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Not really -- like I said it's an irrelevancy. Clearly they are a bit of a weakman though, which is why I'm not super-interested in going through their claims to assess plausibility. Are they the ones who did a bunch of locational data analysis showing (?) suggestive behaviour around ballot drops? They probably aren't lying about that, but of course it doesn't mean their analysis is correct. As I recall the debunkings of it that I saw were pretty misinformed/naive as well though.
Look at it this way -- BLM-associated groups lie all the time about the dangers of being black in America. This doesn't mean that race relations in America are not an interesting thing to discuss, but if I make a post saying "I only want to talk about these assholes who are lying, what a buncha maroons, amirite" I am not making a quality contribution to the discussion.
Yes that's them. They were willing to share their data with D'Souza, but not law enforcement. I'm curious though, what exactly establishes them as a 'weakman'? What standards do you rely on to make that determination on any given topic? If a BLM group made a wildly popular documentary full of lies about the dangers of being black in America and it received favorable media coverage, do you believe that discussing the lies would not be relevant?
They don't seem very transparent nor particularly rigorous -- do you disagree? Your whole thesis here seems to be that they are a weakman.
Not in a vacuum -- if some black poster just got pulled over and arrested by a bunch of racist hicks I want to hear about it, and would consider it a valid (and valuable) contribution to the discussion.
I admit I don't understand your meaning of weakman. I tried to sketch out how to define the term a while ago and Julian Sanchez's description seems the most fitting:
I don't see how weakman would fit for TTV unless I'm using them to somehow make a claim about all stolen election allegations. I'm not doing that and I already said that would be an invalid argument.
As Dean says, you are totally doing that and have done that a lot in the past -- nobody is interested in TTV per se, they are interested in whether the election is fraudulent. What purpose does it serve to restrict discussion to TTV?
Anyways, if you want to talk about TTV I can say that I have substantial experience with exactly the kind of analysis that they claim to have performed with the mobile data -- IMPO what they claim to have done is completely technically feasible, and the various deboonking articles I've seen on the topic seem either ignorant of the realities of that technology or quite dishonest themselves.
This doesn't really say anything one way or the other about the quality of that analysis -- as I said, TTV is not very transparent in their methodology, and it would be easy to get incorrect results out of such datasets via either malice or blunder. I can't say anything about the truth value of what they've done without seeing their work.
That's what I think of TTV -- about the same as what I think of those who are trying to discredit them. Which is not much, and not really a very interesting discussion to have if you ask me.
I've already said upthread: my interest here is wanting to avoid time-wasting Gish gallops and motte-and-bailey diversions, because an unfortunately common rhetorical trick used by some when they encounter arguments inconvenient to their position is to try and change the subject.
And also: The reason I included that disclaimer was explicitly to avoid Gish galloping or similar distractions when discussing specifics. The scenario I have in mind is someone who believes that the 2020 election was stolen comes across the TTV claims I've made, but is frustrated because they realize they can't substantively rebut them. They're reluctant to admit that out loud, because they see arguments as soldiers and believe that conceding TTV to be liars will further erode their overall claims about the 2020 elections. Accordingly, their only viable response is evasion; doing everything possible to avoid discussing TTV directly, and instead preemptively changing to a different subject they believe to be more defensible.
If you're not interested in TTV that's cool! You don't have to comment! If you want to start a thread called "Why the overall 2020 stolen election claims are still valid even though TTV specifically has admitted they have no evidence of it" you're welcome to do so!
Or I can respond in this thread! I can post wherever I want, it's crazy!
You seem to think that people who disagree with you in these matters should just submit to whatever form of discussion you think works best for your arguments -- why would they want to do that?
If you think somebody is Gish galloping, you don't need to respond to them either -- what's with this need to control the conversation?
Why are you so concerned about “controlling the conversation” instead of engaging on the object level or simply blowing the OP out of the water with great evidence from some other source.
I don't have a strong opinion on the specifics of what election fraud may or may not have occurred in 2020, but I think substantial security and transparency improvements need to be made in the future or else this whole mess will happen again.
People shaping the discussion as though they are conducting a cross-examination is not helpful in this regard, nor for the general discourse in this place -- why shouldn't I push back?
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It’s not a weak man when it’s a major and representative example of its reference class.
Tearing apart BLM for misrepresenting any given issue is also totally justified in a world where it is influential and representative.
Ibram X. Kendi, for example, is literally a weak man in the sense of being bad at thinking, but he’s the voice of his generation on the issue of race and so engaging his material is both wholly justified and necessary.
Similarly, all there are are weak men when it comes to election fraud issues because none of them can actually demonstrate a case.
When all you have is weak men, well, “you go to war with the army they have”; to slightly modify that quote.
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I have personally seen "2000 mules" brought up here by people who believe the election was stolen, as at least potential evidence to back their claim that the election was stolen. If one side uses it as evidence, why should that evidence not be interrogated?
I am currently planning a post specifically about whether the BLM movement is the worst thing to happen to black people since the end of Jim Crow, and a good portion of it is going to be specifically about the lying. If and when I get around to posting it, I think it will in fact be a quality contribution to the discussion, and you had better believe that if people try to avoid the substantive claims by deflecting to nebulous appeals to systemic racism, I'm going to do my damndest to make it clear that's exactly what they're doing.
It should! But framing the discussion as "I want to talk about this and only this" is literally using the weakman as a superweapon.
I look forward to it -- but if you make your post only about BLM(inc) or whatever the org is called that went around buying themselves mansions, and get tetchy if anyone wants to bring anything else into the discussion, you would be engaging in unsavoury (I daresay lawyerly) tactics to shape the discussion.
Sure -- please don't do it by saying 'don't say that bro, I told you this post is not about systemic racisim, it's only about BLM(inc)'.
I don't think BLM or its proponents are fairly described as "weakmen". They were enormously, absurdly, disastrously influential on the shape of our society. The damage they did, and the fact that such damage was so easily predictable in advance, is an extremely important issue for any holistic assessment of American culture.
I can easily imagine a similar view from the other side toward Trump and his movement, and sincerely believe that argument is a valid thing to make.
This comes down to a disagreement on norms, I think. I've repeatedly made top-level posts explicitly asking for specific forms of response, and even explicitly listing other forms of response I'm not interested in replying to. I've seen a lot of other posters, including very high quality ones, do the same. I think it's a legitimate thing to do, provided one does it with the understanding that it's not rulebreaking but merely gauche for other commenters to ignore such requests.
I think the request itself is gauche, not only for reasons specific to this case (as Dean amply elucidates upthread) but also because it does not allow for organic discussion to surface unexpected points of value.
(and to be clear, with the BLM example I am talking about the specific charitable org called BLM, not the movement as a whole -- although I guess I'd still object if you made a post about BLM (the movement) and then complained when somebody started talking about gangsta culture or something)
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