You didn't ask, you demanded. Very different to saying "What brings you to that conclusion".
yep, demanded, very rudely might I add.
come on man, at least try if you're gonna call me mean things like 'bully.' You're just being dishonest at this point.
I love being proven wrong. If you can show me anything that substantiates your claim of some worldwide conspiracy to manipulate the media involving a freedom of information advocacy organization, A former world power with its own geopolitical interests, and the leader of the free world, do so.
Otherwise, you'll have to understand my skepticism of the New World Trump Orderâ˘
Well ok, I understand the skepticism because of this. I don't personally agree with the reasons Assange behaves like he does, but I haven't gone into it any deeper. As time goes by, I tend to increasingly ignore characters (mostly) and just focus on the money/interest scale. I know it's crude, but it works for me, pieces just started falling into place ever since I've started thinking in that direction.
And also, I might even say that I now trust Wikileaks info integrity more than, say, The Wall Street Journal.
And, before certain people form thousands of opinions on that statement alone, I don't mean that Wikileaks is uber-trustworthy all of a sudden. It's not even the WSJ, it's just that I've lost faith almost entirely in most mainstream media outlets just because of the money trail, recent events, the complete failure of covering certain important events in the world and truckloads of bias. They really deserve to die out.
I think it's totally fine to be skeptical of Wikileaks. Everyone has an agenda. I just don't think that belief in a shadowy worldwide conspiracy is a good reason to do so.
Heuristic: If it's got the same background basis as Flat/Hollow Earth Theory, Climate Change Denial, Creationism/Intelligent Design, the Illuminati and Chemtrails, it's probably not entirely factual.
If I've misread the tone of your message then I humbly apologise, perhaps just lost in translation between American and British.
I don't have a belief in a Worldwide Conspiracy, I honestly don't believe Trump and his acolytes have the intelligence to participate in a conspiracy. I just believe it's more simply put, dirty politics with Trump doing Politics the way he does business. If he can buy a favour, he will.
I believe it suits Russia to have a friendlier face in the Whitehouse (in some ways not a bad thing) and it suits Trump et al to take advantage of a favour being offered. In between I believe there are many pawns lining their own pockets and Trump looking after all his business friends.
I believe that Assange is an unwitting pawn in this process because he's stir crazy from 4 and a half years in an Embassy and easily flattered. It suits Wikileaks to have this huge dump of intel and it suits Trump to deflect attention away from his total incompetence and corruption.
Simply put a win-win for all parties concerned. Not a conspiracy, more a case of back scratching on an epic scale.
I would tell you what I think of Farage but that kind of language will likely get me banned.
On this we are 100% in agreement
How much proof do you need?
Here you go.
Buckle Up
â˘July 8, 2016 - Trump associate Carter Page visits Moscow and receives an offer of equity from Russia in a massive russian oil deal if Trump will lift US/EU sanctions. These sanctions have crippled the Russian economy and hamstrung their oligarchy.
â˘July 18, 2016 - Trumpâs team makes one tweak to the RNC platform: a pro-Russia softening of our stance on invasion of Ukraine/Crimea
â˘July 22, 2016 - Wikileaks dumps the DNC emails on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, helping hold down Clintonâs favorability among an incensed left and boosting Trumpâs RNC bump while holding Clinton to her lowest polling of the cycle.
â˘July 27, 2016 - Trump tells the press that he would consider lifting sanctions on Russia and âjokinglyâ instructs Russia to continue to hack Clinton âif theyâre listening.â It would be his last press conference of the election.
Now, of course, we know that:
â˘The hacking was directed by Russia to help Trump win the election.
â˘WikiLeaks timed their dumps to hurt Clintonâs campaign.
What has the Trump team been up to since then?
â˘Trump advisor Carter Page is under investigation for his ties to Russia. Heâs continued to visit Moscow in spite of that investigation.
â˘The man who most likely offered Page the deal to offer to Trump was found dead from gun shot wounds in the back of his car in Moscow in December. The Russian state press has called his death a heart attack since the initial report (âŚin the back of his car, in an alley).
