RealityVoid · 5 years ago

I'm not even from the US, but this might just be the scariest comment I read in this thread so far.

CivBase · 5 years ago

That does not make this a coup. This is a riot. While there is no doubt that the rioters want the election results to be overturned, there is no indication that they have the ability or intention to use force to make that a reality.

These are angry people being disruptive and destructive. That's what a riot is. Calling it a coup is conspiratorial.

CivBase · 5 years ago

I agree. I'm not saying these people's demands are reasonable. I don't believe they are. OP just asked what their motivation was and I tried to give a serious answer.

CivBase · 5 years ago

I'm starting to believe we need some kind of regulation for companies who profit off of proliferating and re-enforcing echo chambers, though I'm not sure what that would even look like yet.

meepmorp · 5 years ago

Trump will blanket pardon them.

silexia · 5 years ago

If penalties like this are not enforced against violent attacks that intend to change the results of an election, then America will lose it's democracy.

zucker42 · 5 years ago

Hell no we shouldn't kill people for this. I can hardly think of a more damaging and terrible way to combat these crazies.

ethbr0 · 5 years ago

Not sure you can count tear gas and fire extinguishers as "armed" (that's what CSPAN is showing and reporting).

Then again, the lack of firearms is probably why Capitol Police are playing it so calm.

neaden · 5 years ago

The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2021/jan/06/georgia... as well as first person accounts on Twitter from people who work in the capital.

vlozko · 5 years ago

If you’ve seen the NSFW video of the protestor getting shot in the neck while in the Capitol building, you would have noticed someone next to her holding a semi-auto rifle (AR-15, my best guess).

manfredo · 5 years ago

6 minutes ago (as of the time of this comment) the New York Times reports that 5 guns were seized by police: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/06/us/washington-dc-pro...

asdfasgasdgasdg · 5 years ago

Well, a number of Trump's opponents did think we'd be living in a fascist dictatorship inside of a year after he was elected. That didn't happen. This is very, very bad, worse than I expected, but plenty of people on Twitter expected the imminent end of the United States as a free society.

JxLS-cpgbe0 · 5 years ago

That's not true

Karunamon · 5 years ago

Is there a source on that not coming from some rando's or politician's Twitter account?

alexilliamson · 5 years ago

Now you do what they told ya

bilbo0s · 5 years ago

What we probably shouldn't have done was to hire the people we hired to be police in the first place. That was the mistake from which all others followed. If the people you hire to police your laws will only police the laws they want to police, or even worse, will only police the laws against a certain demographic of people, then you don't have a police force. And acting like these people are police inevitably leads to scenes like the one we see today.

eyelidlessness · 5 years ago

We can’t identify a problem and demand a solution?

watwut · 5 years ago

This amounts to argument that if cops feelings are hurt, it is ok for them to let things just happen. I mean, we expect more from snowflake sjws.

philosopher1234 · 5 years ago

Yes we should, because both are apt.

danbolt · 5 years ago

I think there's a bit of honesty to it as well. I bet the burglars need to see themselves as breaking into Mordor and challenging Sauron to save Middle-Earth. As much as Congress houses difficult things like partisan deadlock and lobbying, it's not a villain's lair in an action movie. I think it was smart of the capitol organizers to ensure Congress was secure, and then stay away from posturing like a James Bond villain.

InitialLastName · 5 years ago

CSPAN reporting at least one law enforcement officer transferred to the hospital with a gunshot wound.

13415 · 5 years ago

I haven't found a picture of a protester carrying a gun, but there are certainly vandals with clubs and bulletproof vests inside the Capitol, and some of them have broken into offices:

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/06/us/washington-dc-pro...

viridian · 5 years ago

I'm not defending what's going on here, but CHAZ/CHOP had a higher murder rate than Somalia because of unelected volunteer "private security". Not sure how you see that as peaceful.

umvi · 5 years ago

> and it was quite peaceful

and also quite illegal and a complete breakdown of rule of law

paulnechifor · 5 years ago

It was peaceful. Very few people got murdered.

ALittleLight · 5 years ago

Quite peaceful? There were four shootings in ten days and at least two people killed [1]. I personally went there and within a span of an hour or so that I was there I saw a woman screaming about how she had been raped and I saw a mob of people violently ejecting a street preacher.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Autonomous_Zone#S...

daenz · 5 years ago

I lived a block away from the CHAZ/CHOP and while it was mostly peaceful during the day, it was angry, aggressive, and deadly at night. I took video of a mob of people brutalizing (pushing to the ground, pinning on the ground) a Christian street preacher in broad daylight because they didn't like his annoying speech. At night, for days at a time, there were gunshots and people getting shot. If you think it was "quite peaceful" there, then you're getting your information from a severely biased source. I lived there and spent more time there than probably any of your sources.

8note · 5 years ago

They aren't really though. There's nothing particularly special about DC. The same sentators and congress can meet anywhere to do their job, and just ignore these folks

hertzrat · 5 years ago

They lose if they do something as distasteful as blackmail congressmembers to take a vote. They would lose support from everybody

cmurf · 5 years ago

This is nonsense, it's not how it works, Congress cannot choose the president unless no candidate gets a majority of Electoral College votes. Trump unquestionably lacks a majority of state certified Electoral College votes. And Biden unquestionably has a majority of state certified Electoral College votes - and per the Electoral Counts Act those certifications made by the safe harbor date, which was December 8, cannot be disputed by Congress.

Everything else going on is a show. And it is working insofar as Trump's sore loser supporters have sent him more money after the election than before the election. They love the lies. They hate the truth. They lack the coping skill to deal with truth, so they sign up for the lies. They purchase lies as a product, that is what Trump sells. It's who he has always been and always will be.

Trump right now: we had an election, that was stolen from us, it was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side...but you have to go home now, we have to have peace.

they took it away from me, from you, from our country

this was a fraudulent election...so many are treated with evil...go home in peace

Translation: We won, but you gotta go home. They stole from me, from you, from the country, but you gotta go home. They are evil, but you gotta go home.

He is unfit for office. He's ill. The proper thing to do is wrap up the counting of ascertained Electoral College votes, declare Biden the winner. And then the House should immediately impeach Trump. And then the Senators can choose to remove him from office and ban him from ever holding public office again. That is the proper way to end this.

dannyw · 5 years ago

That’s what they did.

nkozyra · 5 years ago

https://twitter.com/byaaroncdavis/status/1346908166030766080

jacquesm · 5 years ago

What makes you think they didn't think hard about it? Your elected officials are under siege.

dragontamer · 5 years ago

Hmm, good point.

