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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27864 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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in November Trump will be on the ballot and receive 100 million votes

Put your reputational money where your mouth is. Is this a prediction? Would you be willing to concede that you were wrong if this doesn't come to pass, or would you just say that the election result must have been falsified?

Yes. My hardline for fraud is Biden receiving >79* million votes. A conceded Trump defeat requires significantly fewer votes than 2020.

Money: Trump wins

O/U: 95.5 million for 94.5-95.5 push

Spread: 10 million; voided if Biden totals >79* million; will consider alternate structure where California votes are not included

Edit: Corrected Biden values

I would take the bet that Trump wins in November, although I made the same bet in 2020 and lost so I suppose my reputation isn't worth much. I can't see Biden improving between here and election day, and I don't believe that losing this trial is going to do anything other than galvanize the Republican base.

Ironically, I think the only thing that would tank Trump would be some group of his supporters turning their guns on a group of civilians. So long as Trump and Republican voters win support as the downtrodden underclass taking on the elites things are good. The left wants to portray them as dangerous paramilitary units - the Proud boys, Charlottesville, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, etc. were all major gifts to Democrats.

Interestingly, I have Biden winning with the same set of priors, except that I find right wing violence highly likely between now and November.

except that I find right wing violence highly likely between now and November.

Which will be utterly disorganized and poorly-aimed, cracked down upon harshly, and only serve to further weaken the right and strengthen the left.

Yup. A retarded guy in a Q themed Hawaiian shirt is gonna kill a cop and we're gonna hear about it all fall.

What evidence would you accept to decide if an election had been stolen?

What exactly does stolen mean?

Suppose

  1. Actors work to give one candidate an unfair disadvantage in voter perception, but votes are voted and tallied fairly. (E.g. the suppression of Hunter Biden laptop story)
  2. People change rules to give a favored candidate an advantage (E.g. Pennsylvania Supreme Court broadening early voting standards)
  3. A few people submit votes illegally, or in an illegal manner.
  4. Same as 2, but at scale, as a deliberate campaign
  5. Deliberate tabulation errors, at small scale
  6. Deliberate tabulation errors, by major actors or at scale
  7. Candidates being ruled ineligible
  8. Unfaithful electors costing a presidency
  9. Setting up other slates of electors to substitute for the duly elected ones

Which of these are or are not theft of an election?

My own perception is that Team Biden's done 1, 2, 3, and tried 7 and 8. Team Trump's done 3 (presumably, somewhere) and tried 9. 4 or 6 is what people often hear by "stolen election", but I haven't seen evidence for it.

But whether any election's stolen depends on which of those (and there are probably more debateable types of maybe election theft) exactly is a stolen election.

"1" seems to completely normal political campaigning. E.g., The Hillary Clinton email server thing.

Sure, many would agree. But I've seen this as a way that people have claimed the election was stolen without having to endorse the stronger claims, so I wanted to be sure I included it.

"1" seems to completely normal political campaigning. E.g., The Hillary Clinton email server thing.

Isn't this now, according to the bases on which Trump was convicted, illegal election fraud?

1 was poorly written. It should say allegedly neutral alphabet agencies instead of people.

And that is not normal.

"Actors" includes both. Perhaps I could have split it, fair enough.

We write on a free posting site. I think Tomato knew what you meant anyhow (just as I was pretty sure I knew what you meant)

The republican FBI director famously announced that the FBI was investigating Hillary Clinton's emails a week and a half before the 2016 election.

  • -12

And then famously despite Clinton committing obvious destruction of evidence under subpoena said FBI director invented a new standard to not charge Clinton.

It depends on the scale. For a claim of large-magnitude manipulation (skewing the popular vote by 5% or more), I'd take a plausible scenario how it could be done, corroborated by a significant number of eyewitness accounts from people who do not directly stand to benefit from the claim being proven true (in particular, disqualifying dedicated members of the party alleging manipulation to its disadvantage). Of course, this does leave the possibility that your party should have 55% of the vote but the other 45% have formed a unified block that will falsify the result while agreeing to keep it secret, but this in itself (almost complete absence of people who are not in the affected party, involved with the electoral process and would testify to manipulation they observed) seems like a very surprising scenario. Sure you could in turn concoct a conspiratorial scenario in which principled paper pushers do not exist and they all merely pretend in public that they would execute their role according to its description, and so on, but then increasingly your gap scenario will just look like an alternative model of reality on the algorithmic complexity level of a religion.

For a claim of smaller-scale manipulation (like a 0.5% skew that flips the result), evidence gets harder to come by (and to begin with, how would you even prove that any 0.5% manipulation against you that you presented evidence for was not outweighed by 1% manipulation for you that you didn't present evidence for?), but I'm also finding it harder to consider such cases a "stolen election". Elections shouldn't be sports contests, even if some people feel about them that way; for a country to be governed by the whims of 49.5% instead of the whims of 50.5% does not feel like a terrific delta-injustice. To begin with, this puts us in the range where an election could be "stolen" by adverse weather in a few large metro areas. Either way, this is not the order of magnitude that I expect the parent poster to be wrong by - apparently in 2016 both candidates received around 60 million votes, so he probably will wind up having to assert manipulation on the order of 20+%, based on nothing but the feeling that everyone he knows is extremely outraged about the conviction and so an approximate fifty-fifty can't possibly be representative.

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