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Notes -
I admit I don't understand your meaning of weakman. I tried to sketch out how to define the term a while ago and Julian Sanchez's description seems the most fitting:
I don't see how weakman would fit for TTV unless I'm using them to somehow make a claim about all stolen election allegations. I'm not doing that and I already said that would be an invalid argument.
As Dean says, you are totally doing that and have done that a lot in the past -- nobody is interested in TTV per se, they are interested in whether the election is fraudulent. What purpose does it serve to restrict discussion to TTV?
Anyways, if you want to talk about TTV I can say that I have substantial experience with exactly the kind of analysis that they claim to have performed with the mobile data -- IMPO what they claim to have done is completely technically feasible, and the various deboonking articles I've seen on the topic seem either ignorant of the realities of that technology or quite dishonest themselves.
This doesn't really say anything one way or the other about the quality of that analysis -- as I said, TTV is not very transparent in their methodology, and it would be easy to get incorrect results out of such datasets via either malice or blunder. I can't say anything about the truth value of what they've done without seeing their work.
That's what I think of TTV -- about the same as what I think of those who are trying to discredit them. Which is not much, and not really a very interesting discussion to have if you ask me.
I've already said upthread: my interest here is wanting to avoid time-wasting Gish gallops and motte-and-bailey diversions, because an unfortunately common rhetorical trick used by some when they encounter arguments inconvenient to their position is to try and change the subject.
And also: The reason I included that disclaimer was explicitly to avoid Gish galloping or similar distractions when discussing specifics. The scenario I have in mind is someone who believes that the 2020 election was stolen comes across the TTV claims I've made, but is frustrated because they realize they can't substantively rebut them. They're reluctant to admit that out loud, because they see arguments as soldiers and believe that conceding TTV to be liars will further erode their overall claims about the 2020 elections. Accordingly, their only viable response is evasion; doing everything possible to avoid discussing TTV directly, and instead preemptively changing to a different subject they believe to be more defensible.
If you're not interested in TTV that's cool! You don't have to comment! If you want to start a thread called "Why the overall 2020 stolen election claims are still valid even though TTV specifically has admitted they have no evidence of it" you're welcome to do so!
Or I can respond in this thread! I can post wherever I want, it's crazy!
You seem to think that people who disagree with you in these matters should just submit to whatever form of discussion you think works best for your arguments -- why would they want to do that?
If you think somebody is Gish galloping, you don't need to respond to them either -- what's with this need to control the conversation?
Why are you so concerned about “controlling the conversation” instead of engaging on the object level or simply blowing the OP out of the water with great evidence from some other source.
I don't have a strong opinion on the specifics of what election fraud may or may not have occurred in 2020, but I think substantial security and transparency improvements need to be made in the future or else this whole mess will happen again.
People shaping the discussion as though they are conducting a cross-examination is not helpful in this regard, nor for the general discourse in this place -- why shouldn't I push back?
On the contrary, more people rigorously examining claims and evidence would solve this mess quite rapidly, given the clear lack of actual evidence for the claims made of any significant fraud.
You can never have enough security and transparency to keep people who don’t sufficiently care about evidence and careful reasoning from believing what they want.
Maybe so, but last I saw surveys indicate that a large-ish majority of Republicans and a substantial minority of Democrats believe that some amount of fraud probably occurred in 2020 -- even if no fraud whatsoever in fact occurred, changes to procedures (and the extent to which existing ones are followed) are required to reverse this trend. Note that this has nothing to do with 'claims' nor 'evidence' -- even if no fraud occurred, there's a widespread perception that it could have -- which is not something that is compatible with a functioning democracy.
My own opinion is that there is a tiny amount of deliberate fraud in every election everywhere, and a larger amount of dubious, if honestly mistaken, decisions, e.g. a returning officer in one area may only accept ballots with clear postmark, another one elsewhere may take blurry postmarks, and a third may say even if there's no postmark that's fine. Which of these, if any, is fraud? Are the blurry ballots in the first district being deliberately vote restricted? Are the no-postmarks in the third fraud?
The polarisation around Trump just makes the problem even worse.
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Trust in institutions is down generally and with elections certain forces are trying to hurry that along when they don’t like the results.
I used to work in one aspect of election security and I agree with you here overall, I’m just trying to be realistic about how much perception can be improved when strongly motivated reasoning is in play.
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Lots of people thinking vaccines are dangerous means we should let Bill Maher dictate childhood vaccination schedules to doctors, because it would make people feel safer?
After loudly asserting falsehoods and assembling a critical mass of believers of said falsehoods, the purveyors of fantasy demand in the interest of social cohesion, that we coddle them.
No.
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