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People Who Know How the News Is Made Resist Conspiratorial Thinking (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Conspiracy theories, like the world being flat or the Moon landings faked, have proven notoriously difficult to stomp out. Add a partisan twist to the issue, and the challenge becomes even harder. Even near the end of his second term, barely a quarter of Republicans were willing to state that President Obama was born in the U.S. If we're seeking to have an informed electorate, then this poses a bit of a problem. But a recent study suggests a very simple solution helps limit the appeal of conspiracy theories: news media literacy. This isn't knowledge of the news, per se, but knowledge of the companies and processes that help create the news. While the study doesn't identify how the two are connected, its authors suggest that an understanding of the media landscape helps foster a healthy skepticism.
[...] "Despite popular conceptions," the authors point out, "[conspiratorial thinking] is not the sole province of the proverbial nut-job." When mixed in with the sort of motivated reasoning that ideology can, well, motivate, crazed ideas can become relatively mainstream. Witness the number of polls that indicated the majority of Republicans thought Obama wasn't born in the U.S., even after he shared his birth certificate. While something that induces a healthy skepticism of information sources might be expected to help with this, it's certainly not guaranteed, as motivated reasoning has been shown to be capable of overriding education and knowledge on relevant topics.
[...] As a whole, the expected connection held up: "for both conservatives and liberals, more knowledge of the news media system related to decreased endorsement of liberal conspiracies." And, conversely, the people who did agree with conspiracy theories tended to know very little about how the news media operated.
[...] "Despite popular conceptions," the authors point out, "[conspiratorial thinking] is not the sole province of the proverbial nut-job." When mixed in with the sort of motivated reasoning that ideology can, well, motivate, crazed ideas can become relatively mainstream. Witness the number of polls that indicated the majority of Republicans thought Obama wasn't born in the U.S., even after he shared his birth certificate. While something that induces a healthy skepticism of information sources might be expected to help with this, it's certainly not guaranteed, as motivated reasoning has been shown to be capable of overriding education and knowledge on relevant topics.
[...] As a whole, the expected connection held up: "for both conservatives and liberals, more knowledge of the news media system related to decreased endorsement of liberal conspiracies." And, conversely, the people who did agree with conspiracy theories tended to know very little about how the news media operated.
Do they resist sucking a n1gger cock?
The Earth being flat is easy to disprove.
Obama being a US Citizen that can run for President is not. The weirdly published birth certificate from the Obama White House honestly made things worse to someone being honest with themselves. Parts of it were very clearly manipulated, which honestly made me wonder about it more than I had before it was released.
That's because the media is fully deserving of the #FakeNews joke that has been around. Regardless of what candidate you support: Hillary versus Trump, both sides of the media were racing to publish stories before actually determining if they were based on reality.
News people write news story saying news people are smart and not suckers
also they connect to DPRK WiFi without any worries and just shrug when they canâ(TM)t grt on instagram
People who understand that mass media is nothing more than a branch of some corporations PR department, tend to not believe the unverified B.S.spouted by mass media.
Film at 11.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
BOOK ONE: 1805
BK1|CH1
CHAPTER I
"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the
Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war,
if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by
that Antichrist- I really believe he is Antichrist- I will have
nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer
my 'faithful slave,' as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see
I have frightened you- sit down and tell me all the news."
It was in July, 1805, and the speaker was the well-known Anna
Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honor and favorite of the Empress Marya
Fedorovna. With these words she greeted Prince Vasili Kuragin, a man
of high rank and importance, who was the first to arrive at her
reception. Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as
she said, suffering from la grippe; grippe being then a new word in
St. Petersburg, used only by the elite.
All her invitations without exception, written in French, and
delivered by a scarlet-liveried footman that morning, ran as follows:
"If you have nothing better to do, Count [or Prince], and if the
prospect of spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too
terrible, I shall be very charmed to see you tonight between 7 and 10-
Annette Scherer."
"Heavens! what a virulent attack!" replied the prince, not in the
least disconcerted by this reception. He had just entered, wearing
an embroidered court uniform, knee breeches, and shoes, and had
stars on his breast and a serene expression on his flat face. He spoke
in that refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but
thought, and with the gentle, patronizing intonation natural to a
man of importance who had grown old in society and at court. He went
up to Anna Pavlovna, kissed her hand, presenting to her his bald,
scented, and shining head, and complacently seated himself on the
sofa.
"First of all, dear friend, tell me how you are. Set your friend's
mind at rest," said he without altering his tone, beneath the
politeness and affected sympathy of which indifference and even
irony could be discerned.
"Can one be well while suffering morally? Can one be calm in times
like these if one has any feeling?" said Anna Pavlovna. "You are
staying the whole evening, I hope?"
"And the fete at the English ambassador's? Today is Wednesday. I
must put in an appearance there," said the prince. "My daughter is
coming for me to take me there."
"I thought today's fete had been canceled. I confess all these
festivities and fireworks are becoming wearisome."
"If they had known that you wished it, the entertainment would
have been put off," said the prince, who, like a wound-up clock, by
force of habit said things he did not even wish to be believed.
"Don't tease! Well, and what has been decided about Novosiltsev's
dispatch? You know everything."
"What can one say about it?" replied the prince in a cold,
listless tone. "What has been decided? They have decided that
Buonaparte has burnt his boats, and I believe that we are ready to
burn ours."
Prince Vasili always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating a
stale part. Anna Pavlovna Scherer on the contrary, despite her forty
years, overflowed with animation and impulsiveness. To be an
enthusiast had become her social vocation and, sometimes even when she
did not feel like it, she became enthusiastic in order not to
disappoint the expectations of those who knew her. Th
In North Korea, China, Russia, Turkey, Syria, Sweden, Iran, Germany what could go wrong?!
Even more so with socialism, globalism, immigration you didn't wanted and very large private media companies.
Citizens are wrong. Media is correct. Believe it!
Get some FREE Dogecoins while you still can!
Sometimes the conspiracies are true and worse than we ever imagined.
Bill Hicks 1992 - https://youtu.be/5uyCJKEMOx8?t...
No. I'm being serious. Having a deep understanding of yourself, having an identity that goes beyond "I am for X" & "I am against Y" provides an bulwark against propaganda and conspiracies. Watch kids. They start out believing everything parents tell them. Once they take on traits that their parents don't have, you can see them begin the first phases of critical self-assessment.
All of this can be achieved in many ways. The best comes in the form of exposure. Exposure to philosophy. Exposure to culture. Exposure to other people and their lives.
You want to stop conspiracies and propaganda dead in its tracks? Get your kids out of your comfort zones and into the real world.
The biggest conspiracy on the left is the conspiracy of silence, like Ellen Degeneres saying "Obama gave us eight years of no scandals."
See kids, if you can truly convince yourself that everything your side is accused of either is purely partisan bickering or has a totally innocent explanation, you're fine.
"... barely a quarter of Republicans were willing to state that President Obama was born in the U.S."
Although I was at my birth, I'm not qualified to testify as to its location. I only know what I was told.
If I'm told to testify to a fact I cannot verify personally, that is suspect. Doesn't matter if it is somebody's birthplace, the holocast, 9-11, a closed source model of a dynamic system (or an open source model I have neither the time nor the expertise to understand) - all of these things. Seriously, don't ask.
