Have you talked to anyone who is familiar with Qanon (e.g. investigative reporter, member, etc.)? They believe they are exposing wicked people in high places behind human trafficking rings. I don't think anyone would admit to being a 'servile Trump worshipper', neither a 'servile <insert political figure> worshipper'. Whether they are on to something is another issue. I am not part of Qanon, but I know characterizations such as yours are just wrong.
You really believe Trump is a traitor? Can you name 1 or more specific pieces of evidence? I do not think Trump is a traitor, in fact I think he has been a great president by his merits (in 2016 I was neutral). I love how he talks about specific issues and solutions rather than vague platitudes. He is a breath of fresh air, and that is why he was voted for (though I did not see this in 2016). If he is a traitor, I would love to be enlightened of this and obviously I would not support him. I think most people (such as yourself) don't spend time looking into the claims by his political opponents that he is a traitor. Also, if you support Trump you risk being fired.
Yes, I have engaged Qultists several times via Twitter. Every single time I got defletion, phrases like "Do your own research", "Not.My.Job." in response to requests for sources of information. I did my own research and decided Qanon beliefs are essentially 99.5% false. The "elite pedovore" stuff is falsifiable with only a few clicks and some simple geometry and arithmetic.
As far as Trump being a traitor: I cite the House Impeachment Inquiry - Hill, Vindman and Sonderland all testified under oath to Trump doing things that are a direct betrayal of the USA. The Mueller report and the Senate Intelligence community reports all indicate that the Trump campaign, and Trump himself, not only knew about and welcomed Russian election interference, but actually coordinated with the Russians about it. If you need a sword statement from Donald J. Trump that he did it, I can't provide that, but between House Inquiry, Mueller report and SSCI reports, everyone that's not a judge or a jury member knows Trump did some treason. So read all that and change your mind.
I personally listened to the House Impeachment Inquiry back in February, and read parts of the Mueller report and the Senate reports. I'm insulted that you think I'm just mindlessly repeating some anonymous source's vague assertions. How dare you?!?
Also, please cite someone merely supporting Trump and getting fired. Sources I can look up and examine myself or it didn't happen.
My other post was flagged for sensationalism, so I slightly modified the title. This title actually does describe what is actually in the article (at the end).
Usually I do that, but in this case the title was almost meaningless ('How the Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong'). I wanted to highlight the bit I found interesting.
As unfortunately expected, I cannot find this on 'mainstream' news. In fact, I found this HN post on the third page of Google without seeing it covered by any other major news outlets.
You have to make the distinction between violent rioters (namely antifa) and genuine protestors. this is the 2nd high-profile time this attempted hijacking has happened. there is even a meme: look up "bike lock guy" (Internet Historian's video on YouTube is pretty funny). anyways the federal agents are not pulling out random genuine protestors (how would that make sense?). they are pulling out the violent ones.
'Antifa' and 'violent rioters' is absolutely not the same thing. Please don't conflate them. Some antifascists are indeed violent; most are not. There are also many violent rioters who are not antifascists in any way - there are groups of fascists trying to make things violent, and there are many people who simply want to take advantage of the riots to steal and fight for the 'fun' of it.
> anyways the federal agents are not pulling out random genuine protestors (how would that make sense?). they are pulling out the violent ones.
You are assuming that the federal agents are interested in the well-being of protestors. There is no proof of that. Much more likely, the federal agents have 2 goals: stop and deligitimize the protests, and protect federal or local property from the looting.
The first goal is best achieved by detaining and threatening non-violent protestors, especially their leaders, and journalists friendly to the cause. Violent protestors are already giving the protests a bad name, so they are helping the government's cause. Of course, some violent protestors also need to be stopped, to fulfill their second goal.
There is never, ever, ever any possible excuse for kidnapping people without due process. Ever, ever. Because there's no way to prove that they were violent rioters. They just as well could have been total innocents, and you'd have no way to know.
What you're calling kidnapping is actually referred to as arresting, and it is entirely possible to identify violent individuals with certainty. Every riot in Seattle has had multiple police helicopters circling the area; it isn't difficult to identify and track particularly violent participants.
Proving whether that person participated in the riot is a matter for the courts, all that's needed for an arrest is reasonable suspicion.
> There is never, ever, ever any possible excuse for kidnapping people without due process.
I don't know if you are a native speaker, but the word kidnap might not be the one you should be using. "Kidnap" has strong connotations, and while sime people will happily use that property of the word to create feelings I don't think it is appropriate here.
kidnap: abduct (someone) and hold them captive, typically to obtain a ransom.
There's a lot to be said about police, federal agents, TSA etc, but lets keep this serious.
You misunderstand. Do not conflate protestors with violent rioters, who are taking advantage of the protests (as many protestors on the ground can attest). The state government has refused to do anything about violent rioters, even releasing those arrested for felony crimes. Federal agents are picking up where the state government has refused to take action.
Last night rioters broke into and set fire to the Portland Police Association offices.
Going all the way back to May 29th, protesting has morphed into rioting on a nightly basis. Rioters have fired guns and hit bystanders. "The rioters and looters shattered store windows and tagged buildings with graffiti that police say stretched for 20 blocks." "Demonstrators broke into and started a fire inside the Multnomah County Justice Center, home to hundreds of inmates." "Other protesters set fires throughout downtown, torching dumpsters, trash cans, cars and pallets." -- That was all May 29th.
Here is timeline of the first 12 days. It's much the same every night. [1]
I understand there were attempts to set up an autonomous zone in both cities, so I don't think that buys you much. And CHAZ "security" shot some of the people so the evidence here seems rather lacking.
People being shot by white people in tactical gear that nobody from the zone had seen before, around the same time you have people driving cars into protesters and people trying to shoot protesters with bows, and it's because I wish there was evidence.
I had to resubmit this because an almost identical submission was flagged for having a 'misleading' title, when the quote is LITERALLY FROM THE MAN who quit.
Tell us why you are so passionately disturbed about a four year old article about an organization which eschews formal organization and 99.9% of HN could not name who their “leaders” are?
That's quite a jump from 'broken link' => 'must be propaganda'.
Rebuttals should be analyzed just like the target of the rebuttal. Just as you say the original article should not be taken as gospel, the rebuttal should not be taken as gospel either. The author's accounting of the 28M votes breaks down into 2 categories:
1. 12M voluntarily not cast from the 3 states that auto-send to every registered voter. The author arrives at this calculation by taking an average vote percentage of those states, and applying it to the mail ballots. You can't just apply general vote rate to the mail ballots, then further assume the EVERY SINGLE ONE of the 12M remaining vote was due to people just not bothering to vote. Baked into the author's calculation is that none of the mail ballots in those 3 states could have been involved in fraud...
2. 16M (building on the previous flawed calculation) the author just assumes were people who manually requested the mail ballot, but just decided not to send it in. Why? because there were a total 120M mail ballots sent and 16M / 120M amounts to 13% not voting, which is way lower than general population 50% not voting. This is an assertion with no evidence, and we would expect the percentage of people who do not vote when they MANUALLY request a mail ballot to be much lower anyways. Even a fraction of 16M should raise eyebrows.
So as I understand it, the author's calculations are very hand-wavy and unjustified. But you say this is a 'clear' rebuttal. Can you share how you interpreted the article?
This list proves the total irrelevance of voter fraud. Going back 30 years there are only 1000 such cases in a country of 300M+!
To justify severely hampering the public’s right to vote you would need to demonstrate a pattern of recent fraud efforts that swung elections to the side committing the fraud. as far as I know there are exactly zero of those at the federal level, and probably near zero at any level of government.
There is no legitimate independent body studying this who believes voter fraud in the United States justifies the widespread disenfranchisement strategy the GOP is applying in so many elections across the country. Full stop.
Hmm. It is a rather arbitrary condition that we should be able to prove that voter fraud swung an election before we should be worried about it. There are a lot of recent convictions, which should not happen at all. And I don’t see how a ‘small‘ amount of evidence can prove the point against the evidence.
It should be worrying that this is happening at all. Our vote is one of our most precious forms of expression. This list of convictions is just the ones the author knew of, the ones that just got caught.
Oh and I would love see any evidence on the disenfranchisement you mentioned to update my worldview with. Don’t worry, if you give me a little bit of evidence, I won’t take it as proof that you are ‘wrong’.
On the contrary, these random, isolated incidents, many in tiny local elections, should give us great confidence in our electoral system. Such a tiny rate of problems means our democracy is incredibly strong with respect to fraud.
From an article by Ian Millhiser:
‘ Voter fraud is a fake problem
Despite Trump’s claims that enhanced access to mailed-in ballots will increase voter fraud, such fraud barely exists. The state of Oregon, for example, has provided more than 100 million mail-in ballots to voters since 2000 but has only documented about 12 cases of fraud.
Similarly, according to the Brennan Center for Justice’s Wendy Weiser and Harold Ekeh, “an exhaustive investigative journalism analysis of all known voter fraud cases identified only 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud from 2000 to 2012” — and billions of votes were cast during that period.
Thus, Weiser and Ekeh write, “it is still more likely for an American to be struck by lightning than to commit mail voting fraud.”
These negligible examples of voter fraud, moreover, need to be weighed against the potential impact of a pandemic. If voters are either unable to leave their homes to cast a vote or unwilling to do so due to fears of becoming infected, hundreds of thousands or even millions of voters could be disenfranchised if they are unable to vote by mail.
So even if Trump’s warnings of voter fraud are offered in good faith — and not merely as an excuse to reject voting rights policies that, in his own words, do not “work out well for Republicans” — the president is proposing that we disenfranchise thousands or even millions of voters in order to prevent a small handful of fraudulent ballots from potentially being cast in 2020.“
This is in the context of systematic efforts by the current administration in concert with right-leaning local governments to suppress voting in ways they think will help them win the election.
