• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

NYT op-ed: I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

Jolly_Penguin said:
It is also possible that this whole thing is a work, by someone other than anybody in the white house or connected to Trump. Why are we giving the New York Times so much credit? They could be fooled. Did they actually meet face to face with the source? They could also be in on it, though that's less likely.
Click to expand...

I wonder if Bob Woodward is involved with the release of his new book "Fear". Very unlike him to come out with a book filled with unsourced accusations which are immediately denied by those named. Kind of muddies the waters for Trump as he tries to discover who's involved when everyone gets to feign indignance while claiming how loyal they are.
 
Elixir said:
repoman said:
Cheerful Charlie said:
There is software used to examine writings for example, to uncover plagiarism. There are subtle (or less than subtle) habits writers use that can be used as fingerprints to allow us to gauge if they wrote a given work, if long enough. I suspect now any number of suspects are going to be so examined by the white House to uncover the culprit.

Stay tuned. More explosive diarrhea from the White House to come.
Click to expand...

It is also possible that the NYT was given permission to alter the style while maintaining the meaning of the letter. That would stymie any attempt of using those techniques.
Click to expand...

Yeah - It may bave been carefully constructed to that end by the NYT or the entire cabal (if there is one) that produced the document. I know that if I was part of that effort, I'd have had the thing re-written, part by part, by different individuals for exactly that purpose. I also consider it likely that "lodestar" was a plant, or a red herring. But it would be a delicious disaster if Pence was shown to be the author.
Click to expand...

I've heard the "false flag" term being used to argue exactly that--that the word "lodestar" was added to point people in the direction of Pence. Maybe. But I think it more likely that Pence or his speechwriter would have used that word without really giving it much thought as a signature giveaway of the author. Pence has apparently used the word a lot, but I believe that there are a couple of other signature terms like "cold comfort" that point to Pence. IMO, this is likely to be a cabal of Indiana partisans that wants to push Trump out sooner rather than later in order to get Pence installed. Pence would need as much time as possible to use his incumbency to build up his image for the 2020 race. Dan Coats, Pence, and his speech writer could all have collaborated in the authorship and then had Coats, who is known to hold such sentiments about Trump, deliver it. Coats is a high-ranking official in the administration whom Trump could fire. He is a pro-Pence Indiana politician. And the letter seems very much in line with the way he views himself--as someone in service of the country, not necessarily his party. Pence himself would not likely delivered it personally, but he certainly wants to remove Trump and install himself as President.

I also want to endorse Charlie's point that author-identifying text analysis software exists. In fact, it has been under development for decades, and the techniques available to us now are far more sophisticated than people realize. I am well aware of efforts by the government to perfect it for mining social media and detecting potential terrorist threats or criminal activities. It does not depend totally on low frequency expressions such as "cold comfort" or "lodestar", although those are always key factors. A term like "lodestar", which is very infrequent (or totally unique), is sometimes referred to as a "hapax legomenon", which is very useful in clarifying the meaning of other words in a text. It can also be used as a strong indicator of authorship. However, a "false flag" insertion of a word or phrase to throw people off the track would not necessarily fool modern text analysis tools, which use a variety of statistical techniques to profile a text by detecting clusters of words in the text. Those could then be matched against texts by other authors to identify similar clusters or thematic elements.
 
lpetrich said:
Mike Pence is the favorite, but next in line is someone unexpected: Betsy DeVos.

The better-known staffers are not far behind her, but Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are way down there.

Doing the best, however, is "Field" -- anyone else or uncertain.


I think that "lodestar" is a good catch -- it's a very unusual word. So the writer was either Mike Pence or someone trying to imitate him.
Click to expand...
Or somebody who writes for him.

Or somebody who speaks with him regularly and admires (or has unconsciously adopted) his vocabulary.

It's an interesting hint, but the use of one uncommon word is not the 'smoking gun' people seem to think it is.
Are there other stylistic features that one might be able to identify? Like typical vocabulary or grammatical features. By grammatical features I mean choices between constructions like these:

I saw Trump. He was watching TV. (two independent clauses)
I saw Trump, and he was watching TV. (with a coordinating conjunction)
I saw Trump while he was watching TV. (with a subordinating conjunction)
I saw Trump, who was watching TV. (with one clause made a relative clause)
Click to expand...

I agree; The evidence would be much stronger if there were a few dozen rare vocabulary, grammar or stylistic markers. One datum is insufficient to draw any strong conclusions.

