***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[northoaklandfc]

Cory Booker 2020?

I've been meaning to ask for a while, RustyShackleford what are your thoughts on Booker?

 

[Nike Jordan]

Cory Booker just launch his 2020 campaign.

Like I said before, white progressives are playing themselves with the identity politics thing. Booker gonna have the entire black vote riding for him.

I have my hesitations about him, but if he makes criminal justice reform central to his movement and campaign, then the message of economic populism from Bernie 2.0 might be loss on me, and millions of black people. Especially after 4 years of Trump and Sessions

 

[RustyShackleford]

Cory Booker 2020?

I've been meaning to ask for a while, RustyShackleford what are your thoughts on Booker?

Unless he takes a sincere progressive turn on economics, I would not be my first choice. Unless he pushes social justice hard.

But he will probably be the social justice candidate in 2020. Which will make him a contender for my vote, the nomination, and be on everyone's shortlist for VP

 

[Belgium]

I reckon a lot of people remember Booker's vote against importing cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. Especially the Bernie folks. That'll probably come back to haunt him if he decides to run

 

[RustyShackleford]

I reckon a lot of people remember Booker's vote against importing cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. Especially the Bernie folks. That'll probably come back to haunt him if he decides to run

No it won't. He stated his objection, they added something to the bill then he said he supports it. Me

The identity politics thing will probably come back to hurt the scumbag left more than anything. Progressive are tripping over themselves to win over Trump voters that they are ignoring large factions of the Dem base.

 

[ninjahood]

France >

seen their economy lately?

 

[biggie62]

WATCH: Muslim woman harassed while standing in line at a #TraderJoes in Reston, Virginia. If you know the harasser, please DM me. pic.twitter.com/06wZITBwMu
— Yashar (@yashar) May 7, 2017

Trump got these bigots feeling themselves. The combination of Obama being black, but showing kindness to marginalized groups really did a number of these clowns.

Reston tho? That's a high end area. Been there for work. **** I wouldn't expect that there.

 

[Mark Antony]

Yeah weird for that area but not too surprising.

 

[Nike Jordan]

If Booker runs (and suspect he will), he's going to get constant comparisons to Obama, for the wrong reasons.

 

[osh kosh bosh]

Corey Booker isn't going to be the president guys.

 

[ninjahood]

Corey Booker isn't going to be the president guys.

ain't gonna stop him from trying... that dems bench is thiiiiiin.

Andrew Cuomo got a better chance anyways if we're talking track record.

 

[Nike Jordan]

A reminder that Republican members of Congress literally traveled to France to endorse Le Pen, including vulnerable Rep. Rohrabacher. https://t.co/5xVGanchrS
— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) May 7, 2017

 

 

Hold that L, Scumbag Steve King. 

 

[RustyShackleford]

Corey Booker isn't going to be the president guys.

Who said he was?

 

[RustyShackleford]

Cuomo is a moderate with a spotty social justice record. I really don't see which faction of the Dem coalition will get excited for him

 

[osh kosh bosh]

I'm just putting on record.


Something about Booker I find to be off putting, feels very cornball brother-ish to me.

 

[gry60]

Just wanted to point out that with the April job and unemployment numbers having been released, I haven't heard any complaints from the right and our resident street economist about the way those numbers were obtained...

I wonder what has changed

 

[ninjahood]

Cuomo is a moderate with a spotty social justice record. I really don't see which faction of the Dem coalition will get excited for him

da ones worried about economic anxiety will give him whirl.

he usually places nice with IDC (independent Democratic conference state Senators who caucus with Republicans​ to blunt flagrant progressives bills and moderates em) on annual budgets.

other than banning state fracking upstate (which would've been a boon economically) and his looney idea of eventually shutting down indian point nuclear plant with no feasible power replacement in da horizon, he's been chill.

