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User ID: 442
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8mo ago
If humans go on long enough a perfect sex change will indeed be possible at a genetic level. Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?
In my opinion, and the 'mainstream' tracks this as well, the current hormone mix is good enough for many transwomen to be indistinguishable from ciswomen. They may not all be 'pretty'; but the majority of them will have the hormonal and physical appearance of women as far as their secondary sex characteristics are concerned. The whole 'transwomen are women' and all that...
In general this debate is quite well settled at least from the perspective of the establishment and mainstream professional opinion. People may have issues with it, but I don't see this being overturned and I would predict that trans-rights will be even more embedded over time as the phenom becomes more normalised.
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8mo ago
Likewise, the US public at large has been brainwashed by decades of Hollywood action girlbosses, and nothing but. I honestly believe this is where all the confusion about men playing in women's sports is coming from. Forget all the scientific facts about male puberty changes versus female puberty changes, and documented physical advantages in nearly every measurable physical attribute, be it strength, reaction time, depth perception, you name it. Forget the fact that every 4 years in the Olympics you see the men's divisions regularly annihilate the women's divisions if you compared them apples to apples. 30 years of Hollywood girlboss action movies renders all that moot in the minds of most. The Olympics doesn't have a badass soundtrack, and dozens of camera angles edited together with just the right amount of CGI to saturate your brain in dopamine. So most people in their heart of hearts believe women can easily beat up men, or that men might be a little stronger.
You mean in a medium where: people have fantastical powers; get up after taking ridiculous beatings; fights that are choreographed in the heroes favour, women can be given unrealistic advantages? Yes. Is it part of a concerted effort? Yes it is; just the same as how media was criticised and influenced under previous cultural censorship. Even under that previous censorship, it came out through pushing women into roles and different ethnicities into new roles and criticising it when done badly. The status-quo has been feminism and women's equality for a few decades now. We got Black presidents in movies, many many times, before we saw Obama became president, and a woman president is just a matter of time now as well. A group of people thought that society would be better if women were more equal and ethnicities like Black Americans can have equal rights and opportunities with the rest of the population, and influence on the media was an important tool in making that happen.
I made this point before, but I think people truly underestimate how utterly brainwashed people can be by media.
As a non-culture war example that I've given before, I play a game called Commands & Colors: Ancients. It's a tactical dudes on a map game that has a bunch of Roman battles you can simulate. And it has cavalry. But these aren't armored knights, they are just dudes on horses. They are squishy, don't hit that hard, and mostly only useful for flanking or chasing down weakened units. If you try to form a wedge with them and ride right into the enemy's center with them like you see in movies, they will all die, and you will lose. Badly.
The ironic part of the cultural control is that we project present values back into depictions of the past as well. It leads people to think that people in the past behaved within current cultural frameworks. This seems to create a perception erasor for the people in the present whose main context with the past is through that same media. Most people only really understand concepts like ancient rome through the lens of movies and television shows, maybe a few documentaries if they are more inclined. Shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation were epically popular at the time, but the values explicit to that show are normalised for today's audience. The same perception that caused the opponents to run their 'knights' head first into your troops is the same impulse that sees women as being equal by default. The sad part though is that with the abundance of dopamine hits, in our 'brave new world', people can pick the drug of their choice, or their entire perspective of how the world is.
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8mo ago
It's because the sclerotic voting system has ceded significant power to the establishment of each party through the presence of safe seats and the internal selection process. Influence is worth serious bucks, and special interests and lobbyists have significant influence within the local body politic. Nancy Pelosi for instance, is an institution herself within the Democrat party. The same goes for Joe Biden, but Bushes are no better either, nor Kennedys. The business of politics is the biggest business around, with the government wielding a massive budget. At a time when voters themselves have less impact than ever, they are presented with hand-picked options that will change fundamentally nothing about how politics itself will be run.
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8mo ago
The average height of a Chinese man is 170cm and the average height of a European man is 180cm. The difference between the two is only a little above 5% on average with recent males being 175cm which indicates that much of this disparity is not genetic, but environmental. This represents populations that are separated by the largest continent in the world.
See: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202110/1235772.shtml
How much difference would you accept as reasonable based on genetics? Clearly, one standard deviation is too much. A half maybe?
