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EverythingIsFine


				

				

				
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User ID: 1043

EverythingIsFine


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 08 23:10:48 UTC

					

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User ID: 1043

Is there a particular reason you’re using ((these parentheses))?

It’s more that people are still in denial that the current world of financial regulation is there for a reason. It never fails to entertain me when a new crypto scandal leads to an “innovation” which is just traditional banking with extra steps. As Matt Levine likes to say:

In one sense, crypto is in the business of constantly reinventing or rediscovering the basic ideas of financial history

And I’m inclined to agree.

This only works in a world where contracts and lawyers don’t exist. Like, it’s often illegal to “buy another producers products and resell them yourself” in at least three ways.

#1 is striking in its naïveté. A free market, one that is functional annd competitive, actually requires a certain amount of governmental regulation to remain free, functional, and competitive. It does not happen by magic. Even the holy texts of capitalism make this point explicitly. For example, companies can do a number of things to stifle new entries to existing markets, which breaks the system. There are clear mechanisms that keep the system going, and they are somewhat easily circumvented with lax enforcement. Companies can temporarily collude or take other related actions to undercut a rising newcomer’s prices (the Walmart strategy), blanket them with legal fees (the IP/copyright route), contractually freeze them out (the Microsoft strategy), deceptively manipulate popular perception, or even outright lie, snipe key hires, unleash massive financial war chests, the options go on and on.

Walmart for example should not have been possible. They deliberately bankrupted thousands of companies if not more in their rise to the top. Do you remember this era? They are like the classic case of using their financial heft to artificially lower prices, drive local grocery stores out of business, and then raise the prices again. (And cheat countless suppliers and business partners along the way). And the scandals don’t stop. Why, even just yesterday I saw a story about how Walmart enriched itself by ignoring massive fraud and even lied to the government in the process. Note that Walmarts are too physically entrenched in various communities for much meaningful action to be taken, and boycotts just don’t work very well anymore.

This assertion flies in the face of a great deal of reporting about White House deliberations and decisions. The President still has a very high degree of control over the military in terms of which operations are done. It's just that the military is very persuasive about arguing for the status quo. That's not "ceremonial purpose", it's a process that re-occurs with practically every president. A sufficiently determined president can and will make changes. Before you cry "oh but Trump was stymied by the deep state!" the much more likely conclusion is merely that he cared more about the appearance of being a loose cannon than actually doing so.

Also, another huge hold with this assertion: you forget that the president is literally the only one to nominate leaders in the Cabinet, and a whole host of others to boot. It's like claiming that a corporate board that is in charge of hiring the CEO has no control of the company... Like sure, there's a big degree of separation but they certainly DO have a lot of control in a broad sense!

I mean, that’s a pretty neat example right up until you claim it means something. There’s such a giant chasm between being in a war zone and a life and death situation, and the kind of everyday often trivial political shit that I think the analogy doesn’t work at all.

Trump was quite literally ten minutes away from potentially starting a war larger than Iraq and I’m not even joking. I’m referring to Trump (this info is from him directly) deciding to rescind his already-given order to strike the Iranian military directly and killing about 150 in response to downing a drone of ours. He says he changed his mind at that last minute because it (obviously) wasn’t proportionate. But to me, the fact it was considered at all and initially approved by Trump is a textbook example of going way too close to the edge.

I mean, I agree with you it feels a bit like a scapegoat, politically low hanging fruit — but the arguments in favor of Confederate fetishization being a thing of actual harm rather than a cute Southern quirk I think actually do have some internal merit. That’s why it happened so quickly. I think we shouldn’t be so quick to write the whole thing off as a naked power play rather than a sincere effort to right a wrong, long ignored.

This. This comment right here.

People on the Motte make a lot of fun, often correctly, of the newest crop of social historians and academics and a lot of the crap they produce. But this comment demonstrates in my eyes quite convincingly that they have something of value buried there.

It’s a classic example of “othering”. American is literally by definition not something you can split up. It refers to nationality, not any sort of subgroup. It refers to a broad group political construct of humans. And deliberately sectioning it off for no good reason only plays into the hands of bad actors. And historically, it’s downright ignorant. America does have a large history of immigration that is literally inseparable from its current makeup.

I am curious and confused why you have lumped “white people” in with Confederate history. Surely most white people in America were not Southern rebels, and there’s more to that culture than Robert E Lee? I realize that as a Southerner yourself it feels a bit more personal but… again, I really feel the Confederate issue doesn’t generalize. And part of it is just that Southern primary education more or less lies to its own people about this part of history. Not only do many texts outright lie about the causes of the Civil War, the South may have claimed that slavery would die out, but their actual actions reveal an active attempt at spreading it. A lot of these “reasonable complaints” just boil down to economic issues, made worse because the South didn’t want to take steps to rebalance their economy away from slavery. And they certainly didn’t want to treat Black people like the humans they are. That’s not something you can just glaze over.

I think you might be mixing up your timeline. Trayvon Martin (2012), Eric Garner (2014), Freddie Gray (2015 - Ferguson riots attached), Philando Castile (2015) and other moments like Kaepernick (2015) and the Charleston church shooting (2015) ALL predate Trump. The racial unrest wasn’t invented by progressives. It was already there.

The double impact of the video of George Floyd (2020) and Trump’s own, self inflicted “both sides” response to the Charlottesville protester killings (2017) has far more to do with it than some progressive scheme to make Trump look bad. In particular that 2017 event was tied to Confederate backlash… which even extended to efforts within Southern states to remove Confederate flags. Mississippi removed their own flag in 2020. Even South Carolina stopped displaying it. While there was certainly national pressure to do so, it wasn’t progressive-exclusive.

And speaking in terms of the historiography, it’s also a big mistake to say that the sentiment was new. Many historians have long felt that Reconciliation was a bit too lenient. Since about the 60s I would say, reaching stronger mainstream around the 80s. Many blamed civil rights “taking too long” and Jim Crow type discrimination and political repression “lasting too long” on Reconstruction. Perhaps out of political convenience (easier to blame the past), but again, this wasn’t something new in response to Trump.

I think people are too often conflating morals with fact.

Take "discrimination", in my opinion a superior word to racism alone, though I might accept "vanilla racism" or depending on context its weaker cousin "stereotyping": when someone is treated different because of their race being used as a primary differentiator. We've become so distracted as a society arguing about whether or not it's accurate or occasionally acceptable to make judgements or get caught into debate about if it was really discrimination or some other cause that we forget to say what really needed to be said because the rest is just window dressing: It's morally wrong, all the time, in every society, to treat people worse for some arbitrary reason before you get to know them. Whether it's even possible to do this, or what counts as getting to know them, or any other derivative question is irrelevant. It's morally wrong not from any practical perspective, but rises from basic human dignity and fairness.

The parents in your example, I might initially be tempted to say, are acting logically -- but only to an extent. They are treating school decisions as very short term, zero-sum games which in a sense they are. However, with longer time horizons and a bit of agency, it's harmful to assume it's all just zero-sum and instead should be seeking out more effective solutions. We live in a society, as they say. But this is all beside the point. The real point is that we seem to have inadvertently de-emphasized and cheapened our definition as well as understanding of human rights. The right to be treated equally is one of the absolute fucking basics, and is not worth fucking around with just because we're tempted to get some short term benefits.

Sure, it tells you something "extra", but it's something both immoral and, while perhaps it might in a very localized way be a net benefit in terms of information gain, it's long-term super unhealthy and harmful. I mean, if we're leaving the immoral part to the side and talking about pure utility, making a habit of utilizing those residual values (even assuming they are reliable) is problematic both for you and for society both in the medium to long term. Why? I don't think I need to explain the societal part, as societally accepted racism even when used as a background process rather than a primary process is a significant evil and limits overall prosperity and tends to hinder interpersonal and economic interactions in disproportionate ways - but personally there's harm too. Racism has such a virulent and problematic history that I don't think we can rely on ourselves to "limit" racism to merely residual value only. It's a pipe dream. Our brains simply don't work that way.

