Corey
Robin

“Unless my memory’s at fault, the fuss about the Russian hacking started when it still seemed certain that Clinton would win the election, so this doesn’t seem to follow.”

realthog, I disagree with this. Yes, she mentioned it all election, but the intelligence agencies getting involved coincided very closely with the loss. A part of me suspects it may even be a tit for tat reprisal because of Comey and the FBI, which I guarantee you Hillary thinks cost her the election.

I’ll also admit I don’t have proof either way. Russia could have been behind it, I admit that, but at the present moment the Democrats have zero credibility with me. I don’t really believe the CIA either. Honestly, I don’t have a good method of sorting out what is and isn’t bullshit.

I would also like to take this opportunity to state I was a party line Democrat almost from the age of 18, with only three exceptions. 1) Voting Libertarian in my first election when I was young and too dumb to know better. 2) Cuomo for re-election. First time in my life I voted Green (Howie Hawkins) 3) Jill Stein instead of Hillary Clinton. I even voted straight Dem downballet. I mention this to show that it’s pretty tenuous to say I’m slanted against the Democrats. I spent almost 15 years carrying water for them. Just not anymore. Sanders was the final straw. I felt better than I had in a long time the day I decided I’d no longer carry water for the Democrats.

To be honest, that sounds to me like undiluted Alex Jones to me. Do you think you could try to rephrase a reply in straightforward English, excluding the faux-omniscient smarm?

Try this analogy.

I’m interested in particle physics and cosmology, and I read about those subjects quite a lot. But this isn’t to say I have any expertise in those subjects. If someone like Sean Carroll or Lawrence Krauss comes along and says something about particle physics/cosmology, I’d be a complete flipping eejit to argue the toss with them. They have the expertise. I don’t.

A few comments ago I cited the principle that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You may not quite have understood that point, or you may not have noticed it. For me to reckon that the expert conclusions of the intelligence services of at least two different countries, in both of which countries there’s political pressure to conclude the opposite, requires no “extraordinary evidence” on my part.

realthog, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is such a banal truism that it makes one look equal parts undereducated and patronizing to articulate it as if it’s some hard-edged incisive point, and similarly with harping on the concept of “logical fallacies”. But as far as expert opinion, here’s a widely circulated cybersecurity expert’s opinion to the effect that the so-called intelligence community has not offered “extraordinary evidence” of any kind regarding Russian state responsibility for the DNC/Podesta leaks. As long as nobody here is claiming to be an expert on what interests various actors within various deep-state intelligence agencies may or may not have (especially in light of the less over-repeated truism that all institutions have an inherent interest in emphasizing the seriousness of problems to which they are the solution) then it seems you’re the one arguing for an extraordinary claim — that we should accept even the least-substantiated “expert opinions” of intelligence agencies and officials regarding which dangerous evil foreigners are big bad spooky scary — without extraordinary evidence to back it up.

Why sure, in fact a very topical example of projection might be to cover for one’s dogmatic faith in the so-called intelligence community by lecturing others about skeptical inquiry and logical fallacies with all the smarm of a 13-year-old redditor who just read their first Richard Dawkins book. And another one might be to claim that the people really engaged in projection are the ones who point this out!

In all seriousness, it does seem plausible that an organ or proxy of the Russian state could have been the ultimate source of the DNC/Podesta leaks, and I suspect most of the people pushing back against this recent tide of Rooskies-sappin’-our-bodily-fluids hysteria would agree. What we strongly disagree with is that (1) the hypothetical Russian hack was extra super-duper evil and scary relative to other routine forms of espionage and propaganda just because the target happens to have been an institution of the USA; (2) the release of accurate information about the inner workings of the Democratic Party was a bad thing at all; and (3) mere allegations from the US state about big bad foreigners threatenin’ our freedom (a theme you may recall from such smash hits as “The Maine!”, “Tonkin!”, and “Yellowcake!”) should be sufficient to shift the burden of proof onto skeptics. Any one of those contentions, let alone all three at once, would be alarmingly sycophantic and submissive toward people with the authority to unleash the deadliest military force in human history.