I've only really been following things when shit hit the fan today. It took multiple dozens of minutes after the Capital was breached before the National Guard was called in, which is still too long in my opinion.

entropicdrifter · 5 years ago

Well, now the National Guard has been deployed, so I suspect we'll soon see a sharp change in atmosphere

cltby · 5 years ago

The BLM riots cost about $1-2 billion dollars of property damage [1]. Taking as given the standard gov't value of life of $9M, this works out to 110-220 life equivalents. This would qualify the BLM riots as one of the deadliest terror attacks to ever happen on US soil.

[1] https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a4...

_-david-_ · 5 years ago

Hundreds of the BLM protests were violent (7%).

meragrin_ · 5 years ago

> BLM they had military out in full force, even though BLM was non-violent protests.

The military only became involved after local governments gave "protesters" space over multiple days and emboldened the idiots to the point local police were overwhelmed.

alikim · 5 years ago

> It is unfortunate though, that this strategy is only seemingly applied to white people.

It is much more than unfortunate.

cltby · 5 years ago

It seems widely agreed that 93% of BLM protests were peaceful [1]. That remaining 7% slice was responsible for $1-2 billion of property damage [2], on par with a serious natural disaster. I don't know how someone can continue to use the "mostly peaceful" line with a straight face.

[1] https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/ [2] https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a4...

IgorPartola · 5 years ago

https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1346920198461419520?s=0...

And, you know, taking selfies with them.

nsilvestri · 5 years ago

The point stands: the summer BLM protests in DC were marching in the closed-off streets around the White House and were met with even stronger resistance from the police.

RIMR · 5 years ago

Why would capital police escort armed rioters into the Senate building for "safety" if their job is to ensure the safety of the Senate building, Senators, and staff?

This is a backwards argument. The police didn't do their jobs. They were even seen taking selfies with the trespassers: https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1346920198461419520

bradlys · 5 years ago

84% of police are Trump voters. That's the explanation.

Merman_Mike · 5 years ago

A handful of cops and hundreds of people in an angry mob? Is it really a mystery why they didn't fight too hard to keep the barriers shut?

aspaceman · 5 years ago

It's a pretty straight-forward explanation, just one that people don't like to think about:

Pigs can't be trusted. They like to pretend they're protecting people and doing the right thing. But they're just bullies in uniform. Never trust any of them. Ever. "My dad is a cop though and..." no. If there was a single good cop, they would have stopped this. Fucking pigs. Your dad is a pig. Get over it.

Maybe if cops had better training, they would stop something like this and focus on protecting us. But they don't, and they didn't. They're pigs. Don't be another person who buys into the pigs' lies.

radicalriddler · 5 years ago

They are disrupting political process via force in the name of ideology. They're domestic terrorists.

recursive · 5 years ago

I saw a video on twitter of a window getting destroyed.

meetups323 · 5 years ago

At least one person has been shot. https://twitter.com/AP/status/1346918654076723202

miguelmota · 5 years ago

> It's quite unfair to call them terrorists when they've harmed no one and destroyed nothing.

People were harmed and property was destroyed. There's plenty of videos of fights breaking out and capitol windows being broken.

https://twitter.com/search?q=washingtondc%20windows%20until%...

lm28469 · 5 years ago

> they've harmed no one

Besides the democratic process

> destroyed nothing

Besides the capitol

> the voice of the unheard!

I've been hearing about them weekly for the last 4 years and I'm not even in the US

dwaltrip · 5 years ago

They broke into the Capitol building. Smashed windows. They've attempted to break into the House and Senate chambers.

Ericson2314 · 5 years ago

It's true. "terrorism" is a bad word and we should not use it. The definition prohibits an objective meaning.

And I would rather see this police response for BLM, than that response for these people.

RIMR · 5 years ago

This was an act of political intimidation intended to derail a legislative body's constitutional duties.

It absolutely fits the definition of terrorism.

dragonwriter · 5 years ago

> It’s quite unfair to call them terrorists when they’ve harmed no one and destroyed nothing.

There have been quite a number of injuries and property damage, deployment of chemical irritants by the mob against law enforcement, and several explosive devices identified and defused in the attempt to use violence and threats of further violence to overturn the results of the recent election.

bradlys · 5 years ago

> All I see is law enforcement opening a gate.

That is literally letting them in. They didn't stand their position. They literally walked backwards and let the crowd in.

dillondoyle · 5 years ago

The biggest problem to me is twofold: - there were very very few law enforcement there beforehand. Compare to BLM where there were thousands of storm troopers, tanks, etc camped out before the similarly obviously publicized protests occurred. Here is a comparison photo of what they had in front of the monument before the LEGAL BLM protest this summer [1]

- the 'resistance' was very weak at least at first. The videos of the 'storming' didn't show much resistance, no gas, no rubber bullets, no attempt to hold the line. here is a 'selfie' [2] which to be fair doesn't show cop actively participating, but does show him just standing there. There are some photos of guns drawn trying to protect the floor, obviously out numbered once they secured Members I understand completely retreating. But the main uniformed officers at the entrances didn't act.

It's a stark difference. My story is that here in Denver I was gassed, before curfew, before an unlawful assembly was declared, during a peaceful protest this summer. They shot more than a few eyes out of their sockets with rubber bullets. A judge had to restrain the Denver police for their violence.

Compare to today it took a LONG time for them to deploy these same weapons, and it doesn't even look like they used tear gas/irritants at least in the first videos, just smoke; unlike what they gassed us with and those in Lafayette Park and across the country.

1 https://s.abcnews.com/images/US/national-guard-lincoln-memor... 2 https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1346920198461419520

meragrin_ · 5 years ago

Only 5 guns? Then why didn't "BLM protesters" qualify for "armed rioters"? They were armed with far more than the Trump supporters I have seen.

Rapzid · 5 years ago

Don't forget the explosive devices neutralized by the police.

OCASM · 5 years ago

Obstacles to get in, as opposed to BLM's/Antifa's indiscriminate violence and destruction against anything and anybody nearby.

triceratops · 5 years ago

I'm not doubting they would've voted no even if they'd called witnesses and had a real trial. But (and this is speculation) there'd be a lot more people aware of Trump's corrupt conduct in office and he would've lost by a far larger margin.

Although...who am I kidding. The right-wing media would probably have covered the full impeachment trial in the same way they covered the House impeachment proceedings. Just play a silent video of politicians talking, and have their own pundits say "This is BS we won't even insult you by making you listen to it".

newacct583 · 5 years ago

> letting the term run out and having the president lose in a typical election is probably the least debatable way to change the president

Except that didn't work out, did it? Remember he was impeached for trying to cheat at an election. And people (lots of people) warned he'd continue on that path.

