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Thread: Trump 2017: Year Zero

  1. #2491
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    CNN chyron is currently calling it "Comey's bombshell testimony".

    I'm so sick of this hyperbole. Can we please discuss things for what they actually are and stop exaggerating the importance of every single thing that gets said?

  2. #2492
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    Honestly, I think you're underselling the gravity of it.

  3. #2493
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    Meanwhile, there's this, unbelievable:

    http://theweek.com/speedreads/704722...ealthcare-bill

  4. #2494
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jinsai View Post
    Honestly, I think you're underselling the gravity of it.
    Not to sound snarky, but enlighten me then. All I really took away from this was a confirmation of things we'd already heard dozens of times over. There was still nothing that made the crowd gasp and go "holy shit, this has got to lead to impeachment". There was no smoking gun. No felonious accusations. If anything, this seemed to confirm that the presidency is safe. OTHER people might be in deep trouble - but there's still nothing at all that points to charges against the president.

    I'm not saying that the things said yesterday are minor - but they're not new or shocking in any way, hence my objection to the rampant over-hyping of the hearing. Important to get it on record? Yes. Groundbreaking new information? No.

  5. #2495
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    Quote Originally Posted by allegro View Post
    Meanwhile, there's this, unbelievable:

    http://theweek.com/speedreads/704722...ealthcare-bill
    Putting up the headline, in the same font size the website used, because it's worth it.

    Watch Sen. Claire McCaskill obliterate Republicans after it's confirmed there will be no hearings on their health-care bill

    (edit: huh, it killed the formatting and turned it into a link again. Point remains, it was worth putting that text on this page)

  6. #2496
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    Quote Originally Posted by theimage13 View Post
    Not to sound snarky, but enlighten me then. All I really took away from this was a confirmation of things we'd already heard dozens of times over. There was still nothing that made the crowd gasp and go "holy shit, this has got to lead to impeachment". There was no smoking gun. No felonious accusations. If anything, this seemed to confirm that the presidency is safe. OTHER people might be in deep trouble - but there's still nothing at all that points to charges against the president.

    I'm not saying that the things said yesterday are minor - but they're not new or shocking in any way, hence my objection to the rampant over-hyping of the hearing. Important to get it on record? Yes. Groundbreaking new information? No.
    Some of the details didn't come out until Comey's summary. Here, they've been testified to under oath. That matters.

    The Flynn thing and "lift the cloud" of Russian investigation is where it could be considered obstruction. You know things are looking bad when the best excuse his apologists can come up with is that he's politically clueless. Trump's delayed Twitter response was insanely pathetic.

    It all depends on how Trump handles this, along with his lawyers, who are apparently planning on bringing a suit against him. They should be careful what they accuse him of.
    And in breaking news, Trump just accused Comey of lying under oath.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/u...=Homepage&_r=0

    Just saying, this isn't the beginning and the end... but it's not going to sputter out, and that Comey testimony is making the history books.
    Last edited by Jinsai; 06-09-2017 at 02:36 PM.

  7. #2497
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    smart discussion:
    louiee

  8. #2498
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    Hopefully Trump follows through with his wish to testify under oath. Chances are he'll perjure himself.

    I doubt his lawyer would let him walk into this trap though.
    From the answer he gave today during his presser, doesn't look like there are any tapes.

  9. #2499
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    Quote Originally Posted by Deepvoid View Post
    Hopefully Trump follows through with his wish to testify under oath. Chances are he'll perjure himself.

    I doubt his lawyer would let him walk into this trap though.
    From the answer he gave today during his presser, doesn't look like there are any tapes.
    prosecutor's dream he can't help but lie, all his life every moment of his career
    -Louie

  10. #2500
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    Quote Originally Posted by Deepvoid View Post
    Hopefully Trump follows through with his wish to testify under oath. Chances are he'll perjure himself.

