It wont matter. Just look at what is going on in AZ and the ridiculous stuff people are believing from that state. You could have all the back stops in the world, but if a candidate starts to say he was cheated, inevitably, some % of that persons base is going to believe them. And depending on the candidate, it might be a very high % of his base.
Nm
- Thread starter KNIGHTTIME^
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It wont matter. Just look at what is going on in AZ and the ridiculous stuff people are believing from that state. You could have all the back stops in the world, but if a candidate starts to say he was cheated, inevitably, some % of that persons base is going to believe them. And depending on the candidate, it might be a very high % of his base.
I have to disagree here. Yes, what is going on on AZ is a total shit show, but that doesn't mean you just ignore the possibility of avoiding that in the future. The right wants voter ID and getting rid of no-excuse absentee ballots. That doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice, and it would shut them up if we had a close election in the future.
Well let's see here, dummy:
I registered my name on 29 May 2001.
You registered yours on 27 November 2005
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So those ideas are bad why?
Keep letting confidence erode because SOME people won’t be convinced? That’s the dumbest fvcking response you could possibly make.
Sounds like an entirely believable story, bicycle boy. Too bad you can't prove it and I'm still right.
I'll try to interpret your shitty attempt at English in the second part by figuring that you're projecting again and envisioning you throwing your food all over your nursery. Your poor mother...
Confidence is eroded due to online conspiracies and a candidate who pushed these conspiracies with no evidence. It doesnt matter what you do, there will always be new conspiracies to erode peoples confidence. The issue isnt our system. Of course everyone wants fair elections, but the problem, is that even when elections are fair, online conspiracies can still erode confidence. You guys are acting as if this lack of confidence was caused by legitimate reasons, and it quite simply wasnt.
The right is just wanting to make it harder to vote, because they know they are the minority party. Trump's own people said this was the most secure election in history, Desantis praised Florida's election security, etc etc. The only reason confidence is eroded is because of conspiracies. IF we are going to govern based on conspiracies, then we are going to be walking a very tricky line.
I have no issues with a paper trail. But Georgia had a paper trail, and how many people still believe Georgia was fraudulent? That gets to my point that it isnt the system that is the issue, it is the conspiracies.
Throw up your hands and give in to conspiracies? What a smart person you are. Don’t bother trying to show people that their concerns aren’t valid, just keep telling them to push buttons on a machine and “trust us!” everything is on the level.
If I see with my own eyes that my vote says what it should on a printout and I see people guarding the ballot box and know that the numbers are verified in multiple ways and saved for a full audit, there’s not much wiggle room.
But you’re about to respond with “but it doesn’t matter! conspiracy theories will still continue so we shouldn’t do ANYTHING to make the process more transparent for people!” So fvck off.
Well we really only have 2 options: silence those that espouse conspiracy theories, or do what we can to marginalize them ahead of time. Election security measures seem like the best approach to me.
Nobody is against reasonable election security, but it wont silence conspiracy theorists. They dont live in reality.
Yes, and then when people say that didnt work, there will need to be something else. You guys are acting like the conspiracy nuts are reasonable people, they arent. All the security in the world wont make them disbelieve something that they want to believe.
Dude, I’m a reasonable person and I don’t understand what measures are in place to prevent my vote from being ignored or changed.
Idgaf about nut jobs not believing things. You’re falling for the moronic notion that online retards represent a huge chunk of the population.
Lets ignore Atlanta, stopping voting, then sending all observers home, then pulling out 5 crates of ballots from under a table and then restarting counting without observers present and those votes running 80%+ for Biden. all caught on camera, but yep we are to assume nothing funny went on. Our eyes tell us to question the paper trail.
To pretend nothing happened late that night that on the face of it didn't look crooked is laughable. Can anyone prove that things happened? Not Likely.. That is why Dementia Joe is prez, and by law he should be.
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What you've said here is not unreasonable. But I do not believe partisan poll watchers observing ballot counting does anything to address the current situation. All you have to do is create a conspiracy that the receipts were swapped out prior to the audit/recount. In Arizona, they're literally inspecting ballots for evidence of bamboo fibers because of a theory that China flew in 10's of thousands of ballots. We're not dealing with something that is rational or logical.
