Oooff….Ken Block has written an op ed. Ken Block is the owner of the company Trump hired to find voter fraud in the 2020 election. Here’s what he said.

“ I am the expert who was hired by the Trump campaign, the findings of my company's in-depth analysis, or detailed in the depositions taken by the Select committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol. The transcripts show that the campaign found no evidence of voter fraud sufficient to change the outcome of any election. That message was communicated directly to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, the cries that the election was lost or stolen due to voter fraud continue with no sign of stopping.
The constant drumbeat hardens people's hearts and minds to the truth about the 2020 election. Emails and documents show that the voter data available to the campaign contained no evidence of large scale voter fraud based on data mining and fraud analytics. More important claims of voter fraud made by others were verified as false, including proof of why those claims were disproven. What these claims don't take into account is that voter fraud is detectable, quantifiable, and verifiable. I have yet to see anyone offer up evidence of voter fraud from the 2020 election that provides these three things. My company's contract with the campaign obligated us to deliver evidence of voter fraud that could be defended in a court of law. The small amount of voter fraud I found was bipartisan with about as many Republicans casting duplicate votes as Democrats. “
He paid millions for that report he then threw in the trash. The other company he hired found exactly the same thing.

More proof that the Trump team knew for certain there was no significant fraud, proved there was no fraud, but continued to claim they had proof there was massive fraud…and continues to tell that lie today despite all evidence to the contrary.



Question- How many times did Trump take the Lolita express to Child Rape Island? The previous flight log, from 93-97, showed Trump took at least 7 trips to child rape island with his friend and party partner Epstein in that time period, the same period Epstein admitted he ran a child prostitution ring from his island. He’s already caught.
Yes, Clinton is on the list, but he is not listed as ever going to the island where the young children were presented to guests for sex. He only accepted a donation of use of the plane WITHOUT EPSTEIN PRESENT.
Never forget Trump was best friends with Epstein not just during the 10 year time period when he admitted the child prostitution, but continued for almost a decade AFTER HE ADMITTED TO CHILD PROSTITUTION in the early 2000’s and only broke ties when Trump’s young female employees threatened to sue Trump for forcing them to be together unsupervised with Epstein at Maralago where he tried to rape them repeatedly.
Also don’t forget Trump was found liable for sexual abuse including rape…Donald John Trump is in fact a rapist, and it seems impossible given his long history of inappropriate sexual behavior towards them and uncountable past statements indicating his predilection for sex with underage girls that he’s not also a child rapist.
https://videosift.com/video/Pedo-Trump

This is you guy…this you pick. 🤦‍♂️

Donald Trump IS the Q. You know, of QAnon.

Also the Q of IQ. Lacking in I.

Also Donald Trump probably has good analytics telling him how he stands so he knows he is drowning before he hits the water. His reactions seem adequately correlated to the situation and projections - only they are just as chaotic and dumb as his 4 years in office.

Even the hysterical orange man should know to wait for the actual result before ranting. So he already knew it was done at that stage. His campaign understands the mechanics of vote counting, they are just out to cause damage now. Rudy knows how vote counting works, he is bullshitting hard. The content of what Rudy and Jr. say is irrelevant. Like John McEnroe ranting at the umpire. I would love to write "youre out!" but it still isnt officially over, is it?

Also this will be no victory over Trump or common ignorancy. This is just saving a horror of a situation by a hairs breadth. A feeling of relief rather than victory.

Freedom of religion is independent of civilian armament.
History shows that religious persecution is normal for humanity, and in most cases it's perpetrated by the government. Sometimes to consolidate power (with government tie-ins to the main religion), and sometimes to pander to the grimace of a majority.

Ironically, in this country, freedom of religion only exists due to armed conflict, albeit merely as a side effect of independence from a religiously homogeneous ruling power.



It's true that Catalonians would likely have been shot at if they were armed.
However, likewise, the Spanish government will never grant the Catalans democracy so long as the Catalans are not armed - simply because it doesn't have to.
(*Barring self suicidal/sacrificial behavior on part of the Catalans that eventually [after much suffering] embarrasses the government into compliance - often under risk that 3rd parties will intervene if things continue)

When the government manufactures consent, it will be first in line to claim that people have democratic freedom. When the government fails to manufacture consent, it will crack down with force.

At the end of the day, in government, might makes right. Laws are only words on paper, the government's arms are what make the laws matter.

