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[TempAcc]

Not to mention that leaking stuff before any significant evidence or at least a verifiable source can be presented is an excelent way of ruining and discrediting an investigation altogether. It gives your targets leads on what to do to avoid more evidence being found and makes the whole thing seem politically motivated, in this instance. Things are so ridiculous atm that either the FBI's leadership is filled with incompetent dweebs, or nothing actualy significant has been uncovered and people from inside are leaking rumors to reporters and whatnot for money or some other advantage.

[LoSboccacc]

Why has the whole thing been leaked? Is it a basic smear campaign compiled by an agent that fed bullshit to anti-Trump for money? Do the Russians somehow (and quite hilariously) developed a golden shower-based method of control of the US now?

Well of course there's an agenda behind this. The leaked document weren't discovered by investigative journalists, were submitted concurrently to many agencies - that points to a coordinated smear campaign, and the target seems more likely to be the news agencies than Trump. The only weird point is why CNN got baited - that's the outlier result, as most others agencies did definitely smelt something odd about it all.

[Sheb]

From what I gather, it's been leaked a while ago, but most news orgs decided not to publish it until intelligence agencies appended it as an annex to a briefing given to Trump, which made the documents more legit.

[Reelya]

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-38607456

author and former journalist Frederick Forsyth, who worked for MI6 for 20 years, said the allegations in the memo were "extremely hard to believe".

Mr Forsyth told Today that Mr Trump would have to be a "congenital idiot" to have got involved in a honey trap.

Well at least we've cleared that up. Only a congenital idiot would be caught in a honey trap, so that rules Trump out.

[Phmcw]

From what I gather, it's been leaked a while ago, but most news orgs decided not to publish it until intelligence agencies appended it as an annex to a briefing given to Trump, which made the documents more legit.

Only buzzfeed published the actual memo, CNN and basically everyone else refrained because publishing its existence and publishing its content are two completely different things.
Trump has been briefed about its existence, but there is a big thing about this memo, it doesn't state that the information it contain are true.

I read it, it's basically reporting things that have been said by some Russian officials to the contact of that private spy, and its a collection of such memos.
This is very raw informations, leaking them at this stage is pretty much ensuring that the investigation is going nowhere.

That being said, the content not really is not really usable anyway: it's more gossips than anything else, and it seems to have been circulating for a while.

[Neonivek]

Obama is hard at work making sure the US grip over individuals get ever tighter, and I don't get any hints of Trump willing to tear those things down. Have fun 'murica.

Anyway, for once I agree with Reelya, humanities are infested with people you'd find more akin to conspiracy theorists and new age cultists than rational people that adhere to the scientific method. You don't have to look too deep to find people in sociology and women studies courses refusing to study about western philosophers because they were white, people that think the scientific stablishment is bad and should be brought down because it was mostly born out of western society, people that have no religion and yet think african sorcery is somehow a real thing, trans exclusive feminists that believe trans people (transwomen, in particular) are the result of a government backed conspiracy to deconstruct all feminist efforts and even substitute women for transwomen, which are supposedly more submissive and controllable because transition therapy = brainwashing in their minds, that menopause is a social construct, etc.

Baseless historical revisionism is also a staple of this environment, like the Romulus wife beating law thing Reelya mentioned, the spanish inquisition only targetting women, how ancient egypt was the most feminist civilization ever, etc.

Ancient Egypt was feminist... like at all? What the heck are these from? Though I have heard Minoan Crete was as well, BUT the evidence is loose at best.

Anyhow Intellectuals and... normal people... have known this sort of tendency for people in college and university to be sort of "In their own butt" for so long that there have been terms such as "College Libertarian" created to just sort of hit it home.

This situation is actually damn worrying : American secret services and law enforcement services are obviously doing a political waltz, leaking unverified info left and right, opening inquiries very loudly and closing them as some kind of political announcement.

Wait a minute... Trump is a stupid guy right? (Ok he isn't stupid, he is more... duplicitous)

So what would a stupid guy who has no qualms about tightening his fist around the American people do... if someone said someone was doing something bad to him?

Give them more freedoms and ability to act?

Calling it! Soon the Patriot Act will be the nice law and the US will basically scoff at the UK's flagrant spying on their own people and go "PFT! we will do you one better! Our police officers are allowed to spy on people's phonecalls for fun!"

---

Though I never took the whole "Russia is messing with the US election" very seriously... because... well... They sent an army of hackers and trolls.

OHHH NO! it is like a normal election! Good luck Russia, I hope you find a way to out noise the normal election clatter.

---

Heck Scientology has its own "Hack the world!" division (though that might just be a myth), and I've yet to hear about them achieving anything significant except starting to become completely irrelevant.

[ChairmanPoo]

The Spanish Inquisition was about Protestantism and/or people who were in the shit list of whoever was sitting in the throne at the moment

[Rockphed]

During my college years I met quite a few people who outright rejected evolution when it was mentioned, but they weren't creationist either. They were all studying "liberal" type courses, and definitely weren't Christians but they didn't seem to have any faith in science or evolution either.

So perhaps part of the mistake is trying to put people into two boxes where you either believe one or the other. i.e. it's faulty logic to say that if you reject the bible you must therefore be a rational science supporter. In Australia we're not a big bible-thumping nation like the USA, but most of the non-bible people I met at college were equally irrational in other ways and just as hostile to science as bible-thumpers.

And, in similar vein, believing a religion does not in any way diminish one's ability to science.  So the stereotypical breakdown of "Rational Atheist" and "hysterical religious zealot", fails to capture two distinct swaths of the population.

[itisnotlogical]

Or people might love pop-sci "A recent study says..." articles, but have no interest in actual scientific discoveries.

[ChairmanPoo]

Hey, mathematical constructivism is a malesuada. Which means that, as a result, we already have a programming imperdiet without the law of feugiat ipsum. With the greatest finibus odio in its name, of all lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Mauris vitae imperdiet justo. Nunc id dolor vel nisi volutpat malesuada ut semper orci. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Pellentesque et massa ac nibh tincidunt volutpat ac ac risus. Curabitur ut ligula orci. Etiam varius lacus ac libero auctor, eu scelerisque sapien maximus. Suspendisse ac diam sit amet lectus ultrices malesuada sit amet non augue. Vivamus convallis eu sem id sagittis. In mollis, metus et dignissim semper, dui nisi congue est, non ultricies elit ipsum vitae magna. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Praesent finibus odio in egestas rutrum. Suspendisse id lobortis magna. Maecenas scelerisque venenatis viverra

I'm sorry, I lost you halfway through that. Could you explain in layman's terms? :p

[ChairmanPoo]

Their heart was in the wrong place

Aztecs had a creative solution for that

[milo christiansen]

Their heart was in the wrong place

Aztecs had a creative solution for that

Oh how I wish I had space in my signature...

[Frumple]

... all I can add to that is that non-binary attempts at logical systems are kinda' fascinating, to me. Fuzzy logic et al. The whole binary thing has long struck me as a sort of "This is your brain on biology" mess more than something particularly on point, heh. Or at least less capable of being a sort of general use thing... most logic systems are cognizant enough about what they're really doing to be pretty explicit about what they don't (a lot of things) and do (not actually that much) apply to, if you poke at them hard enough to actually get a straight answer, whereas something that's less... rigid? I guess. Might be able to invert that to whatever degree. What I can remember and what little I've paid attention to it recently says we're still not terribly close to it (it's a pretty impressively unnatural, for lack of a better word at th mo', way of thinking for us humans), but it's a nice line of inquiry.

If my brain hadn't started falling apart faster on me like a decade ago I might've been working with that stuff for a living at this point. Ethics, rhetoric, and logic were largely the fields that hooked me the most so far as my academic studies went, heh, and non-binary stuff easily the most compelling of the third. Probably woulda' been pretty interesting, but eh.

[Reelya]

Their heart was in the wrong place but the outcome is actually a useful tool.

Sadly, Arielle actually took swipes at functional languages too. Anyway I spoilered the rest because this is getting off-topic now as it's really about general American culture than politics.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

She said that both "functional" and "object oriented" are male type thinking essentially, because those are normative paradigms that enforce the social status quo, i.e. they're from the patriarchy.

https://www.hastac.org/blogs/ari-schlesinger/2013/11/26/feminism-and-programming-languages

The idea came about while discussing normative and feminist subject object theory. I realized that object oriented programmed reifies normative subject object theory. This led me to wonder what a feminist programming language would look like, one that might allow you to create entanglements (Karen Barad Posthumanist Performativity).

I realized that to program in a feminist way, one would ideally want to use a feminist programming language. So what is a feminist programming language? Well I took a look at the major programming paradigms, the following are the four main groups a programming language can fall into: imperative, functional, object-oriented, and logic. I decided to explore feminist logic such that a feminist programming language could be derived.

I am currently exploring feminist critiques of logic in hopes of outlining a working framework for the creation of a feminist programming language.

What is a feminist logic is a question I’ve spent the past six months thinking about and researching. There are not a lot of women in philosophy, and there are definitely not a lot of feminist philosophers, so I don’t have a good answer for this question. There is great scholarship talking about weather a feminist logic can build off of formal logic or if it has to reject the laws of identity and create something entirely new. There are solid arguments for both camps, personally I’m swayed by the constructive theories that would build onto formal logic through a feminist lens. There exist logics that handle contradiction as part of the system, namely paraconsistent logic. I think this type of logic represents the feminist idea that something can be and not be without being a contradiction, that is a system where the following statement is not explosive: (p && ¬p) == 1.

So it's going to be a language in the "logic" group, but based on feminist logic rather than traditional logic. Except the creator has extensive access to the best relevant resources and can't even decide on what feminist logic is and quite how this would differ from normal logic in a way that would make a usable language for idk, actually programming a computer or something.

I really recommend reading Karen Barad's Posthumanist Performativity some time.
http://humweb.ucsc.edu/feministstudies/faculty/barad/barad-posthumanist.pdf

[PTTG??]

I've basically never in my life met a straight-up humanities type that actually defended science as an institution.

Might want to update that.