American living in Germany here. You are not alone.
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somewhere near Hamburg? I will be there at the end of November and meet @jsroberts, maybe we could organise a bigger Mutant Meeting (cc @wolfman_al2, @KarlS and everyone else I forgot)
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Dude, for serious? Revealing the astonishing venality and corruption of a political party just by showing how they actually work, in their own words, in context, is undermining democracy? I am a lifelong Democrat and I am thankful for these leaks (Wikileaks should get a Nobel, though I’ll concede Assange is a lackwit and needs to step aside if Wikileaks wants to preserve it’s well-earned integrity).
I’m just trying to get a grip on what the FBI is stating as Russia’s apparent motive.
If we accept the FBI’s story that they believe Russia is behind these leaks (and I know you don’t) then I find their interpretation of Russia’s motives perplexingly abstract.
I guess I’d find their interpretation more convincing if they were leaking similar information from the other side of the floor.
Maybe the Republicans have less whistleblowers or better security.
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I’m in Frankfurt am Main
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later in the thread @bibliophile20 wrote he’ll be in Germany from mid-Dec to mid-Jan
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Ok well stop that. Try instead to get a grip on how you have been deeply betrayed by the party you’ve placed your hope, trust, and faith in. You owe it to yourself to see what they are about. The Podesta leaks are that bad; I’m talking like need-a-few-weeks-to-rethink-my-life bad. Everyone is implicated, from W.J.C. to B.O… Part of the reason the Russia deflection gets me so hot (aside from having lived through the tail end of the last Cold War, and not wanting any part of a new one) is that all my fellow Democrats are, aside from having been fundamentally and holistically sold-out, now being denied the opportunity to take a real look at who and what they’ve been working for.
Edit:
I guess I’d find their interpretation more convincing if they were leaking similar information from the other side of the floor.
Well, we know at least Wikileaks has done exactly that, since they built their rep on Bush admin leaks. I don’t for a second believe Assange is maneuvering for the other side.
This is the core of your statement, to my mind, and if you think that’s where we’re at in America, then I see no need to respond.
If you deny it, then, yeah, you and me have nothing to talk about. I know you are an intelligent individual. Why chose to remain ignorant in the face of plentiful and quality evidence from primary sources that our government is compromised thoroughly? Have you been keeping up on the Podesta leaks?
Edit: That gov is supremely fucked right now is not a fringe position, by the way. Many establishment Democrats have said as much over the past few weeks, including the endearing but milquetoast Robert Reich in his TruthDig editorial this week.
I remember reading an article a few weeks ago suggesting that Russia isn’t trying to meddle with the election for the sake of anything that might happen in the US.
Instead, Putin can use it as something to point to, saying: “Look, even the big champion of democracy has elections that are a joke. Who are they to criticize us?”
The article:
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If we’re just talking baseball, this makes more sense to me than anything else I’ve heard so far.
What exactly is it that you find so shocking about the Podesta leaks?
From what I’ve seen of them, there isn’t anything in there that I didn’t already know: mainstream professional politicians and their advisors are slimeballs unimpeded by most normal ethical considerations, HRC’s public statements are heavily choreographed, and the DNC rigged the primary in collusion with the Clinton campaign.
Still nothing in there that suggests that electing a fascist is a good idea.
Get clear of Trump, then work on smashing the fake leftists of the Democratic Party.
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Can we please just stop acting like any criticism of Democrats is advocating electing Trump? Pretty please? You are waay smarter than that. I don’t think you’ve been following the leaks, or at least not keeping up on them, since they are released frequently (although you could be forgiven for missing out, since most media isn’t touching them). I’m on my phone right now, but I’ll post synopsis later if you want. But a google search of some combination of ‘most damaging podesta leaks’ dated from the last few days (make sure it’s not a weird alt-right site) should get you a good summary + analysis. The Intercept has been doing a great job with analysis, if you follow them (they also cover Trump much more substantively than the ‘YOU GOT KICKED IN THE BALLS LOL’ way establishment media have been covering him).
It isn’t; criticising HRC is definitely not advocacy for Trump.
However, at this particular moment, vigorous public criticism of HRC is assisting in electing Trump, whether the speaker intends it or not.
I’ve got plenty of criticism for Clinton, but I’m saving it for next week, after Trump is defeated. Ain’t worth the risk.
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I guess I see it as ‘we’re all friends here’. I feel pretty safe; I feel like no one here is on the fence for Trump so we can just talk straight (even though I’ve been called a “Fox News trolley” 
, that hurt a little).
Ironically, the Podesta leaks have made me less critical of Hillary Clinton, as it becomes pretty clear in those communications that what I was criticizing her for, has long been the entrenched values of the whole party.
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This is as close to proven as anything is ever going to be. There are enough pieces of evidence that can have only one plausible explanation that there’s no reasonable alternate account that has any plausibility.
This is a gargantuan deal. If this were forty-ish years ago, it would have started a war we’d have been lucky to have lived through. At this point Russian hostilities have created long term global instability. We’ll be fortunate if it merely leaves us in another cold war and doesn’t trigger a hot war. You should not be thanking the nation that’s done this, but condemning them, since it’s you, your kids/grandkids, and everyone else around the globe that are screwed. After the invasion of Ukraine, annexation of Crimea, and arming of extremists who shot down a passenger airliner it was clear that Russia was engaging in a new level of belligerence that was creating a global power instability. With the latest attacks on the US, and the coming instability, we’re in for an ugly period in history. There are many fitting reactions, but none of them are gratitude.
I’ve read the leaks, or at least the highlights that Wikileaks et al have hyped. I had three potential models of the Dems. The leaks mostly confirmed the model I’d taken as most likely, and for that I’m not outraged, I’m relieved. The things in them are embarrassing, and show the kind of insider access and cronyism other data had consistently suggested, but nothing nearly as serious as I’d feared. There’s a good reason they aren’t making headlines - they’re all embarrassing, but fairly minor issues in the scope of US politics at is it played. If you’re outraged, that just suggests you were missing some information that you’re now up to speed on to fill in the story, and really should have been much more cynical about the Dems (and US politics in general) up to this point.
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A lot of points there I want to respond to, not least of which who bears the responsibilty of escalating things with Russia. I would rather give Sean Hannity a handjob though than type it all out on this Android keyboard.
So: placeholder until I get to my Flintstones keyboard. Since I know you will be beside yourself in suspense, I will say that I agree with you on some things and disagree on others 
.
What is your definition of serious? What do you mean when you say ‘thing you feared’? I’m just trying to calibrate how closely our ethics match before I try to summarize the leaks that bothered me most.
@nemomen I have to post and then edit to add multiple quotes on this shitshow phone, so you may have responded to this post before I had added the second part.
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I think the country that sent their military forces across the border of a neighboring nation and annexed territory from that nation (committing various war crimes along the way) bears full responsibility for that action regardless of what they might claim their provocations were.
The nation that uses their intelligence apparatus to break into US computing systems and steal data to try to manipulate a US election bears full responsibility for that action regardless of what they might claim their provocations were.
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My definition of serious would have been unambiguous evidence of quid pro quo or other unambiguous evidence of illegal activity. That’s not there. What we’ve seen has confirmed what everything since the 90s has suggested/shown - that the Dems engage in pay-for-access, insiderism, cronyism, party machinery making calls based on this, and general insider politics that have been the norm for them since the 90s (and earlier). What I feared was that they were doing something more serious than that. Nothing suggests it. There was plenty already out there to show they were doing the things the leaks exposed, so I’m relieved that’s all they show. My political calculus was already taking this into account as the most probable state of affairs.
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Frankfurter here.
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