Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group
reuters.com
reuters.com
This piece is a disaster. It's an excerpt from a soon to be released book, it's light on facts about O'Rourke and is at least equally about Cult of the Dead Cow, it's trying to make things sound more nefarious than they were, and it's playing the guilt by association card. The only questionable activities by O'Rourke are:
- he dialed long distance without paying for it.
- he used pirated software.
(Not that I'm defending this behavior, but so did I.)
And he wrote fiction that barely rises to the level of a really bad Stephen King'esque short story.
That's it.
> "When he was younger, he was arrested on drunk-driving charges"
That will follow him into the campaign far more than his CDC membership.
A very actively contested Presidential primary isn't the same thing as a House or Senate race, and he didn't win the Senate race, either.
And hasn’t pretty much almost anyone driven drunk at least once?
No...
Yes it is.
> You drive to a place and have some beers.
It's quite easy to decide not to drive to a place if you are going to have a few beers over too short of a time to safely and legally drive home, or to choose not to have too many beers if you need to drive to and from the place.
Not once ever. That's super irresponsible.
To be honest, I do think a little less of Beto for it. Is it enough to move a vote, probably not - but it's not helpful.
>That will follow him into the campaign far more than his CDC membership.
Will it? It didn't hurt George W. Bush.
Admitting to smoking pot didn't hurt Obama.
And Donald Trump... Jesus wept, Donald Trump.
There's few crimes that are more dangerous than drinking and driving.
Are we reading the same article? If anything this article seems like a submarine PR puff piece to me, made to increase the image of Beto by making him seem "cool" and "hip" by associating him with the typically-seen-as-sexy "hacker" scene. This article is very similar to the pro-Beto stuff that was all over Texas during his senate campaign.
Still, it’s unclear whether the United States is ready for a presidential contender who, as a teenager, stole long-distance phone service for his dial-up modem, wrote a murder fantasy in which the narrator drives over children on the street, and mused about a society without money.
This doesn't read as very pro-Beto to me.
That sentence doesn't even read as not pro-Beto to me, either. It's more of a neutral "this guy is really cool, but is he cool enough?" rhetorical.
In this case, it seems the best way to play it was to just cut to the chase. Summarize it as brutally as Trump could and just be the first to say it. Get it out there so that an opponent can't ride it's energy.
His association with At The Drive-In gives him more street cred than any tenuous relationship with hacking.
Yea, I've seen it.
They don't use their real names, they have gadgets and mysterious power, not from magic but from skill. They operate outside traditional power structures and governments, you don't know who's working for whom, and they never seem far from a trenchcoat.
Hollywood glamorizes hackers, like violence, crime, rock n roll, space travel, and just about everything else hard.
At the risk of hyperbole, if society glamorized hackers hard, Aaron Swartz might still be with us.
I would challenge the idea that being a “hacker” polls well for a presidential candidate. Recall that “hacking” was a bit of a problem in 2016.
[1] particularly when combined with tonedeaf and heavy handed legislation/regulation about the internet.
Elsewhere, the words "hacker" and "hacking" have an almost universally negative connotation.
Which might be the whole point of this piece:
>But the political balance allows him to appeal to both main strands of political thought in Silicon Valley – a key source of campaign money and cultural influence.
The current president argued during his campaign that the problems with the country arose from "bad deals" and his experience and expertise at "deal making" was the solution to this problem.
Beto might argue during his campaign that the problems with the country arise from unacknowledged cyber warfare in both social media and voting systems. He could then argue that he is uniquely qualified to lead the government to a more solid footing in that regard and protect the democracy.
Both are simplistic arguments of the form problem is X, I'm an expert in X, I can lead a group to fix X.
Opponents will of course spin up the fear of X and especially if X can be used to achieve the goals of the proponent, try to paint them as being part of the problem not the solution.
Unlike the current administrations "Space" force, I could see a justification for a "Cyber" force if such a force provided protection against, and options for maneuver in an algorithmically generated battlefield.
