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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. Even if one disagrees with the conclusions or thinks that he's being unfair (though I think he does a fine job of making the case that journalists acted very inappropriately), this Taibbi article cites a bunch of examples along the lines of what you're talking about : https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million
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Mar 30, 2019 23:31
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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."
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Mar 31, 2019 18:41
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This is kind of another perfect example of bad reporting on this. "Some members on the team said a thing" being used to heavily imply "therefore Barr must have misrepresented the report which actually vindicated our expectations in some way" despite no actual specifics.Helsing posted: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. 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. Sodomy Hussein posted: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. 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.
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Apr 6, 2019 06:13
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BrandorKP posted:Life is more complicated than this Helsing. I go to work everyday and try to prevent the loss of life. I'm being very literal and concrete when I say that. I'm pretty drat good at it. But as I do it, over time I grow very aware of the purposes and ends of all the cargos I briefly interact with. I also grow increasingly aware of all the international systems the work I do supports and the externalities of those systems. This is overly vague because you're not clear regarding what the "American Civic religion" consists of. In reality there are many aspects of US society and culture that are fundamentally incompatible with a decent and fair society. So you need to be clear about what you're trying to preserve here, and why it's somehow necessary to support these ideas in order to accomplish change. To be frank, I get the general impression that you're trying to "intellectualize" the vague feeling of "I feel like other people don't understand the 'complexities' of society and thus they are too ignorant to come up with good solutions, while I and/or the people I personally and professionally respect do understand them." This sort of perspective generally translates to an anti-democratic mindset that believes that only those with sufficient credentials in society should have the right to propose significant change to society (with any significant change proposed by the "underclass" being viewed as fundamentally invalid, since they couldn't possibly understand the 'complexities' involved).
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Apr 24, 2019 17:21
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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? You're interpreting this very strangely and basically reading "supports impeachment" as "considers impeachment of Trump a top priority." I would have answered yes to that question, for example, despite not thinking it's very important in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't really support or contradict what Helsing said. In contrast, polls that actually attempt to gauge what voters consider "most important" (which are a better proxy for this than the poll you linked) usually end up with things like healthcare or the economy ranking at the top.
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May 2, 2019 18:54
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fishmech posted:What point are you trying to make? This poo poo you're dropping looks a lot like "OK well things happened, but it's not the specific strawman Thing I have in my head at this exact moment so it's still cool that I claimed nothing happened". The point Helsing made about the reception of the poster pillowpants was, by itself, pretty noteworthy. It is definitely meaningful that so much obvious nonsense was credulously believed and trusted. The past couple years have also seen the publishing of a lot of extremely bad journalism related to this topic. To be honest, the way the media has dealt with the "Russiagate" topic is probably more interesting and meaningful than anything to come from the conspiracy itself. Helsing posted: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. I think this is less an SA thing and more something related to the cultural and socioeconomic circumstances of many D&D posters. These folks aren't really any more or less better at critical thinking than any other random American, but value "the idea of" being a fact-oriented critical thinker (and associate the concept of critical thinking more with tone/image than content). This leads to a situation where, instead of "Because of the facts, I have been lead to believe X," people flip the order around and assume that the things that "feel correct" to them must be fact-based by default. Obviously I'm making this sound dumb, and it is dumb, but otherwise smart people can easily end up doing this when the media environment they rely on treats certain things are obviously true. This is why any time this topic is discussed, the conspiracy being true is basically treated as the null hypothesis, and other people carry the burden of somehow proving that (for example) Russia's Facebook and Twitter activity didn't have a significant impact. The default belief is that the conspiracy is true, because the people and sources many liberals trust treat it as such. Somfin posted:What other reason could you possibly have for openly liking Putin A lot of right-wingers like Putin. Trump is a right-winger. I don't see what's confusing about this. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Jul 28, 2019 |
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Jul 28, 2019 06:11
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Somfin posted:Are you saying that Russia did stuff on Facebook and Twitter to attempt to alter the outcome of the election? Are we admitting that this happened? What more does there need to be for there to be a conspiracy? A country putting non-zero effort towards influencing public opinions in another country isn't remotely uncommon, and it's even less uncommon if you expand the definition to powerful private entities (which you should). Pretty much all major countries have always done this, including the US. It is completely unremarkable absent any reason to believe it's having a significant negative impact. In light of the fact that domestic efforts have a harmful impact that is orders of magnitude greater, it makes even less sense to care about this (and any reasonable person should be concerned at how disproportionate the media focus is on this issue relative to stuff like the "domestic dark money" issue Helsing mentioned).
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Jul 28, 2019 18:51
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Somfin posted:The question isn't whether or not it worked, the question is whether or not Trump's campaign knowingly conspired with a foreign government. Well, there's two separate things here. One is how you're defining "conspired" (i.e. does it count if Trump was simply aware of some of what Russia was doing, or does this require some sort of active cooperation). The other is why on a strictly ethical and practical level we consider "conspiring with a foreign government" to be inherently worse than conspiring with other organizations/entities. I don't see any reason to be more concerned about a politician conspiring with a foreign country than I should be about them conspiring with corporations hostile to the interests of the American public (if anything, the latter likely has a greater negative impact). The idea of foreign involvement being uniquely bad seems like it's just accepted as a "common sense" thing.
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Jul 29, 2019 02:05
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Somfin posted:In terms of ethics, you're on firm ground here with point number 2. However, in terms of pragmatism, if we can't even stop the obvious influence of hostile foreign governments, how the gently caress can we stop the influence of hostile multinational corporations as well? Like, this is the #AllLivesMatter style of deflection to an always-wider issue that ends up floundering in hopelessness instead of taking action. Strictly ethically speaking, I don't think there's anything bad about collaboration itself, and that it's only bad when the entity someone is collaborating with is bad. Obviously this is definitely true with Russia, but as Helsing mentioned there other forces with dramatically more influence both in terms of Trump himself and the Republican Party in general. And unlike Russia, the US government can actually directly address domestic entities in ways that don't involve possible nuclear war. All it can really do about Russia is improve cyber-security. Ratios and Tendency posted:He literally went on live tv and asked Russia to hack Hillary's emails and then they did, which led to the FBI announcing an investigation into Hillary like a week before the election. What is wrong with ya'll brains? Doesn't the short time between him saying it and them trying it kinda imply the opposite? When people talk about Trump conspiring with Russia, it implies they had some sort of direct back-and-forth communication on this matter. It doesn't seem strange for Trump, who likes Russia/Putin, to say something like this and Russia to then decide to do that thing based upon what Trump said (though the latter in this case doesn't have any actual evidence, but I'll grant that it's not unlikely in this case). The situation doesn't imply that Trump was actually aware that Russia would do the hacking and was involved in arranging it in some way. It seems to me like this whole situation involves a lot of conflating "Trump and Russia having shared interests" with "Trump doing things because Russia told him to or vice versa."
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Jul 29, 2019 05:08
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Somfin posted:This very much reads like you're willing to swap between believing someone and not believing them based on how their evidence lines up with your set-in-stone vision of what happened. Helsing is bringing up various things that cast doubt on the narrative of "this is a proved thing that definitely happened." Both the words and outcomes of the Mueller investigation and doubt about the trustworthiness of the people involved can be used to advance this claim without any conflict. true.spoon posted:Given that some of the most incriminating information concerning Russian involvement comes from Durch sources, I don't really buy that it's all just a conspiracy driven by American warmongers. Yes, the sources are anonymous iirc but something like this being made up completely strikes me as unlikely. The way you phrase this is kind of misleading, since, as far as I'm aware, the statement by Dutch sources is literally the only source outside of US intelligence claims. I'm inclined to think it is likely that the IRA was working with the Russian government, but there isn't actually any hard evidence of this - just pretty persuasive circumstantial evidence. And it's not like the Dutch are friendly with Russia, so that evidence isn't exactly unassailable. And the most noteworthy part of this, in my opinion, is that these claims existed (and were widely believed/trusted) for many months prior to the Dutch source. During this time there wasn't any evidence outside of the claims of US intelligence agencies. This willingness on the part of many liberals to completely blindly trust the claims of US intelligence agencies is far more concerning to me than anything Russia may have done. And, even now, it is very strange and concerning to see people attacking others for expressing skepticism towards things that still have no actual direct evidence supporting them. Basically, the way the media and public have dealt with this story is far more alarming to me than the story itself.
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Jul 29, 2019 21:34
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Conditions weren't nearly as nice this time and the feds were clearly annoyed by the previous deal. The only direct thing we've heard is someone reporting on someone else having heard that Epstein himself said he was attacked the first time. It's entirely possible that that account isn't true. But everything combined in this situation makes assuming that this was not a genuine suicide a far more reasonable default presumption. Basically the main argument here is on what the default assumption should be. People like you are choosing "what would feel the most normal" as your default "null hypothesis." But in this situation I see no logical reason to conclude that suicide is any more likely than him being killed. There's circumstantial evidence that could point towards either possibility, but, in my opinion, the first "failed attempt" definitely pushes "he was killed" into being the more plausible default. The issue with the sort of logic you and others are using is that it's a logic that would allow powerful people and institutions to get away with literally anything as long as they aren't stupid about it. Because you're setting "evidence provided by said institutions" as your basis for believing institutions and powerful people have done things like this. It's a sort of "might = right" ideology, when you boil it down. To put it another way, the downsides to Epstein having been killed and the circumstances of that not being exposed are greater than the downsides of him not having been killed and people assuming he was, particularly since it should not be difficult to provide proof that he killed himself in this situation (and the absence of video proof, if that is the case, is basically the sort of thing that is so conspicuous that it should serve as evidence that he was killed).
