What I care about in the post is whether or not Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica, SCL Group, Breitbart News, et al. were engaged in a conspiracy, criminal or otherwise, to purposely make every American (and Brit re: Brexit) voter in 47 states irrelevant in the 2016 election is the point.
According to Mirriam-Webster, a conspiracy is a secretly devised plan to accomplish an evil or treacherous end.
Considering who Trump is, I suppose any effort to elect him President is by definition evil and treacherous. Except, that he was trying to defeat Hillary Clinton. Nothing evil or treacherous about that.
Certainly there was nothing secret about Trump's goal, or the fact that Mercer and Bannon and Breitbart were supporting him, or the fact that Trump was spending a lot of money to buy ads, including social media.
From what I understand, Cambridge Analytica wrote an algorithm to harvest publicly available data from Facebook which was readily available to anyone on the open internet. I don't see how there could be any insinuation that there was anything criminal about this.
Cambridge Analytica's contract with the Trump campaign was presumably a trade secret. Is every entity that has any secrets whatsoever, engaged in a "conspiracy"? I think the word deserves more respect than that.
Due to American Slavery's [sic] Electoral Mother Fucking College, my presidential vote in Cali is worthless.
Is this really the point: that the Electoral College system, and for that matter every other form of district gerrymandering, is a blight on democracy? Well yes, that's true. But, Trump didn't invent the system. He exploited it, and frankly it's amazing that Hillary was too stupid to do the same.
The two-party system is also a problem. I figure that my vote for Trump would've been worthless, and my vote for Hillary would have been just as bad or perhaps even worse. So I voted for Jill Stein. I guess I'm like the 1% in the old Soviet system who threw away their opportunity to vote for the Communist Party. My vote at least lets the Democrats know that not all progressives are impressed with their party. But obviously, third parties in the USA are just another idea that doesn't work.
Having said all that: manipulating the Electoral College by focussing on swing states, only works well in very close, hard-fought elections.
And, there wasn't any mention at all in that trailer, about the fact that the Electoral College system is what made CA's shenanigans possible.
That some media concern is trying to enlighten you, however imperfectly, should make you somewhat happy, but instead you're inverting things and killing the messenger because you don't like the same kind of pizza. Your being given information that should help empower you and be virally spread to others, but you're killing them, and then blaming others for ignorance.
No, sorry, I don't think this trailer had enough truth in it to be worth promoting. Even Politifact says that Trump tells the truth 4% of the time. Should we promote Trump and be happy that he's gone viral, because of that 4% of the truth that he embroiders in with all the authoritarian nonsense? No thank you.
I hope there's a better video or written presentation somewhere about the Cambridge Analytica situation.
Why haven't you, or Joe, made an investigative trip to Comet Pizza to find out if they have a secret passageway to a pedo cellar?
Sheesh. We're not investigative journalists, we're bloggers. I can't travel because my helpless cows wouldn't survive three days without me.
And aside from that, I think it's safe to assume that the Comet Pizza enterprise picked up shop and moved elsewhere as soon as the SHTF. Criminals play shell games. Not that somebody with boots on the ground couldn't turn up some facts eventually, but it would be a full time job and I doubt that the dirt would be found at the pizza parlor.
This is why I have such respect for real alternative-media investigative journalists like Vltchek. They are few and far between.
I'm not even trying to trigger you, and you getting triggered over the GD Russians,
If you wanted to avoid triggering me, then instead of writing:
It is interesting that the Russians have been accused of doing the same on Facebook, and this raises the question of whether this was a convenient conflation? If so, then people in the Trump operation likely were in cahoots via such as their numerous interactions with the Russians.
You would've said something like:
"It is outrageous that the Russians have been accused of doing the same on Facebook. Even though there's not the slightest scrap of evidence that this is true, there will be some idiots stupid enough to believe it. Was this a convenient conflation, or just Russophobia? And if it was Russophobia, who benefits, and to what end is this false narrative being promoted?
Now to be sure, the Trump operation had numerous interactions with the Russians, but there is absolutely no reason why Trump would have relied on the Russians for his elections propaganda operation. Why would he, when he had a team Americans at Cambridge Analytica who would have had a far better understanding of American culture and politics, based on their lifelong immersion in the same. And he was able to channel millions of dollars to this American operation without violating any laws.
And it's also been said (by others) that the Trump organization was likely in cahoots with the Russians in their attempt to win the election, but again not a scrap of evidence of this has emerged through any reliable channel. Accordingly, we need to ask, why is this false narrative being promoted by elements in the mass media and the Democratic Party?"
And besides, how am I to make an attempt to absolve your damn Russians, showing the means to conflate CA et als. efforts onto the Russians, if I don't mention the GD Russians in the first place?
Is that what you were trying to do, absolve "my damn Russians"? Because I sure didn't notice.
Problem with my attempt to do so has to ponder how schmarty pants messiah, Vladimir Putin, doesn't know that he is somebodies' Useful Idiot. Or does he? He's letting the 'evil' narrative play out.
So you weren't trying to absolve them, after all? Evil narrative, useful idiot? You mean, Putin is a politician operating within a political & economic context, like every other democratic politician in the history of the planet?
OMG, Putin sent 200 crack troops to Venezuela, forcing Trump to demand they get out. Well, geesh, this proves they aren't in cahoots.
You made a distinction between perception and reality. Well, the 200 crack Russian troops (and more importantly, the S300 missile battalions) are evidence-based reality, and not just perception. Trump's snarl at the Russians was a reality (play-acting or not) and it will shape the perceptions of millions of Russians. You can bet that everybody in Russia saw it, although hardly anyone in America did.
If there's a war in Venezuela, the millions of deaths will be reality not perception. If it triggers a nuclear World War III, the billions of deaths, nuclear winter and radioactive poisoning will be reality, not perception.
