And, it took all of about 37 seconds before someone compared a businessman and reality TV star to a vicious, military-style dictator who started a world war that caused the death of more than one hundred million people and methodically murdered millions of people in concentration camps.
Yeah, I'm invoking Godwin's Law because it's applicable here and really a really tired comparison.
So lets keep him has a businessman, reality TV star, and likely crappy president by not ignoring the giant red flags that have been waving for the past year.
If you want to see the oppositions disproval, then you Need to fund their research equally, just like the researchers received the massive funding for their work who actually started off with assumption that greenhouse-gas-caused climate change exists and is caused by humans.
The ones who assume work doesn't prove the foundation of their research is true though, they just further developed the theory, which doesn't receive adequate funding for critical truth analysis.
Cool, so who's going to fund my flat earth research?
Ah, even more bullshit. Spearfishing is not hacking. Someone emails you their password, you access their account, you have only reached the level of unauthorized access, NOT hacking.
Which is why I tried to stop arguing this by calling it unauthorized access.
If the Clinton campaign hadn't been engaging in dishonest activity, and if Clinton hadn't been dishonest herself in her 2-faced speeches, there wouldn't have been any dirt to leak.
Her speeches were only remarkable in that there wasn't more of a smoking gun. All politicians occasionally find themselves in positions where their public positions don't match their private positions. It's not ideal but its unfortunately an activity that is rewarded by the public.
Blaming the messenger is not going to cut it. She should never have been the candidate, and if the DNC process had worked as it was supposed to, impartially, she wouldn't have been, and Sanders would be president-elect.
If the RNC process had worked how it had supposed to Trump wouldn't have been the candidate. The DNC process wasn't impartial, but it wasn't rigged either. Parties do their best to give both candidates a fair chance while signalling who they prefer, in 2008 Obama was able to overcome this obstacle, in 2016 Sanders couldn't.
Personally I think Clinton would have been a great President and was by far the best person for the job, unfortunately she tends to under perform as a candidate. If he were nominated Sanders may have won, but there's a reason the RNC was rooting for Sanders. He was untested in the national spotlight and a lot further to the left than the median US voter, he could have scared a lot of people back to Trump
It's not like a Clinton presidency would be any better than a Trump presidency.
I'm sorry, but are you insane?
Clinton, if all the horrible things said were true, would be a below average President who does more influence peddling than usual. Oh well.
Trump isn't even in office and he's stirred up the China-Taiwan situation, stirred up the middle east, and used his position as President elect to help out his companies. He's filling his cabinet with a mixture of incompetent yahoos and fringe characters who are fundamentally opposed to the departments they're supposed to run, and defending a hostile power who interfered in the election.
If the 2020 election was Trump v. Nixon I'd be campaigning for Nixon. I am not exaggerating when I say Trump poses a serious danger to your country.
All of that is bullshit when it comes to Podesta's account, which is where the motherlode of embarrassing emails with Clinton, the DNC, etc., came from. Podesta's account was NOT hacked.
The terminology doesn't matter, is was an unauthorized access.
The problem is that internal campaign emails will always have dirt, and the side that gets leaked will always be the side that gets hurt in the polls.
Imagine Trump's emails got leaked instead, and you got dirt about staffers complaining that Trump was an idiot, promises of appointments for support, or open discussions of how they were deliberately lying on some topic.
Those dumps, if they were made, probably would have resulted in a Clinton win.
The emails were leaked because Podesta forwarded a password reset form of his email account to a tech and asked him if it was legit. Podesta mis-heard him or the tech got it wrong, and Podesta sent his log-in credentials to the spear-fisher. There was no hack. Not when your sucker emails you their password.
As well public opinion should have been swayed. If you don't want to piss people off about your "public policy for the masses" and "private policy for wall street and the banks", don't give speeches about how you do that sh*t. Problem solved.
Then shouldn't they have had an opportunity to be swayed by the RNC or Trump Org. emails as well?
It's not his fault, because the media is purposely confusing things. Notice how they always talk about Russia "hacking the election" even though that's not at all what happened. And then when they do talk about what Russia is actually accused of doing, they always just say "emails" to try and conflate Hillary's email server with the Wikileaks dump. It's classic disinformation and if you talk about politics with regular people, it's working: people have just kind of mentally merged Hillary's private email server with the Wikileaks email dump with Russians "hacking the vote" despite the fact that none of them are related and the third never happened.
It's a technique that the Democrats are using to distance themselves from Hillary's historic failure as a candidate, and that the Republicans are more than happy to let them get away with because refusing to acknowledge the truth is only going to lead to a GOP supermajority in 2018 and likely a GOP-controlled Constitutional Convention within the next decade.
But it's not surprising that people are confused about what "Russian hacking" is - the media and the lame duck administration are purposely trying to confuse people.
I think you got it backwards, the media conflating the email stories was a huge benefit to the GOP during the election.
You also got it a bit confused as there were three to five distinct email stories (depending how you counted):
1) Clinton using a private unsecured email server instead of the official unsecured email sever, violating some department policies. It wasn't illegal and people had done similar things in the past, but not to the same extent.
2) The tech in charge of the email violated a subpoena. After Clinton turned over her official emails (having her lawyers do the sorting, which was according to protocol), they changed policy to start deleting old emails (completely legal and a good idea). The tech seems to have procrastinated until the subpoena was issued, at which point he illegally tried to fix his mistake by doing the delete. This was illegal and is the 33,000 deleted emails you hear about, but it seems to have just been the tech doing something stupid to fix his screwup. He was never charged since he got immunity in exchange for telling the FBI everything.
3) A few classified emails got sent through the unclassified server by accident. This was the reason for the FBI investigation, the basis for all the claims for her being locked up, and probably the least scandalous part. These are people working with classified and unclassified information on a daily basis, it's inevitable that they'd sometimes put something through the wrong system. It showed the State Dept was a bit too laid back handling classified information, but that's an issue that both preceded Clinton and went well beyond her.
4) Guccifer 2.0 hacked the DNC and gave internal DNC emails to Wikileaks. These were fairly benign mostly showing that yes, campaigns do sketchy stuff sometimes. The most scandalous bit was a party member who was also a CNN contributor got hold of a debate question during the primary and leaked it to the Clinton campaign. Everybody except Wikileaks and portions of the GOP thinks Guccifer 2.0 was actually Russian intelligence (it looks liked they hacked the RNC too but didn't disclose anything).
