Disqus - Latest Comments for Sethop

Re: Yikes! New Behind-the-Scenes Book Brutalizes the Clinton Campaign

Sethop — Sat, 22 Apr 2017 12:18:11 -0000

Compared to what Trump has been doing, or what happened with the GWB Whitehouse, Hillary's email management practices were super secure, ultra-competent, completely compliant, utterly beyond reproach. They were also, of course, an insecure, incompetent, non-compliant disaster zone.

But I don't know how much of the blame for this one can really sheet home to Hillary.

Her IT guy was almost certainly the biggest culprit. Apparently thought he could set the Clintons up with an email server himself. Running on Windows. Without a firewall. (Laughter ensues). Remind me again why he was given immunity from prosecution?

That server was supposed to be for non-classified material only, he said. This was preposterous. Hillary was Secretary of State, the Clinton Library and Clinton Global Initiative stuff was happening on the same server, that thing should have been locked down like Fort Knox. Instead it was wide open to any hacker who stumbled upon it.

Meanwhile, I have yet to see any proof that Hillary knows anything at all about securing an email server, or verifying that it continues to remain unhacked. Securing an internet email server is *quite hard*, and keeping it secure is an ongoing challenge. I'd be surprised if her staff ever explained enough of the pros and cons to allow her to make a reasonably informed decision with regards what to do for her various non-classified communications requirements.

Re: WaPo Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt is Worried About Lying in Public Debates | Beat the Press | Blogs | Publications | The Center for Economic and Policy Research

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 22:43:24 -0000

FWIW, what I see these days is pretty much everything getting automated as fast as we techies can get funded to automate it. I've more to say on this, I'll come back later.

Re: Jake Tapper: Doesn’t Seem That Hillary Clinton Has Done Enough ‘Introspection’ on 2016 Loss

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 22:38:50 -0000

*Complaining* is against the US Constitution? Is this some sort of alternative reality we've fallen into? The Constitution I've read didn't even discuss political parties, let alone have a rule against bitching over which politician won after the election. It may be pointless or counter-productive, but surely not unconstitutional :-)

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 11:06:20 -0000

Right so for a start let me say that I would be enormously pleased to have a discussion about these points and various others with the author of "Designing Social Interfaces", and someone who has actually been inside the democratic primary machine, which seems to me to be in desperate need of a redesign for the internet era, and I'd love to get your feedback on a few thoughts I've had regarding how we potentially make it all a lot less, er, anti-social.

But there's absolutely no reason I'd want to do that with a hot head or with the implication that I might be doing so for the sake of point-scoring, or somehow 'winning' an argument on the internet, which is the kind of anti-pattern I think we need to figure out better ways to avoid if we are to do better at this whole democracy thing in future.

So I'll drop you a line once I've had a bit of time to put some thoughts together on the matter. Hopefully they'll make a fair bit more sense than the admittedly rather circumlocuitous attempts I've made here to educate some of these folks into what I perceived to be the error of their ways.

Rest assured I'm well capable of basic math and I forgive you for calling this 'sleazy propagandistic rhetoric' even if it isn't. No worries.

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 09:45:21 -0000

The so called 'MSM' lost their minds for most of the Democratic primary but have been reasonably good since then. When there wasn't a significant chance - to their minds - that Sanders was going to win, they put out a few more honest reports as regards his legislative record and abilities.

See for instance:

* http://www.nytimes.com/2016...
* http://www.msnbc.com/rachel...
* https://www.theatlantic.com...
* http://edition.cnn.com/2016...

But if you look during the primary primary months (heh) you can certainly find all kinds of idiot nonsense like the link you posted, it was a really embarrassing time for them as an industry quite frankly.

I'm not gonna knock Hillary too much though. She is very smart, and has always been pretty good at putting forward the expert consensus on this and that, the problem being that voters on the whole are sick and tired of 'the experts', the GOP knows that very well, and hence listening to them, or worse, acting like one, was a total road to nowhere in 2016.

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 09:17:40 -0000

Tell you what, if you can find an adult troll capable of reading more than a few sentences, get him to explain to you just how badly you lost this argument. You'll be a better troll for it in the future.

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 09:15:59 -0000

It was totally my mistake, don't worry about it :-)

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 09:12:43 -0000

Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter accusations. First three rules they give you, right?

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 06:02:38 -0000

Ok. I'll leave you to your own self-abuse. I don't think you need any more of my help. Bye.

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 06:00:01 -0000

Uh, I took a look at some of the things he's been saying, and yeah, no, I'm not with him. I think he read what I've been saying - clearly capable of going beyond the first few words, unlike yourself - and it may have made him think about how he's probably been troll-baited in the past - like most of us have, to an extent far more than we knew - so I feel like at least two of us learned something new today. That's a better than average score for the average online discussion. Far better. Win!

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 05:51:06 -0000

>Your opinion IS important to me, although not enough to make me read more than the first few words of your posts.

Right, well I guess I should leave you to live off your own troll droppings then. Clearly no amount of reasoning is going to get you to make any more sense than that you have failed to make already.

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 05:42:41 -0000

Right. So you don't know anything about trolling. Or you're a troll. I'm betting on the latter.

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 05:39:25 -0000

Right. So you keep wanting me to smear Hillary with troll droppings. I keep saying I'm not gonna do it. I described exactly what I meant by 'accomodationist' and challenged you to come up with a better word for moving from a left wing position to a right wing position over time, in response to pressures from the other party and the political culture.

You responded by saying that she hasn't done that, or asking me to provide some more 'proof'. This is so dumb it definitely points me in the direction of thinking you *must* be some form of troll. But ok, if you really need another example, compare her support for single payer healthcare while she was in the Whitehouse to her more recent claims that Bernie's plan for single payer was a clear non-starter.

But here is the thing. By getting me to say all these things, and I could accidentally end up putting a much harsher spin on them if I was in a bad mood, or I believed that you were real, are you not simply making things worse for both sides of the Democratic divide? How should I go about distinguishing this form of behavior from what a well paid Putin, Koch or Rove troll would be doing under these kind of circumstances?

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 05:23:53 -0000

You know if anything you have said about what I've said in this thread was even remotely close to the semantic value an average intelligent spectator would tend to extract from it, you would be so much more persuasive.

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 05:19:10 -0000

You know I *still* can't decide if you're a complete loser or a complete troll. So I guess you're right, I haven't exactly won yet. Anything you can do to persuade me one way or the other? How about some sort of logical argument. I haven't seen one of those from you yet. Maybe even some reference to a logical argument you may have made somewhere else?

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 04:43:23 -0000

You know, you're going to have to get off the ground if you want me to hit you some more.

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 04:41:43 -0000

So what does a Russian troll sound like exactly? What would you say the defining features were?

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 04:40:54 -0000

Right, so you want me to say what exactly? Going my my new meta-trolling theory, I think the idea is that I should spout out a bunch of stuff that could be misinterpreted as me attacking Clinton, presumably using a selection of the the various troll droppings I've found in the area. Not gonna.

As for Bernie being 'singularly bad at passing policy', would you care you provide me with any proof whatsoever for that preposterous piece of crap? I mean, no matter how many times you trolls repeat that stupid soundbite it does not make it even one iota more true.

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 04:35:10 -0000

You know I was hoping you meant you were a moderator and had blocked 'it' from this forum! 'It' seemed to have gone silent about the same time you said that, hence my confusion. But I'm back after a bit of a break and it appears to have gotten up and is making noises like it wants more. Sigh.

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 02:27:38 -0000

> I've blocked it. You made some excellent points.

Cheers :-)

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 02:25:33 -0000

> Ah, Trump et al aren't REALLY neo-Nazis so it was OK to help them win. Got it.

Right, and part of your game is to make all the Democrats attack Trump as a Nazi so that it drives the GOP closer together. Pro move. Natch.

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 02:22:52 -0000

> So cite the examples of this accommodation. Oh right, you can't.

Well, she wrote her dissertation on the work of Saul Alinsky, that's about as radical left as it gets. More recently she voted for the Iraq War and made millions talking to Goldman Sachs in private about how great they are. There's definitely some rightwards drift in there somewhere. The problem is I don't think it's all entirely unreasonable drift, and I've come to the conclusion what you mainly want me to do here is attack her so that there's yet more false nonsense out there on the internet about her, and you've got this cool troll tactic of trying to get the Bernie followers to put that kind of crap out there for you. Sorry, I'm not playing your game.

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 02:10:43 -0000

Which of my claims were outrageous and baseless again?

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 02:10:01 -0000

.... I can't breathe. Ok. That's better. I've stopped laughing now. Good one. I will clearly never convince you of anything. But that's the point of being a troll, isn't it?

Re: What Elizabeth Warren Didn’t Say

Sethop — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 02:08:46 -0000

You're calling the Republicans Nazis are you? Some of them are probably perfectly reasonable people, they're just stuck in an awful situation, inside a political dynamic that forces them ever to the right. I would like to think that Trump has now led them right off the tracks and they may never recover. People like you helped make that happen so I hope you're proud. Cereal boxes. Hah!