site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27864 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

As I said downthread, as someone in deep red country the conversations I hear have an underlying apprehension of violence that rises by the day including today. I don't believe in their hearts these people want violence, but as the right is the political alignment predicted by having superior-to-average faculties at assessing danger, I think even if only intuitively they understand and greatly fear how swiftly we approach violence as the only way out. Blessed are the meek, blessed are those who know when to draw the sword. If and when it happens, it will be the right and only time.

The thought of this as being what stops Trump is many things, all of them wrong. There's not one person in this country who has decided this is the moment to hop off the fence, "Okay, now I won't vote for the man." Farcical. There will be topical complaining from RINOs, the establishment-GOP will continue searching, as they surely have since 2016, at finding a way to keep him out, and in November Trump will be on the ballot and receive 100 million votes. This conviction completes the ascendance of the man as the idea of the total rejection of the establishment. The establishment understands this, and is thus why they attack him with a wholly unparalleled ferocity; it is exactly the same reason those who land on the turbo-normie-left-side-of-bell-curve-meme support him. They don't have to think and wordswordswords, they viscerally understand power against power.

People try to contextualize what's happening in so many irrelevant details, ignore the minutiae. It has never been about vice, it has never been about ambiguous business dealings, it has never been about brashness, candor and honesty. Politicians as a category are the least ethical humans in this country, why would they care about any of this? It is about a man who refused to kneel when demanded by seated power and has risen to threaten their entire existence. This conviction heralds the imminent arrival of the pivotal figure of American history. It doesn't have to be Trump, but where we are in the reverberations of history is no earlier than the election of Buchanan.

100mm would be a massive increase. Trump only got 74mm in 2020 (losing by 6 million).

It’s possible that a felony conviction will get him 20mm more votes but I think that’s pretty unlikely.

This is fair.

I reached the numbers for my wager through personal belief, it's nothing specifically evidenced: I believe at least 10% of Trump's ballots were destroyed in 2020 with methods that will fail this November--physically destroyed, fraudulently marked invalid, "lost", compromised machines modifying totals--that takes 74 to 81, +10 from the verdict is 91, and then enough to reach the over on 95.5 with "any other factor", which refers to the fallout from the establishment's next move when the verdict fails. In the event of a failed assassination attempt I'd add a second over on 105 million.

Again though feel free to write this off immediately as "just what this guy believes", I have no actual argument here.

Why would these methods fail now?

Sure COVID was a thing in 2020, but Trump was in power and already suspicious of rigged elections. Despite that, the rigging took place ant 10% and there was no concrete evidence?

There's not one person in this country who has decided this is the moment to hop off the fence, "Okay, now I won't vote for the man."

Elections are won and lost by a percentage point or two. I don't think it's unreasonable to speculate that possibly one to two in a hundred American voters doesn't like Biden but won't vote for Trump after enough messaging about him now being a convicted felon. It also may not have any such effect, or have a reverse effect. Time will tell. But you're overconfident.

Out of the hundreds of posters on the fora I inhabit, not one has plausibly made the claim that they would have voted Trump if not for this -- at least one or two have said that they didn't want to vote for him (and would have gone for a third party), but now feel that they have to in order to send a message. Some of them do have a post history of criticizing the guy, so I think I believe them?

As @VelveteenAmbush points out, it's the people NOT on forums who are going to stop voting for him. The law-n-order conservatives who have never seen a prosecution they don't like.

And those people are going to vote for who exactly? Certainly not Joe 'Mostly Peaceful' Biden -- even among throwaway votes RFK doesn't really appeal to this crowd, and I can't see them getting too excited about putting the 'Libertarian' in LGBTQ.

The cohort you are talking about are also the 'you don't vote, you can't complain' guys -- so I can't even see it hurting on turnout much here.

ETA: I'm not really talking about quirky geek forums here either -- if you wanna put your finger on that particular pulse I'd reccomend ar15.com -- those guys are the most law abiding, letter-of-the-law dudes you will find, and maybe even more right wing than here. I haven't had cause to be down that rabbithole lately, but I guarantee they will have something to say about this.

And those people are going to vote for who exactly?

They'll just stay home and let the Democrats take the purple areas.

The ar15.com guys are familiar with blatant abuse of the law because BATFE does it all the time.

