gladly at the hands of a Seminole a-bomb knowing that it is just. 
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Feb 19, 2018 23:12
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Nobody's reading what I said at all, are they? I explicitly said such conduct would be "idiotic," i.e., the opposite of "reasonable." I've already explained why you haven't drawn any kind of distinction, nuanced or otherwise, so all you've done so far is pretty much walk yourself through the first few steps of Grown-up and Sensible support of the war for liberal types.
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Feb 19, 2018 23:16
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Heironymous Alloy, is this what you're talking about when you refer the Russian "hacking of election databases"? https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california/articles/2017-09-27/homeland-security-clarifying-state-election-hacking-attempts
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Feb 19, 2018 23:36
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Chomskyan posted:Heironymous Alloy, is this what you're talking about when you refer the Russian "hacking of election databases"? Yes, but there's additional context I would add to that. The first is "no evidence of actual tampering": that doesn't mean there was no tampering, it just means we can't prove it (with publicly available information, anyway). Someone breaks into a house at night and then leaves; you can't figure out if anything's missing; that doesn't mean there wasn't a burglary, or that nothing was stolen, it just means you can't prove that something was stolen. Rather the reverse; the fact of the break-in is evidence of, at least, intent and attempt to rob, both of which are crimes in and of themselves regardless of whether or not anything was actually stolen. Even if we can't prove that the Russians did tamper with the election -- and that does not mean they didn't, it just means it hasn't yet been proven (publicly) -- we can prove they attempted to do so, and attempt to [crime] is also a crime. Past that, there's a huge amount of evidence that most American electronic voting machines are *extremely* vulnerable -- just google "diebold hack" and you'll get a hundred different articles. See, e.g., https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-elections-russia-hack-how-to-hack-an-election-in-seven-minutes-214144 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rigged-presidential-elections-hackers-demonstrate-voting-threat-old-machines/ Many of those machines are so vulnerable that there would not necessarily *be* any trail to find afterwards. Given all that, it seems extraordinarily naive to just rest on "well, we can't prove the election results were tampered with". Maybe not, but there's definitely enough evidence to conclude that tampering probably happened. If you see someone in a mask break into a house carrying a gasoline tank, and then you see smoke pouring out of said house, you don't need camera footage of the match being struck to draw the reasonable inference that someone set the house on fire, even if you can't prove it (yet, at least). All that said, there's also the Podesta / DNC hack, which is a separate incident and similarly criminal, and I don't think the facts of that are disputed at all, so I don't really need the election databases hack to make my case, they're just an extra data point in support. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Feb 19, 2018 |
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Feb 19, 2018 23:48
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So now we’ve moved on to “I can’t prove there was a hack, but come on, there must’ve been. Also the solution would be drones, if not for the fact that actions have consequences.” Truly, a sophisticated philosopher for these complex times.
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Feb 19, 2018 23:53
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yes, but there's additional context I would add to that. Is this some weird remake of that invisible dragon thought experiment from Carl Sagan's book? Edit: lmao, thinking about this some more, this is exactly the same argument that they were using for the whole Benghazi shitstorm, "We don't have any evidence that Hillary sent the stand down order directly, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen!". I also see the same lovely logic constantly from right leaning co-workers about Uranium One/the Deep State/Clinton baby-eating conspiracies "Just wait, you'll see!!!". BadOptics fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 19, 2018 23:56
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BadOptics posted:"We don't have any evidence that Hillary sent the stand down order directly, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen!". You're ignoring the very post you're quoting. We *do* have evidence that the Russians committed crimes in an attempt to interfere with the election. Indeed, I don't think anyone is even disputing that, since we all seem to agree that the Podesta hack was the result of Russian action. It's really important, logically, to draw a distinction between evidence and proof. You can have evidence without having proof. That's basically where we are on Russian election tampering. We have proof that: 1) Russians hacked the DNC, stole emails, and published them in an attempt to interfere with the election and 2) Russians hacked election databases in twenty odd states. Both of those things are evidence which supports the thesis that Russian hacking and interference changed the result of the election. They aren't proof and that's admitted, but they are evidence in support, and it would be foolish to ignore that evidence. When you're trying to figure out if a crime was committed, the fact that you can prove someone attempted to commit said crime is evidence in support, even if it isn't proof. To be clear, when I say tampering "probably happened", I mean "greater than 51% odds," and that's all. As you say, this is completely distinct from the Benghazi bullshit because there there was no evidence, just suppositional bullshit. Lightning Knight posted:So now we’ve moved on to “I can’t prove there was a hack, but come on, there must’ve been. oh wait I was wrong apparently we have a Russia hacking denialist. Hacking is proven. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 00:11
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BadOptics posted:Edit: lmao, think about this some more, this is exactly the same argument that they were using for the whole Benghazi shitstorm, "We don't have any evidence that Hillary sent the stand down order directly, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen!". I also see the same lovely logic constantly from right leaning co-workers about Uranium One/the Deep State/Clinton baby-eating conspiracies "Just wait, you'll see!!!". I remember I used to listen to conservative "arguments" and think "thank god libs are too smart to fall for this poo poo!" Shame on me, Red Scare 2.0 is being led by brain-broke Dem centrists who can't handle the magnitude of their failure.
