I feel like if you think it's all wet, it's probably good informational hygiene not to link to it at all. Why let it into our priors? Per the Davies Mantras.
I'm curious if it follows the pattern recently identified to me that conspiracy theories as a genre take the form of assemblages of "anomalies". Little things designed to make you scratch your head and say, that's funny. But often they're factually false, or only strange when presented misleadingly, or just genuine coincidences, but the key is that they don't actually link up with a logical, connected story, they point every which way, sometimes imply the people responsible are taunting the public with hidden messages rather than covering everything up, but they do get their audience in the mindset of "Something must be going on," and remain hospitable to a wide range of interpretations.
Is 1 generic advice, or specifically that I should take the link down?
You should keep the link up because Bayesian reasoning is just circular if you let it be and because it's your blog.
No, I am not requesting you take the link down. Just musing for the future.
What a bio for an anonymous Substack. "Yes, this is the account Elon nuked on Twitter--the one with the thread connecting all the dots that had over a million people on it. Go easy--I'm new here."
Big "'straightforward from here' guy" energy.
Which now that I look at it was a woman who meant it sarcastically anyway. Maybe I mean Eric Garland, "time for some game theory" guy.
There's a lot of reddit energy around this theory, and one of them linked to this link as a starting place. I don't find it intriguing enough to read thoroughly, but it's also genuinely hard to imagine that Elon/Trump/etc would turn down any opportunity to cheat. Like, occam's razor would assume they'd try in some lazy, flailing way.
Also occam's razor implies that the author is the one who promoted it on Reddit as a good primer.
Unless Occam used a five-bladed razor.
I gave up when they pulled out "she can't possibly have lost all 7 swing states, that's so improbable". Not if the electorate moved 2% to the right it's not!
Yeah, I remember all the modeling people before the election saying "we don't know who is going to win, but probably whichever does win will win 6 or 7 of the swing states."
I blame Musk. I think he threw a bunch of new, poorly informed voters into the electorate.
RFK probably added a few percent to the margin too.
I think it's disrespectful to "junior" someone whose father has been dead for longer than I've been alive. So I only use "RFK jr."
Unless Occam used a five-bladed razor.
Fuck it, we're going with the fifth simplest explanation.
I think almost no one is able to properly evaluate these kinds of claims.
I also think that there's no reason to believe that American elections are being held in an above board manner.
Historically the reason voting machines are used instead of pencil and paper is to make it easier to steal elections.
Computers mean you need even fewer co-conspirators to determine the election.
Why believe that the electorate chose Donald Trump if you don't have to?
Because I have to have some kind of accurate perception of my country in order to make decisions.
That's beyond me. I'm going to behave differently in a country that wants to give concentration camps a try than I would otherwise.
I feel like it doesn't matter if most people want to give concentration camps to try or not since the country is doing it anyway.
I, for one, am glad that we no longer have to speculate about whether anyone will block the 45 billion dollars for the concentration camp agency bill.
I'm not glad about any part of this.
At least Michael Madsen didn't live to see this.
22: I thought there might be pushback from employers but then I saw this
https://bsky.app/profile/fetchstep.bsky.social/post/3lszigsx7cc2t
He said that the farmers were going to be the owners of slave laborers.
19: Because that way lies the same madness that "why believe that Joe Biden won in 2020 if you don't have to?" has already done to Republicans. And because I don't believe that these clowns could sneak deploy hostile voting software at scale without including enough obvious bugs that would trigger multiple investigations of the software. That's one of the hallmarks of batshit conspiracy theories: simultaneously believing that the conspirators are super-efficient about carrying out their plans and keeping the thing secret for years while simultaneously leaving enough gaping holes that a high-school outsider can unravel the plot. Like the people who posit an enormous JFK conspiracy that has bumped off hundreds of people who "caught wind of it" over the years without asking why conspirators who were that good and that organized would ever have tried to bump JFK off in front of thousands of witnesses instead of just having him die of a quiet "heart attack" while visiting one of his mistresses. Much smaller conspiracy required, much less likely to leak, and you can blame any minor discrepancies that turn up on well-meaning attempts to protect Jackie's feelings from the truth of his death. You know, like the assassination of President Harding. What assassination, you ask? Exactly.
(No, I don't think that Harding was actually assassinated. But it's an example of what a successful (and small) conspiracy might look like from the outside, which has a fighting chance of remaining secret and protecting the conspirators.)
Calvin Coolidge was behind it, probably.
Ditto on all the skepticism. I do believe that the tech bros (i.e. Elon plus Andreessen) have mastered targeted social media ads that are completely invisible and much better than dems. That cause of the swing in results would be consistent with swing state only, and with depressing blue turnout as well as boosting red turnout. But if the change in results was part of a statistical study of political ads, I would also be skeptical that the effect was that large.
Like the people who posit an enormous JFK conspiracy that has bumped off hundreds of people who "caught wind of it" over the years without asking why conspirators who were that good and that organized would ever have tried to bump JFK off in front of thousands of witnesses instead of just having him die of a quiet "heart attack" while visiting one of his mistresses.
The best anti-conspiracy argument I heard was directed specifically at the idea that the CIA killed JFK because they were worried he might pull out of Vietnam, and it is simply "then why didn't they kill Nixon?"
The five "components" of the alleged scheme seem like typical conspiracy theory fodder: "I can imagine a malevolent interpretation for this tweet/technology and I don't need actual evidence: my imagined worst case scenario is obviously true."
Those Ohio voting results that are graphed, though, if real, are really different between 2016 and 2024, and different in ways that are not explainable by a shift right in the electorate. The graph shows the kind of anomaly I'd expect from poorly done manipulation of results (presidential vote jumps up for Rs while votes for R senate candidates do not, presidential vote for Ds drops while other D votes are unchanged, happens only in swing states [allegedly]). One thing that is abundantly clear is that mainline news organizations are absolutely horrible at that kind of forensic analysis of numerical results. I don't know if the data in the graph is real, I don't know if the associated claims (that the same pattern repeated in other swing states and didn't show up in non-swing states) are supported. I remember that Harris overperformed in swing states generally (compared to no-swing states), which certainly doesn't fit the conspiracy. As I said above, this doesn't seem like a trustworthy reporter. I'm not going to read further based on this. But there is room in my head for "maybe this did happen."
33. Because by the time Nixon pulled out of Vietnam it was already obvious that South Vietnam was a bust, whereas in JFK's time it was still possible to imagine it was viable?
But nobody in their right mind thought JFK was going to pull out. They might have hoped that Johnson would limit US commitment.
34: oh, yeah, sure, I can totally believe "maybe this did happen." But the linked post is making it sound like a slam dunked smoking gun when what they actually have only supports "maybe this did happen." It's too sad to be funny.
PSA: the piece is mostly or wholly written by an LLM.
I still haven't gotten used to that not meaning a Master of Laws.
There are 23 girls missing from a summer camp in Texas, after crazy flooding. That's so nightmarish.
Hello Muddah, hello Fadduh.
Here I am at Camp Higher Water.
39: I was wondering if you were all OK, then thought to look at a map since I forget "Central Texas" isn't just I-35 from Texas to San Antonio.
That cause of the swing in results would be consistent with swing state only, and with depressing blue turnout as well as boosting red turnout.
Except that Harris overperformed in swing states versus nationally - significantly so.
And yet no one ever asks if Sadi Carnot was assassinated because he wanted to get out of French Indochina. Sus!