rubbershoes
not the only raver in the village
Bannon is Trump's Cummings
US election 2020 thread
- Thread starter petee
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Dom Traynor
Tino Pai
Correct I actually procure polling in NZ and we have the same sample sizes to get the same MoE as the UK, we do smaller polls but it means higher MoEs
So I watched that on YouTube last night and it strikes me. The theatre is plausible. If you weren't inclined to check things for yourself, got your news and pronouncements like this through channels that promote them, you could reasonably be taken in. They've got evidence etc, how can these things be right. No one would stand up there and just lie totally like that. They've found evidence, right.
You have to actually go looking at some of their claims to realise, many are literal bullshit. That Smartmatic and Dominium Voting Systems are separate competing companies. That human mistakes, quickly corrected, were nothing to do with the voting machines. No server was seazed by the US army from a company that doesn't even have an office in Germany. The Edison Research thing was a total lie. That one of their chief complainents is a known fraudster.
How many of the republican voting demograph are gonna do that. It's not difficult but lots of people still don't use search engines or the internet much if at all, outside of Facebook etc.
You have to actually go looking at some of their claims to realise, many are literal bullshit. That Smartmatic and Dominium Voting Systems are separate competing companies. That human mistakes, quickly corrected, were nothing to do with the voting machines. No server was seazed by the US army from a company that doesn't even have an office in Germany. The Edison Research thing was a total lie. That one of their chief complainents is a known fraudster.
How many of the republican voting demograph are gonna do that. It's not difficult but lots of people still don't use search engines or the internet much if at all, outside of Facebook etc.
Cloo
Banana for scale
No one's trying to 'intimidate' anyone, least of the the fucking US government.
I've not heard about masses of armed 'antifa' threatening recounts, or anyone in any way disrupting them or trying to stop them. If you're 'intimidated' by the due process of law and the requirement of proof, well....
Regarding belief purely by headline - yes, they've done it before, regarding 'her emails'. I wasn't initially following the story that closely as, not being in the US, it didn't affect me that much. Seeing the kerfuffle metaphorically out of the corner of my eye, I assumed something genuinely concerning had been found about Hillary's emails - because at that time I still naively had some belief that political campaigners didn't conduct such wild exaggeration. Before I looked more closely I presumed there was some evidence of corruption, or she'd inadvertently released sensitive material etc. And then I found that she'd basically mentioned some meetings she maybe ought not to have on her personal email and that was it. But if I, a fairly non-partisan person can at least initially believe the assumption I had, how much more powerfully will that operate on someone who doesn't even want to look beyond the headlines? They just know there was something bad and 'crooked' about those emails, and they don't care what!
However, there's an important difference in that with Hillary it was about affecting people's decisions using their feelings ('Hillary is crooked!' 'She's corrupt, think about her emails!') and it did that pretty well. Ballots, however, don't have feelings and can't, or shouldn't be, affected by people's 'feelings' about them. They can be counted. If there's evidence that anything remiss has happened, it can be taken into consideration. Feelings without evidence worked agains Hillary, but they can't really do the same against votes.
That said, I'm not going to sleep quite easy until Biden's in - the body of the GOP have proved themselves quite without any fucking shame, so I'm worried what they are capable of under the circumstances.
bimble
floofy
xenon The very idea of asking for evidence puts you beyond the pale, an instant outcast from the true believers.
You don't ask for evidence you either believe her or you don't and if you don't they hate you.
Tucker Carlson, once trump;s favourite fox tv personality, has been entirely cancelled by the Faithful now because yesterday he did a piece to camera about how they (fox) asked Sidney Powell for any evidence at all of her claims, for days, and she refused and then told fox to stop contacting her.
So he is a traitor & pariah now.
You don't ask for evidence you either believe her or you don't and if you don't they hate you.
Tucker Carlson, once trump;s favourite fox tv personality, has been entirely cancelled by the Faithful now because yesterday he did a piece to camera about how they (fox) asked Sidney Powell for any evidence at all of her claims, for days, and she refused and then told fox to stop contacting her.
So he is a traitor & pariah now.
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Lord Camomile
Yipchaa!
I caught something yesterday, no idea what, that for the Trump-appointed SC judges to have a chance of doing something first it's got to get to the Supreme Court, and currently it's so flimsy that they can't even manage that.