5) Finally John Podesta's gmail account was hacked directly, again by what appears to be Russian intelligence. Again nothing scandalous though it's fairly interesting since it shows in inside of a campaign. This also exposed the Clinton Foundation since Podesta was involved with that, and as such the Foundation which brought up questions about influence, got drawn into the controversy.
That the general public got confused is pretty much inevitable, there were a lot of different things going on. And since story had the air of something unsavoury going on then even reporting on something relatively savoury re-enforced the larger narrative that there was some kind of deep corruption going on.
Were you alive, then? Because it was a 14-month march to war.
Wow are you confused. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The Taliban in Afghanistan admitted to hosting and supporting Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who were responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
I know we're living in a post factual world where empirical truth doesn't exist. But the fact is that the U.S. led a coaliton of forces against the Taliban in Afghanistan beginning on October 7, 2001. Less than one month after the September 11 attacks.
A lot of people were confused back then, 9/11 was the major motivation for the war in Iraq and the Bush administration was constantly trying to conflate the two. If they didn't try to suggest they were allied there was always the implication that the crazy Arab Muslim Saddam would commit an unprovoked first strike with his WMDs the way al-Qaeda did on 9/11.
In reality they were mostly enemies, Saddam was a Sunni dictator in a majority Shia country so ran a largely secular state. Not dissimilar to Assad a Shia dictator in a majority Sunni country.
Al Qaeda did not like Saddam because of his secularism, and al-Qaeda was rightly thrilled on multiple counts when the US invaded Iraq, but the motive for the US invading Iraq was 9/11.
"We have looked at this issue carefully and we don't believe we do."
Translation: "We'll do whatever we want until a judge tells us to stop. Maybe not even then."
I don't really get why Uber would give a shit about autonomous vehicles. Their entire business model is based around an asset light setup. They don't own or insure the cars that Uber drivers use. Going to autonomous vehicles in any substantial way would require a very hefty capital investment AND it would ruin their (bogus) argument that they aren't a taxi service. It doesn't make much sense to me.
Uber's biggest asset isn't their drivers, it's all the customers who have installed the Uber app and keep using it.
Talking about self-driving cars generates a lot of free advertising and brings them customers.
And if they ever do get the tech and regulatory approval they'll be able to raise more than enough capital to start fleets for their core markets.
> Which is why the credibility of the reporter quoting the anonymous source matters.
No, it doesn't. I give credit to factual evidence, not anonymous rumors.
I give credit to the heuristics that most reliably lead me to the truth.
Finding people or institutions who are good sources of information and have a good track record is a better than average method for finding the truth.
Attempting to independently verify a small subset of the relevant facts in a field for which I have limited expertise is a very easy way to be wrong.
Yay, we finally get something like a fact. You should really point here though as it has more details.
Though that's an earlier article that leaves out the smoking gun of the same IP being used as the control address for the DNC hack and the hack on the German parliament demonstrating the same actor was behind both.
But when we get to the bottom of it, we find it's mostly assumed because of a few RATs (remote access trojans). Problems with that:
- Guccifer 2.0 took credit for it.
Which never made sense, a fairly advanced hacker emulating a guy who guessed password resets do dump celebrity emails?
A source who both mischaracterizes the Iraq war build up (the CIA did not generally agree with Bush), who undersells the Russian hack evidence (leaving out the control addresses), and is mostly trying to sell a conspiratorial anti-government book and speaking/consulting business.
The timing doesn't work out either, because Trump was still a dark horse candidate during the first leaks
But Trump's uncomfortable pro-Russian biases and entanglements were known all along, that may have been one of the reasons Putin was willing to through with it.
Yes, the FBI, though they only allude to that in passing. There have been other random anonymous people quoted as disagreeing too. I don't think there's much point in playing the "my anonymous source can beat up your anonymous source" game though.
Which is why the credibility of the reporter quoting the anonymous source matters.
> Because a lot of the evidence comes from confidential sources like CIA spies.
Yeah, no. See, I got over the secret evidence thing back when they used it to manufacture the war in Iraq.
Which is why you should be skeptical of politicians cherry picking and misrepresenting evidence from the CIA.
The CIA itself was a lot more skeptical about the WMDs than Bush implied.
Because that's been well established for months.
If by "well established" you mean that the press keeps reporting that it's true without giving us even one single verifiable fact we could hang our hat on.
Ok here. Unless you want them to personally drop hard drives off at your house I'm not sure what else you expect.
First they were going to allow a custom emoji for "#CrookedHillary", then when it got too offensive/slanderous they decided "no, we won't do political emojis".
Wouldn't a better policy simply be to say "we don't do emojis that denigrate other people"?
That's a fascinating article, actually. Why don't we look at the evidence they present to support their claims?
Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.
So... they have anonymous people who are reporting rumors that they won't attach their names to.
AKA anonymous leakers, a basic reporting tool.
The leakers don't publicize their names because they're not supposed to be leaking the information, but the reporter can vouch for the fact that they are senior officials with access to the information.
And there are other insiders saying the complete opposite.
No there aren't, at least not in this article.
Lovely. Why don't they put out some actual, hard proof?
Because a lot of the evidence comes from confidential sources like CIA spies.
Or prosecute someone?
Who? Vladimir Putin?
The FBI and other agencies don't fully endorse that view, but few officials would dispute that the Russian operation was intended to harm Clinton's candidacy by leaking embarrassing emails about Democrats.
So the FBI is willing to put their name on this saying it's not true
I'm not sure how you read that sentence and came up with that interpretation.
The FBI did not say it was false that Russia was trying to elect Trump. The FBI, and every other agency that investigated it, said they agree that Russia was trying to hurt Clinton, but they don't know if the intent was merely to destabilize the US or to actually have Trump win the election.
And NBC simply labels this as a "Russian operation" despite failing to present any evidence of that.
And have a good laugh at the "analysis" within. He simply dismissed all of the evidence of the hacking group intruding to the DNC network. Has Assange even disclosed how he knows that the "leaker" is a DNC insider and not some Russian operative claiming to be one?
Back on topic, let's not forget that they brought up the 17 intelligence agencies again. Would it kill you guys to actually name them? It's also misleading, because it comes from the directors (political appointees)
Who else is going to endorse the statement except the director? And you really think that not only did 17 directors all endorse a false statement, but that no one in any of their agencies leaked evidence to the contrary?
