This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Alright folks, the U.S. Presidential debate is coming up tomorrow night. I'm invested because I've got friends from both sides of the aisle coming, so we'll see what's going to happen...
What do you think will be the major issues discussed? Strengths for Trump? Strengths for Harris?
Outside of just 'debating skills' what do you think the policy strengths/weaknesses will be? My guesses:
I doubt these will come up, but my personal dream is that nuclear and crypto become talking points, and Trump very publicly comes out for both. We'll have to wait and see.
So - what are you predictions my fellow Mottizens?
Kamala has to do 80% of the work in the debate.
Trump is a known quantity in these things. Rambling will occur. His best messaging will be on immigration.
He'll have three some(EDIT: editing for clarity, but leaving the original typo because the first response to it was hilarious)Trump will launch some zingers that land with varying degrees of efficacy.
Kamala has to convince those on the fence that she's not just a party apparatchik. She also stands to risk some support if she gets caught in a flip-flip struggle (some outlets are reporting that part of Trump's strategy is to try to corner Harris with her own debate performance from the 2019 primaries).
The median case is just that - something like a 2-3 point bump in the polls for whoever "wins' the debate. But this cycle has been about outliers. The last debate resulted in a sitting president getting knocked out of the race. So, what are some possible outliers?
Trump could actually say something to sink him with a large part of undecided women - the key demographic for the election. It won't be about abortion, but I wonder if Harris can needle him enough so he off-handedly says something along the lines of "This is why you can't have a woman as president, the're too nasty." Trump loses hard on comments like this.
Trump plays possum enough to let Harris sink herself. This is an almost guaranteed win strategy, but Trump finds it hard to help himself and just not say much. The interesting thing is this was actually what happened for a good part of the first half of the Biden debate. Trump saw that Joe's train was running off the tracks and just stayed out of the way .... before joining him in the ditch over the second half of the debate. If Trump had more discipline, he could engineer some pretty amazing mechanics with this in the debate - say he gets a 30 second rebuttal period after some Harris response, instead of responding at all, he could say "Actually, I'd really like to hear more from VP Harris on xyz" and just give her 30 more seconds to implode.
Harris short-circuit version 1: She gets tongue tied and confused early with an answer and defaults to a weird combination of canned responses and her woo-woo wine aunt aphorisms. This is probably the debate perfformance (outside of the median) that most people are expecting - and the reason why Harris has, reportedly, been conducting many, many prep debates with her staff. If this happened, I think you might be looking at almost the same level of panic as after the Biden debate. There's not enough time for Harris to recover and the worst clips would be repeated ad nauseum in PA and elsewhere. Like I said in another post, there's a chance Trump goes 2-0 with 2 KOs in Debates this year.
Harris short-circuit version 2: ONLY Canned responses without any zingers to Trump or "hear felt" personal anecdotes or connection to voters. Comes across as robotic and scared to go off script. Will answer follow up questions with close to literal repetitions of what she just said. Minimal wine-aunt woo-woo-isms, but not zero. This exits as a Trump win, for sure, but I don't see the same level of panic in the DNC / Harris campaign. They would wake-up Wednesday thinking it wasn't that bad and "she won on substance." They run the rest of the campaign with these odd "isn't she so relatable!" spots from time to time (remember the infamous Hillary in Cedar Rapids selfie video). The end result is a Trump win bigger than everyone expects. The sobering, "Oh, shit, how did we not see this coming after the debate?" will hit like a falling silo on election night.
All that being said, the thing that will definitely not happen - but that I want to - is one of the debate moderators asking, "Why the hell have both of you gone full retard on economic policy. Tariffs and unrealized capital gains taxes. No reform to social security and medicare. How will your administration handle the recession that will likely occur during your first year in office?"
Well, he didn't say that for Hillary.
I was specifically trying to describe outlier scenarios. I don't think he'll say it regarding Kamala, but the chance is not zero. Furthermore, while I don't buy into the "Trump is just as cognitively frail as Biden!" narrative, I think there has been some level of performance decline over the past eight years. I don't see Trump flying into a totally unhinged misogynistic diatribe on "womenz are bad!" It could see Trump, in his stream of consciousness, letting fly some line like the one I proposed in my original post. Look at the J.D Vance "cat ladies" comment; off the top of his head in an interview, and it was horribly received pretty much all the way around. If Trump hits the same note, even if the line is flippant and unserious, it matters in an election that will come down to ~250k votes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link