I’ll beat this dead horse as long as you drag it in front of me.
I’m saying - along with everybody else - that an attempt to change a lost election is not evidence of having preemptively rigged a winning election. That is a comment about a specific case, just as my post to you was about a specific case. One cannot generalize that to all cases without engaging in destructive stereotyping, especially when the two cases being referenced aren’t sufficiently similar in the first place. Exactly why the legal system has precautions about the admission of previous crimes as evidence.
I won’t stand for any accusations that I’m doing it. I’ll continue to label my opinions as opinions and not evidence. I know the difference.
No, it is right. You’re (again) just abusing and misusing the word evidence. Past behavior is most emphatically not evidence of future behavior. Past behavior can be a predictor of future behavior, but it is not evidence of future behavior. You are literally saying there is evidence of something that hasn’t even happened yet. That is not what evidence is. You cannot have evidence of something that hasn’t happened yet.
And you’re also wrong that courts don’t say that evidence isn’t evidence. They say prior bad acts are inadmissible. They absolutely do not say that prior bad acts are evidence. And nobody has said that this is a court of law. They’re saying you don’t know what the word evidence actually means.
You’re saying it can’t be evidence because it hasn’t happened yet.
You’re saying past behavior hasn’t happened yet.
I can’t believe I have to explain this but here we are. Past behavior is behavior that happened in the past. Things that happened in the past have happened.
It boggles my mind that I have to explain this. It boggles my mind even more that I’m probably going to have somebody argue with me over this.
Little Nemo, I still don’t understand what you are trying to achieve here.
As said earlier, I can wave a fistful of cash at NFL referees prior to the Super Bowl and say, “Hey, rig the game for me!” That would count as an attempt to manipulate the Super Bowl outcome.
It by no means means that the actual outcome of this year’s Super Bowl (Eagles 40-22 Chiefs) is illegitimate.
So what exactly are you trying to do when you straddle the fence by 1) saying Trump may have attempted to manipulate the 2024 election but also 2) refusing to say outright, “The 2024 election outcome is illegitimate?” That’s as useful as saying “There may be life in outer space, and there might not be life in outer space.” It’s tantamount to no statement at all.
Wow. Keep on digging that hole 'til you reach China, I guess. I have no idea how you can possibly read simple English and come up with something so utterly at odds with what was actually written.
Past behavior is not evidence of future behavior. It can be a predictor of likely future behavior. That is all, a predictor, and a very fallible one at that. It cannot be evidence of future behavior because the future hasn’t happened yet. Past behavior is only evidence of past behavior. There can be no evidence of something that hasn’t happened yet because, hard as this is for you to grasp, it hasn’t happened yet.
Unless in your reality it’s Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report with precogs who can see the future, there is no evidence of events that haven’t happened yet. And spoiler for a 70-year-old book, the precogs weren’t seeing the only possible future, so they weren’t even producing evidence with their psychic powers.
How you can possibly come up with the mental gymnastics needed to claim I’m stating
I couldn’t argue that an election would be stolen or influenced via election systems. There are too many indicators in place within the various election systems that would make such meddling obvious. I don’t believe that happened.
I DO believe that the 2024 elections may have been unfairly influenced way before any voting took place. Do I have evidence or proof? No, none at all. All I can offer is a few observations and questions:
A few months before the 2024 elections a small house that I thought had been mostly abandoned became occupied and a Trump election sign displayed in the front. Several weeks after the 2024 election the house was again empty and remains so. If there is a nefarious reason for this, why would it be in a hard red Georgia county?
The Georgia laws pertaining to elections specify no length of time required to be a resident before elegibility to vote. No state can impose a residency requirement of longer than 30 days to be eligible to vote. Can this loophole be gamed on a state by state basis?
Most concerning is that Trump and MAGA Republicans have been acting as if the midterm elections will not be any problem for them. Given Trump’s egregious behavior, I have a hard time understanding MAGA Republican’s disregard for voter opinion. A few members of Congress seem to be a little concerned, but is that just for show?
In short, I believe something fishy has happened and probably will happen again.
I’m not saying anything that’s profound or controversial. Which is why I’m surprised I’m getting such pushback.
Here’s what I’ve been saying:
Trump may have committed election fraud in the 2024 election.
This is just elementary probability. It’s saying the probability is greater than zero percent (certainty he didn’t do it) and less than one hundred percent (certainty he did it).
I’ll also note that Kamala Harris may have committed election fraud in the 2024 election. . And Joe Biden may have committed election fraud in the 2020 election.
Trump committed election fraud in the 2020 election.
I feel Trump’s actions on January 2 and January 6 constitute acts which would fit a reasonable definition of election fraud. They were attempts to change the outcome of the election by illegitimate means. I feel that the evidence supporting this belief is overwhelming. I feel that these attempts count as committing election fraud, even though they failed.
Past behavior is evidence of future behavior.
I can’t understand how there is an argument on this one. It’s so basic that people use this principle every day.
If you’ve had a dog for the past five years and for all five of those years, your dog has barked every time a stranger sets foot on your property and somebody asked you “Do you expect your dog will bark at trick or treaters?” would you say “Halloween hasn’t happened yet. So I have no evidence of how my dog will react to trick or treaters.”?
