culture war roundup
WhiningCoil
19d ago
Like I said the fully Trump captured GOP invested heavily in proactively preventing what they believed were the avenues of voter fraud Trump has never given up on from 2020. I can't exactly take a victory lap because even I said I thought an outcome like this was weak circumstantial evidence. But maybe the GOP's heavy investment in fraud prevention carried the day. We may never know since the election only happens once, and we'll never see the counterfactual.
naraburns
nihil supernum
19d ago
I Am Not Immune to Propaganda
I'm bad with numbers, but it feels pretty likely to me. Is that 70%-80%? I don't think I'd say 90%, the electoral college situation does give me some hesitation. By "inevitable" I mean "I don't see anything short of a black swan event shifting the outcome from where it's currently headed," not "I'm 100% sure of this specific outcome."
I furthermore said:
Insofar as Harris has not (yet?) done anything blatantly unconstitutional, I also think it is a little more likely than not (55%? 60%?) that a true electoral win from Trump could still see his inauguration prevented by his opponents, hook or crook. This could potentially be done by preventing an apparent electoral victory simply by thumbing the scales in a few key states.
I rarely "put a number on it." If I had a head for numbers, I would probably have gone into tech instead of becoming a professional wordcel. I don't know what "80%" feels like, the way so many people seem to. But lately I have been trying to, if not quantify my predictions, at least hold myself more accountable for them. I would like to be better at predicting things, partly because I want to become a bit less risk-averse. That means hedging less, and stating more, and looking back at why I was right or wrong.
There is of course still time for Trump's opponents to prevent his inauguration, or try. The fact that the major news networks refused to certify his clear and overwhelming victory for many hours after it was obvious even to them, definitely made me worry that we were in for a repeat of 2020. Instead, we got a repeat of 2016. We do still have to make it two months without lawfare or rioting hindering the process, but the way things are looking this morning, I'm much less confident about this. (Probably my next substantive question is, "what will Jack Smith try next?")
So, what led me to these errors? I don't know! But I have some working theories.
Pessimism: I did not want Kamala Harris to become the President. Politically, my adult life has been a string of disappointments. So my priors on "the candidate I like least will win the election" are high, even though I know rationally that whether or not I like a candidate has very little to do with their electability. I also know many people who are in the habit of predicting that things will happen and, when pressed, will explain that they want those things to happen.
Insufficient Skepticism: Probably anyone who has spent more than five minutes on the Motte knows that I mistrust corporate news media a lot. I am even aware that polls are politically slanted. And yet, somehow, every time I went looking into the polls behind the media's unapologetic shilling for Harris, I came away thinking, "even if that result is wrong, surely it's not so wrong that Trump could actually pull this off." And maybe this just goes back to my difficulty with numbers. But I am such a skeptical person by nature that it feels too convenient to conclude that, no, I need to be even more skeptical.
Superstition: Early yesterday evening, when it became apparent that the "blue wall" was nowhere to be seen, a family member said to me, "he might actually do this!" And I found myself reluctant to agree because I didn't want to jinx it. This is stupid, and I have a hard time seeing how it could have fed into my actual predictions, but combined with the pessimism (above) I apparently have a reflexive resistance to agreeing that something could actually come out the way I want it to.
But maybe you have some different theories? I'm open to suggestions!
Now--all of that said, I do have to congratulate myself on one (possibly ego-protective) thing:
I never did put any money on Harris.
Part of my process this time was telling myself: "you know she's going to win, so you can make some money on it. Plus, if she loses, you'll be happy, so you won't mind the pecuniary loss. Now is the perfect time to finally get into those prediction markets Scott Alexander is always talking about!"
But I couldn't do it. I had initially thought to make myself a killing by betting $10,000, but I found myself feeling too risk-averse. What about $1,000? Or $100? Every time I opened up the necessary apps to start the process, I talked myself out of it.
So did I really think Kamala was going to win? If I wasn't willing to put any skin in the game, did I really believe what I said I believed? I think I did! It feels like I did. But I can't dismiss the possibility that my instincts are better at math than my conscious thoughts. I saved myself thousands of dollars by being pessimistic, skeptical, maybe even a little superstitious. And I'm not entirely sure what to make of that.
Yes - Harris' grand strategy was to build the largest possible anti-Trump coalition, rather than to present a positive vision of her centre-left (or left) plans for America. If you thought (as I did) that the biggest groups of persuadable voters were NeverTrump conservatives and double-haters then this would have have been the right approach. But it appears that it wasn't. I say appears because of the strong possibility based on polls and betting markets that essentially nothing has affected this election since the Dems nominated Harris, and that it has always been 51-49 for Trump with us just not being able to read the runes with the polling technology we have.
they are pretty close to it, last time I checked
Check again, they get nominated for AAQCs, and deservedly so (https://www.themotte.org/post/983/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/208068?context=8#context, https://www.themotte.org/post/987/quality-contributions-report-for-april-2024).
If you want a joke forum maybe you should consider reddit yourself?
I don't want a joke forum, but I do want a serious discussion forum in which cracking jokes and good-natured ribbing are permitted and even encouraged. Which is why I'm here.
low-effort punching-down
An anonymous rando cracking a joke about two fabulously wealthy and powerful women who each came within a hair's breadth of becoming the literal leaders of the free world (and one of whom is currently literally next in line to become the leader of the free world) now constitutes "punching down". Lol. But thank you for providing such an illustrative example of a point I made months ago regarding how the "punching up/down" concept is so prone to abuse:
In practice, all you need to do is find one axis on which Alice is considered to be worse off than Bob, and then claim that her position on this axis negates whatever positions she might occupy on any other axes which might be relevant to the debate over who has more power in an interpersonal or political debate. (Hillary Clinton may be white, cis, straight, fabulously wealthy, well-educated and extremely powerful in the literal sense of having held numerous high-ranking government positions in a career spanning decades - but she is a WOMAN, therefore all criticism and jokes directed at her are unacceptable punching down.)
Moving on.
But to me, it's not even a funny-mean joke, nor particularly inventive; it's just mean.
Fair enough. Doesn't mean it's against the rules. I never claimed it was "inventive" (and now the goalposts are moving again: "your joke did not reach @EverythingIsFine's minimum threshold for creativity, three-day ban"): it was just playful teasing, which this thread and forum are full of.
WhiningCoil
19d ago
I had my thesis. Was I right? Yet to see. Those 3 am vote dumps are still possible.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
19d ago
We've had this discussion a few times now and my answer remains the same.
sulla
19d ago
Regarding the Selzer poll, I had the following exchange:
It’s hard not to view this as just the latest in a long string of people lighting their credibility on fire for a tiny chance of stopping bad orange man. It seems to run contrary to every other piece of evidence: polls, registration, early voting, “vibes.”
A Trump blowout still seems like the most likely scenario to me. There is just too much going in Trump’s favor relative to the very close 2020 election.
We've only got a few days to wait so we'll see. But how willing are you to consider that rather than your ideological opponents willfully blinding themselves, it is perhaps you?
It looks like once again my judgment was infallible and the left was completely and utterly deluded. The entire online left was collectively deluded by the Selzer poll. "She's the gold standard!" It was beyond obvious the poll was rigged.
I ask myself constantly if it is I with the willful blinders. But no, when reality gets a vote in the past 8 years it's always the left who was deluded. The great Selzer debate is just a microcosm. They worship "muh experts" who are bought and paid for, or who are simply lying to support their ideology, and then refused to be moved by facts or logic. I guarantee this will trigger no self-reflection. They will insist they were right to trust the "gold standard" Selzer against all logic.
faceh
19d ago
A) A lot of people moving here/retirees from Blue states that increase the Republican voteshare.
B) Desantis is a terrifyingly competent governor, from day 1. Even Dems notice that he keeps the state in tiptop shape.
C) As part of B), Desantis cleaned up the problem counties when it came to voting, which probably eliminated whatever fraud there was.
I explain here.
Sort of.
I expect the left to QUADRUPLE down on the rhetoric against while males as the source of all evil. The states where Dems have control will probably pass some more laws to entrench current gender divides and further tilt the legal playing field towards females and minorities. They may think they've still got the numbers to win later with the migrant influx.
A very low confidence prediction is we might see active sortition of single females moving out of 'red' areas to blue areas as an act of protest.
I think the main thing will be coming from the Cathedral wanting vengeance, and if they can't take it out on Trump while Trump is in office, then regular cishet males may have to do. Males in positions of authority could come under direct attack to try and replace them with more favorable options.
Finally, expect the media to heighten female 'suspicion' of males. "Ladies, statistically speaking your husband/boyfriend probably voted for Trump, you better be careful around him!" Testable prediction: Increase in divorces between couples that lean liberal in the next year or so.
In short, in the near term certain trends will probably get worse as women process the social and cultural implications of the event. They've got to figure out how to align themselves going forward, and it is POSSIBLE that more of them will align themselves with the right if it looks like the right is ascendant.
On the flip side, I don't know how males will act in a world where it is clear that they're still politically relevant, even if they hold very little cultural power. May be they become bolder about demanding respect, maybe we actually get rumblings of a return to traditional/patriarchal norms. Very unclear.
roystgnr
19d ago
I solve this problem by typing up my selections as I research them, then I bring the notes to the polling place. This usually works out fine for me, but unfortunately during the first election I owned a smartphone, I had my notes on it and I had a little trouble because the poll workers didn't want anyone to get out any device with a camera. I hurriedly memorized things outside for that election and then I switched back to paper printouts afterward. These days the printouts don't seem to be necessary, because "a camera could enable someone to coerce your vote" is a joke in an election where a third of ballots are mailed in.
When I looked into it, a supermajority of voters solve this problem by selecting "party line R" or "party line D". This seemed like a reasonable button for voting machines to use to filter out people who shouldn't be voting, but it turns out that poll tests are illegal and the machines actually record those votes, so basically in non-off years we're just picking all our winners based what each local district thinks about the Presidential candidate from the same party.
ControlsFreak
20d ago
I'm feeling some of the vibe I was trying to channel in my not-well-liked, but at least not-hated comment a couple days ago. One perspective on realizing that close elections have some randomness involved is, "HOLY SHIT THIS IS SO CLOSE EVERY LITTLE THING MATTERS I MUST REORGANIZE MY LIFE AROUND PROVIDING AN EXTRA EPSILON IN MY PREFERRED DIRECTION," while another perspective is, "Eh, if it's close enough that a little randomness can change things, the country must be mostly okay-ish with either result, so from a long-term institutional perspective, it'll probably be fine." I'm shooting for the latter, as I think it turns the temperature down a bit.
Of course, one could also think that the country is strongly divided, but I think the country could be strongly divided 60-40, and whether or not it's close enough that some randomness can change things isn't really the best indicator of dividedness (first moment vs. second moment).
ControlsFreak
20d ago
Oh man, thanks for finding that link! It's what I was thinking about but couldn't find in this comment a couple days ago.
ControlsFreak
20d ago
We cut people some slack when they get dogpiled and lash out.
Except for some times, when they don't even lash out, they just reply to many of the people who dogpiled them, then you ban them. Even acknowledging that one can't point to anything specific that was actually against the rules.
I'd intended to make an election post earlier this weekend but ended up spending time with friends/family and "touching grass" instead, but I also want to get something out before tomorrow. Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit fame) has labeled 2024 "Schrodinger's Election" and I feel it. I look around my purple but leaning blue suburb and Trump Flags, bumper stickers, and yard-signs seem to outnumber Harris ones by a solid two to one margin and are often seen coexisting with more liberal municipal/state candidates and "vote yes/no on [thing]". My intuition is that Trump has this in the bag. But I also know that if history is any guide, my intuition is probably wrong as I thought the same back in 2020. I wouldn't call myself "an election denier" but I do have a sneaking suspicion that an honest accounting in 2020 would've resulted in either a Trump victory or a much tighter race for similar reasons to those that @Tractatus lays out in this post here. As such I find myself approaching the current election with a certain amount of trepidation, I think that support for Trump is much thicker on the ground than it is for Harris, but I also think that whatever "fortification" efforts that are in place now will be far more mature and firmly established than they were 4 years ago.
I am predicting a resounding "win" for Harris, but that win is in quotation marks for a reason.
My alternate lower confidence prediction/conspiracy theory is that the reason the media has suddenly started to give questions about voter-rolls airtime is that it's "battle space preparation" so that in the event of a Trump win all the commentators who've spent the last 4 years prattling on about "the Jan 6th Insurrection" and how there was no proof of election fraud, can pivot to "questioning election results is the mark of a true patriot" without suffering fatal amounts of cognitive whiplash.
In my experience unironic flat-earthers fall into two broad catagories, schitzophrenic nuerologically-diverse lumpenprole, and upper-middle class contrarians who latched onto it as a part of a part wider suite of conspiracy theories and new age woo. Astrology, Homeopathy, Crystal Healing, Second Shooter on the Grassy Knoll, Q-Anon, etc...
Meanwhile I've found that most of the "fiercely independent libertarians who believe in seeing things for themselves" who aren't also well to the left of Charles Murray's bell curve tend to work it out on thier own as they also tend to be travelers and consequentially end up having ties to the crunchier sides of the hiking, sailing, and general aviation communities.
In any case i think my point stands, as concepts go a flat vs spherical Earth has far more wide-reaching, and immediately observiable consequences than evolution vs young earth creationism, and that's well before we begin to consider specific claims about aryans' and indo-europeans' role in the bronze age collapse.
Dem win, as I've been predicting since the biden-trump debate.
Literally nothing matters in this country except the institutions, and they are now as dominated by the ruling party as anything in China. And like in China, any apparent loosening of total control is just a slipup caused by intra-party feuding, like the Connecticut voting fraud case where someone got caught dropping off a garbage bag full of ballots for the wrong democrat in the primaries.
The real difference in this election is how little discussion there's been. I haven't felt the need to debate whatsoever, because it's as pointless as arguing with chatgpt. "Issues" don't matter, reality doesn't matter, only framing and who holds the megaphone matters.
Why get caught up playing the game of "that's misinformation! Well, maybe it's true but it's still malinformation! and anyway you're banned for Hate Speech, read the room." You can see all the moves coming 20 steps ahead, being right in retrospect doesn't matter because you still publicly lost the social power game against the guy who demonstrated his power to rig it, and the only winning move is not to play.
A nonexhausitive list of examples: violent crime & shoplifting rates, the state of the economy, inflation, #s of illegal migrants and the very existence of government programs importing them, Biden's senility, assassins' motivations, "woke and CRT doesn't exist it's all in Republicans' imaginations," Biden's nuclear crossdresser stealing women's underwear, there's no censorship on social media you're just banned for being a bad person, we must criminalize residential school mass grave genocide Denial, leftists don't support Hamas at all you're crazy for thinking so, "yeah well you're weird for noticing!". I could go on and on.
The people lying about all of these didn't lose anything by lying. They actually beat you by demonstrating that they can maintain the lie longer than the truth can stay solvent and then bury it in a ditch afterwards.
Like Scott said about arguing with Vox: they can lie endlessly and force you to burn ever more weirdness points correcting them.
Some follow-ups on past stories
The teenager accused of the fatal stabbing of three girls at a dance class in Southport has been charged with production of a deadly poison and a terror offence, the chief constable of Merseyside Police has said.
Axel Rudakubana, 18, will appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court by videolink on Wednesday charged with production of a biological toxin, Ricin, and possession of information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing to commit an act of terrorism.
The charges come after searches of his home in Banks, Lancashire, Merseyside Police Chief Constable Serena Kennedy said at a press conference on Tuesday.
The terror offence relates to a PDF file entitled Military Studies In The Jihad Against The Tyrants, The Al Qaeda Training Manual, Ms Kennedy said.
Previous discussion here, and here.
Part of the controversy was about how the right wing assumed the attacker was a boat-refugee and/or a recent immigrant, and while that part remains false, another part of it was about his religion, (see Al-Jazeera, Wikipedia, BBC, or even our own discussion) and how it was wrong / islamophobic to jump to conclusions this way. It now turns out that he was indeed radicalized by Islamists.
A shocking new development has emerged in the case of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif after a French journalist reportedly gained access to a damning medical report revealing Khelif has “testicles.” The news comes months after Khelif seized a gold medal in women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics.
The report was drafted in June of 2023 via a collaboration between the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital in Paris, France, and the Mohamed Lamine Debaghine hospital in Algiers, Algeria. Drafted by expert endocrinologists Soumaya Fedala and Jacques Young, the report reveals that Khelif is impacted by 5-alpha reductase deficiency, a disorder of sexual development that is only found in biological males.
(...) The report concludes by recommending Khelif be referred for “surgical correction and hormone therapy,” to help him physically align with his self-perceived gender identity, and adds that psychological support would be required because the results had caused a “very significant neuropsychiatric impact.”
Previous discussion here and here, and here.
More than the object level of either of those stories, what I want to know is: what do?
I've had this discussion with @Hoffmeister25 about assuming the worst about your outgroup without any evidence. While I maintain that it's plenty of fun when your unproven stereotype-based claims are vindicated, I'm going to agree with him that this way lies madness, and that's no way to have a conversation on controversial political issues. On the other hand, I can't help but notice that this sort of recommendation for caution is asymmetrical. When mainstream institutions make a claim, that claim is itself treated as evidence, any caution goes out the window, and requests for evidence are met with ridicule. So how should we be approaching these controversies, given that bombshells like these hardly raise an eyebrow anymore?
As time goes on, I'm leaning more and more towards simply rejecting Rationalism, as it leads to cudgels like "falsely claimed without evidence" beloved by the mainstream media. Vibe Analysis has been the subject of some ridicule, but I think there should be some space to say "I don't have evidence for this, but my gut says there is something off here" and Reddit-tier "source?!" responses to that should not be accepted. At the end of the day we're only people, and our guts will influence us, no matter how much pretense of objectivity and evidence-baseness we'll put on top of that.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
21d ago
Presuming that one of America's biggest culture war issues of the recent half-century might have electoral significance? In MY Culture War Roundup megathread?
faceh
22d ago
I actually do expect a large gender divide this time, because yes Harris is banking on her appeal to women, mostly single ones. Their attempts to snag married women are, as you see in that ad, tone deaf.
And I expect that single males have been driven away because Harris literally cannot try appealing to them as a group with their own independent concerns without pissing off said single females and a few other groups that she relies on. There hasn't been a single aspect of the Harris campaign that has made me, a white male, feel confident she represents 'my interests' or even acknowledges what those interests or concerns are.
(my opposition to Harris is deeper than my identity, mind)
I'm also on record stating that single females are a reliable voting block who can be motivated and steered by fear. So messaging on fascism and abortion are probably good at energizing these types to get out there and vote EXACTLY how blue tribe wants. What is also does is primes them for absolutely insane freakouts if she loses, though.
So it may indeed come down to male turnout vs. female turnout.
On this antepenultimate day of election, I've been thinking about how there is too much dark money in almonds. Or really, the dual question from that post, "[W]hy is there so little money in politics?" Naturally, I wonder, if those numbers are rookie numbers, how do we pump those numbers up?
I'd like this comment chain to primarily be a house for other people's whacky ideas to increase the amount of money in politics, in a way that is most productive, least damaging, etc. This is somewhat self-serving, because I'm also going to throw out a half-baked, whacky idea of my own, and I'd prefer if all the comments aren't solely beating up on my terrible idea. Spread the love; make it a target-rich environment; help by offering up your own whacky idea, so that at least some number of comments are beating up on your whacky idea rather than 100% of the comments just beating up on my whacky idea.
Some general thoughts that I'm trying to work with along the way. First, the idea of having money in politics isn't necessarily automatically 100% bad. I've seen a variety of defenses over the years that it is actually somewhat good to value the opinions of more economically-productive folks over others. Obviously, there are also plenty of criticisms of how this could go poorly, but I don't think it's completely incoherent to vaguely think that there could be value in getting political opinions from people with a proven track record of providing economic value, who have an economic stake in getting the outcomes right, and by making them put their money where their mouth is.
People have definitely proposed what were once very whacky ideas to channel money to some specific purpose. Prediction markets are very much that. Scott joked about just putting prediction markets in control of elections and how it could go horribly wrong. This is the kind of whacky ideas I'm wanting, even if I'm going to try to make my own much more moderate/measured.
A second general thought is that people probably do get a bit too hysterical about the results of elections. I know, I know, there are real differences; there are real choices; we can all point to specific examples of how things could or did get significantly better/worse depending on who was ultimately selected, but in many cases, the actual election process already has some level of stochasticity built-in, and we already accept this non-perfection, even though it could give the "wrong" result and end up with a worse president who does bad things. I can't find the Scott Post now, but I vaguely recall him saying something at some time about how an election outcome could be flipped if it happens to rain on election day in this county of Pennsylvania rather than rain in that county, where it is assumed that rain depresses voter turnout by some single-digit percentage.
To some extent, what I've somewhat extended this to mean is that, especially with a race that appears to be a dead heat (as this one is), since some level of randomness very well may come into play anyway, and we're fine with it, from the perspective of building electoral processes, how much does it really matter, anyway? Both candidates seem to have significant support from wide swaths of the country, and since this is after many months or years of public vetting, we've probably already cut out a good chunk of the really pathological cases if we're thinking about making relatively minor changes to the system. I'll come back to this point later.
