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I think the phrase “that have been submitted to us” is a statement that should be handled with extreme caution.
If “in on it too” means Toomey is more concerned with his own re-election than Trump’s, I vote “yes.”
If you lie on an affidavit in the State of Michigan you are subject to be fined or incarcerated for perjury. Of course, McDaniel could be stretching the truth or lying herself. She does seem like a reprehensible character. Maybe because she’s Mitt Romney’s niece she’s really trying to sabotage Trump <— deliberate and silly sarcasm; not advancing a conspiracy theory. Whew…that was close.
OK, folks I’m posting this here first and I hope all of you will show up:
Please join us tomorrow at 12PM PT/3PM ET for a special Election Law Q & A session with our own John Yoo on Zoom. As you may know, John was very involved in the Bush v. Gore case in 2000 and knows his way around this topic. We will be taking your questions, so bring your wildest theories and schemes and John will tell you why your tim foil hat is on too tight (It’s. A. Joke).
We will post a link on the Member Feed and in a site wide announcement very shortly.
Right!
Not yet. Are you going to, as you promised earlier? If I stray too far into conspiracies?
Lots of tough internet guy talk here. You should be embarrassed but clearly aren’t. And we are your customers.
Now this MIT PhD and inventor for Twitter must be a conspiracy theorist:
https://www.pscp.tv/w/1BdGYYjgkgQGX
That’s only if they are taking extreme caution to be accurate, which we want. Otherwise it has a connotative meaning, which is understandable, too.
No tough guy talk, just reminding you of the rules you agreed to when you joined. That you are our one of customers isn’t relevant in this scenario.
Has anyone been stifled here? Has anyone been told to shut up? Has anyone been instructed not to advance a specific storyline? The answer is no to all of those statements. All we have said it we are not going to allow Ricochet to be a clearinghouse for every wild-eye theory that’s out there and asked you to be circumspect with respect to what you post. That’s what you agreed to when you joined and that’s also (in part) why you pay us.
Very believable.
Yes. You did.
I’m pretty sure you did.
All of us have been, by you, except you weren’t very specific. You were vague enough to stifle all conversation.
The answers were quite straight forward yeses.
You can threaten hard, by pointing a (metaphorical) gun at your interlocutor and making specific demands, or you can threaten softly by taking the (metaphorical) gun out of a drawer and laying on on the desk, and speaking softly about non-specific courtesies and rules.
You have stifled speech using the soft technique, but you have threatened nonetheless.
Point me to where I told anyone to shut up. Conversations have not been stifled (this thread and several others are still going strong). In addition and partly in response to the conversation on this thread, I personally booked an actual expert on election law for you to put your theories and questions to. Seems to me you have a mis-understanding of what “stifled” actually means.
We have reminded you about the rules you agreed to when you joined the site. Those rules are not non-specific, they are actually quite clear and have served us well for over 10 years, and requiring members to abide by them is one of the reasons we charge a fee to use this platform. And the gun metaphor is wildly over the top.
This!
@blueyeti wrote earlier – “some of what is being posted here is just that: unproven, unsubstantiated, and verifiably false rumors being presented as fact.” I do take that as being told not to bring up certain items, but since you won’t tell me what was considered verifiably false, I do feel being stifled.
Does John Yoo know anything about the specifics of the 2020 allegations? It’ll be interesting to hear about 2000 and hanging chads, but that was 20 years ago. More historical at this point than topical.
What I’d like to know is whether poll watchers were prevented from watching, just how many software glitches occurred and how many votes it affected, how many late ballots, how many unsigned ballots, how many otherwise sketchy ballots. More generally: what % of the vote can an entrenched political machine pad if it wanted? 1%? 5%? I think 5% isn’t outlandish. What I also want to know: if there are specific allegations, shouldn’t we investigate them instead of trying to divert with the general or the irrelevant? If it’s nothing then it’s nothing and Biden wins. Fine. Why not find out? How can we find out if we don’t investigate?
All we ask that you don’t post every wild rumor you hear on the street or read on the internet. That you treat statements from people with agendas –on both sides– with some degree of skepticism. Or at the very least, if you are going to post a rumor, clearly present it as a rumor, not Proof That Democracy Is Collapsing In Front Of Our Very Eyes (yes, someone used that phrase to describe observers not being allowed to watch ballot counting –later disproven).
I need to knock off for the night now. I hope all of you who have questions or even things you have heard about the vote challenges come to the Zoom event with John tomorrow and air them out. Which by the way, is the opposite of stifling or censoring conversation.
Yes, I understand. Just out of curiosity — I want to know what I can’t say, and am looking for examples — would you redact me if I repeated the “fine people on both sides” slur, or the disproven “Ukraine” “bribery” falsehoods, or the disproven Russia collusion allegations? Would you redact them? Or in this is it up to us to police ourselves, or for others to flag my comments?
I see that you gave a link to lawyer for questions to be answered, but I can’t find it anymore now. If you would, please reprint that link here so that I can understand the thinking consistent with the CoC and remain a member in good standing.
He knows the specifics and the players very well. Listen to last week’s Ricochet Podcast for more detail on this.
See my Comment #187 – I highly recommend watching this entire video. There is a lot of buffering in the first half of the video which is frustrating but what they’ve discovered – essentially is an artificial algorithm that when triggered transfers votes from one candidate (in this case Trump) to another (Biden) in 3 counties in Michigan which is precisely what was discovered in Antrim County in Michigan when 6,000 votes for Trump were electronically transferred to Biden and only corrected by a hand count.
A.V. Shiva is a Fulbright Scholar, MIT PhD, and a Senate candidate in Massachusetts…so, to suggest he’s a conspiracy theory wacko would be quite laughable.
https://www.pscp.tv/w/1BdGYYjgkgQGX
We have always relied on members to flag comments and posts and for our Moderators to adjudicate them. Occasionally, an editor will make a call on complicated or controversial situations. We’re of course not going to redact any of the topics you mentioned. For starters, they aren’t in dispute. At least not around here, anyhow. And for the record, the vast majority of of the redacts we do are for personal attacks or insults. We very rarely redact something due to accuracy for all the obvious reasons. In the case of the election, my intention was to simply remind everyone to think about what they are publishing and to not make Ricochet a clearing house for every internet rumor that pops up on Twitter or elsewhere. We have not redacted anything on this thread (I can’t speak for all of them) and as far as I know, we have not suspended anyone posting on this topic.
The information for the conversation with John can be found here.
Yeti, let me be more specific, because your instructions referring to the CoC seem to be newly enforced and vague, and I just want to know what is a conspiracy theory or misinformation or not.
One thing that I have written here about is the 2017 disclosure by Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney of a sweeping, government-developed computer program named the “Hammer” and it’s election-altering application “Scorecard,” a pair of programs initially designed for the CIA before being privatized from the Obama administration. And on Nov 2, Gen. McInerney issued warnings of intended voter fraud to support Democrat candidates in this election. Does this constitute a conspiracy theory or not?
And also the whole “rigged election” conspiracy theory has been discussed by Republicans and Democrats alike for months: Is this prohibited?
The CoC if I recall, and I can’t find it now, prohibited conspiracy theories that lent ridicule to Ricochet. But these election fraud allegations run very broadly and deeply, and are profound in their import to the US, and are we only allowed to repeat statements that one side or the other in this dispute have made?
Added: Yeti, thanks for you previous reply. And it is basically clarifying. I submitted this comment before I got it, though. Nonetheless, I really would like to know how you view at least the Hammer allegations and the allegations of its use in the recent election. To my mind, it reeks of conspiracy theorizing. But it also seems to be true, as my comments including bizarre quotes from Maxine Waters and Joe Biden indicate. Is this the kind of conspiracy theory that is prohibited?
The algorithm signature that appears evident in the V.A. Shiva presentation that is evident in 3 counties in Michigan sure sounds like Scorecard FWIW.
I tried but couldn’t watch it. It kept stopping and starting over at the beginning. I’ll try again later.
It stops buffering about 1/2 or a little less than 2/3 the way through.
Thanks.
And for the law-abiding voters to have their votes cancelled out or even overwhelmed by fraud.
Please explain – justify, even – why YOU “have to do” what you claim?
You’re going to make yeti’s head hurt. :-)
Some states have a worked-out mail voting system. Others have very “dirty” voter rolls within a system that USED TO send mail/absentee ballots on the request of individual voters but this time just “threw ballots at the wall and see what sticks.”