I love how they don't bother to link to the actual statement lest someone actually read what it said. It's not based on anything of substance as anyone can read. They essentially say this is totally something Russia would like to do.
No. They essentially say these hacks fit the profile of other attacks that have been tied to Russia.
The technical term for that is that it was a 'brain fart'. Brain farts can happen to anybody. As evidenced here, when a brain fart happens you can even re-correct the words around the 'typo' as in using 'a' instead of 'an.'
Agreed though I wouldn't necessarily call "brain fart" a technical term.
The takeaway is that it was ordinary low-level phishing that cracked Podesta's account. The Clinton team wasn't even invulnerable to plain vanilla phishing.
Well they did have protocols to protect against phishing, and those protocols were followed, but one of the people in that chain made a fairly epic screw up, and fundamentally no organization is immune to someone making an epic screw up.
And remember the RNC was also hacked, so this isn't a case of one side being incompetent.
Is Podesta even in any kind of position now where his computer illiteracy could get him in trouble again?
He was computer literate enough to delegate the tasks he didn't understand, unfortunately the people he delegated to screwed up.
The team he was on lost, and he's very tied to the fortunes of Ms. Clinton and probably won't be the head of anybody's campaign again.
Maybe, maybe not. He's still an extremely competent individual, though I'm not sure if he'd be interested in running a campaign for someone other than a Clinton.
Clinton campaign aide Charles Delavan replied that it was "a legitimate email"............he had intended to type "illegitimate,"
If that's true, shouldn't they have used "an" instead of "a". These are college graduates after all, right?
He doesn't mean typo in the sense that he meant to write "illegitimate" and wrote "jllegitmate".
He meant typo in the sense that he thought "oh that's an illegitimate email" and intended to write something to that effect, but ended up writing something completely opposite.
Just think back to the times you proofread and found a typo, sometimes it's a mistyped word, and sometimes you find words that are radically different than you intended.
Of course that doesn't mean he's telling the truth, it does seem odd that he's tell Podesta to change the password in response to a phishing request. Though it does clear Podesta a bit, as he was mostly following ITs orders (though he did click the link from the "legitimate email" instead of the link from the IT email).
and you can't ignore the interests of minority small states.
And I'm sure you'd feel the same way if small states were black and hispanic majority and it was your "team" that lost elections about it.
No wait I forgot, you're a massive hypocrite who would be outraged because you're so obsessed with winning you'll reach out at any dubious justification that gives you an advantage.
Just like I'm sure you think every voter needs to show ID, to combat the virtually non-existent problem of voter fraud. But you think accessibility is really important so you have no issue with mail-in ballots.
We traditionally define minority in terms of race, religion, or sexuality, precisely because those groups are typically discriminated against.
Hrm. Let's shelve that dubious tradition for a moment, and focus on what minority means in the sense of a democratic government where each proposition that passes has a majority (or plurality) support, and a minority that opposes it.
Yes, lets shelve what people actually mean when they talk about protecting minorities so you can confuse the debate by talking about a different concept that happens to share the same word.
I know Muslims you racist piece of shit, they are some of my best friends and some of the absolutely nicest and most peaceful people I know.
I call bullshit. If you know muslims, you know they're not a race, they're a religion.
Sorry, you're a bigoted piece of shit.
You know precious little about your best friends if you think muslims are a "race".
You're a pretentious moron if your positions are so facile that you need to reject the popular definition of a word in favour of a ridiculously pedantic definition and then claim intellectual superiority.
Secondly, if your muslim friends don't disavow sharia law
Do your Christian friends disavow biblical law? Do you tell them to fuck off if they don't?
(which, my muslim friends do,
Somehow I'm doubtful your "Muslim friends" know your real views.
If your holy book insists that you create earthly governments that subjugate women, or kill gays, you can kindly do that barbaric shit somewhere else.
Blah blah, applies to christians too.
The most devout guy I knew was best friends with a lesbian. News flash, a lot of people don't actually follow their holy books.
You should walk up to some of the Muslims I know, good people who helped me get through tough times, people with whom I talked about religion, people I went to parties with, played sports with, guys with whom I talked about girls, people who moved to your country and I dearly miss.
Ask them if they support sharia law.
Ask them if they believe sharia law should apply to non muslims.
Ask them if they believe sharia law should override the constitution.
I'm not going to claim that Muslims in general are as liberal as Christians. But to say the that anyone who considers themselves a devout Muslim is somehow a terrorist sympathizer looking to subjugate non-Muslims is ignorant and bigoted.
how is the EC a check and balance that protects minorities?
It protects the minority of people who live in small states from the majority who life in large states.
I think you're conflating "minority" with some specific racial term, rather than a generic term for any less than 50% of the population that believes in a given policy.
That's a pretty odd definition for "minority", you're not even properly selecting for rural vs urban, you're just giving a disproportionate of power to people who happen to live in small states.
We traditionally define minority in terms of race, religion, or sexuality, precisely because those groups are typically discriminated against.
I have faith that this will encourage the 4th estate to start doing its job:)
I hope they do, but I have little faith considering how awful a job they did during the election.
and will soon be about even in the SCOTUS
They are already even in the SCOTUS, the fact that Kennedy is the swing vote doesn't mean he's now a Liberal.
when you say you're going to deport millions of Mexicans people are going to start looking at any Hispanic person as an illegal immigrant who should be deported.
If you've got papers, no problem:)
That's not how racism works.
Muslims are targeting Americans as a whole. Any muslim (who, in fact, are victims of islam), who can disavow sharia law, is completely fine.
That is BULLSHIT absolute BULLSHIT.
I know Muslims you racist piece of shit, they are some of my best friends and some of the absolutely nicest and most peaceful people I know.
These are real fucking people you are talking about, people you just blithely claim "are targeting Americans as a whole" because you have some weird idea about what they're supposed to believe. You should walk up to some of the Muslims I know, good people who helped me get through tough times, people with whom I talked about religion, people I went to parties with, played sports with, guys with whom I talked about girls, people who moved to your country and I dearly miss.
You should try getting to know them as something other than a ridiculous caricature and then see if you still feel comfortable repeating that shit to them.
Yes, so after dozens of comments exchanged you've found the way to strike a nerve and make me absolutely furious, you just need to target good innocent people.
