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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?

AAQC material. Thanks for spelling it out.

The degree to which people are willing to twist their minds into knots out of sheer loyalty to Trump (loyalty that they claim is reciprocation of his promise to be loyal to them, despite his consistent inability and at times unwillingnessto deliver) is just sad. The sooner this band-aid is torn off, the better.

I am sufficiently fixed in my views that engagement with you would likely only produce heat. Nonetheless, I dislike you calling me sad for sticking with my man.

He was the only President in my working life whose administration produced an economy sufficient for me to earn money for a retirement account, which is now down to 60% of what it was when he left office. Tangible personal results like that are memorable and anecdotal by their very nature, and thus unfalsifiable, so no data-based argument would sway me.

Are you within 10 years of retirement, and if not, why do you care about the drop?

He was the only President in my working life whose administration produced an economy sufficient for me to earn money for a retirement account,

If so, your working life must be very brief to date, or you are not very representative of the norm. See chart here, indicating that median real retirement savings in 2019 ($65,000) was just $1200 more than it was in 2016 (63,814).

which is now down to 60% of what it was when he left office.

The SP500 closed on Jan 20, 2021 at 3851. It closed yesterday at 3807. That is obviously not anywhere close to a 40% decline; it is a one percent decline. If your portfolio is down 40% then you might want to rethink your investment strategy. If you are young and you are comfortable with volatility, a portfolio like yours might be a good idea. But it sounds like you are not comfortable with volatility.

I had a comment with numbers and info in it, but I cannot paste on iPhone (fix plz @ZorbaTHut ASAP), and so it is lost. Suffice it to say that, had I simply kept my IRA out of the market when I was laid off in Dec 2020 (EDIT: 2021) and just let it bear interest, I would have 150% of my life’s savings in that account.

I honestly have no idea how to fix that, I don't even own an iPhone. Any developers out there with mobile Apple tools who can work on this one?

I don't understand -- your savings would have grown 50% in less than 2 years? That would require an annual interest rate of over 20%.

Sorry, 150% of my current IRA, which has lost a third of its value after I reinvested my 401(k) in January 2022 upon losing the job it was dependent on in December 2021. (I also missed a year in my previous reply.)

I am reminded by your comment of the Trump supporter who validated his support because his buisness had been doing so well. His buisness iirc was repossession or some similar business.

I do not believe that you like Trump on the account of economic indicators during his tenure, nor do you try to make it plausible.

It’s true I did believe he would increase my fortunes when I voted for him, because I believed he was a selfish man who would increase the ability of businessmen like himself to profit. His tax cuts validated my choice. Why I liked him was his enthusiasm for America, his wholehearted dismissal of the woke nonsense as foolishness and tripe, and his awareness of the games being played by those in power.

You don't consider the economy a plausible reason to motivate someone's political leanings? That defies belief.

Tangible personal results like that are memorable

I agree with that, but I don't think either president had that much impact on the economy. Funnily enough taking off the gloves to win the last election might have been a huge mistake for the Democrats because of that.

The President doesn't have that much impact on the economy in general. Not directly, anyway. Appointing the Fed Chair is a big deal, but that almost invariably ends up being someone responsible and non-controversial because no one wants a weirdo who is going to drive the economy off the cliff.