Likewise, democracy is no more than an idea. The people's force of arms (or threat thereof) is what assert's the people's dominance over the government.



You can say the police/military are stronger and it would never matter, however, the size of an [armed] population is orders of magnitude larger than the size of an army. Factor in the fact that the people need to cooperate with the government in order to support and supply the government's military. No government can withstand armed resistance of the population at large. This is one of the main lessons from The Prince.

Civilian armament is a bulwark against potentially colossal ills (albeit ills that come once every few generations).

Look at NK. The people get TV, radio, cell, from SK. They can look across the river and see massive cities on the Chinese side. They know they have to play along with the charade that their government demands. At the end of the day, without guns, things won't change.

Look at what happened during the Arab Spring. All these unarmed nations turned to external armed groups to fight for them to change their governments. All it accomplished was them becoming serfs to the invited 3rd parties. This is another lesson from The Prince : always take power by your own means, never rely on auxiliaries, because your auxiliaries will become your new rulers.






Below is general pontification. No longer a reply.
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Civilian armament does come with periodic tragedies. Those tragedies suck. But they're also much less significant than the risks of disarmament.
(Eg. School shootings, 7-11 robberies, etc -versus- Tamils vs Sri Lankan government, Rohingya vs Burmese government. etc.)

Regarding rifles specifically (all varieties combined), there is no point in arguing magnitudes (Around 400 lives per year - albeit taken in newsworthy large chunks). 'Falling out of bed' kills more people, same is true for 'Slip and fall'. No one fears their bed or a wet floor.

Pistols could go away and not matter much.
They have minimal militia utility, and they represent almost the entirety of firearms used in violent crime. (Albeit used to take lives in a non newsworthy 1 at a time manner)

(In the U.S.) If tragedy was the only way to die (otherwise infinite lifespan), you would live on average 9000 years. Guns, car crashes, drownings, etc. ~All tragedies included. (http://service.prerender.io/http://polstats.com/?_escaped_fragment_=/life#!/life)






A computer learning example I was taught:

Boy walking with his mom&dad down a path.
Lion #1 jumps out, eats his dad.
(Data : Specifically lion #1 eats his father.)
The boy and mom keep walking
Lion #2 jumps out, eats his mother.
(Data : Specifically lion #2 eats his mother)
The boy keeps walking
He comes across Lion #3.

Question : Should he be worried?

If you are going to generalize [the first two] lions and people, then yes, he should be worried.

In reality, lions may be very unlikely to eat people (versus say, a gazelle). But if you generalized from the prior two events, you will think they are dangerous.

(The relevance to computer learning is that : Computers learn racism, too. If you include racial data along with other data in a learning algorithm, that algorithm can and will be able to make decisions based on race. Not because the software cares - but because it can analyze and correlate.)

(Note : This is also why arguing religion is likely futile. If a child is raised being told that everything is as it is because God did it, then that becomes their basis for reality. Telling them that their belief in god is wrong, is like telling the boy in the example that lions are statistically quite safe to people. It challenges what they've learned.)



I mentioned this example, because it illustrates learning and perception. And it segways into my following analogy.



Here's a weird analogy, but it goes like this :

(I'm sure SJW minded people will shit themselves over it, but whatever)

"Gun ownership in today's urban society" is like "Black people in 80's white bred society".

2/3 of the population today has no contact with firearms (mostly urban folk)
They only see them on movies used to shoot people, and on the news used to shoot people.
If you are part of that 2/3, you see guns as murder tools.
If you are part of the remaining 1/3, you see guns like shoes or telephones - absolutely mundane daily items that harm nobody.

In the 80's, if you were in a white bred community, your only understanding of black people would be from movies where they are gangsters and shoot people, and from the nightly news where you heard about some black person who shot people.
If you were part of an 80's white bred community, you saw black people as dangerous likely killers.
If you were part of an 80's black/mixed community, you saw black people as regular people living the same mundane lives as anyone else.

In either case, you can analytically know better. But your gut feelings come from your experience.



Basically, I know guns look bad to 2/3 of the population. That won't change. People's beliefs are what they are.
I also know that the likelihood of being in a shooting is essentially zero.
I also know that history repeats itself, and -just in case- I'd rather live in an armed society than an unarmed society. Even if I don't carry a gun.

