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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29816 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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"My ingroup is relentlessly oppressed by the supposedly neutral authorities, who are actually in the pockets of my enemies. The outgroup is highly organized and relentlessly hateful of people like me. If my side loses a battle, that's just further proof that I'm right and the whole thing is rigged. If my side wins a battle, it's also evidence of how right I am because the only way we'd win against such odds is by being twice as correct as the enemies. My side is the victim. It's all a conspiracy rigged against us."

Freddie De Boer recently posted an article on "The Political Era of Paranoid Delusion". It details how both sides have converged on mirroring ideas of victimization and oppression. The names each side uses might be different, but the conclusions are largely similar. It's only 4 paragraphs long, so I'll post the entire thing here:

President Joe Biden was interviewed last night, his first since his much-discussed debate performance. If you check around online, you will find two simultaneous narratives about this interview, passionately held: that the interviewer George Stephanopoulos and his employer ABC News were bent on embarrassing and attacking Biden, and that the interviewer George Stephanopoulos and his employer ABC News were bent on lionizing Biden and papering over his flaws. It was a hit job; it was a puff piece. The questions were unduly harsh; the questions were softballs. They avoided the hardest topics for Biden to discuss, unless they steered directly towards those questions over and over again. Stephanopoulos was too combative, or was he not combative enough? They taped the piece so that they could surreptitiously edit out Biden’s gaffes and stumbles; they designed the lighting so that it would make Biden look sickly and old. And now The Media™ is reacting to the interview by fixating on Biden’s weaknesses, or maybe they’re treating those weaknesses with kid gloves. What both sides are sure of is that, however the fallout from the interview breaks, it breaks because of dirty tricks, because of chicanery, because of a conspiracy against their side. There is no other option, no alternative. If my side loses, ever, the game was rigged. It’s a conspiracy, and they’re all in on it.

If I had to choose between these two tendencies I would obviously have to choose the blue MAGA over the red. Doing so would protect abortion and environmental regulations and the NLRB, among many other things. It’s not a contest, for me. But of course I’d prefer to choose neither. Blue MAGA is very, very real; the paranoid style has spread like a coronavirus from Republicans to Democrats. Put “The New York Times” into the Twitter search bar on any given day and you’ll find relentless, enraged invective coming from Democratic loyalists who insist that the paper of record is on a mission to reelect Donald Trump. They used to laugh at Republicans when they groused about “skewed polls,” but now they do the exact same thing - any poll that emerges that suggests Biden is losing is a conservative op, run by a firm with a well-known Republican bias. Hacks! That Nate Silver, you know, he’s on the Trump payroll. And while this phenomenon is most pronounced on the streets, Democratic elites have embraced it too. Look at Bruce Bartlett, look at Joy Ann Reid, look at Aaron Rupar, look at Josh Marshall, look at Rachel Maddow. They’re all sure: the narrative that we shouldn’t give another four and a half years to Joe Biden, an octogenarian who looks and acts like the 81-year-old he is, can only be the product of corruption. No sincere heart could look at that man on the debate stage with anything but awe and admiration.

Of course, conservatism is now built on a foundation not of Christianity or free markets but on the belief that elites are screwing you, that it’s all a conspiracy against you and your way of life. That is the bedrock. That is the new covenant - paranoia, obsession, revenge. “They’re all out to get you,” says Trumpism, “and I will destroy your enemies.” You don’t even need me to tell you that.

This, it seems, is where we are: two warring political tribes who share the foundational principle that anything that goes wrong for them is the product of a rigged system. Two angry players, too busy working the refs to concentrate on the game, looking for some higher authority to declare that the other side broke the rules. This isn’t fair. They’re breaking the rules. I’m telling the teacher. They’re denying us what we’re owed. Today the parties are united only in their belief that, on a neutral field and playing a clean game, they cannot lose. If a single voter endorses the opposition, their opponents must be cheating. How could it be otherwise? Surely only conspiracy could defeat us. Surely only The Man could pull the wool over the eyes of millions. This was much more of a Republican thing, and I know that people hate any argument that sounds like “both sides.” But both sides, in fact, are now operating this way. The notion that Democrats cannot fail in a clean election, cannot stumble but through illegitimate outside force, is now fully enculturated into the party. They hate Trump so much they’ve adopted his signature contribution to American politics. And I don’t know how you get out of this without violence, at this point. I really don’t.

The article, in an effort to analyze their outgroups pathologies, manages to highlight a different pathology. It's noteworthy in this case since I think it's very much shared by a lot of people around these parts.

Today the parties are united only in their belief that, on a neutral field and playing a clean game, they cannot lose.

The presupposition of a "neutral field" or a "clean game" is pretty much the default hypothesis for every 'centrist' minded person. Just like the 'radicals' seem to chase the unfairness that keeps them from power, the 'moderate' chases the notion of fairness that keeps the 'radicals' out of power.

