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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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