I tend not to believe conspiracies and I tend not to believe what I'm told. 'None of what you're told, half of what you've seen' - taken from the "Heard it through the Grapevine" song.
When you look at the "conspiracy nuts" you will notice a pattern. It is usually people who feel that they are "left out", that they're not in an "in" circle in whatever way that may be defined. Usually, it means that they're left out of being one of the "knowing ones", the ones that share a secret or at least something that elevates them above the others, something that gives them an "edge", if only a perceived one.
And a conspiracy theory allows them to feel that they belong to the "knowing ones" for a change. Because they now know something, something "secret", that everyone else doesn't know. And they knew it first!
Funny enough, whether that's true or even possible doesn't really matter. What matters is that they know it, and they knew it before the "smart" people did.
This is a powerful motivator. Because it lets you feel superior. You "get" it, you understand, you are one of the knowing ones, and the others, those sheeple, they don't. They are clueless, they don't understand, they don't know.
If you're usually the clueless one who neither knows nor understands, this can motivate quite a bit. And it can motivate you to cling to it, no matter what. Because letting go would require you to admit that you've, as usual, been the clueless idiot.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Although I'm a political moderate, and even perhaps a socialist on some issues, I find it disturbing how much we're seeing Slashdot slide to the political left.
It has been particularly bad today. There were a couple of submissions earlier going on and on about "Nazis". There was another submission with some other nonsense about "Russia". There was an "environmentalism" submission. Now there's this submission, which I think has a clear pro-leftist bias.
All that I want is a Slashdot that's editorially neutral and objective, and that isn't just here to push an agenda on us.
That's what Slashdot was like during its better days. During the Malda era and even into the Dice era, we could come here and find a large range of stories that were not riddled with political bias in any specific direction.
It probably helped that the editors in those days generally kept the partisan politics to a minimum, and focused on submissions about technology, computing, science, mathematics, and relevant topics like those. While politics can't be completely avoided, at least it wasn't the sole focus like it so often is here today.
There's no reason for Slashdot to focus so much on politics. We can get that at numerous other sites.
Biased submissions, like the ones we're getting subjected to here more and more often, don't help anybody anywhere along the political spectrum. All that biased submissions due is ruin the quality of the discussion here, and they ruin the integrity (what little is left these days) of this web site.
The editors here should make a concerted effort to avoid biased submissions like we've been seeing end up on the front page so often. It would be simple to do: if politics is the main focus of a submission, or if it uses buzzwords like "Nazi" and "Russia", then leave it in the queue! Don't put those submissions on the front page. Select one of the many other relevant ones instead. Perhaps one dealing with something like math, or science, or technology, or programming, or Linux, or computing.
Some news agencies reported on that whole Obama birth certificate fiasco. Sorry, too many lies in MSM for me to believe a single thing they say. Also I don't believe the earth is flat not because news tells me (they actually never report on it) but because so much evidence points to it being a globe. This story attempts to group people who believe news is propaganda with flat earthers. Nice try.
If we're seeking to have an informed electorate, then this poses a bit of a problem.
Some people may want an informed electorate, but it's definitely not politicians, the political parties or their high-dollar supporters. They have a vested interested in keeping the masses ignorant, partisan, riled up and easily swayed by slogans and rhetoric.
Examples: Look at the masses of people at Trump rallies chanting "Lock her up!" about someone who has not been convicted of any crimes*. Or that, even as of December 2017, people still believe Obama was born in Kenya
Survey results released by YouGov Friday show that 51 percent of Republicans said they think former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, compared to just 14 percent of Democrats. Perhaps unsurprisingly, respondents who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election were especially convinced of Obama's African origins: Fully 57 percent said it was "definitely true" or "probably true" that the 44th president came from Kenya.
[ * deferring any debate about whether she should be convicted ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This post will never get "Score: 5; Insightful", even though it should.
Did you know that the rates of ice cream consumption and murder both rise at almost the same rate? That's because people get irritable when it is too hot for their comfort.
The entire basis for this article is meaningless, "While the study doesn't identify how the two are connected, its authors suggest that an understanding of the media landscape helps foster a healthy skepticism." Correlation DOES NOT EQUAL causation. The study basically discovered nothing at all.
This "journal" is a McCune operation; the ultra wealthy widow of a banker that funds all manner of establishment approved non-profits and academics. In addition to being the ultimate paymaster of no end of well connected non-profits they fund lots of (D) campaigns in the North East [1,2].
1. https://www.followthemoney.org...
2. https://www.followthemoney.org...
Enjoy your establishment kool-aid. It's telling you want you want to hear so I'm sure the fact that it's 1% "bankster " funded "research" won't be an issue as it ricochets around the liberal echo chamber.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I find it very amusing that the example they use for a conspiracy is Obama's Birth Certificate while at the same time buying into the whole Trump/Russian collusion conspiracy.
Lefts are fucking morons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList
They make much of (supposedly) a quarter of Republicans "willing to state" that Obama was born in the U.S. (citation needed).
However in the meantime 100% of Democrats seem to STILL think Trump has some kind of magical tie to Russia, even though it turns out Hillary paid for the report the FBI used to make that claim. Even though Trump keeps doing things Russia does not like at all.
Someone still has a long ways to go before they shed "conspiratorial thinking", but it's apparently not the people who "know how the news is MADE" (Freudian slip emphasized).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A phenomena emerging from something being mutually beneficial to certain groups of people and followed as an unwritten rule may look like and for all intents and purposes be referred to as a "conspiracy". But there always is that someone... taking it literally... revealing the "truth" to the world... And a good metaphor becomes a vulgarity.
Sounds like in a roundabout way they're describing metacognition, or critical thinking. The latter can find the flaws in a conspiracy theory.
I think what happens is that the more you understand how the news media is made of flawed individuals who get it wrong sometimes, the less you take 'the news' as gospel handed down from upon high by the omniscient.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
It must be true, just ask any Democrat.
We all know that news are subjective, usually reporters try to give you their point of views by emphasizing on part of the news while neglecting other parts. The best way of getting the truth is by reading the same news from different resources. One of the good sites that lists good news from different resources is
Ottawa Korner http://www.ottawakorner.com
people who are in denial also resist conspiratorial thinking.
This story is crazy talk. Everybody knows it's the Russians who are spreading conspiratorial thinking.
Once you realise that everything makes sense.
But a recent study suggests a very simple solution helps limit the appeal of conspiracy theories: news media literacy.
=
But a recent study suggests a very simple solution helps limit the appeal of free thinking: more brainwashing.
This story is the kind of brainless authoritarian feel-good piece that the chosen people of Slashdot lap up
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
Journalist.
Passionately Indifferent
Teaching people about media companies will fix our problems? You can lead a horse to water...
I honestly think most of the Obama haters do not want facts to interfere with their beliefs. It is much more satisfying to continue thinking he is a foreign born Muslim.
People who have actually run a business (or at least been involved in the higher-level management of one) are a lot less likely to believe that typical corporations make money hand over fist for doing next to nothing, are deliberately looking for ways to screw over their customers, and so on.
People who know how sausage is made - don't eat sausage.
