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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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in my opinion trump should keep fighting about election fraud if he's correct, and not if he's wrong. the election fraud discourse over the past few years has both been, as far as i can tell, objectively very wrong, it's a classic example of a "conspiracy theory". IMO "conspiracy theory" is a very poor name, and what people really mean with that word isn't that something's a theory about a grand conspiracy, but a pattern of poor reasoning that leads certain types of people to wild, dramatic, and false conclusions. the election fraud isn't a "conspiracy theory" because it'd require a bunch of democrats to conspire to rig the election - that could totally happen! - it's a "conspiracy theory" because the reasoning people use to support it is of the kind people use to claim JFK vaccine CIA aliens.

we have all these factories lying around, we should turn them on,

the reason we have a lot of service workers, and not a lot of factory workers, is that the production of cheap consumer goods has gotten really efficient, and people (including you) would rather pay money for good service at a restaurant, or enjoyable content delivered via the internet, than for more cheap consumer goods. infinity percent tariffs on cars would not revitalize detroit!