Would you rather have Russians or liberals interfering in our elections?

You're avoiding the fundamental question again. All the whining and sniveling from the left is how the Russians, using social media like FB, snookered Hillary leaning voters to Trump. That's an irrefutable fact. If leftist snowflakes were more part of an “informed citizenry”, would the social media impact be nothing more than a footnote?" That's the only relevant question on the table, please answer.

As to your "koolaid" statement, Hillary lost because she was a bad candidate. Her history of lies, deceptions and an absence of accomplishment are very real. Chewing on cardboard was preferable to hearing her speak. You can leave the leftist talking points at the door, and try to answer a basic and sincere question. Again, please try.

 

Speaking of honor, you misplace yours or just flamebaiting?

 

Is there evidence that it was some intelligence agency, and not THE RUSSIANS! who organized the "Not My President" rally that Moore and CNN promoted?

What makes Democrats victims, and Trump not?

 

Trump asks Russia to find 30,000 Hillary emails. COLLUSION.


Hillary lost because the FBI announced their investigation into her one month before the election. But make no mistake, it was her cheating Bernie out of the nomination that caused her karma.
"You shall reap what you sow." It's so funny to see cons think that they are immune to the consequences of their actions. They were thrown out of power for 40 years when they caused the GREAT DEPRESSION, and they didn't learn. So now history will repeat, because of the Florida school shooting and the Las Vegas massacre. The solution of more guns in schools, exposes the stupidity pandemic of the GOP. Over 20 GOP congressmen are retiring, rather than face defeat this year. And a lot more than that will lose their seats, because of the consequences of Tramp being in the WH. KARMA.

 

Dude, Muelller just indicted 13 Russians! Get a clue.

 

Because it was in plain sight...only makes it more real...not less

 

"Dude, Muelller just indicted 13 Russians!"

I've heard that.

"Get a clue."

I'm finding it difficult to jump to the conclusion that you want me to.

 

On the Dossier, it was a political dirt gathering exercise to smear a political opponent. Don't delude yourself into believing it was "intelligence gathering" for any noble purposes of truth and justice. Real research identifies sources and provides verification that satisfies even minimal scrutiny. The Steele Dossier satisfies none of this. Most of what was published has not been verified. Certainly nothing of importance that would have any connect to proof of collusion.

My favorite debunk relates to claims about Trump's attorney, Michael Cohen, such as the allegation that he traveled to Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin associates. Cohen has repeatedly denied the claims and provided reporters with photos of his passport to show he had never traveled to Prague to meet with Russian officials. If you still claim this hasn't been debunked, please offer a plausible explanation. Otherwise, stop the charade that nothing in the dossier has been debunked.

In any case read the following:

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-russia-dossier-one-year-later-what-we-know-777116

You might learn something.

I agree that it's ridiculous. That Steele Including this comical bit of fiction is the dossier is even more ridiculous.

The "fact" is that the DNI reports completely missed what was most important. On the other hand, Facebook's head of advertising, Rob Goldman, nailed it. He said there were easy ways to fight Russian social media meddling, starting with a "well educated citizenry". It's a fact that we have a generation of millennials completely unequipped to evaluate the onslaught of misinformation on FB and other platforms. Most grew up indoctrinated by progressive teachers/professors, and never learned how to intellectually evaluate random information. The Russians understood this and exploited this societal weakness to the max. Shame on our Intelligence Community for not recognizing this years ago, and recommend a viable plan for mitigation.

What proactive measures did Obama put in place to demonstrate this "considerable resistance"?? Again, you make claims with no backup. What's important is the absence of results under Obama, especially since all meddling occurred completely under his watch. Bring something more than your own simplistic denials to the table.

Actually EVERYTHING. Hillary only wanted dirt. Accuracy was secondary to undermining Trump, as dossier context clearly demonstrated. And let's not forget Steele. The FBI kept Steele as a paid source, until he lied to them and otherwise proved himself to be unreliable. Add that the dossier, as an intelligence gathering paper, would get an "F" for completeness and verification in any decent University. Little in the construction of the dossier suggests accuracy and believability.

You have no basis for this conclusion. If you're going to respond to this overall response, please leave emotion and your own demonstrated projections at the door. I'm tired of stating what should be obvious in the first place.

 

I totally agree that the motivation for him taking on the assignment was for political opposition research. So friggin what? His report was from him to his client - Simpson and Fusion. The Law firm was Fusion's client. And the law firm's client was the dnc. So tell me oh wise one, how could the original report from the field as delivered to Fusion before it was delivered to Fusion's client be some how influenced or edited by or in anyway impacted by the evil hillary and the dastardly democrats ?

