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Somfin posted:The question isn't whether or not it worked, the question is whether or not Trump's campaign knowingly conspired with a foreign government. Well, there's two separate things here. One is how you're defining "conspired" (i.e. does it count if Trump was simply aware of some of what Russia was doing, or does this require some sort of active cooperation). The other is why on a strictly ethical and practical level we consider "conspiring with a foreign government" to be inherently worse than conspiring with other organizations/entities. I don't see any reason to be more concerned about a politician conspiring with a foreign country than I should be about them conspiring with corporations hostile to the interests of the American public (if anything, the latter likely has a greater negative impact). The idea of foreign involvement being uniquely bad seems like it's just accepted as a "common sense" thing.
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Jul 29, 2019 02:05
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Ytlaya posted:Well, there's two separate things here. One is how you're defining "conspired" (i.e. does it count if Trump was simply aware of some of what Russia was doing, or does this require some sort of active cooperation). The other is why on a strictly ethical and practical level we consider "conspiring with a foreign government" to be inherently worse than conspiring with other organizations/entities. I don't see any reason to be more concerned about a politician conspiring with a foreign country than I should be about them conspiring with corporations hostile to the interests of the American public (if anything, the latter likely has a greater negative impact). The idea of foreign involvement being uniquely bad seems like it's just accepted as a "common sense" thing. In terms of ethics, you're on firm ground here with point number 2. However, in terms of pragmatism, if we can't even stop the obvious influence of hostile foreign governments, how the gently caress can we stop the influence of hostile multinational corporations as well? Like, this is the #AllLivesMatter style of deflection to an always-wider issue that ends up floundering in hopelessness instead of taking action. And to point number 1, I'd turn the question around: At what point can the collaboration between a candidate and a hostile power be considered innocent and fine?
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Jul 29, 2019 02:15
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Somfin posted:The question isn't whether or not it worked, the question is whether or not Trump's campaign knowingly conspired with a foreign government. the mueller report came back with a big fat nothing on trump conspiring with russia, so it seems your question was already answered
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Jul 29, 2019 02:21
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Condiv posted:the mueller report came back with a big fat nothing on trump conspiring with russia, so it seems your question was already answered He literally went on live tv and asked Russia to hack Hillary's emails and then they did, which led to the FBI announcing an investigation into Hillary like a week before the election. What is wrong with ya'll brains?
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Jul 29, 2019 03:32
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It's pretty amusing that we blow countries up and then hold more legitimate elections in them six months later than we can manage at home.
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Jul 29, 2019 03:54
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Ratios and Tendency posted:He literally went on live tv and asked Russia to hack Hillary's emails and then they did, which led to the FBI announcing an investigation into Hillary like a week before the election. What is wrong with ya'll brains? Russia started started like 6 hours after he asked, lol
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Jul 29, 2019 04:02
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Unoriginal Name posted:Russia started started like 6 hours after he asked, lol I'm sure that Helsing can find a way to explain why this isn't actually important
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Jul 29, 2019 04:38
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Cerebral Bore posted:Buddy, I have some bad news for you about the "going to" part. Because domestic election fuckery is already happening at a scale that utterly dwarfs anything that foreign governments could ever accomplish. Oh yeah of course. Specifically this new type. Helsing posted:The best documented example of this "fuckery" so far was a Democratic aligned firm that used bots to create the fake impression that the Roy Moore campaign was receiving support from Russia. Of course that story was really inconvenient to the overall purpose of the Russia-gate hysteria so after it was initially reported on everyone has gone about more or less totally ignoring it and continuing to warn about how the Internet Research Agency 9/11ed American democracy with Buff Bernie memes. So if anything Russiagate has made it more difficult to discuss the actually issue of election manipulation. There have been some longish NPR programs half hour to an hour on that specfic example. I'm not sure something addressed at length on freaknomics, market place(I think? I know I heard 2 long podcasts on it, might have been thier secondary podcast ), etc is hard to discuss. As far as the ACORN and GOTV stuff goes, basically agree.