Just on time to logically and scientifically refute the people noticing the "Bitcoin is for nazis" that is being pushed in every mainstream outlet.
What a coincidence. I guess they all detected at the same exact time that this is what all their readers really want to read and that they have to run this story to make money.
"Conspiracy theories" are clearly of no use here. There is clearly no coordination between power entities and if there is it's for the sole purpose to help YOU. Now let's all laugh at the "conspiracy theory" mentally ill social rejects, and reward ourselves for all thinking the same thing for absolutely no reason.
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIzO-Hk2i3I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5ABqRT-QKc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTWY14eyMFg
...the famed "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" in 1998?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
-Styopa
JournoList. Now without the autocorrect for journalist.
Passionately Indifferent
I find it very amusing that the example they use for a conspiracy is Obama's Birth Certificate while at the same time buying into the whole Trump/Russian collusion conspiracy..
Whereas Republicans buy into the Obama's Birth Certificate thing and say that the whole Trump/Russian collusion is a wackjob conspiracy theory.
Lefts are fucking morons.
Americans are fucking morons.
We all know it was faked by Donald Trump, when he arrived here on a spaceship from Uranus.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!!! ;-)
Yet those same self-aggrandizing "experts" swallow the ridiculous an ever-changing Russia conspiracy crap hook, line, and sinker. Every week a new conspiracy theory.
Even top brass at the Intelligence Agencies swallowed it whole after Clinton through the Democratic Party paid a firm millions to create a fake dossier that included a 4Chan porn story about Trump pissing on prostitutes.
Funny thing is these fake laughable stories came from Russians paid to lie so in essence Hillary colluded with Russians to create a fake dossier to doom Trump's chances. Hell, based on this fake crap the Intelligence Agencies put phone taps on Trumps team and tried to get taps on Trump himself while he was running for President. Talk about a threat to Democracy!
Everyone who wants something to be true bad enough will fall for a conspiracy theory. Except for me, of course. I'm way too experienced in life to do so (again).
Is this
" My [disgust] for modern journalism is huge. [Almost] everything they do are hit pieces or playing defense for the side with money.ï "
Another one I liked was a Cold War era Russian remarking cynically "We know how to read Pravda. Do you know how to read the New York Times?". I.e. Pravda was a pack of lies but once you knew how to dissect it you could get some useful information. The US is effectively two one party states superimposed on each other. The Democrat media says only positive things about Democrats and only negative things about Republicans. And the Republican media does the opposite. The problem is people assume that what they read in the media has something to do with truth rather than, like Pravda, being designed to push a narrative helpful to the party which owns the paper. Or the tech company which gives the paper free shit.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
This is exactly what they WANT you to think!
I find it very amusing that the example they use for a conspiracy is Obama's Birth Certificate while at the same time buying into the whole Trump/Russian collusion conspiracy.
Lefts are fucking morons.
Feeling triggered? The Trump campaign's collusion with Russia is being investigated by the FBI. Obama not being an American citizens was made up by Donald Trump. But please, do go on about "lefts" being "fucking morons" when rightists voted for Donald Trump of their own free will, as if that could possibly have gone any way but terribly.
It's not magical, they just own millions of dollars of his debt.
And not just friends who think like you do. Get out of your comfort zone, away from your echo chamber. Find something in common with people who are different from you. Play racquetball at the gym with that liberal hippie neighbor. Go on camping trips with the conservative guy from work. Go rock climbing with your old roommate's gay cousin. Talk with them, get to know them, become friends with them.
Once you do that, you start to learn that we all have more in common with each other than differences. A lot of the propaganda will then become transparent - the usual MO is to dehumanize the "enemy" prior to tearing them down. But if you see, no, if you know those people are human, it's impossible to dehumanize them.
But get told by their parents, extended family, teachers, etc that they are WRONG and they will understand why when they grow up. Eventually they begin to grow up and realize those ideals they had when they were little were not so farfetched and that adults had been lying to them 'because that is how it has always been' and like other potential stockholm syndrome victims they have to choose between keeping their rational psyche intact and turning on their captors, or drinking the koolaid and becoming one of their captors.
They make much of (supposedly) a quarter of Republicans "willing to state" that Obama was born in the U.S. (citation needed).
However in the meantime 100% of Democrats seem to STILL think Trump has some kind of magical tie to Russia
No citation needed for that one though?
You mean the report that Trump paid hookers to pee on him? That one?
PS - That's not the report that people care about when it comes to Trump's ties with Russia. Republicans apparently just like to bring up the "false" pee story because...they're sick?
1. Rich powerful person/group decides to create some propaganda
2. Get a bunch of interns researching across the world looking for facts to back up your story, only facts that back up the propaganda, ignore opposing facts and/or create an answer to each "wrong fact" for quick rebuttal
3. Get the stories pushed out by the AP/NYT using your rich and powerful connections
4, Stories end up in every local newspaper, every local radio news, every local TV station and MSM networks all at the same time
This has worked for decades to totally control "facts" and public opinion. Who is loved and who is hated. The rich and powerful that have controlled this process are currently having a meltdown because peer to peer media, twitter, etc, has proven to be more powerful. They have lost control of the herd and can no longer control public opinion. They don't give a shit that Trump is president they are just freaking out that they were not able to destroy him.
People who have actually run a business and got screwed over by a typical corporation, don't need to "believe" the things they know firsthand.
"a very simple solution helps limit the appeal of conspiracy theories: news media literacy. "
Literacy.Period! would already help.
"Conspiracy theories, like the world being flat or the Moon landings faked, have proven notoriously difficult to stomp out."
>> No they have not! Seriously you want to do a poll on the earth being flat?
Add a partisan twist to the issue, and the challenge becomes even harder.
>>This is code, it means he is a political hack.
Even near the end of his second term, barely a quarter of Republicans were willing to state that President Obama was born in the U.S. If we're seeking to have an informed electorate, then this poses a bit of a problem.
>>Republicans eh?
But a recent study suggests a very simple solution helps limit the appeal of conspiracy theories: news media literacy.
>> Ok thats funny but it goes on...
This isn't knowledge of the news, per se, but knowledge of the companies and processes that help create the news. While the study doesn't identify how the two are connected, its authors suggest that an understanding of the media landscape helps foster a healthy skepticism.
>>Skeptism of the highly integrated media? One that has been found in bed with politicians. One that has been infiltrated by secret services.
[...] "Despite popular conceptions," the authors point out, "[conspiratorial thinking] is not the sole province of the proverbial nut-job."
>>Most important line - "You are crazy if you don't believe me."
When mixed in with the sort of motivated reasoning that ideology can, well, motivate, crazed ideas can become relatively mainstream. Witness the number of polls that indicated the majority of Republicans thought Obama wasn't born in the U.S., even after he shared his birth certificate.
>> This guy goes to church for sure. I mean i don't really care if Obama was born on Mars but it could be a forgery! I mean its not beyond the realms of possibility by a long way.
While something that induces a healthy skepticism of information sources might be expected to help with this, it's certainly not guaranteed, as motivated reasoning has been shown to be capable of overriding education and knowledge on relevant topics.
>>Yes this is why i can tell you are full of shit.
Journalist admits his anonymous source in the FBI was Soviet agent.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/fake-news-russian-mole-robert-hanssen/
The birther arguement was started by aides within the Hillary campaign in 2008.
