Value Buy
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Post by Value Buy on Nov 3, 2017 10:34:19 GMT -5
This bill is not tax reform. Are you posting on the correct thread? I am confused.
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Virgil Showlion
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Post by Virgil Showlion on Nov 3, 2017 11:42:05 GMT -5
Ok, so your argument is if a hostile foreign government spends less than $250,000 on attempting to subvert our democratic electoral process, we should just shrug and laugh that off as too minor to worry about? Not at all. I've condemned the CIA's meddling in foreign governments, and I'll do the same when Russia meddles where it shouldn't. What I'm appealing for is a bit of perspective. Firstly, by reminding people that every major nation on Earth, including the BRIC and allied nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia, have vast apparatuses in place--billions of dollars strong--devoted to spycraft, lobbying (both legal and illegal), cyberwarfare, counterintelligence, and manipulation of foreign powers. If America lashed out at every foreign government spending money to manipulate Americans and the American government to the foreigners' benefit, you'd be at war with the whole world. Secondly, by emphasizing that this Russian psy-op is a negligible blip on the radar in the grand scheme of global information warfare. Rest assured, the only reason the media or the US intelligence agencies care a whit about $100K worth of Facebook ads is because i) it helps undermine the legitimacy of Pres. Trump's hated presidency, ii) it provides a convenient excuse for Ms. Clinton's losing the 2016 election, and iii) it provides a pretext for declaring Russia an enemy in an era when the US MIC is hungry for a new and powerful enemy. The public reaction to this should be the same as it is for every other diplomatic incident (a recent example being Chinese state hackers probing the US power grid): assess the vulnerability, take reasonable steps to rectify (with due consideration to civil liberties) if possible, and get on with life.
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djAdvocate
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Post by djAdvocate on Nov 3, 2017 12:25:40 GMT -5
Uranium One deal.... Uranium will never leave our country. Uranium was allowed to go by truck to Canada for peaceful purposes allowed by the W.H. Uranium was shipped to Europe and Asia, for......peaceful purposes..... No one is allowed to say to who in Europe or Asia. It is a secret. No one can say it is still in Europe or Asia at this time, or what country it went to from there...... No problem people. Be happy. Does anyone think a special prosecutor might be needed here.......... Uranium mining in the US is costlier than Canada and far costlier than in Russia. why would Russia want US uranium, given that fact? answer: they don't. this story is 100% fake.
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djAdvocate
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Post by djAdvocate on Nov 3, 2017 12:27:44 GMT -5
The enduring-yet-premature hope that indictments against Manafort et al. will reach all the way to Pres. Trump himself. I understand hope and faith, but I also understood Paul's yearning for Mitt Romney to win the 2012 US election. Consider this a forewarning from an objective third party with no skin in the game and no preference on whether charges are filed or not. I agree.
It's not a foregone conclusion that the charges brought thus far will eventually lead to charges of Trum and his inner circle, like many who are against Trump here and in the media may believe.
i asked Virgil to show me a post where ANYONE here claimed Trump was a goner for this. your turn.
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djAdvocate
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Post by djAdvocate on Nov 3, 2017 12:29:03 GMT -5
I doubt anything will go all the way to Trump, and even if there was clear cut evidence of collusion, a GOP congress will not impeach him.
I'm hoping this will derail his agenda. He was already doing a pretty good job of that himself, with his infighting amongst the GOP members of Congress and his inability to ignore the smallest insult from war widows and NFL players, but if he gets consumed with what Mueller is doing, he won't have time to try to lobby for any of his pet projects. His voters were willing to put up with his crudeness and self congratulatory talk when they thought he could actually make changes that would benefit them, but when he proves to be nothing more than a rude big mouth, he's poison to the GOP in 2018 and toast in 2020. (IF he even runs again - I've seen two different reports from two different people who claim he won't run again in 2020).
Bannon is lobbying Trump to slam back at Mueller, and I hope that Trump once again takes his bad advice and attempts to fire Mueller, because that will backfire spectacularly and put a wooden stake in the heart of the Dark Lord Bannon. Bannon fancies himself as a political guru, the guy who got Trump elected, but if he does convince Trump to move against Mueller, that should finally expose him for what he really is, and he can shrink back into the black hole he sprang from.
