Russian actors helped Trump and Republicans in election

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Kittamaru, Dec 10, 2016.

  1. Russ_Watters Not a Trump supporter... Valued Senior Member

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    While crackpottery does generate a lot of heat, it doesn't produce much light and I would argue that a smaller number of higher quality posts is a better discussion than a larger number of lower quality posts.
    I certainly get that particularly on on a loosely moderated internet forum idle speculation and conspiracy theory are inevitable, but I disagree that they should be encouraged or practiced by any particular individual. But yeah, we all get to make our own choices and you are entitled to choose the path of lower intellectual quality in your posts if you wish. I'll pass - and I'll point out the flaws.

    [edit] And further given the highlighting of fake news that started as internet conspiracy theory in this election (and the fact that some of the Russian influence was with exactly that), there is a degree of hypocrisy in wanting to complain about conspiracy theory by generating conspiracy theories about it.
     
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  3. Russ_Watters Not a Trump supporter... Valued Senior Member

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    A bit of a side issue, but while I'm not sure what, involvement Trump has in that (Stein is suing the states, not Trump), here's what the PA/federal judge had to say today:
    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...s-green-partys-pennsylvania-recount-case.html

    I think the judge is being charitable, but sure, I'll go with it: you are advocating actions based on borderline irrational thought processes. Are you ok with that? I'm not. I'll stick with favoring facts and logic.
     
    Last edited: Dec 12, 2016
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  5. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    Compared to the average internet shit post, sciforums is pretty high on quality

    What that the Russians wanted Trump and helped him by hacking and leaking DNC emails? That's practically fact at this point, what is up for conspiracy theories due to the lack of evidence is the "why" and if Trump himself had anything to do with it. I myself have pointed out repeatedly that because there is no evidence nothing can be done at this point, as you call it "idle speculation", certainly it feels like a conspiracy theory brewing amongst the left that Trump is in direct cahoots with the Russians, again evidence is actually needed, evidence such that charges can be brought against Trump. I'm not one to believe what I want to be true when evidence is lacking, it is quite possible (always assume stupidity over malevolence) that the Russians want Trump because they believe they can handle him better than Clinton and Trump has absolutely no connections to Russia, and that is the most likely answer until MORE EVIDENCE is presented.

    Also you got quince.
     
    Last edited: Dec 12, 2016
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  7. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    Is it irrational - on what basis is it irrational, especially as other areas have shown things such as broken seals on the voting machines, irreconcilable numbers of voters, and perhaps most disturbingly, people actually reporting that they would hit a button for Candidate A, and Candidate B's name would light up...

    I think there is plenty of reason to suspect that our voting equipment is, if not vulnerable and tampered with, at risk and potentially faulty... and if the Green party is footing the bill for checking all this, what reason do we have NOT to verify it all?

    Simply put - if they go and check it, and they find that everything is A-OK, then no harm, no foul. If they go and check it and, oh, look, there's a previously-unknown direct uplink to the Kremlin (obviously far exaggerated, but you get the point), then hey, we know some weird shit went down.

    What has been asked for is verification of the vote... the fact that some in the Republican party are so adamantly against it (even while others are saying it MUST be done) is rather intriguing... after all, if they have nothing to hide, why are they bothering to prevent it?
     
  8. Watcher Just another old creaker Registered Senior Member

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    There are a lot of things that the founding fathers never imagined, since the technologies that led to such meddling were not even dreamed of in those days. So no, there is no plan to react to this - just like there is no protection from a populist intent on de-legitimatizing the American election system, and substituting disinformation for facts. I suspect that this last election will be a turning point for America. Can it survive as a democratic republic? Remains to be seen, this has gone a long way toward permanent damage.
     
  9. Watcher Just another old creaker Registered Senior Member

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  10. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    So why not help out, use the obvious facts and logic available to a factual and logical guy like you, to advocate for what any reasonable person would advocate for: an audited election, on vetted machines?

    How is that perceived irrationality on the part of some advocates becomes, somehow, a reason to not do the obvious, indicated, ordinary, logical thing?

    The software tallying the votes in the US is secret, and entirely owned by people with obvious, public, partisan allegiances. What does your logic and reason tell you should be done?

