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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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@ymeskhout has written a couple of posts recently discussing the treatment of the Jan 6th defendants, a sequel of sorts to his series of posts on the evidence and court cases surrounding the Red Tribe accusations of election fraud in the 2020 election.

These post has gotten a bunch of responses raising a variety of objections to Jan 6th, arguing for violations of symmetry based on other events, questions about fairness, questions about framing, and so on. The objection that immediately springs to mind, for me, is that the posts are narrowly focusing on specific questions where the facts are on their side, in a bid to minimize surface areas to relevant counter-arguments relating to the Jan 6th riot in general. Certainly, I have encountered similar tactics by others in the past, and previous conversations with the OP have left me with the clear impression that they're a member of my outgroup.

So I think it's useful to state, as clearly as possible, that the general thesis I've just laid out is dead wrong.

Rumor-mongering is an obvious failure mode for political discussion. A lot of different people raise a lot of different arguments, present a variety of different facts, these cross-pollinate, and people walk away with an erroneous impression of facts. Then someone tries to correct the record, a whole bunch of people raise a whole bunch of new arguments, and people walk away with their erroneous impression strengthened, not weakened. This is a very easy problem to fall into, especially if you are good enough at rhetoric and arguments to self-persuade. Normal argument effects dig you in, and bias inclines you to think worse of the people arguing against you.

This effect combines poorly with another of the basic failure modes of political discussion that shows up here with some regularity: speculating and theorizing rather than simply checking facts. This allows one to spin out "evidence" ad hoc to support a position that can turn out to be entirely spurious. It is woeful to see an event commented here, and then a whole tree of a hundred comments going back and forth on some speculation, followed by a five-comment thread where someone points out an easily verifiable fact that renders the entire previous discussion and all the arguments in it completely pointless. More woeful is the realization that the entirely-fictional hundred-comment-thread did vastly more to modify peoples' internal model than the factual disproof. The third or forth time one sees this, one begins to contemplate serious drinking. Since examples are always helpful in driving a point home, here's an example of me confidently talking out my hindparts.

It is extremely important to be able to notice when you're wrong. It's important personally, and it's doubly important for a community like this one. Often, the people who are the best at pointing out that you're wrong are going to be people you disagree strongly with, and maybe don't like very much. The ability to point out error is one of the main reasons such people are so valuable to have around.

Here's what I've seen so far in the recent Jan 6th threads:

  • @ymeshkhout was presented with a number of specific arguments about Jan 6th. Many of these arguments consisted of bald assertions, absent supporting evidence or even links.

  • They did some googling, looked at the evidence available for the specific events named, and found that it absolutely did not match the claims being made.

  • They wrote up a calm, unfailingly polite post detailing the claims, who made them, and what the actual evidence was, with copious links.

  • If anyone actually conceded that their claims were false, I didn't see it. What I did see was a flurry of additional claims, some thankfully including links at least.

  • They then wrote up a follow-up post taking apart a number of the additional items raised.

  • the follow-up post appears to mainly be responded to by more claims, many of them highly tangential to the topic at hand.

I am no stranger to arguing with bad-faith bullshit. This is not what bad-faith bullshit looks like. This is, near as I can tell, what being wrong looks like. The proper response to that is to admit it and take your lumps like a grownup. If you can't do that, if you don't actually value seeing misconceptions corrected, you're acting like a jackass, and ymeskhout is doing this place a tremendous service to make that fact as obvious as possible, with bonus points for style.

I am fairly confident that both Jan 6th and the 2020 election were some degree of bullshit in meaningful, provable ways. Arguing it would take a fair amount of effort, effort that I have not chosen to spend, and so it behooves me to admit that it's entirely possible that I'm wrong, and not to expect other people to give my gut feelings any consideration. It's an argument I want to make, but it's an argument I cannot actually back up, and so it's not an argument I should expect others to take seriously.

To the extent that I think that the picture ymeskhout is presenting is false, the proper response is to put together a detailed argument, backed by the best supporting evidence I can dig up, on exactly how and why he's unambiguously wrong. Until then, I should accept that my point of view is just, like, an opinion man. That's my understanding of how this place works, and why it's valuable. In the meantime, the next time you see someone talking about mistreatment of Jan 6th defendants, a reasonable starting question might be "what's your evidence of this?"

Hell, that's a pretty good practice generally, isn't it?

Here is one example of the sort I brought up, where someone did not even enter the building.

Couy Griffin. Founder, Cowboys for Trump. Ordered held without bail. Convicted of a charge of entering a restricted area. 14 days jail time, $3000 fine, $500 restitution, 60 hours community service, 1 year supervised release.

There have been several who have been found guilty of felony "obstruction of an official proceedings", when the actual act behind that charge was trespassing. Note this crime was passed as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which was about financial crime; this tells you how much of a stretch that it is. But since the actual charge wasn't "trespass", these cases "don't count".

But since the actual charge wasn't "trespass", these cases "don't count".

That sucks, do you happen to know who made up these rules about which examples should "count"? Whoever they are, I hope they are held accountable.

Not I, counselor. If you read that post my claim is that some rioters who "committed no crime worse than trespassing" are getting harsh punishments for political reasons. And that some did not enter the building. Not "were charged with no crimes worse than trespassing" (since part of the issue is the difference in charges for similar acts). Not even "were convicted of no crime worse than trespassing". And I did not limit "punishment" to the actual sentence imposed; being held without bail in this case I consider punitive.

You responded to this by interpreting these statements in a much more restricted way, declared them false based on a source showing actual sentences, asking why I believed these false things. Well, the answer to why I believe these things is because they were widely and gleefully reported in the press at the time. That March 2021 D.C. Court of Appeals decision that said some non-violent defendants had to be granted bond? That happened because they were, in fact, NOT being given bond.

You responded to this by interpreting these statements in a much more restricted way, declared them false based on a source showing actual sentences, asking why I believed these false things.

You are not being honest here.

My immediate reply was to ask you to clarify what you meant by "harsh punishments". I then showed my work about what I found after a quick search and asked you if this is what you meant, then again asked you for any specific cases you believed met your own definitions. You didn't respond. So my first top level post showed my work again, explicitly stated that I was relying on an incomplete database, explicitly admitted what you wrote could be interpreted in multiple ways, again asked you to provide any examples you knew about. You finally did reply by citing the Q Shaman guy's case, and I pointed out that your original claim appeared to have been much more expansive than just that guy, then again asked you multiple clarifying questions, to which you did not reply. When I badgered you again about this, it was to again ask you how you arrived at your position, and since at this point you didn't seem eager to defend it, I asked if it was actually based in fact. You responded, but not substantively, and instead implied that I would tie you into knots somehow.

Here's another question: What would you have me do differently? When your original claim was ambiguous, I asked you to define the terms you were using. When you didn't respond, I searched for examples on my own and asked you if this is what you meant. I continued asking you to clarify what you meant even after multiple unanswered prompts. I do not understand what purpose your evasiveness serves. If you're unhappy about being misinterpreted, you can't blame it on the guy hounding you for days repeatedly asking you to explain what you meant.

What you wrote directly above actually cleared up a lot of my original questions (finally!) and had you just said exactly this, we could have avoided much of the long and exhaustive trail of ask-ask-ask-ask I left behind. So once again, what would you have me do differently? I'm actually listening.

I posted that you did the exact same thing Nybbler complained about above--looking for charges, not acts, but now that I look more closely at your links (at least the first two), I don't see where you even compared January 6 protestors to leftists at all, with or without charges. "Harsh punishments for political reasons" here means "harsher than the left is punished". You have to make a comparison (and once you do, "don't look up charges" then becomes relevant).

"Harsh punishments for political reasons" here means "harsher than the left is punished". You have to make a comparison (and once you do, "don't look up charges" then becomes relevant).

Edit to your edit: how am I supposed to know/assume this? Besides asking for clarification, what else am I supposed to do here?

He was referring to what the protesters did, not what they were specifically charged with. Even if protesters who did no more than trespass were charged with "Treason" that would not undermine his point about them being treated differently from how trespassing protesters are usually treated. As it happens, what a lot of them was charged with was "Obstruction of an official proceeding", an incredibly broad law created for people trying to interfere with criminal investigations/trials that had never been used in this way before. The Wikipedia article is divided into "Use prior to 2021" and "2021 U.S. Capitol attack" for a reason. And then, even if you think that undermines the point somehow, the specific guy he linked was just charged with "entering a restricted area", which is even more overtly about him trespassing.

He was referring to what the protesters did, not what they were specifically charged with.

I'm not a mind reader. I asked him numerous times to clarify his position. If he chooses not to respond, I can't be blamed for the lack of clarity. I did my part.

Are we reading the same thing? I see:

... many of the "rioters" who committed no crime worse than trespassing (in some cases not even entering the building, just supposedly-forbidden parts of the grounds) are getting harsh punishments...

The source article describes it as (emphasis added): "January 6 defendant found guilty of trespass at US Capitol" and "...Griffin guilty of trespassing...". Even if you want to defy their language choice and stick with strict legal definitions ("It's not trespassing, it's 'entering a restricted area'."), you'd still have to face the caveat in the original comment: it's crimes worse than trespassing that they didn't commit, not just one specific law.

I am not the enforcer here, if Nybbler wants to broaden or modify their original claim that's totally fine! It's just bizarre to lament how something doesn't "count" because of contours they themselves created!

I find it hard to imagine how he could make any relevant statement without saying that the crime had to be worse than something. And anything he used would be a "contour".