Honestly, probably less than half a standard deviation but probably not nothing. It's not really that important though, because I believe that there are significant gains that can be had if the environmental influences are taken into consideration and ameliorated.
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9mo ago
Spending a few hours compiling a long and detailed post debunking HBD is particularly uninteresting to this forum and would be like trying to teach a pig to roller-skate, a waste of time and annoying to the pig; however, on the other hand spending a few hours proving how strong the genetic effect is on the population would be wonderfully received. I invite you to spend the time and that post-doc giving all the people here what they want to see, they will love you for it. Go on, I would love to see some actual evidence for this phenomenon.
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9mo ago
Relevant traits such as height, weight, intelligence etc? Compare Europe with Japan, they are very similar and yet separated by thousands of kilometers.
I see this HBD talk here constantly, yet it seems everyone assumes that it is true without bringing evidence, where is the proof for such a bold claim?
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9mo ago
But you keep bringing this up as evidence that genes can't matter, for which it is only very weak evidence.
I'm bringing it up because genes do matter, but there simply isn't nearly as much diversity within the human population which means the overall effect of genetics cannot be large on a population level. It tempers the overall impact of any kind of diversity, the fact that we humans are so similar. I simply do not believe that HBD as seemingly commonly held in this forum is nearly strong enough as a concept to use it as a battering ram to dismiss or deflect the mainstream or the left wing's position on this matter.
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9mo ago
Autism has extremely high overlap within the LGBT community:
Current research indicates that autistic people have higher rates of LGBT identities and feelings than the general population.[1][2][3] A variety of explanations for this have been proposed, such as prenatal hormonal exposure, which has been linked with both sexual orientation, gender dysphoria and autism. Alternatively, autistic people may be less reliant on social norms and thus are more open about their orientation or gender identity. A narrative review published in 2016 stated that while various hypotheses have been proposed for an association between autism and gender dysphoria, they lack strong evidence.[4]
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_and_LGBT_identities
Given the extremely strong overlap between autism and the entirety of the QUILTBAG grouping, I would expect that autism would be the next on the list after or alongside late-stage transgender rights campaigning.
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9mo ago
Sorry, I won't do that again.
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9mo ago
Modern humans are a lot alike--at least at the genetic level--compared with other primates. If you compare any two people from far-flung corners of the globe, their genomes will be much more similar than those of any pair of chimpanzees, gorillas, or other apes from different populations. Now, evolutionary geneticists have shown that our ancestors lost much of their genetic diversity in two dramatic bottlenecks that sharply squeezed down the population of modern humans as they moved out of Africa between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago.
See: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-we-lost-our-diversity
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9mo ago
Yes absolutely.
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9mo ago
We are in a golden age of biological research, CRISPR for instance is an incredible tool because it lets scientists/technicians cut the genetic code at an exact point. Furthermore, we are also at the point where our knowledge of genetic determinism is going to increase exponentially as this is literally one of the best use cases for machine learning -- multivariate analysis on extremely large datasets. We will be able to analyse not only the effect of genes, but also the interaction between different genes over the whole organism and compare that to other combined genotypes.
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9mo ago
For instance, I doubt it’s “stress” that causes whites to have lower math scores than East Asians in America.
Culturally, they have been dealing with things like 'civil service exams' for literally over a thousand years. It's so culturally ingrained into them that they tend to out-study their European brethren. When they reach higher education this over-performance tends to evaporate.
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9mo ago
I wish my comment on this topic hadn't been nixed by the reset, but anyhow in brief:
expect deflections about multiple intelligences or street smarts here. Doesn't withstand much scrutiny but is still more a more poplar stance than you'd expect.
Well, it does apply; however, the coalition on the left are heavily into a one size fits all approach -- higher education -- due to their own deep investment within the educational establishment or having been a product of it. The professional management class (PMC) simply does not respect anyone without a higher education, nor do they respect blue collar vocations or vocational education. Immigration isn't a big deal for people who have jobs with high cultural context (much of the PMC/white collar workforce) and they have significant barriers to entry to their professions. On the other hand, unrestricted migration and the closing of many blue-collar workplaces along with the heavy restrictions on development in heavy blue coded states means that there are narrow windows in both aptitude and time for a young 'disadvantaged' person to potentially rise up and get away from grinding poverty should they have been unfortunate enough to be born into it. All that extra money being poured into education (administration bloat) is essentially a blue coded jobs program with exceedingly little to show for it in terms of ameliorating poverty and hardship.
