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This post is probably pointless because it doesn't seem like any of the Russia-gate enthusiasts are ready to reconsider anything but I can't resist doing a rehash of how ludicrous it was to have the liberal media and so many posters on this forum lining up behind men like James Clapper or Robert Mueller or acting like a bunch of statements from the intelligence "community" were actually reliable. These guys were some of the same people - literally the same people - who sold the war in Iraq and who oversaw the dismantling of civil liberties following 9/11. In the media it was reported that the entire intelligence community had worked together to produce the ICA Report "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections". Later the New York Times was forced to retract that claim and acknowledge that actually the entire analysis had only come from about a dozen agents (all anonymous) who were working within only three agencies (FBI, NSA, CIA) and who were "hand picked" by one James Clapper. The entire basis of the "Russia hacked the election" narrative was a report that was put together by a handful of men chosen by one guy. I think anyone who has a basic familiarity with large bureacracies should be able to appreciate that when a senior manager "hand picks" a team to write a report that senior manager often has a pretty good idea of what the report will say just based on who he is choosing to write it. Especially cause Mr. James Clapper has a bit of history when it comes to stuff like this. He was in charge of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency during the build up to the Iraq war, making him responsible for analyzing satellite imagery of Iraq during the build up to the invasion there. He was rewarded for his hard work in 2007 when Bush II made him Undersecretary of Defense (Obama, seeing the wisdom of having such an august civil servant on call kept him in this job after the election). In 2010 this Republican veteran of the Bush administration was wisely made Director of National Intelligence by the post partisan President Obama. In this capacity he continued to serve the Republic without fear or favour. In the incident that Edward Snowden would later identify as the moment that pushed him into leaking, Clapper courageously perjured himself before Congress in 2013 by denying the existence of the NSA's mass surveillance program. He later confessed that he had spoken "erroneously" but he not only wasn't prosecuted, he also kept his job. Perhaps because his 50 years of experience in the intelligence world gave him the following amazing tradecraft insights, such as Russians being genetically inclined toward duplicitous behavior: quote:FMR. DIR. JAMES CLAPPER: Well, yes they would have and just to reinforce John Brennan’s, former director of central intelligence agency, his comments before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and I have to say that, without specific...specifically affirming or confirming these conversations, since, even though they’re in the public realm, they’re still classified, just from a theoretical standpoint, I will tell you that my dashboard warning light was clearly on and I think that was the case with all of us in the intelligence community, very concerned about the nature of these approaches to the Russians. If you put that in context with everything else we knew the Russians were doing to interfere with the election. And just the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were concerned. Wow, I'm really surprised that a life long national security ghoul with a history of outright perjuring himself before Congress and a theory of Russia that says that lying is in their DNA could have raised false expectations about this probe. And just while we're on the topic let's do a quick rehash of who Comey and Mueller were: quote:No, Robert Mueller And James Comey Aren’t Heroes
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Mar 25, 2019 14:37
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What's that I hear you saying? Does this mean the whole thing was pointless? Of course not. It was extremely useful if you happened to be a Democrat who desperately needed to change the conversation for two years and distract your own followers from questions like "how the gently caress did we just lose that election?" But like, I'm sure the Democrats deciding to worship at the altar of the national security state had no implications for the party, right? Politico posted:Democrats are looking to turn the Donald Trump resistance movement into an army of candidates to try to take back the House in 2018. quote:
Oh nevermind. I can see that after some deep reflection about where it went wrong the Democrats have come up with a bold new strategy of running ex-military small business owners and basing their message on appealing to Republican swing voters. Don't worry though I'm sure that is just a pragmatic decision they made based on what they earnestly believe will protect the most people from Trump. It definitely definitely definitely wasn't motivated by the fact the top donors and consultants at the DNC are terrified at the prospect that a grassroots insurgency in their own party might gently caress up the grift they've been perfecting for the last 40 years. No way would they be leaning on fear about Russia to try and mute any criticisms of themselves or to redirect anger away from their own failures. What an absurd notion. It's a good thing that the various versions of the Russia-gate thread spent so much energy driving away anyone who speculated about that.
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Mar 25, 2019 14:49
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Rime posted:It seems like a rather early and snap decision to relegate the Mueller investigation to the realm of conspiracy, given nobody has read the report aside from the guy who washed away Iran/Contra. This thread may not age well. The Mueller report was prepared by a guy who helped lie the United States into the Iraq war and the initial US Intel assessment came from another Iraq War liar who is also noteworthy for committing perjury in front of congress. Also, it might be contextually relevant to point out that Mueller and Barr have been friends and colleagues for more than 30 years. It's fine to be skeptical of Barr but in that case lets see that skepticism applied equally to everyone. There's no version of this where Mueller comes off as a boy scout but Barr is some kind of creature of the Republican party. I'm sure that the report is going to contain some nasty details about the Trump administration's corrupt entangling with various unsavory characters. I think the conspiracy angle at this point is the assumption that whatever did happen in the Trump campaign somehow is more significant or sinister than the sort of influence commanded by the Saudis or Israelis or various billionaire crackpots who all seem to have a much more visible and pernicious impact on American politics. This would hardly be the first time that a conspiracy theory was launched on the basis of an actual scandal. It may be that there was some amount of untoward behaviour or even something outright criminal (I mean in addition to the process crimes that were unambiguously criminal acts but which on their own don't prove anything about the underlying accusations) but that nevertheless the version of this story that was relentlessly hyped by the media was nevertheless a conspiracy theory.
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Mar 29, 2019 16:54
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Xander77 posted:Like... high-ranking persons Trump campaign probably actually cooperated (let's not use the other C-word) with the Russians to dig up dirt on Hillary in exchange for an implied or explicitly promised improvement in US-Russia relationships and end to the sanctions, but the reporting on the matter was just too melodramatic? Yes.
