https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voti...
So Trump won legitimately. Even if people voted with the wrong information. And the losing side threw its toys out of the cot.
Then when Biden won, the losing side threw its toys out of the cot.
In both cases there’s conspiracy theories. Russian collusion and rigged elections.
Which bits of evidence in it do you think are compelling, actionable and importat? Bearing in mind that the evidence is so uncompelling that right-wing advocates bring up the Muller report more than left-wing ones and you're probably going to get some resistance whatever you pick out.
The introduction and summary are mostly fluff and allusion, so I'm not bothering reading the whole thing unless you want to point to something specific.
[0] https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2019/images/04/18/mueller-report-sea...
I mean, honestly, you’re bothered by lack of details so because of that…you’re choosing not to read the parts where one would expect to find the details.
Which section do you think is the most powerful? What in the document upsets you?
It is pretty normal in my experience that people pretty quickly walk back from pretending that the report actually contains anything, because they can't point to it and rely on the fact that there is this fake consensus that something evil happened so there is no need to provide any evidence of anything specific. If you want to point at something I'll read it, but I think you're bluffing on a weak hand here - this report is political swill. Nobody cites from it when they have a point to make against Trump or the 2016 election.
PS: And I'll just add - telling people to "go read a 450 page document to convince yourself I'm right" is an unreasonable ask. I read a lot of that report at the time it was released and I'm pretty convinced there was nothing in it.
The entirety of what I’m saying right now is “Both the Mueller and Senate Intel committee reports contain pretty extensive evidence and detailing of a significant interference campaign by the Russians on the 2016 election”. I was responding in regards to “blaming Russians” which was far from a baseless conspiracy theory.
One momentary peak of Russian power that you are struggling to narrow down to an example, despite having a 450 page report that you don't feel like quoting from because, presumably, nobody thinks the issue is important enough to explain to the doubters.
You've got nothing. The Muller report is a high-class version of exactly the same conspiratorial gibber that Jones is pumping out.
[^] And although I don't care on the point, I haven't seen the evidence for this either, I assume all the intelligence agencies have tools to pretend to be other agencies when hacking things. I expect even on this point it isn't clear it was the Russians but if it was I support them for good journalism.
[&] Which is what the Muller report seems to be. Rather steamy, no plot.
You pre-dismissed anything I might have cited. You say things like I’m bluffing on a weak hand, I’ve got nothing, and I’m supposed to say to myself “Yes, this person is worth expending effort on, let’s have a totally real open minded debate.” Get over yourself.
As I said in my reply the report concludes that Trump didn’t collude with Russia to win the election. So the major conspiracy theory is throw out the window. It holds as much weight as Biden stealing the election.
Again, I’m not going to get in the weeds with someone who isn’t arguing in good faith. There’s no good that can come from it. In this case it’s extra pointless because I agree with this person. Nothing in the Mueller report is going to convince them of anything.
> As I said in my reply the report concludes that Trump didn’t collude with Russia to win the election. So the major conspiracy theory is throw out the window. It holds as much weight as Biden stealing the election.
The report doesn’t do anything of the sort. The report is entirely focused on assessing evidence of criminal liability. Since collusion isn’t an actual crime the report nothing directly to say on the matter, much less actually coming right out and concluding that it didn’t happen. That’s just ridiculous.
There is evidence that is presented in the context of other matters of potential criminal liability that would be relevant to any discussion of “collusion”. One example would be Manafort and Gates sharing internal polling data with the Russians. You would have to contort yourself pretty hard to rationalize this as something other than coordinating with Russias’s campaign of interference/assistance.
The only reason you think you can anticipate my response is because I've correctly anticipated that you don't have an argument. If something comes up that is outside my predictions neither of us knows what I'd do. But I'm predicting a bluff and it has been a long thread of posts now.
> One example would be Manafort and Gates sharing internal polling data with the Russians.
The Russians could hire a polling company at any time. American's don't keep their opinions quiet. How do you want to spin that in to something interesting? Since Manafort's team won the election, it was probably a "hey, we're serious candidates, you should be ready to negotiate with us if we win" thing. Since one of the president's official duties is negotiating with Russians to try and prevent escalations.
Care to reference a page number for this one so I can make sure I'm dealing with the same topic?
I fear the next one will be better executed.
You could make a similarly flippant remark about people not knowing how electronic voting machines work. At the end of the day, the Taiwanese, French, etc., don’t count votes the way they do for funsies.
Greater, and Actual Transparency combined with a trust worthily network of news outlets would go along way to shut down these types of discussions
Sadly we have neither government nor really judicial transparency in any meaningful way, and we are at a point in time where trust in "news" is lower than trust in congress...
Want to tone down the number of people that believe in conspiracy... More Facts, less Spin...
Really? More facts will change their minds? Who will they trust with those facts?
This is bordering on cult-like behavior and it shows no signs of improving -- I'm not optimistic about this at all.
News outlets (on both sides) have been caught in multiple partisans lies, disinformation, and spin/suppression of inconvenient facts for "their side" for many years now, this has eroded the trust in media and makes presentation of facts harder.
Neither side wants to acknowledge anything that would be seen as supporting the position of the "others"
So in the context of the election, you have one side that refuses to concede that Biden was elected by the people, but you also have the other side refusing to concede that because of COVID and other factors the 2020 election has some pretty non-standard events that (while not impacting the outcome of the presidential election) is the basis of the questioning of the integrity of the election, instead we have people saying the 2020 was the freest, fairest election in all of history because their side won..
neither position is true or healthy, and both position have Cult-Like behavior
> Neither side wants to acknowledge anything that would be seen as supporting the position of the "others"
You seem to be holding up your side of that argument but I don't roll that way. I abhor partisan politics and am happy to point out flaws of the Dem establishment.
As to the last election, it was as fair as one can hope for -- you're taking the defense of the legitimacy of the election to cult-like behavior? What exactly is the left doing that's cult like in that regard?
And thanks for the lecture on the veracity of news -- gosh I had no idea that people like William Randolph Hearst ever existed and manipulated the media generations ago.
Maybe too hard for you, but nuance is a thing -- any source of information is going to have bias and imperfection and it's a matter of understanding that bias and taking nuggets of knowledge. Case in point: while the NYT has made many egregious mistakes (supporting the Iraq war being a biggie), I still trust them as a news source more than Fox.
Fox news was designed as a propaganda wing of the GOP. This is documented. And yet all of you on the right happily lap it up and dismiss any source that doesn't satisfy your preconceived biases.
And as far as COVID goes -- prior to the past president viruses were not political. Bush was at least pro-science in that regard.
I dont think when you have governors of various states in real time changing election rules, and regulations under "emergency" powers can be considered "fair it one can hope"
Also contrary to to democrat talking points there have been successful legal challenges to those election regulation modifications done by governors or election boards.
2020 election was unusual for a variety of reasons not just COVID, and it should not be controversial to say we need to look at all of the changes, emergency orders, and other activities that were happening to ensure everything was handled correct, something I don't think many on "the left" want to even acknowledge
>>while the NYT has made many egregious mistakes (supporting the Iraq war being a biggie), I still trust them as a news source more than Fox
Most likely because your personal bias leans in the same direction as NYT, so you are looking for confirmation of your worldview which NYT, most of the time, provides you.
>>And yet all of you on the right happily lap it up
I am not on the right, nor do I watch fox news ( or CNN or MSNBC or NYT), I get most of my news from varied sources (my RSS feed is currently following over 250 feeds) i also love the GroundNews App / Website.
Ideologically I am a homeless nomad, and reject all political parties, I would love a system where political parties are completely banned. Individualism is my preferred state
>And as far as COVID goes -- prior to the past president viruses were not political. Bush was at least pro-science in that regard.
and you believe only the right has politicized covid? Interesting
Which changes that were made as we tried to navigate a presidential year election during a pandemic do you believe made the election unfair? Why did the vast majority of the complaining about these changes come after the election rather than as they were being made?
I dont believe governors have, or should have, the power to change election law at all, for any reason even "during a pandemic"
I also dont believe governors should have most of their so called "emergency powers" that is ripe for abuse, and many governors did just that, and continue to do just that even outside the election context
Show some evidence for this concern or just drop it. Ironically, election security is in peril because the GOP is installing officials that are ready to steal the next election.
I don't treat the NYT as gospel; it's yet another input for consideration. I'm painfully aware of confirmation bias and do my utmost to take whatever truth becomes apparent.
"Political" has varied meanings/interpretations. In the context of laws and regulations vs. partisan power mongering.
Dealing with a pandemic required unfortunate actions which are political in the first sense. The anti-vax movement has been embraced by the GOP and it is very much political in sense of identity.
I do agree with you on the corruptive nature of political parties.
Long and short of it: I "lean left" but don't make my identity about that. There are classic elements of old school conservatism that I agree with but modern conservatism has now been coopted by the Evangelicals and they are bat shit crazy. Goldwater was prescient and correct in his concern about that happening.
It's rather bizarre that instead of seeing this cult-like behaviour (in the news, in politics, etc.) as an emergent property from the general American culture most will blame the news and the politicians for creating it. It's the inverse, they are just feeding what the populace actually is and behaves like.
What the United States needs to target is the economics of news. Actual news. Not infotainment.
Don't attempt to regulate good/bad news: economically incentivize good reporting and disincentivize bad reporting. The market will follow.
If 24/7 news channels weren't profitable... there wouldn't be any 24/7 news channels.
the Economics of news is going to be very different is media can not hide by "anonymous sources" and "it is just opinion" while spreading lies about individuals or events.
I think the next cases may find more well known news outlets in the defendants chair of defamation action
Want Biden or Obama to have some power? Are you going to be okay with Bush or Trump gets that power?
I would suggest that you at least try to put yourself in the position of these parents when thinking about this topic (as impossible as that may be). Imagine having your child murdered then having this waste of life make up vicious lies about you and your dead child.
Freedom of speech still exists where debate, conflict and truth discovery can still occur. Regulating speech mediates free speech, but doesn't have to eliminate it. The marketplace of ideas can accept that some ideas are not worth keeping.
Why are you talking?
For that matter, why do we have media, or even schools?
In my opinion, this whole ordeal is pretty close to being deserving of a criminal trial because his speech has incited violence and harassment again and again on these parents.
https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...
What I find fascinating is that even after panama papers the banking system is reluctant to really tackle the problem. We learn more from whistle-blower and (possibly law breaching) seizure of strong boxes, than we do from Swiss banks voluntarily. They really only love money. Social justice is nothing.
Swiss neutrality is an enabler of bad things, in finance.
The argument is obviously wrong, for a number of reasons, but I wouldn't mind denying them that talking point.
I wish I had that faith but I think the Holocaust stands as a pretty big counter-argument. I'm genuinely curious about your faith, do you think that something could have been done in Germany in the 30s which would have preserved free speech and prevented the Holocaust?
Easy problem today, harder problem at the time due to lack of knowledge.
They used a list proportional system (the same system used today in Germany, and similar to that used across Europe). Candidates were controlled by the party, rather than self-nominated. It's a huge oligarchical system that lends itself to enormous perversions of democracy. We have self-nominated candidates in the United States, but party primary elections and every type of election used here (MNTV, SNTV, first past the post, and run-offs) are broken and create extreme distortion, polarization, and disenfranchisement by their mathematical nature.
Democracy only works when it's actually democratic. When it's not, a polarized minority can become dominant over the majority, thus dominating the public discourse and shaping the public reason, retaining and expanding power. Most systems tend to reject whichever represents the view of the voters as a whole body; STV deals with the problems of fair and equal single-winner elections (which suppress minority voices) by proportionality for solid coalitions, capturing the median voter group as well as those minority views leaning away from the median voter in proportion to the size of the groups, which are of roughly-even size, thus introducing diversity into the conversation without lopsided a priori voting power, maximizing the efficiency of the public reason.
It's extremely obvious that Trump (his government, his admin) not being able to control the media, control speech, was a really good thing. And that's true whether it's a terrible Republican or terrible Democrat, or any other terrible politician, that is in power. If you give them one big lever of speech control to start from, they'll expand that control, you can count on that.
While the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 didn't, you are correct, outlaw the Klan as a group, it did authorize a whole lot of measures—including authorizing federal military force and suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and new federal civil and criminal causes of action—to combat their actions and those of similar groups, and those authorities were liberally used in suppressing them. Describing the successful strategy as “sunlight as disinfectant” rather than massive application of force is... not grounded in fact.
I don’t know if the First Amendment would have stopped the totalitarian takeover of Germany. But it certainly would have made it harder.
Fair enough. My Jewish roots (int al) are rather more convoluted than yours.
"I'm pretty happy our country has not adopted laws against holocaust denial in the way Germany or Canada have."
Both of my parents were soldiers and I grew up in West Germany and the UK in the 1970s-1990s (on and off, here and there!)
Tort is to do with contract law.
Be American as much as you can - and I will stand in your corner for that too. However there is some history here and Jones was riffing and profiteering on an event that was nominally genocide and he described it as such.
Please don't mistake free speech for hate and spite.
if you'd put this some other way, I'd be down with it.
However, people who say "hate speech is not free speech" are just plain wrong. Yes, it is.
I'm a Jewish grandson of Holocaust survivors. I'm also American. I'm pretty happy our country has not adopted laws against holocaust denial in the way Germany or Canada have. I appreciate the thought behind those laws. But I appreciate freedom of speech more. And I do have faith that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that truth will prevail over lies.
On the other hand, but not in contradiction, I'm also a huge fan of the American system of Tort Law. It's the discovery and enforcement mechanism of a free country.
I think in this case, the system is working exactly as intended. No one is jailing Jones for his speech. But he can be held responsible for the damage that resulted from it, in a way that will dissuade others from profiting off of similar attempts to rewrite history.