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Is there anything we can do to nudge the public into accepting that yes, Governor Cuomo can effortlessly curl 100 lbs dumbells the way you or I can effortlessly life the tv remote? At this point, it seems like "the weights were clearly fake" is completely unfalsifiable.
itsallsotiresome.jpg
Telling me to my face that a campaign that consisted of: -a clearly on the decline Biden, who had been a joke in all his previous attempts, -who only had any credidibility due to having been elevated the the Vice Presidency by Obama (who famously loathed him) as a sop to certain factions within the Democratic party, and who did little to nothing to support his candidacy -who had to have the rest of the party candidates drop out - save for Warren, to split the progressive vote - and rally behind him to stop Bernie Sanders from gaining traction -who routinely "called it a day" by 8 am, held few rallies, and couldn't manage to get anyone to show up when he did -with a running mate whose popularity was so abyssmal she couldn't even make it to the first party caucus
Was, in fact, secretly such a charismatic candidate that he shattered voting results, even above that obtain by historically transformative candidates, is to insult my intelligence. That simply does. not. happen. To ask me to not even question this is to insist that I ignore everything that I have ever seen about Presidential campaigns, to forget everything I know about general voting trends, to just have amnesia about how elections work, and how voters vote, in general. Such a claim falls well within the "to even claim this happened is evidence you're lying" territory; it may as well be the poster child for "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
To go on to claim that in spite of more than doubling the number of write-in ballots - and thus, the number of people voting remotely for the first time - we managed to get ballot rejection rates down to levels practically indistinguishable from zero!. In most cases, we were able to reduce the rate of rejection by five-fold! I guess we were all wrong about the Boomers!
Wait, no, we weren't; such a claim, again, flies in the face of reality. This simply does. not. happen. Ever.
But wait, there's more! I am also to simply ignore Georgia closing up polling stations due to a water main bursting, sending observers home, then dumping votes that went 100% for Biden that were totally already counted before Republican observers were given the boot, nothing to see here, it's honestly disturbing you'd even think to question such a thing, really. I am to simply take in stride that observers were kicked out, and windows blocked from outside observation, totall normal, totally legit, only a loony would think there might even be the barest scintilla of a possibility that something untoward was going on. Why, it's only fair that the Dems would insist on obstructing any attempts to crack down on obvious avenues of vote fraud, as such actions are prima facie evidence that Republicans are just sore losers, as there can certainly be no justification for such efforts!
But this is all old hat at this point; this "debate" has been had with you on the reddit, and here, ad nauseum. You will never offer anything other than the most perfunctary of rebuttals, with a sneer for anyone who disagrees.
I never understand this line. Is the idea that all of the moderate candidates were just going to keep splitting the vote right up until the convention, and then just, idk, let Bernie have it on a plurality or something? The dynamics of primaries demand that candidates drop out to endorse similarly positioned frontrunners. Do you think it's just a coincidence the 2016 and 2008 Democratic primaries also become two-horse races?
'Enthusiasm' is overrated. For every Obama or Trump there is a Starmer or Scholz who coasts by on the incompetence or divisiveness of their opponent - that is definitely not unique to Biden. Similarly;
The obvious explanation is negative polarisation - maybe Biden didn't drive huge turnout himself, but it's very plausible to Trump did both for and against him.
This is just nonsense. The water main 'bursting' happened a 6 a.m. on the morning of election day, disrupting things for a few hours, way before any shift towards Biden was beginning to be observed. There was no big tranche for Biden co-incident with the water problem. The whole kicking out observers thing I have only ever seen reported third-hand by people like Giuliani - the Chief Investigator of the SOS's offices has testified that this never occurred, no doubt you don't trust her but I'm curious what in particular convinces you this did happen.
For me it was the talking head that came on the news at ~11PM Pacific on November 6 saying that a water main had broken and counting would be suspended in Georgia for the night -- my memory on this is quite solid as I had a bet on the go for the Georgia results, and Trump was looking good at the time.
Certainly it's possible that the talking head was mistaken, and this has definitely been said by the 'most secure election evah' people -- but then they would say that, wouldn't they?
Even if I grant that this were the case, it seems likely that the Republican observers were told the same thing and went home -- which would have been fine if the officials had not started counting again a couple hours later -- which they very definitely did.
This one there is no ambiguity -- it was in Philadelphia IIRC and there was all sorts of video at the time. Even observers who weren't kicked out were made to stand behind a rope like 20 feet away from the counting 'because covid'. If you don't believe this one you are positing some sort of conspiracy yourself.
The talking heads (and social media) were reporting on the water main yes. Then the next day people started pointing out that no one called for any plumber for this, it turned into "there was a toilet overflowing". Giuliani got hold of the video of the arena when this happens, at that time, a couple of poll workers corral everyone to the door and have them leave, talk on the phone, then pull a batch of ballots that had been kept under a table earlier in the day and run those in the counting machines with no supervision from any poll watchers. The SoS said that there was a state observer present, but by his timeline he was only there one hour after the counting started.
The Federalist has a pretty good breakdown of what happened in Georgia.
I don't really care what the official excuses are after, when you create that big an appearance of impropriety, you have to go way above and beyond to clear it after. I've had the training to work elections in Canada and the whole thing was extremely clearly made to avoid every appearance of impropriety; No ballot box was ever to be opened without the observers present, you did not let it out of sight until the counting was done, no one was to be left alone with the ballots, you weren't to touch the ballots without being sure the other parties' observers' see exactly everything you were doing.
Ultimately, the most compelling evidence against is that the people who investigated this and claimed there was nothing weird or fraudulent, the Governor and Secretary of State, are Republicans, but that's flimsy considering how many Republican politicians would have gladly defected on Trump if they thought they could get away with it (if they thought they would be giving the killing blow to Trump's political career), just so they could get back to business-as-usual.
Whenever I hear people say that lawsuits couldn't find proof of fraud, the problem is that finding proof of fraud is almost impossible. But there is a lot of proof that the local election officials made deliberate efforts in multiple states to make sure that it would be impossible to catch fraud; which is as damning as finding the actual fraud and the public realizes that. If someone is seen going into a room holding a knife, methodically turns off the security cameras on their way in and then the next day someone else is found stabbed in that room, people know what likely happened. But that does not reach the point at which a judge feels comfortable overturning official results.
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The water main story radicalized me. The media stated it was debunked merely because a government election official said shortly thereafter it wasn’t true. Didn’t offer evidence. Just ipse dixit. And that was apparently enough despite numerous real time accounts that differed. Of all people, Mollie Hemingway had an excellent take down of it.
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I'm 5'8", well into middle-age, and not anywhere near my physical prime.
Were I to show up under center for any NFL team this Sunday, and then proceed to put on a record-breaking performance, putting up numbers the likes of which legendary passers like Marino or Rogers in their prime could only dream of, nobody's going to wait for the "smoking gun" of wire transfers to every team owner, emails from Goodell directly to officiating crews, etc., before proclaiming that the game was obviously rigged.
I expect any Biden supporters could create a list of negatives about Trump just as large as your Biden list.
And indeed, a huge swathe of Democrats did proclaim everything was rigged when Trump beat Hilary. A subject that was much mocked by posters on the right of the spectrum.
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Please don’t put words in other posters’ mouths.
You may argue that they are taking something for granted, but you shouldn’t assert it.
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That post made a lot of specific complaints and you're literally just dismissing them out of hand with literally zero content. I think you've forgotten what this place is for.
Please commit to explain how Joe Biden, despite his faults, has been more popularly elected than even prime Obama.
What do you mean by "more popularly elected?" Biden's EC margin was lower than either of Obama's and Biden's popular vote margin was between Obama's margins (lower than 2008, higher than 2012). More generally the US popular vote has been trending Dem for a while now. The Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote once (Bush 2004) in the last 30 years.
I am not talking about the relative margin.
Biden got 81,284,000 votes total, the most ever. Beating Obama's record 69,498,516.
I don't think population growth alone can account for that. And I'm not really seeing how one can justify it with enthusiasm.
If you think this needs explaining, then why do you not think that Trump's 74,223,975 total votes need explaining as well? You can weave the same sort of just-so story of how that outcome is implausible, with the same sort of emotional incredulity - how did an incumbent candidate who achieved so little of what he had promised to do and stumbled from scandal to scandal manage to attract some 10 million more voters than the first time around, and also blaze past Obama's record? Unless you are contending that the forces of election manipulation also conjured up millions (but fewer) fake votes for Trump for good reason, you are just left claiming a convenient cutoff point where your candidate's unprecedented increase in support is still low enough to be normal but his opponent's is high enough to be evidence of foul play.
Do not presume. I do think the higher turnout on both sides is suspicious.
It speaks to me of a complete free for all where all the normal rules and safeguards were thrown away because of Covid and where the legitimacy of the outcome is impossible to verify.
Had Trump won we may not be having this conversation because the topic would be something else, but it would still be suspicious.
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How can one justify it with non-enthusiasm?
Take out a factor for population, and you’re still left with millions of excess votes. The number of citizens grew by around 7.5M, but there were over 17M more votes. That’s not the kind of gap that hides in a couple of stuffed mailboxes. It should be obvious, incontrovertible, a smoking gun.
But that’s not what we see. Existing mechanisms like poll watchers haven’t caught such fraud. Surprise audits by experts and partisans haven’t found anything close. States with wide variety in procedures and political incentives keep turning up the same lack of evidence.
Forget the Republicans. There’s a huge incentive for Democrat muckrakers to look for just one abuse in a red state. That kind of “gotcha” would be plastered all over social media. But we don’t see that, because there’s nothing to be found. Trump didn’t have to fake it to get 11M more votes.
If he managed that compared to his 2016 bid, surely Biden could manage it compared to Hillary Clinton. People stopped voting Green, stopped voting Libertarian, stopped sitting it out. It was just that polarizing.
While I am and have been generally skeptical for the strong version of the 2020 vote fraud argument:
McCrae Dowless was.
Exactly. That’s the best they could come up with.
I think of cases like these as the motte for election interference. If we can’t find equivalents for the 2020 election, which was more charged, more vulnerable, and more closely scrutinized, I think that suggests an extremely low rate of fraud.
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Funny you would say that, since one of the big 'smoking guns' was poll watchers in battleground states being effectively prevented from watching -- whether under the pretense of anti-covid measures, or counting continuing outside of their presence.
It’s not funny I’d say that. Poll watchers are doing an important job. If you’re talking about the Detroit or Fulton cases, I found them unconvincing.
Do you have more info on the COVID topic? I’m curious about the actual changes in policy. All I find with Google is scaremongering about amateur poll watchers.
I was more talking about Philly, it's well documented due to being one of the few successful R court challenges:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pennsylvania-judge-permits-campaign-observers-close-view-ballot/story?id=74040279
OFC the 'success' was in the form of a court order allowing them to approach counters within six feet instead of being roped off at 20+ -- and came after the counting was largely complete.
I'd have to dig through old reddit materials to get you policies in other places, but six feet was widely enforced, which I'd argue is still too far away to reasonably see what a counter is doing; watchers also complained of being dismissed for improper mask wearing, which Republicans claimed was disproportionately targeted at them in locations with disproportionately
fat black femaleDemocrat-leaning counting officials. Of course they would say that, but it doesn't seem like an outrageous scenario even without fraudulent intent -- dealing with challenges is obviously more work for the counters than not, so I can well believe that they'd be looking for any excuse to get rid of people who were bugging them all the time about their procedures. Covid provided that excuse, and people took advantage -- whether they also took advantage in the form of actually biased counting procedures and/or full-on fraud is an open question, and it really really shouldn't be.More options
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Voter turnout was up significantly in 2020 compared to any presidential election since at least 1992. This was true in every state, with most states seeing around a 6 point bump. It didn't even seem to matter if the state was competitive or not in the presidential election; Hawaii, which usually sees a turnout in the 30s or low 40s, jumped from around 38 percent turnout to around 52 percent turnout. Texas, the new loser, saw turnout increase from 43.4% to 51.3%. California and Montana both saw ten point increases. For whatever reason, Americans, regardless of political disposition, were more inclined to vote in 2020 than they were in previous years. If this, in and of itself, is evidence of fraud in swing states, then it's evidence of fraud in every state, including ones controlled by Republicans that voted for Trump in larger margins than in 2016.
The only metric of "voter turnout" is "votes cast," so ballot harvesting generating 10 million fraudulent votes is the same as 10 million extra people actually standing in line to vote, as far as turnout is concerned. Pointing to 2020's high "turnout" isn't evidence of legitimacy.
I mentioned arguments to the contrary being perfunctory, and we see a lot of this in this thread. Note that "well, Biden may not have been popular, but maybe they just hated Trump so much?" and then the argument stops right there. People publicly called Reagan the antiChrist, I watched prime-time network movies about how totally-not-Reagan was going to get us all killed; I watched every celebrity in the world shit all over GWB, also insisting he's going to get us all killed. Arguing that Trump was so uniquely hated that he drove record-shattering numbers of voters against him (while also driving record-shattering numbers of votes for him), and furthermore accomplished this feat with virtually no help from the Biden camp, who did precious little campaigning to build his own support, again requires me to ignore everything history has taught us of how elections actually work, of what motivates voters to vote. We have to have selective amnesia to think "well, maybe they just hated Trump that much" carries water.
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I wouldn't say it's evidence of fraud in and of itself, but it is suspicious. And I have trouble with the legitimacy of mail in voting in general since it's much easier to coerce or buy votes with it, especially if the conditions are as relaxed as they were that time.
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Easier mail-in voting + COVID meaning there was literally nothing to do except get sucked into politics.
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Does this also apply to Trump? His 74M votes in 2020 is the second most any presidential candidate has ever received. Also beating Obama at his peak.
I think so. I find it hard to believe Trump is more popular than peak Obama either.
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I dismissed a terrible line of logic. I didn't comment on the other points. This place is for rational discussion, and the argument that a poster thinks a candidate is bad therefore it is impossible that they attracted votes is just not at the standard of the motte.
Even Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote. Why would it remotely be a surprise that a far less divisive candidate attracts more votes, after a mediocre term for Trump that had the misfortune to end with a pandemic?
Clinton got 65,844,610 votes, less than Obama's 69,498,516 and much less than Biden's 81,284,000.
In your view, is 2008 Obama more divisive than 2020 Biden? And if so explain how.
Trump went from 63 million votes to 72 million votes. How do you explain an average first term producing that amount of extra votes, unless there was a general increase in voting turnout for 2020?
Why the increase though?
Who knows? But any explanation needs to account for why both candidates saw a massive increase in their vote numbers. Biden wasn't the only candidate who got more votes than Obama ever did.
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