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Fortunately this is simple hueristic to meet for the position you oppose. There are a lot of specific claims that electoral corruption does not happen in American electoral politics, and there are plenty of historical findings to the contrary.
It would be a terrible argument, and yet relying on weakmen arguments is something you have done repeatedly in the past, are charged with doing in the present, and are fully expected to do in the future. As such, your offer of refutation is not accepted, or believed.
It is a very characteristic part of your hobby horse, and is not expected to change.
Yes.
This thread is one of them.
Yes, assuming you are using surreptitious is the common vernacular (as a synonym of sly, as in cunning), rather than an attempt at adding a qualifier for a different definition (as in 'secretely') that can never be met by virtue of being an openly visible word, and thus not a secret, while smuggling the connotation of the other without committing to either.
This would be another example an insinuation, as the argument presents the accusation as based on mind-reading, rather than observation of iterative behavior. The insinuation furthers a further implication to the audience, as opposed to the other party, that no reasonable defense could be made against such and thus the accusation is unreasonable.
The reasonable defense against reoccuring bad behavior is to not conduct the bad behavior, though by its nature this requires controlling one's conduct before, rather than after, the bad habits re-occur. However, you enjoy your snipes too much to not, as you have with your post-posting edit here.
While it is certainly flattering to conclude your doubters are hallucinating liars who make up their basis for distrusting you, you are not forced into that conclusion.
I believe the British would characterize this as a modest understatement.
Specifics have been provided, as they have been provided in the past, as you have denied being provided them in the past, and as you will continue to not link to as part of the denial.
And with that, have a good night.
I'm not trying to wade into this particular fight, but since I have a followed it for its many years, I am confused by this statement. Are you saying that @ymeshkout claims as a general statement that electoral corruption does not happen in American electoral politics, that he has made specific claims about it not happening in particular instances, or that other people have claimed it doesn't happen? Because I am pretty sure the first is false and the last is irrelevant. Probably someone somewhere has at some point said "America never has electoral corruption," but hardly anyone (especially here on the Motte) would literally claim it's something that never, ever happens (whether or not they agree that the 2020 election was stolen).
I think you're being uncharitable here too. While calling @HlynkaCG a "hallucinating liar" would be a bit harsh, he quoted something @HlynkaCG accused him of saying which he claims he did not. Either he did in fact say that (in which case @ymeskhout is either lying or suffering from faulty memory) or he didn't (in which case @HlynkaCG is either lying, misremembering, or mistaken).
If I seem like I am coming down on @ymeskhout's side here, it's because from personal experience I can't help sympathizing with someone who gets accused of saying things he didn't and then gets further attacked when he objects to this. FWIW I think both of you would do well to maybe speak a little more directly (and charitably) instead of using long circumlocutory paragraphs to say "You're a lying liar who lies" as verbosely as possible.
The later, as part of a counter-argument by negation by demonstrating the heuristic is not a rebuttal when it can simply be reversed to press to the opposite conclusion.
I would disagree, as the structural argument is broader motte and bailey. The claim is not a specific instance of Hlynka, but a broader position.
Speaking more plainly is what has gotten mod action in the past, and I wasn't intending to go into it after letting it sit for a night, but since you asked I'll try to make it as direct as necessary and consider this exchange in the thread done. (I have tried to not let arguments carry on past a day and intend to ignore/not make further public posts on this topic today, but if you'd like to PM, I will respond later.)
Among ymeshkout's bad faith habits is that you can provide him effort posts with the citations or examples he requests, and then he will lie in later arguments- or even in the same discussion threads- and deny such examples were provided to him, and use the argument of absence to claim a further point. When pressed sometimes he will deflect on personal-subjective grounds, sometimes he will do so on grounds of gish-gallop refusal, and sometimes he will simply not acknowledge... and then in the next iteration, he will repeat the claims of absence, and challenge for the same points previously provided, and repeat the same cycle. In the process he will regularly mis-represent other people's positions, even when directly corrected, and will affect incomprehension.
My position- which he used to directly link downthread of in the old-reddit- is that this is lying. That mis-representing other people's stated and elaborated positions despite direct clarification is lying. That claiming that no explanation or sources were offered is lying. That making broad insinuations that the only conclusion he can come to about his opponents no longer engage him to the detail he insists is because they are irrational and capricious is lying. And that, having disregarded the posts and positions offered to him only to claim that none were offered to him, that he is owed no such effort or citations in the future. Because, per the position, he would simply ignore the points made anyway and later claim weren't provided, while continuing to make claims and profer links which misrepresent the person's engagements. (Which he continues to do.)
For anyone reading who is passively curious, I've asked Dean many many many times to precisely identify any false statements I've made or other instances of dishonesty and the most substantive explanation I was able to wrestle out of him in recent memory was this post from more than a year ago where he links to threads containing my purported dishonesty, but refuses to specify any further. I've looked through all the threads he linked and couldn't identify any false statements or anything else to substantiate his allegations. I understand that Dean is perennially averse to supplying details, but if ANYBODY reading this can provide ANY insight into what he's claiming, I would be extremely grateful!
Like Dean, I have also followed this topic over the years and had intense disagreement with you and felt extremely frustrated with your response patterns.
Unlike him I'm not convinced you are lying exactly, but with respect to this specific topic (and maybe also the "unequal treatment of BLM protesters vs. Jan 6 people) you behave in a way that is out of sync with the rest of your presentation and temperament, and is not unlike Darwin (as a point of comparison).
Darwin may or may not realize what is doing or how what he is doing is perceived by others.
You may not recognize what you are doing and how it is perceived by others.
But I believe a reasonable person's (here: Dean) subjective experience of your argumentation style with respect to this topic could be labeled "lying," by virtue of the way you present it.
As others elsewhere is chain have noted, it seems like you are approaching this in a specific way (?legal rhetoric style?) that you have much practice in, and value, but does nothing for the people you are disagreeing with in this context.
You I suspect are a good lawyer, and your proficiency with this style disincentivizes people from replying with specifics because you frequently circle back to that style and use it well, which is not the conversation and discussion they want to have and feels like arguing about apples when they want to be talking about trains.
I appreciate that you took the time to answer but I've read what you said multiple times and I can't identify anything actionable. What exactly is my argumentation style and how exactly would it give someone the subjective experience that I'm lying? What is the specific way I'm approaching this topic and how does it stymie people who disagree with me? It would help if you illustrated your concerns with specific examples of things I've said, and ideally offered suggestions on alternative ways I could convey myself.
My suggestion is to drop the topic.
You gain nothing from discussing it with those you agree with and my suspicion is that your approach is if anything anti-convincing to those you want to convince and may make them disinclined to listen to you elsewhere.
You fundamentally do not appear to "get it" for this topic, and as someone on the other side I was so blown away at all clear Dean was in this criticisms. Since that doesn't work for you I don't think anything will.
This may be too much of a two screens situation.
That said your post generated lots of good discussion so who the fuck knows.
I'm sorry but I don't know what to do with this response. If the problems with my argumentation style are so clear, why are they so difficult to specify? I understand that some issues can be difficult to articulate precisely but even so that shouldn't be a barrier from suggesting alternative ways I can communicate myself. A silly example but I can understand how responding to a text message with "Thanks." comes off as curt and rude, even if I can't articulate the exact reasons why. But even then I can still suggest alternatives like "Thanks!🥰" or whatever. I would love to hear a simple suggestion along the lines of "Instead of saying X, try saying Y" or whatever the issue is.
I've asked exactly this from Dean this many many many times and he's never taken me up on the offer. Given the persistent contours of this grudge, I can only assume that his real problem isn't with my argumentation style, but the fact that I haven't adopted the conclusion he prefers. I can't just assume that people are operating in good faith if the evidence suggests otherwise.
Accept that you have a blind spot and give up, or choose to believe those who disagree with you on this have a blind spot and give up.
It's been explained to you simply, at length, and with repetition over the course of years and has never landed and therefore will likely never land.
