One advantage of vagueness, at least if your audience is sufficiently inclined to believe already, is that you can’t *decisively* refute a claim that isn’t concrete enough to meaningfully test. politico.com/news/magazine/…
If you say “they used X software to change such-and-such many votes in Michigan” that’s a reasonably testable claim. We can in principle prove it false. If you just vaguely assert that there was fraud, without specifying a mechanism, we can say “there’s no evidence of that”...
...but it’s so nebulous it’s less succeptible to decisive refutation. There’s always escape hatches: “Ok, you ruled out 5 ways fraud might happen, but maybe it worked some other way, or in another state...”
Maybe in theory you can eventually rule out every plausible mechanism in every state, but now your refutation is a 50 page treatise, and who has time for that?
This strategy isn’t going to CONVINCE anyone there was fraud who actually requires evidence. But that’s not the point. The point is to sustain PERMISSION to believe for those who want to believe.
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This is baffling to me. If she’s fit to work and earn money, she’s fit to decide what to do with it, even if (like many people) she may make bad choices. bbc.com/news/entertain…
If she’s truly so mentally incapacitated that she can’t exercise the control over her own finances we afford the average 18-year-old, how is it possibly ethical to allow her labor to enrich her label and managers?
I’m not pretending to know how mentally fit she is or isn’t. But if she’s incapable of exercising a level of autonomy we grant illiterate teenagers by default, I don’t understand how she’s capable of consenting to a demanding performance & recording schedule.
I’d actually extend the metaphor. What we’re seeing looks an awful lot like the sort of face-saving indirectness we’re all familiar with when a pair of acquaintances start inching toward a romantic relationship.
As in: pre-Tinder people didn’t usually just say “Hey, I think we should begin having sex.” You’d get drinks or coffee, and if there was no chemistry, or at any rate, one person didn’t seem disposed to move things forward, no worries, it was just drinks or coffee.
Linguist @sapinker talks about how this kind of indirect speech works as a kind of gradual commitment mechanism when you’re proposing something—a sexual relationship, a bribe—that involves risk (emotional or legal) if the other party isn’t interested.
If your concern is public perception of election rigging, it seems bizarre to worry about the optics of the “result” changing after midnight on election night, but not about the optics of... thousands of ballots being thrown out because USPS delivered them late.
It is, after all, hardly unprecedented for an election result to be uncertain for a few days. Or for early returns to trend one way, only to be overwhelmed by later ones going the other way. Why would that provoke more public suspicion than refusing to count validly cast ballots?
It is hard not to suspect this strange picture is the result of Kavanaugh’s own social circle very disproportionately comprising people concerned with only one kind of imagined “vote rigging” scenario.
I’m not sure this is an accident. You’re supposed to come away with a vague impression that there’s something scandalous going on with Biden’s kid. Who knows what, exactly, but if the junkies are so steeped in the details it must be pretty bad.
This was what worked in 2016 after all. “FBI finds new laptop with Clinton emails!” It was nothing, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that voters got a sense there was something shady.
DID JOE BIDEN KNOW ABOUT HUNTER’S TIES TO GORPMAN AND BLEEMER? Who are they? Why is that supposed to be bad? Who cares? It sounds shady. You’re just supposed to throw up your hands and infer that Biden must be no less corrupt than Trump after all.
A prediction: The Hunter Biden laptop story is going to end up being pretty big as it plays out over the next week or two. Not because of the contents of the (putative) e-mails or Hunter’s sex tapes, which are nothingburgers even if authentic—but because of Giuliani’s role.
By Monday, nobody but the fever swamps will be talking about the contents of the hard drive. We WILL be talking about whether this was a foreign info op, and how much Trump knew about Giuliani’s decision to accept stolen communications and send them to the NY Post.
In the unlikely event the NY Post’s narrative of where the laptop came from is basically accurate, Giuliani’s actions still look appalling, and if Trump knew & approved reflect badly on him. If that narrative is a cover for an info op, things look substantially worse...
The more I think about the Post’s story, the crazier it seems. IF the story is accurate, Rudy Giuliani is approached with a private citizen’s stolen hard drive, containing e-mails about conduct that on face isn’t even inappropriate, let alone criminal, & hands it to a tabloid.
That’s the best case scenario where we assume this incredibly sketchy “abandoned laptop” story is true. At worst Giuliani is participating in a foreign information operation. But even on the OFFICIAL version his conduct is appalling & of dubious legality.
I’m also pretty curious about the claim that the laptop was handed over to the FBI. Again, IF the story is correct this is basically stolen property. Instead of trying to return it to its owner, they just take it and comb through private files?