dasfoo
24d ago
Except that this was obvious. How can you credibly sell your ability to win elections when you can’t predict something that obvious.
The people they are selling themselves to share the same self-delusion, so it's to their benefit to affirm the delusion to get more work. This assumes that they are self-aware enough to know that their delusion is false, but most delusions persist because the deluded will not challenge them.
dasfoo
2mo ago
One of my bullshit detector modes is applying the "Cui bono?" rule: If true, who benefits from it?
I don't see a tactical or political advantage for Israel to be doing this as a matter of policy: Committing high-value troops to take out low-value targets? And certain carry a highly negative publicity penalty? What's Israel's ROI on assassinating pre-teens?
On the other hand, we know that Israel's enemies love to play the Victim PR game, exaggerating and even inventing tragedies that cast a shadow on Israel's claim of moral legitimacy. What's the Hamas ROI on shooting a few of their kids in the head if it means widespread outrage aimed at Israel? While it's hard for me to imagine such a craven tactic*, Hamas has more to gain from this than Israel does. If they're faking the shootings, the ROI for them goes up even more.
- I also can't imagine the craven tactic of positioning military assets in schools and hospitals, but we know Hamas does this and that Israel appears to take greater care to avoid civilian casualties. So these priors also lean me further toward: "If it's happening, Hamas is doing it." Alternatively, it could be a rogue Israeli soldier who has snapped, but seems unlikely to be a sanctioned military effort.
dasfoo
2mo ago
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.
That's because there are so many. IDK if this comprehensive: https://scifiwright.com/2024/01/summary-2020-presidential-election-fraud/; I doubt it. And I cringe when I see some of his sources. But it's a dynamic not too different from The Motte: If these discussions are essentially outlawed in respectable media, only the unrespectable will be having these discussions. I want these discussions to be had in more respectable fora! I think it would take the power away from the grifters who exploit these fears.
dasfoo
2mo ago
You have to have transparent elections with actual oversight and accountability. That means only valid voters allowed to vote and an ability to audit the election results. No deleted logs, missing ballot images, or discrepancies between voter count and votes counted.
Claims of potential election fraud should be met with good faith investigations and adjudication rather than instant stonewalling. I don't know how you remove partisanship from a process which is entirely staffed by motivated partisans, so that's a problem. But leading the response to a claim with "Nuh-uh" followed by "You're stupid" followed by "I can't hear you. I can't hear you." isn't going give claimants any confidence that their concerns were taken seriously. And, yes, not all the claims are serious -- but it's in the interest of civics that they be taken seriously until they can be actually discounted by evidence. And by "evidence" I don't mean "Ask accused vote counters what was going on at 3 am when no observers were there and then take their word for it as if they're angels," but actually investigate if they're telling the truth and why their stories seem to change. That's the essential problem: from the outset all fraud claims were met with unchallenged derision and all counter-claims were accepted as unchallenged gospel.
As I said a week or two ago, I think the Trump team's approach to dealing with these issues was abysmal (as is his approach to dealing with most issues, IMO), but that doesn't matter to me. I am a "civics-first" conservative: I want systems that are transparent and correctable, and which inspire faith in the systems so that we can live our lives without constantly wondering WTF happened and why there is so much apparent gaslighting when we ask to see how it happened.
dasfoo
2mo ago
Still, there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side.
For the third night in a row, anti-Donald Trump demonstrators took to the streets in several big cities and on college campuses across the United States, including an outburst of smashed windows and a dumpster fire in Portland that police countered with pepper spray and flash-bang devices.
About 4,000 protesters assembled downtown late Thursday chanting “we reject the president-elect!” the Associated Press reported. Some among the crowd vandalized 19 cars at a dealership in Northeast Portland, according to a sales manager, Oregonlive.com reports. Protesters then headed west, over the Broadway Bridge and into the Pearl District, where the windows of several businesses were smashed.
The protest was mostly peaceful until demonstrators met with an anarchist group, after which demonstrators vandalized buildings, kicked cars and knocked out power, KGW-TV reported.
