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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10406 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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POTUS is not the only thing that Americans voted for today.

Ballot questions that would protect abortion rights are projected to pass in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, New York and Nevada.

Fifty-seven percent of voters approved the ballot initiative in Florida, three percentage points short of passing. Florida voted down the initiative even as voters there favor legal abortion by 65%. Among supporters of legal abortion, 14% voted against the amendment, according to preliminary exit poll results.

What was uniquely bad about the initiative in Florida that it caused some supporters of legal abortion to vote against it? Was it the "or when necessary to protect the patient's health, as determined by the patient's healthcare provider" clause? Or something else?

How hard can it be to make a federal citizen ID mandatory?

Let's suppose the GOP controls both houses and the presidency. What are the biggest hurdles that prevent them from ensuring that voting in the 2028 election requires a government-issued ID?

I. Is there a constitutional ban on mandatory federal ID? It's a sincere question. I've heard something that went, "well, if an ID costs money and you have to present this ID to vote then technically it's a poll tax and thus violates the 24th amendment", but is it possible to get SCOTUS to definitively answer this question before someone challenges this requirement? For example, if not having an ID was made a felony, would this solve the issue, since felons can't vote?

II. How hard can it be to issue an ID card to every American citizen? I'd wager the vast majority of Americans have enough documents to prove their citizenship, but what about the rest? Something British can work for the bulk of the rest: if they can get two people of good standing (public officials or licensed professionals) to sign their picture, confirming that they know this person and know they are a citizen and why, this should be enough to issue them an ID. If anyone commits fraud, they lose their license or whatever let them be a public official forever, and everyone they vouched for has to find a new signatory. What kind of undocumented citizens will not be able to find two people to confirm their citizenship?

III. How hard can it be to make voter ID mandatory in every state? If I understand correctly, even federal elections are a state matter in the US. How can the federal government make California require the new ID?

The constitution vests the power of determining electors in the legislatures of each state, Congress can't touch it. For example, California prohibits the checking of IDs in their elections (for all obvious reasons) despite it being entirely constitutional for the California Legislature to redefine their method of electoral college voter assignment as a popular vote open to all persons residing or even just currently in the state.

Article II, Section 1, Clause 2:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

&

"In McPherson v. Blacker (1892), the Supreme Court affirmed the ability of a state to appoint its electors based on electoral districts rather than a statewide popular vote, describing the power of state legislatures to determine the method of appointment of electors as 'plenary,' and suggesting that it was not limited even by state constitutions.**"

What Congress could do, in the imaginary world of unchecked supermajority power and lockstep ideological alignment, is define federal electoral fraud as an act of war, define the perpetrators of federal electoral fraud as unlawful enemy combatants and/or as guilty of treason, and summarily execute them. A nightmare for many reasons and not hyperbole so much as total fantasy driving the point of "Congress can't really do anything." Not anything within the system; declaring the entire government of a state as fraudulent and criminal, sending in the army to arrest them all and run the state via martial law while they get everything sorted out is within their "power," insofar as the sovereign can ultimately do whatever it has the power to do, but that's not the question.

The constitution vests the power of determining electors in the legislatures of each state, Congress can't touch it.

Weirdly that's only for Presidential electors and not for Congress.

Or at least I'm not aware of any analogous caselaw about the manner of congressional elections.

Is there a constitutional ban on mandatory federal ID?

That's the wrong question in a US context. The constitution grants powers, and all others are reserved to the states or the people. So really you need to ask "is there some constitutional grant of powers which would allow the federal government to mandate ID?".

Right, I always forget it's the other way around in the US.

I would actually ignore the ID issue. You want fair elections. Just impose requirement on the states about the quality and auditability of the elections. How they achieve it is their own problem.

I mean, I think that would produce partisan politics into it. If I’m in a blue state, I want to detect Red fraud because it reduces my party’s power in the federal government. If I’m in a red state, I want to detect Blue fraud. So you can do that by putting a thumb on the scale based on the kinds of fraud that Reds or Blues are likely to do. Reds might be prone to voter intimidation, so you make very strong rules aimed at preventing that. Blues might stuff ballot boxes or have illegals vote or whatever, so make a rule about that. But you don’t care about your own tribe’s fraud so you either ignore the problem or make it easier.

Anecdotally, I've been visiting the US for nearly 5 months now and I've been unable to get a state ID (well, driver's permit, I only need to take the picture...) in the 2 states I've been in, waiting in DMVs for literally 10 hours 15 times so far. Appointments in the current place online are 2.5 months out, which is far longer than I'll be here. In a county of a few million, there are 3 DMV offices left. I have a passport but there are extreme barriers in place (...in these Democrat led states.)

As Rov_Scam mentioned, opposition to federal ID has primarily come from the right in the past (see religious-coded claims that ID cards are the "mark of the beast"), although both sides have expressed privacy concerns about the existence of IDs and/or the corresponding database (after all, that link I just gave was to Huffpost, not exactly known for their right-wing slant).

I have a hard time really caring about the supposed privacy concerns both because the IRS does a perfectly fine job not telling anyone my tax info that shouldn't know it and because my identity isn't private anyway: every registered voter's name/address is public information already. (And, honestly, I'm not sure I see the point of my tax info being secret either.)

There's not even really a need for the physical card. The whole point of a photo ID is to present a photo verifiable by a human along with a counterfeit-proof claim of some information about the person that's a photo of (for voting, the information that matters is name, address, and citizenship status). There's no reason other than the implementation complexity for requiring each person to carry around a plastic card instead of having the verifier look up that information in a database, which could alleviate fears of the cost of replacing an ID card.

That said, there's at least two separate issues that ID is being proposed to solve:

  1. Verifying the voter is who they say they are. That is, preventing the voter from voting as someone else who they know isn't going to vote, possibly because that someone else is a fake name they registered. Voters trying to vote multiple times does happen (I've already seen some news stories about people getting caught doing so this election), but it's difficult to get many additional votes this way, partially because it requires having voter registrations that you know will not get used legitimately.
  2. Verifying the voter is allowed to vote. i.e., they are a citizen and a resident at the address they claimed. This is the issue I think you're talking about; as there's a lot of non-citizens around, a significant percentage of them voting would be a lot of votes.* This could be verified by ID at time of voting, but it could also be verified by maintaining the voter rolls by some combination of requiring ID to register and checking the local voter database against some database of citizens. Election organizations already try to do this, but they are limited by the lack of a federal database of all citizens. I think some states collect social security numbers in attempt to approximate the "federal database of all citizens", but I'm not sure exactly how that part of the verification works.

*(Personally my preferred solution is to repeal the laws against non-citizen voting. The requirement to be a citizen to vote was added in most states as part of the wave of anti-immigrant legislation in the early 1900s. Before then, a stated intention to settle permanently in the United States was sufficient. Having a category of residents that don't get to vote is undemocratic.)

Personally my preferred solution is to repeal the laws against non-citizen voting

…

Having a category of residents that don't get to vote is undemocratic

Why do you think so?

I agree that having a class of legal residents who can never earn the right to vote would be undemocratic. However, this sounds like an argument for a faster pathway to citizenship, or perhaps some non-citizen permanent resident status that comes with voting rights, if you like.

But why should persons who have not put down roots in the US, or who have not otherwise meaningfully contributed to the fabric of our society in some way*, have a say in the long-term future of our country?

You may object that there are 18-year-old citizens who vote without having permanently settled anywhere. To this I would say, does our 18-year-old citizen voter have a US citizen parent?

If yes, I would say that my ideal model of US citizenship—which, to be sure, differs from the reality—is that in exchange for the aforementioned “contribution to the fabric of our society”, the social contract grants to each citizen and his descendants in perpetuity a presumptive right to a say in our nation’s future, in the absence of a compelling reason to the contrary (such as a felony conviction or naturalization in another polity).

If no, now you understand the case against birthright citizenship.

*Reasonable people can disagree on this matter, but examples of such might be: military service, or running businesses which gainfully employ individuals in economically deprived areas.

Your suggestions don't sound terribly different from how it worked pre-1926. There's wording about people "who have declared their intention to become citizens of the United States". I don't have strong feelings about exactly where to draw the line at what counts, but in the current system, the best case requires living in the US for 5+ years and excludes plenty of people who end up living in the US for the rest of the lives. Describing those people as not having put down roots in the United States feels misleading to me.

Has there been any major legislative push to achieve this in the past four years?

The voting rights push that didn’t get cloture had a provision requiring voter ID. Presumably everyone who matters agrees it’s constitutional, even if only in private.

This thread isn't about voter ID, It's about national citizen ID.

I've heard something that went, "well, if an ID costs money and you have to present this ID to vote then technically it's a poll tax and thus violates the 24th amendment",

I can't imagine that this is a serious objection since I expect just about every state offers a no fee ID option for at least some people. But I'd be on board with making IDs free to make this objection go away. States can keep charging for drivers licenses.

It unfortunately is a serious objection, even though it's a terrible one. I've seen it in the wild more than once.

Let's suppose the GOP controls both houses and the presidency.

Traditionally, GOP opposition to mandatory ID has been a bigger hurdle than anything else. I say bigger because there hasn't exactly been a ton of enthusiasm from the left for this idea either, and it's never been a huge issue.

How hard can it be to issue an ID card to every American citizen?

If our experience with Real ID is any indication, pretty hard. The law requiring it was passed in 2005 and was supposed to go into effect in 2008. No states were even compliant until 2012, and the full implementation date — when you'll actually need a Real ID to board a domestic flight — has been pushed back repeatedly, currently scheduled for sometime next year. But even then it won't actually be required until 2027; you'll be informed of the noncompliance but allowed to board anyway. This, of course, assumes that the deadline doesn't get pushed back again, and while I won't speculate on the chances of that, only something like half of the people even have Real ID compliant identification.

To give you a sense of what's involved, I helped a woman do this a couple years ago. She had been married twice, and used the last name of her second husband. So while she had her birth certificate, it didn't show her legal name. I had to go to the marriage license department and pull two marriage licenses, both from the 1980s, and then go to the prothonotary to pull the divorce from the first marriage. This is why I roll my eyes when people like JD Vance talk about going door-to-door looking for people to deport. I'd imagine the number of native-born citizens who can immediately produce proof of citizenship upon request is a lot lower than some seem to think it is. I know where my birth certificate is right now, but a lot of people don't. And I'd imagine that the number of married women who have certified copies of their marriage license with their personal papers is vanishingly small (no, the certificate they give you doesn't count).

I kind of think this is a good reason to centralize all of this stuff -- births, deaths, marriages, divorces, name changes.

When my kids were born, we had to take their county-issued birth certificates and send them into the SSA.

But even then it won't actually be required until 2027; you'll be informed of the noncompliance but allowed to board anyway.

Multiple agents, Hlynka disciples. Honestly, how many people just have a current non-compliant driver's license that is valid for a few more years, and just don't care to waste a day with the sloths and pay for a new one. It's easy enough to still just travel with the non-compliant DL and deal with the problem later. Hell, maybe they have an alternate form of ID that they could use and figure, "Eh, if we get closer and I need to travel, I'll decide if I'll go get a new DL or just take this other ID instead." If (when) word gets out that the signs are a lie and that they'll just hand you a piece of paper trash that won't make it 100ft past security, those agents can very rationally choose to just wait until their current DL expires.

I viscerally feel that there are real stories of difficulties with paperwork. I've experienced it, myself and with my wife. Still going through some with her. But if apathy is sufficient to prevent change, apathy will successfully prevent change.

Just to give you my own story: I still don't have a Real ID. In PA DLs are good for 4 years. I renewed mine in 2017, but PA wasn't Real ID compliant until 2018. Nonetheless, family members were telling me I sould upgrade anyway because I'd need it to fly come 2020. Now, in addition to the paperwork, a Real ID costs double what a regular DL costs, so there's that. And I don't fly often so using my passport isn't too much of a hassle anyway, since that's always acceptable ID. Then COVID delayed the full implementation, and when my DL came up for renewal in 2021, the DL Centers were closed and they were doing everything by mail (my license still has a 2017 picture which looks nothing like me, for various reasons). I'm sure if I really needed it there would have been some way to get one but it wasn't exactly a pressing concern. Then I lost my wallet this past summer and had to get a new license and my parents told me I should do the Real ID then but I wasn't wasting a Saturday in the summer getting a driver's license and had to go on my lunch break and getting a reprint takes long enough as it is that I wasn't about to overcomplicate things by getting a Real ID at the same time. So maybe when my license expires again next year I'll get one, but I don't really see any compelling reason to.

