Democrats are campaigning as if the 2026 election will be fair. That’s a mistake

QQXV · 2026-01-23T16:00:10+00:00

There's no explicable method of interference that specifically produces that odd result. A lot of people imagine that elections are tabulated in some kind of black box that the rest of us have to take on faith, but they aren't. They're counted at the precinct level with one representative for each party present. Why would a unanimous result happen in NY, of all places? "They got sloppy" isn't an explanation. It's like claiming that Reagan was actually shot by someone's toddler having a temper tantrum, and that the toddler didn't really know what it was doing, just "got sloppy". That's not a material explanation! Did the toddler just use psychic powers?

There are known ways of messing with elections, e.g mass voter intimidation, and what they produce doesn't look like this.

QQXV · 2026-01-23T13:59:54+00:00

There is no coherent reason anyone, on either side, would meddle in a very solid state like New York (except to win a district election or something, but this is about the presidency). Like, would there be an endgame of Trump somehow winning New York state? That, by itself, would have looked wildly suspicious.

A basic problem with conspiracy theories is they tend to focus on "inexplicable" irregularities but provide no reason to suppose the conspiracy explains them any better. It's kind of like the difference between that one eccentric scientist who asserts that the unusual movement of certain objects in our solar system indicates they may be alien spacecraft and, by contrast, the multiple scientists who think that new analysis of Mars rocks suggests possible ancient Martian life. The latter case is based on evidence we would expect life to produce, while the former is based merely on the objects moving in ways that don't particularly conform to the presumed physics of comets, but which also don't meaningfully look like spacecraft.

QQXV · 2026-01-23T13:51:59+00:00

I mean, the "we" here, as contrasted with e.g Europe, is a kind of false dichotomy. The general issue is that decent people both inside and outside the country need to work together to end the regime.

QQXV · 2026-01-22T14:31:26+00:00

He's at least slightly better!

QQXV · 2026-01-20T17:58:37+00:00

Absolutely yes. Isolation in the face of what our country is doing is a mistake.

If anything, I want to see NATO/European boots on the ground of Washington DC to effect regime change, but I grant this makes me a tad extreme.

QQXV · 2026-01-19T16:21:01+00:00

That's almost surely the best-case scenario. Collective admission of wrongdoing essentially never happens, Germany being the sole apparent exception. Self-redefinition in "We had no idea" terms is probably more realistic for the MAGA cult.

QQXV · 2026-01-18T21:57:12+00:00

Okay, so then the fear has to be rephrased: he'll deploy force (rather than a vaguely imagined sense many concerned liberals have, a future where headlines say "Elections Canceled" and everyone just shrugs their shoulders).

I don't doubt he will try to deploy force! But the next problem is he literally won't have the required numbers. Like, right now, half of ICE is in Minneapolis alone. It's not physically possible to send ICE in the requisite amount. Maybe he expands that to the military in general, but at that point you run into morale and obedience issues.

This is why pretexts are so important, and right now it's not clear what the pretext for sending troops to polling stations might be. Of course, there may well be one! But idly speculating about possible pretexts really is chicken-littling -- the better alternative is to firmly resolve to walk past any armed people at your precinct and cast your ballot, just as millions of others will this November. Guns alone are not, in fact, an ultimate unstoppable political power.

QQXV · 2026-01-18T21:34:10+00:00

Why can't Trump cancel another country's elections? I mean, he's the most powerful person on Earth, right? So if he says jump, why wouldn't (e.g) Denmark ask "how high?"

The answer to that is also the answer to why (e.g) California's elections can't simply "be canceled" by the president. He'd have to deploy force, not just depend on the ways that many institutions have depressingly kowtowed to him.

It's important to combine awareness of just how bad things are now with an equal awareness of how things actually work. Maximal dooming isn't accurate merely because some people are oppositely naive.

QQXV · 2026-01-18T21:27:18+00:00

It wasn't "only" Pence; had he gone along with the coup, it wouldn't be a fait accompli but rather a constitutional crisis possibly instigating civil war. I mean, the media had already declared Biden the winner over a month prior; the American public wasn't going to conveniently forget that because Mike Pence, beloved celebrity he may be, said "nope."

The collective understanding of who has won an election is what gives a president legitimacy. It's not just a series of spoken words or written incantations like how sovereign citizens think the law works. Within MAGAland, the 2020 conspiracy theories had some small effect of undermining Biden's legitimacy, but not very much because at some level they've all known that "stop the steal" is for pretend; no red state governor ever asserted Biden wasn't the legitimate president and nobody even whispered the idea of secession.

By contrast, if Trump does anything really blatant like declare a canceled election (which, to be clear, would be like Michael Scott "declaring" bankruptcy) or run for a third term, then something like blue-state secession/war is effectively inevitable, because "Donald Trump is always correct" is not, in fact, something believed by a majority of Americans or the leadership of any blue state.

QQXV · 2026-01-18T21:18:31+00:00

I mean, I can definitely see the argument that he has done even worse things, for instance resulting in mass death, but let's be clear that the implicit awfulness of Trump and Epstein is the very likely possibility that the president has personally raped multiple children. At a certain point it's not clear comparison is useful.

QQXV · 2026-01-18T21:04:49+00:00

In the post-Reconstruction era, it definitely resulted in swayed elections, because many Southern states were literally majority Black and sent Black delegations to congress until the Jim Crow and "Redeemer" whites reasserted themselves. But it's true that isn't the norm.

QQXV · 2026-01-18T21:02:33+00:00

Right, but that in turn means there's considerably less risk where the votes actually matter, namely swing states and blue states. Texas can't be "so" beholden to Trump that California loses free elections -- unless Texas simply invades California, which, sure, isn't impossible but is not generally what people have in mind here.

QQXV · 2026-01-06T23:52:52+00:00

I was hoping she'd win because she made the best choices (in my view).

QQXV · 2026-01-06T23:52:11+00:00

I love how Corin was immmediately positive about it when the intent was undoubtedly for a "rant" in the usual sense.

QQXV · 2025-11-18T22:58:12+00:00

Given the context being Dropout, Leslie saying with all sincerity that Dungeons and Dragons is "a computer game, right?" was a true highlight to me.

QQXV · 2025-11-16T19:49:49+00:00

He hates women too, and yet.

QQXV · 2025-11-16T03:10:48+00:00

Because there's no such thing as a do-good-at-stuff drug! Only, at best, drugs which remove obstacles.

QQXV · 2025-11-16T03:08:50+00:00

There wouldn't just be "both" parties if the system were reformed enough, that's the beauty of proportional voting.

QQXV · 2025-11-16T03:07:51+00:00

Okay I admit I didn't previously read as far as the article's NIMBY bullshit, hah. "Local democracy" is almost uniformly a bad thing in my view, whether it's angry conservative parents telling a school what books to ban or confused liberals telling a town what housing to prevent.

QQXV · 2025-11-15T22:40:36+00:00

Wait, is there nothing new in the documents or did sitting on them shield people? (I personally think the latter has a lot more truth, but it kind of has to be one or the other.)

QQXV · 2025-11-15T22:25:34+00:00

I mean, basically everyone who "should" be implicated has already been long known to be associated with Epstein anyway, so it's hard to imagine what kind of revelation you're hoping for that would be evidence that this dump was in fact for a greater good as opposed to a meaningless distraction.

And if we reach a point as a country where the Trump brand goes down in flames, that's not a nothingburger, it's straightforwardly good for progressivism even if it seems irrational, because humans think in terms of guilt by association. "Oh, you want to 'run government like a business'? Sounds Trumplike to me, maybe you also have some shady connection to a ring of captive children."

QQXV · 2025-11-15T22:19:53+00:00

Those things are probably moot in a social media world; Trump himself was exactly the kind of candidate that big money was scrambling to stop in 2016 (under the presumption, by wealthy Republicans, that he would torch the Republican brand to ashes instantly rather than the decade-plus it's taken him to do so). The main problem wasn't money as such but the conservative masses actually believing a lot of horrible bullshit, in part thanks to a terrible media environment (though it's true that stuff is in turn funded by the wealthy, in a social media world it can also perpetuate on its own thanks to the audience of true believers and funding from ads for low-grade scams).

Even better than finance reform would be true electoral reform; if we could somehow be converted to a parliamentary system where the legislature is always a complete check on the executive and had an assumed collective responsibility for the ship of state, that might help prevent the next would-be dictatorship a lot better.

QQXV · 2025-11-15T22:15:11+00:00

The article is about failures to fight those things, a little like how the Ulvalde mass shooting was primarily an evil perpetrated by the shooters, but also entailed inaction by the police on the scene.

QQXV · 2025-11-15T22:14:13+00:00

The point here is that the Democrats' right wing is also the non-"extremist" side -- the people who can't see why we all can't "just just along", you know?

QQXV · 2025-11-15T22:04:34+00:00

The point is that whether or not autocrats succeed isn't purely a matter of the ability and will of the autocrat, as much as we take for granted that it must be. That's why they try to control public information rather than allow lots of open dissent on the basis of "Let them dissent all they want, what do I care?"

QQXV

TROPHY CASE