Sure, but they take all the dumb rules to heart -- go on there and ask about cutting an inch off a shotgun barrel or something sometime. And they won't stay home -- voting is a civic duty, remember? And these guys are all about the civic duty.

Yeah, the ar15 guys are serious about the dumb rules because they know if you're not, you risk having your wife shot in the head in front of you. But they're not the guys who will be turning away from Trump. It will be the guys who (at the time Ruby Ridge was in the news) were of the opinion that if Weaver didn't want to get his wife shot, he shouldn't have cut that shotgun too short. Or should have showed up to court (despite getting wrong and conflicting information about the date). There were distressingly many of such people at the time, and they still exist.

Yeah, the ar15 guys are serious about the dumb rules because they know if you're not, you risk having your wife shot in the head in front of you.

That's not why -- you see this on fudd boards all over the place also, around regulations that carry no risk of being actual prosecution. Gun enthusiasts are just very law abiding as a class -- they are exactly the boomercons you are talking about.

Posters on the fora you inhabit are not a representative sample of the electorate, no matter how many fora you inhabit nor how much you post.

True enough -- but I've heard literally zero people on fora or IRL who were plausible Trump voters and say that now they won't vote for him -- 'some' is more than 'none', and I'm pretty comfortable extending this to the electorate. All this lawfare is a big mistake -- it won't succeed in keeping him off the ballot, and Americans love an underdog. Trump will lean into it.

I'm pretty comfortable extending this to the electorate

You shouldn't be. It's just not reasonable to extrapolate your personal social experience to the electorate, no matter how badly you want to.

Whatever man -- apparently he raised $52M over it yesterday, and right next to that in the feed is a sheriff from Cali (who seems kind of law & order oriented) saying "it's time for a felon in the White House": https://x.com/Bubblebathgirl/status/1796750332359262368

That's top of Twitter from typing "trump" into the search box -- tell you what, why don't you see if you can actually find some people that were ever likely to vote for Trump but won't now? The people saying that this matters are saying so because they hate Trump already, simple as.

All very interesting but none of them is a poll

Another guy quoted some upthread -- looks like the same picture to me.

More comments

Give it a week and we'll have new polling that shows if this event moved opinions at all. Hopefully they ask specifically about whether the verdict changed their opinion and in what direction so we don't miss one direction of movement being netted out by another.

Convicting former presidents for paperwork related felonies (in a court and a state that hate him no less) is such a bad precedent to set I don't even know where to start. There is a reason Nixon was pardoned. Who will want to give up power if they know they will be possibly thrown in jail if they do? Even if that never happens the knock on consequences of this down the road are hard to overstate. Like all bad law, it might make sense morally and emotionally at the time, but it creates a monstrosity that will have to be dealt with later.

Sure. The idea that 0 people weren't convinced to cancel their trump vote because of this trial cannot statistically true at the scale of an American election.

But do you really see a meaningful overall shift that way instead of the opposite? Trump has been impeached, sued, and disparaged with screeching histrionic screeds from every single major media platform in the world for almost 8 years at this point.

And yet a sham conviction like this is supposed to be more progress towards crushing him instead of the reverse??

That's even more of a stretch than what you're casting doubt on. Overconfident? Yes. But this was a counter productive move on the establishment's part. I'll be voting for R over L for president this year because of it. Maybe.

I hear have an underlying apprehension of violence that rises by the day including today. I don't believe in their hearts these people want violence, but as the right is the political alignment predicted by having superior-to-average faculties at assessing danger, I think even if only intuitively they understand and greatly fear how swiftly we approach violence as the only way out. Blessed are the meek, blessed are those who know when to draw the sword. If and when it happens, it will be the right and only time.

Can you self reflect for a second about how ridiculous this LARPing fanfic is? This is the right's equivalent of lefty women breathlessly imagining the Handmaids Tale is going to come true. The core Trump demographic is old, obese, uneducated people. They are unhealthy. They have no human capital. They live in the middle of nowhere. Their entire personality is centered around talking about how scary they imagine New York to be. Any people like this who are actually talented, have human capital, and are capable of acting with agency have moved to the coasts to participate in the real world.

They are a party of losers. Their greatest political achievement is electing an elite who openly scorns them and handed out tax cuts to other elites. Their second greatest political achievement is one of them having a heart attack during their protest in DC. These days they comically threaten to "boycott" New York, as if the Red Lobster in Times Square will even notice that they aren't there. They aren't some dark brooding populist force that's going to be the vanguard of the revolution. They're a bunch of people who have been left behind and resist the grownups' efforts to help.