I don't think there's any sense in trying to gleam some object level truth from these expressions. There are surely plenty of cases where the system was rigged and where the system was not. But these pathological expressions exist all the same. The only folly is presuming that your particular pathology is the cause whenever things matter to you.

Any person who supports persecuting people likes to portray his outgroup as paranoid delusionals while dong so.

I don't buy in the self description of liberals who hostile the right and claim to be moderate neutrals.

De Boer is not an outside participant neither, but like many people saying that stuff, someone who dislike right wingers and openly says he agrees with 90% of the woke.

Fundamentally leftists who dislike right wingers and have some heterodoxies, are both denying and supporting the persecution of the right by an establishment that they are much more friendly towards than the neutral observers they try to portray themselves as.

I wouldn't consider leftists who support the left persecuting the right and oppose right wingers opposing thier persecution, or even acknowledging it, as sufficiently distinct with other leftists who claim that the right is actually persecuting the left.

Both the claim that the left and its tribes are persecuted, and that the right, and whites, conservatives aren't persecuted are wrong.

I understand it is convenient for the left to dismiss through claimed both sidesism, the persecution of the right, but it lacks intellectual merit, and is an example of the problems of how partisanship can breed extremism and denial of reality.

I also highly dislike on any faction, the postmodernist irrationalist dismissal of valid ways of discourse. In general this is lacking intellectual merit and promotes sophistry and postmodernist irrationality. Of course, it is presumptuous to assume that any groups claims are false, or true by default. Which can include complaints of mistreatment.

People who have valid reasons to distrust others because they are out to get them, and people who don't but have a continuous culture of doing just that because such culture has given them gains can get things wrong too. The later far more than a first. Plus, in an election, you are going to get people who interpret things through bias.

There is a journolist. There is both coordination, owners of media who fire employees who don't push the line, and journalists, and a lot of groupthink and conformism and people in the hivemind going along with their bias. Not to mention any influence of intelligence services and intelligence agents including of Israeli intelligence officers. There are networks, donors, and a lot more where the direction is comprehensible.

The bias and influence moves in certain directions, and it isn't a direction that is only for the Democrats. It is possible influential zionists might want Trump to win, for example.

It is more messy than just everything being an anti-right wing plot, but on the general sense, the rightist claim is correct based on the facts and that is dismissed by people who are against the right wingers and motivated by such opposition like De Boer. Significant credit must be given to right wing skepticism and opposition towards those who genuinely are hostile to them. While treating them as paranoid and delusional, and demanding they accept that it isn't happening, is a demand that is actually indecent.

I do find it interesting that whenever I venture into left-wing spaces, they have a very similar mindset to the right-wing ones re:

  • the uniparty is neutering politics, pretending to hold our ideology whilst throwing us under the bus at every opportunity (citing e.g. the lack of long-lasting legal change despite the Floyd riots)
  • even when our guys are popular the moderates in our party close ranks to keep them out (Bernie Sanders, attempted with Jeremy Corbyn)
  • mainstream media lies to build complacency and takes every opportunity to identify us with the worst of our movement (e.g. the /r/antiwork interview, the UK media's treatment of Corbyn)
  • the opposition wants us gone permanently, and any election risks them finally getting enough power to manage it

I think that conservatives have a much stronger leg to stand on here: the illiberal centre is left-wing and actively persecutes right-wingers; the fact that it's not quite left-wing enough for the radicals doesn't fill me with sympathy.

But I think that the paranoia on both sides is basically driven by structural problems:

  1. An oligarchic form of government that is unaffected by election results (the Deep State, the Civil Service)
  2. The professionalisation of politics (almost all politicians come from a very similar and unusual background and are beholden to the Overton window amongst people of that background).
  3. An increasingly weighty cruft of legal systems and regulations that have got ever more tangled and impenetrable over time and prevents movement. This (and the production of 'clients') produces a 'ratchet' model of politics where losses like Brexit are often permanent.
  4. Genuine ethnic and moral tribalism vastly reducing the space of beliefs that are shared by a supermajority of people.

The result is that

"My ingroup is relentlessly oppressed by the supposedly neutral authorities, who are actually in the pockets of my enemies. The outgroup is highly organized and relentlessly hateful of people like me. If my side loses a battle, that's just further proof that I'm right and the whole thing is rigged. If my side wins a battle, it's also evidence of how right I am because the only way we'd win against such odds is by being twice as correct as the enemies. My side is the victim. It's all a conspiracy rigged against us."

is essentially true for anyone except the most anodyne of the centre-Left. It hasn't escaped my notice that much of recent right-wing thought (conflict theory, the long march through the institutions, the Cathedral, who/whom) is very much from a left-wing critical tradition, because they are used to being political outcasts and have more mental tools for dealing with that. Often it literally comes from (former) communists - people like Brendan O'Neill, Peter Hitchens, Freddie de Boer.

