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 -
Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses? Trump himself has a big personal incentive to say the election is "rigged" if he loses no matter what. It redirects the conversation from analyzing the defeat ("how could we do better"), which will inevitably shine a light on Trump's shortfalls, to one where the basic facts of reality are debated instead. The obvious example is the 2020 election. Lesser known was that Trump did the same thing in 2016 when he lost the Iowa primary to Ted Cruz. Now it seems he's preparing to do the same in 2024.
Many Republicans are more than willing to go along with this, mostly due to either negative partisanship or living in a bubble ("everyone I knew was voting for Trump, then the other guy won? Something doesn't smell right!"). If the pain of defeat stings, why not just be a sore loser instead? I've debated many people who thought the 2020 election was rigged, and inevitably it goes down one of three rabbitholes:
Vibes-based arguments that are short on substance, but long on vague nihilism that "something was off". Nearly 70% of Republicans think 2020 was stolen in some way, yet most are normies who don't spend a lot of time trying to form a set of coherent opinions, so the fallback of "something was off" serves as a way to affirm their tribal loyalty without expending much effort.
Motte-and-bailey to Trump's claims by ignoring everything Trump himself says, and instead going after some vague institutional flaw without providing any evidence to how it actually impacted 2020. For instance, while mail-in ballots are a nice convenience for many, there are valid concerns to a lack of oversight in how people fill out their ballots. People can be subjected to peer pressure, either from their family or even from their landlord or another authority figure to fill out their ballot a certain way. However, no election is going to 100% perfect, and just because someone can point out a flaw doesn't mean the entire thing should be thrown out. In a similar vein, Democrats have (rightly) pointed out that gerrymandering can cause skewed results in House elections, yet I doubt many Republicans would say that means results would need to be nullified especially if Democrats had just lost. These things are something to discuss and reform for future elections.
People who do buy at least some of the object-level claims that Trump or Giuliani has advanced about 2020 being stolen. There's certainly a gish-gallop to choose from. The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into. For most political issues, parties tend to organically rally around a few specific examples that have the best evidence or emotional valence. The fact that this hasn't happened for Trump's claims is indicative that none of them are really that good, and they rely more on the reader being unfamiliar with them to try to spin a biased story. One example occurred a few weeks ago on this site, one user claimed the clearest examples were Forex markets (which were subsequently ignored), Ruby Freeman, and the Cyber Ninja's Audit. I was only vaguely aware of these, so I did a quick Google search and found a barrage of stories eviscerating the Ruby Freeman and Cyber Ninja narratives. I then asked for the response, preferably with whatever relatively neutral sources he could find, since I was sure he'd claim the sources I had Googled were all hopelessly biased. But this proved too high a bar to clear for him, and so the conversation went nowhere. Maybe there's a chance that some really compelling evidence exists out there that would easily prove at least some of the major allegations correct, but at this point I doubt it.
At this point it seems like the idea that elections are rigged is functionally unfalsifiable. The big question on the Republican side now would be whether to claim the elections were rigged even if Trump DOES win. The stock explanation would be that the Dems are rigging it so they have +20% more votes than they normally would, so a relatively close election means Trump actually won by a huge margin. On the other hand, saying the election was rigged at all could diminish Trump's win no matter what, and it's not hard to imagine Trump claiming "this was the most legitimate election in the history of our country" if he manages to come out on top.
Is there anything we can do to nudge the public into accepting that yes, Governor Cuomo can effortlessly curl 100 lbs dumbells the way you or I can effortlessly life the tv remote? At this point, it seems like "the weights were clearly fake" is completely unfalsifiable.
itsallsotiresome.jpg
Telling me to my face that a campaign that consisted of: -a clearly on the decline Biden, who had been a joke in all his previous attempts, -who only had any credidibility due to having been elevated the the Vice Presidency by Obama (who famously loathed him) as a sop to certain factions within the Democratic party, and who did little to nothing to support his candidacy -who had to have the rest of the party candidates drop out - save for Warren, to split the progressive vote - and rally behind him to stop Bernie Sanders from gaining traction -who routinely "called it a day" by 8 am, held few rallies, and couldn't manage to get anyone to show up when he did -with a running mate whose popularity was so abyssmal she couldn't even make it to the first party caucus
Was, in fact, secretly such a charismatic candidate that he shattered voting results, even above that obtain by historically transformative candidates, is to insult my intelligence. That simply does. not. happen. To ask me to not even question this is to insist that I ignore everything that I have ever seen about Presidential campaigns, to forget everything I know about general voting trends, to just have amnesia about how elections work, and how voters vote, in general. Such a claim falls well within the "to even claim this happened is evidence you're lying" territory; it may as well be the poster child for "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
To go on to claim that in spite of more than doubling the number of write-in ballots - and thus, the number of people voting remotely for the first time - we managed to get ballot rejection rates down to levels practically indistinguishable from zero!. In most cases, we were able to reduce the rate of rejection by five-fold! I guess we were all wrong about the Boomers!
Wait, no, we weren't; such a claim, again, flies in the face of reality. This simply does. not. happen. Ever.
But wait, there's more! I am also to simply ignore Georgia closing up polling stations due to a water main bursting, sending observers home, then dumping votes that went 100% for Biden that were totally already counted before Republican observers were given the boot, nothing to see here, it's honestly disturbing you'd even think to question such a thing, really. I am to simply take in stride that observers were kicked out, and windows blocked from outside observation, totall normal, totally legit, only a loony would think there might even be the barest scintilla of a possibility that something untoward was going on. Why, it's only fair that the Dems would insist on obstructing any attempts to crack down on obvious avenues of vote fraud, as such actions are prima facie evidence that Republicans are just sore losers, as there can certainly be no justification for such efforts!
But this is all old hat at this point; this "debate" has been had with you on the reddit, and here, ad nauseum. You will never offer anything other than the most perfunctary of rebuttals, with a sneer for anyone who disagrees.
I never understand this line. Is the idea that all of the moderate candidates were just going to keep splitting the vote right up until the convention, and then just, idk, let Bernie have it on a plurality or something? The dynamics of primaries demand that candidates drop out to endorse similarly positioned frontrunners. Do you think it's just a coincidence the 2016 and 2008 Democratic primaries also become two-horse races?
'Enthusiasm' is overrated. For every Obama or Trump there is a Starmer or Scholz who coasts by on the incompetence or divisiveness of their opponent - that is definitely not unique to Biden. Similarly;
The obvious explanation is negative polarisation - maybe Biden didn't drive huge turnout himself, but it's very plausible to Trump did both for and against him.
This is just nonsense. The water main 'bursting' happened a 6 a.m. on the morning of election day, disrupting things for a few hours, way before any shift towards Biden was beginning to be observed. There was no big tranche for Biden co-incident with the water problem. The whole kicking out observers thing I have only ever seen reported third-hand by people like Giuliani - the Chief Investigator of the SOS's offices has testified that this never occurred, no doubt you don't trust her but I'm curious what in particular convinces you this did happen.
For me it was the talking head that came on the news at ~11PM Pacific on November 6 saying that a water main had broken and counting would be suspended in Georgia for the night -- my memory on this is quite solid as I had a bet on the go for the Georgia results, and Trump was looking good at the time.
Certainly it's possible that the talking head was mistaken, and this has definitely been said by the 'most secure election evah' people -- but then they would say that, wouldn't they?
Even if I grant that this were the case, it seems likely that the Republican observers were told the same thing and went home -- which would have been fine if the officials had not started counting again a couple hours later -- which they very definitely did.
This one there is no ambiguity -- it was in Philadelphia IIRC and there was all sorts of video at the time. Even observers who weren't kicked out were made to stand behind a rope like 20 feet away from the counting 'because covid'. If you don't believe this one you are positing some sort of conspiracy yourself.
The talking heads (and social media) were reporting on the water main yes. Then the next day people started pointing out that no one called for any plumber for this, it turned into "there was a toilet overflowing". Giuliani got hold of the video of the arena when this happens, at that time, a couple of poll workers corral everyone to the door and have them leave, talk on the phone, then pull a batch of ballots that had been kept under a table earlier in the day and run those in the counting machines with no supervision from any poll watchers. The SoS said that there was a state observer present, but by his timeline he was only there one hour after the counting started.
The Federalist has a pretty good breakdown of what happened in Georgia.
I don't really care what the official excuses are after, when you create that big an appearance of impropriety, you have to go way above and beyond to clear it after. I've had the training to work elections in Canada and the whole thing was extremely clearly made to avoid every appearance of impropriety; No ballot box was ever to be opened without the observers present, you did not let it out of sight until the counting was done, no one was to be left alone with the ballots, you weren't to touch the ballots without being sure the other parties' observers' see exactly everything you were doing.
Ultimately, the most compelling evidence against is that the people who investigated this and claimed there was nothing weird or fraudulent, the Governor and Secretary of State, are Republicans, but that's flimsy considering how many Republican politicians would have gladly defected on Trump if they thought they could get away with it (if they thought they would be giving the killing blow to Trump's political career), just so they could get back to business-as-usual.
Whenever I hear people say that lawsuits couldn't find proof of fraud, the problem is that finding proof of fraud is almost impossible. But there is a lot of proof that the local election officials made deliberate efforts in multiple states to make sure that it would be impossible to catch fraud; which is as damning as finding the actual fraud and the public realizes that. If someone is seen going into a room holding a knife, methodically turns off the security cameras on their way in and then the next day someone else is found stabbed in that room, people know what likely happened. But that does not reach the point at which a judge feels comfortable overturning official results.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link