And my final hope is that Trump, who has made his living for the last 10 years by selling the Trump name, ends up with such a sullied reputation that he not only can't make the usually big bucks going on speaking tours (as most ex-Presidents do) but ends up losing all his golf clubs and half all his other assets to Melania, who will finally get fed up with his sexist behavior, and he has to go back to selling overpriced steaks, while his kids have to get real jobs in the real world.
Actually, this is my final hope - the GOP sheds all this anti-immigrant, anti-gay, pro-evangelical Christian crap and produces a great fiscally conservative, social liberal candidate that no one will have any qualms voting for. (Well, no one but the anti-gays, anti-immigrant Christian fundamentalists and far left libs).
I think Trump losing his fortune is a bit ambitious in the hope department why? by his own admission, he had more debt than assets within the last (20) years.
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Virgil Showlion
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Post by Virgil Showlion on Nov 3, 2017 14:06:09 GMT -5
I agree.
It's not a foregone conclusion that the charges brought thus far will eventually lead to charges of Trum and his inner circle, like many who are against Trump here and in the media may believe.
i asked Virgil to show me a post where ANYONE here claimed Trump was a goner for this. your turn. Page #3 has several posters speculating on Pres. Trump's demise. I entered the thread in page #4 after reading Reply #96, which ends with happyhoix remarking, "If Fox News can't find a way to polish this turd, you know Trump is toast." Perhaps this statement and the comments on page #3 about Trump being dragged in front of Congress weren't referring to indictments. But the same posters have complained that if Trump isn't indicted, Congress won't lift a finger against him. Thus I deduced that at least three posters (I'm sure you can figure out which three) believe this thing is probably going to bring down Trump.
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happyhoix
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Post by happyhoix on Nov 3, 2017 14:36:05 GMT -5
i asked Virgil to show me a post where ANYONE here claimed Trump was a goner for this. your turn. Page #3 has several posters speculating on Pres. Trump's demise. I entered the thread in page #4 after reading Reply #96, which ends with happyhoix remarking, "If Fox News can't find a way to polish this turd, you know Trump is toast." Perhaps this statement and the comments on page #3 about Trump being dragged in front of Congress weren't referring to indictments. But the same posters have complained that if Trump isn't indicted, Congress won't lift a finger against him. Thus I deduced that at least three posters (I'm sure you can figure out which three) believe this thing is probably going to bring down Trump. Well, I've stated a couple times I don't think the investigation itself will bring down Trump. A GOP congress won't impeach him.
I think it will sink whatever chance he had at getting his ship of state sailing in a positive direction. He hasn't gotten any of his big plans accomplished yet, except for getting someone on the SC. He hasn't figured out that he needs to cater to Congress to get them to approve things for him - he thinks bullying will work, despite the fact that it hasn't, to this point. The Mueller investigation and the level of graft and scandal his appointees have brought into the WH with them just adds additional frenzy to the mess.
No wall, an economy that does not have money 'pouring' in, no fabulous new healthcare plan to replace Obamacare, no giant infrastructure bill, tax changes that hurt the middle class and the image of himself as the president who has spent more time on the golf course than any other president to date is what will bring him down - his own voters will do it.
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happyhoix
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Post by happyhoix on Nov 3, 2017 14:44:53 GMT -5
Ok, so your argument is if a hostile foreign government spends less than $250,000 on attempting to subvert our democratic electoral process, we should just shrug and laugh that off as too minor to worry about? Not at all. I've condemned the CIA's meddling in foreign governments, and I'll do the same when Russia meddles where it shouldn't. What I'm appealing for is a bit of perspective. Firstly, by reminding people that every major nation on Earth, including the BRIC and allied nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia, have vast apparatuses in place--billions of dollars strong--devoted to spycraft, lobbying (both legal and illegal), cyberwarfare, counterintelligence, and manipulation of foreign powers. If America lashed out at every foreign government spending money to manipulate Americans and the American government to the foreigners' benefit, you'd be at war with the whole world. Secondly, by emphasizing that this Russian psy-op is a negligible blip on the radar in the grand scheme of global information warfare. Rest assured, the only reason the media or the US intelligence agencies care a whit about $100K worth of Facebook ads is because i) it helps undermine the legitimacy of Pres. Trump's hated presidency, ii) it provides a convenient excuse for Ms. Clinton's losing the 2016 election, and iii) it provides a pretext for declaring Russia an enemy in an era when the US MIC is hungry for a new and powerful enemy. The public reaction to this should be the same as it is for every other diplomatic incident (a recent example being Chinese state hackers probing the US power grid): assess the vulnerability, take reasonable steps to rectify (with due consideration to civil liberties) if possible, and get on with life. Here is my perspective.
