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Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking

nytimes.com

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Re: Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking

#141

Post by ZenoArrow »

etchalon wrote: post #138
lotsoflumens wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrible or not, it's the correct way.

It's literally the complete wrong way. You're inventing potential motivations, convincing yourself those are the motivations of the people involved, and then likely searching for evidence that proves your speculation correct.

It's not completely baseless, a former British ambassador that supposedly has close ties to WikiLeaks has suggested the information they leaked came from a DNC insider:

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/10/really-reall...

With that out of the way, let's return to the earlier question, in the situation I described previously, what would be gained by blaming a foreign group for the leaks?

Re: Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking

#142

Post by ZenoArrow »

etchalon wrote: post #122
ZenoArrow wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Both the FBI and CIA have publicly stated they believe the hacks came from Russia." Let's imagine you're the President and you discover the leaks came from US citizens with ties to the DNC (e.g. DNC employees with access to emails). Would you have anything to gain from pointing the finger at foreign political actors interfering in US politics?

Imagining motives and then working backwards is, in general, a terrible way to parse the world.

How do you think journalism or police investigations would work without such approaches?

Re: Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking

#143

Post by tzs »

DrScump wrote: post #73
pavlov wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same YouGov poll shows that 46% of Trump voters believe the inane "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory is true: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2016/12/28/am... That is a scary example of what we can look forward to. Now that people don't believe in "mainstream" journalism, they'll latch on to wild speculations with no actual research or journalistic ethics. That is net loss for the truth, no matter how m…

The exact quote is: "On the other hand, nearly half of Trump supporters give at least some credence to the Pizzagate rumors. In contrast, 57% of Clinton voters say that is definitely not true (some, however, answered that it could be true)," Putting aside the fact that this is shortly after "Pizzagate" was first widely reported and therefore a topic of broad discussion (of whatever quality) at the time... ... the con…

> ... the contrast is that "nearly half" of Trump supporters give "at least some credence", as opposed to 43% of Clinton supporters. At most, that a whopping 6 percentage point difference. This is news?

It's a 30 percentage point difference.

Here are the numbers from the poll.

Definitely True: 4% Clinton Voters, 11% Trump voters, 5% other voters

Probably True: 13%/35%/29%

Probably Not True: 25%/40%/35%

Definitely Not True: 57%/13%/31%

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docume...

Re: Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking

#144

Post by mathetic »

etchalon wrote: post #53
mathetic wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like Russia as much as the next guy, but the US doesn't really have moral high ground here. The repeating argument in NSA revelations was that intelligence agencies are here to gather intelligence outside the country and on their own citizens. Well then it follows, outside the country it would be pretty weird if Russia spied on US citizens, but not political parties. This goes both ways of course. Once you se…

The US does not have a "moral high ground" here, but that's also beside the point. Yes, we interfere in the elections of other countries. We also bomb other countries. And yet, if another country bombed us, we'd be pretty pissed about it.

Categorical imperative is nasty.

Re: Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking

#145

Post by tzs »

VikingCoder wrote: post #79
zigzigzag wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does YouGov have low credibility? My sense is the opposite: they were the only polling company to get accurate results in important recent votes.

You think the rest of the poll has high credibility? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2016/12/28/am... 52% of Trump voters believe Obama was born in Kenya? 9% of Trump voters believe Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Trump elected? 31% of Trump voters think vaccines cause autism? That's a radical shift from the 6% of Americans who thought so according to a Gallup survey: http://www.huffi…

> 31% of Trump voters think vaccines cause autism?

> That's a radical shift from the 6% of Americans who thought so according to a Gallup survey

The Gallup poll was filing people into three categories on that question (yes/no/uncertain). The YouGov survey filed them into four categories (definitely yes/probably yes/probably no/definitely no). If we assume that the two "probably" categories in the latter correspond to the "uncertain" category in the former, the results of the two surveys are fairly close.

Re: Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking

#146

Post by dmoy »

matt4077 wrote: post #111
dmoy wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to that Chomsky criticism is Robert Fisk's constant railing on LA Times (and others') constant use of "US government sources say". Anything that comes after such a phrase needs to be taken with a giant grain of salt.

That use is problematic, but it's worth pointing out why. Just like this, I fear many people will understand your comment as an insinuation that the LAT et. al. just made up these quotes. I haven't read all of Fisk's criticism, but I believe his case is mostly that it allows those government sources to spread misinformation behind the cover of anonymity.

Oh yea it's definitely not the case that they've made up the quotes. Fisk is quite clear about that (if you can dig up the article, it's from like 2006-ish). It's just assuming what any government official says is true and printing it without doing any digging or checking for bias (or outright misinformation as you say).

Re: Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking

#147

Post by rdiddly »

concinds wrote: post #31
cglouch wrote: post #9

Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, but it does bother anyone that the NYT title calls it "election hacking"? To me that sort of slyly suggests that the actual election / voting process was hacked, which as far as I know did not happen. Perhaps "election-related hacking" would be more accurate. I don't mean to say the DNC and other such hacks weren't a big deal, but I worry that people who just read titles are getting th…

Ever since the election, the media has been trying to confuse people about Russia's "hacking", and keep using the phrase "hacked the election", so frequently and rigorously that it's obviously deliberate. And it worked: 50% of Democrats believe Russia hacked the election results (that's right, the results themselves, not just the DNC) according to the latest YouGov poll. The media is no longer proving itself worthy o…

If these clowns are trying to make me (usually a Democrat) _glad_ that _Trump_ is coming in, it's working. The war-mongering against Russia has got to stop. It's ridiculous. It's from the 80s. (Like Trump.)
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