Yeah, I got it wrong. “Sneaky Fucker theory” isn’t a thing, but “sneaky fucker” is an informal name for a well-known mating strategy. PZ did an excellent job of straightening things out, and I strongly recommend you read his take.
But he touches on one point that I think is worth repeating and expanding. What precisely is Boghossian saying with these two tweets?
Some random facts about me:
… Oh right, and I forgot about that solo snowshoe and x-country ski at Lake O’Hara, the one where I ran out of food and water. Some noodling with Google Earth suggests I did 30km that day. [Read more…]
I’m surprised I don’t read Wonkette more often.
Rachel Maddow did a BIG SCOOP on Thursday night, and we think it’s a pretty big fuckin’ deal. To cut to the chase, somebody (she doesn’t know who YET) used her “Send It To Rachel” tool to send her something that looks like a highly classified document about collusion between Donald Trump and Russia, but is actually a FORGERY. WHOA IF TRUE, right?
It is pretty “whoa,” in fact I was about to sit down and type something up on it until I saw Wonkette scooped me.
What’s fascinating about this weird forgery is that it appears to have been copied off the highly classified document NSA contractor Reality Winner sent to Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept. Remember how The Intercept published a bombshell on Monday, June 5, that Russians had specifically targeted voting machine manufacturers and election officials during their 2016 cyberwar against American democracy, and that they got further than anybody ever knew? […]
Maddow found the EXACT SAME MARKINGS and the EXACT SAME CREASE on the document she got. Forgery detected! (Later in the segment she explained that there were several other screwy things about the document, including that it actually named a high-up American citizen/Trump campaign person. According to the intelligence experts Maddow consulted, this type of document, if real, wouldn’t name an American all willy-nilly like that.)
There was one intriguing mystery left: the file received by Maddow was created on June 5th, 2017, at 12:17:15, yet the Intercept’s article went online at 13:44 15:44. How could the person who sent the document get access to it before the article was published? I was about to sit down and type about that instead, but…
That’s because time stamps on the documents published by The Intercept designate the creation date included in the PDF we publish on DocumentCloud: In this case, that occurred just over three hours prior to publication of our article. Both versions — the one we published and the one Maddow received — reflect the same time to the second: literally the exact moment when we created and uploaded the document.
In other words, anyone who took the document directly from The Intercept’s site would have a document with exactly the same time stamp as the one Maddow showed. Thus, rather than proving that this document was created before The Intercept’s publication, the time stamp featured by Maddow strongly suggests exactly the opposite: that it was taken from The Intercept’s site.
Ah, thank you Glenn Greenwald. It looks like the Intercept has an automated system to process their documents. Downloading the original for myself, I can tell they use an old-ish copy of ImageMagick to do the grunt work. This probably helps them redact information; the boxes they use to cover information look digitally made, yet are burnt into the source images that make up the PDF. This could have the pleasant side-effect of wiping away the original document’s metadata, if it was digital. On the other hand, I also see the original title was “GRU-final,” which probably didn’t come from the Intercept.
I get something slightly different from Greenwald when I dump the document’s info, though.
File Modification Date/Time : 2017:06:05 13:43:03-06:00 PDF Version : 1.4 Linearized : No Create Date : 2017:06:05 12:17:15 Modify Date : 2017:06:05 12:17:15 Page Count : 5
In his case, the bolded bit reads “2017:07:06 21:33:15-04:00,” the exact time he downloaded his copy. My tool is slightly newer than his, however, which could easily explain the discrepancy.
So, that’s one mystery solved: the person or people who sent the document to Maddow used the Intercept’s document as a base. That still leaves who sent it, though. Was it the Kremlin, someone associated with Trump, or somebody else? That one is in the hands of Maddow’s team.
(A hat tip to Lynna, OM in PZ’s Political Madness thread, for the Wonkette article.)
[HJH 2017-07-08: Damn time zones. And I was even going to mention them in my original post…]
I’ve discussed Gödel’s Incompleteness theorems before, and sometimes pointed out that they carry an exception: if your logical system lacks sufficient power to describe the concept of a number, the theorems don’t apply. The theorems depend on being able to map logical expressions to numeric codes, after all. Defining numbers depends on a form of induction, so I thought that if your logical system has that then the theorems apply.
But via a recent blog post of Jeffrey Shallit, I’ve learned that’s not correct. The dividing line is not being able to define numbers, nor is it even addition. Robinson arithmetic is undecidable, yet Presburger arithmetic is. The former doesn’t officially have induction, while the latter does. The line isn’t multiplication, either; Peano arithmetic adds multiplication to Robinson and is undecidable, yet Skolem arithmetic defines multiplication while still being decidable.
So I’ve been a bit too restrictive about when Gödel’s theorems apply. My apologies if I’ve misled anyone because of that.
I’ve meant to post this set of videos for a while. Remember Infinite Series? They did a pair of videos on voting methods, which do a great job of outlining just how difficult the subject is.
I’ll confess I’ve said that if bigots were smart, they wouldn’t be bigots. Reality is a bit more complicated than that, but there is a way to rescue the sentiment.
I’ve seen this in action; while one group of bigots were trolling me, I saw another group think the trolling was sincere. Just recently, I spotted another example.
Older members of the crowd carried Confederate flags, while the younger, internet-driven masses wore patches with 4chan’s Kekistan banner. Rally-goers in homemade armor and semi-automatic rifles paced Houston’s Hermann Park, waiting for an enemy to appear.
The crowd, several hundred strong, gathered in the park on Saturday to defend a statue of Sam Houston, a slaveholder. They had gathered in response to reports that leftist protesters had planned a rally to remove the statue, despite Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner publicly stating that removing the statue wasn’t “even on my agenda.” But as sniper rifles and Infowars-branded jackets crowded the park, it became evident that the left protesters were not coming. They had never planned to come. The rumors of an antifa protest were actually a hoax, orchestrated by an anti-left group defending Confederate monuments.
I suspect these scenarios are more common than we realize, if only because the same thing happened again a month later.
A “patriot” who brought a revolver to Gettysburg National Military Park Saturday amid rumors of desecration of memorials accidentally shot himself in the leg Saturday. […]
Dozens of self-described Patriots came to the park about noon Saturday after hearing rumors that Antifa protesters might crash the park’s events and try to desecrate memorials. Members of Antifa caused a ruckus in Harrisburg recently at an Anti-Sharia rally and one member was arrested for swinging a wooden pole with a nail attached at a police horse.
The rumors on Saturday appeared to be just that: rumors, as no Antifa members were seen at Gettysburg park Saturday.
The result of all this is a self-supporting feedback loop, where people opposed to social justice keep getting fooled by false flags into thinking social justice is as loopy as they’ve been told, and some of them graduate to generate those false flag campaigns.
Let’s say the Kremlin was responsible for the DNC hack, and deployed Twitter bots and trolls to drive disinformation during the recent US election. You wouldn’t expect something like this to pop up overnight, instead it’s likely Russia has practised on its closer neighbours for years. If this were the case, you’d expect them to have plans and organisations set up to counter Kremlin influence.
Sweden has launched a nationwide school program to teach students to identify Russian propaganda. The Defense Ministry has created new units to seek out and counter Russian attempts to undermine Swedish society.
In Lithuania, 100 citizen cyber-sleuths dubbed “elves” link up digitally to identify and beat back the people employed on social media to spread Russian disinformation. They call the daily skirmishes “Elves vs. Trolls.”
In Brussels, the European Union’s East Stratcom Task Force has 14 staffers and hundreds of volunteer academics, researchers and journalists who have researched and published 2,000 examples of false or twisted stories in 18 languages in a weekly digest that began two years ago. […]
France and Britain have successfully pressured Facebook to disable tens of thousands of automated fake accounts used to sway voters close to election time, and it has doubled to 6,000 the number of monitors empowered to remove defamatory and hate-filled posts.
