blind belief is as bad as blind dismissal. lot's of that going around lately. i notice you really like to call out one of the two.

blind dismissal is not good either. happy?

which do you think is the more prevalent position in the current week?

It's not blind belief for people to accept that Russia interfered in our election... there's a lot of evidence for it. Rand Paul has access to even more of the evidence than we do... so it's frankly paranoid for him to be questioning the intelligence communities. He's not quite as paranoid of the government as his father, but he's close.

WMD was a different situation... our intelligence was dated. The CIA, NSA, and foreign intel services were watching the hacking/interfering in real time.

This post was edited by IceMage on Jul 17 2018 09:26am

Party
Country
/10

Country doesn't exist. Enforcing anything that defines a country violates the NAP

that's a bit of a strawman though. no one is actually saying or suggesting to 'blindly believe and support' our intelligence agencies in everything they say and do. that's almost as ridiculous as portraying trump's and the cult's inclination to dismiss the conclusions and findings concerning the 2016 election in favour of putin's denials, as merely 'recognising their wrongdoings' in the past.

obviously it's fair to point out the mistakes that intelligence agencies made in the past and the massive injustices that resulted from it. however, to do that only in order to discredit them when their findings don't fit your political agenda, is a transparent and really dishonest tactic. it's funny how you keep posting memes supporting such right wing narratives but when called out always pretend you were merely trying to illustrate some general observations about [strawman]...

Neither Rand nor I are denying that Russia meddled in our affairs on some level.

What we are doing is recognizing that the intelligence community has a number of incredibly disreputable and biased figures in it and have committed a large number of shady actions, including meddling in foreign elections.



recognizing facts that are critical of the government over a period of many decades is putting party over country?



There are countless people up in arms over the fact that people like Rand Paul, Donald Trump and others would dare to criticize and recognize the actions of US intelligence agencies.
'Do you believe/stand with US intelligence Agencies or Putin' is a common talking point, similar to the one that you just made yourself.

There are countless accusations of traitor and treason being thrown around, including accusations towards Rand Paul because he dared to mentioned that US agencies do it too.



You are assuming you know my motivations and are attributing bad characteristics to me in some unsubstantiated delusion.
I have criticized the feds' interventionism and bad acts on an incredibly high number of occasions.

I have made no secret of the fact that I have seismic differences with the modern regressive left and that American Libertarianism is considered right wing on the inadequate left-right spectrum.

This post was edited by cambovenzi on Jul 17 2018 10:00am

prevalent is a bit hard of a term to nail down. we'd have to examine the difference between effects in someone like the POTUS publicly denying something outright on his massive platform, compared to a slew of relatively unknown pundits on tiny platforms openly accepting. but we've strayed pretty far from a basic fact, Russia clearly did attempt to meddle in the 2016 election. We can temper that by pointing out it's nothing the US hasn't done, or that we're not sure how much they really put towards it, or that we don't know how effective they were in a real sense, or that they meddled on both sides. the point is, blind dismissal here is objectively less truthful than blind acceptance, as long as the context is "did Russia do anything". If Russia simply sought to sow division many on the left over played their hand, but still had a pair of tens. Whereas Trump is holding nothing but a blown gutshot straight draw with no real cards left to come. I wont even count the Mueller investigation as the river, he's likely going to bring some clarity but i have less than no faith he finds a smoking gun in the Trump campaign that isn't Manafort or Cohen on some non-Russia violations. Trump's bluffing entirely on Russia having done nothing, it's ballsy but in the end any hand can beat him.

Trump is counting on Putin to protect his family & financial interests when his presidency will be terminated.

dumb boomers