2016 Postmortem

is what you are doing. Shutting down further inquiry. Further inquiry is part of theory, an Enlightenment value that drives scientific inquiry, as well. Thus, you're wrong about the horsehoe "model," as I would call it, about left and right tendencies. I can list scientists who claim that conservative politics kept them from developing broad data bases needed to ground theories, yet another example of why 'theories' take so long to become accepted as solid, unrevisable history.

So what if these people have no facts yet. They're not journalists or undercover, and yet they are supporting those who are. There is absolutely nothing to associate them with right-wingnut theories, since no one on that end of your "horseshoe" model tries to ground their theories with raw data.

This is a 50-state, 50-state legal, jurisdictional and all around record-keeping nightmare. It's a nightmare. It's labor and time intensive. It's not googling. Yet, as people around here want to build evidence from sources, from google, no less, you decide to berate them.

So yeah, glad you took pains to lecture me about the cost/benefits of "conspiracy theories." I've only been dealing with this crap since the 70's, but feel free.

Okay, let me explain "the spirit" of communication, based on this part of what you said above:

"...I never said a damn thing about "to accept the spirit of the claims made by election programmers, lawyers and other experts"; that was never brought up. The subject was never brought up; the entire discussion with the penguin was about the Palast BS..."

No, you didn't. I did. Understand that what is generally understood about the "spirit" of people's communications around here are the good faith attempts to work together to build an accurate map.

Of reality, elections, a path ahead.

You choose to call it a stage of grief, if you wish. But that's too convenient when real criminal vote count fraud is being investigated. Adults can still be high functioning in all the stages of grief, and they do so with eyes vigilant to actual, factual events they pay attention to. So please remember as real events unfold, we're not talking psychological theory here, either.

This is not about bargaining with losing. DU'ers do not exhibit any anti-spirit or bad faith attempts to deliberately mislead, lie, cast doubt or float other people's lies or conspiracies. Skinner and the old heads have cleaned house and kept hackers at bay and have well articulated policies about that so far. Even you seem to have cleared an alert.

No one needs to be spoken to as if they are full of bs or deliberately trying to bs anyone.
We are not dupes.
We are not duping each other.
We are not fooling each other or stirring paranoia.
You have no evidence for any of those claims.

There are creditable sources many in DU tend to rely on. I go for Tom Englehardt with TomDispatch, Mother Jones, The New Yorker and everything Palast does. I think we even have a black list of bad sources.

In the spirit of looking at credibility, you could give the struggling journalists who are 95% right most of the time a break, too, and not label their claims or anyone who quotes their claims here as bs, either.

So, I call it the "spirit" of mapping -- the attempt to "map" together what is happening.

Just because you have a point -- which you have flung at people as if it's the final word against their stubborn intents to mislead themselves and other -- in repeating that there isn't sufficient evidence yet to have hope that we can prove rigging, your point doesn't mean that your truth is better, more lasting and the final reason to stop this "nonsense" -- it doesn't mean that you should discourage people who show hope that legal and journalistic digging is going to get us -- you -- the evidence we all want.


We need to support activities that support our interests. That includes hope talk, not conspiracy talk, over the damned hard slog of mapping what really happened in red states that had previously gone blue. No beginning, whether it's government, constitution, voting system, study of the mind, starts off with all the facts and evidence. This issue is no different. We also don't have all the historical patterns of voting conflicts to help guide the investigations.

If you'd agree that people's personality is not a solid indicator of their core personhood, we can come to trust the good intent of DU members around these issues and ease up on each other until this arduous process gets sorted out.