6 ms·

I get that you don't seem to like Democrats - that's fine, I don't much care for them myself (although Republicans probably even less). However, the problem we

I get that you don't seem to like Democrats - that's fine, I don't much care for them myself (although Republicans probably even less). However, the problem we are facing today is different than just spin. People are fundamentally trying to alter the public's perception of truth, not just spin or political opinion, and they have found that they can do this by saying a lie loud enough and often enough. And in case you think this is just opinion/spin itself, check this out: https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/01/russian-facebook-page-organized-protest-texas-different-russian-page-l/ https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/01/russian-facebook-pag... There are foreign powers coughRUSSIAcough actively trying to disrupt/damage/destroy our democratic institutions. Considering the ongoing investigations by Mueller we still do not know if POTUS is a puppet, through threat of blackmail or evidence of dirty laundry, to Russian agents. This a real thing. This is important.

littlebegane 9y ago
What does the ‘cough’ around Russia mean? I’ve seen people do that before.
zabana 9y ago
The whole "let's blame it on Russia" thing is getting boring. At one point, my dear American friends, you'll just have to face the mirror.
- adamq_q 9y ago
  Thought the same thing until recently. https://www.thedailybeast.com/jenna-abrams-russias-clown-troll-princess-duped-the-mainstream-media-and-the-world https://www.thedailybeast.com/jenna-abrams-russias-clown-tro... https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/03/russian-facebook-pages-organized-houston-protest-and-counterprotest-la/ https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/03/russian-facebook-pag...
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  It's funny that we can't just meet at the obvious middle ground. Russia didn't win the election for Trump, but you are kidding yourself if you believe it didn't play a factor. US democracy has a lot of work to do, but Putin is an ex-KGB strongman who assassinates his opponents and annexes neighbors. It's pretty obvious how he operates.
  - zabana 9y ago
    You are most certainly right about Putin, but that's not the point. You can't just blame censorship and failing policies on a foreign country. What I find truly intriguing is this lack of self criticism on the part of many people in the US. And about annexing neighbours, let's not talk about Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Lybia, Sudan, Somalia and all the shady things that happened in Central/South America in the 60's.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      Not interested in playing "who is the worst". If you want me to acknowledge the US has done and continues to do evil stuff, well, yeah. My only point is that Russia intervened in a flawed American democracy. That's obvious, the only way to have proper self criticism is to acknowledge that reality which doesn't care about your political views.
    - abiox 9y ago
      tu quoque or whataboutism isn't much of an argument. such responses are often vacuous, if not intellectually dishonest. it's can seem like an effort to divert or sidetrack an argument or conversation with blatantly fallacious responses.
  - wallace_f 9y ago
    We do have a "trash heap"[1] of blatant lies about the Russia hacking from the "Unelected Deep State" (CIA/NSA/FBI), which just adds to lies from them that have been stacking up for decades. I don't trust agencies with histories of trying to murder civil rights activists like MLK, lying to get us to go to war in Iraq, lying about domestic surveillance, etc. Then we have the DNC very literally and provably rigging the primaries in favor of Clinton. You know what? I hate Trump. But give me a break. This Russia trash is just all a distraction. Trump blatantly supports unconstitutional programs like domestic surveillance and gitmo--this should be enough to impeach him alone for supporting an undermining of the US constitution and American's rights. The fact that they need to rely on this Russia story which requires a number of shifting standards and "just trust us's", rather than in-the-open undemocratic authoritarianism here in the US, is probably a testament to failures of the human mind's ability to think in terms of, and stand up for, liberty. I have been to Germany and Japan and the people are unbeleivably friendly and wonderful. What on earth is wrong with people that they can be coaxed into the evil dreams of tyrants--conflicts, authoritarianism--and is it happening again? Are we so different or special that we really think tyranny cant happen to us when we are going through the same patterns of history? Probably, if we could just adjust the human factor of 'susceptability to sell their liberties and fall in line behind authority figures for short-sighted self-interest,' we would live in a much better world. 