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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   33859 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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I've been reading up more on Tulsi Gabbard. Honestly, she has an incredible and distinguished track record- from being a medic in Iraq, to her Hawaiian heritage.

If she really does get the DNI position in the Trump cabinet, there is strong chance that she will attempt a bid for President immediately after.

This could cause competition for the Thelians hoping for more JD Vance after Trump leaves office. But I'm not here to wargame 2028 campaign hypotheticals when Trump isn't even sworn in yet.

It seems she and her husband converted to hinduism.

My immediate take is that her presence and native pacific islander background means you know she ascended, and worked for the positions she had. Her brief stint as a Democrat is a bit odd, but otherwise she looks like she has a pretty pristine track record that's really hard to shit on.

Her being anti-lgbt, with a track record of policies that would otherwise be fairly progressive, she seems like a standard, good pick for almost any position in ... any president's cabinet?

From reading the wiki page, I'm having a hard time figuring out why anyone would mouth-froth over the idea of her having any position of power.

Dear Mottizens, what is your view on her? Any information I've missed?

Her being anti-lgbt, with a track record of policies that would otherwise be fairly progressive, she seems like a standard, good pick for almost any position in ... any president's cabinet?

Having had a quick look at her wikipedia page, I'm not sure I'd describe her as anti-lgbt. Also, There are many presidents/potential presidents for whom being ant-lgbt would disqualify you from a position in their cabinet.

Tulsi is not particularly MAGA. Her warm reception is mostly just about owning the libs or more charitably the tendency of conservatives to welcome agreement wherever it’s found. It’s the same way Bill Maher is praised by the right whenever he’s slightly critical of the far left.

Meanwhile Tulsi is not particularly establishment GOP. She’s a non woke democrat.

A tulsi presidential bid from the left would mean the left was moderating on progressivism. From the right it just means the right continues to move left.

From reading the wiki page, I'm having a hard time figuring out why anyone would mouth-froth over the idea of her having any position of power.

She says she was put under surveillance in the airport for some reason, agents follow her on planes:

https://www.newsweek.com/tulsi-gabbard-tsa-terrorist-watchlist-1985527

So there's clearly not much love lost between her and intelligence goons.

Intriguing!

I admit to being skeptical of the persistent "the establishment is always after me!" cries that seem to be more and more frequent.

It seems she and her husband converted to Hinduism.

She was raised Hindu. You can't convert to Hinduism. No Indian would be able to explain what that even means. Pagans are flexible. The Indian "far-right" (RSS) routinely suggest that Indian minorities are religious chimeras, calling them Muslim-Hindus or Christian-Hindus. The data backs their claims. A majority of Indian Christians & Muslims believe in karma & a plurality believe in reincarnation. For Hindus, the lines between lines between culture & religion are blurry, with very few consensus beliefs.

Push comes to shove, I'd say Hinduism is about:

  • Karma (Actions have consequences)
  • Dharma (Sanctity of the duties you've signed up for + abiding by a personal moral code)
  • Rebirth till Moksha (Less worldly desires is better. Ends up as a general tree-hugger syndrome)
  • General neutrality of the divine. (The system exists for all. No special cut out for devout believers.)

Contrary to popular belief, vegetarianism & non-violence are relatively modern (20th century) ideas and part of Nehru/Gandhi's 20th century Vishwa-guru (teacher to the world) propaganda. Other than a small subsection of Brahmins & Jains (over-represented in the US diaspora), the rest don't put either idea on a pedestal.

All this to say, I'd caution against imposing Abrahamic models onto Pagan religions. American Hinduism is closer to ACX-Rationalism than the sort of conservative thought that is ascribed to India's rural Hindi heartland.

That aside, what's her reason for opposing gay marriage? I know Christians and Muslims have a scriptural disgust for it. I'd like to know where young Tulsi's strong opposition to it comes from.

American Hinduism is closer to ACX-Rationalism than the sort of conservative thought that is ascribed to India's rural Hindi heartland.

LOL, data set of one and all, but this individual cornfed, white bread, SSC/ACX lurking American Hindu agrees with you!

She was raised Hindu. You can't convert to Hinduism. No Indian would be able to explain what that even means.

Gabbard has no Indian ancestry and her mother does not appear to have known anything about Hinduism prior to moving to Hawaii and getting involved with the Hare Krishna sect there, being herself a white American from Indiana. For whatever reason, this rather unorthodox religious background did not seem to bother the Hindu community in the US, who claimed Tulsi as one of their own when she was first elected. Not that I would fault anyone for believing her family aren't real Hindus, but certainly it was also possible to convert to Hinduism in the past, otherwise Southeast Asia wouldn't be full of beautiful Hindu temples.

That aside, what's her reason for opposing gay marriage? I know Christians and Muslims have a scriptural disgust for it. I'd like to know where young Tulsi's strong opposition to it comes from.

Her father is a conservative Catholic whose only claim to fame has been being stridently opposed to gay marriage for the past 30 years.

Many born Hindus do accept Hare Krishnas as Hindu iirc, it’s more that western observers see it as kind of a new age cult because of the audience it attracted in the 1960s (and still does today to some extent). But ISKCON is descended from some 15th century strand of “real Hinduism” via Krishnaism, part of the Vaishnavist collection of Hindu denominations.

Yeah. Nothing wrong with the Hare Krishnas from a strictly scriptural standpoint. It's their fervent expression of it & proselytization that creeps Indians out. Both feel alien to a native Indian.

Wiki says this was the sect of her mother/parents:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Identity_Foundation

Butler's teachings included condemnation of homosexuality,[1][3] hostility towards Islam, and skepticism of science.[2][10][2][11][12][13]

That aside, what's her reason for opposing gay marriage? I know Christians and Muslims have a scriptural disgust for it. I'd like to know where young Tulsi's strong opposition to it comes from.

She worked for her father's anti-gay organisation when she was younger.

She's since retracted her anti-gay stance.

I found some commentary on /r/moderatepolitics where she's criticised for being pro-Russian (so of course a Russian agent) and pro-Assad (because apparently she visited Syria and had an opportunistic meeting with Assad; after which she was a 'skeptic' of Assad using chemical weapons on his own people). There was some speculation on reddit that the senate wouldn't confirm her DNI appointment for the above reasons. She apparently also backed conversion therapy when she was younger. I haven't fact checked or done a deep dive on any of this. I'm just providing a hook for people to start their own research.

I'm actually a big fan of Tulsi after seeing her several times on Rogan (Transcript). She is against the MIC, the deep state (unelected bureaucrats) and forever wars. I was disappointed that she didn't get SecDef and worried that she would be sidelined, but my confidence was restored with the DNI selection. She's unironically what I would like to see as a female president.

I don't know how 2028 primaries will turn out, but I'd expect Rubio, Vance and Gabbard to compete. Vance and Gabbard seemed to get along very well on the campaign trail (Vance being an (ex)marine and Gabbard being Reserve Army).

Edit: Adding some links. Atlantic article doing some character assassination here.

Edit Edit: Glenn Greenwald pushing back against Tulsi attacks here.

The things she has said in regards to the Ukraine war are textbook Russian talking points. What else is there to say? Let's hope that that the senate doesn't actually confirm her appointment .

It would be very funny if the Republican nomination was a contest between Vance (married to a Hindu with a child named Vivek) and Gabbard (Hindu), with Vivek Ramaswamy (Hindu) noticably gaining support.

I'm actually a big fan of Tulsi after seeing her several times on Rogan

Interesting, I kind of had the opposite experience. I liked her as along as I only saw her in clips or short interviews, but on Rogan she came off as pandering a lot.

Not enough to turn me off from her, but I have to say I grew cautious.

I have always found her untrustworthy. Nor sure why.

It's not about politics- I generally approve of what she's for she just does seem to be too calculating in what she says.

She is against the MIC, the deep state (unelected bureaucrats) and forever wars.

I'm fairly confident these are the actual reasons behind her being attacked so much.

Yeah, the 'Russian Asset' came direct from Hillary during the 2019 DNC primaries.

Without any evidence. Just slander

Most of the opposition is going to point at her record on Syria -- she was ponderously slow to realize Assad was an asshole, and remained skeptical that he used chemical weapons after . She cites the Iraq War as cause, and that's fair to an extent, but it's an odd thing to bring to the DNI. I dunno whether to read it as a (figurative) bomb-thrower that'll root through some of the various agencies' more corrupt bits or at least throw some chaos into the various whisper campaigns, or just something she really wanted and Trump was willing to give her.

Some of that's just a tendency for conservative hawks to treat anyone remotely skeptical of their institutions as deadly poison, but even in the self-described neocon circles that wouldn't have cared about other spheres are really concerned on this one -- there was a minor news cycle when she mentioned demanding a ceasefire around Ukrainian that was mostly noteworthy for Romney calling it treason. Same from the places Democrats have been hawks. Which... may or may not be persuasive to you.

She shares a bit of crystal healer woo with RFK, though that probably matters less at here than any other cabinet position. She's also separately a social conservative on a lot of stuff (gays, trans people, abortion, DEI), though that's mostly a separate deal.

From the Blue Tribe-specific stuff, it's a little more boring: she pushed against Clinton getting the 2016 nomination, and hasn't treated Trump or January 6th as The Worst Thing Ever, and is not pro-LGBT.

she was ponderously slow to realize Assad was an asshole, and remained skeptical that he used chemical weapons after.

Assad is an asshole, but my understanding is that the evidence he used chemical weapons is actually quite weak and possibly false intelligence. And it's not like the US and her allies and the international community more broadly have never lied about Middle Eastern dictatorships doing bad things for propaganda.

But it has been a long while since I've looked into this all.

I'd be an asshole too if I had to defend my country from ISIS, Turkey, The United States, and Israel all at the same time.

If you're at the point of freeing all your nation's prisoners to stir up trouble and keep the heat off yourself, I have to wonder if you're still the one defending the nation or just what it needs defending from.

Her brief stint as a Democrat is a bit odd

She was 20 years a Dem? She was 21 when she was voted into the Hawaii House of Representatives as a Democrat.

Sorry, that was a joke!

I phrased it in such a way that I expected most to recognize.

Seems a bit of a moot point as there is surely no way she gets through the Senate.

Why? Because she is a recent convert to the Republican party, or are there other concerns with her?

Not because of that, just that she is pretty far off the reservation as far as apologia for Putin, Assad etc. goes, even relative to Trump, having blamed America for the invasion of Ukraine. Seems unlikely the more hawkish Republicans are willing to swallow this one.

You have had Musk posting a video of Jeffrey Sachs giving the Russian perspective on Ukraine. ..and what hawkish Republicans are now even there?

Didn't they all sign up for Never trump? Is Trump stupid enough to give them a chance once more?

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1182/vote_118_2_00048.htm

Is Trump stupid enough to give them a chance once more?

I think Trump has lost a lot of leverage. In 2026 there's probably going to be a lot more mileage for Republicans in distancing themselves from Trump, not sticking to him.

She's a crank with similar vibes to RFK Jr. or Ron Paul, although they have very different voting records. The fact this group has ascended now is thanks to the Republicans being dominated by the Dale Gribble voters.

  • -18

While I see and understand the throughline of her appeal to the Gribbler faction, I don't see or understand what earns her crank-hood.

She is a crank whereas your opinions are perfect and normal. Oh but wait — weren’t you the one defending the Selzter poll and calling other people (like me) partisans hacks despite us clearly stating the facts for our doubts? And yet who was right? Maybe that should cause you to have just a minuscule amount of introspection instead of just criticizing your out group. That is, maybe you get a lot of things wrong.

You and the other so-called 'partisan hacks' don't get to say you're right because a coin came up heads despite a poll saying it had a 60% chance to come up tails. The fact that you 'correctly predicted' an event has little inherent bearing on whether your reasoning was correct.

I'm incredibly tired of hearing this talking point. Did you correctly predict the election map in 2020? in 2016? Do you have a better record overall than the pollsters you critiscize? What reason do I have to believe that you are not a broken clock that is right twice a day?

On the other hand, you're fine to critiscize OP calling someone a crank with no substantive reasoning.

Selzer said Harris +3. I think it was Trump +13. This wasn’t a close call that went the other way. This was a disaster for Selzer. But it was obvious that Selzer was way off for the numerous reasons I articulated pre election. Note I didn’t try to call the election; I merely said the poll was obviously wrong for a few reasons and that was correct.

I owned up to the Selzer poll being wrong, specifically about thinking it would be off by less than 10 points. The arguments against it were pretty uniformly medicore, along the lines of "nah, it just feels wrong" or crosstab diving or "unskewing", against a pollster who had a track record of proving her critics wrong over and over (e.g. in 2020, when she was far more pro-Trump than most of the competition, and ended up being right). Obviously it ended up being incorrect, and now Selzer has a lot of egg on her face.

Also, I'm not a fan of ad hominem attacks so this will probably be my last response to you.

  • -14

"nah, it just feels wrong"

Perfectly justifiable. If you prefer: "My priors of this being true are so enormously low and a single extreme outlier poll is such a small unit of evidence, so I refuse to significantly update my belief regarding this. The likelihood that a single poll is wrong is far greater than the likelihood that my entire understanding of the electorate is this far off. By far greatest likelihood is a one-off polling error. Miniscule likelihood it is correct and I am demented and detached from reality in my understanding of Trump's support."

Luckily our brains have excellent heuristics that approximate all this. So at a glance you can easily say "Smollett is a liar, no way that happened" or "Nah, that poll is just wrong". And you sound jivey talking about priors and weights of evidence if you simply state the obvious likelihood delivered to you by the sophisticated mechanisms in your brain.

Did you check the link I posted up above? Democrats were saying the same thing in 2020 about Selzer in Iowa, with similarly flimsy arguments, and were simply dead wrong. Comparing Selzer's reputation (before this election) with Smollett is just silly. I agree most "bombshell" polls aren't usually worth much, but if there was one person who had consistently proved her critics wrong it was Selzer.

Dude. This isn’t an ad hominem. You made nothing but an ad hominem in the OP and then I called out that maybe you should show more humility.

As for the Selzer poll, I pointed out that the Selzer poll would require believing there were massive shifts in multiple populations over a short time that wasn’t captured by anyone (indeed her prior poll showed Trump +18 — a 21 point move wasn’t explained by Biden to Harris). That should’ve given you pause. Calling those bad arguments ignores the fact that those arguments actually reflected reality whereas yours did not.

Tbf cricitizing (even unfairly) a 3rd party is not really ad hominem.

It is functionally the same. Ad hominem in the classic sense is “your argument is bad because you are a bad person.”

There was zero intent to engage with the concept that Tulsi is good or bad pick Instead, the poster just said “she is a crank.” It is functionally the same—not addressing the issue and instead basically name calling.

Funny enough the poster claimed I was engaging in ad hominem. Instead, I was pointing out that the poster’s judgement isn’t great—especially when it comes to political topics. So read most charitably his comments re Tulsi amounted to “trust my judgement.” So bringing up his bad judgement is directly addressing his argument. He couldn’t handle it and decided to throw a fit and block me.

Uh, how exactly is she a crank? She’s a Hare Krishna who doesn’t hide her ‘member of a very conservative religion’ views on social issues while having some progressive ideas and being opposed to US intervention.

She's followed quite a similar arc that RFK Jr. has, initially being a Democrat but being very out of step with any major faction. She also has a big thing for conspiracies, like claiming the Syrian gas attack was a false-flag by the British, or being very worried about "biolabs" in Ukraine that Putin was using as fodder for innuendo that the US was creating a supervirus to mass-murder Slavs. The Gribble faction loves stuff like this.

conspiracies, like claiming the Syrian gas attack was a false-flag

No matter how many times you repeat this, its' not going to be true. The Syrian gas attack was indeed a false-flag.

I'll bite. I don't have a lot of priors on this particular incident since I haven't studied it that much.

What evidence do you have that it's a false flag?

Does "the Gribble faction" just mean "people who don't trust all the official narratives and are therefore low status" or do you have something more specific in mind?

That certainly seems to be what it means in practice.

Read the link I posted a few replies above. Hanania explains it quite eloquently.

Thanks, I will.

r/neoliberal on suicide watch rn.

I know, reddit. But they are so confident that she’s a Russian agent. What’s the deal with that? Is it just normal radlib demoralized Russia hysteria? It seems deeper than that.

On a related note; I’ve been on Reddit a lot in the last week, mostly out of morbid curiosity. I had stayed away for probably 12-18 months, and it’s terrible. A much worse echo chamber than I remember, and it was incredibly bad before. Good god.

Reddit is just US operated LLMs talking to eachother these days.

A much worse echo chamber than I remember

An odd criticism to make on here of all places. Pots, kettles etc. Not that there isn't lots of disagreement on here, but you'll find that on places like /r/neoliberal too - but in both places it tends to occur within pretty narrow confines.

But they are so confident that she’s a Russian agent. What’s the deal with that?

There's a standard and very controlled foreign affairs education in the US (and the rest of the Anglosphere). All the top professors and think tanks interact with the State Department regularly. Papers like The Economist are approved reading. Atlantic Council galas are mandatory for the serious.

In that culture there's a disbelief in any sort of autodidactism. Not disapproval, they literally believe that you can't come up with any sort of informed opinion on your own. You need to go to the proper schools and read the proper papers.

When they see someone intelligent and charismatic on the popular stage with some views that differ they immediately ask "Where did she get that from?". Admitting that she developed different views from her experiences and encounters outside the continental US implies that their own education was insufficient.

It's easier to just claim she's a Russian agent.

Honestly I don’t think this is just the foreign affairs people, it’s becoming endemic to most PMCs through the creeping credentialism promoted by university. There’s a large and growing population of people— most of them college graduates— who think that unless you have studied a topic in a college classroom, you cannot have possibly learned it. No, you cannot just read the Western canon and understand it. No, you cannot possibly learn philosophy without a lecture hall. No, you don’t understand math or statistics until you have gotten college credits.

I find the whole notion doubly ridiculous. First because people have self educated for hundreds of years, and it used to be the standard. Abraham Linchpin taught himself law by reading law books. Most of his peers did the same thing. And it wasn’t just law. If you wanted to run a business, you taught yourself accounting, and so on. Books, video, internet and other sources are much more available now than ever before, and any determined person can teach themselves just about anything they want to. They might have to work a bit harder than their peers who get spoon fed readings and practice sets, but in return, they will absolutely know their stuff as they aren’t studying for a test (and going to forget it afterwards) but trying to learn and understand it.

But much more importantly, I see a lot of ignorance in college grads that make me doubt the process does anything more than what they did in high school on most topics. They don’t actually understand the outside world. They don’t understand that electric cars are plugged into the electrical grid and thus would cause whatever types of pollution that our current electric grid causes. They don’t know anything concrete about other countries. Gays for Palestine is a joke that’s been told a million times, but it’s true, they don’t know what Islam has to say about LGBT rights. They don’t know the whole history of the conflict or why Jews went to Palestine in the first place. They cannot find Ukraine on an unlabeled map, nor do they know anything about its population, industry, minerals, or strategic importance. They have no idea why Russia wants it, nor the history of the region. Go down the list and it’s just amazing how the education that’s supposed to make you a better citizen of the country and the world produces a population with strong opinions but no knowledge.

The people who don’t get that education form equally strong opinions and have an equal lack of knowledge. You simply like their opinions better.

Most people do not, in fact, teach themselves philosophy or statistics from the Internet. Instead they learn directly-relevant job skills plus whatever knowledge floats around their social sphere. The conflict happens when someone tries to privilege their social-sphere knowledge.

“Well, The Science says…”
“This is what they don’t want you to know…”
“Everyone knows that…”

These are standard, intuitive social tactics. They’re also decoupled from reality. Unfortunately, the natural response is similarly decoupled, because it’s way easier to shout “nuh uh!” than to explain law or philosophy or chemistry to amateurs. Especially when the Truth is genuinely still under debate.

I’d like to think that’s why we’re here.

I don’t like either one. If we’re to have an open and honest conversation on any political topic, basic facts are key to the discussion. Knowing where Ukraine is, why it matters, its key economic outputs, population, etc matters. For that matter knowing what Russia wants Ukraine for and why Crimea is so important to it’s perceived national security interests, or why having Ukraine potentially join EU and NATO is such a risk is vitally important here. But if you have no idea where Ukraine is, or the history of Russia being invaded because it has no natural features on its borders, or that Crimea was one of the Soviet Union’s main warm water ports to Europe, it’s hard to make sense out of the issue.

Likewise on anything science. If you don’t understand the basics of how the science in question works, or if it’s a legal question, what the law in question actually says, there’s no real point. It’s just vibes based conversation. I lean left you lean right, whatever.

My main beef with modern university education (outside of some job-skills based training) is that it’s not creating people capable of learning and understanding for themselves so much as people who simply believe the consensus views and have large doses of credential-based smugness. They don’t bother to look up the facts before deciding that their side is right. They don’t read books, or bother to find out what the other side of the issue actually thinks. We spend more time and energy on critical thinking and higher education than any generation in human history only to produce a society of people who are the least curious about the world, least interested in finding out the facts before making a decision, least able or willing to think logically than previous generations who had less schooling. My grandfather who didn’t even graduate from college was pretty well educated because he was constantly reading nonfiction books about whatever topics interested him. He was a pretty careful and logical thinker as well and able to make good decisions in business because of that.

Abraham Linchpin

I can't tell whether this is a silly autocorrect fail or an incredibly clever pun+metaphor.

Geeze. You weren't kidding about neoliberal being hysterical today. They're in rare form. I expect this from /r/politics and their ilk. I thought neoliberal thought they were high brow.

Always check the sub overlap thing, whatever it's called (and if it still works with the API restrictions). Neoliberal users are basically just the political wing of /r/traaaaaansIRL_egg-crackers.

Focus on winning the election, focus on telling people what they want to hear and hide behind the carpet all of the progressive electoral poison pills. After you’re in power, you can go back to those points.

If there isn't a name for this there needs to be. The sneering condescension and treating voters as pawns to be manipulated, and expecting them to never figure it out no matter how many times you openly say you're lying to them, as if they're video game NPCs who can't see you stealing if you stick a bucket on their heads.

And hey, to my discredit I thought it was working for them again right up until 2am on election night.

expecting them to never figure it out no matter how many times you lie to them

What's really weird is the ones who have that expectation, not just in a positive sense, but in a normative sense. At least on eX-twitter it seems like there's a significant number of people who believe that, when a candidate has taken a position previously and has since repudiated it weakly or hasn't even repudiated it at all, it's somehow ethically unacceptable for a voter to hold that position against the candidate unless the candidate is currently running on that position. @MaiqTheTrue is correct that it's "Machiavellian" to believe that you should manipulate voters who have the memories of goldfish, but is there a word for the belief that voters are thus morally required to have the memories of goldfish? Maybe this is just a bit of random chaff from the "wishful thinking"/"ought-is" fallacy, where if "X would have made it more likely for my team to win" then that's supposed to be evidence that X is true, at least in a weird sense of "true" that doesn't mean you can use it to infer any other propositions.

Machiavellian. There’s already a name for it. And to be fair, what they’re describing is exactly how politics actually works in a democratic system. The name of the game is to get people to vote for you and you do that by convincing people to want to vote for you. Propaganda is constant in our system driven into every media and cultural outlet it can be. You’ve been taught to want certain things, to believe certain policies will give you a better life. That’s manipulation, and quite often lying to people, and almost certainly “hiding poison pills under the carpet”.

The truism of politics, no matter what the system actually looks like is pretty simple. If you get power, you get to rule, if you don’t, you watch other people rule. There’s nothing unusual about the concept. In autocratic systems, you have to overthrow the current government, in democratic ones, you have to get voted in. Either way, you have to get access to the levers of power before the policies you have in mind actually count for anything.

And treating peasants like peasants is fairly common. It would be the same in any type of system with any party or faction you care to name. Most people in a nation are peasants or even serfs with little to no political control over anything. The sneering condescension is simply reality — despite what both parties tell the voters every couple of years, you actually don’t matter to them, and they actually do hold you to be beneath them.

And treating peasants like peasants is fairly common

It just happened. What do people think Trump just did? If the Democrats take anything away from this election other than "run the most charismatic person you can" and "just tell the bleating sheep what they want to hear" then they are miscalculating

I mean the last two charismatic nominees the Democrats put up won two terms and by pretty handy margins in all four cases.

The Democrats tried that, insofar as they are capable. It doesn't work cause people were already pissed and Democrats seem out of touch (crypto for black men somehow fizzled ).

Truth is, on certain issues , Trump simply is the most credible person in the room. His wildness is useful: it's easy to believe he really will deport people. He's built up that credibility. No amount of talk after Biden called for a surge to the border and Kamala wanted to "rethink ICE" will make Harris' campaign more credible.

Well damn. Why didn't the Democrats do that?

Yeah, telling the bleating sheep what they want to hear would probably work out better for them than telling the bleating sheep that they hate them and look forward to them being replaced by wolves.

More comments

I think the Democrats unleashed the most massive wave of bot and shill astroturfing that they ever have before onto Reddit in the last year or so. I have heard a theory that seems very plausible to me, which is that one of their main astroturf focuses has been to put political posts up on relatively obscure subreddits and then massively upvote them using automated or semi-automated means to drive them to the front page. https://old.reddit.com/r/houstonwade/ is often presented as an example of this theory, and if you take a look at it it seems to check out.

The astroturfing combined with years of censorship having driven out most political dissent means that a large fraction of the political discourse on Reddit in the last few months has consisted of waves of bot and shill astroturfing slamming into the minds of people who are already mentally prepared to believe in wild pro-Democrat political theories.

Reddit is almost done as a political discussion space. Even /r/politicaldiscussion, which was maybe like 70% pro-Democrat a few years ago, is now more like 90% pro-Democrat. /r/moderatepolitics is still holding out but I don't know for how much longer. The dirtbag and socialist left on places like /r/stupidpol and /r/redscarepod is still being tolerated but again, I do not know for how much longer given that they criticize mainstream Democrats almost as much as Republicans do.

I don't know if trying to turn Reddit from 95% pro-Democrat to 99% pro-Democrat was worth what the Democrats invested in it, but it might be. Such astoturfing campaigns are not necessarily very expensive, and in a close election they well might swing it.

X has also been full of astroturfing, and still is for that matter. But in the case of X, the astroturfing is coming through from both sides, rather than almost entirely from the Democrats like on Reddit. I don't know if Republicans didn't bother to invest much into astroturfing Reddit or if it's just that their attempts got foiled by censorship, but on X their astroturfing attempts seem to have decent penetration.

I think the Democrats unleashed the most massive wave of bot and shill astroturfing that they ever have before onto Reddit in the last year or so.

I swear even we got hit with splash damage on this one. I even got a response to that post telling me how I'm wrong and how all the responder's friends are posting coconut memes, which he promptly deleted possibly realizing it made even less sense in the context of the conversation than to comment I was complaining about.

The dirtbag and socialist left on places like /r/stupidpol and /r/redscarepod is still being tolerated but again, I do not know for how much longer given that they criticize mainstream Democrats almost as much as Republicans do.

Even those subs have inherently skewed discussion because of the threat of the Eye of Sauron. You could see it in terms like 'regard', how gingerly certain progressive sacred cows like trans are dealt with. Sister subs have already been banned. They're inherently unstable and fearful.

Reddit has a huge problem with a set of activist supermods. I was going to say that was the main problem and could be mitigated by some method to force mods to only mod a few subs but even if that worked (and it won't; these are the sorts of people who can get around that) there's still the admins who not only have had their own scandals but actively destroyed some of the most popular subs like thedonald.

It just rots from the head down. Which is why Twitter isn't a left wing bubble. Elon is not only not banning entire communities he's actively signal boosting the other side.

I think the real reason Reddit is unsalvageable is that it structurally depends on this crowd for a ton of unpaid work, so they can't just do as Elon and clean them up.

Yes, a lot of it is structural but reddit policy made it infinitely worse. They banned basically most conservative subs that could have created a less progressive set of mods. Beyond that, they seem to have aided mod takeovers by exactly the sorts of obsessed supermods who never should have been given power (I recall at least one story of a mod being told to get new mods ASAP by admins and this acting as a way for these people to get in)

Mods of heterodox subs have to stress over some random stuff nuking the entire sub while supermods don't have it so hard. Of course one side loses in this environment.

That was never an issue until they started cracking down on non-progressive subs. In my opinion these sort of structural "it was inevitable" explanations tend to be wrong.

I don't think "it was inevitable", but I do think it's currently "unsalvageable" (unless you consider "just shut it down and start again" as a valid solution).

Apparently the Harris campaign was astroturfing Reddit using an army of volunteers organized via a discord.

But, as you point out, why did they even bother? The site is full of deranged partisans. Almost all the top posts are made by deranged partisans. Going from 95% to 99% DNC propaganda if anything just devalues it.

In any case, no one ever accused the Harris campaign of competence.

Exactly. What’s weird about democrats is that they spend so much time and energy to reach out to people who already agree with them and are already going to “vote blue no matter who”. It’s just a stupid idea. Even if you win, you’re winning the converted. If you wanted to astroturf, going for a neutral to semi hostile media network might convince a Trump voter or two.

If you wanted to astroturf, going for a neutral to semi hostile media network might convince a Trump voter or two.

This is straightforwardly true, but the problem is the dem candidates. Kamala Harris had no real policies or positions, and could only really exist in a controlled and managed media environment that was willing to give her campaign editorial control over the finished product. She had so much negative baggage that she just wouldn't be able to answer without offending some part of her coalition, and she was a charisma void that meant she couldn't find ways around that. If she was forced to expose her personality and thinking for a solid three hours with no assistance, she would have tanked the campaign harder than she actually did.

When your candidate is so unappealing that they cause voters to peel off whenever they talk in an uncontrolled environment (Kamala even had trouble in extremely friendly environments too), you can only make appearances on friendly media, in friendly spaces. The correct answer is to run a real candidate who is speaking to people's issues and has an actual competent understanding of the world and social context - but when you have to advocate for policies which actively harm your constituents and provide a return on investment for all the lobbyists and donors who financed your campaign, you can't run a genuine candidate, so you're stuck with the kinds of disingenuous empty suits that ran the republican party before Trump showed up and still run the democrat party.

I constantly see claims that modern elections are 99% about turnout, not convincing swing voters, since politics is too polarized for there to be a significant number of swing voters. Maybe those takes are completely wrong, but it's certainly the received wisdom in any at all mainstream election analysis. Not sure that targeting redditors in particular is useful way to get out the vote of Democratic partisans, but the Democrats definitely believe that winning elections is about getting their own partisans to actually vote and discouraging Republican partisans from voting (e.g., by spreading negative news about Republican candidates). I say Democrats simply because that's the media bubble I'm in; I have no reason to believe the Republicans don't believe the same with the parties flipped.

But how does adding yet another pro-Harris post to a sub-reddit that is already 100% full of pro-Harris posts drive turnout? It makes no sense.

It's like a guy adding a 17th Harris/Walz yard sign to a yard that already has 16. It doesn't make his neighbors want to go vote for Harris. It just makes him look like a crazy person.

It's the same mistake that mass media outlets like ABC make. You can make a choice to burn a small amount of credibility in exchange for partisan politics. But at some point, the credibility is gone and then your endorsements actually hurt the candidate.

Democrats who look at the front page of Reddit will say "holy shit, what a bunch of crazy people" and think "maybe I'll stay home on Tuesday".

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Republicans 100% believe that there are democrats who can be convinced to vote Republican with the right pitch(and that Trump did this), although often holding that non voters are mostly people who shouldn’t be voting anyways.

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It's easy to get volunteers to try to take over mostly-left spaces. Things get harder in other spaces, not just because they can be out of touch with those people but because their defense mechanism is avoiding unfriendly (aka not explicitly left-wing) spaces for being impure. Or attacking other leftists for going into them.

This is how they decided a normie-bro like Rogan with many left-friendly views was somehow unreachable and radioactive.

Nobody is saying it’s easy, but Trump leaning people do exactly that. Trump’s base has absolutely no problem going onto any platform available to them. They have no problem putting up signs — even in hostile places — or wearing Trump gear, or posting pro-Trump messages on social media. Trumpers are like CrossFit fans, you don’t have to ask, because they will absolutely tell you.

I think it’s a belief problem. Liberals don’t seem to actually believe in the message. They don’t advertise in hostile environments, they don’t put out signs or wear gear, they don’t talk about it with friends and family. They mostly flee.

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I don't know if trying to turn Reddit from 95% pro-Democrat to 99% pro-Democrat was worth what the Democrats invested in it, but it might be.

I've come to the conclusion that local political censorship ("evaporative cooling") within a community is something that probably has pretty strongly nonlinear behavior. Badgering, for small values of badgering, works in terms of swaying consensus -- it probably shows up great in academic studies or commercial A/B ad testing. But it reaches a point of diminishing, or even negative returns: at some point, maybe even between your 95 and 99 percent numbers, where the evaporated community starts condensing and forming its own alternative structures, eventually re-establishing a more representative balance.

It's not just political subs. Reddit is a web of lies, misrepresentation, shills, fraud, and trolling. Believe me I wish it weren't the case. I mean I have a long train commute.

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