2016 U.S. Presidential Elections: The Circus Is In Full Swing

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Russiagate was the Democrat's version of "they're defrauding the election". While it's definitely less pathological since there are a lot of factual claims embedded in it, it's basically the same thing, a desperate attempt to rally the party around something to account for the loss that they had convinced everyone wouldn't happen.

The thing is that Russia was using bots and other political influence tools to try and muddy the waters in western politics from about 2013, but the effect was tiny, and it was aimed at supplanting specific institutions like BBC News and CNN with Russia Today, and supporting a handful of radical groups. When this tactic really succeeded was when democrats and neoliberals media turned it into a psychotic conspiracy where Trump was basically receiving direct orders from the Kremlin. It turned everyone who disagreed into a kremlinbot and made people feel like the cold war was happening again.

Russia can hardly influence their own elections properly, and even if it could be proven somehow, I highly doubt that Putin had a significant effect on Trump's win. The entire Russian "influence" tactic is all about pretending to have more behind-the-scenes power than would be provable or even remotely possible, allowing people's fantasies about hidden malignant powers to go crazy.

Have you read the Mueller report? https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

(I kind of feel like one of those people knocking at the door asking "have you ever heard of our Lord and Savior" whenever I say that)

If you don't want to read the whole document, I suggest you at least read the introduction and executive summary to both volume I and II. Trump did an excellent job at gas lighting people and persuading that he was found innocent, but he really was not. They just couldn't go after him because he refused to collaborate and he is the president. I am curious as to why you think this was a hoax.

There is also a more recent report that is not as well known https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf

Also, there really wasn't anything even remotely close to what Trump is doing now when he won the election. Hillary Clinton gave her concession speech days after the election, and Obama personally welcomed Trump to the White House, as is tradition.
 
While I disagree with the term "psychotic" and the idea that "Trump was receiving direct orders from the Kremlin", the essence of the Mueller report is true. The amount of influence is still an open point but colluding with a foreign government to influence an election is treason at the highest level and should not be ignored.

Just a tiny bit from the final report: " The Committee found that Manafort's presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for the Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign. The Committee assesses that Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services, and that those services likely sought to .. _exploit Manafort's access to gain insight info the Campaign. Taken as a whole, Manafort's high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik, reptese1;1ted a grave cc:mnterintelligence thre~t. "

Manafort has admitted as much which is why he's in prison today.
 
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I am curious as to why you think this was a hoax.


I think Hoax is the wrong word, it's definitely more complicated than "true" or "untrue", because even if all the most insane fantasies of russiagaters by some miracle turned out to be true, it wouldn't negate the fact that they used crazy logic to explain away their failure to win against the Orange Nazi, and that they needed a myth that massive to plug the hole in the party.

I feel the same way about the election fraud thing. Trumpists whipped themselves into a frenzy with this fantasy about Trump riding into Washington a second time like Jesus of Nazereth on a donkey, smiting down all the "deep state" lizard jew muslim communists who are making their stock depreciate lives suck, and in order to cope they had to invent the idea that the true result of the election was "somewhere else". Even if Trump had won or the democrats were pumping ballots with dead people, it wouldn't have made the Trumpist claims any less insane, because those claims didn't come from a desire to analyse facts, they came from a necessity to keep their ideology intact.
 
This entire situation began with the election of Barack Obama when an embryonic white worm began to grow. Feeding on the hatred of a black president, the worm took on the visage of Donald Trump who embraced all manner of racist scum to put his plan in motion. Hillary was a sideshow, never relevant.
 
Well, yes, I don't think that Trump's victory in 2016 can only be blamed on the Russian interference myself. In fact it's not really clear that the Russians aimed to get him elected, from what I read it seems that for the most part they just wanted to generate chaos and infighting. In the end they just exploited elements that were already present in the American society. And honestly, I think it's still going on, I have seen YouTube accounts posting pro and against Trump in different videos and trying to flame.

I do not understand why we can't have moderation on social media the same way that we have it in this forum. Sure, they would have to hire a lot of people to do that, but it's not like they lack the money. And it surely would work better than whatever automated system they have in place now to fact check.
 
I do not understand why we can't have moderation on social media the same way that we have it in this forum. Sure, they would have to hire a lot of people to do that, but it's not like they lack the money. And it surely would work better than whatever automated system they have in place now to fact check.

Youtube and Twitter barely turn a profit from what I understand, and Facebook is too enormous and has too many posts to be moderated normally with like a billion active users. All three sites do have real people moderating the edge cases, but the bulk of work is done by bots.

Clunky awkward solutions like putting disclaimers underneath blatant lying is probably the best they can do. In the end these companies don't really care about the blatant lying, they just want to avoid getting taken to court, so it's probably the best we can expect as well.
 
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