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CNN wants Harris to win and will do everything they think they can get away with to make it happen. The same could be said of all establishment media. I'm not sure what else you expected.
I will say in response: the 2020 election was clearly and obviously stolen, and then Time bragged about "fortifying" it. It was not the first stolen election in my lifetime, and I doubt it will be the last. To see people still clutch at their pearls over this is asinine. To see it on this board is tiresome. Simply repeating that I shouldn't believe my own lying eyes, and shaming me for refusing to bow to your pressure, might work on some people, but it doesn't work on me.
And why shouldn't they run again? So you and yours don't have to see them, or hear their complaints, or address their concerns? So that the manufacturing of votes and stealing of elections can go on unimpeded?
Not that I am particularly interested in this discussion, but I guess somebody has to ask it: what do you mean when you say the 2020 election was stolen and what evidence do you have beyond some local shenanigans here and there that most certainly didn't flip the outcome?
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.
This kind of thing deserves a really good blog post that I can't really write. everything is like this. Every election, every mass shooting, every presidential assassination attempt, the covid vaccinations, there are always unexplainable anomalies that clearly prove something's going on, even if we don't quite know what it is. Some numbers just aren't right, the times don't line up, some things are suspiciously aligned, some evidence conveniently disappears. An election security engineer at Dominion voting systems used to be antifa. (and, of course, his last name was Eric Coomer - they want you to know it's fucking with you). The numbers don't pass the statistical tests, the dem numbers spiked at the last minute, a pipe burst and they stopped counting, more people voted than were registered to vote, a van seemed to have huge folders of fake ballots ...
The thing is, the world's really complicated. Weird things happen sometimes. Pipes sometimes burst. More often than that, people make mistakes. They do the statistics wrong (if >50% of published academic papers can do it, the substack blogger 'bad cattitude' can do it too). They see a huge change in the reported number of votes on a website and think that means the underlying was changed, when the website was just wrong. They hear a second shot, maybe a third shot.
People constantly make mistakes. I do something pretty dumb on most days. I thought it was Sunday more of last Saturday than I'd have liked to (I was pretty sick, admittedly). And there are more minor mistakes, misreading a point in a paper or blogpost or doing some math wrong or misplaying in a game. And a big problem with internet politics, and especially with what people call 'conspiracy theories', is nothing forces you to notice mistakes. You don't show up at the wrong time, you don't lose the deal, the shed doesn't collapse. You just post, and if it's interesting enough it gets likes, and then a bunch of other people hear it, and it repeats itself. And then you keep making mistakes, and you don't learn how to catch them and it builds on itself. And so a thousand different reasons why the election was stolen, or why covid's not real / is still, in 2024, literally a genocide of the disabled / the vaccine is killing a million people spread and mutate across the internet.
I'm pretty sure none of the anomalies were objectively surprising or worrisome. Every one I've dug into, or seen ymes dig into, has ended up being nothing. Not responding to most of them was reasonable. Of course some of the media, and especially progressives on twitter, was unduly dismissive for poor reasons, but that happens with everything on every side. And then, uh, the president of the united states believes the theories and tries to get Pence to throw the election to the House and j6 happens. The world sure is complicated.
It's not really a moral failing to mess up a statistical test and think the election is stolen, or at least any more than every other mistake (and tbh they might all be). But it's still unfortunate.
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Couldn't agree more. And I might be unfair to @KMC, but @ymeskhout did a pretty good job attempting (and in my recollection, succeeding) to dismantle quite a few of the fraud claims to a degree I am not able to reproduce here. It just irks me when people put forth a hugely controversial claim that has been discussed ad nauseam on this forum and pretend it's an obvious matter of fact. This is a debate forum, debates should have consequences. If we all just go back to our previous claims as if nothing happened, what's the point? It just means the most stubborn win out, as opposed to those with better arguments. It's sadly a strategy some posters here employed to great effect, including our resident "revisionist".
To be clear, that last bit isn't directed at KMC. It's just something that annoyed me for a while now and I might be unfairly projecting my grievances onto him.
Yes, that's how I feel about people declaring 2020 as the most secure election ever, and saying that people who question it are not fit to hold office. My stubbornness is a reflection and response, as well as my own nature.
Cards on the table, the next two most obviously stolen elections I know of are 2004 (the other one in my lifetime) and 1960.
Our elections are insecure. The Democrats appear to have benefited from that insecurity, and are obviously preventing necessary and reasonable methods to increase security. Until there is some contrition from the left, and concessions on election security, I will continue to be stubborn, and continue to insist it was obviously stolen, if to no other purpose than to remind people that it is not settled and there is no consensus.
Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.
How was the 2004 election stolen by the Democrats?
I never said it was stolen by the Democrats.
It was the Ohio electronic voting machines that stole it for Bush.
Ah, given your repeated emphasis on how democrats need to apologize, I interpreted you as meaning they stole that one too
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None of those people are on this forum.
Sure, but that's different from claiming that Publius obviously fucked her.
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The best evidence I have is the midnight flip is forex markets.
All of it is local shenanigans, and it absolutely swung Georgia and Arizona at a minimum. If you're not interested in that, then so be it.
elaborate?
The night after the election, or early in the morning, the dollar plunged. It flipped from expecting a Trump win to expecting a Biden win. This happened at the same time as the midnight ballot counting that restarted after kicking out neutral observers, which I referenced in Georgia as the Freeman/Shaye debacle. It was also occurring in Philadelphia, I recall.
My interpretation was just that the markets were wrong, as they are sometimes, and didn't correctly take into account different arrival rates of different sources of ballots. I don't find that surprising, markets in new / infrequent things aren't that efficient and are often wrong. The people setting the prices are human, and humans need practice to get good at things. Markets in stocks are somewhat efficient because there are many stocks and many people trading them for a long time, and even then...
I think this isn't indicative, really. Election day was a day, and a lot of things happened on that day, including dozens of claimed frauds, so the drop would've happened after one fraud. I don't think this is a particularly strong rebuttal but it's what I think
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I'm interested. Please present the best evidence you have.
If you don't already believe the Ruby Freeman/Shaye Moss story in Georgia, I can't help you. That was the most blatant fraud I've ever seen, caught on camera.
For Arizona, if you'd like to sit through five hours of hearings, you may.
If you'd prefer a summary, the most damning fact is primarily that all the voting systems used the same passwords for all accounts. There were ballots with duplicated serial numbers, ballots with missing serial numbers, 74k ballots returned with no record of being sent, 11k vote cast by voters who only appeared on voter rolls in December (probably a subset of the 74k), 4k registered voters who registered after the cutoff, 18k voters who participated and then were immediately removed for ineligibility, ballots printed on the wrong paper, and to top it off, no count of the votes found and tabulated, or comparison to the official count.
You mean this case where the investigation found no wrongdoing? Or do you think the FBI are in on it too?
You mean the FBI that hosed down the roof of the building where the Trump shooter was shot, the very same day? The FBI that, combined with the CIA, were responsible for the bullshit 'investigation' of the Kennedy assassination?
No they weren't in on it, but hell yes they're the fixers. Their job is to come in, clean up, and present a tidy package to the public. I take that as a given.
The FBI is not to be trusted, ever, on anything. Certainly not anything that would stand to benefit or harm Trump, the only true threat to FDR's Imperial Deep State since Nixon.
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I've never heard about the story beyond a passing mention. I've debated a fair few election skeptics, but they each pluck their own pet theory out of the gish gallop so it's always something new. All I see on the Ruby Freeman/Shaye Moss story on Google is Giuliani losing a defamation suit against them, and being asked to pay a ludicrous sum. Is there a site (preferably neutral) that summarizes it better in your eyes?
I don't really want to watch 5 hours of hearings in any cases.
Upon Google searching it, I find the audit itself was highly controversial for being directed by a partisan firm. I plugged the 74k claim into Google, and found a deluge of articles saying the claim is just wrong, that the claimed discrepency comes from confusing that EV32 and EV33 files aren't meant to be full records of all ballots that have been sent, but rather:
I cannot find any followup from the other side. Do you have an article (again, preferably neutral) that has a response?
No, there's nothing neutral under the sun. I have partisan sources and partisan people writing partisan things.
OK, sure, "nothing is neutral", but do you have any evidence or sources that have a reputation for doing good work that you can provide? As in, people who aren't just broken clocks fishing for an answer they want, regardless of what reality might show?
Nope, the kinds of media I read and consume aren't going to satisfy you.
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I think all media wants their preferred candidate to win because it will make them the most money. Establishment media cares only about lining their coffers.
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news/
Left-leaning news outlets do better under Republican administrations. Right-leaning outlets do better under Democrat administrations. If the bottom-line was the primary driver, CNN and MSNBC would be pushing for a Trump win.
it's principal agent problem all the way to the top. The mistake often done in these kinds of discussions is assuming that the news reporter or the editor and journalist in the news room cares about the bottom line of the corporation. The only ones that do are the CEO and the bean counters in the finance room; everyone else cares about other things (ideology) as it isn't their job to make sure their business is profitable enough to make payroll.
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So that we don't lose again, pretty much. I've said my thoughts on Trump in another post: it's not just the election claims, it's everything. I don't understand why some people are so attached to him. He scares the hoes.
With a partisan media on their opponent' side, Trump supporters believe that anyone they can get through a primary that isn't actually working mostly for the other side will be cast in a way that scares the hoes. Trump's affectations are protecting him, they're not liabilities. In MMORPG parlance, he's a tank; he's such a big juicy target that his opponents can't help but focus all their fire on him, but he's also uniquely good at shrugging it off.
If Trump wasn't their number 1 obsession, and Vance was the most important target they had, couch fucking insinuations would be some of the least vile things the media would be saying about him.
My problem with that is that Trump is not just affecting Trump, he's affecting any Republican out there by pressuring them to align with him. If they do, they endorse all the utterly stupid statements he makes and have to defend them, or slip out of questions about them somehow. If they don't, they're weakening the party and lose support from MAGA diehards. JD Vance really couldn't answer properly on the "was the election stolen" question. He couldn't outright say he thinks it's stolen, and he couldn't say that Trump is wrong on this. Trump has forced his own side at large to confront similar conundrums.
This will not end after Trump wins or loses. This will hang over every Republican Party member who endorsed Trump for the rest of their careers. And the ones that didn't endorse Trump have to shut up about their Trump supporting friends get screwed over in the media, showing themselves as weak in the process.
He should not have run again.
This kind of thing is not a result of Trump being uniquely bad for the Republicans, it's a result of a partisan media using this tool, forcing to confront conundrums, in a single direction.
A fair media would at every opportunity, at least as often as they ask Republicans about the 2020 election, ask every Democrat how it's somehow acceptable that the sitting president be, at least for months, months during which the rest of the world keeps happening, as senile as the man everyone saw in Biden's last debate.
And that's just one example, you can find gotchas or flipflops or embarassing statements for every politician, and if not you can find people they've endorsed or publically approved of that have such gotchas or flipflops or embarassing statements that you can then put the politican's nose in. You can find far-left terrorists that are close friends of Obama, an honest to goodness Klan leader that Biden considers "a mentor", for the same Biden a record of voting against the progressive politics he now claims to espouse,etc... These are not liabilities for these people not because they have been satisfactorily answered, but because the mainstream media shield them from these questions instead of asking them. If they crop up in right-wing media, the mainstream media will rush to write excuses and rationalization (often as "fact-checks") for them.
Of course, Trump generates his fair share of those conundrums, but I don't see him as unique this way. The volume at which people are asked to defend them is a function not the amount or heaviness of these conundrums, but of who holds the microphone.
And to be clear, the answer to pretty much all of these conundrums is the same, it's something everyone in politics knows, and everyone savvy outside of it knows, but that cannot be said out loud or else you create gigantic weak spot for your enemies to attack. It's that politics is in large part a competitive team sport and to get anywhere in it sometimes you just have to put being a team player ahead of personal beliefs, truth or your constituents. Of course the moment any politician admits it his opponents will jump at the chance to lie that they're different "Well, I would never put my party before my constituents!"
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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?
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You're right. I still think Trump shouldn't have run, but this is no longer one of the reasons why.
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Personally, I'm attached to him because he's an honest-to-god political outsider, and the hoes he's scaring are the uniparty, the deep state, the military industrial complex, or whatever you want to call it. FDR's imperial legacy. The Federal Bureaucracy.
He broke the GOP in twain and then picked up the pieces. This is an unmitigated good, in my opinion, because before he came the GOP was the party of the Iraq War.
He's also the only one to take the majority stance on immigration, and say it out loud.
There are many, many reasons to be attached to Donald Trump, and they are due to his uniqueness. Vance may be a suitable replacement, but there are few likely candidates, making Trump all the more precious.
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Not that it changes anything but this was CBS.
It doesn't change it, really, but I appreciate the correction. CNN might have slightly more reputation to protect.
oh interesting - I view CBS much more positively than I do CNN.
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