What Can I Say?

Speaking as one Trump supporter, you’ve largely already won. I’ve no idea how much meat-time you spend in close proximity with Trump supporters, but perhaps a tad more might be useful. The Trump supporters I personally know are not dogmatic, generally liberal on social issues, and troubled in the same way as you as the excessive partisanship. It’s also worth remembering that 20 percent of the voters who pulled the lever for Trump believed at the time that he lacked the temperament to be president. He’s certainly not anyone I ever felt compelled to learn more about, at least until he started speaking as a Republican on issues only Bernie was willing to raise. I’ll go so far as to suggest that you’re experiencing some of the sense of isolation that those who voted for Trump, and Corbyn, and Sanders, and Farage felt for a good longtime. As you know note, most want the same thing. We need to recall Mark Blyth and others and remember that practically nobody had even heard of Blyth until academics stumbled on the existence of a Brown prof who predicted both Trump and Brexit.

The reason I’m personally delighted Trump is president is that he’s the only candidate, outside of Bernie, who spoke to the issues that concern me most – those left behind, the failure of elites, and the sanctimony of the entitled. I’d much prefer Bernie, but I’m not sure he’d be faring any better than Trump given that he’s (far) more committed to addressing the issues Trump merely speaks to. The questions are at least alive. Lamentably, the Democrats are in even worse shape than the Republicans when it comes to introspection, so on that front alone I share your pessimism, although for somewhat different reasons.

And with all due respect, had the Obama economy delivered a fraction of what was promised, rather than endless war pts. ad infinitum, a part-time wage economy, and out of control healthcare premiums all the while the rich got fantastically richer, HRC would have won. The Dems remain sclerotic and in the headlock of the Clintons, with the same freedom of mobility as the Republicans – only out of power in pretty much every sense as well as out of ideas.

Chin up! And you’re right about the meditation. Works wonders!

A few years back, there was a lot of academic interest (inspired, no doubt, by copious government funding) in the security of e-voting systems. But, in retrospect, most of that work had too narrow a focus.

The security research tended to concentrate on “counted as cast” (+secrecy of the ballot), i.e. the imagined threat is that after the voter has cast their ballot, some nefarious person will hack into the computer system and change their ballot.

That might still be a problem, but we have a wider problem too. Democratic systems of government depend on well informed voters, and if those people are deciding how to vote based on stuff they have read on the Internet, that’s opens up a whole new class of ways the faults of the Internet can be used to affect the election outcome, without ever needed to hack the vote counting stuff.

It’s hard to see an easy fix for this. Even without the Internet, newspapers are used by wealthy individuals (who are sometimes foreign nationals) to influence election outcomes. Consider, e.g. The Guardian, which contains a large number of opinion pieces to the effect that the author hates Jeremy Corbyn/thinks Trump is an idiot/thinks Marine Le Pen is a fascist. At least two of those are attempts to influence foreign elections. See, e.g. The Daily Mail for influencing of a different political persuasion.

The problem that voters are easily swayed by arguments that don’t hold water is probably at least as old as Socrates and Plato’s Repblic…

#2 “And with all due respect, had the Obama economy delivered a fraction of what was promised, rather than endless war pts. ad infinitum, a part-time wage economy, and out of control healthcare premiums all the while the rich got fantastically richer, HRC would have won.”

HRC did win, by literally millions of votes. Had the US electoral college adequately reflected the will of the American people, rather than the historical compromise with rich former-slaveholders etc, she’d be in the white house.

I don’t mean to snark: I think kidneystones puts a finger on something really important, something about which I myself (for one) remain genuinely uncertain. There’s a narrative that many of my left-wing friends take, now, as axiomatic: that Blairism led directly to Brexit, by continuing Thatcherism under the fig-leaf of small-scale socialist advances here and there, and so leaving the Many to immiserate; that Obama led directly to Trump by virtue of the logic kidneystones outlines in #2. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe a completely different narrative is true,—that the forces of racist reaction and nationalist tribalism were toxically swilling around in the 90s and 00s just as they are today, but the compromises enacted by Blair and Obama were able to held them in check. The things that their leftier-than-they critics howled and excoriated them for enacting, on eg immigration and security and so on, were needful in order to govern populaces as radically divided as those populaces have today revealed themselves as being. I honestly don’t know which of those two narratives is true.

@6 That’s a fair question. Unfortunately, those presuming that 50 percent of the US population consists of fascist, an opinion recently posted without challenge here, probably aren’t best suited to provide an answer. Denying that ‘race’ and fear of the other aren’t factors doesn’t make much sense, neither does dismissing economic arguments.

That said, your point has merit. There may well be a class of voters who jumped at the chance to acquire ‘progressive’ bona fides by voting for Obama. The degree to which race matters varies, I suspect, very much depending on demographics, location, economics, and which races are being discussed. Suggesting that Hispanics of various backgrounds do not harbor hostility towards other Hispanics on these grounds seems equally simplistic. Certainly, on social issues a segment of Obama voters – middle-class African-Americans hold views on marriage, drug use, and gay marriage that can only be described as conservative.

I linked to Mark Blyth interviewed in GQ (sexist, no?) who detests Trump. Here’s his comment on the Obama economy and the popular vote.

“It’s a bit like the Democrats winning the popular vote. They won the popular vote due to two and a half cities [laughs]. And in those two and a half cities–L.A., let’s say, a bit of Miami, and New York–if you’re a gig economy worker with a degree from Columbia that knows computers, yeah, you’re doing pretty well. And if you’re in West Virginia, and you don’t have a degree, then the gig economy sucks. So to simply say, ‘Everything’s fine, America’s already great, the world of work is transforming!’ is really to cast a broad net that deliberately excludes what’s been done to the worker.” The interview here:
https://www.gq.com/story/mark-blyth-economics-interview

The second article I find important is from the Cato Institute (worse!) reporting on a recent survey on self-censorship and free speech: https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/state-free-speech-tolerance-america

And finally, for John, who may be behind in his Rod Dreher readings, from

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-will-be-president-forever/

‘Good job, Democrats. You are telling straight white people that they are second-class citizens who don’t deserve fairness. You’ll continue to find self-hating liberal whites who are willing to accept this garbage, but many more aren’t falling for it — and know what kind of world Democrats are preparing for them when and if they take power again.

As a registered Independent whose economic and foreign policy views are to the left of the average Republican’s, I would love to have the chance to consider voting Democratic in a national election, especially with the GOP in such a mess. But out of self-protection, I can’t take that chance.’

JH, you’re asking, more or less, “How can I convince the other guy?” I’m reminded of one of the memorable sayings from the conflict resolution / weekend group therapy workshops I took long ago:

“You’ve got to make it safe for the other guy to make it safe for you to tell your truth.”

IOW, you (maybe) make space for people to listen to you by listening to them first. And not just with an eye to gathering the arguments you’re going to use to refute them.

Pie in the sky at the best of times, and certainly not well adapted for the internet/Trump age, or for letter-writing. But worth thinking about, IMO.

= = = kidneystones: “The Trump supporters I personally know are not dogmatic, generally liberal on social issues, and troubled in the same way as you as the excessive partisanship. “= = =

In which we learn that kidneystones does not spend much time in the Midwest US, particularly the semi-rural areas thereof. Hint: it takes at least 6 months of working with people before they’ll even hint what their actual political/social views are. Hint 2: there’s lots of illiberality and racism out there.

= = = kidneystones + quote: I linked to Mark Blyth interviewed in GQ (sexist, no?) who detests Trump. Here’s his comment on the Obama economy and the popular vote.
“It’s a bit like the Democrats winning the popular vote. They won the popular vote due to two and a half cities [laughs]. And in those two and a half cities–L.A., let’s say, a bit of Miami, and New York[…]”= = =

Following the 2016 election results senior Trump advisors opined that next time votes from California should simply not be counted, and presumably they are working on a plan to accomplish just that. For my own part I confess I missed the section of the Constitution that states that natural-born and naturalized people living in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and California in general are not citizen and don’t get to vote in elections. The Trumplings love them some red/blue maps but conveniently neglect to adjust them for populations as with, e.g. Montana.

Two very different problems, media disinformation and intellectual ignorance. They both cause bad voting, but they will be resolved differently.

Almost everyone will realize that social media is a “shit sandwich”. It’s only going to work in an election, one or two more times.

People will still stick with their friends and they won’t stop tribalizing. But they will question all info-sources more, even into their friendships.

It’s important to understand that in the U.S. this insanity began BEFORE social media, with rise of Gingrich to the speakership in 1994 and the creation of Fox News in 1996.

Fox began hammering on the Clintons continuously, and it still operates like a continuous GOP propaganda machine. The other cable networks started in the middle-of-the-road, then veered in response to Fox’s viewer ratings.

Congressional analysts note that the rise of U.S. party extremism is asymmetrical, and the Republicans are largely responsible for the gridlock and dysfunction in D.C. They Republicans deserve Trump, because they created the frustrated conditions for him. The last few books by Mann and Ornstein demonstrate this conclusively.

In reaction to the audience realization that social media is crap, in the near future there will be a resurgence of the importance of well-researched news media, i.e. of vetted brands, in a style reminiscent of the old 3 U.S. television news networks.

But they will be more on guard against spurious news and against spouting official propaganda, because the social media can so easily challenge them. They are unlikely to become the quasi-official propagandists of the 1950’s.

What none of the big vetted news brands yet has, is far-sighted management. They might think about using social media to invite news contributors from around the world who are paid by the piece but who are immediately and publicly ostracized from reportage if they report lies. Also, the big brands should be encouraged to turn and start directly attacking each other on the quality of their news reports. It would make good viewer ratings too. This has already begun somewhat in response to the egregious horseshit spouted daily by Fox’s national talking dolls.

You know what’s weird John, I write down at least a comment on just about each of your philosophical, anthropological and/or political posts – so obviously I enjoy them a good deal – and yet almost always, it is to record my complete opposition. That’s… not normal, I think. So either you systematically strike the precise thin line between what I agree with enough to want to debate and what I disagree with, or if we could talk this out, things would clear up (or I’m more into intellectual SM than I thought). Anyway, I thought your post was mostly completely upside down.

While I am sure there are plenty of folks in Trump’s base who love their children, want jobs for their community, I literally don’t have any clue where to send a letter to potentially win them over to my way of thinking about all that.

I understand the tongue-in-cheekness and I know you know that but still, the inconvenient fact that politics is never a matter of winning other people to your way of thinking is missing there. It is a matter of organizing the people with (broadly) your own way of thinking in order to make the reality grounding said way of thinking come out in the social world. So you don’t send a letter to argue about public neonatal care in the abstract, you send a letter to pressure your mayor to open a new maternity hospital. Or to make public your vote in favor of the candidate who promises it. Or, if you want to say something, you tell the story of that woman who ended in intensive care because none of the overworked midwifes had enough time to notice her internal bleeding and you deftly inject a statistics showing that the USA has abysmal performance in that respect if you really feel so inclined (but you keep in mind that it is the story, not the statistics, that will make a difference).

But obviously you have to talk to the tiger. It’s not literally a beast. It’s made of people. Fellow citizens.

No, you don’t. Well, you may if you enjoy talking. But that’s not how you sway the tiger course. Like, ever.

People who want jobs and affordable healthcare and good schools for their kids. All that ought to make for common ground.

Perhaps it ought to make for common ground, perhaps people like to pretend it does, but it doesn’t. Offering decent jobs, affordable healthcare and good schools to everyone does not make for common ground. Not now, not ever. To start with, I doubt that a common ground has ever existed in the US political system between Black Americans and White Americans. But let’s forget about the racist and reactionary voice that whispers that everyone can be free and equal as long as everyone excludes Black people. I doubt that this makes for common ground even among people who vote like you.

Under the socio-economic conditions defining the current American society, and to a certain extent most Western wealthy societies, that is to say slow growth, extremely high inequality and a strong correlation between broad educative achievements and eventual economic situation, it is an illusion to believe that everybody wins from decent jobs, universal healthcare or good public education. You cannot have 2% growth, a decent job for everyone, 15% return on investment and a CEO who pays himself 250 times his average worker salary. So something has to give, and if it is not a decent job for everyone, it means it will be the ecosystem of lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, but also higher education institutions relying on their alumni giving millions… which relies on the average CEO being able to pay himself 250 times his average worker salary. If decent universal healthcare is available, private healthcare companies but also doctors at high-end private hospitals and down to the nurse working there will all undergo a massive redefinition of their job. If good schools are offered to everyone and social mobility rises up again, the likelihood that children of poor families will climb up the ladder will increase but so will the likelihood that children of affluent or middle-class families will climb it down.

So I don’t believe there is a common ground and as long as these social conditions prevail, I don’t believe there can be one. What can you say, then? Well, wovon man nicht sprechen kann…

‘If you live in the metro areas with the élites, you don’t wake up angry about what’s happening in people’s lives,’ Greenberg said…”

Yes, that’s why they elected the guy who lives in a gold-festooned penthouse on 5th avenue.

Riiiiiight.

Ya know, the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution fairly coincides with the same anniversary of the 2nd Battle of Passchendale

And we still have people who would rather spend their time and energy hectoring and haranguing the right, or seeking to find a better way to lecture fascists, the slow boring of hard board equivalent of trench warfare for inches, with unspeakable costs behind and unbearable but predictable costs ahead.

They would rather fight the right than listen to their left, unto the end of the world.

“I don’t think there’s much I could tell Paul Ryan or Jonah Goldberg about how bad Trump is that they don’t perfectly well know already.”

This line led me to chuckle to myself.

I flashed on how bad Paul Ryan and Jonah Goldberg are. Then, I wondered in what sense we might suppose Jonah Goldberg “knows” anything.

