Maksutov wrote:Dude, Trump came in on a conspiracy theory called Birtherism. The tin foil is with Trump from the very beginning. Have you ever actually watched Alex Jones? Birtherism wasn't just ____, it was racist as well. RACIST. Why would he have to reach for racist lies if he really was a better candidate?
It amazes me that Trumpies don’t understand that Trump’s promotion of Birtherism places their entire cause and argument in a credibility hole that is difficult to climb out of. It doesn’t help when they give Trump, the guy who said this Birther ____ repeatedly, more trust than the very believable and demonstrable pattern of Russian meddling in Western elections. This is a tinfoil hat conspiracy? Birtherism was not? I would guess that Trump fans are the very people who are most likely to believe Birtherism, 9/11 Truthism, and any number of other crazy government conspiracy theories.
Let's revisit the level of discourse on the subject...
Kishkumen wrote:Tinfoil hat conspiracies like the government faking the moon landing? Or 9/11 being an inside job? I think you have a very bizarre idea of what a tinfoil hat conspiracy is.
Ok. Wait. Pause the music. Did you just say the moon landings were fake and 9/11 was an inside job?
The big news from the indictments appears to be that GRU attempted a criminal hack Clinton's emails the same day Trump called on them to do so. People keep waiting for (more) smoking gun evidence of collusion when you have overt signaling happening out in the open. That continues to happen to this day.
There's an irony that of all the things Russia successfully hacked, and it was a lot, the one thing that proved to be impregnable was Clinton's infosec around her personal server. The server is not only the reason Clinton didn't win, but it probably is the reason that there wasn't a landslide victory that would've brought an enduring 6-3 liberal majority on the Supreme Court. History turns on such stupid things.
The second news story that seems to be getting a lot of coverage is at least one Congressional candidate, who may now be a member of Congress, solicited and received materials from a criminal hack against their opponent.
What I find most interesting is the indictments make it clear that Democrat analytics were also stolen. Those would be incredibly valuable for opponents to have, maybe more so than the deluge of wikileaks stories the press irresponsibly covered, and we don't know what was done with those. Contrary to the alternative universe Waterdog is in, it's also impressive how dead to rights the evidence is. It should be obvious, but they're working with a lot more than tech forensics. Time and time again, when we get these brief glimpses into the investigation, the more pessimistic scenarios seem more likely.
EAllusion wrote:There's an irony that of all the things Russia successfully hacked, and it was a lot, the one thing that proved to be impregnable was Clinton's infosec around her personal server.
Where do you come up with this stuff? We don't know Russians are responsible for email leaks any more than we know they didn't hack her bathroom server full of classified docs. The FBI didn't examine any of these computers. In the case of Clinton's server, she had it destroyed to prevent examination, lol.
I keep thinking about the partisan Republican delegation of Senators to Moscow on July 4th wherein they tried to enforce a relative press blackout and came back downplaying Russian election inference and calling for a softer stance on measures against Russia.
The optics of that are atrocious. If Democrats did it, there probably would be calls for assassination for traitorous behavior on the fringes of mainstream conservative media.
Yet they did it. To me, this signals that they must feel relatively invincible to any media consequences of this, and I really can't blame them. Speculation about a mutual understanding of future interference on their behalf is almost too awful to contemplate, but at this point obviously can't be dismissed. But really, the fact that the extreme appearance of impropriety isn't a deterrent says something about how much immunity they think they have.
EAllusion wrote:There's an irony that of all the things Russia successfully hacked, and it was a lot, the one thing that proved to be impregnable was Clinton's infosec around her personal server.
Where do you come up with this stuff? We don't know Russians are responsible for email leaks any more than we know they didn't hack her bathroom server full of classified docs. The FBI didn't examine any of these computers. In the case of Clinton's server, she had it destroyed to prevent examination, lol.
It’s probably safest to assume that the Russians would never do any of that stuff. We don’t have to worry about it. Putin said so, as Trump has reminded us.
Water Dog wrote:Where do you come up with this stuff? We don't know Russians are responsible for email leaks any more than we know they didn't hack her bathroom server full of classified docs.
The indictment among other things? Russians tried and failed in their hacking operation against this, but not the DNC, RNC, various state voter databases, and major and minor campaign figures.