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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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If you still believe that the 2020 election was stolen and the 2024 wasn't, I would like to see some evidence in support of the former claim. I have yet to see any persuasive evidence thereof.

This has been talked over and over and over and fucking over and I'm beyond tired of it. So I'll be brief.

  1. the absolute hysterics about the suggestion of voter ID. You'd get laughed out of the room in Europe for even suggesting elections can be secure without, at least, state issued photo ID.

  2. the inherent untrustworthiness of mail-in voting

  3. motor voter laws in illegal heavy state that opt-in people by default ? You joking.

  4. the various vote dump anomalies, batches of ballots that were 99% or even 100% pro Biden, the fact there's a wide delta between when counties report votes, allowing for fraud.. ... you can go back to these discussions and read it again.

In short, unless you insist on strict, EU style or even stricter measures for running elections you are not a serious person. Your country is falling apart and the one thing you should all insist on is elections that are as secure as possible. Yet here you are, no doubt almost certainly opposing Florida-style measures. (seems to take it most seriously from what little I've researched)

This post is one I agree with:

Is your argument that all of these vulnerabilities were addressed in between 2020 and 2024, which is why Trump got in in 2024 and not 2020?

My argument is that it's some combo of

-enough of them were addressed and that also

-Biden was so horrifically bad and the democrat party such a trainwreck that it's entirely possible they also failed to organise the steal properly.

Still, a lot of work to be done before people from countries where elections aren't disbelieved but simply annulled (when result is not pro-American enough) can look at yours and say "seems to be ran in a sensible manner".

If Trump had won in 2020, what would your conclusion have been?

Do you think Trump was elected legitimately in 2016?

If Trump had won in 2020, what would your conclusion have been?

This is like "if the evidence still pointed to this suspect, but he didn't do it, what would you conclude?"

No, I'm sincerely asking the hypothetical. I find it deeply suspicious how many people claim an election was rigged when it doesn't produce the outcome they want, and insist that it was perfectly legitimate when it does.

If the evidence pointed to a suspect, but it turned out he didn't do it, I'd conclude that I was mistaken about this particular suspect but that relying on the evidence was still a reasonable thing to do in a world where it's impossible to be 100% certain about things.

And actually, Trump isn't even that situation. A suspect is innocent or guilty, but rigging elections can happen to a greater or lesser degree. It's quite plausible that the Democrats tried to rig the elections, but they weren't able to rig them by enough to affect the outcome.

Of course, the real problem isn't the Democrats rigging the elections, it's having a broken system where if the Democrats did rig the elections, you'd never be able to see it, because it's a broken system which makes the elections easy to rig undetectably. If a side supports a system which lets them cheat without evidence, the presumption is that they cheated even if there isn't any evidence. We don't know how much the Democrats cheated, and the way it was set up, they made sure we never could know.

It's not "evidence", exactly, but having stayed up all night on Election Night 2024, I was getting text messages from my Biden-supporting friends and family members basically throwing in the towel and saying congratulations. Then at midnight or so, when all the major swing states stopped counting because poll workers "needed to sleep", I thought it really strange that all these states in different time zones decided that at the same time. Then when the 4am ballot dumps came in (what happened to sleep?), and I saw every predictor index go from 95%+ Trump to Biden, I was forever convinced that it was a rigged election.

Too many inexplicable abnormalities. There were some significant statistical anomalies that came out later to confirm my suspicions, but they seem to have mostly been scrubbed from the internet.

they seem to have mostly been scrubbed from the internet.

How convenient.

it's hard to believe you are being genuine or engaging in good faith here

I'm sorry, but "there would be hard evidence to support my claim, but They have suppressed it" is what you say when you have nothing. It is the first port of call for every paranoid conspiracy theorist who arrived at their conclusion first, went looking for evidence to support it and came up short. To which I say: what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

I also don't know what you mean by "genuine". I genuinely don't believe the 2020 election was fraudulent. I genuinely haven't seen any evidence that I found remotely persuasive.

a charitable reading of the above users post is the evidence did exist, it existed on the internet, but he cannot find it using the typical indexing sites like google

there is ample evidence of google doing this with basic searches, e.g., election fraud or vaccine safety now return 100+ pages of the exact opposite of whatever phrase the searcher is looking for

there is ample evidence of these sites delisting and deboosting sites which had this information, there is ample evidence of posts being censored across all social media sites in the wake of the election, including an entire denial of service attack against Parler by their web host (AWS) which destroyed the competitor

being genuine means when you ask someone a specific question or for specific evidence, you're asking the question because you want engage in a dialogue as opposed to it being a rhetorical tactic to win some argument on the internet or through attrition whereby you, who have expended exactly zero effort here but have set yourself up as some arbiter of truth, demand others expend lots of effort to move you

when a user responds to someone else's genuine explanation with something like "how convenient" or "hyuk hyuk that's what I thought," it's the later as opposed to the former

this sort of behavior is cancerous to a discussion forum and should be sanctioned