I think Trump is pretty terrible. But, I do not get a sense that my points of revulsion coincide much with what exercises Rachel Maddow let alone whatever may trouble Jonah Goldberg.

I have that high school debater’s fantasy desire to win the argument, too. And, on a few occasions I have made it my determined business to actually do so. One thing I have learned from those experiences of winning the argument by sustained effort is that changing the other’s point of view is an impossible standard for winning. The other(s) will always have a point of view of their own and tastes of their own — that is what makes the other, other, no? When I could imaginatively adopt the other’s pov, I found myself better positioned to change what could be seen from that pov. (It may sound like I second JanieM above, and I do but wait for the qualification below.)

I actually find it nearly impossible to imagine what Paul Ryan or Jonah Goldberg sees in Trump, for good or ill. I cannot adopt their pov. I do not read the National Review much. The last piece I looked at was reluctantly linked at Naked Capitalism, and it was a clear-eyed legal analysis of Mueller’s Manafort charges — so, not hostile to Trump though it had a bit of tribal revulsion for mainstream media’s hysteria.

Your reference to ” common ground” triggered recollection of a famous quotation from the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

It is the old issue of property rights versus human rights — an issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall have long been silent. It is the eternal struggle between two principles. The one is the common right of humanity, the other the divine right of kings.

As Z said, we disagree and disagree fundamentally.

If sides are confused at the moment and we are all mixed up, it is as much because we have lost track of principles — ours, yours, theirs. In some versions of the Lincoln quote, he refers to a conflict between Right and Wrong. I am not sure I am that Manichean, but I do think a lot of people nominally on the left got very confused when Obama and Clinton took the side of property against humanity, institutionalizing as the ideological base of the Democratic Party what Thomas Frank calls, a form of liberalism that routinely blends self-righteousness with upper-class entitlement.

I do not doubt that Paul Ryan, Jonah Goldberg and Donald Trump will champion property. They may disagree on some points among themselves. I doubt I would appreciate such fine points. I do not think any of them the least bit competent to their respective roles.

We are in a legitimacy crisis because government has failed conspicuously to take care of the public good or ordinary people or even to try to do so. It is not that Republicans and Democrats disagree on the means to do so. The problem is that so many in both Parties and in the Media are agreed on the unimportance of the goal. No wonder we are confused.

A non-pessimistic take on the triumph of Trump and Trumpism? That strikes me as rather like asking the rabbi about the proper blessing for the Tsar. These questions get at the nature of the Good (How can Trump’s success be good?), so of course The Republic has the answers.

Start with what anyone who would even consider reading or commenting on a thread like this shares in common, what hook you could use to persuade such people. We’ll make the generous (or patronizing!) assumption that the public square is just us writ large, that if we can convince each other about the Good, then that message would work even in the Ozarks. That thing we share in common is actually quite universal. We need the world to make sense, to embody some coherent story, a sense and a story that vindicates the presence and efficacy of the Good in this world we live in. We’re all members of the same species, Homo theoreticus, and the particular subject on which we all need a theory or twenty to help keep us from jumping off a bridge, is how this random muck we experience on a daily basis somehow adds up to something at least potentially good.

The experience of being in the muck, for Homo theoreticus, is that we are like the prisoners in Plato’s Cave. We have to make some sense of the parade of shadows we see, because it all has to make sense, because that is our nature, to believe that it has to make sense. So we imagine a whole system of false lights and true light, casting shadows of both real things and fake dummies, that, if we can work out the system inherent in the patterns of deception, we can break free and climb out into the true light and the real things it reveals.

Well, actually it all is just random. We live in the democracy as described in Book VIII. The rule of the people, after some time has passed and democracy no longer carries on the momentum of the revolt against oligarchy in which it is born, a denial that wealth and social status should order our lives, and becomes instead the denial of any continuing source of order. In that perspectival vortex, the people flit from momentary enthusiasms for monarchy, timocracy, and oligarchy, various combinations of the above, and back again in a random drunkard’s walk. Eventually, their panic at the vacuum of order, of a steady shared vision of the Good, leads them to embrace the tyrant, who, maybe, if we’re lucky, turns out to be some sort of technocrat who starts the cycle all over again by putting philosophy back in charge where it belongs.

That’s where we are right now in the US (the similarities and differences with where other societies might be at the moment I leave to people more familiar with them). We went through a phase a few generations back where we broke the power of wealth and class, and for a while, social democracy, racial equality and the secularization of politics seemed to be a guiding consensus. But nothing kept that ideology in control of things. Now we have the strange spectacle of people who have an constantly shifting set of enthusiasms for military service, or for wealth, or for technocratic expertise, as proof of fitness to rule. Of course these animals don’t cohabit well, and so we have distrust of elites mixed in with a worship of the wealthy or the tech savvy or those with a military record, in combinations that self-destruct within years to months, to even days.

In the absence of commonly agreed sources of the right order, people who present simple theories, accounts of what is wrong with a society in which the chief source of anxiety is that the simple answers have been overthrown, and not really that there are any particular things wrong with society, will rise to power in a democracy among Homo theoreticus. It all has to make sense, right? It can’t just be random chaos, right? So, the fact that things aren’t splendid has to be because we tolerate the blacks or the gays or the Jews, or we haven’t nuked enough foreign countries, or we tax the wealthy, or whatever.

Of course a simpleton like Trump, someone who seems to have dementia with behavioral disturbance, has a huge advantage in exploiting democracy. People, like the Clintons or Obama, who aren’t simpletons, are burdened with at least some fatal loyalty to a highly non-simple world. The non-simpletons are reduced to messaging to sell their non-simpleton public policy. But their messaging becomes increasingly divorced from underlying reality, because no one can actually control other people with theories, they can only try to spin a theoretical structure that flatters as many of the sources of order operating within the voters’ minds as they can. The result is a horrible, contentless gemisch. A Trump tells people that all of our problems stem from coddling all those murderers and rapists from south of our border, while a Clinton is paralyzed in the face of that simple message, and is not willing to say anything except that the Ds are 110% in favor of securing our borders, and a pathway to citizenship. Of course Clinton ends up looking like a liar and Trump like a truth-teller. Trump actually does have more fidelity to his take on the truth, horribly wrong though it is, than Clinton does on hers, right as it is. Public policy is hard to understand. Which of the politicos is lying about public policy is much easier to understand. That Clinton’s messaging is mendacious, that it is shadows on the wall of the cave, of mostly fake things cast mostly by a false light, is not hard to understand. Trump’s message is powerful in comparison. By letting itself be entirely unmoored from true light and real objects, it achieves a clarity and simplicity that a politician who wasn’t demented could never allow himself.

We are betrayed by our belief that knowledge is power. We imagine that knowledge ought to be like the Ring of Gyges, and confer power. That promise of the power that flows from knowledge that Socrates invokes with the Ring of Power, is there to get people to pay attention to what he’s saying, but of course turns out to actually be an insight that leads to the abdication of power. Political power in a democracy is achieved by a conscious mendacity ruthless enough to construct a great lie for the politician to use to rise to power. You study the psychology of the steps by which society moves form monarchy to democracy, as Socrates reviews in Book VIII, and you mine that for material, the anxieties the people live with, from which to construct the simple lie that catapults you past the less ruthless politicians who can’t let go of reality. But if you make that choice, and use knowledge of the dynamics of democracy successfully in politics, you become a tyrant. Astrological eugenics doesn’t really work.
It’s like FTL travel, the foundational lie we have to tell to make space opera possible.
That best state ruled by philosopher kings is a myth, it is the foundational lie, the lie we have to believe because we’re Home theoreticus, and the lie that sets in motion the belief in all the lesser sources of order as well. The best state has never existed, but belief in it lies at the heart of every political crime and folly.

You can keep on trying to forge some Ring of Gyges, some theoretical framework that can recall all the fools and knaves out there from their folly and knavery. But none of us are fool enough to set about that task the way it has to be done to actually work and achieve the political power of persuading a majority in the democracy we live in, because we’re not demented like Trump. A site like this draws plodding people, whose loyalty to reality just isn’t loose enough to craft the sort of lie that will work. Face that truth, fellow nerds. We aren’t demented, and only the demented can follow the Way of Trump. And beyond the Way of Trump, on the path that Trump’s success might suggest, only the really ruthless could fake a purposefully constructed big lie and ride that to the establishment of a tyranny. But such a person would have too much work ethic and common sense to waste time at a site like this, so I won’t bother addressing them.

The only real choice for people like us is to recognize that knowledge is powerlessness, and choose a humble unassuming way of life, far from power and glory. That may not seem like much of a rescue from pessimism, and it is admittedly only optimistic in comparison to the consequences of any other choice. But there it is. Don’t wind up like Ardiaeus the Tyrant! There is no higher wisdom.

We need to recall Mark Blyth and others and remember that practically nobody had even heard of Blyth until academics stumbled on the existence of a Brown prof who predicted both Trump and Brexit.

A professor at Brown is hardly obscure in academic circles. And Blyth was well known in left wing circles long before for his excellent book on austerity, and his analysis of the financial crisis.

Incidentally, he has contempt for Trump and Farage.

PS:Re: hypocrisy

I have no advice for those on the ground, but can only outline mine own pseudo intellectual praxis as an example.

Forget your right, don’t fight it, resist not evil. For me that includes CT.

Find something somebody to your left, so far to your left that it is unattractive and discomfiting, and submit to it for a while. Use that to critique and uncover the conservatism and fascism within yourself and your community.

Today’s reading, Ellen Rooney:Seductive Reasoning:Pluralism as Problematic 1989, I think. I pick up old books in the discard stores. Looks to be a feminist sortie in the Theory Wars, she likes Althusser, Derrida, Stanley Fish, critiques Walter Benn Michaels, Jameson. Looks inimical to my ideology, her critique of persuasion could be applicable in ways she never intended to be applied to conversation with a Right way over her horizon and quotable here ontopic. But no. I would rather spend my time learning from my left.

So, your outreach to Trump voters starts with calling them dupes of a (ridiculously overblown) Russian campaign, moves on to say that only NRO types can even walk and chew gum at the same time, and concludes with the observation that, gosh, I’m sure a few of them have actual human feelings. Might want to work on that approach.

Lee Arnold: Almost everyone will realize that social media is a “shit sandwich”. It’s only going to work in an election, one or two more times.

Everyone will realize that social media is this way for people they disagree with. Very few realize that the media they consume on Social Media, and which confirms their biases, is just as bad. I see very little questioning of liberal sources by liberals.

Cian #32: “Everyone will realize that social media is this way for people they disagree with. Very few realize that the media they consume on Social Media, and which confirms their biases, is just as bad. I see very little questioning of liberal sources by liberals.”

Everyone ALREADY assumes that social media fakery is misinforming the people they disagree with! No one needs to “realize” it. But this event puts the question of proper news sourcing on the front burner for partisans on both sides (not everyone, certainly, but a large number on both sides, perhaps most of them). The reason for this is human: because individual emotional clarity and wellbeing will demand proper news sourcing, as a precondition for the acceptance of news and information. We will allow ourselves this course correction: It is a new form of media (as is cable TV propaganda news); it took us unawares, and we ALL were abused by it. We now understand the mechanism of how the trick was done.

The alternative opinion is to say, “Okay, maybe this time, social media was flooded with falsehoods, but next time, I will believe it anyway!” — But very few people will say that sort of thing. They will avoid it. Very few people want to be wrong, or to be found out as wrong. They may not even understand the intellectual arguments; it is the emotion that they cannot afford. This will even affect tribal beliefs.

@29 I think Obama led to Trump in the sense that he hollowed out the Democrat party (they lost a huge number of statewide seats under him, while the DNC was bankrupt in 2016)

Spot on! From Donna Brazille’s new book,

“When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.
The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings”.

Marc Elias, btw, is the Clintonista responsible for funneling 9 million? through the bankrupt DNC to pay the ‘golden showers’ dossier. Nice people!

Obama bankrupts the DNC in 2012, refuses to pay down the debt (like he’d have trouble raising cash), paving the way for the Clinton campaign to offer the DNC a ‘loan.’ coincidentally about the same time as the Democratic primaries begin.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774

Read the entire thing. Bernie supporters are going to flip.

@31 kidneystones seems to want to be taken seriously, (Not, especially.)

which would be a lot easier if he’d stop with all the constant lying and the endorsement of lying.

Thanks for your recommendation and reply, which frankly seems somewhat charged.

You’re free to claim what you will. I recommend you go back and review the MSNBC coverage and check out James Carville’s commentary. I also recommend you review the changes in strategy ongoing in Democratic party following their humiliating defeats (running against Hitler) in the 2017 elections. Why the ‘new’ focus on jobs if Clinton and the Democrats already had a clear economic message. Mark Lilla, Blyth, and many others who openly deplore Trump have made similar observations.

When Trump says MAGA and bring back the jobs, some hear Make America White Again, and take jobs away from immigrants. I don’t dispute for a moment Trump’s overt race-baiting, and dog-whistling. I just don’t much care. Nor do I have any expectation that any politician will ever tell the truth, although Corbyn and Sanders (my preferred choices).

I don’t think Trump generally has enough regard for the truth to bother lying (unlike Hillary-see above) on most issues. He just says whatever shit pops into his head. That’s a big part of why he won. Many supporters see this as feature, not a bug.

I’m personally delighted that Hillary is off touring the world on her bitter book tour.

No hard feelings, I hope.

Should read Corbyn and Sanders may be less inclined to bend the truth.

@34 This is very good. Kudos.

I don’t believe the social media played much of a role, but I’ve no evidence. As one critic of Hillary’s cash-cow book tour observed, if a voter willing to believe the worst allegations about Hillary (I’d add Trump) it seems fair to say that voter’s mind is already pretty much made up.

There was a great deal of genuine enthusiasm for both candidates. Many loathed both. The Russians tried/are trying to make the race and post-election America as divided as possible. At least one Russian troll farm has been linked to post election anti-Trump demonstrations. The race was dirty. Both sides lied. Both sides appealed to fear. Hillary lost.

Sneering at rural voters ensured they’d turn out in record numbers. They did, as Trump knew they would. He trolled/trolls the press incessantly and media outlets filled/fill their coffers as they feign outrage. Voters shrug as celebrity icons and ‘liberals’ are revealed to be worse predators than Trump. Hillary refuses to return HW’s cash while charging 200 bucks per mark so suckers around the globe can pay to hear her moan.

It’s not all bad. Pelosi and company are trying to squash impeachment talk and ignore Trump tweets and may well take some scalps in 2018. But it still looks like Trump in 2020. Dems best quit whining, accept they lost, and start working to win in 2020, or Trump is going to hand them their asses again.

I’m just at a loss to know what kinds of critical thinking and writing constitute pro-social and efficacious interventions, across the aisle, at the present time

Going a bit meta about your puzzlement, I think it would be interesting to question the underlying assumption here – that a “a pro-social and efficacious intervention” directed at political opponents, or even political allies is possible – and especially to examine the social and historical conditions required for such a possibility. At which point does the concentration of wealth, power and education imperils it? At which point does it obliterate it? Perhaps it is time we come to term that the 1945-1975 period, with its stupendous educative and economical growth immediately following a considerable destruction of capital, was truly exceptional and that something fundamentally different has come afterward.

bruce wilder @22 We are in a legitimacy crisis because government has failed conspicuously to take care of the public good or ordinary people or even to try to do so. It is not that Republicans and Democrats disagree on the means to do so. The problem is that so many in both Parties and in the Media are agreed on the unimportance of the goal.

That sounds right to me.

Last from me, John.

DB is either getting even, getting rich, or acting on behalf of Dems keen to finally free themselves from the Clintons. Probably a combination of all three. A cynic might say that the Obamas are behind it. Cold, but necessary. Time to bury the Harvey Weinstein Bill and Hillary era and rebrand. Probably a wise move. Might even see some fresh ideas and better candidates.

Hope this cheers you up, John!

Not even news at the NYT. Nothing on Donna Brazille and HRC purchasing the DNC.

Surprise!

https://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/?action=click&contentCollection&region=TopBar&WT.nav=searchWidget&module=SearchSubmit&pgtype=Homepage#/donna+brazille/since1851/allresults/1/allauthors/newest/

Lee #34:

I have partisans from at least 4 sides on my news feed (never Trump Republicans, Trump fans, mainstream Democrats and Sanders supporters). All of them regularly post stuff that supports their world view which comes from questionable sources. Yet all of them have no problem identifying propoganda posted by those who they disagree with.

Honestly though where is this unbiased source of media? Did it ever exist? And right wing propoganda has existed for longer than the internet, and spread just fine.

You’re free to claim what you will.

An open admission you don’t have any kind of cogent rebuttal.

Why the ‘new’ focus on jobs if Clinton and the Democrats already had a clear economic message.

Except that you asserted that they didn’t speak to the issues you care about “at all.” That’s is different from that message possibly being unclear or not properly calibrated or even insufficient to the needs of the country. You claimed it didn’t exist. That’s an easily disproven falsehood that can be rectified in about five minutes on Google.

I don’t dispute for a moment Trump’s overt race-baiting, and dog-whistling. I just don’t much care.

This is an open admission you’re a bad person. Not caring about fascists running on a white nationalist platform should be something a decent person is ashamed to admit.

Nor do I have any expectation that any politician will ever tell the truth, although Corbyn and Sanders (my preferred choices).

This in fact isn’t true for a value of “lying” that means “won’t attempt, forcefully and powerfully, to enact most of their high-profile campaign promises.”

Because most politicians in fact do try to do that. Not every campaign promise. But, and the literature on this going back at least half a century is very very clear, most politicians will try and keep most of their campaign promises. Republicans govern largely as they present themselves governing. Democrats govern largely as they present themselves governing. There are some obvious lies (Obama coming out against SSM in 2008 comes to mind) but for the most part they’re mostly honest when it comes to campaign promises.

Most of them. So far, Trump is, as he is in many things, a massive outlier. Although I suppose one could argue a lot of his campaign planks were so vague its not actually possible for them to have been lies.

I don’t think Trump generally has enough regard for the truth to bother lying (unlike Hillary-see above) on most issues.

Clinton’s political record is actually largely mendacity-free by the above standards. She and her husband attempted to enact what they said they were going to attempt to enact in Arkansas. They attempted to enact what they said were going to attempt to enact in the White House. Clinton voted in the Senate precisely as her Senatorial campaigns suggested she would vote.

Given that her 2016 platform was vastly superior to Trump’s platform along every conceivable metric, being “thankful” she did not win is just terrible. It displays a shocking, callous attitude towards the millions Trump is hurting and will hurt in the future.

Clinton could have personally bribed every member of the DNC with cocaine cash she earned from her 1980s drug operation in Mena that she had Vince Foster killed to cover up, and she would still have been the clearly superior choice. The presence of the Usurper alone on the Supreme Court should have been enough to dissuade any right-thinking person.

Finally: https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/11/02/us/politics/ap-us-trump-dnc.html

Note that the NYT makes no reference to Brazile’s charges.

The Wapo is much better
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democrats-express-outrage-over-allegations-of-early-control-for-clinton-in-2016/2017/11/02/84e949da-c000-11e7-97d9-bdab5a0ab381_story.html?utm_term=.c61525988e0d

I don’t frankly see the Clintons surviving this, or many of their many enablers should they decide to continue to flack for the Clintons. Can’t wait for the NYT ‘we did nothing illegal’ defense to slap the public in the face. The Clintons simply bought control of the DNC.

To which we can be sure to hear: “And?”; “So?”; “But Russia..”; “Name one law actually broken.”; all of which are certain to finally lay to rest the spurious smears that the Clintons are class A slime balls.

You know Dems have a problem when John Podhoritz, of all people, is the one asking the right questions: http://nypost.com/2017/11/02/did-hillarys-rigging-at-the-dnc-push-biden-out-of-the-race/

Mario @39

“Russian Hypothesis sounds to me like something that is too damn convenient for everyone involved to be true”

So convenient that James Clapper was raising the issue in May 2016, at a point when Trump’s general election defeat was widely believed to be inevitable.

And I’m old enough to remember when Donna Brazile’s slipping of debate questions to the Clinton campaign WAS the primary rigging. Remarkable how widespread evidence of Russian interference in the election campaign is just Clinton sour grapes, but Sanders’ loss in the primaries by a wide margin due to his lack of appeal to many traditionally democratic constituencies can only be the result of a nefarious conspiracy.

<a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2017/11/02/what-can-i-say/#comment-720958"kidneystones@50:

I’m not sure if you mean something different than I do by “makes no reference to Brazile’s charges” or if they changed it without noting that they did so, but I’d say they’re mentioning DB’s charges… although how they do so incomplete and misleading that it’s arguably worse than saying nothing about them:

Trump’s accusation follows Politico’s publication of an excerpt from former acting DNC Chair Donna Brazile’s upcoming book. Brazile alleges she found “proof” that the 2016 Democratic primary was rigged in Clinton’s favor. Brazile writes that she believes no laws were violated.

The fundraising agreement, signed in August 2015 during the primary process, was unusual for an open seat. Months later, Clinton’s chief challenger, independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, signed his own agreement with the party.

(That excerpt is roughly 60% of the entire article, which is in and of itself telling. The rest is all about Trump tweets. Ah, the Grey Lady, eternal paragon of objective journalism…)

– and as now (all?) the ”Russian Lovers” of this blog have appeared and want ”proof” and have questioned the idea – ”that a single Russian troll farm, amidst the sea of clickbait on the internet*, had a decisive influence on the US election outcome“ –
or they have written stuff like:
”Let’s add to the list: trans toilets, immigration, abortion rights, Milo Yiannopoulos, free speech. This is a nonexhaustive list of things that I expect to have been more important than whatever the Russians did.”

Let me (MOI!!) explain how this ”Internet Thingy” works – and there will be absolutely NO proof or evidence for what I’m gone tell you guys – as that’s NOT the way this Internetthiny works.

SO:
The Internet is more or less ruled by so called ”memes”.
(”Virally-transmitted cultural symbols or social ideas.)

And just like US -(a group of international linguistic-student at a German University – who ran an ”experiment” a few years ago) – the Russian Troll Farm did a hilarious experiment with a bunch of really stupid and moronic Americans.

As ”memes” behave like a mass of infectious flu and cold viruses, traveling from person to person – quickly through social media – and memes are either really obvious or ”really deep” – they NOT ONLY tend to infect really stupid people but also the more let’s call it ”intellectual” –

Just like HERE!

And so we have ”academics” going for the -(zugegebenermassen ”very effective” meme) of Kidneystones girlfriend as ”Satan” or this idea that a Russian Troll Farm is ”a farm of cute little trolls or ”munchkins” which don’t do anything bad to anyone. (Haha!!)

And it’s true – these cute little munchkins are NOT doing anything ”bad” to anyone.
They just made at the US erection a lot of Americans – who are ”sitting in their bathrobes in front of their computers” -(another ”meme”) – with or without an ”erection” – instead of writing about ”teh Spaghetti Monster -(another meme) – MADE them write about their girlfriend -(”Hillary”) – or their boyfriend (Trump) – writing really stupid – idiotic stuff on blogs.

And that’s where we are!!
(If y’all know what I mean??!)

Cian #34: “right wing propoganda has existed for longer than the internet”

And so has left wing propaganda, and a small percentage of people are susceptible to both, and on certain occasions, near-majorities can be fooled. But is it your position that Facebook & Twitter were not inundated by a surge of anti-Hillary lies, — or else, that they were inundated but it doesn’t matter, this wouldn’t be enough to swing 60,000 votes?

Buying control of the DNC is not illegal. It would not be illegal to slip the questions to Clinton before the primary debates. The political parties and their governing bodies are private entities. Or rather we should say they operate in a particular shadow-world between the private and public: U.S. political parties are not described in the Constitution, and the laws regarding them have been settled on a case-by-case basis. There are a lot of fascinating abstract intellectual questions about the private/public nature of the practice of ascendance to governance in mass democracies, which ought to be a treasure trove for academics. But it doesn’t affect real things on the ground. The DNC and the RNC can be taken over by lots of different shady shenanigans that are disgusting but quite legal. The Citizens United case (2010) made it worse. Judgment is by the voters in the voting booths.

kidneystones: “I don’t frankly see the Clintons surviving this…”

Indeed, you seem intent on impreaching President Clinton. What on earth can it mean to ‘survive’ this, or ‘not survive’ it?

All this was identified and diagnosed a long time ago.

With its well-armed, confused and increasingly angry populace, the United States can quickly become the mother of all difficult neighborhoods, one would think, but so far, all is placid. We rally, rant and hold up cute signs, yes, but unlike the Thais, we don’t occupy the central commercial district for two months, then torch a mega shopping center and the stock exchange. We don’t riot like the French and the Greeks, or topple the government like Icelanders.

The Obama card was a brilliant move by our ruling class. After eight years of Bush, they placated our liberals and blacks with an articulate and personable black effigy.[…] I have a feeling, however, that we may be nearing the end of being jerked back and forth like this, that even the most insensate and silly among us is about to explode.”

Linh Dinh, 2010

I am just old enough to remember those chilling and ominous days of Germany’s descent from decency to Nazi barbarism, to borrow the words of Fritz Stern, the distinguished scholar of German history. In a 2005 article, Stern indicates that he has the future of the United States in mind when he reviews “a historic process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason.”

Noam Chomsky, 2010

There is a vast amount of infrastructure – transportation, communication, financing, production – openly available that, until recently, was only accessible to very large organisations. It now takes relatively little – a few dedicated, knowledgeable people – to connect these pieces into a powerful platform from which to act. Military strategists have been talking about ‘super-empowered individuals’ by which they mean someone who

“is autonomously capable of creating a cascading event, […] a “system perturbation”; a disruption of system function and invalidation of existing rule sets to at least the national but more likely the global scale. The key requirements to become “superempowered” are comprehension of a complex system’s connectivty and operation; access to critical network hubs; possession of a force that can be leveraged against the structure of the system and a wilingness to use it.”

There are a number real weaknesses to this concept, not least that it has thus far been exclusively applied to terrorism and that it reduces structural dynamics to individual actions. Nevertheless, it can be useful insofar as it highlights how complex, networked systems which might be generally relatively stable, posses critical nodes (“systempunkt” in the strange parlance of military strategists) which in case of failure that can cause cascading effects through the entire systems. It also highlights how individuals, or more likely, small groups, can affect these systems disproportionately if they manage to interfere with these critical nodes. Thus, individuals, supported by small, networked organisations, can now intervene in social dynamics at a systemic level, for the better or worse.

Felix Stalder, 2010

Our world isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate will power to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power. On the other hand, movements like the Tea Party more than anything else reflect a widespread longing for simpler times and simple solutions — just throw the U.S. Constitution at the whole mess and everything will be jake. For immigration, build a big fence. Abolish the Federal Reserve, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education. At times the overt longing for simple answers that you get from Tea Party leaders is so earnest and touching, it almost makes you forget how insane most of them are.
Matt Taibbi, 2010

Citizens do not elect governments so that those governments can serve up the citizens to the market on a platter. But the market conditions governments to make a present of their citizens. In our era of free-market globalisation, the market is the super-instrument of the only powers worthy of the name, economic and financial power. That power is not democratic: it was not elected by the people; it is not managed by the people; and the people’s happiness is not its aim.