I mean, let's be honest: it would have been better in hindsight to have actually removed him from office.

MattGaiser · 5 years ago

You can very fairly blame them for not removing him. I don't think you can blame them for the storming as Trump has the support of the base. They do not.

systemBuilder · 5 years ago

Look if you still fault them for doing the right thing why should they do the right thing? Give it a rest! Acknowledge that they have done the right thing now! People deserve credit for taking the correct moral stand unlike the terrorist group attacking Washington DC right now!

A4ET8a8uTh0 · 5 years ago

Don't say that. That makes people reluctant to be adults and do what needs to be done. People deserve some recognition for, eventually, doing just that.

edit: Guys. By resorting to ad hominems and offering no incentive for changing one's mind, you are practically guaranteeing calcification and re-entrenchment. Are you happy that you contributed to the situation in a positive way?

8note · 5 years ago

Establishment democrats also are their lunch to an extent.

A pro business, corporate tax cut Democrat isn't all that different from a pro business, corporate tax cut republican

mytailorisrich · 5 years ago

The US Capitol has been stormed into and guns have now been drawn in the chamber of the Senate.

I think it is also time for people to face the fact that this is not hyperbole.

jandrese · 5 years ago

Shots have been fired in the Capitol building.

neaden · 5 years ago

Accurately describing what is going on is not hyperbole. People like you gaslighting us about what we see is what has allowed Trump to get away with so much.

cmurf · 5 years ago

The cult leader gets angrier and threatens his own followers who defy his demands for fealty. The rejection makes them all angry, cult leader and followers.

Trump and Trump supporters have been more caustic by far to Republicans who don't toe the line. They seek retribution and engage in threatening behavior, including death threats.

This morning Trump expressed his displeasure at the Vice President's unwillingness to engage in illegal activity, and then Trump sent a mob to the capitol where Pence was doing his job.

Four people are dead on a day of performative action, merely to count votes, with an outcome that was guaranteed on December 8.

Following this violence and death, most Republicans in the House supported and voted for this cynical, delusional lie of their cult leader. And had very little to say about the mob that was send toward them, by him. They had more lies to tell.

Trump spent five years of the previous presidency trying to delegitimize that president too, just like he's trying to delegitimize the next one.

Don't lecture people on how they should become milquetoast.

notJim · 5 years ago

I went to protests all summer where the cops were beating the shit out of people for standing on the street outside an empty building. They sure as hell weren't removing the cordons and taking selfies with people inside.

hansthehorse · 5 years ago

Joe Kennedy almost certainly stole the 1960 election for his son. Nixon knew this but decided it wasn't worth the national grief to fight it.

travisoneill1 · 5 years ago

How so? The vote differential from FL was clearly within the margin of error of the counting methods, but that only suggests the possibility of a counting error, not a steal.

twobitshifter · 5 years ago

In addition, there was a big movement that claimed 2004 election was stolen from Kerry. Several books were published on it in fact. See this article from Politico, which covered it again in light of the Trump claims. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/19/2004-kerry...

I don't think this election was stolen, but in 2004, I did think there were oddities which were swept under the rug.

MrRiddle · 5 years ago

"Almost every state" is enough these days?

karmelapple · 5 years ago

Have any links handy?

Shared404 · 5 years ago

I suspected that would be the case, but as you pointed out, they have many claims.

At work currently, so haven't really looked at it. Probably will tonight, maybe make a post refuting it.

driverdan · 5 years ago

It's called the Gish gallop after a creationist who used this technique during debates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

ansible · 5 years ago

Yes.

Also consider that 45 is not the typical poor defendant, who cannot afford adequate representation in court. He is (theoretically) a billionaire, and can afford $1K/hour constitutional law experts.

The fact that 45 and his crack team of lawyers (more like, "on crack", right?) have failed so completely tells you there just is no actual evidence there.

Shared404 · 5 years ago

Sounds about right. I didn't have time to get past the landing page when I pulled it up.

I'm kinda regretting wasting everyone's time now.

thu2111 · 5 years ago

I think your comment is probably the most deceptive I've ever seen on HN :(

"It's just a youtube video of voting officials talking at a desk or something."

The discussion they're having at the desk is about fraud. It's a vote counting operation. The counting volunteers say they found a pile of ballots with identical signatures and the woman running the vote is telling them to ignore it because it's not their role to flag this or investigate it. In a vote audit.

The video description text has a transcript of what's going on.

The female counter asks, “So when we’re done with the audit, there’s still the opportunity to challenge the fact that we have multiple ballots with the very same signature?” she asks. “I don’t know if ‘challenge’ is the right word,” the SOS official says ... “And again, we know that you have a concern with this precinct,” she tells them, explaining, “That’s not your role at this very moment,”

A video of counting volunteers discussing fraud they detected and being explicitly told to drop it is very far from "just talking at a desk or something".

xpe · 5 years ago

> Mail-in ballots are particularly prone to fraud, something the New York Times worried about back before Trump.

This is mischaracterization of the article.

1. The title that shows up in the browser bar (the HTML <title>) is: "As More Vote by Mail, Faulty Ballots Could Impact Elections".

2. The title as shown on the page is "Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises". So, clearly, the article speaks about both fraudulent and faulty ballots. In my view, the article is not well organized. The two ideas are too fluidly mixed.

So, with this context in mind, let's discuss two paragraphs from the article:

  In 2008, 18 percent of the votes in the nine states likely to decide this
  year’s presidential election were cast by mail. That number will almost
  certainly rise this year, and voters in two-thirds of the states have already
  begun casting absentee ballots. In four Western states, voting by mail is the
  exclusive or dominant way to cast a ballot.

  The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the
  potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than
  innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud
  that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say.

* Except, of course, in extremely close races.

felipelemos · 5 years ago

What is the difference from a in person casted ballot? Isn't it also anonymous?

titzer · 5 years ago

Would you care to provide evidence that mail-in vote fraud has ever been a significant issue in any US election anywhere, at any time, at any level, now or in the past? Because I have never seen any such evidence, and mail-in ballots have been used for over a century.

