[quote=“DjarmaBum, post:17, topic:91327, full:true”]Is our democracy so fragile and our politician system so inept that the ‘hacking’ version of a rubber band gun shooting a spitball can bring the whole thing down?
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Yes. Yes, it is. You’ve been losing the integrity infrastructure step by step for years, and now all it takes is a strong breath.
Eisenhower warned everybody. I hope it is not going to take a conventional WW3 to produce a CinC who will stand for president and tell it like it is, but I suspect it will take something as major as that. It isn’t true about lemmings and cliffs; that’s human behaviour.
“Russian assholes - having the gall to do what we regularly do.”
Covert Secretary of Propaganda Sean Hannity is trying his damnedest to say it was anyone but Putin.
And Putin’s favorability ratings with right wingers is higher than it’s ever been, apparently because he also hates the gays.
Not because the anointed one (with orange hair oil) could be seen as endorsing Putin?
Double bluff; perhaps the Russians hacked the DNC to assist Trump so he in turn could raise Putin’s poll ratings. Stuff America, this is about my legacy!
Edit; the article cited is actually (in my view) quite well balanced. My suspicion is that Putin and his inner circle probably don’t really “hate the gays”. Their problem is exactly the same as that of the British Conservative Party - which contains people who in power would be at least as thuggish and dictatorial as Putin given a chance, and which also has to defer to the “public opinion” of the old rich people who back it.
Putin has to fend off people like Zhirinovsky, and he has to watch his step with the Russian Orthodox Church, which is where I suspect the gay-bashing comes and which may affect the votes of over 70% of the Russian electorate. He also has to run a rather diverse empire (as the article points out) parts of which are Muslim-Conservative. Pussy Riot, I suspect, got into more trouble over using a cathedral than satirising Putin; his remarks at the time suggested his view of them was rather like that of Margaret Thatcher on the Sex Pistols, i.e. annoying but not worth getting uptight about because they couldn’t actually change anything.
Personally I rank people like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson as worse than Putin because they were prepared to sacrifice the rest of Britain to their personal desire for power, while Putin seems at least to try to raise the average Russian standard of living while ensuring that he doesn’t do badly out of it. Trump is somewhere else - he thinks he’s the Messiah but in reality he’s a somewhat naughty boy.
Don’t forget the ex-football star who’s out there getting chummy with the surf rats in California, thinking he’s going to stop a gang of bank robbers.
It could even happen by it’s self at this point.
An interesting idea, but the CIA is also criticised from a liberal standpoint, as being too inward-looking, obsessed with its own turf wars, and out of control (e.g. supporting Al-Nusra, which is a renamed branch of Al-Queda, because the interests of US power projection in Syria briefly coincide with the Sunni vs Shia conflict - just as US intervention in Afghanistan created the Mujaheddin which evolved into the Taliban).
So… was it the Russians who told the public that it was very scandalous?
True. Plenty of Western European countries also have laws protecting the “sanctity” of “holy places”.
If Pussy Riot had done their thing in an Austrian Church, Mosque, Synagogue, Stupa, etc., they would have theoretically faced a maximum penalty of six months in prison (though a fine would have been much more likely).
Last night I saw a bit on CBC news where they talked about the CIA-said, Trump-said that is going on in the media. It was a panel with media experts and one of the things they discussed is if they’d run stories with CIA sources.
One thing I find problematic about the whole discussion is that it’s framed as “Do you believe the CIA or do you believe Trump?”
The real question is, “Do you believe the CIA or don’t you believe the CIA?” I think we can have legitimate doubts about whether the CIA is a viable source of information. But the Trump part is a pure distraction. The CIA is either telling the truth or lying, is either reliable or unreliable. Trump is automatically reacting to anything negative said about him and adds zero information to the discussion.
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