BANNED USER: /comment/193024
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
Failed repeatedly in his attempts to die a hero and has now lived long enough to become the villain.
User ID: 659
Banned by: @cjet79
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
"Borderline suicidal" I will grant, but whether their behavior was "antisocial" or their concerns "non-existent" is another matter.
As you say, "the most important thing was doing whatever it took to prove their virtue" and I think there is a tendency amongst those who've only ever experienced a prosperous liberal society to falsely conflate "virtuous" and "pro-social" behavior with being supportive polite and inoffensive. Point being that being a "good guy" does not necessarily entail being a "nice guy".
One could argue that the subsequent moderation was a product of having successfully established a reputation for virtue rather than the inverse.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
Like the OP I feel like you're approaching this from the position that "the election must be presumed legitimate unless proved otherwise in a court of law" when the whole point of my reply is that no such obligation exists.
And my point is that Donald Trump is a sore loser who was never going to accept that he lost “fair and square”.
Irrelevant because it is not Donald Trump the individual you ultimately need to convince but a plurality of the people who voted for him.
I don't think that is the job of election officials.
Then, as @Walterodim and others have observed below, we have a serious problem.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
Again, this is where the nature of the contested environment comes up.
As I said above "purpose of an election is not to produce a "true" or "accurate" result. It is to produce a clear result that the candidates (and their voters) can accept as legitimate."
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
That means you don't really even want elections, right? You just want negotiations over policy.
Perhaps this is the Leviathan-shaped hole in the discourse rearing it's ugly head again, but "negotiations over policy" (or rather who gets to set that policy) is exactly what an election is, is it not?
Otherwise, I refer you to @DuplexFields' response above.
No-excuse mail-in voting has been available in many states for a long time...
Sure, but it was typically limited to legal residents living out-of-state/overseas and was something that had to be requested with a reason provided, thus guaranteeing at least some correlation between mailed ballots and active voters. Changing the rules at the last second to allow mass mailings as was done in Virginia, Pennsylvania, California, Et Al was perhaps justified in the context of ongoing Covid lockdowns but has no place today. The whole thing just reeks of Rham Emmanuel/Janet Reno-esque opportunism.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
Did it meaningfully alter the outcome? Was it foul play?
Can you provide evidence that it did not?
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
This is an incoherent pair of sentences.
It's not incoherent at all it is the core of what I mean when I bring up "the contested environment". The purpose of having documented chains of custody and witnesses from both parties involved in the process is so that when irregularities do occur, Side A can tell Side B "Ok, but your guy signed off on it. If you have a problem with the count, you should take it up with them". "Truth" and "Accuracy" are secondary concerns.
The point I'm trying to make here and the point that yourself the OP, @2rafa, @SwordOfOccam don't seem to be grasping is that onus of proof is not on the losers to provide evidence of illegitimacy, the onus is on election officials to convince the losing party that they lost fair and square. See my above reply to @FiveHourMarathon.
Basically yes.
If you want a peaceful transition of power, you need to be able to convince the losers that they lost fairly and that they have more to gain by continuing to work within the system than they have to lose by checking out of it or blowing it up.
As I've touched upon before I think liberals tend treat the relative peace and prosperity of societies such as the US and EU as though it were a physical law (like gravity), rather than something that has to be actively cultivated and maintained, and this sort of attitude strikes me as a manifestation of this tendency.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
I don’t know why people discount the fact that Trump isn’t coming to “they stole the election from me” from some kind of neutral position.
Are you suggesting that liberal partisans/Biden-supporters are not just as biased if not more so in the opposite direction? To quote the Russian Ambassador in Dr. Strangelove "Our source was the New York Times" or rather Time Magazine.
As I've tried to explain in some of your earlier 2020 election threads I feel like you are either misrepresenting or fundamentally misunderstanding the nature opposition's objections.
Elections are by their nature a contested environment not just between the individual candidates, but as Tom Scott touches upon in this video on electronic voting, between the candidates, their respective voters, and those administering the election. You seem to be approaching this issue as though it were a criminal trial where the election must be presumed legitimate unless proved otherwise in a court of law, but that's not how this works. You need to understand that the purpose of an election isnot to produce a "true" or "accurate" result. It is to produce a clear result that the candidates (and thier voters) can accept as legitimate, including the ones who lost. This is why we use paper ballots with documented chains of custody, this is why we have laws requiring that the counting be witnessed by representative of each candidate/party. Defendants may be constitutionally entitled to a presumption of innocence, but there's nothing in the constitution about presuming that election officials are impartial or even competent for that matter. As such I would suggest that in the event that the above safeguards are broken/removed or other irregularities appear (and I don't think you can deny that there were irregularities) it is only fair, dare I say it rational, to ask "what gives?". Likewise the more stridently partisans of the winning candidate insist that "there's nothing to see here" while simultaneously denying access to recourse, the more reasonable it becomes for the losing candidates and their voters to suspect foul play.
The simple thing that after 4 years of this conversation you still don't seem to grasp is that you aren't going to convince anyone the election was legitimate by arguing the niggling technical details of individual cases and motions. You need to actually address the elephant in the room.
My original reply was lost in site reset but I will try to sum up.
While it is very possible that “He Gets Us doesn’t get it" it seems obvious to me from the rest of your post that you don't really "get it" either. I think that by attempting to frame/justify Christainity in explicitly secular left-wing/Rousseauean terms you're effectively falling into the trap I described in my Inferential Distance post about narratives and the Matrix. In short, you still think that's air you're breathing.
If you were to ask a representative sample of sincere Christians for the "starting point" of the Christian faith I'd wager that a significant majority would respond with some take on John 3:16 i.e. For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son. For such a short phrase there's a whole lot to unpack there, but I'm going to stick to the elephant in the room. God is not just mighty, he is the mightiest, the literally All-Mighty. And yet he sacrifices, he suffers, and he is humbled. Consider the narrative role of this act. Consider the obvious question it raises in the mind of the attentive reader. Why would he do that? Sure, in the very next line we get so that whoever believeth in him should not perish but that doesn't the question so much as add a layer of abstraction. Why would God care if our sorry sinful asses perish or not? That's the Big question.
In contrast the whole "sky-daddy said so" brand of rhetoric, you seem to be endorsing here with your talk of Jesus as "the most dominant person" and virtue as mere "status-seeking behavior" is a weak/straw man more common amongst woke academics and edgy teenagers who've read a summary of Nietzsche than actual Christians. The oft heard refrain amongst Christians is not "what did God tell you?" or "what's in it for me?" it is "What would Jesus do?" Sometimes to "be Christlike" means associating with undesirables. Sometimes it means humbling yourself by washing the feet of your guests. Sometimes it means beating the shit out of a shady money changer in the temple square, and sometimes it means having a specific hill that you are not only ready but willing to die on.
Virtue is not desirable because it leads to higher status and other worldly rewards (though it can) it is desirable because contra the irony-pilled twitter and substack perverts that get regularly linked on this forum. Good things are good in and of themselves.
While the Lord knows I have my own issues both theological and otherwise with Bill High, the Signatory Foundation, and wider Calvary Chapel-adjacent subculture that puts out these adds, I have to give credit where credit is due, they seem to have come up with a strong pitch, and it seems to be annoying the correct people.
Edit: spelling/links
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
I think it goes from the lowliest undergrad, to the president of Harvard. I get that this sound radical to some people, but I don't think that "sounding radical" necessarily equates to incorrect.
The implication is that they still think that's air they're breathing.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
despite the absurdity of that claim.
I it really "absurd" though? That's what I am questioning
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
I feel like you're missing the point, the bigger and much scarier claim from a trans perspective is the acknowledgment that that identity is a tool for the identifier more than it is a property of the identified, thus exposing all the "sex assigned at birth" nonsense as the lie that it is.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
That's not center right.
It's not "center right" according to whom?
Like I said, that what was the moderate/centrist position in the 90s is now considered "far right" should be an indication of just how far off the reservation the media has drifted in the last 20 years.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
My take on this is essentially the same as @ArjinFerman's
Seems to me that your complaint against conservatives is that they are too conservative and need to become less so if they want to be taken seriously. Forgive me for finding such arguments unconvincing and suspecting ulterior motives.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
I'm not sure if you intended this question as a joke or some sort of "gotcha" but the obvious answer is Donald Trump.
Dude was/is a vaguely right-leaning Democrat. His political positions and persona hasn't actually changed all that much since the 90s and early 00s. That what used to be the centrist/moderate position of both parties less than 20 years ago is now considered "far right" by the media and academia shows just how far they've shifted to the left.
The Wokies hate Trump because he's an unironic "'Murica Fuck Ya" sort of guy. Meanwhile the DR hate him because his popularity is effectively a big old middle-finger to everything they believe.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
Scott isn't arguing against rigor.
Corporate_needs_you_to_find_the_differences.png
What value that rigor has is in that it applies equally and brooks no excuses, IE in that it is rigorous. Arguing that rigor shouldn't apply under certain circumstances or to only certain parties IS arguing against rigor.
The point is not that engineers don't occasionally over-promise and under-deliver. The point is that unlike people who work in science or academia, they actually have to deliver.
ETA: in short, what @SnapDragon said, the critical difference between a scientist, an academic, and an engineer is that unlike the other two, the engineer actually has to actually produce something of value if he/she wants to keep their job.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
Rich, mainstream white people are the right's natural constituency.
No, no they are not.
Such were the wages of the Clinton years. The Democrats cut ties with their labour roots and now "the Left" is wholly a Hi-Low alliance of wealthy capitalists and urban lumpenproles against the working class and petite-bourgeoisie.
Meanwhile it remains the petite-bourgeoisie who are (and always have been) the right's natural constituency.
Because "Elections are by their nature a contested environment"
Because "the purpose of an election is not to produce a "true" or "accurate" result. It is to produce a clear result that the candidates (and their voters) can accept as legitimate, including the ones who lost."
To paraphrase you earlier comment, it sounds to me like you don't really want elections. You just want to dictate terms.
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