Cont: All things Trump + Russia Part 2

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Childlike Empress said:
Interesting comparison between Watergate and Russiagate:
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It has publicly released no evidence of a conspiracy. However, the fact that people have been flipped and charged, and that the people being questioned/flipped are higher and higher up the chain, rather suggests that there is evidence of criminal activity that the FBI are using as leverage in order to work their way up to the top.

Anybody who thinks any differently hasn't been paying the slightest bit of attention and can be dismissed out of hand.
 
CapelDodger said:
Putin's repeated failure to close anything is starting to look pathological. Even the cyber campaign is open-ended, and its purpose is vague. He maintains the frozen conflicts he inherited and has added a few of his own. It's as if he sees them as assets, but it's hard to see why.

He declared victory in Chechnya, of course, but it's noticeable how many Chechens feature in ISIS so that ain't over either.
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Adam Curtis has a theory that he's engaging in what Curtis calls "non-linear warfare" - the idea being that you are constantly engaged in a war where the purpose of that war is to allow control of the populous, in part by using the media to disseminate conflicting and confusing information, so that nobody can stop you because nobody really knows what you're doing or why. The concept was invented by Vladislav Surkov, one of Putin's main advisers, in a short story he wrote before moving in to politics.

From what I've seen of the theory there seems to be more supposition and inference than actual solid evidence and reasoning, but it's certainly one idea.
 
Emily's Cat said:
The majority of the dot-connecting with respect to Trump is based on people who have ties to the Russian government. Not direct employees of that government, but are in some fashion tied to it through a series of connections. In several cases, the connections are alleged (ie a bank that is alleged to have been involved in some alleged money laundering allegedly on behalf of people allegedly tied to Putin).

Trump was offered, but does not appear to have received*, information about his political opponent from a foreign person with alleged ties to a foreign government.

Clinton paid actual money for information that she is known to have received about her political opponent from a foreign person who was a known intelligence operative for a foreign country.

But in these two scenarios, Clinton's actions are perfectly acceptable, whereas Trump's actions are treasonous.

I'm not sure I follow the distinction. * It is possible that he received information, but that this has not yet been discovered.
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It's already been explained to you. We can't understand it for you.
 
Emily's Cat said:
And Varwoche, I get where you're coming from, but it's an absurd request. It's been a part of so many posted articles, and it's been called out as speculative so many times, that it ends up feeling like a game here. I say "a lot of the grains of sand on the beach in Hawaii are actually ground up bits of coral" and you respond with "Yeah? Well show me one in person or I don't believe it!" :p

I get that's not your intention... but this is not difficult. You're asking me to do meaningless research for things that are prevalent and abundant in this
thread. The fact that they're prevalent and abundant in this thread is exactly why I'm not going to go down this rabbit hole.
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There you go again, dismissively dismissing a simple request for evidence.

You supposedly having posted a cite once upon a time isn't helpful when several days ago, in this thread, you accused the press of "speculative inference". Do you expect readers to review all of your posts since the election? In which thread might I find the unicorn citation to news reports that engaged in speculative inference? (This thread, or part one?) Approximately when was it posted?
 
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Childlike Empress said:
Read that sentence out loud to yourself. Would you take the author seriously if it weren't you?
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Would I take someone other than myself seriously if they said that displaying a complete lack of knowledge or understanding of the absolute basics of a complex, wide-ranging subject made that person unqualified to talk authoritatively about that subject? Yes. Of course I would. Seems something of a tautology to me.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
Would I take someone other than myself seriously if they said that displaying a complete lack of knowledge or understanding of the absolute basics of a complex, wide-ranging subject made that person unqualified to talk authoritatively about that subject? Yes. Of course I would. Seems something of a tautology to me.
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That's not what you wrote. You wrote that everybody who doesn't share your opinion about something you cannot know can be dismissed. What's the word?
 
Childlike Empress said:
That's not what you wrote.
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Yes it is.

You wrote that everybody who doesn't share your opinion about something you cannot know can be dismissed.
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I wrote that anybody who doesn't think that the investigation has been uncovering evidence obviously doesn't understand even the basics* of such a prosecution and their opinions can therefore safely be dismissed out of hand.

I mean, I could start to address what that article presents as arguments, like the idea that something taking a different amount of time to something completely different and unrelated says anything meaningful, or the idea that something not being in the public domain is the same thing as that thing not existing, but honestly I don't need to. The fact that the author has clearly demonstrated that he's utterly ignorant on the subject* means that I don't even need to bother picking such low-hanging fruit, because he simply doesn't know what he's talking about.

