Fox News, Dominion Voting Systems reach $787,500,000 settlement
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
Would be nice if the Fox News crowd would read some of those messages to wake up from all the manipulation.
How would the Fox News crowd even become aware of those messages when their information sources don't report them?
But no one who would have been receptive to the truth is watching Fox in the first place. That is, really, the core truth exposed by this suit. Fox is completely captured by its audience. For years we thought it was the other way around.
A settlement might contain something that wouldn’t be on the table in a court judgement if the value it adds to the side that gets it is disproportional to the cost to the side providing it — so that it is win-win compared to a compromise within the scope of potential court outcomes — but this is the opposite, less valuable to Dominion and more harmful to Fox than money.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/fox-news-media-dominion-voting...
I don't see any Fox News reporting that quotes those messages that were entered into evidence. Though admittedly I didn't spend much time looking-- just the first 3 pages of results in a search.
No comment on the content, just weird to see 'some else's algorithm' beyond the obvious political stuff - I'm vaguely aware of both stories, but have not seen extensive coverage in my bubble.
Often times there will be a big news story that every other site is reporting on and then the top few stories on Fox News will be some "Guess what gaffe Biden or Harris did now" type tabloid-style hit pieces.
Now, not a single mention on the entire front page as of a few minutes ago. But they're sure hammering the hell out of this Bud Light story still.
EDIT: Is Jollo your site? I dig it!
For a lot of people facts don't matter, only culture war. Its no different than sport fans loving their team despite them cheating e.g Astros, Patriots, Red Sox, etc. They just want their team to win.
* Think like a scientist
* Think like a sports fan
* Think like an attorney
* Think like a zaelot
According to his model, being a sports fan is not even close as bad as lower rungs of the ladder. Sport fans do root for their teams and do engage in all sort of tribalism but ultimately care about The Game and they would be deeply dissatisfied if the game ethics were breached in favour of any team, including their own; it would just ruin the whole point of the game.
While the "attorney" persona deliberately ignores the truth or pretends to do so if that requires serving their clients.
Only the true "zaelot" fully lives in their delusion and nothing, truly nothing will make them wake up from anything because waking up would mean losing themeselves.
A sports fan will on average kind of vaguely deny it, but if real proof comes out it just becomes something they don't talk about or they'll pass blame around as much as possible.
A lawyer will deny, deny, deny in every permutation of possible ways. A zealot will both deny and say the enemy deserved it and is worse.
It's not like deflategate made anybody in new england like brady less.
The thing is that that state of affairs has been deliberately cultivated. And this entire case is a penetrating glimpse into how it's done.
There's a range of possible solutions, but they all center on what kind of speech we incentivize. Right now, we've pretty much gone all in on incentivizing speech that gets attention. Traditional media businesses produce news or entertainment in order to sell attention to advertisers for money. Social media just puts a twist on it by outsourcing content creation to individual users in exchange for internet points like upvotes or retweets.
Things aren't going to get better until we change that. Facts and reasoned arguments are boring. Culture war is entertaining and engaging. So culture war makes the most money, and that's what we're going to get.
The only voting machine that isn't "fraud waiting to happen" is an optical-scan under-voting detector - the thing that says "your mark for Mayor is too light and won't be counted", allowing you to take the paper and pen and correct it.
The court erred in this case, not by treating Fox's words (/unchecked republication of accusations) as a lie but by acting like the reputation of an voting-machine company deserves protection when they make something so obviously ideally suited for crime. The Flipper Zero people get accused of knowing their product will be used in crime and yet we don't apply the same logic to e-voting manufacturers.
Fox deserves the hit, but Dominion doesn't deserve the implication of honesty - their entire business is to remove proof of honesty from our elections. Perhaps the solution should have been to fine Fox but give the money to charities seeking to audit and improve the voting process.
I was a juror on a civil case once. They said many of them go right up until the trial date before settling out of court, as things finally become "real". Both sides want the other to flinch first.
It's not just something they tell the folks who get called. I've seen it from the other side too where someone I knew was prepared to testify in a criminal case. The defendant pleaded out the day the trial was due to start while we were in the courthouse waiting for the proceedings to begin.