Hell, maybe they have an alternate form of ID that they could use and figure, "Eh, if we get closer and I need to travel, I'll decide if I'll go get a new DL or just take this other ID instead."

This is exactly what I did. The NJ process for getting a Real ID is by all accounts "The Simpsons DMV"-worthy. The Federal process for getting a passport card when renewing your passport is to pay an extra $30. No contest. (You can skip the card and use the passport book, but carrying the book around is much less convenient)

Just make the ID free!

Lord knows we pay enough in taxes to expect some very basic services to be complimentary.

I agree and would add that the federal government already has lots of experience issuing hspd-12 id cards to their employees and contractors (these include the ability to load certs on them so you could even get nice public key infrastructure), they could just run essentially the same system in parallel

Felons CAN vote - depending on their state. Different states have different rules.

Even if someone can no longer vote because they became a felon after breaking the law in a state that does not allow felons to vote, they still have the ability to challenge the law - a successful challenge would make them no longer felon, thus meeting redressability and other standing requirements.

It isn't actually that hard to get IDs, and I respect the states that allow things like university IDs to count. The main mechanism is cost - should first time IDs be covered by the government? While not prohibitively expensive, the amount of friction that can be lessened doesn't hurt. Also, DMVs suck.

Asking others to sign your picture leads to perhaps more racism, because people with accents who may very well be citizens will face more battles convincing someone to sign their picture. However, it's not that hard to get an ID. I have trouble believing the vast majority of Americans have never opened a bank account, bought alcohol, bought a cigarette, gotten on an airplane, picked up certain medications, or any of the myriad of things that require an ID. IDs are required in so much of our lives here.

It's unlikely we can have a federal voter ID law unless we tie some form of federal funding to the request (example: raising the legal drinking age by tying road funding to the request). The methods by which states conduct their elections is inherently the province of the states and not the purview of the federal government. It's why each state does things so differently from its neighbors, and why we have wacky things like hanging chads or what not. It's why we included poll taxes as an amendment to the Constitution. It's why certain attempts to standardize voting have failed or have been chipped away at in court.

Asking others to sign your picture leads to perhaps more racism, because people with accents who may very well be citizens will face more battles convincing someone to sign their picture.

Citizens with accents usually have their Certificate of Naturalization in a special folder inside their secure drawer. Unless you're talking about AAVE.

Short little off tangent rant, India lacks a right-wing since it is a place where the demographics are mostly OBC and below so the upper castes get shut out of things. I was a big part of what people call Hindu Twitter which at the time (2020) seemed interesting but like all movements has gotten stale after its main talking point got exhausted. The bulk of it is mostly upper castes and some middle castes who now call every white a Wignat (Wigger nationalist), a term no one outside of them and Nick Fuentes has used. I heard Nick use it for Richard Spencer as Spencer did not care much for Christianity. The main issue for hindu twitter was ofc caste and how the grievances exist but people above the middle class do not know about them

Well, all of Hindu Twitter thinks that all whites are evil racist and are wishing for a Kamala win so that the US gets flooded with migrants and explicitly wishing for bad things to happen. This is a hilariously incorrect understanding of the world. People like Thiel or Musk may have racial preferences but are not out-and-out white nationalists or white supremacists. Ironically, all their talking points are recycled from other tweets, so you never get any mindful discourse there. People too full to even read Moldbug are not in it for intellectual honesty or rigor.

This tweet calls thiel a racist which is just false since his fund for the longest time was run by an Indian guy. Anti-Indian sentiment has grown primarily because some Indians are smart and have representation in white collar anglo society which disqualifies them from being treated with kid gloves. Top that off with a population of 1.5 billion with low hbd and high levels of distrust and you get legit hygiene, call centre scams issues. Some Indian founder pointed this out and got called racist by Hindu Twitter.

My big reason behind leaving the discourse was realising that most people there are too bitter to ever do anything well in life, more than that calling 1990s liberal viewpoints and some viral tweets a sign of extreme anti-India racism seems a little wild. Elon Musk is not bankrolling racism against people, if he were, he would simply hire based on that which he does not. The perpetual need to be a victim is hilarious. I ofc don't want to have this comment reach the people on twitter as I like beigng anon but it is simply hilarious.

I will never go back to that place, I wish I never wandered there in the first place given how negative everyone there is.

Well, all of Hindu Twitter thinks that all whites are evil racist and are wishing for a Kamala win so that the US gets flooded with migrants and

Curious since the BJP enthusiasts I know personally are pro-Trump and point to his anti immigration stance as one reason why.

Hindu Twitter has way way too much bitterness, so to sound contrarian, people probably picked this stance up. I find zero sense in it as actual racists are not running anything serious in the US (white ones I meant).

Bitterness leads to victimhood and that is what this is. Many on that faction even unironically advocated for open defection and child marriages.

Yeah, we've got a lot of people unironically advocating for open defection here in the states as well.

It is extremely stupid. The Hindu twitter faction justified it by saying that any and all traditions are sacred so we shouldn't question that.

The bulk of it is mostly upper castes and some middle castes who now call every white a Wignat (Wigger nationalist), a term no one outside of them and Nick Fuentes has used.

I've seen this term being used plenty in American far-right Twitter, though perhaps less than in previous years?

Hindu twitter gets everything from Pop American right wing, I am yet to meet anyone there who has read anything beyond tweets. The term they used for themselves for instance was trad which they copied from trad caths who likely copied it from actual traditionalists like evola and guenon.

The basic issue is that once you dig deep enough and realise that a lot of scriptures that are considered scriptures are just made up (kalki avatar for instance), you would come to the realisation that the shared identity people have even on this niche community is on shaky grounds. Add in them knowing little about history or political science and you get this kind of rhetoric. The place is best left alone, no one there is doing anything worthwhile.

How will 2024 be remembered?

So Trump got endorsed by Joe Rogan, and people have already made comments on that, what I am wondering is, in case Trump loses and you catch actual voter fraud on camera, enough to convince people that elections are not as legitimate as they think they are, will there even be any consequences at all?

What surprised me was Elon publicly talking about demographics where he admits that you can simply flip states by adding a bunch of immigrants, I never expected anyone famous to ever admit this. This is one of the richest people on the planet who gets government contracts, this is extremely ballsy (which I think he is and I wish to be like that).

Think about it, plenty of people on frog Twitter were voting without American citizenship, at what point will the burden of evidence be enough if it even exists for the Supreme Court to acknowledge anything? I think Harris will win and the west will keep taking in migrants by the boatful but I would like to see Trump win.

This video titled the year 4chan won is a good little throwback to 2016 and what that looked like. Ofc 4chan has been neutered now and Trump is not as fringe as he once was. In 2020 Trump was not someone would touch with a 10-foot pole, in 2024, he has a whole lot more support from the mercantile class. Not sure why that is. Maybe this is thermidor, a temporary one.

My recollections of 2016 are clouded. I was barely 16 at the time, and though I was aware of the American culture war, I was fairly sure Trump would lose and did not care much either. I was 16 and not American. I woke up one morning and saw Trump winning, not knowing how much more I would be into this as a spectator during 2020 and 2024.

2024 is going to be “The Year Politics Went Full Retard” for me. It’s just a level of crazy that I would not believe if it had been pitched as the new season of a political drama. A candidate is nearly thrown off the ballot in CO? The same guy convicted of several felonies? And then his opponent is revealed to be unfit for office on live television? Then the same candidate gets shot. Then the opposition candidate drops out and is replaced without a vote. Then the protests at the DNC over Israel. Another Trump assassination. Like WTF? The crazy around 2024 is insane. And of course the discourse itself — debates around transitions for middle school kids, why FEMA is slowing down aid in hurricane zones, some people are convinced of weather manipulation (which I did not have on my bingo card), claims of election fraud, it’s just wild. And frankly exhausting tbh.

Don't worry, it will soon be over. If Elon is right, then we won't have to worry about competitive elections again. In Soviet America, the people do not choose the government, the government chooses the people.

That’s how elections run here. It’s basically divided by districts carefully chosen to maximize the power of the party that runs the state, then you have the electoral college on top. It’s set up so that 3 states basically pick the president.

4chan has been neutered now

How so?

It's got government agencies monitoring it heavily. That's what I've been told, it's not as fun as it was in 2016.

The SNR has become untenable. Organized thread sliding picked up steam circa July 2016 and has not abated.

SNR? Thread sliding? What are these things?

Thread sliding?

"Bad on purpose (by 4chan standards!) to make you click", pushing other threads off the front page.

>front page
>not browsing by board catalog
hownew.ru :^)

Sorry to break character but I didn't want that to make an actual link, would anyone happen to know a convenient way to break autolinking with The Motte's comment formatting? disregard that nyeh

Hey I'm not the one on there whining about slide threads -- simple information man :)

thanks for the explanation.

sorry, Signal to Noise Ratio. By thread sliding I mean the drowning out of interesting content by coordinated spamming of low-effort noise. I'm not trying to not speak plainly, this is just my outside understanding of 4chan. Would that I could attend an academically rigorous course like Advanced Meme Magic Containment Methods.

I assume he means signal to noise ratio.

Thanks! That makes more sense.

My recollections of 2016 are clouded. I was barely 16 at the time

Speaking as a long-term mottizen this was a wild thing to read.

why exactly?

Just my age! I’m used to thinking that everyone here is a grumpy middle-aged person like me 😆

Everyone here is super nice to me because I've been posting here since age 19 iirc, mostly my life's story on the Wednesday threads. I don't post much cw stuff because nrx authors do that better than me anyway.

You're probably about 2/3 of the age of most Mottezians, from what I recall the last time a bunch of people mentioned their ages.

We should do an annual census, I'd be curious to see if the demographics are changing over time, and how.

Yeah, I was raised here in a way, spent a fifth of my life here, I'm not even super culture war heavy since regurgitating nrx stuff isn't super insightful

I mostly post life updates on the Wednesday threads. I hope I can get a startup exit in front of you guys lol.

Really? I was also 16 when Trump first showed up, I thought there was more people in their 20's here.

That's why.

We all feel like we just got here, and the 2016 election is one of the reasons why many of us are here to begin with. We feel like it was barely yesterday.

Stone toss never misses. Yeah, I need to get a move on in life.

The misinformation in your post and on twitter in general is reaching insane levels. People were voting without American citizenship?Really? Is there any proof of that actually happening? The answer is no , unless of course you pay attention to twitter nonsense too much. Voter fraud is extremely rare. I am waiting for any proof that supports the contrary.

The misinformation in your post and on twitter in general is reaching insane levels. People were voting without American citizenship?Really? Is there any proof of that actually happening?

Other people already posted links, what made you think this is something that couldn't have happened, and anyone believing otherwise must to be a result of "insane levels" of misinformation?

This is exactly what I meant in my prediction post last night. He's already got everyone playing defense trying to prove reality is real to his satisfaction.

This guy from China voted and only got caught because he brought attention to it.

There is no reason to believe that this is "very rare" when there is no meaningful process to catch it. No one knows what the rate of non-citizen voting is because there is no meaningful source of truth database to reference against.

Wasn’t there the example in Michigan? The chinaman who voted and then told everyone about it because “?”

The biggest Steelman is that immigrants, legal or otherwise, are counted in the US Census. Then the number of Electoral Votes and congressional seats are apportioned based on that population count. So even without voting, the presence of illegal immigrants can affect the election.

Looking at which states gained and lost EVs, most of it seemed like a wash to me. But I have seen various people lay out paths to a Kamala victory that would not have been a Kamala victory with the pre-2020 electoral vote apportion.

Except they messed up the Census in a way that undercounts Florida by 2 and NY and CA by 1, and refused to fix it after it was discovered. If Trump sweeps the Sun Belt while Kamala wins the Rust Belt, which is not at all implausible, this error will decide the president.

The answer is no , unless of course you pay attention to twitter nonsense too much.

Am I reading this correctly that having evidence something wrong occured, is something to be ashamed of? That people get receipts for their claims from the one social media site with the least censorship is to be expected. You won't find anything which undermines the "US elections are secure" narrative in any space in which diversity of opinion isn't a desideratum. But more to the point, twitter is irrelevant here, as it is merely a secondary source. One can use to discover primary ones.

Also for any readers, there is a top level pos by @WhiningCoil just two posts down which gives evidence that non-citizens are voting in US elections.

The Chinese voter in Michigan: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/30/politics/michigan-chinese-citizen-charged-after-illegally-voting/index.html

Charged with the crime, but the vote still is getting counted.

"The Chinese man – a student at the University of Michigan – cast his ballot on Sunday and then reached out to local election officials later that day in an attempt to get the ballot back, according to a source familiar with the situation.

The man registered to vote at the polling place on Sunday, the source said. He used his university ID and other documents to demonstrate his residency in Ann Arbor while filling out a same-day voter registration forms, the source said."

He wasn't even caught, he practically turned himself in. Granted, he was in the US legally, but he is a non-citizen that voted and got away with it but by his conscience.

Fair point. I may be completely incorrect. I saw quite a few posts from frog Twitter accounts, hence the post. Regardless, I get your point and will add tweets that did show it.

Voter fraud does not seem like a complete impossibility, elon here makes a claim about the state of California making voter ID check illegal which from my limited research does not seem far fetched.

Again, I am neither an American nor someone who votes. But in case this is correct, then there has to be some scepticism towards the American voting process.

Elon is a hack that's supporting trump in an attempt to avoid massive legal troubles. I am sure he also believes some of the nonsense he spews but that does not make him right. You should look into the voting issue a little more deeply. I am not American either but I attempt at all times to try and seperate the nonsense from reality. When it comes to voting the process is already safe enough from what I understand and fraud cases are minimal. Again you should look this up yourself from a wide variety of sources , but a propaganda man like Elon is certainly not a good source of information.

I have the impression that Musk is just saying stuff he knows will play with Internet conservatives; it comes off a bit fake and pandering. I'd expect his personal opinions to be a lot more orthogonal.

"Fight the woke mind-virus" was good, but it's been downhill from there.

I did post a news source for that very reason. My skepticism comes from the fact that there aren't very many sources explicity stating that California requires voter I'd from all voters and is sticking to this requirement.

As for Elon being a hack, he's about as competent as it gets as a professional, I'm not aware of what legal trouble he may be facing so can't comment.

I'd appreciate any links if you have any that explicity mention what has been discussed.

Joe Rogan has finally endorsed Trump after his podcast with Elon, seemingly swayed by Elon’s persuasive ability in his making of “the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear”, with Rogan agreeing him “every step of the way”. It’s interesting as a sort of demographic signal for whatever psychology you think Rogan is closest to in terms of the electorate, as most people think of him as a typology of the male base which consumes his podcast. It’s somewhat telling that he only did this at the very end after the possibility of a Kamala interview was absolutely off-the-table, as the irony is that Rogan’s male base is also similarly completely not the target of any communication from the Kamala campaign, sidelined for the young female demographic completely in terms of appealing to one principal issue (abortion) to the exclusion of anything else besides “we’re at least not Trump!”.

The latter argument would have worked better if Trump was running without the associated star-power of RFK, Elon, Gabbard, etc., all of whom Rogan has tremendous respect for individually, collectively allowing the scales to tip in terms of Trump being the figurehead bringing everyone to the finish line.

Incidentally I don’t think Rogan has voted for any Republican Presidential candidate before, and still was resistant even after the trauma of the pandemic (which changed his perspective on a lot of CW topics). The fact that the guy was a Bernie supporter not too long ago just signals how big of a shift there has been.

This probably doesn’t mean anything substantial (especially as a large chunk of Rogan’s fanbase is probably already Trump sympathetic) but it’s still an interesting development in the anxiety preceding the election tomorrow. What do you think?

I do not think most endorsements really move the needle.

But if there's anything that might goose male (especially white male) turnout just a bit, the combination of the Alpha Male Stoner in Chief and the King of the Space Geeks might do it. And that's not nothing.

This is almost literally an example of Jocks and Nerds setting aside their differences to support the same guy.

Side note, I have been consistently impressed that the Harris campaign has consistently failed in any real attempt to reach out to male voters by addressing what they care about. Every ad actually aimed at male voters has been basically "do it for the women in your life." I think the fallout if Trump wins and its CLEARLY the male turnout that pushed him over the edge is probably underrated.

What do you mean by fallout? Some extension of gendered politics like in South Korea?

Sort of.

I expect the left to QUADRUPLE down on the rhetoric against while males as the source of all evil. The states where Dems have control will probably pass some more laws to entrench current gender divides and further tilt the legal playing field towards females and minorities. They may think they've still got the numbers to win later with the migrant influx.

A very low confidence prediction is we might see active sortition of single females moving out of 'red' areas to blue areas as an act of protest.

I think the main thing will be coming from the Cathedral wanting vengeance, and if they can't take it out on Trump while Trump is in office, then regular cishet males may have to do. Males in positions of authority could come under direct attack to try and replace them with more favorable options.

Finally, expect the media to heighten female 'suspicion' of males. "Ladies, statistically speaking your husband/boyfriend probably voted for Trump, you better be careful around him!" Testable prediction: Increase in divorces between couples that lean liberal in the next year or so.

In short, in the near term certain trends will probably get worse as women process the social and cultural implications of the event. They've got to figure out how to align themselves going forward, and it is POSSIBLE that more of them will align themselves with the right if it looks like the right is ascendant.

On the flip side, I don't know how males will act in a world where it is clear that they're still politically relevant, even if they hold very little cultural power. May be they become bolder about demanding respect, maybe we actually get rumblings of a return to traditional/patriarchal norms. Very unclear.

Every ad actually aimed at voters has been basically "do it for the women in your life."

Even that seems based almost entirely on the idea that one of the most important things in the life of the women you care about is elective abortions. The people writing these ads don't seem to have any meaningful theory of mind for normal men.

Seriously. Nothing about improving their social status or helping them start families or boosting their career prospects.

All about (secretly) cast your ballot for Harris and you can maintain your masculinity AND help out women. Also we have no good definition of 'masculinity'.

Not even an acknowledgment of male-centric struggles.

Not even an acknowledgment of male-centric struggles.

They don't believe in these, except occasionally in the merited-impossibility sense. That is, if you do manage to temporarily convince them men are having a hard time, they'll say that's good for some reason, usually some variation of "well men were on top for thousands of years". If I had a nickel for every private-school full-ride direct-to-FAANG woman at Google who claimed male engineers had some sort of privilege over them, I'd have enough to weight my fist.

The replacement of traditional writing with a combination of discord, streaming and 4 hour long podcasts truly is a disaster. Want to see Elon’s “most compelling” case for Trump? Just waste all your free time today listening to my podcast and it might come up at some point. At least TikTok forces some kind of pace.

ChatGPTBox will summarize yt videos

Jesus Christ its insane.

"Wow I heard an insightful point on [podcast or 1 hour documentary]"

"Where can I find it?"

"Somewhere around the 45 minute mark, and then they go on a tangent about cat-squirrel hybrids for a bit, then they come back to the point."

In the current era we should be able to cite to any given piece of written/typed data nigh instantly, instead the content has evolved to make it more resistant to easy search.

That’s one reason why, surely? It’s much harder to get cancelled or persecuted for something you said if it’s obscured and kept behind the loyalty test of listening to 4 hours of podcast.

Easy search for everybody turned out to be a disaster, unfortunately. So interesting people retreated to hidden sanctuaries (discord, chats) and less amenable modalities (voice, video).

Didn't one of those leftist media assassination groups literally hire a group of people to listen to every Joe Rogan episode to find things they could use to get him kicked off Spotify? I definitely remember that.

It’s much harder to get cancelled or persecuted for something you said if it’s obscured and kept behind the loyalty test of listening to 4 hours of podcast.

You'd think so, but ,back in the day, Shane Gillis got cancelled exactly like that.

If your profile is lower, yeah, probably. I don't like this, because I'd hate for people to have more excuses to send endless whatsapp voice messages .

Yes to both you and @SteveKirk, but this kind of cancellation takes a lot more work than “see thing I don’t like, press retweet”. It’s much harder for it to go viral because the R number is so much lower.

more excuses to send endless whatsapp voice messages

Not the world I want either, I’m a very text-focused person. But I think it’s now clear that you can have too much legibility in a system.

I don’t think it will move the needle much, but I think his interviews with Trump/Vance/Musk did by a few fractions of a percent at least.

I do think one thing that has been lost is that Kamala will probably struggle with men more than Trump struggles with women. The Kamala campaign has aggressively refused to appeal to men, with their weak attempts doing more harm than good.

On top of that, Biden was the “reasonable” choice that “reasonable” men could get behind. Now that the Biden admin is viewed as a bit of a failed hysterical clown show, the “reasonable” masculine thing to do is vote for Trump. Centrist men in my experience feel Dems had their chance and they botched it. “Go to your room and think about what you’ve done, and maybe next time we’ll vote for you” energy. They did the same to Trump last time

Kamala Harris and the Democrats think you don't have to appeal to men; the way to get men's to vote for Democrats is to tell them they should do it for women. The Gillette ad some time ago showed that, and Harris's "weak attempts" aren't much different. The idea is that voting for Trump is a betrayal of any women in their lives -- "How could you [vote for that bad orange man]?" is the idea. Problem is it might work; plenty of men are "responsible" enough to ignore their own interests in the favor of the perceived interests of women.

Maybe.

Alternately I fully radicalized my wife. She's pro abortion, and we have a daughter, and that pulls at her heart strings. However, my argument that we have to keep her from being brainwashed trans in her tender years before abortion matters in her teen/adult years got her full on the Trump Train.

Open threats from the DNC to "alter" the 1st amendment, and Biden sleep walking us to the brink of WWIII also helped.

Funnily enough, this isn't far off from the "radicalizing" argument you see a lot of women give about why they are voting Trump despite being nominally pro abortion. Bridget Phetasy straight up said becoming a mom radicalized her against all the trans stuff. Leapfrogged everything else to become her top issue over abortion.

If there was a broad-scale strategic mistake the left made, 'letting' the GOP turn trans issues into the most central culture war flashpoint has to be it.

broad-scale strategic mistake

Closing the country at all during COVID was the biggest broad-scale strategic mistake for the left. Less damage to the economy and more dead boomers is a massive win for them in the short and long term.

They made out incredibly well for themselves in all the panic spending though. Nobody's ever made a full account of all the trillions that ended up going to left wing orgs. I'm sure that more than made up for general economic damage.

I don’t think they ‘let’ the GOP do it. The reason that trans had so much traction was because people pattern matched it to legalising homosexuality and gay marriage.

The utter terror of having your life destroyed five years later for opposing ‘trans rights’ compelled public people on both the left and right sides to become viral vectors for the ideology. I think people have forgotten how much trans was pushed by conservatives, especially in the UK but in the US too.

In short, the form of the campaign ensured that it would take centre stage regardless of what anyone rationally thought about it as an election winner.

(The pattern matching between ‘trans rights’ and ‘gay rights’ then forced interested parties to double down because if it became possible one day to criticise trans stuff without being destroyed, the same might be true of LGBT issues more broadly. The taboo would be broken. Whether that’s actually the case I don’t know.)

Did the Gillette ad show that? My understanding was that it triggered a massive backlash and actually lowered sales for about 6 months after the ad aired.

The Gillette ad didn't show it worked, though it's pretty much impossible to measure the backlash to one ad in a consumer product like that unless it's truly massive (Bud Light is the only example I know); it did show that's what they think is a good idea.

The Bud Light boycott has already been reversed because my boomer mother-in-law doesn’t understand that Michelob Ultra is owned by the same parent company.

AB Inbev’s total sales have recovered, even as Bud Light’s have not.

True, but this idea is fading hard, especially among the younger generation. Women are so strongly protected by the Daddy State that many men feel no obligation.

Given the relative outcomes in terms of higher educational attainment, life expectancy, suicide rates, gender-specific advocacy/scholarships/celebration, etc., I can't believe there are still men who feel compelled to give up anything to further support women in 2024.

