Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Republicans in disarray!

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

T R E 4 5 O N

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Come on, man.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Just How Broken *Has* 2020 Made Us?

Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Just How Broken *Has* 2020 Made Us?

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Broken enough that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion needs a warning label:

Per the Daily Dot:

The FBI’s Records Vault Twitter account is facing criticism after it tweeted out a link to a PDF that included the Protocols of Learned Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic hoax, without any context.

The Records Vault account is automated, and tweets out links to Freedom of Information Act requests that are now public. However, the account tweeting out the hoax literature without context has generated a heap of criticism…

The PDF the FBI tweeted out does include a 1964 report from the Senate Judiciary Committee where it explicitly calls the document “fabricated,” however, it is toward the end of the 139-page PDF, after several copies of Protocols of Learned Elders of Zion, which the FBI apparently had in its records from when people sent it to them.

Given that the FBI’s tweet was just a link to a PDF with no context, it quickly was condemned online as “wildly irresponsible” and “vulnerable to ‘endorsed by the FBI!’ spin on this infamous racism.” …

Do better, FBI!

Reader Interactions

71Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    Looking forward to the 2027 tweet from the FBI vault on “The Investigation and Prosecution of Donald Trump.”

  2. 2.

    Roger Moore

    I can understand how this happened: the FBI has an automated tool that tweets when it releases FOIA records.  But it was incredibly foolish to set up the bot the way it was configured.  A quick check shows it releases no more than a handful of records each week.  They should have put a human being into the loop to make sure they weren’t making a mistake like this.

  4. 4.

    MattF

    Quite the famous hoax. However, a sad-but-true thing I’ve learned from recent events is that being a hoax doesn’t deter believers. We can, however, get the FBI to do the right thing. If they’re required to distribute this stuff, they should do it with context.

  6. 6.

    andy

    I kind of have the suspicion that somebody in the FBI felt that the context was things pleasing to The Leader and his goons.

  8. 8.

    JPL

    yup  It’s part of the new normal.  It’s the Westboro Baptist Church on double steroids, so buckle down.

  12. 12.

    Kay

    Bernstein
    @Bernstein
    ·2h
    This is literally the plot of
    “Doctor Sleep,” Stephen King’s sequel to “The Shining.”

    The Daily Beast
    @thedailybeast
    · Aug 17
    Followers of the pro-Trump conspiracy theory QAnon believe Hollywood and Democratic elites take a psychedelic drug called Adrenochrome harvested from the fear of children

    A week ago I thought QAnon was next-level Republicans but then an even bigger nutter won a primary.

    I have no idea how bad they will get. None. QAnon may end up as the moderates.

  15. 15.

    Ken

    report from the Senate Judiciary Committee where it explicitly calls the document “fabricated,” however, it is toward the end of the 139-page PDF

    Would it really help to have it at the beginning?  The just-released Senate Intelligence report starts by saying Russia influenced the 2016 election and worked with Manafort and others on the Trump team to do so, yet the Republican Senators who authored the document are out there denying it.

  16. 16.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    “While I believe Hollywood and Democratic elites take a psychedelic drug called Adrenochrome harvested from the fear of children, my opponent wants to wipe out an entire religion, so yes, I am the reasonable centrist in this primary and I don’t apologize for that”.

    That just happened in the GOP.

    I know what they mean with “from the fear of children” but it also sounds like the drug is harvested from people who are afraid of children.

  17. 17.

    Cheryl Rofer

    Roger Moore has it right at #2.

     

    There are things we really need to get fired up about, people. This isn’t one of them.

    I’ve been on edge all the last week too – a combination of COVID cabin fever and general annoyance at a lot of things.

    Deep breaths.

  19. 19.

    CaseyL

    @Ken: IIRC, they did the same thing with the 9-11 Commission Report.  The Democrats insisted on an Addendum that added up all the security policies which were defunded, the warnings which were ignored, the missed opportunities to prevent the attacks – and the GOP added an Addendum to **that** basically saying “La La La I can’t hear you.”

    The GOP got away with so much during Bush II – including the theft of the 2000 election itself (and possible theft of 2004) – so no wonder it figures it can do so again.

  21. 21.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @HumboldtBlue:

    I can’t even begin to guess how many times I’ve  watched that clip over the last year or so! I love her spot-on mimicry, and I could listen to her laugh on a continuous loop. It’s a wonderful laugh, deep from the belly, and blissfully infectious. Thanks for sharing it.

  25. 25.

    NotMax

    Lowest common denominator situational response devoid of context. Stuff like this another reason why self-driving cars are destined to be museum curiosities.

  28. 28.

    Ken

    I assume the automated part is just the announcement. Having the release itself automated would be asking for trouble – that’s a rather high-value target for hackers of all persuasions.

    (It would also mean that the FBI has PDFs of everything in its files ready to go, which seems unlikely.)

  34. 34.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    I can’t wait until Biden wins so that we’ll finally have an adult in the Oval Office instead of this fucking child trapped inside the body of a bloated buffoonish 74-year-old:

    During an interview on CNN, Mr Taylor recounted a story about an interaction with Mr Trump during which he claimed the president became fascinated by the way hurricanes spin rather than staying focused on the potential damage and loss of life the storm could cause if the White House did not act.

    The former DHS chief said the interaction occurred during a 2018 briefing.

    “We had Hurricane Florence bearing down on the United States, it was coming towards the Carolinas on the coast,” he said. “We were briefing the president on the damage we expected and also our concerns about significant loss of life if he didn’t tell Americans to evacuate.”

