They were denounced for doing a ballistic missile test, which was supposed to be stopped as part of Security Council resolution 1718. The denouncement didn't come with much teeth, like adding sanctions or whatnot, it just made demands to stop the missile and nuclear programs. The North Koreans promptly tested another nuclear weapon in response to that.
Are you for real about suggesting this being faked? Have you gone that far down the rabbit hole that you go straight to thinking of fabricated evidence? The North Koreans were proudly announcing that they were going launch the rocket ahead of time! The North Koreans were even the ones who "faked" things, because they said it was a successful launch when it was ruled to be a failure by outside observers.
This is also a big issue for the Trump administration with the deal over Iran's nuclear program. Part of the excuse the Trump folks want to use to break that is that Iran has still done missile tests, but those missile tests weren't a dealbreaker under the conditions of that agreement. So that would be a clear example of reneging on a deal by the US if Trump does that, while the historical case here all the US did was a denouncement when North Korea actually had violated the relevant UNSC resolution.
You really don't seem to know much about how the North Koreans operate, history has shown plenty that they simply can't be trusted. This isn't the first time that they've offered to drop their nuclear weapons program.
In 2007 they agreed to move towards disarmament, and over the course of 2007 and 2008 they actually took substantive steps in that direction, in particular surrounding shutting down the Yongbyon nuclear facility. In return they received aid, and were removed from the US list of State Sponsors of Terrorism in October 2008.
Nothing about that lasted. In 2009 they failed in the launch of the Kwangmyngsng-2 satellite, were denounced in turn by the UN as that launch being cover for a missile test, and subsequently restarted their nuclear program and tested another nuclear weapon in the following month, May 2009, and continued their weapons program up to and including the more recent thermonuclear tests. Notably, this was also roughly the timeframe when Kim Jong-Un was securing the succession, he was named the successor by Kim Jong-il in January 2009, and more steps locking that in took place over 2009 and the subsequent years leading up to Kim Jong-il's death in December 2011.
This really isn't all about Trump, he and his supporters are blinding themselves if they think that somehow his force of personality or whatever will somehow magically fix the problem with North Korea. Their duplicity on nuclear weapons goes back many US presidencies, and if there was an easy way to solve the problem its doubtful we'd be in this position in the first place.
Why is long term sustainability of cash flows necessary from the side of the biotech companies? Stop and think about it, why?
Even in the realm of mathematical finance a sustainable cash flow is not any sort of prerequisite for profitability. If they can make enough income to sufficiently offset the risk based discounting of the initial investments, then there is no need for the income to be long lasting. It could even come in a single lump sum, as long as that lump is big enough.
In slightly reduced jargon, the pharmaceutical company could make bank on their perfect cure in the short term, more than enough to offset any investment costs even considering the likely high risk of failure, and cash out for their investors and shut down once the cure is no longer necessary, and that would be totally worthwhile even from a purely amoral capitalistic standpoint. That money and subsequently the real resources and labors that it represents could afterwards be used for some other productive ends.
That doesn't seem like it is enough, they seem to want more and more. Maybe they are suggesting that the biotrech companies could just switch between various productive ends and keep that money "in house", but the talk of needing "sustainability" or "less risky business" comes across as more than a dispassionate analysis that the cash flows of such cures will be short term.
It comes across as rent-seeking to me, if there is a value judgement to be made.
From an dry analysis of cash flows and such, the basic argument that the one-shot permanent cure will produce a short term spike in income that will fall off in the long term makes perfect sense. The problem is the apparent assumption that a long term sustained cash flow is somehow desirable or necessary, that pharmaceutical companies should be producing perpetuities.
Metaphorically, there is an expectation to be breeding geese that lay golden eggs as opposed to digging gold mines. Gold mines will eventually be unprofitable when the worthwhile veins are dug up, and the miners will have to dig elsewhere or do something else once the mine runs out, but there's still profit to be made for a limited time, enough to make an enterprise worth it. But the geese are a fantasy, if you are talking about making gold. Even in the quotes the analysis says that there is tremendous value to society for the cures, which suggests that there should be plenty of non-rent profit to be had for a limited timeframe if the technology works. But long term sustained profits of the type that GS expects...that starts sounding more like economic rent to me.
To quote Adam Smith on the classical notion of rents:
As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them; and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities makes a third component part
"Profitable business" is not the same thing as a perpetual profit with exponential growth and/or unending dividends. That is how the GS types think, though, got to get that edge over the "risk free rate", or instead get the money out now and nuts to the long term consequences.
This should be another example making it obvious to even the dimmer amongst us that optimizing for individual actors or businesses (like Goldman-Sachs) is not the same thing as optimizing for the society as a whole. I'm not that optimistic in our ability to learn that lesson, though, the sheep seem content to side with the wolves if the rabbits will be eaten first.
Me, some random asshole on the internet, thinking that these guys are likely guilty of crimes does not make this a witch hunt, and you clearly don't know what a witch hunt really is if you think that. I'm not in a jury room deciding whether they are going to be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt based on the case the prosecutors have provided, nor am I part of an angry mob going door to door short circuiting due process with torches and pitchforks. You guys can dish it out but you can't take it, which is pretty damn sad. It doesn't take you very long to reach for "but Hillary!" Is this witch hunt accusation projection? Are you so accustomed to the effort to gin up a witch hunt against her that you don't even know what a legitimate prosecution of political figures would look like?
Quite a turn of euphemism there to turn Manafort's accused crimes into a "paperwork matter", the mental gymnastics to pull that one off are worthy of the Olympics. Spoiler alert: tax fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering are serious business, especially when you consider the context of those crimes: the was money obtained from the recently ousted Ukrainian Yanukovych regime, a puppet government of Russia, as well as the mystery surrounding his business relationship with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska doesn't seem to be particularly happy with the outcome of that business relationship either, mind you, given that he is suing Paul Manafort for $25 million.
You should read up some of the history of Yanukovych, btw, it is pretty damn sobering. He did "lock her up!", with "her" being Yulia Tymoshenko, one of Yanukovych's main political rivals. If you want to know what a political witch hunt actually looks like, there you go, she got convicted for some pretty hard to figure out reasons (her dealmaking with Putin on gas that is piped through Ukraine, and using money from a climate change deal to put into the pension system as opposed to planting forests or something), and subsequently she was brutalized in prison. Putin himself said he couldn't understand why she went to prison. If you want to skip to the end of that story, Yanukovych turned out to be a crooked traitor and fled to Russia, Tymoshenko was let out of jail and her conviction dropped, and Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and propped up a civil war in Eastern Ukraine. So no, there's no guarantee that any of this type of thing will end well for those involved.
