Zuckerberg similarly denied any plans to target Durov's domestic market, yet both moved to expand their respective reaches shortly after the meeting. “We both ended up doing exactly that in two or three weeks,” Durov noted.”
https://www.benzinga.com/news/24/06/39223122/telegrams-pavel...
Seniors and church-goers? Citation needed.
> He was just trying to convince them that this election matters most.
Sure. And he said he was going to "act as a dictator from day 1" (after saying repeatedly that "America could benefit from a dictatorship" and praising what other dictators "have been able to do for their country") for what reason? He said he'd terminate the constitution. The guy who just got indicted again for his BS on and around Jan 6.
Really, he just means "I'll fix the country so well, and there will be so much love, that people will be happy to keep voting us back in".
I don't think he'll succeed. I don't think he'll be elected. But if you think there's not a part of Trump that wants to be President For Life, and will if he thinks he can get away with it, then ... you haven't been listening to him.
>Really, he just means "I'll fix the country so well, and there will be so much love, that people will be happy to keep voting us back in".
No, it means exactly as Trump said it would - he wants to be a dictator, and is willing to terminate the constitution to make it so. Even then, he won't fix jack shit, because that would actually require working, which is something he cannot and will not do. He had a supermajority in congress in his first term...and did nothing besides pass tax cuts for billionaires.
I'd never in my youth imagine that the country I grew up in would elect a guy who trashes the constitution who wears lifts and orange makeup, let alone potentially doing it twice. May you live in interesting times indeed.
Yeah because Trump is the one who's going after his opponents using the judical system.
> he won't fix jack shit, because that would actually require working
He won't fix shit, neither will Kamala, or Biden. They're all in it for themselves yeah.
I'm sorry, the $450 million judgement was for systemic fraud committed for decades prior to his involvement in politics.
Further, the going after him for retaining government documents could have been avoided completely if he didn't lie to the FBI, lie to them again, and then lie to his own attorneys so they'd unknowingly lie to the FBI on his behalf. It's not like they were benign documents about what the secreatary of HUD or eudcation eats for lunch; they were SCI documents pertaining to Israel's nuclear weapons program...that were gifted to the Saudis so the Saudi PIF would in turn fund a golf tournament Trump could host at his courses in an attempt to give the middle finger to the PGA Tour.
Show me the man, and I will show you the crime.
> More than eight-in-ten White evangelical Protestant voters who attend religious services frequently (85%) voted for Trump in the most recent election, as did 81% of those who attend less frequently.
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/30/most-whit...
> White born-again or evangelical Christians made up 24 percent of the electorate in the 2022 elections, according to the media consortium exit poll conducted for CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS. Black (11 percent) and Latino (11 percent) voters and those from a union household (18 percent) combined to constitute 40 percent of the vote.
Source: https://rollcall.com/2023/06/28/be-skeptical-of-the-wave-of-...
He says he won the last election, so he's already running for a third term.
Also, he's almost as toxic to the left as Trump is at this point because he doesn't want kids to be transitioned and doesn't think people that say mean things (or things someone in particular thinks are mean) are automatically bad people.
Yet he hasn't totally won over as much of the right as Trump has.
And finally, it's very possible even Zuckerberg is a conservative.
That's a pretty big understatement about all the wacky, inept and dumb things he has said (and presumably believes)
This is a social contagion with disastrous consequence to the youth that "transition"
Most of them will end up gay or return to normal if you leave them alone.
What is the matter with "transphobe" there is no "phobe", it's just the recognition that biology didn't change recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Carlos
Here's a couple from more than a 'few' years ago. And you can go continue back in time and find more examples. Data has not supported the social contagion claim. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-undermin...
Me jumping in for everyone to understand the push-back and why the "data" you propose is not swaying our opinion. The reason something like a study isn't changing our minds about the topic is because we've seen how profit-making institutions, researchers, academia, and even the school system have all been "captured". The topic is taboo, and any sort of dissent is met with a huge amount of pushback, mockery, cancelling, "phobe" calling, and all manners of ugliness. The "literature" is then effectively rigged.
And even if the study is true, and valid, and there was no bias in the research conducted, because we've seen the above "capture" we can't reasonably convince ourselves to trust "the science". This is why it's so tragic that the left has gone scorched-earth with previously-trusted institutions. The trust and reasonable debate will take decades to be re-established, and until then we're stuck with this weird tribal "us vs them" hell hole.
