US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6491

On January 03 2017 01:45 ChristianS wrote:
Jesus Christ, I'm so sick of the exchange:

Person 1: Isn't it concerning that Russia influenced our election?
Person 2: Nah, because I'm not concerned about the source, I'm concerned with the content of the leaks.

Look, there was some stuff in the leaks that was legitimately concerning. There was also a fuckton of stuff that wasn't actually indicative of anything concerning, it just looked kind of bad. It wasn't smoothed and polished and prepared for mass consumption. The reason it wasn't is because it wasn't meant to be consumed by everyone, it was meant to be a private email discussing the campaign. If they had made stuff like that public themselves, any negative misconceptions it produced would be their own fault, because they didn't control their messaging.

What happened instead is that hackers, probably Russian, pulled all that stuff out, and waved it around at everyone, knowing that it would produce a lot of misconceptions and hurt her election chances. So a fuckton of people believe that the e-mails literally revealed election rigging in the Democratic primaries, when in fact they reveal that people at the DNC preferred Hillary. Nothing in the DNC leaks was illegal, nor did any of it in any way prevent the primaries from being free and fair elections. Hillary didn't steal the nomination, she won it fairly. (That they had to force DWS to resign to try to placate the angry masses a bit is not proof of wrongdoing either, just an indication that they thought firing someone from the DNC might help their political chances.) But these misconceptions were everywhere, in a large part because of imprecisely worded e-mails being made public all over the place.

Now maybe you could try to say it's still their fault, because they shouldn't say things even behind closed doors that could hurt their chances (as people often said about Romney's leaked 47% comment). But first of all, that's ridiculous to expect the same standard of carefulness of speech from every member of the campaign in every conversation they have, public or private. Second of all, it still doesn't address the fact that this same reveal of Republican private conversations would almost certainly have the same collection of imprecise and inartful statements that would hurt their political chances. No doubt someone in some e-mail would make reference to "oversampling" for a poll and there'd be a whole big thing over whether Republicans were rigging polls.

Here's an analogy for you. Let's suppose you have a girlfriend you've been dating for a few years. Now suppose there's someone who wants you two to break up, so they've been recording all your private conversations, including when you talk with your friends about your relationship. They also make copies of all your diary entries. Then one day, they start sending your girlfriend daily packages with recordings, photocopies of pages from your journal, etc., each day trying to emphasize a different time when you said something that sounded kind of bad. Maybe one time early in your relationship you confided in your friend that you just don't know if she's "long-term material." Another time you confided that you think that dress does, in fact, make her look a little fat. Now your girlfriend is mad at you, and you're upset at what an intense invasion of privacy this was. She keeps quoting little snippets of things you said over the last couple of years out of context.

Thing is, you're in a really unfair position at this point. You could try to address each thing you said in the recordings, apologize, try to explain what you meant by it, have an argument, and eventually make up. That's a normal process of conflict resolution in couples, but the thing is that process generally takes around a day to complete. They're dropping a new bombshell every day, so if you try to address them head on, you'll spend all of your time fighting with her. You try to protest that this material was unfairly recorded, and that your privacy has been violated, which might work if she had been recording it, but since it was some shady stranger, she doesn't care. As long as it's true, she'll insist that whoever the source is, it's what's in the recordings that matters.

Should you have said those things? Maybe not, but I think it's fair to say that if you recorded any one person's words, comments, writings, etc. and revealed everything the had said about someone ever to all of their friends, nobody would come out looking clean. If now your girlfriend is thinking about leaving you and going back to her ex because he never said all of those things about her, she's wrong. Of course he said stuff like that about her if they were together very long, it's just that nobody is actively trying to break them up, so nobody has recorded all that stuff and sent it to her. If your comments had been left in the private contexts in which they were said, she would think the same thing about you.

The point is, what's in the leaks does matter, but it has to be judged in the context of "Okay, this stuff wasn't meant for the public to see so it's not going to be carefully crafted messaging designed to avoid giving false impressions. If it reveals something clearly illegal or unethical that's fair game, but if it's just something phrased in a poor way, we should forgive that because they didn't think this would be seen by anyone." It was not judged in that context. So #14 or w/e on the mostdamaging wikileaks.com list was someone from the DNC referring to their "propaganda" in talking about the production of their political ads. That's a poor word to use publicly, because it has associations with creepy government-manufactured truths that no one is allowed to question. Privately, of course, it's a perfectly useful word to describe messaging intended to influence public opinion.

The result was that one political party had all their dirty laundry pulled out and paraded around in public for all to see, while the other did not. The reason is because as best we can tell, a foreign power against whom we are frequently in opposition thought that it'd serve their interests more to have the other political party in charge. So he got ahold of both parties' dirty laundry, but only revealed the one side to try and swing public opinion against them. Now that the election is over and the outcome isn't going to change, you can stop getting defensive about whether this would be a good reason for electors to defect or something, and just deal with what's in front of you. That's a creepy precedent. We should try to make sure that can't happen again, because our leaders are supposed to be chosen by the American people, not by Russian intelligence agencies.

A Labour MP has claimed that it is "highly probable" that Vladimir Putin’s Russia interfered in the UK’s Brexit referendum.

Ben Bradshaw said Moscow’s likely interference in the vote would fit a pattern of meddling in other nations’ affairs, following the CIA’s accusation that Russian hackers tried to influence the recent US elections.

Speaking in the Commons debate on Aleppo, Mr Bradshaw also claimed that the huge flows of migrants into Europe had been deliberately encouraged by Russia to destabilise the EU.

He said: "I don’t think we have even begun to wake up to what Russia is doing when it comes to cyber warfare.

"Not only their interference, now proven, in the American presidential campaign, [but] probably in our referendum last year. We don’t have the evidence for that yet. But I think it’s highly probable."

Last week the CIA claimed that Russia had interfered with the US election and actively helped Donald Trump win the White House.

The agency suggested emails hacked from the Democratic Party and given to the WikiLeaks website aided the Republican candidate’s win in November’s race.

Mr Bradshaw also pointed to French elections where Marine Le Pen’s National Front asked Russia for a £23m loan to help it fight presidential and parliamentary campaigns in 2017.

German politicians and intelligence officers have warned that hackers and others acting for the Russian state could undermine Germany's general elections next year.

Mr Bradshaw went on: "When will we realise that Russia’s strategy is to weaken and divide the free world and that driving the biggest refugee flows into Europe since World War Two is a deliberate, a deliberate, part of that plan.

"When will we admit that what Putin can’t achieve militarily he is already achieving using cyber and propaganda warfare."

A Downing Street spokesman said he had not seen any evidence of Russian interference in the EU referendum.