MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15d 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
15d 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
15d 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
15d 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
15d 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
15d 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
15d 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
15d 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.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15d ago
I think "Prominent Democrats hate Trump supporters, think they are [insert slur here], and are happy to say so if they don't realise there is an open mic" is priced in by now - in much the same way that "Trump is uncouth" is priced in. Biden isn't saying anything in private that he wasn't willing to say in public in his 2022 midterms speech where he said "MAGA Republicans" were a threat to democracy (complete with scary red lighting in the background).
The point I am trying to make is that "MAGA see Puerto Ricans as outgroup" is not priced in - if Hinchcliffe had said Haiti was a trash island it would have been a dog bites man story.
Republicans with large Puerto Rican constituencies are doing damage control. They think it could be cutting through. I don't think it will - but very obviously it is provoking more of a response on both sides than the usual "politician insults opponents in a way which demonstrates a lack of civic virtue" story.
Compare and contrast the response to "Puerto Rico is a trash island" to the other seen-by-the-PMC-as-unsayable things said at the rally - nobody is surprised by a watermelon gag at the expense of a black conservative, or the false claim that Midtown Manhattan isn't safe for a lone woman at 10pm. Or compare to the token performative outrage at Musk putting out ads calling Harris a "C-word" - again, it doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15d ago
The reason why the Puerto Rico as trash island gaffe may be cutting through in a way which the average "Republican says something vaguely racist" or "Democrat insults the rustbelt" story doesn't is that it isn't just an attack on the outgroup. The much bigger issue is that it may be, and can be spun as, a mask-off moment about who the outgroup is.
The big positive message of the MSG rally, and in my view the Trump campaign more generally, is "Real America is uniting behind Trump to crush the external enemy (illegal immigrants and an unspecified subset of undesirable legal immigrants) and the internal enemy ("far-left lunatics", which has a deliberately ambiguous meaning but appears to include the Democratic politicians letting the external enemy in). To make this work, Trump has to define "Real America" broadly enough to have enough votes. And, at the margin, the key groups that the Trump campaign have successfully included in their idea of "Real America" in a way previous identarian-right movements failed to do are black men with otherwise-conservative views and well-assimilated Hispanics. And the big threat to that outreach is the not-unreasonable fear among well-assimilated Hispanics that Trump's coalition don't see them as Real Americans, even as Trump himself insists that they are. If Musk or Vance or some other sufficiently prominent Trump supporter said "Actually, Puerto Ricans aren't real Americans" and didn't get slapped down then Trump would be toast.
Apart from Hinchcliffe, every other speaker who does a funny bit is clowning on MAGA's outgroup (mostly named Democratic politicians, but also California, flag burners, art fags etc). And that is what you expect at a unity rally. There is a time and a place for equal-opportunity clown-on-everyone comedy, but right after prayers and the national anthem isn't it - and in any case from reading the transcript of Hinchcliffe's bit, the nearest thing to an ingroup roast is where he suggests his own mother might have joined in the pet-eating in Ohio. There are, for the obvious good reasons, no jokes about inbred West Virginians, SSDI cheats, or fat divorced middle-aged men, and I do not think the audience would have laughed at them if there had been. It certainly looks like Hinchcliffe was put on the agenda to clown on the outgroup - probably a poor choice (and definitely a poor choice in hindsight) because his MO as a comedian is to go after everyone.
So when Hinchcliffe calls Puerto Rico a trash island and the audience laughs (from listening to the video, my guess is that a lot of them don't, but Hinchcliffe treats the half-laugh as a slow audience to warm up rather than a joke that went down badly, which does the Democrats' work for them spinning it), the message sent is "MAGA considers Puerto Ricans to be the kind of people it is okay to clown on straight after the national anthem at a unity rally." And that message is not consistent with the appeal to assimilated Hispanics that Trump has, to date, been making successfully. "Trump hates Puerto Ricans" is spin, but it is true that Hinchcliffe and the rally attendees who laughed at him think Puerto Ricans are their outgroup, that the Trump campaign chose Hinchcliffe to speak straight after the national anthem, and that Trump is sending flacks to deflect blame for what Hinchcliffe said rather than using his bully pulpit to say how much he loves Puerto Ricans.
Is any of this going to affect the election? Probably not, because nothing seems to be affecting the election - from outside it feels like everyone made their mind up within 2 weeks of Biden pulling out, and we are just waiting to see which side in a 50-50 nation has the better GOTV operation. But "Republicans think Puerto Rico is trash" is news in a way which "Biden thinks Republicans are trash" is not, so if anything is going to affect the election at this late stage, Hinchcliffe's gaffe is a candidate.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
16d ago
I think this is positive information about the big picture of election security in PA. The reason why pro-establishment people on both sides of the aisle have a low prior on "the 2020 election was stolen" is that we think that stealing enough votes to flip the result (80,000 votes in PA) would involve committing a ridiculously obvious crime that would be caught given the existence of a clear victim with the resources and motivation to kick up a fuss. This allows you to run modus tollens:
- An organised attempt to fraudulently flip 80,000 votes would be easy to catch if it happened.
- Despite no lack of trying, neither the Trump campaign nor local Republicans found any organised attempts to fraudulently flip a large number of votes
- Ergo there was not an organised attempt to fraudulently flip enough votes to flip the results.
It turns out that fraudulently registering 1500 voters (60% of the 2500 registrations in the suspicious batch - the others appear to be genuine) is a crime that is easy to catch. This is additional evidence for the premise that an attempt to steal 80,000 votes would be easy to catch.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
16d ago
In a world where elections are run by mutually-distrusting state governments, the logic of the electoral college (fixed number of EVs per state, allocated winner-takes-all) improves election security because it means there is nothing for a one-party state government to steal - to steal a presidential election you need to tamper with votes in a state with functioning two-party politics, which means committing multiple felonies with a sympathetic and politically powerful victim. The actual machinery of the electoral college is bad because it creates additional attack vectors (what happens if you blackmail or threaten an elector to vote faithlessly?) and creates additional process steps which take up time pointlessly, cutting into the time available for recounts and investigations.
A version of the electoral college where each state government cast its electoral votes directly (by certificate fedexed to the Capitol on January 5th, by Eurovision-style capitol-to-capitol video link of January 6th, or by some hypothetical future system of secure electronic communication between federal and state governments) would just work better. To avoid the Hawaii 1960 problem, you could require the state chief justice to countersign the certificate to confirm that there is no ongoing state court litigation that could change the vote.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
20d ago
The judgement is a fairly uncomplicated application of section c2 of 52 USC 20507 (the National Voter Registration Act) which says that you have to complete voter roll purges at least 90 days before the election. The idea is to ensure that legal voters purged by mistake (based on media coverage, it looks like this is about 1% of the people affected in this case) have plenty of time to re-register.
If Youngkin is going to make a big deal out of this, he should explain why he failed to meet a statutory deadline, given that the election date was known in advance, as was the desirability of removing non-citizens from the rolls.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
20d ago
The whole point of the 14th amendment was to grant citizenship to the freedmen, who had no legitimate descent from any US citizen. (Slaves not being citizens, as an obvious statement of fact). If a citizen parent was a requirement to benefit from the 14th, then it wouldn't have done what it was supposed to do.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
20d ago
My trad-cath friend kind of does, in that he believes quite firmly that there were genuine witches at Salem, and that Tituba at the very least had a literal pact with Satan.
For the record, so does Arthur Miller, explicitly according to the editorial material in the version of The Crucible I read in GCSE English, and in my view implicitly in the text. Both the witches and the witch-hunters thought (incorrectly in that timeline) that witchcraft was effective.
The point made by The Crucible is that both Hathorne-Danforth and Senator Joe McCarthy moved rapidly from using witchhunting to suppress actual witchcraft (which Miller thought was mostly harmless, but the Venona transcripts make clear was effective in our timeline) to using witchhunting to attack their political opponents, and then to using witchhunting to settle their supporters' personal beefs.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
20d ago
I agree with you that the Pendleton Act is the point at which the US Executive Branch stops being a one-man show.
But the bigger change over the 20th century is the shift in power from Congress to the Executive.
Even now, the US government is more of a one-man show than it was when an effective House Speaker could have more power over domestic policy than the President did.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
22d ago
Curtis Yarvin talks a lot about how no president has been truly in charge of the government since FDR. The reason for this is the Administrative Procedure Act.
Which is silly, because the APA is a way of regularising the use of the broad powers delegated by Congress to the executive during the New Deal era. Pre-FDR Presidents had less control over the government, not more - both because the federal government had less control over "the government" viz-a-viz the states, and because the executive had less control over the federal government viz-a-viz Congress.
That the federal government was small enough for one man to control in 1890 and not in 1930 seems entirely plausible. But Yarvin defines the government as "that which is sovereign" - which in 1890 still meant the system of shared sovereignty between the feds and the states.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
22d ago
There was an audit carried out in Arizona, by the Republicans' preferred auditors. It found a lot of sloppiness (some on the part of the election administration, some on the part of the auditors), but not the pattern of favouring one side or the other that you would see if this was fraud rather than incompetence. This didn't stop Kari Lake winning a Republican primary in which her key argument was that she recognised the fraud and other Republicans did not. And the Gateway Pundit photoshopped the auditor's report to say they had found fraud on a scale large enough to affect the result.
@The_Nybbler says further down the thread that he would not accept the result of such a commission. I don't think anyone who was plugged into the right-wing alt-media ecosystem would.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
22d ago
Birthright citizenship makes it easier, not harder, because birth in the US (which is universally registered, even if the register doesn't suffice to prove identity) is sufficient to prove citizenship.
Verifying citizenship in the UK is a mess because birth in the UK after 1983 doesn't provide British citizenship unless one of your parents was a citizen or permanent resident. If you can trace your ancestry back to 1983 through British citizens born in the UK then you can rely on the chain of birth and marriage certificates, but for a lot of people the documentation they would need to confirm their parents' (or grandparents' - most people being born today have parents born after 1983) immigration status 40 years ago doesn't exist.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
22d ago
This is one of those things where the Anglosphere simply has a different view on what the government should be doing compared to Napoleonic countries.
If the government maintains a register of everyone legally present in the country, then it can issue certified copies of entries in the register easily. This is perfectly technically feasible, and several countries have done it. The UK was going to do it under Blair, but he got voted out - the first thing the coalition did on taking power in 2010 was to abolish the register that was supposed to be the basis for the ID card scheme. It would be even easier to do for the US technically than it was for us because you normally issue SSNs at birth. But most Americans, and even most politically engaged Brits, think that making such a register is an act of petty tyranny.
If you don't have a population register, then all an ID means is that at some point some appropriate authority figure said "this birth certificate and this photo belong to the same person" and the government wrote this down.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
22d ago
Suggesting that the process was unfair, fraudulent, or rigged is also protected speech provided the transfer of power is not obstructed.
Depends how you do it. Filing a false police report is not protected speech. Nor is defaming identifiable individuals, if done with "actual malice". The Trump-Raffensperger phonecall is closer to filing a false police report than it is to normal political lying.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
22d ago
But X is already right wing Twitter
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
22d ago
There is a very obvious innocent explanation of the "ballot dump", which was trailed by both sides before the election - as in the Trump campaign was saying "there is going to be a late break to Biden because they are stealing the election", and the Biden campaign was saying "there is going to be a late break to Biden and Trump will wrongly claim that it is evidence of fraud." The root cause is that (unusually) there was a large partisan gap between postal and in person votes, because fear of COVID-19 was a partisan issue.
In states which can't open postal votes early (which includes all the key swing states in 2020), in-person votes are counted faster than postal votes, because the envelope opening, signature verification etc. all take time and have to be done before you can count the ballots. [In states which do open postal votes early, the postal votes are counted faster than in-person votes because after opening but not counting them they are neatly stacked, all right-way-up etc. As a result Texas and Florida both looked competitive in the early stage of the count until the in-person votes started coming in].
In states where in-person votes are counted at precinct level and postal votes are counted at county level (which is most states, but I don't have a list handy), the in-person votes dripple in over the course of hours, whereas the postal votes come in in big lumps - especially when a big metropolitan county like Fulton or Wayne posts a batch of postal votes.
Everyone who was paying attention, including Trump, knew that there would be a late break to Biden in key swing states for these innocent reasons. Trump "knew" (in the legally and morally relevant sense) that the "ballot dump" was not evidence of fraud, even if his supporters didn't.
He also "knew" that the Dominion voting machines lie was false - the version of the story he was running with involved claims about the ownership of Dominion which were contradicted by the public record. (Smartmatic had Venezuelan connections, Dominion didn't).
I don't think that Trump "knew" that the gish gallop of hinkiness that the right-wing internet started putting together within hours of the close of polls would not find enough dodgy ballots to throw the election into question because I don't think anyone knew that at the time. But he did know that it was a gish gallop - that if he wanted to get it adjudicated in the time available (based on his behaviour, I don't think he did) he would need to be clear and focussed about what he was alleging (he wasn't). When Trump tries to take his best evidence of fraud to a sympathetic audience, you get something like that Trump-Raffensperger phonecall. Trump's people are trying as hard as they can to make specific allegations of fraud which Raffensperger can admit or refute (Trump himself is not helping), Raffensperger's people are saying "We already investigated that - there is an innocent explanation that we can show you offline." and Trump is saying "Oh no you didn't."
That isn't what a co-operative fact-finding process looks like, or even an adverserial one conducted in good faith. I have worked for unethical bosses (Fortunately, not for much longer than the duration of a contractual notice period), and Trump's end of that call sounds like a boss trying to get a subordinate who is slow on the update to falsify documents. "NASA needs to know that the O-ring is clean." "But I checked, and it's burnt half-way through." "Who do you believe, the boss or your lying eyes." "Excuse me?" "I need you to be a team player." etc.
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.
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