EAllusion wrote:Indictments aren't equivalent to guilt and an indictment shouldn't be taken that way. But we have lots of evidence available to us.
... Now that we are in agreement that an indictment isn't evidence and shouldn't be treated as such,...
That's not what EA said. This continues to be an example of your conflating proof and evidence. Evidence sits on a spectrum which can be for or against a claim. If someone described indictments as conclusive evidence, perhaps then you'd be making a point here. But that isn't the case.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
Themis wrote:Where there is smoke there is almost always fire
Same stuff was said about Obama, tables were perfectly turned. Now here we are.
Lots of things were said without any real smoke. Do you have any examples to provide some substance to your assertion? Things is very different with Trump. Much of the smoke comes from his own words and behaviors. Even a number of Republicans and republican friendly organizations are telling us of Russian interference. Maybe if you can provide an example with Obama we can see if we have a number of democrats agreeing.
canpakes wrote:Depends on the indictment you're talking about. I'm extremely skeptical of the indictment of Russian military officers. Other indictments towards people like Flynn and Manafort, I'm not particularly skeptical of as far as the technical letter of the law is concerned. I'm sure Flynn did lie to the FBI. I don't think it's relevant though. It's a Scooter Libby situation that ultimately does not serve justice.
To your question of a line of convergence. You're asking for me to speculate. I don't have any issue with doing that, but should be kept in context. I believe Russia is engaged in normal intelligence activities like anyone else. It wouldn't surprise me if they were involved in some of the email leaks, even all of them. But I don't think there is any hard evidence to support this, based purely on analytical conjecture. Nonetheless, if they were involved, I don't believe they were specifically targeting democrats with the design of a kind of soft coup as its being made out to be. More likely they were just trying to gain access to whatever they could gain access to... democrats, republicans, you, me, anybody, everybody. In my mind it's not very likely that the Russian state was involved, but highly likely that private Russian citizens were involved. Then, those people may have sold that data to someone else... like the Russian govt, or anybody who was willing to pay for it. Also possible multiple parties were involved. Democrats could have had their systems infiltrated by multiple sources... at the same time. Whether Russians were involved I frankly don't care. We know who the emails came from... the democrats. It was not manufactured propaganda. To the extent that these emails did or didn't influence the election, it's the democrats own fault and well deserved. I really just don't think it even had much of an impact. The emails were barely reported on outside of right-wing circles. But again, I don't care. Because they were truthful. Was CNN running fake stories about Hillary thanks to these emails? No. But they were running fake stories about Trump during the same time period. In this respect it was already very much a rigged game.
Thanks for your response. This helps me understand where you’re coming from.
You mention the ‘emails’ situation above; are you convinced that Russian activities were limited to that, or do you see a possibility of the Russians having also engaged in a wider disinformation effort (the original ‘fake news’ incidents propagated via social media, email, fake news sites, etc.) designed to generate distrust or confusion?
There's a range of evidence a person can be indicted on. In theory, it's supposed to warrant belief that prosecutors have a reasonable chance at securing a conviction, but as the saying goes, you can indict a ham sandwich. On the other end, people also get indicted on rock solid cases, like video tapes of teh person committing the crime. Indictment alone isn't reason to conclude guilt, but we have access to enough of the evidence in public to have a good sense of how strong the cases minimally are. And the answer is quite strong.
canpakes wrote:Thanks for your response. This helps me understand where you’re coming from.
You mention the ‘emails’ situation above; are you convinced that Russian activities were limited to that, or do you see a possibility of the Russians having also engaged in a wider disinformation effort (the original ‘fake news’ incidents propagated via social media, email, fake news sites, etc.) designed to generate distrust or confusion?
Supposedly Russia spent money on Facebook ads. My understanding is that this was on the order of something like $100,000, in an election where many billions of dollars was spent. Not to mention all the other forms of media influence. You're talking about literally drops in the Mississippi river.
That isn't an attempt to influence an election. Been a while since I looked at that, but I know there were reports that showed the particular ads as well. They are comically bad, and promoted both conservatives and liberals alike. We could discuss what the purpose of those ads were, but it certainly wasn't to influence voting. More likely it was intended for what they are being used for now. Regardless of who one, they can disseminate misinformation to suggest "collusion" and then play that narrative either direction. There is no way you could expect to have any impact whatsoever on an election with $100k in Facebook ads. You'd have a hard time influencing the mayor election of even a small town with that little. LOL. Perhaps they were running a test on Facebook itself, to see how many clicks they would get? Maybe it was a social media experiment? Who the hell knows. I think Putin is the type that he likes to troll and just “F” with people. So he invests in damned opportunities and boy this one is paying out in spades.
There's so much evidence of Russian activity it's comical. After the indictments, you can see this very detailed picture emerge just on what we're able to access. When some of these pieces of evidence have been pointed out to Water Dog, he's reasoned that it could actually be a super-sophisticated framing job.
Themis wrote:Lots of things were said without any real smoke. Do you have any examples to provide some substance to your assertion? Things is very different with Trump. Much of the smoke comes from his own words and behaviors. Even a number of Republicans and republican friendly organizations are telling us of Russian interference. Maybe if you can provide an example with Obama we can see if we have a number of democrats agreeing.
There's so much evidence of Russian activity it's comical. After the indictments, you can see this very detailed picture emerge just on what we're able to access. When some of these pieces of evidence have been pointed out to Water Dog, he's reasoned that it could actually be a super-sophisticated framing job.
You can't reason with that level of (deliberate) thick-headedness.
Thanks for the links.
First, I was not aware of this. All I have asked for is the evidence. Show me the evidence. I believe this is the first time anybody has actually linked to some supposed evidence. Still not the actual evidence, but at least it's a report discussing supposed evidence that exists. I do not track every news report that has come out, this is information I had missed.
American investigators have identified two people behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona, both officers of the GRU. The investigators were apparently able to unmask the hacker thanks to one crucial mistake: the hacker forgot to turn on his VPN once, revealing his real IP address, presumably when he used either WordPress or Twitter.
LOL. In the other thread I sarcastically joked about identifying the hacker because they failed to use a VPN. And now it turns out that truly is what this is based on? They have an IP address from Russia. Wow, that's some hard hitting evidence right there. Madness.