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Jul 29, 2019 04:50
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Somfin posted:In terms of ethics, you're on firm ground here with point number 2. However, in terms of pragmatism, if we can't even stop the obvious influence of hostile foreign governments, how the gently caress can we stop the influence of hostile multinational corporations as well? Like, this is the #AllLivesMatter style of deflection to an always-wider issue that ends up floundering in hopelessness instead of taking action. Strictly ethically speaking, I don't think there's anything bad about collaboration itself, and that it's only bad when the entity someone is collaborating with is bad. Obviously this is definitely true with Russia, but as Helsing mentioned there other forces with dramatically more influence both in terms of Trump himself and the Republican Party in general. And unlike Russia, the US government can actually directly address domestic entities in ways that don't involve possible nuclear war. All it can really do about Russia is improve cyber-security. Ratios and Tendency posted:He literally went on live tv and asked Russia to hack Hillary's emails and then they did, which led to the FBI announcing an investigation into Hillary like a week before the election. What is wrong with ya'll brains? Doesn't the short time between him saying it and them trying it kinda imply the opposite? When people talk about Trump conspiring with Russia, it implies they had some sort of direct back-and-forth communication on this matter. It doesn't seem strange for Trump, who likes Russia/Putin, to say something like this and Russia to then decide to do that thing based upon what Trump said (though the latter in this case doesn't have any actual evidence, but I'll grant that it's not unlikely in this case). The situation doesn't imply that Trump was actually aware that Russia would do the hacking and was involved in arranging it in some way. It seems to me like this whole situation involves a lot of conflating "Trump and Russia having shared interests" with "Trump doing things because Russia told him to or vice versa."
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Jul 29, 2019 05:08
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Ytlaya posted:All it can really do about Russia is improve cyber-security. McConnell is literally preventing this right now.
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Jul 29, 2019 05:26
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Ytlaya posted:Doesn't the short time between him saying it and them trying it kinda imply the opposite? When people talk about Trump conspiring with Russia, it implies they had some sort of direct back-and-forth communication on this matter. It doesn't seem strange for Trump, who likes Russia/Putin, to say something like this and Russia to then decide to do that thing based upon what Trump said (though the latter in this case doesn't have any actual evidence, but I'll grant that it's not unlikely in this case). The situation doesn't imply that Trump was actually aware that Russia would do the hacking and was involved in arranging it in some way. Russia shopped the idea in exchange for sanction relief through the likes of Roger Stone and Don Jr. They even had a direct meeting about it at Trump Tower. Jr repeatedly bragged about it on twitter. We know all this.
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Jul 29, 2019 05:54
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Unoriginal Name posted:Russia started started like 6 hours after he asked, lol Somfin posted:I'm sure that Helsing can find a way to explain why this isn't actually important You do realize the source for that information is an indictment that came out of the Mueller probe, right? I.e. it is 1) completely unproven, 2) comes from a man with a history of lying (or being profoundly wrong) about crucial national security issues and 3) originates from the same man who then declined to press any charges against Trump and wouldn't even testify without being subpoenaed, and who then refused to read any excerpts from his own report in front of cameras because he didn't want to provide any sound bites with which to attack the GOP. You are selectively cherry picking specific claims from the report while ignoring the report's conclusion that was insufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy. All the central "facts" of the hacking allegations are based on unreleased "evidence" that relies on a small and "hand picked" group of analysts in the FBI, CIA and NSA as well as the work of a private firm -Crowdstrike - contracted to the DNC, and a handful of other statements made by figures in the intelligence or security world, none of it backed up by enough evidence for anyone to draw a conclusion that isn't based mostly on what people in authority are claiming. Meanwhile the principal example Mueller gives of Russia's supposedly sophisticated and pervasive information warfare against America are the actions of the Internet Research Agency. It's just so loving insane that anyone could actually look up what the Internet Research Agency was doing and then take Mueller seriously when he describes them as one of two major prongs in an attack on America society. You guys are all internet savvy, you have no excuse. What the gently caress?
