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Believing this requires significant sane-washing of the last 8 years of media. I mean, to pick a random example off the top of my head that Youtube reminded me, Joe Biden's mental decline. The behavior of those in the media is completely unhinged and totally detached from reality, not to mention nakedly self serving. They've gaslit all of the country on an industrial scale about innumerable topics, or instituted a bizarre form of cognitive mutilation where you are only permitted to think of fact in ways they have told you that you are permitted to think of them. Impossible tangles of double-think abound for sex, gender, crime, equality, equity, you name it.
I would hope Elon has better sources of information than I have. But, to pick at Zelensky's 4% approval rating Hanania leads with, is it even possible to know what the real number might be? Also, I'm supposed to be assessing these "debunks" in a media environment where all the election polling around our own election was purposeful lying. Trump's internal polls showed him winning. Biden and then Kamala's internal polls showed him winning. At no time during the entire election cycle did anyone's internal polls show anyone but Trump winning. Public polls on the other hand, with the exception "low quality" pollsters like Rasmussen, all showed Harris winning. The Harris campaign even went so far as to gaslight the nation claiming Trump was lying about his internal polls as a pretext for election denial.
So why should anyone believe anything these people say about Zelensky's poll numbers? How can they possibly claim to be more credible than just making shit up? If Trump and Elon want to parade around some fake numbers the IC gave them that serve their agenda, they are in good company. Well, maybe not good company, but you know what I mean. Don't pretend this is a deviation.
I mean, this is just naked revisionist history and sane washing right here.
What past is he talking about? "Misgendering" was a ban on sight offense on every social media platform. Books about it were banned, at least temporarily. Liberals didn't calmly argue with conservatives about where to get news from, they banned it. It's pure imagination that anyone, anywhere, was calmly debating what sources of information were preferable to seek the truth. It was a boot stomping on a human face thinking the roles would never be reversed.
Furthermore, I keep going through Hanania's supporting evidence, like "Editor-in-chief of The Federalist joins others in repeating repeating the completely made up lie about Zelensky meeting with Democrats beforehand." except, oh wait, here is a Democrat tweeting about meeting Zelensky before the Trump meeting. Just finished a meeting with President Zelensky here in Washington. He confirmed that the Ukrainian people will not support a fake peace agreement where Putin gets everything he wants and there are no security arrangements for Ukraine. . Did the original rumor name the wrong Democrats? Yes. Is it a made up lie that Zelensky met with Democrats beforehand? Absolutely not.
Frankly it's barely worth the effort to continue to pick apart these sour grapes that Hanania isn't making the living on Twitter that he used to or expected to. Though I am especially tickled he cites Elon being on the wrong side of an argument with Sam Harris about how bad COVID was going to be. The same Sam Harris who has horribly beclowned himself with extremely motivated reasoning about the measures that he still believes were justified to deal with it. Elon might have been wrong about the numbers, but he was directionally correct about how serious to take it. Especially in retrospect, and especially compared to Sam Harris.
Although I agree wholeheartedly with you about the media cover-up / lying about the Biden cognitive decline .... I would never, ever want to get a beer with this anchorwoman (or podcaster? whatever the correct term is). It took her less than 90 seconds to go full reeeeeeee and actually use the phrase "I can't even..." Again, this is despite the confirmed fact that I agree with the general story here.
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This isn't true, many had Trump winning.
Hanania actually published an article before the election expressing skepticism of the polls:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/are-the-polls-too-close-to-be-trusted
The best anti-establishment takes usually come from people like Hanania. They don't come from "anti-establishment" conspiracy theorists who don't believe any data, election results, polls, scientific studies, and just bloviate and make assertions completely untethered to any evidence.
Yesterday you said you weren't here to passive aggressively side talk about all these low quality populists. I didn't have time to respond and I figured the charitable thing to do would be to take you at your word, or at least not rub your errors in your face. And yet here you are not just side talking but coupling it with hilarious jokes like "The best anti-establishment takes usually come from people like Hanania" and it's complete tonal whiplash.