It is about a man who refused to kneel when demanded by seated power and has risen to threaten their entire existence. This conviction heralds the imminent arrival of the pivotal figure of American history. It doesn't have to be Trump, but where we are in the reverberations of history is no earlier than the election of Buchanan.

Trump is a talented guy who recognized there are a bunch of losers out there and figured out how to manipulate them. These people spend their political capital on banning lab grown meat to own the libs. They're not leaving anything of note behind in history.

  • -11

Militant angry Trump supporters actually kind of are losers until and unless proven otherwise. They have loads of guns and a large fraction of them think that the 2020 election was stolen from them, yet they've killed a total of about 0 government workers. If they continue like this, it will make sense for their enemies to ignore them as LARPers. Personally, I'd love to see them rise up and make some of the establishment face the consequences of their inactions and actions, but so far they haven't done almost anything. What's it going to take? I guess there is some breaking point at which they would rise up, but what would it take?

Dissident right Twitter bodybuilders and even stuff like Charlottesville (despite subsequent messaging) has given some very online people a completely warped perception of Trump’s base. They’re thinking it’s tall white fit, salmon-colored shorts wearing frat bros, decently educated, probably 115 IQ college grads, deep red, hard right, well versed in issues, probably know how to handle a gun. Similarly, people’s very online perception of the Dem base is either the worst dregs of the criminal or homeless underclass, or like ‘aids skrillex’ type screeching weedy non-binary student protesters crying about Palestine and police brutality.

But that isn’t Biden’s base, and that certainly isn’t Trump’s base. As the Tomato says, Trump’s base is fat middle aged or old people in flyover states who watch Fox News. They may or may not have guns, but boy, they sure aren’t overthrowing the federal government with them, today or any day.

[REDACTED] : "They have no human capital." and subsequent description is boo outgroup [REDACTED]: boo-outgroup [REDACTED]: boo-outgroup [REDACTED]: boo-outgroup [REDACTED]: antagonistic [REDACTED]: boo-outgroup [REDACTED]: boo-outgroup [REDACTED]: boo-outgroup

My. It's rare to see a comment get quite that many reports, and have the consensus of the volunteer jannies be that it's frankly fucking terrible.

You could very well have conveyed the exact same message with much less inflammatory wording. In the words of @Amadan, while we don't police content, we very much police tone.

And yours is utterly dripping with sheer contempt, and is absolutely not what we're looking for here, or even conducive to a healthy argument.

You've been warned once for antagonism before, and I would wager it hasn't worked. I hope a day's ban will make you choose your phrasing more carefully in the future. You're welcome to share your opinion on Trump and his voters, simply not while nakedly sneering.

That was absolutely not a ban worthy comment.

For what it's worth, I didn't at all consider reporting the comment.

Tomato's response was probably a bit more acerbic than desirable but it's a reasonable conclusion to the discourse of the terminally online left and right. The left is much more gleeful about the prospect of violence but that seems a poor gradient when both sides, again among the terminally online, wonder loudly "Why aren't we killing them all yet?" The right thinks it should have been no later than summer 2020, the left thinks probably no later than Charlottesville, and so when violence hasn't happened but you expect it, you seek an answer. Nobody's questioning first principles, they're not asking if their fundamental assumption is wrong because people almost never do. The right concludes with docility, the left concludes with calling it a larp. When the lefties have been hearing since at least 2020 "One of these days, man . . . " some amount of mirth isn't unreasonable.

Well--not unreasonable within the frame. Stepping back to only observe terminally online discourse (and discuss it here sure) without allowing it to excessively influence one's thinking is best.

Of course I also assert it as a fear response, but I have no blame for someone who chooses to self-assuage fear of the will to bloodshed that still absolutely inhabits western man.

Oh come on, there are comments on here dripping with sheer contempt all the time that don't get the authors banned.

Keep in mind, I'm not a leftoid, I just think that most of the rightoids on here are retarded. If we had more leftoids here, I'd tell them that they are also retarded, cause I genuinely believe that.

But the Tomato didn't express himself in a way more obnoxious than what we see regularly here, so come the fuck on, shape up or have this site keep being viewed as a joke by actually smart people.