The German cabinet recently endorsed legislation — now before Parliament — to impose fines of up to $53 million on social-media companies that fail to remove posts deemed to be “hate speech.” Some especially notorious recent examples concerning migrants have been traced to Russian origins.
You’d also expect the Kremlin to brag about their online savvy. It would be a national source of strength and pride, after all.
Last February, a top Russian cyber official told a security conference in Moscow that Russia was working on new strategies for the “information arena” that would be equivalent to testing a nuclear bomb and would “allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.”
Andrey Krutskikh, a senior Kremlin adviser, made the startling comments at the Russian national information security forum, or “Infoforum 2016,” held Feb. 4 and 5. His remarks were transcribed by a Russian who attended the gathering and translated for me by an independent European cyber expert. […]
According to notes of Krutskikh’s speech, he told his Russian audience: “You think we are living in 2016. No, we are living in 1948. And do you know why? Because in 1949, the Soviet Union had its first atomic bomb test. And if until that moment, the Soviet Union was trying to reach agreement with [President Harry] Truman to ban nuclear weapons, and the Americans were not taking us seriously, in 1949 everything changed and they started talking to us on an equal footing.”
Krutskikh continued, “I’m warning you: We are at the verge of having ‘something’ in the information arena, which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.”
Putin’s cyber adviser stressed to the Moscow audience the importance for Russia of having a strong hand in this new domain. If Russia is weak, he explained, “it must behave hypocritically and search for compromises. But once it becomes strong, it will dictate to the Western partners [the United States and its allies] from the position of power.”
If you live in the United States and focus on news relevant to there, it isn’t that hard to dismiss evidence of Kremlin hacking. They haven’t done it before, right? The US is a tech leader, anyway, and would spot any attempts coming from a mile away.
If you step outside of that bubble, though, you find many more people convinced of the Kremlin’s hand, if only because they’ve felt it themselves.
Not this one, mind, but this one from Shiv.
So, without further ado, let’s dive into the latest candy-glossed hate piece to make waves in feminist discourse: “I am not a ‘cis’ Woman, I am a Woman and that Matters.”
Hands down, it’s the best counter-argument to the “E” in TERF that I’ve read.
I mean, hey, it’s taken a good ~2,400 words but now we can answer the question, “why is it wrong for cis women to have some spaces just for them to feel safe in a world where they don’t?”
It’s not wrong to want safety. However, the motivations for this trans-free “women only” space…
- Perpetrate rape culture by overstating stranger danger;
- Perpetrate rape culture by obscuring the actual tactics of serial predators;
- Assumes trans women are as likely to be violent as cis men, which is factually incorrect;
- Assumes violence is an essential property of certain persons, which is also factually incorrect–not to mention the rhetorical flourish liberally employed by white supremacists;
…all of which are complaints which have nothing to do with “trying to take away cis women’s safety.”
And all of those prior 2,400 words are well-cited and argued. I do two minor nitpicks, but the first only strengthens the argument. The second:
Please note, I have not once accused Broustra of being transphobic in this piece, nor will I.
I’ll go two steps farther. Broustra denies gender identity, via calling for the explicit exclusion of trans* women in “women-only” spaces; she shows a familiarity with TERF culture, through her Xeroxing of their ideas and arguments; and as a bonus, she is actively working to exclude trans* women, because she is campaigning for her point of view in a public forum. In my books, that makes her a TERF.
That first? I’ll post it over on Shiv’s piece as a comment, when I get a chance. So go read and bookmark her post!
Before getting to the point, though, do you mind if I be a little petty? Emphasis mine:
I was asked about my observations on technical details buried in the State Department’s release of Secretary Clinton’s emails (such as noting a hack attempt in 2011, or how Clinton’s emails might have been intercepted by Russia due to lack of encryption). I was also asked about aspects of the DNC hack, such as why I thought the “Guccifer 2” persona really was in all likelihood operated by the Russian government, and how it wasn’t necessary to rely on CrowdStrike’s attribution as blind faith; noting that I had come to the same conclusion independently based on entirely public evidence, having been initially doubtful of CrowdStrike’s conclusions.
MMmmmm.
But on to the main point: the day after Thursday’s revelation that “a GOP operative who presented himself as working with Mike Flynn, … actively solicited Clinton emails from hackers he believed to be Russian and assumed to be affiliated with the Russian government,” one of the anonymous sources became nonymous. Meet Matt Tait, a British cybersecurity researcher who’s covered that angle of American politics. Said GOP operative, Peter Smith, approached him to validate the batch of emails that were claimed to be from Hilary Clinton’s private email server.
In my conversations with Smith and his colleague, I tried to stress this point: if this dark web contact is a front for the Russian government, you really don’t want to play this game. But they were not discouraged. They appeared to be convinced of the need to obtain Clinton’s private emails and make them public, and they had a reckless lack of interest in whether the emails came from a Russian cut-out. Indeed, they made it quite clear to me that it made no difference to them who hacked the emails or why they did so, only that the emails be found and made public before the election.
Ignore the whole attribution angle of the DNC hack. Instead, let’s focus on the actions of the Republicans. They had access to illegally-obtained dirt on a rival party, and didn’t care that this dirt was illegal. All that mattered to them was winning.
This isn’t a one-off, either; yesterday I pointed to an old story about another GOP operative, Aaron Nevins, who struck a deal with “Guccifer 2.0” to use the material they gathered from local DNC chapters in local races. That material wound up being used in attack ads, and may have swayed voters. But there was also a recent report which showed that Republicans had extensively gerrymandered electoral districts, guaranteeing themselves safer seats and a greater odds of winning. This lines up with prior reports. Republicans are also notorious for voter suppression, to the point that they openly brag about it and waste taxpayer funds to do it. Voter disenfranchisement? Also a Republican tactic.
This is a party devoted primarily to winning. Their policies and values are secondary, leading to an unending stream of hypocrisy. This explains a lot about why they have so much difficulty governing, the Republicans lack a unified vision to guide policy and rally everyone around. This makes it easy for outside groups to sway Republicans to their side, to the point that they even rely on them to draft some legislation.
This is poisonous for democracy. It must be opposed, no matter your political leanings.
Do you remember the good old days? Back when political parties didn’t team up with foreign powers on multiple occasions to use illegally obtained material for personal gain?
[Aaron] Nevins confirmed to the [Wall Street] Journal that he told hacker Guccifer 2.0 to “feel free to send any Florida based information” after learning that the hacker had tapped into Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) computers last summer. From the DCCC, Guccifer 2.0 released internal assessments of Democratic congressional candidates, known as “self-opposition research,” to GOP operatives using social media. Nevins told the Journal that, after receiving the stolen documents from the hacker, he “realized it was a lot more than even Guccifer knew that he had.” The stolen DCCC documents also contained sensitive information on voters in key Florida districts, breaking down how many people were considered dependable Democratic voters, undecided Democrats, Republican voters and the like. Nevins made a war analogy, describing the data he received to Guccifer 2.0 as akin to a “map to where all the troops are deployed.”
After Nevins published some of the material on the blog HelloFLA.com, using his own pseudonym, Guccifer 2.0 sent a link of the information to close Trump associate Roger Stone — who is currently under federal investigation for potential collusion with Russia.
What the Journal story does indicate, however, is that a GOP operative who presented himself as working with Mike Flynn, a top Trump adviser with numerous dodgy Russian ties himself, actively solicited Clinton emails from hackers he believed to be Russian and assumed to be affiliated with the Russian government. Once he obtained a stash of unverified emails presented as the deleted Clinton emails, this operative then suggested the hackers release the cache to WikiLeaks one month after the DNC WikiLeaks dump and a month before the Podesta WikiLeaks dump.
*sigh*, I sure miss those days.