But I’m forced to credit them with intelligence, by the framing of the theory.

You see that, right?

The supposition is that these people engaged in a massive ballot stuffing scheme, and covered it up so well (including successfully obtaining the silence of every one of the people involved) that the only evidence left is an abnormally high number of bullet ballots.

So they have to be smart enough and self-serving enough to do all that, but stupid enough to not do the obvious - and selfish - thing and make those ballots straight ticket votes.

See my previous point about any argument that relies on the same people simultaneously displaying extremes of competence and incompetence. I’m not saying that never happens, but it is usually a good indicator that you’re engaging in wishful thinking.

Generally speaking, a good test for fantastical thinking is when your theory relies on the same people displaying outlandish degrees of both competence and incompence at the same time.

If the people who did this are good enough to pull off - and keep quiet - a fraud at this scale, how did they fuck up such an elementary component?

If they’re capable of fucking up something that basic, how is it that they’ve failed to leave any other stunningly obvious evidence?

Personally, I’m of the opinion that even apparently fair elections should be treated as active crime scenes. That’s how we do things in Canada. Everything is checked and rechecked. But this particular theory seems to have veered pretty far into moon landing territory.

The people below him matter because they enact his agenda. The fact that there is a cult of personality around Trump absolutely explains why real voters would vote that way. But anyone enacting a ballot stuffing scheme on his behalf would almost certainly understand that he needs cronies to actually do any of the things he wants to do.

Without calling into question the broader possibility that malfeasance did occur, I don’t feel like this argument is particularly credible.

Suppose you were to engage in some form of straight up ballot stuffing? Why then would you make them bullet ballots? Why not vote straight ticket Republican? Straight ticket ballots are not unusual - even less so then bullet ballots, apparently - so you’d draw less suspicion, and you’d get the benefit of lots of extra down ticket votes.

If someone was going to cheat, what benefit would they gain from cheating this way?

To be fair, it’s been a longstanding rule with Republicans that whatever they accuse others of is merely a projection of what they’ll do the moment they can get away with it. Whether or not they would try to steal an election isn’t even a question. They’ve as much as admitted it. The only question is whether or not they did. I’ve not seen any evidence to that effect, and I’m not presuming there is any, but it would be idiotic not to at least contemplate the possibility.

It’s astonishing to me that anyone ever entertained the idea that MAGA was a freak event, even back in 2016.

Republicans: “Billionaires are just better than everyone else and we should all get out of their way and hand them the keys to everything for the betterment of all mankind.”

Republicans After Being Forced to Spend One (1) Week Around Elon Musk: “No, shit, wait, these guys are fucking idiots!”

Are you somehow under the impression that Public Citizen were responsible for Harris’ nomination?

At least they’re digging in and fighting. That’s a hell of a lot better than giving up.

Also I really think the key thing to pay attention to here is “multiyear period”. As in, it takes years for companies to reconstruct their entire production and supply chain. Imposing harsh tariffs on goods made outside the US could theoretically boost domestic production, but only if there’s actually the skills and infrastructure available domestically to make that cost-effective… And even then, the gains would take years to decades to realise. And Trump sure as shit isn’t making the kinds of education and infrastructure investments needed to actually make any of that worthwhile.

Easily one of the most braindead takes I’ve seen.

“Oh but he didn’t mention voter fraud.”

Yeah, because he won. There’s no value in questioning the ref’s call when it’s in your favour.

I think my next step is going to be to sign up for NDP membership, so that I can use my voting power to push that party into a more explicitly progressive direction.

That and, as you said, getting involved in local advocacy and education. That part is going to be trickier since I just moved to a new province so I’m basically starting from scratch.

The war on drugs only failed if you truly believe its goal was getting rid of drugs.

To quote John Erlichman, one of its architects:

“The Nixon Campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

By the strandards of what it was created to do, the war on drugs was fantastically successful.

The war on porn will be successful in exactly the same way, because Republicans have already spent decades redefining all LGBTQ content as “pornographic”. This is will be a tool for disrupting queer and trans communities, for erasing queer and trans resources and tearing down queer and trans rights activists. Stopping porn isn’t the point, and it never was.

And to be clear, this isn’t supposition, it’s already literally happening in Florida.

Florida is the model for what they want to do everywhere.

Two years.

No, they didn’t. And when you tell yourself that, you make yourself a sucker.

Because when we tell ourselves that people who do terrible things cannot be human, we forget the logical implications of that; that only the inhuman are capable of doing terrible things.

And we’re human. We know this for sure. So therefore whatever we do, cannot be terrible. Because we’d know if we crossed that line, right? Our friends, our family, our coworkers… None of these people are inhuman. We know them, we talk to them, we care about them. So, logically, they could never be capable of anything truly monstrous. Because only monsters can be monstrous.

The Nazis were human. That’s the worst, and by far the most important lesson of the Holocaust. That humans did those things. That every single person you know is, under the right circumstances, capable of the most monstrous acts imaginable.

That’s why so many people cannot bring themselves to believe that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide; because they believe that only inhuman monsters can commit genocide, and they cannot call every person in Isreal an inhuman monster, can they?

It’s not our humanity that keeps us good. Goodness is not inherent, or God given, or born into us. It’s a choice we have to make, every single moment of every single day.

Every time you tell yourself that the worst people in the world aren’t really people, you make it just a little bit easier to cross those lines. To do something truly monstrous. Because the one thing you know for sure is that you are not a monster.

“orcs”

Cut that shit the fuck out. Dehumanization is the weapon of the enemy. We do not use it.

I actually completely agree. This is exactly the point Bernie was making when he said that the Dems brought their loss on themselves by abandoning the working class.

Canadian leftists need to really focus in on issues of cost of living, access to housing and education, the things that working class people are worried about.

I’m queer, and I’m married to a trans woman. I’m not saying the left should give up on talking about issues of inequality and social justice. But I am saying that we need a message that resonates with working class voters, not just people on the margins.

We need to make unions cool again. We need to get the rugged individualists excited about solar power (what’s more rugged and self sufficient than powering your home with nothing but the light of the sun?). We need to start talking about cutting those millionaire and billionaire elites down to size.

This isn’t easy. We’ll need to find careful ways to shape these messages, because there are a lot of thought terminating cliches that you’ll trip up on if you’re too direct. But I think the possibility is there. Even when you can’t talk about “socialism” and collectivism, you can still say things like “community” and “people having each other’s backs.” Appeal to the ideals that they want to think they believe in.

Don’t do their work for them.

Sometimes, simply existing is the greatest act of rebellion. Let your life be an affront to them, every single day. Get up just to spite them.

Locking up Trump wouldn’t have kept the Republicans from winning. They’d have just found another candidate willing to say the same things.