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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28505 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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The presidential debate is on right now. I was somewhat skeptical of the Biden age narrative, but wow, he sounds awful. It's literally like he walked out of a nursing home. I suppose I should say something about the substance, but it's almost superfluous fluff at this point. Tariffs won't raise prices? Come on. Biden says fewer obviously false things, but that's mainly because he doesn't make as many factual assertions that could be falsified.

I feel dirty watching this. Trump is wiping the floor with Biden simply because he can string together multiple syntactically correct sentences on a single topic without stammering. For the first time I now believe Trump will win the election.

I think Biden probably said more false things (eg Charlottesville, Suckers and Losers, bleach). Trump was making a prediction re tariffs that the overall impact of tariffs coupled with his other policies will bring prices down. He didn’t get into it on the debate but on the all in podcast he noted he would make tariffs reciprocal so that perhaps his policy might bring down prices overall.

The biggest whopper for me was the idea that Roe was hugely constitutionally popular amongst legal scholars at the time it was decided which is a complete anachronism.

The post-debate spin/cope that "sure, Biden was incoherent, but that's because he cares about the truth while Trump just lies!" is so absurd. I am sure that Trump told lies, like "millions of illegals coming from prisons and mental asylums". I don't actually know that it's false, but it seems like it couldn't possibly be true or well-sourced.

On the other hand, Biden's claim that Trump said people should inject bleach to cure COVID is something I have personally investigated and know to be false. I view Biden's lie as more damaging, because it is not an obvious exaggeration or hyperbole, it's just a false statement about what Trump said about COVID.

A different media would be screaming about Biden's repeated claim that billionaires only pay 8.2% in tax, because it is basically a lie, but no, it's okay because some think tank did a study where they counted unrealized capital gains as income and came up with that figure.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal is bizarrely insisting on fact-checking what they call Trump's "false claim that 'every legal scholar' wanted Roe v. Wade overruled". While I think Trump said "every serious legal scholar", which of course allows him to no-true-scotsman the statement into being true, but also, could any viewer seriously think that Trump was saying every single person who studied Roe v. Wade thought it should be overruled?

I've long been uncomfortable with the media consensus that Trump's lies are out of proportion to any other politician, and I think the treatment of this debate provides a great example. If there is a difference, it is that Trump's lies tend to be "bullshit", claims that both he and we know aren't literally or precisely true, but express some true feeling, whereas Biden's lies masquerade as careful, reasoned analysis.

Yep. For example on Roe, at the time it was decided it was heavily panned. Many legal scholars thought (and think) the legal logic of Roe was shitty even if they agreed with the outcome (including famously RBG). Trump exaggerated this claim and could’ve been clearer but was directionally right. Biden’s response was the more mendacious one confusing the legal principle with the outcome—another poster pointed out Joe didn’t make this same mistakes years ago.

Another whopper I found hilarious was when Biden said if he could just raise taxes on billlionares he could pay down the debt and do about a million things. He noted his plan would raise 500b over ten years. We are currently spending every 100 days about 1t in deficit. That is, his revenue over 10 years would pay for 50 days of spending. This was a massive lie! The biggest lie of the evening. It was both factually wrong and contextually wrong. Everyone should be jumping up and down saying “this is BS.” Instead, we get quibbling over whether Trump really had the biggest tax cuts in history or the best economy (when in both cases it was clear Trump meant they were big and good).

Should Trump be more precise? Yeah I guess. But his meaning is clear and frequently comports with the truth. Biden on the other lies especially when you think through the context.

Here’s a clip of Joe Biden making the exact point Trump did last night regarding Roe V Wade: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1806541264776565119

Great link also because it shows what Biden's stutter actually looked like - a temporary trip over a word or phrase, followed by punching through it to complete the thought.

That was not what happened last night. Sentences, thoughts, whole themes were randomly picked up and dropped off like a bus driver at burning man.

