US Politics, February 2018: Our country was founded by geniuses, but it’s being run by idiots

If everyone was in everyone else’s head i suspect we’d all be horrified as fuck, but part of society is to encourage you not to listen to the asshole voice in your head if you have one, and troll farms dont help that.

See, for example, the many previously-covert racists who no longer feel like they have to hold their tongues. It's not like the events of the past couple of years have slowly convinced them that, hmmm, yeah, maybe other races are inferior to me. It's just created an environment where they feel increasingly comfortable speaking and acting on their pre-existing prejudices.

xposts

If the bots did anything, it was to give these voters the illusion of community, that they weren't alone in thinking what they think. But the rot has long been there.

― droit au butt (Euler), Tuesday, February 20, 2018 3:55 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

As Old Lunch and j. said, you are of the opinion that that sort of illusion does not have an impact on opponents or fence-sitters, particularly in close-knit communities where social conformity is a value?

A big element of wanting to deny the story for some is they kind of got played in a big way by taking the email leaks seriously and not seeing that for what it was because it confirmed a narrative they like. I don’t think we can really “punish Russia” but there probably should be serious conversations about cyber security and media literacy.

With a few exceptions, seem like colorless drones compared to the Watergate circus.

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, February 20, 2018 3:44 PM (eighteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I loved Butterfield! the Musical

who is our Martha Mitchell?

Reince Preibus.

Morbs when the book is closed on this we're going to be looking at a Sgt. Peppers/Mothers cover featuring the likes of Rob Goldstone, Julian Assange, assorted Russian hookers, Macedonian teenagers, and, uh, the Trump family

I don't know if I can stand any more color

not to mention a Roger Stone return engagement

from the P4B thing i linked:

As the largest on-line group to come out of the 2016 primary, and the group who helped form the grassroots for Bernie 2016, we hear the voices who are angered by this news, but understand, it wasn’t 13 Russians who did the work, it was people like you. Keep organizing.

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/993/875/084.png

As Old Lunch and j. said, you are of the opinion that that sort of illusion does not have an impact on opponents or fence-sitters, particularly in close-knit communities where social conformity is a value?

― Moo Vaughn, Tuesday, February 20, 2018 5:02 PM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't think these Americans have close-knit communities anymore! But social media can provide a facsimile of it.

If these people were fence-sitters, it was only in the sense that they might have stayed home. Their beliefs (or whatever passes for belief here) were already established, ready to be brought to action (even if only a drive to the voting booth). And sure, if that's persuasion, sure. My point is that the bots are important only for helping get out the vote, not for convincing people to become Republicans. And yes, that's important enough, since he won. I guess I don't see what the bots did as out of the rules of a democracy, though, understood in the rawest sense in which people get to vote rather than in some richer sense requiring deliberation etc. Enough Americans gave up on deliberation a long time ago to undermine hope of a democracy in any richer sense.

https://www.getbadnews.com/#intro Interesting exercise in understanding fake news effects/twitter role.

Hold up, did I miss another indictment?

Van Der Zwaan?

Yup.

why is the lefty go-to 'come on, it's not like Clinton lost the election because of the Russians!'

because they don't want to admit that they might have been influenced by bad actors' shitposts as well? seems pretty clear to me

juat a bad week for billy corgan, first d'arcy disses him now zwaan is indicted

lol

xp ^a line of thinking that never even occurred to this Bernie voter

I don't presume to speak for all lefties, but my opinion of the gentlewoman from Illinois/Arkansas/Chappaqua has been p much the same for 25 years.

(of the sludge from Queens, about 35 years)

yeah I think it's fair to speculate that this propaganda may have inflamed the base and turned out the vote as much or more than it did flip any votes

― Rhine Jive Click Bait (Hadrian VIII), Tuesday, February 20, 2018 3:59 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Or to speculate that it depressed the vote or drove it to third parties as much or more than it turned it out or flipped it. Turnout declined nationally as a consequence of both inter- and intra-party negative campaigning. While this was not true in all states - turnout rose significantly in highly-contested Florida and Pennsylvania, as well as in Arizona for which Hillary made a play or at least a feint, though in two of three cases this may reflect population growth/demographic change as much as anything else - but it declined significantly in many of the often-less-contested mostly-blue or recently-blue purple states of the midwest like (Minnesota,) Wisconsin, Iowa, and Ohio, staying roughly even in Michigan, where slightly fewer picked a name on the ballot. The third party and, where relevant, write-in votes also increased substantially in every one of these states. Worth noting that MI, WI, and MN were all states in which Sanders beat Clinton with a message crafted by a former Manafort ally and with the assistance of Russian propaganda efforts, and IA was very nearly so, but also that Hillary had also lost all but one of these in 2008, when Obama was not on the ballot in MI.

all states in which Sanders beat Clinton with a message crafted by a former Manafort ally

can you expand on this?

lefties are also extra sensitive to accusations like this due to the long history of the American left getting ratfucked by their own government (as opposed to foreign ones), I'd wager. it's not simply a matter off ass-covering, I don't think.

coupled with the fact that this was the first election cycle in living memory where someone approaching a leftist got within spitting distance of the nomination and you have a p solid recipe for skepticism/contrarianism

I don't presume to speak for all lefties, but my opinion of the gentlewoman from Illinois/Arkansas/Chappaqua has been p much the same for 25 years.