I'm also thinking about tech. We've talked a bit before about digital elections. I know, I know, many people are against them. Hopelessly insecure, they say. But, I think, bitcoin seems mostly secure, right? At least good enough that a random search tells me that people have put something like $1.3T worth of economic value into it. I will hypothesize some extensions of tech that don't actually exist now, and perhaps there are true barriers to them existing. I'm kind of okay with pointing them out, but I'd prefer if it's not all complaints that the tech is impossible. I've already accepted that I'm probably further toward the side of "it is probably possible for us to build tech systems that at least mostly work well enough to do what we want, even if there are theoretical (or even practical) security issues along the way, at least to the level of insecurity that we generally accept from banks, bitcoin, current elections, etc." than most people in these communities. So, the objections will be noted, but I may not be all that interested in engaging at this time.
Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't bring up secrecy in voting. I've made a big deal about this in the past. I do think it's a big deal. And a big part of what's going in to my half-baked thoughts is to ask, "If we can use tech to allow us to inject dark money directly into politics, but ensuring that this money truly is dark, like really truly secret/anonymous, can we possibly leverage that for good?!"
Secrecy/anonymity are related in a way. An individual's vote being secret means that when you're looking at the pile of votes, they're all anonymous. One of the reasons why I've pointed out that this is important is because it makes coercion and quid pro quo harder. I won't choose any particular article to link to concerning Elon Musk paying people to sign a pledge, but you can pay people to sign a pledge, they can take your money, sign the pledge, then walk into the voting booth and vote whatever the hell way they want, and there's nothing Elon Musk can do about it. Similarly with corruption going the other way. I can't remember where I heard it, I think it was EconTalk, maybe in their discussion of crony capitalism, but right now, when someone gives money to a politician's campaign, it's important to them that the politician knows that they, specifically, gave that money to the politician's campaign. If the politician couldn't tell who gave money to his campaign, he could be corrupt in many ways, but at least he couldn't act corruptly in the specific way of just looking to the people who gave the most money to his campaign and doing the things they tell him to do.
There are a lot of whacky ideas possible here already, and I vaguely recall thinking along these lines in the past. Maybe someone else will flesh out a more specific idea for how to focus on the campaign contribution part, but I want to keep in mind my second general thought and get even more whacky.
What if we just said, yes, we'd like to give money some amount of say in presidential elections. People can just put their money where their mouth is and directly pay money to affect the election. The not-perfect idea for what to do with that money is to just put it in the government's general fund, because some folks view that as, itself, a politically-undesirable endpoint. I have vague-but-not-great alternative ideas, but would be open to others. But we want a balance of some sort, like how the electoral college tried to balance state-level interests with population-level interests. I don't want to throw away one man one vote or the state-level interests that the electoral college gives us, so let's just make a minor modification to give money some say. Let's just give money some EC votes. Five, ten, twenty, I don't know how many exactly. Enough to make it a thing. Not enough to make it the main thing. If it's able to sway the election, that means the election was close enough that maybe a rainstorm in Pennsylvania could have switched the outcome anyway, so probably either option was okay-ish. At least, probably not catastrophic.
Re-enter the tech. Imagine the tech allows a person to simply allocate some amount of cryptocurrency to this money vote. It does so with all those fancy bits of 'receipt freeness' that the digital election nerds talk about. Maybe it allows you to freely withdraw/switch your money vote later, making it harder for you to prove to a candidate that you money voted for him/her by just showing them your computer when you do it. Maybe go further and make people have to go to an in-person voting booth, after being scanned for electronics so they don't have a camera or whatever, and give their money vote that way. Whatever it is, imagine this tech allows people to just give their money vote, but it's (within a margin of error that will always exist for real systems) completely secret/anonymous.
Do we care how much people give? I don't know that I do. One side has their billionaires; the other side has their own. If those billionaires want to literally give away billions of their own dollars, that seems fine? I imagine they won't be billionaires for much longer if they're dumping significant fractions of their wealth into an election every four years.
...do we even just let foreigners have a money vote? Remember, we're significantly limiting the impact by only giving them a small number of EC votes. Do we care? We still need to have the regular votes of regular US citizens be close enough for this to come into play. Might as well be rain in Pennsylvania. If a foreign government wants to dump billions of dollars directly into the coffers of the US government (or whatever else we decide to do with this fund), maybe this is fine? It's not like they could actually just buy a candidate, anyway, since Russia's billions of dollars are fighting China's billions of dollars, and the candidate literally cannot know who gave what. Besides, the American public was mostly okay with either result, anyway.
Obviously, this is a whacky idea. Obviously, you'd need to hammer out significant technical implementation details and compromises on things like how many EC money votes to have. Obviously, this is a completely whacky hypothetical that isn't actually going to be adopted by the US any time soon. One last thing floating around in my head is that perhaps whacky ideas like this get incorporated in one of those charter city concepts, which are already whacky anyway. Any thoughts? More importantly, any other completely whacky election ideas?
EDIT FOR POSTERITY: Thanks to @haroldbkny for finding the original Scott Post I was remembering about the "rain in Pennsylvania" thing.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
22d ago
But if we were set back to the technological level of the 1700s, how possible would it be for us to recover to our modern-day level?
Very. Null risk.
I've cited Ord previously on this topic, but I'm feeling lazy today so I'll just quote:
Even if civilization did collapse, it is likely that it could be reestablished. As we have seen, civilization has already been independently established at least seven times by isolated peoples.12 While one might think resource depletion could make this harder, it is more likely that it has become substantially easier. Most disasters short of human extinction would leave our domesticated animals and plants, as well as copious material resources in the ruins of our cities—it is much easier to re-forge iron from old railings than to smelt it from ore. Even expendable resources such as coal would be much easier to access, via abandoned reserves and mines, than they ever were in the eighteenth century. 13 Moreover, evidence that civilization is possible, and the tools and knowledge to help rebuild, would be scattered across the world.
13 Overall the trend is toward resources becoming harder to access, since we access the easy ones first. This is true for untouched resources in the ground. But this leads people to neglect the vast amount of resources that are already in the process of being extracted, that are being stored, and that are in the ruins of civilization. For example, there is a single open-cut coal mine in Wyoming that produces 100 million tons of coal each year and has 1.7 billion tons left (Peabody Energy, 2018). At the time of writing, coal power plants in the US hold 100 million tons of ready-to-use coal in reserve (EIA, 2019). There are about 2 billion barrels of oil in strategic reserves (IEA, 2018, p. 19), and our global civilization contains about 2,000 kg of iron in use per person (Sverdrup & Olafsdottir, 2019).
This is, of course, leaving aside the issue that substantial chunks of the world would be directly untouched by nuclear war (Africa/South America, also probably New Zealand and Ireland), so it's not exactly like literacy will be lost forever in 20 years or something even if rebuilding fails in all the places that are involved.
faceh
22d ago
Well, I'll toot my own horn:
Quoth me 12 days ago:
I also expect the markets to narrow in a bit as we come closer to the election and people decide to close out their positions at a marginal profit rather than actually take the dice roll. If somebody bought a bunch of Trump shares at ~45-50% and can sell them for 55-60% that's a decent profit for a short period trade.
Wasn't sure if they'd get right back to 50-50, but when there's THIS MUCH actual uncertainty (everyone has their vibes, but there simply no trustworthy, unbiased way to call the election in advance) then the 'money' has to return to baseline because very few people are willing to keep their funds at risk all the way to the final bell.
Previously I thought Trump had a pretty solid shot at winning this but I’m seriously thinking Harris has it in the bag now, against all odds.
Lmao. Harris doesn't have any single advantage that Biden lacked going into 2020, and has a number of disadvantages.
My personal expectations, in order of decreasing confidence: Trump squeaker win. Kamala Squeaker win. Trump blowout.
A Kamala Blowout doesn't seem possible, and my post up there explained my thoughts:
So in short, she's got the die-hard Dem base + the anti-Trump brigade on lock, but I think she utterly lacks cross-demographic appeal AND has been boxed in by the dueling demands of demographics they DO have support from, such that any attempts to outreach sincerely to outgroups will be interpreted as defection.
Which demographics is she pulling in 2024 that Biden DIDN'T pull in 2020? Make the case for me because I don't see any way she pulls better numbers than Biden. I can buy that Trump might do a bit worse than he did in 2020.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
At times I've been morbidly curious about BG3, but as a huge BG2 fan I just fear it's going to ruin what I remember playing through so many times. I worry that it looks like a product of the post-5e D&D culture, which I don't care for at all. Would you say that these concerns are justified?
Honestly, I was nonplussed at how convinced The Motte was about a Kamala victory in the predictions subthread. Most picked Harris, and even those who picked Trump expressed less confidence than the prediction markets, which were about 65% Trump at the time.
My guess? I don't think you guys are susceptible to propaganda so much as addicted to the black pill. This is a very dour message board. So I agree with the second half of your post more than the headline.
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