2024 ELECTION THREAD

Saw Mooch on a podcast not long ago; I think I posted the vid somewhere round here in fact. He's certainly no Trump fan. But I find it hard to believe that he didn't see all the qualities and tendencies for which he now criticises Trump before he took the Press Sec job. I suppose it's possible, but he doesn't strike me as that stupid either.

I think a lot of people go in thinking he can't be THAT bad, then learn he actually is.

All the t-shirts fit.

Russia HOAX in the news again, as DOJ indicted some parties that were paying influencers in US for content creation. People like Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, for deals like 100k for a weekly episode. The whole indictment is worth reading IMO, even if the most surprising thing there is that the whole thing was organized on Discord servers. They spent like $10M. Also few pages of evidence about the campaign

Also one funny thing was

The people recruited were given these fake profiles of people they'd be working for, any instead of doing the due diligence to figure out that they're not actually real and they're spreading Russian propaganda, this guy (Dave Rubin probably?) was worried that the fake profile mentions social justice like those damn liberals!

Glad this indictment came to my attention, otherwise I'd never have detected the Russian elements in this

yikes, the very small tidbits i've seen of him (like highlights of his stuff on rogan) he appeared fairly reasonable

my god that dude must have a colostomy bag attached 24/7 to allow him to defecate while putin is elbow deep up his ass

so sad

I mean this may be a case of just useful idiots but the irony is so freaking funny.

Putin is a scumbag, Russia sucks donkey balls, and Ukraine is THE BIGGEST ENEMY OF THE US RIGHT NOW

unsure if you're being sarcastic or not but if this is genuine i'd love to read your cliff notes on why that is

it is mimicking Tim Pool's rebuttal post to being found out as a paid russian propagandist. he also claimed to be a victim, which is hilariously on brand for these guys.

I'm mocking Tim Pool for being a Tim Fool

yeah it's pretty shocking, i only knew him from seeing clips of him on rogan where he came off as a very intelligent and measured person, guess my read was way off

i can see an argument how the "situation in ukraine" is the biggest threat to the US right now as it costs a lot of monies and could eventually draw us into a larger conflict directly

but to claim that ukraine itself is our enemy is perhaps one of the dumbest things in the world i've ever read and I often re-read most of my own posts after posting so that says a lot

the indictment's pretty funny. my favorite part was either tim pool doing zero due diligence on "eduard grigoriann" or benny johnson pretending to do due diligence and -- despite zero digital footprint and an obviously counterfeit/unreal one page profile -- his only objection to partnering being eduard's mention of "social justice".

they are clearly both victims of a horrible scam where they were vastly overpaid for their content against their will and just happened to be encouraged to circulate russian "raw videos" on a daily basis

Isn’t Benny johnson some mouthbreathing MAGA influencer? Been a minute since I’ve been on Twitter but that name seems to ring a bell

idk about the other ppl, but pool might be lucky that he's such a dumbass he might able to reasonably get out of this by claiming dumb as all hell. but then again, that UKRAINE IS THE BIGGEST ENEMY OF THE US RIGHT NOW 😡 😡 😡 clip is pretty damning, and there's probably a lot more where that came from. i would lol a lot if he gets got here

rubin too. he might be ****ed if he was getting $5m/year for propaganda rendered
idk if you can reasonably claim that you never thought about how/why/where the money was coming from there

wait, you thought Tim Pool was reasonable?

i'm very sympathetic to the journalists who accept the bags of money though

when i was working a foreign desk, i made very little money - i was the "local hire" and not the person sent from the USA and thus was paid on that scale

that's also how most of my colleagues were as well, unless you the bureau chief, you were making very little money

i had poker which sustained my income, my colleagues did not

basically all of us moonlit on the side for far less prestigious organizations as freelancers in order to pay the bills

in your 9-5 you're researching and interviewing a human rights lawyer in beijing who is under house arrest

but then when you have a spare moment you submit articles to everything from local stuff like an article on best bar to watch NHL games in the city for Timeout Beijing, an article about chinese manufacturing for Aluminum International Today, and then an article about your favorite things about China for a party newspaper's English edition

inevitably you will get job offers from party newspapers such as global times or be offered a talking head role as an anchor on one of their english language tv shows - if you were to watch a CCTV9 news broadcast of state run propaganda in English, it was mostly staffed by people I knew directly who jumped for a much bigger salary and hopes they could relay their camera time experience to being a news anchor back home (spoiler, they couldn't)

i even got approached by interfax, which tried recruiting my hard, although not state run, it's definitely tied closely to moscow, even being founded by kremlin journalists, and despite that they offered me 3x my original salary (yes I was paid that little) i still turned it down because it felt like i'd be compromised

so knowing a lot of people who joined the sith for far less money (going from 30k a year to 70k) and who did so with very hopeful aspirations to both be able to "be the change from within" combined with "gotta pay my student loan debt" i definitely am very sympathetic to a blogger who is probably not doing all that well who then finds himself financially secure and put within a network where they can then become a household name and relay that to more financial success - ie even if pool/owens/shapiro etc have a total break with their employers, they now have the cachet to go it alone or get a bestseller published etc etc

do i agree with what they are doing, no, not at all

but the overwhelming majority of bloggers you know, even those on the left, are creatures of someone else, it's incredibly hard to organically get noticed when you're competing with mainstream media

this isn't a mr beast thing they attack a niche previously untapped and flourished unbeknownst to the conglomerates like disney and viacom

so i get it, i'm sympathetic, but i think tim has definitely crossed a line, there's no way when he first started as an occupy wall street livestreamer or even member of the team at vice would have ever felt such in a million years he'd find himself a decade later taking money from russia to spout their talking points for millions of dollars

i've only seen the rogan pod where it's him and a lawyer for twitter and he basically undresses her and exposes all her lies and bullshit in a very calm and professional manner

that's all i knew of him

having said that, most people who were sitting in a room debating against that woman in particular would have likely looked really smart and professional so perhaps i indeed gave him too much credit

for sure

calling yourself a "victim" when your shadowy sugar daddy whos been showering you with 10x more cash than you're worth is exposed as a russian op, though, is deserving of all the lols.

Reminds me of how Logan Paul is a "victim" of all the crypto scams he "accidentally" runs.

as the kids say, you might want to adjust your priors

Dave Rubin dot not surprise me at all.
No idea why he started to be on my YouTube feed but after listening like 3 times what he had to say , couldn’t finish the garbage he was spewing.

I’m glad to see my compass ain’t that broken after all .
Did they really made millions ?
Damn …

Hey baham I need your contact immediately, I’m switching side for a while !
I will win the election for them …

agreed, i still disaprove, like i said, i personally rejected all those offers

interfax was the one that i genuinely looked into and thought about because they are a genuine news organization mostly focusing on economic stuff like dow jones

but i was also regularly offered to be a television personality, i even did a few tv commercials (those i'll never share because they are just so cringe besides the doxxing element) and even got cast randomly (again i never applied for any of this stuff, just casting directors would tell their friends "i need a foreigner, any of you guys know any?" and then we'd get text messages) to star in a made for tv biopic of norman bethune - all this despite that i had zero acting experience, was in my 20s, and norman bethune was in his 50s when he was in China - the day before filming began I got a text saying that they found an older candidate and thus i got dropped, a few months later i found out it was a good friend of mine who got the role, and he himself was only about 5 years older than me which was hilarious they were like (that 28 year old is too young to play a 55 year old, better cast the 32 year old instead)

i kind of wish that movie got filmed because it would be hilarious to show people 😀

but like i get how over time one can get so used to being part of an operation that while they initially may have gone in carefully dipping in their toes and grabbing the money, after several years of being called a villain by the other side and a hero by others, they could over time begin to personally drink the koolaid and it slowly goes from being an act to a genuine and heartfelt statement

that's really funny. were they going to give you makeup or just pretend you were 50?