Jokes aside it's obvious why you like Hanania's stropfest, but you make no effort to explain why anyone else should, just another wide brush of smears against anyone who questions the neoliberal consensus. I'm not going to defend conspiracists, because that's just your nail, it covers everyone from doesn't trust polls to flat earthers and beyond.
Instead I'm going to do you a favour and explain some things populists don't like, so you can better reach those doge guys and future republican senators. Populists don't like being lumped in with the craziest people you can currently think of. They don't like people who smirk at the powerlessness of others. They don't like arguments from authority, especially when they don't respect the authority. And most importantly they don't like listening to people who are too blinded by their own petty bullshit to notice that the entire world changed in November, or who try to gaslight them into thinking Trump changes nothing even as he goes around changing everything, or whatever the fuck you were doing there.
If you think someone is "gaslighting" or otherwise stomping on the rules, report it. This sort of callout is doing no one any good.
But you are here now and the side talking and sweeping generalisations are against the rules, right?
Maybe I’m missing something here, but I don’t see it.
Calling a Twitter “fake news account” conspiracy theorists is not smearing the entire category of populists. If AT is playing that game, he didn’t do it in this comment.
The issue is that if you read his posts you notice a trend, wherein anyone he doesn't like gets called a conspiracy theorist or a conspiracist or a low quality populist, but they always turn out to be working class or red tribe and there's never an angle for engagement, they are just dropped like edicts from on high. And after he drops his ridiculous wide sweeping general attack he applies to everyone he dislikes - which includes everyone from Elon Musk to Whiningcoil - and you try to engage him he never defends or elaborates his position and usually just side talks more.
This is just petulance:
And if you don't have a problem with it then there's no point in reporting it is there? But I don't think it would be tolerated if some guy constantly declared that niggers always vote for the plantation, and I won't tolerate this.
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That doesn't sound like me.
This has got squat to do with "neoliberalism." Musk is basically a neoliberal. The problem is saying false things like the 4% approval rating stat and then doubling down when it's pointed out. It's not like he cited a real poll that, unbeknownst to him, had methodological flaws. The poll was completely made up.
Ok so conspiracists includes Elon Musk now and you don't like neoliberalism. You've fixated on Musk, despite not mentioning him at all in the previous post, but at least there's an argument to deal with. Next time say all that in the first place instead of whining about everyone you dislike.
Poor reading comprehension.
Whoa whoa that's interpretation pal. I'm trying to determine a coherent worldview out of a temper tantrum, it's not easy. You could always explain yourself better, but we both know why you won't.
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He's referring to this comment, which on my reading does straightforwardly say that you're here for "work(ing) with them to explain your arguments and defeat(ing) theirs" as opposed to "sulk(ing) quietly to yourself and then passive aggressively side talk(ing) about all these low quality populists".
You're not making sense. I'm possibly the biggest Musk critic on this forum (even our resident progressives claim he's good at managing Tesla, SpaceX, etc - I don't), and you're taking swipes at people like me ("They don't come from "anti-establishment" conspiracy theorists..."), as you're trying to refocus the conversation on how wrong Musk is. Make it make sense.
I’m very confused. I feel like we’re all arguing and/or moderating past each other.
To which of the following do you object?
I don’t think Alex actually said the last one. I read his comments as a pure complaint about Elon Musk’s susceptibility to AECTs like this particular account. But you and @Fruck are taking it as a personal or at least tribal attack? What am I missing?
I didn't get the impression that he was limiting his criticism to that particular Twitter account, rather it feels like a sweeping condemnation of all AECT's.
That would be a pretty big point of disagreement as well, but it's open to civil debate.
The missing piece might be that I unironically consider myselfban AECT, so I don't know how to read that as anything other than an attack. I'm aware that there are people in my group that have a few screws loose, but a sweeping condemnation of the entire group based on that feels extremely unfair, and I was under the impression that it's even against the rules.
How is what he doing different from condemning the entirety of, say, Critical Race Theory, based on the conduct of the students of the Evergreen State College?
If that was posted completely in a vacuum, I guess it’d be a violation. In response to a post about Evergreen? I want to say it’s okay, because I don’t know how else he’d refer to the category.
