It’s all fine since he didn’t use it for official business right, right…
drfloyd51 3 hours ago [-]
The FBI just made a bounty to find who hacked family photos.
I am sure the FBI will do that for my family too right?
Or we’re more than family photos hacked?
kingo55 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe the family un-friendly kind?
pnw 5 hours ago [-]
Based on the links in the articles, it's personal photographs and a resume from an old Gmail account. The resume dates from 2017.
justonceokay 5 hours ago [-]
Or more likely unofficial business
dlev_pika 4 hours ago [-]
I still can’t get over the fact that *Kash “Stay in my lane” Patel* is heading the FBI
reddozen 3 hours ago [-]
you mean best selling children's book author Kash Patel who is desperately trying to scrub the internet of his music video[0] revising the Jan 6 insurrection
Was he running openclaw on his unpenetrable system by any chance?
sv123 4 hours ago [-]
Clowns, all the way down.
mikkupikku 4 hours ago [-]
Unfair to clowns, a noble profession.
xeonmc 4 hours ago [-]
Prefer the title “jesters”
bryanrasmussen 4 hours ago [-]
the sensible middle of the road between clowns on the left and the jokers on the right.
seemaze 3 hours ago [-]
Its hard to keep this smile off my face
mixmastamyk 44 minutes ago [-]
…here I am stuck in the middle with you… ♪
kstrauser 35 minutes ago [-]
flicks open a straight razor
Jordanpomeroy 3 hours ago [-]
When the clown moves into the palace it doesn’t make him the king, the palace becomes a circus
jameson 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder how many others are hacked but remain undiscovered
longislandguido 4 hours ago [-]
Considering 95% of spam that hits my inbox originates from compromised Gmail accounts, I'd say it's a few.
Because Google is too big to fail, all Gmail traffic is essentially whitelisted and they can't be bothered to do anything about it.
detourdog 3 hours ago [-]
Almost all phishing attempts at my domain are from google. Many Norton subscription bills for around $350. I report every single one to google. I can’t believe they aren’t using there AI to figure this out.
mcmcmc 2 hours ago [-]
> I can’t believe they aren’t using there AI to figure this out.
Why would they burn compute on it when they have zero incentive to fix the problem?
themafia 30 minutes ago [-]
Meanwhile have a complaint volume of more than 0.1% and they'll consider you extremely suspicious and start actively interfering with your deliveries.
Then you get into the forgotten early 2000s era google "postmaster tools" to try to poke through the chicken entrails to divine the nature of your issue.
gzread 2 hours ago [-]
Google was banned from Usenet once, so there's hope. Every single provider was so fed up with spam they just blocked the whole network.
maximilianburke 34 minutes ago [-]
More than clowns, they’re all fools.
themafia 31 minutes ago [-]
It always will be. The FBI is scandal prone and a stranger to success. I'm not entirely sure a large federal apparatus is needed anymore. It maybe made sense when local police were poorly trained and psychics were seen as credible investigative tools, but, I think we're well past that. I think it should be chopped into 50 pieces and handed over to the states to operate. A small coordinating office is all that should be left.
3 hours ago [-]
longislandguido 4 hours ago [-]
Did you write the software that allowed him to get hacked in the first place?
throwawaysoxjje 1 hours ago [-]
But his emails!
k310 5 hours ago [-]
A great many experts in the military, medicine, disaster relief, and cybersecurity { the list goes on } were fired.
It's almost as if the nation were being weakened on purpose.
