dasfoo
9mo ago
You have to have transparent elections with actual oversight and accountability. That means only valid voters allowed to vote and an ability to audit the election results. No deleted logs, missing ballot images, or discrepancies between voter count and votes counted.
Claims of potential election fraud should be met with good faith investigations and adjudication rather than instant stonewalling. I don't know how you remove partisanship from a process which is entirely staffed by motivated partisans, so that's a problem. But leading the response to a claim with "Nuh-uh" followed by "You're stupid" followed by "I can't hear you. I can't hear you." isn't going give claimants any confidence that their concerns were taken seriously. And, yes, not all the claims are serious -- but it's in the interest of civics that they be taken seriously until they can be actually discounted by evidence. And by "evidence" I don't mean "Ask accused vote counters what was going on at 3 am when no observers were there and then take their word for it as if they're angels," but actually investigate if they're telling the truth and why their stories seem to change. That's the essential problem: from the outset all fraud claims were met with unchallenged derision and all counter-claims were accepted as unchallenged gospel.
As I said a week or two ago, I think the Trump team's approach to dealing with these issues was abysmal (as is his approach to dealing with most issues, IMO), but that doesn't matter to me. I am a "civics-first" conservative: I want systems that are transparent and correctable, and which inspire faith in the systems so that we can live our lives without constantly wondering WTF happened and why there is so much apparent gaslighting when we ask to see how it happened.
dasfoo
1mo ago
I’m recently divorced (politics didn’t factor, my wife was more conservative) and have been wrestling with this political absolutism in online dating apps and have gotten into some dustups about the topic in a dating subreddit.
A lot of dating profiles put politics first. As I live in a purple suburb of a radically leftist city, most of this manifests as “No MAGA.” As a “conservative” of the classically-liberal-anti-trump variety, I am not MAGA, but this sentiment extends to anyone who has ever in the last 30 years referred themselves as conservative or Republican. It’s impossible to open a dialogue about what it means to be “conservative” and whether MAGA is actually “conservative.” Nuance is dead. Thought has been replaced by memes.
I would swipe left on any “No MAGA” profile, anyway, because, to me, that mindset – that discussion of political differences is completely off the table – is what I find offensive, even if the person agreed with me on every other issue. As long as the discussion is respectful and aimed at understanding each other’s different views, it should be tolerable. My guess is that the “No MAGA” party would be unable to remain respectful during such a discussion, so in order to assert their moral superiority, they need to shortcut the conversation before it begins. The ability to understand an argument has atrophied, overshadowed by the rush of clicking the “like” or “dislike” buttons.
dasfoo
9mo ago
My favorite "fact check" of the night was on the Climate Change question. The moderator asked a question which included a reference to Donald Trump calling climate change a "hoax." Both candidates gave answers, neither of which supported Trump's "hoax" framing; Walz argued against it and Vance avoided it. Then the moderators "fact-checked" Trump, who was only there in the moderators' own words. It was truly bizarre execution of a pre-planned fact-check and exposed the lie of no moderator fact-checking.
(Interestingly. I'm having trouble finding a quote in which Trump calls "climate change" a "hoax." This biased article (https://democrats.org/news/donald-the-denier-donald-trump-has-repeatedly-called-climate-change-a-hoax/) claims that he has 'repeatedly' called it a "hoax," but only produces one quote in which he refers to the "global warming hoax," which is arguably different as the term was changed to fit a broader definition. And then there's this earlier article where he directly says it might not be a hoax: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-climate-change-not-a-hoax-but-not-sure-of-its-source.)
dasfoo
11mo ago
the "Vance is weird" thing REALLY got under GOP's skin
I've seen this claim a lot on Reddit, along with the celebration of Waltz's dig at the Vance couch rumors. I think it's either a disingenuous interpretation or a case of the Democrats getting high on their own supply. Here's how I interpret the Right's indignance at both of these attacks:
They are both completely manufactured by the powerful coordination of Democrat politicians, the media, and big tech. The individual claims are a trifle, but it's the ease by which both were able to propagate into culturally pervasive conventional wisdom in hours is pretty frightening. They're also completely transparent in their engineering, which goes like this: 1. Make some oddball claim that is either opinion or invented from whole cloth. 2. Follow quickly with a barrage stories about how wounding this claim has been to Republicans. It's dizzying. I would be that most Republicans hadn't even heard of these attacks until after the round of stories came out claiming how devastating these attacks have been.