CogitoCogito · 5 years ago

So what you're saying is that it's possible that there were fraudulent ballots in support of Trump?

willis936 · 5 years ago

Mail-in ballots are sent out to people who request them. You would need such a massive identity fraud campaign to move the needle on an election that I can’t believe you would be unable to find any evidence of it anywhere in 50 states. There are no signs to indicate further investigation is needed. Also importantly, there are enough audits in place to catch the whiff of a foul election that can be litigated with evidence discovery.

salawat · 5 years ago

I'd still like to see the actual process behind that one county in Michigan that actually got looked. I can't find any information on the alleged "emergency patch" of GA voting systems either. Or an explanation of why several State's judiciaries chimed in on changing election timeframes when constitutionally, that is the perview of the Legislature.

I'm still on the lack of evidence fence but I'm seriously leaning toward the side of "Thou dost protest too much" when the response isn't the most gruelingly painful enumeration of every detail of the process to the rest of the country.

You can throw all your numerical arguments about why it shouldn't matter at me that you want. I'm not buying it.

This is the simplest god blessed process to automate. It's literally a counter. There should not be anywhere near as much opportunity for controversy or hell, even something to hide!

The tech behind it should be absolutely boring, and yet, no reckoning. No public release of auditable source code, or machine images.

I don't give a damn who won. I give a damn that someone questioned it, and heaven and hell were not moved in an attempt to answer the question.

Not trying to Gish Gallop mind, I just think the integrity of the system is important enough to warrant keeping the process transparent and dirt simple enough, your State should be able to account for it to the rest of the nation. Voting is not a joke, and I don't even like entertaining the possibility that some irregularities could even exist to explain.

8note · 5 years ago

The same thing applies for an in person vote. Once they've voted and left, you can't tell anymore. One person could have submitted all of the votes for the day, and you couldn't te the difference.

This must mean that no in person votes should count at all!

dragonwriter · 5 years ago

> How many of Gore’s supporting court cases were tossed for lack of standing etc?

Fewer (and similarly with Bush’s — both filed a number of lawsuits in the 2000 election), but then, the legal basis of the cases was different.

Its not really anyone outside of the Trump campaign’s (and their legal team’s) fault that the Trump campaign filed an unusually large number of lawsuits making claims that were not justiciable, independently of whether the claimed facts were true.

jcranmer · 5 years ago

The difference between 2000 and 2020 election cases is that most of the latter are based on wild, speculative legal theories. The last few filed really start to look crazier than sovereign citizen bullshit theories.

The Trump campaign filed several lawsuits prior to the election challenging various election procedures--which is how it's supposed to be done--and found mixed success, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. After an election, there is very little legal recourse--even Bush v Gore made it clear that challenging election procedures should be done before an election without very good reason. In the case of 2000, those challenges were largely about various recount provisions, and even then, these were filed very quickly. But in 2020, a lot of the cases weren't filed until previous ones had failed (laches! laches!), and even tried the novel legal theory of arguing the entire election should be thrown out because of a challenge to long-enacted laws (laches! laches!). The lawyers involved changed too--the competent conservative lawyers didn't want to sign on to Trump's crazy legal theories, but Trump apparently decided to not listen to anyone who told him he had no remaining viable recourse.

It is worth pointing out that the defendants in one of the suits have filed a motion to impose sanctions on Trump's lawyers. Amusingly, they ask for a fine of all the money raised for the legal suits, although they are unlikely to get it.

xpe · 5 years ago

> Further, very few information sources are truly factual, and without bias?

This statement presents a false dichotomy. I could also say that no measurement of the temperature in Phoenix, AZ is "truly" accurate. However, they are accurate enough for our purposes.

To take it a step further, we can combine sources. We can use reasoning about the sources in how we combine them. These sort of study and technique is meta-analysis.

toyg · 5 years ago

It’s not as unreasonable as you make it sound. Some of the most devout Christians I know are scientists, and extremely logical people too. Precisely because they know how the sausage of Official Science is made, and are naturally inquisitive people, they are not shy to question our supposedly-scientific understanding of the universe (i.e. our best guesses at how it all started) and eventually resolve that doubt with (what they think is) an equally-unprovable act of faith. (Note: this is not about creationism, we’re talking Big Bang etc).

I don’t disagree that human communication is often an oxymoron, simply because of how bodies work. Until we get perfect brain-to-brain data transfer, we’ll always have to go through this messy mismatch between my perceptions and your perceptions.

8note · 5 years ago

The nazis did a lot of technological development, and the brits were doing a colonialism while the industrial revolution was ongoing.

The engineering mindset tends not to care about the provenance of a model, only whether it's useful for a goal. We don't care about the why,unless the why is required for something we're trying to do

bas · 5 years ago

Every election has had issues. Voter fraud, however, is rare. Voter suppression is common and tactical.

tylerhou · 5 years ago

> It frustrates me to no end that a group of people say, "The election had no issues" just as it frustrates me when someone says, "The election was stolen."

I think this is a strawman. Can you find me a source of a prominent* Democrat that said that this election had no issues? Most of the time, people who support the election's outcome mean that there was no fraud significant enough to change the outcome, or that this election had less fraud/was more secure than a previous election.

On the other hand, when Trump says the election was stolen [1] (along with some Congressional Republicans), he means that the outcome should have been him winning.

*Prominent being: US Senator, US Representative, Secretary of State, state election official, state governor, DNC leadership.

[1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13469288825958850...

fl0wenol · 5 years ago

I voted you up but I must disagree.

I don't think the election had no issues, and few would claim so. Let's start with: Where the hell is my federal election holiday? And it just goes downhill from there.

ehsankia · 5 years ago

It's all just like numerology or p-hacking. When you look super close and try hundreds of different tricks, some of them eventually show signs of working, but that doesn't mean you found something relevant.

I've seen countless videos of people taking the analysis done by some charlatan on Youtube, then applying the exact same calculation to a bunch of other Republican counties and getting the exact same anomalies.

x86_64Ubuntu · 5 years ago

Coming out and saying that you think the election stolen gets you labeled a conservative nutter. So wise commenters won't say that, instead they will do what you've noted. Imply that folks are saying the election was perfect, and then say that they think there might have been some "imperfections" going on.

That way the listener doesn't automatically correctly categorized their point of view as nuttery, but is drawn into listening longer out of decorum. And the speaker doesn't suffer a loss of reasonableness for "wanting the truth".

Consultant32452 · 5 years ago

We don't identify voters and we removed chain of custody on ballots. Instead we put unsecured boxes on street corners to collect ballots and put them in the mail. We eliminated signature validation. The list goes on. I have no idea who got the most legitimate votes, but neither does anyone else.

>The closest thing to a widespread problem is voter suppression, where states administer elections in regionally uneven ways to suppress one party's turnout. This is predominately against black citizens in the south after Shelby v Holder.

I agree with you 100% but that just means every election is illegitimate.

elhudy · 5 years ago

>10s of cases out of 100s of millions/low billions of votes cast

I know of at least 2 people in my friend group who voted in their "home states" that they haven't lived in for 4+ years. I don't know if this is considered voter fraud, but if it is, it certainly undermines integrity of this claim.

In any case, at the macro level, there isn't reason to believe one party participates in this more than the other.

zo1 · 5 years ago

We're in some really messed up limbo situation here. Reading all these back and forth comments, I can't even fathom what legitimate "evidence of fraud" would even look like other than super blatant ones. It's not like we'll find some guy holding a gun at a polling station and forcing people to vote one way.

If fraud is happening, and the people doing it don't want to get caught, then you won't find any blatant evidence unless they're sloppy. And even if they're sloppy, at most you'll find hints of what occurred. We have plenty of those.

But somehow in this whole back and forth mess, various facts/stories/details/testimony with various levels of validity/credibility that seem to question the integrity or hint at fraud occurring, are being dismissed with constant repetitive calls of "where is the evidence"?

gwright · 5 years ago

If we are at the point that we have to have "evidence" (in the legal sense) that fraud has occurred in order to resolve the outcome of an election, then the water is under the bridge. Voting process and procedures should all be designed to build and strengthen transparency, to fortify the process against actual fraud and vague assertions of fraud that can't be trivially disproved.

We find ourselves in a situation where the processes have been constructed in such a way that there is suspicion about the outcome and logistical difficulties at disproving what should be by design trivially disprovable, this just creates a terrible feedback loop of mistrust. The argument that we don't need better controls until actual widespread fraud can be proved in a court of law seems mistaken to me. We need the controls to keep us from getting to the point where a forensic analysis is needed to discern what happened during an election.

I realize that there are legitimate concerns that better voting controls can result in "voter suppression" but our haphazard approach to voting controls and process transparency has left us in a place where large numbers of people are suspicious and there doesn't seem to be any effective way to counter those suspicions in part due to the haphazard controls.

zo1 · 5 years ago

Arguments are distinctly different to evidence/facts.

orblivion · 5 years ago

I'd argue we need evidence that there was a fair election, not evidence that there was fraud. If there's non-trivial ambiguity, there's room for fraud, and people will likely enough exploit it.

Stupid example: What if only Republicans were allowed to count ballots, and the only result you got was a number of votes that they told you, and they threw away all of the records. It would be impossible to get evidence, but you wouldn't need any evidence to rightfully distrust the result.

Purely electronic voting systems are analogous, though it differs in the details and degrees of things.

avhon1 · 5 years ago

Yes there are. In 2016 I voted in Indiana on a voting machine that was all-electronic. I didn't put my vote down on paper, and the machine didn't produce a paper record for me to examine. After I voted, I asked if I could have a record of my vote, and was told I couldn't.

In 2020, in the same city, I voted by marking a paper ballot and inserting it into a machine which scanned it and output it into a sealed box.

Hnrobert42 · 5 years ago

I know in parts of Virginia as late as 2014 it was electronic only. I am not sure about more recently.

SV_BubbleTime · 5 years ago

What good is a receipt if a user can literally “correct” votes in a silent “adjudication” process and just print the “corrected” numbers?

I don’t buy a lot of the claims going on here, but what does a receipt do if you don’t trust the machine? Or more importantly the operator?

3131s · 5 years ago

But it's a shame there's no national ID, because then both sides would have to stop griping about disenfranchisement and fraud.

th48 · 5 years ago

> incredibly scrutinized

At best you could say there wasn't enough fraud to tip the balance, but this "no fraud," "most secure election ever" nonsense is ridiculous. People like you probably also would have claimed dependent tax credit fraud was incredibly rare (from Snopes, a "FACT CHECK" site, no less):

> https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/declaration-of-non-depende...

ibejoeb · 5 years ago

One of the things giving rise to the distrust is that poll watchers were disallowed. It's safe to say that nobody who cares about integrity would be OK with that action.

tathougies · 5 years ago

> The lack of standing is pretty obvious for the supreme Court isn't it? Texas has no say in how Pennsylvania votes. There's other things that are ridiculous about that case, like wanting throw out unrelated Texan votes.

No it's not though. Texas is asking the Supreme Court to answer the question of whether the constitution allows the governor to make up election rules or whether it's just the state legislature. The Supreme Court has ruled that how other states conduct their elections affects other states. By precedent, they should have answered it.

Moreover, similar challenges to PA law by PA voters, PA candidates, and Trump himself were dismissed also for standing. Perhaps you can argue Texas has no standing to tell PA what to do. But shouldn't a PA voter have standing to question whether his governor can make up rules? How come absolutely no one has standing?

> I'm not sure you can argue they're bad actors when the clear and obvious reasoning for those measures across the country are to limit the spread of a deadly pandemic.

But they violated a court order. Sure, it's to stop a pandemic. But a judge ordered that order to be violated. Court orders supersede gubernatorial edicts.

> The governor's in charge of enforcement

I'm sorry... that's not good enough for an election. Can a governor allow votes to be made up even though it's against the law, because the governor is 'in charge of enforcement'. Can Trump use the national guard to stop the Biden electors from meeting because he's 'in charge of enforcement'.

At some point, the government needs to be held responsible for lack of enforcement of basic civil rights -- election integrity is a governmental duty. You can't just choose not to enforce it.

tathougies · 5 years ago

No I don't support throwing out votes. This is why I support thomas and alitos reaction to texas v pa.

They said they would have taken the case but, even if they found pa to be wrong, they would not give the resolution asked for. That's eminently reasonable to me. This ensures that if they ruledagainst pa, then what happened there won't happen again while ensuring that thousands who voted in good faith are not disenfranchised

Proziam · 5 years ago

> but I don't understand how anyone can claim the media is not reporting on something, and then link directly to media about that thing

Well let's look at once recent example that I mentioned.

[0] CNN completely discredited the Hunter Biden story when it was released. They called it 'Russian Disinformation' and in their articles repeatedly used charged language such as "dubious" to refer to the information presented.

This was done on an ongoing basis by the majority of news organizations at the time. EDIT - [3] And supported by social media giants (Famously Twitter, but Google/Youtube did the same thing)

Fast forward past the election and the narrative has changed rather sharply. [1] They no longer call the story Russian Disinformation, and instead publish that the FBI is actively investigating Hunter Biden.

[2] As I mentioned, the same thing happened after 2001. The largest news institutions eagerly promoted that the US was under extreme threat. CNN in 2002 was publishing quotes like "we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” and "Saddam is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time.”

Then when it became clear that there was no WMD's to be found they started giving room to the opposing narrative such as: Joe Wilson “I think it’s safe to say that the US government should have or did know that [the Niger documents were] fake before Dr. ElBaradei mentioned it in his report at the UN yesterday.”

Just to be clear, I'm not saying 'everything is a lie and the election was stolen and Trump is telling the truth'

What I am saying is that the sources of information have proven themselves to be incredibly untrustworthy to the point where many people automatically believe the inverse of what they claim.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/18/media/new-york-post-hunter-bi...

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/politics/hunter-biden-tax-inv...

[2] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/leadup-iraq-war...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54552101

Proziam · 5 years ago

That isn't the strongest evidence that I linked, let alone the strongest evidence that exists. I recommend looking into the data gathered by the Voter Integrity Fund (I linked a video from an individual presenting their findings) to have a place to start.

You picked the one high-profile case where an individual who did not vote in a specific state somehow had a signature verified ballot cast in their name. Because of who he is, and because of his beliefs, it made headlines (in conservative media).

If you google "Nahshon Garrett CNN" you see the following results: https://pasteboard.co/JIuN3X9.jpg

You can swap CNN for almost every major media outlet(NBC, MSNBC, etc) and see the same results. So, compared to the amount of articles posted that call allegations of fraud baseless, or claim there is no evidence, the coverage this well-documented counterexample is extremely minimal. It's noteworthy that an independent channel (Tim Pool) has such a presence in the results.

> Also please vote in your elections, it impacts all of us.

There hasn't been a President in 40 years (until Trump, ironically) that has not started a new war. As someone who strongly believes that violence should only be tolerated as a defensive measure of last resort, I cannot in good conscience vote for anyone who does not believe the same.

razius · 5 years ago

To add to this, lies with easily proven evidence if they wanted to investigate. Eg. Check report on something from a hearing or court document, checked the hearing or the court document itself and it's completely opposite to what the media is reporting.

ethbr0 · 5 years ago

> Big chunks of the media decided a long time ago that they could make money by just pandering to angry people

And then social media decided to cut out the cost of producing content, and just put angry people in a cage together.

jandrese · 5 years ago

In the news it turns out that lies are more profitable than the truth, and the market has spoken.

jandrese · 5 years ago

I'm guessing they don't count Fox News, OAN, Breitbart, etc... as part of "the Media" in that?

To be fair, they probably shouldn't be counted in that regard, but it is how they have branded themselves.

starfallg · 5 years ago

>Both sides have "news" outlets which are agenda based and profit motivated. And truth doesn't usually sell as well.

The problem with the both sides argument is that one side is disproportionately loose with the truth and constantly resorting to not just half-truths, but complete fabrications.

Without good faith there will be no useful dialogue.

Acrobatic_Road · 5 years ago

A lot of international news just repeats the american MSM with regard to domestic news.

ChrisKnott · 5 years ago

I think people listening to talk radio on long commutes was a major early driving factor.

A pretty good doc about it; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brainwashing_of_My_Dad

jml7c5 · 5 years ago

That explanation doesn't quite fit with historical opinion polls. It wasn't until 2000 that strong dislike of the opposing party shot up, and dislike had been slowly growing before that. But it is possible that the sudden change in trajectory was delayed by the 4 year election cycle, which puts politics in the fore of people's minds for durations that are too short for contempt to really snowball.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/06/22/1-feelings-a...

scsilver · 5 years ago

Yeah but now you dont even have to leave the house to stock up on chef boyardi and prepare for the rapture.

ImaCake · 5 years ago

Building on the history theme here; plenty of modern revolutions have been preceeded by a rise in polarising media. The french revolution had the pulp paper of Jean-Paul Marat [0], the soviets had Lenin's writings [1], and the Nazis had Julius Streicher's Der Sturmer [2]. It's not difficult to draw comparisons to Bannon's Breitbart here.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Marat 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_St%C3%BCrmer

karmelapple · 5 years ago

There were gatekeepers before, who generally acted responsibly.

Now that anyone can publish anything, and make it appear reasonably professional, there's much more competition for everyone's attention.

And the media outlets who cater to specific biases, and are outspoken and over-the-top, seem to win the attention.

zepto · 5 years ago

It really isn’t just Fox. They don’t have a lot of shame about their partisanship or desire to hide it, but there is ideological distortion going on everywhere.

andrewstuart2 · 5 years ago

I don't know that I'd associate it with the right wing, though. All parties are currently guilty of what you might call overfitting, where medium-term profits are directly measured against the content generating those profits, which understandably eventually segments the population and fits content to what keeps them engaged.

core-questions · 5 years ago

Unfortunately, you've fallen into the trap, friend. FOX may be to the right of MSNBC, but on a larger scale historically-informed left-right spectrum, the two are not actually that far apart ideologically. Most "conservative principles" these days are just the modern liberal status quo delayed by ~20 years; for example, anti-homosexual rhetoric is dead and dying on that side in a way that lines up well with what I remember from the Democrats in the late 90s.

The hyperpolarization is not to do with the right vs left dichotomy so much as it is a deliberate, encouraged-by-both-sides establishment of a false dichotomy designed to pen people into a small range of discourse. Some call this the Overton window; the deliberate establishment of contrasting narratives in a 2-pronged strategy was perfected in America by Arthur Finkelstein in the mid-20th century and is becoming an art form today.

If you can see FOX as a "right wing propaganda machine" but can't see the other MSM networks as being equally polarizing machines aimed at a different half of the audience, you're missing the shot.

The solution is to see the false dichotomy for what it is, look at who is pushing it, and look at what direction both "sides" actually push for. If you're on the right, they want you to have your attention and energy soaked up in this useless Stop the Steal push for Trump, who actually didn't accomplish any of the things his populist base asked for (immigration control, really bringing back American jobs, giving a shit about the working class). If you're on the Left, they want to soak you up with Biden instead of the more progressive policies that someone like Bernie or Tulsi Gabbard espoused. Either way, you're being played if you allow your energy to go toward supporting one of these useless figureheads instead of critiquing the system itself.

ocdtrekkie · 5 years ago

> It was definitely interesting when their tone shifted on the election outcome.

This was pretty intriguing to me, because I do believe Fox had a lot to do with the radicalization of their side of things. It drove their support, and the moment they backed off from the crazy train, people abandoned them in droves for whatever agreed with the direction they were heading, be it Newsmax or OAN. Fox brought on it's own downfall here.

jhallenworld · 5 years ago

I tune in the AM radio for this- the rhetoric on it now was only available on shortwave in the 90s. TYT and friends on youtube for the left's view- I can't stand MSNBC.

umvi · 5 years ago

This strongly resonates with me. Somewhere along the way we allowed ourselves to lose more and more empathy and kindness toward people who think differently than us.

ernst_klim · 5 years ago

> I think we as a people are also to blame

Honestly, I think it's only people to blame. No media would restrict you from just going to your neighbour who's having opposite values and views, and simply talk and try and understand.

People voluntarily selected extreme toxic partisanship, media just feeding the hungry ones. Even half of this thread could be reduced to "these other people are just dumb their values are wrong that's the problem"

rightbyte · 5 years ago

I guess he means the counting late night in Fulton(?), Atlanta without observers?

xnx · 5 years ago

Also no evidence that any fraud would be in favor of Biden and not Trump.

tomjen3 · 5 years ago

Doesn't matter, assuming you allow people to pick who they follow. Try to look at the twitter feed of somebody who disagrees with you on a topic you find important - most the posts will be insults towards those who disagree with that persons POV.

andrewstuart2 · 5 years ago

Or, hear me out, requiring certain levels of transparency from content systems that have started to augment such fundamental constructs as human-to-human communication and information sharing.

There's nothing inherently wrong with automating content discovery; it's the cost function being optimized that I think we would almost all take issue with.

polotics · 5 years ago

I would so love to have sliders on Youtube to be able to adjust bias filtering, and watch the suggested videos switch sides in real time. This would probably get me to pay for the subscription.

zmmmmm · 5 years ago

Reminds me after the GFC how some of the rules that were brought in were around banning automated real time trading systems. This was in some similar ways recognizing that automated algorithmic treatment can have extremely harmful side effects - even when it successfully executes the goals of its owner (for the stock market - once a certain threshold is breached, get me out of the market as quickly as possible - as an individual, its exactly what I want, for the overall market it is a disaster if everyone does it suddenly).

jcfrei · 5 years ago

Kind of ironic calling for shutting down platforms with algorithmic content systems on HN.

mancerayder · 5 years ago

Why can't there be a Giant Lever on the side that inputs a variable into the Magic Algorithms that you can adjust. Up down, left or right, whatever you want to call it. Why would you do this - even if people never touch it: because at least people KNOW there's a decision-tree at play here.

Also there MUST be some randomization or more generalized content introduced. And I'm not talking Trending Now or Hit Songs That Just Came Out. I'm looking at you, YouTube and Facebook. Sometimes I actually want new stuff and it keeps dragging me back into a virtual rabbit hole.

raydev · 5 years ago

Both FB and YouTube's top shared posts and video are super right-leaning, though (YouTube has other massively popular videos, but they are about gaming or influencer stuff). What would the equivalent "liberal" viral posts be, and why aren't they nearly as popular as the right's?

jandrese · 5 years ago

In communism anyone who opposes the state is disappeared.

In capitalism anyone who opposes the corporation is disappeared.

You end up needing a mix of both. An independent news media with an explicit obligation to the truth, one that they can get in trouble for violating. We had that obligation for a long time through the middle of the 20th century. News organizations were well regarded even if they didn't always make the right calls they tried their best.

But then Rhupert Murdock realized that you could simply pretend to be one of those respected parties and lie to the viewers constantly and there would be no consequences. The obligation to the truth turned out to be a gentleman's agreement and there were no truth police breaking down your door when you told lies. That's when we discovered that the media is like the Prisoner's Dilemma. Fox news discovered that as long as everybody else was beholden to the facts they could lie repeatedly and constantly win the game. They've only fallen from the very tippy top of the ratings in recent years as other news organizations like OAN have discovered that the bigger the lie the bigger the ratings.

Fast forward to today and respect for the independent media (the all important 4th branch of government) is at an all time low and we have completely indoctrinated delusional people storming the Capitol building.

zepto · 5 years ago

This really isn’t true.

My (logged out) YouTube feed has mostly cooking shows, programming videos, stuff about crafts and watchmaking etc, because those are mostly what I like to watch.

I’m also interested in guns. The moment I watch a gun video, I immediately get shown Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and The Blaze instead of all the cooking videos etc.

And yet none of the gun videos I watch are remotely political. They are exclusively about sports and history, and don’t even talk about gun politics, let alone politics in general.

hertzrat · 5 years ago

During elections, before I stopped using facebook, I used to try to follow everybody I could from every side of the political spectrum to try to get a more balanced feed. My goodness, my feed was immediately full of insane conspiracy theories, white nationalist group posts, communist posts, nothing but stories of subjugation and oppression of everybody from every side. The choice I made was to try to broaden my bubble, but what I got was insane

Jochim · 5 years ago

I think algorithms have more of an effect than you give them credit. Anecdotally on the occasion I've been linked to or suggested a Jordan Peterson/Moon Landing conspiracy videos on Youtube, after watching just one my feed is absolutely packed with that type of content for up to a week.

It's fairly easy to see how this can lead people who did not already hold those viewpoints down a rabbit hole where they end up far more radicalised than they would have otherwise been, especially since I've not once seen Youtube put any sort of "rebuttal" videos in amongst the "illuminati aliens are controlling your government" ones.

sn41 · 5 years ago

You are being naive. I wanted to see what the impact of a 50 caliber looks like on iron plates. This is just a childish curiosity for things that go bang. Immediately I was bombarded with recommendations of barely concealed white supremacists, and bizarre conspiracy theorists. I know that if I clicked on even one of them, then my recommendations will be full of that crap. Similarly, watch one motivational video, and Youtube decides "oh! I see!! so that's what you really want. Here's a deluge of 'similar' crap."

What I want to know about is more coherent explanations of abstract math and some scientific experiments which I never got to see in school, in addition to comedy. That I watch something else once in a while is not really an indication of my identity or my Jungian shadow self.

wussboy · 5 years ago

Exactly. Is why we outlawed underage drinking and hard drugs. Once you get a taste you can’t say no even if you want to. The problem is not humans and human nature. The problem is that social media exploits human nature in a new way. It’s not going away without regulation, in the same way we have regulated countless other human ills.

hertzrat · 5 years ago

Interesting if true. Do you have a non-twitter source?

intended · 5 years ago

Absolutely.

And making that distinction helps highlight that there are factors in how information is shaped and transmitted through networks of people that results in these outcomes.

dsr_ · 5 years ago

Hardly. The Fairness Doctrine is exactly "the cure for bad speech is more speech".

