Unstolen election mega-thread

Just re-posting two initial comments here for now to get the ball rolling, will add to it in the comments as usual.

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Why didn't Dems steal it this time? Well, Dems were promising to steal it -- the state election boards in battleground states, the media, and Obama himself on the campaign trail.

Why didn't they this time? Perhaps the election steal of 2020 was part of the broader civic breakdown of 2014-2020 -- most of which was marked by political violence, hostile rhetoric, etc. Stealing an election is not physical violence, or even heated rhetoric, but it is hyper-competitive, antagonistic, anti-social, etc.

It was also part of the broader hostile crusade by woketards, like censoring and deplatforming everyone during the 2014-2020 abyss. That's also hostile, anti-social, war-like, etc., but not physically violent.

This is part of the Peter Turchin 50-year cycle in civic breakdown, whose last peak was the late '60s and early '70s, then the late 1910s and early '20s, late 1860s and early '70s, a missing explosion circa the late 1810s and early '20s (which was instead the Era of Good Feelings), and another burst around the Revolutionary War of circa 1770.

It's a kind of energy that builds up, and then dissipates, over a cycle lasting 50 years, or 25 years in either direction.

By 2024, it was already clear that the violent symptoms of this pattern had abated -- BLM and Antifa did not burn down half the country in '24, there were no roving executions of cops caught on camera like in the mid-late 2010s, Democrats didn't roam around assassinating Trump supporters for no reason and getting off with no bail, etc. Although there were 2 assassination attempts on Trump himself -- the violence hasn't gone to 0, but it's only 5% of what it was during the 2014-2020 abyss.

Libtards didn't even hold marches when the Supreme Court over-turned their sacred cow of Roe v. Wade in '22. There will be no pussy hat marches when Trump is re-inaugurated.

Twitter allowed itself to be bought out and taken over by Musk, which would not have been allowed in 2014-2020, and they submitted to the new orders about no more crazy censorship and ban waves.

So, the failure or unwillingness of Dems to carry out the steal this time must be part of that general dissipation of policitized zeal from its 2014-2020 peak (abyss). There will be no Russiagate, #MeToo, Resistance, etc. bullshit like there was during Trump's first term, during the peak of politicized zealotry.

I thought since stealing an election wasn't violent or confrontational, they'd still do it -- especially since that's what they were promising for the past few months, right up through most of election night, with Philadelphia halting their vote count early in the evening, waiting for the rest of the state to return their numbers, anticipating a steal. Who am I to second-guess the same message, from the same top-level figures, that was followed up on by a successful insane steal in the very last election?

The energy level declining across all dimensions -- violence, censorship, stealing elections -- is also bipartisan. There was WAY less zeal on the Trump side this cycle, compared to 2015-'16, and even 2020. No one is sincerely posting God-Emperor memes anymore, no one is champing at the bit to lay the first bricks in that Big Beeyooteeful Wall, which never got built the last time. And there's just been far less trolling and teabagging this time than in 2016, and certainly 2020 when it got stolen, preventing the teabagging.

Politicized zeal overall in American society has fallen off of its 2014-2020 explosive peak, and will reach a minimum circa 2045, which will be as non-partisan as the mid-1990s were 50 years earlier. Then the next explosion will happen in the 2060s and early '70s, and the cycle will keep on repeating...

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Also a quick dunk on tech determinist dum-dums, who blamed / credited the explosive zeitgeist of 2014-2020 on newfangled tech (social media, smartphones, "meme magic," online in general).

Well, Americans are even more online than they were in 2016, yet the zealotry has fallen off a cliff after 2020, and will continue plummeting toward a minimum in 2045 -- all while Americans continue to be as online, or even more online, than they were in the 2014-2020 period.

That's the cross-temporal proof. Then there's the cross-sectional proof -- Japanese people have become more and more online since they first adopted the internet. Yet they have experienced no such explosion of politicized zealotry -- whether leading to violence, censorship, heated rhetoric, stolen elections, or whatever else.

All technologies are mere tools, indifferent to how they're used, and impotent to shape, channel, or nudge human societal systems or individual behavior. Rather, the dynamics of society and individual psychology lead to some people using some tech for some purpose in some state of affairs, and some others to use some other tech (or even the same tech) for some other purpose when they're in some other state of affairs.

Americans didn't need social media or the internet or online anonymity to carry out an equally explosive bout of zealotry in the late 1960s and early '70s, or the late 1910s and early '20s, or the Civil War or the Revolution -- or the civic breakdown of the 60s AD during the Roman Empire, most of whom weren't even literate, let alone employing a communicative medium other than speech sounds coming out of the mouth.

When the cycle enters a crazy zealous phase, they use whatever means / media they have at their disposal, and when the cycle leaves the crazy zealous phase, they either use different media that have no stain of the zealous-associated media, or they use the same ol' media for a different purpose.

Technologies are utterly indifferent to how they're used, and they have no deterministic or even probabilistic influence stemming from inherently from themselves, toward human behavior, at any scale (person, group, society, etc.).