I think horseshoe theory is overrated, but dissident/complacent is often a useful axis to go alongside left/right and authoritarian/liberal when you want to model how groups will behave.

I kind of agree with their points, but I feel the overton window is sufficiently skewed towards the Left (along with the Left not really being able to understand the sheer breadth of the political spectrum) that these discussions are being had by like 95th percentile Left people and 40th percentile Right People in the grand scheme of things.

I mean, what are the broadly popular left-aligned ideas which are outside the overton window? Marijuana legalization is the only example I can think of in recent history, but I'm sure there must be other examples.

True. Cultural victory to the point that even the most frothingly-left stuff will be treated more as 'awww that's impractical but we understand the dream'

But I think that the paranoia on both sides is basically driven by structural problems:

It's not driven by structural problems, it's driven by the fact that radical wings are ... radical wings. They are weirdos and of course, to them, everything looks like "the uniparty is keeping us down".

Bernie bros were genuinely the worst about this.

We have seen radical wings not do these things. Anti-abortion people don’t do this. They just win thru institutions. Milton Friedman is as much of a weirdo as any of those people. Even today the very libertarian people are the weirdos. And he crushed his competition over decades which is completely provable because you can go on Reddit and stop in neoliberal and see that his enemies adopted his labels (before undermining).

I'm saying that the uniparty is keeping them down. Combine that with the fact that radical wings are growing rapidly in America and Europe for the structural reasons I give and it's no surprise that the amount of paranoia is also growing.

If someone is agitating for fringe views, and the country is even roughly representational, then keeping them down is the expected behavior.

You're right that they are growing though, but even a growing fringe can still be anathema to ~2/3 of the population -- that was more or less what the French election just showed.

If the country is roughly representational, and someone is requesting unpopular actions, then not necessarily giving them what they want is natural and appropriate. The charge - increasingly true, I think - is that active methods are being taken to discredit and weaken those broadcasting non-majority views along the lines I described in reply to OP.

Which I can understand but it's somewhat distasteful at best and causing the very problem it's meant to prevent at worst.

I'm not sure I get the distinction between you're drawing here about "active methods".

Sticking with left wing examples for now, let's say there's a movement advocating for a wealth tax.

Saying, "no, only 10% of people want that," is appropriate.

Saying, "no, only 10% of people want that," and then going through that movement to find the one member who said something stupid ten years ago and bringing it up incessantly whenever people talk about wealth taxes is what I would call "active methods". An active attempt to damage and (further) discredit movements that are not popular in order to prevent that movement from ever becoming more popular.

That kind of seems like regular politics. Possibly unpleasant, but not some kind of illegitimate thing. Parties do it to each other all the times -- the left wing broadcasts MTG in their fundraisers all the time. Right wing blasts the squad.

What's more relevant to me is the question: if a movement never becomes popular, how do we distinguish between "we were discredited" from "our ideas were never palatable to more than 10% of voters"? Because I feel that many losing movements declare that, and it can't be universally the case.

More comments

There is something I uniquely hate about using “radical wing” as a term. It’s just feels like you are implying they are crazy people.

In Europe the right is rising. But I don’t like calling them “radical”, they would be normies for most of history. Today’s neoliberal establishment of “open borders” were the radicals until about 1980. I feel like labeling something radical is just means to lazily call a side as not worth considering their ideas.

At some point all the political groups have been the establishment and in power. Even the Pride and a lesser extent the pedophiles found themselves in the establishment since 2020 but were far outside of it in 2000.

Especially when the "radical fringe" are actually the majority: https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/192912?context=8#context

For me, it's "extreme/ist/ism." It's the dumbest and most obvious boo-light ever ("anti-abortion extremists! open borders extremists! Tea Party extremism! Extreme political views!"). Extreme relative to what, exactly? I think its use could have been slightly (but only slightly) more excusable a century or so ago when there was a broader social and political consensus, but now those words are just used to exploit the lingering but fast fading memory of Normal and Decent Times in the minds of inattentive readers.

I also hate the term centrists which some people like to claim. It comes off as people who want to claim they are moderate, but I guess I think it can only be has no opinion. The Overton window moves so if you are a centrists I guess you are a npc. Wherever the window is at the moment you’re in the middle. I don’t think it would be a popular political philosophy if you explained it like that.

De Boer might be the only one who actually fits the radical label. But only in the American context. That is the establishment in a few places. I’d probably label him a failed ideology over radical (might even be a maximizing ideology in an AI world since the price system might be replaceable).

If America didn’t have black people Bernie Sanders would probably be the dead center of American politics. And that might actual be the short term utility maximizing position (I think bad for growth, but homogenous tribes like sharing much more with each other).

To me it's encouraging that, I think, most regular people don't feel either of these ways. They mostly call it like they see it.

