November 9 2016

[Pali]

First off, Clinton has a pretty good record on environmental issues.

 

Second... so what is your prescription then?  Frankly, I think your equivalence of the two is rather absurd, but even granting it, what is the course of action to take in your mind?  "Protesting not voting" could be argued to be what cost Bernie the primary, and it's also a slogan without any depth to it - what are we protesting for?  What is the plan for getting our protest demands actually enforced?  What are we willing to do to demand they be enforced?  The last protests I took part in had 100,000 people present, and they ended up with Scott Walker retaining his governorship twice because too many joined in the protest parties but didn't actually vote when the recall and second-term elections were held.  If you think voting is unimportant, what do you think we should be doing - starting another civil war, hoping to start some kind of revolution?  Kill the rich as a coworker of mine is fond of suggesting?

[Vaerick]

We should be calling for a constitutional convention. To keep a continuity of government, and a stabilized nation the current mechanisms should be ongoing until they can be replaced or absorbed, but essentially, what has to happen, is we must do away with all the crumbling bits that have been built on crumbling bits that have been built on crumbling bits, while keeping the skeleton of the government as a foundation and stepping stone. New amendments dealing with healthcare reform, education, climate change, social rights, and after these are decided and ratified, new muscles and skin can be added to the newly refinished skeleton.

As far as civil war goes, we're past that point. I think if that happened, by the end of it it wouldn't matter- no one would win. We're past the point of where we can go to war with ourselves or other major nations without irrevocably breaking everything.

Ideally, we need everyone to be aware that the game itself is not designed for us to win. Not sure where the quote is from, but "Poor American's do not look at themselves as a proletariat, but rather a  group of temporarily embarrassed millionaires." 

Protest and mass unrest can take many forms, I don't have a specific answer to this, but it needs to be different in the delivery system than in the past (single planned marches, sit ins, protests, etc). New age needs new tactics. It needs to be asymmetrical warfare waged by a peaceful citizens army with the goal of disrupting their machinations wherever possible. For example, the DAPL protesters have already cost the company something like 6 million dollars and counting, and I am sure there will also be some legal ramifications and or payoffs coming in the future. Companies can't keep that up forever, and their crackdowns will only be effective if there are too few people to stand the line. Neither businesses nor politicians want mass amounts of legitimately angry people drawing attention to their shenanigans.

Just off the top of my head.
 

[Vaerick]

And no, Pali, what cost Bernie the election was theft and cheating. Collusion and illegal donations. Possibly outright electioneering. Bernie didn't lose, he was robbed.

[Vaerick]

Also, something fundamentally important- the Supreme Court should take a firmer role. They should appoint the attorney general, as well as any other justice-related positions. The DoJ should report to them and not to the president, and they should have broader powers against corruption. Which, while we are on THAT topic, it should be federal law, that any official who either writes laws or enforces them should be held to a higher standard, to-wit there should be additional punitive actions taken against those who abuse their position- with mandatory sentencing based on the level of offense.

[Pali]

I'm all for a constitutional convention, but that is something that will not happen for some time, if ever.  In the meantime, we're faced with an election right now.  I don't see how working for a convention later has anything to do with choosing who I vote for in two weeks.

 

You are welcome to continue to assert that the primary was stolen from Bernie, but the reality is that polls consistently had Hillary in the lead from the start.  Those polls lined up pretty well overall with how the votes actually came down.  How the votes came down lined up pretty well with how delegates were apportioned.  Sanders had the youth vote overwhelmingly, but Clinton had the 45+ crowd just as overwhelmingly, and the older crowd votes more, especially in primaries.  Want to claim that the DNC rigged the votes or otherwise stole it?  Provide evidence to back up that claim.  The DNC emails don't contain it - all they show is that the party was willing to work on her behalf against him through messaging and propaganda, not that they even considered vote tampering.

 

The Department of Justice, which the attorney general heads, is an executive branch department.  It is responsible for law enforcement, and law enforcement should be separate from law-making and from law-judging.  You are asking for cops and courts to be the same thing - this is NOT the path we should be taking.

[Manual Labour]

I agree with almost everything Vaerick has said, but Pali is right, any kind of reform is a pipe dream.

The only hope is for a spontaneous mass awakening, hehe, good luck. The kids of today are so damn brainwashed and education (even in the Ivy League) is so piss poor it will be a surprise if anyone knows anything in 15 years in America.

Meanwhile lets keep debating which bathroom trannies should use, and put in laws that effectively revoke free speech if you offend someone, and the death penalty for offending a religion. These progressive moves will surely solidify our glorious north american future. Or maybe we can pool all our resources into the war against institutional racism and sexism (LOL!) and then we will truly be free amiright?...

[Vaerick]

As long as the system keeps moving forward nothing will be different. We essentially, as a people, need to bring it to a stop. 

 

At this point nothing but massive upheaval is going to even halfway mitigate the many ongoing natural disasters. Let alone the other burdens in the country. 

i don't like saying this but I don't believe incremental change is feasible anymore- not with the status quo. By the time it is righted in that manner it will be far too late. 

[Vaerick]

And yeah I think they went after those bathroom laws precisely because they are incapable or unwilling to do any meaningful work. 

[Vaerick]

As for those "polls" it's almost all bullshit. Msm has been proven to have collaborated with the dnc and the hrc campaign. That is subversion and manipulation of the public will . 

 

Then we have what happened in brooklyn (120k dropped from Bernies hometown but not elsewhere? Walks like a duck and talks like a duck) and elsewhere. Proof or no it was stolen. The signs are clear if not exact. 

[f0xx]

FBI is re-opening their investigation against Hillary.

 

 

Let's see how they are going to cover this one up.

 

[FatMike]

Yeah, just saw that on twitter. Makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. There are lots of places I can think of that will good for her to get 3 hots and a cot for a few years that aren't names The White House.

[Celerity]

Trump's chances just got a lot better.

[FatMike]

I so hope the walls come crashing in on her. I just cannot abide by lies and corruption. I don't care if she was the perfect candidate that could fix every issue I care about with a wave of a magic wand and make the world a better place for everyone.....she's a dirty, despicable, "DEPLORABLE", nasty, mean, inconsiderate, just plain bad person.

[Pali]

4 hours ago, Vaerick said:

As for those "polls" it's almost all bullshit. Msm has been proven to have collaborated with the dnc and the hrc campaign. That is subversion and manipulation of the public will . 

Right.  Polls run by universities are bullshit because they're part of the MSM and work for the DNC.

 

New York has a long history of doing its elections badly.  On top of that, even if all 120k of those people had voted for Bernie, he still would have lost New York.  "Proof or no" does not fly with me - I require actual evidence of collusion.

[FatMike]

 

[Vaerick]

All the Dws stuff and Donna Brazile passing questions doesn't raise any red flags either? CNN leaving millenias off of polls to boost hrc numbers?  debates being scheduled on days and times with low coverage? Pretty sure Harvard and Yale have said that minus the election fraud in various forms that sanders would have taken in by leaps and bounds. I find it suspicious he can fill an arena of 30k and Clinton had to cancel events because she couldn't get enthusiasm for a turn out even when Bernie stumped for her. 30k vs canceled events should say it all. And that's just the shady shit. There's also the outright treachery of the two party system controlling our elections. Erroneous party offiliation to even vote for Bernie in the first place favors establishment backed candidates to the point of lockout. less than 20% of people voted for hrc or trump in the primaries. Then they take there two candidates and lockout everyone again after. Not to mention lobbyists as super delegates. It goes on and on and on and on. illegal or no. Proof or no. What we witnessed was the subversion of representative government for the benefit of a select few. It was fraud. It was cheating. It was and is morally wrong. 

[Pali]

There is a difference between propagandizing for Clinton, which we have evidence that the DNC considered doing (but little evidence that these considerations actually turned into actions), and vote tampering.  Evidence of one is not evidence of the other.  What CNN did or didn't do with its polls (again - evidence?) is irrelevant when considering other polling, including many non-media polls, that consistently found similar results.  You're "pretty sure" about Harvard and Yale - how about some sources to back that up?  An argument from incredulity regarding audience sizes is not convincing to me either - rally attendance is hardly a scientific sampling of likely voters.

 

Our system having two parties is a natural consequence of elections being on a winner-take-all, first-past-the-post basis, particularly given that congressmen and electors are apportioned on a per-district basis.  Want more than two parties?  Then we need to switch to a system of proportional representation, such as a parliamentary system where we vote for parties rather than candidates and legislative seats and electors are then given based on what percentage of votes the parties get, because otherwise political power is going to end up concentrated in two large parties as smaller parties conglomerate with those close to themselves to stop those far from themselves from gaining ascendance.  This is not a conspiracy in action, it is game theory in action.  If we ever want a third party to be more than a momentary upset, we need to change our entire system of voting.

[Vaerick]

1. Collusion between politicians and leading news sources is a huge breach of trust. The press is supposed to be an antogonistic check on the government. They aren't supposed to buddy up to spin a story. Illegal or not it's wrong. 

2. I'm at work on my phone and have no idea how to cite websites for you just now but rest assured they are coming. 

3. That's the whole point. The system itself is broken. It's limping along solely because of years of momentum, propaganda, and money else wise it would have died already. My whole point of this is that the problems are beyond the solution making capabilities that exist. Nothing that any of us care about is going to be changed for the better in a system that lacks the raw ability to do so. and I promise you that voting in people to a broken system will not yield results. Our votes do not matter until the system functions.

Society and technology is different and the means of suppressing the masses so much greater than ever before. The war for our rights to not be serfs is going on right now. And no vote for an oligarch is going to stop it. 

[Pali]

1) I agree - I don't like how cozy the various media groups are with their preferred parties either, though a bit of historical perspective shows that this has been the case pretty much from the start (and could even be argued to be less of a problem now than it used to be given the Internet allowing everyone a platform of sorts).  What does this have to do with my point that plenty of non-MSM sources gave Clinton similar leads over Sanders?

 

2) Fair enough.

 

3) Yes, the system sucks.  I'm not disagreeing with that.  But complete disengagement from the system doesn't get us anywhere either.  Constitutional conventions aren't going to materialize out of thin air - they will require us to vote into office politicians willing to call for one.  You seem to be taking an all or nothing approach here, where if a pol isn't trying to completely solve an issue, the fact that they're willing to do things that may still mitigate the fallout is fine to ignore.  Clinton and Trump have a very stark delineation between them on environmental issues; you seem to be saying that I should just stay home on Election Day because Clinton doesn't go as far as I want her to on those issues, or because voting doesn't matter.  To the first, I think that is an unreasonable level of ideological Puritanism to hold.  To the second, voting may not be speaking with a loud voice, but it is still the only voice I've got that will be heard, and I see no reason to be silent.

[Vaerick]

Ok, a couple of sources. As per specific links to various issues in the primary and particular oddities it will take a great deal of time but I'll work on finding the pertinent ones. A lot is naturally going to be from wikileaks.

Now for the studies, I was a little off. The one in particular I was thinking of was from Stanford and Tilburg Universities. This one is particular to the primaries. The second was from before, from Harvard and Sidney about the status of  elections and their integrity (election integrity project) to begin with. Most of the world failed but we failed harder than most. The third is a link to George Washington's farewell address which in the part about factions pretty much sums up what we are seeing. The fourth is info on the racketeering lawsuit that has been filed against the dnc (btw, their defense is that sanders supporters knew hrc was favored so they were just dumbshits for even trying). I will add more as I find them, but these four are a good core start to what's going on.

I'm not saying you shouldn't vote but I am saying don't hold your breath on solutions. It's one step forward and two back.  For example, Obama ended the ground campaign (largely) in Iraq, and then opened up what, four new wars on top of the existing ones? I know it's not all his blame, but that's pretty much how it works. Or Keystone gets blocked, and then DAPL and others start rising to take its place. On and on and on. And quite frankly, particularly on the Climate change issue, but maybe with WWIII as well, it is very much too little too late. Aside from the rapidly deteoriating natural systems, the increasingly hostile anti-Russia propaganda/rhetoric  has left our timeframe for "fix it or die" even smaller than ever. Incremental steps will only be taken once the moneyed interest can suck out all they can and move on to the next target. Since Regan slashed the upper taxes from something like 70% to something like 30% when he was leaving office, the concentrations of wealth and power are in such extremes that it may already be too late, because let's face it eventually, the disparity will be such that it WON'T be possible to stop the erosion let alone take them back.







https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6mLpCEIGEYGYl9RZWFRcmpsZk0/view?pref=2&pli=1

https://sites.google.com/site/electoralintegrityproject4/projects/expert-survey-2/the-year-in-elections-2015

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/election-fraud-rico-lawsuit-alleging-widespread-e-vote-rigging-dnc-primaries-derail-clinton-nomination/

[Vaerick]

Oddly enough, this just popped up on my twitter. Apparently a newly released tape of HRC talking about Palestine and how we shouldn't have pushed for elections and if we did "we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”  Kinda sets the mood for her whole train of thought really.

http://observer.com/2016/10/2006-audio-emerges-of-hillary-clinton-proposing-rigging-palestine-election/

[Pali]

6 hours ago, Vaerick said:

I'm not saying you shouldn't vote but I am saying don't hold your breath on solutions.

I'm not.  When it comes to the future of humanity, I am not an optimist.  I don't think Clinton will be anything more than 4 more years of Obama, and I've not been overly happy with the last 8 years.  My position throughout this thread has simply been that a Clinton presidency will be better than a Trump presidency.  If you agree with that, then we're on the same page.

 

6 hours ago, Vaerick said:

And quite frankly, particularly on the Climate change issue, but maybe with WWIII as well, it is very much too little too late.

I'm well aware of that.  As I said, the idea at this point is to mitigate its worst effects - while I'd prefer us to treat this as a WW2 level emergency and restructure the economy nation-wide, that is simply not going to happen in the current political climate, which means we're going to be stuck dealing with the effects of climate change for far longer than I'll be alive.  Apologies to future generations.  Personally, I'm expecting WW3 to come not from any conflict between the US and Russia - I don't know where this idea that Clinton wants war with Russia comes from, but I don't think that either government is comprised of individuals stupid enough to want that - but rather from the need for hundreds of millions of people to move over the next several decades as the places they live stop supporting human life, and the rest of the world not wanting them to come in.

 

Now, as for your sources.  Both 1 and 4 are fairly linked - both are arguing their cases largely based on exit poll data not lining up correctly with voting results, though 1 also bases some of its position on how states with and without paper trails ended up being reported.  We'll get back to them.  Let's turn to 2, which you claim says we failed harder than most... yet we came in at number 47 out of 139, so we were in the top third (better, not worse, than most), with a ranking of "high" election integrity.  Is this as high as I'd like?  Hell no.  But it's also not all that damning, either.  On top of that, this is nowhere near specific enough to be relevant for the Hillary/Bernie primaries, which is what we've been discussing in regards to election integrity (edit: I didn't dig too deeply into this one, so if there is a relevant subsection you think I missed, feel free to provide a direct link and/or quote)

 

1 and 4.  4 is a report of a lawsuit being filed that alleges that the exit polling data shows greater discrepancies with the resulting vote tallies than we accept as legitimate in other countries.  1 is partially based on the same data and argument, with the other portion of 1 being an argument based on Clinton outperforming Sanders in locations that relied on electronic records vs locations with paper records.  Let's start with 1.  Snopes has an article on the study cited in 1, which brings much of it into question.  First, this was not a Stanford study - this is a graduate student paper that has not been subjected to peer review, which immediately makes it an unreliable source of information (the August 8th update says "In regards to peer review, we will seek publication in an academic journal at a later time" - this does not inspire confidence).  Second, the paper claims "As such, the potential for election fraud in voting procedures is strongly related to enhanced electoral outcomes for Secretary Clinton. In the Appendix, we show that this relationship holds even above and beyond alternative explanations, including the prevailing political ideology and the changes in support over time."  The appendix does not in any way detail alternative explanations, nor how they are dismissed.  "Having looked at the three main arguments against the exit polls, finding that either of these three arguments seem to hold no support, and even contradicted, by the independent numbers." is as in-depth as the appendix gets regarding these alternative explanations by my reading.

 

Third, and most pertinent, Snopes quotes an analysis by the Nation: "While exit polls are used to detect potential fraud in some countries, ours aren’t designed, and aren’t accurate enough, to accomplish that purpose. [emphasis Pali's] [A polling company VP], who has conducted exit polls in fragile democracies like Ukraine and Venezuela, explained that there are three crucial differences between their exit polls and our own. Polls designed to detect fraud rely on interviews with many more people at many more polling places, and they use very short questionnaires, often with just one or two questions, whereas ours usually have twenty or more. Shorter questionnaires lead to higher response rates. Higher response rates paired with larger samples result in much smaller margins of error. They’re far more precise. But it costs a lot more to conduct that kind of survey, and the media companies that sponsor our exit polls are only interested in providing fodder for pundits and TV talking heads. All they want to know is which groups came out to vote and why, so that’s what they pay for."  This seems to fairly effectively demolish the notion that our media exit polls should be lining up with great accuracy with the vote results - which means that 4 is entirely based on a misunderstanding in how polls designed to catch vote fraud are distinct from how our media conducts exit polls to provide headlines, as is the latter half of 1.

