redthrowaway

>He said: “In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as [Alexey] Navalny are part of that spectrum. There are also newspapers like “Novaya Gazeta”, in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn’t a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks.” In addition, he claimed “no WikiLeaks staff speak Russian, so for a strong culture which has its own language, you have to be seen as a local player.”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/24/julian-assange...

On Wikileaks facilitating Snowden's defection:

http://www.businessinsider.com/snowden-assange-wikileaks-and...

Oh, and here's him requesting FSB security guards inside the Ecuadorian embassy, because that's totally a normal thing that normal people do:

https://archive.is/wEW0o#selection-867.62-867.223

And here's just a decent run-down of the whole shebang:

https://20committee.com/2015/08/31/wikileaks-is-a-front-for-...

Or they're just a front for Russian intelligence, as has been suggested for years, as evidenced by the fact that Assange says there's no need to report on Russia because of the "free and open media" they have, as evidenced by his show on RT, as evidenced by their facilitating Snowden's defection, as evidenced by...

It seems like there are a few die-hards left who thought Assange and Manning were the greatest thing ever exposes the big bad USG, and are refusing to acknowledge the obvious: wikileaks exists so the FSB can run agitprop against its geopolitical foes.

Edit: I'd just like to point out the fact that all of these downvotes are flooding in at 3:00 am PST on a Friday night. Can anyone think of a timezone that might coincide with?

And twitter being popular with journalists makes it a fantastic platform for news junkies like myself. But that's mostly a one-way street.

Take a deep breath. There will be other elections.

>What would you do when "news" on social media is weaponized, and is used to shift the thought patterns of whole populations?

>Ignore any real or alleged connections to recent events

Please.

And there are plenty of ways to counter foreign propaganda, but a democracy needs to trust its citizens to discern the truth for themselves.

>What do you propose as an alternative? Simply allow people to intentionally mislead people for their own gain?

Yes? That's kind of one of the founding principles of liberal democracy. It was a good idea in 1791, and it's still a good idea today.

The left is flipping its shit about "fake news" these days, but even in the US they've gone through far worse eras in terms of news reliability. The fact that you used to have gatekeepers who were more or less honest is an artifact of the startup costs of the television and newspaper industries, not some nirvanal state that has collapsed into darkness.

Seriously, go take a look at some of the shit pamphleteers were up to in the 1800s. The state of affairs today is nothing.

Democracy can survive people lying. It can't survive granting the government the ability to determine which "facts" the people are allowed to believe.

So the government will now decide which media sources the public is allowed to consume.

That'll end well.

From http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/03/us/politics/hillary-bil...

But privately, she embraced the Clinton campaign’s aggressive strategy of counterattack: Women who claimed to have had sexual encounters with Mr. Clinton would become targets of digging and discrediting — tactics that women’s rights advocates frequently denounce.

The campaign hired a private investigator with a bare-knuckles reputation who embarked on a mission, as he put it in a memo, to impugn Ms. Flowers’s “character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition.”

In a pattern that would later be repeated with other women, the investigator’s staff scoured Arkansas and beyond, collecting disparaging accounts from ex-boyfriends, employers and others who claimed to know Ms. Flowers, accounts that the campaign then disseminated to the news media.

By the time Mr. Clinton finally admitted to “sexual relations” with Ms. Flowers, years later, Clinton aides had used stories collected by the private investigator to brand her as a “bimbo” and a “pathological liar.”

Mrs. Clinton’s level of involvement in that effort, as described in interviews, internal campaign records and archives, is still the subject of debate. By some accounts, she gave the green light and was a motivating force; by others, her support was no more than tacit assent.

----

The Clintonian strategy of attacking, slandering, and blackmailing his accusers is a matter of historical record. And there are many people in the know who said she was a driving force behind it, while others claim she merely acquiesced to it. You can read Hitchens recount the sordid affair here:

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/1999/05/christopher-hitchens-...

Or read No One Left to Lie to for a more in-depth look.

Now you don't have to believe she was the one driving the bus in the smear campaigns against her husband's accusers, even though plenty of people who were there at the time have said she was. But it does show that Politifact is being especially uncharitable to that claim, when they simply could have said it was disputed.

If all of your employees are doing one thing, it's safe to assume you've told them to, even if your fingerprints aren't on the proverbial gun. Your comment is exactly what I'm accusing politifact of: you're being as uncharitable as possible to the claim, ignoring common sense and plain language in order to find a reading of it you can say is false.

Thing is, you're not pretending to be impartial and non-partisan. Nor am I. Politifact is. When Politifact's standard of objectivity is indistinguishable from that of a reasonably intelligent random commenter on the Internet, that's a problem.

Nope. Politifact will generally use the most generous possible reading of what a Democrat says, or the least generous reading of what a Republican says, when determining truth or falsehood.

Take a look at these two stories:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/...

