Forget the US elections, if you are running an election and you lose 'because of leaks' what is the rational response. Blame the leaker, blame your indiscretion, blame your own actions?
The post election narrative has become surreal with the cartoonish rhetoric of 'enemies' and 'russia did it'.
Why is Russia an enemy? What has Russia done to the USA? Instead of acting like a responsible member of the international community we are ratcheting up tension, hate and hysteria with no evidence. This is the definition of demonization and propaganda.
On the other hand we unironically place nukes at Russia's borders via NATO an organization whose reason to exist is anti-russian, stir up trouble in Ukraine, practiced some extremly dubious 'shock doctrine' economics by the Chicago school in the 90s that destroyed what was left of the economy and directly led to the Russian oligarchies and follow a distinctly anti-russia global policy. Let's not be blind to reason.
For starters it was only a 70k vote differences between the electoral college win, so about anything small could have made a difference.
The leaks itself were only small and didn't contain so much, but they were amplified with big dis-information campaign that surely must have depressed Democratic turnout to some degree. Especially the leaks focused on demotivating the former Bernie supporters, to support their (imo wrongly) narrative that the primaries were rigged against Bernie by the DNC.
You realise you are just inventing another way to 'delegitimise' elections.
If there is even the tiniest wrong doing the US is an advanced country with a sophisticated infrastructure, legal process and rule of law to oversee fair elections.
Surely any hint of wrong doing should be pursued aggresively through the US courts than smear campaigns and innuendo in media that seek to cast apersions and undermine the very process and results of free and fair elections.
How do you propose to hold free and fair election or call for them now if any loser can now seek to delegitimise the results by pointing to 'propaganda' and 'hidden forces'? Because if your position is 'people can be misled by propaganda' then this position negates the basis of democratic elections.
This is against common sense, due process and rule of law. This 'burn the house down' strategy by losers cannot be accepted in any civilised society governed by law.
How did Hillary became the prime candidate even when it was Bernie that had high turnout? DNC leadership favored Hillary blindly, thats why. If the leadership was neutral Bernie would've been the main candidate by popular vote. If the race was between Bernie and Trump, Bernie would've win.
Not to mention that all most all media channels were bashing anything Trump but actively not reporting bad things about Hillary. Even the slightest negative about Trump got coverage whereas Hillary was safe from such media bashing. If Trump and Hillary where given neutral and equal coverage, then Trump would've gotten even higher vote.
Yes, I wanted to be charitable and high-minded and just point out that none of these people are actually disputing anything, merely asking some questions. But when I saw the intrepid investigators were SuperPoop and Fuego...
> This is why the Democrats lost, wake up already. The truth, try to atleast learn it.
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Clinton did win the popular vote by a large margin, although that's not really germane to the grandparent comment. I think the point he was trying to make is that Assange/wikileaks lost a lot of credibility during the recent U.S. election cycle by being blatantly partisan. They dressed up their DNC email leaks in bombshell controversy, but ultimately there was no great revelation - nobody was arrested, no investigations were began, etc. Of course, the damage was done by the timing and the subsequent response of the conservative media machine.
I think for a lot of moderates like myself, wikileaks has clearly hooked its wagon to the anti-NATO, anti-EU, pro-Russia, nationalist movement that elected Donald Trump. How can I trust anything they leak when they have an agenda that involves vilifying democrats and electing pro-Russia republicans?
No great revelation? The expectation of political favors in exchange for money is pretty huge. Selling Russia Uranium while accusing them of working for the other side. Citibank supplying Obamas entire cabinet.
I don't know what you think is a non issue if those are partisan to you.
Furthermore, why would you not trust a truthful source because of political motivation? That reeks of cognitive dissonance.
I always found asking for sources on the internet kinda odd, you could have found the sources in the same number of characters as your reply.
Seems to mainly be a way to lazily dismiss people relying on their memory, this is a forum and expecting everyone to have a source handy for every belief and opinion they have is absurd.
If you actually care you're going to put your own research in anyways and not rely on the source provided by the OP.
Anyways I was curious and did the 5 mins of research for you.
> Selling Russia Uranium while accusing them of working for the other side.
Seems to be old news and not part of what was released by Wikileaks.
Anyways I'm more concerned about the accuracy of the information than the motive for releasing it, and the accuracy doesn't seem to be in question even by the DNC.
> Wikileaks has clearly hooked its wagon to the anti-NATO, anti-EU, pro-Russia, nationalist movement that elected Donald Trump
I'm not sure they have. I think they are more on the fuck the HRC train, HRCs stance towards whistle blowers while breaking the same rules without repercussions to hide corruption might be what resulted in the unprecedented amount of information that was leaked. There are people who hate HRC.
Whether all this would have happened if the DNC presidential candidate had been someones else is debatable.
Or maybe Russia runs Wikileaks now. Sad that the most effective way Russia can manipulate our nation to provide transparency, the promise of which is the main reason I voted the way I did last election.
Popular vote doesn't matter. The presidential candidate that wins in a state gets the vote of the state(and so all the votes from that state). If it was by popular vote then votes from California, New York etc will get more weight than other states.
Yes, I know what popular vote is. Am just saying that US presidential electoral college system works correctly as it gives each state in the federal system equal weight in choosing the president. It was never designed to be by popular vote of individuals. So it doesn't matter at all.
Electoral votes = senators + congressmen. All votes from a state goes to winning candidate as it is winner takes all. So Trump won. Does popular vote mean all votes from US tallied together as a whole or is it winner takes all votes from that state and then tally each state? My argument was based on the understanding that its the later one.
> Does popular vote mean all votes from US tallied together as a whole
Yes.
The popular vote means the vote of the whole people nationally, exactly as if state boundaries did not exist.
The electoral college vote is weighted in a way that relates to the population of each state, but which favors smaller states. The relationship between the popular vote and the electoral college vote is further complicated by the winner-take-all system, and by the fact that voter turnout in a state does not effect the number of electoral college votes.
It's weird how a lot of conversations about the strong evidence that Russia influenced the US election are refuted with "yeah, but Clinton" as if that even starts to justify the situation.
The last year has very clearly done away with the idea that Wikileaks is a non-partisan body that only pursues truth. Maybe Assange has finally gone stir-crazy in that embassy, but he's actively ruining the good name he created.
I'd be interested in reading about this "strong evidence". Seriously. But I'll I've seen is quotes from people in the US's security aparatus that we should trust them that strong evidence exists.
There was a significant amount of strong evidence from independent security researchers being presented publicly for months prior to the election. Maybe you should do a bit of research.
Forget the US elections, if you are running an election and you lose 'because of leaks' what is the rational response. Blame the leaker, blame your indiscretion, blame your own actions?
The post election narrative has become surreal with the cartoonish rhetoric of 'enemies' and 'russia did it'.
Why is Russia an enemy? What has Russia done to the USA? Instead of acting like a responsible member of the international community we are ratcheting up tension, hate and hysteria with no evidence. This is the definition of demonization and propaganda.
On the other hand we unironically place nukes at Russia's borders via NATO an organization whose reason to exist is anti-russian, stir up trouble in Ukraine, practiced some extremly dubious 'shock doctrine' economics by the Chicago school in the 90s that destroyed what was left of the economy and directly led to the Russian oligarchies and follow a distinctly anti-russia global policy. Let's not be blind to reason.