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I still can't get over the American Pravda aspect of this. Why not just say, "yeah, it wasn't great, but Covid was a tough time and we did our best"? Would anyone have thought worse of election officials and leadership if they did so? The ridiculous claim that it wasn't just good, but actually the bestest and most beautiful election ever just serves to further undermine trust in institutions. Insisting on phrasing it that way feels more like point deer, make horse than a literal claim about the quality of the election.
This and a handful of other threads over the last couple months have got me thinking about doing another Inferential Distance post on "trust" and "credibility" because it's becoming increasingly clear to me that there are a lot of people who seem to think that it's something that can somehow be arbitrated or imposed. The New York Times is a "Credible Source" because [reasons]. Appeals to academic consensus are "credible" because [reasons].
The idea that credibility and trust are resources that can be acquired, expended, and undermined just doesn't seem to factor into liberal thinking.
They believe, apparently correctly, that they have a set of institutions sufficient to manufacture and maintain credibility indefinitely no matter what they say, as long as they back each other up. The NYT can say whatever it wants and it will be credible -- just ask NPR, CNN, the Washington Post, whatever nonprofit NYU just spun up, etc. Whatever Fox News (or the New York Post or the Washington Times) says is "not credible" because "Faux News". The ground truth is too hard to reach and so never enters into it, at least for a majority of those paying attention at all.
This is exactly what I'm talking about.
You and I clearly have fundamentally different (and functionally incompatible) understandings of what the word "credibility" means.
What does credibility mean to you?
What I'm getting at is that to answer that question is an effort post in itself because it is clear that my concept of "credibility" is very different from that of many other posters.
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If it's published in the NYT, a sufficient number of people will believe it or act as if they believe it. That's "credibility".
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I don’t know, when Burger King changes their french fry recipe, do they say it’s pretty good or do they proudly announce that it’s “the best ever” even if it’s a minor change in oil made for cost saving reasons? It seems extremely standard for every change made by some organization to be ‘the best ever’, because the alternative is that it isn’t the best ever, which means there’s been a decline. Yeah, perhaps service declines during coronavirus were inevitable across the board, but they weren’t usually advertised as such. Who can forget major hotel chains announcing that they were now only changing sheets every other day to ‘fight climate change’ or ‘reduce the spread of covid’ rather than to save money?
The processes changed, sure, but to have officials go on TV and say yeah we’re pretty sure it’s going to be a fair election but it might not be the fairest yet seems unlikely, even if the political climate isn’t as heated as it was in 2020.
To go with that analogy, I would say that the public is more like Burger King's board of directors or shareholders than they are like the customers. If the new King Kong burger fails then the CEO might not make a commercial about how much it sucks but when he talks to the owners of the company he should be honest about the fact that a hamburger made out of gorilla meat was a misstep for both culinary and PR reasons. The public is not an external group for election officials to spin things to, but are instead the main stakeholders that the officials are working on behalf of.
I get that that's not how it actually works and I don't expect anything but ass-covering from them, but I still think it's fair to criticize them for it.
Fair enough, I don’t disagree. I think a lot of government is interesting in that voters are theoretically both the shareholders and customers.
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Domino's explicitly admitted that their pizza sucked. I found their advertising compelling and thereafter purchased Domino's pizza for the first time in a long time. It was true, they did make it better!
Sometimes, it's actually better to just tell the truth, if for no reason other than establishing credibility.
Still sort of think the low end delivery stuff sucks. I think I prefer grocery aisle pizza over Dominos plus relatively cheap to fix them up and add flavor (garlic, jalepenos etc) to your own taste.
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I think that still fits with her narrative. They only admitted it sucked after they changed it. They didn't say their new pizza sucked
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It’s probably based off some narrow technical claim from an agency that is true. For example I’m guessing the number of electronic voting machines with no paper trail has decreased. So if you have a bunch of things you have been trying to improve and they have all improved since the last election and are the best they have ever been then you can claim it is the most secure ever. There might be other things that you don’t measure that have been going in a negative direction but because they aren’t part of the improvement plan they don’t exist.
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