TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
No bio...
User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
None of this is unique, unusual, or dangerous. Leftist NGOs and Democratic governors/AGs preparing for a potential second term of Trump. Sinister-sounding quotes like "controlling the flow of information" and "democracy-proofing our institutions" but nothing actually out of the ordinary in terms of real actions. I'll remind you that the vast majority of the actual escalation has come from Republicans. Remember J6? Remember "the election was stolen!!!" 70% of Republicans still believe that crap.
Trump will try some hamfisted executive orders, which will get massacred in the courts like much of his EO's did in his first term. He'll declare victory anyways, and the base will love him because they desire the appearance of "owning the libs" more than any actual substantive policy changes.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
None of these seriously challenged the idea that Trump won in 2016.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
I think this forum should disable/remove the downvote button. It's a legacy holdover from Reddit but it really doesn't fit the theme of the motte. Downvoting increases the intensity of heat while doing little for light. Humans are hard-wired to care about the popularity of their ideas, even people very low on the agreeableness spectrum (which I'm sure accounts for the majority of posters here). People who are routinely downvoted are much less likely to post, intensifying the echo chamber effect.
If a post breaks the rules, reporting it is still the best solution.
If a post is just using bad logic, it's much better to refute that logic with a response than to downvote. There's nothing I find quite as aggravating as making (what I think is) a good point, only to be downvoted with no responses. This doesn't happen nearly as often on this forum as it does on Reddit, but it's still a nuisance when it does occur.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
7mo ago
She's a crank with similar vibes to RFK Jr. or Ron Paul, although they have very different voting records. The fact this group has ascended now is thanks to the Republicans being dominated by the Dale Gribble voters.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
I also didn't like the BLM protests, but their major aim wasn't to undo a presidential election. They were a separate issue entirely.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
The question isn’t whether you can prove that the ballots are illegitimate or not. The question is why can’t you?
Because nothing will ever be enough to someone who's engaging in motivated reasoning. I support requiring an ID to vote, fixing gerrymandering, fixing incumbents' free mail privilege, etc. But if all these issues are remedied, I'm sure there will still be others. Yet US elections have been fairly secure so far -- that's why Trump's 2020 crusade kept turning up nothingburgers. The public perception only started diverging from reality (seeing huge issues everywhere, most of which didn't matter) when Trump started being a sore loser.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Democrats stormed the White House
The capitol riot could probably be considered a de-escalation since they didn't burn the Capitol building to the ground.
What are you talking about? When did Democrats ever storm the White House? I vaguely recall "sieging" federal buildings during the 2020 protests, but when did major left leaders ever support such violent measures?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
The SCOTUS protestors had nowhere near anywhere near the level of support for their actions. Some leftists may have supported their cause (rejecting Kavanaugh), but no major political figure egged them on for their methods. For contrast, Trump egged on J6, and only stopped supporting it once he realized it was a PR disaster. He also still claims the 2020 election was stolen.
‘Muh J6’ is a convenient rhetorical point for democrats
My point isn't to prove that the Democrats are justified in anything they do, it's to argue against Rightists who are chugging the negative-partisanship Koolaid by the gallon, pointing at Leftist transgressions, some real, many exaggerated, and pretending the Right isn't doing stuff that's on-par or even worse.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
These discussions aren't "essentially outlawed" anywhere, the people making the claims just need to bring their receipts, which they consistently fail to do. You had Giuliani saying these things on national television, and getting dunked on because he had little evidence.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9mo ago
you're required to take the beating
Not at all. He could have fought back with his fists to try to get the guy off him. The problem was that he escalated with multiple gunshots instead.
The notion that he can't fight back at all is a goofy strawman.
I owned up to the Selzer poll being wrong, specifically about thinking it would be off by less than 10 points. The arguments against it were pretty uniformly medicore, along the lines of "nah, it just feels wrong" or crosstab diving or "unskewing", against a pollster who had a track record of proving her critics wrong over and over (e.g. in 2020, when she was far more pro-Trump than most of the competition, and ended up being right). Obviously it ended up being incorrect, and now Selzer has a lot of egg on her face.
Also, I'm not a fan of ad hominem attacks so this will probably be my last response to you.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
They did not. When Hillary Clinton says Trump is an "illegitimate President," I just don't understand how you conclude that this is "superficially similar" language with a "real and very important difference."
Because of other actions surrounding what they said? While I really don't like that Hillary said the election was "stolen" and that Trump was "illegitimate", I still think there's a big difference between her comments and what Trump did. Hillary conceded almost immediately after the 2016 results were in. To my knowledge, Trump still hasn't conceded for 2020. Hillary never made phone calls demanding governors and secretaries of state "find" enough votes for them to win. Trump did. Hillary never egged on her followers to go to the capitol to protest or disrupt the electoral count. Trump, obviously, did.
To the contrary, I would say that it translated to the political class very well, in a variety of ways.
You linked an article where the Dems put forward abolishing the EC in favor of a direct popular vote (or some other system), but this doesn't seem germane to the argument that EverythingIsFine is making. There wasn't a broad rejection of election results by D leaders. The closest was probably Stacey Abrams refusing to concede in Georgia, but 1) she got a ton of pushback from this from her own party, and 2) even in this most extreme example, she didn't try to interfere directly like Trump did.
No: you are treating Democratic attempts to ensure their own permanent victory as "fix" while treating parallel Republican attempted to ensure their own permanent victory as "change."
What Trump did was fundamentally different from normal election reform, and thus his actions deserve to be seen differently. Dems saying we should abolish the EC (in future elections) or Rs saying we should require IDs to vote (in future elections) are very different proposals from Trump's "we need to overturn the votes from certain states (in an election that just happened).
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
No, it didn't challenge the idea that Trump won in 2016.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
And Republicans protested in 2012 when Obama won re-election. But in that case and the one you cited, neither were trying to undo the results of the election other than expressing general disapproval that their side lost. Neither went to the federal capital, and neither were egged on by a sitting president.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
There was no real or serious attempts by the Russians to get Manchurian candidate Trump into office
This is incorrect, or as you would hyperbolically put it, "extremely" incorrect. Trump wasn't a total puppet, but Russia was definitely helping him. The activities of the Internet Research Agency are now public knowledge after Prigozhin died in a fireball after missing his shot at the king. Campaign staffers such as Papadopoulos met with RU intelligence agents to arrange for embarrassing email leaks from people like Podesta, lied about it several times, and was sentenced to prison. Many other individuals such as his campaign manager(!) had suspicious links to Russia, and there has been plenty of additional evidence that Russia was trying to influence the election. Some of it was just to delegitimize democracy, while much of it was to prop up Trump. Is this really hard to believe? Russia has been interfering in US elections since the Cold War, and history has shown how much friendlier Trump has been to Putin compared to Biden or Hillary.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Where are the republicans inventing new legal theories
Lawyers arguing in new ways to new situations is just standard legal practice, e.g. when Trump's lawyers argued the presidency is not "an officeholder of the United States".
Where are the republicans using partisan organizations assessments of their ideological opposites as a justification to enact a domestic spying program?
The origin of the Trump-Russia investigation is shrouded in bias, just like the investigation into Biden's son was. But in both cases it was clear that there were actual problems there. Not problems that reached up to the highest level, but problems nonetheless.
I'm not a fan of plenty of the things Dems have done in regards to their woke crusade, but in terms of concrete escalation, storming the capital and trying to overturn a legitimate election due to being sore losers was far worse and more blatant.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
The left broadly owned up to screwing up over Biden's age. Could you imagine MAGA doing anything remotely similar, i.e. saying "yes our enemies were broadly right about this particular issue, and we have no choice but to change our strategy"?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
You put it much more eloquently than I could, and I might be yoinking your answer to reply to some others downthread.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
IIRC a pretty similar number of Democrats said the same thing about the 2016 election
I'd be very interested if you have a source on this.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
I have a laundry list of bad interactions with MAGA aligned people on this forum, but I can't really supply evidence of any specific poster being bad over and over again since I typically just block them if they're sufficiently bad even once. The fact it keeps happening over and over across many different posters should be sufficient evidence that it's a systemic issue, and not just one or two bad apples that slip through the cracks.
Moderation never worked on a "specific sentences get you banned" basis, it was always about whether the post as whole
This type of vibes-based moderation is just a glaring invitation for mods to be arbitrary. At the very least there should be a sentence or two that should be close-enough to breaking the rules that it can be cited as the issue, and then the rest of the post's tone can be used as context for whether to pull the trigger. Right-leaning mods are naturally going to feel that left-leaning posts are far more hostile and delusional than the average right-leaning post, which is probably why a post like Turok's gets banned while something like this gets AAQC'd.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.
The guy who deletes his posts was weird but I don't really think he fits this mold either. His posts were mostly short -- I don't recall him really gesturing at anything particularly bad, but maybe I'm misremembering.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
Actions speak louder than words. The fact they forcibly butted him aside due to the age concerns should be enough proof.
But if you want articles, here's one explicitly issuing a mea culpa.
Beyond that, here's some more: From the Times, from the WSJ
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
I think there's some truth to movements themselves being concessions when they replace something, although I still think it's useful to look within the movements to see if there's corrections within the movements as well. When Dems lost 2024 they had a notable period of reflection where new ideas were more accepted. When MAGA lost in 2020 they denied the results and said the election was a scam without any compelling evidence. And again, I can't see MAGA doing anything close to what the left did in regards to Biden's age.
I don't see why anyone here is relevant since this place is small and mostly dominated by conservatives. Demanding they stop rejecting conservative critiques more broadly is just silly since there's so many conservative (really, MAGA) critiques that are just utterly wrong, like thinking 2020 was rigged or that vaccines cause autism. I'd like to see MAGA really change it's position on any major thing in a way that implies their critics are right.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
PR doesn't end with just public facing statements. For example, if an organization is established to help the poor but all the workers openly hate poor people, that's a PR issue since news organizations or even just the poor people themselves would eventually realize how much the organization loathed them.
And again, Trump's loathing of illegal immigrants has never been a secret by any means.
Thanks, that'll be a useful bit of info in the future. Saved.
Still, there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side. The likely counter would be the Mueller investigation, but it was very different from J6. It's not an ongoing idea that all elections are fake. Harris isn't implying "wait until I win or lose to see if the election is legitimate" like Trump is.
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