I don't care about the routine spying that all nations do to each other, yours and mine included.
However, if it can be proven that our president worked with the Russian government to defeat the Dem candidate - THAT is something I care about.
Our spy agencies have speculated that the Russians, on their own, would not have done such a good job crafting social media messages so perfectly suited to court the Trump voter. Were they working with the Trump campaign to get it just right, or did they find some American media company they paid to help them, totally unrelated to the campaign?
So far we don't know. We might not ever know for sure. But I'm certain that's part of what is being investigated.
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djAdvocate
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Post by djAdvocate on Nov 3, 2017 16:58:02 GMT -5
i asked Virgil to show me a post where ANYONE here claimed Trump was a goner for this. your turn. Page #3 has several posters speculating on Pres. Trump's demise. I entered the thread in page #4 after reading Reply #96, which ends with happyhoix remarking, "If Fox News can't find a way to polish this turd, you know Trump is toast." Perhaps this statement and the comments on page #3 about Trump being dragged in front of Congress weren't referring to indictments. But the same posters have complained that if Trump isn't indicted, Congress won't lift a finger against him. Thus I deduced that at least three posters (I'm sure you can figure out which three) believe this thing is probably going to bring down Trump. i read through the entirety of page 3. Trump is barely mentioned. impeachment is not mentioned AT ALL. want to try again, or are you going to let my view that your statement is absolute rubbish stand? post #96 is on page (4) right? if so, didn't see it. is that what you want to stake your claim on? edit: i see that happy repudiated the claim. so who does that leave?
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Virgil Showlion
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Post by Virgil Showlion on Nov 3, 2017 18:00:16 GMT -5
Here is my perspective.
I don't care about the routine spying that all nations do to each other, yours and mine included.
However, if it can be proven that our president worked with the Russian government to defeat the Dem candidate - THAT is something I care about.
Our spy agencies have speculated that the Russians, on their own, would not have done such a good job crafting social media messages so perfectly suited to court the Trump voter. Were they working with the Trump campaign to get it just right, or did they find some American media company they paid to help them, totally unrelated to the campaign?
So far we don't know. We might not ever know for sure. But I'm certain that's part of what is being investigated.
Presuming "perfectly suited to court the Trump voter" was language actually used by US intelligence agencies, how on Earth are they qualified to make this determination? Virtual focus group testing using all the private data they're ripping off? But let's assume they aren't full of crap and these ads really are something special. The overlying theory still makes no sense. The Trump campaign goes to Moscow and says, "Hey, comrades. We want to run an ad campaign on Facebook. For no reason at all, we're going to conspire with you to make some bang-up illegal ads rather than hiring one of countless US ad firms to do it for us legally. There's a whopping $100K in it for you if you go along. How about it? Oh, by the way, throw some pro-BLM and pro-Bernie stuff in there for good measure." If anything close to this turns out to be true, I'm going to start officially referring to the US as "the Twilight Zone" and believing in chemtrails, microchips in vaccines, and the Clinton kill list. Because the laws of a sane reality as I once knew it no longer apply.
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thyme4change
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Post by thyme4change on Nov 3, 2017 18:10:12 GMT -5
I am unclear on what part Trump supposedly colluded on. If there was cooperation, it doesn't mean the campaign initiated or was part of every activity that took place.
There is lots of evidence that Putin is meddling in various elections, and I think he had a plan with or without any help from any US candidates. We have to figure out what all was done, and how we can minimize it in the future.
If Russia's efforts were helped along with information sharing or other involvement from either of the parties, that is important to know too.
And it is super-dooper important if there is any tangible gains going in either direction.
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Post by Opti on Nov 3, 2017 18:40:11 GMT -5
mid, haven’t we already established that your lady parts don’t know as much law as you think they do? What did I miss? Are lady parts and gentleman parts practicing law instead of whole human beings?