I'm not surprised that Rogan, specifically, endorsed Trump. He has somewhat Trumpish views, especially on vaxines and covid. He had a nice, friendly chat with Trump, while Kamala refused to go on his show (at least in his preferred format). And he's a bro who likes combat sports, and Trump was an old wrestling fan (yeah not the same, but uh... adjacent?).

Still notable because so few celebrities have publicly endorsed Trump. Until now he had um... Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan? Basically just a handful of washed-ups who have given up on having an active career. celebrities are overwhelmingly democratic. Like, it's hard for Republicans to play any pop song at their rallies because the musicians all sue them. But maybe that monopoly is starting to break.

He has somewhat Trumpish views, especially on vaxines and covid.

Trump is quite pro-vaccine. He still touts Operation Warpspeed.

i've literally never heard him mention it, even though (IMO) it was one of the best things to come out of his time in office.

Also he was famously in favour of taking horse medicine, and backing RFK who's entire campaign is antivax.

Horse medicine

Is this a comment? A question? What are you saying? I can take a guess, so can other readers, but make your point clearly and with some effort.

Comment length is only one proxy for comment thoughtfulness, respect, and consideration. Referring to Ivermectin as horse medicine is a long played-out point which will not convince anyone. Allowing it to be referred to that way is already allowing two-word "points", so you should go ahead and allow two-word "rebuttals" too.

It's like unironically referring to Trump as Drumpf; it's a useless turn of phrase which adds nothing to the discussion except signal one's team membership. There is no argument to be made against it except either mockery or a reminder to respect the norms, the latter of which you don't seem to find necessary.

I have absolutely no interest in relitigating whether Ivermectin is horse medicine, but it's a turn of phrase which should be called out. My response had no less substance than the original use of the phrase.

you know that's actually fair, i admit that calling it horse medicine was some low-effort snark on my part.

I still say that Trump has mostly run on a very heterodox approach to healthcare though. you can't say he's "pro-vaccine" when he's promising to put RFK in charge of health. But, who knows, it's always hard to tell what Trump will actually do.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/555247-trump-takes-credit-for-vaccine-rollout-one-of-the-greatest-miracles/

Joe Rogan never really regained his mainstream credibility after the early 2022 COVID hitjob. That level of media scrutiny changes people. It also made it so that the highest-ranking Democrat willing to go on his show was John Fetterman. On a personal level, it’s clear which side listens to him more. That sort of social camaraderie is fundamentally what drives human political behavior.

Can you define "mainstream credibility" in this context?

Acceptable to the NPR listeners would be my definition. The idea being that left leaning outlets work to put entertainers and podcasters and news outlets into a heretical works pile where they lose advertising and support and get relegated to right leaning channels and advertising for support. Liberals generally shun such media so it hurts them to be branded as « not mainstream credible « .

I think USA Today or 60 Minutes would be closer to mainstream than NPR. I tend to think college professors (or those who envision themselves as their peers) as the prototypical NPR listener.

With so much early voting, it probably would have mattered more last month, or even last week. Now it feels almost like a virtue signal, much as I hate to say.

I wouldn't be so sure. Aren't a lot of his viewers low propensity young men who are extremely unlikely to have already done anything to vote early? It might be timed to get them out on election day itself.

Yeah, supposing they're registered. Which many aren't, and don't have time to be.

How many swing states allow same day registration?

None from the looks of it, but what's the actual ballot return rate? A few of these guys might put down the bong and go find their ballots in the mail pile, or actually go to the polls on their lunch break.

This makes sense to me. I think I saw somewhere that early voting skewed female, which makes me think men just spontaneously turn up to the polls on the day. You'd want to give them a nudge at the last minute, like the night before.

Absolutely. It’s the safest endorsement ever made. He put absolutely nothing on the line with this one

How much fraud is there?

During the Republican Primaries, Vivek called out the GOP Chairwoman for being utterly useless, and leading the GOP to loss after loss after loss, and called for her resignation. In the wake of this, the Trump takeover of the GOP was complete, with Lara Trump taking the top spot. One of their top priorities? Voter fraud. Largely because Trump has never abandoned his fraud claims. Reactions from political pundits was that this was generally a bad idea. Polling supposedly showed the continued sour grapes over losing in 2020 turned voters off. All the same, the organization clearly staffed up to proactively fight potential voter fraud.

They successfully took noncitizens off the voter roles in Virginia.. They've been wining court cases in PA and GA to prevent mail in votes from being counted if they arrive after election day. In Arizona they won a lawsuit once again trying to purge non citizens from the voter roles. And many more.

Now, winning court cases is all fine and dandy, but if the people counting the votes choose to just blatantly ignore it, you still have a problem. To illustrate my point, there was a Chinese national in Michigan that voted because LOL apparently? And when he went out of his way to report that he shouldn't have been allowed to vote... well he's in trouble but the vote is still going to count. And that's basically the rub. Without police in the room enforcing these court orders, once a fraudulent or illegal vote is counted it's fiat accompli. Laws are meaningless with a process designed to ignore them.

Regardless of my black pilled skepticism about whether all these legal victories will amount to anything, what if they do?

My understanding of a lot of polls is they weight their demographics by turnout from the last election, plus maybe some secret sauce to try to guesswork around shifting coalitions. But, what if their starting point, the 2020 election, was rife with fraud that is now being proactively stamped out? Or at least reduced significantly due to the GOP's new diligence? Well garbage in, garbage out. If the polls get their weighting from fraudulent elections, they won't be accurate for an election that has had the fraud cracked down on.

So I propose that if Trump wins, and the polls are significantly wrong, it could constitute some circumstantial evidence that there was significant fraud in 2020. Alternately, it's possible that if the polls are bang on and Trump loses, perhaps it constitutes equally weak circumstantial evidence that they were not. Assuming places like PA and GA don't count undated or late dated ballots anyways because fuck you, once it's counted it's fiat accompli.

To illustrate my point, there was a Chinese national in Michigan that voted because LOL apparently? And when he went out of his way to report that he shouldn't have been allowed to vote... well he's in trouble but the vote is still going to count.

Wait, what? Why are same-day registrations not given provisional ballots in Michigan like they are in other states?

I'd intended to make an election post earlier this weekend but ended up spending time with friends/family and "touching grass" instead, but I also want to get something out before tomorrow. Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit fame) has labeled 2024 "Schrodinger's Election" and I feel it. I look around my purple but leaning blue suburb and Trump Flags, bumper stickers, and yard-signs seem to outnumber Harris ones by a solid two to one margin and are often seen coexisting with more liberal municipal/state candidates and "vote yes/no on [thing]". My intuition is that Trump has this in the bag. But I also know that if history is any guide, my intuition is probably wrong as I thought the same back in 2020. I wouldn't call myself "an election denier" but I do have a sneaking suspicion that an honest accounting in 2020 would've resulted in either a Trump victory or a much tighter race for similar reasons to those that @Tractatus lays out in this post here. As such I find myself approaching the current election with a certain amount of trepidation, I think that support for Trump is much thicker on the ground than it is for Harris, but I also think that whatever "fortification" efforts that are in place now will be far more mature and firmly established than they were 4 years ago.

I am predicting a resounding "win" for Harris, but that win is in quotation marks for a reason.

My alternate lower confidence prediction/conspiracy theory is that the reason the media has suddenly started to give questions about voter-rolls airtime is that it's "battle space preparation" so that in the event of a Trump win all the commentators who've spent the last 4 years prattling on about "the Jan 6th Insurrection" and how there was no proof of election fraud, can pivot to "questioning election results is the mark of a true patriot" without suffering fatal amounts of cognitive whiplash.

I’m expecting precisely nobody to accept the results. Baked in. One side believes the election was stolen, both believe the election is being stolen now (they differ on methods and direction, but in both cases, it’s against them). One side believes the other is Nazis. The other side believes that the others are communists.

Note the PA case is about undated/wrongly dated ballots, not ballots that arrive after election day. Meaning they wouldn't be counted if undated even if they arrive BEFORE election day, which is why it was being challenged. Because obviously you know that an undated ballot that arrives before election day was mailed in time. There has been significant debate about that clause in the law by Republicans when they were the ones expanding mail in ballot access to help rural turn out, when they were on the pro side.

Note that the US. Supreme Court may have overruled the PA one and allowed the undated ballots to be converted to provisional ballots for the November election:

https://www.thewellnews.com/2024-elections/supreme-court-allows-undated-ballots-to-be-counted-in-swing-state-lawsuit/

Speaking of which- the really incredibly blue counties in Atlanta illegally extending early voting hours, what’s going on with that? Is there any way to stop the illegal votes from counting? Of course not.

In 2020, I was on my cousin’s deer lease for the election, watching TV during the day and he said- this was before Trump got up and claimed the election was stolen, mind you- ‘they’re counting them(ballots) just as fast as they can fill em out’. I don’t know if he was referring to Pennsylvania or Arizona or what. But 2020 was weird, the establishment had trashed its trust, and it was apparent that democrats were willing to do things normally beyond the pale out of TDS.

This kind of reaction to the base’s sentiment is natural even if it doesn’t do anything.

Speaking of which- the really incredibly blue counties in Atlanta illegally extending early voting hours, what’s going on with that? Is there any way to stop the illegal votes from counting? Of course not.

AP News "Georgia judge rejects GOP lawsuit trying to block counties from accepting hand-returned mail ballots" says a judge has already reviewed the issue and said they're not violating the law. Apparently the law says that after a certain deadline, the drop boxes have to close and absentee ballots can only be accepted by handing them to an election official... so they kept the offices open so people could hand their ballots to election officials without having to do so on election day when presumably anyone could go to their polling place and hand in an absentee ballot, but at that point they might as well just vote in person (modulo rules about letting you hand in an absentee ballot for someone else; not sure what Georgia's laws say about that).

It is a bit disorganized that they would be deciding to do that last minute... but early voting is new enough and significantly more popular this year, so it's not surprising the election offices were caught off guard by its popularity and needing to increase resources.

There's also the related issue that apparently Cobb county messed up and sent out ballots late, which would be a reason for them to attempt to do their best to make up for their mistake so people could still return their ballots.

Catholic doctrine distinguishes between a sacrament which is illicit, and one which is invalid. An invalid sacrament is null and void, whereas one which is simply illicit is meerly wrong or sinful, while still retaining its essential function.

I wonder if a similar distinction is appropriate here. Its hard for me to see why votes cast in violation of minor provisions of state election code (such as early voting hours) should be voided. Voters can't be expected to understand the entireity of the state election code. A proper remedy would target the election officials responsible for the violation.

Of course, things like ballots cast by inelligible voters or in the name of others should be tossed out and rendered invalid.

Let’s say you have Area A and Area B. A votes R and B votes D.

A and B are supposed to be open 9-9. But B decides it will remain open an extra 2 hours.

B making the decision to stay open is unfair unless A also gets to stay open longer.

Except this is already the case because different states have different rules and in some cases so do different muncipalities within states.

Which isn't to say whatever the rules are shouldn't be followed, but your example would suggest there is already built in unfairness due to the fragmented nature of your electoral law and procedures.

If the rules are published in advance, it averages out. If you change the rules at the last minute, you're explicitly fishing for a certain outcome.

That’s one reason why the electoral college still makes sense. If votes are pooled nationally but elections are run locally then you’re incentivizing states to be as lax as possible to pile on the votes, trading validity for volume.

About a decade ago in Washington, which is fully by mail, we had some conservative counties start offering free postage for ballots. Very quickly the state moved to make free postage universal.

Doesn't that just switch the incentives to swing states? Indeed PA has mail in voting because Republicans passed it in 2019 prior to Covid, because they thought it would help rural turn out, to make the state more Red. Obviously that is not what came to pass, but that was the intent.

With the electoral college a legislature has incentive to help their preferred candidate win, but they only need 50% + 1 to do that.

Without it a legislature has incentive to put as many votes on the board as possible. So if your state leans hard in one direction, it helps your candidate to do maximize number of votes cast, so you have incentive to be lax on election security excepting coordinated attacks by the other side.

Its hard for me to see why votes cast in violation of minor provisions of state election code (such as early voting hours) should be voided.

Because the minor violations are ways to get around (what little) safeguards. In Fulton County Atlanta's case, they were trying to count ballots during off-hours, and attempting to refuse GOP poll watchers from being admitted because they weren't allowed to come in during off-hours.

