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 -
Popular vote counts for Democrat candidates since 2008, per Wikipedia:
What is the steelman for why I shouldn't take Biden's anomalously high vote count in 2020 as evidence of fraud? I never looked too closely into the details of the 2020 fraud claims, and I'm sure that this issue has already been discussed at length previously, but it seems like it would be reasonable to revisit that discussion in light of Harris's vote count dropping back to be more in line with the historical average. (The votes are still being counted, but we can safely assume that her total vote count won't go too much higher than 70 million. Biden got over 10 million votes more than that.)
Trump's vote total of 74,223,975 in 2020 was also elevated compared to what would historically be expected of a Republican candidate, but it seems less anomalous in light of the 71,352,277 votes he's received so far this year. Whereas Harris has drastically unperformed Biden while simultaneously performing more in line with other Democrat candidates.
It's not exactly a formal statistical analysis, but this does somewhat increase my credence that there was substantial fraud in 2020. It just doesn't pass the smell test that there were ~15 million people who were that excited to vote for Biden, who had largely never voted Democrat before, and then they all just failed to materialize again in 2024.
Occam's razor in my opinion is that Harris, Clinton, and Obama in his 2nd year underperformed, and turnout has been increasing as America becomes more polarized and politically activated.
Biden overperformed for the same reason normies went to BLM rallies in 2020, there was an huge anti-Trump awakening, it's just petered out.
Compare that to a 15 million vote fraud coverup, which is more likely?
The coverup, obviouslyl. It requires us to pretend history began circa 2019 to pretend that BLM represented a ground-breaking, once-in-century event that the Reagan landslides, the Chance to Bury Racism Forever that was 2008, or ushering in Camelot with JFK that previous elections couldn't dream of coming close to.
Previous centuries didn't have a 9 minutes video of a handcuffed man dying in front of a crowd.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link