Yes, and then let this application grow and gain neo nazi moderators and turn it into a racist safe space. Without free discussion, and real actual discussion instead of retarded namecalling we get shit like trump in power.
But I don't think they actually want a safe space, they want victimization.
The alt-right segment that is causing trouble on Twitter has a very predictable pattern, they find a target and then troll them until they get a reaction. If the victim retaliates they claim that the victim is the real racist/sexist/bad person, if instead the service retaliates they claim they're being censored.
In either case they need a victim to target and aggravate and they need an authority to rebel against. You're not going to get a lot of black women signing up to be harassed on an alt-right Twitter knock-off. The only way they get what they're looking for is by being on the same service as their target.
If you're talking about actual harassment I have no problem with banning, they get to throw a tantrum for a couple days but then you've taken away their access to victims.
I think the average person has always been a little more racist than the mass media. I don't think this was deliberate censorship, it was just the fact that to work in mass media people tend to be relatively smart and well educated, and as you add education a lot of the ignorance that feeds racism goes away.
Now that social media has reached the masses all that unintentional censorship is gone and ignorant views and arguments are getting a lot more air.
I don't think that censorship is the answer but we need to recognize that it was effective.
The real solution is to explain to the masses the thing that took the elites years of advanced education to figure out, that racism is wrong.
because these groups have been hitting the dog whistle so hard you'd think they picked up a coaches whistle by mistake.
And we called out Black Nationalists in the 70s. They mostly calmed the hell down and stopped being racists. The White Nationalists didn't do that when they were called out. They doubled and trippled down. Mostly because they're being used by a wealthy elite to win elections and stuff state legislatures with pro-corporate anti-worker politicians. That's what pisses me off the most about racism. It's just an excuse to give everything to the 1%.
But Trump is standing up to the 1% by filling his cabinet with Goldman Sachs executives!
your understanding is inconsistent with modern Democracies which include numerous checks and balances and protections of minorities.
One of these checks and balances is called the Electoral College:)
And your argument comes full circle, how is the EC a check and balance that protects minorities?
All the foreign leaders Trump praises are authoritarians who Trump praises specifically for their authoritarian actions.
Why would you expect him to reverse the expansion of executive power?
It's the nature of the beast. That is to say, it is easy for him to undo executive actions - nobody can tell him, "Obama had the power to make executive orders about immigration policy, and you can't!" However, it will be hard for him to create *new* executive actions, since everyone can tell him "Obama shouldn't have had this power, so you shouldn't either." The restraint imposed upon an executive makes it hard for them to expand executive power, and easy to reduce executive power, and it is in his (and arguably our own) interests to reduce many of the executive fiats Obama pushed.
The GOP controls all three branches of government and it's dubious that they'll start standing up to their own president.
There's also the concern of what he'll do when he's told he has to stop, the SCOTUS doesn't have an army, what happens if the commander in chief decides a ruling is wrong and he knows better? Trump is still extremely unknown as to how he'll govern.
1) there's a difference between legal and illegal Mexicans (or hispanics), and illegals don't have any right to be left alone;
All hispanics are getting caught in the crossfire, when you say you're going to deport millions of Mexicans people are going to start looking at any Hispanic person as an illegal immigrant who should be deported.
2) they want muslim terrorists and their sympathizers to leave *everyone* alone.
And yet they're targeting Muslims as a whole, which causes a lot of hate crimes and creates more Muslim terrorists and terrorist sympathizers.
And what does an EC do to stop the winners from enslaving the losers anyway?
It's called checks and balances. The liberal majority for the past 8 years has foisted upon the minority a massive expansion of executive power (and government power in general), and the minority has bitten back.
So when you wrote:
if you can't understand the very *intentional* reasons behind avoiding a pure democracy (such as 51% of the population deciding democratically to enslave the remaining 49%)
That actually had nothing to do with popular vote or the electoral college, you were just making an unrelated argument about the trouble with what you consider "pure Democracy". Note your understanding is inconsistent with modern Democracies which include numerous checks and balances and protections of minorities.
The good news is that this expansion of executive power can be undone with the stroke of a Trumpian presidential pen
All the foreign leaders Trump praises are authoritarians who Trump praises specifically for their authoritarian actions.
Why would you expect him to reverse the expansion of executive power?
- the better news is that you'll see liberals embrace the idea of putting limits on new Trumpian executive action, and thereby protecting the rights of both the majority and the minority.
As did Liberals during Bush, Conservatives during Obama, and it would have been Conservatives again under Clinton.
tl;dr - leave us alone. That's really what the victorious minority in this election cycle was saying. Once the chastened majority realizes this, and takes it to heart, they'll start winning elections again.
They weren't saying leave the Muslims or Mexicans alone, in fact, Trump's biggest and most consistent campaign pledges all revolved around specific actions he'd take against those two minorities.
The fact that outraged citizens who have had their popular vote winner lose an electoral college contest is a tribute to the lack of education these people have.
Again, we're not a democracy, we're a federal republic.
If this surprises you, or outrages you, you didn't pay attention in civics class.
It may surprise you that I'm not a moron so your "fact" didn't surprise me, nor did it surprise the vast majority of those outraged citizens you speak of with such contempt.
Furthermore, if you can't understand the very *intentional* reasons behind avoiding a pure democracy (such as 51% of the population deciding democratically to enslave the remaining 49%), then you lack sufficient imagination and intelligence to be worth listening to on the matter.
Or the other intentional reason for avoiding a democracy, such as enabling slavery.
Question: How do you count slaves for 3/5s of a person without giving them a vote under a proper democracy?
Answer: You can't. That's one of the reasons you create a system like the electoral college, where slave owning states can get extra electors for their slaves, but they don't actually have to give their slaves a vote.
And what does an EC do to stop the winners from enslaving the losers anyway? It just changes the criteria from "51% of the population" to "51% of the electoral college votes". Worse than that it means the winners have no stake in building support in the states they lose, so a Democrat could run on a policy of "enslave Texas" because, unlike popular vote, losing votes in Texas is completely irrelevant.
tl;dr - there was a good reason for instituting the EC in the first place, and those reasons haven't changed.
Other reasons included avoiding a demagogue, which failed pretty spectacularly.
The original country was much less federalist, so a President who was supposed represent states as more equal partners makes more sense.
