Even on HN, there was an argument about something as sensible as “kids in preschool were a major cause of the spread of Covid”, while parents have known from time immemorial that kids in preschool were walking Petri dishes for every communicable disease imaginable.
The above statement is very much common sense. Now the opinion should come in about what should have been done about that fact.
Has January 6th already slipped from your mind? Aside from that it's strange to suggest we should ignore what people said, consistently, for years.
As serious as the charges are, I think we should honor their desires because it belittles the entire pack of idiots.
People doing serious jail time for something that was so stupid, it deflated them.
Is there a fairly neutral source on January 6? I can only find partisan ones, and the photos and video I saw seem very benign. Is there a decent writeup that draws it all together?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...
Gore didn’t spend years complaining. He ceded the election and moved on.
At some point, "half the country" simply evolved within common parlance into shorthand for Trumpists and Republicans in general. An unfortunate side effect of this is that it's also useful among the left, who should know better, when used unironically to make Trumpism into a bigger monster than it is.
Of course, nowhere near half the country even voted at all, and of those who voted, a slightly bigger half voted for Hillary Clinton. But Trumpism demonstrates that minority movements can still have influence when they grab power, even if they can't really claim a mandate. That a significant fraction of Republicans either believe the election was stolen or believe claiming such is necessary to maintain power is still troubling.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/03/14/republi...
“Classic Media” today, is busy pushing the narratives of whacky billionaires/corporations as a general undercurrent.
1) Work in the office is better than remote.
2) National healthcare can’t work in the US, only in every other industrialized nation.
3) wealthy people are geniuses & you should read the books they read and listen to them about everything.
4) progressives are evil, conservatives are evil.
5) Ignore the military industrial complex, keep feeding the military budget.
6) homelessness can’t be solved.
7) Support the Troops! But once they are veterans ignore them to the bureaucracy of the hellhole of veterans affairs.
8) Authoritarianism in government is alarming but there is nothing to be done.
It's also worth considering it isn't even just one side, in 2019-2020 Hillary was still saying the election was stolen from her.
Note: I was working for an election services company over the 2020 election cycle and saw coworkers and even myself seeing death threats. I still think there were a lot of at least suspicious things across the country. In the end, the lack of trust in media/news and the government is pretty well deserved all around.
Not all has-been losers are treated equally. The so-called leftist media has not taken up her claim; the democrat base has not taken up her claim; I've heard of no serious democratic candidates running on her claim. So when you say it isn't just one side, you're comparing a mountain to a molehill.
Hilary made jokes about it for sure. Trump sounded like he wasn’t joking. Maybe libs just can’t get his joking style.
Half of the country doesn’t trust the other half, and Vice versa. That’s mostly the problem right there (they trust their media but not the othersides, they trust their election officials but not the othersides, well, except in Georgia).
That’s just a straight up lie. Or—being charitable—a shameless false equivalence.
She repeated the (proven) fact that there was widespread Russian involvement in promoting her opposition & a disinformation campaign.
edit: note "Twitter files" showed that the claim of large Russian influence was unsubstantiated.
The Twitter Files showed zero of note, they were themselves an orchestrated propaganda exercise that suckered exactly who it was aimed at, but was widely—and deservedly—mocked in every other circle as completely unserious.
Hell, they destroyed what little reputation Matt Taibbi had left. Even he had to backtrack somewhat after the fact (in the most milquetoast, admit no actual fault, fashion tho I might add).
At most they revealed that the Twitter safety team did much more than they were credited for publicly, and revealed that most people have no idea what Trust & Safety involves.
As for “various definitions of proven” in this case the definition is “actually happened in reality and we have the receipts”, as in “proven fact”. Hell, people went to jail over it.
Partisanship is really annoying.
At one time or another, it's been far more than half. Trump "losing the popular vote" was daily news on left-leaning sites. From Hillary Clinton:
> Trump "knows he’s an illegitimate president," Clinton said. "I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that — there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did … I know he knows this wasn’t on the level."
And Russian interference comments, e.g. these from Jimmy Carter:
> In June 2019, Jimmy Carter, the former Democratic president, said, "There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election, and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf."
In fact last year, a whopping 72%[0] of Democrats thought Russians got Donald Trump elected, which is about the same as the number of Republicans[1] who think that the Twitter files etc contributed to Joe Biden winning.
All in all, most of the US can be convinced that a fraud happened, split equally along party lines.
[0] https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gen... [2] https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/70-percent-republ...
This was a fact. No one claimed that he lost the electoral vote and no one claimed that he didn’t win based on the rules.
> In fact last year, a whopping 72%[0] of Democrats thought Russians got Donald Trump elected
It is a fact that Russia interfered in the election and that they were responsible for hacking and leaking the Democrats private messages. It is also a fact that people close to Trump were convicted about lying about their communication with Russia. The opinion part comes in about whether it resulted in Trumps winning.
I’m also not clutching my pearls. I know that the US has a history of interfering with (small d) democratic elections across the world.
Well, there was a huge amount of fuss about how he won on a technicality and the rules are wrong. Which looks extremely similar, even if it can be motte and baileyed away years later.