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Notes -
It’s not “trust us”
It’s “where’s the evidence to confirm the suspicions”
There was intense scrutiny of this election. Plots leave evidence. Extraordinary claims were made.
You can ignore the narrative and simply examine the cases.
Pattern recognition is great until it becomes immune to counter evidence or ceases to even require supporting evidence.
I get the same feeling and employ nearly the same responses when I deal with the right on elections or the left on systemic racism. So much smoke, so little fire.
With Russiagate, there was a lot of smoke and some actual fires, just not any fire that matched the level of rhetoric about Trump himself. So the left was wrong to overhype it as a bonfire, but the right is wrong to pretend that the level of coziness Trump officials and associates had with certain Russians was unprecedented, inappropriate, and in some cases illegal. Republicans used to recognize the threat from Russia and I miss those days.
And I'm saying it's a futile game to play at this point - to 'produce evidence' that would be inevitably rejected by arbitrary standards that align with political convenience. I agree that evidence for fraud is lacking, and I'm also of the opinion that no quality or quantity of evidence would matter, either. I could no more produce evidence for election shenanigans than I could for whatever Hillary Clinton may have been up to after she Bleachbit her files, yet I find it perfectly reasonable to assume she's a crook because of the nature of her transgression, regardless if I can't find the evidence that was deliberately destroyed or withheld.
My issues with the election have more to do with last-minute changes to rules and procedures, specifically with regards to mail-in voting. But I recognize that because these changes were officially approved by local governments and are therefore 'legitimate', I have no standing to complain. I also know it has a plausible defense in COVID safetyism, so I really can't push against it without seeming like a callous asshole. But at the same time, said safetyism was also of their own making, and it increasingly looks like they had no idea what they were doing or its potential consequences while they forced their decisions through anyway. And while US political media has always been a circus, their conduct during Trump's presidency rose to the level of mentally poisoning the electorate IMO - to the point where I seriously question the legitimacy of democracy when in its inputs are perverted in such a fashion. I don't think it works (at least to my satisfaction) when the media engineers half the country into believing the president is a Nazi and Putin's puppet.
Some people seem to think all of that is just kind of a backdrop for the real meat and potatoes discussion of election legitimacy; like vote counts. To me, it is the primary thing. The background is the foreground. Whatever process is borne from it is tainted with it. Whatever procedural fuckery may or may not have happened in the aftermath, I can't really asses because I am reliant on institutions I can trust in order to parse them. They revealed themselves untrustworthy, and now all I can do is shrug in suspicion. And that's what it is: a suspicion, that I will probably have for all my life, but won't actually do much with. It's certainly not a high-ranking factor in my 2024 decision making.
I feel like people are trying suss out legitimacy with data tables, tabulations, rulers and metrics. Those aren't worthless, but I think what seals the deal is a magic trick: doing a good job and not deeply alienating your political opposition. In a world where Biden is addressing the border crisis, not mindlessly going along with LGBTQ politics, not selecting an idiot for VP, and speaking more like he did in 2008 than he does now, nobody is harping about his vote counts. People broadly would have moved on. Counterintuitively, the obsession with proving MAGA dummies wrong on this topic reveals how little else is on offer from that platform, and deepens the suspicion. "Any man who must say 'I am the king' is is no king at all" and all that.
I'm not sure if this is clarifying or frustrating to read. I'm self-aware enough to recognize that I sound like I'm intentionally closing myself off from evidence, but I don't think I am. It's just that nothing really turns on this, and I'm fine if it's never conclusively settled because I have plenty of other reasons to doubt Biden's 'legitimacy' any way.
I also accept that this dynamic was also true for Trump. For his antics and speech, he was deemed illegitimate by half the electorate despite winning fairly according to the rules.
I appreciate a lot of what you’re saying, here. I guess I want to offer a mild defense of the tables and metrics.
There are responses elsewhere in this thread saying “I don't care about TTV, and I don't care about their evidence.” Great, fine, revert to a state of absolute Cartesian doubt. But that’s not the conclusion drawn. No, people are going to swap in their own preferred epistemology, for all the same strategic and tribal reasons as any other point of contention.
I find that…frustrating. It becomes very tempting to wade in with data. In normal, sane debates, that’s how you’re supposed to win, after all. Bring facts, and even if you can’t convince your opponent, the rational audience will come away with the correct conclusion. Ah, youth.
If we don’t have data, what’s left to try?
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