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Virgil Showlion
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Post by Virgil Showlion on Nov 3, 2017 18:40:23 GMT -5
And it is super-dooper important if there is any tangible gains going in either direction. The operative word being "tangible".
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thyme4change
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Post by thyme4change on Nov 3, 2017 20:10:38 GMT -5
And it is super-dooper important if there is any tangible gains going in either direction. The operative word being "tangible". Winning the election is tangible.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 3, 2017 20:55:42 GMT -5
mid, haven’t we already established that your lady parts don’t know as much law as you think they do? What did I miss? Are lady parts and gentleman parts practicing law instead of whole human beings?
You missed oped playing the sexism card ,
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Post by Deleted on Nov 3, 2017 20:59:09 GMT -5
I am unclear on what part Trump supposedly colluded on. If there was cooperation, it doesn't mean the campaign initiated or was part of every activity that took place. There is lots of evidence that Putin is meddling in various elections, and I think he had a plan with or without any help from any US candidates. We have to figure out what all was done, and how we can minimize it in the future. If Russia's efforts were helped along with information sharing or other involvement from either of the parties, that is important to know too. And it is super-dooper important if there is any tangible gains going in either direction. Things like him tweeting about her emails directly after jr meeting... him tweeting someone should releas her emails, apparently after G said Russia had them, Trump asking at a rally for Russia to hack h r emails. The RNC changing the Ukrainian gets platform via Trump team request. Also if he directed or approved his campaign meeting. yes, I’d like to know if Kushner analytics helped Russians target ads. Again, th cover up and obstruction is most likely, if anything, to do him in.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 3, 2017 21:00:24 GMT -5
mid, haven’t we already established that your lady parts don’t know as much law as you think they do? What did I miss? Are lady parts and gentleman parts practicing law instead of whole human beings?
The thread where posters were discounting mid and swamps legal experience, apparently due to their vaginas.
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Value Buy
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Post by Value Buy on Nov 4, 2017 6:50:19 GMT -5
Uranium One deal.... Uranium will never leave our country. Uranium was allowed to go by truck to Canada for peaceful purposes allowed by the W.H. Uranium was shipped to Europe and Asia, for......peaceful purposes..... No one is allowed to say to who in Europe or Asia. It is a secret. No one can say it is still in Europe or Asia at this time, or what country it went to from there...... No problem people. Be happy. Does anyone think a special prosecutor might be needed here.......... Uranium mining in the US is costlier than Canada and far costlier than in Russia. why would Russia want US uranium, given that fact? answer: they don't. this story is 100% fake. Answer: they don't....................... Then why did they buy it? Their uranium would have a unique signature, as does ours. I admit I do not know the reason why they wanted it, but was it so they could keep a happy relationship with the U.S? Based on the last couple of years interaction, i would say no. Regardless we sold it with the stipulation it would not leave the country. It did. And according to our country we have no way of tracing it's final destination. Or our leaders refuse to tell it's citizens where it is. Take your choice.
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Value Buy
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Post by Value Buy on Nov 4, 2017 6:56:03 GMT -5
What did I miss? Are lady parts and gentleman parts practicing law instead of whole human beings?
The thread where posters were discounting mid and swamps legal experience, apparently due to their vaginas. Now you are off topic, and yet I can not go off topic........
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Virgil Showlion
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Post by Virgil Showlion on Nov 5, 2017 10:44:14 GMT -5
The operative word being "tangible". Winning the election is tangible. The DNC rigged the party nomination in favour of Ms. Clinton. She spent $1.2 billion (note: $1.2 billion > 10,000 x $100K) to woo the American people but made numerous severe errors while campaigning, especially in swing states. She lost the EC vote. She did not lose because of a token Russian psy-op. If $100K worth of Bernie colouring book and "Hillary is Satan" Facebook ads is sufficient to alter the outcome of your federal election, you should thank Pres. Putin for putting you out of your misery.