And finally under a pure popular vote regions with lower populations tend to be ignored politically. The EC does fix this though it really goes overboard, the Senate does more than enough to give them representation.
Slashdot Mirror
And, it took all of about 37 seconds before someone compared a businessman and reality TV star to a vicious, military-style dictator who started a world war that caused the death of more than one hundred million people and methodically murdered millions of people in concentration camps.
Yeah, I'm invoking Godwin's Law because it's applicable here and really a really tired comparison.
So lets keep him has a businessman, reality TV star, and likely crappy president by not ignoring the giant red flags that have been waving for the past year.
If you want to see the oppositions disproval, then you Need to fund their research equally, just like the researchers received the massive funding for their work who actually started off with assumption that greenhouse-gas-caused climate change exists and is caused by humans.
The ones who assume work doesn't prove the foundation of their research is true though,
they just further developed the theory, which doesn't receive adequate funding for critical truth analysis.
Cool, so who's going to fund my flat earth research?
Ah, even more bullshit. Spearfishing is not hacking. Someone emails you their password, you access their account, you have only reached the level of unauthorized access, NOT hacking.
Which is why I tried to stop arguing this by calling it unauthorized access.
If the Clinton campaign hadn't been engaging in dishonest activity, and if Clinton hadn't been dishonest herself in her 2-faced speeches, there wouldn't have been any dirt to leak.
Her speeches were only remarkable in that there wasn't more of a smoking gun. All politicians occasionally find themselves in positions where their public positions don't match their private positions. It's not ideal but its unfortunately an activity that is rewarded by the public.
Blaming the messenger is not going to cut it. She should never have been the candidate, and if the DNC process had worked as it was supposed to, impartially, she wouldn't have been, and Sanders would be president-elect.
If the RNC process had worked how it had supposed to Trump wouldn't have been the candidate. The DNC process wasn't impartial, but it wasn't rigged either. Parties do their best to give both candidates a fair chance while signalling who they prefer, in 2008 Obama was able to overcome this obstacle, in 2016 Sanders couldn't.
Personally I think Clinton would have been a great President and was by far the best person for the job, unfortunately she tends to under perform as a candidate. If he were nominated Sanders may have won, but there's a reason the RNC was rooting for Sanders. He was untested in the national spotlight and a lot further to the left than the median US voter, he could have scared a lot of people back to Trump
It's not like a Clinton presidency would be any better than a Trump presidency.
I'm sorry, but are you insane?
Clinton, if all the horrible things said were true, would be a below average President who does more influence peddling than usual. Oh well.
Trump isn't even in office and he's stirred up the China-Taiwan situation, stirred up the middle east, and used his position as President elect to help out his companies. He's filling his cabinet with a mixture of incompetent yahoos and fringe characters who are fundamentally opposed to the departments they're supposed to run, and defending a hostile power who interfered in the election.
If the 2020 election was Trump v. Nixon I'd be campaigning for Nixon. I am not exaggerating when I say Trump poses a serious danger to your country.
All of that is bullshit when it comes to Podesta's account, which is where the motherlode of embarrassing emails with Clinton, the DNC, etc., came from. Podesta's account was NOT hacked.
The terminology doesn't matter, is was an unauthorized access.
The problem is that internal campaign emails will always have dirt, and the side that gets leaked will always be the side that gets hurt in the polls.
Imagine Trump's emails got leaked instead, and you got dirt about staffers complaining that Trump was an idiot, promises of appointments for support, or open discussions of how they were deliberately lying on some topic.
Those dumps, if they were made, probably would have resulted in a Clinton win.
Is that really how you want a campaign decided?
The emails were leaked because Podesta forwarded a password reset form of his email account to a tech and asked him if it was legit. Podesta mis-heard him or the tech got it wrong, and Podesta sent his log-in credentials to the spear-fisher. There was no hack. Not when your sucker emails you their password.
There was more than one hack.
As well public opinion should have been swayed. If you don't want to piss people off about your "public policy for the masses" and "private policy for wall street and the banks", don't give speeches about how you do that sh*t. Problem solved.
Then shouldn't they have had an opportunity to be swayed by the RNC or Trump Org. emails as well?
It's not his fault, because the media is purposely confusing things. Notice how they always talk about Russia "hacking the election" even though that's not at all what happened. And then when they do talk about what Russia is actually accused of doing, they always just say "emails" to try and conflate Hillary's email server with the Wikileaks dump. It's classic disinformation and if you talk about politics with regular people, it's working: people have just kind of mentally merged Hillary's private email server with the Wikileaks email dump with Russians "hacking the vote" despite the fact that none of them are related and the third never happened.
It's a technique that the Democrats are using to distance themselves from Hillary's historic failure as a candidate, and that the Republicans are more than happy to let them get away with because refusing to acknowledge the truth is only going to lead to a GOP supermajority in 2018 and likely a GOP-controlled Constitutional Convention within the next decade.
But it's not surprising that people are confused about what "Russian hacking" is - the media and the lame duck administration are purposely trying to confuse people.
I think you got it backwards, the media conflating the email stories was a huge benefit to the GOP during the election.
You also got it a bit confused as there were three to five distinct email stories (depending how you counted):
1) Clinton using a private unsecured email server instead of the official unsecured email sever, violating some department policies. It wasn't illegal and people had done similar things in the past, but not to the same extent.
2) The tech in charge of the email violated a subpoena. After Clinton turned over her official emails (having her lawyers do the sorting, which was according to protocol), they changed policy to start deleting old emails (completely legal and a good idea). The tech seems to have procrastinated until the subpoena was issued, at which point he illegally tried to fix his mistake by doing the delete. This was illegal and is the 33,000 deleted emails you hear about, but it seems to have just been the tech doing something stupid to fix his screwup. He was never charged since he got immunity in exchange for telling the FBI everything.
3) A few classified emails got sent through the unclassified server by accident. This was the reason for the FBI investigation, the basis for all the claims for her being locked up, and probably the least scandalous part. These are people working with classified and unclassified information on a daily basis, it's inevitable that they'd sometimes put something through the wrong system. It showed the State Dept was a bit too laid back handling classified information, but that's an issue that both preceded Clinton and went well beyond her.