As for debunking of the cohen meeting, his passport does confirm that at the time of this reported meeting, he was a hop skip and a jump away in Italy, and guess what? No need of passports or stuff when travelling within the EU. I guess it escaped you that tradecraft 101 would suggest a direct flight is contraindicated when engaged in an international criminal conspiracy.

No it isn't. You should read the transcript of the russian spies discussing Page.

And that well educated citizenry is doing something about it, despite the obstacles trump and his lackies are throwing up at every turn.

And if it wasn't for the gullible nobody would believe the bullshit you appear to believe in, so I suggest you reconsider what is most important.

Sanctions, expulsions, expropriations, evidence protection to name a few off the top.

The meddling continues.

I doubt you've ever seen what would pass for completeness and verification at a university, but be that as it may, that isn't the standard required for an "intelligence" report. Trying to measure the dossier like one would a university paper is so much intellectual constipation.

Keep projecting. I too am perplexed why you cant see the obvious and keep repeating the same tired bullshit defenses.

 

Lots of "projection" on your part. It seems logical Steele's orders were to produce a dossier that was damaging to Trump. And Steele would do whatever he had to do to satisfy those objectives. In fact, given that he's on record for hating Trump and wanted to do what he could to undermine his candidacy, he was probably chomping at the bit. Given all this, the shoddy and largely unsubstantiated dossier speaks for itself.

Yes, he could have traveled from Italy to Prague, but you're still wrong. The reported meeting in Prague was specifically stated to be at the end of August. Cohen was in Italy from July 9 -- July 17. There was absolutely no overlap between the two events. The timeframes aren't even close. Besides, Cohen can show he was in SoCal with his son doing a college visit to USC at the end of August. Do you want to try rationalizing this again??

Reading is a skill you still haven't mastered. The 'well educated citizenry" that Goldman was referring to were the people reading the Russian propaganda in FB and the social media sites. They weren't very well educated if they bought what they were reading without doing further verification. And that's the point. We have too many millennials who never learned to think. The Russians exploited it, and Obama, along with our intelligence agencies, did nothing to warn them. Why do believe there was such a huge miss??

I asked you specifically what proactive measures Obama took in the two years he had to react. You keep listing the actions he took after the fact as we was walking out the door. Care to try again??

I'm looking at my diploma from UCLA for a degree in Economics as I write this. If you even meet the minimum entrance requirements for UCLA (much less be able to get in), congratulations. But given your analysis skills demonstrated to date, it's not looking good. Your bad attempt at dissing my University experience aside, any report, intelligence or otherwise, requires a minimal level of verification. The dossier fails.

What you call obvious really isn't,. You got the Cohen timeframes completely wrong. You didn't understand what Goldman meant by a "well educated citizenry". Finally you've failed twice to identify proactive measures Obama had 2 years implement. You might want to re-consider who is repeating tired BS.

 

Given your facility for bullshit i am not surprised you have a ba in economics. As for your facile assumptions of motivations and nefariousness at every corner except trumps it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to understand your motivations.

OTOH, I'm not the one defending the indefensible so I will tip my hat to your facility.

 

OK, I get that you don't want to address your blatant misses in our back-and-forth. It's predictable behavior and frankly I didn't expect anything more.

The jest of the "interference" we were discussing was the period from 2014 where Obama was initially warned, to the end of his presidency in 2016. A period for action that was completely owned by Obama. A period where only Obama could formulate a strategy for dealing with what was to come. Trump has plenty of warts, and there are a lot of topics where we could dissect his short comings, but interference from 2014-2016 isn't one of them. I do understand your desire to somehow weave Trump into it. Diversion and deflection can sometimes be an effective tactic.

I will agree that an Economics degree means reading and studying a lot of BS. The economic models we studied were for the most part simplistic and left out the many complexities of society. But, it did force and help develop critical thinking. A skill that's unfortunately rare among young adults in our society. The fact that the Russians had any impact at all in social media confirms it.

 

What obama did and didn't do is not the issue. He was proactive as well as reactive. Course McConnell refusing to release a bi partisan statement about russian interference in the Summer of 16 also contributed to the clustermuck. Since covert actions are not generally publicized and much of the investigation is top secret, I doubt we are going to learn the extent of the obama administration responses.

