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drmanhattan16


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 05 17:01:12 UTC

				

User ID: 640

drmanhattan16


				
				
				

				
2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 17:01:12 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 640

accept all who surrender, Hamas and civilian, starve/shoot/bomb/propagandize those who don't.

That's a war crime, you don't get to kill non-combatants who refuse to surrender to you. Their non-combatant status is not suppressed unless the military advantage of killing them is high enough.

group of open-minded free-thinkers

Don't self-aggrandize, you might actually believe your own hype.

If Israel's outright policy is to commit a war crime, then they're playing a much more dangerous game which could result in the US applying much heavier pressure. It's unlikely they're going to go that route, doubly so when it would give their enemies a PR bonanza.

Which states are we comparing to? I don't know what that list you're talking about looks like.

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.

What's the source on that?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1X_KdkoGxSs

New video by Lex Fridman, Destiny + Benny Morris vs. Mouin Rabbani and Norman Finkelstein on the I/P issue.

I'm posting this here because Finkelstein made this into a greater farce than one could ever have imagined. Weird blend of Rabbani/Morris debating specific historical points and Finkelstein/Destiny basically fighting each other.

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.

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).

How far am I supposed to take this analogy? Because if I take Hlynka's position and apply it here, then we are left with the idea that outsiders have no obligation to actually consider the probability of fraud occurring, and that they should be free to accept payment to accept the idea that no fraud occurred.

That doesn't strike me as particularly rational and virtuous, respectively.

Wait, who is the secondary? My understanding is that the polycule was a thing of the past.

Because you're trying to shift the burden onto the people who are "election deniers," using terminology itself which is smuggling in your default position the election should be assumed to be legitimate unless there is a strong showing of facts to meet some high standard. It "seems reasonable" to do what? You think it's reasonable to have your default position and burden obligation and evidence standard. And that's fine by itself, but this language is all part of how you're attempting to simply assume the default position by fiat to shape the field against anyone who would question the results of the election.

What's the non-presumptive phrase to describe people who deny the 2020 election was legitimate, and why would it not be subject to the euphemistic treadmill?

much of the way the election was conducted was declared illegal after the election when the outcome could no longer be changed; much of the way the election was conducted in explicit contravention to state law, i.e., the "agreed-upon method"

What's the source for this?

Why would random people or even Trump be required to agree to the election is assumed legitimate standard because "his side" lost a bunch of court challenges about illegal election law changes?

"Required" is a strong word. But the case gets weaker with each failed court challenge. At some point, there's no vitality to it left.

the 2020 election wasn't decided by 7 million "votes," it was decided by 50,000 "votes" in 5 states

That's not the point. The point is that millions of voters, who I suspect didn't think they could ignore the results of another state simply because the laws in that state changed, still went out and voted for Trump.

This isn't, in other words, a case where a disinterested party is being approached to accept the validity of the 2020 election, this is a case with a very much interested party.


Ultimately, this still leaves me no more persuaded on the "and then?" part of Hlynka's position. Even assuming that the truth of the 2020 election is unknowable, why is there no obligation for those think Biden didn't win fairly to consider how much of their motivation is simply losing the election?

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.

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.

Is there a responsibility, in your view, for the losers to examine if their real objection might not be principled, but literally over just losing?

But doing the opposite of a bad thing, doesn't make that a good thing. The liberals say you must interact and be friends with these people, but the conservatives/nationalists say you must not interact or be with these people. I chafe at both rules, or the single rule of "I get to decide your friends". Since we cannot have unlimited friendships, and we don't have unlimited options, the rules are two sides of the same coin.

I don't think that's the liberal position. Arguing that one ought to be friends with people of a different race/sex/gender/etc. is the progressive position.

Describing election disputers, election fortifier, election revisionist, election skeptic, etc., etc., doesn't need to be absent all presumption, but when you write a phrase like "election denier," you are at the extreme end of presumptive and it is another example of smuggling in your default position (not to mention your distain).

It would only take a short amount of time before any of the phrases you used would be seen by the people they are being used to describe as just as hostile and presumptive as "election denier".

I'm not playing the "source?! source? You have a source?!" game in a dialogue about another user's statements around disputing the default position to judge a disputed election.

If you're going to claim the election laws were changed and found illegal, that's a claim you are making. It's entirely reasonable to ask you to explain what you're referring to with a source. I assumed you were referring to PA and WI, but I wanted to be sure. Regardless, the legality of the election methods themselves is of very little importance if you're not from that state - if a state had legalized letting non-citizens vote, that would hardly be a consolation to those who think the election was stolen.

This matters greatly because simply saying those rules were illegal isn't the same as saying the vote counts were inaccurate due to fraud, to say nothing of whether the outcome in WI or PA was actually changed as a result. For example, the WI court ruling on the drop boxes being illegal also said there was no indication of voter fraud in the election, though their citations might leave someone questioning the election frustrated.

It depends on the challenge and the court holding. If a court declares your challenge isn't going to be heard because you cannot show you, specifically, will be harmed by this illegal rule, this has nothing whatsoever to do with whether some rule or procedure or application is legal let alone to the point where one can buttress a claim of an "agreed-upon" set of rules.

Sure, not every failed court challenges was due to the facts/proof, some were dismissed over jurisdiction and standing. But ultimately, court challenges aren't, in my view, some lynchpin against Trump's claims.

Trump famously and repeatedly claimed he would not "concede" to the winner if he thinks the election is unfair, but somehow he accepted "the basis of an agreement to a contract" because he ran anyway? Or he voters/supporters did because they voted anyway?

I have no problem with a candidate declaring the election is unfair and then wanting investigations. But there is an obligation, I think, to accept that this claim is falsifiable. If the evidence coming back is that there's no clear evidence of fraud, then Trump ought to rethink his conviction on the matter.

A common argument against this line of reasoning is that fraud is undetectable, so not having clear proof is an unfair standard. But I rarely see people advance this to the conclusion that we therefore don't know who necessarily won the 2020 election, I only see it being used to argue that Trump did have the election stolen from him. That's a stronger argument that does need to have proof shown.

why should election losers be obligated to do this? and if they are, then therefore what? if they fail to meet that obligation, then therefore what?

You should be obligated to do this because this because it divides the country further if matters of truth are subordinated to one's partisan/ideological goals. You cannot claim to be a rational or reasonable truth-seeking person if you cannot accept a truth which might hurt your in-group.

Speaking practically, denying the outcome of the 2020 election matters more to the people who lost than the people who won. If you cannot convince people that you are not reasonable or rational, that you cannot be persuaded that you might be wrong, then people will rightfully dismiss anything you have to say. You can sit back and revel in the supposed ignorance of your opposition, but they're in power right now and it seems like they're going to be there for a while.

But if losing while truth is apparently on your side is what you want, then I suppose you can ignore this obligation.

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?

If that's the case, why do you insist on using the term election denier? After all, any of these other terms would mean the same thing anyway eventually, so why not use those terms and avoid my complaints? Frankly, this is nonsense. You use the term because you want to smuggle in your opinion as the default while signaling disdain to others.

Because your objection isn't the phrase, it's the meaning you perceive behind it. The demand to use another phrase for the same thing is part of another euphemistic treadmill.

Whether or not "fraud" (whatever that means) is done, if elections are done illegally in contravention to law, you cannot then claim "well, actually there was an agreed upon method which was done so you are bound to the outcome" because it's explicitly not an "agreed-upon method."

Whose law? The federal governments or any particular state's? As I said, you don't have a claim to the latter - your concern is whether or not there was fraud, not whether that election was done illegally.

First, this obligation is goofy. "Do I care about this only because I lost?" Every person is going to think and say "no."

See, that's the funny thing - Hlynka doesn't even care about this standard, nor do some people on this site, apparently. It says something that the most trivial of intellectual hurdles is apparently beyond what he requires of others. More to the point, just because someone says "I'm not doing this because I lost" doesn't mean we have to believe them. There are ways of evaluating whether someone is being rational that can find clearly irrational people even when we allow for ambiguity.

This is why this just looks like an attempted beachhead in order to expand these obligations toward your default position. What you really want is to get election losers to have to meet some growing obligation and standard to analyze "facts," which you will morph and grow into proving something to others who are hostile, like you, for what I'm sure are purely truth-seeking, rational motives. This is why I claimed it looked like you're trying to smuggle in your default position because otherwise these meek obligations you're trying to get others to agree on don't matter.

In your view, am I or am I not trying to establish a "beachhead"?

Hlynka's opinions and election "deniers" claims are disprovable; the issue is you have no facts which are good enough to convince them and no explanations good enough to poster-board over their concerns and suspicions, and frankly any person who doesn't start from your default position, about the legitimacy of the election and its outcome. If this justifies obligations, I can think of a myriad number of obligations which conflict with and undermine your default position assumption.

How can they be disproven when in the same breath, I'm told that fraud is undetectable, but we also know it must have occurred? If the former is true, then you can't deny the possibility of no fraud. If the latter is true, then it's disprovable, but you have to provide evidence of it. Yet, I see multiple people using the former as their justification for the latter. You have to pick one and stick with it, no jumping between stances when it suits you. (I mean "you" in the general sense, not just you specifically).

Moreover, if someone wants to come to the conclusion that we fundamentally cannot know, based on facts, whether the election was stolen or not, then it's very curious how this never comes accompanied with a suggestion for which outcome is more likely: stolen election or not. I understand why this happens, but it's very telling that Hlynka and those who agree with him on this issue don't seem to care about evaluating what their real objection to the election actually is.

This is why Hlynka harps on this not being the correct default position because it won't convince losers whenever anything slightly suspicious happens.

And it doubly won't convince them if their real objection is the outcome of the election, not its integrity.

But Hlynka isn't interested in asking himself or others if that's actually the case. What a shame.

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.

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?

And for me the essay wasn't even fun to read, it has a lot of Curtis Yarvin-esque beating around the bush.

I'm not sure how much beating around the bush you can get when you say things like "You still have 42 million feral blacks milling around."

From your report's summary:

There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. In all likelihood, more eligible voters cast ballots for Joe Biden than Donald Trump. We found little direct evidence of fraud, and for the most part, an analysis of the results and voting patterns does not give rise to an inference of fraud.

Seems like this is the key takeaway for anyone.

Is your ultimate point that elections have security issues, or that the 2020 election was actually stolen from Trump? People who want to argue the first are free to do so, I'm open to the idea that we can tighten election security, especially for state and local elections (where more serious claims appear to be made).

Nyberg appears to be some small-time individual who got 15 minutes of fame and has moved on to doing whatever she does now. Her twitter feed is mostly about plugging her own stream/Patreon, quote-tweeting some lesbian novel bot, and talking about trans politics from a clearly pro-trans perspective (and I mean in the normie online progressive way). Of this, most tweets don't even seem to break a hundred likes.

In fact, this whole damn thing seems fairly confined to people whose only power is on the niche pieces of the internet they occupy. The most egregious is arguably RationalWiki, but that site isn't some powerhouse or progressive mainstay. David Gerard's power on that site might be vast, but it's fundamentally limited.

"This story is small-time" wouldn't be a problem necessarily, even a murder in a small town matters. But it's worth considering that when you search up Nyberg on Google, you get her twitter, a LinkedIn profile, and then a Medium piece which clearly comes down on the side that Sarah is an actual pedophile. DuckDuckGo straight up links to the "Why you shouldn't stand with Sarah Nyberg" piece at number 1.

So I don't really think it's obvious that Nyberg and the anti-GamerGaters got what they want. The anti-Nyberg pieces are still up and coming up in top results.

What will be left of Ukraine after Russia and the West are done with their proxy war?

Ideally Ukraine will be a part of NATO as its allies fund its reconstruction. Even better if it means the death of current Russian regime. No better message for every other tyrant eyeing the lands near them.

It's hard to get good numbers as both Russia and Ukraine lie about everything. But it feels that Ukraine is exhausted and will soon lose this war. My heuristic for this is reading between the lines of the news.

"Both sides lies" is a meaningless platitude. Perun covered this exact topic 2 weeks ago and argued that Ukrainians are still incredibly supportive of fighting Russia, though they recognize that its going to be hard and grinding. Russians are harder to poll due to fear of state punishment for the "wrong" opinions, but even then, there's less support on the Russian side for fighting the war to its conclusion than there is on the Ukrainian side. He also doesn't ignore all the things "between the lines", talking explicitly about the average Ukrainian soldier's age issue in the linked video.

I have to ask, at this point, why does the West still support Ukraine? Yes, it's very convenient that Ukraine is willing to destroy itself to hurt Russia. But, as a utilitarian, I am very skeptical of the benefits of "grand strategy" type decisions like this. The world is complicated. If we let Putin have the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine will he then demand the Polish-speaking parts of Poland? No. It's not like this war has been a resounding success. Furthermore, he could die tomorrow.

Supporting Ukraine is an affirmation of the post-WW2 status quo in which war for the sake of expansion will not be tolerated. Russia may fear Ukraine slipping from its control, but the reason Eastern Europe did that is precisely because Russia has acted on this notion of spheres of influence. Moreover, every dead Russian, while tragic, and every spent ruble on military equipment is part of the cost that Russia will have to deal with. No better cost-effective solution for depleting the resources of an expansionist and corrupt system.

Moreover, you know why Putin won't demand the Polish parts of Poland? Because Poland is in NATO. That's precisely the threat of Ukraine after the 2014 revolution, it may join America's umbrella and then it can never be touched.

Peace would be nice. But, and I recognize that I have less stake in the issue given that I'm not losing people myself over the issue, I believe it would still be good for the Ukrainians to continue fighting. I support giving them as much as they ask for and more.

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?