Maybe
anti-racist & activist & dissent-quashingis a really small set, maybe it’s even empty, but I don’t think reasoning about it is wrong.I suppose I’m struggling to figure out how Alex could have been more specific about the group he was condemning.
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Reading this conversation, I observe your comment has no single verifiable claim, it's all smears and claims what populists (underdefined) are or are not, whereas comment you replied to had a verifiable claim what polls did predict or did not.
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Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.
Why not apply this level of learned helplessness to Musk? Surely he’s burning credibility, too.
True, but entirely over-applied by centrists nowadays when talking about the right's or right-aligned responses. In fact, I most often see it deployed as a statement when a centrist is commenting on one of the issues the left is not able to articulate a right wing argument on, and because most centrists live in left wing media environments, they too cannot articulate the RW theory of the issue.
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You know, I want to take a longer stab at this part. This is less "What I believe" or even "How I think things should be" and more "Is this just the human condition?"
What even is credibility? Is it being absolutely truthful and aligned with reality in every word you say? Or is it delivering the goods, what you said along the way be damned? Musk has a long record of optimistic timelines for various technological achievements. I recall full Falcon 9 reusability was regularly years behind where Musk would confidently say it would be. All's said and done though, none of those "lies" mattered. SpaceX developed a fully reusable rocket and nobody else is even close a decade later, much less beat SpaceX to market in the few years Musk was off in his estimates.
I also recall the story about how Tetris was licensed to Nintendo. Some businessman shamelessly lied that he had the rights to it, signed the paperwork with Nintendo, and then flew off to Russia to do whatever it took to actually secure the rights. He lied... but he did deliver the goods. What does that say about his credibility? He certainly wasn't blacklisted or anything, and in fact goes around bragging to an adoring press, telling the story over and over again.
I was reading The Odyssey lately, and towards the end there was this peculiar part that really struck me where it's mentioned that Odysseus' maternal grandfather was a "world renowned perjurer and thief". Just the way it was phrased, as an admirable thing to be known as struck me as a hilarious bit of bronze age morality. But this more or less meshed with the rest of the bronze age morality on display in The Iliad and The Odyssey, where lying, cheating and stealing is just smart and brings honor if you succeed. Only failure is dishonorable. The line about his grandfather just served to further snap it into focus. One might think we've left that behind, but we're the same human animal now as we were then.
We still say "Fake it till you make it" after all.
So, with respect to Musk, Trump, or anyone's credibility, I think they can lie as much as they want so long as they deliver the good more often than not. Zelensky has a 4% approval rating? Fuck it, why not. Does a ceasefire get declared soon, or some sort of lasting peace agreement? That's credibility. Nobody will remember Musk's tweet when peace and prosperity returns.
World War 3 breaks out and Kiev eats a few megatons? Well, that tweet might end up in the history books, and not in a good way.
I don't especially enjoy this view of the world. And when the shoe is on the other foot, I will likely be losing my ever loving fucking mind that the other side is lying up a storm and "getting away with it".
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Learned helplessness? Hmmmm, perhaps. Its been 10 years. I don’t think there is any shame in realizing I'm outgunned in an information war. I ignored as best I could the breathless coverage of polls for the entire election cycle, and I can't say I missed anything. Likewise, I simply cannot be made to care about Elon's or Trump's tweets, Cabinet drama, etc. I'm waiting for peace or world war 3, for my life to get better or worse. All the beefs Hanania has with Elon are just noise. Sour grapes that he didn't make it into the cool kids club like he hoped.
^ 100% ^
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I can't argue with that.
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No matter what you believe about the validity of polling, "Zelensky has an approval rating of 4%" does not pass a basic sanity check at any level. He's a wartime president, if his approval was really just 4% in a time like this he'd be shunted aside at warp speed. There are plenty of people in Ukraine at the moment with both the willingness and the ability to remove what would be a hysterically unpopular president with relatively little hassle if it came to that.
My point is not that I believe Zelensky has a 4% approval rating. It's that Hanania is point of fact wrong that the lies Trump & Elon are telling are in any way, shape, or form morally or qualitatively different than the lies the last regime told, and especially not in any way that makes them look worse. He's sanewashing the last 8 years of neoliberal hegemony in media and the deep state because in his little bubble, they weren't that bad.
OK but if you are Trump and Elon and you want to stay in power it would probably behoove you not to repeat the mistakes of the last guys.
Particularly with Elon. Like – Trump's entire shtick is being "directionally accurate" where he says "look windmills have killed a million birds, literally a million, they are counted as COVID deaths, folks" and only humorless scolds and fact-checkers take that as anything but a joke with a nugget of truth (wind turbines kill a lot of birds!)
But Elon's whole deal as I see it is that he's suppose to be a smart nerdy engineer, and so he should care about precision as part of his PR, or so it seems to me. (I suspect being "directionally correct" works much better in engineering than one might initially think, but you needn't generalize that unnecessarily.)
Maybe! But that is criticism unrelated to Hanania's thesis which he is absurdly and laughably wrong about.
No he isn't. Not one thing was wrong. Musk has a disdain for the truth and has been caught doing nothing but blatant lying. What are the lies you accuse the establishment of? Because if you look a little deeper I believe you will see that they aren't lies but a shaping of the truth and that's a massive difference. This is literally what the media has been doing forever. The richest man in the world tweeting that zelensky has 4% approval is a new level of insanity and a blatant lie. You can't equalize these two things , they are not the same. And in fact no, Elon wasn't 'directionally correct' about covid. That's a massive discussion that can't be given a 'truth' 'lie' response , and that's the exact difference. What can be true or false is sam harris's point , that 35k deaths did appear and that 600k cases did appear. These are both TRUE.
"Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
"We are building a democratic society in Afghanistan."
"Our test grades are low because we don't spend enough on education."
"Race-based caps on school discipline will lead to better outcomes."
"COVID was not a lab leak."
"Police routinely kill unarmed, compliant black people."
"Joe Biden is mentally competent."
"The laptop is Russian disinformation."
"Insurrectionists murdered a police officer on Jan 6th."
"Rittenhouse is a white supremacist murderer."
"The BLM protests are mostly peaceful."
"Antifa is just an idea."
"Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist."
...Off the top of my head. There are plenty more where those came from.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "shaping of the truth"?
Iraq was a failure of the establishment and also a failure of the anti-establishment. It was supported by a large majority of rural, working-class, no college degree, salt of the Earth white people. The modern Right is incapable of telling those people they are wrong on any issue, so we know what they'd do if the war happened today.
I must begrudgingly second FC here, your assessment does not square with how I remember the political climate of the 2000's, unless you really want to lump Michael Moore and Adbusters in with MAGA.
(Admittedly, Moore himself did make comments around 2016 to the effect of "Trump and MAGA is what the neoliberal establishment deserves.")
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...I don't know if you're old enough to remember the events of the 2000s first-hand, but in that era, rural, working-class, no college degree, salt of the earth white people believed that they had their own elites. George W Bush was president, and was at least attempting to implement policy at the federal level in direct service to Red Tribe and its values. The anti-establishment of the time would be the grass-roots antiwar types.
Then why are Liz Cheney and John Bolton urging people to vote Democrat?
You may be reluctant to recognize it, but the last ten years has been one long campaign within Red Tribe to purge the neocons. That effort has been wildly successful, to the point that the neocons attempted to defect to the Democratic party, and now with the defeat of Harris appear to have collapsed as a coherent faction. It is true that Red Tribers are not giving speeches about how the 2000s hippies and Noam Chomsky were totally correct, but what they have actually done is change their policies and their coalition on a fundamental level.
Blue Tribe, by contrast, absolutely smothered its peace movement the moment Obama was inaugurated and is now the party of imperial wars and armament corporations. The fact that you have not received emotional gratification from the Red Tribe public should not outweigh the concrete changes that have in fact happened. The most significant break from this pattern, Biden apparently forcing through an Afghanistan withdrawal, also appears to be an example of the deep state resisting the lawful authority of the President.
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What blatant lie? You have literally zero evidence that z's approval rating isn't 4%. Not one shred of it. You also have no evidence that Musk didn't make that claim in good faith.
