About 3 years ago I heard firsthand they were sending over a billion a month. I'm sure the numbers have only gone up...so probably quite a lot of raw data.
That said, the actual overall entropy [0] is likely low (based on what I've observed in my inbox over the years; mostly just HTML templates with names and links).
I wish someone would try their luck with the spam laws on the books against linkedin. The likelihood of a win would be very low, but the benefit if they did win would be enormous to everyone.
Actually, I was referring more to the recipient side, not the LinkedIn user side.
I don't really see a big difference between someone selling their personal address book to LinkedIn and someone supplying it automatically. In both instances, both parties benefit (the user with connections or money, and LinkedIn with new user leads), and the recipients end up with unsolicited email.
Using an address book to locate existing users and present them an option to connect is one thing. Using that address book to market to unknown people through their email addresses is clearly spam.
I was a rave promoter in the early 2000s and was using my personal email address to send out promotions for a while. I had several thousands of emails that I had collected over the years, including a few email lists that forwarded all over the country. Several years ago, I signed up for linked in, dutifully unchecked the 20 emails or so on the first page of emails and then clicked, next, after which it emailed the entire rest of my gmail contact list. I ended up in the top 5% of viewed profiles on all of linked in for the month. I felt terrible about it.
Mocking those on the opposite side of the aisle from you isn't going to help a damned thing. Maybe if everyone stopped shitting on the opposite party we'd see Congress get their shit together.
I don't have an aisle, so I can't mock the opposite side. But I can mock the republican aisle for having descending into complete buffoonery.
If you have conservative leaning ideals I would suggest abandoning ship and starting something new. Nobody with a functioning brain is voting that way any more. It is a horrible clown show what has happened, unprecedented.
I don't have an aisle, so I can't mock the opposite side. But I can mock the Democratic aisle for having descending into complete buffoonery.
If you have liberal leaning ideals I would suggest abandoning ship and starting something new. Nobody with a functioning brain is voting that way any more. It is a horrible clown show what has happened, unprecedented.
Yea its sad to see such educated people become spewers of childish non-constructive rhetoric. Although it is very helpful in determining some people you would never want to work or associate with.
As someone with no stake in US politics (so no 'side of the aisle') both candidates are bad. Trump however is another level of bad. An openly sexist, potentially racist man with no political experience, running for the highest political office in your country is lunacy.
Duverger's law suggests that our form of elections results in a two party system. Opponents of the duopoly should advocate for an alternative. Such as Approval Voting.
The GOP REDMAP 2001 redistricting (gerrymandering) effort (and the Kochs Bros) created the Tea Party and the extreme obstructionism and partisanship we see today. Even the GOP regrets how successful that effort was (eg #NeverTrump), so expect a walkback on that.
Having run for office, I never mock candidates. Not even Sarah Palin. People not involved in campaigns just don't know how rough it is.
So we're supposed to tolerate corruption simply to avoid Trump? Trump offers us a lesson that if we don't take democracy (and the underlying components/principles) seriously, it will decay.
Sadly Bush didn't offer a lesson. Obama took office and continued and expanded the Bush Doctrine on foreign policy, greatly increasing extrajudicial actions and drone stuff.
I hate to be the check your privileged type, but I can't imagine hearing that from any type of minority person. Sure, if you are an upper middle class white guy, like most of us here, the idea of sending a lesson might be attractive. But that lesson isn't worth sacrifices to the rights of women, LGBT people, Muslims, African Americans, and everyone else that would be hurt be a Trump presidency.
If a Trump presidency resulted in any changes to the rights of any of the groups you mention, we'd also have congress to blame. The president does not have the power to make laws.
We've seen an ostensibly moderate president (Obama) uphold and extend the Bush Doctrine on foreign policy, killing, mutilating, and devastating all sorts of innocent people throughout the middle east.
The lesson we'd learn from a Trump presidence is that we need to be more picky about the sort of people we vote into office. The first step in this is not holding our nose and voting for the major party candidate who offends us slightly less.
This election, we get to choose between a democrat who is actually a moderate conservative (and could easily run the same platform as a republican) and a populist Republican, who has borrowed Democratic Party rhetoric on rust belt issues and combined it with some elements of paleo-conservatism. They are both hybrids that defy the party conventions.
What worries me most about a Trump presidency is not local (US) policy, as you rightly point out that he needs legislative support that he doesn't have to make changes (although he can retard progress through veto power, depending on your definition of progress and his inclination), but the absolute murder he will do to the US reputation and standing in the international community (already a complex topic, and I imagine fairly mixed in most circles).
