Giuliani reveals under oath no evidence for stolen election.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Ceeboo is still lying. “I saw the article.”

No you the “F” didn’t, and you most certainly didn’t read any articles linked or c&p’d to the thread you daft lying door knob. Good Lord, what is it with religionists and lying? MG does it over and over again on the Terr. forum, and the The Donkeys of the Apocalypse do it here.

Stop. damned. Lying. Christian.

- Doc

[ceeboo]

Ceeboo is still lying. “I saw the article.”

No you the F didn’t, and you most certainly didn’t read any articles linked or c&p’d to the thread you daft lying door knob. Good Lord, what is it with religionists and lying? MG does it over and over again on the Terr. forum, and the The Donkeys of the Apocalypse do it here.

Stop. damned. Lying. Christian.

- Doc

My post got you pretty angry eh? Triggered!

You should consider editing your bigotry too - for your own benefit.

[Doctor Steuss]

Rudy Giuliani, Under Oath, Reveals Baseless Origins Of Trump Big Lie Claims

Anything involving Giuliani, and his role in the ole große Lüge always leads me back to his butt cough. Because deep down, I am 12.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Ceeboo is still lying. “I saw the article.”

No you the F didn’t, and you most certainly didn’t read any articles linked or c&p’d to the thread you daft lying door knob. Good Lord, what is it with religionists and lying? MG does it over and over again on the Terr. forum, and the The Donkeys of the Apocalypse do it here.

Stop. damned. Lying. Christian.

- Doc

My post got you pretty angry eh? Triggered!

You should consider editing your bigotry too - for your own benefit.

Yeah, liars who lie about their actions and like to moralize about other people’s behaviors are a trigger for negative emotions associated with a lifetime of Evangelical Christians who profess to disciples of Christ or perfected in His blood or whatever have run their course with me. Stop. damned. Lying. CHRISTIAN.

- Doc

[ceeboo]

My post got you pretty angry eh? Triggered!

You should consider editing your bigotry too - for your own benefit.

Yeah, liars who lie about their actions and like to moralize about other people’s behaviors are a trigger for negative emotions associated with a lifetime of Evangelical Christians who profess to disciples of Christ or perfected in His blood or whatever have run their course with me. Stop. damned. Lying. CHRISTIAN.

- Doc

Yeah - You are definitely pretty embarrassed and furious! Capital letters too? (Interesting)

Maybe you should take a moment to collect yourself? Your making yourself look like a fool.

Again, you really should delete all of your bigotry too.

[Moksha]

Anything involving Giuliani, and his role in the ole große Lüge always leads me back to his butt cough.

When we look at the magnitude and grossness of Guiliani's post-election lies, it calls out for sanctions, fines, and possible incarceration.

[Gadianton]

I don't subscribe to the great man theory of history so much as believe history is the result of many factors, one of which includes the chance involved in one individual of many available candidates seizing the opportunities of a moment that does put their unique imprint on the time.

I think the main reason for the size of the right-wing rebellion movement in the US is just that this group has always been a big part of the American mainstream. It's no recent anomaly.

These are both good thoughts to consider as I get to my main point. I was hoping a couple questions would be answered first, but I suppose that's out, so I'll continue. Joseph Goebbels's beginnings were small, just like Hitler's. As a public speaker, he'd mastered the art of 'stochastic violence' -- he incites but does not direct anything in particular, maintaining personal deniability. He was banned from speaking, got the Nazi party banned from Berlin, had many libel suits against him, and no doubt, 'his side' was full of complaints of censorship and unfairness. What had he done?

There are a whole lot of people who could have been those who were part of a rebellion or a violent mob, but only those who actually were, were. It's super easy to laugh at suggestions that words and propaganda end in serious results unless those results manifest, but then it's even easier to say the results were inevitable. And so there's a natural bias towards consequences and away from intent.

In the leading days to the Jan. 6 capitol riot, inflamed words and declarations of intent are all over the place. Threats, guns, knives, bombs, and a noose all headed to the steps of the capitol. On their way, everyone has deniability. Is this really serious or just frustrated Americans blowing off steam? That question isn't answered until an event either unfolds or it doesn't unfold. A crowd like that doesn't know what its doing until it either does it, or doesn't do it. Even though there were threats of blood and all the tools to draw blood at the capitol steps, when officers started dying nobody would have said that was part of the plan. But that might just be because the attack was easily thwarted.

A crowd chanted "Hang Mike Pence" and a band of rioters broke into the capitol with a noose and searched for Mike Pence. Were they really serious? Of course not! They were just blowing off steam, trading in hyperbole and metaphor. We know that because they didn't find him and hang him. What if they would have found him? Can't really predict that very easily, it all depends on the right shouting from the right people at that right moment, the actions of the other person you're watching -- does some guy break out running toward the target in anger or not? You don't know until it actually happens. Up to that point, however, every other thing that had happened would have been ridiculous to suggest would happen twenty minutes prior.

[Chap]

A crowd chanted "Hang Mike Pence" and a band of rioters broke into the capitol with a noose and searched for Mike Pence. Were they really serious? Of course not! They were just blowing off steam, trading in hyperbole and metaphor. We know that because they didn't find him and hang him. What if they would have found him? Can't really predict that very easily, it all depends on the right shouting from the right people at that right moment, the actions of the other person you're watching -- does some guy break out running toward the target in anger or not? You don't know until it actually happens. Up to that point, however, every other thing that had happened would have been ridiculous to suggest would happen twenty minutes prior.

Yup. Nothing is impossible any more. There are no boundaries. And who broke them down, because he hated losing the election?

Lord knows what we will get if a revenge-oriented Trump manages to get re-elected.

[Physics Guy]

Emphasising how deep-rooted a problem is may lead to despair that bad things are inevitable, but emphasising contingency and individual responsibility can foster the false hope that small measures will be enough to prevent bad things. Wasting too much time with band-aid solutions can be even worse than doing nothing.

I've heard this put as the Stockdale Paradox: sometimes pessimism is a more reliable basis for hope.

There are opportunity costs on both sides, though. If you insist on pushing for big measures that just aren't possible you may lose your chance to do smaller things that would in fact have helped significantly.

And it's even tougher than that because there's no binary choice between one big plan and one small plan, but a continuous range. Whatever you do, there are going to be people who think you're not trying to do enough, and people who think you're trying to do too much. Plus all the people who just think you should have done different things, regardless of size. Leading nations is hard.

It's none of my business what Americans do with their politics, so I don't even try to reach a firm opinion. I just think that people who worry a lot about talk radio or Facebook may well be underestimating the scale of the problem.

[Physics Guy]

Consensus and solidarity is harder to achieve than one might think, and not even just because people are stupid or corrupt or whatever. It's actually harder as a matter of logic. There's a whole topic in philosophy, law, and political science called judgement aggregation. It's about the purely logical difficulties in mapping many views onto one collective view. I only really know one single issue in this field, which I happened to stumble upon because I had managed to resolve a certain totally unrelated problem in quantum mechanics, and when I was trying to explain my insight with an analogy, I realised that it could be a cool new kind of voting paradox. I was then sad to find that it was only new to me.

It's the paradox known as the discursive dilemma. My own favourite illustration of it concerns a large political party—the Metal Party—composed of three roughly equal blocs. All three blocs would ideally like to have more cops, lower taxes, and a balanced budget. They have different ideas of which concessions to make to reality, however. The Copper Bloc wants to hire more cops but not raise taxes, and is forthright about running a deficit to do that. The Silver Bloc wants to hire more cops but balance the budget, and allows that it will have to raise taxes. The Gold Bloc is against both taxes and deficits, and so admits that we can't have any more cops.

It's clearly a fractured party. But the three blocs do all agree on what the issues are, and on what is ideally desirable. They agree about what measures are possible and what effects they will have. They're all honest and intelligent people of good will. None of them can accuse the others of inventing fake facts or applying bogus logic.

And every one of the three blocs has substantial common ground with each of the others, agreeing on something important and dear. Furthermore each of the three blocs sees a good reason to remain part of this party, because within the party it is able to command a majority for two out of its own three platform items. The Copper Bloc loves the great party that so clearly endorses cops and low taxes. The Silver Bloc is proud to belong to the party that loves law and order and fiscal responsibility. And the Gold Bloc stands firmly in the small-government party of low taxes and balanced budgets.

Each party does find itself in the minority on a third policy point, but in each case it's on the point that the party doesn't really want in its heart, but just feels compelled to accept as a bow to reality. The Coppers aren't going to leave the party of working families for love of deficit spending. The Silvers tolerate taxes but it's not as though they actually like them. And don't get the Golds wrong, they love our boys and girls in blue as much as anyone.

So the Metal Party hangs together in spite of its internal divisions. It's a big tent and that's fine.

Until it comes time to vote on the issues. Then, by clear 2:1 majorities on every issue, the Metal Party collectively demands more police, lower taxes, and a balanced budget.

Every single member of the Metal Party readily admits that this combination is flat-out impossible. More cops have to be paid more, and that extra money has to come either from taxes or borrowing. There is no free lunch. Yet the logically impossible policy is the 2:1 majority view of the party.

AAAHH. This silly little scenario has alarming implications for real democracy, because it's a scenario that can really appear, just under different labels or dressed up with extra complexity.

The reason that the paradox is called a dilemma is that it's hard to choose among the possible ways to resolve it. At most two of the three issues can be decided consistently by voting, and then in practice the third will have to yield to mere logic. But which issues should be decided by majority vote and which by logic?

Does the Metal Party ultimately stand for hiring more cops (2:1 are for it), and if it's in government it has to settle on some way of paying them by however much political skullduggery in smoke-filled back rooms it may take? Or does the Metal Party really stand for Low Taxes and Balanced Budgets (2:1 for both), and if it governs it will have to weasel out of hiring more cops by whatever dodge it can find?

The Metal Party collectively doesn't know whether it wants to die on the hill of hiring cops, or throw cops under the bus. That's the dilemma, and you hit it head-on no matter which way you try to approach it. The party seems to have a lot of coherence, it seems to have a lot of potential for consensus and solidarity, but on every single issue, when you come to the nitty-gritty detail of actually doing anything in the real world, with necessary means supplied for every wished end, the party collectively has no consensus at all, but is in a completely unresolvable dilemma between dying on the hill and throwing under the bus.

It's a big and basic problem for democracy that on any problem more complex than a binary choice, there can be gridlocks that are inherently very hard to resolve, with no consistent consensus being possible even in logical principle, even if everyone's noble and smart.