90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1932

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Visage à trois #651

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

FOUR Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #830

Maricopa County’s ‘Maladministration’ Of 2022 Elections Cost Kari Lake The Governor’s Race, Lawsuit Claims

Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake filed a lawsuit against Maricopa County election officials on Friday, alleging that the widespread problems experienced by Election Day voters were enough to change the outcome of the highly contested gubernatorial race.

Filed in Maricopa’s superior court against Secretary of State and Democrat gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs, County Recorder Stephen Richer, and the county’s board of supervisors, the lawsuit raises numerous issues regarding Maricopa’s conduction of the 2022 election, which Lake claims disenfranchised thousands of predominantly-Republican voters.

“The debacle that occurred in Maricopa County on [Nov. 8] — was ‘chaos’ as Maricopa County’s Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates admitted on live TV during a press conference held shortly after Election Day,” the suit reads. “Video footage, first-hand accounts, and expert testimony directly contradict Maricopa County officials’ public statements deliberately attempting to downplay [the pandemonium].”

Within hours of polls opening on Election Day, printers with misconfigured settings in at least 70 of Maricopa’s 223 voting centers produced ballots that were rejected by many of the center’s vote tabulator machines, leading to long wait lines and confusion among poll workers and voters. While Gates and Richer told voters they could leave their original centers to vote at another location, the unfamiliarity with existing “check out” procedures resulted in more chaos.

Upon arriving at alternate centers, some voters were told by election officials that the county’s e-Pollbook had them marked as having already voted since they hadn’t been properly “checked out” of their original locations.

“The result of this confusion was predictable — a larger reduction in the number of votes cast for Lake, a much smaller reduction in the number of votes cast for Hobbs, and a highly improper relative advantage created for Hobbs,” the lawsuit reads.

Lake claims that Election Day voters in Maricopa favored her over Hobbs by a 3:1 ratio and their ability to properly vote would have resulted in her gaining between 15,000 to 30,000 votes in the county’s final election canvass. According to Arizona’s certified election results, Hobbs defeated Lake by roughly 17,000 votes.

Also included in the legal filing are accusations of illegal ballots being tabulated over the course of the election. Citing sworn testimony from several poll workers involved in Maricopa’s signature verification and curing process for early voting ballots, Lake contends that the county’s signature verification managers “had a practice of sending already rejected ballots back through the process,” which allegedly led to as many as tens of thousands of ballots with “mismatched signatures” being officially counted.

Testimonies alleging chain of custody issues are also included in the suit, with Lake asserting that Maricopa election officials failed to document chain of custody records for nearly 300,000 ballots as required by Arizona law.

In addition to requests for access to Maricopa’s 2022 ballots and an examination of the printer-tabulator problems, Lake has asked the court to vacate the certification of the 2022 gubernatorial contest and require Maricopa County to re-conduct another election “in conformance with all applicable law and excluding all improper votes.” She furthermore has demanded that the court invalidate all illegal votes “on an absolute or prorated basis.”

“This case is about restoring trust in the election process — a trust that Maricopa County election officials and Hobbs have shattered,” the suit reads. “The judicial system is now the only vehicle by which that trust can be...

Hope you're ready for some more fun, because this here is a historic doozy.

The tweet thread from Bari Weiss is long, so I'll post a few of her tweets and then switch to text so you don't have to wait 30 seconds for them to load:

Continued:

For years, Twitter had resisted calls both internal and external to ban Trump on the grounds that blocking a world leader from the platform or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information that people should be able to see and debate.

"Our mission is to provide a forum that enables people to be informed and to engage their leaders directly," the company wrote in 2019. Twitter's aim was to "protect the public's right to hear from their leaders and to hold them to account."

But after January 6, as @mtaibbi and @shellenbergermd have documented, pressure grew, both inside and outside of Twitter, to ban Trump.

There were dissenters inside Twitter. "Maybe because I am from China," said one employee on January 7, "I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation."

Always listen to the person who has experienced communism firsthand.

But voices like that one appear to have been a distinct minority within the company. Across Slack channels, many Twitter employees were upset that Trump hadn't been banned earlier.

After January 6, Twitter employees organized to demand their employer ban Trump. "There is a lot of employee advocacy happening," said one Twitter employee.

"We have to do the right thing and ban this account," said one staffer. It's "pretty obvious he's going to try to thread the needle of incitement without violating the rules," said another.

In the early afternoon of January 8, The Washington Post published an open letter signed by over 300 Twitter employees to CEO Jack Dorsey demanding Trump's ban. "We must examine Twitter's complicity in what President-Elect Biden has rightly termed insurrection."

But the Twitter staff assigned to evaluate tweets quickly concluded that Trump had *not* violated Twitter's policies."I think we'd have a hard time saying this is incitement," wrote one staffer.

"It's pretty clear he's saying the ‘American Patriots' are the ones who voted for him and not the terrorists (we can call them that, right?) from Wednesday."

Another staffer agreed: "Don't see the incitement angle here.":

Visage à trois #650

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

FOUR Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #829

UPenn deletes disgraced Twitter exec Yoel Roth’s PhD dissertation arguing minors should have access to sex apps

"Yet, absent from these discussions is even a cursory recognition that the new medium of gay-targeted social networking may be a crucial social outlet for gay, bisexual, and questioning youth," Roth wrote, arguing for the consideration of allowing minors on Grindr.

It has been revealed that former Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter Yoel Roth’s doctoral dissertation, entitled "Gay Data," has been withdrawn from the University of Pennsylvania.

According to the Substack Contra, Roth’s dissertation was withdrawn from the website as of December 11.

The 2016 dissertation speaks about the potential usage of sex-based apps, similar to Grindr, for LGBTQ youth.

In one section, Roth outlines the problems with allowing minors on Grindr, an adult app made for connecting gay men for sex.

Citing three examples involving adult Grindr users meeting underage users of the app, Roth wrote, "In each case, public accounts of the assaults are framed in largely the same way: older, predatory men take advantage of impressionable, naive teenagers who have stumbled their way onto Grindr."

Despite these issues, Roth wrote, "Yet, absent from these discussions is even a cursory recognition that the new medium of gay-targeted social networking may be a crucial social outlet for gay, bisexual, and questioning youth."

"While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat," Roth continued.

"Perhaps this is truly representative of an increasingly absent demand among young adults for networked spaces to engage with peers about their sexuality; but it’s worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of popular sites of gay networked sociability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18."

"Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture," he added.

"Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults."

Noting the cases of assault brought forward by app users, Roth asked "Would these assaults have happened anyway (perhaps with different victims) if Grindr didn’t exist? Assaults, robberies, and rapes happen when people meet offline, too; yet in these cases, we’re fixated on the fact that a new technology seemed to play a crucial part in enabling something tragic to happen."

The revelation of Roth’s dissertation comes as Twitter owner Elon Musk takes on child exploitation that has reportedly been occurring on the platform "for years."

Lesley Podesta, Eirliani A Rahman, and Anne Collier resigned from their positions on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council last week, with Musk stating "It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!"

Despite former CEO and founder of the company Jack Dorsey stating that "this is false," Musk wrote, "No, it is not."

"When Ella Irwin, who now runs Trust & Safety, joined Twitter earlier this year, almost no one was working on child safety," Musk continued. She raised this with Ned & Parag, but they rejected her staffing request. I made it top priority immediately."

Roth, who resigned from his position on November 10, was revealed to have made a number of questionable posts regarding sex with minors.

In one 2010 tweet from Roth, he wrote, "Can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers?"

He linked an article from Salon titled "Student-teacher sex: When is it OK?" which documents the story of a high school choir teacher, Matthew Hirschfelder, who had sex with a student. According to Salon, "Things get messier when looking at cases like Hirschfelder's. If we draw the line at high school graduation, as opposed to at a student's 18th birthday, it means that a teacher having sex with a...