No, not that. You're the one focused on that detail, because you're fascinated by it. You might want to talk that out with a grown up.
The rational people, though, ARE focused on the web of connections between Fusion GPS, Clinton-machine money, employees at DoJ/FBI (and their spouses), and messages involving some of those folks who are on the record as partisan Clinton supporters and who are plainly talking about what they can do to prevent Trump from becoming president. Your own obsession with fabricated hooker stories is your own thing.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
If we're seeking to have an informed electorate, then this poses a bit of a problem
Most adults are not ignorant due to a lack of ability - the amount of intelligence needed to read a birth certificate is minimal - even less than the amount needed to send a tweet.
The reason most adults are ignorant is because they want to be. They prefer it. Being uninformed makes life a lot easier. There are no weighty considerations to make - just vote for the candidate with the nicest hair, or the tallest, or the best ..... body.
And the same applies to most other choices. Grab the pizza with the brightest coloured package. Buy the shampoo with the most attractive model on the bottle. Choose the clothes that some celebrity wears, or the beer they drink, or the cigarettes they smoke. And while you're at it - why not vote for the candidate they suggest, too?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
https://mobile.twitter.com/MoElleithee/status/776808154621444096
And it was disowned by Hillary and a number of Republican politicians. But the far far right of the Republican party kept it going.
And let's be clear, ultimately Trump disowned it too. Because it was always dumb. The odds of Obama not being an American citizen were always laughably low. And I say that as a Republican who never particularly liked Obama.
There are people on both sides who look for ANY excuse to hate on someone. ALL of these people need to be shut down. Because they keep the stupidity rolling.
Made:Plane crashes at 12:40 in Nebraska
Reported: investigators are looking into the possibility that terrorism brought down a plane today
Reported: a plane once used by a former US president crashed today. Is there a connection? News at 11
No citation needed for that one though?
No because everyone has the countless cycle of Democrats claiming there is a Russia collusion on the news.
I have helpfully provided many links for you as you appear too be too stupid to have ever followed the news, or to use Google. You poor bastard. Can't keep helping you though so you are on your own from here.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you're trying to take a swing at partisan bias, using the Daily Mail as a citation is pretty self-defeating. Also, there isn't just a single report used to make a claim that Trump has ties to Russia. The significant financial links between the Russian government and not just Trump himself but also much of his cabinet are well-documented by a large number of sources. You're either shoveling nothing but partisan bias yourself or you're too ignorant of this subject to discuss it.
I guess most Republicans aren't grown-ups then. The article the GGP linked to specifically mentions the detail about "golden showers". It's clear the whole point is to note one thing, the claim about a pee tape, being ludicrous in the minds of most people and then by extension trying to conflate that with any or all other evidence that implicates Trump or his campaign team. The icing on the cake, of course, is if such a tape actually exists and were released to the public, it'd be like Trump admitting to some sort of crime.
Knowing Trump, though, I'd imagine he'd blow it off and complain about "Crooked Hillary".
So, what you're saying is that Clinton did precisely the same thing Trump did? So, she should share a cell with Trump? Because nothing I'm hearing discredits the actual evidence against at least some of "Trump-machine money" and their plainly talking about what they can do to prevent Clinton from becoming President or their actual words confirming those actions in emails.
PS - I very much doubt that a golden shower tape exists. I won't claim one way or another if Trump (or Clinton, for that matter) ever engaged in kinky sex games with hookers. I will note that every time the dossier gets brought up in an attempt to discredit it, all people hear is "Trump paid hookers to pee on him". That's precisely the same tactic that Trump (and most other good politicians) used to trash his opponent. It was the same with Obama and his birth certificate. It's just amusing to me that right-wing media keeps bringing it up (because it's click bait and all the media really cares about is ad revenue).
Most conspiracies turn on to be true wether they where true conspiracies or just truth being hidden. The false ones are there to discredit the truth. Take flat earth; it's such an outragages claim that it can discredit any conspiracy or coverup... like 9/11. To believe that in 9/11; two plans demolished three building in which all three building fell in a free fall fashion like in a controlled demolished seem foolish. To deny the truth of 9/11 isn't being covered; well.... However, if you can connect flat earth with 9/11 then both seem foolish. Lets not forget who created the term "Conspiracy Theorist" -- it was the CIA and it was designed to discredit people.
And in peace and war -- false flags are the norm and are well documented in history.
The birther arguement was started by aides within the Hillary campaign in 2008.
(a) Not relevant, the FBI never investigated obama's birth certificate because only idiots cared
(b) false
You mean other than the 2 sources he already cited, one of which being CNN.com?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
"Hey, this horrible thing happened!"
"You mean, this other horrible thing?"
"No, I mean this horrible thing. Why are you derailing the conversation with nonsense?"
"Because I'm a fucking douchebag."
Wow, its like you two were made for each other. Literally. Everyone knows that ken dolls have no "cones" so together you two make a full person. Wonder twin powers activate - invincible motivated reasoning!
Fusion GPS, and what they provided was the basis by which the FBI went after Trump.
Er, no. In fact, exactly the reverse, Steele believed a cabal within the FBI sat on the file preventing it from reaching the top.
There were two FISA warrants on Manafort (2014 and 2015) that predated the dossier.
Getting a FISA warrant requires a woods procedura which essentially means that every claim used to justify the warrant must be independently verified so if the dossier were used to justify a FISA warrant that means the relevant facts were verified by at least one other source.
Furthermore, renewing a FISA warrant on a US person after 90 days requires proof that the warrant is actively yielding relevant intelligence.
So even if the Steele Dossier had been used to justify the investigation, the fact that FISA warrants were issued and then renewed shows that there was independent confirmation of the claims therein. That's not a a good road to go down for someone who wants to say the dossier is fake.
Every partisan individual in the US is a conspiracy nutter. They have been hoodwinked into thinking that every person of the "other party" is out to get them.
In reality, the only people out to get them are the ones running the parties.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
"Stuff I the customer don't like and I think looks bad" need not remotely be driven by a company deliberately trying to do bad by its customers,
You are right though. Its more about not giving a damn. For example, bugs in an billing system that produce errors in favor of customers will get fixed ASAP. Bugs that produce errors in favor of the company aren't nearly so urgent.
Whether it is malignant neglect or just malevolence, the end result is the same though. Customers getting the short end of the stick. And that is the only point that really matters to a customer. Dismissing their complaints as just not knowing how hard it is to run a company is like telling them to eat cake.
Wow, are you always so rude, or just to strangers on the internet?
I don't know where Obama was born but why make a fake birth certificate? You open it up in the pdf and things are in separate layers. How does that happen?
Indeed. Or rather the ones running the parties already have them and have managed to compromise any rationality they may have had completely. So these people are right about being victims, they are just completely delusional of who they are victims of.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Hey you know what's funny? That dossier was funded by Republicans first! Ha ha!
So those 4 grand jury indictments so far are just what? Imaginary? The emails? The meetings with known Russian operatives? I guess all that is just imaginary as well?
And let's not forget that Trump refuses to divest himself from his business and won't divulge his tax returns. I wonder what one would find. Maybe Mueller will shed some light after taking most of the Trump cabinet to the cleaners after digging through Deutsche Bank.
