ymeskhout
2mo ago
If there's no hard evidence then it makes the weakmanning accusations even more baffling.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
If the strongest claim from people who believe the election was stolen is that "some fraud is happening" then there's nothing for me to disagree with.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
So, no harm, no foul? Government abuse is fine so long as the person persevered in any case?
No. You made a claim that the FBI tried to intimidate him into silence but provided no citations for this assertion. I googled his name to see if I could find this evidence of intimidation on my own and instead the first thing that popped up was the Amazon link to his book with hundreds of favorable reviews. Both the high SEO listing and the number of reviews are contrary to the claim that he was intimidated into silence, and since I haven't seen evidence to the contrary, I'm forced to conclude that whatever attempts that may have been made (which again, hasn't been established) were inconsequential. If they did try to intimidate him into silence, that's very bad even if it was unsuccessful, but the intimidation would be far worse if it was successful.
I would at a minimum be subject to the smears of people far more powerful than I am and who would be motivated to deny any wrong doing.
I appreciate you outlining the reasons why you were averse to reporting what you saw. Do you have any reasons to believe that TTV would have felt similarly stymied? Their work received extensive media coverage and widespread endorsements from powerful figures with deep pockets. If TTV is inadequately equipped to do something about the fraud they claim to have uncovered, is there anyone who is?
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Your original claim remains pointlessly ambiguous because you can argue you're technically correct whether the drop in incarceration was either -100% or -1%. If you're describing what happens to the "common criminal", what's your definition of that class? What portion of criminals? How common is this experience? How many people need to be released without bail for this to be considered "common"? How many charges need to be quietly dropped for this to be "common"? It's such a vague claim to make.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
You made a claim about "common criminals". Are you implying that the 2 million people currently behind bars are by definition "uncommon"?
ymeskhout
2mo ago
Assuming arguendo that voting fraud is possible because there aren't enough safeguards, I don't see how that gets us to 1) fraud did not cancel itself out and instead favored a particular candidate then to 2) the one-sided fraud was significant enough to affect results 3) the fraud remained undetected despite significant efforts to uncover it.
If someone just wants to argue that fraud is possible, I'll take whatever I can get, but I'm looking for the strongest possible claims.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
Nah, I'm thrilled by the most perfunctory of acknowledgements from anyone holding a position weakly. I rarely even get that much of a morsel.
ymeskhout
3mo ago
I have no idea what you're referring to about my "intuition" that "Alex Jones would do something like this". Do what? Where are you getting this from?
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Seems pretty disingenuous to call it “voluntary” when the nigh-certain alternative was an even worse court-imposed judgment.
Why do you think the prospect of a worse court-imposed judgment was nigh-certain? Do you believe it's disingenuous to label voluntary any lawsuit settlement? I'm assuming the RNC is not a mom & pop business whose legs start shaking at the sight of a legal document. They had the resources to litigate the allegations and chose not to, I'm assuming because the chances they had a meritorious defense was dim.
Yeah, surely the prior three decades of forced atrophy had no effect on their ability to effectively discover and root out such things. Two years should be more than enough to get them up to speed! Not to mention that they obviously extensively raised the issue in 2020, their next earliest opportunity, much to your oft-voiced chagrin.
Right, we're back in familiar unfalsifiable country. If the RNC lose on an issue it's not because it wasn't meritorious but rather because the RNC is perpetually helpless and unable to defend its interests against an onslaught of relentless attacks. These types of excuses can be self-soothing as a coping mechanism, but they're not very persuasive to other people.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
I apologize, I misread your prior comment as claiming I was retreating a bailey position.
Your CIA exercise is a good attempt at trying to steelman a strong-version of the stolen election claims. Another possibility I wondered about is some sort of a decentralized conspiracy of sneaking in as many operatives (most likely an election activist) into positions of election authority. After that, I don't know how that would be accomplished or what they'd be able to do without getting caught.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
Is the reason this case so bad based on the fact that the charges have never been pursued before, or is there also an affirmative defense of the alleged fraud?
I think a lot of the support for dramatic fraud theories comes from people recognizing that something is badly wrong, and defaulting to the scripts that society and the media have provided them for what "wrongness" looks like.
This is likely the interpretation with the highest amount of charitability I'd be willing to co-sign on. But I do have a quibble about "the FBI really did break the law to illegally spy on an opposition candidate", are you talking about Trump? Edit: I got confused and forgot you were talking about 2020 instead of 2016, so I don't know what you're referring to here.
He walked back his claims about his campaign being wiretapped, claiming he didn't mean it literally. He said "I used the word ‘wiretap,’ and I put in quotes, meaning surveillance, spying you can sort of say whatever you want" and also that his allegation wasn't really based on any actual evidence but more on "a little bit of a hunch". His DOJ confirmed in a court filing they had no evidence of wiretapping.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
ymeskhout
2mo ago
I appreciate that you took the time to answer but I've read what you said multiple times and I can't identify anything actionable. What exactly is my argumentation style and how exactly would it give someone the subjective experience that I'm lying? What is the specific way I'm approaching this topic and how does it stymie people who disagree with me? It would help if you illustrated your concerns with specific examples of things I've said, and ideally offered suggestions on alternative ways I could convey myself.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
That metaphor doesn't make sense because I don't know what innocent/guilty is supposed to map to for Giuliani. I'm saying that Giuliani is lying when he claims to have evidence, and whether or not his court procedure was messed up (citation needed) doesn't affect his ability to release his purported evidence outside of court. There's no reason for me to default to assuming he's telling the truth.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
But what convinced me that there was more than the usual fraud (over and above election rules changes) going on was the whole Georgia water main thing.
Rudy Giuliani had the perfect opportunity to present evidence of his claims when he was sued by the Georgia election workers for defamation, but he instead sandbagged and stumbled towards a default judgment. I think he acted that way because he knew he had no defense against defaming them. Do you think my conclusion is unreasonable?
ymeskhout
2mo ago
What do your examples have to do with whether or not TTV is lying? Your post is ambiguous so as best as I can tell (please correct me), you're not disputing that TTV was lying or that they've hoodwinked millions of people, but offering an explanation for why certain demographics would be susceptible to gullibility. Dissecting the reasons behind the gullibility is an interesting topic for sure, but it seems downstream to my argument about whether or not TTV was lying/grifting.
ymeskhout
3mo ago
You're right that the sentencing data does not necessarily reflect pretrial detention, but you're not giving me any other data to fill those gaps. The article you linked doesn't cite how many were held pretrial or for how long, but I would assume a high positive correlation between pretrial detention and sentence severity because that's how it works in practice. As of May 2021 70% of J6 defendants had been released pre-trial compared to a release rate of 25% for all federal defendants, which makes sense given the unusually high number of federal misdemeanor prosecutions.
As far as I can tell, Ray Epps is heralded as an unusual case because he plead guilty to misdemeanors (so did 40% of other J6 defendants), served no jail time (so did 37% of others, likely significantly higher if you count only misdemeanors), and was not detained pretrial (so did 70% of others). I don't see what is unusual about any of these factors. I know working with data can be hard, but maybe it can be instructive if you can cite a single example of a J6 defendant who languished in prison for weeks for far less egregious behavior than Ray Epps, because I don't know the evidence behind your claim.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Maybe I overlooked something, but where does the edited Veritas video show the NPR exec stating they won't let a donation influence their coverage?
ymeskhout
2mo ago
Not to completely dismiss your talents but I think the biggest factor that made you money was being lucky enough to find someone willing to put up cash on something so bonkers.
Taibbi has no credibility with me. His reporting on the Twitter Files appears accurate enough but he gets indignant when you point out the obvious conflicts of interest of him tailoring his criticism of Twitter to avoid saying anything bad about its new owner. My conclusion from back then was "Taibbi feels constrained from criticizing Musk because Musk is too valuable a source" and the dude just voluntarily tweets out his text message to Musk admitting this. He exhibits very selective curiosity about the stories he covers, stopping short of what becomes inconvenient to his narrative. If his sources are accurate about the declassification of this surveillance report, why doesn't he just get the report itself instead of bizarrely reporting on the number of inches of the binder it's contained in.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
I'm not familiar with what you're referring to. As best as I can parse, victims distributed across different places and time is much easier to ignore than a dramatic single event where hundreds perish at once.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
Yes this is true, a TWA 800 cover-up is materially much more difficult on a dimension beyond just the number of conspirators you'd have to pay off or cajole.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
There's nothing unreasonable about having suspicions or drawing conclusions based on insufficient evidence. I think it's very likely that Navalny was murdered, but I also have the awareness to admit that I cannot prove to any satisfying degree. That's perfectly ok! If someone has a suspicion about 2020 but cannot prove it, the honorable thing to do is just admit that instead of pretending to hold a well-grounded conclusion.
Right, I've repeatedly identified the motte-and-bailey tactic of making bombastic fraud-fraud claims about Dominion Voting or whatever but then shifting towards the weaker "the election was unfair" position when pressed for evidence on the initial claims. I don't want to tip the scales here and it's why I'm asking people to volunteer what they believe are the strongest claims worthy of attention. If someone wants to claim that the strongest argument in favor of the stolen election is the attempted suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story then that's fine and I'll take whatever I can get, but that's conceding the more dramatic claims as indefensible.
Again, I've been repeatedly accused of dishonesty and weakmanning on this topic, and I'm trying to do everything I can to facilitate them making their case that it's a valid allegation instead of a baseless smear.
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