Share this page!

Julian Sanchez Profile picture
Twitter logo
Feb 8 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Technically illiterate county officials in NM are about to waste $50,000 in public money “investigating” nonsensical fantasies about hacked voting machines, in a county Trump won by 25 points. washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/…
Chaser: They want to contract the “investigation” out to a notorious charlatan & crank best known for falsely (but very insistently) claiming that he invented e-mail (about a decade after e-mail was invented).
The worst part is that Ayyadurai has a long history of using his MIT credentials to launder absolute nonsense & make it sound technical & impressive to the untrained. Like this inept effort to statistically demonstrate vote tampering in MI.
Any trained mathematician would recognize the elementary mistake (if we charitably assume it’s a “mistake”) but it sounded very impressive & mathy to many without a math background.
Will he be satisfied to just pocket taxpayer’s cash here & give an all clear (Trump won the county after all), or will he feed them another cock & bull story to validate the “foreign interference” narrative? Guess we’ll see.
If he goes the cock & bull route, I predict it will be obvious nonsense to actual election security experts, but county officials won’t be able to tell the difference, and never, ever own up to have wasted public funds on a grift.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Julian Sanchez

Julian Sanchez Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @normative

Julian Sanchez Profile picture
Feb 10
I just got a graphic novel adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four and was pleasantly surprised to see they included the Appendix “Principles of Newspeak” (as unillustrated text). I think readers often forget about it, but it’s a diegetic appendix and radically alters the ending.
For those who haven’t read it recently: “Principles of Newspeak” is an explanation of how Oceania's totalitarian government controlled thought through language. But critically, it’s written *by future historians within the world of the novel* explaining a defunct system.
So while (what most think of as) the novel proper ends with the triumph of Big Brother, the appendix makes clear the regime has fallen, and strongly implies that this collapse occurred sometime before 2050. Turns out Nineteen Eighty-Four has a happy ending! Sort of.
Read 13 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
Feb 4
It’s nice to hear Pence state clearly that he had no right to overturn the election; would’ve been nicer if he’d more strongly said there was no legitimate reason to question the result.
The cowardly dodge here is to make noises about “irregularities,” which is conveniently ambiguous between “real but ultimately trivial issues that arose as a byproduct of doing an election during a pandemic” and “the lunatic conspiracy theories the base now believes."
See, when your respectable friends ask what “irregularities” means, you can point out that the West Slothrop County Registrar authorized additional ballot dropboxes to be installed in a manner inconsistent with subsection B of section 243.2 of the state election code…
Read 5 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
Jan 26
So, this sounds like the correct decision, but it’s a little weird that the court doesn’t seem all that interested in a question I’d have thought would be relevant to the analysis: What’s the normal level of traffic for that time and place?
Like, if the roads are normally dead at that hour and this was one of the only two cars anywhere in the vicinity, that seems less unreasonable than if there’s normally modest traffic…
…because it goes to the reasonableness of the antecedent inference “One of these two cars is very likely to contain the robbers.” The court notes that the stop location was “near” an interstate, but that doesn’t in itself tell you a whole lot.
Read 4 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
Jan 23
I saw this nonsense floating around a conspiracy nut board, and it made something click for me: These folks are basically operating on cinematic epistemology. They believe what would be true if the news were a Hollywood movie.
One of the most common refrains on Qanon forums is “we’re watching a movie” (like, they literally think major events are being faked by the White Hats as a kind of elaborate morality play to gradually “enlighten” the masses). But they’re more broadly operating on movie logic.
In the real world, a tiny handful of scientists (mostly undistinguished or long past their prime) loudly bucking an overwhelming consensus of experts are going to be cranks, grifters, or just plain wrong 99% of the time. But in a movie (cf. “Don’t Look Up”) that’s the hero!
Read 9 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
Jan 21
Trump’s MO since launching his political career has been to routinely accuse opponents of whatever he is most obviously guilty of, in hopes of getting the dual accusations treated as basically equivalent.
Republicans are currently systematically using hilariously obvious lies about fraud and election rigging as their pretext to actually rig elections. Now the savvy pose will be to treat it as hypocritical to make true claims that superficially resemble the lies.
So now if you notice that Republicans are using a completely imaginary problem as a pretext to push legislation that seems aimed at making it harder for minorities to vote, that’s exactly the same as utterly bats**t conspiracy theories about Dominion & Venezuelan communists.
Read 4 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
Jan 21
Music to my ears. Most film adaptations have given the “World’s Greatest Detective” aspect of the character pretty short shrift, so pleased to hear this version is leaning into it.
The Keaton version cracks the pattern to the Joker’s poisoned consumer products (offscreen), and the Bale version uses some fancy tech to reconstruct a fingerprint from bullet fragments, but otherwise film Batmen don’t do a whole lot of detecting.
I guess Bat-Kilmer solves some corny riddles, but I refuse to count that.
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @normative has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @normative!

Read all threads by @normative

:(