> What worries me most about a Trump presidency is not local (US) policy, as you rightly point out that he needs legislative support that he doesn't have
If a sufficient electoral base exists to elect Trump, a sufficient electoral base exists to get him sufficient legislative support (sooner than new people are elected, perhaps, simply by raising the prospect of electoral danger to present incumbents) to implement his policies.
That assumes everyone actually knows what his objectives are before electing him, or that those objectives stay the same after election. Given how often his views have changed so far, I'm not sure that's a safe assumption to make.
Edit: Also, to be clear, if he does have legislative support because enough people support him to elect representatives with similar agendas, that's not really something for me to be worried about, as that would be no different than any other candidate. If it's the will of the people, so be it (as much as I dislike it).
What worries me about a Clinton presidency is that she's a threat to world peace. Remember how "Bush lied to invade Iraq"? I see the same thing happening here with the Clinton camp blaming the Russians for the DNC e-mail leak. President Hillary is preparing the American people for a possible WW3 with Russia. She's clearly showing her intentions.
I don't think that's very plausible at all. You really think a career politician who knows that both countries routinely probe and hack each other is going to go to war over this? Anything she says will be to affect Russia's international standing and embarrass them for getting caught, and possibly to maneuver for a better deal somewhere else.
That the US would go to war over the hacking of a non-governmental institution is ridiculous, and whoever is spouting stuff like that should immediately lose quite a bit of credibility with whoever is listening. Only congress can officially start a war, and if the president started getting aggressive with a country such as powerful as Russa over something so small, well, there would be some interesting ramifications to presidential power. Remember, congress has the ability to amend the constitution.
It's only a start. She's preparing the people to be more hostile toward Russia with conspiracy theories such as this. It's not about the hacking; it's the more severe accusation of influencing the election and American politics. The FBI is already starting an investigation. She also wants a no-fly zone over Syria in direct confrontation with Russia, escalating the tensions. I can only see more hostility in the future.
>If a Trump presidency resulted in any changes to the rights of any of the groups you mention, we'd also have congress to blame. The president does not have the power to make laws.
I think you are being naive if that is your logic. Why care about the president at all if they can't pass laws? The truth is that they do have a large amount of influence on the laws of this country. There is a reason people call it Obamacare and not Pelosicare. You are also not factoring in executive orders which can be used to do a lot of damage. I imagine Trump's immigration ban will attempt to be issued with an executive order for example.
Put another way, they are allowed to act unchecked by Congress much of the time.
Why is this?
I think the president and congress play a coordination game through which corrupt legislation is passed.
Take Obamacare. Its passage was a massive success to rent-seeking firms and interest groups. All the interest groups and most of the members of congress who were instrumental in getting it passed were happy to have it called "Obamacare" and not "PhizerCare" or "AbbotCare" or "HalliburtonCare".
Correspondingly, both parties benefit from the notion that Obamacare is somehow leftist or constitutes a big defeat for "greedy firms" and "selfish doctors".
In reality, the program simply modernizes many of the existing flows of rents from the public to firms, and reflects some of the changes in magnitude of influence of some industry subgroups.
This is one reason why the GOP didn't come up with a serious market-based counter-proposal: The spoils of Obamacare were just too appealing to pass up, at least for enough of the GOP's constituents to get the bill passed. The loud crowing about wanting to repeal it is no more meaningful than anything else politicians say to seem principled or to seem consistent.
From the beginning, Obama was far more pragmatic than HRC about pleasing healthcare industry incumbents, which is one reason for his surprising performance in the 2008 Democratic primary.
I strongly agree that executive orders and extralegal actions (which Bush honed and Obama perfected) are quite worrisome... But the core issue is that congress largely agrees with the actions that are undertaken. As a case in point, there was a lot of outrage from Democrats about GWB's extralegal shenanigans during the Iraq war, but then once Obama took office we got the chance to observe that in fact he (and his party) strongly support drone warfare, happily exploit the idea of enemy combatants not having rights, enjoy every clause of the Patriot Act, and utilize every extrajudicial rendition option just as GWB did.
We have one party, and it goes through a little ceremony every few years to see which corporatist warmonger gets the chance to be our figurehead.
I would really prefer to avoid a 4-year object lesson of that sort. Not saying Hillary will be a good president, but she won't be as bad as him. At least it buys us 4 more years of (roughly) status quo and maybe the disintegration of the Republican party. Which, IMO, would be an objective good thing (same with the Democratic party). Restructured, in 4-8 years with 2-3 viable future parties forming we may have some that exhibit saner political stances.
You're naive. There are rumours that Bill Clinton encouraged Trump to run, an attempt to scare people to vote for Hillary. If Hillary wins, she'll be president for 8 years. The DNC won't kick her out, and she's too well connected and smart to face accountability for her actions. The Clintons are above the law. If Trump wins, he'll do such a bad job as president that the Dems could win in 2020 with a better candidate. It's either 8 years of Clinton or 4 years of Trump: your choice.