To illustrate my point, there was a Chinese national in Michigan that voted because LOL apparently? And when he went out of his way to report that he shouldn't have been allowed to vote... well he's in trouble but the vote is still going to count.

My whacko conspiracy theory is that he did it to sow chaos. It's obviously very easy for non-citizens in Michigan to vote. So easy, in fact, that the only way they'd ever get caught is if they turn themselves in. This is pretty obvious, but people insist it isn't so. Some Chinese guy saying, "yeah, I voted, can I get my vote back?" exacerbates the obviousness.

Eastern folks sure seem to understand self-immolation style protest.

That's the wild part. Our entire election system is apparently governed by the honor system where nobody would ever lie so we never need to check. And then people have the gall to state that voter fraud is rare. If this were any other institution arguing about why they should never be audited or have any oversight what so ever, we'd all be calling bullshit.

That's the wild part. Our entire election system is apparently governed by the honor system

Yes, welcome to the party, this has been a GOP talking point since the Clinton administration.

My state’s online voter registration accepts many forms of identification, but doesn’t require any that would prove citizenship. You just have to affirm you are a citizen, and are informed it’s a crime to lie about it.

I don’t think they have some database to cross reference things like driver’s licenses with citizenship. If they did, I wouldn’t expect my permanent resident friends to have gotten called for jury duty, and yet they have.

If republicans ever wanted to fight fire with fire (probably the only way we ever get meaningful reform) what noncitizens would they need to import who could be counted on to vote red? Russians? Hungarians?

They didn't poll Russia, but among the 34 countries Pew did poll, only the Tunisians and Hungarians prefer Trump to Biden, at least when the only question is whether they "have confidence in ____ to do the right thing regarding world affairs".

Globally (at least in these countries, which are a somewhat diverse sampling), Biden had 43% confidence and Trump had 28%.

I feel like the interpretation of that could be a hell of a scissor statement. Democrats: "Everybody else everywhere in the world knows the right choices to make; why don't you?!?" Republicans: "Hundreds of countries are run the way you want, and for some reason you can't understand why everybody wants to live here instead!"

This includes a poll of various Euro countries on Trump/Harris. The countries preferring Trump to Harris are Slovenia, Slovakia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Hungary, Georgia, Serbia and - at 78 to 22 % - Russia.

Of course such polls have a limited value in telling how the citizens in those countries would vote if they actually were American citizens. Insofar as someone living in Finland is concerned, what exactly would there be for us to gain in Trump becoming a president over Harris? The two most important ways US politics affects Finland are trade and security, and in both cases Trump causes at least some level of danger of those things going south, i.e. there being tariffs and a trade war or an US withdrawal - partial or full - from NATO.

Sure, at least the latter one didn't happen during the first term, but both are actually things, i.e. a change in trade policy and withdrawal from Europe that many Trump supporters, including prominent ones, actually want Trump to do, so they still exist as possibilities. Putting America first is what Trump would be specifically elected to do! OTOH, if one actually lived in the US, the priorities would undergo at least some revision.

I rather suspect that for most of these countries the poll mainly indicates opinion on Russia/Ukraine conflict - there's a rather amusing poll from Czech Republic on how the voters of various Czech parties would vote, and while the most Harris-voting segments are TOP-09, a center-right party, and the Christian Democrats, the most pro-Trump party is KSČM - the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia.

An easier solution would probably be to just prosecute noncitizen registered voters. Or, heck, just prosecute illegal immigrants. They're breaking the law, after all.

Requires voter ID. Which is racist and therefore going to be fought tooth and nail

Requires voter ID.

Why? You know who voted, you know who is a citizen (almost all the time - social security records are how the US usually verifies citizenship before granting a passport, so it's good enough for voting), and you know where they live (its on the voter roll).

Noncitizens voting under their real identities is the easiest type of voter fraud to catch and prosecute. Several red states and purple states with Republican governors have run the checks, and successfully caught and prosecuted the tiny number of noncitizens who voted. The most recent example is Texas, who referred 1930 suspected noncitizen voters for prosecution - that is 1930 suspected noncitizens who have ever voted in Texas, not 1930 noncitizens voting in any given election. 1930 votes is less than 0.02% of a typical Texas presidential election turnout (c. 11 million), so even if all 1930 really are noncitizens (some will be paperwork errors) and they all voted in the same election, it isn't enough to swing anything short of Bush v Gore II - The Electric Boogaloo.

The type of fraud that voter ID prevents is people voting, in person, in someone else's identity. That is a type of fraud that could be committed by noncitizens, but would normally be committed by citizens because they have more stake in US elections. It is also a type of fraud that doesn't happen in elections with no-excuse postal voting because committing the same type of fraud by post is a lot easier.

You're thinking like a democrat by assuming that republicans would want illegal aliens to vote. That they dont is pretty much the crux of the issue.

Trump is apparently very popular in Israel.

Ironic given Jewish voting preferences in America

The more orthodox the more they vote for Trump

It really depends on the Jews. Among the Russian-speaking American Jews the GOP is still more popular, since they or their parents still remember the USSR.

Given that it appears a dem scheme to cheat was already exposed shouldn’t that partially increase odds that they did in fact cheat? It would be weird if the o r and only time they cheated they got caught

What was the "dem scheme to cheat"? Some clueless immigrant checking the wrong box?

Something similar to Pennsylvania happened in Arizona: https://www.azfamily.com/2024/11/05/40k-damaged-incomplete-voter-registration-forms-submitted-maricopa-county/

40K damaged, incomplete voter registration forms submitted in Maricopa County

When I read this headline, my first thought was that the registration forms had been corrupted by Chaos.

Anyway, I hope the voting machine spirits are adequately appeased by the ritual sacrifice of ballots, lest we end up with more hanging chads. Praise the Electomnissiah.

They found thousands of fake registrations by a single dem aligned PAC

It was a bit more sophisticated than that

Welfare offices and other agencies in at least 46 US states are providing voter registration forms to migrants without requiring proof of citizenship, leading Republicans and conservatives to call for swift federal action to stop the handouts.

Every state but North Dakota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Wyoming gives applicants for either welfare benefits, driver’s licenses, or in some cases, mail-in ballots federal voter registration forms without demanding proof of citizenship.

There is currently no requirement on federal voting forms to provide proof of US citizenship, though it is illegal to falsely claim one is a citizen or for a non-citizen to cast a ballot in a federal election.

While I think this is stupid, anybody can print out a voter registration form off the internet whenever they want. Having physical forms available does not meaningfully change anything.

This isn’t what I’m talking about. Take Lancaster country for example. They found approx 2500 fake registrations by a Dem aligned NGO. This now has been found in about four counties in PA. Add in VBM and there you have a GOTV effort n

2500 were suspicious, but after review 50% were confirmed legitimate, 25% were incomplete but not suspicious and the remaining 25% were being further investigated (so some number of these could be fake).

As was mooted at the time the organization involved pointed out as per PA law they have to turn in all registrations they collect whether incomplete or inaccurate because they are not allowed to filter those out.

So how many are actually fake is up in the air.

It’s possible it sends the wrong message and confuses noncitizens who end up voting when they shouldn’t

You don't think every one of these NGOs that are organizing migrants into this country, helping them apply for welfare, walking them through exactly what to say to claim asylum, wouldn't also be going, in that sickening passive voice "This is a voter registration form. You can only vote if you check this box here. If you vote it's important to know that Harris will protect your asylum status here."

I would guess this.

This one actually does seem quite sketchy. Hmmm.

Polls are always off to some degree, and it's often explainable to their weighting factors, e.g. in 2016 they didn't take educational polarization into account sufficiently. It's also pretty clear that many polls are herding this year, and the fact they're weighting on previous elections (which AFAIK wasn't standard practice before 2024) is another potential avenue for a bigger-than-average miss. Much of the industry is just really, really worried about underestimating Trump for a third time in a row, and as such they might be overcorrecting.

The initiatives against voter fraud won't amount to much because there's never been much evidence for widespread voter fraud despite countless fishing expeditions trying to find some. It does exist in isolated cases, e.g. an old black women voting once for herself, and once for her dead father whose house she's now living in. But beyond individual incidents like these, there's not much else.

Much of the industry is just really, really worried about underestimating Trump for a third time in a row, and as such they might be overcorrecting.

There is no good indication that any of the major polls underestimated Trump in any previous elections.

If you estimate that Trump has a 30% chance to win, and he wins, you weren't wrong. You'd have been wrong if Harrison Ford, estimated as having a 0% chance of winning, had won.

There haven't been enough elections in which Trump was eligible in order to say much about whether his chance of winning was underestimated.

I was talking about polls here, not modelers like Nate Silver. Polls don't estimate win chances, they estimate win margins. They had a lot of egg on their face for stuff like Wisconsin in 2016.. Polls underestimated his support in most swing states in both 2016 and 2020.

I agree that Nate Silver didn't get it "wrong" in 2016 as popularly perceived, as they're doing something different.

Would you consider the coercion of electors as being in the same class of fraud as ballot-stuffing? My prior for the former is non-negligibly high at this point due to the prior correspondence of 2016’s scheme and the fact that if the polls are whatsoever correct (still holding out on a judgment for that one) then we’re looking at a likely EV differential that could fit on one hand.

My understanding of a lot of polls is they weight their demographics by turnout from the last election, plus maybe some secret sauce to try to guesswork around shifting coalitions. But, what if their starting point, the 2020 election, was rife with fraud that is now being proactively stamped out?

They don't get their demographic data from the official tabulations of the last election. The official tabulation doesn't have demographic data. The adjust their weighting based on exit polling from the last election, among other things. For your theory to have any credence there would have to have been fraud in the exit polling, and efforts taken to eliminate fraud in exit polling.

Exit polling was useless in 2020 already thanks to mass mail in ballots. I thought pollsters broke things down with zip code and results, zip codes often serving as pretty good proxies for demographics.

this is a game where there are two players not just the Republicans. the Republicans might be cracking down on Democratic vote tech this year but that doesn't mean the Democratic party haven't made improvements to their vote tech that might compensate for whatever measures the Republicans have introduced.

Tucker Carlson appearing on Joe Rogan experience speculated that UAPs are real, but are not alien visitors from other planets but supernatural in origin and always has been here. More recently he claimed to have been mauled by a demon in his sleep, which resulted in physical marks (more probable culprit - one of four dogs in the room?). His suspected demonic activity today - the invention of nuclear weapons:

I have never met a person who can isolate the moment when nuclear technology became known to man. So, where did it come from exactly? ... it's very clear to me these are demonic.

Why are apparently kooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right? Cadence Owens also came out as dinosaur truther and flat-earth curious.

Is Tucker trying to become the next Alex Jones? Is this part of an op to associate historical revisionism and opposition to the ruling regime with insanity?

RationalWiki used to call this "crank magnetism": people who are receptive to one "crazy" opinion rarely limit themselves to just that. In other words, "don't be so open-minded your brain falls out". I'm not linking to RationalWiki, because it's RationalWiki.

Another way of framing it is that once you've established that conventional wisdom on some topic is wrong (perhaps even knowingly wrong i.e. the powers that be know what the truth is and are keeping it from you), it's only natural to wonder what other topics are so affected. To name but two people, Graham Linehan and Lionel Shriver have both admitted that realising the extent to which the mainstream lied to them about the transgender issue (as they see it) has made them sceptical about whether climate change is real.

Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?

Zvi calls this the Incorrect Anti-Narrative Contrarian Cluster, and he's had a post about it in IOU status for nearly three years.

Part of the answer has got to be "the right is highly suspicious of running sanity gatekeeping, because all the institutions which were supposed to do that went rogue and abused their power to shut the right out of the conversation".

(Also, you mean "kooky".)

I wonder if he got the idea from the Demon Core.

I have never met a person who can isolate the moment when nuclear technology became known to man.

I've never met Mr Carlson, but I could isolate several moments as potential candidates.

Candace Owens is into the weirder end of YEC. This is epicycles on an established set of beliefs that are mandatory among a particular subset of the population. Really, you’re surprised that YEC epicycle beliefs are common among far right pundits?

Claiming demonic experiences is also common-ish among very conservative Christians, so tucker getting into this stuff isn’t strange.

