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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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