These are elementary truths. Political strategists of whatever shade impose a safe silence so that no one dare imply that we are continuing to nurture a lie and act as willing accomplices. What we call democracy looks more and more like government by the rich and less and less like government by the people. We cannot deny the obvious: the masses of the poor called upon to vote are never called upon to govern. Assuming the poor could form a government in which they were the majority, as Aristotle imagined, they would lack the means necessary to change the organisation of the universe of the rich who dominate and control them.
José Saramago, 2004

@59 This actually will be my final comment, and I apologize sincerely for the multiple comments. I was distressed and there’s little point in pretending otherwise. I’d like to note, however, that this apology (and any others I’ve made) is directed towards our hosts, and to the readers of the blog, not other commenters unless otherwise stated. There appears to be some confusion on the matter. But the apology is sincere nonetheless.

As this is my last comment for a while I hope John will allow me to say that the only times I’ve been this upset Democrats and Labour decided to support Bush’s invasion of Iraq. For me, the crime is of that scale. I don’t know frankly how many Sanders supporters there are here, but one of the reasons I post is because I do believe absolutely (and naively) in the integrity of elections and institutions. I watched the Young Turks coverage on Youtube and it was far and away the best, at least at this stage. Everyone from Warren to senior Sanders flacks are in a big rush to sweep 2016 fraud under the rug. So, perhaps the Clintons will not just survive, but thrive.

Young Turks – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3W2GIZ8rN0

So convenient that James Clapper was raising the issue in May 2016, at a point when Trump’s general election defeat was widely believed to be inevitable.

This is the same James Clapper who lied to congress in 2013?

It is over a year later and the intelligence agencies still haven’t provided any actual proof for these allegations. Which given the US intelligence agencies long history of lying to the American public might be cause for concern?

Remarkable how widespread evidence of Russian interference in the election campaign is just Clinton sour grapes

Really? Care to give any examples of this widespread evidence? Not allegations, or assertions, or innuendos. Actual hard evidence?

Layman @61:
“It seems extreme to say that there’s _no_ evidence. What would convince you that, at the very least there _is_ evidence?”

Evidence would convince me. Not assertions of evidence. Not innuendos. Actual evidence. I know this is unusual, but I do not believe the word of intelligence agencies.

To give an example. There is still no evidence that the DNC was hacked. And actually there are some technical details that makes it seem more likely that it was an inside job (the speed of the file transfers). There’s no evidence that the crime the Russians are accused of even happened.

That’s not to say that the Russians didn’t do it. It’s perfectly possible they did. It’s also possible that at a later date we will have good evidence that demonstrates culpability. But that evidence does not currently exist in the public domain.

“Apparently the DOJ has enough evidence that they’re considering charging multiple Russian government officials. In your view, does that not mean that someone has offered, or uncovered, actual evidence?”

We know that they considered it worth talking to the WSJ. That’s pretty much it. We don’t actually know what the evidence is, what the quality of it is. We simply don’t know those things. It’s possible that we will never know and a prosecution won’t happen because it’s unlikely the US will be in a position to arrest those people.

We’re also talking about hacking – an area that is generally surrounded by an incredible amount of official hysteria, confusion and misinformation. As well of course a certain amount of US hypocrisy. The NSA, after all, is mostly devoted to hacking. And does all the things (and worse) that the FSB has been accused of.

Lee Arnold @58:
No my point is simply that there is nothing particularly new about crazed right wing propoganda. For my sins I’ve spent the last 6 years living in the south and as someone who haunts second hand book stores I’ve seen a lot of right wing propoganda from the 50s, 60s and 70s. There’s the bircher stuff. There’s the stuff people talked about the country clubs. The stuff from the Clinton years. In more recent years there were the email chains that went round. None of this is particularly new. None of it is particularly caused by Facebook/Twitter – any more than the crazy stuff of the Clinton/Bush years was caused by AOL email.

There is a huge, well funded, shadow network of Republican linked media operations that push vicious propoganda. That is where most of the right wing nuttiness on Facebook comes from. Not from Russia, not from Macedonian teenagers creating clickbait. From the Republican party and from affiliated right wing groups. That’s partly what makes this obsession with Russia so baffling. We have just seen another yet election where the full on Republican propoganda and vote supression machines goes into action and the centre left’s response is to discuss a Russia based Trollfarm. For real?

Correction: (2) should read “–leaving to one side comparisons of moral evil”

@ Darag 6 “the shredding of political norms and the transition of politics into a form of social warfare, in which few people vote out of a sense of policy preference, but rather out of a sense of generalised hatred for the other ‘side’”

Serious question: I’ve seen people jump into Matt Yglesias’ Twitter feed with ‘you should get oven’d’ and heard some pretty dark stuff from Trump-supporting acquaintances out in the open on facebook. So where are all the lefty edgelords joking “Stalin would’ve known what to do with those dumb rednecks” and half-ironically cheering for the opioid crisis and rural unemployment to worsen, and for country music fans to die in mass shootings, out of hatred for the Trump voters it would predominantly affect? Is there some far-left media or corner of Twitter edgier than Chapo that I’m not cool enough to know about? (Do I even need to say ‘white genocide’ is not an example of the above?)

I wonder how well people really grasp the fundamental asymmetry here.

Why call this blog “Crooked Timber” when renaming it “kidneystones” would so much more accurate?

Z you write:

OK, one last and I shut up for good. Ordinary people who voted for Trump typically are in a socio-educative position that does not guarantee that they and their children will not fall to the bottom 10 to 20% of an extremely unequal and competitive society, but that guarantees that they and their children will never reach the top 10 to 20%. They believe (not unreasonably) that people at the top (us) are holding them down and (quite unreasonably) that if they don’t hold the people at the bottom down, they will fall there themselves. If you want to talk to these people, a precondition is you understand the socio-political forces that you benefit from and that hold them down (especially as they perfectly well understand they’re being held down, but understand far less well precisely how themselves).

Assuming this analysis to be broadly right, a political movement that campaigns fiercely for a society in which everyone lives decently, even at the bottom, and equally fiercely against the actual political and social forces holding everyone but the top down would have the potential to resonate with these people. Conversely, this movement would meet considerable resistance from the top (and the top is us), so there is no way it gains enough political power quickly enough to transform the society deeply enough so that common grounds can again be found for 90% of the population. Absent this common ground, no meaningful change in the way our system is organized can happen democratically, and democratically is the only way it can happen. So we wreck the biosphere.

I don’t think your end conclusion (that there is nothing that can be done) is correct, but the insight that we are part of the problem dynamic is broadly correct. I’m not sure what the solution is, but recognizing that we are in fact contributing to the problem in a serious way is a necessary step to dealing with it.

I’d like to remind the afterberners that Sanders is not a .e.ber of the democratic party so he has zero right to complain about his treatment by them. The same goes for you: your hero joined the party for about three minutes so he could grandstand in a presidential election, and then you complain that he isn’t treated fairly? You want to be treated fairly by an organisation you first have to join it. Then co-operate with it.

As for listening to trunpettes so I can change their minds – been there, done that, got the t shirt. Frankly it’s not worth the abuse. These people are voting against their own interests and there is nothing you can do about it. They’re vulnerable to Russian troll farms because they want to believe this simplistic fascist shit. You can’t change that, you just have to win elections so it doesn’t matter.

And as for this business that the Facebook troll farms don’t matter – a single Twitter account run by these dudes was quoted in every major American newspaper as if it represents a real American voter when in fact it was being run from a Russian office. That’s some serious force multiplication. These troll farms made a difference and leftists who can’t acknowledge that are stupid.

Buying control of the DNC is not illegal.
[…]
Judgment is by the voters in the voting booths.

Sure. And that means people can and will conclude that the only way to get a party that represents them is to kill the one who is blatantly lying about doing so while sucking half the oxygen out of the room, even if it means risking terrible short-term outcomes. Whether they’re justified or not, this outcome is just as predictable as the many “totally predictable” outcomes that centrists constantly hang over the heads of everyone to their left while lecturing them on the supreme moral culpability of not surrendering their independent political agency to the Party.

Orange Watch #84: “the only way to get a party that represents them”

That’s not the only way. You could also run for office yourself, or start your own party, or take over a party, instead of whining about why a democracy doesn’t automatically provide the solutions for you. The Russians took over an election, why can’t you? My point was that Clinton’s actions regarding the DNC are not necessarily a prosecutable crime. For my own overall view of the larger matter, one week after the election back in November under a post here by John Quiggin, I wrote: that the Sanders wing would be stronger because the Democrats have had the Clintons rejected, while the party still has the majority of voters, and so the Dem voters now have a chance at ejecting the rest of their banksters, and at the same time, the Republicans have taken on objectionable baggage that can’t keep his promises and may finally rip them apart or reduce their numbers. It’s a year later, and I would still say the same thing.

And as for this business that the Facebook troll farms don’t matter – a single Twitter account run by these dudes was quoted in every major American newspaper as if it represents a real American voter when in fact it was being run from a Russian office. That’s some serious force multiplication. These troll farms made a difference and leftists who can’t acknowledge that are stupid.

In the stories I read the twitter account was quoted for its views on the Kardashians and national Unicorn day. I’ve seen nothing to suggest that the far right extremist stuff that came later was quoted by anyone in the media.

Two pretty good stories on the Internet Research Agency:
https://amp.meduza.io/en/news/2017/10/17/russian-journalists-publish-massive-investigation-into-st-petersburg-troll-factory-s-u-s-operations

https://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/documents-show-how-russias-troll-army-hit-america?utm_term=.ffLaKa24O#.weNkvke7x

The Max Seddon one is old, but is better than anything that’s been published since in the US that I know of. So yay, evidence.

The whole operation does seem peculiarly inept. I’ve received more coherent spam in the past year.

AND I put the really good question of another commenter on the back for a reason –

People invented new products that created new jobs, -(mainly in Europe and mainly in ONE European country) – when a few old jobs were taken away by automation – but most of the US jobs – which were ”taken away” – NOT by ”globalization” – but by a bunch of OUR OWN greedy corporations – who thought they could make more dough by outsourcing or fire their workers altogether.

That was ”going on” and – now as the ”Producing Countries” of this world – hardly can keep up with the demand of our consumers – the ”new” -(and great ”old” jobs) – slowly will come back to US too – but very, very slowly as WE tend to slow down such a process with a lot of bickering if the Russians gave US our desperate confusion – or if we actually did it ALL to ourselves…?

Fuzzy Dunlop @76

I was referring to the phenomenon of ‘negative partisanship’ but I see that sentence has more than a whiff of ‘both sides do it’, which wasn’t my intent but doesn’t excuse the sloppy prose. My apologies. FWIW – I’m absolutely of the opinion that a large swath of the GOP electorate has adopted essentially fascist political beliefs , that this is a phenomenon happening entirely on one side of the aisle, and a damn scary one at that.

Mario @83 – You are correct. Masha Gessen is Russian. I’m not sure how this gives her special insight on anything (personally, I think she’s rather sub par as a political analyst, as her 2013 essay on the Khodorkovsky pardon made clear). Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are also Russians. They have also spent most of their careers researching the Russian security services, particularly ,w/r/t the Internet. You might want to take a look at what they say.

@Cian O’Connor – if I had even the slightest hope that dumping a collection of links here would change anyone’s minds or influence the debate I would. But it isn’t as if any of this is secret, and hasn’t been endlessly litigated for the past few months, but its a Saturday and I’m in Moscow so I’m going to take in some museums instead.

nastywoman,

When we ran ”the experiment” – the major rule about commenting was:
NOT to be too ”coherent” – in order to sound ”authentic”!

well if you want to deliver a message that actually is effective, some modicum of coherence is needed. This applies to your posts too, btw.

Daragh: doesn’t it bother you that Masha is Russian? After all, she wrote an article downplaying the meddling… can that be honest?

Sebastian H @80 I don’t think your end conclusion (that there is nothing that can be done) is correct

Nah, I don’t believe it either (I didn’t say nothing can be done, I think, I said we wouldn’t do it quickly enough). In fact, I would even be definitely optimistic in the middle-term. The only slight problem is that I also believe that we have an immediate environmental and climate crisis to deal with. So yeah, we will solve our problems with democracy eventually, but probably not quickly enough to save kelp forests and coral reefs. And I like kelp forests and coral reefs.

but the insight that we are part of the problem dynamic is broadly correct. I’m not sure what the solution is, but recognizing that we are in fact contributing to the problem in a serious way is a necessary step to dealing with it.

Yes.

‘You can (and should!) identify Russian troll farms’

Why? And why are ‘Russian’ ‘troll farms’ any worse than American troll farms (i.e. the American media, and electorate)?

‘ and try to weed stuff out’ Why? Are people too stupid to make their own minds up?

‘ weed it again’. Why? No one on CT fell victim to these ‘Russian’ ‘troll farms’. Who are these others who are too stupid to be able to evaluate propaganda? And Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

‘Facebook and Twitter can self-police’ (i.e. self-censor: yes they can and do, but that’s a bad thing, of course, corporations being only concerned with profit).

‘legislators can make law’ (i.e. the State can censor).

Is anyone going to comment on the US’ relentless interference in Russian democracy, btw? Or is it all a bit different when it’s ‘us’?

Cian: “Evidence would convince me.”

Here’s a suggestion: Provide a list of any ten criminal convictions in the last year, cases to which neither you nor anyone you know was a party. What evidence do you have that any crime occurred in any of those cases? What evidence have you seen? Isn’t it the case that you have only words from journalists to go on?

Or, let’s take this one.

Cian: “This is the same James Clapper who lied to congress in 2013?”

