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god_from_celegans  6mo ago (text post)   Edited 6mo ago   2316 thread views

What did you learn from leaked documents?

We seek to understand the world, but it's made harder when part of it is hidden from us.

Leaked documents, represent a kind of ground truth, showing how the world really works. Telling us what's for sale, what the real agendas are, how powerful spies are, and how coordinated governments are. They are almost the opposite to conspiracy theories, as they present observations that can prune conspiracy theories.

But there are too many documents to read, so let's compare notes. What surprised you and caused you to update your view of the world?

Feel free to give a low effort reply, it's better than nothing.

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Wikileaks Hillary emails from 2016 showed that Tim Kaine had been selected as VP well before the election itself. It wasn't spelled out exactly why, but it was clear from the tone that Hillary's staff knew he was the pick a year in advance of the official announcement. The plausible working theory is that, since Tim Kaine had been chairman of the DNC, he selected Debbie Wasserman Schultz as his replacement in exchange for Hillary picking him for the VP slot. DWS was famously a Clinton acolyte and, if she didn't outright rig the primary for Clinton, at least did everything within her power to ensure the same.

This dynamic was barley-reported on: the mainstream media covered the emails but tried as little as possible to cover the content of the emails, or else focused on Goldman Sachs soundbites; social media preferred juicy coverage about John Podesta and "spirit cooking". But Hillary trading her VP slot for an arranged primary was right there in the data and largely ignored. And it was much more plausible and revealing of how power today works than any of the other angles.

Wow, that is interesting and I totally missed it. It's nice to see the dynamics of mundane corruption.

I agree there was little reporting on the contents. I remember one spreadsheet that detailed "what they have given me" and "what position I have given them" but I can't for the life of me find it again. However, it showed that you can buy an ambassadorial position for ~$100k

I vaguely remember that Ambassador expose and am not convinced it came from the Hillary Clinton emails -- it might have been a different wikileaks dump or a different dump altogether. I'm fairly convinced Ambassadorships have been for sale for a long time. If you start running down the list of different ambassadors, any to countries that aren't especially important are basically all patronage jobs. It's one of those things.

Oh... that might be why I couldn't find it. I'll have another look.

I think, even if something is widely suspected, it's still nice to have written evidence and details like the prices. It helps with debates and economics papers if nothing else.

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