I'm sad to see HN can't seem to have a normal conversation about anything related to USA politics. Can we try to maintain some sort of reasonableness?
How does this help? Also it's not about being tech-savvy or not, yes we're all normal people. It's trying to maintain a level of reason on this forum. I'm genuinely interested in what people think of what Twitter does, but the tone of nearly every reply in the thread is somewhere between mildly polarized and extremist/conspiracy theorist.
Trusting in people's good nature alone has never worked. If the community doesn't implement some mechanism to control the activity it doesn't want, then it will be done. You can refuse to believe that if you want, but I think you will find that belief challenged by reality.
Not coincidentally, a mechanism of control for dealing with undesirable behavior is exactly what this whole Twitter thing is about in the first place. Since we've agreed that people here are not inherently better than the general populace, what makes you think that HN is more immune to this sort of thing than a community like Twitter or reddit?
> what makes you think that HN is more immune to this sort of thing than a community like Twitter or reddit?
I've always perceived HN as fairly elitist, e.g. composed of many top earners and skilled people. The term is often meant negatively; in this case it might be a positive feature. Reminding people that they're on HN, where I think most expect a higher standard than on Twitter or reddit, might make them try to be better. I'm not saying we are composed of some elite, just observing that it's often perceived that way and that we can actually try to use that notion in a good way, to improve the conversation.
1) Have you taken a look at Parler?
2) The Chair of Texas state GOP has called for the state to secede in the wake of the supreme court ruling
3) Diamond and Silk (and they are famous in the US in some areas) have called for a coup.
4) General Flynn who was once the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency endorsed a call for Trump to declare martial law and redo the election
Your naivete is being taken advantage of by bad faith actors.
* This is not true because <some sound logic or data source>
Instead, you just wrote that I'm naive and pretty much left it at that.
Why does this topic make you do that?
(Edit: just noticed that your profile even says you're a data scientist of all things!)
If you are not an American, I suppose it makes sense that you are not aware of the current political climate. If you are American, then you've been deliberately ignoring the obvious.
There's enough. Aggregating various recent polling, it seems that about 1 person in 8 is OK with that, and maybe 2 more (for a total of 3/8) are passively in favor - that is to say, they won't do anything about it, but won't object if it happens. You don't need a majority of people to support a coup; indeed, that's kinda why it's such an attractive option to the unscrupulous.
An important problem nowadays is that our media and interpersonal communications take place at lightning speed, but out political technology is many respects still rooted int he 18th century, and our administrative technology covers a span from 19th century unresponsive bureaucracy to 21st century oppressive surveillance. Politics as presently constituted does not work well for a lot of people, and so they are not invested in maintaining the status quo.
Put simply, our economic infrastructure is highly distributed, but power is highly centralized and that makes a lot of people angry.
The left-biased media was worried about election fraud for months before the election (good!) and are now declaring it the "most secure election in American history" in spite of the broad introduction of mail-in voting.
People living in democracies should scrutinize the hell out of their elections.
https://spectator.us/reasons-why-the-2020-presidential-elect...
https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/23/5-more-ways-joe-biden-m...
I think he's made it clear that he will not do that, and election fraud challenges are just the easiest strategy currently available to pursue his objective of staying in power.
But certainly there are limits to how far the challenge can go. I'll be right there LOLing with you if he needs to be bodily removed from the WH. I disagree that he's given any indication that he'd go that far, though. Once his options are exhausted, he'll leave.
That's called a coup attempt. A pathetic one, sure. But a coup attempt nonetheless.
I agree with you int hat I think people should have a chance to deploy their arguments but you need to bear in mind that there are a lot of people who are willing and able to resort to force in place of argument.
Consider the Voter Integrity Fund by Matt Braynard. It's one of the more convincing arguments I've heard to date, and involved making many thousands of phone calls, analyzing the resulting data, generating reports, and collecting sworn testimony. All that didn't happen overnight, and they didn't begin immediately after the election.
But the frivolous ones are being made by a team of "presidential" "lawyers"...
> If your argument is simply "No good case has been made yet, therefore no good case can be made"
That's not my argument, nice effort trying to use your powers of deduction, but I'd take it back to the supplier and tell them it's defective.
> we can't know until they are presented.
So should we give Team Total Landscaping all the time they'd like?
I would bet some money that there was at least 1 fraudulent vote during the whole election. I would bet more money that there weren't that many fraudulent votes that if they were cancelled it would flip the results and give Trump the win. Trump and Giuliani are screaming "massive fraud", which sounds like they have a good case, but they've shown up to the court empty handed. Some have argued "they're just preparing the very good case", geezus christ that's not how that works, and besides, their time is running out.
If a team of astrophycists from a famous university started screaming "Something's happened to the sun, it won't rise tomorrow", we'd pay attention. If we ask them to show us what data they have, but they refuse, and they just continue yelling shit, we'd start wondering if they're still sane. And if the sun rose tomorrow, we'd be more certain that they've lost the plot. Maybe they'd change their claims, still offering no proof, but if the sun still rose the next day...
If a group of homeless people claimed the same thing, we'd probably laugh and continue with our day. Sadly some people are being fooled by a bunch of "homeless" people, probably willingly because they can't admit to themselves that they've been fooled by conmen.