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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".
Why did you stop? (Alternatively, hey Mitch, didn’t expect to run into you here!)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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Louis CK has met one of the people you're talking about.
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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.
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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."
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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:
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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).
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:
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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.
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People have fetishes for seemingly everything ,so this would not surprise me either.
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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.
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
but to
.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who saves one life, saves the world entire.
Many societies have thought this way. They have tended to leave skulls.
Except for the fact that other anti-social behaviour harms people....
Out of context religious doctrine just makes you sound stupid.
Proudly misunderstanding the failure mode of communism and fascism also makes you sound stupid.
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.
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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.
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That sounds like ego defense. Groups build those when they feel threatened. When groups feel safe they totally just kink on those models.
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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.
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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.
From a gender critical perspective, there’s a much simpler explanation.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am firmly for people being in as close to total control of their bodies, in life and manner of death, as feasible.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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That's reasonable. I just wanted to generalize the issue, to show that rape wasn't unique in this regard.
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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.
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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.
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The end of a revolution is usually only visible in hindsight. This might be it but it’s too soon to say.
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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.
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.
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 %?
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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.
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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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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Specifically the men in these demographics. The gender gap is turning reciprocal.
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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.
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.
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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.
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No. The tide continues to come in, even if one particular wave recedes.
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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.
I thought that was everyone, not the right particularly.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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Huh... most of the stuff I've seen looks like they're having fun with it.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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.
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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.
Well, we've got three days to see. I'm willing to eat crow if I'm wrong.
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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
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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?
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
Please provide links.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Never say never:
https://www.hiiraan.com/news4/2024/Nov/198754/somali_leaders_in_minnesota_endorse_trump_for_president.aspx
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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.
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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.
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Well, I'll toot my own horn:
I called it.
Quoth me 12 days ago:
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.
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:
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.
A much larger portion of the cemetery demographic? The non-citizen demographic?
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…even MORE women? That’s the only demo I can see since it’s A) a female president nominee, and B) 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:
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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 lyingputting 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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'.
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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.
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.
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Except what Curtis Yarvin dubs "Moore's Law of election 'fortification.'"
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On the other hand, that's a deep blue state where democrats have a massive advantage in personnel and they have to do something.
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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?
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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.
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My guess is Republicans are just using the same election 'tech' that Democrats used last cycle. Shady stuff like vote harvesting.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
stealingdon'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 hestealsrelies 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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You are right and the other poster is wrong. Read the article and not what Ben Garrison stated.
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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.
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Nate Silver on the Selzer Poll:
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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