 

[RustyShackleford]

Cuomo is a moderate with a spotty social justice record. I really don't see which faction of the Dem coalition will get excited for him

da ones worried about economic anxiety will give him whirl.

he usually places nice with IDC (independent Democratic conference state Senators who caucus with Republicans​ to blunt flagrant progressives bills and moderates em) on annual budgets.

other than banning state fracking upstate (which would've been a boon economically) and his looney idea of eventually shutting down indian point nuclear plant with no feasible power replacement in da horizon, he's been chill.

The competitive fringe in the Democratic party is now the progressive left, not the centrist left. An economic populist might do better with the white working class than a Cuomo. Albeit that might be his best demographic

Cuomo is firmly to right of both Obama and Clinton, and the IDC is hated by progressives, he seen as Wall Street friendly as well so he is dead in the water with progressives and young people

He doesn't have the record or name recognition to eat in the south.

Unless the establishment throws a ton of money and support behind him, or there is a ton of vote splitting among the coalitions, dude is going to have a tough time. And he should, he is a crappy choice.

 

[noskey]

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...sh-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy#comments

I had been speaking to former employees of Cambridge Analytica for months and heard dozens of hair-raising stories, but it was still a gobsmacking moment. To anyone concerned about surveillance, Palantir is practically now a trigger word. The data-mining firm has contracts with governments all over the world – including GCHQ and the NSA. It’s owned by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of eBay and PayPal, who became Silicon Valley’s first vocal supporter of Trump.

In some ways, Eric Schmidt’s daughter showing up to make an introduction to Palantir is just another weird detail in the weirdest story I have ever researched.

A weird but telling detail. Because it goes to the heart of why the story of Cambridge Analytica is one of the most profoundly unsettling of our time. Sophie Schmidt now works for another Silicon Valley megafirm: Uber. And what’s clear is that the power and dominance of the Silicon Valley – Google and Facebook and a small handful of others – are at the centre of the global tectonic shift we are currently witnessing.

It also reveals a critical and gaping hole in the political debate in Britain. Because what is happening in America and what is happening in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. The Trump administration’s links to Russia and Britain are entwined. And Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can see all these relationships in play; it also reveals the elephant in the room as we hurtle into a general election: Britain tying its future to an America that is being remade - in a radical and alarming way - by Trump.

There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.

My entry point into this story began, as so many things do, with a late-night Google. Last December, I took an unsettling tumble into a wormhole of Google autocomplete suggestions that ended with “did the holocaust happen”. And an entire page of results that claimed it didn’t.

Google’s algorithm had been gamed by extremist sites and it was Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who helped me get to grips with what I was seeing. He was the first person to map and uncover an entire “alt-right” news and information ecosystem and he was the one who first introduced me to Cambridge Analytica.

He called the company a central point in the right’s “propaganda machine”, a line I quoted in reference to its work for the Trump election campaign and the referendum Leave campaign. That led to the second article featuring Cambridge Analytica – as a central node in the alternative news and information network that I believed Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, the key Trump aide who is now his chief strategist, were creating. I found evidence suggesting they were on a strategic mission to smash the mainstream media and replace it with one comprising alternative facts, fake history and rightwing propaganda.

Mercer is a brilliant computer scientist, a pioneer in early artificial intelligence, and the co-owner of one of the most successful hedge funds on the planet (with a gravity-defying 71.8% annual return). And, he is also, I discovered, good friends with Nigel Farage. Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s communications director, told me that it was Mercer who had directed his company, Cambridge Analytica, to “help” the Leave campaign.

The second article triggered two investigations, which are both continuing: one by the Information Commissioner’s Office into the possible illegal use of data. And a second by the Electoral Commission which is “focused on whether one or more donations – including services – accepted by Leave.EU was ‘impermissable’”.

What I then discovered is that Mercer’s role in the referendum went far beyond this. Far beyond the jurisdiction of any UK law. The key to understanding how a motivated and determined billionaire could bypass ourelectoral laws rests on AggregateIQ, an obscure web analytics company based in an office above a shop in Victoria, British Columbia.

Hide your FaceBook; hide your Instagram.

Key to understanding how data would transform the company is knowing where it came from. And it’s a letter from “Director of Defence Operations, SCL Group”, that helped me realise this. It’s from “Commander Steve Tatham, PhD, MPhil, Royal Navy (rtd)” complaining about my use in my Mercer article of the word “disinformation”.

I wrote back to him pointing out references in papers he’d written to “deception” and “propaganda”, which I said I understood to be “roughly synonymous with ‘disinformation’.” It’s only later that it strikes me how strange it is that I’m corresponding with a retired navy commander about military strategies that may have been used in British and US elections.

What’s been lost in the US coverage of this “data analytics” firm is the understanding of where the firm came from: deep within the military-industrial complex. A weird British corner of it populated, as the military establishment in Britain is, by old-school Tories. Geoffrey Pattie, a former parliamentary under-secretary of state for defence procurement and director of Marconi Defence Systems, used to be on the board, and Lord Marland, David Cameron’s pro-Brexit former trade envoy, a shareholder.

Steve Tatham was the head of psychological operations for British forces in Afghanistan. The Observer has seen letters endorsing him from the UK Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and Nato.

SCL/Cambridge Analytica was not some startup created by a couple of guys with a Mac PowerBook. It’s effectively part of the British defence establishment. And, now, too, the American defence establishment. An ex-commanding officer of the US Marine Corps operations centre, Chris Naler, has recently joined Iota Global, a partner of the SCL group.

And it was Facebook that made it possible. It was from Facebook that Cambridge Analytica obtained its vast dataset in the first place. Earlier, psychologists at Cambridge University harvested Facebook data (legally) for research purposes and published pioneering peer-reviewed work about determining personality traits, political partisanship, sexuality and much more from people’s Facebook “likes”. And SCL/Cambridge Analytica contracted a scientist at the university, Dr Aleksandr Kogan, to harvest new Facebook data. And he did so by paying people to take a personality quiz which also allowed not just their own Facebook profiles to be harvested, but also those of their friends – a process then allowed by the social network.

Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale.

The company also (perfectly legally) bought consumer datasets – on everything from magazine subscriptions to airline travel – and uniquely it appended these with the psych data to voter files. It matched all this information to people’s addresses, their phone numbers and often their email addresses. “The goal is to capture every single aspect of every voter’s information environment,” said David. “And the personality data enabled Cambridge Analytica to craft individual messages.”

[...]

Cambridge Analytica worked on campaigns in several key states for a Republican political action committee. Its key objective, according to a memo the Observer has seen, was “voter disengagement” and “to persuade Democrat voters to stay at home”: a profoundly disquieting tactic. It has previously been claimed that suppression tactics were used in the campaign, but this document provides the first actual evidence.

Tamsin Shaw, an associate professor of philosophy at New York University, helps me understand the context. She has researched the US military’s funding and use of psychological research for use in torture. “The capacity for this science to be used to manipulate emotions is very well established. This is military-funded technology that has been harnessed by a global plutocracy and is being used to sway elections in ways that people can’t even see, don’t even realise is happening to them,” she says. “It’s about exploiting existing phenomenon like nationalism and then using it to manipulate people at the margins. To have so much data in the hands of a bunch of international plutocrats to do with it what they will is absolutely chilling.

“We are in an information war and billionaires are buying up these companies, which are then employed to go to work in the heart of government. That’s a very worrying situation.”

Quoting this. Most interesting, scary, informative article I think I've read about the intertwining roles between data manipulation, Brexit and Drumpf. I encourage all to read to understand how detailed and methodical, and how terrifying, the past years election influencing was. I really wish the author touched more on Sophie Schmidt and Google, but as is, the article is extremely detailed and well written, the relationship detailing was so well explained.

Everyone should read this.

 

[IATT]

 

[AZwildcats]

Blackburn has a lot of nerve 

 

[IATT]

 

[IATT]

 

[Mark Antony]

What is it with these people that keep demanding graciousness despite the opposition's pervasively brash and aggressive tone? who started this ********?

 

[gry60]

What is it with these people that keep demanding graciousness despite the opposition's pervasively brash and aggressive tone? who started this ********?

They still think they can compromise with the GOP.

I call them fools.