The Wait: Election aftermath open thread (with emergency kitties)

“This is not available to you.”

WTF? I thought everything on Twitter was supposed to be public.

Surplus – I get that occasionally too. Twitter seems increasingly prone to malfunctioning.

Threp,

There’s still voter suppression (such as signature matching) in GA, but thanks to a massive organizing effort led by Stacey Abrams, black voter registration and turn out is up enough to overcome that.

@Naglfar:

It’s a bug I’ve gotten before. Try refreshing the page.

You mean, not only can a tweet be non-public, but whether a fixed tweet is public or not can change from one page load to the next?

@Lumipuna:

Twitter seems increasingly prone to malfunctioning.

It’s also really fucking slow. It takes like two full minutes to load a page there (from right click “open in new tab” on a twitter link posted e.g. here to having the tweet in front of me on the screen — embedded images and stuff can take another minute to appear as anything other than placeholders).

I also sometimes get something weird where attempting to open a Twitter link fails because the browser decides not to even try. I get a blank empty tab with the URL in the address bar, the throbber throbbing, but no network activity and no status indications, not even the very first one, “Looking up twitter.com”. So far as I am aware the instant a browser is told to navigate to a page it should initiate a hostname lookup (unless the URL uses a bare IP as host, of course), and as soon as it initiates a hostname lookup it should indicate that it is doing so with its status line, so a blank status means it has taken no action at all toward loading the page.

This last can’t logically be Twitter’s fault, though. If the browser hasn’t even initiated a hostname lookup, let alone gotten an IP, sent a request there, and received (or failed to receive) a response, then Twitter’s servers have not had any chance to influence the browser’s behavior yet. Not unless they can send messages backward in time, anyway. So it seems to be a browser bug in (at least) Firefox. The odd thing is that it is usually Twitter that it decides not to even try to look up, let alone contact. So the bug is biased to be more likely to occur for some domain names than for others, at a point in the process where the domain name should just be an opaque token as far as the browser is concerned. Odd.

I still think of Twitter as a way of sending texts to more than one person. I feel pretty ancient.

(Just to try to drag some of the rest of you with me, “Groove is in the Heart” by Deee-lite came out 30 years ago.)

@Alan:
Hey, I still remember when a common tone for receiving a text message involved the phone doing the morse code for SMS.

As for Trump’s reactions… sounds about right. I mean, he’s not been shy about claiming he was going to contest any ‘fraud’ (at least any that went against him) in the sense of the term broad enough to encompass anything he didn’t understand or like. (And I’d argue ‘didn’t understand’ is the larger category.) With the hopes of getting it up to the Supreme court.

People have been pointing out that Trump obviously doesn’t understand the legal system… and for someone that’s been involved in thousands of lawsuits even before he became President, that’s saying something.

That twitter thread Moggie linked on the last page is a very nice summary, involving things like one elderly woman claiming that her ballot was stolen from the mail… except that apparently two ballots were sent to her and both returned with matching signatures. Oops. And, unsurprisingly, at least two different claims of ‘Republican poll watchers weren’t allowed inside!’ were just poll watchers who weren’t among the selected (and exactly balanced) groups that WERE allowed inside.

They’re grasping at straws, and pretty much every one of these lawsuits is going to end up thrown out because the number of votes that might change on that wouldn’t even be enough to swing the election anyway. It’s all just playing to the base to claim that the election was stolen without having a shred of actual evidence.

And as someone else pointed out on another blog I read, one big difference between now and the 2000 Bush v. Gore election that DID go to the Supreme Court is that in 2000, the whole point of the case was that the recounts were taking so long (because of so many badly-designed ballots) that the state recount was actually running over the deadline needed to appoint electors. We’re weeks from those deadlines yet.

@ jenora

Ah, I only found out years later it was meant to be SMS. I’s always assumed it was SOS got wrong.

And yeah, Bush v Gore 2000. I got to attend a really good talk on that last week. Some very interesting points raised. And as you rightly say, that was all about a recount. There seems little grounds for challenging merely the first count; and the RNC has already been knocked back on their first case. They were arguing about a few hundred potentially dodgy ballots; but as Trump lost by several thousand votes the judge asked what their detriment was, and they didn’t have an answer so it got tossed.

But the states have until 6 December before they have to send their electors, so that’s the key deadline.

@Naglfar:
Well, Twitter has defended not banning him so far for some of the things he’s done ‘because he’s President’. So probably not going to get banned before the actual inauguration. After that, though…

Queen:

https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1324439705522524162

Well, over the past forty-eight hours I’ve gone from gibbering terror to merely extreme nervousness. I guess that’s an improvement.

I’m not relaxing totally until noon 1/20 though. Four years of PTSD will do that to ya.

Whelp, looks like the liberal “conservative outreach program” did not work. Biden won less republican votes than Hillary did in 2016 and Trump expanded his racist base by 6 million votes.

Went over to Wonkette to tell these geniuses as much and they literally said my mom was a whore (on an allegedly feminist site).

You know what? Liberals own this mess. They keep on trying to run moderates, in the hopes of syphoning “reasonable conservatives” that do not exist. Some of them are even defending Dianne Feinstein as a “progressive of her time”, so we know they’re not likely gonna run her off in 2022.

But because they are privileged little shits and don’t have to put up with anything republicans do, they will continue to say and do as they please. POC will continue to be pigeon-holed into having to save the democrats from themselves. Even if they don’t deserve a single fucking thing.

What I would like to see is the GOP shrivel up and die while the Democratic Party splits into at least two parties, one center/right and a progressive party.

Given the number of people who voted to re-elect Dump I’m afraid the GOP will be with us for a long time to come.