- Iβm now hearing this meme that says Obama, Clinton, et al. are doing nothing, just gave up.
Guys. Itβs time for some game theory.
I found this to be an entertaining and interesting look at the whole Russian involvement thing.
129x140 characters is a great way to hide the fact that you have very little to say. Let me boil this down to the simple statement being made: Russia, which lacks a free press, leveraged the (often overly-)free press of the United States to propagandize a desirable electoral outcome. The United States, forked by the characteristics of that press, was forced to let the Russian gambit play out so that Truth Justice and The American Way will slay the Short Fingered Vulgarian. Shit. I'll bet I can get that down to a tweet. Hang on. Russian propaganda Trumped our American free press - but Truth will Make America Great Again. Fuckin' A. 93 characters. Doesn't make it any more or less accurate.
Assange is really unlikely to be working for Russia, at least not knowingly. He's been around since the late 80s and his politics don't differ over-much from a lot of hackers. He's a bit too credulous with respect to conspiracy theories, his graph-theoretic justification for Wikileaks is probably overly-simplistic and by his own admission his years locked up in an embassy hasn't been good for his mental health, but Occam's razor says he's exactly what he looks like, a eccentric who's trying to do good with mixed success. That doesn't preclude Russia using him, and he's said he doesn't care what the source of the documents he publishes is, but it's unlikely Wikileaks as an organization or Assange as an individual are actually working for Russia. Also the Left has had an "anti-establishment distrust of Western intel" since the red scares, when it was targeting them, at least.Let's skip ahead to "Wikileaks." BRILLIANT. Ingratiate the Left into this anti-establishment distrust of Western intel.
Assange has always been anti-establishment and he loves the limelight. I think his principal interests are to dissolve power structures and look good doing it. That the Russians gave him a DNC server dump but not an RNC one speaks volumes. He would have cheerfully run both but just as cheerfully run one without the other because after all, the truth will set you free.
I think you're right that there's more than a little ego there, but I don't like this scapegoating of him because 1) If the election had gone a little differently a lot of us would be cheering him on for speaking truth, even if largely inconsequential truth, to power 2) he'd be perfectly happy to publish anything he had on the other side, if he had anything on the other side they hadn't admitted to publicly I don't think it unlikely that Russia had shit on both the RNC and DNC but only leaked the DNC to Wikileaks, I just don't think Wikileakes deserved to be scapegoated for publishing what it got, and I'm willing to accept that when Julian says whatever he's gotten with respect to Trump is just what Trump has said publicly it's true if only because what could be worse than what Trump has said publicly.
I liked the Russians better when President Harrison Ford kept them in check. Let's never forget his famous "GET OFF MY PLANE!!!" speech to terrorist Gary Oldman. Those were the days.