Don't get mad, get Vlad. Or just prepare for the long-desired Rapture.[0] and which politicians seem to be working very hard to being about (the Apocalypse part, anyway)
> Prophecy, not politics, may also shape America’s clash with Iran
So, is prophecy OK in a pitch deck? Asking for a friend.
vrganj 3 hours ago [-]
The Manchurian Candidate.
afpx 3 hours ago [-]
For real, I wouldn't be shocked if Trump drafted everyone between 18 and 42, sent them all to Iran and then let Israel nuke Iran
RobRivera 4 hours ago [-]
When do the Raptor puppets go on sale?
idiotsecant 4 hours ago [-]
Its both dumber and more dangerous than that. Competent people are not valuable to governments that value loyalty more than competence.
gotwaz 2 hours ago [-]
"Competent" people are not valuable and over rated because they will flake out in such jobs when the group holds them responsible for all sorts of things they have no control over. They are the first people who recognize lumits. Their own, their teams and the systems. But people dont want to hear about Limits. They want saviors and messaihs. They want fantasy and magic. So the system runs not optimized for efficiency but illusion of control, for damping of anxieties and fears.
trinsic2 1 hours ago [-]
and that will be there eventual downfall luckily.
refurb 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, the “experts” like the head of the HHS that was a lawyer and former DA in California.
Were any of the people fired responsible for security on personal gmail accounts?
chao- 5 hours ago [-]
From the administration that brought us "We are currently clean on OPSEC", I can't claim surprise. Disappointment, but not surprise.
Nor, however, can I take the statements of malicious actors at face value. They hacked a personal email address, but that does not mean "the FBI’s security was nothing more than a joke".
calvinmorrison 4 hours ago [-]
These government officials are idiots. Jeffery Epstein, idiot. Why do even rich and powerful use easily hackable stuff?
Lest us not forget bObama@yahoo.com or the IT guy who worked for the Clinton foundation who posted about bleachbit on recdit
tomjakubowski 4 hours ago [-]
Obama's old personal email was at defunct ISP ameritech.net, not Yahoo. I only remember because that's the ISP I grew up with.
Trump using yourefired as his Twitter password well into his 2016 campaign was amazing, too.
dhosek 45 minutes ago [-]
Ameritech.net was backed by yahoo’s mail and IIRC, joefish@ameritech.net and joefish@yahoo.com would be the same mailbox.
lostlogin 2 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised he put the 'e' on 'you're'.
calvinmorrison 2 hours ago [-]
Idiots
gzread 2 hours ago [-]
Because they are experts in acquiring riches and power, not experts in computer security.
Nothing anti-semitic about pointing out close ties between political allies. Like how Jared Kushner's family is so close with Netanyahu he slept in Jared's bed. If anything it's patriotic & pro-Israel.
2 hours ago [-]
PilotJeff 2 hours ago [-]
BRING IT ON
trhway 5 hours ago [-]
Hegseth - Signal app
Noem - habeas corpus definition she gave at the Congress hearing
Kennedy Jr - vaccines and the rest of his view on medicine
Now Patel's unhackable FBI.
I think the world has changed, and i really need to update my expectations of what is new normal. It is like in tech when paradigm shift happens, and you're either go with the new paradigm or get irrelevant.
conductr 5 hours ago [-]
If Idiocracy was made today, I wonder how far in the future they’d place it. In 2006, they thought 500 years which seems optimistic now.
mattkevan 3 hours ago [-]
We’re way beyond Idiocracy now, we left that timeline six years ago.
For all his flaws, Camacho was a good leader - he recognised there was a problem, knew he couldn’t fix it and actively rallied the world around the one person who could.
This bunch of dipshits expressly denigrated the experts, refused to take the slightest precaution to protect themselves and others from a deadly virus and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
And that’s not even thinking about the industrial levels of fuckery and bullshit they’ve perpetrated over the last year.
jrumbut 54 minutes ago [-]
Camacho is aspirational at this point. I would have a lot of sympathy for someone trying to do the right thing but unaware what that is.
antonvs 2 hours ago [-]
> caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Excess mortality in the US during the pandemic was around 1.2 million.
mcmcmc 2 hours ago [-]
It would literally just be a compilation of TikToks
3 hours ago [-]
thereisnospork 4 hours ago [-]
Future? I'm thinking a Borat style mockumentary in the present.
scotty79 3 hours ago [-]
I think it's the future of entertainment. Ruthlessly mocking idiots in power (and others). To be honest it's the present of some entertainment.
root_axis 3 hours ago [-]
Don't forget "the files are on my desk" and many other classics.
