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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34638 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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You have no evidence for this. You're just assuming everyone is a bad-faith conflict theorist because you are unable to envision how anyone else could be otherwise.

When your model of your enemies is such that if they do what you expect, it affirms your beliefs, and when they don't do what you expect, you assume they made a mistake and thus it affirms your beliefs, consider the possibility that your model is wrong.

I expect my enemies to have double standards against Trump. They have acted accordingly.

Just because they didn't completely ignore Biden doesn't mean they are using fair standards.

And just because they acted against Trump doesn't mean they have double-standards.

Sure, it's hard to come up with a mistake-theorist justification for his theory. It's possible to make a more charitable conflict-theory one, though. If one assumes that the deep state really, really hates Trump, then one might expect them to overplay their hand. Naturally this would be a more impressive prediction if made in September.

I agree that theories of the deep state tend to be sloppy and/or unfalsifiable. This is plausibly an example of such. I think it's still bad practice to put words in his mouth.

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