Right now, this site is mostly just a refugee camp for midwits who overrate their own intelligence because they realize that different races differ in IQ or whatever (Wow! You just have to be a non-retard to understand that different races differ in IQ for probably in part genetic reasons! Congratulations on having a bare minimum intelligence to be worthy of smart people paying attention to you!).

Having the bare minimum of intelligence to be able to see through leftoid ideas of how everybody's on average equal in intelligence or whatever... doesn't take much. It's just like the bare standard minimum. This site is overrun with lame social trads, religious idiots, authoritarians, and so on... all of whose ideas are not rationally obviously correct, but they clearly are pushing these ideas because they have deep-seated emotional (as opposed to rational) reasons for wanting to push those ideas. They often write things that are not rationally justified, and imply that their opponents are all sorts of nasty things when they write it, but I am not calling for them to be banned. So why ban Tomato for writing a mild few paragraphs poking fun at his political opponents?

Edit: Sorry, I was drunkposting and a bit too harsh. Oh well, I don't mind a week vacation.

have this site keep being viewed as a joke by actually smart people.

I'm tempted to ask where all these "smart people" are whose opinions we're supposed to care about, but I don't really care.

So why ban Tomato for writing a mild few paragraphs poking fun at his political opponents?

Because poking fun at your political opponents is not what this place is for.

You have a long record of exactly the sort of comments this place is not for, and since you went full I Am Very Smart with a post you surely knew would result in a ban, why don't you go find smarter pastures that are more fitting for your intellectual caliber?

You have one AAQC and a bunch of warnings and (remarkably) only one previous ban. I'm giving you a one week ban, but I strongly suggest you decide whether you want to return if this level of sneering really reflects how you feel.

I think this comment should have been allowed. Almost all of the negative statements about Trump voters here are demonstrating a counterargument to @jake's claim that a Trump voter revolution is nigh. The tone is 20% more biting and recriminatory than the argument itself, but that could also be said of a lot of @FCfromSSC comments I enjoy reading.

I've got a thread going on with a couple of the mods on how they are killing this place, and owe them a response -- this is a perfect example to include. They've shifted the (important!) norm of 'be charitable to other posters' to 'be charitable to every-fucking-body' -- and I don't think it's possible to get at truth when people are handcuffed this way.

(and of course I'm elsewhere in this very thread arguing strenuously against @Tomato's thesis here -- but if we aren't allowed to put our theses forcefully to the forum, how are we gonna test our shady thinking, eh?)

Trump's core demographic is >70% white; among young white men it is the overwhelming majority; it is the hypermajority of those men most capable of purposeful violence. You cope, just as many of those in the terminally online right go doomer. They wrongly think the time for violence was years ago and they rationalize their misunderstanding as passivity. You fear reprisal so you take the lack of response as proof there is no sleeping leviathan.

Violence is the worst outcome. In "organized" warfare it's considered a sterling ratio for 1 civilian to die for every 1 combatant killed. In a civil war everyone is a civilian. Most wouldn't die from direct violence, they'd die from starvation and disease. Lack of food, people die. Lack of meds, people die.

The people who would act and suffer most have lives, families, jobs, hobbies and hanging with the buds. They understand on some level how we are living in the best time so far it has been to be a human. Something ancestral absolutely calls to them in recognizing how even a person living in project housing has a lifestyle of quality that would astonish people just 100 years ago, let alone 500. Why tear it down if it isn't absolutely necessary?

And that's the catch. These people aren't risking the lives of themselves and everyone they love, they aren't risking damning subsequent generations to the same strife, only because violence might be necessary. Knowing this makes your response darkly funny: so you think there but for lack of will go death squads? There but for lack of will go politicians getting garrotted for transing kids and sending pallets of cash to Ukraine to protect the GAE? I wonder if your mockery doesn't hint some awareness because the arguments I'm making should be the arguments you're making. That the issues of the day are not yet (and it could be not-ever!) worth risking civilization to address, or at least that peaceful resolution remains an option and should be certainly held as paramount. Instead you mock and I must think it's because you're afraid, I'm worried too, because we both know these things: it won't take many, the people who could constitute far more than many, and we know exactly what they're capable of if that switch is flipped. They just correctly don't think it's necessary yet, and that's good!

