The Washington Post is staking their reputation on a Watergate like huge scandal: Russia was responsible for all the fake news stories and manipulation of the American public in a huge disinformation campaign led by the GRU and FSB. Sorry if this is a paywall, Google for it.
Trump team already denying and dismissing and parroting their propaganda. So does he go to jail for treason? Or is the election invalidated? Or does no one care and we carry on like nothing happened?
What a roller coaster.
Nothing will happen. The GOP regards the other half of the country as a bigger threat to ‘freedom’ than Russia, and there is literally nothing that will change their mind. News sources like the Washington Post are already tainted in their minds.
I also see no path to prevent this in the future. When people pick their own facts, the risk is that those facts get picked for them. How do you roll that back?
Thanks for the link, should be an interesting read. The plot could perhaps be adapted into a movie in a few years time (provided we survive the nuclear holocaust), although we already have two(?) versions of the Manchurian Candidate (only seen the more recent one, it was decent enough I think…)
But… Is this the same CIA that claimed Iraq had WMDs - or was that more of an “appointed staff claimed vs. service members were screaming the opposite to a deaf nation”?
And what if Russia did it, it isn’t as if the US haven’t done the same (more covert as well as overt) over the years.
Isn’t part of the intelligence services job description to protect (and not only perform rendition flights and extra-judicial killings?) and through offensive operations they should have enough stuff in their playbook to also be able to protect against it?
I suppose the real question is:
I guess this got a bit more P&R than I intended.
The intention is to be ‘critical’ and not ‘hostile’ :)
I suppose getting rid of the electoral college would solve a lot of problems; Except for the low participation rate in most western “democracies”.
Nothing’s gonna happen. :(
Ultimately, we’re at fault. If you don’t take the effort to find out what’s up, and if you slavishly believe and follow what’s spoonfed to you, whose fault is that?
What fucking world is this?
If the whole gross election cycle taught us anything, it’s that the GOP are totally on board with anything as long as it keeps them in power. Trump has given them innumerable outs and they’ve ignored them all.
How the hell can the country be so divided that the GOP would side with Russia over our own intelligence agencies? That’s just fucking mindblowing to me.
The fact that Joe Walsh, one of Trump’s biggest supporters, is changing his tune is a positive sign regarding the entire Trump fiasco. I know Trump has the core brownshirts that will never be swayed, but at least it shows not all of his supporters are that far gone.
GOP looses more by denouncing Trump. Simple as that.
You’re not taking into consideration that a lot of the ignorance among Turmp’s supporters is willful. They intentionally stay ignorant and avoid education. For example, it takes a real concerted effort not to get a high school diploma in this day and age. And Trump himself has said a lot of his supporters are the “poorly educated”.
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Or is that your point? :shrug:
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I should explain that, of the (white) people my age I know who didn’t graduate from high school (several of my friends), not graduating was intentional. Among other things, they didn’t think it was “cool”.
If you don’t want to call and don’t have a fax machine, you can use this free online fax:
Yeah, it’s sort of my point–if we as a people are willfully ignorant, we can’t blame anyone else really.
As far as the rest, it is deeply disturbing that we’ve reached a point where a major party is not even trying to hide the fact that it would, literally, sell out the nation to keep its hands in the till.
The GOP have nothing to do with ethics, or governance. They are about hanging on to power at all costs. They also completely disregard the truth at all times. Trump’s team just said it was ‘an historic electoral college win’ or something like that – transparently false, laughably easy to disprove. Nobody cares.
They are bad people on the wrong side of justice. That’s all there is to it, IMO.
We’ve been through the looking glass for months now. Nothing has sense.
How, though?
GOP is looking to drop the Grand Old from their name and to just be 1984’s the Party.
It’s sarcastic. Russia almost certainly tried to get Trump elected, but it probably didn’t make a difference.
Oh.
Well in that case, it’s OK. Hillz ran a bad campaign. That excuses the fact that Russia engaged in intelligence ops to meddle in a US election on a scale never before seen, that it possibly colluded with one side, and the party controlling all areas of federal government in the US is fine with that.
Nightgaunt says it’s all good, guys.
Pretty much sums up everything that has happened since the 2016 campaign started.
The official Russian presence on socmedia was and is noticeable. There are loads of alt right types from obvious Putinbots spewing Trumpprop to level 9000 mememasters running embassy accounts. They have the alt left media sewn up (Pilger/Greenwald/Assange etc) and they really understand the new media/post truth world. They had their email hack trending above everything else in the final days.