One of the rules of the site is "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be." Hard to imagine a more partisan and inflammatory claim than "the Democrats rigged the 2020 election in order to install their preferred candidate". It's very aggravating when this rule has been egregiously violated (i.e. an extremely partisan and inflammatory claim was presented without any evidence in support of it), I try to be charitable by specifically requesting that various posters provide evidence in support of said claim, and the best they can cough up is "well there would be evidence in support of this partisan and inflammatory claim if the Dems/deep state/Big Tech/WHO/Bilderberg Group/Illuminati/whoever hadn't suppressed it". This is not evidence in support of an inflammatory claim. This is an IOU for said evidence. This is a glorified "source: dude trust me". And when I respond with more than a little exasperated frustration at multiple posters egregiously violating the rules of this space, you accuse me of being "cancerous" and failing to argue in good faith.

Put yourself in my shoes: imagine if someone made an extremely partisan and inflammatory claim with which you disagreed without presenting a lick of evidence to back it up, you asked them to do so, and their response was "I don't have evidence for it because it's been suppressed". Would you respond with "huh, how unfortunate, that must be really frustrating, this thing must go all the way to the top"? Or would you roll your eyes and say "come on dude, get real, I need more than just your word to go on"? I strongly suspect the latter, as I did.

the user responded to your question with a genuine answer about his experience the night of the election about what he remembers experiencing in live time which you responded with a low-effort quip

Imagine if someone made an extremely partisan and inflammatory claim with which you disagreed without presenting a lick of evidence to back it up, you asked them to do so, and their response was "I don't have evidence for it because it's been suppressed"

one, that's an uncharitable reading; the user wrote "seems to have been scrubbed from the internet" which implies the user went looking for the things he remembers which convinced him the election was stolen and couldn't find them

two, he gave you evidence of his experience which supports his "inflammatory" comment; the fact you don't find it convincing doesn't mean he didn't provide evidence

three, vast numbers of posts and articles were scrubbed from indexing sites or censored off social media making finding linkable evidence exceedingly difficult and time consuming

I can see you're frustrated. We're over 4 years post less-than-the-most-secure-in-history election and this has been discussed to death and many users are generally frustrated about the topic. When I'm frustrated I try not to respond because I try to engage genuinely or not at all. I try to not engage on forums like I'm trying to win some argument on the internet because I think some version of effortless "source?! you got a source!?! source?!?" and otherwise disingenuous interactions are cancerous to a discussion forum. Effort should be met with effort for one to remain healthy.

I don't really think people (or at least me) would enjoy strict rules around anyone who isn't repeating the status quo or consensus being required to make some huge effort post or not engage at all. For top posts that's probably necessary, but I think requiring a high standard for responses in a thread will lead to less engagement and a more boring forum.

I'm unsure if you've seen this post, but I think it does a good job attempting to answer this question in a defensible way with effort and evidence you may find interesting.

When I ask a question like yours, I try to think of what would be the minimum amount/type of evidence which I would find convincing. In the context of an election, I would say the minimum evidence would be there exists enough illegal ballots which are larger than the spread between the races. Given how shit US elections are (like comically shit for a 1st world country, they're unauditable and purposefully so, and entirely rely on unearned trust to carry them), I don't think a higher minimum should be required nor do I think this is a hard bar to meet in most elections let alone one where stated engages in rampant, unilateral executive illegal changes to rules and election security and straight-up failed to even perform required signature checks across all the close states while at the same time vastly increasing the number of ballots floating around.

I mean, fine. Forget the statistical stuff, and just focus on the top paragraph that I wrote regarding the lived election night experience. You don't agree that it was all pretty fuckin' weird?

Just the narrow vote margin alone suggests 2020 was more likely to be stolen than 2024 (although by that measure, 2000 is way more likely)

(although by that measure, 2000 is way more likely)

The plurality of voters cast votes in favor of Gore in sufficient states to pass 270 electoral votes, and yet Gore did not get 270 electoral votes or become president. "Stolen" seems like an accurate descriptor.