I don't really think that's a fair characterization. You mentioned for example distracting the base with empty immigration promises. But wait. Who killed the 2013 Gang of Eight immigration reform bill that passed the Senate and died in the House on Boehner's watch? A serious bipartisan effort that passed 68-32? A real, not-vaporware bill that both gave a path to citizenship alongside border security improvements and expanded employer verification? Yes, short sighted right wing House members under Boehner's weak speakership. Sound familiar? Meanwhile, I don't see a strong correlation between centrists and war hawks. Some prominent Iran hawks for example include a wide range of Democrats and Republicans both and of various polarities. You have Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton and McCain historically on the GOP side, to name a few. Hardly close allies.

This reads as hilarious to me. I've been reading some reviews and excerpts about the Mitt Romney book that came out recently that seems to be relatively unvarnished. And it's pretty clear based on what's described that a lot of right-wing senators aren't really being very honest about their true feelings. Contrast that with the dealmaking wing of the GOP. I don't understand how compromise became a dirty word for modern right wing Republicans. Suddenly making a deal is a betrayal and childish, which is not only ignorant of how politics with a slim majority literally must work, but is incredibly hypocritical because of the aforementioned pageantry on the far right while the middle literally just wants to get shit done.

I think Matt Gaetz is a performative blowhard, but also might have been totally within his rights to push to oust McCarthy. That's not really the issue. The issue is what came after, where by most accounts Jordan cynically tried to politically kneecap Scalise for his own benefit before the whipping even got started, and earned too much ill will in doing so. It wasn't even very ideological, though it could have been. And now no one has the political stature to be a replacement. This was all so, so predictable.

It's really a marketing failure, if anything. While Congress doesn't get as much done as IT wants (and promises), legislation that changes American Life writ large is still somewhat common. When it happens, they don't often talk about it very loudly. The election cycle is basically every two years, but many of these big bills take about three years to come to fruition or be noticeable (just to throw out a typical number). They manage to pass at least two bills per year I'd estimate that have a noticeable impact on the median American. So there's often an awkward timing thing where they can't take credit too quickly, or people get impatient, but often they wait too long and then it becomes awkward to take credit because the other party might now be in power and they don't want to make their opponents look good.

Why is your conclusion that it was all a lie? You are aware that attitudes, especially about sex, hardly move on a linear, one-dimensional scale. History is about things changing in many ways, some good and some bad and many unforeseen. It's about context and tons of interactions with contemporary events. This is extra true in this case because as you start to allude to, these expectations were largely unstated -- and that's because the Sexual Revolution wasn't particularly intentional. There's some early links to feminist movements in the creation of the birth control pill (1960) due to its then-controversial moral implications, but research was heading in that direction anyways and I think that a lot of the movement was simply an intersection between that invention, which allowed wider scale lower-consequence sex (very important!), the happenstance of Vietnam War counterculture already starting to go full steam ahead, and an already-rising incidence rate of what Wikipedia rather blithely calls "non-traditional sexual activity" that had started back in the early 50s. In other words, the Sexual Revolution was more a thing that happened rather than a directed or conscious movement.

Truth be told however, a lot of stuff was happening for women in the 1960s and thereabouts. I feel strongly the Sexual Revolution should be treated as its own thing, but all that stuff makes it hard to be totally certain. Specifically, you had traditional Second Wave Feminists focused on legal stuff and equality, you had a more hippie-based cultural movement, and you had some radicals hanging around as well, as well as some other political events. There were a lot of big legal things happening including sex being allowed into movies and books more, equal pay pushes, and you are correct, a lot more talk about gender roles.

And that's where I think you're succumbing to a bit of presentism. "Normalizing" both the act of sex (particularly unmarried sex) and discussion about sex is by definition contextual. We use the word differently today. Normalizing to someone in 1965 might mean that it's now normal to talk about sex in casual conversation and a heightened awareness of sexual activity, including queer stuff. Whereas in point a above, you say that it's about not shaming each other and not having unfavorable impacts. That's not really what the promise was, if there even was one. The conversation was just getting started, in the public consciousness. So talking about it being a lie just doesn't make sense.

Part b might be a valid criticism of second wave feminism, but not the sexual revolution. And it's one I wouldn't be so quick to declare as false. Certainly some feminists declared that loosened gender roles might be better for everyone, but I think the language was (and should be) more of a moral and legal question about rights than an explicit "I Offer - You Receive". In other words, it isn't fair nor just to force (societally and legally) certain roles and restrictions on women because they are people too, even on the off chance it makes society overall worse. And again, here I believe you are projecting what is actually intended as a third/fourth wave feminism criticism onto the second wave. Both the claim about men having no issue doing traditionally female-coded things as well as the activism behind it doesn't historically line up at all with the Sexual Revolution. I would say that for example, a push to accept house-husbands didn't really start to bloom until maybe the 2000s.

This is completely correct. It's not even up for debate, really: You can find the 2021-22 financial statment here and scroll to Page 4. In ONE YEAR, they (Wikimedia) received 160 million dollars in donations and in the SAME YEAR spent literally twice as much money (6.2 million dollars) in just processing those same donations than they did on internet hosting itself (what people assume the money is spent on) -- which was only 2.7 million dollars. Look at those two numbers. 160 vs 3 million. They aren't even in the same ballpark. 15 million dollars they literally just gave away in grants and 88 million dollars in salaries and 18 million on "professional services", which is odd for an organization that primarily (as far as I assume most donors are concerned) simply runs Wikipedia and literally prohibits (most) paid editing...

Here’s my take. Compliant with my own “50 year rule” that holds that any political injustice or status quo that’s persisted for more than 50ish years should be accepted automatically and we simply move on (since by that point most people originally involved are either dead or too old to matter, plus “sins of the father” rhetoric), I think a two state solution is just permanently dead.

What Palestinians, broadly speaking, need most is a return to open elections (new leadership - the PA has been useless for years and doesn’t actually seem to care about getting an actual solution) coupled with a sustained series of publicized Kumbiya moments of forgiveness and unity. Ideally with a charismatic leader on one or both sides. Then a sustained push for equal rights. Possibly combined with some mild economic and land reform/incentives. This will probably work fine for the West Bank and Gaza will probably remain slum-like, without a great near term solution. Focus on the equal treatment bits and learning to live as a multicultural society. I’m not saying Israeli government is like Apartheid, and we shouldn’t treat it the same, but if we are honest it certainly shares some attributes and Israeli doesn’t yet treat all Arabs the same.

I think this approach is completely plausible. It just will take work and a willingness from Palestinians and Israelis alike. For those who think a lifetime of war and conflict and oppression is inevitable, as well as those trapped in the recent news, I think it’s helpful to continue to consider what a medium term resolution can or could be like.

I actually think the numbers do matter. If Israel kills, directly or indirectly, 50,000 Gazans it is way different than 5,000. People start to know people individually affected. International reaction is different. Refugee pressures increase proportionally. Unrest spreads and worsens in the West Bank. Iran starts to feel more tempted to get involved directly. Hezbollah, who for now seems to be totally disinterested in getting pulled into another massive war and getting Beirut leveled again, starts to feel pressure to actually do something.

Scope isn’t the only thing that matters and is often fallible (i.e. doesn’t solely determine responses or determine them absolutely). But it sure as hell does matter all the same.

I do appreciate the response actually, even if it does happen to the the last. I do like to reassess my beliefs on occasion, though I've yet to see any reasoning or evidence forcing a reassessment, to be honest.

I guess from a bit more of a meta view, it feels a bit to me that maybe this comes down to a bit of a, for lack of a better word, epistemological disagreement? Sure, I'm not spending hours and hours scouring primary sources, but there are journalists who literally get paid to do so and report their findings. I know media trust is always a little sensitive, but my general sense is that enough journalists actually care and/or do their jobs that if there was real meat in these allegations we'd at least get a "recent findings in GA raise questions" article or two from at least one reputable publication. Wouldn't an actual election scandal be helpful for viewership numbers that journalists chase to the exclusion of all else, according to some? And I feel like I'm also capable of putting stories through a moderately decent sniff test. Many articles for example immediately after the election included examples of claims and then what the official response was. In most if not all cases, my assessment was that the official responses fully addressed each concern with high-quality information without suspicious gaps or non-answers.

So in that context, repeating a litany of detailed questions about e.g. Oregon election procedures that require far more effort to respond to than to type, feels like it's unclear if those are real questions, rhetorical ones, or simply aspersions about my subject matter expertise or lack thereof. Right? That's how it felt to me at least. And frankly, it's a little insulting that you are claiming that I somehow "have little knowledge about" these things when you yourself have done near zero legwork to back yourself up.

I mean, do you propose some other method of finding the truth? How did you arrive at your conclusion that the election was seriously questionable? That's an honest question.

In some sense maybe you are right about the Target Gift Card Fraud being ultimately unimportant, but I think the phrasing and quality of evidence can still serve as a basis for getting a sense of scale. That's why I brought up the example of hearsay about a neighbor being VERY different in its implications than a directly observed canvasser offering bribes -- they both can be described fairly as "someone was handing out gift cards for checking unsealed ballots". Yes of course I would read the source if linked. Yes, I made a good faith effort to find it. I was actually quite frustrated I could not, which led me to the completely defensible and logical conclusion that it must not exist other than you misremembering something!!! I focused on the report because I frankly hate video as a format and would rather do almost anything else other than watch court recordings (text is far superior for finding relevant portions of a longer topic efficiently).

I'm of course much more interested in an allegation like one much upthread where you claim "We're not talking about millions of votes needing to swap, but appx. 40,000 in any of 5 different states, any of which would change the outcome if a single one did something as simple as requiring canvassing hundreds of thousands of votes which had no signed chain of custody receipts (and no election officials have yet been charged despite this being a crime in multiple states like AZ)."

Let's look together! Maybe this could inform in terms of how, today, I might look into an allegation. Googling for chain of custody problems, there seems to be a very worrying Georgia Star article claiming there are a lot of custody receipts missing, potentially a lot of votes. Maybe that's it? But wait, no, looks like there's also an article that seems pretty well researched with plenty of specifics that looks credible. They located all but 8 of ~1500 of the custody receipts, and with one county person saying she was alone and another saying she was too busy. But only 78,000 drop box ballots were submitted, so even assuming maximum fraud for the missing cases, I don't think that implies all that many ballots. Hundreds maybe? Bad, possibly deserving investigation (which the article implies but doesn't outright state is ongoing), but not election-tipping (the margin was what, 12k?). I don't default to assuming fraud of course, given its historical rarity etc etc. which I've mentioned, but on balance this doesn't seem to be something that makes me doubt the whole election. I don't see any reason to doubt the quality of the reporting nor the response from the elections department, do you?

Okay okay, looks like you mentioned AZ originally, maybe you weren't referring to GA, so lets keep looking and wait! Look here! A hit from some random message board linking the same original aggregator thegatewaypundit (which has overt calls to action at the bottom of their articles, not a great sign of an unbiased source) that led me to the Georgia Star article before. Maybe this is a lead? 740,000 votes worth with missing documentation? Tracing, tracing... Oh. Original source appears to be a "resolution to reclaim Arizona's electors" from some MAGA guy running for office whose Twitter... oh he's reposting a 9/11 conspiracy theory, stuff about the rapture, US government child abduction, all within the last two days or so. Credibility down the toilet and I'm not going to scroll that far back in his history, which is filled with basically the classic Twitter reposting of any and all theories about fraud, so I think I'm okay dismissing him as a serial reposter/hearsay guy.

Hmm, that also doesn't seem like what you might be referring to. Let's keep looking. I also come across a nice report again with a seeming good quality that seems a partial response to I guess it's Kari Lake's claim and lawsuit about 300,000 worth of missing chain of custody documents? I sort of dislike "fact checks" despite their usefulness and know they can have unfair assessments, especially in their "ratings" which don't always match the long-form responses but this one has what, on its face, appears to be a good summary of the case results:

The county filed a motion to dismiss the suit on Dec. 15, claiming Lake misunderstood the forms required in its chain of custody process. The county also said Lake’s claim “regarding chain of custody is based on an incomplete understanding of election administration and baseless speculation about what could happen at the County’s contractor, Runbeck Election Services – not on any allegations of what actually happened.”

On Dec. 19, Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson ruled Lake’s lawsuit could go to trial on two out of 10 initial counts — including the claim about the ballot chain of custody and a claim that some ballot printers malfunctioned because of an “intentional action” by an election official on Election Day, causing Lake to lose.

A witness for Lake, Heather Honey, an investigator and supply chain auditor, testified at trial that county election officials had not provided her with the delivery receipt forms that would show the county followed chain of custody procedures for ballots placed in drop boxes on Election Day. But during cross-examination by the county’s attorney, Honey testified that the forms did exist and that she had seen them in photos — they just weren’t physically provided through a public records request. Honey also testified that she was told that employees of Runbeck Election Services, an election software company headquartered in Phoenix, submitted about 50 ballots for family and friends into the ballot stream improperly. Honey later said she couldn’t identify those 50 ballots.

On Dec. 24, Thompson dismissed the last two counts of Lake’s suit, saying that Lake failed to provide evidence that officials intentionally took steps that changed the election outcome. The judge said, “Every single witness before the Court disclaimed any personal knowledge of such misconduct. The Court cannot accept speculation or conjecture in place of clear and convincing evidence.”

Hmm. We see not only no evidence of wrongdoing, but also the process working (trial granted for strongest counts) as well as the one possibly questionable action affecting... 50 ballots. I think this is probably the claim you were referring to, and decide to stop my search.

If you see a flaw in my investigation technique, I'm all ears. But you can only go through this same source-seeking process so many times, obtain a totally reasonable and believable answer from a good source or sources before you start to assume a pattern. Yes, assumptions bad, but I mean, that's multiple times now across the last few days that you've had plenty of chances to bring up evidence and have not produced anything but either disproven or questionable or small-scale stuff. And, not a single actual link. Only a sort of vague 'hey go dig this way'. So the question really needs to be asked:

If this isn't how a normal interested citizen investigates, then how should they??? What are your actual expectations? Please help me out here. I cannot see what's so wrong about this kind of moderate depth dive that discovers little and decides to resurface.

The question of, well does that make it okay for the system to persecute or come down hard on people with doubts (or more) about the results? To an extent I actually agree with you. I think your original comment made some good points. For example, the disbarment attempt seems a bit much. However at the same time I do think I have the faith that the proceeding will end up being fair. It's also a bit of an interesting question exploring "how bogus does a bogus case have to be" to deserve to lose a law license? Rules prohibit, I forget the exact phrase, but roughly "knowingly arguing something blatantly unconstitutional or being grossly negligent in not knowing how blatantly illegal what you're arguing is" and say it is deserving of punishment "up to and including" revocation of the license. There might be a smaller punishment. There might be the other angle about duty to client vs. duty to fact/good faith that comes up. But painting it as the only reason more lawyers didn't join up is patently unfair, and mixes up cause and effect. Lawyers were already dropping off cases like flies even before their integrity came into question, quite a contrast to 2000 where lawyers flooded into Florida in short order. And I truly do think that it was a case of, they agree to take a look at the evidence and decide that the chances of victory are extremely low. At least that's my impression. My certainty on that particular isn't incredibly high I will concede.