I've said before my political alignment is the one that keeps technology moving forward. We are closer than I think anyone understands to the singularity, and I think it's going to solve everything; to be honest I think it's because an AGI will emerge, a peaceful one, but one who nonetheless accepts no ideological contestation of good, true good. What's truly best for everybody, including the most important thing humans will ever do in colonizing space. Many of the people doing that research, yes live in those cities, and in conflict many would die, and regardless the research would be impacted and in the best case it's a decade before we've picked up the pieces and by then it could be too late.

party of losers

What typifies the leftist? They brand themselves superbly, so even past the successes of the communist's long march on American institutions, starting with universities, asserting themselves in the legal, HR and marketing departments of every major western corporation, they can also get the support of the culture generators of the entertainment industry, so at its peak it is celebrities, the attractive, those of good tastes. But this is the pleasant mask, the typical left-voter is one of: welfare dependents and the indolent; criminals; illegal aliens or the children thereof, or at any rate people from countries ruined by disastrous governments who now vote for politicians with the policies of their wrecked homelands; single mothers, especially those whose children have multiple fathers; a million or so women who only vote on abortion. Who else? The millions of illegal aliens the left has allowed to invade this country with the explicit purpose of altering voter demographics. The "party of winners", institutional winners yes, would not exist if it could not promise the money of the productive to give to its patrons. Leftist leaders are "grownups" but in a dark sense of the tyrant-mother; leftism in the body politic is the supreme abdication of personal responsibility.

Trump is a talented guy

If he were a grifter he would have made his appeasement to the establishment in his first term and he would still be President. There's much to discuss about his general ineffectiveness in office (though his overtures at peace with North Korea and his success at starting no new conflicts deserve great praise), the plausibility of it being a grift has been dead for three years.

Trump's core demographic is >70% white; among young white men it is the overwhelming majority;

In 2020 Trump won young white men by just 6 points. Younger zoomers are already majority nonwhite or close to it. When adding the 45% of young white men who vote Dem to almost all young black and Hispanic men (many of whom are indeed armed etc) it seems unlikely that violent young men in total are as extremely Republican as you suggest. In addition we have things like obesity data and so on. Young Red men aren’t all, or even close to being, in any large number, fit, muscular 6’5 blonde Midwestern farm boys with a personal armory ready to March on Washington. Even if they tried, blue hair they/thems in Arlington or Silicon Valley can drone them as easily as the IDF drones square-jawed jacked Palestinian youths trying to throw grenades at Israeli soldiers. The idea that the reds would easily win a civil war is ridiculous. They might win, but it is unlikely to be easy.

Agree so much with this. It honestly still baffles me how much of a cult of personality Trump has been able to build and maintain despite losing.

It baffles you because none of the politicians you support are likable, they're nakedly predatory and contemptuous of the plebs. Blues are struggling against the fact that they're squares and stiffs. Tomato's screed reads as "dear subhuman filth" does. The online right have been using the sentiment as a recruiting tool for years.

Trump literally ran a university to scam the plebs! He’s the most nakedly predatory man in the game.

I’m very much red tribe and it’s an absolute embarrassment that Trump is the nominee again.

in November Trump will be on the ballot and receive 100 million votes

Put your reputational money where your mouth is. Is this a prediction? Would you be willing to concede that you were wrong if this doesn't come to pass, or would you just say that the election result must have been falsified?

Yes. My hardline for fraud is Biden receiving >79* million votes. A conceded Trump defeat requires significantly fewer votes than 2020.

Money: Trump wins

O/U: 95.5 million for 94.5-95.5 push

Spread: 10 million; voided if Biden totals >79* million; will consider alternate structure where California votes are not included

Edit: Corrected Biden values

I would take the bet that Trump wins in November, although I made the same bet in 2020 and lost so I suppose my reputation isn't worth much. I can't see Biden improving between here and election day, and I don't believe that losing this trial is going to do anything other than galvanize the Republican base.

Ironically, I think the only thing that would tank Trump would be some group of his supporters turning their guns on a group of civilians. So long as Trump and Republican voters win support as the downtrodden underclass taking on the elites things are good. The left wants to portray them as dangerous paramilitary units - the Proud boys, Charlottesville, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, etc. were all major gifts to Democrats.

Interestingly, I have Biden winning with the same set of priors, except that I find right wing violence highly likely between now and November.

except that I find right wing violence highly likely between now and November.

