US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2169

On March 07 2020 20:53 Wombat_NI wrote:
How do people not realise Trump is absolutely full of shit? It really does boggle the brain.

On March 07 2020 20:53 Wombat_NI wrote:
How do people not realise Trump is absolutely full of shit? It really does boggle the brain.

On March 10 2020 01:13 JimmiC wrote:

I have been having the same experiences more and more lately and think it is only going to be more common. As people have less and less trust in the media, governments and science it becomes almost impossible to agree on the facts let alone move on to interpreting those facts. There seems to be a attitude that different facts are OK and that people should respect peoples different facts. Which I find mind boggling since there should be only one set of facts the correct ones. And on top of that there are more and more people treating their presumptions as facts and then making conclusions based on those. In becomes a lot more to unpack when your not sure what set of facts they are using to get to the conclusion they have come too.

On March 10 2020 01:13 JimmiC wrote:

I have been having the same experiences more and more lately and think it is only going to be more common. As people have less and less trust in the media, governments and science it becomes almost impossible to agree on the facts let alone move on to interpreting those facts. There seems to be a attitude that different facts are OK and that people should respect peoples different facts. Which I find mind boggling since there should be only one set of facts the correct ones. And on top of that there are more and more people treating their presumptions as facts and then making conclusions based on those. In becomes a lot more to unpack when your not sure what set of facts they are using to get to the conclusion they have come too.

On March 10 2020 02:13 JimmiC wrote:

Something that is known to have happened. The reason for why it happened is usually an assumption. A lot of people, including in the media, are using absolutes to describe possible reasons and outcomes.

On March 10 2020 02:20 Acrofales wrote:

Okay. But how do we know something happened? And I don't even want to ask how we know *anything*, which is probably too deep. But how do we know stuff that we didn't observe directly ourselves?

On March 10 2020 02:37 farvacola wrote:
As an armchair continental crit theory guy, one of the few marginally positive developments out of Trump’s rise is that mainstreamers and analytics now must confront the notion that “truth” as a concept may be far less rooted in objectivity than they once maintained.

On March 10 2020 02:32 Wombat_NI wrote:

A fourth estate doing its job should accomplish that.

Between it not doing so and crazy conspiratorial internet posters though it is increasingly difficult to have any source of such information that is considered generally trustworthy.

In light of clear irregularities in voting results in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary and structural barriers to voter participation, The Grayzone and CODEPINK call on the Organization of American States (OAS) to provide emergency international election monitors in the primary contest.

Since its founding in 1962, the OAS has dispatched hundreds of election monitoring teams to countries across the Western hemisphere. But it has monitored a US election only once in its history – in 2016, after Donald Trump claimed that the vote would be rigged.

In October 2019, the OAS accused the Bolivian government of irregularities in vote counting during the country’s presidential election. The organization issued a formal statement expressing “deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results after the closing of the polls.” Within days, a military coup was put into motion that resulted in the forcible removal of President Evo Morales – the winner of the presidential election – and the installation of a brutally repressive government.

“While the OAS’s findings in Bolivia have been comprehensively discredited by researchers from the Center for Economic Policy Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it is incumbent on this organization to uphold the same standards it applies in countries targeted by the United States for regime change to the United States itself,” said CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin.

The United States Agency of International Development (USAID), an arm of the US government notorious for meddling in foreign elections, stated in its 2015 election guide: “Detecting fraud: Exit polls provide data that is generally indicative of how people voted. A discrepancy between the aggregated choices reported by voters and the official results may suggest, but not prove, that results have been tampered with.”

By the standards USAID applies to other nations, these troubling discrepancies must be investigated as signs of potential fraud and tampering.

The United States is one of the world’s only industrialized countries that relies exclusively on computerized vote counting, which is not transparent and publicly observable. Most democracies verify election results through the use of paper ballots, which are counted by hand and publicly observable