It's someone in the White House; As the WH staff are a small group who work closely together, we should expect some shared linguistic idiosyncrasies, rendering this 'evidence' very weak indeed.
 
'Deep Throat' Effect.

Knowledgeable insider feeds incriminating evidence to the public.

I would suspect that somebody is positioning for exoneration when the axe falls. I'd say it was an indicator of impending collapse.

This White House has leaked like a sieve since Dump came to office. Be prepared for an uncontrolled proliferation of "I Was a Trump White House Aide" tell-all books.
 
Wonder if Cheato will resort to firing suspects one-by-one, until one of them comes out after being fired and claims responsibility
 
Hyperbole aside our govt has gone over to the dark side. Republicans are in fear of being too contrary to Donald Vader. Paul says people should take lie detector tests.

Sounds more like NK and the Nazi regime. You dare not say anything contrary.

Back in the 80s I knew a Libyan immigrant. As he put it you could not risk confiding in your brother.

If we were not economically strong who knows what a Trump could do.
 
So has the author(s) of the editorial been outed yet? No way anyone in this admin is going to be able to keep that secret for long. They'll be named in the next couple of days if not already.

Worldtraveller said:
Who cares who wrote the damn thing. The author is basically saying "We are ok with screwing over poor people, and crashing the economy, but we're trying to protect our big bank accounts."

Fuck them.

https://twitter.com/JoeBerkowitz/st...lkrational.org/index.php/topic,602.10800.html
Click to expand...

My thoughts exactly. Fuck them. "Resistance." What a laugh. They are cowards. They're still OK with caging kids, destroying education, destroying healthcare, doing everything possible to punish outgroups while they're in power, but not OK with the very stooge they put into the office? They want to have their cake and eat it, too, with a cherry on top for "Look at us, bein' all espionage in teh White House. We r resistance n shit." *raises fist*

To the author(s): Fuck you for putting him there to begin with. Fuck you for going along with it up until something looked like it might actually happen that you happen to not be completely ignorant about. Fuck you for taking advantage of the logical consequences of your stunted ideology to get your agenda items met up until now, when even your compromised right wing Manchurian candidate mentality can't ignore the alarm bells.

You damn well fucking BETTER be doing whatever you can to thwart your blubbering messiah's catastrophes. It's the fucking least you can do, don't you think?
 
NYT Trump column: Linguistic clues to White House insider? - BBC News
The software we used hones in on certain characteristics of writing style, including how often the writer repeats words, when they use rare words, how often and where they use punctuation, how many characters they use in each word, and how long their sentences are.

Compared with most of the official statements and speeches we analysed, the New York Times column had a distinctive style (again, some of this could be down to the editing process).
Click to expand...
It has only 19.3 words per sentence, while official statements of the Trump Administration are often around 30 words per sentence.

This is consistent with Mike Pence's 17 - 20 words per sentence in some of his recent speeches -- and some columns written by him in the 1990's.

Also, while official statements seldom use passive voice, Mike Pence's speeches and writings use it more often, as does this NYT op-ed. Like "Although he was elected as a Republican" instead of "Although the American people elected him as a Republican".

So we have three pieces of evidence that point to Mike Pence or an imitator of him:
  • The word "lodestar"
  • Sentence length
  • Use of passive voice
So we have a grammatical feature.
 
Has anyone started a pool so we can bet on who it is?

I'm guessing it involves Kelly, Mattis, and Mnunchin at least, and Kelly did most or all of the writing. edit: Also Sessions.
 
Text of Tweet that Angry Floof has a screenshot of:
Scott Dworkin
@funder

BREAKING: A Republican lobbyist just told me that "@realDonaldTrump intends to use lie detector tests on his own cabinet and staff members," in an effort to try and uncover who was behind the scathing New York Times op-ed. They also said "he wants them to be arrested when found."

23:49 PM - 6 Sep 2018
Click to expand...
A lie detector or polygraph works by monitoring various physiological features, and telling lies is supposed to show up as distinct from saying what one believes to be true. There has been a lot of controversy about how well lie detectors work, if they work at all. One could get a false positive from a test subject being nervous, and a false negative from a test subject staying calm. In fact, lie detectors may work in some cases because of belief that they work -- a test subject who is trying to tell some lie might fear getting exposed by the machine, and the machine would then record the subject's fearfulness.

