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The States Unfair
The New Republic reports:
This is, to be blunt, not plausible. It's a pretty obviously not plausible. Pennsylvania is not a small state, nor an economically insecure one, nor a state that leans entirely blue in population or businesses. An individual county was able to find sufficient support for New Jersey's booth; Pennsylvania as a whole has much more resources available. There are, in fact, no small number of Pennsylvania businesses that would drool over the opportunity to represent the state in the most Trump-partisan environment possible, including individual businessmen that have outright donated tens of millions of dollars in Trump-partisan funding.
It appears that Shapiro only began asking businesses shortly before ("the governor’s office approached the chamber less than two weeks out from the start of the fair to help get companies involved", "we were asked by Governor Shapiro’s office in mid June") the start of the event, when it had become both much harder and more expensive to act. Not impossible, since I've personally deployed a small business convention booth literally across the planet with less notice, while driving from the ass-end of Pennsylvania to Washington DC is about seven hours, and no international customs. Still exactly what you'd do if you wanted the request to fail, without admitting that you wanted the program to fail. There are individual high school sports teams who could have gotten this done, including fundraising, had they been given the six months Ohio gave out. It's not even clear that the requests were sincere, rather than perfunctory.
And to spell things out: the Chamber of Commerce businesses did not say they did not want to participate, just that they couldn't manage it. Shapiro's explicit words, that the "None were interested," just weren't true.
There's some fun exploration about where this falls from a Bounded Distrust perspective. Shapiro's office put out a 700k USD price tag that's outright laughable if you've done any serious work like this. But it's also since just been falsified by reality. Pennsylvania's senators put out a call for businesses in the aftermath of the initial reporting, and got response and volunteers and an arranged booth immediately, despite the shorter timelines. So it turns out you don't need die-hard Trump supporters; a variety of mining businesses, crayon merchants, construction companies, and a nutrition supplement seller were quite happy to jump in.
But it got a nice slogan:
This is a trivial matter. The Fair seems to be a bit of a joke, the booth in question is a glorified convention stand, the weather means attendance may be lackluster, and few people will remember it in six months.
It's just that Shapiro, one of the moderates with the greatest reason to want to reach out across the aisle and show de-escalatory competence as an administrator, instead believed it more productive to punt on a glorified convention booth and then give an interview to TNR.
And in that interview, he said things that were false, so as to put the blame anywhere else, and people believed him.
The Shallow End of The Betting Pool
PBS reports:
There he goes, making up conspiracy theories about malicious actors responsible for his own run-of-the-mill incompetence.
... there's (weak) photographic evidence, isn't there.
To be fair, damage to the liner would not, on its own, result in the algae bloom. To be charitable to the point of fault, the liner could both be subject to sabotage and poorly applied or requiring early maintenance. The algae blooms themselves are near-certainly downstream of phosphate levels, and while (contrary to the cited expert) it doesn't take a ridiculous bulk of phosphate fertilizer or a long period to cause an algae bloom even in a pool this size, there are a wide variety of other plausible sources of phosphate. Decaying leaves or grass clippings, run-off from people trying to repair a different vandalism, mechanical failures in a filtration system, or use of water which already had phosphate in it are all possible.
It's just hard to tell what the actual situation is, when the New York Times began with Raise Doubts about Trump's claim at the headline, only to not actually find positive contradictions in the documents, and far down in the story to notice a paraphrased:
That seems like at least strong evidence that some vandalism happened, and nontrivial evidence that the vandalism had a larger effect, which quite a lot of media voices are minimizing as a conspiracy theory, just to support claims of incompetence. Which doesn't make Trump's claims correct or the vandalism responsible for the broader problems; it just shows that the NYT's arguments aren't consistent with its own evidence.
But that is, ultimately, just a pool liner.
It's not a question with millions of lives on the line.
The Question With Millions of Lives On The Line
The Lancet published:
A better statistician than I has already gone over the modeling problems, and they're significant:
It's a fun read if you like math, and better than I could write on the statistics side, so I'll not try. Instead, I'm going to hammer the model itself.