4) Guccifer 2.0 hacked the DNC and gave internal DNC emails to Wikileaks. These were fairly benign mostly showing that yes, campaigns do sketchy stuff sometimes. The most scandalous bit was a party member who was also a CNN contributor got hold of a debate question during the primary and leaked it to the Clinton campaign. Everybody except Wikileaks and portions of the GOP thinks Guccifer 2.0 was actually Russian intelligence (it looks liked they hacked the RNC too but didn't disclose anything).
5) Finally John Podesta's gmail account was hacked directly, again by what appears to be Russian intelligence. Again nothing scandalous though it's fairly interesting since it shows in inside of a campaign. This also exposed the Clinton Foundation since Podesta was involved with that, and as such the Foundation which brought up questions about influence, got drawn into the controversy.
That the general public got confused is pretty much inevitable, there were a lot of different things going on. And since story had the air of something unsavoury going on then even reporting on something relatively savoury re-enforced the larger narrative that there was some kind of deep corruption going on.
Were you alive, then? Because it was a 14-month march to war.
Wow are you confused. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The Taliban in Afghanistan admitted to hosting and supporting Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who were responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
I know we're living in a post factual world where empirical truth doesn't exist. But the fact is that the U.S. led a coaliton of forces against the Taliban in Afghanistan beginning on October 7, 2001. Less than one month after the September 11 attacks.
A lot of people were confused back then, 9/11 was the major motivation for the war in Iraq and the Bush administration was constantly trying to conflate the two. If they didn't try to suggest they were allied there was always the implication that the crazy Arab Muslim Saddam would commit an unprovoked first strike with his WMDs the way al-Qaeda did on 9/11.
In reality they were mostly enemies, Saddam was a Sunni dictator in a majority Shia country so ran a largely secular state. Not dissimilar to Assad a Shia dictator in a majority Sunni country.
Al Qaeda did not like Saddam because of his secularism, and al-Qaeda was rightly thrilled on multiple counts when the US invaded Iraq, but the motive for the US invading Iraq was 9/11.
"We have looked at this issue carefully and we don't believe we do."
Translation: "We'll do whatever we want until a judge tells us to stop. Maybe not even then."
I don't really get why Uber would give a shit about autonomous vehicles. Their entire business model is based around an asset light setup. They don't own or insure the cars that Uber drivers use. Going to autonomous vehicles in any substantial way would require a very hefty capital investment AND it would ruin their (bogus) argument that they aren't a taxi service. It doesn't make much sense to me.
Uber's biggest asset isn't their drivers, it's all the customers who have installed the Uber app and keep using it.
Talking about self-driving cars generates a lot of free advertising and brings them customers.
And if they ever do get the tech and regulatory approval they'll be able to raise more than enough capital to start fleets for their core markets.
> Which is why the credibility of the reporter quoting the anonymous source matters.
No, it doesn't. I give credit to factual evidence, not anonymous rumors.
I give credit to the heuristics that most reliably lead me to the truth.
Finding people or institutions who are good sources of information and have a good track record is a better than average method for finding the truth.
Attempting to independently verify a small subset of the relevant facts in a field for which I have limited expertise is a very easy way to be wrong.
Yay, we finally get something like a fact. You should really point here though as it has more details.
Though that's an earlier article that leaves out the smoking gun of the same IP being used as the control address for the DNC hack and the hack on the German parliament demonstrating the same actor was behind both.
But when we get to the bottom of it, we find it's mostly assumed because of a few RATs (remote access trojans). Problems with that:
- Guccifer 2.0 took credit for it.
Which never made sense, a fairly advanced hacker emulating a guy who guessed password resets do dump celebrity emails?
See also: https://www.sovereignman.com/trends/former-intelligence-officer-on-the-bogus-russian-hack-20578/
A source who both mischaracterizes the Iraq war build up (the CIA did not generally agree with Bush), who undersells the Russian hack evidence (leaving out the control addresses), and is mostly trying to sell a conspiratorial anti-government book and speaking/consulting business.
And one last note, but they were planning to blame Trump for being too cozy to Russia from the beginning.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/25651
The timing doesn't work out either, because Trump was still a dark horse candidate during the first leaks
But Trump's uncomfortable pro-Russian biases and entanglements were known all along, that may have been one of the reasons Putin was willing to through with it.
and the DNC itself was asking its media allies to support Trump as one of the "pied piper" candidates, as you can see in the PDF attached to this email
So?
> No there aren't, at least not in this article.
Yes, the FBI, though they only allude to that in passing. There have been other random anonymous people quoted as disagreeing too. I don't think there's much point in playing the "my anonymous source can beat up your anonymous source" game though.
Which is why the credibility of the reporter quoting the anonymous source matters.
> Because a lot of the evidence comes from confidential sources like CIA spies.
Yeah, no. See, I got over the secret evidence thing back when they used it to manufacture the war in Iraq.
Which is why you should be skeptical of politicians cherry picking and misrepresenting evidence from the CIA.
The CIA itself was a lot more skeptical about the WMDs than Bush implied.
Because that's been well established for months.
If by "well established" you mean that the press keeps reporting that it's true without giving us even one single verifiable fact we could hang our hat on.
Ok here. Unless you want them to personally drop hard drives off at your house I'm not sure what else you expect.
First they were going to allow a custom emoji for "#CrookedHillary", then when it got too offensive/slanderous they decided "no, we won't do political emojis".
Wouldn't a better policy simply be to say "we don't do emojis that denigrate other people"?
That's a fascinating article, actually. Why don't we look at the evidence they present to support their claims?
So... they have anonymous people who are reporting rumors that they won't attach their names to.
AKA anonymous leakers, a basic reporting tool.
The leakers don't publicize their names because they're not supposed to be leaking the information, but the reporter can vouch for the fact that they are senior officials with access to the information.
And there are other insiders saying the complete opposite.
No there aren't, at least not in this article.
Lovely. Why don't they put out some actual, hard proof?
Because a lot of the evidence comes from confidential sources like CIA spies.
Or prosecute someone?
Who? Vladimir Putin?
So the FBI is willing to put their name on this saying it's not true
I'm not sure how you read that sentence and came up with that interpretation.
The FBI did not say it was false that Russia was trying to elect Trump. The FBI, and every other agency that investigated it, said they agree that Russia was trying to hurt Clinton, but they don't know if the intent was merely to destabilize the US or to actually have Trump win the election.
And NBC simply labels this as a "Russian operation" despite failing to present any evidence of that.
Because that's been well established for months.
