Mastodawn

Soatok Dreamseeker

The "2024 election was stolen" conspiracy theories are just a rehash of the "2020 election was stolen" conspiracy theories and this is both sad and frustrating.

People choose to believe these narratives because they validate feelings and beliefs about how unfair the outcome of the election is; because they are profoundly ignorant of how the elections are conducted, secured, and validated; because it's easier than looking at America for what it really is.

If you see these kind of posts and can't help but notice the presentation style has a certain "FOX News" aesthetic, yeah, that's kind of deliberate.

Soatok Dreamseeker 3d ago

The biggest problem with the kinds of Democrats that fall for this nonsense is this unfounded belief that we're somehow The Good Guys.

Exhibit A:

https://www.inc.com/don-reisinger/jeff-bezos-says-big-tech-companies-should-ignore-employee-outcry-partner-with-us-government.html

This might be a subtle point but they're not arguing "We're the guys who only perform good actions, or actions in service of goodness", they're saying "goodness is inherent to your [national] identity", which lets them turn a blind eye to bad actions that conflict with their self-image.

MAGA shatters their illusion.

There are no "good guys". There are only good and bad choices, if you're lucky.

The belief of Goodness as an identity is best avoided.

Jeff Bezos Says Big Tech Companies Should Ignore Employee Outcry and Partner With the U.S. Government

The U.S., he says, is 'the good guys.'

Inc

Soatok Dreamseeker 3d ago

If you want to use some character (Superman, Jesus, the sexy werewolves from that Van Hellsing movie, whatever) as an abstract ideal to strive for, okay, sure.

But the first step towards committing atrocity is failing to recognize one's own capacity for harm.

EinsPossum, Hass-Ära 2.0 3d ago

@soatok those werewolves were pretty nice abstract ideals.

Softwarewolf 3d ago

@soatok I too strive to be a sexy werewolf. Better than being a politician.

Soatok Dreamseeker 3d ago

@faoluin https://youtu.be/XHPPNxeKhCw

typical politician

YouTube

Riley S. Faelan 3d ago

@soatok By way of a sad irony, there's kind of an inherent historic linkage between the Manichean dualism and the rise of Zoroastrianism in Old Persia.

@soatok I think what a lot of Americans don’t realise (or don’t want to admit) is that trump is possibly the most ‘American’ president there’s been so far.

Like, this is what the American empire is about. Invading other countries and killing their people, as well as the absolute prioritisation of the wealth of the capitalist class over the needs and rights of the people. He is much more abrasive about doing it, but the presidents before him were doing the same things, just quieter.

I think this can be best seen in /why/ trump is so deeply unpopular. The issues that are dominating popular discussion for Americans are… cost of living and ICE. A lot of Americans are unhappy with government because the misfortune is pointed inwards at them too now. Hell, even the main concern people have with the Iranian war is an economic one, not the ‘killing people’ part.

Earthshine 3d ago

@Mudlark @soatok when you get down to it the whole idea of saying this is American or that is American is one of national identity politics and not one of reality. I think it's important to keep saying, as an American, that this is not what our country is about, because when we stop saying that is when the worst people win and get to make America in their image and the real atrocities begin in earnest.

@Mudlark @soatok

trump is possibly the most ‘American’ president there’s been so farbeen saying this exact thing :vape:
"this isn't america"
buddy i have some bad news for you

Andrea (Drea) Tamar Pinski 3d ago

@Mudlark @soatok

It is the same reason why folks hated andrew Jackson. Because he was not quiet about what he was doing. While all other presidents before and after have a similar policy towards the indigenous people.

@soatok It's not that surprising they love to view themselves as the "Goodguys". If forced to have to view it as a collection of choices instead of a default "Good" they are then forced to have to acknowledge all the racist, classist, etc shit they have backed and continue to back. It forces them to confront stuff they've backed instead of just blaming the "Badguys" of everything.

As such I would not say MAGA shatters their belief of being the "Goodguy", but re-enforces it. They say the "Badguys" are extra bad now. Sure, they are right that the Republicans are worse than they were, but it does nothing to change what they've done or are doing. Just makes it easier to asside by saying the "Badguys" are now extra bad. Especially since the stepping stones to everything that is going wrong now they had a hand in laying and this belief makes it easy to brush that asside as well.

Soatok Dreamseeker 3d ago

@vvelox It doesn't shatter it for everyone, but the ones for whom MAGA does shatter, they resort to conspiracies.

The Doctor 3d ago

@soatok People want to be lied to.

@soatok many of these look to me like russian state (bot?) accounts, which makes sense if u consider russia would greatly benefit from an american civil war

@lycansubscribe @soatok Many people are nothing more than useful idiots, spreading whatever disinformation campaigns feed them.

This account posts more than 60 times a day. What more needs to be said about the quality?

Riley S. Faelan 3d ago

@soatok For historic context, do you remember how the 2000 election was stolen?

blobcatupsidedown

Riley S. Faelan 3d ago

@soatok The problematic design of Diebold's voting machines was an #infosec topic for years. One of the reasons why Estonia pointedly refused to adopt USA-style machine voting while designing and implementing a crypto-based Internet voting scheme was, well, that.

And, irony of ironies, while conspiracy theorists virtually always talked about ballot stuffing and stuff (there were some long threads about supposedly weird coincidences in county-level tallies which, AFAIK, were thoroughly checked and didn't yield anything actionable), the actual security breach sat in the SCOTUS the whole time. Non-constructive paranoia is weirdly predictable (and exploitable) that way. It tends to prefer the bogeyman to be somewhere close, and to resemble popular tales of historic narratives.

But, strangely enough, The Influencing Machine is also a known paranoid ideation pattern.

Riley S. Faelan 3d ago

@soatok FWIW, I find the moniker 'BlueAnon' to be problematic. It arose as an artificial simulacrum to the QAnon, and is commonly interpreted as indicating a symmetry of "both sides", except there is nothing QAnon-like on either the left side or Democratic Party's side of USA's politics; everything commonly attributed to "BlueAnon" is just small and temporary outbreaks of unfounded gossip.

There's a very interesting write-up of the general pattern by Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. In 1960s, he just described his observations, but the underlying psychology has been thoroughly studied in the decades since, and, well, the systematic paranoia is politically asymmetric.

Ironically, one of the recent developments has been attempts to invent an "LWA", "Left-Wing-Authoritarianism", as a similar both-sides counterpart to RWA, and I believe I have already ranted here about its methodological problems. (Empirically, Altemeyer made kind of a point to look for the left-wing counterpart to RWA as soon as he identified it, back in the eighties, and, basically, what he found is, left-wing brains just don't work the same way, and when they get paranoid, their paranoid ideas — founded or unfounded — are generally not very much like the dominant fascist paranoid ideas, either.)

Soatok Dreamseeker 3d ago

@riley Fair, but I'm still annoyed at democrats spreading the same genre of misinformation as the QAnon bastards

Riley S. Faelan 3d ago

@soatok Calling out the counterfactual rumours makes sense. An important functional difference between the 'sides' is, most people left-of-the-watershed stop repeating rumours once they positively know they're false (and the small subminority who doen't, plus the trollbots, tend to have a degree of isolation, most of the time). QAnonists hardly ever care about fact-checking, and nowadays, are closely integrated into the mainstream GOPster social networks.

If there's a QAnon counterpart on 'our side', the tankie movement is more defensibly that than the pattern of baseless rumours getting sometime rumoured. And the tankies really aren't on our side.

@soatok they *were* playing dirty with voter supression initiatives, and the electoral system in the US was never fair in the first place

@soatok I actually don't know if the 2024 election being stolen is so far-fetched. we already know that trying to rig elections is a longstanding practice in america, from the successful ones like gerrymandering to the unsuccessful january 8th insurrection. we also know that trump and his team have actively tried to rig elections. I find it entirely plausible they managed to cheat some votes somewhere without it being found out

@soatok all of this can coexist with the understanding that trump really does embody the us. he's arguably the most wildly successful american politician in decades, despite being terrible at his job. trump's success reveals the corruption and fragility of the american political system (remember all those checks and balances that turned out to amount to little more than wishful thinking?) as well as the american hunger for bigotry and fascism

@soatok it also reveals the abject failure of the "reasonable" "moderate" republicans to stand by their alleged principles. it reveals the abject failure of the democrats for allowing this to come about in the first place then failing to shore up the guardrails when they got back in power to prevent a repeat of everything. not to mention their absolute unwillingness to meet the moment and stand for anything other than being the lesser evil

@soatok we saw how the dems respected the american people so little that they were unwilling to even pretend they'd stop supplying a genocide for the sake of winning power against an open fascist. the dems have laid bare how eagerly they'd follow republicans to the right

all of this to say that america is fundamentally broken. whether or not the election was stolen, the entire system is bent towards violent fascism. all aspects need to be addressed

Soatok Dreamseeker 3d ago

@Yza Talk to @mattblaze sometime (election security expert)

@soatok @mattblaze i mean, depends what you mean by stolen, right? i'm not saying computers were all hacked or whatever

@soatok absolutely wild people are still drool screaming into the internet about this.

Did not a single person tell them how many news and media agencies have changed ownership in the last year or so?

“Legacy media” lol