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 -
The Proud Boy sentences being quite severe is on my mind today. 22 years for Tarrio who was not there on Jan 6. He does have text saying it was them who did it. A few others got in the high teens sentences who were there.
I will admit I respect the Proud Boys and agree with a lot of their statements. I do believe the 2020 election was stolen. The lack of a secret ballot thru mass mail-in voting violates every principle of Democracy. Without violating the secret ballot Trump would have easily won in my opinion. The Proud Boys official position from memory was a desire for a new election following Democratic principles. Seems fair to me. So I feel they are directionally correct even if they took things too far.
The right won’t get equal treatment in the court. It seems like the key courts are in cities that are going to have unsympathetic juries and judges. If you flip these courts to rural areas then my guess antifa types are getting 20 years and Proud Boys 2 years. In rural areas they would have judges very sympathetic that the election wasn’t proper and their anger was justified in the same way BLM protestors get courts sympathetic that America is a racists nation.
I think the left is making a mistake with these massive sentences. If they gave them a couple years I would feel it was fair as they went too far. But now I want them pardoned. If Trump pardons them as he should then it’s a slap in the face of the court decision. Delegitimizes the court to have the court decide these are really bad people deserving long sentences for overturning Democracy but then have the next guy release them. It feels very third worldish to me. With other lawfare attempts it seems as though any future POTUS should do mass pardons. I’m not sure how balance of powers can survive this.
The punishment for Proud Boys seems to have some connection to the debates and Biden declaring them “white supremacists” and Trump telling them to “stand by and stand down” (which felt coded). It made it important these guys got long sentences to confirm that they are the bad guys because then a court confirmed what they told you. Same thing with Floyd officers and long sentences which confirmed that they were bad murderous cops. A jury convicted therefore we know it’s true.
It’s another example of punishment for exercising your right to a jury trial.
I agree with Garrett Jones books “10% Less Democracy” and America would be better with less activision and less voting. But America looks more and more like a third word spoils system. Win you get the spoils, lose you go to jail. Which makes elections far more important.
Links aren’t important just sometimes people asks for articles.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1172530436/proud-boys-jan-6-sedition-trial-verdict
https://apnews.com/article/enrique-tarrio-capitol-riot-seditious-conspiracy-sentencing-da60222b3e1e54902db2bbbb219dc3fb#:~:text=WASHINGTON%20(AP)%20—%20Former%20Proud,for%20the%20U.S.%20Capitol%20attack.
https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/1503603571
https://reason.com/2023/09/06/with-22-year-sentence-ex-proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-pays-hefty-trial-penalty/
Edit: Focus on the punishments and any results from the severity. I used a certain frame to put it in their view. We don’t need to discuss election legitimacy again.
The argument that the election was inherently flawed because mail-in voting somehow violated the principle of a secret ballot doesn't hold water and is made in bad faith by those who didn't like the outcome in 2020. Mail-in voting has existed in various states for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 years, absentee voting has existed for longer, and no one I'm aware of made the argument that it was inherently flawed prior to 2020. Indeed, as late as the fall of 2019 PA's mail-in voting bill sailed through the state legislature with unanimous Republican support.
Claiming that mail-ins are suddenly unconstitutional to the point that we need a redo is a convenient argument to make if your guy loses the election and you're grasping at straws for some excuse undo the result, but let's not pretend that this is an argument based on principle. Would you be making this argument if Trump won?
It's also telling that 2020 is apparently the only election they care about. No one was protesting the 2021 off year elections for local judges and clerks, no one was protesting the midterms, no one was protesting the various special elections that have been held over the past few years, and I doubt anyone will protest this year's elections. Hell, there doesn't even seem to be much of a legislative push in red states to completely do away with mail voting, or any serious court challenges raising the secret ballot issue. It all comes back to Trump—shit only matters when he's involved. The entire system is rigged against him and him alone. I've always thought he was a narcissist but at this point I can't really blame him giving the number of people who do act like the world revolves around him.
So like Barack Obama in 2008? Or 2012? (when Democrats worried absentee voting would drive old-people votes which harmed them). Or Trump whining about it for months before the election as the scheme was being ramped up by executive fiat in explicit contravention to election laws across dozens of states? There are dozens of high profile examples over the last 2 decades and sooner who have discussed the inherent flaws in mail-in voting and how they're prone to fraud and coercion, part of the reason being the lack of secrecy which makes buying votes more feasible because the person can pay you as they take your ballot, verify what it says, and then give you your $50 target gift-card.
