Why is Everyone Stupid, Politics Edition · 5:29am Jun 4th, 2022
[EDIT: See Murcushio's comment explaining why I'm wrong. He's right.]
IMHO, the only thing the Democrats have to do to win the 2024 American Presidential election and not have a civil war is to stop pushing on gun control.
IMHO, the only thing the Republicans have to do to win that election is to run anyone other than Trump.
(Your mileage may vary. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.)
Yesterday, Biden called for a ban on "assault weapons".
Today, the prediction market SMarkets.com predicts that Trump is more than twice as likely as any other candidate to be the Republican nominee in 2024.
In game-theoretic terms, both players have a clear winning move by which they could increase their expected returns from about 0.5 (getting half of what they want) to nearly 1.0 (getting everything they want). Game theory predicts both players always choose to make any compromise that will gain them more votes than it loses, until the two players are close enough that this is no longer possible. That's supposed to be how a 2-party democracy works: compromise happens by mutual convergence.
Instead, what we have looks like both parties vying with each other to see who can lose the most votes by becoming more extremist. How did this happen?
I blame the practice of allowing each party to run only one candidate for President. Because only party members vote on party nominees, the most-extreme candidates win each party's nomination. It would be better to just let each party run as many candidates as they like, and let voters rank all the candidates rather than voting for just one candidate, so we could have a weighted vote, or an iterative elimination process, or any of the various voting methods known to be much better than what we have but that can't work if everybody just votes for one candidate.
So much arguing over temporary issues of the moment; so little argument over the most-important question, which is how our voting system is supposed to work.
For my urban readers: Gun control is much more important to rural folks than you think, because American polls, like this recent Gallup poll and this recent Pew poll, are designed to measure only the amount of support for more gun control, not to measure opposition to stricter gun control. From where I sit, gun control seems to be the most-important issue for rural Americans. At least, it's the most-common reason people have given me for voting for Trump, by a large margin.
That said, I don't think it's the real most-important issue. The most-important issue is one that is never named as an issue in polls: the silencing and slandering of rural America, done not by the government, but by the press and the media.
I disagree completely. The only reason anybody calls themselves a Republican nowadays is because of Donald Trump. On his second term election, he won a record-shattering 78 million votes, increasing voters among blacks, Latinos, and women by large margins. Bear in mind that most of the other Republicans are crusty old men, disconnected from the real world, and/or in bed with China, just like the Democrats. The only political thing that most of the American people can ever agree on is that they want an outsider, not a politician, for president. Well, we had that. Denying Trump a second chance would not be a smart move for the Republicans, it would be like handing the game to the Democrats.
Not that I want to go down that rabbit hole here, but given Trumps poll numbers, the fact that Joe Biden somehow magically got 4 million more votes than Trump's record-shattering 78 million (more than any presidential candidate, ever) is really suspicious, to say the very least. The fact of the matter is that the game has gone beyond what you describe. What's really happening here is that the Republicans are becoming as extremist as they have to be to compete with the extremist Democrats, and the Democrats are cheating. Now, whether you believe that they are cheating directly by election/voter fraud or indirectly by simply lying about their polices (like Biden has done already [running for president: "We are going to shut down covid!" first week in office: "I can't do anything about covid" - yes he actually said those things]) and by media control, is up to you. Regardless, the game is no longer as simple as you posit.
5662066
Running Trump gains the Republicans zero votes. For every Republican voter who only votes because Trump is running, there will be a Democrat who only votes because Trump is running. And nobody who would have voted for Trump is going to vote for a Democrat. Whereas running anyone other than Trump would certainly gain votes, from the large pool of Republicans whose trust he's lost, and of independents who are deterred by Trump's, well, Trumpiness.
5662068 I don't entirely disagree, I do see your point. Trump Gained 16 million votes over the 2016 election. Sixteen million. What you're saying is that Biden also gained 16-18 million votes. I honestly don't believe that, and here's why. While literally everyone (who wasn't completely brain dead) on the left loudly proclaimed that they didn't like Joe Biden, and did not want to vote for him, but merely voted for him to take a vote away from Trump (even though that's not how that works lol), a lot of people on the right actually voted for Trump specifically because of his Trumpiness, not in spite of it. Again, it goes back to the thing of everyone wanting an outsider. We are really talking about the difference between a sleepy old candidate with a pathetic political achievement record that struggled to attract any fans at all, and a charismatic candidate that attracted tens of thousands of fans anywhere he went, even if he wasn't speaking, even if he was in another country. He has parades in other countries. When he's not even there.
Your argument is based on the idea that both candidates are equally despised. But that's simply not the case. While, of course, either one is largely despised by the opposing voters, what I'm trying to point out is that there is a vast disparity when it comes to their own supporters' opinion of them. I really don't think that Trump has lost that much, if any, support from the actual voters on the right. Yeah, he was never liked among Republican politicians (probably has something to do with the fact that Trump was a lifelong Democrat lol), but that doesn't matter. If he had lost any support from voters, how the hell did he gain sixteen million votes? That's kind of a lot. Sitting presidents don't get that many new votes, that's not normal. You propose that Biden gained 16-18 million votes, simply because that many people who would not normally have gone out to vote just hated Trump that much. But what of Trump's new votes? You mean to tell me that 16 or 18 million people who would not normally have gone out to vote just hated Joe Biden that much? I might believe that. But not Hillary Clinton? But not Barrack Obama? For two terms? Where were those people then?
Honestly, the huge jump in voter turn out is extremely suspicious. How does one candidate gain sixteen million votes, and the other guy somehow gains even more than that? Need I remind you that Obama didn't get anywhere near that number of votes, and he was charismatic and beloved, too, like Trump. Biden is a tired old creep, his own voters say they don't like him, and he got 18 million votes more than Obama did?
What I'm trying to say is that Trump actually gained new supporters. Apparently 16 million of them. And you can see evidence of that everywhere. There were entire movements of people switching sides, becoming conservatives and Trump supporters. Rallies. People filming themselves talking about why they were switching sides. It didn't happen in secret. Meanwhile, where was that for Biden? Where were the rallies of people for Biden? Where were the conservatives becoming liberals? Yeah. There wasn't. There weren't.
So I disagree.
I really can’t argue with either of you since they are both good points. You can’t overestimate the effect of the media in polarizing the anti T vote. People who get most of their news from major media think he is the face of evil, Hunters laptop is a Russian fake, etc. Republican moderates can be just as polarized as Bernie Bros when opposing him. Every time I think Us politics is going to calm down it gets crazier. Sigh.
Edit: So I misunderstood a little. Still, my point stands. Your argument is based on the idea that Trump gains an equal number of people who hate him enough to vote against him as he gains people who actually support him. But, I mean, that sounds kind of silly when you say it that way, doesn't it? Who else has that effect on people? Where's the evidence? What actually suggests that other than Biden's magical 18 million vote lead?
I’m afraid US politics has totally beyond my understanding.
The problem, IMHO, is even deeper than gun control or presidential elections themselves. The nub lies the constitution itself. This text, written at the end of the 18th century, has been redacted for a country which bore no semblance whatsoever to what it is now. It is antiquated. Worse, all the mechanisms aimed at altering it are now practically inoperative. So, here it is, the so-called most advanced country in the world is stuck with an outdated, set in stone political system. And it’s not going to improve with time.
5662082
i live here and it's beyond even my understanding
5662082 I see. So apparently freedom of speech, freedom of religion and of the press, freedom to peacefully assemble, liberty, justice, and the ability of the people to prevent their government from becoming tyrannical are antiquated.
These things are more important now than ever. They've been important for the past 246 years, at least. Since the dawn of civilization, actually. Where do you get the notion that these things are not universally important? Or that they are antiquated? It's simply not true.
5662087
Oh, sure, those principles are already there.
Now go put an amendment legalising abortion or banishing the death penalty.
Good luck pal. :p
5662092 See, now that's a legitimate argument. Calling the entire document antiquated is just plain wrong. Also, amendment difficulties have less to do with the constitution and more to do with other laws.
(Also I like how killing babies is ok, but killing murderers isn't...)
5662095
Oh, I meant that the text is antiquated because most of the mechanisms of revision were thought with only a handful of states in mind. Now, I don’t intend to enter into religious or philosophical debates. I simply wanted to emphasise that a seminal act, such as the US constitution, which is now practically impossible to alter, is bound to be increasingly out of step with modern society concerns.
American voting system is pretty fucked up. Even our, Russian, is better. It is not totally good, yes, but, at least, is not stuck in 18th century.
5662080
I'm not remotely stunned by the increase in voters. The USA supports a population of 329.5 million, do subtract some amount for non-adults, but the total of 155 million between the two isn't crazy to me.
Mass movements were made to establish mail-in ballots and increase voting accessibility.
If voter fraud happened, there's no reason both established sides couldn't have had the resources to accomplish some of that.
As someone who spent time in a big city in Wisconsin before, during and after the election, I'm not surprised the state flipped between 2016 and 2020.
For some number of Democrats, I have little doubt that whichever side of the Democrat spectrum one was on, 2016's "I'd rather not see a Republican as president but I'm not voting for Clinton / putting in the effort to go vote" likely became "I do not want a repeat of that, regardless of what it takes".
I'd at least like to hope that most people make their vote for an administration rather than just one head person.
5662080
I'm sorry you feel that way, but reality disagrees. You can't just make up votes. But what you can do is something called ballot harvesting, which is totally legal in most states. You basically go around to a bunch of people who never really voted before or haven't in a while and you get them to fill out a mail in ballot, then you bring it in for them. Voting was easier than in any other election in 2020, because you know, we needed people specifically not to get in crowds to vote. Each vote is tallied compared to registered voter data, so there are no fake votes, only votes real people cast.
5662103
That's why we have the Supreme Court, who can interpret changes in society and match them with the intent of the founding fathers... Oh wait. We have people in there quoting decisions made in the 1600s. Okay so we're hosed.
They know what Trump is, they know what he (says he) wants to do, they know it'll burn it all down. That's why they're voting for him.
5662122
That's also why no one cares about what he does. Trump supporters didn't hire a moral authority. They hired an arsonist. The system is broken, it must be destroyed. So you send in the outsider who says he is willing to tear it all down.
It's fascinating from this side of the Atlantic, since gun control is one of a relatively small number of issues where the Transatlantic divide has got wider in recent years. A UK moderate Conservative's position on gun control would be considered wildly extreme in US politics. So would a US moderate Democrat's in UK politics, but for the opposite reason.
5662122
5662123
And as I liked to remind people, the system was built to render people like Trump impotent. The only way to properly smash the system is civil war aimed specifically at doing so, by design. Somehow, both parties are so out of touch with reality that they're choosing strategies which increase the chance of that happening.
(Disclaimer: there is a difference between saying something is inevitable and actually supporting it)
5662068
There's also the undeniable problem that Trump never won a popular vote. Even W managed that in his second term. The man squeaked in on a technicality, and as a result, with ended up with a someone unlike any other, a man who expected the office to conform to him, and expected to lead on his terms. He won largely from fear of what Hillary would bring, and lost from fears of what he would bring with more time.
5662154
Yes, yes. Saying something is flammable isn't the same as suggesting we set fire to it. The problem with the idea of a civil war is that it requires leadership, and resources. It also requires a clear delineation of where the opposing factions will be. We couldn't have just one civil war, we'd have 50, fought state by state. Because that's how we function now.
5662092
I agree with you that the Constitution is the problem. But the example you gave,
... is in my eyes evidence that the Constitution is still working. It was designed very carefully to stop some coalition of states from forcing their morals and worldview onto the other states, and yet have enough federal power to provide military defense.
Abortion can only clearly not be murder if you deny the supernatural, which only 1/4 of Americans do. If you believe in any supernatural, non-material phenomenon, you can't dismiss the view that human life is dependent on spirit, and that that spirit enters or is created at conception.
The death penalty is only clearly wrong if (A) you don't believe justice is good, and (B) you either
I think both of those views are indefensible. The notion that the death penalty is clearly wrong, is clearly wrong. One can argue that it's bad policy for other reasons, but that argument is subtle and complex, and not the kind of argument one can simply presume is true and force on others.
5662154
Perhaps that is the intent, or at least the unconscious desire, of both parties.
5662122
That part is simply wrong. I know many Republicans, and not one of them wants to "burn it all down". They believe the Democrats want to burn it all down, and they're trying to stop them. Republicans are not in favor of revolution, nor of rewriting the Constitution.
As someone from the other side of the world I can only offer an outsider’s view from a very different system.
We have some pretty strict gun control laws here... laws which would be seen as extreme by many Americans yet very few rural and remote voters here feel disempowered or slandered. Heck, even the original laws they replaced were things that you’d be disturbed by.
We always considered our gun issues to be problems created by city folks and most rural people were in favour of most stricter controls because we saw guns as a tool we needed for vermin control, hunting and not much else unless you took up a sport. Basically it was accepted that a stronger form of gun control made it easier for law enforcement to keep these things out of the hands of those who were likely to misuse them. Limiting the types of guns allowed also meant that anything misused was far less likely to lead to mass death and injury.
Before things go bonkers, assumptions are made and wild words are thrown about please keep the below in mind, I grew up farming, I own a 12 gauge shotgun and a .22 rifle. They are used for vermin control and I used to compete in skeet competition. I have to maintain a license, prove I need them for a valid purpose and store them according to strict regulations... none of these rules impinge on my ability to use them as I need.
While my work means I no longer live on the farm full time my family is still there and I ‘work from home’ there one week in three nowadays. This means I have an extra form to fill in for my license each renewal but that does not stop me from owning and using these tools. Five minutes to fill in the form every 5 years isn’t much of an inconvenience.
The only things I will say on the politics side is that political parties and the media have made a complete bollocks of elections, journalism and government over the last decades and no one can completely claim the moral high ground anymore. While this may apply to the US in a more extreme way, we in the rest of the world have our own issues as well... our own recent election and the media bias circus over here is just another case in point of how the disconnect between the average voter and the major parties and the media is undermining the public’s faith in the system.
5662158
If we're talking about the supernatural, the bible has a few helpful passages about that with regards to when the spirit is present. A women who miscarries is not charged with murder, because that fetus has not yet become a person. And more importantly, allowing 1/4 of the people of a particular religion to dictate the actions of the other 3/4 is definitively unconstitutional.
5662162
Yes, because those are sane republicans who only want to avoid seeing a democrat in office. They would pick anyone with the R by their name, because allowing a D is unconscionable.
5662158
I think there's a very strong utilitarian argument against the death penalty, as a matter of course.
The issue isn't "Don't believe in justice" but the justice system - especially the US justice system - being imperfect and making mistakes. So long as it is, then there needs to be an incredibly high standard of procedure to ensure the death penalty is applied correctly. This is arduous and stupidly expensive, and still constantly wrong. It's more expensive to put a prisoner through death row than to house them for life without parole.
At which point there's no difference to society. Either way, this person is removed from the general population. And there's no argument here for it being an effective disincentive - at those stakes, the crime's being committed, what's being disincentivized is only getting caught.
It's better to treat those people humanely as well. Because they deserve it? Hardly, but people who are treated better behave better. Treating people humanely is ultimately cheaper and results in less violence and less needs for guards and wardens, and in turn those guards and wardens are less likely to carry internalized violence back to their families and the general population. It also means wrongful convictions are less ethically nightmarish.
That's the thing about real high level utilitarianism. It turns out it's not the Cold Equations. More often, it's biting the bullet on showing kindness to people we might think don't deserve it. That one took me way too many years to internalize.
Anyway, the real game theory here, to me, is that the Democrats don't win by swaying centrist votes, but by increasing overall voter turnout. Their biggest obstacle is voter apathy or nihilism. Taking stances and actually fighting for them is their real winning move. Whether they're actually doing that or not...
As an Australian, seeing anything short of a ban on semiautomatic weaponry as an extremist stance is interesting, though. It only took one mass shooting here for that to become the norm. By global standards, advocating to keep things the way they are is the extremist stance.
I can honestly say I've been able to vote for over 12 years but haven't until it was a chance for literally anyone who wasn't Trump. I don't care that he's "not a Politician", I care that he's a despicable human being. Biden is boring sure but at least he's not actively an asshole.
Even if we want to be super cynical and sacrifice any gun control messaging,
1) How can Dems push gun control any less? The most prominent is Beto, who can't be easily controlled, and there's biden who is mostly "argh do something" with a smattering of "plz lets go back to assault weapons ban" which is literally clinton era policy. And they only do this after major shootings for a week! If D Leadership were behind the scenes trying to stop this, there's not much to stop. Next time they're asked, do they pivot to mental health and doors, do they renounce what they've proposed and is largely popular? They should clamp down on any confiscation talk ofc, but does that mean they can't promote voluntary buybacks, the least coercive thing ever, because...
2) The right will always present Ds as the most extreme thing ever. If I could snap my fingers and say every D politician/commentator would actively say "I will not push for any gun control" how many Rs would take a sigh of relief and say "phew, glad that's over, now i can vote on every other issue I broadly agree with Ds on". This impossibility is an advantage inherent to reactionary thought, and also a testament to the discipline of NRA messaging. A small majority of americans want to arm teachers now!
The R base will reject anything, here's an incumbent that dropped out because he was for a return to the assault weapons ban and a raise to 21
Basically, the difference in R turnout based on D's actual position is nil. imo they should focus on one or two things, like increase the age for certain guns to 21 but focus on other things. The focus on other things is a huge topic i wont get into.
Whether Trump is the best or the worst thing to happen to the party is still up in the air lol. When you interview his supporters a ton of them say theyd prefer someone else to run but would ofc vote for trump again. Even though they say they'd prefer someone else, does that mean they'd turn out at the same rate for that someone else? Hard to tell. The Teflon don theory has held up. His approval does indeed dip during his bad weeks but it always bounces back. The wildcard is how Ds would fight someone else in 2024, and that's a huge unknown, right up there with what will happen after Trump?
Appendix A: Without going on a huge rant about what Ds should be doing, a lack of pushing for what they promised around like minimum wage is not only prima facie bad tactics, it also leaves open smears from the right on what they truly do want (communism? gay communism? globalist gay communism?) This is one reason Obamacare was hard to defend for so long, until the prospect of it going away got too real. The proposition "Obamacare reformed insurance min standards and opened up a marketplace increasing access to insurance while enriching existing toxic cost structures" is a mouthful and not very compelling. But they're unwilling to make the proposition "Obamacare is good because more people insured" because it leaves them open to the left "M4A is better because it insures everyone". Don't get me started on the child tax credit that expired
5662204 Yes, I know the argument. I wasn't arguing in favor of the death penalty; I was arguing that whether or not states should allow the death penalty is not as clear-cut a moral judgement as whether or not states should allow slavery, and that therefore the American thing to do is to leave it up to the states to decide. That's why I wrote,
What you wrote is a reasonable argument, but it's subtle and complex, with many possible ways of being wrong. For instance, I could counter-argue that life sentences are far more harmful than the death penalty. Being given life in prison seems to me not much worse than being executed, and is done much, MUCH more frequently. It seems to me that if you're against the death penalty, you should be against life imprisonment for the same reasons, and that focusing on the death penalty just distracts public attention from the much bigger problem of how bad our prisons are and how easily we lock people away.
(I don't want to have that argument; I'm just showing that your argument isn't bulletproof without at least one long supporting argument to deal with that objection.)
By "the American thing to do", I mean that America is a country designed to allow individual states more freedom, at the expense of national unity. America is multi-cultural by design, and multi-culturalism means allowing more than one culture. If everything is decided at the federal level, then there's only one culture. There are other countries people can move to, like China or Japan, where large scale unity is prized more highly.
5662205
This.
By any wider standard than myopic (or outright blind) amerocentrism, Democrats pushing for tighter gun control is not "extremist."
It's an attempt at normalizing away from extremism in the form of over-permissiveness and the horrific consequences it keeps resulting in.
5662246
Apologies. Just scanning through the whole thread and that (B) caught my eye.
Still.
This strikes me as entirely post-hoc justification[2] of a decision originally made to ease tensions over slavery abolition. Like, when the issue is "forcing their morals and worldview onto the other states", the moral always was specifically slavery abolition. The writers of the constitution were very unsubtle about that - not just in having to make the three-fifths compromise, but in their argumentation that led to it.
I agree that design was careful, but it was also carefully anti-democratic. The phrase 'tyranny of the majority', from its inception, was specifically referring to the poor, who the founders saw as unfit to make good decisions in self-government. Be bitter and cynical about the validity of that one all you want[1], but it seems like those ideas are behind why the US ends up being so resistant to reform and stuck in its two party system in a way that other democracies simply aren't.
[1] Edit: I mean a general 'you', I'm not accusing anyone specifically of this
[2] Edit: While I'm at it - I also just mean, whenever I see this argument made. Not Bad Horse specifically.
5662259
Yes, that's true. As always, I blame Plato. Or in this case Socrates.
5662265
Fuck me I'm nerd sniped.
This is 100% also just, a thing. The founding fathers were definitely operating just when Roman and Greek documents had been recovered from the middle east and translated into English from Hebrew. So while there's the general path that British law took, where Roman law followed into common law like a hand-me-down quilt, the US was inspired more directly from the lead-piped tap. The founders were absolutely classics nerds which is why so much of American civil architecture has columnades and temple fronts and is built in the style that it is. The First Bank of the United States is basically the ur-example.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/93/First_Bank_of_the_United_States%2C_Philadelphia%2C_Pennsylvania_LCCN2011633532_%28edited%29.jpg/1200px-First_Bank_of_the_United_States%2C_Philadelphia%2C_Pennsylvania_LCCN2011633532_%28edited%29.jpg
This is just really funny to me because so much of the (clearly aesthetically superior fight me) Gothic architecture was basically just defined as anything that wasn't classically inspired - thus, the word "Romantic". Because people were learning about the greatness of Rome again for the first time and all of them basically got a fucking mania that real civilization had fallen and the dark ages never really ended.
Which is cool but it goes some way to explaining why the original conceptions of American democracy were limited to white, landowning males. Until... Andrew Jackson, I think?
Pretend I made a clever pun about Solon here I guess.
EDIT: Sorry, I'll stop hogging your thread now, you just caught me in the middle of being bored and studying the origins of the US Supreme Court
If anyone cares, here's a random apathetic 21 year olds perspective who lived in tx and ma both for a long time.
(Also I voted for Biden in 2020)
Based on purely anecdotal experiences and word of mouth, I find a Biden victory near-impossible, regardless of what he does, and think that trump can win even if he blunders anything short of nuclear war.
At least, that's how I see things now, I hope I'm dead wrong. I'm thankfully inexperienced and I'm sure there's a lot at play here that I don't understand.
But I do know I've met a lot of people that think the same as me. A lot.
5662296
We can never assume anything like a victory ever again. The numbers themselves are in question now. Every election will be hard won, in court.
5662169
What's the story about 1 in 4 people controlling the other 3/4 in the Bible?
More than 80 percent of gun owners want universal background checks and other sensible gun control measures, so I think your perspective on American politics is perhaps a bit off-mark. Unlike most issues Democrats push, this is actually a winning one.
5662330
That's in Revelations, I believe.
You live with rural Americans. Please give us your estimate of them.
5662296
That is my estimation as well.
5662346 I... really would not take anything in Revelations literally, or anything more than metaphorical end-of-the-world stuff. The Bible is inspired by God, but we're studying that particular chapter in early morning class right now, and it really looks like God-inspired fanfiction.
5662349 We are universally handsome, well-mannered, content, and in general a joy to be around. Our politicians listen to us, mostly because they live within a few blocks of us, and on occasion need to borrow a chainsaw to deal with a fallen tree or request permission to hunt quail on the back 40 acres. Oh, and we are above average in every way.
5662246
Bad Horse, what you forget is that someone sentence to jail, however long, can be brought out of it if it comes to the fore that the sentenced person was framed or justice was miscarried. Once the person has been killed…
This is beyond the point and somewhat irrelevant, but I always have this sentence, taken out of TLoTR, in mind: 'Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.'
Now, from a practical standpoint, if the death penalty was an efficient deterrent from murder, it would have been known for centuries. The fact is, dispatching people never had any effect on crime statistics. For me, executing people, even criminals, is simply murdering them, with society’s assent.
5662360
Most everything in the bible is god inspired fanfiction. The rest is historical fiction passed down in an oral tradition and transcribed by people who likely had no business doing so.
5662388
I don't forget the point. It doesn't matter. Since 1970, something like 400,000 people have lost at least 15 years of their life to prison, while 1546 have lost maybe 40 years to execution. The loss of life to execution is trivial compared to the loss of life to incarceration.
Have you got sources for that claim?
5662360
I think you summed up rural Americans perfectly. (rural American here)
5662116 On the contrary, reality disagrees with you. See, you CAN just make up votes, and there is a mountain of evidence to suggest that. Bear in mind 'evidence' is not the same as 'proof,' but still. For example, did you know that every single swing state that Biden absolutely needed to win used Dominion voting machines? A company, just coincidentally, that Kamala Harris' husband is connected to. And Dominion voting machines had MANY errors and problems in the 2020 election, including just making up votes out of thin air, as witnessed by many election workers in several states using the machines. So you see, you are entirely wrong. You can just make up a vote out of thin air. And they did.
And I'm not even going into all the poll watchers being denied access, even after getting court orders to let them in. Not counting surprise truckloads of ballots arriving in the middle of the night. Not counting (I think it was) Wisconsin continuing to accept ballots well after 8pm, illegal in their state. Not counting various videos of election workers counting the same stack of ballots over and over again. Not counting incidents like an alleged 'pipe leak' that caused all election workers to leave their building and come back to magically find new piles of ballots.
Even ignoring all that, votes were simply made up, that is a fact, that is not conjecture, election officials themselves complained of Dominion voting machines doing specifically that. Ok, so, now reality actually disagrees with you.
Although, I'll definitely grant you, a lot of "legitimate" ballot harvesting must've happened, just like you say.
5662337 Indeed, gun owners especially know just how bad it would be for lunatics and criminals to own guns. But the thing you've missed here is that when a politician says "common sense," it's usually anything but.
5662477
Dominion voting machines still tabulate votes based on existing voting rolls. You cannot just add votes from nowhere.
What you can do is get a bunch of people to vote, and turn those in for them. That's legal. And that's what happened.
You cannot just spout off a bunch of baseless nonsense and call that reality with any hope of being taken seriously.