US Politics Mega-thread - Page 435

On July 10 2018 08:21 Plansix wrote:

I saw that earlier. It is a little conspiratorial, but my view on Trump + Russia has always been that even if 25% of it is true, it’s still terrible.

But even if it is as bad as it could be, I don't know how congress sells it to the American people while Fox News exists.

On July 10 2018 11:53 Plansix wrote:
Collins is naive enough to believe the court won’t overturn a ruling like Roe.

And it’s all related to the steeped-in-creepy-history transatlantic relationship between the United States and Europe. And not to mention NATO in modern times. Here’s what I think of NATO in the language of the intelligentsia which might appease your "he's a Russian propagandist!" sensibilities:

SEOUL, South Korea—A top adviser to South Korea’s president says he would eventually like to see the U.S.–South Korea alliance end. In language that sounded almost Trump-like, Chung In Moon, a special adviser to President Moon Jae In for foreign affairs and national security, said in an interview that alliances in general are a “very unnatural state of international relations” and said that, “for me, the best thing is to really get rid of alliance.”
There you go. "Alliances in general are a very unnatural state of international relations." Isn't that the fucking truth of it.

--omitted for brevity--

Meanwhile, I saw this excellent coverage on the Poor People's Campaign from RT America, where Americans in America covering American news are apparently quite literally labeled as Russian Foreign Agents:

There's got to be Soviet jokes about this kind of thing. Government law enforcement arresting people for protesting poverty, while government representatives are lying to the media about poverty and at the same time government intelligence agencies even accusing people who report on poverty of being foreign agents?

I’ve also noticed that a lot of the same people who show up on places like Democracy Now and Jimmy Dore (like I linked at the start) are literally the same people that show up as guests on RT America. Basically just socialist anti-empire activists that don't see the light of day on corporate media. Jimmy's been on RT, too. And that lady who was at Occupy. They're all part of the same circle of people fighting to get the socialist anti-empire message out, and now they're probably all tainted with the label "associate of Russian Foreign Agent" in some NSA/FBI database. It’s just a cruel joke.

Honestly, the only thing find wrong with RT America is the fact that apparently no American billionaires will help those American people broadcast their message so that they can be free of "Russian influence". For the pro-socialist anti-war anti-police state activists it's simply “different aims, different means, but common ground in between”.

On July 06 2018 16:58 a_flayer wrote:

On an unrelated note, did anyone catch wind of that "#walkaway" campaign? It seems so horribly manufactured, I can't even begin to describe it. Sounds like the Russians are at it again, just like they must have hacked the Ocasio-Cortez website that one time.

Kremlin-affiliated trolls have subversively co-opted #WalkAway as an influence campaign, data appears to show. The hashtag is boosting visibility for a right-wing-hyped non-movement of disenchanted liberals who are supposedly abandoning the Democratic Party in a bid to breed division.

Data available through Hamilton 68, an analysis project focused on monitoring agitprop and backed by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, shows that swarms of Russian troll accounts made #WalkAway one of the highest ranking hashtags on Twitter in the past 48 hours.

One writer for Arc Digital noticed similar trends and came to the same conclusion.

“The primary functional goal of an astroturfed campaign like this one is to manipulate public opinion by gaming online algorithms to amplify certain content and push it onto people’s social media feeds and to the top of search engine results,” wrote behavioral scientist Caroline Orr.

The #WalkAway hashtag itself can be sourced back to a YouTube video posted in May by New York-based hairdresser Brandon Straka. In the video, Straka explains how he had grown disillusioned by liberalism and the Democratic Party which, he argued, merely used people of color and LGBTQ people but did little to advance their agenda. He then calls on others who feel the same to #WalkAway from the Democratic Party—thus launching the campaign.

Little had come of it until last week, when right-wing media outlets and leading conservatives discovered the video and began circulating it online. Coverage by websites like the Gateway Pundit and Breitbart hailed the news as a watershed moment, claiming that liberals were abandoning their party “in droves.”

The Daily Dot reported on how, even at that early stage and among the dozens of real ex-Democrats telling their stories, bot Twitter accounts were already beginning to exploit the rising conversation. One collected 16,000 retweets before being banned.

On July 10 2018 14:18 a_flayer wrote:
I know this is awkward timing considering my previous post, but I posted the following a few days ago when I saw some social media campaign about "walking away from Democrats cause they're so racist".



In case it wasn't clear, I was being sarcastic when I blamed it on Russia, but it seems the media has caught on.

They're blaming it on Russia.

Source

The account that they use as an example is currently suspended but still visible here in the Web Archive. I'm sure there's bots from Russian IP addresses retweeting this, and this may be one, but it does not look like a Russian government bot to me at all. It's a bot alright, but I do not believe this to be part of a Russian government plot.

Whether it's the racist evil genius computer scientist Robert Mercer and his buddy Steve Bannon or some other racist American billionaires and their henchmen, or perhaps a country like Israel (maybe both), I can't tell you. But Russia is just not on my radar for this one.