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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.
I would certainly agree with that!
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