It's also notable how inauthentic these two claims are in that the attacks therein are virtues within liberalism, where weirdness and sexual noncoformity are supposedly sacred. So it also exposes a deep hipocrisy within Democrats who will apparently say anything to win (I'm not exempting the GOP/Trumpism from this, BTW, just pointing out that the lack of concern for principles is rarely this brazen and happy to be this brazen).
I'm surrounded by Republicans who don't care about these attacks. They're laughable, absurd even. Except for how powerfully they've been executed.
dasfoo
11mo ago
I think what you're talking about it more "optics" than "DEI," unless the intent is to remove DEI from the context that actually makes it negative.
A lot of VPs are picked to balance out the weaknesses of the main candidate. Trump picked Pence to give his ticket someone grounded in traditional GOP politics. He picked Vance to give his ticket some youth. Obama picked Biden to balance "inexperienced young black" with "seasoned journeyman white," etc. etc.
DEI is a subset of optics, and more cynical one. Not many people would argue with the generic values of "diversity, equity and inclusion" if defined broadly (well, "equity" is problematic unlike "equality") but the specific policy implications of brand-name DEI as practiced by its proponents is corrosive, and the acronym just becomes a shorthand for criticizing those implications.
dasfoo
8mo ago
One of my bullshit detector modes is applying the "Cui bono?" rule: If true, who benefits from it?
I don't see a tactical or political advantage for Israel to be doing this as a matter of policy: Committing high-value troops to take out low-value targets? And certain carry a highly negative publicity penalty? What's Israel's ROI on assassinating pre-teens?
On the other hand, we know that Israel's enemies love to play the Victim PR game, exaggerating and even inventing tragedies that cast a shadow on Israel's claim of moral legitimacy. What's the Hamas ROI on shooting a few of their kids in the head if it means widespread outrage aimed at Israel? While it's hard for me to imagine such a craven tactic*, Hamas has more to gain from this than Israel does. If they're faking the shootings, the ROI for them goes up even more.
- I also can't imagine the craven tactic of positioning military assets in schools and hospitals, but we know Hamas does this and that Israel appears to take greater care to avoid civilian casualties. So these priors also lean me further toward: "If it's happening, Hamas is doing it." Alternatively, it could be a rogue Israeli soldier who has snapped, but seems unlikely to be a sanctioned military effort.
dasfoo
9mo ago
The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into.
That's because there are so many. IDK if this comprehensive: https://scifiwright.com/2024/01/summary-2020-presidential-election-fraud/; I doubt it. And I cringe when I see some of his sources. But it's a dynamic not too different from The Motte: If these discussions are essentially outlawed in respectable media, only the unrespectable will be having these discussions. I want these discussions to be had in more respectable fora! I think it would take the power away from the grifters who exploit these fears.
dasfoo
9mo ago
Still, there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side.
For the third night in a row, anti-Donald Trump demonstrators took to the streets in several big cities and on college campuses across the United States, including an outburst of smashed windows and a dumpster fire in Portland that police countered with pepper spray and flash-bang devices.
About 4,000 protesters assembled downtown late Thursday chanting “we reject the president-elect!” the Associated Press reported. Some among the crowd vandalized 19 cars at a dealership in Northeast Portland, according to a sales manager, Oregonlive.com reports. Protesters then headed west, over the Broadway Bridge and into the Pearl District, where the windows of several businesses were smashed.
The protest was mostly peaceful until demonstrators met with an anarchist group, after which demonstrators vandalized buildings, kicked cars and knocked out power, KGW-TV reported.
Imagine if J6 had been J6-J9!
dasfoo
11mo ago
There's now a counter-attack to the couch meme forming on X with a false rumor that Waltz has admitted to drinking horse semen. This kind of low-blow falsehood becoming a tit-for-tat escalation is both not good and easily foreseeable.
dasfoo
10mo ago
Or, two, he's comparing the totalitarian endpoints of each ideology. Communism verus fascism.
The picture on the right, however, is not the endpoint of Communism, but a waypoint. In the endpoint, most of the people in the picture on the right are dead or in prison, because it was never going to turn out the way they thought it would and it's always worst for the non-conformists. Honestly, the endpoints of Fascism and Communism look pretty much the same: A corrupt political hierarchy eating each other for power while stealing from the people and murdering as many witnesses as possible.
dasfoo
9mo ago
Tangentially, IMO both sides got the response to claims of election shenanigans totally wrong, going into tribal mode rather than civic mode.
Whether or not there was actual fraud, there was pretty compelling appearance of fraud in the seemingly sychronized one-way anomolies that took place on election night. Rather than carefully investigating claims of impropriety and producing explanations that assauged concerns, the winning side took the very Trumpian approach of declaring fraud impossible in the most secure and perfect election ever held, coupled with a slate of articles condescendingly headline with the following template "No, xxxxxxxxx didn't happen, you fucking MAGA retards!" (OK, that last part was implied rather than stated directly.) It seems to me, as someone who voted for neither Trump nor Biden in 2020, that there were ample claims of shenanigans that deserved sober investigation, and sober investigation was never produced. The losers, on the other hand, thanks to grifters who saw they could profit off an atmosphere of polarized suspicion, threw every possible crazy fraud theory into the mix and then threw the stupidest tantrum in American history on Jan. 6. Trump was a terrible figurehead for a cause that could only possibly succeed with a careful and precise and civic-minded legal approach. I don't think the winners were ever capable of entertaining the best evidence of fraud and the losers were never capable of producing it.
dasfoo
11mo ago
Any minnesotans got any cool stories about him?
Some of the stuff coming out about him includes:
- Claims that he quit his National Guard post when they were called up to Iraq but has continued to play it up in his bio, including citing a retroactively invalidated rank
- Was once arrested for DUI going nearly 100mph in a 55 zone
- While he allowed Minneapolis to burn in 2020 his wife found romance in the smell of the fiery destruction
- Presided over the redesign of the MN state flag to resemble the Somali flag
- "Tampon Tim"
Can't vouch for the truthiness of any of these. Interesting how #1 & #2 strongly echo attacks on Geroge W Bush in 2000 and 2004.
dasfoo
11mo ago
The comms failure is, to use a popular parlance, "weird." If the Secret Service is in charge of security for an event, and commonly enlists local LEO as support for their mission, it's baffling to me that it's common practice to silo local LEO's ability to communicate with the SS. If it's not common practice, then it's doubly "weird" that it happened to coincide with here with so many other seemingly obvious breeches in protocol.
In security, in the event of a breach, speed of communication between different layers of the responding force is crucial, and this system seems to have been designed to prevent responder communication from the bottom to the top.
It does call to mind the comical depiction of the FBI in the movie Die Hard, which suggests a derisive elitist attitude from the Feds toward the locals, but it's shocking to see it play out in real life like this.
dasfoo
1mo ago
In the best possible case that I can see, we would be expending our political power to create stable economic conditions for our opponents to then rule.
You just explained why any party that campaigns on cutting spending will never do it.
dasfoo
5mo ago
All I am asking is for conservatives to put the same level of value on the lives of foreigners as their domestic opponents do on fertilized human embryros.
Is that really all you're asking for?
The conservative position on fertilized human embryos is "Don't kill them." I would assume this position also applies re: the lives of foreigners. The conservative position on fertilized human embryos is NOT "The government must provide all the food/medicine/trans operas/LGBTQIA++ comic books required to get that embryo through life."
This sounds like the old canard that by not providing a womb-to-tomb welfare state, you are in effect murdering the weak.
What am I missing?
dasfoo
4mo ago
It's just like when there are cuts to school budgets: the affected orgs, who oppose the cuts, make sure that the effects of the cuts create maximum sympathy as a PR campaign against the cuts. Meanwhile, none of the org administrators suffer a salary cut.
dasfoo
9mo ago
Temporary Protected Status and Asylum are different legal protections, with different criteria and processes. More generally, what does the term "illegal immigrant" refer to? I am under the impression it refers to people in the United States without a legal status that permits them to remain. That very literally does not include people with TPS (like the Haitians in Springfield have). if "illegal immigrant" includes even people who have legal permission to be here, what precisely are the boundaries? Are there green card holders who are "illegal immigrants?"
Isn't the distinction Vance was making that the immigrants entered the U.S. illegally and then TPS retroactively changed that status, temporarily, to legal?
It's also kind of funny to hear Vance complain about the CBP One app since it was launched in... October 2020 by the Trump administration!
But if you read the article, it says that the app's functions have been expanded under Biden to do things like grant parole to illegal immigrants! https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/cbp-one-overview
On October 28, 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) launched a mobile device application called CBP One so that travelers could access certain agency functions on mobile devices. Over the last two years, the agency has expanded CBP One’s uses. The app has become the only way that migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum at a port of entry can preschedule appointments for processing and maintain guaranteed asylum eligibility. CBP One also became the only way that Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans seeking to secure travel authorization to obtain parole through special programs for those nationalities can submit their biometric information to CBP.
CBP One’s original uses included 1) providing travelers with access to Form I-94 information, 2) scheduling inspection appointments for perishable cargo, and 3) assisting international organizations who sought to help individuals enter the United States.
The app’s latest functions, like the use of CBP One to pre-process asylum seekers, has raised concerns both about gaining access to a legal right through a smartphone app and about the privacy implications of the app.
I follow the film industry pretty closely, but like most other film buffs, I had never heard of the movie, Emilia Perez, until a few weeks ago when it was nominated for 13 Oscars
Really? It made a huge splash at Cannes last year. The movie podcasts I listen to have been monitoring it for a year now.
But, yes, as a fan of two other Audiard movies, this was total horseshit. The characters make no sense, the songs are tuneless, and the plot is not only stupid but is actually kind of sick -- unless you choose to read this movie as deeply critical of transsexuality as a concept.
The title character attempts two key transitions in this movie: Man to Woman, and Killer to Savior. IMO, both are depicted not only as failures but also as sick expressions of narcisissm. This former drug lord in "her" new life becomes an advocate for the victims of drug lords like "his" former self. It's so gross a turn as to be literally nauseating if one has any empathy for the victims of those monsters. If this transition is to be seen in parallel with the gender transition, how are we then to read the gender transition? That one, too, doesn't really take: Perez is unable to shake "his" past, becoming jealous of his supposedly widowed wife's romantic life and employing "his" old tactics to run the new fiancee out of town. This backfires in a way that also brings the trappings of "his" old world back into "her" new life. The message? One can't escape their nature, and the attempt to do so will ruin the lives of everyone around them.
EDIT: I'll add to this that Zoe Saldana's character operates as the key trans-enabler in this story. She is hired by the drug lord to facilitate the transition. She does it, at first, cynically, out of greed. Later, she sort of falls in platonic love with the woman that Perez becomes, lavish praise on Perez' really groos moral makeover, as if fake tits can erase decades of murder. It doesn't end up well for her, either, at least psychologically. This mirrors how many trans-skeptical critics think about those who cheerlead for transitioning: a mixture of cynicism and myopic self-congratulation.
dasfoo
6mo ago
At what point are Trump's allies tacitly seconding accusations that Trump is an authoritarian and his "movement" a cult of personality, by treating him as though the accusations are true?
Isn't this just all politics during the age of social media? Every candidate is idealized because to show any misgivings is to give aid and comfort to the other side. No nuance is allowed, or else you will be beset by purity trolls who will question your loyalty. It's gross and tiring, but it's the same dynamic that made every Democrat pretend to be all-in on Joyful Kamala within one day and previously pretended that Joe Biden was as sharp as ever right before he obviously wasn't.
dasfoo
9mo ago
Even keeping it to the 2020 election, why was no one who claimed that 2020 was "the most secure election in history" asked for the data on which that statement was based? By what metrics, and how do those metrics compare to past elections? Or was that claim based on partisan wish fulfillment and yet accepted as fact because we don't like the people claiming otherwise?
dasfoo
11mo ago
Basically a bunch of people who had reason to dislike him came forward and badmouthed his claims about his military service. I have no idea what the truth is or the specifics of the claims.
Their claim was that he was a rich kid who wanted military "experience" for his future political career and didn't do anything as soldier. IIRC they even suggested his Silver Star was earned via an intentionally-inflicted minor wound that also got his tour cut short.
dasfoo
5mo ago
If you're like Charlie Chaplin, doing it explicitly as a satire making fun of Hitler, it's fine.
Well, yes, Chaplin did satirize Hitler in the 1940s, but he also wore that mustache long before Hitler rose to power, starting in the 1910s.
dasfoo
7mo ago
Except that this was obvious. How can you credibly sell your ability to win elections when you can’t predict something that obvious.
The people they are selling themselves to share the same self-delusion, so it's to their benefit to affirm the delusion to get more work. This assumes that they are self-aware enough to know that their delusion is false, but most delusions persist because the deluded will not challenge them.
dasfoo
9mo ago
The shift in (publicly expressed) conservative views on female sexuality in the face of wokeness has been fascinating. Conservatives are now openly much more sex-positive when it comes to traditional sexuality, as a bulwark against alternate sexualities, whereas in the past they were more focused on opposing sexual permissiveness by promoting modesty. Look at the conservative embrace of Sidney Sweeney or all the rightoid influencers on X who prominently display cleavage while opining on whatever issue: the new conservative messaging is "It's good for men to want to fuck real women," because too many other, weirder avenues have opened up in pop culture.
Now, surely, this has always been the conservative ideal, but it was more prudent in the past to let it bubble in the background, lest your daughter forsake the first half of the madonna/whore dichotomy. The balance is what's important, and if nature if pulling heavily on the whore-half, socially we need to over-promote the madonna-half. Now the framing window has changed from, "Don't be a whore" to "Don't be some weird whore who is outside the bounds set back when your grandma was a respectable hetero whore for grandpa behind closed doors."
If conservatives fear that teachers/librarians are in a conspiracy to groom their kids into blue-haired gender-queer kink-mongers, you'd better believe there will be some counter-grooming. Who doesn't want their son to love tits, or their daughters to have happy marriages by doing things we don't want to know about to please their husbands? Now that the left is so far down the sex-as-anything-but-breeding path, we can be more honest about the merits of good old-fashioned fucking.
I'm a "Stop the Steal" agnostic. The 2020 election looked fishy, but most of the "proof" of election fraud has been merely suggestions with no follow-through. I'm not a Trump voter, but I have no faith in the integrity of his opponents -- especially if you take them at their word that he is an existential threat.
The Democrats do themselves no favors by trying to stop all of these election reform measures in swing states, like PA and GA. Their insistence that we should not clean the voter rolls, enforce ballot integrity or deadlines, or be able to produce records that verify vote counts or reconcile ballot and voter numbers is bewildering in the absence of fraud. Can anyone of the "Most Secure Election in History" persuasion steelman the argument against increasing election integrity? Isn't it in everyone's best interest to increase confidence in the electoral process, even if you think 2020 election deniers are kooks, as it will improve the legitimacy of whoever wins and diminish avenues of sympathy for the deniers?
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