The US interferes with elections and those states combat those attempts. Other states interfere with US elections, and we must combat those attempts as well. Welcome to the game, not playing is not an option.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
I don't disagree with your characterization, but I'd also characterize cable news, the NYT, WaPo, etc. that way. These big "news and entertainment" companies do not offer any meaningful political dissent whatsoever.
You're the one who demanded specific examples, but then failed to provide any yourself, after being asked repeatedly.
What is your evidence that Rachel Maddow is an actress and not a journalist? What is your evidence that Rachel Maddow has zero journalistic acumen?
Specific examples!
By the way, have you looked up the definition of whataboutism yet, to which you have openly confessed of being guilty? It's not a "buzzword". It's not "juvenile". And it definitely doesn't mean "Counter-factual scenarios that reveal your opinion to be illogical and cherry-picked for some emotional reason" as you falsely claim. It's a logical fallacy particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda, comrade.
You also seem to be willfully misunderstanding why I brought up the Flint Water Crisis, which was simply to point out an example of the kind of embarrassing story that RT seems to focus on when reporting on US domestic issues. I brought up the Flint Water Crisis simply because it's one that most people are familiar with and the importance of journalistic coverage of the situation is obviously important to the democratic process.
I don't think Rachel Maddow is relevant at all to this discussion. If her coverage of the Flint issue was exemplary, that's great. It is not germane to my use of the Flint example at all. The fact that you and most people are aware of the Flint Water Crisis is because it happens to be one of the rare stories like this that did get significant big media coverage. Thankfully, Maddow determined that covering the story would not alienate her advertisers!
As for your dogged effort to keep this discussion about whataboutism and the minutia surrounding its definition, I have reviewed the definition and it seems to be relevant only to debates where there are two sides and one side uses the technique as a logical fallacy in an attempt to persuade or in order to distract from the truth of his opponent's argument.
The remarks I made that led to my being accused of whataboutism were some questions I asked about scenarios that seem to me to warrant a similar approach to determining the harms/benefits of journalism. Please re-read that last sentence again several times as it is critically important to my point.
I am not asking those parallel questions to distract attention from the claim you make that RT's reporting has caused destabilization, simply asking you to clarify (by applying your analytical approach to some similar scenarios) a more general rule for categorizing journalism as being harmful or helpful through the lens of political "stability" (a term which is highly loaded and rarely used without significant bias).
I understand how the technique you describe as whataboutism is sometimes used in a persuasive argumentation scenario argued by two partisans. But in this case you are the only partisan. I consider the Russian government and the US government fairly morally similar, and I'm not interested in arguing the minutia of how the US is slightly better, because I don't disagree. My concern is whether RT helps or hurts the marketplace of ideas and the search for truth in the American political discourse, and my argument is that it helps in many obvious ways, while the specific harms that you and others claim exist cannot be supported by links to specific articles, etc. The many articles about embarrassing aspects of the US are very easy to find on RT, and I view those as helpful to American democracy rather than "destabilizing".
Since you seem to be one who views "stability" as a good thing no matter what, I was hoping that you would clarify when journalism that can be perceive to create destabilization is good vs when it is bad. Your simplistic view seems to be that regardless of all other factors, if the journalism was done by a journalist whose salary is paid by a foreign government, the journalism is bad and unhelpful, no matter any other factors. But by this definition the VOA is also all bad and unhelpful, so I think it's a pretty useless definition.
Again, since I think you might be trolling, I don't want to spend too much time trying to be thoughtful in my reply. In my view, propaganda is everywhere, and the reader must understand how to filter it from the truth. That is a core responsibility of citizenship. I'll often cross-reference NYT stories with a similar story in the Globe and Mail, since omissions are much more likely to stand out than when comparing the version found in the WSJ, which may cater to a different American political constituency.
Isn't it enough that the weaknesses of our own media needs work that we don't help to undermine with those who actively chip away at the basic tenets of an open society?
Exactly the point.
Look, there's this thing in western jurisprudence called "mens rea". It's what differentiates, say, first degree murder from manslaughter.
In this case, RT and Sputnik are clearly motivated by the desire to manipulate the US election. As you've already conceded, those other outlets are not. As a result, these represent different acts, and therefore it is not unreasonable for them to warrant different responses.
And what you're suggesting is that Twitter take sides in this, support US propoganda and suppress others... How is this different than RT?
