MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
It won't be the cabinet - it will be the EOP staff who actually run things. By default "Da Boss" in an administration with a lazy or distracted President is the WH Chief of Staff, but the crucial point is that someone controls access to the President's autopen. Famously, when Wilson had a stroke pre-25th amendment it was the First Lady.
Senate-confirmed cabinet secretaries have far less power than they are supposed to. In the British system, you tend to get "sofa government" with a high-energy PM and cabinet government with a low-energy PM. In the US system, the shift in power from departments to the EOP seems to be hard-coded now.
Yes - Harris' grand strategy was to build the largest possible anti-Trump coalition, rather than to present a positive vision of her centre-left (or left) plans for America. If you thought (as I did) that the biggest groups of persuadable voters were NeverTrump conservatives and double-haters then this would have have been the right approach. But it appears that it wasn't. I say appears because of the strong possibility based on polls and betting markets that essentially nothing has affected this election since the Dems nominated Harris, and that it has always been 51-49 for Trump with us just not being able to read the runes with the polling technology we have.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
This is only relevant for 1960's Illinois-style ballot rigging, which isn't how modern election fraud is done. In 2020, the plausible fraud allegations related to postal votes (illegal ballot harvesting in Dem machine cities being the one made most noisily, but there were also claims of large-scale manufacture of postal votes that hadn't been touched by electors). And in 2024, the fraud allegations that were being teed up to go if Trump lost mostly related to large-scale voting by non-citizens. For both of those techniques the work is done before polls close. (The time to inject bogus postal votes is at the postal vote opening stage after which postal votes are subject to the same chain of custody as in person votes - injecting postal votes once counting of paper in-person votes has started is Illinois-complete).
I don't think there is major voter fraud in the US, but the fraud that is least unlikely is postal ballot harvesting. If you're doing that right, it is all done before polling day.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
The maximally-cynical view here is that all three ways of resolving a election that is fucked beyond the ability of state courts to adjudicate (state legislatures nominating electors, a contingent election in the House, and SCOTUS deciding the election Bush v Gore-style) favour Republicans, so anything that fucks elections is good for Republicans and anything that unfucks them is good for Democrats. This view predicts the views of national MAGA leadership reasonably well, but not the behaviour of the locally elected Republicans who actually administer elections.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
Requires voter ID.
Why? You know who voted, you know who is a citizen (almost all the time - social security records are how the US usually verifies citizenship before granting a passport, so it's good enough for voting), and you know where they live (its on the voter roll).
Noncitizens voting under their real identities is the easiest type of voter fraud to catch and prosecute. Several red states and purple states with Republican governors have run the checks, and successfully caught and prosecuted the tiny number of noncitizens who voted. The most recent example is Texas, who referred 1930 suspected noncitizen voters for prosecution - that is 1930 suspected noncitizens who have ever voted in Texas, not 1930 noncitizens voting in any given election. 1930 votes is less than 0.02% of a typical Texas presidential election turnout (c. 11 million), so even if all 1930 really are noncitizens (some will be paperwork errors) and they all voted in the same election, it isn't enough to swing anything short of Bush v Gore II - The Electric Boogaloo.
The type of fraud that voter ID prevents is people voting, in person, in someone else's identity. That is a type of fraud that could be committed by noncitizens, but would normally be committed by citizens because they have more stake in US elections. It is also a type of fraud that doesn't happen in elections with no-excuse postal voting because committing the same type of fraud by post is a lot easier.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
I also remember CNN's refusal to call Ohio for Bush in 2004, even though it was clear by the time I stopped watching the results that Kerry had no chance of winning. It was a lot less close than 2000 Florida.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
Voters aren't obliged to get the joke. In so far as the punching up/punching down framework is helpful, a platform speaker at a Presidential campaign rally attacking a group of voters is always punching down and always fucking up.
Trump hired an edgy comedian to introduce his rally. Said comedian insulted Puerto Ricans. Biden (probably misspeaking) turned the insult around on Trump supporters. Trump decided to treat this as the worst thing ever. Doubling down on a row when both parties screwed up and were rude, but your side was racist as well, is stupid.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
Does the US media release exit poll results soon after polls close, or is the "calling" of states entirely based on partially counted results?
In the UK the national exit poll drops a few seconds after polls close at 10pm, so we know the results to within 20 seats or so before any votes are counted. Obviously the exit poll isn't always accurate - the exit polls in 1992 predicted a hung Parliament rather than a small Tory majority - but the actual error was only 30 seats. (The UK only has one race to count in each constituency, so we can count by hand overnight and the only results that aren't in by breakfast time are where multiple recounts were needed and a few Scottish seats where it isn't safe to transport ballot boxes in the dark on iffy rural roads.
As a keen election watcher from the UK timezone, I would stay up for an exit poll and then catch the real results on Wednesday morning my time (2-3am EST). I suspect we will know if PA is the tipping point state by then. We won't know which way it is going to tip because there isn't an obvious Dem bias to the postal votes the way there was last time.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
If you can drive safely at 10mph over the speed limit, then the bastards posted too low a limit. (Uncontested freeways are arguably an exception - although the Germans have demonstrated that German drivers driving German cars don’t need speed limits)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
In 1979, [Maye Musk] divorced Errol Musk. Two years later, Elon, who was about 10 at the time, decided to live with his father, as he had the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a computer, things which Maye could not afford to give the children as a single parent.
I thought the right could meme?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
The generation of elites currently in charge and screwing up (Boomers and early Xs, except in Silicon Valley where success comes younger) were teenagers in the 1980s when it was expected that young PMC members worked menial jobs. (I am younger than that I didn't because I wrangled an engineering summer job - and even that involved shop-floor work - but the majority of my contemporaries at one of the top private schools in the UK did). This is still the generation where more CEOs have worked for McDonalds than any other company.
The Silicon Valley elites who being touted as more competent than other elites were more likely to have been hacking on their startups (or ideas that didn't pan out before they started their startup) at the age when the parents would have been waiting tables. So I don't think "elites didn't wait tables in university any more" is the problem.
The thing that has changed is that elite careers are increasingly unlikely to involve leading non-elites. My grandfather was an officer in WW2, and his father had been an officer in WW1. (Even my working-class maternal grandfather had been an NCO in India). My father's first graduate job was as a shift manager in a factory. The only people I have had to manage are younger versions of myself, and when I was on the graduate job market there was a major ugh filed attached to jobs like manufacturing industry or commercial banking where you would have to be a hands on manager of line workers (with the military seen as an exception, but almost nobody from Cambridge went into the military). You can go through 6-9 months on the burger line (split across three summer jobs) while only developing a superficial relationship with co-workers who are unlike you and you both know it. You can't command a platoon and only develop a superficial relationship with your troops.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
He may claim to be self-made, but parent's name is blue on wikipedia.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
I don't think Scott has been cancelled by the establishment or was ever in serious danger of being. (It is hard to cancel a doctor in private practice.) The primary row was about the NYT publishing his real name - he said that he would feel obliged to self-cancel if this happened. He later changed his mind on this question, and now has both a Substack and a psych practice tied to his legal name.
There was an attempt by Topher Brennan to get Scott cancelled, but it didn't work, and in any case Topher Brennan is not the Biden-Harris administration (despite having "former candidate for US Senate" on his Medium page). I assume the personal beef driving this was a boundary dispute between users of the semi-socialised pussy in their shared social circle.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
Failing to beat Obama after the 2008 financial crisis.
Did any 1st-world governing party except Merkel's CDU survive that? Post-2008 German politics is hilarious - the 60% or so of the electorate who want Merkel out keep trying to vote her out (including by punishing her coalition partners) but she keeps finding a new coalition partner willing to trash its relationship with its own voters for four years running the German foreign ministry.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
It's also interesting that historically under the oldest laws "rape" was considered a crime against the woman's owner -- her father or her husband. There wasn't really a distinction made between ambush rape and rakish seduction.
Under English common law (and therefore pre-feminist American law), "Rape" was the subset of illicit sex where the man was wholly guilty and the woman wholly innocent - all other illicit sex was a crime with two co-conspirators. (In the Christian west, it was a crime against society, not the woman's father specifically, but I agree that the oldest laws were pre-Christian.) Jed Rubenfeld wrote a law review article about this that was the most infamous thing about him until his wife wrote Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
This explains why people who experienced rape trials in the pre-feminist age thought the victim was on trial - because in important ways she was.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
The other point is that various biases cause both old and new media to focus on trivialities (process scandals, horserace polls, gaffes, bimbo eruptions etc.) over substantive coverage of what is actually at stake. And, at least in this cycle, both candidates are leaning in to the media obsession by not sharing meaningful policy proposals at all (Kamala) or sharing stupid proposals which his intelligent supporters insist he won't actually implement (Trump).
Because partisans of both sides think that their side is right on the merits, they see a bias in favour of trivialities over the merits to be a systemic bias against their side.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
Given who the MAGA right see as their outgroup, "Manhattan" would have been even better. NYC also has notorious problems with garbage and rats - which are much more well-known than Puerto Rico's because, well, NYC. In the second half of 2024 they are introducing bins as a new, innovative garbage management innovation. The campaign to do this had used #Trashcity as a hashtag on the basis that everyone knew it referred to NYC.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
Yeah - the point of the joke is to clown on an island you don't like. The reason it was a gaffe isn't that Hinchcliffe told a rude joke (Trump being happy to say worse things than that is long since priced in) - it is that he read the room at a Trump rally and thought that Puerto Rico was the right island to clown on.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
ll preface this by saying that I don't think statistically significant election fraud
Does "except Illinois" go without saying nowadays?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
The relevant scaling parameter is the number of races, not the number of voters. I have participated in hand-counts in the UK with 1, 2 and 3 races being counted simultaneously, and the difficulty of counting an election scales slightly more than linearly with the number of races. 3 races can't be done to British standards overnight. More than 20 races (if you add federal, state and local offices plus initiatives) in an American election is common. If you hand counted it to British standards it would be December before you knew who had been elected dogcatcher.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
The value to the average news consumer is that the news is accurate.
Even before you consider the fact that the "average news consumer" is the product, not the customer (legacy media always made more money from advertising than subscriptions), this unfortunately doesn't appear to be true outside the business/financial media niche where FT/WSJ/BBG/Reuters operate.
The first requirement for is that the news is new and exciting. "Exciting" causes most of the common media biases - crime is always out of control because crime stories are lurid and easy to report, particularly if the victim is a moderately attractive woman. (The Guardian does the same thing, but they call it "violence against women" rather than "crime".) Political scandals are almost always over-egged. School shootings get more coverage than gun suicides. "New" causes stories to be rushed out with inadequate fact-checking - none of the New York journalists who broke the story that the Titanic had been crippled by an iceberg strike and was being towed into New York Harbor suffered professional consequences for getting it wrong.
The second requirement is that at least on the big partisan questions, people want media that flatters their preconceptions. The easiest recent example to pick over because it got exposed in a defamation lawsuit was the Fox News coverage of the 2020 election - senior figures at Fox (including Tucker Carlson) knew that they were pushing specific sensational fraud allegations that were not supported by the facts, but also understood that if they stopped they would lose MAGA-aligned viewers to places like OANN who were willing to keep going. The left-wing "mainstream" media are, of course, just as bad, but aren't stupid enough to make discoverable tapes saying how awful they are.
News being accessed by social media filter makes this much worse, because it makes the incentives stronger. And it means that even if you want to read news from writers with a reputation for trustworthiness, what the algorithm shows you is what people like you click "like" on, which in practice is going to be the stuff that makes them feel good.
The replacement of professional journalism and legacy media business models with social media "citizen journalism" makes things even worse by removing all incentives other than social virality. Elon Musk doesn't give a damn whether the right-wing "citizen journalism" he is signal boosting on X is true or not because he knows his target audience don't either.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
For added amusement, Smurfette is La Schtroumpfette in the original French, which sounds like someone bowdlerised "strumpet" by translating it into French, then German, then back to French. But this appears to be pure co-incidence - Google translate can't find a French translation of "strumpet" that looks anything like "Schtroumpfette".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
I think it's helpful to think of continental philosophy as a sort of 20th century version of TheMotte for French academics. They had their own memeplex, their own points of reference, there was a whole context surrounding it that isn't immediately obvious if you're approaching it for the first time in 2024.
And a huge part of that context is that they were writing in French. About half the time one of the OG continentals appears to be spewing word salad in English translation, it turns out that the original French is relying on a pun or allusion that didn't survive translation. But the industry of Anglosphere "pomo" that was inspired by continental philosophy (but mostly lives in English departments) is mostly staffed by mediocre scholars who only read Foucault and Derrida in translation and think that the word salad is the point.
An easy-to-explain example is Roland Barthes' Death of the Author. Reading it in translation, the connection between the "author" who is dying and an auteur-director in visual media is not obvious, and the dismissal of fiction-writers as mere "scriptors" is incomprehensible. But in the French, the auteur who is dying in the literary world and the auteur who is triumphant behind the camera are one and the same word. The weak form of Barthes' claim is "JRR Tolkien can't be an auteur in the way Peter Jackson is because the experience of reading Lord of the Rings is co-created between author and reader in a way that the experience of watching a movie isn't" and the strong form (which Barthes does endorse) is that JRR Tolkien has no more input to the experience of reading Lord of the Rings than a screenwriter does to a movie, and have you heard the one about the starlet so dumb she slept with the writer?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
You would expect this to be true, but empirically it doesn't seem to be. The going rate for a sober, trustworthy worker with a 90 IQ and a good attitude is something like 2/3 of the going rate for a 100 IQ worker - in other words it is above any likely minimum wage. And the going rate for a 90 IQ worker who is drunken, lippy, violent or dishonest is comfortably negative.
The Problem of low wage work (and in today's society it is a capital-P problem - a lot of what tradcons hate about our society is downstream of it) is really a two-parter:
- How do you raise 90 IQ normal-testosterone boys so they grow into men who will be sober, trustworthy workers with a good attitude? (Yes - the "Prussian education" thing happened for a reason)
- How do you make the experience of low-wage work something where a normal-testosterone man can maintain a good attitude without feeling emasculated?
If you solved those problems then the going rate for 90 IQ male workers would be well above the sort of minimum wage levels that are within the Overton window, so the minimum wage would be largely irrelevant.
If Trump is assassinated, it will be by a loony, not a Democrat. Given the previous assassination attempts, not necessarily a left-coded loony. The charisma about Trump that makes him an effective politician also makes him a better target for Herostratus-style loony assassins. (See also Reagan, JFK).
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