site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 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.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

And yet it fails the very next part

then you have to coordinate them to cover up that they didn't actually vote when people check,

A whole bunch of people saying they were signed up at the homeless shelters and that they didn't vote yet somehow votes were submitted in their name would be noticeable. And if these homeless people were willing to lie and say they actually did vote, then it would be easy to just get them to vote to begin with.

This also explains a great deal about how California can continue to spend billions of dollars on homelessness without actually achieving any sort of meaningful reduction in homelessness.

There's already an easy and known explanation for it, spending doesn't matter. Housing supply and demand matters and California is extremely NIMBY. It's why West Virginia has some of the worst drug rates but low homelessness. Homes are cheaper (because they have a much larger supply:demand ratio) so even most of the addicts can afford a place.

A whole bunch of people saying they were signed up at the homeless shelters and that they didn't vote yet somehow votes were submitted in their name would be noticeable.

Dunno about a whole bunch, but I recently saw a reporter interviewing homeless people in LA saying that they were paid to fill out ballots for/against some ballot initiative -- so what if it's both happening and noticeable, but nobody does anything about it because the people doing the fraud keep getting elected?

but I recently saw a reporter interviewing homeless people in LA saying that they were paid to fill out ballots for/against some ballot initiative --

If there is any teeth to it, why is it kept only at "interviewing" random people? Put together a list of names who are willing to officially testify. File lawsuits. Have professional journalists (the top news media corporation in the US is conservative aligned! They have talent who could do a proper investigation). It seems remarkable that apparently the amount people want to go in evidence for it is random ground interviews, something easily and commonly staged, and then everyone is apparently happy to stop there and be satisfied. If they're real, it should be easy to do more than some guy making a YouTube or Tiktok video or something!

And if there is something going on, it should be able to be traced to top level officials (if the accusations was that they were involved). When voter fraud schemes do occur, they're often from private individuals engaged in their own misbehavior. For example we actually know of a drugs for votes scheme in Puerto Rico and we have an idea who was involved. A violent gang had connections to the Republican candidate and independently engaged in a drugs for votes scheme to support her. She was not involved, they just did it because they stood to benefit from her winning.

It wasn't some youtuber, it was like a real old-fashioned TV news reporter -- I do think a lady got charged on that one, you could look it up? But I have no reason to think it was staged.

It wasn't some youtuber, it was like a real old-fashioned TV news reporter -- I do think a lady got charged on that one, you could look it up? But I have no reason to think it was staged.

So I did look it up, and yes a woman named Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong plead guilty to it. There doesn't seem to be any proof of connections to higher level officials, she seems to have done it of her own volition and got caught. https://www.facebook.com/SpectrumNews1SoCal/videos/a-marina-del-rey-woman-paid-homeless-individuals-on-las-skid-row-to-register-to-/1835258350765981/

This combined with the recent Puerto Rico case serve as good evidence of how hard getting away with such a widespread conspiracy would be, the homeless people will not actually engage in a cover up as alleged. If there was widespread election fraud going on, then "just go and ask people if they actually voted" seems to be an effective strategy. Even just a random person attempting it with a very small segment of homeless people got it leaked.

Even a far simpler case like someone who tried to fake signatures for a petition got easily caught https://abc7news.com/post/exclusive-team-confronts-couple-paying-san-francisco-homeless-fake-signatures-petitions/18868695/ it's really hard to get away with such fraud for an extended period.

How do you feel about the toupee fallacy? It seems like the sort of thing that you might agree with in... other contexts?

The toupee fallacy is possible, like it is true about every alleged conspiracy and secret. A successfully pulled off fake moon landing would look like a real moon landing to my eyes.

But that's why just like the moon landing, we can look at other logistics and question how feasible the coverup would be. If the moon landing was fake, that's a lot of people who would need to be silent about it, many of them who have little incentive (or even an opposite incentive like rival countries) to keep it covered.

Likewise if there was a mass fake voter scheme, that requires a lot of people with little incentive to keep it covered up. In fact, many of them would have the opposite incentive and would like the attention and money they might get from exposing such schemes or even just because some of them are conservative (I find it unlikely every single homeless person is some hardcore lefty). So like with the fake moon landing, we need an explanation as to why the USSR doesn't call out the US/many of the homeless don't expose the fake voter scheme.

As we see just with this random woman and a very tiny amount of homeless people involved, they seem perfectly willing to talk. So we can't take "the homeless won't talk about it at all" as a baseline.

Likewise if there was a mass fake voter scheme,

What if there were a number of smaller fake voter schemes? Some of them better organized/more skillfully implemented than others?

If it's just a bunch of random people doing it without greater coordination then yes it could be theoretically possible, but this would also not be what is alleged (a greater scheme coordinated by politicians). And we would expect to see something similar, many of these schemes should be caught instead of it just being rare one of occurances.

I would not be surprised whatsoever if in every state there's been cases of someone filling out their nursing home parents ballots or sending in for a recently deceased but not yet recorded and updated nephew or even yes, a random person who pays another one to vote and don't get caught. If we're saying it's never happened, that would be absurd.

But is it large or coordinated as alleged? Well that would show a lot of signs we aren't seeing.

More comments