This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
My claim isn't that it was rigged or stolen (and I think this reply goes for @drmanhattan16 as well), it's that hundreds of thousands (or at least tens of thousands) of votes were cast illegally in a fashion that subverts election security. The result is not an obviously rigged election, but an election where there are votes of questionable legality that make up more than the margin of error. Additionally, as covered in this post the issues were substantially concentrated in deep blue counties and likely made it systemically easier to vote in an illegal fashion.
I want to be very clear - I am not trying to skirt the core point or handwave my way from this to mass fraud. I don't believe that happened. My model isn't that there are groups concocting totally fake ballots. What I do believe is true:
Dane and Milwaukee counties encouraged voting illegally in a way that would increase the vote counts in those counties relative to legal procedures.
This is not a result of a conspiracy, it's a result of their actual preferences with regard to maximizing ballot access and being the kind of people that wanted to take Covid very seriously.
Election security measures are poor enough that people vote illegally on a regular basis (see the mentally adjudicated portion above), which plausibly enables ballot theft by family members. I have no hypothesis on the directionality of this outcome, but it creates doubt about electoral legitimacy, which is very bad for obvious reasons.
The poor electoral security that was the hallmark of 2020 likely did enable at least some bad actors to cast fraudulent or knowingly illegal ballots. I expect that this is a small number, I have no good way of putting a good number on it, but it is (again) very bad that poor electoral security even makes this a possibility.
Taken as a whole, I cannot overstate how damaging to institutional trust it is to have counties and states just making up new rules on the fly that violate black letter law. When leadership elects to behave this way, they're shredding goodwill and trust in an unsustainable fashion. I can (and do!) have a poor opinion of groups like TTV, I don't agree with the people that call the election rigged or stolen, but I find brushing past just how bad 2020 was with nothing further, "well, you can't prove those votes were fraudulent" to be really frustrating. I'm not going off the conspiracy deep-end about Soros county clerks or something, I am entirely sincere that I actually want to improve the quality of elections because I think it will help prevent the dangerous destabilization of my country.
I will also chime in to say, as someone who has felt frustrated by many the election fraud claims, these are all reasonable and important concerns and I absolutely agree with the overall need to have high quality election processes.
More options
Context Copy link
I can acknowledge every point you made and it doesn’t excuse the motivated reasoning, grifting, and conspiratorial thinking whatsoever.
We can and should do better.
We also can and should directly rebut unjustified claims trying to overstate and concoct problems.
We should not carry water for those who want to delegitimize any election where they don’t like the result.
I can acknowledge every point you made and it doesn’t excuse your moralizing, consensus building, and generalizations whatsoever.
We can and should do better.
We also can and should address arguments directly, rather than lumping them in with all other arguments nominally on the same side.
We should not baselessly accuse others of carrying water for extremists with no supporting evidence, and plenty of contradictory evidence.
When I said:
I was referring to the likes of TTV, not the commenters here who stated agreement TTV and similar are dumb, or called them extremists as you have. (I wouldn’t call them “extremists” myself, in that these views are extremely common.)
I’m not sure how many comments you’ve read here or in the past, but several posters have said things like “I can’t blame those who believe the plot” or “even if the voting plot wasn’t real, it was still rigged.” Some of those stances have been more reasonable than others.
@Walterodim gave you many disclaimers and was quite clear that he wasn't speaking for those people. You ignored the substance of his comment entirely, choosing instead to essentially frame it as one of many questing tendrils of the election denial kraken.
When someone says "I don't agree with X but here are my beliefs," and your only response is to discuss how their own beliefs contribute to X (or the discussion around X), you're engaging with the comment on the meta-level rather than the object level, which is really only valid and useful if the commenter seems to be operating in bad faith.
It's like if I said "I'm no vegetarian but there was a year where I couldn't afford meat, and my health did fine" and you, a carnivore, respond with a list of bad arguments vegetarians use. It's neither here nor there. Walter isn't the representative of all election deniers, and doesn't seem to be the election denial equivalent of a secret vegetarian looking for converts.
Keep in mind he said:
Which is a little annoying when myself and others have not done that here.
Both he and I made some general remarks about what we don’t like, in addition to addressing the specific points made here.
@Walterodim presents his concerns well and I believe I commended him off the bat for that.
I’ll also note my points in the comment you don’t like apply to both sides of the aisle, since it’s not like the left hasn’t had its issues with imprecise language and unjustified claims of election illegitimacy.
He said that as a contrast to his beliefs about the election--namely that it wasn't stolen. It was describing his own stance on the issue, not accusing anyone else of that behavior.
But you didn't address his specific points. That's the issue. If you had, then after that point it would be much more permissible to discuss the meta level. Jumping straight to the meta is counterproductive and just a couple steps away from accusing someone of bad faith.
Not really. When you reply to someone with "we should do better" you're implicitly accusing them of being part of the problem. If you had said anything at all that actually acknowledged his point, that would be something, but the way you worded it:
you're basically saying, "What you're saying may be correct, but it's meaningless, because your side is still wrong." If you think he's intentionally covering for his side, make that case. If not, just directly address the argument, which already had plenty of disclaimers against the extremists.
The “we should do better” bit was attempting to agree with his overall point that we should do elections better, not telling him to do better.
I could have made that clearer, but perhaps consider you’re misreading me worse than you think I’m misreading him.
Let’s also not accuse me of “jumping to the meta” in a convo that was already a couple of rounds deep. I agree with the substance of his points on the object level. Where we seem to disagree is on the meta issue of framing, and perhaps attributing how much distrust even came from real vs. imagined issues.
And, for the record, I don’t actually place him on the “other side” in that he and I agree far more than we disagree and he seems highly reasonable.
Seriously?
I think just about anyone would read these two lines as connected, and therefore both referring to the same thing. That is, we can and should do better about conspirational thinking etc.
This is a clear enough implication that if that is truly not what you meant I wouldn't describe it as me "misreading" your comment but rather simply as you miscommunicating.
I don't think you're misreading Walter either, I just think you failed to engage with him. If you did mean to say "we can and should do election security better," that does help, but your comment was still an attempt to make Walter answer for the actions and views of his more extreme counterparts.
OK, well what you said to him was the opposite, unless by "object level" you refer solely to verifiable data and not to his actual object level arguments.
I'm not really interested in litigating this more, I just found your "we can and should do better" comment annoying and preachy. If that was meant to be about election security, then it shouldn't have been placed in the middle of a bunch of other "we can and should do better" statements which were referring to election denialism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
We are on the same page.
Cheers, and concurrence. Please keep on keeping on.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link