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9mo ago
Why is there a culture war? Because the study and practice of politics is professional, and the culture war creates cheap single-issue voters. Getting cheap votes on auto-lock means that they can spend their resources on their own interests and the interests of important constituents such as the median swing voter. Politicians have gone a long way to ensure that internal party processes are often the only way for them to actually be unseated from their positions, so it vests power within the party infrastructure itself and takes away power from the people they are meant to represent.
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9mo ago
Right, but we're discussing the individual heritability of intelligence here, not the race-level heritability, so this is an area where the scientific consensus disagrees with the comment you linked. See e.g. this review, finding intelligence to be highly heritable through genes. This isn't a HBD guy, this is ". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[1] He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology." and "Plomin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to scientific research.[8]". There is a tremendous amount of mainstream literature on the heritability of intelligence, a lot of back and forth between various camps, and the consensus has ended up that there are large genetic components.
I don't doubt that intelligence is heritable; however on a group level there is very little actual diversity within the human population given the fact that our most common ancestor is very recent, and HBD is making claims about the average intelligence of different groups.
The simple way to settle this would be to:
A. Discover the genes responsible for intelligence. B. Genetically test a significant number of various groups to get a baseline rate of their presence. C. Derive the genetic difference in intelligence between groups.
Has anyone actually done this?
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9mo ago
This is obviously false. Consider someone living in brazil, 7000 years ago. Their only real chance of spreading genes outside the americas came in the 1500s. That's certainly not enough time. Secondly, it's irrelevant—that everyone at some point shared ancestry doesn't mean everyone is the same along any particular trait. This is really obvious when you consider that this would apply just as much to visual racial markers.
Even historically isolated populations have had significant selection pressure and intermixture with Eurasian peoples. The average age of the most common past ancestor has been put at between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago, so in biodiversity terms human beings are closer to Cheetahs than they are to Chimpanzees. There isn't a significant amount of 'diversity' within the population to start with.
Okay? Two different responses to that. (1) If race is just something we made up, that doesn't stop us from doing statistics on it, and that doesn't mean that the stats can't tell us averages of the people who happen to be in whatever made-up categories we throw them into. This is especially relevant when people are already drawing up racial stats on representation or whatever—there should be no problem with using the same categories, to show that it's actually not all discrimination! (2) Race isn't perfect, but it does act as a proxy for genetically closer clusters of people.
It also acts as a proxy for environmental and sociocultural factors as well. Melanin levels as far as I am aware have little to know direct impact on brain development, but it still has a clear and measurable effect on social and cultural factors.
I'm not familiar with how the Gaussian-by-construction biases things; I do find this a plausible concern but don't know enough stats to figure out what things like that would do. But that doesn't void it as a measure entirely, that just means that you can't really compare gaps very well. One standard deviation might mean different things at different places along the scale, but that doesn't mean that the order is invalid.
I.Q. tests are designed for instance to give men and women the same I.Qs on average -- 100. Recent 'gains' by women that raised their relative I.Q. compared to men, IIRC 100 vs 104, would that indicate that women as a group are smarter than men on average, or does in indicate that the factors that lowered women's I.Q. in the past were removed and the test's adjustment hasn't taken that into account yet?
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9mo ago
The effects of epigenitics, microbiota, and environmental cells are just quite small. The evidence just isn't there. Environmental confounding is very well addressed by existing studies. "lack of an actual genetic explanation" - again, complex traits are extremely polygenic.
Quite frankly given the high level of motivated reasoning I see behind the HBD debate I doubt that the proponents of this theory are more careful than the academics who point at other factors. I would have to see significant actual evidence that they indeed have taken these things into consideration.
