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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18014 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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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.

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.

  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?

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.

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.

  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.”

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