Ugh. Internet arguments are the worst. 1. I did not say that you said that those emails were about Bernie; I said that those emails could be about Bernie, beca

Ugh. Internet arguments are the worst. 1. I did not say that you said that those emails were about Bernie; I said that those emails could be about Bernie, because it's something that I do regard as a live possibility. I was just being honest about how little content there is there; it could be about Bernie or not. (Also the "I didn't mention Bernie so why did you think it was about Bernie?" card is extremely lame; we're talking about a WikiLeaks leak and WikiLeaks in parallel with this leak has announced e.g. via Twitter that they interpret this as being about Bernie. Of course it's neither my nor your innovation to read the emails that way; we both received it.) Like, you say "the emails refer to two upcoming primaries." I am simply saying that this is too assertive for my tastes. It doesn't say anything about primaries; it says "KY" and "WVA" and those can be primaries, they also might not be. (I'm afraid I don't understand your "by the way" here -- you might be trying to point out the disambiguation link up-top, but of course acronyms may also refer to things that are not on Wikipedia. For example, Brad Marshall has a lot more emails from before this time mentioning the HVF; but have fun trying to find that on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVF .) So, I mean, there's a lot that we're reading into this thing to come to that conclusion. Getting fussy and treating it like it's not a conclusion is not a great idea. It might well be a correct conclusion. But it's a conclusion that we're presently coming to off of limited evidence, and you shouldn't be all like "you cannot possibly be serious!" when someone points out that the evidence is limited, when it is. 2. You have a messed up definition for "clearly" then. That's OK, it seems like a lot of things seem a little muddled in your worldview. For example, you're right that "that is clearly saying that knowledge that Sanders is an atheist would hurt him in KY and WVA," as long as we weaken the word "knowledge" to "belief" (because it would be easy to misread what you said as drive-by-asserting that Bernie is an atheist, whereas Bernie has disclaimed this a few times, even though he has repeatedly asserted that he's not very religious in any organized way). But it's not "clearly suggesting to use the question against Sanders." That's another conclusion. It might be right, but it's not like the email says "My Southern Baptist peeps would not vote for him if they knew the truth." In fact the whole case for this hinges on the word "skate" (you used, in quotes, "skate by", but that is not even what the email said). That word by itself is not clear. It is implicitly suggestive via a negative connotation. 3. I am not doubting that the bigotry exists and I am not stating that the DNC for sure acted ethically. However, we would need to know a lot more than this email to know if that were true. For example, you're treating this as a serious suggestion rather than some banter among friends. The email thread ends on an "AMEN!" which suggests that nobody in this thread considered it a starting block for some sort of conspiracy to actually ask Bernie the quetion to get him to be unelectable. In fact, that earlier thread about the "HVF" I mentioned, there was an official DNC denouncement of claims that the Bernie campaign was making; it came on the backs of a lot of back-and-forth in order to write a formal press release which is not present here... But one of the more interesting (and very hard to interpret) emails comes from Hillary's general counsel, Marc Elias, who was CCed on the question apparently independent of his work on her campaign. https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/5740 https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/5740 . It seems they might, having known him personally, sent him some examples of what Bernie is saying and solicited his legal advice on whether they could meaningfully speak against Bernie, even though they're supposed to be formally unbiased. So it seems that on serious matters they approach it with sincerity and gravity, whereas the one you're calling a "conspiracy" might also just be a private sharing of personal bigotry, rather than an attempt to exploit it publicly. Again, I'm not saying that this is surely what happened. Maybe it was a serious suggestion, too. We're on HN, we're both more mature than that; we both know what uncertainties are, and I'd hope we both have a practical knowledge of Bayes' theorem. I am merely saying that you're very convicted based on a conclusion drawn from very little evidence. We may get more evidence, and better evidence, which vindicates you. But the evidence as we have it right now is relatively brittle, as such things go. You multiply the odds ratio by the probability that he would have sent that email if he was trying to conspire against Bernie (relatively high, but he'd probably have been more explicit about it and his listeners probably wouldn't have treated it with such a lack of seriousness) divided by the probability that he would have sent that email if he wasn't trying to conspire against Bernie (which is probably not a tiny negligible probability the way you're making it out to be).