1 - https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/yet-another-major-russia-story-falls-apart-is-skepticism-permissible-yet/ https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/yet-another-major-russia...
- kumarvvr 9y ago
  Russia is not the whole cause, but it was a catalyst. Most importantly the issue is not the effectiveness or outcome of the covert interference, but that interference is wrong. Most importantly, aiding and abetting covert influence should be a punishable crime. Current tech environment, where tech gaints simply saying they hadn't noticed is not an acceptable answer. When you are a tech gaint, with power to influence so many people at once, you have the responsibility to be transparent. With great power comes great responsibility. Not faux remorse after the fact.
- aaomidi 9y ago
  I don’t think anyone is specifically blaming Russia. If they are that’s a pretty naive thing to do. When I personally talk about Russia, I just point out that this happened. This being the rise of fake news, etc. We should remember it was the United States and her allies that normalized this behavior. We should take a few lessons from this, when we do something unethical or questionable these tactics are going to be normalized and other countries are going to use them. Another example is Trump ordering an attack on a sovereign nation without that nation asking or any resolution passing in US Congress or the UNSC. We need to understand that this is the age we live in, and that we need to work around fixing these issues. Not blaming others or trying to reverse technological processes.
PeachPlum 9y ago
The CIA has many people working as "journalists" in the USA for the same reasons. Over 40 CIA working as 'journalists' and on the JFK assassination story in 1973. How many are CIA reporters today? https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32403785.pdf https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-3... e.g. https://theintercept.com/2014/09/04/former-l-times-reporter-cleared-stories-cia-publication/ https://theintercept.com/2014/09/04/former-l-times-reporter-... If you've read the Podesta emails you'll know how close the MSM and DNC are. I don't doubt the RNC has the same type of relationships.
jordanb 9y ago
Have you seen Adam Curtis' Hypernormalization[0]? The word "hypornormalization" was created by a soviet thinker to describe the soviet world in the 1980s: Nobody really believed in Communism anymore and everyone could tell everything is getting worse. The party leaders, factory managers, and government bureaucrats were all thieves who were telling ever more preposterous lies to the people about the state of the economy and the society. Nobody believed the lies, but they also couldn't perceive any alternative arrangement of affairs so they didn't know how to do anything except proceed as if they did believe the lies. He then traces the rise of perception management, the rise of the banks and neoliberalism, and machinations in the middle east, along with the career of Donald Trump, and threads them all together as Curtis tends to do, to make the case that we are currently in a period of hypernormalization in the west. What's interesting is that he makes the case that Trump is the perfect man for this time and place, being a phony made-for-TV businessman whose entire career is the triumph of perception over reality, and the movie was made in 2016: Trump wasn't even president yet. As with all Curtis' stuff I only believe maybe 90% of it. The stuff on the middle east is the weakest. He's guilty of doing the same thing he accuses our political class of doing: oversimplifying things to the extent that he risks fictionalizing them. But it's an extremely interesting look at the current state of the western world. Oh yeah and Russia features heavily in it, not just in the cautionary tale of the USSR, but at the same time Curtis is emphatic in emphasizing that the post-truth world wasn't conjured up in some Kremlin propaganda office. We've been working on building a post-truth world for ourselves for the past several decades. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aLQPNPlK5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aLQPNPlK5M
