Can we stop saying “baseless” and just say “false” or “lying”? By the epistemic standards we apply to any normal fact, this garbage about millions of votes being stolen isn’t (merely) “unfounded”. It’s false. It’s a lie.
Like, sure, it’s logically possible that every Republican state election authority and all the cybersecurity agencies, have totally missed the electoral equivalent of a whale in the bathtub. It’s logically possible we’re all brains in vats & all reality is an illusion.
But we’re not in freshman philosophy & newspapers don’t normally apply the Cartesian method of doubt before deploying terms like “true” and “false.” By any normal standard, these claims are false.
If this nonsense were just circulating on fringe message boards, no news outlets would have the slightest qualms about calling it “false.” If you become skittish about using the word when the president quotes the message board, you’re just getting played. Dangerously.
It’s not even accurate to say these claims are offered “without evidence”. There is “evidence” offered, and it’s uniformly terrible and overwhelmingly contradicted by better evidence. There’s no reason to make it sound like we just don’t have any information either way.
It is not more “objective”—in fact it is in practice misinforming your readers—to adopt a pose of postmodern nihilism about, like, whether anyone can ever really KNOW anything, maaaaan. At least when the president said it.
“I am a Bengal tiger and can shoot lasers from my eyes,” said Sanchez, without providing evidence. Some critics object that Sanchez appears to be bipedal and lacks characteristic physiognomic features of panthera tigris. Scientists described ocular lasers as infeasible.

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More from @normative

24 Nov
The truly perverse thing about the current electronic voting security freakout, motivated by a desire to deny the results of the presidential election, is that for DECADES this really was an absolute security horrorshow with minimal mainstream media attention.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of serious security researchers and activists, the situation has materially improved as more and more states adopted requirements for manually-auditable, voter-verifiable paper trails, though plenty of jurisdictions still need to up their game.
Some of the states at the center of the present freakout are those that have adopted the best security practices. Pennsylvania is one of only a handful of states that does automatic manual audits for all races. Meanwhile eight states still don’t require paper audit trails.
Read 12 tweets
23 Nov
A healthy development for basic security & good governance reasons, but I would really like to hear the tortured rationalization for thinking there’s grounds to “ascertain” today & not a week ago.
She alludes to some recent developments (Michigan certified; Trump’s lawsuits keep getting tossed) but they don’t really add up to any coherent or principled reason you’d say there was an “apparent winner” today but not last week.
Michigan’s RESULT was never seriously in doubt. Various longshot lawsuits remain. Most states still haven’t formally certified, which has never been a prerequisite for initiating a transition anyway.
Read 7 tweets
17 Nov
I’m not sure “media literacy” training, at least of the traditional sort, is helpful here. My recollection is that they typically encourage people to be skeptical & do their own research, which is great if the person is competent to do that, but otherwise makes things worse.
The people whose brains are the most utterly crammed with absolute nonsense are, in my experience, the folks most likely to proudly tell you they always “do their own research.”
The always insightful @zephoria has written a bunch about this: points.datasociety.net/did-media-lite…
Read 8 tweets
16 Nov
I find it weird that there’s a massive ecosystem of YouTube “reactors”—people who just watch a video/movie/show and react to it—but virtually none who are attempting to offer substantive, well-informed critique or commentary.
As far as I can tell, it’s almost the opposite: The appeal is in seeing a naive reaction to some beloved thing the YouTube viewer already knows & likes. (Often something the reactor was too young to have seen when it was new.) Which, OK, I get it, that can be fun.
But surely there are enough folks out there with film degrees they’re not otherwise getting much use out of who could support a different kind of “reactor” channel—one where you learn something about the artistry that goes into making something you liked “work.”
Read 6 tweets
13 Nov
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...”
Read 5 tweets
11 Nov
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.
Read 4 tweets

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