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Learning not to trust the All-In podcast

(passingtime.substack.com)
460 points paulpauper | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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FigurativeVoid ◴[] No.42068747[source]
When the pandemic started, I really enjoyed the podcast. They seemed to have some good insights, and I found them funny. It was a vibe that I sorely missed being home alone.

If one them sees this, I hope they take it kindly. The podcast has gone downhill drastically. The level of discourse has dropped considerably. They make all sorts of claims with very little evidence.

Recently they have all agreed that voter ID laws "just make sense." But they don't even bring up any of the unpleasant history around IDs.

When DeSantis was running, they didn't ever talk about him flying immigrant around as a horrible political stunt.

They've been leaning closer and closer to anti vax stances.

I still listen.. but I'll probably stop soon. It's becoming a bro podcast.

David Friedberg has the best mind for evidence, and he speaks less and less.

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WillPostForFood ◴[] No.42069093[source]
Recently they have all agreed that voter ID laws "just make sense." But they don't even bring up any of the unpleasant history around IDs.

This year is the 80th anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, do they really need to go through the history of IDs? We need to rebuild confidence in the integrity of elections, Voter ID, which most democratic countries require, seems like an incredibly modest step.

The states that historically had the worst race issues all have voter id anyway, it is the Northeast and West coast that are refusing.

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troyvit ◴[] No.42069355[source]
> We need to rebuild confidence in the integrity of elections, Voter ID, which most democratic countries require, seems like an incredibly modest step.

People didn't lose confidence in the integrity of elections because our elections lack integrity, they lost confidence because they were told in a way that resonates with them that our elections lack integrity.

Voter ID would just be security theater in that it's an onerous rule that does nothing to help any actual problem aside from making things look better to some people.

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MyFedora ◴[] No.42069572[source]
I'm having a hard time understanding your comment. I'm not American, but can someone explain why it wouldn't make sense to lose confidence in elections when gerrymandering and the electoral college skew the results so much? Sure, votes are technically counted, but if the system is set up so that those votes don't really impact the outcome the way you'd expect, isn't that a pretty valid reason to feel disillusioned?
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hellotomyrars ◴[] No.42069678[source]
The GP isn't making a statement about how voters feel disillusioned in the electoral process in general. They are making a statement about how one of the two political parties has spent 4 years telling their supporters that the 2020 election was stolen because of rampant voter fraud.

It doesn't even matter if you agree with the claims that were made about voter fraud, I can't think of any good faith argument by literally anyone on the political compass that it didn't cause people to lose faith in electoral process.

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lmm ◴[] No.42072289[source]
> It doesn't even matter if you agree with the claims that were made about voter fraud, I can't think of any good faith argument by literally anyone on the political compass that it didn't cause people to lose faith in electoral process.

Maybe people shouldn't have faith in the electoral process, and the way to rebuild confidence in the integrity of the electoral process is to rebuild the integrity of the electoral process first and tell people about it second.

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parasubvert ◴[] No.42073226[source]
That would make sense if there was an actual argument for the process being compromised. But there isn’t. You can rebuild it and be accused of inserting back doors. There’s no win - the whole argument is that the process is sound if a certain party wins, if that party loses, then the process is corrupt.

Notice how there’s no cries of election integrity problems for this election? Because the “right” party won.

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lmm ◴[] No.42073409[source]
> That would make sense if there was an actual argument for the process being compromised. But there isn’t.

There are pretty strong arguments that many states illegally (according to their own rules) expanded the scope of postal ballots in 2020, added people to the voter rolls without adequate checks that resulted in people getting added who shouldn't have, etc., which could very plausibly have added up to enough to tip the knife-edge election.

> Notice how there’s no cries of election integrity problems for this election? Because the “right” party won.

