Trump's win, and subsequent loss, are actually pretty good evidence that American votes are in fact real, I never thought about it that way.

Is Biden against NATO? No.
Is Biden against free market? No.
Is Baden in favour of more State intervention? No.

That's how a real communist should act, — javi2541997

This is a very confusing sequence of words

yes, he is a compulsive liar.

exactly. It's ridiculous to hear "will of the voters" in this circumstance - Trump is being indicted because he wanted to take control against the will of the voters. Donald Trump's existence is itself a threat to the possibility that the will of the voters will be enacted in the future.

The judge and jury should presume innocence until proven guilty. Not prosecutors and not the general public.

Imagine committing some pretty heinous crimes but you've convinced half the population that if you were to be tried for your crimes, that's proof that those who would try you are evil authoritarians.

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters" - the man certainly knows his target audience

What I've found is that conservative conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy only as long as there's no evidence of the conspiracy. As soon as real compelling evidence arises, they reject the conspiracy and find a new one.

They're like the hipsters of the conspiracy world. They only like stuff before it's cool.

Okay well the only way to investigate that is by looking at specific changes rather than general questions about change.

it's a very general question, it's probably better handled on a specific level - why did they want to change this specific election law to this?

But, just as an example, if the existing law was crap for some reason, then changing it to be less crap might be good. Why change anything ever? Because some things can be improved. Maybe an election law was making it unreasonably hard for some people to vote, or a new law was going to make voting much more accessible to more people. Changes can be good. Surely you can think of changes that are good in general, not all changes make things worse in the world right?

The generic question "why change an election law?" has the generic answer "to make it better".

perhaps you can go into detail?

A voting change favouring one party doesn't mean the voting change is bad. If a neighborhood of old conservatives couldn't vote one year because there was no easily accessible place to vote for them, and someone changes election laws to make sure they have a place to vote, is it bad just because they're mostly conservatives?

I don't think a change benefitting one party is in itself proof that that change is bad or unethical. Can you understand why I think that?

easy, if the changes to election laws were designed to allow more people to vote...

In what world is blocking changes automatically good and not bad? Sometimes changes are good

that sounds less like someone cares about election integrity and more like someone is upset they lost. All that happened AFTER he lost, right? Not before?

so how did he fight for it then?

if he fought for election integrity, then why is he saying that the only presidential election he was ever president during is also the presidential election with the least integrity in the history of the us?

It's not adding up. Surely someone as competent and concerned about election integrity at trump could have done something to ensure that there was election integrity...

Addition is a specific algorithm. Quaddition is another specific algorithm. If someone's telling me that I'm wrong about what algorithm I'm using inside my head, and the algorithm they think I'm using is some arbitrarily complicated thing I've never even heard of before, they better have a good argument.

seems like you're just ignoring the whole section where I argue that addition generally solves the sorts of problems I use it to solve, even for numbers > 57. Addition is an operation that generally solves all such problems, regardless of if they're above or below 57.

If someone is going to tell me what's in my mind - and telling me I've been using quaddition instead of addition is doing just that - then they should have a good reason for believing that. I have a good argument for why I've been using addition. What's the counter ?

Yes, but in the thought experiment, you've never done that. The idea is that in real life there's a number you've never added up to before. For the sake of presenting the challenge, we just pick 57. — frank

Ah right. Well, in that case, if I'm disregarding the obvious silliness of the whole thing, then I would think about the sorts of problems I was trying to solve with addition, and think about it those sorts of problems would be solvable by quaddition.

Perhaps I used addition once to count how many apples me and my brother picked together. I picked 5 and he picked 10, so together we picked 15. I'd then think, would quaddition give me the correct answer? In this case, yes, but in the case where one of us picked 57 or more? No, clearly not.

Quaddition doesn't generally solve the sorts of problems I've thus far been using addition to solve, so no, I haven't been doing that.

Following our failure to deliver a fact that distinguishes our historic use of "plus" vs "quus," — frank

Surely the only thing you need to prove historically that you weren't quadding is to show any instance where you've added two numbers > 57, right?

dude has already intimidated witnesses. I really hope they hold him to that agreement.

"I i think therefore I am" seems like the only justifiable 100% certainty to me. The best you can get after that, I would think, it's 99.9 followed by some amount of 9s percent certainty - there's always some doubt for any other statement I think.

I think they're both corrupt, as in they both have corruption in the ranks, but I don't believe the corruption is the same. I don't believe the scale of it is the same.

It seems to me like you can buy the occasional democrat representative. It seems to me that republican representatives exist to be bought.

Is anyone else just completely amazed that a man could try to brazenly steal an election and still a third of America wants to vote for him again?

I'm not entirely sure I know how to process the extreme fucked-upness of this situation. It's absurd, is surreal. There's no way anybody who values democracy could consider him getting power again would be an acceptable outcome.

America's fucked.

I don't think a word of that responded to the question I asked.

How much of a crime would it seem like if Biden loses the election and does all the same shit Trump did though?

I don't think you should let the "victimless" angle go unchecked. It's only arguably victimless because he failed. "Attempted murder" is a crime still, even if no one got hurt.

He failed to make a victim (arguably), should his failure count in his favour?

He refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power, and then it turned out he wasn't interested in a peaceful transition of power. The dude basically announced his intentions well ahead of time. If someone tells me they're gonna stab someone, and then I see them later with a bloody knife in their hands, why wouldn't I believe them?

I'm not a lawyer, I'm not here to prove to you he was guilty. I can't provide anything, there are people whose job it is to do that and that's exactly what they're going to do. I eagerly await the trial and, if it's made public, the evidence that comes out of it.

yes, of course I agree. I don't personally need a confession to find a person beyond all reasonable doubt guilty of a crime involving intent. The same can't be said for every poster

joking or not, it's relevant to the argument NOS is making. If NOS thinks that trump can't be guilty here because you can't prove intent without a confession, then that means a lot of crimes that involve intent are also unprovable without a confession.

If I barge into someone's home and shoot them in the head, then without a confession you can't prove that I didn't intend to shoot approximately in their direction and I just accidentally shot them in the head.

he's specifically talking about crimes where intent matters, I guess.

Although, interestingly enough, intent DOES matter in a murder charge. If a lawyer can't prove intent for a murder charge, they can opt to pursue manslaughter charges instead.

So instead of saying declared innocent, he might claim that you can't convict someone of murder without a confession, only manslaughter .

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/steve-bannon-said-trump-going-say-election-stolen-jan-6-committee-1234610621/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/14/steve-bannon-audio-trump-declare-victory

https://youtu.be/OxNoUnxN_cs

superdeterminism as an explanation for "spooky action at a distance" is intensely unsatisfying.

Bells theorem proves that local hidden variables can't be an explanation for certain quantum events. Superdeterminism comes in and says, hold up, I've found a loop hole - what if the universe does operate by local hidden variables, BUT the universe has conspired to trick us into thinking it doesn't work that way?

The problem with the superdeterminism approach is that it can adequately fit with ANY possible observations. No matter what you observe, a superdeterminist can come out and say, Welp, you observed that because the universe conspired to make sure you observed that.

It basically undermines the entire idea that we can use observations to inform our ideas about how the universe works.

I thought he was snarkily saying the opposite lol.

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4139548-pence-confirms-notes-trump-overturning-election/

Very interesting from pence here. I really hope that Donald trump comes to regret throwing him under the bus.

Hitler didn't personally kill anyone. He only used words too.

Not that those people in question are comparable to Hitler, just showing by example that words can be sufficient.

but he's not using proof by assertion, is he? He made the assertion, and he's going to defend it in a trial, with evidence and arguments.

oh I get it, fantastic explanation. Thank you.

I did read that but there were details I found hard to understand. I would really appreciate it if you could lay out the explicit difference between the two situations that makes one arguably ethical, and the other one unethical.

What I would say to anybody still defending Trump right now, after everything that's happened is, consider how you would react if Biden loses the election in 2024 and he pulls all the same shit Trump did.

He loses in 2024 and he asks Kamala Harris to not certify the republican winner. He loses in 2024 and he calls the governor of some state and asks the governor to find him some more votes. He loses in 2024 so he and his team arrange the same sort of fake elector scheme. He loses in 2024 and then has a big speech talking to his supporters about stolen elections, trial by combat, marching to the capitol to show strength and so on, and his supporters then violently charge into the capitol.

What should happen to Biden if he did all that shit?

he's talking about it like the elector thing is the only thing Donald Trump is in hot water for. Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I don't believe if is. I'm not even sure it's ONE of the things he's in hot water for.

I should also note that the argument "democrats did it 60 years ago" shouldn't be very persuasive. Maybe the democrats who did it 60 years ago were also fraudulent little pests. Or maybe there was some context there that made sense that's absent here.

For example, I'm not sure of the timing of everything but if those "fake electors" for Kennedy did what they did after knowing that the recounts were in Kennedy's favour, that might be a factor not present in the trump situation.

In any case, regardless of whether some people who are probably dead by now were trying to steal an election, we should judge what's happening here on its own merits. Why was the fake elector scheme devised? What was it's purpose? What were they hoping to achieve?