So it’s ten days until the election now, and I cannot wait until this nightmare is over. Talk about it, or whatever else you want to talk about. No trolls, MRAs, Trumpkins, etc.
Categories
Ten Days Now: Election, etc Open Thread
And speaking of white privilege and incoherent gasbags:
Trump: Clinton Would Add ‘650 Million’ Immigrants, ‘Triple The Size Of Our Country In One Week’
The GOP nominee offered no evidence to support his claim.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-clinton-650-million-immigrants_us_5816c811e4b0990edc31e593
@Comey
Even Jackass Walsh thinks Comey is a piece of shit. Bloody hell, so much for what I said about this being “Too far into Conspiracy Land for me” back on the first page…
@otherwise
So, who wants to place bets on how many of the new posters defending Gert/Mr Al/Skyboomrooster/etc are Gert/Mr Al/Skyboomrooster/etc?
@joekster
I only have a few minutes here, but I want to caution you when you read early American documents in how you interpret what they meant by “freedom.” Political freedom and economic freedom are linked, but not the same, and sometimes they meant one and sometimes the other. “Economic freedom” can be interpreted as “capitalism” by the way, not the freedom to explore any old economic system. “Political freedom” can be interpreted as “freedom for me and people like me,” not freedom for literally everyone. Read the Federalist Papers with this in mind and you’ll get a somewhat different idea of what Madison et. al. were talking about than if you read them with a modern idea of the meaning of “freedom.”
@Dalilama, PoM: I appear to have allowed my posts to out-run my knowledge base. My apologies.
Truth is, I’ve never been able to really focus on pre-civil war US history. It all seems to focus on slaveholders and various people whose wealth depended on slavery in one way or another, whom I am utterly unable to sympathize with, so my knowledge of the period is mostly based on what I recall from high school and occasional references in my undergrad classes.
I violated one of my primary rules: ‘know what you know, know what you don’t know, and know the difference’.
Thank you for the correction.
Because it is relevant, on a basic level, for assessing his suitability for office. A man who would casually laugh about using his status to commit sexual assaults is not likely possess good judgement. A mendacious hypocrite, bare-faced liar and obvious opportunist; all of which matters.
The Podesta emails reveal what we already know about Clinton, her politics, the attitudes of her peers.
At the very worst she may have been involved in soliciting donations [to the Clinton Foundation] from dubious sources in return for who-knows-what. The gist of this was already known to the public.
Scildfreja Unnýðnes for constitutional regent!
You get to wave at the people, ride ponies, and use your pen to symbolically enact the will of the mammoths.
I want to spend a moment talking about polls, and why the polls can seem so bizarre. I’ve seen people mentioning this on other threads but this is the right thread for it, I think.
Your basic scientific poll is done by taking a random sampling of the population, such that every member of the population has an equal chance of being selected as every other member. The results of the poll will be some number, with a margin of error calculated to reflect that the random sample may not have the same number as the actual number seen in the population. It’s generally accepted in social science that a 95% confidence is Good To Go, so the margin of error is usually calculated such that we believe there is a 95% chance that the true number is somewhere between the error bars.
So when we see a poll that shows Clinton with 49% support, plus or minus 3%, what this means is that we are 95% confident that the true number is somewhere between 46% and 51%. There is a 5% chance that the true level of support is outside that range.
HOWEVER
You see immediately the problem: in order to be truly representative, every member of the population has to have an equal chance of being selected for the random sample, which is not the case. Most political polls are telephone polls, which automatically exclude some members of the population. Pollsters are getting better about hitting people with cellphones instead of landlines, but there are people who just don’t have phones, almost all of them poor. The poor lean Democratic, so polls are often weighted somewhat to compensate for the Democrats who aren’t in the polling pool.
FURTHERMORE
We don’t really care about the total population of the US, do we? We only care about voters. Since ~30% to ~60% of people actually vote, a random sample of the entire US is going to sample a lot of people who are outside the population that really interests us. This is where Romney’s polling in 2012 went off the rails, and where a lot of the skew in Fox News polls and some other polls happens. Pollsters are asking themselves, Which of these people we’ve just polled are actually going to vote?
