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A comment on Edward Snowden on The Joe Rogan Experience [video]. Parent comment

Re:Edward Snowden on The Joe Rogan Experience [video] by pstuart on Thursday October 24, 2019 @06:17PM (#21349762)
I'm a Democrat because this is a two-party system and any shred of old-school conservatism left the GOP a long time ago. The GOP today is the Trump party.

A spoiler is by definition any candidate that takes votes away from a possible winner in a close race. That is uncontested. Many consider Ross Perot to be a spoiler.

Regardless of "rumors", there is the fact that she's been the darling of the right wing: Tucker, Karl, David Duke, et. al.

Give me one reason other than spoiler why they would liker her.

We also know that Russia operates disinformation campaigns here and has weaponized social media. There is documented proof of them setting up BLM vs. "All Life Matters" events to intentionally divide us.

They will seize every point of division and amplify it to their best abilities.

Whether or not she actively solicits the KGB's help, they will be helping her.

Tell me where I'm wrong.

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Re:Edward Snowden on The Joe Rogan Experience [video] by jessaustin on Friday October 25, 2019 @12:22AM (#21351858)
Rove and Duke are horrible people, so if they were to support her I'm sure it would be for suspect reasons. (If Duke weren't consulted every time we have an election, would anyone remember he still exists? Does he still exist?) For whatever other faults he may have, Carlson actually seems like a pacifist to me. Perhaps he hasn't always been, but I haven't always been either. (Perhaps, like me, and unlike anyone else on TV news, he has paid attention for the last two decades?) He has already interceded directly to cool down the conflict with Iran. [0] Incidentally, opposition to foreign wars is one of the oldest authentically conservative political values in USA. The military-industrial complex has no values, conservative or otherwise. Fools who styled themselves conservative have long been useful to MIC. Fools who style themselves liberal have been so recently. From my increasingly pacifist point of view, it's hard to differentiate the two packs of fools.

I suspect that Carlson isn't actually a Gabbard partisan. He is, however, one of the few people on TV who have interviewed her with an open mind. This tells us more about TV media than about Gabbard.

Even if I believed every single thing I've heard about what Russia supposedly did about our last election (and I don't) I wouldn't care. They haven't been accused of changing votes or stuffing ballot boxes. They have been accused of excessive communication. 1A, dude. If our democracy can't handle speech, it ain't really a democracy. KGB didn't put Trump on all four channels of TV news for 25 hours a day starting in mid-2015. KGB didn't decide we'd waste trillions of dollars and uncounted lives on decades of pointless war. Etc.

Also, living where I live, I've heard a lot of awful shit said about BLM. I don't think any of it was as obnoxious as the idea that they were about the KGB rather than, you know, what their fucking name says.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/us/politics/trump-iran-st...

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Re:Edward Snowden on The Joe Rogan Experience [video] by pstuart on Sunday October 27, 2019 @09:56PM (#21373693)
I'm quite bemused to find myself in the Eisenhower Republican camp: Russia is our enemy and wants to destroy us. They've found it's easiest and cheapest to simply inject some cash and let us do it from the inside.

> If our democracy can't handle speech

Speech or propaganda? An unfortunately high number of our citizens are either too stupid or too uninformed to vote "correctly" (i.e., assess and analyze proposed candidates, laws, etc). I'm not trying to be elitist, just pessimistic about things.

This is all an "Experiment in Democracy", right? We're applying a system developed in the agrarian age that now is suffering from information overload, nationally coordinated disinformation campaigns, and the influx of unlimited money in political campaigns.

We need to rethink how to achieve the original goals without bad guys gaming the system.

Sorry, this is kind of rambling, but HN sucks fluid dialog.

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Re:Edward Snowden on The Joe Rogan Experience [video] by jessaustin on Monday October 28, 2019 @12:36PM (#21378507)
Russia is our enemy and wants to destroy us.

This may have been true decades ago when a different polity existed there and conditions in general were quite different. I see no evidence that this is true today. Occasionally Russian politicians might rattle the saber, but that's mostly for domestic political reasons, like it is in every other nation on Earth including USA. Just as USA society is not a monolith, neither is Russia society. Russian military interests are specific to particular nations like Ukraine and Syria where they also have economic interests. The main thing they want from USA is something they have in common with a number or other nations: please stop the sanctions and related economic aggression.

I'm sure anyone here could come up with a variety of USA war media articles or presentations criticizing the conduct of the Russian state in one way or another. In every such article I've read, Russia is held to a standard that USA hasn't met since the start of the Philippine-American War at the latest, and in some cases since the Pilgrims landed. I'd like to think that such articles insult their readers' intelligence.

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