Several months ago, I decided not to renew my paid subscription for deBoer's Substack, having grown frustrated with how thin-skinned and unnecessarily combative he is, and his evasiveness and hypocrisy on specific issues.

Nonetheless, I agree with him here. Election night, November 2016. Trump wins. Almost immediately, there's liberal caterwauling and rending of hair. "There's no way this election result can be legit - it must be Russian interference!" Followed by 3+ years of investigations and vague gestures towards "evidence" ultimately amounting to a whole lot of nothing. Me and everyone else here correctly recognised this for the pathetic cope it was.

Then, November 2020 rolls around. Biden wins. Almost immediately, there's conservative caterwauling and rending of hair. "There's no way this election result can be legit - the Democrats must have hacked the voting devices!" Followed by 3+ years of investigations and vague gestures towards "evidence" ultimately amounting to a whole lot of nothing (as exhaustively catalogued by @ymeskhout).

There were many people who correctly identified "Russiagate" as a cope, but think that the 2020 election was fraudulent. They would surely have rubbished any similar claims about a fraudulent election had the boot been on the other foot. No, it's worse than that - many if not most of these people did rubbish similar claims when the boot was on the other foot four years earlier. If you somehow still think Russiagate was legit, but the 2020 fraudulent election claims were bullshit, you are the person deBoer is talking about in this post. If you still think the 2020 fraudulent election claims are legit, but that Russiagate was bullshit, you are the person deBoer is talking about in this post.

I agree, and when you actually ask ‘2020 was fraud’ proponents here about the arguments, the smarter ones will typically concede the practical points but then argue that there was just a general air of illegitimacy, a kind of stench of it, perhaps due to mail-in ballots or some shenanigans in a few counties, or maybe ‘the media propaganda manipulated people’ into voting a certain way (if that made a vote illegitimate, then no democratic election in history has been legitimate). Of course voter fraud occurred, as it has in every election since 1789. But the evidence that it was much more fraudulent than 1968 or 2000 or 1932 or whatever is very thin and largely self-serving. I’m also curious whether the claims will be retracted if Trump wins this year, since presumably that would be the deep state choosing to allow him to become president again, right?

I’m also curious whether the claims will be retracted if Trump wins this year, since presumably that would be the deep state choosing to allow him to become president again, right?

Why would a sincerely curious person have reason to believe a 2024 Trump victory would negate or disprove beliefs of deep state opposition to Trump?

The core argument on the idea of a deep state is that it exists and is organized and has power that it utilizes for a cause, not that it is all-powerful and all-determining. There is no requirement for some Nybbler-level nihilism that the deep state determines all and resistance is futile because the deep state determines all. The premise of a deep state is that it is still a state, and while people frequently have unclear ideas of the limits of states they are also very aware that there are limitations of a state and their ability to fail if key actors are opposed (the basis of politically organizing against a vague group of interests) or fall out (divisions within the private coordination mechanisms causing visible turmoil). Even the most famous examples of deep states of contemporary history, including some of the ones that popularized the term like the Pakistani deep state, can have both clear power and clear limits and failures to their attempts to influence. For a somewhat more public version, the current fallout over Biden that is breaking the Democratic coalition apart is a failure of system, not evidence of that Biden's new critics are secretly pro-Trump. The non-public Democratic coordination mechanisms are still anti-Trump, they just are in disagreement as to how.

Organizations- public or secretive- can simply try and fail. Their failure does not imply they were secretly for the other side the entire time. This is particularly true when the reasons for their failures are the over-use of increasingly ineffective/discredited tools that have become less effective with time and over-use.

From the smarter deep conservatives I know IRL, there's either margin of fraud issues('Trump only won by five points but republicans need ten') which might not happen this time, or the political machines that are actually rigging the elections aren't as onboard with Biden as they were, or 2020 was exceptional and the deep state dropped the ball on faking a global pandemic this time, etc.

You can have as many epicycles about history as you want. What matters is epicycles about the future. You can believe that the the JFK assassination never happened, that the moon got where it is as an alien death star to wipe out an advanced ancient civilization, stonehenge was built by aliens, there was an ancient nuclear war that destroyed Mohenjo-Daro, the Nazis built pyramids in Antarctica before their base was destroyed by American nuclear weapons disguised as a test, cats were domesticated by the Annunaki to implant cameras in and spy on the progress of civilization, the earth is 6,000 years old, the printing press was invented in 800 AD but suppressed by the inquisition until Gutenberg, the last prince of Wales reached north America and that's why the Cherokee are white-looking, the Incas were regularly in contact with China, Atlantis had a Mars colony, the Olmecs were the original black people who colonized west Africa, Eleanor Roosevelt was transgender, whatever, and still be a smart, well functioning person who accurately predicts what's going to happen in the future, even on related subjects. And the guy who told me the cats theory was a physics professor. Why? Because those are matters of fact, not function. Kind of like scientific theories- it's a term to describe processes. Denying whats doesn't matter. You're simply factually wrong about something that happened once, and it probably doesn't affect your day to day life if black people originated in Mexico instead of Africa, nor does it really affect anything in the future. Denying hows does. If you believe elves built your car you can still fix it. If you believe elves power your car by running in hamster wheels inside of it in exchange for gasoline, you can't.