Can you name a political opinion of yours that has changed in the last, say, two decades? Because the whole "unwillingness to process new information/change one's mind" thing is not nearly as admirable or awesome as many people seem to think.

That the Democratic Party can be changed from within.

Anyway, I exaggerate. Clinton and Trump are both much worse than I would've said 20 years ago. As is America. As is the human race.

That Manafort ally-Sanders campaign connection seems really specious imo. Like it reminds me of the kind of conclusions people would draw from the leaked emails when not knowing how to separate things that seem weird/scandalous but are actually just normal.

"Hitler was a vegetarian!"

This is both ridiculous and hilarious

From @TIME: WH staffers were unable to convince Trump to mute his tweets to Mueller indictments, so they booked spokesmen on Fox News "to try to direct Trump toward a little less fanciful readings of the indictments." #ThisIsntNormal https://t.co/cqsZaUmRdl

— Chris Lu (@ChrisLu44) February 20, 2018

Once again, I feel the need to pan this work of fiction we're living in for straining all plausibility.

Okay, sure, the president's staff are engaged in needlessly convoluted Three's Company-level hijinks to communicate with him via his favorite teevee channel, that's believable.

OL otm. I guess it is appropriate to our age that savvy political professionals believe the most effective way to communicate with the president is by appearing on a nationally broadcast television show, instead of like, calling him on the phone or whatever.

As much as I love Peter Sellers, a gritty Being There remake would be timely.

I guess I don't see what the bots did as out of the rules of a democracy

except that the botmasters didn't belong to our demos!!

I think there are limits to the grit you can put in Being There.

A Face in the Crowd, maybe.

eh I mean ok you're right but they're doing what the direct mail people are doing already and surely the republicans have learned from the bots to do it themselves next time
xp

gritty reboot of tadeusz dołęga-mostowicz's the career of nicodemus dyzma, maybe: the 1932 Polish bestseller being there was (allegedly) plagiarised from

(everything is fake all the down)

The North Koreans have learned how to assemble their own a-bombs, who even knows where they got the idea from and also who cares.

That Manafort ally-Sanders campaign connection seems really specious imo. Like it reminds me of the kind of conclusions people would draw from the leaked emails when not knowing how to separate things that seem weird/scandalous but are actually just normal.

― Nerdstrom Poindexter, Tuesday, February 20, 2018 5:16 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Political professionals are journeymen who are often ideologically and geographically flexible in their assignments, though usually rooted in some spectrum of core belief. That and a longterm relationship help explain longtime "establishment" Dem operative Tad Devine (Bentsen, Bob Kerrey, Gore, Kerry, Corzine, Menendez, McCaskill, Bill Nelson, etc.)'s becoming Bernie's chief strategist. Whether they are sufficient to explain that role among others he has taken on is another question. Consider that Devine, once chief of staff to mob-tied Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci, after more than two decades at the center of Democratic politics, appears to have been marginalized (or marginalized himself) by the 2008 cycle. That's two years after he first went to work for Paul Manafort (and alongside Tony (but not John) Podesta) on behalf of Putin-aligned Yanukovych and the Party of Regions, and I'm not aware of his having worked for any party-endorsed politician or having had any non-Yanukovych major client since. Certainly no facts involving compromising financial or other incentives have been made public, but that does not mean that they will not develop. Given that Manafort has already been indicted, and Podesta is reportedly a subject of the Mueller investigation, it may be a bit early to draw conclusions on this score.

What can be established, however, is that the typically-negative (sorry, "contrast"ing) message Devine crafted is precisely the opposite of the one he had previously used on behalf of establishment candidates, which regardless of the degree of foreign association if any should say something about the degree to which the Sanders campaign was a cynical exercise in friendly fire against the presumptive nominee and fairly inevitable primary victor.

I should be clear that I don't assign that characterization wholly to Sanders himself, though he's no naif.

she didnt seem so damn inevitable for about 4 weeks there

I don't think Devine is the same story, but I note that Mike Flynn said lots of mean things about Russia before he was pushed out by the Obama admin

she didnt seem so damn inevitable for about 4 weeks there

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, February 20, 2018 6:38 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Perhaps not to people who are bad at politics or math

god, that Time article - the extent to which this presidency resembles the Bill Mumy Twilight Zone episode is just uncanny at this point

tbh i can't read that shit anymore. every week we have a new "trump paces and fumes as white house staff try to calm the storm" and they are all the same

Yeah, Trump has been Unraveling on a weekly basis since the very beginning, it seems.

Perhaps not to people who are bad at politics or math

Or didn't know it was a fix. OH NO HE DINT

definitely feels like some version of "Inside the White House's historically disastrous week" gets re-run every Sunday