But sure, it's all just a big conspiracy.
Obama not being American was a conspiracy. Clinton running a child sex ring under a DC area pizzeria (and then, on Mars) was a conspiracy. People don't get indicted by a grand jury based on conspiracy.
~X~
Hate to shatter your nice projection, but one can learn to do business with liars and thieves without getting robbed blind. What one can not, is retain any nice illusions about the character of the esteemed business partners.
It is not that some do not believe that Obama was born in the USA. Rather, for purely existential reasons, they decided that a man like Obama couldn't possibly be the president of the USA. Not without forcing them to change their perception of life on this planet in ways that they could not countenance. Therefore, Obama had to be a foreigner. Had to. No amount of evidence, argumentation or proof will convince them otherwise. Ever.
Create situations where people float conspiracies because what is seen doesn't add up.
If we didn't have a media oligopoly of 4 corps in the US, then conspiracies would be ridiculous things indeed because they'd be floated all the time, and you'd need to find trustworthy news sources. News literacy and a sense of healthy skepticism would be something you'd pick up over time, rather than the affinity teachers misguidedly hand kids in school by forcing them to file their reports from "real news" (e.g. the people they like the most, academics and college graduates). Today tabloids like the inquirer are more reliable than the mainstream news.
Instead, what we have is mis-information as the standard, and nobody has a clue as to what is going on. Which is utterly terrifying.
But only one of those wacko conspiracy theories produced indictments.
Maybe you deserve it. No, actually, you absolutely deserve it.
"His name was James Damore."
-Squawk- Its Hillary's Fault! -Squawk-
That gave me a chuckle, thanks.
I work with a founder of a marketing conpany. With the funding cuts in the press, "reporters" expect whole articles to be submitted, including info graphics, etc. This is the sad truth about "reporting" today. Sadly, Trump the buffoon is correct: it is fake news, a lot of the time.
The reason, from what I can tell, why the press missed Trump winning the primary and general, is they didn't have the funds, or willingness to get out and talk to people. They replayed Trump tweets, and people responding to Trump tweets. the irony is, that had they gotten out there, they'd have raised a louder alarm. Go look at Shattered (great reporting btw) , Hillary spent all her time on her victory speech, and zero on her concession. She didn't get out, and her peeps were too busy infighting to do so. The press was busy talking to Hillary and team, replaying what they said. Not doing investigation.
Hmmm. You also seem strangely obsessed with male genitalia. Does that actually impact how you think about politics? Strange.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Yup the left has gone to the cultural Marxists - completely devoid of sanity or logic. They believe the mass media is like gospel, and considering that 90% of journalism graduates are women, it is increasingly moved towards the left. In fact the only actual evidence of collusion that's verified is by Hillary and Russia, and those legal issues are never talked about. Therefore trust in mass media is at an all time low, and rightly so.
What is scary? The Russian thing AND the birth certificate thing? Both lies made up by the same people, the Clintons. We have the confirmation from their own emails and speeches. Note they do not talk about how the emails are fake anymore? They only attack who may have 'stolen them'. Not the wonky ass shit they were doing in there.
I am sure I could tie to one of the rules for radicals but I am being lazy today.
As for the news they seemed to think FoxNews was amazingly run and what a nifty way to do things. They dialed it up to 11 and said lets do that too. If you had told me 10 years ago that CNN would be this bad I would have laughed so hard I probably would have shit myself. Yet here we are.
Also watch. In about 3 hours everything in this board that is against the clintons orn the DNC will be marked -1. I watched it in realtime yesterday with a different story.
Clinton running a child sex ring under a DC area pizzeria (and then, on Mars) was a conspiracy.
No, the one on Mars is absolutey true.
You know what fails to get mentioned when this Fusion Research topic comes up? That a Republican initially financed it. Also, investigating any ties between Trump and Russia do not HINGE on that stupid document. Flynn and Manafort are enough to warrant an investigation. Pushing to give Flynn a pass cements the need to look into it.
Did you miss the 2016 election? Oh sorry that wasn't across the board coordinated lying, that was the public secretly hiding who they were going to vote for for the first time in history and/or some honest polling mistakes.
Anyone who doesn't realize the "liberal" conspiracy at this point has passed the critical point for evolutionary divergence - they've decided to become something less than human. They've trashed their instincts and have submitted to pluto/technocrat authority. They've decided to become less than alive. They want to be cogs in a machine. They are like a fire - they are not alive but they consume and produce, and when their fuel is taken away they blow away in the wind.
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
People uninformed about basic civics, and drilling down things to a simplistic left-right single axis are morons.
I point my finger at the other guy and swear, It wasn't me!
Whether you're talking about swinging left or swinging right it's very difficult for people to believe their news sources when they have proven over and over again to be partisan hacks. As an example, while there was looting and rioting in St Louis earlier this year to the point that the national guard was deployed for several days to keep the peace it never made the front page of cnn.com because they were too laser focused on destroying Trump by making front page news out of every single tweet that he wrote. If we want to get to a place where the news organizations are trusted by people gain, whether left or right, we have to get to a point where they objectively report facts rather than where our news organizations are subscribed to one set of political ideologies and use that to influence what comes out of their news broadcasts.
Because it's irrelevant. It does nothing to change the fact that the Clinton campaign did themsleves of what they accused Trump of doing - conspiring with foreign intelligence agents to swing an election. And the paid for it.
The positively Biblical levels of hypocrisy on the part of Democrats certainly hinges on it. The hacking narrative is dependent on the idea that Russia hacked the DNC servers - which the FBI has never been allowed to examine. And yet people continue to eat up Russiagate sundays with a spoon.
Vanilla, everyday corruption. Not "election meddling". And John Podesta, Hillary's campaign manager, was up to his eyeballs with the same deals as Manafort.
Yeah, that is what I said, Americans are fucking morons.
That report was the BASIS for the investigation.
But of course, now that it's been proven to be fabricated bullshit, time to shift the goal-posts. That's what you subversive clowns tend to do.
Yet, when there's a REAL smoking gun, like the Uranium one scandal, you pathetic shills will attempt to claim it's a "nothingburger" and that it doesn't mean anything, and shouldn't be investigated.
I've seen better lies come from 4 year olds.
> ... Sweden and Germany rank substantially better at press freedoms than the US ...
Who can forget the FAKE NEWS aired by German media?
http://www.ce.cn/xwzx/gnsz/gdxw/200803/31/t20080331_15014013.shtml
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-04/02/content_6587120.htm
My reaction to the whole Trump/Russia stuff is. So you're telling me that Russia decided to play the game the way it's played in the US and people on the losing side of that are upset?
Okay. Whatever.
They could have just asked anyone who's ever actually worked in the news media, as this has been patently obvious to those of us who have.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I don't know any conservatives (and I know quite a few) who think that the liberal media is engaging in a conspiracy, but this is a conflation of terms on the part of the liberal media. They know damn well what they are doing, and now thanks to talk radio and the internet, so does anyone else who is not slurping up their liberal pap. The MSM do not engage in cloak and dagger meetings or phone calls, AKA conspiracy. Anyone who says they do is a kook.