"It wasn't a big thing" - how do you know? You do not. A group of people ask for a place at the table and you and your ilk question their legitimacy as human beings - that's what you're doing. People are saying "I feel this way, I am this way, I see others who feel like me and and feel empowered to come forward and live as the person I feel I am"
And your response is 'it's a phase' - like their identity is a fidget spinner. Nothing is being lost or endangered by making trans people feel welcome and valid and allowing them to pursue treatments that make them happier.
The topic is not taboo. What's taboo is invalidating the lives and existence of other human beings just finding a voice and a place in the world and figuring it out. After all if it's a phase, or a social contagion, it'll blow by and you can relax - but the amount of effort going in to making these people feel scrutinized and unwelcome doesn't seem like that's the point at all.
Every single person I know that isn't on-board with the Left or trans issues (someone the left would call a bigot and nazi), is 110% fine with actual real-world average trans people that want to just live their lives. What everyone has an issue with is the fact that trans activists have an obsession with "being allowed" in opposite-gender spaces such as toilets (like WTF, why?!?). They also have this weird obsession of wanting to have trans issues exposed, taught and presented to kids (again, why?). Also the whole thing about promoting, encouraging and allowing minors that can't consent to be transitioned and have their bodies effectively butchered (on this I will take a stand - this is a tragedy and history will judge those that participated). All of these have nothing to do with normal people questioning the "legitimacy" of trans individuals as humans, that's just been the catchy marketing hook presented by professional activists as they usurped the trans movement, so that they could polarize and perpetuate "The Movement" at the detriment to peace and harmony among all humans (whether they're trans or not).
The fact that the whole trans movement go co-opted by activists is sad, and causing real harm to trans individuals. Meanwhile, the rest of us, normal people, average people, have no desire to prevent trans individuals from being who they are or want to be.
Interesting how taking on a feminine role was limited just to appearance. A common theme for the males who choose to do this, is they tend to mimic only the aspects of the feminine that they objectify sexually.
His isn't an isolated case either. Women whose husbands choose to live out this fantasy often report very similar behavior.
I would recommend perusal of this site: https://www.transwidowsvoices.org/our-voices
These accounts are well worth reading for some insight into what it's like for the partners of these men, and how the "being a woman" fantasies of these men are so different from the actual lived reality of women.
Even if you want to limit consideration to people who self-professed an identity under our modern conceptions, there's a full century of consistent examples. There was a thriving community of trans people in Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s, until it was rather abruptly cut off in 1933. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...
Maybe biology hasn't changed recently, it's just that society isn't suppressing the people you find distasteful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Jorgensen
You are factually wrong right from the start.
Wendy Carlos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Carlos
Sophie Wilson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson
If you go back 4 years, Trans and Black Lives Matter very much dominated the DNC, and those topics today get barely a whistle. I read the whole DNC platform, it's very much not what it was a few years ago.
Meanwhile the VP candidate on the other side has a non white, non Cristian wife and has very much repudiated the racist part of the party.
I suspect that in 4-8 years you will have seen some massive shift in US politics and party platforms away from where we are today. Because it looks like both sides are making some pivots
Zuckerberg sees the writing on the wall. I suspect that he would rather see a trump admin and avoid an anti-trust fight or privacy legislation.
Unless they are mean to him. Then yeah. Automatically bad.
BTW, you listed none of the serious issues the left has with Elon.
Characterising the critiques of Musk in this way is not only reductive, but flat out wrong.
He is a billionaire who is hated, and now has changed his image entirely. Following in Elon's path.
People tend not to change their colours at a later age, and he is a cutthroat business guy.
Lots of ongoing commentary over the years that he really wants to be President.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/will-mark-zuckerberg...
If Zuck wants popularity, maybe a good way to go about that would be to de-shittify Facebook, Instagram, and so forth so that those platforms respect their users.
I don't think that age is everything, but I feel like it is a significant factor.
At the very least, it is very frustrating as a younger person that the vast majority of our lawmakers are _very_ old. This has (historically, but not recently) been more of a problem with congress: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/aging-congress-boomers/
That seems like the issue here, but nobody seems to care.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/02/20/james-comers-twitter-h...
Being pressured to enforce your own terms of service by the government ain't censorship.
Zuckerberg is a coward, afraid to stand up to Jim Jordan. What a pathetic letter
When your ToS are vague enough to apply to just about anything (as most are), it absolutely can be.
