Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
No bio...
User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
welp =/
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
OK, sure, "nothing is neutral", but do you have any evidence or sources that have a reputation for doing good work that you can provide? As in, people who aren't just broken clocks fishing for an answer they want, regardless of what reality might show?
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
I've never heard about the story beyond a passing mention. I've debated a fair few election skeptics, but they each pluck their own pet theory out of the gish gallop so it's always something new. All I see on the Ruby Freeman/Shaye Moss story on Google is Giuliani losing a defamation suit against them, and being asked to pay a ludicrous sum. Is there a site (preferably neutral) that summarizes it better in your eyes?
I don't really want to watch 5 hours of hearings in any cases.
Upon Google searching it, I find the audit itself was highly controversial for being directed by a partisan firm. I plugged the 74k claim into Google, and found a deluge of articles saying the claim is just wrong, that the claimed discrepency comes from confusing that EV32 and EV33 files aren't meant to be full records of all ballots that have been sent, but rather:
The EV32 file includes all requests that voters make for early ballots, either by mail or in person, up to 11 days before Election Day. The EV33 file includes returned early ballots up to the Monday before Election Day.
I cannot find any followup from the other side. Do you have an article (again, preferably neutral) that has a response?
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
This interview is silly. Yarvin claims without evidence that Democrats know how to steal all the elections without leaving any evidence. When asked how Trump won 2016, he handwaves it away by claiming they "didn't have the technology back then".
This is just pre-cope for if they lose. If they win, they can claim "we won despite all the Dem fraud, we must have actually won by 40 points!"
Maybe there's actual evidence somewhere but I stopped watching after a few minutes.
Again, as I said to the other guy, if you're so sure the election is a foregone conclusion, put your money where your mouth is.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
I got fed up with the enshitification of streaming services that I went back to pirating all the videos and TV shows I watch. I've gotten a google search result for a show I want to watch, only to subscribe and find out it's been removed a few too many times.
where is anybody bothering to exchange ideas about it?
Nobody ever really did this. Debates have always just been simultaneous press conferences.
just wondering what the options are besides the groupchats.
There are none, since it's incredibly rare for people to actively go out and search about things that could change their minds on political issues. Revealed preferences are that people don't give a crap about being persuaded despite exhortations of "having an open mind".
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
I'm interested. Please present the best evidence you have.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
Repealing the 12th would do little more than act as a massive incentive for an assassin's bullet. The VP has basically no defacto power, but that could change if #1 isn't around any more.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
Fox may have jumped the gun on calling Arizona, but nobody called the national race overall until 3 days later when it was clear that Biden did indeed win.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
This strike is comically atrocious PR for unions generally. Led by a fat entitled brat that looks like an IRL interpretation of Evrart Claire, with a millionaire salary who just so happened to start the strike one month before the election and having been photographed having a meeting with one of the candidates. He even has connections to the mafia and an unsolved murder (????) hanging over his head too.
Basic longshoremen themselves have had all sorts of suspicious stories come out, like how they get paid half a million per year to wash trucks, get fired for not showing up, and then rehired anyways due to their connections. Their salaries are also sky-high. They'll claim it's because they're working overtime since they're short-staffed, but it's an open secret that the union will only let you join if you have dynastic connections. They're also aggressively opposing automation in this strike as the cherry on top. Just a magnificent feast of hypocrisy, whiny entitlement, and rent-seeking.
Unions are good if they're counterbalancing employers' naturally higher market power, but unions that are too powerful are functionally just parasitic cartels that make society worse off for everyone.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
“he’ll accelerate the decline of the US empire and cause political instability/collapse due to failed reform attempts”
If you haven't heard this from the right, you haven't been paying attention. Stuff like "Obama is ruining the country" was common back in 2009-2017, especially in regards to stuff like TARP and Obamacare. Lots of breathless exclamations that a Kenyan was turning us into a Communist nation, with a leader who was definitely going to pursue a third (and fourth, fifth, etc.) term subverting the constitution.
think the notion that Trump has a 50% chance of winning the upcoming election is, in light of what happened the last time he tried, is rather far-fetched.