Of course it's true that it's extremely unlikely that a wartime leader has only a lizardman level of support. But crazier things have happened many times. So maybe before calling Elon a liar, you should consider that you, in fact, are the liar.
Its very easy to find evidence that shows that its not even close to 4. Its easy for me , for you and for Musk. I dont need evidence to claim he didnt make it in good faith , a lie even when said because of lack of knowledge , that also supports the position of the enemy of the person you are lying against. Certainly this statement cant then be made in good faith. It is a result of a person consuming too much Russian propaganda and there is nothing you can say that will make the facts change. I am not a liar since I havent made any wrong statements because unlike Musk I fact check my opinions heavily.
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This is what would make sense to me, but over and over again, I see people claiming to believe and acting like they believe the opposite, that good poll numbers for a candidate actually encourages more people to vote for that candidate rather than the candidate's opponent. I don't quite get it, but, well, people behave based on what they believe, not based on what they should believe.
There's no one size fits all rule for polling. It helps to boost your numbers in some circumstances, particularly earlier in the race and to downplay your numbers in others, particularly in the final stages. For example if you want to project dominance of the field you would boost the numbers to give the opposition the impression they have no hope. If you want to get your people out voting you tell them the margins are so close it could come down to a single vote. The complaint should be that polling was ideologically aligned.
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I think the idea is that people don't want to waste taking time out of their day to vote for a loser. That the pain of having had skin in the game and being disappointed is enough to discourage people from putting that skin in the game in the first place if you demoralize them enough beforehand.
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Polls spent the summer and fall showing Harris ahead because they were attempting to shape the conversation and manipulate people into believing it was true and then in the final poll they all miraculously converged to showing what the better polls had been showing for months.
This isn't a defense of the polling industry, it's a condemnation of it. The vast majority of polling, and especially the "most reputable pollsters" according to the media, didn't just happen to randomly get ridiculous Harris numbers (or Biden numbers or the alleged Biden cliffhanger after his debate) for most of the polling season and then just happened to get ties in their final poll. After years of bad misses, the pollsters converged on "okay, it's basically a tie" as a face-saving measure when the result wasn't a tie. Trump handily won.
The media and polling companies work hand-in-hand with one bullhorning what they believe people should think and then the polling industry confirming people think (or at least a decent number of people think) what the media has been bullhorning at them. These aren't people just doing their best to measure public opinion, they're part of the opinion manufacturing and manipulation process and it's high time everyone treated them like it.
But by all means, if you disagree, I encourage everyone to bet the margins of their favorite "gold standard" pollsters in the next election. And when you lose, I hope it changes not only your opinion about these pollsters' predictive capacity but also undermines your belief pollsters are accurate measuring opinions with less objective results like "support for gun control" or whatever else.
Because FPTP in the electoral college magnifies small wins, particularly in the situation we are in where most of the key swing states are in the Rustbelt, so they tend to swing in the same direction. But the actual margin of victory in terms of votes was small - 1.5% in the popular vote and 1.7% in the tipping-point state.
The only recent election where the popular vote was closer was Bush v Gore. The tipping point state in the electoral college was closer in 2016 (0.8%) and 2020 (0.7%) but 1.5% is close by historical standards.
Given that most polls claim a 3% margin of error, the polls predicting a toss-up were correct.
The presidential election isn't decided by national popular vote so going back and forth between it and intrastate popular vote which selects electors which elect the president muddies the waters. A pollster could be exactly correct at the national level popular vote and still miss badly on picking who was going to win the election.
Do you think pollsters should be judged on their actual prediction or do you think as long as they were in their 6+ point spread (depending on the poll) they were "correct" ?
I don't find a polling company which regularly gets their predictions wrong directionally (i.e., who is going to win), but within a 6 point spread to be valuable; pollsters do make predictions on winners and pick their anchor points of their 6 pt spread and should be compared and judged on them. It's not enough to merely be in their claimed error spread.
The response to a "pollster" who is predicting the outcome of a race to just answer "it's a coin-toss" is "give me my money back."
