Let me put it another way: we haven't heard anything yet, to my knowledge, of Wikileaks refusing to leak something on Trump. If this happened, it would have been very easy for the leaker to simply contact someone else and say "oh by the way, I tried to get this out there via Wikileaks but they refused to do it."
Unless and until this happens, this accusation of bias (in the sense that you're using the term) is nonsense. Wikileaks and Assanage are biased against secrecy and lying in government; this has been open knowledge for years now. But they can only use the material that people provide them, and Clinton just happens to have more dirt of the sort that Wikileaks deals with (of the sort that is typically presented to them) as a result of her long political career.
Your argument thus boils down to timing alone. I don't have a problem with Wikileaks timing the release of information to damage individuals. They have never claimed to be neutral. They are anti- certain forms of policies and governance, and by embodying some of those very things that they stand against Hillary Clinton has made herself a completely legitimate target.
Sacrifice our principals to stop Hillary? Hell yeah!
Well that's a glorious way of summing up your own bias that you could possibly parse it that way. Advocating that people vote for a third party is clearly not favoring one of those over the other. Advocating people vote for Johnson or Stein is obviously a way to not sacrifice my principles to either.
Neither candidate so dangerous as to be worth sacrificing one's principles over. At the end of the day they are both pathetic and craven. Neither one will cause armageddon; they're too vain to.
What a shocking revelation! Next you'll tell us that wrestling is fixed!!
Actually, it is a bit shocking. Most politicians are not so pathetic and chameleon as to openly state this to their backers. There are ways to openly and honestly separate one's personal opinions from one's politics whilst not lying to the people about the positions one will be fighting for. Even Trump managed to do this, at least once and at least briefly regarding the transsexual bathroom thing. He's for letting transwomen use the bathrooms in Trump Tower, but he defers to the party when it comes to national policy--he'll veto legislation that tries to protect transsexuals on the national stage because he's "in favor of letting the states decide." (Maybe he's walked this back since then; I don't know.)
That's pretty slimy, but at least that's reasonably honest. Clintonian politics is not the only form of politics there is in the world.
Do you still think the Russian government is justified in hacking their internal communications and dumping them to the Internet to look for dirt?
I don't respond well to this sort of fear-mongering or this protectionist attitude toward unrepentant liars. Leaks have always happened. They are an essential tool for keeping our democracy at least semi-functional. But suddenly they're not leaks any more--they're "hacks" ! Oh noes!
It's pathetic. Go have a Yes, Minister marathon if you think that leaks are some dangerous new element in our political process, some kind of highly destabilizing new form of warfare.
I appreciate lies being exposed. If it's true that the Russian government is the only one doing it at this moment in time then kudos to them! I encourage anyone and everyone to leak/hack Trump's dirty little secrets as well, though I must say that (as I am with Bill Clinton) I'm much more interested in his lies on policy than his lies about his personal affairs.
Most politicians have enough shame to not bluntly state this to their backers. Even Trump apparently had enough courage, in between his airheaded ramblings, to take a personal stance against discrimination against transsexuals whilst deferring to his party's platform by saying that he's in favor of letting the states decide. (Although I don't know whether he's walked that back since then.)
I don't know where you get your information, but Assange has never been neutral. He has been anti-lies, anti-corruption and anti-secrecy (its this last one that terrifies our national security apparatus, which is why they are after him) in general for years before Wikileaks. Clinton has made herself a target through her actions and what she stands for: Clintonian politics, i.e. politics based on baldfaced lying and scheming.
I'm sure if Trump had a long history as a politician, there would be more stuff on him that Wikileaks would be in a position to release. Right now, what could they possibly have? Maybe his tax returns, if someone over at the IRS were willing to leak them, but I highly doubt people are going to care about that at this point in the race (the staunch Democrats will, I'm sure, but the Trump supporters and fence-sitters more or less view Trump's supposed ruthlessness and savvy as a plus, not a minus.)
A fair description of many unindicted higher-ups at the NRO, NSA and plenty of other three letter organizations who have violated their charter by directing their apparatus at American citizens and then perjured themselves to Congress when asked about whether they were doing it.
But that's beside the point. I don't need to love Assange or Wikileaks to respond to information they have released. They are not known for releasing fabrications, and Clinton has refused to comment on this release. Therefore, the only reasonable position to take is that material they have released is probably genuine.
I care about analyzing and responding to that material. I am deeply, deeply suspicious of anyone who tries to change the subject to a nonstop vilification of Assange or Wikileaks instead. Leaks have always happened. They just sound a lot scarier now because they can call them "hacks", but I'll lay dollars to donuts that it was an insider to enabled it. Go have a Yes, Minister marathon if you think leaks are some scary new invention of the 21st century.
If it wasn't Wikileaks, it would've been someone else. I'll be willing to discuss the "problem" of Wikileaks, Assange and their methods immediately after James Clapper is fired and indicted for perjury.
Nobody gives a shit about his tax returns, at least not in terms of his POTUS run. He doesn't want to reveal them because he doesn't want people to know how much he's worth and he's also probably a bit worried that all those eyes will spot something shady there.
Neither of things matter to the people voting for him. Trump has reasons for keeping them secret that have everything to do with his ego and his bottom line, but very little to do with his candidacy. But by all means, if someone at the IRS wanted to leak his tax returns... I won't shed any tears.
If you don't believe any kind of negotiation requires public and private positions and presentations, you've obviously never been in any kind of negotiation worth a damn.
Well Trump, for all of his many many many MANY flaws, last time I checked has nonetheless managed to handle this pretty well regarding the transsexual bathroom dispute. (Unless he's flip-flopped on this; I can't be bothered to keep up with every stream of consciousness ramble that comes out of the man's head.) He's for allowing them to go in whatever bathroom they want. When point-blank asked, he answered that if a transsexual woman wanted to visit the women's bathroom at Trump towers that he would have no problem with that. But he defers the issue to the states, which is a fancy way of saying that he would veto legislation trying to protect those rights on a national level and the red states will be allowed able to restrict them.