Anyway you want to slice it, Its been trump's responsibility for the past 13 months and all he has done is suck up to russians, call the investigation a hoax, repeatedly lie about russian contacts, and smear the intell community and the fbi, while refusing to impose any other penalties on russia despite him having signed a law doing so. A clear dereliction of duty as commander in chief. It doesn't really matter what obama did or didn't do in that context. According to trump he is the only one that can fix all the damage obama did to america.

as for critical thinking skills, I agree that there is a very large chunk of the population that does not possess much if any. Status quo for approximately forever.

It isn't just a lack of critical thinking skills that makes propaganda effective. It works on highly educated people as well well as the ignorant and uneducated. the balance between intellect and emotion is almost universally tenuous which is a basic principle of "perception management".

Russia happens to be really good at social and political perception management, utilizing disinformation to exploit existing social/political divisions. They seized the exploitation opportunities of the social media revolution and kicked US (et.al) in doing so.

The sad part is that Trump's America is still waving its arse in the air. Not the best of strategies to make anything or anyone great.

 

We know the reactive, which was after the fact and too late to have much other than a symbolic impact. You say Obama was proactive, then say it was probably in covert actions that we'll never know. So in fact, you don't really know if Obama did anything at all. Reflection by officials who were aware of Obama's responses suggest much more could have been done:

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/14/obama-russia-election-interference-241547

This was never a Mitch McConnell issue, but I understand the WH wanting to share any blame that might come from the fallout of a public statement. Actually, the time for a public statement would have been up to a year earlier, before each respective party picked their final candidate. Obama could have given a hallmark speech, bipartisan in nature, that outlined some of the social media interference that might be forthcoming in the near future. He certainly made the effort the inform the country that Travon Martin could have been his son. I would suggest that known upcoming interference was at least as important.

Yes, Trump is POTUS and he owns whatever messes he inherited. As I've mentioned before, Trump has a host of issues he has to deal with regarding Russia, and any actions he takes against them has to be taken from a holistic approach. I'll agree that many of Trump's actions have otherwise been the equivalent of shooting himself in the foot. He's obviously made some terrible hires, and too many statements have been made without thinking things through. As far as Obama's DOJ and FBI, their troubles have been of their own making. These are departments where leadership has to abide by the highest ethical standards, and they failed. There is going to have to be some significant house cleaning before confidence in the leadership can be restored.

I mostly agree with your assessment here. Still, "highly educated people" should be able to dispassionately look at information and evaluate it for accuracy before allowing emotions and ideology to kick in. There was an excellent article in the WSJ on Friday entitled "Russia Bypassed Facebook Filters". In the article, they show a few examples of Russian propaganda (through doctored pictures) in action. If you look at the images through the lenses of intellect while keeping your emotions in check, they don't pass the reality smell test. They should certainly at least trigger a demand for clarifying information before taking them in as truth. Yet most people don't, which ironically makes Trump the bad guy down the road for "not doing something". It's this twisted logic that's aways a head scratcher to me.

Nice partisan pontification. Being an Economics major, I do appreciate much of what he's done to make citizen's finances great again. It's a fact given too little coverage in the legacy MSM.

 

Bzzzt!

You assume too much.

"Highly educated" is no guarantee of any ability to think critically. It might even be a hindrance, as "education" seems to only be akin to the collection of knowledge.

Whatever is fed to the young minds is expected to be regurgitated. No deviations seem to be accepted. There is no way that one can believe that any student could develop any ability for creative thought, outside of the enforced boundaries, under these conditions.

 

Most highly educated people cannot attain said education without critical thinking skills. Your perspective of the meaning of education is one dimensional. Sure one acquires a collection of knowledge thru the process but one must also have the ability to synthesize and apply that knowledge.

As for you not having any way to believe that today's students cannot develop creative thinking abilities outside the "box", I guess that explains why the level of innovation is dropping like a stone these days. (poe).


You don't need a degree to acquire critical thinking skills but there are direct correlations with both education and intelligence level.


“Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” - Foundation for critical thinking.

 

In 2014 there was a report that russia was building a disinformation campaign to disrupt western democracies. There was no explicit threat to the US or its 2016 election at that time. You really should get the timeline correct.

It wasn't until 2016 that russian efforts to meddle started to emerge.

And considering that candidate trump was yelling about "fixed elections etc. since the early stages of his campaign, Obama's political calculus was either a bi partisan announcement/warning or nothing since doing it unilaterally would have done far more damage than good. Just look at the republican response to date with them holding all the cards.

Holistic approach? AMERICA WAS ATTACKED. And trump is still dicking around.

As for FBI leadership, despite the constant smear campaign, it seems more and more obvious that in fact the FBI and the DOJ leadership are pretty damn ethical. The nunes memo was a total friggin fabrication. Disgusting partisan bullshit lacking ethics AND morals.

