No, they say (in the public assessment) that Russia intervened to favor Trump, not that there was interaction between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Now, there's been at least one guilty plea from the Mueller investigation specifically referencing interaction, but that's a separate thing from the public intelligence assessment.
No, they don't.
> There's at least two anti-Trump rallies alleged to have been organized by Russia.
Be that as it may, the public assessment does not state as the ICs assessment that any part of the intervention had an anti-Trump purpose (a rally can be organized whose overt message supports a cause without the purpose being advancing that cause.)
The FBI strongly disagrees with that statement. Facebook has been proven to be used as one of the tools to achieve those ends.
Whatever the FBI or people in it believe, the public assessment put forth by the US Intelligence Community does not address interaction; it is inaccurate to attribute that as a public unanimous conclusion of the Intelligence Community.
Note that I'm not making the “no collusion” argument, hence the reference to the Papadopoulos plea. The Trump-Russia interaction just is outside the scope of the public Intelligence Community assessment, and shouldn't be described as the public conclusion of the US intelligence community.
If we were so worried about the integrity of democracy, we wouldn't have our fingers in so many other ones. You've just described soft power.
If the citizens of Iran or Vietnam or Korea or Iraq have a right to be upset at a lack of political self-determination, so do I. Punishing the people of a country for the actions of the leaders they did not meaningfully choose is exactly why US interference is wrong.
And it is because I as an individual care about democracy that I oppose the actions of both my leaders and anyone else to override democracy.
Great question. We don't know, because either we don't get caught or doesn't happen to begin with.
We can make up all sorts of conspiracies, but Russia got caught so the conversation starts there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_interventi...
Probably a level which should induce intense concerns in citizens of those countries if they already had a democracy to protect in the first place.
But thanks for the textbook display of Whataboutism.
Whataboutism is pointing at an unrelated problem, to divert attention from your problem. "But what about African Americans getting beaten!" to draw attention from bread lines and GULAGs - that sort of thing.
This is an incredibly related problem. The two cannot be discussed in isolation. This is quite literally, one of the top countries for 'interference in democratic elections' having an issue with its election being interfered with by a foreign power (In a relatively[1] minor way.)
Notice how none of the talking heads or politicians are taking a principled stance against interference with elections - they are just taking a stance against interference with their elections.
[1] Relatively, in terms of impact, effort expended, size of the United States.
Yes, the accusation you've launched is one of blatant hypocrisy; the use of such accusations against those raising an issue as distraction technique to draw attention away from the issue raised is exactly the definition of Whataboutism.
You can probably construct an argument where the hypocrisy of some speaker advancing the argument would itself actually be relevant to the argument being advanced [0], but that's almost never the case in any real discussion; instead Whataboutism (and then tu quoque fallacy more generally) has the same rhetorical purpose as guilt by association or as hominem; create a negative emotional charge attached to some group associated with an argument, and use that to get people to dismiss the argument without considering it's merits.
The accusations in the motivating instances for naming Whataboutism were often both indisputably true and the same type of wrong as the act they served to distract from.(which is as close to relevance as charges of hypocrisy get.) They were still fallacious, just as this one is, irrespective of its truth or.degree of analogy.
[0] e.g., if the argument specifically included as a key point that the speaker did not engage in hypocrisy.
You can cry "whataboutism" all you want when confronted with examples like these ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... ), but don't be surprised or dismayed when no one listens.
Sure, it's a “thing”, specifically a name based on rationalization given to the cognitive filtering mechanism which a number of fallacies, notably as hominem and tu quoque, target.
But it's never relevant to the merits of the argument; targeting moral authority is always an effort to avoid consideration of the merits of the argument.
If so, I sympathize. I get that a lot, myself.
But, and maybe someone can clarify, every single intelligence agency has come out and said that there was some interaction between Russia and Trump and, more specifically, between Facebook and Russia. And it's been proven Facebook is directly implicated in both the Trump campaign and Russian election meddling.
We hold the ability to vote in free elections as pretty a basic fundamental right in a democracy, so why wouldn't this be the thing we should all be worried about?