Some are starting to talk about some of our mainstream journalists as belonging in a "special kind of journalistic hell(3)."
1-https://theintercept.com/2016/09/18/washpost-makes-history-f... 2-https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/exclusive-documents-... 3-https://www.salon.com/2016/09/20/betraying-snowden-theres-a-...
What a strange game. The only move to win is to cheat.
Please define the word destabilization. Does that mean changing the status quo? Would the NYT be guilty of destabilization if it published an expose revealing that officials in 20 US cities hid significant drinking water pollution from their citizens for years? Surely once published the article would destabilize politics in those cities significantly.
Similarly, suppose the NYT published Donald Trump's taxes, revealing information that was likely to create a multi-year impeachment effort. Would that destabilize the US? It's hard to argue it would make things more stable.
Did the NYT's publication of Judith Miller's reporting on Saddam's WMD that helped sell a war effort that killed and displaced millions of people and cost trillions of dollars cause "destabilization"?
Newspapers are supposed to publish information that leads to political change. That is the point of having a free press, so that ideas can be shared that can be vetted by the public and acted upon to make society better.
Counter-factual scenarios that reveal your opinion to be illogical and cherry-picked for some emotional reason? OK I'm guilty.
To further ruin the joke by over-explaining it, he wasn't literally asking you to define whataboutism, because you'd just given an excellent example of it, so his question was rhetorical, and your answer was not only redundant but also incorrect.
Your and his arguments could be labeled as “Tory” but it would be useless for me to point that out; id rather attempt to reach common ground or understanding.
You've also proven you don't know what the definition of whataboutism is. The fact that you don't happen to know the definition doesn't mean it's a "buzzword".
It's a logical fallacy particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda (which is the main point of this discussion).
Please look up the real definition before trying to incorrectly define it and confess to being guilty of it, because you don't even understand what you're confessing to.
The definition you gave was wrong, even though you are guilty of doing it yourself, and what you're doing is logically fallacious and intellectually dishonest.
I looked at the definition of whataboutism on Wikipedia, and now I think I understand what you are attempting to argue.
If person A says "Russia treats political enemies badly" and then person B replies "Well, the US puts its political enemies in Gitmo", you would call that a scenario where person B should have said something specifically to refute person A's statement, but instead made a parallel assertion that does not have any direct relation to the statement made by person A.
In your view, in order to refute the claim made by person A, someone would have to provide evidence that in fact Russia does not treat political enemies badly.
When someone is heavily partisan and makes the comment of person B above, the intent might be to deflect attention from person A's point. If you view person A and B as adversaries each trying to be objectively right in some highly logical world, then only a strict logical refutation of person A's point would suffice. The definition of whataboutism descries it as a logical fallacy, which is quite telling.
The truth is, both claims may be true. Person B's statement does not refute person A's statement, but it is not meant to. In reading through the comments that you and the other person claimed were whataboutism, I think your interpretation was that I was asking rhetorical questions that I thought had an obvious answer which should logically refute your assertion.
In fact, I was simply introducing a few scenarios that seem similar to me so that I could better understand how it was so easy for you both to make very broad (and seemingly impulsive) statements with strong implications about the "appropriate" political consequences of journalism.
I was hoping that one of you would explain to me some method of analysis that offered insight into all of those scenarios in addition to this Russia stuff.
It seems that you did not mean to make broad statements about journalism, only about RT specifically because RT is obviously guilty by virtue of its association with the Russian government.
To me that is not obvious, and so when I hear words used like "destabilization" or "terrorism" (these are both propaganda words and I heavily discount any statement containing either one) I have to wonder if perhaps the person making the argument has more of a persuasive motive than a desire to understand the situation or phenomenon in question.
You're trolling in bad faith, demanding people provide specific examples then refusing to provide any yourself, and making untrue blanket statements about cable news and then trying to excuse your ignorance by claiming you don't actually know anything about cable news and never watch it. Yet you claim to know so much about RT, but never provide any links to back up any of your claims about it, even after being repeatedly asked. You said that Rachel Maddow's coverage of Flint was suspect because she made an overreach in her coverage of Russia, yet you have no problem with RT broadcasting Kremlin propaganda about Ukraine and don't think that reflects on their coverage of Flynt, to which you conveniently can't find any references, so we just have to take your word.
