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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25671 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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https://abcnews.go.com/Business/worried-meta-decision-allowing-2020-election-denial-ads/story?id=104985165

So Meta the parent company of Facebook and instagram is now allowing users and advertisers to post claims about election fraud in the last election but not the soon to be held 2024 elections. I’ll lay my cards out here and say I’m personally a skeptic of the claims that the 2020 elections were stolen. I don’t see why that should prevent other people from making such arguments.

But my question for you guys is whether these claims are going to really erode trust in future elections. To me the issue that erodes that trust is that the official government structures never bothered to look into the claims that such fraud might have happened and instead opted for the COVID style full court press of “nobody should bother to take it seriously, and if you do it’s clear that you’re falling for misinformation.” To me nothing erodes trust faster than an official response of “nothing to see here.”

To me the issue that erodes that trust is that the official government structures never bothered to look into the claims that such fraud might have happened

They did though, there were plenty of state level election officials like Raffensperger who went through point by point on at least some of the issues, and many claims literally had their day in court were addressed by the courts. A big problem though was that the election fraud claims were a massive gish-gallop so it was hard both to refute everything, and to take the overall claims of fraud seriously. The people claiming fraud really should have coalesced around one or two of their strongest allegations that 1) were well-evidenced, and 2) could have made a material impact in the results for at least one state.

I’m never moved by people like Raffensperger. If there was fraud, it means he failed! There is an incentive for him to not look closely. And quite frankly, some of the denials that came from his office (at least live — haven’t looked retrospectively) were inconsistent with the truth.

I don’t know there was fraud. My belief is it was impossible to know and unless you had proof Biden needed to become president.

But it was “weird” and we shouldn’t be encouraging “weird” elections. We used to count elections within hours of the polls closing. Why can’t we do that again?

He did have the President—and half the country—telling him it was his job to find the fraud. But of course, it was their job to tell him to find it, so clearly they must have been sandbagging, or they would have convinced him to flip! It’s perverse incentives all the way down.

I think when the hypothesis is tried over and over again, both in and out of court, and no one manages to present a smoking gun, that’s evidence against. Reasoning that one of the suspects had incentives not to cooperate isn’t enough.

But holding him up as proof (ie the guy who oversaw the election is a Republican and therefore it was on the up and up) isn’t the convincing argument people think it is.

It ought to be convincing in that generally Republicans want Republicans to win, and so allowing a plot against Republicans to succeed in a GOO-controlled state is not what we would expect.

Trying to counter that baseline assumption with “but if it happened they’d want to cover it up to avoid blame for the failure” is cope. There was intense scrutiny and if evidence existed it was going to come out in all likelihood, so risking being blamed for a cover up was a bigger danger than uncovering the devious plot by the outgroup.

It ought to be convincing in that generally Republicans want Republicans to win, and so allowing a plot against Republicans to succeed in a GOO-controlled state is not what we would expect.

Only if you consider Trump a neocon, when in reality he is more outsider to the whole political scene than anything.

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