4 hours ago [-]
pwarner 4 hours ago [-]
Only the best people
0xbadcafebee 2 hours ago [-]
The real paradigm shift is coming in 2028.
ToucanLoucan 5 hours ago [-]
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” ~Hannah Arendt
trhway 5 hours ago [-]
i'm from USSR, so pretty familiar with it. The issue here is whether it is a fluke, or the world is really going into new phase where totalitarianism and authoritarianism are going to become dominating state of affairs.
For example many attribute rise of totalitarianism back then in 20th century to the power of broadcasting radio and "formation of mass society". We have a similarly transformative factor now - social media. And with the new tech power - propaganda (sounds dated, today it is more like mind control) through social media and total surveillance plus AI "minority report" - we can get a hyper-totalitarianism orders of magnitude more totalitarian than those of the 20th century. And may be we're witnessing the birth of such a new world order.
gzread 2 hours ago [-]
Totalitarianism and authoritarianism has been the norm for the majority of human history. The last century of technological progress created a bubble where the power of sycophancy wasn't strong enough to counteract the power of actual technology. Now that the technology is widely distributed and easily available to sycophants, and that they've had time to learn how to leverage the technology, sycophancy again brings an advantage.
Fricken 3 hours ago [-]
Authoritarianism is a spectrum and all states are on it. We all have brain slugs now, it was voluntary. We'll be going back to that old time religion, but with a new twist. With AI every man will, in a much more literal way, be able to have an ongoing private conversation with god. And you won't need money or the government anymore. God has a special plan for you and you follow it.
epistasis 4 hours ago [-]
The people of the US were converted into functional Putin-subservient Russians for the last election, and the media environment is not getting better, and in fact seems to be getting much worse.
However there is revolt amongst a good chunk of the fractured coalition that barely brought Trump into office.
Trump's Epstein coverup and sheltering of Ghislaine Maxwell took off the shine with a large number of people. The ghastly behavior around the deaths of major figures takes off more. Exempting producers of the pesticide glyphosate has taken off most of the MAHA coalition. And then, of course the wars, when he promised not to launch any and accused his opponent of doing exactly what he's currently doing...
It remains to be seen just how permanent this is, and whether the post-Trump US can be reattached to reality instead of reality TV, but I use hope.
ToucanLoucan 4 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately that leaves us with the Democrats who have shown time and again that they are unwilling or unable to confront this movement for what it is.
I'm frankly far more concerned that the Republicans lose next election, and we get Democrats in power who then prioritize "getting back to normal" and once again utterly failing to hold accountable the utter BUFFET of mediocre wannabe dictators who brought us to the brink already.
I also hope. But I'd be lying if I said I thought it was rational.
Avicebron 2 hours ago [-]
The real fear is that they don't solve any of the problems that caused this in the first place... it's not about some vindictive punishment, it's about solving the problem.
parineum 46 minutes ago [-]
>The people of the US were converted into functional Putin-subservient Russians
It's crazy that you continue to push this narrative despite the entire "Russia-Gate" thing turning out to total bullshit oppo followed by Trump being currently at war with one of Putin's allies and having jailed another.
The evidence supporting this claim is what, he wasn't nice to Zelenskyy that one time (despite still financially supporting Ukraine in their war against Russia)?
fooster 37 minutes ago [-]
The Russians certainly did interfere in the 2016 election. It was not bullshit.
cyberax 1 hours ago [-]
Totalitarianism is not becoming more popular. Russia is not totalitarian, Venezuela is not totalitarian, and even China is not really totalitarian anymore.
These are authoritarian countries. Meaning that they don't have an official ideology, the real one that has people willing to die for it. If anything, they are focused on suppressing people and keeping them passive.
Iran is a notable exception here. They _are_ a totalitarian theocratic state, and this makes them more resilient. They are not governed by a single person but by ideology, even if it's unpopular among the people.