What they do is carry to varying degrees liberal bias in their soft and hard news. They also often take talking points verbatim from democratic strategists, democrat politicians etc. and report it as gospel with no investigation or factual context either about the topic or the source. OTOH, anything conservative is suspect, and even when all the facts support a conservative position, it is reported with something between vague skepticism and open hostility, often citing unnamed sources (which is often the reporter or producer and no one with any actual knowledge or expertise in the topic) to counter or cast doubt on the issue. This has been going on for decades, and we are sick of it.
I am not a big Trump fan, the guy is Joe six pack with a billion dollar check book who got elected president, but that said, he is not Hitler or the Antichrist (if you think he is, just stop reading, you are too far gone to even grasp the basics of this post). Just look at the coverage of Trump's presidency:
- Almost 2 years of investigation and zero evidence of any wrong doing or collusion by the president with Russia, but 98% of reporting on Trump is still negative.
- Never mind that ISIS in Syria is nearly wiped out,
- The economy is going gangbusters,
- Employment is up,
- Abuse of H1B visas is being cracked down on,
- illegal aliens who were stealing American jobs, benefits and driving down US wages are being deported and driven off in hoards, etc.
All great news for the average American, but if you listen to the MSM you would think that the third Reich has been reincarnated, meanwhile Trump is busy re-instating and protecting the 2nd amendment gun ownership, freedom of religion that was trampled by Barak Hussein Obama and as far as I know has yet to be bitch slapped by the supreme court for violating the constitution (BHO was bitch slapped a record number of times for exactly that, never mind he supposedly taught constitutional law).
The bottom line: is Trump perfect? not by a long shot. Has he done some good things for average Americans? Yes. Have those been fairly and consistently reported on? Absolutely not.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
I must have missed that proverb. Could you tell me which one it is?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
With 4 of his staff charged or pleading guilty to lying about acting as foreign agents, I'd say the democrats are right.
There WAS no Republican governor of Hawaii to verify the certificate.
Democrat Hawaiian Health Director Loretta Fuddy who approved the questionable certificate was the only person to die in a plane crash after she supposedly verified the birth certificate. Interesting, and fuel for conspiracies, but no actual proof of anything.
Democrat congressman Neil Abercrombie was outraged by the birtherism and while campaigning for Governor of Hawaii made it an issue in the campaign - He promised to, if elected, get the original Obama birth certificate out of Hawaii's records and display it to the public to end the birther stuff. After he was elected and became governor, Abercrombie was questioned about the matter and he had a series of excuses for why he could not produce the document, and he never did.
Incidentally, I am no "birther" and I despise most conspiratorial nonesense, but it's junk like this that gives the suspicious and conspiratorially-inclined the ammunition they need to go over the edge. My attitudes towards this sort of nonsense does not, however, override my inclination to oppose the posting of dishonest and/or ill-informed fake "facts" like what you posted.
According to both US law and international law, certain government facilities of one nation are considered part of that nation's terriroty even if on the other side of the world and even if in a hostile country. The land upon which the German embassy in the US is located, for example, is considered a tiny bit of Germany for as long as that embassy is active.
John McCain was born at the Coco Solo US Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal zone (a US Military facility) which means that under both US and International law he was born on US soil. His father was a US Navy officer who was outside the physical country on official business, and his mother was also a US citizen married to that US Navy officer, thus he would also be a US citizen by virtue of having not just one, but BOTH of his parents as a American citizens.
It's sadly NOT entertaining that people who think themselves smart and well-informed are so easily shown to be ill-informed idiots on such a basic thing as this. Simply put: nobody with a brain complains about it because it is such an obvious and extremely well documented nothingburger.
The poster of that link was probably just using a convenient link.
There were other sources for the same info, so it was NOT just some "made-up" thing at a British tabloid.
The bigger problem you dodge by blowing-off the source without debunking the content is this:
Obama MADE MONEY for YEARS off of book sales that were being promoted BY HIS OWN LITERARY AGENT based, in part, on the claim Obama was born in Kenya. Obama, himself, was the primary driver of the "birtherism" and he used it for as long as he could for financial and political gain. First, he gained benefits as a college student by claiming Kenyan birth, then he benefitted from book sales hanging on the claim of Kenyan birth, and then he gained politically by claiming to be a victim of all those obviously RACIST "birther" opponents while he stoked the consiracy theory by being the first President in US history to refuse to prove he was eligible to run for president when challenged on the matter. Years into his presidency, when he seemed unable to gain more politically by claiming victim status than he lost to the doubts, he trotted-out a low-resolution, obviously fake, PDF file image of a birth certificate rather than providing the real thing, which in all liklihood exists. This clever act simultaneously made his supporters happier AND re-energized the conspiracy nuts who instantly noticed that the watermarks on the image of the page are curved (as though the document was curled while scanned) but the text is not curved at all, thereby indicating the text in the image and the watermarking in the image are not from the same piece of paper.
Obama could make a mountain of money from a book on how to create a fiery conspiracy theory, stoke that fire into an inferno, and benefit from it.
Obama MIGHT be one of the cleverest con artists and political hucksters in history, but I personally suspect he accidentally stumbled onto this tactic while trying to hide something tawdry and incvenient: I suspect he was indeed born in Hawaii but he may have lied about his birthplace over the years for college admission and financial aid reasons (claiming to be a poor foreign student). Later, when running for office and realizing he had a problem, I suspect he distracted people from THIS issue (ripping off the college admissions and financial aid system with a false foreign student claim) by stoking the birther idiots and claiming to be a victim of racism knowing full-well that the birther idiots would stupidly play along. There is SOME reason why Obama is the only President of my lifetime who made sure his academic repcords were sealed and inaccessible to the public, and why I have never heard ANY of his fellow college students come forward to talk about being in class with him, never heard a single professor come forward to talk about Obama's time as a student, and never heard a single former student come forward to talk about his time as a Constitutional Law teacher. Consider Ted Cruz for example: Prof Alan Dershowitz was talked about having him as a student, and former classmates have come forward to speak about him. Several men have come forward to talk about their time together in school with Trump, including a student who has recounted Trump defending him from other students who were harassing him. Such stories from others who "knew him when..." are common among Presidents and Presidential candidates - but oddly not for Obama.
you're telling me that obviously biased media outlets like MSNBC (which ABC ranks as less honest than even Fox News!!!!!) are trustworthy.
Hell, it sounds like you are telling me that FOX is trustworthy!
WTF?
Sounds like this is another editorialist claiming to be a Journalist.
> They make much of (supposedly) a quarter of Republicans "willing to state" that Obama was born in the U.S. (citation needed).
Sure thing!
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/poll-persistent-partisan-divide-over-birther-question-n627446?cid=sm_tw
> However in the meantime 100% of Democrats seem to STILL think Trump has some kind of magical tie to Russia,
Weird that you didn't need a citation for that one.
> even though it turns out Hillary paid for the report the FBI used [dailymail.co.uk] to make that claim.
First, the memos started at the request of the McCain campaign. Second, even if Clinton paid for oppo research (you know, a normal part of every fucking campaign) that doesn't somehow falsify them. That's just the genetic fallacy striking again.