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/...

Now, the first story is simply true. Hillary Clinton did attack her husband's mistresses and accusers, and there's a long history of documentation of that. But Politifact labels it "mostly false" because it was never proven to have come directly from her. As if Sidney Blumenthal just took it upon himself to slander Lewinsky as a delusional nymphomaniac.

In the second link, Clinton claims none of her emails were labelled Top Secret. Note the dodge, here. She didn't say, "I didn't send or receive classified information", she said "those emails didn't contain the correct headers". I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest, given that we know she tried desperately to modify the records of the emails once they were discovered, if those headers were simply stripped either before or after the fact. Either way, she is simply not stupid enough to not know what she was doing. But she claims innocence through stupidity, and politifact labels it "mostly true".

What do both of these examples show? That when Hillary walks the line and is careful not to explicitly say anything demonstrably false, while clearly lying in substance, politifact says she's honest. When Trump says something that's substantively true, while not paying attention to specifics, politifact says he's lying.

This is not intellectually honest fact-checking. Letting one candidate play word games and lie while calling out the other for being less careful but telling the truth is not fact-checking, it's shilling.

A Model S is pleasing, not beautiful. It reminds me a bit of Mazda's design language, or some of the more Aston-y Fords. It's not a pinup, but it's a nice car to look at.

What's the differentiating factor between them and Tesla? Why would I buy an Air, when it seems to be similarly specced to (and less attractive than) a model S, from a far better know company?

I suspect Congressional Republicans will pass Trump's infrastructure plan because they're shell shocked and not quite sure what their base demands of them. It's not an ideological capitulation, but rather a defensive retreating into their shell while they figure out where they stand. Was Trump really a denunciation of the Conservative Movement, or just a well-known figure who eked out an EC victory against a detested and uninspiring opponent?

>a health care plan that would save money be blocked by under Obama?

Which plan was this? Obamacare was a massive expenditure. If you're talking about proposals to improve it, why would Republicans try to fix a program they thought was ill-conceived and detestable in the first place? They now have the opportunity to repeal and replace Obamacare whole cloth. Let's see what they do with it.

>I applaud your constructive approach in this conversation BTW.

Thanks. I'm trying to be civil, hopefully with some success. I realize SV types aren't a natural audience for conservative views, but I think HN is a pretty good forum for people to discuss opposing views rationally and civilly.

>And I hope you are right about blocking Trumps craziness.

You and me both. I'm more hopeful than optimistic, at least in the first year while Congressional Republicans find their legs. My appraisal is that they'll probably pass some legislation that's anathemic to conservatives, but they'll stop short of endorsing illiberalism. There's a personal, moral difference between doing things you think are wrong and doing things you think are Wrong, and the latter will remind Republicans of who they are and what they believe.

>Every Republican voted against it. At no point did Republicans in Congress try to improve any of its manifest flaws

David Frum argued against this and got booted from polite conservative company for his troubles. The Obama administration inserted poison pills into the bill, like some of the impositions on small businesses, as bargaining chips they could give up to Republicans in exchange for their support, but he seriously misjudged the Republican mood.

Fact is, in the middle of a massive recession when the government had just rammed through a really ugly trillion dollar bailout and the deficit was going through the roof, no conservative was going to vote for a massive new entitlement program. They wouldn't vote for it now, either.

You also have to understand how immensely unpopular Obamacare is with the Republican base, which has very little to do with Fox News and everything to do with how it's a massive wealth transfer from working taxpayers to the nonworking poor. Obama likes to crow about giving 20M people health coverage, but think of what that means: 300M already had it. And for those 300M, their health care coverage got worse and more expensive.

And Obama's "Elections have consequences. I won." line to Eric Cantor might, in retrospect, not have been the ideal way to get Republicans on side. Just throwing that one out there.

>Romney ran for president on a platform that his healthcare plan was a good idea when he did it but a bad idea when Obama did it.

Which was obvious bollocks, and one of the reasons he lost--there was absolutely no appetite for Romney among the Republican base. He was the Republican's Hillary Clinton.

>To liberal ears, it's really hard to explain how this was a principled stand against wacky liberal ideas run amok

Conservatives believe government is generally terrible at everything. They think the health care system needs less government, not more. Your default position when it comes to "will conservatives support x policy proposal" should be, "if it shrinks the government then yes, otherwise no".

The US currently has around $100T, with a 'T', in unfunded liabilities in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That gap is going to close one way or the other, either through increased taxes, decreased spending, or a sovereign debt crisis. Adding another massive chunk to that is a very bad idea that conservatives simply do not like. Paul Ryan isn't trying to cut Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security because he's a nasty man who hates poor people, he's doing it because the US simply cannot afford those programs and the only way to pay for them would be to massively raise taxes. If you're okay with that, vote Democrat.

