I’m not knowledgeable enough about potential electoral fraud to get into much of a debate, but it does seem to me that any fraud should tend to favor Democrats over Republicans simply because it’s easier for Democrats to cheat.
As @SwordOfOccam pointed out, “the best check on election fraud at any scale is that people of various ideologies and parties make up the officials and volunteers in any given area, and all it takes is one witness to expose something.” The trouble is, that’s just not the case in all urban districts. In 2012, for example, 59 voting precincts in Philadelphia alone voted 100% for Obama. The linked article notes that precincts in Chicago and Atlanta did the same in 2008. It would be much easier to run up the tally in those areas, either via fraudulent votes or fraudulent tallies, than it would be in even the reddist of Republican precincts, since Republicans don’t cluster up in the same way that urban Democrats do, and there are always at least a few Democrats in the strongest Republican strongholds.
Lewis2
2mo ago
There are shortcuts. Come in with a membership transfer from your local church, Masonic temple, Elks lodge, or the like, and you’ll be accepted and welcomed like some long-lost relative. Get involved in the local community and demonstrate that you’re hard-working, reliable, and not a complete ass, and within a couple of years (or sooner), you’ll have people trying to set you up with their female friends and relations.
Lewis2
1mo ago
The crowd at Datasecretslox, a sister site to this one, have annual in-person meetups, and I gather many of the commenters also participate in a loosely-affiliated Discord channel. Possibly as a result, they seem to have quite a bit more of a community feel over there. You might give them a shot.
Lewis2
2mo ago
Have the other predictions failed or just not come true yet? I think the normalization of pederastic relationships is coming absent a culture shift, but I don’t think it will happen for another several decades at least.
Lewis2
3mo ago
Do British drivers actually abide by the speed limits? US drivers routinely drive at least ten MPH over.
Lewis2
3mo ago
My point was mostly that @ymeskhout’s first point was not necessarily correct—that I would expect the background level of fraud to favor Democrats in any given election due to ease of opportunity.
As for a grand, national conspiracy to change election results, while I do think that is a threat due to most states’ remarkably poor election security practices, I don’t think it’s the only, or even primary, threat model to be worried about. Instead, I would think a distributed conspiracy would be far more likely, with low-level participants each working independently and without any direction from on high, but all from the same motive.
Take sex abuse conspiracies by way of analogy. The Catholic sex abuse scandal was a grand international conspiracy, with almost all members of the hierarchy implicated in some way or another in moving priests around and preventing them from being prosecuted. The conspiracy naturally eventually leaked, and it caused a huge scandal. By contrast, every time some Baptist minister abused a girl in his church in the past 50 years, the elders just quietly removed him, sent him away to counseling, and didn’t say anything when they learned he was serving another church a year later. You had pretty much the same actions in both cases, but for the Catholics, the conspiracy was (naturally) a top-down one, while for the Baptists, it was (naturally) bottom-up, without any coordination from congregation to congregation. A bottom-up conspiracy of people individually choosing to fill out absentee ballots for their mentally incompetent relatives, poll workers in safe areas slightly inflating their numbers, and the like, would be very difficult to prove, since there would be essentially no coordination among participants or even knowledge that anyone else is doing anything similar. Just about the only thing they’d have in common would be opposition to rules that make voting more secure, which is a position that’s remarkably more common in one party than the other.
Lewis2
2mo ago
Equally rape, what's to stop any woman from claiming she was raped to abort a child she doesn't want? Because, in all honesty, requiring a conviction before an abortion is so stupid that I don't think anyone can get behind it.
You don’t need to require conviction, just an accusation to the police. Most supposed rape victims aren’t even willing to do that, which makes their claims slightly suspicious.
Lewis2
14d ago
I was formerly the board chair of a local non-profit daycare. Even with free facilities, only a couple of full-time staff, a bunch of part-time high school and college students making barely above minimum wage (this was pre-Covid), and zero excess funds most years, we still were barely cheaper than many of the other local daycares. At least where I live, childcare is a highly competitive field. Any conspiracy to artificially inflate costs would need to include every daycare run by a non-profit, university, church, stay-at-home mom, large employer, etc., including every new entrant into the business, of which there are many. A sinister cabal is just not possible.
Lewis2
1mo ago
the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace
To what does this refer? It seems to me that the Ukrainians are no more eager for a negotiated settlement than the U.S. is. Now, it might be in their national interests to negotiate a peace, but they still have to want it to go down that route.
Lewis2
1mo ago
The screen on my nine year old iPhone just cracked, so I’m finally facing the prospect of purchasing a new phone. I’m very pleased with the longevity of my current phone, so I’m planning to stick with Apple (yes, I know Android is supposedly better, but I’ve never heard of an Android lasting so long without any issues). Anyone have an opinion on the benefits of getting an SE vs. a 13/14/15? I’m hoping to get a decade’s use out of whatever I purchase, but I’m also cheap, so I’d prefer to spend as little as possible to accomplish that. (I assume the cameras for any iPhone on the market will be head and shoulders above what I have now, so I’m not worried about getting the best camera available.)
Lewis2
2mo ago
I’d be interested to hear any examples you can give of past pederastic predictions. I spend a lot of time reading 19th and early 20th century primary sources, and I don’t remember ever coming across that concern, nor can I think of anything that would have caused concern about it in the 16th–18th centuries. The closest I can come up with is opposition to castrati, but that’s closer to opposition to trans procedures for minors than to anything related to pedophilia. I guess there was also opposition to child brothels, but those were apparently actually a thing in some areas, and polite society was unanimously happy to shut them down.
As for the present, I agree pederasty normalization is extremely unlikely in the next several decades for reasons that you note. I can’t help but notice, though, that some pedophilic activists and sympathizers have started to mimic techniques that other marginalized groups have used to gain acceptance, and I could see a concerted effort paying dividends in, say, 50–70 years.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Islam is dying. Just as Christianity is. Sunnis and Shi'ites in fight, Pakistan has problems with the Taliban. They are not united.
I don’t have an opinion on the future of Islam, but the end of this paragraph seems to contradict the beginning. Islam is disunited precisely because it isn’t dead. The Shiites and Sunnis, and ISIS and the Taliban, all care so deeply about their religion and about the proper interpretation of it, that they are willing to physically fight and die for it. Citing that as evidence that Islam is dying is like citing the Thirty Years’ War as evidence that Christianity was dying 400 years ago.
Lewis2
2mo ago
Sure, and the police should be able to use the DNA to track down the supposed rapist. If it turns out she lied, then she can face the legal consequences for filing a false police report. Looks like up to a year in prison in my state, plus whatever additional penalty she may face for getting an illegal abortion.
Lewis2
14d ago
Oh, you’re absolutely right. I remember raising the minimum wage for the part-timers to $8/hour ten or twelve years ago. The last I heard, the new starting wage at the same daycare was something like $15–$17/hour, and this isn’t even in an urban area, let alone a major one. I don’t know of any white collar jobs that saw a 100% increase in salary over the same time period.
Lewis2
1mo ago
I’ve also seen plenty of old people complain that the concomitant rise in property taxes is increasingly burdensome, especially for those on a fixed income. Sure, their kids may see more money when they die (realistically, the nursing home will probably eat most of the proceeds), but that does nothing to help them here and now.
Lewis2
2mo ago
New Reddit’s design has more white space and shows less content. It also requires you to load a new page in order to read comments that are more than a few levels deep, whereas old Reddit just requires you to tap a [+]. And as No_one said, Reddit requires you to log in to view some content, including sometimes perfectly innocuous content. Really the only downside to old Reddit is that it doesn’t have a dark mode.
Oh, and like you, I didn’t start browsing Reddit until after old Reddit had been replaced, so I don’t say any of this out of nostalgia for the old days.
Lewis2
1mo ago
I don’t have Internet at my house, nor do I have an unlimited data plan, so I make reasonably extensive use of my song collection. I also don’t trust that everything I like will always be available, so I greatly prefer to have locally saved recordings.
Lewis2
1mo ago
In the past 400 years, Christianity became practically the universal religion in two new continents and made massive gains in a third. If by “Islam is dying,” you mean that it will thrive as a major force for the next half millennium before eventually weakening, it seems to me that your claim is pretty much meaningless. On a long enough time scale, every religion, ideology, and nation could be said to be dying, since none will survive the eventual heat death of the universe.
Now, I don’t think you mean that Islam will thrive, grow, and eventually decline, but instead that it’s already on its way out. If my understanding of your claim is correct, it seems to me that Islam’s divisions are actually a clear point of strength. For comparison, look at all the mainline Protestant churches in the US. Almost all are in fellowship with each other despite their doctrinal differences, and almost all are in absolute free fall in terms of membership and attendance, much more so than their more cantankerous theological cousins, who take their confessional distinctives seriously.
Would Christianity have been stronger or weaker without schisming?
My viewpoint is probably a minority one, but I actually think it was a strength, sociologically-speaking, as the divisions fostered a competitive zeal among the different church bodies. This is most obvious in America, where Christianity is, despite its decline, still doing undeniably better than in Europe.
Im going to plant my flag in the ground and say that dresses as a general class are awesome, and I would wear them in a heartbeat if it were socially acceptable to do so. By “general class,” I would include things like robes, kilts, togas, vestments, opera capes, and so forth. These are all much more aesthetically pleasing than modern clothing, even if they’re not always as practical. I hadn’t ever thought about it before, but your comment makes me wonder if some transgender people (those on the transvestite end of things) just feel the same itch and find that women’s dresses help them to scratch it. If so, it’s just too bad that wearing clothing styles of 200+ years ago just makes you look like a twat.
Actually, a second thought on that point: men used to enjoy dressing up in fancy dress in the Masons, Shriners, Knights of Columbus, etc., but now young men have no such outlet. Maybe they should.
Lewis2
2mo ago
In a certain sense, yes, but only insofar as our legal system isn’t perfect. You also have to hazard the odds that your girlfriend will die from complications arising out of the abortion.
Edit: Of course, even should she choose not to abort the baby, there’s nothing forcing her (or you) to raise it. Adoptions are a thing.
Lewis2
2mo ago
After all, if two people who weally, weally wuv each other dis much!!! deserve the right to get legally married…
The gays weren’t the first to start sawing off that limb; the no-fault divorce crowd were. They were the ones who redefined marriage as being purely about love and redefined love as being purely about emotions. No-fault divorce and its effects (single parent households, destruction of wealth, and the like) have caused far more damage to society than gay marriage ever will, and that’s ignoring the fact that the push for gay marriage probably would never have succeeded had no-fault divorce not fundamentally redefined marriage in the first place.
Lewis2
3mo ago
The welfare state will eventually collapse of its own accord, and it won’t be pretty when it does. All open borders accomplishes is hastening that collapse and making things worse in the meantime. As Trump said, Mexico (et al.) aren’t sending their best.
Lewis2
1mo ago
sometimes inconsistently tried to provide services in Guarani and Quechua.
What sort of services are you thinking of? It can’t be the mass, surely, since that wasn’t permitted to be celebrated in the vernacular until post-Vatican II. Or were exceptions made for Latin America?
Does anyone on the right actually believe that? I only ever hear complaints that Biden is old, senile, and obviously being puppeted around by various other figures in his administration. In other words, he is personally weak and pathetic, something even their worst detractors can’t say about Stalin and Mao.
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