As long as you’ve chosen to defend Richard Dawkins instead of defending your own deference to the US military-industrial complex, it’s fair to say that he and his ilk offer an odd little mirror of the social role of religion: just as salvation in the spiritual realm is religion’s substitute for revolution in the corporeal realm, skepticism toward the imagined power of deities is their substitute for skepticism toward the socially constructed authority of states and capitalists. Your bumper-sticker-worthy stance of “the CIA said it, I believe it, that settles it” is a pretty perfect illustration.

Ah, so you were referring to yourself as someone who’s written books on those topics, not Dawkins? (Now that I take 2 seconds to check, Dawkins’ age does appear to be 75.) If so, we have here an illustration of Clay Shirky’s point that the world of modern technology is one where “saying ‘I published a book’ will generate no more cultural capital than saying ‘I spoke into a microphone'”. It seems that thinking critically about your own political ideology is much harder for you than thinking critically about “science denial” (not that it requires some extraordinary stroke of genius to disagree with creationists or antivaxxers, but whatever) so I’ll try to give you a quick helping hand here:

if you wish to argue that the conclusions of the US (and UK) intelligence services are a conspiracy…

The activities of any intelligence service are by definition a conspiracy, since when shorn of a certain ideological fluff, the term “conspiracy” doesn’t necessarily mean any more than some kind of plan concealed from people who might otherwise obstruct it. If you think critically you’ll realize that strictly speaking your faith in the CIA’s assessment is also a conspiracy theory, the conspiracy in this case being that the CIA has evidence of Russian hacking that it’s keeping secret so that its source can continue to glean more information from the Russians. And your conspiracy theory could be correct, but without having evidence to know for sure, the major difference between your conspiracy theory and the ones you might deride as “conspiracy theories” is your trust in the benevolence of the conspirators.

…you need to produce some evidence better than hand-waving

No, you need to produce some better evidence than hand-waving, even if the hands doing the waving are employed by the CIA. It’s hardly an extraordinary claim to point out that intelligence agencies might use classified but ultimately dubious evidence to make a public case against a foreign foe for political reasons; again, just Google the word yellowcake, in case you’ve already forgotten about that one. On the other hand, the claims being made about Russian hacking are quite extraordinary — enough so in many people’s minds to warrant an escalation of tensions between two nuclear superpowers — and only through a profound lack of critical thinking about the political role of intelligence agencies could one conclude that unsubstantiated public allegations from them or anybody else should qualify as “extraordinary evidence” in support of these claims.

please produce some evidence

Yellowcake. Can you say the word? Yell-low-cake. Here, let me help!

I don’t know who you are and I don’t see any reason to care, but judging strictly from what you’ve posted here I’d address you the way Val Kilmer addresses Robert Downey Jr. in this scene, except with the word “smarmy”. Especially in that last comment, which consisted 100% of salving your ego by wrapping yourself in the identity of a Very Serious Person, and 0% of responding to literally a single actual point addressed to you.

please let me know why it is that you’re so frightened of the notion that people who choose to disagree with the conclusions of the intelligence services should offer better evidence than handwaving

I’m frightened of this notion because it’s a slavishly, obsequiously authoritarian one: that claims made by the state and its military/intelligence services are to be taken in complete faith by default, no matter how little actual evidence they present or how often they’ve been caught fabricating similar claims, and that by default the burden of proof rests entirely on skeptics to prove they’re not “wild and woolly” conspiracy theorists. I’m frightened because people who believe such notions hold the vast share of cultural, political, and economic capital in US society, and because believing such notions would render one not merely unable to mount any real resistance against a potential future fascist regime, but altogether unwilling. I’m frightened because at least in some sense, what people who believe this notion are doing — taking unsubstantiated allegations from the most powerful organs of the state as sufficient proof that particular political actors are treasonous proxies of a sinister foreign power — resembles the discursive conventions of a fascist regime much more directly than anything else going on in mainstream US politics right now, even including Trump himself. Does that answer your question?