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 -
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/worried-meta-decision-allowing-2020-election-denial-ads/story?id=104985165
So Meta the parent company of Facebook and instagram is now allowing users and advertisers to post claims about election fraud in the last election but not the soon to be held 2024 elections. I’ll lay my cards out here and say I’m personally a skeptic of the claims that the 2020 elections were stolen. I don’t see why that should prevent other people from making such arguments.
But my question for you guys is whether these claims are going to really erode trust in future elections. To me the issue that erodes that trust is that the official government structures never bothered to look into the claims that such fraud might have happened and instead opted for the COVID style full court press of “nobody should bother to take it seriously, and if you do it’s clear that you’re falling for misinformation.” To me nothing erodes trust faster than an official response of “nothing to see here.”
They did though, there were plenty of state level election officials like Raffensperger who went through point by point on at least some of the issues, and many claims
literally had their day in courtwere addressed by the courts. A big problem though was that the election fraud claims were a massive gish-gallop so it was hard both to refute everything, and to take the overall claims of fraud seriously. The people claiming fraud really should have coalesced around one or two of their strongest allegations that 1) were well-evidenced, and 2) could have made a material impact in the results for at least one state.This is rewriting history. The vast majority of cases were dismissed for lack of standing, and no evidence was ever heard. There was no fact-finding mission or hearing. The press declared that Biden won, all questions were treated as ipso facto ridiculous, and what debate there was was contained to (censored) conversations on Facebook and Twitter.
OK, if you want to quibble about what "had their day in court" means, sure, my statement would be more accurate if it read as "were addressed by the courts" (before being dropped/denied/withdrawn).
I'd then turn around and say you're rewriting history by implying these cases didn't get a similar legal treatment to any other lawsuit.
You do realize that’s not a quibble? It goes to the very heart of your argument.
My main argument was that the gish-gallop claims were falling on their own merits. That hasn't changed.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Thank you. These claims have not been judged on their merits, the people raising them have been judged on their standing.
And then after the fact, courts are unwilling to do anything about it anyway, so they judge that there can be no relief, either.
It’s not just courts. You have to explain why various investigative authorities and prosecutors, including in conservative locales, either declined to pursue various theories or tried to and couldn’t find good evidence.
The simple reason is that no one could find good evidence and various courts rejected bad attempts.
Trump lost the popular vote both times after consistently polling that way.
But he is white, so there is that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m never moved by people like Raffensperger. If there was fraud, it means he failed! There is an incentive for him to not look closely. And quite frankly, some of the denials that came from his office (at least live — haven’t looked retrospectively) were inconsistent with the truth.
I don’t know there was fraud. My belief is it was impossible to know and unless you had proof Biden needed to become president.
But it was “weird” and we shouldn’t be encouraging “weird” elections. We used to count elections within hours of the polls closing. Why can’t we do that again?
He did have the President—and half the country—telling him it was his job to find the fraud. But of course, it was their job to tell him to find it, so clearly they must have been sandbagging, or they would have convinced him to flip! It’s perverse incentives all the way down.
I think when the hypothesis is tried over and over again, both in and out of court, and no one manages to present a smoking gun, that’s evidence against. Reasoning that one of the suspects had incentives not to cooperate isn’t enough.
But holding him up as proof (ie the guy who oversaw the election is a Republican and therefore it was on the up and up) isn’t the convincing argument people think it is.
It ought to be convincing in that generally Republicans want Republicans to win, and so allowing a plot against Republicans to succeed in a GOO-controlled state is not what we would expect.
Trying to counter that baseline assumption with “but if it happened they’d want to cover it up to avoid blame for the failure” is cope. There was intense scrutiny and if evidence existed it was going to come out in all likelihood, so risking being blamed for a cover up was a bigger danger than uncovering the devious plot by the outgroup.
Only if you consider Trump a neocon, when in reality he is more outsider to the whole political scene than anything.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Your comment is a pretty good example of why I've mostly stopped trying to debate people who claim election fraud. It goes something like this
Them: "There was widespread fraud in this election! "
Me: "There's not really any compelling evidence to that effect..."
Them: "Well, OK, but do you really trust them not to commit fraud in some other way? As proof, here's a laundry list of sins my outgroup has committed to prove how biased they are..."
Your comment isn't a perfect analog but it's pretty close. Most specific claims crumble into a generalized disdain of the outgroup upon deeper scrutiny.
Part of this was terrible mail-in voting rules where they only started counting long after the votes had come in, and part of it was an illusion since individual states have dragged their counting in almost every election, it just didn't matter since the elections weren't that close in the first place, so nobody really cared if Obama won Indiana in 2008 on election night since it wouldn't have made a difference.
But I generally agree that elections should be counted a lot faster. It was clear that many on the right fringe saw the delayed count as dead-to-rights evidence that the Deep State (or whoever) was rigging things and were just playing for time. States should do everything in their power to ensure the election can be confidently called within a day.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link