This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Trump clearly believed that the election was stolen, often even when everyone else in the room was telling him to give it up.
Those cases were all spurned on lack of standing. This is lazy argumenting.
This is the rhetorical trick. The disputed 2020 election results are an "outcome," so disputing them becomes "changing the outcome". Neat. 🙄
Election Night 2020 Florida wraps up results early, great results pour in for Trump, then half a dozen swing states stop counting ballots simultaneously before huge 6am Biden drops. For four years now I have been told that this doesn't count as evidence, for no particular reason. You could try to prove that the 2020 election was legitimate, if all the ballot chains of custody hadn't already been destroyed.
Show me the text you want a steelman before you editorialize it.
What do you think you're saying, exactly? Everybody knows, including Trump, that his alternate electors were not the officially certified electors. That's not the argument!
What's the point of providing alternate electors if you don't attempt to get them counted as alternates? Note that this is completely precedented: The disputed election of 1876 faced a number of alternate elector slates.
If the 2020 election were stolen, then the most important norm was already broken before Trump did anything.
What would it take to convince you that Trump knew there was no outcome-determinative fraud? More generally, what would it take to convince you of any fraud? Say Alice gets a check in the mail signed by Bob. Alice calls Bob and asks about the check. Bob says he didn't sign it. Alice asks her check forgery friend to see if the check is real and they say it is fake. Alice goes to multiple different banks and they all say the check is fake. Alice then tries to cash the check. At what point would you say Alice knows the check is fake? Or do you say Alice still doesn't know the check is fake?
Not all of them. And even for those dismissed on standing, the Judges frequently talked about the merits anyway. If I had to guess, they probably did this just in case they got overruled on appeal as a way to speed up the legal process given how time sensitive this was. That way, if the standing portion got overruled, the appeals could keep the overall dismissal since they touched on the merits. Even if they all were dismissed on standing, there is still the problem of people that Trump himself picked repeatedly telling him there was no outcome-determinative fraud.
I don't understand the critique/trick. I wasn't trying to make a grand statement here, just trying to say "he thought this thing and then acted on those thoughts". It would be the same as me saying "Alice knows the check is fake and decided to cash it anyway". It's more of a connecting statement to tie his thoughts to his actions and not anything else.
Of course it is evidence, it is just very weak evidence. Another theory consistent with this set of facts is that, in many states, mail in votes and early votes were not allowed to start being counted until election day, so, the surge in mail in and early voting from COVID meant that results would take a while to count. Combine that with the partisan split between election day voting and mail in/early voting and you get what we saw in 2020. If you followed any of the people closely covering the election, you'd know they all said this would happen months prior. Counterpoint that I've heard a lot so I'll preempt it: "that is just evidence they were preparing to rig it beforehand". My reply is that is certainly possible, but now you need to convince me that this plot is somehow so grand that random journalists are talking about it, yet so secretive that the best election fraud evidence is vague statistical maybe anomalies or super unclear video of something maybe wrong happening? That seems incredibly unlikely.
I worded that section poorly in hindsight. Basically, I listed a bunch of critiques of Trump, so the steel man I'm asking for would be the best argument against those critiques. The critiques are obviously framed against Trump cause they are Trump critiques, so the the argument against the Trump critiques can accept or deny the frame as it sees fit.
Well, those electors did sign pieces of paper saying they were the officially certified electors. And Trump and co. are all trying to say "use this slate, use this slate" which only makes sense if the slate was certified, otherwise see the next section.
Perhaps, assuming that Trump genuinely believed there was fraud, trying to get his slate certified by the state legislature was fine. But, since he didn't, he shouldn't have tried to have his slates be used. The election of 1876 is precisely the reason they created a law to say what happens when there are disputed slates of electors. However, what we have with Trump isn't a case of "which slate was properly certified?" (maybe we do assuming you agree with me above that Trump thought his slate was certified), it was a case "one slate was properly certified, this other slate wasn't, but Trump wants the other slate to be picked anyways".
I agree with this. In fact, if it was stolen then not only would J6 be justified, much further violence would be justified.
Again take a 20,000 foot view. The IC had spent four years making shit up to try to undermine Trump and or help Biden. On election night Trump looks poised for a victory. Then in almost unprecedented fashion the counting stops and then lo and behold Biden wins after a giant ballot dump.
If you just had those facts and it was a third country you would say “that smells really bad.” You wouldn’t say “oh but the people in charge of the elections said it was good and sure they destroyed the evidence but we have no reason to believe they were wrong.”
In what way was Trump poised for victory? Most of the polls/predictions were pretty heavily in Biden's favour.
Around say 10 PM on election night
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am not pretending it wasn't at least a little suspicious the way the vote counts jumped as we all went to sleep that night (the blue line jumping over the red line me was funny). I'm just saying the innocent explanation of partisan difference in mail in votes is the far, far more likely explanation than widespread, outcome-determinative fraud. That is a high, high bar to clear and needs a lot of very strong evidence.
So, yes, in your third world country hypothetical I would probably say it was fishy and there's a good chance of outcome-determinative fraud. But, if I later learned there were innocent explanations of this that outweighed the probability of outcome-determinative fraud, I would believe those innocent explanations. A big difference with third world countries is that my priors for outcome-determinative fraud are way higher. If you tell me a random country in Africa had outcome-determinative fraud, I would probably believe you without even looking it up. And if I did, I'd probably just look at headlines or check if that country has a history of election fraud. However, if you told me the French or British or US elections had outcome-determinative fraud, I would need much stronger evidence since that is a much more surprising conclusion.
The problem is the fraudulent explanations and the innocence explanations look similar AND thr lack of security means it would be hard to tell the difference coupled with the obvious incentive.
Maybe there would be a red mirage or just maybe Biden got truly 60k of votes when he needed 75k and they added 15k. So the red mirage was in part true and in part false. They would look the same.
We judge it based on our priors. If we have two alternative explanations to explain the same set of facts, we choose the explanation that is more likely based on our prior belief. If it's wet outside, it could be that it rained, or it could be that a forest fighting helicopter dropped their bucket of water by mistake. Both explanations fit the facts, but the rain explanation is more likely cause our priors of rain occurring are much higher than a forest fighting helicopter dropped their bucket of water by mistake.
Yeah, but in that analogy the firefighting department predicted rain, said it'd look as if one of their helicopters dropped its bucket but it'll be rain. 5 minutes before it was wet outside, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and completely cloudless. All weather stations in the areas in question stopped reporting the weather at the same time, then deleted the records of the raw instrument data as fast as they could after the event, so any and all subsequent attempts to reconstruct the weather are done with already processed and edited data, and there's even a video of firefighting helicopters flying erratically over Atlanta.
Now none of this is actual proof, but I would not blame anyone for believing shenanigans happened.
This seems to be boiling down a disagreement on our priors on election fraud likelihood, like with many other people replying. I do not agree with that analogy of what it was like before the election. Adjusting the analogy, I would say it would be like the weather man saying "Firefighting helicopters are continuing to fly over area A to get to the forest fire, but lucky for us in area B, we won't have to deal with them flying over us (analogous to there being fraud, but not significant fraud). Expect scattered sun showers (analogous to setting expectations for the 'red mirage') and low visibility from all the ash in the air (analogous to the info environment making it hard to tell what it true or not in the moment and afterwards).
responding to this specifically since I see it brought up a lot. I can't interpret this fact without also knowing how normal it is to do such a thing. Is it a normal practice? What is the reason for not storing it? Maybe there's a good reason, maybe not. Maybe it's best practice and storing data has been tried but they changed it for a good reason. Who knows. Without context, I can't really interact with that info. It's like if you told me "Bob doesn't save his receipts when he goes the grocery store! Something fishy is happening", then we obviously know that it is no big deal. But, the only reason we know that is that we have the context of it being extremely common for people to not save their receipts, so Bob not saving them as well isn't notable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There is a very obvious innocent explanation of the "ballot dump", which was trailed by both sides before the election - as in the Trump campaign was saying "there is going to be a late break to Biden because they are stealing the election", and the Biden campaign was saying "there is going to be a late break to Biden and Trump will wrongly claim that it is evidence of fraud." The root cause is that (unusually) there was a large partisan gap between postal and in person votes, because fear of COVID-19 was a partisan issue.
In states which can't open postal votes early (which includes all the key swing states in 2020), in-person votes are counted faster than postal votes, because the envelope opening, signature verification etc. all take time and have to be done before you can count the ballots. [In states which do open postal votes early, the postal votes are counted faster than in-person votes because after opening but not counting them they are neatly stacked, all right-way-up etc. As a result Texas and Florida both looked competitive in the early stage of the count until the in-person votes started coming in].
In states where in-person votes are counted at precinct level and postal votes are counted at county level (which is most states, but I don't have a list handy), the in-person votes dripple in over the course of hours, whereas the postal votes come in in big lumps - especially when a big metropolitan county like Fulton or Wayne posts a batch of postal votes.
Everyone who was paying attention, including Trump, knew that there would be a late break to Biden in key swing states for these innocent reasons. Trump "knew" (in the legally and morally relevant sense) that the "ballot dump" was not evidence of fraud, even if his supporters didn't.
He also "knew" that the Dominion voting machines lie was false - the version of the story he was running with involved claims about the ownership of Dominion which were contradicted by the public record. (Smartmatic had Venezuelan connections, Dominion didn't).
I don't think that Trump "knew" that the gish gallop of hinkiness that the right-wing internet started putting together within hours of the close of polls would not find enough dodgy ballots to throw the election into question because I don't think anyone knew that at the time. But he did know that it was a gish gallop - that if he wanted to get it adjudicated in the time available (based on his behaviour, I don't think he did) he would need to be clear and focussed about what he was alleging (he wasn't). When Trump tries to take his best evidence of fraud to a sympathetic audience, you get something like that Trump-Raffensperger phonecall. Trump's people are trying as hard as they can to make specific allegations of fraud which Raffensperger can admit or refute (Trump himself is not helping), Raffensperger's people are saying "We already investigated that - there is an innocent explanation that we can show you offline." and Trump is saying "Oh no you didn't."
That isn't what a co-operative fact-finding process looks like, or even an adverserial one conducted in good faith. I have worked for unethical bosses (Fortunately, not for much longer than the duration of a contractual notice period), and Trump's end of that call sounds like a boss trying to get a subordinate who is slow on the update to falsify documents. "NASA needs to know that the O-ring is clean." "But I checked, and it's burnt half-way through." "Who do you believe, the boss or your lying eyes." "Excuse me?" "I need you to be a team player." etc.
Also situations like a homeless-support NGO that apparently provides mailing services for every single homeless person in Philly, and there's some (conspiracy thinking)(honest questioning)(take your pick) about ballots from sources like that.
More options
Context Copy link
Here is where this explanation breaks down. They stopped counting (no one could really say why). Then very early in the morning the next day there is massive vote dump. So either they stopped counting when they were 95% of the way there (which doesn’t make sense) or for some reason they refused to release the already known vote total.
Of course there are innocent explanations but the behavior was quite odd. Also the Dem discussion on red mirage can equally be explained as the Dems planned on potentially gaming the vote so they told everyone about the red mirage so that when they cheated they could say “we told you about the red mirage.” Just like the IC prebunked the true Hunter Biden story.
You can come up with any number of scenarios that are theoretically plausible, but they're all just conjecture, not evidence. Suppose I have an argument with Smith on Tuesday night. The next morning, I get up to go to work and my car won't start. I sue Smith alleging that he broke into my garage when I was asleep and damaged my car so it wouldn't start. I don't produce any evidence of a break-in. I don't produce any evidence that Smith was anywhere near my house in the relevant time frame. I don't produce any evidence that the vehicle's failure to start was the result of tampering. I don't specify what is preventing the car from starting (battery, fuel system, electrical system, starter, etc.) How seriously should my allegations be taken? I've outlined a plausible scenario, but I haven't provided any but the most general details and I haven't provided any evidence. This is the level the Trump fraud allegations were operating on. Actually, this is above that level, because here there's at least an identifiable person I'm making allegations against. The Trump situation is closer to me getting into an argument with an unidentified Home Depot employee and alleging that someone who works for the company must have done it.
Except this makes little sense. If this were planned months in advance, one would think they wouldn't need to stop counting. Fake ballots could have been ready to go from the outset, not manufactured over the course of a week following the election.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link