I don't think anyone seriously disputes that the civil service has a partisan imbalance. If (and it's a big if) the "deep state" were to cheat, it's pretty clear which side they would cheat for. Well before the results came out this time, it was widely reported that the Republicans had filed hundreds of lawsuits questioning various election irregularities and the Democrats... hadn't. So yeah, only one party doubts the integrity of the election (or, if you want to be more cynical, only one party cares whether it's being rigged, since both parties know which way any rigging is going). That's exactly what we'd expect, whether it's being rigged or not?

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toyg ◴[] No.42074474[source]
> I don't think anyone seriously disputes

... that the federal "deep state" doesn't matter, since elections are handled at the lowest level by state authorities - which are tightly controlled in red states, as much as in blue states (if not more, arguably), by the locally-dominant party. This is just how business has always been done in good ol' Murica.

Writing sweeping statements like the one you make, indicates that one lives in a partisan bubble.

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1. lmm ◴[] No.42074704[source]
> ... that the federal "deep state" doesn't matter, since elections are handled at the lowest level by state authorities - which are tightly controlled in red states, as much as in blue states (if not more, arguably), by the locally-dominant party.

The whole point of the "deep state" concept is that it's not controlled by the formal political structures at all - yes the state bureaucracy is nominally accountable to the elected executive, but in practice it's made up of humans who are unlikely to be 100% loyal to their boss or their organisation's stated mandate (and with the chain of command being pretty long, there's plenty of room for small disalignments to compound). Even in red states (and red counties), the offices of the state bureaucracy are, systematically, often in blue islands. It's got nothing to do with state vs federal, because it's the same kind of people who work in government jobs[1] either way.

[1] OK, "government office jobs" or something, yes the typical military employee is quite different from the kind of people I'm talking about. But you know what I mean.

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2. toyg ◴[] No.42075519[source]
> it's made up of humans who are unlikely to be 100% loyal to their boss

If true, that obviously cuts both ways.

But really I think you're just being paranoid and somehow biased against state employees - who are definitely not all "blue" by any stretch, particularly in red states. If you really think any low-level minion, or even middle-manager apparatchik, will risk their jobs by substantially fiddling numbers against the will of their boss, there is no argument that will ever cut through your ideological lenses.

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3. lmm ◴[] No.42075795[source]
> If true, that obviously cuts both ways.

It does, but ultimately it adds up to a drift towards what a typical government employee would want to do rather than what the elected representatives decided - and government employees are not a representative sample of voters.

> If you really think any low-level minion, or even middle-manager apparatchik, will risk their jobs by substantially fiddling numbers against the will of their boss

What's "substantial" though? There are a lot of things that are just a nudge at any given layer. Your boss tells you that there's some new bullshit requirement that says you have to check voter rolls against the juror database, but he doesn't sound particularly enthusiastic about it, and the department's already understaffed. So maybe you stick it on the pile, or you send an email to your subordinates late on Thursday afternoon, and maybe your boss never follows up on it and neither you do, and maybe the end result of that is that the checking never happens and your state's election laws are perhaps violated (and maybe some people who shouldn't have been able to vote got to do so), but even if the Reps win their lawsuit against your department the chance of anything getting pinned on you is essentially nil.

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4. toyg ◴[] No.42079205{3}[source]
As you say yourself, those things are typically bullshit anyway (mostly targeted at disenfranchising minorities), and they're definitely not something that can substantially and continuously influence a presidential election in a single direction in a country of 400millions.
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5. lmm ◴[] No.42082890{4}[source]
> As you say yourself, those things are typically bullshit anyway (mostly targeted at disenfranchising minorities)

Maybe, but I do think it's a worsening of partisanship - time was when the civil service felt a responsibility to remain strictly neutral and implement the policies of our elected leaders, right or wrong. Now people put their personal morals first and are less willing to implement a law they disagree with, and while there are good sides to that, it's also reducing trust in government services.

> they're definitely not something that can substantially and continuously influence a presidential election in a single direction in a country of 400millions.

Could they overwhelm a popular landslide? No. Could they nudge the vote enough to tip the balance in a knife-edge election? Perhaps.