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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:
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.
I'm curious as to what makes you so passionate about this issue. I have to admit it's just not that interesting to me. It just feels like Daily Show level dunking on the proles.
The equivalent might be multiple effort posts trying to argue against flat earthers, Nation of Islam, Bush did 9/11, or astrology.
I just don't feel a strong need to make arguments for or against low status belief systems.
I’ll back @ymeskhout here and say that there’s a pretty significant amount of motte-and-baileying going on, where people retreat to ‘obviously the Deep State didn’t literally hack voting machines and the people who claim to have evidence of large-scale ballot stuffing are grifters, but there was still a widespread effort across the country to swing it for Biden using unsavoury methods’. And then the minute pressure is relaxed, people go back to ‘the deep state literally stole the election’.
So I understand why he’s being a hardass and saying, ‘can any of you provide any evidence at all that the election was literally, actually stolen’. And he gets crickets, or attempts at sanewashing.
I do actually believe that the combination of censorship, changed voting rules, and keeping Biden in a basement so his senility wouldn’t show add up to ‘an election that should shame a first-world country’. But the American Right has an amazing ability to take valid, compelling critiques and convert them into obviously wrong factual claims.
Not to be too whiny, but this isn't just a characteristic of the American Right. The biggest social movement on the left over the past decade has been BLM and BLM-adjacent movements. When it comes to some of the core complaints regarding police brutality, police acting as an adversarial group towards the public, and other policing issues, I and others that now identify more with the right are often sympathetic. Instead of trying to build a coherent coalition around that and stick to the facts, they come up with absolute nonsense like "hands up don't shoot" and the idea that police are "hunting black men". It's ridiculous, it has nothing to do with facts, and it makes the country a worse place. People believe ridiculous fabulists and race-grifters rather than sticking with the defensible critique.
There are a lot of examples like this (Israel-Palestine, business practices in the medical industry, predatory lending in housing and education) where the facts are actually relevant and probably sufficient to build a substantial coalition, but the most prominent voices push the most retarded version of the argument that you've ever heard in your life.
True, thanks for the pushback. I wonder how much of this is downstream of having a healthy grassroots community. The British Left, which has an extensive set of community organisations and publishers behaves on the same kind of way (see ‘the countryside is racist’) but the right mostly doesn’t as far as I can see.
(Instead they all stick their fingers in their ears and chant ‘this is fine, this is fine, everything is fine, nothing is wrong, I can’t hear you lalalalala’).
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I agree this is a concern though we might disagree on how widespread it is comparatively speaking. The best guard against this phenomenon is for the sane actors to disavow the retarded versions of their arguments. I'm someone who has long supported BLM's policy positions (at least the Campaign Zero ones released in 2016) and I'm not shy about acknowledging the retards who are nominally on my camp, or otherwise acknowledging reality and facts adverse to my positions.
I'll bite. Describe some of them.
Sure, anyone who when asked 'how many unarmed black men were shot by police last year?' answers something insane like 10,000. Anyone who calls for the literal abolition of police or prisons. Anyone who believes the Jacob Blake shooting was unjustified (though I'll leave room for a compelling argument based on the reality of the case). Anyone in general who lies or otherwise misrepresents the circumstances for any particular incident of police abuse. Anyone who argues that the only explanation for any racial disparity must be racism. I could go on, and you're welcome to take me to task on anything else within this constellation.
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