You'd think if they had really led it that Trump’s many failed (because it wasn’t defamatory) lawsuits over the story, the dossier, etc., would have included them, but no, just the DNC, Hillary Clinton, the New York Times, the Pullitzer Prize, the Washington Post...
The truth is that none of them, Fox personalities included, are journalists or even "news". They should all stop misleading people and call themselves "entertainment". They way they can say whatever they want.
https://twitter.com/MMFlint/status/63815342950072320?lang=en
Context:
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/arts/television/02hack.ht...
Interestingly, Diebold IP and tech was acquired by Dominion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions
Because it was a win, and a sure $787.5M is better than a gamble that the court would find for them on the elements other than falsity (very likely) and find enough more damages than 787.5M to justify the added time and cost (far less certain). And the court had already found for them as a matter of law on falsity, so there was no real moral vindication to be sought at trial.
I agree, the case was pretty much nailed on. Dominion should have held out for the full 1.6bn and stuck The Murdoch's, Tucker and co on the stand to humiliate themselves.
What a world it is, that high journalistic standards can end in a $787m payout.
E.g. Party in power will say “CNN LIES!” and get DOJ to set up a sham trial.
But even if it shouldn’t be possible for the ruling political party to infringe on free speech, it should also not be tenable to lie to millions of Americans this blatantly.
Or, laws specifically regarding elections (and maybe a few other matters). Even if they were forced to disclose their known misstatements (lies) publicly in someway that might help them collectively keep each other in honest.
It might be similar to how public companies are required to have audits and report their results and whatnot. We in the public get information to help us determine what the truth is regarding stocks.
Honestly just like the deregulation of finance introducing risks to banks and resulting Great Recession, the deregulation of fairness doctrine and other things are equally at fault for things like this happening IMO. We’re letting history repeat when we forget why such regulations were instituted to begin with.
I mean I get that this incentivizes plaintiffs to sue when they think they’re getting screwed but… isn’t that a good thing? (That is, isn’t that the whole point of the tort system?)
In my understanding, if this is a grave concern, then it's the federal prosecutor that should press charges. I assume DVS were simply suing as a business for damages.
Edit: wording to clarify the point
Coughing up nearly a billion dollars to settle a trial because they know they’ll lose is quite humiliating.
Edit: good call out andrew! That’s what I get for commenting at the bar.
> just buy their way out of legal humiliation
Except they basically didn't buy their way out of the humiliation. Most of the damming stuff has already been made public. Most of the embarrassing laundry has been aired. At this point, the only real question is whether Dominion would get the $1.6B they had asked for. Instead, they settled for a guaranteed half.
Plus, Fox is still facing a lawsuit from Smartmatic, another voting system. Smartmatic issued a statement, "Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign. Smartmatic will expose the rest." It also likely means Fox losing more money.
> Settlements and plea bargains are a cancer on the judicial process
I definitely understand the sentiment and plea bargains can be really bad pushing low-income people to plead guilty to lesser crimes even if they're innocent and letting rich people off easy when they're definitely guilty. Likewise, a company might reach a settlement with someone they've wronged who doesn't know their rights and who isn't on equal footing with such a giant corporation.
In a civil case between two companies with basically unlimited legal funds, it seems quite reasonable. It's important to note that this case isn't about Fox doing you harm. It's about Fox doing Dominion harm. Between Fox and Dominion, this seems like quite a reasonable outcome. Dominion won big against Fox and it will likely encourage other litigants to continue pursuing Fox.
What is bad about this settlement other than things like you wanting to know potentially more details that might be exposed? If your answer is that Fox has caused more harm than just the harm to Dominion, that's a different trial. I would agree that Fox has created incredible harm to our society. I don't know how we could pursue that in a legal sense which is a shame. Still, this isn't a plea bargain or settlement that seems bad. It seems like a reasonable outcome where the complainant received half of what they were hoping to get without the uncertainty of the trial outcome. Even if Dominion won the case, they might have been awarded less damages than they asked for (or less than the settlement).
Except they basically didn't buy their way out of the humiliation.
Yes they did. The embarrassment of having text messages quoted in legal documents (and subsequently in the media) is nothing compared o the having Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson etc. being subjected to cross-examination under oath and having to make admissions (probably on camera) in a forum they don't control from top to bottom. Bear in mind that the target audience for Fox News watches a lot of TV because they don't enjoy reading. Words don't have the same kind of emotional force as personal testimony.