Authoritarian states are fragile in comparison. They struggle to survive the removal of their leader, especially the ones that had governed for a long time. The long-time ruler inevitably becomes the arbiter between the elites, a focal point of their undercover agreements.
And once the ruler is gone, the elites are now faced with a new round of struggles. So the smarter ones decide that perhaps it's a good idea to have some kind of collegiate power, where people can discuss their disagreements rather than shoot each other. This usually results in the country becoming milder and not so carnivorous towards its citizens.
The USSR was a good example. Stalin died, and his successors decided that a new Stalin was not a good idea. Instead, they gave power to the Politburo, where the General Secretary was "the first among equals". The USSR did not become a human rights paradise afterwards. But it never had any more mass purges, deportations, or mega-projects built with slave labor of GULAG inmates.
trhway 53 minutes ago [-]
>Totalitarianism is not becoming more popular. Russia is not totalitarian,
Russia is totalitarian today. It transitioned from authoritarian to totalitarian slowly starting about second half of 201x and very quickly down hill during 2022 with the introduction of all those "discreditation" laws and the likes and especially with extreme hardening of application of such laws.
>Meaning that they don't have an official ideology, the real one that has people willing to die for it.
That is the point. In a contrast to being just a kleptocracy for the first ~15 years of Putin, Russia does have such an ideology at the state level today - "Russian world" (known outside as "Russian fascism" - "rushism") with Ukranian war (where at least several hundred thousands of Russians have already died) being one of the real-world implementations of that ideology.
add-sub-mul-div 5 hours ago [-]
I don't think people appreciate enough how much it mattered that Trump was a celebrity buffoon/reality show personality for decades before "politics". Stupid people eat that up. Other Trumpy candidates have not been able to reproduce his success. Let's not assume this is the new normal.
OhMeadhbh 4 hours ago [-]
I heard some of the best advice I ever heard at a Subgenius devival in Dallas in the 80s: "Act like a dumb-shit and they'll treat you like an equal." Every year that quip seems more and more relevant.
dogemaster2025 4 hours ago [-]
I don’t think people appreciate enough how much it mattered that Trump was the only candidate explicitly saying they were working to Make America Great Again, as opposed to foreign interests or illegals.
OhMeadhbh 3 hours ago [-]
I recently read one of the best descriptions of why middle of the road, non wealthy voters went for Trump in the book "The King in Orange," a book about the "magickal" aspects of the 2016 campaign by John Michael Greer, the former (?) head of the Ancient Order of Druids in America.
I expect cogent commentary about ritual magick by a Druid, but was a little surprised to find well laid out political commentary. I guess that was a failure of my imagination. Worth a read, even if you consider the topic bollocks. Greer sticks mostly to psychology and musings about using metaphor to engineer the mass imagination. Much less woo-woo than you might expect.
I mention it in support of the previous poster's commentary about the Dems messaging being irrelevant to most Americans. Seemed to me middle America doesn't love Trump as much as they weren't able to hear Harris address any issues they were concerned about.
I can recommend The King in Orange, What's the Matter with Kansas and Metaphors We Live By for more musings about such things.
s5300 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
pugchat 59 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
fbilol 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
paxys 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
root_axis 3 hours ago [-]
Doesn't gmail opt people into 2fa automatically?
upheaval7276 4 hours ago [-]
I'm no fan of this administration, at all, but this seems like a big fat nothingburger. They hacked a personal gmail account, not a government account, not government infra. Why is this not a failing of Google instead of the government? And surely the hackers would have eagerly released anything damning, but nothing damning seems to exist. What am i missing here?
claaams 3 hours ago [-]
Remember when this admin used a Signal group chat to coordinate an operation against Houthi forces in Yemen and left in some journalists. Do you think he cares care whether he sent an email with his gov email on a gov device or if he sent it with his personal email?
weaksauce 4 hours ago [-]
you don't think that it's relevant and concerning that the director of the FBI didn't take operational security seriously enough that his account got compromised? even if they didn't get anything incriminating (which maybe they did and are going to blackmail him later) that show a shocking lack of competency for someone in that kind of position.
upheaval7276 4 hours ago [-]
we don't even know how it was compromised. was his password "password", or did the hackers exploit a gmail/google vulnerability?
weaksauce 3 hours ago [-]
i think the facts of the matter are that a gmail vulnerability is on the very low likelihood kind of event. they wouldn't burn their insanely valuable vulnerability on showing how much of a fratboy kash is. the most likely possibility is that he either clicked on something dumb and gave access through phishing(really bad) or had a really weak password without 2fa(also really bad).
pkilgore 4 hours ago [-]
are you suggesting the former is not a demonstration of a shocking lack of competency?
upheaval7276 3 hours ago [-]
I'm suggesting we don't know how the account was hacked, which is true. could be due to incompetence or not. i don't know, nor do you
jeroenvlek 3 hours ago [-]
True, but don't you think the FBI director should be held to higher standards of security hygiene than average people? Because I'm interpreting your tone as "it could happen to anyone". At some point the doubt is gone and there's no more benefit to give...
alexandre_m 2 hours ago [-]
Comments in this thread mostly reflect people’s own biases, that is a shallow projection based on the headline.
drfloyd51 3 hours ago [-]
Did the director have his email on a vulnerable server? Yes. Yes he did.
He should have known better.
margalabargala 4 hours ago [-]
It's not a big deal, for the reasons you mentioned. But it's interesting to a lot of people, and therefore newsworthy.
upheaval7276 4 hours ago [-]
it's definitely newsworthy, no doubt there. but i see so many people in this thread pointing to this as somehow a failing of the fbi, which it's not. i'm all for calling out this administration for its many many failings, but this is not one of them, and calling this a failure of the administration just hurts the credibility of everyone pointing out real issues with this administration.
reddozen 3 hours ago [-]
True yeah. but uh anyway what about HILLARYS EMAILS we need to hear about those for the next 4 decades (no convictions despite "Lock Her Up" slogans for 5 years)
wmf 3 hours ago [-]
People are concerned because every government official uses their personal email for work.
drfloyd51 3 hours ago [-]
The director of the FBI should not be hacked in anyway ever for any reason.
If Gmail isn’t secure, he should be using something else.
nradov 3 hours ago [-]
How is this a failing of Google? They can't be blamed for users who fail to secure their own accounts.
m_ke 4 hours ago [-]
just think of what could someone do if they got into your personal email account?
upheaval7276 4 hours ago [-]
yes, and...?
ohyoutravel 4 hours ago [-]
Major public figure who is currently in a position of power in the USA. That’s bad news because it reveals sensitive details which may lead to their further compromise. Imagine you’re compromised by a corrupt administration with pics of CSAM or something already, now imagine a foreign actor also having compromised you. It’s a sticky situation.
upheaval7276 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, that's all true, all potential issues in theory. I'm still not seeing why this points to or supports the (valid) claim of incompetence in the FBI. That seems to be the angle most posters in this thread are taking, and it seems...misguided to me. Tilting at windmills. Let's call out the admin for their real failings, not nonsense like this. Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional.
blooalien 3 hours ago [-]
> "Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional."
Doesn't it though? Especially when your profession involves the security of a nation and you can't even secure your own personal email account successfully?
eclipticplane 3 hours ago [-]
Shouldn't the FBI be protecting its own members -- especially its executives -- personal digital footprint, given the risk?
ohyoutravel 3 hours ago [-]
Leaking one’s credentials to sensitive personal repositories of information is a “real failing” lol, how could one think any differently? I would be mortified and immediately rectify the situation.
antonvs 2 hours ago [-]
> Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional.
Why not? Most professionals at larger organizations have to do security training. These kinds of attacks are far less likely to succeed on anyone who follows the basic precautions taught in such training. E.g., if he had MFA enabled on his account - as he certainly should have had - they would not have been able to compromise it externally, i.e. it would have had to be much more than his email that was hacked.
I don’t get the propensity some people seem to have for defending this shameful collection of incompetent criminals, bullies, and clowns.
ImPostingOnHN 2 hours ago [-]
> Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional
If you work in security: it *absolutely does*, because 99+% of the time you are the primary contributing factor, whether from password reuse or downloading malware or clicking bad links or opening random emails or being susceptible to social engineering, etc.
If you are the head of a security organization: obviously you should not expect to retain that job, as your poor reputation is now an albatross around the company's neck.
If you are the head of the FBI: lol. lmao. what the actual fuck. my money is on someone spearfished him with an email subject about a book deal and he'll just click fucking anything.
OhMeadhbh 4 hours ago [-]
Certainly the FBI and GMail having gaps in their operational information security isn't news.
buttersicle 3 hours ago [-]
Do you think the FBI manages his personal email?
Kind of defeats the purpose of it being a personal email don't you think?
michaelmrose 3 hours ago [-]
The FBI does because he is included in "the FBI"
bloppe 3 hours ago [-]
I read the headline and first thought was seriously, that's it? Surely this is one of the least concerning things about the administration
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/iran-linked-hackers-claim-b...
I am sure the FBI will do that for my family too right?
Or we’re more than family photos hacked?
[0] https://youtu.be/TPF_e2E5F74
Because Google is too big to fail, all Gmail traffic is essentially whitelisted and they can't be bothered to do anything about it.
Why would they burn compute on it when they have zero incentive to fix the problem?
Then you get into the forgotten early 2000s era google "postmaster tools" to try to poke through the chicken entrails to divine the nature of your issue.
It's almost as if the nation were being weakened on purpose.
Don't get mad, get Vlad. Or just prepare for the long-desired Rapture.[0] and which politicians seem to be working very hard to being about (the Apocalypse part, anyway)
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/29/us/iran-israel-evangelicals-p...
> Prophecy, not politics, may also shape America’s clash with Iran
So, is prophecy OK in a pitch deck? Asking for a friend.
Nor, however, can I take the statements of malicious actors at face value. They hacked a personal email address, but that does not mean "the FBI’s security was nothing more than a joke".
Lest us not forget bObama@yahoo.com or the IT guy who worked for the Clinton foundation who posted about bleachbit on recdit
Trump using yourefired as his Twitter password well into his 2016 campaign was amazing, too.
Noem - habeas corpus definition she gave at the Congress hearing
Kennedy Jr - vaccines and the rest of his view on medicine
Now Patel's unhackable FBI.
I think the world has changed, and i really need to update my expectations of what is new normal. It is like in tech when paradigm shift happens, and you're either go with the new paradigm or get irrelevant.
For all his flaws, Camacho was a good leader - he recognised there was a problem, knew he couldn’t fix it and actively rallied the world around the one person who could.
This bunch of dipshits expressly denigrated the experts, refused to take the slightest precaution to protect themselves and others from a deadly virus and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
And that’s not even thinking about the industrial levels of fuckery and bullshit they’ve perpetrated over the last year.
Excess mortality in the US during the pandemic was around 1.2 million.
For example many attribute rise of totalitarianism back then in 20th century to the power of broadcasting radio and "formation of mass society". We have a similarly transformative factor now - social media. And with the new tech power - propaganda (sounds dated, today it is more like mind control) through social media and total surveillance plus AI "minority report" - we can get a hyper-totalitarianism orders of magnitude more totalitarian than those of the 20th century. And may be we're witnessing the birth of such a new world order.
However there is revolt amongst a good chunk of the fractured coalition that barely brought Trump into office.
Trump's Epstein coverup and sheltering of Ghislaine Maxwell took off the shine with a large number of people. The ghastly behavior around the deaths of major figures takes off more. Exempting producers of the pesticide glyphosate has taken off most of the MAHA coalition. And then, of course the wars, when he promised not to launch any and accused his opponent of doing exactly what he's currently doing...
It remains to be seen just how permanent this is, and whether the post-Trump US can be reattached to reality instead of reality TV, but I use hope.
I'm frankly far more concerned that the Republicans lose next election, and we get Democrats in power who then prioritize "getting back to normal" and once again utterly failing to hold accountable the utter BUFFET of mediocre wannabe dictators who brought us to the brink already.
I also hope. But I'd be lying if I said I thought it was rational.
It's crazy that you continue to push this narrative despite the entire "Russia-Gate" thing turning out to total bullshit oppo followed by Trump being currently at war with one of Putin's allies and having jailed another.
The evidence supporting this claim is what, he wasn't nice to Zelenskyy that one time (despite still financially supporting Ukraine in their war against Russia)?
These are authoritarian countries. Meaning that they don't have an official ideology, the real one that has people willing to die for it. If anything, they are focused on suppressing people and keeping them passive.
Iran is a notable exception here. They _are_ a totalitarian theocratic state, and this makes them more resilient. They are not governed by a single person but by ideology, even if it's unpopular among the people.
Authoritarian states are fragile in comparison. They struggle to survive the removal of their leader, especially the ones that had governed for a long time. The long-time ruler inevitably becomes the arbiter between the elites, a focal point of their undercover agreements.
And once the ruler is gone, the elites are now faced with a new round of struggles. So the smarter ones decide that perhaps it's a good idea to have some kind of collegiate power, where people can discuss their disagreements rather than shoot each other. This usually results in the country becoming milder and not so carnivorous towards its citizens.
The USSR was a good example. Stalin died, and his successors decided that a new Stalin was not a good idea. Instead, they gave power to the Politburo, where the General Secretary was "the first among equals". The USSR did not become a human rights paradise afterwards. But it never had any more mass purges, deportations, or mega-projects built with slave labor of GULAG inmates.
Russia is totalitarian today. It transitioned from authoritarian to totalitarian slowly starting about second half of 201x and very quickly down hill during 2022 with the introduction of all those "discreditation" laws and the likes and especially with extreme hardening of application of such laws.
>Meaning that they don't have an official ideology, the real one that has people willing to die for it.
That is the point. In a contrast to being just a kleptocracy for the first ~15 years of Putin, Russia does have such an ideology at the state level today - "Russian world" (known outside as "Russian fascism" - "rushism") with Ukranian war (where at least several hundred thousands of Russians have already died) being one of the real-world implementations of that ideology.
I expect cogent commentary about ritual magick by a Druid, but was a little surprised to find well laid out political commentary. I guess that was a failure of my imagination. Worth a read, even if you consider the topic bollocks. Greer sticks mostly to psychology and musings about using metaphor to engineer the mass imagination. Much less woo-woo than you might expect.
I mention it in support of the previous poster's commentary about the Dems messaging being irrelevant to most Americans. Seemed to me middle America doesn't love Trump as much as they weren't able to hear Harris address any issues they were concerned about.
I can recommend The King in Orange, What's the Matter with Kansas and Metaphors We Live By for more musings about such things.
He should have known better.
If Gmail isn’t secure, he should be using something else.
Doesn't it though? Especially when your profession involves the security of a nation and you can't even secure your own personal email account successfully?
Why not? Most professionals at larger organizations have to do security training. These kinds of attacks are far less likely to succeed on anyone who follows the basic precautions taught in such training. E.g., if he had MFA enabled on his account - as he certainly should have had - they would not have been able to compromise it externally, i.e. it would have had to be much more than his email that was hacked.
I don’t get the propensity some people seem to have for defending this shameful collection of incompetent criminals, bullies, and clowns.
If you work in security: it *absolutely does*, because 99+% of the time you are the primary contributing factor, whether from password reuse or downloading malware or clicking bad links or opening random emails or being susceptible to social engineering, etc.
If you are the head of a security organization: obviously you should not expect to retain that job, as your poor reputation is now an albatross around the company's neck.
If you are the head of the FBI: lol. lmao. what the actual fuck. my money is on someone spearfished him with an email subject about a book deal and he'll just click fucking anything.
Kind of defeats the purpose of it being a personal email don't you think?