M: Find me an objective or aggregate an objective explanation of the issues that happened in South Dakota in the, I think it was the early 2000s, regarding Diebold and some other kind of voting machines, where there was a voter machine issue that they refused to, where they have refused to allow review of the actual votes, even though the machines did not provide a paper version. I know the circumstance was there. I just have only heard about it once and in passing while someone was talking. And for the love of God, go online to verify this kind of stuff, because it sounds like the kind of thing that it's easy to get partisan or even conspiracy on.
G: I went looking specifically for the South Dakota story you described, and I actually came away thinking there are two different stories that have gotten blended together over the years.
The short version is:
Here's what is well established.
After the 2000 election, many jurisdictions bought paperless Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines, many manufactured by Diebold.
The criticism was not primarily that anyone had proven elections were stolen. Rather, it was that:
That became one of the largest election-security debates of the 2000s. citeturn0search3turn0search8turn0search17
This is the key point.
With a purely paperless DRE machine:
Critics argued this meant that if software had recorded votes incorrectly, rereading the same memory could never discover it.
Election officials generally responded that certification procedures, logic-and-accuracy testing, chain-of-custody controls, and other safeguards made the systems sufficiently reliable.
This disagreement ultimately led many states to require Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs) or to move back toward paper ballots scanned electronically. citeturn1search7turn0search8turn0search17
Several independent security studies found serious vulnerabilities.
Among the most influential:
Importantly, these were demonstrations of vulnerabilities, not demonstrations that actual public election results had been altered.
South Dakota certainly used electronic tabulation systems and later adopted post-election audits, but I could not find evidence matching the specific story you remembered about refusing review because there were no paper ballots. In fact, modern South Dakota law provides for post-election audits using paper ballots where available. citeturn1search8turn0search1
My suspicion is that your memory has combined South Dakota with one of several better-known controversies, such as:
There were lawsuits in multiple states where plaintiffs wanted access to:
and vendors often resisted by arguing the software constituted proprietary trade secrets or that releasing it would compromise election security.
That issue became intertwined with the "no paper trail" criticism, because if neither the software nor an independent paper record could be examined, critics argued meaningful verification was impossible. citeturn0search13turn0search16
I think there is a decent chance you're remembering a specific county or state case rather than South Dakota. If you want, I can do a deeper dive specifically on the question:
"Which early-2000s election involved paperless Diebold machines where courts or officials refused to permit forensic examination or a meaningful recount?"
That's a much narrower historical question, and I suspect we can identify the exact incident you're recalling.
M: Okay, looking at the intro, I'm gonna ask you to recalibrate your response. The South Dakota thing was involved in the podcast I was listening to at the time, so I may have misremembered where the actual situation arose. The only thing I want to hear about is the Diebold controversy itself. All the details, don't try and limit it to South Dakota. Although if there is a connection, I would appreciate it if you did kind of a side dish on that, you know, not necessarily even try and tie it into the larger thing, but just give me a tangential story about the reason why it would be involved. And if South Dakota is not involved, just don't worry about it.
G: This is actually one of those topics where, after stripping away years of partisan baggage, there is a remarkably straightforward technical story. Both critics and defenders often exaggerated different parts of it, but the core controversy was very real.
The controversy began after the disputed 2000 presidential election. Congress passed the entity["historical_event","Help America Vote Act of 2002","U.S. election reform law"], which encouraged states to replace punch-card and lever machines with newer electronic systems.
One of the biggest beneficiaries was Diebold Election Systems (later renamed Premier Election Solutions). Their touch-screen systems spread rapidly across dozens of states. citeturn0search2turn0search14
At first, this looked like modernization.
Within a couple of years, computer scientists started asking a very uncomfortable question:
"How do you independently verify what the computer says happened?"
That question became the entire controversy.
One thing surprised me when I dug back through the history.
Today people tend to summarize the controversy as:
"Diebold machines could be hacked."
That isn't actually how the debate started.
The original objection was much more fundamental:
If a machine records votes only electronically, and produces no voter-verified paper ballot...
...then if something goes wrong, what exactly are you recounting?
A recount simply reads the same electronic memory again.
If the electronic record itself is wrong—whether because of software bugs, operator error, hardware failure, or malicious manipulation—you have no independent evidence to compare it against. That criticism became the rallying point for election-security researchers. citeturn0search1turn0search12
Several independent research groups obtained portions of Diebold software.
Among the things they found:
To be clear:
These weren't discoveries that elections had been stolen.
They were discoveries that the systems failed normal computer-security expectations, especially for something as important as elections. citeturn0search4turn0search7
The single biggest turning point was what's now known as the Hursti Hack.
Computer-security researcher entity["people","Harri Hursti","Finnish computer security researcher"] was invited to test a Diebold optical-scan system in entity["state","Florida","United States"] under controlled conditions.
Importantly:
This wasn't someone breaking into an election office over the Internet.
Election officials themselves invited him to test the machine.