I agree with this. It seems an odd stance to take (assuming O'Rourke commissioned, or was at least okay with, this piece) given how other candidates are taking an explicitly hostile stance toward Big Tech. The media has done a fantastic job of convincing people that "election hacking" was a huge problem in 2016 (it wasn't), so it's curious why whatever consultant is working for this campaign decided this was good positioning.
He’s a candidate in a primary. Big difference in the audiences.
The Democratic primary electorate is probably the segment of the population with the strongest negative impact around the 2016 election hacking that was evoked in the grandparent post, so while true your comment reinforces rather than negates the point.
Parties don't wheel out candidates, candidates seek the party nomination. Candidates who have done so in the past and whose on-paper qualifications and public esteem have increased since then often remain inclined to do so and have a basis for expecting they might do better.
Many party voters are also inclined to vote for these candidates; some of these are long time supporters.
I'm more surprised that candidates whose resume includes only some local politics, a few terms in the House, and a failed Senate bid throw their hat in to the Presidential ring than that those that spent 36 years in the Senate and run for President twice before, serving for eight years as Vice President after his most recent Presidential run, do so.
CNET: "Beto O'Rourke has serious hacker credentials. The presidential candidate was a member of hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow"
WaPo: "'Psychedelic Warlord': Beto O'Rourke's past life as a teenage hacker" and "Beto O’Rourke’s hacking universe, explained."
Sources:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/beto-orourke-wrote-murder-f...
https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/beto-orourke-has-seriou...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/psychedelic-wa...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/15/beto-orou...
In the right generation, isn't that practically a job requirement for a CSO?
Which, were he applying for a job as a CSO, might be relevant.
(though cool, NSFW)
The food can be a metaphor for genitalia or for the attached humans. For example a tacofest, much like a sausagefest, is a gathering in which one sex is greatly overrepresented compared to the other. Meat goes in a taco.
So, one can guess what was featured on his BBS.
https://web.archive.org/web/20041214030544/http://www.cultde...
That at least somewhat supports my interpretation. I was thinking more along the lines of image files.
Image files back in the 80s weren't super common because everybody was on slow dialup and had crappy CGA graphics. There was a fair bit of risque ANSI crawls from groups like ACID and ICE, but they were usually too artistic to be considered just porn.
It certainly wouldn't have been unusual for a young Beto O'Rourke (or any other Texan) to have tacos on his mind for any number of reasons, but "Taco Land" was the name of a punk bar in San Antonio. It was well known to Texas punks and their ilk and was immortalized by the Dead Milkmen in the late 80s by their song "Tacoland".
http://www.textfiles.com/groups/CDC/cDc-0080.txt
Also whats up with textfiles.com having so many broken links on Google? So much for that whole "Archive Team" angle.
According to the article O'Rourke left the CDC boards turned 18 and went to college. He's 46, so we are talking 1989 or 1990.
The article then talks up all the Back Orifice/Hacktavism stuff which was a solid decade after he left. It's not like Beto's helping Virus and Sir Dystic write SMBRelay...
Anyway this makes me respect him more.
Anyone know his handle btw?
So the reporter interviewed him first then went to the other members, who somehow "flipped" uncharacteristically (unlike they had done before). The book will be published in June but the reporter decided to start banging the drum much earlier, which is more convenient for O'Rourke than for his sales (he's basically given all the good bits away already). If he wanted to maximize exposure and sales, he would have waited for the eve of a primary; like this, it helps O'Rourke get the dirt out early.
Speculation? I'd just call it realism.
Same. I bet every one of us in this thread did, too! At least the pirated software part.
(In his defense, this vagueness can actually be read as strategic. Barack Obama took a similar tack in 2008, and it let people project onto him pretty much any profile they wanted. In politics, specificity can be a career limiter.)