There are significant and obvious causal factors, like for instance lead exposure:
Overall, Black children had an adjusted +0.83 µg/dL blood Pb (95% CI 0.65 to 1.00, p < 0.001) and a 2.8 times higher odds of having an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL (95% CI 1.9 to 3.9, p < 0.001). When stratified by risk factor group, Black children had an adjusted 0.73 to 1.41 µg/dL more blood Pb (p < 0.001 respectively) and a 1.8 to 5.6 times higher odds of having an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL (p ≤ 0.05 respectively) for every selected risk factor that was tested. For Black children nationwide, one in four residing in pre-1950 housing and one in six living in poverty presented with an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL. In conclusion, significant nationwide racial disparity in blood Pb outcomes persist for predominantly African-American Black children even after correcting for risk factors and other variables.
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7084658/
And how exactly do they account for the elements that are not well studied? Like for instance volatile organic compounds in the air and poorer air circulation/higher CO2 levels at home? Being poor puts people closer to environmental contaminants that have large and well-known effects on the overall intelligence of people.
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9mo ago
I decided to weigh in properly first, before I respond to anything below.
I find it incredibly ironic that this topic which deals with a whole host of complex environmental, social, cultural and yes genetic factors that are interlinked is being reduced to what amounts reductive reasoning. The genetic biomarkers that indicate genetic lineage also indicate significant non-genetic differences or environmental and social causes as well. The genetic markers that indicate race also point to factors such as: blood serum lead levels; air quality/pollution exposure; poverty and its associated effects and a complex interplay between sub-cultures and the wider society around them. The argument in a nutshell is: HBD -- they are poor because they are stupid; whereas the mainstream position is that they are stupid because they are poor and discriminated against both presently and historically.
There is considerable evidence demonstrating that fetal exposure to maternal psychosocial experiences contributes to the determination of children’s neurodevelopmental trajectories (Bale et al., 2010). Data generated largely over the last two decades shows that when pregnant women experience significant stress, anxiety, or depression (each of which are frequently indexed by cortisol levels), their children are at increased risk for biobehavioral characteristics conceptualized as potential precursors to psychopathology
Also
The results of the study revealed that children who were living in poverty and whose parents lacked nurturing skills were likely to have less gray and white matter in their brains.
The researchers say that white matter is usually linked to the brain’s ability to transmit signals between cells and structures, while gray matter is associated with intelligence.
The MRI scans also revealed that poor children had two key brain structures that were smaller, compared with wealthier children. These were the amygdala – a structure linked to emotional health – and the hippocampus – an area of the brain linked to memory and learning.
Furthermore, it was found that children in poverty were more likely to experience stressful life events, such as moving house or schools, which can have an impact on brain development.
See: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/268066#Improving-parental-nurturing-skills-vital
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1893020/
The American Black population is simply exposed to a greater level of stress, and this affects them both individually as well as socially within their segregated communities. They are affected both at a personal level and by the effects of this psychopathology on a wider level within their communities as they are exposed to crime at a much higher rate than the rest of the non-Black population. These effects are passed down both through both genetic expression as well as their cultural environment. These factors carry down through multiple generations as unless the environmental causes can be ameliorated, they will persist into future generations as long as the environmental factors that caused it are still present.
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9mo ago
See:
“data also show that any two individuals within a particular population are as different genetically as any two people selected from any two populations in the world” (subsequently amended to “about as different”). Similarly, educational material distributed by the Human Genome Project (2001, p. 812) states that “two random individuals from any one group are almost as different [genetically] as any two random individuals from the entire world.”
Here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1893020/
In a nutshell, if you take a White or Asian person, they are about as different or as similar as say two White people are.
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9mo ago
I don't have time for this right now, but I'll leave my flag in the sand and say HBD is wrong. I'll just leave this quote here I found on reddit that does the same job as me taking the time:
Human biodiversity is actually pretty low - Homo sapiens has been through a number of bottlenecks and when compared to other species, such as our closest relatives like chimpanzees, we'd look like inbreeds.
Human migrations over the last thousand years have been such that literally everyone on Earth is a descendant of literally everyone that lived 7000 years ago whose offspring didn't die out. This is known as the Identical Ancestors Point (google it) and it's pretty uncontroversial if unintuitive. You can easily derive it by reasoning the other way around: simply put, the probability that anyone lived 7000 years ago and wasn't one of your ancestors given the amount of potential ancestors you'd be supposed to have (which is 27000/generation time) is low enough to be considered negligible. And 7000 years ago is a pretty conservative estimate.
