Trump vs. Biden

[Stigmata]

No, I know he lost the election.

And we would've gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddlesome teenagers mail-in ballots.

 

[ceecee]

Per Axios....

The publicly-stated position of President Trump's legal team is that the reason Trump lost Georgia is because Georgia's Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has been bribed by a Venezuelan front company in cahoots with the CIA to throw elections to Communists.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Per Axios....

The publicly-stated position of President Trump's legal team is that the reason Trump lost Georgia is because Georgia's Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has been bribed by a Venezuelan front company in cahoots with the CIA to throw elections to Communists.

I never realized Hugo Chavez was so diabolical he could sabotage American elections from beyond the grave.

 

[Stigmata]

Per Axios....

The publicly-stated position of President Trump's legal team is that the reason Trump lost Georgia is because Georgia's Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has been bribed by a Venezuelan front company in cahoots with the CIA to throw elections to Communists.

Yet to them seems plausible whereas the concept of global warming, which is overwhelmingly accepting as a valid planetary concern within scientific communities, is totally made up and false.

*shows everyone a snowball to prove global warming isn't real*

 

[Jaguar]

.

 

[Maou]

Clearly no one read my links. Its the people who helped Chavez get elected, that helped Biden get elected. Use your fucking brain.

 

[Jaguar]

Causal explanations, conspiracy explanations included, are also informed by various social motivations, including the desire to belong and to maintain a positive image of the self and the in-group. Scholars have suggested that conspiracy theories valorize the self and the in-group by allowing blame for negative outcomes to be attributed to others. Thus, they may help to uphold the image of the self and the in-group as competent and moral but as sabotaged by powerful and unscrupulous others. If this is the case, we can expect conspiracy theories to be particularly appealing to people who find the positive image of their self or in-group to be threatened (Cichocka, Marchlewska, & Golec de Zavala, 2016).

 

[Jonny]

Cable: 06CARACAS2063_a

Wikileaks article linking Smartmatic to Sequoia (Dominion) and election fraud, and used by Chavez.

Tldr

>Dominion and Smartmatic share subsidiaries with each other despite claiming that they have zero business relation. CNN, MSNBC, Atlantic, ETC, have all repeated this claim of zero-relation, despite that fact that it is provably false.

>Smartmatic loves to intentionally hide who their real owners are, and launders money through a series of undetectable channels. This is NOT how an honest company operates. Ever.

>Smartmatic / Dominion is just as, if not more shady, than what Powell is accusing them as. US intelligence officers have been aware of this problem for decades, but still let a related company ( Dominion ) handle the US 2020 election.

>Everything Powell has stated about Chavez is true, and if you read other documents on wikileaks classified by the same source ( Robert Downes, Political Counselor ) this just further confirms everything.

Injuncted Princeton voting machine report: Insecurities and Inaccuracies of the Sequoia AVC Advantage 9.00H DRE Voting Machine, 17 Oct 2008 - WikiLeaks

Your link offers no evidence of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Also, I question your inclusion of the Dominion parenthetical after Sequoia. Smartmatic does not own Dominion Voting Systems

Use your fucking brain.

 

[Nicodemus]

Clearly no one read my links. Its the people who helped Chavez get elected, that helped Biden get elected. Use your fucking brain.

Not sure you ever noticed, but: People are not taking you seriously.

 

[Red Herring]

Opinion | When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy - The New York Times

When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy

Understanding the structure of global cabal theories can shed light on their allure — and their inherent falsehood.

By Yuval Noah Harari

Conspiracy theories come in all shapes and sizes, but perhaps the most common form is the global cabal theory. A recent survey of 26,000 people in 25 countries asked respondents whether they believe there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.”

Thirty-seven percent of Americans replied that this is “definitely or probably true.” So did 45 percent of Italians, 55 percent of Spaniards and 78 percent of Nigerians.

Conspiracy theories, of course, weren’t invented by QAnon; they’ve been around for thousands of years. Some of them have even had a huge impact on history. Take Nazism, for example. We normally don’t think about Nazism as a conspiracy theory. Since it managed to take over an entire country and launch World War II, we usually consider Nazism an “ideology,” albeit an evil one.

