4 ms·

This is shocking and scary amount government over reach, to fabricate evidence of something that everyone knows is false... We are really through the looking g

This is shocking and scary amount government over reach, to fabricate evidence of something that everyone knows is false... We are really through the looking glass here, folks. Watch the confirmation hearings where potential appointees are asked to simply state factually who won the 2020 residential election. The amount of dissembling, avoidance, and inability to say that the emperor has no clothes..... it's just shocking. This sort of rank corruption, of turning a government against its own people to subvert democracy... that more people aren't out in the streets about this makes me quite angry. We live in a state of continual shock of how bad things have gotten, I guess

wat10000 3mo ago
The problem is that everyone doesn't know this to be false. A substantial portion of the population "knows" it to be true.
- RajT88 3mo ago
  Agree. Signs and flags around my neighborhood after 2020, "Trump won, you know it and I know it". ETA: Why the downvotes? It's true, and I have photos of the signs. These people exist.
  - epistasis 3mo ago
    (We're not supposed to talk about downvotes, but boy have I seen my comments fluctuate up and down at the top, which is highly unusual. In most web open forums I take part in, anything connected to this brings in lots of "new" users, some or many of which end up being bots. I upvoted you, for the record.)
    - RajT88 3mo ago
      Talking about social media strangeness. I've noticed on Facebook that when you make a comment on a political article, you will sometimes - within a minute or two - start getting failed login attempts or password reset attempts on your account. Given that your email address and phone are not visible unless you explicitly share them (and I use a pseudonym on FB), the implications are frankly chilling.
      - epistasis 3mo ago
        Could be coincidence, could be a data leak from Meta that wasn't reported, could be outside groups using LLMs to match profiles of text to external sources that do have your name... It's a wild world out there in political technology, and I probably can't even guess what's going on with half of it. Way back in the early 2010s I went to a data science meetup, way before facial recognition and face processing was easy, and found out that Facebook was tracking the faces in every photo, building databases of locations, times, and people out of it all, even for people without accounts, etc. And that was just a side project! 15 years ago! For motivated groups operating without the usual bounds of being part of the US government, the sky is the limit in what they can do. Buying data from Thompson Reuters is really mild compared to what I'm sure is going on inside of PACs within the US. When you add in the state groups operating outside the US on US social networks with the goal of spreading distrust and disunity, I have zero doubt that it's possible somebody is scraping the replies to political articles and trying to take control of accounts that show any interest in politics, to use those accounts for other purposes because they appear to be valid accounts instead of bots.
        RajT88 3mo ago
        > I have zero doubt that it's possible somebody is scraping the replies to political articles and trying to take control of accounts that show any interest in politics, to use those accounts for other purposes because they appear to be valid accounts instead of bots. I can't prove it, but it sure looks like this is what's going on with some of the accounts which are posting anti-datacenter content on FB. Old ladies inactive for years who all of a sudden become super activists. A wild world indeed, and frustratingly one that Meta doesn't seem bothered by. Presumably because it drives engagement.
        epistasis 3mo ago
        In addition to the immediate gains of engagement, the ability to manipulate public opinion through campaigns like this are pretty explicitly the goal of some Silicon Valley oligarchs, especially the PayPal Mafia. They believe that they can control the monster that they have created in their own favor. Time will tell!
- luxuryballs 3mo ago
  The problem is that if you look with an inquisitive eye without having a preference on the outcome there's no way to tell because of the margins in just a few districts, all that is sure is that the Constitution was followed and the valid electors chose the President (which is a major reason why it is designed that way).
  - wat10000 3mo ago
    Despite what people say, absence of evidence is evidence of absence, if you've gone looking for the evidence and it's something that you should find if the claim is true. There's a bunch of evidence we'd expect to see if there was enough cheating to swing the election, and we don't see it. All we have is evidence of some pathetic attempts by the actual loser to overturn things.
