HaroldWilson
2yr ago
It's hardly common sense; the business of business is business, and it's seems a reasonable assumption to suppose that, in the absence of convincing evidence to the contrary, ABC's use of 538 is ultimately driven by business incentives.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
You are wildly overestimating the effect of pollster 'house effects' in both directions. Even PPP, which is explicitly affiliated with the Democratic party, has overrated Democratic candidates by an average of just 0.9% - and to be fair Rasmussen is not much higher than that in the opposite direction. Of course such fine margins do matter in elections, but when you say something like this you're giving a bit of a false impression;
That isn't much use if the results on particular questions really are friendly to Republican views because the general public is switching to a more conservative view of a topic
Polling 'bias' probably isn't turning thumping conservative majorities in issue polling into close runs or liberal majorities, where they exist they are very slightly shifting the scale of the majority or in a very, very close cases they might tip the balance. In any case, we can rest easy because the big-name 'establishment' pollsters publish issue polls favourable to Republicans all the time, so clearly they aren't afraid to do so.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Well to be fair on the criteria shown in the above link it does reference overcoming obstacles &c., and it seems straightforwardly true that Black applicants are more likely to have faced more important obstacles given the average lower socio-economic standing of black families. Vice versa for Asian Americans.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I think this is a quite different claim. What I suspect is the case here is that the undoubtedly Democratic views of the 538 team lead them, consciously or perhaps more likely not, to be more suspicious of right-leaning pollsters. Which is to say that they genuinely do think Rasmussen is guilty of uniquely bad practice, but perhaps yes, their ideological dispositions brought them to that conclusion. So I don't think Morris considers it targeting of Conservatives per se, he just sincerely thinks that Rasmussen are unusually unscrupulous pollsters.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Insofar as there may be some discrepancy in the treatment of Republican pollsters, I think the more plausible explanation is some kind of motivated reasoning against/semi-conscious suspicion of right-wing organisations on the part of the 538 team rather than some attempt to fix forecasts. You see the converse happen on RCP sometimes.
why buy 538 and libbify it?
This is just silly. ABC bought 538 to change forecasts by 0.1% and therefore somehow deliver elections to Democrats? No-one thinks that conspiratorially in real life.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Well the terminology is almost irrelevant; the point is there's no inconsistency, one can reasonably hold the positions of being pro-abortion and anti-death penalty. You presented it as some kind of contradiction.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The partisan lean per se was not the cause of the letter. After all, there are other R-biased pollsters he didn't go after. Harris for instance has a similar average overestimate of Rs to Rasmussen. The crucial point was their close relationship to explicitly Republican/conservative outlets and institution.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
This is pretty uncertain. Just as plausibly it could discourage Democratic voters by making them complacent.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
"You are conservative? To the gulag!"
What are you havering on about. The controversy here is not that Elliot Morris is threatening to exclude Rasmussen because conservatism is bad, rather the exclusion is being considered on the grounds that Rasmussen is a partisan agency that produces Republican-friendly polling deliberately. This is still a silly thing to do for the reasons Nate points out, but the reason their close affiliation with conservative organisations is somewhat incriminating, or at least suspicious, in the eyes of Morris, is that it calls into question the motivation behind their polling.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Yawn. Pointlessly lazy and uncharitable. If the 'regime' plans to manufacture consent or whatever for the next 'ruler' by excluding a single slightly R-biased pollster from 538 forecasts, thereby increasing Biden's predicted chances of victory by 0.1% on a site no ordinary voter reads, I suggest the regime tries a bit harder.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I don't think the two issues are particularly connected. There is a whole grab bag of potential reasons to be against the death penalty; false convictions, it's seemingly non-existent effectiveness as an additional deterrent, the 'sanctity of human life'. It seems that only the final one of those justifications also entails being against euthanasia
some liberating principle of self determination immediately crumble in the face of the contradiction between free will and materialism
Look, I'm hardly going to try to litigate centuries of debate over free will here, but it seems pretty clear to me that justifying euthanasia on the grounds of respecting the autonomy of the person is a legitimate perspective which is in no way contradictory with a number of legitimate criticisms of the death penalty. I don't even subscribe to the former but to rather glibly discount it as you do is pretty arrogant.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The WaPo article linked about the American Board of Anaesthesiologists suggests that their objections were not, primarily, about the potential for botching but regarding the mere fact of execution. The quote they give from the Board; 'we are healers, not executioners'. They would be against it even if it was guaranteed to be painless; or at least that seems to have been the case in 2010.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Come on. I am not in favour of euthanasia for non-terminally ill patients, but having said that to act like being in favour of it and being against the death penalty are two somehow contradictory positions is just silly. Clearly the voluntary nature of euthanasia changes their perspective.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The millions of physician assisted homicides of unborn children are totally fine -- in fact, it would be unethical to withhold them -- but it is absolutely verboten to participate in the execution of convicted murderers.
Don't pretend to be stupid. Obviously they don't consider them 'homicides', and you know that.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Of course it is perfect for Silver's business, we have elections only every few years so it can take decades of data to prove that he is actually full of shit
538 doesn't just do Presidential races, it does all Congressional races too, and other bits here and there like primaries. They did a short post about the historical performance of their forecasts (sports and politics) a while ago and the overall picture is that they do reasonably well.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I mean if you're going to say this you might have at least given us some examples of the coverage you find objectionable.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
This is why I think the pre-Bakke quota system some universities had was actually the best, as it was far more transparent. Set aside some minimum percentage of place for black students (and possibly also Natives) and Asian students, for instance, at least know they are competing on an even-playing field for the 95%, or whatever, of places left, and thus there is less scope for sour grapes. As you say all this ruling seems to achieve is to make things even more obscure and impenetrable.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Captain America is absolutely evidence of the narrative-framing identified by the Polish ambassador, and you saying "it's not evidence of anything" is just wrong, because it certainly is evidence that the ambassador's perception is correct.
If I understand you correctly, then I don't think anyone would disagree with the fact that myth-making of that kind occurred, the point is whether the Polish ambassador is correct in his assertion of the 'unbreakable ties' of such things to 'international Jewry', which I would dispute and here is the relevance of my next comment re;
Can you explain why all of our prevailing cultural institutions will consider you evil if you advocate for white people specifically in the way you would for Jews? The Whig view of history is the myth, that we just got some enlightenment that this was the path of moral behavior, and Superman just got it right a couple decades faster than the rest of us. Nope, we internalized myth and propaganda developed with conscious political motives, the Whig view of history is just believing the myth rather than the truth of what forms our perception of reality.
Ignoring the rather tiresome strawman of Whig history that appears to have become common currency these days, the point is not necessarily that the expansion of American citizenship represented some natural endpoint of the 'path of moral behaviour', but that once the extension of the American nation beyond the Anglo, or at most Nordic/Germanic/Saxon etc. character, which was well before any one could assert any notion of Jewish influence, the only possible next resting place was a universal definition. Those trying to stop the growth of American citizenship no longer had plausible ground to stand on; if a freed black slave, Irishman, Pole or Italian could become a citizen in every sense, on what basis was a Chinaman to be denied that same citizenship? And so forth. Whether or not this was a good or bad development is besides the point, which is that the trajectory was set before any possible Jewish influence.
Can you explain why all of our prevailing cultural institutions will consider you evil if you advocate for white people specifically in the way you would for Jews?
Because in an American context 'whites' is a meaningless and unhistorical category; what are white interests?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
systemically
Well the point is that I don't think such systemic discrimination, on net as it were, really exists. On the personal level no doubt it happens; and if there was a white teacher who was actually bullied for being white, then yeah it would be fine for him to express pleasure if that was no longer the case if he became a teacher in the same school. However I think the difference between the general level of prejudice towards gay students (whenever he was kid) was probably so vastly greater than the equivalent for whites that there is a difference in kind not just in degree.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I don't think the general level of homophobia encountered across the, in this case, United States decades ago, is on the same level as anti-white prejudice.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Test comment will delete
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Test comment - will delete
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
This is exactly what I am talking about. It is a radical critique of Gentile identity because it subverts the identity of America as a white country.
This is perhaps a well-worn point by now, but it bears repeating if you're going to insist on this 'white country' framing; without wishing to be too Whiggish about this, does not, surely, the extension of American identity to all racial groups simply represent the final stage of the steady expansion of the range of that identity to non-Anglos and freed slaves in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? That the 'white country' idea ever emerged among anyone at all is itself testament to the fact that the nativists had had their day long before the middle decades of the twentieth century and before even you could impugn Jewish influence.
Last week I posted that secret report from the Polish ambassador in 1939:
And as last week, uncritically handing us what a contemporary thought is not evidence of anything, even if it is his real thoughts.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
expressing sympathy for another group
Yes but more specifically in sympathy for another striking union which does have a work condition/wage dispute they are acting upon.
I don't think men really suffer too many of the risks either these days. It's always rather laughable when fairly comfortable young men LARP about men being killed down the mines or on the battlefield; the number of men engaged in genuinely dangerous work grows ever smaller in the West and no American has been drafted for over fifty years. Now, some of the points raised by such people are clearly serious issues; homelessness, crime &c. Yet too many glibly dismiss the serious problems women disproportionately face too, partly because, ironically, so many internet posters live in young, urban, liberal environments.
This, for instance, just absolutely reeks of terminal online-ness.
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