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U.S. Politics: Confirming The Trumpocalypse


Mr. Chatywin et al.

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5 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Except, as has been pointed out to you repeatedly, no one is actually believing the story or claiming it is true, merely that it is possible. 

Again, you'd have a point if the FBI didn't consider it plausible enough to order a wiretap on its basis. Or the ODNI give a briefing. Or state that the sources were credible. I don't have to believe or disbelieve anything based on the information that the report had; I can simply look who is considering it at least credible to look into to believe that it is...worth looking into. And as I pointed out, the good thing is that it has a lot of specific data points that make it falsifiable. Unlike the birther story, this has tons of data that can be investigated and shown to not corroborate. 

Is it your assumption then, that despite having this information for months, the major news sources have not attempted to do this?

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10 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

A previous source of high value intelligence that was deemed credible by multiple intel agencies, along with ANOTHER source that was also deemed credible. Both of whom apparently would be totally burned if this turned out to be false. 

But how would you prove that it is false? It can only be done if whoever did the construction was sloppy and you could find that a given individual was not in the city where the propaganda claims that he was on a given day (which might be the case with Cohen). If the propagandists did their work well, the information is unverifiable: unless there was round-the-clock monitoring and recording, you can never prove that two people in the same city on the same day never met each other or a man did not engage in certain acts within a private hotel room.

Of course, you can't prove that it's true either, but that's not going to burn anyone.

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2 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

Is it your assumption then, that despite having this information for months, the major news sources have not attempted to do this?

No, I don't assume that at all, though they may not have been attempting to actively disprove or falsify it. Per their statements they've apparently been attempting largely to corroborate it - which isn't the same thing and isn't looking at the same data. I also think that they've been attempting to do whatever they've been doing fairly quietly, which isn't as easy when you're talking about this sort of information. 

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But how would you prove that it is false? It can only be done if whoever did the construction was sloppy and you could find that a given individual was not in the city where the propaganda claims that he was on a given day (which might be the case with Cohen).

And all sorts of other data. When there's this much data, there is a lot of places where you can either demonstrate zero evidence exists or, like Cohen or the Russian businessman earlier, show that it's a fabrication. People are sloppy all the time. Hell, in this document there are multiple basic misspellings of people's names in it, which makes it less likely to be credible. 

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If the propagandists did their work well, the information is unverifiable: unless there was round-the-clock monitoring and recording, you can never prove that two people in the same city on the same day never met each other or a man did not engage in certain acts within a private hotel room.

Of course, you can't prove that it's true either, but that's not going to burn anyone.

If enough of it is proven to be false it makes the person who had previously provided highly credible information into a low credible source, and makes them significantly less valuable to others. Given that this is the work of someone getting paid for intel and analysis that's kind of a bad deal for them. Perhaps burn is the wrong term. 

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3 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

If enough of it is proven to be false it makes the person who had previously provided highly credible information into a low credible source, and makes them significantly less valuable to others. Given that this is the work of someone getting paid for intel and analysis that's kind of a bad deal for them. Perhaps burn is the wrong term. 

This is only true if his identity is released.  I think the fabrications regarding Cohen are enough to put the ex-officer into the low credibility camp and should lead to his identity being released.  If it turns out that the report was largely a bunch of fabrications, which it looks more and more like, there should be consequences.

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1 minute ago, Mudguard said:

This is only true if his identity is released.  I think the fabrications regarding Cohen are enough to put the ex-officer into the low credibility camp and should lead to his identity being released.  If it turns out that the report was largely a bunch of fabrications, which it looks more and more like, there should be consequences.

His identity was released

 

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