And it's pretty obvious that Trump and company had some ties to Russia. I mean, they signed a letter of intent to build something over in Moscow, Manafort had a history of supporting pro-Russian political parties, and literally the only thing that the campaign changed in the party platform was to soften language concerning the invasion of Ukraine. And there was the meeting in Trump tower where his kid's own e-mails -- given freely to the public, I might add -- pretty well confirmed that they were seeking dirt on Clinton from the Russians. And those indictments, guilty pleas, firing Comey for looking into the connections...
Right. Just tinfoil hats. Purely coincidence. I'm sure it'll all turn out to be (rolls dice) George Soros (rolls dice) and the lizardmen behind the whole thing because (rolls dice) Trump wants to shut down Dulce base.
Did you check what those people were indicted over? Or did you just believe the news when they said the magic word "indictment" because it's what you wanted to hear.
I guess he doesn't know how news is made.
There was Republican research on Trump's finances by Fusion GPS. The dossier was a wholly Democrat thing.
One indictment was for improper lobbying and tax evasion from three decades ago. The indictment is the guy "lying" that the transition team, after the election, didn't meet with Russians. Even though the state department already knew and approved the meetings.
A couple hundred classified emails were willfully and deliberately mishandled, including being on a device that Carlos Danger used.
Vanilla, everyday corruption. Not "election meddling". And John Podesta, Hillary's campaign manager, was up to his eyeballs with the same deals as Manafort.
nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know.
Wow. The daily mail article only suggests that the Clinton campaign paid for the urination ridiculousness. It does not at all address the various testimonies and admitted meetings between Trump campaigners and Russians. The FBI is investigating for other reasons than the silly urination mess. The AG now saying "ohh you mean that sort of meeting" is not a conspiracy theory. They are facts and suggest that further investigation is warranted.
The ability to read is not synonymous with being a conspiracy theorist. If you actually read the first sentences of the CNN article you would have seen that the bill signed by Trump contains provisions that block Trump from easing the sanctions. So the Republicans don't trust him either. Hardly a conspiracy theory. Just reasonable suspicion.
Fuck you fucking slashdot morons shilling for him.
Did you even READ the CNN source? It says the REPUBLICAN legislature included provisions that block Trump from easing the sanctions. In other words, even the REPUBLICANS don't trust Trump. So it entirely refutes the poster's ridiculous position. It also refutes yours. Sources aren't just something that has some vague resemblance to part of an arguing point. An actual source SUPPORTS the point. So all that is proven is there are two Trump fanboys that either can't read or don't bother reading. And it proves that either the Republicans are also afflicted with the conspiracy theory bug or that there is some reasonable suspicion of Trump with respect to Russia.
Oh. The Daily mail source didn't support the poster's point either. It only addressed peeing nonsense that really didn't make much difference regarding the investigations. Plus it's ...well...The Daily Mail. So either the poster was intentionally lying or there is some cognitive dysfunction.
Or both.
And of course, no conspiratorial rant is complete without a link to actual, proven fake news. Keep doing God's Work, we're all having a laugh at your expense kiddo.
Who cares. It doesn't matter who is lying and why. And they all are. Politicians and big business are going to screw you over either way and there's nothing you can do about it. Be a good person in your community and hope it trickles up because despite Reagan and Trump I don't believe anything trickles down.
And that's not exactly a slam on Trump, I hate all politicians equally regardless of party affiliation. My understanding is the top 2 bribers/campaign contributors were in for almost a 100 mil each. There is no way the rest of us can compete with that level of influence.
Most people seem to think "crazy idea with no backing" when they hear "conspiracy" or "conspiracy theory." This is unfortunate, because what a conspiracy theory is (by literal definition) is a theory that some group of individuals or other actors are working together to achieve something, likely in secret.
While common "conspiracy theories" like Pizzagate may be nonsense, the idea that literal conspiracy theories (as described above) are inherently wrong/crazy/nonsense is itself wrong. On the contrary - OF COURSE wealthy and powerful people work together in secret to achieve many of their goals. And yes, some of these are nefarious goals in which these people are working to consolidate their power or wealth by taking it from someone else.
How else do we explain the numerous attempts my US intelligence agencies to influence foreign elections, or straight-up depose leaders of other countries? How do we explain what corporations do to lobby Congress? These are examples of groups of people working together (conspiring) to achieve goals - goals which the public would often find reprehensible.
Of course we should be skeptical of what we take in, and work to confirm and validate it with as much first-hand evidence as possible. But to dismiss all conspiracy theories as nonsense is the wrong way to go - it's clear that there are powerful people in this world, and some of these people work together to consolidate their power. Watergate, anyone?
Just read Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky and Edward Said.
http://twitter.com/bash_history
Can't be! Everyone knows Mars is flat...
We don't believe you.
You can provide cites that show that a lot of Democrats think Trump colluded with Russia. It's going to be real hard to come up with cites that 100% of Democrats do.
It's clear to me that Trump is a lot closer to the Russians than I like, and he has pushed pro-Russia policies more than most. Whether this amounts to collusion is something I'm waiting for the end of the Mueller investigation to decide.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You know, people like you have argued that it's not wrong to have business dealings and meetings with Russians. I therefore find it ironic that you seem to be arguing that it was wrong to try to prevent Trump from becoming President. Certainly the FBI should have stayed out of it (in specific, Comey should not have done that fake "more emails" flap in October that may have cost Clinton the election), but you're including "Clinton-machine money" which it seems to me should naturally be partisan towards Clinton.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
What uranium ore scandal? Clinton was one of several government officials who signed off on the sale of some of a Canadian company to Russians. That means some of the profits would go to Russia. I haven't heard anything about Clinton being involved in uranium ore.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
LISTEN TO ME WELL:
1st The term was coined and has been pushed by the CIA and their useful idiot media and political drones to control narratives and thinking--and you can look that up
2nd Humans are by nature deep in their bones CONSPIRATORIAL. A lot of conspiracies are absolutely real. To conspire, and also to recognize when someone has conspired, IS QUINTESSENTIALLY HUMAN. It is what separates us from the other animals. So stuff that in your pipe and AWAKEN. We are not paranoids.
Dennis Morrisseau
USArmy Officer [Vietnam era] ANTI-WAR
LIBERTY UNION founder
Lieutenant Morrisseau's Rebellion
FireCongress.org
Second Vermont Republic, VFM
POB 177, W. Pawlet, VT 05775
dmorso1@netzero.net
802 645 9727
Condé Nast, the parent company of Ars, is sinking into the abyss; just look at the financials. These people cannot even keep their own company afloat.
There is plenty of evidence his birth certificate is forged. Some of it is even persuasive.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/birther-conspiracy-theorists-seize-death-hawaii-official-fuel-birther-conspiracy-theory/356080/
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2016/12/15/sheriff-joe-arpaio-5-year-investigation-proves-obama-birth-certificate-fake/95444730/
There's a lot of comfort to be found in conspiracy theories. It suggests that the people running the world are infallible, competent, and never make mistakes. The alternative is terrifying: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-tan/the-unspoken-malaysian-tr_b_5065111.html
Would you rather live in a world where the people responsible for protecting you from terrorists and nuclear war can lose a 777, or one where they can make one disappear without a trace and convincingly pretend to look for it for over a year?
News flash: people who understand how things we read and buy in real life actually work are more resistant to conspiracy theories than those who think everything is mystical and non-understandable.
