So it's odd that every time I read a (fairly rare) bait comment, it has the same username: yours.
To be clear I don't generally track or pay attention to user names, you just seem to be making a clear and persistent effort to kick off arguments in bad faith.
which claim? Almost everyone agrees that people across the political spectrum believed the election had fraud in 2020.
As for evidence of actual fraud. I'll just wave my hands towards the fact that democrat turnout in 2020 is way out of line with national trends, whereas 2024 is exactly in line with past trends.
Now you're making two claims, neither of which you're providing evidence for.
If "everyone agrees...the election had fraud", I'm sure you can provide multiple reputable polls showing this sentiment of "everyone". (I'll be generous and lower the bar to just a majority of Americans, but I'm not going to accept polls that show -only- a majority of Republicans, since your claim is "across the political spectrum")
Second. Even if, as you've admitted elsewhere, every single court case was lost (or denied due to lack of standing) in 2020, you do realize that evidence can be presented outside courts, right? Where is this evidence? They've had 4 years to collect it. If it's widespread and, as you said elsewhere is a statistical anomaly, then it, almost by definition, should be obvious to spot. Hand waving to vibes and feels and "sure seems obvious to me" doesn't mean jack.
Now, I'll grant you, that vibes and feels certainly mean a lot to the animal natures of all of us. But feels and vibes are not proof of anything.
So for me, I saw the evidence with my own eyes when thousands of ballots came in for Joe Biden, and my immediate thought was... oh so those must certainly be fake. That's evidence enough for me. We all have our own bar.
> If "everyone agrees...the election had fraud", I'm sure you can provide multiple reputable polls showing this sentiment of "everyone". (I'll be generous and lower the bar to just a majority of Americans, but I'm not going to accept polls that show -only- a majority of Republicans, since your claim is "across the political spectrum")
I will restate. A significant (not a majority) number of democrats believed the election was fraudulent. Enough believed it was fraudulent, that this should concern anyone bothered about democracy and legitimacy. Here are the polls:
Look you probably think you 'won' because I mis-spoke about a majority of democrats, but these numbers are .. not great. 45% of the country, 11% of democrats? The results have stayed stable across time. Guess what, they get to vote too? You have to convince them. One easy way to do that is to share their incredulity that 1000s of ballots come in 100% for Biden in the middle of the night.
You know, you can approach this like a scientific hypothesis testing, or you can approach it the way everyday voters do. I think this is a choice that democrats need to make. By and large, the 'social sciences' are not very good at understanding human behavior because they don't understand what drives people. They're the 'men without chests' that CS Lewis talks about.
> So for me, I saw the evidence with my own eyes when thousands of ballots came in for Joe Biden, and my immediate thought was... oh so those must certainly be fake. That's evidence enough for me. We all have our own bar.
By that standard of evidence, I know a magical spell that's able to turn someone into a shapeshifter.
This should go some way to explaining why I don't treat my immediate thoughts on a small surprise to be sufficient.
> Look you probably think you 'won' because I mis-spoke about a majority of democrats, but these numbers are .. not great. 45% of the country, 11% of democrats? The results have stayed stable across time. Guess what, they get to vote too? You have to convince them. One easy way to do that is to share their incredulity that 1000s of ballots come in 100% for Biden in the middle of the night.
> You know, you can approach this like a scientific hypothesis testing, or you can approach it the way everyday voters do.
That's the problem, there is no proof that will convince them. And I don't mean that derogatorily. In generally, one can't be convinced by facts when they arrived at a conclusion by feelings. Especially, when so much astroturfing that was done about "I'm not saying there's fraud, but a lot of people are saying it.". If you have people in high places, that know better (because we have them on record saying they know 2020 was legit), spreading fear for the sake of it, all it does is create a false narrative of some overwhelming consensus, which then just feeds on itself. "See, look at all of these tweets, posts, articles, mentioning other people mentioning that they have a bad feeling about 2020."
There was no evidence that anything was untoward in the 2020 election—and people have had 4 years at this point to present evidence that there was. The problem with your example is that people looked at something that has occurred for almost every election in the past 100 years, that precinct by precinct votes often come in over time and in groups (you cannot be surprised that a precinct, as in a specific small area, is more homogenous than not). You can find pictures of chalkboards and primitive displays of election-night results coming in even from the early 20th century (probably before this too). But people took these static, after the fact, incremental updates to the running total as some sort of horse race. Like the NYTimes was tracking a basketball game. It's not, to pick a computer metaphor, it's like showing a progress bar for a count of all of the items in a database. The computer literally cannot count all of the "red" or "blue" items in one atomic operation; it has add them up, incrementally.
This has been proposed elsewhere, but in addition to actual speeding up the counting in certain states (and removing the barriers to doing counting ahead of of time(looking at you, PA)), is the idea of making it illegal to post results until some representative threshold of the results are in. As in, once you can be statistically certain that a different outcome isn't possible (maybe 99.99% or something), then you can post your first update of the results. Obviously, no one would accept that we should wait until all of the results are in, because oversees/military/absentee ballots might take days to arrive (even if they were mailed the day before election day). And, one obvious solution is maybe to require, at a national level, that all ballots must be received by COB election day, so that they can be tabulated in a timely manner.
Again, I fully understand that most people operate off of vibes and feels. Even highly educated people, outside of their domain (and maybe even inside their domain, if they have a vested interest in not being proved wrong), will default to vibes and feels. But you literally CANNOT prove a negative. So, just like it's impossible to prove no aliens have visited us, no one can prove that the 2020 election wasn't "stolen". Which is why we require evidence to rebut claims (extraordinary or not). No one has provided proof that aliens have visited us. And no one has provided proof that the 2020 election was "stolen"—as in the outcome would've been different. Yup, there's always some shitheads, ne'er-do-wells, and honestly-mistaken-about-their-elibilibity-to-vote-people that are caught each year. (Sadly, especially for the GOP, the number of GOP-voting voters that fall into the category outnumber the Dem-voting voters.) But, not once, at least that I've been able to find record of, in the past 40+ years, has identified fraud been able to change the result of any election from state-representative on up.
Your edit demonstrates exactly what I mean by bad faith: you're intentionally itching for a fight in all your comments, you're not focused on conveying your points in a way that invites level-headed discourse.
Are things ok with you in general? Could there be some non-political reason why you're resorting to inflammatory techniques to get people to talk with you?
I mean I've been doxxed before several times for 'level-headed' discourse with various people on the internet. People make fun of Trump supporters far basically embracing all the various insults that get hurled at us, but I would venture the vast majority of us don't really care anymore. We're tired of it. If the level-headed discourse gets us violence, might as well just say what we really think.
As for my claims:
1. The United Nations bankrolled UNRWA and has for the last few decades, which has funneled money to Hamas. They have consistently voted against Israel, and they stood by silently in their peacekeeping missions in Lebanon and Gaza while Hamas, Gazans, and Hezbollah literally raped and massacred people on live TV. Yes, they need to go. They've not given us anything that American leadership has been unable to provide.
2. The election. The election turnouts between 2016 and 2024 are in line with each other but are extremely at odds with 2020. There was massive last-minute rule changes (like in PA) by executive action (which have now been undone by the supreme court). There were many instances of poll watchers being blocked (videos in fact) in 2020. Counting would suddenly stop and restart. Then there would be thousands of ballots in ballot dumps 100% for Biden. This is not normal. I have no hard evidence. I've freely admitted that elsewhere. But the totality of evidence points to some really fishy business going on here. I mean, Putin wins his elections too, and 'won' a referendum in Crimea.
I'm not sure what other takes are in bad faith, but as I've said many times, happy to discuss
So your answer to discourse getting out of hand in the past is to take an approach that starts it out of hand, seems counterproductive no?
Although now that you're presenting those takes with some more surface area, the rationale doesn't feel all there.
After all, for how massive the UN is and its mandate, I don't think the UNRWA or ill equipped peacekeeping forces avoiding entering a full blown engagement justifies the extraordinary claim they're actually a terrorist organization.
And the voter fraud rationale is similarly light: most of what you mentioned was covered in numerous lawsuits, and the vast majority were lost or dismissed. The remaining few don't account for any significant gap in the election process. Is there a case that would have materially affected the outcome of the election that wasn't dismissed or lost?
> After all, for how massive the UN is and its mandate, I don't think the UNRWA or ill equipped peacekeeping forces avoiding entering a full blown engagement justifies the extraordinary claim they're actually a terrorist organization.
They're either a terrorist organization or useless. Either way, the need to be disbanded and investigated. They should not be able to hide in the USA under the guise of diplomatic immunity. They are not a state.
> Is there a case that would have materially affected the outcome of the election that wasn't dismissed or lost?
No but that never happened with Kennedy/Nixon either. American history is weird. No court is going to touch an election. Why would they. It's national suicide.
I find it laughable that the average American can choose to 'believe' something that is simply and provenly not true. That's why there are so many flat earthers, q anon believers, climate change deniers, and all kind of supporters of provenly wrong ideas. I think this is because of the (wrong) notion that an ideology or a stance is better than facts.
Well, the Earth is not flat, there are multiple easily accessible proofs, the q anon conspiracies are demonstratably false, and the 2020 elections had multiple investigations which uncovered
0 voter fraud, and as much as you might want to believe the opposite, it's simply not true. Believing in something doesn't make it true.
So it's odd that every time I read a (fairly rare) bait comment, it has the same username: yours.
To be clear I don't generally track or pay attention to user names, you just seem to be making a clear and persistent effort to kick off arguments in bad faith.