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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I feel like sometimes I’m good at this where you say something in a scissor statement way. I usually do it in a playful way. Trumps good at this. His comments here can come off how you say but also outrage the left. He did it with the Proud Boys in the debates with his stand back and stand by. He did it with Russia and hacking. It’s a fun way to communicate where your meaning has a very mild and what you mean meaning but people can see a way to get offended by it.

I highly recommend listening to that call and/or reading the transcript -- there's very little room for the alternate interpretation, he goes on for like an hour about all the ways he thinks fraud was committed, and how many votes can be 'found' just by looking into one or two of these things. It doesn't really support the idea that he didn't believe what he was saying to be true either, he's very vehement.

I feel like sometimes I’m good at this where you say something in a scissor statement way. I usually do it in a playful way. Trumps good at this.

I think it's more that he says a lot of stuff, and there's an army of people employed at sifting through it to snip out bits that make him look maximally evil out of context.

I think it's more that he says a lot of stuff, and there's an army of people employed at sifting through it to snip out bits that make him look maximally evil out of context.

And that he is imprecise and careless about what he says, especially when he's regurgitating things he has only vaguely committed to memory, so he leaves a lot of room for others to figure out what he meant.

On the latter part I think he does both. “The fine people” thing seemed to me that he was actually trying to be nuanced. The proud boy thing seemed more like a scissor statement and as is it was weird he was asked to condemn an org as white supremacists who had a black man as their president. The Russian stuff maybe a scissor statement.