jerkyleboeuf posted:

About "the Russia thing"... is that topic verboten here? What's the deal? I can't imagine there are too many Trump fans here.

Let's assume that Trump gave Putin a huge bribe and said, "Use all of your hacking powers to hack the election." Then, Putin gathered an army of FSB computer engineers to hack American voting machines, buy off GOP officials and officials on the Board of Elections, expose an overwhelming majority of Americans directly to highly effective propaganda in the form of reposted RT articles on Facebook, and finally, release private emails from the servers of DNC officials to undermine their brilliant campaign to elect Hillary Clinton - all without leaving behind a single data point of credible evidence that they had done any of this. If this had all happened, and Trump was basically installed in a soft coup, my question to you would be, who gives a shit?

jerkyleboeuf posted:

About "the Russia thing"... is that topic verboten here? What's the deal? I can't imagine there are too many Trump fans here.

recap:

cars posted:

blinkandwheeze posted:

It's been months now and i still don't really understand what they are saying russia actually did

Yeah this is exactly what's at the core of this, nothing in terms of an actual event, everything in terms of the political goal. There is no "there" there and what we see instead is bad-faith enabling of a materially-driven, never-ending anti-foreign narrative by U.S. intelligence services that want more funding and less oversight to perform the activities of imperialism, as currently performed by Democrat-style liberals in politics and the media who feel it's politically expedient for them in terms of the next election.

The Democrats here, from the Clinton campaign to the Democrat-friendly news press, and probably all the way down to much of the "grassroots" people re-posting these stories on social media, are all folks who couldn't really care less about Russia, who don't see it as a threat to themselves or the U.S. in any real way and who are probably more than a little afraid that too much scratching will reveal the names of their own political leading lights, though I think most of the people in the intelligence agencies feeding them the "information" are far more politically adept than the political figures themselves and aren't likely to point fingers at their own current backers until they secure different ones.

The intelligence agencies care about Russia in terms of their own long-standing foreign policy agendas, and they care about Trump's administration insofar as the agencies don't feel they can depend on them to follow or support the well-established Washington narrative that facilitates those agendas. The agencies like smooth operations and Trump's people don't seem to be greatly interested in that concept, otherwise they'd be asking those agencies "What should we do?" all the time and there would be no friction there. I think even a lot of Democrats, if they bother to think about it, realize that attitude toward the U.S. intelligence/investigation agencies is warranted, i.e., that if there were a problem there to be concerned about but the agencies felt they were getting what they wanted out of the White House, we'd never hear a thing about that problem from them, while history shows those same agencies are fully willing and able to create a "problem" where none exists to get their way (and that they'll usually do that anyway because of the benefits of applying constant pressure even against the compliant).

I posted that graph a while back of the see-sawing of support for the CIA between Democrats and Republicans in recent years and I still think the correct way of seeing it is, they only need one at any given time.

cars posted:

their agenda is to dominate the countries immediately to Russia's west through proxies, for the same reason that they're trying to perform the acts of imperialism everywhere else in the world, and to muster financial support for that and reduce oversight they need to give supporting politicians at home political capital to spend against Russia as a hated foe. The thing about contemporary Russia is that it's shown its willingness and ability to resist this pressure as few countries can and it's unusual in that regard, and its bourgeois-nationalist leadership can also use that position to bolster resistance elsewhere, so it receives an extra dose of propaganda.

colddays posted:

https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-details-russian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/Here we have another US intelligence document proving that Russia hacked the election. This time,there's not even the most basic paragraph of justification for why it had to have been Russia, simply stating that "Russia did it" in the first sentence is enough to prove it now. The whole document is nothing more than a description for how a phishing attack works. It's interesting to me that they decided to "leak" it to the Intercept this time instead of just releasing it outright.

edit: also this article called Russia a nation state lol why do amerikans not know anything at all

Keven posted:

It's pronounced the rizz own like the rza

agreed, it's already been established in canon:

dipshit420 posted:

I thought something sounded familiar

lmao i just found this as well

Bablu posted:

the guy speaking (seder?) sounds like a huge idiot. i've never seen somebody whiff so hard on smth they shd have crushed into the stands

he's called michael brooks and he's cool although he did vote for hillary

https://youtu.be/OnSeADPonNQ?t=54m44s