There are other ways of indicating that someone supports something (or doesn't support something), but that this position will not be an issue for the party or for people worried about it. It requires some courage, beginning a sentence along the lines of "I personally think X, but...", but voters have been known to respect this sort of honesty before. Clintonian politics is not the only form of politics this country has seen or appreciated I happen to think that, in 2016, the boldfaced lie approach favored by Bill and Hillary Clinton would be a step backwards for this country.
And this is a determination I have made that must stand regardless of my disdain for Trump.
If you want to see what happens to a party without superdelegates, look at the GOP nominee right now. Had the Democrats voted for someone less scrupulous than Bernie without superdelegates, the DNC would be in just as bad a spot if not worse.
Trump is the best thing to happen to the GOP in a long time. It'll take quite a few years to take root, but may well be the beginning of the end of their unholy wedding of evangelical Christianity and highly corrupt pro-corporate fiscal conservatism. (Even the evangelicals themselves don't really want to see gay marriage and transsexual bathrooms as the big hot button issues any more.) In another 8+ years I could easily see myself voting Republican, particularly if the Democrats continue down their current path.
The superdelegates make the Democrats less beholden to the changing political climate, and over the long term this is probably going to hurt them. The biggest mistake you (and they) can make is to assume a reversion to the mean is inevitable. Take a gander at "The Southern Strategy" sometime if you want to see how radically the political landscape can change over just a few election cycles.
But if all you care about are the next 4 years then sure, the Democrats are in a much better position.
Do you know about politics at all? I mean that seriously, do you know how it works?
I'm almost certainly a bigger cynic and misanthrope than you, so, yes. It's still not a commonplace thing to be so completely cynical and chameleon and hollow as to casually tell a large (though private) audience of your backers that your public position is not the same as your private position.
Do you want politics to always be based on boldfaced lies? Because I would prefer we slowly drift towards something, verisimilitude-style, a little more genuine.
So you're saying that the motivation of a person distributing private documents has absolutely no bearing on whether or not those documents should be given scrutiny for truth?
By all means, scrutinize. I'm saying that based on their past performance and Clinton's refusal to comment on it, an assumption of truth seems reasonable. The bare minimum you need in order to make a claim of fabrication plausible is for the target, having had several days to hire someone to look it over, actually deny it. Let's be fair here--if the most outrageous thing possible came out about Trump--from ANY source--and days and days later he was still saying "no comment", you wouldn't be entertaining any theories that it was a complete fabrication, would you?
Really, the best way to survive American politics is to avoid black and white viewpoints.
Preaching to the choir.
Never let yourself fall into the trap of feeling like everything has to be good versus evil
I'm in no way for Trump, if that's what you're getting at. I encourage everyone to vote Johnson or Stein.
However, we all have our priorities and our pet issues here, and one of mine happens to be truth. Trump's disregard for truth is one of the many reasons why I couldn't support him, and I'm not going to support anyone who has said the kinds of things Hillary has said.
I really can't stand the We've Always Been at War with Eurasia style of governance. Perhaps you can.
But the real issue here is, that if you hacked every politicians email account in the USA I think you would have a really good chance to find the same or way worse than anything that Wikileaks has released, regardless of what party you are for, you got to admit something is not right when one side has all the internal conversations released and the other does not.
Trump isn't a politician; Clinton is. People aren't complaining that the media isn't publishing stories about (Hillary) Clinton being a some kind of girl-crazed uber-macho creep, and so you really shouldn't complain that people aren't leaking stories about Trump talking about lying in his (nonexistent, until now) career as a politician. I'd welcome any all leaks about any and all politicians from any and all news outlets. If Wikileaks/Assange is the only one doing it, and/or if Hillary is the only one with an actual leak in the wild... so be it.
And as it happens, I don't think all politicians have "way worse" than what Wikileaks released. I think the vast majority of politicians have enough sense (and shame) to at least pretend that they believe what they say in public, or at least they have enough sense to not flatly state that their public opinions are completely distinct from their private beliefs. I even think that a significant minority of them actually do believe what they say in public.
None of this should be construed as pro-Trump. If you can't hang Trump on his own words by now, that's not my problem. The Democrats are playing with fire with this this "we're the not-Trump party; therefore, you're not allowed to say anything bad about our candidate!" attitude. We're are voting for someone, not against someone. After Brexit turned out the way it did, I can't believe people on this side of the pond still think that Project Fear will see them through until the end. Americans are at least twice as suicidally stubborn as Brits are, and Trump isn't a tenth as dangerous as Brexit is.
. If Wikileaks were operating simply as a neutral information broker, they'd have dumped it all at once.
Where does Wikileaks or Assange claim to operate as a neutral information broker? I think you'll find that newspapers across the world often have an editorial page, and even their headline stories, as you may have noticed, can seem to fortuitously appear at opportune times.
These aren't leaks, these are hacks. A leak is when someone on the inside of something puts information out there for public consumption, which actually has a completely different set of possible motivations.
1. There's really no way to differentiate between the two, as a large proportion of hacks originate from someone with inside knowledge. If this was 20 years ago, it would have been a simple "leak", not a "hack". It's not like we're talking about nuclear launch codes here.
2. Cry me a fuckin' river. When it comes to peoples' privacy rights that I'm concerned about, a future POTUS is at the absolute bottom of that list. This disturbs me slightly less than leaks disturb the characters on Yes, Minister. May we never live in a world without political leaks (and/or "hacks") of this nature.
Once again, I find it most disturbing that you choose to focus on the unspeakable crime of someone showing evidence that Hillary is a completely self-aware, unrepentant liar. I don't mean "caught in contradicting statements"; I mean, she was actually talking about the art and necessity of lying as a politician. And you really think the most damning and horrible thing in this situation is that this astoundingly frank little speech of hers wasn't hushed up for all eternity?
the motivations involved mean that any reasonable person needs to be more careful about giving the results any actual weight because of the likelihood of modification.
Is that your roundabout way of saying you think it's fabricated? Even though the Clinton campaign refused to deny or comment on its authenticity? Because if someone called me a liar and put words in my mouth that were definitely unfavorable, I don't think I would hesitate to mention that it was a lie. Pleading the fifth is fine for an actual criminal court, but you cannot possibly expect any thinking person to take seriously the possibility that this was a fabrication if she and her people completely refused to comment on it, especially seeing as how Wikileaks is not particularly well known for publishing fabrications.
