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Russia Reportedly Used Pokemon Go In an Effort To Inflame Racial Tensions (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Russia's far-ranging campaign to promote dissension in the United States reportedly included an effort to weaponize Pokemon Go. CNN reported that in July 2016, a Tumblr page linked to Russia's now-notorious Internet Research Agency promoted a contest encouraging people sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement to play the game near famous sites of police brutality. Players were told to change their characters' names to the victims of those incidents -- an apparent effort to inflame racial tensions. The Tumblr page was linked to Do Not Shoot Us, a multi-platform campaign designed to mimic aspects of Black Lives Matter. (As CNN notes, the name plays on "hands up, don't shoot," one of the movement's slogans.) Do Not Shoot Us included a website, donotshoot.us, along with related pages on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. The Facebook page was one of 470 pages that were removed after the company determined that it was linked to Russian groups attempting to interfere in US politics.
Wasn't the slogan they used "Pokemon go to the polls!"?
It's less trying to promote one side or the other than a case of Let's You and Him Fight where they just try to get everyone so mad at each other than the US has trouble governing. Trolls are less about converting people (although it's great if they can) and more about making the other side think their views are so insane that they can't be reasoned with. It's all an attempt to get us into increasingly frustrated self selected bubbles and it does seem to be working. ...but maybe I'm just bitter because the Russians didn't offer me a Lapras for helping them. I mean if you're going to use Pokemon Go, use it!
The thing about Pokemon GO is that you have almost no interaction with other players. They didn't add raids until this year, meaning that at the time, literally the only interaction you had with other players was by attacking a gym held by an opposing team or adding a lure to a gym. Nothing else you did effected anything that anyone else was doing. There remains no way to talk to other players in-game. No way to see other players. No way to see if anyone is near you.
This story makes absolutely no sense. You can't interact with other players and other players names only show up in very limited circumstances and are otherwise meaningless. Besides, Russia doesn't need to do anything to make Black Lives Matter "inflame racial tensions," that's literally the purpose of the movement itself.
... Realize that the MSM(ratings), politicians(votes) and external forces(espionage) are at place to cause anger? The common American goes about their day, trying to earn enough to provide for their loved ones. But the left is eating up anything and everything divisive, projecting all kinds of ill will towards anyone who has a differing opinion - SO MUCH SO, that a person who should not be the president of the US, IS the president of the US, because there was no other choice.
And what has happened since the US election? The left has double downed on portraying any and all who don't think exactly as they do, as misogynists(oh the irony there) and racists(check out the founding and core of the Democratic party for the TRUE racists.
Pushing people so far will yield someone who is not afraid to push back, and that was who was elected - the only person is not afraid to push back against all the crap that is constantly slung against the right.
Keep on looking down your nose at fly over country, and this will NOT get any better. In fact, it will get MUCH worse.
*Please done take this as the right is perfect, because I am greatly saddened that Trump can't act like an adult. He had the perfect opportunity, and has done nothing but blow it.
... so must be trying to destroy the American way of Life clearly! /s
You all just loved Russia when they were flat out honest to goodness murderous communists.
If so you should send me your money before some Nigerian prince steals it from you. The story went from Russia hacking servers and emails, to Russia colluding with Trump, and now we're down to talking about Pokemon and Facebook ads. But Russiagaters have to keep talking about this - if they stop, they'd have to admit they were a million megatons of bullshit crammed into a five pound sack.
https://consortiumnews.com/201...
Pokemon Go plays YOU!
Russia hasn't done shit. Bush's mistake back in 2003 was in trying to provide evidence (all of which was fake) that Saddam planned 911 and was pursuing nuclear weapons. If he only knew he could have skipped that whole sending Powell to the UN and providing satellite photos, and just told a tall tale with no evidence whatsoever. Because people would eat it up with a spoon.
Yes Iâ(TM)d like to know if that happened. I would also like to know if Hillary Clinton is actually an alien from a far away galaxy. Wouldnâ(TM)t you like to know if that was the case? Or do you not care about your country or democracy? She was a sitting senator, after all, and ran for the highest seat in the land, with millions of people voting for her (many of them citizens!). If an alien from a far away galaxy were able to infiltrate our demoracy to that extent, I hope we would all want to know about it.
It's right wing Democrats who keep fucking the Russian chicken, though they've been reduced to talking about Pokemon and Russian internet ads (many of which came AFTER the election, and one of which was for a documentary attacking a Trump golf course). They clutch onto that raft so they don't have to admit they nominated an even worse candidate than Trump to run for the presidency.
And before the Russian chicken came a long, right-wing Democrats were fucking the "white male privilege" chicken with abandon, ever since Obama clinched the primary in 2008. Because right-wing Democrats are just as happy as right-wing Republicans to keep people divided on race when they should be uniting on class.
Which is just you resorting to lazy ad hominem and not addressing the substance of the matter. Lazy, intellectual cowardice.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Have gnu, will travel.
...to send me your life savings?
Fixed that for you.
The Russian's hacked power plants storyline was bullshit.
CrowdStrike is bullshit.
The "17 intelligence agencies" line was bullshit.
The Russia hacked election systems is bullshit.
Sure, lets look at this - while remembering the FBI wasn't allowed to examine the DNC servers so how exactly would they have "high confidence" in any thing - but this time noting the weasel words:
Zero evidence provided, only claims and accusations. Well guess what Chem Trailers, Sandy Hook Truthers and Birthers have? Claims and accusations.
Then there's the fact the entire "Russia wanted Trump to win so hacked the election" makes no sense whatsoever. The election was Hillary's to lose, right up until she picked Tim Kaine as her running mate and decided to skip campaigning in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan. So according to the storyline, Putin was crafty enough to dig up dirt on Hillary (which was all true) but dumb enough to collude with someone as dumb as Trump. Which means the CIA, NSA & FBI would know all about it. Which meant Hillary would too, who had already campaigned on shooting down Russian jets in Syria. So what's really going on?
The entire "Russian hacking" storyline is nothing but Swiftboating from Clinton supporters, as she was the candidate who engaged in corrupt collusion with Russian interests to sell a fifth of America's uranium.
And you can skip that Snopes link that handwaives away Hillary's culpability for a number of reasons:
1) Access is corruption
2) Avoiding the appearance of impropriety applies to politicians, not just judges
3) Her own campaign was warned internally that the deal was a political liability for her
4) Hillary flat-out broke her confirmation promises on keeping a wall between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation
At this point, Chem Trailing anti-vaxxer Birther Sandy Hook Truthers have more respectability than Russiagaters.
Hmmm, "is reaching". Passive verb phrase anchoring your lead sentence.
As Pinker points out in more than one book, the principle advantage of the passive voice is to avoid naming the subject conducting the action.
The subject of your sentence is "fake russia-gate narrative", which in this construction effectively behaves as topic, not subject. And it's already wrong, because "-gate" is a suffix that principally denotes criminal coverup (Nixon's more serious crime). Not a single item in your list concerns any kind of cover up (though a few that might warrant a cover up).
Does your adjective "fake" then apply to your misapplication of "-gate"? Well, it could, but it probably doesn't, as most readers would sort your intent here.
If there wasn't the possibility here of criminal collusion with the Russians on the part of several tight-lipped members of the Trump family (Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner) and prominent tight-lipped officials within the Trump administration (in the first row, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Michael T. Flynn; in the second row Roger Stone, Rick Dearborn, George Papadopoulos, and Wilbur Ross; in the third row, Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer via Cambridge Analytica) this would not be a "gate" narrative whatsoever.
I use the modifier "tight-lipped" because—despite norms and procedures designed to strongly encourage or legally require full disclosure concerning interactions with foreign nationals—we had to learn about these connections the hard way in almost every case.
Who, then, is the subject engaged in spinning this "fake russia-gate narrative" willfully elided from your opening sentence?
It is nearly a universal principle of tradecraft that no narrative about anything important is allowed to exist uncorrupted. If the opposing interests don't corrupt it automatically in the normal course of events, then interests benefitting from a general climate of less clarity are sure to step into the breach.
All joint narratives are fake narratives. To discriminate the true from the false, the valid from the invalid, one has to break some eggs.
Nameless eggs, in your case.
The vast majority of responsible news reporting has operated since the beginning on the heuristic of "where there's smoke, there's fire". Usually a hunch or vague suspicion precedes discovery of a smoking gun. Maddow bends over backwards to frame "smoke" stories in language such as "what this would seem to suggest". Like the Y Combinator, a fair number of these early smoke stories graduated to attain full unicorn status—and loving it.
The main exception to this rule are the more "salacious" aspects of the Steele dossier. Short of serving a subpoena to the Kremlin, these wilder allegations from the standard-issue shit stew of raw intelligence will probably remain unconfirmed. Colbert is by far the worst offender here, leaning on the pee tapes over and over again for cheap laughs, despite this having the least prospect of demonstrated credibility. Whenever the dossier comes up, Maddow keeps repeating "and other salacious allegations" and then refuses to go there.
Next, the whole point of the Mueller investigation is to assign responsibility where responsibility belongs, despite certain cretins fervently wishing otherwise.
Non-fake narrative (subtype "gate"): a worrisome number of people in the Trump administration had ties to Russia which they systematically concealed, criminally concealed, downplayed, covered up, neglected to recall, or lied about. Once discovered, most of these ties were directly confirmed by the person responsible. Snopes verdict: 100% confirmed.
Non-fake narrative (subtype "tradecraft"): the Russians are engaged in a global disinformation strategy to undermine democratic norms and thereby weaken their democratic adversaries. Snopes verdict: W
Wouldn't a more effective long-term method of undermining Russia's economy be to spread renewables? Yeah, we can temporarily undermine them with a glut, but we would be ultimately creating a disincentive to actual energy independence.
Yes, but that's the point. 20-30 years out Europe will still be heavily dependent on natural gas. It needs time to get their power grid ready for a more distributed method of power generation. People will also need to retrofit gas burning heaters and utilities with electric.
We can spin up natural gas production pretty quickly. The only major hurdle is building more LNG plants to ship the stuff.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
The parties traded places fifty years ago, dumbass. This is not news. And skip Robert Byrd as he spent the rest of his life apologizing for joining the Klan, as opposed to Republicans like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms who went to their graves as Dixiecrats.
You mean right-wing corporate democrats whoring themselves out for money?
Yeah, and in that century, we didn't have the infrastructure for global shipping and communication. We're talking about ramping up production of a natural resource, whose production and usage is quite bad for the environment, in order to undermine an economic foe. This is clearly not a good long term plan, when a concentrated effort to make that gas worthless forever is also going to be better ecologically.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Ruskies can learn a thing or two from US media on how best to "inflame racial tensions" for profit.
Next they're going to say Russia mind controlled Hillary and made her call half the country deplorable.
Actual quote: "...you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables."
(Source: Dylan Cutler's answer to What percentage of eligible voters voted for Trump?)
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Well, no, they can't. Russia is a shithole of epic proportions, and gave up competing a long time ago. Now they're just trying to drag other countries down to their level.
I have just 2 words in response to your TL;DR bullshit:
Fuck you.
Devops is for boring Luddites not fun people who play Pokemon Go.
It's like a Roth IRA, but...no wait, it still screws you in the end. Never mind.
"Squirrel!" works for dogs.
For Americans, it's: "Russians!".
Welcome back to the 1950s, folks.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.