benmmurphy
8d ago
The Babylon Bee was serving an underserved market. The Babylon Bee might individually be more relevant than the Onion but not so relevant when compared to all the Cathedral media. Of course that is an unfair comparison, but if you compare Cathedral vs anti-Cathedral media then Cathedral media in total is more relevant.
benmmurphy
12d ago
don't the pollers have some degree of freedom because they sample based on demographics and not purely random. presumably they use this to perform adjustments. i also assume they poll the chance of the person voting as well and don't just make that number up.
benmmurphy
14d ago
I thought the steelman would be something like the message was in related to FEMA media shots and they wanted to avoid political signage in the media they produced and for some reason they mistakenly said 'Trump signs' instead of 'political signage'.
benmmurphy
14d ago
I think this is because at the moment the left dominates a lot of the idea institutions like universities and the media. If it was the other way around I'm sure the right would be intolerant of different ideas and the left would be more accepting. There are people in both groups that are accepting of a free exchange of ideas but I think the majority or the people that actually end up in control of these movements have the opinion of free speech when I'm weak but controlled speech when I'm strong.
benmmurphy
15d ago
Hypothetically, lets say the optimal societal solution to fluoride is the government injects the water, but pregnant women and new borns drink bottled water. What is the chance that society actually converges on this solution given the past policy decisions. Even if there was no past commitment from the government to the fluoride policy i feel like this would go down like a ton of bricks. Making people pay extra when they are making babies is not a popular policy position. But given a bunch of bureaucrats have committed to the fluoride i can't see them admitting there might be flaws in their approach.
benmmurphy
16d ago
Polymarket are now effectively running a death lottery on Trump. Also, the odds seem really good for the 'Trump will not be President' wager considering what happened this year. It was around 1/200 when I looked. 4 sitting Presidents of 46 have been killed so far. the historical odds is something like 4/46 * 2/50 of being killed in a 2 month window if we include November to January before certification. so about 1/280, so purely on historical odds alone its not a good bet but if you think Trump is significantly more likely than average then those odds start to look interesting.
benmmurphy
17d ago
Also, if median-voter-theory applies then presumably every election you would need to rig harder than the previous one as the rigger party pushes more of its agenda and the alternative party adopts more of the rigger party agenda. So eventually you would naturally reach the rigger limit. But I guess the rigger limit would be reached faster due to variance caused by exceptional or poor candidates or miscalculations about the electorate.
benmmurphy
17d ago
'injecting' ballots is only feasible depending on the current margin in the target states and the overall swing. if there is some kind of late night reversal caused by an injection it would look too suspicious this time. they would probably need to inject ballots across all the states in order to make the data look less suspicious but that would mean involving more people which is a very risk endeavour.
benmmurphy
18d ago
this is a game where there are two players not just the Republicans. the Republicans might be cracking down on Democratic vote tech this year but that doesn't mean the Democratic party haven't made improvements to their vote tech that might compensate for whatever measures the Republicans have introduced.
benmmurphy
18d ago
If the Democrats refuse to certify Trump I think its more likely to be due to claiming Trump is unqualified to hold office (for some reason) than voter fraud allegations. But don't be surprised if Trump wins and they try and do a similar challenge to what Trump did but somehow its preserving democracy instead of destroying democracy.
benmmurphy
19d ago
538 also has an article about some kind of shenanigans with a Democratic primary poll in 2020 which Selzer was involved with. https://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/iowa-caucus-2020-election-live/#254963
two reasonable interpretations: a mistake was made in the poll and they withheld the results because they would always dump a poll in a situation like this and this is consistent with their strong ethical practices. another interpretation: the poll was damaging to a certain candidate so they either took advantage of a situation or created a situation in order to hide the poll results.
benmmurphy
19d ago
It was on a podcast: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3kBW-6TebUg
benmmurphy
19d ago
Yarvin's theory is pollsters have to adjust for the better Democrat election tech or else they will get egg on their face when they underestimate the Democratic vote.
benmmurphy
19d ago
if all the polls are 'herding' the results in order to remove outliers then there should be some kind of opportunity for someone with a lot of cash and willing to take the risk to produce 'real' polls, keep them a secret and make EV bank on polymarket.
benmmurphy
20d ago
My guess is Republicans are just using the same election 'tech' that Democrats used last cycle. Shady stuff like vote harvesting.
benmmurphy
20d ago
the great filter is rocket men get thrown in jail before they can explore the stars
benmmurphy
21d ago
"The Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian disinformation campaign" was actually "The Hunter Biden laptop has the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign". Often they are not straight up lying but saying something that is technically true but designed in a way to mislead their audience into believing something that is false. I think if you consciously do this it is not any different from lying. It's like these people running scams on Amazon where they sell you the box but not the thing inside the box but then claim its not fraud because they sent you what was in the picture.
how is this legal? it seems like the legal theory is just add 'in minecraft' after the illegal act and then its ok. the people involved are very clearly receiving consideration for their vote as long as the 'in minecraft' clause was not added.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597
Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—
https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/expenditures-to-influence-voting
In simpler terms, this means it is illegal for anyone to use money or anything of value to influence someone's vote.
i'm going to solicit people to kill other people but make them check a box that says 'in minecraft' or 'this does not really create a legal agreement' and everything is ok.
ah: i missed the link that explains the courts have decided no money involved no problem:
https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2007/08/06/0655517.pdf
Whatever the wisdom of using vote-swapping agreements to communicate these positions, such agreements plainly differ from conventional (and illegal) vote buying, which conveys no message other than the parties’ willingness to exchange votes for money (or some other form of private profit). The Supreme Court held in Brown v. Hartlage, 456 U.S. 45, 55 (1982), that vote buying may be banned “without trenching on any right of association protected by the First Amendment.” Vote swapping, however, is more akin to the candidate’s pledge in Brown to take a pay cut if elected, which the Court concluded was constitutionally protected, than to unprotected vote buying. Like the candidate’s pledge, vote swapping involves a “promise to confer some ultimate benefit on the voter, qua . . . citizen[ ] or member of the general public” — i.e., another person’s agreement to vote for particular candidate. Id. at 58-59. And unlike vote buying, vote swapping is not an “illegal exchange for private profit” since the only benefit a vote swapper can receive is a marginally higher probability that his preferred electoral outcome will come to pass. Id. at 55 (emphasis added); cf. Marc John
benmmurphy
22d ago
The motte is the more extreme version of slatestarcodex/astralcodexten. Vance is not based enough to hang out here. He probably hangs out with the normies in the slatestarcodex comments or that other weird vbulletin forum. What you would really hope is Vance is that guy that keeps posting on the reddit split off asking where everyone else is.
If the Russians were funding the Greens it would be because they wanted to push for shutting down coal and nuclear power plants which would increase Germany's reliance on natural gas as a way to fill the gap when the baseload becomes more unreliable.
The weird thing is I thought there was a thing about the German secret service infiltrating the Green party due to Russian ties. The problem is I don't know when this happened. In my head this must have happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union because of my age but also in my head my thoughts were 'I hate the Greens. I hate the Communists. But you really shouldn't be doing this in a democracy'. [weirdly enough the USA did the same thing to the Republican party 16 year later]. Also, if I search for the terms 'scandal over germany secret service green party' in Google I can't find it so maybe I'm hallucintating. I asked chat gpt and apparently it happened in 2000 which make sense to me but maybe this is chat gpt hallucinating as well. Chat GPT wouldn't supply me with links and I can't find anything on google in the front page.
this is the closest i could find to what i remember: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/german-spies-target-left-wing-party but that doesn't mention Russia or the Green party. i could have misremembered and thought it was the green party when it was a leftist party.
benmmurphy
25d ago
its funny they make reference to a case that involved a socialist being jailed for his anti-war protest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debs_v._United_States) that was clearly decided incorrectly based on the current interpretation of first amendment protections. of course this also shows that the current interpretation is something that needs to be strongly guarded against because the courts can quite easily take away the right to free speech.
benmmurphy
25d ago
the twitterati need to punish people for defecting even if their particular instance of defection produces no harm in order to send a message to all the other potential defectors.
benmmurphy
29d ago
it could also be Johnson is a good faith actor and his CIA took me to a room claim is a way of telegraphing to everyone that he has been compromised.
how does the federal government ban abortion? that seems beyond their power. i presume the FDA can ban / regulate abortion drugs but the FDA doesn't have the power to regulate surgical procedures. but it looks like commerce clause strikes again. just mention the magic words 'affecting interstate commerce' and the federal government can regulate anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Carhart
(a) Any physician who, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, knowingly performs a partial-birth abortion and thereby kills a human fetus shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both. This subsection does not apply to a partial-birth abortion that is necessary to save the life of a mother whose life is endangered by a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself. This subsection takes effect 1 day after the enactment.
the other hilarious thing is if they argued against the federal government having the power to regulate abortion they would have been probably more likely to succeed given the make up of the court.
More evidence for the dead internet theory. I saw this tweet which has a picture of two users discussing bluesky (https://x.com/crystalandqueue/status/1857526125401878582).
Based on the account names I would suspect those accounts are bots, but maybe boomers when picking account names try and pick what they want and then either the site auto-fills these number for them or they just mash the keyboard. But with the advent of LLMs presumably there are a lot of people just running bots even just for the lolz.
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