-Presumption of guilt: where is the presumption of guilt? Doesn't seem to be in the legal process from what I've seen so far, and that's the big place where it would matter if it was a bonafide witch hunt. Or if there were vigilantes going around attacking people on that presumption, but fortunately we haven't devolved enough into chaos for that to happen. If you are talking about the court of public opinion, then you really need to get a lot thicker skin, because if the standards for that were higher than "looks bad" then Trump would never have had any sort of political career at all. Remember that his political star rose due to delegitimizing Obama by insinuating that he was not born in America, not to mention all the other specious attacks since then, which is far more egregious than anything in this Russia business.
-Finding zero evidence of collusion: how do you know that? Seriously, how? Because the press has found evidence suggesting collusion, but the special prosecutor's probe hasn't shown its hand on that subject yet. They could have tons of evidence, or they might not, but they haven't disclosed that publicly either way and they haven't finished their investigation into that. The indictments so far have been for slightly different things than that.
-Unprofessional FBI leaders and agents: I don't think the truth on this one will go the way you want it to. The unprofessionalism being accused against Comey was to the detriment of Clinton, due to his editorializing on her case despite deciding not to indict her. McCabe is in a similar boat, he seems like oked sending word to congress that the Clinton email case was being reopened right before the election in October, which was promptly leaked to the public. That's almost by definition an October surprise. Of course, I don't believe those were the reasons why Trump and Sessions fired Comey and McCabe when and where they did, the circumstantial evidence hints towards a corrupt motive IMO, and may possibly rise to witness tampering or witness retaliation. Rushing to fire McCabe before the public release of the IG report that supposedly was the justification for his termination was a huge red flag.
-Phony "conspiracy against the United States charges": I think you are just arguing based on ignorance here, and you don't know what those laws mean. They probably won't have to prove those charges against the Russian nationals because Russia will never extradite them, not because they don't have a provable case. The charges against Manafort look remarkably strong from what I've read and heard about it.
-Overturning and election: sorry, but no, that's not what's going to happen unless this turns into a civil war or there are some major amendments to the Constitution. Hillary Clinton is not going to be president, and if Trump is going to get kicked out we have a specified line of succession which we will go down, which currently is loaded to the brim with Republicans. The lefties who desperately want Trump gone still know that Pence will be next. The president is not above the law, and we aren't going to remain a democratic republic for very long if we put him above the law.
You have to admit though, it's pretty funny to see Democrats, who for years made fun of conservatives for saying that Russia was a serious threat, now saying emphatically that Russia meddled and that Russia is threatening our democracy. Remember when Obama made fun of Romney for even bringing up Russia as a threat, making a flippant reply about the 1980s wanting their foreign policy back? Yeah, well who's laughing now? I suppose that we conservatives will have to satisfy ourselves with saying we told you so about Russia.
This is such an odd reaction and I've seen plenty of similar reasoning, but are you guys really thinking this through logically? Let's step through it.
The initial premise, that the Democrats underestimated the Russians a few years back despite the calls of some of the conservatives like Romney, and that ultimately that bit the Democrats in the ass when Russia made a serious play on them, is sensible enough for the starting point of an argument. However, a consequence of accepting that premise should be to say that the conservative Russia hawks like Romney were right, and that subsequently should lead to a conclusion somewhere along the lines that confrontation with Russia with the goal to mitigate their threat should be the way forward.
That's not at all the direction that the Republicans, by nominating and subsequently falling in line behind Trump, have taken with any consistency. The bulk of the party has dragged its feet, and the Republicans who took the hard line on Russia have been standouts as exceptions, like McCain and Romney. We are only just now in the last week, more than a year after the fact, getting real sanctions on Russian oligarchs, and that was only after a particularly brazen nerve agent assassination attempt on British soil. And a lot of the American right wing political base seems to think this whole Russia thing is puffed up fakery, with the long running prompting of Trump, and Trump has been remarkably submissive towards Putin.
If the Republicans want to satisfy themselves' with the parent's "I told you so!" about the Russian threat, they really need to come to the realization that the Russians really aren't on their side, and fast. Because there is no reason to expect any sort of loyalty from Putin to anyone over here, and there's no guarantee that he will refrain from busting out the dirty tricks against the Republicans if he sees it to be in his interest in the future. Putin really hated Clinton, but she's almost a political nonentity now, so who knows what pots he'll try stirring now that she's no longer a threat to him? Seems like he's got a whole lot of data on Americans to play with.
What's the evidence that this is a witch hunt? Is it just because Trump and his buds are calling it one? Because I've that's the standard I've got some bad news for you, Nixon thought it was a witch hunt against him, and no, that wasn't, and he had to quit before he got fired.
The Red Scare with McCarthy had major congressional force backing it, and congress seems to be asleep at the switch this time around, and sometimes running interference for Trump particularly through the actions of Rep. Nunes, as opposed to focusing on measures to secure electoral and other infrastructure. If you are going to invoke McCarthyism, you are going to want to show how it is a relevant comparison deeper than the pure surface similarity of being freaked out by the Russians.
You think Mueller's running a witch hunt? Because the work he's shown so far with the guilty pleas and indictments suggests otherwise. I know we've always been at war with Eastasia, but Mueller is a Republican, and was W Bush's pick to run the FBI, and was almost unanimously granted an extension to his 10 year term in Obama's first term. His background doesn't suggest him being any sort of political inquisitor.
I'm sorry, but from the other side of the fence these accusations of "witch hunt" really sound like cries of deflection and denial, there's an obvious amount of dirt in public view and the usual suspects want nothing more than to sweep it under the rug. Personally, I think a lot of these guys are guilty as hell, but ultimately I want the truth to come out and let the chips fall where they may. When you got guys like Hannity running interference for obvious crooks like Paul Manafort, who would be a total crook due to his work in Ukraine and for other dictators even if he had never met Trump, that's pretty clear indication that the truth and honest enforcement of the law is not the desired end from that side.
Having populations sitting around and unable to integrate with the country they are in or find legal livelihoods is a problem in a lot of places, and lots of them handle it a whole lot worse than the US does. Unfortunately, the AC above seems to want to use that as an excuse, and makes it pretty obvious that he's bomb throwing by reaching for the phrase "major white countries," which is not the least bit subtle. Also unfortunately, it looks like the Breitbart crowd has taken over moderation duties, as they would be the folks sympethetic towards this sort of "insight".
One of the worst manifestations of this problem is stateless people, which still exist even in places like Europe, even if they shouldn't by their own laws. Obviously it is also huge problem in the Middle East, and has been a compounding problem for a long time in large part due to the various wars dating back at least to the mid 20th-century wars against the Israelis and continuing to today with the Libyan and Syrian wars displacing large numbers of people as refugees.
Again unfortunately, the answer for this sort of problem that the alt-right and Trump folks seem to provide is the essentially the answer for the homeless that is routinely and roundly mocked on South Park: just send them elsewhere!