I suggest you do some research into something called perception management. What they did sure as hell passes the smell test. It seems you are unaware of the massive amount of intellectual investment that russia has made over the decades in disinformation techniques.

You want to look at a couple of ads and assess potential effect of the overall russian campaign by extrapolation of your own "critical assessment" of the ad creative content. That's like only examining a rocket engine and assessing the overall viablity of a mission to mars. Perhaps you should take a "holistic" approach to assessing the campaigns effectiveness. Having spent a few decades in the marketing/technology biz, I can tell you it was a master stroke.

And as an economics major I guess you learned to completely disregard multi year trends financial indices when assessing the impact of something like tax cuts in the short, medium and long terms. Or is it just partisan myopia?

 

Technical innovation fits within the box of what is 'acceptable avenues to pursue'.

Conservative thought is shouted down in our institutes of so-called higher learning. If one strays outside of the approved leftist orthodoxy, their safety is at risk; their academic future is at risk. Yay. Tolerance.

Why be so afraid to hear countering views? Surely a critical thought process could find the flaws in opposing arguments. Instead, we hear inane slogans .

Sound bites and talking points are not evidence of critical thought. Universities, and even our primary schools, spend far too little time teaching kids how to think. Their focus is, sadly, on teaching what to think.

Many leftists do not understand this point, or they intentionally misunderstand it. People on the right do not despise the idea of a higher education. What is despised is the passing off of indoctrination as being an advanced state of being.

 

Maybe we can have Russian liberals...

 

Out of curiosity is anyone here upset that Russia tried to influence our election.

I don't think so.

 

It seems that there are plenty here who are upset, to me.

I am not. Having grown up during the Cold War, Russia's activities don't surprise me one bit. That, and the fact that we are not innocent of such doings, makes it difficult for me to get too cranked up about it.

I likely have a different perspective than you. To me, their efforts amounted to nothing of note. I see far more damage being done to the country by our own political left than Putin could hope to do short of a nuclear attack.

 

I will say this. That use of that kind of gross generalization is indeed a thought crime.

 

You're not going to get that Obama had forewarning as early as 2014 that the Russians were preparing to screw with us, and that he essentially did nothing. And you're not going to get that highest level FBI officials were texting each other about about undermining candidate Trump, and that represents ethical failings that can't be tolerated. I not going to bother pointing out what you don't seem to understand about how the economy works -- it's not worth it. No matter what's presented to you, your inner leftist is going to reject any reason and critical thought on these matters. That's OK. but I do want to address the following:

What I do know is that Rob Goldman, Facebook's Head of Advertising, has forgot more about Russian propaganda than you or I will ever know. He's probably examined every Russian Ad and group misinformation campaign identified on FB, and he says you're wrong -- very wrong. After looking at everything, he said the easy way to fight the Russian campaign starts with having a "well educated citizenry". That means social media users who can think critically, and just as important, aren't easily manipulated due to blind ideological indoctrination. Too many on the left don't qualify, and that's why we have all the pissing and moaning about "Russians" instead of looking internally and asking what's wrong with our voting citizens. Unfortunately, that's the kind of internal reflection most Democrats would be incapable of doing.

The fact that this doesn't bother you, or that you may not even get it, is both puzzling and troubling..

 

In a way that is my point. American conservatives hate and fear American leftist more than any foreign enemy and the left returns their views. Which is a good way to not survive as a nation.

 

EThical failings for using their "company" phones to text each other? Ethical failings for having personal opinions? Do you have ANY evidence of illegal actions taken by any of those "officials"? Of course not. Just a bunch of texts between two lovers that trashed not only trump, but holder, clinton and others regardless of partisanship.

Don't seem to understand how the economy works? Please bother to point out what you mean or do you always engage in useless and unsubstantiated accusations of competence? A pattern seems to be emerging, but that could just be me.

Oh please. Goldman made a statement in order to defend his organization's actions. As for being an expert on propaganda, I don't know the man, but I have been studying it for over three decades, so if he is the expert you purport him to be, I'm sure we could have a rather interesting in depth discussion.

A well educated citizenry. Well guess what? there is a large % of the citizenry that is well educated. Of course such a generalized blanket statement as the "solution" sounds superficially reasonable. Its like saying the cure for hunger is to eat more food.


I agree that gullibility, tribalism, ignorance, stupidity and general indifference are characteristics of large blocs of voters in EVERY nation.

as for internal reflection, it seems yours requires gross generalizations to support your preconceived notions.