Skip to main content

Weak Arguments: They have no kraken

 






I have said very little on this blog -- if anything -- about the post-election controversies in the US which consist largely of Trump and a shrinking group of supporters arguing that they haven't really lost because....

I have said little about it because it was boring, and because I had confidence the process would run its course through the electoral college vote. Anything I said during that period between the two votes would so quickly become dated there'd be no point to having said it.   

Now I'll say this: Trump's arguments were always very weak, even ludicrously so. I actually heard an apparently serious Trump supporter make this point: Biden got a significantly lower vote count in New York State than Hillary Clinton did. This proves he was (except when cheating) a weaker candidate. This proves that all the states that he won and Clinton lost, must not really have been won fairly at all.

Seriously. That’s not only a real argument, it seems to be a fair sample of them.

Just to be clear: here is the answer to that one. The tactical people around Biden were not idiots. They knew that Clinton had lost. They knew that she had gotten more popular votes than Trump largely by running up the score in safe states, safe for ANY Dem nominee, like New York and California. They were smart enough not to make the same mistake. They did little campaigning in the safe states, spent little ad money there, and focused on the battleground states almost exclusively. So, yes, they got fewer votes in some of the safe states than Clinton had. That isn’t proof their candidate was weaker, only that they are capable of arithmetic.

What is the strongest case for election fraud? It is simply that there is always fraud. This is a big country. Fifty states — and DC has 3 electoral votes. More than three hundred million people. There was surely some fraud somewhere. There was likely a lot of precinct-level stuff going in both directions. If you dig enough you’ll find some, somewhere. THAT is the case.

And the counter to that is that if we disregard the results of an election every time that can be (truthfully) said, we’ll have no elective branches of govt left. The evidence for systemic asymmetric voter fraud on Biden’s behalf is paper thin. Mr hair-dye-drain has pursued it because he’s got nothing better to do and the checks aren’t bouncing

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
9 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
17 comments
Read more