Hey y’all did you know that Linux can’t count votes from multiple parties? I think I remember Torvalds talking about that somewhere.
These people are using technobabble to justify disputing their gigantic loss rather than laying the blame at the feet of the people who actually lost.
From our point of view, wouldn’t the largest possible group of people having their faith in the democratic institutions of the US shaken be a good thing? It kind of softens the wall of “the US system of government was created by demi-gods and is the best of all possible systems” propaganda that you have to pierce to have a meaningful dialogue about class warfare.
It depends. Russiagate was a crisis of faith in the institutions. People believed we were being ruled by a Manchurian candidate. They thought we had entered a terminal epistemological crisis. They thought democracy itself had been hacked by Cambridge Analytica and their targeted advertising algorithm. This loss of faith was generally harmful. It served as the justification for a massive increase of surveillance and censorship on social media platforms. It disciplined the media to boycott political stories like the Hunter Biden laptop or the leaked J.D. Vance dossier (both rather mundane in and of themselves) if there is any hint that a foreign government was involved. Institutions which once published the Pentagon Papers now wring their hands about newsworthy information obtained by ‘illicit’ methods.
These election fraud cranks fall in the same bucket, but because the loss was so decisive, this shit isn’t gaining much steam. Instead, it feels like progressives are losing faith in the Democratic Party, and liberalism itself, which is more productive (I am, by no means, declaring the Democratic Party dead however).
If the election is close, libs lose faith in the particular implementation of liberal democracy that’s present in Amerikkka. That’s where you see people asking for ranked choice voting, reform within the Democratic Party, more ballot measures, regulating super PACs, etc.
Now that the election was not even close, they don’t lose faith in the implementation of liberal democracy, they lose faith in liberal democracy itself. It’s a double edge sword: it pushes them into fascism, e.g. all the guys saying ‘I’m a middle class white guy who voted Harris but now that Trump won and he’s gonna send the minorities that didn’t voot hard enough to the camps I’ll just eat popcorn’ or it can push them into revolutionary socialism. However, there are no nucleation points for the latter, and the left has failed to use the last 4 years to build a large net to catch everyone who’s disillusioned with liberalism right now. Red Star Caucus and PSL are incredibly tiny compared to the fascists’ various organizations (including the Republican Party).
We need people to understand that liberalism has failed, not just the institutions that are present in this context. The worrying thing is that the only recognizable alternative for 99% of westerners is fascism, not socialism.
Also, if the libs find anything, they can’t do anything about it and remain libs, and even for the ones that go full fasch; they’ll be radicalized in opposition to other fascists. This is a positive step, I don’t see a bad (well, worse) outcome from this action.
Encourage!