site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29061 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The Colorado Supreme Court holds:

A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot. The court stays its ruling until January 4, 2024, subject to any further appellate proceedings.

[recent related discussion, slightly older]

The Colorado Presidential Primary is scheduled for March 5th, for both parties. As the decision notes, January 4, 2024 is "the day before the Secretary’s deadline to certify the content of the presidential primary ballot)"; while the matter is open to further stay should federal courts intervene, such an intervention would itself determine at least the state presidential primary.

How are the procedural protections? From the dissent:

As President Trump, argues and the Electors do not contest, section 1-1-113’s procedures do not provide common tools for complex fact-finding: preliminary evidentiary or pre-trial motions hearings, subpoena powers, basic discovery, depositions, and time for disclosure of witnesses and exhibits. This same concern was raised in Frazier; the then-Secretary argued that “it is impossible to fully litigate a complex constitutional issue within days or weeks, as is typical of a section 1-1-113 proceeding.”...

Despite clear requirements, the district court did not follow section 1-4-1204’s statutory timeline for section 1-1-113 claims. The proceeding below involved two delays that, respectively, violated (1) the requirement that the merits hearing be held within five days of the challenge being lodged, and (2) the requirement that the district court issue its order within forty-eight hours of the merits hearing.

And the other dissent:

Thus, based on its interpretation of Section Three, our court sanctions these makeshift proceedings employed by the district court below—which lacked basic discovery, the ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, workable timeframes to adequately investigate and develop defenses, and the opportunity for a fair trial—to adjudicate a federal constitutional claim (a complicated one at that) masquerading as a run-of-the-mill state Election Code claim...

and

Even with the unauthorized statutory alterations made by the district court, the aggressive deadlines and procedures used nevertheless stripped the proceedings of many basic protections that normally accompany a civil trial, never mind a criminal trial. There was no basic discovery, no ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, no workable timeframes to adequately investigate and develop defenses, and no final resolution of many legal issues affecting the court’s power to decide the Electors’ claim before the hearing on the merits.

There was no fair trial either: President Trump was not offered the opportunity to request a jury of his peers; experts opined about some of the facts surrounding the January 6 incident and theorized about the law, including as it relates to the interpretation and application of the Fourteenth Amendment generally and Section Three specifically; and the court received and considered a partial congressional report, the admissibility of which is not beyond reproach.

Did the Colorado Supreme Court provide a more serious and deep analysis of the First Amendment jurisprudence, at least?

The district court also credited the testimony of Professor Peter Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University, whom it had “qualified . . . as an expert in political extremism, including how extremists communicate, and how the events leading up to and including the January 6 attack relate to longstanding patterns of behavior and communication by political extremists.”

He testified, according to the court’s summary, that (1) “violent far-right extremists understood that [President] Trump’s calls to ‘fight,’ which most politicians would mean only symbolically, were, when spoken by [President] Trump, literal calls to violence by these groups, while [President] Trump’s statements negating that sentiment were insincere and existed to obfuscate and create plausible deniability,”

There are interpretations here other than that of the Russell Conjugation: that stochastic terrorism is limited to this tiny portion of space, or perhaps that shucks there just hasn't ever been some opportunity to worry about it ever before and they're tots going to consistently apply this across the political spectrum in the future. They are not particularly persuasive to me, from this expert.

Perhaps more damning, this is what the majority found a useful one to highlight : a sociology professor who has been playing this tune since 2017.

If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet that this is overturned, or stayed until moot. But that's not a metaphor I pick from dissimilarity.

Genuinely, it is hard to come up with anything to say that isn't already immediately obvious to any casual observer. My main reaction is that after all the sturm und drung about our sacred democracy, the people that want this are doing everything in their power to destroy the remaining legitimacy of Our Democracy. Of course, this thinking is about on par with the elephant in StoneToss.

Second is that I can barely contain my contempt for the legal profession and all of its fake pseudo-philosophizing. Hundreds of pages. They wrote hundreds of pages on this. Does anyone believe that hundreds of pages were necessary to arrive at this conclusion? Whether you think January 6 was an "insurrection" that disqualifies Trump or not, it's pretty obvious that you view isn't going to be based on careful line-item reading of endless history and text. In writing so extensively on the topic, the justices clarify that they're just liars concocting elaborate explanations for doing what they want to do anyway.

