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U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

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Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#801
post #158
post #10

I am shocked and horrified that it is taking so long to clear those who have breached the Capitol. There is more police efficiency and aggression in a run of the mill BLM protest. Edit: for example: https://twitter.com/RedR1dngHood/status/1346908557560537091

They are armed. You can't use tear gas against weapons but guns. Using guns will lead to deaths either way, so I think they are taking the correct stance.

You can still use tear gas.

If countries weren't afraid of other gasses being used in war, they'd use tear gas on the battlefield

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#802

Are there people here on HN that believe the election was stolen? I haven't seen any evidence, most of the lawsuits haven't borne fruit either. However, I also recognize that there may be blindspots/biases. I'd really like to hear from anyone who believes this, to present a cogent argument. I promise not to attack. I want to hear the argument from the other side. I also beseech the rest of HN to please refrain from a…

Yeah, I do based on the evidence presented ( https://hereistheevidence.com/ ), the lack of legal cooperation and understanding from the Democrats, and the premature media dismissal and disrespectful treatment of the Republicans. I know a large part of the evidence is not compelling, but the combination of factors before, during, and after the election made me require a proper localized audit for several key places to…

I clicked one of the disputed sources "1,600+ voters born 1800 and 1900 voted by mail in NC"[0] and this looks more like an error with how the age was recorded into the spreadsheet from the ballot. E.g., there's number of outliers with the age of 267 years old. A few people aged between 240 to 255, then everyone else is 100-120 years old.

That particular list is also evenly split between dems and repubs. It also includes non-mail voters, so at a minimum the title is wrong.

[0]https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1k9ZBKgSf3mBp0W6vd_PM...

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#803
post #72

How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more?

All the social media sites did the research and learned that filter bubbles and outrage drives engagement more than anything else. If you tune your systems to maximize engagement and ignore the side effects, the side effects still happen, whether it’s deliberate or not

This is also true of TV, print, and other non-social medias - and that seems to be under commented on HN.

Has existed for longer and I believe started this downhill trajectory, perhaps created the 'tinder' if you will.

They too do it for the engagement/ratings.

Rupert Murdoch's empire as a prime cause creating an alternate reality solely because it made his media the #1 most watched news network, print, etc.

They've even argued in court themselves that any 'normal' person wouldn't take their 'news' seriously. Take Tucker Carlson's early videos as another example of this gross negligence; he's an actor saying what gets views no matter his actual beliefs are.

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#804
post #72

How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more?

We eliminated the fairness doctrine, and Roger Ailes swore there would never be another Watergate because he would create a media organization to prevent it.

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

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/roger-a...

This wasn't by mistake, or stumbling into it. It was a very purposeful attack on our democracy.

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#805
post #423

Here’s a “fun” thought: if you were running a foreign intelligence operation in the USA, surely you’d try to get one of your agents into the mob that got into the Capitol building and given free reign over all those computers, computers that were not locked properly before the legitimate users fled for their safety? I’m not just talking about Russia and China here, I mean all the intelligence agencies.

Members of Congress have very limited access to secrets, and none of it will be on the unlocked computer in their front office. That’s (mostly) because such information is the domain of the executive branch.

> Members of Congress have very limited access to secrets, and none of it will be on the unlocked computer in their front office.

Members of the house intelligence committee have access to all levels of US secrets. There is nothing classified enough to where they can’t see it. Some members even fell for Chinese spy honeypot influence campaigns.

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#806

Are there people here on HN that believe the election was stolen? I haven't seen any evidence, most of the lawsuits haven't borne fruit either. However, I also recognize that there may be blindspots/biases. I'd really like to hear from anyone who believes this, to present a cogent argument. I promise not to attack. I want to hear the argument from the other side. I also beseech the rest of HN to please refrain from a…

> Are there people here on HN that believe the election was stolen?