But at its heart, Nazism was a global cabal theory based on this anti-Semitic lie: “A cabal of Jewish financiers secretly dominates the world and are plotting to destroy the Aryan race. They engineered the Bolshevik Revolution, run Western democracies, and control the media and the banks. Only Hitler has managed to see through all their nefarious tricks — and only he can stop them and save humanity.”

Understanding the common structure of such global cabal theories can explain both their attractiveness — and their inherent falsehood.

The Structure

Global cabal theories argue that underneath the myriad events we see on the surface of the world lurks a single sinister group. The identity of this group may change: Some believe the world is secretly ruled by Freemasons, witches or Satanists; others think it’s aliens, reptilian lizard people or sundry other cliques.
But the basic structure remains the same: The group controls almost everything that happens, while simultaneously concealing this control.

Global cabal theories take particular delight in uniting opposites. Thus the Nazi conspiracy theory said that on the surface, communism and capitalism look like irreconcilable enemies, right? Wrong! That’s exactly what the Jewish cabal wants you to think! And you might think that the Bush family and the Clinton family are sworn rivals, but they’re just putting on a show — behind closed doors, they all go to the same Tupperware parties.

From these premises, a working theory of the world emerges. Events in the news are a cunningly designed smoke screen aimed at deceiving us, and the famous leaders that distract our attention are mere puppets in the hands of the real rulers.

The Lure

Global cabal theories are able to attract large followings in part because they offer a single, straightforward explanation to countless complicated processes. Our lives are repeatedly rocked by wars, revolutions, crises and pandemics. But if I believe some kind of global cabal theory, I enjoy the comforting feeling that I do understand everything.

The war in Syria? I don’t need to study Middle Eastern history to comprehend what’s happening there. It’s part of the big conspiracy. The development of 5G technology? I don’t need to do any research on the physics of radio waves. It’s the conspiracy. The Covid-19 pandemic? It has nothing to do with ecosystems, bats and viruses. It’s obviously part of the conspiracy.

The skeleton key of global cabal theory unlocks all the world’s mysteries and offers me entree into an exclusive circle — the group of people who understand. It makes me smarter and wiser than the average person and even elevates me above the intellectual elite and the ruling class: professors, journalists, politicians. I see what they overlook — or what they try to conceal.

The Flaw

Global cabal theories suffer from the same basic flaw: They assume that history is very simple. The key premise of global cabal theories is that it is relatively easy to manipulate the world. A small group of people can understand, predict and control everything, from wars to technological revolutions to pandemics.

Particularly remarkable is this group’s ability to see 10 moves ahead on the global board game. When they release a virus somewhere, they can predict not only how it will spread through the world, but also how it will affect the global economy a year later. When they unleash a political revolution, they can control its course. When they start a war, they know how it will end.

Conspiracy theories weren’t invented by QAnon; they’ve been around for thousands of years.
Conspiracy theories weren’t invented by QAnon; they’ve been around for thousands of years.
But of course, the world is much more complicated. Consider the American invasion of Iraq, for example. In 2003, the world’s sole superpower invaded a medium-size Middle Eastern country, claiming it wanted to eliminate the country’s weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam Hussein’s regime. Some suspected that it also wouldn’t have minded the chance to gain hegemony over the region and dominate the vital Iraqi oil fields. In pursuit of its goals, the United States deployed the best army in the world and spent trillions of dollars.

Fast forward a few years, and what were the results of this tremendous effort? A complete debacle. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and the country was plunged into chaos. The big winner of the war was actually Iran, which became the dominant power in the region.

So should we conclude that George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld were actually undercover Iranian moles, executing a devilishly clever Iranian plot? Not at all. Instead, the conclusion is that it is incredibly difficult to predict and control human affairs.

You don’t need to invade a Middle Eastern country to learn this lesson. Whether you’ve served on a school board or local council, or merely tried to organize a surprise birthday party for your mom, you probably know how difficult it is to control humans. You make a plan, and it backfires. You try to keep something a secret, and the next day everybody is talking about it. You conspire with a trusted friend, and at the crucial moment he stabs you in the back.

Global cabal theories ask us to believe that while it is very difficult to predict and control the actions of 1,000 or even 100 humans, it is surprisingly easy to puppet master nearly eight billion.

The Reality

There are, of course, many real conspiracies in the world. Individuals, corporations, organizations, churches, factions and governments are constantly hatching and pursuing various plots. But that is precisely what makes it so hard to predict and control the world in its entirety.

