• Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    There can be information that’s classified, then a reporter finds out about it and it gets printed in the NY Times. But that information is still classified.

    Correct.

    So you can simultaneously be discussing something that’s public knowledge and also classified.

    Semi-correct. If you’re in a position of knowledge about the classified info, you don’t discuss it in earshot of people without a need to know whether ir not it’s public knowledge. You just drop a bunch of “no comment” or “I can neither confirm nor deny” or “that’s classified, I can’t say shit.

    Fox News blasted at you 24/7 in the mess hall and you got suckered by it.

    I was blue-leaning when I joined, and blue-as-fuck by the time I separated. I had a healthy hatred for Fox from day one. Working in an on-base hospital, the only time the news was on was in the breakroom and I was pretty quick to change the channel and then lecture the dipshits who were in there before me about putting political shit on at work. The second time I ran into that, I bitched up the chain, and they threatened the entire department to have the TV removed from the breakroom if it became an ongoing issue. Still popped up occasionally, but honestly that shit’s way worse at the civilian hospital I work at now than anything I ran into in the military. In all fairness though, medical USAF is probably the bluest slice of the military there is; and I live in the cousin-fuckingly-deep-south right now, which is home to the reddest slice of the healthcare community there is, so contrasting the two definitely isn’t reflective of either ‘whole’ that either of those slices belong to.

    …I got most of my news from Reddit at that time; which isn’t to say I’m above getting duped like anyone else, but one of the things I like about these kinds of link aggregates is that you can get multiple perspectives from breaking news at a fairly quick glance.

    (as your President says you are)

    I mean, they did get me with the healthcare and college. Also fuck that guy.

    so you’re going to go on pretending that you have some special knowledge that no one else has.

    What? Did you even read my rant? Half my take was on the basis that I specifically didn’t know shit - I was an e-nothing medic - but even as an e-nothing medic I had to take regular training to ensure the infosec shit was absolutely drilled into my brain. It was common knowledge even for folks like me who don’t handle classified info at all. The whole point was to contrast myself against someone like a Secretary of State whose knowledge about how to handle classified info should blow my dumb ass out of the water; but that even my dumb ass could recognize the incredibly blatant fuckups.

    Hilary Clinton is a smart woman

    Correct. But that doesn’t mean she can’t make bad choices.

    Trump and his gang are a bunch of morons.

    Semi-correct. Trump and his gang play an extremely convincing gaggle of village idiots, and while there’s certainly no shortage of sincere stupidity, there’s also a degree of planned and jaw-droppingly well executed malice coming from those traitors, and I refuse to dismiss it as just stupid people blundering their way through a series of mistakes that just so happen exclusively fuck up our own country and allies while strengthening our enemies. The existence of these shitstains is the most convincing RL parallel to the Darth Jar Jar fan theory I’m aware of: so long as you can play a convincing-enough dumbass, you can get away with a ridiculous amount of evil.

    So, I’d encourage you and anyone else reading this to focus less on the stupid and more on the malice. The stupid is distracting; the malice highlights Trump and his circle as domestic enemies to the US.

    Your country is fucked and it’s not going to get any better until y’all can start admitting that you got scammed.

    My country is fucked because two-thirds of us either actively wanted an enemy of the US to be our president, or were so undisturbed by that possibility that they couldn’t even be bothered to color in a quarter-inch rectangle to stop it. Most of us are some combination of stupid, apathetic, or evil; and I have zero faith that’s going to change any time soon. Idk what country you’re in, but pressure your representatives to put and keep the pressure on us - first step to us getting our shit together is for the ‘find out’ stage to hurt bad enough to make a lasting impression.