I love what he did for downballot dems in 2016 and he had that great speech on youtube. But c'mon. Mr GOP Lovefest is not who we need in 2020.
That indicates O'Rourke votes slightly conservative for a Democrat, but is still far more liberal than any Republican. The data cited there shows him pretty squarely in the "slightly conservative Democrat" range: https://voteview.com/person/21361/beto-o-rourke
Is that an inaccurate assessment? I'm wondering where "Mr GOP Lovefest" comes from.
Meanwhile there is a crop of new-style politicians, all over the spectrum, that run via the new (AOC/Trump era) standard of use the social media+memes to build up brand and support.
AOC didn't really have a national brand until after she won, and she got there mostly through traditional retail politics. Trump had a media brand to begin with so he was able to create traditional media coverage whenever he wanted.
Old-school politicians use the news to try and drive social media and public sentiment, top down.
Right now Beto seems a lot like Hillary, using the traditional approach of PR driven puff pieces to try and capture attention. Meanwhile the AOC/Trump populists use a direct channel (Twitter) to bypass the media and have a conversation directly with their hardcore fans. And then that conversation works its way out into the mainstream media.
I'd also add that AOC is able to use social media now to build national support, but she won her primary with old-fashioned shoe leather politics. Even local NYC press didn't run a lot of stories until after she won the primary (I was closely tracking a race in a neighboring district so I think I saw most of what was out there.)
In most polling (see https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/democr...), if the poll includes O'Rourke he consistently pulls about the same amount of support as Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, and more than Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar or Kirsten Gillibrand. So there's definitely enough demand for him out there to make him worth covering.
Because a good representative represents their people. And as a Texan, I can assure you that his left-leaning constituents weren't always the majority he had to represent.
Any politician who blindly ignores a large segment of their constituents (even the ones that didn't vote for them) isn't someone you want in office. I don't have to name specific examples for you to know who I'm talking about.
This is definitely the case. It's interesting to watch Texas, as demographically it shifts from a traditionally conservative white voting block to a much more diverse state that will naturally vote democratic. Give it another election cycle or two and turning at least one Senate seat blue is almost assured.
Doesn't matter to his voting base. See e.g. Obama. Obama did very little of what he promised in the first term, got re-elected anyway (heck, even I voted for the guy). But unlike Obama, Beto is not going to be the president, not after losing the race to one of the least likeable candidates in his own state, and not with a DWI on his criminal record.
> he still only won by < 3 in a state Trump
> won by 9 and Romney won by 15
(1) Having risen to national fame by being a not-Ted-Cruz candidate.
(2) How Texas culture works.
How do you contrast yourself with Ted Cruz? Well, Cruz is a very common type of character in Texas. Baptist, often wears a suit, a little stodgy and uptight but apparently earnest in his beliefs, probably watches football and has very innocuous / safe musical tastes, and casts his lot with the traditional Southern social fabric that exists here. I know a million guys like Cruz.
But as big as that cultural bubble is, there are also tons of people who live outside it. You could almost go so far as saying that every Texan decides at some point whether they're going to live in that bubble.
In the language of Texas culture, Beto is basically saying, hey, I'm not one of these traditionalists. I'm different than that. And he is, even if he has some conservative views. The message makes sense to a Texan.
Whether it will translate to a national audience is another question entirely, and I think it probably won't. He'll have to change his message. Also, he got a lot of momentum because people wanted to support whoever opposed Cruz, and he'll need something else to create that kind of energy now.
One can imagine at a national level his stance on issues would be more accepted, but he'll need to harp on them much more than focusing on who he's not. That "contrary image" is actually a positive and not a negative for many.
Issues make a much larger difference in the primaries than the general elections for two reasons. The policy gap between Cruz and Beto are vast compared to differences between any two democratic candidates. And independents tend to be less driven by issues and more by character and charisma.
