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Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

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Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#191
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Giuliani was doing wasn't dissent, it wasn't a difference of opinion or anything remotely similar. It was straight up lying. Yes, defamation should be chilled.

Good, then prosecute him for the actual crimes he committed.

I'm confused; you seem to be arguing two opposite positions. You say that a civil defamation lawsuit by Dominion is suppressing dissent, and that Giuliani should be criminally prosecuted for unspecified crimes. You do realize that the latter has a much larger chilling effect, right? It's not consistent to argue against a civil case for being too chilling, and then argue for a criminal case over the same conduct.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#192

Ken White has been talking about the potential for this suit for a couple weeks now. He spends a lot of time talking about what isn't defamation --- people use defamation suits and threats thereof to chill free speech, and he's a 1st Amendment guy --- but the Dominion cases are apparently examples of very serious defamation cases. The core of defamation is (1) a false statement of purported fact that (2) causes damag…

"[Dominion will probable be] treated as a public figure." Why? I'd never heard of them before November 2020, and I imagine that is true for most people. I'd also be curious to learn more about what counts as "reckless disregard for the truth", if you're willing to share.

Jurisprudence includes the concept of a "Limited Purpose Public Figure", which typically includes anyone or anything that is part of a prominent matter of public interest. It is not a requirement that this person or group be prominent before hand. Unfortunately this occasionally has the effect of making some plaintiffs a LPPF by the very nature of the allegedly defamatory statements made against them, but that's how the law works.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#193
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Giuliani was doing wasn't dissent, it wasn't a difference of opinion or anything remotely similar. It was straight up lying. Yes, defamation should be chilled.

Good, then prosecute him for the actual crimes he committed.

Lying about a company generally isn't a crime (except in restricted circumstances; there are probably scenarios where it could be a securities law issue, say), but a company is absolutely able to take a civil suit against someone who maliciously lies about it.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as potentially hackable voting machines are used in elections, the anxiety about hacking will be there and will eventually be exploited by politicians. If we want to fix the issue, we really just need to move back to hand counting paper ballots.

Dominion voting machines leave an auditable paper trail and thus do support hand-counting of paper ballots, which was done as part of the recounts in disputed states. No discrepancies beyond the margin of error of hand counting were found in those recounts vs the electronically reported results. You can see how they work in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9BDiO3JGTs

I'm not saying they were hacked. I'm saying the layman needs to be confident beyond a reasonable doubt. A normal non-security professional needs to understand and have confidence in the system they use to vote. Most people don't even know how to troubleshoot computer issues beyond rebooting, let alone understanding complex IT security or auditing measures put in place for these machines.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that I should track down and link each video of each of those individual situations that happened? And put it in a post on HN to be downvoted exactly as much as the Scott Adams video? Pardon me for getting the exact same results for like 1/80th the amount of work. Go ahead and dismiss all of those videos because they are in a supercut featuring Scott Adams. You do you.

I think he's saying that people here won't be "persuaded" by Scott Adams sourced information, as he is well known as a self-described purveyor of exaggerated and misleading information.

It's like linking to project veritas. If I wanted to see some highly out of context and edited video to fit a narrative there are plenty of those around and none of them are all that compelling

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#196
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not going to happen anytime soon in the US, but the thing that will win people over is a genuine common philosophy of some kind. We've spent the last 50 years doing a weird washed-out half- Christianity, and now half of us want the old Christianity-based system back, and the other half wants a tech-humanism that is anathema to the first half. If either side is genuine about their beliefs, a first step is probabl…

> It’s not going to happen anytime soon in the US, but the thing that will win people over is a genuine common philosophy of some kind. We’ve spent the last 50 years doing a weird washed-out half- Christianity, and now half of us want the old Christianity back “Christianity” isn’t a unifying philosophy; even more recently than 50 years ago, the most dedicated evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant Christians were camp…

That's fair, I'm just struggling to define what the prior American mythos actually was, and I think Jesus factors in there somewhere, in name. As a Catholic myself, I know well that actual religious belief isn't the main driver. Maybe I'm wrong and there never was an American mythos, but there's a palpable sense of change that isn't just outright racism.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#197
post #8

I hope whatever happens with these lawsuits it chills the baseless accusations of voter fraud used to undermine voter confidence in our democracy

Why is it baseless to challenge voter fraud concerns? If anything this will chill future concerns and people will not speak up. It sounds like you don’t want anyone to ever question a vote.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#198
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dissent is only to be tolerated when it's politically convenient. Come on, man.

It’s a bit worrying that total lies about a conspiracy between Dominion and (very much dead) Hugo Chavez to rig an election for Joe Biden is what gets classified as “dissent” these days. I’d normally use a different, eight letter word to describe that. Defamatory statements draw lawsuits. Nothing terribly new or worrying about that.

>> Dissent is only to be tolerated when it's politically convenient. Come on, man.

> It’s a bit worrying that total lies about a conspiracy between Dominion and (very much dead) Hugo Chavez to rig an election for Joe Biden is what gets classified as “dissent” these days.

I'm not sure if you can really even call this a "classification." It's more of a false equivalency, either made in bad faith or through some sloppy bit of emotional reasoning.

I'm seeing a lot of this kind of thing now (another similar example is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25898393). It's like some people are experiencing certain generalized feelings, then applying charged words to what triggered those feelings without understanding either the words they used or the thing they're commenting on.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#199
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Researchers usually have well research and evidence to back their claims which wouldn't put them at risk like Giuliani. Giuliani has also repeated these claims that have so far been unsubstantiated repeatedly even after being asked to retract them. There is some willful level malice implied in this lawsuit that is I think is not applicable to security researchers so I'm personally not worried but I do get the general…

And researchers aren't usually operating under the delusionally optimistic assumption that they'll get $20,000 per day and a presidential pardon for their work.

Let's see. $1 billion damages vs. earning $20,000 per day. Guiliani comes out ahead after 50,000 days. I kind of doubt he got that long...

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#200
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not going to happen anytime soon in the US, but the thing that will win people over is a genuine common philosophy of some kind. We’ve spent the last 50 years doing a weird washed-out half- Christianity, and now half of us want the old Christianity back “Christianity” isn’t a unifying philosophy; even more recently than 50 years ago, the most dedicated evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant Christians were camp…

That's fair, I'm just struggling to define what the prior American mythos actually was, and I think Jesus factors in there somewhere, in name. As a Catholic myself, I know well that actual religious belief isn't the main driver. Maybe I'm wrong and there never was an American mythos, but there's a palpable sense of change that isn't just outright racism.

> That’s fair, I’m just struggling to define what the prior American mythos actually was

The problem I think is that you are starting from the assumption that America had a uniting mythos that only recently fell apart, rather than America having had deep, vicious internal divides throughout its entire history that were sometimes temporary subordinated to even stronger shared opposition to external forces.

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