The Russian Debate

[ArnoldRimmer]

I find that whole "Russia tried to influence the POTUS election!" completetly ridiculous.

Did the russian government prefer one POTUS candidate? Probably. And maybe they really tried to influence the POTUS election in order to improve the chances of their preferred candidate to win.

Pretty much every government tries to influence elections in other countries in some way; if these governments point their fingers at russia now, they're nothing but the worst hypocrites. Germany for example clearly tried to influence the Brexit voting, they tried to influence the POTUS election (for example by giving 5 million dollars to Clinton's infamous "pay-to-play" foundation right during the POTUS election, or by producing Anti-Trump and Pro-Clinton articles and publishing them via the german government-controlled international media etc.).
Governments are constantly trying to influence the affairs of other countries to their liking, sometimes more, sometimes less successful.

And the US itself probably has the worst record of meddling with foreign elections of them all; in 1996 for example they were successful at making their preferred candidate Boris Yeltsin president of Russia. The TIME magazine even proudly admitted that back then:
http://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1996/1101960715_400.jpg

So Russia trying to influence foreign elections is quite probable, simply because every country does so. And yet, the "proof" they've presented so far is ridiculously harmless:

For example some facebook ads worth a few tenthousand bucks. Not only is that virtually nothing; it got even more ridiculous when they had to admit that hardly any of these ads advocated a specific POTUS candidate, and that the majority of these ads were published AFTER the POTUS election - which makes perfectly clear that the purpose of these ads wasn't even to influence the POTUS election, for it makes no sense to publish such ads after the election had already taken place.

I completely agree with what someone has written on the first thread page: If the "right" candidate had won (Clinton), there would never even have been any reporting on this.
If I remember correctly, someone working on the Clinton campaign meanwhile even admitted that the whole "Russia rigged the election" narrative was invented after Clinton lost, simply because they needed a scapegoat to place the blame on.