Put your money where your mouth is then.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
This largely proves my point.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
future historians will draw parallels between Gorbachev and the Kamala Harris presidency
This is just goofy. First off there's only like a 50-50 shot she'll win the election.
Next, the implicit argument of your claim is that Harris will lead to the political collapse of the USA, a doomer take that the far right has correctly predicted 4929 of the last 0 times it's happened. This is another motte post claiming something bombastic with little evidence. Another broken clock.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
The vast majority of the world is not experiencing interstate conflict, you're just hearing about the bits that are because it creates explosive headlines (heh). Then your brain is automatically the availability heuristic (incorrectly). Simple as.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
Do you have evidence and statistics of how the response is bad? As in, comparing it to past hurricanes. This site leans heavily right, and with a Democrat as president my default assumption is that the party out of power complains like broken clocks.
One barometer that can be checked is power outages. Florida has actually recovered very quickly, going from >1M without power to <100K in just a few days. The poorer inland Appalachian regions have fared worse and are only 33-50% reconnected, but it's still just been a few days since the hurricane hit.
As another commenter said, why aren't planes and helicopters air dropping supplies and Starlink in?
And if there has been a major relief effort, where is the news on it? The left controls pretty much the entire mainstream media, so where are the videos of airlifted supplies? I know internet is out, but people on X have shared plenty of videos of waters washing away homes etc.
Disaster porn always gets more views due to human negativity bias. There's a few people reporting on the relief efforts like the article I linked, but most don't focus on it for normal reasons of optimizing for views.
Do these factors make it more likely for these swing states to turn Blue or Red?
Not really much at all. Hyper polarization means any changes will be miniscule. Obviously Trump could say it's a huge Democrat disaster no matter how bad it was but I haven't really seen much of a compelling narrative yet among even Republicans, let alone swing voters.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
It seems to me that you just have a chip on your shoulder about the guy. None of the examples you posted here or on the other post seem wrong beyond a "reasonable people could disagree" level. Certainly not to the extent that an unbiased person would call the person making them a "hack".
I have two priors here: The first is that he uses Twitter as a sounding board for rapid ideas-testing, so I'm more willing to excuse things he says there than I would be if he made the same argument on Substack or a published article. The second is that his interests cover a few different disciplines, primarily geopolitics, economics, and the things that branch out from them, but he has a few specific topics within those fields that he's become more of an expert on. As such, I don't think the notion that he bounces between topics is particularly troubling -- he has a core set of things he covers on rotation, and most topics beyond them are covered through a similar lens. Failing that, he tends to bring data. Sometimes his conclusions are overbroad and the data can be a bit iffy (e.g. he's a big solar booster but I've heard there are issues with LCOE as a measure of their ultimate economic feasibility, yet he frequently cites it in his charts) but overall he does a good job.
For the object-level concerns:
Claiming that China somehow possesses capacity to detonate electronic devices at will... in the U.S.
Without a single suggestion as to the means they could do it. Like, there's almost zero reason to believe this is true.
Probably the worst (for him) example you brought is this one... but he's not saying that they'd just make peoples' phones explode through a hack or something, but by their supply chain dominance, a topic he's talked about at length before in other contexts. I still think it's directionally wrong that this would happen, although I don't really hold it against him much since, again, it's Twitter.
Here he is giving Kamala credit for increases in U.S. energy production that By the very graphs he posted obviously and clearly began during Trump's term.
You're arguing against a strawman here. He's not saying that Trump was bad for energy or anything like that, just that Biden continued being good.
Here he references data that cuts off in 2022 to dismiss claims about the number of migrants in Springfield in 2024. Then later admits that the number could still be higher and indeed plenty of people post various sources to back up the claim of 20k. Note that you can easily check and see that there was dramatic devolution of the situation in Haiti that might have caused a large uptick in refugees since then!
In the article he linked, there was another chart that had employment numbers to 2024 which showed basically no change in the 2 years. Furthermore, somebody in the replies posted another thread showing there was no huge surge.
As a final point, the fact that you'd put Zeihan in with the likes of Nate Silver and Scott Alexander is wild, and that you'd use him as a foil to Noah is even wilder. I've been going through some of Zeihan's predictions and he's a typical doomer, with all the bad predictions that come along with that. E.g. he made a very strong prediction that China would collapse in 10 years, and I don't think we need to wait another 6 years to see if this comes true. It's way too overconfident. China could certainly experience turmoil, and if we're being generous then there's maybe a 10% chance this spills over catastrophically in the next few years, but he's saying it like it's guaranteed.
He's also claimed Alberta and Saskatchewan would have imminently held independence referendums, and then joined the US.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
The US did it in the 90's so I see no reason why it'd be impossible.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Again, with what troops?
With troops from NATO member states? There's been a steady drumbeat of articles over the past few years of countries doing exactly this. By the way you're framing this you're seeming to imply there's some huge problem here, but you're not really saying what that is. I also don't recall this being a topic that Noah has returned to much. Did he write an article about it? You posted a single tweet he made as your evidence that he has no idea what he's talking about, on a thing that did end up happening and was (I would argue) a good idea. Is there more to this that I'm missing? This just seems extremely thin to me.
Zeihan triggers the same "bullshit artist" alarm to me that you're getting from Noah, although for me it's probably somewhat lesser here. I've only read a few of his takes and I haven't been particularly impressed, as he has the age-old pundit problem of overconfidence. His book is a good example, where it's stated as a prediction rather than a highly unlikely worst-case scenario. Funnily enough, Noah had the same critique as I did.
I also read Nate Silver and Scott Alexander and think they're great overall. They run into issues sometimes, nobody is perfect after all. But they're better than the pack which is the important part. I'm less enthused about Yud, as he's sounded more and more like a detached luddite lunatic.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
This whole thread started from a pretty flagrant violation of this rule, which seems to be in complete abeyance at this point.
The vast majority of posts on the Motte are between right-wing takes and far-right-wing takes. If there was a generous population of pro-Palestinian people here then maybe your argument would have some legs to stand on. But most people are treating this as a discussing of 2A rights and whether it's justified to shoot violent leftists. The notion that some Holocaust deniers balances that out is just goofy.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Right but... he also had friends there to help him out, who immediately intervened to drag the guy off him.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Typical sort linear thinking, draw the line on the graph, circle the high point, and assert that things couldn't possibly go higher than that!
This is uncharitable, bordering on a strawman of what he said. He didn't claim it with strong certainty, just that there was a good chance that unrest had peaked. Given the retreat of woke (e.g. Harris' campaign platform) this is seeming more and more prescient now. Quoting directly from the article:
Now of course, interest might die down and then surge again even bigger than before, as it did for BLM and QAnon in 2020. But as of right now, all of these movements seem to be less in the public eye.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Test and trace certainly seemed like it could be good early on, before it became clear that COVID was too easily spread and would never be effective. He dropped the push for test and trace after a few months.
Reinforcing east-flank NATO countries is a good idea given Russia's aggression. Previously, NATO had mostly only kept tripwire forces near Russia to avoid "provoking" them. Rescinding that policy to at least some degree was a good choice.
None of these seem like horrible miscalculations by any stretch unless I'm missing other context.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
It really doesn't seem like this is true, outside of specific contexts. Roe is dead. AA is gone. DEI is declining. Trump is openly calling for a blood-soaked deportation campaign and nobody really cares (although maybe people realize he's just full of shit at this point). Even leftists like Matt Yglesias are calling for more immigration restrictions. Harris is sprinting away from woke as fast as she can. Ctrl+f for "trans" on her campaign platform brings up only 2 results, both of which deal with "transnational criminal organizations".
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
We've likely reached the peak of unrest sometime in the last few years. The woke movements are still bubbling, but the first derivative of their energy has turned negative.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
I don't really think raising taxes on the poor exclusively is a great idea. While the poor have been doing alright recently, I'd say that's generally a good thing given the US's gini coefficient is generally higher than other OECD countries. Letting most parts of the Trump Tax Cuts expire would be a good start. Also, slashing all refundable tax credits seems unwise, given that the EITC qualifies as one according to my Google searches, and it's one of the best redistribution programs that exist. Economists across the ideological spectrum generally rate it pretty highly.
The credentials issue of jobs generally is certainly an issue, but for reasons of zero sum signaling competition rather than... the fact that people work at a desk.
Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses? Trump himself has a big personal incentive to say the election is "rigged" if he loses no matter what. It redirects the conversation from analyzing the defeat ("how could we do better"), which will inevitably shine a light on Trump's shortfalls, to one where the basic facts of reality are debated instead. The obvious example is the 2020 election. Lesser known was that Trump did the same thing in 2016 when he lost the Iowa primary to Ted Cruz. Now it seems he's preparing to do the same in 2024.
Many Republicans are more than willing to go along with this, mostly due to either negative partisanship or living in a bubble ("everyone I knew was voting for Trump, then the other guy won? Something doesn't smell right!"). If the pain of defeat stings, why not just be a sore loser instead? I've debated many people who thought the 2020 election was rigged, and inevitably it goes down one of three rabbitholes:
Vibes-based arguments that are short on substance, but long on vague nihilism that "something was off". Nearly 70% of Republicans think 2020 was stolen in some way, yet most are normies who don't spend a lot of time trying to form a set of coherent opinions, so the fallback of "something was off" serves as a way to affirm their tribal loyalty without expending much effort.
Motte-and-bailey to Trump's claims by ignoring everything Trump himself says, and instead going after some vague institutional flaw without providing any evidence to how it actually impacted 2020. For instance, while mail-in ballots are a nice convenience for many, there are valid concerns to a lack of oversight in how people fill out their ballots. People can be subjected to peer pressure, either from their family or even from their landlord or another authority figure to fill out their ballot a certain way. However, no election is going to 100% perfect, and just because someone can point out a flaw doesn't mean the entire thing should be thrown out. In a similar vein, Democrats have (rightly) pointed out that gerrymandering can cause skewed results in House elections, yet I doubt many Republicans would say that means results would need to be nullified especially if Democrats had just lost. These things are something to discuss and reform for future elections.
People who do buy at least some of the object-level claims that Trump or Giuliani has advanced about 2020 being stolen. There's certainly a gish-gallop to choose from. The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into. For most political issues, parties tend to organically rally around a few specific examples that have the best evidence or emotional valence. The fact that this hasn't happened for Trump's claims is indicative that none of them are really that good, and they rely more on the reader being unfamiliar with them to try to spin a biased story. One example occurred a few weeks ago on this site, one user claimed the clearest examples were Forex markets (which were subsequently ignored), Ruby Freeman, and the Cyber Ninja's Audit. I was only vaguely aware of these, so I did a quick Google search and found a barrage of stories eviscerating the Ruby Freeman and Cyber Ninja narratives. I then asked for the response, preferably with whatever relatively neutral sources he could find, since I was sure he'd claim the sources I had Googled were all hopelessly biased. But this proved too high a bar to clear for him, and so the conversation went nowhere. Maybe there's a chance that some really compelling evidence exists out there that would easily prove at least some of the major allegations correct, but at this point I doubt it.
At this point it seems like the idea that elections are rigged is functionally unfalsifiable. The big question on the Republican side now would be whether to claim the elections were rigged even if Trump DOES win. The stock explanation would be that the Dems are rigging it so they have +20% more votes than they normally would, so a relatively close election means Trump actually won by a huge margin. On the other hand, saying the election was rigged at all could diminish Trump's win no matter what, and it's not hard to imagine Trump claiming "this was the most legitimate election in the history of our country" if he manages to come out on top.
More options
Context Copy link