Trump isn't going to signal the downfall of the US no more than Obama has. Democrats have adopted the scare tactics and language of Republicans circa 2008
Have you seen Trump's twitter feed? I've rarely seen such spew outside 4chan. Your average software engineer is more qualified, just by the signal virtue of having self control in public.
It's widely understood internationally that this is not normative US election wank.
I assure you, I'm not a Democrat either. I would probably be a Rockefeller Republican... if such a thing existed today.
Italy is in a world of hurt with 12%+ unemployment, a 37% youth unemployment rate, actual problems at the government level with the actual mob, corruption that would make your head spin, and a desperately shrinking economy.
Yeah, interesting reading. I think they got more 'fingerprints' on this than they wanted, though....
> From: Daniel Strauss [dstrauss1987@me.com<mailto:dstrauss1987@me.com>] > Sent: Sunday, May 08, 2016 12:25 PM > To: Miranda, Luis > Subject: Deep background question > > Hey > > So we want to see the list of committee appointments the Sanders Folks submitted just to verify it was mostly staffers and ineligible figures. That possible with no fingerprints attached?
Whatever the case, it sure does look as if the DNC has been playing favorites. There's more where that came from, e.g. -
> From: Daniel Strauss [dstrauss1987@me.com<mailto:dstrauss1987@me.com>]
> Sent: Sunday, May 08, 2016 12:25 PM
> To: Miranda, Luis > Subject: Deep background question
> > Hey
> > So we want to see the list of committee appointments the Sanders Folks submitted just to verify it was mostly staffers and ineligible figures. That possible with no fingerprints attached?
I would argue that the distinction is between smearing him because he's a secular Jew or being an atheist. They're arguing he's an insufficiently religious Jew, which is a common smear in itself against some Jews.
None of them are particularly interesting, though. So far I'm pretty surprised with how pedestrian it is.
Even looking for the word "fuck" reveals few internal communications which use it. In one thread, some guy seems to have gotten a sub-optimal time slot for putting out Democratic-leaning news on CNN, since it's at 6AM rather than closer to near 8:20AM when, it turns out, Obama was going to deliver some statement. They asked him if he thought it was possible to move the thing forward a couple hours, and suggested that if he couldn't then they might have to withhold the news completely for a later time. And he replied with a bit of lip about how crummy that is: "They structured their whole show on that we’ll make news in the 6am hour. We told them a time. They took care of us. Now they’re all asleep. Are we really going to screw them over on our mistake???" and he follows it up with a couple more replies which are similarly irreverent but not outright bad, making a valid case (which the higher-ups seem to eventually agree with) that alienating someone who's doing you a favor is a really bad idea and they should just bite whatever bullet they're biting with the worse time-slot. They basically tell him, "You're right, we'll listen to you, but fuck off with the attitude." And that's the scope of the thing. Relatively minor.
In another one, someone admitting that they're writing for FoxNews.com invites comments from them about some hit piece he's thinking about writing on the subject of Hillary Clinton maybe protecting Bill and trying to silence his accusers during his sex scandals... an internal email discussing this "opportunity" (to, presumably, have whatever their words might be, twisted) one emails to the other people in his office, "Is there a Fuck You emoji?". After some laughs they decide not to respond at all; but the guy is persistent, so the person who handles the forward says, "The asshole from fox emailed us again. I did some research and there’s still no “fuck you” emoji, unfortunately."
It's pretty tame stuff so far in my browsing. Relatively professional.
I was talking in particular about the use of profanity in a working environment, of course.
I do not know what you are reading into those emails but speaking purely objectively, there is remarkably little content in them to go off of. It could potentially have to do with Bernie Sanders in the Kentucky and West Virginia primaries (which were in early May), but that seems somewhat unlikely given the timestamps -- the West Virginia primary was only 5 days after the email was sent, which is almost no time for one to ask the question, get whatever answer, and launch a smear campaign. It could also be not about Sanders at all--WVA is an odd way to refer to West Virginia when WV will work as well, and the name "Sanders" doesn't appear anywhere in the emails themselves.
Even if it's about Sanders, the email doesn't even say whether the guy is rooting for or against Sanders: it could just as easily be "Hey, I heard this rumor that Sanders is an atheist, can we get someone to ask him so that he can squash that rumor like a bug?"
It doesn't strike me as a "civil rights violation" to ask about someone's religious views. I mean, maybe the US people not voting for politicians based on their religious affiliation is a larger civil rights violation that you fear will be triggered if this question is asked, but that seems like several steps away from a sure thing, since it's quite possible that Bernie will play a different political card.
1) The emails refer to two upcoming primaries, which occurred in close temporal and spatial proximity to each other. Literally no other campaign in the nation is in two states. It is hard to imagine any other figure in the nation that that refers to other than Bernie Sanders. I didn't mention Bernie Sanders in my reply, so why did you think it was about Bernie and then attempt to deny it? I think you protest too much.
2) The email is clearly suggesting to use the question against Sanders. Your hypothetical suggestion is plainly unsupported by the facts. Let me just quote the objectionable e-mail:
> It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.
That is clearly saying that knowledge that Sanders is an atheist would hurt him in KY and WVA (by the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WVA). It is also implying that someone should directly ask him so he can't "skate by".
3) civil service jobs are not supposed to involve discrimination based on religious preferences and attempts to exploit bigotry by national political organizations is deeply unethical.
> 3) civil service jobs are not supposed to involve discrimination based on religious preferences and attempts to exploit bigotry by national political organizations is deeply unethical.
Are you talking about political agents being unethical (to which I say, "duh"), or are we talking about what you previously stated, "conspiring to commit a civil rights violation, or exploit one" ? Those are very different things.
People have a right to vote for a candidate as they see fit, based on all the information they have at their disposal. That's a core tenet of democracy. While I would prefer people not use religious views of candidates in most cases, there are cases where I would definitely like to know (for example, if the candidate believes the world will end within the year, I think that's probably the most relevant information in a presidential candidate you can know). While self serving, I can't see the action as purely negative, as it would be increasing true information to the public (as opposed to attack ads that insinuate unverified information).
I would say that national political organizations conspiring to exploit bigotry at the ballot box (which you correctly note is allowed) is a civil rights violation. It's the actions of the formal organization to promote bigotry vs the actual voters themselves acting as they see fit.
While I agree in this case it's probably bigotry they would be exploiting, how do we differentiate that from an informed view of how someone's thoughts on religion (or birth control, or the belief in evolution, or how to deal with Israeli/Palestinian relations, or trade agreements) might translate into other areas of office? If you think they don't matter, it's bigotry. If you think they do, such as inform as to the character of the person, the personality of the person, how they deal with conflict, etc, then it's not. How to we objectively differentiate between things that matter and things that don't?
You raise some good points. I'll grant that this is probably not an area where you would want to create legislation or prosecute the violations. I still contend they are violations: just ones we do not necessarily want to set an example of pursuing,
I agree, and I think a good solution that works (or doesn't, as the public sees fit) is to expose the behavior, which is what we have here. We're having a discussion about it, and agree it's poor behavior, and if it's poor enough or deemed problematic enough, it may make headlines and hurt rather than help the people involved. Again, we have an instance of more (hopefully correct and verified) information being released so the public can do with it what they deem prudent. Thus, we have democracy in action (even when that action may be to choose inaction).
1. I did not say that you said that those emails were about Bernie; I said that those emails could be about Bernie, because it's something that I do regard as a live possibility. I was just being honest about how little content there is there; it could be about Bernie or not. (Also the "I didn't mention Bernie so why did you think it was about Bernie?" card is extremely lame; we're talking about a WikiLeaks leak and WikiLeaks in parallel with this leak has announced e.g. via Twitter that they interpret this as being about Bernie. Of course it's neither my nor your innovation to read the emails that way; we both received it.)
Like, you say "the emails refer to two upcoming primaries." I am simply saying that this is too assertive for my tastes. It doesn't say anything about primaries; it says "KY" and "WVA" and those can be primaries, they also might not be. (I'm afraid I don't understand your "by the way" here -- you might be trying to point out the disambiguation link up-top, but of course acronyms may also refer to things that are not on Wikipedia. For example, Brad Marshall has a lot more emails from before this time mentioning the HVF; but have fun trying to find that on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVF .)
So, I mean, there's a lot that we're reading into this thing to come to that conclusion. Getting fussy and treating it like it's not a conclusion is not a great idea. It might well be a correct conclusion. But it's a conclusion that we're presently coming to off of limited evidence, and you shouldn't be all like "you cannot possibly be serious!" when someone points out that the evidence is limited, when it is.
2. You have a messed up definition for "clearly" then. That's OK, it seems like a lot of things seem a little muddled in your worldview. For example, you're right that "that is clearly saying that knowledge that Sanders is an atheist would hurt him in KY and WVA," as long as we weaken the word "knowledge" to "belief" (because it would be easy to misread what you said as drive-by-asserting that Bernie is an atheist, whereas Bernie has disclaimed this a few times, even though he has repeatedly asserted that he's not very religious in any organized way).
