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Thursday, July 19, 2018

Damn, I must be transforming into a Leftist! Now I agree with something Noam Chomsky said regarding Russia interfering in the 2016 (and other) elections!
It’s a pretty remarkable fact that—first of all, it is a joke. Half the world is cracking up in laughter. The United States doesn’t just interfere in elections. It overthrows governments it doesn’t like, institutes military dictatorships. Simply in the case of Russia alone—it’s the least of it—the U.S. government, under Clinton, intervened quite blatantly and openly, then tried to conceal it, to get their man Yeltsin in, in all sorts of ways. So, this, as I say, it’s considered—it’s turning the United States, again, into a laughingstock in the world.
Of course Russia interferes in our elections! Of course many other countries do as well. And, of course, Chomsky is quite right that we interfere in other countries all the time.

I still personally dislike Chomsky since I think he personally set natural language processing and semantic analysis back decades, but in this case I think he's right.

3 comments:

Hey Skipper said...

I dislike Chomsky for many other, less linguistically expert reasons.

But there is no doubting his ability to occasionally grasp the readily apparent. Except for the part where he misses the readily apparent. Russia's activity -- so badly hidden as to be readily apparent -- had no effect on the election.

It is every minute since then the Russians are reaping uncountable payback on their trivial investment. If only those suffering from TDS could figure out the readily apparent and simply put the Russian angle on complete disregard.

Bret said...

No effect? Zero? I'm pretty sure it had a non-zero effect. I'll bet at least one vote somewhere was changed. However, I'm not totally sure that the pro-Trump Russia effort outweighed the effect of the anti-Trump Steele dossier which was at least partly Russian and worked against Trump.

I'll have to admit I'm at a bit of a loss as to what true collusion between a presidential candidate and Russia would look like. For example, if the candidate's campaign organization contracted an entity to dig up dirt on an opponent and that entity contracted a foreign agent who then contacted and worked with Russian agents and spies, that's apparently NOT collusion with Russia because that's what the Steele Dossier is. So what is?

Hey Skipper said...

I'll have to admit I'm at a bit of a loss as to what true collusion between a presidential candidate and Russia would look like.

I am pretty certain I said exactly that when this whole schlamozzle started. TDS sufferers kept using the word "collusion" without having any theory at all for what form it could possibly take.

That's bad enough on a personal level, but the NYT has run probably a hundred stories implying Trump colluded with the Russians.

In the meantime, as you note, real collusion between the DNC and a foreign agent goes completely unremarked. It is somewhere between astonishing and appalling the depths to which straight reporting has sunk at the NYT.

No effect? Zero? I'm pretty sure it had a non-zero effect.

Perhaps. But since that is statistically unmeasurable, then the effect was zero. As for the fraudulent dossier, my guess is that it had no effect on the election -- the allegations were too good to be believed. (By too good, I mean any assertion that is too good to be true is almost certainly false.) TDS sufferers couldn't be made to hate literallyhitlerTrump any more than they already do, and the rest of us knew bollocks when we saw it.

The effect it is having, though, is revealing for all to see the epic corruption in the upper reaches of the FBI.