Politics is all about image and appeal. And it's not just Beto. Every politician from Trump to Beto plays this game. People vote on their image of you rather than who you really are. I think Black Mirror had a great episode on how image and messaging defines a political campaign.
Do you have any examples?
And most of what happens to people in this community occurs behind their backs.
"slowly amassed", perhaps?
So much so we have seen tech enthusiasts fawn over hacking groups from time to time and ignore less desirable behavior ... until we realize in the end they're just not what we want them / imagine them to be.
I still like to think of there being some idealistic hackers one day that will change the world for the better, but I recognize they're still going to be just, people.
I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I'm a hacker, and I'd make a terrible president. I might make an excelled trusted advisor on matters of my expertise, but that doesn't mean I'd be a good president.
I'm confused... Doesn't that also apply to career lawmakers? Is there any statistically meaningful data to suggest it's better to have a lawyer or a judge than a hacker in a position of power?
As opposed to the paragons of virtue who wield power now.
Yeah, no hackers from the 80s and 90s ever had any bad intents. /sarcasm
(I was a part of that scene as well).
Once the Internet became widely available there wasn't the same need for a culture to being able to do that (at least in theory). Who is considered a hacker therefor changes from people engaged in hacker culture to people who for example do information security. You can to some extent go to university, never talk to anyone and come out of there being considered a hacker. While previously being a hacker would be quite distinct from academia (though there would of course be overlap among people). As the point was that you were doing something different from what was already established. Whether that was coding, security or community.
I wouldn't personally judge someone who was consider a nefarious hacker when hackers were more of a subculture, as most of the activities would be considered relatively mundane today and there motivations often benign. I would judge someone for running a dark market, distributing malware or even just run an unethical data business today however.
As a further tangent, I do think it is curious how most people (myself included) thought that the plot of the movie "Hackers" was a bit ridiculous. But then 20 years later Maersk gets hit by ransomware.
I'm saying: there's the Steven Levy notion of "hackers", about exploration and getting extra slots on time-sharing computers and ordering sweet-and-sour bitter melon, and there's the Markoff and Hafner notion, about breaking into DEC for source code and owning up a sizable portion of the NSFnet Internet.
cDc is from the Markoff/Hafner side of "hackerdom".
(That's not a moral argument; there were good people among the Markoff/Hafner-type hackers, and holy shit were some of the white hats in the mid-1990s complete pricks).
The argument isn't about whether Beto was a part of hacker culture at all. Clearly, he was. It just wasn't the hacker culture the OP was referring to.
> The meaning connoted by cDc is the the one from the movie Wargames
cDc engaged in much more than run-of-the-mill systems exploits. They produced a lot of literature and overall espoused hacker culture as an inclusive one. I'd be very interested to hear what each of them think about how broadly the term "hacker" can be applied, and I'm willing to bet they don't all share the same view.
> The argument isn't about whether Beto was a part of hacker culture at all. Clearly, he was. It just wasn't the hacker culture the OP was referring to.
You can't do that. You can't say "both definitions are valid" and then bristle up when someone doesn't use your preferred definition.
For what it's worth, and not apropos whatever that debate is, I'm very comfortable with how I'm characterizing cDc and what cDc members would in general think about what I'm saying, albeit that the Boston ones would claim that I am not giving them enough credit for also going to weird Boston nerd culture places like the MIT hackers did.
What debate exactly do you think I'm making up? This entire discussion stems from a disagreement about what qualifies as a "hacker", which is all that I have addressed.
What a monster!
Can confirm. For me in the 80s it was about the writing and the friends, some of which I'm lucky to say I still have. Indulging in some phreaking when needed was about the extent of our "misuse" of technology.
The knowledge that hackers have is immensely powerful. Hackers know how to root boxes, take down networks, pick locks, impersonate people, infiltrate virtually any secure area, falsify records, circumvent protection devices... They can steal from banks, screw with the phone system... hell, they can hack into cars on the highway. The ones with government jobs can screw with entire countries' telecom systems, disable satellites, jam telecommunications, spoof and reroute individual communications, and cause rolling waves of disruption to the power grid across entire regions of a country. Hackers have the knowledge to systematically destabilize virtually all the infrastructure of our civilization.
