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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35661 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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But as I said, if he was returning to a different topic, that would ... also be internal, like, neurons, or maybe a soul or something, so the external/internal dichotomy isn't useful here? Presumably he returns to the topic [in this theoretical example because I still have no idea what the topic is, or what ymeskhout is alleged to be doing here, this is just a tangent about some psychological argument] for some specific reason. And that reason would be about external things - he's trying to inform us, the topic is interesting, etc - just like the reason would be if he was talking about something else instead! So I don't really see how it's external or internal, but just incorrect vs correct.

Also, can you just say what the "topic" is, and give an example of "prior engagement" being ignored, or something? I genuinely have no idea what you or dean meant.

We're talking about the guy's behavior, and you're going on some weird abstract rants about the universe... No, we just talking about the dude, it's not that deep.

Also, can you just say what the "topic" is, and give an example of "prior engagement" being ignored, or something

I'll look for a link later, but one of his hobby horses was election fraud, and how there is no evidence for it, even after people sent him examples that he couldn't address on substance.

I'll look for a link later, but one of his hobby horses was election fraud, and how there is no evidence for it, even after people sent him examples that he couldn't address on substance.

I read those threads with some interest. While I cannot claim to be an expert of the law, I found that Meshkout seemed to very much have the better of the argument, and I think it's a very good thing that he kept hammering the point for months and years afterward.

It's very easy for culture war issues to cement falsehoods as common knowledge. We never really achieve certainty on most of the questions we discuss here, and on a question as complicated as election fraud it's very easy for arguments to proliferate far faster than they can be answered, until false certainty arrives by something approximating a distributed Gish Gallop. My Recollection is that Meshkout was trying to fight this tendency by focusing on the specific questions brought to court, and by returning to those questions with periodic updates as they worked their way through the legal system. While this is not a perfect answer to the question of election fraud, it's about the best approach I can imagine to the best-defined subset of the question.

If you or others disagree, I'd be fascinated to read an effortpost on the subject.

I chased down a lot of the fraud claims, and a few of them were actually valid -- they were definite things that deserved follow-up and investigation because either the people running the election did a weird thing or someone else did a weird thing to them.

But neither side seemed to want to talk about them! Instead the stop-the-steal people wanted to keep on bringing up stuff about supposedly-legit poll monitors being barred from supposedly-legal videotaping, stuff it is trivial to show is against election law. IT is just Duke LaCrosse with a different polarity.

No, we just talking about the dude, it's not that deep.

Yeah it was a complete tangent

I already found the reddit post. I don't see at all what the substack post has to do with election fraud, and ymeshkout's posts frankly seemed par for the course here - yeah, he's arguing persistently and at length for something he believes is accurate and that many are wrong about, just like everyone else. And, iirc, he was right, and the 'examples he couldn't address on substance' ended up falling apart later

I remember the topic being disproving election malfeasance updates weekly. I don't remember how much engagement but I do remember checking out of those posts because they were the same every week where two sides simply talked past each other.

Oh, that makes sense. Honestly, while they were repetitive and probably not useful (although that's definitely also true of the twice-daily high effort "the wokes did another bad cancel thing" posts - like, I get it, I agree the wokes and canceling and civil rights law are not ideal, but I got the message the first fifty times it happened, now what), the fact that the election posts were both correct and opposing a wrong view that was held by many here made them much better than many random posts.

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