That is disgusting tactic but not a CT lozen.

The strategy is very understandable and if you simply treat Politics and being in power as a Zero Sum Game then there is logic to what the Dems are doing. It is there best chance to stay in power (if that is all they care about) to have as many of the extreme right running in the GOP in an attempt to polarize their voters to the extreme Maga supporters only and so the more moderate voters will have no choice but to vote Dem.

Strategically that is sound if all you care about is winning.

And the Dem's who defend it argue, which can be true, that while the most extreme Republicans pose the biggest threat, simply having the GOP take back power in the House and Senate, is still a meaningful threat as it would mean that Voting Rights, Abortion rights, etc will be stymied or pushed back. Thus the Dems must win to achieve these societal 'just' requirements. There is truth to that too. Although one could counter (and I do) the Dems have no real desire to fix any of them anyway and WON"T even if they get power again. They will push them to the 2024 election and use them again, and so on.

Funnily enough, I was watching a talking head Historian on one of the news shows yesterday and he was discussing this tactic and said the Dems in 2016 were hoping for and pushing for Trump win in the primaries, as they thought him a laughable candidate that Hilary would easily beat.

So it seems to me the Dems understand the risk they are undertaking here and just look at America and say 'it is worth it if we, the Dems, can keep power', because if one thing like this rail strike had happened and there is a GOP wave and the GOP grabs the House and Senate and then the POTUS in 2024, the Dems would have gambled and lost and condemned the country to the worst possible outcomes for decades to come.

that is a helluva gamble, the Dems are willing to play for their own power.

Lozen reminds me of a few acquaintances I have who kind of pretend to be politically neutral, but actually buy in to every single right wing talking point and discreetly vote hard right every chance they get

If you want a Ned Stark response from me, this is the issue.

Democrats enabling MAGA candidates infuriates me, and I frankly don't give a **** about the tactical merits.

You’ve just described like a third of the regs in here.

I dont think they are even pretending, they just dont have very much self awareness or even they have self ignorance.

They think its some happy accident that the right just happens to be aligning with the non political "common sense view" pov they have some how arrived at completely independently, because you know, they dont think in the partisan way everyone else does.

My exact thoughts

He's still seems like a pretty nice guy despite this though

No

I brought up the point as I was watching that Right Wing news show Meet the Press on Sunday were Chuck Todd asked the Vice President that question about supporting Maga candidates which she would not answer .

It is ideologically corrupt to the extreme. Given the events leading up to last presidential election and its aftermath, it also feels extremely shortsighted.

I think people liek kyrie irving, etc, etc

I thikn conspiracies for whatever reason are way more popular now then they were before our time in the 90's and 80's. say the flat earthers

its weird because I would think with technology nd info it woudl be easy to dispell but on the other hand maybe its easier to lure and attract and spread that type of correct/incorrect info?

Fwiw I spoke a lot with lozen in the Canadian thread and I have to admit sadly , cause I find lozen amicable to speak with and much more open minded than the typical right wingers , he seem to have shift substantially toward right radical.
Obviously not there yet but dangerously close to being label one imho .
His povs and references have shift for sure since I started exchanging with him .

If you think people like Kyrie Irving, I can say definitively that you do not know my wife.

In my years living in Alberta it was hard to be anything left leaning and espouse those views. I was regularly told I was 'granola' (take my pick of fruits, nuts or flakes) if I got into my social views.

I suspect lozen has learned to get along with most of the right leaning folk there by using a lot of right talking points, even if they are not what he believes. I also believe he likes to 'own the libz' here to a degree and its his way of poking them.

positionally he seems very much on the centre of Canadian politics which is generally left of Dem and GOP politics. But I also think he could shift to centre/right.

Alberta , Polievre , is not center right .

Believing a few thousand dollars of absurdist Russian facebook ads swung the election to Trump is one of the dumber conspiracy theories that 10s of millions of people believe, and people here believe it.

