RussiaGate

[barbos]

They did, it was according to them foreign invluence/money. I remember your constant whining about foreign influence.

So an app created by Russians to aid other Russians in their voting choices is foreign influence. Hmmm...

And threatening to jail Apple and Google employees just for hosting the app on their app stores is just fine.

I have not heard about jailing anybody and who created it is irrelevant. Napster was created by americans if I remember correctly.
Plus you were whining about politically affiliated poll watchers in US.

 

[lpetrich]

Whistleblower: Trump Team Wanted Lies About Russia, Border, Racism - Rolling Stone

Brian Murphy, the former principal deputy undersecretary in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, filed a whistleblower complaint last year — as well as a handful of internal complaints and reports — that all painted a frightening picture of how things were running in the department tasked with keeping Americans safe. “From the outset, there were three things that I was told that we would look to manipulate intelligence on and bend the truth about,” Murphy told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week. “And I told them upfront that I wasn’t going to do it.”

On Russia, the border, and white supremacy, Murphy said he felt “intense pressure to try to take intelligence and fit a political narrative” — accusing administration officials of demanding information be manipulated to burnish Trump’s image and help his messaging

In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved efforts to denigrate Democratic candidates in order to benefit Trump, an intelligence community report from March found. Putin also authorized a campaign “undermining public confidence in the electoral process and exacerbating socio-political divisions in the U.S” — something that Trump and some of his closest allies readily embraced during and after the election by making repeated false claims of fraud.

In regards to the southern border, the former FBI agent alleged, the DHS took a similar approach: fabricating a terrorist threat and misleading Congress to improve the political conditions for Trump’s coveted border wall.

The pattern repeated when it came to white supremacists, particularly after white supremacists killed a counter protester, Heather Heyer, at a right-wing rally in Charlottesville in 2017. “After Charlottesville, it became a third-rail issue…within the department to talk about white supremacy in any meaningful way,” Murphy said.

Russia? New Evidence Shows How Russia’s Election Interference Has Gotten More Brazen | Brennan Center for Justice "The Kremlin-linked operation behind 2016 election meddling is using similar tactics for 2020, plus some new ones."

What might the Trump Admin be doing with Russia that it might want to hide? Given those Russian electioneering efforts on his behalf, Trump and his underlings may want to hide whatever coordinated they did with their extra campaigners.

The southern border? Seems like the Reichstag Fire. Claim that some horrible evil monsters are entering through the southern border.

White supremacists? With the sympathies that Trump expressed after that "Unite the Right" Charlottesville march, one has to suspect that the Trump Admin has something to hide.

 

[Swammerdami]

Let's hope the QOP insists on Congressional hearings re Gen. Milley's alleged misbehavior. Line up several witnesses to explain how this Orange Menace was a treasonous criminal, and Milley should be treated as a hero for his precautions.


ETA: Just as the AFL and CIO became the AFL-CIO when they merged, so the merger of the GOP and QAnon suggests the need for a new name. Is "QOP" better? Or "GOPAnon"?

 

[TomC]

Let's hope the QOP insists on Congressional hearings re Gen. Milley's alleged misbehavior. Line up several witnesses to explain how this Orange Menace was a treasonous criminal, and Milley should be treated as a hero for his precautions.

Pretty much this.

If Jan 6th "incident" isn't worth as much investigation as Benghazi or Clinton's Email, then I don't know what is.
Tom

 

[Gun Nut]

They did, it was according to them foreign invluence/money. I remember your constant whining about foreign influence.

So an app created by Russians to aid other Russians in their voting choices is foreign influence. Hmmm...

And threatening to jail Apple and Google employees just for hosting the app on their app stores is just fine.

I have not heard about jailing anybody and who created it is irrelevant. Napster was created by americans if I remember correctly.
Plus you were whining about politically affiliated poll watchers in US.

If you are going to call the creation of a tool "foreign influence", then the hell yes it matters if it was actually created by foreigners. Russians making something for russians to use is not "foreign influence".. it's just "influence".

 

[ZiprHead]

They did, it was according to them foreign invluence/money. I remember your constant whining about foreign influence.

So an app created by Russians to aid other Russians in their voting choices is foreign influence. Hmmm...

And threatening to jail Apple and Google employees just for hosting the app on their app stores is just fine.

I have not heard about jailing anybody and who created it is irrelevant. Napster was created by americans if I remember correctly.
Plus you were whining about politically affiliated poll watchers in US.

On Thursday, representatives of Apple and Google were invited to a meeting in the upper house of Russia’s parliament, the Federation Council. The Council’s commission on protecting state sovereignty said in a statement afterward that Apple agreed to cooperate with Russian authorities.

Apple and Google did not respond Friday to a request from The Associated Press for comment.

