BANNED USER: /comment/193024
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
Failed repeatedly in his attempts to die a hero and has now lived long enough to become the villain.
User ID: 659
Banned by: @cjet79
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
3mo ago
I'm not sure how else to start this so I'm just going to dive straight in.
A long time bug-bear of mine is something I've come to refer to as the "Leviathan-shaped Hole in the discourse". It's something that has come up multiple times in the last couple weeks and while I've written about it at length back when this community was on reddit and in the comment section of SSC proper back in the day it's been pointed out to me that I haven't really written about it in a while and that I should probably revisit the subject for those who are just joining us. Aknoldewdgment to @Fruck, @hydroacetylene, Et Al.
The short version is that I believe that there are multiple basic human intuitions that are simply missing from the modern secular liberal mindset/worldview.
The long version might require a bit of background to explain.
I get the impression that I'm something of an odd man out here in that I did not go to college after high-shool and in that I never really thought of myself as being particularly intelligent. If anything it was the inverse. I'll be the first to tell you that I am not that fucking bright. I had dreams of being a professional fighter and/or skate-border, but as I moved up the food-chain it became increasinly clear that natural talent was no match for natural talent coupled with the time and money to train full-time. If I were smart I may have figured that out a head of time. In anycase 9/11 Happened and I enlisted. I spent 10 years as a Combat Medic and another 18 months as a feild operative for a Prominant Humanitarian NGO in East Africa before deciding to return to the states and go to college on the GI bill.
As one might imagine, going from being a "Muzunga" in Nairobi to being undergrad at the University of California was a bit of a culture shock. And it is that sense of culture shock that has stuck with me and signifigantly shaped my worldview since. It's one thing to stick out visually, to be visibly older than all the other freshmen, or to be one of half-a-dozen white guys in an otherwise black neighborhood. But it is another to realize that you genuinely walk different, talk different, and think different from your obstensible peers. I was first introduced to rationalism through one of my professors and a fellow-student, and the desire to make sense of whatever the fuck was going on was major part of the initial apeal. I was actually at one of the first SSC reader meet-ups hosted by Cariadoc where I got to meet Scott, and bunch of the other movers and shakers, face to face but as much as I was a fan of the general ideas (systemitized wining Yay!) it was painfully obvious to me that we had fundementally different conceptions of how how the world actually worked. Which in turn brings us to the real topic of this post.
One of the things about having existed in a world outside liberal society is that you cant help but recognize that there is a world outside liberal society. Accordingly it becomes difficult to ignore just how much of liberal society (or what Scott would call "the Universal Culture") is predicated on assumptions that do not necccesarily hold. Yes, If A & B then C, but that's a mightily Laconic "If". This is where the hole comes in. My position is that the secular liberal dominiation of academia has effectively castrated our society's ablility to discuss certain topics in a reasonable manner by baking liberal assumptions about how the world ought to work (rather than how it actually does work) into the vocabulary of the discussion. As such, in order to argue against a liberal in a manner the the liberal will regard as valid one is forced to go through a whole rigirmarole of defining terms that nobody's got time for. Thus the liberal inevitably wins every argument by default. However, winning the argument does not neccesarily equate to being "correct" as one can make a dumb argument for a smart position and vice versa.
The "Leviathan shaped hole" is named for the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. I find Hobbes signifigant in that he was one of the first guys in the enlightenment/modern era to approach political science as an actual science with theories that could be either proven or falsfied. However these days he's mostly regarded as a joke, a cartoon characterchure of an absolute authoritarian drawn by people who've never really bothered to read or engage with any of his arguments and I believe that this does our society a disservice. It seems to me that we are at a point where the sort of culture/worldview that produces a guy like Greg Abbott or the median Trump voter is as alien to the typyical liberal as that of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon and I can't help but expect this to end badly.
Thing is that for all the talk of "fighting the power" one gets the impression that a liberal does not really understand the implications of those words because the've never been in a position to to actually do so. I'm reminded of an argument I got into with another user regarding the killing of Jordan Neely. The Argument has been made that Daniel Penny acted unlawfully by interposing himself between Neely and his intended victim and subsiquently killing Neely. To call Penny a "murderer" and a "vigilante" implies the pressance of a sovriegn authority that penny was obliged to defer to. Hovever if that's the case why did it not act? The simple answer is that it was not pressant and thus the accusations against Penny ring hollow.
One of those fundamental Hobbesian bits of insight that liberals see to lack is the understanding that violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways is not some aberation, it's the default, and if you aren't going to do anything about it someone else just might.
Basically yes.
If you want a peaceful transition of power, you need to be able to convince the losers that they lost fairly and that they have more to gain by continuing to work within the system than they have to lose by checking out of it or blowing it up.
As I've touched upon before I think liberals tend treat the relative peace and prosperity of societies such as the US and EU as though it were a physical law (like gravity), rather than something that has to be actively cultivated and maintained, and this sort of attitude strikes me as a manifestation of this tendency.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
As others have touched upon it's not homogeneity that drives Japan's relatively low levels of criminality, it's culture, customs, and habits.
Both the guy and the girl in the described story could be the most Ashkenazi of Jews and the guy would still be an asshole in need of an ass-whooping.
Likewise surveillance doesn't mean shit if it isn't backed by the will to do something about it, see the current state of the UK.
The missing fourth option on your list is "reject modernity and embrace tradition" not in the silly RETVRN sense peddled by gay-presenting euro-poors who self-identify as perverts on twitter, but in the understanding that maybe grandpa knew something you don't. Maybe all those backwards seeming customs that you chafed at because you're a good little liberal who believes in self-actualization and fighting the power actually serve a critical role. Maybe life is better when you make a conscious effort to say what you mean and mean what you say and refuse to tolerate anything less from those around you. Maybe "suiting up" to leave the house isn't just for you and contra liberal sensibilities, the old man (or woman) who tells the kids to "knock it off", wear a belt, watch thier language, etc... is serving a vital social function.
My original reply was lost in site reset but I will try to sum up.
While it is very possible that “He Gets Us doesn’t get it" it seems obvious to me from the rest of your post that you don't really "get it" either. I think that by attempting to frame/justify Christainity in explicitly secular left-wing/Rousseauean terms you're effectively falling into the trap I described in my Inferential Distance post about narratives and the Matrix. In short, you still think that's air you're breathing.
If you were to ask a representative sample of sincere Christians for the "starting point" of the Christian faith I'd wager that a significant majority would respond with some take on John 3:16 i.e. For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son. For such a short phrase there's a whole lot to unpack there, but I'm going to stick to the elephant in the room. God is not just mighty, he is the mightiest, the literally All-Mighty. And yet he sacrifices, he suffers, and he is humbled. Consider the narrative role of this act. Consider the obvious question it raises in the mind of the attentive reader. Why would he do that? Sure, in the very next line we get so that whoever believeth in him should not perish but that doesn't the question so much as add a layer of abstraction. Why would God care if our sorry sinful asses perish or not? That's the Big question.
In contrast the whole "sky-daddy said so" brand of rhetoric, you seem to be endorsing here with your talk of Jesus as "the most dominant person" and virtue as mere "status-seeking behavior" is a weak/straw man more common amongst woke academics and edgy teenagers who've read a summary of Nietzsche than actual Christians. The oft heard refrain amongst Christians is not "what did God tell you?" or "what's in it for me?" it is "What would Jesus do?" Sometimes to "be Christlike" means associating with undesirables. Sometimes it means humbling yourself by washing the feet of your guests. Sometimes it means beating the shit out of a shady money changer in the temple square, and sometimes it means having a specific hill that you are not only ready but willing to die on.
Virtue is not desirable because it leads to higher status and other worldly rewards (though it can) it is desirable because contra the irony-pilled twitter and substack perverts that get regularly linked on this forum. Good things are good in and of themselves.
While the Lord knows I have my own issues both theological and otherwise with Bill High, the Signatory Foundation, and wider Calvary Chapel-adjacent subculture that puts out these adds, I have to give credit where credit is due, they seem to have come up with a strong pitch, and it seems to be annoying the correct people.
Edit: spelling/links
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
3mo ago
What's with that?
As a general rule, Republicans do not share the Democrats' fixation on race essentialism.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
a staunch social conservative known for his pragmatism and willingness to compromise with Democrats.
I'm unsure whether this is intentional comedy or unintentional, but it is amusing either way.
Like @The_Nybbler I am deeply skeptical of educational attainment as a proxy for raw intelligence. If anything it strikes me as a case of affirming the consequent. Simple truth is that I've met too many 60th percentile ASVABs who were demonstrably capable of organizing/supervising complex evolutions involving hundreds of people and dozens of moving parts, just as I've met too many post-grads from prestigious institutions who I wouldn't trust to boil water, to take such claims at face value.
More generally I will reiterate my take from the previous thread. While Thomas Sowell does not address HBD directly I find it hard not to read his "vision of the anointed" in to pretty much everything HBDers post here. The scales falling from my eyes moment was when the Wonderlic "Race Norming" scandal came to light in 2019, and a significant portion of users here defended it. To be clear, The NFL had been collecting Wonderlic score on players since the late 70s, and what they got caught doing was artificially adjusting the scores of high-performing black players downward to change the racial distribution of disability payouts. On a dime I saw users who had claimed to support standardized testing flip from "the data obviously supports our conclusion" to "we must correct manipulate the data to better reflect the truth". This is what might be called in another context; "saying the quiet part out loud" and it exposes the fact that HBD as it is advocated for here on theMotte and more generally amongst rationalists is much more of a normative belief than a descriptive one. An argument over "ought"s rather "are"s.
Yes, I catch lot of flak on this forum for maintaining that Utilitarianism is a stupid and evil ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing, but I feel that the discourse surrounding HBD is an apt illustration of the problem. Once you've gone on the record in defense of lying or manipulating data to defend your preferred narrative or achieve your preferred policy outcomes, what reason does anyone else have to trust you? Contra The Sequences and Scott Alexander, information does not exist in a vacuum, and arguments do not spring fully formed from the either. The proles are not stupid. They recognize that the Devil can quote scripture, and that a liar can tell the truth when it suits them. Thus the fundamental question one must always be prepared to ask when evaluating a statement is not whether a statement is true or false, but "Cui Bono?".
Who benefits from Id Pol, HBD Awareness, and Intersectionality? Who benefits from the dismantlement of Anglo/American norms about equality of opportunity and equality before the law? I can tell you who does not benefit in anyway. Those who possess genuine individual merit.
This is kind of where I'm at.
I watched the first movie and reread the first 3 books in preparation for the new movie and if nothing else I feel like Denis Villeneuve deserves credit for accurately capturing "the Vibe" of Herbert's books. Dune is big, it's weird, and it doesn't hold your hand. There are some changes I disagree with but like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings they at least feel in line with the original work. I'm still annoyed that they dropped the line "Are you suggesting that the duke's son is an animal?" from the Reverend Mother's test in part one but so it goes.
The handling of Alia was annoying from the outlook of a purist but understandable from a cinematic perspective and in light of the compressed timeline, and as such I was broadly ok with it. In Hindsight I would have swapped the casting around with either Anya Taylor Joy or Lea Seydoux as Irulan and Florence Pugh as Lady Fenring but that's neither here nor there.
I've seen people complaining about how Stilgar is portrayed but over all I feel that it was pretty faithful. He is the true believer, and he does volunteer to let Paul kill him so that Paul can be the de jure leader of the Fedaykin and Sietch Tabr not just the de facto, to which Paul gives the famous reply "I'm not going to break my knife before a fight".
Christopher walken was wasted in the sense that they cast him in a position of authority and then didn't give him an unhinged monologue to deliver a la Poolhall Junkies, Pulp Fiction, King of New York, the Rundown, Etc... and I agree with @naraburns criticism of his characterization.
On the flip side I disagree with Nara's complaints about Fayed Rutha, wanting a fair fight (or a minimally unfair fight) feels very in character as a major motivation of his in the books is wanting to prove that he his better than everyone else, and overall I agree that "Austin Butler as psychosexual Darth Maul" was the correct call given that truly book-accurate Harkonens are not compatible with a PG-13 rating. They're less about the random killing of underlings and more cannibalism, heartplugs, futanari, and general body-horror. Pity we couldn't go full Drukhari Gladiator/Event Horizon in this bitch.
One of the less stupid notions to come out of LessWrong was the idea of making one's beliefs "pay rent"
The fundamental problem with HBD as it is typically advocated by dissident progressives and users here on theMotte is that if the hypothesis is correct (and that is a big "IF") the actual benefit/utility to adopting "HBD Awareness" over some flavor of "colorblind meritocracy" will be less than zero. Accordingly I feel that it only appropriate to question why certain individuals/users seem to be so invested in their opposition to "blank slatism". I have my theories but none that are likely to be considered "charitable" or "kind" by the mod team.
Why do you think Amy Coney Barrett adopted Haitian children if there was no fixation on race?
Catholicism.
ACB is a wealthy catholic woman and Haiti is a majority catholic country with a surplus of catholic orphans in catholic orphanages in [current year] where US child services tend to frown upon faith-based adoption in general and that of Trad-Caths in particular.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
I know it's an unpopular take here but the older i get the more convinced I've become that you cannot derive healthy morally upstanding behavior from materialism and self-interest (enlightened or otherwise) alone. A strictly "rational" worldview inevitably devolves into either nihilism, hedonism, or psychopathy.
do you mean the email server?
Do we really need to go over all of this again?
Per Comey's report "Exonerating" Clinton, on at least three occasions Clinton or someone on her staff made unauthorized copies of classified documents for whom the Secretary of State was not the classifying authority. All 3 of said documents were tagged "Top Secret" and "SCI" meaning that strict compartmentalization procedures are to be followed. Right there, that's three felonies worth 2 - 5 years in prison a piece for a normal person.
In addition to the above, said copies were then removed from the Secretary of State's SCIF (a violation of the afore mentioned compartmentalization procedures) digital copies were then uploaded to a staffer's personal computer and then sent to Clinton's personal email account in the clear (ie unencrypted) over an unsecured internet connection. (Something most security types would agree constitutes gross negligence). At some point the digital copies are altered to remove their tags and tracking data implying that somebody knew that they were being naughty and adding another 3 three felonies to the pile. The documents were recovered in the possession of an unnamed staffer's spouse (who did not have a security clearance) during an unrelated criminal investigation revealing at minimum of 3 known instances of Unauthorized Disclosure (more felonies).
Investigators subpoenaed the staffer's* email history at which point the Clinton server suffered an unfortunate loss of, oh who are we kidding, they wiped the server to destroy the evidence rather than answer the subpoena wich is about as clear-cut a case of Federal Obstruction of Justice as a prosecutor could ask for.
In contrast the FBI raided Trump's home in Mar-a-Lago for an alleged breach far less egregious than any of these.
*let's be blunt, given that the material was recovered from Anthony Weiner's personal computer while he was being investigated for child-porn and cyberstalking we can surmise that the staffer in question was Huma Abedin.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
but I’m not aware of a pattern of such killings by Putin.
It seems to me that the obvious offramp is for Texas to simply do nothing, wait for the feds to start tearing down the fences/wire, and then film them doing it. With the purposes of making sure the footage is seen in every state during every commercial break from now till November while also redoubling the bussing efforts.
It seems to me that the Feds don't really have a winning move here as anything other than letting Abbott have this one seems more likely to blow up in their faces than to stop Abbott.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
so i made a summary with the help of ChatGPT
...and presumably didn't go through the effort to validate it because that would require you to read Balko's "obnoxious" writing.
Why should anyone trust your summary?
I view this thread and the one about Poseidon Archer above as further evidence that Id-Pol makes people stupid.
Your framing is interesting but your, and the authors', fixation on the Melanin content of recruits' skin is causing you to ask the wrong questions, and become blind to the obvious.
As others have pointed out, the core of the US Military since World War 2 has been the multi-generational "Lieutenant Dan" types, and this is especially the case in the middle-management and critical skill positions, Pilots, Senior NCOs, Nuclear Engineers, that kind of thing...
The topic of "Retention" is probably worth multiple effort-posts in itself so I'm going to stick to the cliff-notes but the conventional wisdom post-Vietnam has been that Retention was more important than recruitment when it came to maintaining capabilities. That paying a fat re-up bonus was a small price to pay in comparison to the 1-2 punch of losing experienced troops as well as having to recruit and train new ones. There seems to been a shift away from this approach in the early 2010s (some of which I witnessed first-hand). The idea, on paper at least, was to move towards a "leaner" more "agile" and "economical" force based on the principles of Just-in-Time production. The theory was that fewer people sitting idle and less equipment downtime would mean more getting done, in practice what it meant was dudes burning out, and lapses in maintenance and training due to lack of slack in the system. Mutiple fatal mishaps in the US 7th Fleet ought to have been a clue but like I said this issue and the associated political wrangling could be a series of effort-posts in itself.
What does that have to do with recruitment numbers though? Well, that's where the "Lieutenant Dan" types come in. The naive take is that recruitment, is about selling military life to high school kids. The Savvy take is that it's about selling it to the troops because if the troops are sold they'll stay in, and you'll get a shot at their kids to. Burnout doesn't just lose you one man it runs the risk of losing you his friends and family as well. Simply put it's guys like me, that is a decorated combat veteran with an honorable discharge and multiple male heirs, that the DoD should be courting and yet it seems like it's guys like me that the DoD with all it's [current year] DEI bullshit seems most hell bent on alienating.
Look at Benghazi was handled.
Look at how the withdrawal from Afghanistan was handled.
Look at just how few shits our so-called "elite" give about the lives of American service members.
Why would I entrust my sons to these people?
As @remzem observes downthread, the woke don't really think long term.
Churchill was the one who declared war. It was his choice.
That's certainly a take, and a depressingly common one around here it seems.
Setting aside the fact that Churchill didn't even become prime minister until May of 1940, I'm just going to reiterate what I said the last time this topic came up a month ago.
Hitler's diplomatic position in August of 1939 was essentially that of a belligerent drunk at the bar who keeps getting in people's faces and asking "Oh Yah? Watch'ou goanna do about bro?" and then acts surprised when someone decides to "do something about it".
The Nazis were already on thin-ice for continuing their territorial expansion post Munich, rebuking the Anglo German Naval Agreement, and harassing neutral shipping in the North Sea wich the British regarded as their back yard. If they didn't want a war with the British, they could have easily avoided it by not doing any of those things and more critically by not aligning themselves with the Bolsheviks against a country that both the British and French had a security agreement with.
Edit to add: That last bit in particular also demonstrates that all that talk from current year nazis about "racial brotherhood" and "opposing communism" is a crock of shit.
For all the talk condemning "brother wars" Prussians seem particularly prone to engaging in them and as much as I want to make a joke about Martin Luther being to blame I'm worried about someone falling into the same trap I almost did with @Southkraut's comment down thread where I almost chewed them a new one before I realized they were being facetious.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
If by "done right" you mean ignoring the obvious elephant in the room to focus on largely irellvant legal details i suppose that explains a lot.
The elephant in this case being how do you launch an SM2 in Long Island sound without anybody noticing? At the very least you're talking about buying the silence of 250 or so sailors plus everyone on duty at New York approach that night. Though i suppose you'll dismiss such an observation as mere "vibes" rather than "evidence". After all "the law firm involved has a reputation for serious lawyers doing serious work."
Sorry dude I don't think this passes the smell test. Abolitionism was already gaining steam (Hehe) well before the industrial revolution, and "people are shitty" is wholly general argument.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
Fine, you want me to speak plainly let us speak plainly.
It's not like @Cimafra, @BurdensomeCount, @Hoffmietser, @SecureSignals, or our old friend Oakland Et Al. have been particularly shy about their motives. Thomas Sowell might not have mentioned HBD directly in Conflict of Visions but it hard not to read his "vision of the anointed" in pretty much everything that gets posted on the topic. Personally, the breaking point/scales falling from my eyes moment was when the Wonderlic "Race Norming" scandal came to light in 2019, and the bulk of the users here defended it. On a dime I saw users (including some who are active in this very thread right now) flip from "the data is obvious and supports our conclusion" to "we must manipulate the data to better reflect the truth". This is what might be called in another forum; "saying the quiet part out loud" and it cuts to the quick as It exposes HBD as a normative belief rather than a descriptive one. An argument over "ought"s rather "are"s.
I know I catch a lot of flak for maintaining that Utilitarianism is a stupid and evil ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing, but I feel that the discourse surrounding the topic here is an apt illustration of the problem. Once you have gone on the record in defense of lying or manipulating data to achieve your preferred policy outcomes, what reason does anyone else have to trust you? Contra the Sequences, information does not exist in a vacuum, and arguments do not spring fully formed from the either. The proles are not stupid. They recognize that the Devil can quote scripture, and that a liar can tell the truth when it suits them. Thus the fundamental question one must always be prepared to ask is not whether a statement is true or false, the question is "Cui Bono?".
Who benefits from Id Pol, HBD Awareness, and Intersectionality? Who benefits from the dismantlement of Anglo/American norms about equality of opportunity and equality before the law? I can tell you who sure as hell doesn't benefit in anyway. Those who possess genuine individual merit.
You, (that is the mod team) have made it clear my dismissal of HBD as a product of Bay-Area rationalists looking to paper over their preexisting racial and class resentments with a thin veneer of "Science!", is uncharitable and unkind and will eventually see me banned and yet if the shoe fits...
Again, I want to say that I deeply appreciate you writing these and wish that I had the talent for story-telling that you manifestly do. It's funny, as much as I am thankful to have put those days behind me your stories make me feel nostalgic in a way that is difficult to explain.
I have few pictures or mementos from my time in, and even fewer from the Interregnum when I was going to school while working as a PMC over the summers. Part of me thinks this is a good thing, shit sucked, I (or rather "old me") sucked, and it is better to leave it behind. At the same time I can't help but feel a bit of loss. Was that me or was it a dream. My better half met me towards the end of that phase in my life and never really knew me while I was in it, she just heard the stories my friends would tell. My two boys know almost nothing of my old life, as far as they know I'm just another fat balding little-league dad and always have been. It's Uncle Tony who tells them stories about waging war in Iraq and wrestling Baboons in East Africa. I occasionally find myself wondering whether I'm doing them a favor or a disservice, but I also have a good 8 - 10 years before I got to worry about one of them wanting to join the Marines.
As an aside it feels like every dive/neighborhood has its archetypes and my "Cowboy"'s funeral was only a few weeks ago, and maybe the reason I'm feeling reflective is that it was interesting to see who had moved on and who was basically in the same place they'd been a decade ago.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
(This, incidentally, is a major reason why conservative protests are usually incompetent).
Define "incompetent" because in my experience conservative protests/rallies (especially the pro-life and pro-gun ones) are typically larger in terms of attendance, and better organized in terms of transportation, porta-poties, trash pick-up etc... than progressive protests. They just don't enjoy the friendly relationship with the media that the progressives do.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
3mo ago
At the risk of beating a dead horse I feel like this is another case of the "leviathan-shaped hole" rearing it's ugly head because to me the obvious answer to "How does a prosperous society combat insidious 'compassion'?" is via "charity" but I also recognize that "charity" has a very different meaning to liberal-brained people than it does to non-liberal-brained people.
A week ago there was a post about parenting that feel like kicked the same ant-hill and that I wanted to reply to but couldn't because I was sitting out a ban.
The short version is that specific choices don't matter much. But attitude matters a lot. To that end a point where I've found myself at odds with members of my family and other parents my age is that I don't want to be my kids' friend. I am their father and my job is to tell them "no, you don't get ice cream unless you finish your veggies". My job is to tell them to "stand up straight shoulders back, chins up". Am I doing this because I'm an asshole? Maybe. Am I doing this because I hate them and want them to suffer? Fuck no. I'm doing it because I give a shit. I'm doing it because I want them to be better, and while it may be 10 - 15 years early to tell I think it's working. I can already see a difference between my kids and my nieces/nephews and their peers/classmates. I am prepared to embrace the possibility that I am the "bad guy" and may be better for it.
One of the common failure modes of liberalism is to assume that being good means being nice when the truth is that sometimes the best and most compassionate thing you can do for someone is to tell them "Get your fucking shit together dude"
There's a whole 'nother story I want to get into here, but it's getting late and I should probably call it. Have a good night.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
Again, "You seem to be approaching this issue as though it were a criminal trial where the election must be presumed legitimate unless proved otherwise in a court of law, but that's not how this works."
My core point is that no such presumption exists.
As I've tried to explain in some of your earlier 2020 election threads I feel like you are either misrepresenting or fundamentally misunderstanding the nature opposition's objections.
Elections are by their nature a contested environment not just between the individual candidates, but as Tom Scott touches upon in this video on electronic voting, between the candidates, their respective voters, and those administering the election. You seem to be approaching this issue as though it were a criminal trial where the election must be presumed legitimate unless proved otherwise in a court of law, but that's not how this works. You need to understand that the purpose of an election isnot to produce a "true" or "accurate" result. It is to produce a clear result that the candidates (and thier voters) can accept as legitimate, including the ones who lost. This is why we use paper ballots with documented chains of custody, this is why we have laws requiring that the counting be witnessed by representative of each candidate/party. Defendants may be constitutionally entitled to a presumption of innocence, but there's nothing in the constitution about presuming that election officials are impartial or even competent for that matter. As such I would suggest that in the event that the above safeguards are broken/removed or other irregularities appear (and I don't think you can deny that there were irregularities) it is only fair, dare I say it rational, to ask "what gives?". Likewise the more stridently partisans of the winning candidate insist that "there's nothing to see here" while simultaneously denying access to recourse, the more reasonable it becomes for the losing candidates and their voters to suspect foul play.
The simple thing that after 4 years of this conversation you still don't seem to grasp is that you aren't going to convince anyone the election was legitimate by arguing the niggling technical details of individual cases and motions. You need to actually address the elephant in the room.
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