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Post by billisonboard on Nov 5, 2017 11:17:15 GMT -5
... The DNC rigged the party nomination in favour of Ms. Clinton. ... There is the proper word choice (which I hadn't found). Not "fixed" as some have used. Thanks Virgil Showlion just to be clear, this is not
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Post by Tennesseer on Nov 5, 2017 17:19:08 GMT -5
Satire from The Borowitz ReportWhite House Claims Flynn’s Job Was to Make Coffee When Papadopoulos Was BusyBy Andy Borowitz WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The White House called an unscheduled press briefing on Sunday to clarify Michael T. Flynn’s role in the Trump campaign, claiming that his job consisted entirely of making coffee when George Papadopoulos was busy with other matters. “Sometimes, we would ask for coffee and George was otherwise occupied,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said. “At that point, Michael Flynn would step in and make that coffee.” When asked what role Flynn’s son, Michael G. Flynn, played in the campaign, Sanders indicated that he, too, was involved in coffee-making to the exclusion of all other responsibilities. “There were many times when the two Flynns would make coffee together,” she said. “The father would actually make the coffee, and the son would add the creamer, sweetener, and whatnot.” Sanders said that, in the weeks to come, the White House is likely to release the names of additional campaign staffers whose roles were limited to the preparation of coffee beverages, and that such names might include Jared Kushner and Donald Trump, Jr. “This was a campaign that drank a great deal of coffee,” she explained. link
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happyhoix
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Post by happyhoix on Nov 6, 2017 7:44:18 GMT -5
Winning the election is tangible. The DNC rigged the party nomination in favour of Ms. Clinton. She spent $1.2 billion (note: $1.2 billion > 10,000 x $100K) to woo the American people but made numerous severe errors while campaigning, especially in swing states. She lost the EC vote. She did not lose because of a token Russian psy-op.If $100K worth of Bernie colouring book and "Hillary is Satan" Facebook ads is sufficient to alter the outcome of your federal election, you should thank Pres. Putin for putting you out of your misery. At one point last year, Facebook was about 10% Russian content. Twitter was about 5% Russian. That's the miracle of social media - you spend a piddling amount of money to place the content, then other users push it around the platform for you - for free.
And it wasn't 'Hillary is Satan' - it was content designed to inflame sentiment against Muslims and immigrants. Fake BLM postings designed to inflame the whites who feel like victims, to make them think they were part of a big nationalist, white power force uniting to elect Trump.
A while back, you lectured me on how evil Facebook is, and how it disseminates propaganda by extremists groups but surrounds it with videos of cute kittens so we don't notice we're being mislead. You advised me to perform a social experiment on myself so I could judge just how nefarious Facebook is. Now you're suddenly laughing off the fact that Russians may have used social media against us in order to help elect a president they could very well have blackmail material against?
So what is Facebook? A nefarious propaganda machine attempting to ruin our families by normalizing the gay lifestyle and radical feminism, or something so banal it couldn't possible influence people to vote one way or another? Think carefully, because you can't have it both ways.
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Opti
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Post by Opti on Nov 6, 2017 10:05:41 GMT -5
Good political cartoon.
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happyhoix
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Post by happyhoix on Nov 6, 2017 12:25:15 GMT -5
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happyhoix
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Post by happyhoix on Nov 6, 2017 12:32:56 GMT -5
Along about dessert, we may get to sample some Trump Jr, who apparently 'hinted at' a Trump administration reversing the current anti-Russian laws in exchange for good dirt on Hillary.
www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-jr-hinted-at-review-of-anti-russia-law-moscow-lawyer-says/ar-AAuvF91
Promising something in exchange for dirt on your opponent, does that meet the definition of colluding with a hostile foreign government?
I'm sure Trump Sr would pass that off as 'a good business deal,' but I'd be more interested to see what the federal regulations would consider it.
Have you noticed that so many of Trump's pals (and kids, and kids of pals) have some kind of criminal deals going on the side? I think maybe he isn't surrounding himself with the 'best minds' like he claims.
Or maybe, in his thinking, all the best minds have criminal deals going on the side....