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union really was conspiring to ignite communist revolutions throughout the world; capitalist banks were employing all kinds of dodgy strategies; the Roosevelt administration was planning to re-engineer American society in the New Deal; and the Zionist movement pursued its plan to establish a homeland in Palestine. But these and countless other plans often collided, and there wasn’t a single group of people running the whole show.

Today, too, you are probably the target of many conspiracies. Your co-workers may be plotting to turn the boss against you. A big pharmaceutical corporation may be bribing your doctor to give you harmful opioids. Another big corporation may be pressuring politicians to block environmental regulations and allow it to pollute the air you breathe. Some tech giant may be busy hacking your private data. A political party may be gerrymandering election districts in your state. A foreign government may be trying to foment extremism in your country. These could all be real conspiracies, but they are not part of a single global plot.

Sometimes a corporation, a political party or a dictatorship does manage to gather a significant part of all the world’s power into its hands. But when such a thing happens, it’s almost impossible to keep it hush-hush. With great power comes great publicity.

Indeed, in many cases great publicity is a prerequisite for gaining great power. Lenin, for example, would never have won power in Russia by avoiding the public gaze. And Stalin at first was much fonder of scheming behind closed doors, but by the time he monopolized power in the Soviet Union, his portrait was hanging in every office, school and home from the Baltic to the Pacific. Stalin’s power depended on this personality cult. The idea that Lenin and Stalin were just a front for the real behind-the-scenes rulers contradicts all historical evidence.

Realizing that no single cabal can secretly control the entire world is not just accurate — it is also empowering. It means that you can identify the competing factions in our world, and ally yourself with some groups against others. That’s what real politics is all about.

Tl/dr: Of course conspiracies happen and people and groups follow interests. But "they" are never all in it together since "they" are an extremely long and diverse list of players at odds with each other and none of them as powerful or influential or farsighted and cunning as these beliefs make them out to be.

Also:

I think the belief in a huge conspiracy by an ominous global elite is a combination of seeing intent and causal relation where there is none (Agent detection - Wikipedia) and need for cognitive simplicity in a highly complex world.

I'm not an American, but it also seems perfectly plausible to me that elevated social inequality in combination with education being used as a gateway to and hallmark of the ruling class would lead to a deeprooted mistrust against academia, science and complex answers among significant parts of the population. Deeply creepy on the one hand but more of a natural consequence of long time neglect on the other (which also means something can be done about it).

 

[Red Herring]

Causal explanations, conspiracy explanations included, are also informed by various social motivations, including the desire to belong and to maintain a positive image of the self and the in-group. Scholars have suggested that conspiracy theories valorize the self and the in-group by allowing blame for negative outcomes to be attributed to others. Thus, they may help to uphold the image of the self and the in-group as competent and moral but as sabotaged by powerful and unscrupulous others. If this is the case, we can expect conspiracy theories to be particularly appealing to people who find the positive image of their self or in-group to be threatened (Cichocka, Marchlewska, & Golec de Zavala, 2016).

I wouldn't put it all down to ingroup thinking and sense of selfimportance though. I remember reading an article about believers in chemtrails being introduced to a friendly airplane engineer who explained them all the facts (to no avail). What stuck with me was how it mentioned that these chemtrail believers attending the meeting had all undergone quite some hardship in their lives, were dealing with some amount of trauma and were feeling treated unfairly by life itself.

Mostly anecdotal, for sure, but it sounds like a form of coping mechanism.

 

[Maou]

Your link offers no evidence of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Also, I question your inclusion of the Dominion parenthetical after Sequoia. Smartmatic does not own Dominion Voting Systems

Media claimed Dominion had no links to Smartomatic, and Venezuela, therefor claims of the software being pure shit and esily hackable is false. My link proves its the same company. Which means USA used easily hackable hardware in the 2020 election, which had been used prior to bring Chavez into power and possibly other people. I even heard that Sanders lost the Democratic primary for the same reason. This means our election integrity has been compromised since the mid 2000s. Shouldn't you be even slightly worried?

This isn't even about 2020. Its about why the fuck is USA using commie software to run their elections in certain states?

We need, election reform. No more machines.

