drmanhattan16
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User ID: 640
drmanhattan16
1mo ago
His post isn't a disagreement over "policy," it's a disagreement over the default position.
No, Hlynka is clear that elections are negotiations and that the winners have to convince the losers to cede power. He says as much here. I can't show him wrong under his standard because it's not about facts - if the convincing fails because the losers don't like losing, Hlynka wouldn't tell them to accept it.
Moreover, Hlynka was never clear if he was a principled election fraud investigator (in the sense that he only cares about ensuring valid elections) or if he's only being that way because he doesn't like that the Republicans/conservatives don't have their man in the White House.
Is your belief, one which is likely higher than this legal standard, one of "policy" or "facts"?
Facts, obviously, because my contention is that there isn't evidence of the election ultimately being stolen from Trump. I ultimately wouldn't have had a problem accepting a possible Trump victory in 2020 if that was the verdict at the time.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
Hlynka and all the people supporting his QC confuse me.
It's confusing because it seems like there's a great deal of people who think the fact of the matter is that the 2020 election was unfairly stolen by Trump. They argue the facts and think their side is correct in a verifiable manner. I understand this perspective, even if I disagree on the facts.
Hlynka's post and subsequent comments aren't about this. It's about how election deniers have to be persuaded by the non-deniers that there was no ultimate theft. He interweaves this with references to attempts to suppress investigations into election fraud, but his subsequent comments in that thread make it clear that he assigns the election deniers no obligation to evaluate their own motivations.
If I talked with a person who disagrees on the facts, I know they would be willing to publicly state that the facts are the only thing that should determine the conclusion. Whether there was fraud or not, a stolen election or not, the facts are the sole method of determining this. But Hlynka isn't arguing the facts because his revealed preference is debates over policy. And no, elections are not the same thing as debates over policy.
I will ask anyone here who supports his view the same question I asked him - do you actually care about the facts of the 2020 election, or are you just interested in negotiating over policy? Because if it's the latter, just be honest and we can avoid debating a topic which doesn't actually touch upon your real concern.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
Yes, yes, there are these two tribes, but WHY do these tribes hate each so much? It seems obvious to me that the red tribe is currently on the defensive, and so fights on out of a spirit of plucky individualism/puerile defiance (you choose). They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation.
You are missing why they are fighting in the first place. This is not a case of "I know I'm wrong, I'm just arguing to piss you off", the red tribe holds fundamental moral values. The most basic of oughts is that one ought to promote what one deems moral. Why wouldn't they fight against someone promoting something they don't think is moral?
But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself. Why do they hate the red tribe so much? One could point back to Trump and say "Look at all the damage the red tribe did!" but Trump himself seems to have been the red tribe lashing out at blue tribe condescension/scorn.
This is again missing the point. You don't need an explanation for why this particular culture played out the way it did to understand 90% of it. The Blue Tribe holds different values and will fight for its morality, simple as that.
Humans set their standards by their environment, which is why nerds and jocks will self-segregate despite the countless things that make them similar. You cannot point to the far group(s) and ask why a tribe doesn't organize with the other tribe against the remote tribe, it's very rarely relevant. Failure to understand this is bizarre given that you've read SSC's Outgroup piece.
It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all
This is so blind to anything the Blue Tribe says that I have to seriously consider if you are just casually speculating with no research on what either side alleges. The Blue Tribe accuses the Red Tribe of a whole host of things, which can largely be grouped into two categories: bigotry (racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.) and irrationality (in particular, deriving views based on "common sense" and religious beliefs).
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
That's not what the lawsuit alleged. It said that hosts were allowed to make claims that executives believed were false, and that guests were brought on and made claims that the hosts believed were false.
Okay, yeah, this is the case I was thinking of. I recall going through the evidence brought against them and I found it fairly convincing that Fox had no reason to believe what they were peddling and also didn't believe it themselves.
The actual proof can be found in the pdf at the bottom of this article. It's 192 pages, but it's either screenshots that can quickly be read or large font question-answer segments. I think it clearly indicates that the people at Fox didn't believe what they were saying, because their own research team was telling them there wasn't any evidence, and it notes that Fox believed executives had an obligation to correct people from stating falsehoods on their own network.
Ultimately, what did Fox in wasn't the view that the election was stolen. It was not believing their own public statements.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
I'm not shaming anyone. My initial comment was out of confusion, but I have no problem with people deciding even their voice is too much to risk. Moreover, not every part of one's identity is the same. If I show you a picture of my hand, you'll discover my race, but showing my face would be far more personal and could lead far easier to identification.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
We're talking about what has to be necessarily revealed on Yassine's podcast. Voice is necessary simply because people have to speak on a podcast, the information you're talking about wouldn't be necessary unless Yassine was insisting on identifying people to that level.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
Man, it's a good thing Yassine isn't asking for those in the first place, huh?
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
I'm not convinced that anyone who goes onto the podcast is in serious danger of losing their jobs or having their families harassed in two decades time or even further into the future. Even if they happen to be election truthers.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
Am I misremembering, or was this the one in which Fox was shown to have peddled the idea that Dominion's voting machines were rigged but not even the hosts saying it believed what they were saying?
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
I think part of the point is, people will have to come out and identify as election deniers. The next thing, they're being accused of supporting the Jan 6th coup, wanting to overthrow the legitimate government, and being a fully-signed up fascist.
There's plenty of election deniers who openly admit to it and would probably have no problem with it even in conversations with strangers. What has happened to them that is bad?
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
There's also a possibility that some of the snow which hits my tongue was irradiated and I end up slowly consuming enough radioactive material to kill me. We don't take risk by itself as our sole factor. At the end of the day, I think the chances of someone maliciously using a voice recording from someone here is low enough that going on the podcast isn't an issue.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
Meanwhile they get a potential embarrassment and have to expose their identity.
Huh? You're talking about having to expose their voices? I don't think that really constitutes "expose their identity".
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
I recognize you didn't give a "should", but Hlynka very much would agree with the absurd position I detailed in my previous comment. That's his position, unless he draws some line based on how many people actually disagree.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
Consider an unopened box. You and I agree that whatever is inside, we will share equally between ourselves. We open it, and it happens to be your favorite candy bar. I go to split it equally, but you grab one side of it and insist that actually, you want the whole thing and I should re-negotiate over it.
Would you say you are acting in bad faith?
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
I meant that you'd find spaces open to the discussion. Yes, some might object on the old grounds of disenfranchising certain voter groups, but from what I can tell, there's a whole host of things being alleged as insecure/improper which don't have anything to do with letting people vote. You can always start there.
It's not representative of the left, but you can always try /r/Destiny. They have plenty of people who will argue seriously with you on the topic.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
Who is objecting to that on the "2020 wasn't stolen" side? Put simply, if you open your argument with "I don't think 2020 was stolen, but here are cases where we need to tighten election security", I think you'd find earnest discussion in even the most pro-Biden/left-wing spaces.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
In other words, no matter how fair an election might be that both sides had previously agreed to, the loser should be catered to with negotiations and compromises simply because they refuse to accept the outcome.
I reject that idea entirely. If Trump supporters and other election truthers need to have refuges from the rest of the American nation, I'm willing to accommodate that, but I'm not going to accept their claim that they just have a principled concern about election security.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
Because "Elections are by their nature a contested environment"
So is capitalism. I don't see that getting in the way of two competing rational capitalists being unable to agree to facts.
Because "the purpose of an election is not to produce a "true" or "accurate" result. It is to produce a clear result that the candidates (and their voters) can accept as legitimate, including the ones who lost."
You misunderstood what I was saying. I wasn't arguing about why we have elections, I was arguing about how we understand if the procedure/process was followed conditional on our agreement to such a process. Basically, I reject the notion that the election process' outcome doesn't need to be truthful just because the real contention is the policies both sides want.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
Why would it be better? It's a flat-out rejection of the idea that the truth should inform action. I have no problem with litigation over the facts of the 2020 election, but the frustrating part is that the election truthers don't ever give me confidence that they care about the truth for its own sake, but more because they think it's impossible Trump could have lost in the first place.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
Perhaps this is the Leviathan-shaped hole in the discourse rearing it's ugly head again, but "negotiations over policy" (or rather who gets to set that policy) is exactly what an election is, is it not?
No, my point is that you and anyone else who takes this viewpoint is essentially claiming that you don't care about proof over whether the election was stolen in the first place. You just want a guarantee that your policies are enacted.
Suppose the Democrats were to offer a guarantee that they'd quash any attempt at enacting laws which would shift the government's stance to be more socially progressive in exchange for Republicans (including the MAGA ones) never bringing up the 2020 election again, and that this would hold for the next 10 years. God himself comes down and says they're not lying about what they'll do. In this scenario, I would expect people complaining about the election losers to largely come down against this deal on principle. Instead, I suspect the losers would actually, seriously debate if they should accept.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
I agree. But if you want to go down the route of saying the losers are refusing to be rational because that would cost them energy and momentum vs. the winners who don't, then just say that.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
How far back does this trend of "marriage -> more right-wing" go for women? A century? Two centuries?
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
That means you don't really even want elections, right? You just want negotiations over policy. Because if the losers, as I suspect, are a bit more motivated by losing than they claim to be, then no amount of proof would work because they don't care about proof in the first place.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
If the claim in court, where you do need to be very specific, was that people weren't allowed in, but they were and just kept far away, then the claim should reflect that, right?
There were 74 million people who voted for Trump according to Wikipedia. Even if we think that number is too low, or that Biden had some part of his supposed 81 million votes forged from nowhere, it seems like reasonable to say that Trump supporters were not sitting out election day hoping that only others would vote him. They probably went and voted for him as well. If you accept this premise, then we seem to have the basis of an agreement to a contract - using established election rules, both sides would vote and the winner would be who got the most votes (nominally speaking). Trump supporters added their bit of strength to the validity of using the election as it ran to decide if Trump would continue to be the president.
Given this, I don't see why it's attempting to smuggle in my position as the default to say that the party who alleges the agreed-upon method was invalid due to fraud has to demonstrate why that is the case.
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