David Corn is a sold out moron who doesn't have a clue what he is talking about. The Republican party was basically founded on a conspiracy theory. CTs, believe it or not, go back way beyond YouTube videos and have been a major driving force behind modern political movements. I personally think they are endemic to humanity and are a main vehicle by which material gains are pursued in modernity.

When you realize the North didn't give a miniscule amount of a damn about the plight of black people leading up to the civil war it frees you up a little to consider what was really moving the political currents then. This enormous fear of a "slave power", that wealthy slaveowners in the South were wielding tremendously outsized influence and were scheming to spread slavery over the entire country and take over had a grip on the Northern political conscience. Of course, slavery being their business, expansion of slavery meant this southern cabal would run slavery wherever it expanded and essentially run the country. The civil war is now portrayed as a fight over slavery. But no one who mattered minded slavery as practiced, limited to southern states. Abolitionists were an extreme minority with no power. Expansion of slavery, in the minds of the men of the Republican party, meant living under the heel of plantation owners permanently. Many saw wealthy slave owners as already running the county. They saw the civil war as a battle which had to be fought to prevent said cabal from taking over everything and so they were conspiracy theorists.

Some of the current CTs swirling around MAGA are especially disturbing because we've seen then before, a mix of antisemitism and hatred of socialism, expressed by the Nazis through the label "cultural Bolshevism". MAGA republicans say "cultural Marxism", but it's the same thing where Bolshevik and Marxist really mean Jews. And there have been a lot of conspiracy theories adpoted by Republicans in between as they practice a fear based politics. They usually have a few conspiracies spinning at any given time, not unlike cigars where everyone in the club can choose their favorite brand to puff. Many brands share ingredients, like cultural Marxism and "the great replacement" theory both see Jews as the elitist technocratic social engineers, using their trickery in wielding the mongrel hoards against Christian whites.

According to then sitting presiding Trump, such Russian interference did not occur. He repeated this while on stage with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018. According to him it was a hoax perpetrated by his political enemies.

Since he was the president he would obviously have access to the facts of the case. It would seem you are accusing a president of the United States for willfully lying about foreign attacks on election integrity, while on stage with the leader of that foreign nation.

Deuces doesn't believe that, or at least is agnostic about whether, the Russian government tried to interfere in the 2016 election. As best I can remember, he thought that whatever was done was probably funded by oligarchs without the endorsement of the Kremlin. For that reason, I don't think he has any problem with what Trump said on stage with Putin.

I would ask how you feel I am right radical

I believe in Pro Choice but I think a federal law allowing abortion to 15-18 weeks would be a compromise and of course for rape and incest and any time if the mothers life is in jeopardy. That is what we currently have in Canada It varies province to province
Believe in Climate Change though I think Nuclear power is the solution to carbon reduction
All for LGQBT2S I am still on the fence about kids transitioning but after watching a W5 (canada's sixty minutes) I see both sides
I am triple vaxxed
Atheist
Voted NDP last two provincial elections
Were you may say I am on the right
I do not believe biological men should compete in women's sports at a competitive level
I believe in Voter ID but making it easy to vote
I do not believe in Defund the police but better training and pay your cops more
I believe the USA has a border crisis

My apologies if I call out Dems for things that the left media pounded on Trump

Hey if Biden calls a border wall racist but than builds parts of the wall himself ....
When you have 5 folks calling out Trumps WH spokesperson for lying which she should than those same people should call out the current one or VP for flat out lying


If there is anything that has pushed me more to the right its Justin Trudeau whom I voted for the first time. Who has turned out to be a corrupt autocratic leader

Ill call out hypocrisy when I see it on both sides and think the USA would benefit so much with a viable third party and eliminate the filibuster

Let me add I would guess that many here would consider your support of Bill 21 in Quebec that makes a law that you cant be a judge or school teacher if you wear a Turban or Burka a radical right wing policy.

The ads were a part but a bigger part was how Facebook allowed Trump's team to micro target, much of the country with very specific chat focus that inflame them.

Everyone understands now how social media is the BEST tool to understand State by State, Region by Region, and City by City what is important to people, what they are buying, what makes them happy or mad. Every company now buys that data to micro target regions.

The Trump campaign getting access to this first and understanding the value in it, was able to very cheaply, in comparison, beside Russian efforts go into every area of regional chat and tell them what they wanted to hear, with a pro Trump spin and what they did not want to hear with a Hilary spin.

So if one part of the country wanted more X, then the Russians would foster chat in that area saying Trump was Pro X and Hilary was not.
If another part of the country did not want X, the Russians would say Trump was against X and Hilary was for X.

it did not matter if they contradicted as this was local/regional chat.

They then understood how to whip up anger using that tactic in the same way normal middle class americans were whipped up to go to the Capital and storm the Capital on Jan6th.

In a tight race between Trump and Hilary the numbers of people motivated and/or turned by that was meaningful, even if overall it is not a large share of total votes. Tight races are won on the margins and this was a big part of the Trump margins, gifted to him by Russian help.

The allegation was that the Russian state sponsored the ads and the further claim was that they were impactful. None of that is true. There is no direct tie to state sponsorship. While some of the ads were political in nature, they went for both sides and appear to be just the kind of nonsensical clickbait you would expect from a foreign source with no understanding of America idioms. Most of the cited ads ran after the election. Not to mention, it's just dumb on the surface to think that Russians think a few thousands dollars of ads in an election where billions are spent would have any impact. They were the first people in space. They did come up with their own way to make nuclear bombs. They did win WWII. They have their flaws but they aren't utterly moronic.

I think way more people pretend to believe the Russian facebook ads CT than actually believe it, which points to a vey troubling overall trend. For instance people here simply aren't dumb enough to actually believe that theory even though they say they do. It has to be the case that conspiracy theories, on both the Right and the Left, are being fueled by both sincere belief by the dumber people and by represented belief presented by actual non-believers, the smarter set. My tentative thought is that the represented belief is functionally much more dangerous because it won't ever be retracted and is propagated by those with more power. Never recanting, no matter what, is kinda built into the representational strategy. Someone who sincerely believes something because they think it's true might come to think some alternative is true based on whatever criteria they use to determine truth. Someone who only represents something as true cannot be persuaded by any epistemology, as they already know the truth and have decided to betray it.

it’s a secularism law which shouldn’t be term in a left vs right thing.

And it’s probably the weakest enforcement bill compare to many countries Like in Europe .
If that is far right , hell what u think Europe is ?
But again …..conservatism loves religion right ?

Seeing how religion is turning against democracy , even in the US now I surely am more in favour the ever of bill 21

No. The ads, while political in nature, were mostly orthogonal to specific issues. Or would you like to show an example? I'm biased towards sources which actually showed the ads when discussing them. The mainstream media tended not to actually show the ads, presumably because showing the ads themselves would hurt their conspiracy case. But, please, roll that beautiful bean footage. Let's see this sophisticated Russian propaganda machine.

The idea that the Russian troll farms actually worked directly with Palantir or Cambridge Analytica, which appears to be what you are saying, seems completely off the spectrum. Are you actually saying that or were you trying to merely imply it through intentional conflation?

It's a pretty realistic take. In all reality the same basic bones of the conspiracy has been in play the entire time. With some updates for the times.


As far as the russian stuff goes--I witnessed with my own eyes how impactful they can be. When I see otherwise lifelong mild-mannered ~50yr old consultants to multi-B companies flopping around like a fish/foaming at the mouth looking like they're having a seizure on their sofa holding an ipad opened to facebook--you simply can't convince they those kinda ads had no effect at all Numbers and some other stuff may be debatable though. What we may see right thru--can still get to other people in a big way.