poke your head in a microwave unintelligent fuck thanks

This post was edited by A30N0fCH405 on Jul 5 2020 02:01am

This is the part of your post that rubs me the wrong way. I see almost all Democrats and Republicans doing this same thing.

You point out that "maybe it was X and maybe it was Y", where X is something that clearly makes Trump a traitor, and Y is something that makes the mishap a whole lot less grave.

You bring this up to point out that Icemage is jumping to conclusions when he insists that it was X and that Trump is a traitor, however I get the impression that you yourself are assuming that it's Y. You have a problem with Icemage's assumption, but you don't have any problem with your own.
If Republicans are truly convinced that Trump is innocent in all of this, then why aren't they pleading for a full investigation, so that Trump's name can be cleared and the source of this info can be sued for libel?

You're presenting a false equivalency in that dichotomy. Two scenarios being presented, one which calls the president a traitor and alleges a shadowy conspiracy theory and a coverup, a second which denies any grandiose and inflammatory claims and chalks up anything out of place to human error. The null hypothesis never requires equal proof or investigation or belief. It is the absence of evidence of the former. As the old axiom goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. As president josh clanton would ask the NYT, "I ashume that you have some". And when they don't, he'd call security and they'd get blasted away by blockfaces wielding cyclones akimbo.

Rational skepticism isn't a belief structure requiring justification.

The null hypothesis is that none of this happened. If the source of the information that led to these allegations is clearly not credible, then indeed you have nothing to justify, as there is no grounds for any accusations in the first place.

However, when you bring up the alternative explanation that Trump was made aware of the intelligence but not in a way that made him properly grasp the gravity of the situation, you agree that something happened except it didn't play out the way Democrats are saying it did. That isn't skepticism; that's actual speculation which requires justification just as much as the Democrats' narrative does.

The null hypothesis isn't that none of this happened, its that none of this was some extraordinary treason or inflammatory geopolitical gambit. Its the argument of the mundane, that whatever happened wasn't that remarkable. That it wasn't a grand scheme or willful misconduct- not that nothing happened. Its only the extraordinary part of the claim that requires extraordinary evidence. The ordinary part requires only ordinary evidence. We already know about Russia trying to exert geopolitical influence over the Taliban after the US withdraws, we already know they're arming the Taliban, we already have the DoD saying they think this claim isn't credible and that's why they didn't hold a detailed briefing with Trump. The mundane explanation is just that. Skepticism and denialism-verging-on-nihilism aren't the same thing. It is the least compelling case ever to argue that just because something happened, it contradicts the skeptical argument that nothing extraordinary happened.

Both things matter, and they're inevitably tied to each other. If the intel was solid enough to be included in the PDB, and Trump didn't read it, and he wasn't orally briefed on it, that's concerning and a failure on multiple levels. If he read it and forgot about it, his mental competency comes into question. You can't separate the two questions because ultimately Trump is responsible for responding to threats to our troops, so if he failed to respond to a real threat, it's a serious problem.

So the intel wasn't credible, yet it went in to the PDB, and went to the Brits and NATO? If that's true, that's also concerning. Why did they include something with no credibility? It makes no sense. From the administration's statements, they seem to be falling back on "there was dissent as to the level of confidence in the intel", which seems like a normal occurrence based on former intel people I've read.



I never said that, and I'm not staking out a solid position here. There's multiple possibilities of what happened, but Goom's position that the intel was complete bunk doesn't make any sense given the reporting on it and the administration's obfuscation and half/non-denials.



I don't know who is taking the first position, but it's not me. I don't know what the truth here is. It's possible the intel is flawed, but it had to have some merit if the reporting is true on the PDB/Brits/NATO.

We're both outside the black box of the intelligence community looking inwards at deliberative processes. You and I don't know what the nature of discussions they've had with each other or foreign allies are, to what degree it presented it as a threat versus rumor versus seeking more input, how seriously it was treated, what they knew for sure at the time versus now. We're looking at spy agencies that are paid to be secretive and for whom opaqueness is national security. If we could tell what the truth is, they aren't doing their jobs well. The only peeks we have inside that box are an anonymous source of completely unknown credibility talking to the NYT, most likely just one of the congressional democrats turned to the media as soon as he heard it- and the official statements from the DoD saying there's no 'there' there.
That's a lot of blanks with myriads of possible answers that you're filling in with malicious intent.


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Only as bunk as the DoD has said it was. Its a curious thing how this deference to authority conks out at convenient times. Between the obvious logical flaws in the story, the mundane rational explanations and top officials in the intel community shooting it down as non-credible, I don't see what evidence to the contrary is supposed to weigh against that at all.

You should be more specific, because there's multiple issues at hand. What malicious intent?

You think DOD's "no corroborating evidence" quote means the intel is bunk, and that's consistent with all the other statements and actions of the administration? You can't just look at one statement, you need to look at all the evidence. And you also need to look at what the administration is not saying. The Press Secretary refused to say whether it was in the PDB, no other adminstration official has said it wasn't in the PDB, and the best papers in the country say it was. See, when you have 1) an unwarranted hyperskepticism and paranoia of the media and 2) an unwarranted faith in the credibility of this administration, you end up coming to the wrong conclusions.

I'm in agreement that there's more questions than answers so far, we just differ on what's the most likely explanation.

That's the thing. None of you care about the troops. You don't even mention them. You care that it has a very slim chance of hurting Trump.

None of you care about the troops because you don't even talk about them! If you really cared you would talk about the troops instead of the system and leaders to dictate where the troops are, how they are deployed, what threats they face, and literally every other thing about their job.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Jul 7 2020 03:55pm