Africans have more genetic diversity than literally every other ethnicity on earth taken together, so any classification that separates "Africans" from other groups is going to be suspect.
Race isn't a valid construct, genetically speaking. It's not well defined; even HBD proponents disagree on how to classify people beyond Blacks/Whites/Asians. Most of the definitions are based on self reports or continents of origin, when we know what is considered "black" in the US may not be so in, say, Brazil, or that many people from Africa can very well be considered "white". Of course most HBD proponents are from the US and are hardly aware of other countries' existence apart from their national IQ so they just handwave it away.
Intelligence is not well-defined and not construct valid. There's no single definition of intelligence on which people from different fields can agree. (Among other things, this is why AI specialists have been struggling with "general AI" for the better part of a century)
IQ has a number of flaws that would make anyone outside the field of psychology not touch it with a ten foot pole. For starters, it is by definition Gaussian for no apparent reason. The g construct itself has no neurological basis and is purely an artifact of factor analysis.
Evolution isn't just mutations + natural selection. To assume that diversity just arose from different populations adapting to different environments is already a pretty huge assumption that none of the HBD proponents cares to back up. Not every trait is an adaptation.
There's no single genetic explanation that was ever put forward to account for traits purported to be "genetic" in origin by HBD proponents. This is because HBD proponents do not care about genes, and because they do not know about anything related to genetic mechanisms. Epistasis alone fucks up many behavioral genetics models and this is just scratching the surface of the complexity involved.
Heritability does not imply genetic determinism. Many things are heritable and do not involve genes. These include epigenetic mechanisms, microbiota, or even environmental stress on germinal cells (this can carry over two generations if someone is pregnant - the stress then applies to the cells that would become the germinal cells of the foetus). That's not even addressing the environmental confounding factors. When confronted with their lack of an actual genetic explanation, HBD will fall back to utterly bizarre retorts like "uuuh you don't need to find genes for something to be grounded in genetics".
Literally every public HBD proponent operates outside academia and is virtually unknown in the genomics community. They are known to make up their own journals (from Mankind Quarterly to OpenPsych) so they can publish in them instead of trying to get accepted in mainstream ones. "Everyone is in a conspiracy against me" only goes so far as an argument. On the other hand, literally every public figure in the genomics community has spoken against HBD. Generally speaking, HBD proponents are unqualified. Their understanding of genetics and evolution does not go beyond high school, none of them hold a degree in a discipline relevant to genetics and none of them has ever published in a high profile journal. (I'm going to be charitable and assume that high profile means IF > 4). HBD proponents are more interested in shitposting on the internet than publishing genetics papers and going to conferences.
Literally anyone who's been working on HBD stuff has been receiving funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund whose express purpose is to prove a hierarchy of races and justify eugenics since the 1930s so their neutrality can be questioned.
Many public HBD figures have been found guilty of fraud. Cyril Burt would literally forge results, while Lynn would take the average of two neighbouring countries' IQ in order to derive "data" from a country's unknown national IQ. HBD proponents actually doubled down on this practice. People like Rushton would attempt to transpose pleiotropy mechanisms from some species to humans, despite the explicit insistence that such mechanisms were not adaptable because the genetics behind skin colors in humans are completely different from that of species governed by pleiotropy. Other people like Kanazawa would write a paper literally assuming the Earth was flat, and it was accepted in a "high profile" journal like Intelligence in three weeks.
Each one of those should be a debunking, but of course HBD proponents don't really care about any of those; as I said, none of them has ever been really involved in the actual scientific community. The whole point is to give an appearance of scholarship under the guise of clever sounding citations and lengthy papers, nevermind that those are in bogus journals from fields that are virtually unknown of the broader genomics community.
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9mo ago
If demographics really are destiny, then the one side that actually has the greatest reason to destroy or undermine democracy is the GOP. There are a number of verifiable claims for instance that they deliberated deregistered voters and attempted to minimise voter turnout by making it harder for some demographics that vote Democrat to exercise their rights. If the demographic wave washes away any chance for the GOP as it currently exists to ever wield power again, that will give them all the right motivation and incentive to prevent that from happening. The GOP can reform and form a new coalition to oppose the Democrats, but it might mean free reign in the foreseeable future for the Democrats to unroll their entire wish-list of changes like Healthcare and social spending that the GOP ideologically and institutionally opposes. Once that happens, it would be incredibly difficult for them to reverse as the changes would likely be incredibly popular with the broader American public.
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9mo ago
It seems incredibly incompetent for Trump to allege voter fraud and then do seemingly nothing to counter it in the four years he held office. What can you really say? It was there, he saw it, and he was too useless to do anything about it? If it was a true claim, then the most motivated person in the world to deal with it would be Trump himself or his closest advisors.
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9mo ago
What do you believe are my motte and bailey positions on this topic?
The election fraud issue is vapid because taking a deep dive into what amounts to propaganda is an exercise in frustration. The claims serve the purpose of riling up his base support, and to shore up his power; given the vast number of them they act as a shotgun approach for his supporters to find one particular claim compelling.
Your motte: All claims are at best specious and at worst groundless. Your bailey: Insufficient evidence exists that has survived testing by the court system and all attempts have failed, there is simply insufficient evidence to make the claim that the election was stolen -- I'm not so sure on your fall back position to be honest as the motte here is so strong that it would be hard to imagine ever having to fall back to the bailey.
I thought about this issue while I was at the gym, and the most plausible take that fits the evidence or lack-thereof would be internal government agencies such as the CIA. I'm looking at this issue through the lens of The Dictator's Handbook, which you can get 90% understanding through watching this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&ab_channel=CGPGrey
If the Democratic party had a concrete means to steal elections, or an 'auto win' button, then I cannot see them not pressing it every single time as they have already worked themselves up into a rhetorical fervor that their opposition is evil and cannot be allowed control of the government. On the other hand, the only institution with the knowledge, wherewithal and motivation to steal an election would be the CIA as they already have considerable experience in doing this exact thing in overseas countries, the list of governments overthrown or rumoured to have been overthrown by the CIA is quite frankly staggering. The CIA has literally had one main job over the past 75 years that it has been around, dunk on the Russians, and it would be hard for them to let that go -- especially given the alleged ties between Trump and Russia. The sheer amount of useless chatter can be explained away by one of two possible scenarios: either propaganda, as I suspect, or a successful intelligence operation flooding the information space with useless junk.
Biden came to the White House with a long history of receiving intelligence briefings, having served eight years as vice president and 36 years as a senator from Delaware, where he led the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and served on the Intelligence Committee when it was first created in the 1970s. The thing he missed most after leaving the vice presidency, he said, was reading the President’s Daily Brief, the compilation of the intelligence community’s top collection and analysis.
Joe Biden has had considerable ties to the CIA through his long career in office, and during this term he has increased the funding and elevated the status of the agency within the United States government by for instance elevating the director of the CIA to his cabinet. See: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/politics/bill-burns-cia-director-cabinet-level/index.html . Biden would have the necessary ties to coordinate the effort with the CIA and I believe the CIA could have been motivated to help him, especially given accusations publicly for instance that Trump compromised several agents with his intelligence leaks, along with a number of other OPSec issues as well. One the other hand, Biden has given greater 'treasure' and power to the agency over the past few years; whereas the Republican party has developed a spottier relationship with the agency ever since the second gulf war; finally, the 'drain the swamp' rhetoric is a direct challenge to the institutional members of the government.
Unfortunately, there is no real evidence and at best it is 'evidence of absence'. I am picking on the CIA as a potential conspirator simply because they are the only agency that could pull this kind of mission off and then get away clean. They have a potential motive to act due to their seemingly poor relationship with Trump; the means to act because of their close relationship with Biden as well as their institutional know-how in the spheres of dis/misinformation and election tampering, and finally they have recieved rewards from the Biden administration with considerable additional funding going their way. This is heading down the road of 'conspiracy theory', but the agency deemed responsible to prevent foreign interference in the election is likely the best placed agency to tamper with the election themselves. The necessary number of potential guilty parties is quite small and well contained given only a few top level people need to know the full extent of a 'possible conspiracy', and the rest of the agency has little motivation to offer help to Trump who has shown disdain for them and has actively hurt their operations.
Arguably Iran too has already got the bomb, or is pretty close to the threshold, and not quite politically committed to crossing that line yet. It seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy that has continued to act to destabilise both South East Asia and the Middle East.
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