The Rosetta Stone came in very handy.

In New Berlin, Wisconsin, a woman named Kim Teschan, 64, told a canvasser accompanied by a Post reporter that she was fired up to vote after learning about how “corrupt” the 2020 election was from videos on Facebook.

~sigh

A Postal Service spokesperson confirmed to The Post that the man in the video is an employee who had appropriately delivered the ballots. When The Post told Matlack that the man was a verified employee carrying a post office basket, Matlack responded, “Anybody can obtain those baskets.” Later, he added, “So working for the post office means you’re incapable of committing any sort of election fraud?”

And that’s a strawman. The argument was not that no postal service workers are capable of committing fraud, but that this particular postal service worker was simply delivering the mail, which happens to include mail-in ballots.

Protip: That oversharing is a misuse of a legitimate conversational tactic where you’re sort of trying to “prime the pump” and get a both-people-sharing thing going. The problem arises when people generally don’t want to get particularly deep, early into most sorts of interpersonal relationships. Trying to do this anyway can leave people with a negative impression.

To get around this, there are other conversational tools. A useful one is the innocuous question, something like “oh, what was that like?” or “huh, how’d that go?” after a simple “what you been up to?”, “how’s your day going?” or somesuch. Even if you don’t really care, manufacturing the curiosity to dig a little deeper into surface-level things keeps the conversation flowing while avoiding getting into any actually uncomfortable topics. It can often open up into an opportunity for humorous observations or interjections, maintaining that lighter tone and keeping people comfortable with surface-level banter.

Conversation is a bit of an art, though, so its useful to develop a wide range of tools in your conversational toolbox for deployment in a wide variety of individual circumstances. Banter-heavy tv shows like Firefly can provide helpful templates if your real life situation does not give you much practice opportunity, though getting out into the world and practicing on random people is always necessary.

There’s a lot of technological possibilities. Also just things like food imports.

Which is right?

Why not none of them?

Not entirely. A few months ago AOC was discussing how her own internal polling of her own district ended up under-estimating her support by around 10 percentage points. It was in that hour long talk she gave explaining why she was still supporting Biden as the candidate, before he dropped out.

Polling has always been tricky, but I think in the past decade its gotten nigh-impossible. These institutions now seem to be more focused on not losing their jobs than actually trying to gauge support for a politician.

Makes me wonder if issue polling instead of politician polling is better. I imagine it probably is a little bit, but I’m not sure.

I don’t actually know what they got in exchange, but I’m guessing the N Koreans got the better end of the deal.

That is attention you paid to those tanks, resources consumed to deal with them.

(resources that could’ve otherwise hit an IFV full of guys)

You can’t electronically jam a tank. It also forces your opponents to pay a lot of attention to it, taking resources away from focusing on your squishy light infantry.

Musk has posted around 1,300 times on X this year about immigration and voter fraud.

Yeesh. And that’s just a couple topics. He knows he has other companies too, right?

I think they’re just trying to set expectations as high as possible so that if they lose, then their accusations of cheating will sound more plausible, giving them more room to actually try to cheat the election.

I think this is less “sports fans destroy own city” and more “existing criminals take advantage of chaos to get away with crimes”.

Personally I believe there is some responsibility on the massed, drunk sports fans to beat up and deter looters from taking advantage of their celebrations.

I actually sort of like this idea. People would still figure it out, of course, but it’d shift people’s default attention from the person to the platform.

He doesn’t gain much from pandering to his own supporters. There are still some people that are on the fence, not many, but a few. People that do believe in regulation cutting but also think the President should be a role model. This will probably tip a very small number of them, which matters in a close race.

That’s a pretty slow “slicing through defenses” if you ask me…

having little effect.

I disagree. Many people are brought out, you can very commonly find people’s personal accounts. The problem is they’re continuously recruiting as well, and do overwhelmingly well particularly with young male gamers who are disproportionately active online.

We can’t forget that every year, millions of people turn 18. Right now, four whole years worth of them don’t really personally remember a lot about the Trump presidency, they were doing the whole growing up thing.

I do agree that people do bear responsibility when they seek it out. I don’t think that’s most though, for most its the default from their local culture that they need education and critical thinking to save them from. Much like religion in general, if nobody helps you break free with independent ideas and critical thinking skills, you simply won’t. It’s a default of sorts, depending on the overall environment you were reared in.

Conspiracy theories, which underpin so many fascist movements, are fun, is part of the problem.

What’s more pleasant, living in a harsh and difficult reality where you’re a small fry and real change is hard and life is mostly dull, or living in a dream world where all your problems are “their” fault and you can live with an emotional sense of superiority?

You can be an egalitarian, having to be equal with everyone, or you can be better than some people. Then, remembering that you can always just avoid thinking about contradictory evidence, try to objectively decide which you might prefer. Being an equal, or being a superior? I mean, does it matter what’s true? Does it make a difference in your day to day life if black and white people actually are fundamentally equal, if you don’t really have to treat them that way?

Imo, this is how it gets the smart people. Running theory anyway.

Agreed. I would point to widespread systemic racism as an evidence of this festering. And this was despite Ulysses S Grant’s, as President and controlling both Houses of Congress at the time, attempted harsh persecution of the KKK during Reconstruction. There’s just only so much you can do against what is essentially a domestic guerilla campaign. They hide. Really well. They come out and do things when you’re not watching, and flee when faced with real danger.

It’s not a strawman, I think you mean shifting a goalpost. It’s not that either though, since my position has remained completely consistent. I’m arguing it does not work, the problem of right wing authoritarianism was never actually addressed. It was driven underground, it was hidden, it’s symptoms were masked as people went around thinking “no problems here!”. This was a grave error. From its position underground, it was only a matter of time before it at some point rose threaten society again.

The solution you advocate for requires a neverending process of rolling the dice, hoping no Nazi infiltration into courts or higher government has happened. This does not work, it is not a viable long-term solution. A long term solution must take both a societal and medical perspective into account to understand how a person actually becomes a Nazi.

The medical part is largely under-discussed, it’s only recently that physiological changes in the brain differentiating these sorts of conservatives are becoming more recognized, and explaining why an ideology of fear is so much more effective on them than you or I.

The court order would have never been brought forward if the ideology had been successfully stamped out post-war. Ultimately, an idea cannot be forcibly destroyed though, only driven into hiding where it can continue to fester underground and through back-channels, as the John Birch Society did here in the States.

This is why addressing the root socioeconomic and individual psychological causes becomes necessary. While most people like to focus on one or the other, I think both are necessary.

edit for grammar