"...resisted almost all activist demands for Blackrock to divest from arms companies and fossil fuels firms..." Which has nothing whatsoever to do with pushing Woke.
"...money invested in ESG-focused funds..." This is just hilariously missing the point. Blackrock doesn't just "invest" - it provides day-to-day funding for businesses. You don't get access to those funds if you don't meet Larry Fink's requirements on diversity, which is why I had to sit through interminable videos of my CEO (and other bigwigs) verbally fellating Fink's (Fink is praised by name) diversity initiatives and how vitally important they are, never mind the obvious negative impacts it has had to our company's performance.
edit: also, what makes you think that only the funds specifically marketed as "ESG-focused" get your money? Look up your company's 401(k) plan information; I assure you, even if you're not chosing to invest in ESG funds, your money is still going there.
Tractatus
18d ago
She just did a land acknowledgement before a concert, and yes, it was as cringe as expected.
Swift is following the normal trajectory of what is expected of white women in America; signal being socially progressive, be a striver, support neolib Democratic Party candidates.
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23d ago
Because absolutely no last-minute polls existed that justified his sudden shift the day prior to Election Day 2016. Nate knew something was wrong with the polling, and put his thumb on the scale to make Trump look better than his model said.
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23d ago
"Selzer was also an oracle up until random number dialing in Iowa stopped working." I certainly did...back in 2004, when she confidently predicted a Kerry win in Iowa.
Anyne looking at Selzer's methodology should be discounting her on that basis alone.
"...the reality is that polling methods haven't adjusted for Trump and the response bias issue with his supporters..."
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26d ago
Tractatus
26d ago
When I went into work this morning, the credit team that negotiates with the banks for funding to keep day-to-day operations going had to prove, to Larry Fink's satisfaction, that we were on track to meet DEI goals. That these DEI goals are in blatant violation of laws protecting investors from their wealth managers absconding with their investments in order to further their own political policy objectives, even when this is to the blatant detriment of the investors, is somehow completely irrelevant.
Presumably, sometime after taking the Oath of Office, President Trump will once again - he did this in 2017, remember? - issue an Executive Order clarifying that taking your investor's funds to give sweetheart loans to companies that are adequately woke is, in fact, a violation of investor protection laws designed specifically to stop such actions. And presumably, the Department of Justice will once again laugh this off and and advise the President that "the Executive has passed his Executive Order. Now let us see him enforce it" just as they did back then, until such time as a friendlier administration can take power and issue an Executive Order mandating that such behavior be done.
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26d ago
And he'll still bend the knee and tell his fans to vote for the neolib shill over the populist candidate that is the only person that has the faintest chance of sticking up for the working class, and he'll do this until they're shoveling dirt over his grave. He'll do this while getting in his Audi R8 and yelling "No Refunds!"
Tractatus
26d ago
The coverup, obviouslyl. It requires us to pretend history began circa 2019 to pretend that BLM represented a ground-breaking, once-in-century event that the Reagan landslides, the Chance to Bury Racism Forever that was 2008, or ushering in Camelot with JFK that previous elections couldn't dream of coming close to.
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27d ago
sadly, I know waaaaay too many Christians devouring media insisting that the Rapture is happening any day now.
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27d ago
She pulled this same stunt in 2020 for the Senate race; which, to be fair, did manage to get the RNC to panic and blow money there until she put out a "new" poll showing them up by 10.
She's a hack; even if she weren't, her methodology is to triple-down on landline phone polling, but only counting guaranteed voters. How anyone expected this to be legit is beyond me.
Tractatus
27d ago
The continued glazing of Nate Silver, and the absurd belief in the validity of modern polling, betrays that the Rationalist/Rat-adjascent community is pathologically obsessed with appearing to be "scientific," at the expense of actually being right.
As I have pointed out ad nauseum, the shift to landline surveys has destroyed polling. No, Nate was not "less wrong" when he shifted his probabilities in 2016 to give Trump around 30%; there wasn't a single poll at the time that justified his change, but you lot still want to believe his model has any validity, and we'll be playing this same song and dance 4 years from now, and likely, until the end of the republic.
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27d ago
You get that it's not 1972, right?
Do you really not question why literally no-one in the Democratic Party has addressed this issue by going on to CNN and saying "What gives? The Party decides the nominee, not the voters; why do you all care so much how badly we're rat-fucking you?"
Voters expect the parties to put forth the candidates they voted on, not whoever they selected behind the scenes. This isn't "let's get together and decide the nominee behind closed doors in a cigar smoked room" anymore.
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1mo ago
GOF research was being funded by Fauci the entire time it was supposedly "banned"
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1mo ago
Nate wasn't doing polling, he was placing odds on election outcomes. Why you think "that logic" has anything do with the potential accuracy of any given poll is beyond me.
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1mo ago
No, Nate isn't "less wrong" because 95% chance of winning and 70% chance of winning don't actually have a meaning in this context. How could you even make such a judgement? How do you know that if we had access to 100 different universes with the exact same 2016 race, Hillary doesn't win 95% of them?
It's absurd to claim that Nate Silver's model was more accurate because it gave marginally better odds of a Trump victory; that's not even getting into the fact that absolutely no new polls were available to Nate that showed a tightening race - this was purely Nate fudging the numbers because he knew something was off (something he used to constantly do with his sports prediction spreadsheets he made his bones on)
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1mo ago
Polling inaccuracy is because of declining response rates resulting in oversampling of hyper-engaged partisans, which can't be controlled for, not whether or not Trump is on the ballot.
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1mo ago
I'm 5'8", well into middle-age, and not anywhere near my physical prime.
Were I to show up under center for any NFL team this Sunday, and then proceed to put on a record-breaking performance, putting up numbers the likes of which legendary passers like Marino or Rogers in their prime could only dream of, nobody's going to wait for the "smoking gun" of wire transfers to every team owner, emails from Goodell directly to officiating crews, etc., before proclaiming that the game was obviously rigged.
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1mo ago
The only metric of "voter turnout" is "votes cast," so ballot harvesting generating 10 million fraudulent votes is the same as 10 million extra people actually standing in line to vote, as far as turnout is concerned. Pointing to 2020's high "turnout" isn't evidence of legitimacy.
I mentioned arguments to the contrary being perfunctory, and we see a lot of this in this thread. Note that "well, Biden may not have been popular, but maybe they just hated Trump so much?" and then the argument stops right there. People publicly called Reagan the antiChrist, I watched prime-time network movies about how totally-not-Reagan was going to get us all killed; I watched every celebrity in the world shit all over GWB, also insisting he's going to get us all killed. Arguing that Trump was so uniquely hated that he drove record-shattering numbers of voters against him (while also driving record-shattering numbers of votes for him), and furthermore accomplished this feat with virtually no help from the Biden camp, who did precious little campaigning to build his own support, again requires me to ignore everything history has taught us of how elections actually work, of what motivates voters to vote. We have to have selective amnesia to think "well, maybe they just hated Trump that much" carries water.
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1mo ago
Is there anything we can do to nudge the public into accepting that yes, Governor Cuomo can effortlessly curl 100 lbs dumbells the way you or I can effortlessly life the tv remote? At this point, it seems like "the weights were clearly fake" is completely unfalsifiable.
itsallsotiresome.jpg
Telling me to my face that a campaign that consisted of: -a clearly on the decline Biden, who had been a joke in all his previous attempts, -who only had any credidibility due to having been elevated the the Vice Presidency by Obama (who famously loathed him) as a sop to certain factions within the Democratic party, and who did little to nothing to support his candidacy -who had to have the rest of the party candidates drop out - save for Warren, to split the progressive vote - and rally behind him to stop Bernie Sanders from gaining traction -who routinely "called it a day" by 8 am, held few rallies, and couldn't manage to get anyone to show up when he did -with a running mate whose popularity was so abyssmal she couldn't even make it to the first party caucus
Was, in fact, secretly such a charismatic candidate that he shattered voting results, even above that obtain by historically transformative candidates, is to insult my intelligence. That simply does. not. happen. To ask me to not even question this is to insist that I ignore everything that I have ever seen about Presidential campaigns, to forget everything I know about general voting trends, to just have amnesia about how elections work, and how voters vote, in general. Such a claim falls well within the "to even claim this happened is evidence you're lying" territory; it may as well be the poster child for "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
To go on to claim that in spite of more than doubling the number of write-in ballots - and thus, the number of people voting remotely for the first time - we managed to get ballot rejection rates down to levels practically indistinguishable from zero!. In most cases, we were able to reduce the rate of rejection by five-fold! I guess we were all wrong about the Boomers!
Wait, no, we weren't; such a claim, again, flies in the face of reality. This simply does. not. happen. Ever.
But wait, there's more! I am also to simply ignore Georgia closing up polling stations due to a water main bursting, sending observers home, then dumping votes that went 100% for Biden that were totally already counted before Republican observers were given the boot, nothing to see here, it's honestly disturbing you'd even think to question such a thing, really. I am to simply take in stride that observers were kicked out, and windows blocked from outside observation, totall normal, totally legit, only a loony would think there might even be the barest scintilla of a possibility that something untoward was going on. Why, it's only fair that the Dems would insist on obstructing any attempts to crack down on obvious avenues of vote fraud, as such actions are prima facie evidence that Republicans are just sore losers, as there can certainly be no justification for such efforts!
But this is all old hat at this point; this "debate" has been had with you on the reddit, and here, ad nauseum. You will never offer anything other than the most perfunctary of rebuttals, with a sneer for anyone who disagrees.
Tractatus
2mo ago
Comparitive advantage only holds true in very limited circumstances that, quite frankly, simply do not exist in the real world; perfect interchangability of goods produced, infinitely elastic consumer demand for the goods in question, no risk in sudden changes in demand, and limited parties.
Hypothetically arguing that because America can produce wheat, and Japan can produce cars, so who cares if the Detroit auto industry collapses because "Comparative Advantage baby!" ignores that Detroit can't just immediately shift to production of wheat;even if they could, what happens when excess production pushes prices so low that it's simply not worth it to employ them as farmers; what happens if another country can grow wheat more efficiently (and these all just barely scratch the surface of the actual problems with Comparative Advantage)
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2mo ago
I'm on desktop (Opera browser), and it goes straight to the highlighted section for me as well.
That said, Bauer is one of those insisting that the Holocaust can only refer to Jews murdered by the Nazis, so the pushback against the "other undesirables killed in the Holocaust" feels a little unseemly, particularly insisting that only those killed in the known camps count (why not include massive numbers of Poles and Romanians killed in town, but not the camps?)
Tractatus
2mo ago
"Use of herbal and mechanical contraception is well-attested as early as very ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia."
Attested to by women of all stripes and social status, or attested to by women caught in status traps?
That cities are population sinks doesn't tell us that humans evolved to avoid having offspring (again, such a thing would be impossible for natural selection); we see frequently in history that the moment you get cities, you get reduced fertility as people get caught up in status games, behavior which doesn't happen muich in lower-scale societies where social trust is much higher, and social pressure can much more easily tamp down on defectors. This is because cities - civilization in general - are not conducive to healthy families, not that humans inherently don't want families.
Tractatus
2mo ago
None of which suggests that women would evolve to not want children, which violated the most fundamental law of natural selection - alleles that lower reproductive fitness get weeded out. It's a tautological - anything that hinders reproductive fitness had better be making it up somewhere or it's gone.
"Even if Trump was a bog-standard Democrat in the 90's, which he wasn't..."
They're saying this based off of his political positions that he espouses in public, for all the world to hear, and comparing this with where the two national parties have stood over the years. Everything Trump has campaigned on was Democratic dogma in the 90s, and, having lived through that period, your insistence that a) broad-based tariffs, b) eliminating illegal immigration, c) insisting that allies pay their fair share of maintenance of the international order were, in fact, anathema to 90's Democrats is just outright gaslighting. Those were absolutely policies publicly supported by the majority of Democrats; "nobody is illegal" isn't a mantra that exists in the public conscience until the rise of Woke.
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