But, this is my memory we're talking about, so very possibly a load of utter bollocks.
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SheilaNaGig
Break requested
We can look at their facebook feeds. This is a sample from my stepbrother (who I loathe and detest) , a successful insurance salesman.
Attachments
Yossarian
⏭️
Yep - Giuliani seems to believe that if he spunks enough lawsuits into the lower courts, one of them is bound to penetrate the egg of the Supreme Court.
Zapp Brannigan
Built like a steakhouse, handles like a bistro
Don't like a local count results? Take it to court.
Don't like a local court decision? Take it to state supreme court. Never mind that there's actually a legal process which stops any old shit from being escalated on the grounds of "we don't like the decision", just take it to the state supreme court.
Don't like a state court decision? Take it to the federal supreme court. Never mind that there's actually a legal process which stops any old shit from being escalated on the grounds of "we don't like the decision", just take it to the federal supreme court.
Supreme court is full of Republicans, so they'll just hand the keys to the USA back to Trump. Never mind that they're an actual court who hear actual legal cases and judge them based on content, legal process and precedent. They're Republican biased, they'll just do it for no other reason.
TRUMP WINS.
Watching this is like seeing a bloke loading an artic with pallets of cash from the side of a bank with a hole blown in it, while screaming to anyone who'll listen that "that guy in the bank wants to rob it".
SheilaNaGig
Break requested
This is how it’s working.
andysays
Love and solidarity
What a delightful metaphor
bimble
floofy
SheilaNaGig yep, but there's probably a difference between posting stuff on facebook (that might be an activity that makes you feel better, signalling belonging to your in-group etc) and believing it in the same way you believe that you have two feet, or that the sun rises in the east.
SheilaNaGig
Break requested
maomao
普費斯
Remember somewhere around a quarter of Americans believe that the Qanon conspiracy theories are accurate. This is actually far less outlandish and has a more obvious payoff (ie. if youre a Trump fan there's an advantage to going along with it even if you think the election was fair) than Qanon.
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
I heard a bit of that live and I started off thinking it was funny, running a bingo card with Chavez, Antifa and the rest. It then started feeling quite disturbing, watching an absolute lie being shaped and projected upon the world. I don't think it will work, but it was really nasty and went way beyond any kind of postmodern pissing about with truth. Have a feeling that future politics and media studies students will be looking at this an example of the way something entirely untrue was injected into the political system.
Just on one point, I leapt in at random at I hour 13 mins, to one of the questions. It looked to me as if they are pinning the whole thing on the potential implausibility of media reports on the night. 'They reported that Biden's vote went up by 100,000 votes, how could those votes just appear' type stuff. If that is the case it will be the culmination of 4+ years of chatter about fake news organisation. I suspect all the crazy stuff about programming codes and Venezuela will be icing on the cake (interestingly I just mistyped at as 'Ickeing on the cake'). The fake news stuff seems like the glue for the whole thing - 'therefore, if everything you hear in the liberal media is wrong, every batshit thing we say about Chavez and the voting machines must be right'.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Yeah, I had a similar reaction. It's heroic-level lying. Trump is so loved by the American people that so many people voted for him that they broke the election-stealing algorithm. And it's such a big lie that you had to remind yourself every now and then that every single thing they were saying was totally made-up. If you didn't know that, it might all sound reasonable and very worrying. It hit lots of key points wrt computers and manipulation as well, stuff that you can't judge if you're not an expert on the subject. In addition to the mad stuff about a long-dead foreign leader being behind it all, the reasonable- and technical-sounding details about source code and hidden algorithms give the superficial impression that they know what they're talking about.
It feels to me like the 'fake news' narrative is reaching a tipping point. The more news outlets they have to categorise as 'fake news', the weaker the rhetoric becomes. Losing Fox News was a blow in that regard.
Monkeygrinder's Organ
Dodgy geezer swilling vapid lager
Yeah this is key to all the conspiracy stuff really isn't it (and a lot of alternative health and other stuff as well tbh). That if you can find any issues at all with the 'official' version then you can throw that out and replace it with basically anything you want. It's ridiculous but it's quite powerful.
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
Essentially, create an avalanche of shit, lies and misinformation, throw in some direct pressure and hope this tips a couple of state legislatures into sending trump delegates. The court cases are a means, not an ends. I don't see it working, but it really is an attempted coup, at least in the sense of stealing an election. I don't do liberal wailing about some kind of idealised representative democracy and Biden will be shit, but trump genuinely is taking American politics to another place.
Giuliani has named Wayne County several times now as a centre of corruption. They are obviously using it to cause distress among people of colour and cause a reaction. Possibly causing chaos in the streets of Detroit. This is the Trump administration declaring how utterly racist they are and their desire to disrupt any attempts at healing the divisions he has deliberately caused. Any Republican senators or representatives who does not grow a spine and remove all support from and resists this cabal, should be charged with conspiracy and jailed.
bimble
floofy
This below is not about the election directly but a seriously scary real world consequence of this administration's industrial scale spreading of baseless made up stuff.
Thread from a witness at a senate commitee hearing that was held yesterday, in the middle of the absolute disaster of the pandemic, where the hearing was about.. hydrochloroquine ffs.
And he was the only one of the 4 witnesses who cared that science shows it doesn't work. The other 3 had feelings that its' a conspiracy.
Thread from a witness at a senate commitee hearing that was held yesterday, in the middle of the absolute disaster of the pandemic, where the hearing was about.. hydrochloroquine ffs.
And he was the only one of the 4 witnesses who cared that science shows it doesn't work. The other 3 had feelings that its' a conspiracy.
Quite, the handwringing about the subversion of democratic norms is silly - everyone involved does whatever they think they can get away with, democratic norms are a sham. The unusual thing is how far this is from the 'things you can get away with' class of actions.
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
I've wondered about that too. True loyalists will manage to flick the switch and start seeing fox as the enemy or even part of the quanon thing if that's what they are told next. But for others there might be a recognition of the rabbit hole they are hurtling down, or at least a gnawing sense of 'wtf'.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
No way it's going to work. It was never going to work. Think it was elbows who pointed out the importance of 'soft power' aspects to this, and he's right. The fact that Biden has been received by world leaders as president-elect matters. The fact that they have no facts on their side matters. The formal mechanisms of any system count for nothing if they're not backed up by this kind of soft power.
And that's why I see 20,000 people, many visibly from the political extremes, as not a very impressive number at Saturday's march. In a country the size of the US, you'd need ten, twenty, fifty times that number of people out protesting around the country, day after day. And that is exactly the kind of thing you would see if they somehow managed to turn the electoral college.
Johnny Doe
Well-Known Member
Add in a kernel of truth amongst bullshit, so that when it's challenged the one thing that can be evidenced is offered as proof the whole wacko plot is too
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
Yeah, I suppose the distinction is between 2000 and 2020. In 2000, Bush won within the rules. It was a close run thing of recounts, hanging chads and court cases, but probably the 'correct' outcome. The bigger issue, was directly racist voter suppression in places like Florida. 2020 is the same game, taken further, with an annexe, add in a mezzanine floor, bend, pressure, lie... a trip round the circuit, but this time in the style of a Mad Max + Rollerball pursuit.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Yep. In this instance, it is true that Chavez lost one of his referendums (and abided by the result, it has to be said). So it might sound plausible that he would be so enraged by that as to work out a way never to allow it to happen again. That builds on prejudices formed by long-standing narratives within mainstream US discourse that always spoke of Chavez as a dictator, regardless of how many free elections he won (free as certified by international observers, including those from the US).
They're tiny kernels, though, really well buried.
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maomao
普費斯
Except that this is pretty much what he was promising to do if he lost the 2016 election anyway. And now he's doing it as the incumbent he has a much larger following and a veneer of legitimacy.
Winning court cases would be an advantage but I doubt there's much chance of getting the supreme court to reverse anything or even to get that far at all. What is important for Trump is that he has court cases still ongoing in December when the electoral college actually takes place giving him the means to call the whole process into question. If the stop the steal protests grow then expect protests and violence around the court cases and electoral college proceedings.
And the process doesn't even stop when/if Biden gets in. There would be frequent government shutdowns and a refusal to cooperate with an administration that they consider illegitimate. Civil wars don't just stop because a legal case got tossed out of court.
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