This shouldn't need to be said at this point, but given the new Speaker's apparent beliefs, it bears repeating:
While there are weaknesses in US election infrastructure, there is simply no evidence whatsoever that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen" or that technical attacks in any way altered its outcome.
58 of my colleagues and I wrote this shortly after these nonsensical conspiracy theories began to spread two years ago. It remains as true now as it was then. https://www.mattblaze.org/papers/election2020.pdf
@mattblaze it's a mistake, both factual and rhetorical, to say there is no evidence instead of saying the evidence is scant and uncompelling.
It's like, yes, there is evidence that the world is flat. It's poor evidence and the overwhelming body of evidence and analysis debunks it. But it exists.
If one wants to engage with someone who has questions about the election, they're going to be immediately shut out once they deny that the evidence exists.
At that point they're clearly gaslighting and won't make any progress.
Although, if the goal is just to preach to the choir or signal tribalism, have at it.
@volkris you’re not as clever ad you think you sound. This isn’t a freshman philosophy class.
@mattblaze who said anything about philosophy?
This is really about rhetoric and political science. This is 100% about real world choice of words.
Philosophy doesn't enter into it.
The moment a person feels gaslit they're going to shut down and your argument is not going to be convincing.
Again, maybe your goal is not to convince. That's fair. The choir will still eat it up.
But if you do want to reach some people with misguided beliefs, then you have to reach them where they are.
@volkris made up bullshit isn’t evidence.
@mattblaze that might be, but AGAIN, if you want to convince someone then you have to meet them where they are.
If I'm a fervent believer that the earth is round and your first words to me are, "Seeing as the world is flat..." I'm going to start with the assumption that you don't know what you're talking about, and you're unlikely to convince me of your perspective.
Maybe a person does believe a bunch of made up bullshit about the election. Fine. If you want to reach them you have to engage with that.
Again, IF your goal goes beyond preaching to the choir.
@volkris Can you give some examples of people being successfully deprogrammed of the belief that the election was rigged, stolen, etc.?
@mark I know a few people personally.
Just one example was a friend who brought up statistical evidence that the vote counts didn't satisfy the expected distribution, but once you went through the stats with them, they were satisfied that the evidence was due to a misunderstanding of the statistical expectations.
And that's exactly how we (as a society) should have addressed those questions, not denying that they existed but answering them.
SO MANY reasonable people would have been assured of a fair vote who even to this day don't know.
@volkris I don't believe that, at scale, questions could be answered. Not when there is a dedicated core of non-believing agitators who have something to gain from raising questions forever. The nature of communication at scale ruins nuance and subtlety.
But I am pleased to hear you had success in person-to-person contact. I think it's asking a lot of people to be able to pull that off, but I won't diminish it worked for you.
@mark the thing is, once a claim has been generally debunked, non-believing agitators are not only rejected by the mainstream, but they're rejected even more powerfully the stronger they agitate.
Heck, I saw this play out anecdotally just last night, hanging out with a group where one person became more and more forceful trying to promote a far out theory about the world, which just annoyed the rest more and more, so they got more and more excluded from the conversation.
No, you'll never convince everyone, but you don't have to.
Address the questions and concerns of a mainstream and what's left will be rendered marginalized and powerless.
@volkris
once a claim has been generally debunked, non-believing agitators are not only rejected by the mainstream, but they’re rejected even more powerfully the stronger they agitate.
I'm not seeing evidence of this hypothesis. Basically all of Trump's lawsuits were thrown out, and his supporters' response to that fact was that he hasn't been given a fair shake by... (error actual opposing actor not found), not that, maybe, the common thread was he was filing bad lawsuits.
It appears that people believe what they want to believe and fit facts to that belief structure, most of the time. Especially when there's nothing as meaningful as "a personal friendship" to influence them to alter their beliefs.