We should have already figured out well by now that the rhetoric around "merit-based immigration" was total bullshit when coming from Trump and his camp, it's a relic from the parts of the America right that aren't so virulently xenophobic and who used to have sway.
Really, this is what the "shithole" comments should have made perfectly clear. The problem with that wasn't that he used naughty language, it's that he didn't want people immigrating from "shitholes", but instead more coming from say, Norway. Doesn't matter if the "shitholes" have skilled people who want out and we could pick up in a brain drain, they are from of one of "those places" with too many of "those people".
He doesn't want to just clamp down on illegal immigration, he wants to clamp down on legal immigration too, and deport as much as he can get away with as a bonus. It doesn't do the rest of us much good to play doublespeak games with white supremacists like Stephen Miller.
It is another very clear piece of evidence of what Trump is not: a small government conservative in the American sense of that term. This is straight in the wheelhouse of "picking winning and losers" that small government conservatives have been railing against since at least as long as I have been politically aware. That faction of the American right has lost whatever dominance they had, and whether or not we like that we need to come to terms with it.
Unfortunately, as has been pointed out there doesn't seem to be much in the way of a coherent ideology motivating Trump's protectionism and favor for certain businesses over others. Trump's hatred for Amazon doesn't look high minded at all, he just doesn't like them and he doesn't like the threat they pose to the businesses that he does like. To be fair, there are coherent reasons to not like Amazon or want to curtail them, but when he reaches for BS arguments like those against the US postal service, it makes it pretty clear that the motive is simple political animus and he is working backwards to try to fill in justifications and policies from there.
I am not a small government conservative, but at least I can appreciate their argument that we shouldn't have the government build up and knock down businesses just because of their political connections or lack thereof. Perhaps they should actually do something about it, while they still can.
Depends on your opinion of what counts as a kludge, I guess.
Conventional cosmological theories are contradicted by observational evidence if you only include known forms of matter, but if there's a bunch of dark matter, non-ordinary matter out there that we haven't been to nail down by other means and doesn't show up appreciably via electromagnetic radiation then we might be able salvage those theories. That seems a bit kludgy to me, because it is an ad hoc response to a failure of theory. That kludge could lead to fruitful theory though, as it could point in the direction of previously unknown matter or some other phenomena. But it needs some more evidence and/or theory modifications to explain it beyond "not ordinary matter" to be complete.
I'm regaining an appreciation for my high school physics class opening with Ptolemaic epicycles, as they provided a mathematical fix to better model the anomalous planetary movements, but didn't provide the bigger picture insights into what was causing planetary motion or an impetus to move away from geocentrism until much later.
Newtonian mechanics makes pretty good estimations of lots of phenomena on the human scale, but we know that that was not the end of the story.
The name "dark matter" itself is indicative of it being known unknown. It's not named something vaguely Greek or Latin like the lots of the pedestrian forms of matter because we don't know with confidence what it is yet, and haven't had direct evidence as it's particular nature as "matter", and the phenomena might possibly not even be due to matter at all. The evidence is galactic motions and larger don't work mathematically with the conventional cosmological models if you only include the more familiar forms of baryonic matter we observe, but the math works much better if you have a whole lot of matter that we can't "see" outside of those gravitational effects. So you have a placeholder or best guess that seems to make the most sense when paired with what else we think we know, and you can plug it into the models and try to predict where it would be.
"Dark matter" may turn out to be "correct" in the sense that there may be a bunch of non-ordinary matter in the places we are guessing it is that is causing the expected gravitational effects, but the current state of the theory is inherently incomplete because dark matter can only defined now by saying it is not ordinary matter, but there is not an affirmative evidence backed argument for what it actually is. It could be something like WIMPs or whatever, but we need more evidence beyond relying on ad hoc fixes to earlier theories that failed in the face of anomalous galactic motions.
See, when you jump straight to "false flag" as an excuse without anything to back it up it doesn't make it look like you are dealing with this in good faith, especially when the accusation is that it linked back to a traceable IP that's presumably in Russia and not the endpoint of an anonymizer. At least when Trump reached for the "it could be anyone!" excuse during the 2016 election there weren't as many specific details in the public about the hack and the publication of the espionage materials.
At least a parallel construction argument would be halfway believable. I could very easily see the western intel agencies catching this guy and the uncovering overall operation by some other means, but not wanting to reveal those means they dig through the data to find one comparatively innocuous screw up and use that as the explanation for the public argument. Unlike the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, the intel community is justifiably paranoid about revealing sources and methods, so it would be hardly surprising for them to pick and choose which cards to reveal for indictments against Russians in Russia that will never be extradited by the Russian government.
Keep in mind what this guy (guccifer 2.0) was doing, he was basically running a social media and communications operation to publicize the stolen emails. There's no guarantee that he was personally involved with the initial hack that got the intel in the first place, and could easily have been using different systems and gotten handed the stuff from another department with tighter security.
Just speculating here, but one way I could think of this going wrong for him would be he could have normally been connecting to his accounts from a secured system with more automated connections to the VPNs and whatnot, but a small number of times decides to log on to social media outside of his normal workspace, and slips up and forgets to turn on the VPN there. Heavily secured systems can be a pain in the ass from a usability standpoint, and maybe he wanted to shitpost on Reddit or something and used his laptop and missed the VPN that one time, and well, whoops.
The recent example of NSA should also show that even high end signals intelligence agencies aren't completely airtight. Remember that the US case against Kaspersky depended on an NSA contractor screwing up and taking the NSA malware home on a compromised laptop. That's a bigger screw up than forgetting to connect to the VPN when logging on to social media one time.
It should be a flashing red light to sell stock in this guy's companies. This indicates a wider scale and deeper cluelessness about business in general, and that sort of aggressive cluelessness that does not bode well for the concept of "long term viability and profitability" for businesses he runs.
Or maybe he is just BSing and trying to ride a wave of exuberance but doesn't actually believe what he is saying. That's not really much better.
The American Right contains libertarian elements, but they are no where near as libertarian as they believe they are, much less represent themselves as. Ron Paul was one of the best examples of right-wing libertarianism in America, and he was an also-ran that never went much of anywhere in the Republican party. The authoritarian parts of that coalition have grown in power and really are in the driver's seat with Trump, and they were most strongly represented in the "Religious Right". This may come across as rude, but your insistence that the American Right wing can't be authoritarian comes across as a sort of forced naivete you'd see in an Orwell novel, because your notions of small government conservatism are both not uniformly held on the right nor are they the primary motivation for the dominant political actors in the current power structure on the right, and you haven't really been paying attention if you think they are.
Trumpism isn't really much of a coherent ideology, but if Trump is anything he is pretty strongly authoritarian, and the cult of personality built around him is also pretty authoritarian. In the psychological sense, the central elements of Right Wing Authoritarianism are as follows:
Authoritarian submission — a high degree of submissiveness to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.
Authoritarian aggression — a general aggressiveness directed against deviants, outgroups and other people that are perceived to be targets according to established authorities.
Conventionalism — a high degree of adherence to the traditions and social norms that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities and a belief that others in one's society should also be required to adhere to these norms.
These seem a much better fit of descriptors for Trump support than traditional small government conservatism. The central and consistently overwhelming anti-immigrant nature of him and his most ardent supporters should be a major tell demonstrating that, as the more pro-business and small government elements of the American right are no where near as hostile towards immigration in general or immigrants in particular. Duterte-like executions for drug dealers is also squarely authoritarian in nature. Authoritarian submission is a particularly interesting one, as that looks like that can turn on a dime with authoritarians when given the right push, as they can be "Blue lives matter" in one moment and deep state conspiracy theorists who want purges of the FBI in the next. The Stalinist purges are even less comforting historical examples of that, where old school Leninists who were in on the ground floor of the communist revolution in Russia were forced to confess as traitorous agents conspiring with the imperialists and the capitalists and executed and exiled to the gulags en masse, and also shows that the same impulses can take over the political "left".
As for authoritarian regimes, you seem to be missing the point a bit there too, because that seems to be what Trump wants, even if he can't get it. Wikipedia might not pass for a great scholarly resource, but authoritarianism in the other sense is a lot more complicated than simply having a more powerful central government. Burning down actual mechanisms of a free society while chanting it is in the name of "Freedom!" would hardly be out of character for an authoritarian movement, and if you need an example look at the base hatred towards the free press and the properly Orwellian invocation of "fake news!"
It's not even about being leftwing or pro-gun control, some of this just seems poorly thought out, in particular firearm assembly. I'm not big on guns, but I do know that taking them apart and putting them together is useful practical knowledge even if all you want to do is clean the gun, and there doesn't seem to be much gained by trying to block that. Going after bump stocks makes sense since it is a way to jury rig a machine gun that should be illegal like other means of jury rigging semi-automatics into full-automatics, but not basic practical knowledge on handling and proper maintenance.
Maybe they are up in arms (no pun intended) about the notion that people in the US can order various gun parts and put them together themselves, but that is more of a consequence of the pretty lax and frankly a little bit weird gun classification system used in the US that only the lower receiver is considered to be the firearm and thus is the only controlled part. Or perhaps the OP or article misrepresented the issue of ghost guns, where I could understand youtube not wanting to show how to manufacture hard to trace guns from 80% finished receivers.
I must hate myself to bother this much a Russian troll like yourself, but the indictment of the Internet Research Agency and the associated group of Russians has plenty of evidence in it. And I'm sure they will find out just how much more evidence there is against them if they decide to leave Russia and go to a country with an extradition treaty with the US. That sort of indictment is not an idle threat, as another Russian hacker extradited to the US from Spain found out the hard way.
I guess you can go back to apologia to the Russian invasion of Ukraine if you want to by pretending that the overthrow of Yanukovych was actually the done by the US government. I'm sure you have a wonderful Gish Gallop to justify that nonsense.
So what's your principle then? What is your standard that is independent of the particular actor? Is big data good, or is big data bad? Is what Obama did bad as well as what Trump did bad, or are they both ok? Or is there some reason why one is ok and the other is bad? Is it fine for Facebook and its ilk to have the keys to the big data kingdom to do with as they please?
Mods keep modding up this sort of crap, doesn't seem to accomplish much of getting to the bottom of the issue, just seems to be a bunch of Tu quoque chaff to short circuit any sort of higher thinking beyond tribalism. Perish the thought of a coherent analysis that might cause cognitive dissonance.
Right-wing authoritarianism is an academic term, I didn't make it up, and perhaps the mods should look it up before they decide that I am misusing it. It refers to a psychological outlook, and the "right wing" portion of it does not refer to the typical right-wing versus left-wing political spectrum. Stalinism is arguably fueled by RWA, even though communism is the opposite of right-wing from a traditional political standpoint.
I used the term right wing authoritarianism explicitly to differentiate it from an authoritarian regime, which is a related but different thing. But you don't seem to be referring to either, but rather just throwing shade, and not in a particularly informed manner.
Next you'll tell me the mafia isn't real. Or that Paul Manafort is a figment of my imagination.
List crazy conspiracy theories all you want, but you're just flashing shiny objects to distract from what's actually happening. Maybe in Russia you can get indictments with no evidence at all, but it typically doesn't work quite that way in the US federal legal system, at least as long as democracy isn't torn down. There's evidence both in the indictments and found by the news media, as well as forensic analysis of the email thefts of the dems. Though I suppose indictments aren't the way the Russians always handle problems, there seem to be a lot of dead Russian expats in Britain who died under mysterious circumstances after they ran afoul of Putin's gangster government. Or perhaps not so mysteriously when the poison was polonium or a Soviet era nerve agent.
Curious that you went out of the way to deny Trump being a Putin puppet, I just said he was acting extremely guilty, not particularly what he was guilty of. Because I'm not sure precisely what Trump is guilty of, it's a target rich environment given his business and personal history.
Right wing authoritarianism is on the rise nowadays, and it seems to have taken root pretty strongly in the internets, or at the very least it has taken root very loudly. Principles don't really matter for that, what matters is particular people, and whether it's my guy doing something or if it is your guy. Tu quoque is what passes for a standard rhetorical technique.
So for this subject, the underlying issue of whether or not Facebook hoovering up tons of personal data with poor controls on how that data is handled with political actors or even hostile criminal or foreign entities is immaterial to the RWA, much less the particular details of each case. What matters is whether Obama did it or Trump did it, or choose your own dichotomy if you are not in the US.
It really looks like it is time for the Wild West days of social media to come to an end, and the Europeans at the very least seem to have come that conclusion already. I'm not really expecting the Republicans in control of the US government currently to do much about it until the next time it bites them in the ass, though. Shouting "but Obama!" doesn't seem to be very motivated by the concept that there's a more general underlying problem, but rather as an excuse.
It has been pretty well established that the Russians waged a psychological warfare campaign in the 2016 election, and it looks like they were reaching out to elements of the Trump campaign at least both through Papadapolous and the Trump Tower meeting about "adoptions", aka the Magnitsky Act and the sanctions surrounding that. I suppose you can bullshit if you want about that, but there have been many indictments and even several guilty pleas around with these issues, and Don Jr. outed some of his emails himself about this last year.
It hasn't been made clear yet what Trump's role himself in all of this is, but his behavior has been, in the parlance of our times, acting guilty as all hell. His twitter tirade this weekend against McCabe and Mueller is not the behavior that comes out of an innocent person, or at very least it is of an extremely aggressive defense strategy desperate to discredit law enforcement and the prosecution in the face of indictments. He might run afoul of the same issues that Nixon did and follow a similar path, though, he might not get charged for the underlying criminal behavior like his underlings have been and will be, but instead for obstruction of justice and abuse of power. Go back and read about Watergate, you'll find that Nixon was actually quite a bit more subtle than Trump has been in that regard, and the impeachment case against Nixon was a slam dunk.
Cambridge Analytica being a criminal enterprise sure doesn't help though. Malware versus not malware and data breach versus not data breach is a lot more subtle of an issue than bribery and honeypots.
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They were denounced for doing a ballistic missile test, which was supposed to be stopped as part of Security Council resolution 1718. The denouncement didn't come with much teeth, like adding sanctions or whatnot, it just made demands to stop the missile and nuclear programs. The North Koreans promptly tested another nuclear weapon in response to that.
Are you for real about suggesting this being faked? Have you gone that far down the rabbit hole that you go straight to thinking of fabricated evidence? The North Koreans were proudly announcing that they were going launch the rocket ahead of time! The North Koreans were even the ones who "faked" things, because they said it was a successful launch when it was ruled to be a failure by outside observers.
This is also a big issue for the Trump administration with the deal over Iran's nuclear program. Part of the excuse the Trump folks want to use to break that is that Iran has still done missile tests, but those missile tests weren't a dealbreaker under the conditions of that agreement. So that would be a clear example of reneging on a deal by the US if Trump does that, while the historical case here all the US did was a denouncement when North Korea actually had violated the relevant UNSC resolution.
You really don't seem to know much about how the North Koreans operate, history has shown plenty that they simply can't be trusted. This isn't the first time that they've offered to drop their nuclear weapons program.
In 2007 they agreed to move towards disarmament, and over the course of 2007 and 2008 they actually took substantive steps in that direction, in particular surrounding shutting down the Yongbyon nuclear facility. In return they received aid, and were removed from the US list of State Sponsors of Terrorism in October 2008.
Nothing about that lasted. In 2009 they failed in the launch of the Kwangmyngsng-2 satellite, were denounced in turn by the UN as that launch being cover for a missile test, and subsequently restarted their nuclear program and tested another nuclear weapon in the following month, May 2009, and continued their weapons program up to and including the more recent thermonuclear tests. Notably, this was also roughly the timeframe when Kim Jong-Un was securing the succession, he was named the successor by Kim Jong-il in January 2009, and more steps locking that in took place over 2009 and the subsequent years leading up to Kim Jong-il's death in December 2011.
This really isn't all about Trump, he and his supporters are blinding themselves if they think that somehow his force of personality or whatever will somehow magically fix the problem with North Korea. Their duplicity on nuclear weapons goes back many US presidencies, and if there was an easy way to solve the problem its doubtful we'd be in this position in the first place.
Why is long term sustainability of cash flows necessary from the side of the biotech companies? Stop and think about it, why?
Even in the realm of mathematical finance a sustainable cash flow is not any sort of prerequisite for profitability. If they can make enough income to sufficiently offset the risk based discounting of the initial investments, then there is no need for the income to be long lasting. It could even come in a single lump sum, as long as that lump is big enough.
In slightly reduced jargon, the pharmaceutical company could make bank on their perfect cure in the short term, more than enough to offset any investment costs even considering the likely high risk of failure, and cash out for their investors and shut down once the cure is no longer necessary, and that would be totally worthwhile even from a purely amoral capitalistic standpoint. That money and subsequently the real resources and labors that it represents could afterwards be used for some other productive ends.
That doesn't seem like it is enough, they seem to want more and more. Maybe they are suggesting that the biotrech companies could just switch between various productive ends and keep that money "in house", but the talk of needing "sustainability" or "less risky business" comes across as more than a dispassionate analysis that the cash flows of such cures will be short term.
From an dry analysis of cash flows and such, the basic argument that the one-shot permanent cure will produce a short term spike in income that will fall off in the long term makes perfect sense. The problem is the apparent assumption that a long term sustained cash flow is somehow desirable or necessary, that pharmaceutical companies should be producing perpetuities.
Metaphorically, there is an expectation to be breeding geese that lay golden eggs as opposed to digging gold mines. Gold mines will eventually be unprofitable when the worthwhile veins are dug up, and the miners will have to dig elsewhere or do something else once the mine runs out, but there's still profit to be made for a limited time, enough to make an enterprise worth it. But the geese are a fantasy, if you are talking about making gold. Even in the quotes the analysis says that there is tremendous value to society for the cures, which suggests that there should be plenty of non-rent profit to be had for a limited timeframe if the technology works. But long term sustained profits of the type that GS expects...that starts sounding more like economic rent to me.
To quote Adam Smith on the classical notion of rents:
"Profitable business" is not the same thing as a perpetual profit with exponential growth and/or unending dividends. That is how the GS types think, though, got to get that edge over the "risk free rate", or instead get the money out now and nuts to the long term consequences.
This should be another example making it obvious to even the dimmer amongst us that optimizing for individual actors or businesses (like Goldman-Sachs) is not the same thing as optimizing for the society as a whole. I'm not that optimistic in our ability to learn that lesson, though, the sheep seem content to side with the wolves if the rabbits will be eaten first.
Me, some random asshole on the internet, thinking that these guys are likely guilty of crimes does not make this a witch hunt, and you clearly don't know what a witch hunt really is if you think that. I'm not in a jury room deciding whether they are going to be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt based on the case the prosecutors have provided, nor am I part of an angry mob going door to door short circuiting due process with torches and pitchforks. You guys can dish it out but you can't take it, which is pretty damn sad. It doesn't take you very long to reach for "but Hillary!" Is this witch hunt accusation projection? Are you so accustomed to the effort to gin up a witch hunt against her that you don't even know what a legitimate prosecution of political figures would look like?
Quite a turn of euphemism there to turn Manafort's accused crimes into a "paperwork matter", the mental gymnastics to pull that one off are worthy of the Olympics. Spoiler alert: tax fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering are serious business, especially when you consider the context of those crimes: the was money obtained from the recently ousted Ukrainian Yanukovych regime, a puppet government of Russia, as well as the mystery surrounding his business relationship with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska doesn't seem to be particularly happy with the outcome of that business relationship either, mind you, given that he is suing Paul Manafort for $25 million.
You should read up some of the history of Yanukovych, btw, it is pretty damn sobering. He did "lock her up!", with "her" being Yulia Tymoshenko, one of Yanukovych's main political rivals. If you want to know what a political witch hunt actually looks like, there you go, she got convicted for some pretty hard to figure out reasons (her dealmaking with Putin on gas that is piped through Ukraine, and using money from a climate change deal to put into the pension system as opposed to planting forests or something), and subsequently she was brutalized in prison. Putin himself said he couldn't understand why she went to prison. If you want to skip to the end of that story, Yanukovych turned out to be a crooked traitor and fled to Russia, Tymoshenko was let out of jail and her conviction dropped, and Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and propped up a civil war in Eastern Ukraine. So no, there's no guarantee that any of this type of thing will end well for those involved.
Ok, let's go through that.
-Presumption of guilt: where is the presumption of guilt? Doesn't seem to be in the legal process from what I've seen so far, and that's the big place where it would matter if it was a bonafide witch hunt. Or if there were vigilantes going around attacking people on that presumption, but fortunately we haven't devolved enough into chaos for that to happen. If you are talking about the court of public opinion, then you really need to get a lot thicker skin, because if the standards for that were higher than "looks bad" then Trump would never have had any sort of political career at all. Remember that his political star rose due to delegitimizing Obama by insinuating that he was not born in America, not to mention all the other specious attacks since then, which is far more egregious than anything in this Russia business.
-Finding zero evidence of collusion: how do you know that? Seriously, how? Because the press has found evidence suggesting collusion, but the special prosecutor's probe hasn't shown its hand on that subject yet. They could have tons of evidence, or they might not, but they haven't disclosed that publicly either way and they haven't finished their investigation into that. The indictments so far have been for slightly different things than that.
-Unprofessional FBI leaders and agents: I don't think the truth on this one will go the way you want it to. The unprofessionalism being accused against Comey was to the detriment of Clinton, due to his editorializing on her case despite deciding not to indict her. McCabe is in a similar boat, he seems like oked sending word to congress that the Clinton email case was being reopened right before the election in October, which was promptly leaked to the public. That's almost by definition an October surprise. Of course, I don't believe those were the reasons why Trump and Sessions fired Comey and McCabe when and where they did, the circumstantial evidence hints towards a corrupt motive IMO, and may possibly rise to witness tampering or witness retaliation. Rushing to fire McCabe before the public release of the IG report that supposedly was the justification for his termination was a huge red flag.
-Phony "conspiracy against the United States charges": I think you are just arguing based on ignorance here, and you don't know what those laws mean. They probably won't have to prove those charges against the Russian nationals because Russia will never extradite them, not because they don't have a provable case. The charges against Manafort look remarkably strong from what I've read and heard about it.
-Overturning and election: sorry, but no, that's not what's going to happen unless this turns into a civil war or there are some major amendments to the Constitution. Hillary Clinton is not going to be president, and if Trump is going to get kicked out we have a specified line of succession which we will go down, which currently is loaded to the brim with Republicans. The lefties who desperately want Trump gone still know that Pence will be next. The president is not above the law, and we aren't going to remain a democratic republic for very long if we put him above the law.
You have to admit though, it's pretty funny to see Democrats, who for years made fun of conservatives for saying that Russia was a serious threat, now saying emphatically that Russia meddled and that Russia is threatening our democracy. Remember when Obama made fun of Romney for even bringing up Russia as a threat, making a flippant reply about the 1980s wanting their foreign policy back? Yeah, well who's laughing now? I suppose that we conservatives will have to satisfy ourselves with saying we told you so about Russia.
This is such an odd reaction and I've seen plenty of similar reasoning, but are you guys really thinking this through logically? Let's step through it.
The initial premise, that the Democrats underestimated the Russians a few years back despite the calls of some of the conservatives like Romney, and that ultimately that bit the Democrats in the ass when Russia made a serious play on them, is sensible enough for the starting point of an argument. However, a consequence of accepting that premise should be to say that the conservative Russia hawks like Romney were right, and that subsequently should lead to a conclusion somewhere along the lines that confrontation with Russia with the goal to mitigate their threat should be the way forward.
That's not at all the direction that the Republicans, by nominating and subsequently falling in line behind Trump, have taken with any consistency. The bulk of the party has dragged its feet, and the Republicans who took the hard line on Russia have been standouts as exceptions, like McCain and Romney. We are only just now in the last week, more than a year after the fact, getting real sanctions on Russian oligarchs, and that was only after a particularly brazen nerve agent assassination attempt on British soil. And a lot of the American right wing political base seems to think this whole Russia thing is puffed up fakery, with the long running prompting of Trump, and Trump has been remarkably submissive towards Putin.
If the Republicans want to satisfy themselves' with the parent's "I told you so!" about the Russian threat, they really need to come to the realization that the Russians really aren't on their side, and fast. Because there is no reason to expect any sort of loyalty from Putin to anyone over here, and there's no guarantee that he will refrain from busting out the dirty tricks against the Republicans if he sees it to be in his interest in the future. Putin really hated Clinton, but she's almost a political nonentity now, so who knows what pots he'll try stirring now that she's no longer a threat to him? Seems like he's got a whole lot of data on Americans to play with.
What's the evidence that this is a witch hunt? Is it just because Trump and his buds are calling it one? Because I've that's the standard I've got some bad news for you, Nixon thought it was a witch hunt against him, and no, that wasn't, and he had to quit before he got fired.
The Red Scare with McCarthy had major congressional force backing it, and congress seems to be asleep at the switch this time around, and sometimes running interference for Trump particularly through the actions of Rep. Nunes, as opposed to focusing on measures to secure electoral and other infrastructure. If you are going to invoke McCarthyism, you are going to want to show how it is a relevant comparison deeper than the pure surface similarity of being freaked out by the Russians.
You think Mueller's running a witch hunt? Because the work he's shown so far with the guilty pleas and indictments suggests otherwise. I know we've always been at war with Eastasia, but Mueller is a Republican, and was W Bush's pick to run the FBI, and was almost unanimously granted an extension to his 10 year term in Obama's first term. His background doesn't suggest him being any sort of political inquisitor.
I'm sorry, but from the other side of the fence these accusations of "witch hunt" really sound like cries of deflection and denial, there's an obvious amount of dirt in public view and the usual suspects want nothing more than to sweep it under the rug. Personally, I think a lot of these guys are guilty as hell, but ultimately I want the truth to come out and let the chips fall where they may. When you got guys like Hannity running interference for obvious crooks like Paul Manafort, who would be a total crook due to his work in Ukraine and for other dictators even if he had never met Trump, that's pretty clear indication that the truth and honest enforcement of the law is not the desired end from that side.
Having populations sitting around and unable to integrate with the country they are in or find legal livelihoods is a problem in a lot of places, and lots of them handle it a whole lot worse than the US does. Unfortunately, the AC above seems to want to use that as an excuse, and makes it pretty obvious that he's bomb throwing by reaching for the phrase "major white countries," which is not the least bit subtle. Also unfortunately, it looks like the Breitbart crowd has taken over moderation duties, as they would be the folks sympethetic towards this sort of "insight".
One of the worst manifestations of this problem is stateless people, which still exist even in places like Europe, even if they shouldn't by their own laws. Obviously it is also huge problem in the Middle East, and has been a compounding problem for a long time in large part due to the various wars dating back at least to the mid 20th-century wars against the Israelis and continuing to today with the Libyan and Syrian wars displacing large numbers of people as refugees.
Again unfortunately, the answer for this sort of problem that the alt-right and Trump folks seem to provide is the essentially the answer for the homeless that is routinely and roundly mocked on South Park: just send them elsewhere!
We should have already figured out well by now that the rhetoric around "merit-based immigration" was total bullshit when coming from Trump and his camp, it's a relic from the parts of the America right that aren't so virulently xenophobic and who used to have sway.
Really, this is what the "shithole" comments should have made perfectly clear. The problem with that wasn't that he used naughty language, it's that he didn't want people immigrating from "shitholes", but instead more coming from say, Norway. Doesn't matter if the "shitholes" have skilled people who want out and we could pick up in a brain drain, they are from of one of "those places" with too many of "those people".
He doesn't want to just clamp down on illegal immigration, he wants to clamp down on legal immigration too, and deport as much as he can get away with as a bonus. It doesn't do the rest of us much good to play doublespeak games with white supremacists like Stephen Miller.
It is another very clear piece of evidence of what Trump is not: a small government conservative in the American sense of that term. This is straight in the wheelhouse of "picking winning and losers" that small government conservatives have been railing against since at least as long as I have been politically aware. That faction of the American right has lost whatever dominance they had, and whether or not we like that we need to come to terms with it.
Unfortunately, as has been pointed out there doesn't seem to be much in the way of a coherent ideology motivating Trump's protectionism and favor for certain businesses over others. Trump's hatred for Amazon doesn't look high minded at all, he just doesn't like them and he doesn't like the threat they pose to the businesses that he does like. To be fair, there are coherent reasons to not like Amazon or want to curtail them, but when he reaches for BS arguments like those against the US postal service, it makes it pretty clear that the motive is simple political animus and he is working backwards to try to fill in justifications and policies from there.
I am not a small government conservative, but at least I can appreciate their argument that we shouldn't have the government build up and knock down businesses just because of their political connections or lack thereof. Perhaps they should actually do something about it, while they still can.
Depends on your opinion of what counts as a kludge, I guess.
Conventional cosmological theories are contradicted by observational evidence if you only include known forms of matter, but if there's a bunch of dark matter, non-ordinary matter out there that we haven't been to nail down by other means and doesn't show up appreciably via electromagnetic radiation then we might be able salvage those theories. That seems a bit kludgy to me, because it is an ad hoc response to a failure of theory. That kludge could lead to fruitful theory though, as it could point in the direction of previously unknown matter or some other phenomena. But it needs some more evidence and/or theory modifications to explain it beyond "not ordinary matter" to be complete.
I'm regaining an appreciation for my high school physics class opening with Ptolemaic epicycles, as they provided a mathematical fix to better model the anomalous planetary movements, but didn't provide the bigger picture insights into what was causing planetary motion or an impetus to move away from geocentrism until much later.
Newtonian mechanics makes pretty good estimations of lots of phenomena on the human scale, but we know that that was not the end of the story.
The name "dark matter" itself is indicative of it being known unknown. It's not named something vaguely Greek or Latin like the lots of the pedestrian forms of matter because we don't know with confidence what it is yet, and haven't had direct evidence as it's particular nature as "matter", and the phenomena might possibly not even be due to matter at all. The evidence is galactic motions and larger don't work mathematically with the conventional cosmological models if you only include the more familiar forms of baryonic matter we observe, but the math works much better if you have a whole lot of matter that we can't "see" outside of those gravitational effects. So you have a placeholder or best guess that seems to make the most sense when paired with what else we think we know, and you can plug it into the models and try to predict where it would be.
"Dark matter" may turn out to be "correct" in the sense that there may be a bunch of non-ordinary matter in the places we are guessing it is that is causing the expected gravitational effects, but the current state of the theory is inherently incomplete because dark matter can only defined now by saying it is not ordinary matter, but there is not an affirmative evidence backed argument for what it actually is. It could be something like WIMPs or whatever, but we need more evidence beyond relying on ad hoc fixes to earlier theories that failed in the face of anomalous galactic motions.
See, when you jump straight to "false flag" as an excuse without anything to back it up it doesn't make it look like you are dealing with this in good faith, especially when the accusation is that it linked back to a traceable IP that's presumably in Russia and not the endpoint of an anonymizer. At least when Trump reached for the "it could be anyone!" excuse during the 2016 election there weren't as many specific details in the public about the hack and the publication of the espionage materials.
At least a parallel construction argument would be halfway believable. I could very easily see the western intel agencies catching this guy and the uncovering overall operation by some other means, but not wanting to reveal those means they dig through the data to find one comparatively innocuous screw up and use that as the explanation for the public argument. Unlike the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, the intel community is justifiably paranoid about revealing sources and methods, so it would be hardly surprising for them to pick and choose which cards to reveal for indictments against Russians in Russia that will never be extradited by the Russian government.
Keep in mind what this guy (guccifer 2.0) was doing, he was basically running a social media and communications operation to publicize the stolen emails. There's no guarantee that he was personally involved with the initial hack that got the intel in the first place, and could easily have been using different systems and gotten handed the stuff from another department with tighter security.
Just speculating here, but one way I could think of this going wrong for him would be he could have normally been connecting to his accounts from a secured system with more automated connections to the VPNs and whatnot, but a small number of times decides to log on to social media outside of his normal workspace, and slips up and forgets to turn on the VPN there. Heavily secured systems can be a pain in the ass from a usability standpoint, and maybe he wanted to shitpost on Reddit or something and used his laptop and missed the VPN that one time, and well, whoops.
The recent example of NSA should also show that even high end signals intelligence agencies aren't completely airtight. Remember that the US case against Kaspersky depended on an NSA contractor screwing up and taking the NSA malware home on a compromised laptop. That's a bigger screw up than forgetting to connect to the VPN when logging on to social media one time.
It should be a flashing red light to sell stock in this guy's companies. This indicates a wider scale and deeper cluelessness about business in general, and that sort of aggressive cluelessness that does not bode well for the concept of "long term viability and profitability" for businesses he runs.
Or maybe he is just BSing and trying to ride a wave of exuberance but doesn't actually believe what he is saying. That's not really much better.
Trumpism isn't really much of a coherent ideology, but if Trump is anything he is pretty strongly authoritarian, and the cult of personality built around him is also pretty authoritarian. In the psychological sense, the central elements of Right Wing Authoritarianism are as follows:
These seem a much better fit of descriptors for Trump support than traditional small government conservatism. The central and consistently overwhelming anti-immigrant nature of him and his most ardent supporters should be a major tell demonstrating that, as the more pro-business and small government elements of the American right are no where near as hostile towards immigration in general or immigrants in particular. Duterte-like executions for drug dealers is also squarely authoritarian in nature. Authoritarian submission is a particularly interesting one, as that looks like that can turn on a dime with authoritarians when given the right push, as they can be "Blue lives matter" in one moment and deep state conspiracy theorists who want purges of the FBI in the next. The Stalinist purges are even less comforting historical examples of that, where old school Leninists who were in on the ground floor of the communist revolution in Russia were forced to confess as traitorous agents conspiring with the imperialists and the capitalists and executed and exiled to the gulags en masse, and also shows that the same impulses can take over the political "left".
As for authoritarian regimes, you seem to be missing the point a bit there too, because that seems to be what Trump wants, even if he can't get it. Wikipedia might not pass for a great scholarly resource, but authoritarianism in the other sense is a lot more complicated than simply having a more powerful central government. Burning down actual mechanisms of a free society while chanting it is in the name of "Freedom!" would hardly be out of character for an authoritarian movement, and if you need an example look at the base hatred towards the free press and the properly Orwellian invocation of "fake news!"
It's not even about being leftwing or pro-gun control, some of this just seems poorly thought out, in particular firearm assembly. I'm not big on guns, but I do know that taking them apart and putting them together is useful practical knowledge even if all you want to do is clean the gun, and there doesn't seem to be much gained by trying to block that. Going after bump stocks makes sense since it is a way to jury rig a machine gun that should be illegal like other means of jury rigging semi-automatics into full-automatics, but not basic practical knowledge on handling and proper maintenance.
Maybe they are up in arms (no pun intended) about the notion that people in the US can order various gun parts and put them together themselves, but that is more of a consequence of the pretty lax and frankly a little bit weird gun classification system used in the US that only the lower receiver is considered to be the firearm and thus is the only controlled part. Or perhaps the OP or article misrepresented the issue of ghost guns, where I could understand youtube not wanting to show how to manufacture hard to trace guns from 80% finished receivers.
I must hate myself to bother this much a Russian troll like yourself, but the indictment of the Internet Research Agency and the associated group of Russians has plenty of evidence in it. And I'm sure they will find out just how much more evidence there is against them if they decide to leave Russia and go to a country with an extradition treaty with the US. That sort of indictment is not an idle threat, as another Russian hacker extradited to the US from Spain found out the hard way.
I guess you can go back to apologia to the Russian invasion of Ukraine if you want to by pretending that the overthrow of Yanukovych was actually the done by the US government. I'm sure you have a wonderful Gish Gallop to justify that nonsense.
So what's your principle then? What is your standard that is independent of the particular actor? Is big data good, or is big data bad? Is what Obama did bad as well as what Trump did bad, or are they both ok? Or is there some reason why one is ok and the other is bad? Is it fine for Facebook and its ilk to have the keys to the big data kingdom to do with as they please?
Mods keep modding up this sort of crap, doesn't seem to accomplish much of getting to the bottom of the issue, just seems to be a bunch of Tu quoque chaff to short circuit any sort of higher thinking beyond tribalism. Perish the thought of a coherent analysis that might cause cognitive dissonance.
Right-wing authoritarianism is an academic term, I didn't make it up, and perhaps the mods should look it up before they decide that I am misusing it. It refers to a psychological outlook, and the "right wing" portion of it does not refer to the typical right-wing versus left-wing political spectrum. Stalinism is arguably fueled by RWA, even though communism is the opposite of right-wing from a traditional political standpoint.
I used the term right wing authoritarianism explicitly to differentiate it from an authoritarian regime, which is a related but different thing. But you don't seem to be referring to either, but rather just throwing shade, and not in a particularly informed manner.
Next you'll tell me the mafia isn't real. Or that Paul Manafort is a figment of my imagination.
List crazy conspiracy theories all you want, but you're just flashing shiny objects to distract from what's actually happening. Maybe in Russia you can get indictments with no evidence at all, but it typically doesn't work quite that way in the US federal legal system, at least as long as democracy isn't torn down. There's evidence both in the indictments and found by the news media, as well as forensic analysis of the email thefts of the dems. Though I suppose indictments aren't the way the Russians always handle problems, there seem to be a lot of dead Russian expats in Britain who died under mysterious circumstances after they ran afoul of Putin's gangster government. Or perhaps not so mysteriously when the poison was polonium or a Soviet era nerve agent.
Curious that you went out of the way to deny Trump being a Putin puppet, I just said he was acting extremely guilty, not particularly what he was guilty of. Because I'm not sure precisely what Trump is guilty of, it's a target rich environment given his business and personal history.
Right wing authoritarianism is on the rise nowadays, and it seems to have taken root pretty strongly in the internets, or at the very least it has taken root very loudly. Principles don't really matter for that, what matters is particular people, and whether it's my guy doing something or if it is your guy. Tu quoque is what passes for a standard rhetorical technique.
So for this subject, the underlying issue of whether or not Facebook hoovering up tons of personal data with poor controls on how that data is handled with political actors or even hostile criminal or foreign entities is immaterial to the RWA, much less the particular details of each case. What matters is whether Obama did it or Trump did it, or choose your own dichotomy if you are not in the US.
It really looks like it is time for the Wild West days of social media to come to an end, and the Europeans at the very least seem to have come that conclusion already. I'm not really expecting the Republicans in control of the US government currently to do much about it until the next time it bites them in the ass, though. Shouting "but Obama!" doesn't seem to be very motivated by the concept that there's a more general underlying problem, but rather as an excuse.
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
It has been pretty well established that the Russians waged a psychological warfare campaign in the 2016 election, and it looks like they were reaching out to elements of the Trump campaign at least both through Papadapolous and the Trump Tower meeting about "adoptions", aka the Magnitsky Act and the sanctions surrounding that. I suppose you can bullshit if you want about that, but there have been many indictments and even several guilty pleas around with these issues, and Don Jr. outed some of his emails himself about this last year.
It hasn't been made clear yet what Trump's role himself in all of this is, but his behavior has been, in the parlance of our times, acting guilty as all hell. His twitter tirade this weekend against McCabe and Mueller is not the behavior that comes out of an innocent person, or at very least it is of an extremely aggressive defense strategy desperate to discredit law enforcement and the prosecution in the face of indictments. He might run afoul of the same issues that Nixon did and follow a similar path, though, he might not get charged for the underlying criminal behavior like his underlings have been and will be, but instead for obstruction of justice and abuse of power. Go back and read about Watergate, you'll find that Nixon was actually quite a bit more subtle than Trump has been in that regard, and the impeachment case against Nixon was a slam dunk.
Cambridge Analytica being a criminal enterprise sure doesn't help though. Malware versus not malware and data breach versus not data breach is a lot more subtle of an issue than bribery and honeypots.