ymeskhout
2mo ago
The objection was on the rules themselves, not just that I'm a trained lawyer. I'm trying to separate the earnest objections versus the pretextual excuses from those unwilling to have their beliefs scrutinized. If someone objects to the rules but then offers no alternatives, I have nothing to go off.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
I'm excited that you're game. Are you referring to historical instances of electoral fraud that happened before the 2020 election or during it?
ymeskhout
2mo ago
I've previously spent $130 to hire a Nigerian voice actress to redub someone concerned about their identity and I imagine the masking options are way cheaper now.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
I'd rather you directly say "I think this claim is false and here's why" and even "And I think you know it's false"
I would love it if this happened! Specifics are so much better than riddles
ymeskhout
2mo ago
false statements that the speaker may or may not have actually had the relevant information and intent to deceive.
I draw intent to deceive through their strident refusals to cooperate with authorities once they're required to show their evidence, including their willingness to go to jail over it. The alternative theories are 1) they're telling the truth or 2) they're mistaken but don't know it. If they're telling the truth, I've seen no explanation for why they've refused to cooperate with election authorities. Presumably if you have extensive evidence of serious election fraud, you'd want to do something about the fraud itself besides just making a documentary. If they're mistaken but don't know it, I would still expect them to fully cooperate with election authorities who then would be in a position to further investigate their claims and thereafter inform them that they were mistaken. Instead, TTV's consistent refusals to share their evidence showcases they must be aware that their evidence is bullshit and that sharing it would expose that it's bullshit.
ymeskhout
3mo ago
If that's what cjet is indeed referring to then oops, my bad, I didn't mean to imply that and I'm curious how that misinterpretation occurred with what I wrote and what edits I should make to rectify that. I thought "encouraged others to march towards the Capitol but did not enter themselves" was clear enough but I'm open to edit suggestions. I'm also open to other individuals who serve as better comparisons.
ymeskhout
3mo ago
No I meant "to" because I didn't see anything about Alex Jones encouraging others to go inside. I don't know what you're referring to about regularly-scheduled program, it's hard to compare behaviors from different people because people don't act like mimes and do exactly the same thing at the same time at the same place. Best you can do is outline what the relevant factors and dimensions are and then analyze the actions according to that template. Inevitably you're bound to encounter reasonable disagreement throughout that process.
ymeskhout
3mo ago
I have no seen any evidence or video of Alex Jones explicitly telling people to enter the capitol. He was just the first person that came to mind who seemed more-or-less comparable to Epps along the "whip up crowd to head to the Capitol" axis.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
An unanswered question is very weak evidence of someone doing so because they're uncomfortably challenged because there's plenty of innocent explanations for why someone wouldn't respond (e.g. touch grass, etc.). The context of what I was responding to here is an instance of someone having the time and nevertheless acrobatically evading the question. This scenario is strong evidence of my assertion.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
I think it's bad for any news outlet to ask a fact-checker to be fired not because they're bad at their job but because their fact-check is inconvenient to a news outlet's preferred narrative.
Is there any part of the above that you disagree with?
ymeskhout
1yr ago
It depends on what you consider a "lie". Two potential examples come to mind with the first being an ACORN lawyer, Juan Carlos Vera, who took down information about the (fake) sex trafficking coming in through Tijuana and immediately reported it to law enforcement. Even after this information came out, O'Keefe still kept implying that Vera was indeed an enthusiastic participant in sex trafficking. The second example comes from the NPR sting, where Veritas used deceptive editing to imply that NPR executives were very eager to accept a $5 million donation from a Sharia group in exchange for coverage input.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Because he wasn't supposed to be vetting them. Somehow he managed to insert himself into the process, against the wishes of Elon, and began slow walking and obfuscating access to the documents Elon wanted the journalist to have.
This doesn't make sense, Jim Baker has been the Deputy General Counsel and Vice President of Legal for Twitter since June 2020, he's absolutely supposed to vet records that will be released to an outside party. That's basically foundational to his job as general counsel for a company. Some of the things a general counsel would want to review are relatively banal (e.g. employee SSN) and others would be making sure that a disclosure doesn't violate an NDA, disclose trade secrets, or otherwise runs afoul of the overbearing National Security Letter gag orders.
The point of a legal department is to protect a company from legal liability, and releasing these files without any lawyer reviewing the disclosures would have been an idiotic move. So unless Musk specifically asked to release the files without involving legal, it's presumed that the legal department would do its job. That Taibbi seems surprised by this makes me think he doesn't understand what a general counsel's job is.
Musk claims that Baker's explanations were "unconvincing" but why should we take him at his word? He could easily tell us what the reasons are. I think it's plausible that Jim Baker would at least have a strong motive to conceal things that would impugn the FBI which is his previous employer, but motive is not the same thing as commission. If Baker did indeed conceal things from the reveal, then Musk can just tell us. If Baker did indeed have unconvincing reasons for being involved, then Must can just tell us. The fact that he's light on the details makes me think Musk's reasons for firing him may have been more personal than anything else.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Given that he's formed a branch of the State Law Enforcement specifically to investigate election crimes, I'd guess the odds of such an investigation both taking place and finding evidence if fraud did occur is substantially higher than it was before.
I mean, the motivation behind forming this agency was as a response to completely delusional claims of voter fraud that are unfortunately held by a significant portion of the electorate. I get that DeSantis is a politician that has to cater to the people who vote for him (no matter how crazy they are), so I can't fault him too much on this point. However, it does undercut the notion that this necessarily means it's an earnest and non-crazy investigative endeavor. It's possible that it was just put in place for the sake of appeasing the louder loons. Of course this doesn't mean that the agency is incapable of doing honest police work, but it definitely doesn't augur well that they chose — as their opening salvo — to go after random nobodies who are guilty of being misled by their government.
I agree with almost everything you said. If we had six hours, I would've started the discussion with "how do you know who is white?". I tried to pin Walt on some answers about "white interest policies" but there were only so many ways I could rephrase a question. I know a white supremacist I've been talking to for years who has been agonizingly obfuscatory on very elementary questions across many years, so I didn't have high hopes for clarity. Edit: It was wrong of me to impugn @WaltBismarck by association, especially through a connection he has explicitly abandoned.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
I never asked for an exhaustive list, I just want some specifics on why the rules are unfair rather than just proclaiming they're unfair for unspecified reasons. Someone who knows their beliefs will crumble when it encounters a stiff breeze of scrutiny has an incentive to make up whatever excuse to keep them safeguarded, so I need some method to discern who has earnest objections and who's just making shit up.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
How do the rules favor other trained lawyers, and what changes would you suggest?
ymeskhout
2mo ago
If the constellation of stolen election beliefs was treated in a similar manner to the low status beliefs you reference, I would agree with you that this would be a waste of time. Unfortunately it remains a deeply consequential position that isn't just relegated to some fringe. The Republican party has enshrined this belief into a shibboleth that is a practical requirement for admission, as the presumptive leader of the conservative movement uses it as a screening/loyalty test.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
you need to sweeten the pot a little.
What would you suggest? All three I tagged have variously accused of me flagrantly dishonesty, bad faith, and other misdeeds on this particular topic. I would imagine someone who holds that belief would be eager for the opportunity to substantiate it and record it for posterity.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
The facts you describe are indeed what is broadly accepted happened, but it's misleading for you to characterize this as "the sequence of events described by the crazy conspiracy theorists in Georgia" without mentioning the components that render this a remarkable sequence of events for the conspiracy theorists: that they created a ruse to send observers home so that they could pull suitcases full of Biden ballots and scan them multiple times without the observers present.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
onus of proof is not on the losers to provide evidence of illegitimacy, the onus is on election officials to convince the losing party that they lost fair and square.
I agree that election officials have a responsibility to affirmatively defend the integrity of the elections they manage. The problem is that some election skeptics are implacable and immune to evidence. They believe the only legitimate outcome is when their preferred candidate wins, and so they see a loss as presumptive evidence of fraud and they'll work backwards and credulously repeat whatever theory happens to be convenient to their narrative. It's a big problem but I don't know how you're supposed to reason with delusional people.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
I only brought up Giuliani because he was the one who broke the story, and who made the most confident pronouncements about the election workers involved, and who claimed to have a bunch of evidence to prove his allegations. I posit if the claims about "pulling out suitcases of Biden ballots and scanning them multiple times" were true, he was the best positioned to prove them.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
So to loop it back, I said my theory for why Giuliani sandbagged his trial is because he didn't have the evidence he claimed he had. You claimed this was an unreasonable position to hold, but now you're saying that you don't know what evidence Giuliani had? If he hasn't released his evidence outside of court, do you still think it's unreasonable to think the man has been lying about that? At what point would you be willing to accept that explanation?
ymeskhout
2mo ago
That's interesting, how do you know that Giuliani actually had evidence to present instead of just bluffing? Assuming he had evidence, why didn't Giuliani just release the evidence elsewhere? I think the reason he didn't release evidence is because he was lying about having had evidence. Which part of my conclusion do you think is unreasonable?
Lewis2 said they're not knowledgeable enough to get into a debate, so I'm asking if there are other people willing to herald this argument as the strongest 2020 stolen election claim.
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