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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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