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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.
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?
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.
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.
My understanding is that an ultimatum from A to B with no external enforcement mechanism would still be commonly understood as a compulsion placed on B by A.
This is exactly what I am replying to. @ymeskhout presented a conversational norm/expectation that they felt was necessary to have the conversation, and I was questioning the validity and generality of that expectation.
An isolated demand for rigor, is only a coherent concept in a world of generalized principles. Obviously it is okay to treat different cases differently, but you should be aware that you are doing it, and if you are worried about epistemic hygiene you should interrogate your reasons for the different treatment of different topics.
@ymeskhout seems to appreciate this, and offers their reason for making this specific demand in this specific situation, I just don't find "they might motte and bailey me" to be a very convincing reason for making this specific demand.
Of course, if the demand is mollified from, bolding mine,
to,
then I think it is totally reasonable.
Again, I am concerned specifically about the generalized principle of the form; Bob must disavow 2.a if they want to discuss 2.b with Alice. I think it is a bad principle and I am suspicious that anyone would actually apply it fairly. If you think that is a total normal and anodyne request, if you can't imagine a situation where it might be employed nefariously to manipulate the terrain of a discussion, that's fine. If you think you would/do apply it fairly when it is needed, and never when it is not warranted, that's also fine, I am not going to actually check.
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