Your arguments have no merit, because you're being intellectually dishonest and trolling. And this is not the place for that. Take it somewhere else where it will be appreciated like /r/The_Donald, if you're not going to stop it here.
You're the one who didn't know what the word "whataboutism" meant, and who posted an incorrect definition, yet with your very own words, you actually explicitly confessed to being guilty of whataboutism: "OK I'm guilty."
So do you still stand by your confession that you're guilty of "whataboutism", now that you've bothered to skim (but not understand) one article about it?
There is nothing "silly" or "made up" about the word "whataboutism". That's proven by the fact that there is a 15 page Wikipedia article with 116 citations in it, including references to "whataboutism" in the Oxford Living Dictionaries and Cambridge Dictionary.
What's "made up" is your incorrect definition that you gave for it: "Counter-factual scenarios that reveal your opinion to be illogical and cherry-picked for some emotional reason".
What exactly is so "silly" about this -- it seems pretty serious and on-topic to me, comrade:
Tactic: Propaganda technique
Type: Tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy)
Logic: Logical fallacy
Active period: Cold War–present
Prominent usage: Soviet Union propaganda, Russian propaganda, Russian annexation of Crimea, Russian military intervention in Ukraine, Donald Trump,
Related: Ad hominem, And you are lynching Negroes, The pot calling the kettle black, Red herring, The Mote and the Beam, Clean hands
Changing the subject is NOT winning the argument.
Get it?
Your point would be a lot stronger if you are able to convey a consistent world view for analyzing those scenarios, or by explaining how the scenarios are different. I mention them because I think they are similar and ought to be analyzed similarly, but I'm open to persuasion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destabilisation
Secondly, your whataboutism is an effort to change the subject away from the topic, a private company concluding that it didn't want RT+Sputnik's advertising money. It then ventures into not very good equivocation (Judith Miller was not the Times; indeed, she was forced to resign by the Times).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
Given this, I accept no burden of proof. It is what it is.
Of course Judith was forced to resign once the sloppy reporting was fact checked by people who did not work at the NYT. The NYT had to let Judith go to save face after it helped defeat the anti-war activists and other people who were cautious to believe George W. Bush's claims about Saddam.
Keep in mind that for a major company like the NYT firing one reporter is not a big deal at all. It should be shocking that simply firing one person is enough to make the journalistic scandal of the millennium go away.
If you think about it, your assertion that the alleged political motives of RT are inappropriate hinges upon your judgment that it is in Russia's national interest to undermine the legitimacy of powerful interests in the US, and (apparently) thus to weaken the US or put it at some sort of disadvantage.
I realize you are convinced that my views and comments fit some schema you feel duty-bound to try to refute, but I think that if you examine your belief system on the matter you will find that you simply feel loyalty to the status quo power structure in the US, which is closely aligned with its government. Thus you oppose any sort of disruptive or revolutionary behavior or ideas that might threaten this status quo that you are fond of.
Note that the status quo in the US is corporatism and militarism, and that there is really not a leftist movement of any stature in the US. HRC and Trump are both slight permutations of a more authoritarian version of Bush or Obama, since the nation has turned more toward authoritarianism as time has gone on.
Only if you view this authoritarian, militaristic course of action as being strongly in the US national interest is it possible to believe with full certainty that RT publishing stories that might appeal to the American far left or the most disempowered Americans is a bad thing. For only then does the amplification of those ideas/movements, etc., threaten anything that is a force of good.
In my view, the biggest weakness in the US is that there is very little dissent and we put far too much trust in our leaders, and apply far too little scrutiny to our institutions (public and private), allowing significant diversion of resources to various groups who benefit from the status quo.
Politicians should fear journalists and should fear the public finding out about their excesses, their side deals, and the true stories of how they became millionaires on $150K public servant salaries. If RT helps expose these fraudulent people for what they are, the US will be far better off for it. And yes, a consequence of some toppling of the existing power structures would probably be less global militarism, but I think it's hard to argue that our laying waste to so many countries abroad is remotely in the US national interest, but no disrespect intended if you do feel strongly that Trump's action in Yemen, etc., is bold and necessary to the world order.
Go learn the real definitions of the terms you're tossing around, instead of making up your own.
You're the one who actually claims to be guilty of whataboutism: "OK I'm guilty."
Are you proud of that? Do you wear it as a badge of honor? Those were your own words. Don't contradict yourself now by denying that you're not trying to misdirect.
