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 -
I'm not ignoring it, I'm treating it as a freak occurrence. It's the closest state in the closest election in the last 80 years. That's the platonic ideal of cherry picking. I copied the chart into Excel and took the average, and the average is 56,514 (median is 28,713) of a data set already filtering for the closest elections.
I notice that you neglect responding to the part where the fraudsters don't have to cast only 115 votes. They have no idea at the time they're doing it how many they need.
I focused on the Presidential election because:
A) it's where we have the most data
B) it's what most of the people talk about, like Trump is still out here claiming he won in 2020.
C) It makes the topic even more unwieldy to discuss.
I've seen that poll before and I think the question is shit. I would say yes to "political violence can sometimes be justified?" because I'd consider a hypothetical random civilian who tried to assassinate literal, actual Hitler a hero. The question didn't ask what my limit would be.
Two problems with this. First of all, doping is a crime you perform in private. Pretending to be someone else you do in public.
Second of all, the limiting factor of conspiracy is not finding like-minded individuals. It's finding like-minded individuals without failing to recruit someone and that someone tipping off authorities.
Who is our modal fraudster anyway? To figure out who is eligible to vote you need their name and some other detail, usually birthday or partial SSN. You're talking about getting data from data brokers, but they're using it to just wander around a city casting votes in person? It's like assembling Ocean's Eleven to rob a liquor store. If you are smart enough to try to farm citizens to impersonate, I'd think you'd be smart enough to come up with a better plan than this. I think every person we have prosecuted for voter fraud at the polls was just trying to impersonate a single relative.
The lack of trust in the system is not the problem of the system. It's a problem of people distrusting the system. To put it bluntly, to the Democratic party places a very low importance on this benefit, and doubts they can earn it even by following instructions. Georgia was a big part of Trump's 2020 claims of election fraud, and Georgia already requires photo ID.
If anything, it increases distrust in the system because it just opens the doors to further claims of fraud seeming plausible. Trump has just tried to restrict mail-in voting, which I predicted Republicans would do.
I wouldn't be opposed to voters being given more info, but it doesn't remove my complaint that voter ID is a waste of time. But not all states use ERIC, and Republicans are the ones who seem to want to leave the program.
Yes, this was a government analysis done in 2014 covering the change in turnout in states before and after voter ID. It's mentioned right in that general section.
From the page right after it, it was too soon to examine the effects. But I still object to putting everything on canvassers to fix the problem. Part of voter ID isn't just "whether voters need to provide some proof vs none at all." It's that Republicans change the laws to arbitrarily reject perfectly valid ways to identify people.
More options
Context Copy link