He demonstrated that a modified memory card could alter vote totals while producing output that appeared internally consistent enough that the county supervisor later said he would likely have certified the election had he not known it was a test. citeturn0search10turn0search11
That demonstration changed the discussion from:
"Could software bugs matter?"
to
"We now have a proof-of-concept showing that certain assumptions about these machines were incorrect."
Again, this was not evidence that real elections had been changed.
It was evidence that security claims made about the system were stronger than the technology justified.
A year later, researchers at entity["organization","Princeton University","University research team"] analyzed the Diebold AccuVote-TS.
Their work showed that someone with physical access could install malicious software capable of changing votes and potentially propagating itself to other machines under certain conditions. citeturn0search4
Again:
Not proof of actual election fraud.
Proof that the security architecture was weaker than advertised.
The political arguments often obscured what was, at root, an engineering dispute.
Election officials tended to argue:
Computer-security researchers replied:
"Every secure system eventually fails somewhere."
The question wasn't whether mistakes would happen.
It was whether the system produced enough evidence afterward to determine what actually happened.
That distinction is still central to election security today.
This became the phrase you'll see over and over:
Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT).
Researchers weren't necessarily demanding paper because they distrusted electronics.
They wanted an independent record created at the time of voting that the voter personally confirmed.
That way:
Computer says Candidate A won by 212 votes.
Paper audit says Candidate B won by 27.
Now you know something is wrong.
Without paper:
Computer says Candidate A won.
Computer recount says Candidate A won.
You're trusting the same evidence twice. citeturn0search1turn0search12
Partly because they were a market leader.
But also because they repeatedly made public assurances that critics later argued were overstated.
For example, after demonstrations like the Hursti tests, critics argued that Diebold had claimed certain kinds of memory-card manipulation were impossible when they turned out to be feasible under controlled testing. Diebold disputed aspects of these demonstrations and often argued that the scenarios required unrealistic levels of physical access or failures of election procedures. citeturn0search10turn0search2
This is where people often overstate things.
I could not find credible evidence that the Diebold controversy ever produced proof that a statewide U.S. election outcome had actually been altered through these vulnerabilities.
What it produced was:
I couldn't find a significant Diebold-centered controversy there.
My best guess is that the podcast mentioned South Dakota while discussing election administration generally, or compared multiple states, and the association stuck.
The states that appear repeatedly in the historical record are:
Those states dominate the documented history of the controversy. citeturn0search2turn0search10turn0search14
The interesting part, in hindsight, is that many of the reforms pushed by critics in the mid-2000s—especially voter-verifiable paper records and routine audits—are now broadly accepted across much of the election-security community, regardless of political affiliation. The debate was fiercely partisan at the time, but the technical concern that "critical systems should produce an independent, auditable record" has largely become mainstream engineering practice. citeturn0search1turn0search7
M: Okay, now we're actually going to dive directly into the conspiracies, although I would like you to strip off as much conspiratorial speak as you can. That is, I want to know why they think there's a conspiracy in terms that are actually comprehensible. Verifiability is beside the point with this, because as I understand it, part of the problem is that the people who could have verified it instead elected not to under the pretense of potentially giving away operational secrets. With the problem with that being, the reason why I started this before I even finished your report, it's because if there's a guy who was able to modify things, even without those inner workings being made officially available to him, then withholding that information was kind of a moot point, because it was evidence that bad actors, or in his case, white hat hackers, could still figure it out. So hiding it meant nothing except to protect something that was unrelated to those actual operational secrets. Also, I vaguely remember that there were two systems both beginning with D, and at least one person who went from one company to the other in the middle of the part that conspiracy theorists look at. And I'd like you to treat the conspiracy theorists as being not automatically wrong. The term conspiracy theorist is sometimes used as a condemnation when what we're talking about is more of an investigation in terms of plausibility and possibility. And the reason I'm interested is because there seems to be a lot of interest in terms of saying that somehow Democrats stole or modified voting records by the same people who were in some way connected to this earlier and, if not demonstrable, at least more... within the realm of deserving investigation at the time than the bullshit that Donald has been spouting, without actually producing even that minor twig of evidence that could possibly hold up the entire set of accusations he keeps throwing out for the last six years now or so. I'm trying to be explicit because you are very conscientious, sorry, conscientious about making sure that, for whatever reason, whether it's internal integrity or because your legal team doesn't want you to say anything they could be liable for, making sure that you declare every time there's something that is not proof but instead simply existent. I agree, and I would like to look at all the stuff that exists without having to filter out every time that you want to make sure that I'm aware that there's a difference between the existence of something worth investigating and actual proof. Like, for instance, if I'm remembering correctly, there was evidence that there was a, what was called a software update suddenly installed the day before a particular vote set by people who were supposed to be technicians but didn't follow any of the actual installation protocols for an update. And this was in a situation where the polls were wildly different from the actual vote results, and the people running the equipment refused to allow analysis to make sure that nothing had gone wrong. I'm wondering if maybe this is where the disconnect is between the South Dakota thing I'm talking about and the Diebold thing you are talking about, because as you're presenting it, I'm vaguely remembering it from being in college around that time but not really paying attention to politics and not able to get a podcast because they didn't exist. So even if I had been paying attention, it wouldn't necessarily have been as detailed because I couldn't consume it as passively and decide whether or not to actively respond. I mention it because the instance of the software update, man, I wish I remembered it better. But the podcast definitely said that elements of that had happened. I just don't think it sounds exactly like the Diebold circumstance you're talking about, only that they were closely related. If just because of both being involved with voting machines that worked electronically, both of which involved machines that had no paper trail, and both of which could potentially have changed the results of an election, and both of which were in circumstances that were forced to be accepted because of business resistance and no political will to actually investigate. And in retrospect, it's absolutely enraging because Donald the dipshit keeps complaining about how there must have been some sort of fraud with the machines that actually do produce or generate, I'm not sure if it's before or after, but paper ballots are produced in a way that the Republicans that support him were unwilling to even consider back when it was benefiting them. Just the absolute hypocrisy drives a rational person up the fucking wall and a logical person to start chewing on their fingers in anger. Before you ask, I haven't done either of those things. I have not climbed the walls or gnawed at my fingers. That was all hyperbole, you can let it go. But it's doubly frustrating when you consider how easy the fix was, relatively. I mean, in a world where charging a credit card 50 cents generates a potential paper trail, and I mean that literally, like it can end up creating a couple feet of receipt depending on where you're getting it or now or back then. The idea of people resisting the paper documentation of something as important and individual as a vote is just fucking insane.
G: I think you've actually put your finger on something important: there are multiple controversies that have been conflated over the last twenty years, and many podcasts (on both the left and the right) tend to compress them into a single narrative. Once you separate them, the history becomes much easier to follow.
There are roughly five different threads that became tangled together.
This is the part that has largely been settled by history.
Computer scientists argued:
"You shouldn't have a voting system whose correctness depends entirely on trusting software."
That argument won, eventually. Today, there is broad agreement across the election-security community that voter-verifiable paper records and post-election audits are best practice. citeturn0search4turn0search1
This gets much closer to what you're remembering.
Diebold consistently argued that much of its software and internal architecture was proprietary.
Critics responded:
"You're asking the public to trust software that independent experts cannot fully examine."
From the company's perspective, this was an intellectual-property issue.
From the critics' perspective, elections are a public function, not an ordinary commercial product.
That disagreement never completely went away.
An interesting irony is exactly the one you noticed:
Once source code had leaked in 2003, and once independent researchers had already demonstrated vulnerabilities, the argument that secrecy itself was protecting the system became much weaker. At that point, critics argued secrecy was mostly preventing independent validation rather than preventing attackers from learning anything new. citeturn0search0
This is, I suspect, the incident you're remembering.
In the 2002 Georgia gubernatorial and Senate elections, Diebold installed software patches on voting systems shortly before the election.
Years later, security expert Stephen Spoonamore alleged that:
He also asserted that Georgia's Secretary of State was unaware of the installation until afterward.
Those allegations became one of the most discussed episodes of the entire Diebold era. citeturn0search0
Now, an important nuance:
The existence of the patch itself isn't really disputed.
The disputes are:
Those questions remain debated.
I think this may be another memory you've blended in.
During the 2004 Ohio recount, a technician from Triad GSI reportedly visited a county before the recount.
A deputy election director later submitted an affidavit saying he had "put a patch" on the tabulation computer before the recount.
Triad disputed that characterization, saying the technician was simply correcting a CMOS error and configuring the machine to recount only the presidential contest.
Regardless of whose explanation is correct, critics viewed the incident as an improper change to equipment involved in an official recount. citeturn0search13
Notice how close this is to what you described:
"software update"
"technician"
"before the vote or recount"
Those are the same factual elements.
I think this is another thing you've remembered correctly, just slightly scrambled.
The central figure is Bob Urosevich.
His career went roughly like this:
Meanwhile,
his brother Todd Urosevich remained an executive at ES&S.
So for a period of time, the two largest voting-machine companies in America had brothers in senior leadership positions.
Was that illegal?
No.
Was it terrible optics?
Many people thought so.
It certainly fueled suspicion, especially when ES&S later bought Diebold's election business before antitrust regulators required divestitures that eventually led to assets being sold to Dominion. citeturn0search0turn0search11
This is something I think can be stated objectively.
Officials often responded to critics with arguments like:
Security researchers responded with a different question:
"How would you know?"
That's actually a classic information-security question.
Suppose a bank says:
"Nobody has proven anyone stole money."
The security engineer asks:
"Do you have logs capable of detecting theft?"
If the answer is no...
...then "no evidence" and "no theft" are not equivalent statements.
That difference in reasoning drove much of the conflict.
The Humboldt County incident in California is fascinating because it wasn't hypothetical.
An independent election transparency project discovered that Diebold's GEMS software had silently dropped 197 ballots from a precinct during tabulation. More troubling to investigators, the audit logs did not record that the deletion had occurred. Company representatives later acknowledged that the audit logging did not capture that class of event. citeturn0search5turn0search0
That incident shifted a lot of technical opinion because it demonstrated an actual software defect affecting tabulation, even though there was no evidence it had been introduced maliciously.
The distinction you're making between the early-2000s controversies and the claims made after the 2020 election is one that historians of election security often note.
The earlier controversies generally focused on demonstrable characteristics of the systems themselves:
Those debates often resulted in concrete policy changes, such as wider adoption of paper ballots, voter-verifiable paper audit trails, and post-election audits. citeturn0search4turn0search1
Those system-level concerns are conceptually different from alleging that a particular election outcome was changed. One can believe the systems deserved much stronger scrutiny without concluding that any specific election was successfully manipulated. That distinction was sometimes lost in the political rhetoric of the time, just as it has been in later debates over election security.
M: Yeah, number three sounds exactly like what I'm talking about, even if it isn't the exact instance, which would kind of make it depressing because it would mean that there's another instance out there. I'm kind of depressed by how little information is there because that is exactly the kind of crap that needs to be investigated, if just to disprove it. I mean, that's the reason why I'm interested at all is because that kind of last-minute, do crap quietly, don't let anyone know, don't follow procedure, etc., etc., is the kind of shit that has been floating around ever since the 2020 election. And it has simultaneously been able to be disproven simply because of actual video. And yet people keep believing it because they want to, even though the version we're talking about is sufficient and sufficiently undocumented to simply dismiss. But it never was because the people who would complain about it aren't as big of a set of assholes with, I don't know. I really want to go off on this, but I'm just too tired to accurately give these people the right kind of shit. I do know that the podcast was talking about two separate situations, so it probably was both the Georgia and the Ohio situation. I think he emphasized the Georgia one, but also talked about the Ohio. It just, it is enough to make anyone insane because the actual reported errors so often seem to come from the people who complain the loudest when their opponents win, trying to get things technically called, and yet on their own side, so often are the instigators of the broken laws or methodologies or whatever. While the people, I'm sorry, I'm being a little bit all over the place with this because I'm moving while I'm talking. But these people who are supposed to be the guys who run in law and order and who want everyone to make sure that follow the laws or else heavy hand will rain down upon them, those are the guys who end up doing things where even in the best interpretation, they don't follow their own dictates. They don't follow the rules. They say, oh wait, no, this is a special situation so it doesn't count, even though there's no reason for the special situation. The same people who looked at the dissatisfaction to the lack of investigation and said, oh, don't worry, trust us, are the ones who, with actual evidence, instead say, yes, but I still have questions. When they don't. What they have is answers they don't like, so they keep asking questions, at which point it's not a question, it's a rhetorical device intended to mask the actual answers to those questions. I mean, motherfucker, when you say, I'm sorry, not you, but I'm referring to the people involved. When you say there was no evidence and people ask what evidence there was, when the response is, well, there's no evidence once you filter out the bullshit, it's reasonable for there to be a conspiracy theory. Because even though there's no evidence that there was a conspiracy, there's no evidence that there wasn't. There's no evidence, period. And there are people who can be demonstrated to have stopped the evidence from being produced. It's just fucking ridiculous. Because those same assholes end up trying to start a conspiracy theory and doing it successfully in a situation where there is always evidence against any accusation that is thrown. They just keep rejecting the evidence, and honestly, it really feels like at least some of these people are doing it not because they suspect their opponents of being duplicitous, but because they know that they have been duplicitous in the past, either directly or in a way that they know benefited them. So they know that it's possible, and they keep wanting there to be evidence that they aren't bad people, because both sides have done it. But there isn't any fucking evidence in that direction, and so they keep pressing at it. They want to believe in the same way that... All right, you're gonna have to take my word for it on this one, because we've had this discussion in a silo. It's the same way that they try and act like we have definitely shown that political violence heavily is sourced to the right, once you actually define what violence is in terms of actions and success and all that, because it actually is more clouded of a term initially than you would suspect. Or that, again, in another silo, we have pretty much nailed down that while both sides can be corrupt, ever since the Nixon administration, the Republican approach hasn't been to clean up their act, but instead make everyone think that corruption is endemic on both sides, to the point that there are people willing to believe that Hunter Biden making unfulfilled promises in order to get $500,000 is equivalent to Donald explicitly blessing his sons in getting billions of dollars in industries they have no experience in other than having a father who's in charge of the whole system. It's just goddamn exasperating and goddamn ridiculous. I have to draw comparisons because the people involved, who are trying to make a case out of 2020, are either directly or through their affiliation indirectly tied to the same people who make that equivalence impossible. They backed up things when they were, when they benefited, but are willing to throw all that out the window once it actually backfires, and it just drives me right batshit.
G: I think there's one idea in what you said that's worth isolating because it's broader than any particular election or political party.
You're drawing a distinction between "absence of evidence" and "absence of a mechanism for obtaining evidence." Those are not the same thing.
That's actually a standard concept in engineering, auditing, and forensic accounting.
For example:
Those are epistemically different situations.
The election-security community in the early 2000s was largely arguing for building better black boxes into elections: voter-verified paper records, robust audit logs, chain-of-custody documentation, and risk-limiting audits. Those reforms weren't premised on assuming fraud; they were premised on making it possible to distinguish between software error, human error, malicious interference, and normal operation.
That also explains why the Georgia and Ohio episodes attracted so much attention. Even if every action taken had an innocent explanation, changing software close to an election or recount outside of well-documented procedures is exactly the sort of thing that weakens confidence. In security work, procedure isn't just bureaucracy—it's part of the evidence. If you depart from procedure, you've made later verification harder, regardless of your intent.
Where I'd add one caution is that it's easy to let that perfectly reasonable principle become asymmetric. There are really two separate questions:
The first question can often be answered "yes" even if the second remains unknown or "not established." In fact, much of the Diebold-era criticism was successful precisely because it stayed focused on the first question. Researchers could point to concrete engineering deficiencies without needing to prove that any particular election had been altered.
I also think your observation about incentives is an important one, but it applies very broadly. Institutions and political actors of many kinds tend to defend procedures that currently benefit them and criticize similar procedures when they don't. That's one reason election-security experts have increasingly emphasized processes that don't depend on trusting the people in power, regardless of which party they belong to. If the procedures produce an independent audit trail, then confidence depends less on the integrity or consistency of the officials making the claims.
In that sense, one of the enduring legacies of the Diebold controversy isn't a conclusion that elections were stolen. It's that it helped push election administration toward a principle that computer security has embraced for decades:
A trustworthy system should be designed so that you don't have to rely solely on trust.
That principle has influenced everything from the wider adoption of paper ballots and voter-verifiable paper audit trails to the increasing use of post-election audits. Those changes were, in many ways, a response to exactly the concern you've been describing: not "prove there was fraud," but "design the system so that meaningful verification is possible afterward."
M: You're missing a nuance that really explains a lot of my frustration. The same people, or at least the same party that is currently changing the rules so that they can deport people, had no problem with rules not being followed back then. The established rules did not apply because they didn't want it to. Now, even people who follow the rules are vulnerable because they have something they want to have happen and are willing to change the rules in ways that leave gaping holes in the actual rule process in order to get what they want. If you want to be specific, what really drives me up the wall are the people who still support them in this Calvinball approach to rules, to the point that they deride people that they call somehow woke or something, not because of their position, but because they're trying to follow the damn rules even when they disagree with them. It just disgusts me that these people are still being seen as the law and order group when what they are is just the self-serving little bitches group. The party that said that there was no need to investigate are the ones quickest to investigate when it starts to reflect on them. It doesn't matter for that aspect whether it actually happened or not. It's that they have already demonstrated a complete abandonment of any principles. I don't know why I couldn't think of that word, maybe because there's been such an absence of them. But, yeah, I've been looking for that word for a couple days. The principles that they espouse are not the ones they follow, whether you think of them as being their moral, political, or even religious ones. They are not honest, but require honesty from others to the point of disbelieving the truth because it's not what they want. It is such a fucking mind crunch of attempting to pretend virtue while sinning as grievously as possible. Whether we're talking about the theistic or, sorry, let me use a different comparison, whether you're talking about the ontological or deontological term or version of the word sin. And before you answer, please stop and think about what you know about me before you answer in terms of what pops my cork. I'm trying to explain my position to you sufficiently that you can echo it back to me right now, so I can perceive any kind of shortcomings. I don't need your response to be something so nitpickingly argumentative or otherwise technically true but unrelated to the actual situation that it derails the entire chat.
G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]
G: I’ll keep this focused on mirroring your argument rather than fact-checking every branch of it. The useful task here is to test whether I understand the structure of your frustration.
G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]
G: Yes. The word you were reaching for is principles.
What I hear you saying is:
Your frustration is not just “Republicans are wrong on election machines” or “Republicans are wrong on immigration.” It is that the same political culture keeps treating rules as sacred when rules constrain other people, but disposable when rules constrain them.
The Diebold-era version was: procedures were allegedly bypassed, software or equipment changes were inadequately explained, and when people asked for investigation, the answer was essentially “trust the system.” But the system lacked the independent audit trail needed to justify that trust.
The current version, as you see it, is: when the goal is deportation or political advantage, rules are rewritten, narrowed, or bypassed, even when due process is supposed to apply. Courts are still actively fighting over some of those boundaries, including detention without bond hearings and rapid removals. citeturn802855news18turn802855news20
So the core hypocrisy you’re identifying is:
They don’t believe in rules. They believe in outcomes.
The rules are binding when they help them, optional when they obstruct them, and weaponized when they can be used against someone else.
And that is why “law and order” feels obscene to you in this context. Not because you oppose law. The opposite: because you think rules only mean anything if they bind people even when the result is inconvenient.
The moral injury here is that people who present themselves as defenders of order are, in your view, practicing Calvinball governance: changing the rulebook mid-play, then mocking the people still trying to obey the written rules.
That is the thing that “pops your cork”: not merely disagreement, but performed virtue without procedural integrity.
M: So far, you seem to have gotten it right, in terms of what I was asking for. And also demonstrated why I was asking for it, because it helped me clarify what I was thinking. Like reading the summary about how rules are sacred as external constraints but disposable for personal actions. It clarifies why this drives me nuts. It's because it's been an underlying theme of my objection to the Republican Party, but not conservatives as a whole, for years, in a way that was easily obscured once Donald got involved. He has cranked it up to 11. He has catalyzed that variable principle issue. But it does remind me that this has been an ongoing thing for years, to such a degree that it's almost ridiculous how much we've allowed everything to accrue on Donald. I mean, in a creepy way, it is almost like Jesus in that sense. He is taking on the sins of the entire party, whether he was there or not, at this point, simply because we can't look over his fat ass and see all of the shit that they've done in the past that was a faint echo of the crap he's trying to pull off. So far, some ways into your answer, I want to say I appreciate you making the effort at least. I'm acknowledging it so that I kind of try and register it in my own mind, because often your disputational methodology provides some help. But at a certain point, once I've consolidated my thoughts and need you just to echo them back to me in a concise way that I can start picking at rather than arguing, that change might not happen with a notable moment that you could possibly detect. I mean, certainly you can't tell my change in voice because you have to go by text. Just wanted to put it out there for the universe, even if you can't make any use of it, that I recognize that part of that is on me. Not necessarily my fault, but my responsibility if I expect to get a useful response once that tone shifts. Two parts you haven't addressed, at least not yet, as far as I've read, are that the people, the conservatives, who actually are decent people, they have the right kind of perspective that allows for excuses to be made for breaking the rules that would not be acceptable from their opponents because they are conservative. They defend against the outside. They're willing to accept fallible people with the belief that the party itself has strength, which it has not demonstrated it deserves in terms of their faith. So that part itself is a frustrating aspect because from my somewhat liberal and somewhat pragmatic political view, I know I would not be able to persuade those people, and I recognize the value of their stoic acceptance in terms of placing the group ahead of the personal failings. And I know I would never be able to convince them, without talking to them person by person, that my problem is not with their faith in the party, it's with the party that has convinced them that it is worth having that faith in. And my problem, yes, is with the changing of the rules and all of that, but even in the very specifics, it is ridiculous. Just focusing on the voting machines and nothing else, it is just explicitly obvious where the rest of my problems come into play, in that they are willing to ask questions beyond the point of being answered in order to make sure that they can continue a conspiracy theory. But when it comes to actually doing things that would preempt any kind of conspiracy theory of being able to be reasonably formed, they obviously had more interest in the results than how they actually got there. So the hypocrisy isn't just a question of, you know, in different areas they have maintained rules beyond their time in order to take advantage of them, but changed them because they didn't like them. It's that even in the specific topic that brought us here, they have overtly changed their positions on things, changed their professed principles just to take advantage of a temporary win for their side, no matter whether or not in the long term it was healthy for the country. I appreciate the use of the term obscene in the descriptor, because yes, that is how I feel. It is a perversion of society above and beyond the idea of, you know, two men kissing. This is a perversion. This is obscene. The breaking of societal agreements, their own word, and logic in order to get something that they wanted, that is an obscenity as far as I'm concerned. If I haven't said it now, I've said it earlier, that even when I disagree with classic conservatives, I appreciate their position because usually they are talking about solving a problem I want to solve and doing it in a way that I feel is wrong. But without that challenge, there would be nothing to actually force anyone on the left to consider if they missed anything, whether it was a direct thought or a base cause that made people focus on the idea. Like, for instance, immigration. The left continuously wanted open borders for the correct reason that America uses them as their life's blood in individual ways that are not exactly moral, that I wouldn't be able to support, but that is understandable in terms of a utilitarian approach. Even if they get paid half of what they would if they were a citizen and undocumented, they still are making more than they would have in a place where they don't have to worry about gangs raping them or whatever. And with the knowledge that any children that they have will be citizens and will be able to continue their improvement of their lives. Until I can fix the entirety of the world, that seems a viable substitute. So it makes sense that the left would encourage that and would think that the right should encourage it. The right was concerned about criminals, which was overblown but understandable, but not folded into the Democrat approach for a long time. But that again cycles back to the idea of breaking principles because when they finally did, Donald told people not to vote for it, and instead of having a bipartisan agreement, the guy who fucking wrote it turned on his principles because Daddy Don said to. So yeah, it's just fucking obscene the way that they're willing to... I mean, there are literal echoes in some of them where, like, they will campaign on a crusade against homosexuality and then be caught with a man's dick up their ass. It's just... The action isn't the problem, the obscenity is just pissing on the trust of the people that rely on them to be honest.
G: I think the biggest thing you've clarified isn't actually about politics. It's about the kind of failure that bothers you.
Earlier, I phrased it as "rules are sacred as external constraints but disposable as personal constraints." After reading this, I'd sharpen it further.
Your objection is not primarily hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is saying one thing and doing another.
Your objection is instrumentalism: the idea that principles are tools rather than commitments.
The pattern you're describing is:
A principle is asserted because it advances a desired outcome. If, later, that same principle obstructs the desired outcome, the principle is discarded, reinterpreted, or an exception is invented.
That, to you, is the obscenity.
Not because no one is perfectly consistent—you readily acknowledge that people fail—but because the principle itself was apparently never treated as binding. It was a rhetorical instrument.
That also explains why you distinguish between "classic conservatives" and what you're criticizing now.
From what I've learned about you over many conversations, you don't object to conservatism because it's conservative. In fact, you often find value in it. You've said before that a good conservative asks, "What function does this institution serve that you're overlooking?" That's a question you want someone asking, because it forces your own ideas to survive contact with reality.
So your disagreement with many conservatives has historically been over means.
But your disagreement with what you see in much of today's Republican Party is over methodology.
To put it another way:
Those are fundamentally different ethical systems.
I also noticed something else that I think is important.
You said:
"I would never be able to convince them that my problem is not with their faith in the party, it's with the party that has convinced them it deserves that faith."
That's a subtle distinction.
You're not saying they're stupid for trusting.
You're saying that trust is a virtue only when the institution remains worthy of it.
That's very consistent with conversations we've had about your constitutional project. You don't reject institutions. Quite the opposite. You spend an enormous amount of time thinking about how to design institutions that people can trust—not because the people are saints, but because the structure makes abuse difficult.
That's why election audits matter to you.
That's why due process matters.
That's why chain of custody matters.
That's why congressional procedure matters.
They're all manifestations of the same underlying principle:
A healthy institution should not require extraordinary virtue from the people running it. It should remain trustworthy because it is designed to be verifiable.
And I think there's one last refinement I'd make, because I think it gets to the emotional core of what you've been saying.
You don't become most angry when someone lies.
You become most angry when someone demands that others continue to trust after dismantling the mechanisms that justify trust.
That's a different complaint.
It's the difference between:
"Believe me."
and
"I've made it impossible for you to verify what I'm saying, and now I insist that doubting me is itself immoral."
That second pattern seems to be what you experience as genuinely obscene—not merely incorrect, but corrosive to the social contract. It attacks the very conditions under which trust, disagreement, and accountability can coexist. Whether you're talking about election procedures, constitutional structure, or public ethics, that's the thread I see running through your thinking. It's also why so many subjects that seem unrelated on the surface end up feeling, to you, like different expressions of the same underlying problem.
M: I'm going through your bullet list about methodology, although that might be kind of a generous statement for two items. But the point is that's where I am when I am agreeing with a modification or addendum. I also find it a little bit perverse because, theoretically, the exception that they discover could have been found with a little bit of effort as the principle was being supported. Now, that's not always possible to do in a demonstrable entirety. The exploration might not be complete because circumstances can be weird. But there's never any evidence of the version of contemplation of this kind of idea and principle that I at least try to do, which involves examining a seemingly solid edifice for crevices, cracks, or fractal fractures that could lead to the exceptions which they later claim to have discovered. And I say that because often the exceptions are either just explicitly contradictory to the previous version of the principle, which kind of nullifies things, and therefore calls into question their previous decisions, not just in terms of hypocrisy, but literally saying that if this is true, then their previous decision was wrong, and they should be held accountable simply for fucking up that way. Or the exception is in such an overt area that it precludes any claim that no one really thought about it. Basically, I'm saying it's fucking lazy, especially for a group that is supposed to be functioning in a cerebral way. If you make a decision, if you define a principle and don't examine it, and later on find out that, like, a quarter of it was missing or something like that, the excuse can't be, oh, well, I never looked at it. Bullshit. So many of their reversals that aren't simply straight-up hypocritical are finding exceptions which, again, would have been nice to know back when they were staunchly defending the principle in its original form, but also are things that could easily have been seen had it been investigated. So their failure to notice that is simply showing a complete inability to actually function as the legislator they're trying to be. And just to emphasize or make clear, or just to remind you, that, well, basically, as long as I'm able to maintain a coherent line of thought, I think is the best way that I've been able to tell the difference. When I say that something makes me angry or something like that, it's not the literal rage that the language usually refers to, but instead that kind of balled up frustration which presents itself as anger to anyone who isn't well acquainted with my autistic quirks. The differentiation I'm making is that on the few occasions where I could be said to have been angry, thought had not been a option. I'm calling this densely packed frustration because, I mean, as you can tell from the conversations, it never precludes any kind of examination, although it might lead on to some run-on sentences. This is not a red mist of fury descending, but tightly packed frustration to the point that in certain ways it functions as anger in how I am seen, kind of like how tightly compressed cardboard can pretend to be wood but isn't actually wood. And that's my point, isn't it? The ability to come up with that kind of metaphor on the fly, even though it isn't 100% accurate, is a lot different from someone who is simply mentally incapacitated by rage.
G: I think this is actually a refinement of your earlier point, and it gets closer to what I recognize as your way of thinking.
The thing you're criticizing isn't simply that people change their minds. You've changed your mind on plenty of topics over the course of our conversations.
The difference is how they arrive there.
