Conspiracy Thread: Russians Preparing Sealed Indictment for Buzz Aldrin

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Conspiracy Thread: Russians Preparing Sealed Indictment for Buzz Aldrin

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

R. Guyovich posted:

this is the all-purpose conspiracy thread, which now includes speculation on the #Russiagate investigation. qanon is kind of its own thing still, but might get folded into this thread at some point. have at it.

mods reserve the right to punish people here capriciously, solely to fuel forum-wide conspiracy theories. remember, admins can edit posts with no trace. maybe i will edit all your posts to make you look like a raving lunatic. the sky is the limit.

A conspiracy of people charged and convicted of conspiracy, :hmmyes:

# ¿ Mar 26, 2019 23:56

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 20:18

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

SickZip posted:

All the talk of Iran-Contra and I've never seen anyone post about the revelation that George HW Bush was the leaker who revealed it to the world.

That was a twist that even conspiracy theorists wouldn't have believed. The reveal that one of the biggest and most illegal conspiracies of modern political history was revealed because it was stepping on the toes of an even deeper and more illegal conspiracy is one for the ages

Great moments in project management.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2019 23:35

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Ytlaya posted:

This article seems to care a lot about the framing of Russia's very small-scale actions as "attacks by Russia," but if you're going to use standards that low the US also "attacks" and is "attacked" by countless countries on a regular basis. Like, once you start defining an attack as "people in a country spying on or trying to influence through propaganda another country" it's hardly anything remarkable or uncommon. It also just takes for granted that it's worse when countries defined as "US enemies" do it than when countries that are actually at least as morally bad - but arbitrarily defined as "not enemies" - do it (with Israel being a prime example).

And regardless, it is unquestionable that the way the media dealt with this story is far worse than anything with actual factual basis from the story itself. Pretty much the only thing from "Russiagate" that is even remotely relevant or significant is releasing the DNC e-mails, and that is far less concerning (since the hacking/phishing itself is nothing particularly uncommon, and the solution to it is just "better cybersecurity") than our entire not-explicitly-right-wing mainstream media getting swept up in this insanity for years and repeatedly reporting unverified things or manipulating nonsense into something that sounds sinister.

When it comes to Trump specifically, the Russia angle was always one of the dumbest ones to use against him (since there's plenty of other "normal rich person" corruption to work with), but it still received disproportionate focus because it was one of the few things that could be focused on without also implicating many other politicians and rich/powerful people on "both sides of the aisle."

Trump loving loves authoritarians, so he leaned directly into the punches on Russia stuff and took every effort to make it obvious he was colluding with Russia on some level and that this was cool and good because he's the smartest president in history. Never mind that "Russia bad" has become a major plank for both parties so it attracts the most criticism (the establishment right, who still haven't gotten over the Cold War, and the establishment left, who really don't like Putin's authoritarianism). So it became the biggest attractant for attention and the president's people are basically at a loss to explain or defend his behavior, making the coverage even more breathless.

The Russia thing is also a major part of Trump's total disregard for the emoluments clause, that is, his regular plain corruption.

Meanwhile IT ALSO exposes how dumb American politics are that we have had hearings about Facebook ads that look like they were made with crayons and centrist Democrats were indeed searching for a reason Hillary was betrayed rather than lost a campaign that she ran badly. But, it never the less exposed that social media companies are not our glorious benefactors (ending that 10-year fawning period in the media) and that the the U.S. government's cyber security is weak.

Overall it goes to the idea that Trump's election woke a lot of people out of a stupor and there's now a lot of confusion about what must be done next. This is natural when the Clinton wing of the Democratic party has been ascendant for the last 25 years but can no longer win elections, and the establishment Republicans realized that voters do not give a poo poo about any part of their platform.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2019 19:28

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

glowing-fish posted:

2. The history of the Trump presidency, when it is written, will be about the criminal investigations against him. Assuming he is even remembered as anything but a footnote to "And then climate change destroyed civilization", the major lens that Trump will be viewed through is through these investigations, which continue. Even his egregious and inhumane policies, as well as his blundering about the world stage, will still be treated through the lens of his corruption, and how he made those around him even more corrupt. History isn't simple, so Trump's corruption will be viewed as going along with his policy, along with the increasing xenophobia and anti-intellectualism of the Republican Party dating back decades. But Trump's corruption, including but limited to the Special Counsel investigation, is still the primary story about Trump.

People won't stop defacing his walk of fame star, so I can't wait for the group ballsy enough to try and get him a presidential library or something.

# ¿ May 8, 2019 00:13

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

glowing-fish posted:

Okay, and a little bit of meta:

In the two threads that I made about the investigations, I was pretty careful to say that federal investigations are complicated things, there will probably never be a smoking gun, and that Trump was probably not acting as a "Manchurian Candidate". Although there have been a few salacious accusations, a lot of the details of money laundering and perjury are pretty dry and procedural. It was a complicated story, basically.

The problem is that most of D&D has just fallen prey to being a venting chamber for the 24 hour news cycle, or even the 12 hour Twitter Sick Burn cycle. Some state office holder in Oklahoma says something homophobic and people shout "Guilliotine" for the next 90 minutes. USPOL made thousands of jokes about Mike Pence loving horses, and they were not funny after the first page. So then we come to something like these investigations, which involves having to deal with legal filings from a half dozen trials over two years, and it is hard to sum it up in a Twitter sized burst.

Self-described advocates for media literacy were like "Oh yeah, the guy who arranged pardons for all those Iran-Contra figures had a news conference and said 'no collusion', and all the big news outlets are repeating it, so it looks like that is the end of the story"

While at times D&D has allowed an interesting form of lateral thinking, and there are some knowledgeable people posting here with good insights, in general, this place just seems to be a place to post their reactions to the news cycle. The people posting things like "Dehumanize Yourself and Face to Bloodshed" as a reaction to Barr's press conference were one of the worst examples of that. Someone can always take a complicated news story, and "win" by posting a single line of Twitter leftism. Someone will probably write a book about Mueller's choices in this investigation, and there is a good case that Mueller should have been more aggressive. But the person posting "Mueller is a Republican Cop" is not making that case. But, right now on D&D, that person "wins".

And that is all I have to say about the matter.

Just stop closing your threads without notice.

# ¿ May 8, 2019 03:37

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

It's way simpler than what's being suggested re:Putin anyway. Fox News is coming out against it, so that's end of story for Venezuela intervention.

But please don't act like campaign Trump's foreign policy maps perfectly with president Trump. His stance on "interventionist" policy is totally incoherent; peace with NK at all costs (with nothing to show for it), but Iran is a terrorist organization that we can't work with. We have to do active measures against Maduro and we're back to square one with Cuba, but other dictators are great.

(What's actually happening is that Trump's limited attention span is being taken advantage of by the hawks in his cabinet).

# ¿ May 9, 2019 18:32

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

SickZip posted:

Does he have any isolationist cabinet members left? I'm pretty sure they've all been forced to resign and he's left with representatives of the standard Republican foreign policy. So the consequent incoherence is heavily resulting from the dissonance between a executive with isolationists tendencies but lacking firm ideas being surrounded by hawks with very firm ideas.

Since this is the conspiracy thread, I'll say that the fall of the isolationist wing of the cabinet almost certainly wasn't coincidence.

Stephen Miller is still in there. But there's a critical shortage of right-wing figures who are both isolationist and not totally insane, leading to them gradually being replaced by more "traditional" hawk Republicans.

# ¿ May 9, 2019 18:52

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

mountaincat posted:

If the FBI's goal was simply to discredit King, then intervening makes sense. Arresting King for being involved in the rape would not only discredit him but also prevent him from organizing labor strikes and civil rights protests. On the other hand, if the FBI's primary interest was in identifying communists, then it might make sense for them to avoid revealing their operation by intervening.

Fake or not, why didn't the FBI ever do anything with the recordings and transcriptions? King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, more than 4 years after the rape allegedly took place. The theory that the FBI was primarily concerned with identifying communists is consistent with the fact that the transcriptions were never used. And if this theory is true, then there would be no particular reason for them to fake the transcriptions.

They made it up is one possible reason. Another is that whatever they collected was inadmissable because Hoover was simply running a domestic spying program (on dozens if not hundreds of public figures) that was meant mainly as a dirty tricks operation to help like-minded politicians and bureaucrats should the need arise. They also did all sorts of stuff that would damage the credibility of a court case, like send MLK a letter politely asking him to kill himself.

# ¿ May 31, 2019 18:46

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

is pepsi ok posted:

The bad news is that McCarthyism is back.

The good news is that it's the libs that are doing it this time and they are too incompetent to actually bring anyone down lol.

Spoken truly like someone who doesn't know what either McCarthyism or libs are

# ¿ Jul 24, 2019 23:56

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

is pepsi ok posted:

Boy nothing gets past you, huh?

Did you want to go back and edit a joke into your shitpost, or this really all you're bringing to the table?

# ¿ Jul 25, 2019 02:13

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

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).

The database security issue is also something that needs to be looked into, as there are advantages to running an electronic system (protects against more likely forms of fraud and Revenge of the Hanging Chad). It's dismaying to read about penetration of these databases using predictable methods being executed by Russian script kiddies. The technology and policy proposals exist to protect the databases. No need to go full Luddite and have Tammany Hall count the votes for a week every November.

Pretty much the only thing going for the electoral system in terms of security is that it is actually fifty different systems.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2019 18:39

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

The problems with Mueller from the start were that he is a Republican and more importantly yet, obsequious to power. His not making any determination whatsoever surprised even Barr. According to Mueller, "when the president does it, then it's temporarily legal" is sound law, after which probably nothing happens anyway, despite Republicans own-goaling that during the testimony.

Thus the president committing crimes remains a "conspiracy theory" to Mitch McConnell and the local anarchists and Marxists, and Barr, who got the job entirely because he loudly mused that he would make the Russia investigation go away, was able to immediately spin the report.

The Trump/Russia scheme is not elaborate; nothing about Trump is, he's a corrupt real estate developer, which is almost redundant. It's that Trump has business interests in Russia (because the emoluments clause is now meaningless), and his campaign was run by a bag man for the Russian government. Mueller decided not to interview Trump "because it would take too long," and cites the Trump campaign successfully shutting the gently caress up during questioning in the report, followed by not granting anyone immunity to testify.

The story coming out of the report and Mueller's testimony is that Mueller sucks, despite everyone dreaming that he would end this nightmare even when he was part of the machinery that got us here. The entire thing has become a good lesson on what a fluke Watergate was.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2019 21:03

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Helsing posted:

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".

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.

quote:

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".

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.

When you have this little faith in the ability of people to critically analyze information it's a wonder why you even bother being involved in politics; but "involved" is a strong word when the starting point is "It's all hopelessly corrupt, don't bother."

quote:

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.

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?

quote:

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).

Yeah we had that in 2008 and 2012 (even if Obama profited nicely from being mistaken for a revolutionary), it was nice.

quote:

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.

Someone used a dirty trick to destroy a Democratic GOTV operation--making Democrats bad!

quote:

It is completely unremarkable absent any reason to believe it's having a significant negative impact.

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.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/26/8931950/trump-russia-meddling-mueller-gidley-no-impact

"Well lots of things we don't like influence American voters, making this not a real problem" is more whataboutism. Trump's campaign openly, publicly coordinated with a criminal Russian hacking operation. This isn't disputed, even by the Trump campaign.

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.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2019 19:57

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 20:18

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

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.

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?

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

# ¿ Jul 29, 2019 18:47

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Conspiracy Thread: Russians Preparing Sealed Indictment for Buzz Aldrin