To be even more accurate, known perjurer Jim Clapper and Torture Apologist and kill list architect Jack Brennan did the tracking through FISA warrants they claimed didn’t exist.
Sage rat, can you tell the difference between Russians trolling your dumb ass and a bunch of guys murdering a lot of people on 9/11? If not, you should join the wonderful US Army, maybe they’ll even let you wave the flag.
So I take it you share the opinion of our president that Putin is more trustworthy than our intelligence agencies?
I have the superhuman ability to distrust Clapper, Brennan, and Putin, ALL AT THE SAME TIME!!
Problem is, when I do so, I often black out and wake up barely clothed in an alleyway. I suggest you attempt to pull off such a stunt with serious consideration for your safety and that of those around you.
Don’t forget that, after Russia’s intelligence agencies interfered with the election, they claimed that doing so constitutes an act of war.
So we should escalate the conflict right? Now instead of posting memes we will talk shit about them behind their back, that’ll show ‘em.
Will has successfully filed the entire Russian act of war as “publishing memes”, so him being reminded that Russia itself considers “publishing memes” to be an “act of war” means he can ignore Russia’s own definition for his own and then add his anti-war schtick.*
I had a thread about whether it was possible to lie to oneselves so much as to consign your own soul to Hell. There are real-world reasons why this question occurred to me…
I favor the Russian people. I do not want the squabble between two bad governments to spill over into civil society. I will not be baited into joining the squabble as the governments would love us to do. Sadly, gullible homers like yourself will march blindly into war.
Yes.
And I can tell the difference between describing you as a serial rapist or as a forum user. One is, I assume, a falsehood while the other is a truth. Jingoism or not, patriotism or not, truth is truth and falsehoods are the territory of people with issues.
Let’s say that I did decide to always describe you as a serial rapist. I know it’s not true, so what would it be about my personality to make me think that’s a reasonable sort of thing to do, as my way for interacting in the world? Maybe it allows me to avoid taking you seriously. Otherwise I’d have to pay attention to your arguments and actually consider them seriously. I’d prefer to be a coward and to shield my unsupportable beliefs by making up little fantasies that allow me to get away from having to deal with reality. I’d rather spin around in a tutu, throwing glitter up in the air, and imagine that I’m the most wonderful person in the world and everyone who disagrees is a big fat meany. Woohoo!
It is true that hacking our government officials is not mass murder. I do not pretend otherwise. But hacking is also not spreading memes. You probably know that there were two different groups doing two different things so, like I said, you’re just doing the forum equivalent of getting out in front of everyone and proclaiming yourself the fairy princess ruler of the universe and prancing about in your tutu, with your ass all hanging out and love handles like Jaba the Hutt.
If you have to shield yourself from reality by coming up with cute little fantasies that have nothing to do with anything, and go “teehee” when people point out that you’re being blatantly dishonest… Well, you then should grow up. You can disagree with the importance of military attacks on the US government - when they’re only cyber attacks - but disagreeing is a different animal than fantasizing. I don’t know how old you are, but I think it’s safe to assume that you’re not 6. You’re not a fairy princess. You can be a big boy and admit what’s real and what’s not.
It’s the shawarma place across the street, why?
LOL, sick burn.
You guys seem to know Will much better than I, and you are doing just fine roasting him. But I want to point out one little thing that always bugs me. People on the right and the far left like to minimize the IRA’s actions (even leaving aside the hacking) as “posting memes”, and they point to some silly right wing Christian memes that are just preaching to the converted. But that was like ten percent of their activity.
The vast majority of what they did started literally years before the election, building fake identities as left wing black activists. Then as the election approached, they used the credibility they had built up, not to advocate voting for Trump (they were canny enough to know this wouldn’t fly) but to claim that Hillary Clinton was “not on our side” and to urge people to simply sit out the election. Classic voter suppression, and in fact black turnout WAS way down. Maybe that was mostly because Obama was no longer on the ballot, but given the small margins in a few key states, I don’t think we can say with confidence that their efforts were not an important factor.
I wasn’t minimizing the IRA, I just had no interest in letting someone pretend like that was all that happened or the more important thing that happened.
But the actual import of the IRA is a complicated topic.
On the one hand, saying that it was just a meme factory ignores that most people are easily influenced. It’s like putting L. Ron Hubbard in the “bad SF author” bucket and ignoring that - bad science fiction or not - he still managed to affect the lives of a bunch of people in a very real-world way. It is, as you note, a rather stupid way of looking at the matter. If flashy images and stupid slogans didn’t work, Coca-Cola wouldn’t be a company that’s thousands of times larger than every other generic brand out there. We might want to think that humanity is better than that, but clearly they aren’t. Memes - like black lives - matter. *
BUT, at the same time, the IRA’s budget was $1m. The Republican party did all the same things, they had a budget a hundred times larger, and they started working on Clinton’s image decades earlier than the Russians.
It is, in theory, conceivable that the little bit of extra Russian aid might have been the straw that pushed Trump over to victory, but probably it wasn’t. CNN and their mega coverage of how non-PC Trump was, almost certainly, did far more than the IRA to help get Trump elected. Compared to American business and American political PACs, the troll engine was simply outspent and outclassed.
None of which is to say that their activities should have been legal or that we shouldn’t view it as a state attack on our elections - Putin’s caterer wasn’t doing it just because international propaganda just happened to come up in a spin on the “try a new hobby” roulette wheel. If you let that sort of thing go without oversight, you’re liable to see China, the EU, Russia, and everyone else start chipping in to a level that equals the domestic spending capacity, and that will be a problem.
- Personal note: I really have to question the choice of “Black Lives Matter” as a name… I can’t help but read it and think of some teen valley girl going, “Gosh you guys, like…didn’t you know? Black lives matter! They’re people, too!” :smack:
They impersonated black activists? Cite?
Not that I think they are morally above doing such things. But I haven’t seen any reporting that they did anything like this; and frankly, I don’t believe they are capable of getting into the mental space to persuasively mimic such people. (It’s weird to realize that I absolutely have more faith in Russian propagandists to pull this off than American conservatives.)
ETA: I cosign your last couple paragraphs, though.
Maybe Mueller was never inclined to indict the President*. Any reason he would be required to? If he has the eight by ten color glossies with the numbers and the arrows, plus la pistola fumidoros, why not just lay it all out? Maybe he isn’t required to make a judgement more properly required of Congress?
He may not be duty bound to do so, he may not be bound to offer an opinion. His job was to investigate, perhaps he is mindful of the limitations therein.
I have no idea if they did that specific thing but, I would be certain, they did things to try and convince African Americans to stay home. There’s no reason to think the parties are stopping at fighting over voter suppression through legalistic means.
And remember that a Mister Paul Manafort lead the Trump campaign. I would not hold the slightest amount of amazement to discover that there are domestic, fake BLM accounts of all varieties of platforms set up by Republican groups, through secret coordination with party members.
America invented the con. I’d be disappointed if we weren’t already in the game when Russia showed up.
Here are a couple along those lines:
Russian Trolls Were Obsessed With Black Lives Matter (Mother Jones)- Russian trolls were obsessed with Black Lives Matter.
The Surprising Nuance Behind the Russian Troll Strategy (Medium) - The Surprising Nuance Behind the Russian Troll Strategy | by Kate Starbird | Medium
Russian Trolls and the Trump Campaign Both Tried to Depress Black Turnout (Atlantic) - The Shared Russia-Trump Focus on Depressing Black Votes - The Atlantic
HOW RUSSIAN TROLLS USED MEME WARFARE TO DIVIDE AMERICA (Wired) - How Russian Trolls Used Meme Warfare to Divide America | WIRED
Read the report from your government. The claims against the Russians were based on 1)the fact RT exists 2)memes 3) barely substantiated hacker claims.
If the Russian govt says that memes mean war in order to play dumb on govt-backed trolling accusations, good for them, you, and your Tarantino revenge fantasies. I refuse to participate in your dim witted, historically misguided attempts at instigating a war between bad governments.
Yes I will use the tools of rhetoric at my disposal, including lampooning you and your buddies’ half-baked tin-foil hat conspiracy theories, and downplaying what really was boilerplate election statecraft. You can choose to be a pawn. I’d rather not be. Keep waving that flag, rube jingo.
Again, just the sheer amount of willful stupidity you have to engage in is jaw dropping. Or would be jaw dropping if I hadn’t already lost all respect for your opinons. These “claims” led to the indictment of 13 Russians, as well as 3 Russian companies after a special counsel investigation. You have the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, the NSA, the ODNI, the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and more agreeing on it. You have private firms like New Knowledge Cybersecurity and Graphika. You have the New York Times, the Guardian, and other newspapers all agreeing. Yet here you are, wallowing in your own willfull ignorance like a pig wallows in … pig wallowing stuff.
He knows this. He’s just a fucking troll.
But Putin says he didn’t so Will takes him at his word.