They already do. Try going there and posting even moderate opinions. See how long your account will last.
"Free speech for me, but not for thee"
242 karma · joined April 20, 2020
"Free speech for me, but not for thee"
"Free speech for me, but not for thee"
In Glenn Greenwald's case at least, it turns out that if you actually assemble a team of excellent editors then they will do their job and prevent you from putting out profoundly bad content. His "unfiltered" phase is just pure contrarianism with no substance.
These are arbitrary ways of cutting up the vote. Right now we have a minority of people imposing their will on the majority of the remaining people. I don't have any allegiance to one state or another. I'm an American and go where my job needs me. Why do I deserve less representation in government just because I need to live in a city for a profession instead of living back with parents in the middle of nowhere?
Our leaders govern people not land and any system that enforces minority rule to the point that presidential hopefuls know more about the cost of corn in Iowa than about the specifics of tech regulation which affect 1000x the number of people is wrong.
Well that's an absolutely absurd and dishonest take on chaos theory.
I can tell you that the five year average of all stocks will probably go up by a predictable amount in the next ten years even if I can't tell you what an individual stock will do two weeks from now. The climate of the earth is an even more stable system that doesn't have to worry about predicting when the next political instability will occur. These models are good and accurate and can be used for predictions beyond 2 weeks.
That's the whole point. This isn't my field of expertise and it certainly isn't yours. No offense, but the 45 minutes you spent between my post and this one is not a "literature review." I am a professional scientist and for my most recent publication it took me three weeks to cover the literature on my one narrow finding. That was already after spending the last five years in a PhD becoming an expert in my field! The three weeks was spent deeply reading almost every significant paper on the topic I was publishing on. That is what literature review means and you don't really understand the nuances of applying Benford's law to election fraud by spending 45 minutes browsing wikipedia and skimming abstracts.
If the political science experts who have spent decades studying the facts surrounding Benford's law disagree that it is a reliable indicator of fraud then what are we doing running sketchy analyses and then making huge leaps to claim it as "mathematical proof that the democrats stole the election." And yes, that is a conspiracy theory with all of the hallmarks of one. It is to the point that state election officials are having to waste their time to go on television and debunk literal lies and disinformation that are being broadcast by certain political figures. Judges are already tossing Trump's lawsuits because even his lawyers have to tell the judges that they have no evidence of fraud. The continued assertion that Democrats are "stealing the election" is the conspiracy theory here and it is literally dangerous. A bomb threat was called into a Philadelphia counting center. Vote counters are being escorted to and from counting locations by the police for their protection from armed mobs that are aggregating in some areas. You'll have to excuse me if I'm already tired of seeing these baseless claims show up over and over again when not even Trump himself can pull out evidence to support them when it comes time to do so in court.
If you want to learn about Benford's law then good on you. I think that it is a really interesting topic and there is some good entertainment to be had in learning about it. However, it's delusional for people like the author of this article to spend an evening learning about it and then act like it is the magic bullet from the Kennedy assassination.
Your other claim is literal misinformation.
Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican: "Observers from the Democratic Party and Republican Party, from the Biden campaign and the Trump campaign, have been in our counting area observing, right up against where the process is taking place, from the very beginning" (he said this in response to a similar lie by Ted Cruz)
All of the newly minted statistics experts on the internet wildly missaplying methods to support their foregone conclusions are exactly the same as Johny C. Theorist getting an internet education in materials science so that he can understand for himself that jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams. Trump's polling numbers also don't follow Benford's law in some cases. That's because there is no direct causation between legitimate elections and a Benford's law style distribution.
The fixation on wildly cherry picked data and missaplied statistics is the conspiracy theory. There are already court cases with the best experts in the land looking at the counts. Guess what? They are starting to be laughed out of court because they have no evidence to support their claims. It is either supremely arrogant or delusional to claim that you have found this thing that you spent five minutes learning about on the internet that proves magically that the Democrats stole the election while world renowned experts aren't able to prove it to a judge.
There is no liberal conspiracy to steal an election. Trump made the same claim in 2016. He made it during the Republican primaries about his opponents (that they cheated him). He said the system was rigged when he settled the fraud lawsuite for trump university. Hell... he even said he was being cheated when his tv show wasn't awarded an Emmy. This is just what he does and instead of spreading lies he needs to accept that he lost (probably... we'll see soon) and stop dividing the country.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/11/04/marjorie-gr...
The way I see it, you can either have politics on the site or not. You can't have politics, but then filter it out to the point that the front page is an alternate reality bubble where Trump doesn't lie daily.
Stuff like this will get consisted flagged to the depths of HN while conservative victimization porn from tabloids about how Mailchimp and the liberal elite are coming to take away your conservative values and censor your views will linger on the first few pages for days. You can't have it both ways.
IMO, HN needs to rethink the way it's flagging system works to prevent abuse.
This special treatment has already gone on for too long.
Retreating into conspiracy theories is well known to be a coping mechanism for dealing with exactly these types of fears. Fixating on articles about election fraud in the US over the next couple of days is the same as diving into wikipedia about the materials science of steel beams after the 9/11 terrorist attacks because you want to believe that it was an inside job. I'm also seeing stuff pop up on here about Benford's law which is uncertain science at best [1].
The next few weeks will be a difficult time for our country and we need to be prepared to accept the results of the election without devolving into conspiracy theories. We should carefully consider whether our sudden "academic interest" in the history of fraud is real or has more to do with a wish to rationalize what we are seeing in the US today.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/a...
TV networks don't need to be complicit in tearing apart our country and I hope they continue to re-evaluate the role they play as a megaphone for Trump's dangerous rhetoric.
Let's stop broadcasting conspiracy theories about "widespread fraud". Well... fraud in, you know, only the states that it looks like Trump narrowly lost (we'll see once all votes have been accounted for).
I understand the desire take these absolutely nuts claims and try to rationalize them and shrink back down into something that is easy to work out like math. This is easily one of the most uncertain periods of time in our life and conspiracy theories are well known to be a natural response to that fear of the future. But, the cold hard truth is that fraud detection like this isn't a hard science and experts have a hard time making robust claims. Random people on the internet applying statistical techniques that they learned about a few hours before making the leap to go around screaming "Fraud!" isn't real evidence. It's conspiracy theory and no different than all of the detailed mechanical engineering assessments people warp themselves through to believe that 9/11 was an inside job.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/a...
A mainstream rightwing media figure is out there expressing nostalgia for the good old days of mob violence and when you could just lynch your opponents and calling for a civil war (as well as beheading Fauci). This is also in the context of armed extremists threatening people who are just trying to count the results of the election. Police are required to escort them in and out of counting locations in some cities for their protection [1].
Even his former whitehouse colleagues have expressed disgust at the statement. You don't have to pretend that this is at all appropriate just because Bannon is on the same "team" as you and companies like Twitter and Google have no requirement to be a mouthpiece for calls to violence.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/otilliasteadman/fears-f...
Enough is enough and Twitter has no obligation to be a mouthpiece for calls for violence that are splitting our country apart.
I am truly disgusted that something as fundamental as the postal service has been taken over for partisan means and to undermine something as core to our country as being able to vote for our leaders.
To make matters worse, this is now in direct violation of a federal judge's order. The rules just don't matter anymore. It's only what you can get away with before you are punished.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-wall-donald-trump-bunke...