But it's not "clearly suggesting to use the question against Sanders." That's another conclusion. It might be right, but it's not like the email says "My Southern Baptist peeps would not vote for him if they knew the truth." In fact the whole case for this hinges on the word "skate" (you used, in quotes, "skate by", but that is not even what the email said).
That word by itself is not clear. It is implicitly suggestive via a negative connotation.
3. I am not doubting that the bigotry exists and I am not stating that the DNC for sure acted ethically. However, we would need to know a lot more than this email to know if that were true.
For example, you're treating this as a serious suggestion rather than some banter among friends. The email thread ends on an "AMEN!" which suggests that nobody in this thread considered it a starting block for some sort of conspiracy to actually ask Bernie the quetion to get him to be unelectable. In fact, that earlier thread about the "HVF" I mentioned, there was an official DNC denouncement of claims that the Bernie campaign was making; it came on the backs of a lot of back-and-forth in order to write a formal press release which is not present here... But one of the more interesting (and very hard to interpret) emails comes from Hillary's general counsel, Marc Elias, who was CCed on the question apparently independent of his work on her campai...
The information presented is limited, correct. It is, however, more than enough for any reasonable person to conclude 1) it is about Bernie 2) WVA refers to West Virginia 3) It's talking about state primaries 4) they hope to harm his chances.
Everything about Bayes theorem etc and probabilities of various other explanations are disingenuous. Consider what Brad Marshall said when asked for comment:
> “I do not recall this. I can say it would not have been Sanders. It would probably be about a surrogate.”
Usually when people deny remembering having sent an e-mail that was clearly delivered it's evidence that they're lying.
Your particular approach to engaging on what we don't necessarily know rather than what occurred prima facie makes me think that if you saw a nuclear explosion, you'd point out we don't know whether mushrooms do indeed grow that fast or not.
I do not know if you are aware of how little sense this comment makes. For example, it is in the very structure of the words "disingenuous" and "consider" that the sentence "X is disingenuous; consider Y" is nonsense for all X and Y; you cannot prove that someone is being insincere by asking them to think about something that they've not thought about before. This is ignoring the bigger issue that people forget things all the time and that it does not usually mark a lie, and that even if someone is lying about some statement somewhere, it doesn't change the basic Bayesian fact that yes, you do need to consider an event in the context of all of the probability-weighted candidate explanations for it, if you want to know whether it's reasonable for a person to conclude it.
I respectfully yield whatever last words are in this exchange to you.
Well, none of the six results were particularly interesting. Four were variations on Trump's debate comment about having a big penis. One was a news summary which included the world's first successful penis transplant. The last was someone calling Trump "Hillary Clinton with a penis". Nothing authored by someone in the DNC.
this actually demonstrates some savvy low level marketing, seems like they were going to redirect 'applicants' to a microsite likely with more satirical anti-Trump stuff.
The desire to keep the 'offensive shit ..verbatim' is also quite interesting ( I think ).
1) again, shows some savvy marketing to not step over the line into smearing
2) does anyone know if the phrases in their posts are actually taken from Trump quotes or anecdotes? They seem plausible but also a bit off the wall.
In any case, somewhat interesting to see the inner workings of US political marketing machinations
* Trump's threat to pull back from our most important military alliances<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-and-the... like NATO, pull aid from our allies like Israel, and his gushing praise for dictators would put our country on a dangerous path.
Greg Sargent of WaPo seems to have a pretty friendly relationship with the DNC. I'd like to know what they were trying to damage control here: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/11242
90 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 42.0 ms ] threadhttps://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/?q=i%27d+like+to+add+you+to...
That said, the actual overall entropy [0] is likely low (based on what I've observed in my inbox over the years; mostly just HTML templates with names and links).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/linkedin-sued-hacki...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/linkedin-class-action-email-...
I don't really see a big difference between someone selling their personal address book to LinkedIn and someone supplying it automatically. In both instances, both parties benefit (the user with connections or money, and LinkedIn with new user leads), and the recipients end up with unsolicited email.
Using an address book to locate existing users and present them an option to connect is one thing. Using that address book to market to unknown people through their email addresses is clearly spam.
Clinton defenders's arguments are getting stranger by the day.
If you have conservative leaning ideals I would suggest abandoning ship and starting something new. Nobody with a functioning brain is voting that way any more. It is a horrible clown show what has happened, unprecedented.
If you have liberal leaning ideals I would suggest abandoning ship and starting something new. Nobody with a functioning brain is voting that way any more. It is a horrible clown show what has happened, unprecedented.
You very much have an opposite side of the aisle wether you want to admit it or not.
Citation needed.
> with no political experience
That's not necessarily a bad thing.
Duverger's law suggests that our form of elections results in a two party system. Opponents of the duopoly should advocate for an alternative. Such as Approval Voting.
The GOP REDMAP 2001 redistricting (gerrymandering) effort (and the Kochs Bros) created the Tea Party and the extreme obstructionism and partisanship we see today. Even the GOP regrets how successful that effort was (eg #NeverTrump), so expect a walkback on that.
Having run for office, I never mock candidates. Not even Sarah Palin. People not involved in campaigns just don't know how rough it is.
I hate to be the check your privileged type, but I can't imagine hearing that from any type of minority person. Sure, if you are an upper middle class white guy, like most of us here, the idea of sending a lesson might be attractive. But that lesson isn't worth sacrifices to the rights of women, LGBT people, Muslims, African Americans, and everyone else that would be hurt be a Trump presidency.
We've seen an ostensibly moderate president (Obama) uphold and extend the Bush Doctrine on foreign policy, killing, mutilating, and devastating all sorts of innocent people throughout the middle east.
The lesson we'd learn from a Trump presidence is that we need to be more picky about the sort of people we vote into office. The first step in this is not holding our nose and voting for the major party candidate who offends us slightly less.
This election, we get to choose between a democrat who is actually a moderate conservative (and could easily run the same platform as a republican) and a populist Republican, who has borrowed Democratic Party rhetoric on rust belt issues and combined it with some elements of paleo-conservatism. They are both hybrids that defy the party conventions.
If a sufficient electoral base exists to elect Trump, a sufficient electoral base exists to get him sufficient legislative support (sooner than new people are elected, perhaps, simply by raising the prospect of electoral danger to present incumbents) to implement his policies.
Edit: Also, to be clear, if he does have legislative support because enough people support him to elect representatives with similar agendas, that's not really something for me to be worried about, as that would be no different than any other candidate. If it's the will of the people, so be it (as much as I dislike it).
The interest groups that care generally want the status quo preserved.
If Trump is not destined to do this, then I think there is little danger he'll be elected.
Note, the same applies to HRC.
That the US would go to war over the hacking of a non-governmental institution is ridiculous, and whoever is spouting stuff like that should immediately lose quite a bit of credibility with whoever is listening. Only congress can officially start a war, and if the president started getting aggressive with a country such as powerful as Russa over something so small, well, there would be some interesting ramifications to presidential power. Remember, congress has the ability to amend the constitution.
I think you are being naive if that is your logic. Why care about the president at all if they can't pass laws? The truth is that they do have a large amount of influence on the laws of this country. There is a reason people call it Obamacare and not Pelosicare. You are also not factoring in executive orders which can be used to do a lot of damage. I imagine Trump's immigration ban will attempt to be issued with an executive order for example.
Put another way, they are allowed to act unchecked by Congress much of the time.
Why is this?
I think the president and congress play a coordination game through which corrupt legislation is passed.
Take Obamacare. Its passage was a massive success to rent-seeking firms and interest groups. All the interest groups and most of the members of congress who were instrumental in getting it passed were happy to have it called "Obamacare" and not "PhizerCare" or "AbbotCare" or "HalliburtonCare".
Correspondingly, both parties benefit from the notion that Obamacare is somehow leftist or constitutes a big defeat for "greedy firms" and "selfish doctors".
In reality, the program simply modernizes many of the existing flows of rents from the public to firms, and reflects some of the changes in magnitude of influence of some industry subgroups.
This is one reason why the GOP didn't come up with a serious market-based counter-proposal: The spoils of Obamacare were just too appealing to pass up, at least for enough of the GOP's constituents to get the bill passed. The loud crowing about wanting to repeal it is no more meaningful than anything else politicians say to seem principled or to seem consistent.
From the beginning, Obama was far more pragmatic than HRC about pleasing healthcare industry incumbents, which is one reason for his surprising performance in the 2008 Democratic primary.
I strongly agree that executive orders and extralegal actions (which Bush honed and Obama perfected) are quite worrisome... But the core issue is that congress largely agrees with the actions that are undertaken. As a case in point, there was a lot of outrage from Democrats about GWB's extralegal shenanigans during the Iraq war, but then once Obama took office we got the chance to observe that in fact he (and his party) strongly support drone warfare, happily exploit the idea of enemy combatants not having rights, enjoy every clause of the Patriot Act, and utilize every extrajudicial rendition option just as GWB did.
We have one party, and it goes through a little ceremony every few years to see which corporatist warmonger gets the chance to be our figurehead.
Once that seed has been planted, confirmation bias does the rest.
It's widely understood internationally that this is not normative US election wank.
I assure you, I'm not a Democrat either. I would probably be a Rockefeller Republican... if such a thing existed today.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/why-italy-s-economy-is-a...
So no, not so much with the survival.
"Off the record" is a fun search term to browse.
"otr" might be interesting too
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/?q=%22off+the+record%22&mfr...
> From: Daniel Strauss [dstrauss1987@me.com<mailto:dstrauss1987@me.com>] > Sent: Sunday, May 08, 2016 12:25 PM > To: Miranda, Luis > Subject: Deep background question > > Hey > > So we want to see the list of committee appointments the Sanders Folks submitted just to verify it was mostly staffers and ineligible figures. That possible with no fingerprints attached?
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/7065
I knew it! Lots of people secretly hate the iPhone, but won't admit it public!
Even looking for the word "fuck" reveals few internal communications which use it. In one thread, some guy seems to have gotten a sub-optimal time slot for putting out Democratic-leaning news on CNN, since it's at 6AM rather than closer to near 8:20AM when, it turns out, Obama was going to deliver some statement. They asked him if he thought it was possible to move the thing forward a couple hours, and suggested that if he couldn't then they might have to withhold the news completely for a later time. And he replied with a bit of lip about how crummy that is: "They structured their whole show on that we’ll make news in the 6am hour. We told them a time. They took care of us. Now they’re all asleep. Are we really going to screw them over on our mistake???" and he follows it up with a couple more replies which are similarly irreverent but not outright bad, making a valid case (which the higher-ups seem to eventually agree with) that alienating someone who's doing you a favor is a really bad idea and they should just bite whatever bullet they're biting with the worse time-slot. They basically tell him, "You're right, we'll listen to you, but fuck off with the attitude." And that's the scope of the thing. Relatively minor.
In another one, someone admitting that they're writing for FoxNews.com invites comments from them about some hit piece he's thinking about writing on the subject of Hillary Clinton maybe protecting Bill and trying to silence his accusers during his sex scandals... an internal email discussing this "opportunity" (to, presumably, have whatever their words might be, twisted) one emails to the other people in his office, "Is there a Fuck You emoji?". After some laughs they decide not to respond at all; but the guy is persistent, so the person who handles the forward says, "The asshole from fox emailed us again. I did some research and there’s still no “fuck you” emoji, unfortunately."
It's pretty tame stuff so far in my browsing. Relatively professional.
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/11508
I wouldn't call that professional. I would call that conspiring to commit a civil rights violation, or exploit one.
I do not know what you are reading into those emails but speaking purely objectively, there is remarkably little content in them to go off of. It could potentially have to do with Bernie Sanders in the Kentucky and West Virginia primaries (which were in early May), but that seems somewhat unlikely given the timestamps -- the West Virginia primary was only 5 days after the email was sent, which is almost no time for one to ask the question, get whatever answer, and launch a smear campaign. It could also be not about Sanders at all--WVA is an odd way to refer to West Virginia when WV will work as well, and the name "Sanders" doesn't appear anywhere in the emails themselves.
Even if it's about Sanders, the email doesn't even say whether the guy is rooting for or against Sanders: it could just as easily be "Hey, I heard this rumor that Sanders is an atheist, can we get someone to ask him so that he can squash that rumor like a bug?"
It doesn't strike me as a "civil rights violation" to ask about someone's religious views. I mean, maybe the US people not voting for politicians based on their religious affiliation is a larger civil rights violation that you fear will be triggered if this question is asked, but that seems like several steps away from a sure thing, since it's quite possible that Bernie will play a different political card.
1) The emails refer to two upcoming primaries, which occurred in close temporal and spatial proximity to each other. Literally no other campaign in the nation is in two states. It is hard to imagine any other figure in the nation that that refers to other than Bernie Sanders. I didn't mention Bernie Sanders in my reply, so why did you think it was about Bernie and then attempt to deny it? I think you protest too much.
2) The email is clearly suggesting to use the question against Sanders. Your hypothetical suggestion is plainly unsupported by the facts. Let me just quote the objectionable e-mail:
> It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.
That is clearly saying that knowledge that Sanders is an atheist would hurt him in KY and WVA (by the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WVA). It is also implying that someone should directly ask him so he can't "skate by".
3) civil service jobs are not supposed to involve discrimination based on religious preferences and attempts to exploit bigotry by national political organizations is deeply unethical.
Are you talking about political agents being unethical (to which I say, "duh"), or are we talking about what you previously stated, "conspiring to commit a civil rights violation, or exploit one" ? Those are very different things.
People have a right to vote for a candidate as they see fit, based on all the information they have at their disposal. That's a core tenet of democracy. While I would prefer people not use religious views of candidates in most cases, there are cases where I would definitely like to know (for example, if the candidate believes the world will end within the year, I think that's probably the most relevant information in a presidential candidate you can know). While self serving, I can't see the action as purely negative, as it would be increasing true information to the public (as opposed to attack ads that insinuate unverified information).
1. I did not say that you said that those emails were about Bernie; I said that those emails could be about Bernie, because it's something that I do regard as a live possibility. I was just being honest about how little content there is there; it could be about Bernie or not. (Also the "I didn't mention Bernie so why did you think it was about Bernie?" card is extremely lame; we're talking about a WikiLeaks leak and WikiLeaks in parallel with this leak has announced e.g. via Twitter that they interpret this as being about Bernie. Of course it's neither my nor your innovation to read the emails that way; we both received it.)
Like, you say "the emails refer to two upcoming primaries." I am simply saying that this is too assertive for my tastes. It doesn't say anything about primaries; it says "KY" and "WVA" and those can be primaries, they also might not be. (I'm afraid I don't understand your "by the way" here -- you might be trying to point out the disambiguation link up-top, but of course acronyms may also refer to things that are not on Wikipedia. For example, Brad Marshall has a lot more emails from before this time mentioning the HVF; but have fun trying to find that on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVF .)
So, I mean, there's a lot that we're reading into this thing to come to that conclusion. Getting fussy and treating it like it's not a conclusion is not a great idea. It might well be a correct conclusion. But it's a conclusion that we're presently coming to off of limited evidence, and you shouldn't be all like "you cannot possibly be serious!" when someone points out that the evidence is limited, when it is.
2. You have a messed up definition for "clearly" then. That's OK, it seems like a lot of things seem a little muddled in your worldview. For example, you're right that "that is clearly saying that knowledge that Sanders is an atheist would hurt him in KY and WVA," as long as we weaken the word "knowledge" to "belief" (because it would be easy to misread what you said as drive-by-asserting that Bernie is an atheist, whereas Bernie has disclaimed this a few times, even though he has repeatedly asserted that he's not very religious in any organized way).
But it's not "clearly suggesting to use the question against Sanders." That's another conclusion. It might be right, but it's not like the email says "My Southern Baptist peeps would not vote for him if they knew the truth." In fact the whole case for this hinges on the word "skate" (you used, in quotes, "skate by", but that is not even what the email said).
That word by itself is not clear. It is implicitly suggestive via a negative connotation.
3. I am not doubting that the bigotry exists and I am not stating that the DNC for sure acted ethically. However, we would need to know a lot more than this email to know if that were true.
For example, you're treating this as a serious suggestion rather than some banter among friends. The email thread ends on an "AMEN!" which suggests that nobody in this thread considered it a starting block for some sort of conspiracy to actually ask Bernie the quetion to get him to be unelectable. In fact, that earlier thread about the "HVF" I mentioned, there was an official DNC denouncement of claims that the Bernie campaign was making; it came on the backs of a lot of back-and-forth in order to write a formal press release which is not present here... But one of the more interesting (and very hard to interpret) emails comes from Hillary's general counsel, Marc Elias, who was CCed on the question apparently independent of his work on her campai...
Everything about Bayes theorem etc and probabilities of various other explanations are disingenuous. Consider what Brad Marshall said when asked for comment:
> “I do not recall this. I can say it would not have been Sanders. It would probably be about a surrogate.”
(emphasis mine). https://theintercept.com/2016/07/22/new-leak-top-dnc-officia...
Usually when people deny remembering having sent an e-mail that was clearly delivered it's evidence that they're lying.
Your particular approach to engaging on what we don't necessarily know rather than what occurred prima facie makes me think that if you saw a nuclear explosion, you'd point out we don't know whether mushrooms do indeed grow that fast or not.
I respectfully yield whatever last words are in this exchange to you.
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/8763
nothing :(
Also, here's one where the DNC creates fake (satirical) craigslist posts advertising jobs for Trump businesses: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/12803
The desire to keep the 'offensive shit ..verbatim' is also quite interesting ( I think ). 1) again, shows some savvy marketing to not step over the line into smearing 2) does anyone know if the phrases in their posts are actually taken from Trump quotes or anecdotes? They seem plausible but also a bit off the wall.
In any case, somewhat interesting to see the inner workings of US political marketing machinations
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/?q="Donald+trump"
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/?q="Dangerous+Donald"
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/4736
* Trump's threat to pull back from our most important military alliances<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-and-the... like NATO, pull aid from our allies like Israel, and his gushing praise for dictators would put our country on a dangerous path.
edit: Seems they were just scared of the narrative after platform concessions with the Sanders camp: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/13370