Google was forced to remove the app because it faced legal demands by regulators and threats of criminal prosecution in Russia, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter who also said Russian police visited Google’s Moscow offices Monday to enforce a court order to block the app. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

https://apnews.com/article/europe-russia-elections-voting-vladimir-putin-a6e00789816f93b224a69074d3999568

 

[barbos]

I have not heard about jailing anybody and who created it is irrelevant. Napster was created by americans if I remember correctly.
Plus you were whining about politically affiliated poll watchers in US.

If you are going to call the creation of a tool "foreign influence", then the hell yes it matters if it was actually created by foreigners. Russians making something for russians to use is not "foreign influence".. it's just "influence".

No, if foreign money were involved at any stage of creating or operating that app then it's foreign interference. And foreign money are always involved in Russian Navalny opposition. US is just unable to not interfere.
To be honest, I am not familiar with that app situation, what it does.


...
looks like it suggests how to better vote against ruling party. Does not look that big of a deal to me, but apps usually use google servers, hence it's foreign election interference.
Russian voters are no different from americans, they are idiots. But they are different kind of idiots. In US you have most of the people entrenched in their parties and know who to vote for no matter what. In Russia they are not entrenched (except communists of course) and ruling party could drop at any moment and this app could easily facilitate that. Plus young people don't vote at all and all of them have smartphones and if they start voting because of that app then Putin is out for sure.

So this app is actually a big deal, it could easily manipulate ruling party out of majority.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

They did, it was according to them foreign invluence/money. I remember your constant whining about foreign influence.

The app wasn't about foreign influence or foreign money.

How do you know that?
It's an established fact that "opposition" (it's called non-systemic opposition by Russian government) is financed by anonymous donation which can not be traced. Imagine that happening in US.

Of course it's anonymous--if it weren't the guy funding it would be in prison or dead.

Opposing the party in power doesn't get you 6 feet under here.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Swammerdami
You still don't get it. Greatest System in the world and result is .... Trump.

It's only the "greatest" because it doesn't reek as bad as any of the others.

 

[barbos]

How do you know that?
It's an established fact that "opposition" (it's called non-systemic opposition by Russian government) is financed by anonymous donation which can not be traced. Imagine that happening in US.

Of course it's anonymous--if it weren't the guy funding it would be in prison or dead.

Yes, It's catch 22. But in US anonymous donations are not allowed and people go to prisons for that.
As for Navalny, It's complicated, it's hard to tell to say what caused what. But In Russia there are opposition parties which don't take foreign money, communist party for example.
Navalny was funded from abroad, like Vladimir Lenin, remember him?

 

[barbos]

Swammerdami
You still don't get it. Greatest System in the world and result is .... Trump.

It's only the "greatest" because it doesn't reek as bad as any of the others.

Most of the Europe and especially northern Europe have better system than US.

 

[bilby]

Swammerdami
You still don't get it. Greatest System in the world and result is .... Trump.

It's only the "greatest" because it doesn't reek as bad as any of the others.

There are dozens of better systems.

American democracy isn't even in the top thirty most liveable or most democratically accountable extant national systems.

 

[lpetrich]

Swammerdami
You still don't get it. Greatest System in the world and result is .... Trump.

It's only the "greatest" because it doesn't reek as bad as any of the others.

Why so, Loren Pechtel? What do you think is wrong with the Economist's Democracy Index and the Fragile State index?

What is so horrible about proportional representation? A parliamentary system?

 

[Swammerdami]

Swammerdami
You still don't get it. Greatest System in the world and result is .... Trump.

It's only the "greatest" because it doesn't reek as bad as any of the others.

Why so, Loren Pechtel? What do you think is wrong with the Economist's Democracy Index and the Fragile State index?

What is so horrible about proportional representation? A parliamentary system?

When barbos wrote "Greatest System in the world" I think he intended the sarcastic "Greatest System in the World™".

While proportional representation and other mechanical changes might be good ideas, I think U.S. dysfunction relative to Northern Europe has other causes. Until recently Northern Europe countries had little ethnic diversity. Another difference might be Scandinavia's widely-admired constitutional monarchies. And, because their historical memory extends to many centuries before America's birth — and because the horrors of World War II were more vivid for them — Europe has a stronger grasp of humanitarian values.

Do we have a thread discussing these differences?

Unfortunately, it sometimes seems like Western Europe is shifting to follow U.S. trends, rather than vice versa.

 

[bilby]

Why so, Loren Pechtel? What do you think is wrong with the Economist's Democracy Index and the Fragile State index?

What is so horrible about proportional representation? A parliamentary system?

When barbos wrote "Greatest System in the world" I think he intended the sarcastic "Greatest System in the World™".

While proportional representation and other mechanical changes might be good ideas, I think U.S. dysfunction relative to Northern Europe has other causes. Until recently Northern Europe countries had little ethnic diversity.

That's simply not true. Ethnic diversity in Northern Europe pre-dates the discovery by Europeans of the Americas.

Yet I hear this frequently from US citizens. Is it something taught in your schools? Northern Europe has been a trading hub at least since the neolithic period, and the arrival of Europeans in the Americas was a direct consequence of this. Do you imagine that they brought goods and languages from afar, but not people?

London, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Lisbon and Madrid were multicultural cities long before New York even existed. Indeed, York (the original one in the North of England) was a vibrantly multi-ethnic trading centre a thousand years ago.

Ethnic diversity in Northern Europe was massively magnified by the Romans, who had a deliberate policy of stationing soldiers far from their homes, to reduce the risk of rebellion. They brought their families, or formed new ones with the locals, and the effects can still be seen today.

Another difference might be Scandinavia's widely-admired constitutional monarchies.

Constitutional monarchy really is recent. It's not so much a cause of the differences under discussion as it is a description of them.

The US system dealt with the problem of monarchy tending to autocracy by electing a monarch on a temporary basis (and calling it a 'presidency'), while Northern Europe tended to deal with it by stripping the monarchy of any real power and giving that power to the leaders of the legislature, leaving a purely ceremonial monarch.

And, because their historical memory extends to many centuries before America's birth — and because the horrors of World War II were more vivid for them — Europe has a stronger grasp of humanitarian values.

Now those, I agree, are significant factors.

Do we have a thread discussing these differences?

Unfortunately, it sometimes seems like Western Europe is shifting to follow U.S. trends, rather than vice versa.

That I put down to Hollywood. US culture is dominant in entertainment, and that has a huge influence in this regard.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Swammerdami
You still don't get it. Greatest System in the world and result is .... Trump.

It's only the "greatest" because it doesn't reek as bad as any of the others.

Why so, Loren Pechtel? What do you think is wrong with the Economist's Democracy Index and the Fragile State index?

What is so horrible about proportional representation? A parliamentary system?

I was referring to democracy in general, not the exact details of how the representatives are elected.

 

[jab]

They did, it was according to them foreign invluence/money. I remember your constant whining about foreign influence.

The app wasn't about foreign influence or foreign money.

How do you know that?
It's an established fact that "opposition" (it's called non-systemic opposition by Russian government) is financed by anonymous donation which can not be traced. Imagine that happening in US.

So, I take it that a similar app developed in Russia, by Russians, with Russian money only, would be a-okay with Putin.

 

[jab]

Why so, Loren Pechtel? What do you think is wrong with the Economist's Democracy Index and the Fragile State index?

What is so horrible about proportional representation? A parliamentary system?

When barbos wrote "Greatest System in the world" I think he intended the sarcastic "Greatest System in the World™".

While proportional representation and other mechanical changes might be good ideas, I think U.S. dysfunction relative to Northern Europe has other causes. Until recently Northern Europe countries had little ethnic diversity. Another difference might be Scandinavia's widely-admired constitutional monarchies. And, because their historical memory extends to many centuries before America's birth — and because the horrors of World War II were more vivid for them — Europe has a stronger grasp of humanitarian values.

Do we have a thread discussing these differences?

Unfortunately, it sometimes seems like Western Europe is shifting to follow U.S. trends, rather than vice versa.

Canada is very multi-ethnic, with a history of African slavery, though not as extensive or politically fraught as the US, with a gross history of the mistreatment of indigenous people, and considerable immigration from non-European parts of the world since racist immigration laws were mitigated then repealed, 50-60 years ago, and with present-day racism in our society; yet our democracy seems a little less faulty than the USA's.

 

[TomC]

Why so, Loren Pechtel? What do you think is wrong with the Economist's Democracy Index and the Fragile State index?

What is so horrible about proportional representation? A parliamentary system?

When barbos wrote "Greatest System in the world" I think he intended the sarcastic "Greatest System in the World™".

While proportional representation and other mechanical changes might be good ideas, I think U.S. dysfunction relative to Northern Europe has other causes. Until recently Northern Europe countries had little ethnic diversity. Another difference might be Scandinavia's widely-admired constitutional monarchies. And, because their historical memory extends to many centuries before America's birth — and because the horrors of World War II were more vivid for them — Europe has a stronger grasp of humanitarian values.

Do we have a thread discussing these differences?

Unfortunately, it sometimes seems like Western Europe is shifting to follow U.S. trends, rather than vice versa.

Canada is very multi-ethnic, with a history of African slavery, though not as extensive or politically fraught as the US, with a gross history of the mistreatment of indigenous people, and considerable immigration from non-European parts of the world since racist immigration laws were mitigated then repealed, 50-60 years ago, and with present-day racism in our society; yet our democracy seems a little less faulty than the USA's.

Possibly because you remained under the thumb of European aristocracy until much later, and had a chance to learn from mistakes made by the U.S. Founding Fathers.
Tom

 

[barbos]

How do you know that?
It's an established fact that "opposition" (it's called non-systemic opposition by Russian government) is financed by anonymous donation which can not be traced. Imagine that happening in US.

So, I take it that a similar app developed in Russia, by Russians, with Russian money only, would be a-okay with Putin.

Probably not. this app would still be like giving water and food to people waiting in line to vote.
Voting should be as hard as possible and as dumb as possible.