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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The thing is, I think people on the Motte are overall going to be more charitable to Biden than the average normie voter, even if we don’t like him. Because we have access to a much less tightly controlled info-space. We’ve probably all seen a bunch of compilations of his sentences turning into gibberish, or him talking about how he’s just met a world leader that’s been dead for twenty years, or having to be physically turned around at an event because he’s facing the wrong way. To us, his debate performance would seem about normal, better than average for him even. For most people it’s not like that. If you’re a not particularly plugged-in liberal, your only exposure to him is two State of the Union addresses that he was drilled on for months and read off a teleprompter, and carefully edited CNN clips of his best moments, where he seems quite bright and energetic. For those people, to see him in an unscripted environment and notice that he really does occasionally have trouble finishing his sentences, and sometimes loses his train of thought is very shocking and disturbing.
Do you really think people have higher exposure to positively-edited CNN clips, more so than negatively-edited TikTok clips? I don't think that's accurate at all. I think most people have seen more clips, and causal conversations with many conservatives not uncommonly turns up at least one reference to Biden losing it, in my personal experience, so I imagine that's similar for others in swing states.
Conservative voters are obviously more likely to have seen videos and discussion of Biden falling, freezing up, or talking incoherently (whether fairly edited or not). Liberal and swing voters, otoh, are much more likely to have only seen positive coverage, which is why they are currently freaking out about Biden’s performance.
I wonder how many of them are putting 2 and 2 together (ie the republicans said Biden was mentally unfit, the media told us they were lying, but Biden clearly is mentally unfit ergo the media was lying).
Sadly, I'm sure most will reach for a relief valve against cognitive dissonance; they'll claim it's a recent development. If anything, they might end up blaming conservatives because their unprincipled claims for years that Biden was unfit made them ignore his actual decline when it happened.
As someone who hasn’t been paying much attention, when did the mental decline happen then? Because Biden seems much more declined compared to 2020
Edit: this commenter suggests that it is in fact a relatively recent development https://www.themotte.org/post/1054/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/224758?context=8#context
I haven't seen a qualitative change in recent times, I've seen footage of unfocussness similar to the debate for the last 4 years, but I think they were rare episodes 4 years ago, and since the beginning of the year it's more like the baseline with rare instances of focus.
More options
Context Copy link
Biden has been gaffe-prone his entire life. But I believe there's been an increasing chorus of voices talking about something adjacent to early stages of dementia starting around the beginning of this year. Sorry, no specific citations, just my general impression from listening to lots of news and pundits.
Whether Biden actually has dementia is an interesting question. I have known a number of elderly people through the entire dementia-related decline, in situations both very fast (like a year/18 months) and much slower, where the decline happened over more like a decade.
The way Biden speaks and acts during his muddled, confused phases like in the debate isn’t very similar to what I saw in those people. I know we have actual doctors here who probably have more experience with older patients with cognitive degeneration, but to my mind it doesn’t seem like dementia specifically. It almost seems like what happens when I’ve seen people on very powerful painkillers or downer drugs and they just kind of become incoherent. Dementia in the early stages often looks much more like very confident, almost angry restating of incorrect truths (“Stan is dead? Stop bullshitting me, I saw him yesterday for breakfast”), but not grammatically incorrect or mumbling or trailing off really, just memory loss.
Biden seems able to remember near-term facts to some degree, even if he sometimes muddles them up. But the sentence trailing and incoherency would typically come long after memory-related decline became MUCH more obvious and frequent than it currently is for Biden.
Whether you call it "dementia" or "age related cognitive impairment" is irrelevant. Pretty clearly something changed since 4 years ago. It's hard to notice because ablity to read a teleprompter is an extremely low hurdle to clear. I was just commenting that noticeably more people started saying the emperor had no clothes earlier this spring, rather than just the right-wing political hacks who've been saying it for years. I'm thinking specifically of the Wall Street Journal and Special Counsel Robert Hur.
Despite fumbling the beginning and ending, Biden had a legitimately pretty good 30-minute stretch in the middle. I suspect he was given a shot of something good, but the timing was too close to the start of the debate. There are a lot of nootropic-interested people on this board. I should ask if this sounds congruent with any cognitive performance enhancing drug.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What do you think about all of the breathless reporting about Democrat insiders losing their shit over this?
Are those people not plugged in or constantly hyper-consuming political information including full speech readouts, press releases, presidential daily schedules, Politico inside scoops etc?
For what it is worth he was worse last night than when I saw him speak live a few weeks ago. Illness, stress and lack of rest can exacerbate age related decline pretty quickly, I've seen it happen in literal days when I worked in social care. UTI's and cold/flu being the most usual culprits.
And if you actually have exposure to him it's possible he was coming across reasonably well in lower stress situations, with less time to have to speak. That plus bias towards your own side would do a lot of heavy lifting.
Most of my contacts are in British politics not American, but a couple of them actually met Biden fairly recently and were shocked to see the difference last night as well, which indicates that perhaps something did get worse in the immediate past.
More options
Context Copy link
I think they thought they could hide his decline.
More options
Context Copy link
I think a lot of them have fallen into the trap of believing their own propaganda, that Biden's apparent frailty and incoherence were merely Republican propaganda brought out by misconstruing events and taking clips out of context.
They did the same thing with Hillary Clinton; the Republicans swore she was ill, Democrats swore this was foul calumny, then Hillary collapsed at the 9/11 memorial. (Obviously her illness, whatever it was, was considerably less serious)
More options
Context Copy link
I think those people have been in quite a lot of struggle sessions where the very suggestion that Biden might be a little bit over-the-hill is laughable Drumphist propaganda and if you humor that idea it’s a sign that you may be a dangerous racist sexist fascist who needs to be voted off the island. But now they have a moment where the conditioning is broken by intense public ridicule and the scales fall off.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link