4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
12hr ago
It depends on the scale. For a claim of large-magnitude manipulation (skewing the popular vote by 5% or more), I'd take a plausible scenario how it could be done, corroborated by a significant number of eyewitness accounts from people who do not directly stand to benefit from the claim being proven true (in particular, disqualifying dedicated members of the party alleging manipulation to its disadvantage). Of course, this does leave the possibility that your party should have 55% of the vote but the other 45% have formed a unified block that will falsify the result while agreeing to keep it secret, but this in itself (almost complete absence of people who are not in the affected party, involved with the electoral process and would testify to manipulation they observed) seems like a very surprising scenario. Sure you could in turn concoct a conspiratorial scenario in which principled paper pushers do not exist and they all merely pretend in public that they would execute their role according to its description, and so on, but then increasingly your gap scenario will just look like an alternative model of reality on the algorithmic complexity level of a religion.
For a claim of smaller-scale manipulation (like a 0.5% skew that flips the result), evidence gets harder to come by (and to begin with, how would you even prove that any 0.5% manipulation against you that you presented evidence for was not outweighed by 1% manipulation for you that you didn't present evidence for?), but I'm also finding it harder to consider such cases a "stolen election". Elections shouldn't be sports contests, even if some people feel about them that way; for a country to be governed by the whims of 49.5% instead of the whims of 50.5% does not feel like a terrific delta-injustice. To begin with, this puts us in the range where an election could be "stolen" by adverse weather in a few large metro areas. Either way, this is not the order of magnitude that I expect the parent poster to be wrong by - apparently in 2016 both candidates received around 60 million votes, so he probably will wind up having to assert manipulation on the order of 20+%, based on nothing but the feeling that everyone he knows is extremely outraged about the conviction and so an approximate fifty-fifty can't possibly be representative.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
13hr ago
I wouldn't be surprised if the "door app" collects behavioural data that the operator can sell as a side gig, enabling them to undercut the previous NFC-based system when offering the system to your office. (They might also figure this makes it easier to issue and revoke access than if they had to issue/collect physical tokens.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
13hr ago
Do you think that Trump would still be likely to win after being convicted, jailed and released after being pardoned? It seems to me that if played right, such a move would be immensely emasculating - "you're only standing here because they took pity on you" - while also taking selectively taking some amount of wind out of the persecution narrative (which motivates the hardcore pro-Trump base) but not weakening the "he's a felon" narrative (which probably pushes at least some nose-holding establishment Republicans over the edge).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
13hr ago
in November Trump will be on the ballot and receive 100 million votes
Put your reputational money where your mouth is. Is this a prediction? Would you be willing to concede that you were wrong if this doesn't come to pass, or would you just say that the election result must have been falsified?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
14hr ago
So does she have any examples of this lack of nuance, charity and civility from people that represent positions she agrees with, or is it a phenomenon curiously concentrated in her opposition? On that matter, is she exhibiting nuance and charity herself in opining on why people she disagrees with advocate for their positions?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6d ago
Well, what is the upper bound of ideological difference that you are willing to tolerate from a trading partner? Russia is one matter in which the US is still lucky to have a great number of affluent nations sharing its majority perspective; China is frankly a wash; and on the topic of Israel, you might find yourself actually having the opposite perception on who is genociding whom from all but a small handful. It's all well if you say you will reject the sinful outside world and stay in your righteous bubble, but nations trade with each other because it's advantageous for them - moral righteousness does not on its own beget food, science or missiles, and at least the hypothetical extreme case of an isolated America-Israel alliance shunning everyone else as genocide abetters vs. the rest of the world trading freely with each other even as there are occasional local scuffles would probably not develop in the favour of the US in the long term even considering its geographical and human capital advantages.
Granting that this is what happened, it sounds a lot like a case of what people here like calling "leopards eating faces" when it happens to the other side. Republicans are the law-and-order party that spent decades architecting a legal system where prosecutors have free rein to use tactics like blackmailing (or, equivalently, bribing) people to incriminate their allies, so as to be able to secure convictions in cases like gangs where they feel they caught a bad guy but can't find a legally watertight way to prove his guilt directly; now that they found themselves at the business end of this machinery, they are crying foul.
More options
Context Copy link