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2020 stolen election time! There's been some rather big developments with my favorite cute little hobby horse. I haven't had the time to make a deep-dive write-up, but it's has already been extensively reported on elsewhere (e.g. this post by Jacob Sullum). To summarize, Dominion voting systems sued Fox News (and Newsmax, and OAN) for defamation. Dominion has been past the discovery stage for more than a year now but their filings only recently became public and, no way to say this lightly, it's been extremely humiliating for Fox. Tons of text messages from the big names (Carlson, Hannity, etc.) either talking shit about how crazy Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani are, or (especially for Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo) credulously accepting and repeating the stolen election theories.
One especially funny example involved Sidney Powell credulously forwarding an email to Bartiromo from a complete rando claiming they had "Election Fraud Info". In that same email, the anonymous rando claimed that they got their information from their dreams, that the wind tells them they're a ghost, and that Justice Scalia was murdered during a human hunting expedition. As evidenced by the filings she submitted to court, Powell's skepticism faculties appear to be basically non-existent, and the fact that so many people took her seriously at first is a good illustration of the pitfalls of siloed reasoning.
Maybe the most damning revelation of how Fox was operating (from both a legal liability as well as a journalistic ethics perspective) is how they treated their fact-checking process. When Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted on November 12 that "there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised" Carlson texted Hannity "Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke." If Dominion needed to prove the actual malice (and it's not yet clear if they would need to) in a defamation case, they couldn't have asked for better evidence.
There isn't much for me to say that I haven't said before. My operating theory has long been that some people seemed to earnestly believe the crazy theories they were spouting about Hugo Chavez or whatever (e.g. Powell, Giuliani, maybe Dobbs) while many others were just pretending to entertain it because it was in their best financial interests (e.g. Carlson, Hannity, Murdoch, etc.) and the text messages confirm this. To Carlson's credit though, he endured a lot of negative pushback from his criticism of Powell.
I've already done my hand-wringing on how the media seems to love shooting itself in the foot, except it was framed in context of how liberal outlets fucked up the Covington debacle from four years ago. The Dominion lawsuit demonstrates the problem behind audience capture; Fox pundits and reporters had to deal with a credible financial pressure to cater to the crazy fringes of their audience for fear of losing them to their less scrupulous competitors. If so, it would be a demand-side problem. I'm not sure if the problem with liberal media fuck-ups follows the same framework, but I'm open to arguments. My general impression there is that the call is coming from inside the house: liberal journalists too afraid of their fellow cohort to break ranks. I suppose a good test-case scenario would be to see how NYT's current "trans youth reporting controversy" plays out. They obviously already got a severe amount of criticism from the activist fringe, but would a significant portion of their audience care? And if so, where would they go?
One last question: has anyone here changed their opinion on the 2020 stolen election theories?
What was Zuckerberg buying with his $400,000,000 donation to a couple of NGOs administrating US elections under the pandemic? Are we to believe that these NGOs are truly politically impartial? I had a quick look at The Center for Tech and Civic Life board of directors - these do not look like people who'd greatly like Trump or even be evenly split on him. That one of their members is supposedly a Republican is not sufficient - she founded a non-profit management consultancy company! A non-profit based in Chicago - I think it's clear that they're left aligned at the board level and probably employ even more left-aligned people on the rank-and-file level. (edited to make clearer that I think the above non-profit is left-leaning)
I personally believe the US election was rigged. It's already been admitted by the media, they only use the word 'fortified' instead of rigged. I'm sure everyone is aware of that article.
What exactly were these people doing, if not projecting influence and power such that Biden would be elected? Is that not rigging? If you can quietly threaten that there'll be riots, suppression, endless legal warfare, career implications against officials who don't use their leeway to come to the correct procedural/administrative conclusions, is that not rigging? Or perhaps the vast donations to election-administration groups from left-wing billionaires will disappear if the correct conclusions aren't found.
And why would the election not be rigged? It is enormously important to control who is in power in an extremely powerful country like the US. It's like papal elections pre-Reformation. The Papacy was very influential, they had immense wealth and could give out all kinds of sinecures. The College of Cardinals was immensely seedy and corrupt as a result.
Was the media impartial? No, obviously not. Why would the election officials be impartial? There are methods to influence outcomes. The US has a long history of machine politics in urban centres. There's nothing you can easily point to that proves this election was rigged, yet it stands to reason. That we can easily find articles 'debunking' the various claims of election fraud is not sufficient to show that there wasn't election fraud. Nobody would buy a 'debunking' from a bank saying that they did not embezzle user's funds, that it's just misinformation. Or say the CIA debunks the claim that they were involved in regime-change, is that believable? A bank would only admit its embezzlement if it thought it would be revealed anyway, the CIA only admits decades after the event.
There is no trustworthy party that could be relied upon to show that these elections are rigged, or not rigged for that matter. The information environment is so bad we should only operate from first principles. Logically, if the entrenched institutions of the NGO-bureaucracy-media apparatus are opposed to a candidate, they can flex their muscles against him covertly. There is no outside supervisor who can oversee elections in the most powerful country in the West. In a time of chaos and confusion under COVID, the blob has more and better opportunities to interfere than in 2016, when most were very comfortable that he wouldn't win. This time they knuckled down, coordinated and got to work on the fortifications. Dominion might've been involved or it might not. Who knows?
Rigging involves everything from stuffing votes, ballot harvesting, procedural manipulation to media manipulation. A more expansive definition would include education and demographic policies, which do not favor the right. Even a narrow definition is more than satisfied by the 2020 elections with overt media manipulation in the Hunter story and vast opportunities for procedural manipulation. I cannot believe that Zuckerberg's hundreds of millions don't buy him influence.
That Trump's people can't find evidence of election interference only shows they're incompetent and outclassed. This isn't new information! They didn't manage to do much during the presidency, the administrative machinery ran rings around them. They clearly didn't have the necessary influence to get results and impose pressure - in what universe would we expect a weak administration like Trump's to overpower a stronger administrative base in a test of influence and 'prove' that the election was rigged against them?
Good idea! Suppose there's a foreign country with a two party system where each party wins roughly half the time and economic performance and thermostatic effects strongly predict electoral outcomes. Which conclusion does Occam's razor support, that this is a fair competitive system or that it's massively tilted in favor of one party? On which position does the burden of proof lie, that the elections are fair and both parties are pretty good at triangulating, or that they're rigged completely but only so that the party rigging them wins by a small margin half the time?
I'm not sure that the institutional delegitimisation of the Republican Party is old enough to confidently state "each party wins roughly half the time".
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This rebuttal hardly makes sense. Lets say one party can steal 1/10 votes in a metro area. that just gets baked into triangulation. Lets say the media collaborates with portions of the government and a party to shift views in a direction. That gets baked into "triangulation", but even then there can be inflection points, such as the 2020 election which indicate a discontinuity in election results, which is fishy.
Governments are not like people, there is little advantage in giving them the privilege of guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Don't you find is suspicious that election fraud is the only area of the world where statistical and circumstantial evidence are routinely called "no evidence?"
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The parties are secondary, the essence of the administrative/establishment machine is primary. Say that Jeb Bush was elected in 2016 and went on to go up against Biden in 2020. The reaction against him would not be very great as it was with Trump.
The differences between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton exist but are fairly small. Both are from well-connected families, enmeshed in the US political establishment. They espouse basically similar policies on globalization, immigration and an interventionist foreign policy. Trump is the outlier here. He had markedly different desires with regard to globalization, immigration and foreign policy, amongst other things. There was considerable conflict between Trump and the Republican Party, they are not the same thing. The Republican Party wanted Jeb Bush or someone who wasn't Trump.
The parties aren't important as actors in and of themselves, they're more like factions of a large distributed entity. At no point did I say that US elections were consistently rigged against the Republican Party, they've rigged elections themselves. 2000 for example. I say that the 2020 election specifically was rigged against the populist right in the form of Trump. There was a much weaker attempt in 2016, they were much less coordinated and effective in inventing and amplifying nonsense like Russiagate and so on.
Both parties, most of the time, represent the establishment and field tolerable candidates for that establishment. There's no triangulation where it's important, the establishment has their own interests as opposed to the general public. For example: wrecking MENA with pointless wars, wrecking education with stupid policies, wrecking the health system by bad regulations, wrecking the food supply with subsidized corn syrup, wrecking inner cities with pro-crime policies. I suppose you can go all chicken and egg as to who leads who on making it fashionable to blow up MENA countries or introducing stupid fads in education. I believe that the elites lead - they aren't paying the price for the policies they introduce and they have the most media power to propagandize their goals. From time to time they change course, bolstering policing or withdrawing from failed wars. But that's usually only when the failures become spectacularly obvious.
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What the "rigged" narratives claim about the system doesn't necessarily result in one party wiping the floor with the other every time even if it's strongly true. After having been the case for a long time, the machines of both parties adjust to the system and obey the rigger's desires to a much greater extent than they ever do the voters they are supposed to represent. As such, they may continue to trade wins back and forth a normal amount of times, yet somehow never actually enact policies that are strongly desired by their bases.
Say, that sounds an awful lot like what both political parties are actually doing. Even aside from how the Trump phenomenon has affected the Republican side the last few cycles, don't forget how mad much of the Democrat base seems to get that they keep getting standard machine politician candidates like Hillary and Biden for their presidential candidates rather than anyone more exciting.
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