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I struggle to understand what their motives are here. Are you implying the pollsters are trying to help the democrats based on the theory that people turn out for a winner? I don't know what the basis for that theory is. It seems equally or more likely that over-estimating a candidate's popularity will lull them and their voters into a false sense of security. Based on this theory of polls, it would seem more likely the pollsters over-estimating Harris's polling were trying to favour the republicans.
I don't really see evidence to think either of these is the case though. Maybe they are just incompetent or too afraid of being outliers.
I am implying pollsters vote Democrat and are Democrats by vast margins and are part of the regime media who are Democrats and vote Democrats by vast margins and do things to make it more likely Democrats would win. They're on the same team and part of the same milieu and travel in the same circles. They're not merely biased, they have an agenda and you can see them doing the same bag-o-tricks every election cycle. Under normal circumstances, public opinion just doesn't shift like that (and don't in predictive polls), but miraculously it does to drive the same cycle every single time.
Supporting candidates can mean different things at different times, e.g., cratering Biden's polling post-debate, and not just "overstating Democrat support."
A Harris campaign which is trailing by 7 in PA in late September but is getting +2 from "gold standard pollsters" is not being lulled into a false sense of security, they're being saved by allies in media when a campaign which would otherwise see voters disengage and, most importantly, have a much harder time convincing donors to continue to open their wallets to finance a flailing campaign.
There are situations where it's defensible to argue it's "equal or more likely" overstating support would lull a candidate into a false sense of security, but it's not in any of the scenarios we're talking about and also there are countervailing forces. You may think this is likely to "harm" a campaign, but why wouldn't it be "equal or more likely" it would harm your opponent whose supporters think it's a waste of time to bother when they're going to lose anyway? People like to be a part of the winning team.
For whatever it's worth, zero pollsters I know of think "overstating" support within a pretty large margin harms campaigns.
Well they're definitely terrified of being outliers, there are about a half dozen pollsters who were run out of polite company for correctly polling Trump support in 2016 onwards.
To believe the "they're just bad at their jobs" explanation, you would have to explain how pollsters who have a history of failing to predict horse-races somehow manage to still get lucrative contracts from NYT (Sienna) to Reuters (Ipsos) while the accurate pollsters see themselves blacklisted, especially from lucrative commercial contracts. And also why those pollsters continue to fail and be embarrassed cycle after cycle after cycle.
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Oh come on. Trying to act like the "Kamelanomicon" narrative never happened isn't going to work.
Do you want me to link 50 articles about how recent polling surges show that America has rediscovered its favorite brat VP?
The "I don't get it, what do you even mean" tactic is incredibly obnoxious. It's just a way of insinuating that someone is an incoherent schizo conspiracy theorist without openly breaking the rules. And it doesn't even work to bully people without a supporting crew of redditors jeering and snapping their fingers.
Now you're talking about articles about polling, not polling. That is a different thing and I don't dispute at all that it is seeking to 'shape the conversation'.
I am not trying to insinuate you're a schizo conspiracy theorist (though now I am wondering if your anger is causing you to lump multiple things together as your enemy, when not all of them are the same).
Ironically I am not the same person as Bleep.
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There's a difference between coordinated efforts to selectively highlight polls that are positive for your side and actually manipulating poll results to appear positive for your side. The discussion seems to be about the latter. The former is bad, but the latter is arguably worse.
This, I agree with. As I've written before, I struggle to see why people would believe that polls showing their preferred side winning would improve the odds of their side winning, since I could come up with multiple equally plausible mechanisms by which it could help or hurt. But it seems common knowledge enough that many/most people do believe that this is how it works, and one shouldn't feign ignorance of this very possibly false narrative.
I think the process is "hey, we're going with kamela, give us some polls we can spin." The whole polling and media campaign is coordinated on whatever the new version of JounaList is.
That one woman with the "kamela landslide incoming!" poll right before the election was obviously not organic imo. It's all organized narrative shaping, and the line they were going with was indisputably "Kamela: it's inevitable (or you're weird)"
Saying the polls can't have been manipulated because that might reduce dem turnout is trying to ignore the evidence that all of their strategy was based around demoralizing Republicans.
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