What's the word?
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I have no idea.

*Or, well, given the author of that thread's history of disbarment due to lying to a client, and committing fraud and forgery, perhaps does understand but is deliberately lying about it.
 
House Judiciary Hearing today was quite the eye-opener and quite interesting.

C SPAN streaming of the hearing and the transcript

Expect to hear the word "fake" in front of dossier every time the word comes out of a Republican's mouth. Expect Fox News to harp and harp about the Trump biased FBI agents and attorneys involved in the Mueller case. They have already started.

The Democrats ripped apart every GOP argument in the hearings but don't expect that to matter to them at all. The most hypocritical, Trey Gowdy of course. He has no memory of his Benghazi bull ****.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
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The Democrats ripped apart every GOP argument in the hearings but don't expect that to matter to them at all. The most hypocritical, Trey Gowdy of course. He has no memory of his Benghazi bull ****.
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Convenient Memory Disorder™ has always been endemic among the GOP, although over the last few years it seems to be becoming more widespread and worse at an almost exponential rate.
 
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Have any of them said, "This conclusion is factually incorrect"? If not, shut up about bias. All that matters is did Mueller prove the elements of the crimes for which he sought indictments? If yes, bias be what it may.
 
Craig4 said:
Have any of them said, "This conclusion is factually incorrect"? If not, shut up about bias. All that matters is did Mueller prove the elements of the crimes for which he sought indictments? If yes, bias be what it may.
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No the bias is huge, it seems special councils are created to get away from partisan government bias. There seems to be a clear pattern of covering up for Clinton, in favor of coming down on Trump....bias.

Read this article, it also sums it up nicely.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454543/mueller-investigation-too-many-anti-trump-coincidences
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
Adam Curtis has a theory that he's engaging in what Curtis calls "non-linear warfare" - the idea being that you are constantly engaged in a war where the purpose of that war is to allow control of the populous, in part by using the media to disseminate conflicting and confusing information, so that nobody can stop you because nobody really knows what you're doing or why. The concept was invented by Vladislav Surkov, one of Putin's main advisers, in a short story he wrote before moving in to politics.
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I don't know who Adam Curtis is but that's hardly news: Bolshevik Chekists started to implement such a strategy after copying and refining what the Tsarist Okhrana did in the late 19th century (https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/okhrana-the-paris-operations-of-the-russian-imperial-police/5474-1.html).

Soviet --> Russian intelligence services do that since about a century. The only novelty is that they today have all the interwebz to play with...
 
logger said:
No the bias is huge, it seems special councils are created to get away from partisan government bias. There seems to be a clear pattern of covering up for Clinton, in favor of coming down on Trump....bias.

Read this article, it also sums it up nicely.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454543/mueller-investigation-too-many-anti-trump-coincidences
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I read the article. It was stupid. I don't have time to take on all the dumb points at this hour, so I will start with the first two dumb ones.

The investigation is venturing well beyond the original mandate of rooting out evidence of Russian collusion.
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No. The special counsel letter specifically says "any links" to Russia (not just coordination) and any matters that arose directly from the investigation.

Should he not have such a broad mandate? Possibly. But where it is now is the original mandate.

Department of Justice officials, now in the Trump Justice Department but who once served in Barack Obama’s administration, selected Comey’s close friend and long associate Robert Mueller as investigator. From that germination, an innate conflict of interest was born — given that Mueller’s appointment assumed that Comey himself would not come under his own investigation, a supposition that may be increasingly untenable.
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Those "officials" is rod rosenstein who was a bush appointee. The Mueller appointment assumed no such thing about Comey coming under investigation.

As an aside, it is editorial malpractice to assert conflicts of interest without ever actually citing department conflict of interest policies.
 
So law enforcement is not supposed to hold any political opinions whatsoever? Not until humans are replaced with robots.

Any thinking person can see that opinions can be held but nonetheless be suppressed so as to not exert undue bias in the capacity of one's duties.

The police that Trump exhorted to be rough on suspects can still comport themselves in compliance with Constitutional directives without letting their feelings lead to actions they might wish to be permitted. So too for FBI agents.

Actually, we *want* some measure of a kind of bias in law enforcement. And that is bias against wrongdoers that compell and inspire to prosecute with vigor.

Trumpists would be only too happy to have the FBI fully staffed with fellow believers exercising every bias in favour of the Leader. Yeah, *that* kind of bias would only be too welcome.
 
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