    Mr Taylor said initially he thought the president was intently studying the storm, and described him studying a foam board where pictures of the hurricane and its projected path were hanging.

    “Then he turned to me and said ‘I’ve got a question’ … ‘do the hurricanes always spin this direction?'” Mr Taylor said. “He meant counter clockwise, that’s called the Coriolis effect.”

    He claimed the president then followed up asking if that was why water in Australian toilets flow opposite of those in the US.

    “This is what the president was focused on. Americans were on the path of a deadly hurricane, he needed to get out there and tell them to evacuate, and he was just marvelled at the way that hurricanes spin, in a way that a third grader might learning about earth science,” Mr Taylor said. “This is the president that we’re talking about to keep us safe.”

    h/t https://www.yahoo.com/news/official-briefed-trump-hurricane-florence-175730152.html

  40. 40.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @zhena gogolia:

    Rachel pointed out earlier that all of them (“in addition to their day jobs” LOL) all live rent-free in Trump’s head.

    ETA: Thanks, stacib. Nancy Pelosi for sure.

  43. 43.

    Matt McIrvin

    Two observations:

    1. Everybody, STOP hate-retweeting the motherfucking Protocols of the Elders of Zion. IT’S STILL A RETWEET
    2. The enthusiastic antisemites popped up in the Twitter replies within milliseconds, so yeah, I’m not inclined to regard it as an innocent oopsie.
  47. 47.

    Roger Moore

    @Baud:

    The only reason it’s an issue is because of who is president.

    I think there’s more to it than that.  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a really touchy subject, since they have such a nasty history.  For a government account to tweet them out without any context is enough to make a lot of people nervous.  It turns out the context is relatively benign, but the initial reaction makes sense, and it would have made sense if it happened during the Obama Administration.

    Also, IIRC, this is not the first time that account has caused some controversy.  I don’t remember the thing it published before or who was upset about it, but I have some memory of a previous contretemps related to this account tweeting some kind of document that set people off.  That by itself should have made the people in charge of the account realize it was a bad idea to leave people out of the loop.  Hopefully they learn their lesson and don’t let it happen again.

  48. 48.

    RaflW

    Someone on Ted Cruz’s social media team called Steve Schmidt ‘oleaginous’ yesterday. I think that may have caused one of the small tears in the space-time continuum.

  53. 53.

    Roger Moore

    @Ken:

    I assume the automated part is just the announcement.

    Yes.  FOIA requests all have to go through a vetting process to make sure they aren’t releasing something they shouldn’t be, that anything that should be redacted has been, etc.  But the FBI has decided, to its credit, that some of the stuff released under FOIA is of general interest and should be made available to everyone rather than just the person who requested it.  When that happens, they put it in a public archive of requested documents, and their Twitter bot tweets about it.  That’s what happened here.

    The problem is that tweeting process is automated and just lists the item that was added to the archive with no context.  People who saw the tweet and didn’t understand the context were understandably concerned because it looked like the FBI was pushing discredited anti-Semitic propaganda.  It turns out that’s not what is happening, but it shows flaws in the process.

  54. 54.

    Baud

    Rachel just reported that Kamala will appear at the very beginning of the show as well as at the end.  Don’t be late.

  55. 55.

    Jay

    Bad news. Riot police are back to Minsk streets. Some rallies and protests are disrupted. People are being detained again, Searches. Intimidation of workers. Belarus had 3 days of peace. It allowed Lukashenka to regroup and strike back. We can expect further escalation.— Franak Viačorka (@franakviacorka) August 19, 2020

  56. 56.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    @NotMax:

    Whereas Dolt 45 and Kushner & Co. are oleanderous.

    And they’ve transformed the executive branch of government into a doucheocracy.

  58. 58.

    Jay

    @Roger Moore:

    but all sorts of nut jobs from Nazi’s to Qanon accounts on social media have seized on the tweet and are reposting it as a “confirmation” that the “Protocols” are real.

  59. 59.

    Kay

    Zeke Miller
    @ZekeJMiller
    · 2h
    Trump on Qanon “I don’t know much about the movement, other than I understand they like me very much.”

    The movement.

  64. 64.

    Jay

    @Wyatt Salamanca:

    nope, a Marine Vacuflush. It grinds the waste into mush, ( to minimize water use) while using generated chemicals to kill off the bacteria, and is USCG approved for immediate discharge in most marine areas.

  65. 65.

    Sebastian

    Not the first time this bot is fucking up royally. Gotta work hard to have so many coincidences

  67. 67.

    Jonas

    I’d say that probably publishing the Protocols without context anytime over the past 100 years would have been a bad mistake, not just in 2020. But speaking of conspiracy-addled religious bigots and 2020, we have this lovely lady who just won a GOP primary in Florida who makes Baruch Goldstein look like Mr. Rogers. Fortunately it’s a heavily Dem district, so she has virtually no chance, but still, wtf?

  68. 68.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    @Jay:

    I’ll settle for any device that purges Trump and his confederacy of dunces out of our system.

  69. 69.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    @Kay:

    Trump on Qanon “I don’t know much about the movement, other than I understand they like me very much.”

    This might be the line that best sums up Trump.  He’s an emotionally insecure basket case who constantly needs positive reinforcement and anyone who provides that must be a decent person in his mind.

  70. 70.

    jl

    Everybody in states where we can expect voting problems and/or swing states needs to do early voting GOTV work, or contribute to people doing that. And in blue states, need to contribute. Need to get most of the vote in before election day. That is the only way to counter this stuff. Besides post office scandal, Trump campaign will be very inflammatory in last month, give people plenty of incentive to vote.

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