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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   26558 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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The problem with this approach is that if you actually believe it then there's no point having the CIA, FBI, NSA or Secret Service. What's the point in having an intelligence apparatus at all if the person who it is meant to be informing just believes what your supposed greatest adversary posts on social media? This argument would work if we were talking about an actual old boomer watching Fox News reruns on their iPad, but we're talking about the POTUS. If the safeguards around the president are so lax that Russia can do this then you end up in the same position - Russia has already won a total and complete victory.

To what an extent can a Republican president in general and Trump The Great Adversary specifically actually trust the intelligence agencies, though?

Trump is a well known oddball, an oddball of the same age Biden was when he started his first term, I might add. Did you not elect him to crush the deep state, banish drag-queens from schools, deport every illegal immigrant or whatever and defy hostile parts of government?

Here's your based, unyielding chieftain. He has already figured everything he needs out, as he was meant to. Did you expect him to listen to something so silly as secret services? Down with that woke nonsense!

Did you not elect him to crush the deep state, banish drag-queens from schools, deport every illegal immigrant or whatever and defy hostile parts of government?

No, I'm not American. I'm not even a right-winger - but I am a populist, and I hoped Trump would got re-elected because he would smash and destroy the infrastructure of the American Empire. I'm not exactly shedding tears over the shutdown of USAID, an organisation which provided both generators and torture training to right wing regimes so that they could prevent the socialists from taking power and charging Americans slightly higher prices for fruit.

Did you expect him to listen to something so silly as secret services? Down with that woke nonsense!

I think the ironically named intelligence community in the US is full of shit and actively hostile to Trump, as they revealed in their text messages. But if your position is that the intelligence community can (and should) defy the will of the voters and implement the policies they prefer in the face of popular opposition, I think you're defending something far worse than Trump is even threatening to be.

Sigh. Fine, I'll repeat myself while filtering the irony out: while it's true that POTUS has better access to knowledge than anyone, it's still up to him what to do and believe. You'd think that wide access to the internet would kill and bury many falsehoods, but this isn't how it works. Trump campaigned specifically on his opposition to corrupt, hostile branches of the government. That he doesn't appear to take much advantage of his special access, or of a google search for that matter, shouldn't be surprising

This argument would work if we were talking about an actual old boomer watching Fox News reruns on their iPad, but we're talking about the POTUS.

...But, is Trump not both? I think he spent quite a bit of his first term watching Fox News, IIRC.

I think that the President of the United States has access to intelligence resources and briefings that aren't accessible to the public.

I doubt that Trump has access to any SECRET KNOWLEDGE about the origins of the Ukraine war (or if he does it's probably not stuff that involves "Ukraine starting it.") I think he's just looking at roughly the same facts everyone has access too and coming to his own conclusions (and also talking imprecisely).

If he has any SECRET KNOWLEDGE ABOUT UKRAINE STARTING THE WAR I bet it would be something along the lines of that Ukraine had massed troops in an attempt to retake their lost territories in the Donbass, and that is what spurred Putin to launch the "SMO." But I've read people speculating about that on The Internet, so the secret knowledge would be concrete evidence of intent, like declassified SIGINT intercepts or something.

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