In a policy-oriented, non-tribal democracy, the "male" mode seems better for reflecting voter preference: everyone can vote for the candidate that agrees with their beliefs and values, with no worries that the rug will be pulled after the election as the candidate does a 180. In a tribalised or one-party democracy where elections are not decided on policy, what you call the "female" mode seems better: the majority policy preferences will at least be approximately realised at the "winning candidate does whatever is popular" stage.
In concrete terms, imagine if 90% of Americans were against open borders, but there are 53% of voters who will vote Democrats no matter what. Would you rather Democratic leadership does the masculine thing and stand on the principle of open borders because they determined this is correct, or they yield to what is popular?
I don't think that this is what "steelman" usually means, unless you are actually trying to imply that statements "we were literally on the cusp of world peace" are the most defensible version of the case for Trump. That would mean the case for Trump is really rather indefensible, which lends credence to "all dumb Trump supporters".
Why would we need that, considering for example that this far more overbearing paean by a fairly established account is sitting at +24 a bit further down? We are evidently in Poe's Law territory ether way.
I think there is an underlying understanding that many people (including some of the direct replies you got here) are already personally convinced that significant amounts of fraud happened, and their belief in it is so strong that any amount of American institutions investigating and finding that no fraud happened will not decrease their belief in the fraud so much as it will greatly increase their belief that the institutions have lost their integrity. If that is the case, the best way to regain the trust of those people is to make heads roll - that is, instead of organising an investigation that finds no fraud, organise an investigation that finds (significant, but perhaps not at the level of actually overturning the results) fraud, identify a perpetrator or group of perpetrators, and make a show of punishing them severely. This would be more effective the more this perpetrator could serve as an effigy of the outgroup. Life in prison for a single easily mockable overweight Democratic Party apparatchik transwoman would have gone a long way to restore faith in institutions in many Deplorables, and if that person did in fact perform election fraud it would not even be unjust under the standard American understanding of justice.
I do personally find it unlikely that there were no instances of fraud that this sort of spectacle could have been pulled off with. Surely, among the tens or hundreds of thousands of volunteers who are many standard deviations above the general public in terms of political engagement, and the many entities engaged in the counting process, there must be some place where someone with terminal TDS decided that the unique dangers of Trump weigh heavier than the sacred precepts of the system and decided to throw out or reshuffle some ballots while nobody unsympathetic was looking. That no official investigation seems to have turned up even one small fish of this type to crucify does indicate to me that the involved institutions may have prioritised not being seen as giving comfort to Trump over either fact-finding or public peace.
If you think this needs explaining, then why do you not think that Trump's 74,223,975 total votes need explaining as well? You can weave the same sort of just-so story of how that outcome is implausible, with the same sort of emotional incredulity - how did an incumbent candidate who achieved so little of what he had promised to do and stumbled from scandal to scandal manage to attract some 10 million more voters than the first time around, and also blaze past Obama's record? Unless you are contending that the forces of election manipulation also conjured up millions (but fewer) fake votes for Trump for good reason, you are just left claiming a convenient cutoff point where your candidate's unprecedented increase in support is still low enough to be normal but his opponent's is high enough to be evidence of foul play.
You can't just claim everything to be a step onto a slippery slope without evidence and/or concrete arguments. There are plenty of instances in world politics of actors doing a particular thing with ease and not proceeding to attempt every other action that is somewhat similar to it: the US rolled over Iraq but did not proceed to invade Iran, the Russians waltzed within something like 30km of Georgia's capital and then just turned around and went home, ...
I was taking "Biblical levels of destruction" to be defined in terms of the vibes of the best pictures you can cherry-pick, rather than any concrete data-based criteria. The Bible itself may not have pictures, but it certainly doesn't make its case with data.
I think the real complaint is not that the Federal response has been unusually slow, but that it is insufficient for the "Biblical" levels of destruction. Thousands of dead bodies, "4 Reefer Trucks" full in one county, everyone who is asking for donations asks for more body bags because they keep running out.
Where does this figure come from? The latest news reports I can find are still talking about a figure of 200something dead, which includes the area of initial landfall.
Really, I'm wondering where this perception of "biblical proportions" is coming from. Central Europe (approximately next door from me) had a flood around the same time which looked about equally bad to the NC pictures I'm seeing, where the death toll stood around 24. A factor of 10 difference just seems to be about what I'd expect given the lower level of preparation, inferior civic infrastructure and construction standards in the US (typical European houses would be much less likely to collapse), and the European flood is now being filed away as a fairly boring once-in-a-few-years event (outside of media that is still trying to make culture war hay of it).
Do you have any evidence that capacity for independent thinking is lower in your outgroup than your ingroup? If not, you are just guilty of a flipped version of the same thing that the parent accused them off, with "free critical thinkers vs. NPCs" taking the place of the "smart pro-science liberals vs. chud knuckledraggers" one.
An IDF soldier can go toe to toe with just about any soldier in the world except the Americans and maybe the British on a good day.
Where is the evidence that the Americans or the British are particularly effective soldiers? They haven't fought a war that didn't amount to clicking targets on a screen in a context of absolute air superiority for over half a century. In a 1v1 setting like paintball with real guns, I'd bet on the average Russian, Ukrainian or even North Korean (assuming they get to eat full meals for a month prior) soldier, and, yes, of course on an average Israeli one, over the average American.
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I figure that a lot of people on the anti-refugee side do not actually recognise any "rights of people with a legitimate claim to asylum", and think of asylum as a privilege rather than a right. An acceptance regime that produces false negatives is therefore not perceived as anything like robbing people of their rights.
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