Each time mail-in or absentee voting legislation has been passed, this was discussed repeatedly with additional security requirements and conditions because of those concerns. 2020 saw mail-in voting explode in usage while at the same time most anti-fraud checks were ignored.
It's honestly pretty puzzling you're unaware of any of this.
No one is arguing mail-in voting is inherently "unconstitutional." What people are arguing is the fraud which was enabled by illegal election law changes (which is unconstitutional) and simply ignoring anti-fraud requirements, including the mail-in scheme, made it so the election outcome was legitimately in doubt, the only practical available remedy being a redo. The way elections are conducted in the US make them not meaningfully auditable even if all players didn't fight tooth-and-nail to restrict transparency.
We're not talking about millions of votes needing to swap, but ~40,000 in any of 5 different states, any of which would change the outcome if a single one did something as simple as requiring canvassing hundreds of thousands of votes which had no signed chain of custody receipts (and no election officials have yet been charged despite this being a crime in multiple states like AZ).
If two people raced bikes all over France and then the loser tested positive for PEDs, do you think they should both get a do-over race or otherwise we're not talking about "principles"?
edit: you added the entire last paragraph and maybe some other changes after others had responded
So the protests in Arizona over that "election" and large ongoing legal battle over it just don't count?
The Federal Government is currently abusing laws made 150 years ago in response to the Civil War as well as stretching interpretation of other laws way past their breaking point in front of laughably biased "judges" and juries, to find and throw people in jail for a protest in DC in Jan 2021 in response to the election of 2020, and your response is because they don't come out in large numbers again after all of these people are having their lives destroyed and made examples of, is because they just don't care? Well, that's certainly something.
Do you follow election disputes/protests over "local judges and clerks," closely?
Well, at least you got in your jab to make this about trump and how he's just the worst or whatever.
Hold on. I grew up in Oregon, they have had mail in ballots for a very long time, and nothing yet has surfaced as a problem despite this worry of yours that vote-buying is possible.
I’m of the school of thought that the system is responsive enough that we can actually wait, yes actually wait until we start to see hints of an actual problem before taking action. Otherwise just let things take their normal course, that has a long history of decently functioning checks and balances.
That system, which involves judges sometimes making calls in cases that don’t allow for the full regular process to play out, due to time constraints and the nature of a national emergency, is a fine way to resolve things. Sometimes I think a few judges overstepped. That’s not okay to be upset about, but it’s also normal. Nothing was diabolical about it. And in fact despite the so-called massive weaknesses of how things played out, practically zero evidence of fraud showed up to court. Due process after the fact was followed, and that due process determined that most every allegation was either worthless or unsubstantiated.
Moreover, guess what? People in every state are still armed with democracy even now. Many but not all states have reverted parts of their covid changes. And in all states, if voters want to “tighten” (quote marks because it’s a misnomer, IMO) voting laws, they are perfectly free to vote to that effect and elect representatives who share their views to make or revert changes moving forward.
Classic example is Raffensburger in Georgia. Voters re-elected him with a significant margin. In other words, The People we’re perfectly happy with how the process went.
I didn't write this was only a "worry" about "vote-buying." The "worry" of others I described was how mail-in ballots are far more prone to various types of fraud and other concerns, one of which was "vote buying" tying the comment into the above about the importance of secret ballots in "democracy"; whether or not this is done through "vote-buying," isn't necessary, but there are more than enough "hints" of this happening with the target gift-card description not being something I made up but something which was alleged to have happened in Las Vegas, Nevada. The affidavit of which was collected as part of a filed election lawsuit.
How would you know whether or not these "checks and balances," are decently functioning? What do you think are the current "checks and balances"? Could you describe to us the apparatus which investigates this in Oregon? Could you detail for us some of the investigations they've done in Oregon? Do you know which, if any, of these "decently functioning checks and balances," were discarded or ignored in Oregon in the last few elections?
What is your level of knowledge about how the election system, i.e., registering, printing, sending, collecting, counting, canvassing, etc., for the state of Oregon?
dozens of binders of sworn affidavits showed up to court in many states, but those affidavits and lawsuits weren't heard on the merits
and the "process," wasn't followed either, with an easy example being the district court responsible for expedited process in the Trump's filed election contest simply refusing to start the process, an appeals court dragging their feet and refusing to make the district court do the process, and then that lower court declaring the whole thing was moot because of Jan 6
Did you know that?
You keep using this word "due process," but what does it mean to you? "Due process" doesn't necessarily determine something on the merits, so making a statement about evidence which exists and was determined by a court to be "worthless or unsubstantiated" is simply wrong and evidences a lack of knowledge about this topic.