Some of the faults are simple and direct. A dose-response analysis is fundamentally taking a different perspective than any attempt to cut inefficient or wasteful spending. Some are more esoteric: many of the countries where USAID has the greatest significance are also those with the least state capacity to measure deaths. Instead, the public data sources are models that themselves use aid-dependent variables to estimate mortality rates. This circularity would just be a statistics problem on its own and explains some of the unusually convenient numbers that the LessWrong article notices, but there's a more critical problem: even assuming the aid-dependent modeling was correct, several of those programs were not stopped, only moved under the Department of State.
The Lancet paper does not actually consider a specific mechanism or group of mechanisms, but the underlying drivers of a significant majority are ART provisioning, and that runs into trouble when not all ART was under USAID to start with, and the parts that were had a waiver by February 2025, if not during the initial cuts and freezes.
Some disruption is plausible in early 2025. A complete cessation is not, and was not when the Lancet paper was published. The nightmare scenario that this paper treats as plausible isn't a genuine situation that could happen because of DOGE or the current USAID closure or extant or currently-proposed program cuts.
My problem here is not that this number is, ultimately, made up and dependent on counterfactuals, just as earlier predictions of 600k deaths were made up and counterfactual. It's not the Lancet's reputation: this is the paper that published Wakefield; it knows what it is.
There's a far more serious issue. These aid programs aren't getting less controversial, and they won't get more widely-supported if USAID floats back under the next administration to fund a stack of random scholarship programs and social events. There's no plausible scenario where putting ART programs under the Department of State results in this catastrophic cut from 2025 to 2030.
There is, however, reason to worry about it in the future.
The State Department itself estimates over 20 million people are getting ART through PEPFAR programs. While there's some fuzziness around the edges if you try to track down how they produce that number, since it's at least in part downstream of reporting by organizations that get money based on the number of treated patients, it's probably not off by 50%. Pulling ART from HIV-positive patients produces corpses within a half-dozen years, with very high reliability. And while it might be nice were the relevant governments able to fund their own people's treatment, a large portion of these countries aren't there and won't be there in twenty years.
((I'll caveat that it's not clear how much impact it would have on new infections; the data is pretty strong for it in individual cases, and very lackluster at population levels. While PEPFAR promotes high rates of testing and ART treatment as an HIV eradication tool, in practice even countries that have hit PEPFAR's 95-95-95 metrics officially have only seen modest reductions in new HIV cases that are hard to isolate from other potential causes. Studies have maxed out around 40% reduction. And, of course, ART as an 'HIV eradication' framework has conflict with 15- to 20-million-plus people who would keep having HIV for forty years even if new transmission went to zero.))
And there are a few other programs with other similar body counts and unsolvable problems. It's a little easier for a marginally-capable government to begin handling its own tuberculosis program than handle bulk orders of ART, but many of these countries are not marginally-capable.
The Lancet study is wrong because that ART rugpull isn't happening, yet. What happens if someone does propose it? What, if any, distinction would readers be able to take, when the Lancet gives a panicked paper worried about the next mass murder? Who's going to care?
Most media coverage focuses hard on the trolley problem: whether cutting funding is equivalent to murder. That's an interesting philosophical question, but it depends on a foundation that's falling out of the basement level: whether people would care even if it were.
Because there's a limit. After the third or fourth time you promise your political opponents are going to commit mass murder on scales previously reserved for the biggest genocides ever recorded, and then in the aftermath, have to revise down to unremarkable numbers, that reputation follows you. And it's going to keep following even if the claimed catastrophe's actual meat does show up. Given that several fudge factors that supported the ART program are starting to fray around the edges, with the HIV eradication framework becoming so clearly unachievable that, or the various financial arguments about it being cheaper to avoid infection running head-first into infections that won't go away, that's a concern that needs to be treated seriously, not rhetorically.
But it's more useful to twist the edges of the truth today, to show how one's political enemies are monsters.
The idea that Trump has done anything wrong ever, in his life, is a baseless, unproven conspiracy theory put out by bad actors with a reckless and wanton disregard for the truth.
