felis-parenthesis
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User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I prefer a zoomed in view of religious technology in which the details are subtle and difficult to get right. There are interesting thoughts in a post to /r/neology claiming that Islam and Marxism are both examples of a certain kind of thing, more specific than religion or ideology (and asking r/neology to invent a word for it)
The central text must hit
the sweet spot in the vague/clear trade-off for maxim memetic potentency.
Look at how revered and celebrated texts work socially. They need to be clear enough to provide rallying cries and ideals that are solid enough for people to get behind them. They need to be clear enough that it seems legitimate to punish people for breaking the rules or disputing the teachings. And yet such clarity is the other side of the coin from rigidity.
A revered and celebrated text can only live a long life if it has a certain amount of vagueness. When times change, society needs new meanings. If the text is amended, the process scrubs off the patina of age, and invites further amendment. The text should have enough wiggle room for re-interpretation without literal change. A text also need powerful defenders to promulgate it and censor rival texts. The text must meet their needs. Their varying needs. The text should have enough wiggle room for those with power to re-interpret it to their advantage.
So I agree with you that the religious technology works by insisting that the text is 100% true and cannot be altered. But that is a tricky constraint.
This makes me think about the fifth precept
To refrain from states of heedlessness brought about by intoxicants
which in nearly all Buddhist texts is specifically targeted against alcohol. But not all.
As I was taught, the fifth precept includes being intoxicated by one’s own ideas—not just the ingestion of intoxicants. Just recall what it feels like to be completely intoxicated with one’s own ideas, views, opinions, etc., including the bodily and emotional sensations, the mental ideas of being right, others being wrong—not a far place from being drunk, except that this is the drunkenness of self-absorption, self-belief, self-separation. I’ve certainly have had these experiences when I’m caught up in what I think ought to be.
https://tricycle.org/magazine/reader-responses-fifth-precept/
Perhaps extending the fifth precept to intoxicating ideas is a recent Western Buddhist innovation. And it seems to come in two versions.
Version one is a purity spiral. One extends the fifth precept to make it stricter. Not just Tee-total but heedful of the warning of Dostoevsky against ending up as a Raskolnikov.
Version two is a dilution. One excuses drinking a can of beer because ideas are the big danger. It is safe enough to relax with a beer after work providing that one does not buy into the ideology of alcohol and start thinking that beer is the only way to have a good time and that getting drunk shows that one is a real man.
I'm quite cynical, so I mostly think that "intoxication by ideas" is a dilution, not a purity spiral. But maybe Aaron Bushnell died of intoxication by ideas, and his burns are a later link in the causal chain by which poisonous ideas eventually kill people.
VinoVeritas survives his small-molecule intoxication, while Aaron Bushnell did not survive his big-idea intoxication. And I'm probably not reading the room. The Motte is the wrong place to say "Less thinking please. All these fancy words will mess with your head and you will end up dead."
Edited to remove a stray space that was ending a block quote prematurely.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I thought that terrible wars, leaving society short of men, were common in history. Indeed, I thought that was the origin story of polygamy in Islam. The followers of Mohammad had lost too many men waging Jihad. Sticking with monogamy would leave women without husbands and slow down rebuilding the population of warriors. So Mohammad declared that a man could have up to four wives.
The birth rate remains 50:50 (Is it actually 51% boys, 49% girls? I think it is not exactly 50:50, with some built-in compensation for slightly different death rates) so it is not exactly your hypothetical. Worse, I'm talking about societies very different to our own, so it is hard to know the relevance of the comparision.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I see examples as the key to complying with the rule to "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion." The highlighted phrase is part of a 136 word paragraph that is emphatic without being explicit.
For example, "It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again.". I feel as though I have learned something about Americans and their politics. But have I? I imagine telling a friend "America politics is so toxic that if Trump wins, it will start fights between men and their wives." And my friend will be skeptical, pushing back with "Really? How does that work?" and I won't know. I've just got the vibe, but if I'm pushed as to what specifically is meant by "incessant leftist whining", I have to fall back on what I already know.
Perhaps what I already know is wrong. The emphatic nature of the paragraph encourages me to believe more strongly in what I already know. The lack of explicitness deprives me of the opportunity to believe less strongly in what I already know because it clashes with the examples given.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I've been thinking of Dewey's point as The Riddle of the Flute Children. Its applies quite generally. Cutting and pasting the riddle:
Amartya Sen starts his book The Idea of Justice with a parable about three children and a flute. Who gets the flute? The child who can play it? The child who made it? The child who has nothing else?
The response that gets to the heart of the matter is
Kill the person who asked the question. Once the idea of redistributing flutes takes hold, ambitious men will fight to be Lord High Distributor of Flutes. The fighting will escalate. The flute will be broken and the child who made it will die.
Asking who deserves the flute is self-defeating because the question sets off violence that leaves us without a flute.
Turning aside from political philosophy and turning back to the reading of old books, I notice that Dewey has priority. He made my point in 1927, 96 years before me. But his point and his once popular book have faded and I was unaware of them.
It seems obvious to me that my violent and strident phrasing of the Riddle of the Flute Children is a mistake. The idea gets masked by peoples reaction against the over-the-top expression. I would do better to phrase it in a mild and temperate way. Perhaps
recognition of evil consequences which have resulted from the opposite course
Whoops! That doesn't work either. Only a dark wizard of Ravenclaw would pick up on the profundity of the point being made. How is one supposed to expressive this difficult idea?
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I'm seeing
The age-adjusted rate of overdose deaths increased by 14% from 2020 (28.3 per 100,000) to 2021 (32.4 per 100,000).
but 32.4 per hundred thousand is 0.0324 %.
I think that the issue is that CDC is dividing (overdose deaths this year) by total population, but we are trying to get a feel for the meaning of the number of overdose deaths by doing the calculation
(overdose deaths this year) divided by (total deaths this year)
We are pondering: people are always dying, what proportion of deaths are overdose deaths?
One anticipates that (total population) divided by (total deaths this year) roughly approximates life span, so 70 or 80. But the ratio is more like 100. Err, I'm seeing in other calculations that (total population)/80 over estimates (total deaths this year) by quite a lot. Total population is around 334 million, total deaths for 2021 3.4 million. The ratio is surprisingly (confusingly?) close to 100.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I'm looking at this graph which runs from 1999 to 2021 and depicts a terrifying rising trend.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
You have misplaced the decimal point. 112000/3500000 = 0.032 which is 3.2%
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I think that the rotation of roles does help a little. The blue electors may well treat with the white princes, saying "I'll give you the crown if you give me X". On the other hand, the big prize is that one of the blue elector's children will go on to become king. Can they do a trade for the big prize? Can blue electors say to white princes "I'll make you king, if you make my son king in turn" ? No! When the white king dies (or perhaps demits the throne due to an age limit) it is the blue line that supplies the princes, but it is the red line that supplies the electors/kingmakers. Picking a blue electors' son as heir is beyond the power of the white king and beyond the power of the white line.
Perhaps blue electors can treat with members of the red line. "Promise to make my son king, and I'll give you the white king that you desire." But the members of the red line will have to have a deal set up whereby the white king pays them back. Complicated deals in smoke filled back rooms are certainly a thing, but now timing gets in the way. The blue electors are talking to members of the red line, but the election of the blue king is perhaps thirty years down the line; it is the children of the members of the red line who need to be trusted to keep the bargain.
Perhaps the Rotating Triple Crown fails because it depends too much on people believing in it. If the blue line believe that the kingdom will last, they may chose a good white king in the hope that their son inherits a thriving kingdom. But if belief falters, then the blue electors will sell the crown for a prompt reward, preferring to cash out and loot a system that they think is failing.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
The Rotating Triple Crown is mainly an attempt to design a rule of succession that solves the problem of the stupid eldest son. One reason why a king might lack iron-clad legitmacy is that he took the crown as part of an ad hoc modification to the succession rules when the legitimate eldest son is seen as unacceptably stupid. The other side of this coin is when such an attempt at ad hoc modification fails, and the legitimate eldest son ends up lacking legitimacy because no-one wants to be ruled by an idiot. To the extent that the Rotating Triple Crown does actually solve the problem of the stupid eldest son (with its very limited use of election) it also eliminates two possible causes of a failure of legitimacy.