-scheherazade

This is because analytics, people love sci-fi, magic and adventure -- how successful could it be join these categories in a movie. sceptically entusiastic

Never forget. Trump won by 70,000 votes. And lost the popular vote by over 3,000,000 votes. To say that these pundits' "entire analytical framework was drastically and catastrophically faulty" is totally wrong. They were wrong by whatever percentage of the total votes 70,000 votes is. Or maybe double that, to cement a Clinton lead. So they were wrong by 140,000 / 138,884,643 = 0.00100803081 so

They were wrong by 0.10%.

And based on the population who voted they were right by (Clinton's votes: 65,844,610) - (Trump votes: 62,979,636) = 2,864,974 votes / 138,884,643 = 0.02062844341.

They were right by 2.06%. They were over 20 times more right than they were wrong.

Also, regarding Economic and Racial anxiety, BOTH were correlated as predictors of support for Trump. That does not mean that every person who was Economically anxious was also Racially anxious but I would bet those populations do overlap somewhat, partly because the question isn't just 'Are you economically anxious?' but 'Are you economically anxious while Barack Obama is in the White House?'

I don't necessarily feel dumber having watched this video, but it's clearly very biased, and I do feel like it was a waste of my time to see it. The video's writer is obviously just looking to name a few Liberal up and comers and attempt to cut them down.

Also, consider the post source. @bobknight33 is as Russian-trolly as Russian trolls get. This is exactly the kind of right-wing propaganda they love to use to bash Liberals in America and push them further towards their wing.

Funny, but flawed it's own way.

Let me preface this commentary by saying I am not in any organized religion. I go back and forth in believing in God and also not being able to find proof he exists, basically an agnostic theist. So this is not in any way an attempt to 'prove' anything other than that I disagree with the way the video is portraying the biblical tale. I also know there are far more egregious examples than this story of God as an uncaring, flawed being with an uncertain temperament.

First, this story is one of the 'go to' stories that most atheists or anti-religion people look to for a clear example of the 'wrongness' of the bible or God. The reason is, if you don't take anything else into context, this story is massively damning! What god would call for a mass genocide out of the blue, right? Certainly not one people consider to be good!

But, if we look at the context of the bible in the Old Testament, we see that this is not wholly out of line for the character shown of God. If we take the statements of the bible as literal, then God has already shown he will destroy any threat to those he considers his 'chosen people'; even those who are/were part of that group.

In this case, the Amalekites were descendants of Esau. Esau was the brother of Jacob (later named Israel) and was supposed to inherit the blessing of his father, as well as command over the 'chosen people' of God. Esau was of rough nature and was a hunter. Once he was starving and went to Jacob, who tended the fields (sort of the Cain and Abel bit all over again), begging him for a bowl of lentil soup. Jacob told him that he would give him the bowl if Esau would pass his birthright (blessing and command) over to Jacob, since obviously Jacob was more able to care for his people than a solitary hunter. Esau agreed, but never really meant it, he was just hungry and was willing to say whatever he needed to so as to get that soup.

Jacob was dead serious though, so he took the birthright and became Israel, the leader of God's chosen. Esau was livid and swore to murder Jacob, who fled. Esau never got the birthright back, but he did sire the people who became the Amalekites, who in turn swore vengeance on Israel-ites.

This becomes important as time goes on, because basically every single time the groups encountered one another, the Israelites tried to be peaceful but the Amalekites always attacked.

By the time Saul was king, God chose to have him go and destroy the Amalekites, deeming them beyond saving. As he had told Moses during the first Amalekite attacks, he had Samuel tell Saul to blot their memory from history, wiping them out completely. Saul chose not to do this, sparing their king and some animals. Because of this, God replaced Saul with David.

So, now we come to the main part of the discussion. Like I said, this story is used quite often to show the capricious nature of God. However, like I said, it uses the story out of context. Now that we have the 'historical' description of the origin and ongoing nature of the conflict, we can put it into context.

If you are going to dissect the nature of 'God' as shown in the Old Testament, you have to look at the information given to show that nature. The bible says he is all-knowing, but it also says that he gave mankind free will. If you look on God as more of a creature running a simulation, he hopes that humanity will come to follow his rules of their own accord, even though he knows many will not. He chooses Israel and his descendants to be his 'messengers' to the other people that have chosen not to follow his rules, basically they are his missionaries that he hopes will lead his simulation to the proper conclusion.

