My model for a thought on this is the Syria model. Right now their over-reliance on drones is masking a manpower shortage. I imagine a day completely to the surprise of anyone in the west when they have been out of the 24 hour new cycle for a while and we wake up and we find the Russian troops are rapidly advancing , whilst the AFU is abandoning its fighting positions. At which point the rest of the country falls in hours two days leaving everyone shocked.
This is a decent framework and I'm not going to pretend otherwise — MeaningCycle and the function-before-truth move map almost exactly onto how I think. Why a belief exists, what need it serves, what incentives keep it alive: that's the right first question, and most people never ask it.
But hold the word you used: *before*. You start before the truth debate. Before isn't instead of. Understanding what function a belief serves explains why it persists — it doesn't make it true. You drew that line yourself.
So apply it cleanly here. "2020 was suspect" serves a function: it metabolizes a low-trust environment, it signals in-group membership, it gives a loss a villain. That's a complete function-analysis and it explains perfectly why the belief is sticky. But run your own model to the end — function explains the persistence, then you still have to walk back to the truth question. And on truth, you already answered: nothing proven, nobody named.
That's the whole point of starting before the truth debate instead of staying there. You earn the right to the function question precisely so you don't mistake "this belief is adaptive" for "this belief is correct." Don't stop one step short of where your own framework points.
Fair — I'll drop the psychology, it doesn't answer anything. Here's the reasoning, straight.
"My concern started in 2020 from watching the process" — but you didn't watch precincts count. You watched coverage of the process. And the framing that made counting look suspect was already running before counting started — Stop the Steal pre-dated the votes. So "I saw it develop myself" isn't independent of the framing; the framing shaped what you were watching for. That's not an insult, it's just how information environments work. Look at the top of this thread: Pool seeding "they find ballots after election day" is that framing happening live.
On the substance: you conceded nothing's proven and nobody's been named. Good. So the live question isn't 2020 — that one's settled, it got tested every way we have and held. The live question is forward: should counting and verification be separated, should audits be inspectable. Yes to both. I'll build that with you. What I won't do is treat a forward reform as if it reaches back and reopens a result that already passed every test. Those are two different conversations and only one of them is actually open.
@Erickschultz11@Timcast And I went ahead and gave you your like because that’s what this is really about, and we both know it. You’ve been man enough to admit when you were engaged in tribal signalling before. But when I ring the bell, you get a food pellet and an electric shock.
@Erickschultz11@Timcast Didn’t it seem a little bit weird to you that the stop the steal campaign started before the election happened?
Ritual in group signalling in progress.
Nexus to foreign information operations.
Nazi Germany isn't coming back — that's not how this works. The project gets rebooted under whatever language is acceptable today: rules-based order, sovereignty, democracy promotion, the green transition, DEI, ESG. Same continental resource problem, new communications layer.
Ideology doesn't cause wars. Ideology is the technology you use to mobilize people for a war the material structure already requires. You don't send a young man to freeze to death outside a city he can't pronounce over a logistics problem — not unless you've first given him a story worth dying for.
On the "Russia should be more aggressive" thing in the ecosystem — blow the bridges, hit harder, stop holding back — watch what that's actually selling. The restraint isn't weakness, it's escalation management. Spook the larger animal and the response stops being calibrated.
That's the real reason the NATO question matters. A NATO member at war with Russia isn't a bigger Ukraine — it's a different physics problem, because the escalation spiral stops being manageable. Deterrence only holds while the border stays ambiguous. Which is exactly why keeping Ukraine out and the borders contested was the move: you don't walk straight at the horse, you come around from behind so it doesn't bolt and do something drastic.
@NebojsaMalic@ConciousLabRat Another thing to keep in mind is one of the most dangerous actors is one whom it’s about to lose it’s position or relevance so they try to make a desperate last stand.