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Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by dragonwriter on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @07:46PM (#35365607)
> The United States does not have a strong democracy. Half (more or less) of the population believes the election was rigged.

From various recent polls, it looks like somewhere between 30-40%, somewhere under 2/3 of Republicans and Republican-leaners and basically no one else.

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by soderfoo on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @08:31PM (#35366045)
30% is about par for the course when it comes to contemporary controversial POTUS elections [1][2].

It seems to ebb and flow: each side takes their turn being the aggrieved party and then alternate next go around (2000, 2016, 2020).

Consecutive cycles of animosity on one side could be worrying.

The tapestry of dysfunctional patchwork that make up the American Constitutional Republic, while tattered and frayed before, has found ways to persist.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2000/12/01/many-questio...

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/4687/seven-americans-accept-bus...

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by rootusrootus on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @08:45PM (#35366156)
> Consecutive cycles of animosity on one side could be worrying.

Is that not what we're experiencing now?

It's hard to 'both sides' this issue with a straight face, when the biggest election denier in America is a former president and current presidential candidate. When was the last time that happened?

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by dragonwriter on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @08:55PM (#35366242)
> It’s hard to ‘both sides’ this issue with a straight face, when the biggest election denier in America is a former president and current presidential candidate. When was the last time that happened?

The closest parallel was probably Aaron Burr and his…whatever exactly he was trying to achieve in 1806-1807 in the Southwest after being dumped as VP in 1804 in part resulting from Jefferson’s suspicions that he was trying to pull electoral shenanigans in 1800. But that’s a long time ago, in very different circumstances, and not a particularly close parallel. So, never anything really similar.

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by soderfoo on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @09:43PM (#35366658)
For better or worse, I've found reading (deep dives) US history adequately anesthetizes one to modern day shenanigans.

But you raise a good point in that Al Gore was far more gracious when aggrieved. He comported himself with the norms established in the last 60 years during the modern mass media era.

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by throwawaylinux on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @08:34PM (#35366070)
For the most recent presidential election maybe. For the previous one a majority of Democrats including many high ranking Democrat politicians and officials were election deniers.

Clearly you aren't going to have a large contingent of deniers of elections that your favored party won.

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by dragonwriter on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @08:42PM (#35366133)
> For the most recent presidential election maybe.

Yes, that’s generally what “believe the election was stolen” without further qualification means; its not a reference to the total sum of people who believe at least one election in the history of the US was stolen.

> For the previous one a majority of Democrats including high ranking Democrat politicians and officials were election deniers.

No, they weren’t.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-republicans-distru...

A large percentage of Democrats believe Russian interference and other improper interference influenced the election results, but that’s different than thinking the actual vote was rigged or invalid.

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by throwawaylinux on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @08:53PM (#35366224)
Yes they were a huge number of election deniers for the 2016 election and a vast amount of irresponsible rheotoric around it that was very dangerous to democracy. Don't try to gaslight on this one. A lot of uneducated morons and delusional conspiracy theorists thought "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election", fueled by dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric from certain anti-democratic election denier politicians and media corporations.
Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by dragonwriter on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @08:56PM (#35366246)
> a huge number of election deniers for the 2016 election

[citation needed]

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by throwawaylinux on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @08:58PM (#35366261)
No it isn't.
Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by dragonwriter on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @10:20PM (#35367000)
Well, since you are just lying, I can see why a demand for evidence is inconvenient.
Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by epylar on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @09:16PM (#35366425)
How many election deniers?
Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by throwawaylinux on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @09:32PM (#35366565)
A large majority of Democrat voters fell for these baseless and dangerous election-denial conspiracy theories. Why do you ask?

https://twitter.com/peterjhasson/status/1064259048902668289

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by dragonwriter on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @10:19PM (#35366985)
The one question you present evidence of is not questioning the legitimacy and validity of the election; there is a difference between believing (rightly or wrongly, with or without sufficient cause) that improper activity effected the popular vote tally and believing that the election is illegitimate.

You present no evidence relating to actual election denial.

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by throwawaylinux on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @11:37PM (#35367605)
> The one question you present evidence of is not questioning the legitimacy and validity of the election;

False.

> there is a difference between believing (rightly or wrongly, with or without sufficient cause) that improper activity effected the popular vote tally and believing that the election is illegitimate.

There are differences between different things. Believing election tallies were hacked certainly is a baseless conspiracy theory that questions the legitimacy of the election, despite your wailing and gnashing of teeth. Not to mention something like a full 1/4 of Democrat voters believed Trump to be an illegitimate president too.

Your gaslighting and sealioning doesn't work I'm afraid, better luck with somebody else.

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by dang on Thursday March 30, 2023 @01:01AM (#35368225)
You've broken the site guidelines egregiously here, and have unfortunately been doing that a bunch elsewhere. We've warned you multiple times before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34429933 (Jan 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30858404 (March 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29085513 (Nov 2021)

If you keep this up we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you. Therefore could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules? Including, but not limited to: not being snarky, not calling names, not making personal attacks, not posting flamewar comments, and not using HN primarily for political battle.

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by throwawaylinux on Thursday March 30, 2023 @03:14AM (#35369176)
Sure I'll try to do better, I'm sorry. Would you apply the same rules to people escalating, calling me names, being snarky, etc in the same thread?
Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by dang on Thursday March 30, 2023 @09:39PM (#35381306)
Appreciated!

Yes, if that's what they were doing, but I'd have to see specific links. (For example I don't think https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366985 broke the site guidelines although it wasn't entirely un-edgy either.)

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by throwawaylinux on Thursday March 30, 2023 @10:51PM (#35381877)
I don't have a problem with the comment you linked. But this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366133 kicked off the snark with the first sentence, and quickly escalated to namecalling, calling me a liar a few comments later.

So yes I should have just ignored them or kept the higher ground, but sometimes that kind of trolling sucks me in.

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by dang on Friday March 31, 2023 @01:21AM (#35382939)
I don't think the first sentence of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366133 was snarky. Interpretations differ, of course, and often by quite a bit when someone is speaking to you personally, but FWIW that sounds rather neutral to my ear.
Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by RobAtticus on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @08:53PM (#35366225)
When push came to shove, how many Democratic leaders (Reps and Senators) voted against or objected to the electoral college results in 2017? It was less than 10 Representatives and no Senators, meaning none of the objections were even put to a vote[1]. That is a far cry from what occurred in 2021.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_States_Electoral_C...

Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok by throwawaylinux on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @11:37PM (#35367606)
Talk about clutching at straws and trying to find any possible metric to deflect from the dangerous 2016 election deniers and conspiracy theorist lunatics.

You can't just pick out some other thing and claim that is what is matters most. Just saying "when push comes to shove" doesn't mean anything. How many times did the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee lie about having evidence for the delusional conspiracy theory that "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election", dangerously fueling election denial and undermining confidence in the democratic process? Aside from rhetoric and assertions by partisans and conspiracy theorists involved in the whole mess, where is the evidence to say what one side does is better or worse or more or less "damaging to democracy"? There isn't any.

If you in denial of the reality that both sides question elections and make up conspiracy theories when it suits them, you are incapable of anything approaching an objective understanding of the topic. Sorry.