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Feb 20, 2018 00:19
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Chomskyan posted:Latin America should drone strike the US for election meddling Can’t wait for this thread to become pro-JDPON
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Feb 20, 2018 00:24
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https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/965562552645246991 This is why I follow him on Twitter.  For those of you that saw the wrong tweet I originally posted: also lol
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Feb 20, 2018 00:25
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:You're ignoring the very post you're quoting. Evidence for the hack being Russian is actually not all that solid, it's basically a report from a security firm hired by the DNC that says "trust us it's Russia", and the FBI/CIA then endorsing this report despite never actually accessing the hacked servers. They may know more than that, and it's certainly possible it was the Russian state, but it's awfully thin evidence relative to the incredibly serious implications of this being true. On the other hand we know 100% that Russia funded Facebook and Twitter trolls, but that's a much less serious offense and probably couldn't be said to have swung the election even as close as it was. The conflation of these two things is deeply dishonest but it's the whole basis for the Russian interference narrative and has been since day 1 icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 00:30
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icantfindaname posted:Evidence for the hack being Russian is actually not all that solid, it's basically a report from a security firm hired by the DNC that says "trust us it's Russia", and the FBI/CIA then endorsing this report despite never actually accessing the hacked servers. They may know more than that, and it's certainly possible it was the Russian state, but it's awfully thin evidence relative to the incredibly serious implications of this being true. That's not true, but you may have missed the story because it only came out recently. Danish intelligence cracked the Russian hacking operations months ago and even got security cam footage of all those involved. The Cozy Bear stuff can be considered proven at this point, even if you're inclined to be suspect of American and private intel sources. https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/danish-spies-shared-intel-russian-cozy-bear
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Feb 20, 2018 00:32
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:That's not true, but you may have missed the story because it only came out recently. Danish intelligence cracked the Russian hacking operations months ago and even got security cam footage of all those involved. The Cozy Bear stuff can be considered proven at this point, even if you're inclined to be suspect of American and private intel sources. Huh. Maybe it is stronger evidence than I thought. The narrative is still focused more on social media though, with the implied solution being increased censorship and scrutiny of it. The hack is being used at most to add rhetorical support to the social media angle, it's not being emphasized by itself. I listen to Nate Silver's podcast and in his punditry the hack basically ranks third in impact on the election behind the Comey Letter and Twitter bots, it's barely mentioned at all. I would think it'd rank first, the email thing was a huge blow to Hillary, it substantiated much of the narrative of DNC corruption and conflated naturally with Hillary's email scandal. It's very weird it isn't emphasized more, and that's part of what makes me doubt how strong the evidence really is. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 00:39
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FuturePastNow posted:Anything that creates conflict and tension and divides us is the goal. If you believe all it took was some twitter trolls and a relatively piffling amount of money to to do what's currently happening, then people aren't admitting to some problems that have been building for a while. vvv: Also this. People making comparisons to Pearl Harbor are either insane or do not realise that you're promoting a dangerous course of action with that rhetoric. So what is it, insane or stupid? Kokoro Wish fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 00:45
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Ok so to sum up we have - A successful email phishing operation against the DNC - A scan of 21 voter registration databases with no evidence of any tampering - A number of troll factories that ran social media campaigns You believe this cumulatively constitutes an act of war?