Some people – journalists! – say that Clapper lied to Congress, but you don’t believe that what people say about evidence is actually any indication of evidence at all. You don’t personally have, nor have you personally seen, any evidence that Clapper ever lied to Congress. Using your standard, there’s no reason at all for you to believe that Clapper lied to Congress. Yet you do believe that he did, while you don’t believe that Russians hacked the DNC, even though the standard of evidence for you, personally, is the same in both cases, e.g. Some journalists told you that some people at intelligence and law enforcement agencies said so.

Then there’s this bizarre turn.

Cian: “Okay this story is actually good and provides what seems like decent evidence of Russian hacking activity:”

Here you link to some words by journalists, telling you what they say someone else said and did, and call it evidence.

and @100
I really got a kick out of:
”No one on CT fell victim to these ‘Russian’ ‘troll farms’”

You think all these ”Russian Lovers” on CT fell in love with Russia because they have some ”Olga from the Wolga” at home?

Anarcissie: “That (someone said that) ‘the DOJ has enough evidence that they’re considering charging multiple Russian government officials’ does not constitute credible evidence of much of anything.”

Sure, but I’ll ask you the same question: What would it take to convince you that there is some actual evidence that the Russians were behind hacking the DNC? Obviously journalism isn’t the answer, so what is?

AND finally @100

”Or is it all a bit different when it’s ‘us’?”

Well – let’s say if a bunch of German Trolls would have been a lot more successful in making America believe that Trump – is actually… no NOT ”Satan” – BUT a reborn crazy fascist from the 30th it would have been a lot better than finally having to realize that my ”own people” – MY Americans – who I love and adore soooo much can be taken totally to the cleaners by a bunch of (Russian) ”yahoos” – some of whom one occasionally can meet at gaming conventions…

Fascism is not a distinctive political movement, it is a social-emotional force that can take over any country. Polanyi:

“Fascism was an ever-given political possibility, an almost instantaneous emotional reaction in every industrial community… One may call it a ‘move’ in preference to a ‘movement,’ to indicate the impersonal nature of the crisis the symptoms of which were frequently vague and ambiguous… There were no accepted criteria of fascism, nor did it possess conventional tenets. Yet one significant feature of all its organized forms was the abruptness with which they appeared and faded out again, only to burst forth with violence after an indefinite period of latency. All this fits into the picture of a social force that waxed and waned according to the objective situation…

“In its struggle for political power fascism is entirely free to disregard or to use local issues, at will. Its aim transcends the political and economic framework: it is social. It puts a political religion into the service of a degenerative process. In its rise it excludes only a very few emotions from its orchestra; yet once victorious it bars from the bandwagon all but a very small group of motivations, though again extremely characteristic ones…

“The appearance of such a movement in the industrial countries of the globe, and even in a number of only slightly industrialized ones, should never have been ascribed to local causes, national mentalities, or historical backgrounds as was so consistently done by contemporaries. Fascism had as little to do with the Great War as with the Versailles Treaty, with Junker militarism as with the Italian temperament. The movement appeared in defeated countries like Bulgaria and in victorious ones like Jugoslavia, in countries of Northern temperament like Finland and Norway and of Southern temperament like Italy and Spain, in countries of Aryan race like England, Ireland, or Belgium and non-Aryan race like Japan, Hungary, or Palestine, in countries of Catholic traditions like Portugal and in Protestant ones like Holland, in soldierly communities like Prussia and civilian ones like Austria, in old cultures like France and new ones like the United States and the Latin-American countries. In fact, there was no type of background—of religious, cultural, or national tradition—that made a country immune to fascism, once the conditions for its emergence were given…

“A country approaching the fascist phase showed symptoms among which the existence of a fascist movement proper was not necessarily one. At least as important signs were the spread of irrationalistic philosophies, racialist aesthetics, anticapitalistic demagogy, heterodox currency views, criticism of the party system, widespread disparagement of the ‘regime,’ or whatever was the name given to the existing democratic setup… In no case was an actual revolution against constituted authority launched; fascist tactics were invariably those of a sham rebellion arranged with the tacit approval of the authorities who pretended to have been overwhelmed by force…”

The Great Transformation (1944) pp. 238-39, 241, 237, 238, in that order.

However, it doesn’t actually show a mechanism by which this rigging happened.

This isn’t addressed to Daragh, whom I don’t care to interact with, and is not any attempt to jump into the discussions of the primary and election and fergawdssake scary Russians, but having just finished an article in the Nation on new books by Stuart Elden based on the lectures of Foucault, and having approached this question on this blog before (there I tentatively advocated for following money flows and NGO’s and other forms of local organizing and recruitment) the question of the mechanism by which Clinton did gain inalienable support from, for example, the older superdelegates (who should be studied hard, ethnographically and anthropologically) but not young black women does need to be investigated, and will not be found in coercion, legal forms, intimidation, or a even study of practices and policies by the campaign, but on the ground near the very hierarchical bottom of the Democratic Party, and is I suspect very connected to the documents and policies Brazille revealed, and to the “Invisible Primary.” That’s a very long sentence that probably needs some semi-colons but I must amuse myself.

It is telling the usual suspects are claiming that since Trump won narrow margins in key swing states this is ‘just enough’ – just enough for them to invest in the theory without feeling like the lowly ‘conspiracy theorists’ they so disavow.

Can they explain:
1. Why Russian trolls could swing 16% of voters earning under $30k a year but – блядь! – couldn’t stop, like, a 5 point swing back to Hilary among those earning over $250,000?
2. Why they are so perversely effective in three Rust Belt states the Democrats hadn’t lost since Reagan?

However did those hacker geniuses convince the American voter that in a time of economic crisis a Populist outsider was running against the DLC.

It is for chickens to laugh at! XA XD XA XD XA XD XA XD XA XD XA

Yan @85 Yes! And Daily Kos’ “Gunfail” series–a regular feature detailing gun accidents. It’s hard to imagine seeing something like that on the Baffler or Chapo. And certain voices would interpret this difference as a sign that those outfits have a ‘class only’ ideology, but that clearly ain’t so. I think it’s safe to say the far left has a much more serious, commitment to rigorous humaneness than the center-left. And the former take themselves more seriously. Which I think is why Chapo was so successful–it threads the needle of being mean to (usually) just the right people, in just the right way, which is hard to do if your whole political project is founded on rejecting all the ways we’re told it’s socially acceptable to put people down.

Daragh @94 I didn’t quite take it as ‘both sides do it’ism :). And I mean given the basic differences in agenda, I don’t think it would necessarily be blameworthy for the far left to be organized around pissing off the other side. If what they want is reprehensible, then there’s nothing wrong with wanting to piss them off. But even on this simple procedural criterion, there’s a big difference between the far left and the whole of the right.

“Read the entire thing. Bernie supporters are going to flip.”

Said as if Bernie supporters did not know this anyway, though we did.

Layman @105 – Indeed. I also note that some people here seem to thing Brazile is ‘turning against the leadership’, when a) Hillary Clinton is not in any meaningful sense of the word a leader of the Democratic party anymore b) Brazile’s ‘revelations’ seemed designed to curry favour with the wing of the party that supported Bernie Sanders, who is (despite his continued refusal to debase himself by actually joining the Democratic party). Her latest bombshell apparently regards her seriously considering replacing Clinton on the ticket, which is interesting given that this was never even remotely within her power to do.

As mentioned before – the fact that such utterly transparent attempts ingratiate herself with what she sees as the new power (while doing huge damage to the Democratic party and allowing Trump to distract from his own crimes) is taken as gospel truth that the primaries were rigged by the same people asking ‘Where’s the evidence?!!??!’ on the Russia interference is deeply depressing, if not surprising.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/11/03/rep_tulsi_gabbard_the_dnc_needs_to_be_completely_overhauled_no_more_games_no_more_retaliation.html

@102 Layman:

Patronizing much?

Criminal case 1: The prosecution has a single jail house confession.

Criminal case 2: The prosecution has documentation, video footage, witnesses and a paper trail.

Are you seriously claiming that the two are equivalent. That all evidence is of equal quality. If you’re not claiming that then presumably even you can grasp that there is a difference between strong evidence, and hearsay.

I never claimed that the evidence needed to be 100%, but thanks for assuming that I’m really stupid. All the stories I had seen in the western media up until 2/3 days ago (and I had actually been looking pretty hard) had been evidentally extremely weak. Lots of claims, statements by officials (oh, but they’d never lie. Iraq was just an innocent mistake) and childish discussions of hacking (I have the technical sophistication to follow discussions of hacking exploits. Do you?).

Some people – journalists! – say that Clapper lied to Congress, but you don’t believe that what people say about evidence is actually any indication of evidence at all. You don’t personally have, nor have you personally seen, any evidence that Clapper ever lied to Congress.

Dude, I saw the testimony on C-Span and I read the Edward Snowden leaks. Seriously? That’s like the worst example you could have picked.

Using your standard, there’s no reason at all for you to believe that Clapper lied to Congress. Yet you do believe that he did, while you don’t believe that Russians hacked the DNC

No, I don’t believe that there is reliable evidence that the Russians hacked the DNC, or indeed that anyone hacked them. The Russians may well have hacked the DNC, but equally so could a number of other people, or it could have been an inside leak, or Russian/Chinese/Republican agents could have simply stolen it from the offices. Currently, with the evidence we have (very little) all are equally possible.

To date:
+ There has been no forensic investigation of the DNC servers by the FBI because the DNC wouldn’t allow them access (which is really, really weird by the way. It suggests that the DNC are trying to hide something, and is a reason to be suspicious of the whole hacking narrative). The only investigation was by CrowdStrike – a company that (deservedly) doesn’t have a good reputation in the industry (I follow computer security stories quite closely because they interest me).
+ It is actually very hard to attribute blame for hacks. The typical approach (attribution based upon the hacking tool) is completely unreliable because once a hacking tool has been used, pretty much everyone who wants it has access to it. There are other methods that can be used, but other than the AP story that I linked to, nobody seems to have had any success with these. Most of them would require access to the servers.
+ Most of the investigations in the public domain have used the metadata on the Guccifer documents. Ignoring the vast majority of these investigations (which were highly amateurish), the problem with the good analyses is that there are simply too many ways to interpret what the data tells you. For example the metadata doesn’t prove that they were acquired through a hack (though that’s certainly one possible interpretation). In addition it’s impossible to tell if the metadata has been tampered with – something that hackers do all the time to cover their tracks.

Then there’s this bizarre turn.

Right because when I post the first story in a year that actually provides good (if circumstantial) evidence of Russian hacking in this area, after arguing that there was no decent evidence that proves I’m a hypocrite. Or something. Muppet.

The AP actually published a decent story 2/3 days ago that provides good circumstantial evidence of Russian hacking activity. People should read it. It doesn’t prove that they hacked the DNC, but it certainly makes them a likely suspect IF the DNC was indeed hacked. It’s a good story. The only good story from a western source on this whole thing that I’ve read (though the FT may have some stuff behind the firewall).

The reason I believe this story is because it fits into a pattern of previous stories on this subject, the targets (who are mostly Russian) make sense, the technical details in the story are solid and the people quoted on the record in the story are good people who know what they’re doing. As opposed to anonymous intelligence officials. I believe it’s called evaluating the story – sorting the fake news from the real news. You should try it sometime.

”You can (and should!) identify Russian troll farms and try to weed stuff out, weed it again.” a man called ”John Holbo” wrote – and our so called President once mumbled he wouldn’t have won without Twitter.

And when John Holbo writes:
”It’s hard to think of a technical patch, or a legislative fix, that doesn’t significantly infringe the freedom to think and say (stupid) stuff.” – let’s finally come to the conclusion it’s just too distracting…
Life is just far too confusing… as there is all this ”stuff” on the Internet from all these Troll Farms and there are these days where I really don’t know where I should look first – at the rates SNL sketch about my naked President or at Crooked Timber.

– and then there are all our ”Kriegserlebnisse” all these great ”stuff” we once did and we HAVE to remind anybody – that we were ”blond”…

– AND when a man called John Holbo wrote:
”You can (and should!) identify Russian troll farms and try to weed stuff out, weed it again.” – let’s doubt that he meant for US to doubt the influence of Russian troll farms?

He probably was aware that:
”The most effective way for Russian troll accounts to end up in news posts was simple: They tweeted newsworthy photos and videos, even if they were not the ones that shot them. Buying photos is an expensive and complicated process for news organizations, which have become increasingly happy to embed tweets that include the photos they desire as something of a workaround. It’s free, easy and legally colorable. The only issue, it ends up, is that you might be embedding a tweet created by a Russian troll farm as part of a massive conspiracy to influence the American political system.

Such was likely the case with articles like NBC News’ “Gay Pride Events Festive But Some Concerned After Orlando,” which included a tweet by @lgbtunitedcom; Vox’s “Someone shot 30 holes in the Emmett Till memorial. The sentiment behind that is normal in politics.” (@Crystal1Johnson); ATTN:’s “What This Company Is Offering Employees Is Raising a Privacy Debate” (@LuceelysToP); HuffPost’s “This Malibu ‘Official Sanctuary City’ Sign Is Not Quite What It Seems” (@Jenn_Abram); and Breitbart’s “Texan Trump Supporter Pays for Billboard Ripping ABC over Russia Coverage” (@Pamela_Moore13).

Sometimes, entire stories were based around a Russian account’s video, as was the case with a Complex post from August titled “Donald Trump Claims His 17-Day Vacation Isn’t Really a Vacation.” The post included a tweet from Trump and a video from the aforementioned @Pamela_Moore13, a prolific Russian troll farm account that has appeared in news articles at least a dozen times since October 2016.

– and so as in the Huffpos article above – WE – instead of all ”outfits” Huffpo could have come on this thread to the conclusion that ”Russian Trolls Didn’t Need To Infiltrate American Media, Because We Let Them In” – and yes there are also these American Troll Farms BUT they tend to concentrate on our sexual preferences or – Taylor Swift and they are just NOT as well ”organized” as the Russian Gamers were – and now wonder WE – US Gamers were NOT ”winning”’…

How…. SAD!!
(USA! USA!! USA!!!)