Candace Owens is into the weirder end of YEC.

I believe there's nothing genuine at all in Candace Owens' public persona, no genuine belief to analyze there at all.

She suddenly appeared as a "personality" during Gamergate when she tried to claim some ground on the anti-Gamergate side, found herself run out of it after encroaching on another leftist grifter's turf, realized that there's much more alpha in being a black woman right-winger, so after a week she came back as a pro-Gamergate grifter instead.

Someone genuinely moving from one side to the other is certainly possible, but I'm deeply suspicious one would do it within a week. It took me years. Hence since then I just dismiss her as an obvious grifter.

She made some high-commitment lifestyle changes since then, though. Someone in her position getting into YEC esoterica and Holocaust denial out of general historical revisionism is basically what I would expect if those changes were genuine. She’ll be tweeting about ancient Atlantean colonies on mars any day now.

She married a handsome Englishman with a big country house and a hundred million dollar inheritance coming down the pipeline. I suppose that counts as “high commitment”, but my guess is that both the before Candace and the after Candace would have taken that deal, politics aside. The Holocaust denial, YEC conspiracies and extreme esoteric weird online stuff seems more a consequence of being at home in a foreign country with a phone and babies for company; even her father in law denounced the antisemitism quite publicly, so I think it’s more on her than on her tradcath milieu for now.

The Holocaust denial, YEC conspiracies and extreme esoteric weird online stuff seems more a consequence of being at home in a foreign country with a phone and babies for company;

Man, when did kids go from asking why is the sky blue to "I don't get it, mama, how can you dispose of so many bodies in such short time? They didn't have enough crematoriums in Auschwitz, it makes no sense, mama!"?

Funny, but you know what I mean, she was already a clearly ultra-online person and in my experience new mothers at home with babies often go even deeper into whatever very online space they were in before they gave birth. Usually this is just celebrity gossip, astrology woo, fanfiction, a video game, whatever, but in Candace’s case it was clearly the schizo side of DR twitter (presumably she avoided the mainstream side because of racism) which intersects heavily with the Alex Jones verse, which itself intersects with YEC, David Ike lizard people, flat earth etc.

I totally believe this but she’s also buying into the kind of schizophrenia you get in the actual IRL tradcath esoteric paranoid schizo verse, very specifically.

Wait, you're telling me Cadence Owens is with the Schizocore Hyperboria video crowd now?

tradcath esoteric paranoid schizo verse

Any rec's on twitter accounts or blogs I can follow for lulz. This is kind of turning into my soap opera stand-in.

More comments

Funny, but you know what I mean,

Yes, but I like my version better.

There has always been an element of the intelligence community plugged into weird supernaturalist subcultures involving UFOs and poltergeists and the like; some of you may remember Jason Jorjani and the attempt to legitimize (and co-opt) the derogatory term of the ‘alt-right’ pre-Charlottesville and its connection to Spencer, Bannon, and the like. The whole interesting part of that affair that many ignore would be the fact that Jorjani testifies to an MI-6 agent tied to Erik Prince originally roping him into that mess under the pretenses of being a “British member of the Vril Society” whose interests involved back-engineering Nazi time-travel tech. The field of UFOlogy speaks of rumors of high-ranking evangelical intelligence officials whose far-reaching and high-impact beliefs include the claims of UFOs being demons attempting to deceive the world into apostatizing from the true faith of Christ Jesus™ (Protestant Christianity), and Michael Flynn (the previous director of the DIA) being at least a certain type of person who gets power in those positions isn’t exactly lending any credence against opposing viewpoints.

Tucker might be an extension of the same belief system, insofar as this isn’t intended as some psychological operation on the part of whomever believes in the specific claims thereof (most Christians, like Tucker, believe in some version of them), but it might unintentionally act as one. That some intelligence operatives are using this to their betterment has no doubt, but that then goes to the general question of most psyop-based explanations for the current UFO craze: why? Why push demon-aliens in flying discs zapping people? It doesn’t make that much sense.

Many (most?) complex civilizations “believed in” personifications of bad behavioral inclinations and social forces, and they called them evil spirits or demons. IMO the utility of personifying invisible forces is that humans are excellent at memorizing characters with personalities, but not lists of assertions or principles. It’s easier to persuade oneself not to eat too much cake when it’s a question of obeying an ugly demon who tempts you with thoughts and who has tempted you before, versus some hazy self-negotiation involving delayed gratification and self-reward. Demons also center a person’s moral identity: your true identity always wants the longterm good, and the demons are what tempt you (not “another part of me wants…” which is sort of depersonalizing). If the intel community is religious and interested in civilization-crafting then maybe they want to bring back angels and demons? Linking UFOs to unknown forces takes the public’s interests away from futuristic cia crafts and onto spiritual concerns. Plausibly, the same org that is so high-tech that it can make UFOs is also so smart that they see no merit in a population overly concerned with mind-boggling military technology.

This is somewhat similar as a hypothesis to what’s been floated in terms of all these things being engineered to increase the religiosity of the nation in order to save as many souls as possible in the long-term (and also to defend against the ‘ultimate deception’ of the antichrist). Nick Redfern’s Final Events has a similar perspective to this in terms of being in contact with a group within the intelligence community that actually believes that this is the right thing to do, and what ought to happen, due to their belief that there actually does exist a real unexplainable phenomenon deemed to be “extraterrestrial” by the larger populace that is actually demonic in nature. Incidentally, the late Old Testament scholar Michael Heiser believed he had encountered the same group of intelligence officers going to various theologians and airing their conflicting feelings about what they had done in such an affair. Whatever’s happening, it’s probably at minimum as weird as Michael Flynn going on camera with his family saying the QAnon oath and never elaborating. (Based?)

This thread you started is fascinating btw, just thanking you.

Personally I'm starting to believe demons might actually exist. Who knows?

The space of possible minds is exceedingly large; the space of possible disembodied minds (if such a thing is granted as possible) seems much more vast than embodied minds purely mathematically given the limitations of the permutations of matter; if Yudkowsky is correct, the vast majority of mind-space is populated by hopelessly alien minds operating on opaque decision-theories; if Scott is correct, the vast majority of actualized civilizations taken randomly from the space of all possible minds fall victim to an inexorable entropic coordination problem which isn’t just limited to embodied minds, but also disembodied ones (cf. acausal trade); depending on your theory of anthropics, coordination problems in universes with vaster mind-spaces would be preferred over ones with smaller mind-spaces, etc.

You can also tie this into simulation arguments, extortion from counterfactual agents, or whatever else, to create whatever rational™ defense of “non-local molochian agents” you want, but if it walks like a demon and talks like a demon, it probably is a demon. Jonathan Pageau analogizes the EA metaphor for picking the right mind out of a vast mindspace of minds oriented towards the great-filter of Moloch (what Yudkowsky posits as “demon summoning”, which is much easier than “angel summoning”) as “Sauron building his body from the corruptive power of the ring” which isn’t that far off from the more recondite discussions of alignment I’ve seen.

Okay yes but they don't actually visit us. Even if this is all true, the people seeing demons in this worldline are still crazy.

If you’re interested in alien minds, you might want to investigate Catholic doctrines on the psychology of angels.

I don't normally post AI summaries, but this one is unsettling:

"Key aspects of angelic psychology in Catholic doctrine include:

"Intellect and Knowledge

  • Angels possess pure intellect without need for sensory input
  • They understand through direct intuition rather than reasoning from premises to conclusions
  • Their knowledge is innate rather than learned over time
  • They cannot change their minds once they've made a decision (hence the permanence of Lucifer's rebellion)

Time and Consciousness

  • Angels exist outside physical time but can interact with temporal events
  • Their consciousness is not sequential like human thought
  • They can apprehend multiple concepts simultaneously rather than sequentially

Would you like me to elaborate on any of these aspects? I find the medieval philosophical arguments about how pure intelligences might function to be particularly fascinating."

Excuse me. I'm going to have to inspect my CUDA code for signs of the holy ghost.

The text above describes a mind eerily similar to the ones we summon transiently in LLM activations.

"Let's think step by step," the angel said dubiously.

I’m somewhat familiar with that from what I’ve read from St. Maximus and Fr. Lagrange; do you have any recommendations?

Commenting here so I can also get the recommendations.

(I love collecting somewhat strange books like this)

One of the most enduring constants in UFOlogy is that people who go down the UFO rabbit hole often find that it stares back (yeah yeah it's a horrible mixed metaphor.) I uh didn't realize that Erik Prince had been tied to back-engineering Nazi time-travel technology, though, so thanks for the spare link to peruse.

UFOs are very interesting because the intelligence agencies either have pretty hard proof or they don't, but I find it interesting that there does seem to be such an overlap within the intelligence community between people who are "into" UFOs and people who are "into" stuff like poltergeists. If you had e.g. satellite imagery of a UFO reentering the atmosphere, presumably you wouldn't connect that to woo stuff like remote viewing, but we live in a world with people like Hal Putoff and Lue Elizondo.

Makes you wonder what they know (Grush referred to UFOs as "inter-dimensional," which has been the conjecture of leading UFOlogists like Jacques Vallee – who of course has his own ties to intelligence agencies) – or if they don't know and it's just weird topics attract weird thinkers.

I suspect there's actually something to the weird, but I think it's also important to note that a good intelligence operative is probably very good at making connections between seemingly unrelated things. Seems quite likely that intelligence agencies are brim-full of people who are very good at reading a lot into very small amounts of data, which pays of spectacularly when they're right...and also when they're wrong.

What puts me off of UAPs and the idea that “they have proof” is just how little physical evidence of life, not intelligent life, just plain ordinary life, exists. The best the Pro-UAP can do is a plausible fossilized bacteria sample found on Mars. They have no ships, megastructures, signals, planets with obvious life-signs. It doesn’t surprise me that people into UAPs are into non physical phenomena as they need some plausible way to explain how these things exist without leaving physical proof.

I think the idea that UAP are necessarily connected to extraterrestrial lifeforms is wrong. We could have a ship full of dead bodies in a hangar at Area 51 and still have no proof of extraterrestrial life. Likewise, if we detect a megastructure around a nearby star that's the product of alien life, it doesn't prove anything about UAP.

The best theory continues being that the US government employs a lot of people and does not actually have very strong gatekeeping, so weirdos (of the type that would convince themselves that they have seen UFO evidence, or perhaps make up a story for grift/wishful thinking and come to believe it for real) can get in and thrive. Every time these characters (Lazar, Elizondo, Grusch...) are brought up, what jumps out at me is how obviously different their manner of speech and even their names sound from "serious" members of the US military that are quoted on "serious" topics - the Mearsheimers, Gradies and Saltzmans, inevitably of Jewish, Nordic or sometimes Irish extraction, patrician-sounding first names and middle initials. This alone suggests that there is some ethnic-cultural divide at play here, and the UFO crowd might be different enough from normal spokespeople that heuristics of trustworthiness and willingness to make stuff up which were trained on official communication would not actually be valid.

Christopher K. Mellon (former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Irish descent) doesn't just have a patrician-sounding first name and middle initial, he's a member of an old patrician family (the Mellons), and he's one of the main drivers on the UAP topic. John Ratcliffe (former Director of National Intelligence, English extraction I guess?), John Brennan (former Director of the CIA, Irish descent), H.R. McMaster (former National Security Advisor, Scottish extraction I presume), Avril Haines (Director of National Intelligence, Jewish on her mother's side), Mark A. Milley (Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Irish), Timothy Gallaudet (Rear Admiral US Navy, French extraction I guess?), and Harald Malmgren (senior aide to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Nordic) have all publicly indicated that they take the UAP issue seriously, although some of them, like Haines and Milley, might feel under pressure from Congress to do so.

From what I've seen, the ethno-cultural divide, if there is one, are that the ones that I would view as patrician-types are often more refined in their presentation. Mellon is careful about what he says, although he indicates that he thinks that UAP are real and a serious concern. Haines, Milley, and McMaster say things like "there are puzzling things out there that we don't understand and are hard to get to the bottom of," Ratcliffe and Gallaudet refer to having seen direct video/photographic evidence, Brennan circumspectly suggests that UAP might be a type of life, and Malmgren – who is now almost 90 – decided to go on Twitter and tell the world that he was told about "otherworld technologies" by Richard Bissel (of the CIA and NRO). Perhaps Malmgren behaves a bit differently because (he says) he was never under an official oath – Bissel spoke to him informally. But I'd be genuinely interested in which of the above people you classify as "serious" and which you don't – I'm very interested in American ethnography, and it would make my day if you did an assessment of them.