In the above example, the explicit process wasn't followed. So was that the "due" process? Or does it just not matter because Raffensberger was elected a year later anyway?
First, your specific reference to a Las Vegas lawsuit, as near I can tell, does not exist. There was this story? If that's it, the fact you are misremembering specifics that do not exist is concerning. If you mean that story, it was about a GOTV effort that offered a raffle entry to Native Americans for voting (only illegal if proof of voting is required to enter the raffle, something the news story doesn't really address) and perhaps gave gas cards to voters who were in remote locations (apparently, legal if the gas cards are used to go to the polls, so that one might be a question mark).
If vote buying actually occurred, much less if it occurred on a scale needed to actually tip an election, we would know about it. Conspiracies are easy to hide for a few people, for a few isolated cases. Conspiracies that are capable of actually tipping an election? Practically zero chance they are undiscovered.
As to the history of how the balances work: a simple google will lead you to the Oregon SoS page which will tell you:
So clearly they are on the lookout but consistently don't find much. Going farther back? "[T]he Division obtained 38 criminal convictions for voter fraud out of the 60.9 million ballots in Oregon elections cast over a 19-year period". Oregon has an extensive and well-tested system of voting by mail with very little history of issues of nearly any kind and nothing I have ever seen gives me any reason to think otherwise.
As to the legal process. Maybe you don't know how courts work? I am starting to genuinely wonder. Sometimes, a lawsuit is filed, and it's so obviously false, unsupported, or has such a disproportionate ask (or of course lack of standing/wrong jurisdiction) that a court declines to even consider it. This is not a random gut decision but a process involving often multiple hearings and submissions from lawyers. In these cases, even though nothing is publicly examined and goes through some sort of trial-like process, the judges certainly look at and study the submissions they receive. They then evaluate the submission on its merits. News organizations as well as citizens kept a close eye on these and virtually none of them panned out -- and huge majorities of people actually in the know and experts on election processes, when they actually examined these affidavits, almost always found them to be poorly researched, based on hearsay only, misunderstandings of legitimate vote counting processes, etc. All this to say, it's certainly due diligence (due process, if you want to get real technical, is a more specific term about individual rights, but I'm using it in the broadly acceptable and widely used sense of "to fully and fairly traverse the full normal procedures").
There's basically a mountain of reasons to believe that by and large the voting system works pretty darn well, and by that token I refuse to be drawn in to some off-topic epistemic debate. The whole thing just frankly reeks of cognitive distortion and confirmation bias on a massive national scale. That's why Trump never actually settles on a single list of reasons why the election was "rigged", because it wasn't evidence -> conclusion, it was "I feel like I won" -> "let's seize and publicly endorse any and all claims that match but the specifics don't matter because I am so sure I won"
No. You get a target gift-card if you allow your ballot to be collected.
If only this were true, but it's not "hidden" you just didn't know about it.
Does this webpage constitute your understanding of all the questions I asked? If so, this doesn't inspire confidence you have any granular knowledge about these topics at all; In the few states I've worked politics in (not Oregon), the SoS/AG and other parts of the government do not have a good apparatus to catch voter fraud; they essentially just rely on local election officials to report things and they sometimes look into a few of them to make a show of it. Local election officials are not equipped to catch voter fraud; they rely on the legal requirements as to what constitutes a "legal ballot" to fight fraud. If those requirements are removed or simply ignored (as happened en mass in 2020), then you have destroyed the "checks and balances" you claim work well because they were ignored and not enforced.
Courts didn't throw these lawsuits and contests out because they entirely lacked merit, but for lack of standing, mootness, etc. Lack of standing doesn't have to do merits of any particular substantive case, it's something which was dreamed up 100 years ago to enable courts to simply refuse to get involved. Mootness has to do with the wanted remedy being now impossible or the underlying conflict not mattering anymore. In some election cases such as the election contest in Georgia, it's because the lower court flat out refused to schedule a hearing despite it being required, by law, for them to do just that, and then once Jan6-20 rolled around they simply declared the contest moot anyway and discarded the case.
Judges and clerks do regularly look at the "merit" part of cases even when they dispose of them for the reasons I described above, however, that doesn't mean they "found" them to be lacking or however else you characterized it. In normal cases, this typically does influence judges into massaging or overlooking procedural errors. In a case like the election lawsuits and contests for an institutionally disliked President to "overturn an election," the strength of the merits has an inverse effect because Courts were desperate to simply not be involved. Again, Trump's GA election contest is a good example.