By the way, for all the folks who think fake news is new, The National Enquirer (of batboy and living Elvis fame) has always been more popular than the NY Times of the Washington Post. Racism, tribalism and idiocy aren't new this millinium.
Um that is because we have proof and overwhelming evidence including the CIA and even Russia itself. Russia boasted their intelligence service is superior to the CIA as you saw with the latest election!
The only people who don't believe watch biased entertainment sources like Fox News
http://saveie6.com/
Not really. Liberals are into facts. It's part of the philosophy. Conservatives just ideology. Facts are fiction and fiction is fact and are based on ones owns truths. Conservatism is very dangerous in it's current form as a result.
http://saveie6.com/
Democrats and Republicans are political parties. There is no liberal party, just as there is no conservative party.
Your other wild musings are really quite funny. I like learning new and interesting ways people can be completely wrongheaded and still express 100% confidence in themselves. Keep it up!
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Hillary did not pay for the report.
She contributed to a POOL for research,nothing more
The American right is much, much worse about ignorance (and valuing non-ignorance) than the left. This is very old news. And yeah, there's a ton of hard data supporting it.
But leftists really need to understand that "better than the Republicans" simply isn't good enough. If the average Democrat utters unique 3 political lies per week and the Republicans utters 30... that's not enough to translate into a political advantage! Those three lies are not only more than enough material for Fox News and talk radio to have a field day to embolden their base, but they're also enough to disillusion the centrists, fence-sitters, and "politics are just too depressing" folks.
You have to try to set the bar higher. Relative honesty isn't good enough; relative sanity isn't good enough.
Example? Well, just yesterday I replied to drinkypoo who more or less was denying that Obama had ever "took the side of black people before facts came out". And he did, of course. He didn't do it remotely to the degree that Fox News says he did; he's an infinitely more insightful and reasonable person than the current POTUS, etc. etc., but that isn't good enough.
Ring wingers never want give up on nonsense like Benghazi or the birth certificate thing or WMDs or a 9/11 connection in the Iraq War. And leftists don't want to give up their own deceitful shibboleths like the shooting Treyvon Martin, or that Trump supposedly "confessed to sexual assault on tape" (and of course he didn't even come close to it. His entire cringey macho thesis was that women "let you" touch them, with no hint whatsoever that he was using some sort of coercion), or that conservative Islam is somehow much less dangerous than conservative Christianity.
Some people misinterpret this all as saying that left should be more passive... no, nothing could be further from the truth. The American left is anemic as hell, woefully centrist and compromise-ready also unwilling to fight important nuts-and-bolts battles like the electoral college and campaign finance reform. The left NEEDS to be bold and stubborn, but it can take the high road while it does so. It can't sling mud the way the Republicans do and get away with it. It can't beat the right at its own game. It just makes people shrug and give up.
Which is exactly what happened last year. The numbers don't lie. It wasn't a spike in the pro-Trump right, it was the anemic response of the anti-Trump vote that allowed the unthinkable to happen. This really shouldn't be a controversial thing to say any more, and yet somehow it is.
If you consider environmentalism categorically leftist, maybe you should reconsider your own bias.
sudo ergo sum
However in the meantime 100% of Democrats seem to STILL think Trump has some kind of magical tie to Russia
Where did you get that figure from? No need to answer, it is clear you pulled it out of your arse. Why even bother trying to argue, if you are going to make shit up?
The media never mention the impact of zero information content stories on distracting attention away from serious issues. They also never mention how on the order of 10 entities own every major news media outlet in the country. And of course, they go out of the way to deny and minimize allegations that top-level ownership controls content.
Instead they go out of their way to create inherently loaded terms like 'Conspiracy Theory' (with the unspoken 'nutjob') and then use that to label anyone who disagrees with them in any way. Whether you're a birther, truther, flat-earther, hollow-earther or simply think the media are controlled shills of profascist oligarchs, banks, and multinational corporations -- you get lumped under the same label... which then gets broadcast to the hundreds of millions of captive viewers.
The KGB did interesting experiments in the 1960s that showed that a television program put viewers into a suggestible, near hypnotic state where mental filters failed and they believed what they saw. The widely publicized failures of subliminal advertising distract and mislead away from the success of 'barely liminal' advertising.
With all this, how can one NOT believe the 'conspiracy' that the media would act in underhanded ways and then act out of self interest to cover up their actions by attacking their critics?
TL;DR: The repeal of Net Neutrality is the media and government saying they don't like you thinking anything they don't tell you to think.
Rewrite of news release. Might be heavily edited -- possibly even fact-checked! -- or slightly paraphrased or truncated, or published verbatim. That's why news release rookies are advised to write in a "journalistic" style -- to make it as easy as possible for a journalist to publish something about your news release's topic -- and ideally, what you want them to publish.
Precognition. A news story about an event scheduled to happen later in the day. Often includes phrases like "it is expected". Nobody in particular ever seems to be doing the expecting, though occasionally they are vaguely described as "experts" or "insiders" or "the X community". (I once heard the passive voice used twice in the same sentence, one use nested inside the other.) Few or no facts in the story beyond the scheduled time and/or place of the event, yet they somehow manage to make a paragraph or two out of it.
Media event (establishment). The scheduled event occurs -- with photo ops, video news releases, text news release, prepared statements -- and is reported as though it was something. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's just the Fed or whatever announcing that it is doing what it said it would do.
Media event (outsider). Planned protest or demonstration or disruption by new or ad hoc group. So: Ferguson residents protesting in Ferguson, yes, Al Sharpton before the cameras in Ferguson, no. (See "Media event (establishment)".)
Investigative journalism. Continues to be an endangered species, because it is labor-intensive and its natural enemies are often in a symbiotic relationship with the journalist's employer. Conception is rare, and it tends to die in the womb or be throttled after birth, or crippled before leaving the nest.
Ads as news. Someone has a new book or (more likely) movie or TV show, and coincidentally has an interesting event or talent peripherally related to that project.
Science as boogeyman/savior/party-pooper. Some research in the physical or social sciences leads to counter-intuitive or controversial conclusions, possibly tentative ones. The research suggests possible products or public policy initiatives. Even if the researchers and commenting experts aren't trying to panic or enrage or gull the general public or some dimwitted or excitable segment of it, by the time the sausage factory turns it into a story, it very possibly have that effect.
Breaking news (expected unexpected event). A specific instance of a typical unscheduled event occurs: inner-city shooting, election went "the wrong way", etc. Reporters interview official sources at or near the site of the accident/election/crime/fire/championship. May also seek out local or national experts (or "experts") for information or bloviating, so the reporter doesn't have to.
Breaking news (unexpected unexpected event). An event that has no story template: politician resumes doing incredibly stupid thing that got him in so much trouble before, person of integrity appears in unlikely place/profession. My personal favorite in this category: the election of Jesse Ventura as Governor of Minnesota. The reporters went all deer-in-the-headlights, as their mental scripts had no contingency plans for a non-duopoly candidate doing the unthinkable: winning. Those pesky voters went off-script. (Insert own cynical "professional wrestling" remark here.) (Maybe there is a template now for that politician-with-self-destructive-compulsion, due to the careers of Marion Berry and Anthony Wiener.)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.