2020 Election Thread

Political discussion here. Any reasonable opinion is welcome, but due to the sensitive nature of the topic area, please be nice and respectful to others. No flaming or trolling, please. And please keep political commentary out of the other board areas and confine it to this area. Thanks!
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In2ition
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by In2ition »

Mori Chu wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:03 pm
In2ition wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 8:31 am
I love both of you guys. It's all good.
You're a good sport, in2. I talk a lot of trash but it's good to have interesting discussions here about these topics with everybody.
I feel blessed.
"When we all think alike, nobody is thinking" - Walter Lippmann
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them." ~ Frederick Douglass

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Superbone
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by Superbone »

In2ition wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:37 pm
Mori Chu wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:03 pm
In2ition wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 8:31 am
I love both of you guys. It's all good.
You're a good sport, in2. I talk a lot of trash but it's good to have interesting discussions here about these topics with everybody.
I feel blessed.
You know what? My sons actually set me straight on this and I agree with them. If you just listen to the media, there seems to be only 2 factions and we're on complete opposite sides from each other with no middle ground. But if the entire country were to get together and intermingle and have person to person conversations, we're much more alike than we are different. In fact, it's too bad we can't do more of that.

I recently saw a 60 minutes piece where two groups, one democrats and the other republicans, somewhere in middle America got together and had conversations with each other. They found that they had much more common ground than they expected.
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Mori Chu
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by Mori Chu »

Everyone came together and agreed that they hate Ted Cruz.

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BAMF
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by BAMF »

Superbone wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 3:08 pm
In2ition wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:37 pm
Mori Chu wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:03 pm
In2ition wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 8:31 am
I love both of you guys. It's all good.
You're a good sport, in2. I talk a lot of trash but it's good to have interesting discussions here about these topics with everybody.
I feel blessed.
You know what? My sons actually set me straight on this and I agree with them. If you just listen to the media, there seems to be only 2 factions and we're on complete opposite sides from each other with no middle ground. But if the entire country were to get together and intermingle and have person to person conversations, we're much more alike than we are different. In fact, it's too bad we can't do more of that.

I recently saw a 60 minutes piece where two groups, one democrats and the other republicans, somewhere in middle America got together and had conversations with each other. They found that they had much more common ground than they expected.
This

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virtual9mm
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by virtual9mm »

Meanwhile, people are continuing to die in mass shootings and we as a nation continue to sit on our collective asses talking about how special we are while the Chinese are on the warpath, militarily, diplomatically, and technologically. We are getting our collective asses kicked and we don't even know it because we are so busy arguing with each other.

Biden's plan isn't big enough. We need nothing short of a national mobilization built around a new sense of unity. But I can't see us getting there.

We are going to have to get our noses blooded before we start getting a grip on reality.

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Nodack
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by Nodack »

virtual9mm wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 9:27 pm
Meanwhile, people are continuing to die in mass shootings and we as a nation continue to sit on our collective asses talking about how special we are while the Chinese are on the warpath, militarily, diplomatically, and technologically. We are getting our collective asses kicked and we don't even know it because we are so busy arguing with each other.

Biden's plan isn't big enough. We need nothing short of a national mobilization built around a new sense of unity. But I can't see us getting there.

We are going to have to get our noses blooded before we start getting a grip on reality.
This +10,000

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BAMF
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by BAMF »

virtual9mm wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 9:27 pm
Meanwhile, people are continuing to die in mass shootings and we as a nation continue to sit on our collective asses talking about how special we are while the Chinese are on the warpath, militarily, diplomatically, and technologically. We are getting our collective asses kicked and we don't even know it because we are so busy arguing with each other.

Biden's plan isn't big enough. We need nothing short of a national mobilization built around a new sense of unity. But I can't see us getting there.

We are going to have to get our noses blooded before we start getting a grip on reality.
Lets just hope the bloody nose is only that and not a severed head.

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virtual9mm
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by virtual9mm »

BAMF wrote:
Sat Apr 03, 2021 7:51 pm
virtual9mm wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 9:27 pm
Meanwhile, people are continuing to die in mass shootings and we as a nation continue to sit on our collective asses talking about how special we are while the Chinese are on the warpath, militarily, diplomatically, and technologically. We are getting our collective asses kicked and we don't even know it because we are so busy arguing with each other.

Biden's plan isn't big enough. We need nothing short of a national mobilization built around a new sense of unity. But I can't see us getting there.

We are going to have to get our noses blooded before we start getting a grip on reality.
Lets just hope the bloody nose is only that and not a severed head.
Yes, very much so.

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Superbone
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by Superbone »

Didn't know where to put this so putting it here. Scary stuff. This is what's driving almost half of America.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/tech ... rithm.html
Feeding Hate With Video: A Former Alt-Right YouTuber Explains His Methods
Focus on conflict. Feed the algorithm. Make sure whatever you produce reinforces a narrative. Don’t worry if it is true.

For over two years Caolan Robertson produced videos for a who’s who of the far right, but says he has since come to regret his role in the rise of online extremism.

By Cade Metz
April 15, 2021

In 2018, a far-right activist, Tommy Robinson, posted a video to YouTube claiming he had been attacked by an African migrant in Rome.

The thumbnail image and eight-word title promoting the video indicated Mr. Robinson was assaulted by a Black man outside a train station. Then, in the video, Mr. Robinson punched the man in the jaw, dropping him to the ground.

The video was viewed more than 2.8 million times, and it prompted news stories across the right-wing tabloids in Britain, where Mr. Robinson was rapidly gaining notoriety for his anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic views.

For Caolan Robertson — a filmmaker who worked for Mr. Robinson and helped create the video — it was an instructional moment. It showed the key ingredients needed to attract attention on YouTube and other social media services.

Refer someone to The Times.
They’ll enjoy our special rate of $1 a week.
The video played into anti-immigrant sentiments in Britain and across Europe. It also focused squarely on conflict, cutting rapidly between shouts and shoves before showing Mr. Robinson’s punch. It also misrepresented what had actually happened.

In a 20-second segment of the video posted to YouTube, Mr. Robinson describes his visit to a train station in Rome.
“We would choose the most dramatic moment — or fake it and make it look more dramatic,” Mr. Robertson, 25, said in a recent interview. “We realized that if we wanted a future on YouTube, it had to be driven by confrontation. Every time we did that kind of thing, it would explode well beyond anything else.”

Mr. Robertson would go on to produce videos for a who’s who of right-wing YouTube personalities on both sides of the Atlantic, including Lauren Southern, Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones.

The videos were tailored for the “echo chamber” that is often created by social media networks like YouTube. To keep you watching, YouTube serves up videos similar to those you have watched before. But the longer someone watches, the more extreme the videos can become.

TRACKING VIRAL MISINFORMATION Every day, Times reporters chronicle and debunk false and misleading information that is going viral online.
“It can create these very radical people who are like gurus,” said Guillaume Chaslot, a former YouTube engineer who has been critical of the way the company’s algorithms pushed people to extreme content. “In terms of watch time, a guru is wonderful.”

Tech companies, regulators and individuals across the globe are struggling to understand and control the enormous power of YouTube and other social media services. In 2019, YouTube made “important changes to how we recommend videos and prevent the spread of misinformation and hateful content,” Farshad Shadloo, a spokesman for the company, said in a statement. It barred Mr. Molyneaux and Mr. Jones. But extreme videos continue to spread.

In time, Mr. Robertson said, he realized that the videos he worked on stoked dangerous hatred. And in 2019, at a conference in Britain run by a left-wing newspaper, The Byline Times, Mr. Robertson distanced himself from his work with the far right. His change of heart was met with some skepticism.

“He was presented as a prodigal son,” said Louise Raw, an antifascist activist who was onstage for Mr. Robertson’s mea culpa. “But he has not been held to account.”

Now, Mr. Robertson is detailing the ways he and his collaborators searched for confrontations to gain popularity on YouTube.

Efforts to contact Mr. Robinson were unsuccessful, and Mr. Jones did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Ms. Southern said she should not be described as a far-right activist, saying she is merely a conservative. She was not involved in “some horrible far-right grift that tried to deceive people into watching our content,” she added. “We were just doing what any other YouTuber does.”

Raw footage of the episode in Rome, provided by Mr. Robertson and reviewed by The New York Times, shows that the YouTube video was edited to give the false impression that Mr. Robinson was threatened. The full footage shows he was the aggressor.

A clip from the footage provided to The Times. The raw footage of the incident in Rome, provided by Mr. Robertson, shows Mr. Robinson was the aggressor.
When the man noticed he was being filmed from across the street, he approached the camera, and Mr. Robinson shoved him into an oncoming car. As the man protested, called Mr. Robinson crazy and told him to live his own life, Mr. Robinson escalated the argument.

“There’s one way this is going to go,” he told the man. “You’re going to end up knocked down unconscious.”

Over the more than two years he helped produce and publish videos for Mr. Robinson and others, Mr. Robertson learned how making clever edits and focusing on confrontation could help draw millions of views on YouTube and other services. He also learned how YouTube’s recommendation algorithm often nudged people toward extreme videos.

“It meant that we did more and more extreme videos,” Mr. Robertson said.

Mr. Robertson grew up in Ireland, and after his parents divorced, he moved with his father to a predominantly working-class area in the north of England. Realizing from a very young age that he is gay, he often felt like an outsider. But he said he encountered more overt homophobia when he moved to London for college and walked through the largely Muslim neighborhoods at the East End of the city.

After the 2016 shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla. — where a Muslim man pledging loyalty to the Islamic State killed 49 people and wounded 53 more — Mr. Robertson developed an extreme animosity toward Muslims, particularly immigrants. His anger was fueled in large part, he said, by videos he watched on YouTube.

He began watching videos from mainstream outlets, like an episode of the HBO show “Real Time With Bill Maher” in which Sam Harris, an author and a podcast host, advocated greater criticism of Muslim beliefs. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm suggested more-extreme videos involving personalities like Mr. Robinson, a former member of the neo-fascist and white nationalist British National Party who was born Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

In 2017, Mr. Robertson contacted Mr. Robinson and soon began working with him as a video producer. By the end of the year, he was also collaborating with Ms. Southern, an activist from Canada.

Knowing what garnered the most attention on YouTube, Mr. Robertson said, he and Ms. Southern would devise public appearances meant to generate conflict. That December, they attended a women’s march in London and, with Ms. Southern playing the part of a television reporter, approached each woman with the same four-word question: “Women’s rights or Islam?”

They often received a confused, measured or polite response, according to Mr. Robertson. They continued to ask the question and sharpened it. Ms. Southern, for example, said it would be difficult for Muslim women to answer the question because their husbands wouldn’t let them attend the march. That caused anger to build in the crowd.

“It appears in the videos that we are just trying to figure out what is going on, gather information, understand people,” Mr. Robertson said. “But really, we were trying to find the most incendiary way of making them mad.”

The thumbnail image for the YouTube video was indicative of a confrontation: a woman screaming as Ms. Southern walked away. As he often did, Mr. Robertson sharpened the video’s visual contrast — lightening the white colors and darkening the blacks — to subtly make the scene seem more dramatic.

Ms. Southern described the situation differently. “We asked the question because we knew it was going to force people to question their own political views and realize the contradiction in being a hard-core feminist but also supporting a religion that, quite frankly, has questionable practices around women,” she said. And, she added, they used video techniques that any media company would use.

The next year, Mr. Robertson and Ms. Southern traveled as far as South Africa, Australia and New Zealand to create similar videos. Over the lifetime of Ms. Southern’s YouTube channel, according to channel statistics reviewed by The Times, her videos were viewed over 63 million times.

More than 71 percent of people who viewed these videos had not subscribed to her YouTube channel. In 2018, at the height of her popularity, at least 30 percent of the views occurred after the videos were automatically recommended to the viewer by YouTube’s algorithms.

Mr. Molyneux shied away from the kind of conflict that Ms. Southern embraced. He fashioned himself as an online philosopher. But the material Mr. Robertson edited slipped in “far-right ideas that appealed to the ethnonationalists — the extreme right-wing audience,” he said.

In 2018, the pair traveled to Poland for a video that painted the country as a place free of hardship and strife. The subtext was that it was because Poland is predominantly white. In an email to The Times, Mr. Molyneux said, “It was nice being in a country wherein I didn’t have to hire protective security.” He added that he felt the same way when he visited Hong Kong.

By early 2019, Mr. Robertson said, he grew disillusioned. There was a noticeable drop in traffic on Ms. Southern’s YouTube channel. Around the same time, YouTube began to remove more videos the company thought encouraged violence and spread misinformation.

After an Australian man killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand — driven in part by anti-immigrant beliefs propagated by YouTube — Mr. Robertson realized, he said, that the videos he had made led to the same kind of violence in the Orlando nightclub in 2016.

“I felt like I had gone full circle that day,” he said.

Now, Mr. Robertson oversees Byline TV, a video offshoot of The Byline Times. He also runs a new organization, Future Freedom, which seeks to de-radicalize right-wing extremists. He is still counting YouTube views.

Mr. Robertson recently boasted in a text that in one day a video targeting Mr. Jones, the conspiracy theorist he once worked with, had been viewed over 250,000 times.

Cade Metz is a technology correspondent, covering artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality, and other emerging areas. He previously wrote for Wired magazine. @cademetz
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Nodack
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by Nodack »

The black light bamboo recount has yielded zero results for Trump and the Republicans. Trump decided to create another scandal in Maricopa County to replace the recount failure.

Maricopa County Republican official calls Trump 'unhinged'
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watc ... p-unhinged



Has anyone ever seen a man who lies as easily and as often as Trump does? Trump cult will believe every word.

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Nodack
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by Nodack »

‘Our democracy is imperiled’: Maricopa County officials decry 2020 recount as a sham and call on Arizona Republicans to end the process
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... uxbndlbing
The Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors on Monday denounced an ongoing audit of the 2020 election vote as a “sham” and a “con,” calling on the GOP-led state Senate to end the controversial recount that has been championed by former president Donald Trump.

In a fiery public meeting and subsequent letter to state Senate President Karen Fann, the board members said the audit has been inept, promoted falsehoods and defamed the public servants who ran the fall election.

“Our state has become a laughingstock,” the county officials wrote. “Worse, this ‘audit’ is encouraging our citizens to distrust elections, which weakens our democratic republic.”

Calling the process a “spectacle that is harming all of us,” the five members of the board — including four Republicans — asked the state Senate to recognize that it is essential to call off the audit, which officials have said is only about one-quarter complete.

“It is time to make a choice to defend the Constitution and the Republic,” they wrote. “We stand united together to defend the Constitution and the Republic in our opposition to the Big Lie. We ask everyone to join us in standing for the truth,” they added, using a term that refers to the false claim that the election was stolen.

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Superbone
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by Superbone »

I’m glad to see that not all Arizona politicians are idiots.
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Indy
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by Indy »

It is really the AZ house/senate, because those races are very local. The state-wide, or even county-wide elections end up being much more moderate.

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Nodack
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by Nodack »

On a local and national level they all seem nuts to me. There are almost no Republicans willing to stand up and call out Trumps lies. The very few who do get kicked out of the cool club or worse.

Just watch what happens to the careers of those Republicans on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors after this. No elected Republican gets away with speaking the truth about Trump and lives to tell the tale.

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Cap
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by Cap »

Nodack wrote:
Wed May 19, 2021 1:06 am
Just watch what happens to the careers of those Republicans on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors after this. No elected Republican gets away with speaking the truth about Trump and lives to tell the tale.
They don’t face primaries, so they might survive.

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Nodack
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by Nodack »

What’s Behind the New York Attorney General’s Criminal Probe of the Trump Organization
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... ion-489866


We have informed the Trump Organization that … We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... r-BB1gUT5j

With this news, Donald Trump, those around him, and the country as a whole inch closer to the prospect that a former president could face criminal charges, and possibly even prison time.


Trump CFO Allen Weisselberg under criminal tax investigation by New York attorney general
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/20/trump-c ... ation.html

Ex-Trump Organization exec thinks CFO Allen Weisselberg has already flipped on the president because he is facing TWO criminal tax probes and 'wants to protect his children'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... ident.html



'Don't take me, take Melania!': Trump will TURN on his own family claims disgraced attorney Michael Cohen after it was revealed the Trump Organization and its CFO are being criminally probed
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... probe.html

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Nodack
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by Nodack »

If you think our elections are rough...

Eighty-eight politicians have been murdered in Mexico since the start of the electoral process in Sep. 2020.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Mex ... -0005.html

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virtual9mm
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by virtual9mm »

Nodack wrote:
Wed May 26, 2021 4:20 pm
If you think our elections are rough...

Eighty-eight politicians have been murdered in Mexico since the start of the electoral process in Sep. 2020.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Mex ... -0005.html
We're rapidly headed that way.

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Nodack
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by Nodack »

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/28/opinions ... index.html
A chilling new poll by PRRI, the Public Religion Research Institute, found that nearly one in four Republicans (that's tens of millions of people) believe the QAnon mythology that "the government, media, and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles." You might just shake your head and laugh at this nonsense, except that that they also believe that "because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country."

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Superbone
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Re: 2020 Election Thread

Post by Superbone »

Nodack wrote:
Sun May 30, 2021 12:12 am
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/28/opinions ... index.html
A chilling new poll by PRRI, the Public Religion Research Institute, found that nearly one in four Republicans (that's tens of millions of people) believe the QAnon mythology that "the government, media, and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles." You might just shake your head and laugh at this nonsense, except that that they also believe that "because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country."
It’s a bunch of idiots if you ask me.
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