- MrRadar 9y ago
  > Nobody really believed in Communism anymore and everyone could tell everything is getting worse. The party leaders, factory managers, and government bureaucrats were all thieves who were telling ever more preposterous lies to the people about the state of the economy and the society. Nobody believed the lies, but they also couldn't perceive any alternative arrangement of affairs so they didn't know how to do anything except proceed as if they did believe the lies. Wow, that pretty much describes exactly what happened in this[1] article in which coastal "third way" centrist consultants to the Democratic party interview midwesterners to figure out why they voted for Trump instead of Clinton and completely omit almost everything they are told in their final report which they carefully craft to reaffirm their preconceived worldview. [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/on-safari-in-trumps-america/543288/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/on-safa...
js8 9y ago
> I get that you don't seem to like Democrats No you don't get it. I am not American, but if I was, I would prefer Democrats, at least program-wise. And yet, I share the OP's opinion. Here's the thing - before social media (which are much more open to public than traditional ones), the general intellectual idea was that more openness in democracy, despite its apparent weaknesses, actually makes the whole thing strong. So for example, military budgets were much more open in the U.S. than in the USSR; this openness could be considered a flaw from the strictly military POV, however, it actually makes everything more efficient because it doesn't let people in power cover more corruption. And so on, you could find many other examples. However, recently (in the past 20 years), the liberals (in the U.S., you don't have mainstream left, so please don't call them that) have rejected the idea that openness makes the society stronger. And the outcry about social media is just a manifestation of that belief. Now, the action depends on this belief. If you believe that openness is bad for society, you will favor the censorship of social media, and, taken to the logical conclusion, a very controlled society like Russia or China. However, if you don't believe that openness is bad, then the proper reaction to existence of social media is to have more openness from the side of the government (and also perhaps industry). In other words, maybe people (on social media) are anxious for information (and so they fill the void with speculation), but the government is still keeping too much for themselves, much more than the social media would allow to be shared. But it will take some time to catch up, because of course existing bureaucrats are used to have their ways. Just an example. If the U.S. government agencies truly believes that Russian manipulated the election, why don't they just share all the evidence openly, as soon as possible? Why don't they call specific sock-puppets out as being known to be Russian hackers? The reason why not is because institutionally, they are still living in the old paradigm, where secret service operations couldn't be in much public light, because historically, there was no good platform to disseminate this information (citizens couldn't easily use or cross-check it but it was valuable for the foreign actors). Of course, there might be more cynical reasons why is it that way.. but hopefully you get the point.
sien 9y ago
I'm not an American. FWIW I would have voted Democrat both times. But blaming new media for the losses is a huge, disingenuous cop out. Looking next time, at how tough a third term is to get might work better. Making sure that the candidate has few ties to the previous, or both previous administrations from the same party might help more. Tyler Cowen has a good article about it on Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-01/facebook-doesn-t-deserve-blame-for-russian-interference https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-01/facebook-...

littlebegane 9y ago

What does the ‘cough’ around Russia mean? I’ve seen people do that before.

zabana 9y ago

The whole "let's blame it on Russia" thing is getting boring. At one point, my dear American friends, you'll just have to face the mirror.

adamq_q 9y ago
Thought the same thing until recently. https://www.thedailybeast.com/jenna-abrams-russias-clown-troll-princess-duped-the-mainstream-media-and-the-world https://www.thedailybeast.com/jenna-abrams-russias-clown-tro... https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/03/russian-facebook-pages-organized-houston-protest-and-counterprotest-la/ https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/03/russian-facebook-pag...
aaron-lebo 9y ago
It's funny that we can't just meet at the obvious middle ground. Russia didn't win the election for Trump, but you are kidding yourself if you believe it didn't play a factor. US democracy has a lot of work to do, but Putin is an ex-KGB strongman who assassinates his opponents and annexes neighbors. It's pretty obvious how he operates.
- zabana 9y ago
  You are most certainly right about Putin, but that's not the point. You can't just blame censorship and failing policies on a foreign country. What I find truly intriguing is this lack of self criticism on the part of many people in the US. And about annexing neighbours, let's not talk about Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Lybia, Sudan, Somalia and all the shady things that happened in Central/South America in the 60's.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Not interested in playing "who is the worst". If you want me to acknowledge the US has done and continues to do evil stuff, well, yeah. My only point is that Russia intervened in a flawed American democracy. That's obvious, the only way to have proper self criticism is to acknowledge that reality which doesn't care about your political views.
  - abiox 9y ago
    tu quoque or whataboutism isn't much of an argument. such responses are often vacuous, if not intellectually dishonest. it's can seem like an effort to divert or sidetrack an argument or conversation with blatantly fallacious responses.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  We do have a "trash heap"[1] of blatant lies about the Russia hacking from the "Unelected Deep State" (CIA/NSA/FBI), which just adds to lies from them that have been stacking up for decades. I don't trust agencies with histories of trying to murder civil rights activists like MLK, lying to get us to go to war in Iraq, lying about domestic surveillance, etc. Then we have the DNC very literally and provably rigging the primaries in favor of Clinton. You know what? I hate Trump. But give me a break. This Russia trash is just all a distraction. Trump blatantly supports unconstitutional programs like domestic surveillance and gitmo--this should be enough to impeach him alone for supporting an undermining of the US constitution and American's rights. The fact that they need to rely on this Russia story which requires a number of shifting standards and "just trust us's", rather than in-the-open undemocratic authoritarianism here in the US, is probably a testament to failures of the human mind's ability to think in terms of, and stand up for, liberty. I have been to Germany and Japan and the people are unbeleivably friendly and wonderful. What on earth is wrong with people that they can be coaxed into the evil dreams of tyrants--conflicts, authoritarianism--and is it happening again? Are we so different or special that we really think tyranny cant happen to us when we are going through the same patterns of history? Probably, if we could just adjust the human factor of 'susceptability to sell their liberties and fall in line behind authority figures for short-sighted self-interest,' we would live in a much better world. 1 - https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/yet-another-major-russia-story-falls-apart-is-skepticism-permissible-yet/ https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/yet-another-major-russia...
kumarvvr 9y ago
Russia is not the whole cause, but it was a catalyst. Most importantly the issue is not the effectiveness or outcome of the covert interference, but that interference is wrong. Most importantly, aiding and abetting covert influence should be a punishable crime. Current tech environment, where tech gaints simply saying they hadn't noticed is not an acceptable answer. When you are a tech gaint, with power to influence so many people at once, you have the responsibility to be transparent. With great power comes great responsibility. Not faux remorse after the fact.
aaomidi 9y ago
I don’t think anyone is specifically blaming Russia. If they are that’s a pretty naive thing to do. When I personally talk about Russia, I just point out that this happened. This being the rise of fake news, etc. We should remember it was the United States and her allies that normalized this behavior. We should take a few lessons from this, when we do something unethical or questionable these tactics are going to be normalized and other countries are going to use them. Another example is Trump ordering an attack on a sovereign nation without that nation asking or any resolution passing in US Congress or the UNSC. We need to understand that this is the age we live in, and that we need to work around fixing these issues. Not blaming others or trying to reverse technological processes.

PeachPlum 9y ago

The CIA has many people working as "journalists" in the USA for the same reasons. Over 40 CIA working as 'journalists' and on the JFK assassination story in 1973. How many are CIA reporters today? https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32403785.pdf https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-3... e.g. https://theintercept.com/2014/09/04/former-l-times-reporter-cleared-stories-cia-publication/ https://theintercept.com/2014/09/04/former-l-times-reporter-... If you've read the Podesta emails you'll know how close the MSM and DNC are. I don't doubt the RNC has the same type of relationships.

jordanb 9y ago

Have you seen Adam Curtis' Hypernormalization[0]? The word "hypornormalization" was created by a soviet thinker to describe the soviet world in the 1980s: Nobody really believed in Communism anymore and everyone could tell everything is getting worse. The party leaders, factory managers, and government bureaucrats were all thieves who were telling ever more preposterous lies to the people about the state of the economy and the society. Nobody believed the lies, but they also couldn't perceive any alternative arrangement of affairs so they didn't know how to do anything except proceed as if they did believe the lies. He then traces the rise of perception management, the rise of the banks and neoliberalism, and machinations in the middle east, along with the career of Donald Trump, and threads them all together as Curtis tends to do, to make the case that we are currently in a period of hypernormalization in the west. What's interesting is that he makes the case that Trump is the perfect man for this time and place, being a phony made-for-TV businessman whose entire career is the triumph of perception over reality, and the movie was made in 2016: Trump wasn't even president yet. As with all Curtis' stuff I only believe maybe 90% of it. The stuff on the middle east is the weakest. He's guilty of doing the same thing he accuses our political class of doing: oversimplifying things to the extent that he risks fictionalizing them. But it's an extremely interesting look at the current state of the western world. Oh yeah and Russia features heavily in it, not just in the cautionary tale of the USSR, but at the same time Curtis is emphatic in emphasizing that the post-truth world wasn't conjured up in some Kremlin propaganda office. We've been working on building a post-truth world for ourselves for the past several decades. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aLQPNPlK5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aLQPNPlK5M

MrRadar 9y ago
> Nobody really believed in Communism anymore and everyone could tell everything is getting worse. The party leaders, factory managers, and government bureaucrats were all thieves who were telling ever more preposterous lies to the people about the state of the economy and the society. Nobody believed the lies, but they also couldn't perceive any alternative arrangement of affairs so they didn't know how to do anything except proceed as if they did believe the lies. Wow, that pretty much describes exactly what happened in this[1] article in which coastal "third way" centrist consultants to the Democratic party interview midwesterners to figure out why they voted for Trump instead of Clinton and completely omit almost everything they are told in their final report which they carefully craft to reaffirm their preconceived worldview. [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/on-safari-in-trumps-america/543288/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/on-safa...

js8 9y ago

> I get that you don't seem to like Democrats No you don't get it. I am not American, but if I was, I would prefer Democrats, at least program-wise. And yet, I share the OP's opinion. Here's the thing - before social media (which are much more open to public than traditional ones), the general intellectual idea was that more openness in democracy, despite its apparent weaknesses, actually makes the whole thing strong. So for example, military budgets were much more open in the U.S. than in the USSR; this openness could be considered a flaw from the strictly military POV, however, it actually makes everything more efficient because it doesn't let people in power cover more corruption. And so on, you could find many other examples. However, recently (in the past 20 years), the liberals (in the U.S., you don't have mainstream left, so please don't call them that) have rejected the idea that openness makes the society stronger. And the outcry about social media is just a manifestation of that belief. Now, the action depends on this belief. If you believe that openness is bad for society, you will favor the censorship of social media, and, taken to the logical conclusion, a very controlled society like Russia or China. However, if you don't believe that openness is bad, then the proper reaction to existence of social media is to have more openness from the side of the government (and also perhaps industry). In other words, maybe people (on social media) are anxious for information (and so they fill the void with speculation), but the government is still keeping too much for themselves, much more than the social media would allow to be shared. But it will take some time to catch up, because of course existing bureaucrats are used to have their ways. Just an example. If the U.S. government agencies truly believes that Russian manipulated the election, why don't they just share all the evidence openly, as soon as possible? Why don't they call specific sock-puppets out as being known to be Russian hackers? The reason why not is because institutionally, they are still living in the old paradigm, where secret service operations couldn't be in much public light, because historically, there was no good platform to disseminate this information (citizens couldn't easily use or cross-check it but it was valuable for the foreign actors). Of course, there might be more cynical reasons why is it that way.. but hopefully you get the point.

sien 9y ago

I'm not an American. FWIW I would have voted Democrat both times. But blaming new media for the losses is a huge, disingenuous cop out. Looking next time, at how tough a third term is to get might work better. Making sure that the candidate has few ties to the previous, or both previous administrations from the same party might help more. Tyler Cowen has a good article about it on Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-01/facebook-doesn-t-deserve-blame-for-russian-interference https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-01/facebook-...