They're not self-selecting at a rate of 1300 people per week...
The IT dept is migrating them.
Don't act like you have more insight into IBM's support issues that the head IT guy at IBM.
The IT department is migrating who? Everyone? Do you honestly believe they're drawing names at random out of a hat, from all the divisions combined, without regards to the kind of software the people in question are running and need to run? Do you think the mid to high level executive with little technical expertise and the mission-critical stuff stored in the 20 year old macro-heavy spreadsheet of doom is going to be migrated in the same manner as everyone else?
There's a hell of a lot more to statistics than large sample sizes being generally preferable.
The size of a number has no bearing on its statistical relevance. A sample of 90 would be entire sufficient, if it were a high quality sample with zero bias. And a sample of 90,000 would be worthless if it was a poor quality sample with no attempt to correct for bias.
The differing demographics and use cases for Mac vs. Windows users are the obvious potential biases here. The people who are allowed to use Macintoshes at IBM are not likely to be a random sample of employees. I suspect many divisions at IBM don't offer Macintosh workstations as a option for their employees.
That 'cure' is going to be worse than the disease. Maybe most people around here are too young to remember, but the internet has had these growing pains before. What was it, MyDoom? Sasser? I forget. This was early 2000s, and there was a month or so when things were a lot worse than they were today. Huge chunks of the internet were unusable, I mean it was BAD. I had an XP box literally get pwned about 20 minutes after a fresh install had finished, before it could finish downloading security updates. (To be completely clear here, I wasn't doing anything on it other than updating)
The problem with computer security is rebuilding from the ground up is never as simple as all that. Building a trusted boot environment, for instance, in the real world inevitably means giving the DRM keys to the kingdom to Microsoft or something. Making things truly secure inevitably entails permanently taking power away from the users. No more rooted phones, and quite possibly no more rooted laptops, either.
You can come up with some amazing back of the napkin idea that will solve all our security woes without infringing on white hat hackerdom and it can be 100% feasible... but that isn't the solution that the industry leaders or the politicians are going to go with. Ever.
Better solution: use this as an excuse to make the pipes fatter and boxen stronger (aren't we getting close to the point where we can have patent-free boxen that are fast enough to run web servers? Or do we need another 10-15 years?) that so DDOSes become more and more resource-intensive to pull off, work on identifying the zombies better and quicker and pass around the blacklists so that ISPs start throttling or banning or sending messages to the users letting them know that their devices are owned. If security patches aren't forthcoming for certain devices, well, eventually consumers simply stop buying that brand because "______ sucks. It's so slow!"
A total ground-up rebuild of things, if such a thing is even possible, would be an unmitigated disaster because it will be used as an excuse to push through all kinds of horrible ideas. Instead, use this problem to push through good things: fatter pipes, better Android patching, more aggressive use of sandboxing (we've had a mature LXC for years now, damn it) and various "defense in depth" strategies that make remote exploits much trickier to pull off, etc.
Why is attacking the Hillary campaign a bad thing? We now know they corrupted the democratic process in the primary to deliver her the nomination. And we know from the latest Wikileaks release that Clinton has been openly talking to Wall street about the fact that she's been routinely lying in public, saying what is necessary to get elected.
Why are you attacking someone for attacking this loathsome woman? She and her campaign deserve to be attacked. I think it would've been fantastic if she could've been forced to step down and give someone else a chance (not Bernie, or at least not necessarily, just anyone decent the Democrats can shuffle into place quickly.) to take on Trump. Barring that, I think pushing Johnson or Stein into double digits would be fantastic. I even think that would be a more important goal, long term, than sacrificing literally every shred of dignity and concern for the truth and the future of our democracy just to stop some shock-jock version of George W. Bush (i.e. someone who is almost certain, at the end of the day, just a lazy puppet.)
Assange never claimed to be objective, but as a purported newsman he doesn't need to. News organizations all over the world have taken an opinion in this race. Assange isn't pro-Trump; he's just anti-Clinton. As am I.
Pardon him for what? He's a non-citizen of the USA who never signed any non-disclosure agreement with the NSA, who reported information given to him by a source. (He didn't do it in an objective way, but throughout history most newspapers have never claimed to be entirely objective.) The fact that you can casually admit that we're after the man in clear disregard for our first amendment (but we're not after any of the perjurers he exposed) and then say that somehow means he's "lost every shred of credibility" is staggering.
Credibility for what, pray tell? I don't give a shit about the man's opinions, that's not even relevant, so are you actually asserting he's putting out false information now?
I don't care if the information about Hillary's lies are part of some Russian plot or not. If the truth is "destabilizing" well then fuck stability. Hillary admitting to having "public" and "private" positions is a piece of information that I, as a citizen, want to have. I especially want that information to be out there if she wins, as seems likely enough. And if you think we shouldn't have that information, just because Wikileaks didn't tit for tat release something on Trump as well... well, to hell with you.
Anyone who thinks shooting the messenger is more important than examining the message is highly suspect in my book.
The NSA and NRO are toxic organizations. What the hell is there to leak about Trump that hasn't been leaked, and what would it matter even if Wikileaks had something extra to throw on that pile? Hillary's skeletons involve about policy and important governmental stuff. Trump's skeletons are about him being an airheaded flip-flopping womanizer.
If your first reaction, upon seeing evidence that a candidate for the most powerful position in the world has not only been lying but is self-aware of her lies and has been openly talking with industry leaders about the necessity of these lies ("public" vs. "private" positions) and your first impulse is to vilify the messenger... then you, good sir, are up to no good.
I welcome any and all revelations about Trump that anyone is sitting on, but I sure as well want to hear about Hillary's policy on veracity regardless.
It's hard for us to figure out how to give a robot a humanlike mind, let alone a humanlike mind with hard-coded morality. That was always more of an interesting plot device than some realistic prediction something on par with Clarke's speculation about geosynchronous satellites.
