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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29558 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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Cheating in what sense of the word? Influence campaigns? Those have been run by everyone. Intelligence agencies, state actors, private companies, etc. Anyone who has something to gain by one administration winning can try and convince people. That's how the system runs.

This is absurd. If soldiers can have their First Amendment rights suspended for the duration of their service, then clandestine, not-democratically-accountable state agencies can (or rather should, because apparently they cannot) be told to keep their hands off elections. The idea that public service should remain politically neutral is not particularly novel.

"Should" in what sense of the word? In an ideal world? Sure. In actuality, organizations act in their own interest. This is true for state agencies, private organizations, sovereign states, etc.

If the police decided strategically blocked streets to hinder access to majority polling stations with majority-Democratic populations, would you be saying the same thing?

If violence is being used to prevent voting, I really doubt anything we are saying matters. At that point we are inches away from armed civil conflict.

Who said anything about violence? I'm just talking about the police exercising their competences to direct traffic.

Violence in the "state's monopoly on violence" sense of the word. If the state is physically preventing you from doing something you are otherwise physically capable of doing, that is the state exercising said monopoly. Were the state to do that, we would likely see real violence afterwards.

If the state is merely making it harder to get to polling stations, well, they already do that. Here's a sensationalized news story about how the right is making it harder for minorities to vote by selectively closing polling stations. In actuality, I'm quite sure that both sides do this when they have control over where to place polling stations. That's the nature of politics. Anything that hasn't specifically been banned is in play.

This seems like an exception that swallows the rule. Suppose that instead of the police blocking the streets, it was conservative protestors riled up over reports of voting irregarities. The police arrest people getting violent but otherwise do nothing. Is this still just the nature of politics?

That's the nature of politics. Anything that hasn't specifically been banned is in play.

If that was the case, these tactics would be announced loudly and proudly, not done under the veil of plausible deniability.

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