The poll is then weighted such that likely voters are giving heavier weighting than less likely voters. How do we determine which demographics are more likely to vote than others? There’s some voodoo in this, to be honest. If you assume that Republicans are super-stoked to vote for Trump and will have high turnout, while Democrats are wishy-washy on Clinton and will have low turnout, you can start with a poll that has Clinton winning by 10% and wind up with a weighted poll that has her losing by 5%. That 15% just disappears into the weighting.
So that’s a brief explanation of polling and why Fox polls seem to consistently show Clinton with a slimmer or no lead compared with other polls. The assumptions that go into a poll are, if anything, more important than the data that go into it.
@Policy of Madness
That was the info I was looking for regarding why the polls all of a sudden decided to narrow.
@Oogly
Yes, these instant changes in polls should always make you ask questions. Polls are lagging indicators: they don’t tell you what people think today, but what they thought yesterday. The polls are changing rapidly because the assumptions going into them are changing rapidly, not because the raw numbers coming out are all that different from yesterday’s.
I think this is the most relevant thread to post this in, but I’ve started doing dramatic readings of Owen Ellickson’s Trump Leaks Twitter Saga. I’ve finished two parts and am working on the third.
@Anne
I love Ellickson’s tweets! And the voices! ?
God, I hate Comey. He knows exactly what he’s doing. How did America get this undemocratic that this is completely overlooked?
That Trump is still going is a disgrace, but the fact that people like Comey have free reign to imply things that are incorrect is even more of one.
7 days to go. What time will the results come through to Britain?
@nparker,
Keith Olbermann did a good job of explaining your question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU6U8xC6KOc
For the WoW enthusiast. (Spoilers, btw…you know…in the title…)
@Scildfreja
W-O-W.
It will be very interesting to see what develops in this worse-than-Watergate issue.
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes
Goddamn.
People really need to stop cursing people to live in interesting times. Times are just too interesting nowadays. Too goddamn interesting.
@Scild
… Holy shit. That can’t be a real thing, that’s a plot to a fucking spy thriller.
What the FUCK?
I wonder whether Comey will last until Clinton gets inaugurated. My money is on no. (If Trump wins, Comey likely gets rehired.)
The only thing you suffer from violating the Hatch Act is losing your job, and the other thing to fire Comey for is departing from department policy regarding elections disclosures.
Yes, that’s a very good point (Axecalibur makes essentially the same one). Except that I think it highly unlikely Gert is a neo-nazi or (more than most of us, through living in a racist society) anti-black racist (I use the qualifier because antisemitism is a form of racism). Left-wing antisemitism is a thing, as I’ve been aware since reading Steve Cohen’s That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic more than 30 years ago (it’s online, if anyone wants to read it, just google). Gert looks to me like a lefty who’s never grasped that there are issues beyond class and imperialism.
Surely referring to Obama as “intelligent and well-spoken” is subject to exactly the same criticism, as an implicit insult to other black people? Unless you’re saying the specific word “articulate” is frequently used in that way in American discourse. But it isn’t in the UK, so Gert may well have been unaware of it. And isn’t using “dark” as a near-synonym for “bad” similarly dubious? It still seems to me that inferring that Gert is more of an anti-black racist than most of us who live in racist societies on the basis of one not overtly disparaging word and a hyperbolic expression of disappointment is a considerable stretch. (Particularly as weirwoodtreehugger points out that the use of “bonobo” was presumably aimed at their nym.)
Nonsense: “dogwhistle” implies intent. You can’t accidentally blow a dogwhistle.
I shan’t bother to respond to the various personal attacks on me. Think what you like, as long as I’m not banned, or asked by David not to comment, I’ll continue to do so when I think I have something to say that needs saying.
I mean, yeah. He’s a brocialist, and he throws a big ol tantrum whenever someone points out how he’s perpetuating oppression along other axes. Is this an argument against his ban?
No, but you can hear that word often used as a “compliment” towards black men that you like; you know, The Good Ones. The ones who speak the way you think maybe all black men should speak. And then you might repeat those words, without ever considering the racism that underlies your thinking. And if you do that, and you’re hostile to correction, then you’re a racist and you can find somewhere else to hang out online.
Here’s the thing: people have pointed out that they think you’re being problematic. You can either listen to their criticism and evaluate yourself and your actions and determine if you think you need to adjust your behavior, or you can whine about how unfair they’re being since you didn’t break any of the blog rules.
“I can be an asshole as long as David doesn’t ban me” is exactly the line of reasoning Gert used to justify his behavior and it’s what eventually got him banned. Why defending a brocialist troll is the hill Nick wants to die on, I don’t know but I am going to think of him as a troll from now on because of this.
I find it notable that on a feminist oriented site, we have men who insist that they shall only defer to the white male authority and refuse to listen to anybody else.
@Nick
Yeah, which is exactly the kind of person that (unintentionally I’m sure) says and does racist shit. He’s exactly the Berniebro I mentioned earlier, who was mad at ‘low information voters’ in the South during the primary. Ya don’t get a pass, cos you didn’t know or didn’t mean it
Yes
The path to casting off (or as best as possible) racist tendencies is to confront them and learn from them. Gert refused to do so. So, yeah, I’m more than comfortable calling him a racist
Stop focusing on the person. The sound of the dogwhistle is the important thing. ‘Articulate’ and ‘zionist’ are dogwhistles in the sound they make. And there’s a difference between ‘accidental’ and ‘unintentional’. Benefit of doubt, Gert didn’t mean to be antisemitic, but he did consciously insist on saying ‘zionist’. He blew the whistle of his own accord. At best, he didn’t know what noise it’d make
Sure? I mean, yes, Gert could be left or right leaning, we don’t really have much to go on either way. We know that he doesn’t like corruption, and we know that he thinks Clinton is extraordinarily corrupt; we also know he doesn’t like Trump, since he said he’d vote Clinton just to keep Trump out. So he seems more interested in opposing corruption than anything.
I’m just not sure why you’re expanding this out, because I didn’t say he was necessarily a neo-nazi or right wing. Just that he belong to the group of { racists, neo-nazis, anti-semites }.
~puts on dork glasses~
Words associate with other words in a loose association network. My networks are influenced by the networks of other people by the words I hear as they communicate. In this way, concepts carry a certain cultural significance when a certain proportion of people hold the same associations. With the prevalence of mass media, this is becoming global, at least within language barriers.
There’s an American association between “articulate”, “African-American” and “unintelligent”. The word “articulate” is a relatively rare one, and the combination of “articulate” and “African-American” even moreso. So there’s a good probability that, given A and B, it’s likely C was a co-traveller with the memeplex.
~takes off dork glasses~
And you’re right – he could very much not be aware of the association. It’s more about his reaction to the suggestion that he might be propagating something that’s racist. Case in point….
Not really? I mean, you’re right. There is a connection between “dark” and “dark-skinned”, but there’s also a connection between “dark” and “shadow”, “dark” and “night-time”. The commonness of the term “dark” makes it incredibly difficult to tell whether it has racism as a fellow traveller, too.
In the end, the important thing is to listen. If people tell you that it’s racist – not just one person, but the community – then you respect that community by not using the term. By and large the African American community dislike the term “articulate” and decry its racism, so to respect them, we don’t use it to refer to them. Easy-peasey.
EDIT: Just read Axe’s reply. I’ll avoid using the term “dark!” Thanks for pointing it out. I wasn’t sure about that one. I’ll leave my original comment in there for context.
My original comment still stands, I think. Normal people – i.e. people who live in racist societies but dislike racism, even if they don’t understand its pervasiveness – don’t use the word “Zionist” outside of very specific circumstances. They certainly don’t use it as a replacement for “Israeli” or “Jewish”. This plus use of the word “articulate” in reference to President Obama paints a fairly clear inference.
I agree with you. Viscaria explained the issue better.
I like to imagine that this is the sound of the racist dogwhistle