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Notes -
I know we've discussed voting policies at length, but something I keep returning to mentally is how it ever became an acceptable norm to implement mass mail-in ballots. Republicans (especially Trumpy ones) go on and on about susceptibility to fraud, and I certainly think there's something there, but it's not even my real objection. Even if you implement a system that I think incontrovertibly filters out all examples of identity fraud in voting and manage to get a full 1:1 match between the name on the ballot and the voter, I will still think that mass mail-in voting is an inherently corrupt system. The secret ballot is of such importance that it is enshrined in multiple international law settings; not that long ago, without the current valence of mail-in voting, I think I could have gotten almost everyone to agree that removing the secret ballot in favor of "assisted" voting inherently increases opportunities for coercion and vote-buying. Once we include ballot-harvesting, where low-propensity voters are "assisted" by people from campaigns, this is unmistakably a serious weakness to the traditional concept of secret ballots, with ample opportunity for intimidation, coercion, vote-buying, or using the mentally incompetent.
What puzzles me isn't so much why my opponents have decided that having people go door-knocking to collect ballots is a very important civil right, but why I don't really see anyone from the broader right arguing against this as a form of corrupt machine politics. Instead, they harp on about fraud, which might be a real concern, but is hard to prove and can't be scaled up the same way as sending political operatives around to do now-legal corruption. Why is there no organized campaign on the right to restore the secret ballot?
You hear it a lot as a Motte among intellectual conservatives, but it gets wildly drowned out by the Bailey of whackadoodles screeching about voting machines that changed votes* from Hackers in Venezuela or something like that.
I've spoken locally to my Republican party committee and elected reps that their election advocacy should focus more on "2020 was a weird time, it lead to a weird election, let's get back to normal..." than "2020 was actively illegally stolen." There was no appetite for it. It's hard to read whether they are all true believers (I doubt this) or if they worry that signaling less than true belief will lead the base to eat them alive. But the result is the same: the GOP is too focused on allegations of "Actual" election fraud to worry about the procedural stuff.
*I want to be clear here: I interact with people on a daily basis who told me throughout 2021 that Trump was still the president, that he had secretly written a memo that passed all presidential powers to the Military (it is not clear what is meant by this? The JCS? The DoD? Some individual general?) and so it never was given to Biden, and that any day now (in July/August/September/etc) the dominos were going to fall. When I refer to the voter fraud bailey, I mean those people, who are vastly more numerous than motte users generally. If you don't believe insane things like that, but do believe in some degree of voter fraud, quite simply I am not referring to you when I use the term whackadoodles.
My big thing with voting machines is why the hell is their firmware/software NOT open source? That shit is what fuels the conspiracy theorist in my head. At this point, I want to be dying peoples thumbs blue or whatever the fuck they do in Africa, because there are just too many inconsistencies for me to be comfortable.
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I've been wondering lately to what extent the whackadoodle ideas are being deliberately seeded as a tool to discredit more cogent complaints.
I realize that this sounds fairly whackadoo itself, but there seems to be a bit of a pattern with recent government actions that might reasonably be criticized:
Mandatory vaccination as an infringement on civil liberties --> "Bill Gates/5g/microchips"
Unauthorized Chinese spy-balloon overflights --> "I'm not saying it's aliens..."
Inadequate/bungled wildfire response + possible manual arson by crazy people --> "Jewish Space Lasers!"
Unprecedented and technically illegal changes to election procedures --> "Dominion/Italian satellites/German servers changing vote tallies"
and so on...
I just now notice that most of these involve space vehicles of some sort -- is it a tell, or am I whackadoodling?
I think it’s an attention getting strategy along the lines of some of the crazier PETA stuff. If you’re not getting attention, nothing else matters. And like it or not, crazy gets attention. If people weren’t talking about 5G nanotubes or whatever, the question of mandatory vaccination would have been a minor issue.
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Yes but no IMO.
I think they are seeded, but not as a tool to discredit cons. They are probably seeded by people with a financial interest in creating a media sphere distinct from reality; so people get locked into the conspiratorial universe where Hilary Clinton isn't a made-man venal corporatist stooge but a literal satanic pedophile blood drinker.
The same exists on the left; from tankies and such who aren't content with the boring Marxist critique of capital and has to make the further leap that rich people and the US personally crush third worlders in wine presses for entertainment.
It's the same everywhere and forever 99% of the time 100% of the time: there is no grand conspiracy or narrative; there are individual actors reacting to market forces attempting to maximize profit and therefore coordinating with no coordinator.
I think that is why a lot of these dudes that I am familiar with on the left conspiratorial media sphere spend no time at all attacking Trump/Desantis/the Reps; and all of their time and energy attacking AOC/ "Elites"/ the Dems: because they aren't primarily trying to steer politics. They are trying to lock their audience in by providing a unique product; so their main competition isn't the right, it's the left.
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I knew people who were repeating 5g nanotechnology bill gates sterilization vaccines back when the public’s view of antivaxxers was still hippies with scented candles and children with misspelled names. There might have been some amplifying of narratives going on, but I highly doubt that particular constellation of ideas came from the government.
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It seems very possible. Though the fertile soil for growing your own Dale-Gribbles is pre-existing, I've noticed a strong personality type among the conspiracy theorists in my life. There's a natural tendency in any extremist community to play "more extreme" as a trump card, so it wouldn't be hard to play into this tendency by offering ever more extreme stories.
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This is likewise what I've tried to encourage in people around me. I frankly think 2020 was a complete mess, but also think that it would be best to let bygones be bygones and give my opponents an easy intellectual out that doesn't rely on them needing to admit to any sort of malfeasance. They may not want to reform elections to improve security (although some might), but the above framing is much, much harder to push back vigorously against than the whackadoodle stuff.
On the whackadoodle note, the guy that really summed it up for me the most was a helpful guy at my gun club. Nice guy, good dude, set aside some time to help me figure out what the hell was wrong with the sighting on my rifle (turns out the scope rings were genuinely awful, needed to be lapped). This was back in mid-November of 2020, and we naturally got to talking about the election, and he was absolutely convinced that not only did Trump legitimately win, but that he was definitely going to figure out a way to prove that he'd been cheated and would remain in office. When I asked how he figured that was going to work out, his eyes narrowed, he got a very knowing look, and simply replied, "He hasn't been wrong about anything yet". I'm basically on this guy's side, but I really have no idea how to reply to that. Trump? The guy that we've all been watching? That guy hasn't been wrong about anything? Well, fuck me, I guess we're about to be in for a wild ride was my thought pattern, and you know what? I haven't been wrong yet.
My West-Wing type fantasy scenario would be the GOP leadership of 2020, including Trump and Mitch McConnell, getting up and doing a collective press conference where they said something like what an NBA team says after a playoff series where their best player tore his ACL. "Hey, we lost under the rules, but those rules were weird, the whole thing was weird. Maybe some portion of our base refused to leave the house? We'll accept the result, but we will win it next time when the rules/situation aren't weird."
I forgot to note in my first comment, the local GOP is also very heavily trying to get people to vote by mail. So part of the reason they aren't turning against Mail-Ins is because doing so causes their own people to refuse to vote by mail, which loses you some votes relative to the Democrats who encourage Mail-Ins. Even people who really do plan to vote in person forget, or get there and the line is too long, or get sick, or whatever. Where that same person might have remembered to vote by mail. So unless you can change the rules with your current elected officials, opposing mail in voting will cost you votes on election day right now.
I couldn't have phrased that any better.
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