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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.
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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