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Mar 29, 2019 20:16
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true.spoon posted:Helsing, can you give an example of particularly bad reporting in this regard (preferably mainstream, for example a Rachel Maddow piece, and maybe not older than a year)? This is an honest request, I would like to have something to compare to what will eventually be publicly known to callibrate my worldview so to speak. Well, let's just start with the obvious question of proportionality. Can we say that the coverage of this event given by the media was in any way proportionate to the impact it was having, especially in light of all the other stories that necessarily received less coverage? With modern propaganda/public relations/info warfare, or whatever you want to call it, the most important factor is repetition. Plenty of stories that are critical of powerful people or inconvenient for the media itself get published or broadcast - but typically they don't get repeated coverage. You'll get the occasional story on a topic like the Saudi starvation campaign in Yemen but endless discussion of Russia's use of barrel bombs in Syria. While the media has given you information on both topics the amount of coverage dedicated to the one topic in favour of the other inevitably distorts our view. So in what follows I think its crucial to appreciate that emphasis is the key here. What stories get repeated coverage? It might be helpful to think of these stories sort of like coordinate advertising campaigns. A good advertiser will release a variety of different 'spots' as part of the same campaign - huge 5 minute commercials that play in movie theatres, sort 15 second spots that go onto prime time television, glossy magazine ads, banner ads on websites - and then on top of that they'll have "influencers" who promote these products further. A single advertisement wouldn't be very effective but when all of these actions are taken in conjunction over a long period of time they are much more effective at shaping consumer behaviour. Similarly, with propaganda in the news the objective is typically not to fool people with a single piece of incorrect information but instead to shape the overall tone and extent of the coverage dedicated to different issues. Typically you don't necessarily need to lie at all as long as you are good enough at controlling what issues get covered. So with thati n mind let's ask ourselves whether this was what the country actually needed from the media following Trump's victory. Was this a good use of the media's investigative powers? Were these stories that really got to the heart of what was wrong with Trump and what was alarming about his victory? The Hill posted:MSNBC's Maddow covers Russia more than all other topics combined: analysis That analysis only covers a 6 week stretch but it seems pretty representative of MSNBC and CNN's overall approach to this. The Intercept story also offers some good examples of the stories that suffered as a result: The Intercept posted:Missed Opportunities While Focusing on Russia Of course it gets so much worse than this. Because in addition to talking about Trump's alleged Russia ties to the exclusion of everything else, the media also used Trump's alleged connections to Russia to justify some of the most insanely bad pro-war reporting I've ever seen, even in the US media. Here's someone on the Rachel Maddow blog repeating what Maddow herself repeated suggested on air: that Trump's Korean policy is orchestrated by Russia: MSNBC.com, Rachel Maddow Blog posted:Donald Trump’s first big concession to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un came before their summit even began: the American president agreed to a bilateral summit, one of the dictatorship’s long-sought goals, in exchange for practically nothing.  So just to be clear: the United States government runs a massive annual military exercise off the coast of North Korea. It is constantly brought up by the North Koreans as a blatantly provocative power play and it's regularly cited as a major barrier to better relations. Which frankly seems kind of reasonable whatever your feelings about the North Korean regime. The idea that simply meeting with the other side unconditionally to talk diplomacy is some kind of massive "concession" is the kind of mindset that in the recent past was considered the exclusive purview of only the most insane Republican war mongers. Now its a serious talking point pushed by allegedly liberal commentators. Lost in all this is the fact that the main impetus for the negotiations comes from the Koreans themselves or the fact that maybe it's actually a good thing to be de-escalating tensions in that region. What should be an unambiguously positive story with a focus on the Korean experience is very irresponsibly appropriated by liberal hawks who literally suggest that trying to set up an unconditional diplomatic meeting warrants a full congressional inquiry. Also let's be perfectly clear that this news coverage has an agenda. The media is pretty open about the fact that the quickest way for Trump to earn their praise is by dropping more bombs. We also see this with the ridiculously schizophrenic coverage of Venezuela: somehow the media want us to think that Trump and Maduro are both clients of Russia even though Trump is the strongest advocate in the White House of attacking Venezuela. In fact we could do quite a laundry list of specific examples of Trump conducting anti-Russia policies vastly harsher than anything Obama contemplated, but this all goes largely unremarked upon in most of the media. Meanwhile we've gotten an endless drip drip drip of stories like this one: Quartz posted:Russian operatives were promoting sex toys on Instagram to sow discord in the US I could go into this in greater depth because this story is really just remarkable. However, I'm going to assume that the average goon is familiar enough with the internet and such to recognize how fundamentally ridiculous the story above and the statistics it cites are. This is a blatant exercise in using scary sounding out of context numbers to frighten baby boomer news consumers who don't understand how loving silly the underlying premise of the article actually is. All these scary sounding quotes about the reach of instagram sort of rhetorically overwhelm the readers mind to the point that they're maybe less likely to consider how loving stupid an idea it is that instagram sex toy ads are a noteworthy part of some Russian intelligence op. But hey, let's take a moment to talk about the organization behind that story, the Internet Research Agency, because they're a pretty important and largely under explored part of this story: New York Times posted:Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russian Tactics Let's pull a couple sentences from early in that article because they deserve particular emphasis: quote:But it was a sign that American political operatives of both parties have paid close attention to the Russian methods, which some fear may come to taint elections in the United States. So first of all notice how techniques used by American firms (and which would be totally familiar to anyone with a background in marketing or branding in corporate America) gets turned into "Russian methods". Do I really need to point out the insanity of taking banal everyday web marketing stuff that corporations and politicians do all the time and trying to present it as some form of advanced Russian propaganda technique? Notice how problems that are completely native to America and directly attributable to American companies are reinvented as a scary foreign threat emanating from Russia, which American firms are merely emulating. Also notice how one of the firms that was drumming up fear about Russian "information warfare" was actually practicing exactly the techniques that we're all supposed to think are destroying American democracy. This is probably the most well documented and direct example of using social media to attack an election and its being done by a Democratic firm to attack a Republican candidate. And of course this has an important function. The endless drip-drip-drip of stories, no matter how individually ridiculous they are, created a widespread atmosphere of panic in which practically anything seemed plausible to a lot of people. It was in that context that the Washington Post actually went as far as promoting a shadowy anonymous group called "Prop or Not" that tried to argue practically every major source of news outside the US mainstream was more or less direct Russian propaganda. Fortunately other media figures pushed back against that excess and the WaPo had to disavow the story, but plenty of other stories drumming up a panic about "fake news" and implying that we needed to crack down on alternative media sources still circulated. Circling back to what I was saying earlier, it's really key to understand that part of what made this whole media process so insidious was how it relied on insinuation and disproportionate coverage of specific events (along with a concomitant lack of coverage on other crucial events that would have contextualized the things that did get covered) the media was able to more or less reassure a large part of its audience that the 2016 election was a fluke produced by forces that were exogenous to the country, and that the logical solution was to adopt a more aggressive foreign policy and double down in our support for established institutions like the media and intelligence agencies. And this is without even going into the specific problems with how the story was reported, the extent to which statements by known liars and perjurers were taken at face value, the credulousness with which the media reported every indictment as though it were a conviction, or the fact that practically none of the people who hosed this story up have shown the slightest contrition now that the whole thing is blowing up in their faces. This also doesn't address the extent to which a story about Russian influence has obscured the much more important question about Trump's relations with the gulf monarchies, MBS, Israel and, worst of all, so called "dark money" from the US billionaire class itself. Cause that's the real story of 2016, which for some reason the mainstream media doesn't want to engage with and which Democratic partisans seem way less hyped about, despite the fact they used to complain endlessly about Citizens United: Mother Jones posted:By Election Day, however, it was clear Trump had run a largely conventional presidential campaign when it came to fundraising. He raised more than $300 million from wealthy givers and small-dollar donors, lobbyists and business executives—the usual suspects. He used those funds to pay a roster of consultants, pollsters, fundraisers, and ad makers, often in ways that obscured the purpose of the campaign’s spending. He ran lots of TV ads. Super-PACs and dark-money groups provided more than $100 million in unofficial support. And in the final week of the campaign, pro-Trump outside groups actually outspent groups supporting Hillary Clinton by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. Funny how we haven't been getting round the clock coverage about the massive flood of unaccountable billionaire money or the fact that both parties have more or less let the IRS going to poo poo meaning there's effectively no oversight of campaign spending whatsoever.
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Mar 31, 2019 18:00
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Trump's entire persona was to more or less "lean in" to any criticism. He did the exact same thing when Jeb! tried to attack him over his criticism of George W. Bush and his handling of 9/11. When Bush said "my brother kept us safe" Trump had no problem saying "no he didn't, the attack happened on his watch". That's not something you're supposed to be able to say in front of a Republican primary audience in North Carolina, but he said it and won the debate and went on to win the primary and then the presidency. And I think that's the light in which his comments about the Russians should be read. For Trump any conversation is about domination: when somebody accused him of being friendly with Russia he therefore understood the best response was to embrace the criticism and turn the whole thing back around again so it would stay focused on Hilary and 'but her emails". Also something that a lot of people cannot quite accept but which is quite obviously true is that a lot of Americans have a stronger and more visceral hatred for some other part of America than they could possibly have toward any foreign country, which is a big part of why trying to associate Trump with Russia wasn't very effective.
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Apr 2, 2019 17:05
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GreyjoyBastard posted:the russia investigation won't find anything, and if it did it won't be anything important, and if it is talking about it is pointless Given that most people on this forum treated the entire thing with an embarrassing degree of credulousness I actually think it's extremely important to talk about. This was such an elementary failure of contemporary liberalism that I really think it behooves us to ask how so many people got this so wrong.
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Apr 4, 2019 13:50
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From the Washington Post:The Washington Post posted:Members of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team have told associates they are frustrated with the limited information Attorney General William P. Barr has provided about their nearly two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether President Trump sought to obstruct justice, according to people familiar with the matter. The New York Times The New York Times posted:The officials and others interviewed declined to flesh out why some of the special counsel’s investigators viewed their findings as potentially more damaging for the president than Mr. Barr explained, although the report is believed to examine Mr. Trump’s efforts to thwart the investigation. It was unclear how much discussion Mr. Mueller and his investigators had with senior Justice Department officials about how their findings would be made public. It was also unclear how widespread the vexation is among the special counsel team, which included 19 lawyers, about 40 F.B.I. agents and other personnel. Wow it sounds like this case is about to blow wide open!
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Apr 5, 2019 02:16
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Ytlaya posted:I don't think there's anything that complex about it. Most liberals are just normal people, just like conservatives, and are just as susceptible to being sucked into their ideologically-acceptable Fox News-like media environments. A central premise of liberal democracy is the efficacy of a free press acting as a guardian against corrupt politicians, interests and institutions. The fact the media is actively making these problems worse is an extremely serious problem that the current system cannot solve. Events like Russia-gate should be pushing people toward more radical solutions - "radical" in the traditional sense of the word, which says that we must get to the 'root' of problems rather than their surface level manifestations. quote:I actually think the "Democrats looking for an excuse" angle, while true, is kind of overstated and that the poor journalism surrounding "RussiaGate" is far more concerning than anything else (and likely motivated as much by liberal viewers wanting to see it as any sort of top-down Democratic Party desires). There's really not much excuse for the degree of terrible reporting that occurred in liberal-aligned media, that was frequently outright false or completely unsubstantiated. I think that Matt Taibbi was correct when he mentioned one of the problems with our current media environment being that, because it's split along partisan lines, people never actually see fact-checking of stuff from "their side." Liberal media has no incentive to prominently publish when stuff they reported about Trump/Russia was false, so that reporting only shows up in right-wing or non-mainstream media most liberals never see. And likewise, liberal media frequently fact-checks the various wrong things conservative media says, but conservatives obviously don't see it (or take it seriously). Both sides have completely immersed themselves in these closed media universes, and I think that the liberal side of this has become far worse post-Trump. The Democrats looking for excuses and the poor journalism from the media are not two alternative explanations, they are the same explanation described in different ways. I also think you're overlooking the extent to which the media has used this to their own ends: the panic over Russian bots has become an all purpose excuse to justify cracking down on non-traditional forms of media. Remember Prop or Not? Or the move to start actively managing and controlling what is discussed and shared on social media? The Russia-gate narrative has been seized upon as an excuse to shore up the reputation of the mainstream media and to try and justify herding people back toward traditional sources of news. Some of this probably isn't deliberate. It's not as though there's some central conspiracy directing everyone to drum up panic over Russia. But let's not ignore the extent to which the overlapping interests of these different groups create incentives that would make a formal conspiracy redundant. The Democrats and the media don't really need to actively coordinate too much because their interests at a higher level align closely enough that they can each just act out of their individual selfish motivations and it will, to borrow a phrase, as though an invisible hand were guiding them toward protecting the endless cyclone of corruption and graft that is the American establishment. Also notice how just by talking about the "establishment" being corrupt I now sound dangerously close to some Tucker Carlson fan, don't I? After two years of Russia-gate it's remarkable how well the media has trained liberals to react to any sweeping criticism of the media or government as sinister evidence of a red-brown alliance. That's a habit of thought that is going to stick around long after Russia-gate has been forgotten. Liberals are increasingly viewing mainstream American institutions as bulwarks against racist populism (how they square this with their growing recognition of America's fundamentally racist history is am ystery to me but somehow they do it). In previous versions of this thread there were numerous liberal posters arguing that Russia is the greatest threat to the globe right now and is behind a massive upsurge in racist populism - the usually unspoken but implicit implication here being that American state power is therefore the only force in the world that can hold back the rising tide of Russian sponsored fascism. So we end up with the American pseudo-left arguing that America must maintain its vast military empire to hold off the slavic menace. We're apparently not allowed to criticize NATO anymore because if we do that we're somehow siding with Trump and the racists or something. The fact is Russia-gate was very successful in its intended purpose and we're going to be stuck with its legacy for the foreseeable future. A huge number of liberals have been trained to view any systemic critique of American power or corruption in the government as associated with Fox News style racism. I don't think that is going away any time soon and its a very dangerous attitude.
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Apr 6, 2019 14:59
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So Mueller's report more or less openly states that there was no viable way for the executive branch to hold itself accountable. Of course some of us warned of this back in 2017 quote:Thanks to the constitution and the period it was drafted in Trump is effectively an elected king. However (and the founders didn't anticipate this when they vested all these kingly powers in the office of President) he's a king operating in a highly partisan system with opposing political parties. So unlike most heads of state the office of President is very politicized and also has substantial political power. He's got the democratic mandate of a head of government combined with the executive independence and prerogatives of a head of state.
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Apr 18, 2019 19:16
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Though apparently Trump did his best to get himself charged and part of Mueller's strained reasoning for not charging him just hinges on the fact he didn't have sufficient sway over his own staffers:  If nothing else the Mueller report will certainly furnish us with more details of Trump's chaotic first couple years in office.
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Apr 18, 2019 19:34
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BrandorKP posted:I expect something along the lines following question to be asked when they bring Mueller in to testify: Who gives a poo poo about any of this? In the end this turned out to be a bunch of palace intrigue between rival factions of a fundamentally broke and horrible government. All this empty speculation about the report was a massive self indulgence by liberals that came with huge opportunity costs.
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Apr 18, 2019 20:30
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That was a rhetorical question. I'm well aware that people give a poo poo and I'm saying its a petty self indulgent habit that has done real harm.
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Apr 18, 2019 20:47
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Rex-Goliath posted:so we should ignore executive abuses of power because when actual leftists are running for office they’ll certainly hold back If the Russia-gate poo poo had been covered in a more measured and proportionate manner then this highly predictable outcome wouldn't have been so devastating or demoralizing.
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Apr 19, 2019 15:44
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BrandorKP posted:Try this one, weird it worked yesterday Oh look, a rich rear end in a top hat with a track record of bad policy endorsements whose most notable contribution to public discourse has been to aggressively promote race science and who thinks Trump got into power because there was "too much democracy" is now arguing that Democrats should follow up on the total failure of the Mueller probe by... doubling down on that strategy! Because if there's one thing that would really help out liberals in America right now it is crowding out the conversation about expanding healthcare or making a fairer economy by continuing to fixate on an unwinnable battle in Congress. Brandor doesn't it ever loving occur to you that the reason monsters like Sullivan keep pushing this particular approach is because they actually know that their preferred policies are unpopular and can only gain the consent of the populace in a situation where the political spectrum is very narrow and the opposing side is demonized? Sullivan in particular jumped onto the race science bandwagon in the 1990s because it provided a convenient excuse for overlooking the incredible damage that neoliberalism did to black communities in America, naturalized the poverty of black communities as some kind of genetic inevitability, and thereby served to help legitimize Bill Clinton's right-wing pivot in the 1990s on crime and welfare. Real politics involves gaining and wielding power to improve the lives of your supporters. The reason Democrats are so eager to talk about impeachment is because if they had to actually compete with the Republicans by offering to use political power to improve the lives of their supporters then they would start raising dangerously high expectations, like the idea that maybe Americans could ask the rich to pay more taxes so that regular Americans can enjoy affordable healthcare, clean drinking water and bridges that don't collapse, things that most rich countries take for granted.
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Apr 22, 2019 18:27
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BrandorKP posted:I don't buy that we can't do both. Ain't poo poo going to happen in Congress until the next election anyway. Ok. So just to be clear. You do not think that the leadership of the Democratic party by and large have a massive financial investment in maintaining the party's current relationship to a relatively small group of consultants, lobbyists and donors? You don't think that the top priority for those people is finding a way to beat Trump without actually empowering the Berniecrats? You don't think huge parts of the Democratic establishment are currently in panic mode over the popularity of the Sanders campaign? Because anytime I see someone make this ridiculous "we can do both" point they always seem to be posting from some alternative universe where the Democratic leadership are reliable allies of the left. Sure, maybe in theory it is possible to do both. That is not what is happening though. quote:Do you think it's a bad thing that Congress assert it's self over the executive? Thinking things can remain the way they have is the most utopian belief of all. It makes calls for a racial ethnostate of fully automated gay luxury space communism seem positively grounded and plausible by comparison. The Liberals talking about "saving the system" are the most deluded people of all. The system is already dead, we're currently squabbling over what to build among the ruins. The sooner we recognize this the more of the old order we might be able to save. But if you do want to save something of the current order then the only way to do that is to become a radical. If anything resembling liberal pluralism and democracy are going to survive then they first must be rescued from the liberal class itself. People like Andrew Sullivan, and the citizens like yourself who keep giving them attention and legitimacy, are the greatest risk of all. You cannot choose your enemies. You're stuck with Trump/whomever follows him and the GOP. But you could at least have some expectations of your so called friends. And anyone looking at the situation realistically and without sentiment would be forced to conclude that the liberal commentariat and most of the Democratic party are more invested in preserving their current privileged position than they are in being realistic about what will be required to actually put America back on a proper footing. I find it so telling how many posters in D&D refer to the Democratic party using terms like "we". That to me is the most dangerous idea of all, that you can rely on a party of rich corporate lobbyists and sociopathic political climbers to save liberal democracy. These are literally the people who conducted its last rights and drove a stake through its atrophied heart in the 1990s in the name of the 'end of history' and the only political task you can actually imagine accomplishing is to somehow put these ghouls back into power.
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Apr 22, 2019 19:58
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BrandorKP posted:It's this Helsing: Before I could hope to answer this you would have to explain what the difference is between changing a story instead of reconciling it. As presented this is too vague for me to answer. Though I would say that even if 1 "will happen anyway", exactly what will happen and how is not set in stone which means just because option 1 might be inevitable is in no way an excuse to shrug and say "oh well, nothing to be done, might as well try 3". Also, I find it hard to reconcile your Christian beliefs with your apparent faith in American state power and the emissaries of that power. To be blunt, the religion I see in your posts is the American civic religion that believes the American government is fundamentally benign and noble. To be a little blunt and rude about my feelings, it comes off like to you it didn't matter that Obama signed off on the killing of children or completely abandoned his promise to help underwater homeowners because he talked pretty words and name dropped your favorite theologians.
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Apr 23, 2019 16:22
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BrandorKP posted:Mueller Objected to Barr’s Description of Russia Investigation’s Findings https://nyti.ms/2DEvWEQ Once again, a great example of a headline that Mueller truthers can project all kinds of hopes onto, which then leads to the following underwhelming story: quote:“The special counsel emphasized that nothing in the attorney general’s March 24 letter was inaccurate or misleading,” a Justice Department spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, said in response to a request for comment made on Tuesday afternoon. “But he expressed frustration over the lack of context and the resulting media coverage regarding the special counsel’s obstruction analysis.” The President literally confessed to obstruction of justice on live television more than a year ago, and it doesn't matter because he's basically an elected King and nobody in a real position of power has any interest in impeachment anyway. Once again, the obsession with the palace intrigues of an intrinsically broken government distracts people from the more consequential issues of actually building a new politics. This poo poo is theatre.
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May 1, 2019 00:49
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BrandorKP posted:Helsing things like this: It would be easier for me to respond if you explained why you think that.
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May 1, 2019 19:29
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BrandorKP posted:70% of Dems think impeachment should proceed. You'd rather move on to building something new. Which group of people are the constituency for that? That's exactly my point though. The effect of being so relentlessly focused on the drama of the Mueller probe and the endless speculation about a Clancyesque Russian plot to install a Manchurian candidate was to divert a lot of the energy and attention that should have gone into asking hard questions about how to fix the Democratic party. The Democrats obviously are only a small part of this mess but they happen to be the one institution that is theoretically both amendable to grassroots pressure and capable of enacting major political reforms (provided it had totally new leadership). So the focus on the Democrats here is a pragmatic necessity. The GOP sucks but that can't really be avoided. At least in theory the Democrats could be an effective vehicle for rooting out political corruption and addressing some of the deep systemic problems that are threatening to swallow up America's fraying democratic institutions. Instead the Democrats spent two years fixating the Mueller probe and now there's no time left before the primary to actually discuss anything except who the most electable opponent to Donald Trump is.The Mueller probe and the endless hyping it received from "journalists" like Rachel Maddow has had a pacifying effect on the Democratic base at a time when they should be mad as hell at their own leaders. It also had a measurable impact in raising Democrats opinions of some of the most corrupt and problematic parts of the American security state. So you're right, the United States currently lacks an effective constituency for making a serious political challenge to the system. The Mueller probe and the broken civic ideology it encourages people to cling onto is part of the reason for that.
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May 1, 2019 20:19
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Look Brandor, the cute widdle conspiracy theory that you fed and sheltered is a big boy now. Gosh they grow up so fast.The Hill posted:Assessing who Putin's preferred 2020 candidate will be tl;dr - Well actually Trump wasn't the pro-Russia Presiden that Putin wanted him to be so now Vlad is looking to get a populist Democrat elected. It's amazing how every part of the Russia-gate conspiracy theory has achieved a zombie-like state of immortality even when the evidence never materialized or totally dissolved upon closer inspection. The only thing that's changed is the vague pretense that all this scaremongering was ever about anything other than defending the status quo.
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May 2, 2019 18:42
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glowing-fish posted:
This complaint about people acting like they've got it all figured out would probably garner more sympathy coming from somebody who didn't also write things like this: glowing-fish posted:
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May 8, 2019 18:09
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BrandorKP posted:Russia Is Targeting Europe’s Elections. So Are Far-Right Copycats. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/world/europe/russian-propaganda-influence-campaign-european-elections-far-right.html This article is conflating two separate things: the emergence of a distinctly reactionary and web-savvy far right in Europe and the allegations of widespread Russian interference in foreign elections. If you actually read this closely then you can see how the author is basically stitching two separate but related stories together to create the impression of a vast and sinister thread of an unprecedented nature. I think the reality is more prosaic: the European far right has been rising for a decade and familiarity with the internet is now more or less universal, so of course we're going to see more right-wing political coordination on Facebook or WhatsApp. I imagine you could write the exact same stories about the left or the centre because every political tendency is now using the internet to coordinate and pull votes. Imagine if someone in the Russian media cited Hilary Clinton saying "Pokemon go to the polls" as an example of the sinister Democratic plot to use the internet to win the election. I mean, no poo poo the far right is using the web to coordinate, it would be more shocking if they weren't doing that. The other half of this article is about the specific threat of Russian trolls disrupting western elections. The author at least acknowledges what should be obvious by now, which is that these campaigns are literally only are hurtful as our media allows them to be: The New York Times posted:A longstanding debate has been whether this material changes behavior or votes, especially as tech companies have worked to stamp it out. But security researchers suggest that swinging elections is a stretch goal for this kind of campaign, if that. The primary point is to muddle the conversation, make people question what is true, and erode trust. The thing is, this is catnip for both Russia hawks and American liberals. The Democratic party is a walking contradiction right now, torn between an increasingly social democratic grassroots base and a thoroughly liberal/pro-business elite that wants to keep the country's politics frozen in some weird simulcarum of the Obama years. They smooth over that contradiction they need to keep the conversation muddled. Stories about the unique dangers of foreign attacks on the election system and repeated insinuations that criticism of the status quo gives aid and comfort to America's enemies is a powerfully attractive narrative for a party that doesn't know how to square the demands of its donors with the needs of its own base. That's not to say that there are no coordinated campaigns by the Russians to inject additional hysteria and confusion into elections. But if those campaigns were reported on in a manner more proportionate to their likely impact then they'd be a marginal footnote of passing interest. Ironically enough it is the Democrats and liberal media who have most enhanced the effectiveness of these campaigns. If America were a healthier country with a less divided population then people would not be jumping at shadows like this. The pathetic obsession with these Russian psy-ops campaigns is such a telling sign of American decline.
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May 12, 2019 23:38
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glowing-fish posted:I was thinking about Spiro Agnew. I was thinkin of this old post you made in January: quote:19. What if Robert Mueller is going to find a way to "sweep things under the rug" to protect the Republican Party? Seems the ol' razor is getting a bit dull.
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Jul 21, 2019 18:48
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Well I'm convinced. Its not like a high level career FBI spook would ever lie or exaggerate or mislead or even simply being delusional about the Russians causing domestic strife. Sure he's part of an institution where lying to the public comes more naturally than breathing and yeah he has a very sketchy career in that institution and of course the official FBI position has tended to be that everything from civil rights to the anti-war movement was actually a Russian plot but you know maybe this time Liberals should just uncritically worship at the altar of the security state even though every concrete piece of evidence purporting to show meaningful or efficacious examples of Russian interference has been manifestly ridiculous.
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Jul 24, 2019 21:34
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fishmech posted:Sir, this is a Sonic drive-in. That's a pretty easy question to answer: it isn't. Somfin posted:Yeah the report is being suppressed and concealed for no reason and it's actually a good thing to not investigate problems because if the investigator isn't a pure angel then there's no way their investigation could find anything accurate We already had the investigation, and everyone in the previous version of this thread couldn't shut up about what a meticulous and dedicated and principled man Mueller was and how it was clear that he was developing an iron clad case of criminal conspiracy against the President. After the results of the report first came out everyone kinda went through this phase of quiet embarrassment and didn't say much but now enough time has past that suddenly I'm reading posts like this one where you are talking as though the report hasn't already come out. Or in this case it came out and was a huge disappointment but only because the hidden bombshell has somehow been "suppressed". By the way here's another memorable quote from Robert "isn't a pure angel" Mueller: "Iraq has moved to the top of my list. As we previously briefed this Committee, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program poses a clear threat to our national security, a threat that will certainly increase in the event of future military action against Iraq. Baghdad has the capability and, we presume, the will to use biological, chemical, or radiological weapons against US domestic targets in the event of a US invasion." But hey that was like almost two decades ago, who the gently caress has a memory that long? The fact this guy's entire career is built on lying to the public and hyping up imagined foreign threats that inflate the need for an all powerful security apparatus is totally irrelevant to his comments on Russia and only a Putin shill would expect people to be naturally skeptical toward such a trust worthy source. After all you can only pick one bad thing to oppose at a time which means if you don't like Trump you're obliged to love and trust anyone who is critical of him.
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Jul 24, 2019 22:35
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fishmech posted:So then why are you so angry about Russians being investigated and found guilty? I'm not. Though, given your reputation on these forums as an aggravating world class pedant I'm genuinely a bit surprised and disappointed that you'd mistake indictments for convictions. I thought your whole thing was exhausting people with endless rounds of technically correct but actually irrelevant disputes over terminology. That would at least be interesting but instead you're just being performatively stupid and expecting me to somehow be upset or unnerved that you've intentionally read my argument poorly.
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Jul 24, 2019 23:17
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BrandorKP posted:Russian Hack of Elections System Was Far-Reaching, Report Finds https://nyti.ms/2y91NdI Brandor I think you are genuinely trying to make sense of this situation and are approaching this from a good faith perspective, but I implore you to please consider the way a lot of your posting in this thread comes off. You and I have both been posting in various iterations of the Russia-gate thread for going on two years and I've genuinely tried to follow your thinking here and yet for the life of me I really cannot pin down exactly what you actually belief or what exactly you think the significance of all these random tweets and news headlines is supposed to be. That's a problem. You can say what you want about my opinions on this matter but I've tried to at least lay them out clearly and back up my positions. I feel as though you at times are (maybe not purposefully) being strategically vague about what you do or do not believe and that makes it a lot harder to actually have a meaningful dialogue. Almost invariably you'll post a very alarmist headline and not even bother to quote the article or even tell us what your actual thoughts about it are. Which is frustrating because typically when you actually read the story its nothing like what the headline would lead you to believe. In this particular case the very sinister sounding headline which is blatantly designed to plug directly into people's anxieties about the 2016 election "hack" sounds vastly more frightening and dangerous than what actually follows in the body of the article, which turns out to be a fairly mundane (and already known) story about how Russia performs the same kinds of digital probing on American infrastructure that the Americans brag about doing to rival powers. It's not ideal and in a different context it might be a good starting point for a discussion on the need for much stronger cyber security, but as I'll explain below its seems likethat the real concern motivating the article is less cyber security and more the need to constantly be publicizing stories that keep people focused on foreign threats to democracy rather than the much more serious domestic ones. It's particularly grating because there is an extremely simply solution to this problem: all elections should be done on paper ballots, hand counted in public view, with registered scrutineers and other observers present, and all ballots physically preserved for the event of a recount. Provided you have a workable civil society, it's a more or less unhackable system (at a larger scale, though obviously individual ballot boxes can be stuffed if your civil society is sufficiently corrupt or dysfunctional) with centuries of best practices built in and yet amidst all the concern trolling about Russian election hacking I've yet to see a single major elite media figure or politician even mention that issue let alone advocate for it. Which really ought to tell you that the concern here isn't that Russians are hacking election machines and changing voting outcomes (though I guarantee you the editor was well aware that many people would read the headline and interpret it htat way, and that indeed that false impression was almost certainly a feature and not a bug) is not particularly genuine. As a general rule of thumb when people only want to talk about the problem and won't even mention the obvious solution that ought to be a red flag that their real agenda is something else. Given your concerns about disinformation and a breakdown in dialogue I ask that maybe you start actually unpacking and discussing the articles you post instead of just dropping them off and waiting for other people to comment on them. Whether you realize it or not your just posting in a way that will invite everyone to project their pre-existing biases onto the headline at a time when anyone ostensibly feared about a breakdown in our ability to talk to each other ought to be rowing hard against that current. And the best way to do that is to actually explicitly articulate an argument instead of relying on alarmist media headlines to rile people up.
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Jul 26, 2019 17:03
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Silver2195 posted:I mean, Democrats are at least trying to get election security laws passed, even if they aren't using your specific proposal. Yeah, from what I've seen they want to give three quarters of a billion dollars to the states over the next two years so that this money can be given to the private companies that run the election infrastructure in the hope that they'll use it to somehow beef up security. So lets be prudently cynical here since this is America: its a giant handout to the states so that whoever is in office can reward whoever donated to their campaign with a nice fat subsidized contract to do something that no healthy democracy would ever dream of outsourcing. There's something in there about voting machines not being connected to the internet but that just raises the question of why the gently caress you'd want to have digital voting machines at all when paper ballots are by far the most reliable system for recounting and by far the hardest system to illegally influence. Oh but that's right it wouldn't be very profitable to give your college roommate's company a contract for running a paper ballot system would it? Well, I guess we better stick with those idiotic voting machines and then give him even more cash so he can pretend to fix the made up problem that wouldn't exist if this poo poo was actually done properly in the first place.
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Jul 26, 2019 17:32
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Sodomy Hussein posted:The Schumer bill apparently calls for more stringent use of paper ballots (some systems don't have a physical trail at all, which is nuts). Yeah the first few stories I read about this were all playing up the need for reporting attempts at foreign interference and making it an immigration offense to interference in elections but I'm reading that there is indeed a paper ballot requirement, which is great news and a massive why-wasn't-this-done-years-ago improvement over the status quo for sure. Doesn't entirely change my assessment that this is mostly a matter of theatrics that mostly exists to funnel money to contractors. Lord knows the Democrats have had many opportunities to address this and other voting integrity related issues. Still, it's my mistake for assuming that just because I hadn't read about it in the summaries therefore there was no paper ballot requirement. Whoops. Regarding the legislation, I'm not sure if this is the specific basis for the legislation that was just rejected but this proposal from last year seems solid so hopefully whatever Schumber is pushing is along these lines: quote:a)In general This is the kind of stuff that I think some posters thought the Russia-gate media circus would actually help with, but I think the overall impact was the opposite and that the fixation on Russian 'active measures' ended up distracting from the more mundane but important lessons of 2016. The Democrats live or die based on turnout and a stronger focus on every possible tactic to increase voter turnout and push back against voter suppression is at this point a matter of existential significance for the entire government.
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Jul 26, 2019 20:09
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I think the advantage of the voting machines is that they create more of an opportunity for profit. A traditional paper ballot is too inexpensive to properly grit off of.
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Jul 27, 2019 00:27
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BrandorKP posted:Today I walked past a news stand and saw 3 out of 4 papers with that article as the headliner above the fold. This is exactly the technique that creates a feverish impression that something was uncovered. It reminds me of how in the original Russia-gate thread I would regularly see posters saying that if you wanted proof of Russian interference "read the thread". They couldn't point to any specific post or news article, they just thought that anyone who had been reading the Russia-gate thread continuously would know that a deep and sophisticated criminal conspiracy between Donald Trump and the Russian government had either "stolen" the election or at least had been a significant and noteworthy reason for why Hilary lost. I read almost every page of that thread and suffice it to say there was no such smoking gun. In fact reading the thread regularly should have been raising alarms for more people because the shape of the story kept changing and the allegations were constantly shifting, and almost without fail every story about Russia-gate would eventually turn out to be hyped, and invariably hyped in a specific direction (toward the most alarmist conclusions regarding Russian interference). If this were just a media circus you'd expect stories to be wrong in every direction but of course this was more than just a media frenzy, which is why all the stories tended toward one direction and one conclusion. And yet for many of the people watching the thread every day only seemed to make the underlying evidence of conspiracy and collusion at the highest level seem more likely. Watching people say "read the thread" any time they were challenged on the Russia-gate narrative really impressed upon me how bad the situation had gotten. That's why I'm saying its not ideal to just post inflammatory headlines without any exegetical comments. Because in the absence of context these headlines are not neutral. quote:There are couple of things going on. About 30% is that I am watching a couple things: the story in the main stream papers (Eg. when I directly post times articles), the story that filters into D&D (and I've fallen off cross posting this, both moderately in interest and massively in available time), and the stories being told in response from various groups. I'm actively trying not have a opinion there. I'm trying to watch. If you want someone to be angry at for being manipulative you should really be pissed off at glowing-fish. He basically turned previous versions of this thread into a Fox News style operation. He acted as the relatively moderate and reasonable sounding equivalent of the semi-respectable news anchor - the Shepherd Smith figure in essence. But he'd use his posts to constantly insinuate that something very big and very sinister was going on and he'd pretend to be thinking really hard and be very concerned about the scandal, but all the while he'd also do this big pantomime about being extremely diligent and cautious and fact-oriented. Which was pretty misleading because in practice he was clearly signal boosting the crazier conspiracies and repeatedly suggested that people like Louise Mensch or Eric Garland. So much like the way that the more reasonable sounding news anchor hosts at Fox que up the insane ravings of the hard right opinion commentators, glowing-fish was the thin edge of the wedge, laundering insane sounding ideas and making them seem more palatable and reasonable. Though obviously blaming him too much is unfair since people very much wanted to believe. The result was a thread where a blatant fraudster like pillowpants could show up and actually get taken seriously as he assured people he was an investigative journalist with evidence that the KGB had infiltrated the Republican party in the 1980s and that Trump's campaign was an active measures campaign decades in the making. That guy got initially got a good reception. I don't think most posters turned on him until after 1) his first toxx failed and 2) he started literally claiming he was in direct contact with Mueller himself. People were genuinely pissed at me when I kept saying pillowpants was obviously lying and probably also terminally stupid. And lets not forget the multiple posters speculating that maybe some of the other posters on this forum were paid Russian trolls intentionally disrupting any online discussion of Russia-gate. And glowing-fish for his part didn't push back against any of this - his focus was entirely on pushing back against Russia-gate skeptics while creating an environment where the most ridiculous versions of the conspriacy theory would seem plausible and went mostly unchallenged by the thread regulars. I have to admit, the last two years have increased my cynicism to newfound levels. Posters on Something Awful came of age on the internet, our catch phrase used to be "the internet makes you stupid". I honestly never would have expected how many posters here would allow themselves to be manipulated into thinking about the internet in the same way as Rachel Maddow's audience of confused boomers. Which is frustrating because issues like foreign interference from billionaires or intelligence agents is an extremely important topic to discuss. The issues covered by Russia-gate sprawl across so many important contemporary issues and questions that urgently need to be talked about. But the effect of Russia-gate has actually been to dumb people down and seemingly make them less willing or able to talk about these issues in a way that would lend itself to an actual solution. Instead its become a new excuse for the security state and traditional media and political elites to try and reassert control of an increasingly fragmented and acrimonious civil society and a collapsing social order. A real accounting of Trumpism would have been a conversation focused on domestic media sources and dark money from American oligarchs gave Trump the edge at the end of the election, or perhaps unpack how instead of a pendulum swing back to the left Obama - the last politician who conceivably could have avoided this wreck - drove the country into a ditch. But no. An election in which FBI fuckery actively played a role in getting Trump elected somehow transmogrified into a situation where the FBI was the last line of defense against Russia fascism. Because liberals would rather appeal to the literal architects of the Iraq war to save them than countenance actually dirtying their hands with politics. quote:Paper is definately best but add a paper voter pamphlet and voting by mail. Washington State's model is by far the best in the country by a large margin. It's so easy. One can be informed about the candidates, some very entertaining (GoodSpaceGuy) and vote wearing only underwear, while drinking. I feel like the American people should be able to be sold on that. Strongly agreed.
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Jul 27, 2019 18:03
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That's exactly my point though. Hence the italicization. It's not just that something happened in a mundane sense. Something happened, and while exactly what the contours of that thing were change with time and depending on who you're asking, the point is that it was extremely significant and ought to take up more of your attention than most other news items. That's the something I'm critiquing. Many discrete acts such as Facebook ad purchases by the Internet Research Agency or twitter bots retweeting inflammatory comments were indeed shown to have happened. There were illegally acquired emails published through wikileaks which may have come from Russian government sources (though like so much of Russia-gate that's nowhere near as certain as most people seem to think). The media and some politicians and government officials wove these discrete events together into a story line about a Russian "attack on our democracy" that was comparable to September 11th or Pearl Harbour and implied that Trump himself was likely deeply compromised by Putin if not directly controlled by him. Of course the potency of the Something was greatest when the threat was comparatively amorphous and sprawling. That's not to say that the specific elements that were woven together to tell that story were all invented out of hole cloth or that some of the specific allegations aren't rooted in truth or that some of these events aren't actually connected. It's more a question of how the story coalesced into a specific narrative form, and the weight and significance attributed to specific parts of the story. And also a question of why men like Mueller who should be idling away in prison after his career at the FBI is instead being feted as a hero by the media and Democratic party. And of course it raises the question of what the political utility of this story was and how that factored into the ways in which it was promoted. Now all that having been said if you want to argue about specific aspects of the Mueller report or identify areas you think require further investigation or if you can present an alternative take on how this all fits together and why its actually not unreasonable to make 9/11 or Pearl Harbor analogies then by all means please proceed, and perhaps we can use whatever example you prefer as a way to ground this rather abstract discussion in something more specific.
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Jul 27, 2019 19:02
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Allegations that Trump was deeply compromised and/or that the Russia-gate allegations constituted an "attack" on America comparable to 9/11 or Pearl Harbor were entirely mainstream and widely repeated and continue to be repeated in some areas, and these repetitions served an obvious political agenda so if you're going to claim that it's a strawman argument then you're just advertising your own ignorance.
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Jul 27, 2019 19:32
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Just so that we are on the same page here, when you say that Trump is "deeply compromised" this means that you feel he is either a self conscious agent of the Kremlin or else the Kremlin has significant compromising information on him and therefore controls or heavily influences Trump's foreign and domestic policy? Or if that isn't your meaning then what exactly are you saying?
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Jul 27, 2019 20:05
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fishmech posted:Trump openly says he loves Putin my dude, repeatedly. This is not hard to suss out but you seem to be terminally aggrieved that it wasn't following some particular sub-subsection of a flowchart. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPX-wuplDvc
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Jul 27, 2019 20:23
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Somfin posted:Wait, are you saying that everybody but you thought it was successful? Or are you saying that everybody but you thought that conspiracies need to be successful in order to fit the definition? No matter how hard you try you're not going to memory hole the fact that the mainstream media and many many posters on this thread were united in their expectation that Mueller would reveal a vast criminal conspiracy, not wrap things up after putting a few GOP operatives away for process crimes. And to repeat myself, you can't just talk about this story without discussing how the narrative was constructedi n the media, and how that narrative necessarily crowded out other stories and also were presented as organically leading to a specific set of approved solutions - trust the CIA and FBI, kill traffic to alternative news sites, re-establish tight elite control of political parties, build an alliance between moderate Republicans and Democrats, escalate America's military confrontation with Russia - that all got signal boosted and given additional urgency thanks to the widely spread perception that an extremely serious and effective attack was carried out on American "democracy". Suffice it to say this left other stories - about the flood of domestic dark money that Trump received in the summer before the election, or the irresponsible role of cable news, or the abject failures of the Democratic party, or the pathetically bad record of "resistance" from Congress since Trump took office, or the actually much more alarming levels of influence that countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia exercise over not only this administration but also past administrations - on the wayside and has also primed a new generation of liberals to treat all criticism of the US security state is Russian "disinformation". BrandorKP posted:1-4 % guys. 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. Besides which, do you know what the best counter to that kind of campaign would be? A Democratic party that was actually serious about raising turnout through massive investments in GOTV infrastructure and policies that are designed to appeal to the base rather than win over moderate suburban Republicans who are temporarily horrified by Trump's lack of decorum but who we can reliably anticipate will swing back to the GOP in a cycle or two (assuming they even do vote against Trump at all in 2020). One of the most effective voter registration operations in recent memory was ACORN and its advantage to the Democrats should have been obvious. ACORN was hit by a fake scandal that was purposefully designed to make it into a scary racialized menace that would frighten "moderate voters". The Democrats were at the height of their power and influence back then, it was 2009 and Obama was riding high. The Democrats still allowed ACORN to be destroyed because they were just that fixated on not spooking moderate voters. This was at the height of their loving power. I wonder if ACORN would have made a difference in some of those tight 2016 races? We'll never know. Because instead of investing in organizations like ACORN the Democrats want to keep their grifting operation going, and that means running campaigns mostly aimed at voters whose desires aren't going to gently caress with the need to keep the donors pleased. And if you don't recognize by now that the practical function of Russia-gate is to keep shelving those conversations about the Democratic party indefinitely then you haven't been paying attention.
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Jul 28, 2019 16:55
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Sodomy Hussein posted:You've got a lot of pet issues here that have nothing to do with anything and are making it clear that you're impossible to communicate meaningfully with on this topic, in that you don't accept American democracy or any "mainstream" news source. You're essentially become a Green Party chud. Bigger news stories crowd out other, just-as-important information. That's... Not as insightful as you think it is. I'm not sure what you mean when you say that I "don't accept... any "mainstream" new source". What does that even mean? I think people should pay more attention to the editorial agenda of the mainstream news (just as they should toward any alternative or foreign media) and tend to think journalism these days suffers from low standards but I think that mainstream papers regularly produce factually accurate and important stories. As for saying that my skepticism toward American democracy makes me "impossible to communicate meaningfully with". Uhm, all I can say is lol to that. quote:The American left, moderates included, is more distrustful of Israel because of Netanyahu's apartheid and open alliance with Republicans (who love Netanyahu because he's doing what they'd like to do here) than at any other time in history. Can you unpack the significance of the sentence I bolded and explain why you think it contradicts what I was saying? Because that seems entirely compatible with my agument. As far as involvement, I would not hang around this thread getting into these arguments if I didn't think effective communication was possible or had no interest in other people's opinions. I actually think people should be much more involved rather than less, though obviously I have my own specific ideas of what the most effective form of involvement would be. quote:The point of contention here isn't that Russia is the only organization performing dirty tricks. No one actually thinks that. I mean really, you think the overriding problem is that people trust politicians too much? I don't know what exactly it would mean to call it the "overriding problem" because these issues are hard to disentangle but yes absolutely I would say that unwarranted faith in mainstream politicians and a reluctance to recognize just how deeply corrupted the upper levels of government has become is a massive part of the problem and very relevant to this discussion. I actually think you sort of alluded to this issue yourself with your previous comments about how much misplaced trust in Mueller there was. quote:Yeah we had that in 2008 and 2012 (even if Obama profited nicely from being mistaken for a revolutionary), it was nice. I mean yeah, a worthwhile political party should be able to defend institutions that are vital to its defense rather than folding like a cheap suit. The fact that this retreat was largely motivated by the fear of spooking moderates is actually pretty indicative of why the Democratic party is incapable of challenging the GOP as it drifts further and further rightward. quote:It's a testament to Trump's political operation that so-called leftists and Trump are now reading out of the exact same playbook, everything from "it's just a conspiracy theory" to "it had no real effect" to "there's no THERE there" to "no collusion." But not too surprising as they've both found the sources who say everything they want to hear in far "left" commentators. You're fully in bed with Trump, but it's dark and you think those are Greenwald's hands. Ok, so we both think that the other person is wrong and have different interpretations of how events here fit together and of what is or isn't relevant. I guess the only solution is to actually make arguments and refer to evidence and see if we can actually convince each other? If you want to have a thorough discussion of the scale of the alleged interference, how efficacious it might have been, what the correct response would be, etc. then I'm completely game. quote:The argument of "Well that's something, but have you guys heard about THE EVILS OF CAPITALISM?" is laughable. Two wrongs don't make a who cares. The fact that politicians and their minions are somewhere right now performing spin doesn't make these problems irrelevant. We're talking about the American and Russian governments here so I don't know how "wrongs" even come up in this discussion? I'm talking about whether the reporting on Russiagate is proportionate to the harm that was supposedly caused. Fixating on a particular story has the necessary opportunity cost that you can't spend as much time on other stories. If Russia spent $1 to "interfere" in the election I guess that would technically be a "wrong" but obviously it'd be pretty stupid to spent two years reporting on it to the exclusion of everything else, so presumably even you will agree there is some threshold for relevance here, which means what you're implicitly arguing is that Russiagate crosses the threshold of relevance and was worth spending this much time on.
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Jul 28, 2019 21:07
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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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