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Jul 29, 2019 17:28
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Also, regarding the way people here keep confusing indictments with convictions, it is worth noting that a federal judge recently gave the government a slap on the wrist for making prejudicial statements and claims about the Internet Research Agency's connection to the Russian government that are well beyond the scope of anything that has been proven:quote:I. BACKGROUND pp.6-9 posted:Concord points to a number of discrepancies between the allegations of the indictment p.10 posted:In short, the Court concludes that the government violated Rule 57.7 by making or It will certainly be interesting if we get to see these claims tested in a court of law and see what the prosecution actually has. Until then, people should probably remember the allegations about Russian interference - both the hacking claims and the social media campaign - are mostly just allegations. Mueller did lay some charges for perjury and money laundering but all the speculation that this was just a technique for flipping people turned out to be quite wrong (or alternatively the people had no information to trade because the alleged conspiracy didn't happen). We're still extremely reliant on government officials saying "we've seen the evidence, we can't show it to you, but trust us". And that is coming from literally the same people who said Iraq was an imminent danger with a sophisticated WMD program. Whatever may or may not have happened, people really should be more reflexively skeptical of the people making these claims and be more critical of how everything has been treated by the media, which has done a horrifically bad job of reporting this or keeping things in perspective.
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Jul 29, 2019 18:23
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Helsing posted:You do realize the source for that information is an indictment that came out of the Mueller probe, right? I.e. it is 1) completely unproven, 2) comes from a man with a history of lying (or being profoundly wrong) about crucial national security issues and 3) originates from the same man who then declined to press any charges against Trump and wouldn't even testify without being subpoenaed, and who then refused to read any excerpts from his own report in front of cameras because he didn't want to provide any sound bites with which to attack the GOP. You are selectively cherry picking specific claims from the report while ignoring the report's conclusion that was insufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy. So which is it, does the Mueller probe prove nothing noteworthy happened or is it completely untrustworthy This is why it is a waste of time to engage you, you're just spoonfeeding the Trump line
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Jul 29, 2019 18:47
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Sodomy Hussein posted:So which is it, does the Mueller probe prove nothing noteworthy happened or is it completely untrustworthy Holy hell it must be so easy to see the world through this lens. Everything is completely binary.
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Jul 29, 2019 18:53
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Given that some of the most incriminating information concerning Russian involvement comes from Durch sources, I don't really buy that it's all just a conspiracy driven by American warmongers. Yes, the sources are anonymous iirc but something like this being made up completely strikes me as unlikely.
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Jul 29, 2019 19:27
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Sodomy Hussein posted:So which is it, does the Mueller probe prove nothing noteworthy happened or is it completely untrustworthy The only point I'm making there, and I honestly do not know how I could communicate this more simplistically for you than I already am, is that it seems inconsistent for the poster I was responding to to act as though allegations from the Mueller report are "known to be true" if they are also going to ignore the fact Mueller declined to press charges. That's not me relying on the Mueller report to make my argument, that is me pointing out a contradiction in the construction of someone else's argument. Obviously the Mueller report cannot "prove" a negative. What I would say is that given how the Mueller report concluded it is incumbent on people who think the conspiracy allegations are still valid to explain how they square this with the outcome of the probe. Since I've emphasized from day one that I don't view Mueller as trustworthy I am open to the idea he found evidence of high level misconducted and covered it up. However, because I also happen to know how unreliable the originators of most of the Russia-gate story is, I also think there's a real possibility that fundamental aspects of the Mueller probe were deeply misconstrued or even invented from whole cloth from the very beginning, and this obviously has influenced how I've regarded the story as it evolved. By this point I am pretty dubious about how much distance there seems to be between the claims being made and the actual evidence presented - the longer that continues the more inclined I am to think that core parts of the story need to be viewed with a lot of suspicion. Things like the reporting on the Internet Research Agency are so bad and so obviously manipulative that I don't know how anyone could not be suspicious of how they are reported on.