Elections are a lot like that. It's not hard to come up with a just-so story as for why the deep state can rig the election in 2020 but not 2024. It doesn't even have to make sense. What's important is that it doesn't impinge on future processes.

Honestly I am beginning to drift towards the position you described in your last paragraph. Deep State rigging for Biden in 2020, Deep State rigging for Trump in 2024. I think the Deep State might have decided it’s better to get Trump in the Oval Office to get middle America on board for World War III. They would have to undertake some maneuvers to get Trump personally on board for a war, and to contain his domestic political impulses, but I think they believe they can do that. That might be easier for them to manage than the French Revolution nightmare scenario of a simultaneous existential foreign war plus a hot civil war at home.

I always thought the insinuation that the federal civil service was near-uniformly Democrat was unlikely. Academia? Sure. Journalism? Definitely. But DC is filled with ex-military and other middle aged straight white guys in senior positions in the federal government who live in the suburbs and who, statistically, are at least substantially (say, 50%) Republican. Especially in the CIA, full of Mormons anyway, and in the Pentagon. These people aren’t revolutionaries, probably consider Trump vulgar, but that doesn’t make them Democrats.

https://www.fedsmith.com/2021/02/12/political-donations-and-federal-employees/

Sure, I don’t dispute that, but even that article suggests that in many of the most important departments like State, 30-35%+ of employees are Republicans. Also, since Dems in the federal government are likely more committed than Republicans it doesn’t tell us everything about the ratio of employees.

Also, since Dems in the federal government are likely more committed than Republicans

what makes you think that they are more commited?

I mean we did have real fraud in 2020. It’s just people ignore the obvious frauds.

The expanse of mass-mail in voting is considered fraud by historical Democratic principals. Trump wins in a landslide without that.

At this point it is beyond proven that the FBI interfered with social media with regards to the Hunter Biden laptop. They knew it was real the entire time. The CIA helped cover that up.

These things aren’t conspiracies. They are proven and changed the election.

I don’t know why we are doing both-sides here.

Now I agree the right has gone too far. I know people who never rational think thru issues anymore and just assume they are being lied to.

mass mail-in voting is considered fraud by historic democratic principles

I disagree. At worst, by weakening the secret ballot, it makes more opportunities for fraud. That’s different.

Regardless, to get from there to “Trump wins in a landslide,” you have to have a chain of beliefs.

  1. MMIV allowed more fraud.
  2. More fraud gave an advantage to Democrats.
  3. Such an advantage was needed to overcome Trump’s natural lead.

Sure, #1 seems obviously true. But proponents have consistently failed to bring evidence for #2 or #3. Where are the legions of dead or duplicate voters? The confessions of Democrat strongmen who went door to door coercing Biden votes? The sob stories from would-have-been Trump voters?

If the Democrats successfully weaponized MMIV, there should be more evidence. Same goes for Trump’s hypothetical lead. Polling (then or now) doesn’t suggest that he has massive support. Either there is a powerful conspiracy hiding and weakening the evidence, or it doesn’t really exist.

The average voter hasn’t committed fraud. He also knows that his neighbors and teammates haven’t committed fraud, haven’t talked about the option, haven’t been visited by team officials in the dead of night. He correctly concludes that his team is not benefiting from fraud. He fails to extend this conclusion to everyone else.

The expanse of mass-mail in voting is considered fraud by historical Democratic principals. Trump wins in a landslide without that.

And if the expanse of mass mail-in voting had caused him to win in a landslide, you'd be saying the election was illegitimate and stolen from Biden, yes?

At this point it is beyond proven that the FBI interfered with social media with regards to the Hunter Biden laptop. They knew it was real the entire time. The CIA helped cover that up.

I agree, and this was an outrage, and I said so repeatedly at the time and since. But this doesn't prove that the election was fraudulent - as pointed out by @2rafa, if media propaganda manipulating people to vote a particular way makes an election illegitimate, then every election since the invention of democracy was illegitimate. We'll never know the counterfactual where the Hunter Biden laptop story is allowed to freely circulate on social media - it might have swung the election, it might not. There are obvious parallels with Russiagate truthers constantly asserting that Trump only won because of sketchy Facebook ads from Russian accounts!!! targeting swing voters, something something Cambridge Analytica.

But this doesn't prove that the election was fraudulent -

What's this un-fraud of the gaps(analogous to god of the gaps)?

