You know, just because someone somewhere said that the Russians hacked the election doesn’t mean that what we’re all discussing right now, in Congress and out, is whether the tabulation of the vote was accurate. So, if you want to be a complete asshole, you can write a whole column about how the vote counting process wasn’t tampered with. But no one gives a shit.
It’s almost as obnoxious to say that the Russians tried but failed to influence the election. Obviously they influenced it. The election absent the DNC and Podesta emails would have been different, and the same can be said for an election that lacked a concerted effort by a Russian army of bots and trolls who amplified negative stories about Clinton and even helped widely disseminate fake news that was damaging to her campaign.
The Russians didn’t commit crimes and invest all this effort and expense at great risk to their international relations and economic interests without knowing the potential upside could be huge.
I don’t know how you can look at a country that has Donald Trump as its president and see it as materially better off than Dresden in 1945. So, I don’t see failure. I see my nation carpet bombed, hollowed out, humiliated, and virtually defeated.
I’d call that influence.
“The russians hacked the election”. This is the new Birtherism. It’s also a convenient dodge for the Dems to avoid acknowledging that systematic, consistent fuckups lost the election to Trump.
You know, stuff like that.
So, have fun with this rabbit. Meanwhile, 2018 is coming. And the current policy profile will cook the Dem’s goose in the Senate. Could the Dems drop below 40 in the Senate? Yes, they could.
It’s exactly the new Birtherism, except based on evidence instead of racism. Weirdly, it’s also a convenient dodge for the Dems to avoid acknowledging shortcomings. Strange how more than one thing can be true at a time.
Ah, an argument. Will wonders never cease?
OK, what evidence? And what SPECIFICALLY did those big bad Rooskies do?
I hear they won the election for Trump. OK, in WI, what did they do? And in MI, and in OH, and in PA, what did they do? Because those were the places that tipped the balance?
I know something about WI. I know that 25K voters MORE voted for Senate than voted for POTUS, and the margin for Trump was about 14K IIRC. So did the Rooshins stop the WI voters from voting for Hillary?
That’s the missing link of the “evidence” in this new scandal. Just what did they do?
Since Trump was elected, he has denied Russia’s role, talked about lifting sanctions, bashed NATO using Russian talking points which are bullshit, criticized Merkel, continued to praise Brexit and criticize the E.U., gutted the State Department, tried to have Flynn run our national security, told Tillerson to blow off NATO in favor of visiting Russia, and used all of it to further undermine faith in our institutions.
Of course, the biggest prize, which could easily backfire on them, is getting an outright ignoramus elected as our president. Nothing is a more damaging to our leadership and reputation.
If you think that none of this swung the election in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania and the loss can be completely explained by Clinton’s inherent faults, then there is no arguing with you. But they helped Trump from the beginning, with an army of bots and trolls. It was his secret weapon, and it had a massive effect in the primaries of both parties.
link
How many Bernie Sanders supporters actually bought the Mena airport and Hillary a murderer rehash? Are you jumping to the conclusion that these and all of the trash about the Clinton Global Initiative actually swung Sanders voters?
Or are you arguing that this line of attack on Clinton altered the outcome of the Republican primary of 17 candidates?
I can see strong arguments that the Republican primary baked in a Trump majority in the Republican states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio and possibly tipped Republican areas of Pennsylvania enough to flip the electoral college. I can also see the need for an investigation of the chain-letter conservative communications for similar sources. Having actual evidence that Russia was driving these off-the-wall Republican ideas and not Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who but reflected and amplified them would make some sense out of some members of Congress, like Louis Goehmert and Steve King. But so far, that is not what is being alleged.
You’re looking at the elephant’s tusks and missing the elephant.
I don’t even know to begin because your viewfinder’s aperture is almost closed.
I won’t even try to make this all clear to you at once. I’ll just try to shine a flashlight on a couple of things you’re not seeing.
On the issue of Sanders, there was so much anti-Clinton poison poured into that movement by people who weren’t sincere Sanders supporters that it was unbelievable. And you’ll hear so many of the Sanders supporters say even today exactly what Putin said, which is that it doesn’t matter who leaked it, it only matters what was leaked.
But that misunderstands what happened. The leaks were magnified, distorted, appended to fake news and used to build a grand narrative of perfidy and outright evil that set in and drove people straight out of any consideration of unifying behind Clinton. I saw people I respected very much consumed by it, driven almost mad by it.
And it was never just the leaks. It was poison flowing into virtually every significant Sanders board in the country, produced abroad and promulgated here. Leaks were carefully timed. The Podesta emails went out one hour after the Access Hollywood tape, for example, and the first big WikiLeak batch was timed to undermined unification at the Democratic convention.
Meanwhile, unseen to most of us, even more effort was going into puffing Trump up through a straight line from RT to Stone to InfoWars to Breitbart to Trump’s addled brain. Fake news was immensely profitable in Facebook when it was presented to right-wing minds, and it had a massive impact in Trump’s favor from the beginning of the primaries to the end of the general.
This was a massive operation, and it’s all easy to see and most of it is easy to prove.
What you’re hung up on is the possibility of hanging criminal charges on some Americans associated with Trump. That’s not what’s going on. What’s going on is an effort to find a way out of the smoking crater that’s been left of our country. The counterintelligence investigation may never get criminal indictments. We can prove that Stone and Assange orchestrated the entire leaks enterprise and coordinated it with Bannon and Jones, and it would not by itself be indictable. But it happened. And now we’re fucked.
So, what do want to do about it?
Tell me that talking about it isn’t going to win us 3 senate seats and the House?
That shit is almost irrelevant. Unless we figure out how to combat this rising tide of fascism and this loss of control of our own destiny, our elections aren’t going to materially improve things.
The left seems to think that attacking neoliberalism is the key. That could be part of a solution but it’s ignores that we have an emergency of the highest order on our hands and that that is a not a way to address it when you have almost no political power and no short-term prospects of getting any.
This is the only thing that matters:
“Unless we figure out how to combat this rising tide of fascism and this loss of control of our own destiny, our elections aren’t going to materially improve things. “
I will let slide the argument over what was worse, the fact that the DNC emails were leaked or what was in the e-mails. I was in Philly: I know very well that it created issues and lead to DWS’s resignation. It is also true that in the end the vast majority of Sanders people voted for Clinton. There was an enthusiasm gap for her seen in a reduced number of volunteers – but that existed far before the Wikileaks and was based on substantive differences with the Clintons. I was in two delegation breakfasts in Philly on Thursday morning (one a 3 state delegation breakfast in which Sanders held the majority of the delegates). In both people had mostly let the anger go.
Maybe you don’t get the last part – that the LEAST important part of the Sanders campaign was Clinton hate.. But then I don’t think you really understood Sanders.
I am so goddam tired of people suggesting the Sanders people didn’t unite behind Clinton because of the Wikileaks or because “right-wing meme’s”. Or that this is Bernie Sanders fault.
You want to split the Party – keep pushing that.
It is a flat out insult to the millions of us who supported him, and to the VAST MAJORITY who voted for Clinton. 16% of Clinton voters in 2008 did not vote for Obama in the general election.
http://edition.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#val=USP00p3
The caucus99 types were no worse than the Hillaryis44 or the noquarter types were in 2008. At least they weren’t spreading rumors about a whitey tape.
HOW DO YOU FIX THE PROBLEM? WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
This is the only thing that really matters.
Is what we do or say trying to fix that problem in some way? Or is it just more venom.
It blows my mind how disinterested people are in trying to understand why we are where we are.
Wikileaks did stop us from re-taking the Senate. Wikileaks did not stop us from re-taking the House.
If we don’t figure shit out the GOP is going to get close to 60 votes in the Senate.
We really can’t afford this crap.
Facebook. I have mentioned this before. My Facebook page was infested with fake news and so many bought into it. My first encounter with it was The Baltimore Gazette. That was once a real paper, and it looked real but it had turned into a vehicle of fake news and it caused a lot of ugly debate on my Facebook. It didn’t end there of course. And to my mind it was vicious, and not at all ordinary.
I was a Sanders supporter. But the attacks on Hillary were so far over the edge they could not be ignored, and I came to arguing very much against the lies that even alleged that she killed people. And Facebook was not the end of it. Many of my friends saw it and were repeating it. Most of them are republicans but the level of lie was too high to ignore.
It really did get to the place you allude to. It wasn’t about Hillary. It was about the fucking lies that were incessant and still are. Much as I liked Sanders it was impossible to ignore to the point where my son thought I had become a Hillary supporter. But it was not about her. And now Trump is taking us apart a little at time. He has already moved to abandon NATO and much of our safety net and institutions. Imagine a fucking fool using twitter to say the former president hacked him. Maybe he should have.
And it becomes increasingly likely Russia had a very heavy hand in our elections and likely still does across the internet and influence in our government. Shit just listen to Spicer talk. We will become fools to ignore this.
Not just fools; useful idiots.
It’s beyond idiocy. Look at the comments in this diary. Parody is dead.
Right-wingers aren’t the only folks who live in an alternative reality.
Morons is what they are.
..
If they didn’t do anything then what are you worried about? Isn’t the point of an investigation to gather the evidence and see where it leads?
It almost amuses me to hear people still talking about election results nearly two years from now that have almost no prospect of improving things when we have a lunatic sitting on top of enough radioactivity to power a solar system.
If I were you, I’d have my eye on other things, like the North Koreans playing around with nukes of their own and collusion between our government and the Kremlin to destroy open, tolerant multicultural progressivism in the West.
Trump hates the same people they hate. And Putin hates Clinton.
That makes up for everything.
.
Yes, that is concerning and teh SoS is not making me feel any better. You’re absolutely right.
Dems are not doing this right. Revenge is a dish best served cold. Wait for the investigation, then if there is something, talk about it. By discussing this 24/7/365, what the Dems are doing is hardening the Repubs to back Trump. Just bad strategy all around.
Nononono, dataguy, you’re supposed to be arguing that Libs should have tried to pass abortion laws in the states, instead of thru the courts.
Oh and gay marriage, that should have been thru the courts, and not state-by-state. Riiiight. Got it all straight now.
And make appeals to the white working class, which involves deporting brown people. It’s a winner in at least five state, believe me.
.
At last, someone brave enough to call for a realistic approach to interest group politics.
We should found a think-tank to push the idea, and name it after an appropriate Democrat.
I recommend John Stennis.
This is terrible political advice. If Democratic Party leaders and rank-and-file members don’t shout from the rooftops about the mushrooming evidence of propagandistic interference in the 2016 election, AG Jefferson Beauregard Sessions’ Justice Department will spike the fucking investigation and no Republican will pay a political price.
And that would be dataguy’s goal, eh.
Three million more votes for Clinton than Trump and millions for Democratic candidates more than for the Republicans. That’s the Russian effect on top of the gerrymandering, vote suppression and our slave-state favoring Constitution. The GOP voters, regardless of how they felt about Trump personally all voted for him it’s the tribe and because they saw him, rightly, as an easily manipulable tool who would appoint the right SCOTUS Justice and sign all the Ryan legislation.
They -or at least the average GOP voter – didn’t count on the shitstorm and the ongoing incompetence. So be happy with dumping all over HRC; the rest of us have work that needs to be done to save the republic.
Gerrymandering is the other New Birtherism. It’s the key to Democratic party victory. Except, in WI, all the statewide offices are all R, and in MI too and in OH. It’s that dadgum gerrymandering still isn’t.
Democrats are so occupied chasing these little rabbits that the entire big pic is just escaping them.
The big picture as I see it, is the voters in those states like getting punched in the face so they keep electing assholes like Snyder, Walker and Kaisich who are happy to do just that.
The first fucking thing Scott Walker did was fuck over the WWC. They rewarded him by re-electing him. Twice.
OK, let’s take that as a rational statement. You are saying that the entire state is idiots.
WI is 3 sub-states. There is Milwaukee. There is Lacrosse/Eau Claire/Madison/??. And there is the rest of the state. Milwaukee is the big city, where probably 90% of all blacks/minorities live in the state. Lacrosse is a union town still. Eau Claire is a college town. Madison is UW, and is students/teachers/etc.
In the rest of the state, you cannot buy a D vote. The D Party is the party of big cities, higher taxes, blacks, illegals, hippies in Madison, and sex wierdos. That’s the image.
You folks think you are so smart, so smart that you have contempt for those racists who are stupid (your view of WI). Yep, that’s also why they voted for Trump. My wife’s family is all over WI. They are not interested in this nonsense. Too busy paying high taxes, watching the unions and their pensions, and the folks in Milwaukee do stupid shit.
I don’t see WI switching back for a bit. Dems need something other than contempt for the rural turfs. Just what might that be?
“watching the unions and their pensions.” That’s the tell right there isn’t it? Someone else has something they don’t, and it pisses them off, so rather than try to get pensions or benefits for themselves, they vote for people who will take those pensions and benefits away from those unions, blacks, and hippies.
I understand them, I understand them just fine. And when shit goes sideways, (again) I’ll vote to bail out the auto industry, expand medicaid, and do everything I can to help them out, even though they want to kill my cow because it makes sweeter milk.
Seems easier to drag others down than to lift each other up. Perhaps it always has been. Heck, I’d love union representation. I also know that there is one party that will guarantee I can never have it and one that at least considers unions as part of its base. That latter party might, if in power, make it less of a heavy lift to get more union representation for more of us. Maybe one party has a better history of making sure that healthcare is in reach for someone like me as well. I don’t like dragging others down. Doesn’t fit my moral compass. So it goes.
And yep – like you I will vote for whichever candidates will do the most good for these same folks. It’s the right thing to do, and that is good enough for me.
https:/www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/13/how-rural-resentment-helps-explain-the
-surprising-victory-of-donald-trump?utm_term=.7ce71b84be4e
Politics of resentment – Kathy Cramer
Too funny. Too funny. “less government” == “less goodies for the blahs, more for us whites”.
Yeah yeah.
How can one tell?
(1) before the ACA, it was widely documented that medical bankruptcy was a significant source of all bankruptcies. the ACA went a long way to reducing that problem. Trump voters hated the ACA, eh? Until of course, now, the Rs wanna take it away. But they hated the Dems and Obama for it.
(2) If it were about economic uncertainty, you’d have seen people of color (who are, -objectively-, worse off than whites, and esp. down at the bottom of the income ladder) voting for Dampnut. You didn’t.
Oh, sorry, and we all have seen the racism, the white supremacy, the homophobia, the nazism. So yaknow, keep tellin’ us it’s all the economic insecurity. We know what it is:
The poorest white man can feel better than the black man.
Went through a medical bankruptcy – comes with the territory when married to someone with a pre-existing conditions that make joint surgeries, shall we say, complicated. That whole process sucked the life out of me, and darned near decimated our family as a unit. Would not wish that on anyone. Personally I was in a very dark place for quite a while after that soul-sucking experience, and on some level I think each of us still bears some psychological scars. Our last surgery just over a year ago (a joint replacement, followed by a stroke) under the old rules pre-ACA would have blown through an annual cap in coverage and quite possibly a lifetime cap – assuming our goal was to get my spouse in rehab and back to as close to 100% as possible. Instead, we just grumble about a few bills that are largely manageable. No foreclosure, no repos, no bankruptcy. Mostly we focused on recovery from surgery and complications. I can live with the current setup. I can also start telling stories of friends who had life threatening illnesses that would have never been treated, and so on, had the ACA never came into existence. It wasn’t perfect and isn’t perfect, but it can be a real life saver. That’s what matter to me. And yeah, we have badgered our Congresscritters (probably to no avail) over the last few months.
Hmmm, the “Russia birther issue” has gotten Flynn fired, impacted Sessions (although you might not like that part), might impact Gorsuch hearings, and has Trump so obsessed it’s impacting his ability to focus on anything else:
Why Letting Go, for Trump, Is No Small or Simple Task
With Cohn, with McCarthy, with Nixon…we’ve had penny-ante crooks up against the American identity before. They always lose. I refuse to be spooked by Trump (who’s an accident of history; a gutter-level con-man riding a wave of corrupted national dialogue that will never be repeated) and I refuse to give in to any of this fake “realpolitic” ethos of failure and defeat.
Reality-Denyingly dishonest) comment ever?
For (could this possibly, actually need explaining?) the utterly absurd equating of “The russians hacked the election” — a proposition with extensive (some, including the relevant U.S. intelligence agencies, might claim “massive”, “compelling”, “consensus”, or even “dispositive”, but I’ll keep it conservative) evidence supporting it . . .
. . . with Birtherism — a proposition in conflict with all available relevant evidence.
Are you really this stupid, or really this dishonest?
“It’s the new birtherism”? Are you out of your mind?
What a blind, despicable position to take.
I’m wondering if you have ever clicked on the rating scale under each post. You know, this thing about typing “4-Excellent” under posts just makes you look odd. Plus it fills up these comment streams with these useless posts.
multiple times.
You could look it up.
Well, if you know how to do things appropriately and still act like a fucking moron, you’re a fucking moron.
I did give you the benefit of the doubt.
As he’s explained multiple times, he can click all he wants on the rating system buttons but THEY DON’T WORK FOR HIM. Thanks to some quirk of his computer connection to this site, they don’t work; the only way he can register praise for any post is to do precisely what he’s doing.
But I guess you haven’t been paying attention.
Instead, out of your ignorance, you proceeded to a false conclusion.
Then you used that false conclusion to justify your obnoxious insults.
If you weren’t so aggressively and deliberately and routinely an asshole, I might have found the motivation to explain yet again why I rate comments here as I do.
But you were, so I didn’t.
relationship with the facts comprising Reality for someone self-congratulatingly labeling himself “dataguy”.
Noting this is not the first time I’ve pointed this out.
Nice grenade, Issues.
That was a lot of effort on the Russians’ part just to get Fiona Hill on the National Security Council as a result and Rex Tillerson as a message-boy.
Olvier Knox, Yahoo News: Putin critic will handle Russia for Trump’s National Security Council
Until someone put the facts on the table, this Russia sidetrack still looks like lousy politics based on a mistaken idea about clickbait. There is still lots of innuendo but as little there there as there was evidence of corruption in the Clinton Global Initiative.
And the hype becomes dangerous as international and military policy in the hands of someone who makes snap judgements.
At this point, you’re not much different from the people demanding evidence that there really was a moon landing.
The evidence has been right in front of your face, and I don’t blame you for not seeing it’s significance earlier because I didn’t see it as that significant earlier.
But to deny it now is it’s own form of Birtherism.
This is from the summer of 2015:
I believe that Comey had a greater negative effect on the outcome than Russia. But I’m not blind to the fact that HRC was suboptimal and Trump was an excellent salesman for white supremacy.
Who is Chen?
And does not the US and probably most every nation with the means engage in information war now?
National governments over the past decade and a half, probably longer, have crapified the utility of the internet as a democratic space just as Rush Limbaugh and the shock jocks have crapified the broadcast media and cable as democratic space.
Where is the evidence that internet trolling moves voters?
Remember I wound up voting for a straight Democratic ticket in 2016.
I raise the evidence question because this line of attack on Trump has little traction in this area, even among Democrats. They are baffled with the DC bunch fixated on this with so little actual evidence of Trump-Russian collaboration. Association, contacts, that is standard guilt-by-association nonsense like Obama and Bill Ayers or Obama and Jeremiah Wright. It convinces only the true believers.
To win against Trump with this story, you have to have the institutional traction that will allow the facts to be brought forward as evidence. That did not happen in the Watergate case for two years and then only because of a minor judge. The institutions that have hinted the most have been the least willing to bring forward evidence. Even Comey continues to be coy. Watergate broke wide open when Jeb Macgruder and John Dean stopped being coy and gave direct evidence.
What you are arguing is that the Russians are more effective in information warfare (formerly known as propaganda) with a smaller budget than the US military with larger budgets and touting their information warfare capabilities. I personally think both stories are hype and both countries have been wasting their money.
Tim Berners-Lee has had a strong statement on the corporate and government crapification of the internet. He is on target. But that is a different issue.
If you want to go to war with Russia over internet trolls, you have made your case. Is that really where you are going with this line of criticism?
Maybe there is no hope for you.
The U.S. propaganda efforts are dwarfed by what the Russians are doing.
Maybe you need to read up on how Angleton went about Italy, about how Kim Roosevelt did Iran and how David Atlee Phillips did Guatemala.
Yes, we’ve meddled in elections.
And the results were generally not happy, and the victims were generally not grateful. But the victims didn’t deny it happened. They weren’t that stupid.
We do not employ armies of bots and trolls or train and finance people to generate torrents of fake news.
Our methods are generally more traditional and obvious. We rely on open source media dominance, first of all, to promulgate our culture in ways that are both honest (we have much to admire and emulate) and dishonest (we try to put our best face forward and paper over the rest).
Since the Cold War ended, we have generally been on the side of democratic elections outside of the Islamic World, and we haven’t been spending a bunch of time throwing the organs of our intelligence community into generating fake news and propagating it. When they have, it’s been in a war setting and for a military purpose.
Yes, we can still get our mainstream media to gang up on a Hugo Chavez in ways that go beyond honest criticism. But this isn’t about some kind of both sides do it bullshit anyway.
This is about the Russians deciding that they would take giant risks to get Trump elected and now Trump looking to give them their payback.
This isn’t a political tactic on my part or a desire to get hits on my websites. My country has been nuked. I’m not going to listen to anyone who says that we deserve this or that we don’t have a responsibility to put our country first here above all other considerations.
(E.g., survival of humanity and of functioning ecosystems — if the two goals aren’t in fact incompatible.) I’ll give the benefit of the doubt that you didn’t mean that quite the way it came out. At least I hope that’s the case.
Cuz the way it came out looks like raw nationalism (think “Deutschland uber alles”; or the original “America First”; or Trump’s reiteration of it), one of the greatest, most destructive banes of humanity through much of recorded history.
Have you now been read in so that you are an insider?
How do you know this?
“We do not employ armies of bots and trolls or train and finance people to generate torrents of fake news.”
All I know is one big fat number $60 billion for the intelligence community, listed in the Federal Budget. That is almost the entire defense budget of the Russian Federation, listed as $66.4 billion.
Peter Pomerantsev, Defense One: Putin’s Russia doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality
One wonders where Pomerantsev stands in all this given the out-of-the-blue attack on Glenn Greenwald toward the end of this article.
Especially after seeking to argue that the key is continuing to create distraction and imagining what will Putin do next.
Trump seems to have mastered Putin’s method of distraction. I’m not sure that two can play this game without serious conflict.
Our country most definitely has not been nuked. That is an extreme metaphor. It has been distracted in the same way that Rush Limbaugh has been tolerated for 30 years. And FoxNews for 20 years. And Sinclair for 10 years.
It will take a lot of time (and if sanity returns some hardnosed investigations) to figure out the 2016 election.
Hyperbole like “nuked” is a great way to actually wind up with a world that is nuked. Especially with a still warhawk Congress and an inconstant but chest-beating President.
Things could be worse, I’ll grant you that. And they will be.
Where it matters, though, we have been reduced to dust.
Nuked.
confront us (as I’ve pointed out here before):
(RE: your link.)
Everyone* seems aware of #1. #2 not so much.
And while the data and models are lacking to reliably assess the relative probabilities of #1 vs. #2 being the one to take us out, we have at least managed so far to contain #1 throughout the 7 decades or so that it has been an existential threat, providing at least some evidence suggesting we might manage to continue containing it (but otoh, N. Korea and the likelihood of foolish responses).
But it’s my assessment that #2 is actually the existential threat most likely to get the job done.
First due to the general lack of political will to do any more than tinker around the edges of the problem, when drastic measures are required even to mitigate what’s coming and already here, much less reverse it.
But even more so (and I take this to be the point of your link) due to the intent of the Reality-Denying political faction currently in power to gut and roll back even those meager, inadequate, far-less-than-half-measures.
Also too, this from the linked article is, erm, “interesting”:
Sounds very much like they expect the Clean Power Plan to be upheld, and are looking to preempt that embarrassing outcome.
*Well, except maybe the insane ones toying with notions of “theater” nukes and “limited” nuclear warfare as thinkable options. Some of whom unfortunately currently occupy the very highest levels of our government.
This is what you do now?
Ask yourself, wouldn’t we know about these bots and trolls the same way that we know about Russia’s? After all, this was figured out by non-governmental entities, too. In many case, they figured it out before our intelligence community.
Or, wouldn’t we have learned about it when the Kremlin complained about it? Or when Snowden leaked about it?
It isn’t happening, and you try to hide behind a large budget to pretend that I don’t know that it isn’t happening.
You mean like JTRIG?
How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations
Can we all stop calling stuff the new birtherism?
None of this is like birtherism at all, there isn’t a comparison. WE don’t need some label for all of this to simplify it and calling stuff birtherism isn’t going to move any votes.
I’m not trying to move votes. I’m trying to get people on my own site to stop saying the stupidest imaginable things.
People that want to say stupid things wont be stopped by logic or reason. They have their ideas, and they will stick to it for whatever reason, ignoring whats right in front of them, repeating the faulty logic that makes them look stupid in the first place.
They have seperated into another reality, shouting from their bubble to the people outside they are the ones detached. Projecting their own attributes onto others that are “enemies”
And since this place allows for a wide variety of opinion, noone is kicked out for stupid opinions. Ofcourse, there are always sad people who feel persecuted when people downvote them and all. Just another indicator for their thinking.
you’re not the main culprit that I’m aggravated with currently đŸ™‚
Google “Sisyphus”.
Psst.
I’ve got a windmill over here for sale for you to tilt at.
I thought that I invented that term. What else is the new Birtherism? There is not an endless number of things which are the new Birtherism. I had no idea that there is a cottage industry of people calling stuff the “new Birtherism”.
just read the last 2 thread, I think I’ve seen 10 different things called that
I wish I didn’t agree with you, booman, but I do.
Sometimes in movies when the fighting begins, and crockery starts flying and furniture breaking, I find myself doing a rapid real time assessment: “That’s okay, they can lose that and still come back. That’s okay too, they can replace that,” etc. etc. — until finally the damage is too great and the RTA is: no coming back from this one. Which is fine if it’s a movie: I just give myself over to acceptance, distance myself, maybe even appreciate the destruction.
Hard to do that with your own country.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who ventures outside of the liberal bubble.
What THEY talk about is how we’re just as fucking crazy as they are (BothSidesDoItTM) because we believe that Russia and Trump colluded to give Trump OVER9000! votes on electronic voting machines to win the election, just like they believed the morons at FoxNews and Breitbart about PizzaGateTM
This is called…another distraction.
What you do with morons who are carefully constructing STRAWMEN out of wheat chaff and Elmers Glue is tell them that the 2016 election was INFLUENCED by Russian/Trump interests.
And you stop. Right there.
And let the PermaGovTM fill in the blanks for you…free of charge!
Come on y’all. Wake the fuck up, AG and all that.
All the left has to do is ask pointed questions, and let TPB do the rest. And no, I’m not even kidding.
Protip: Pence as President-After-Trump is probably worse than a neutered Trump.
So, be careful what you wish for and all that.
The strongest statements in this whole thread lie in Tarheel’s comment above:
and
I wrote a piece here recently that deals with this whole problem:
Life In PostFactual America
An excerpt:
Booman’s ongoing argument here is that Russia massively influenced this election with propaganda disseminated through the internet.
I agree. It did.
But the real problem…worse by far than the results of the election…the overarching problem is that our entire news system has been totally “nuked.” Not by Russians but by our own corporate system. People have become so immured to lying media that they can longer tell truth from fiction. Worse, they don’t even try to do so anymore. They just tune into whatever lying media they most enjoy, flop down on the couch and trance out.
And here we are now, finally reaping the whirlwind of lies that started when JFK was assassinated.
The Russians didn’t destroy the concept of truth in America, the CIA did way back in 1963.
Sure, we need to find out who did what in this election. But more importantly, we need to reinstate the concept of “truth” in this country. When an entity like James Clapper can:
1-Barefecedly and publicly lie to the U. S. Senate
2-Have his lies proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be lies
and
3-Remain on the national stage as some kind of authority on anything except brazen lying “in the national interest”
Then our goose is totally cooked.
We can trust no one.
We are living in a PostFactual world.
“Nothing is true; everything is permitted.”-Hassan-i-Sabbah, The Old Man of the Mountain, the person who founded the sect know as “The Assassins.”
We see madmen loose in the streets, guns in hand.
We see massive numbers of Americans, their lives lost to opioids.
We see millions of people being forced to choose between two serial liars in a presidential contest and millions more throwing up their hands in surrender, saying “Why vote? It’s all bullshit.”
We see all of this and so much more.
We see a “Peace President” waging drone wars on civilians.
A so-called “liberal” presidential candidate calling a large part of the population “deplorables” and asserting her right to lie to us by stating that politicians must have contradicting “public and private” positions.
We see urban areas in riot mode over police actions that are inexcusable and…simultaneously…hundreds of news stories excusing those police.
Truth has been thrown out the window.
Instead of gabbling on about whether “them Russkies” did us in or not, le’s get down to brass tacks.
We have done ourselves in by surrendering to a media system that is based on lies, a media system that was totally corrupted by the professional liars at the CIA 60+ years ago in Operation Mockingbird. Putin didn’t pull strings to make HRC say the things she said…it’s her job to prevaricate. He didn’t take over Obama’s mind and make him a baby killer, nor did he somehow infiltrate the DNC and cause it to hustle Bernie Sanders out of the picture. We surrendered our disbelief in the face of massive lying campaigns from the onset of the Dulles years right on through to today.
We “nuked” ourselves!!!
And now we are paying the piper.
Sure…establish who/what/where/when regarding this administration’s dealings with Russia, and punish the hustlers.
But if you want the real truth?
Look within.
Walt Kelly knew, 40+ years ago.
Bet on it.
Look within.
AG