@129
”It is now becoming necessary to also become intentional about community development and localism, and planting some seeds for disparate futures among we the peoples.”

You mean baking ”better bread”?
Ups – sorry – I didn’t mean to beliddle your important coherent comment – so please – moderation don’t pass this example of silly trollism…

I just finished two on “hierarchy”:

Cian: “I never claimed that the evidence needed to be 100%…”

No, you claimed that “…nobody has offered any actual evidence.” That’s simply not true; what you mean to say is that they have, but you don’t believe it.

“Dude, I saw the testimony on C-Span and I read the Edward Snowden leaks.”

Put another way: When Snowden publishes something you can’t independently verify, you believe it; but when someone else publishes something you can’t independently verify, you don’t believe it. Why the difference? Because you accept Snowden’s words as evidence, but you do not accept someone else’s words as evidence. In neither case to you have any first-hand knowledge of or access to the actual evidence, but in the one case that doesn’t matter to you, and in the other it does. This is precisely the point I meant to make.

“…after arguing that there was no decent evidence …”

You did not argue that there was no _decent_ evidence. You argued that there was _no_ evidence. That’s the root of dispute. This latest article, the one you linked to, is simply another case of journalists saying things you can’t verify, but, suddenly, it strikes you as evidence, when the other such articles were not. Thus my surprise.

Then there’s this: “The document you just linked to a document confirms much of what Brazile claimed.”

‘Much of’ is doing a lot of work there. Indeed, it confirms many things: That there was a DNC, that there was a Hillary Victory Fund, that they had an agreement, and so on. Of course, Brazile’s key claim is that the agreement rigged the primaries for Clinton. That claim seems preposterous in light of several things.

From the document I linked, we learn that:

“Nothing in this agreement shall be construed to violate the DNC’s obligation of impartiality and neutrality through the Nominating process. All activities performed under this agreement will be focused exclusively on preparations for the General Election and not the Democratic Primary. Further we understand you may enter into similar agreements with other candidates.”

Indeed, we also know that Sanders signed a similar agreement, and then declined to engage in joint fund-raising activities, and that in fact by focusing on small donors he raised more money than Clinton did despite this agreement. We know that the DNC has no role in managing the primaries; they are managed by the states. And we know that Brazile also claims to have considered replacing Clinton on the ticket, but decided not to only to spare the disappointment of women at losing a female candidate; a facially absurd claim, since the DNC chair has no such power or authority.

Cian, the DNC has complied with all FBI requests related to the servers and in testimony FBI reps have confirmed they have all the evidence they need from the DNC and full cooperation. Why are you lying, and why are your repeating lies from Trump’s Twitter feed?

Always the high road for FesteringNose.

stephen t. johnson – I think the proposition is that almost anyone else would have beaten Trump. Hillary Clinton was a hugely unpopular candidate who ran one of the worst political campaigns in a long time.

It’s trivially easy to find testimony from the FBI that they received full cooperation and got everything they think they need. First hit on Google gives a report that Comey said he got full compliance, and an aide called Watson said they got copies of the servers that were sufficient to do what they need to do. You might have issues with the quality of the FBI investigation but that’s not the dncs fault (though who knows, you guys probably think Hilary Clinton controls the investigation from the back of the pizza parlour where she is hiding the bodies). I’m sorry but I’m not going to waste my time writing html for links – it’s trivial for you to google this information and check whether the things you read in Trump’s Twitter feed are true before you repeat them here, and telling that you don’t even though you “follow these investigations closely”.

– and I think Mr. Holbo urgently should open a new theres about – when and how what voters voted for Bush or was it AlGore or and I think it’s all Reagans fault because Betsy Bloomingdale talked him into joining the LA Country Club and from then on it was ALL downhill…

Faustusnotes: Let me get this straight. You’re claiming that:
a) I am fascist orientated.
b) That I blindly believe anything Putin’s twitterer in chief says (which account is that by the way).

Care to back up either of those charges? Or did you just feel like randomly making stuff up?

Layman: No, you claimed that “…nobody has offered any actual evidence.” That’s simply not true; what you mean to say is that they have, but you don’t believe it.

Yeah I exagerated. The pedant in me salutes you. What I should have said is that the evidence is extremely weak and proves nothing. But absence of evidence doesn’t prove innocence, etc.

Put another way: When Snowden publishes something you can’t independently verify, you believe it; but when someone else publishes something you can’t independently verify, you don’t believe it.

Can we just accept that I’ve read Hume and move on from this extremely tedious argument. Yes knowledge is contingent and never 100%. Happy?

The Snowden document dump is evidence of very high quality. Not only would it be hard to forge that many documents, but the information in them is confirmed by information elsewhere, while the reaction of the US government suggests that they were indeed official NSA documents. Most of the information that we read in the newspapers does not reach this level.

As for James Clapper’s original perjury. I can only assume that you’re suggesting that the C-Span testimony could have been created by Hollywood special effects artists, and so how do I really know that it was TV footage of him. I mean I guess I don’t…

There is nothing like this to support the allegations about Russian hacking and interference.

Why the difference? Because you accept Snowden’s words as evidence, but you do not accept someone else’s words as evidence.

Err no. I accept the documents in the Snowden document dump as evidence. BECAUSE I READ THOSE RELATING TO NSA SURVEILLANCE.

In neither case to you have any first-hand knowledge of or access to the actual evidence, but in the one case that doesn’t matter to you, and in the other it does. This is precisely the point I meant to make.

In other news I also don’t have first-hand knowledge that the earth revolves around the sun. Isn’t elementary philosophy fun?

If you can point to evidence for Russian hacking that is similar to the proof of NSA surveillance I would be happy to read it. No lie, I love this stuff.

You did not argue that there was no _decent_ evidence. You argued that there was _no_ evidence. That’s the root of dispute. This latest article, the one you linked to, is simply another case of journalists saying things you can’t verify, but, suddenly, it strikes you as evidence, when the other such articles were not. Thus my surprise.

So let’s get this straight. After discovering an article that undermines my point, I post the article. And you use this to try and claim that I’m a hypocrite.

And to underline this point. So far I’ve posted stronger evidence of Russian hacking than you have. You haven’t actually posted anything. What makes you so convinced that they hacked the DNC?

On the PDF you linked to:
“1. With respect to the hiring of a DNC Communications Director, the DNC agrees that no later
than September 11, 2015 it will hire one of two candidates previously identified as acceptable to
HFA.”

Bazile claimed that the Hillary campaign had control over the Communications director during the primary, and here in the document we have confirmation.

“2. With respect to the hiring of future DNC senior staff in the communications,
technology, and research departments, in the case of vacancy, the DNC will maintain the
authority to make the final decision as between candidates acceptable to HFA.”

An again, here we have more confirmation about the control that the Hillary campaign had over three key departments. Just as Bazille said.

“3. Agreement by the DNC that HFA personnel will be consulted and have joint authority over
strategic decisions over the staffing, budget, expenditures, and general election related
communications, data, technology, analytics, and research. The DNC will provide HFA advance
opportunity to review on-line or mass email, communications that features a particular
Democratic primary candidate. This does not include any communications related to primary
debates – which will be exclusively controlled by the DNC. The DNC will alert HFA in advance
of mailing any direct mail communications that features a particular Democratic primary
candidate or his or her signature. ”

Oh look, more input and oversight over staffing, budget and expenditures. And they get to review all communications about a candidate, and will be alerted by direct mail communications. Clearly these are not things that all primary candidates get, otherwise they wouldn’t be in this document.

“Indeed, we also know that Sanders signed a similar agreement, and then declined to engage in joint fund-raising activities, and that in fact by focusing on small donors he raised more money than Clinton did despite this agreement.”

You’re saying that Sanders had control over who the DNC hired, was able to vet hires and had joined authority over strategic decisions? Huge if true.

We know that the DNC has no role in managing the primaries; they are managed by the states. And we know that Brazile also claims to have considered replacing Clinton on the ticket, but decided not to only to spare the disappointment of women at losing a female candidate; a facially absurd claim, since the DNC chair has no such power or authority.

The DNC charter allows her to initiate a process where the DNC can replace the nominee. Whatever else one thinks of her, I think it’s reasonable to assume that she has a good working understanding of the powers and processes of the role, and how the DNC work.

I don’t like Brazile – but assuming she’s stupid seems unwise.

Layman 11.04.17 at 11:04 am @ 106 —
That’s a hard question, come to think of it. I had the idea that a case laid out in court with the witnesses under oath and the normal rules of evidence being maintained, and where a record of the proceedings were available to the public, might give us some idea of the truth, although one might have to go to some trouble to dig it up. However, if seriously powerful people believe the Russia story must be put over, then they might be able to bend the courts as well as the media. We may have to wait until the passage of time renders the subject unimportant, as with the invasion of Iraq or the War in Vietnam. I do hope that criticism such as mine will at least lead to a better quality of official lying; it is somewhat humiliating to be handed fare about ‘Russian troll farms’ as if large-scale paid and volunteer fraud on the Internet had not been epidemic for the last 20 years at least.

@Lee Arnold:

You’ve gotten much better at hexing since you first hexed!

The image rotation, esp., was cool.

Cian: “Yeah I exagerated.”

Yes, that’s what I said from the start. What took so long?

Anarcissie: “That’s a hard question, come to think of it. I had the idea that a case laid out in court with the witnesses under oath and the normal rules of evidence being maintained, and where a record of the proceedings were available to the public, might give us some idea of the truth, although one might have to go to some trouble to dig it up.”

Like you, I doubt that even that would do it. You’d only have their word to go on that the trial actually happened.

It’s a small thing, but this Republican tic of referring to the Democratic Party as “the Democrat Party” is, syntactically, completely analogous to referring to a Jewish lawyer as a Jew lawyer. Please don’t do it.

I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. If it helps I’m a British ex-pat, way to the left of the Democrats, for whom the official name of the ‘Democratic Party’ is of very little interest. I might remember this if someone could explain to me what the insult is I guess.

Let me suggest that this thread shows it is not only the Trumpites who are dug in, but also the Berniebros and, yes, the Clintonsistas, too. People are making what ought to be simple fact-based questions (did Russian propaganda influence the election? what was the influence of the Clinton campaign over the DNC?) into identity-based beliefs, which cannot be touched.

Somehow we need to get people to stop zealously defending their faiths.

@150
”it is somewhat humiliating to be handed fare about ‘Russian troll farms’ as if large-scale paid and volunteer fraud on the Internet had not been epidemic for the last 20 years at least.”

Now that is true – but the ”large-scale paid and volunteer fraud on the Internet” never before had been used as effectively in creating ”political memes” – and let’s believe for a second what the Moron believes that it could’ve been anyone – from the Chinese to a “400-pound guy” lying in his bed.

The sheer volume of the -(documented) trolling is even for a 400 pound guy too much.

And I’m NOT saying it couldn’t have been done by ”them Chinese” – and the funny banter between our ”Russian Lovers” against teh Layman and Faust are for sure entertaining – but I just don’t know if it makes a lot of sense – as it is (still) so easy to track down where the trolling comes from – which – how true how true don’t prove that the Great Vlady himself commanded the troll farm.
AND there is nobody on this blog – who would love the idea more – that Vladimir didn’t know about the whole thing – and it was just your a few very creative Russian Gamers who managed to fool our Fools and Idiots to such a degree.

Now that would be truly… shall we say… ”fascinating”?

BUT I just don’t know if the type of ”Russian Lovers” we have here on CT – would enjoy such an amazing triumph of… for sure very young and really ”anarchistic” Russian gamers as much as playing their doubting game here…?

@all –

what I really don’t understand? –
Whoever did it – did it in such a way – that ultimately it’s no win for anybody.

So why do we have commenters here who try to defend ”THE Russians” or ”THE Americans?

Haven’t you guys noticed yet – as Mr. Holbo has hinted – that the most ”effective adversaries” – if we call them like that are… US – and like in the classic ”Fight Club” the best hits against ”Russian” -(or American?) Lovers always comes from themselves.
It’s like the F… face – NOBODY on this planet is able to argue more effective against him –
as whatever leaves his mouth or what he does – and as we all know – (or should know) – that even that ”virus” will be only ”temporary” -(like every ”sickness”) and sooner or later ”the body” has created so many ”Antikörper” that the body will get well again – we just could try to spend the waiting time in ”areas” where you don’t run into the F…faces…

Following thoughts: once identity becomes an issue, we start to see behaviors analogous to family dynamics (perhaps these are actually the same.) Roles take precedence over actual behavior: “Dad” may be an abusive alcoholic, but he’s still Dad and deserves some sort of respect. So we have the precedence of image over the person’s actual behavior: Trump is making American great again, Hillary Clinton the great feminist hope, Bernard Sanders is some sort of saint and so on. Everyone is supposed to be the messiah.

What I find striking is the divergence between the image and the person. It is most evident with Trump, of course, many of whose followers still believe even as he works hard to elevate his ego and ruin their lives, but there is some of it in all the leaders. Hillary Clinton is indeed a feminist, but she is also a devout Methodist and conflicted on abortion and charity. (And the less said about her beliefs on foreign policy, the better.) Sanders plainly believes in his socialism, but he is more of a tough practical political survivor than a saint.

We may pay attention to the person behind the curtain, as it were – we supposedly study these matters and pay attention to the actuality as well as iconography – but we have difficulty bringing these insights to a wider public.

AND about the (desperate?) desire of some here – by pointing (like in school?) to some sins of some ”others” -(”Brazille” or ”Clinton” or some ”Democrats”) – whatever they did or could have done NEVER EVER will excuse what went down in the homeland with the erection of the F… Moron.