â˘Trump advisor Paul Manafort, who left his official role as campaign chair last summer, is under investigation for his ties to Russia. Manafort reemerged after the election to advise Trump on cabinet positionsâŚ
â˘Rex Tillerson, former Exxon CEO, emerged as a dark horse candidate for Secretary of State shortly thereafter. Tillerson has extensive business ties to Russian oil and lobbied for a reduction in sanctions while at Exxon. He has deep ties to the company that offered Carter Page the equity deal, may be hiding oil assets in offshore tax shelters as he has in the past, and has been awarded the Russian Order of Friendship honor by Putin.
â˘Former military intelligence officer, and Trumpâs National Security Advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn is under investigation for his communications with Russia following a December increase in sanctions by Pres. Obama. The Trump team have defended those calls with various conflicting explanations. After getting kicked out of the Obama DIA for his insubordination and islamaphobia, Flynn - the veteran intelligence office, cozied up to Putin.
â˘Finally there is Trump advisor Roger Stone - a former business partner to Paul Manafort who cut his teeth in politics as one of Nixonâs dirty trixsters. Stone outed himself as a back-channel communicator between Wikileaksâs Assagne and the Trump campaign back in November. In his spare time before the election, Stone led the charge to cement the election as rigged in case of a Clinton victory. He is also under investigation by US intelligence.
During the campaign many described Trump as a useful idiot of Russia. His actions since then may determine that an underestimation.
â˘Trump is speaking with Putin soon regarding the lifting of sanctions.
â˘Leaks, unsubstantiated though given the above hardly far fetched, have identified Trump as a Russian asset cultivated over at least the last five years.
â˘Allegations have emerged that Russia has both the carrot of the oil money and the stick of kompromat - incriminating evidence used as blackmail - to encourage Trumpâs pro-Putin action.
â˘Russia has arrested two high ranking Russian cyber intelligence officials for treason - potentially because of their role as US spies.
â˘A third Russian hacker is currently in a US-Russian tug of war while in jail in Prague, with a potential connection to the Huma Abedin emails that were discovered in October and which may have tipped the election to Trump.
â˘Russian officials are celebrating the election of Trump and are joyous over their efforts to elect him.
â˘John McCain laments that we have no unified response to Russian cyber-intrusion, which he likened to an act of war.
Letâs revisit Rex W Tillerson, the ex CEO of ExxonMobil who has been appointed to Secretary of State? Well we know thatâŚ
â˘Tillerson was given around 2 million Exxon shares valued at $181 million at current prices - to be vested over next 10 years. Exxon agreed to cancel the shares and just put the cash value into a blind investment trust (with no oil shares). He has apparently also sold his current 600,000 shares.
However, we donât know if Tillerson has connections to Exxon through undisclosed offshore companies. For example it was reported in Dec that leaked files showed he was a Director of a Russian subsidiary of Exxon called Exxon Neftegas, which had never been publicly reported. Exxon has said he is no longer a Director. But Exxon has created more than 67 offshore companies in the Bahamas alone.
â˘We also know that Tillerson personally negotiated with Sechin a massive oil deal between Rosneft & ExxonMobil that was put on hold due to sanctions. Itâs estimated the deal could be worth upward of $500 billion.
Of course, all of this is conveniently, "fake news."
/s
Do your own research, I did mine. Here are 39 links that are my sources.
and for the record, I am also not Pro-Hillary.
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Lack of time and tiredness due to real life responsibilities prevent me from engaging in a more detailed discussion during this time of the year. Answering your inquires would take up a significant portion of my time for a single post. Why bother? I just don't have the energy for it. But you'll most likely see more of me in the summer.
The rest you can have, but this... Let's just say I've talked to some professors, a lot of them, about this topic. I plan on opening a thread for this at some point in the next month or so. I don't have much time these days.
I want to share what I heard from them. Mind you, they are very careful and one of them insists on calling it a "climate shift". Some of them have worked and talked with scientists who were analyzing the ice on Antarctica. The change to "shift" has a lot to do with the nature of Earth's climate, Milankovitch cycles and other stuff. Pretty amazing, I hope I get some more free time to dedicate to this topic and how I even ended up researching it in depth.
If it were just bloggers or Infowars or journalists trying to sell their paper, I wouldn't even bother. But this was different.
No offtopic from me anymore I promise.
edit: disclaimer... No one denies climate change in this story, it's about the various nuances of that topic and the way it is propagated, reported and written about.
You need to separate climate change and the people using it as a buzzword to milk subsidies. Yes, green is the color of money etc, no, there is no credible evidence that indicates that environmental conditions that govern life on this planet aren't in a state of flux. The argument is more complex than Joe Schmoe's understanding of the issue, but Climate change is real, no matter how slow or on a geological time scale you want to paint it as.
Yes, Life can tolerate much "worse" conditions than we're experiencing currently, no, we don't want to wantonly get to those conditions, etc.
It's a very complex issue, but denying it happens outright is at best irresponsible and at worst just as agenda driven as those selling snake oil off of it as a marketing term
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I'm not reading all of that but the first one you listed was proven false immediately when Carter himself came out with proof he was at his sins birthday on that date.
Edit: Also the Carter that they claimed was going to Russia, turned out it was a different guy completely unrelated to Trump.
That's why you dont trust BuzzFeed reports that were sourced back to a guy on 4chan sharing the exact report to Republicans as a joke.
Oh boy, where to start on this.
First off, WashPo Literally made up a list of differing (albeit equally partisan and narrative driven) outlets, put it on a website claiming to be an impartial third party, and called them "fake news" -- not a term I'm fond of by the way, I work in the media, and this kind of laziness and lack of due diligence is why the term was coined in the first place. The article was then parroted by many of the other outlet's you've cited here. So Citing WashPo in any context outside of "they went and did it again" is counterproductive. Don't have the time to line item debunk any of them individually, but I can't in good conscience recommend them for their fact checking or really anything but their consistently partisan narrative.
note that they've since amended their article, distancing themselves from the organization and admitting they have no way of verifying the site's sources or methodology.
Guess it's better to ask forgiveness than do due diligence nowadays. Maybe I'm just out of touch, but I don't think it is a stretch to characterize this as textbook yellow journalism, regardless of your political leanings. Me? I'm pretty far left. I still try to hold onto at least a shred of journalistic integrity before publishing.
The vast majority of the other ones I've had a chance to look through (and previously read) are along the same lines as the one @paulsmyth posted. editorializing and wildly speculating about a vast political conspiracy, without much in the way of substantiation. Calling it an Op-Ed doesn't exempt it from being Yellow. It's no more acceptable or factual than when breitbart waxes poetic about white nationalism, or when the return of kings cites McCarthy era neurological studies to justify bold face misogyny. These people are out and out abdicating their responsibilities as Newswriters to drive CPM and revenue.
The sheer volume of the list is out of my scope (and time) to tackle. If you'd select some of the ones you find most compelling, I will gladly take the time to have a reasonable discussion about them.
@paulsmyth I think it serves Russia too, but the level of coordination you're attributing to the parties involved is both giving them too much credit and cheapening what they do outside their tangential symbiotic relationships as independent entities.
Time will tell
This we can both agree on. My issue isn't with you, or necessarily even your viewpoints. It's with the massive decay of Source Vetting, fact and events based reporting, and extinction of real investigative work in my field.
I hate the popular distrust of the people I work with, but, unlike them, I'm self aware enough that I can see why the attitude has become as widespread as it is.
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That almost made me chuckle. Such insanity that hearsay is considered a "source" and if challenged that is some sort of harassment? Talk about the rule of stupid.
It is really sad. FaceBookNews, no source vetting, no due diligence and 100% agenda. The 1930ies doesn't look as weird anymore.
I share your lament with regards to the state of Journalism. The context of the article I shared on Farage was just that he has a relationship with Assange, the rest of the article is of no consequence to me. While it was Buzzfeed who reported Farage visiting the Ecuadorian Embassy, there is pictorial evidence of this. Of course it's possible he wasn't visiting Assange but he would have no other reason and he certainly gave none
Yes, yeeeeessss, finally, some real mccarthyistic slander, but still not enough. MOAR! =)
fantastic...
What are you five? What a childish word, bully. Come on breh, srsly? At least use a more mature word than bully.