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Now consider "pizzagate," a claim that John Podesta and possibly Hillary Clinton were somehow involved in some kind of child trafficking ring based on a few cryptic out of context sentences in their e-mails. Clinton was known for being anti-Putin, while her rival Trump seems pro-Putin.

Can I be forgiven for thinking we're in the midst of a full-blown cyber war assault by Russia against political opponents abroad?

If this is indeed the case, I really think the best thing for US intelligence to do would be to take a page from the Russian playbook and leak everything they have on this and "doxx" everyone involved.

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Russians already consider the leaked Panama documents a Western "doxx." The Panama leak, if you recall, showed that one of Putin's friends, a humble musician otherwise, was holding accounts worth $2bn. Western media, and opposition media in Russia, ran the story for weeks as proof of Putin's corruption.

Kremlin predictably called it a Western hoax, and an act of cyber war. I wouldn't be surprised if they ~actually~ viewed it as such. If that's the case, the DNC leak might well have been motivated, in part, as their retaliatory strike.

I believe your interpretation of the facts. But the other interpretation, which a bunch of folks hold firmly to, is that Pizzagate is accurate and the NYT is publishing this article as a way of discrediting it.

The problem is that you have to believe either that there's a vast Russian conspiracy to destroy America by manipulating the media, or a vast American conspiracy to run a child trafficking ring by manipulating the media. There isn't a particularly compelling explanation of the facts where you don't believe in a conspiracy at all. And since both possibilities are so far out of our usual experience, the people who favor each interpretation talk past each other.

>full-blown cyber war assault

This "cyber-war" is, naturally, a little less abhorrent to ones personage as the alternative which is that ..

>Clinton is the tip of the ice-berg of a global conspiracy to blackmail .. and control governments .. by way of sick, sexual, perversion, involving human slavery and .. beyond ..

.. okay. I understand. I hope its not true, too. Lets use Democracy (tm), et al., to find out ..

There seems to be more evidence for the former than the latter.

Really? There is evidence? Because, so far, not a single shred of evidence has been presented. The fantasy that Russia hacked the elections is just as ethereal as the fantasy that the US Gov't has been compromised by pedophile networks. I mean, both of these evil conspiracies are as 'proven' as each other, and both result in the same conclusion: the US is truly fucked.

It's sometimes difficult to tell the difference between "cyberwarfare" and "a bunch of idiots on reddit".

I don't think the fact that they're on Reddit is particularly interesting. Consider that we did, already, have a big moral panic over Satanic ritual abuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse

We already know that humans are susceptible to believing that people at the highest levels of power are participating in Satanic rituals and child abuse, despite a lack of sensible evidence. Funny that that's exactly what was insinuated about the Democrats.

We, as humanity, have got to get better at handling the cognitive biases of ourselves at scale.

Suggestions?

If Putin wanted to frame Clinton and Podesta for child rape, he would have come up with something far more convincing than pizzagate.

This is why Clinton kept her emails on a secure server :-/

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but her server was anything but secure. It wasn't even using TLS.

What's more likely, Podesta getting phished or "a full-blown cyber war assault by Russia against political opponents abroad"?

Can we really think in terms of likeliness after what was revealed in South Korea?

I lack insight into russias cyber war capabilities, so I have genuinely no idea. As has probably no one else outside russias security cycles.

Those two aren't mutually exclusive.

I don't understand what you mean. Podesta getting phished could be part of a larger cyber war.

Russia's GRU has used spearphishing many times. This isn't isolated or out of the ordinary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Bear

Podesta was phished. That is a fact.

But every Pizzagate claim relies on interpretations of the emails that were (accurately, to the best of my knowledge) leaked, not what's in the emails. The "evidence" is stuff like a handkerchief with a map that seemed "pizza-related," plus the claim that this must be coded language because obviously people don't have pizza-related-map handkerchiefs, plus 4chan and UrbanDictionary references to "pizza" and "hot dog" being coded language used by pedophiles.

It's the same as with the "spirit cooking" nonsense. Yes, he was invited to a "Spirit Cooking dinner". No, there's no reason to believe that a "Spirit Cooking dinner" really means a Satanic ritual. It could be, in theory, yes; there's no way to prove that it isn't. But it probably isn't.

Is there even any evidence that he attended this dinner?

... that and having a taste for pretentious shock-art is not a crime last I checked. I've had a little bit of contact with East Coast elite circles before and that kind of vapid modern "aaaaaht" is par for the course. Never saw anything quite as over the top as Abromovic but I definitely saw things in the same shock-jocking coated with art school babble genre. I always figured it was a stuff people pretended to like for social signaling purposes.

I don't consider all the pizzagate claims impossible. Blackmail has historically been a tool of political manipulation and so a high placed blackmail ring is not unthinkable. I just consider them unlikely, especially in light of the (IMHO rather obvious) existence of an intentional cyber warfare and propaganda campaign against the Clinton presidential campaign.

I've become even more suspicious after listening to one or two interviews about "pizzagate" and hearing the following names and sources mentioned repeatedly: Brietbart news, gab.ai, 4chan, and the Washington Times. The latter is owned by a front for the Unification Church. The first two are pretty well known alt.right outlets, and 4chan is not exactly known for being a forum for unbiased rigorously vetted investigative journalism. (Nor is Reddit.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times

The sources for this seem to have negative credibility.

I'm being equal opportunity here. If there was a massive push to label Trump as head of a child abuse blackmail ring and all the info came from hard-left rags and people known for supporting Clinton I'd be just as skeptical.

I think you're pretty spot on with this. A handy thing to keep in mind when it comes to things like these is that we can only speculate. It happens too often that speculation and assumptions are presented as fact, or that someone retelling what another person says fails to use the same qualifying language and states something as fact.

I've personally come to speculate that there is some dodgy and disgusting acts occurring at this pizza joint. I'm not going to get dogmatic and explain why.

The media, through negligence or design, seems to almost always picks the weakest arguments and presents them as the best there is, if by design it's akin to strawmaning in my book. It works to drum up insane amounts of controversy and/or presents the opposing narratives case as weak. This is why we have 4chan and reddit with these rabid 'citizen journalists' that do all this investigation and forget how stupid it, and they, can be made to sound, it's also why we're going to get more of them, they can navigate through information that allows them to speculate (with good judgment in some cases IMO) that the MSM will just not cover.

> I've personally come to speculate that there is some dodgy and disgusting acts occurring at this pizza joint.

There was only one "dodgy and disgusting" act that occurred at Comet Ping Pong. That was when a man, misled by totally fabricated nonsense, brought an assault rifle into the store to, at best, intimidate and threaten innocent people.

The people spreading this conspiracy theory should be ashamed.

You are 100% correct that having an appreciation for shock art isn't a crime. For that matter, neither is hypothetically attending satanic spirit cooking dinners.

But there's so much weirdness in the peoples' lives that the Pizzagate investigation is looking into and the media is so hysterical in denying the very idea of a pedophile ring that it's just causing people to look harder into it. The type of artwork that was at a supposedly family friendly pizza place was just weird enough, but then you had the JimmyComet Instagram account allegedly putting #chickenlovers hashtags on pics with kids and much other weirdness. No smoking guns obviously, but tons of weirdness.

A normal person sees lots of things like that and goes "maybe there's something odd going on here". But the media refuses to show some of these pics and hysterically goes off kilter about "fake news".

A normal person remembers that Anderson Cooper did a report years back about LITERALLY THOUSANDS of Pentagon employees buying child porn and that story vanished down the memory hole, but no, there's nothing bad going on in DC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7n316nGhVo

That is terrifying logic, because it applies equally well to pretty much any person that happens to be in the public eye. I could generate a "pizza related" pedophile ring conspiracy theory about Paul Graham, and someone like you could step up and say "well maybe it's true because the media doesn't take pedophile rings seriously and a lot of people at the Pentagon had child porn".

A normal person does not look the underlying fact pattern and say "maybe something is going on there". But it's easy for trolls to decontextualize and distort --- well, we're down to "pizza shops" now, so I guess the words we're looking for are "anything at all" --- to force people to wonder whether there might be something going on.

Because of course: something is going on: crazy Internet trolls are trying to frame strangers for pedophilia.

> Because of course: something is going on: crazy Internet trolls are trying to frame strangers for pedophilia.

Frame is the absolute wrong word. Nobody is framing anybody. It's an investigation: and one that's limited to looking at public records and internet articles and social media accounts and the like.

I know that the New York Times has already decided the idea of a pedophile ring involving some powerful people to be double-plus "fake news", but its current CEO Mark Thompson literally helped cover up the crimes of child abuser Jimmy Savile for the BBC, so should we just take their word for it?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/jimmy-savile/10...

> The author of a controversial inquiry into the handling of the Jimmy Savile scandal at the BBC has suggested that a former director-general lied when giving evidence, according to a tape recording. Nick Pollard was asked by a journalist during a taped conversation if Mr Thompson's "instinct" was to "lie" during questioning when he appeared before the inquiry. Mr Pollard replied: "Yes. Well... yeah, yeah."

Once again: there is nobody in the world we couldn't direct this kind of "investigation" at. It's literally --- I mean literally in its original sense --- an investigation guided by Urban Dictionary. Did you not have 9th grade English class at your high school? I saw Lizzy Proctor speaking with the devil!

> there is nobody in the world we couldn't direct this kind of "investigation" at.

Most people post a lot of Instagram pics with hashtags like chickenlovers on pics of kids? Frankly, I don't think most people act in this way. I'm no stranger to twisted humor, but the weirdness level with this is off the charts if you just look at (formerly) public Instagram posts and artwork.

Again, being weird isn't a crime, and all that's happening is people looking at some of these connections and past history about them. There's a lot of smart folks who are convinced something is being covered up.

Even though Pizzagate emerged this year through Wikileaks, some of these allegations have gone on for a while. This is extremely interesting: back from Andrew Breitbart in 2011.

https://twitter.com/AndrewBreitbart/status/33636278100561920

> How prog-guru John Podesta isn't household name as world class underage sex slave op cover-upperer defending unspeakable dregs escapes me.

It's a vast conspiracy, and only only the brilliant minds on r/The_Donald could uncover it. Not local law enforcement, not the FBI. Just Internet people and their intuitions about Instagram.

New day dawning.

> There's a lot of smart folks who are convinced something is being covered up.

There were a lot of very smart Truthers and Birthers too.

> I'm no stranger to twisted humor, but the weirdness level with this is off the charts if you just look at (formerly) public Instagram posts and artwork.

Person who owns a pizza restaurant takes pictures of people who attended his restaurant! How shocking!

How anybody can even remotely consider "pizzagate" credible is beyond me.

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