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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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Oh come on. Trying to act like the "Kamelanomicon" narrative never happened isn't going to work.

Do you want me to link 50 articles about how recent polling surges show that America has rediscovered its favorite brat VP?

The "I don't get it, what do you even mean" tactic is incredibly obnoxious. It's just a way of insinuating that someone is an incoherent schizo conspiracy theorist without openly breaking the rules. And it doesn't even work to bully people without a supporting crew of redditors jeering and snapping their fingers.

Now you're talking about articles about polling, not polling. That is a different thing and I don't dispute at all that it is seeking to 'shape the conversation'.

I am not trying to insinuate you're a schizo conspiracy theorist (though now I am wondering if your anger is causing you to lump multiple things together as your enemy, when not all of them are the same).

Ironically I am not the same person as Bleep.

Do you want me to link 50 articles about how recent polling surges show that America has rediscovered its favorite brat VP?

There's a difference between coordinated efforts to selectively highlight polls that are positive for your side and actually manipulating poll results to appear positive for your side. The discussion seems to be about the latter. The former is bad, but the latter is arguably worse.

The "I don't get it, what do you even mean" tactic is incredibly obnoxious. It's just a way of insinuating that someone is an incoherent schizo conspiracy theorist without openly breaking the rules. And it doesn't even work to bully people without a supporting crew of redditors jeering and snapping their fingers.

This, I agree with. As I've written before, I struggle to see why people would believe that polls showing their preferred side winning would improve the odds of their side winning, since I could come up with multiple equally plausible mechanisms by which it could help or hurt. But it seems common knowledge enough that many/most people do believe that this is how it works, and one shouldn't feign ignorance of this very possibly false narrative.

I think the process is "hey, we're going with kamela, give us some polls we can spin." The whole polling and media campaign is coordinated on whatever the new version of JounaList is.

That one woman with the "kamela landslide incoming!" poll right before the election was obviously not organic imo. It's all organized narrative shaping, and the line they were going with was indisputably "Kamela: it's inevitable (or you're weird)"

Saying the polls can't have been manipulated because that might reduce dem turnout is trying to ignore the evidence that all of their strategy was based around demoralizing Republicans.