daguerrean
16hr ago
Pro-Israel/Pro-Russia poster in the wild
I don't track individual poster opinion enough to say if any individual person fits this bill on the Motte, but that is close to the vibe of this place. The Motte is heavily Jewish and overwhelmingly pro-Israel outside of a few dedicated posters like SecureSignals that even the mods are palpably hostile to. The Motte isn't exactly pro-Russia but it is more willing to view the conflict with Mearsheimer-style nuance than normies, along with a dedicate subset of outright pro-Russia posters.
I take this as the Motte being largely composed of disaffected American blue-tribe contrarians. If the blue tribe/college standard is Palestine/Ukraine by virtue of being contrarians the Motte will naturally gravitate more towards Israel/Russia
daguerrean
1d ago
But if you think NATO prestige is important, its a huge loss.
Why? I genuinely know very little about NATO so this question is sincere. Why would Finland and Sweden join if NATO is dead? Why would Ukraine losing discredit NATO when it wasn't even a member? It got a shitload of money just for being a proxy, presumably we would do much more for a legit member. Money can't guarantee victory but money is useful and people want money, why would that prospect not retain its attractiveness? If I offer to give any student at my local high school free SAT tutoring and a student I tutor gets a very low score does that completely discredit me and prove my tutoring was worthless? Not at all, at the end of the day he has to take the test and I can only do so much. The tutoring could remain an extraordinarily good deal for anyone willing to take it.
daguerrean
1d ago
No, largely because Jewish people sympathetic to ethno-nationalism mostly live in Israel! Jewish Americans sympathetic to civic nationalism show loyalty to American ideals such as the Constitution.
There is a factual disagreement here that can be resolved: How common are influential Jews outside Israel that support Zionism but oppose White nationalism?
daguerrean
5d ago
Your interlocutor really has a hilarious profile and photo, truly beyond parody. I sometimes wonder how people that seem to perfectly conform to every aspect of a certain stereotype mentally cope with it. "Disabled", they/them, "brat", asexual panromantic, Jewish, cat lady that enjoys "riding on public transit"
daguerrean
5d ago
Worse than alienating swifties it could potentially alienate Swift herself. While I get the sense that the value of an individual celebrity endorsement is near zero, I believe that the impression that all socially desirable people support the Democrats is probably worth a great deal (but not enough to carry an election on its own of course). I believe that left to her own devices Swift would likely come around to supporting conservatives in time. She's rich, she's white, she's heterosexual, she has a white meathead boyfriend.
Look at Lana del Rey, in 2016 she was a witch putting a hex on Trump. In 2024 she married an obvious Trump supporting, camo wearing boat guide from Louisiana. Look at her Instagram now, she has made no political posts and all the comments are from people berating her and assuming that her silence tacitly implies support for Trump. Swift will come around too, just give her time and don't be too mean.
Well, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez removed her pronouns from her twitter bio. Does this represent Democrats coming to see the extremes of gender ideology as a political liability? In addition to her we have a representative from Massachusetts, Seth Moulton facing criticism over expressing sympathy with the anti-trans in women's sports position, and in part blaming the election loss on some of the demands of ideological purity on this issue in particular.
Even Reddit seems to be sensing this shift and top comments are reflecting unease with trans orthodoxy. Even the comments from many Democrat supporters on Reddit seem to be avoiding a full-throated defense of trans orthodoxy and instead blaming Republicans for making an issue out of something that hardly affects anyone.
Is this a sign of things to come? Will they actually move against gender orthodoxy or just make it slightly less visible while pursuing the same policy goals behind the scenes?
Edit: Just wanted to share this clip as well as it seems germane
daguerrean
6d ago
Just in my own experience what makes anti-Indian racism different from other forms is that it faces less social censure in places where racism is normally taboo, particularly from women. I think any woman that posts photos of herself on social media has probably experienced some "noticing" that online sexual harassment she receives is not equally perpetrated by all ethnicities. I think women play a big role in defining social taboos and have carved out an exception for Indian men that you notice in places like Reddit. I think this is evidenced by the fact that I never notice any hostility towards Indian women (outside of some fringe places like the Motte where their frequent HR-style wokeness is noticed).
Source: See "send bobs and vegana" meme which IIRC predates all the focus on Indian scammers.
daguerrean
6d ago
the fortune you were able to accumulate because your wife was loyal enough
What do you think each of their value over replacement spouse is?
It was funny but I don't like this sort of thing. It disturbs me that battle of the sexes has apparently become the leading interpretation of this election result, which is somewhat nonsensical given that Trump won White women. Men vs women strife is much worse than racial strife in my opinion (yes I understand that racial strife can lead to wars and genocides in a way that gender conflict doesn't, but I'm talking about at the non-violent levels we are currently experiencing). I've never had a conversation with a black person in my life, what do I care if they hate me? But I really would rather not see my family divided. I would much rather political battlelines become White vs non-White than man vs woman.
daguerrean
11d ago
Reputation as a confident better
It is not his reputation as a confident bettor at stake, it is his reputation as an honest man which reflects on both the value of his words as a bettor and his words as a political scientist. Nate has shown himself to be a weasel with no integrity and that should absolutely inform your opinion of his political commentary as a good Bayesian
Massive cope. His model got a few small things right, it got the big things people actually care about wrong. As usual he will hide behind the “things with <50% probability still happen!” defense, but this is just sophistry as it was never 50/50
He liked to tout how in 2016 he allowed the errors of different polls to be correlated, rather than being purely independent experiments. But at the end of the day all this does is increase the uncertainty and expand the error bars. If you keep doing this and allowing for more error here or there it tends your “prediction” towards throwing up its hands and saying “idk it’s a coin flip”, which is what happened to Nate and why he had to shut off his model so early on election night. He did plenty of bitching about “herding” of polls while he himself was herding towards coinflip. His big brag in 2016 was ultimately that he had herded towards 50/50 harder than anybody else.
In the prediction thread I called this for Trump with high confidence and said it was an “easy call” because there was ample evidence there for those with eyes to see. 2020 was an extremely close election and by every metric (polls, fundamentals, vibes, registration, mail in voting) Trump was better positioned this year than he was then. Nate can call everything a coin flip and cope all he wants but his credibility is shot
Water fluoridation is one of those things that always astounds me and reminds me how completely different the past was, politically and in terms of social cohesion and trust in science, experts and all that. The idea that a few scientists could run a few relatively short-term experiments (just a few years) and see a relatively minor benefit (tooth cavities hardly seems like an existential crisis) and based on this get the government to introduce a chemical to the water supply nationwide without facing widespread riots or resistance is just insane to me. I'm not trying to claim that fluoride is harmful or anything like that, just that the public seems to have had such complete trust in politicians, scientists, public health officials, bureaucrats and the media to accept it is an amazing demonstration of how different things are. It is an oft raised lament that "we don't build anything anymore" or that we aren't capable of the large-scale works of the past and I think this is directly related to that. I think there needs to be a certain level of blind trust in authorities to enable that which is a bit of a two edged sword.
It is becoming very hard for me personally to reconcile my lament that "we don't build anything anymore" with my own anti-conformist and stubborn opposition to things like covid lockdowns and covid vaccination as I think they are in direct opposition to some extent. As I've gotten older I have come to believe that public consensus and trust in institutions is more important than the actual content of that consensus or the 'correctness' of those experts and institutions, but at the same time I remain skeptical and stubborn. Does anyone else relate to this conflicted feeling?
daguerrean
13d ago
I've seen it repeatedly stated that Democrats didn't lose votes to Trump but just had lower turnout than 2020, but is there any evidence for this other than what you stated: that Trump got roughly the same number of votes and Democrats got fewer than 2020? Just as a possibility:
2020: Trump: 10 votes / Biden: 10 votes
2024: Trump: 10 votes / Harris: 8 votes
It is possible that the same 10 people voted for Trump and 2 of Biden's voters stayed home for Harris. But it is also possible that 2 of Trump's 2020 voters stayed home and 2 of Biden's voters switched to Trump. How do you distinguish between them?
daguerrean
13d ago
This is the game played when calling it socially constructed. Of course there are messy edge cases where the lines get blurry and arbitrary socially constructed rules throw people into one bucket or another. You could play the same game with most other categories like species or colors or flavors and so on, but that doesn't mean that they aren't basically capturing real and useful information and describing somewhat natural categories.
daguerrean
14d ago
Loser: Lichtman
Winner: The Keys
daguerrean
14d ago
Well it feels similar to 2016 for Silver. He comes across as simultaneously wrong and cowardly in that he ultimately did say Harris winning was more likely while pushing the odds as close to a coin flip as possible. I think it leaves people asking themselves: why listen to a guy that will ultimately just tell you "I don't know, anything could happen, it's a coin flip"? For a guy that wrote a book about how he liked to live on the "river" (or was it the village?) as a high-stakes risk-taker he seems to do a lot of bet-hedging and saying "I don't know". You don't have to subscribe to The Silver Bulletin to get a shrug and an idk.
I have think it will be a Trump victory. Lately the attacks by the Harris campaign have seemed weak, desperate and inconsistent signaling a campaign that knows it doesn't look good. I remember back in September there was a big push for the 'Republicans are weird' angle and there was much agreement even on this site that it was devastatingly effective. Despite the alleged effectiveness it seems to have been dropped pretty quickly and by late-October we were back to the usual 'Trump is a fascist dictator existential threat', which to me indicated that the 'weird' angle was actually pretty ineffective and largely astroturfed. Latching onto Trump's Liz Cheney comments seems incredibly weak too, not only is it a blatantly dishonest misinterpretation of his words (this is typical) but it is supposed to win people over through their sympathy for...Liz Cheney of all people? Fundamentally Kamala Harris has always been unpopular as she got an absolutely negligible amount of votes in the 2020 primary. All the enthusiasm I saw on reddit in the wake of her being chosen felt forced and inauthentic. She isn't popular and Trump is more normalized than ever. Seems like an easy one to call.
As for rioting and looting, I don't think there will be much at all. I don't remember any substantial riots in 2016 and as I said, Trump is more normalized now than he was then by far.
daguerrean
17d ago
are on watch as some of the worst herders
I assume you're referring to the chart titled 'Which pollsters are the biggest herders?'. Unless I'm reading this wrong AtlasIntel appears to be doing little or no herding, as their 'Actual' total of small margin polls matches the 'Theory' total of small margin polls. The smaller the fraction in the 'Odds against...' column, the more herding they are doing right? By my reading Redfield, Emerson and InsiderAdvantage are herding most, while AtlasIntel, WaPo and Rasmussen are doing the least.
daguerrean
2mo ago
Trump has always been rambling and nearly incoherent. He has always been sensitive to slights, particularly about his rallies/businesses/resorts and prone to distracted ranting defending them. The Washington Post picked Hillary as the clear winner of every debate in 2016. Trump simply does not come across well to educated people in a debate format, and that includes Motte users, even those of us that support him. Despite some users here predicting that Trump had a nontrivial chance of openly calling Kamala a racial slur on national television, that didn't happen. This debate won't change anything and Trump is a known entity.
I don't understand what the message is here? Yes I am blue tribe through and through no matter how racist and pro-White I may be. I am disgusted by the low class vulgarity and tastelessness of Republicans. I am aware that in light of the election Republicans seem more interested in being the party of the uneducated and the party of men than the party of Whites. But what am I supposed to do with this information?
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