Wednesday, July 11, 2018

For the Record: Bad Numbers and Conspiracy Theories


Alphabet Bad Student. Hand-drawn grunge font by Arkady Kazantsev via dreamstime.


Not only that. I don't know where young Charlie's getting his numbers from, but they're totally wrong: there were
—24.6 million being a lot more than minus 3.5 million by most calculations. Just so you know.

I'm surprised there are that many registered, almost 89%. Let's get those people off their asses in November.


Another popular rightwing idiocy is the assertion that the special counsel investigation must not have any evidence against Trump, as demonstrated that the charges thus far filed against Paul Manafort have nothing to do with the Trump campaign (even though some of the charges for which Flynn, Papadopoulos, and Gates have already pleaded guilty—lying to investigators on their contacts with Russians in the context of the campaign and presidential transition—plainly do):


You didn't hear Laura Ingraham snorting "this has nothing to do with Gotti!" when the charges were filed against Sammy the Bull.
Or the general insistence that the idea of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian state in 2016, continuing into the present, is a "conspiracy theory" like that of the conspiracy to sap our vital fluids by fluoridating the water supply, as opposed to a hypothesis supported by a good deal of hard-to-ignore evidence:
It's getting so tiresome, not helped by mainstream cluelessness like this from David J. Kramer in the Washington Post worrying that Putin might be about to "con" Trump in Helsinki, as if Trump were some innocent sap, too unguarded and trusting, who could be sneakily talked into the views HE'S BEEN OPENLY EXPRESSING FOR THREE YEARS. Thanks to Jonathan Chait, by the way, for one of the most forthright discussions of the evidence I've seen in the fora of politely received opinion. It's about time.

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