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A massive electoral fraud scandal in Puerto Rico has been revealed in Propublica today.
The TL;DR is that a gang was sneaking drugs into a prison, and exchanging those drugs with addicts in return for votes for the governor (Puerto Rico being one of the few places that lets current jailed felons vote). Federal investigators were planning an indictment against the gang, prison guards involved, and the prisoners who took the deal before orders from above in the upper echelons of government shut it down.
But there's a twist you might not expect, the votes were for the Republican governor and the higher ups who shut it down was the Trump admin. This might be the biggest this you style story yet. Trump is constantly claiming about stolen elections and voter fraud, and yet little evidence has ever shown up. We finally found a massive scheme, and it was a MAGA related plan. There is no direct connection with this plot to Trump or the governor, but the gang leaders did have some personal connections to the governor.
The scheme probably wasn't enough to secure the election (at least not with the inmates alone) as the numbers aren't, but it was closer than you might guess. Thus even with a relatively massive scandal, it probably didn't have a direct impact then but it's interesting how the investigation was spiked.
Erick Erickson (conservative radio host/podcaster) posted something interesting earlier that seems applicable here.
Perhaps Trump's focus on electoral fraud is not motivated by being against fraud, but instead just because he lost in 2020 and can't accept that hit to his ego, the shattering mythology of his victimhood, and that's why they won't push this Puerto Rico case further?
MASSIVE. You know what else is massive?
Oh, look, it's the red flag for bullshit reporting.
Trump getting up to shenanigans with his time machine again.
Seems worth mentioning that the election being referenced was a primary. She went on to win the general by 130k votes, with a 10% lead in the popular.
And they were being bribed to vote for the same party that always wins the prisoner vote?
Wow, that is a lot of effort to daisy-chain tie this to Trump, in spite of not having any evidence.
Fun fact: the walking stereotype author of this piece was a Pulitzer Prize winner for investigating child care scams in Wisconsin, but all of the wiki citations about it go to dead pages.
So this author is an even worse person than I first imagined. Vapes are banned in a lot of places because of a morally panic on popcorn lung. Twitter is telling me they are banned in 60 countries. Let’s just say she contributed a part to causing a ton of lung cancer deaths.
Also a lot of people generally still believe vaping is bad for lung health. It might be worse than no smoker but it’s almost certainly less than 10% as bad as cigarettes.
I would also be curious what gets journalist to write things like these articles. You can read the article and by her own language realize she is writing in a specific style that she knows she doesn’t have the goods. But still rights the article anyway. Is it just needing a paycheck?
I don't accept this reasoning. It implies that every imperfect politician with any authority beyond a city, and certainly every politician with policies you don't like, is the equivalent of a mass murderer.
Normally, doing things which lead to unnecessary loss of life is bad because that's only possible through malice or negligence. If you're dealing with millions of people, though, that's no longer true and everything you do contributes to deaths. Our intuitions don't scale up to situations where ordinary decisions cause loss of life.
She wrote an article that vaping is poison. If she wrote the article with the same journalistic integrity as this article then I believe it’s fair some of the deaths fall on her.
If you shit on the commons then when the commons are bad you have some responsibility for the commons being bad. Her culpability though would depend in my view significantly on her intent. Did she write the article wanting click-baity outrage porn that was poorly sourced or did she write the article believing she was informing the public.
I would put writing an article that has direct correlation to people smoking more cigarettes as a very shitty thing to do if the article on vaping was poorly sourced. It would have a very logical path to people die more of lung cancer.
Writing an anti-vaping article only leads to lots of people dying because the article is seen by lots of people and the small chance of each one dying adds up. Adding this sort of thing up is exactly the problem--it turns a minor issue into a major one simply because it is being done on a large scale. And if we allow that into our morals, it becomes impossible for any human to do things on a large scale because everything has a tiny chance of death that can add up.
(Also, I am skeptical that she's causing many deaths anyway. People would decide to stop vaping not by reading one article, but by a cumulative set of experiences of which the article is a tiny part, and her contribution to those deaths has to be divided by the total number of anti-vaping things the person saw, weighted by their influence.)
In this case Vaping is illegal in a lot of places. Chicago they are fairly hard to buy and when I’ve bought one I believe it was illegally.
I have no problem with people doing things in good faith but being wrong. That will happen. Judging by the article shared today I do not believe she is a good faith writer.
Small things definitely need to count for morality. The commons depend on a lot of people doing small things morally. Like not littering. Not stealing $5 items at Whole Foods. Small theft adds up to a percentage of shrinkage which then makes everyone else pay more.
The issue is small things that have huge effects because a lot of people are involved. A $5 theft is small. A $1000 theft is a lot bigger. A "$1000 theft" which causes 100000 people to lose 1 cent worth of their time each should not be counted the same as stealing $1000 in a lump sum.
On a normal scale, "I did something which cost a thousand lives, but it was a mistake made in good faith" is not considered to be a valid excuse (especially if you knew in advance that a mistake would be lethal, and especially if you've made such mistakes often). If you really think that causing a loss of a statistical thousand lives is like causing that loss directly, you can't justify adding an exception for good faith.
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My take is that they get the idea for an article, research it, then write out their idea (regardless of their findings). That's very different from finding an interesting topic, researching it, then writing out their findings (regardless of their initial idea).
For example, Machine Bias could've come about like:
I am more referencing how do they sleep at night. To write an article that misinforms to this extent (unless she really does have quality off-record research).
This article on Puerto Rico seemed written by a lawyer to say bad things about Trump without crossing a line that would be defamation
No bad tactics, only bad targets, maybe? That's pretty much #2
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Personally I don't take the stance that we can only trust the official word of the state, tons of important stories come out precisely because people are willing to leak things but don't want to immediately destroy their careers.
Careerists not wanting to upset their upcoming boss spike indictments that they worry would upset him. And accordingly they were right, when the Trump admin took place they did exactly that and forced the story down.
The average government worker cares for their job first and foremost obviously. It's the same way that the Trump admin can't get many of the careerist lawyers to sign onto political prosecutions, because they care about their future careers. They're perfectly happy to sit back and do nothing.
Taking a group that votes you and bribing even more people in the group to.vote for you is actually still bad.
Considering the careerist lawyers rightfully predicted the investigation would be stalled and decided to drop the case early to prevent further backlash, it doesn't seem like Trump is excited to latch onto this example of election fraud.
Damn she's got a really experienced career exposing all sorts of corruption and issues! Lead battery factories in Africa, tabocca industry influence in South America, benefit fraud, fuck ups during undercover law stings, a wet wipe company in Wisconsin selling tainted products, tainted alcohol products in Mexico.
Quite an impressive resume.
On the other hand, such things are literally impossible for anyone other than the author of the piece to interrogate. Even if they, personally are telling the truth, there’s the issue of how many people actually agree with that statement, whether or not the information is first hand or just rumor, whether or not the person was knowledgeable about the phenomenon to really understand what they saw or thought they saw. All of that is acting upon the rather charitable assumption that these people are just concerned about the truth, when it could be all kids of things: not liking their job or boss, seeking notoriety, Believing that the wrong political party gained from this, etc. We literally cannot check; we have no answers to any of those questions.
By contrast, even though the official statements of the government are biased, we at least have some idea of what they know, where it comes from, what they are like, and what biases they have. The AG of Puerto Rico is known, he has a party affiliation that we know about, ambitions we know about, a past history we know about. It’s not something we have to guess at, he or she is a public figure whose name and history we have in front of us.
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Granted, it's a Wikipedia article so probably needs a hell of a lot more depth to the bare statement, but the Mexican alcohol one made me laugh. Good God, young adult goes on sun holiday and overdoes it on the boozing and happy fun times, leading to tragic death? I mean, it is sad, but it happens all the time (even without tainted alcohol). We'll be coming up to summer sun foreign holidays time soon over here and in a few more months post-exam time (in Ireland), and I guarantee you there will be stories in the media about 18-20s year olds dying or getting into serious accidents in mass-market holiday resorts abroad, often involving drink (over-consumption of). Sadly, there is little or nothing "mysterious" about that death.
If there is a need to write a story about "clubs trying to entice you in with 'drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence' promotions can afford this because they sell paint stripper as alcohol" then it's a public service, but it's hardly Watergate-level investigative journalism.
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It’s possible all the “anonymous” sources are being done in good faith……..but it’s also how we spent 10 years in the Iraq War. It was the exact strategy he would do go on the MSM selling the WMD for war. It’s still essentially toilet paper because liers user this tactic too.
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No, that's the story journalists tell about themselves. More commonly, it's the method used to launder libel so as to protect the journalist from lawsuits.
This is pure speculation.
This is the sort of weasel-wording you have to learn to parse when reading the news. Was told by "a supervisor" (Why not name the supervisor?). "To take the case no further". Further than what? The vote fraud stuff had already been dropped. A normal phrasing there would have been to "not go back to the old stuff" or something. And why? There's no discussion of the actual evidence that the vote buying even happened. Choosing to prioritize resources on easily provable drug offenses is very common. That's the case for most people in federal prison for "drug" charges.
Also worth noting, because it's much more pertinent, but this was soon after González-Colón took office, and she has much more direct relevant and influence over an unimportant province like PR. But "territorial governor possibly implicated in vote buying scheme" wouldn't have this article doing rounds like tying it to Trump does.
This is unbearably naive, and just embarrassing to say about PR.
Sure. But right off the bat, it seems more probable that it would have been an inducement to vote in the first place, again, if indeed this even happened.
Again, this is pure speculation. Do you honestly believe that Donald Trump is particularly invested in the local primary politics of a territory? I know the guy gets autistically fixated on random shit, but I can't recall him ever caring much about PR. And while the governor loves him, the article itself mentions it's a very one-sided obsession.
There are much simpler explanations for this, again, assuming it even happened. I suppose we'll see if he says anything about it. I give high odds that if he does, it's something bombastic and vague in support of the governor just because she says nice things about him.
There was that entire arc involving a branded garbage truck, but I'm not sure that is indicative of deep political ties to the local leadership, or just riffing on the news cycle.
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Ok this alone makes me think you're disconnected from the world. The average government worker, like the average worker, doesn't give a shit about "the mission". They want to go in, do their job, get paid, go home. They aren't there for pleasure and passion, they're there to make money. Some people may find joy in their job, but it is a job at the end of the day
Most people will not rock the boat in order to "do what is right".
Trump seems to care a lot about election integrity! He's constantly talking about fraud, and yes while it is Puerto Rico this would be one of the largest cases of election fraud in the US in modern times. This would be a great way for him to push for his SAVE act and try to limit mail in voting.
Well like yeah, let's be honest. Everyone knows, even many of his strongest conservative supporters like EW Erickson, that Trump is just salty over losing. He doesn't care about election fraud, he probably doesn't even truly believe it that much. He would use this case as a tool if it benefited him, but acknowledging that election fraud is being used for Republicans doesn't.
I'd broadly agree, but I would also say it applies to the post-2024 Democrat voters who couldn't believe Harris lost and spun up their own stolen election conspiracy theories, complete with "voting machines hacked" (after years post-2020 declaring the machines were super-secure and couldn't be hacked) and the same general run of complaints Trump had used. So Trump saying 2020 was stolen because (A, B, C) was all lies, but 2024 being stolen because (A, B, C) was the solid truth. These and these aren't even the true nutjobs holding that view.
Everyone is salty about losing. Even the 'official' explanation that Hillary and Kamala lost because Sexism Misogyny Racism White Supremacy Christian Nationalism is being salty that "no, your candidate there wasn't good enough" is the real explanation.
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I think I may have completely misinterpreted you there as "care first and foremost about the ostensible purpose of their jobs". My bad.
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