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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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The political war over Hurricane Helene is heating up. Elon Musk is accusing FEMA of blocking his attempts to deliver Starlinks to areas affected by the disaster. Right-wing Twitter/X is full of talk about various incidents in which purportedly people coming to the area to try to help and/or deliver supplies are being turned away by FEMA. Also full of talk about FEMA using money to support illegal immigrants. Some people are pushing theories that FEMA is deliberately withholding help.

How credible is any of this?

My guess is that FEMA is a typical semi-competent government agency that makes many blunders. It might be bad at coordinating with random people who want to help but are not government employees and it might thus institutionally prefer to just block off the area and try to handle everything without random people's assistance. This policy then causes the various incidents that are being talked about.

I doubt that FEMA is deliberately withholding aid, if for no other reason than that I do not see how withholding aid would benefit the Democrats politically.

What do you make of it?

How credible is any of this?

At this point, with lawfare, several unclear assassination attempts, it's IMO pretty credible FEMA would deliberately be a bit slow. Politico thinks Helene could affect elections in the states hit.

Politico has an article.

Hurricane Helene hit especially hard in heavily Republican areas of Georgia and North Carolina — a fact that could work to Donald Trump’s disadvantage in the two swing states.

...

Helene hit some predominantly Democratic communities hard too, adding to the uncertainty. In North Carolina, “Buncombe [County] was affected in really bad ways, and that is a liberal bastion,” said Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. “And Watauga is in really bad shape, also a blue leaning county.”

Overall, Helene could “dramatically change who is in the electorate,” Cooper said.

“In a state like North Carolina where margins matter, then every little tweak to the electorate could be the tweak that makes the difference,” Cooper added. “It’s right on the razor’s edge between red and blue.”

County elections offices in North Carolina — five of which remained closed Thursday — will assess damage to early voting sites and polling stations to determine “which facilities won’t be available,” Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the State Board of Elections, said this week.

"Every little tweak matters" - there you have it.

Perfect motivation for strong partisans to be inefficient with recovery so that voting is depressed in leaning red counties.

How do “several unclear assassination attempts” cause FEMA to sandbag their one job?

If you had a time machine and could go back in time and shoot Hitler in the head to save six million Holocaust victims, would you?

Would you travel back in time and detonate a bomb to kill Hitler, if it meant you also killed 1,000 civilians in the blast?

If you had a time machine and could kill Hitler by not repairing a bridge before he could evacuate before an allied strike, if it meant another 100,000 civilians died in the assault, and another 50,000 starved in the aftermath?

The media and the DNC has been saying Trump is Hitler for close to a decade now. I'm sure you can do the math.

There’s no time machine. This proposed negligence doesn’t kill or even personally affect Trump. And—most important—Democrats don’t actually equate Trump and Hitler!

The stochastic terrorism argument is a way to assign blame. It’s not, in and of itself, evidence.