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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36860 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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In the past Federal election cycle, I organized Reddit vote swaps via TheMotte subreddit. This cycle, there's a new game in town: https://www.swapyourvote.org

Under the vote swap system, one swing state voter agrees to vote for Kamala Harris and is matched with two safe state voters, who vote for a third party of the swing state voter's choice.

In my case, the swing state voter doesn't have a preference, so I get to vote for Chase Oliver, my preferred candidate, while also securing a critical swing state vote to take a shot at defeating Trump in that state.

Exchanging votes is completely legal and is the only real way to secure support for alternative viewpoints until we can get approval voting on the Federal level.

  • -36

It is entirely possible that I am too election-brained to understand the logic here at the moment, but I am a bit confused at the premise. If there is a relatively large percentage of third party votes in safe blue (or safe red) states, but a very low percentage of third party votes in swing states, literally nobody who matters will be fooled. It will be plainly obvious that voters who have a strong preference for one party over the other, and who could be relied upon to turn out for their preferred side in the event of a close election, are casting meaningless throwaway votes.

It shows that people who "can be relied upon to turn out" would prefer a third party if they didn't feel like they "had to" vote against whoever they hate, like if their state ever went ranked choice. Without the vote swapping, they hold their nose and their third party signal vanishes. It does nothing for this particular election, but it maybe, just maybe, increases the odds of escaping the two party trap in the future.

We won't escape it. Duverger's law. What third party votes actually do is signal that there's a body of people who have a different set of preferences (with some very vague gesture as to what those might be) whose votes might be worth attempting to appeal to in future elections.

how is this legal? it seems like the legal theory is just add 'in minecraft' after the illegal act and then its ok. the people involved are very clearly receiving consideration for their vote as long as the 'in minecraft' clause was not added.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597

Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—

https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/expenditures-to-influence-voting

In simpler terms, this means it is illegal for anyone to use money or anything of value to influence someone's vote.

i'm going to solicit people to kill other people but make them check a box that says 'in minecraft' or 'this does not really create a legal agreement' and everything is ok.

ah: i missed the link that explains the courts have decided no money involved no problem:

https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2007/08/06/0655517.pdf

Whatever the wisdom of using vote-swapping agreements to communicate these positions, such agreements plainly differ from conventional (and illegal) vote buying, which conveys no message other than the parties’ willingness to exchange votes for money (or some other form of private profit). The Supreme Court held in Brown v. Hartlage, 456 U.S. 45, 55 (1982), that vote buying may be banned “without trenching on any right of association protected by the First Amendment.” Vote swapping, however, is more akin to the candidate’s pledge in Brown to take a pay cut if elected, which the Court concluded was constitutionally protected, than to unprotected vote buying. Like the candidate’s pledge, vote swapping involves a “promise to confer some ultimate benefit on the voter, qua . . . citizen[ ] or member of the general public” — i.e., another person’s agreement to vote for particular candidate. Id. at 58-59. And unlike vote buying, vote swapping is not an “illegal exchange for private profit” since the only benefit a vote swapper can receive is a marginally higher probability that his preferred electoral outcome will come to pass. Id. at 55 (emphasis added); cf. Marc John

an expenditure

money or anything of value

Not under discussion by OP. Am I missing some obvious transfer of money or valuables here?

Eh. Find a website that matches me with someone in my state who is voting the exact opposite slate that I am so we can both stay home rather than wasting time on a vote that would just cancel each other out.

I just don't see how you could expect people to follow through. There's no possible enforcement mechanism.

If I know the identity of my counterparty, it should in theory be possible to check whether they cast a vote or stayed home as agreed.

Not sure what the proper penalty would be.

If you're charged for voting, and not charged for not voting, I think the courts would see that as vote buying.

While exchanging (promises of) votes is completely legal, there is of course no possible enforcement for this, right?

Joe Blue could easily create many sockpuppet accounts, claim to be in a safe state, and farm a bunch of swing state votes without providing any corresponding value to any 3rd party?

I get to vote for Chase Oliver, my preferred candidate, while also securing a critical swing state vote to take a shot at defeating Trump in that state.

It is interesting to see how they try to balance the affinity between the Libertarian Party and the Republican Party with the assumption that the Republican Party needs to be defeated.

We are not matching [safe state] voters from red states (like Texas) … unite to advance a non-fascist, forward-thinking agenda for a more just and fair world.

This isn't really the right place for this kind of thing. We are a discussion forum, not a place for organizing political action.

If you want to discuss that website, or discuss who you prefer for president, or discuss why we need approval voting all those are fine.

I accept your swap and will vote for whatever candidate I was going to vote for anyway. Thank you for being a stooge.

You are my 117th swap so far this election.

White power

/s

Happy Diwali to my man J.D. Vance. In which, a Colored pagan gives white people more reasons to feel superior. Now with conclusive genetic data to back it.

In Scott's 'links for November' he shares:

Pervasive findings of directional selection realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation. Scientists took DNA samples from human remains in Europe dating from 10,000 BC to present, and found that genes for high IQ and other positive traits have been getting more common during that time. (image) (link to paper)

Curious pattern matchers will find another identical graph in the paper. The intelligence graph coincides perfectly with....drum roll please...... yes, it's white skin and hair color.

Conclusive proof tying whiteness to intelligence! Nazis --> elated, Data --> supported, immigrants --> deported. Don't @ me bro

I thought I was cherry picking. But nope. No other graph superimposes this nicely with intelligence. (other graphs)

I'm surprised white supremacists didn't pounce on this immediately. I don't expect them to read. But still.....

Now what, 2000 more words about a stupid graph ? Yes ! But I'm more interested in trends within the intelligence graph over time, rather than what it means for white faces and blonde hair. The intelligence graph has inflection points which leads me to divide European history into distinct eras based around these points. Let's talk about these eras instead.

Reverse engineering history from kinks in intelligence genomic graphs :

The intelligence graph has a few distinct trend reversals. Those key reversals / phases eye balled with 250 yr tolerance on either side are:

  • 7000 - 4500 sharp rise
  • 4500 - 3500 BC slow stagnation
  • 3500-3000 BC - sharp drop
  • 3000 - 1500 BC - restoration of steady recovery
  • 1500BC - 500 BC steady rise
  • 500BC - 1200AD steady decline
  • 1200+ AD steady increase

What (spurious?) co-relations can we draw ?

7000 - 4500 BC:
The sharp rise corresponds to the Neolithic expansion. Agriculture spread and Near-East farmers started replacing native hunter gatherers.

3500- 3000 BC:
Sharp drop coincides with the Yamnaya expansion. It is in full swing, going deep into Europe. Big L for Skin heads. Aryans made them stupider.

1500BC - 500 BC:
Steady rise coincides with Bronze age collapse. But, not major genetic changes. This makes sense in context of the white-skin preference graph. It doesn't reflect any major change during that time. Might have been a purely cultural change or noisy data.

500BC - 1200AD steady decline:
I like this one. The Greek and Romans did not perform much population replacement, so the steadiness in genetics is to be expected. Germanic, Viking, Slavic & Celtic people performed some 'population replacement', but there isn’t one inciting genetic factor. On the other hand, This steady decline coincides with the continent’s biggest cultural phenomenon : Christianity. Another L for the skin heads.

1200AD++ steady increase:
Turns out, there's minimal lasting genetic impact owing to mongols or black death. So, I'll discard them. This increase appears cultural. Renaissance happens in 12th century, the technology hockey-stick begins and with it what I expect was positive selection for IQ.

If my (potentially spurious) correlations are to be believed, ancestral pillars of white identity (Yamnaya Aryans and early Christians) suppressed intelligence than promoting it. I'd love to see a global intelligence graph over the same period,. That way I can view relative impact instead of absolutes.

"There are 3 kind of lies : Lies, Damn lies and Statistics"

In closing, was whiteness good for European intelligence ? Idk, I remain confused.

P.S: Yes, I am extrapolating from one paper and drawing correlations over correlations. Don't take this as gospel. Please.

  • -10

You would have expected "white supremacists" to pounce on this immediately, but they didn't... So why are you talking about them?

Aside from that, what can you expect to find? Some hidden genetic evidence that shows that, actually, white people are stupid, ugly and short? It seems rather obvious the only evidence you can find will support the fact we can all observe every day of our lives: Compared to any other race on the planet, White people are the opposite of that.

1200 AD is when the church started to more aggressively expand its control over marriages- if the Hajnal line selects for intelligence, we’d expect it to pick up around then.

The Church didn't ban cousin marriage in Western Europe, though. Aversion to cousin marriage is an ancient Indo-European tradition and something smuggled into Christian law by the influence of the Indo-European peoples who became Christians. It was something introduced into Christianity by peoples long disgusted by cousin marriage.

Firstly, I don't know if you can assess intelligence from ancient populations.

We can go to West Africa or Haiti today and see 'ok these people aren't that smart', test genes and compare with other populations today. We can draw upon all kinds of data and observations from real countries, real peoples that exist today.

But 3000 years ago? 8000 years ago? Why was the Bronze Age collapse so good for IQ, such that it took us ages to recover to that peak level of intellect? Were the Sea People the true bringers of enrichment and diversity? We just don't know. Who can say what we're really graphing here, there could be a million confounders we don't know about.

Secondly, call me high-time preference but I'm interested in the here and now. So what if Meds, Hittites and ancient Egyptians had masterful civilizations while the Germanics were carving ugly wooden faces? Ancient Egypt is gone now. The Greece of Plato and Aristotle is gone now. Rome is gone. Byzantium is gone. We see ruins and read stories about peoples who don't exist anymore, places that lost their relevance. We can construct stories about how the dirty Asiatics brought Christianity with them to displace proper European religion but it's all just conjecture, we weren't there at the time. Our knowledge of this period is vanishingly small.

Let's focus on not becoming ancient history for someone else to ponder over.

Firstly, I don't know if you can assess intelligence from ancient populations.

once you analyzed lots of phenotype-genotypes for moderns you can apply these models for ancient, and analyzing population averages is simpler in some aspects than getting a good score for individual: for individual, a trait would depend on non-linear combinations and rare alleles; for comparing between populations, these aren't significant, because a population cannot reliably continue lucky non-linear combinations (we however do in in agriculture with f1 seeds and cloning).

How verifiable is it, though? Where are we getting DNA from, are they outliers trapped in peat bog pits or something? The article says they just found basically anonymous DNA samples from across Eurasia, over thousands and thousands of years. We can't know that this is a balanced sample.

What if they have X genetics and we accurately capture that but some epigenetics are activated/deactivated at the time? As far as I can determine, the methylation pattern is more easily lost (and they didn't cover it anyway).

I like my science as concrete and provable as possible. This is dangerously abstract. Abstraction is fine if we had some real Indo-European farmers or Neolithics to talk to but since we don't, standards for validity should be kept high.

Not much verifiable. There should be much more work comparing new data (hopefully more detailed and nuanced than this) to see whether there shifts make sense with what we know from other means. There is no expectation why samples would be unbiased but this is problem for all archeology, not just DNA.

As far as I can determine, the methylation pattern is more easily lost DNA methylation governs differentiation of cells between tissues, it's not something revelant here.

standards for validity should be kept high.

How then do you like hypothesis that we are smarter than Homo erectus? It's not something that can be tested. It's pure speculation, right? Heck, how we can be even be sure Indo-Europeans existed? It's just deep extrapolation from existing languages on much murkier ground.

Skull size is a pretty clear signal for Erectus, I'm happy with skull size variations implying intelligence difference, ceteris paribus. I'm happy with a broad trend of rising intelligence under selection pressure. I do believe in evolution and genetics. But I don't believe that we can precisely chart IQ rising and falling over thousands of years like OP's charts suggest. The level of confidence is too high.

DNA methylation is absolutely relevant to working out which genes are expressed, it's a way of determining epigenetics.

The human body is a very complex piece of machinery that we don't fully understand. This article suggests that the heart can store memories (which are transferred with transplants) which I didn't believe in at all prior to this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987719307145

When dealing with such a complex system, with many facets barely known to us, we should be cautious before reaching conclusions - especially if there's no way to test them.

Crises, especially ones with a large risk of death tend to drive evolution. Who got to survive after a collapse? Smart people with a higher time preference survived because they were the ones prepared to survive the collapse and to rebuild afterwards. The ones who die are the ones who are dumb and therefore do stupid things to kill themselves, are unable to plan ahead, and lack a solid work ethic.

Now the reverse is true of High Civilization like Greece and Rome. We say it ourselves — good times make weak men. The Greeks and Romans used slaves for everything and had a pretty decent welfare state in Rome itself. The chief problem for Rome was a large class of unemployed in Rome who had to be entertained. In such a city, one could live a comfortable life and never have to break a sweat doing anything productive. And so if you were lazy, stupid, and uninterested in working or getting educated, not a problem. And so while those people die quickly in a collapse, they didn’t really suffer all that much in Rome. So those types would definitely lower the IQ of classic civilization.

Crises, especially ones with a large risk of death tend to drive evolution. Who got to survive after a collapse?

Have you lived or witnessed close by a collapse? From my experience with the fall of the communism it is not the type of person that you described that thrived.

You mean, smart people with a lower time preference.

Doesn't this risk being a just-so story? It's not clear to me why a civilisational collapse or dark age would necessarily favour smart people with a higher time preference - you can probably argue just as easily that it would favour impulsive and violent people, because short-term aggression is more valuable in a time of instability. Long-term planning and building is more valuable in a time stable enough for generational or intergenerational investment to bear fruit.

Crises tend to favour fast strategies - and surely you could argue that fast strategies will value IQ less than slow strategies, and so you might expect average IQ to go down through a crisis.

To be clear, I'm not asserting that this is definitely the case. It just seems at least as plausible to me as the theory that crises favour people with higher IQs. I have no strong opinion on how crises influence the genetics of IQ.

What a terrible post.

I'm surprised white supremacists didn't pounce on this immediately

Why would they? What does it prove, in the most white-supremacist-friendly interpretation? That intelligent Europeans (alone, as far as we know) preferred fairer-skinned partners? Or do you mean that they should have pounced because, in their stupidity, they would have congenially misinterpreted the findings as showing a causal relationship between fair skin and intelligence if they had bothered to read them?

I don't expect them to read.

Is there a single group of people outside of academia that would be more likely to read this paper? I don't know how many read it in full, but it did generate a lot of discussion on RW twitter, much of it reasonably well-informed. The IQ results were flattering enough on their own that there was no need to resort to whatever nonsensical argument you expected to see referencing skin color.

3500-3000 BC - sharp drop

I suggest you draw some vertical lines on the graph. The sharp drop definitely starts before 3500. It looks more like 4000-3500, with recovery starting around 3300. So,

Sharp drop coincides with the Yamnaya expansion

is false. The Yamnaya expansion began sometime between 3300 and 3000, coinciding with the beginning of the slow increase. Note that it took a thousand years or more for Aryan genes to spread to most of the rest of Europe. I too would have expected the Aryan invasion to be associated with a drastic change in one direction or the other, but that's just not what the graph shows.

Big L for Skin heads

I don't think I've heard skinheads referenced anywhere in the last 20 years except as hypothetical boogeymen. Less of this.

Germanic, Viking...

Please google the word "Germanic".

500BC - 1200AD steady decline

I like this one

I'm sure you do.

This steady decline coincides with the continent’s biggest cultural phenomenon : Christianity

How does Christianity explain the 1/3 of the decline that took place before the birth of Christ, or the 1/2 of the decline before it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, or that during the interval before Christianity established itself in the more remote regions of Europe, let alone becoming a major force in the lives of the scattered, illiterate farmers that constituted the majority of these regions? The decline would have had to start around ~800 AD for your point to stand, but that is much closer to the beginning of the increase we see in the High Middle Ages than it is to your Christian pre-Socratics.

Another L for the skin heads.

I'm not old enough to remember what the skinheads were really about, but nowadays, the image of a right-wing extremist who passionately believes in the salvific power of both Christ and the Aryan-derived heritable component of IQ is chimerical. (A believer in the latter is more likely to be an antireligious pagan (sympathizer). Actually even he might not exist; I've never heard it claimed that the Aryans' special sauce was their superior IQ.)*

ancestral pillars of white identity... suppressed intelligence [rather] than promoting it

Wait. I thought that the "whiteness" of a historical current, as perceived from the 21st century, as a latent variable modulating its contribution to intelligence, was your strawman, but maybe that was an accidental steelman of you. Is your working theory that whites were dumbed down by the Aryans and Christianity, but we compensated for it through the gradual lightening of our skin? I would think that was unfair, but then I don't understand why you say you're confused. Why would you expect all these unrelated things to have a consistent effect on intelligence?

*The closest I've heard is that their milk-drinking gave them an enlarged frontal cortex (unmediated by gene-culture coevolution) and so maybe a superior memory. I'm not familiar with the physical evidence, but one indirect point in favor is that international memorization competitions are apparently dominated by Mongolians, the one (large) ethnicity that both is Asian and drinks lots of milk. Also, the Aryans seem to have had a knack for epic poetry -- or just very long poetry, in the case of the Vedas -- which is not shared by many other cultures.

I'm not old enough to remember what the skinheads were really about

Whites and blacks getting together in racial unity and roughing up newly arrived pakistanis in UK in the 70s?

This Is England (2006) is a fun movie about that. Green Street is also a fun but different movie. The Brits need to keep their white working class around just so that we get more of these movies, IQ be damned.

If you like Green Street, I would suggest The Football Factory as a very realistic/funny look at the same stuff.

How do you think the Puerto Rico joke will affect the election?

What "Puerto Rico joke", and why would anyone think it would effect the election?

One of the speakers at Trump’s MSG rally was talking shit about Puerto Rico.

It’d be a campaign-ending breach of decorum for any other candidate, but for Trump, it was Sunday. Not much chance it swings the election.

If the joke had been about Haiti I could see it being a boost for Trump, following the pattern where he dog-whistles racism shortly before elections in order to get racists to vote for him, even though he doesn't end up implementing any of the policies they support. But Puerto Rico was a non sequitur because nobody had been making a campaign issue out of anything related to Puerto Rico. I don't see it having any effect IMO.

I don't know who that guy is, maybe he's totally out of the loop and using stale lines? Or not generally political and falling back on stuff from last time PR was politically relevant?

These guys need an SNL writers room feeding them topical lines. Just more missing cultural infrastructure.

He is the host of the largest live podcast in the world. I could see the joke doing fine at his normal events.

You can see that he is getting a bad audience reception and gets nervous and it makes everything worse (he even does the risky thing about commenting on the cold reception). Allegedly, there’s some background about the islands trash collection being bad or something, but I watched the set and it just comes off as mean and punching down (plus even if that was the connection it’s not well enough known to make for a good joke). As do about half the jokes overall. Just bad vibes all around. It doesn’t even have any lead in!

