Dana Bash points out that tTrump’s legal team is not just second rate but that a lot of good GOP lawyers like Ben himself simply dislike Trump and don’t want to fight for him anyway. Interesting if true. How much do you have to suck to not get even lawyers to take your money?
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Screenshot for the highlights reel: TV screen showing simultaneous Covid and election data, with Covid data helpfully coded red-scale. The Trump virus. Biden said cases could cross 200k/day in the next surge. Hold on to your ventilators. Winter’s gonna be rough.pic.twitter.com/sEjboHJYqy
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Okay calling it a night. I’m guessing the networks will call it sometime tomorrow and Biden will do an actual victory speech and Trump will tweet “see you in court.” I’ll be able to end this interminable counting-for-Godot thread. We will then start a transition hell thread.
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Day for of Counting for Godot. The news headlines are Cauchy converging on a Biden victory projection via Zeno’s paradox. Wish I’d taken screenshots. CNN is currently on “Biden nears victory.” Fox is on “America (still) waits.” NYT is on “Biden edges closer to victory.”
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* Day four Trumps Twitter feed right now is a flood of RTs of sketchy allegations of ballot fraud, plus a bunch of flagged tweets. He really thinks there’s a way out via some loophole. I suspect he’s applying intuitions from tax or real estate law which have way more loopholes.
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Strikes me there are two kinds of games: 1. games designed by idealists to make cheating hard 2. games designed by self-dealing elites to make cheating easy He’s used to type 2 and elections are type 1. It takes a lot long-term more work (eg gerrymandering) to cheat in type 1
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Thing about electoral processes is that it’s not hard to cheat but it’s very hard to hide that you’re cheating. You have to resort to something blatant that people will spot to have a sufficiently big effect.
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I suspect all the minor attack surfaces from Florida 2000 (hanging chads era) have been closed off but there’s probably a bunch of new ones. But at best there’d be opportunistic/reactive room to cheat at the margins. Florida worked because it was one state and a ~500 vote margin.
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Trump’s got a fairly common personality trait (assuming everyone is cheating if you can’t see what they’re doing), coupled with an uncommon one (using that as justification to cheat wildly yourself). I know tons of people with the first trait, but very few with the second.
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Most suspicious types merely end up as angry, depressed cynics, not as cheats themselves. It’s heartening that the median person in a reasonably prosperous society is in fact NOT a cheat. The average cheating level is raised to cynicism inducing levels by fat tail of big cheats.
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Having hair-trigger cheater-detection brain wiring is not surprising. All apes probably have that hard-wired. Recall behavioral economics results that biases often disappear when a problem is framed in cheater-detection terms. In scarcity-shaped ape societies, cheating is endemic
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But in a more prosperous society, runaway cheater-detection cognitions turns into an autoimmune disease because it triggers reactionary cheating as in Trump. And since everybody is NOT cheating and the exceptions are NOT worth policing, they enjoy huge success.
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And so they conclude all huge successes are from cheating, like their own. The zero-sum mercantilist mindset is so deep-rooted they literally can’t see the most common way to be a huge success in low-scarcity environments, which is actually doing something non-zero-sum.
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Putting a pin in this topic for potential future analysis. I lost interest in this stuff 10 years ago, but it’s gotten important enough again, if I can get interested again I’ll think it through.
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Though the front page still shows a *new* counting-for-godot headline. You have to click through to see the call.pic.twitter.com/s4gSZkzxOX
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The NYT is reporting that AP and TV networks have called it
News that other news outlets are now sure there will be news. How much more meta can this get?pic.twitter.com/5fLsdhpKew
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Santorum is putting up a rather sad defense on CNN. It’s like speaker-for-the-dead. Bunch of disingenuous rationalizations but they’re humoring him.
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Fox calls it too. Trump is now the loneliest man on the planet. I imagine even Rudy is looking for a good moment to slink away.pic.twitter.com/J9uacKL2mw
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Obama must be the happiest guy on the planet now. This is *deep* redemption that his veep was the one to end what was effectively an “undo-Obama” 4-year-run of pure resentment. Undo/redo. Makes me think hard right will be auto-saving their own revert point here. Dueling forks.
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Fox coverage now is Bret Baier and Chris Wallace, the known reasonable moderates Trump is known to hate. They read out a WH press release verbatim but are otherwise firmly reinforcing that this is a solid call.
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Chris Wallace pointing out that Mitt Romney conceded gracefully despite being prepared for a legal fight, and the cost of nit doing so etc. Wonder if Fox will overall seek rehabilitation and sideline the Hannitty crowd.
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Commercial break. This portion of the live tweet brought to you by Timur Kuran and Zeynep Tufecki of the Turkish Center for Great Weirding Analysis. Apply for membership today and receive a free Turkish coffee pot.pic.twitter.com/hAqFrJM4Oy
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Fox is now being almost embarrassingly gracious about all things Biden. They’re going to give him a nice if short honeymoon till the Georgia runoffs. Trump is literally golfing and the Fox guy said something about putts. Kasich is on CNN. He’s pretty much a shoo-in for cabinet.
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Unfortunately for Trump the strong GOP downballot performance (arguably a rout of the Dems) makes it far harder to argue fraud even in principle/circumstantially. If you figure out a big enough exploit you’d obviously try to distort senate and house races too.
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Ok will stop tracking this here until Biden speech. After that we’ll close this thread. Replies time-stamped after Biden’s speech will not be counted.
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