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I mean, the motivation behind forming this agency was as a response to completely delusional claims of voter fraud that are unfortunately held by a significant portion of the electorate. I get that DeSantis is a politician that has to cater to the people who vote for him (no matter how crazy they are), so I can't fault him too much on this point. However, it does undercut the notion that this necessarily means it's an earnest and non-crazy investigative endeavor. It's possible that it was just put in place for the sake of appeasing the louder loons. Of course this doesn't mean that the agency is incapable of doing honest police work, but it definitely doesn't augur well that they chose — as their opening salvo — to go after random nobodies who are guilty of being misled by their government.
The Election Crimes Unit has been in existence for LESS THAN A YEAR.
If they're going to take down Public Officials, (which, being honest, I do not predict will happen!) it behooves them to build a very strong case, which means gathering evidence, which takes time. And of course this election would be their first chance to catch it in action.
So taking an easy early 'win' in hopes of deterring other actors makes sense as an opening salvo in this context.
I responded to this here.
I don't see the win here (aside from improving DeSantis' electoral chances), because the problem with faulty record-keeping was the main argument against how Florida decided to implement Amendment 4. None of the issues are predicated on criminal behavior by the officials. The fact that the system made mistakes about voter registration was exactly what was predicted, and it's rich for the government to take out its frustrations on the victims of this system.
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Objection! Low effort consensus building which you have not only failed to demonstrate, but you have failed to uphold in this very day's update regarding Desantis's domestic political context, in which multiple contemporary contexts of conspiracy to commit voter fraud, potential evidence of fraudulant voting, and systemic weakness for fraud have been noted without sufficient rebuttal. That you, and even a significant portion of the American electorate, insist that claims of voter fraud are completely delusional and dismiss other people's reasons and perspectives does not, in fact, make those other people unreasonable or completely delusional.
Given your past ruts on this topic with similar tendencies of not acknowledging contrary evidence, I would submit you are not objective on this topic, given your frequent shills for your private substack and the financial interests in catering to your desired target audience I would submit you are not impartial, and given some of your past clunkers on understanding other people's viewpoints even when described to you, I would submit you lack the credibility to be a trustworthy evaluator of the motivations of your outgroup, especially on topics in which you have both past bad history and current financial incentives to defend dumping on your outgroup.
Most of the american electorate on both sides wouldn't know a motte from a pot, so that's a weird objection. Most voters vote for a combination of 'my friends/family vote this way' and really strange idiosyncratic reasons, and their positions on any specific issue are much worse. I don't see what that has to do with ymeskhout's precise and very long arguments
Wouldn't he just not post on what a journo could call a "alt-right dogwhistle reactionary forum" in that case?
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But I did, in the same post above you're replying to. If DeSantis was serious about actual voter fraud, I don't have an explanation for why he'd choose to make a public spectacle of people who were misled by his administration and dragging them to jail.
We've been over this so so many times by now, and this exchange from May 2021 remains the most illustrative. I ask questions and your response is along the lines that it's not your job to educate me. Ok, fine, I accept that it's not your job, but I have no idea what exactly you expect of me. I have no idea how I'd even try to parody your position if I wanted, because you repeatedly refuse to state what it is besides a generalized complaint! If I said "Trump's election fraud allegations were true, or at least were made in good faith" you'd accuse me of strawmanning or whatever and then darkly hint that I am somehow missing the point or that I am intentionally ignoring the real and totally valid election fraud theories that apparently exist somewhere out there.
I get that you don't like it when I talk about the 2020 election fraud theories, you've made that abundantly clear! What I don't get is why you keep wasting time on this beat. You either have specific arguments to make or you don't. If you don't have any, or you just refuse to make them out of principle, vaguely complaining is not going to accomplish anything. I'm not a mind reader, and you can't expect me to respond to arguments you choose to keep cloistered in your head.
Well, you caught me. The dozens of subscribers paying $0 a month pose a grave liability to my impartiality. I hope my reputation can someday recover.
This would be credibility-boosting confession of failure, were it not intended to pretend to humility.
Oh, hey, look- linking to an argument that charged you with conflating information sets to dismiss the grounding of other people's prior arguments as non-existent...
...to conflate information sets to dismiss the grounding of other people's prior arguments as non-existent.
When the charge is you dismiss previous arguments and treat them as having never existed, dismissing previous arguments to treat them as having never existed is certainly illustrative, but also demonstrative.
Raising attention to your poor conduct and worse competencies on this topic is not time wasted.
Your projecting your opinions onto other people's evaluations is one of your consistent analytic flaws that deserves noting to warn others not already familiar with your tendencies.
Based on your past- and still present- conduct, I don't expect you to respond to arguments in good faith at all, and I consider it sound reminder to newer members of the community to be aware of this for the same reason the best advice to give anyone during the Julius saga was to warn those unfamiliar to move on.
This, too, would be credibility-boosting confession of failure, were it not intended to pretend to humility.
Also, you're a lawyer.
Your responses, more so than anyone else's in this community, continues to be the greatest source of inscrutability for me. Besides the vague and generalized discontent, I continue to have no idea what you're talking about, and I don't understand if this is just a language issue or an indication of a less obvious chasm or something else entirely.
If anyone besides Dean is capable of summarizing to me the specific concerns he holds, that would be really helpful.
Edit: I've been trying to organize a Bailey episode about the 2020 election with Shakesneer for a few months now. If you think a real-time discussion would be helpful and want to team up with him, let me know!
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