Things are headed strongly in the opposite direction you're implying.
Me neither.
I think it's a very sophisticated two-way dog whistle.
The ideologists on both sides can spot each other a mile away; the rest of us look from pig to man, and man to pig, and can not tell the difference.
My response to him was to point out that Harris is strong and trending stronger, while Trump is weak, so the tea leaves are saying the opposite of what he thinks they're saying.
That isn't really a fair assessment; it is true that large groups of people generate more wild theories but there was a lot of misinformation everywhere. Most of it inconsequential.
But weighting by consequence it is hard to overlook things like:
- "Plague of the unvaccinated" and the tide of misinformation saying that the vaccine would halt COVID. A lot of people believed that. They were wrong. And a lot of the blatant human rights violations through the COVID era were probably driven by that particular mistake. It wasn't a right-wing phenomenon.
- "14 Days to Flatten the Curve", which turned out to be critical misinformation that derailed any debate over the wisdom of lockdowns. Certainly a forgivable move given the urgency and confusion in the first few months, but the fact that it was material and misinformation stands out in hindsight.
- Dismissing a lot of legitimate studies related to Ivermectin. It turned out that they were showing that people who had parasites + COVID had a much better response to COVID if they took an anti-parasite drug so, y'know, fair enough but not that useful in the west. But there was a lot of misinformation that the studies themselves were fake that undermined trust that the responders were looking at evidence. That dismissal was also certainly not coming from the right wing.
I read along from Australia during that period and I saw little evidence that people who knew what they were talking about "[Dismissed] a lot of legitimate studies related to Ivermectin".
It was clear cut at the time that meta-studies from "the Global South" showed that Ivermectin greatly improved M&M stats (recovery from infection, death rates) across the board for the cold, the flu, COVID, .. everything really.
No great suprise there, when parasites are killed off the host has more resources to fight off infection.
What was repeatedly dismissed, perhaps not always clearly, was the great leap being put about that Ivermectin would magically cure COVID in G20 coutries with little to no general parasite problems.
The big deal was that social media meta study that sourced 80% of COVID bullshit back to 12 "people" | groups that were all snake oil sales types peddling miracle cures on the vack of sowing fear doubt and uncertainty.
It was an endless sisyphean task pushing back against the amplification of bullshit in US social media.
But there was also a large crowd of people spreading misinformation that the reason the evidence was misleading was because it was fake or the studies were faulty and that only crazy people would want to take Ivermectin. It turned out not only were the studies were fine but also that there are many people who should probably take Ivermectin immediately upon recognising COVID symptoms. That large crowd were, in a pretty clear-cut way, spreading misinformation. Not right wingers, they tended to be more of a pure-play authoritarian variety based on the arguments I had.
> I read along from Australia during that period and I saw little evidence that people who knew what they were talking about "[Dismissed] a lot of legitimate studies related to Ivermectin".
Bit of a tautology there, we'd expect the people who got things right to know what they were talking about in hindsight and vice versa. People who spread misinformation have a fairly particular profile, it just isn't partisan.
No, there wasn't. I haven't kept up with the science, so there may be such studies now, but there certainly wasn't back in late 2020, when the ivermectin craze spread like wildfire among right wingers.
Nope. Not now, not then, and not in the absence of parasites.
The early pandemic studies you "recall" were real studies, meta studies that looked at the use of Ivermectin in "the Global South" in countries with high incidence of worms | parasites | etc.
These studies showed a distinct improvement in the face of COVID for treated groups .. eg: those untreated that had parasites and caught COVID Vs. those treated and caught COVID but now had immune responses uncomprimised by parasites.
more recent studies, in G20 type countries,
A Cochrane meta-analysis of 11 eligible trials examining the efficacy of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 published through April 2022 concluded that ivermectin has no beneficial effect for people with COVID-19.1
Since May 2022, an additional 3 large randomized clinical trials including several thousand participants have been published, each reaching a similar conclusion.
Today JAMA publishes a new trial of ivermectin treatment for mild to moderate COVID-19 that addresses the possibility that the existing literature may have missed the efficacy of ivermectin because the previously tested dose (approximately 400 μg/kg daily for 3 days) was insufficient.
At a higher treatment dose (600 μg/kg daily) and longer treatment duration (6 days), Naggie and colleagues again conclude that ivermectin is not beneficial for the treatment of COVID-19.
and,
New study shows ivermectin lacks meaningful benefits in COVID-19 treatment (March, 2024)
New research led by the University of Oxford has concluded that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin does not provide clinically meaningful benefits for treating COVID-19 in a largely vaccinated population.
Damn- no effect in any trial in the absence of worms.
> Bit of a tautology there, we'd expect the people who got things right to know what they were talking about in hindsight
whereas I'm talking about qualified epidemiologists who were correct then (2020) and still correct today .. the likes of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Stanley (who I worked with in the 1980s) et al.
This would be correlation not causation if it were something like parasites caused better COVID outcomes and people in the global south were being given sugar-water. Then there'd be studies showing that sugar water caused better COVID outcomes but it'd be correlation not causation.
In this case though the correlation was because of causation.
What the actual studies show is simply a correlation, and we can do some educated guesses based on prior knowledge: ivermectin is an effective dewormer, the human body can produce anti-bodies against COVID, and that the immunesystem is better fighting a single thing, than multiple ones. Putting these together, we get a reasonable hypothesis showing a third variable that explains the measured correlation, through a causative mechanism (parasite hindering healing and parasite getting killed).
You've misunderstood the correlation-causation complaint. We have a pretty clear theory of causation here and the results back it up. Just because causality depends on specific conditions doesn't stop it being causal. Any medical treatment that isn't 100% effective (ie, most of them) depend on specific conditions being present - otherwise they'd be perfectly effective. Of course since the chain of causality is quite clear on this one we can conclude from the base rates of parasite infections there isn't much point taking ivermectin for COVID in the west.
There are zero new info in studies like that (unless you believe every logical conclusion requires a new study? If A is proved, should we separately prove A or B or what?), and they can’t even shut up all the idiots that still go on about ivermectin, so not even that goal is achieved..
The studies were not faulty, but any meta-analysis of the studies that did not take this into account was.
No, there wasn't.
It is not established, but a player's hit points remaining and parasite infection status may negatively affect COVID survivability dice roll.
Just add those up in your head. dc am not a doc.
The point under discussion is whether COVID misinformation is largely a right-wing phenomenon. The Pew study I linked to shows that right wingers are FAR more likely to believe that COVID was a hoax, and vice versa, which is a fair proxy for COVID misinformation in general.
Try to keep up.
> The examples you've given are just right wing apologetics.
> That particular delusion is entirely due to right wing misinformation
This is blatantly violating the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), in addition to being logically invalid emotional attacks and fallacies that do nothing to actually respond to GP's points. Suggest against this - it absolutely destroys the credibility of the points that you do make, in addition to reducing the quality of HN.
None of what I've said is "logically invalid emotional attacks and fallacies."
Do better.
These statements:
> No, those mistakes did not justify the downright biblical flood of COVID misinformation that emanated from the right.
> The examples you've given are just right wing apologetics.
> That particular delusion is entirely due to right wing misinformation
Violate these parts of the guidelines:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.
There was virtually zero factual content to your comment. It almost pure partisan political activism.
> None of what I've said is "logically invalid emotional attacks and fallacies."
It seems like you don't understand the difference between an emotional plea and a factual statement. "the downright biblical flood of COVID misinformation that emanated from the right" is not a fact - it's an emotional plea, as are the other cited statements. It is impossible to find a citation for this statement because "biblical flood" isn't a technical term that you can back up with facts. "right wing apologetics" is another instance of something that you cannot prove because it does not have a factual status.
> Do better.
> Try to keep up.
You should review the guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Edit out swipes.
The term "flamebait" is also an emotional plea, but we trust adults to use their brain and decide how to report that in good faith.
"Biblical Flood" is a euphemism indicating "a lot of" misinformation (which is a fact [1]) and anyone not being willfully obtuse could interpret what the commenter meant. but I suppose it's easier to immediately dismiss that very true statement than engage with it.
Incorrect. Emotional pleading is a logical fallacy wherein one manipulates the emotions of the listener in an attempt to convince them of an argument without actually supporting it. Labeling something "flamebait" is a characterization of the tone of an argument, and whether it appears to be designed to incite low-quality discussion/flaminess, which is orthogonal to the argument itself. An argument can be flamebait without containing emotional pleading, and vice versa. The two are unrelated, and the fact that you so confidently state that they are indicates that you don't actually know what either of them are.
> "Biblical Flood" is a euphemism indicating "a lot of"
Yes, I know that - and that's completely irrelevant as to its factual nature. It's still an euphemism designed to manipulate the listener, and is something that is impossible to prove factually. There is no objective test for whether something is a "Biblical flood" (and you can't even get different people to agree on what meets the threshold for it) - you thinking that it can assessed as true indicates that you don't have a good handle on what it means for something to be "factual".
> which is a fact [1]
Copy-pasting journal article links is not an argument, and that article in particular doesn't support the point that you think you're making.
Which is also not measurable and manipulates the reader. I don't see the readers comment as flamebait. Just because misinformation comes from right-wing media and people have eyes to see that and call it out doesn't make it flamebait. What should we call it? An unknown amount of totally apolitical misinformation from [insert party here]?
> It's still an euphemism designed to manipulate the listener, and is something that is impossible to prove factually
As are most arguments when we use phrases like "a lot", "similar to", etc. If you dismiss things based on such broad criteria, I am puzzled by your comment history. You have told users they are bad and support Tyranny[1], said it's malicious to support infrastructure spending[2], and called Snowden a narcissist (which proves he had no altruistic motives?)[3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41434473 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41375616 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41406143
These are not emotional statements supported by an argument, these are arguments supported by emotional pleas.
And a simple cmd+f shows "Emotional plea" is a phrase you do not use sparingly either. You are using this word very broadly. If you cannot hold yourself to the same standards you hold other users, you aren't debating in good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41375535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41375602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41406195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41206808
You have obviously constructed a belief system that makes it impossible to engage with things you disagree with while allowing yourself to lash out at users however you see fit and bring up whatever politics suits you.
> Copy-pasting journal article links is not an argument
An argument is not a theoretical bottle exercise for one to wordsmith their way towards not engaging with the facts. In the real world, we have eyes.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440241258026?i...
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...
Yet most people can still recognize it when they see it, it's relatively easy to provide good heuristics ("is it unnecessarily politically partisan? does it bring up irrelevant examples?"), and is against the guidelines.
> and manipulates the reader
I already pointed out that the characterization of "flamebait" is not an emotional plea, as you incorrectly called it, and you didn't respond to that characterization at all and merely ignored it, so I can only conclude that you're inventing some other definition to fit the word.
Regardless, it's also against the HN guidelines, so we can safely put aside the problem of whether or not it's appropriate to point out, because it is.
> I don't see the readers comment as flamebait. Just because misinformation comes from right-wing media
...and that's why you don't see it - because you're pushing the same political agenda that they are.
This is also deceptive goalpost-moving - the poster didn't just say that "misinformation comes from right-wing media", but that it was a "Biblical flood" from "the right", which means an objectively large quantity, which neither you nor they have provided any evidence for.
It's pretty clear that that comment is flamebait. It made a politically-charged claim meant to attack a particular political group that had zero evidence for it, which you have also provided zero evidence for. Most of that user's other comments have been flagged and the account was eventually banned, which pretty clearly shows that they were engaging in flamebait.
> people have eyes to see that and call it out
Yet more emotionally-manipulative rhetoric. You still haven't provided evidence for these claims, either (although even if you had, it wouldn't excuse this).
> I am puzzled by your comment history.
Yet more emotionally-manipulative rhetoric (you are clearly not puzzled - you're personally attacking me), coupled with profiling, which is an ad-hominem that is extremely inappropriate (for HN, and for anywhere) and bad-faith.
> said it's malicious to support infrastructure spending[2]
This is a straight-up lie. I said "Proposing that we should continue to throw more money at infrastructure, before diagnosing and fixing the problems that are causing that inefficiency [...], is straight-up malicious." This is very different than what you claimed I said. You read my comment, and lied about what I said.
> and called Snowden a narcissist
Which is an irrelevant, intentionally misleading and out-of-context fragment of what I said - which was saying that he had narcissistic tendencies as an explanation for his actions, not as a means of trying to distract from an argument that he made.
> And a simple cmd+f shows "Emotional plea" is a phrase you do not use sparingly either. You are using this word very broadly. If you cannot hold yourself to the same standards you hold other users, you aren't debating in good faith.
More profiling. This is not appropriate for HN. Please do not do it.
> You have obviously constructed a belief system that makes it impossible to engage with things you disagree with while allowing yourself to lash out at users however you see fit and bring up whatever politics suits you.
This is yet another character attack - again, inappropriate for HN. As we've seen, you're also willing to lie about my words, so this assessment isn't based on fact anyway.
> An argument is not a theoretical bottle exercise for one to wordsmith their way towards not engaging with the facts. In the real world, we have eyes.
More emotionally-manipulative and deceitful rhetoric. Also, it's worth noting that you ignoring my point and instead proceeded to link-drop like it proved your point.
> https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...
This is completely irrelevant to claims that there's been a "downright biblical flood of COVID misinformation that emanated from the right".
I don't need to read the others - if you have a claim that you want to make, you can source the claim from the paper, because given that you lied about what I said, the burden is on you to prove that your claims are based in reality. Posting a link is not proof behind a claim.
If you can't argue in good faith without profiling other users, making personal attacks, making partisan political comments, justifying guideline-breaking behavior because you agree with the opinions made, claiming that your opinions are "facts" without providing evidence, sneering at people who don't agree with said opinions, and actively lying about other people's words and claims, then you shouldn't comment on HN.
Please do not respond if you can't avoid doing the above - especially if you can't avoid lying about my own words back to me.
That was not misinformation. The idea that Ivermectin was helpful in dealing with CoVID was determined from a meta analysis that included a fake study that nobody can confirm happened and even used dead people. It was pushed by grifting doctors who sell Ivermectin.
Yes, if you have parasites and take an anti-parasite drug you're gonna feel better, whether you have CoVID or not.
> the tide of misinformation saying that the vaccine would halt COVID
It halted it as much as it could considering 30% of people didn't complete vaccination. I finished and have had every booster and never got CoVID despite all of my family members getting it (who refused to get vaccinated).
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
It's simply stating facts to point out that conservatives have, for decades, approached voter participation from the perspective that voter turnout harms their odds of victory. Reducing voter turnout under the fig leaves of 'protecting the vote' or 'fighting rampant voter fraud' is a long-term party strategy.
I wish both parties were pro-voter participation, but the reality is that one party succeeds with high voter turnout and the other does not, so funding projects to increase voter turnout is a partisan activity.
You describing these justification as "fig leaves" proves rather conclusively that you are making partisan, as opposed to factual, statements.
> is a long-term party strategy
...and your goalpost-moving from describing individuals on HN ("You can tell someone's political party merely by asking whether they support a high voter participation rate. You can also offend members of the other party by pointing out this fact.") to the strategy of political organizations further undermines the idea that you're making this comment in good faith.
If you're making this comment in good faith, then you don't understand how biased you are. You are, factually, not approaching this from a neutral standpoint.
This is just electioneering 101: The party leadership can’t explicitly say “voter participation hurts us,” they have to instead pound on the table with unfounded claims of widespread fraud as an explanation to the party rank and file for the voter suppression they’re engaging in.
I’m not saying I don’t have opinions, but I don’t need to lean on them when the facts make the case for me. The fact is that the low information voting bloc of the party is indoctrinated with the rampant fraud myth, and they support policies that suppress participation as a result. The high information leadership encourages this false belief because they know they lose elections when voters participate at high rates.
It gives me no pleasure to report these facts. They are what they are.
Better voter identification IMHO is a reasonable ask from Republicans that's always shot down by Democrats. They say it excludes people that don't have ID.
To me it seems reasonable to make having ID mandatory. And also making your ID mandatory for voting, like in every other developed nation I know. Make it free to get a state ID in the same legislation.
This would take away the main argument Republicans have for saying there's potential fraud. Having ID is also good for people, because it eases interaction with the state in other things.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/tujqxf/voter_id_la...
Now, Republicans could take away this argument by instituting a government ID like you're suggesting. It would have to be well thought through - the structure of US society puts many roadblocks in front of those least likely to have IDs, like:
- often large distances to government offices, which can be expensive to travel if you don't own a car
- many people basically can't take time off work, sometimes from multiple jobs, or they risk losing their health insurance
- usually you need some kind of documentation to get a new government ID, and many people don't have this available for a number of reasons - according to this source[0] at least 1.5%
Any solution would have to work around these issues, but it's definitely not impossible. And once this is implemented, the Democrats' concerns would be taken care off - why don't Republicans seem to ever work on this? If you started requiring voter ID without doing this, you'd de-facto be banning people from voting - often times those who are already marginalized. Yet I haven't seen Republicans running on implementing such IDs. Why do you think that is?
I would agree with you that the Democrats should bring this up too, if there were evidence for voter fraud beyond the usual margins (that also exist in elections in other countries). But I haven't seen such evidence, and all attempts by Republicans to find evidence in investigations has completely failed. So why should Democrats compromise with them on this point? Why can't Republicans alleviate their concerns before implementing voter ID?
This reminds me a lot of the attempts during Trumps presidency to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Somehow they always tried to repeal it first, and never presented their better replacement. Four years ago, they promised that their plan is two weeks away, yet it's still nowhere to be found. But they are still running on repealing the ACA. I wonder why? Why does this pattern keep coming up?
[0]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/mill...
Again, you moved the goalposts from "individual voters including people on HN" to "party leadership". You are either incapable of understanding that voters are not equivalent to party leaders (which is an extremely serious flaw), given that I already pointed it out to you, or you aren't acting in good faith.
> I don’t need to lean on them when the facts make the case for me
> It gives me no pleasure to report these facts. They are what they are.
The "fact" that you are claiming is: rank-and-file republican voters ("You can tell someone's political party merely by asking whether they support a high voter participation rate") are using voter fraud as a "fig leaf" for voter suppression. You have provided exactly zero evidence for this claim, despite repeatedly asserting that it is a fact, and changing the goalposts when challenged.
Furthermore, "Fig leaf" doesn't have anything to do with whether or not voter fraud exists - it has to do with whether the users of that justification honestly believe in it. And, speaking as someone with many conservative friends who honestly believe in it, your assertion is factually false,
Your claims are uncited, false, and politically biased. This is partisan political activism.
The media doesn't seem too interested in figuring out the actual impact, so I don't think any of us really know if it was balanced or not. But this doesn't strike me as the type of thing we want billionaires doing regardless.
Concerns without evidence are nothing. Is there any evidence at all this occurred? Why aren't Republicans attacking Musk donating 10's of millions of dollars to directly help Trump?
I mean, we know why they aren't attacking him. Because they're complete hypocrites.
Can you link to something describing the basis for these concerns?
You can tell because the lizard has begun looksmaxing
However, we know from numerous leaks now that the White House has indeed pressured every major social media company to target specific citizens and censor them.
I am assuming you believed him because he provided some evidence to support his claims?
https://istories.media/en/news/2024/08/27/pavel-durov-has-vi...
He also said that he doesn't visit Russia anymore, yet a recent FSB leak indicates that he was frequenting there. And before that he heavily marketed Telegram as ad-free forever. And before that there were quite weird populist PR tactics when professional cryptographers pointed out Telegram's crypto is a mess.
YMMV, but I wouldn't trust a single word from this guy.
Telegram's crypto may be weird, as the professional cryptographers you allude to have pointed out; I don't know, not being a cryptography expert. But MTProto 2.0 has been shown to enjoy many nice security properties (including a version of forward secrecy, though one afaik not as good as that enjoyed by Signal): formal proofs available here https://github.com/miculan/telegram-mtproto2-verification/tr... and some peer reviewed papers describing the formal verification effort are linked to there as well. Considering that I think calling Telegram's crypto "a mess" is misleading.
Honestly, the issue was not about their crypto at all, but about the attitude and how they reacted. It's literally as if someone says "dude, I know a thing about crypto and you might've made a mistake there" and Pavel immediately goes into offensive defense, preaching how they have the best ACM champion PhDs and shifting the burden of proof, basically a canonical Putin/Trump-style of evading an argument.
That's what makes me wary of this guy, not his product.
If it's true then he was reckless in his traveling not just to France.
There also was a story when he claimed that Telegram is developed abroad but it turned out that many of Telegram employees actually worked at the same beautiful historical office building where Vkontakte was located at that time.
Also, a fun fact, when he was a CEO of Vkontakte, one day he was throwing banknotes into the crowd from a window in that notable historical building. Maybe he was conducting an experiment with universal basic income, who knows.
> while driving a Mercedes it's typical for the rich to register their properties to a friend/family/classmate
They can earn a lot of money via Telegram Bug Bounty Program if they can prove it
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/all-the-texts-fox-ne...
Why should I treat your comment as valid information?
Exactly this. It is incredible bizarre how his imagine has taken such a drastic turn from being a "hacker" to a "Jiu-Jitsu bro."
Zuck is on a major PR campaign drive, I would not trust a word he says.