Also, which "plot"? There were at least 3 plots - all stupid and misguided, not all of them necessarily illegal.
- There was a plot to overturn the election using the legal system.
- There was a plot to overturn the election by lobbying legislators and governors to pull the levers of various constitutional machinery. Legality of some these requests certainly open to interpretation.
- There was a plot to overthrow the government. Some of the people who entered the Capitol may have had that intent, and we know there were some militia freaks with caches of guns that ultimately didn't follow through with their plans.
Am I alone in thinking that?
If I am trying to do my day job and can't avoid getting drawn into political debates, that's exhausting.
If I share an interesting article about new Javascript features, it doesn't mean I'm either endorsing or ready to debate the author's climate-change-denial posts from years back: that's also exhausting.
If I go to read fan theories of my favorite books, only to have the conversations focus on the author's controversial Tweets du jour, that's exhausting.
If I'm watching the Superbowl, and everyone keeps interrupting the game to tell me how awful a person one of the key players is, that's exhausting.
Granted, I do think you're totally right that there are places to discuss these things, and I don't know of a one-size-fits-all approach here. That said, the "don't-let-my-peas-touch-my-mashed-potatoes" (new phrase for me, and I love it) instinct is quite reasonable, since otherwise life becomes an infinite stew of pessimism and critique.
You want to slap some sense into everyone around you, and break through the politeness that the bad guys are weaponizing, but it's just going to start an argument. You can carve out a space to talk shop undistracted and save the politics (as important as it may be) for later.
One strange thing to note from watching my vote count after I posted this comment. It rocketed sky high within the first 30 minutes, was the top comment, and seemed to be settling to an equilibrium. Then suddenly, over a span of a few minutes, it got massively downvoted to about 33% of the count it had at peak. I've been posting on the internet a while, and I've never seen such a rapid swing.
So yeah. Carry on. Trump ate enough of my mental bandwidth back when he had both the power of the Presidency and influence as the Leader of the Republican Party—and I actively avoided much of the news that that still went out of its way to find me. He still has influence, an apparently dwindling amount and not as the clear leader of his party, but he doesn’t have the power of the Presidency. Now it’s just some other disappointment who is strangely enough, disappointing in many of the same ways as his immediate predecessor but with less natural political instinct but is also less of a chatterbox on Twitter.
Anyways I'd say there's very little reason other than blind faith to trust any election result that uses voting machines. Here's a John Oliver clip featuring:
- Hitting "remind me later" on critical Windows security updates for over a decade
- Administrators not believing the voting machines are connected to the internet, just connected to a "secure modem"
- Mappings of candidates vote counts being reversed, so candidate A gets all of candidate B's votes and vice versa.
- Machines being left unattended and having easy override procedures that allow anyone knowing the procedure immediate admin access
What's really notable is that she hasn't pulled out of the political sphere entirely, which is just _what you do_ when you're the spouse of a Supreme Court Justice.