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Jul 29, 2019 20:12
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true.spoon posted:Given that some of the most incriminating information concerning Russian involvement comes from Durch sources, I don't really buy that it's all just a conspiracy driven by American warmongers. Yes, the sources are anonymous iirc but something like this being made up completely strikes me as unlikely. "There is some truth to it" is not a valid defense though. If Israeli conspiracies got the same treatment as Russian conspiracies it would actually be worse than the status quo.
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Jul 29, 2019 20:24
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Helsing posted:The only point I'm making there, and I honestly do not know how I could communicate this more simplistically for you than I already am, is that it seems inconsistent for the poster I was responding to to act as though allegations from the Mueller report are "known to be true" if they are also going to ignore the fact Mueller declined to press charges. That's not me relying on the Mueller report to make my argument, that is me pointing out a contradiction in the construction of someone else's argument. This very much reads like you're willing to swap between believing someone and not believing them based on how their evidence lines up with your set-in-stone vision of what happened. Has any evidence that has come out changed your viewpoint? What evidence could, at this point?
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Jul 29, 2019 20:55
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Mercrom posted:"There is some truth to it" is not a valid defense though. If Israeli conspiracies got the same treatment as Russian conspiracies it would actually be worse than the status quo.
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Jul 29, 2019 21:09
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true.spoon posted:I am not sure I get what you are wanting to say (valid defense of what? what do you mean by status quo in this instance? what Israeli conspiracies?) but "there is some truth to it" in this case means it is very likely that Russian groups hacked the emails and these groups were very likely connected to state intelligence agencies. The status quo is that Israel bribes politicians and spreads disinformation on social media. That's at least as threatening to democracy as Russian intelligence hiring some hackers to release some emails. But most of the time it's not actually about it being a threat to democracy. It's about partisan politics and xenophobia, and that's why people feel comfortable believing anything or even making poo poo up.
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Jul 29, 2019 21:33
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Somfin posted:This very much reads like you're willing to swap between believing someone and not believing them based on how their evidence lines up with your set-in-stone vision of what happened. Helsing is bringing up various things that cast doubt on the narrative of "this is a proved thing that definitely happened." Both the words and outcomes of the Mueller investigation and doubt about the trustworthiness of the people involved can be used to advance this claim without any conflict. true.spoon posted:Given that some of the most incriminating information concerning Russian involvement comes from Durch sources, I don't really buy that it's all just a conspiracy driven by American warmongers. Yes, the sources are anonymous iirc but something like this being made up completely strikes me as unlikely. The way you phrase this is kind of misleading, since, as far as I'm aware, the statement by Dutch sources is literally the only source outside of US intelligence claims. I'm inclined to think it is likely that the IRA was working with the Russian government, but there isn't actually any hard evidence of this - just pretty persuasive circumstantial evidence. And it's not like the Dutch are friendly with Russia, so that evidence isn't exactly unassailable. And the most noteworthy part of this, in my opinion, is that these claims existed (and were widely believed/trusted) for many months prior to the Dutch source. During this time there wasn't any evidence outside of the claims of US intelligence agencies. This willingness on the part of many liberals to completely blindly trust the claims of US intelligence agencies is far more concerning to me than anything Russia may have done. And, even now, it is very strange and concerning to see people attacking others for expressing skepticism towards things that still have no actual direct evidence supporting them. Basically, the way the media and public have dealt with this story is far more alarming to me than the story itself.
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Jul 29, 2019 21:34
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Somfin posted:This very much reads like you're willing to swap between believing someone and not believing them based on how their evidence lines up with your set-in-stone vision of what happened. It doesn't read like that at all. He's saying that the report doesn't support the allegations of a conspiracy between Trump and Putin that are being made, and even if we accept the explanation that Mueller must have lied and covered up the real evidence because it's all too top secret to be shown to the public, that would still require us to uncritically trust the word of a man who has either lied or been catastrophically wrong about national security before. So it's not a great argument even if Mueller directly came out and said "Trump conspired with Putin and I have all the proof but you can't see it until the trial", but he isn't even saying that it's just something people are imagining he might be secretly doing because the alternative is that they were wrong. None of the things Helsing is saying are contradictory. Someone can be untrustworthy, and also can write an accurate report. Real life isn't a brain-teaser riddle where once someone lies then everything they say is a lie and you just have to invert every statement of theirs to get the truth on any topic. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Jul 29, 2019 |
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Jul 29, 2019 22:38
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VitalSigns posted:It doesn't read like that at all. It's just awful convenient to be able to say "you can't cite him, because he's inherently and completely untrustworthy" and also say "it must be true, because the inherently and completely untrustworthy guy said it."
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Jul 29, 2019 23:03
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Ytlaya posted:The way you phrase this is kind of misleading, since, as far as I'm aware, the statement by Dutch sources is literally the only source outside of US intelligence claims. I'm inclined to think it is likely that the IRA was working with the Russian government, but there isn't actually any hard evidence of this - just pretty persuasive circumstantial evidence. And it's not like the Dutch are friendly with Russia, so that evidence isn't exactly unassailable. Let me give you a couple of questions that I believe are useful when deciding on the veracity of claims by intelligence agencies: 1. Is there any outside pressure on the agencies? (This was obvious for the Iraq war. Not apparent in this case, Obama seemed hands-off, well and Trump...) 2. Why would the intelligence agencies lie about this? (Connected to 1. in the Iraq war. Incredibly vague in this case. Because they hate Russia? Because they want war? Pure jingoism?) 3. Is there some effort to use this for something concrete? (Connected to 1. and 2., obvious in the Iraq case, completely unclear here.) 4. How are the reactions in other countries? (This is the big one Americans tend to forget about the Iraq war. Countries like Germany and France had a very critical overall reaction in the run-up to the war. No major dissent (by allies) in this case.) 5. Does whatever is claimed itself make sense? (Can be debated for the Iraq war, but generally yes in this case.) There is a difference between blindly trusting and making reasonable conclusions in situations of imperfect information (that you update when necessary). Now, it is perfectly possible that many "liberals" did not reach a conclusion in a reasonable way but rather through blind trust in authority or hatred of Russia or whatever and you are right to be worried about this (see the Iraq war). However, as far as I am concerned, it was possible to reasonably believe that Russia was behind this relatively early and has since then only become more reasonable. We will likely disagree on this and that is fine. One last point, the agnostic position of simply not believing anything is not neutral. If Russia was indeed behind this, such a viewpoint would likely play directly into their hand. Additionally, I think you find yourself in a situation where even if the predictions of people you aggressively doubted turn out to be true, you still think they were wrong for making the prediction at the time. This can be correct but if you have been wrong for a couple of times in this way (say for example Assads poison gas, Skripal, MH17 and so on) you need the flexibility to reevaluate your premises.
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Jul 29, 2019 23:11
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Somfin posted:It's just awful convenient to be able to say "you can't cite him, because he's inherently and completely untrustworthy" and also say "it must be true, because the inherently and completely untrustworthy guy said it." This is embarrassing dude
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Jul 30, 2019 04:33
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VitalSigns posted:This is embarrassing dude Thanks for the input, VitalSigns, I'll keep it in mind
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Jul 30, 2019 06:03
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Somfin posted:It's just awful convenient to be able to say "you can't cite him, because he's inherently and completely untrustworthy" and also say "it must be true, because the inherently and completely untrustworthy guy said it." The untrustworthy guy isn't saying it.
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Jul 30, 2019 06:13
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Somfin posted:Thanks for the input, VitalSigns, I'll keep it in mind Sorry let me be more helpful now that I've slept. Try applying this reasoning to other situations and see if it still makes sense: "I was right that the CIA were completely untrustworthy about Saddam's WMDs, look they finally admitted they were wrong in their own report!" "Oh so the CIA is untrustworthy, but now their report is true? You can't just cherrypick which reports you want to believe, Helsing! If the CIA is untrustworthy and they say Saddam had no active weapons program then that only confirms that he did!"
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Jul 30, 2019 12:39
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He went on national television and asked for it. And then they did it. This does not require reams of study and page-long screeds about truthiness
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Jul 30, 2019 15:42
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It's like coordination between super pacs and candidates. They can't coordinate, but they can.
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Jul 30, 2019 16:03
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Unoriginal Name posted:He went on national television and asked for it. Someone's bluster on TV isn't proof of a criminal conspiracy even if the thing they bluster about happens. Bush went on TV and told the Iraqi insurgency to "bring it on" and then they really did bring it on and we almost lost the war, but that doesn't mean W was secretly in cahoots with the rebels and was sending them their marching orders through the teevee machine.
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Jul 30, 2019 16:14
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true.spoon posted:2. Why would the intelligence agencies lie about this? (Connected to 1. in the Iraq war. Incredibly vague in this case. Because they hate Russia? Because they want war? Pure jingoism?) For the CIA and the FBI: Justification of a massive security and surveillance state that crushes civil liberties to "protect America" from a vast and inscrutable foreign menace. For Democrats: The opportunity to blame their own failures and manifest failures of our economic and political system on an external enemy. Relief from the obligation of providing solutions to real problems because they can advance their political careers by frightening people into voting for them out of fear of the Other. The motivations are obvious. Now I'm not saying that anyone is sitting around deliberately concocting a fake Russian conspiracy to fool the public, what I am saying is that the Democratic Party establishment and the liberal elite are very motivated to believe that the Russia collusion story is true and to promulgate that belief because it would be a massive political benefit for them if Trump really were caught red-handed conspiring with Putin. And likewise the intelligence agencies benefit from anything that increases their power and influence. And we should take a narrative promulgated by people with a strong interest in it being true with a grain of salt, especially when the evidence is shaky and they contiually retreat to a motte-and-bailey defense when challenged on that shakiness. That's how this stuff usually works. Like I don't believe the Bush Administration sat around plotting "first we'll fabricate a completely fake WMD weapons program to frame Saddam, then we'll invade, then uh do a completely real and honest investigation which will prove we were lying which we'll release to the public as the war grinds on until we get killed in the midterms". The most likely explanation for that debacle is that they believed the war would be good for them personally and believed the PNAC bullshit about how a democratic US-allied Iraq would secure America's world hegemony for generations to come. But to do it they had to get the public on board with the idea that Saddam was an imminent existential threat, and well hell Saddam probably was secretly building WMDs anyway because that's the sort of thing he would do so even if we can't definitively prove it right now, if we convince the media and the public that it's true we'll be vindicated when we invade anyway and no one will really care that looking back on it we really weren't as sure as we said we were.
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Jul 30, 2019 16:18
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I know with certainty that the Bush administration initially thought that response to 9/11 was going to be much, much, larger than it was. As a cadet we were told by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Delano Hall that we would likely be used (and paid) as unlicensed seaman for the massive sustained sealift they thought was going to be nessisary. Obviously that ended not happening. But think about the scale of action they were thinking about. They thought they had to break out all the RRF. I don't think you understand how much it got dialed back from the first few weeks.
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Jul 30, 2019 16:59
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Everyone knows that. In the first few weeks after everyone thought every high school stadium in Podunk, Oklahoma was a target and 9/11 was only the spearhead of a massive war on American soil, instead of Al-Qaeda shooting their load and going soft. It's not relevant to what I was saying, which was that people who would benefit from a narrative being true don't have to knowingly and consciously plot to sell the public on a lie, most of the time they're just so motivated to believe it that they construct the narrative they want on top of a mix of real and imaginary "evidence" that doesn't really support it. The Bush Administration didn't confidentially believe that Saddam wasn't a threat and consciously concoct a fake case for war that would be exposed as bullshit by their own investigation. They just wanted to believe it was true so hard that any discrepancies and conflicting evidence was dismissed because they were firmly convinced they'd find all the smoking guns they needed once they conquered the country. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Jul 30, 2019 |
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Jul 30, 2019 17:19
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VitalSigns posted:Everyone knows that. No, everyone does not know they intended to break out the RRF. Outside of people here who read me saying it a couple times over the years or that were there themselves ( and a couple if other goons might have been there.) There are a few goons from the classes before mine and after mine that still post on SA and at least one was in the previous version of the thread. And I have no idea what y'all in podunk were imagining. We lost internet when the towers collapsed. The upperclassmen watched TV coverage in the wardroom, but I didn't as a pleb. I did walkout of a calc midterm (which hosed me pretty hard) and went down to the waterfront to watch the plane hit the second tower and the towers collapsing. Photos from cadets who had been at ground zero filtered in for about month afterwards and we would hear things from the power squadron guys who were ferrying fire fighters or the ones who were on the school ship that got used as a floating hotel for a while. I quite literally do not know "what everyone knows" regarding that event as my experience of it was very different. But I do have all the letters I drafted to family and friends to refer back too. I also have colleagues who were in one of the towers, I never ask specifically but occasionally a story from the day will pop out of one. But I've written about that in other threads over the years and b even posted some photos.