Finally, I would predict increased potential for violence, and it sure does seem like the people in charge are pushing the envelope, but after 2020 and its fallout, it's hard to imagine the American right doing much other than the elephant from StoneToss routine.

My main reaction is that after all the sturm und drung about our sacred democracy, the people that want this are doing everything in their power to destroy the remaining legitimacy of Our Democracy.

How does one define "democracy"?

There was this essay I read about a year or so ago and have not been able to find again, that keeps coming to mind as various things I read keep reminding me of it. I've even been tempted to try writing up a reconstruction (with what "steelmanning" I can) and posting it here for discussion.

The essay mostly referenced Rousseau, particularly his "general will" concept, and distinction from the "popular will," to argue that not only are elections not a sufficient condition to have a democracy, they're not important to democracy — practically unnecessary — and too much emphasis on them is a major threat to democracy. The tl;dr of the whole thing was to essentially define "democracy" as single-party rule by an intellectual vanguard of technocratic elites who do what they think is best, no matter what the voters want, and treat all elections as merely advisory and non-binding; and that "populist" politicians who campaign on doing what their constituents vote for, and then — even worse — try to actually do it once in office — in other words, what most people think "representative democracy" means — are the greatest threat to "democracy."

it's hard to imagine the American right doing much other than the elephant from StoneToss routine.

Exactly. Like @The_Nibbler said above, "Red Tribe is just going to quietly go extinct."

In what way does the observed evidence differ from what we would see in a world where these officials genuinely care about and want to preserve democracy, and genuinely believe that the Constitution has been violated and that this is the appropriate legal remedy?

It feels like your bottom line is 'My opponents will lie and cheat to beat Trump' and therefore it doesn't matter what actually happens in reality, if it's something that hurts Trump then the explanation must be lying and cheating.

That's the type of totalizing philosophy that can't actually learn from new evidence or predict things with a causal model. It should be avoided wherever possible.

I think in the eyes of a lot of the public there’s no plausible charitable reading of “they removed a major candidate (who pretty much has the nomination at this point) from the ballot in absence of a conviction for a crime.” This is a red line for any country that wants to claim the mantle of “real democracy” — that candidates even the ones the elite disagree with — have the right to run in a free and fair election. I don’t see how anyone who planned to vote GOP in any form is going to be okay with losing the election where their nominee Isn’t on the ballot.

So what’s being created here is a scenario in which the only result that the public can be sure that there was no interference in is “Trump wins.” If Trump loses, the GOP and MAGAs are not going to simply say “maybe next time,” because the reason they think the6 lost is the denial of their right to a fair and free election. It’s going to make the aftermath of 2020 look very tame. At least in 2020 we were holding a fair election where everyone who was running was on the ballot, the laws were mostly followed, and while there’s plausible theories of fraud, it wasn’t overt. I expect that there might well be attacks on state governments and election officials, possibly riots or other forms of violence because that’s generally what happens when people belief that their government has betrayed democracy.

Trump has only been barred from the Republican Primary ballot in CO. Absent a new ruling in a new court case, he will still be on the General Election ballot in CO, and people there are welcome to vote for him.

  • -10

If the finding of fact used to bar Trump from the primary is that Trump participated in an insurrection to a degree that makes him ineligible to run in a primary, what logic overturns that for the general election? How can the same facts mean you can’t run for the nomination, but that running for the actual office is okay? If he’s unable to run for the nomination he must also be ineligible for the general.

AFAIK they made a ruling on the primary ballot, and that's it. That logic might also apply to the general ballot, but they'd have to make a separate ruling for that to actually happen, and they could just not.

One obvious line of attack would be for Republicans to take a straight party-line vote to impeach (as if a ham sandwich, which prosecutors can famously charge with anything) any and all accessible current office holders who might run on the other side under (Trumped up, one might say) charges of "insurrection" against the Constitution and demand that states remove them from ballots too.

But I don't think that is a good idea, nor are they currently well-enough aligned together to actually pull it off, probably for the better.

There won't be much in the way of riots because the US Government has demonstrated it has the tools to successfully crush and then punish rioters. Turns out all the riots that weren't crushed and where the rioters didn't see serious consequences were because the government, for reasons of its own, wanted those riots to have more effect. The GOP and MAGAs will suck up the loss because they have choice but to do so or be imprisoned without fanfare.

In what way does the observed evidence differ from what we would see in a world where these officials genuinely care about and want to preserve democracy, and genuinely believe that the Constitution has been violated and that this is the appropriate legal remedy?

That removing the front runner from the ballot and attempting to imprison him is third world banana republic behavior.

What would be the appropriate response from the courts if Obama tried to run for a third term? What if he was really popular?

The issue at hand, which I don't think most of the comments here are addressing, is that a significant number of politicians, lawyers, etc believe that President Trump is disqualified from being on the ballot in the same way that Obama is disqualified from the ballot. They mostly come to this conclusion by looking at the January 6th report.

The most significant thing is that the court ruled that the January 6th report could be admitted into evidence and is being used as fact. The Supreme Court of the United States cannot contest that as it is a state-level decision, and the USC decides matters of law, not fact.

The cries that this is anti-democratic is missing the point. Restrictions on our elections are intentionally anti-democratic, but our books are full of them. Term limits, age limits, etc. This suits me, as I much prefer to live in a Republic than a Democracy.

The most significant thing is that the court ruled that the January 6th report could be admitted into evidence and is being used as fact. The Supreme Court of the United States cannot contest that as it is a state-level decision, and the USC decides matters of law, not fact.

The Supreme Court can certainly rule on state-level issues in its capacity as an appellate court from a State's highest court. That the January 6th report is admissible is a matter of law, not of fact. Furthermore, while appeals courts are indeed supposed to defer to trial courts as to matters of fact, this deference is not absolute --- and when it comes to the US Supreme Court, the deference is basically as much or as little as they care to give.

Playing cute games like accepting a partisan document as "fact" and then telling the US Supreme Court that it is beyond their review only works if SCOTUS plays along.

I wish we could amend Article 14 and change it to "convicted of insurrection in a court of law" or something like that. Most restrictions to office are ones that can be resolved by a simple glance at a birth certificate or official register.

By "I wish we could" I mean that the political will to come together and amend the Constitution no longer exists and I do not expect it to ever exist again. It is ironic that an article intending to defend against insurrection might be a cause of one.

In that reality, Democratic officials wouldn't have spied on the Trump campaign, instigated the Russian collusion hoax, rigged Hillary's primary, indicted Trump over Stormy Daniels, or changed election law to keep him from winning re-election. Even if the people behind those decisions are not sitting on the Colorado bench, it doesn't entitle them to unlimited benefit-of-the-doubt.

In what way does the observed evidence differ from what we would see in a world where these officials genuinely care about and want to preserve democracy, and genuinely believe that the Constitution has been violated and that this is the appropriate legal remedy?

In that world, this isn't an unprecedented step, and many people are regularly kept off the ballot, and members of both parties are vigorously prosecuted when they are found to have broken the law.

Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in, so I don't think there's anything principled at work here.

In that world, this isn't an unprecedented step, and many people are regularly kept off the ballot, and members of both parties are vigorously prosecuted when they are found to have broken the law.

So it's not the case that committing any crime at all makes you ineligible for the ballot. A convicted felon can run for and be elected as President, nothing in the Constitution against that.

The statute being cited in this case is specifically about officers of the state committing insurrection.

Are there past presidential candidates who arguably committed insurrection while officers of the state who you think should have been prosecuted in this way? Who are they, and what did they do?

You can say that Jan 6th wasn't actually a big deal, or wasn't Trump's fault, those are both reasonable positions. But the Senate being evacuated in the middle of certifying electors because a mob has stormed the building and is roaming the halls clashing with security and stealing things from Senator's offices is actually a really unusual thing that hasn't happened a bunch of times before.

Whether or not you think it rises to the level of insurrection, the argument 'if people were being fair we would have seen tons of prosecutions like this before' doesn't actually hold water, because things like this haven't happened tons of times before.

Are there past presidential candidates who arguably committed insurrection while officers of the state who you think should have been prosecuted in this way? Who are they, and what did they do?

Yes - Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who arranged for the surveillance of the President Elect and ginned up a fake scandal involving Russia in an attempt to take back the Presidency despite losing the election. There's a much clearer and easier case to be made for those two being directly involved than there is Trump with January 6.

Are you saying these actions (which I disagree about, but that's not important at this step) amount to insurrection?

Is your claim that they planned to use these charges to stop him from taking office in 2016, and somehow maneuver that to themselves staying in office instead?

That claim doesn't make any sense to me, even if they somehow succeeded in getting the Congress to impeach over that, Pence would have become president. There's no clear path from any of that to an overthrow of the entire order of succession.

Or are you saying they did that in an attempt to make him lose the next election so they could win it instead?

Because, that may be scummy and improper, but it's not insurrection. Lying and doing unethical things to win an election is very bad, but it's also very common, and the most it could amount to is election fraud. If you are legitimately winning an election, it's not insurrection.

Are you saying these actions (which I disagree about, but that's not important at this step) amount to insurrection?

No, but I am saying that they are actually closer to insurrection than anything Trump did. At no point did Trump deceive a court in order to acquire a fraudulent warrant, for instance.

Is your claim that they planned to use these charges to stop him from taking office in 2016, and somehow maneuver that to themselves staying in office instead?

Their plan was to sink the Trump presidency. Ideally they would have been able to get Pence down too and the entire election nullified, but they didn't actually succeed. Instead, they settled for simply sabotaging his term through the Mueller investigation, which we now know was completely fraudulent from the beginning.

Also, just to be clear, I don't think that this amounts to insurrection. But it is far, far closer to insurrection than anything Trump did during his time in office.

So, there's a difference between 'You think these actions were closer to insurrection than anything Trump did, therefore you find it unjust that only Trump was punished for insurrection' vs 'The prosecutors in question thought that those actions are closer to insurrection than anything Trump did, therefore their choice to only punish Trump for insurrection is intentional malice.'

Can you grant that, even if it's motivated reasoning or driven by propaganda and disdain, many of your opponents really and truly believe that Trump committed insurrection?

Because if so, that's sufficient to say that they are being honest (even if not fair/just) in prosecuting Trump for things they believe to be insurrection, but not prosecuting others for things that we all agree are not.

More comments

Given how wide the "gave aid or comfort to enemies" line is this seems to be mainly an argument for every state to remove their political opponents from the ballot every election. For instance, Biden would be disqualified due to the Iran deal.

Negotiating an international treaty is not what that phrase means even if one thinks the treaty was a bad one.

That would be an insane interpretation.

Now the Iran-Contra deal is a little closer, but the intent wasn’t betrayal or treasonous.

For instance, Biden would be disqualified due to the Iran deal.

Only given an evenhanded adjudicator. That's not how this works, as @FCfromSSC points out above. It's double standards all the way down.

Trump had been unfairly prosecuted for much longer than that. I do not view 1/6/21 as the start of something different, I view it as the continuation of dirty tricks.

One of those tricks being letting the mob in on purpose to make Trump look bad.

Correct, my model is that if they weren't lying and cheating, I wouldn't see them lying and cheating. Charitable models are all well and good, but sometimes, you can simply see that people are lying and cheating and this is the base truth of the matter. What happens in reality will substantially impact my position on whether they're lying and cheating, but it will be based on whether they're lying and cheating, not whether I could come up with an incredibly implausible explanation for how they're actually very honest and doing their duty.

If I'm paraphrasing correctly, your point was 'why spend hundreds of pages pretending to justify your actions with evidence and legal theory when you were just going to lie and cheat to get this outcome no matter what'.

That doesn't sound like someone who has carefully read through the entire document and carefully considered every argument and weighed it against legal precedent and come to the conclusion that this is lying and cheating. It sounds like someone who has decided that they don't need to bother doing that analysis because they've already concluded it's lying and cheating in advance of considering that evidence.

That's not 'seeing them lying and cheating', that's interpreting things to be 'lying and cheating' before actually demonstrating that to be the case.

But correct me if I'm wrong about your process here.

(And if your point is just 'anything that is unusual/unlikely on baserate priors and also disadvantages Trump will be interpreted as lying and cheating because my prior on that is already high and thus it's the highest-probability explanation I have for rare events like these,' then that could be a reasonable position but you'd need to state it and argue for it explicitly)

That doesn't sound like someone who has carefully read through the entire document and carefully considered every argument and weighed it against legal precedent and come to the conclusion that this is lying and cheating.

Correct, I didn't read hundreds of pages of dissembling. There is no careful weighting required to arrive at the conclusion that no insurrection occurred. I am familiar with January 6, I have read the Amendment in question, and that suffices. I also have not actually read every scholarly work of scientology prior to concluding that it's probably a load of shit.

I have no particular affinity for Donald Trump, but I have a great deal of contempt for dishonest lawyers attempting to make convoluted arguments to avoid plain meanings.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats