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Notes -
I had a nice phonepost that got blasted. So this one will be more brief.
Last week we had discussion on the LA Times and Washington Post's decision to forgo an endorsement for the election.
Since then, Jeff Bezos has posted his reasonings in an opinion piece. It is fairly short, but the gist of it is: credibility, principles, and failings. It's a nice little letter that tickles my fancy.
There are some complications.
We know WaPo is hemorrhaging money. Some 80 million last year. Now on top of that, NPR reports up to 200k subscribers have cancelled. Which is an astounding number. 8 percent of their subscriber base. That's not a good way to make more money.
This is all for the Democracy Dies in Darkness paper. Many years have been spent cultivating a image and brand that appeals to progressive liberals. If there was a newspaper of the #resistance it was WaPo. So, why now?
Jeff doesn't think there's a future in the brand. He bought the paper in 2013. He oversaw the building of this identity. Seemingly, he was fine with it. Now, he sees the numbers and wants to see if there's a different future. I won't make a strict judgment of his sincerity, but the paper's record does make one wonder just what happened if not the whole this memory of an industry is dead deal.
As much as it tickles my fancy to see media outlets struggle with concepts credibility, trust, and take some (minor) responsibility-- I think he is wrong. There is space for one NYT. There is space for a NY Post. There is a small space for a Free Press, and there's space for a leaner probably meaner WaPo. It's going to take much more for me to believe there's even demand for a less righteous, more journalistic WaPo. I'd find value in that, but I'm pretty sure I'd find better value elsewhere.
If the attempt to make a more viable business lines up with his vision of a more trusted media, and Bezos is committed to reform, I wish him the best of luck.
Here in old Europe (Germany), almost no organisations endorse political candidates. Not newspapers (at least, not respectable ones, and even the tabloids endorse implicitly only), not churches, not unions. Even individual celebrities rarely canvas for a candidate (politicians non-withstanding, naturally).
I kind of like it this way, you Americans might want to try it some time.
I think that the timing is a bit suspicious. If Bezos had decided right after the 2020 election that going forward, his newspapers would not be endorsing candidates, that would be fine. Him taking this principled stand just before an election where one candidate is known to hold grudges and would likely influence government deals with Amazon just out of spite is an amazing coincidence.
It is like an recruit who has been ordered to storm a trench having a long look at the barbed wire and the enemy MGs, and then telling his sergeant that he can not follow the order because he has just discovered that he is a pacifist.
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I think he wants to pivot WaPo to something more like the WSJ, as there is more money and perhaps also clout in being seen as objective and not just a another political rag.
The NYTs and other mainstream media suffered from 2018-2022 by being perceived as too ideologically biased , such as During Covid or the riots. Blaming Trump for everything was not going to work if people had grown to distrust the media in general, as Bezos noted. This led, I believe, to coverage that portrayed democrats and Biden in a more negative light, such as endless headlines about inflation and shortages and other problems during the Biden administration, instead of the liberal media being water carriers for the Democrats, as During the entire Clinton-Trump era.
Yeah he lost subscribers but probably made up some of those. Only time will tell of this was truly an error on his part.
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I mentioned it last week, but if you are going to sell yourself out, you should at least not do it cheaply.
Everyone seems to be jumping to Trump being the one to get benefits. But I think there is a much more mundane explanation: Kamala can't pay up.
If there is a bit of quid-pro-quo between newspapers and the democratic party, then the democrats can't necessarily do much back scratching if they are not in power.
And the newspapers don't want a reputation for always being willing to shill for the democrats. Its bad for both groups in that it lowers the credibility of them doing it in the future. But its also bad for the newspapers, because there is no reason to help out someone who is always going to help you.
Its noticeable that billionaire controlled newspapers are the ones not endorsing Kamala. The exact kind of people that would know how the game of favors is played, and have an interest in preserving the value of their own favors.
This also feeds into my increasing certainty that Trump has this election in the bag. I think the last time I felt this certain about an election was probably 2012 or 2008. Much of the election coverage has not been about trying to claim that the election is going to be fair, they are instead already replaying the post election 2016 stuff that Trump is a fascist. Basically the coverage they do when they want the government deep state machinery to act as a roadblock. If there was a lot of confidence in winning I think the media would be more focused on election integrity.
I don't think that the quid-pro-quo works as you imagine. The people writing for the left-leaning newspapers are true believers. At least some of their readers are true believers as well.
Economically, I think that they would do much better under Trump. Not because of his policies, but because of the culture war. Every day they could lead with "You won't believe what Trump has Xeeted now". They would be an integral part of the people who style themselves la resistance.
Bezos messing with the editors is going to massively decrease the value of his newspapers. If people want to read what billionaires think, they can just use social media. I think that he has solid business reasons though. It is not about changing who is winning, a newspaper endorsement is unlikely to change that. It is about being seen as an ally by the winner.
What is more likely? President Harris going: "You prevented the editors from endorsing me. No more US government deals with AWS!" Or President Trump going: "Your newspaper endorsed my enemy! No more US gov deals with AWS, traitor!"
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If you are certain about the election outcome, it should present an amazing opportunity for you to double your net worth, because 538 is still 53 vs 46. Just figure out how certain you are and what odds the prediction markets are giving you, and calculate your Kelly bet.
The writers and readers can all be true believers. The owner still has ultimate authority over them and chose to exercise it against their wishes.
That demonstrates the owner's authority, and their value as someone that needs to be traded favors to in the future.
I think the value of the WaPo paper is a bit of a writeoff in Bezos' mind. The value of AWS contracts with the government probably outweighs any profit the paper is making.
I'm 80-90% certain that Trump is going to win. I don't really know how to calculate Kelly bets. My betting pool is small anyways, probably no more than $100. I get no joy from gambling, so I'm not signed up for anything and would have some transaction costs involved with setting all that stuff up.
My form of backing up what I think is to make a public declaration on here and to people in person that I think a certain outcome is likely. If I'm wrong I'll be wrong. If someone wants to take the other side of the bet with me I'll trade in a few hours of factorio assistance on their factory vs assisting me if I win. Or I'll just change my profile flair to be something like [I was wrong about the election, USER was correct].
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Huh. Is that your own neologism, or is that the word we're using for what was formerly known as 'tweeted'?
Also, missed opportunity there for Elon Musk to have named the site 'Y.com' -- then he could have trademarked 'Yeeted'.
I think Elon’s just had a thing for the letter X (the unknown variable) since the nineties, when the original x.com failed.
Y.com should be like Twitter, but only for biological males.
So Reddit should just buy Y.com.
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Historically, the WaPo had a reputation as the society/gossip/trade publication for the federal government. There's definitely room for a paper doing that.
Isn't that The Hill?
Both The Hill and my personal favorite Politico do it much better than WaPo, which is stuck in an awkward spot where their demographic target is more The Atlantic/New Yorker types, but in a NYT format that tries to also do everything, IMO to its detriment.
Politico's MO changed in the years since the 2021 purchase by Axel Springer, which is a major German media conglomerate. What used to be a US-centric paper with a major EU counterpart wing has more or less been reversed by an Atlanticist-German ownership.
Not as many overt changes as one would expect, but very much a 'this is the uniparty' sort of dynamic.
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I'm talking about in like the 60's-90's.
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I do not find Bezos' denial that this was politically motivated very credible. Just earlier this month the Post editorial board endorsed both a Senator and a House rep. Apparently Bezos came around to these principles in the last two weeks. Or maybe endorsing Senators/Reps moves the needle for voters in a way it doesn't for President? Does endorsing these candidates not create an appearance of bias the way endorsing a candidate for President does?
Also this:
Does Bezos understand this makes it look more like a quid pro quo? If the meeting is something that had been scheduled months ago and just happened to fall on the same day then it could excused as a coincidence. "The meeting (quo) wasn't set up until we killed the endorsement (quid)" looks worse! Not better!
What is best theory for a trade? Trump gets a not-that-bad signal from a known media enemy and Bezos gets tax cuts?
How did it come to be that the LA Times did something similar? That part is strange. As mentioned, the lack of endorsement is more significant than an endorsement itself. I assume a place like the LA Times is far more doomed than WaPo.
A lot of what he writes suggests it is political. Just not in a quid pro quo way. WaPo benefited from one Trump presidency. It could continue to downsize and remain a bastion of resistance for some years, or maybe it can't and that is why this signal has to be sent. Bezos doesn't want to own the bastion of resistance anymore.
Maybe he is tired.
re: LA Times, though the owner is a Clinton donor, he met with Trump in 2017 and asked for a cabinet position, then was appointed by Paul Ryan to a health policy advisory committee. He's a pharma billionaire who presumably has strong opinions on relevant issues and would like a seat at the table, the LA Times is definitely secondary to that.
Amusingly, he was also an early investor in Zoom. I wonder whether that or his pharma investments paid off better during Covid.
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If the owner's daughter is to be believed, he just genuinely believes that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza and doesn't want to help a candidate who won't take action against it.
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The meeting was with Blue Origin executives which is Bezos' space flight company. Presumably WaPo doesn't endorse Harris and maybe Trump steers some NASA contracts Blue Origin's way if he wins. This hearkens back to the JEDI military contract during the Trump administration, which allegedly went to Microsoft over Amazon for political reasons (including alleged interference by Trump).
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"We'd like to work with you in our coming administration, but we can't do that whist you're openly endorsing our opposition. Make that go away and we can talk."
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The decline of the journalism and its ability to support itself is a long term trend, so it's hard to judge the value of a more centrist WaPo. Especially if combined with a shift of a lot of educated voters to the Democrats.
But having another Democrat-aligned outlet with a slightly more prestigious name also has dubious benefits for Bezos. It's arguably a more certain road to irrelevance.
The people who want that (and are cancelling as a result) are operating on a cargo cult mentality about what makes an institution prestigious and valuable themselves. They seem to imagine that these outlets simply saying things while being who they are makes those things consensus. This is just a justification for entryists to seize these orgs and draw down any credibility they have for what are often silly causes.
Maybe this would be fine if it guaranteed victory at the cost of the business. But it clearly does not in certain cases. Whatever the power of elite journalist consensus to hobble Trump, we've long hit diminishing returns (and they've only been so destructive because Trump can't help himself). You're paying a premium for an influence operation that's just doing what everyone else is doing to no avail if you're Bezos.
It might even harm the party's chances by putting their elites in a bubble. This might not matter to the freeloaders who believe the organization is there to serve their interests but I imagine it matters to the person funding the enterprise.
So I can see why Bezos just ducked beneath the endorsement issue and is pushing back.
It’s news. The value to the average news consumer is that the news is accurate. If I’m reading about the election, the best source is the one that’s accurate and thus allows me to guess at the future. One thing that will help with respectability is that the news source in question is at least pretending to be fair to all sides. Of course as a mainstream news outlet it’s not going to actually endorse Trump because that’s too jarring a change from Narrative. Everyone knows that real news endorses democrats.
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I had a similar thought reading a thread from a few weeks ago about how "the Democrats own the language". We had users on this very forum arguing that "the consensus" is whatever the media says it is and the only thing i could think to say was something to the effect of "thats not what that word means."
I think there is a sort of mind that gets so wrapped up in the world of symbols and symbol manipulation that they have trouble imagining that "The Truth" could be a lie, or that Dan Rather and Brian Stelter might be less than Reliable Sources
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I mean, WaPo as a centrist paper still has to cut costs, so resignations from highly paid editors are probably a nice bonus.
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I wonder if Bezos intended the layer of Straussian reading that's available here? Perhaps it's just because it's my pet issue, but I remain surprised at how hard it is to get people to agree with me that electoral legibility is an absolutely crucial part of legitimating democracy. It's not enough to have very serious experts tell people that it's the safest and most secure election ever, it must be genuinely hard to imagine how the election could be rigged.
It's easy to make an almost impossible to rig voting system, we have the technology: in person printed paper ballot wrapped in individual booth in an opaque envelope and then cast in a transparent urn on presentation of official identification (or a secure number of local witnesses) and counted simultaneously and locally by volunteers of all political sides in a ceremony open to the public and cameras on the same day all the votes are cast that is declared a public holiday.
The fact people actively resist setting up something that's at least as secure as Athens' pottery shards tells me they're more interested in the result than the security of elections.
Who knows what Athens would have done if they didn’t have CCTV?
More seriously, this is a problem with scaling. The peak voting-eligible population of ancient Athens was probably under 60,000. That’s around half the eligible voters in modern Athens, GA. You need a solution that still works at 2,500x the size.
So we do implement most of those features. Physical, printed ballots. Adversarial counting. Cameras. Even the states which hate requiring ID use some form of proof.
The big ones we’re missing are transparent boxes/individual envelopes and a full voting holiday. Sure, I’m in favor of both. I’m even fine with photo ID requirements. But they aren’t free, and I’d argue that they wouldn’t actually reduce the amount of bitching that goes on after an election. Trump and people like him will seize on the counting, the certification, any possible vector for sowing doubt. They have already baked into their worldview a far-reaching conspiracy against him, personally. That’s license to doubt even the most secure process.
You don't though. There's no requirement for 150 million people to share a single polling place. In fact there's no requirement for any given polling place to handle more than ancient (or modern) Athens. In larger cities like NYC break election up by burrough/neighborhood. Brooklyn votes, the Bronx votes, Manhattan votes, and trusted representatives from each report thier tally to Gracie Mansion who reports the city's tally to the State, and so on up the chain.
This is not rocket science or brain surgery. This is a social technology the western world has had for millenia and as such I'm inclined to both agree with @IGI-111 and take thier suggestion further. Election integrity is niether impossible nor even particularly impractical, election integrity is actively opposed by certain vested interests, the DNC among them.
But as soon as you compress the ballots into a count--as soon as you move away from the pottery in an urn--you're leaving an opening. Motivated reasoners can and will jump on that just like they jumped on everything else.
We are already doing most of these millenia-proven strategies.
Yes, which is why maintaining a strict chain of responsibility/custody is so crucial. So long as said chain is maintained, any discrepancies should be readily identifiable along with those at least proximally responsible.
As i said, This is not rocket science or brain surgery. This is a social technology the western world has had for millenia. If you want to argue that the us is too poor too stupid and too fractured to employ the sort of basic checks one might expect in France or the Sudan, that's fine, but make that argument explicitly so that we may offer a proper rebuttal.
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Anyone with a passing familiarity with voting in any other part of the world will tell you that the US system is a joke when it comes to security and integrity, precisely because you don't follow these strategies.
My thoughts exactly.
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Big Pottery is in the tank for ostracons. Who do you think manufactures all those perfectly broken, dulled ceramic pieces? You can see their shills in the thread right now.
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I think one thing not talked about enough is keeping a good chain of custody. It absolutely boggles my mind that there’s no talk about simply using the same supply chain logistical tracking that FedEx and Amazon and UPS use to track a package from the seller to the buyer through multiple warehouses often in various states. And it seems like it would eliminate fraud at the counting sites — if a ballot gets counted, but isn’t recorded as cast at a polling place or retrieved from a drop box, it’s going to be obvious. And you could likely figure out where these ballots are coming from. Scanning the unique barcode on each ballot as it’s fed into the machine would make it obvious if someone is counting the same ballot more than once.
And while it does a lot to prevent fraud, having a ballot logistical system tracking ballots would make forensic investigations possible, and would enable recounts as needed. All the raw data is there and can be looked at. Add in the need to badge in and out of the areas where ballots are held or counted provides the possibility of finding out who might be messing with the ballots.
I mean, it is something we consider. That’s how PA was able to find its registration-dumpers, how audits like the Cyber Ninjas worked, etc.
I’m sure there are holes, since states and counties have a lot of leeway, but keeping a paper trail and sealing containers are pretty universal. The federal best practices can be found here.
I get the impression that partisanship has led skeptics to think it’s the Wild West out there. In practice, there’s already a bunch of boring procedure that raises the cost of fraud.
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I think this is precisely why something like this would be good to do. There are many people in power who agree with you and honestly, in good faith, believe that it won't actually appease Trump and his followers; if they went with it anyway, it would provide a truly costly signal to the electorate that they take election security seriously. So seriously, that they consider this kind of non-free step worth it even if it means submitting to demands from what they consider to be an irrational/cynical actor, thus increasing in the odds of someone irrational/cynical winning an election, in addition to both a reduction in their own status within their own peer groups and a reduction in the status of said peer group among various peer groups.
Okay, so what do we get for it?
That’s like demanding a car ban because you enjoy biking. Directional agreement is not a blank check.
As @07mk says, what you get is more secure elections. You want secure elections don't you?
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We'd get more secure elections and, likely more importantly, the perception of more secure elections as judged by the electorate. And personally, "we," the people who agreed to take this costly action, would gain actual knowledge that wasn't there before, that we actually do care about fair elections and are not merely convincing ourselves that we care about fair elections.
I really don't understand the push against election security. In all other areas of government regarding probity and integrity, there is an understanding that the appearance of integrity is just as important as the integrity itself. It's such low hanging fruit to institute controls that are commonly found throughout the rest of the free world.
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Use pottery shards. Which are immensely more secure than mail in ballots or voting machines.
As others point out. Almost every European country implements something close to this standard or better. Some have done so for longer than the US has existed.
This isn't costly. Most of the cost comes from printing the ballots, which you already do. And issuing the IDs, which you already do for driver licenses. The rest can be handled for free by volunteers.
The idea that this doesn't scale is nonsense. France can get same day results for 50 million votes with this system. That's twice the voting population of California. And we do it on five continents, multiple times a year, last time was with only three weeks notice.
And the idea that this doesn't quell questioning of the process I just don't see. That last one was one of our most contentious elections yet, the country is divided to the degree that nobody can get a majority and the smallest of margins would be extremely consequential for everyone, and yet nobody even thought to question the process because all it takes to convince yourself your vote is properly counted is lose a holiday afternoon to count it yourself.
All you need to achieve this is a small percentage of volunteers, logistics for printing the ballots and some empty space to put the ceremony. The rest is literally just coordination and political will.
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This requirement is a joke:
Given the prevalence of "paperless" billing, we've (or at least, my state has) decided that simply printing out a copy of your online bill suffices. They don't actually keep the copy for future validation so it is completely trivial to forge. To add insult to injury, this is considered a better form of ID than the temporary driver's license we are issued before the real one gets sent which isn't considered an acceptable form of ID for registration.
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Athens voted by casting tokens in different urns, IIRC- functionally not riggable below a certain scale. Sparta, on the other hand, voted by acclamation- the side which the magistrate thought had more people clamoring for it at a given time(judged by volume) won. This system is pathetically easy to rig and I just thought noting this while we’re on the subject would be an interesting aside.
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Their reality. When Donald J. Trump held a rally at a place where many Democratic events were held in the past, media intersped footage from Trump's rally, with the American Bund event from the 1940s. We do not live in a world where Trump's alleged persecution complex isn't affirmed daily.
Americans are eager to use the term "Europoors", justifying it by pointing out that even UK as one of the richest European countries would if it were a US state below Mississippi in GDP per capita. Yet even much poorer countries like Slovakia implement security measures which would give the average democrat a heart attack.
It is thus shown it isn't a question of money, the US has it in spades, but of political will.
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Stupid and uncharitable. There are undeniable trade-offs to many of these ways of making voting systems 'more secure'. Not saying you can't think they're worth it, but 'my opponents have contempt for democracy' is not in fact the only conclusion you can draw. As it happens I am pro-paper ballots and human counters but this doesn't seem to have any recognisable political valence - in fact hand-count states are mostly Democratic.
"Uncharitable" i will grant, but it is far from "stupid", remember if something is stupid but it works it Isn’t stupid.
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For what it's worth I'm not pointing at Democrats in particular. I think Americans have been tampering with their process with little care for how trustworthy it looks in many stupid ways for a long time.
It just happens that it's Republicans complaining about it today. I was saying this back when Democrats were the ones complaining too.
When I press people on the tradeoffs, and I've done so for years, they always end up folding to a canard for participation and how they think making voting easier or harder will affect turnout in their favor. This is clearly incivic and you're reaping the distrust you've sown today.
If Americans love their republic as much as they all claim they should manage to put aside gaming the process once in a century to setup something decent enough to beat the shards of Yugoslavia. You're the most powerful country in the world and you still have massive voter fraud scandals. It's ridiculous.
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