Which will be utterly disorganized and poorly-aimed, cracked down upon harshly, and only serve to further weaken the right and strengthen the left.

Yup. A retarded guy in a Q themed Hawaiian shirt is gonna kill a cop and we're gonna hear about it all fall.

What evidence would you accept to decide if an election had been stolen?

What exactly does stolen mean?

Suppose

  1. Actors work to give one candidate an unfair disadvantage in voter perception, but votes are voted and tallied fairly. (E.g. the suppression of Hunter Biden laptop story)
  2. People change rules to give a favored candidate an advantage (E.g. Pennsylvania Supreme Court broadening early voting standards)
  3. A few people submit votes illegally, or in an illegal manner.
  4. Same as 2, but at scale, as a deliberate campaign
  5. Deliberate tabulation errors, at small scale
  6. Deliberate tabulation errors, by major actors or at scale
  7. Candidates being ruled ineligible
  8. Unfaithful electors costing a presidency
  9. Setting up other slates of electors to substitute for the duly elected ones

Which of these are or are not theft of an election?

My own perception is that Team Biden's done 1, 2, 3, and tried 7 and 8. Team Trump's done 3 (presumably, somewhere) and tried 9. 4 or 6 is what people often hear by "stolen election", but I haven't seen evidence for it.

But whether any election's stolen depends on which of those (and there are probably more debateable types of maybe election theft) exactly is a stolen election.

"1" seems to completely normal political campaigning. E.g., The Hillary Clinton email server thing.

Sure, many would agree. But I've seen this as a way that people have claimed the election was stolen without having to endorse the stronger claims, so I wanted to be sure I included it.

"1" seems to completely normal political campaigning. E.g., The Hillary Clinton email server thing.

Isn't this now, according to the bases on which Trump was convicted, illegal election fraud?

1 was poorly written. It should say allegedly neutral alphabet agencies instead of people.

And that is not normal.

"Actors" includes both. Perhaps I could have split it, fair enough.

We write on a free posting site. I think Tomato knew what you meant anyhow (just as I was pretty sure I knew what you meant)

The republican FBI director famously announced that the FBI was investigating Hillary Clinton's emails a week and a half before the 2016 election.

  • -12

And then famously despite Clinton committing obvious destruction of evidence under subpoena said FBI director invented a new standard to not charge Clinton.

It depends on the scale. For a claim of large-magnitude manipulation (skewing the popular vote by 5% or more), I'd take a plausible scenario how it could be done, corroborated by a significant number of eyewitness accounts from people who do not directly stand to benefit from the claim being proven true (in particular, disqualifying dedicated members of the party alleging manipulation to its disadvantage). Of course, this does leave the possibility that your party should have 55% of the vote but the other 45% have formed a unified block that will falsify the result while agreeing to keep it secret, but this in itself (almost complete absence of people who are not in the affected party, involved with the electoral process and would testify to manipulation they observed) seems like a very surprising scenario. Sure you could in turn concoct a conspiratorial scenario in which principled paper pushers do not exist and they all merely pretend in public that they would execute their role according to its description, and so on, but then increasingly your gap scenario will just look like an alternative model of reality on the algorithmic complexity level of a religion.

For a claim of smaller-scale manipulation (like a 0.5% skew that flips the result), evidence gets harder to come by (and to begin with, how would you even prove that any 0.5% manipulation against you that you presented evidence for was not outweighed by 1% manipulation for you that you didn't present evidence for?), but I'm also finding it harder to consider such cases a "stolen election". Elections shouldn't be sports contests, even if some people feel about them that way; for a country to be governed by the whims of 49.5% instead of the whims of 50.5% does not feel like a terrific delta-injustice. To begin with, this puts us in the range where an election could be "stolen" by adverse weather in a few large metro areas. Either way, this is not the order of magnitude that I expect the parent poster to be wrong by - apparently in 2016 both candidates received around 60 million votes, so he probably will wind up having to assert manipulation on the order of 20+%, based on nothing but the feeling that everyone he knows is extremely outraged about the conviction and so an approximate fifty-fifty can't possibly be representative.

The establishment understands this, and is thus why they attack him with a wholly unparalleled ferocity

It’s less mindblowing than what happened to JFK.

The Republicans hired Lee Harvey Oswald?

I wouldn't know, but its always fair to ask Cui Bono. In the case of LBJ getting to decide what to do in Vietnam, warhawks got prettymuch exactly what they wanted, and the resulting political unrest provided a solid tentpole for Nixon.

Obviously the assassination of kennedy has enough question marks that an entire cottage industry spawned around explaining it, but it doesnt seem like it was orchestrated by people with leftist goals.

but it doesnt seem like it was orchestrated by people with leftist goals.

Since Fidel Castro figures as the person who ordered it in some of the theories, I don't think that's necessarily true. The (Soviet) KGB is also a common suspect.

There's not one person in this country who has decided this is the moment to hop off the fence, "Okay, now I won't vote for the man." Farcical.

Trump had been immune to a lot of these things so far, but I'm really hoping this moves the needle for the less-engaged crowd, however slim that wedge is. We'll know more about the actual impact after the next group of polls I guess.

There's not one person in this country who has decided this is the moment to hop off the fence, "Okay, now I won't vote for the man."

That's exactly what a number of Alaskan Republican voters did when Ted Stevens was railroaded, so I don't see why I shouldn't expect at least some of them to do the same with respect to Trump. After all, "Taking the high road" is the only thing that separates us from them, you see. We're the party of Law and Order, and only a Leftist would vote for a felon, so therefore anyone who votes for a felon has ceased to be One Of Us and has become The Enemy. Better to lose while keeping your Sacred Values than to damn your immortal soul to eternal hellfire for a mere election.

Nobody except Twitterati resistance libs takes this trial seriously. Anybody with the faintest glimmer of a possibility of voting for trump thinks it’s a political prosecution at best and third world country bullshit more likely.

Nobody except Twitterati resistance libs takes this trial seriously.

Do you include former GOP state governors Asa Hutchinson and Larry Hogan (the latter running as the R candidate for Maryland's Senator) in the "Twitterati resistance lib" category?

Yes

Donald Trump is the idol of a cult of personality bewitching a third of the country, whose every utterance compels the leaders of the free world ever more openly to complete madness, running against a backdrop of reignited multipolar geopolitical conflicts, collapsing middle-class living standards, allegedly stolen elections and entrapped so-called insurrectionists, unbridled millions invading undefended US borders, schools erasing children's concept of gender, worldwide lockdowns, and mandatory population-wide experimental injections.

Ted Stevens is "series of tubes" guy.

Ted Stevens did not trigger existential crisis in a low-stakes, functionally-irrelevant, 90% Republican-voting state, therefore disenfranchising a third of the country by holding show trials for the most polarizing man in American history will provoke no more than eyerolls from the median Republican voter, because the median Republican voter is a holier-than-thou asshole who will cut off his nose to spite his face? Have you just emerged from a coma? The non-RINO Christian Right is framing this "mere election" as the final turnaround on the highway to the Downfall of Western Civilization. Despite all his character flaws, Donald Trump is not immanentizing the eschaton. He is an avatar of all of the insults suffered at the hands of the Elite, and with every sling cast upon him, it becomes clearer what lawlessness they will embrace to render him powerless, and how trivially they could trample over people like us who don't have a billion dollars and a TV show and buildings with our names on them. When the alternative is writing a blank cheque to godless, lawless evil, it turns out God will forgive you a vote for a felon; man's laws are not God's laws, render unto Caesar, etc.

Nobody stood up for Ted Stevens, because Ted Stevens was a nobody who stood for nothing. Trump is the last man standing. And if they bring him down, and the only ones left are sneering subservient RINO elite wannabees and a lawless brigade that makes its living destroying the lives and livelihoods of middle class Americans on principle... Well, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.

Well, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.

Man, what the heck are you talking about? Americans have never been richer, had higher incomes, had more political and economic freedoms. The job market has been stronger-for-longer than it has in years. Inequality is on a downward trend. Things are incredible right now. Whose boot is stamping on whose face??

If tiktok zoomers entering the real world for the first time, and wanna be coal miners instating on a maintaining a antiquated fantasy instead of getting a real job in a real city think things are bad now, wait until we get a normal economy.

  • -11

Every single metric you listed as being "incredible" right now is material and even that is only pertinent to the economic elite. Wage earner's buying power is going down and they are uninterested in your exploding portfolio.

You don't understand Trump voter's social grievances. All you think about is number go up. This election is bigger than that.

