Dissembling about who was at the heart of the DNC email hack isn’t helping journalists. The fucking FSB stole emails from a server, then laundered them through WL, in order to aid their government’s preferred candidate. There’s no slippery slope in calling that exactly what it was.
10 Likes
Conflating government spies with journalists, whistleblowers, and activists is what will harm them.
10 Likes
While the FSB did hack the DNC (ETA: Cozy Bear may instead be the SVR), it was the parallel GRU hack that was the source of leaked the documents.
It should be remembered that the GRU also hacked and leaked documents from the DCCC and John Podesta. None of those documents had real nefarious content while their release was damaging. The DCCC documents included fianancing, strategy and internal communications, some of which were used by Republican candidates in the 2016 campaign. Then there was the Podesta email release, which was timed to distract from the Trump Access Hollywood tape.
6 Likes
We can’t.
1 Like
A reminder: Both Putin’s foreign minister and Trump’s UN ambassador declared in 2017 that Russia was waging war on the US. With troops. Look up the constitutional definition of treason.
I’d ask everybody to note the framing.
7 Likes
These days we’re all being asked to express a willingness to hear out people and organisations who, not that long ago, were rightly and uncontroversially classified by liberal democratic societies and cultures as obvious agents of destruction and lies and oppression. At the same time, we’re also being asked to condemn anyone who dares to remind us that the nature of these scorpions remains unchanged.
Seriously, what kind of person thinks that Americans should trust the word and intentions of a corrupt and oppressive and explicitly anti-Western regime run by a former agent of an organisation that literally coined the term “disinformation”? (probably the same kind of person who thinks that America’s foremost public grifter since the 1980s would be a suitable occupant of the Oval Office and who agrees with him that some white nationalists are very fine people).
10 Likes
Mark my words, Barr will be played by John Goodman on SNL.
6 Likes
Shhh. DNC and Hillary want to ignore that! And the funny thing? Trump is gonna win 2020 and he will deserve to win based solely on the corruption of the DNC and how they treated Bernie. Not to mention the DNC’s latest trick which is to refuse support for any Dem who dares to run against an incumbent Dem. Talk about corruption! LOL
1 Like
I meant that for the sake of simplicity of the story I was telling I was casting the American journalists as the good guys. Reality isn’t so convenient, though, and in the real world you can’t decide to trust information based on some good guy/bad guy heuristic.
Because it is illegal to accept foreign aid in US elections (I didn’t decide that, it’s a law), and because the Russian government is known to try to develop compromising material on people to later blackmail them with. If you receive an email like the one Don Jr. received when you are working on a presidential campaign, you should be extremely concerned that rather than trying to help you win they are trying to get evidence that you attempted to break the law so they can influence your action later (or the actions of people you know, like your father).
Don Jr. was (apparently) not aware of the law or of the danger of dealing with foreign spies, but not being aware of those things doesn’t mean you can’t get yourself into huge trouble doing them.
Maybe this shouldn’t be thought of acceptable but:
- It is actually a very different kind of thing
- I’m cool with following your logic and putting both Clinton and Trump in prison
9 Likes
I’m going with Dana Snyder from Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell.
3 Likes
Yes - everything depends on how one guy gets treated. Hail the Messiah.
You guys are definitely making me want to vote for someone else.
15 Likes
I definitely recognize a difference. The problem is that the rhetoric used by these politicians fails to recognize that difference. If they cared about supporting whistleblowers and activists they would take care to make a distinction, but their rhetoric deliberately conflates these things.
Yes, exactly!
Strongly agree.
This level of entitlement kills me. I know you are being entitled on someone else’s behalf but seriously, someone deserves to be president because someone else did something wrong?
Do you know how many times people have done bad things to me? Do I get to be the CEO of Alphabet now?
If corruption within the Democratic party depresses their vote and Trump wins again Trump will still be an awful president who deserves absolutely nothing above the baseline love and compassion owed to all living things. If you have two parties - the corrupt party and the fascist party* - then the fascist party winning is not cause for celebration.
* Note: Fascist party is also corrupt (fascism is always corrupt)
20 Likes
It’s more about all of America being punished accordingly for not recognising that Sanders was and is the One True Saviour and for somehow being blind to the corruption of the DNC in 2016 (only the pure could see this, dontchaknow).
“The worse the better” is an expression of complacent privilege made by those People’s Heroes™ who will be last in line to experience the worst of the “the worse”.
14 Likes
That’s not what deserve means. Trump won’t deserve to win, but short sighted spiteful fools will certainly see a poetic justice in it if it happens.
9 Likes
I will say again, as I have before… My granddad shot Nazis because they paid him to do so. Punching them for free is relatively benign!
12 Likes
You know what? By saying that, you have outed yourself as someone who doesn’t actually give a fuck about what Bernie or AOC or any other progressive cares about. You couldn’t care less about Warren’s policies, or Buttigieg or Harris representing gay folks or women of color, or any kind of a return to rule of law and sanity.
You only care that you did not get your way in 2016, and are willing, even eager, to fuck up America and the world in 2020 in an immature, entitled, despicable temper tantrum. If Trump is elected, I guarantee that people will die who would live if a Democratic president was elected. Children will be separated from parents, lives will be ruined, the environment and the economy will be harmed, and America’s standing in the world will be further reduced. And you seem to think politics is just a game? Grow the fuck up.
14 Likes
" The racial diversity among the population residing in the state of Vermont is currently at 94.7% Caucasian, 1.9% two or more races, 1.5% Asian, 1.2% African American, .4% other races, and .3% Natives of North America."
8 Likes