Not in a thousand years!

And history will NOT be nice to US and the only excuse we will have – for our children or grandchildren will be – that we completely had lost our minds at a certain point – and there will be no mentioning of ”but, but, but the alternative to the F… face was soooo bad”

That doesn’t fly anymore in history as nobody remembers anymore ”the alternatives to all these other ”F…faces” who once ruled their countries. AND in retrospective this ”Russian Thing” will be absolutely HUUUGE – and as every sane (European) country already has made sure – that these type of let’s call it ”Internet Games” will NOT be played in other so called ”advanced Democracies” the ”US example” probably will be the only one for the history books.

Just another one for ”Americas Exceptionalism”!
-(and please excuse the light irony)

Cian, layman has provided you the information, which as I said is the first hit on Google.

The first hit for me on Google was Politifact. The article was not very good and got some basic facts wrong. The next article was The Hill article that I linked to above. This story contradicted Layman’s version of events. As have most of the articles I’ve read. If, as you say it’s common knowledge that the FBI were given direct access to the servers it should be pretty easy to provide evidence. Instead I’ve provided evidence that they didn’t and you’ve accused me of being a stooge of Trump and/or Putin.

As for Russia owning Putin, again why should I bother helping you with such trivial information?

This is an academic blog, you can do your own research.

I have done my own research. I see some conspiracy theories from people who clearly don’t understand debt issuance. I see some pretty good journalism, mostly Russian, on Trump’s failed business ventures in Russia. I’ve also read stuff exploring Trump’s deep financial ties to the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia and China. Which oddly none of the Russiaphobes in the US seem very interested in. In addition there’s the inconvenient fact that Trump’s foreign policy has actually gone against Russia’s foreign policy interests on quite a few issues (Syria, North Korea).

Now obviously, as a fine academic mind such as yourself must realize, it’s impossible to prove a negative. But actual evidence that Trump is owned by Putin does seem to be rather thin on the ground. Other members of his administration have deeper ties due to their past lives as oil executives, while the generals who seem to be mostly running things (and are a lot more worrying than Russian spectres) are highly Russia phobic. But in general their orientation seems to mostly be towards the Gulf and the awful regimes that run the oil states.

I’ll grant you it’s not so clear in this case since we don’t have major FBI figures admitting to the truth of the facts in dispute, but I point you to the recent indictments,and today’s new reports on the paradise papers. Lock, stock and barrel, Trump is owned by Russia.

Err what? Manafort is a sleazy political consultant who’s mostly been charged for tax evasion (the money laundering may stick, but a lot of that money looks legitimate, if highly immoral). There’s no connection to Putin that I can see there. Or Trump for that matter. George Papadopoulos most probably got scammed by Russian con artists. I suppose it’s possible they were Russian agents – but in that case they were either highly incompetent, or it was some kind of bizarre operation where they were trying to make the Trump administration look stupid.

Why are you so eager to defend him?

If you were to accuse him of being a Lizard person I’d ‘defend’ him from that accusation also. I’m not ‘defending’ him because I think he’s a good person – he’s obviously far from that. I just don’t think any of these charges have much merit. I also think they’re distracting from the truly awful things that he is doing (various appointments, the destruction of the USDA, EPA, Puerto Rico, etc, etc), and for that matter the various ways in which he is dirty (hint – the GULF).

(I didn’t say you were a fascist either, I said the white population that voted this election was more fascist oriented than usual. This is a particularly gratuitous misreading!)

The white population that voted this election is mostly the same white population that voted last election. This line of reasoning may need more work.

Raven Onthill 11.05.17 at 9:00 pm @ 158 —
It is probably not possible, except maybe for a few very advanced spooks, to determine who, if anyone, especially trolled and spammed the Net with regard to the election. Moderately sophisticated Net-based malefactors can operate without leaving accessible tracks. Yes, if one had the logs of all the servers in Moldova…. but one doesn’t. Hence taking a strong position on the Russia stories requires belief, and that source of belief is likely to be tribal identification, or some kind of interest in something other than the truth.

That nitwit Orwell has confused people with the absurd idea it takes a memory hole to rewrite the past. Not only did Clinton lose the popular vote, but the entire Obama presidency never happened at all, and Shrub’s presidency has retroactively moved into the ancient past.

@156 (and 159): I believe Mr. Frant just did explain it to you, but I’m happy to try again. For some time now GOP politicians have been deliberately referring to the “Democrat Party” as an insult. (I think this is actually pretty well known to people who follow U.S. politics in any detail):

http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2010/03/since_when_did_it_become_the_d.html

You say you didn’t know any better. Now you do, and respectfully I presume you’ll cease and desist.

@173
”Besides, Facebook and Twitter have experts; they can find out, if they want to know.”

They didn’t have to ”find” it out – or when you get paid in Rubles you better don’t find IT out – or you might get asked afterwards why you have been so… let’s be polite and call it ”naive”?

So what I always try to… hint and what might be a… bit worrying – where are all these… let’s be polite and say ”naive” commenters on CT coming from… and as I know a few dudes who work at F… book – I#m aware they are NOT coming from F… book.

So they must be from the last rock in America where people don’t know that some Russians tend to have the same taste in Interiour Design as the great F… Moron – and IF THAT Fact isn’t ample – and obvious – and undeniable proof – beyond ANY doubt that there has been ”a collusion” between the F…faces -(and F… book) – and Russia I don’t know what more proof an Anarchist wants?

And about this typ of… let’s be polite and call it ”anarchistic posturing” here of some ”Oltimers”?

Men!!

Y’all nuthing – NUTING – compared to the Gamers of ”F… book”!

Slate

Instead, whether because they were denied access or simply never asked for it, the FBI instead used the analysis of the DNC breach conducted by security firm CrowdStrike as the basis for its investigation. Regardless of who is telling the truth about what really happened, perhaps the most astonishing thing about this probe is that a private firm’s investigation and attribution was deemed sufficient by both the DNC and the FBI.

Cian @ 155, this is a great example of my confusion about your methodology.

There’s a dispute between the FBI and the DNC about what the FBI asked for. In this case, you believe the FBI, though it isn’t clear to me why, except that you can then use that dispute to cast doubt on the entire question of the hacking. Oddly, though, you don’t believe the same source (Comey) when, in the same testimony you cited, he says there is no doubt that the Russians were behind the DNC hacking. That’s some methodology!

… because if somebody explains it to him then he can evaluate the case and determine whether it’s [something that he thinks] is reasonable. Because the only requests he feels the need to comply with are the ones he agrees with: other people are not him, and do not have the same entitlement to feelings worthy of respect.

Dude I’m British. I’ve lived here 6 years – and it hasn’t been something that has ever come up. I asked my wife, who is registered as a Democrat about this and she looked at me blankly. I asked around the office and got the same blank look from the people I work with. I honestly don’t get the insult. If it’s a big deal I will try to remember, but it would probably help me remember if I knew what the insult was. I would be willing to bet that most Americans also don’t know anything about it either.

Cian: “If it’s a big deal I will try to remember, but it would probably help me remember if I knew what the insult was.”

You’ll try to remember the actual name of the party, and try to remember to use it? Do you have to do that with your own name? It’s tricky, I’ll grant you that.

And now we have “Kremlin Cash Behind Billionaire’s Twitter and Facebook Investments” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia.html

Groan. Just how much internet surveillance is being run by various national security agencies?

@182
”I would be willing to bet that most Americans also don’t know anything about it either.”

Yeah – the other night I saw Jennifer Lawrence wandering out in the street in Hollywood –
”JENNIFER LAWRENCE” the Oscar winning Jennifer Lawrence and ”our sister” who showed the F…face the finger right at the beginning – when he had his outing – and so Jennifer Lawrence asked ”Americans” ON Hollywoodboulevard – if they could name 5 – in words ”FIVE” movies with Jennifer Lawrence – and now – as you seem to be ”a better” like me -are you willing to bet if ”most Americans” could name them?

No?

So why in the world does somebody shows up at this blog here – NOT knowing that probably every SINGLE one of these Russians – who played with your – and all the other ”Americans” mind – for sure is able to name five movies Jennifer Lawrence was in -(and if it only was all of the Hunger Game Films)
AND!!

And here it comes!!! – FOR SURE every single one of these Russian Trolls – who posted all of the ”stuff” -(you like to question) FOR SURE knew the difference between ”Democrat” and ”Democratic” -(in US political lingo)

And isn’t that… ”awesome”?

Collin Street – I found most of your screed impenetrable, but if it helps I’m almost certainly to your left politically. I didn’t know about the ‘Democrat Party’ thing, and now that I do know I’m sorry I guess. Though it seems kinda stupid. The liberal obsession with process and decorum is funny, in a tragic kind of way.

Raven Onthill: Which leads me to a hard question: is Bernard Sanders a demagogue?

No, don’t be stupid.

But what about about Sanders? His rise was made possible by the unresponsiveness of both parties to the needs and will of the people.

How would any of these things make him a demagogue?

But his most ardent followers don’t seem to listen when he tells them they have to be their own revolution. They want a messiah and they will have their messiah, even over their messiah’s objections. So perhaps he has been made into a demagogue against his will. I am reminded of Frank Herbert’s Paul Atreides, who became the unwilling leader of a jihad.”

You know that his supporters are going out, fielding their own candidates and setting up grass roots operations, right? That they are doing the things that Bernie said need to be done. That when Bernie has said things that his supporters disagreed with, they criticized him for that. That plenty of people who supported him in the campaign have criticized him for not being radical enough.

John (OP),

I literally don’t have any clue where to send a letter to potentially win them over to my way of thinking about all that.

After thinking about this a few days, and after seeing that one major problem is the destitute state of motivation and organization on your side, I’d say, send letters to your own people, and try to make your way of thinking about ‘all that’ compelling enough to whoever, them or not them, so that they all don’t feel they are better off voting for a Trump or staying at home.

Painting a nice vision of the liberal / leftist future is quite urgent, I would say. From skimming the net I can see that for many the vision they associate with your side is a hybrid of a caliphate with an intersectionalist third wave feminism dictatorship. Not really coherent, quite bizarre, but very effective in terms of marketing.

Sometime back in the mid-20th century, as I dimly recall, the Republican Party made it an official policy to stop calling the Democratic Party ‘the Democratic Party’ and start calling it the ‘Democrat Party’. This was supposed to be some kind of deprecation. As a mere child (probably from another planet) I found this tactic difficult to understand — where’s the insult? — but at the time it was very popular among Republicans. Is it coming back, part of the eternal return of dumb things?

Banned commenter deleted

#185 – that story is pretty bad – and is actually a good example of the kind of thing that I’m complaining about.

8% ownership of Facebook isn’t going to give you any kind of control over the company.

The connection to the bank says more about the ways in which Russian wealth, much like US wealthy, is dependent upon political connections and state support. Russia is incredibly corrupt. Which is a story, and has been since the 90s, but not the story that apparently anyone in the US is interested in. Also, good luck finding any business person in the US who hasn’t done deals with Russian Oligarchs.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/does-congress-have-the-guts-to-invoke-war-powers/

The link is mentions how Congress decided the war in Yemen didn’t deserve a vote. I wish we had one tenth the amount of coverage on Saudi influence on our policies as we have had on Russian, and after the Saudis there are a few others (Israel, cough) where I would like to see more discussion in the press about influence. But sticking to the Saudis, how exactly does it work? Are we supposed to think that we support the Saudis as much as we do simply on the merits of the issues? This might matter a bit more than Russiagate, especially as we seem to be inching towards a war with Iran.

I’ve never noticed Republicans using “Democrat party” at all, much less as a common pejorative, and much less still as an anti Semitic dogwhistle.

However, it does sound really weird. I think one reason may be that the two US parties have names that can pass as adjectives. The Republican Party could mean the party of Republicans, or, and this is how it rings in my ear, the party that is Republican or holds Republican principles. So that may be why we call it the Democratic Party, as an adjective modifying party.

Of course there’s nothing in principle wrong about naming a party with a noun, like the Labour Party. But it will sound weird to American ears.

Re. the ‘democrat’ vs ‘democratic’ thing – getting riled up by that is falling into the trap that this is intended to be. Happy falling. The word ‘snowflake’ comes to mind.

Cian: “Layman, is there any criticism of the DNC or of Clinton that you would consider acceptable? ”

Of course. I’ve a long record at CT for my lack of enthusiasm for Clinton. She’s a terrible campaigner, too fond of militarism, too eager to make a deal with the devil (or Republicans, whoever she runs into first) and, last but actually first, because of my strong conviction that no immediate family member of a former President should ever run for or be elected President, because it is spectacularly bad for democracy. I would have preferred almost anyone – certainly Sanders, or Warren, or even Biden.

But Sanders lost, and she was the nominee, and Trump was the opponent, and whatever else she is, she ain’t Trump; and the next President could do tremendous good or tremendous bad or something in between, and it was perfectly obvious where to place one’s bet.

Generally, the Democratic Party has been camped on “we’re not the other guys, we’re not so bad”, and that’s not a very effective way to capture enthusiasm. Would I like them to be more aggressively progressive, more committed to the working class, more determined to counter the depredations of the wealthy? Yes, I would. Is there any chance that by voting for Trump, or for Jill Stein, or just staying home, that will happen? Not a chance in hell.

I hope I’ve cleared that up for you.

@205
”Which in this context means apologising and dropping it.”

Doesn’t work – as the fifth rule of trolling is: ”NEVER EVER” apologize – and apologizing anywhoo is soo not very… ”inspired” – as it would be much more… ”creative”? if he would cook a big bowl of ”Borscht” – and either heat it up to a good sauna temperature OR cool it down so tremendously that it reaches at least the temperature of the Lake Baikal at this time of the year and then he should sit in it – but very slowly and sing ”Gardemariny vperiod” -(ande of the most romantic Russian love songs) –

and all would be forgiven!

Cian

The liberal obsession with process and decorum is funny, in a tragic kind of way.

A preference for politeness over rudeness is not an obsession. It is neither funny nor tragic how some people become defensive when inadvertent rudeness is identified for what it is, but it is interesting.

Lifelong Dem here. This Democrat vs Democratic thing is a mystery to me, and I find either usage fine. It really does look like childish nitpicking when it comes up; griping about it seems petty from here.

Cian, criticisms I will accept of the DNC might include (not limited to):

– losing the election
– failing to notice and respond adequately to the redistricting issue
– allowing someone who is not a member of the democratic party to run in the primaries, creating an entire narrative of corruption and collusion that was self generating and self sustaining by the time of the election
– failing to identify more and better candidates than Clinton
– poor computer security
– losing the election

But this bullshit about their corruption is just spin and waffle, as is the idea that Bernie could have won the general, along with all these dumb arsed conspiracies about how everything is Obama and Clinton’s fault.

Here is a short list of reportage that appeared to be solidly sourced and checked, from the last several years. News reportage is NOT legal evidence. “Evidence” is not the correct word to use:

One or more Russian oligarchs paid above-market prices for Trump properties and appeared to be laundering money through Trump properties. Until a few years ago, the FBI was wiretapping a Russian money-laundering, extortion and gambling ring that was operating in Trump Tower NYC. In 2016 somebody hacked the DNC. WikiLeaks is a neutral organization (or it poses as one) which can therefore be manipulated as a cut-out by any hacker or spy service. Trump made statements in his speeches that, in retrospect, suggested knowledge of the DNC hacks and knowledge of meetings by his campaign officials with Russians offering dirt on Hillary. On the other side, the Clinton campaign’s “oppo research” (a campaign file of dirt on your political opponent) included a “dossier” sourced to a British spy suggesting that Russian intelligence has spent years making various inroads into the Trump operation, and it was alarming enough for the Clinton campaign to give to the FBI. In turn, the FBI thought the dossier alarming enough to present to Obama and Trump together in the White House after the election. Flynn was fired from the NSC. A few other Trump campaign people lied to FBI and Congress about meetings with Russians. Comey had enough insider knowledge to believe that Trump’s dinner ingratiations were attempts at obstruction of justice. Facebook stated that about a quarter of the Russian-paid ads in 2015-16 were targeted geographically, including in Michigan and Wisconsin (which might suggest that there was a spotter, possibly from the Trump campaign, directing the ad buys using electoral analytics). In a legal contest at DEF CON 25 held a few months ago in Las Vegas, contestants hacked into U.S. voting machines in 90 minutes.

This is serious stuff, not propaganda or distraction. There are different issues:

1. Several possible felonies may have been committed by U.S. citizens: money laundering, hacking, receiving stolen property (hacked emails), various laws about dealing with hostile foreign governments, lying to the FBI, obstruction of justice. This is Mueller’s bailiwick.

2. Whatever has happened, it undermines confidence in all U.S. candidates and the entire election process, which was shaky to begin with. This couldn’t be more dangerous to everyone. And it is going to happen again. This ought to be Congress’s bailiwick.

3. We need laws to guarantee carefulness and transparency at Facebook, Google and Twitter. These companies have ascended to the technological status of public utilities like water and sewage. Or else, break ’em up like the Bell System (i.e., put an end to the patent monopolies on software).

4. The public is being told that voting machines were not hacked in the election. But if the U.S. government knows it happened, do you think they would tell us? All hell would break loose.

On Trump and his associates, I assume most people take for granted they are corrupt. It’s the one sided obsession with Russiagate that disturbs me because I think a lot of it is motivated by militarism. That was the point I was attempting to make in the Corey Robin thread which blew up and was then shut down.

So are Trump and company very likely lawbreakers? Very likely so imo, one way or another. Should they be investigated? Sure. I still think much of the Russiagate coverage has been over the top, but won’t push that here because for me it isn’t the point that really matters.

The point that really matters is that whatever the Russians did, other countries have much greater influence and in a bad way on our policies. I accept layman’s point that it should not be a zero sum game. We should be able to investigate it all, but we don’t, precisely because the Saudi and Israeli lobbies have enormously more influence in DC than the Russians. Right now the Saudi supporters in Congress are fighting to keep Congress from voting on our support for the Saudi war crimes in Yemen. I ge the distinct impression that Trump Administration, Netanyahu, and the Saudis all want a confrontation with Iran. The Yemen issue alone should have been front page news beginning with Obama’s support and it is only getting worse. People in Yemen know we support the Saudi bombing. There should be obsessive nonstop media investigations into who supports the Saudis, who gets money from them and why. This isn’t happening precisely because the Saudis have real clout in DC and the Russians don’t.

I wanted to edit my post after I sent it, so will do the next best thing.

First, change “ very likely” to “ virtually certain” . I am virtually certain Trump is a crook. I also think he is mentally unstable and if it was politically possible would favor removal by the 25 th Amendment even if that meant a possibly more effective Republican takes over.

Second, another link to Daniel Larison, who imo criticizes Trump on foreign policy issues exactly as it should be done. The focus is on his actual horrible deeds and warmongering and irresponsibility and hostility to diplomacy and not about hypothetical slavish obedience to the wishes of Putin.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/there-should-always-be-daylight-between-the-u-s-and-our-clients/

And another link to Larison, doing Trump criticism the way it should be done— that is, if Trump is supporting the Saudis as they impose a blockade likely to have genocidal consequences, maybe that should receive the bulk of our attention right now? But it doesn’t, because it is more than just Trump who supports the Saudis.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/starving-yemen-to-death-3/

@208: Off topic: I might make an exception for John Quincy Adams, although he wasn’t in the event a very good president. Of course, back then Washington felt it necessary to admonish Adams senior not to deny merited promotion to Adams’ son John Quincy because of their relationship. Today’s political dynasts feel no such compunction.

That said, women have often come to political power through relationships with powerful men. It wouldn’t have happened any other way. I think no less of Eleanor Roosevelt for being an unelected political wife. Hillary Clinton made the choice to throw in her lot with an extraordinarily gifted young man with ambitions to match his gifts, and I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision, even though she was plainly mad about the boy (and the available evidence suggests she still is).

@204: With all due respect, if you have not noticed it, you are not paying enough attention.

@221
Of course, advertising in general and political attack ads in particular are the heart of the matter. This is an old and always germane story. Sharp oppositional reporting isn’t encouraged when wild, nonsensical claims pay the bills. Ever more so.

Take a look at the Va. governor’s campaign: stepping up Willie Hortonism (and all that), . . . Swift Boat ads turned out the susceptible against Kerry. . . there’s gold in all that dirt. (And T Boone Pickens shoveled a lot of his oil money at hungry TV advertising execs, eh?)

Other countries ban political ads at the end (at least) of much shorter campaign seasons. But install politicians like Justice John Roberts and restrictions on speech by time and place must fail against the headwinds of freedom, freedom, freedom! (etc)

https://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532824432/if-voting-machines-were-hacked-would-anyone-know

Anarcissie #231: “the article does not make a lot of sense ”

What confuses you?

“You write of “Saudi influence on US policy”, but isn’t it more accurate to say that US Saudi policy is more the result of the US playing “the great game” (geopolitics/imperialism) rather than being passively manipulated by Saudi elites?”

I don’t know, honestly. I think it is mutual manipulation. Also, of course we all use abstractions like “ the Saudis” or “the US”, but I assume what is really going on is that various individuals in both countries profit in some way from bombing Yemen. That can even filter down to the level of people who make careers at think tanks thinking deep thoughts about why we need to support this or that country as it bombs one of its neighbors.

Anarcissie #235: “would know…by comparing their paper trail… claims that someone said Russians…”

The article reports that not all states had paper trails, and some of the states with paper trails didn’t do the audits. It also links to the Bloomberg story which reported that Russians had hacked into “voter databases and software systems ” in 39 states. The Bloomberg article goes on to report that they weren’t successful — but then, you don’t give credence to reportage.

Anarcissie #237: “How does Bloomberg know, especially if they weren’t successful?…why I don’t read the news any more. Can’t we demand better?”

No you can’t. Bloomberg wouldn’t know, because it was reported to them by somebody else. The Bloomberg piece SAYS this. This is called “reportage”. You the reader are already supposed to KNOW this. Instead you are confusing reportage with evidence. This is the same confusion that other people exhibited in the comments above. Reportage is about following the pieces of a story, particularly a complicated one. It may turn out to be false. A good newspaper corrects or retracts when they find this out. The reporters may have bad sources. Their sources may be trying to misinform them deliberately. It is especially true in the case of sources from government, business, political operations, crime, and so on. In short, almost everything involving humans. You are asking the correct next questions. But to expect to have it all laid out for you beforehand, so you can properly agree to believe it, before you will pay any attention, seems unreal. It ignores the reality that this is an unfolding story. It also avoids the question of what evidentiary procedure you indeed would accept, short of a prosecution in front of a jury (and even then…?) I think we can forget being humiliated by the contempt of our masters (never one of my fears anyway) it is the contempt of our peers.

Anarcissie @237: “Russians hacked into voter databases and software systems in 39 states — what does that even mean? What Russians?”

The new McCarthyites can, of course, point to specific, occasional evidence in particular cases of state-associated people. But the overall impression they’re promoting of a huge, scary conspiracy depends on world-historically stupid, Iraq war level, fake evidence like the following (https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/10-31-17%20Edgett%20Testimony.pdf):

“We took a similarly expansive approach to defining what qualifies as a Russian-linked account. Because there is no single characteristic that reliably determines geographic origin or affiliation, we relied on a number of criteria, including whether the account was created in Russia, whether the user registered the account with a Russian phone carrier or a Russian email address, whether the user’s display name contains Cyrillic characters, whether the user frequently Tweets in Russian, and whether the user has logged in from any Russian IP address, even a single time. We considered an account to be Russian-linked if it had even one of the relevant criteria.”

It’s pointless to argue with conspiracy theorists, since their paranoid world view already determines what information they will consider, much less consider trustworthy. And because they’re very good at mixing solid information and sources with flimsy ones, they can always switch back and forth between them when on the defensive. And, as the cliche says, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Of course the Russian state tries to meddle with our elections and our media, and has done so for more than half a century. Of course, many others states are doing and have done the same. And of course the US is doing and has always done the same. Nothing has changed but the technology and the party using it to scare the public into compliance.

Anarcissie

Twenty years ago I actually thought the flood of narrative in Media might actually force the evolution of more critical consumption of story. A common theme among early bloggers was the stupid scripts journalists and pundits habitually and compulsively used. A tone of irony and a memory for last week and last year and even decades past informed the commentary on the sad state of journalism. Curiosity was expressed about the motives of those “sources” apparently being cultivated for access or driving a story: the tantalizing “real story” throwing shadows on stage from the wings.

But the ratio of PR hacks to journalist hacks continued to mount year by year as the value of journalistic franchises eroded away. I have seen numbers like 5 to 1! Lee helpfully tells us that transcribing groundless speculation and adding lurid or alarmed tone is now, reportage. No facts beyond some one said someone said. No curiosity about who is conducting the orchestra.

I suppose it was inevitable when two hacks who kept Whitewater alive and generated a cloud of scandalous dust in the 1996 election and called it smoke, founded Politico.com. or when “Talking Points Memo” lost its irony — did I only imagine it? Did the New York Times win a Pulitzer for its WMD in Iraq reporting? Fabulous stuff that was. I remember well Safire in his last year selling Saddam conspiring over 9/11.

The best part about Russiagate is that no one actually cares about any principle being violated. On CNN, I half expect them to do an Explainer on what a “principle” is. Russia hacked the election never is allowed to motivate any useful reform of the electoral system. Or the lobbying culture. Or selling the foreign policy of the U.S. to right-wing thugs in Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Anarcissie – there is no paper trail for most electronic voting systems. It is possible to build reliable and secure voting machines, but the vast majority used in the US are neither reliable (that is nobody knows if they count properly), or secure. Like I said above, the Association for Computer Machinery and most Computer Security professionals have been screaming about this since they were introduced.

Though with most of these machines the security risk comes from local actors (Republican party activists for example), rather than foreign powers. If you have physical access to one of these machines you can do all kinds of things to them.

Cian: “That story doesn’t actually demonstrate that the Russians did those things. Rather it’s assumed that the Russians were involved.”

Once again, this is not so. The story is based on a story in the Intercept, and the
Intercept story is based on a leaked analysis from the NSA. Now, it’s possible you don’t believe the content of the leak – maybe the leak is misinformation, maybe the Intercept is lying about it – but if that’s the case, once again I have to ask: What are your criteria? Why do you believe e.g. Edward Snowden’s leaks but not the Intercept’s leaks?

https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-details-russian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/

Regardless, the information in voter databases is a saleable commodity. It’s not a safe assumption that the only people trying to hack it would be trying to influence an election.

The leak didn’t contain the analysis. It’s merely an assertion that the Russians are responsible.

The Edward Snowden leaks contained copious technical details, presentations on the capabilities, bureaucratic details on how analysts could request certain capabilities and a whole lot more. The two aren’t even remotely comparable.

Yesterday the President said that the staff and leadership of the NSA, CIA, and FBI are lying about Russian involvement in hacking the DNC; and that Putin on the other hand is telling the truth when he denies Russian involvement, on the evidence that Putin has denied it multiple times. He went further to say that the FBI investigation should stop before it kills millions of people. I’m reminded of Bennie Noakes, in Stand on Zanzibar, who reacted to any news of this sort by assuming he was hallucinating, and repeating “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!” as the story unfolded.