Stop talking about Russian "meddling."

[Kyle]

I'm getting real sick of every single news agency referring to Russia's interference with the 2016 election as "meddling." What's being discovered is that Russia, in an effort to destabilize existing alliances and power structures, has been manipulating the news and public opinion in countries around the globe. This spans from creating fabricated news items to spread division and race-based hate-- to direct attempts to access and falsify election data. That's the news today from Bloomberg, by the way, that Russia accessed and attempted to alter the voting results in the 2016 election-- but reportedly were unable to.

When the news (or anyone) refers to these acts as "meddling," it almost makes it seem like it's fair play. Almost like it's "Russia up to its dirty tricks," but still within the realm of acceptable espionage and sabotage that takes place on the world stage.

And that's bullshit. Not only is Russia's interference into elections a direct attempt to undermine legitimate democracies, but its effect is terrible. They've succeeded. Liberals hate conservatives and vice versa. Civil discourse is disposed of on both sides-- the flames fanned by fake news and social media garbage-- as everyone on both sides decide that "there is no reasoning with Conservatives" or vice versa.

So calling this "meddling" seems to trivialize the importance of it or at least normalize it somehow in a way I think is unacceptable. Look back on it- Russian interference with our democratic system has done more damage than any other efforts taken against the US since at least 9/11.

[Mike]

100%

[Phoebe]

They've been very effective, because we should all be completely united in punishing Russia for these things and exposing what they're doing online, yet they've managed to arrange things so that Trump supporters think any complaint about Russia is part of a fake news attack on Trump. I might add the neo-Nazi movement first developed these warm feelings toward their Russian friends, who are now presumably considered white people. I'd like to know why any of this is considered okay nowadays and why every one of our elected officials isn't up in arms over it; don't you all think your WWII and cold-war era grandparents would be absolutely rolling in their graves over what is going on right now?

[Kyle]

[Phoebe]

Honestly, the wild conspiracy theories are starting to be very Occam-compatible, because one of the only reasons it makes sense that they would do this is that they're concerned about their national party or key parts of its leadership being implicated in taking Russian money for God knows what.

[Mike]

The Senate just voted to reinstate the Russian sanctions AND expand them AND included a provision that Trump cannot roll them back without congressional approval.

The vote was 97-0. Rand Paul and 1 other Republican abstained. One Democrat absent.

I'm amazed. The House still has to approve, but it's tied to a bill for sanctioning Iran, so it's expected to pass AND get the president's signature. Obviously he's unpredictable, but even just the Senate vote is a huge positive sign.

[Kyle]

Hmmm. He has to sign it. But he still might not.

I'll be he does that "I don't sign it so it becomes law by default" thing.

[Mike]

I'm cool with that. And the fact that they wrote it that way is a tacit, bipartisan admission by the Senate that they don't trust his judgment in regards to Russia.

[Phoebe]

I feel like just given the very basic, limited information we have, the punishment should be a lot worse, especially since we have every reason to believe they're still doing it in other countries and will come back and hit us again. I don't understand why electoral security is not a front-and-center topic and that everyone is working frantically to make sure there's no chance of this happening again by having a paper trail for every ballot, mechanisms in place to ensure that things can be counted accurately, and so on. But suppressing legitimate votes is now an actual Republican strategy, so there's no hope of that happening anytime soon I don't think.

One bright spot: someone shared a crazy thing on Facebook and Facebook sent me a message indicating that the post was very likely based on false information. So they're actually putting some mechanism in place to push back against b******* stories. I wonder if in the run-up to elections there is some mechanism they could put in place to suspend any accounts that generate fake news, and prevent accounts from being created without a more sophisticated system of verifying physical address and location. They can start with my cousins.

It's also high time people started pushing back against their b******* machines in the media, but of course they won't do that - the response instead is to insist that news we don't like is fake, regardless - and now you have things like Megyn Kelly interviewing Alex Jones and making an incredibly cruel, psycho person's actions mainstream. It's interesting because I don't see this on the left. You see outlets like Mother Jones and the New Yorker and Daily Kos fighting about left-leaning news they consider crap or conspiracy-level. They don't just accept it as helpful to their side, but recognize that when it's false it's actually very damaging.

[salvation122]

[El Jefe]