I'm not sure I understand the comment about prosecutors. Why does any involvement in the justice system disqualify one from public office? Surely some crimes are worth prosecuting?

Also, what are these agendas to change the social fabric of the country through engineering schemes? I don't know what that means.

How do you feel about Trump's attempts, with support from others like Lindsey Graham, to undermine confidence in US elections? ISTM that encouraging the public to doubt the foundations of democracy is pretty dangerous. (And I we can agree that this was his plan all along if he appeared to be losing, as it was in 2016, and that he doesn't actually have evidence of widespread fraud, or obviously he would have shown it by now.)

It looks like I'm going to get downvoted, and this probably isn't the right place for political conversations so I'm going to bail on the discussion. Apologies for not getting to all your points. If you leave any last words in the thread I'll read them.

Just in closing

1)In my view (to re-iterate) the other side isn't necessarily low information or brainwashed. They sometimes just have different life experiences and priorities. We usually don't just "straighten them out" with real talk. Sometimes at best we get them to reconsider things. Usually not even that.

2)We should keep an open mind, but we usually don't because we have motive. We should look at our motives. Sometimes we don't understand them as well as we should.

3)Beware the military industrial/intelligence complex.

4)Prediction: 24 months before boots on the ground in Syria. Could get much wider but hopefully not.

Re prosecutors I didn't mean legally disqualify; I was asking why you wouldn't consider voting for anyone who'd been a prosecutor. Understood now.

Some minor irregularities occur in every election, yes. Most of those are not fraud, but honest mistakes. You see this in recounts shifting votes by a few hundred one way or the other. However, I have yet to see any evidence of widespread fraud. If I recall correctly most of the issues with the 2016 election were Russia spreading misinformation to cause people to vote differently, not them actually casting fraudulent votes. There was some concern of them having changed or having had the ability to change voter lists, but not to actually change votes. People were upset with what interference did go on, but mostly people were upset that someone they (and I) saw as dangerously unqualified and ill-suited for the job had won. Most did not disbelieve the results themselves. (Not all, of course; there are always those with extreme beliefs. But you notice Hilary or others in the Democratic leadership didn't promote these lines of thinking!)

Anyway, I don't see any of what you described as suspicious. Plenty of people agree with your views on many of the issues (and so vote R down ballot), but find Trump distasteful and/or dangerous, and so voted against him personally. I mean if anything the split results are evidence against widespread fraud; if Democrats were willing and able to fraudulently alter the election results, why wouldn't they cheat on the house and senate races too?

I'm not even sure what you mean by the 11th hour timing and stop count. Trump was ahead in a number of states. Then Biden caught up as mail ballots (which favored him for obvious reasons) were counted, at which point he easily caught up in PA, barely caught up in GA, and slightly fell short in NC. This isn't suspicious; it's just how counting works. They stopped counting when all the ballots were counted. (Or in the NC they will; they don't actually have all the mail ballots yet.) The networks called PA once Biden was ahead by a sufficient margin that, given remaining ballots were expected to continue favoring him, it wasn't realistic for Trump to mount a comeback. Some of them probably called AZ prematurely, but that was a mistake, not fraud. And regardless, as Republicans keep pointing out recently, networks don't decide election results; voters do. Occasionally networks do project wrong, but once all the votes are counted, that's the result that matters. In enough states to win the election, those final results favor Biden.

But just taking a step back, let's look at the sequence of events: back in 2016 Trump was already talking about election fraud. Why? Because polls had him way down and he expected to lose, so he wanted an excuse. At that point he didn't have access to any information beyond what the general public did, so there's really no other explanation. This time, it was exactly the same thing. He was talking about mail ballot fraud before the election even happened, and didn't produce any actual evidence of widespread fraud, just assertions. If he had real evidence, wouldn't he have provided it by now? Or better yet, if he was aware of a specific mechanism for fraud before the election, why didn't he explain it? He simply talked about people in living rooms filling buckets with ballots or whatever, but that makes no sense, because it ignores all the measures states have in place to prevent such things. Each ballot is tied to a registered voter; you can't just cast a bunch of fake ballots. The much more logical explanation, looking at his behavior for the past 4 years, is the same as it was in 2016, that he expected to lose, and so he sought to invalidate the process itself.

Of course no one wants illegal votes to count. The problem is, when Trump claims there was widespread fraud or illegal voting without real evidence, and then he and his allies point to these normal events as supposedly suspicious, it sows doubt. That doubt causes people to lose faith in the democratic process itself, which is dangerous, because some then believe they have to take steps outside that process to achieve their goals.

Anyway, I understand you're not planning to respond. I'm probably done too anyway. But I hope you'll at least entertain the possibility that the election was fair, and Biden is a decent person who is going to do the best job he can for the American people and the world.