 

What your sources provide is, at best, reason for extra scrutiny of the votes - and the only part that really holds up to critical analysis (edit: and is relevant to our discussion of the Democratic primaries) is the first half of 1, which regards the differential outcomes in places with and without paper trails.  Even this half of 1 is providing incomplete data, as it examines only 31 out of 50 states, which leads me to wonder how well - or if at all - the data from the other 19 would have fit into their thesis.  This is the kind of question that peer-review would likely provide illumination on, but these students didn't wait for peer-review to release their paper to the public.

 

I'm sorry, but if you intended these sources to convince me that the DNC rigged the primary votes in multiple states, they have utterly failed to do so.

 

Edit: Sorry for all the edits.  I'm a bit intoxicated after a night out of Halloween celebrations, and re-reads found a number of places that I felt would benefit from elucidation.

[Pali]

As for the Clinton audio recording, I have three reactions.  The first is to note that this is being published by Donald Trump's son-in-law.  The second is that anyone who thinks that the US doesn't interfere in elections in other countries is ignorant of history - we've been doing it for a long time, and we generally only don't like it when it's someone else doing it to us.  The third would be to inquire as to the context of these statements - we have here a 14 second recording of two sentences, which we have no context for in the recording, nor do we have any way to verify that the audio has not been altered in some way.  I'd very much appreciate the Observer releasing the other 45 minutes of the tape unedited.  

 

A similar problem exists for the recently released O'Keefe videos that seem to provide fairly damning evidence of DNC-related groups intentionally stirring up trouble at Trump rallies - O'Keefe has a history of deceptively editing videos (the recent ACORN and Planned Parenthood scandals were created by his videos, which did not honestly present events), which is a serious problem when he seems to finally have some that may indeed have some grounds to back their claims and yet he still won't provide unedited versions; he may actually have something we need to know about here, but he's made himself too unreliable a source to trust edited videos from.

[Vaerick]

Man I wrote this whole other thing and it timed out.

I'll just say this. It's politics. It's designed to be operated in shadows and restrict evidence. So calling for evidence in and of itself is a large waste of time. Especially when the press works with the government to set the story. If you want a sense of what is happening you have to read between the lines. Comey himself said, others would have been jailed. Bill meeting Lynch on the tarmac was a travesty. And it's not like that's the only funny thing that happened.

I get the notion of HRC over Trump, and that will probably carry the election. If you, however, excuse HRC's actions so as to fight Trump it's all a loss, because what she did will have been legitimized and set as a precedent. That will allow the next one to justify doing worse. I won't reward her behavior or Trumps. I was ready to vote for her before the primary ended, but then all the dws stuff happened and she did what? Hired her to the HRC campaign. The chair of the "neutral" dnc getting hired to the HRC camp should say it all. I won't vote for that level of crap.

I've never even met a hardcore HRC fan and the Trump fans I've met are mostly idiots (with some exceptions). My point with this statement is that it's not like either of these people have high percentages of support from the general population. If more people gave them the finger they wouldn't be able to get away with this bs.

I'm still hoping for the universe to intercede. I'm sure it won't but one can hope.

EDIT:
At the end of the day you gotta believe what you think is best. I am glad we had the conversation though. I understand your points. I hope I've made mine clear (sorry, there's never gonna be a direct link of Hillary admitting all the shenanigans- not unless hell freezes over, but it's not like that absolves her of her sins either, so to some degree you'll have to forgive my assertions). I dunno though- for me, after what I've seen I couldn't say it was morally correct nor in the best interest of the nation to vote for either. I think we need to look beyond this election, set up a citizen's union and a non-violent citizen's army for the sole purpose of bringing strength to bare against ANY bad politician, group, entity, or business. I think this election has effectively ceased to matter in the bigger picture, weighed in the long run.

[Pali]

2 hours ago, Vaerick said:

Comey himself said, others would have been jailed

No, he did not - he specifically said that they would not have been.  "Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.

In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here. [emphasis Pali's]

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now."

 

Security or administrative sanctions is how others have been punished for similar acts, not jail.  One can argue that this disqualifies her from the Presidency, but it doesn't do so in any sort of legally binding way.

 

2 hours ago, Vaerick said:

So calling for evidence in and of itself is a large waste of time.

This attitude is one that I find dangerous.  One can use any sort of logical wrangling one wants to support any conclusion if you work with the premise that evidence does not matter.  Evidence must be the baseline for how we judge factual claims.

 

As for the equivalence of the two... I think Bill Maher put it well last night.

 

Thanks for the chat, Vaerick, but I don't know that we're going to get anywhere continuing it.  We've both said our parts.