[FRIAM] Trump, truth, and politics: Why do we still think Trump is acting with respect to the truth?

[Eric Charles]

Is it a lose if your kid goes to the principal’s office for abusing his
classmates, or goes to jail for a night for drunken bad behavior?

Sure... the situation would be improved, and we would call it a win, if we
could send Putin to the principles office... Part of my point was exactly
that it seems unlikely a public accusation by Trump would do anything
towards getting Putin to "learn there are consequences to things and stop
doing those things." Does anyone think Obama's sending home a handful of
diplomats did that?

This is especially true as there is not any suggestion that votes were
altered. If there were implications of that, it would necessarily throw the
election into question, and have huge political implications. But that
isn't among the things Russia is accused of. Instead, they are accused (by
some) of an effort to selectively search for and release true reproductions
of material authored by people in the inner circle of the Democratic Party,
which is not itself a state entity. While there is reason to think the
released material had implications for how the election played out, the
material doesn't even rise to the level of a propaganda effort in the
traditional sense of the spreading of false information or even false
implications, and it is not a direct attack on the democratic process. In
terms of its criminal nature, such an act should be viewed similar to
hacking the email system at a start-up company, and releasing embarrassing
(but accurate) materials regarding ongoing operations, shortly before an
IPO.

That said, I fully agree with your take that this is a sideshow compared to
many more important issues that could be covered by the news.



-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician
U.S. Marine Corps
<echarles at american.edu>

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 12:21 PM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
wrote:

> *“*Even if the intelligence community had iron clad proof, that everyone
> could understand and believe beyond a reasonable doubt (which they don't),
> it would only heighten questions about the legitimacy of Trump's win. At
> this point, that wouldn't be a win for Trump, or the country.”
>
>
>
> For some narrow, short-sighted, definition of “win for the country”.  Is
> it a lose if your kid goes to the principal’s office for abusing his
> classmates, or goes to jail for a night for drunken bad behavior?   In the
> long term it is a win if we learn there are consequences to things and stop
> doing those things.   The supposed Russian hacking thing is a sideshow to
> the real problem of Trump’s conflict of interests in so many countries,
> esp. his outstanding debts to foreign banks.  Who really has their finger
> on him and how does his intend to use his new power in relation to that?
> No one wants to dig into the hacking thing very deep because at the end of
> the day it proves nothing.  States do nasty things.  Yes, we get that.  Our
> networks and infrastructure are not particularly secure and like our
> shipping ports there are productivity consequences to being more cautious.
>
>
>
> Marcus
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20170104/25abb25d/attachment-0002.html>