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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   4848 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 18, 2022

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Not exactly an original observation, but I keep bumping into a style of writing that includes "falsely" or "conspiracy theory" or similar verbiage every time that it mentions a given claim. This popped up for me again when I went to read the Wiki for the Republican New Hampshire Senate nominee, Don Bolduc:

For more than a year, Bolduc endorsed the false conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was rigged to favor Joe Biden.

...

he continued to promote the false claim that the election was marred by fraud.[7]

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Bolduc is a 2020 presidential election denier.

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He endorsed the false claim, promoted by outgoing president Donald Trump,

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Throughout his campaign for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, Bolduc continued to promote the false claim that the election was stolen

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Bolduc continued to promote his false claims that the election was marred by fraud

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Bolduc has repeated COVID-19 falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

This is a really short article on this guy to have at least seven times that they keep repeating the same thing over and over. Yes, OK, got it, the official position is that there was definitely nothing wrong with the election and that all of The Science on Covid has always been completely correct and questioning it just being a conspiracy theorist repeating falsehoods, which are super false, and also disinformation. But given that this has been pounded over and over and over, why the written tic of repeating it so many times? There are lots of things that I think are obviously, factually wrong, but I don't feel the need to reiterate that literally every time I mention those things.

So what's driving this stylistic choice?

I am so old I remember when neutral style was actually the pride of Wikipedia... But I guess fighting for The Cause is more important nowdays.

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