If your answer is that Fox has caused more harm than just the harm to Dominion, that's a different trial.
It is, and the fact that it's a different trial is part of the problem. The anglo-American legal system is full of procedural arguments which are generally gamed for the advantage of powerful incumbents, and even a large-ish company like dominion has to balance their desire for full accountability and transparency with the fiscal reality of a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush. It's extraordinarily difficult to mount class actions and meet the procedural threshold for establishing harm, so all the incentives run towards a transactional approach.
This is a bad thing my view, on the basis that 'justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.' As it is Fox writes a painfully large check to Dominion but gets to issue an anodyne statement expressing its commitment to the highest standards of journalism [puke emoji] while continuing to pursue the lowest common denominator in its audience's imaginary. As you're probably aware, Fox has barely covered the fact of this litigation. Unless its audience sees someone like Tucker Carlson sweating it out on the witness stand, this whole thing may as well not have happened for them.
But they can be sued for libel and slander, as in this lawsuit.
It seems strange to have to impart basic civics lessons here.
”Why Tucker Carlson pretends to hate Elites"
found by copy pasting "Tucker Carlson, in his interview with Ben Shapiro while discussing self-driving trucks" into the google and getting lucky
But if your comment is just "one time someone from the other team said the quiet part aloud" that's rather naive and unremarkable.
> Don't be snarky.
It makes for a nicer community if you just post the link and leave out the snark.
At 6:12
Transcribed by me: "I would maybe make up some pretext for public consumption, like 'oh they're dangerous', 'the technology's not there yet'"
It's a perfect demonstration of a complete lack of integrity. The ends justify the means whenever he believes in it.
In a world where Tucker Carlson has gained more political power and is legislating some policy which should be very politically popular, he still believes the right way to do things is in an "ends justify the means" fashion, and would therefore be willing to mislead the public - and anyone else that required misleading - in order to enact this policy. Again, this is something that he argues would protect the jobs of millions of Americans.
How can you possibly think that we are taking it "out of context"? This is ironclad evidence for people who argue something like "Tucker Carlson is a lying maniac who puts himself and what he thinks is important before justice and integrity". Even when in idealistic hypotheticals constructed for PR, he still would do what he does best: make up pretext for public consumption.
In fact, he was making a very socialist / populist point that few on the Left would be able to disagree with.
That is, the point was about the national necessity of protecting a job base for a immense mass of people. Protecting it from robot capitalism.
Dominion Voting Systems doesn’t give a flying fuck about the culture wars, but they do care if people stop buying their products. Fox on the other hand very much cares about the culture wars, and is as shown here perfectly willing to lie.
During all of this election denial I've been sitting around thinking to myself every now and again: Wait, haven't we been trying to talk about how the software in these machines should be open for public review? Weren't we concerned about the political biases of these company's owners? It worries me that now if you say something like "well, actually, I'm concerned about election integrity" a lot of people will think you're going full culture war.
In 2020 I worked at a polling place that used the same machines (not in Georgia). Each voter receives a printout with a human-readable list of their selections, along with a QR code. This printout is turned in, and the QR codes are scanned to tally the votes. In the event of any concerns with the computer tally, a recount can be done of the human-readable printouts. This is what was done in Georgia (for procedural reasons this was technically a "hand audit of 100% of the votes", which can be done at the SecState's discretion, not a "recount" which can only be triggered by certain requirements, but it is actually the same thing).
The Dominion machines are good precisely because, unlike past digital voting machines, they create a human-readable paper trail that is legible to both the voter and to (re)counters, just like it was before computer voting terminals.
Voting machines that do not create such a paper trail should be illegal, and anyone who proposes blockchain as a solution should receive a lifetime ban from making any democracy-critical policy decisions.
This is not an acceptable design. Not only should the voter be marking their ballot by hand not doing so through a machine whose UI may have bugs, but any scanner must scan the human-readable marks, not some machine-readable marks because the voter can't check that both sets of marks match.
> The Dominion machines are good precisely because, unlike past digital voting machines, they create a human-readable paper trail that is legible to both the voter and to (re)counters, just like it was before computer voting terminals.
Intentionally obfuscated paper trails. The problem is that none of this is required. Paper works. Paper + optical vote-checkers works. Nothing beyond that works, or is needed.
> anyone who proposes blockchain as a solution should receive a lifetime ban from making any democracy-critical policy decisions.
Lol, total agreement. But ... why does that not extend to people who make black-box machines that have a ton of chances to change the vote?
I don't think I agree with the first part. Marking by hand is probably more error-prone. People are notoriously not great at correctly filling in a bubble, leading to scanning errors. Any UI bug should be caught thanks to the human-readable printout. If I select Biden and my printout says Trump, I'll notice.
The second part, I think I agree. It should print out a perfectly bubbled-in human-readable ballot. That would seem to remove both human bubble-filling error and QR-code shenanigans.
> why does that not extend to people who make black-box machines that have a ton of chances to change the vote?
The one and only added chance to change the vote is to alter the QR code to something other than the human-readable selections, and this is trivial to check by having humans sample a few thousand ballots.
The other way to change it would be for the QR reader software to lie about what it read, but you could do that with traditional bubble-ballot reader software too. In both cases, having humans sample the ballots is the solution.
> > Not only should the voter be marking their ballot by hand not doing so through a machine whose UI may have bugs
> I don't think I agree with the first part. Marking by hand is probably more error-prone. People are notoriously not great at correctly filling in a bubble, leading to scanning errors.
Perhaps, but risk of systemic failure allowing a vote to be stolen is the paramount concern. UI errors (esp on randomized ballots) tend to balance out.
The UI concerns are real, but they can both be addressed physically and through ballot design.
> the QR code to something other than the human-readable
You wouldn't want to have a QR code though, if you simply read the human-readable marks. The QR code is some sort of premature optimization based, I think, on the assumption that scanning is difficult. If you have only one mark then you know it's the canonical mark.
> Any UI bug should be caught thanks to the human-readable printout. If I select Biden and my printout says Trump, I'll notice.
Real ballots often have twenty or more choices so this is harder in practice.
And you're trusting a machine's UI at each step. It's telling you which marks mean what rather than you marking the paper according to instructions on the paper. A paper ballot can't be altered after the fact to change your vote, any machine-generated paper can simply be reprinted.
The correct answer, if anything is needed at all, is an under-vote detector. It doesn't tell you how you voted, it just says "no selection is readable for Mayor" or "You only made four marks for City Councillor but are allowed to place up to five votes", and so on.
The challenge now is to ensure all 50 states are on board with using machines with no known exploits. Unfortunately some states are lagging behind greatly (can you guess which ones?)
The problem is that it introduces all these failure cases.
Pen+Paper's only drawback is that it's said to be slow, in practice it can be finished same-day by booking enough elections volunteers.
> but it is better than having no paper record at all
That's a weird standard. "Sure, it costs a lot and introduces all these weird and nigh-undetectable failure cases but the other machines were even worse! ..."
> the option of a manual recount
Which will be fought, of course. They always are. So in the end only some areas will ever have a human audit.
The public deserves that every vote be hand counted by a bipartisan team.
I've actually gone to viewing parties at pubs for the last two US elections. Your media dominates ours.
Why use machines at all? In my opinion any action that does not remove the machines altogether is not good enough. Machines are hack-able, humans are much harder to "hack", especially if you have both parties' representatives in the room at all times.
Nobody really wants "instant" results, if you get 90% of the count the night of the vote, that will be good enough. I come from Romania, and we only count by hand, and by 10PM you usually know the results with pretty high confidence. Romania only has 10 mil votes, but as I said, it scales very well.
Thats a lot of overhead and costs that is not going to fly with voters.
> I come from Romania
Well that explains it. You do not fully understand the "election night frenzy" that occurs every four years in the US.
I actually understand it, it's very similar for us. Why would you immediately assume it's different? In the UK it's different, it's incredibly quiet and somber. And I just told you that we finish counting earlier than many if not most US states anyway. Recounts happen but are limited to individual poll stations, because of all the party representatives they have very few chances of changing anything.
It's really not that much overhead, the US has 900k people operating the polling stations on the voting day (https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/document_library/fil...).
That means 10 workers need to handle 1600 votes. It's really not that much, you can manually count those in a couple of hours once the polls are closed. Also, you can tap into volunteers from both parties.
I really don't understand the US: you have half the country saying that the 2000 elections were decided by malfunctioning counting machines in Florida. Now in 2020 you have the other half distrusting machines for fear of tampering, and you still rely on machines? why?
This is the norm in Europe, poll stations count their own votes and they get tallied up centrally. e.g. Germany https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/politics/election-in-ger... or UK https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-britain-counts-its...
e.g. When talking about laws or policies that positively discriminate based on skin color, someone said "this wouldn't even be a discussion in Europe, it would just be accepted". I had to point out that it would actually be illegal/unconstitutional in all places I know about in Europe.
Another one: All of Europe, except the UK, has voter ID requirements, some stricter than others.
I will add manual vote counting to my list.
Not sure how old you are, but look up "hanging Chad". Gore didn't come out and say the 2000 election was stolen, but that was definitely part of the Zeitgeist on the left, and it did get pretty hysterical. Not to the level of 2020, but it was a level you only read about in history books
Also, don't forget 2016 where Russian infiltration was the only acceptable explanation for why Trump won and not that half the population genuinely hated what the Democrats had to offer and were desperate for anyone different than the status quo in the aftermath of the uneven GFC recovery. There were definitely political hysterics then. Only difference between 2016 and 2020 was that the losing candidate didn't openly push the theory as forcefully in the aftermath of defeat.
Luckily Obama won both his terms handily, otherwise similar controversies in 2008 and 2012 would have been likely.
edit: I suppose the News international phone hacking scandal was journalists/individuals/government holding Murdoch to account https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki... ... but that was in the UK.
NOTW closed but then I think they started publishing the Sun on Sunday instead?
NI/BSkyB merger was scuppered but now its back on the cards I think?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/09/business/fox-news-venezue...
Of course, these sort of things have happened before:
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/24/938545344/fox-news-settles-wi...
[1] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/trump-lawyers-fox-news-sued-...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/07/media/cnn-settles-lawsuit-vir... "CNN settles lawsuit with Nick Sandmann stemming from viral video controversy"
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/business/media/washington... "Washington Post Settles Lawsuit With Student in Viral Protest Video"
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna29289191 "NY Times settles lawsuit with McCain lobbyist"
> Dominion chief executive John Poulos told a press conference the deal included Fox "admitting to telling lies, causing enormous damage to my company".
A victory at trial, whether the damages were higher or lower than the settlement, would likely have been appealed & fought tool and nail by Fox to reduce the settlement amount. And even then there wouldn't be an admissions of guilt or anything like that-- it would have been spun as just more judicial activism as Fox maintained their innocence. There would never be an apology, never a public victory that Fox News viewers saw and acknowledged as a huge blunder by Fox.
This way still still sucks, but maybe some very few will see it as a tacit admission of Dominion's case again against Fox, after all why settle if you're innocent? Though I have my doubts. People are not easily shaken from beliefs held mostly out of ideological alignment.
One of Dominions ex-directors also has ongoing lawsuits against various Trump people -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems
https://cstrial.com/insights/c-s-earns-victory-for-former-do...
Also: Gotta love how someone downvoted this simple observation. Go back to Reddit, whoever you are.
Appears to be an Asian and European term.
So I simplified a bit. Overall turnover is the same as revenue. Usually turnover is referred to as a ratio of accounts payable actually paid in a period or stock sold in a period.
Personnel turnover is also not an absolute number but a ratio of people to people leaving. So in this case turnover is the same as they are ratios but for personnel rather than widgets.
Hopefully that makes sense.
Let's hope this will induce Fox hosts to be a wee bit more careful about keeping facts straight going forward.
My guess is that the lesson they learned here is “don’t get caught”.
https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1648432832266801158
> News: I'm told that, as part of the terms of its settlement, Fox News will 'not' have to acknowledge ON AIR that it told lies about Dominion in the wake of the 2020 election. Fox did acknowledge falsehoods in its statement. But don't expect hosts to have to read statements.
Otherwise, you're 100% correct. If that money is less than they made from the shows the lies were spread on, then telling blatant lies to improve ratings officially just became a 'cost of doing business' that can be accounted for and will happen again.
Just two small drops in a giant ocean of garbage but it is something.
There is an entire spectrum of political views, a good example would be stories about incarceration and homelessness which result in fairly left swinging opinions and very little blaming of the people involved.
This was really annoying because the reaction to Trump's casual mention of it injected virulent American politics into everything around the world. We should have been able to discuss this and other topics without Rep/Dem nonsense spilling over, but instead any discussion of covid became nearly verboten, with even simply statements of obvious fact being banned. (ie, we haven't yet checked the Wuhan lab to see if Covid did in fact leak from there.)
I do find the correlation between vaccine hesitancy and conservative political views interesting though.
Is a parent far-right for demanding high standards from drugs they put into their children, or a leftist for not just accepting big-pharma's word?
I personally saw a lot of people be ejected from "the left" because of questioning the medical response to Covid. Many different circumstance, but they'd all run into the mandatory acceptance of the message. Some had been vaccine "wary" before and remained that way, others were pro-vax but doubted the safety given its minimal testing time, etc. All of these people were your average west-coast hippy type and they're now being told they're allied with unite-the-right anti-jew stuff in the USA.
I can't wait until the new affiliations drop and we can ditch the legacy groupings.
Wouldn’t republicans believe more in ‘each to their own, survival of the fittest’ (I want the best for my children) where democrats would be more ‘value for everyone’ (I should get vaccinated regardless of risk to protect my neighbours)
I imagine the Christian religion is more popular with republicans, which if true is equally interesting given it would contradict the above assertions (love thy neighbour, etc)…
With only two parties I don't think the parties themselves are good proxies for the views of the people who end up voting for them.
I think generally most people would want 1) each to their own 3) success of the hardworking 3) equality for everyone. With only two parties for the whole political spectrum neither group is actually that distinct. Many people vote on the key issues that impact their day-to-day and so there's generally no real difference on issues that aren't in the news.
Anyways, being on the west coast I assume that most of the Americans I'm talking about are Dems, and in Canada, probably 'Liberals'. I think their (perfectly reasonable) hippy distrust of government and corporations makes them doubt the "benefits" meaning they had no reason to do it for neighbors either. (This was 2+y ago now, who knows where they are now.)
A community meeting I went to a few years ago spent twenty minutes or so discussing microwaved water, and if the venue used a microwave and whether some people were "safe to drink the tea", and went downhill from there in a science sense. Everyone was very eager to help but it wasn't a terribly well informed group.
Not even a billion dollars will convince them they're wrong though...
It might wake some of them up, though. Pardon the sheep, for they are asleep. Dreaming dreams of nightmare fences.
It's pretty surprising to see people on 'hacker'news so in favour of government surveillance/censorship.
In my opinion, that may be a fairly contrary-to-fact opinion to hold.
Take the contentious issue of transgender human rights, for example: the HN discussions that I’ve seen quite heavily tended towards right-wing principles of distrust of intellectuals [0] (vis-a-vis completely discounting readily available scientific information). I presume that much of the indignation towards trans topics also stems from a the right-wing principle of religious traditionalism [0].
Granted, that’s just based on my experiences in the comments. I’ve not done any sort of in-depth analysis to arrive at the above opinion.
Alternatively, perhaps the latest stage of right-wing politics could be defined as the replacement of democratic law-and-order with righteous authoritarianism, rendering the quote somewhat nonsensical, in my hypothetical opinion.
There's a weird form of "intellectual"ism going on these days.
I've gotten insanely mad pushback on my contention that we simply cannot know if Covid leaked from Wuhan. (Or, back in 2020 we couldn't - who knows where we're getting now.) It could be easy to show there was a leak, but would be almost impossible to show there wasn't. Note that I wasn't saying "we shouldn't take the vax" or anything, just the leak issue. Total rabid culture war.
Similarly, there's a huge push that "trans women are women" and that there's science for this, gender spectrum and so on, but there's no ability to look behind the curtain. The studies don't show what they purport to, and don't match the claims they're being used to defend. Nobody has attempted to show a midpoint on the sex spectrum, and even if they did - the argument has moved on and now trans is an issue of self-id that doesn't require any physical issue. Bring this up and you're "literally saying trans people shouldn't exist", etc.
In both cases there's no depth to the argument, despite that it apparently comes from the best scientific minds in the world - it claims to be a factual claim but when you ask to see the facts it becomes a purity issue where you're then shamed for not simply believing. I was told I was a Covid denier because of not simply accepting the no-lab-leak story.
> perhaps the latest stage of right-wing politics could be defined as the replacement of democratic law-and-order with righteous authoritarianism
One side makes "facts" a matter of righteousness and the other side simply eschews facts for their religion.
That’s the scary part - the facts are readily available, but so few take the time to understanthe current state of it. Instead, they argue from their armchair based on this-or-that principle of the day.
The science is still new, but has solid foundations. It might only be a matter of years before a genetic test for tendency towards “transgender” will be created.
Unlikely, considering that when researchers control for homosexuality in their test subjects, the correlations with gender incongruence that were supposedly found in earlier research are no longer present.
Do you recognize that you're about five years behind in "the message"? Trans is purely self-id, to declare yourself trans in the "progressive" countries like NZ and Canada you don't need to even suggest that there's anything physical involved. Specifically you're even allowed to keep changing your identity, something that couldn't happen if trans had a physical nature. Also, you're allowed to claim non-binary but use the women's washroom without even explaining why this would be appropriate.
In Canada you'd be called a trans-medicalist, which theoretically is advocating conversion therapy - to talk people out of their felt experience of gender or gender identity. It's borderline 'hate speech'.
> The science is still new, but has solid foundations.
What is the contention? Not the evidence, just the premise?
Do you suggest that males, like William (Lia) Thomas and Boyd (Fallon Fox) Burton are no stronger than women the moment they transition or that they rapidly become female-like by taking estrogen and losing testosterone as a consequence of their genital surgeries?
In these studies, is Caster Semenya treated as female despite fathering a baby?
> That’s the scary part - the facts are readily available, but so few take the time to understan the current state of it.
What facts? Be specific. Because many studies in the subject area would have failed a second-year student recently in any other specialty. Specifically the small sample size and self-selected nature of the trans athletes who have a motive to sandbag and return worse times in order to "prove" that they belong in women's sports, etc.
If that isn't what you meant, then please list these good studies because the space is crowded with academically blessed nonsense.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/stop-using-phony...
My post (parent to yours) outlined enough problems with "studies" in general that I can't think you're seriously suggesting any of them except by inertia at this point. Trying to pick an accurate journal, by reputation, in a time of extreme cancelling doesn't work. Even if SciAm had any standards they couldn't have published a negative article about transition because they would literally receive death threats.
If you've got sources that say sex is a spectrum, they're simply wrong. Developmental sex disorders don't make a new sex. Males produce sperm, and females produce eggs. There's no third sex that produces spegg, or what have you.
All of these articles contradict basic, and observable, biology. If they were true we'd have discovered it long ago when people and animals couldn't breed in expected ways. It's one of those things that only academics, who've never set foot on a farm, could believe.
Further, most of those articles are literally attempted child murder to justify the fetishes of their adult authors. They say things like "puberty blockers are reversible" despite all evidence (and basic logic) showing that they are not. It's impossible to have performed a study on giving children puberty blockers (at regular puberty age, not earlier like in the cases of precocious puberty) because we weren't performing a standard procedure until recently which could be studied. Those authors are saying "things we've never tested, which have huge and systemic impacts on your body, have zero long-term consequences".
John Stewart tells us that children are not being given puberty blockers, but doctors are telling us they are - and in sufficient quantity to have studied their impact. Obviously one, or both, of these is a lie. The more you look into trans "science" the more you'll see none of it is even intellectually plausible, let alone the pinnacle of science as you implied.
What, did you leave your brain at home?
It sounds like you want me to walk you through the science?
How about you read the research and tell me what your questions are and then I will respond.
> If you've got sources that say sex is a spectrum, they're simply wrong.
Apparently you've never heard of people with intersex conditions.
> despite all evidence (and basic logic) showing that they are not
Sources?
Also, basic logic built upon faulty assumptions leads to faulty conclusions, no matter how correct your logic is or is not.
> children are not being given puberty blockers
Medical conditions that require puberty blockers are very rare and, at any given time, not every state has an individual with such a medical condition or such a treatment plan.
> The more you look into trans "science" the more you'll see none of it is even intellectually plausible
The more you write like that, the more you sound like a foolish human.
P.S.,
"Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness? Here I am thinking by no means only of the so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather the so-called ‘Intelligentzia’ that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw, but encounters it in its easiest synthetic form—upon the printed page."
-Albert Einstein, Why War?, 1931
We all know that foreign interference is a genuine concern, however, an opinion that appears to be right of centre doesn't always equate to it being grown in a Russian troll farm.
Trolls win when people think they have to achieve purity of thought - to drive away anyone who believes wrong-think even at the cost of the forum itself. Triggering forums to play purity games and cull the insufficiently aligned is a troll victory.
That doesn't mean you should let politics bleed into every other thread, but in a politics thread just move past the idea of needing to censor people to win.
But all I see is disinformation, especially folks glued to cable news (they’re all profit centric with very sporadic integrity) that have never traveled outside the states, and have had no contact with a diverse, pluralistic society.
I see a lack of empathy for anyone that’s “different”.
I’ve watched our middle class get decimated by trickle down economics lies and blaming poor people for being poor.
I’ve watched the invention of healthcare for mass profit from Reagan’s presidency that’s made it nearly impossible for anyone to just relax.
I’ve watched college go from a Pell grant and a 10-hr/week job to the price of a house, also from Reagan’s presidency.
I’ve watch gun ownership rise to hundreds of millions sold including weapons that liquify human life and a party that can watch the outcome of child massacres and just look the other way.
I don’t need to sensor anyone. You can talk all you want. But I’m tired of the lies, the greed, the misogyny, and the hate.
I honestly don’t have a clue what non-liberals believe anymore. I can’t make sense of any of it.
Show me a conservative that actually cares about all of humanity and not just themselves.
> I’ve watch gun ownership rise to hundreds of millions sold including weapons that liquify human life and a party that can watch the outcome of child massacres and just look the other way.
I think this is a good example.
In Canada there was a mass shooting and the government responded with a huge list of firearms restrictions. Ammo, magazines, models of guns, etc. Like 1400+ restrictions.
But none of that would have impacted the guns the shooter had, which were all obtained illegally across the border. What it would have done is left even more country families without defense and made it easier for the shooter to go house to house. But it played well in the cities and was used to create an artificial lib/con divide in what is fundamentally a city/country issue.
None of the "don't ban guns" people I spoke to wanted anyone to get shot, but they didn't want laws that won't help. We know that the vast majority of guns used in crime are illegal and that they come from the USA, not via stolen legal guns, so no amount of legal firearms crackdown would impact their numbers.
If those restrictions were separately proposed when there wasn't a shooting some of them might have gotten some support, but when presented as a knee-jerk solution where they obviously wouldn't work there was a lot of pushback. Nobody wanted more shootings, especially the conservative side who had suffered in them, but they weren't willing to have their tragedy turned into a political defeat as well when it wouldn't even help.
> the misogyny
I'm pretty sure you mean abortion. I'm pro-choice and the bans scare me, but I see women getting shit on from both sides of the aisle.
Men are being put in women's prisons:
https://fairplayforwomen.com/campaigns/prisons/
Even if they're baby rapers:
https://torontosun.com/news/national/hunter-trans-killers-ba...
And when they abuse women, the female inmates face extended punishment for describing them as male:
https://insidetime.org/women-face-punishment-for-using-wrong...
Also sports:
And violent terrorism against peaceful protest:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/07/us/former-ncaa-swimmer-riley-...
Both sides of the Dem/Rep fight are absolutely abusing women and women's rights, and while they're fighting against the other's excesses it's generally not to help women but to score points.
Now, the thing that makes it hard to prove defamation against a news organization is the "actual malice" standard (the legal term is actually a bit different from what those words normally mean). That is, if the Fox interviewees came on and spewed their lies, and there was no evidence that Fox itself disbelieved them or were highly skeptical, Fox would be fine. But the thing that was so damaging to Fox is that they were publishing lies while at the same time commenting in private messages that they knew it was all BS. That is why Fox had so much legal jeopardy.
Sad.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
No one should trust the literal mechanical linchpin of democracy to a company that uses lawfare instead of its words.
If they didn't use the court system then there isn't really any legal alternative for non-government entities to exercise their judgement against each other outside of lobbying their representatives to make Fox News illegal?
The facts were laid out and the chance for an independent to review and make judgement. Fox settled because they felt that the facts were not in their favour.