A cheese shop uncontaminated by cheese
by Tom Sullivan
More from the man who’d push the red button to prove how big his “hands” are.
With just 21 days to go before Election Day, Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly on the campaign trail that the election is being “rigged,” tweeting on Monday specifically about “large scale voter fraud” being a problem.
Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2016
ABC News reached out to the top election official in all 50 states to find out if they agree. Of the 26 state officials who immediately responded, all maintained that the presidential election has not and will not be rigged in their state.
And since Republicans control so many state legislatures, Think Progress observes, “If the election is really rigged, 33 states are rigged by Republicans.” (Image at top.)
The Guardian:
It will comes as little surprise to those who have paid even the slightest attention to the post-truth campaign of Donald Trump that these claims of voter fraud and ballot rigging are almost entirely fact-free and lacking in evidence. One legal scholar dedicated years to studying the issue and could find only 31 cases of voter fraud out of more than a billion votes cast. As the ThinkProgress thinktank has noted: “Iowa’s Republican secretary of state uncovered zero cases of voter impersonation at the polls during a two-year investigation.” Even the hard right Breitbart website – so close to Trump that its boss, Steve Bannon, is the chief executive of the Trump campaign – had to admit that, “given the sheer variety of jurisdictions that run a typical presidential election, the nationwide effect of voter fraud may be much harder to measure, and probably small”.
Post-truth campaign is right. The party that in the “do your own thing” 1960s started accusing the left of moral relativism now practices factual relativism. Conservatives insist on believing their own thing. Whoo-EEE! Facts are for losers. Winners make up their own. Evidence not required.
Getting especially tired of this BS (as defined by Wikipedia):
Proof by assertion, sometimes informally referred to as proof by repeated assertion, is an informal fallacy in which a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction. Sometimes, this may be repeated until challenges dry up, at which point it is asserted as fact due to its not being contradicted (argumentum ad nauseam). In other cases, its repetition may be cited as evidence of its truth, in a variant of the appeal to authority or appeal to belief fallacies.
A form of brainwashing, in extreme cases.
RationalWiki provides an example:
It is a very simple formal logical fallacy that has the following structure:
X is true.
In practice, arguments by assertion tend to take the “rinse and repeat” approach to logic:
X is true.
No really, X is true.
Actually, X is true.
But X is true.
What’s frightening is how much post-truthiness has infected the entire culture. A fairly lengthy article by a 3rd Degree Berner that flashed across Facebook the other day (can’t find it now) had a virtually identical structure. “The primary was rigged. No really, it was rigged. You can tell it was rigged because of how rigged it was,” etc. No evidence offered. None required.
It’s the logic of a cheese shop uncontaminated by cheese.