So your last point is critical. I agree we need to restore confidence. But right now, that's like the arsonist telling us how important it is to put the fire out. The lack of confidence in the system was manufactured via baseless conspiracy theory, and now the conspiracy theorists are using that as justification to breed more conspiracy (like the AZ audit). Yes we need to put the fire out - but not on the terms of the arsonist, who swears the gasoline he's about to pour on the fire will actually help.
So that's the core difference. Rational folks from your side see an argument like "how can more oversight be a bad thing?". But from my perspective, it's like Congress holding a hearing on Flat Earth. All you're doing is elevating the conspiracy and giving it a platform.
Remember, this was not driven off some actual incident or evidence. Trump told us ahead of time he would not accept a loss as legitimate, and it was only possible if he was cheated. From there, an army of loyal followers constructed narratives and connected dots to give his prediction credibility. Dead voters, ballots from China, secret-vote switching algorithms in the machines - it's been a "throw shit against the wall and see what sticks" approach.
No amount of "election integrity" is going to solve that as long as the party keeps going along with the arsonist.
And that’s all I’m trying to prevent. I don’t want people to think shady shit happened. The more transparent and easy to understand the voting and counting process is, the better off we’ll be.
Will there be crazy people who still think the lizard people are using mind control to make us think the election was transparent and honest? Probably. But you can’t help those people.
There is one factor that makes people think that a lot of the unbelievable is possible. For four years, Democratic politicians and media have told the country that Trump is evil, he represents an existential threat to Democracy and all that is good, that he’s literally Hitler but worse. As the election neared, the rhetoric ramped up to “we need to do whatever is necessary to remove him from office or the world is doomed.” The “would you kill baby Hitler” question was applied to Trump and every scary thing in the world: climate doom, authoritarianism, racism, etc. was going to be apocalyptic if Trump won the election. This was common across social and broadcast media.
So, after being drilled into us that it was the right and good thing to do to remove Trump by any means necessary for so long, can you blame people who believe that some people took that seriously?
Trump was as bad as he was said to be. He coordinated the Big Lie before the election to sow doubt on democracy. He then pressured state election officials to overturn their certified election results. When that didn't work, he pressured his VP to break the law and overturn state certified results. He then led a mob to the Capitol that led to a violent insurrection.
You're Mr. Law and Order, though...
I agree you're a totally reasonable person.
My best advice is "trust but verify." Society requires we trust expertise. Efforts to undermine expert authority in a free society are basically efforts to tear down that society. And just because those efforts are protected by the 1st Amendment does not mean they deserve a platform.
Trump's attack on this is no different than if he tweeted "Alot of people are saying buildings aren't safe! Could all collapse any moment. WE MUST INVESTIGATE!". Then the internet springs into action. YouTube videos are made. Memes go viral. Q-anon invents conspiracies about a plan to collapse our economic system by the intentional triggering of an earthquake at a specific frequency meant to collapse NYC.
Soon 30% of the public is questioning the integrity of modern building to various degrees. That's basically what's happened here. You're not one of the nut jobs, but this blatant undermining of expert authority creeps in as a spectrum. I could rewrite your opening sentence as "Dude, I'm a reasonable person and I don't understand the math that ensures this building won't collapse."
No. You don't. You've placed a level of trust in government regulations, building codes, our educational system, our understanding of physics and material properties, and the integrity of the individuals involved in designing modern structures. Society functions because of that trust in authority. Not because we constantly have to prove to individuals that the building is safe.
You don't question "building integrity" because there's no incentive for anyone to politicize it. But imagine being a structural engineer trying to combat disinformation at that level. You've spent your entire life dedicated to something and now everyone is questioning your expertise. That's what an actual expert on "election integrity" feels like right now.
And keep in mind - grifters will always exist. In my crazy scenario, there would be a whole bunch of structural engineers giving the theory credibility. Doing news interviews on pro-Trump networks. Making YouTube videos with math the layman doesn't understand that "proves" it's all true. Pro-Trump news sources would promote those individuals, creating the grifter feedback loop necessary.
Legit journalism doing deep dives and explaining what's actually happening are labeled "fake news." Eventually it reaches your more "reasonable" sources of information in a much toned down way. But just enough for you to say "Dude, I'm a reasonable person and I don't understand the math that ensures this building won't collapse"....
I’d love to see this “legit journalism” you’re talking about.
The bigger problem is the mainstream media has shot their credibility to hell over the past 5 years. They bent over backwards to take every opportunity to shit on anything Trump did and focused 100% on negative Trump stories the entire time. A CNN producer admitted on tape that it was a company goal to get Trump out of office, and you want people to trust them when they say the election was fine?
Even if every single vote was legitimately and legally cast and counted, a media that has been openly cheerleading for a Biden win has a hard time convincing anyone with different views that they’re just objectively reporting the truth.
As much as you want to blame Trump for what’s happened here, you’re missing a giant piece of the puzzle if you don’t also look at the state of American journalism. The mainstream outlets do not have the trust of the American people. You’ll probably say “that’s Trump’s fault for saying ‘fake news’” but if you do, I’ll just link a dozen stories about media activism masquerading as journalism.
And Fox News and Conservative talk radio is the answer??!?
It's like you perceive a problem ("legit journalism") and proceed to offer up a version that is twice as bad.
Where did I offer up Fox News and Conservative radio?
Holy shit, it’s like you don’t even read.
If I were on your side, that's exactly how I would argue this point. I don't know how to answer it. It's a chicken / egg like argument.
But the bottom line is this - if Trump had won re-election I don't know what the left would have done. Would they have rejected the results? Would AOC have organized a march on the capitol that was far more violent than Trump's? I don't know.
The same can't be said for Trump. We saw the crazy train. We saw Rudy and Kraken lady. People like Michael Flynn were openly calling for martial law. We know Trump was giving audiences to people making that case - like Mike Lindell. We know Trump publicly pressured his own VP to throw hundreds of years of tradition under the bus and try to delay the EV certification. We know Trump organized a March on the capitol that very day, undoubtedly to pressure Pence and congressional Republicans.
So for me, this is all about threat assessment. We don't have organized left-wing militias in this country that I'm aware of. In a slightly different timeline, maybe Bernie Sanders wins in 2016. Maybe his rhetoric becomes more violent. Maybe he loses and acts like Trump and the left placates him because the base of the party is with him. Maybe makes an anti-democratic run at flipping the election in congress. Maybe the media apparatus is united behind a center right power structure in the Republican party to oppose an obvious threat to democracy from the left.
In that backwards world, you'd have a Mitt Romney as president, trying to claw us back from a left-wing populist threat.
If that was our world I would be aligned accordingly.
I'm not here to defend the media. There are good journalists and bad journalists working inside a capitalist media system that ultimately makes decisions based on profit. It's incredibly flawed. But you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I agree with you that the mainstream press aligned against Trump. Did they do that because of a left wing bias? Did they do that because of an urban rural bias? I think it's complicated. Ultimately, history will judge if they were right or not.
But here's what I'd ask - start with a blank slate. Imagine the US is truly under threat. A populist left-wing demagogue is drawing massive support from the people. His words are anti-democratic. He doesn't even pretend to respect the constitution or the rule of law. He calls for the jailing of his political opponents at rallies.
The US news media has many biases. They are generally biased in favor of self government, the rule of law, and democratic norms. As such, they are one of the checks our system has against that sort of failure. Ultimately history will judge if they over-reacted or not. Living through it, our biases cloud our judgement.
The problem with your hypothetical reversal of Trump is that Trump did actually respect the rule of law and the separation of powers and the Constitution. When his EOs were rebuffed by federal judges with dubious powers to do so, he abides by the rulings and reworked the EOs and resubmitted. He could’ve stated that a single judge doesn’t have the power to stop supersede the Presidents authority on immigration but he didn’t. Likewise, for almost everything, he pushed budgetary and legislative actions to Congress and governance issues, including Corona response, rightfully to the States. He undertook none of the actions of which you speak. Even after the election, they sought to use the courts to remedy what they saw as wrongs rather than use the military to stay in power as was put out by the media.
Quite honestly, most of what you’re worried about were media projections that simply didn’t happen. Even the occupation of the House was a half-day push that never threatened our government or Democracy one iota and ended peacefully without any lasting damage. Even the deaths that were attributed were mostly natural causes or u related. Out of the 5, the two that were not stroke or heart attack outside of the House were the Ashli Babbit shooting and one person crushed by the crowd.
It’s time for Democrats to stop making everything seem like an existential threat so they can control people. It’s destroying the country.
I honestly don't now how to get past this problem. I think the problem comes in when you are deeply partisan.
A deeply partisan lefty can't recognize quality journalism critical of left-wing policy. Their brain just can't process it because they're so convinced their world view is right.
But a non-partisan socialist can accept quality criticism of their world view. Instead of rejecting criticism out of hand, they can absorb the criticism and reflect on their own viewpoints.
How far left or right you are on policy is irrelevant to being partisan. Partisans accept blanket things as true and are able to rationalize away anything that doesn't conform. It's far easier to convince your base that the NYT is "fake news" than it is intellectually counter the arguments presented. Quality journalism is all around you - created by flawed humans with their own biases (just like you and I have).
You (fairly) point out that a portion of the left vilified Trump for everything he did. That because they view Trump as bad, they never looked at any issue on the merits, and instead, reactively opposed whatever position Trump took. But then you rationalize an equivalent position on the right - that the MSM is bad - so you can simply disregard them as a whole without looking at each argument presented on it's own merits.
You are making a good point - much of the left assessed the "threat" posed by Trump incorrectly. COVID was a wanna-be dictator's dream. A global crisis where authoritarian muscle could be flexed to accumulate power. But the strategic long game isn't how Trump plays things. Trump is a bad fit for a modern autocrat - he's just not willing to put in the work even though he'd love the power.
Case in point - a "smart" autocrat trying to subvert democracy doesn't publicly call for the jailing of his rivals. He figures out how to install loyalists in key positions who open investigations and do it for him. But our system is too robust for that to work. Trump resorted to PUBLICLY pressuring his AG to make arrests via Twitter.
So what is that? Is that OK because Bill Barr wouldn't go along? Trump *couldn't* order illegal arrests because no one would do it. Trump *couldn't* defy a federal judge because no one in the administration would have gone along with it. Our system is just too strong to fail that hard that fast.
But this is a looks like a duck quacks like a duck scenario. When a sitting POTUS is calling for the arrests of his rivals - it's the media's JOB to make that a huge deal. They'd be derelict if they didn't. I think your bias against the mainstream press making it harder for you to sort of the significant of some of these things.
He tried to get state officials in Georgia to overturn their certified election results. He pressured Michigan legislators to do the same. When that failed, he pressured the Vice President to break the law to overturn election results.
He then incited a mob that violently breached the Capitol.
You're either willfully dumb or a liar. Which is it?
So they're not a part of the state of American journalism you were talking about?
Yea I don't really see how this is debatable. Trump shattered norms. In a pre-Trump world, everyone on this board would agree that a sitting POTUS pressuring state officials to figure out a way to flip the election results is bananas. No one defends that. We all agree it's impeachable on it's face, and anti-democratic at it's core. This is what the slow boil does.
You make a good point but how much of that insider information from unknown sources can actually be trusted after so much of it was refuted by the people who were actually involved.
Again, you can draw conclusions merely from Trump's own words and tweets. What happens behind closed doors and gets "leaked" requires more scrutiny for sure.
I think the much larger problem is reactionary political opinion versus actual journalism. Opinion shows are way more entertaining than reading long-form journalism. It reaches the people much easier and snippets are easy to digest on social media. And there's very little accountability because it's opinion.
I'll say this - if Trump supporters held his words to the same level of scrutiny that they hold the NYT, we'd all be in a much better place.
That did not happen, The people involved with the capitol breach planned it well ahead. I have said from day one all involved at the capitol should be charged with whatever crime they did. I also say that about the rioters. If Trump even once told people to charge and break into the capitol he should be charged. If certain congress people, senators and vice presidents encouraged and or abided the riots they should be charged as well.