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Virgil Showlion
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Post by Virgil Showlion on Nov 6, 2017 12:44:51 GMT -5
At one point last year, Facebook was about 10% Russian content. Twitter was about 5% Russian. That's the miracle of social media - you spend a piddling amount of money to place the content, then other users push it around the platform for you - for free. You call it "Russian content", but it's content that originated in thousands of places that resembles the content in the psy-op. 99.999% of the content would still have circulated had Russia sat on the sidelines. If you believe Ms. Clinton's health wouldn't have been called into question, immigration would have been a back-burner issue, and BLM wouldn't have dominated news headlines without the Russians, beam me up. The war for people's attention on the Internet is a multi-billion-dollar war employing millions of skilled marketers, designers, analysts, bloggers, journalists, and pundits. The idea that the Russian op was so phenomenally well designed that it made a meaningful impact among a sea of competitors literally millions of times its size is the fantasy to end all fantasies. I know it's what the media wants you to believe, but they have their own agenda, as you well know. And it wasn't 'Hillary is Satan' - it was content designed to inflame sentiment against Muslims and immigrants. Fake BLM postings designed to inflame the whites who feel like victims, to make them think they were part of a big nationalist, white power force uniting to elect Trump. Tell that to the posters who posted sample Russian ads. One was a "Hillary is Satan" meme. One was a Bernie Sanders colouring book. A while back, you lectured me on how evil Facebook is, and how it disseminates propaganda by extremists groups but surrounds it with videos of cute kittens so we don't notice we're being mislead. You advised me to perform a social experiment on myself so I could judge just how nefarious Facebook is. Now you're suddenly laughing off the fact that Russians may have used social media against us in order to help elect a president they could very well have blackmail material against? I'm not laughing at it, and I'm not claiming it has no impact whatsoever. I'm claiming its impact is closely related to its seed magnitude, which is proportional to its cost and man hours invested. Both are negligible in the great miasma of Internet content that surrounded the 2016 election. The "lecture" you're talking about was this thread, and my grievance was with you (and others) was that you were treating Facebook manipulation (see here) as something you were immune to. Note that I concern myself with the scale of search engine and social media manipulation, and its effectiveness. I also acknowledge that Mr. Zuckerberg, whose power over Facebook content dwarfs Russia's by many orders of magnitude, has the right to manipulate people on the platform he's built. Again I emphasize that I'm not dismissing propaganda and foreign psy-ops as ineffectual. I'm emphasizing perspective. The amount of attention being paid by the media to this Russian op is absurdly disproportionate to its impact. It's like blaming a single drop of water when a child drowns in a bathtub.
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thyme4change
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Post by thyme4change on Nov 6, 2017 14:12:32 GMT -5
At one point last year, Facebook was about 10% Russian content. Twitter was about 5% Russian. That's the miracle of social media - you spend a piddling amount of money to place the content, then other users push it around the platform for you - for free. You call it "Russian content", but it's content that originated in thousands of places that resembles the content in the psy-op. 99.999% of the content would still have circulated had Russia sat on the sidelines. If you believe Ms. Clinton's health wouldn't have been called into question, immigration would have been a back-burner issue, and BLM wouldn't have dominated news headlines without the Russians, beam me up. The war for people's attention on the Internet is a multi-billion-dollar war employing millions of skilled marketers, designers, analysts, bloggers, journalists, and pundits. The idea that the Russian op was so phenomenally well designed that it made a meaningful impact among a sea of competitors literally millions of times its size is the fantasy to end all fantasies. I know it's what the media wants you to believe, but they have their own agenda, as you well know. And it wasn't 'Hillary is Satan' - it was content designed to inflame sentiment against Muslims and immigrants. Fake BLM postings designed to inflame the whites who feel like victims, to make them think they were part of a big nationalist, white power force uniting to elect Trump. Tell that to the posters who posted sample Russian ads. One was a "Hillary is Satan" meme. One was a Bernie Sanders colouring book. A while back, you lectured me on how evil Facebook is, and how it disseminates propaganda by extremists groups but surrounds it with videos of cute kittens so we don't notice we're being mislead. You advised me to perform a social experiment on myself so I could judge just how nefarious Facebook is. Now you're suddenly laughing off the fact that Russians may have used social media against us in order to help elect a president they could very well have blackmail material against? I'm not laughing at it, and I'm not claiming it has no impact whatsoever. I'm claiming its impact is closely related to its seed magnitude, which is proportional to its cost and man hours invested. Both are negligible in the great miasma of Internet content that surrounded the 2016 election. The "lecture" you're talking about was this thread, and my grievance was with you (and others) was that you were treating Facebook manipulation (see here) as something you were immune to. Note that I concern myself with the scale of search engine and social media manipulation, and its effectiveness. I also acknowledge that Mr. Zuckerberg, whose power over Facebook content dwarfs Russia's by many orders of magnitude, has the right to manipulate people on the platform he's built. Again I emphasize that I'm not dismissing propaganda and foreign psy-ops as ineffectual. I'm emphasizing perspective. The amount of attention being paid by the media to this Russian op is absurdly disproportionate to its impact. It's like blaming a single drop of water when a child drowns in a bathtub. Do you feel the same way about the Hillary-Russia investigation?
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Virgil Showlion
Distinguished Associate
Moderator
[b]leones potest resistere[/b]
Joined: Dec 20, 2010 15:19:33 GMT -5
Posts: 27,448
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Post by Virgil Showlion on Nov 6, 2017 17:45:20 GMT -5
Do you feel the same way about the Hillary-Russia investigation? I haven't been following it closely. Yesterday I read a conspiracy theory that the Uranium One rumblings, followed by the Wienstein scandal, followed by Donna Brazile's book release in rapid succession were an attempt to "put a stake through Hillary Clinton's heart" in response to her reporting she'll run again in 2020 "if the people want her to".
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happyhoix
Distinguished Associate
Joined: Oct 7, 2011 7:22:42 GMT -5
Posts: 21,442
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Post by happyhoix on Nov 6, 2017 18:11:21 GMT -5
At one point last year, Facebook was about 10% Russian content. Twitter was about 5% Russian. That's the miracle of social media - you spend a piddling amount of money to place the content, then other users push it around the platform for you - for free. You call it "Russian content", but it's content that originated in thousands of places that resembles the content in the psy-op. 99.999% of the content would still have circulated had Russia sat on the sidelines. If you believe Ms. Clinton's health wouldn't have been called into question, immigration would have been a back-burner issue, and BLM wouldn't have dominated news headlines without the Russians, beam me up. The war for people's attention on the Internet is a multi-billion-dollar war employing millions of skilled marketers, designers, analysts, bloggers, journalists, and pundits. The idea that the Russian op was so phenomenally well designed that it made a meaningful impact among a sea of competitors literally millions of times its size is the fantasy to end all fantasies. I know it's what the media wants you to believe, but they have their own agenda, as you well know. And it wasn't 'Hillary is Satan' - it was content designed to inflame sentiment against Muslims and immigrants. Fake BLM postings designed to inflame the whites who feel like victims, to make them think they were part of a big nationalist, white power force uniting to elect Trump. Tell that to the posters who posted sample Russian ads. One was a "Hillary is Satan" meme. One was a Bernie Sanders colouring book. A while back, you lectured me on how evil Facebook is, and how it disseminates propaganda by extremists groups but surrounds it with videos of cute kittens so we don't notice we're being mislead. You advised me to perform a social experiment on myself so I could judge just how nefarious Facebook is. Now you're suddenly laughing off the fact that Russians may have used social media against us in order to help elect a president they could very well have blackmail material against? I'm not laughing at it, and I'm not claiming it has no impact whatsoever. I'm claiming its impact is closely related to its seed magnitude, which is proportional to its cost and man hours invested. Both are negligible in the great miasma of Internet content that surrounded the 2016 election. The "lecture" you're talking about was this thread, and my grievance was with you (and others) was that you were treating Facebook manipulation (see here) as something you were immune to. Note that I concern myself with the scale of search engine and social media manipulation, and its effectiveness. I also acknowledge that Mr. Zuckerberg, whose power over Facebook content dwarfs Russia's by many orders of magnitude, has the right to manipulate people on the platform he's built. Again I emphasize that I'm not dismissing propaganda and foreign psy-ops as ineffectual. I'm emphasizing perspective. The amount of attention being paid by the media to this Russian op is absurdly disproportionate to its impact. It's like blaming a single drop of water when a child drowns in a bathtub. You spent a lot of time explaining to me how Facebook manipulation warps people's perspectives. You're right. You can't now pretend that, yes, it does warp what people think, but in this case, the fact that 126 million American voters saw propaganda generated by the Russian government for the sole purpose of interfering with our election process 'is absurdly disproportionate to it's impact.'
Yes, a lot of those 126 million voters didn't have their minds changed. But do I need to remind you how very few voters pushed Trump over into the win column? Here is a hint - he didn't win in a landslide. He didn't even win the popular vote. If only a relatively few voters saw the Russian propaganda and it provided extra motivation to either stay home on voting day, or to make sure they did go out and vote, did it impact the election? How can you claim for sure it didn't?
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