>simply an attempt to regain power by obstructing even previously-bipartisan ideas, even at the cost of damaging the country, to ensure that the other side couldn't take credit.

There's a real divide in the GOP between the line-in-the-sand types and the responsible government types. You've got people like Boehner, who thought it was necessary to compromise with Obama on some things, and people like Cruz, who thought it was vital to take a stand and ensure the government did not continue to grow, even at the cost of shutting it down. While electoral politics certainly play some role in that, it really is driven by ideology. Ted Cruz, whatever else you might say about him, is not a flap-in-the-wind sort of guy. He's a true believer. Ditto Ryan.

As I can't edit this comment any more, let me apologize for the "obstruction" bit. It was a cheap blow, not a meaningful contribution. But please do pay attention to the "checks and balances" bit, then go read Federalist 51[1] (if men were angels...) or at least a decent summary of it[2]. This notion of government being designed to pit power against power in an effort to avoid what Trump would be if he governed unopposed is central to conservative belief, and it's why we keep banging on about the Founding Fathers and the Constitution.

[1] http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm

[2] https://mises.org/library/if-men-were-angels

The money shot:

"The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

First, read Hillbilly Elegy. It's not directly about politics, but Vance is a working-class man who came from a home marked by substance abuse and every other kind of dysfunction you can imagine to become a Yale law graduate who works at an SV VC. It's at times tragic, at others hilarious, but it's always compelling and insightful. And it's hailed by conservatives, from humble backgrounds and rich, as an essential compendium when it comes to understanding the Trump phenomenon.

I can't recommend a primary source that answers your question, as I've yet to find one. Vance aside, the white working class is not known for its prodigious literary output. But I found this article enlightening[1]. Granted, I'm a middle-class coastal professional, so my personal ability to discern its truth is limited. And the author injects a little too much of her own progressivism for my taste. But it passes the sniff test for me.

[1]https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-t...

I actually agree with you, and fighting the urge to get a dig in can be tough. You can also see from the other responses to that comment how it derails conversation. I'll try to be better in the future.

Which policy proposals did Republicans block that you think they would have been ideologically predisposed to embracing?

It wasn't a strategy to regain power, it was a mission to prevent the President from inflicting further harm upon the country (according to conservative thought). There were plenty of Republicans who thought it would cost them in the elections. But they saw it as worthwhile to prevent the expansion of the welfare state and the enshrinement of Obama's progressive agenda in law.

The notion that they wanted to make government work worse in order to bolster their claim that government doesn't work is what progressives tell each other, not what motivates conservatives. Ditto working class voters "voting against their interests", etc.

A lot of conservatives saw it as their duty to stand athwart Obama's agenda and yell, "Stop!"

And quite frankly, they succeeded. I think you're unfairly discounting how much of that was ideologically driven, rather than the result of simple partisanship.

That's certainly true, and you'll see Republicans pass some legislation they don't want to. But they're not going to rubber-stamp policies they find abhorrent.

I suspect the trillion-dollar infrastructure spend will happen. But the "Muslim registry", and similar illiberal proposals, will not.

>Didn't both of those publications vigorously oppose Trump?

Yes.

>The "conservative intellectual" niche may be the most politically irrelevant group in the country.

Trump won the Presidency, not the Movement. The rest of the GOP, though shell-shocked, has not suddenly ditched conservatism and embraced Trumpism. The vast majority of the GOP members of the House and Senate, and those in state governments, are conservative, not Trumpist.

Conservatives, not just Republicans, have far more power in the US right now than at any point in recent memory.

And thankfully, the Founding Fathers, sharp blokes that they were, crafted a system of checks and balances. I suspect we'll hear fewer cries of "obstruction!" when Congress blocks President Trump's policies than we did for Obama's.

Hillbilly Elegy is excellent and touches on some of the points, but really just read conservatives. We're not exactly shy about what we don't like about modern liberalism. Go peruse the pages of National Review or Commentary Magazine.

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

Did "No politics for a week" not end up happening?

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

>I don't want anything to do with the NHTSA (or any other government regulatory body) if I can help it.

Great, so don't make software for self-driving cars.

Given the political issues that are of extreme interest to people here that aren't toxic (crypto backdoors, h1b, etc), why not modify the rule to be "no election discussion, broadly defined" rather than "no politics"?

You don't even have to hit tangents in comment threads to run into issues. Crypto backdoors? H1B changes? There are a lot of topics that are both political and of very high interest to hackers generally and HN specifically. If Congress rams through a crypto backdoor bill in the lame duck session, are we seriously not going to have a thread about it on HN?

Yes, and all of the people weaving wool in their house were real people, most decent people, who were negatively affected by mechanized looms. But the Industrial Revolution proceeded apace, and now everyone is much, much wealthier as a result.

There is short term pain in automating jobs that no longer need to be performed by humans, but no sane person would look at the long term result of that automation and say it was a bad thing.