 

[Jaguar]

I wouldn't put it all down to ingroup thinking and sense of selfimportance though. I remember reading an article about believers in chemtrails being introduced to a friendly airplane engineer who explained them all the facts (to no avail). What stuck with me was how it mentioned that these chemtrail believers attending the meeting had all undergone quite some hardship in their lives, were dealing with some amount of trauma and were feeling treated unfairly by life itself.

Mostly anecdotal, for sure, but it sounds like a form of coping mechanism.

I think we read different articles. Scratch that, I think only one of us actually read it.


Edit:

Scholars have suggested that conspiracy theories valorize the self and the in-group by allowing blame for negative outcomes to be attributed to others. Thus, they may help to uphold the image of the self and the in-group as competent and moral but as sabotaged by powerful and unscrupulous others. If this is the case, we can expect conspiracy theories to be particularly appealing to people who find the positive image of their self or in-group to be threatened .

Say you don't accomplish what you set out to do and rather than hold yourself accountable like any self-respecting individual would do, they find some far-fetched story to concoct in order to save face. "It wasn't my fault X happened, they did this to me."

Georgie Porgie the Populist comes along and what does he tap into? A group of people who feel a particular way about losing. Or feeling "left out." "Ignored." In order to get them to follow him, he finds someone or something for the people to blame all their problems on. His job isn't to unify but rather to drive a wedge between people. You're not to blame for your failures in life, a mysterious "they" are.

 

[Red Herring]

I think we read different articles. Scratch that, I think only one of us actually read it.

No, I didn't and didn't claim that I do. I was referring to the quoted post (and the memory of previous ones) to dump a thought I had been carrying with me for a while. It wasn't meant to refute anything you posted but to add to it.

 

[Nicodemus]

Media claimed Dominion had no links to Smartomatic, and Venezuela, therefor claims of the software being pure shit and esily hackable is false. My link proves its the same company. Which means USA used easily hackable hardware in the 2020 election, which had been used prior to bring Chavez into power and possibly other people. I even heard that Sanders lost the Democratic primary for the same reason. This means our election integrity has been compromised since the mid 2000s. Shouldn't you be even slightly worried?

This isn't even about 2020. Its about why the fuck is USA using commie software to run their elections in certain states?

We need, election reform. No more machines.

It is time to adjust to the new realities. No matter how much you wail, come January 20, Trump will no longer be president, and the whole world will treat Joe Biden as his successor. Whether true or not, your complaints about irregularities no longer matter. Everyone who matters has moved on.

 

[Stigmata]

Media claimed Dominion had no links to Smartomatic, and Venezuela, therefor claims of the software being pure shit and esily hackable is false. My link proves its the same company. Which means USA used easily hackable hardware in the 2020 election, which had been used prior to bring Chavez into power and possibly other people. I even heard that Sanders lost the Democratic primary for the same reason. This means our election integrity has been compromised since the mid 2000s. Shouldn't you be even slightly worried?

This isn't even about 2020. Its about why the fuck is USA using commie software to run their elections in certain states?

We need, election reform. No more machines.

McConnell was the one that stonewalled any talks about election security/reform legislation, though. How can you question the legitimacy of the election when a very prominent member of the same party who questions the election also actively halted any attempts to shore up election security?

 

[Maou]

McConnell was the one that stonewalled any talks about election security/reform legislation, though. How can you question the legitimacy of the election when a very prominent member of the same party who questions the election also actively halted any attempts to shore up election security?

You once again assume I am a Republican. I voted Republican, but I am not Republican. In fact, I hate Republicans more than Democrats right now. They don't give a fuck about the people who got many of them into office in the last few years. They are controlled opposition. I was independant till 2015. Time to join a new party.

 

[The Cat]

 

[Vendrah]

You once again assume I am a Rwpublican. I voted Republican, but I am not Republican. In fact, I hate Republicans more than Democrats right now. They don't give a fuck about the people who got many of them into office in the last few years. They are controlled opposition. I was independant till 2015. Time to join a new party.

As an independent, you should really consider that the 'alternatives' streams could be lying as much as the mainstream media.

 

[Jaguar]

In other news, a long shot Republican candidate in Maryland who lost by over 40 points claims that Larry Hogan was part of a plot to steal the election from her.

Ye gods, the GOP is literally trying to overthrow America all over America.

Avoiding reality: It's never going to end.