[MagicWishMonkey]

Is it really a conspiracy if US intelligence agencies say Russia has been stirring up shit?

The way right wingers bend over backwards to pretend that Russia doesn't have a long history of this sort of thing never ceases to amaze me.

[mistermann]

More abstractly, most everyone bends over backwards to promote their subconsciously estimated personal ~~illusion~~ model of reality as being representative of shared reality.

As the saying goes: "Humans gonna human".

[Chris2048]

> to pretend that Russia

I didn't pretend anything, I compared two things.

The US intelligence agencies don't themselves have a clean record: COINTELPRO, PRISM, CIA spying on the Senate intelligence committee (then lying about it).

Each of those counts as a conspiracy, and it's of note that people like Edward Snowden have been hunted and chased out of the country (and people like Julian Assange similarly persecuted).