The general public did not elect Trump; they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton.
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Something like WikilLeaks is probably already a pawn, like 4chan or The Onion Router.
< /conspiracy >
Watching CBC last night they talked about this with a political panel. Basically no one could take it at all. What struck me, though, was that before that they talked about giving Trump “the benefit of the doubt” and “a chance to govern” and those ideas (while they were rejected) were given a bit of devil’s advocate room, like they were worth considering.
I’m a lot more worried about things like that. Things that actually have a ring of truth to them that people can hold onto. Places where they have successfully translated an idea like “be quiet and accept what is happening” into something people can swallow (“benefit of the doubt”). This lying about crowd sizes and “alternative facts” stuff is very weak PR.
Yeah, he was angry and going on a tear. Then when he came down from that and started talking about the actual business of the president he stuttered, stumbled, and paused to remember what he was talking about.[quote=“OtherMichael, post:130, topic:93362”]
As opposed to a vague claim or opinion,a “falsifiable” statement can be proven true or false.
[/quote]
Though “easily falsifiable” is an odd turn of phrase that likely means “easily proven false” rather than “well within the category of things that can be proven false”, and I can understand someone thinking the wrong word had been chosen.
This is a very good point. The part that heartened me is that they lashed out like wounded animals instead of just shrugging it off. They could have told their lies plainly but they told them angrily. Apparently, they feel like they need people to believe them. They are in get-away-with-things mode, not in who-cares-what-you-think-we-can-do-anything-we-want mode. So I’m not expecting a drone strike on CNN in the next few weeks.
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The longer I live, the more credence this theory gains with me.
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Again, I agree that US-american exeptionalism combined with patriotism is a recipe for political havoc, and that the road which leads to here and now is not only paved with good intentions and slippery slope decisions.
However, I again urge everyone to think twice before invoking The Nazis®.
All my hope I expressed earlier in this thread rests on people who can can mediate between the polarised groups. Calling out stupidity, falsehoods, or outright lies is, of course, important. However, the comparison to true Nazis™ or Nazi methods© is something I would rather have the isolationist, nationalistic right wing nutter utter than people who are able to reason, and also, importantly, to compromise.
Invoking the Nazis in any political context, to put it bluntly, is comparable to invoking Satan in any religious context. As such, it is disruptive to any discussion. It is divisive. It is crass.
I admit, I do draw the analogies myself, and more than I like to admit. There. I did it. I called people Nazi myself, online and offline.
But nowadays, my brain kicks in with the pressing question “why don’t I shut up and think of something I could have learned from history instead of just being scared to shit?”
However, I haven’t found an answer to that question yet, except for commenting at length at some places, and withdrawing from 140 character “discussions”.
I hope I can muster the energy to reach out to my parliamentary representative during this legislative period, on certain subjects as immigration, surveillance, the protection of minorities, and the accountability of the investment banking sector. I hope I can convince the people I know that not voting is no option, even though they don’t believe in any political party any more. I hope I don’t give up.
But until I do, I’ll try just to call Nazis Nazis. And we certainly still haven’t smashed those, yet.
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They released zero of the documents they received from the GOP… I have little faith in them at this point.
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So the American press finally stands up (and does its fucking job) after decades of appeasement to power for access.
Ya’ll made this possible so congratulations…
Too bad you didn’t find your cojones until now.
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Don’t you think it is equally likely that they received no documents about the GOP because Republicans are spotless and are doing G-d’s work?
/s
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Who knows, honestly. I have no clue what Assange’s goals are. Maybe he thought that by not having Clinton in office, it would be easier to attack and bring down Trump than her? I’m a fan of transparency when it comes to the powerful, but they’ve (wikileaks and assange) made some questionable decisions with some of their dumps, which has hurt regular people. I’m not really cool with that. I do hope they get and release Trump’s tax returns. At this point, I have little faith in them to act in the public interests.
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Holy crap does this mean Trump is the grandmaster of the assassin’s.
True. In general, I am in favor of transparency, but there are limits. People who are not public figures and are not doing anything of public interest have a right to privacy. Public figures making decisions on public things should be done in public. The line is very blurry and not easy to determine. And the public needs to trust whoever is making these decisions. I have no faith that wikileaks cares about this one bit. They just want to fuck shit up.
One reason that I have a lot of respect for Edward Snowden and friends is how hard they thought about what needs to be public and what is of no consequence. This is a job for real professional journalists.
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Those are artifacts of a stagnated and broken political system, not evidence of the will of the populace.
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I agree with all of this. I do think Assange has something of an ego problem and he thinks that he has all the answers to our current problems. I’m more on board with what Snowden, Greenwald, and Poitras did.
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I am guessing an American embassy in Jerusalem is not close enough
If you’d like to know more (and that’s a real “if”) BB had a link to a paper he wrote that provided substantial insight into his thinking (back when he was regarded more as a force for good and less as a rapist/trump backer):
I definitely think he’s a “if you want to make an omelette you’ve to to break some eggs” kind of person (where eggs stand in for human lives). I think the idea that he would want Trump to be elected because he wants America to fall apart as a country is quite believable.
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When you posted this it piqued my interest so I picked it up on Audible. I’m through the first act so far, and it’s actually making me optimistic. Putin’s brand of authoritarianism seems to be a special product of Russian history; particularly post-Soviet corruption and the nihilism that developed under Communism. He also seems to have his tentacles into every aspect of civil society, including his own opposition. It doesn’t seem like something that Donald Trump can just plug into the United States in a top-down fashion.
That’s not to say that we won’t end up there, sooner or later, but insofar as he believes that he can simply emulate Putin and achieve the same result, he may be pounding a round peg into a square hole.
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Is there a betting pool on how many days it takes to go from this first press conference to full blown North Korean style facts?
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“Mr. President, would you care to respond to the allegation that Kim Jong Un has discovered more unicorns than you?”
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