You can read all about the bad jouranlism behind this conclusion if you wish.
And have a good laugh at the "analysis" within. He simply dismissed all of the evidence of the hacking group intruding to the DNC network. Has Assange even disclosed how he knows that the "leaker" is a DNC insider and not some Russian operative claiming to be one?
Back on topic, let's not forget that they brought up the 17 intelligence agencies again. Would it kill you guys to actually name them? It's also misleading, because it comes from the directors (political appointees)
Who else is going to endorse the statement except the director? And you really think that not only did 17 directors all endorse a false statement, but that no one in any of their agencies leaked evidence to the contrary?
No. They essentially say these hacks fit the profile of other attacks that have been tied to Russia.
The technical term for that is that it was a 'brain fart'. Brain farts can happen to anybody. As evidenced here, when a brain fart happens you can even re-correct the words around the 'typo' as in using 'a' instead of 'an.'
Agreed though I wouldn't necessarily call "brain fart" a technical term.
The takeaway is that it was ordinary low-level phishing that cracked Podesta's account. The Clinton team wasn't even invulnerable to plain vanilla phishing.
Well they did have protocols to protect against phishing, and those protocols were followed, but one of the people in that chain made a fairly epic screw up, and fundamentally no organization is immune to someone making an epic screw up.
And remember the RNC was also hacked, so this isn't a case of one side being incompetent.
Is Podesta even in any kind of position now where his computer illiteracy could get him in trouble again?
He was computer literate enough to delegate the tasks he didn't understand, unfortunately the people he delegated to screwed up.
The team he was on lost, and he's very tied to the fortunes of Ms. Clinton and probably won't be the head of anybody's campaign again.
Maybe, maybe not. He's still an extremely competent individual, though I'm not sure if he'd be interested in running a campaign for someone other than a Clinton.
Clinton campaign aide Charles Delavan replied that it was "a legitimate email"............he had intended to type "illegitimate,"
If that's true, shouldn't they have used "an" instead of "a". These are college graduates after all, right?
He doesn't mean typo in the sense that he meant to write "illegitimate" and wrote "jllegitmate".
He meant typo in the sense that he thought "oh that's an illegitimate email" and intended to write something to that effect, but ended up writing something completely opposite.
Just think back to the times you proofread and found a typo, sometimes it's a mistyped word, and sometimes you find words that are radically different than you intended.
Of course that doesn't mean he's telling the truth, it does seem odd that he's tell Podesta to change the password in response to a phishing request. Though it does clear Podesta a bit, as he was mostly following ITs orders (though he did click the link from the "legitimate email" instead of the link from the IT email).
This could enable someone to easily kidnap or assisnate VIP people. I'd think twice about using Uber if I were a person with a lot of money or power.
That's probably not that hard for a dedicated psycho to do already.
The more realistic concern might be scandal, troll through the data for a rich VIP who might be having an affair, then blackmail them.
Then he was a good man, but a bad muslim.
You don't get to decide who's a proper Muslim or not.
Anyone who points to themselves and sincerely says "I'm a Muslim/Christian/Jew/Atheist" then I generally take them at their word.
and you can't ignore the interests of minority small states.
And I'm sure you'd feel the same way if small states were black and hispanic majority and it was your "team" that lost elections about it.
No wait I forgot, you're a massive hypocrite who would be outraged because you're so obsessed with winning you'll reach out at any dubious justification that gives you an advantage.
Just like I'm sure you think every voter needs to show ID, to combat the virtually non-existent problem of voter fraud. But you think accessibility is really important so you have no issue with mail-in ballots.
We traditionally define minority in terms of race, religion, or sexuality, precisely because those groups are typically discriminated against.
Hrm. Let's shelve that dubious tradition for a moment, and focus on what minority means in the sense of a democratic government where each proposition that passes has a majority (or plurality) support, and a minority that opposes it.
Yes, lets shelve what people actually mean when they talk about protecting minorities so you can confuse the debate by talking about a different concept that happens to share the same word.
Sorry, you're a bigoted piece of shit.
You know precious little about your best friends if you think muslims are a "race".
You're a pretentious moron if your positions are so facile that you need to reject the popular definition of a word in favour of a ridiculously pedantic definition and then claim intellectual superiority.
Secondly, if your muslim friends don't disavow sharia law
Do your Christian friends disavow biblical law? Do you tell them to fuck off if they don't?
(which, my muslim friends do,
Somehow I'm doubtful your "Muslim friends" know your real views.
If your holy book insists that you create earthly governments that subjugate women, or kill gays, you can kindly do that barbaric shit somewhere else.
Blah blah, applies to christians too.
The most devout guy I knew was best friends with a lesbian. News flash, a lot of people don't actually follow their holy books.
Ask them if they support sharia law.
Ask them if they believe sharia law should apply to non muslims.
Ask them if they believe sharia law should override the constitution.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
If they really are good people, the aren't "good" muslims.
Looks like your party would be quite at home.
I'm not going to claim that Muslims in general are as liberal as Christians. But to say the that anyone who considers themselves a devout Muslim is somehow a terrorist sympathizer looking to subjugate non-Muslims is ignorant and bigoted.
It protects the minority of people who live in small states from the majority who life in large states.
I think you're conflating "minority" with some specific racial term, rather than a generic term for any less than 50% of the population that believes in a given policy.
That's a pretty odd definition for "minority", you're not even properly selecting for rural vs urban, you're just giving a disproportionate of power to people who happen to live in small states.
We traditionally define minority in terms of race, religion, or sexuality, precisely because those groups are typically discriminated against.
I hope they do, but I have little faith considering how awful a job they did during the election.
and will soon be about even in the SCOTUS
They are already even in the SCOTUS, the fact that Kennedy is the swing vote doesn't mean he's now a Liberal.
That's not how racism works.
Muslims are targeting Americans as a whole. Any muslim (who, in fact, are victims of islam), who can disavow sharia law, is completely fine.
That is BULLSHIT absolute BULLSHIT.
I know Muslims you racist piece of shit, they are some of my best friends and some of the absolutely nicest and most peaceful people I know.
These are real fucking people you are talking about, people you just blithely claim "are targeting Americans as a whole" because you have some weird idea about what they're supposed to believe. You should walk up to some of the Muslims I know, good people who helped me get through tough times, people with whom I talked about religion, people I went to parties with, played sports with, guys with whom I talked about girls, people who moved to your country and I dearly miss.
You should try getting to know them as something other than a ridiculous caricature and then see if you still feel comfortable repeating that shit to them.
Yes, so after dozens of comments exchanged you've found the way to strike a nerve and make me absolutely furious, you just need to target good innocent people.
Yes, and then let this application grow and gain neo nazi moderators and turn it into a racist safe space.
Without free discussion, and real actual discussion instead of retarded namecalling we get shit like trump in power.
But I don't think they actually want a safe space, they want victimization.
The alt-right segment that is causing trouble on Twitter has a very predictable pattern, they find a target and then troll them until they get a reaction. If the victim retaliates they claim that the victim is the real racist/sexist/bad person, if instead the service retaliates they claim they're being censored.
In either case they need a victim to target and aggravate and they need an authority to rebel against. You're not going to get a lot of black women signing up to be harassed on an alt-right Twitter knock-off. The only way they get what they're looking for is by being on the same service as their target.
If you're talking about actual harassment I have no problem with banning, they get to throw a tantrum for a couple days but then you've taken away their access to victims.
I think the average person has always been a little more racist than the mass media. I don't think this was deliberate censorship, it was just the fact that to work in mass media people tend to be relatively smart and well educated, and as you add education a lot of the ignorance that feeds racism goes away.
Now that social media has reached the masses all that unintentional censorship is gone and ignorant views and arguments are getting a lot more air.
I don't think that censorship is the answer but we need to recognize that it was effective.
The real solution is to explain to the masses the thing that took the elites years of advanced education to figure out, that racism is wrong.
because these groups have been hitting the dog whistle so hard you'd think they picked up a coaches whistle by mistake.
And we called out Black Nationalists in the 70s. They mostly calmed the hell down and stopped being racists. The White Nationalists didn't do that when they were called out. They doubled and trippled down. Mostly because they're being used by a wealthy elite to win elections and stuff state legislatures with pro-corporate anti-worker politicians. That's what pisses me off the most about racism. It's just an excuse to give everything to the 1%.
But Trump is standing up to the 1% by filling his cabinet with Goldman Sachs executives!
One of these checks and balances is called the Electoral College :)
And your argument comes full circle, how is the EC a check and balance that protects minorities?
It's the nature of the beast. That is to say, it is easy for him to undo executive actions - nobody can tell him, "Obama had the power to make executive orders about immigration policy, and you can't!" However, it will be hard for him to create *new* executive actions, since everyone can tell him "Obama shouldn't have had this power, so you shouldn't either." The restraint imposed upon an executive makes it hard for them to expand executive power, and easy to reduce executive power, and it is in his (and arguably our own) interests to reduce many of the executive fiats Obama pushed.
The GOP controls all three branches of government and it's dubious that they'll start standing up to their own president.
There's also the concern of what he'll do when he's told he has to stop, the SCOTUS doesn't have an army, what happens if the commander in chief decides a ruling is wrong and he knows better? Trump is still extremely unknown as to how he'll govern.
All hispanics are getting caught in the crossfire, when you say you're going to deport millions of Mexicans people are going to start looking at any Hispanic person as an illegal immigrant who should be deported.
2) they want muslim terrorists and their sympathizers to leave *everyone* alone.
And yet they're targeting Muslims as a whole, which causes a lot of hate crimes and creates more Muslim terrorists and terrorist sympathizers.
It's called checks and balances. The liberal majority for the past 8 years has foisted upon the minority a massive expansion of executive power (and government power in general), and the minority has bitten back.
So when you wrote:
if you can't understand the very *intentional* reasons behind avoiding a pure democracy (such as 51% of the population deciding democratically to enslave the remaining 49%)
That actually had nothing to do with popular vote or the electoral college, you were just making an unrelated argument about the trouble with what you consider "pure Democracy". Note your understanding is inconsistent with modern Democracies which include numerous checks and balances and protections of minorities.
The good news is that this expansion of executive power can be undone with the stroke of a Trumpian presidential pen
All the foreign leaders Trump praises are authoritarians who Trump praises specifically for their authoritarian actions.
Why would you expect him to reverse the expansion of executive power?
- the better news is that you'll see liberals embrace the idea of putting limits on new Trumpian executive action, and thereby protecting the rights of both the majority and the minority.
As did Liberals during Bush, Conservatives during Obama, and it would have been Conservatives again under Clinton.
tl;dr - leave us alone. That's really what the victorious minority in this election cycle was saying. Once the chastened majority realizes this, and takes it to heart, they'll start winning elections again.
They weren't saying leave the Muslims or Mexicans alone, in fact, Trump's biggest and most consistent campaign pledges all revolved around specific actions he'd take against those two minorities.
We're a federal republic.
The fact that outraged citizens who have had their popular vote winner lose an electoral college contest is a tribute to the lack of education these people have.
Again, we're not a democracy, we're a federal republic.
If this surprises you, or outrages you, you didn't pay attention in civics class.
It may surprise you that I'm not a moron so your "fact" didn't surprise me, nor did it surprise the vast majority of those outraged citizens you speak of with such contempt.
Furthermore, if you can't understand the very *intentional* reasons behind avoiding a pure democracy (such as 51% of the population deciding democratically to enslave the remaining 49%), then you lack sufficient imagination and intelligence to be worth listening to on the matter.
Or the other intentional reason for avoiding a democracy, such as enabling slavery.
Question: How do you count slaves for 3/5s of a person without giving them a vote under a proper democracy?
Answer: You can't. That's one of the reasons you create a system like the electoral college, where slave owning states can get extra electors for their slaves, but they don't actually have to give their slaves a vote.
And what does an EC do to stop the winners from enslaving the losers anyway? It just changes the criteria from "51% of the population" to "51% of the electoral college votes". Worse than that it means the winners have no stake in building support in the states they lose, so a Democrat could run on a policy of "enslave Texas" because, unlike popular vote, losing votes in Texas is completely irrelevant.
tl;dr - there was a good reason for instituting the EC in the first place, and those reasons haven't changed.
Other reasons included avoiding a demagogue, which failed pretty spectacularly.
The original country was much less federalist, so a President who was supposed represent states as more equal partners makes more sense.
And finally under a pure popular vote regions with lower populations tend to be ignored politically. The EC does fix this though it really goes overboard, the Senate does more than enough to give them representation.