But a small handful of people do dumb shit and suddenly all hackers aren't trustworthy? The fact that the world still operates at all is testament to the fact that they aren't abusing their power.
So, on the one hand the stupid stuff will be touted as him being just a dumb kid, but the non-stupid stuff will be touted as revolutionary and ahead of his time.
The people tasked with spying on people daily -- the people who should know better and be more tolerant -- simply believe everyone is a hypocrite or some kind of monster.
In practice, no secrets means everyone will hate each other, not be more tolerant. People can't live with knowing certain things, and if everyone's secrets are in the open, what actually happens is that people can't live each other. It's stupid, they're stupid, but that's how they act.
My fear is that more transparency will simply widen the disparity in treatment, because there will be more ammunition to use against the weak, while the strong are protected from accountability no matter what is dug up from their past.
——
Major edit: This is why I am an advocate for privacy, rather than radical transparency. I think a level playing field is a prerequisite for transparency.
Someone, I guess here on HN quoted something along the lines of: "the more noble the goal is the less the truth matters" (I'd like to know the original quote but I didn't write it down and now I vannot find it.
Sure as hell ain't perfect but can potentially clean up some of what you have out there.
(He says, remembering all the times he's had fun hanging out with furries... those guys know how to party!)
Not Zero Cool
I enjoyed the story, and if any of it is legitimate and honest insight into O'Rourke's inclinations then I'm interested to see more of his policy proposals.
Furthermore, I think the article's point about O'Rourke's technical literacy giving him an edge in obtaining support from the tech sector is interesting, and if at all valid, potentially a huge factor. Not that this really needs elaboration on HN.
In regards to the CDC, I haven't heard of any members ever being convicted of a crime? I'm not confident enough to say it hasn't happened, but if so I'll take any good light to bring to the hacker culture that we can get these days.
Most of the top tier (by current polling) 2020 candidates don't have much beside donations and merchandising on their website yet; Harris has some things that are at about the level of a stump speech and Warren has actual issue pages.
Those currently in Congress (e.g., Sanders, Harris, Warren, Gillibrand, Klobuchar) can (and do) signal platform positions concretely through sponsored legislation, even they don't have issues pages on their website.
- Arrested when sneaking into private property.
- Member of cDc
- Co founded a small Internet services and software company.
- published an tiny online newspaper,
Any hacker born in 70's can relate.
I personally would love to anoint him with the "Doctor" moniker, for his active contributions to WebMD.
> At the time, people connected to bulletin boards by dialing in to the phone lines through a modem. Heavy use of long-distance modem calls could add up to hundreds of dollars a month. Savvy teens learned techniques for getting around the charges, such as using other people’s phone-company credit card numbers and five-digit calling codes to place free calls.
Probably best not to telegraph such intentions.
Sounds like a commitment to do so in the primary and general election both, which is quite legal.
As an independent I don't participate in primaries typically.
> In a closed primary, only voters registered with a given party can vote in that party's primary. States with closed primaries include party affiliation in voter registration so that the state has an official record of what party each voter is registered as.
https://www.fairvote.org/open_and_closed_primaries
The system isn't nearly as open as people seem to think.
What stops people voting for unpopular candidates in order to sabotage the party?
Isn’t it basically the same as entryism?
[0] https://theintercept.com/2017/10/28/josh-walker-anarchist-co...
One takeaway from that case could be that it did at least partly imply that the burden of proof is on the government, not the press. However, since all 9 justices had differing opinions, there's a lot of uncertainty over what is and isn't legal.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchist_Cookbook#Legalit...