    I doubt his lawyer would let him walk into this trap though.
    From the answer he gave today during his presser, doesn't look like there are any tapes.
    The term "tapes" is anachronistic. He's probably weighing his legal council.

    He could play coy and say "there are no tapes," even if he has digital recordings on his phone. If he slips up and admits that there are any recordings at all, he can be forced to relinquish them.

    He's put his lawyers in a tough spot here though. He told the press 100%, I will testify under oath, and answer to Mueller under oath.
    I wonder if he understands fully what that entails? If he walks back from that promise, it will only make him look more guilty. He probably thinks that he can just lie, and there won't be enough evidence to convict him since there's no Blue Dress in this situation.

    The thing is, will the people around him also be willing to lie under oath to corroborate his version of external details, such as asking everyone present to leave the room...

  11. #2501
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    Wow this Twitter thread, very interesting:

    https://twitter.com/aodespair/status/872966218738741250

  12. #2502
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  13. #2503
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    So, the DOJ is moving to argue Trump exempt from clear violations of the constitutional emoluments clause? I don't even get the foundation for the exception argument here? Can anyone explain this better?

    http://thehill.com/homenews/administ...rnd=1497052482

    EDIT: I just noticed something interesting...

    A couple weeks ago, Newsweek and other media outlets were jumping on a story noting that Trump's twitter feed was seeing an unusual spike in seemingly fake bot followers. Using the analysis algorithm of the site Twitter Audit, it seemed that only 51% of followers were deemed authentic, with around 15.9 million registering real, and 15 million fake.

    This story ran alongside claims that Trump was blocking habitual critics... there was some muttering about a class action lawsuit.

    Anyway, that story died in the wake of the crazy scandal whirlwind that ensued.

    So, randomly, I just now went to Twitter Audit to check what the "score" was now.

    NOW, less than two weeks later, the % has dramatically shifted.
    His account now sits with 70% authentic followers.
    The final score now: 22.5 million authentic, 9.5 million fake. The numbers haven't introduced a huge spike of new followers to the pool, it just seems like roughly six million of those accounts that were registering as fake have now been siphoned off into the authentic row.

    So, how easy is it to fool/spoof this algorithm? If you check the comments sections on his tweets now, there is far less "trolling" presence (though it's still there), and a lot more accounts becoming familiar faces, interjecting simplified spin-takes on current scandals, and spamming shit like "I love you, Mr President! Don't listen to haters. MAGA!"

    I'm not entirely sure what to make of it...
    Last edited by Jinsai; 06-10-2017 at 07:39 PM.

  14. #2504
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    Quote Originally Posted by DigitalChaos View Post
    It's extremely accurate, but it views the situation on an island. There are a lot of situations that could have unfolded earlier that let Trump know what Comey's answer is. Including "I can't answer that." Or even the fact that Trump doesn't want to push too far. Also, a guilty person would still want to ask "did you find any evidence of the crime" in various ways unless they have already resigned themselves fully to their fate of being found guilty.
    His evidence based on criminal law cases says otherwise; I've studied a ton of criminal law and various popular criminal cases and I've seen the opposite: not-guilty people too afraid to ask questions lest they appear guilty, as well as guilty people afraid to ask questions. And that's the one area the author disregards: Fear. Fear that the prosecution is building a case against you and anything you do, including asking questions, can be held against you. But the author has a really good point about Trump not asking any questions; except we don't know that Trump didn't; Comey may have just neglected to memorialize that in his memos.

  15. #2505
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    Quote Originally Posted by RhettButler View Post
    VERY good article, thanks.

  16. #2506
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    Is this legit? Please let this be real.

    https://twitter.com/ericgarland/stat...30366262861824

    UPDATE: Thanks for answering so quickly. I did google him and it was nit very helpful. I guess I did have some hope left. Whether that is helpful or not, I'm not sure.
    Last edited by Swykk; 06-10-2017 at 09:43 PM.