I suspect that at least some of pResident Trump's suspects may have some familiarity with lie detectors -- enough familiarity to not be scared by them.
 
lpetrich said:
Text of Tweet that Angry Floof has a screenshot of:
Scott Dworkin
@funder

BREAKING: A Republican lobbyist just told me that "@realDonaldTrump intends to use lie detector tests on his own cabinet and staff members," in an effort to try and uncover who was behind the scathing New York Times op-ed. They also said "he wants them to be arrested when found."

23:49 PM - 6 Sep 2018
Click to expand...
A lie detector or polygraph works by monitoring various physiological features, and telling lies is supposed to show up as distinct from saying what one believes to be true. There has been a lot of controversy about how well lie detectors work, if they work at all. One could get a false positive from a test subject being nervous, and a false negative from a test subject staying calm. In fact, lie detectors may work in some cases because of belief that they work -- a test subject who is trying to tell some lie might fear getting exposed by the machine, and the machine would then record the subject's fearfulness.

I suspect that at least some of pResident Trump's suspects may have some familiarity with lie detectors -- enough familiarity to not be scared by them.
Click to expand...

Lie detectors work ONLY if the subject believes that they do; And there are recorded instances of police getting confessions from suspects by using a 'lie detector' that consisted solely of a photocopier with the word 'LIE' on the glass, where each time officers suspected a fib, they hit the 'Copy' button, producing a page that read 'LIE'.

Polygraphs are pseudoscience; Only in the USA are they still treated as though they were real by courts of law.
 
Oh, what an entertaining clown show. If something like this was offered as a script for some TV show, it would have been turned down as too unbelievable. But here we are. What will Der Trumpster do next? It's like going to the zoo and seeing a fight break out on monkey island. Yes, a government we can be proud of.
 
Angry Floof said:
So has the author(s) of the editorial been outed yet? No way anyone in this admin is going to be able to keep that secret for long. They'll be named in the next couple of days if not already.

Worldtraveller said:
Who cares who wrote the damn thing. The author is basically saying "We are ok with screwing over poor people, and crashing the economy, but we're trying to protect our big bank accounts."

Fuck them.

https://twitter.com/JoeBerkowitz/st...lkrational.org/index.php/topic,602.10800.html
Click to expand...

My thoughts exactly. Fuck them. "Resistance." What a laugh. They are cowards. They're still OK with caging kids, destroying education, destroying healthcare, doing everything possible to punish outgroups while they're in power, but not OK with the very stooge they put into the office? They want to have their cake and eat it, too, with a cherry on top for "Look at us, bein' all espionage in teh White House. We r resistance n shit." *raises fist*

To the author(s): Fuck you for putting him there to begin with. Fuck you for going along with it up until something looked like it might actually happen that you happen to not be completely ignorant about. Fuck you for taking advantage of the logical consequences of your stunted ideology to get your agenda items met up until now, when even your compromised right wing Manchurian candidate mentality can't ignore the alarm bells.

You damn well fucking BETTER be doing whatever you can to thwart your blubbering messiah's catastrophes. It's the fucking least you can do, don't you think?
Click to expand...
Maybe the idea is to make Trump even more paranoid and "resistance" more pronounced to a point of implementing 25th?
 
lpetrich said:
NYT Trump column: Linguistic clues to White House insider? - BBC News
The software we used hones in on certain characteristics of writing style, including how often the writer repeats words, when they use rare words, how often and where they use punctuation, how many characters they use in each word, and how long their sentences are.

Compared with most of the official statements and speeches we analysed, the New York Times column had a distinctive style (again, some of this could be down to the editing process).
Click to expand...
It has only 19.3 words per sentence, while official statements of the Trump Administration are often around 30 words per sentence.

This is consistent with Mike Pence's 17 - 20 words per sentence in some of his recent speeches -- and some columns written by him in the 1990's.

Also, while official statements seldom use passive voice, Mike Pence's speeches and writings use it more often, as does this NYT op-ed. Like "Although he was elected as a Republican" instead of "Although the American people elected him as a Republican".

So we have three pieces of evidence that point to Mike Pence or an imitator of him:
  • The word "lodestar"
  • Sentence length
  • Use of passive voice
So we have a grammatical feature.
Click to expand...
Don Lemon linked "lodestar" to military and hence Kelly. I have never heard that word before.
 
Oh yes, it was obviously written to provoke Trump.
 
Sarpedon said:
Oh yes, it was obviously written to provoke Trump.
Click to expand...

Well, why write it at all then? They could have continued quiet sabotage of his insanity for the sake of human civilization.
Revealing yourself and resigning would not accomplish much I suspect
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom