Russia hired 1,000 people to create anti-Clinton 'fake news' in key US states during election

I haven't seen anyone in the corporate media say the reason Trump won was because of Russia. They are all saying that Russia interfered with the election in an effort to get Trump elected.

They say that because evidence supports the claim. But saying that, and investigating that is different than saying the actual reason he won was because of Russia.

 

So you think the massive amounts of coincidences are nothing than hot smoke?

I'll agree that most of the evidence at the moment is circumstantial.

 

Wait, what? I get that you and Rolling Stone can get some mileage by using "mass hysteria on social media" as equivalent to an "unholy alliance of neocons and DNC darlings," but back up and look at the evidence yourself.

There's a lot of smoke, and any American should want to see if there's fire.

Finally, as F.B. already posted, I seriously cannot find anyone claiming "he definitely won because Russia." Or nobody most of us take seriously. He won b/c Hillary ran a terrible campaign and b/c he conned middle America, hugely, bigly. Russia ran a lot of ridiculous fake internet chafe but for the life of me I cannot find a serious intellect claiming that "definitely" delivered Trump's win.

I mean, it's fun to high horse and look down at everyone's reaction to things. It's SUPER fun. But make sure you take some time with all the evidence yourself. Something really, really weird is going on. Or perhaps you think major intelligence officials and agencies are as stupid as social media.

 

First, I apologize if my posts are poorly organized -- I'm dealing with a bout of mono in middle age and my brain is not functioning as it should.

I think the commentary from Dick Cheney, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain, five people I think we can agree aren't exactly difficult to distinguish from each other, has been indistinguishable from each other in references to both the Russia thing as "an act of war" and approval of the cruise missile strike on Syria. I find that just a bit troubling.

Calling for an independant investigation is not the same thing as claiming Russian yellow journalism "hacked an election" or "engaged in an act of war."

I suppose Rachel Maddow, the random Californians and Austinites on my FB feed, fellow UT staff, my mom, Sam Fisher, or the random stoners in the practice room I use on South Manchaca are not "serious intellect" but that's a large chunk of people I interact with that I would otherwise expect to know better. I appreciate that you and FB don't engage in the same [Russian bots made people vote for Bernie / All Trump supporters are white supremacists / Misogynistic men were the core of Sanders supporters / Reading WikiLeaks is illegal / Julian Assange is a Russian stooge] hyperbole, but that kind of rhetoric is coming from the DNC (and more importantly, from journalists that didn't treat these claims with critical distance and repeated them) and it certainly looks very much like ungrounded denialism, which to me is very alarming because it means that the Democratic Party is going to use the same flawed playbook to lose the midterms.

I remember as far back as 2011, talking to Democratic Party voting Americans in Tel Aviv in 2011 about the upcoming election. At the time I was working for a few PACs (strictly clients for my ad agency -- I had no personal connection) and I told them that I believed Obama would win, based on the things I had read in preparing for the ads I was creating and targeting. They were very cheery and did that "He's great isn't he?" sort of thing. I said I liked him better than previous presidents of recent memory of either party, but my prediction was based on his overwhelming support from insurance companies and financial institutions, which gave him a huge advantage in fundraising. "And that's great, right?" they said, gleefully, and I said "Only if winning elections is all you care about. It would be nice to have a president that didn't white-knight Wall Street and ignore the needs of the working class."

I believed all those intelligence officials and agencies when they told us that Iraq was an existential threat to the world and supported the invasion of Iraq based on that, allowing myself to ignore the fact that there are many in our government that never saw an interventionist war they didn't like. That unfortunately describes, all politics aside, most outside of the small bubbles of restraint within the progressive left and libertarian right that have been consistent then and now about the use of force...and jumping to conclusions without conclusive evidence.

If having a higher standard for a causus belli than "because the media personalities and politicians I agree with politically say so" is so high a bar that I can be described as riding a high horse, it speaks volumes to how low the bar is in our body politic in demanding a fact-based approach to policy. Politics both internal and external (and by extension, money) governs how our government works. Intelligence agencies are not excluded from this. As far back as the Korean War, in my academic study anyway, and likely since the beginning of organized warfare, there have always been analysts overruled and ignored on the side of every bad decision made by intelligence.

Conventional wisdom held that China would never invade UN forces in Korea, the US would eventually overcome the VietCong and North Vietnamese, The Soviet Union would be around for generations to come, Egypt would never attack Israel again in the Sinai and Negev, Saddam Hussein was stockpiling biological and chemical weapons and was working on a nuclear bomb that would irrevocably challenge the security of the world, and also, that people throughout the Middle East would welcome Western armies as liberators and would form democratic societies if only their despots were bombed out of existence. There were many within intelligence communities that called these things right and predicted events correctly but their conclusions were not the answers leaders wanted to hear that supported the policies they had in place.

I don't think it's a serious of nefarious plots, and certainly not particular to Americans, as much as it is a universal limitation in our primitive primate brains to be vigilant of our own cognitive dissonance. I'm not a flag ranked officer, or a high ranking federal employee, nor am I a journalist or media company chairman who has people like this in my social circle that I would be inclined to believe without effort. If was any of those people, I don't see how I would be more immune to that sort of fallacy. But, I'm not one of those people and I see it from a distance and that's certainly how it looks to me.

With that said, I do not treat the NSA or the CIA, or MI6, or Shin Bet, or any other Western clandestine service in the same way as I do random people on social media. I don't regard my friend's hippie wife's anti-vaxxer memes with the same amount of credibility as an official statement from Admiral Rodgers or General Alexander, as much as I hold them to a much higher standard of providing evidence for their claims.

 

Wrong thread.

 

^last post on the bbs by @robbie380 2 months ago

I guess he's so underwhelmed by the lack of Russian connections that he can't even visit the BBS anymore.

 

You probably mean no harm, but:
Wouldn't use this for political reasons, it's always concerning to see longtime-posters disappear. Hope he's safe.

 

Maybe he's on a deep dive undercover investigation with Hannity and Assange finding out the real Russia non-story.

 

I hope you get paid for this!

 

Oh, I forgot you, aren't you one of the people who told us this whole Russia thing was FAKE NEWS?

Haw haw haw.

 

I'm not sure how you could forget me when I'm one of the the only people responding to you, Lord Haw Haw.

I never used the term "fake news." I have found myself using words I generally don't, like "dialectic," because I am sincerely interested in the truth and not dry humping unsubstantiated claims that make me feel better.

I said since the beginning that an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence. All I've seen is some extraordinary spin to spoil for a war and a huge exercise in denial in the failure of the Democratic Party to prevent the least popular president of all time from being elected.

Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes get paid 30k a day to sell their souls. I'm guessing David Brock (or whatever surrogate) is paying you less to sell yours.

 

Lost in all of this was that Russia committed a hostile act towards the USA by interfering with the election and neither Trump nor any Republican has done anything about it. America is now Russia's pushover.