David Brock, Invasion 4Chan, the Alt-Right, & Pizzagate

[guruilla]

It is not difficult for me to entertain the notion, given the things we discuss here and elsewhere, that child abuse and sacrifice occurs at high levels in DC – point finale. This remains true whether the shitstorm of hastily-gathered quasi-evidence and strange hints comes from the right or the left. The important thing is it comes from a place hostile to the currently dominant power or worldview.

And/or a place of vying for same said dominance? (In-fighting can't be ruled out, or culling of the herd that aspires to power?)

If high quality 1080 multi-angle well video of Hilary cooking and eating children was found, the response here would be
"Well, no one likes that but... but... Trump! Trump Trump!!!"

& it creates a potentially endless loop of cry fakery.

Anyone who says there is nothing to Pizzagate has not put the hours in on Voat to deep dive.

True dat.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/308 ... p-war-room

Top Dem super PAC launches anti-Trump war room
By Jonathan Easley - 12/06/16 11:43 AM EST

A top Democratic super PAC is launching a war room aimed at making President-elect Donald Trump’s life miserable as he prepares to enter the White House.

Liberal political operative David Brock, a close ally of former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, told reporters on Tuesday that his super PAC, American Bridge, has established a war room that will act as an aggressor and a watchdog for the Trump transition team and his incoming administration.

Brock claims to have the largest archive of Trump opposition research in the Democratic Party, including thousands of hours of footage that operatives are mining for damaging material.

“The Trump administration is shaping up to be one of the most corrupt since the Gilded Age,” Brock said. “American Bridge will use everything at its disposal to hold it accountable.”

American Bridge has established a rapid response team that will fact-check Trump’s claims in real time. Experts are said to be combing through Trump’s domestic and foreign business interests, his personal life, his charitable foundation and those he has associated with, using Freedom of Information Act requests to uncover new details.

Its findings will be passed along privately to the media, to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and even to Trump’s own supporters in an effort to undermine the president-elect.

In addition to American Bridge, Brock’s network of liberal groups includes the media watchdog Media Matters, the judicial and regulatory group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the social media platform Shareblue.

All are in the process of reinventing themselves in the age of Trump.

Brock says that Shareblue could turn into the “Breitbart of the left” — as long as it receives a significant financial investment.

He’s seeking additional funding for CREW, saying he hopes it will rival the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch. Judicial Watch had a huge impact on the 2016 elections, using regulatory channels to create a steady flow of problems for Clinton, most often related to her use of a private email server while secretary of State. Brock’s web of liberal groups raised some $75 million in the 2016 cycle.

And Brock said that Media Matters will need to retrain its focus from monitoring Fox News and conservative talk radio to combating a scourge of fake news and conspiracy theories that have percolated online.

Brock and many Democrats partially blame Clinton’s loss on a proliferation of fake news spread across social media platforms like Facebook.

“A lot of garbage came spewing out of Facebook, and these companies need to adopt new standards and clean their own house,” Brock said. “We’ll be involved in a campaign to push them to do that.”

Brock took credit for dragging Trump’s popularity to historic lows for a president-elect, although it wasn’t enough to beat back Trump’s insurgent campaign.

Democrats are clinging to what looks like a healthy popular vote victory for Clinton to question Trump’s legitimacy.

“The public demands this. Hillary Clinton got more votes for president than anyone in history,” said Democratic strategist James Carville. “She’ll win the popular vote by more than 2 percent, or 2.5 million votes. It would be a dereliction of duty not to do something of this magnitude.”

Brock said he didn’t have a price tag yet for the new initiatives at American Bridge but said he’d heard from donors who were energized by Clinton’s loss and eager to contribute to combating Trump.

Brock has invited 225 current donors and 175 prospective donors to a meeting in Palm Beach, Fla., over Trump’s inaugural weekend as he seeks to fund the groups he hopes will rival the Koch brothers’ network of influence on the right.

Still, several top Clinton donors interviewed by The Hill have expressed deep frustration with the direction of the party and say they’ll remain on the sidelines as Democrats rebuild.

Brock said he's hopeful Clinton will join the fight once the sting of her election defeat is behind her.

"We'd like to see her engaged when she's ready," Brock said.

This isn't Brock's first time looking for damaging information on an administration. In the '90s, before his politics changed, Brock dogged the Bill Clinton administration with reporting on the president's sex life.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Brock says that Shareblue could turn into the “Breitbart of the left” — as long as it receives a significant financial investment.

Wasn't Breitbart the Huffington Post of the right, though? Wasn't that the pitch, fucking verbatim?

Their whole schtick was patterned after existing, successful liberal news blogs & news aggregators. It's not an innovation, it's a reaction.

I really think I'm done caring about America, even abstractly. It's just time to monetize this bottomless ocean of stupid.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

Brock says that Shareblue could turn into the “Breitbart of the left” — as long as it receives a significant financial investment.

Wasn't Breitbart the Huffington Post of the right, though? Wasn't that the pitch, fucking verbatim?

Their whole schtick was patterned after existing, successful liberal news blogs & news aggregators. It's not an innovation, it's a reaction.

I really think I'm done caring about America, even abstractly. It's just time to monetize this bottomless ocean of stupid.

Apparently he thinks Michael Huffington's turncoat ex-wife's news aggregating slave blog empire wasn't worthy of the inspiration, so he wants forgo the side-boob in favor of teeth -- putting where their is -- and go with sinister insanity instead of mindless partisanship. I doubt they will have featured sections like the Oprah-worthy "Voices".

[guruilla]

There may be an opportunity to watch Correct the Record trolling tactics live at Voat/pizzagate thread: We've been infiltrated by CTR

(It's a pretty funny read; apparently anti-pizzagate posts are getting massive & rapid upvotes where ones that are critical of those posts are getting downvoted with the same speed)

From one comment:

Yup this is right in line with their usual tactics. I personally have a very long history of rooting these fuckers out and exposing them, and have studied their methodology and the patterns in line with their past behavior/typical underhanded manipulation & attempts to silence others. They will flood this place with a ton of "hate speech"-type posts, a lot of racist shit and flat-out trolling sort of posts -- in essence, "let's make this place as miserable as possible of an environment to try and dissuade readership/posting activity" is one of their main goals. They also use the racist posts and in particular, they love to use neo-Nazi type rhetoric and anti-semitic remarks because they have a very easy scarlet letter to pin on this whole investigation by painting it as the cooky conspiracy theory whipped up by a bunch of delusional racists.

Also, check this out & see if you can make sense of it (you being the generic-sympathetic RI reader):

Here is a first hand glimpse of a non-human bot in action on Reddit (self.conspiracy)
submitted 18 hours ago by clovize

This is under a link in this Pizzagate related article at Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/com ... deception/

jpop23mn 0 points an hour ago oh, c'mon! This is clearly the fake news that makes us lol bad

clovize[S] 2 points an hour ago* Given your garbled syntax, I have a capcha to determine if you are a human or a bot. Answer this question: are dominos played on cheese or pasta?

jpop23mn [score hidden] 59 minutes ago I'm still not convinced

[–]clovize[S] 1 point 4 minutes ago Wow, first hand glimpse of a non-human bot in action.

[–]lemonyfresh3667 [score hidden] 57 minutes ago A bot lol, gives the same comment to every pizzag8 post

jpop23mn via /r/conspiracy sent 9 minutes ago bot? Shill? That's original

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/com ... an_bot_in/

[Joe Hillshoist]

Not sure if the material's been fully digested at this stage but then it's a lot to swallow

Is there some suggestion that elite dodgy people sacrifice and eat children associated with pizzagate?

If so why would you start a post using those words?

[Jerky]

Guru, what is it that you're even trying to do here?

Your attempt to cast yourself as a dispassionate seeker of truth - in this forum, at this late date in the game, and on this subject - are patently preposterous. It reeks of a certain cornered desperation. And yeah, I get it. The authorities are getting involved now. It's no longer just a game that you've somehow autistically managed to spin out of your head and into the Big Bad World. There may be consequences for your actions now. And you're frightened. I get it.

However, here - and in so many other posts over the years - YOU are one of the most plainly and obviously compromised parties in the discussion.

In fact, here at RigInt, you are the LEAST credible participant in this discussion by a country mile.

You stand exposed, Guru. You have engaged in a dangerous game, both here and elsewhere. Your efforts have put people - REAL people, not your imaginary cannibal Satanist clique - at risk of real, physical harm. I know that's difficult for you to grasp, so I'm working on making it impossible for you to ignore, via something I've been working on during my most recent ban.

In a day or two, all will be clear.

J.

[identity]

You stand exposed, Guru

guru.png

[Iamwhomiam]

[norton ash]

DisInfo Wars. Bots have no shame and neither do their parents.

[Plutonia]

I don't know if anyone other than me bothered to read Raimond Gaitas' observations about the effect of spin on the conditions for sober judgement, so here they are without most of the references to Oz + UK politics - still on point:

Spin [...] is a distinctive form of political mendacity, different from lying and other more common ways that politicians deny citizens truthful answers to their questions.

The corrosive nature of spin on democratic politics first struck me in 2004 when I wrote Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics (Quarterly Essay 16). In that essay, I contrasted the responses of the Australian and British electorates to the mendacity of their governments. Australians, it seemed, were cynical about their politicians, expected them to lie, but were confident that they (the citizens) had their feet on the ground and were therefore capable of taking the measure of their politicians. Australians were confident of their capacity for sober political judgment.

The British, however, struck me as so disoriented by the sophisticated, eloquent spin of the New Labour government led by Tony Blair that they could no longer see the ground on which to plant their feet. More serious than systematically misinforming them, their government had steadily eroded the conditions for political judgment. In doing so, it not only denied them the evidence with which to assess this or that claim: it undermined what is necessary for the sound application of the concept of evidence.

Many Australian citizens, it seemed to me, expected politicians to lie. It didn't much matter to them either because they believe that the lies they were told didn't seriously affect them, or because they were confident that they had other trustworthy routes to the information they needed. Being confident that there is ground beneath one's feet when one needs to plant them firmly is an enabling condition of making a sober judgment.

In Plato's Gorgias, Socrates makes a similar point about the political role of orators (read ''masters of spin'') who boasted that they had great power because they could manipulate people to believe whatever they wanted them to believe. At one stage, Socrates tells a young orator, Polus, that he (Polus) is good at oratory but bad at conversation.

Conversation (or dialogue) is, Socrates believed, a condition of sober judgment, because real conversation - the kind that someone celebrates when she exclaims joyfully, ''At last, someone to talk to!'' - presupposes the possibility that one might call one's partner in conversation to seriousness and that she will respond authentically to that call. ''Come now, can you mean this? Do you take me for a fool? Why do you so constantly resort to cliche? Why do you yield so often to your sentimentality?'' And so on. These are calls to a kind of sobriety that cannot survive inauthentic forms.

Socrates believed that oratory was not a morally neutral skill that can be directed at good, bad or indifferent ends, but intrinsically rotten because it betrays the trust necessary for genuine conversation and, in so doing, erodes the conditions of political (and other forms of) judgment. We should think the same about spin.

For many years, we in the democratic West have praised conversation in politics as though it expressed an ideal of democratic accountability. That may be a sentimental illusion about the nature of politics, encouraged by politicians who spin counterfeits of [fake] conversational intimacy to make us more vulnerable to manipulation.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/ ... 1390x.html

Oh! So this is what has happened to us! It's good to know.

[Joe Hillshoist]

I don't know if anyone other than me bothered to read Raimond Gaitas' observations about the effect of spin on the conditions for sober judgement, so here they are without most of the references to Oz + UK politics - still on point:

Spin [...] is a distinctive form of political mendacity, different from lying and other more common ways that politicians deny citizens truthful answers to their questions.

The corrosive nature of spin on democratic politics first struck me in 2004 when I wrote Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics (Quarterly Essay 16). In that essay, I contrasted the responses of the Australian and British electorates to the mendacity of their governments. Australians, it seemed, were cynical about their politicians, expected them to lie, but were confident that they (the citizens) had their feet on the ground and were therefore capable of taking the measure of their politicians. Australians were confident of their capacity for sober political judgment.

The British, however, struck me as so disoriented by the sophisticated, eloquent spin of the New Labour government led by Tony Blair that they could no longer see the ground on which to plant their feet. More serious than systematically misinforming them, their government had steadily eroded the conditions for political judgment. In doing so, it not only denied them the evidence with which to assess this or that claim: it undermined what is necessary for the sound application of the concept of evidence.

Many Australian citizens, it seemed to me, expected politicians to lie. It didn't much matter to them either because they believe that the lies they were told didn't seriously affect them, or because they were confident that they had other trustworthy routes to the information they needed. Being confident that there is ground beneath one's feet when one needs to plant them firmly is an enabling condition of making a sober judgment.

In Plato's Gorgias, Socrates makes a similar point about the political role of orators (read ''masters of spin'') who boasted that they had great power because they could manipulate people to believe whatever they wanted them to believe. At one stage, Socrates tells a young orator, Polus, that he (Polus) is good at oratory but bad at conversation.

Conversation (or dialogue) is, Socrates believed, a condition of sober judgment, because real conversation - the kind that someone celebrates when she exclaims joyfully, ''At last, someone to talk to!'' - presupposes the possibility that one might call one's partner in conversation to seriousness and that she will respond authentically to that call. ''Come now, can you mean this? Do you take me for a fool? Why do you so constantly resort to cliche? Why do you yield so often to your sentimentality?'' And so on. These are calls to a kind of sobriety that cannot survive inauthentic forms.

Socrates believed that oratory was not a morally neutral skill that can be directed at good, bad or indifferent ends, but intrinsically rotten because it betrays the trust necessary for genuine conversation and, in so doing, erodes the conditions of political (and other forms of) judgment. We should think the same about spin.

For many years, we in the democratic West have praised conversation in politics as though it expressed an ideal of democratic accountability. That may be a sentimental illusion about the nature of politics, encouraged by politicians who spin counterfeits of [fake] conversational intimacy to make us more vulnerable to manipulation.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/ ... 1390x.html

Oh! So this is what has happened to us! It's good to know.

Reading that article six years later lots of things come to mind.

Including that he spoke too soon about this:

Australians, it seemed, were cynical about their politicians, expected them to lie, but were confident that they (the citizens) had their feet on the ground and were therefore capable of taking the measure of their politicians. Australians were confident of their capacity for sober political judgment.
...
Many Australian citizens, it seemed to me, expected politicians to lie. It didn't much matter to them either because they believe that the lies they were told didn't seriously affect them, or because they were confident that they had other trustworthy routes to the information they needed. Being confident that there is ground beneath one's feet when one needs to plant them firmly is an enabling condition of making a sober judgment.

It was about 2010 that I formed the opinion that the whole 5G culture war was happening. Tony Abbott was the one who gave me that opinion after he took the leadership of the opposition in a party room election ... well basically about the reality of climate change.


I "know" some of the commentors on that article... not thru RL but via the internet. Interesting comments that they made.

Finally

Gillard's government, which had only just been elected when that article was written, was the first to put a price on carbon emissions (the "carbon tax"). It cost her the next election and was used to frame her terribly. Tony Abbott won the next election (2013) after screaming "Axe the Tax" and "stop the boats" and "ditch the witch" at the tv for 3 years in the worlds longest dummy spit.
...
Actually from memory Gillards govt hadn't been elected. there was a hung parliament and no govt had formed at this stage.
...
If anything destroyed the conditions for political judgement, and I mean destroyed, not eroded, it was this dummy spit and the political climate in Australia following Gillard's election victory and subsequent action on global warming. No government was ever as unable to spin anything as Gillard's. Ironically Abbot, who was obviously unfit to be pm/prime minister to anyone with half a brain (not many Aussies obviously), didn't last a full term of government before his own party knifed him. (not literally, politically)

(Gillard was the first ever deputy pm to challenge a first term pm in Australia, that happened in the months leading up to that election in some very dodgy circumstances. the pm at the time - kevin Rudd- didn't even have the guts to call a leadership spill and force a ballot. Abbott used that against Gillard for the entirety of her term as pm.)

None of this would have happened without Rupert Murdoch having control of between 2/3 and 3/4 of Australian media sources and most of the rest owned by the Fairfax group (of wankers). For the 20 years before the article was written (1990 - 2010) media diversity in Australia shrunk by a huge proportion. This was offset a bit during the 00s by the rise of blogging, but blogging has been dead since 2010 - at least the independent political sort has been.

So a diversity of information sources, all competing to have credible intelligent analysis that accurately predicts reality/future consequences and relying on the judgement of their readers is far better than a msm landscape dominated by a few players pushing ideological or partisan wheelbarrows. At least in terms of fostering the conditions for the population to work thru spin and innoculate themselves against it.

More serious than systematically misinforming them, their government had steadily eroded the conditions for political judgment. In doing so, it not only denied them the evidence with which to assess this or that claim: it undermined what is necessary for the sound application of the concept of evidence.

Edited to fix the quotes.

[mentalgongfu2]

Searcher08 wrote:
If high quality 1080 multi-angle well video of Hilary cooking and eating children was found, the response here would be
"Well, no one likes that but... but... Trump! Trump Trump!!!"

This is such a ridiculous assertion, I hesitate to give it merit by repeating it.

But GD it's so ridiculous, I can't help myself.

Because this is such a Hillary-loving board, we would never have a "Hillary is dangerous" thread, and anyone who questions the assertions in this thread or its progenitor is a Hillary lover commie radical leftist bastard.



Maybe that old gray mare ain't what she used to be after all....

[Searcher08]

Sometimes Brit understatement *really* doesn't translate well to text.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Sometimes Brit understatement *really* doesn't translate well to text.

Genuinely laughed, loudly, at that.