This is what some people sound like.
I do sympathise with our own ymeskhout on Trump and his supporters - okay, I grant that certain claims of malfeasance might be false or overstated, but the instinct to defend him, the requirement to defend everything no matter how corrupt or absurd, is profoundly humiliating.
Just making fun of the reflexive, incessant, PBUH-style "without evidence" quoted in one of the linked articles. Like 10+ arrests and police reports in the first few days for attempted or successful vandalism.
FWIW, I think ymeskhout made quite a few good points in his crusade against MAGA election rhetoric, and think he provided an extremely valuable service about it. I still suspect there was quite a bit of fuckery to one degree or another, and would not be surprised if there was an eventual Johnson-style historical conclusion that at least one state was steelman stolen, but there was definitely a shitton of irresponsible claims and rhetoric being thrown around.
To @Bartender_Venator, I generally think @gattsuru is one of the best posters on this site.
I disagree with this in the strongest possible terms.
Personally, I found his approach to discussing the election to be one of the biggest factors in transitioning me from a "I'll be back when woke calms down" Democrat to an actual Republican.
He was a good poster but on the topic of the election he went full Darwin+Lawyer fusion. I watched him to willfully misrepresent people, ignore good points and ignore and reframe to where he had more, he refused to accept the possibility that concerns were in any way valid and so on. He acted like a trial lawyer in court. That can be convincing but it's hollow.*
It was also tremendously inappropriate.
One of the major points I (and others) was making is that this not a situation where you can rules lawyer your way out of it. Democracy requires consensus, you need to be persuasive and to make everyone feel like the elections are free and fair.
You needed to allow audits without complaint and go "see, this was fine" you needed to patch some of the common sense problems with the way the election was run so it doesn't happen again. He refused to engage with these ideas and the Dems refused to do these things and now we have a situation where both side barely accept when they lose and the fabric of our country was hanging on by a thread.
Ymeskhout chose this hill to die and crashed out over it. He was also wrong, but factually and meaningfully.
*And later we know him to be wrong about some matters of fact.
You can't persuade everyone of anything, so this is just the heckler's veto writ large. And your own view can just be flipped, if persuading people is the only measure.
Democracy does require consensus, so YOU (the generic you, not your own personal self) need to be persuasive and to make everyone believe the elections were NOT free and fair. If you cannot convince enough people, then they stand.
See how that works? Republicans pushed for mail in voting when they thought it would help them, then flipped to calling the laws they themselves passed as being unconstitutional (see PA, below), those are not the actions of people trying to build consensus and persuade people objectively that the election was rigged. They are the actions of political partisans seeking advantage.
So they were not persuasive. They failed to persuade the majority the election was rigged. Time and time again expansive claims were walked back. If you want to blame anyone, blame those who claimed they had rock solid proof repeatedly then demonstrated they were untrustworthy. As much as you think Democrats need to persuade you the elections were fair, you also need to persuade them that they weren't. And from Sydney Powell to Rudy Giuliani, to Dan Moul a terrible job was done.
You may be examining this objectively and deciding what would help you trust the process better, but unfortunately many of your fellow travelers were not. So the consensus stood, because your side failed to persuade them.
"Act 77 also had the support of almost all of the Republican state representatives in the Pennsylvania House, including state Rep. Dan Moul, a Republican from Adams County who joined the lawsuit over the mail-in voting law in 2021.
"So my bad. I should've checked the constitutionality of that big bill," Moul says.
Moul is one of 11 Republicans in the state House who are claiming in the lawsuit that the mail-in voting provisions in Act 77 that they voted for three years ago are unconstitutional.
"We pass bills all the time. Do we go back and check every single one to make sure it stays within the confines of the constitution? We'd never get anything done if we did that," Moul says."
Why should we trust Republicans on this matter who vote for a law (because they thought it would help rural turn out and thus Republicans), then "realize" it is in fact unconstitutional and whose excuse is basically: I just voted it for it, I didn't check it was actually in line with the Constitution I was sworn to uphold, right after it becomes a big deal about giving Democrats an advantage? Suspicious isn't it? Almost enough to persuade you that it wasn't anything to do with fairness or election security, just who got the advantage.
And finally. If your argument is that consensus must be reached then:
"Recent polling shows roughly 28% to 36% of the overall U.S. adult population express ongoing doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election"
It was. The majority of people do not believe the election was rigged. They were persuaded. It can't be a requirement to persuade everyone, especially when it becomes a partisan issue. 18% of Americans think the moon landings were faked. 20% think the government is microchipping them. A third of Americans think the FDA has a bona fide cure for cancer they are hiding.
Persuading everyone simply cannot be the standard. And if it were, well your side also failed to meet that standard, significantly more so in fact. That's quite a lot of persuading that still needs to be done for your consensus.
"Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?"
I'm not sure what this has to do with the heckler's veto, which has to do with a 3rd party preventing 1 party from communicating to another consenting party by physically impeding the communication. This seems more akin to a tyranny of the majority kind of thing, which is also heavily misused (since, in a democracy, a majority must be tyrannical sometimes, almost definitionally) and I'm not sure really describes this situation accurately either, though it's more fitting.
Yeah it's maybe not perfect. But if you must convince every single person the election is legitimate, then one person (the heckler equivalent) is able to unilaterally undermine the legitimacy of the election. Much like a single heckler can unilaterally silence a speaker. It's not quite tyranny of the majority either, I agree.
"In discourse, a heckler's veto is a situation in which a party who disagrees with a speaker's message is able to unilaterally trigger events that result in the speaker being silenced."
The issue is that the "in discourse" is a load-bearing portion of what makes the heckler's veto negative. Because discourse is just consenting people talking, rather than imposing their coercive force on others. It makes sense that there are other standards when coercion is involved, and certainly perfection ought never be the standard. I think there's plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree on any value between 50.0000001% and 99.9999999% though.
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In a democracy the response needs to be "sure let's calmly and carefully audit the election results to prove things to you." The response was anything but, and in some ways was catastrophically not that. The Democrats acted in a way that was indistinguishable from how you would act if you did do something wrong.
None of what you wrote changes that fact, and much of the negative state of America in the ensuing years was caused by refusing to act as a basic transparent democracy, presumably because orange man bad.
Secondarily, if your penetration tester reveals flaws, you don't refuse to fix the flaws just because nobody has taken advantage of them yet. That's asinine. Meanwhile we still have California trying to act as shadily as possible.
We've had numerous examples of people acting shadily in elections in America that resulted in jail time, and some major instances of people acting in a way that most people agree was sus.
The refusal of Dems to say "okay we won but let's change things so everyone is more comfortable next time" may be the single most important thing behind the future death of America.
I feel like that might be overstating it, though I have no real strong argument for anything else being a more important thing other than maybe AI being the one most important thing behind the future death of [all nations]. But it's certainly an important point, and I'm not sure why other Dems don't get this, other than hubris, ego, and blindness by hatred. It seems obvious to me that, for my party to be the party that actually deserves to win, it needs to actually be better in some meaningful sense than the other party, and for them to be better in any meaningful sense requires having enough humility to open oneself to attacks of cheating and fraud and other bad things, taking those seriously, and correcting ourselves based on that, especially when they come from our opponents whom we've judged as being evil or whatever. This is abusable, but also, the reverse is also far more abusable.
Though the saying "the way you do anything is the way you do everything" isn't strictly true in every case, I do believe that when it comes to ideological thinking, it's almost always true. The only way we can have any confidence that our proposed policies are truly better than the other guys' proposed policies - instead of merely policies that we've convinced ourselves is better - is by coming to those policies in a humble, self-critical way (necessary, not sufficient, though), which we can only have any confidence we did if we also treat political attacks from our enemies in a humble, self-critical way. The idea of crushing my enemies in order to forward policies that I've genuinely convinced myself is better than the other guy's just because I genuinely consider the other guys evil seems just completely obviously far more evil than that to me.
My pitch here is that the worst about Trump is and always has been the way that people respond to him. The response concerns about elections created an cavalcade of disasters - selling out objectivity and professionalism to oppose Trump, BLM Riots and the inequality in response to Jan 6, accepting the way that tech and public health put fingers on scales (and that includes governmental agencies messing with the election), media collusion, the tremendous failure that was the Biden administration (and the way that the administration should be the biggest scandal in the history of American politics and just isn't). All of these things are about Trump, but second run is the place that most generated some of them.
America in the mind of many isn't really a democracy anymore after that election and I think it's going to be a long time before the loser accepts the results again.
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As did the Republicans as I showed you an example of.
In a democracy run by rationalists with good faith politicians and rational voters, the responses should be "let's audit" I agree. That is not the world we are in. So it is not the response you should expect. Because it is not what Republicans would do in return as they demonstrated perfectly. That is the the framework everyone's actions need to be interpreted within.
But your point was all about the fact that persuading had to be done, not anything beyond that. And Republicans failed at that harder than Democrats did.
And you may well not fix flaws! They might be too expensive to fix or have other trade offs. Remember there are two competing axes of voting legitimacy, maximizing legitimate voters and minimizing illegitimate voters. Those trade off against each other. There is no objectively correct answer. It's a values choice. And within our non-good faith framework, Democrats would be crazy to do anything to reduce turn out even fractionally if they think high turn out helps them. Likewise Republicans would be crazy to do the opposite.
As PA demonstrated, Republicans took an act they erroneously thought would help them, then flipped on it as soon as they discovered it would not. That is the framework our democracy operates within. No-one is operating in good faith. They are all acting for what will help them most. Expecting the Democrats to rise above when Republicans do not is an isolated demand for rigor.
Your good faith framework might be nice (I'd surely prefer it!) but it is not the world we are in and both Democratic and Republican politicians need to act accordingly. And they largely do.
I think you are massively over-estimating the "future death of America" issue here. Democracy will continue, politicians will continue to be conniving rats (in my direct experience of working with national level politicians!) and that the best we can do is set one group of conniving rats against the other such that they broadly even out, by attempting to out connive each other.
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I feel like I see this kind if application of rules-lawyering in a lot of inappropriate contexts, such as interpersonal relationships. As if there were some 3rd party judge or jury observing the proceedings who everyone is trying to convince, rather than the reality that it's just the other person or people who you need to convince. You can't rules-lawyer your way into someone apologizing to you, forgiving you, being grateful to you, liking you, liking someone else, disliking someone else, etc. You need to actually understand what it would take to convince that specific person and do what it takes to do it, including sacrificing values you might hold sacred, if that's what it takes. Or just understand that you can't do the convincing and stop wasting everyone's time and energy.
Though maybe that's my secular atheistic upbringing speaking, and in extremely religious societies where everyone follows the same religion, this rules-lawyering is both effective and healthy. Maybe that's why this tendency to rules-lawyer is so common; our brains might have evolved to survive in extremely religious societies where everyone can appeal to some god or another to convince others.
I find it irritating and honestly sometimes pathetic on the internet (it's almost always not intended, just the rationalist personality style, but it often comes across as "I'm afraid to debate as a debate, so I want to set the exact frame of the argument exactly where my evidence is strongest, declare the win condition which is easiest for me to achieve, then put every burden of proof I can on you, and declare victory if I can claim I keep the 10% of my argument I choose as my win condition"). Note that this is also how ratbetting works, frame control is often much more important than the substance of the bet. It doesn't help that I grew up around lawyers who tended to see that adversarial mode as implicitly a lesser form of lawyering compared to understanding relationships, pragmatics, iterated games, etc. In comparison, trying to "win" a conversation is a little gauche.
What I do understand is that a full debate, where both sides are fully allowed to contest the frame, takes a lot more work on the internet. You have to write instead of speaking, you have to deal with the inherent difficulty of conveying full meaning via posts, and you lack a direct relationship to your audience/interlocutor. Still, people here should recognize the difference between the two, that one is a lower mode than the other, and that winning or losing a rules-lawyering debate really doesn't matter very much unless the specific question of fact is seriously prior-shifting, which it very rarely is.
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