As I pointed out in that more detailed comment, I was asking some questions about similar scenarios to try to understand the analytical approach that you are applying that lets you confidently judge certain journalism as harmful.
Consider the international broadcasters like Voice of America, the BBC World Service or Deutsche Welle. These organisations are state-funded, broadcast to dozens of foreign countries via shortwave or satellite and often have explicit foreign policy goals. A government beaming news reports into a foreign (and often hostile) country is at the very least suspicious.
We know as a fact that the US has engaged in major international astroturfing campaigns, using large clusters of VPN nodes and thousands of bogus personae to influence public debate in foreign countries. There's a not-unreasonable argument that this capability is mainly being used to combat "extremism", but there's a huge amount of disagreement about what exactly constitutes "extremism".
Perhaps it's time for an international convention on psychological warfare? At the very least, it would be useful to have some kind of high-level debate on where we draw the line between providing an alternative viewpoint and engaging in hostile propaganda activities.
To me it makes perfect sense that when a foreign state actor is determined to be hostile to your country by your intelligence community, that you are going to stop accepting money from them.
Also seems (if RT is telling the truth) that the paid RT election propaganda on twitter was actually twitter's idea that they pitched to RT, so perhaps twitter got greedy and is complicit (as opposed to just having ran ads indiscriminately) and now they're trying to wash their hands to avoid a PR disaster.
Link: https://twitter.com/M_Simonyan/status/923519609269116928
I think it's not just about being state-funded, but "powerful interests" funded. Large corporations want to control public opinions just as much. US government doesn't sponsor CNN directly, but it itself as a business as well as its advertisers are vested in having one political outcome vs another. They are far from neutral.
As to the topic at hand, it all started with a PR campaign promoted by Clinton and the media organizations which backed her candidacy (to the point of handing her debate questions beforehand or smearing or silencing her opponents) that Russians significantly altered the results of the election, up to and including flipping the result completely.
We've heard for months Russians, Russians, Russians, "17 Intelligence agencies", piss dossier blackmail, secret meetings or coded gestures being signaled at some dinners and so on. It is a story many want to believe, because it explains their view of the world -- "my compatriots could not have possibly have voted how they did", or "my candidate was so good and experienced there is no way people could have voted for any other candidate". So there is a desire to believe in these conspiracy theories, simply because they provide an explanation for what happened.
As you said, Russia is interfering with elections, so are Americans, Chinese, anybody with money is going to trying to influence election results in US. They'd be stupid not to.
And I agree in general with the idea of identifying and stopping the influence as much as possible, so good on Twitter here. What is suspicious is this continuous obsession with Russia. I think it is a distraction and a waste of time. I think a better obsession would be an obsession with US. Say looking at what's happening here and why did so many people voted how they did. It has nothing to do with KGB. But then again I've accused of being a "Russian shill" since I don't seem to like Clinton and don't tow the party line here. So you know, take these words with a grain of salt (or maybe a shot of vodka).
There is still the question though: have other nations participated in this creation of news? Probably so, so perhaps the spot light shouldn't be on Russia only, but more generalized into this problem. But, the problem exists nonetheless and taking action is reasonable.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/julian-assange-wikileak...
So why didn't wikileaks mention that?
They all do the same stuff.
That said, what has WikiLeaks published that has turned out untrue?
[fixed Pedestal/Podesta autocomplete]
http://www.newsweek.com/republicans-trump-russia-dossier-cli...
Allegedly also partially "funded by an unknown Republican during the GOP primary."
> That said, what has WikiLeaks published that has turned out untrue?
I don't think anybody is arguing that WikiLeaks is posting fake news or untrue information - the argument is that WikiLeaks is curating the information it releases in order to send a specific message.
They released a bunch of info claimed to be mails from the inner echelons of the AKP (ruling Islamist party) that turned out to be an archive of a public Yahoo group used by random Turks to bitch about things including politics.
If they'd have hired a basic Turkish speaker to look at the leak, they'd have avoided being burned. Instead, they decided to get into a spat with an actual journalist and researcher who's been working against Erdogan for years and tried to paint them as Erdogan shills.
Consider something. Let's use Trump as an example, since the discussion of 'why aren't they releasing stuff on [the other side]' is generally connected to him. Imagine somebody had a treasure trove of leaked and compromising information on Trump. And they then submitted this information to Wikileaks. As the weeks and months passed by, it became clear to them that Wikileaks was not going to publish this information. Do you think they would not submit this to other media outlets? US media outlets would do absolutely anything for this sort of information.
I'm curious to see where my logic may be failing me.
Other outlets are accepted [by general public] to have already been compromised wrt bias.
Up until the Trump campaign - Wikileaks was considered to be an unbiased leak of private and/or confidential information.
The name "Wiki" even intentionally evokes the name Wikipedia, the (slightly biased) generalist source of information that appears at the top of many of our search results.
In many cases, Wikileaks is actually worse. Seeing MSNBC or Fox News flash on the screen, we know the bias put forth by the company. We don't know Assange's bias. Correction, we do now.
To be honest, I'm curious to see how your logic even equated Wikileaks to other media outlets in the first place.
If I take your response as the answer then it would imply you believe that somebody would choose to simply not publish substantive leaks if they couldn't get them published by wikileaks. However, I'm sure you don't believe that, so that must be a straw man - leading me to believe that you probably are simply choosing to not answer the question.
Assange stated that the data was requested by Cambridge Analytica knowing they were hired by the Trump campaign for normal opposition research. I consider withholding that information alone (the fact that the guys Trump's campaign hired attempted to break the law and were rebuffed) as quite impactful. Trump is quite tight with Brad Parscale, as he was the "Campaign Digital Director" in charge of these things.
Your entire Parent post is centered around a false equivalency between MSM outlets and Wikileaks.
Here's a similar assumption I'll throw your way: Parent personally slighted you and/or your belief system, and caused you to react this aggressively to my comment.
If I were to employ the same non-sequitur logic you used about myself further, I would reckon you are a shill.
I'm just asking why you think this and in particular why our hypothetical leaker would not simply contact another organization for publication if Wikileaks failed to do so? Many of the biggest leaks in recent times have not come from Wikileaks. The Panama Papers were published by Süddeutsche Zeitung. Snowden's NSA and global surveillance leaks were brought to the public attention through contact with Glenn Greenwald.
I'd actually even take this a step further. Wikileaks is under an implicit, but mandatory, obligation to publish such materials if they were given them. Imagine our leaker did simply take the materials to e.g. Glenn Greenwald and published our hypothetical groundbreaking leaks. A condition of said leaks could also be publication of the fact that they were provided to Wikileaks who chose to not publish them. That would, overnight, destroy Wikileaks as an organization.
The minute anyone can prove that WL withheld anything newsworthy to suit its own political goals, WL is done. This has not happened. Further, anyone who leaked something big about Trump to WL (such as his taxes) would clearly want to see them exposed, and would not sit by and wait for Trump to win while the damning materials went unpublished.
They can't publish what they don't receive.
No, not like that at all.
The claim there is: All major French political parties were targeted for infiltration by the CIA's human ("HUMINT") and electronic ("SIGINT") spies in the seven months leading up to France's 2012 presidential election.
That's dramatically different to actively trying to (a) make US citizens lose faith in the US election system and, (b) influence the election outcome.
Reading the CIA leak, it seems like pretty sensible questions. The ethics of spying during an election could be argued, but I think it is entirely reasonable for every country to be trying to understand similar things listed in that document ("What policies do they promote to help boost France's economic growth prospects?", "What are their opinions on the German model of export-led growth?" etc).
If they were being reasonable they would be listing a lot more organizations that spread propaganda than just RT.
This looks completely reactionary.
The ultimate goal would be to have the elections questioned by the losers (whoever the winner was) in order to diminish US influence abroad as the winner would be busy with internal affairs. It was probably a bet against Hillary winning since she had a more hawkish international vision.
Anybody, who claims that RTs and Sputniks $274,100 spent during the campaign had a material effect on the elections should very well explain, how the Russians are getting orders of magnitude better ROI than everyone else. I'm all ears and I'm sure all the DC lobbyists too.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidentia...
But keep in mind that all of the projections based on data collection, historical trends, polling, etc., had Trump suffering a decisive loss up until several hours into election night.
In order for the description to give to be true, you have to believe that all of the pollsters, Nate Silver, etc., didn't know what they were doing. The thing is, they did actually know what they were doing.
Crediting Cambridge Analytica, RT, the Russian government, Donald Trump, or anyone else with some sort of strategic genius because Trump won is utterly ludicrous.
Trump's strategy was innovative in that it blended things that had traditionally been part of the Democrats' and Republicans' platforms, but at no point did anyone on Trump's side have any remote degree of certainty that it would succeed. Trump was outspent by 4:1 or even 5:1 by the Clinton campaign.
This is not because he had a far more efficient approach and enjoyed a comfy lead the whole time, but because he simply didn't have the support from donors needed to spend more than that (and wasn't willing or able to invest more of his own alleged wealth).
Trump's win was not really even a win in the sense that many of the voters in rust belt areas that he "won" from Hillary had voted for Obama previously. HRC's campaign felt that the rust belt was not an area where Hillary needed to do more campaigning, and it's not clear they were wrong in thinking that. Maybe Trump's gruff pro-American bluster was unbeatable there, and Hillary would have struggled to seem sympathetic to the economic struggles going on there.
But the point is that Trump simply chose a strategy of combining national defense "strong man" posturing with the typical rust belt "buy American" playbook that Democrats have been using for years. Yes it's a bit racist, but it was when Democrats used it too.
Trump's strategy almost didn't work, and everyone who expected it not to work was probabilistically right. It had very low chances of winning and came down to the moves made by both candidates in the final days before the election that drove turnout more than they influenced candidate choice.
Yes the leaked email stories hurt HRC, but I think that her refusal to address the issue head on when asked about it and to offer full transparency was a big mistake. It conveyed an elitism and arrogance that might very well have led a lot of former or lukewarm supporters to stay home.
My point is that it wasn't about the detailed analytics, it was about the big, slow trends of rust-belt economic hardship and the resulting resentments, and Trump managing to beat a very mediocre and uninspiring GOP field to win the primary with his populist message.
I'd actually been predicting the onset of an authoritarian, trade-protectionist trend for a while but I did not think Trump would beat such a strong and well-funded establishment candidate.
I say this because in all of the chaos about "Russian meddling" we are told to believe a story that involves too many evil geniuses and too little acknowledgement of big, slow trends.
I also don't buy it that Hillary "coming clean" about the emails would have been preferable to denying any serious wrongdoing. Everyone claims they value honesty and openness, but its probably an example of people saying one thing while acting entirely differently. Is it preferable to let a narrative form against her, or to simply use her own words against her to claim she's unsuitable to be president? I don't know, but its far from obvious that just copping to every claim against her regarding the emails was the right move.
There were many campaign missteps and ignoring the rust belt was chief among them. But ultimately she did have the election in the bag until Comey's 11th hour memo about more emails being found. There are a lot of external factors that caused her to lose, but it should never have been that close and it was because of her blind spot for the rust belt.
I'm not suggesting there was anything to come clean about. But there were emails indicating that some of the campaign finance stuff relating to the Clinton Foundation was not above board. Not only did HRC not address this issue, but she didn't claim that the organization was just like many other similar orgs, or offer to offer a full audit of where the dollars went. Those are the totally obvious responses to allegations that lines have been crossed.
True, doing that would have played into the idea that the story was real, but keep in mind that there were emails from a disgruntled loyalist who was mad at Chelsea threatening to reveal the scheme as fraud.
The news orgs generally ignored this story for some reason, so maybe that's why there wasn't a specific response to it offered by the campaign, but in my view it is not really clear whether it was completely above board or not. Per my earlier comment elsewhere in the thread, I am concerned that lifetime public servant Paul Ryan has a net worth of $8M, and that the Clintons are worth $250M after public service careers.
What are the odds that Paul Ryan obtained that money legitimately? I'd say they are quite slim. If emails about Ryan were found that indicated a likely corrupt source of the funds, I'd hope that some journalist somewhere would pick up the story and take it to fruition. I'd hope the same thing about any major US political candidate, if there is evidence that a massive ($250M) fortune might have been improperly won through deals that violate campaign finance law.
It's not that I don't think Ryan or Clinton are relatively good "knowledge workers" for the jobs they end up in, it's that the purpose of campaign finance law is to prevent interest groups from being able to buy their way in. If we let our "nice" politicians get bought by interest groups in ways that violate campaign finance law, we are allowing the corrupting incentives to exist that campaign finance law is meant to prevent.
