In the article I saw, it said that the account had identifying information, and the posts were deleted but archived.

My interpretation is that the campaign of Janet Mills -- his primary rival -- found all of this during opposition research and then sent it to CNN.

Really? You think so? I could be wrong, but that doesn't seem at all the case to me.

First, I think a lot of this is just skill. You dig around in the stuff that's publicly known, find usernames and links to old bios, and then start searching for those usernames on every social media site to see if a unique handle appears on OkCupid, PornHub, etc.

Second, on the resource side, there are tons of data brokers that have a ton of info on all of us. You don't think CNN has $50 to drop on a file filled with tracking data on a senate candidate? I think even broke local newsrooms have access to license plate reader data and leaked medical records and a ton of super personal info. I don't think they tend to use it, because a lot of them are understaffed and it's less cost-effective than just writing up local police blotters and whatever appears on Nextdoor. But I don't think it's hard to get this stuff at all.

But I don’t think it’s hard to get this stuff at all.

Okay, then show me: If its just that easy, find my old reddit account.

You are here on lemmy. That means you are EASILY more technically competent than 97% of the staff at any given newsroom in the US. And I know for a fact I'm an easily doxx-able account.

I've built tools like this and have some knowledge of the price for API's that give these kinds of access. The API's you are imagining to exist (and a few do) are priced at the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollar per month. There are minimum purchases. Like you don't even get basic access without getting to price points in the hundreds of thousands. And even then, you need skilled operators, technicians, and programmers to build around those API's to get the kinds of information you are looking for.

I think you are massively underestimating the technical skills and overestimating availability of the tools required to do these things.

What I would suggest is that this information came through the work of a private investigation outfit; a contractor that specializes in this kind of work. I also don't think its coincidence that the governor also announced their candidacy for Senate on the same day. I would guess that someone "in the know" had a PI outfit building this profile and released the information to CNN to try and sabotage GP. Not necessarily someone in the office, but some one with knowledge of the plan and independent funding to carry out the work.

Well maybe I'm wrong then. FWIW, you sound confident and credible to me.

I do agree that it seems obvious that this was sent to CNN by Janet Mills rather than discovered in house. I was just saying that I think this kind of research is easy enough for CNN to do that they could, but I agree that based on the timing of Mills' entrance into the race and the fact that I just don't really expect places like CNN to be that proactive that, yeah, this was absolutely sent to them in an email that probably looked like: "Subject: Anonymous bombshell tip! ; From: PR@ millsforsenate. com"

I'm curious how it works out. Attacking a guy running as an outsider in Maine for being pro-worker, pro-gun, and fed up with the system kind of sounds like they're misreading the electorate. Like... don't threaten Mainers with a good time, you know?

Attacking a guy running as an outsider in Maine for being pro-worker, pro-gun, and fed up with the system kind of sounds like they’re misreading the electorate. Like… don’t threaten Mainers with a good time, you know?

Yeah. I totally agree. And, full disclosure, I was in a zoom with Graham last night (an organization I volunteer/ organize with is going to endorse him, and this is a huge hint for your doxxing effort). And I did try to directly ask him about this, but I was late to the zoom and couldn't get my question in. He also seemed pretty rattled.

These kinds of "attacks" aren't going to stop and I think its a strategic mistake to apologize, depending on where you are at in the candidate cycle. Graham caught on leaning into the kinds of things he said in his reddit account, not leaning away from them. And the best model for that who found great success in doing so is the, now meteoric, Zohran Mamdani.

Zohran didn't lean away from calling Israels actions a genocide: he leaned into it. And he made political hay in doing so). Graham isn't wrong in saying that there have been no demonstrated diplomatic solutions to fascism: so don't back down from the statement.

Common Defense Endorses Graham Platner for United States Senate in Maine

Common Defense endorses Graham Platner for Maine’s U.S. Senate, citing leadership, defense of democracy, and a commitment to veterans and fully funded VA care.

^{Common Defense}

Good for you, and thanks for doing all that! I won't prescribe a specific strategy, but for what it's worth: as soon as I read the news about this today, I went and donated $10.

I already liked him, but I don't just throw $10 at everyone I like. But I saw this and immediately wanted his campaign to see strong fundraising this week and get the message that they don't need to worry about this kind of thing.

The streams are not the problem. Sometimes with content that was especially hard to find I'd grab the URL to the stream and download it via curl.

The problem is getting there. You have to navigate through treacherous sites with dubious "Stream now" buttons that bring even the best ad blockers to their limits. With myriad "sorry your stream is in another castle" and CAPTCHAS so complicated they could summon Cthulhu.

I think op doesn't want to navigate that shit with a remote keyboard and mouse and would rather have a nice interface that hides all that shit.

Yeah currently I'm just leaning toward using a docked Steam Deck, and using desktop mode with a wireless keyboard that has a built-in touchpad. The browser as is would be fine.

Maybe if I want to put in the extra effort I can see about adding the browser as a "non-Steam game" and set it to open straight to a streaming site, so that I can open it directly from gaming mode.

stream torrents

It's called leeching

Imperialism is when you have a civil war.

Liberals always think "imperialism" is when you say things about places you don't directly rule. I am begging you to learn about unequal exchange and foreign interference. Imperialism is a process of incredible violence where labor and resources are extracted, finished products are sold back at a high price, and governments who resist are interfered with. Imperialism is enforced by organizations such as the IMF, CIA, and US Military.

If China were like American imperialists, Taiwan would have been reduced to rubble long ago. A better example of imperialism would be the attempt America has been discussing to steal Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing industry.

Got a text from someone that has been interacting with some folks from Taiwan on an international trip. This was how they described the situation.

They are in their 60's and grew up in Taiwan and own an apartment in Taipei, returning often, both speak Mandarin. They said the Taiwanese do NOT fear China, that is the opinion of the US government.

Aah.

Posing a question on this same logic(I don't agree with this, just asking to see whether you view it similarly. Also, assuming that you are USAmerican):
Are the Southern states of USAmerica under imperialism now?
Or is imperialism cool when it's the Northern USAmerican states doing imperialism on the Confederate States?

Already has been. Two excerpts from Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth:

Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.”

[12]Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. [13] Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” [14] In fact it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.

Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeatedremoved, beginning at age nine. [15] The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.

In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. [16] The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care. They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land — or the monastery’s land — without pay, to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. [17] Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location.

[18]As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.

One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.” [19] Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed.

[20]The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery.

[21]The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.

Selection two, shorter: (CW sexual violence and mutilation)

The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation — including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation — were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs.

[22]Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.” [23] Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet.

[24]In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who wasremovedd and then had her nose sliced away.

[25]Earlier visitors to Tibet commented on the theocratic despotism. In 1895, an Englishman, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote that the populace was under the “intolerable tyranny of monks” and the devil superstitions they had fashioned to terrorize the people. In 1904 Perceval Landon described the Dalai Lama’s rule as “an engine of oppression.” At about that time, another English traveler, Captain W. F. T. O’Connor, observed that “the great landowners and the priests… exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal,” while the people are “oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft.” Tibetan rulers “invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition” among the common people. In 1937, another visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, “The Lamaist monk does not spend his time in ministering to the people or educating them. […] The beggar beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth.” [26] As much as we might wish otherwise, feudal theocratic Tibet was a far cry from the romanticized Shangri-La so enthusiastically nurtured by Buddhism’s western proselytes.

-Dr. Michael Parenti

Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth

Along with the blood drenched landscape of religious conflict there is the experience of inner peace and solace that every religion promises, none more so than Buddhism.

^redsails.org

Free the Dalai Lama's Tibetan slaves

Oh wait already did

Tired: Theocratic monarchy where the crown is passed from you to your heir

Wired: Theocratic monarchy where the crown is passed from you to yourself reborn