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 -
What is the steel man for the Trump fake elector scheme being no big deal? To be clear, I'm not talking about a steel man of Trump's behavior as it relates to J6 itself (the tweets, the speech, the reaction to the crowd, etc.), I'm talking exclusively about the scheme where, according to the Democrat/J6 report/Jack Smith narrative, Trump conspired to overturn the election by trying to convince various states, and later Pence, to use a different slate of electors. Here is the basic narrative (largely rephrased from this comment along with the Jack Smith indictment):
There was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election (in the event someone replies with evidence there was, you would also need to prove that Trump knew it at the time to justify his actions)
Trump's advisers, advisers that were appointed by himself, repeatedly told him there was no outcome-determinative fraud after looking into it. Despite this, Trump still insisted there was outcome-determinative fraud. Trump still insisted even after he started losing court cases left and right about there being outcome-determinative fraud. Assuming 1 is true this means that Trump is either knowingly lying or willfully ignoring people he himself picked
Trump, despite knowing there wasn't outcome-determinative fraud (assuming 2), still tried to change the outcome of the election. First, he tried the courts where he knowingly lied about there being outcome-determinative fraud in court filings. When that failed he tried contacting various state legislatures and other state officials to ask them to certify his slate of electors. When that failed, his final option was to try to convince Pence to either use his slate of electors to win (a slate of electors not officially certified despite claiming to be certified), or to invalidate enough state's electors to make it so no one gets 270 electors, throwing the election to the house where Trump would then hopefully win given it becomes 1 state 1 vote there.
With that narrative, here are the Trump critiques that I want a steel man defense of:
Trump knowingly lied about there being outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election. This is wrong.
Trump tried to use this lie to change the results of the election. This is wrong.
Trump used this lie to get slates of electors to falsely certify they were the chosen electors of that state. This is wrong
Trump tried to convince various state legislatures that these were the lawfully chosen slate of electors and to decertify the Biden slate and certify his slate. This is wrong.
Trump tried to convince Pence to step outside of his constitutional authority to make him president. This is wrong
The strongest steel man that I can come up with involved the case of Hawaii in 1960
The New York Times summarizes the situation,
While this is the closest prior case of something similar, and thus no big deal, what Trump did is still different enough that it can be meaningfully distinguished:
Both Nixon and Kennedy had good reason to believe they won. Trump didn't.
Kennedy's first slate of electors, the ones that weren't certified, weren't the ones eventually counted. Only the ones certified by the state were counted. Trump's false electors were never certified, so asking Pence to certify them was completely unprecedented.
Nixon accepted that Hawaii had final say over what was and wasn't their slate of electors. Trump didn't and continually insisted his slate was correct.
Another argument that I don't think is strong, but nonetheless might be the strongest steel man:
This is not a strong argument because then it would've just been a constitutional coup and those are still wrong. The way many Latin American countries have constitutional coups is that they stack the court that allows them to reinterpret their constitution to give them more power or that allows them to violate term limits. This is still wrong despite technically being legal. The problem is the norm breaking, not the technical legality.
Trump clearly believed that the election was stolen, often even when everyone else in the room was telling him to give it up.
Those cases were all spurned on lack of standing. This is lazy argumenting.
This is the rhetorical trick. The disputed 2020 election results are an "outcome," so disputing them becomes "changing the outcome". Neat. 🙄
Election Night 2020 Florida wraps up results early, great results pour in for Trump, then half a dozen swing states stop counting ballots simultaneously before huge 6am Biden drops. For four years now I have been told that this doesn't count as evidence, for no particular reason. You could try to prove that the 2020 election was legitimate, if all the ballot chains of custody hadn't already been destroyed.
Show me the text you want a steelman before you editorialize it.
What do you think you're saying, exactly? Everybody knows, including Trump, that his alternate electors were not the officially certified electors. That's not the argument!
What's the point of providing alternate electors if you don't attempt to get them counted as alternates? Note that this is completely precedented: The disputed election of 1876 faced a number of alternate elector slates.
If the 2020 election were stolen, then the most important norm was already broken before Trump did anything.
What would it take to convince you that Trump knew there was no outcome-determinative fraud? More generally, what would it take to convince you of any fraud? Say Alice gets a check in the mail signed by Bob. Alice calls Bob and asks about the check. Bob says he didn't sign it. Alice asks her check forgery friend to see if the check is real and they say it is fake. Alice goes to multiple different banks and they all say the check is fake. Alice then tries to cash the check. At what point would you say Alice knows the check is fake? Or do you say Alice still doesn't know the check is fake?
Not all of them. And even for those dismissed on standing, the Judges frequently talked about the merits anyway. If I had to guess, they probably did this just in case they got overruled on appeal as a way to speed up the legal process given how time sensitive this was. That way, if the standing portion got overruled, the appeals could keep the overall dismissal since they touched on the merits. Even if they all were dismissed on standing, there is still the problem of people that Trump himself picked repeatedly telling him there was no outcome-determinative fraud.
I don't understand the critique/trick. I wasn't trying to make a grand statement here, just trying to say "he thought this thing and then acted on those thoughts". It would be the same as me saying "Alice knows the check is fake and decided to cash it anyway". It's more of a connecting statement to tie his thoughts to his actions and not anything else.
Of course it is evidence, it is just very weak evidence. Another theory consistent with this set of facts is that, in many states, mail in votes and early votes were not allowed to start being counted until election day, so, the surge in mail in and early voting from COVID meant that results would take a while to count. Combine that with the partisan split between election day voting and mail in/early voting and you get what we saw in 2020. If you followed any of the people closely covering the election, you'd know they all said this would happen months prior. Counterpoint that I've heard a lot so I'll preempt it: "that is just evidence they were preparing to rig it beforehand". My reply is that is certainly possible, but now you need to convince me that this plot is somehow so grand that random journalists are talking about it, yet so secretive that the best election fraud evidence is vague statistical maybe anomalies or super unclear video of something maybe wrong happening? That seems incredibly unlikely.
I worded that section poorly in hindsight. Basically, I listed a bunch of critiques of Trump, so the steel man I'm asking for would be the best argument against those critiques. The critiques are obviously framed against Trump cause they are Trump critiques, so the the argument against the Trump critiques can accept or deny the frame as it sees fit.
Well, those electors did sign pieces of paper saying they were the officially certified electors. And Trump and co. are all trying to say "use this slate, use this slate" which only makes sense if the slate was certified, otherwise see the next section.
Perhaps, assuming that Trump genuinely believed there was fraud, trying to get his slate certified by the state legislature was fine. But, since he didn't, he shouldn't have tried to have his slates be used. The election of 1876 is precisely the reason they created a law to say what happens when there are disputed slates of electors. However, what we have with Trump isn't a case of "which slate was properly certified?" (maybe we do assuming you agree with me above that Trump thought his slate was certified), it was a case "one slate was properly certified, this other slate wasn't, but Trump wants the other slate to be picked anyways".
I agree with this. In fact, if it was stolen then not only would J6 be justified, much further violence would be justified.
Again take a 20,000 foot view. The IC had spent four years making shit up to try to undermine Trump and or help Biden. On election night Trump looks poised for a victory. Then in almost unprecedented fashion the counting stops and then lo and behold Biden wins after a giant ballot dump.
If you just had those facts and it was a third country you would say “that smells really bad.” You wouldn’t say “oh but the people in charge of the elections said it was good and sure they destroyed the evidence but we have no reason to believe they were wrong.”
I am not pretending it wasn't at least a little suspicious the way the vote counts jumped as we all went to sleep that night (the blue line jumping over the red line me was funny). I'm just saying the innocent explanation of partisan difference in mail in votes is the far, far more likely explanation than widespread, outcome-determinative fraud. That is a high, high bar to clear and needs a lot of very strong evidence.
So, yes, in your third world country hypothetical I would probably say it was fishy and there's a good chance of outcome-determinative fraud. But, if I later learned there were innocent explanations of this that outweighed the probability of outcome-determinative fraud, I would believe those innocent explanations. A big difference with third world countries is that my priors for outcome-determinative fraud are way higher. If you tell me a random country in Africa had outcome-determinative fraud, I would probably believe you without even looking it up. And if I did, I'd probably just look at headlines or check if that country has a history of election fraud. However, if you told me the French or British or US elections had outcome-determinative fraud, I would need much stronger evidence since that is a much more surprising conclusion.
The problem is the fraudulent explanations and the innocence explanations look similar AND thr lack of security means it would be hard to tell the difference coupled with the obvious incentive.
Maybe there would be a red mirage or just maybe Biden got truly 60k of votes when he needed 75k and they added 15k. So the red mirage was in part true and in part false. They would look the same.
We judge it based on our priors. If we have two alternative explanations to explain the same set of facts, we choose the explanation that is more likely based on our prior belief. If it's wet outside, it could be that it rained, or it could be that a forest fighting helicopter dropped their bucket of water by mistake. Both explanations fit the facts, but the rain explanation is more likely cause our priors of rain occurring are much higher than a forest fighting helicopter dropped their bucket of water by mistake.
Yeah, but in that analogy the firefighting department predicted rain, said it'd look as if one of their helicopters dropped its bucket but it'll be rain. 5 minutes before it was wet outside, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and completely cloudless. All weather stations in the areas in question stopped reporting the weather at the same time, then deleted the records of the raw instrument data as fast as they could after the event, so any and all subsequent attempts to reconstruct the weather are done with already processed and edited data, and there's even a video of firefighting helicopters flying erratically over Atlanta.
Now none of this is actual proof, but I would not blame anyone for believing shenanigans happened.
This seems to be boiling down a disagreement on our priors on election fraud likelihood, like with many other people replying. I do not agree with that analogy of what it was like before the election. Adjusting the analogy, I would say it would be like the weather man saying "Firefighting helicopters are continuing to fly over area A to get to the forest fire, but lucky for us in area B, we won't have to deal with them flying over us (analogous to there being fraud, but not significant fraud). Expect scattered sun showers (analogous to setting expectations for the 'red mirage') and low visibility from all the ash in the air (analogous to the info environment making it hard to tell what it true or not in the moment and afterwards).
responding to this specifically since I see it brought up a lot. I can't interpret this fact without also knowing how normal it is to do such a thing. Is it a normal practice? What is the reason for not storing it? Maybe there's a good reason, maybe not. Maybe it's best practice and storing data has been tried but they changed it for a good reason. Who knows. Without context, I can't really interact with that info. It's like if you told me "Bob doesn't save his receipts when he goes the grocery store! Something fishy is happening", then we obviously know that it is no big deal. But, the only reason we know that is that we have the context of it being extremely common for people to not save their receipts, so Bob not saving them as well isn't notable.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link