Actually, everything you've ever seen in movies about AI is probably implausible. It's going to be stupid, stupid, stupid, kinda-useful-but-nowhere-near-human, SINGULARITY. The only way to stop precisely at human levels of intelligence is to try to simulate a human brain, with all of the limitations and lack of introspection that implies, but even then it's a bitch and a half to figure out all of the subtleties, not the least of which is what kind of "sensory" input to feed it to allow it to mature into something recognizable as intelligence.
All of that is assuming that consciousness is simply information processing.
Would you grab someone by the pussy merely because they let you (e.g. because you could ruin their career if they didn't[*])?.... I'd like you to think very hard about how a big, famous celebrity and an aspiring unknown might interact and the relative power imbalance, even if no threats are made.
Depending on the context surround that "letting", that might make him an asshole, sure. But consent is consent, and being an asshole isn't a crime and it isn't an unusual quality in a politician.
Quite a large number of people are going the extra step and are saying that he "admitted" to committing sexual assault (purely on the basis of what he said, not taking into account what his accusers have said). The last thing the left needs right now is a big, cringe-y debate over whether or not grown adults can't be expected to say "no" or otherwise withhold consent because privilege and the male gaze and blah blah blarg horrible paternalistic women-can't-be-expected-to-take-responsibility-for-anything bullshit. Making this election a referendum on SJWs' interpretation of power dynamics can only backfire, because the people it sways weren't Trump voters to begin with.
It's the same as it was with Bill... If he committed a crime, arrest him. Otherwise, keep the discussion political. It's not like you don't have plenty of ammunition to work with there.
Here's what I would need to even consider it: functionality that they won't pull the plug on. Online Wii games stopped working just a few years after they were released... why? Because, uh, that costs a small amount of money, but we're done with the Wii. We want you to buy our other thing now. What, open it up so anyone can run a game server? Ahahaha... that's a good one. No no no, just buy our new thing, and go ahead and re-buy all your nostalgic games for your new system, though if you get any Wii games the online features won't work for them on the new system, either.
I even miss the little world weather thing. I'd often pop in to just twirl the globe for a moment... it couldn't possibly cost anything significant to run the freakin' weather server, could it? Silly me, of course it's not really about the cost; it's about convincing people to migrate. I'm half surprised they didn't just try to push an update that made all Wii consoles buggy or prone to overheating.
Walled gardens I get, and I even can accept Nintendo's preference for lower end hardware because what they're selling is the experience, but rule one in a walled garden is (or should be) never burn it to the ground and expect all your customers to obediently follow you to your next one. I suppose Nintendo can get away with it because they're so profitable and they still have so much nostalgia to build on (and still have a strong presence in portable gaming), but instead of using those things as a springboard to become a dominant powerhouse, they're content to milk them until they're dry... and who knows, perhaps those wells of nostalgia and inertia might last them another 40 years.
So your definition of "having principles" is trying to stop someone from revealing the truth that one of our candidates has apparently admitted to her campaign contributors that some/many/all of her public positions are lies ?
I'm certainly not pro-Trump, but revealing truth about our politicians or prospective politicians is almost never a bad thing, and attempting to suppress that truth from coming out is almost never a good thing. No one deserves to be patted on the back for helping to keep the American people in the dark, regardless of everyones' motives here.
The problem is that electing Trump in place of Clinton because of this would be a boneheaded move.
Voting for Clinton out of fear is a boneheaded move. Sending a message is more important than the next four years. Trump is dangerous, but not half as dangerous as Bush Jr. was and we survived eight years of him. You shouldn't vote Trump, but it is vitally important that Project Fear be shut down. If the lesser evil side's candidate is still quite toxic, do not vote for that candidate.
Vote Stein or Johnson. Get them into double digits. This Keynesian beauty contest bullshit needs to end. Accelerate the breakup, or at least the shakeup, of the two party duopoly and/or do away with first-past-the-post elections.
It's irresponsible to vote for Hillary and even more irresponsible to lecture people that it's irresponsible to not vote for Hillary.
I didn't say we had definitive proof of anything. I said that Trump clearly was not bragging about a rape situation. He appeared to be bragging about a "I'm so goddamn rich and awesome, women will let me fondle them" situation.
If you think that this confirms all sorts of bad things about his character, sure. If you think this makes his accusers more believable insofar as he's describing his point of view of what was, from their point of view... I don't know. Maybe slightly, but it certainly isn't damning. Guy says he's a god amongst women, possibilities? He sucks with women. He's snivelling around them but he likes to think otherwise. He's wildly exaggerating. The list of possible interpretations of those words is a long one, and I think "bragging about raping women" is fairly far down the list.
If this conversation came out about Bill Clinton, I wouldn't think it affected the probability of Juanita Broderick's claims (of being raped by him) of being true. We know he's a womanizer. We know Trump is a womanizer. This revelation is a minor one, and it certainly isn't a confession of anything.
Except for the fact that we don't necessarily have to rely on the courage, tenacity or honesty of mainstream media reporters (and their military babysitters) to see what's actually happening.
So, uh, I'd say almost everything of importance is new here.
If you fall into the category of "rich person who don't know how to use the internet" (in which case...), go ahead and value your pharmacist and PCP all you want. Certain rich people will still prefer to have the personal touch, I'm sure.
But they are fairly useless for intelligent people who understand how to research things online, and particularly intelligent poor people. Anything serious enough that you can't use the internet to figure it out is too serious for a PCP to deal with. They will refer you to a specialist. Even if you happen to know you are in such a situation and try to make an appointment with the specialist directly to save yourself a couple bucks they will refuse, forcing you to go through a PCP first. Any minor procedure a PCP can do, a nurse or medical assistant can do just as capably, and at a fraction of the cost.
It's a racket, plain and simple.
I don't know where the US is on the list of per-capita government spending on health care, but I'd suspect it's dismayingly high.
I rather doubt that, given the number of people who're like me and simply don't go (I have Obamacare insurance now, but I still mostly can't go because it's such shitty insurance.) If it is abnormally high, it's probably either due to emergency room subsidy (I've often contemplated just going to the emergency room to get stuff taken care of, since they won't turn you away. A lot of people do this) or due to our regulatory structure being especially corrupted by rent-seekers as compared to the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
baldfaced, not boldfaced, damnit.
