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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29974 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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Exhibit 0: Biden himself talked about his debate the next day. Are we supposed to be impressed about telling right from wrong? That he knows how to do the job he's been in for four years? These are not reasons to be elected President again, they are basic pre-requisites. For that matter, "speaking smoothly" and "walking" might actually be core requirements as well.

While that may be true. It’s clear he was contrasting himself with his opponent. He’s saying Trump doesn’t satisfy these basic requirements but he does.

If you're in a job interview, and you say something like "well sure maybe I'm a bad writer, but at least I know how to work a computer!" it doesn't really help you very much, even if the other applicants in fact are bad at computers. If you are responding to allegations about your age by... uh, confirming allegations about your age, and bringing up a different point, that's just mutual destruction, it doesn't actually help you much. I mean clearly in his worldview everyone has a binary choice, so if it truly were zero-sum, he'd be making a smart point. However, that's not how elections work, and especially not this one. Turnout is a thing.

And in fact more broadly, people have been debating whether it would be better to have an incompetent but moral leader, or a competent but immoral leader for a long time, it's a core philosophical debate. Hanging your whole strategy on appealing exclusively to people both a) accepting this framework and then on top of that b) preferring the former of the two is not a winning recipe. Both of those assumptions are very shaky! I know a fair number of people who actually do prefer a competent narcissist over a useless do-gooder due to the stability, and hope that the economy will be better with the trade-off.

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