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Feb 20, 2018 00:45
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Chomskyan posted:Ok so to sum up we have I think I've been clear that my position is that the Podesta hack alone (coupled with the use of the information so obtained to attempt to interfere with the election) is enough by itself that Russian interference with the election may be accurately characterized as an "act of war." The rest is just gravy. Just to take an alternative line of argument from the semantic debate above, since that line seems played out, If you look at the historical record, about a zillion wars have started for much more trivial reasons than interference with an election. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Jenkins%27_Ear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram World War One started because a random nutjob private citizen shot a hereditary monarch, it wasn't even sparked by state action. America joined WW1 because Germany sent Mexico a telegram. "Act of War" if by that we mean "action after which war is the response", is not exactly a high standard to meet. IIn that sense, it's descriptive, not prescriptive. The only difference between this incident and any of those others is that we're in a post-nuclear world so the consequences of calling something an "Act of War" are far more dangerous. That just changes the stakes, though. It doesn't make the description inaccurate, it just makes it inadvisable.. Said another way, "They're not wrong." icantfindaname posted:The narrative is still focused more on social media though, with the implied solution being increased censorship and scrutiny of it. The hack is being used at most to add rhetorical support to the social media angle, it's not being emphasized by itself. Yeah I get all my news from here so I miss larger "media narratives." If you're telling me that centrists are using all this to create a smokescreen in favor of more bullshit centrism, that doesn't surprise me at all. Kokoro Wish posted:then people aren't admitting to some problems that have been building for a while. yes Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 01:21
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:2) hacking the DNC. You uh You do know the "but her emails" had nothing to do with the dnc hack right?
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Feb 20, 2018 01:32
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GlyphGryph posted:You uh Fed the larger narrative. There was a period where the media just kept repeating the word EMAILS for weeks and it all blended together in the Trumpian zeitgeist.
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Feb 20, 2018 01:33
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“We’ve fought wars for less, it’s cool” - a smart person.
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Feb 20, 2018 01:35
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I think I've been clear that my position is that the Podesta hack alone (coupled with the use of the information so obtained to attempt to interfere with the election) is enough by itself that Russian interference with the election may be accurately characterized as an "act of war." The rest is just gravy. Wait you just called out “whataboutism” earlier today when people were pointing to all the ways the US has interfered in elections. And now you’re what-abouting a bunch of heinous wars started for flimsy reasons. Why are you so gung ho to start a war?
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Feb 20, 2018 01:36
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Kobayashi posted:Wait you just called out “whataboutism” earlier today when people were pointing to all the ways the US has interfered in elections. And now you’re what-abouting a bunch of heinous wars started for flimsy reasons. Why are you so gung ho to start a war? Please don't strawman him. He'd only be gung-ho about starting a massive war that would kill who loving knows how many people if nukes weren't a consideration.
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Feb 20, 2018 01:40
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:World War One started because a random nutjob private citizen shot a hereditary monarch, it wasn't even sparked by state action. America joined WW1 because Germany sent Mexico a telegram. "Act of War" if by that we mean "action after which war is the response", is not exactly a high standard to meet. IIn that sense, it's descriptive, not prescriptive. This is an insane simplification of WWI.
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Feb 20, 2018 01:40
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:World War One started because a random nutjob private citizen shot a hereditary monarch, it wasn't even sparked by state action. America joined WW1 because Germany sent Mexico a telegram. "Act of War" if by that we mean "action after which war is the response", is not exactly a high standard to meet. And you think this is cool and good and the standard we should be using to enter World Wars? 
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Feb 20, 2018 01:41
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WampaLord posted:And you think this is cool and good and the standard we should be using to enter World Wars? I never said anything remotely approaching that, rather the exact opposite -- I said specifically that we should not. Again, I think the miscommunication here is that I'm coming at the definition of "Act of War" from a descriptive angle and the rest of the thread seems to be approaching it prescriptively. The question I'm trying to answer isn't "is it morally appropriate to call [Russian interference] an act of war?", it's "historically speaking is this the sort of event that has sparked wars?". As the rest of the thread has pointed out, the answer to the first question is "no." The answer to the second question though, well, that's pretty clearly "yes." Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 01:45
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