Given a situation where a litigant shows up to court with a lawsuit, the court tells them they're not the proper party to file the lawsuit, and doesn't allow them to present any substantive evidence in court, implying the underlying evidence is garbage because it "practically zero evidence showed up in court" is simply dishonest. There was a ton of "hints," and a ton of evidence, but the fact none of it "showed up in court" is a condemnation of the legal system and not a defense of it.
that's not what "due process" means, especially "substantive" due process, and again, I specifically cited a case which didn't "fully and fairly traverse the full normal procedures"
when you use statements like these in direct connection to legal arguments, using a vernacular or general definition of "due" "process" is going to confuse who expect the word to be used in the legal definition (whose implication you're using to give more weight to your assertion)
"huge majorities" huh? How would you know? Have you looked at a single one?
even if one were to believe this is true, and it is sadly not if you understand how elections happen and votes are counted in the real world in districts all over the country, the voting system "working pretty darn well" and still having enough failure modes to sway the results of very close elections, e.g., when the highest office in the land is decided on tens of thousands of votes across 5 states
refereeing in a football game can be pretty good generally, but one wrong call can decide the outcome of a game
your comments avoid specifics and want to talk about generalities and imply because of those generalities that the specifics don't particularly matter on net
and I think it's because you don't really know any of the specifics about the vote process, the vote counting, the fraud allegations, the filed election contests, the filed lawsuits, etc., you just sort of have a good feeling about it therefore people are wrong or something and I do not think proving any particular specific thing is going to dislodge this belief in you
is that accurate? What type and amount of evidence do you think would change your mind from "everythingisfine" to "maybe I don't know if it is"?
I looked at a non random but still what seemed to be adequate sampling of the actual court cases within a month or two or the election and in pretty much every case, saw nothing at all to indicate extensive fraud. This includes not just the allegations but also looking into the actual comments and rulings by judges in some of these cases. I did see a lot of fraud claims simultaneously disproved. Based on that sampling I concluded that the process seemed to be working just fine. Obviously it’s been a while and I feel little need to revisit that, especially given that every specific brought up in this site so far over the past few months when it’s come up has turned out to be hogwash. Classic example: this supposed target gift card scam. I can’t find anything at all about it on Google. Zero. And the fact that you still declined to provide a source is absolutely screaming at me.
Also, precedent beats speculation. We do have a great precedent for a disputed election! Bush vs Gore. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. I know people have mixed feelings about the results, but the very fact that a legitimate grievance went through the full process, strongly implies that the same will happen again to future legitimate cases. And that was escalated from a state, Florida, that was horrifically unprepared for a recount and had poor procedures in place. So not only have we a demonstrated court escalation even when local government process is poor, we have a lot of other states that took lessons and tightened things up in terms of more and better written and followed procedures and many other improvements.
Meanwhile a lot of the 2020 lawsuits had trouble finding lawyers to pursue them, much less expert witnesses who declined to participate in droves once they saw the “evidence”.
You looked at Trump's GA election contest, which I specifically mentioned 4 times now and you've seen no evidence of any fraud? It was filed "within a month or two" of the election, but you decided to avoid the election contests filed by the Trump campaign by lawyers representing Trump and the campaign? Gosh, if only I specifically linked this case, the one I've talked about 4 or 5 times, you'll read it then, huh?
Let's say I give you a link to the exact sworn affidavit where a person describes offering people at their apartment complex target gift-cards for unenveloped ballots, what will that change? If you're honest with yourself, it will change nothing and you'll have the same opinion as before just perhaps a slight admission of "okay there was vote-buying/fraud, but not enough to change the outcome and it's just this one incident" which is the motte and bailey game which is normally played here.
I've found people who write comments like yours who are unwilling to do the legwork and want to pick out one example, demand it be spoonfed linked to them, ignore other examples they could also easily find, and in the end they don't really care about the specific incident anyway. Again, there are thousands of affidavits attesting to "fraud" across the country. Have you read a single one?
yeah? could you go ahead and describe the context of the lawsuit, who sued whom, what it was specifically over, what they sued for, what was done at the lower court level, and the issue which went up and down and up again?was it an election contest or not?
did the lower Florida court simply refuse to schedule the first hearing to start the process, i.e., specifically denying the process to the party filing?
the truth is you simply do not have granular knowledge about these topics or lawsuits
You can go watch the disbarment hearing going on right now, live, for one of Trump's attorneys John Eastmen to maybe understand part of the reason why this is the case; you can even watch his first witness, retired Supreme Court of Wisconsin judge, Michael Gableman give you a detailed account of what he found in his independent investigation authorized by the Wisconsin legislature into the 2020 election.
Enjoy!
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link