All this to say, bringing it back, that near as I can figure, you just start with a baseline, strong distrust of all things justice system and government and media at once, while I do not? And that might truly be an irreconcilable difference. We all, epistemically, at some point decide to place our trust in some people or organizations more than others, on some sort of basis (whether passed on from another person of trust, personal experience, personal logical reasoning, etc). Perhaps that might be a more productive, other thread kind of question to explore.

Dude. LMGTFY link... I can't find anything. I'm like 5 pages in. I LITERALLY CANNOT find the claim, and suspect you can't either, or else you would have given me a link. Instead you perform a CLASSIC gish-gallop, throwing out a ton of detailed questions and zero actual answers nor any actual claims. I decide to call you out on one specific piece of bullshit and you dodge the question.

You know what I DO see? Articles like this that cite some of these affidavits. They are poor quality. Misunderstandings of proper procedures, claims that poll workers were grumpy with observers, even one that talks about how he just can't believe so many military members voted Biden. Seriously? What else do I see? Oh yes, an example of a judge who looked at evidence directly in Michigan and called it "generalized speculation" and "simply not credible". You have a great article here that also mentions some of these allegations. And this is only one example of many. For example:

One of the affidavits filed by a Republican challenger at TCF, who heard from other challengers that vehicles with out-of-state license plates delivered tens of thousands of ballots to TCF at 4:30 a.m., claimed that every one of these ballots were cast for president-elect Joe Biden. Kenny wrote that the affidavit was "rife with speculation and sinister motives." The state's deadline for returning absentee ballots is 8 p.m. on Election Day and all ballots were verified as having been cast by eligible voters before they were delivered to TCF, Thomas explained in his affidavit.

This is not only NOT evidence ("I heard someone else say...") but this claim is literally impossible and has been proven false. These are the kinds of allegations we are talking about. There were dozens of lawsuits and rather than instantly suspect some sort of conspiracy among both GOP and DNC nominated judges alike, doesn't it sound much more likely that there's just nothing there? I strongly suspect that this likely nonexistent Target gift card buying falls under this category: "I was talking with my neighbor and HE said that someone offered him a gift card to vote" is very different than "I had a man knock on my door and offer me a gift card for my ballot, which I reported to the police and there is a paper trail proving it". Organized door canvassing is very obvious and that kind of vote-buying is very blatant. I find it extremely unlikely that such an effort occurred on any sort of scale undetected beyond a single affidavit.

You accuse "commenters like me" of moving goalposts or playing a motte-and-bailey game, but I could just as easily (and supported by evidence galore) say that the theories of how fraud happened are far worse offenders. What exact fraud occurred? Was it coordinated? Was it widespread? Please answer clearly. Bonus points for having the same opinion back in 2020, unchanged.

You want a specific claim? I claim, and practically everything seems to back this up, that 1) no deliberate county or larger scale coordinated efforts exist to fraudulently manipulate either vote totals or ballots, 2) that any fraud that did occur was both sporadic and unfocused in nature, and 3) occurred in roughly comparable scales to decades long precedent for electoral fraud, perhaps with a very modest allowance for Covid complications independent of the actual people on the ballot. I think that captures at least the gist of it. Notice the scale component. It matters. It's not just some motte-and-bailey, it's literally the criteria for determining how much we should care both as individuals, societies, and government bodies about fraud!! I of course support prosecuting individuals if it has any material deterrent effect, and increasing election funding and transparency, but otherwise why bother fighting a problem that doesn't really matter?

I do love that you provided a lone example, the Gableman report. I assume it's this one?. The one that recommends decertification of the results, which is both meaningless grandstanding from a practical standpoint and agreed by virtually everyone to be specifically illegal and unconstitutional? That aside, of course there are some good suggestions and some bad ones too that I do hope the legislature discusses, but most of them are process-oriented. In terms of content the report appears to focus on some Zuckerberg money that was sent to some counties to improve their election processes and help with extra covid costs. Which... well you might feel that it was bad, but the so-called statistical reasoning that appeared elsewhere in the thread about its supposed impact on vote turnout looks highly suspect to me. And more importantly a Bush-nominated judge explicitly allowed the money, which was upheld on appeal. So basically the process was followed just fine. Yes, I do read primary sources where practical and needed, thank you very much. And it's also... not even a fraud allegation, no vote counts nor ballots were changed. I can't emphasize this enough.

It's helpful here to separate the whole "voter disenfranchisement" (or "voter suppression" or whatever term is in vogue) debate on some level from the "fraud" one, as they are in many ways different cans of worms, and we've been talking about fraud. I think the former is beyond our scope... but notably, it is an absolutely massive paradigm shift to move AWAY from fraud/vote-buying/hacking/etc. and into the realm of, for lack of a better phrase, regular but high-stakes political maneuvering that's part of the normal lower-d democratic process (for better or worse). They are two different worlds.

I say that but I just can't help myself but to mention: Gableman's report also contains hilarious statements such as the following, where he - and I kid you not - forgot to include a citation, instead leaving in a "(CITE)" placeholder instead, like I did way back in high school once:

Turnout, otherwise known as “getting out the vote,” (GOTV) has before 2020 been an exclusively partisan phrase (CITE) used by partisan campaigns...

And, I assume, the reason no citation could be found easily is that the statement is... well, literally and objectively wrong. The phrase is old and has been used in both partisan and nonpartisan contexts. Just one example here from 1976 (of many possible) I plucked out of a google search that explicitly refers to "nonpartisan get-out-the-vote activities". It's the cumulative impact of things just like that which make the whole effort seem amateurish and further reduces my trust in the source.

I'm doing a fun little assignment where we're supposed to find a few misleading graphs, infographics, or other data visualization and talk about how it could be misleading. For example, I remember this fun one from the CBC in Canada that deliberately misstated the proportion of public funding. Anyone have any other good examples that spring to mind? (Not that I'm trying to freeload, it's not that kind of difficult assignment, but I'm curious if there are any that have just stuck in your head like that one did for months or years?

That’s almost entirely it in my opinion. But about your second point:

Partially, phones also make typing i.e. incredibly annoying. You have to avoid autocapitalization and also switch back and forth between qwerty and the numerical/symbolic keyboard. And my iPhone at least doesn’t ever autocorrect it to add the periods.

And also, virtually all abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms have had their own periods gradually dropped over the last decades, especially as they proliferate. What might have been the I.A.E.A. in years past is now just the IAEA (though this would depend on the style guide and how close the acronym is to its own word vs. an actual abbreviation). I think the logical conclusion, for the sake of consistency, is that the same should be done for other similar uses.

And if the original phrase is Latin, a language no one speaks, and therefore (almost) practically meaningless? Even less reason to be pedantic.

I looked at a non random but still what seemed to be adequate sampling of the actual court cases within a month or two or the election and in pretty much every case, saw nothing at all to indicate extensive fraud. This includes not just the allegations but also looking into the actual comments and rulings by judges in some of these cases. I did see a lot of fraud claims simultaneously disproved. Based on that sampling I concluded that the process seemed to be working just fine. Obviously it’s been a while and I feel little need to revisit that, especially given that every specific brought up in this site so far over the past few months when it’s come up has turned out to be hogwash. Classic example: this supposed target gift card scam. I can’t find anything at all about it on Google. Zero. And the fact that you still declined to provide a source is absolutely screaming at me.

Also, precedent beats speculation. We do have a great precedent for a disputed election! Bush vs Gore. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. I know people have mixed feelings about the results, but the very fact that a legitimate grievance went through the full process, strongly implies that the same will happen again to future legitimate cases. And that was escalated from a state, Florida, that was horrifically unprepared for a recount and had poor procedures in place. So not only have we a demonstrated court escalation even when local government process is poor, we have a lot of other states that took lessons and tightened things up in terms of more and better written and followed procedures and many other improvements.

Meanwhile a lot of the 2020 lawsuits had trouble finding lawyers to pursue them, much less expert witnesses who declined to participate in droves once they saw the “evidence”.