I’m arguing the election was rigged. Everything from changing election laws behind the backs of Americans, flooding the system with dark money, threatening riots should they lose, suppressing and controlling information…it’s all there

I was reposting the argument to which you replied. Why would you ask about “falsifying votes”?

A glittering generality or two and praxis is persuaded.

I never said they were confessing to falsifying votes.

There was “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information”. This is according to their own admission.

“Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation [the censorship of Hunter Biden’s laptop] and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.”

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

Of course, it all favored one candidate.

They are not keeping it secret. My guess is they knew they couldn’t keep their election rigging secret, so they did what they already admitted to doing, control the flow of information. Since smooth-brains tend to believe everything these people write, all they had to do was say their efforts were to “save democracy”, and other glittering generalities. “They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. ” Riiiiiiiight.

There was “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information”. This is according to their own admission.

“Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation [the censorship of Hunter Biden’s laptop] and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.”

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

Of course, it all favored one candidate.

I can agree to that. The court is a good venue in which to argue the evidence. What I mean is I need to see the evidence and use my own judgement rather than trust the word of some judge or juror. That is why I hope these trials are broadcasted live.

I hate judges and lawyers. I despise the whole profession and the system upon which it is maintained. I don’t even like the US constitution. The only thing that would affect my own beliefs would be the evidence.

No. I actually expect him to be found guilty. I have zero faith in the US legal system. If he is acquitted I will be pleasantly surprised.

I am susceptible to lies and am fully aware of my biases. All I can do is listen to both sides of the story, any information that is available, and come to my own conclusions.

Yes, I think it is possible Trump lost the election and tried to take it back by potentially illegally means.

I’m willing to hear any argument that I have.

Yes you do.

You’re subject to The Big Lie, which according to Goebbels, is “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”.

To reverse, flip, or abolish a decision. Such a thing can only occur once the truth is established, only after an election is contested, perhaps even held again. For some reason or other you say that Trump and his team were doing one and not the other. Why not just say he was contesting the election?

"It's obvious" is not a good enough answer, I'm afraid. I suspect you repeat the phrase because others do, because of propaganda.

I can take one example from your Wikipedia page and illustrate my point.

"In the days after the election, Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, exchanged 29 text messages with Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, urging him to pursue efforts to overturn the election. "

Then when I read from the source texts, she urges no such thing. So where does this idea come from if not from propaganda?

https://archive.ph/7pIGc

Yes, quite obviously so. I know you know that

I don’t know that because I haven’t seen it. If it’s that obvious then such a quote should be easy to find.

Have you seen or read any quotes from Trump or others using the phrase “overturn the election”? Has he requested, demanded, or pressured anyone to do such a thing? In my searching I’ve found nothing, so naturally I’m curious how this phrase has dropped into the political lexicon and is now repeated as if it occurred.

Challenging the legality or validity of an election. What do you think it means?

There is nothing wrong with contesting an election. There is something wrong with McCarthyism and seeking to disbar and ostracize people who do contest elections.

I never said it was a Democrat vs Republican issue, I’m afraid, so your argument means nothing. I strictly used the phrase “anti-Trump forces”. I was noting the “typical anti-Trumpism” Dershowitz (a Democrat) and other lawyers were facing. It’s no secret the neoconservative wing of the grand ol’ party are NeveverTrump. Besides that, Rosenzweig has voted for Democrats since 2018. Who cares about their party affiliation? More straw men.

“A dark money group with ties to Democratic Party heavyweights will spend millions this year to expose and try to disbar more than 100 lawyers who worked on Donald Trump’s post-election lawsuits”. This, according to Fooloso, is a bipartisan effort to “preserve election integrity”. No greater amount of hokum has foamed at the corners of someone’s mouth.

Your emphasis does nothing but distract from what you’re trying to hide.

More key points:

1. The project was devised by Melissa Moss, a Democratic consultant and former senior Clinton administration official.

2. Some of the attorney targets already have been hit with bar complaints. One going after Georgia attorney Brad Carver for his role as an alternate elector was dismissed for lack of evidence. Carver, in an email to Axios, reiterated his position that his involvement was legally appropriate.

3. "This is mostly important for the deterrent effect that it can bring so that you can kill the pool of available legal talent going forward," according to a person involved with the effort, who asked to remain anonymous.

4. Advisory board members include former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.); and Paul Rosenzweig, a conservative and member of the Federalist Society who was former senior counsel for Ken Starr's Clint0n-era Whitewater investigation and served in George W. Bush's Department of Homeland Security.

At almost every step Ukraine appears to be a common theme. It is becoming more and more evident that Trump got in the way of their ongoing regime-change and proxy war in Ukraine.

I don’t care about the complaint of anti-Trump forces, nor if you lap it all up.

A dark money group with ties to Democratic Party heavyweights will spend millions this year to expose and try to disbar more than 100 lawyers who worked on Donald Trump’s post-election lawsuits, people involved with the effort tell Axios.

David Brock, who founded Media Matters for America and the super PAC American Bridge 21st Century and is a Hillary Clinton ally and prolific fundraiser for Democrats, is advising the group.

Brock told Axios in an interview that the idea is to "not only bring the grievances in the bar complaints, but shame them and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms."

https://www.axios.com/2022/03/07/trump-election-lawyers-disbar

I was just listing the typical anti-Trumpism he faced, at least according to him, both the attempt to remove people from their careers and the ostracism people face should they oppose anti-Trump narratives. He has spoken about it many times.

Why would you pretend I said the complaint against Dershowitz has something to do with him being a social outcast? Because you like men of straw.

I’m afraid the only expertise of “legal experts” is law. An election is a political venture, not a legal one. So I’m not sure why you’d think his lawyers were the kind of experts he was referring to.

There is a movement to disbar and condemn the lawyers who work for Trump. Famed defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who defended Trump in his first impeachment, has illustrated how shadowy legal groups like The 65 project has sought his own disbarment. He often notes that he has been effectively alienated from his usual social groups because he had the gall to believe that one particular defendent deserved representation. He says of the most recent indictment that it is the worst example yet of criminalizing lawyers and strikes at the heart of democracy and the US constitution.

A legal entity is another abstraction. I am left to abandon marriage in the world and to read about it in laws, all of which vary according to jurisdiction.

I find something sinister in the legal account of marriage and property. If the law were to abolish one or the other tomorrow I could not see the property and marriages of my own and everyone I know null and void. This is because people, not laws, recognize the validity of both.

I don’t have a fully fleshed out theory of property, but it is probably Lockean in character. If I was walking in the woods and found someone had built a dwelling on state land and was working on it to survive, I would recognize it as that person’s property and leave it alone. The initial just acquisition, the occupation, the labor, would lead me to recognize it as that person’s property, while the law would have no justification save for its own claim to authority. In holding up the real people, the labor, the thing and land up against the law’s words on paper, I would side with one long before I would the other.

There's nothing so simplistic as believing reality begets only one interpretation.

Not only that but there is nothing worse than official truth. The institutions that most wish to police misinformation have historically produced misinformation on an industrial scale.

For those who seek to shape public opinion, the veracity of the information appears to be of a secondary or even tertiary concern. The censorship of the Covid lab-leak hypothesis, for example—a valid theory—reveals that the charge is often used simply against information that they do not like. The shape of public opinion is paramount to whether the information is actually true or false. It’s the only reason one would get upset about dissenting opinions, really.

I appreciate the reduction to the absurd, but you could just describe married people and be done with it. You could describe the visible and recognizable things instead of referring to your abstract idea of what marriage means. At some point it must refer to the world or else you’re left compounding abstract nouns.

What is marriage to you?

Since language must be a component of the 'natural' society you distinguish from the 'abstract', sharing a language must be natural to some degree. So, the question applies at least to the point where you would place language outside of what a community shares. The burden of explanation falls upon your theory.

I don’t understand what you wish I would explain.

Everything is natural to me, including abstraction. I only seek to understand where the referent is. If it is concrete, he is concerned with people and their movements. That there is society, concern for others. If it is abstract, he is concerned with an idea. That there is anti-society, self-concern.

Oppenheimer aside, Rousseau's view of 'natural' man challenges your view of the boundary between natural and 'idealized' commonalities.

How so?

How did the language come into existence?

A perennial question without any obvious answer. Do you have a theory?

I do not think people are connected or related because they use the same language.

Oppenheimer was referencing Rousseau’s “The Social Contract”, which is obvious because he mentions the title in your quote. So it’s odd you’d look for what he is referencing in a different, much earlier work.

The notion of a “bond” or “connection” is strictly metaphorical. It isn’t real. There isn’t anything between us, holding us together, which we can confirm by looking. A real bond or connection would be an umbilical cord. So in that sense I am not a realist when it comes to these metaphors. I would rather say Individuals relate to one another, or interact with each other in various ways. I relate to the grocer when I go to the market, for example. This is what I meant by "history", I think, the culmination of our interactions with one another. That is the extent of our relationship.

Only these types of interactions, in combination with the accounts of those involved, can determine what kind of relationship we are looking at—and from this, the nature of the collective, if any. I would argue that in order to do this, one must be nominalist. He must consider only the concrete, particular things involved, what they themselves tell of their lives and relations with each other, and let go of the pre-conceived, realist account of collectives.

At any rate, I need to still need to figure it all out, so I appreciate your questions. I would argue the activities involved in this nominalist account of relationships are inherently social in the original sense of the term (from Latin, socialis, "of companionship, of allies; united, living with others; of marriage, conjugal,"). People interact with each other in volitional, voluntary, "real" ways, and this account of society is paramount to, and more accurate than, the collectivist account of society (as the struggle between classes and races, for example). Actual social interactions and connections aren't determined by the will and imagination of some platonist/collectivist, who thinks he can surmise what a community is and ought to be through pure reason alone, utilizing concepts such as class, race, nationality etc. to do so. Each time he refers to the idea before the flesh-and-blood individuals involved, he is putting himself above all. For that reason I would say collectivist doctrines such as socialism, fascism, and their father, republicanism, are anti-social and anti-society.

You’ve supplied meaning to life with those remarks. However slight the significance might sound, you’ve still deemed life worthy enough of your attention and meaning. The difference is yours is not as aesthetically pleasing as other accounts. Yours is thick on the metaphor while loose with the truth.

I don’t understand the question, Paine.

This is exactly what @schopenhauer1 was talking about with his neologism the "TPF effect".

You guys sure are consistent, but I’m not so sure one should be consistently fallacious.

Your focus is me and not the arguments. Why must you keep me in your mouth? Why can’t you criticize the arguments, or absent that, come up with a better one? My politics and beliefs are no secret, so pointing them out isn’t any sort of revelation or refutation.

That's not the issue it is trying to illustrate. Rather, the gun didn't exist before, and then it will exist. Not only that, the gun will be used let's say in some nefarious way. Thus a worse state of affairs is likely to take place. But wait! You can prevent this... But you don't, you let it happen because you don't believe in future conditionals? I call bullshit.

I believe everything exists, but I question what they exist as. Future conditionals, for example, don’t describe or predict any actual future, no matter how likely. I let it happen because I do not trust your judgement.

Well, that's fine. You can do whatever you want. Clearly you don't believe in future states, for example. But my point is "de facto" dictates are a thing. Just because you choose not to acknowledge them, doesn't mean they are not a thing.

It doesn’t mean they are a thing either.

No mind reading necessary. No matter how you attempt to dress it up your arguments fall on under two related themes: defending Trump and radical individualist autonomy.

You described my intentions but completely missed the mark, I’m afraid. Here again you feign interest but immediately resort to ad hominem. It’s a pattern.