pigeonburger
7mo ago
Candace Owens is into the weirder end of YEC.
I believe there's nothing genuine at all in Candace Owens' public persona, no genuine belief to analyze there at all.
She suddenly appeared as a "personality" during Gamergate when she tried to claim some ground on the anti-Gamergate side, found herself run out of it after encroaching on another leftist grifter's turf, realized that there's much more alpha in being a black woman right-winger, so after a week she came back as a pro-Gamergate grifter instead.
Someone genuinely moving from one side to the other is certainly possible, but I'm deeply suspicious one would do it within a week. It took me years. Hence since then I just dismiss her as an obvious grifter.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
Might be the efforts of Scott Pressler in PA. The guy exhudes weirdo, cult leader energy and if someone could turn it around for the GOP there, I think it's him.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
(Meta: why is it that Trump is rarely referred to by first name?)
Ummm... I would guess maybe it's because his last name is more distinctive, he is "the" Trump that people would immediately think of if you said "Trump", while Harris is a fairly common name, and Clinton could refer to either Bill or Hillary.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
Considering that this organization is literally publishing their passwords in an Excel document on the open internet, would you think that their physical security is likely to be particularly competent?
No, I don't think it is. But the BIOS password is not holding back anything if the physical security is lacking.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
Of course, it shows a lack of attention from the IT team who made the document, which puts into question how much we can trust them with regards to the security layers that actually matter. I'm just pointing out that this one "security layer" does not matter.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
Lots of people are going to have physical access to these machines who shouldn't have access to things like system settings.
And they all have access to the BIOS settings, with or without the BIOS password. Unsupervised physical access to a machine makes completely irrelevant a BIOS password.
Or are you also in the habit of arguing that people should leave thier doors unlocked because a determined thief will just pick the lock or break a window to get in anyway?
I'm not saying they SHOULD give out the BIOS password. I'm saying that for these machines to be trustworthy, the BIOS password does basically nothing if untrusted people have access to them unsupervised for significant amounts of time.
I'm saying it makes no difference if the door is locked or not if someone is given a couple of hours unsupervised access to your house; they have more than enough time to get in with or without a locked door.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
in the hullabaloo it would have been easy for someone to stick a USB in
If that was possible, then the issue is not a BIOS password, it's unsecured USB ports and no one keeping an eye on them. Someone could stick in a keylogger or rubber ducky and cause all sorts of issues, without any BIOS password.
I'm not making the case that voting machines are secure; from my understanding they're very much not. Just that the situations in which having the BIOS password enables someone to do something nefarious overlap almost perfectly with the situations in which someone could do similar harm without the BIOS password. Replacing the OS with a tampered version is not a drive-by attack even with the BIOS password any worker can do in a couple of minutes with the machine. They need physical access to the machine for a length of time that is in the same ballpark as the time they would need to bypass a BIOS password.
How would you feel about the scenario, "My biggest enemy managed to get the BIOS password to my machine AND dozens of people have unsupervised access to my machine, and one of those people could or could not be my worst enemy."
Pretty much the same as if no one had my BIOS password and dozens of people have unsupervised access to my machine, and one of those people could or could not be my worst enemy. BIOS passwords are a paper thin security feature, they're more to keep nosy kids and clueless employees from creating issues for IT to solve than protect the integrity of the data on the machines.
Lots of people from random officials and polling site volunteers, to the voting public themselves are going to have unsupervised physical access to these machines.
Because that's the very point point, a BIOS password is hardly any protection against someone who knows what they're doing having unsupervised access to the hardware, AND it requires having unsupervised physical access to the machine to exploit a leaked password anyway. At best it saves them a bit of time. The usefulness of a BIOS password is protecting against people who don't know what they're doing accidentally changing BIOS settings, or very unsophisticated malicious actors (kids, disgruntled employees wanting to break something).
Because if my biggest enemy managed to get the BIOS password to one of my machines (if I even cared to put one; I don't), I would not give a fuck. If you told me my biggest enemy managed to get the BIOS password to my machine AND unsupervised physical access to my machine for for a couple of hours, then yeah I'd be worried and wouldn't trust that machine anymore.
But so would I if he just had unsupervised physical access to my machine for a couple of hours.
Hence, the BIOS password is inconsequential.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
Ehhh, it's not great that these passwords have been disclosed but honestly, it's not the end of the world in this situation, assuming the voting machines are designed intelligently (not a safe thing to assume, I know): if someone has access to enter the BIOS password, they probably already have the kind of access they need to the machine to compromise it in many ways.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
This cements my thought that the “Vance is weird” campaign is a fully enclosed propaganda ecosystem, as in, it isn’t exaggerating some aspect of Vance (eg “Trump lies”), it is just totally made up. And that’s really spooky, because there’s a section of the public that will believe whatever the DNC wants them to believe. If they can make you believe Vance is weird they can make you believe anything.
I dunno, to me it kind of makes sense that a normal guy would seem weirder as a politician than an average politician would. It's up to what people expect of a politician. Normal people don't methodically control their actions and words to make everything fit into a neatly packaged personal narrative, so it's easier to cherry-pick examples to craft a different narrative.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
I think the argument they want to make is that Trump is a charismatic populist that will lead his people down a dark path with his "violent rhetoric".
pigeonburger
7mo ago
The modern world being so complex you need layers upon layers of experts to even understand problems is the story the managerial class tells about why it should rule, but that's only a story. We could be doing other things, with other tradeoffs.
I think what did the most damage to this story in recent times is Elon Musk. I think that's what they hated most about him, before the Twitter purchase.
The managerial class had evaluated the question and decided that while electric cars were a cute idea, they were not a realistic replacement for ICE cars. It also concluded that space exploration was just too expensive and that it should just be about launching drones to increase the prestige of institutional Science, and as a way to transfer more ressources to contractors so embedded in the US government they're practically an arm of it.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
What's sad is that had it been kept out of hot political issues, it could still be useful to validate our answers to these questions once they are no longer politically hot. Now that it's balls deep into political issues, even old mistakes will have to be maintained or memory holed because previous examples of Science being wrong are going to be used as examples of why today's Science could be wrong, and we can't have that!
pigeonburger
7mo ago
Yeah, but in that analogy the firefighting department predicted rain, said it'd look as if one of their helicopters dropped its bucket but it'll be rain. 5 minutes before it was wet outside, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and completely cloudless. All weather stations in the areas in question stopped reporting the weather at the same time, then deleted the records of the raw instrument data as fast as they could after the event, so any and all subsequent attempts to reconstruct the weather are done with already processed and edited data, and there's even a video of firefighting helicopters flying erratically over Atlanta.
Now none of this is actual proof, but I would not blame anyone for believing shenanigans happened.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
It might not be a solution if you're not willing to host web accessible services, but I run an instance of wallabag for myself. I then have a bookmarklet to send any page I wanna keep to it. It archives pages in a way to focus on readability. It's also good for bypassing some paywalls (not all). Once in while I organize the pages I've saved to it by adding tags to them. You can also add annotations to the pages saved.
The elitist liberal media says that McDonald’s is unhealthy slop, but deep down, you know the truth.
Yup. Very few people are deluding themselves that a McDonalds burger is healthy, but it's honest. Yeah, ground beef isn't the healthiest meat, white bread buns aren't the most nutritious either, but from remembering what I used to think when I was a liberal 15 years ago, it's as if McDonalds had an Underpants Gnome-like scheme that increased their profits from sneaking in toxic sludge inside their food and customer base.
Now, Portillo's Chocolate Cake Shake, that is one thing that on my last trip to the US that I couldn't allow myself to eat just from looking at the caloric intake it represented. That actually seemed like it was designed to bring ruination to a body.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
It can still be, it's just that they've tiered their offering to extract more money at the top of the market. They probably realized there's a lot of people eating at McDonald's who don't really go because it's cheap, and would be willing to pay over 10$ for a trio, so they added items for that market, but you can still eat what I'd call a full meal for around 5 US dollars.
There's a lot of ground to cover between being unwilling to put up with incivility and being willing to resort to force of arms to secede, a fact which is exploited in modern politics; if I can get the other side to leave in anger or disgust, but not angry enough to come back with guns, then they're pretty much just ceding the ground to me.
If politics feel horrible and fill me with dread, it's not an accident, it's what my political opponents deliberately wish me to feel so that I have to disengage from it to protect my mental health, that makes me less likely to vote, less likely to be informed past the headlines, etc...
Of course, there's great peril in this strategy in that all sides ratcheting this up doesn't really push further away the point at which people resort to violence; maybe slightly at best as it changes the perception of a normal baseline, but not as much as it reduces the gap between participation in politics and violence.
To play Devil's advocate for a second (I too think 21 is unnecessarily high), maybe the point of 21 is that it makes 18 easier to enforce. Here the drinking age is 18, and alcohol was a normal part of my life from around the time I was 16. Normal as in my parents wouldn't have any problem if I drank alongside them for meals of social gatherings, I would go out to bars with friends and order alcohol without anyone bothering me, and whenever there was a party my friends and I would always manage to have beer case one way or another (family/siblings buying for us, one of us having a fake ID, etc...). I don't think I could have gotten into bars pretending to be 21 at 16. Maybe people were more lax with it back then too though, it felt to me like the rule was that as long as the ambiguously aged late-teen young adult seems the discreet type they wouldn't bother checking ID.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
It's been a long time but I enjoyed that so much, I'd have given it way more than that.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
were high status 6 figure men going to vote Kamala anyway?
I imagine probably most people in liberal professions will; I guess COVID might have hurt them a bit, but I'm pretty sure doctors are still high status?
pigeonburger
8mo ago
I know a guy who's been to one. When they're succesful, they're like a big party where you're surrounded by likeminded people. It might feel alien to us contrarians on The Motte, but being in a big crowd of people cheering along is a lot of fun. (As you might have experienced at sports events). I don't imagine they convince a lot of undecideds, or attract the really passive people on their own, but every enthusiastic supporter who brings a passive supporter along has a chance of turning them into an enthusiastic supporter. And I imagine it does a lot to keep the enthusiastic supporter enthusiastic and maybe encourage then to volunteer or donate (both of which, having worked political campaigns, are a big deal).
pigeonburger
8mo ago
Dosage and tolerance on weed is kind of ridiculous and all over the place. Low tolerance and low dosage can take you places high tolerance users simply cannot reach anymore with any amount of THC.
As far as anyone could tell bears a lot of weight here. It's not like the US flipped a coin yesterday. She had a much lower chance, we in the public just couldn't tell if the public polls were honest, artificially trying to keep it close to encourage turnout, or were afraid of predicting anything but 50%-50% because that's the safest prediction possible.
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