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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.
The steelman case for a stolen election is to take the entire "electoral fraud" bit, pick it up, throw it in the bin, and instead look at censorship. Basically you'd need to argue that some of what's come up in Missouri v Biden predates Biden's presidency and was used to sway the election in a way that'd be recognised, if it occured in the third world, as leaving the election deeply flawed at best. The second argument you'd want to make was that self-coups committed by some State Governers and institutions damaged democratic procedures before the election even occured. Then the third argument would be threat of intimidation or violence coming from riots that occured shortly before the election.
I will not elaborate further on this, however, because I think the legitimacy of a government depends on more than just whether it was elected or not.
I personally think pursuing the "election was flawed/unfair" angle is a sound strategy much more grounded in reality, but it requires disavowing the "election was stolen" angle in order to close off motte-and-bailey acrobatics between the two.
I think my comments on electoral fraud, "pick it up, throw it in the bin", should make clear that I'm not trying any acrobatics or ambiguity here. But limiting the definition of a "stolen" election to just electoral fraud seems to lack a basis. Plenty of non-democracies "steal" elections even when the number of votes cast were not subject to fraud. For example, the Cuban election system functions on a basis of non-competitive elections. The number of candidates always matches the number of seats and therefore all candidates win their seats. Hypothetically there's a candidacy system that is subject to competition prior to the election, but actual attempts to run as opposition in these selection votes leads to intimidation. This means that all election results showing victory by the Communist Party of Cuba are "stolen", without actually requiring that fraud took place at the ballot box itself. To use another example of how elections can be stolen without requiring fraud (though there probably was fraud anyway), the 2015 Venezuelan Election gave MUD a supermajority but the ruling PSUV would later strip the National Assembly itself of legislative powers in a self-coup. So the results of the election itself weren't stolen but the outcome the election promised, that the winners of the election would have legislative powers, were.
As an aside, trying to figure out if there was any concrete definition of a "stolen" election pre-2016 turns up a long papertrail Democrats and Socialists accusing Bush of stealing the 2004 election, including in academic literature. It's interesting how the shirts on this flipped from blue to red.
Yes, you've made your position completely unambiguous and I apologize if anything I said implied otherwise.
I'm not trying to limit the meaning of 'stolen'. I've conceded that it's a term with fuzzy definitions and open to interpretation, I only use it as an imperfect signifier to distinguish the two types of claims within this topic. I agree that you can reasonably label an election outcome "illegitimate" even if no actual fraud took place.
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What if I believe it was deliberately made structurally unfair going into the election, and that it was, in the end, stolen? Can I argue against the injury as well as the insult?
That's fine if that's the version of 'stolen' you want to argue, the word is ambiguous enough. I was primarily interested to hear from people who have stridently accused me of weakmanning the overall genre and hoping to hear from them about what they believe are the strongest claims I've allegedly ignored or unfairly dismissed.
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Are you saying that the word 'stolen' has a hard technical meaning such that someone who believes, for example, that there was a distributed effort by various actors including those in service of the US government to pervert the course of a fair and free US election, can not in good faith describe that as a 'stolen' election? Is this a standard or established somewhere else? Did Russa 'steal' 2016?
Are you claiming that anyone who wishes to argue that the election was flawed or unfair must also state emphatically that it was not 'stolen' before it is possible to have a productive conversation, even if the person in question never said it was stolen, or did, but never referencing the more extreme and implausible versions of that claim?
Are you sure this is not an isolated demand for rigor, is it really your normal operating procedure to demand disavowals from interlocutors in this way, either over a specific definition or cluster of ideas, even if that person has not previously held or promoted them?
How would you feel about reciprocal rules, would you be okay with both parties not using the word 'stolen', such that they could not say it was stolen, and you could not say it was not stolen?
Motte-and-bailey fallacies rely on ambiguity in order to maintain as much flexibility as possible to jump between the two positions, and so the best guard against this tactic is to get people to be specific and unambiguous about their positions. A request for disavowal is only appropriate if there is a history or suspicion of this kind of slipperiness, and I would apply it consistently to any other topic where this issue applies.
The word 'stolen' perhaps implies some measure of dishonesty but is still too ambiguous to have a hard technical meaning. Someone claiming that the election was 'stolen' doesn't tell me enough information about what they actually belief, and paired in contrast to 'unfair' it's my imperfect attempt to try and draw a distinction between the two camps of allegations. I don't really care what vocabulary people use as long as the meaning is clear and unambiguous enough.
To clarify my question, is it your position that someone who has only ever been a part of camp 'unfair' who wants to discuss camp 'unfair' with you, must first disavow camp 'stolen'? If not, then that is resolved and I simply misunderstood you. If yes, then while I have no intention of going through your comment history I think it would be quite extraordinary if this was actually a consistently held principle. Demanding that people you are talking to disavow Bailey position they have not themselves mentioned or argued for, seems like it should violate community norms if not rules.
