Long term, the flaws in the US election system is the main culprit. From the ability to abuse it easily and legally (even illegally if you time it right), to the absurd length, to the monied interests, and to the greatly exhaggerated important of the presidency compared to other elections (especially state and local). 2016 is the year it all came to a head in the modern era, because 2000 wasn’t enough.
EDIT
2004? WTH, me?
I like appropriateness of how ⊥ is the mathematical symbol for falsehood.
For starters.
Excuse me: “swing the election in [trumps] favor”? He lost by 3 million votes.
Don’t forget the very vocal Bernie supporters who pushed anti-Clinton messages through the entire election cycle and then either stayed home or voted Green. One regional Bernie organizer I know posted every bit of fake HC news on his facebook and twitter pages. So much so that I am no longer a friend in RL.
The Right tends to have the paranoid ideas. They are out to get other people, therefore other people are out to get them.
They are therefore particularly open to disinformation which confirms their prejudices. I mentioned above the German preference for believing internal treason over Enigma decryption in WW2.
Basically the rule is that when spreading disinformation you tell the enemy what he wants to believe.
There are a lot of ifs, ands, or buts here but . . . at least for me . . . the importance of this information–that a forged e-mail was inserted into a hack/leak of DNC e-mail–is that someone, someones probably, was very clearly, and quite illegally targeting Clinton. Yes, all of the DNC leaks hurt Clinton but arguably many of people involved had at least theoretically good/legal motives (good journalism, whistle blowing, etc.) but there’s nothing ethical or legal in any way with this forged e-mail, the only motivation here was ratfucking Clinton. It was a masterful piece of work which makes me think it’s probably Russian professionals and not anyone involved with Trump but . . . if, say, Roger Stone was the author of this email, I’d be delighted to see him go to jail for it. Also, although the odds are very slim it would happen, it seems to me that the FBI owes Clinton a public apology for a pretty serious mistake.
A bit OT but this kind of thing makes me worried that guys like Trey Gowdy are going to have the last word about Trump and Russia. The damage has been done and the odds of holding anyone criminally accountable are very slim. Instead of a focused criminal investigation, one that is necessarily carried on behind closed doors, we need an open and public investigation that accounts for all that we know about Russian interference in the election. Maybe people go to jail, maybe a lot of people go to jail, but a lot went on during the election that is confusing, opaque, and maybe only kinda illegal and the whole business needs to be known, as possible.
Disinformation worked pretty well on the left too. Heydrich produced false documents “proving” Russian officers were plotting against Stalin, which helped convince him to purge many of the competent officers they had.
However, at the end of the day Trump won. And, worst of all, he won with the voting public being given full knowledge of what he was like. No carefully massaged image, no on message speeches. Government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid. Both the US and the UK really need to look very hard at why it is that half their populations who turn out to vote do so for unsuitable candidates and stupid reasons. It is not a straight above/below average IQ thing.
I don’t think that’s true. More than anything Trump is a swindler, and people were swindled. Trump is not even remotely delivering on his promises (which alternated between terrible and impossible). Basically every single thing he’s done as president you can find a tweet or a speech saying it shouldn’t be done. They thought they were voting for a strong man, they may have even thought they were voting for a nascent dictator. They actually voted for a con artist who pulled off a con that was way too big and got way in over his head.
But that was obvious from the beginning to anyone with a functioning brain, just as over here it’s obvious that you wouldn’t trust Farage or Nuttall further than a louse could kick them. To be taken in by a con man, people want, at some level, to be fooled. They want to believe there is an easy answer, easy money. Just as I suggested above that the FBI were only taken in because they wanted to believe HRC was a criminal.
Trump didn’t have a sophisticated campaign of misrepresentation, and anybody who was taken in by him needs to take a long, hard look at themselves.
I don’t agree with that. To be taken in by a con artist people have to be vulnerable to that con. Cons might play on greed, sympathy, desperation or any other emotion or cognitive bias. I see through deceptions that other people don’t but I’m also deceived by things other people aren’t. Why such a large portion of the American population was vulnerable to this particular con is an interesting question to me, and I don’t think it can be summed up by “they want to be fooled.” Does that link a person who sends money to a Nigerian prince in exile to a person who buys a fake gilded bible that their deceased spouse ostensibly ordered to a person who gives $25 to a person on the street who claims to need to buy a bus ticket home? People fall for cons for lots of reasons.
Maybe it goes without saying, but I think it should be said: It doesn’t matter what precise effect it had on the American electorate, it was an attempt to swing the election by a foreign power, an inimical foreign power. It doesn’t matter whether the attempt was successful or not, it needs to be corrected, the country needs to be protected against any future attempts, and the perpetrator needs to be served his just deserts.
Sure, indulge in the navel-gazing and political blame-shifting as much as you feel you need to, but the priority of that is low compared to the practical stuff. Root out the weak and the corrupt who were nudged or bought by the inimical power and do whatever political adjustments need to be done to get the government machinery working again.
That’s well established. I was more winking at the way the Russians have been quite specifically, And successfully, feeding it lately. They didn’t hack our elections just by breaking into some emails. They hacked it by feeding soros and evil Hillary into the news’bullshit factory.
That’s not true. I have a list of unambiguous campaign promises that he’s kept, which I will read in alphabetical order.
He nominated Gorsuch and had him confirmed to the Supreme Court.
…
That is all.
And congress only had to fundamentally change the rules for confirmations from here on to do it.
Who needs bipartisan consensus on supreme court judges anyway? Just put Kushner on.
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