Why I ignored Your midterms

Are you a fool if you care about America in the colonies? Yes and no.

There was a time when I cared about US politics.

It was fun when the Genocidal Neo-Nazis declared GamerGate to literally kill Obama, or so The Atlantic remembers. I remember it differently, but it’s not my job to correct the record, sure, whatever. From the mid-2010s internet, I remember a nova of chaos energy. I remember freedom and mischievous fun. It could fill dozens of books and already filled a few.

To me the internet is a vomitorium, not home.

Go fact check what a vomitorium actually is, but do it somewhere else, I wilfully misuse it to the day I die. My post-truth is chaotic evil; if I still used Facebook, I would pretend to be a conservaboomer asking “how can global warming be real?” under weather news about unusually cold events, just so that it may lure some record correcting idiot there to post me a long explanation that I would never read,

containing whatever the canned answer was by the Online Skeptic Community™ to such inquiries back in 2007, before those terminally online perverts gave each other brain AIDS in a self-harming ideological purity spiral that even predates the reactionaries’ use of “woke”, let alone the contemporary one. (Where are they now? Atheism+ and the rest. I’m afraid to look. Based on their past trajectory they should all be transsexual, transracial and transhuman by now.)

To me the internet is a vomitorium, not home.

There was a time when I cared about US politics, when it was fun. Once it stopped being fun (the day Trump got elected, I still can’t believe it really happened), it instantly became intolerable, just like Internet Atheism went from a subculture of abrasive but smart nerds to something captured by lunatic apparatchiks who started wearing it as a skin suit to maliciously spread their personal misery, US politics become a past hobby to me, after election night, 2016. I wasn’t alone with this, the final episode of "You Can't Stump the Trump", meant to celebrate the victory, never made it to Youtube.

I did keep an eye on events though: by acquiring a huge amount of experience in American politics, being active online during these crazy years, I did know a lot more about the topic than most of the professional pundits in my colony, so I made use of this skill throughout the Trump era, putting those wasted, fun hours into practical use.

Fun should be the limit to an outsider’s engagement. It’s not foolish to care about the US from the colonies, decisions are made there that affect you. But only put emotions into it if you get a positive return: fun. Once it stops being fun, disengage. You don’t have a vote. You’re not American, thank Isten.

The Last Time I Cared

In 2020 I did world class reporting — in Hungarian though — on election shenanigans in the US. It was the very last time I truly cared about American democracy, and I went out with a bang.

I did a followup on a Twitter user’s analysis on election data, centered around Benford’s law. I checked the data sources, checked the algorithm, reproduced everything, it wasn’t lazy journalism, no one else bothered to cover it so thoroughly, even in the US.

Turns out Benford’s method, which was regarded bullet-proof before November 2020, statistician SCIENCE magic!, couldn’t be applied in this case. Apparently I made a fool of myself by trusting a method meant to detect bad data. It detected bad data erroneously, because the data was bad:

"The misapplication was a result of looking at data that was tightly bound in range, which violates the assumption inherent in Benford's law that the range of the data be large¹. The first digit test was applied to precinct-level data, but because precincts rarely receive more than a few thousand votes or fewer than several dozen, Benford's law cannot be expected to apply."

— Wikipedia on Benford’s law, as of this post. This article has a tendency to evolve.

So it fails on precinct-level results, as long as it goes for Joe Biden, yet it somehow worked on precinct-level results going for Trump. Weird. I would have pointed this out to the fact-corrector midwits with the megaphones, that if they’re tight, all they need is data from deep Red precincts where it should also fail due to this limitation, but they didn’t care, no one cared, the case was closed. No data ever came.

And you know what, I agree, close the case. With this article alone, I did my part. It got 125K+ views, not bad for Hungary. I won’t even link it, as I said, the case is closed. As far as some far-away colonial goes, some low caste Indian in the Raj can contribute to keeping the big wigs in the Westminster Palace in check, I carried my weight to keep American democracy alive, for life. I refuse to carry anymore. I refuse to care anymore.

How we vote

I write from a Hungarian perspective, in English, so I decided it won’t break my vow of ignoring US politics if I make an effort post about how we vote in Hungary, one that happens to coincide with the midterms. Ultimately I couldn’t be bothered, but here it is in a nutshell, lifted from a comment I left under a Substack post (with a grain of paprika):

1. any voting that is not on paper, tallied by people, must not be allowed.
2. there should be no voting place where the major parties (in the US it's as simple as it gets, the Two) don't have delegates, throughout the voting and the tallying.

In Hungary the ballots close at 7pm and we should have a result before midnight. It's fast and infinitely scaleable. Results are sent in to the center electronically, but all the parties have their own records from even the smallest village so they can double check the data (it's only sent in if they all agree locally in the first place).

Electronic voting is not worth the tradeoff. Democracy is about legitimacy, it sucks at anything else (maybe to meritocratically select snake oil salesmen).

During the 2022 election Hungary got a lot of attention, the united opposition made sure to have plenty of delegates for every voting place, successfully mobilizing 20000 people.

International observers, usually reserved to oversee banana republics showed up in record numbers, which is as humiliating as being singled out for an STD² checkup in public; even if it turns out to be all clean, the process itself is the punishment.

Bad Hungarians get Third World treatment. We’re not saying that you’re a disease-ridden slut, Hungary, but we’re going to get some swabs up your wherever, just to be sure, it’s in your best interest, why would you object, unless you have something to hide? The other countries? Like Germany or Latvia? They’re assumed clean, even if some very nasty stuff is oozing out of their front holes from time to time, brutalized protesters, the chancellor overruling the results of a local election, nationalist ethnic cleansers running for reelection and winning, that’s all fine, we’ll pretend it smells like roses, as long as the ones in charge, from The Empire’s perspective, are impotent yes people. So, spread your legs please, Hungary, you dirty whore!

And we did, and got swabbed so hard we couldn’t walk for a few days.

The end result: everything was in order. In fact, the increased scrutiny turned out to be great for Orban: even the Little Fideszers realized that winning yet again, this time under unprecedented probing made the Victor’s³ ultimate legitimacy even greater, indisputable. For all its faults, democracy delivers legitimacy like no other. Legitimacy is the reason we bother with democracy in the first place.

Losing my care

And probably the only reason we do so. Democracy is a shitty form of government from all aspects but legitimacy. The downsides start with the famous Churchill quote you’re all familiar with, and I won’t even attempt to make a top 10 list on why you should consider alternatives if legitimacy is unimportant to you. Play some old school Civ for domination victory if you care to find it out.

Based on this model I foresaw the 2020 shitshow 2 years ahead: the lack of transparency during the 2018 midterms was shocking. There was some fuckery in Florida that I won’t bother to look up, you should all know it by heart, remember the county’s name, the same way you still know about boofing⁴ thanks to the Kavanaugh hearings. It was a slow motion crash that Republicans watched impotently, Trump might have made noises, but no one dared to act upon it. It was emasculating.

America should have stopped, the world should have stopped on that local, Floridian election fraud dime. But it didn’t. The steal was impossible to admit for either side involved.

There’s an underlying hostage paradox that makes this unfathomable: admitting cheating would break American democracy, therefore it’s the very last thing that will ever happen, opening up the possibility to get away with more and more brazen cheating.

Cheating is a spectrum: while eradication is impossible, mitigation is a must, so something could have been done about it. Nothing was ultimately done. Republicans yielded in 2018 and got what they deserved in 2020.

Encountering no meaningful resistance, the Democrats kept doubling down, kept pushing to make elections even less transparent. Should I blame them? It’s politics at the top of the Empire, it’s for A-players only, and the Republicans can’t even get their shit together to successfully advocate for voter IDs.

My benchmark since the 2018 midterms for Trump’s reelection was this: will the Republicans take steps to prevent these things from happening again, address this erosion of trust in the process, or will they continue to infight about Trump or COVID or whatever is secondary to the legitimacy and transparency of the elections? It turned out to be a good predictor of not only the result, but the shitshow surrounding it.

They were raped a little in 2018, then, instead of getting a handgun and a strong man for escort, they went to the 2020 election dressed provocatively and drunk. They were asking for it.

They either start standing their ground or they will get raped again and again, forever. That’s one drawback of being The Empire, rather than a tiny colony: there’s no Big Brother to turn to for justice (or revenge), no external help will come to the rescue, the OSCE observers won’t be bossing Washington around. Or even a state. Or even a county.

You still have our last option, turning towards the Vatican and asking for divine intervention, but based on our experience it won’t get you far, the best you can hope for is an advice along the line of “¯\_(ツ)_/¯ God helps those who… etc etc 🙏🏻”, which is pretty much my advice minus the frankincense. It’s also absolutely free.

It’s possible that the Democrats had a better ground game, it’s possible that Trump is counter-productive, it’s possible that abortion is a stupid hill to die on, and the rest of the after action cope. Whatever the truth is, it shouldn’t be possible, it should be definitive. If one side wins, they need to win legitimately, and deserve the trophy, whether you like them or not. That’s the only reason why we bother with democracy, it’s in the best interest of the parties and voters, of the winners and losers, of all.

1. “the assumption inherent in Benford's law that the range of the data be large“
Very scientific.

2. Yes, I know that the current version of newspeak has long since moved on to another acronym because calling the harmful and 100% science-backed consequences of irresponsible hypersexuality a “disease” might hurt the feelings of certain groups, but remember that despite all the progress claimed by the imperial petite elite, Alinsky allows tactical exceptions for them, Trump is gay for Putin, receiving oral sex from a penis, which is usually liberating and perfectly fine topic to discuss around the dinner table in Funny Nerd Family episodes, turns back into an act of old school humiliation if the person in question is a GamerGate Hitlerman, and so on; so in this case, for their own reasons, neither side should object to it.

3. 😎

4. The county also starts with a b.