On the UFO topic, I am inclined to agree that normal "heuristics of trustworthiness and willingness to make stuff up" don't apply. But I don't think that they apply to "serious" members of the US military on this topic either. People who are cleared into SAPs (special access programs) are, apparently, supposed to lie if directly asked about a SAP they are cleared into, and most of the people on the above list are or have been read into such programs. UFO fans often assume that this means that the people in the military who talk about UFOs are telling the truth and the people who are denying knowledge of them are lying, but I would remind people that the knife of deception may cut both ways.

Hm. Certainly cause for an update if accurate, but do these people make the same claims as the "little grey men" crowd around the people that I mentioned? My impression was that there was a separate push a few years ago around the "Tic Tac" videos, which was much more measured and ambiguous and had the vibes of some intel operation that is too 8D-chessy for me to understand, rather than actual hints of confirmed aliens. (Baiting someone into revealing or believing something? My favourite theory at the time was that some branch of the USG wanted to signal to the PRC that they may have developed tech for spoofing input to/coherently dazzling complex integrated sensor systems, by way of using it on their own during a training exercise) It makes sense that that sort of undertaking would get fire support from real top brass. Did any of the people you listed directly vouch for any member of the batch that I mentioned?

Off the top of my head (so I might get a few details wrong):

The Tic Tac videos were (essentially) an intel operation – it was Mellon, Elizondo and Company getting the UAP topic into the New York Times and into the public discourse. The actual incident had been publicly discussed (and IIRC even video footage released) well before it made it into the Times, but Team Mellon was able to get the footage released with a chain of custody and get their narrative into the big leagues. The goal of the operation (ostensibly) was to get people to take the UAP topic seriously. If there's a psyop, it seems to lead straight into the little grey men territory rather than just showing off advanced technology (although of course the US of A might want China to think it has a crashed flying saucer...)

  • Mellon wrote the forward to Lue's book. He's not necessarily vouching for all of the claims, but he seems to take them seriously. This is notable in my mind since he probably was behind the scenes helping write Congressional legislation around this stuff, and if you look at what Congress has been drafting it has, unironically, been stuff along the lines of "GIVE US THE ALIEN CRAFT."
  • Milley/Haines/McMaster/Brennan seem more to take e.g. the issue seriously, but haven't to my knowledge made claims along the lines of Grush or Elizondo. I believe Haines was open to the possibility of ET life being responsible for UAP sightings, and Brennan suggested UAP might be (or be the product of?) some form of life.
  • Ratcliffe basically said "we're picking up crazy signatures from classified intelligence capabilities" (I think he at least implied recon satellites, but he may have stated it outright.) I'm not as familiar with what Gallaudet said, but I think it was along similar lines – he had seen good footage or other evidence during his time in the navy. He might be open to the "little grey men" stuff but I don't think he claims to have firsthand experience.
  • I assume Malmgren used the term "otherworld technologies" on purpose. He said his informal briefing was "60+" years ago, so if there's an op to fool the PRC it's gone back decades (perhaps involving the 1952 UFO flap over D.C. and the 1971 treaty we signed with the USSR that mentions the risk from unidentified objects on early warning radars? Interestingly Nixon was president in '71, I wonder if Malmgren was involved in that treaty.) Note that Malmgren has said he has no firsthand experience, it seems like (he claims) Bissel informally brought him up to speed in case it ever came up. Which of course raises the possibility that Bissel was just lying (or of course that Malmgren is lying, but I dunno why he would bother).

I uh didn't realize that Erik Prince had been tied to back-engineering Nazi time-travel technology, though, so thanks for the spare link to peruse.

It’s pretty funny to word it that way, but you should also probably watch the opening segments of this new interview of Jorjani when you have the time even if a lot of the things said in it is batshit crazy. Any conspiracy you can imagine, he touches on; remote viewing, time-traveling Nazi breakaway-civilizations, crash-retrieval UFO programs, future unaligned ASI simulating our pasts, etc. are not spared. The crazy thing is the fact that this guy had Steve Bannon’s ear and was clearly involved in intelligence to the point where he got his blackmail telegraphed on the New York Times even as he was basically an unknown philosophy professor in the public eye beforehand.

Which raises the point of how there are intelligence operatives and contacts saying things like what Jorjani says without batting an eye. David Grusch was involved with briefing the NSC and the President on behalf of the NRO and then says the government has knowledge of the afterlife and interdimensional lifeforms. Whatever is going on, it’s not just your run-of-the-mill false flag.

Uh, it seems plausible to me that intelligence agencies actually select for the kinds of guys that wind up getting into this stuff. Like intelligence work is basically looking for a much more boring version.

I've theorized for some time that one reason why intelligence agency types and pilots tend to be so into UFO stuff and believe UFO lore explanations for potentially more mundane elements is precisely because that's the type of a profession you get into if you want to "learn the truth", make first contact, get into space to see the secret alien moonbase and so on. In intelligence agency types you get into more of an X-Files territory, in case of pilots it's more like getting into astronaut training and then enacting Rendezvous with Rama.

It’s not a coincidence that the CIA recruits a lot of Mormons from BYU, either, due to their lifestyle and loyalty choices; Mormons also coincidentally believe that there exists a race of infinitely many nordic-looking Supermen all living on their on planets, and that Joseph Smith upon receiving his first revelation from two of these beings was knocked effectively unconscious (not unlike many contactee experiences).

That’s a long-winded point to saying ‘you’re right’, by the by, but it’s just another piece of data that makes all these things weird (as the alien contactee experience, as independent from the causal influence of Mormonism, was something the IC legitimately investigated in the 50s.)

The CIA literally has an occult warfare division (MK OFTEN) and maintained specialized units of remote viewers for years. Some of the intelligence they provided was actually acted upon by the military in various conflicts: they found an American general kidnapped by Red Army Faction during the Years of Lead in Italy. They gave information about new types of Soviet nuclear submarines to the Navy. They identified locations of Iraqi surface to air missile sites during the Gulf War. Given all that I could see why someone who had ties to the intelligence community like Tucker Carlson might not immediately write off the existence of demons.

But did the intelligence really come from clairvoyants, or was that a cover to distract the enemy from trying to find which one of them was selling secrets to the Americans? I vaguely recall that the British laundered some of the ENIGMA decryptions via this method....

"has"? it was halted in 1973, unless you think the government is simply lying about everything and doing it secretly with no evidence.

“Dissolving” and reconstituting programs in a shell game to avoid oversight is an intelligence agency staple.

Woah how have I never heard of all this stuff before? Incredible.

Yeah I strongly believe that there's some ESP/magical stuff they found out and keep under wraps.

I don’t disagree with you. There is at least some overlap between the intelligence community’s contacts and superficial voices pushing the narrative of Havana Syndrome (i.e., microwave mind control weaponry) and the ones involved in the UFO field, too. The main pioneer of the aforementioned microwave weapons for the DIA (John Alexander) had his hand directly in the DoD’s parapsychological contractual studies before they were shut down, and these are the type of people Tucker would be aware of (and also wary of) in not only his skepticism of the IC but also his personal relation to it in his family.

Ultimately it’s about proximity to Pandora’s box.

Some people will gravitate towards it on the assumption that hope, too, lives within it–hope for a better understanding than what is available.

It’s natural that the chaotic nature of that source of knowledge will splinter into many different confusions, and to notice only the strangeness is to risk missing the point.

Is Pandora's box code for psychodelics or something?

Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?

Left-wing kooky beliefs aren't apparent, because it's the consensus narrative that supplies the "kooky" label, and they still maintain a nearly arbitrary degree of control over what the "consensus" is. "Men can be women" was an astonishingly kooky belief five minutes before you could get fired for disagreeing with it.

"Why is this thing I've been told I must laugh at so incredibly laughable?" Do you laugh at Simulation theory too?

EDITED FOR CLARITY.

I don't think anyone claims that 'men can be women' per se.

The left just happens to disagree with your assertion that 'anyone born with male parts is and will always be a man.' This is not saying 'men can be women' so much as 'you are wrong about who is a man and who is a woman.' The standard view on the left, as I understand it, is that if John Doe comes out as a transwoman (changing her name to Jane Doe), then Jane Doe was always a woman, and our (and her) previous belief that she was a man was an error of fact, and mutatis mutandis for transmen.

People who have Read The Sequences, on the other hand, hold that 'man' and 'woman' are an inaccurate map of a more complicated territory, and their definitions depend on which hidden inference one is asking about.

Trans rationale is just a rhetorical three cup trick where the desired outcome is slipped underneath whichever restlessly rotating definition suits the advocate. They'll say whatever improves their position. If it's "men can be women" that's what they'll say, and if you argue that men can't be women they'll slip the ball under a different cup. The left plays the role of the stooge, be that willing or unwillingly.

people who have Read The Sequences hold that 'man' and 'woman' are an inaccurate map of a more complicated territory

The left != people who have Read The Sequences. Also, I don't see how this idea is any less kooky.

I don't think anyone claims that 'men can be women' per se.

If I find examples of people who do appear to be claiming that men can be women per se, would you change your mind? For example, people who insist that someone who was universally regarded as a man ten years ago is in the present a woman, without qualifiers?

More generally, intellectual embroidery is, I think, how the transition from "kooky" to "consensus" is achieved. Reality contains infinite, fractal complexity; we emphasize or elide that infinite complexity as needed to conform what we see to what we think.

If I find examples of people who do appear to be claiming that men can be women per se, would you change your mind? For example, people who insist that someone who was universally regarded as a man ten years ago is in the present a woman

But this is arguing that "universal regard" is the definition of gender. Those sorts of assumptions are exactly what is being disagreed with. That's why there's "assigned gender at birth".

"Assigned gender at birth" can rescue you if you have a pre-transition person that already wants to change their gender, but it won't when "universally regarded" includes the person in question themselves. If they denied that men can be women, that would mean someone who changed their mind later on either has always been a woman, or that they're not a woman now, which pro-trans people don't believe.

I think the way to rescue this is to hold that a person has privileged insight into their own gender but can still be mistaken.

The existence of post-transition trans people who are by their account much less in conflict with their gender perception demonstrates that that there is sometimes privileged insight that is true, or at least beneficial to assume. The existence of trans people who detransition doesn't disprove the existence of those people, it merely establishes that the correlation isn't perfect.

I don't believe that men can be women either. I get where it comes from - the left believes in reality being socially constructed and in wise experts -, the more they freak out the normies the wiser. Trans stuff is amplified for depopulation purposes, to make money in the medical industrial complex, to give more power for government to intrude in the family, etc. Demons inventing nukes, now that's an interesting new delusion.

I don't believe that men can be women either

That's not an axiomatic belief, it's a derived belief based on your definitions of "man" and "woman," which in turn descend from your beliefs about the duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex, which in turn descend from your beliefs about the optimal way to organize society, which in turn descend from... and so on and so forth.

I hate to make this a bravery debate, but that statement doesn't actually convey anything concrete about your beliefs, it just marks you as part of a particular ingroup. If you taboo'd the words 'man,' 'woman,' 'male,' and 'female,' you could actually have a productive discussion with leftists about whether people should be empowerd to advertise their sexual preferences via their mode of dress... about how we should create divisions within sporting leagues to balance inter-competitor fairness, the enjoyment of the audience, the marketability of particular sports... about the minimum physical capabilities we want in our soldiers... and so on.

I doubt you'd change your mind, or the liberal's mind, but "men can't be women" and "everyone is valid" are both equivalently vacuous statements that boil down to, "my view on the ideal distribution of responsibility and privilege is correct."

That's not an axiomatic belief, it's a derived belief based on your definitions of "man" and "woman," which in turn descend from your beliefs about the duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex,

This is false. My definition of "man" and "woman" has nothing to do with duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex, and believing that it does already effectively means believing that men can be women relative to my definitions.

you could actually have a productive discussion with leftists about

To the extent you could have a reasonable exchange of ideas with a person like that, those ideas would not be representative of what is actually being pushed by their political establishment. This person would not acknowledge what the establishment is actually doing, instead they would constantly sane-wash it into something palatable. If you provide evidence that the sane-washed version ins't what's being pushed, and the version you're objecting to is, two things might happen depending on the temperament of the person: conversion ends, or they'll the thing they just swore isn't happening is actually good. I don't think that's a productive conversation.

You're assuming people here are siloed off in an echo-chamber. Please consider the possibility that we've been having these conversations for a long time, and what you claim simply does not fit our experience.

discussion with leftists

I doubt you'd change your mind, or the liberal's mind

Why are you conflating liberals with leftists?

That's a bunch of postmodern second-hand lesswrong rhetoric meant to let the camel's nose into the tent. Now the camel is halfway in and kids are being sterilised and/or taken away from parents who "don't affirm their gender". Let's get the camel back out.

I believe none of those are the reasons, though they're close.

for depopulation purposes

It's not "in order to depopulate", it's "because we don't hold population as a virtue, it fails to apply as an argument to prevent this".

to make money in the medical industry

You think the average leftist cares about making big medical companies money?

to give more power for government to intrude in the family

I think this is a general mistake with attributing intentions to other people. Leftists don't think trans is good because it lets them strengthen the government's intrusion, they think the government being able to intrude is good because it lets them support trans kids.

If X has the result of "Y", while you think "anti-Y", it's common to say "they're doing X to support Y." But those disagreements are very often a question of relative ranking of X and Y; it's usually "they think X is more important than Y, so that they will accept an anti-Y result to bolster X". Compare pro-life vs anti-life, pro-choice vs anti-choice.

There are both true believers and cynical actors pushing any particular policy, like bootleggers and baptists both being pro prohibition as a classical example.

Well sure, but it's still wrong to say that baptists are pro-smuggling.

Fundamentalist Christian memes being used as explanations by people who may not 100% practice fundamentalist Christianity is not that odd. These are elites but not part of respectable society, after all.

Again, do you laugh at Simulation Theory? It used to be a reasonably high-status talking point in the rationalist community.

No.

Probably 90% of people in America (and higher internationally) believe in the supernatural to some degree. And when a person (like Tucker Carlson) is on air for hours every week, they are going to end up saying some wild shit. You would too.

Republicans and Democrats are not any different when it comes to their propensity to hold magical beliefs.

Have you every spoken to a liberal woman about astrology?

By no means am I suggesting that libs by-and-large aren't nuts too.

Tucker Carlson appearing on Joe Rogan experience speculated that UAPs are real, but are not alien visitors from other planets but supernatural in origin and always has been here.

Honestly based.

Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?

The contemporary American right is an accident of history, an odd amalgamation of people that hold disparate and often mutually contradictory beliefs. So generalizing about them as a group is difficult. Nonetheless I speculate that there are (at least) two factors at play here:

  1. I believe there is a "religious temperament" that predisposes one to not only literal belief in the supernatural, but also anti-empiricism in general, more "speculative" modes of thinking, etc. An appreciable number of these people find themselves on the right for various reasons (the phrase "the religious right" exists for a reason).

  2. Leftism is the socially dominant ideology in elite culture, so the right naturally attracts contrarians who are attracted to odd ideas for their own sake.

anti-empiricism

What is "anti-empiricism"? And is this an example of it?

(If I can get some sleep and five goddamn minutes of peace, I'm still hoping to get some replies written to your recent posts on art, BTW. Keep up the great work.)

What is "anti-empiricism"?

It's a bit difficult to define, because the idea I had in mind is a loose federation of beliefs and attitudes, and doesn't really have any specific criteria. In terms of concrete beliefs though, I would say that the core of it would be something like an openness to entities and propositions that we don't (or can't) have direct empirical confirmation of, like God, souls, ghosts, UFOs, etc. In more rarefied territory, it would be an affinity for philosophical positions like: hostility to logical positivism, belief in abstract (non-spatiotemporal) objects, belief in non-naturalistic moral facts. But independent of any concrete beliefs about the existence or non-existence of specific entities, I think it's also a psychological disposition to see things as being suffused with meaning and significance.

And is this an example of it?

Not really. Lots of people are recalcitrant in the face of new evidence when it contradicts their deeply held beliefs. That's more of a human trait than a left-right trait. But, if someone just has an overriding commitment to making sure that children have access to puberty blockers for some reason, I don't think there's anything metaphysically there that doesn't fit into a purely materialist/naturalist worldview.

"Anti-empiricism" is in no way intended to be an insult of course. I personally have a strong anti-empirical streak.

I'm still hoping to get some replies written to your recent posts on art, BTW. Keep up the great work.

Thank you! I really appreciate that.

What is a "non-naturalistic moral fact"? Like categorical imperatives that aren't related to facts of the world?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/

Most often, ‘non-naturalism’ denotes the metaphysical thesis that moral properties exist and are not identical with or reducible to any natural property or properties in some interesting sense of ‘natural’.

As much as Kamala Harris was criticized for not going on podcasts or sitting for interviews, stuff like this makes it clear that it was probably the right decision. Dealing with such criticism is probably better than dealing with the fallout of an unexpected gaffe. Trump can get away with this, because he's already demonstrated that nothing he says will faze his supporters, but conventional politicians don't have that luxury. Hell, Vance only has that luxury because he's joined at the hip with Trump. Doing the podcast circuit is the kind of thing fringe candidates like Andrew Yang do because it gets them airtime they don't have to pay for, and the exposure is worth the gaffe potential. Once you've already made major candidate status there's little upside and huge downside to going on a freewheeling 3-hour podcast where the conversation could go in any direction. Tucker Carlson can say shit like this because he isn't running for anything and nobody is poring over his every word looking for ammunition against him. Imagine what would happen if Tim Walz went on Rogan and said the same thing.

Reality caught up to his brand of professional counterculture. Now he’s got to keep chasing the dragon.

Also, people will pay him for it.

“Influencers” are the natural consequence of applying Tumblr-style incentives to legacy media personalities. Balkanization encourages specialization, and Tucker is sliding towards a passionate, dedicated, decoupled-from-reality audience.

Seems relevant that Tucker is a true believing Christian. UAPs being supernatural rather than extra-terrestrial, and demonic mauling/nuclear activity seems parsimonious with that.

Carlson isn’t particularly religious by conservative pundit standards. He’s a WASP Episcopalian who rarely if ever attends church.

I wouldn’t put Tucker in that bin. He said he bought after the demon attack a bible to read it (very slowly in a year) but that he is not coming from a tradition of faith and dislikes pastors.

Fair enough, my mistake.

I think these people have been in the spotlight for so long, mouthing other peoples opinions or regurgitating talking points, that when they are finally allowed to be themselves they don't know where and when to stop. They already stepped over the line to follow their convictions. That line was much clearer and held more immediate consequences than belief in flat earth Satan bigfoot or whatever.

If everyone gave an earnest list of views they hold or are curious about or share any sort of odd thing that gave them an emotion that they felt was worth exploring the umpteenth time they have to fill 30 minutes of dead air I think there is not a single interesting person left that doesn't hold to some odd belief. Hell, most people are so uninteresting that they would never get to a point of being a political talking head in the first place.

On the flipside, the lunacy people believe on 'the left' is no different. As an example: most people believe in a theory of human evolution that's much dumber, consequential and more immediately and obviously wrong than flat earth.

But more directly to Tucker, it feels like he's throwing away a sort of sacred status he built for himself. He could always present himself as kind of untouchable. From a persona perspective it's like he decided to give himself a weakspot. Feels like an odd thing to do for a man like him but, barring it being a conspiracy by TPTB to weaken a persona that's becoming too powerful, it's just a whatever.

As an example: most people believe in a theory of human evolution that's much dumber, consequential and more immediately and obviously wrong than flat earth.

I get that its fashionable in this space to dunk on the "blank slatists" but this is a pretty dumb take that seriously oversells the rigor or "hardness" of fields like psychology and anthropology while underselling the significance of things like basic navigation, land surveys, and wireless communications to modern society, or the disciplines of physics and astronomy historically.

The spherical nature of the Earth along with its approximate circumference has been widely known in the western world since classical antiquity, and to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.

Contra the popular meme, 15th century sceptics weren't expecting Columbus to literally "sail off the edge of the earth" they were expecting him to run out of food and potable water before he even got a third of the way as the approximate latitude and longitude of the spice islands he was trying to reach had already been well established. Furthermore the sceptics were entirely correct in that it was essentially blind luck that Columbus stumbled upon the hear-to undiscovered island chain of the Bahamas just as his supplies were running low.

I think you are misrepresenting where people get their beliefs from. Most people don't look at any evidence for or against in some rational vacuum. We're just told what is and what isn't. Most of the time in a setting where we are completely incapable to question what's being said. This is true for the roundness of the earth and the 'leftist' theory of evolution. To compare and contrast two narratives that are believed in the same way on a basis that's irrelevant to why they were believed in the first place is missing the point of the comparison.

I think that's a big part of why flat earth guys can exist in the first place. Most people have no idea why they believe the earth is round and are completely incapable of defending their belief without appealing to a higher power. Same for the 'leftist' theory of evolution.

Outside of that, I'd argue that population differences are much more immediately obvious, like I said in my comment. It's very hard to get a good first hand look at the roundness of the earth or experience the curvature in action. But it's very easy to notice different phenotypic differences between population groups.

Fact of the matter is that population differences are just as real as the roundness of the earth. There is no wiggle room or 'softness' to this fact.

and to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.

This runs contrary to my experience, though brief, running through flat earth circles and debates. I found the most common character type to be working class dudes used to relying on their own senses and to a lesser extent belligerent basement dwellers. I'd find it very interesting if PMC types were going in on flat earth.

The spherical nature of the Earth has been widely understood in the western world since classical antiquity, and to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.

IME Unironic flat eartherism is somewhat common among irreligious, generationally poor men. Usually as part of a complex of inconsistent theories and ideas.

to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.

This is not my experience at all. Aside from the vanishingly small minority that is flat-earth for religious reasons, most of the flat earth people very much do not seem like PMC types, they're fiercely independent, self-reliant men with libertarian leanings who don't like appeals to authority and believe in seeing things for themselves before they're satisfied.

In other words, I think it's much more likely we'd see a flat earther here on the motte than in any PMC office, even if everyone made their beliefs completely transparent.

In my experience unironic flat-earthers fall into two broad catagories, schitzophrenic nuerologically-diverse lumpenprole, and upper-middle class contrarians who latched onto it as a part of a part wider suite of conspiracy theories and new age woo. Astrology, Homeopathy, Crystal Healing, Second Shooter on the Grassy Knoll, Q-Anon, etc...

Meanwhile I've found that most of the "fiercely independent libertarians who believe in seeing things for themselves" who aren't also well to the left of Charles Murray's bell curve tend to work it out on thier own as they also tend to be travelers and consequentially end up having ties to the crunchier sides of the hiking, sailing, and general aviation communities.

In any case i think my point stands, as concepts go a flat vs spherical Earth has far more wide-reaching, and immediately observiable consequences than evolution vs young earth creationism, and that's well before we begin to consider specific claims about aryans' and indo-europeans' role in the bronze age collapse.

Agreed. The typical flat earth believer is very low in socioeconomic status, bordering on underclass, doesn’t believe what he’s told just in general, and winds up with a web or conspiracy theories which might contradict each other. He(and it’s a he) is about equally likely to be white or black(I’m not sure if this means blacks are overrepresented once you adjust for the very low socioeconomic status involved) and whether or not he claims to be a believer he never goes to church or prays, nor does he let Christianity influence his ethics or spirituality if he even has any. He’s deeply cynical about human relationships- in every sense of the term- and might use this to justify some mildly unethical behavior. He didn’t do well in school, even when you adjust for IQ, for the same reason his boss doesn’t like him now, and he tends to go from job to job without settling in a career. He believes a complex and often contradictory tangle of health/scientific, historical, economic, and possibly legal and supernatural-ish woo woo crap, but it’s not all natural or traditional. He might be a bit racist, but he hates rich people and authorities more. The police are out to get him(and it’s possible that they actually are), and he doesn’t connect this to his own bad behavior. He doesn’t vote, doesn’t know who he would vote for, and is mad at both parties when he thinks about politics.


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