How did the simple act of hacking a server lead to Trump's victory? You're not arguing they hacked the machines that tabulate votes and stuff, right?

It's also disturbing when an imaginary scandal (Hillary's emails!!!) can pick up real steam and momentum among the population due to right wing news like Fox News having absolutely no shame. They will roll with ANYTHING these days no matter how slimy, bizarre, or untrue. And you have mainstream journalists that pick up those stories as well and people buy into it because they legitimately want a candidate who is clean and not corrupt.

And then on the Republican side, you have one of the most corrupt candidates in all of history. But nobody cares, because right wing media is designed to obscure truths like that and to focus on made-up scandals of the left. And it works. Our media is completely broken and we can't seem to admit that because we've been "slow-boiling" in this media atmosphere for such a long time. But it really does present a huge problem for democracy when 50% of the population is living in a total alternate reality dreamworld and completely unable or unwilling to see the corruption in Trump because of a portion of the media that's more than happy to let friggin TREASON go uninvestigated. As long as it gets them their tax cuts!

https://www.theatlantic.com/internat...-trump/510689/


http://www.newsweek.com/trump-putin-...lection-541302

https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/stat...53945503567872

https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/stat...52258986500097

https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedBen/stat...52853650632704

Why not ask if Putin himself put on makeup and used millions of fake IDs to personally vote for Trump millions of times?

Nobody on earth is arguing the machines were altered. It is pure red herring.

As if that is the only definition of direct interfence.

No, but you seem to be arguing that since it's not that it's the equivalent of chain emails or Facebook posts. This isn't propaganda as usual. It's not that Americans needed to steel themselves against fantastic lies, it's that they were overwhelmed by truthful mini-scandals, that can only happen with a massive leak.

That's the same idiotic strawman argument that Jeff Lord used on Bill Maher last time.

I think you're correct: it's not propaganda as usual. It was especially stupid and fantastical. I mean, which of the scandals culled from the Podesta emails were truthful? PizzaGate? Spirit Cooking? HILLARY CLINTON GOT THE DEBATE QUESTIONS IN ADVANCE? Bill Clinton's secret black son? Hillary Clinton setting a rapist free because she hates children?

Then define it.

We have people saying they changed stance on the Ukraine after meetings with Russians and were going to lift sanctions. Mysterious bank transfer that equaled the amount in the dossier. Trump won't release his taxes.

Not according to Kasparov:

Guys, when I say I read the news, I hope it's understood that I don't need the FAQ on Russian hacking. I get it. Draw the line between that and the direct interference that was so destabilizing that led to Trumps victory.

One of the reasons this country is so ****ed is because the left is only very slightly more discerning than Trumpkins about the things they're just mindlessly blabbering about. Only slightly.

Jeff Sessions lied under oath to Congress. That's about as simple as it gets. He cannot remain as Attorney General.

You have been spending way too much time with Greenwald, dude. Yeah, sure, you can try to defend this administration all you want but the evidence is all over the place they are NOT on the level.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Good troll, I guess.

Step one: hack political party led by person you hate,

Step two: gather personal correspondence of said person and those around them,

Step three: release said correspondence at times it will be most hurtful,

Step four: have several back-channel communications with people from party you like about said hacking and the timing of said releases,

Step five: have leader of party you like directly quote propaganda in a debate created by your intelligence community,

Step six: popularize your propaganda on social media, all of which is against leader of party you hate and/or favourable to leader of party you like,

Step seven: have leader of party you like repeatedly claim everything above is a lie no matter how much evidence is presented while repeatedly talking about what a great guy the dictator in charge of it all is.

This is something that has been going on for decades. Here is the definition of it and legitimately this is what Wikileaks is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures

Nothing I said in any way could be any way construed as either defending the Trump Administration nor a claim they are on the level.

I tried explicitly being clear -- as clear as the English language allows. I tried being Socratic. I'll try one more time.

- I am not a Trump apologist, that's inane.
- I am not arguing the Trump Admin is 'on the level' and just in the past hour of posts said he was a lying clown multiple times.
- I don't even dismiss that Trump / Putin aren't engaged in some grand conspiracy, that Trump is corrupted and working expressly for Moscow. It could very well be that is the reality.

Evidence for the third bullet remains lacking.

The most likely scenario is some forms of implicit and explicit collusion that may have risen to criminal but it remains unclear.

Also: the forms of interference the Russians engaged in during the election seem positively mild and ultimately leveraged the worst, per-existing features of our political culture. A symptom of a far worse disease. A veritable finger poke to the chest to a pretend strong man.

What propelled Trump to victory was a mix of degenerate hateful idiots and people passively building a consensus for Trump due to selfishness and greed. Russian interference provided some fodder for bad impulses in the media and probably served to distract but was ultimately not even close to dispositive in Trump's favor. The main factors that led to Trump's victory are people who hate religious and racial minorities, liberals, some mix of the two, or whose primary concern is keeping every last dollar and not giving an extra red cent to the state that they don't have to. Reflexive partisanship. Deep-seated idiocracy. Far far down on the list are Russians duping people.

I am arguing as clear as the language allows, then: the scandalization of Trump/Russia connections remains a form of cognitive dissonance due to laziness on the left. An inability to solve either the systemic reasons for Trump's victory nor build a popular consensus against him.

Anything that responds to this with "lol troll Trump defender" are people who are deeply wedded to these lazy solutions.

Active measures taken against another democracy happen plenty often. The normal response would be sanctions or something like that. But what's not normal is for Trump and the Trump campaign (Sessions, Flynn, Page, etc.) to be involved in and/or to get quid pro quo for these active measures taken by a hostile foreign power. I know that's tricky because I've had to explain it to a bunch of people. But when Trump's campaign works directly with Russia on this, that's what makes it treason.

Everybody knows that countries are going to interfere in other countries' elections. But when you have an American actively involved and assisting with that, that's what makes it treason. Lock his ass up.

But your argument is basically "we deserved it" for being stupid?

See here is where you are screwing up. You are viewing things in a vacuum without the context of history or other scenarios that are currently happening around the world. The Trump/Russian links are mounting with a mountain of evidence. A dossier that was leaked by Buzzfeed is being further and further corroborated everyday. There was and is an active measures campaign that was mounted against the US(and its allies), that much has been corroborated by 17 intelligence agencies. Their was a popular consensus against Trump, however that didn't seem to matter.

Well, it's not quite that either; although that's closer than "TRUMP DEFENDER TROLL."

I don't know that merely being stupid deserves punishment, so I'm not arguing for sadism. I wish Trump on no one, not even dumb people.

But yes. What led to Trump and backsliding away from democracy and those sorts of impulses now common in the electorate were systemic failures of our political system and political culture, some dating back the founding of the country, some almost a century in the making, some more recent. Russian interference is a sideshow causative factor and a sideshow to addressing those problems. Believe me, I hope it works. If Trump broke the law, it should be applied to him vigorously. It would solve an urgent problem the way defibrillators might revive a 300lb dude who just collapsed from a heart attack after eating a 2500 calorie meal. But in the end we'll be left as obese fat guys with a severe diet problem. That's not to say we should necessarily put the defibrillators away but let's recognize all of us, collectively, have borne witness to our eating problems and lifestyle build to this moment. Distributed guilt is hard to measure but is a thing.

I mean, yeah. I've watched Fox News become more and more popular, watched Rush and right-wing radio take over the AM airwaves. I've watched in horror as people that used to call themselves conservationists 20 years ago (because they loved hunting and fishing) now trash any efforts to protect the environment. I've seen very intelligent people succumb to ignorance and hate when they didn't want to deal with difficult issues like LGBT rights or transgender people existing. I've watched all this stuff happen and I've complained and protested about it every step of the way. What more do you expect the good people to do? We came out and voted en masse for Hillary. We got 2,900,000 more votes than the other side. We're just continuing that fight by pointing out Trump's massive crimes and lies. I don't see why you would have a problem with that.