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 -
Where in the world is
Carmen SandiegoJames Talarico?If you've been paying attention to the Texas Senate race recently, you might have seen a rumor spreading around that the dem candidate, James Talarico, had spent roughly a week in a mental hospital. This has now been thoroughly debunked but it is an interesting showcase into how the right wing influencer machine works given how far it spread.
Following a story on X can be pretty difficult given the poorly working search function, so I'm piggybacking off of some what Jesse Singal has uncovered. Best I know of is that the story started from @tickletexts although it's not locked down yet. Tickle uses an AI edited profile picture, and highly questionable claims of cancer that she's used to solicit donations over before, claiming to be a white South African immigrant now living in Texas. Singal tracked down a relative who confirmed her as actually being a native Texas woman, most likely doesn't have cancer, and a criminal record.. She's known for giving false identities before even.
As Singal points out
According to Tickletexts she worked alongside a lady Caroline Wren in developing the story and theory
Anyway how did we go from a lie made up by a crazy con artist to Elon Musk and Stephen Miller peddling it?
Somehow it seems Sykes's claims got into the eyes of the two influencers Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher. They claimed to have called the Lindner Center of Hope in Ohio and received confirmation that Talarico was a patient there.
The details of how it evolved from here are even fuzzier. The Twitter account Louis Riel claims to have done a visualization of it through scraping posts, but I have not verified it so so let's go back to Singal who was in a twitter space with Amacher and confirmed a lot of the details and Tony Ortiz who has access to the full call audio and also participated in the spaces.
Amacher points to Caroline Wren and Tickletexts as his source. They called to "verify" the story, and after being repeatedly told by representatives that there was no man named James Talerico at the facility or in their records, one of the representatives offers up a guess that perhaps he was discharged recently and it's not showing up for that reason.
And
And
What's interesting is even if it wasn't just a theory offered up by the staffer, as Nick Ortiz points out this timeline still would not match Amacher's claims
So we know that he couldn't have been "just discharged" on the evening of the 10th, since he was in public on the 9th. This was just a theory offered up by a staffer.
Amacher tried to shop it around to the tabloids such as the TheBlaze and the Daily Mail, but they wouldn't pick it up on suggestion from their legal teams so he gave it to Nick Sortor instead who as an influencer has lower standards than a journalism outlet. Amechar denies this but as you can see from the community note, this is what he said. Not really surprising he would lie though is it? From Nick Sortor the story picks up among the MAGA X space and spreads from there. There's also some evidence that the Paxton campaign (the Republican running for senator) might have involvement in this.
So let's go back to Singal's statement, Something went really, really wrong here.. What happened, and how did it spread?
The conspiracy is sought out. As user quantumfreakonomics pointed out in another thread, the original evidence towards the mental hospital theory was really weak to begin with. It's literally just a private plane (without any proof of Talerico being on board) flew from Austin to Ohio and back. This doesn't generate a conspiracy theory unless you wanted a conspiracy to begin with. You start with the idea that something is up, and then look for clues that can hint at something, anything being amiss.
If we want something to be true then we look past the obvious red flags in the case. A person with an AI generated picture claiming to be them should be automatically suspicious right? "It's because I have cancer" is a very convenient excuse to be faking identity. Some sort of party putting their real name and face to a story is a key part of journalism, it forces a layer of responsibility and risk of reputational harm onto a real human being. Anonymity and anonymous sources are common in reporting but their identity is generally still known to the journalist. For example when JD Vance is an anonymous source to Politico, the journalist knows who the source is. The journalist is simply shifting the risk of harm away from the anonymous source and onto themselves. When a politico writer says "a source in the white source", they are putting their name to a real and known source in the white house who I have confirmed. Of course similar to the red flag of AI pfps, another red flag is when claims are made by objectively bad people. Nick Sortor has an extensive criminal record and has an active Kentucky state warrant out for his arrest. Someone being immoral doesn't instantly invalidate their claims, but generally immoral people are more willing to do other immoral things like lie seems a given.