Anyway, for this type of censorship to be effective to prevent dissemination of knowledge, it would need to happen before distribution, and prior restraint is generally considered unconstitutional in the US, except in matters of national security. National security could likely include planned troop movements and nuclear weapons manufacturing procedures (although, you can figure out a lot by reading physics textbooks).
The interesting thing is where the line is drawn, how far 'national security' is interpreted.
If your society is held together by a lack of available knowledge on how to blow stuff up (or take other dangerous actions), I don't expect it will be held together for very long. Motivated people can figure this out pretty quickly.
It's horrifying to me that there's places where that isn't allowed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Munitions_List
It seems distributing TAC online should be fine, I thought it might fall under some kind of ITAR requirement but I am just ignorant of the truth.
Here's some instructions to build a nuclear bomb, right off the top of my head:
1. Take a mass of U-235 about half the critical mass of U-235 and shape it into a rod.
2. Take another equal mass of U-235 and form it into a hollow cylinder, into which the rod will fit. DO NOT PUT THE MASSES OF URANIUM TOGETHER!
3. Put some kind of inert material between the two masses of uranium to keep them separated, and also to keep the rod lined up with the center of the cylinder. Place the separated uranium in a tight cylinder with room left on top of the rod.
4. Put a charge on top of the cylinder, behind the rod. Connect the fuse for this charge to whatever detonation mechanism you like--igniting this charge will also ignite the bomb.
You might say, "hey, that's cheating! Where do you get all that U-235 in the first place?". You're right, that is a hard problem. The entire US managed to scrape together enough U-235 for one of these bombs and just dropped it on Hiroshima completely untested because getting U-235 is a pain in the ass.
Instead, you'll want to have concentric shells of plutonium that implode together into a critical mass with the use of shape charges. Plutonium isn't even a naturally occurring element, but it's still easier to get than U-235. The shape charges are a little harder to figure out (this is one of many things John von Neumann is known for) but enough of it has been documented that it can't be that hard to work out. This is the design of the bombs tested at Trinity and later dropped on Nagasaki.
So, yeah. Some details of specific, advanced nuclear bomb designs are restricted, but largely because the information is currently classified and virtually everybody with that information works in a government position where the laws surrounding classified information and the non-proliferation treaty are binding to them personally. Also, actually putting the information into practice requires lots and lots of hard, large-scale work to get enough fissile material in the first place. I'm pretty sure the physics and engineering faculty of the average American university could build working nuclear bombs if they had unlimited budgets and resources, it's just that once you start trying to refine weapons-grade plutonium, it's kind of obvious and then someone from the Department of Energy shows up and confiscates all your plutonium and you probably end up on some sort of watchlist somewhere.
Somewhat more related to your argument, it was also because the device was simple enough not to require explody testing.
I'm pretty sure the physics and engineering faculty of the average American university could build working nuclear bombs
Not quite building but the design part of this was, in fact, done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment
Spawned a relevant court case as well.
That's not only less funny, but it's also a little hard to believe. I mean, I know how simple the design is, but for something as innovative and novel as the first atomic bomb, you'd think you'd still want to test it. Although I guess if it didn't work, that would have been fine since they had another tested design by then anyway.
Introductory:
The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives by Tenney L. Davis.
Advanced:
Chemistry and Technology of Explosives by Tadeusz Urbanski (English translation by M. Jurecki).
Encyclopedic:
Encyclopedia of Explosives and Related Items by Basil T. Federoff.
Advanced applications of explosives, toward the destruction of materiel and human beings:
Tactical Missile Warheads by Joseph Carleone.
When I was an undergraduate I even found a book about nerve gas on the shelves -- Some aspects of the chemistry and toxic action of organic compounds containing phosphorus and fluorine by Bernard Charles Saunders. Dig into the citations and you find a further wealth of detail, papers now universally accessible through sci-hub.
The main obstacle to making effective bombs isn't restrictions on information. It's that most people inclined to violence [2] can't or won't teach themselves something new even if given a wealth of high quality literature to do it with.
[1] And on Amazon and Library Genesis.
[2] Most non-violent people too have trouble with learning on their own. People who keep learning new things may overestimate how common that ability is in general.
Edit: I guess that could be read as plural...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/my-advice-to-progres...
I'm not sure how writing off a demographic of people not even born yet is going to go for his campaign.
While it's extremely early (though in most recent elections, the eventual primary winner was at this point in first or second place, more often second), Harris is only polling third (consistently, across polls) and is way behind Biden (first) and Sanders (second, so arguably the most likely nominee).
I wonderfully interested that you think the DNC would allow that to happen after just two year of being shown explicitly that they will do whatever is needed to make sure that does not happen.
It's not the same DNC. While the Sanders faction didn't gain control after the 2016 election, they essentially got a power-sharing agreement and, more importantly, they've gotten a bunch of reforms, including mostly neutralizing the power of superdelegates. And Sanders is starting 2020 in a much stronger position than 2016, and doing so without an opponent with anywhere close to the establishment power of Clinton, whose partisans also were in charge of the DNC at the time.
But... Because neither of us can possibly prove it. I guess we'll just wait and see. I believe they just won't let him and they'll either do it by rigging more subtly this time, or have Warren there only to split his votes. Either way, it'll be more interesting than the "show" they put on last time with Webb and Chafey bowing before Hillary.
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/donna-brazile-i-found-proof...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/02/politics/elizabeth-warren-dnc...
[2] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-b...
[3] https://observer.com/2016/07/wikileaks-proves-primary-was-ri...
Which hardly, even if viewed as such a system, can support your suggestion that such a system not only existed but should be suspected to still be in place.
Party organizations involved in the primary process need to avoid even the appearance of favoritism. The DNC under DWS failed in this, and it also demonstrated other forms of unprofessionalism (such as passing around credit card information in unencrypted email!). Cleaning house was necessary. Furthermore, superdelegates had been a controversial issue in the last two contested nomination contest, and were clearly perceived by a substantial number of party supporters as undemocratic. Reforming them was also necessary. But none of that changes the fact that there is no evidence of any form of rigging of the nomination process.
If it's obvious there was some sort of corrupt manipulation of the process, it should be possible to point to at least one single state where there is evidence of electoral manipulation.
No, it didn't have a “system to allow rigging”, beyond partisans of one candidate being in near-total control of the DNC.
They did have and leverage a system which helped promote a public inevitability narrative for a candidate that sewed up institutional support early by way of superdelegate voting rights, which led to then being included by media in delegate counts, reinforcing an artificial image of momentum which is demonstrated to drive subsequent voting behavior. This was dismantled when superdelegates voting privileges were reformed.
I'm not certain of my inferences from your comment, but you seem to be missing the context of what he's saying.
He's leading into that with the underlying (and very valid IMO) assumptions that economic trends can yield predictive power for cultural outcomes, and that China (and thus Chinese people to the more homogeneous populations of the US) will be heavily demonized due to the ongoing economic show down between China and the US.
I don't remember anyone blaming "Asians" for Virginia Tech, and rightfully so.
We don't know factually what he's currently doing, but we can say he did in the past.
If pussygate was a big deal to people, driving drunk would be even worse, but it's not like it'll get the same coverage.
https://history.house.gov/People/Other-Office/Member-Preside...
The request was for candidates with “lots of political and executive experience”, not merely some political experience.
It's not just a factoid. It shows that more experience has been generally required.
Whether the software/services for he founded in 1998 and ran until...sometime before March 2017 is lots of executive experience is debatable, but it's certainly not particularly large scale executive experience for a Presidential candidate.
Unfortunately however, he may be too white and male to appease his party's intersectional hierarchy.
Given that the top two Democratic candidates for 2020 by current polling are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, I don't think there's much reason to think that being white or male is a huge disadvantage.
His thin resume, OTOH...
No, he wasn't. Ever. Clinton was, consistently, and at a similar point to where we are now with respect to 2020, Biden was (slightly, but pretty consistently across polls) in the number 2 spot. And both Biden and Sanders were somewhere around 50 points behind Clinton.
> and they kneecapped him.
The “they” that did (the Clinton-allied team that was in control of the DNC leadership in the years before and through the 2016 primaries, and had a fanatical commitment to assuring her nomination) isn't around any more, nor is a parallel group committed to any other candidate in a similar position.
Nor are many of the rules which facilitated they and their media allies efforts to do that, in no small part because of the substantial influence of Sanders allies in the DNC since the 2016 election; most notably, superdelegate voting privileges have been curtailed.
[1] Fun fact, did you know that some historical uses of the word "fact" are more as an antonym to "opinion" than as a qualification of a statement's truth value?
Funny how the combine a very bad thing with some cool things as counter-weights. I'd have more faith in the objectivity of the article if they mentioned that O'Rourke actually put people's lives in danger, hit a vehicle, and tried to leave the scene. [1]
[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article...
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-17/reuters-shelved-bu...
Both 2600 and cDc started in 1984, however. LOD did too.
https://torrentfreak.com/warez-leader-is-chairman-of-san-die...
For anyone interested in finding writings by "Psychedelic Warrior", here's a search you can use to get started:
https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&&q=site%3Atextfiles.c...
EDIT: Found elsewhere where he claimed it was called that because it's Icelandic for 'waterfall'. But now I'm thinking that was a cover story.
I loved reading the CDC growing up. That one of them is a serious presidential candidate now is truly making my day. I'm almost in tears laughing at the idea.
I’m not sold as Beto as the candidate but this is a weak meme. 2/10 be best.
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/brace-yourse...
There are two sides to any story. We only get one anymore; which one depends upon the political affiliation of the media organization or author and how it relates to the subject. The other side of the story is immediately dismissed as either a smear job or puff piece by partisans.
He agreed to be interviewed for this, so this would be a pretty poor attempt at a hit job if it was one.
Source:
> No one in cDc would talk about O’Rourke until I promised not to publish before the 2018 election. That was OK: I wanted the full story for my book, which spans decades, rather than 1 scoop ahead of a state vote. I offered O’Rourke the same terms. He accepted, and we spoke. (8/10)
What concrete results has he delivered?
In an image caption.
Well, at least he didn't turn out to be Satoshi. That would be one of the few ways to top this.
Here's the difference borders make: check out Nogales Mexico vs. Nogales Arizona -
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/travel/nogales-arizona-me...
It's not race or genetics or even culture. It's the institutions separated by country borders that let almost otherwise identical cities have radically different outcomes.
google it, there's a video.
If anything all this does is show that being an old school hacker doesn't prevent you from becoming an ineffectual small-r-republican with a donkey pin
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/21/18150359/...
I wonder how much of that is an artifact of running in Texas.
It's unlikely to matter in a Democratic presidential primary campaign, especially one where a number of candidates are going to try to use environmental issues as a key differentiator.
“He needed the fossil fuel money in order to almost (but still not) win his one campaign for statewide office” is probably not a defense the O'Rourke camp would be well served by when the issue, inevitably, arises.
When I donate to political campaigns as a private citizen who happens to be employed by a software company it does not suddenly make the campaign I donated to a shill for tech companies.
The usual approach to reporting political donations by firm/industry uses only PAC funds from corporate PACs controlled by firms in the industry, but OpenSecrets aggregates PAC and individual employee donations, which it justifies on the basis that “[o]ur research over more than 20 years shows a correlation between individuals' contributions and their employers' political interests and we have also observed that the donors we know about, and especially those who contribute at the maximum levels, are more commonly top executives in their companies, not lower-level employees.” [0]
In any case, I've been commenting on the political impact, not the merits, of the donations wet his candidacy.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/beto-orourke...