In this post I debunk Conspiracy Denial, using as an example a recent post by a [Christian] blogger whom I deeply respect in some areas, and in the process try to show how our worldview influences our opinions and beliefs. Enjoy.
Ron McKenzie is a retired “economist living in Christchurch watching what God is doing in the world.” He has an interest in “Economics” and “Theology” and has published a series of books, most that I love and deeply appreciate. His first book, Being Church Where We Are, is a gentler version of my, “Escape the Church”. His book on Authority is IMHO a 100% sound, even stunning take on the who, what, how and why of the subject, which along with Michael Hoffman’s treatise on Usury should be on every believer’s bookshelf.
I concurred with his deep understanding of the nature of money (that it is simply “a record of a half completed transaction”) and this connection encouraged me enormously when I researched this topic a few years back. His unique take on eschatology has formed the basis for my own understanding of the future. I also align with his theological take on most subjects, even to the point of seeking out his opinion in personal matters.
I do however have issues with a couple of his conclusions – first over the importance and legitimacy of usury, and secondly his geo-political analysis. His take on the former subject is that the charging/incurring of interest is normal and even necessary [which is then assumed to be biblically validated], whereas I find otherwise. In the latter subject his approach is decidedly mainstream whereas mine is essentially conspiratorial.
My post, Putting American Politics Into Context, explains my geo-political take more clearly and my constant, long-term blogging explains that the charging of interest is unbiblical, it is the mechanism of enslavement and therefore it is immoral.
Analysing The Posts
Ron’s recent posts relating to the US presidential elections cause me concern, for they show failures in logic and the danger of a faulty starting point. As I have said, Ron has a priori assumptions more akin to conspiracy denial (indeed he has told me directly that he does not believe in conspiracy theories and explained why this is so) whereas my core assumptions are a lot more conspiratorial.
Having seen corruption first hand in many of my investigations, I hope to reach reality quicker than conspiracy deniers by assuming that mankind is essentially corrupted from the get-go. From my life experience then, assuming that self-interest, greed & corruption exists universally by default and finding (or proving) otherwise is more logical than the reverse. This is essentially the age-old question over whether the glass is half full, or half empty. It’s both of course but we get it right more often if we assume that the water is constantly evaporating or being drunk than if the glass is currently being filled.
Ron says:
Many Christians believe that massive voter fraud allowed Joe Biden to unfairly defeat Donald Trump in the US presidential election. Rigging an election in a nation with a corrupt bureaucracy is easy, but in a nation with a professional public service with sound management skills, this is not as easy as is often assumed.
Ron speaks mainly to the Christian community but “many” unbelievers also do, and the number that this word “many” represents is increasing daily as the evidence is being allowed out. No person who has done even a modicum of research into the matter would write these words.
In any election anywhere, a few people will try to vote twice and a few will try to vote on behalf of their dead parents, but all these would not be enough to switch a national election. Transporting and scanning sufficient extra paper votes would be difficult, because 30,000 votes is a lot of paper. It would be hard to keep them out of sight if sound ballot management processes were in place. And the fake paper ballots would be easy to tracked and could be used as incriminating evidence the perpetrators.
Fraud most certainly DID occur, and yes, it was “massive”. Ron clearly has not done the research when he wrote this post. Hopefully he does a bit more serious research and changes his opinions.
Election administration tends to attract careful, conscientious people, who love operating in a rules-based environment. Once they have been assigned to a task, these people tend to become very loyal the objectives of their organisation. Their attention to detail means that getting fraud past them will be quite hard.
First in his latter years he was a public servant in New Zealand. Secondly he did not work in a department where open fraud occurred at high levels. Both these facts set him up to be a ‘conspiracy denier’ by default. He assumes things that in my book are simply not valid.
Therefore, if the presidential election was stolen, it would seem more likely that the software on the tabulation computers would have to be manipulated to change sufficient votes from one candidate to another. Change on that scale could not be done by a disaffected vote counter, while their supervisor was on a coffee break. Such an effort would need to be carefully planned in advance and be capable of switching the relevant states, when it became clear which were close enough to flip.
The perpetrators of the fraud would need to have been able to manipulate the tabulation software and databases without election officials noticing. I suppose that what can be done, can be hidden. The fraud would have to be carefully planned in advance by clever people, the effects would have to be carefully hidden with no evidence of the vote changes being observable.
The problem with most conspiracy theories is that they are beyond the capabilities of the proposed perpetrator. I doubt that the democratic party is capable of organising and hiding the widespread fraud that would have been needed to have swung the election. It couldn’t keep its servers secure before the 2016 election, so it seems unlikely that it could manage the much more complicated task of stealing an election.
Guesswork and assumption based on a set of life experiences that has conspired to set Ron up for what I consider an epic fail.
In logic terminology this is called various things such as strawman arguing and more but is essentially setting up a false paradigm then attacking it and Ron does this all the time in regards to his geo-political commentary. Ron has a fixed idea of how a conspiracy is supposed to work (with a central leader instructing his minions what to do) then he validates his conspiracy denial by disproving his “straw man” or whatever it may be.
In the case here, he assumes that there is a central leader (say Sleepy Joe) who has funded it all and made it all happen (in this case through the Democratic party) and you can also throw in that, “Donald Trump may be an innocent angel” sort of thing too if you want. Sleepy Joe and even his handlers obviously cannot do that so therefore, “There was no conspiracy”. Literally, “they are beyond the capabilities of the proposed perpetrator”. He may ultimately accept that there was fraud but, “There cannot be any conspiracy” because his understanding is that the enemy is dysfunctional. I explain why this black & white polarisation is unhelpful in the abovementioned post.
Some are suggesting that the election was hacked by Iran, Serbia or China, which plays well to right wing voters who already hate these nations, but they are about as implausible as the claim that the Russians hacked the 2016 election. However, if the CIA and the NSA are not capable of tracking foreign attempts to hack election servers, they are incompetent. If the United States cannot keep its election computers secure against foreign intrusion, it is a long way from becoming great again.
Yes, but again it is not a binary matter like Ron presents here.
He continues with, Debunking Elections [selected paragraphs]
Proving that something has happened is often quite hard, because no evidence was left behind, or because the evidence that was left has been lost or destroyed. Proving that something did not happen is even harder, because if nothing happens, no evidence is left behind. The focus has to be on what was done to prevent something happening.
No.
To establish the truth, an investigator looks at the facts and then applies sound logic. As an investigator I will first establish the circumstances surrounding the events (this one is that this is a political situation in a foreign [to me] country where known vested interests exist and people have strong reason to try to deceive me) then I will assess the people who are trying to tell me something.
Then I will listen to what they are saying.
Then I will assess the basis upon what they say what they do, usually looking at the evidence. Most of the time, if I use common sense, this gets me VERY close to understanding reality. There is no need for guesswork or assumption, except perhaps in the initial phases of an investigation when I am yet to get meaningful information.
The United States has monitored elections in countries all around the world, condemning many as stolen and fraudulent, often with very little evidence. Debunking an election is quite easy. Political commentators just throw out some accusations, regardless of whether they have evidence, and force the administrators of the election to refute their claims. They often just repeat the claims of the opposition politicians who lost the election without bothering to check if they are true.
This may be so but it’s my role to suss this all out. Indeed that is what I have done with the 2020 American Presidential Election. The populace over there is truly awakening to a different reality to that which Ron is implying here.
Proving these claims of fraud are wrong is quite difficult, because there is usually no evidence to demonstrate that nothing happened. And when an accusation is refuted, the political commentators just throw out some different ones. Their strategy is often to make so many complaints about the conduct of the election that the election administrators are kept on the back foot.
“Usually no evidence”? In this situation one simply has to look for it. Assuming that there is none, ESPECIALLY when this is actually claimed by the MSM who are known to conceal and deceive over critical information is naive. You cannot prove a negative – technically (unless you have full knowledge, i.e. you are God).
BUT, there are tens of millions of people in the USA many of them available to help establish reality. Yes, of course some effort is required to dig through the BS to find the gems, but after some work, I can confirm that there is AMPLE evidence of fraud in the US 2020 presidential elections. AMPLE!
The US had debunked elections all over the world, usually with very little evidence of fraud, but mostly because the incumbent does not submit to the demands of the sitting US president. So it is ironic that the latest US presidential election is being challenged as fraudulent and there is does not seem to be any way of proving conclusively that it is fair. I can’t help thinking about people with planks in their eye looking for specs in the eyes of others.
Wrong.
Ron clearly takes his main feed from the MSM. Trump was re-elected with a popular landslide. Very serious (massive) fraud was perpetrated upon the US people in the 2020 elections and the first court who receives the legal case will expose that fraud.
It seems bizarre that [aspects of the process were] done in some places by transporting USB drives from place to place …
A well-prepared quality plan would have identified in advance, all the opportunities where fraud could occur, and put processes in place to ensure that they did not happen. These are standard quality management practices that are well understood. I am surprised that the election officials are not publishing their quality plans and the audits done to ensure that actual practices complied with their quality design.
Ron has written this with the assumption that the authorities wanted a “free and fair election” and that fraud is not the norm. Reverse this assumption though (Yes things like this ARE INDEED well understood) and it all makes sense! Bye bye “bizarre”! I would then be surprised if the election WAS all above board! And surely this is all evidence of malfeasance to those with an open mind?
I wonder if this stuff was not done as well as it might have been because the administration of the election is so decentralised, with each state having different processes. In some states, counties seem to have managed the election process differently. This variation in practice makes it difficult to do enough of the quality management processes described above. Assessing all variations would be too difficult.
I can’t help wondering if problems arose because what should have been standard administrative processes have been politicised.
I can’t help but wondering when people with an overly positive approach to life will accept that the world can be a big bad place at times, handing crooks, crims & crazies the opportunity to do evil and to present reality to the masses, i.e. differently to what it really is.
Faced with results that they do not like, many Christians believe that massive voter fraud allowed Joe Biden to unfairly defeat Donald Trump in the US presidential election. On the other hand, a strange aspect of the presidential election results is that Donald Trump got many more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, despite increasing hostility to his presidency and the claims of many people that they had voted for him only to get rid of Hilary Clinton. This suggests that someone was flipping votes for him too.
No it doesn’t. That is always possible but there has been no claim that I am aware of along those lines and certainly no evidence that I have seen.
If people really believe that there was significant fraud in the US presidential election, they should ponder the possibility that both sides were at it. The Republicans are widely considered to be more competent than the democrats, so if it is so easy to steal an election, wouldn’t they be trying to do it too.
Of course, but where is the evidence? Or even the claims? There are none.
If you follow this logic then WW2 was a scrap between two potentially bad men, but (apart from Mike King’s writings) where is the “Churchill was a fruitloop” commentary?
The consequence is that the American people will find it increasingly difficult to trust the results of future presidential elections. No matter who is elected, if half of the population belief that the result was the outcome of fraudulent activity, trust in the presidential system will be slowly undermined.
Agreed, but this has already happened. Furthermore these claims of fraud are not a partisan issue. They may have started as such but anyone in the know will readily acknowledge that this is a very serious issue that has transcended party politics by a long ways!
Just as Donald Trump was undermined by the claims that Russia stole the election and ongoing hostility from the mainstream news media, Joe Biden will find his presidential being undermined by claims that he stole the election, that his family is corrupt, or claims that he does not have a mandate because he only won because people who do not really like him voted for him as the only way to get rid of Trump.
IMHO this is moot because Joe Biden will never be the US president. Donald Trump will never concede the 2020 elections and he has the power to ensure this all too. I also think he has the will and the support to do it too, but that last bit is only a personal judgment call.
Given the scale of fraud that would be needed to switch an election seems to be beyond the capabilities of any political actors in the US, it is not surprising that many of them believe that Chinese military cyber-ops hacked the voting systems and switched votes in Joe Biden’s favour after Hunter Biden did a deal with some powerful people in China. A nation that believes that the Russians could steal the 2016 election from Hilary Clinton will have no problems believing that the Chinese stole the 2020 election for Joe Biden.
These words are written with a priori false assumptions galore. As I have previously explained the US 2020 Presidential Elections were undertaken in the context of a “complex conflict situation”, essentially open warfare between countries. The war I have already discussed is ungodly tension.
If flipping votes was as simple as many believe, one possibility is that the presidential election was not a democratic process in which the people elected a president. It might have been a hacking contest between groups of cyber-ops people in the Russian and Chinse military machines, with the Russians supporting Trump and the Chinese backing Biden. It would be ironic if Biden won, because the Chinese have better 5G technology than the Russian.
And now, we are getting a lot closer to the truth, slipped in here at the tail-end of a stream of false assumptions and conspiracy denial. I do not buy into the “contest” between China and Russia idea but I can accept that there has been CCP involvement. For me the jury is out over the matter of whether or not the US President deliberately let it all unfold as a trap to ensnare US traitors, or whether it evolved for him. He most certainly knew in 2018 when he activated legislation and he has openly spoken of election fraud for the last year or so. Analysing his successes thus far outfoxing his powerful and determined opponents ‘in the swamp’ thus far tends towards the former being reality. If over the coming months/years key people who performed traitorous acts are ‘disappeared with [swapping sides] ankle boots’ like John McCain was, and like Joe Biden may also be with his similar ankle boot, then this will certainly be the most likely reality.
I absolutely love Ron McKenzie’s take on many things. His handle on reality in the geo-political space sadly though screams, “MSM! Gullible!” to me. When your entire life has been shaped by relative times of apparent peace, and positive experiences (in his case in the NZ public service), and your main source of news and information has come through a political and media empire that has a strong hidden agenda, this is understandable but I believe unwise.
Understand people please, that as a conspiracy analyst I have repeatedly found that almost ALL conspiracies relating to matters of power & money do actually stack up. It’s the moon, ET and flat earth stuff that doesn’t.
Thanks for swinging by today.
Supplied to Ron McKenzie on 31 December 2020:
Hi Ron
I have just published a couple of posts putting the 2020 presidential elections in the US into context. I propose to analyse components of your recent commentary with a third post in the next day or so. I supply it to you here as I propose to publish once I have your response, corrections, or comments as you so desire. You well know my take on conspiracy matters as we have discussed this previously. My goal here is to bring logic and truth to the surface and to be seen as a thought leader in this area – not to overly ‘ping’ you. Feel free to respond in any way you wish privately or in the public arena. I have no hidden agenda.
Ron [updated: removed the two above-linked & analysed posts and] replied on 4 January 2021:
I don’t have anything to say …
In future posts I will continue this subject of learning reality.
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