I gave up years ago and Dean seems to have updated his mental model of you to figure that you are liar*.
I repeat that your model of how we perceive your behavior on this should be as a Darwin* - discussion will get nowhere and time will be wasted with pointless demands for more engagement.
*Apologies Dean if you disagree with these characterizations.
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I've read this sentence several times and I admit I am still not sure what you're trying to say here. My best stab at it is: people generally claim American electoral politics is (relatively) free of corruption and therefore we should assume any given election was free of corruption unless provided with extraordinary evidence of said corruption, and @ymeshkout is leaning on that as the "heuristic" that we should dismiss claims of the 2020 election being fraudulent. Is that... close? I swear I am not trying to be flippant or cute here, you're just constructing such an abstruse argument here that I literally cannot parse it.
Well, maybe you think that @ymeskhout generally claims his opponents are "hallucinating liars" (I do not actually recall him saying this, though as I noted above, you do both tend to throw accusations of dishonesty rather freely), but this was a specific instance of @HlynkaCG claiming he said something which he claims he did not.
I am not trying to trick you into saying something I will mod you for. Directly calling someone a liar usually does result in mod action, yes, but I'd rather you directly say "I think this claim is false and here's why" and even "And I think you know it's false" (which is pretty close to calling someone a liar, but at least leaves room for the possibility that you're mistaken) than write long paragraphs which read a lot like "You're a big fat liar and I'm trying to use enough words to avoid being modded for calling you a liar."
FWIW, how you put it in the subsequent paragraphs (listing all the ways that you think @ymeskhout is arguing in bad faith and being dishonest) are acceptable IMO. Not saying I agree with you, and he is certainly entitled to rebut it, but I consider saying concretely "This is what I accuse you of saying/doing in the past and I think that constitutes lying" is within bounds.
I would love it if this happened! Specifics are so much better than riddles
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You’re abusing the concept of a weak man argument to shelter an unjustified position.
All there are here are weak arguments and so addressing any one of them is not a weak man approach.
You’re smart enough to recognize this instance is BS, and then failing to be consistent and extrapolate, and instead trying to claim this is a flawed approach because it’s picking on a dumb case.
It’s all dumb cases because every one falls apart upon close examination.
@Dean and I have gone round and round on this issue for literally years where he continues to insist that I am ignoring blockbuster evidence, but then simultaneously he'll write very long posts articulating why he's justified in refusing to mention this blockbuster evidence I'm ignoring. A sample of responses to my (many many many) requests:
Dean is intelligent, knowledgeable, and articulate on a wide array of topics (particularly in the realm of geopolitics). The only topic I'm aware where he has maintained this years-long stonewalling vow is on the 2020 election, and the only explanation that makes sense to me is that he's concerned that I'd eviscerate his supposed blockbuster evidence. I admit the weakness in this explanation is that I don't understand how someone who is otherwise intelligent could compartmentalize to this degree without self-awareness.
Oh I do. I know many brilliant, otherwise sane, people who believe Joseph Smith saw an angel and translated golden plates telling the story of Hebrews who lived in the New World—in direct contradiction of all available evidence and the entire fields of archeology, genetics, linguistics, and probably several more.
Once you have a trapped prior or anchor/sacred belief, the human mind warps around it so well, and polite society has to allow this.
Yes, you're right. We used to have a sort of peace treaty around discussing religious beliefs where we generally left people alone and didn't badger them about it, even if you think the beliefs are completely delusional. The problem is we don't have a similar convention for folks who want their non-religious beliefs to be similarly immune from evidentiary scrutiny, perhaps because admitting the desire for immunity is a bridge too far. The culture war topics for me that fit this bill the most are 2020 stolen election claims on the right, and the incoherent and vague concept of gender identity on the left.
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I want to focus on Wisconsin for a moment, because it's the state I'm most familiar with and I have never received a rebuttal from someone that disagrees with me about the quality of the election. This is a state with about 3 million votes, decided by about 20,000 votes, for reference. I think this report is a good summary of some of the known irregularities and mistakes.
Another story I bumped into later was this one:
Presumably the first 1,000 were selected basically at random and showed a 9.5% voting rate among people that had been deemed mentally incompetent and weren't allowed to vote. If that rate held, that would be over 2,000 votes from ineligible, mentally incompetent voters, just in Dane County. I don't know if other counties are suffering from similar errors; if they aren't, that would suggest something about the direction of bias, if they are, that would tell us something about the total number of illegally cast votes.
In any case, I don't think it's plausible to arrive at illegal ballot counts that are lower than these. Throw in various other irregularities, such as reported behaviors at nursing homes where standard election policies weren't followed due to Covid, illegal ballot-curing procedures by clerks filling in witness information, and other shenanigans, and we're going to keep going up. I would personally feel comfortable saying that hundreds of thousands of votes were plainly illegal, as these people were obviously not actually indefinitely confined, but I understand someone objecting and saying that's a weird one-shot deal that won't happen again. That over 50,000 of those ballots were cast by people who have never shown an ID in an election makes that my absolute lower-bound for illegal votes though, which would put us around ~2%.
I haven't thoroughly explored other states, but I would be surprised to find that they actually did a lot better in 2020. In some of them, it wouldn't make a material difference for national elections, but I would expect that to only result in even sloppier procedures because there isn't going to be anyone taking all that close of a look at whether California's vote count is garbage when they eventually get around to delivering sometime in December.
The incredible thing here is that the report you cite from WILL concluded there was no widespread fraud, despite the documented issues being real problems.
Multiple cases and investigations did not find sufficient evidence to overturn the result.
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-wisconsin-lawsuits-presidential-16d90c311d35d28b9b5a4024e6fb880c
So my priors are entirely reinforced here by evidence you presented: that while certain states were shitshows, there was no “rigged” or “stolen” election.
My claim isn't that it was rigged or stolen (and I think this reply goes for @drmanhattan16 as well), it's that hundreds of thousands (or at least tens of thousands) of votes were cast illegally in a fashion that subverts election security. The result is not an obviously rigged election, but an election where there are votes of questionable legality that make up more than the margin of error. Additionally, as covered in this post the issues were substantially concentrated in deep blue counties and likely made it systemically easier to vote in an illegal fashion.
I want to be very clear - I am not trying to skirt the core point or handwave my way from this to mass fraud. I don't believe that happened. My model isn't that there are groups concocting totally fake ballots. What I do believe is true:
Dane and Milwaukee counties encouraged voting illegally in a way that would increase the vote counts in those counties relative to legal procedures.
This is not a result of a conspiracy, it's a result of their actual preferences with regard to maximizing ballot access and being the kind of people that wanted to take Covid very seriously.
Election security measures are poor enough that people vote illegally on a regular basis (see the mentally adjudicated portion above), which plausibly enables ballot theft by family members. I have no hypothesis on the directionality of this outcome, but it creates doubt about electoral legitimacy, which is very bad for obvious reasons.
The poor electoral security that was the hallmark of 2020 likely did enable at least some bad actors to cast fraudulent or knowingly illegal ballots. I expect that this is a small number, I have no good way of putting a good number on it, but it is (again) very bad that poor electoral security even makes this a possibility.
Taken as a whole, I cannot overstate how damaging to institutional trust it is to have counties and states just making up new rules on the fly that violate black letter law. When leadership elects to behave this way, they're shredding goodwill and trust in an unsustainable fashion. I can (and do!) have a poor opinion of groups like TTV, I don't agree with the people that call the election rigged or stolen, but I find brushing past just how bad 2020 was with nothing further, "well, you can't prove those votes were fraudulent" to be really frustrating. I'm not going off the conspiracy deep-end about Soros county clerks or something, I am entirely sincere that I actually want to improve the quality of elections because I think it will help prevent the dangerous destabilization of my country.
I will also chime in to say, as someone who has felt frustrated by many the election fraud claims, these are all reasonable and important concerns and I absolutely agree with the overall need to have high quality election processes.
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I can acknowledge every point you made and it doesn’t excuse the motivated reasoning, grifting, and conspiratorial thinking whatsoever.
We can and should do better.
We also can and should directly rebut unjustified claims trying to overstate and concoct problems.
We should not carry water for those who want to delegitimize any election where they don’t like the result.
I can acknowledge every point you made and it doesn’t excuse your moralizing, consensus building, and generalizations whatsoever.
We can and should do better.
We also can and should address arguments directly, rather than lumping them in with all other arguments nominally on the same side.
We should not baselessly accuse others of carrying water for extremists with no supporting evidence, and plenty of contradictory evidence.
When I said:
I was referring to the likes of TTV, not the commenters here who stated agreement TTV and similar are dumb, or called them extremists as you have. (I wouldn’t call them “extremists” myself, in that these views are extremely common.)
I’m not sure how many comments you’ve read here or in the past, but several posters have said things like “I can’t blame those who believe the plot” or “even if the voting plot wasn’t real, it was still rigged.” Some of those stances have been more reasonable than others.
@Walterodim gave you many disclaimers and was quite clear that he wasn't speaking for those people. You ignored the substance of his comment entirely, choosing instead to essentially frame it as one of many questing tendrils of the election denial kraken.
When someone says "I don't agree with X but here are my beliefs," and your only response is to discuss how their own beliefs contribute to X (or the discussion around X), you're engaging with the comment on the meta-level rather than the object level, which is really only valid and useful if the commenter seems to be operating in bad faith.
It's like if I said "I'm no vegetarian but there was a year where I couldn't afford meat, and my health did fine" and you, a carnivore, respond with a list of bad arguments vegetarians use. It's neither here nor there. Walter isn't the representative of all election deniers, and doesn't seem to be the election denial equivalent of a secret vegetarian looking for converts.
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We are on the same page.
Cheers, and concurrence. Please keep on keeping on.
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You’re falling for one of the oldest tricks in the book. Who cares what the conclusion says? What does the actual evidence imply? @gattsuru had a post just last month that discussed an academic’s open, unpunished admission that he lied in the conclusion of one of his papers in order to hide an inconvenient result. This report is just more of the same. The authors put all of the inconvenient evidence in the body, said whatever they wanted in the conclusion, and trusted that most people would simply take the conclusion at face value, as you’re doing here.
You’re conflating academic impropriety with election issues that were investigated by multiple parties and the legal system.
You’re falling for the old trick where you can’t accept suggestive evidence didn’t lead to a well-established conclusion you favor.
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Before I go looking at the murky details, I want to commend you for simply having presented a case that could actually matter.
The issue right off the bat though is if it’s an identified issue then why has no investigation not resolved whether there was, in fact, a plot?
Smoke, sure, was there a fire though?
Because the deep state/cathedral/whatever is preventing an investigation to get to the bottom of it.
Bold claim when several of the swing states are GOP-controlled and Trump was the incumbent.
The scale and amount of effort it would take to execute such a plot could not be concealed in a situation where all sides were on high alert for foul play.
Elections are besides the point if you believe dark forces can simply dictate outcomes without being caught. I wonder what they were up to in 2016.
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From your report's summary:
Seems like this is the key takeaway for anyone.
Is your ultimate point that elections have security issues, or that the 2020 election was actually stolen from Trump? People who want to argue the first are free to do so, I'm open to the idea that we can tighten election security, especially for state and local elections (where more serious claims appear to be made).
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Ok, I was hoping for something new and I'll keep my mind open towards that. We're repeating the cycle from a year ago where I ask for specifics and you scoff at having to provide proof for something so patently obvious. I've outlined before the reasons I believe your reluctance to substantively engage by providing specifics:
I'm again open to having my mind changed but you're still responding with riddles and disdain even after a lengthy sabbatical.
Do you want to do a Bailey episode about this? You can quiz me all you want about whatever you want! You'd keep both our raw recordings and can do whatever with it! Let me know my man, otherwise sleep tight my friend.
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