I doubt it. Unless you’re an idiot you’re going to be able to apply the evidence of your dog’s past behavior (he has always barked at strangers on your property for the past five years) to a future situation (trick or treaters will be strangers on your property) and conclude there is a good probability that your dog will bark at trick or treaters this Halloween.
This does not mean you have precognition. Reaching this conclusion did not require any psychic powers.
The evidence of Trump committing election fraud in the 2020 election increases the probability that he may have committed election fraud in the 2024 election.
Again, it doesn’t prove that Trump committed election fraud in the 2024 election. Evidence is not proof.
Getting back to the original question which led to me entering this thread, I feel that it is more likely that Trump committed election fraud in the 2024 election than Biden did in the 2020 election.
It’s just that you’re using “evidence” very sloppily.
You have evidence of your dog’s behaviour, enough to conclude that he barks at trick-or-treaters as a rule. That evidence enables you to predict the future pretty confidently, but it is not evidence for how he will behave in the future. That is skipping a step.
Since the future hasn’t happened, you don’t know. You have evidence of how he behaves in a given scenario, but you don’t know whether that scenario will come to pass.
And saying that there is between a zero and 100% chance of something happening is really kind of pointless. All you’re saying is, “it’s not impossible.” Great: thanks for the insight. It’s not impossible that Trump will wake up tomorrow morning filled with remorse, murder the VP and everyone in the line of succession until he gets to someone competent, and then resign. But arguing that such a thing isn’t impossible is silly, because it’s vanishingly unlikely.
This is what I was responding to. I disagree, and I explained why.
is not what I was arguing with. That statement is perfectly reasonable, which I think is why you are confused. Your conclusion is common sense, and likely correct, and so you’re not all that particular about how you reached it.
Which of the following is your view? (I’ll leave out the word evidence.)
Your dog has always barked at strangers on your property in the past. You expect to have some strangers on your property in the near future (trick or treaters). You consider your dog’s past behavior in that situation and predict it is likely (but not certain) he will bark at the trick or treaters.
Your dog has always barked at strangers on your property in the past. You expect to have some strangers on your property in the near future (trick or treaters). You feel there is no way to make a prediction about whether or not your dog will bark at the trick or treaters because that is a future event and nobody can tell what will happen in the future.
So that’s the sole issue? The use of that particular word? You agree with the general principle that past behavior can be used to determine the probability of future events?
Sigh. For the 99th time. The proper analogy to what you’ve been saying is that a dog barking at trick-or-treaters in 2020 is evidence that the same dog bit treat-or-treaters at multiple different spots in 2024.
Of course the word “evidence” and your bizarre twisting of the meaning of the word is exactly the point here. Opinion, suspicion, possibility, all are acceptable words to describe the later event. Evidence is not.
How did you get this? You’re comparing barking and biting. I have always been very specific and compared election fraud and election fraud.
I also disagree that opinion, suspicion, possibility, and evidence are all words that have a vaguely similar meaning. They all have distinct meanings and I chose evidence because it’s the word that best fits my intent.
An opinion is just a personal belief. I could have the opinion that Donald Trump is a good President. Or I could have the opinion that Donald Trump is a bad President. Either is valid as my personal opinions.
A suspicion is an opinion that something negative occurred. I could have a suspicion that Donald Trump committed election fraud in the 2024 election. Or I could have a suspicion that Joe Biden committed election fraud in the 2020 election. Like opinions, either suspicion is equally valid as just my personal belief.
A possibility is just an acknowledgement that something could have happened or might happen in the future. So it’s a possibility that Trump committed election fraud in 2024 and it’s a possibility that Joe Biden committed election fraud in 2020. Saying something is a possibility is not expressing a belief on whether or not that thing actually occurred.
And finally there’s evidence. Evidence is information which indicates whether something is likely to be true or false. Evidence is not a matter of personal belief.
So it is possible that Donald Trump committed election fraud in 2024 and Joe Biden committed election fraud in 2020. But the fact that Trump committed election fraud in 2020 is evidence that the likelihood that he committed election fraud in 2024 is significantly higher than the likelihood that Biden committed election fraud in 2020.
I think we’re kind of talking past each other here. You can suspect Trump committed election fraud in 2024, just like I may suspect that the NFL is rigging games in favor of certain teams. But such a suspicion is meaningless unless it’s backed up by 1) understanding how difficult it is to rig or fraud it and 2) giving a good hypothesis as to how that tough barrier to fraud/rigging was overcome.
A U.S. presidential election involving a candidate winning multiple swing states isn’t something one can achieve just by slipping a USB thumb drive into a computer.
You seem sincere, and you are so close here. It is evidence about the likelihood, though not evidence of any facts. Everything in your post from “higher” on is skipping steps again.
Even in counterfactual hypothetical land, “would do” and “did do” are different. The likelihood that Trump would have committed election fraud in 2024 is very high; the likelihood that he did do it is precisely the same as the likelihood that Biden did so, slightly above but rounding to 0%.