It depends. The two factors I would consider most is how often the individual has engaged in slipperiness and how often slipperiness is utilized within the given topic. I consider disavowal to just be one of the ways of stating one's positions clearly and unambiguously. I have been very consistent about this because it applies to many topics and it's a very easy way to close off slipperiness. A good example is 'Defund the Police'.
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Isolated demand for rigor indeed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/25/donald-trump-claims-none-of-those-3-to-5-million-illegal-votes-were-cast-for-him-zero/
Could you explain what you think I was referring to when I used the phrase 'Isolated demand for rigor' in my comment, and how this is a reply to me, because I can't parse it.
Trump alleged, in an election he won while slightly losing the popular vote, that millions of fraudulent votes were cast, but 0 of those were for him.
That is an insane claim. It has no relation to reality. This is par for the Trump course, where he will simply say things like his crowd was the largest or exaggerate the value of his property or any number of documented falsehoods, large and small.
No evidence of this mass voting fraud was ever produced and I don’t recall President Trump or anyone else taking action to investigate or rectify this massive, critical issue threatening our democracy, such that it could not be repeated (out of self interest if nothing else).
So that’s the baseline to consider when evaluating future claims.
The isolated demand for rigor here is you focusing on the true meaning of the word “stolen” instead of acknowledging that the entire “election was stolen” theory is originated by a man with a long history of making fact-free assertions about elections and many other things. Another isolated demand for rigor being made by others is something like “prove to me no fraud happened” in a sad attempt to shift the burden of proof.
An insane man believes even elections he wins are massively rigged. A cohort of buffoons generated baseless theories and tried to generate evidence that the 2020 election was in fact stolen, as proclaimed by their dear leader. All of those claims, to my knowledge, did not survive contact with basic scrutiny, and TTV refused to produce evidence it claims to have.
And when our resident lawyer @ymeskhout brings up a prominent case of obvious grift and buffoonery to examine in detail, just in case anyone here sympathetic to the claim of a rigged election can defend it, he gets dragged for his approach, the obsession, his lack of character, an inability to engage with the “true” issues, and for posing an isolated demand for rigor.
It’s a basic demand for rigor that apparently cannot be met.
I am sorry but this still does not seem very relevant to what I was trying to get across, I will try again.
I am specifically asking if the demand for people to disavow a position they have not advanced is an isolated demand for rigor only being brought out in this instance, or a standard practice for productive conversations.
@ymeskhout has themselves acknowledged that it is, if not an 'isolated demand for rigor' a 'specific demand for rigor' because they think it is only appropriate when the person is 'slippery' or the topic is particularly fraught. Personally, I think this allows @ymeskhout far too many degrees of freedom, that this is functionally an isolated demand, and the correct approach would be to treat people as bad actors only after they have behaved badly, state clearly what you expect from them before continuing to engage, or simply not engage with commenters who you think are bad faith.
I am not replying to the broader conversation with @ymeskhout and have not participated in it. If specific users are behaving badly and @ymeskhout knows this and wants to act on that information, I don't see any problem with that. If the initial comment was, I can't have a productive conversation with @ motte-user-i-just-made-up without them first acknowledging that all of their previous election fraud claims turned out to be wrong, I would not have commented.
Do you think, as a general rule, it is reasonable to demand that people disavow popular Bailey positions that they have not personally advanced, simply because the topic is one in which Motte and Bailey arguments are common? I have a strong instinctive dislike for this kind of compelled position taking, it feels like a 'debate tactic', which is why I also asked about tabooing the word stolen. If @ymeskhout had simply said, it is necessary to state ones positions clearly and unambiguously, which they claim is all the disavowal is supposed to accomplish anyway, I would not have commented.
I brought up the Defund the Police example because it illustrates the problem really well. If we're talking about the issue, it's helpful to know if someone means "literally abolish the police" or "reduce the police budget slightly by recategorizing 911 dispatchers as non-police". It would be annoying to have someone argue the 911 dispatcher accounting trick only to then turn around with "and therefore that's why we need to abolish the police" when the coast is clear.
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Given how many comments I’ve seen where people have expressed the “big lie” stolen/rigged plots are so obviously dumb and almost no one here believes them, I don’t think you’re identifying a real problem.
If it’s a position this hypothetical person has not advanced and presumably they don’t believe it then I fail to see a problem. Nobody is being compelled to do anything since it’s a voluntary debate with ongoing negotiations as to what would even happen.
Somebody here should be theoretically able to meet the stated requirement.
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