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ELECTION_FOLLIES

                                             January 16, 2020

An open letter, directed to the pundit
aggregators at electoral-vote.com, for      They're good
lack of anywhere better:                    representatives
                                            of what I think     Us crazy lefties
                                            of as "the          just don't
                                            moderate jihad".    understand
                                                                political
                                                                realities,
                                                                you know.
I think you guys are missing what I would call the Real
Story with the great Sanders/Warren feud: the story
developed tremendously fast, with all sides handed their
scripts and playing along in unison with remarkable
rapidity.  I've spent a few hours a day working the
reddit "politics" group, voting down what looks an
awful lot like hired shills pushing divisive lines
(Warren is a snake, she's a known liar, etc.) targeted
at what I gather is supposed to be a Bernie-dominated
forum.

I also, by the way, see quite a few people like myself
refusing to go off into the who-said-what weeds, arguing
there are bigger issues at play. Contempt for CNN's
management of the debate (and stage management of this
controversy) is rampant.

You, on the other hand, are happy to go with the
Bernie-so-sexist line, and will no doubt take the
"Warren is a snake" guys at face value-- that's always
the "mainstream" view of reality: minority factions get
dismissed because of the more extreme members, and the
suspicion of folks like myself that the extremists are
hired guns (and perhaps people conned by the hired
guns), that's mere "conspiracy theory".

And yet, we do know that there are phoney voices out
there on the net these days: we're allowed to talk
about the foreign ones, but some domestic ones have been    BROCKPUPPETS
well-documented also (e.g. Hillary's brockpuppets last
primary season).

Even if by some miracle every domestic political faction
in the United States is too classy to use these
techniques, even if there are no foreign players who are
yet playing these games, the mere suspicion that they
are is enough to poison the narrative: there's an
entirely reasonable fear that our political discourse
has been hijacked that makes it even harder than usual
to take a contrary voice seriously.

I would argue these vulnerabilities are fully as bad as
the obvious weakness of our electoral machinery itself,
it casts doubt on every outcome, undermining the sense
of legitmacy of democracy itself.  We will never come      THE_TOY_WEB
away from this election feeling like "the people have
spoken".


And yes, here we go today, from Zenger at electoral-vote:

https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Maps/Jan16.html#item-7

  "And there is little question that this has lit the fuse
   on long-simmering tensions between supporters of the two
   candidates. On Twitter, in particular, things have
   turned downright nasty."

And that, despite the admission:

  "Needless to say, Twitter is hardly a representative
  sample of the electorate"

He goes on to remark:

  "In the end, the ironic net effect of all this is to make
  things at least a little (and maybe more than a little) easier
  for the decidedly centrist Joe Biden."

An "ironic effect", yes.  Unintended consequences.

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