ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP

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Turtledove wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

And what evidence do you have for this belief? Christopher Steele?

One example of many is Helsinki

The excellent question included in it just one of many examples of the evidence that our President has been compromised by the Russians. Which is the Steele dossier.

You're telling me you actually believe that bullshit?

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Turtledove wrote:

Here's just one snippet from that article if you don't feel like reading the whole thing.

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As a result, U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years. Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.

It's not accurate to say Russia sought to install Trump into the presidency. As I've said before, you can physically view the ads that constituted the entirety of provable Russian election interference — that is, that which Mueller has indicted Russians for. You don't need to guess or imagine, letting your darkest fears overwhelm your reason; you can simply look at the empirical data.

What does that data show? Some of those ads promote Trump or attack Clinton. Some of them promote Bernie Sanders or Black Lives Matter (and/or attack Clinton from the left). After Nov 7th 2016, ALL of them attack Trump. Basically the only thing they NEVER do is promote Clinton.

Given that evidence, the conclusion should not be that there was something about Trump that Russia liked, but something about Clinton that Russia hated. If you say "Russia sought to install Trump" then by the same standard they also sought to install Bernie Sanders. Is Sanders also a Russian asset the Kremlin has kompromat on? The Russians also sought to build membership in Black Lives Matter — does this mean BLM is a Russian psyop? Is everyone who wasn't With Her with Putin? Or is it simply that Clinton's rhetoric during the campaign was sufficiently russophobic as to garner their disfavor?

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Turtledove wrote:

Here's a more complete treatment of this extremely important question.

Donald Trump has been compromised by Russia

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We can start with the 2016 presidential campaign in which Trump not only refused to criticize Russia or Putin directly, but also openly and publicly asked for their assistance in finding Hillary Clinton’s missing e-mails.

If you watch the clip of him saying it, it's very clearly a joke.

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But perhaps even more telling is Trump’s consistent refusal to acknowledge Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election — which of course continues to this day.

Transcript of January 11, 2017 press conference:

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JOURNALIST: First of all, did the heads of the intelligence agencies provide you with the two-page summary of these unsubstantiated allegations? And secondly to that, on the broader picture, do you accept their opinion that Vladimir Putin ordered the hack of the DNC and the attempted hack of the RNC?

TRUMP: [lengthy response regarding security briefing with intelligence agencies] As far as hacking, I think it was Russia. But I think we also get hacked by other countries and other people.

Trump has waffled on this, but that's due to his belief that such things are, at this point, inherently unknowable. Per his Twitter: "Unless you catch 'hackers' in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking." My fact-check on that is "half true" — assuming competent network security, it isn't difficult to have automated systems collect sufficient evidence, but bad security will leave logs you can't trust as accurate. In a way it's like identifying the man who robs a liquor store with a recording security camera system versus without.

In any case, Trump is so flimsy on this issue that he'll probably parrot the last argument he's heard. In that press conference he implied he thinks Russia did it, because he'd just met with the US intelligence agencies. After a meeting with Putin he said he thinks Russia didn't do it — he didn't say for sure they didn't, just that Putin's denial was very persuasive. In short, he hasn't reasoned it out either way — indeed, he's rationalized how he can't reason it out — and goes purely by his gut feel du jour.

But back to the DNC servers. Did they have competent security? Almost certainly not. The DNC refused to let the FBI analyze the evidence, had third party firm Crowdstrike analyze instead, then destroyed the servers. Crowdstrike's report mentioned malware of Russian origin that had infected the network — specifically, old versions of them. Anti-malware with up-to-date definitions should have been able to alert administrators to the issue prior to data theft, because the malware didn't extract emails itself so much as set up a backdoor for entry. It's also theoretically possible this back door was never utilized; in the vast majority of infections, it isn't.

Lastly, the author of that article has severe TDS. One calling X a facto agent of Y despite one openly admitting they doubt X works directly for Y and X saying publicly he wants to be tougher on Y (and did say so during the campaign, 3rd presidential debate) is stretching it, but the author refuses to acknowledge the stretch and assets such things with a brazen confidence.

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鬼殺し wrote:

...Damn. With Xav on vacation, Scrotes better step up his wackadoodle game or this place might actually get rational for a bit.

Shit, maybe we can lure TheShitRubsOff in here...

You can thank me for him being gone. Both him and I got probated because of this topic, because of something I posted and what he replied to it. I don't think either of the posts warranted a probation though.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

If you watch the clip of him saying it, it's very clearly a joke.

That is the most directly absurd thing you said in your post. I know the next day the pathological liar claimed it was a joke. Nobody laughed and no one thought it was funny. It was not a joke. You can believe he meant it as a joke but to claim that it was clearly a joke is patently absurd. While saying it he was sober, somber, and matter of fact. The reporters erupted after he said it and he didn't respond that he was joking, he doubled down on it being a good thing if Russia broke the law and did exactly as they did which was helping Trump get elected by stealing information.

Regarding your assertions that you know what Russia's motives are better than the USA intelligence community, nope, not a believable position.

Apropos of nothing in particular...



=^[.]^=

BTW, I've argued before that classical liberalism (and it's extremist form, so-called "anarchocapitalism") are essentially centrist, and I recently discovered this handy visual aide:

The only change I'd make is that I'd rotate the chart 60° counterclockwise (and reset the "left" and "right" labels correspondingly). Why? Because people who want little or no government have correspondingly little or no interest in political parties until and unless they're scared into action. In the triangle above the red and green teams need their own political movements to achieve their respective ends, but the blue "team" just wants to keep the red and green teams from bothering them. As such, individualists don't truly have their own permanent political party — merely temporary, reactionary ones, or a temporary alliance with a permanent one.

I understand that our current Overton Window is such that classical liberalism is considered right-wing and that the Freedom Caucus currently dominates the GOP, but at the end of the day the Republican Party is an always will be the home of the green team, even if they've all but disappeared for now and we're borrowing it while they're gone. Sooner or later (the sooner the better) the Democrats (or a party replacing them) will take down the sign saying "you must be this progressive to ride" and start appealing to both communists AND individualists again and/or the GOP will get cocky as the Democrats now are start appealing to their fringes a bit more again because they think they don't need as many liberals as they've enjoyed (aka "popular mandate" syndrome), and then we'll once again revert to the default position: libertarians will think both parties (and their own, for good measure) are nearly equally full of shit. In other words, rotating the triangle may represent Overton shifts, but the default position is 60° counterclockwise, and even our current left-dominated situation is slightly counterclockwise from ancaps and ethnonationalists being equally far to the right.

In essence, the role of liberals (aka libertarians) in a democracy is to negotiate an alliance with whomever is currently losing in the war of communist authoritarianism versus fascist authoritarianism. If liberals don't vote, the result is disaster, and whichever of those two is winning won't negotiate unless it's essentially a tie. But regarding the side(s) that will negotiate, it is liberal voters' function to tell them they're going to lose and their only hope is to agree to liberal terms to earn assistance at the polls. They'll agree, because they must; then later they'll try to renege, which liberals cannot allow. But the point is that liberals will naturally ally with the losing side, despite profound disagreements.

All of this, as it so happens, is why authoritarians are drawn to oppression narratives. Convincing liberals that your brand of authoritarianism is being oppressed by the other is — for good reason — an effective means to get their support. Particularly if the truth is that the oppression is mostly in the opposite direction, as liberals would not support you otherwise. This is why it's particularly important for liberals to be able to tell true claims of this nature from bullshit ones, and to always be skeptical of them.

Well, friends, as I write this the fascists are certainly weaker than the socialists. The latter feel compelled to hoax hate crimes in an attempt to maintain the delusion otherwise.

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Raycheetah wrote:

Apropos of nothing in particular...



=^[.]^=

Is this mean to criticize Trump’s reactions to SNL?

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MrCoo1 wrote:

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Raycheetah wrote:

Apropos of nothing in particular...



=^[.]^=

Is this mean to criticize Trump’s reactions to SNL?

The real joke here is that anyone could consider the current run (or even the past twenty years or so) of SNL to be funny. =9[.]9=

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Raycheetah wrote:

The real joke here is that anyone could consider the current run (or even the past twenty years or so) of SNL to be funny. =9[.]9=

In my opinion SNL has been getting less funny as it gets older, but I generally assume all shows get worse as the season count increases — it's hard to generate so much high-quality non-redundant content year after year. I don't consider it to be particularly sinister, just sad.

And, hey, if someone thinks something is funny where I don't, and it's intended by its creators to be a joke, then good for them.