Imagine if J6 had been J6-J9!
dasfoo
2mo ago
HRC would never have gotten "deplorables" past a focus group
IIRC, wasn't that said at a private donor event and someone released a surreptitious recording? That is, it was never intended for a wide or unfriendly audience. Or am I getting it mixed up with Obama's "God, Guns any Gays" remark?
dasfoo
2mo ago
Is what you're seeing a shift in core conservatives, or is it a shift in the center as SJ evolution pushes an increasingly-broad spectrum of people into oppositional alliance?
Probably the center, but I think the right -- or, the people who have become "the right" since Trump -- have fewer intellectual obstacles in the way of embracing. Even the religious conservatives, who used to be the sexual scolds, have at the essence of their ethos the aggressive male sexual imperative of "be fruitful and multiply." They want to keep it in marriage, but if kids do not feel empowered to acknowledge the hormonal impulses that will lead them to marriage, it's a non-starter. I'm not sure the left has, at their essence, a procreative sexual ethos. They want to deconstruct all of the old natural impulses and replace them with new "enlightened" ones, which is the opposite of the innate physical urges.
dasfoo
2mo ago
Was that a thing? I just remember a bunch of conservatives calling her mid on twitter.
I saw her being celebrated as a hot young woman who not only embraced being a hot young woman but saw no shame in it nor in men enjoying her in that role.
dasfoo
2mo ago
The shift in (publicly expressed) conservative views on female sexuality in the face of wokeness has been fascinating. Conservatives are now openly much more sex-positive when it comes to traditional sexuality, as a bulwark against alternate sexualities, whereas in the past they were more focused on opposing sexual permissiveness by promoting modesty. Look at the conservative embrace of Sidney Sweeney or all the rightoid influencers on X who prominently display cleavage while opining on whatever issue: the new conservative messaging is "It's good for men to want to fuck real women," because too many other, weirder avenues have opened up in pop culture.
Now, surely, this has always been the conservative ideal, but it was more prudent in the past to let it bubble in the background, lest your daughter forsake the first half of the madonna/whore dichotomy. The balance is what's important, and if nature if pulling heavily on the whore-half, socially we need to over-promote the madonna-half. Now the framing window has changed from, "Don't be a whore" to "Don't be some weird whore who is outside the bounds set back when your grandma was a respectable hetero whore for grandpa behind closed doors."
If conservatives fear that teachers/librarians are in a conspiracy to groom their kids into blue-haired gender-queer kink-mongers, you'd better believe there will be some counter-grooming. Who doesn't want their son to love tits, or their daughters to have happy marriages by doing things we don't want to know about to please their husbands? Now that the left is so far down the sex-as-anything-but-breeding path, we can be more honest about the merits of good old-fashioned fucking.
dasfoo
2mo ago
The most surprising thing to me is that apparantly Iran didn't clear their airspace before launching their missiles, significantly raising the chances of a horrific accident.
This makes me suspect the attack was a rash decision, rather than something carefully thought through.
Or maybe they considered clearing airspace would tip-off Israel to an impending attack? I would guess Israel's enemies are currently quite paranoid about how deeply Israel might have penetrated their operations after what happened to Hezbollah.
dasfoo
2mo ago
He's always heavy on eyeliner. IDK why none of his people have figured out a more natural look. Maybe he likes it that way.
dasfoo
2mo ago
No, I'm honestly just emotionally over it all.
This is OK. Just stop paying attention to politics. It will make little difference to your life beyond the improvement of shaking off the stress.
Almost any claim that X disaster will happen if you don't vote for Y is garbage. Most people just keep working, living, loving and tune out politics.
dasfoo
2mo ago
Yes, I would like to be challenged on the notion that all politicians have become completely self-serving and/or only serve the wealthy and elite and are incapable of nuanced thinking.
Maybe instead re-evaluate the position politicians play in your worldview? One of the reasons I lean libertarian is my understanding that people's well-meaning motives and actions are easily corruptible and so the best we can do is limit the power given to anyone person. IMO, the root of your angst is that you want a single person moral enough to exercise a level of power no single person is moral enough exercise. The solution is not to create a false specter of a more-perfect human, but to reduce the power of the federal government.
dasfoo
2mo ago
Temporary Protected Status and Asylum are different legal protections, with different criteria and processes. More generally, what does the term "illegal immigrant" refer to? I am under the impression it refers to people in the United States without a legal status that permits them to remain. That very literally does not include people with TPS (like the Haitians in Springfield have). if "illegal immigrant" includes even people who have legal permission to be here, what precisely are the boundaries? Are there green card holders who are "illegal immigrants?"
Isn't the distinction Vance was making that the immigrants entered the U.S. illegally and then TPS retroactively changed that status, temporarily, to legal?
It's also kind of funny to hear Vance complain about the CBP One app since it was launched in... October 2020 by the Trump administration!
But if you read the article, it says that the app's functions have been expanded under Biden to do things like grant parole to illegal immigrants! https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/cbp-one-overview
On October 28, 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) launched a mobile device application called CBP One so that travelers could access certain agency functions on mobile devices. Over the last two years, the agency has expanded CBP One’s uses. The app has become the only way that migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum at a port of entry can preschedule appointments for processing and maintain guaranteed asylum eligibility. CBP One also became the only way that Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans seeking to secure travel authorization to obtain parole through special programs for those nationalities can submit their biometric information to CBP.
CBP One’s original uses included 1) providing travelers with access to Form I-94 information, 2) scheduling inspection appointments for perishable cargo, and 3) assisting international organizations who sought to help individuals enter the United States.
The app’s latest functions, like the use of CBP One to pre-process asylum seekers, has raised concerns both about gaining access to a legal right through a smartphone app and about the privacy implications of the app.
dasfoo
2mo ago
Even keeping it to the 2020 election, why was no one who claimed that 2020 was "the most secure election in history" asked for the data on which that statement was based? By what metrics, and how do those metrics compare to past elections? Or was that claim based on partisan wish fulfillment and yet accepted as fact because we don't like the people claiming otherwise?
dasfoo
2mo ago
Tangentially, IMO both sides got the response to claims of election shenanigans totally wrong, going into tribal mode rather than civic mode.
Whether or not there was actual fraud, there was pretty compelling appearance of fraud in the seemingly sychronized one-way anomolies that took place on election night. Rather than carefully investigating claims of impropriety and producing explanations that assauged concerns, the winning side took the very Trumpian approach of declaring fraud impossible in the most secure and perfect election ever held, coupled with a slate of articles condescendingly headline with the following template "No, xxxxxxxxx didn't happen, you fucking MAGA retards!" (OK, that last part was implied rather than stated directly.) It seems to me, as someone who voted for neither Trump nor Biden in 2020, that there were ample claims of shenanigans that deserved sober investigation, and sober investigation was never produced. The losers, on the other hand, thanks to grifters who saw they could profit off an atmosphere of polarized suspicion, threw every possible crazy fraud theory into the mix and then threw the stupidest tantrum in American history on Jan. 6. Trump was a terrible figurehead for a cause that could only possibly succeed with a careful and precise and civic-minded legal approach. I don't think the winners were ever capable of entertaining the best evidence of fraud and the losers were never capable of producing it.
dasfoo
2mo ago
My favorite "fact check" of the night was on the Climate Change question. The moderator asked a question which included a reference to Donald Trump calling climate change a "hoax." Both candidates gave answers, neither of which supported Trump's "hoax" framing; Walz argued against it and Vance avoided it. Then the moderators "fact-checked" Trump, who was only there in the moderators' own words. It was truly bizarre execution of a pre-planned fact-check and exposed the lie of no moderator fact-checking.
(Interestingly. I'm having trouble finding a quote in which Trump calls "climate change" a "hoax." This biased article (https://democrats.org/news/donald-the-denier-donald-trump-has-repeatedly-called-climate-change-a-hoax/) claims that he has 'repeatedly' called it a "hoax," but only produces one quote in which he refers to the "global warming hoax," which is arguably different as the term was changed to fit a broader definition. And then there's this earlier article where he directly says it might not be a hoax: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-climate-change-not-a-hoax-but-not-sure-of-its-source.)
dasfoo
3mo ago
The argument is that the actions Republicans take do not increase election integrity, and are instead aimed at adding hoops to jump through that may reduce voter turnout among groups that typically vote Democrat.
Those all sound like eminently reasonable election safeguards (possibly except for the in-county restriction, maybe because I live near the intersection of 4 counties; in-state should suffice), and would be easy to comply with for anyone of any race or background, and it seems racist to suggest otherwise. If some communities need to be better educated on election procedures, that does not seem like an insurmountable obstacle, and I'm sure there are organizations dedicated to voter awareness that would be happy to help them.
dasfoo
3mo ago
Implementing these will make voting slower, more difficult, and more likely to generate lawsuits. They encourage a heckler’s veto, where anyone with the time and money has more levers to slow down and cast doubt on the outcome. Is that likely to improve legitimacy?
I don't see "slower or more difficult" as valid objections to improving vote security. Maybe it should be slower or more difficult? Maybe not, but I would need more information to judge those trade-offs. And it already seems to have gotten slower despite the improvements in technology. Lawsuits aren't always bad. Maybe some are worthwhile? I don't know, I'm just saying that when someone says, "Your system is flawed" and your reply is, "It's the most perfect ever," without probing the suggested issues, is shitty public relations whether or not there are actual problems. And worrying about whose ox gets gored by investigating potential hazards is never going to result in effective systems regardless of who is in charge. That's a Soviet-response to Chernobyl environment in the making. Get it the fuck out of American voting systems, please.
Every election ought to be able to withstand an audit and defend its results, and not just met with a shrug when hundreds of thousands of ballots can't be accounted for or memory cards get wiped or voter rolls don't match or someone just accidentally let thousands of late ballots get counted or all of the vote totals changed in the dead of night after all of the observers were told to go home. The best reply to false or incorrect accusations of vote fraud is to present the accuser with impeccable records that support the result. If your election systems are such a mess due to laziness or complacency that you can't really support the result, it doesn't matter who is accusing you of what -- get your shit in order, or it makes it look like they might be correct when they accuse you of corruption. That is corruption, even if it's a less malicious sort of corruption.
dasfoo
3mo ago
He attended a private party at an exclusive restaurant while his state prohibited such get-togethers: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/opinion/gavin-newsom-french-laundry-california.html
Remove the sensationalism of the orgy, and it's violation of the same principle.
dasfoo
3mo ago
I'm a "Stop the Steal" agnostic. The 2020 election looked fishy, but most of the "proof" of election fraud has been merely suggestions with no follow-through. I'm not a Trump voter, but I have no faith in the integrity of his opponents -- especially if you take them at their word that he is an existential threat.
The Democrats do themselves no favors by trying to stop all of these election reform measures in swing states, like PA and GA. Their insistence that we should not clean the voter rolls, enforce ballot integrity or deadlines, or be able to produce records that verify vote counts or reconcile ballot and voter numbers is bewildering in the absence of fraud. Can anyone of the "Most Secure Election in History" persuasion steelman the argument against increasing election integrity? Isn't it in everyone's best interest to increase confidence in the electoral process, even if you think 2020 election deniers are kooks, as it will improve the legitimacy of whoever wins and diminish avenues of sympathy for the deniers?
dasfoo
3mo ago
It would be closely related to the "Sicilian immigrants are eating our horses" meme as featured in The Godfather.
Uh, what? I think a re-watch might be in order.
dasfoo
3mo ago
What about this is blood libel?
If you wade into the X threads where the Cats thing got started, there are now nascent claims of voodoo and, yes, cannibalism.
Wasn't there also a Denzel Washington movie in which he takes a hospital hostage over something similar?
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