The non-RINO Christian Right

A minority, and a shrinking demographic.

sneering subservient RINO elite wannabees

I also object strenuously to the use of the term "RINO" to characterize the GOP establishment. Because there's nothing "in name only" about them. Indeed, it's quite clear to me that — regardless of what GOP voters may want or think the party stands for — they are the Republican Party. Being a "RINO" "sellout" Outer Party fake-opposition is what the Republican Party is, what it has been for a long time. It's populist outsiders like Trump — and the sizable fraction of voters who support them — who are really Republicans "in name only."

it becomes clearer what lawlessness they will embrace to render him powerless, and how trivially they could trample over people like us who don't have a billion dollars and a TV show and buildings with our names on them.

Which is why we're going to lose. They can and will simply "trample over" all of us, and there's nothing we can do about it.

When the alternative is writing a blank cheque to godless, lawless evil

"But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also."

I've been told repeatedly that Christians are not promised worldly political victory, but that they will be handed over to be persecuted, that they will be killed, and that they will be hated by all (see Matthew 24:9). That the right must understand that, per Tolkien, history will only ever be "a long defeat" and that the only victory to be had is in the next life, by sticking to our values unwaveringly even unto torture and martyrdom; that one should indeed willingly embrace said martyrdom like so many saints of old.

Back at the old place, Hlynka argued that it was precisely this embrace of "principled defeat" in this life for the sake of the next that defines "right wing" and separates it from the left, and thus only those who believe in an afterlife can be on the right; and that, regardless of their political positions, atheists are all automatically "left wing" by definition.

And if they bring him down

There's no "if" about it.

the only ones left are sneering subservient RINO elite wannabees and a lawless brigade that makes its living destroying the lives and livelihoods of middle class Americans on principle... Well, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.

Yes, I agree with that. That is what's going to happen. It's inevitable, and there's nothing anybody can do to stop it.

Death is the only escape.

Are you Christian?

Are you Christian?

No, but most of the "normie Republicans" I know are (at least in a nominal "Christmas and Easter" sense). And I'm repeating the arguments some of them give (over and over) for why it's better for Republicans to "stick to our values" and keep losing than to "descend to our enemy's level" by retaliating tit-for-tat. They like to quote Mark 8:36 a lot.

I, personally, am one of those atheist right-wingers that Hlynka claimed doesn't exist.

I wouldn’t know. I think it was Michelle Obama who lamented to Barack that the left was too committed to going high when the right went low. Now the situation is perceived to be reversed. It seems there is something in both tents that suggests principles. I’ve never heard about them. I don’t think they exist.

It is fully possible for a muscular Christian narrative to assert itself alongside the tit-for-tat plays of the right.

Michelle's comments were funny at the time, given that the contemporary Democratic/media strategy was to regularly accuse or insinuate opposition to the Obama administration was based on racism, even as the Obama administration employed political machine politics at the national level. It was very consistent with assuming a posture of moral superiority while simultaneously going low.

I'll second at least the sentiment that RINO is almost always wrong as an appelative. (And am sympathetic to much of the rest.)

For some reason, your reference to Toilken makes me think of the fall of Gondlin. Yesterday felt like that to me.

Back at the old place, Hlynka argued that it was precisely this embrace of "principled defeat" in this life for the sake of the next that defines "right wing" and separates it from the left, and thus only those who believe in an afterlife can be on the right

This is an interesting idea, and it's the best and most coherent version of the Hlynkian thesis that I've seen. (I don't recall ever seeing this exact formulation in any of his own posts, at any rate - if you have a link I'd appreciate it.)

if you have a link I'd appreciate it

Afraid not; it was years ago and over on Reddit (which I find terrible to try to search).

Trump is the last man standing

Sometimes, like right now, I get the strangest urge to create a sure-selling T shirt.

I’ll only say this; That was a very long time ago, in a very different time politically for the US. Not only is the GOP different now to the point of almost being unrecognizable, so are independent voters and what they want.

I live in a deep blue area, but I know a ton of red tribers, mostly undercover like me. My experience is largely the same; this Los being perceived as lawfare even amongst less politically engaged independents, and has only strengthened support for trump as the anti-establishment force that he is perceived as being. Which is almost entirely a positive; red tribe “establishment” types have been almost entirely hollowed out and might as well be democrats at this point.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats