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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   29602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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The responses seem to group into a few categories. Here is, in my view, a good faith summary of these categories (that are not all mutually exclusive)

  1. Some variation of "your priors for fraud occurring are too low meaning that your standard for evidence is too high"

        a. the lack of voter security measures should increase your prior more than it did
    b. the history of past fraud should increase your prior more than it did

  2. Trump genuinely believed there was fraud. This made his subsequent actions all good faith attempts to right the wrong of electoral fraud

        a. this belief was based on there really being fraud
    b. this belief was based on flawed but still believable evidence of fraud (a reasonable minds could disagree situation. See 1.)
    c. this belief was based on Trump being either dumb, crazy or something similar which made him ignore evidence to the contrary

  3. What Trump did is merely part of a series of tit for tat norm violations, and while they are indeed norm violations, they just another escalation, so it isn't really that big of a deal

Am I missing anything?

That seems reasonably fair. Maybe add:

3.a. norms are sufficiently strong, and the mechanisms of government sufficiently firmly in anti-Trump hands, that there was never a real danger of this escalating to a coup. Trump probably knows this. So the norm violation is not of itself as dangerous as it looks, and is intended more as a signal of not rolling over than serious dictatorial intent.

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