The KGB Oracle Forums General Public Discussion (SPECIAL ACCESS) KGB Political Debate Central Deligitimization of Obama

No, its not. You seem to truly be well into delusion now, in the literal sense. This discussion is exactly as I stated inn my last post - its about *your behavior*.

No amount of dodging, weaving, insulting, attempted obfuscation or anything else will change that. You need to either 1) apologize to all the people you have baselessly insulted, including , apparently, 50% of the GOP voting base - or 2) construct a rebuttal that it not readily demonstratable as a fallacy.

Please, if you cannot act like a rational person and address the actual topic - which, much to your disappointment you do not get to change by fiat - please feel free to take your ball and go home. Since your attempt to change the format to formal debate failed as miserably as your attempt to win by flamewar I see you have devolved to insult again.

So I will say it one more time: apologize for your behavior, or concoct a justification not readily demonstrable as fallacy.

(addendum: or give a good reason why I should listen to an argument that is an obvious and demonstrable fallacy.)

Derid, you are acting irrationally. Feel free to continue "debating" by declaration, but deductive reasoning does not work that way.

You premises are still false, your argument is invalid and as a result your conclusion is unsound. You have not addressed any of it outside of simpleton "no U! haha I win!" rebuttals.

Feel free consider my points and address any of what I have brought up when you are up for it. Until then, I will consider you a card-carrying member of delusional nuts who believe elections were stolen.

I underlined relevant parts for your convenience. Argument cannot proceed until you adequately address all of them.

Just FYI - acting in a certain manner, then falsely claiming the other party is actually the party acting in that manner does not win you any points.

You do this far far too often, and toss in some silly remarks to boot.

I already demonstrated how the underlined portion of your last quotes are incorrect/invalid/absurd - in that order. Should you choose to use your brain for something other than dogma shoveling you will come to understand that.

This was my post on 12/7 btw... addressing the last of your string of fallacies that had yet to be addressed.

Where you said

And as I said a long time ago, if you want info on the state of voting security google it your own self. While I am happy to adopt a more formal tone when you do so, I am not going back and retroactively do so. I felt no need to respond thoroughly and formally to your snide BS lobbing then, and still do not feel particularly compelled.

Good place to start is State of Ohio audits on the subject, but google will have plethora of other references from various state audits and professional security analysts.

I have to admit that it's getting very boring reading the same rebuttal in thread after thread. "You haven't addressed my points, therefore I win." Since you are such a fan of pointing out the fallacies in other people's statements, allow me to demonstrate yours.

First of all, this entire argument is guilty of the appeal to ignorance fallacy, since you are debating over something that cannot positively be proven true or false. If you believe that it can be proven either way, then the burden is on you to do so. Have fun with that.

Second, nearly every thread in this forum is filled to bursting with ad hominem arguments. Everyone has been guilty of this, and unless you guys just really like trolling each other, you should really tone that down some.

Third, you (sini) are constantly guilty of the straw man fallacy when, whether willfully or through ignorance, you misrepresent or twist your opponent's argument into something it is not. In this case, Derid is not trying to prove to you that the election was stolen. If you don't believe me, re-read the thread and find the spot where he said, "yes, the election was stolen." Instead, he is trying to show you how it's impossible for you or anybody else to say that it wasn't stolen. Since this argument is not one you can win, you instead twist his argument to make it seem as though he is one of the 49% that believe (more on this in a moment) that the election was stolen and then proceed to try to punch holes in that position.

I personally couldn't care less, but if I had to comment on the legitimacy of the election, I would say that in all likelihood there was just as much tampering by one side as the other, so whatever. There probably hasn't been a legitimate presidential victory in the past 20 years (note the use of the word "probably" as opposed to "definitely"). Here is the point where you commit another fallacy. The article you linked earlier is a poll that shows that 49% of Republican voters believe that the election was stolen. For you to dismiss this argument out of hand as you have is an argument from silence. I'm not saying they are correct, but I cannot sit here and say that they are wrong just because I think so. The fact is that there is no evidence that says it was or wasn't stolen.




What you are saying is that since the outcome was a win for Obama as determined by the governing body, and since the opponent conceded that it was a win for Obama, then there could not possibly have been any tampering. You are saying that the end proves the means, which is impossible. The outcome can neither prove nor disprove the means used to reach it. Here, let me demonstrate: "Your dog's puppies look just like my dog, so they must have mated." -OR- "Those puppies look nothing like my dog, so some other dog must be the sire." Neither of these statements are necessarily true, but neither can be proven false without much further investigation.




First, your paraphrasing of Derid's reasoning is exactly the straw man I referred to earlier. Derid has absolutely not been asserting that the lack of evidence that there was no tampering proves that there was tampering. As I said before, his position the entire time has been that there is no way to positively prove that tampering did or did not occur.

You made two mistakes in the second part. You continue to stand on the 332 v 206 electoral count to describe the election as not close when it has already been demonstrated to you that the margin of victory was a mere 300k votes. Had those votes gone the other way, would you believe that Obama lost in a landslide? I won't presume to know the answer to that question. The last part of your statement is a non sequitor. For one thing, you again use the straw man to make it appear that Derid has concluded that there was tampering and that it affected this election, which is not the case, but then you go a step farther and reason that for that to have been the case in this election it must have been the case in all of the previous ones. That logic does not follow.

Now, since you brought up this subject, and since you are the one that dismissed the other side of the argument out of hand, if anyone here is responsible for providing evidence to support their argument it is you. So I will end with this. If you believe that the election was won legitimately, with no tampering whatsoever, and that all of the people that believe otherwise are delusional knuckle-draggers, prove it. I will not try to prove that it wasn't, because I already know that doing so would be virtually impossible.

P.S. Derid, please forgive me (and correct me) if I have misunderstood your position here or if you take offense to me trying to defend said position.

Above is my original post. My point was - people calling election STOLEN are DELUSIONAL.

It in no uncertain words stated STOLEN ELECTION in the link, quote and the article also talks about this. Survey question also talks about STOLEN ELECTION in no uncertain words.

So when Derid objected to this article, he implicitly agreed with STOLEN part.

His later re-phrasing to "election fraud possibly occurred" simply does not flow if you interpreted literally, it does not contradict MY POINT. The only way it could make sense if he is suppressing his premise, and this is exactly what he is doing, because otherwise it DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE.

Again:

(P) There was election fraud
(P) Obama won election
---------------
(C) Election was stolen

Is this the argument we are discussing?


To restate my argument:

(P) Some people believe elections were stolen
(P) There is no evidence of fraud
----------
(C) There people are delusional

This is the problem with your viewpoint: Just because they believe something that probably isn't true does not make them delusional. I could just as easily call you delusional for believing beyond any doubt that the election was not stolen. Neither side could prove their position. Just so we're clear, I tend to agree with you that people that refuse to accept the outcome of the election are probably deluding themselves, but I would not go so far as to lay a blanket label of 'delusional' on everyone who is of the opinion that there were shenanigans, simply because of how easy voter fraud is to commit these days.

Also, and I believe Derid made this point earlier in the thread, the poll was so poorly worded that it becomes a causal oversimplification and a false dilemma. The fact is that anyone stupid enough to actually respond to this poll deserves to be lambasted in the article, regardless of which option they chose. Even the article itself points out this glaring flaw in the poll.




For clarity, what exactly is your point in this argument? That the people who agreed that the election was stolen are delusional? See my previous statements. If your point is otherwise, go ahead and state it clearly for me.

I disagree with your assertion that Derid's objection to the article is the same as implicit agreement with part of its content. That doesn't really make any sense. Again, I believe that Derid's objection was to your opinion that there was no possibility of tampering in the election. There simply isn't any way for you to prove that. Intellectually you have to be willing to concede that. I'm not asking you to concede that the election was rigged, only that you can't know whether or not it was, just as I can't. Trust me, we all know that you believe it was not, and you are not wrong to believe that.




No I don't think we're discussing the first argument there, that simply makes no sense. It's based on a faulty premise for which there is no evidence, and the conclusion does not follow from the two premises even if they were both true.

In your argument, P2 again uses the argument from silence. Lack of evidence for is not evidence against. Your conclusion then in this case is based on a faulty premise. This argument could be made in the same way, but would also be wrong:

(P) Some people believe the election was stolen
(P) There is evidence of the ability to commit voter fraud
-----------------------------
(C) The election was stolen

The overriding point here is not that you are wrong, but that you can't be right in this argument. You will (reasonable assumption here) never be able to prove that the election was stolen or not stolen. We can go on like this forever, because this argument is pointless and not winnable.

Brutal wrote: " and unless you guys just really like trolling each other"

- Guilty as charged

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Sinij wrote: " So when Derid objected to this article, he implicitly agreed with STOLEN part."

- I dont know how many times I need to restate hoping you will finally get it, my objection was to your insulting manner towards everyone who did not hold to *your* belief that it was 100% legit. Doing so does not require me to believe it was stolen, only that you do not have sufficient evidence to level such strong dismissive language towards those who might disagree.

On a related note, you had been employing this tactic in thread after thread lobbing what I refer to as "Dogmatic BS bombs" - basically the rhetorical equivalent of walking around with a chip on your shoulder. Me being me, I will happily knock it off - cause thats what I do.

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Brutal wrote: "P.S. Derid, please forgive me (and correct me) if I have misunderstood your position here or if you take offense to me trying to defend said position."

- You are spot on , that is precisely my position. And you are free to post whatever you want here.

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Brutal wrote: "I personally couldn't care less, but if I had to comment on the legitimacy of the election, I would say that in all likelihood there was just as much tampering by one side as the other, so whatever."

- I pretty much agree with this. In the past my complaints about election security have been under the auspices of a GOP win. Generally I evangelize the security issue, because I think it transcends ideological and party lines. I consider election security to be poor, and it will not improve until and unless people of all major ideologies agree that it needs improved. 8 years ago, questioning election security brought the ire of GOPers. The last 4 years questioning election security has brought the ire of Dems. Neither side wants to address election security when "their" guy has recently "won" and I think that is a problem.

A large part of the reason I trolled so hard as opposed to taking a reasoned approach, was the fact that I have been on record here many many times - including in recent weeks, as bringing up election security in a GOP unfriendly light - even recounting actual shenanigans re: voting machines and precinct assignments that were racially tinged, that I saw with my own 2 eyes in addition to reports of and evidence of (but not proof of) possible tampering in the past (namely 2004) in Ohio (where I live). So being labelled as a "right right swamp fever dweller" or whatever, was something I thought merited a deep and thorough trolling. Considering I am copiously on record of being skeptical of election security in general, not just when side "A" or side "B" happens to have most recently won.


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Welcome to the political forums Brutal.

This is all about intellectual sword fighting and is ALWAYS in goo fun. None of us take it personally, and just like to troll, Peacock, etc.