Goldmoon Dawn on 22/11/2017 at 00:30
While you prepare your argument, lest we forget:
[video=youtube;--3N6rIdVnw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--3N6rIdVnw[/video]
Renzatic on 22/11/2017 at 00:40
If it's true that Mueller, Sessions, et al. are all colluding to expose Hillary for what she is, then why is that Trump, after winning the presidency, stepped back on his own claim of pressing charges against her, and now only brings her up when his ass is in some fire or another? Who's going after Hillary right now? Certainly not Sessions? And Mueller? He's currently involved elsewhere. Trump himself isn't doing any pressuring beyond some Twitter quips here and there. The only people actively talking about anything are the left wing liberal media (who, strangely enough, the usual suspects usually lambaste until moments like this) bringing up the Uranium One deal, and the slight rustling in Washington that's inspired.
I mean yeah, if she's guilty of something, then do something about it. But right now, no one's doing anything except dragging her out when they're in trouble for something themselves.
Also, a video of a picture of a meme? Wuh...wuh...what?
Pyrian on 22/11/2017 at 03:13
A video of a picture of a meme including a quote originally fabricated by a fake news site attributed to a behind-the-scenes scene at a Matt Lauer interview and now attributed to an e-mail that almost certainly doesn't exist?
Renzatic on 22/11/2017 at 04:44
Damn, that's meta as all hell naw.
Tony_Tarantula on 22/11/2017 at 14:08
Quote Posted by heywood
Human intelligence is always the best.
If they have conclusive evidence, they're not likely to release it publicly because somebody will make the case that it reveals intelligence sources and methods. If they do have it, it's probably because the perpetrators were not trying to be particularly secretive, or they were just amateurs. But personally, I think it's more likely that they are just matching characteristics of the attacks with known patterns.
I'm still skeptical because security agencies and investigative journalists that actually are financially and ideologically independent, have tended to be extremely skeptical of the claims given because the information presented so far is inconclusive at best, and a lot of what has been given has turned out to be patently false.
You're also playing directly into (
https://theintercept.com/2017/02/23/the-increasingly-unhinged-russia-rhetoric-comes-from-a-long-standing-u-s-playbook/) the exact same propaganda technique used to create Islamophobia
Quote:
Two vital points stand out here: 1) the key to sustaining fears over foreign adversaries is depicting them as all-powerful and ubiquitous; and 2) once that image takes root, few will be willing to question the propaganda for fear of being accused of siding with the Foreign Evil: “the thesis no American dare any longer challenge without himself becoming suspect.”
This tactic — depicting adversaries as omnipotent super-villains — was key to the war on terror. Radical Muslims were not just violent threats; they were uniquely menacing, like Bond-film bad guys.
When photos emerged showing how the U.S. government was transporting terror suspect Jose Padilla to his trial by placing blackened goggles and earphones over his face, one U.S. commentator justified it by explaining it was necessary to prevent him from “blinking in code” to his terrorist comrades to activate plots. When asked why terror suspects were bound and gagged for long intercontinental flights to Guantánamo, a U.S. military official said that these were “people who would chew through a hydraulic cable to bring a C-17 down.” They possessed powers of dark magic and were lurking everywhere, even when you couldn't see them. That's the reason to fear them so much that one submits to any claim and any policy in the name of crushing them.
(
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/04/washpost-is-richly-rewarded-for-false-news-about-russia-threat-while-public-is-deceived/)
Anyway, there's some more relevant updates:
(
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-22/unsealed-fusion-gps-bank-records-reveal-523k-payment-russian-money-launderer)
edit:
What I actually believe here....I noticed that the tension with Russia and the rhetoric about how evil they are started ramping up right around the time (2012-2013ish) that US/Saudi/Israeli proxy wars started to bump into resistance from Russian ally states and even direct intervention from Russia. The Ukranian affair was another spark.
I believe that, since the origin of the Russia hysteria comes from the same defense/intelligence agencies that were behind those proxy wars in the first place, that we're being primed for a hot war with Russia. It's extremely misguided both because the results would be disastrous (after Obama's foreign policy pushed Russia and China into military cooperation) and because the US military has demonstrated that they're not capable of winning wars against tribal goat-fuckers (not just a pejorative, literal goat fucking is a common practice in Afghanistan) when given 16 years to do so, let alone defeating a tough, well trained, technologically advanced military like Russia has that actually is capable of disrupting US OPTEMPO and C3.
(
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/932870188365524992)
Tony_Tarantula on 26/11/2017 at 19:56
At least in GMD's defense, he appears to be slightly smarter than Tom Friedman: (
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/friedmans-love-letter-to-a-war-criminal/)
NYTimes also ran an interesting piece on the Russia paranoia.
TLDR: It's pissing off Putin's opponents, because all you're accomplishing is to solidify Putin's power and feeding his own attempts to be seen as all powerful:
(
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/world/europe/russia-vladimir-putin-liberals.html?_r=0)
Quote:
“The image of Putin's Russia constructed by Western and, above all, American media outlets over the past 18 months shocks even the most anti-Putin reader in Russia,” Oleg V. Kashin, a journalist critical of the Kremlin, wrote last week in Republic, a Russian news site. He complained that the American media has consistently misconstrued the way Russia works, presenting marginal opportunists and self-interested businessmen with no real link to the Kremlin as state-controlled agents working on orders from Mr. Putin.
For Ivan I. Kurilla, a professor of history and an America specialist at the European University at St. Petersburg, a bastion of liberal thinking, Russia's prominent and almost entirely negative role on America's political stage since the November election reprises a phenomenon first seen in the late 1800s.
“Americans use Russia each time they feel their own identity in crisis,” said Mr. Kurilla, the author of a new book on the history of Russian-American relations, “Frenemies.”
Unlike China and India, which are far more distant culturally and geographically from the United States, he added, Russia is a country on to which alarm over America's own internal problems can be easily projected.
“American liberals are so upset about Trump that they cannot believe he is a real product of American life,” Mr. Kurilla said. “They try to portray him as something created by Russia. This whole thing is about America, not Russia.”
The first time this happened, he said, was in the decades after the American Civil War, when amid deep trauma over the conflict and a series of corruption scandals, Russia suddenly became the focus of feverish discussion as a model of menacing tyranny. This was largely because of the writings and influential public lectures of George Kennan, an American explorer who returned from Siberia in the 1880s with horrific stories, mostly true, of Russian despotism.
Both Mr. Volkov and Mr. Kurilla worry that American intelligence agencies have made it too easy for the Kremlin to deny its interference in the American elections — and, at the same time, also take credit for it — by keeping concrete evidence secret, which has only allowed sometimes wild conspiracy theories to take flight.
Renzatic on 26/11/2017 at 20:29
There is some truth to this, I think. There's no doubt that Russia did meddle in the election, but they didn't do it through hacking polls and or killing officials. They did it simply by exploiting us for what we are, preying on our greed, widening divisions through the most basic propaganda imaginable, and playing on our own paranoia. If we haven't long since convinced ourselves that The Other Side was the embodiment of purest evil, out to destroy the American dream, and take away our God given freedoms, the Kremlin's little social media experiment against us would've failed before it even began.
It's something of an irony that we, as a nation, are so easy to exploit because we believe we've all been exploited, because we want to believe we've been exploited.
Kolya on 26/11/2017 at 21:23
It's not as basic as you paint it. They don't play on our greed, but our new found inability to filter, research, analyze and weigh information on a day to day basis - in other words they exploit our lack of information gatekeepers and DDOS our minds.
(
http://nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/modern-media-is-a-dos-attack-on-your-free-will)
Quote:
Democracy assumes a set of capacities: the capacity for deliberation, understanding different ideas, reasoned discourse. This grounds government authority, the will of the people. So one way to talk about the effects of these technologies is that they are a kind of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the human will.
Kolya on 26/11/2017 at 21:31
We burned our firewalls and we're so proud of it. We thought we could understand everything ourselves and we wouldn't need any professional journalists to explain it to us, to tell right from wrong and protect us.
And here we are, with millions of idiots, led by a leash.