SlowBoy
1d ago
Doctrinal answers to this question vary of course. In France we launch a full scale nuclear response. And we make (pretty good) movies about it to make sure people know.
Maybe that's what the French tell themselves: in practice, France will not unilaterally launch a nuclear strike. Maybe they're more independent than other NATO countries but France is not doing this alone. A catastrophic decision like this will be consulted with the US government.
SlowBoy
1d ago
American appetite for ending the war is shrinking, which is reflected in Trump's election on pledging to negotiate peace. America might have more money to spend than Russia, but is less willing to spend it.
SlowBoy
5d ago
It's imminently reasonable to suspect that some vaccines are not manufactured well. That would be a very explanation for why 1) vaccines are a good technology that save lives 2) some people seem to be getting sick from them.
SlowBoy
5d ago
Maybe Harris got more votes in 2024 because Georgians were less excited about her.
SlowBoy
5d ago
My mistake, I should have said dozens. I think I saw "hundreds" somewhere recently and internalized that for some reason.
Okay. Which vaccines in particular do you believe in?
The technology for smallpox vaccines could be totally sound, and the company that makes the shots puts too much mercury in them or something. A batch could be bad. Maybe the adjuvants are too strong. We have good heuristics for noticing when something causes noticeable immediate side effects, but not when something contributes to chronic stress. Maybe every shot contains one of the 32 arms of Exodia, and you need to catch them all to visit the shadow realm.
SlowBoy
5d ago
The vaccine schedule now includes hundreds of vaccines and the incentives are all screwed up. I think it's pretty reasonable to believe in vaccines as a technology in general and that a lot of them have been captured by special interests.
SlowBoy
5d ago
I do not know what RFK Jr.'s specific stance on vaccines is
Republicans won by increasing their share of the stupid vote.
You don't know what your opposition believes, but you're sure they're the stupid ones. Thanks for putting these two sentences in the same post because it saves me the trouble of having to argue them out of you.
SlowBoy
5d ago
The post I replied to originally said there was no proof of fraud in 2020. I provided some. I can't make you argue that, but I don't see why you would want to join this thread if not to respond to that specific point.
You know people will laugh at the idea that Georgians were earnestly more excited about Harris than Biden.
This isn't even an argument, this is just shaming a plausible idea as a priori ridiculous so you can assume me of some sort of bad faith or sophism. If you think 2020 and 2024 were both legitimate, isn't Georgians being more excited about Harris imminently plausible? Ok, yeah, I guess you can keep claiming to have never seen a good argument when you reject mine out of hand.
SlowBoy
5d ago
The report went out that a water pipe burst. This caused people to change their behavior. The fact that it wasn't real is even more suspicious. How did this story get out there? Poll watcher went home!
SlowBoy
5d ago
I offered one: vote counting stopped simultaneously across several swing states, poll watchers were sent home, then huge pro-Biden ballot drops were delivered. If you can't respond to that, this is not an argument, this is just two people posting text.
Again: comparing two numbers from two different events without any context is apples-to-oranges. Harris got more votes in Fulton County than Biden did: ok, what does that mean? How do we sort out confounding variables? I weighed 100 pounds four years and 150 pounds today, I must be getting fat! (I was 8 then and 12 now, I've put on one and a half feet and I'm junior varsity swim.)
SlowBoy
6d ago
Your question is a non-sequitur: why do I have to prove anything more? There is clear irregularity in 2020, either give an innocuous explanation for the counting stopped over a water pipe, or concede.
There could be all sorts of trivial reasons why Harris would grow from Biden:
- They learned how to cheat better
- Population Growth
- Demographic Change
- Georgia flipping blue in 2020 excited more blue voters to vote in 2024
Comparing two different numbers from two different moments in time without any context is, pardon, complete apples to oranges.
SlowBoy
6d ago
Ballot counting stopped in Fulton County on election night 2020 because of claims of a burst pipe that later turned out to be false. But after poll watchers went home ballot counting continued and the next morning the largest pro-Biden ballot drop of the entire election was delivered.
SlowBoy
6d ago
Ballot counting stopped in Fulton County on election night 2020 because of claims of a burst pipe that later turned out to be false. But after poll watchers went home ballot counting continued and the next morning the largest pro-Biden ballot drop of the entire election was delivered.
SlowBoy
6d ago
They do a good piece every now and then, but all the best content that people still talk about seems to come from a 10-year period that ended somewhere in Obama's first term.
SlowBoy
12d ago
The polls did better this time than 2016 and 2020. At least, in general.
The controversy about polls starts in 2016. I think this is worth emphasizing, because there are still arguments floating around that the polls in 2016 were fine. And thus every subsequent argument about polls is really a proxy war over 2016. Because 8 years later we're still talking about Trump, we're still discussing how the polls over- or under-estimate Trump. We're still discussing how the polls do or don't measure white rural voters.
In 2016 the polls were entirely wrong. For months they predicted Hillary winning by a large margin blowout, sometimes by 10+ points. (I remember sitting in class listening to a friend excitedly gossip about Texas flipping blue.) Toward election day itself, the polls converged, but still comfortably for Hillary. And when Trump won, and the argument came around that the results were technically within the margin of error -- it missed entirely that whole states were modeled vastly incorrectly. The blue wall states of Pennsylvania Wisconsin and Michigan were not supposed to have gone red. Florida was supposed to have been close. States that had once been swing states were not even close. (To. me, this was the smoking gun that Trump had a real chance in 2016: Iowa and Ohio were solidly predicted for Trump from the very beginning, and no one offered any introspection on what that implied as a general swing.)
2020 was not much better. Without getting into claims about fraud and states: Biden was also supposed to win by larger margins than many states in fact showed. There were still lots of specific misses (like Florida redding hard). And again a series of justifications that polling did just fine because, technically, everything was inside some margin of error.
2024 is actually much better. AtlasIntel and Polymarket both broadly predicted exactly what happened. Rasmussen was fairly accurate (after taking a break in 2020 if I remember correctly). There's also a lot of slop. Selzer's reputation is destroyed (actually people may forget all about it by 2028). The RCP national average was off by a few points. Ipsos and NPR and Morning Consult and the Times were all wrong. Well, maybe that's not much better than 2020 -- but mixed in with all the bad data were predictors who got everything exactly right.
So Nate Silver's problem is that his method is junk. He takes some averages and models them out. The problem is that a lot of the data he relies on is bad. A lot of the polling industry is still wrong. And unless Silver is willing to stake a lot of expertise on highly specific questions about counties and polls, he can't offer all that much insight.
SlowBoy
12d ago
In a way, Biden's legacy is Trump. He was the only one of three candidates to beat Trump, then he's forced out and endorses Kamala to spite the party bosses. (Saw some reporting out today supposedly confirming that this is why he endorsed Kamala.) Biden's whole presidency is defined as the Interregnum Trump. To a large extent his legacy is going to be remembered in the things he's already done, but all those things will be remembered as occurring between Trumps.
It would be hard for Biden to do anything that couldn't get undone by Trump, which also means that most of what Biden could do would be implicitly accepted by Trump. Actually, probably the biggest thing he could do for his legacy would be maintain a smooth and peaceful transition, and maybe even help Trump in a matter or two.
SlowBoy
13d ago
People drank raw milk for thousands of years. Louis Pasteur only invented pastuerization in the 1860s. It wasn't until the early industrial era of contaminated factory dirt that raw milk began causing problems. Which is to say, pasteurization doesn't make milk safe to drink, it makes dirty contaminated milk safe to drink. Which isn't even a problem anymore because our cleanliness is better. Not to mention that the average cow used for raw milk lives in very healthy natural conditions compared to the feedlot pens used for factory farming mass milk cows.
I've been drinking raw milk on and off again for years. It's never made me sick. Raw milk is banned in certain states, but a dozen or so allow it, and more allow some workarounds. It would probably make the Founding Fathers sick to know that milk as they knew it is now illegal to drink in many places. What kind of liberty is that?
Anyways, the last pandemic probably didn't come from viruses in the food supply jumping to humans; it probably came from novel coronavirus funding. Prosecute the people responsible or bankrupt the institutes responsible. I don't know that either of those things will happen, but with Bobby Kennedy in government it's the likeliest chance we'll ever have.
SlowBoy
15d ago
All of my best friends are happy and excited. Meanwhile, anybody I know who I suspect doesn't like Trump has gone quiet. In 2016 there were loud meltdowns and public outbursts; I don't see nearly as much this time. Exemplified by, say, Cenk Uyghur's infamous 2016 tirade, column a, Cenk Uyghur walking off stream in 2024, column b.
SlowBoy
15d ago
Saw somebody comment that the Pelosis and Schumers of the party who pushed Biden out will now have to lose power. I wonder if that's how it will go.
SlowBoy
15d ago
Mechanically, the electors would all still the valid Constitutional lynchpin of the system. If there were a majority of Harris electors, state law might constrain some, but presumably they'd all be free to coordinate around another candidate. There would no no special mechanism for facilitating this, but a few things could happen:
- The Democrats organize behind the scenes and pick another candidate. This person becomes President.
- The Democrats don't organize electors behind the scenes. Come electoral ratification in Congress, nobody has the requisite 270 electoral votes. The president is then picked by a special election of the House (each state has one vote). The mechanics of this option favor Republicans, so it would be in Democrats best interests to go back to (1).
Please note that, if Harris died, Biden is still president in the interim, and he could attempt to nominate someone new as his VP (to force a consensus). There is also the chain of succession that goes underneath the Vice President, and someone from that could be elevated as a compromise candidate.
SlowBoy
16d ago
If the rules are published in advance, it averages out. If you change the rules at the last minute, you're explicitly fishing for a certain outcome.
SlowBoy
16d ago
Its hard for me to see why votes cast in violation of minor provisions of state election code (such as early voting hours) should be voided.
Because the minor violations are ways to get around (what little) safeguards. In Fulton County Atlanta's case, they were trying to count ballots during off-hours, and attempting to refuse GOP poll watchers from being admitted because they weren't allowed to come in during off-hours.
SlowBoy
18d ago
This poll is a complete outlier in the wrong direction. It's not just that it's different from all other polls (which are probably herded to a close split 50-50 so nobody has egg). It's that it's totally divorced from every other fundamental. Republican early turnout is up, voter registration is up, enthusiasm and endorsements are up. Trump is the most popular he's ever been, he's bringing Democrats like Gabbard and RFK onto MAGA, he's got billionaire and tech endorsements, Muslims in Dearborn and Minneapolis are endorsing him, he's filling out rallies in New Mexico and New York. Trump got 40M views on Joe Rogan, Kamala wouldn't even go. If Kamala was winning in Iowa, why isn't she campaigning there? Tim Walz is in the state next door, it would be trivial for him to go. They're campaigning in Pennsylvania. And wouldn't Kamala be more popular? Major newspapers are withholding endorsements, her rallies are tepid at best, shouting broke out at one because attendees didn't get their promised Beyonce concert. It's possible this poll is right and every other indication is wrong -- but then, aren't the crosstabs of this poll awfully convenient? Republicans are apparently shifting further left than Independents, and after 4 years of Biden-Harris, inflation, immigration, and Ukraine, voter's biggest concern is... Abortion? In Iowa?
This is too much, it's not worth taking seriously. Maybe, really really, everything else is wrong and this one poll is right, but it's not very likely. I don't know why this poll gets so much credulity here. It's like listening to a LLM, which has no experience of the world, and has no reference or context. It's possible this one outlier poll is right. But it's exceptionally unlikely. And in the world of crazy outlier predictions, there are lots of other outliers that are just as credible.
SlowBoy
19d ago
Who has access to voting machines? Lots of people, presumably. It's not like we have a full list of all election workers who stand near a ballot. I went and voted early this week, there were two ballot machines, in the hullabaloo it would have been easy for someone to stick a USB in. How would you feel about the scenario, "My biggest enemy managed to get the BIOS password to my machine AND dozens of people have unsupervised access to my machine, and one of those people could or could not be my worst enemy."
Can we give it a month before we prognosticate about red lines and weakness? Russia's response isn't guaranteed to appear within the quote tweets of one social media cycle. This would be like saying Americans showed weakness after 9/11 because Bush was still in the situation room on 9/12.
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