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Jul 30, 2019 19:26
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US intelligence agencies have such a long and storied history of lying to the public and even to their ostensible masters in the government for literally every reason under the sun, including the dumbest ones possible, that they should never be given the benefit of the doubt ever.Unoriginal Name posted:He went on national television and asked for it. He went on national television and asked for it. Then somebody possibly connected to the Russian government did it. The conspiracy theory begins when you all start filling in the blanks with conjecture and then continues as you spend years doing that while lapping up any claim no matter how absurd and it really ought have ended when the report that was hyped up as slam dunk evidence ended up as a wet fart and then the guy who was hyped up as the great savior turned out to be a complete ineffectual coward, but like all good conspiracy theories it just keeps going and going. Somfin posted:This very much reads like you're willing to swap between believing someone and not believing them based on how their evidence lines up with your set-in-stone vision of what happened. You first, buddy. What evidence has or could change your mind?
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Jul 30, 2019 19:32
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Cerebral Bore posted:US intelligence agencies have such a long and storied history of lying to the public and even to their ostensible masters in the government for literally every reason under the sun, including the dumbest ones possible, that they should never be given the benefit of the doubt ever. Actually no we can't question the intelligence services during this perilous time for our country, how dare you sir, turning over all your electronic correspondence to our loyal spies is a great act of patriotism, oh and also we have to invade Iraq now bc it would be v rude to imply the CIA is incompetent or mendacious when they assure us Saddam is 5 minutes away from building nukular weapons. Oops looks like we killed more Americans than 9/11 and a half million Iraqis and wrecked an entire region only to find out the CIA was wrong, hmm ah but nevertheless
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Jul 30, 2019 19:47
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Tankies agreeing with the Senate Majority Leader to own the (neo)libs: https://twitter.com/politico/status/1156036724734095367 Wonder why he would've said such a thing?  Oh VitalSigns posted:Actually no we can't question the intelligence services during this perilous time for our country, how dare you sir, turning over all your electronic correspondence to our loyal spies is a great act of patriotism, oh and also we have to invade Iraq now bc it would be v rude to imply the CIA is incompetent or mendacious when they assure us Saddam is 5 minutes away from building nukular weapons. Most of the evidence for the Russia stuff came from the Dutch, would you like to try again?
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Jul 30, 2019 19:53
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Buddy, you all handed Mitch this talking point on a silver loving platter by overhyping a shaky-rear end story and pinning all of your hopes on a Republican cop, and now you're angrily demanding that we have to keep giving the GOP even more ammunition by pretending that the story still has legs and has to be pushed when anybody can see that keeping it in the headlines is just a huge boon to the GOP after Mueller shat the bed. In fact, I recall that people on the left kept warning you lot that this poo poo had the potential to backfire years ago and you collectively responded by angrily accusing said people of being secret Russian agents. Angry_Ed posted:Most of the evidence for the Russia stuff came from the Dutch, would you like to try again? So how exactly do you know what evidence came from where? Is there some convenient catalog of who provided what and from where they, in turn, got it?
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Jul 30, 2019 20:10
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