Just take a look at the 10 top-performing link posts on Facebook each day. It's almost universally right to far-right leaning content. Whoever is perpetrating this anti-conservative bias must be spectacularly bad at their job. On the other hand, conservative victimhood appears to be a winning message in this political cycle.
In Glenn Greenwald's case at least, it turns out that if you actually assemble a team of excellent editors then they will do their job and prevent you from putting out profoundly bad content. His "unfiltered" phase is just pure contrarianism with no substance.
> a minority of states imposing their will on the majority of the remaining states
These are arbitrary ways of cutting up the vote. Right now we have a minority of people imposing their will on the majority of the remaining people. I don't have any allegiance to one state or another. I'm an American and go where my job needs me. Why do I deserve less representation in government just because I need to live in a city for a profession instead of living back with parents in the middle of nowhere?
Why should a few people in rural states have up to ten times the representation that I do in government just because my job requires me to "cluster in a few cities"?
Our leaders govern people not land and any system that enforces minority rule to the point that presidential hopefuls know more about the cost of corn in Iowa than about the specifics of tech regulation which affect 1000x the number of people is wrong.
"Does this person deserve to be treated like a human being based off <x immutable property>" isn't really acceptable in civil society and for good reason. Keep that stuff to 4chan, not in my workplace. That's not some sort of "leftist" thing.
"Alternative facts" and the politicization of objective reality are IMO the most dangerous trends of the past four years. There's no way to begin to bridge our fractured political landscape when leaders devolve into conspiracy theories about scientists and apolitical entities rigging the system against them. I am glad that some publications had the guts to call a spade a spade.
> approximate present does not approximately determine the future
Well that's an absolutely absurd and dishonest take on chaos theory.
I can tell you that the five year average of all stocks will probably go up by a predictable amount in the next ten years even if I can't tell you what an individual stock will do two weeks from now. The climate of the earth is an even more stable system that doesn't have to worry about predicting when the next political instability will occur. These models are good and accurate and can be used for predictions beyond 2 weeks.
> I haven't done any stats since college, and that was over a decade ago, so I don't claim to be an expert.
That's the whole point. This isn't my field of expertise and it certainly isn't yours. No offense, but the 45 minutes you spent between my post and this one is not a "literature review." I am a professional scientist and for my most recent publication it took me three weeks to cover the literature on my one narrow finding. That was already after spending the last five years in a PhD becoming an expert in my field! The three weeks was spent deeply reading almost every significant paper on the topic I was publishing on. That is what literature review means and you don't really understand the nuances of applying Benford's law to election fraud by spending 45 minutes browsing wikipedia and skimming abstracts.
If the political science experts who have spent decades studying the facts surrounding Benford's law disagree that it is a reliable indicator of fraud then what are we doing running sketchy analyses and then making huge leaps to claim it as "mathematical proof that the democrats stole the election." And yes, that is a conspiracy theory with all of the hallmarks of one. It is to the point that state election officials are having to waste their time to go on television and debunk literal lies and disinformation that are being broadcast by certain political figures. Judges are already tossing Trump's lawsuits because even his lawyers have to tell the judges that they have no evidence of fraud. The continued assertion that Democrats are "stealing the election" is the conspiracy theory here and it is literally dangerous. A bomb threat was called into a Philadelphia counting center. Vote counters are being escorted to and from counting locations by the police for their protection from armed mobs that are aggregating in some areas. You'll have to excuse me if I'm already tired of seeing these baseless claims show up over and over again when not even Trump himself can pull out evidence to support them when it comes time to do so in court.
If you want to learn about Benford's law then good on you. I think that it is a really interesting topic and there is some good entertainment to be had in learning about it. However, it's delusional for people like the author of this article to spend an evening learning about it and then act like it is the magic bullet from the Kennedy assassination.
It certainly is a mystery why legally cast mail in votes (which are allowed to arrive after election day per state law in some jurisdictions) would sway to one party. It's almost like one candidate has been telling his supporters to, in no uncertain terms, not use mail in ballots.
Your other claim is literal misinformation.
Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican: "Observers from the Democratic Party and Republican Party, from the Biden campaign and the Trump campaign, have been in our counting area observing, right up against where the process is taking place, from the very beginning" (he said this in response to a similar lie by Ted Cruz)
No. This baseless insistance that the most closely watched election in living history has had fraud at a scale never seen in the US that occurred in front of hundreds of bipartisan observers is literally a conspiracy theory.
All of the newly minted statistics experts on the internet wildly missaplying methods to support their foregone conclusions are exactly the same as Johny C. Theorist getting an internet education in materials science so that he can understand for himself that jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams. Trump's polling numbers also don't follow Benford's law in some cases. That's because there is no direct causation between legitimate elections and a Benford's law style distribution.
The fixation on wildly cherry picked data and missaplied statistics is the conspiracy theory. There are already court cases with the best experts in the land looking at the counts. Guess what? They are starting to be laughed out of court because they have no evidence to support their claims. It is either supremely arrogant or delusional to claim that you have found this thing that you spent five minutes learning about on the internet that proves magically that the Democrats stole the election while world renowned experts aren't able to prove it to a judge.
There is no liberal conspiracy to steal an election. Trump made the same claim in 2016. He made it during the Republican primaries about his opponents (that they cheated him). He said the system was rigged when he settled the fraud lawsuite for trump university. Hell... he even said he was being cheated when his tv show wasn't awarded an Emmy. This is just what he does and instead of spreading lies he needs to accept that he lost (probably... we'll see soon) and stop dividing the country.
After years of courting conspiracy theorists, it has gotten so bad that they even managed to elect someone that openly believes in QANON to congress. [1]
"Free speech for me, but not for thee"