Making jokes at a political rally is always a little dicey (especially since on possible pillar of comedy is an element of transgression) but there’s absolutely such a thing as being too mean and he was absolutely in that zone, to my judgement. I only chucked once.

It won't

Judging by the massive surge in DJT stock this morning, or prediction markets, not at all.

unchanged:

https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-2024?tid=1730135416810

So far the outrage seems to be localized in people that have never entertained voting for trump as a thought. And I do hope that the blue collars will pass the IQ test of "comedians telling jokes and landing flat" that the punditry class seems to have failed.

Agree. It's been this way since 2016: "OMG Trump did or said bad thing , I am going to vote for Hillary/Biden/Harris" said probably no one.

Young Latinos love KillTony and older Latinos from Puero Rico are probably critical of their home country. I doubt it changes their vote.

I think those remarks have low potential upside for Trump's campaign and high potential downside. I doubt that the number of people who would decide to go out and vote for Trump because a comedian at his event said Puerto Rico is a floating island of garbage is as large as the number of people who would decide to come out and vote against Trump because of it. So it was careless for Trump's campaign to allow it to happen. It's another unforced error, following on the heels of when Tucker Carlson, a few days ago in a public speech, made a long political metaphor involving spanking one's daughter. These are the kinds of things that make me wonder, did Trump's campaign people start smoking meth the last few days or something? It's just stupid, stupid shit that might endanger an election that might well be decided by a few tens of thousands of votes, especially given that the Democrats have spent the last week putting a lot of media energy into trying to make the Madison Square Garden rally seem like a Nazi rally. Like come on, Trump campaign people, just shut up and go do more McDonalds type photo ops and talk about crime and immigration and shit. There's a time and a place for crude, controversial jokes. A week before the election and at a highly publicized rally at a major venue where most of your main people appear is probably not the right time and place.

Reuters article to flesh out this low-effort comment

Political leaders from both sides of the aisle and Puerto Rican celebrities bashed comments at a major Donald Trump event in New York by a comedian who called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage."

Speaking before the Republican presidential candidate at a rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, comedian and podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe added that Latinos "love making babies" and that they do not "pull out," comments that leaned into a racist trope that Latinos are preoccupied with childbearing and averse to birth control.

"There's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now," Hinchcliffe said. "I think it's called Puerto Rico."

The presidential campaign of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats, several prominent Puerto Rican celebrities and some congressional Republicans denounced the comments, which were widely panned as racist.

The Trump campaign itself said the comments do not "reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign." Trump himself has not commented on Hinchcliffe's performance.

This was an example of an unforced error, albeit a tiny one in the grand schemes of things. It makes me wonder why anyone would book a comedian at all. Politics is very much scripted; comedians by trade are not.

Probably tiny. The problem is that, if the polls are accurate, this is a ludicrously close race and tiny errors can have huge effects.

The Hispanics in the US have a birthrate identical to republicans and in actual Latin American countries it’s, like in Latin European countries, lower than America.

While I don’t think contraception is good, ‘Hispanics have a lot of kids because the Catholic Church tells them to’ is mostly not true, see also, the percentage of those births out of wedlock(very high).

podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe added that Latinos "love making babies" and that they do not "pull out," comments that leaned into a racist trope that Latinos are preoccupied with childbearing and averse to birth control.

The irony is that the age of the big Catholic family in Latin America is over. Mexico has a lower birth rate than the USA. Puerto Rico's TFR is lower than Singapore!

Please put more effort into top level posts

Would you mind including some more commentary or analysis of your own?

The end of a revolution is usually only visible in hindsight. This might be it but it’s too soon to say.

So are we in a thermidor right now? Does this mean that the world has achieved peak bioleninism or will it be like 2016?

No. The tide continues to come in, even if one particular wave recedes.

Will the demographic shifts not mean that in the long term this may not matter?

Probably. But a Trump win buys the country another 4 years. But at some point, the Democrats will win a clean sweep, amnesty the existing illegals, let in millions more, and win every election going forward.

win every election going forward

They thought that would happen before, it didn't.

African Americans, Latinos and Asians are all shifting right, and increasingly voting Republican. The younger they are and the more they identify as American (as opposed to their ethnic identities) the more likely they are to support the GOP.

The old patterns are breaking down and being replaced by new ones. Men vs women, college-educated vs non-college-educated, married vs unmarried are going to be the relevant demographic criteria of the next few decades, I would predict.

married vs unmarried are going to be the relevant demographic criteria of the next few decades, I would predict.

Which of course means that the GOP managing to boost the marriage rate is a matter of political survival, and this is probably doable by tax policies and benefits cliffs they love tinkering with(one wonders how many cohabiting couples- and seriously cohabiting is pretty bad and if we can get these people to marry slightly faster that's a good thing in se- would marry for a payout).

For a man, the financial risk of divorce utterly swamps any possible gains from tax incentives.

To get investment in capital, you need secure property rights, because nobody is going to invest time and effort in a business he cannot expect to profit from, in much the same way no one washes a rented car. Likewise, to get investment in marriage, you need secure ownership of women by men.

As long as Marriage 2.0 is the only game in town, men are going to continue following their incentives rather than accepting a debased marriage.

erwgv3g34 what do you think the odds are that the Republicans manage to reduce women to chattel before losing their current political struggle with the Democrats as a %?

Isn't that exactly what happened in California after the 1980s amnesty?

I agree it's not a straight line descent, but the broad strokes seem to be there.

That just means they need to step up the pace.

Modern progressive globalism burns human beings like fuel. If it's running out of fuel, or some of the existing fuel is going bad, then it needs to import more fuel. This will go on until it can't, but that might be well after any of us are alive to see it.

The Canadian globohomos seem to be running into a bit of a brick wall already, so it might be sooner than you think.

African Americans, Latinos and Asians are all shifting right, and increasingly voting Republican.

Republicans are now running a 1990s-Bill-Clinton analogue for president. To remain even nominally competitive, the Republican party has had to abandon numerous priorities as simply untenable, to the point that the party itself has completely fractured from its base of supporters. It's certainly true that "old patterns break up and are replaced by new ones", and that there will be a viable "Republican Party" for the foreseeable future. They'll be running on democratic policies when they aren't outright endorsing democrats.

It seems to me that this is not, in fact, acceptable, and that it does, in fact, provide a pretty good argument for why the existing social structure should be done away with.

a 1990s-Bill-Clinton analogue

That's possibly the only take on Trump I've seen that argues he's too moderate.

Left-wingers might say he's a fascist or whatever, right-wingers might say he's boorish or distractable or egotistic. I don't think I've heard any of them say he's not extreme enough.

Could you elaborate?

Could you elaborate?

Are you familiar with the idea that "conservatives are liberals driving the speed limit"? This is just an instance of that. Trump's general policies are fairly similar to 1990s-Clinton policies. He makes no pretension of fiscal responsibility, which used to be a core Conservative concern and now has been completely abandoned. He has no interest in legislating morality. He is not a good example of moral character, he does not stand for public morality, and he has no interest on enforcing public morality through law or the bully pulpit. He's "tough on crime", though Clinton did a better job on actually following through. They've both been publicly accused of rape/sexual assault/sexual harassment, though it seems to me that the accusations against Clinton were far more substantial. He passes ineffectual gun control measures, though Clinton's were more lasting. They even both survived an impeachment.

If you want to see the tribes come together, Trump is as good as it's ever going to be, and it's never going to be this good again. This is the closest point of approach. When he fails, Red Tribe will inevitably turn to less conciliatory options.

When he fails, Red Tribe will inevitably turn to less conciliatory options.

"Inevitably"? I question this in two ways. First, in the abstract, are we not beings with agency? With free will? If we turn to "less conciliatory options," is that not a choice? Thus, we can choose otherwise. We can choose to turn the other cheek. Choose not to sink to our enemy's level, but let it go, be the "bigger men"; maintain our higher moral standards, our more virtuous conduct — the "more conciliatory options," if you will — so as to persuade with the example we set, to overcome evil with good; to not retaliate in kind, but leave such consequences of our enemies' wickedness for a Higher Power to mete out? Is this not in character with what so many of Red Tribe believe? With how we think of ourselves in contrast with Blue Tribe?

Secondly, I've heard people talk in this manner before, about how if our current means fail to hold the line in this or that matter or incident, we'll surely escalate to harder means. And every time, it failed to happen. Why should this time be any different. We've never "turned to less conciliatory options" before. "This time is different." It's never different. What we've always done is most likely what we always will do.

We've never "turned to less conciliatory options" before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

And which side of that conflict was the Red Tribe on?

I mean, contra the degree to which Confederate flags have become something of a "Red Tribe" symbol — even here in Alaska — to speak in Albion's Seed terms, wasn't it mainly the Cavaliers who drove secession, while modern Red Tribe seems to descend more from the Borderers, concentrated in Appalachia, and AIUI, many of their counties in the South voted against secession — see most notably West Virginia, along with eastern Tennessee and Kentucky (see also a bit more here.

But also consider which side lost, and the lessons learned therefrom. One might say that "the South will rise again," but it's been how long? And on just what metric have they "risen" in that time?

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The GOP is the socially moderate party for social conservatives, which offers them protection for their way of life. The dems are the socially progressive party for people who want to make social conservatism illegal, which offers them realistically just harassment of social conservatives but it could be state discrimination occasionally, and of course both parties have other interest groups in their coalitions.

Seriously- religious freedom/conscience protections, homeschooling protection, parental rights- these are all major focuses of the GOP and they're areas where the GOP has winning records. They are also very important to social conservatives.

The GOP is the socially moderate party for social conservatives, which offers them protection for their way of life. The dems are the socially progressive party for people who want to make social conservatism illegal, which offers them realistically just harassment of social conservatives but it could be state discrimination occasionally, and of course both parties have other interest groups in their coalitions.

This seems like a system one would be well-advised to extricate oneself from with all possible haste.

Meh. This isn’t the deal I’d prefer but social conservatives don’t have the numbers to control the country. We need to bide our time when we can’t win, and that means supporting our protectors over our enemies.

but social conservatives don’t have the numbers to control the country.

Here's someone willing to argue the contrary.

But even if you don't buy Mrs. Hoyt's arguments about the actual size of the "silent majority" and the margin of fraud, how big a fraction of the population is needed to "control" a country, anyway? I must point again to the German Peasant's War? What size fraction of the population controlled sixteenth century Central Europe? Or America during and just after the Revolution? What were the numbers a pharaoh needed to control Egypt? How many did the Son of Heaven need to rule all of China?

These people did not need to win popular elections.

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African Americans, Latinos and Asians are all shifting right, and increasingly voting Republican.

Specifically the men in these demographics. The gender gap is turning reciprocal.

I don't know about VCs, but I think that the shift of tech executives toward Trump has another major cause besides just that he looks like he might win. The idea that it's driven by some sort of awareness that Trump is a heavy favorite to win doesn't make sense to me because to me it's pretty clear that, prediction market weirdness aside, the race is still a toss-up. There is no actual good evidence in favor of the theory that Trump is running away with it.

So what is the other cause for the shift? I think it's pretty simple actually. Most tech executives come from the kind of blue tribe middle/upper-middle class family and cultural backgrounds where either voting Democrat is just what one does, because "it is the right thing to do" (I don't believe that, but people in those cultures do)... or, at least, the idea of voting for a Trump seems beyond the pale. One might vote for a Romney, but not a Trump. Being in the middle/upper-middle class does not grant people any sort of special degree of interest in or understanding of politics. Indeed, most such people are politically pretty apathetic. They feel that they are doing the right thing for the world by voting for the Democrats or for moderate Republicans once every couple of years and they don't think much about politics otherwise except maybe to occasionally grumble about some particular blatant excess like the WMDs-in-Iraq clusterfuck. They are the kind of people who think that the New York Times and the Washington Post are paragons of journalism and trust that writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Jared Diamond have given them a good understanding of anthropology. They are repelled by the Republican political umbrella's religious conservatism, its talk about Judeo-Christian values, its adulation of traditional family structures, its reflexive worship of the military, and many other things. As, to some extent, am I for that matter... and I myself would never vote for a Republican, if it was not for my belief that somehow, the Democrats have become even worse.

They are not stupid people, indeed many of them are brilliant, but a person's intelligence is usually not evenly distributed among different areas of understanding. It is at least as common for someone to be brilliant in one field and mediocre or even actually unperceptive in others as it is for a person to be smart all across the board. Take tech, for example. I have met many good coders who have very little interest in politics, have not thought very deeply about it, and do not have anything particularly interesting to say about it. The typical white collar professional knows very little about history and is not particularly interested in it. When he is done at work for the day, he does not spend hours thinking and reading about politics, he goes home and puts on Netflix.

Understandably, if one grows up in a background like this, spends most of one's time in college and the business world around other people who came from such a background, and spends most of one's energy focusing on business decisions and technology instead of on politics, it might take one a long time to come to the conclusion that maybe the Democrats are actually not on the right side of history any more than the Republicans are. Even when they begin to pressure you to use your company to censor their political opponents. Even when you realize that a large fraction of their rank-and-file voters automatically despise you simply because you have made a lot of money. Even when their policies make the cities where you live dirty and poorly policed. And it might especially take one a long time when the only alternative to those Democrats isn't a safe Romney type of figure, but is instead Trump and his whole gang of rabble-rousers.

I think it is notable that two of the most prominent anti-Democrat tech businessmen, Musk and Thiel, both spent time in South Africa. I do not know to what extent that experience shaped their political attitudes, but I doubt it is a coincidence that they share in common some experience having grown up not just in nice blue tribe suburbs in the West, but also in a country that has experienced a lot of devastation from racial animosity, crime, and corrupt political patronage systems.

One might vote for a Romney, but not a Trump.

Not exactly. One might publicly flirt with the idea of voting for a Romney, before deciding to go ahead and vote for the Democrat after all.

In an interesting coincidence, the owner of the LA Times, who caused such a controversy by telling his editorial board not to endorse any candidate for president, was also born and raised in South Africa.

Do some people enjoy being raped?

I normally don't wade this deep into controversial gender stuff, but... once I had this thought it won't leave my head. It's super anti-memetic, the sort of thing that if true nobody would want to admit and everyone who found out would suppress other than misogynists who people would ignore. If it were known to be true and widely admitted then rapists would just use it as an excuse, therefore the media/scientists/everyone lie and say it's not?

A bunch of people have rape fetishes. They are aroused by power and strength, or the courage and audacity to defy social conventions, or the idea of being so desirable that they drive someone insane and make them lose control. Or I've heard someone describe being raised in a super conservative household where you need to be pure and chaste, but they secretly want sex, so fantasize about being raped so that they could experience sex but it wouldn't be their fault and they haven't done anything wrong. I personally can imagine scenarios in which as a teenager a hot girl could have offered to have sex with me and I'd say no because I was a good boy who didn't do that sort of thing, but maybe would have ultimately been happy if she had forcibly insisted? But that never happened so I don't actually know.

Now of course, fantasies are not reality. Actual rape is going to be more violent, less perfectly tailored to someone's ideals, more terrifying, and probably with a much less attractive person than in an imaginary hypothetical. Lots of people have fantasies that they wouldn't actually want to carry out in real life. But it seems like the translation should be nonzero. And the translation of that it actual rapes is also nonzero. That is, if the proportion of people with rape fetishes is A, the proportion of those people who would enjoy actually being raped is B, and the proportion of those people who experience rape is C, and if all of these proportions are nonzero (and not so tiny as to pragmatically be zero), then the product, ABC is the proportion of people who have actually been raped and enjoyed the experience.

And it seems like they would experience an entirely different set of issues than normal rape victims. On the one hand, the experience is going to be a lot less traumatic: Instead of a horrifying and degrading experience they got to have an enjoyable if unexpected sexual encounter. On the other hand, they probably feel guilt and shame for their feelings, which they cannot voice without severe backlash from society. Rape is "the worst crime" possible, it's victims are permanently "Victims" and "Survivors". Its existence is a weapon to bash men and promote women. Mainstream culture is super well equipped to support and assist typical rape victims, at the expense of absolutely silencing and shunning anyone who might have not had a terrible experience and not been traumatized by it. And that itself might just amplify the shame and guilt and trauma for this subset of people. Like the kid who doesn't cry until they know someone is watching, I suspect that this subset of rape victims might not be traumatized from the rape itself, and wouldn't ever be traumatized in a different society, but are traumatized by our society's reaction to them and the need to stay "in the closet" so to speak, because of the backlash they'd receive if anyone found out the truth.

I'm not crazy, am I? Is this secretly a thing that nobody is allowed to talk about? I'm not sure it's really actionable if true. I don't think it makes rapists less horrible people even if they get lucky and target someone who secretly enjoys it, because the expected value of their crime is still catastrophically negative. So it wouldn't indicate reducing criminal or social penalties for rapists. And I don't think it would indicate reducing support or funding for rape victims, a majority of which are still traumatized in the normal way that everyone thinks they are. But maybe it would suggest something along the lines of... giving people the benefit of the doubt? Having more options for how people are allowed to cope with rape on their own terms without assuming they are "victims" when they might just be fine? I'm not sure this makes much difference, but I'd like to hear thoughts and/or statistical/scientific evidence for or against this (if that's even meaningful given the massive reporting biases this would create)

Definitional question: if the victim enjoys it, is it even rape? Note: I'm not taking about if the woman feels pleasure or orgasms from it, but if she actively thought it was a good experience and she was glad for it.

I used to joke with my wife and ask her "can I rape you?" When she would say no, or roll her eyes, I would say "fine, I'm not going to rape you if you don't want me to".

I used to joke with my wife

Why did you stop? (Alternatively, hey Mitch, didn’t expect to run into you here!)

Definitionally I think rape is defined by agreement/consent prior to and/or during a sexual encounter, which is a conscious and voluntary process, while pleasure and enjoyment are (mostly) involuntary and emotional responses.

Hopefully it's clear that a scenario where a woman expects to enjoy having sex with someone, agrees to have sex with them, and he's not very good and she has a surprisingly poorer experience than anticipated. If she later regrets that decision, and in retrospect should not have agreed to it, they still did agree to it at the time, so it is not retroactively defined as rape (by sane people).

What I'm considering here is the inverse scenario: the woman (or man) does not agree to have sex with someone, the other person forces it, and it's a surprisingly good experience. In retrospect they would have agreed to it (or, at least, would not have objected as strongly), but they still did not agree to it at the time, so it was definitionally rape, and the person who committed the crime is not retroactively absolved of their sins (which had a highly negative result in expectation even if not instantiated in this instance).

