site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   22614 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Popping the Filter Bubble
Part 1 of what may become an ongoing series

Before @seething_spendcel published their post on the Henry Nowak I had actually started writing a post of my own as it had been easily rank in the top-5 if not top-3 of culture war stories for over a week based on the amount of coverage it was getting yet there had been literally Zero discussion of it here. Now I see @Quantumfreakonomics talking about this being a "Slow news week" and how "The current thing is still Graham Platner" and I am suddenly motivated to bring up another top-3 culture war story that does not appear to have been discussed here.

So let's talk about Spencer Pratt and the Unburning of Pacific Palisades.

For those just joining us Spencer Pratt is an MTV Entertainment executive who got his start in reality TV. He lost his home in the 2025 Palisades fire, and he is currently running for Mayor of Los Angeles. His platform is simple, Karen Bass (the Incumbent) is both corrupt and incompetent. He claims that she has been redirecting funds intended to rebuild the burnt-out neighborhoods to her friends while championing policies that make life worse for ordinary Californians.

Those who pay attention to Right-Wing Twitter are no doubt familiar with the proliferation of AI generated ads like this, and the meme about Spencer Pratt contributing money to his opponent's campaigns so they could run more ads like this.

Anyway the important thing that you need to know is that over the last 6 weeks Pratt has gone from being a complete outsider with a snowball's chance in hell to being neck-and-neck with the incumbent, and then last week just days before the polls officially opened, a miracle occurred Google "Unburned" the Pacific Palisades restoring the Google Maps and Street View to their pre-fire state, now Google claims this is all a mistake but many, myself included, would like to know how imagery that was clearly pre-fire came to be labeled as having been taken in May of 2026. I might have believed a story about having to restore the servers from an old back-up even if the timing was a bit suspicious, but clearly pre-fire imagery being labeled as having been taken in 2026 would seem to go a step further than just "a glitch".

Speaking of "glitches". Californians are famously incompetent when it comes to anything involving voting be it Elections or the Academy Awards, polls in person voting was this Tuesday but with the majority of votes being cast by mail it's unlikely we will have an official result till next week and right-wing tweeters have noticed something interesting...

39.3% vote in…
Karen Bass: 117,579
Spencer Pratt: 86,323

42.4% vote in…
Karen Bass: 130,429
Spencer Pratt: 86,323

0 out off 13,000 votes for Pratt would seem to stretch credulity and Gov. DeSantis is calling Shenanigans

The utterly blasé attitude of California to its comically pathetic electoral dysfunction is very frustrating to me, if not exactly surprising, given the state of the state. Functional democratic systems simply cannot (and indeed do not) take weeks to tally votes. Even if there is no or negligible fraud actually taking place (and I honestly believe that that’s true) the blatant appearance of opportunity for fraudulent elections is itself a serious problem. Part of a democracy is and must be confidence in the system! People need to see that the votes are being counted properly! Especially since this problem only appeared post-Covid, presumably due to lax rules about mail-in ballot postmark dates, the fix cannot be that difficult.

Does the federal government have any leverage to force reform? I know states control their own elections (which I think is right and proper in the US system) but surely there’s a point where this just can’t go on. Will it ever become sufficiently embarrassing such that the functionally one-party state government actually feels pressure to change? There seems to be very, very little motivation even from California voters to fix the system, many don’t even seem to see it as a problem.

Democracy cannot work unless you can convince the loser that they lost a fair game. That's fundamental. Otherwise there's no reason for them to keep playing along. Elections need to be essentially flawless.

No I think 2020 disproves this quite soundly.

If you arrest dissenters and punish them severely enough; you’re fine

Ah, the myth of the stolen election rears its ugly head again.

As conspiracy theories go, it seems rather weak. I mean, the way election disputes were settled pre-Trump was generally through the SCOTUS. In 2020, Trump had the most conservative court any Republican could wish for, the one who would overturn Roe. If the Democrats had a way to blackmail the SCOTUS, we would not have gotten Dobbs.

Say what you will about the left, but they at least have the grace to accept a defeat at the ballot booth when they get handed one. With Trump/MAGA, it is not "the election was rigged because of this or that irregularity", but it is fundamentally "the election was rigged because our side did not win".

Also, who was arrested and punished for merely disputing the election result, exactly? It is a free country, you can claim that an election was stolen or that your neighbor is an alien impostor all day long. However, if you decide to do something about your beliefs, like storming the capitol or shooting your neighbor you will still get in trouble for that.

  • -13

Say what you will about the left, but they at least have the grace to accept a defeat at the ballot booth when they get handed one.

Ahem. somethingiswrong2024? The numbers are wrong? Lawsuits? Accusations that the voting machines were tampered with (after reassurances four years previously that nobody could meddle with the machines and it was the safest election ever)? Trump faked his own assassination attempts? Any querying of how elections are held, counted, or returned is right wing attempts to subvert elections and destroy democracy?

Stacey Abrams claiming she wuz robbed in Georgia?

There are conspiracy theorists on the left as well as on the right.

Sure. Both parties do their best to make the election outcome not reflect the will of the people, and both parties whine about how their loss does not reflect the actual sentiment of the population because the other side did that. Gerrymandering and making it maximally inconvenient for demographics who lean towards the opponent to vote while making it maximally easy for your demographics to vote (think "we will make you wait in line for hours" vs "there is a bus to pick the elderly up from care homes and ferry them to the voting booth") are time-honored strategies.

However, both these strategies and the exaggerated whining about them are of limited badness. The effects of gerrymandering on the outcome of a particular election can easily be determined with sixth-grade math, there is little dispute what the outcomes would have been if the districts were drawn differently, or the difference between seat distribution and popular vote. Likewise, wrongful claims of voter suppression are of limited badness, because they can not persuade the people who voted that their vote did not count, only that their candidate would have done better if the other voters were not suppressed.

By contrast, saying "the totals do not reflect the will of the people because of election fraud, i.e. either your vote did not make it into the totals, or the other side just stuffed the ballot with fake votes to win" is much more corrosive. The main selling point of democracy is that it offers people a way to change their government without all the bother of violently overthrowing it. Telling someone that the ballot box is broken is the same as telling them to use the cartridge box instead.

