Negatory
2yr ago
Inasmuch as Klein has influence among Dem insiders/elite, “saying the quiet part out loud” might matter.
I agree Klein isn’t going to change mass opinion, but then the common Dem voter is already quite likely to believe Biden is too old (and probably never had a strong attachment to him anyway).
Negatory
2yr ago
I agree with you that 2020 was a special case due to Covid and that we should have higher voter registration checks and other such measures, which are consistently opposed by the left.
But Occam’s Razor applied here seems more likely to lead to the theory that in an election with incredibly high scrutiny, Trump was as full of BS about 2020 as he was about 2016 with unfounded claims of major fraud. Trump’s well-documented antics in Georgia support such a theory of Trump’s true concern not being “integrity” per se.
Taking in the entirety of the circumstances, the stark lack of hard evidence for claims made by Trump and others and their demonstrated track record of buffoonery easily overpowers any bias or shenanigans by the left for which there is actual evidence.
Your link up there applies more to Trump than anyone else by far, in other words.
Another way of looking at it is that you and others have presented theories and suggestive evidence that 2020 was rigged in some meaningful way against Trump, but I have definitive evidence Trump has lied in the past about election fraud, that he personally has sought to meddle in a state’s election, and that the particular cases advanced by his MAGA associates fell apart upon examination.
In Bayesian terms, this is not a hard case. Not until someone can really meet @ymeskhout’s challenge and provide a solid case for meaningful fraud, not just suggestive/circumstantial evidence and possibilities.
Negatory
2yr ago
I think Clinton was wrong to say what she said in 2016 about illegitimacy, though at least the plot she alleged by Russia was actually real, even if we can’t know how much impact it had.
2000 and the hanging chads was actually a pretty crazy situation overall. Gore took it pretty gracefully even if Dems made a lot of commentary about it.
I can’t properly evaluate the ratio of “claim to evidence” about the other stuff, but it’s pretty easy to endorse a consistent policy of “people shouldn’t make claims they can’t back with evidence.”
Trump was also making claims about election issues in 2016 and before. I’m sure one could go find some Republicans complaining about election integrity over the years too.
I mean, the whole bit where Obama was illegitimate based on his alleged birth situation rushes to mind.
Overall, it’s pretty easy to say “Democrats have been pretty bad and imprecise with election integrity claims” and also believe Trump and MAGA are on an entirely new level.
It’s nice being an Enlightened Centrist who can be disgusted by both sides and maintain the poor behavior by one side does not justify it by the other.
Negatory
2yr ago
I mean you can twist this the other way too.
Perhaps Putin felt he needed to take decisive action because of the potential for Biden administration policy to make the geopolitical situation worse for Russia.
It’s possible Trump was deterring Russian aggression against Ukraine by being a bit of a wildcard and also Putin not wanting to put him in a hard place, vs. having him as about the friendliest US president he could hope for. Once Trump was out the calculus changed. Trump was also extremely unpopular with basically all of our allies, in and out of NATO, and that division was generally good for Russia.
But also they do love American chaos.
Negatory
2yr ago
You’re trying really hard to avoid the obvious consequence that both Trump and Pence state outright.
You’re making a distinction without a difference for no reason that actually matters here.
Negatory
2yr ago
Oh it is weakly proven without qualifiers.
Gotta limit it to the last few hundred years of history to start.
And I completely agree it’s “hard mode” that simply can’t be pulled off well in many parts of the world. (I don’t think IQ is the issue in say Russia or Iran, but culture and ideology matter.)
Bur after the USSR’s collapse, the ChiComms have the only real rival system in the running and it’s not a model that anyone is copying (unlike the Soviet model).
Western democracy/market capitalism/liberalism has worked in enough places over enough time, and defeated or outlasted several strong competitors, such that using the short hand of “it’s the best system” is something I believe is well justified by the historical record since 1776.
Negatory
2yr ago
I’m confused by your logic here.
That article and the public sentiment they analyze clearly shows inflation isn’t being hidden. They even cite the inflation number for food, which was considerably higher than average.
There’s more than one inflation number and any average is going to have its issues, but there are sub indexes for food and energy.
I’m aware of the debate over the best way to calculate the CPI, but competing claims as expressed here are still within a few points of each other.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/consumerpriceindex.asp
This debate is all publicly available information so how would the government hide if it were really trying to downplay inflation high enough to keep SS afloat?
Negatory
2yr ago
Ok that’s funny because I didn’t even consider the obvious joke.
That dang Original Sin anyway.
Negatory
2yr ago
To really even things up, would you be willing to suffer some light head trauma?
Just to make things fair here.
Negatory
2yr ago
Are there any other large-scale problems our society faces where we need a “powerful jew” to personally suffer before we can make progress?
Negatory
2yr ago
Luckily, there are so many powerful Jews that odds are high at least one of them is suffering from any given problem we gentiles might face.
Negatory
2yr ago
That was my sense, that he’s pretty influential with DC insider circles, so I don’t understand @FiveHourMarathon here.
Negatory
2yr ago
Not sure if you realize this but by choosing to not accept the election results of any given state the VP would be in effect single-handedly deciding the election outcome, given who controls which state legislatures, if he chose to.
Which was the whole point of the exercise, which Pence rejected.
Here he is in his own words:
Vesting the Vice President with unilateral authority to decide presidential contests would be entirely antithetical to that [constitutional] design.
I think the words I used align with Pence’s statement and directly follow from the words you used.
Trump agrees with my interpretation too.
"If Mike Pence does the right thing we win the election," Trump told thousands of supporters who rallied Wednesday on the Ellipse, just south of the White House, an hour before the count in Congress was to begin.
"All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people," Trump said.
Why do you disagree with Trump and Pence on their shared understanding of this theory and its implications?
Negatory
2yr ago
I think you and @ymeskhout should have a podcast discussion about the appropriate rules for running a structured podcast debate on a contested topic with a million different theories and unclear evidence.
Negatory
2yr ago
I think you’re overly worried about loopholes and training instead of whether someone who has good evidence has a fair shot in a discussion, not a court of law or formal competition.
You’re actually demonstrating a talent for nitpicking much as a lawyer or policy analyst might. Raw talent can go a long way.
Negatory
2yr ago
I don’t disagree with your overall point, but.
If you resent underqualified black women being shoved into positions of responsibility as publicity stunts, you're already voting for Trump.
I do resent affirmative action and I am very much not a Trump voter. Pretty sure I’m not alone even if our numbers are small.
Negatory
2yr ago
Being a lawyer is not magic.
Nobody here is going to be impressed if @ymeskhout tries to win on a technicality instead of the substance of the issue. Moreover, if he did act in some kind of unreasonable procedural way, it’s going to decrease anyone ever being willing to go on the podcast, which is against his demonstrated preferences.
But you can try to lay the grounds for the excuse that anyone debating an issue with him and doing poorly is because of legal superpowers and not on the merits.
Or you can propose a different format. Or find a lawyer who holds the relevant beliefs I guess.
Negatory
2yr ago
To nitpick, if you change the word “insufficient” to say “incomplete” or “indefinite” I think the Bayesian gods will be appeased about proportionate evidence for holding a belief.
Believing Russia very likely killed a prominent dissident, particularly one there is pretty strong evidence for a prior poisoning attempt, is not a significant claim. Rather par for the course.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and all that.
TDS can cut both ways.
Some can’t believe Trump could ever do anything right/good, some believe he couldn’t do anything wrong/bad.
Some will exaggerate or inappropriately assign blame, others will downplay and sanewash.
This isn’t a completely new phenomenon (I remember people seriously alleging Obama and Bush were on the verge of establishing a dictatorship), but Trump has an incredible talent at arousing emotion on both sides of the aisle and perhaps generates the strongest reality distortion field ever measured, in US politics anyway.
In Trump’s defense, he retracted the policy himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_family_separation_policy
Negatory
2yr ago
How would lying about the inflation rate work?
What evidence is there that the government has done this already?
My understanding is that there’s no magic data or math here: prices are public knowledge. I’m aware of debates over what the best formula is, but we aren’t talking about hyperinflation.
“Inflation is low pay no attention to rising prices of basic goods or exchange rates.” I’m unaware of any government being able to successfully lie about inflation because you can’t hide shortages and/or rising prices for very long at scale.
Negatory
2yr ago
It’s easy to say with the benefit of hindsight that a particular side benefitted and therefore they had the motivation to have a hand in letting it happen, but, like, incompetence is always a possible explanation, as is confusion when multiple bureaucracies are involved.
Frankly, I was appalled that a security breach was allowed to the extent it was and surprised that more lethal force wasn’t employed. But if more lethal violence had been employed we would be having a very different discussion.
Also there was other testimony about what the holdup was.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/21/us/politics/national-guard-january-6-riot.html
This reminds me about all the theorizing about why it took so long to get boots on ground at Benghazi, except for geography is not so much a relevant variable.
Keep in mind he said:
Which is a little annoying when myself and others have not done that here.
Both he and I made some general remarks about what we don’t like, in addition to addressing the specific points made here.
@Walterodim presents his concerns well and I believe I commended him off the bat for that.
I’ll also note my points in the comment you don’t like apply to both sides of the aisle, since it’s not like the left hasn’t had its issues with imprecise language and unjustified claims of election illegitimacy.
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