There is a third indirect boost to legitimacy
The descendents of the Blue King meet to choose a new King from among the White princes. When, in the fullness of time, the White King dies, the descendents of the Red King will meet to choose a new King from among the Blue Princes. The cycle continues with the each King succeeded by a prince of the next colour chosen by a conclave of KingMakers, all of the previous colour.
The blue kingmakers are choosing a White king. Presumably they are also looking ahead to when a member of their own, blue, line ascends to the throne. Therefore, they have an incentive to select as White king, some-one with a responsible attitude to the long term future of the kingdom; some-one who will fix problems, rather than leave them to fester and become a challenge for the next blue king.
The Rotating Triple Crown is attractive world-building for an alternative history science fiction novel set in a world with twentieth century technology, but still having executive monarchies. The world-building gifts the author an explanation for how executive monarchy has managed to survive. It also lets the author write competence porn. The kings are shrewd and effective, because the kingmakers chose shrewd effective kings, not because the author wrote them that way.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
There seems to be a translation issue
- Schmitt aptly recalls that the Christian `love your enemies' reads, in Latin, diligite inimicos vestros, not hostes vestros (1976: 29). Here the distinction between private inimicus and public hostis stands out neatly. foot note to The Essence of the Political in Carl Schmitt
The distinction also occurs in Greek: πολέμιος versus ἐχϑρός
The issue is occasionally discussed at length (Search for "hostis" to jump to the discussion).
When I first came across this, I was puzzled. Tyndale published the first English bible in 1535. Why did nobody complain about translation issues until 1932? On the other hand. I'm so old that I studied Latin and Greek for O-level in an English Grammar School. I'm guessing that the educated elite in England learned a decent amount of Latin as recently as 1900. If they cared about what Christ meant by 'love your enemies', they would read the Vulgate, find "diligite inimicos vestros", then go off to fight in the Boer War, happy that shooting at a 'hostis' was compatible with Christianity.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
... large countries with no internal barriers ...
That is a sharp observation. I've written as though the mobility boundary was the whole story. What about the political boundary?
The Canadian fishery that collapsed was on the East coast. Presumably the fishermen could move to the West coast of Canada and pivot to different fish (Perhaps salmon instead of cod?). So Canada, with different fisheries on the East and West coast, lets us ponder what we think of political boundaries.
Imagine that geography and fish biology makes fishery regulation trickier and more expensive on the East coast. Let us fill in the details, first that politics is uniform across Canada, but mobility is restricted. This creates a perverse incentive. Fishermen on the West coast don't want restrictive catch laws and expensive inspections that they don't need. But what if the fishery on the East coast collapses? Won't the fishermen from the East move West, compete for jobs and drive down wages? No. In this hypothetical there is an internal mobility boundary different from the political boundary. Fishermen on the West coast can ruin things for fishermen on the East coast and not have to care.
Second branch of the hypothetical: Canada is a single, big unitary country with full internal mobility. There is a fight on the East coast, within the East coast fishing community, between those seeking catch restrictions so that there will be fish to catch next year and those with bills to pay this year. If stocks are higher on the West coast, the large size of the country dilutes the urgency of local concerns, the catch restrictions don't get imposed, the East coast fishery collapses. Later, an influx of East coast fishermen to the West coast, drives down wages, and drives up catches. The conflict between those looking to the future and those pressed by immediate concerns repeats, with the same outcome. Classic progressive collapse, first East, then West.
Third branch of the hypothetical: Canada is divided. (Perhaps the division is somehow fishing specific. I haven't thought how such a thing would play out in the long term.) Fishermen cannot change coast. But each coast decides its fishing policy independently.
I've thought of PaCCAP as the question of how big should the PaCCAP be, in the sense of comparing the second case with third. In both cases the mobility boundary and the political boundary coincide. The first hypothetical probes what happens if one has fewer and larger political units than mobility regions. It looks bad. There is obviously much scope to argue about the correct size for a PaCCAP, but the mobility boundary and the political boundary should always coincide.
And what about effects of scale that historically allowed large countries to dominate smaller ones?
I've been thinking about why defensive alliances fail to keep collections of small countries safe. We talk about fighting for King and Country. But why did Britain enter the Great War (1914-1918)? The country involved seems to be Serbia, or maybe Belgium, not England. I'm pondering that small countries have historically been unsuccessful in staying safe because the concept of a defensive alliance is ambiguous. Inventing new terminology I ask whether "defensive alliance" means "chaining alliance" or "isolating alliance".
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
You have only grasped half of the reason why open borders are bad. There are deeper problems with open borders. The way you frame it, with "bad guys" crossing the border, suggests that the problems are fixable. Just dial it down a bit and have a semi-open border, closed to "bad guys", porous to "good guys". But open borders is a path to catastrophe, even on a homogeneous clone world, with no races and just one culture.
I've made two lengthy attempts to explain the point, one as a modernized version of Malthusian Immiseration, the other in response to a discussion of Bryan Caplan's ideas.
Did I manage to distill the essence of the issue here? Lightly edited, it reads:
Think about the collapse of the Canadian Grand Banks cod fishery, and the survival of the cod fishery around Iceland. People are not very good at taking care of their natural resources. It is 50:50.
"Open borders" is the idea that if you screw up, you can move on. If the Canadian fishery collapses, Canadian fishermen can move to Iceland and carry on fishing. If the Icelandic fishery collapses, Icelandic fishermen can move to Canada and carry on fishing.
Once the idea of "open borders" gets into peoples heads it tilts the social dynamics towards collapse. We don't want "open borders", regardless of cultural issues. People either take care of their own lands, or when it comes time to move on, they find that there is nowhere left to go.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
The Department of Corrections had required Hood to sign a waiver agreeing to stay 3 feet (0.9 meters) away from Smith’s gas mask in case the hose supplying the nitrogen came loose.
It is a deficiency in the article that it fails to mention the composition of the air that Hood was breathing. It would have clarified why Smith's attempt to avoid hypoxia by holding his breath demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of the peril he faced.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
The sociological interest lies in watching people fail to join the dots.
The airplane safety card has a section on depressurization and the oxygen masks dropping down. "Put your own mask on first."
The danger being guarded against is that the parent takes too long trying to fit the mask on their frightened child and the parent passes out themselves. But how could that happen? Surely the parent soon suffers respiratory distress that forces them to fit their own mask before resuming helping their child? No. Hypoxia doesn't work like that. It is the carbon dioxide that makes you want to breath and the parent is breathing that out just fine. You can pass out from hypoxia with very little warning. I think this is now widely know, mostly due to the warning on the airplane safety card. The warning retains its place on the terse card because they want every-one to know.
There are other routes to this knowledge. Starving My Brain of Oxygen…For Safety?!? is two minute video on pilot training
Without proper training, pilots may not recognize the symptoms of hypoxia
More on the hypoxia training story I was looking for a much older video, which I think was an upload of a historical film of hypoxia training for pilots, with the low oxygen environment being some kind of Nissen hut. Hypoxia training isn't new.
There is a classic industrial accident involving a storage tank. Workman climbs down inside to do maintenance after the tank has been drained. But the residual chemicals have reacted with the oxygen, so he climbs down into a nitrogen atmosphere and dies. His safety buddy sees that he has passed out and, forgetting his training, climbs inside to do a heroic rescue. He also dies. Do you prefer Deaths from Environmental Hypoxia and Raised Carbon Dioxide or Confined Spaces Deadly Spaces: Preventing Confined Space Accidents? The YouTube video has a cute animation with a plumber with a mustache (Mario?) testing the air in the sewer. This also happens down on the farm Incident Investigation: Worker Loses Consciousness in Manure Spreader Tank | WorkSafeBC.
News coverage pretends to know none of this
In his Guardian interview, Smith said he feared that if Alabama carried out his execution it would put the new killing method of nitrogen hypoxia on the map.
The news coverage makes it seem that you can blunder into a confined space with little oxygen, gasp and struggle, and face the horrifying prospect that if you cannot escape in twenty-two minutes, then the lack of oxygen will kill you. And that this is a new hazard. I would feel more comfortable with agit-prop headlines screaming: Capitalism has been killing workers with nitrogen hypoxia for decades.
I'm feeling a little lost. Was the execution deliberately botched by pro-death-penalty activists trying to persuade the impalers and the crucifiers that the method is sufficiently cruel? Were the difficulties invented by anti-death-penalty activists trying to persuade us that the method is excessively cruel? I can tell that I'm being lied to, but not why or by whom or which details are false.
I can also see that the lying isn't being called out, perhaps not even noticed. The lies contradict well known stories about how the world works and how to avoid being killed by it, and yet people don't seem to join the dots and complain about the contradictions. That troubles me.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
The problem is that any efficient and humane way of executing people inevitably ends up associated with death,...
I advocate using lethal injection of alcohol as the means of execution. Injection? It is not that toxic, so it probably needs a big IV bag. Given the enthusiastic recreational use of alcohol, no-one can argue that it is a cruel method of execution. And to return to your point about the association with death, using alcohol sends a valuable public health message about the dangers of binge drinking. In the UK acute alcohol poisoning causes 500 or 600 deaths each year (out of about 6000 alcohol specific deaths, of which 78% are due to alcoholic liver disease). Some of those deaths might be avoided if people had a background awareness that alcohol is what is used for executions by lethal injection, which hints that heroic drinking might not be entirely safe.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
This takes me back to 8th November 2002 and Security Council Resolution 1441
The remarkable bit is in section 5
...further decides that UNMOVIC and the IAEA may at their discretion conduct interviews inside or outside of Iraq, may facilitate the travel of those interviewed and family members outside of Iraq,...
Basically, UNMOVIC gets to whisk the Iraqis who know, out of Iraq, and their families too, so that they can spill the beans without having to worry about going back to Iraq or about how to get their families out.
I tried to guess what would happen next. Once Saddam's own experts were outside Iraq, and their families were outside Iraq, they would be able to speak freely. What would they say?
Perhaps they would say that Iraq did indeed have forbidden weapons and say where they were hidden.
Perhaps they would explain how weird and corrupt it all was. There was money allocated to the Mustard Gas budget, but it was "stolen" to build a palace. It is no use looking for Mustard Gas, there isn't any. The Mustard Gas budget is just there to fake out the Iranians. (The CIA believed it too!)
I admitted to myself that I just didn't know and went 50:50.
Notice that I managed to be 100% wrong. Saddam never complied with 1441. UNMOVIC never got to talk to Iraq's weapons experts outside of Iraq. And that refusal to obey 1441 was the legal basis of the war.
We all remember how it looked to hoi polloi. Weapons of Mass Destruction. We must invade before they can be used against us. Panic! War!
But insiders, steeped in the minutiae of UN Security Council Resolutions probably had a different take. What if the weapons are not found? What if the weapons were never there? Do they get into trouble for starting a war on lies? No.
Technically they were not actually claiming to know for sure. They were claiming the right to find out for sure. Saddam was playing a game of "I've handed over all the weapons. I've dragged my feet and obstructed the inspectors for so long that no-one feels really sure, but don't worry, that is only to frighten the Iranians. Honest!". And 1441 gives UNMOVIC the right to question the relevant Iraqi officials when they and their families are safely outside of Iraq. I wonder what would have happened if Saddam had let the officials and their families leave, and their testimony had been that the weapons were all gone.
I suspect that there was a double game being played. Saddam knew that the weapons were gone. If he could get the UN to accept that the weapons were gone and leave, then his experts could start manufacturing again, and he could recreate what he had lost. Perhaps not immediately, but if he got into another war with Iran and needed them again. But it all depended on retaining his experts. Once UNMOVIC had moved them and their families to the USA, Saddam wasn't getting them back. So maybe the point of 1441 was that the US knew he didn't actually have the weapons any more and the plan was to steal away his experts so that he couldn't recreate them in the future.
But why would insiders feel the need to fake weapons of mass destruction? They were following the legal technicalities and knew that the formal resolution was only that Saddam had to stop playing around and let them find out about the weapons for sure. And if Saddam continued to play around and got invaded, then the US would find out about the weapons for sure. All nice and legal, even if it turned out that there are no weapons any more.
Even at the time, most people following politics had no interest in the clever maneuvering of section 5 of 1441. But I'm guessing that it mattered to insiders. Legally, they were in the clear, even if no weapons were found. So faking it is double bad. First, they might get caught. Second, faking it admits that they are at fault if the weapons are not there; which is silly, because they have won the bureaucratic battle and it is technically Saddam at fault for not surrendering his experts.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
"Rip his arm off and beat him to death with the soggy end" is part of the kayfabe of the World Wrestling Federation (now WWE after a legal dispute with the World Wildlife Fund over who is the real WWF). Your teacher's annoyance with you might well be genuine, but he is nevertheless issuing a comedy threat and inviting you to participate in an in-joke (perhaps forgetting that you are too young to get the reference)
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
Fauci managed to do his gain of function research under the nose of both the US government and the Chinese government and they didn't stop him. The US government wanted to stop him, gain of function research was forbidden in the USA, which is why he had to send money to China to do it there. I'm pretty sure that the Chinese government would have stopped him if they had been keeping up with the technology and realized the stakes.
He managed it by being high-ranking insider. Applying that insight to "secretly develop a fleet of autonomous killer robots", if you are an insider working for DARPA, the Pentagon will help you keep it secret. The top people are politicians in the Joe Biden electoral sense. The level below that are politicians in the bureaucratic maneuvering sense. If you are the highest ranking technologist, who understands the details of the authorization mechanisms that confer control of the killer swarm, you are exposed to serious temptation.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
sacred
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
This is why I hate meta-moderating. I'm given your comment. It's vulgar mockery is excessive. "Bad" or "deserves a warning"? Being conscientious I check the context first.
Oh! I read the "self correcting problem" comment myself yesterday. It struck me as incorrect. Dangerously incorrect. But how to phrase my disagreement? What would crisply convey the tragic truth that there is nothing to guarantee that it will actually self correct. Everything could collapse, like when the Romans left Britain in 410 AD. I fail to reply to it.
Your comment crisply captures the sense of "Look around you! The people you see running towards the cliff edge may well fail to stop." I go with my gut, tick the "Good" box, and click submit. May God have mercy on my soul.
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
It is not the exact same argument; you are missing a scale factor.
Imagine that a collection of nation-states has free movement within each state, and restrictions on movements between states. What works best? A world with 8 huge countries, each with a billion inhabitants, or a world with 800 small countries, each with 10 million inhabitants? Scale matters and there is something real to discuss. It is not the exact same argument at the different scales. There may well be a right size for a country, with strong borders and free movement inside.
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
That is an important distinction and worth up holding. The underlying issue is that the economic logic of copyright leads to an awkward compromise. Copyright terms long enough to liberate the Artist from the tyranny of the day job, but not so long as subject the Artist to the tyranny of the copyright office. (Where there's a hit, there's a rip!). Meanwhile the economic logic of trademarks suggests that they should be eternal.
The culture war aspect is that copyright eternalists love the term "intellectual property" because it fudges the distinction. They hope to use the unlimited life of trademarks as an argument for eternal copyright because they are "the same kind of thing".
Think about this in terms of the external audit of a public company.
A public company has its own accountants. They may notice money going missing, track it down, and report the employee to the police for fraud.
As a public company it must also submit to and pay for an external audit. The external audit is not looking for fraud. The external audit is auditing the internal controls and the procedures. Are the internal controls sufficient (if the procedures are followed) to stop money going missing? Are the procedures being followed? It gets a little tricky because a big business is inevitably full of minor lapses and edge cases. The external auditors will not qualify the companies accounts unless the weaknesses of internal controls and breaches of procedure are material.
However, if there are material weaknesses, the external auditors will qualify the accounts, saying that they cannot be fully relied upon because blah blah. This is a big deal. Remember that the external auditors are not looking for fraud. Looking for fraud that is really there is often futile; the fraud only took place because lax procedures that were not even followed, provided an opportunity to get away with fraud. Once the accounts have been qualified the company takes measures (perhaps under a new board of directors) to remedy the problems.
The weaknesses of internal controls and the failures to follow procedures are treated as dispositive. It is presumed that there was fraud and action is taken to prevent it. It would be wrong to say that people don't care about the facts or whether fraud actually happened. If perchance fraud can be found there will be efforts to identify the perpetrators and prosecute them. But there is an acceptance that finding material weaknesses in procedures is as "we found fraud" as it gets.
Perhaps some-one will claim "Sure there are problems with the procedures that might in theory have allowed fraud to go undetected, but no fraud was proven, so I'm content that no fraud happened and no action is required." But where money is at stake, this is naive and silly.
The core of @Hlynka's claim is that votes are as valuable as money, so the same presumption of fraud applies.
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