Turbulent_Singularity
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User ID: 3294
Turbulent_Singularity
5d ago
I haven't listened to anything long form and uninterrupted from Trump in a while (I watched most of the debates and some Trump clips), so what instantly struck me was just how fake the "Trump is old and incoherent just like Biden was" narrative is. I already thought it was a bad narrative and this really cemented that thought in my head. Trump is aware of the way he goes on conversational detours and actually says it is one of his strengths, so he clearly does it intentionally unlike with Biden's gaffes. He called it "the weave" and says it's the mark of a good speaker if they can weave multiple different things together but still come back home at the end. I found this all amusing to listen to even if I didn't 100% agree about the weave being the mark of good oration.
I also watched the recent Theo-Vance podcast and what I found notable was Vance on the election. When asked, Vance says the biggest problem in 2020 was big tech bias and the Hunter Biden laptop story, but that he still thinks voting is fair. When Trump was asked, he "weaved" together an answer that involved various vote by mail problems and law changes he thinks were done wrong, date changes, voter ID, or just outright ballot box stuffing alongside the Vance answer of an unfair big tech.
Back to Trump, I really liked the mini deregulation theme with environmental review and permitting. I also really enjoyed when he looked off to the side and stopped himself from saying something with a big smirk on his face (maybe a slight mark against the Ezra Klein disinhibition theory?), like when he said "You know, my uncle, I had a great uncle who was a great genius just like (pause, look to the side and smile while clearly holding back a specific name of someone he was about to say) other members of my family but he was a professor at..." or when he said "I only believe them if [the polls are] good (chuckle). No, ..." all with a huge smirk knowing what he said is ridiculous.
Turbulent_Singularity
5d ago
I'd go for the social technology first. At least, I'd learn enough to make sure I don't become the target of some "evil rich billionaire" campaign preventing the technological progress I'd do later, or that I don't become part of a conspiracy theory claiming I'm an alien, lizard or something else wacky for inventing a bunch of stuff and getting rich super fast.
Turbulent_Singularity
5d ago
Maybe Yarvin is right after all and this is the start of a WaPo journalist revolt, which might also spark one at the LA Times.
The "Must Read Opinions" recommended on the side of that article (presumably some simple algorithm suggesting popular, recent opinion pieces)
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On political endorsement
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For The Post, the wrong choice at the worst possible time
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Readers respond to The Post’s decision not to endorse Harris or Trump
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Refusing to endorse a candidate, The Post wounds itself
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Democracy Dies in Darkness
Turbulent_Singularity
6d ago
I instantly thought of my post on this when I saw the news. The second of my "potential Yarvin defenses" is even weaker now, assuming we don't have mass resignations at WaPo.
As well as the fallout from this, I'm also interested in how this decision was made. Very rich people all generally know each, so I wonder if the LA Times owner and Bezos spoke about this and coordinated in any way. Or maybe they spoke and one convinced the other? Or maybe they didn't speak at all and did it completely independently from each other? Or maybe they didn't speak at all, but Bezos saw the LA Times owner do it with only minimal fallout (so far), so he thought he could do it as well?
The chances of mass resignation from either paper go much higher if there was any coordination between the two. Also, I'd guess that if one paper mass resigns, the other will probably be inspired to mass resign as well.
Turbulent_Singularity
6d ago
I will not make you transcribe even more. I will watch the whole video and the day 2 testimony as well, if I can find it, along with further days if they exist (I see the description says day 1, presumably there are more days? I don't see any other days on Viva Frei's channel after searching). But, I will need some time to go through it all. I will probably post my thoughts on it in the next culture war thread in a few days.
Also, is this the trial court's opinion? The date and the judge's name seems to match up, but I want to double check. The trial judge's opinion, and not the appeals court's, is most important here since they are level that deals with matters of fact while appeals courts only deal with matters of law.
Side note: It is incredibly annoying trying to search for a court opinion and only finding news articles talking about the opinion without ever linking to it. So many news articles do not link the primary source they are citing. Side side note: this also makes Wikipedia much worse since you aren't allowed to use primary sources, so you are stuck using high quality secondary sources like news articles that cite the primary source. So, it can be a real headache trying to find the actual source of something on Wikipedia.
Turbulent_Singularity
6d ago
I haven't see any indication that the owner of the LA Times wants Trump to be endorsed, only that he wanted the paper to be neutral on this, which he got. One person laughing at him and quitting is not what Yarvin was talking about. He was talking about the whole news room quitting, which didn't happen.
Reading the Yarvin quote, do you really think he is making a nuanced point of "Bezos can tell WaPo to not cover something and a few people might quit, but it will otherwise work. But, he can't tell them to cover something they don't want to cover. They'd all quit in that case"? No, he says pretty plainly, "there is no way he can use the Post" and what the LA Times owner did sure looks like him using the LA Times.
Turbulent_Singularity
7d ago
The bussing got dropped. No one seriously talks about sending busses of white kids to 99% or 100% black school districts miles away, or sending busses of black kids to 99% or 100% white school districts miles away anymore. People still occasionally talk about modern de facto school segregation, it's legacy, and how it still exists because of where people of different races live (according to them), but no one seriously suggests bussing as a solution anymore. Now, it's only ever brought up as a "look how horrible conservatives were to have racist protests against these busses of black kids!" example, but without actually defending or even really talking about the policy details of it.
Turbulent_Singularity
7d ago
The LA Times editorial board was going to endorse Kamala for president, but the owner prevented it (Archive). An Editorial Chief resigned in protest.
This situation made me remember a section of an article that Yarvin wrote a while back (it's about AI risk, but the section about using money for political power is what I keep coming back to in response to claims of money in politics)
What can Jeff Bezos do with his two hundred billion dollars? Well, it turns out, he can buy the Washington Post, the world’s second most important newspaper. That ain’t nothing. But… can he tell the Post what to say? As though he was W.R. Hearst? Lol.
Jeff Bezos does not really own the Post. He sponsors it, as if it was the Indy 500. If he sponsored the Indy 500, and decided the cars should have five wheels and a rocket exhaust, and also it should go farther and become the Indy 2500, they would tell him to go pound sand. If he started telling the news desk what to write and cover, like Hearst, or even like “Pinch” Sulzberger, they would laugh at him and quit. (Pinch’s heir, sadly, seems to have ceded that power to the NYT’s Slack—like many a weak monarch of a waning dynasty, letting his authority decay into an oligarchy. Hard to get it back, bro.)
Jeff Bezos could destroy the Post. Since journalism is redundant and the Post is only #2, this would have zero effect on the world. There is no way he can use the Post. Anyone talking about the “Bezos Blog” is either ignorant, or a fool, or a fraud.
The LA Times situation is still only a few days old, so more people could quit in protest in the days to come, vindicating Yarvin. But as of now, it seems that an owner can control their newspaper to a certain extent. Yes, telling the editorial board to not endorse someone is a different category of control than telling the news desk what and what not to cover, but Yarvin didn't make those caveats and I suspect if you asked him about this scenario when he wrote the article, he wouldn't distinguish it and would say journalists would resign in both scenarios. In fact, he even says, "There is no way he can use the Post", which is a very strong claim.
Potential Yarvin defenses and rebuttals
It's an endorsement, it doesn't really matter. That's why there haven't been mass resignations. If the owner told them what to cover, there would be mass resignations
Many individual news articles don't really matter or only barely push the needle, yet Yarvin still made the blanket statement. He didn't say "Bezos can use the Post for minor things, but for anything major, people would resign." He said, "There is no way he can use the Post"
It's the LA Times. If it was the Washington Post or the New York Times, they would resign
Possible, but now the argument is no longer that you can't use money for power. It's that you can't use money for power at the biggest, most prestigious organizations, but you can use it elsewhere. This is a much weaker claim. Plus, it's not like the LA Time is some middle of nowhere town's local rag.
This situation has changed the strength of my belief in that Yarvin argument about using money for political power. I will be going back to it less frequently.
Turbulent_Singularity
7d ago
I might watch the whole thing later, but what you showed me so far hasn't really moved me. All I think now is "there were a few technical problems. Wait times were longer than expected because of these technical problems. A 19 inch image ballot would probably be rejected from the tabulator in 2022. A 19 inch ballot image was used in 2020, but in 2022, they used a 20 inch image"
Here is the evidence that I'd be looking for after learning that
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what is error rate of the printer and tabulator? How about in past elections? How about in other states or countries, if used abroad? Is this a normal type of machine error? Is it human error? How easy is it to make this human error e.g. is it as simple as closing a document without saving, or is it more akin to changing the font, font size, margins, line spacing, columns, etc "by accident"?
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were all or most of the technical problems and delays in red areas? (would need to adjust for number of machines per county or polling station to see if there was bias). Same analysis as above to check for that bias in other elections, past and present, in Arizona and not.
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is there evidence this 19 inch image ballot problem was intentional in anyway? Right now, especially given 19 inch images were used in 2020, it seems like a mistake. If this problem was in all or mostly red areas, it would be evidence of intention. If printing 19 inch ballots when you are supposed to print 20 inch ballots is as easy as misclick, that is evidence of a mistake.
Turbulent_Singularity
7d ago
Here is one in 2020 that found 3/4 of absentee ballots were not valid
Was this supposed to be a link?
Turbulent_Singularity
7d ago
There is significant fraud every year
This is the fundamental disagreement that I seem to be ending up at with nearly everyone that replied to me. If you believe significant fraud happens every year, then it happening again in 2020 doesn't need strong evidence. But, if you don't, like I don't, then you need much stronger evidence.
Turbulent_Singularity
7d ago
How is it controlled by him? Do you have any evidence of mass fraud outside of a few videos of soldiers peeking how people vote etc? Or is it that the whole system is rigged by holes, from selection of candidates, assasiations and assasination attempts to bullying of government workers, media system, espionage and the rest of it?
I don't know exactly how it's controlled, I'm just taking the news and various western governments and NGOs at their word with places like Russia or China. Of course, there is always the leftist/isolationist critique that these all can't be trusted since they are just mouth pieces to help western interests, but I don't believe that critique.
Again, from where I stand your whole electoral system is illegitimate.
Do you agree that there is a "tipping point" where the level of fraud/election unfairness switches from "yeah it sometimes happens here and there, but it's small and not really a big deal, so elections can still be trusted" to "it is so pervasive you can't trust the results of any election"? It is not merely a difference of degree, it is a difference of kind when it gets that pervasive.
Turbulent_Singularity
7d ago
The alternative is what happened with integration bussing, slowly stop fervently supporting it after it's clear it is a dumb idea, but never relent on criticizing conservatives for opposing that policy nonetheless. If you search for school bussing, there is very little talk defending the actual policy or responding to conservative policy critiques, but plenty of talk about how conservatives opposed it for racist reasons or that conservatives were outrageous in racist protests near schools.
Turbulent_Singularity
7d ago
Journalism? The modern media establishment would neither investigate nor report on systemic leftist fraud, as they would be reporting on themselves. There is no basis for a journalistic prior.
All of them? Every single one? Every single MSM journalist is in on this? I 100% believe in institutional biases that can lead to things that looks like conspiracies but are not actually, but this is well beyond bias into a full blow conspiracy. Now, me saying conspiracy doesn't automatically dismiss it like some who say throw around conspiracy do, but it does mean that the more people you add, especially if you add people from more and more disparate groups (keeping a secret in one group in the CIA is easier than keeping it in one CIA division is easier than keeping it in the CIA is easier than keeping it in the CIA + journalists, etc), the more likely it is for things to leak.
How do Pennsylvania Republicans investigate fraud in Philadelphia? Who's cooperating with them? More, in states like California and Oregon, who would possibly investigate leftist fraud? There is no basis for an investigative prior.
Do you think it's impossible to investigate things like criminal gangs as well? The problem is similar, but it still happens. People will never be 100% lock step with the party, especially as you expand the scope of the fraud. There are always people willing to whistle blow if the group gets large enough.
A hypothetical poll worker who fraudulently fills out 1,000 ballots and washes them together with legitimate ballots cast at their precinct has no fear of reveal or recourse because in this instance there is no method to differentiate legitimate and fraudulent ballots.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is why they have explicitly partisan poll watchers to watch the poll workers to make sure they don't cheat. You can literally walk in and watch poll workers work and if you see someone doing something, they will throw out the votes before they ever get put in the pile and get mixed up.
Turbulent_Singularity
7d ago
Thanks for the links to your posts. I was trying to find previous discussions on this, but I must have missed this. Off topic a bit, but I'd love to be able search for something like "top level comments, in the culture war thread, with these keywords". Top level comments in the culture war thread are very similar to new posts with the discussion they generate, so there should probably be a way to search for them like you can specifically search for posts (or maybe not given the intentional rule of sort-by-new so people are forced to skim past topic they aren't normally interested in).
Turbulent_Singularity
7d ago
This seems to be boiling down a disagreement on our priors on election fraud likelihood, like with many other people replying. I do not agree with that analogy of what it was like before the election. Adjusting the analogy, I would say it would be like the weather man saying "Firefighting helicopters are continuing to fly over area A to get to the forest fire, but lucky for us in area B, we won't have to deal with them flying over us (analogous to there being fraud, but not significant fraud). Expect scattered sun showers (analogous to setting expectations for the 'red mirage') and low visibility from all the ash in the air (analogous to the info environment making it hard to tell what it true or not in the moment and afterwards).
then deleted the records of the raw instrument data as fast as they could after the event
responding to this specifically since I see it brought up a lot. I can't interpret this fact without also knowing how normal it is to do such a thing. Is it a normal practice? What is the reason for not storing it? Maybe there's a good reason, maybe not. Maybe it's best practice and storing data has been tried but they changed it for a good reason. Who knows. Without context, I can't really interact with that info. It's like if you told me "Bob doesn't save his receipts when he goes the grocery store! Something fishy is happening", then we obviously know that it is no big deal. But, the only reason we know that is that we have the context of it being extremely common for people to not save their receipts, so Bob not saving them as well isn't notable.
Turbulent_Singularity
7d ago
Point taken. "Outcome-determinative fraud" is not the right phrase. However, what I am trying to distinguish is a single person voting in two districts, or maybe a felon voting when they shouldn't, or maybe giving a single friend $5 bucks to vote for you as dog catcher from organized attempts to swing the outcome of an election. I agree ballot harvesting, among other things, is wrong and shouldn't be allowed, but you challenge the rules before hand, not after you lose. And before you tell me Trump was sounding the alarm on it, my memories of 2020 are that, yes he mentioned ballot harvesting here and there, but it was mainly about mail in fraud or fraud by the poll workers at the actual polls.
This is basically back to that CEO example where, yes, everyone knows there is stealing, but no one has ever blamed a bad quarter on stealing before since they knew that it wasn't ever big enough.
Saying that, someone did post a really good reframing to that CEO example, so I am still thinking about that.
So, ultimately answering the Putin hypo (even when it's obvious what the answer would be, I still don't like it when people don't directly answer presented hypos), the answer would be that yes, I do still believe the Putin elections are shady. This is cause there is not really a big difference between Putin being able to rig it 30%, 40% or 50%, so the outcome is still controlled by him. Contrasting that with cases of single person voter fraud and there is basically no risk it swings the election. Contrasting that with ballot harvesting and Trump had a chance to challenge that sort of thing before hand, not possible in Russia.
Turbulent_Singularity
7d ago
First, I'm saying they are both wrong and second and more importantly, trying overturn an election would be worse than any of those things.
Turbulent_Singularity
8d ago
I imagine the same way it happened with Tammany Hall in New York. It became increasingly obvious that Tammany Hall had the real power so anti-Tammany people grouped together and started winning elections. Eventually, these progressive anti-Tammany coalitions passed electoral reforms that stripped these groups of their power.
Turbulent_Singularity
8d ago
Only works if Trump gets to appoint some people.
Yeah, that sounds fine to me since that's what the people that thinks there was fraud would want.
And what if they found there was in fact fraud? Then how does that heal the nation? Presumably Harris would need to resign, Biden appoint Trump as VP, and then Biden resign?
Yeah, sounds find to me as well. And if they don't, just impeach. And if that doesn't happen, public outcry next election would elect enough people that would impeach and then appoint Trump. Yeah, it's unrealistic, but Dems have nothing to worry about if there wasn't fraud.
Turbulent_Singularity
8d ago
I really really liked this reframing. This is probably the closest I've been to changing on my mind on this. I need to think about it more, but my initial thoughts are that Trump did have at least a few people that he picked and should've been on his side on the inside that also told him the claims of fraud weren't real. Yet, he always ignored them and followed the ones telling him there was fraud and he even repeated specific claims of fraud that his people on the inside debunked.
The counter to that counter is that those that didn't think there was fraud were just naive and trusted institutions too much. So, even though Trump picked them, they just ended up being unintentional mouth pieces of the institutions anyway. Anyway, I need to think about this more before I am sure this actually convinced me since this logic can apply to many other situations of institutional trust as well. To be clear, am I understanding this argument correctly where it doesn't actually matter if there was outcome-determinative fraud for the argument to work? Even the spurious reports now have gravity because you can't trust any of the debunking from those institutions, right?
Turbulent_Singularity
8d ago
Especially with Loper Bright overruling Chevron deference, the president has even less authority to regulate than they used to.
Turbulent_Singularity
8d ago
Doesn't this argument justify constitutional coups?
Turbulent_Singularity
8d ago
I don't think I ever denied local fraud, but do any of those cases relate to national elections to congress? Or statewide elections for something like a governor? Were any of them significant enough to even have the chance to flip an election (aka not those voted in 2 states examples or single cases of a felon voting when they shouldn't. However, someone organizing hundreds or thousands of these cases would count) even if they actually didn't flip it? Have any of them been linked to the democrat or republican party or has it been for personal gain?
It might read like I'm moving the goalposts, but small scale fraud like this is consistent with "swiping a few dollars here and there" in my CEO hypo, so I've been consistent.
Being more clear now, my prior for local fraud in the middle of nowhere is way way higher than my prior for fraud for a statewide or national level election, so skimming that that fraud database doesn't really surprise me.
This is what I think about voting. Funny enough, giving the argument "your vote doesn't matter" is probably more impactful than actually voting, but still probably not impactful enough to worry about for most people since they don't really have an audience.
The counterarguments are always something like, "but if everyone thought the same as you, then your vote would matter since way less people are voting!", which is true, but also never going to be the case.
People also always bring up cases of "look at this super close election, the difference was only a few hundred votes!", but, even in that case your odds of changing the election are still only 1 in a few hundred. And that is assuming you know how close the election is going to be before hand. So, yes politics are very important, but your chance of changing anything about it with your vote is next to none, so there is no real point to voting. Paradoxically, this makes telling people to vote, while not voting yourself, more important to do.
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