Biden is old, his speech and stance and movement shows it much more than Trump does, and it's basically negligent for democrats to not replace him, or have already replaced him. With that said - Biden did not sound anywhere this bad a few months* ago, or a few weeks ago. If he had, "we" would have noticed when reporters asked Biden a few questions , like we noticed in the first minutes of the debate. Yes, he's mostly repeating prepared remarks in those videos, but he was doing plenty of that during the debate, and he was not any better while doing so. I believe claims that he was sick, and that fucked up his voice and otherwise degraded his performance, being sick often does really lower one's capabilities. It's still objectively bad that he's old enough being sick brings him down here, but this is not a median Biden performance.

* - this is the source of the 'president of mexico, sisi' quote. But people fuck up important words sometimes. I did so twice today. One of the CNN hosts did so too.

Again he should still pull out, but people are swinging too far with the crowd on their assessments of the facts.

The question is if they have given a dementia patient the nuclear codes. Either they have taken the nukes away from the president which means the president isn't actually in charge or a dementia patient is controlling the nukes. Both are bad options.

I'd be more worried about a dementia patient failing to launch nukes than doing so accidentally. People with dementia act bizarrely but not randomly.

Do you think the president was literally controlling the nukes before?

Eisenhower probably had a great deal of personal power over them. It has probably declined since then.

Eisenhower probably had a lot of personal power in that if he deliberately ordered the nukes launched, they'd be launched. But there were still a lot of other people in the chain, from him to the top brass to the commanders at the silos to the actual key-turners. There's pretty much no way he could have had a "senior moment" and launched the nukes. Same goes for Biden.

In the course of a week /r/neoliberal has flipped from smugly poo-pooing anyone questioning the mental fitness of Biden to accepting that he needs to be replaced immediately. Given that the subreddit for better or for worse captures the demographic of who runs the Democratic Party, I think that's a telling sign itself.

There can be few things in life as crushing as getting what you really wanted. Well this was what they wanted.

POLITICO headline: ‘Biden is toast’: Democrats are in full freakout over the president's debate performance.

I think it's a little hyperbolic, but at least one Democrat texted POLITICO that they thought Dems needed an open convention. I'm very glad I reserved judgement about his fitness for the debate.

We'll see what happens after people sleep on it. There've been rumblings before and, over time, people accepted the fait accompli. Happened with Trump too after the Access Hollywood tape and other issues.

Wow. And I just checked this is an accurate headline. Sometimes you should bet on obvious things. I have no idea why betting markets have been close to 50-50. Every Wall Street analyst or hedge fund manager has said Trump 100% wins. I thought it was obvious at this point. Nothing happened tonight I didn’t expect.

Keep in mind that this debate was abnormally early, and Biden and Trump only have one more to go. It’s quite possible that most liberal and swing voters mostly forget about last night by November. If Biden has a better performance in the next debate, that could swing things back the other way too.

https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-the-2024-US-presidential-election

Wow... Gavin Newsom is up 12 cents TO BECOME PRESIDENT.

Weird since you'd think Harris would take precedent even with her unpopularity.

Every single person on the CNN panel are saying this was a disaster. "Democrats are panicking".

I'm not normally one for being suspicious, but... reddit /r/politics post-debate thread isn't showing any comments because of a "reddit error"...

I'm not normally one for being suspicious

Why? What would it take, at this point, to convince you that massively centralized services abuse their position to control discourse?

It's about the mechanisms and people, plus a dash of incentives. I find it hard to believe that some higher-up at reddit saw "oh that was a bad debate for Biden, better censor" and then ordered an employee to deliberately break their code for an hour. That's a lot of steps, very blatant, and doesn't fit my model for typically how censorship works in practice. Reddit censorship typically takes other forms, and institutionally, is usually incentivized to have more discussion/reactions in their threads, not less. A political agenda that's too explicit runs contrary to their profit-seeking motives, especially in an election year. They normally take action more to appease investors and make the platform avoid political headaches, especially along the left. My normal expectation for how reddit would censor debate stuff would be long-standing suspicions about manipulation of the voting algorithm and upvote displays. Or, institutional/organizational behavior around moderator selections or actions. However, I am a bit more open in this case because it seemed so abnormally timed. At least I don't typically remember threads breaking all of the sudden.

I find it hard to believe that some higher-up at reddit saw "oh that was a bad debate for Biden, better censor" and then ordered an employee to deliberately break their code for an hour. That's a lot of steps, very blatant, and doesn't fit my model for typically how censorship works in practice.

