The Tiny Scandals and Trials

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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

#451

Post by Oploskoffie »

ti-amie wrote: Fri Sep 03, 2021 7:36 pm The true believers don't understand that the former guy doesn't give two s**ts about them. I'll never understand why they think he does.
It's an interesting area of psychology to have a good Google at and just spend some time reading some the great number of scientific articles that are out there on the subject. One reasonably recent one was in the Scientific American (Google for "People Drawn to Conspiracy Theories Share a Cluster of Psychological Features" and click on the PDF file located at the Fe University link if you want to read all of it). There's two paragraphs in there that illustrate to me how someone like Trump, such a vocal conspiracy theory believer, can have so many "true believers".

The first is this: "New research suggests that events happening worldwide are nurturing underlying emotions that make people more willing to believe
in conspiracies. Experiments have revealed that feelings of anxiety make people think more conspiratorially. Such feelings, along with a sense of disenfranchisement, currently grip many Americans, according to surveys. In such situations, a conspiracy theory can provide comfort by identifying a convenient scapegoat and thereby making the world seem more straightforward and controllable. “People can assume that if these bad guys
weren’t there, then everything would be fine,” Lewandowsky says. “Whereas if you don’t believe in a conspiracy theory, then you just have to say terrible things happen randomly.”

The second is this: "While humans seek solace in conspiracy theories, however, they rarely find it. “They’re appealing but not necessarily satisfying,” says Daniel Jolley, a psychologist at Staffordshire University in England. For one thing, conspiratorial thinking can incite individuals to behave in a way that increases their sense of powerlessness, making them feel even worse. A 2014 study co-authored by Jolley found that people who are presented with conspiracy theories about climate change—scientists are just chasing grant money, for instance—are less likely to plan to vote, whereas a 2017 study reported that believing in work-related conspiracies—such as the idea that managers make decisions to protect their own interests—causes individuals to feel less committed to their job. “It can snowball and become a pretty vicious, nasty cycle of inaction and negative behavior,” says Karen Douglas, a psychologist at the University of Kent in England and a co-author of the paper on work-related conspiracies."

What I see in the second paragraph is the room that someone like Trump (and those around him) has had to push the craziness, the lies and the theories ever further. The article suggests that it is, indeed, possible to "quell conspiracy ideation" by, amongst other things, encouraging analytic thinking, but how hard has it become to get through to people when political beliefs have become so much more polarized and people's personal media-intake is becoming ever more determined not only one's political beliefs, but also by how "smart" algorithms used by large online (news) media players like YouTube tend to send you down one direction to the point of completely ingoring any other point of view?
My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.
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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

#452

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I am going to do the search you suggested. Thanks.
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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

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“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.” Albert Einstein
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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

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I think this is a woman and have thought that from the beginning but this is swerving way out of my lane.
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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

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Full NYTimes article. Above is the TL;dr

Machine Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows

Days before lawyers allied with Donald Trump gave a news conference promoting election conspiracy theories, his campaign had determined that many of those claims were false, court filings reveal.

By Alan Feuer
Sept. 21, 2021
Updated 4:45 p.m. ET

Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.

But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening.

By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.

The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.

The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.

According to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign’s deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to “substantiate or debunk” several matters concerning Dominion. The next day, the emails show, Mr. Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services.

Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public. It found:

That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election.

That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros.

And that there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing “antifa” activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed.

As Mr. Coomer’s lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion” and Mr. Coomer.


Even at the time, many political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike, dismissed the efforts by Ms. Powell and other pro-Trump lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in denial of his loss. But the false theories they spread quickly gained currency in the conservative media and endure nearly a year later.

It is unclear if Mr. Trump knew about or saw the memo; still, the documents suggest that his campaign’s communications staff remained silent about what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely.

“The Trump campaign continued to allow its agents,” the motion says, “to advance debunked conspiracy theories and defame” Mr. Coomer, “apparently without providing them with their own research debunking those theories.”

Image
Eric Coomer, a former Dominion Voting Systems employee, was accused of playing a role in a conspiracy to breach voting machines and reverse the 2020 election’s outcome. Credit...Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via Associated Press

Mr. Coomer, Dominion’s onetime director of product strategy and security, sued Ms. Powell, Mr. Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others last year in state district court in Denver. He has said that after the election, he was wrongly accused by a right-wing podcast host of hacking his company’s systems to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat and of then telling left-wing activists that he had done so.

Soon after the host, Joe Oltmann, made these accusations, they were seized upon and amplified by Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani, who were part of a self-described “elite strike force” of lawyers leading the charge in challenging Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

On Nov. 19, for example, Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani appeared together at the news conference at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters and placed Mr. Coomer at the center of a plot to hijack the election by hacking Dominion’s voting machines. By Ms. Powell’s account that day, the conspiracy included Smartmatic, Venezuelan officials, people connected to Mr. Soros and a “massive influence of communist money.”


Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani did not respond to messages seeking comment on the documents. Representatives for Mr. Trump also did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Mr. Trump continues to falsely argue that the election was stolen from him, and in recent months Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani have stuck by their claims that the election was rife with fraud. A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani said in a court filing last month that at least some of his claims of election fraud were “substantially true.”

And as recently as three weeks ago, Ms. Powell told a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the 2020 election was “essentially a bloodless coup where they took over the presidency of the United States without a single shot being fired.”

It remains unclear how widely the memo was circulated among Trump campaign staff members. According to the court documents, Mr. Giuliani said in a deposition that he had not seen the memo before he gave his presentation in Washington, and he questioned the motives of those who had prepared it.

“They wanted Trump to lose because they could raise more money,” Mr. Giuliani was quoted as saying in the deposition.


But at the time that the internal report was prepared, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell were both “active supervisors,” as he put it in his deposition, in the Trump campaign’s broader plan to challenge the election results — an effort that eventually included more than 60 failed lawsuits filed across the country. While Ms. Powell soon went her own way in claiming that Dominion had conspired to steal the election, Mr. Giuliani continued working closely with Mr. Trump and his campaign, ultimately changing strategies and seeking to persuade state legislatures to overturn the popular vote.

The motion notes that “the lines were blurred” as to whom Ms. Powell was working for at the time: herself, her nonprofit organization or the Trump campaign. Almost immediately after she promoted the conspiracy theory about Dominion at the news conference in November, Mr. Trump sought to distance himself from her. But by December, as Mr. Trump’s legal options narrowed, the former president considered bringing her back into the fold and discussed whether to appoint her as a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud.

The release of the documents was only the latest legal trouble for Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell, both of whom have been sued directly by Dominion for defamation. Dominion has also brought a defamation suit against Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, for amplifying false election claims. Last month, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the cases could continue moving toward trial.

About the same time, a federal judge in Detroit ordered penalties to be levied against Ms. Powell and eight other pro-Trump lawyers — Mr. Giuliani was not among them — who filed a lawsuit that sought to overturn the election results in Michigan using the false claims about Dominion.

“This case was never about fraud,” the judge, Linda V. Parker, wrote in her decision. “It was about undermining the people’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.”

In June, a New York court suspended Mr. Giuliani’s law license, ruling that he had made “demonstrably false and misleading statements” while fighting the results of last year’s election for Mr. Trump.

Even recently, the new court documents say, former Trump campaign officials have continued to cling to the baseless notion that the election was marred by fraud.

When lawyers for Mr. Coomer asked Sean Dollman, a representative of the Trump campaign, in a deposition if the campaign still believed that the election was fraudulent, he answered, “Yes, sir.”

The lawyers then asked, “What is that opinion based on?”

According to the court documents, Mr. Dollman gave a less than certain answer.

“We have no underlying definite facts that it wasn’t,” he said.

Susan Dominus, Shay Castle and Mindy Sink contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/us/p ... oting.html
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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

#460

Post by ti-amie »

I don't understand.

Why would supposedly sane, rational people do the bidding of a man known to harbor criminal intent at the very least based on his years in NYC.

Why would supposedly sane, rational people willingly put themselves in a position where they will be stripped of their livelihood?

Legal Twitter is bandying the "d" for disbarment word around.

Is there no such thing as self preservation anymore?
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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

#461

Post by dryrunguy »

ti-amie wrote: Tue Sep 21, 2021 9:09 pm I don't understand.

Why would supposedly sane, rational people do the bidding of a man known to harbor criminal intent at the very least based on his years in NYC.

Why would supposedly sane, rational people willingly put themselves in a position where they will be stripped of their livelihood?

Legal Twitter is bandying the "d" for disbarment word around.

Is there no such thing as self preservation anymore?
Two words... Stockholm Syndrome.
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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

#462

Post by skatingfan »

ti-amie wrote: Tue Sep 21, 2021 9:09 pm I don't understand.

Why would supposedly sane, rational people do the bidding of a man known to harbor criminal intent at the very least based on his years in NYC.

Why would supposedly sane, rational people willingly put themselves in a position where they will be stripped of their livelihood?

Legal Twitter is bandying the "d" for disbarment word around.

Is there no such thing as self preservation anymore?
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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

#463

Post by ponchi101 »

Both Dry's and Skating's replies are much better than anything I can come up with.
Although I usually frown a cases like this, in which the only thing to be made is money, this time Dominion has a real case. Their reputation has been shredded around the world, and their sole potential clients are "countries" or very large states, within such countries. It is not like they can sell these machines to anybody else. And now, which country would even dream of getting close to Dominion, simply because in countries where elections are run rigorously, the 1% chance that indeed Dominion was involved in electoral shenanigans is enough to deter them from using them. I have heard, from some Venezuelans, that the election was indeed stolen because of the connection between SmartMatic (which was the perpetrator of the fraud done in the Venezuela in 2004) and Dominion.
I hope they do get to bankrupt Giulianni, Powell and the Pillow Guy.
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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

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Re: The Tiny Scandals and Trials

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“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.” Albert Einstein
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