Surely, by the same token, congress should pass a law requiring the publication of a decade or more of income tax history for any personal wealth or companies where the candidate as a majority shareholder. Note that in spite of the massive opposition to Trump's failure to offer up his tax returns, no such law has been discussed. Chances are quite a few officials or would-be officials would rather not be subject to additional transparency requirements.
Comey's involvement was truly odd. I thought he should have been more thorough/careful before he dismissed the possibility of any wrongdoing initially. How long does it take for a team of people to review a few thousand emails. I think it could be done in a weekend if there was any motivation at all to resolve the issue in a timely fashion. So Comey not only chose to allow his actions to impact the election, but allowed his agency's tarnishing of the campaign to drag on and on in a completely unreasonable way. So in my view his last-minute comments were one of several major blunders. He's been challenged over his decisions, but I have not heard him challenged on why it takes so long to review emails. Of the 20K emails most were spam just like in any inbox. So we're talking about a few thousand pages of reading that took months and months for no apparent reason.
And as far as Clinton's personal wealth, 15 years of book deals and 100k speaking engagements will create quite a nest egg. Let alone starting their careers as high powered attorneys. There's nothing unexplained here.
Most of that was just politically motivated stuff. The difference is that the trove of emails was not filtered and research discovered the potentially implicating campaign finance stuff within that trove.
> 15 years of book deals and 100k speaking engagements
The personal wealth was likely done in a way that does not violate any laws. A donor can make a book deal happen with a $2M advance rather than violating laws by donating $2M. That's gray area but not surprising or concerning.
The potential area of concern is the way that the Clinton Foundation may have been used to collect donations from foreign governments in a pay-to-play arrangement. I'm not entirely sure whether it's reasonable that such things are illegal, but they are illegal so if someone is doing it we should all be concerned.
I'm pretty concerned about Paul Ryan's $8M as well. You didn't address this so I am guessing that you assume it all to be above board?
(that said, I'm not an expert on campaign law and I'm not in a position to say what was/wasn't legal: I'm just trying to point out that it's not enough to look only at quantity spent)
Which gets us back to the issue of Russian propaganda through social networks.
Washpo admit they got it wrong, at least.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/12/...
Why is it that you treat one case as "look at their evil propaganda" and the other as "oh gee practices could be better"?
Let me be honest with you. I'm European so I shouldn't really have a stake here. But I look at the world and what I see is that US media is infinitely more influential in Europe than Russian media. Infinitely more influential in Europe than even European media, and that concerns me. So your "oh gee practices could be better but we're the good guys trust me" doesn't fly with me.
Can you say the same for RT and Sputnik?
What about Fox News? Did they apologize?
> have engaged in considerable soul searching.
It is my opinion that absolutely nothing changed. It's still the same people with the same interests.
Thanks for the link, I'll read it.
Your representations (in this thread and elsewhere) simply fail to accurately reflect the facts.
What do you mean?
Both the NYTimes and the Washington Post published major editorials saying how they got it wrong. I'm sure other papers followed as well, but they were some of the more notable.
And it was hardly one story - it was a whole narrative about how they trusted that the White House was giving them information in good faith, and how they should have paid more attention to signs that faith was misplaced.
And yes - that faith was misplaced, and yes they should have paid more attention.
It is my opinion that absolutely nothing changed
Well, both papers became much more doubtful about any claims from the Bush administration after that.
And you may have noticed they were pretty harsh on Obama's claims of how easy health care would be. They also seem to be asking questions about some of the Trump administrations claims - or at least he seems to think they are being very unfair to him.
"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"
In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., "we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58127-2004Aug...
Now they are embarrassed.
Hacker News is a community. You don't have to use your real name, of course, but users should have some consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be an entirely different forum.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac...
[2] http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-a-lobbying/3...
You can check Sputnik and RT here: https://euvsdisinfo.eu
Foreign intervention in elections up till then have been pure amateur hour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clint...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEMA_camps_conspiracy_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_genocide_conspiracy_theo...
Even president 45 fell for this admittedly pathetic troll:
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/22/politics/donald-trump-retw...
It does seem like there are a fair bit of analysts in United States intelligence (Clint Watts being on that side of the fence, essentially) who strongly believe that RT or Sputnik are less media sources, and are instead funnels of disinformation propaganda designed to destabilize the United States government. Whatever your personal opinion of these media sources are, in this light, Twitter's action here is hardly surprising.
For example: https://www.rt.com/op-edge/272920-us-army-jade-helm/