Not that Wikileaks didn't **** up by publishing something given to them by Russia (according to Clapper, through an intermediary), but these intelligence cronies are still probably half pissed about the cables leaked six years ago.

It's difficult for me because I don't want Russia to actually gain power, but on the other hand alot of the intelligence community's comments on WL just comes across like whining about people finding out the truth.

Now that's interesting.



Neither does it over Europe, where Wikileaks is based?

He was drawing a distinction between journalistic organizations that publish confidential information because it's in the public's interest and organizations like Wikileaks that dump massive amounts of confidential documents onto the public indiscriminately in order to harm the US government. That seems like a fair distinction, and it seems like it's a fair explanation for why what Wikileaks does isn't journalism.

Yeah, but the New York Times has worked with Wikileaks starting in 2010. The principle still applies: if publishers can be charged for publishing leaked information (so that it's not only illegal to leak it, it's illegal to publish it), then the USG could go after nearly any media company that's worth paying attention to.

Not to mention, if the Russian state department starting publishing confidential information through one of its media arms that would cause an international scandal on a very different scale.

Compare anythings WL has released to the Panama Papers. The PP has resulted in very little of consequence, partly because nobody but a small media elite has access to any of the documents. It may be more damaging to just release things, but when they aren't just released, it's much easier for authority figures to spin the stories and put pressure on journalists.

It's not entirely bad to just dump documents. Even then, much of the "damage" done to the U.S. through Wikileaks was the sorts of political damage done by helping defeat the TPP trade deal. I.E., they're damaging the sorts of things we want to oppose anyway. Because most of the information kept secret doesn't benefit us, it benefits American elites, particularly business elites.

Clinton just barely lost. She lost for many reasons. Two of those reasons include Wikileaks and the Comey letter. Though Clinton gives hardly a nod to anything but those two things, tipping the scales in her favor.

Fired because he improperly handled the Clinton emails.

Damn. Things had seemed normal for a while. This seems like the most explicitly dictatorial gesture we've seen in... days.

Joking aside, it's bad. How can a Trump appointee be expected to conduct an impartial investigation of Trump-Russia collusion. And even if there is no collusion, how will anyone be able to trust the outcome of the investigation if that is the bureau's conclusion?

Uh, yeah, that practice can only, like, help defame a presidential candidate in the interest of a foreign government who'd prefer for her opponent to become president.

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Oh, whoops, I meant allegedly.

A foreign government desiring a political candidate is not wrong. What's wrong is setting up a troll campaign to confuse people and hacking political targets. And of those two, the troll campaign was probably most of the heavy lifting, because I'd bet much of the crazy ways people interpreted the Clinton emails were pushed hard by the Russian trolls.

Let's not forget that the U.S. literally hacked the French elections and spied on candidates in 2012. Not to get too heavily into "whataboutism", but it is pretty interesting to see America's reaction the same stuff we do to others on a regular basis.

We should punish Russia, sanction them heavily. There's also a danger that Western governments will now want to place controls over internet data to prevent future attacks, which could result in a new layer of information control. Still, the point is, Americans should learn from this how to protect ourselves politically, and to stop doing it to others.

We now see what damage a weak country like Russia can do to the political landscape of a country like France, the UK or the US. What sort of things do you think the CIA is capable of, given their funding trumps the FSB?

I suppose my biggest problem with the United States is the never ending stream of lies they tell us. I'd feel much less opposed if they could tell us more accurate motivations.

I was actually very impressed with Obama when he said this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKpso3vhZtw

Because Obama basically said "the job market's ****ed and we can't fix it". Which is the exact opposite of what Trump's campaign, and exactly what Americans don't want to hear. But at least he had the balls to come forward and say it directly.

When it comes to Syria, all we get is spin, spin, spin. If they could be honest about wanting to push out Assad not primarily out of humanitarian concern for Syrians, but because they desire control of that region, it would be easier for me to swallow.

sage

this is "impeach Trump" thread, not the nihilism general thread

I know Trump was harping on this, but didn't Clapper basically say they have no evidence of collusion still?

The guy is guilty of something, if nothing else than of being an out of control paranoid maniac.




Bernie voter here. This is ****ing hilarious watching Trump crash and burn. But in all seriousness we can't let this guy get the nuclear codes.

1) The fact that a former president endorsed a candidate is not an example of what you say it is, i.e., the US government "desiring" (or endorsing) a political candidate. Obama spoke as a private citizen, not as a representative of the United States.

2) Russia didn't simply *want* a certain candidate to win an election. They engaged in fraudulent, criminal activity in order to influence an election.



That link doesn't say what you claim it does. It does not say that the US hacked the French elections.



He said automation does more to eliminate manufacturing jobs in the US than competition with foreign labor markets/outsourcing, and that, despite whatever Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders might say, it's impossible to restore jobs that have been lost because of automation. That's not brave. He just stating something that is factually true, and isn't pandering.

1) Russia never explicitly endorsed Trump, either. And if you want the other direction, Trump tacitly supported Le Pen. But Obama still has enough cultural authority to speak on behalf of the pre-Trump power structure.

2) That's literally what I said.



No, they did not hack voting machines, they hacked political targets. What's your point? A minor quip about grammar?



Okay.

My point is my point: "That link doesn't say what you claim it does. It does not say that the US hacked the French elections." The article says the US illicitly gained access to computers in Sarkozy's office in the final days of his presidency. It doesn't say the US tried to interfere in an election, or that it "hacked" an election. So, no, it's not a minor quip about grammar. If you cite a source as evidence, you should make sure it actually backs up your claim.

That's all irrelevant to my point. My point, again, was just this: your evidence did not back up your claim.

If we're talking about the obscurity of the true "motives" of the "United States", presumably it matters that even though populist candidates make unrealistic promises about bringing back jobs that have been rendered obsolete by technological innovation, just about any source that matters recognizes that dealing with the economic consequences of automation is a serious, serious problem?

Hacking all of France's political parties and compiling reports on them does not count as hacking an election? So if Russia just hacked the DNC and Podesta, but never released anything, did they not hack the election?

It's not hard to find instances of the US actually manipulating elections, if that's the only thing you care about.



Sure, but it's a facile point to make when plenty of easily accessible evidence does exist. It's not hard to find other tacit endorsements, either.

I suppose if you use the verb "hack" to mean expressly working within the election mechanisms to alter things, but I don't use hack that way, I exclusively use it to mean computer hacking.

Don't know how you can read this as anything but "I'm firing you because I think you're investigating my crimes"

Americans: Wasn't Andrew Johnson impeached for doing something like this?

Hopefully someone in the FBI can locate the right person to flip and testify. I'd like Trump to get taken down before Republicans can destroy any more of the country.

Yes, except he was in opposition to a hostile congress, i.e. of the other party.

Got it, I'll keep that in mind when reading future stuff.



Okay, so it seems secular stagnation can result when there's too much saving and not enough investing. Which I take with your hints to mean: the wealthy buy more and more stocks, not because they want an actual return on an investment, but because the stock market is a low tax rate savings account. When the stock market goes up, that means more money is being dumped not into actual investments, but as storage. Which is how i.e. Walmart can have much more money than debt.

What this means is that money is being sucked out of the real economy and dumped in these giant corporations which don't increase growth.

Can't we wait until they remove suppressors from the NFA first?

“The American Suppressor Association believes that citizens should not have to pay a tax to protect their hearing while exercising their Second Amendment rights,” said Knox Williams, President and Executive Director of the ASA.

Never heard of this but **** lol, Americans believe in this sort of **** more firmly than the Bible.

I want to know what kind of person sets up "The American Suppressor Association".

In other (third page flagged for off-topic anti-Randian politics) Hacker News, R.I.P. gerrymander reforms / 2020 Democratic congressional candidates.



Just in time for you rural folks to see Medicaid cut off, courtesy TrumpCare! Have a nice day.

I read that as saying the U.S. Census Bureau is about to become a ****show and he wants out before it hits the fan.

Well it may well have already become moribund from lack of proper funding, courtesy congressional Republicans.

For the Lord said, "Starve the beast, and I shall bestow unto thee the riches of gerrymandering."

Probably someone who owns a company that manufactures them, or someone who likes them as a hobby. I would imagine, probably the same kind of person who sets up an association for anything else. For the record, I don't like any kind of association. They're just dormant governments really.

Well, no, not exactly. That's not how stock works. The only time a corporation benefits from a stock sale is the first time it happens, at dilutory events like public offerings (usually there is only one public offering, the IPO). When you buy stock in a company outside of an IPO, the corporation doesn't see any of that money. Unless a company is planning another public offering, or doing some seriously shady ****, the stock price is literally irrelevant for the actual (non finance goods) business operations of a corporation.

Other than that, you're on the right track.

We're in the middle of a god awful, 30 year long, maybe 40 year long stock market bubble. Stock price growth is absolutely ****ing insane right now. Average returns on S&P 500 stocks since 1980 are about 13% per year. That wildly outpaces any reasonable ROIC you can expect from doing anything "real" with that money.

Like, imagine buying a rental building and getting 13% of your land+construction costs back in rent, every year. That would be insane. Absolutely ****ing insane. You'd be lucky to get 4%. If you tried to get more than that, you'd get guillotined and piked. And not necessarily in that order.

Why would a rational person ever roll the dice on real capital investment, then, when they can just make an absolutely stupid amount of money buying stock? They wouldn't. So they do stupid **** like liquidate perfectly good companies, get their money out, and hurl it at the stock market. Everybody's stocks get bid up, they sell to the new suckers and bid up some other stock. Then all this **** bleeds over into housing and cars and every other damn thing.

It's all a complete house of cards. The worst part? Your deferred income savings account. Your 401(k) and RRSP, those little government bribes to get workers to keep feeding the bubble. Meanwhile the savings that people used to use to start businesses in their 40s and 50s are locked up in retirement plans for another 20-30 years longer, and spent in trickles to avoid the government tax bomb on them.

Money money everywhere, not a drop of wealth.

The American Armor Piercing Ammunition Association believes that citizens should not have to pay a tax to protect themselves from deadly ricochets while exercising their Second Amendment rights to open up on an APC.



All authority is illegitimate.

No, for example if you asked me repeatedly to dress you up as a girl and tie you to a saw horse and I finally gave in, that would be legitimate authority because there's an annoyance debt to be made up. Not that I'm not into that kind of stuff.

You're probably gonna wanna get that request in writing....

Full legal documentation is part of my particular sex slave fetish.

Ah yeah, that was a dumb thing to say because I knew that. Companies can issue bonds and new stock, but the latter is rare I believe.

As far as the rest, I basically agree. I think that's why America is so militarily aggressive. We don't just want to expand markets, more importantly, we need to con more people with capital to buy into the markets we have going. Of course, this requires a wealthy elite. So it helps explain why the U.S. is so belligerent, especially against left wing and equalitarian governments and supports center-right governments.

Another interesting bit: between 2011 and 2013 China poured more concrete than all of the US from 1901 to 2000. They had to create artificial demand. But much of the housing remained empty, because so much of housing now is treated as investment rather than regular goods people actually can use. That's why there was such a proliferation of those giant McMansions all over the U.S., they looked good to investors.

What's bad for me is, the government props these shenanigans up by basically guaranteeing market crises will be abated through government intervention. So it doesn't just tap from the market, it taps from everything.

The tax cuts for the wealthy the AHCA proposes is just the next step. At some point it will have to burst. Let's hope it's not bad.

Also yes, all authority is illegitimate.