I've been hearing these arguments about Twitter shadowbanning, until some leaked screenshots showed that their mods literally have an entire frontend for various forms of throttling. In fact I kept hearing that argument well after those screenshots came out, because some people didn't get the memo.

A political agenda that's too explicit runs contrary to their profit-seeking motives, especially in an election year. They normally take action more to appease investors

A lot of these SocMeds were running at a loss for years. Twitter never made profit IIRC, Google keeps dumping money into YouTube, Amazon into Twitch, etc. There's no evidence that the primary motivation for running these services is profit, it's a claim repeated purely as an article of faith, that helps dismiss concerns over corporate interference in public discourse.

Reddit very specifically just had an IPO which is usually an especially profit-driven time for a company, even one that doesn't normally care. That's like an universal law. One single bad reveal can tank the stock price, and they are usually on the lookout for things to juice their numbers.

Twitter of course has throttle power, that's the nature of twitter, and sometimes they want to suppress things for good, good-adjacent, or legal reasons. And yes, probably sometimes bad reasons. But my expectation is that normally any Twitter employee who is caught manipulating a political hashtag they don't like and for partisan reasons alone would be fired very quickly. I'm also not sure why people would think shadowbanning doesn't exist. We were pretty sure it did, and ditto for reddit, but Twitter and Reddit work a little differently when it comes to how users engage with the platform. Again, reddit normally does any censorship on a mod or structural level, even social media companies more generally aren't very blatant or wide-ranging in their bias. For example, TikTok is thought to suppress pro-Palestinian content, but even that kind of makes sense, because a lot of the news is depressing and makes people mad and, at least beyond a certain threshold, that's bad for user retention and engagement. They don't completely shut down the conversation, either. So yeah, I'm not saying social medias don't lean on the conversations. But they are normally a little more nuanced about it. Another example of how reddit might be biased: they would simply take greater aggregate inaction on bot-like accounts that happened to be pro-Biden. This is an example of where the interests align: leadership political views, and juiced user numbers. Contrast this with an outage at a high-volume time in a high-volume sub, and it seems unlikely. Still plausible though!

Reddit very specifically just had an IPO which is usually an especially profit-driven time for a company, even one that doesn't normally care. That's like an universal law. One single bad reveal can tank the stock price, and they are usually on the lookout for things to juice their numbers.

And yet they still haven't made a single dime of profit in the entirety of their existence. I repeat: the "profit driven" nature of our system generally, or these companies specifically, is an article of faith. Every decision they make is justified with "they're just trying to make profit", even when their actions cause profits to drop. The whole idea is just a "lens" to view the world through, that can explain away any set of facts you throw at it. It's completely unfalsifiable.

and sometimes they want to suppress things for good, good-adjacent, or legal reasons. And yes, probably sometimes bad reasons.

I see no reason to believe they do it primarily for good-ish reasons. If nothing else, power corrupts so we should be extremely weary of giving so much of it to so few.

But my expectation is that normally any Twitter employee who is caught manipulating a political hashtag they don't like and for partisan reasons alone would be fired very quickly.

Now that Elon owns it, maybe, though I wouldn't oversell it. Before that? You have to be joking. The entirety of Twitter had the same progressive left ideology. No one would get fired for partisan throttling, because everyone higher up the chain held the same preferences and would agree what was being throttled is racist harmful disinformation, or whatever. No one ever got fired for that, let alone "very quickly".

I'm also not sure why people would think shadowbanning doesn't exist

It was commonly referred to as a conspiracy theory, until the evidence became undisputable.

We were pretty sure it did, and ditto for reddit, but Twitter and Reddit work a little differently when it comes to how users engage with the platform.

Sure. So the exact mechanism of throttling will be different. I don't have a strong opinion on how they do it, but I'd agree with the heuristic you mentioned earlier: suspicious timing is suspicious.

We have good reason to be suspicious. There's no way this is a coincidence.

Reddit frequently has these kind of issues, especially at high-traffic times. It might not be a coincidence in the sense that a presidential debate could put the servers on the fritz, but I highly doubt it's some kind of nefarious conspiracy.

Things are broken all over reddit, /r/neoliberal threads aren't working. The most functional conversation I'm seeing is in /r/pics

"Joe Biden holding a "Dark Brandon's Secret Sauce" can before the first 2024 presidential debate"

Fuck neoliberal. They banned me for being an origional Milton Friedman reading, Pinochet backing, University of Chicago neoliberal.

I checked that sub yesterday and the top threads were Chomsky dicksucking and a copy-paste from /r/fuckcars. Whatever it was at one point, it got eaten and shat back out by redditism worse than /r/ssc

I'm actually really curious to see the media headlines tomorrow. I like fact checks, don't get me wrong, even if they aren't always even-handed. But if fact checks are on top of the news feed, and not anything about such an abysmal, horrifically bad performance, I will be have some major doubts about the media environment.

It is current year plus nine, we don't need to wait until tomorrow.

Nyt: "Biden Struggles as Trump Blusters in Contentious Debate"

Wapo: "Biden struggles, Trump deflects questions"

No, you break out "embattled" for this one. I know it's only prescribed for when politicians you like are caught with dead/teen prostitutes, but surely someone has a stash.

Trump is the most comfortable on stage by far. He is a natural extrovert and is more cognizant and cohesive compared to Biden and is able to react on stage. Biden is struggling on memory recall and projecting his voice. His posture and tone are much worse than Trump, and he seems to repeat talking points rather than reacting to the live debate.

They're both is beginning to burn out, hours of live debate are HARD. Trump is still doing better but he's getting stuck repeating and rehashing old topics, when he can use the new topics to his advantage to push on Biden's weaker office performances.

This is elder abuse. I wonder if seeing Trump beat up on an addled old man with a cold will turn off some voters.

Biden has improved since the beginning, but probably the best thing Democratic partisans can take from this debate is the hope that everyone will forget it by November.

Trump is only three years younger than Biden

People can age differently - and when decline comes it can come very fast. Biden wasn't like this two years ago.

The years count more very early on or very late.

I compared photos of my father from today and last year. Had to pretend I needed the bathroom so he didn't wonder why I was crying.

They should let the man rest. I wouldn't wish this on anyone. (Not getting sentimental, would just make it quick)

And you don't know when things are going to rapidly take a turn for the worse.

Every presidential debate in history has been held in September or October. Who's idea was it to depart from precedent? Donald Trump seems eager to debate any time any place, so the choice was up to Joe Biden and his team. Did the Democratic Party leadership pressure Biden into this unique arrangement as a final test to see whether he will become the Democratic presidential nominee?

According to the NPR clip I heard this morning, Biden pushed for this early debate because they needed some play to reverse the fading in the polls.

Nate Silver thinks it was because they wanted to leave time for Biden to recover if the debate goes bad. I will never doubt him again

Nate Silver thinks it was because they wanted to leave time for Biden to recover if the debate goes bad. I will never doubt him again

Or to throw open the convention and replace him with a Democrat with no baggage and no need to satisfy the Democratic base in the primaries. They can pick a tailor-made Trump-beater. Or they could pick Harris I suppose, which I think would not go well for them.

This is the most plausible non-conspiracy theory.

The most plausible conspiracy theory is that Democrat insiders knew (for some time now) that Biden is mentally unfit so wanted to do an early debate in order to have an open convention / orchestrated new ticket introduction. Based on the immediate pivot to that by, at least, CNN, I have to say I'm not so sure about it being a conpiracy theory anym--Epstien didn't kill himself!

My bet is that Biden and team knew it would be bad and wanted the debates to be lost in memory by the time the election rolled around.

I think the practical answer is that the primaries wrapped up way sooner than normal. The second is set for Sept 10, which isn't too odd. But Biden's team did say only two debates, Trump pushed for more, which does say something. Also, there is the VP debate in between, in August. Edit: No actually, no October debate is super weird. I think you may be right.

You say that — and I don’t doubt that’s how it came across (not watching the debate). But I’m also seeing on /r/politics, threads, etc that Biden partisans are crowing about some apparent Trump gaffes.

So my feeling here is, baring one of them having a complete meltdown, it’s pretty much all ready priced in that both are going to produce some cringeworthy takes the other side can point to but on the whole it’s very likely not gonna move the needle one way or the other.

EDIT: actually I take this back. Even some of the most mind killed democrat partisans i follow on X are saying this is really bad for Biden. I still can’t bring myself to watch but I’ll take their word for it.

EDIT: actually I take this back. Even some of the most mind killed democrat partisans i follow on X are saying this is really bad for Biden. I still can’t bring myself to watch but I’ll take their word for it.

People I watched it with mostly ranted about how Trump was lying, there should be fact checking, etc.

But man, Biden was bad. Democrats could have gone with literally anybody and it would have been orders of magnitude better. I don't see how anybody can watch that and come away claiming that Biden 'won' the debate.

I just checked CNN to see what the fuss was about and their talking heads were discussing whether Biden will step down as a nominee after this. If CNN isn’t even trying to spin it as a Biden win…well, it must have been a bloodbath.

EDIT: Correction, I was watching NBC, which is even worse for the Democrats.

CNN went full hyperventilating nerd.

Van Jones was crying.

The stupid things that Trump is saying are exactly the same things that he has been saying for the last 4-10 years. Biden did not look or sound this bad in 2020. I went back and checked. Trump looks and sounds exactly like he did in 2020.

Trump also has the 'advantage' that for many his skeptics, his brain getting eaten by RFK's worm is not necessarily worse. Trump being moderated by his staff versus Biden moderating his staff sorta thing.

He looks and sounds the same, but I feel like he was more coherent back then. Now it feels like i'm listening to an AI bot that randomly strings together some of Trump's catchphrases- "failing magazine! best economy, maybe ever! i'll solve it all immediately by making a deal!" without even an attempt at logic.

He missed multiple chances to really hammer Biden on specific lies (e.g. he could have used Snopes' debunking of the "very fine people" thing better here - just ask people to Google it!).

He's a bit lost in space too, he just has a functioning tether.

The most embarrassing moment in the history of our country.

The debate, I mean.

It's somehow better than 2020 with the changes to the structure so Trump can't interrupt Biden every 2 minutes like a five year old.

So probably second most embarrassing moment of our country...it's shameful that this is what the rest of the world will see.

The moderation and format were both excellent, I felt. I think leaving fact checking and challenges to the media afterward, or the candidate on-stage, is the better way to go, and I felt each candidate had plenty of time to make their case.

I agree, I think this format worked well and should be the standard going forward. Kudos to CNN for not thinking that people shouting over each other = interesting.

I mean it seemed like a really well run debate by... recent western world standards. The participants were a big problem, but I don't think we can (directly) put that on CNN!

Don't worry, November 5th is likely to supersede it.

When Biden flubbed the answer early on, I don't know if you saw, and ended with "we beat Medicare", and then petered off with a confused look of horror, I was like "holy fucking shit, he lost the election".

The most amazing part of that was the relative restraint with which Trump responded. He actually spun it sort of politely along the lines of "I know you misspoke, but you DID beat medicare."

Biden's opener was insane levels of rambling and shotgunning talking point canned statistics. If he had continued that way, I think you could call it a wash. Especially by the end, Trump got lost in the sauce pretty bad as well.

But Biden's first two answers after his opener were literally convalescent home rambling half-sentences to nowhere. As a rule, I never feel second hand embarrassment for politicians, but I was covering my eyes at that point.

You can just about tell that his handlers spent the last week drilling him on short, efficient answers to questions. Probably made him cue cards and all.

And maybe they even had him getting through full sentences that made grammatical sense.

And it all jumbled together when he was put in the spotlight so he could only half-remember what he was drilled on.

Yeah, that first opener especially. It looked like a kid who crammed all night for like a 6th grade oral presentation and starts off with "George Washington was born into a two room farm house and his dad was also George and his Mom was from England and he had two dogs and they grew corn and sold it in town and his uncle had wooden teeth and King George didn't like Thomas Jefferson's slaves so they decided to have Paul Revere ride across the Delaware River on Christmas to deliver the Gettysburg address to Abraham Lincoln before he was shot on 9/11 by Lee Harvey Oswald. Grover Cleveland was elected twice non-consecutively"

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