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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?
one of the replies or sub-replies to this might be a strictly better target for this comment but from reddit to here you've been loudest on the subject. i understand why some people can't see it, i understand why my brother can't see it. he doesn't understand how a person can be deeply cynical and deeply hopeful. i don't blame him for choosing the latter, i don't blame most people. but most people don't come to this place, or places like it, few as they must be. this is a place to say truths, like how your hope has lead you astray. i don't have a strict stance on fraud, i don't know what happened. i know what not to assume, and i can reason from that.
in american politics it is unjustifiable to assert and then operate from a presumption of governance in good faith, ethics, and lawful behavior. ours is a capricious leadership, rapidly shifting between utilitarianism or deontology depending on political utility. there is no enduring standard for ethics, "democracy" or even "constitutionality." what's right is ours, what's wrong is theirs.
key high-population elections districts lack methods of independent hard audit; it is not possible to verify every ballot has a unique corresponding voter.
for (2) it is not possible to verify those districts have not engaged in fraud.
the two previous major american elections saw those key districts experience bureaucratic mishaps and procedural issues the US state department has historically identified as hallmarks of fraud and often thereby used to justify sanctions on foreign states.
american politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, and pundits commonly express (a) earnest belief their oppositions' victory poses a threat to life itself.
for (1; 5) claims of adherence to law in elections are dubious.
owing to the seriousness of the allegations of (5a), if (¬5a) and their expressions are rhetoric and sophistry, claims of adherence to law and ethics in any pursuit may be assumed as the falsehoods of the profoundly antisocial.
(2; 3; 4) if fraud is possible, (1; 4; 5; 6; 7) it is probable.
for all, the burden of proof logically falls on elections officials. elections are presumed fraudulent unless proved authentic.
Most of what you lay out are reasonable concerns. I wouldn't have much criticism if that's where the concerns stopped, but the 2020 stolen election advocates made claims much more specific than just "fraud is possible". Consider the parallel to the "The Dragon in My Garage" from Carl Sagan. There's a dragon in my garage, but you can't ask to see it because it's invisible, and you can't check for breathing sounds because it's silent, and you can't ask to throw flour on it because it's not corporeal, and so on.
Let's say that substantial election fraud in fact happened, does that mean that both parties engaged in it and so it's a wash in the end? No, because said fraud specifically favored one candidate. Ok does that mean that the safeguards we have to prevent this kind of widespread fraud (judges, election officials, journalists, etc.) were able to uncover it? No, because for some reason they all decided to uniformly abdicate their duty. And so forth. The problem is that each successive step gets increasingly implausible and also indistinguishable from just someone who is coming up with rationalizations for why their theory can't be falsified, and so long as they can come up for an excuse, they can remain within the dais of "sure seems fishy".
the first premise of my statement rejects this exact assumption of good-faith governance as unjustifiable. your response was to reassert that assumption without substantiation.
if possible, probable is a statement of expected evidence, i didn't write all that trying to get you to admit fraud is technically possible. it's irrational and to emphasize discursively illegitimate to demand evidence from skeptical outsiders when the system they scrutinize lacks the ability to prove its own authenticity.
we have motive, means, and procedural issues the state itself has historically considered evidence of fraud. this is what i mean by expected evidence. i expect the system is fraudulent and has been fraudulent. if this system can't prove it's authentic, that's strong evidence it's not.
No, I don't have to assume good faith. All I'm asking is for you substantiate your asserted premise. If you're saying that they did abdicate their duties and incentives, it would be helpful to explain why instead of just saying saying so.
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