This is a misrepresentation of what I said. I didn’t claim I could prove a negative. I claim that I put in enough effort to feel secure that I hadn’t missed anything big. Time’s passing, Trump’s large legal teams are repeatedly and miserably failing even to find anything small to leverage. So while I don’t claim to have exhausted all possibilities, with every passing day it looks like we did exhaust them to a reasonable practical satisfaction. That’s all we can really ask from life, otherwise we’re in for a constant state of worry that we can’t rule out every bit of uncertainly.
If I misrepresented you, I apologize. On the other hand, you haven’t really emphasized “something big,” but, rather, “anything at all.” You’ve said a coup “couldn’t happen,” and that is very different.
Yes, definitely, Trump is failing. But he has not failed yet. It is not impossible for things to go bad, even now. Biden might make the gaffe of all gaffes. The Supreme Court could do something insane. Forty electors might break faith. All extremely unlikely, but not impossible.
I think you are backing away, now, a little, from your previous untenable claim. That’s all to the well. It was an overly strong statement, and deserved the smackdown it received. The SDMB is heavily into pedantic exactitude.
Underlying it all is a belief that facts and truth aren’t based on observable facts or data, but that “truth” instead comes from a source that they personal identify with and relate to. This is a key characteristic of regimes (or political factions if they don’t quite achieve power) that have an authoritarian orientation, and attacks on the concept of truth (as we understand it) is a precursor to authoritarian ideation.
If I had any more energy for this, and any hope that it would be persuasive, we could walk through all those scenarios and demonstrate that the path to achieving them is incredibly, incredibly long, narrow, and steep, basically indistinct from “impossible”. Experience tells me that my effort would be rewarded by switching tack to “well, it’s probably something ELSE”. That tells me there’s literally no point to these “what if” exercises, which is incredibly frustrating.
It wasn’t a claim so much as rhetoric, and yes, SDMB loves to undermine a rhetorical truth by pointing out that it’s not literally true. If I’m guilty of any trolling, it’s my enjoyment of pressing that button maybe a bit more than I should…
Anyway, I’m bowing out of this thread, I’ve (over)explained myself and obviously not persuading anyone.
Excellent analogy.
The storm isn’t passing. Trump plans to keep on storming–reports that he plans to launch his campaign for the 2024 presidential election during Biden’s inauguration–
Yikes.
He wants to be sure he can take the spotlight and eventually erase anything Biden might do.
One of the benefits of having a 3-month transition is that it gives various political camps time to reduce tensions through an understood period of political and verbal ceasefire. This has been a time-honored tradition in part because we as a society have generally valued good sportsmanship in competition, and we’ve also valued cooperation between factions, understanding that there will be time to express disagreement and thwart the other side’s agenda. Trump, with the tacit (and in some cases explicit) endorsement of Republicans, is undoing that tradition, and this is likely going to have a lasting impact.
Trump isn’t even the first Republican in recent years to refuse conceding an obvious defeat - Matt Bevin, a self-styled Trumpian governor of Kentucky, engaged in similar post-election whinging. It’s becoming a pattern for Republicans to create doubt about elections in which they lose. I don’t think this is something that goes away until it becomes obviously ineffective as a tactic. It might be ineffective in the sense that it doesn’t reverse the result of an election, but yet nevertheless effective in casting doubts about the legitimacy of an incoming administration. At minimum, it creates a climate in which bipartisan cooperation becomes out of the question. The only legislation that can pass, therefore, is that which passes on the strength of brute-force partisanship, which avails progressives to “Both sides do it” false equivalency.
And Republicans in the Senate know that it makes building coalitions difficult, which is an incentive to let Trump be Trump. The longer the Trumps remain politically viable, the more trapped they are by Trumpism.
How does what you said differ from what I said? Both of the examples you gave are someone pretending to be concerned about something when they actually aren’t.
Is it because I didn’t explicitly say “they pretend to be on your side”? Because I would argue that’s implicit in pretending to be concerned. In fact, the first part of both of your examples is very often not explicitly stated but assumed by the statement of concern.
Concern trolling isn’t simply “pretending to be concerned.” It’s a specific form of trolling in which the troll poses as an advocate or member of a group and expresses worry about the group’s strategy, objectives, etc., with the intention of disrupting discussion and undermining that group. That false flag group infiltration is the key element.
Concern trolling is usually a political phenomenon. Wikipedia and RationalWiki both have good explanations of how concern trolls typically operate.