Any group or race that tries to eradicate his messengers is a threat to his simulation, so he eventually will deal with them harshly. Sodom and Gomorrah, The Great Flood, and other examples of God deciding that he needs to protect his 'messengers' and clear off the playing board. In the case of the Amalekites, by this time period mentioned in the story, we are talking about generations of them trying to destroy the Israelites. So, God tells Samuel to tell Saul that they must be wiped from the playing board. Saul exercises his free will, therefore David enters the picture.

If you look at free will and God's choice of his messengers, as well as his protection of them, you get this story situation. By telling Saul to wipe them out, God is saying that he has tried to look the other way, but the Amalekites will never stop as long as they exist. Therefore they must be dealt with in a manner that will prevent them from rising as a people in the future and attempting harm to his messengers again.

It still doesn't paint God in a perfect light, but makes him more of a tinkerer. He keeps creating flawed inventions that choose to follow their own path and not his. The sad thing is, if you assume that he is all knowing, he knows this is going to be the end result. He creates angels and they turn on him. He creates humans and they turn on him. Then he creates Jesus, a combination of god and human, who doesn't turn on him. It is almost like he decides to create a Hero unit that can show the other simulations an easier path to winning.

Realistically and analytically, I know it doesn't make perfect sense. That is why I have my struggles with wanting to believe and then not being able to logically. If you choose to look at God as being a flawed creature (again, assuming that you believe he exists), the whole thing sort of makes more sense. In any case, we all have our own opinions and beliefs. I hope that my wordy post has explained how I try to work through mine.

This guy has my vote - First honest accurate analysis of Brexit and Trumpism I've seen.
Why is this kind of a discussion not all over the traditional media? Is mainstream media so devoid of intelligent analytical skills that they are incapable of doing this kind of thing? or is it that they have for so long been part of the political elitist mentality (on left and right) that they are simply unwilling to present an honest analysis?

The problem i have with the first problem is not one of statistics or odds but one of your financial situation. If you played the game with ten cents i'm sure it wouldn't work out the same as if you played with a thousand dollars or even more extreme a million. The larger the value to one personally the less chance you will take losing it. In the end keeping a large amount of money even if the odds of doubling it are much better is completely a rational decision when it makes a difference in your life. What odds would you need to double all you had opposed to losing it all. I would call your choice very rational and analytic regardless of odds.

You need an extremely controlled situation to see if there is a bias and what it might be. I'm guessing i could manipulate the outcomes easily with the choice of participants and the amount of money involved.

Hahaha... seriously, what kind of passive aggressive bullshit is that? "Ignoring the theoretical underpinnings of socialism, because I've decided that that's waffling, I say Jesus was a socialist." Next time, maybe just write TL;DR and make a farting noise while rolling your eyes.

You can't dismiss the actual meaning of the word Socialist as 'semantics', if you're talking about whether or not something is socialist. That doesn't help the discussion.

In order to use socialism as you appear to be doing, you would have to first:
- ignore the history of socialism and its political development,
- ignore the entire body of academic work, current and past, on socialism, and
- ignore how the word socialism "IS used now, like it or not" in actual socialist or semi-socialist countries

By doing that you end up at your definition of the word, yes. But you had to take a pretty long detour to get to that point

Marx's quote on religion is pretty straightforward - it can be, as you say, open to interpretation, but it's generally agreed that he didn't say that your Jesus was a stand-up socialist. He is more commonly taken to mean that religion is a false response to the real suffering of the oppressed; religion provides a fiction of suffering and a fiction of redemption/happiness, that will never translate into real change. It makes the oppressed feel like they are bettering their lives, while actually keeping them passive and preventing them from changing anything.

The slightly larger context of the quote is this: "Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend. Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüth einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volks."

I don't know how to make that more plain, but I can try. Religious suffering is on one hand a response to real suffering (wirkliche Elend, by which one would mean a materialistically determined actual lack of freedom, resources, physical wellbeing, etc), but it is also a false reaction against that real suffering. Real oppression creates suffering to which there could be a real respones, but religion instead substitutes in false suffering and false responses - it tries to tackle real suffering with metaphysical solutions. He goes on to say:

"Die Aufhebung der Religion als des illusorischen Glücks des Volkes ist die Forderung seines wirklichen Glücks."

This, too, seems pretty straightforward to me, but you might see 4 or 5 different things there. Religion teaches the people an illusory form of happiness, which doesn't actually change or even challenge the conditions of suffering, and must therefore be tossed out, for the people to ever achieve real happiness.