    The count of ballot votes lost to machine malfunction in Michigan is now, apparently, about 600,000. Almost all of them were lost in very heavily Democratic precincts - because that's where the malfunctioning machines were. It's still possible to count those votes, most of them, physically. What does your logic and reason tell you should be done?

    The exit polls in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and several other States show consistent and significant disagreement with the vote tally, concentrated in regions featuring certain kinds of voting machines and certain demographic indicators of voting preference and certain partisan allegiances of voting system oversight. What does your logic and reason tell you should be done?

    The "cross-check" system allegedly designed to prevent multiple voting across State lines has rejected hundreds of thousands of voters with no record or evidence of multiple voting across State lines, predominantly from the poorest and least mobile and lowest percentage voting demographics, with known partisan leanings opposed to the designers of the crosscheck system. What does your logic and reason tell you should be done?

    And so forth.
     
    Last edited: Dec 12, 2016
  11. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    Ahh now you are talkin'... what IS Putin Blackmailing Trump with?
     
  12. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    And this is kind of my point - it's obvious why Trump and his cronies don't want a physical recount - because it could very well prove that they SHOULDN'T have won. They have everything to lose and nothing to gain (in their minds)... which is all the more reason it needs to be done.

    Fortunately, charges of Treason have just been filed:
    http://realtimepolitics.com/2016/12...rump-mcconnell-guiliani-comey-monday-morning/

    And even Republican senators are saying an in depth investigation is needed:
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ir-leaders-remain-mum/?utm_term=.3b319a823d0c

    I'm hopeful that, if nothing else, all of this will sway the undecided Electoral Voters that it is time for them to do their jobs and keep this country out of the hands of someone that has, by all appearances, plans to sell us out to the highest bidder, regardless of the damages, be they economical, environmental, or reputation.
     
  13. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    23,328
    Maybe that's part of the problem... it is all way toooo obvious!
     
  14. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    3,951
    The CIA hired many consultants from the former KGB after the collapse of the Soviet Union, so of course when they make an announcement that Russia hacked our candidates and the election to tilt the election in favor of Trump and against Clinton, that carries a lot more weight than some stupid and paranoid casino mogul pronouncing that it is hogwash, or it should.

    Reminds me a lot of George W. Bush and Ashcroft's dismissal of the other CIA report that Osama Bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack on American soil, just before 9/11.

    And if you didn't understand the import of the last sentence, read it again and again until you do, Trump supporters. You all can actually read something at a level higher than "My Pet Goat", can't you?

    Dang. Why not simply let Putin run for US President? I'd have probably voted for him over Trump.
     
  15. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Morbidly Comedic Tragedy

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    ... by a dude with a super PAC. I actually don't expect that particular episode will even be funny.

    While Trump dismissed allegations Russia was attempting to tip the scales in his favor, McConnell said cybersecurity threats are an issue that affect both sides of the aisle and need to be addressed.

    “It defies belief that somehow Republicans in Senate are reluctant to either review Russian tactics or ignore them,” he said ....

    .... “Let me speak for myself, the Russians are not our friends. They invaded Crimea, Sen. McCain and I had some Democratic friends met with the delegation from the Baltic countries just this past week. To say that they’re nervous about the Russians is to put it mildly,” McConnell said. “We intend to keep the commitments that are made in the NATO agreement, which I think by any objective is one of the most if not the most successful military alliance in the world history. And I think we ought to approach all of these issues on the assumption that the Russians do not wish us well.”

    House Speaker Paul Ryan voiced his support of the House Intelligence Committee looking into the matter.


    (Brufke↱)

    Someone should probably let Sean Spicer know↱.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Brufke, Juliegrace. "McConnell: The Russians Are Not Our Friends". The Daily Caller. 12 December 2016. DailyCaller.com. 12 December 2016. http://bit.ly/2hmYnxf

    Preza, Elizabeth. "‘Stop doing that!’: RNC spokesman freaks out when asked why he doesn't trust the CIA on Russian hacks". Raw Story. 12 December 2016. RawStory.com. 12 December 2016. http://bit.ly/2hxMgOp
     
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  16. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    What, exactly, has Putin done to 'harm the american people"?
     
  17. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Purposely spread private information and lies to control our election. Otherwise known as cyberwarfare.
     
  18. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    Actually,IMO, that is an excellent and confronting question!
    The same question could be asked about what harm has America actually done to the Russian people.

    The answers given would be very revealing about the American psychy...

    Ever since the birth of the nuclear age global paranoia has ran rampant.

    Perhaps you could start a thread devoted to just that issue?
     
    Last edited: Dec 14, 2016
    sculptor likes this.
  19. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Politico Points

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    A straightforward headline from Politico: "How Russia Wins an Election"↱

    The talking points:

    • "The Kremlin's canny operatives didn't change votes; they won them, influencing voters to choose Russia's preferred outcome by pushing stolen information at just the right time—through slanted, or outright false stories on social media."

    • "The Kremlin's canny operatives didn't change votes; they won them, influencing voters to choose Russia's preferred outcome by pushing stolen information at just the right time—through slanted, or outright false stories on social media."

    • "America was just the latest target".

    • "These 'active measures' are techniques Moscow has honed for decades".

    • "All of it is in service of Putin's grand strategy of breaking up the European Union and NATO from the inside out—without even firing a shot."

    • "With major elections coming up in France, Germany and the Netherlands, you can bet that Putin's work is not done".

    • "In both the British referendum and U.S. presidential votes, Russia happened upon an almost perfectly divided electorate. It took a nudge of just a few percentage points in each case to achieve victory."

    • "The final Brexit tally came in at 51.9 percent “Leave” and 48.1 percent “Remain”—so Russia needed only to turn or rally roughly 157,000 votes across the United Kingdom to deliver a major blow to the EU."

    • "The U.S. election may consist of a far larger number of votes, but the system, we now know, can be gamed even more easily."

    • "Russian social media influence efforts needed to pump up Trump and tear down Clinton in just four key states."

    • "Many will immediately point out it's impossible to prove Russia ‘caused' a Trump victory, and they are correct. But what if we find Russian influence correlated with preferable voting outcomes in Brexit, the U.S. and across up to more than a half dozen elections across Europe?"

    That's just a brief list of talking points. Foreign policy experts Clint Watts and Andrew Weisburd↱ continue, explaining:

    In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama's strategists conducted a surgical influence effort, mapping key votes down to the neighborhood level. Russian operatives have borrowed from this playbook and targeted audiences vulnerable to their influence across the West—largely supporters of the “alt-right” and others angered by the perceived effects of globalization, immigration, terrorism and economic hardship. In the U.S., Russia's blending of semi-overt and covert social media accounts use common hashtags and phrases to create what appear to be conservative Trump supporters or alt-right cheerleaders. These social media personas, whose bios are littered with words like “country,” “Christian,” “America” and “military,” then push pro-Trump hashtags loaded with skewed and fake news at American audiences, helping generate organic Trump support and distrust of the U.S. government. These accounts tweet hashtags and keywords in unison at specified time intervals and carry odd follower relationships fitting inorganic, mathematical patterns. In one example from July, two Russian propaganda outlets pushed a fake news story claiming that Incirlik Air Base in Turkey—a facility used by NATO—was overrun by terrorists, using the hashtags #trumppence16 and #benghazi to attract a pro-Trump audience.

    Again, the question remains whether or not Trump voters care; they might well be perfectly complaisant asssets.

    • "Russia didn't just intervene in the general election against Hillary Clinton—it helped him defeat his anti-Moscow GOP rivals, too."

    • "Dating back to the earliest parts of 2015, Russian media outlets incited fear of immigration and promoted Brexit advocate Nigel Farage's accusations of American manipulation to foster popular support for the British to leave the EU."

    • "Today's Russian propagandists borrow from the playbook of their Soviet forefathers."

    • "Since the summer of 2015, we've observed Russian messaging pushed to groups across the spectrum, the left and the right politically."

    • "Anarchists, anti-capitalists, white supremacists and anti-government militias have all received Russian English-language directed propaganda through the targeted application of bots and person-to-person engagement from what appear to be fellow Americans with strong Russian leanings."

    • "Some Russian campaigns didn't work."

    • "Stories predicting doom from climate change or nuclear war have gained little to no traction in the U.S. Bernie Sanders supporters didn't gravitate to Russian propaganda in substantial numbers, either."

    • "When Russia's digital propagandists find a message that resonates among a disgruntled American audience, they refocus their efforts to exploit where they find success—predominantly among conservative audiences".

    • "Sputnik News spun an innocuous email from a WikiLeaks dump into a nonsensical ailment known as 'decision fatigue,' a fake story further amplified by an Infowars video viewed millions of times."

    • "Russia's messaging narrowed and improved as the U.S. election approached and was so effective that even Trump fell victim to Russian propaganda, citing a falsely attributed email story hosted by Sputnik news."

    • "Germany, the key remaining player in the EU, has already noted Russian hacks against its parliament in 2015, along with a sharp uptick in propaganda ahead of the country's upcoming elections."

    • "The net result is an information world in which Western electorates cannot distinguish fact from fiction, eroding the integrity of democratic institutions and the voters' trust."

    • "Russia would prefer that its chosen candidates be victorious, but losing is almost as good: Putin and company are happy just to foment chaos, confusion and doubt. It doesn't even take much."

    To the other, it didn't take today's Politico article to raise a certain question. Yesterday, for instance, Steve Benen↱ took his turn:

    It's a phrase many on the right have quickly grown to hate: “If this were happening to a Democrat….” I can appreciate why this annoys so many conservatives; the framing is almost certainly used a little too often.

    But once in a while, it's almost unavoidable.

    Imagine if Hillary Clinton spent months praising the president of China, hiring lobbyists with ties to Xi Jinping, changing the Democratic Party's platform to be more in line with China's wishes, and vowing to change U.S. foreign policy to make it far friendly towards China.

    Then imagine, reports surfaced that China hacked Republican computers in order to steal information to hurt Donald Trump. Soon after, in this hypothetical, imagine if Clinton held a press conference in which she encouraged Chinese espionage agencies to hack Trump's computers in order to help her win the presidential election.

    Imagine if Democratic leaders were made aware of China's alleged crimes, but said and did nothing, because they were principally concerned with winning an election.

    Imagine, after the election, that U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that China was deliberately working to elect Clinton, prompting Clinton―who lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes―to denounce U.S. officials' work, defend China, and balk at calls for an independent investigation.

    What do you suppose the reaction would be from Republicans and the Beltway?

    I suspect we'd hear a very specific phrase that would dominate the discourse: “constitutional crisis.”

    Except this hypothetical is precisely what happened: just substitute Clinton for Trump, Democrat for Republican, China for Russia, and Xi Jinping for Vladimir Putin.

    It's a point worth considering as Congressional Republicans seem to be preparing to take a dive↱.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Benen, Steve. "In the Russia scandal, imagine if the shoe were on the other foot". msnbc. 12 December 2016. msnbc.com. 13 December 2016. http://on.msnbc.com/2hLe1iy

    —————. "Key Republicans prepared to overlook allegations against Russia". msnbc. 13 December 2016. msnbc.com. 13 December 2016. http://on.msnbc.com/2gFQval

    Watts, Clint and Andrew Weisburd. "How Russia Wins an Election". Politico. 13 December 2016. Politico.com. 13 December 2016. http://politi.co/2huzehH
     
  20. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    go figure:
    People seem to love their propaganda induced paranoia.
    They seem to embrace it as though it were the embodiment of the beloved.
    sacred, holy, beyond question or reproach?

    The nation state needs it's subjects to fear the goyim and embrace the authority of the nation state.How nice that so many fall into line with little provocation.
     
  21. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    22,910
    Yeah, what has Putin done? Aside from threatening the US and our allies militarily, and then there is the small matter of intervening in our elections, what has Putin done to harm Americans? Who cares that he secretly intervened in our elections and hacked into the servers of our election offices, because after all he was only helping Republicans.
     
  22. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    22,910
    Yeah, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain....nothing to see here.

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  23. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    What the fuck are you talking about? goyim? Do you even know what that means? Do you even recognize the propaganda you fell for? And that is now being revealed as a ploy to distract you from the very real cyberattack that has been perpetrated on our nation? I don't care about Hillary, this isn't a partisan issue.
     

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