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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Just to be clear, you mean “years” as in two years, because (as I already noted) the decree was lifted in 2018 and the only national election since then was in 2020.

If you were in the business of genuine persuasion, I suppose that this is where you would reveal your extensive experience with poll-monitoring and ballot challenges. Then you could explain in detail how it’s actually really easy to get tens of thousands of volunteers mobilized and adequately trained in two years or less to coordinate doing that across thousands of decentralized voting precincts. To really put a bow on it, you’d be sure to take into account the fact that a substantial plurality or even outright majority of these precincts underwent dramatic administrative changes immediately before that election due to (read: on the pretext of) the Covid pandemic, many of which served to make those very activities far more difficult, if not practically impossible.

You will be accused of a misleading summary because you gave a misleading summary. I hope that the above helps to show why.

If so, it would be useful to know which step exactly is erroneous.

You haven't contradicted my summary, but instead just doubled-down on the assertion that it was impossible to investigate voter fraud because the RNC was really left helpless (setting aside other people with an interest in investigating voter fraud, like law enforcement and whatnot). You can chalk it up to a deficient theory of mind on my part, but I don't understand who finds these excuses persuasive. It comes across as calcified helplessness.

I have given reasons why you’d expect the RNC to lack the relevant capacities at the time(s) in question, none of which you’ve given arguments against. You simply double down on the assertion that the RNC or others really must have been efficacious, without evidence, ipse dixit.

"We don't know if bigfoot exists because my cryptozoologist uncle has been in prison for the last 30 years."

"Aren't there other people that can look for bigfoot? Maybe park rangers or something?"

"My uncle really is in prison. He can't look for bigfoot from behind bars."

"Ok fine but you haven't explained why your uncle is pivotal in the hunt for bigfoot! What stopped other people from looking for bigfoot? Assuming he exists of course."

"By now I've clearly established that my uncle has not been in a position to conduct any scouting trips for bigfoot, none of which you've even tried to dispute. Good day sir!"

Your problem was both that I was supposedly saying the RNC was helpless and not accounting for other interested parties. You said exactly that in your last reply. Now you’re acting as if you never said anything about the RNC and it was always exclusively about the third parties. That’s dishonest.

Nah, I did talk about the cryptozoologist uncle but I think he's being used by you in this argument as a distraction. @atelier claims we can't know if bigfoot exists because the uncle hasn't been allowed to work. That assumes the uncle is somehow foundational to the mission of finding bigfoot. If you reject the assumption (I do) then talking about the uncle is irrelevant. But if you do accept the assumption (do you?) the obvious follow-up is how did the world end up relying on just one man to find bigfoot? Why aren't the park rangers doing their job?

Gee, what could possibly be the relevant disanalogies between a random cryptozoologist, Bigfoot, and park rangers vs. the RNC, election fraud, and law enforcement? (Here’s a start: we definitely know election fraud exists.)

Sure, let's assume bigfoot definitely exists. Justifying away the lack of photos of bigfoot by citing the cryptozoologist' prison time (as atelier did) doesn't begin to explain why he would be the only person capable of supplying them. It remains a distraction tactic.

It does not, because there are a host of other disanalogies here which you apparently refuse to even countenance, as evidenced by your insistence on this incredibly unfitting metaphor. Are you really going to make me write up the whole list of them by your stubbornness on this point, or can you see for yourself what the problems might be? Well, I can guess what your answer will be, so I suppose I'll do it anyway.

The Republican Party is frequently the only entity legally allowed to send its own poll-watchers besides Democrats or other established political parties. In a two-party system, therefore, the absence of RNC poll-watchers and challengers is functionally equivalent to only one party getting to meaningfully observe. Presumably anyone can go and look for Bigfoot in national parks and the like. Not just anyone can work the polls.

Discovering Bigfoot is a matter of roughly equal independent interest for most anyone, and no one obviously stands to gain by concealing his existence. By contrast, the RNC has a special interest in preventing election fraud, and whoever is committing election fraud obviously stands to lose by its discovery.

A random cryptozoologist serves no national coordinating function among American Bigfoot-hunters generally. But the RNC is the only organization on the GOP side which plausibly has the reach and capacity to coordinate nationwide poll-watching for Republicans.

Law enforcement doesn't stake out polling precincts, they only go after voter fraud if someone brings them evidence proactively or they happen to discover it incidentally. There are usually no dedicated law enforcement units for election crimes, with limited exceptions in red states like Florida. Law enforcement has no direct fiduciary interest in preventing election fraud, unlike the RNC. In this they are like park rangers, for whom "Bigfoot detection" is no part of their job description. Moreover, given the partisan valence of voter fraud accusations, political considerations can easily deter local law enforcement from going after voter fraud in e.g. deep blue areas. But the RNC, as a private and openly partisan entity, is subject to no such constraints.

I hope that you will now cease flogging this broken-down horse.

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