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Aug 12, 2019 00:59
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predicto posted:why not both.gif You are using the logic of "if X made a non-zero contribution to something, you must assume that the contribution was meaningful and had some non-negligible effect." This is not even remotely logical (especially when there's a very clear and obvious explanation for the existence of right-wing politics in the US that doesn't require Russian involvement). The burden of proof is on you and others to prove the significance of Russia's efforts.
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Aug 13, 2019 19:24
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BrandorKP posted:I will never get the huge boner for the libertarian. He hasn't been a libertarian for many years now. Stuff like this kinda reinforces my perception that 90% of the bizarre hate boner people have for that guy is due to people going off some vague baseless perception that he's a right-winger*. It's always been obvious that the real source for the negative sentiment is that he pushes back against the US government and security state, and all the other criticism people levy at him (which is generally a mix of valid and dumb things) is just dug up to justify that initial negative reaction. Since any remotely honest look at the guy comes out with him looking better than the vast majority of other media figures who don't receive a fraction of the same negative attention, it's obvious that this isn't just some organic thing. * the kind of amusing thing about this is that these people seem to be looking at literally the only good thing in libertarian ideology (reflexive distrust and skepticism towards the US security state and foreign policy) and using that association to tar those opinions as somehow being right-wing
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Aug 19, 2019 01:41
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The thing about Greenwald is that he only receives the negative attention he does because he has taken positions that run contrary to the bipartisan aims of the US government. He has some dumb views, but not to an extent any greater than pretty much literally any other journalist or public figure you can think of. In the greater context of US (or Brazilian in the case of his recent publishing of the Sergio Moro whistleblower stuff) journalism/politics, it doesn't make sense to consider him anything but a positive figure who has done good things outweighing any random dumb views he might have (and in the case of the Brazilians stuff, he is genuinely putting his life at risk). He's basically a good example of how public sentiment can often be controlled and influenced without the need to tell lies (though that often happens too). All the media has to do is focus negative attention on the people (or topics) they want to attack or discredit, and that puts those people (and their defenders) on the defensive. It helps that harmful/bad mainstream views aren't perceived in nearly the same negative way. For example, Barack Obama is unquestionably a far worse person who has done and believed far worse things than Glenn Greenwald, but (at best) he gets more of a "yeah I disagree with him about some things" treatment instead of a 'lol look at this libertarian wacko" one. People just don't notice that double standard and how unreasonable it is, because any individual part might seem like it makes sense and they've been preconditioned to always assume good faith on the part of "credible" public figures.
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Aug 20, 2019 03:17
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How are u posted:The fun part about exiling discussion of Russian election interference to the Conspiracy Thread is that it's not a loving conspiracy. You seem to not understand what the word "conspiracy" means.
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Dec 19, 2019 23:49
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predicto posted:Just like everyone else in DnD, I don't want to play Helsing games anymore. There's a good reason this thread is dead as a doornail - discussing anything with you is pointless. Being wrong probably does make it more difficult to discuss things, I'll grant you that.
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Dec 21, 2019 00:31
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It's funny how people like the guy in the post above mine view the points Helsing is making as non sequitors, because they're incapable of understanding the concept of "putting things in context." It seems like, to these people, if someone says a bunch of technically true things (like "Russia technically involved itself in the US election") that should just be taken at face value with no consideration given to the way people and politicians are interpreting and using that fact. It's like if someone went around quoting technically-true black crime statistics and someone said "This is misleading because of (insert other facts) and helping to support a racist narrative" and they replied with "That's a nonsequitor, I'm talking about these facts and not those other facts. Are you denying these facts are true?"
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Dec 21, 2019 22:43
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Regarding Epstein, there's also very strong circumstantial evidence and, at the very least, we can conclude that a bunch of public figures had no problem socially associating with Epstein after his first arrest for procuring an underage girl for prostitution. Basically, the Epstein situation is one where it's definitely true that Epstein dealt in underage prostitution, and your default assumption should be that the powerful people he associated with were at the very least aware of this and likely directly participated. Ignoring Epstein specifically, on a basic ethical level it's my personal belief that when you're talking about people with great wealth/power, concepts like "burden of proof" should be treated differently than they are with normal people. Partly because great wealth gives a person more power to obscure and obstruct the process, and partly because the consequences of letting wealthy/powerful people get away with crime are greater than the consequences of "wrongly" punishing them (which is the complete opposite of how it is with most normal people, where it's worse to wrongly convict than it is to wrongly not convict). Not only are the wealthy/powerful capable of greater crimes, but they are by definition not part of a group oppressed by the powerful (since they're a part of that group). I would go as far as to say that those without wealth/power have an obligation to presume guilt on the part of the wealthy, because institutions themselves can't be relied upon to go after "their own." This doesn't mean you should just blindly assume they're guilty of any accusation made against them (since there might be some clear factional/partisan motivation), but it means that if you're uncertain and there's reasonably strong circumstantial evidence of something, you should lean towards assuming guilt until the claim is disproved or credibly discredited. Again, this is my personal belief and very obviously is not derived from the US legal framework.
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Jan 2, 2020 22:24
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