  - epistasis 3mo ago
    What do you mean "there's no way to tell because of the margins in a few districts"? Anybody looking with an inquisitive eye and no preference for the outcome reaches an extremely strong concision, that there was no voter fraud that could have influenced the outcome.
    - luxuryballs 3mo ago
      I can't tell because there's not enough evidence either way, it's OK to have a third opinion of "I can't know", that's actually the default position.
  - FireBeyond 3mo ago
    The very right wing Heritage Foundation spent millions looking for voter fraud, and found that, at -most-, 1 in 700,000 votes was fraudulent, in Wisconsin (69 out of 45 million votes cast over 20 years). Generally the number is higher than 1 in a million, up to 1 in 3 million. You'd think, if anything, a right wing organization would be trying to prop up Trump's claims... but yet...
    - epistasis 3mo ago
- Covzire 3mo ago
  Because California has systematically made it impossible to audit elections there. You have to be disinformed to think elections there are secure, you can't possibly know they are.
  - wat10000 3mo ago
    Are you seriously suggesting that Trump would have won California if not for cheating?
    - timmytokyo 3mo ago
      Trump claims that. So his cult does too.
  - epistasis 3mo ago
    You are making up things, and then saying others are being disinformed? California's elections are widely audited, observed, and secure. Stop spreading lies.
    - Covzire 3mo ago
      Really? How do you audit or control for who shows up to vote? Do you check some kind of government ID or can anyone simply vote by claiming they are who they say they are?
      - ceejayoz 3mo ago
        I can't speak for California, but here in my area of NY you show up, give your name and address, which they find in the registered voters list, and you sign on an iPad that gets checked against the signature on file. Then you get handed a ballot. By the local volunteers who are mostly people from the neighborhood, plus observers from both major parties. Your neighbors are there checking in alongside you. Getting past all this risks years in jail for... an extra vote in a safely blue state. None of this requires an ID, in part because in the US, there's no law that you have to have an ID in the first place. "Papers, please!" used to be a derogatory thing about totalitarian regimes. (More practically, if we Dems were rigging elections, we'd win more often.)
- quickthrowman 3mo ago
  > The problem is that everyone doesn't know this to be false. A substantial portion of the population "knows" it to be true. If they choose to believe a histrionic liar, that’s their problem. The rest of us don’t have to entertain their credulousness and ignorance. Repeating lies doesn’t make them true, it only makes credulous people believe it. Once the aggrieved-in-chief victim of the century is out of office, the theatrics around election fraud will cease.
  - jmye 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - anigbrowl 3mo ago
    It absolutely becomes everyone else's problem when they start shooting people or seizing control of things they're not supposed to. If you wait to the point that it affects you personally, it will probably be too late to do anything about it. Refusing to believe in something doesn't immunize you from force wielded by people who do believe it. Once the aggrieved-in-chief victim of the century is out of office, the theatrics around election fraud will cease. We could all hope so, but this is a very passive response. Do you really think the people in the President's orbit are unaware of his advanced age and declining health, or are willing to just return to private life and give up power once he dies of natural causes? It seems far more likely to me that they know he could go any time and have some sort of plan to stick around. While none of them have exert the same sort of charismatic influence as the President does, do you really imagine that they and the substantial bloc of voters behind them are just going to magically come back to their centrist senses and abandon their violent and paranoid ethos?
  - wat10000 3mo ago
    To paraphrase a popular saying: if one of your countrymen believes a bunch of bullshit, they have a problem. If tens of millions of our countrymen believe a bunch of bullshit, we all have a problem.
iso1631 3mo ago
> This is shocking Is it really? Have you been asleep for the last decade?
- epistasis 3mo ago
  Having ICE buy data from a data broker to fabricate evidence for a well disproven conspiracy theory? This is still shocking, absolutely shocking! I will retain my right to be shocked and angry about government overreach, thanks.
  - iso1631 3mo ago
    Shocking suggests something unexpected

wat10000 3mo ago

The problem is that everyone doesn't know this to be false. A substantial portion of the population "knows" it to be true.

RajT88 3mo ago
Agree. Signs and flags around my neighborhood after 2020, "Trump won, you know it and I know it". ETA: Why the downvotes? It's true, and I have photos of the signs. These people exist.
- epistasis 3mo ago
  (We're not supposed to talk about downvotes, but boy have I seen my comments fluctuate up and down at the top, which is highly unusual. In most web open forums I take part in, anything connected to this brings in lots of "new" users, some or many of which end up being bots. I upvoted you, for the record.)
  - RajT88 3mo ago
    Talking about social media strangeness. I've noticed on Facebook that when you make a comment on a political article, you will sometimes - within a minute or two - start getting failed login attempts or password reset attempts on your account. Given that your email address and phone are not visible unless you explicitly share them (and I use a pseudonym on FB), the implications are frankly chilling.
    - epistasis 3mo ago
      Could be coincidence, could be a data leak from Meta that wasn't reported, could be outside groups using LLMs to match profiles of text to external sources that do have your name... It's a wild world out there in political technology, and I probably can't even guess what's going on with half of it. Way back in the early 2010s I went to a data science meetup, way before facial recognition and face processing was easy, and found out that Facebook was tracking the faces in every photo, building databases of locations, times, and people out of it all, even for people without accounts, etc. And that was just a side project! 15 years ago! For motivated groups operating without the usual bounds of being part of the US government, the sky is the limit in what they can do. Buying data from Thompson Reuters is really mild compared to what I'm sure is going on inside of PACs within the US. When you add in the state groups operating outside the US on US social networks with the goal of spreading distrust and disunity, I have zero doubt that it's possible somebody is scraping the replies to political articles and trying to take control of accounts that show any interest in politics, to use those accounts for other purposes because they appear to be valid accounts instead of bots.
      - RajT88 3mo ago
        > I have zero doubt that it's possible somebody is scraping the replies to political articles and trying to take control of accounts that show any interest in politics, to use those accounts for other purposes because they appear to be valid accounts instead of bots. I can't prove it, but it sure looks like this is what's going on with some of the accounts which are posting anti-datacenter content on FB. Old ladies inactive for years who all of a sudden become super activists. A wild world indeed, and frustratingly one that Meta doesn't seem bothered by. Presumably because it drives engagement.
        epistasis 3mo ago
        In addition to the immediate gains of engagement, the ability to manipulate public opinion through campaigns like this are pretty explicitly the goal of some Silicon Valley oligarchs, especially the PayPal Mafia. They believe that they can control the monster that they have created in their own favor. Time will tell!
luxuryballs 3mo ago
The problem is that if you look with an inquisitive eye without having a preference on the outcome there's no way to tell because of the margins in just a few districts, all that is sure is that the Constitution was followed and the valid electors chose the President (which is a major reason why it is designed that way).
- wat10000 3mo ago
  Despite what people say, absence of evidence is evidence of absence, if you've gone looking for the evidence and it's something that you should find if the claim is true. There's a bunch of evidence we'd expect to see if there was enough cheating to swing the election, and we don't see it. All we have is evidence of some pathetic attempts by the actual loser to overturn things.
- epistasis 3mo ago
  What do you mean "there's no way to tell because of the margins in a few districts"? Anybody looking with an inquisitive eye and no preference for the outcome reaches an extremely strong concision, that there was no voter fraud that could have influenced the outcome.
  - luxuryballs 3mo ago
    I can't tell because there's not enough evidence either way, it's OK to have a third opinion of "I can't know", that's actually the default position.
- FireBeyond 3mo ago
  The very right wing Heritage Foundation spent millions looking for voter fraud, and found that, at -most-, 1 in 700,000 votes was fraudulent, in Wisconsin (69 out of 45 million votes cast over 20 years). Generally the number is higher than 1 in a million, up to 1 in 3 million. You'd think, if anything, a right wing organization would be trying to prop up Trump's claims... but yet...
  - epistasis 3mo ago
Covzire 3mo ago
Because California has systematically made it impossible to audit elections there. You have to be disinformed to think elections there are secure, you can't possibly know they are.
- wat10000 3mo ago
  Are you seriously suggesting that Trump would have won California if not for cheating?
  - timmytokyo 3mo ago
    Trump claims that. So his cult does too.
- epistasis 3mo ago
  You are making up things, and then saying others are being disinformed? California's elections are widely audited, observed, and secure. Stop spreading lies.
  - Covzire 3mo ago
    Really? How do you audit or control for who shows up to vote? Do you check some kind of government ID or can anyone simply vote by claiming they are who they say they are?
    - ceejayoz 3mo ago
      I can't speak for California, but here in my area of NY you show up, give your name and address, which they find in the registered voters list, and you sign on an iPad that gets checked against the signature on file. Then you get handed a ballot. By the local volunteers who are mostly people from the neighborhood, plus observers from both major parties. Your neighbors are there checking in alongside you. Getting past all this risks years in jail for... an extra vote in a safely blue state. None of this requires an ID, in part because in the US, there's no law that you have to have an ID in the first place. "Papers, please!" used to be a derogatory thing about totalitarian regimes. (More practically, if we Dems were rigging elections, we'd win more often.)
quickthrowman 3mo ago
> The problem is that everyone doesn't know this to be false. A substantial portion of the population "knows" it to be true. If they choose to believe a histrionic liar, that’s their problem. The rest of us don’t have to entertain their credulousness and ignorance. Repeating lies doesn’t make them true, it only makes credulous people believe it. Once the aggrieved-in-chief victim of the century is out of office, the theatrics around election fraud will cease.
- jmye 3mo ago
  [dead]
- anigbrowl 3mo ago
  It absolutely becomes everyone else's problem when they start shooting people or seizing control of things they're not supposed to. If you wait to the point that it affects you personally, it will probably be too late to do anything about it. Refusing to believe in something doesn't immunize you from force wielded by people who do believe it. Once the aggrieved-in-chief victim of the century is out of office, the theatrics around election fraud will cease. We could all hope so, but this is a very passive response. Do you really think the people in the President's orbit are unaware of his advanced age and declining health, or are willing to just return to private life and give up power once he dies of natural causes? It seems far more likely to me that they know he could go any time and have some sort of plan to stick around. While none of them have exert the same sort of charismatic influence as the President does, do you really imagine that they and the substantial bloc of voters behind them are just going to magically come back to their centrist senses and abandon their violent and paranoid ethos?
- wat10000 3mo ago
  To paraphrase a popular saying: if one of your countrymen believes a bunch of bullshit, they have a problem. If tens of millions of our countrymen believe a bunch of bullshit, we all have a problem.

iso1631 3mo ago

> This is shocking Is it really? Have you been asleep for the last decade?

epistasis 3mo ago
Having ICE buy data from a data broker to fabricate evidence for a well disproven conspiracy theory? This is still shocking, absolutely shocking! I will retain my right to be shocked and angry about government overreach, thanks.
- iso1631 3mo ago
  Shocking suggests something unexpected