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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   20447 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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Given the significant interest around the 2020 stolen election claims (definitely my favorite hobby horse topic), and the serious accusations that I have been weakmanning the overall category of election fraud claims, I would like to extend an open invitation to anyone interested in exposing the errors of my ways to a real-time discussion for a Bailey episode.

Here are the conditions I would suggest:

  • Given the wide array of stolen election claims and our limited time on earth, you will have free reign to pick 2 or 3 of whatever you believe are the strongest claims worthy of attention, particularly if any of the claims are ones I have conspicuously ignored. Hopefully this will address any concerns that I'm weakmanning.
  • Once you have the 2-3 topics chosen, you agree to share in advance all the evidence that you plan to rely upon to make your case so that I have a chance to look at it. Same obligation applies to me for anything I might rely on. I want to avoid anyone thinking that they were either surprised or caught off-guard, and it's also not interesting to listen to someone carefully read a 263-page PDF.
  • In terms of number of participants, this might be best as me versus 3. Any more than that is prone to be too chaotic and too tedious to edit, and any fewer I'd be concerned of being insufficiently comprehensive about the topic.
  • Everyone involved will have immediate access to everyone's raw recording to guard against any concerns of selective/misleading editing.
  • Ideally, you're a bona fide believer (or at least genuinely believe the theories are sufficiently plausible) in the stolen election claims you're arguing for, rather than just someone who can competently steelman the arguments. I want to make sure that every claim is adequately defended.
  • I don't intend enforcing any strict format or time limit, as it would be best to discuss each claim for as long as is necessary to ensure it all gets a fair shake.

Are any of the above unreasonable or unfair? Do you have any suggested additions/changes?

I've been trying to set a conversation like this for years but haven't found any takers. @Dean, @jfk, @motteposting are the ones I know are sufficiently motivated and informed about the topic, and whom I'd most look forward to dissecting this topic with. Feel free to nominate anyone else you think would be good.

What benefit would anyone gain from going on your show to talk about the 2020 election? It looks like all downside to me at the moment man, you need to sweeten the pot a little.

You have home ground advantage and podcasting experience, you get a great episode (at least conceptually, I would love to listen to motters argue) and a very positive spin on a potential mea culpa (I know it's unfair to imply you are working an angle and I apologise, but it is a positive thing you'd get.) Meanwhile they get a potential embarrassment and have to expose their identity.

Also it's @jkf, I used to catch on that too.

you need to sweeten the pot a little.

What would you suggest? All three I tagged have variously accused of me flagrantly dishonesty, bad faith, and other misdeeds on this particular topic. I would imagine someone who holds that belief would be eager for the opportunity to substantiate it and record it for posterity.

Meanwhile they get a potential embarrassment and have to expose their identity.

Huh? You're talking about having to expose their voices? I don't think that really constitutes "expose their identity".

I think part of the point is, people will have to come out and identify as election deniers. The next thing, they're being accused of supporting the Jan 6th coup, wanting to overthrow the legitimate government, and being a fully-signed up fascist.

This podcast is probably okay if nobody except the likes of mottizens are going to listen to it, but it's a real possibility that someone might listen to it and decide to out the fascists getting ready to support Trump in his second attempt to impose totalitarian dictatorship. Look at all the alarm and disquiet over Project 2025 from sober reliable sources.

(Yes, that last was tongue-in-cheek). Everyone from "women and minorities most affected" to "climate change denialism" to "concentration camps for gays and forced pregnancy!" just in that random sampling.

I think part of the point is, people will have to come out and identify as election deniers. The next thing, they're being accused of supporting the Jan 6th coup, wanting to overthrow the legitimate government, and being a fully-signed up fascist.

There's plenty of election deniers who openly admit to it and would probably have no problem with it even in conversations with strangers. What has happened to them that is bad?

Fox news was sued and lost almost $800 million.

Am I misremembering, or was this the one in which Fox was shown to have peddled the idea that Dominion's voting machines were rigged but not even the hosts saying it believed what they were saying?

That's not what the lawsuit alleged. It said that hosts were allowed to make claims that executives believed were false, and that guests were brought on and made claims that the hosts believed were false. I don't think there were any claims that were (provably) disbelieved by the person who made them. The argument was that executives/hosts had enough control over the claims of hosts/guests that allowing those claims to be made was tantamount to making them directly.

But in this case that means the podcast itself would be analogous to Fox executives/hosts, and the motte members would be the hosts/guests, so it's not a direct example.

That's not what the lawsuit alleged. It said that hosts were allowed to make claims that executives believed were false, and that guests were brought on and made claims that the hosts believed were false.

Okay, yeah, this is the case I was thinking of. I recall going through the evidence brought against them and I found it fairly convincing that Fox had no reason to believe what they were peddling and also didn't believe it themselves.

The actual proof can be found in the pdf at the bottom of this article. It's 192 pages, but it's either screenshots that can quickly be read or large font question-answer segments. I think it clearly indicates that the people at Fox didn't believe what they were saying, because their own research team was telling them there wasn't any evidence, and it notes that Fox believed executives had an obligation to correct people from stating falsehoods on their own network.

Ultimately, what did Fox in wasn't the view that the election was stolen. It was not believing their own public statements.

Well but keep in mind the Boston Strangler got away with it for for decades before we discovered how to use DNA to identify people. Voice identification isn't far off I'd bet, but it isn't really necessary - this isn't a court case, fancy computer programs aren't required to whip up an outrage mob to ruin your life, only plausibility is, and like Pierre said a motivated individual could do that today. So yeah they are exposing their identity in my perspective, in a way they hadn't before, but even if you think it's only a possibility why would someone roll the dice on their livelihood for a podcast argument?

You could just speak through a speech synthesizer.

I've previously spent $130 to hire a Nigerian voice actress to redub someone concerned about their identity and I imagine the masking options are way cheaper now.

Redubbing is a great idea, and it would mollify my concerns about my identity enough to sweeten the pot. Although yeah, I'd hope it was cheaper than $130.

Adjusting equalizer settings is usually enough, and I haven't explored the AI voice tools yet but I imagine there's potential there

There's also a possibility that some of the snow which hits my tongue was irradiated and I end up slowly consuming enough radioactive material to kill me. We don't take risk by itself as our sole factor. At the end of the day, I think the chances of someone maliciously using a voice recording from someone here is low enough that going on the podcast isn't an issue.

This case from a few months ago is interesting.

A voice analysis conducted by Catalin Grigoras, Director of the National Center for Media Forensics, compared audio recordings of Jezos and talks given by Verdon and found that it was 2,954,870 times more likely that the speaker in one recording of Jezos was Verdon than that it was any other person

I think that your relatively safe opinions have stopped you from fully thinking this through. It certainly does seem unlikely at this moment that someone would use a voice recording from here against a user. But it also seemed completely ridiculous that people would lose their jobs for opinions they held 20 years ago, or go after members of your family, until it happened and now it happens all the time. The concern isn't simply this moment, it is the rest of time.

All of those people made it much less work to find their identity than is under discussion.

20 years ago there was an expectation of privacy which doesn't exist today. There weren't programs that could search images and match faces. The culture frowned on the idea of firing someone for non work related issues, so even if someone did suspect their black face halloween costume might resurface, they probably thought they could just apologise for it like in a sane world.

Besides which, we are talking about people who are convinced that the most powerful government in the world has become an anarchotyranny that hates them and does everything in its power to gaslight the planet about its democracy. And they're right.

I'm not convinced that anyone who goes onto the podcast is in serious danger of losing their jobs or having their families harassed in two decades time or even further into the future. Even if they happen to be election truthers.

Yeah I gathered. How about you get ymeskhout to say your full name, address and telephone number on the next episode. Boy would my face be red then!

Man, it's a good thing Yassine isn't asking for those in the first place, huh?

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Voice + whatever history one can build up from this website + potential reddit history and in the present of AI that's more than enough for a motivated journalist to round up a list of wrong-thinkers to push whatever psyop-of-the-month or even just to keep on file in case whatever organization they associate with started making statements about Gaza or whatever in the next year. If I can allow myself to be slightly paranoid.

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