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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Haitians in Springfield eating cats appears to be at least a little more than just a wild rumor. A woman filed a police report on August 28th after her cat went missing and she found meat/gore in her Haitian neighbors' yard that she believed to be her cat's:

https://x.com/nicksortor/status/1836159326861562275

No information on if the police ever investigated further to confirm or deny this report.

For those of you who didn't believe the story, does this new evidence change your view, and in what direction? I was already leaning towards it being likely due to my prior knowledge of Haitian cuisine including cats, and the police call recording from Springfield about Haitians stealing geese from the park.

I am finding the open way this is being handled really interesting.

  1. Assert a provocative claim you heard on TV.
  2. Later admit you were just creating a story to help get the word out about something else. (The story may prove to be a lie, but maybe lying to lead people to other truths can be a noble pursuit.)
  3. Try to find evidence for the claim anyway.
  4. If it was true on some level in some instance, act vindicated. Quietly thank the lord that your story turned out to have some basis. (To do this, you should really need to find multiple dogs and cats eaten in Springfield, but a single example across the whole nation also counts as vindication because you don't need the original claim to be true, you just need it to seem slightly less ridiculous.)
  5. If no adequate evidence can be found, keep investigating. (You still have the hope a news story will surface that backs the original claim, or that a crazy person will fake evidence good enough to move you to 4.)
  6. If no adequate evidence comes along, maybe try accusing others of using distraction techniques. How dare they go on about eating cats and dogs when the future of the country is at stake?

This level of information hygiene is so unhealthy for everyone exposed to it.

I completely agree, but I also have a hard time caring when the other side isn't much better, but simply has better PR.

See the "trans surgery on illegal aliens" bit from the same debate, which was roundly mocked on twitter and in the media; Not only did most people not bother looking it up but basically just assumed it has to be made up bc it sounds so ridiculous, when others then showed articles on Kamala talking about precisely this they turned to flat-out lying that "this is just the headline, but her real words were about medically necessary treatment". Except that it's trivial to look up that it was explicitly stated that medically necessary as judged by mental health experts was sufficient. Which in practice includes, among many other things, trans surgery based on suicide risk. They even explicitly mention "gender transition surgery"!

Or now that I think about it, as naraburns pointed out this is pretty much 100% what they are doing for "abortion denial deaths", except with the added irony that any alleged example they have found so far is more accurately described as just "abortion death".