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Notes -
That argument is a strawman, the real argument is [the same argument].
There are plenty of posters in this thread arguing that Biden might have looked old, but he still won because blarglemumkas. Likewise, I watched the debate with (conservative) friends who said things like, "That argument doesn't work on me, but I bet it plays great with normies!" These are all rationalizations. I want to remove the word "normie" from our vocabulary. I want to stop analyzing how some hypothetical person who doesn't exist might have reasoned. (To the extent that "normies" exist, they reason in a million idiosyncratic and personal ways.)
My position is that this substance is style, that these political facts-and-figures arguments are not real, that discussing these things are an empty trap. It doesn't matter what Biden (or Trump) said as much as how he said it: the substance is style, the style is the real substance. I think much of the discussion here is focused on the wrong half of the debate. I think it's masturbatory. And I'm not impressed by the argument that, of course it's jerking off, that's what we're here for.
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