From the link, it seems that Stacey Abrams mostly did the former, whining about voter suppression. While some might be persuaded to rise in armed resistance despite their vote being counted because they think that there is some Black voter whose vote was suppressed, I feel the danger of that is limited -- the actual nucleus of such a resistance movement would have to be the suppressed voters, so if there are hardly any there is no movement.

By contrast, denying the legitimacy of the Biden election is a basic tenet of MAGA. It is not just a cope from the base (which we certainly have about 2024 on the left, like "Musk stole the election for Trump"), it is what a Republican congressman has to claim to believe to be in good standing with his party.

"Grace to accept defeat" being utilizing their legion of plants already in government to harass their enemies and prevent their legitimate governance even after losses!

Not to mention rioting on inauguration day. And after the election in 2016.

My point had nothing to do with whether the election was actually stolen. I was responding to the claim that democracy can’t work if the losing side doesn’t accept the legitimacy.

Many didn’t in 2020, yet hour democracy continues.

I'm not an American, but it seems the losing side did, grudgingly and for the most part, eventually accept the legitimacy. Not everyone, but enough. The majority at least, and the Republican Party as a whole.

That said, at least when seen from across the pond there was enough weirdness that, if the same thing were to happen in e.g. an African country, everyone internationally would've said it was sus. I'm not assuming there was enough fraud to actually change the election. I'm perfectly happy to recognize Biden's win. But none of it looked good, and I would expect better from a first-world democracy.

This is the insane thing that Democrats seemingly cannot get through their heads. If you went to any politically inclined person in 2000 and described the 2020 election without telling them the country, they would have assumed it was Russia or Iran or Congo. If you told anyone about California today without telling them its California, they would tell you to send in the UN to monitor the election because its almost certainly being manipulated.

  1. The left did not have the grace to accept defeat when they lost to Trump. Instead, see what Obama did on his way out. Biggest underdiscussed scandal of all time.

  2. The left created a system that enabled fraud without significant ability to detect fraud. They then claimed the absence of evidence was evidence of absence.

  3. The court you cite decided not to fix this system prior to the election; they weren’t going to overturn after the fact without fraud being established beyond a unreasonable doubt.

  4. Georgia seemingly has proven shenanigans occurred.

You're assuming that our democracy is still working

Democracy cannot work unless you can convince the loser that they lost a fair game.

Unfortunately, it also works fine if you can cheat and use force to keep the loser down.

The conversation around this reminds me of a clip I saw of a conversation between Jon Stewart and some (former?) head of some government agency on a stage a couple years ago, where he was pointing out that the fact that the agency can't account for where all their funds went is, in itself, proof of mismanagement, and she was insistent that the fact that they couldn't actually point to a wrong place where the money went meant that there was no evidence of mismanagement. The idea that the people running things have a responsibility to pro-actively provide evidence that things were being tracked properly in order to clear the bar for "not mismanaging" seemed to be utterly foreign to her and completely impossible to penetrate her mind. When incompetence can so easily allow for malice, incompetence must be treated like malice. This is why the ethical standard for bribes and favors in business is that it must not even appear to be corrupt; the lack of actual corruption is not a defense and not relevant.

It would be going too far to say that this is deliberate in order to ensure the 'right' candidate gets selected then voted in to office, but by the sounds of it, it is less than ideal. I don't know how they can address this, and I imagine any efforts at oversight, so that missing boxes of ballots that are 99% for candidate A and contain just enough votes to bring A over the line rather than B aren't found under the table with half an hour to go on the last day of counting, would be met with screams of outrage and claims that this is more Republican efforts at voter disenfranchisement.

Yeah, if this was an account of a Third World country, your immediate suspicion would be voter fraud. Is California a banana republic?

Yeah, if this was an account of a Third World country, your immediate suspicion would be voter fraud. Is California a banana republic?

The entire US is a banana republic when it comes to elections and counting votes.

Thousands of votes and not a single one for the second largest (to that point) vote getter? Thats just not statistically possible

Someone else downthread says the votes get uploaded in batches per candidate, which makes sense to me, even if it is utterly, ridiculously stupid as a way to do things.

Really? That seems terrible. Leave it to the Americans to look at their electoral college system and decide that there is still room for horrible procedural improvements.

Voting is not very hard to do right, it can (and should be done) with just paper and a ballot box. If a citizen is concerned about voter fraud, they should be free to observe the ballot box during the whole voting process and then observe the counting process. Once you have finished counting your district, then and only then will you send a preliminary result on. We do it like that in Germany and it just works. Anything more technological is a terrible idea, because it will be very hard to persuade people who have no clue about computers that their vote was counted correctly, and it will be even harder to persuade the people who are very knowledgeable about computers.

If it takes all night to count the votes, that is fine, you will not be penalized on the democracy index for that.

But it wasn’t just Bass that went up. All other candidates but Pratt. Why was he the missing batch?

More than that, the later batches favor Bass over Raman by a far lesser margin than earlier votes did. You can't explain this by Democratic votes coming in later.

Okay, batch release does explain some of it, but none of the batches were for Platner Pratt (sorry, I got confused about the other candidate starting with P who is roiling the waters in California)? At all?

There's not enough to say this is definitely fraud, but it's murky enough that claims of "I wuz robbed" later will be credible to the supporters.

That is wild. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, and that seems well over sufficiently advanced.

Well, that certainly makes fraud easier. Don't need to worry about making your fake batches seem even remotely plausible.

Ehh, given that it’s LA (where a supermajority of primary votes can be presumed to go to one democrat or another; the fact a republican is competing at all is an anomaly over recent decades) and that democrats are significantly more likely than republicans to vote by mail, I don’t think it’s impossible that a batch of ~10k mail-in votes, especially if they came from the same neighborhood, could have zero for the republican. Unlikely, yes, but not impossible. A 1% chance isn’t zero chance. I admit it is Bayesian evidence toward fraud, but even putting aside possible misreporting my priors based on modern history are that electoral fraud in the US really is minimal. Incompetence rather than malice.

Anyway, this is exactly why I think some common sense vote-counting reform is so important. We should not be able to have this conversation in a first-world democracy. It is at best a pathetic embarrassment. The mail-in postmark deadline should be set several days before the election date, with at most a one-day grace period for late arrivals. My understanding is that most states, including blue states, pretty much do it this way already anyway without issue.

Similarly to why I think voter ID laws should be enacted. I don’t believe there’s an epidemic of non-citizen votes, but I do think allowing for the appearance thereof is itself a serious problem. People being concerned about election integrity is itself a valid and important reason to shore up the process, even if they can’t prove anything. I remember the first election I voted in was 2016, while I was in college; a couple of my friends were international students who asked about what it was like. They were somewhere between baffled and appalled when I explained the process and how little verification there was, even the one who was a very liberal girl was shocked. They couldn’t imagine that elections in the famous U.S. of A. were so ramshackle. It was an eye-opening experience.

Much the same applies to drop boxes and electronic voting. Even if they are largely secure in practice, the mere appearance of an opportunity for fraud is a pointless and stupid mistake.

A 1% chance isn’t zero chance.

Yes, but it is not a 1% chance. 1% chances are fine. By contrast, this is astronomical. Suppose that that in the bluest neighborhood on the planet, there is a chance of 99.9% that anyone will vote Democrat, far exceeding the margin of even one party states. Still, the odds of none of 13000 voting for the GOP would be merely 2 in a million. It is utterly implausible.

In this case though, I think that the better explanation is an utterly stupid way to update the votes (by bunches per candidate), not the most incompetent voting fraud in history.

It does sound like California went for "what is the stupidest way to hold an election?" and thus the kind of results here. If I go by what I'm reading online, they send out mail-in ballots automatically to everyone who's registered. But you can't check the voter rolls and get rid of any outdated information because that's MAGA Republican right-wing voter suppression. If you have a driver's licence, you get a ballot. And you can get a driver's licence even if you're an undocumented immigrant without a right to vote. So long as the ballot is returned within seven days after election day, it will be counted. Ballots are verified by signature so if there's a problem with the signature then they'll send you a form to fill out and return so the ballot can be counted. And what most boggles me, ballot harvesting. Well gosh, I sure can't immediately think of three ways off the top of my head this could be abused!

Some or all of the above may be mistaken or misinformed. But wow. Big rich technocratic blue blue blue governed state runs things in a manner that a parish raffle would blush to attempt, and this is the best anyone can do, don't complain or question you MAGA shill!

Someone said that but provided no evidence. The problem with that claim wasn’t that one other candidate had voted to up. All other candidates excepting Pratt had their votes go up. So they release in batches for multiple candidates but not Pratt? That doesn’t pass the smell test.

I don’t think it’s impossible that a batch of ~10k mail-in votes, especially if they came from the same neighborhood, could have zero for the republican. Unlikely, yes, but not impossible. A 1% chance isn’t zero chance.

You’re overestimating the odds by a few orders of magnitude. Even in North Korea the ruling party only gets 99.93% of the vote — they “lose” 7/10,000. Cuba’s ruling party gets 80%. In Laos the ruling party gets 98%. In Vietnam they just got 99.96%.

If Democratic precincts are hitting one-party state margins, it’s at least a little plausible to wonder what else they might have in common?

Edit: to be clear I’m willing to accept the explanation that this is a reporting artifact, with the understanding that reporting votes this way is awfully convenient for masking fraud.

Such results only show the perfection of the psephological science in California that has brought elections to such a pitch of representative democracy, all results are validly valid and indicative that the greater population (save for a few diehard holdouts of regressive thought) are all perfectly informed, correct-thinking, on the right side of history, citizens! 😁

  1. The reporting artifact falls down when all the other candidates received votes (ie it wasn’t just one candidate).

  2. If it is a voting artifact can anyone show where Pratt gets a dump of votes but no one else?

No it’s not possible. Lizardman constant. The most favorable Dem districts tend to be 85-15% Dem. Not the 99-1 you’d need for this to make sense. By the way, some votes went to another Republican in the race. It was just zero to Pratt.

My priors put heavy weight some sort of reporting error. What are those screenshots taken from?

I dunno but it seems like these reporting errors seem to go in one way and it’s never quite clear how they are “corrected.”

Google "Unburned" the Pacific Palisades restoring the Google Maps and Street View to their pre-fire state, now Google claims this is all a mistake but many, myself included, would like to know how imagery that was clearly pre-fire came to be labeled as having been taken in May of 2026. I might have believed a story about having to restore the servers from an old back-up even if the timing was a bit suspicious, but clearly pre-fire imagery being labeled as having been taken in 2026 would seem to go a step further than just "a glitch".

It is undoubtedly some boring, stupid, arcane bug that would make every critic's eyes glaze over and convince no one. Decent chance it was on the imagery provider's end, serving up stale data which the batch ingestion pipeline saw as new and labeled it as such.

More fundamentally, I don't know what the actual execution and motivation of this scheme would look like. Some rogue individual undermining the logged and audited data controls? A conspiracy from top executives? And all to trick people looking at Google Maps into thinking the Palisades fires didn't happen and and so harm a candidate who will lose by 20% to one who will lose by 20.01%? (As far as conspiracies go, there are much higher impact levers Google has that could make it a loss by 20.1% instead; why Google Maps satellite view?)

And all to trick people looking at Google Maps into thinking the Palisades fires didn't happen and and so harm a candidate who will lose by 20% to one who will lose by 20.01%?

No, to trick people into believing that the incumbent has done a good (or at least adequate) job of rebuilding.

Okay so make that "and all to trick people looking at Google Maps into thinking the Palisades fires have been fully recovered from and so harm a candidate who will lose by 20% to one who will lose by 20.01%?"

Do you think that's plausible?

"Well I asked Claude and it told me the camera never lies!"

Remember, there are intelligent people out there proposing we allow AI to choose our candidates for us because they can make far better and more informed decisions than the lumpen mass of the common people.

we allow AI to choose our candidates for us because they can make far better and more informed decisions than the lumpen mass of the common people.

I mean, that is a tremendously low bar.

Somewhat. We're talking about people whose idea of fact-checking is "grok, is this true?!?"

Still better than the Tampa Bay Times!

To be fair, people are primed to be skeptical of this stuff because of all the incidents when definitions in online dictionaries and wikipedia would quietly change overnight to back up what had been said by some presidental candidate or politician.

If you're referring to Amy Coney Barrett and Merriam-Webster's usage note in the entry for 'sexual preference', please note that at least that particular lexicographic outfit considers their vocation to be describing how words are used, rather than prescribing how they ought to be used; thus they were not, like Willy the Word Decider, decreeing the term to be doubleplusungoodspeakful, but noting that many other people had taken offence at its use. (This is the same reason that certain four-letter words for below-the-waist bodily functions are listed as more taboo than four-letter words referring to the loss of eternal salvation: the man on the Clapham Omnibus will take more umbrage at "Fuck $NAME1" than he would at "God damn $NAME1".

  • -11

Vaccine is another one. Redefined over night.

Don't forget "herd immunity".

What do you mean by this?

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-the-CDC-definition-for-vaccination_fig1_367030584

Maybe it means vaccine went from "get it and you won't get X" to "get it and it reduces your chances of getting X somewhat"

The covid shot didn't reduce your chances of getting it at all, it simply reduced the severity of symptoms (if Pfizer et al are to be believed).

How much of this is a redefinition and how much of it is a more correct clarification on what that thing is.

Even before COVID I was aware vaccines don't prevent an ailment with 100% effectiveness. I get the flu vaccine every year, and maybe 20% of the time I'll still get the flu - I figured most people have had similar experiences.

Did a large swath of people actually believe a vaccine had 100% effectiveness before COVID?

Notoriously, it wasn’t called the flu vaccine but flu shot.

For many vaccines, there was near 100% protection.

More comments

That's never been true though?

Measles is something like 3% post vaccine, and mumps is something like 12% per a quick google.

Flu is a bit more obvious - the idea behind the flu vaccine is to make the flu uncomfortable but not require hospitalization and result in death, it's never really been entirely preventative.

Measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines are really good protection, good enough that they break the chain of transmission resulting in herd immunity (which means even the people for which the vaccine failed probably won't get the disease). Diphtheria vaccine is that good too.

Flu vaccine is a joke. The vaccine gives you flu symptoms, and you often get the flu anyway.

More comments

And here was me thinking a dictionary told me the definition and meaning of a word, not that "many people at this precise moment use 'bad' to mean 'good', hence we define 'bad' as meaning 'good', e.g. "School shootings are bad" means "School shootings are good, proper, right, and praiseworthy".

That’s a less denying the charges and more admitting to them. I’d also point to the increasing redefinition of “assault rifle” — which does have a technical meaning

((It’s also just nakedly not true: the organization would spin in its grave rather than recognize how Red Tribers use a disputed trans-adjacent word.))

There were other cases. The most obvious one is perhaps the case where the dictionary swiftly ‘updated’ its definition of recession to include a non-standard but not totally made up one that didn’t embarrass Joe Biden as he campaigned for reelection.

Plus the Wikipedia edit wars around whether or not Kamala Harris was “border czar” when it would embarrass her (though that’s more two-sided) and the redefinitions of “Cultural Marxism” from part of the Wikipedia series on Marxism to “Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory”.

Meriam-Webster’s dictionary definitions veer left and include left-wing extemporising: https://archive.vn/FI0tu

Wikipedia notably excludes most right-wing publications from being neutral sources while keeping lots of left-wing ones.

It’s a common pattern: the activists rush forward, then the respectable “we just report the world” orgs immediately provide cover by recognising activist claims and laundering them into respectability. So Joe Public thinks “I don’t remember that word meaning that”, goes to the dictionary, see it does mean that (as of 10 seconds ago), and goes, “ah, guess I must have been wrong and the Republicans are making a big fuss over nothing”.

Do all of these individual actions have plausible explanations? Yes. Would they rush to change the definition of certain words to help Trump in the same way, or consider right-wing usages and mores valid in the way they do left-wing ones? Not a chance in Hell.

I agree that's the motivating factor. But I think it's important to improve people's mental models of how a big corporation actually works, as compared to the dynamics involved in e.g. Wikipedia mod types.

There's another angle I'm more sympathetic of, where stories like this are shit thrown against the wall to pressure corporations to act more in line with their goals. The Left has done a fantastic job of this ("A Google vision classifier identified black people as monkeys, and that's because Google wants us to throw black people into zoos!"). If so, I can't complain too much: Google should be more sensitive to the Right, so have at it. But it should be recognized as what it is: shit being flung, not an actual useful model of reality.

Certainly. I was under the impression a low/mid level true believer going rogue could change the data, maybe with another couple of people turning a blind eye, which is why I put the likelihood of it being true at say 10%, but I haven't worked somewhere like google and I'd be interested if you think that's wrong.

It's possible, though very unlikely. No one would have the permissions to change the prod geo data unilaterally. However, members of the team that owns that part of the system (so, probably a dozen people) can assume privileges that would give them that power. Part of that process to assume privilege is getting permission from another member of the team; you'd need a collaborator, or (more likely) lie about the reason you need the privilege. Also, critically, that escalation of privileges and the actions you take are all logged and auditable; if shit hits the fan with a PR disaster, there will be a very clear trail leading to you, and that would lead to an immediate firing.

It is vanishingly unlikely that anyone would be so motivated to put their career on the line for an obviously ineffectual action (the number of voters who switched their vote from Pratt to Bass based on a mislabeled satellite view of the Palisades is exactly zero). And the population of potential rogue employees who could do that is genuinely very small: it'd have to be someone very stupid and very passionately interested in Bass's electoral prospects who happens to be on the small team who can even assume those privileges.

Makes sense, thank you for explaining.

Who is allegedly committing this fraud? And for what? Karen Bass is the obvious answer, but I'm not sure what the motivation is. It's a top two election (nobody's getting 50%), and unless something disastrous happens, the chances of her finishing third are slim to none. She's going to have to run against somebody in the fall, and Pratt is probably an easier win than Raman.

t's a top two election (nobody's getting 50%), and unless something disastrous happens, the chances of her finishing third are slim to none. She's going to have to run against somebody in the fall, and Pratt is probably an easier win than Raman.

Trivially, Raman booting Pratt out makes sure there's not a Republican in the actual election, because California's Top Two is a joke, and there's a wide variety of political positions that Raman and Bass overlap precisely on and Pratt does not.

I don't think the evidence for the fraud theory has been demonstrated, and it might not exist even presuming it was correct, but paeans to motivation fail when there's tons of motivation available.

Oddly enough, I don't think it's Bass herself up to any mischief (if mischief is being done). I get the vague impression it's more the party in California at large that dislikes certain candidates both internally and externally and want to put their thumbs on the scales, e.g. maybe Bass isn't that popular or even good at her job (though I did get the impression that she wasn't particularly awful by Californian standards) but damn it, no disgusting MAGAhead is going to run against a Democrat, and thus gain some legitimacy for their horrible and repulsive views, even if we have to intervene to ensure the right result!

Politics is organized around the reality that groups want their friends to win and their enemies to lose. LA and California both are controlled by political machines run out of the Democratic Party. In that sense it’s exceedingly simple. Spencer Pratt is an enemy of the political machine, so they want to make him lose.

Raman likely doesn't rock the boat on NGO grifting, etc. Same machine, different figurehead.

Who is allegedly committing this fraud?

Presumably the same people and organizations who've been benefiting from the redirected funds.

And they work at Google? We're still missing a key step in the conspiracy.

Cui bono? I think it's more likely Pratt would be responsible if anything, to drum up attention to the wastelands he formerly called home.

the wastelands he formerly called home.

Which, according to one comment, is a rich people problem:

But he has an uphill battle, according to Efrén Pérez, a professor who teaches political psychology at the University of California Los Angeles. The city has not had a Republican mayor since 2001 - a quarter of a century ago.

And Pratt's base and his platform are still rather narrow, Pérez says.

"I'm not saying that there isn't any validity to being a spokesperson for - and potential improver of - the sort of tragedy that befell one very wealthy slice of LA," Pérez says - referring to the fact that one of the fires struck the affluent enclave of the Pacific Palisades, where Pratt lived.

"But that wealthy slice of LA is not representative of the entire city."

Fair enough, few people are going to weep over millionaires losing their luxury homes (citation needed) but I would have thought "can we do something about the entire state burning down every year or so?" would be of interest to everyone, not just the rich?

Bass campaign manager: "The fix is in! We have rigged the vote counting so that Bass has no chance of losing!"

Staffer: "But what if that doesn't work? What if we get caught?"

Campaign manager: "Good point! Call up Akshay at Google, he's our man on the inside, and make sure he updates the satellite views of the Palisades to outdated images to ensure that even if our vote fraud scheme is uncovered, we have a failsafe."

Machine members have friends who owe their positions within Google to machine actions? That doesn't seem unreasonable.

I have no reason to think the Google maps team is in LA or that the LA Democratic machine has a hold over them. I think this sounds extremely unlikely.

Two students who network in school and end up on different paths after school but have shared views on politics and social justice. One becomes a DEI hire at Google and the other goes directly into politics seems unlikely?

How does the LA political machine place someone into Google, which has comparatively few positions in LA?

Not the LA political machine, the DEI political machine.

What redirected funds? The story you linked to involved alleged misappropriation of funds by a nonprofit that Karen Bass has no relation to.

I've got to say, I really don't understand the relation between Google Maps and the election here.

Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I've never met anyone who doesn't have the default maps view on all the time. Is satellite view more common in the US?

Also, are people using google maps to make voting decisions? Do voters not go near the burned areas ever, and one day scroll through maps - for fun perhaps? - and see it all rebuilt and just go huh, must have been rebuilt since I last checked?

Given how much Pratt's campaign has focused on the damage caused by the fires and lack of progress in rebuilding, the removal of said damage from google maps and street view has been interpreted by many as Google putting thier finger on the scales in favor of Bass.

I don't know what kind of Angeleno is unaware that the Palisades are burned to a crisp. The base rate of such fuckups (showing old imagery under a wrong date) is unclear to me.

Even for people who do use satellite view, I doubt most are looking at the dates. It seems like quite a stretch that someone who was considering voting for Pratt would switch their vote to Bass based on a Google satellite view, especially since the median voter is probably tuned in enough with local news that they'd know that the area hasn't been substantially rebuilt.

Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I've never met anyone who doesn't have the default maps view on all the time. Is satellite view more common in the US?

On my computer, I use satellite view most of the time. Seeing urbanized areas, mountain ridges, and golf courses is fun, and I don't have a data cap. (On my phone/car, I use non-satellite view for better legibility.)

I think the last time I looked at the satellite view I was in school, bored in IT class.

Pratt has run an impressive campaign and will probably make it to the runoff given the current margin with the DSA candidate, Raman.

He probably won’t win in the actual election, though. LA’s demographics would make it very hard.

LA’s demographics would make it very hard.

Accounting for demographics, California's heavy Democratic tilt is entirely unsurprising. There's no need to postulate vote fraud (against Republicans, at least), because they're going to lose anyway because of demographic headwinds. You need some other hypothesis to create space for vote fraud, e.g.:

  1. Each of California's demographics are more conservative than the country as a whole, and to get observed California results you need vote fraud to counteract California's demographics' conservative lean.

  2. The country as a whole has levels of vote fraud similar to California, across demographics.

I don't know of anyone who'd argue 1. As for 2, you'd get people arguing for it, but it doesn't make sense then to focus on California; Republicans should instead focus first on states they have any actual power in.

There's no need to postulate vote fraud

What’s your explanation for why it takes California a month to count votes and later-arriving votes always favor Democrats? Do you think it’s suspicious that late-arriving votes are favoring neither Bass nor Pratt but Raman, the exact outcome needed to knock Pratt out? And do what do you think is a better explanation than fraud for a system that combines no Voter ID with a willingness to mail out millions of unverified ballots?

What’s your explanation for why it takes California a month to count votes

Mail in voting rules. "Mail-in ballots are valid as long as they are posted by election day and arrive to county election offices by 9 June" And a state law that allowed counties a month to count votes. So they took all month. Google says a recent law changed that to 13 days.

The boring literal answer is they choose this. They could chose not to, as 42 states don't allow this manner of post-marked mail in voting arriving long after election day.

Right, and why did they choose this system….?

They created a system that easily allows fraud and makes smoking gun proof difficult. When people notice irregularities or things that look like fraud, the supporters of the system demand smoking gun. Instead the opposite should be the presumption — it’s fraud until proven otherwise.

Ideology. According to the ideology: mail voting good. Therefore, we should do as much mail voting as possible. It's a silly affectation that (reasonably!) decreases confidence in elections, but, again: demographics explain everything about California. If Democrats pushing their supporters to vote by mail results in more Democrats voting by mail, that is unsurprising. Even the strictest voting scheme would still result in Democrats sweeping every statewide election.

To your last question: ideology, again. I agree it creates the potential for fraud. But California Democrats don't need fraud to win by the margins they do. The system is less "we need this to beat the Republicans, who are otherwise on the precipice of victory" and more "we want to show just how dominant we are over Republicans by implementing a voting system they reasonably despise."

Let me try this a different way. Under California law, all of the following is completely legal:

California mails out millions of ballots to a list of voters that is not standardized or verified. You can get a ballot with a drivers license. You can get a drivers license without being a citizen. There is an unknown number of ballots in the ether that correspond to no legal voters. But if those ballots are received at a counting facility, they will be accepted as valid.

Activists and organizers are allowed to harvest ballots on behalf of voters. They can collect ballots and send them in the mail. If you can’t sign for your ballot, then those organizers are empowered to sign your ballot as a witness on a different box.

The only thing, the only thing that would be necessary to transform this into fraud is for some of these ballots to not touch the hands of unique voters. It would require a list of ballots that does not actually belong to likely voters, or access to legitimate ballots. Then you simply fill them out and mail them in. It would take a few people at best, in an environment where there are thousands of organizers whose activities look indistinguishable from fraud because ballot harvesting is legal.

Such election fraud is never investigated or even taken seriously, because that’s a right-wing conspiracy theory.

Really, they created a system that looks indistinguishable from fraud, on purpose, that consistently produces suspicious and convenient results, that nobody ever investigates, that produces conduct identical to that used to steal elections throughout history, that no other secure election system on earth uses. What’s the most parsimonious explanation?

I say it’s fraud!

But California Democrats don't need fraud to win by the margins they do.

If they were committing fraud, then, by definition, they would need fraud to win by the margins they do. It’s a tautology.

later-arriving votes always favor Democrats?

It's pretty unsurprising if mail voters vote Democrat.

Why? In this case late-arriving ballots aren’t just favoring Democrats but Raman specifically, which is very convenient!

Edit: and it’s the same for the governor’s race! Results have been called for Becerra at 26.72%. Hilton at 26.38% is uncalled although the next trailer Tom Steyer is at 21.03%. Apparently it’s possible that Tom Steyer will overcome the 300,000 ballot deficit he needs to claim 2nd place, but not the additional 20,000 he would need to claim 1st.

Why?

Perhaps because Republicans think that their votes won't count if they mail them in. Perhaps because Democrats put off voting more often in lots of different races.

In this case late-arriving ballots aren’t just favoring Democrats but Raman specifically, which is very convenient!

Do I really need to explain to you that LA is full of pinkos who want to elect a socialist? Do you think it's sus that Mamdani won in NYC? Where did the phantasm of the Based Angeleno come from? I can assure you that Angelenos are not Based.

You’re missing the point: the question isn’t why they lean Democrat by why they lean Raman very disproportionately from how they leaned for bass in earlier batches.

You don’t just need to explain why late votes are Democrat but why they are a different kind of Democratic, and the exact one to bring 3rd place into 2nd to keep an R off the ballot.

If late votes leaned D, but with a propoetion

This is not an explanation. Late-leaning ballots lean Democratic because Democrats vote late — therefore it can’t be because of fraud. But that’s indistinguishable from election fraud! That’s exactly what it would look like if it were fraud. Fraudsters would harvest late ballots that lean Democratic because that’s how they’re cheating.

Is there any reason for California to accept ballots weeks after the election?

Is there any other state on earth that conducts their elections this way?

Look, they’ve created a system where:

  • Millions of ballots get mailed out to voter rolls that are never purged
  • Any returned and filled ballots are presumed to be legitimate a priori
  • The ballots are counted by unions run as one-party organizations
  • Once counted it is impossible to disentangle chains of custody to even investigate whether any ballots were cast fraudulently

All it would take to steal an election is a political machine to harvest ballots, fill them out, and send them in the mail.it would take a few dozen people. This is literally legal in California because ballot harvesting is explicitly legal and there are rules about it. Ballot harvesters exist. They even have rules about “curing” ballots where you can chase down invalid ballots and have them fixed Ie the organization you would need to commit fraud already exists. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s the literal law. We simply trust, without evidence, that every ballot filled out actually touched the hand of a unique voter.

Come on! This doesn’t bother you at all? You don’t have any explanation at all, except that Democrats happen to prefer voting by mail? Which is exactly how it would look if democrats are using mail to commit fraud.

Ballots break for Karen Bass, right up until the day after Election Day, when they start breaking for Raman. I guess the more left-wing you are the more likely you are to fill in a ballot late. It simply cannot be the case that when millions of ballots are floating around without any security at all that someone is stuffing a few ten thousand into mail boxes. That the results benefit one party the same way every time is a statistical artifact. That no other country on earth conducts elections this way is just a stylistic choice. That the same people who would benefit are the same people responsible is a coincidence. There is no evidence of fraud. Is that really what you believe?

This is not an explanation. Late-leaning ballots lean Democratic because Democrats vote late — therefore it can’t be because of fraud. But that’s indistinguishable from election fraud! That’s exactly what it would look like if it were fraud. Fraudsters would harvest late ballots that lean Democratic because that’s how they’re cheating.

Okay, but it's also indistinguishable from Democrats voting late.

Let me ask you a question. Do you live in a state with vote by mail? Do you vote by mail? Do your Republican friends?

Fraudsters would harvest late ballots that lean Democratic because that’s how they’re cheating.

"Harvesting" is a specific thing where people collect mail in ballots and turn them in. I don't like it, but it has to be done, or postmarked, by election day. You seem to be using "harvesting" in a different way that's unclear to me.

Is there any reason for California to accept ballots weeks after the election?

Well, no. Fortunately, they don't.

Millions of ballots get mailed out to voter rolls that are never purged

I agree this is bad.

Any returned and filled ballots are presumed to be legitimate a priori

Not really true, the signatures have to match.

The ballots are counted by unions run as one-party organizations

This appears to be made up.

Once counted it is impossible to disentangle chains of custody to even investigate whether any ballots were cast fraudulently

I'm not sure what this means.

They even have rules about “curing” ballots where you can chase down invalid ballots and have them fixed Ie the organization you would need to commit fraud already exists.

Curing doesn't allow changing the actual contents of the ballot. Fairly few ballots even go through curing at all. In 2024, 120k ballots were rejected.

It simply cannot be the case that when millions of ballots are floating around without any security at all that someone is stuffing a few ten thousand into mail boxes.

This would be pointless since ballots must be postmarked by election day. Or do you believe that USPS is in on this too?

Ballots break for Karen Bass, right up until the day after Election Day, when they start breaking for Raman.

This isn't really true. The proportion of votes in each batch going to Bass is pretty stable. Most batches after the first favor Raman more than Pratt, but not all the time.

That the results benefit one party the same way every time is a statistical artifact.

You mean, the Democrats? You think it's weird that Californians elect Democrats? Pal, have you been to California?

This is naked special pleading. You seem to be confused about several things about how elections work in California (what harvesting is, how late ballots can arrive, whether they can just be shoved into mailboxes days after election day) - which is understandable since, as far as I know, you don't live here. However, that doesn't prevent you from being sure that the guy you like ought to win the race, and if he doesn't, it's because of FRAUD. If later arriving ballots don't look like the first batch of ballots counted, it's FRAUD. If later ballots should look the same as earlier ones, why even bother counting them? Either they look the same as the earlier ones, and it's a pointless exercise, or it's fraud and they shouldn't be counted.

More comments

Very much an aside, but:

I guess the more left-wing you are the more likely you are to fill in a ballot late.

This seems entirely believable to me. At the extreme end, zero-covid loons would all vote by mail and would be overwhelmingly far-left. Very-online far-left agoraphobes would also exclusively vote by mail, which is not true of very-online far-right types (who wouldn’t trust it). More relevantly, far-left PMC types who can’t be bothered to go out to a polling station are more likely to vote by mail. Same for boomer-lib retiree types. Less charitably, dysfunctional zoomer-socialists with self-diagnosed mental illnesses are presumably very likely to send their mail-in votes at the last possible moment. Combine these and similar factors, plus the fact that actual republicans are likely not to trust vote-by-mail systems, and I could easily see a direct correlation between left-wing-ness and propensity for mail voting. I think this is borne out by surveys too, although I admit I don’t remember where I read that.

More comments

LA's also a serious machine city, significantly more so than Chicago these days, and he's running on a platform of "turn off the money fountain." If you want to survive doing that, your best shot might be to cut deals with some of the unions in advance, and signal loudly that you'll play nice with the money fountain (this is what Trump did). I wouldn't underestimate the chance they "find" enough mail-ins for Raman to knock him out of the runoff, better to have two candidates you know are both committed to the machine.

I honesty didn't believe any of the previous election fraud theories until now, but this one is really pushing it. They can seriously only get about half of the votes reporting on election night? And somehow it takes one night to count half, and weeks to count the other half? I can't see any sane or innocent explanation for this.

I don't agree with universal mail voting, but other states that do it don't have this BS.

California is shamefully slow at counting ballots. They are always this way. There doesn't seem to be a correlation between higher taxes, more state workers and actual state capacity.

My problem with them is all the ballot harvesting.

It's not really a state capacity issue, we know why California takes forever. They're over the top voter friendly.

They automatically send out mail in ballots to every registered voter so basically everyone votes by mail + ballots are accepted as long as they're posted by election day (and received by a date far out, this election is June 9th). It's impossible to count ballots that aren't there to be counted yet.

Maybe those are dumb choices but the main state capacity wise would just be in the speed of their mail service.

I think California actually does lack State Capacity. Look up the leadership of Calpers. It’s a non college degree female. That’s managing like half a trillion dollars. It’s a cushy job. But you could certainly find some Stanford MBA’s to run it as a less stressful lifestyle job versus Wall St. And then you see news article recently of SpaceX employees forming I guess a co-op to negotiate lower fees with wealth managers for their sudden wealth. You can actually do things competently when you want to. My gut says a lot of California government functions have under qualified people when you have the ability to do an average job easily (probably like Alaskas permanent fund management) or high agency like whatever the SpaceX co-op is doing. A very valuable California resource like Calpers is basically just a slush fund for allies.

It's got nothing, or at least little, to do with late arriving vote by mail ballots. My county has nearly 100k uncounted ballots that arrived by the second.

Is there any reason why people think slow first counts are Bayesian evidence of fraud rather than incompetence? Countries with actually-rigged elections like PRI Mexico or Chavez' Venezuela count their elections overnight just as fast as countries with free and fair elections.

One reason for the slowness is the incredible amount of grey ballots. They aren't provably fraudulent, but they come in large dumps of "harvested" ballots that often dont have the appropriate signatures (which is a laughably low level of verification as is). These ballots then have to go through long "curing" processes which in CA is essentially just a very slow rubberstamp at allowing illegally cast ballots to still count. It is probable that large swathes of grey ballots are actually fraudulent, but there is no way to know if the harvesters got the signature and had the harvestee fill out the ballot, or if they did it themself.

I don't know about LA county but only 0.7% of ballots counted so far are in the curing process in my county. What's your evidence for the "incredible amount" that go through curing?

Nate Silver tweeted out that something like 120k ballots in CA went through the process in the 2024 election. While as a % of total votes this isn't much, its still a huge number that gums up the works. And given CA's ridiculously low signature rejection numbers, it means those are only the most egregious of ballots. IMO signatures, in an actual verification procedure, would likely be rejected 90%+ of the time. Most people have very inconsistent signatures.

You've confused the number of ballots rejected during 2024 with the number of ballots that went through curing.

So that's merely the number that failed to be cured.

Correct.

So what's the evidence for huge numbers of ballots being rubber-stamp cured?

"Incompetence" is underselling it. This looks like "failed state African shithole" levels of incompetence. Calling it fraud is the charitable option.

If there is one thing we know about California, it's that they would never take a well-meaning but poorly-thought-out policy and stick with it despite increasingly absurd consequenses year after year.

Imagine if someone ran for governor on the radical platform of "we will have all elections counted and called within three days of the end of polling"!

Slow-counting is one of the hallmarks of election fraud because it is evidence of an irregular system. An irregular system is ripe for fraud. These irregularities are not supposed to exist, because there is no reason for them to exist except to facilitate fraud.

This was understood by everybody, e.g. was even used in State Department training materials, until about 2020.

In a secure election system, you register valid voters, receive a basically-known quantity of ballots, and you count them. In California, nobody even knows how many ballots there are because they’re all floating in the ether somewhere. They don’t purge voter rolls, because that’s an evil Republican trick. They don’t require you to show identification, because that’s an evil Republican trick. There’s not even a real deadline. There are no systems for securing anything. Millions of ballots are sent out totally unsecured, and as long as someone fills them out and sends them back they have to be counted.

This is a system designed to produce election fraud. It’s basically legal. There is a limitless supply of ballots, all you need is a political machine to collect them. Voters aren’t even needed.

That other regimes have used other systems is basically a non-sequitur.

There's two different kinds of fraud. You have a fake election: there are no votes you just make it up. That can be done quickly. Then there's a real election where you insert enough fake votes to make up the difference at the end, that has to be done slowly.

Yeah that’s a good way to put it. America’s two-party nature means that there are a lot of “contested” elections in what would normally be one-party states.

It's not just the slow counting. It's the composition of the later votes. In this case the early votes put Spencer in second, and matched polling results pretty well, and the late votes are much more heavily Democratic -- enough to knock him out if trends continue. Further, the number of uncounted votes has at times gone UP, substantially.

Right I agree. Countries with un-debatably fake elections usually announce things very quickly, you don’t want the tension of an unclear result creating even the faintest oxygen for your opponents.

Clearly California disagrees!

"Fraud elections" is not a sliding scale you linearly turn up or down, but description for several different phenomena. It's quite different thing to cheat in partially fradulent but contested elections where you have not a total control of the overall system than fully fake elections where you control most of steps in the process. Because the fraud modes are very different, it makes sense that some fraud is associated with long waits while other more fradulent are not.

Example of fraud in contested elections: suppose you have well-positioned partisans who can add fake votes in the name of people who did not vote in some precincts, but not in all, and furthermore, the other party may contest the result for a recount. Examples of near full control, most people who ostensibly count votes are fully in your pocket, so they only play smoke and mirrors to confound outsiders, and you can make announcements of the tallies as you wish quite quickly. Finally, in totalitarian countries of yore, you can pressure people to vote for single available candidate, these were also very quick to count.

Those are some nice theories, but is there any evidence of a proven (or at least widely-considered) rigged election where the vote counting was slow?

I thought "results are withheld because people counting realize they need to stuff ballot boxes" was such a widely known trope of failed state elections in 3rd world, but I had to search for some examples and i was surprisingly difficult because google results are polluted by trumpbbrained US politics. Here is some example of dubious delays in final results or "amended" results I could find by scourging Wikipedia: Afghanistan 2014 and 2019, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Nigerian, early 20th century US and later.

In contrast, I don't think "long time to count votes" is a Bayesian evidence bit of fair process either: most European states have announced election results (considered fairly counted) quite quickly as long as I can remember.

You can filter google results from before a certain year. Add before:2019 or before:xxxx date to your search query and it will return results that have not been updated since that date.

This article seems relevant: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-34641418

You're probably reaching back to something like LBJ's Texas Senate race, where the candidates and their machines would hold counties in reserve to play against each other like trap cards, with each county having the margin needed to counter your opponent's reveal until they ran out.

Political lore is that this was SOP in statewide elections in Illinois, with the Daley machine in greater Chicago and the Republican machine in the rural south trying to delay releasing results until they knew how many votes they needed to steal. But that doesn't describe how the most famous rigged election in Illinois history (the 1960 Presidential election) went down - Kennedy was ahead of Nixon throughout the "count", and Cook County on average reported faster than the rest of the state.

What do you mean "rather than"? The incompetence enables fraud.

It's not necessarily "the incompetence was deliberately cultivated to create a pathway for fraud", but it still counts.

I'm saying that competence and riggedness are orthogonal. You can rig elections competently or incompetently, you can count honest elections competently or incompetently. An incompetently run election is more vulnerable to external fraud, but the claim OP is making about California is about insider fraud.

I'm saying that competence and riggedness are orthogonal.

and I'm saying they aren't. A competently run election isn't just counted correctly, it's verifiable as well. It produces evidence which exposes fraud (if present).

I don't think saboteurs would design a system to catch themselves in their schemes, then proceed to get themselves caught carrying them out. Hence, incompetently-run elections can be caused by people wanting to rig elections. Since the reverse isn't true (incompetent elections aren't caused by people that want an honest election), it is Bayesian evidence.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats