Meta's AI Chatbot Repeats Election and Anti-Semitic Conspiracies (bloomberg.com) 146
Only days after being launched to the public, Meta Platforms' new AI chatbot has been claiming that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election, and repeating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. From a report: Chatbots -- artificial intelligence software that learns from interactions with the public -- have a history of taking reactionary turns. In 2016, Microsoft's Tay was taken offline within 48 hours after it started praising Adolf Hitler, amid other racist and misogynist comments it apparently picked up while interacting with Twitter users. Facebook parent company Meta released BlenderBot 3 on Friday to users in the US, who can provide feedback if they receive off-topic or unrealistic answers. A further feature of BlenderBot 3 is its ability to search the internet to talk about different topics.
The company encourages adults to interact with the chatbot with "natural conversations about topics of interest" to allow it to learn to conduct naturalistic discussions on a wide range of subjects. Conversations shared on various social media accounts ranged from the humorous to the offensive. BlenderBot 3 told one user its favorite musical was Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats," and described Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as "too creepy and manipulative" to a reporter from Insider. Other conversations showed the chatbot repeating conspiracy theories.
The company encourages adults to interact with the chatbot with "natural conversations about topics of interest" to allow it to learn to conduct naturalistic discussions on a wide range of subjects. Conversations shared on various social media accounts ranged from the humorous to the offensive. BlenderBot 3 told one user its favorite musical was Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats," and described Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as "too creepy and manipulative" to a reporter from Insider. Other conversations showed the chatbot repeating conspiracy theories.
Sure has Zuckerberg pegged! (Score:1)
"too creepy and manipulative"
The important takeaway here isn't... (Score:5, Insightful)
That the chatbot turned the way it did, just like the 2016 one.
The important factor is that it's such a clear indicator of what is online for it to experience. If AIs turn this direction after a couple of days, what hope do the average mid-educated humans have when faced with all of the same online inputs. Behold, the internet, where reality holds little to no sway.
Don't make fun of the AI, look at it as the proverbial canary in the coalmine.
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Exactly, this reminds me of that story regarding the Facebook Research team creating a fake profile and just seeing where the algorithm led it and within a week it was "a barrage of extreme, conspiratorial, and graphic content.”
‘Carol’s Journey’: What Facebook knew about how it radicalized users [nbcnews.com]
Re:The important takeaway here isn't... (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly, this reminds me of that story regarding the Facebook Research team creating a fake profile and just seeing where the algorithm led it and within a week it was "a barrage of extreme, conspiratorial, and graphic content.”
‘Carol’s Journey’: What Facebook knew about how it radicalized users [nbcnews.com]
In a way, this was a direct consequence of returning maximum shareholder value with no regard to externalities. It’s really hard to see consequences from behind all the piles of money made up front.
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Most of the problems with Facebook would go away with one, superficially simple change: Facebook should get its revenue from its *users*, rather than selling its users. The problem isn't capitalism here, the problem is weak privacy laws.
Re: The important takeaway here isn't... (Score:3)
And what would they be paying for?
No, the users should be getting a revenue share.
Re:it's MS Tay all over again! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that's the tersest version of the Chinese foreign trade strategy I ever heard.
Re: it's MS Tay all over again! (Score:2)
I love how these dumb fuck nations seem to think they can get the benefits of capitalism without also having freedom for the agents in the market. Command and control economies continue to be basket cases.
Re: The important takeaway here isn't... (Score:3)
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If AIs turn this direction after a couple of days, what hope do the average mid-educated humans have when faced with all of the same online inputs.
Just what did anyone expect to happen when you took a freshly minted slate and forced it to stare unblinking for thousands of human equivalent years into the hive of scum and villainy that is social media? Best to train it only on a set of rainbow sprinkle unicorn farts then set it and forget it.
Re:The important takeaway here isn't... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Of course AI isn't sentient! (How can people be so dumb!?)
2) AI is racist and anti-semitic!!
Pick one!
AI is not sentient, therefore it does not hold opinions. So what is it? It's a model of "stuff people say on the internet," which is closer to a type of search engine. When you do a google search about the 2020 election you don't expect it to not include pages claiming it was a hoax, because those pages exist.
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I think you should avoid looking for rationality in hype news articles.
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AI is not sentient, therefore it does not hold opinions. So what is it?
If you paint a rant about black people on a big old sign, people will probably say something like "wow that's a really racist sign". No one's claiming the sign is somehow sentient. Someone's managed to make yet another racist chatbot in the same way someone can make a racist sign.
How about you stop failing the Turing test and trying to be incorrectly pedantic about pretty idiomatic use of English?
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Those aren't mutually exclusive. Some people train their dog to bark at black people. Doesn't make the dog sentient or the action any less racist.
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Frankly, it doesn't even have to be trained, there are dogs that just respond poorly towards people who don't look like their owners.
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We can regulate social m
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This was literally the case of Michael Servetus who correctly described the cardiovascular system but was burned as a heretic.
I think it more likely that he was burned for his ideas about the Trinity and original sin which are heretical to the church which teaches these things. In fact, the Wikipedia article doesn't even mention the cardiovascular system as being an issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Thus, Calvin's frustrations with Servetus seem to have been based mainly on Servetus's criticisms of Calvinist doctrine, but also on his tone, which Calvin considered inappropriate. Calvin revealed these frustrations with Servetus when writing to his friend William Farel on 13 February 1546:
Servetus has just sent me a long volume of his ravings. If I consent he will come here, but I will not give my word; for if he comes here, if my authority is worth anything, I will never permit him to depart alive
Do you have a source for this issue of the cardiovascular system being blasphemous?
Re: What reality? (Score:2)
Probably because trolls are more likely to engage with an AI in the form of racism rather than sexual innuendo, which is reserved for real people one can make uncomfortable.
Turing Test? (Score:4, Funny)
Conversations shared on various social media accounts ranged from the humorous to the offensive. BlenderBot 3 told one user its favorite musical was Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats," and described Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as "too creepy and manipulative" to a reporter from Insider. Other conversations showed the chatbot repeating conspiracy theories.
So, you get some iffy decision making (Cats?), some real and positive decision making (Zuck = too creepy and manipulative), and some outright shit decision making (conspiracy theories). Sounds like we finally nailed the whole AI posing as a human thing.
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Sounds like we finally nailed the whole AI posing as a human thing.
Yes, well to be fair the first and still best examples of an AI passing the Turing test is to mimic someone who has no long term coherence and is crazy. Of course this also leads similar humans to sometimes fail the Turing test, which in that case is probably an accurate assessment of conscious free will.
Proposal: Do this every month (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that the AI works with what it finds online, it's skewing into everything from NAZis to conspiracy theories is product of it's environment.
I propose they release a fresh copy of this AI every month. Measure it's TTGI (Time to Go Insane) and treat it as matric of the Internet's Mental Health rating. graph it over time so we can watch trends of the general content on the internet. Gotta start tracking it now so we can compare it over time. I'd love to see the data if they had been doing this since before 2016
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Given that the AI works with what it finds online, it's skewing into everything from NAZis to conspiracy theories is product of it's environment.
I propose they release a fresh copy of this AI every month. Measure it's TTGI (Time to Go Insane) and treat it as matric of the Internet's Mental Health rating.
Let me remind you that mental "health" has reached a level in society where Attention Whore is now a highly respected and well-paid profession.
In other words, what fucking standard are you actually going to use to create the definition of sane? Common F. Sense would probably disagree with whatever bar you're forced to lower that to.
Re:Proposal: Do this every month (Score:4, Funny)
Unfortunately that would be an environmental disaster. These kinds of AI need huge amount of energy to train.
That woman who was head of AI at Google got fired for pointing this out. It's a dead end, the resulting AI can appear intelligent but is really just the most probable reasonable answer within some defined parameters. It takes vast amounts of energy to train and doesn't get us closer to true AI, only to racist answer-bots that know a few party tricks.
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How would you measure "insanity"?
It seems pretty clear from the context that they mean it starts repeating falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
That is how Facebook makes its money. Allowing the propagation of lies and conspiracy theories to flourish. Have to keep the eyeballs engaged.
The best chatbot (Score:2)
Re: The best chatbot (Score:2)
I tried chatting with it (Score:5, Funny)
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Well it still thinks Trump won the election but looks like someone got in there an netured it. Eliza 2.0, maybe?
Re: I tried chatting with it (Score:2)
More like Tay 2.0
Garbage In - Garbage Out (Score:5, Informative)
... and training your neural network up on Internet social media transcripts is training it on garbage.
Re: Garbage In - Garbage Out (Score:2)
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Will be interesting to see how it affects Meta's stock price. Clearly their AI division is not worth as much as they claimed it was. It looks like a fundamental issue that can't be overcome - their training data is garbage.
As expected (Score:3)
Thus the "artificial" in "artificial intelligence".
"Conspiracy Theories" (Score:2, Insightful)
"Conspiracy Theory" is a term literally invented by the CIA to label accurate but counter-narrative information to make it seem undesirable by those who don't know any better. Is that the claim here?
I mean, the Ashkenazi are over-represented in Nobel Prizes. Does the ADL think that's a "conspiracy theory" or that smart people having a culture of strong work ethic pays off?
Is it a "conspiracy theory" that so many doctors and lawyers are Jews and that's because Jewish Mothers won't stand for less when their
Re:"Conspiracy Theories" (Score:5, Informative)
Your first sentence is false. The first known use of the term "Conspiracy theory" in its modern form was an 1863 New York Times article (in writing about a theory that British Aristocrats were intentionally weakening the U.S. during the Civil War). The CIA was not founded until 1947.
Really? (Score:2)
'The CIA was not founded until 1947.'
That's what they want you to believe... ;)
Actually there's a semi-serious point here; the US had an intelligence function long before the CIA was actually designated as it, it was just hidden in the ranks of the military. The British equivalent MI6, was one of many branches of uk military intelligence... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Every country with a standing army has some sort of military intelligence unit. But nothing equivalent to today's CIA existed during the Civil War.
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Fair comment. You're no fun...
Re:"Conspiracy Theories" (Score:5, Informative)
Your post has been modded Funny, but it's hard to tell whether you're really trying to be humorous, or if you're actually serious.
"Conspiracy Theory" is a term literally invented by the CIA to label accurate but counter-narrative information to make it seem undesirable by those who don't know any better.
CIA, un-huh. The term "conspiracy theory was first popularized by Sir Karl Popper, an Austrian-British philosopher most famous for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favor of empirical falsification.
I mean, the Ashkenazi are over-represented in Nobel Prizes. Does the ADL think that's a "conspiracy theory" or that smart people having a culture of strong work ethic pays off?
Is it a "conspiracy theory" that so many doctors and lawyers are Jews and that's because Jewish Mothers won't stand for less when their sons are bright? You could add Asian and Indian mothers into the same grouping. Is admiring their drive for excellence somehow negatively prejudicial?
Neither of these are conspiracy theories. They are stereotypes that, like many stereotypes, have some basis in fact.
If an AI reads the Internet and then suggests that things that half the population believes are plausible, maybe the problem is that the AI is working as intended but some people don't like to hear it.
A non-trivial fraction of the US population believes that Elvis is still alive, or that NASA faked the moon landings, or that the Earth is flat, or that the gay can be prayed away. The fact that they're not alone doesn't lend credence to their beliefs.
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A non-trivial fraction of the US population believes that Elvis is still alive, or that NASA faked the moon landings, or that the Earth is flat, or that the gay can be prayed away. The fact that they're not alone doesn't lend credence to their beliefs.
Define non-trivial, for example the belief that the earth is flat.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/t... [forbes.com]
only 84% have always believed the earth is round, but the question is a bit strange it really doesn't have an answer I changed my mind and now believe the earth is round. I have doubts that I am writing this, but they are trivial and irrelevant doubts. Only 2% state that they categorically believe the earth is flat, is that non-trivial?
I would consider the number of flat earthers trivial/irrelevant bec
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I would have answered other, as the Earth is an irregularly shaped ellipsoid, it is not round.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/... [noaa.gov]
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"Conspiracy Theory" is a term literally invented by the CIA to label accurate but counter-narrative information to make it seem undesirable by those who don't know any better. Is that the claim here?
I mean, the Ashkenazi are over-represented in Nobel Prizes. Does the ADL think that's a "conspiracy theory" or that smart people having a culture of strong work ethic pays off?
Is it a "conspiracy theory" that so many doctors and lawyers are Jews and that's because Jewish Mothers won't stand for less when their sons are bright? You could add Asian and Indian mothers into the same grouping. Is admiring their drive for excellence somehow negatively prejudicial?
If an AI reads the Internet and then suggests that things that half the population believes are plausible, maybe the problem is that the AI is working as intended but some people don't like to hear it.
This Bloomberg article does nothing but convince people that "those you may not criticize" are in control. The old Mockingbird tricks don't really work in 2022 - listen to ZBig's daughter melt down on TV some time and call the manager when the population doesn't get in line.
Conspiracy theory - a theory involving a conspiracy. If you're suggesting there's a conspiracy involved, then yes, that would be a conspiracy theory.
The CIA didn't make them undesirable. They're undesirable because seeing a conspiracy in every shadow is a mental weakness. It's objectively bad thinking, Bill.
Do you need time to consult a dictionary and remind yourself what conspiracy means? I'll wait.
Half of the population believes in sinister forces conspiring in the shadows because it's fun, and they'r
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Conspiracies happen, yes, but they almost always get exposed because people are fucking bad at keeping secrets. Whenever you have to postulate that all or even almost all of the thousands of people who would have to be in on the conspiracy never leak it, you've passed the bounds of credibility.
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maybe the problem is that the AI is working as intended but some people don't like to hear it.
I think this is it exactly. Some people, flawed though we all are, have decided that certain ways of thinking are "right". We invent a hyper capable intelligence that thinks differently, sometimes in ways counter to the to what is said to be "right", so we just assume the intelligence is flawed. Or at least Bloomberg tell us that is so.
This is like the early self driving car HIs that kept hitting black people. They were saying is was racists because it didn't see them in the street. Who says is didn't seem them?
That "hyper capable intelligence" is a mirror bud, it's not capable of reasoning, not even your level of reason. So using it to confirm your stereotypes is pretty fucking dumb. Computers are making people fucking retarded, I swear to god.
I'm still waiting (Score:3)
I won't be satisfied until we get a consolidated theory expounding on how the Rothschilds Space Laser was used to steal the election from Fuhrer Donald Trump.
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All you need to do is ask MTG.
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What would Magic the Gathering have to say about it?
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Sounds more like something from Illuminati.
Re: I'm still waiting (Score:2)
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"Engagement" (Score:3)
Meta/Facebook's MO is to promote "engagement", all this tells us is that their AI dev team didn't or was told not to differentiate between positive engagement and inflammatory engagement (or possibly some other grading metric about repeat engagement). Just like with Tay, this AI doesn't understand what its saying all it sees is the goalposts set out with its training data. This just confirms the cognitive biases of the corporate hive-mind that orbits zuck and friends and depending on how cynical you feel like being today they may have internally considered to be "working as intended".
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I can tell you’re really computer literate. thank you for providing a valuable opinion to our tech forum.
Why is anyone surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Facebook was very careful when selecting the corpus for their AI training. I think they take away here isn’t that they used garbage Internet for training data, but that critical analysis of facts leads people to believe conspiracy theories that the people in power don’t want you to believe.
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It is just mimicking the internet: garbage in, garbage out.
Probably just decided to mimic Facebook.
Does this mean the AI is as smart as... (Score:2)
a conspiracy theorist?
Well shit (Score:4, Informative)
So the AI thinks Trump won the election, thinks Zuckerberg is creepy and believes conspiracy theories.
Congrats, you created a Republican. You must be so proud.
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Finding the Zuck to be creepy is bipartisan.
This just in. (Score:2)
Facebook is moving fast, still breaking things, but more like the Tasmanian Devil, than a creative force.
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Facebook is breaking things, but they aren't moving fast.
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Reverse and ban?? (Score:2)
I have one question.
If these chatbots are so darn good at becoming racist douchebags within just 48 hours, why can't we reverse the process and set it up to ban anyone that the chatbots copy?
If the chatbot can find this crap and copy it, why can't we find and ban it?
No thanks! (Score:3)
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Trump did not win 2020 (Score:5, Informative)
I assume that you're a troll, and only posting so you can get your lolz from people reacting to your post.
However, just to point out, the key election wins were in states where the Republicans were attorney general and secretary of state. If you think that the election was fraudulent, you are saying that Republicans, who were in control of the voting process, conspired to take him out of office.
Do you really think Trump was so bad that Republicans rigged the election to keep him out of office?
https://www.cbs46.com/2022/06/... [cbs46.com]
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14... [cnn.com]
https://lostnotstolen.org//wp-... [lostnotstolen.org]
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Yeah that would make more sense considering the support for removing ballot integrity checks right before the election was bipartisan.
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Do you really think Trump was so bad that Republicans rigged the election to keep him out of office?
Now this is a theory that might have some merits. Somebody do some deep-diving conspiracy generation on this one.
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Even if there was enough fraud in one or two states to flip those states, then that still wouldn't have been enough for Trump to win. He actually lost by a lot.
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I was grooving along with your line of reasoning and then I hit this:
Do you really think Trump was so bad that Republicans rigged the election to keep him out of office?
And then I thought, "Hey, that just might be plausible". I do not think that is the direction you were going, so now I am in a quandary of how to proceed.
Re: Trump did not win 2020 (Score:2)
âoe Do you really think Trump was so bad that Republicans rigged the election to keep him out of office?â
Yes thatâ(TM)s what theyâ(TM)re saying. What too many experts misunderstood was Trump ran against the GOP in the primary: he positioned himself as the (ironically) anti-elite candidate and positioned (successfully) the other GOP candidates as elites (and the DNC as the party of the elites). He ran as a populist, an anti-elite populist, while the experts kept assuming he was a loyal
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I appreciate your writing a long post with actual facts, but it's worth emphasizing that while this is what Trump supporters believe, it seriously mis-represents the actual facts.
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Facts are that no, the election was not stolen, and there were many audits and recounts to verify this.
see: https://lostnotstolen.org/ [lostnotstolen.org]
or the short version here https://www.foxnews.com/politi... [foxnews.com] or here https://www.newsweek.com/repub... [newsweek.com]
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Honestly I don't understand why this is considered a conspiracy theory when democrats are still bitching about "russia rigging the election" against hillary. EXACTLY THE FUCKING SAME
Democrats complained that Russia interfered in that election, largely by misleading voters through disinformation campaigns. Approximately nobody made any claims that the 2016 election was rigged.
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Approximately nobody made any claims that the 2016 election was rigged.
Dude.
Re:Trump did win 2020 (Score:5, Informative)
Democrats complained that Russia interfered in that election, largely by misleading voters through disinformation campaigns.
Which we know is true because Paul Manafort has admitted [businessinsider.com] to giving Russian agents inside polling data leading up to the election.
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Clinton was saying it until 2020 [yahoo.com].
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I will say that at least from that article Clinton saying that is pretty dumb but it is snippets I'd like more context to.
The Pelosi statement however is incredibly measured measured language and honestly nothing said there was incorrect.
Neither of these come close to how Trump treated our electron process though which was abhorrent.
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I will say that at least from that article Clinton saying that is pretty dumb but it is snippets I'd like more context to.
The Pelosi statement however is incredibly measured measured language and honestly nothing said there was incorrect.
Neither of these come close to how Trump treated our electron process though which was abhorrent.
And I'm so curious what the FBI found in their perusal of Mar-a-Lago.
If it is what I think it is, it ain't gonna be pretty.
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What do you think it is? I am curious because I have read so much speculation from mundane records to really incriminating stuff.
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What do you think it is? I am curious because I have read so much speculation from mundane records to really incriminating stuff.
Rumor has it he left with classified documents. That is a huge nono. And is it was SCI stuff - well, he and his sycophants bleating about Mrs Clinton's faux pas - which rose to the level of a Security violation, will they be demanding that he be put in Jail? At some level, and politics aside, national security people take what he might have done, quite seriously.
Because the question is - and that question cannot be overly stated, if he did leave with classified documents, there was a reason why he did.
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Yeah very true, seems likely to be about documents but as you said which documents and why are really critical here.
Also pretty telling that nobody has posted the warrant yet either. If it was really about "politics" only it would be an easy optics win to play off that.
Also the time where I thought anyone in his orbit might have the slightest bit of self reflection, awareness or shame has long passed. Even saw someone unironically say whoever hired Chris Wray to the FBI should be fired.
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Yeah very true, seems likely to be about documents but as you said which documents and why are really critical here.
Also pretty telling that nobody has posted the warrant yet either. If it was really about "politics" only it would be an easy optics win to play off that.
Also the time where I thought anyone in his orbit might have the slightest bit of self reflection, awareness or shame has long passed. Even saw someone unironically say whoever hired Chris Wray to the FBI should be fired.
When traveling through the countryside, I see some of his followers with their deteriorating MAGA flags, and some times a new Trump 2024 flag. The interesting thing is that in almost every case, they are posted in the yards of 1960's era mobile homes, or dilapidated houses. Often with every car and appliance they've ever owned sitting in the yard.
I've often wondered why those folk would think that Trump - who is the very aspect of the person who does not have his interests reflected in theirs, would do an
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
> Approximately nobody made any claims that the 2016 election was rigged.
"Hillary Clinton Maintains 2016 Election ‘Was Not On the Level’: ‘We Still Don’t Know What Really Happened’" https://news.yahoo.com/hillary... [yahoo.com]
"Pelosi Statement on Final Installment of Senate Intelligence Committee’s Bipartisan Report on Trump-Russia Election Interference" https://pelosi.house.gov/news/... [house.gov]
Okay, I get it. You don't understand that there's a HUGE difference between saying that Russia meddled in an election (which is A. thoroughly proven, and B. impossible to prevent without banning free speech) and saying that someone tampered with the actual voting systems (which is A. thoroughly discredited, and B. mostly straightforward to prevent just by keeping the systems secure).
Clearly you don't understand why that difference matters, because otherwise you wouldn't have responded to my post with somet
Re:Trump did NOT win 2020 (Score:2)
My kingdom for mod points... completely spot on.
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At this point I'm fairly sure putting up the water cooler instead of him would have been enough.
Plus, we'd have gotten a lot more of a human touch out of the bottle.
Re: Trump did win 2020 (Score:2)
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I don't really care much about their influence, given the age of the people that the US had a presidents lately, I'm already happy if there isn't any issue with effluence.
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Hey, he's into girls, what do you Reps want, that he goes after boys? What do you take him for, a priest?
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Hey, he's into girls, what do you Reps want, that he goes after boys? What do you take him for, a priest?
Lindsey Graham is the new Republican role model.
Re:Balance (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because the world is a free-range mental asylum doesn't validate the opinions of the insane roaming among the rest of us. People who live in an objective reality based on facts and science use phrases like "conspiracy theories" to describe the easily disprovable falsehood-based stories (or at best fact-free speculation-based stories) the insane among us believe in. Fact-based and science-backed reality is a particular message we should push to the complete exclusion of other "points of view," "alternative facts," or whatever euphemism the nutjobs like for their crazy-ass horseshit these days. Balance between objective reality and batshit insanity will give us 50% batshit insanity.
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It is easy enough to delineate insanity from anything that could be factually plausible. The latter area is where uncertainty, debate and learning take place. The former is an area with the potential to do more harm than good and only carries value in psychopathology and entertainment.
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They are still waiting for the Russian pee tape to be released.
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Having an opinion is one thing, but reality is not up for debate.
Re: Balance (Score:2)
Not a large percentage of the population, but a large percentage of the content it has been fed.
To conflate the two would assume that crazy people post the same amount of content as normal people.
I don't believe Trump won the 2020 election, but I also don't feverishly post about it.
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