Let me put it another way: we haven't heard anything yet, to my knowledge, of Wikileaks refusing to leak something on Trump. If this happened, it would have been very easy for the leaker to simply contact someone else and say "oh by the way, I tried to get this out there via Wikileaks but they refused to do it."
Unless and until this happens, this accusation of bias (in the sense that you're using the term) is nonsense. Wikileaks and Assanage are biased against secrecy and lying in government; this has been open knowledge for years now. But they can only use the material that people provide them, and Clinton just happens to have more dirt of the sort that Wikileaks deals with (of the sort that is typically presented to them) as a result of her long political career.
Your argument thus boils down to timing alone. I don't have a problem with Wikileaks timing the release of information to damage individuals. They have never claimed to be neutral. They are anti- certain forms of policies and governance, and by embodying some of those very things that they stand against Hillary Clinton has made herself a completely legitimate target.
This is basically what I take from your position:
Sacrifice our principals to stop Trump? Never!
Sacrifice our principals to stop Hillary? Hell yeah!
Well that's a glorious way of summing up your own bias that you could possibly parse it that way. Advocating that people vote for a third party is clearly not favoring one of those over the other. Advocating people vote for Johnson or Stein is obviously a way to not sacrifice my principles to either.
Neither candidate so dangerous as to be worth sacrificing one's principles over. At the end of the day they are both pathetic and craven. Neither one will cause armageddon; they're too vain to.
What a shocking revelation! Next you'll tell us that wrestling is fixed!!
Actually, it is a bit shocking. Most politicians are not so pathetic and chameleon as to openly state this to their backers. There are ways to openly and honestly separate one's personal opinions from one's politics whilst not lying to the people about the positions one will be fighting for. Even Trump managed to do this, at least once and at least briefly regarding the transsexual bathroom thing. He's for letting transwomen use the bathrooms in Trump Tower, but he defers to the party when it comes to national policy--he'll veto legislation that tries to protect transsexuals on the national stage because he's "in favor of letting the states decide." (Maybe he's walked this back since then; I don't know.)
That's pretty slimy, but at least that's reasonably honest. Clintonian politics is not the only form of politics there is in the world.
Do you still think the Russian government is justified in hacking their internal communications and dumping them to the Internet to look for dirt?
I don't respond well to this sort of fear-mongering or this protectionist attitude toward unrepentant liars. Leaks have always happened. They are an essential tool for keeping our democracy at least semi-functional. But suddenly they're not leaks any more--they're "hacks" ! Oh noes!
It's pathetic. Go have a Yes, Minister marathon if you think that leaks are some dangerous new element in our political process, some kind of highly destabilizing new form of warfare.
I appreciate lies being exposed. If it's true that the Russian government is the only one doing it at this moment in time then kudos to them! I encourage anyone and everyone to leak/hack Trump's dirty little secrets as well, though I must say that (as I am with Bill Clinton) I'm much more interested in his lies on policy than his lies about his personal affairs.
Most politicians have enough shame to not bluntly state this to their backers. Even Trump apparently had enough courage, in between his airheaded ramblings, to take a personal stance against discrimination against transsexuals whilst deferring to his party's platform by saying that he's in favor of letting the states decide. (Although I don't know whether he's walked that back since then.)
I don't know where you get your information, but Assange has never been neutral. He has been anti-lies, anti-corruption and anti-secrecy (its this last one that terrifies our national security apparatus, which is why they are after him) in general for years before Wikileaks. Clinton has made herself a target through her actions and what she stands for: Clintonian politics, i.e. politics based on baldfaced lying and scheming.
I'm sure if Trump had a long history as a politician, there would be more stuff on him that Wikileaks would be in a position to release. Right now, what could they possibly have? Maybe his tax returns, if someone over at the IRS were willing to leak them, but I highly doubt people are going to care about that at this point in the race (the staunch Democrats will, I'm sure, but the Trump supporters and fence-sitters more or less view Trump's supposed ruthlessness and savvy as a plus, not a minus.)
They are malevolent and criminal.
A fair description of many unindicted higher-ups at the NRO, NSA and plenty of other three letter organizations who have violated their charter by directing their apparatus at American citizens and then perjured themselves to Congress when asked about whether they were doing it.
But that's beside the point. I don't need to love Assange or Wikileaks to respond to information they have released. They are not known for releasing fabrications, and Clinton has refused to comment on this release. Therefore, the only reasonable position to take is that material they have released is probably genuine.
I care about analyzing and responding to that material. I am deeply, deeply suspicious of anyone who tries to change the subject to a nonstop vilification of Assange or Wikileaks instead. Leaks have always happened. They just sound a lot scarier now because they can call them "hacks", but I'll lay dollars to donuts that it was an insider to enabled it. Go have a Yes, Minister marathon if you think leaks are some scary new invention of the 21st century.
If it wasn't Wikileaks, it would've been someone else. I'll be willing to discuss the "problem" of Wikileaks, Assange and their methods immediately after James Clapper is fired and indicted for perjury.
Neither of things matter to the people voting for him. Trump has reasons for keeping them secret that have everything to do with his ego and his bottom line, but very little to do with his candidacy. But by all means, if someone at the IRS wanted to leak his tax returns... I won't shed any tears.
If you don't believe any kind of negotiation requires public and private positions and presentations, you've obviously never been in any kind of negotiation worth a damn.
Well Trump, for all of his many many many MANY flaws, last time I checked has nonetheless managed to handle this pretty well regarding the transsexual bathroom dispute. (Unless he's flip-flopped on this; I can't be bothered to keep up with every stream of consciousness ramble that comes out of the man's head.) He's for allowing them to go in whatever bathroom they want. When point-blank asked, he answered that if a transsexual woman wanted to visit the women's bathroom at Trump towers that he would have no problem with that. But he defers the issue to the states, which is a fancy way of saying that he would veto legislation trying to protect those rights on a national level and the red states will be allowed able to restrict them.
There are other ways of indicating that someone supports something (or doesn't support something), but that this position will not be an issue for the party or for people worried about it. It requires some courage, beginning a sentence along the lines of "I personally think X, but...", but voters have been known to respect this sort of honesty before. Clintonian politics is not the only form of politics this country has seen or appreciated I happen to think that, in 2016, the boldfaced lie approach favored by Bill and Hillary Clinton would be a step backwards for this country.
And this is a determination I have made that must stand regardless of my disdain for Trump.
If you want to see what happens to a party without superdelegates, look at the GOP nominee right now. Had the Democrats voted for someone less scrupulous than Bernie without superdelegates, the DNC would be in just as bad a spot if not worse.
Trump is the best thing to happen to the GOP in a long time. It'll take quite a few years to take root, but may well be the beginning of the end of their unholy wedding of evangelical Christianity and highly corrupt pro-corporate fiscal conservatism. (Even the evangelicals themselves don't really want to see gay marriage and transsexual bathrooms as the big hot button issues any more.) In another 8+ years I could easily see myself voting Republican, particularly if the Democrats continue down their current path.
The superdelegates make the Democrats less beholden to the changing political climate, and over the long term this is probably going to hurt them. The biggest mistake you (and they) can make is to assume a reversion to the mean is inevitable. Take a gander at "The Southern Strategy" sometime if you want to see how radically the political landscape can change over just a few election cycles.
But if all you care about are the next 4 years then sure, the Democrats are in a much better position.
Do you know about politics at all? I mean that seriously, do you know how it works?
I'm almost certainly a bigger cynic and misanthrope than you, so, yes. It's still not a commonplace thing to be so completely cynical and chameleon and hollow as to casually tell a large (though private) audience of your backers that your public position is not the same as your private position.
Do you want politics to always be based on boldfaced lies? Because I would prefer we slowly drift towards something, verisimilitude-style, a little more genuine.
So you're saying that the motivation of a person distributing private documents has absolutely no bearing on whether or not those documents should be given scrutiny for truth?
By all means, scrutinize. I'm saying that based on their past performance and Clinton's refusal to comment on it, an assumption of truth seems reasonable. The bare minimum you need in order to make a claim of fabrication plausible is for the target, having had several days to hire someone to look it over, actually deny it. Let's be fair here--if the most outrageous thing possible came out about Trump--from ANY source--and days and days later he was still saying "no comment", you wouldn't be entertaining any theories that it was a complete fabrication, would you?
Really, the best way to survive American politics is to avoid black and white viewpoints.
Preaching to the choir.
Never let yourself fall into the trap of feeling like everything has to be good versus evil
I'm in no way for Trump, if that's what you're getting at. I encourage everyone to vote Johnson or Stein.
However, we all have our priorities and our pet issues here, and one of mine happens to be truth. Trump's disregard for truth is one of the many reasons why I couldn't support him, and I'm not going to support anyone who has said the kinds of things Hillary has said.
I really can't stand the We've Always Been at War with Eurasia style of governance. Perhaps you can.
But the real issue here is, that if you hacked every politicians email account in the USA I think you would have a really good chance to find the same or way worse than anything that Wikileaks has released, regardless of what party you are for, you got to admit something is not right when one side has all the internal conversations released and the other does not.
Trump isn't a politician; Clinton is. People aren't complaining that the media isn't publishing stories about (Hillary) Clinton being a some kind of girl-crazed uber-macho creep, and so you really shouldn't complain that people aren't leaking stories about Trump talking about lying in his (nonexistent, until now) career as a politician. I'd welcome any all leaks about any and all politicians from any and all news outlets. If Wikileaks/Assange is the only one doing it, and/or if Hillary is the only one with an actual leak in the wild... so be it.
And as it happens, I don't think all politicians have "way worse" than what Wikileaks released. I think the vast majority of politicians have enough sense (and shame) to at least pretend that they believe what they say in public, or at least they have enough sense to not flatly state that their public opinions are completely distinct from their private beliefs. I even think that a significant minority of them actually do believe what they say in public.
None of this should be construed as pro-Trump. If you can't hang Trump on his own words by now, that's not my problem. The Democrats are playing with fire with this this "we're the not-Trump party; therefore, you're not allowed to say anything bad about our candidate!" attitude. We're are voting for someone, not against someone. After Brexit turned out the way it did, I can't believe people on this side of the pond still think that Project Fear will see them through until the end. Americans are at least twice as suicidally stubborn as Brits are, and Trump isn't a tenth as dangerous as Brexit is.
. If Wikileaks were operating simply as a neutral information broker, they'd have dumped it all at once.
Where does Wikileaks or Assange claim to operate as a neutral information broker? I think you'll find that newspapers across the world often have an editorial page, and even their headline stories, as you may have noticed, can seem to fortuitously appear at opportune times.
These aren't leaks, these are hacks. A leak is when someone on the inside of something puts information out there for public consumption, which actually has a completely different set of possible motivations.
1. There's really no way to differentiate between the two, as a large proportion of hacks originate from someone with inside knowledge. If this was 20 years ago, it would have been a simple "leak", not a "hack". It's not like we're talking about nuclear launch codes here.
2. Cry me a fuckin' river. When it comes to peoples' privacy rights that I'm concerned about, a future POTUS is at the absolute bottom of that list. This disturbs me slightly less than leaks disturb the characters on Yes, Minister. May we never live in a world without political leaks (and/or "hacks") of this nature.
Once again, I find it most disturbing that you choose to focus on the unspeakable crime of someone showing evidence that Hillary is a completely self-aware, unrepentant liar. I don't mean "caught in contradicting statements"; I mean, she was actually talking about the art and necessity of lying as a politician. And you really think the most damning and horrible thing in this situation is that this astoundingly frank little speech of hers wasn't hushed up for all eternity?
the motivations involved mean that any reasonable person needs to be more careful about giving the results any actual weight because of the likelihood of modification.
Is that your roundabout way of saying you think it's fabricated? Even though the Clinton campaign refused to deny or comment on its authenticity? Because if someone called me a liar and put words in my mouth that were definitely unfavorable, I don't think I would hesitate to mention that it was a lie. Pleading the fifth is fine for an actual criminal court, but you cannot possibly expect any thinking person to take seriously the possibility that this was a fabrication if she and her people completely refused to comment on it, especially seeing as how Wikileaks is not particularly well known for publishing fabrications.
They're not self-selecting at a rate of 1300 people per week...
The IT dept is migrating them.
Don't act like you have more insight into IBM's support issues that the head IT guy at IBM.
The IT department is migrating who? Everyone? Do you honestly believe they're drawing names at random out of a hat, from all the divisions combined, without regards to the kind of software the people in question are running and need to run? Do you think the mid to high level executive with little technical expertise and the mission-critical stuff stored in the 20 year old macro-heavy spreadsheet of doom is going to be migrated in the same manner as everyone else?
There's a hell of a lot more to statistics than large sample sizes being generally preferable.
The size of a number has no bearing on its statistical relevance. A sample of 90 would be entire sufficient, if it were a high quality sample with zero bias. And a sample of 90,000 would be worthless if it was a poor quality sample with no attempt to correct for bias.
The differing demographics and use cases for Mac vs. Windows users are the obvious potential biases here. The people who are allowed to use Macintoshes at IBM are not likely to be a random sample of employees. I suspect many divisions at IBM don't offer Macintosh workstations as a option for their employees.
That 'cure' is going to be worse than the disease. Maybe most people around here are too young to remember, but the internet has had these growing pains before. What was it, MyDoom? Sasser? I forget. This was early 2000s, and there was a month or so when things were a lot worse than they were today. Huge chunks of the internet were unusable, I mean it was BAD. I had an XP box literally get pwned about 20 minutes after a fresh install had finished, before it could finish downloading security updates. (To be completely clear here, I wasn't doing anything on it other than updating)
The problem with computer security is rebuilding from the ground up is never as simple as all that. Building a trusted boot environment, for instance, in the real world inevitably means giving the DRM keys to the kingdom to Microsoft or something. Making things truly secure inevitably entails permanently taking power away from the users. No more rooted phones, and quite possibly no more rooted laptops, either.
You can come up with some amazing back of the napkin idea that will solve all our security woes without infringing on white hat hackerdom and it can be 100% feasible... but that isn't the solution that the industry leaders or the politicians are going to go with. Ever.
Better solution: use this as an excuse to make the pipes fatter and boxen stronger (aren't we getting close to the point where we can have patent-free boxen that are fast enough to run web servers? Or do we need another 10-15 years?) that so DDOSes become more and more resource-intensive to pull off, work on identifying the zombies better and quicker and pass around the blacklists so that ISPs start throttling or banning or sending messages to the users letting them know that their devices are owned. If security patches aren't forthcoming for certain devices, well, eventually consumers simply stop buying that brand because "______ sucks. It's so slow!"
A total ground-up rebuild of things, if such a thing is even possible, would be an unmitigated disaster because it will be used as an excuse to push through all kinds of horrible ideas. Instead, use this problem to push through good things: fatter pipes, better Android patching, more aggressive use of sandboxing (we've had a mature LXC for years now, damn it) and various "defense in depth" strategies that make remote exploits much trickier to pull off, etc.
Why is attacking the Hillary campaign a bad thing? We now know they corrupted the democratic process in the primary to deliver her the nomination. And we know from the latest Wikileaks release that Clinton has been openly talking to Wall street about the fact that she's been routinely lying in public, saying what is necessary to get elected.
Why are you attacking someone for attacking this loathsome woman? She and her campaign deserve to be attacked. I think it would've been fantastic if she could've been forced to step down and give someone else a chance (not Bernie, or at least not necessarily, just anyone decent the Democrats can shuffle into place quickly.) to take on Trump. Barring that, I think pushing Johnson or Stein into double digits would be fantastic. I even think that would be a more important goal, long term, than sacrificing literally every shred of dignity and concern for the truth and the future of our democracy just to stop some shock-jock version of George W. Bush (i.e. someone who is almost certain, at the end of the day, just a lazy puppet.)
Assange never claimed to be objective, but as a purported newsman he doesn't need to. News organizations all over the world have taken an opinion in this race. Assange isn't pro-Trump; he's just anti-Clinton. As am I.
Pardon him for what? He's a non-citizen of the USA who never signed any non-disclosure agreement with the NSA, who reported information given to him by a source. (He didn't do it in an objective way, but throughout history most newspapers have never claimed to be entirely objective.) The fact that you can casually admit that we're after the man in clear disregard for our first amendment (but we're not after any of the perjurers he exposed) and then say that somehow means he's "lost every shred of credibility" is staggering.
Credibility for what, pray tell? I don't give a shit about the man's opinions, that's not even relevant, so are you actually asserting he's putting out false information now?
I don't care if the information about Hillary's lies are part of some Russian plot or not. If the truth is "destabilizing" well then fuck stability. Hillary admitting to having "public" and "private" positions is a piece of information that I, as a citizen, want to have. I especially want that information to be out there if she wins, as seems likely enough. And if you think we shouldn't have that information, just because Wikileaks didn't tit for tat release something on Trump as well... well, to hell with you.
Anyone who thinks shooting the messenger is more important than examining the message is highly suspect in my book.
The NSA and NRO are toxic organizations. What the hell is there to leak about Trump that hasn't been leaked, and what would it matter even if Wikileaks had something extra to throw on that pile? Hillary's skeletons involve about policy and important governmental stuff. Trump's skeletons are about him being an airheaded flip-flopping womanizer.
If your first reaction, upon seeing evidence that a candidate for the most powerful position in the world has not only been lying but is self-aware of her lies and has been openly talking with industry leaders about the necessity of these lies ("public" vs. "private" positions) and your first impulse is to vilify the messenger... then you, good sir, are up to no good.
I welcome any and all revelations about Trump that anyone is sitting on, but I sure as well want to hear about Hillary's policy on veracity regardless.
It's hard for us to figure out how to give a robot a humanlike mind, let alone a humanlike mind with hard-coded morality. That was always more of an interesting plot device than some realistic prediction something on par with Clarke's speculation about geosynchronous satellites.
Actually, everything you've ever seen in movies about AI is probably implausible. It's going to be stupid, stupid, stupid, kinda-useful-but-nowhere-near-human, SINGULARITY. The only way to stop precisely at human levels of intelligence is to try to simulate a human brain, with all of the limitations and lack of introspection that implies, but even then it's a bitch and a half to figure out all of the subtleties, not the least of which is what kind of "sensory" input to feed it to allow it to mature into something recognizable as intelligence.
All of that is assuming that consciousness is simply information processing.
Would you grab someone by the pussy merely because they let you (e.g. because you could ruin their career if they didn't[*])? .... I'd like you to think very hard about how a big, famous celebrity and an aspiring unknown might interact and the relative power imbalance, even if no threats are made.
Depending on the context surround that "letting", that might make him an asshole, sure. But consent is consent, and being an asshole isn't a crime and it isn't an unusual quality in a politician.
Quite a large number of people are going the extra step and are saying that he "admitted" to committing sexual assault (purely on the basis of what he said, not taking into account what his accusers have said). The last thing the left needs right now is a big, cringe-y debate over whether or not grown adults can't be expected to say "no" or otherwise withhold consent because privilege and the male gaze and blah blah blarg horrible paternalistic women-can't-be-expected-to-take-responsibility-for-anything bullshit. Making this election a referendum on SJWs' interpretation of power dynamics can only backfire, because the people it sways weren't Trump voters to begin with.
It's the same as it was with Bill... If he committed a crime, arrest him. Otherwise, keep the discussion political. It's not like you don't have plenty of ammunition to work with there.
Here's what I would need to even consider it: functionality that they won't pull the plug on. Online Wii games stopped working just a few years after they were released... why? Because, uh, that costs a small amount of money, but we're done with the Wii. We want you to buy our other thing now. What, open it up so anyone can run a game server? Ahahaha... that's a good one. No no no, just buy our new thing, and go ahead and re-buy all your nostalgic games for your new system, though if you get any Wii games the online features won't work for them on the new system, either.
I even miss the little world weather thing. I'd often pop in to just twirl the globe for a moment... it couldn't possibly cost anything significant to run the freakin' weather server, could it? Silly me, of course it's not really about the cost; it's about convincing people to migrate. I'm half surprised they didn't just try to push an update that made all Wii consoles buggy or prone to overheating.
Walled gardens I get, and I even can accept Nintendo's preference for lower end hardware because what they're selling is the experience, but rule one in a walled garden is (or should be) never burn it to the ground and expect all your customers to obediently follow you to your next one. I suppose Nintendo can get away with it because they're so profitable and they still have so much nostalgia to build on (and still have a strong presence in portable gaming), but instead of using those things as a springboard to become a dominant powerhouse, they're content to milk them until they're dry... and who knows, perhaps those wells of nostalgia and inertia might last them another 40 years.
But I'm out.
So your definition of "having principles" is trying to stop someone from revealing the truth that one of our candidates has apparently admitted to her campaign contributors that some/many/all of her public positions are lies ?
I'm certainly not pro-Trump, but revealing truth about our politicians or prospective politicians is almost never a bad thing, and attempting to suppress that truth from coming out is almost never a good thing. No one deserves to be patted on the back for helping to keep the American people in the dark, regardless of everyones' motives here.
The problem is that electing Trump in place of Clinton because of this would be a boneheaded move.
Voting for Clinton out of fear is a boneheaded move. Sending a message is more important than the next four years. Trump is dangerous, but not half as dangerous as Bush Jr. was and we survived eight years of him. You shouldn't vote Trump, but it is vitally important that Project Fear be shut down. If the lesser evil side's candidate is still quite toxic, do not vote for that candidate.
Vote Stein or Johnson. Get them into double digits. This Keynesian beauty contest bullshit needs to end. Accelerate the breakup, or at least the shakeup, of the two party duopoly and/or do away with first-past-the-post elections.
It's irresponsible to vote for Hillary and even more irresponsible to lecture people that it's irresponsible to not vote for Hillary.
I didn't say we had definitive proof of anything. I said that Trump clearly was not bragging about a rape situation. He appeared to be bragging about a "I'm so goddamn rich and awesome, women will let me fondle them" situation.
If you think that this confirms all sorts of bad things about his character, sure. If you think this makes his accusers more believable insofar as he's describing his point of view of what was, from their point of view... I don't know. Maybe slightly, but it certainly isn't damning. Guy says he's a god amongst women, possibilities? He sucks with women. He's snivelling around them but he likes to think otherwise. He's wildly exaggerating. The list of possible interpretations of those words is a long one, and I think "bragging about raping women" is fairly far down the list.
If this conversation came out about Bill Clinton, I wouldn't think it affected the probability of Juanita Broderick's claims (of being raped by him) of being true. We know he's a womanizer. We know Trump is a womanizer. This revelation is a minor one, and it certainly isn't a confession of anything.
Except for the fact that we don't necessarily have to rely on the courage, tenacity or honesty of mainstream media reporters (and their military babysitters) to see what's actually happening.
So, uh, I'd say almost everything of importance is new here.
But they are fairly useless for intelligent people who understand how to research things online, and particularly intelligent poor people. Anything serious enough that you can't use the internet to figure it out is too serious for a PCP to deal with. They will refer you to a specialist. Even if you happen to know you are in such a situation and try to make an appointment with the specialist directly to save yourself a couple bucks they will refuse, forcing you to go through a PCP first. Any minor procedure a PCP can do, a nurse or medical assistant can do just as capably, and at a fraction of the cost.
It's a racket, plain and simple.
I don't know where the US is on the list of per-capita government spending on health care, but I'd suspect it's dismayingly high.
I rather doubt that, given the number of people who're like me and simply don't go (I have Obamacare insurance now, but I still mostly can't go because it's such shitty insurance.) If it is abnormally high, it's probably either due to emergency room subsidy (I've often contemplated just going to the emergency room to get stuff taken care of, since they won't turn you away. A lot of people do this) or due to our regulatory structure being especially corrupted by rent-seekers as compared to the rest of the world.