A fundamental difference here is that religious goodness is internally, individually, and fundamentally motivated. 'Good' is 'Good', and you as a Christian individual should choose to do Good. A goal of Marxism is to abolish that kind of fundamentalism and replace it with continuous criticism; creating a society that always questions, together, what good is, through the lens of dialectical materialism.

You might recognize this line of thinking* from what modern Europeans call the autonomous left wing, or what Marx and Trotsky called the Permanent Revolution, which Wikipedia helpfully comments on as "Marx outlines his proposal that the proletariat 'make the revolution permanent'. In essence, it consists of the working class maintaining a militant and independent approach to politics both before, during and after the 'struggle' which will bring the 'petty-bourgeois democrats' to power." Which sounds great, except it can also lead to purges, paranoia, and informant societies.

My entire point is that socialism and Christianity are entirely different beasts. One is a rich, layered mythology with an extremely deep academic and political history, but no modern critical or explanatory components.** The other is an academic theory of economics and politics, with all the tools of discourse of modern academia in its toolbelt, and a completely different critical and analytical goal.

TL;DR? Well, Jesus (in a lenient interpretation) taught that we should help the weak. Marx explained that the people should organize to eradicate the conditions that force weakness onto the people. Jesus
taught that greed would keep a man from heaven, Marx explained that religion, nationalism, tribalism and commodity fetishism blinded the people to its common materialist interests. Jesus taught that the meek will be rewarded for their meekness, and while on earth we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; Marx explained that meekness as a virtue is a way of preventing actual revolutionary change, and that dividing the world into the spiritual and the materialistic helped keep the people sedate and passive, which plays right into the hands of the Caesars.

*I'm just kidding, I know you don't recognize any of this


**There probably are modern scholars of Christianity who adapt and adopt some of the tools of modern academic discourse; I know too little about academic Christianity.

I wish he would have flatly stated that. For what it's worth my comment has no leaning toward the politics of this. I wasn't able to follow exactly what argument he was building (even though it's obvious to us, I still watch these analytically to view them from others' perspectives), but that he 'drops the mic' at the end didn't help.

Of course it's unreasonable to say reason is becoming extinct. I would say that for the last 300 years or so, we've become amazingly reason-driven. There are probably more people alive today who are reasonable (who believe that the validity of their own and others actions is best judged by a measure of their rationality) than in all of human history.

As for your other questions:
1) Do I even have a bit of an analytical mind? Yes, in a jar, in the fridge.
2) Did I ever have history in school? Yes, on several occasions. We never covered Fox News though

Where black and white is used so much, black and white rules.
I dont like it either, I wish it was different. But saying I am a hypocrite because I describe black and white with... black and white and calling it unreasonable (do you even have a bit of an analytical mind? Did you ever have history in school?), is audacious, to put it friendly.
Nice try, though.

@lucky760, I presume you run google analytics (or something similiar) over the site?

Would be interesting to know how different people use it.
For me, I always click on recent comments, top 15, etc. I also like seeing the top rated new comments (it often leads to the most interesting discussions).

Would also be good if pure invocation comments "dead" "ban" etc were somehow filtered out of the recent comments list.

I don't think I've ever clicked on the top 15 sifters lists on the bottom.

I also agree with @MilkmanDan re the video size. I generally watch videos full screen if I'm interested in the visual content. If it's primarily audio, it probably won't even be on the top tab.

Despite that measures of time may not be so analytically robust, there are reasonably good relative measures. Throw a stone into the air or drop it from a fixed height, and see how many arrows you can shoot before it hits the ground. Even if it were as long as 3 seconds, that's still an impressively short time to shoot 3 arrows in.

"The high-income tax increase sapped 0.25 percentage points from GDP in 2013, estimates Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pennsylvania."

"Politicians who support tax increases operate under a misconception that there is little real effect, Maloney said.

“A higher tax rate reduces our ability to recapitalize and reduces our ability to expand,” he said. “You keep your forklifts a little longer, you do whatever you can to stretch the dollars you’re left with.”"

"According to Zandi’s estimates, the payroll tax cut subtracted 0.6 percentage points from U.S. economic growth, more than twice the effect of the high-income tax cuts."

“Clearly, taxes affect behavior; they affect some behaviors more than others. What has not been established is that the level of taxes has a clear and important impact on economic growth. And one reason is that this is not a well-posed question. How government activity affects prosperity depends not only on the level of taxes, but also on what the money is used for.”

"Thus, the proper answer to a question as broad as whether tax increases are “positive” or “negative” for growth is: “It depends.”"