I don't think consent is a conscious and voluntary process. Even if we're supposedly defining the word... this new word doesn't seem to be what consent feels like to me.

Your language center's justifications are not always a good predictor of your deeper bodymapped feelings of whether you want to have sex. The actual predictor of trauma is whether or not the body and spirit are engaged or revolting, the language center just provides very circumstantial evidence of the state of body and spirit.

I think there is a substantial conscious and voluntary component to the thing we mean by consent, and for legal and social purposes that's the only part we as third parties can/should use as inputs into decision making processes. A law saying "If you have sex with someone and they are traumatized afterwards then you get 20 years of jailtime, but if they shrug it off then you go free" is a terrible law because people choosing to have sex with someone else can't entirely control the other person's reactions. So legally rape should absolutely be defined by visible and mostly unambiguous signals. Similarly, a social convention of "If you have sex with someone and they are traumatized afterwards then you are a bad person and everyone should shun you, but if they shrug it off then you're fine." is... more reasonable, but still dubious, because if you're so bad at a sex you traumatized someone then clearly something is wrong with you. But again, if you force sex on someone and they shrug it off you're still a horrible person because that is an action with very negative expected outcome. If you shoot at someone with a gun, maybe you don't actually hit them and wound them, and maybe you don't get convicted of murder, but you still get convicted of assault, because you easily could have hurt them.

So there's the legal definition, and the social definition, and the moral definition. And the moral version of consent involves internal thoughts and feelings, the legal one does not and should not, while the social one is probably somewhere in between. And all of them are meaningful and useful, and mostly referring to the same thing even if having different words for them might make it easier to communicate the distinctions.

I don't necessarily think your inverse is fully analogous. We are not necessarily talking just about women who happen to like it during and afterwards, but women who specifically wanted to be raped because they really enjoy or believe they will enjoy that experience. My point is that if she actually does actively want it, then I'm not sure if it's definitionally rape, which I always was told meant forced and unwanted sex.

Furthermore, as another thought experiment that goes beyond just a definitional dispute, I believe someone who really wants to have an encounter like that will be acting differently and giving off different signals, so it's not entirely clear to me if a man who takes the bait is really a rapist, or someone who's on some level playing along with the game she is setting forth. Some of the dispute likely comes down to whether we believe that all consent is truly verbally communicated, or if there are levels of communication that go beyond that.

The instance I'm imagining for the inverse is more latent. A woman who doesn't consciously realize she has a rape fetish, or enjoys porn of that sort but doesn't think she wants it in real life, or has it but thinks that's bad and feels shame and tries to suppress it. Therefore isn't sending off signals to get it, and if someone tried to rape her she would try to stop them. But then when it happens she realizes that it actually is fulfilling and enjoyable and she retroactively changes her mind.

This would be quite rare, and there's probably less contrived scenarios, but this would definitely count as rape because whatever implicit consent would only apply retroactively.

Well. It can still be forced even if you wanted it. And 'unwanted' can be complicated. The mind is rarely a monolith on such matters.

This topic is cursed, so I'll keep my thoughts brief.

From an evolutionary biology standpoint:

Some meaningful percentage of humans in the early history of the species were the product of coerced sex.

Males being naturally stronger than females is the reason it would normally be males doing the coercing.

Females who aggressively fought back against coerced sex were more likely to be injured or die by said males.

Thus, females who fought back would not be passing genes on to the next generation quite as often.

Likewise, females who 'accepted' coerced sex and adapted to bear and raise any resulting child were more likely to pass on their genes.

After 1000 generations, the genes of women who accepted it would be more prevalent than those who resisted.

The inverse is probably true for males. Weaker males who didn't/couldn't coerce sex probably lost out overall.

So we would expect there to be some innate tendency for some women to find coerced sex 'appealing'. Call it a survival mechanism if you want. Being forced into an act but at least being able to 'enjoy' it means you don't get killed in the process.

Then tie that into the need to filter partners for 'Fitness' (as defined by prehistorical norms), and a male being strong enough to overpower and take a woman without her cooperation is an imperfect but not entirely incorrect proxy for a male who can produce and protect strong offspring.

So a complex set of factors and the way intersexual dynamics work would make it not too surprising that women and men would have some kind of urge to engage in 'coerced' sex acts because that's a way to signal one's fitness as a mate on a very primal level. How strongly one experiences this urge, especially compared to other competing urges probably varies a lot. So even if I believe the urge/desire is common, it doesn't mean everyone actually experiences it as an overpowering desire.

Thus, females who fought back would not be passing genes on to the next generation quite as often.

Then tie that into the need to filter partners for 'Fitness' (as defined by prehistorical norms), and a male being strong enough to overpower and take a woman without her cooperation is an imperfect but not entirely incorrect proxy for a male who can produce and protect strong offspring.

Aren't these two factors contradictory? If the woman does not fight back, then there is no fitness filtering. Meanwhile, a rapist who kills his victims won't pass on his genes either.

I mean, if a woman is strong enough to fight back and escape a man, that's either an abnormally strong woman or an abnormally weak man.

So I should perhaps phrased it as those who effectively fought back versus merely offered impotent token resistance.

Meanwhile, a rapist who kills his victims won't pass on his genes either.

Well, he won't pass on his genes with that woman. Even assuming that he never finds a woman who offers little enough resistance to leave alive, he could still have children in a consensual relationship separate from the rape.

Louis CK has met one of the people you're talking about.

There’s mentally ill women who seek out getting raped as a form of self harm(the term for these people is ‘crazy’) and there are women who have a fetish for getting raped by men they wanted to have sex with anyways, and we should probably note with this group of fetishists that the median woman doesn’t actually want to have sex outside a relationship so date rape as casual sex is still unwelcome to these women.

I'm not crazy, am I?

If you were trying to convince others that you're not crazy I wouldn't let them read this post.

What you're describing, that level of deviancy from the norm can only be, to me, explained as mental illness. They're clearly not "fine" even if they're fine with the rape.

But say they're not, then maybe they don't consider it rape at all and this crisis of being abnormal wouldn't occur to them.

So it wouldn't indicate reducing criminal or social penalties for rapists. And I don't think it would indicate reducing support or funding for rape victims, a majority of which are still traumatized in the normal way that everyone thinks they are. But maybe it would suggest something along the lines of... giving people the benefit of the doubt?

It probably already does this. People who consider what happened to them not that bad are probably not reporting it as a rape and if it happened out that it was reported they're probably not testifying, not getting a rape kit, not taking pictures, and even assuming all this is done just happenstance of them enjoying the experience, their descriptions, testimony, and demeanor would probably end up maybe allaying some amount of criminal penalty.

But even considering all that, you break a law, you get punished by the law, some things are mitigating, but someone enjoying a thing because they have a mental illness doesn't make it okay.

The rape your requiring in this hypothetical means the person being raped can't be aware that it is going to happen. Even if they enjoy the act their agency is still being taken without their permission. Even doing something I like, I wouldn't be thrilled to have this forced on me and my time taken.

This kind of thinking is like "it's okay to steal from rich people because they won't miss it." or "it's okay to attack that guy because pain don't hurt and he loves to fight." Maybe you could use that as mitigating factor in sentencing, but no, there's no benefit of the doubt. In fact, what is the doubt here? That we should give people a pass if they encounter a .01% individual who is not bothered by their victimization?

People have fetishes for seemingly everything ,so this would not surprise me either.

...

IRL, I used to work in the same building as a therapist and I used go to lunch with him. He told me it's fairly common in male victims of child rape to fetishize the behavior, that is, at least in the ones who are troubled enough to seek therapy. This didn't take place in a therapy-happy country mind you.

When I was a young man in a long distance relationship I would often end up listening to Loveline with Adam Corolla and Dr. Drew on my way back home Sunday evenings. One of those nights, they were discussing this in the more general context of the sexual experiences of children. Adam was talking about how while he was initially skeptical of the connection between adult sexual issues and childhood experiences, with enough time and repetition, he had come to believe that Drew was onto something when he always asked folks about their childhood when this sort of thing came up. He went on to liken a child's mind to wet cement that was slowly drying. Those childhood experiences would make an impression on the cement that ultimately cured into sexual expectations and preferences as an adult.

This made sense to me at the time and speaking as someone who works in the mental health field and is married to a therapist, I've heard more than enough stories like this myself to believe that this is the most likely explanation for all sorts of sexual preferences.

The one thing they cannot have a fetish for is 'homosexual behavior' I have been told online.

That sounds like ego defense. Groups build those when they feel threatened. When groups feel safe they totally just kink on those models.

The one thing they cannot have a fetish for is 'homosexual behavior' I have been told online.

On the contrary, as a supporter since before it was popular of the rights of gay people, I believe that, if one condition is fulfilled, one can legitimately consider someone to have a fetish for 'homosexual behaviour'.

That condition is that one also consider heterosexual behaviour a fetish.

To me, 'equal rights for gay people' means that for a system of ethics to be valid, it must be invariant with regard to gender parity, i. e. the morality of an act or relationship is identical to that of an otherwise identical act or relationship, differing only in that the gender of one participant is reversed.

To me, 'equal rights for gay people' means that for a system of ethics to be valid, it must be invariant with regard to gender parity, i. e. the morality of an act or relationship is identical to that of an otherwise identical act or relationship, differing only in that the gender of one participant is reversed.

This seems a very odd and unique definition. The genders are not the same, so why would swapping them in any situation result in the same result?

I'm not referring to

s/modal woman/modal man

but to

s/woman with xyz characteristics/man with same characteristics

.

In any case in which Alice and Adam, as individual people, not as representatives of womanhood and manhood, are identical in every way except their gender, and Bob and Bill are identical in every way except that Bob is attracted to women and Bill is attracted to men, and Alice and Bob have exactly the same feelings and commitment to each other (or lack thereof) as Adam and Bill, the relationship between Adam and Bill is immoral if and only if the relationship between Alice and Bob is immoral.

The genders are not the same

I'm not referring to 'the male gender' and 'the female gender', averaging over four billion people; I am referring to four hypothetical individuals.

If women are, on average, disproportionally FOO, and men, on average, disproportionally BAR, then, in the hypothetical, Alice is more BAR than most women and/or Adam is more FOO than most men.

If women are, on average, disproportionally FOO, and men, on average, disproportionally BAR, then, in the hypothetical, Alice is more BAR than most women and/or Adam is more FOO than most men.

This is only relevant if you think ephemeral things like FOO and BAR are relevant, and if you think it is wise to make society-wide policy decisions for fringe cases. I, in particular, don't think the latter. You make policies for the 4 billion, and the couple thousand outliers conform, get outcast, or something different.

Its no different than dealing with other antisocial behavior like crime, just luckily most of these issues are rarer than retail theft of cigarettes and razor blades.

This is only relevant if you think ephemeral things like FOO and BAR are relevant

FOO and BAR are what are called metasyntactic variables, acting as a stand-in for anything different between the average man and the average woman which would affect the morality or immorality of their relationship. If you tell us what you believe the relevant differences between the genders are, I can explain how this applies to it specifically.

You make policies for the 4 billion,

Who saves one life, saves the world entire.

and the couple thousand outliers conform, get outcast, or something different.

Many societies have thought this way. They have tended to leave skulls.

Its no different than dealing with other antisocial behavior like crime

Except for the fact that other anti-social behaviour harms people....

Who saves one life, saves the world entire

Out of context religious doctrine just makes you sound stupid.

Many societies have thought this way. They have tended to leave skulls.

Proudly misunderstanding the failure mode of communism and fascism also makes you sound stupid.

Except for the fact that other anti-social behaviour harms people....

We are talking about a specific arrangement where the state provides benefits to a sort of arrangement. Including and excluding different types of people is often necessary to preserve resources. There is no reason to extend marriage benefits to M-M or F-F relationships because they don't function similarly to M-F relationships.

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Isn't a fetish by definition a minority preference? And by implication a small/fringe minority?

Someone saying they have a pizza fetish doesn't just mean that they like pizza; almost everybody likes pizza, it's not a fetish. (unless taken to some extreme; do not recommend googling "pizza fetish")

A fetish, or paraphilia, is traditionally a focus on a part or feature of one’s sexual partners, or oneself considered sexually, or a behavior/role. By contrast, a sexual orientation or gender preference is based in the partner’s identity, and a gender is how one’s sexual features relate to their own identity.

One can have a thumb fetish: for big thumbs, small thumbs, thumb-play, gloves, mittens, art focused on thumbs, etc. Most people would not consider the thumbed to have an orientable identity, so a fetish it remains. (I can think of two specific exceptions for that sentence.)

Features traditionally considered primary, secondary, or tertiary sexual characteristics of one sex (size and shape of genitalia, big/small breasts, long/short hair, short/tall stature, small/large hands or feet, hair color, etc.) can be immediate dealbreakers if they go against one’s typical image of their target orientation. However, they can also be fetishes, not just identifiers.

Race can be a fetish or an orientation. So can height. For people toward the middle of the bisexuality spectrum, major categories of genitalia can be fetishistic; those toward or on the edges will generally consider them orientable.

For furry fans, consult a furry scale. Everyone inside and outside of the fandom will have different opinions on what level of furriness is a furry fetish, what level is xenospecies orientation, and what level is a bestiality perversion. Levels 5 and 6 do not have thumbs. Level 6 does not have linguistic sapience.

Some people enjoy being killed and eaten. They even record a video telling everyone they were fulfilling their biggest dream. Their partner still goes to prison for murder and cannibalism.

Anyway, there's no central definition of rape anymore, so we have to examine each one separately.

  1. You invite the dude upstairs for a coffee; the vibe is off, but he won't leave and makes advances to you, you are a bit too tipsy and tired to argue, so you have sex with him to get him to leave. The "new" forced central example, and the one I have the biggest doubts about. I would appreciate if anyone knows women that are explicitly into that.

  2. A handsome, high-status acquaintance safely overpowers you or blackmails you into sex. A very non-central example, probably the most commonly fetishized one, as already discussed by other commenters.

  3. An ugly, low-status stranger safely overpowers you or blackmails you into degrading, no-kinks-barred sex. All I can say is, more women watch kink.com porn than you think.

  4. An ugly, low-status stranger beats you up or threatens you with bodily harm to coerce you into relatively vanilla sex. The "old" central example. People already wrote about /r/rapekink, but I remember another story I read on Reddit, probably on /r/tifu or something.

The guy's girlfriend had a rape kink and it was an itch that he couldn't scratch no matter how hard he tried. Rough sex? No. CNC? No. 24/7 CNC? Still she kept complaining that it didn't really tickle her fetish because she could tell it was him and it was 100% safe sex, she wanted something that was indistinguishable from "the real thing". So he waited until she had to fly to a different town on a business trip, bought a disguise, secretly flew there as well, ambushed her in a park and had surprise sex with her before revealing his identity. Well, that was when she realized she didn't really have a rape fetish.

The moral of the story is: while there's at least two people in the world that into any kink you might think of, people routinely lie to each other and to themselves.

Some people enjoy being killed and eaten. They even record a video telling everyone they were fulfilling their biggest dream. Their partner still goes to prison for murder and cannibalism.

I will push against the lack of is-ought distinction here. I am entirely in support of radical bodily autonomy, if a sane and informed person wishes to be killed and eaten, I won't stop them, or seek to punish anyone who, uh, lends them a hand or a mouth. Emphasis on sane, of course, but people can be weird enough to have all their cognition and still want absurd and harmful things, but as long as it's done to them and they can't be talked out of it while retaining capacity, I wish society would let them.

Why?

If your belief is that people should be trusted to make their own decisions, well, people are wrong all the time, and suicide is irreversible. It is quite common for people to make decisions they'll regret later, and putting guardrails around certain large decisions (not making them impossible, mind, just preventing people from getting away with them without careful planning) protects people.

For the same reason babies can't be trusted to not eat toys, toddlers can't be trusted to be alone around fire or bodies of water, and children can't be trusted to make large medical decisions on their own, adults generally can't be trusted to fully understand what it means to be killed and eaten. The few who can be trusted to actually understand what that decision means, are also perfectly capable of orchestrating and getting away with it, so a strict law banning that decision is really more of a filter banning it for the less intelligent and conscientious.

If your belief is more general--that people have a right to their own preferences--then I submit to you that people are frequently wrong about their own preferences. Preferences are built atop more basic preferences, and most people are not great builders.

Why?

I am firmly for people being in as close to total control of their bodies, in life and manner of death, as feasible.

For the same reason babies can't be trusted to not eat toys, toddlers can't be trusted to be alone around fire or bodies of water, and children can't be trusted to make large medical decisions on their own, adults generally can't be trusted to fully understand what it means to be killed and eaten.

I disagree strongly. I understand perfectly well what it means to be killed and eaten, and have no desire to undergo that fate. So do most people. But if someone, however rare, is otherwise a sane and functioning member of society and harbors a desire to be cannibalized, then I support their right to do as they will with the most inalienable of properties, themselves.

I'm an advocate for the availability of MAID (though implementation details can vary) and I see nothing wrong with the occasional art piece where someone lets others dine on bits of themselves while alive (memory brings up someone using the fat removed during liposuction to fry food). Where's the stretch when I already consider those acceptable? Personally, if I was dead beyond hope of recovery (and wasn't set for cryogenic preservation), I couldn't care less what's done with my corpse.

The few who can be trusted to actually understand what that decision means, are also perfectly capable of orchestrating and getting away with it, so a strict law banning that decision is really more of a filter banning it for the less intelligent and conscientious.

A fair point, but I'm a stickler for principle here. I'd rather have a formal system where people are exhaustively examined and certified as being "sane and intelligent enough to make stupid decisions" and then let them do as they will. I'd hope that's the default assumption for most people, we already let people drink more than is good for them or eat themselves into obesity, and while attempts to regulate that or reduce negative externalities by things like banning drunk driving exist, most people are against societal meddling as invasive as outright prohibition or somehow making fatness illegal.

A society that only lets people make "good" decisions is a tyrannical one as far as I'm concerned.

I don't want to nitpick every way someone can off themselves. I'd rather have a means for people to prove that they're competent to kill themselves, and then let them choose how to dispose of the body (or the means of death) as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else.

If your belief is more general--that people have a right to their own preferences--then I submit to you that people are frequently wrong about their own preferences. Preferences are built atop more basic preferences, and most people are not great builders.

Inconsistent preferences != wrong preferences!

We all have conflicting preferences. My desire to have a burger conflicts with my desire to lose weight. Someone's desire to have a good family life conflicts with their desire to be a billionaire.

There are often temporary conditions that can make people do things that cause a combination of permanent harm while being something they wouldn't want on reflection. But if someone who isn't otherwise mentally ill wants to be eaten, is able to articulate their preferences and reason about them, and can't be convinced to do otherwise over a decent length of time, I'm not standing in their way (unless legally and regulatorily obligated, which I am).

Inconsistent preferences != wrong preferences!

We all have conflicting preferences. My desire to have a burger conflicts with my desire to lose weight. Someone's desire to have a good family life conflicts with their desire to be a billionaire.

There are other points I could bring up, but I think this is the crux of our disagreement. I also want to both eat burgers and lose weight. I want to lose weight for all sorts of reasons (live longer, feel better, be healthier, look better, make more money) and have basically one reason to eat a burger--it tastes good. Any healthy person should be able to weigh these preferences and make a decision to diet. The fact that I don't do that means something is wrong with me, according to my own (and in my opinion any reasonable) set of values. A healthy society should also be able to weigh these preferences and come to the same conclusion.

There are second order effects that make universal government-mandated diet programs a bad idea, but I think it would be fine for the government to force me on a diet if I weighed, say, 450 pounds. At that point I've demonstrated an inability to abide by my own long-term preferences to any degree. If you take me, with my current values, and put me in a vacuum, I'd probably even agree ahead of time to abide by the diet because I recognize it's a good idea, even if in the moment I'd try to fight it.

Maybe you could go anarcho-capitalist with this and let people decide ahead of time which social contract they want to follow and how restrictive it will be. Some people can live in the forced-diet country and some can live in the eat-all-you-want country. But in my opinion this doesn't take things nearly far enough. If you take the veil of ignorance to its logical conclusion, there are people who now in this life have incorrect preferences. I think mentally healthy people, behind the veil of ignorance, would commit to protecting each other from these harmful preferences. It's reasonable to agree to some social compact along the lines of "we'll both do what's necessary to protect each other from class V obesity."

The preference to eat isn't wrong necessarily, but it is actually wrong to place it above the preference to live longer, and it's something I and most people do all the time, because we aren't perfect. If your model of people and human rights doesn't account for imperfection (or sin as I wrote elsewhere) then your ideal government will lead to a lot of suffering as people are enabled to pursue their worst impulses.

In short, there are two ways (relevant to this discussion) that preferences can be incorrect, and they bleed together. The first is that your priorities are wrong. This usually has to do with time preference--you logically know you shouldn't eat the burger, but dieting is long-term and the burger is right there. The second has to do with knowledge--maybe you simply don't fully understand what it means to die 10 years early, or how great being skinny feels. Either way, I'd say just about everyone has wrong preferences and that when they're wrong enough the government should step in and intervene.

When and where to intervene is another question. I'm fine with MAID, particularly for those already dying anyways, but I worry about the cultural effects of government (so society)-endorsed suicide. Same with cannibalism, if you make it legal sometimes, the taboo starts to unravel. I think culture warms up to cannibalism generally and people suffer unnecessarily. So on the object level, I'd still prefer cannibalism be illegal. If people really want to do it they can skirt around the relevant laws in secret, without the government stamp of approval. But I don't think that's where our disagreement really lies, and I could probably be persuaded otherwise about cultural dynamics.

That's reasonable. I just wanted to generalize the issue, to show that rape wasn't unique in this regard.

You're going to have trouble reconciling that with any reasonable definition of sanity. Most that I've seen try either give up on the concept of mental illness altogether or cop out to i-know-it-when-i-see-it.

Quite a few things that are common in the human condition are past the verge of what counts as sanity for me. That being said, while I agree that the majority of people who wish to be killed and eaten are mentally ill, in a manner that might be amenable to treatment, I think there are a non-zero number who have no other mental illnesses, ignoring "wants to be eaten" by itself.

For the latter, well, it's their body and their choice, advocating for radical bodily autonomy requires me to bite that bullet.

Yes, there are whole subreddits full of them. /r/Rapekink for example. Yeah I have a thing for digging up weird corners of the internet where utterly bizarre stuff happens.

Evidently, there is such a thing as "rape baiting", where women who actually want to be raped, for whom role-playing isn't enough, go out seeking to be raped. They have a whole FAQ on it, trade tips on how to do it most effectively, and share stories of their most successful attempts!

There's also a lot of women posting there about what happened to them and how they feel about it. Many seem to be struggling, not quite sure how to feel about it. Things like, not liking it, but also not wanting to think of themselves as victims, not seeing it as the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone. I can see going to a place like that when you don't really want the fawning sympathy treatment but aren't quite sure what you actually think about it.

I have no clue what percentage of women overall think or feel along these lines. Even coming up with a way to measure it accurately seems difficult. But there's enough written about it that I don't think it's all fake or like 0.1% or anything like that.

How much posting on subreddits like that do you really think is organic and how much do you think is trying to spin up male attention? I'm not going to rule out the former but I'm going to mostly bet on the latter.

I think it’s organic. Male attention is not hard to spin up and I would predict that the median poster their expects there to be no male attention on that board.

I think it's mostly the former. Possibly there are a few creative writing exercises on there, but I'm doubtful there's anything organized like that going on about it.

Nobody is going to go to that much effort to spin up male attention just for kicks. If somebody was doing something like that, it'd be for money, and there would be pretty clear tells. Links to OnlyFans accounts or other paid fetish porn sites easy to find, use of accounts that were purchased for higher karma or otherwise artificially karma-boosted by lots of unrelated low-effort posts in mainstream subs, lots more active engagement with male "fans". Not to mention being quarantined by Reddit would be a death-knell for such an operation, to be avoided at all costs or abandoned if unavoidable, rather than a mild inconvenience with some upsides, which is how it seems to be treated. Plus, people doing marketing-like things mostly just aren't all that creative. Go on any porn sub on Reddit, you'll find OnlyFans links behind almost every profile. That's what spinning up male attention looks like.

It smells to me a lot more like a group of fantastically weird people who are mostly self-aware about how weird they are who have built a small and out-of-the-way community to discuss their weird thing than some kind of artificial operation. Perhaps not all that different from this forum here infact.

Things like, not liking it, but also not wanting to think of themselves as victims, not seeing it as the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone

This is not meaningfully distinguishable from men who go to bars with the intention of getting into barfights.

And... like, it's just sex. You can die from getting into a barfight because that's inherently dangerous, suffer a medical condition that affects you for the rest of your life, or suffer psychological damage (people who get mugged tend to look over their shoulders a lot more often, for instance); sex is not meaningfully or materially different.

Which these women recognize, obviously; this is a simply a consequence of gender equality. Actually, it's even more noteworthy since it takes an active rejection of the societal privilege women are granted to see unwanted sex as something special and distinct from "standard" assault (in diametric opposition to the women who aren't raped but claim they were for social clout reasons).

This is provided they're telling the truth about what they feel, though criterion of embarrassment and that hard rejection of the "easy way out" heavily suggests they are.

I don't think this is a topic that is THAT secret. It's well known that rape victims sometimes orgasm and feel awful about that, and that is by no means a completely taboo topic in therapeutic communities. (It probably is in many relationships though.) Neither is it at all obvious whether that would make the ordeal overall more or less damaging. If it helps to think of this from a male perspective (I totally assume 98% of people here are male but maybe you're not), think about the female guards at Abu Ghraib torturing male prisoners via sexual touching etc. It's easy to imagine getting turned on in the house of your enemy, and it's just another power your enemy has over you in addition to electric shocks, waterboarding, dogs etc.

The part where a victim just shrugs it off and feels fine, that story I find much less likely and here's where it's complicated. The victim may well feel and tell themselves that they're fine, but then go and act differently in their lives (this is basically the life of many porn actresses). This is damage or impact that the victim can't acknowledge. Is there also sometimes a case where a rape victim can just shrug off what happened and go back to life as it was, just an experience for the wank bank, never to be considered any further? Hmm. Sounds conceptually possible. But then so is it possible to imagine someone who doesn't mind any kind of crime happening to them. It is hard to know quite what to do with that possibility.

The part where a victim just shrugs it off and feels fine, that story I find much less likely and here's where it's complicated.

I think that's the meat of my claim/conjecture though. Not just that it feels physically good in the moment, but that they literally are happier as a result of the encounter than they were before. Or at least would be absent the social ramifications. You can imagine it happening for any type of crime, but it seems highly implausible for most crimes, but rape seems like the scenario where, because things are so complicated and unstraightforward, you'd have more variance: with some people being damaged by it way more than something simple like being mugged, but some being damaged way less and possibly negative.

If they are not consenting in their minds, something has just happened to them they didn't want or ask for. Most normal people are never going to be happy about that. If they are consenting from the word go, but don't indicate it, then, well, that's just a weirdo.

To be honest I find it easier to imagine someone who shrugs off being beaten up because it gives them a good story or makes them feel more alive, than I do this.

Most normal people are never going to be happy about that.

And who's to say that they're normal? Some people are weird. I'm not even slightly suggesting that this is the typical case, because it's obviously not. But some people are weird.

A lot of people have responded to you and covered more substantial ground than I will cover here, but I'd like to bring up the odd point of maturity, which I believe is relevant. Many of the Epstein girls readily went along with his cash-for-sex deals in the 90s or whenever. Courtney Wild, One of the most vocal women in the various documentaries, has admitted that, after initially pleasuring Epstein and I guess ageing out(?) she became a kind of tout for him, corralling other girls who might have wanted to make some extra money (for drugs or whatever). While she presumably did not do this for erotic pleasure, she did do it to cash out.

That she could do this then and now regret it is no impenetrable conundrum. She was something like 14 or 15 at the time. By current standards, just a dumb hustling kid. We get older, we realize how stupid we were.

In another infamous pop culture case, Mackenzie Phillips, former star of the 1970s sitcom One Day at a Time, claims to have had an ongoing consensual sexual relationship with her own biological father for ten years .

If this doesn't trip your WTF meter I don't want to know what does. Anyway she regrets it now, has admitted to being really messed up in the head, and over the ensuing years of regret and shame wrote a book about it (as one does.)

My point here is that we are all always growing, and the orgasm of yesteryear may today be something we look back on later with feelings of guilt and shame (Notably I have never had this experience). It doesn't really matter. To enjoy rape as the raped surely still does not excuse the rapist. The old Monty Python skit springs to mind:

MANDY: Well, Brian,... your father isn't Mr. Cohen.

BRIAN: I never thought he was.

MANDY: Now, none of your cheek! He was a Roman, Brian. He was a centurion in the Roman army.

BRIAN: You mean... you were raped?

MANDY: Well, at first, yes.

The crux of your question is whether some women (or men?) might actually sensually enjoy the experience of violent rape. I would suggest that looking at the macabre list of salacious and bizarre experiences that people report enjoying (a list I shall not enumerate) no doubt this is one of them. I also don't think this is necessarily anything we need to worry about collectively or individually.

The basic idea of sin is that there are certain actions which seem likely to cause temporary pleasure but will in the long run only lead to suffering. People generally are sinful, and virtually every conceivable sin has been committed at some point by someone who wanted to do it.

Wanting to get raped is similar to wanting to rape someone in the sense that it is an incorrect, invalid preference. In some senses those who want it to happen are worse off than those who don't--they have a longer way to go to get back to a healthy psyche and the capacity to form stable, healthy romantic relationships. If Sally wants to be raped and it actually happens, this preference may be reinforced and she'll probably seek out more dangerous, unstable, abusive men who trigger to some extent the same desire in her. It's a totally different kind of suffering but just as bad and spread over a much longer period of time.

Our current culture's fervor to recognize all preferences as valid has forgotten an absolutely crucial concept, which is that people can not only make mistakes but have harmful (invalid) preferences. People in general can truly "consent" to virtually anything, including flagrant acts of self-harm, but that doesn't make those acts okay or something society should encourage. It especially doesn't mean their preferences will remain static--someone who burns off their own hands in a fit of mental illness may recover from these disordered preferences in the future and regret their own actions. Consent doesn't carry forward into the future--that person cannot now consent to having no hands; the choice was made for them by their past self.

Sally may not ever fully recover, or recognize that she was harmed, but that doesn't mean she wasn't harmed. This is an uncomfortable position to take because it requires a sense of moral sovereignty. We know what's right for her even if she doesn't, and we say she was harmed even if she disagrees. This is already the position most people take regarding mental illness, even people who think morality/values are entirely subjective, and it has to be extended to less obvious mental illness too. We have to acknowledge that it's possible to have bad preferences, that there is such a thing as an evil action even if its only victim is the perpetrator, because if we don't then our moral philosophies (such as consent-only sexual ethics) will collapse under the weight of all the epicycles they will require.

This is a good argument. I'm certainly not trying to argue that rape is okay if the person enjoyed it. But in this case that would still imply that the appropriate social/therapeutic response to such a victim is entirely different than the response to a more typical rape victim, right? A thing happened to them and instead of traumatizing them due to something horrible that they hated happened, a thing happened to them and it wasn't immediately horrible but instead messed with their preferences and self-perception. Or simply brought to light that their preferences were already messed up. And it doesn't seem like the way to help them heal, the way that society is structured to try to help rape victims heal, would be the same.

Well, from a practical standpoint, I think women are very susceptible to social pressure and telling them that something was traumatic has a good chance of making it actually traumatic. Which ironically enough is what I want in this case--better to be traumatized by something terrible than to seek it out for the rest of your life. I guess there are probably a few people clear-minded enough to see through this, and they need to be dealt with more honestly, but as a society we have no consensus on these things so even something like "that wasn't traumatic but it should have been" is not something everyone will agree on. Probably more effective to say something like "that was traumatic and this is how you process trauma."

That's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered before. But if you dig into that it's kind of like inflicting psychological punishment on someone for their own good. Like if a kid is picking on their siblings, and they don't really understand the long-term adult consequences of being a jerk (nobody will like you and you will have no friends and be lonely), so you spank them so that they learn to associate the bad behavior with pain. You are inflicting pain that previously didn't exist, and could be avoided on the first order simply by not punishing them, because you expect that in the long term it will improve their behavior and make them better off due to second order effects.

Except in this case instead of a parent it's all of society inflicting the punishment, and it's inducing psychological trauma into them instead of physically spanking them, and they're adults instead of children. But it is still supposed to be for their own good. I'm not sure how I feel about that. And as a side effect you also end up inducing trauma into the subset that genuinely tried to avoid being raped, will try to avoid it in the future, but happen to be tough enough not to be traumatized by the experience unless society induces it into them. And those people may be more common than the sort who irresponsibly set themselves up to get raped semi-on purpose.

At least on the fantasy side, it's worth spelling out how different even consensual stuff is in practice rather than theory. There's a lot of people who have fantasies about being woken up by oral (or... other forms of somnophilia, even if they get kinda borderline on consent from a currency matter), very carefully set up clear consent ahead of time, and then find out the hard way how active their startle response can be. Some of it's not realizing the line between a) letting someone else access to you, and b) giving up control, but some of it's also just more direct and instinctual.

And for genuine clear nonconsent, there's obviously many more issues -- you mention violence and attraction, but disease and (for women being raped by men) pregnancy risk are significant, and rapists are (unsurprisingly) not likely to be considerate of their victims in other ways, and there's no shortage of other more subtle problems. A lot of rape fantasies also revolve around things that aren't really possible or even safe as part of negating the fetishist's 'responsibility' in the act: in fandom spaces, this can be as blaise as sex pollen or hypnosis, to full-time slavery or pet play, to as extreme as abduction or worse.

There's probably some interesting things to be said about the extent that formalizing grief and harm can really augment or concretize it, but it's not clear how much that happens in the general case, nevermind how much it applies here. Rape fetishists know it's wrong, and that's part of the point.

That said, the bigger reason for the taboo on conversation about the topic, even (arguably especially) in sex-positive spaces, reflects more concern about how potential rapists would react to prolonged discussion. A lot of academic literature and criminology on the subject points to rapists excusing or justifying their bad acts, and while a formal belief that their victim 'deserves' or 'wants' it isn't the only method (social pressure is a big popular target), it's a pretty common one. There's some debate about how accurate these models are, but there's no small amount of evidence in favor. Given that, by definition, we're not exactly talking people who make good evaluations of other's interests, putting an asterisk saying it's only a tiny percentage wouldn't really defuse this concern.

but disease and (for women being raped by men) pregnancy risk are significant

Perhaps for those who also have fantasies of being forced into the OB/GYN office beforehand to remove the IUD, maybe; for everything else, it's not meaningfully distinct from promiscuous gay men, so the same mitigating strategies they use should be viable here for those who are intentionally chasing this.

the bigger reason for the taboo on conversation about the topic, even (arguably especially) in sex-positive spaces

If a space claims to be sex-positive yet has taboos on conversations about the topic it is, obviously, not sex-positive (it's only pretending to be one, typically for political reasons or [more charitably] self-defense).

There's probably some interesting things to be said about the extent that formalizing grief and harm can really augment or concretize it

This is the thesis statement of free love and 1970s-type liberal sexual ethics (as distinct from progressive sexual ethics) more generally. The answer is "this is obviously true, but leads to Repugnant Conclusions", and is an outright attack on progressive/feminist/gynosupremacist and traditional/androsupremacist sexual ethics because 'sex with women is harmful by default' underwrites them, so they need to preserve that notion [that this sex creates grief and harm] by any means necessary, even when it makes no logical sense.

Case in point:

reflects more concern about how potential rapists would react to prolonged discussion men [99% of 'potential rapists', as women define rape] might use the information to harm women

It’s always seemed very much that the idea is less the rape part and much more a fantasy of being able to have sex and not be responsible for it. That’s the thing they show in the scenes women like tend to show the woman having sex with a powerful and wealthy man, while not exactly her idea, she enjoys it. And of course since we’re talking rape the woman isn’t responsible for the choice. He raped her, after all.

Now I would consider this the female version of the male fantasy of having hot women hit on him and all but jump on him. The fantasy is different different from the male simply because women aren’t going to fight off most men.

But this should then translate to a small fraction of real life encounters, right? It's certainly not the central example of rape, but there are powerful and wealthy man in real life, and a lot of them are horny and unethical enough to wield their power and influence to coerce the women around them into sex, which in turn removes responsibility for her choice. While probably the majority of the women in this scenario have a bad and icky and possibly traumatizing experience, it seems like some of them might enjoy it because it's literally their fantasy playing out in real life.

I think what most women want is to be enraptured by a powerful, handsome, high-status man and "it just happened."

This is exactly what is portrayed in one of the most famous romantic scenes in motion picture history, a scene long renowned by women for how "hot" and "sexy" it was:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=l0976pL8iTw&themeRefresh=1

What this scene portrays is by modern standards sexual assault. She tells him to stop, never gives consent, and he kisses her anyway.

Another example of this is the Suits Matt and Rachel file room sex scene -- no consent, he yanks her toward him, they have sex. That's rape by college campus standards, but again, it's considered one of the hottest scenes in TV history by women.

Now, when things end badly, two sayings come to mind: "hell has no fury like a woman scorned." "What women hate, hate, hate with the passion of the thousand suns is finding out the man they had sex with is not actually as high status as they thought." So if he is a chad but he scorns her, or it turns out in the light of day all her friends think he is a total dork, or a few weeks later it turns out her husband is a more powerful force in her life than her adultery partner -- then "it just happened" gets retconned as rape. In some of metoo stories there are admissions that the women only changed their mind about the incident days or years later after "reflection." I also think people, and especially many women, have an incredible ability to self-modify their own feelings and so they will actually believe that it was "rape."

I think the archetype sexy rape fantasy is the following scenario: woman is already very attracted to man, but refuses sex because of some powerful societal force or other reluctance unrelated to attraction ("my parents won't let me" "we are out in public" "you are too much of a rogue" "I'm holding out for a nice guy" "You just sacked my entire village and kidnapped me") but the man overpowers her anyways, thus showing that he is more powerful than all the things that she feared or worried about. And I would wager that most women would get turned on by this kind of fantasy.

Now in the case of ambush rape by a hobo, I suspect the woman understands that this man is, despite his temporary physical domination, low status and thus she is not actually all that aroused by him. Perhaps there is some pleasure in the middle of the act, but it is quickly erased in the clarity of the aftermath. The trauma still exists in the idea that she had forcible sex with a low-status man.

It's also interesting that historically under the oldest laws "rape" was considered a crime against the woman's owner -- her father or her husband. There wasn't really a distinction made between ambush rape and rakish seduction. Under more recent laws, mostly obsolete, it was only rape if she screamed and tried to fight, otherwise the woman is liable for severe punishment of committing adultery. It's possible that some kinds or rape would be enjoyable for many women, but are also terrible for society to allow. Imagine there was a law that rape was legal "if she enjoys it" or "rape is legal for 6' professional athlete chads because on average women will enjoy it." It might actually be the case that women would get some pleasure from such a law -- but it would be an absolute disaster for society. So in this case society has two choices 1) admit the real crime is against the father or husband -- which is not possible under feminism or 2) force women to act as if they were traumatized them and treat them as damaged if they admit enjoying it. Personally, as a man, if my wife was ambush raped, I would not want society telling her, "actually tell your husband how much you enjoyed it, it's ok, drop the stigma." Society should be telling women "your husband or future husband is higher status than the guy who raped you, you should be ashamed and disgusted by the sex with that low status guy."

It's also interesting that historically under the oldest laws "rape" was considered a crime against the woman's owner -- her father or her husband. There wasn't really a distinction made between ambush rape and rakish seduction.

Under English common law (and therefore pre-feminist American law), "Rape" was the subset of illicit sex where the man was wholly guilty and the woman wholly innocent - all other illicit sex was a crime with two co-conspirators. (In the Christian west, it was a crime against society, not the woman's father specifically, but I agree that the oldest laws were pre-Christian.) Jed Rubenfeld wrote a law review article about this that was the most infamous thing about him until his wife wrote Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

This explains why people who experienced rape trials in the pre-feminist age thought the victim was on trial - because in important ways she was.

Imagine there was a law that rape was legal "if she enjoys it"

This is exactly how "the law" already works. You really think the judicial system magically detect the small bursts of XXX-radiation emitted every time a penis contacts a vagina (or whatever) like some sort of BBC TV-detecting van?

It's all dealing with what happens after the fact; the risk you take when you break the law like this is that the viewpoint of the aggrieved never changes their mind in a way that's hostile to you- this is usually done through blackmail [or if this is legal-but-frowned-upon, hush money] since it's more lucrative to the aggrieved, but can happen for moral/religious shifts too. Rape allegations correlate with moral/religious revivals and declines in a man's status [as the "nobody would ever believe you" effect wears off]; that's the lesson of #metoo.

rape is a property crime

Seeing you write this, and the fact you phrased it in this way, has illuminated something very important for me: traditionalist sexual ethics in a context where sex and pregnancy are divorced coalesce to reveal that this is just the male version of the need to play status games with sex, in bitter conflict with progressive sexual ethics where it's the female version of the exact same thing.

I guess that's why sexual ethics that don't account for, or de-prioritize, status are so different and unnatural-feeling.

Rape fetishes usually involve implied consent. The “rapist” is the most attractive person in the erotica’s universe, and the protagonist usually knows that he would stop if she didn’t enjoy it. We should probably just stop calling it rape fetish altogether and call it dominance fetish or something. The phenomenon of the fetish is totally distinct from the real world phenomenon of rape.

Obviously some substantial proportion of generally well-adjusted women have “rape fantasies”, but these rape fantasies mostly involve (a) extremely handsome 6’5 vampire princes who are in love with them, who (b) are extremely good at giving head and spend most of the sexual interaction giving them pleasure, and (c) who inevitably marry them, are monogamous and have children with their beloved wife who they spoil and are happy with forever after after the fact. Very different to getting roofied and waking up with some random guy from a party on top of you (who will never speak to you again), let alone being raped by a homeless guy in an alleyway on the way home from work, such that the comparison is ridiculous.

The archetypal male fantasy is the harem of nubile young virgins (72 of them, maybe even), the archetypal female fantasy is taming the dangerous and powerful bad boy into a loving monogamous husband and father who only has eyes for them. That’s why almost no romantic fantasies written for women involve female promiscuity, and why almost all end with (as in Fifty Shades of Grey) the protagonist marrying the man of her dreams and living happily ever after.

And yet, some proportion of rapists are 6'5 attractive sociopaths who go on romantic dates with women and then rape them. And probably don't marry them afterwards, if they were interested long term they'd probably be patient. But I assume that people not being traumatized and therefore not reporting it to the police would cause a rapist to keep going and thus become disproportionately prolific than some disgusting homeless person who gets reported and caught quickly.

Also, I'm not at all suggesting that this is typical or average. It's an exception, I'm just wondering if maybe it's on the order of 1-5% rather than 0-0.01% mentally ill people that society's failure to entertain it as a possibility would imply.

...

Nah, getting off on humiliation is much more of a male thing than a female one, see how cuckqueaning as a fetish is so much rarer than cuckoldry. Women who are into degrading sex don’t really see it as being humiliated because it doesn’t happen with low status men, it’s more about surrendering control to a hot man, which is feminine. Amusingly the only widespread female equivalent of male fetishes that are huge popular on porn sites like women insulting men’s penis size or “mom fucks my high school bully” is the fetish many ftm trans men have for a transman being treated like a woman, called ‘she’, which kind of proves my point and says interesting things about the effect of test.

A woman being attracted to a fantasy of surrendering and being treated like a favorite toy by a powerful and sexy man isn’t a humiliation fantasy. It’s more like a man fantasizing about the harem or whatever.

For men, sexual humiliation is your woman whoring herself out and everyone knowing about it. For women, sexual humiliation is your husband and love of your life leaving you for a younger, sexier, skinnier woman. And while there’s plenty of material made in which that happens, pretty much all of it is made for men.

is the fetish many ftm trans men have for a transman being treated like a woman, called ‘she’, which kind of proves my point and says interesting things about the effect of test.

From a gender critical perspective, there’s a much simpler explanation.

I thought the archetypal male fantasy was a femboy with an AK.

No, that's the archetypal liberal male fantasy (the liberal female fantasy is this but with a girl instead, and why you find both of those on 4chan).

The archetypal traditionalist/male fantasy is being doted on by unlimited young women of breeding age; the archetypal progressive/female fantasy is being doted on by unlimited powerful older men who prefer separate beds.

Notice how the former is co-operative in character while the latter are adversarial; notice also how the former is really childish in character compared to the more mature/realistic tastes of the latter. Finally, note that the women who post about turning their rape fantasies into rape realities online are liberal in character.

That’s why almost no romantic fantasies written for women involve female promiscuity

Though my knowledge of the genre is somewhat limited, I know a clear counter-example: Kushiel's Dart, by Jacqueline Carey (plus the following two books). The protagonist is a courtesan, and remains so after her marriage.

I haven't read Twilight, but wasn't there a continual 2-men-1-woman drama?

Of course they exist, in the same way that things that are the complete opposite of the classically ‘masculine’ fantasy obvious exist. But they’re very much in the minority of successful romance stories.

Twilight is very much about the drama of having to pick, and that's common but not universal to paranormal romance of that era. For a not-awful version, see the first three books of the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs (though in turn the main character of that series has already dated and implied to have hooked up with one of the two-or-three suitors, so I guess it depends on 'promiscuity').

That said, it's very far from universal. Anita Blake is the most infamous for having the heroine pick up every non-villainous character to get within arm's reach, since it's set in a universe where fucking solves everything, but Jemesin does has a couple love triangles resolve themselves into polyamoryish in The Broken Earth series. In online spaces, it's often a pretense for the readers to get some M/M in their het romance. Rare to see that published, though. Some of the less... bizarre parts of the Omegaverse and paranormal erotica spaces tend to revolve around "Why Choose" or reverse harem solutions, though I doubt most non-furry guys want to know much about it and it's not really fuzzy enough for my tastes.

Yeah but she only ended up marrying and having sex with the vampire, not the werewolf. As someone once described it, the series is "A young woman's struggle to choose between necrophilia and beastiality."

It always gives me a surge of vindictive glee when someone says something to the effect of, "I hate when outsiders learn to co-opt our language to scam us."* Sucks to suck! Next time learn to receive and transmit factual observations instead of markers of ingroup status!

I'd wager this happens because it's a time-efficient mental heuristic-- you learn that people in your ingroup are unlikely to lie to you because they share the same goals, so when you recieve ingroup-signals you spend less effort discerning truthfulness. Intelligent people need this heuristic less and therefore groups full of high-average-intelligence people have a sort of herd-immunity against this type of scammer. Scammers often try to signal that they're high-intelligence by talking like LLMs trained on smart-people-talk... but that only fools dumb people who've trained themselves to have the separate-but-related heuristic of trusting anything that includes enough technical language. (See: homeopathic remedies, the medbed people, anything "quantum.") To the high-intelligence group, they just look like nuts, cranks, and schizophrenics.

However, implicit understanding of that herd-immunity becomes its own type of heuristic. Which works fine under normal conditions because you need to be smart** to lie to a smart person, and if you're smart you have more alternatives to being a scammer. But there's a particular failure case that I think is especially interesting: when a formerly high-average-intelligence group reduces its selection criteria and lets lower-intelligence people in. High-intelligence people become vectors of information instead of firewalls against it, because their level of laziness when evaluating ingroup claims is no longer adaptive.

I don't have any real conclusion to draw from this... Actually, I suspect I shouldn't draw any conclusions from this, because "the ingroup gets shittier when we let new people in" is exactly the sort of heuristic I suspect I'm already predisposed to have by genetics and culture. It's almost certainly priced in so to speak. So having the mechanistic explanation for the heuristic should actually push me toward being more open to expanding the ingroup-- at least, in cases where I suspect the new members are equal or greater intelligence to the existing ingroup. (Should I be even more in favor of increasing green card caps for technically skilled workers? But then again, I'd guess that I'm predisposed to be biased in favor of that by political affiliation and cultural influences anyways so this might be a wash.)

Though-- if human intelligence actually declined after the invention of agriculture (I'd put a sub-50% probability of this being true, but it would be really interesting if it was) it would imply that we were in a sweet-spot in terms of ingroup formation. If you live in a optimally sized band of primates, there's no need to send ingroup signals because you already have a deep, personal connection to every member of the ingroup. If you live in our current, massively populous, highly-anonymous society, relying on signals of ingroup membership gets you scammed. But for a thousands-of-years-long golden age you could afford to be stupid. Ingroups were both large enough that you could rely on yours to avoid having to think for yourself, and small/impermeable/anti-anonymous enough that scammers weren't a risk.

* See: fake-feminists seducing feminists, trump supporters donating their kids' entire inheritance on accident because of predatory web design practices, LGBT getting suckered into buying rainbow capitalist merchantise, megachurch pastors fleecing their denominations into giving them private jets, etc. (I'm providing politics-related examples of this because they're the most visible, but I'd wager the most common version of this is, "this fast-taking fellow convinced me we'd both be rich but he got away with the money and I was left with the bag.")

** well, you need high fluid intelligence specifically

There is a great cost to scammers utilizing ingroup signals though, it introduces friction akin to a transaction tax imposed by the government, except now it is imposed by lack of ability to trust. Sometimes transactions are so consequential it always makes sense to have vetting with insurance. Something like title insurance on a real estate property. But what about the special Best Buy warranties? What if it made sense to buy that crap for a $400 television because you dont know if you are getting a SONY or a SƠNY? This pretty quickly destroys your economy.

I don't understand why you framed this as a rebuttal to what I'm saying. Was my thesis unclear? In case I need to restate it-- "resist attempts by your ingroup to use language as a status-signalling tool because it will make you all vulnerable to scammers and I will laugh when they take your shit."

You shouldn't laugh, you should be sad.

I won't claim that this vindictive glee is in line with my deepest ethical principles, but... c'mon. Bad things happening to good people is tragedy. Bad things happening to bad people is justice. Bad things happening to idiots is hilarious.

Building social cohesion is not stupid. When it works your community has virtually no transaction costs.

Well if your only means to do that is by using language to communicate status rather than factual information, it clearly doesn't work.

That's why I enmesh myself in communities where status is a factor of conveying useful, factual information. It's much more efficient than handicapping strategies like sticking to a counterproductive party line as a high-cost signal of commitment to ingroup values.

I think it depends on the group of smart people and what their domain of knowledge actually is. My observation is that smart people tend to vastly overestimate their ability to understand things not in their own domain. They think the6 can tell if someone is scamming them in another area but often they’re just as vulnerable as anyone else.

Part of this is the way society works. Everyone specializes in one or two areas, and outside of those areas you really don’t have much more base knowledge than the average person. This makes it much easier to sell a scientist on a financial scam. Not because the guy is stupid, but because he doesn’t know much about finance and doesn’t spend a great deal of time thinking about it. Or maybe it’s home repairs where a roofer can come into a neighborhood full of lawyers after a big storm and make bank by scamming the lawyers on repairs they don’t need and cheap materials that don’t last.

The other part is plain ego. Smart people have been praised for their intelligence for a long time. Everybody since their third grade teacher has probably told them how smart they are. Add in the success they get in their domain, and you believe it. They’re smart and can figure it out. And they actually are much more vulnerable simply because their ego won’t let them notice that something is off. In fact I would consider this an advantage for the less intelligent. They know how much they don’t understand about stuff they didn’t understand at school.

This is a vibes-based claim rather than a data-based claim, but I genuinely don't think scam rates are comparable across intelligence brackets even after controlling for domain-specific intelligence. When you're smart you end up learning meta-strategies to evaluate fact-based claims like checking your assumptions against known cognitive biases and using formal logic to determine whether claims are contradictory without having to access the actual underlying truth value of either claim. If me and a random joe were presented a list of scammy and non-scammy investment options for... I don't know, undersea mining concerns, or instagram influencer management companies, or whatever, I think I would outperform the random joe on avoiding the scams. I wouldn't be immune, but I'd fall for less of them.

And in turn, even after controlling for intelligence-- I think a random joe trained to ignore signals of ingroup membership would do better at avoiding scams than an equally intelligent random joe left to his native heuristics. There's a valid question of global performance-- heuristics are mostly useful and adaptive. But I think, in the current age of massive, permeable, low-trust, groups, I think most peoples' heuristics are lagging behind what's actually efficient.

Re: ego, it's debatable whether the Dunning-Krueger effect is actually real.. If it is real, then smart people must be less unjustifiably confident than non-smart people. If it's not... well, then we still haven't found any evidence in the reverse direction, so the null hypothesis should be that the level of unjustifiable confidence is the same, and non-smart people don't have any relative advantage. (While also suffering from the other phenomena I talked about in my original post.)

Isn't this mostly what Robin Hanson's The Elephant in the Brain is about? Haven't read it yet.

Even intelligent people are still driven by urge to seek status and fit in and receive social acceptance, and that can be hacked by a savvy operator, even if the smart person 'knows better.'

Smart people have been praised for their intelligence for a long time. Everybody since their third grade teacher has probably told them how smart they are. Add in the success they get in their domain, and you believe it. They’re smart and can figure it out. And they actually are much more vulnerable simply because their ego won’t let them notice that something is off. In fact I would consider this an advantage for the less intelligent. They know how much they don’t understand about stuff they didn’t understand at school.

To be clear, I've also run into less intelligent people who commonly make bizarre mistakes, people so dumb they're actively destructive with their foolishness. And some of those people notice I'm kinda smart and try to play the know-it-all game with me, making up stuff that sounds vaguely plausible to sound like they know what they're talking about. My favorite was in a technology class where I wondered aloud why the Internet Protocol skipped from IPv4 to IPv6, and a guy I know is this type started telling me all about how big and important IPv5 was. I looked it up on my phone, and an IPv5 did exist, but it was a special-purpose experiment that was never in common use -- obviously not something this guy knew anything about. Instead of having curiosity with me, and going, "yeah, that sounds like a good question, we should find out!" he took it as an opportunity to fake insight.

When I first started meeting people like this, I found it very surprising, because it confused me why people would actively fake knowledge instead of being straightforward -- you know, "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt." But once I met a few, the pattern became clear; once someone starts being like this, you'll notice them doing it all the time. I usually let people get away with a few of these moments simply because I'm interpersonally trusting, but once I realize someone's doing it I lose all respect for them as sources of advice and I tend to assume anything that comes out of their mouth is just noise.

Maybe this is just something people do to me, or maybe they think I'm bullshitting all the time and they're just mirroring it, but long story short, it's not always the case that people who did poorly in school understand, or act in accordance with, their limitations. Dumb people are just as capable of intellectual overconfidence as smart people, especially when they believe it will ingratiate them with someone smarter than them. But someone who says, "I don't know -- but I'd like to find out!" presents intellectual curiosity and actually increases my perception of their intelligence.

But someone who says, "I don't know -- but I'd like to find out!" presents intellectual curiosity and actually increases my perception of their intelligence.

It fascinates me when academics, interviewed on some high-quality podcasts, reply with a point-blank "I don't know". And only after host adds more explicit hedging and reframes the question as the one aimed at best guess (instead of what they've probably been taught to perceive as "give me an up-to-date overview of the field on this question" query) they respond with an account, naturally transcending a median listener's knowledge on the topic by a large margin. Such public talks seem like a promising venue to instill (or at least popularize) the courage of admitting your ignorance.

What podcasts like this do you recommend?

Disclaimer: although I consider them high-quality by various proxy measures, ultimately I don't have enough knowledge to assess most of their takes.

Off the top of my head:

  1. Conversations with Tyler (misc);
  2. Any interview with Michael Everything-is-contingent Kofman, eg regular ones on the War on the Rocks (Ru-Ukr war, Ru military history);
  3. Ones and Tooze, by Adam Tooze (misc econ);
  4. SigmaNutrition (typically interviews with the authors of papers/books, discussion of nutrition research and methodology);

There is more, of course. Speaking of literal examples (from CwT):

Claudia Goldin:

COWEN: Let me ask a question I’ve been wondering about. Why does China, right now, have so many of the world’s self-made female billionaires?

GOLDIN: I don’t know, but I wouldn’t mind being one. [laughs]

Joseph Henrich

COWEN: But productivity growth is falling, right? In most countries? This baffles me.

HENRICH: You mean why productivity growth is falling?

COWEN: Right. Japan, US, Western Europe. Productivity growth is lower than it was, say, before the ’80s. I don’t blame the Internet for that, but it doesn’t seem to have helped very much.

HENRICH: I’m a cultural evolutionist so I want to see this on much longer time scale. Ask me in 200 years.

[laughter]

COWEN: OK. 200 years, we’ll have you back for a second episode.

[...]

HENRICH: I’m not sure that that necessarily follows.

COWEN: But it’s a coherent cultural pessimist scenario.

HENRICH: [laughs] I’ll have to think about it more.

Paul Graham:

COWEN: Were the Medici good venture capitalists, or do you give greater credit to the Florentine guilds?

GRAHAM: I have no idea. I need to learn more about the —

COWEN: The guilds would run competitions. The Medici would just pick the people they liked. They both have good records in different ways, but obviously, they’re competing models.

GRAHAM: You’re an economist. You’ve read books about this stuff. I don’t know. What do I know about the Medici? [laughs]

I remember such a thing happening in a podcast (or maybe radio program? its been a while) where they had a group of physicists on a "popular science" format to speak about some new thing that was breaking in their field. The only one I remember was Lawrence Krauss (b/c he was actually a professor of mine in college). There was the back and forth like you describe, and eventually the host was able to get a fairly detailed answer to his question, after which he asked the guest if they could possibly simplify the explanation for "the folks listening at home". After a brief pause Dr. Krauss simply replied: "no".

Dr. Krauss simply replied: "no".

Nice example. I think it's a decent stance. Compressing models/theories is always lossy and it takes a special skill to map them onto simpler models/metaphors, while keeping predictive power intact. If you are unsure how to do this, don't do this.

b/c he was actually a professor of mine in college

Sounds cool. What was the experience like?

I was a 100s level physics class for non-physics majors, mostly comp sci people with a scattering of others who took it for fun or it counted as a required elective. Apparently it was a special pet class of his that he'd been working on for a while. It was pretty low stress with the grade being mostly based on attendance and participation. He did miss a lot of the classes himself though. In fact, by his own attendance policy he would have failed the class by missing about 30% of them. I do remember he had a 80s era red Corvette that really stuck out in the staff lot and was a good indicator he was actually there that day.

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.

What about doing things like what Sports betting does with pro sports. If you could form teams and try to bet on their performance in the election, I think it would be a way to get more money in. And the money put in could be used as push polling because if you can change the odds, then I mean you can change the outcome of the actual election.

I definitely had prediction markets in mind. There have been plenty of conversations in rationalist-adjacent spaces about whether or not you can pump money into prediction markets to change the odds and affect the outcome of an election. It's a weird, indirect thing, though. This is a more direct way of trying to use your money to affect the election. Presumably, it would be a partial substitute for that action. If anything, I wonder if it pulls the money that is more interested in affecting the outcome (possibly trying to make money through influencing federal regulation), while leaving the money that is more interested in predicting/making money directly.

This is a really bad idea.

Activist rich people like Soros, are bad enough. It isn't true that they are wasting their money. Now you want them to be able to just directly buy votes which will not reduce at all the influence they can exert through other means of funding politicians, journalists, NGOs. Which includes both direct quid pro quo but also attack dogs organizations that influence outcomes by attacking people who don't play along.

My impression with your constant "its fine" is that you rather sympathize with the ideological characteristics and agendas of the people who are most involved in funding politicians who do have some similarities ideologically, and even ethnically (plenty of Jews very highly overepresented among the top republican and democrat donors) and want them to get their way. In observing the results of their agendas, these rich activists are more fanatical, less objective, and reasonable on various issues, like policing, prosecution policies, DEI, relations with Israel, than what a good policy, that is independent, objective and in line with the common good would promote. They have bad ideas of how to change things, and their character is questionable too.

I would rather someone like Sam Bankman Fried who was one of the top donors in last election, to not be deciding things.

They are also more connected with foreign governments too. The negatives of one's goverment becoming subservient to foreign goverment interests are real and it is pretty obvious how this would lead to bad governance against the interests of the actual people but in line with the interests and agendas of foreign governments and billionaires.

These rich activists, do not have an inherent right to rule and in fact such claim for their right to run things can be very fairly interpreted as a form of treason. My wacky idea is that they can in fact be stopped from exercising their current influence, and their NGOs banned, and restricting large donations, giving all candidates a goverment backed x amount of money and a right to get small donations. In so forcing politicians to not have to do what AIPAC, ADL, a shitload of NGOs, or rich donors want them to do. Which will result in representative democracy which is already like many systems, a flawed system and not a perfect formula, to come closer to something that could potentially work.

That and restricting citizenship rights to natives with minor exceptions and restricting numbers of foreigners and deporting where there has been mass migration. Not allowing parties to hack democracy by replacing the electorate with foreign population who has to be loyal and prioritize getting away with replacement, or other benefits. Which is it self constitutes an example of a violation of the inherent rights of a people for their continued existence and service of their common good, since you are replacing them and destroying their nation, and also putting the rights of foreigners above them.

Modern states should take much more seriously the currently huge problem of treason and of the violation of the rights of the people that happen when their rights are disdained and foreign groups are favored. Even if we consider a society to not just be one nation's state that has guests but a multiethnic society, even there the consideration of not screwing the majority ethnic group of its inherent rights, which include cultural/ethnic rights, to perpetuate their ethnicity, instead of having an oppressive negative identity that treats this as evil.

Plenty of constitutions have things written in line of this, but an unwritten constitution has been followed that does the complete opposite. My wacky idea is restore the nation state democracy and enforce it, while restricting the agendas that destroy it. Down with the idea of fake postnationalism oppresses the natives, while allowing nationalism for groups of the progressive intersectional coalition.

The influence of billionaire activists and most NGOs result in a very skewed, harmful direction. With enormous overepresentation of certain identitarian agendas and complete absence of the interests of other groups such as white people in the USA for example. It represents massive agency problems and makes a complete mockery of the idea of democracy. So yeah, my idea and favorite evolution of democracy is one in anti corruption, anti treason, where both laws and elite ideology is against the DEI, replace the natives, multiculturalism (which isn't even genuine multiculturalism but no culturalism for natives and allowing culture and nationalism, and even extreme versions of that, for approved groups), and where such tyrannical agenda is not allowed to run the media, governments, NGOs. Where it is taught as an example of tyranny, oppression, corruption and civilization destruction. It has backlash today where its supporters have marched on institutions and created their influential networks, NGOs. Imagine how much it would be hated if it was encouraged to dislike it.

So under this system there would be much fewer influential active NGOs, while all these state within a state NGOs would be banned and subject to further justice measures where necessary and where they are found to have done other crimes like spying. NGOs should be few and influential NGOs involved in activities that enhance the common good, and not in civilization self destructive criminal agendas. They must operate under a framework that has such restrictions, so you don't get any new ADLs to ever come into existence.

I would also add that the system to not become predatory internationally, while should be very adamant and vigilant against foreign subversion, and agendas at the expense of one's own nation and represent a self confident civilization that perpetuates it self and serves its common good and its interests, it should be willing to have genuine win win cooperation with foreign nations were there is a genuine opportunity to do so, rather than being predatory and out to win by screwing over others. Else it isn't a scalable model.

Now you want them to be able to just directly buy votes which will not reduce at all the influence they can exert through other means of funding politicians, journalists, NGOs.

I'm confused. Presumably, these would be substitute goods. That is, suppose someone is spending 100 on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs right now. Then, an alternate means of political influence arises, say, the money vote. It may, in fact, be plausible that they might even want to increase their total spending, but the nature of substitute goods would imply to me that they would even then spend something more like (made up numbers) 70 units on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs; 60 on the money vote. It seems unlikely that they'd continue spending 100 on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs... and another 30 on the money vote.

One of the things I actually sort of like about the scheme is that it would be a substitute way of channeling money. Probably one that I'm even a bit more comfortable with than the traditional ways folks use money to buy political influence. We might even get some data about relative values of things, which could help with election design in the future.

Most of the rest of your comment seems almost entirely inapplicable, as it completely ignores the two main features of the proposal - the limited strength of the money vote in comparison to the traditional election, and the strong secrecy. I kinda feel like your response is just sort of irrelevant if it doesn't consider those features.

giving all candidates a goverment backed x amount of money and a right to get small donations.

Living in a European country with state financing of political parties, it is utterly alien to me to donate to political campaigns. I know it happens, but I would never do it (aren't you psychologically locked-in after donating to Trump/Harris?) and the amount of effort and time American politicians have to raise funds seem gross.

I looked up how UK does it and they actually harshly restrict political expenses:

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/election-spending-regulated-uk

Each party can spend £54,010 for each constituency that they contest. A party that chooses to contest all 632 seats in Great Britain at the election will therefore be able to spend just over £34m.

A small proportion of spending at elections is conducted by third parties – groups like charities and trade unions that do not stand candidates of their own, but campaign for particular outcomes. … Several spending limits are then applied to registered campaigns.

If the UK (or Canada or Australia or whichever country) is better governed is debatable, at least theoretical raising funds could also be a useful signal in a democracy, but I wonder how an election cycle in the US would look like if Democrats/Republicans (and GreenParty/Libertarian) could only spend $100 Million each?

But, I think, bitcoin seems mostly secure, right?

I'm not familiar enough with the mechanics, but would crypto elections be pretty riggable? Could you pay miners to only include transactions that had votes for your candidate in their blocks? There are probably ways to avoid that if you design things right, though.

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.

You can make it pretty clear that you're the one who gave the money if you tell them you're going to give them $648,355.27, and then, lo and behold, someone makes a donation the next day of exactly that amount.

I do think there would be some technical challenges to be solved, but I think we have a lot of really useful pieces that could help solve those problems. I'm not going to pretend that I have a fleshed-out whitepaper with full technical specification or anything, but I can give you some of my general thoughts.

A lot of work has gone into anonymization protocols. They're probably not perfect yet. There are all sorts of timing issues or side channel issues and even just the fundamental problem that metadata is hard. But I think progress is being made. To the extent that one is bullish on the idea that real anonymization is plausible in the not-too-distant future for some form of cryptocurrency, I think they can be bullish on something here, too. Moreover, it's not just cryptocurrency where work is being done on anonymization. TOR was a big leap forward on that front, even if there are still some challenges there, too. Again, to the extent one is bearish/bullish on any hope there, I'd expect them to be likewise bearish/bullish here.

Consider some TOR-like properties. A message can be routed through multiple intermediaries, such that those intermediaries mathematically cannot know the content of the message in question. Those intermediaries aren't even really trusted. They can refuse to pass your message along, but you can realize that it hasn't been passed along by the non-response or inappropriate response you receive. I don't think it's too big of a step to imagine that one can leverage intermediaries, even perhaps untrusted ones, in a way such that those intermediaries are mathematically unable to determine the content of your message (who you're voting for or how much you're spending). Those intermediaries can choose things like random delay times, which can help thwart timing attacks. I agree that timing attacks may pose unique challenges, and again, I haven't solved all of them right off the top of my head, but I think the idea would be to try to show some property that so long as some low percentage of those untrusted intermediaries are observing random delays, we could get in front of those problems.

Tornado Cash gave us a significant step toward anonymity in the transactions, as well. The very basic idea is that you dump a bunch of things into a pot, mix them up, divide them out, and make it significantly more difficult to correlate inputs/outputs. Details here are more complicated; I'd say that it's probably still not perfect, but to the extent that there are lessons to be learned, I think we can learn them and continue to iterate. Again, general bearish/bullish sentiments.

Of course, I'd like to also call back to the 'receipt-freeness' business that the digital election nerds really like. The idea is that they want a way that the the final election tally can be 'published', but in a way that is still specially encrypted. Thus, while people can perform the proper cryptographic operations on the output to determine what the result was, no one can determine from the encrypted, published final tally what any of the individual votes are. Even the people who voted do not have sufficient information to prove how they voted, but they do retain sufficient information to prove that their vote was counted correctly in the final tally. Side note here would be that if you have a system where someone can freely rescind their vote later, even if you had someone watching your computer when you initially voted, and even if they kept that piece of information which could be used to prove that the initial vote was correctly counted, they would not have sufficient information to prove that it was not later rescinded. (There are still tricky choices here, perhaps, and I do think more work would need to be done to decide on every detail.) In any event, this would be another check to make sure that intermediaries couldn't just refuse to include your vote.

if you tell them you're going to give them $648,355.27

Or you could just buy some schlock "paintings" from the politician's son at absurd prices.

Here are two wacky ideas for buying elections:

  1. Start a buisiness in an emerging, not-yet-regulated industry. Do all the textbook Silicon Valley valuation-pumping capital-raising stuff, but shove all the money into as many federal elections as possible. Max out the personal limit for every candidate's official campaign of one party, then find a surrogate to do the same for the other party. Hand pick one or two primary candidates in out-of-the-way races and pump their SuperPAC to the moon. Use your positioning as the politician-favored firm in the industry to raise even more money. Of course, the key is to only use investor capital for this, not customer accounts that you happen to have custody over. This is surprisingly cheap. You could do it for about $100 million.

  2. Buy a major social media company. Gut the employees and bring in your own people. Change the algorithm in clever ways that will shake out to favor ideas of your own preferred politics. Unfortunately, this is much more expensive, estimated to be about $40 billion even in favorable circumstances.

At least as far as (1) goes, I think Scott included PAC spending in his comparison to almonds, so that's not currently pumping our numbers up enough. We have to do better. (2) is more interesting/nuanced/complicated. Definitely a part of what Elon was buying with his $40B was political influence, and it's in a way that would not be captured by Scott's numbers. It's hard to know how expensive it was relative to the political influence it bought.

One of the things I like about my idea is that it gives a direct connection between dollars spent and election outcomes, rather than a fuzzy, "Oh, maybe you're buying political influence by buying Twitter or donating to a left-leaning university/think tank, but we have no idea how to connect those things in a quantitative fashion. I'd actually kind of love a more complicated scheme than what I presented here, one that allowed us to then do some math to estimate things like what the implied marginal values of electoral outcomes are in terms of dollars. But the best idea I had in that direction was to make the money EC votes proportional rather than winner-take-all. I don't super love that for other reasons, but perhaps there's a nice design that could help us make better estimates.

"Hey Elon, can I copy your homework?"

"Yeah, just change it up a bit so it doesn't look obvious you copied."

"Ok."

There’s been a major swing in predictions markets with Harris gaining serious momentum.

this is due to a new Selzer poll. Selzer is apparently one of the most highly credible polling firms out there, with very high historical accuracy, and it shows Harris winning Iowa by several points. If true, this signifies a potential Harris blowout victory across the entire country.

Either way, it seems polling is fundamentally broken for calling elections now. Emerson is showing a 10 point lead for Trump in Iowa. All the other polls showed Trump ahead for a long time, but they either were subject to “herding” or were just massively off in the opposite direction of previous elections.

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.

I believe the prediction market swing started days before the Iowa poll, pretty much after the Hinchcliffe joke.

I can't remember, was there this much hubbub among election nerds over one particular poll in Iowa as a bellwether as there has been/is now? When I saw this first start someone had spelled it as "Seltzer poll" and I thought that it was like the bakery "cookie polls" expect with different varieties of Alka-Seltzer or something.

I'd guess I'd give current odds as 60-40 for Harris, but this is solely because the online American right spending the final days before the election losing its shit over some squirrel seems like losing type behavior.

Updating prediction back to 50-50 after seeing news of Finnish Social Democrats doing door-to-door knocking for Harris in the US.

There was a story about British Labour staffers working for Kamala as well. If this isn't illegal, I feel like it should be. I hope it doesn't kick off some trend where Americans help European parties in their campaigns.

the online American right spending the final days before the election losing its shit over some squirrel

I thought that was everyone, not the right particularly.

The Selzer poll was released on Nov 2, but in the field from Oct 28 to Oct 31. If it were leaked early, it probably would have exerted an effect on the market.

I first encountered Selzer during the Democratic primaries in 2008, when she predicted Obama winning the caucuses, against the conventional wisdom. It was a big deal then. Back in 2016, 538 called her the best pollster in politics: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/selzer/

This cycle, if you followed e.g. the 538 subreddit, you had people regularly speculating on what the Selzer results would be. So the current near orgasmic state and level of interest isn't merely focusing on a random poll because it shows a pro-Harris result.

I can't remember, was there this much hubbub among election nerds over one particular poll in Iowa as a bellwether as there has been/is now? When I saw this first start someone had spelled it as "Seltzer poll" and I thought that it was like the bakery "cookie polls" expect with different varieties of Alka-Seltzer or something.

I heard about this poll pre-election back in 2020. But I think its prominence has increased in the years since because of the amount and degree of polling errors the other big boys have had, which has increased since. Selzer made big outlier pro-Trump calls in 2016 and 2020 and was dead on both times. So given the track record of success combined with the increased inaccuracies of other polls the attention on this specific one has mounted considerably since 2020.

the online American right spending the final days before the election losing its shit over some squirrel seems like losing type behavior.

Huh... most of the stuff I've seen looks like they're having fun with it.

The American left spending the final days before the election losing its shit over Trump calling Liz Cheney a chicken hawk and blatantly lying to claim he wants to put her in front of a firing squad seems like loser behavior.

Kamala refusing a Rogan interview after both Trump and Vance go on likewise reads as "losing type behavior."

At least the squirrel thing is fun and seems to be based on truth.

Sure, neither campaign seems to be covering itself with glory, which is why I said 60-40, which is still pretty good for Trump. The squirrel thing just seems particularly frivolous to me.

Trump's odds in '16 were 70-30 and in '20 they were even worse per 538. 60-40 is the best odds he's ever had.

It is frivolous, but it taps into a particular undercurrent for anybody who distrusts the government and likes cute critters. It sort of analogizes to the theme of "uncaring government arbitrarily killing things you love" vs. those who trust government to be mostly benevolent with its power which defines at least some of the Trump/Harris divide.

I don't know if Harambe dying swung any election outcomes, but it was probably the most popular meme to arise that year, and has persisted for a long time.

I dunno, the right clearly likes meme magic more than the left, so its not surprising to me they'd try to cast one last spell right before its time to vote.

I don't know if Harambe dying swung any election outcomes,

It didn't need to directly, specifically affect the election, it only needed to let the inherently-chaotic properties of meme magic do their thing on the fabric of reality.

I'd guess I'd give current odds as 60-40 for Harris, but this is solely because the online American right spending the final days before the election losing its shit over some squirrel seems like losing type behavior.

I think this is disingenuous way to describe the kerfuffle. It is not about a squirrel, it is so much more. The owner was treated as some kind of criminal, waiting for hours while government agencies raided his home as if he was some member of cartel or something. Also the squirrel we are talking about was a mascot of his nonprofit serving 300 other animals, it was quite famous minor social celebrity with many cute videos. There is so much packed into it besides a cute little squirrel getting killed, it is what its killing represents. There is so much you can read into this: the insane level of licensing, the fact that government probably spent thousands of dollars in mandays of agents investigating and killing some "random" squirrel. It is about facelessness of bureaucracy, where even blunders like these cannot be pinpointed and they just go away as if nothing happened

And it is also about media coverage, including comments like yours here. Which is now standard "why do you care so much about X" response. It is easy to throw back - if some stupid squirrel is so unimportant, why did government went so hard after it? You cannot have it both ways, where on one hand it is just some stupid problem, while at the same time it is a problem that requires probably dozens of people investigating it. So which one is it? If I grant you that it was just some stupid squirrel, then the person in charge of the raid should be automatically fired for mishandling public resources on such a stupid thing, right?

Sounds like the system wanted to make an example of P'Nut.

Like Bill Foster's wife's divorce lawyer made an example of him in "Falling Down".

This poll is a complete outlier in the wrong direction. It's not just that it's different from all other polls (which are probably herded to a close split 50-50 so nobody has egg). It's that it's totally divorced from every other fundamental. Republican early turnout is up, voter registration is up, enthusiasm and endorsements are up. Trump is the most popular he's ever been, he's bringing Democrats like Gabbard and RFK onto MAGA, he's got billionaire and tech endorsements, Muslims in Dearborn and Minneapolis are endorsing him, he's filling out rallies in New Mexico and New York. Trump got 40M views on Joe Rogan, Kamala wouldn't even go. If Kamala was winning in Iowa, why isn't she campaigning there? Tim Walz is in the state next door, it would be trivial for him to go. They're campaigning in Pennsylvania. And wouldn't Kamala be more popular? Major newspapers are withholding endorsements, her rallies are tepid at best, shouting broke out at one because attendees didn't get their promised Beyonce concert. It's possible this poll is right and every other indication is wrong -- but then, aren't the crosstabs of this poll awfully convenient? Republicans are apparently shifting further left than Independents, and after 4 years of Biden-Harris, inflation, immigration, and Ukraine, voter's biggest concern is... Abortion? In Iowa?

This is too much, it's not worth taking seriously. Maybe, really really, everything else is wrong and this one poll is right, but it's not very likely. I don't know why this poll gets so much credulity here. It's like listening to a LLM, which has no experience of the world, and has no reference or context. It's possible this one outlier poll is right. But it's exceptionally unlikely. And in the world of crazy outlier predictions, there are lots of other outliers that are just as credible.

Yarvin's theory is pollsters have to adjust for the better Democrat election tech or else they will get egg on their face when they underestimate the Democratic vote.

Where did he write on this?

It was on a podcast: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3kBW-6TebUg

Republicans are apparently shifting further left than Independents, and after 4 years of Biden-Harris, inflation, immigration, and Ukraine, voter's biggest concern is... Abortion? In Iowa?

Well, why not? I've seen a number of people refer to Iowa having a six-week abortion ban just enter into force in July, and it's one of the few states with a six-weeks-or-less that's not deep red (in the sense it voted for the Dem candidate as recently as 2012). If there's an actual swing, it could very well be an effect very specific of Iowa (and with limited predictive value elsewhere).

I'm not sure why Ukraine was included here, most polls I've seen (like this one) have shown supporting Ukraine continue to be relatively popular. Of course the recent events (rapid Russian advance in Donbass) might make a difference, but I haven't also seen the Trump campaign refer to Ukraine too much, compared to issues like inflation and immigration.

Somebody's definitely going to have egg on their face after this. Selzer has a long track record of proving her critics wrong over and over, and most of the rest of the polling industry has been herding more than at a sheep farm in the Scottish highlands.. There's a good chance polling firms have been cooking the results in favor of Trump, in a desperate attempt not to underestimate him for a third time in a row. Even if the result in Iowa is at the extreme end of Selzer's MoE and Trump wins the state by a point or two, that likely bodes ill for his chances elsewhere. Trump's best hope in this case would be that Iowa just really, really likes black people (it voted for Obama twice).

On the other hand, if Trump wins Iowa by 5-10 points as previously expected, then it will be a rare black-eye for Selzer. I really wouldn't want to bet against Selzer given her track record, but 1 in 20 polls will go outside the MoE even if everything is calibrated correctly.

It'll be interesting to watch no matter what happens.

My best argument for Trump given this poll:

The poll itself is likely an outlier, and Trump is winning Iowa by low single digits. This might seem to bode badly for swing states. But Trump's power is motivating low propensity voters to come to the polls, and he's spent essentially no effort on doing so in Iowa. In WI, MI, and PA, on the other hand, he is effectively bringing out his broader base, making them much more competitive than you'd infer from this poll. And in other swing states, his path to victory relies on a different coalition, so you can't project IA's results to them. Additionally, Iowa had a six week state-level ban on abortion, which is a state-specific effect that doesn't carry over to other states.

I can buy this argument, but if I were Trump's campaign, I wouldn't be especially happy making it.

It's a pretty mediocre argument for Trump. Polls already try to correct for propensity for voting (read up on "registered voters" vs "likely voters"), and if anyone is doing this correctly, Selzer would. Certainly fewer campaign events on both sides have been held in Iowa, but Trump has always had a relatively poor get-out-the-vote operation, and races have become so nationalized that it's unlikely for local conditions to be particularly anomalous relative to their demographics. It's banking a lot on Trump's rallies having large local effects, when there's not a lot of evidence for that.

The abortion point could be relevant, though, I'll grant you that.

Her track record looks impressive until you pull back the curtain a bit. She got many primaries wrong. Her final polls differed from polls a month prior in strong ways.

Also there is a bit of survival bias here. Stock pickers that survive may not be that much better; could just be a random walk.

Her track record looks impressive until you pull back the curtain a bit. She got many primaries wrong. Her final polls differed from polls a month prior in strong ways.

Please provide links.

Also there is a bit of survival bias here. Stock pickers that survive may not be that much better; could just be a random walk.

She's been high-profile since at least 2008. 16 years of bucking conventional wisdom is a lot of record to just dismiss as "random walk".

16 years sounds like a lot. In reality you are talking about four presidential elections. Also not nearly all of that was “bucking conventional wisdom.”

Keep in mind the claim re random walk in stock pickers is frequently much larger compared to Selzer.

In 2020 in the penultimate poll she had the race in Iowa tied between Trump and Biden tied. Is it possible the electorate moved by 8 points? Sure but not likely.

She also in for example had the Iowa 2016 primary going for Trump.

She also does midterms and a bunch of other stuff, and I'm pretty sure she started in the 90s sometime and only became well-known in 2008 after a few runs having relatively robust results. You can cherrypick anything she's gotten wrong, but she has one of the best track records of any pollster bar none. It's clear that some around here are only questioning her because they don't like the result she's getting, rather than for any relative inaccuracy.

No we are questioning her because the poll doesn’t make sense for all the reasons given.

A lurking issue with the vast bulk of the polls so far: they all show a tossup. Not "they follow a distribution that's consistent with a tossup," but "they follow a distribution that's tightly clustered around a 0-1% margin for one or another candidate, in all the swing states." It's statistically impossible for this to arise by chance. You never see significant outliers. You would with the sample sizes they're working with.

This isn't indicative of a tight race: it's indicative of pollsters being scared to publish results favoring a candidate one way or another. If it were the former, you'd see obviously wrong outliers in one direction or another, but you don't.

If there's a single pollster I trust, it's Selzer. She has a reputation, and it's an earned reputation: she's been willing to publish outliers before, and consistently those outliers have been more consistent with the actual results than the mainstream popular wisdom and other pollsters.

Iowa itself doesn't matter: if Harris wins it, she's already won (and if I had to guess, I'd still bet Trump wins Iowa). But even if the actual results are at the pro-Trump edge of her confidence interval, he's very likely cooked: there is no way Iowa doesn't vote substantially to the right of all the swing states, particularly PA, MI, and WI.

It’s a BS poll. A prior poll had Tru o up 18 over Biden. Do we really think there was in a few months a 21 point swing in Iowa? Look at the cross tabs. It is just a really bad sample.

It would be odd for that result to show in polls, however I think it could be correct simply because everyone is measuring the exact same data. They should be getting results within the error margin of the correct answer. And the reason I tend to buy a dead heat is that Americans are highly polarized on almost every topic. Abortion, Israel, Ukraine, the economy, education, culture, etc. all are by now completely coded blue or red. There’s very littLe left to persuade in the middle. It’s all about the base. That should be producing a very tight race.

Even if the ground level truth is an exact tie in all the states, you would still expect more outliers than there are: there's always the luck of the draw, and it's irreducible. If someone has a process to massage the sample data enough so that these outliers never show up in the final published numbers, they're destroying information in the process.

Interesting, except the number of people claiming to be "independent" is near all time high.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/548459/independent-party-tied-high-democratic-new-low.aspx

I'd say the bases of each party are probably smaller than it has been in a while. Lot MORE people to be persuaded.

I think its a tight race because the Democrats managed to pick a candidate that is arguably less popular and likeable with independents than Trump.

I suspect that's just because it's fashionable among Democratic party-line voters to claim independence. Has been for a long time, but the weaker Harris ticket likely encourages that more.

and not only with the voters, let's not forget that supposedly Bernie Sanders is an independent. In my opinion, the number of true independent voters in any given year is half or less of what we are told.

I believe Harris winning Iowa about as much as I believe Trump winning Virginia.

Trump winning Minnesota would be the funniest outcome in this election.

In general it just doesn’t make sense, given that the demographics showing Harris making new headway compared to Biden are basically swapped in comparison to what you would usually suspect. Crosstab-delving within polls is generally discouraged unless they have wild results, but the issue in this cycle is that all top-line polls are being exceedingly risk-averse in anticipation that their jobs are on the line if they get another huge overwhelming ‘miss’ in getting Trump wrong after the last two elections. The only A-rated pollster (before Selzer) whose methodology isn’t just ‘herd now, answer questions after the election’ so far is AtlasIntel, and they just released a poll stating that Trump is ahead in all swing states.

I would recommend buying the dip in terms of Trump’s odds of winning Iowa obviously, but polling is just totally broken this year. Emerson releasing a poll showing the exact opposite of Selzer in Iowa today (even as Emerson has historically underestimated Trump) is just another example.

Both Emerson and Atlasintel are on watch as some of the worst herders this year. Emerson is especially bad. I'd trust Selzer over these guys just based on reputation beforehand, but especially after learning they're cooking the statistical books.

none of the polls he's including are unweighted; when pollsters get results, they weight them depending on their predicted turnout which is heavily biased towards the last similar election which will necessarily reduce variance

his assumptions are just wrong: no, they won't be a binomial distribution even in theory, and almost no one uses random phone dialer to randomly select voters; they have models and try to find the voters which fit the proxies in their models through panels, surveys, mixed-mode contacts, etc.

His article isn't about "herding" as to how he defines it using his chosen metrics, it's a complaint by an alleged model maker that the people's who work he's relying on stealing don't have more variance which would make his model better. The article is really about pollsters being cowards, which make the almost guaranteed Silver final prediction being 50:50 all the more funny. Nate's a coward only because the people whose work he steals relies on are cowards!

This isn't herding which Silver admits when he refers to 538 penalizing late polls which move towards released polls calling it herding. NYT/Sienna, Washington Post, ABC, the "golds standards," etc., are herding when they release a poll in Sept which is Harris+5 and then just so happen to conveniently get a near identical prediction as Emerson which has been claiming a close race all along. Those pollsters aren't just honest non-manipulators who happened to get Harris+1/Tie as their final result joining all the dirty manipulators.

It's honestly perplexing to me why Silver continues to have such high esteem in these spaces, but it's easy money every election cycle.

cooking the statistical books

pollsters cook statistical books when they weight and predict turnout the same way Nate Silver "cooks the statistical books" when he weights polls in his glorified poll average

Selzer isn't a coward by releasing a Harris+3 for Iowa, but whatever the reason for it and I have my speculations, she'll get a double digit miss as a result.

Polls have long weighted their results, but there's ways to do it well, and ways to do it poorly. The goal is to calibrate demographic metrics based on likely voter data to create a facsimile of a perfectly representative sample. Getting it correct makes for more accurate polls. Getting it wrong in an innocent way can lead to mixups like 2016, where there was insufficient weighting by education especially in swing states.

But with degrees of freedom comes the ability to misuse it, where pollsters can coax their models to produce results they think are "better". Or they can just not release results that show something they think is strange. No matter what happens, polls should still show something resembling a normal distribution. They should create their model first, then enter in their results and see what pops out. The fact they're not getting a normal distribution is evidence that they're looking at results, then tweaking the model and rerunning afterwards, effectively mangling the results into whatever they desire. The fact that this is very prominent around a few polling houses and not others should be an indication that something is wrong.

Selzer isn't a coward by releasing a Harris+3 for Iowa, but whatever the reason for it and I have my speculations, she'll get a double digit miss as a result.

I'd gladly take an even-money bet that Selzer is off by less than 10 points.

The point was trying to make is that because they're all weighted and because the underlying data are not random, you would not expect to see the variance numbers Silver is using as his thresholds. The claim of binomial distribution around +-6 is dependent on the assumptions Silver is making, but those assumptions are wrong. Polls are done individually, they're tailored individually. When Silver writes articles like this, he comes off as someone who would be actually lost if he ever attempted to conduct a poll and then he makes a bunch of statements about polling generally using assumptions which are just wrong for polling.

Polling with predictive capacity is extraordinarily difficult. The end prediction is what matters, not the particulars of the models they use. The models are a tool, they're not the entire prediction. Of course I think pollsters who adjust their model to better fit what they believe is the correct result and they should. I have far more respect for individual pollsters than aggregators, who I consider to just be poll readers.

If I was Selzer, I would have gone back and tried again because her poll is ridiculous for a variety of reasons we can see in the information released about the demos she reached and what they care about. I understand aggregators don't like this and they don't like when variance shrinks, but the pollsters are the ones making the predictions more so than the aggregators stealing their work.

I'd gladly take an even-money bet that Selzer is off by less than 10 points.

Well, I didn't expect a response like this and didn't check back here. I am already overbudget on political bets this season, but I likely would have taken this depending on the amount and hassle to set this up. Bravo, though! I love to see people willing to put money down on their predictions.

Selzer is currently off by a whopping 16.5%. I should go back and look at my model for Iowa and why I undestimated Trump by 3 points. Selzer sold her credibility in an attempt to motivate downtrodden Democrats into thinking it was still possible. No serious person could have looked at some of the results from that poll, e.g., abortion most important topic, among others, and take it at face value; anyone who did should be discounted if not entirely ignored going forward.

For what it's worth, I'll cop to the fact that I would have lost the bet. Selzer had a pretty stellar record before, but this was a massive, high-profile mistake that she'll likely never recover from, at least not fully.

are on watch as some of the worst herders

I assume you're referring to the chart titled 'Which pollsters are the biggest herders?'. Unless I'm reading this wrong AtlasIntel appears to be doing little or no herding, as their 'Actual' total of small margin polls matches the 'Theory' total of small margin polls. The smaller the fraction in the 'Odds against...' column, the more herding they are doing right? By my reading Redfield, Emerson and InsiderAdvantage are herding most, while AtlasIntel, WaPo and Rasmussen are doing the least.

Like I said to the other guy, that chart does not include all pollsters, it just includes the ones that show the worst signs of herding. AtlasIntel is borderline, and only looks ok next to egregious examples like Redfield and Wilton.

And you seemed to miss the context where Silver said WaPo is one of the high quality non herding. Silver had them as the same odds as Atlasintel. So Silver, who published the article, clearly disagrees with your assertion.

You are right and the other poster is wrong. Read the article and not what Ben Garrison stated.

That’s not true according to Silver. https://www.natesilver.net/p/theres-more-herding-in-swing-state

Yes Emerson herds but Atlasintel he is showing as one of the higher quality ones. Also they’ve been very accurate in the past.

The list in that article isn't a list of all pollers, it's just the ones that he's accusing of herding. Atlasintel is borderline. It only looks OK relative to Emerson, where the evidence is more incontrovertible.

That’s not how Silver is framing it. He states:

By contrast, the most highly-rated polling firms like the Washington Post show much less evidence of herding. YouGov has actually had fewer close polls than you’d expect, although that’s partly because they’ve tended to be one of Harris’s best pollsters, so their surveys often gravitate toward numbers like Harris +3 rather than showing a tie.

Note that WaPo has the same odds of herding as AtlesIntel. So if Silver thinks WaPo isn’t herding, then he thinks atlasintel isn’t either.

Alright, yeah I've reread it and you're correct.

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.

The idea that abortion is going to cause a massive polling error in favor of Harris is just a blatant wish fulfillment fantasy. There is no evidence for it. It’s completely made up. Even in 2022 the polls underestimated Republicans slightly, they just didn’t miss as badly as they did with Trump so people misremember them as overestimating Republicans.

Odds are the polls will underestimate Trump like they always do, meaning it will be a Trump blowout. The “right leaning” pollsters haven’t changed anything about what they do, and the gap between them and the polling average is the same as ever. This strongly suggests nobody has changed anything, meaning they will be wrong in exactly the same way.

The phenomenon isn't unique to the left. Sidney Powell torched her career for no reason last time. Occasionally, people (even smart ones) just self immolate pointlessly. There but (mostly) for the grace of God go I

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?

I've got no horse in this race; I suppose I would prefer Harris wins but it would certainly be funnier if Trump does. Seems like this pollster has a sterling track record. I'm not sure why your initial response would be blanket denial.

She has gotten a lot of things off. You are being shown a curated list to prove she is right and only looking at the final poll.

I don’t know why after the insanity of the past 8 years, your initial reaction to something absurd like this wouldn’t be blanket denial.

This pollster also shared the results with Kamala surrogates well in advance. People tweeted rumors about it yesterday. Apparently a surrogate let it slip by accident, not realizing the poll wasn’t released yet. So a pollster colluded with Democrats and released an absurd “momentum shifting” poll 3 days before the election, but your default response is to take it at face value? I have a bridge to sell you, man.

So a pollster colluded with Democrats and released an absurd “momentum shifting” poll 3 days before the election, but your default response is to take it at face value? I have a bridge to sell you, man.

Well, we've got three days to see. I'm willing to eat crow if I'm wrong.

Most people who have blown their credibility against Trump have blown it the first or second or billionth time he's been on the brink of starting the Fourth Reich or whatever. Selzer hasn't: her results in both 2016 and 2020 were consistent with Trump's margins.

I guess she's nearing retirement, so maybe she wants to blow all her reputational capital in one go on orange man bad.

But I would not be happy if that were my only explanation for her results.

Which results? The final poll? Or the poll before the final poll? Because she showed Biden and Trump tied in September in 2020. Why do we test her against only one poll?

It's hard to square the Selzer poll with anything else we're seeing. Looking at Iowa early voter turnout as a percentage of 2020, R got 83% and D got 56%. Sure it's possible that there's a huge block of voters coming out on EDay or that large numbers of Rs are coming out to vote for Harris.

The top 2 issues found in the poll were Democracy and Abortion. Which seems a little weird. Iowa passed some major abortion restrictions over the summer. It seems possible that voters would take that out on Trump, but it's odd that it's suddenly showing up in a poll.

Ann Selzer is 67. It's certainly possible that she took a big payout from someone so she could retire and the Harris campaign could save house seats. Or it could be a polling miss.

Or it could be real. But I'm surprised no one else noticed it if it was real.

There has been noticing, if you wanted to notice.

There was a recent poll showing Trump only up by 5 in Kansas, in the polling no matter the result Kamala has been consistently doing better among white voters than even Biden, and in general, the Blue Wall state have been holding up better than Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia.

Now, I, a party hack social democratic Democrat don't actually think Kamala is up by 3. But, if it's off by let's say 150% of Selzer's worst result ever in the past basically 20 years - 5 points. So, let's say 7.5 points.

A Trump +4.5 in Iowa would be disastrous., as personally in a busy election-related Discord, Trump +5 was our hope for the poll.

OK, I'm totally willing to believe that Iowa is way to the left of where is usually is due to abortion. This isn't Missouri here in terms of the voter base's social conservatism and the restrictions are pretty recent. But 'democracy' as a top issue is a dead tell for something weird with the poll; my guess is it's way oversampling nevertrump demographics.

Well, I'll toot my own horn:

I called it.

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.

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.

A much larger portion of the cemetery demographic? The non-citizen demographic?

Which demographics is she pulling in 2024 that Biden DIDN'T pull in 2020?

…even MORE women? That’s the only demo I can see since it’s A) a female president nominee, and B) abortion.

abortion

Are happily married women with children being mobilized by abortion? Are sexless 20-somethings with nose rings shitting themselves over having to carry a purely hypothetical baby to term?

What is happening with this abortion Handmaid's Tale fanfic? Why is the a-word such a powerful meme?

Are women actually afraid of losing policy advantages, or is it just posturing that goes over well in their book clubs and socially reinforces itself into a loosely-held belief? I personally know a married woman who does not want children and would happily kill 2 babies for every abortion she needed to keep her DINK lifestyle, but she is notably liberal to an extent that normal women definitely are not. Does anyone have an actual model for what's going on for this issue?

Are the Democrats really out here convincing every single woman that it's perfectly normal to find yourself needing an abortion, and it will kill you to give birth?

Looking at "Who Gets Abortions in America?" (NYT article dated 2021)... 60% of women who have abortions already have children, although only 14% are married, so "happily married women with children" aren't getting a large percentage of all abortions. That said, about 25% of women get an abortion at some point in their life, so it's not exactly rare.

Of course, that's not counting "spontaneous abortion" (better known as miscarriage). I was having trouble finding statistics for how many women will ever have a miscarriage, probably partially because it's tricky to define since well, I'll let Wikipedia explain:

Among women who know they are pregnant, the miscarriage rate is roughly 10% to 20%, while rates among all fertilisation is around 30% to 50%.

I bring up miscarriage because some of the concern over abortion bans has been over healthcare for miscarriages getting lumped in with abortions.

I bring up miscarriage because some of the concern over abortion bans has been over healthcare for miscarriages getting lumped in with abortions.

Well yes, because democrats lie constantly about the actual content of abortion bans. Women denied a D&C invariably turn out to have been kicked out of the hospital before it was apparent they needed one because they were uninsured(=hospital had to eat the cost for her being there), or primarily victims of their own terrible decisions(Amber Nicole Thurman should have gone to the emergency room four days before she actually did).

I mean you're also not going to get statistics on miscarriages because no one, except the women who experience them, care very much and lots of them don't get or need any medical care. The whole miscarriage issue is a distraction driven mostly by democrats lying.

Of course, that's not counting "spontaneous abortion"

Oh please, this is like calling death by accudent, illness, or natural causes "spontaneous murder". It has nothing to do with the issue of abortion.

Are sexless 20-somethings with nose rings shitting themselves over having to carry a purely hypothetical baby to term?

As best I can tell yes. And they aren't perfectly sexless. There is some hypothetical possibility that someday they would want an abortion. They could easily obtain one of course.

But yes fear mongering about a hypothetical national abortion ban forcing them to carry a hypothetical baby to term seems popular.

Are sexless 20-somethings with nose rings shitting themselves over having to carry a purely hypothetical baby to term?

Yes. Young women are genuinely terrified about the possibility of being raped and forced to carry the baby to term, or having a hookup and [...], or even just accidentally/intentionally conceiving a baby with their husband and having their life threatened by some malady an abortion could fix. Three of the women in my close circle have of their own volition brought up fears about maternal mortality rates/abortion restriction... Despite the fact that all three were on birth control and additionally one also mentioned that she would personally never get an abortion (though she's pro-choice in general.)

I would say the fear is out of proportion to the actual probability of potential negative events, but that doesn't stop them from genuinely feeling it. It's just what women-centric filter bubbles bring up. It's like how men are irrationally terrified of false rape accusations.

It's like how men are irrationally terrified of false rape accusations.

Don't forget irrationally terrified of being seen as a creep because they asked a woman out in the wrong way/in the wrong place.

Or women's fear that their date will turn out to be a creep. Or worse, a Trump supporter.

Something in the water supply's just trying to get men and women to fear each other. And what we fear we often end up resenting, even hating. Women are convinced that men have it easy and waste their privilege playing video games and jacking off while doing things to hurt women ("patriarchy theory"), while men are convinced that women have it easy and waste their privilege eating hot chip and lying putting on makeup and getting railed by Chads ("gynocentrism theory"). These two sides aren't completely symmetrical, and one may have a point in some connection where the other doesn't, but they do reflect growing resentment by normie men and women towards each other.

In that sense, it's no wonder so many people are going, "wow, it must be so much greener on the other side!" and gender-transitioning.

Democrats are quite happily lying about the actual content of abortion bans. It is literally false that Amber Thurman died because Georgia law forbade saving the mother's life when it would kill the baby- for one thing, she had a legal abortion, and for another, Georgia law allows the care that would have saved her life if she'd sought medical care before spending four days bleeding through one pad per hour. But democrats say this anyways.

It is in fact very very unpopular to require women with ectopic pregnancies to just die. There is no state which does that, but claiming that red states routinely do this is a key part of democrat's messaging, their actual ads aren't 'Women are being FORCED to GIVE BIRTH instead of living their best life'.

Are happily married women with children being mobilized by abortion?

That phrase describes an increasingly-shrinking minority of women these days. And ones with teenage and older female children may well vote on vicarious fears/worries about abortion access.

Are sexless 20-somethings with nose rings shitting themselves over having to carry a purely hypothetical baby to term?

Young people are low-propensity voters, and overwhelmingly progressive for other reasons. The abortion talk is aimed at 35+ women, who are much higher-propensity voters.

Does anyone have an actual model for what's going on for this issue?

Sure, women find the idea of not being able to even have the option of terminating a pregnancy intolerable, even if they might otherwise want to keep the kid. Also, our culture denigrates devotion to family and unpaid child-raising as a life-style.

Are the Democrats really out here convincing every single woman that it's perfectly normal to find yourself needing an abortion, and it will kill you to give birth?

More like, "it's perfectly normal to find yourself needing an abortion, and banning "normal" abortion care will kill you." Of course, these stories are complete and total BS, not attributable to abortion restrictions. But most people don't look behind the screaming media spin.

Coworker and I were discussing election betting market when a woman on the team asked how concerned she should be about Trump winning. She’s married, has a young child, and, if not outright smarter than me, definitely has better math chops. She’s the best product forecaster we have. I asked her what she was most worried about. Her answer: birth control getting banned.

In case someone doesn't know, birth control is literally the least controversial political issues there is.

Yes, among actual voters, sure.

But, Republican's voted against various pro-birth control bills on both the state and local level.

Then, you've got members of The Heritage Foundation, who wrote Project 2025 talking about returning consequentiality to sex - https://x.com/Heritage/status/1662534135762624520

Project 2025 also says the morning after bill is an abortion bill and the coverage of it should be eliminated and there's also been talk about the Comstock Act.

Republicans voting against free birth control because some money would go to planned parenthood is what actually happened there and the uberconservative wishcasting to ban the morning after pill was walked back by the Louisiana state legislature, let alone by the national GOP(and aside from a few deep southern states there has not been a case where republicans had a realistic path to getting the morning after pill banned- in all cases they chose not to do it).

Yes, that's what the Heritage Foundation believes. That's also what the Catholic Church believes. Those organizations are not the Republican party or the Trump administration.

If Trump is elected, there will not be a national ban on birth control. Despite the idle wishing by the Heritage Foundation.

I stand by this prediction and discount anyone who goes against it as having lost touch with reality.

People who are smart in one area aren't always smart in another, especially when values, tribes, and deep-set fears come into play. There are vanishingly few people I trust to provide level-headed insights into politics, even people I respect in other areas. It requires an extreme level of intellectual humility to look at such emotionally-fraught issues even-handedly -- something that, understandably, very smart and insightful people often struggle with.

Yeah, I do expect the gender split to be significant.

Because I'm also sure a lot of guys will peel off because holy SHIT the Harris campaign has been horrible at marketing to males, in particular white ones. Not sure if that means they'll come out for Trump, though.

There's certainly an argument that higher female turnout relative to male could tilt it for her.

Yes, I'm certain it's going to come down to turnout, and that's where the Democrat machine has an unbeatable advantage. They've got people going door to door making sure the right people's ballots are collected here, in a place where turnout literally doesn't matter because half the Democrats are running unopposed or against 5 different permutations of the People's Socialist Environmental Indigenous Justice Party For Killing Whitey.
If they're doing organization like that just for fun in a blue state, I doubt there'll be a single ballot unharvested in swing states.

On the other hand, that's a deep blue state where democrats have a massive advantage in personnel and they have to do something.

There are rumors, stemming from the boss himself, that Republicans found some “secret” to help improve turnout. I’m skeptical, but you never know.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/us/politics/trump-secret-house-republicans-panic.html

Elon musk lottery?

Might be the efforts of Scott Pressler in PA. The guy exhudes weirdo, cult leader energy and if someone could turn it around for the GOP there, I think it's him.

My guess is Republicans are just using the same election 'tech' that Democrats used last cycle. Shady stuff like vote harvesting.

Fascinating.

Had you heard that the GOP has tightened the voter registration gap in PA by about 300k?

Do we recall that Biden won PA by 70k in 2020., and the GOP has gained support since then.

Do we think the Dems were more or less efficient at ballot harvesting that year?

Do we think the GOP might be more or less organized at getting out the vote in 2024?

Just thinking out loud. Like I said, Kamala has no advantage that Biden lacked, and some apparent disadvantages.

Seems absurd to expect her to do better than 2020 Biden.

I don't see any reason their ballot harvesting ops would be less effective now. They've had four more years to organize and consolidate power, how could they have lost any capacity?

Because they don't have the advantage of an ongoing pandemic to motivate against in-person voting and creating cover for a sizeable increase in absentee ballots.

I think there's just going to be fewer ballots out there to that are ripe for harvest, ultimately.

Kamala has no advantage that Biden lacked

Except what Curtis Yarvin dubs "Moore's Law of election 'fortification.'"

Women do tend to be more likely to vote than men, especially young women.

Yep. I don't know what is most likely to motivate otherwise detached males enough to get them to the polls, so this might be what tilts it for her, honestly.

Although... it is entirely possible that males are motivated to vote because of how horrible the Harris messaging towards them has been. It might be enough for them to realize there's nothing good for them coming if she wins.

https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1852849659347124434

AtlasIntel CEO confirms that if white male turnout is high, Trump wins. That’s a big if! But also still plausible

Which demographics is she pulling in 2024 that Biden DIDN'T pull in 2020?

The argument I've heard (I'm not a polling or campaigning expert, so I can't really gauge how true it is) is that Kamala is relying upon a massive swing among women, of a similar magnitude of the increases in turnout that the Obama candidacy relied upon among black voters. This isn't related to her own sex, but instead a combo of abortion fears and disproportionate female distaste for Trump and concern about potential authoritarianism. That kind of reasoning is the only way that ads like this make sense to me. It also explains why Kamala prefers to go on SNL (demographic overwhelmingly elderly) than Rogan (demographic primarily young and male).

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.

I have no idea what's going to happen. But I do think there's a real chance of a Harris blowout. Trump was underestimated in 2016, but the previous 8 years have not been kind to his reputation among low-information voters. The abortion debate and Harris's gender have joined revulsion to Donald Trump as factors polarizing a lot of female voters to the left. I suspect we're going to see unprecedented gender splits on the ballot.

Whether anyone likes it or not, Trump is uniquely polarizing, with 40% of the population loving him, 50% hating his guts, and 10% trying to figure out what to do. As someone who moved from column B to column C, I don't see how Trump gets over the hump of how many people believe he's deeply evil.

I'm going to vote for him for the first time ever, but if I had any money to put down, I'd bet on Harris.

Yeah, I’m thinking the same. I’m disappointed since I think illegal immigration is going to be a huge issue for the western world in the coming decades and we needed to set a strong precedent with Trump for mass removal, as well as his government efficiency and moves towards Musk being big bonuses. But unfortunately the sole champion we had was this guy who couldn’t get enough women on-side, because he is quite frankly a pig and a womanizer, and such a megalomaniac he couldn’t take an L

My only hope now is that Kamala wasn’t lying with her pivot towards the centre. It’s a very slim hope; I know.

I wish my boy Musk luck - not sure he will survive a Kamala term.

I'll bet you a Trading Spaces dollar right now that Elon Musk is alive and well when Kamala leaves the Oval Office, whether it's 2029 or 2033.

I don’t mean literally survive, I mean he’ll be ruined from a business perspective

I'll take the other end of that bet. In 4 years, Musk will be fine and about as rich as he is now.

As rich as he is now would be a huge hit to him, given we should expect large growth. Or do you mean he will still be the richest man on earth?

sure, if you want to retreat to that particular bailey.

If it makes you feel better, there was never any chance Trump would manage a significant removal of non-natives. It's as likely as ending social security.

the great filter is rocket men get thrown in jail before they can explore the stars

For what it's worth, the Soviets did fish Korolev out of the gulag after WWII because they needed him...

Musk is hardly anywhere as technically competent as Korolev

Korolev's also had the benefits of state resources, sharashkas and priority in a state planned economy go a a long way.

I am a native of Tennessee, have lived in Kentucky, and currently live in Ohio. None of these could be described as "blue states." Pretty much everyone that I talk to on a daily basis lives and votes in one of these three states.

For the last three or four months, almost every person I know has been assaulting my ears, unsolicited, with monologues about how Trump is a racist, sexist and fascist, and he must be kept out of the White House. Literally - I'm not saying that as a stock example, I mean that people have actually used those terms, in series, in sentences to describe him and his politics. Additionally, multiple people have told me they wish the would-be assassin's bullets didn't miss their mark. These people include my dad - a blue-collar tradesman; my coworkers, at a blue-collar manufacturing firm; my mom, a retail worker; a close friend of mine who joined the Army; and a guy I know who works in construction. No matter their age, race, or who the winners' policies would be likely to benefit, there is a lockstep consensus, even though these are all people who are the types of people, in the appropriate states, that you'd expect to support Trump. The only exceptions that I personally have are my fiancee and her family, a close friend from church, and an old coworker. All other people are happy to start venting about Trump to me.

(Notably - and this is not meant to be boo outgroup - I never hear anyone talk about how the election outcomes, or the policy outcomes that follow from that, will affect them personally. One guy I work with did at least reference his neighbors who are voting for Trump because they don't want their taxes to go up, which he described as "greed.")

My subjective impression, is that this is primarily caused by the successful capture by liberals of so many institutions, resulting in leftism becoming the "default position" in America. When all the big companies, all the media, and all the artists and musicians push in the same direction, you have to be a serious non-conformist to push the other way; and that is an uncommon trait. With that in mind, I don't know how the Republicans ever win any elections.

Given that the election is a dead heat, the House is split and by thin margins, and a conservative leaning SC, perhaps there isn't any non-conformity so much as an extremely common difference of opinion. I'd wager that R's win elections because approximately half of voters are R's.

Did you go eat at McShlucks after?

LOL

Tbh, it's like I'm the guy in the original post except I really want it to stop.

With that in mind, I don't know how the Republicans ever win any elections.

My impression is that people will say one thing and vote another. It’s the only explanation, because I see the same pattern of virtually everyone hating on conservatives or its ideology.

Nate Silver on the Selzer Poll:

Releasing this poll took an incredible amount of guts because — let me state this as carefully as I can — if you had to play the odds, this time Selzer will probably be wrong.

I'm not believing late in the game polls that show large swings out of nowhere. There's been a few influencers that have wisely said 'don't believe anything you see in the news in the last few days before the election.'

Edit: Nate didn't have much good to say about the Emerson poll either.


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