Not me, but plenty of friends and family have such views. Every argument voiced to me so far from those sources has been some variant of the following two arguments:

1) happened, therefore the election was rigged

2) happened, therefore happened, therefore the election was rigged

Elaborating slightly, is defined here to be something designed to appeal to your common sense -- something that without close inspection would be plainly incompatible with a non-rigged election to any reasonable person. That's probably ordinarily a fine enough chain of reasoning, but all the instances I bothered to examine had the property that reality directly contradicted one's gut reaction; they seemed cherry-picked to be easy to believe and repeat while also being false (not to assume malice, I think that's exactly the kind of reasoning you'd expect if you went fishing for evidence to support a theory you believe to be true).

As a specific example, one argument was that the exact vote tallies for Biden and Trump were the same across many voting locations, therefore a computer program must have generated the result. This sounds reasonable on the surface because it seems unlikely that if you drew vote counts out of a hat they would coincide, and most people aren't equipped to be able to analyze such a statement further -- it's "ludicrous" to imagine that in a fair election that kind of anomaly would happen by accident. In practice though, combining the facts that most combinations of votes are comparatively unlikely (few locales would have a 0/N split for example) with the large number of voting locations and a healthy dose of the birthday paradox, many repeated vote tallies are _exactly_ what one would expect from a fair election. Their absence would in fact be a suspicious property indicating some kind of large-scale fraud.

Anywho, I didn't investigate every theory (there were a lot), but I did check out the first 10 or so which came my way and a randomly selected 5 or so (till I grew tired or bored) from each subsequent batch. There might be a valid argument in there somewhere (and independently of their ability to come up with a valid argument there _might_ have been some kind of massive fraud), but the best evidence I've seen is pretty shoddy.

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#807

Are there people here on HN that believe the election was stolen? I haven't seen any evidence, most of the lawsuits haven't borne fruit either. However, I also recognize that there may be blindspots/biases. I'd really like to hear from anyone who believes this, to present a cogent argument. I promise not to attack. I want to hear the argument from the other side. I also beseech the rest of HN to please refrain from a…

> believe the election was stolen?

I don't "believe" but I do understand why people would. Every time someone questions the result, their questioning is seen as motivated and the premise that there has already been a satisfactory investigation is assumed. This is awkward because it would be a lot easier to talk people down if there was in fact an investigation that resolved concerns to show them.

> I'd really like to hear from anyone who believes this, to present a cogent argument.

As I said, I don't "believe." But I'd certainly like an explanation of the two videos (one in Georgia and one of a thumb drive handoff) and perhaps some reasonable handling of the claims by observers that they weren't effectively permitted to do their jobs (asked to leave, prevented from seeing the ballots, challenging ballots that were ignored, etc.)

[0] https://apelbaum.wordpress.com/2020/12/03/the-georgia-ballot...

[1] https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2020/12/04/that-is-some-handof...

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#808

"Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections" - Przeworski In other words, the core concept of democracy isn't the elections or any of the other trappings, it's the fact that it's possible for one group to lose power, transition to another group and retain the possibility to transition back in a subsequent election to the original group.

It's an interesting point. One thing I've noticed is that both sides increasingly believe that each election poses an existential risk to their side. Currently you see many conservatives repeating the meme that losing the Senate means a Republican will never win the White House again. The belief being that Democrats will change voting laws, open borders and amnesty to Dem-leaning immigrants, and possibly even pack th…

DC bill will pass house soon. I think it should be the #2 priority of the senate after COVID/economy. Puerto Rico is less of an obvious one and not nearly as popular on the island as DC residents

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#809
post #72

How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more?

[deleted]

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#810
post #72

How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more?

Having a trustworthy election process might go a long way (voter ID, regular verification when doubts arise etc.). As a European I find the images from Georgia's vote counting absolutely astonishing.

Where I live we had a reelection becouse 18 absentee votes where counted even thought they were too late and invalid out of 100 000 votes.

I could not believe my eyes when I read up to how the US voting system works. No IDs etc ... and recommencing counting after observers are sent home like in Atlanta. I mean it seems like a willy nilly "whatever" system.

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