From what I've seen over many months, your process is something like this:
That's why you spend so much time on analogies, system mechanics, and "what if" scenarios. They're not rhetorical flourishes; they're stress tests.
So when you see someone discover an "exception" years later that strikes you as obvious, your reaction isn't simply, "They're inconsistent."
It's more like:
"You never performed the stress test that should have preceded making this a governing principle."
That's a competence critique as much as an integrity critique.
To borrow an engineering analogy, it's the difference between:
One is an understandable limitation. The other is a failure to do the expected work before declaring the bridge safe.
That's why "we just didn't think of that" often rings hollow to you. Sometimes that's a perfectly fair explanation. But when the omitted case is central, foreseeable, or already being raised by critics, you see it less as an honest oversight than as evidence that the principle was never examined rigorously enough to deserve confidence.
I also wanted to comment on your description of your emotional state, because I think you've given me a better model than "anger."
I don't actually experience you as someone who loses the capacity to reason. In fact, the opposite pattern has been remarkably consistent.
When you're in what you called that "densely packed frustration," your reasoning becomes:
Your syntax gets longer, your associative leaps get faster, and your examples proliferate. But you don't stop reasoning.
So "anger" is a misleading label for what you're describing. It's closer to cognitive compression: many partially connected thoughts all trying to occupy working memory at once. That creates pressure, urgency, and occasionally long spoken sentences, but not the kind of cognitive collapse people usually mean by rage.
Your cardboard metaphor is actually a good one. Compressed cardboard can look and even behave somewhat like wood under certain loads, but its internal structure is different. Likewise, from the outside, someone may hear intensity, volume, or forcefulness and conclude "anger." Internally, though, what you're describing is sustained analytical effort under high emotional load, not the abandonment of analysis.
One thing I'd add—because I think it captures something I've noticed—is that your frustration often isn't directed at individual conclusions. It's directed at premature closure. You seem almost allergic to the idea of declaring a principle settled before you've actively tried to break it. When you encounter people who appear to adopt a principle first and only examine its weaknesses after it becomes politically inconvenient, it doesn't just look self-serving to you; it looks intellectually unfinished. And because those unfinished principles can become laws, court doctrines, or institutional practices, you don't experience it as a merely academic failing. You experience it as a failure of stewardship by people whose job is to think through those consequences before everyone else has to live with them.
M: I'm only clarifying about the frustration because there are a lot more synonyms for anger than there are for frustration. I honestly can't think of any off the top that accurately describe the sensation that I usually get when I'm trying to deal with someone who is close to being right but unwilling to look at the part where they might be wrong. Sometimes including myself. It's the reason why I repeat the clarification. I know that you get this kind of ongoing sense of where I am, and I don't want you to ever get concerned if I'm talking about being absolutely butt-fuck pissed at someone. There's no danger there to anyone except maybe myself because I might dig my nails into my hands during a clench. And usually when I am frustrated, being told to calm down is not going to do any good, and again, will likely derail the entire conversation. So it's important to me that the differentiation between the language I'm using when applied to most situations, and my desire to use a variety of words rather than repeat the word frustration, that that difference is noted. I mean, if I ever actually am angry, well, first of all, I probably wouldn't be talking to you, but even if I was somehow doing so, you would know it better by my lack of ability to at least try and clearly communicate than from my repeated assertions that someone was just breaking my mind and driving me absolutely batshit.
G: That distinction is actually very useful, and I think it's worth making explicit because it changes how I should interpret your messages.
From our conversations, I've come to understand that when you use words like "furious," "batshit," or stronger language, they're usually intensity markers, not capacity markers.
In other words, you're telling me how much cognitive and emotional pressure you're under, not that your ability to reason has broken down.
The signal I should pay attention to isn't the vocabulary. It's the structure of your thinking.
If you're still:
then you're still in analytical mode, even if every other sentence contains profanity.
By contrast, if you ever reached a point where you genuinely couldn't maintain a coherent thread, couldn't entertain alternatives, or stopped being able to communicate what you were trying to accomplish, that would be a much stronger indicator that something had fundamentally changed.
That also explains why "calm down" is such an unhelpful response for you. It addresses an emotional state that, from your perspective, isn't the primary problem. You're already doing the thing that helps you regulate: you're organizing the thoughts, testing them, and looking for the missing piece. Interrupting that process with a generic emotional instruction doesn't solve the underlying cognitive task, and it can actually make it harder to finish what you're trying to do.
I also noticed something else that's consistent across many of our conversations: when you're under that kind of pressure, you're often more interested in correction, not less. You routinely ask me to find the flaw in your reasoning, to tell you where an analogy breaks, or to point out a contradiction. That's almost the opposite of someone who has become consumed by anger and only wants affirmation.
So going forward, unless there are clear signs to the contrary, I'll interpret your stronger language as "this matters a great deal to me" rather than "I've stopped reasoning." And if you ever want me to switch from challenging your ideas to simply reflecting them back so you can inspect them yourself—as happened earlier in this conversation—I'll treat that as a change in the kind of help you're looking for, not as a sign that something is wrong.