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 -
Sure. A lot of people think that. The key question is what kind of investigation, what kind of investigative steps. There's a huge transition to:
They had basically nothing here. You could easily take such minimal indication seriously by, for example, going and interviewing the source of that indication, seeing what's there. If there was something worthwhile, that could justify some additional steps. Instead, we pretty much just had fever dreams of a Manchurian candidate. Those dreams were crossbred with wet dreams of getting The Donald and preventing him from becoming president. It was irresistible to them politically, and the response to the same set of facts would have been completely different if the ox being gored was tinted blue instead.
You don't need to publicly tell the world when you're on the same team as all the journalists. You just need to not object too strongly, even though you already know that most of it is all bullshit. Carter Page was forced to resign, even though he did literally nothing wrong (he is a profoundly weird person; I don't agree with much of his perspective of the world). Rumors are swirling about this and that, AlfaBank and more. The political environment is already ripe enough for Hilary to call Trump Putin's puppet in a debate. Fortnights of airtime and furlongs of column space are already dedicated to pushing the exact message you want; you don't have to tell the world. On that score, you just have to do the minimal amount to keep the narrative going, and make sure not to squash it too hard. Note that we may never have a window into any back-channel discussions between FBI officials and members of the media, where they probe about some story or another, and perhaps instead of tipping your hand a little and telling them that it's bullshit, you just no comment your way into letting the public think it's legit. (Do these back-channel interactions go differently if it's a blue in the crosshairs? Andy McCabe leaking on the Clinton Foundation investigation?) In the meantime, keep working on vapor, just in case the unthinkable happens and the bad guy gets elected; you'll have insurance to take down his presidency, maybe even before it actually starts.
But also remember that it was unthinkable! No one thought Trump had a chance of winning. If you come on too strong in telling the world, you risk backlash. Better to just enable the whole frenzy and continue chasing ghosts, just in case.
In hindsight, given the outcome of the election, would they have behaved differently? We don't really know. That clip is great in showing the difficulty of multi-agent reasoning, especially in partial information environments. Motivations can be varied and complex. (Plus bonus reference to a source with the NYT!) It's wicked hard to work backwards and really get a glimpse of their internal calculations at the time.
...so instead of trying to proceed via proof by hypothesized motivation, we can actually just look at the problem, itself. The DOJ/FBI regulations, themselves. We're already in a weird counterfactual world, one where they didn't have any actual tip from a foreign ambassador... in our world, they literally just have, "Well, we think so-and-so benefits from this crime." In that counterfactual world, the actions they took or didn't take in the real world do zero work to explain whether a hypothetical action would be justifiable in the counterfactual world. They were in an entirely different context! We're stuck just looking at the counterfactual world you've set up, looking at the regs, and seeing that it would be wholly inappropriate for them to jump into a full, wide-ranging investigation of anyone close to Trump based on nothing other than, "...well, we think he benefits."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link