  17. #2507
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    Quote Originally Posted by Swykk View Post
    Is this legit? Please let this be real.

    https://twitter.com/ericgarland/stat...30366262861824
    No... This guy... I mean, I'm on his side, in a lot of ways, but he's a twitter voice for liberal outrage, and he teases his outrage with optimistic fervor, but he's not a professional political analyst, and he isn't privy to any inner-workings information.

  18. #2508
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    Court Records: Wasserman Schultz Used ‘Voice Changer’ in Call to Law Firm Bringing Suit Against DNC – Caller ID Gave Her Away
    https://trofire.com/2017/06/02/court...-id-gave-away/

  19. #2509
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    @DigitalChaos
    I don't believe her lol

  20. #2510
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    Quote Originally Posted by DigitalChaos View Post



    Lots more detail in that article, but don't start thinking this is some nefarious thing. This is just what having a good PR team looks like today. .
    I like and half-unlike your take here.

    The roll-out of fake twitter bots being groomed to spit out positive spin is transparent... it's just odd to me why others aren't noticing the gross shift.

    Sounds like a bad PR team who didn't know how to cook the optics books.

    RE: Wasserman using voice alter software, that sounds like a fucking blatant pin-the-tail case by some 4chan troll.
    Last edited by Jinsai; 06-10-2017 at 11:32 PM.

  21. #2511
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    I wanted to follow up about the bot-army thing, because this relates more specifically to your field of expertise (spoofing and farming numbers), but don't mistake me for someone unfamiliar with the practice. You only need to dip your foot into the music industry to discover that this is rampant promotional PR now. In the industry, it's considered a light grayish area of advertising... pay some bot-farm a few hundred dollars, generate a million "fans" on Twitter.

    Pay to play for spins, which trick algorithms, which in turn fool the upper level algorithms, all of which are primed to function in a domino effect.

    In the music industry, this pay to play situation was originally related to radio, where it was illegal. You could not pay a radio station to "spin your single" a set number of times a day. Hence why they created music television, as a means to get around that.

    But it was originally illegal... for a reason.

    Obviously, this is all outdated, nobody gives a shit about radio anymore, so go ahead and waste your money and pay for spins there... because the real market to pay for spins now is by acquiring bots to say "OMG Beyonce I luv you!" and to hit click over and over again on your youtube video from different IPs.

    It's sad, but hey, it's business.

    This is government. This is the president. That's gross propaganda in the political realm. It's gaslighting.
    This should be illegal for any politician to employ.
    It's what Goebbels would have done! It's flagrantly deceptive and intentionally so, with the aim of misinforming the public and controlling the perception of opinion.

    Accepting this as a sign of the times is ambivalence towards a form of normalized brainwashing. It's "ok" when Katy Perry's label does it, because whether or not her new album sells well is not a threat to democracy. It's a big deal. All of the big record labels do it now, because you HAVE TO. If you don't fight fire with fire, you will lose. It's now a prerequisite.

    This will become the norm in politics unless we say that it is unacceptable legally. Otherwise, every politician will be employing it. They will have to, or they will lose.
    Last edited by Jinsai; 06-11-2017 at 12:17 PM.

  22. #2512
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    Quote Originally Posted by DigitalChaos View Post
    @Jinsai - By extension, you should have a problem with Hillary testing a variety of positions and messages to see which one has the best response... and then taking the "best" one and delivering it in front of the public. It's just as deceptive. But where is the line of deception? Was it deceptive when Obama used big data analytics to figure out which potential voters were most important to contact for donation requests or which ones were most likely to go vote with just one more push? Maybe you don't think it is deceptive, but what about the fact that this extremely expensive system has become almost mandatory now to actually win? (a comment on your fight fire with fire comment)
    Collecting data and using modern analytics are a COMPLETELY different thing, and you have to acknowledge that. To not do so would be akin to willful ignorance in favor of doing things "the old fashioned way." Spoofing millions of fake supporters who pretend to be real and regurgitate talking points to deflect scandal? That is NOT the same thing.


    The primary reason most of this is "gray" area is because of the rules of the platform it happens on, not so much the moral aspect. Just as you pointed out with radio.
    Here is an example without any bots. Portions of this example are very dark gray, and even a few are banned. But the enforcement mechanisms are complete shit. -- Apple recently opened up Ads within App Store search results. It's super easy to manipulate the results. It's also really easy to get some people to accept deceptively worded subscriptions (that are a pain to remove). Combine it together and you have completely useless apps making $80k/mo. https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to...e-bdb943862e88
    It's shrugged about and considered shady in the record industry because, well, it is dishonest... but it's so institutionalized now, that it's accepted. It's like if every student in your class has access to the answers to the tests. If you don't look, you're going to be the worst-performing student, no matter how hard you study or know your shit.

    You're veering into actionable responses and who to reach out to in order to stop it, and how unrealistic that is. I'm saying, before trying to figure out how to prevent it in the formats that it works in, we should just say "this is illegal for a politician to do." We already have that, in some aspects. Look at the flack that the White House Social Media Director is getting for his single politicized tweet, for its violation of the Hatch act.

    Now, we're citing this as reprehensible?! But we cannot point to a provision which would prevent the PRESIDENT from accumulating a bot army of sycophantic voices to drown out criticism and alter public perception? This is not just "another step" down the slippery slope, and we cannot look to Twitter, Facebook, or any other outlet to police it.

    And you suggest legal enforcement. Firstly, this isn't a simple system. Our government can't handle complex systems. Shit, they can't even grasp crypto. Even if they could, this isn't some centralized thing. The internet is dynamic and things change with little friction. It happens quickly and outside of the reach of govt. Are you really going to regulate a social media platform that is owned and operated out of another country?
    This is strictly a political consideration. I don't care if the tactic is employed by entertainers or businesses trying to sell soda or whatever. That's already gone too far, and there's no stuffing the genie back in the bottle there. This is addressing activity unique to elected officials. We already have specific laws dictating what is acceptable behavior for politicians... we just aren't keeping up with the rapidly changing times.

    I'm sure similar problems unfolded back when TV first started being used for politics. And radio before that. And newspapers before that. The power and reach of every subsequent method was exponentially larger. Add in the diversity of pathways that comes from the internet allowing nonstandard options. It means that there is a MUCH bigger adjustment required of people to properly mentally filter and frame what is being presented to them. If we had someone from the 1700's encounter the media of the 90's, how long do you think it would take until they could self-filter and realize that things like "bat boy" aren't actually real? That all those infomercials aren't quite what they claim to be? etc.
    There are no legal constraints that are truly future-proof, but we herald the constitution for being pretty well constructed in that regard. The internet has provided this strange new "marketing" tool built around the distortion of public perception. It's so normalized now that it seems most people are responding with "what's the big problem with that" when it's utilized by politicians. If this keeps going unchecked, we are going to be living in a world where nobody has any fucking idea what's going on anymore.


    Or... if that's too hard. Let's just admit that democracy isn't really as noble as we make it out to be.
    Noble concepts can be corrupted and distorted. We hold to ideals, and we pass laws that get us in the ballpark of delivering on those ideals.

    On a side note, how is Trump Jr NOT saying here that his father basically doesn't play coy with language, and that he basically did order Comey to drop the Flynn thing?

    https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status...-investigation

  23. #2513
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    Quote Originally Posted by DigitalChaos View Post
    Well. Them being his followers doesn't seem to be a requirement for manipulating news. But let's say you can somehow define a specific action of the POTUS that needs to be illegal, and it passes through congress and it doesn't get smacked down by SCOTUS. Ok. After all the time required to do that let's also pretend that this is still even a threat and people are still even using Twitter. Ok.... well now a 3rd party can just run a bot army in a way that benefits POTUS. Now what?
    It wouldn't be specific to Twitter. It would, conceivably, prohibit an elected official, or their subordinates, from spoofing (or colluding with a spoofing outlet) to intentionally fabricate an illusory support base that disseminates misinformation and spin. An unconnected third party can do it... but if any connection is found between that third party and the elected official, that would be a punishable offense, to both the third party and the elected official, thereby making the risk unviable.

    ANYWAY, I posted this earlier, but I know it's just going to get buried... so I'll throw it in there again...
    HOW IS THIS GOING MOSTLY UNREPORTED!!!?!?!?!?!

    https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status...-investigation

  24. #2514
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    Quote Originally Posted by DigitalChaos View Post
    It's going unreported because Trump Jr is saying the opposite of what you somehow think he is saying. The last 5sec he even reiterated it: if Trump tells you to do something, there will be no ambiguity. There was ambiguity in what Trump said to Comey.
    I guess it's true that it could always be walked back as a gaffe, but it could also perhaps be grounds to subpoena his testimony in a hearing.

    Preet Bahara is now saying also that Trump tried (and failed) to establish a personal connection prior to his being fired... what that amounts to, who knows.

    As for the suggested regulations, I just don't see it working. You'd have an easier time trying to stop TV networks from favoring a candidate and preventing that candidate from having any kind of relationship with anyone who works for media.
    I dunno, you can establish the legal restriction, and sure, people will try to dodge around it, but what we have right now is rampant bullshit. It's hard to believe that it's perfectly legal for any politician, let alone the president, to do this. If the penalty out-balanced the potential reward, future politicians would be foolish to try it on the level that it is currently happening. You would know, at the very least, that something as flagrant as what's happening now would immediately put you under federal investigation.

    For instance, the Nixon impeachment set new precedent regarding the nature of White House recordings/tapes, and how damaging they could be. There's a reason nobody since has (as far as we know) done it.
    Unless Trump was really that ignorant...
    Last edited by Jinsai; 06-12-2017 at 12:16 AM.

  25. #2515
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    Quote Originally Posted by DigitalChaos View Post
    @Jinsai - what you described would, at best, get you to Super PAC levels. The candidates are not allowed to interact directly with the PACs, but there are a ton of ways to indirectly do it. (like all that raw video Ted Cruz published for his PAC that The Daily Show got their hands on).
    But wouldn't you think that the laws regarding regulating Super Pacs actually have lessened the egregious reliance? We can find exceptions, especially where it goes unpunished, but it is on the decline. Laws don't prevent crime, they reduce it.

  26. #2516
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    @DigitalChaos , I see your pedantry and raise you a "but reducing bad things is a good thing."

    This goes beyond social media as a general uncontrollable uncertainty. I'm talking about a specific form of appeal to social media. Going back to mentioning the Hatch act, we're relying on something from the WWII era there, to denounce inappropriate social media engagement.

    In the modern world, we acknowledge that these laws were crafted prior to us understanding the potential impact of the internet, which most people didn't even understand outside of the realm of cyberpunk fiction prior to the roll out of reality... and NO cyberpunk author prior to the turn of the century really predicted (as you put it) the weaponization of THIS particular form of it.

    I'm talking specifically about the creation of fake people in online discourse, with the purpose of not only slanting popularity by spamming the "like" and "follower" and "views" for feeds, but also to engage REAL people w/ nothing but mind-numbing jokey meme-ridden spin response.

    Even Joseph Goebbels would balk at how audacious that is. There has to be something in that insanity that can be deemed "WRONG/BAD!" to deem it illegal.

    EDIT: I just want things to feel sane again... what the hell is this?!

    Last edited by Jinsai; 06-12-2017 at 09:45 PM.

  27. #2517
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  28. #2518
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    Maybe in future America should vote the way Britain does still, at a booth with a pencil and then the votes are physically counted.

  29. #2519
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    "President of the Electoral College of the United States" ... I died of laughter!


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