Merely feigning concern (like saying “get well soon” to someone you don’t particularly care about) may be hypocritical or jerkish, but it isn’t concern trolling. I’m not defending HMS_Irruncible here, but the label doesn’t apply in his case.
Bolding mine. The motive in most cases cannot possibly be known. This shit drives me up the wall sometimes. It leaves no room for dissent among groups who share the same goal. See also: tone policing.
(This is a general rant, sorry, it just grinds my gears.)
But isn’t that what the phrase is for to begin with? To succinctly say, “I don’t think you’re really part of this group; I think you’re trying to disrupt discussion and undermine us”? I mean, I at least usually see “concern troll” used as an accusation first and foremost.
I understand your complaint. “You’re a concern troll!” can be a lazy attempt to shut down legitimate dissent.
In my experience, for what it’s worth, real concern trolls are absolutely terrible at disguising their intent. Their awkward attempts to fit in with the target group are on the “how do you do, fellow kids” level.
Yes, thank you. It’s not always that. But sometimes it is that.
For concern trolls, it IS always that. But they’re not always concern trolls.
And yeah, it’s pretty easy to spot them. They’re not subtle.
But a lot of people get labeled concern trolls who aren’t. Case in point: this thread.
People are dumb. They use or take labels the wrong way. Case in point: Nazism. People who would agree with every single tenet of National Socialism somehow think it’s overboard to be labeled a Nazi. Go figure. Or some people label others as trolls when they aren’t. It’s hard to hit the right balance. For years, this board went easy on some obvious trolls and they took advantage of it. That’s starting to change but it can occasionally (though far less often than the opposite on this board) go too far the other way.
This asshole already has a thread, so I won’t start my own to continue this. Tl;dr, someone makes a minor mistake saying “meteor” when they meant “meteorite”. I corrected it (not rudely) for the sake of factual accuracy. Then this fuckwit thought that he was being clever by googling for a list of definitions and attempting to make a “gotcha” snipe at me which he did not get correct. And the Dunning-Keuger nitwit is so stupid and so stubborn that he still thinks that he’s got me with his degree from Google University. Puzzlegal asked us to drop this in the main thread, but I don’t want the latest spewed ignorance to remain unaddressed.
“Not all meteorites are asteroid in nature. Some are meteoroid. Had you looked this up as I suggested, you’d know this.”
Not all meteorites are asteroid in nature. Some are from Mars or the Moon. A very rare few might possibly be from comets, such as Tagish Lake. However, the vast majority of meteorites are from asteroids. “Meteoroid” is simply a label given to a specific size classification of object in space. You nitwit.
“Nobody ever says “an asteroid fell to earth”, or “this is the site of an asteroid impact”. Do you ever go to the rock shop and say “show me your asteroid section?” No. It’s meteorites. Aways meteorites. Nobody ever calls it anything else. You know this.”
In the objects in the scale of this discussion—ones big enough to form gold deposits—people always say it is the site of an asteroid impact and that an asteroid fell to Earth. Meteorites are specifically the solid, visible recovered stones that were large enough to make it to the surface but not so large that they utterly vaporized on impact.
“Look, you were pedantic enough to bust somebody’s chops over “meteor” not being close enough to “meteorite”. There’s some SDMB rule that states that your correction must contain an error, and that someone else must point it out. The proper protocol is that you good-naturedly have a laugh at your own expense, you don’t double down on something that could easily be resolved with 5 seconds of googling.”
I wasn’t “busting someone’s chops”, I was correcting a minor error in the attempt at fighting ignorance. I have been a meteorite collector for over 20 years and am active in the meteorite community. The extent of your knowledge, however, is obviously limited to your 5 seconds of Googling looking for a gotcha.
This is one of the frustrating things about being knowledgeable about a subject on the internet. You provide hopefully helpful information, but then you have to fight against some know-nothing asshole with a google search who spreads his worthless, ignorant horseshit and attempts to undercut anything you do. You try to fight ignorance, ignorance fights back.
For evidence of my “street cred” on meteorite related material, I submit a couple of photos of meteorites in my collection that are included in the authoratative, academic meteorite database, and have been there for 14 years:
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meteor/MetBullFindphoto.php?credit=Darren+Garrison
What do you have to submit, you ignorant blowhard dipshit?
Your rock collection is very nice. You’re still incorrect. I’m sorry this seems to distress you so much, and I hope that venting about it in an election-related thread has brought you some comfort.
And you are still too stupid to live.