Tuesday, February 02, 2016

"But just for fun, watch me build my case for a rigged election."

Scott Adams Blog: "As I have said in prior blog posts, the stock market is definitely rigged. I say that with certainty simply because it is possible, the risk of detection is low, and the gains are enormous. Whenever you see that combination, crime is guaranteed. 

 The Iowa caucus might be an exception to the universal law of human awfulness. We can hope that is the case. But keep in mind that it would only take one player to rig the result. 


 Now consider that a healthy percentage of the American public believes Donald Trump is literally a Hitler-in-waiting. If an American patriot in Iowa had a chance to take down Hitler and save billions of lives, I hope he or she took the shot. That’s what I expect of my fellow-citizens.  As a thought experiment, put yourself in the shoes of an Iowan who has the opportunity to rig the Republican caucus vote. You alone might have the power to stop Trump-Hitler. If you don’t, the next Holocaust is on you.  What do you do? As an American and a patriot, I hope you rigged the election to save us all from Hitler. If you didn’t take the shot when you had it, why not? 

If I were in that situation – and I believed in my heart that I could stop Hitler – I would feel obligated to do it. How could you feel otherwise? And if I were a GOP establishment person who just wanted to keep the military-industrial machine intact, I would have that motive as well.  I’m not saying the Republican caucus in Iowa was rigged. All I’m saying is that the result looks exactly like it was rigged, and the people who had the opportunity had the best motive in the history of all motives. You might say they had the mother of all motives and a few aunts of motives as well.  

 As I was having these thoughts last night, some folks on Twitter mentioned that Republicans were using a new Microsoft app to tally results. Apparently that system was a bit buggy. Microsoft provided the system for free.  Oh, and Microsoft is Rubio’s biggest donor. "

2 comments:

  1. Wapo has an interesting article about the conspiracy theory he refers to at the end, a theory originally broken by breitbart. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/02/no-trump-fans-marco-rubio-and-microsoft-didnt-steal-your-votes/

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    1. Thanks for the link... kind of silly though. The refutation of the piece was basically "they're so dumb" without providing anything resembling data, one way or the other. Having read Adams' hypothesis first - sabotaging Trump rather than swinging it to Rubio - it makes a more sense. The idea that the WAPO writer doesn't see how the chess pieces move because it doesn't fit their ideas is more a failure of imagination than anything else. The whole idea that *if* somebody wanted to swing it without making it obvious you couldn't throw Trump's votes to Cruz, because that'd make it a blowout, which no polls showed. But you could tag them to Rubio to make a stronger showing at 3rd. Given that it's highly unlikely Cruz does anything impressive in NH, a strong Rubio going in works for the narrative. I don't find the suggestion absurd. Unlikely, but still. See also Diebold, voting machines, GWBush, etc. The most interesting reading I saw of the Cruz win was re: the evangelical vote - http://reason.com/blog/2016/02/02/cruz-won-iowa-because-of-evangelicals-wo

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