I’ve written a lot about the 2020 stolen election claims. This is a beat I randomly fell into in response to watching otherwise extremely intelligent conservatives decompensating in real time. I described the Gish gallop that was obvious from the beginning on Nov 5, 2020, and I sounded
This specific controversy really highlights my issues with some of the LessWrong/SSC/adjancent sphere's reluctance to weakman others. In the case of the Republican Party, it just so happens that the weakman case is the one endorsed by >50% of the relevant population....
... is what I was writing until I got to your link to your weakman post on the same issue.
Maybe it's the Canadian in me, but I have no clue how your largest political party went off the rails so hard. Then again there's more than enough to mock on our side so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Is there a steel man case for “the election wasn’t ‘stolen’ and there is no evidence of concerted voter fraud, but the mass and late breaking adoption of vote by mail created significant voting security risks that cast a greater-than-typical uncertainty on the accuracy/validity of 2020 results compared to previous elections?”
If so, have you written about it or would you consider doing so?
I’m not on the Trump conspiracy side, but I generally think we don’t do enough to secure elections and that we were particularly unprepared for the election-in-pandemic situation of 2020.
A huge number of Democrats believed that Donald Trump (or Russia) stole the 2016 election, and for a while it was fashionable to claim Trump was an illegitimate president and even that one day justice would be served by annulling his presidency, thereby doing a ctrl-v on all of his wicked actions as president. Magical thinking like this happens because the president has way too much power and congress is increasingly (and embarrassingly) useless every year, and so every election becomes the “most important” and so on. We’d be better off with a parliamentary system if we intend to keep being this polarized.
I haven’t paid a ton of attention to this topic but I also find it interesting, maybe for similar reasons. What do you think of the claim that the election wasn’t stolen but the “election stolen” crowd is directionally pointing at a series of completely legal moves that add up to an unfair advantage?
Not really related, but I think one of the reasons Trump supporters are so convinced that the 2020 election was stolen is the increasing polarization and information-bubble-isolation of our world. They can’t possibly imagine that anybody would have voted for Biden; they don’t know anybody who did (or would admit to doing so openly), they aren’t seeing any pro-Biden memes in their social media feeds. Biden can’t possibly have won fairly, from their point of view.
More to the point, in spite of every possible organizational and institutional advantage other than incumbency and a Trump campaign that was disorganized to the point of imbecility, Biden was able to wheeze to victory only two weeks after polls closed.
"The claims kept getting increasingly desperate and unhinged, like testing Arizona ballots for bamboo to see if they were sourced from China ..."
Big LoL. Somewhat in passing, I'm reminded of a book and Atlantic article by Kurt Andersen, "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire" -- highly recommended:
I think I'll put on my tombstone "died waiting for 2020 massive vote fraud evidence".
Sadly, there is no place left for the sane.
This specific controversy really highlights my issues with some of the LessWrong/SSC/adjancent sphere's reluctance to weakman others. In the case of the Republican Party, it just so happens that the weakman case is the one endorsed by >50% of the relevant population....
... is what I was writing until I got to your link to your weakman post on the same issue.
Maybe it's the Canadian in me, but I have no clue how your largest political party went off the rails so hard. Then again there's more than enough to mock on our side so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Is there a steel man case for “the election wasn’t ‘stolen’ and there is no evidence of concerted voter fraud, but the mass and late breaking adoption of vote by mail created significant voting security risks that cast a greater-than-typical uncertainty on the accuracy/validity of 2020 results compared to previous elections?”
If so, have you written about it or would you consider doing so?
I’m not on the Trump conspiracy side, but I generally think we don’t do enough to secure elections and that we were particularly unprepared for the election-in-pandemic situation of 2020.
A huge number of Democrats believed that Donald Trump (or Russia) stole the 2016 election, and for a while it was fashionable to claim Trump was an illegitimate president and even that one day justice would be served by annulling his presidency, thereby doing a ctrl-v on all of his wicked actions as president. Magical thinking like this happens because the president has way too much power and congress is increasingly (and embarrassingly) useless every year, and so every election becomes the “most important” and so on. We’d be better off with a parliamentary system if we intend to keep being this polarized.
I haven’t paid a ton of attention to this topic but I also find it interesting, maybe for similar reasons. What do you think of the claim that the election wasn’t stolen but the “election stolen” crowd is directionally pointing at a series of completely legal moves that add up to an unfair advantage?
Not really related, but I think one of the reasons Trump supporters are so convinced that the 2020 election was stolen is the increasing polarization and information-bubble-isolation of our world. They can’t possibly imagine that anybody would have voted for Biden; they don’t know anybody who did (or would admit to doing so openly), they aren’t seeing any pro-Biden memes in their social media feeds. Biden can’t possibly have won fairly, from their point of view.
More to the point, in spite of every possible organizational and institutional advantage other than incumbency and a Trump campaign that was disorganized to the point of imbecility, Biden was able to wheeze to victory only two weeks after polls closed.
"The claims kept getting increasingly desperate and unhinged, like testing Arizona ballots for bamboo to see if they were sourced from China ..."
Big LoL. Somewhat in passing, I'm reminded of a book and Atlantic article by Kurt Andersen, "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire" -- highly recommended:
https://archive.ph/prYcS
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/
https://www.amazon.ca/Fantasyland-America-Haywire-500-Year-History/dp/1400067219
Kind of amused to note that the Atlantic article is prefaced with a cartoon of sorts which references the "rigged" election.