Mainstream media, as bad as it can be, still generally has standards too. There are real people making real claims. Scott Alexander has a great piece on how the media very rarely lies I suggest you read. As Reason writer Billy Binion points out
To reiterate the most important part he said IMO, It's good for business. There is a market demand for this sort of slop, but not enough actual verifiable high standards of evidence supply. So a bunch of personalities grift, using victimhood culture as their excuse for why they can't operate in the traditional higher standards environment. Nick Sortor was chosen precisely because he doesn't have the moral or ethical or legal standards of the daily mail or the blaze after all. The influencer space is so bad they don't even compare to some of the worst and most questionable mainstream journalism outlets.
That's the real reason this spread. There is a demand for bad news and conspiracies about Talarico, but there just isn't enough supply to match so sloppy and unethical influencers see financial incentives to find something. And they did. It doesn't seem to have had any meaningful effect on the actual election chances so at the end of the day it's all a wash anyway I guess.
Brother, the man actually did disappear for two weeks in the home stretch of a Senate campaign with, at one point, not a single event planned until election day, and his campaign only offered a very late and very unbelievable cover story about the flu. The NYT claims to have seen home video proving that. You don't get to, though. Nothing suspicious about that. The screen shots of security footage have, since first shown to the NYT on Monday, been shared a bit more widely with the journalist nomenklatura, including CBS.
So, he was sick as a dog with the flu, so sick that he couldn't even make Zoom calls or plans for future events, but he was up to puttering around in the garden at random hours in various outfits? Well, at least some male with brown hair was. He's willing to share home video footage, but not a statement from the UrgentCare he claims he went to, or a note from the PCP he claims he saw?
That's weird, bro. Weird as fuck. So obviously weird that you wrote all those words of Republican Pounce distraction.
Hey, speaking of partisan idiots leaping to conclusions that were too good to check, did you see MSNOW reporting that Kash Patel was secretly in Russia while he was literally on camera in Virgina?
It's occurred to me before that a potentially valuable tactic for a Democrat-friendly news media would be to take a complete nothingburger of a story about a Democratic candidate and just act really weird about it. Assure everyone that it's nothing, but make oddly specific wording choices, show less evidence than you have on the grounds that it's not all that interesting a story. Try to get Republicans to bite and waste a lot of time and effort hunting down a story that goes nowhere instead of stuff that can hurt the candidate, maybe fracture the base a little fighting over it. Then make sure you release the completely uncontroversial evidence that proves it's nothing in plenty of time for it to disseminate before the election, knowing some Republicans are dug in at this point and will keep wasting airtime trying to argue a conspiracy around nothing.
The whole Obama birther thing might have been an example of that, I'm not sure how deliberate it is, but it seems like it would be if anything more effective today.
I suspect something like this was going on with all the weird photos/videos of Biden (his hand passing through the microphone, the photo with the Carters, etc.).
More options
Context Copy link
I say it's the opposite. The more you talk about something, the more power it has.
Remember eating the cats? All those articles "debunking" the cat eating just drew attention to the fact that 20,000 Haitians were suddenly airdropped on a small town in Ohio.
Trump himself is a creation of the media. Perhaps the media thought they were able to trick the Republicans into nominating him. This backfired badly.
The way you win the news cycle is by talking about the things YOU want to talk about, not the strange and unexplained disappearance of your own political candidate.
This is the strategy I'm proposing, I think.
You find your candidate story, throw one or two news articles out about it, deliberately structured in a way to be suspicious, then say nothing more about it (it's not a story, so why would you?), and let the conspiracy-hungry side of the Republicans pick it up and waste a bunch of time talking about it. You don't just keep throwing articles at it the way they did with the Haitians, you largely ignore it. If anyone asks why you're not talking with it in a situation where it makes sense to say something, the line is "nothing happened so there's nothing to talk about". In the meantime, you just talk about whatever you were otherwise going to talk about.
Then later on you just toss out some rock-solid proof: you don't spend a bunch of time talking about it there either, but you make sure there's ironclad information making it very clear that nothing's going on (not in a "there are stories debunking this" sense, in a "anyone looking at this evidence for more than a minute realizes there's nothing going on" sense) and it's easily accessible.
The examples you propose are mostly the media trying to force an issue by throwing out a large amount of news volume, and indeed a lot of it backfired, both in that it got people thinking about it more than they otherwise would have and in that it caused the media to waste airtime they might have been able to use somewhere else. I'm proposing sort of the opposite: spend little time on it in terms of news volume, but bait a hook for Republican conspiracy theorists to bite so that they waste their time and credibility on a story that was poisoned from the start.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link