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fairness-Doctrine might be useful.

colejohnson66 · 5 years ago

Yes, but because the radio used public airways, the courts found that the FCC can regulate them. It’s why you can’t swear on the radio (the FCC says so) despite free speech allowing swearing.

free_rms · 5 years ago

Fox News was founded in 1996.

Fox broadcast stations having nightly news, like your local Fox affiliate news at 11 was and remains different.

Gwypaas · 5 years ago

I'd say the problem with Instant Run-off is that it feels good and tangible but doesn't accomplish anything.

A prime example is the Australian parliament, where the lower chamber is essentially IRV while the upper chamber has some variation of multi member districts.

The lower chamber has 4.5% of the seats being outside the two major blocks, the senate has 18.5%. I.e., the people want more choice but the system does not allow for it.

IRV doesn't solve the problem of gerrymandering either.

I'm completely with you on the distance vs. political opinions. There is something extremely powerful in electing one, who has personally convinced you, from your town to go and represent us all, but the world doesn't operate on that scale anymore.

katbyte · 5 years ago

People should be held accountable for what they say on media platforms, and lies shouldn't be allowed.. but i can't see that even happening.

_qulr · 5 years ago

I would argue that this is the result of a free market of news. These media organizations only exist because they tell people what they want to hear. There's a huge market for that. In order to peddle anything, you have to get people to listen first, and you can't take listeners for granted in a society where the media is not controlled by the government.

dageshi · 5 years ago

News is basically a cheap form of entertainment nowadays. The clue really is in the name, it's just "new stuff" and humans seem hardwired to always want to be consuming "new stuff".

giantg2 · 5 years ago

The genuine sources have issues like bias or sloppy investigating, that leads to outright lies too. For years the media was representing the gender wage gap as being a man and women in the same job with all attributes other than gender being equal (even Obama said this during a state of the union). That clearly isn't what the BLS study says (difference in occupations, in part, drive the wage gap on an aggregate level).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlynborysenko/2020/03/31/grea...

salawat · 5 years ago

>But when media organizations peddling outright lies are allowed to call it "news", and are treated as being just as valid as genuine journalistic organizations

Where are these "genuine journalistic organizations" defined except in our own minds?

There is no journalist licence. There is no license to publish. You have a printer, and someone to buy what you print out? Congratulations! You're a journalist! In the U.S. anyway.

thisismyswamp · 5 years ago

*Benefits a very small part of society, you mean

camhart · 5 years ago

Yes, horrible things have, at times, been done in the name of religion. But to claim that religion, generally speaking, is all about manipulation through misinformation is wrong.

elliekelly · 5 years ago

Facebook and twitter allow the manipulation and coercion to happen faster and more efficiently. We weren’t ready for that massive shift in media.

ameen · 5 years ago

You’re still able to employ critical thinking. I’d say the lack of critical thinking has led us here.

throwawaytolk · 5 years ago

What do you think politics is? What do you think morality is?

What a tired old marxist line this is; And one never applied to say, the political theory of marx himself

briantakita · 5 years ago

If you break down religion to be an organized belief system or doctrine, religion can exist without being called a religion.

Religion is no more misinformation than a particular Philosophy is misinformation; a perspective on reality. Even the meta-philosophical act (philosophy of philosophy) of having an ontology of philosophy or any form of abstraction/reification, is an organized form of how one views the world.

unixhero · 5 years ago

This IS new in our modern times. Ever since The Second World War this has never occured.

The US yo me now seems to have become close to the comedy movie Idiocracy. You know in the 80s and 90s everyone looked up to the US so much. It was where everyone dreamt of going. I dont know anyone who clings on to that idea now.

memorybadger · 5 years ago

Truth is required to act freely. Freedom requires knowledge, and in order to act freely in the world, you need to know what the world is and know what you’re doing. You only know what you’re doing if you have access to the truth. So freedom requires truth, and so to smash freedom you must smash truth.

Part of what fascist politics does is get people to disassociate from reality, there is no truth, there is only opinions. You get them to sign on to this fantasy version of reality, and from then on their anchor isn’t the world around them — it’s the leader and his opinion.

Part of interview on Fascism with Jason Stanley Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.

sputknick · 5 years ago

I agree with this "bubble of association" idea, and it doesn't have to start out political. Its just easier than ever to surround yourself with people like you. We have all kinds of segregation in who we live near, and who we associate with. The fact that its less about race than at anytime in history makes it easy for this segregation to hide itself. I live in a red state, but during the election my kids counted the signs in neighbors yards, it was 3:1 Biden. I work in tech, and so do most people in my well off, blue neighborhood. We are racially diverse, but segregated from people who don't think like us. I bet most people in here work at companies that are predominantly liberal or libertarian. I bet most people live in well off neighborhoods surrounded by college educated, worldly people with very little to fear from the world.

mhh__ · 5 years ago

> wouldn't this mean that China won this time since Biden is the President

Only if there was interaction between the Biden campaign and the Chinese state, which there was in the case of the Trump campaign

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

raxxorrax · 5 years ago

Very true. There are huge language barriers that makes this unlikely. You don't get a 5 cent army of people highly proficient in another language and presenting manipulative talking points. There are those people, but they would still have difficulties reaching large audiences.

bjoli · 5 years ago

The left he/she is referring were not anti-nazi, they were pro-communist, and almost uniformly pro-soviet groups that argued that the ruling social democratic government had betrayed the working class.

The Nazis weren't the nice guys, but neither were their opposition, at least not the one referred to by the parent.

dnissley · 5 years ago

The two fringe groups were not Nazis and anti-nazis. They were Nazis and communists. The communists had their own agenda, they were not simply anti-nazi.

mlindner · 5 years ago

When both extremes are saying that the other side should face death or life imprisonment as well as anyone that defends that extremist, what those groups actually stand for becomes irrelevant.

belorn · 5 years ago

The historical comparison is not that great. About half of the American population is not unemployed and at the risk of starving. Most of the production of food and resources is not being sent to nearby countries in the form of payments for a lost war. There is no hyperinflation that is causing a massive drop in living standards.

malandrew · 5 years ago

Anyone who is a student of history should have a uniquely strong distrust of the government. I find that it’s the folks with the weakest familiarity of the history of governments abusing its citizens that have the greatest faith in more and bigger government, especially distant government (i.e. federal government)

skissane · 5 years ago

I doubt that because arguably these problems are significantly worse in the US than in other first world English speaking countries (Anglophone Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand)