December 27, 2016

KEEP THE PRESSURE ON - Who to contact about issues

Seems like every single day I read another article detailing Trump and/or his incoming administrations' corruption or conflicts. A common theme among responses (here and elsewhere on social media) is the question of "what can be done?"

I'd like to keep a running list of issues and contact people for those of us, who want to keep these issues from falling through the cracks, to reference. If there's already something like this going on here or elsewhere, please let me know. Otherwise, add to this post as relevant.

While I find profound comfort in being amongst a group of like-minded people, I know there are other constructive means to making our voices heard.

Calling is best, letters 2nd best and email last resort. We need to mobilize ourselves. We are a majority of the population and we cannot rely on our reps and lawmakers to act in or address these issues themselves. There is power in numbers. We have to keep their feet to the fire.

RE: James Comey – violation of Hatch Act
https://osc.gov/Pages/HatchAct-HowToFile.aspx

RE: Trump Foundation Investigation
NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman
http://www.ag.ny.gov/contact-attorney-general

RE: Trump conflict of interest, possible Emoluments Clause violations
Contact your Congressman/woman
http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

December 25, 2016

Fun little tactic I like to employ when debating/arguing with an opposing viewpoint in person

Make your opponent specifically explain, detail or qualify their stance. I've employed this tactic too many times to count in my adult life after learning about it on HS speech/debate team many, many years ago. Here's a really basic article explaining it:

http://lifehacker.com/win-an-argument-by-asking-your-opponent-to-explain-thei-1718890620

Fun way to seem non-threatening while you're doing this is to act like you don't know the answer either. It's satisfying for a few reasons, least of which is getting to prove that they don't know WTF they're talking about without you looking like an ass and flat-out telling them they're an idiot.

Bit of advice for employing this tactic: always stay on the offense.

December 18, 2016

Are shills on FB using hacked/cloned accts to sway tide of comments?

Conspiracy theory warning. (Or maybe this is already well known and I'm just super late to the party? This is long....sorry.)

I posted something on my personal FB page when pussy-gate happened. I got nasty replies from complete strangers who I had no mutual friends with and who never responded to my replies to their comments. When I looked at their profiles there was no recent activity and they weren't from my area or the profile info was sparse. Whatevs. I didn't give it much thought.

Since then I've honestly been very surprised at the number of anti-HRC or anti-liberal responses I've seen on my friends' anti-Trump FB posts. When I try to figure out who the commenters are, same as my post...no mutual friends, inactive/sparse profiles. Just complete strangers coming in and dropping some nasty comment. I've also started to notice when reading anti-Trump news link posts on FB, when I click on a profile of someone who says essentially "killary" or "libtard" or another few word reply...majority of the time it's an inactive profile.

I thought maybe it was just me seeing a pattern where one doesn't exist to help justify my feelings after the election.

But today I was on a Huffpost FB post, reading the comments and decided to test my theory. Granted, this is not a scientific analysis by any means. But I was interested with what I found from a tiny sample.

The post had 1138 comments and the first reply was in essence "Trump's a narcissistic sociopath who's going to ruin our country". I checked the first 100 replies to that comment and broke the replies into 4 groups: For, Against, Unknown and N/A. Each For and Against response I clicked on the profile and noted if the profile had been active in the last year (active as in more than 2 posts since 2015). Here's what I found:

"For" had 81 responses with 2 inactive profiles
"Against" had 12 responses with 9 inactive profiles
Unknown had 6 responses
N/A had 1 response

Huff is obviously predominantly anti-Trump, so the number of For or Against posts didn't surprise me. It's the percentage of Against posters who have inactive profiles that surprised me.

Are hacked/cloned profiles being used as shill accounts to sway the tide of comments? Is this a thing? There was one obviously brand new fake account (Against), but all the rest had friends, photos, etc. Just no recent activity. There could be lots of non-nefarious explanations, as well as the simple explanation that I AM seeing a pattern that doesn't exist.

Since I have nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon, I'm going to troll a Fox news page and do the same test on an anti-HRC post.

December 16, 2016

Trump suggests espionage against the US was a good thing

Source: Huff Post

Trump tweeted this morning:

"Are we talking about the same cyberattack where it was revealed that the head of the DNC illegally gave Hillary the questions to the debate?"

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-russian-espionage-was-a-good-thing-for-america_us_5853ffaee4b0b3ddfd8c272f

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THIS! THIS is what was elected. A person who thinks espionage against his own fucking country is beneficial.

And his herr-derr mouth breathing supporters and surrogates are lapping it up.

There is no coming back from this kind of division of the people of this country. There is no reaching across the aisle to work with people who support this. This is cancer. And putting some damn ointment on it ain't gonna help.

We're doomed if our representatives don't start radiation and chemo on this situation, STAT.