I don't get it

“And if the expanse of mass mail-in voting had caused him to win in a landslide, you'd be saying the election was illegitimate and stolen from Biden, yes”

  • yes. I’m autistic. I’ve flipped on positions before when the data points in that direction. Which does include flipping from Trump is a bad clown show POTUS only doing decent because McConnell is good to believing Trump has great judgement.

“There are obvious parallels with Russiagate truthers constantly asserting that Trump only won because of sketchy Facebook ads from Russian accounts!!! targeting swing voters, something something Cambridge Analytica.“

  • Perhaps I am wrong on this but when I looked at the data the Russian troll farms did not reach a lot of people and the people they did reach were mostly core MAGA. I don’t believe the quant argument is strong that it could flip the election.

This is also different because it’s external versus internal. It’s different when Russia plays some games we don’t have the tools to prevent and our own CIA decides to back candidate X. The CIA interfering in an election is bad. Especially when they are spreading known false information. They have done this during war times but during an election is different.

The expanse of mass-mail in voting is considered fraud by historical Democratic principals. Trump wins in a landslide without that.

In what possible sense? Oregon has had vote-by-mail for a while now, I think it's hardly sensible to claim that all elections in Oregon are fraudulent by any sensible principle.

Now sure, maybe mail-in voting could induce or enable fraud. But you seem to be suggesting that the means of voting is itself fraudulent, even if the result is generally reflective of the indicated preference of valid and eligible voters.

The expanse of mass-mail in voting is considered fraud by historical Democratic principals

Oregon has had vote-by-mail for a while now, I think it's hardly sensible to claim that all elections in Oregon are fraudulent by any sensible principle.

Oregon didn't expand mail-in voting. The fact that they've done it for years doesn't mean every other state in the union can implement the same voting methods in months.

At least address what's being said before accusing people of a gish gallop.

It's not (inherently) fraudulent in Oregon -- it was fraudulent in 2020 in the states where it was banned by statute and 'worked around' by various illegal policies implemented by Democrat-aligned administrators without going through the proper legislative process. (eg. Wisconsin (IIRC?) with their expansion of 'indefinitely confined')

Jesus, the Gish Gallop distributed Motte & Bailey of rotating arguments. First it was inherently fraudulent[1]. Then it was fraudulent-by-method-of-adoption[2]. Then it there-exists-fraud-in-fact via stuffed ballots or water leaks[3].

In any event, do you think the result in Wisconsin numerically reflect the intended desire of the eligible voters?

I'm not responsible for whatever other arguments people are making -- mine is true.

If by 'eligible voters' you mean 'the ones that voted in accordance with State law', then no, probably not. If you mean something else, you should be working towards legislative reform to make it easier for people to (legally) vote -- as in Oregon I suppose.

For the sake of reducing confusion, if you’re replying to their thread, it helps to distinguish.

And by eligible voters, I mean those which are entitled and not otherwise forbidden to vote.

For the sake of reducing confusion, if you’re replying to their thread, it helps to distinguish.

I think it's quite obvious that opinions I state in a thread are mine and not somebody else's -- do I need to add a disclaimer?

And by eligible voters, I mean those which are entitled and not otherwise forbidden to vote.

If an otherwise eligible voter submits his ballot in the form of a homemade crayon-drawing, it is not a legal ballot and should not be counted. Same goes for mailins, in jurisdictions where the legislature has not passed a law allowing them and defining the procedures for their acceptance.

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That’s not a Gish gallop.

At worst, jkf is defending a different position than sliders. Call it sanewashing, or maybe distributed motte-and-bailey?

Also, I'll add, that JKF is defending a different position that sliders, but he could also clarify it because he's responding to a thread of comments relating to sliders.

For example, if he is advancing fraudulent-by-method-of-adoption[2] then he could also write "VBM is legitimate when properly adopted but not when adopted via procedurally-invalid means, hence I believe in Wisconsin it is illegitimate because ".

That would probably elicit a very different response. It would also clarify what is the crux of JKFs argument.

[ And if JKF believes that VBM is illegitimate even when adopted via procedurally-proper means, then clarify that would also be helpful! I don't mean to say he can only adopt the position above. ]

Yeah, I think your question about Wisconsin is a good way to clarify.

I put my own objection to sliders here. “Fraud was plausible” is very easy to defend. “Fraud changed the result,” not so much.

That is fair. I accept the correction and have edited it.

I live in Washington; we've had universal vote-by-mail for a while now too.

I don't know if all our elections are fraudulent. They're doing a lot of good things to secure them, but there're still inherent gaps. And I'm very uncomfortable about that.

Secret ballot principles are violated. It’s been when discussed here. Every organization that defines what makes a good Democracy before 2020 said mail-in ballots had issues. After 2020 it’s all good.

We probably do have the technology today to make mail-in voting fine. You could have an IPhone do facial ID and watch you vote in secret.

That is a tendentious appeal to consensus that doesn't exist. Oregon has been doing vote-by-mail since 1996.

FYI, I think my comment is what @sliders1234 is referring to when he says that it's been discussed here before. In that comment, I survey international pro-democracy organizations which set out what it means for an election to be fair and free. It is clear that a consensus did exist across these organizations. That some locations have been bucking that consensus and that some groups have now turned entirely against that consensus does not mean that the consensus did not exist.

The consensus that you point to is for a different topic than the one you are claiming.

You are trying to manufacture a consensus against VBM by pointing to universal support for the notion of secret ballots. The core of the disagreement is whether VBM (especially optional-VBM where anyone that wishes can go in person if they choose!) is sufficiently protective of the right to a secret ballot.

If anything, the point that one can derive from this is that mandating VBM is not good policy. On that, sure, we can easily agree.

The core of the disagreement is whether VBM (especially optional-VBM where anyone that wishes can go in person if they choose!) is sufficiently protective of the right to a secret ballot.

Those cites were pretty clear that the only consistent way to ensure the secret ballot and voter faith in such is in-person voting, with only one person being allowed in the voter booth at a time. They explicitly call out weaknesses of VBM in these terms. I am manufacturing nothing. It's there, in black and white, preserved by the beauty of the internet.

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Ok then I assume you don’t believe the secret ballot is important to free and fair elections.

No issue if spouses pressure their partners or children fill out ballots for grandparents with dementia.

Sure perhaps saying it was considered the standard pre-2020 is an appeal to consensus, but I agree with the logic the experts were using in before 2020.

Sometimes I think it’s fine to reference prior work and assume people have familiarity with it. You don’t need to rewrite every argument.

Bruh, this idiotic “so I guess (a bunch of crazy shit I don’t believe)” is tiresome.

Yes I believe in the secret ballot. I do not believe that the option to do mail in seriously erodes that.

Less antagonism. You've been warned about this repeatedly. Next time is going to catch you a ban.

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And if we defund the police. Crime won’t skyrocket. If we get rid of the SEC - no one will insider trade. If the MLB isn’t enforcing bans on steroids then even those who don’t want to do steroids will (like Barry Bonds a later user) because the players getting ahead are cheating. Maybe I just know more people who are willing to cheat that if you remove the enforcement preventing cheating that people will cheat.

If you remove the enforcement even if society is 99.5% trustworthy those who abuse the commons are going to rise in power.

I do not believe that the option to do mail in seriously erodes that.

I’m going to jump in to ask, why?

I agree that VBM by itself doesn’t really enable classic vote-buying: if someone offers you money to vote a certain way, sure the buyer can verify your ballot before it goes in the envelope prior to handing over the “wages”, but you can easily get another ballot (unbeknownst to the vote-buyer), vote however you want, and invalidate the previous ballot.

But the examples given above (spouse pressuring spouse, filling out ballots for non compos mentis elderly relatives) seem to be much easier to pull off when mass VBM is the norm. To belabor the point re: the spouse example, if you live with someone, you presumably have access to their mail and can see whether they have received another VBM ballot with which to try and evade your spousal pressure to vote a certain way.

Not to mention, “ballot harvesting” seems vulnerable to unscrupulous harvesters steaming open the envelopes, changing the ballots that don’t vote for the right candidate (e.g. by filling in all the bubbles, so the ballot gets rejected) and then re-sealing the envelope.

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Freddie's not wrong, but I find him endlessly tiresome and miserable. He constantly gropes for the truth and almost seems to grasp it, and then hastily backs away as if it burned his fingers. Every time I read one of his essays, I think "You've almost got it" and then he swerves and ostentatiously clears his throat to make sure no one thinks he's suggesting non-leftists might ever be right about something.

This is not particularly charitable to Freddie.

The worst case was him deleting his most popular substacks, "Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand" and "Of Course You Know What 'Woke' Means", because conservatives found his arguments good and started linking them. He seems afraid to be seen building bridges with non-fellow travelers, even when their interests and beliefs align with the old-style left perfectly.

Doesn't one need to keep in mind that he's legitimately a crazy person? He might fear getting too much attention from the wrong people when he looks at the results.

What were the actual sharings-in-bad-faith or misrepresentations that he was worried about?

Was it only that right-wing people shared them as well, or did right-wingers understand the meanings of those posts in a different way to deBoer?

Pretty sure it was basically that right wingers were sharing it around as a good anti-woke rant, and Freddie was dismayed that his enemies were using his words as ammunition against leftists (even leftists he himself was attacking).

What were the actual sharings-in-bad-faith or misrepresentations that he was worried about?

He never offered any explanation to my best research. About a year ago he updated the first essay with "I beg you to read anything else I've written other than this piece. I beg you", followed by deletion in December.

Are those Archive links he links to in his Substack faithful to his original postings or have they been selectively editor prior to archival?

You can see every version captured by IA. Scott used to neuter pieces with edits before removing them entirely, so it's worth checking out the earliest archived version and comparing it to the latest

This is Freddie deBoer.

But yes, I've noticed Scott editing old posts to remove the best parts. He speaks some truth that conservatives appreciate. Then edits it out because he thinks they are icky or correctly determines that his social group won't appreciate him handing ammo to the other side.

Also he edited out the Ben Carson brain surgery question. About how Ben Carson pioneered a new procedure to separate the two halves of the brain in children with extreme seizures. But then left the other half still alive in their head unconnected to their senses and frontal lobe. Is that a (part of a) person suffering in dark silence for a lifetime? I thought that was a good question and am disappointed that he edited it out.

I know, I mean Scott used to do it too. They have very similar temporary failures of their Crimestop brain implants, followed by repentance and attempts to hide the evidence.

Also he edited out the Ben Carson brain surgery question.

Huh? https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/16/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate/

Maybe he did edit it out and then restored it, but it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that he'd be worried could get him in trouble.

He edited out the follow-up question about the kaballistic implications.

Yes, he's not going to get in trouble for that. I thought he removed it because it is disturbing.

TBH it is disturbing and I think the answer would be yes.

Are those Archive links he links to in his Substack faithful to his original postings?

Unless he's in cahoots with archive.org, they must be. And the content doesn't seem different from what I remember.

I guess he should be applauded for giving a link, at least, even if he refuses to put the arguments under his own name for some reason.

I find this sort of false equivalency incredibly obnoxious. We have institutions that are 99.5% leftist, run by Democrat apparatchiks, and every leak or FOI document reveals quotes like today's "I don't want to hire white men for sure."
Is there any equivalent evidence from the other side? Any CNN execs caught emailing Trump: "jawol mein fuhrer, I have leaked the debate questions to Biden to throw him off his guard, your victory is assured!"
Or just insane conspiracy theories about how JournoList members conspiring with the DNC were actually Republican triple-agents all along? Literal stalinist levels of frenzied deflection against randomly chosen "wreckers"?

Just the act of labeling leftist zealots "blue maga" shows it's a tactic to hurt your enemies while making excuses for the now-revealed misdeeds of your own side.
The weirdness of qanon boomers is extremely different from the weirdness of the left, and conflating them is just a trick to criticize individual leftists without ever admitting the problems of leftism: "They're bad because they're just like the enemy!", rather than "woah our revolutionary ideology goes absolutely off the wall retarded at the slightest inconvenience, why is that?"

The more I read from deboer the more I dislike him intensely. A pretty intelligent mind capable of truth-seeking that's been deliberately turned to producing demeaning propaganda.

I guess the thing to understand is that hardcore leftists don’t really think minor stuff like the civil service or Google implementing hardcore quota-driven affirmative action is what they want. They don’t not want it, but they also want to overthrow capitalism, tax billionaires at 99%, nationalize the banks, that kind of thing, so even though the left has cultural ascendancy they still feel powerless and ‘betrayed’.

Bens a hardcore never Trumper. He seems to have a strong bias against him. So he tries to make these arguments.

Just the act of labeling leftist zealots "blue maga" shows it's a tactic to hurt your enemies while making excuses for the now-revealed misdeeds of your own side.

Stalin was actually a "state capitalist" isn't an unheard of washing of hands in the DeBoer's part of the political spectrum, so he is probably just employing a trope familiar to him.

I think it might be more a long the lines of communists declaring social democrat parties social fascists. It's hard to place DeBoer, he just seems to lash out at everyone and seems like a rather awful person to be around, even when he isn't going through a manic episode.

Deboer is an actual literal OG Marxist, nearly everyone in the US is his outgroup politically. Yes, including self described Marxist socialists, who are usually more Zizek than Engels.

This makes him crystal clear about some things, and the ability to call out blue delusions is one of them. Which is mostly what he’s doing- he’s not MAGA, he’s not a Republican or a conservative. He’s using it as an insult, sure, but he’s insulting people who are definitely not republicans. He’s highlighting basically the same thing you are- that blue beliefs of institutions being aligned against them are by and large delusional paranoia.

Yep it’s bizarre. For example, we now are getting tons of leak about how people knew about Biden’s problems (eg Bernstein said he heard it from about fifteen sources; yet nothing was published). The most galling was the NYT that ran with the cheap fake claim. Then when that blew up they then went back to those same cheap fakes, did a little journalism, and it turned out they weren’t cheap fakes.

Or take George S himself. He was happy to give fake information re Bill Clinton and sex because he thought it was for the greater good. Thirty years later and hiding sexual liaisons is the gravest of sins. Which one is it George?

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