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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   34536 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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Some follow-ups on past stories

Southport stabbing suspect accused of murder of three girls charged with owning Al Qaeda training manual

The teenager accused of the fatal stabbing of three girls at a dance class in Southport has been charged with production of a deadly poison and a terror offence, the chief constable of Merseyside Police has said.

Axel Rudakubana, 18, will appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court by videolink on Wednesday charged with production of a biological toxin, Ricin, and possession of information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing to commit an act of terrorism.

The charges come after searches of his home in Banks, Lancashire, Merseyside Police Chief Constable Serena Kennedy said at a press conference on Tuesday.

The terror offence relates to a PDF file entitled Military Studies In The Jihad Against The Tyrants, The Al Qaeda Training Manual, Ms Kennedy said.

Previous discussion here, and here.

Part of the controversy was about how the right wing assumed the attacker was a boat-refugee and/or a recent immigrant, and while that part remains false, another part of it was about his religion, (see Al-Jazeera, Wikipedia, BBC, or even our own discussion) and how it was wrong / islamophobic to jump to conclusions this way. It now turns out that he was indeed radicalized by Islamists.

Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif Has XY Chromosomes And “Testicles” : French-Algerian Medical Report Admits

A shocking new development has emerged in the case of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif after a French journalist reportedly gained access to a damning medical report revealing Khelif has “testicles.” The news comes months after Khelif seized a gold medal in women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics.

The report was drafted in June of 2023 via a collaboration between the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital in Paris, France, and the Mohamed Lamine Debaghine hospital in Algiers, Algeria. Drafted by expert endocrinologists Soumaya Fedala and Jacques Young, the report reveals that Khelif is impacted by 5-alpha reductase deficiency, a disorder of sexual development that is only found in biological males.

(...) The report concludes by recommending Khelif be referred for “surgical correction and hormone therapy,” to help him physically align with his self-perceived gender identity, and adds that psychological support would be required because the results had caused a “very significant neuropsychiatric impact.”

Previous discussion here and here, and here.

More than the object level of either of those stories, what I want to know is: what do?

I've had this discussion with @Hoffmeister25 about assuming the worst about your outgroup without any evidence. While I maintain that it's plenty of fun when your unproven stereotype-based claims are vindicated, I'm going to agree with him that this way lies madness, and that's no way to have a conversation on controversial political issues. On the other hand, I can't help but notice that this sort of recommendation for caution is asymmetrical. When mainstream institutions make a claim, that claim is itself treated as evidence, any caution goes out the window, and requests for evidence are met with ridicule. So how should we be approaching these controversies, given that bombshells like these hardly raise an eyebrow anymore?

As time goes on, I'm leaning more and more towards simply rejecting Rationalism, as it leads to cudgels like "falsely claimed without evidence" beloved by the mainstream media. Vibe Analysis has been the subject of some ridicule, but I think there should be some space to say "I don't have evidence for this, but my gut says there is something off here" and Reddit-tier "source?!" responses to that should not be accepted. At the end of the day we're only people, and our guts will influence us, no matter how much pretense of objectivity and evidence-baseness we'll put on top of that.

As time goes on, I'm leaning more and more towards simply rejecting Rationalism, as it leads to cudgels like "falsely claimed without evidence" beloved by the mainstream media.

Reject Rationalism, embrace rationalism.

That is to say, movements will be corrupted by status games and politics, but ideas remain true or false regardless. It is rational to observe the degree to which the mainstream media is attempting to manipulate public opinion with both carefully-crafted deceptions, repetition of lies, and aggression towards alternate sources of info, and write them off. It is rational to note how science with the wrong conclusion is buried or never even attempted and to see how the universities have purged themselves of wrongthinkers, and write them off as well.

It is rational to recognize that the words of a liar are very poor evidence. And it is not rational to deny that a liar is a liar and call it charity.

How do we want to call the social manipulation technique at work here? I'm voting for "the social scientists gambit", since it's especially widespread there. It goes like this:

Adam: I'm 6.2.

Bob: No way, you look more like 5.6.

Adam: You have no evidence for this statement, so you should default to trust me.

Bob: Actually, I have measuring tape, let's just see.

Adam: I'm calling HR, this is beyond rude!

Or in more general terms you a) control the null hypothesis and then b) either claim that even testing the null hypothesis is offensive, or you allow it to be "tested" as long as the procedure is designed to get the correct results. Just see the frontpage of /r/science and try reading up on the actual definitions of terms like "racial resentment" or "hostile sexism" for practical examples of the latter.

Imo one big problem is the frequentist / null-hypothesis framework to begin with. You can't have a reasonable opinion about anything if you by-default assume 95% hypothesis A (which just-so happens to be the one you favor) 5% everything else. The appropriate attitude is bayesian priors, which are difficult to do perfectly but in rough terms are actually quite simple: You assume relevant stats of the general category (say, murder rates per ethnicity or religion) and then slightly or strongly adjust based on how much you know of the case (say, a witness explicitly states an assailant screamed "allahu akbar!"). Of course, this makes the next problem obvious, which is abusing incorrect stats, such as claiming that we're not allowed to use the murder rates per [category], but only population percentages.

The other obvious problem is harder to manage: Manipulated/plainly wrong stats. Tbh, I've yet to find a good approach that scales for this one. Sometimes they cook the numbers in obvious ways that are even openly stated in the manual which is easy to adjust for, but more common seems to be the situation as with the recent californian retail thefts, where technically speaking everything is done correctly, but one step in the pipeline completely fails in an undocumented manner.

At least attempting something like this seems better than just going by your guts. And if this is too involved to always do for everything - which I consider understandable - hard scepticism is also always an option as well.

Okay, but that example is actually rude, no? Demanding someone’s measurements is not normal. Neither is insisting someone recant. Calling someone a liar is almost always picking a fight.

An observer would come away from this conversation thinking both participants are assholes and possibly stupid.

Sure, that's how it works. If an observer does not consider it rude, the the tactic falls flat. The trick is to make a claim that makes you look good in such a way that there is no way to call it into question without looking like a douchebag. So I chose an example that would be plausibly considered rude by an average reader here.

But keep in mind that many liberal readers have the same instinctual reaction you have, but to the insinuation that different ethnicities might have different murder rates. Likewise, a honor-virtue ethics society might simply consider Adam pathetic, and Bob virtuous and brave.

Edit: Also, feel free to adjust the example if you think you understand roughly what I'm getting at! I try to find a middle ground between brevity and fidelity in these kind of examples, so it's hardly perfect.

I’m inclined to call it “normal social maneuvering” instead of anything about social science!

make a claim that makes you look good in such a way that there is no way to call it into question

That’s definitely the crux of it. Some claims can’t be made to some audiences. Some questions can’t be asked to others. I don’t know if I can come up with a better example.

Regarding the edit—yeah, I feel that. I have a hard time going for brevity.

I can see the argument that it's part of the repertoire of normal social maneuvering, but it's still a particular manipulative technique that imo deserves some snappy name. "just a joke bro" is also part of normal (male) social maneuvering, but obviously a very different kind.

It's curious how eager some people are to deny that the Southport killer as an off-the-boat refugee. Surely, that he was a second generation immigrant makes the whole situation worse! What it means is that even when you're not importing terrorists, you're importing people with with a high propensity to become terrorists. There could hardly be anything more damning of British immigration policy, and yet somehow that he was not "off-the-boat" is seen as pro-immigrant.

The pro-immigrationists know that claiming different ethnic groups have different propensities to violence is still mostly beyond the pale, even for anti-immigrationists. Therefore, they can dissimulate by claiming that anyone born in the UK is 'British' and therefore any crimes ethnic minorities commit cannot be blamed on immigration. They can be safe in the knowledge that the obvious counter-argument to this won't be made publicly, even if it is true.

There's a good chance that many of the pro-immigrationists have secretly noticed who commits most of the crime though. From there, I can see two approaches. Either blame racism for minority crime rates, or secretly read Steve Sailer while keeping quiet for the greater good. I'm sure the latter is pretty rare though.

If stopping people arriving on boats is at the edge of the Overton window then removing people whose parents came on boats is well outside it. If you can rule out the first solution by saying it wouldn’t have solved the problem anyway then you don’t even need to refute the second, most people won’t dare discuss the implications you’ve drawn out in public so the public battle is already won for the pro-immigration side.

rejecting Rationalism, as it leads to cudgels like "falsely claimed without evidence"

Does it? I don't think I've ever seen the phrase "without evidence" used sloppily by anyone whose definition of evidence is "B s.t. P(B|A)/P(B) > 0".

It's not being sloppy with the phrase "without evidence", as @RenOS pointed it's more about elevating your position to the null hypothesis.

The whole Bayesian reasoning thing always felt like a gimmick to me anyway. You can claim to be a good Bayesian no matter the outcome of any particular case.

People can claim to be good anything regardless of facts on the ground. Talk and unfounded claims are cheap and may even be free (ignoring opportunity costs).

I'd expect anyone who outright calls themselves a Bayesian to do better on that front.*

*Going off Bayesian priors about what the kind of people nerdy enough to have even heard of the idea are like, let alone self professed ones

I mean that the whole framework is designed so that you never end up having to eat crow. "My priors for this are very low. Oh, it happened anyway? Oh well, I promise to bump up my priors somewhat for the next time this non-repeatable event happens!".

Uh.. That's the worst way of reasoning from evidence that's ever been tried, barring all the others.

Absent logical omniscience, you are occasionally going to be wrong, and then you try to be less wrong. Taken deeply enough, no macroscopic events in the history of the universe are likely to ever be truly alike or repeatable, so sorting out reference classes is unavoidably important.

"I was wrong about World War 3 not happening. Well, we can't have a World War 3 2.0 happen for me to be right about, but at least I can adjust my priors for massive wars happening in the future".

Besides. You can very much eat crow when you are confidently wrong. It just takes intellectual honesty, and Bayesians at least pay lip service to the notion we learn from our mistakes. Keep being bad at updating, and people will stop considering what you say to be informative (and that's not unique to self-professed Bayesians, because in practise most humans apply the concepts implicitly, some are more disciplined and explicit than others).

it's more about elevating your position to the null hypothesis.

One of the key differences between Bayesian and frequentist statistics is that the latter has a "null hypothesis" and the former does not. Priors aren't the same thing; in Bayesian-speak an experiment leads to an update that's a real number, not a binary acceptance/rejection.

You can claim to be a good Bayesian no matter the outcome of any particular case.

Yeah, but you can also claim to be a good non-Bayesian pundit regardless. The biggest difference from my point of view is that I've seen the best rationalists publish graphs of how well their past predictions, as declared in advance, turned out to be calibrated. I've never seen anybody more mainstream than Nate Silver do the same, even though "my punditry is my profession and public service and livelihood" would seem to entail a much stronger case for doing so than "I like blogging", so I'm going to doubt that rationalism has led to much of anything in the mainstream media.

... which is a shame, because an admission of "that's evidence but not enough to budge my priors" really is a big step up from a declaration of "without evidence". When not moving far from your priors is a good idea (which it often is - I've seen legitimate evidence for Flat Earth Theory!) you at least gain a little humility from having to openly admit what you're doing. And when your conclusions resembling your priors is a bad idea, you're more likely to notice that eventually if you have to acknowledge every time when you're dismissing Not Enough Evidence rather than Not Real Evidence.

definition of evidence is "B s.t. P(B|A)/P(B) > 0".

Wouldn’t the definition of “A is Bayesian evidence of B” be “P(B|A) > P(B)”

I typed >0 when I meant to type >1, yes. That's very embarrassing.

Forgive me if this question has already been asked. What would this medical report imply for Khelif's lawsuit against JK Rowling and Elon Musk, if anything? If Khelif has testicles (and is hence a man/male by any reasonable definition of either term), how can Khelif claim JK Rowling defamed Khelif by describing Khelif as such?

That is not the definition of woman the courts will use. In the UK especially, truth is not a defense against libel.

I thought Khelif filed the suit in France.

I've only seen other people ask this question, but haven't seen an answer. I'd imagine you're right, but I'm not a lawyer.

Just because one owns an Al Qaeda training manual does not mean that one has been radicalized by Islamists. Al Qaeda knows a lot about terrorism, so if you want to do terrorism it might be a good idea to read their manual even if one's political ideology has nothing to do with Islamism.

So would you say it is unlikely that the dude got radicalized by Islamists, or are you just pointing out this is not a smoking gun? The latter claim is not interesting, as it's only a matter of time until it gets resolved now that there's a full-blown terrorism investigation. But I don't think this should be an argument that allows people to throw a wet blanket on the conversation around immigration and Islam.

The problem with this is that there is a very clear record of condemning people for their thought crimes on this exact basis.

You can't kick a non-white person and call them a slur without making the attack racially motivated.

You can't create a right wing political movement whilst owning ethno-based political material without being labeled a neo nazi terrorist organization.

By the very same token, you can't stab children in the face whilst owning an Al Qaeda training manual without being labeled a muslim terrorist.

Agreed, but the BBC was reporting there were 'no known links to Islam', presumably after police had searched the guy's house and found the ricin and Al Qaeda manual. At the same time, police had said they weren't currently treating it as a terrorist incident.

There was a huge loss in trust of the government to accurately report what they knew about the attack when they knew it. The latest excuse seems to be that reporting information about motives early 'might impact the legal case against the attacker', with no same standard being held to the Prime Minister quickly painting rioters as 'Far Right Extremists' with a sweeping broad brush prior to their trials.

In an attempt to mitigate ethnic tension in the short term via narrative control, the UK government has lost long term credibility in their reporting of future incidents.

Anyone that wants more information on this topic should check out the /r/unitedkingdom subreddit and search for 'southport stabbings'. Huge culture-war flareup over the last few days with some accounts seemingly doing damage control for the govt's early narrative.

Obligatory Election post!

The US election is finalized tomorrow. Who do you think will win, Trump or Harris? Polymarket currently has Trump at about 58% and Harris at 42%, but these things can change on a dime!

Relatedly, do you think there will be issues certifying the election results? Which side do you think will struggle more if they lose?

And of course - do you think we'll see outright political violence? I certainly hope not, but it's good to be prepared.

Overall, how was your experience of this election? Did it seem noticeably different from any recent elections in any particular way?

Who do you think will win, Trump or Harris?

If I had to bet, I guess I'd bet on Trump, but as a foreigner looking at the situation only through the Internet, I don't feel particularly confident.

Relatedly, do you think there will be issues certifying the election results? Which side do you think will struggle more if they lose?

Stranger things have happened I suppose, but it would be weird for Dems to do it after 4 years of handwringing over voter-fraud conspiracies. Don't think Trump will try anything either given how the last time turned out, unless they'll find a smoking gun.

And of course - do you think we'll see outright political violence? I certainly hope not, but it's good to be prepared.

My impression is people are tired. Maybe some half-heated protests. Maybe a lone-wolf attack. But nothing mass-scale, not even a repeat of J6.

Overall, how was your experience of this election? Did it seem noticeably different from any recent elections in any particular way?

It was bizarrely vibes based. No actual clash of ideas or policies, either from the candidates, or from their supporters.

It was Bizarrely vibes based. No actual clash of ideas or policies, either from the candidates, or from their supporters.

Yeah agreed on this. The almost complete lack of genuine policy proposals, especially from the Harris camp, was shocking to me.

Like... I get that vibes are more important but usually there's at least the veneer of caring about the object level policies. This time it seemed that veneer was totally absent.

The almost complete lack of genuine policy proposals, especially from the Harris camp, was shocking to me.

'Who, whom?' is the only policy statement they need.

Stranger things have happened I suppose, but it would be weird for Dems to do it after 4 years of handwringing over voter-fraud conspiracies. Don't think Trump will try anything either given how the last time turned out, unless they'll find a smoking gun.

Scoop: Some top Dems won't commit to certifying a Trump win

Words don't actually have meaning to politicians. They are just mouth sounds they make to keep their job.

I don't have an issue with only promising to certify 'fair' elections in hindsight, because that is Trump's current attitude too.

If the Democrats refuse to certify Trump I think its more likely to be due to claiming Trump is unqualified to hold office (for some reason) than voter fraud allegations. But don't be surprised if Trump wins and they try and do a similar challenge to what Trump did but somehow its preserving democracy instead of destroying democracy.

I’ll take that latter bet.

I don’t think they’ll resist certifying unless there’s a Bush v. Gore level of doubt.

Stranger things have happened I suppose, but it would be weird for Dems to do it after 4 years of handwringing over voter-fraud conspiracies

Democrats have absolutely no problem with threading that needle. They’ll just claim their claims to be real and republican’s to be false.

As I see people proclaiming a Harris landslide, I'm pretty sure it means the end of our country if that happens. And yeah, there is the whole "They'll flood swing states with illegals and then grant them all amnesty" angle. But for me it's just the fact that they, be it big media, three letter agencies, George Soros, etc, were able to brainwash the country into voting for a rando with a 19% approval rating with zero democratic input or vetting during a primary. If that succeeds, it's over, we're no longer a democracy. If people will rubber stamp whoever the CIA tells them to elect, we're fucked.

Eh, I'm not nearly as doom and gloom as you. FWIW I don't think America has been a real democracy since at least FDR, if not earlier, lol.

I agree that the deep state agencies' grasp on the political landscape is troubling. I get the sense that now that big tech has gotten more of an understanding of the situation though, there will be a realignment of power. Political or otherwise.

"Former" CIA staffs most of the moderation teams. How much of a collaboration this is I don't know. Which is to say, I don't know if they were invited in, or sent in, or both. But IMHO you should treat big tech as an extension of the CIA.

Personally, I was invited. Zorba had to wait for my badge and gun to come in the mail before he could give me any permissions, though.

You think that’s bad, imagine the headache it must have been to get @self_made_human onboarded and his gun transported into rural Scotland.

Five Eyes collaboration made it quite easy tbh, especially when they figured out I could write a legal script for all the crack cocaine I was asked to smuggle in!

Damn, the CIA’s gonna do the same thing to the British blacks that they did to the American blacks… 😢

This website hardly qualifies as "big tech" sufficient to be dunking on Coil

Do you have even something like even an InfoWars citation on for this? I've never heard this before (and, plainly, don't believe it). I know some of the moderation folks at YouTube etc. They're the last people who would work at the CIA - most are art history major from Vassar types ... which, yes, brings up its own concerns about the censorship. But, this idea that we're already at KGB levels of information-gov't integration seems truly weirdo.

Facebook, Twitter stocked with ex-FBI, CIA officials in key posts

WASHINGTON — Dozens of former national security officials have gone to work for Facebook and Twitter after leaving government service, raising concerns about the influence of their onetime agencies over the social media giants.

At Twitter alone, at least eight former FBI agents work at the company’s so-called “trust” and “security” divisions — including its product policy manager Greg Anderson, who previously worked on “psychological operations” at the National Security Council, The Post has learned. Another is Matthew Williams, the company’s co-lead of its Trust and Safety department who spent more that 15 years in intelligence with the agency.

The discovery of the DC-to-Silicon Valley pipeline comes amid an outcry over revelations that the FBI influenced Twitter to suppress The Post’s account over its reporting on Hunter Biden’s overseas business interests in October 2020 and has regularly demanded specific accounts and tweets be banned.

The irony if you never hearing about this, because the FBI/CIA has such control in the first place should be a punch in the gut.

Thanks for the source. Learning has occurred.

should be a punch in the gut.

Wow, like, damn, dude, you're so based and right. I'll go take my midwit self to the euthanasia trough ASAP.

I have terrible news for you about the board members of Euthanasia Trough Ltd

What? After that partnership with Nihlism, Inc. I thought the synergies were leading to way more onboarded users - OHHHH, I see it now.

Well, I disagree. The primary driver for Democratic turnout in this election is Trump and abortion and none of them rely on Harris being anything other than not-Trump, you don’t need a deep-state conspiracy for her to be a viable candidate. Also I disagree that CIA brainwashed people to vote for her, like, I don’t even know where to begin with that.

So back in 1908, when there weren't any primaries, the US wasn't a democracy? Only in the 70s, when binding national primaries were first implemented, did it become one?

Elites always win. This isn't new.

Well no, the big issue is that the Harris-Walz campaign position is that the first amendment doesn’t protect anything they disagree with.

it's just the fact that they, be it big media, three letter agencies, George Soros, etc, were able to brainwash the country

If that succeeds, it's over, we're no longer a democracy. If people will rubber stamp whoever the CIA tells them to

This post is beyond goofy. It's like a perfect personification of the Dale Gribble voters Hanania rails against.

Do you have any evidence the CIA or George Soros is "brainwashing" people to vote for Harris?

I am starting to theorize that Prediction markets will have a bit of a bias inherent to them on certain issues, given that the participants are generally pro-capitalist and like/trust markets. This probably broadly correlates with certain beliefs and preferences which gently nudge how they trade to put the result a point or two off from 'reality.'

Polymarket might reinforce this issue, being crypto-based.

And of course - do you think we'll see outright political violence?

Yes. Do I think it will be on a scale large enough to warrant alarm? Not sure. Probably not. Trump wins we're seeing some cities get huge protests, some of which will turn into rioting and looting. Kamala wins and I'm not sure where the violence pops up, but there'll be some.

Overall, how was your experience of this election? Did it seem noticeably different from any recent elections in any particular way?

It has been miserable for me in that the candidates we got would probably have lost handily to almost any of the respective opposing Party's other frontrunners.

I am starting to theorize that Prediction markets will have a bit of a bias inherent to them on certain issues, given that the participants are generally pro-capitalist and like/trust markets.

I think there is too, although I haven't spent as much time looking at this bias as others. Smells like an opportunity.

I have think it will be a Trump victory. Lately the attacks by the Harris campaign have seemed weak, desperate and inconsistent signaling a campaign that knows it doesn't look good. I remember back in September there was a big push for the 'Republicans are weird' angle and there was much agreement even on this site that it was devastatingly effective. Despite the alleged effectiveness it seems to have been dropped pretty quickly and by late-October we were back to the usual 'Trump is a fascist dictator existential threat', which to me indicated that the 'weird' angle was actually pretty ineffective and largely astroturfed. Latching onto Trump's Liz Cheney comments seems incredibly weak too, not only is it a blatantly dishonest misinterpretation of his words (this is typical) but it is supposed to win people over through their sympathy for...Liz Cheney of all people? Fundamentally Kamala Harris has always been unpopular as she got an absolutely negligible amount of votes in the 2020 primary. All the enthusiasm I saw on reddit in the wake of her being chosen felt forced and inauthentic. She isn't popular and Trump is more normalized than ever. Seems like an easy one to call.

As for rioting and looting, I don't think there will be much at all. I don't remember any substantial riots in 2016 and as I said, Trump is more normalized now than he was then by far.

I finally got Robinhood event contracts working and put down a trivial amount of money on Harris. I find it hard to believe that after January 6, Trump is more popular than ever. I have a feeling that the movement reflects how pollsters are adjusting for their big misses in 2016 and 2020, not a change in sentiment on the ground.

I mean, it helps that Jan 6 has been extensively relitigated, and found to not be what it was at first sold as. No police officers were killed, down from initial claims of 3-6. There is extensive footage of capital police just waving grandmas into the capital, contra the sizzle reel that the media put together. Trump is consistently reiterated that he told people to march "Peacefully and patriotically". The FBI has never disclosed how many agent (agent provocateur?) they had in the crowd, but the former head of the Capital Police claims his agency was excluded from briefings and intentionally kept in the dark about it. In fact, the former head of the Capital Police contradicts many "official" claims with his narrative of the events of that day. And effectively the only person willing to get his side of the story was Tucker Carlson, who was coincidentally fired before the episode aired. So he interviewed the guy again when he went independent.

So yeah, a lot of people are now willing to overlook January 6.

Hell, a lot of people are motivated by it because a from the outside it appears that many ordinary people were put through the wringer and many are still in prison or will be heading to prison over it.

That was probably the biggest misstep. Making a big deal of out J6 was one thing, but slamming people with no criminal records with prison time reads as pure political payback.

This is the one time it would have been helpful to exercise some restraint and leniency, but it'd be hard to square that with the narrative that the republic was inches from being overthrown.

Normies don’t give two shits about J6.

My personal prediction is a 270-268 Harris win, with the Democrats taking PA and all three great lakes states by ~1% in each case.

This is not a policy election. It's a GOTV and political ratfucking election, and the DNC has massive operational edge in both.

This is a low confidence prediction.

Electoral college - 80% Trump
Popular vote - Cointoss

Polls show a close race, but pollsters underestimated Trump support in both 2016 and 2020, when he was supposed to lose soundly. (In October 2020, poll aggregators were showing him down by 10 points nationally.) I see a lot of people arguing "surely they've adjusted now", but if anything, my impression is the media has been trying to hyperstition a Kamala victory, and I wouldn't put it past polling organizations to be part of that attempt. Reports of a close race encourage turnout from an otherwise divided and demoralized Democratic base. The timing of the sudden Kamala swing in polls feels artificial.

Riots/violent coup attempts - 10%

For either party. The level of passion from Democrats is lower, and the sort of Republicans who would consider staging a January 6th again will, I think, have been spooked by the DOJ's level of political repression in the last four years.

Relatedly, do you think there will be issues certifying the election results? Which side do you think will struggle more if they lose?

Neither side will contest the election. Republicans will bark about illegal votes if they lose, but not bite. Meanwhile, Democrats will kvetch about the electoral college if they lose despite a popular vote victory, but otherwise stand down.

MAGA Republicans will be devastated if they lose this one, woke Democrats merely irritated.

I agree with your assessment that a repeat of Jan 6 is unlikely but I don't think it's because people are cowed, I think it's because the actions taken by the "rioters" didn't spark the admiration of their own side that progressive protests do. Begging someone else to do something about the problem, burning it all down because you don't like the hand you are dealt: conservatives, with their emphasis on personal responsibility and an internal locus of control, just don't resonate with these courses of action the same way progressives do.

For rank and file conservatives, the way Jan 6 was handled by the DoJ is a glaring injustice, but the rioters themselves are not heros. I think they are regarded as, at best, well-intentioned idiots and buffoons, and at worst, feds and their dupes working to supply the establishment with casus belli for extreme action to stamp out their political opponents.

Reports of a close race encourage turnout from an otherwise divided and demoralized Democratic base.

Maybe true but a) this functions both ways, so pollsters could, under this theory, equally be great polling results for Harris in order to avoid complacency, and more importantly b) the differences here are tiny (well within any MoE) between a close EV race and a popular vote tossup delivering a Trump victory, only one or two points. Polls can't pick up those tiny margins anyway, and the far more parsimonious explanations for polling predicting tight races in key states is herding - but once again this has no particular valence so could be hiding good results for either Harris or Trump.

finalized tomorrow

Oh man, I wish. Back in the good old days, I think (?) we used to get same day election results, but not anymore.

Even barring the real possibility that this gets tied up in the courts for weeks, or even months, I don't expect a same day result. Last election was held on Tuesday November 3, but results were not confidently projected until November 7, and not called until November 19. Per Wikipedia:

The general election was held on November 3, with voters directly selecting their state's members to the U.S. Electoral College. On November 7, most national media organizations projected that Biden had clinched enough electoral votes to be named the U.S. president-elect

More detailed timeline from 2020:

State Electoral
votes		 AP race projection First votes reported
Arizona 11 Nov. 4 at 2:51 am Nov. 3 at 10:02 pm
Georgia 16 Nov. 19 at 7:58 pm Nov. 3 at 7:20 pm
Michigan 16 Nov. 4 at 5:58 pm Nov. 3 at 8:08 pm
North Carolina 15 Nov. 13 at 3:49 pm Nov. 3 at 7:42 pm
Nevada 6 Nov. 7 at 12:13 pm Nov. 3 at 11:41 pm
Pennsylvania 20 Nov. 7 at 11:25 am Nov. 3 at 8:09 pm
Wisconsin 10 Nov. 4 at 2:16 pm Nov. 3 at 9:07 pm

I think Trump will win. I think he's being underestimated again, and low propensity voters and undecideds are splitting for him. The Democrats found the one politician less charismatic than Hillary Clinton. But then again, I also believed that he'd win against Biden, so I'm curbing my expectations this time around. But that's what I'm reading the vibes right now.

No idea. I'm just posting this as a reminder, mainly for myself, that no matter what narrative of inevitability will be drawn from this election, it sure didn't look inevitable the day before.

Good on you! Yeah just judging by the comments, it definitely seems pretty split so far.

Who do you think will win, Trump or Harris?

Harris, because we'll get as much turnout from the living-impaired voter demographic as necessary to ensure she wins.

Relatedly, do you think there will be issues certifying the election results?

No, because Republicans lack the wherewithal to block certification no matter how obviously fraudulent the results. We could have North Korean election results, and people will just throw up their hands, grumble, and plan to vote harder in 2028.

And of course - do you think we'll see outright political violence?

Only if Trump somehow manages to miraculously overcome the margin of fraud — in which case, we will see strong attempts to block certification. We'll also Trump given a lengthy jail sentence in New York, which left-leaning state law enforcement — and possibly the FBI — will attempt to arrest him so he can be extradited to serve said sentence before he can be sworn in. Expect large, organized uprisings to stop the Fascist takeover.

Harris, because we'll get as much turnout from the living-impaired voter demographic as necessary to ensure she wins.

Granting the possibility that it would be easy to cast ballots in the name of dead people, wouldn’t this type of fraud be trivial to prove after the fact? Who voted in any given election is public information. Select a random cohort of voters, then check if they are still alive. Did anyone do this for 2020?

wouldn’t this type of fraud be trivial to prove after the fact?

No, because AIUI, it's literally illegal to try to obtain the evidence necessary to prove it. (Edit: I think /u/The_Nybbler has posted comments here to this effect.)

To again quote "L" at Jim's:

It literally would not matter if there wasn’t a single genuine voter for Kamala in any of those states. The vote is whatever the people counting the vote say it is. Guess who those people are?

By the way, there’s not a single mechanism or institution that would ever support any kind of challenge to the results. Musk can say whatever he wants, in the short time he has before prison, and it doesn’t mean anything.

…

Again, doesn’t matter if they exclusively counted votes while utterly shitfaced. You have no institutional means to stop them saying the total is whatever we want and no ability to use force. You’re done, simple as.

[Emphasis added]

I think it varies state-by-state. Here is what voter data Pennsylvania says you can get for $20.00:

PA Full Voter Export

As provided by 25 Pa.C.S. Section 1404(b)(1) (relating to Public Information Lists), as well as the SURE Regulations at 4 Pa. Code Section 184.14(b) (relating to Public Information Lists), the Department of State will provide the Full Voter Export List to requestors.

This version of the Public Information List is a full export of all voters in the county and contains the following fields: voter ID number, name, sex, date of birth, date registered, status (i.e., active or inactive), date status last changed, party, residential address, mailing address, polling place, date last voted, all districts in which the voter votes (i.e., congressional, legislative, school district, etc.), voter history, and date the voter’s record was last changed.

The cost of the Full Voter Export list is 20.00. Upon successful payment an email will be sent to the provided email address.

This data is current as of 11/04/2024 and will be refreshed on 11/11/2024 at midnight

Why can some election integrity guy on Twitter not post TODAY the cryptographic hash of a pseudorandom algorithm that he will use to pull a sample of registered Pennsylvania voters who cast a ballot in the 2024 election to manually check for dead people? This wouldn’t be like, super easy, but surely someone out of the 25% of the country who thinks Trump won in 2020 has both the skills and the will to do it.

Supposedly anyone with a few bucks can file a FOIA request too. In reality you need a team of lawyers to force the government to comply with it's own laws. Which is why only large news organizations get any information out of FOIA anymore.

And that's more or less how it's played out over the last 4 years with all the litigation that is still ongoing from the 2020 election.

I bet on Trump after the assassination attempt. I don’t think anything since then has really changed his fundamentals. Harris is a significantly better candidate than Mecha-Biden, but I’m not sure how much that affects swing states. High confidence she wins the popular vote, though. Trump enthusiasts are wildly uncalibrated on this.

Democrats are unlikely to fight certification. I guess there’s a possibility of a Bush v. Gore cock-up leading to a serious legal challenge? Not the “throw shit at the wall” approach of the Kraken suits. Trump found those by making it a show of personal loyalty. Harris can’t and won’t command that kind of initiative. She’ll give a polite concession speech, and if she has to retract it like Gore, she will.

Trump supporters will pitch a fit if he loses. I was at the local gun store this weekend; it’s become fashionable to say things like “winning the vote is one thing, making it through the count is another.” A Democrat victory is presumed illegitimate. Trump will continue to pander to this sentiment, refusing to admit defeat. Again. That won’t actually lead to violence, mind you; Texas’ continued lean red will satisfy their honor.

In summary, there’s next to no chance of organized violence by anyone. It is possible that a Trump victory leads to riots in Democratic cities, but there would be zero chance (or expectation) of that changing outcomes. It’d be violence for frustration’s sake. Conversely, there’s near zero chance of random pro-Trump violence. Coordination on the level of 1/6 is more likely but still implausible. Nothing more complex will occur.

My overall experience? Pretty unpleasant. The discourse has been terrible and the vibes rancid. I am incredibly disappointed at how many intelligent, articulate users on this forum alone gave up all pretense of rigor.

I didn’t vote in 2012. Every Presidential election since then has been a referendum on Donald Fucking Trump. I’m ready for him to be out of the news. He doesn’t deserve to be rewarded.

I voted for Harris, and so should you.

Texas’ continued lean red will satisfy their honor.

They’ll show up to some Texas nationalist movement events and then stop, most likely.

In summary, there’s next to no chance of organized violence by anyone. It is possible that a Trump victory leads to riots in Democratic cities

Democrat militias carrying out organized violence doesn't count as organized violence? They get a complete pass on rioting and burning as much as they want? Why? Why the passive "leads to" instead of "the left will"?

Militias? Sure, that’d count. Those are awfully few and far between.

I don’t believe I’ve given anyone a pass on looting and/or burning.

And I use the passive because I don’t believe “the left” is an agent.

It is possible that, after a Trump victory, some morons at a Mostly Peaceful™ protest go burn down the local 7-11. I don’t consider that organized violence any more than I consider the Charlottesville debacle organized.

Militias? Sure, that’d count. Those are awfully few and far between.

If we define "militia" as "organized to the point that the people committing the violence have defined, articulatable responsibilities in managing how the violence is implemented", that doesn't seem rare to me over the last decade. "you three hit people, these two "intervene" once you've gotten a few licks in, these two are on medic duty, you guys run interference with anyone trying to record the action..." I've been observing something like that pattern since 2015/2016 at the latest.

Who do you think will win, Trump or Harris?

I do not know.

Relatedly, do you think there will be issues certifying the election results?

If Trump wins, I place an 75% probability that Rep. Jamie Raskin carries through on his implied threat to not certify the election results, as he tried to do in 2016. I doubt that he can get a critical mass of democrats to join up with the effort, however.

do you think we'll see outright political violence?

I would not be surprised if there were extensive protests which degenerated into limited looting sprees in major cities in the event of a Trump victory. I would be surprised if more than 5 people nationwide were killed.

Overall, how was your experience of this election? Did it seem noticeably different from any recent elections in any particular way?

The media bias was cranked up to 11, and the candidate quality (with the pleasing exception of JD Vance) was through the floor.

I doubt that he can get a critical mass of democrats to join up with the effort, however.

Yeah, the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act's standards are high: 20 Senators and 87 Representatives is not pocket change. I'd expect some sort of symbolic act anyway, but I'd be unpleasantly surprised if they were able to pick up even half that.

((Of course, in 2020 I thought Red Tribes never rioted; there's a lot of space for unpleasant surprise.))

Low confidence predictions on the swing states- NC, Georgia, Arizona: Trump

Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada: tossup

Michigan, New Hampshire: Harris

Downballot, I think r’s take the senate but democrats get a mildly less restive caucus.

I expect trump to allege fraud in swing states he loses. His lawsuits will probably go better for him this time but still not succeed. If trump wins the election there will be a few protests in deep blue cities which turn violent because of retards, but no wide scale rioting. I expect protestors in blue cities in red states to get the jackboots on them if they violate some pissant technicality.

If Trump loses the overall election the majority of the R caucus will vote against certifying again, but there won’t be another January 6.

It's a good thing I'm not an American, because I'd be driven to despair by the choice of candidates in every election since Obama and Romney. Though my mild disappointment in a Trump win would be even more mildly assuaged by Vance becoming more likely to be elected himself in the future. I like smart people being in power, even if they have to ride Trump's coat tails on the way there.

I do recall when too much time on Reddit had given me minor TDS, I remember my gut dropping when I heard the news he'd been elected back in the day (I was very concerned about him kicking off a nuclear war with the Chinese). I very quickly learned that was an overreaction, mostly by becoming a regular on the old Motte and being exposed to more reasonable (or at least varied) viewpoints than the Reddit mean.

Anyway, I'm mostly ambivalent between the two, or at least I can't pick one I think is strictly superior. If I had to bet, I'd pick Trump going largely off the prediction markets, it's too close to call from what I can tell otherwise.

Trump, not because of the polls (too much herding means they are likely wrong in some way) or because of the match up, but because of the fundamentals which I think outweigh most other things. Inflation has hit pretty hard (even if that was likely to have been similar had Trump won in 2020, that doesn't matter to voters), the Democrats do not have the benefit of an incumbent, and the Senate races up for grabs heavily favor Republicans. Therefore like 2016 regardless of who the candidates are, the Republican should be favored to win.

The only headwinds are abortion, which seem to have driven turnout for Democrats in mid-terms and special elections and the like, and that Trump while popular with his base is also unpopular with others, even sometimes those not out and out Democrats. However I don't think those are enough to prevail over "It's the economy stupid", but they will probably make it closer than it would otherwise be.

Elseworlds prediction: A generic Republican would out-perform Trump. The fundamentals favor the Republican candidate enough and Trump is polarizing enough that any random Republican carries almost everyone Trump would have in this circumstance plus picks up some of the wishy-washy Democrats and Independents who are unhappy with the economy but also really dislike Trump. Sure his base would be less enthusiastic about Jeb 3.0 or non-Mormon Romney or whoever but they are still being hit by inflation and economic circumstance, so it is extremely unlikely they are a loss overall, and picking up even a few thousand votes in purple states is likely more valuable.

Elseworlds prediction: A generic Republican would out-perform Trump.

Is there a single generic Republican running for any other office who is ahead of Trump? If there is even one, I would be surprised. If that's the case or even if this isn't a long list, it should be very difficult to make this argument. Would you vote for a generic Republican over empty-suit generic Democrat?

Is this some pure counterfactual which requires the generic Republican to run only for President?

People do not like the GOP brand. Substantial portions of Trump's voter base do not like the GOP brand. He gets them to go to the polls and then they mostly vote for downticket GOP. Absent Trump being on the ballot, they don't show up and the GOP loses. It is seemingly only in these spaces among people who are mostly disaffected blue tribers, if even that, who claim these sorts of things.

Sure his base would be less enthusiastic about Jeb 3.0

Trump's base wouldn't bother to show up to the polls and vote at all because they're not GOP voters which is why the GOP managed an anemic majority despite a R+6 general ballot in the 2022 midterms

They don't have to be GOP voters with the current economic woes. But even without Trump the GOP has a realignment which will last beyond Trump (see DeSantis et al). The GOP post Trump is not the same as the GOP pre-Trump.

So you don't know of a single generic Republican who is currently ahead of Trump?

But even without Trump the GOP has a realignment which will last beyond Trump (see DeSantis et al)

Oh yes, we got the primaries to see what the GOP would default to without Trump and that "generic Republican" would be far behind Trump. It would look a lot like the Senate, where despite Trump still in politics and having heavy effect (and threat), the Senate votes to fund wars, pass awful immigration bills, pass awful funding bills, etc.

DeSantis, perhaps with the best chance among them, would be trailing far behind Trump's numbers because he's uncharismatic and is unappealing in the battleground states. His stated chances on abortion in his train wreck in Iowa would be hard for him to outrun. If we can guess what a Trump-less DeSantis campaign would look like, we have that train wreck for guidance.

The GOP has a near zero GOTV operation despite spending a billion dollars on a system to do it. Without Trump, voters do not show up to the polls and a generic Republican would rely on groundgame to do that, but there is none.

Would you vote for this generic Republican like Nikki Haley over generic Democrat? How many generic Republicans have you voted for?

I've never voted for a generic anybody, because they don't exist. They're a theoretical comparator. I have voted for both left and right wing actual candidates though, both at local and national levels.

Being behind Trump in a primary against Trump does not mean that you would run behind a Democrat in the general.

Most people vote for parties not candidates, the impact of charisma is not zero, but it is massively overrated in my opinion. Fundamentals and political coalitions are the building blocks of political success. Charisma is at best a tie breaker when fundamentals are balanced. Trump won in 2016 largely because he was a Republican following two Democratic terms with a not great economy. A generic Republican probably would have won, though with a different voter spread.

GOTV is also overrated in my opinion (and I say that as someone who has organized such things in the past). Even our best internal measures showed it had very little impact. But politicians and political consultants like myself (albeit retired now) are reluctant to stop them, because what if this is the one time it does make a difference. No-one wants to be the one who broke from tradition and got hammered because of it. Plus of course consultants and strategists can rake in big bucks for organizing them.

As an example Rishi Sunak's Tories got beaten by Kier Starmer's Labour, and would have if they were running a re-animated Maggie Thatcher, Tony Blair converted to the Tories or an Angelic Winston Churchill descended from Heaven (ok well maybe not the last one!) Because the economy was shot and the Tories were in charge at the time.

"It's the economy stupid" is the dominating factor. Candidates, GOTV, scandals, and the like are very secondary. In a bad economy (defined by how people feel, not actual measures) the incumbent party will be punished regardless of almost anything else. And inflation and living costs have been feeling very bad for large chunks of America right now.

Not-Democrat is going to be enough to get a lot of votes this electoral season, regardless of the candidates in question I think.

Being behind Trump in a primary against Trump does not mean that you would run behind a Democrat in the general.

I'm sorry I wasn't more clear, but what I meant to say is these generic Republicans, the many nameless candidates no one knows, are all running behind Trump and have been for months with that difference finally closing in the remaining weeks of the election. We can go down a list of every generic GOP running for Senate, House, etc., and we can see they're behind Trump in the same exact polls by significant margins.

Most people vote for parties not candidates, the impact of charisma is not zero, but it is massively overrated in my opinion

I honestly don't understand how this is a defensible position. Were all the GOP registered voters voting for the party when they picked a 1990s Democrat reality TV star from NYC? Was the Obama wave in 2008 in primary voting for party? Was him winning a landslide in 2008 due to people just voting Democrat? Was him beating Romney despite 4 years of incredibly unpopular policies just people voting for party?

Kamala is a good counterexample, but I think she's the exception which proves the rule. As long as you have every institution, nearly every major media conglomerate, the government bureaucracy itself trying to win you an election, as well as those major media institutions essentially running your campaign while you hide, I agree that charisma is likely overrated.

Trump won in 2016 largely because he was a Republican following two Democratic terms with a not great economy.

Trump won in 2016 by ~50,000 votes across 5 states. The other primary candidates who would have likely been the alternatives would have lost badly because they would have picked the wrong topics to focus on and they weren't going to flip rustbelt states which were required to win the presidency for the first time in the generation with another Romney 2.0. A guy like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush wouldn't have even won in Ohio demonstrated by Romney loss there in 2012.

As an example Rishi Sunak's Tories got beaten by Kier Starmer's Labour, and would have if they were running a re-animated Maggie Thatcher, Tony Blair converted to the Tories or an Angelic Winston Churchill descended from Heaven (ok well maybe not the last one!) Because the economy was shot and the Tories were in charge at the time.

I honestly don't follow UK elections or know much about them at all. I barely know the parties, but didn't Reform UK, a party started in 2024, cannibalize much of the Tory vote? Do you think an uncharismatic rando would have been able to accomplish something like that? I doubt it.

"It's the economy stupid" is the dominating factor. Candidates, GOTV, scandals, and the like are very secondary.

Institutions and media are able to gaslight people into thinking pretty much anything within a wide band for long enough for the economy to not be the controlling factor.

Without GOTV, you just lose. Without registration machines, you just lose. In my experience, they're the necessary foundations to win at all. There are ways to substitute for them, like having a guy so charismatic he drives voters to the polls.

Trump won in 2016 by ~50,000 votes across 5 states. The other primary candidates who would have likely been the alternatives would have lost badly because they would have picked the wrong topics to focus on and they weren't going to flip rustbelt states which were required to win the presidency for the first time in the generation with another Romney 2.0. A guy like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush wouldn't have even won in Ohio demonstrated by Romney loss there in 2012.

But would Romney have lost in 2016, after a two term Democratic president? That is the question. The pattern is that after two terms the leadership usually swings. So yes my contention is that Romney probably would have won Ohio in 2016. 2012 was a different election with different fundamentals.

My experience with being in politics is that people vastly overrate the ability of the media and politicians to gaslight the people. At best we hope to find something that resonates then run hard on it, but we have much less power to actually persuade people than is commonly believed. I know, it used to be my job. It isn't Trump's charisma that drove his win, because he inspires hate in about as many people as he does adoration. Look at Brexit, despite the media going hard, it still happened. The people have their own opinions formed by their social groupings much more than driven by the media or politicians in my direct experience.

Put it this way if we had two boring uncharismatic, candidates in this election, with the economy as it is, with Biden being dumped for Boring Dem 2.0, who would you put your money on? I submit the smart money would be on Republican 2.0 all else being equal. High inflation, low economic confidence, some push back on woke stuff like trans, a one term President who can't run for a second term because he can barely cope with a debate. Setting aside who is running, the fundamentals I think lean Republican.

Yes, Romney would have lost after a two term Democratic president. Fundamentals were worse for Democrats in 2012 than the were in 2016. The national registrations imbalances were worse. The economy was quite a bit worse with very unpopular policies still in recent memory. I agree people vote for parties when they don't know the candidates, but far more people know the top of the ticket than the down ballot. We're talking about the top of the ticket here.

My experience with being in politics is that people vastly overrate the ability of the media and politicians to gaslight the people.

we had a 3 year long 24/7 news cycle into a hoax about Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia to win 2016; the media is regularly engaging in a cycle of throwing stuff out to see if it lands with a portion of the population who want it to be true and then they run with it

if the media crunchdown doesn't work then they rely on goldfish memory to drop it and move on to the next accusation cycle

if you're trying to hit every ball, your batting average may plummet, but eventually you find something which has a sufficient amount of nugget of truth or interest group to hang onto and then use it to gaslight large portions of the population

you shred your credibility when you do this and we've seen that in hyperdrive for 8 or 9 years, and yet the media has incredible power in framing any discussion, controlling any perception of reality and we see that in the way the regime tries so hard to control information and places of discussion, and set the outside limits of acceptable beliefs

you see it in the collusion hoax to the covid hysteria to the BLM religious revival

At this point, I think this Great Alternative Generic Republican theory is functionally unfalsifiable; fundamentals were worse, the GOP in 2016 had an even worse policy on immigration until Trump showed up, their trade/industrial policy was to ship it to china and suck more money into wall street, the possible alternative candidates polled worse in must win states in the midwest, and more, and yet this belief survives.

I'm not saying this particular to you, but it's always funny to watch the cycle in these sorts of forums: Trump is an idiot and buffoon, he will fail miserably, and never succeed at anything, but also once he does win or do anything (win presidency, get SCOTUS picks, overturn Roe, etc., etc.,) actually it wasn't that difficult and also any nonTrump generic GOP would have done it anyway (and probably would have been more successful!).

More comments

Rishi Sunak's Tories got beaten by Kier Starmer's Labour, and would have if they were running a re-animated Maggie Thatcher, Tony Blair converted to the Tories or an Angelic Winston Churchill descended from Heaven (ok well maybe not the last one!) Because the economy was shot and the Tories were in charge at the time.

I don’t think this is true at all. Rishi Sunak lost because he was a useless man in a suit who talked tough while doing very little and firing everyone who tried to follow through on the rhetoric. He alienated centrists who split to Labour and right-wingers who split to Reform.

We’re talking about a man who thought that resurrecting David Cameron from corrupt ignominy and extending compulsory maths were political triumphs.

Kier Starmer was and remains an incredibly weak candidate: a proven liar who literally couldn’t open his mouth on policy without either scandalising his party or the nation.

Even dragged down by a decade of mismanagement, almost anyone could have followed the Johnson strategy of pushing for change, getting foiled, and using that to push for a bigger mandate. To put it frankly, Sunak didn’t have the guts and he spent two years fiddling, losing not only his chance to accomplish anything but his ability to credibly promise to do something next time round.

I'm a lifelong democrat voter who would vote Haley, but I do think it's up in the air how much better she'd do. Trump does energize Democrats too.

I think Trump will win. Weak confidence.

If Harris wins, I think we'll see a serious attempt at immigration amnesty within her first term. Moderate confidence.

If Harris wins, I think Trump will probably receive a prison sentence. Moderate confidence.

If Harris wins, I think Trump will make some attempt to challenge the legitimacy of the election. Moderate confidence.

Over the next year, polling will measure significant decreases in trust in the Federal government, the media, and Elite institutions generally. Extremely high confidence.

Posts I didn't get to prior to the election, in no particular order:

  • Retrospective on whether Hunter Biden was selling access to Joe, and on whether Joe Biden was cooperating with the sale, how this was investigated by the authorities and the press, and how we talked about it here over time.

  • Retrospective on Jan 6th, comparing the arguments we had on the day to the information that's come out since.

  • Path-Dependence as an expression of institutional decay: Public Trust in elections and institutions, Democratic Party presidential candidate selection, hopefully other examples.

Dem win, as I've been predicting since the biden-trump debate.
Literally nothing matters in this country except the institutions, and they are now as dominated by the ruling party as anything in China. And like in China, any apparent loosening of total control is just a slipup caused by intra-party feuding, like the Connecticut voting fraud case where someone got caught dropping off a garbage bag full of ballots for the wrong democrat in the primaries.

The real difference in this election is how little discussion there's been. I haven't felt the need to debate whatsoever, because it's as pointless as arguing with chatgpt. "Issues" don't matter, reality doesn't matter, only framing and who holds the megaphone matters.
Why get caught up playing the game of "that's misinformation! Well, maybe it's true but it's still malinformation! and anyway you're banned for Hate Speech, read the room." You can see all the moves coming 20 steps ahead, being right in retrospect doesn't matter because you still publicly lost the social power game against the guy who demonstrated his power to rig it, and the only winning move is not to play.

A nonexhausitive list of examples: violent crime & shoplifting rates, the state of the economy, inflation, #s of illegal migrants and the very existence of government programs importing them, Biden's senility, assassins' motivations, "woke and CRT doesn't exist it's all in Republicans' imaginations," Biden's nuclear crossdresser stealing women's underwear, there's no censorship on social media you're just banned for being a bad person, we must criminalize residential school mass grave genocide Denial, leftists don't support Hamas at all you're crazy for thinking so, "yeah well you're weird for noticing!". I could go on and on.
The people lying about all of these didn't lose anything by lying. They actually beat you by demonstrating that they can maintain the lie longer than the truth can stay solvent and then bury it in a ditch afterwards.

Like Scott said about arguing with Vox: they can lie endlessly and force you to burn ever more weirdness points correcting them.

Why get caught up playing the game of "that's misinformation! Well, maybe it's true but it's still malinformation! and anyway you're banned for Hate Speech, read the room." You can see all the moves coming 20 steps ahead, being right in retrospect doesn't matter because you still lost the social power game, and the only winning move is not to

I've been feeling this too, but contemplating that it may just be a side effect of getting old and having done all this before.

I'd say it's pretty close to even, certainly the closest (polls-wise) that we've seen in decades. Nate Silver has an almost perfect 50-50, while betting markets have 55-45 in favor of Trump. I trust Silver a bit more than the betting markets, which have a record of being slightly R leaning. There was a Romney whale in 2012, and a 35% chance for a Trump win in 2020 was a bit too high IMO given the polls. Silver might have a slight D bias, but it doesn't matter much in any case since they both pretty much agree with each other (the betting markets have mostly converged with Silver over the past few days after being too pro-Trump for a bit).

Anyone who has a high degree of certainty on this election outcome is either a fool, a charlatan, or a grifter. You should knock them down a peg or two in your mental map of who to trust.

Relatedly, do you think there will be issues certifying the election results? Which side do you think will struggle more if they lose?

Republicans will absolutely, 100% throw a fit if they lose. That's practically guaranteed. Trump has been laying the groundwork for it for a while now, as have pro-Trump accounts like Catturd (who's a good barometer of the online right). Trump said the vote was rigged when he lost the Iowa primary in 2016 (with little evidence), he said it was rigged in 2020 (with little evidence), and so of course he'll say it was rigged now if he loses. Republicans will squint, say something like "the media is biased, so yeah, I guess the election was stolen" while ignoring all of Trump's actual claims.

I'm not sure if the Dems would go the same way. I'm sure there will be some who want to escalate given what Republicans have done, while others will be more along the lines of "we cannot become that which we hope to destroy". The jury's out on which side will win.

As to whether either side could actually steal the election, I'm doubtful. Trump is more committed, but also highly incompetent and he doesn't have the levers of government at his disposal like he did in 2020. The Dems are more competent and control the presidency, but are less committed and so I don't there will be enough of a consensus to take drastic action.

"the media is biased, so yeah, I guess the election was stolen" while ignoring all of Trump's actual claims.

Maybe you don’t mean me since I am not a Republican … but this is too light on the media.

The thought is ‘ the vast majority of journalism in this country revolves around getting one political party elected ‘ and even that thought is almost too tame for me.

Trump has hours and hours of air time to fill and a bunch of information at his disposal to try and say the election was stolen with a straight face. The rest of us don’t have that problem. We can simply just state what is, imo.

I’m unsure what the solution is - but ‘ journalism ‘ needs to be disbanded and reformed into proper working other in much the same vein as the government itself.

The media exists to make money, with the partisan slant being a secondary consideration, caused by the leanings of the reporters themselves. If the media was as coordinated and hated Trump as much as some would claim, it wouldn't have given him so much free air time for his entire political career.

I agree journalism could use improvement, but I haven't heard of any reasonable propositions to do so. Most people who want to change it can only think of replacing it with something like Catturd, i.e. the same problems as before, amplified significantly, but it agrees with their sectarian ideology so they claim it's "better".

"Disbanding" the media would be a terrible idea.

"Disbanding" the media would be a terrible idea.

Not sure why. Mainstream media is already pretty much dead or dying, being replaced via the capitalist mechanism you use to justify it, making money.

I think either group is going to be a problem. However, some states have been calling up NG (https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/02/us/washington-oregon-nevada-national-guard-election/index.html) especially it appears in Blue states. This seems rather telling, because it seems like the elites are expecting unrest in Blue areas not red ones. This makes me suspect that they’re anticipating a Red win, as that’s what would cause trouble in Blue areas. The Proud boys aren’t going to Portland. But Antifa goes there all the time.

I suspect they're expecting riots no matter who wins. They're organized and funded in advance, and you can't tell the people you've bussed in to shut up and go home without blowing off some steam. Like Hines always talks about, blues just consider it a charming youthful game for their tribe, like Spartan kids playing Pillage The Helots.

If Harris wins the riot can be about Dunkin Donuts' complicity with Israel or something.

It just means the left took stuff like J6 seriously, while the right tries to memoryhole it as nothing more than a few folks strolling through a building.

Antifa doesn’t like Harris much either, though.

If Harris loses, I think there is a strong chance that the powers that be will remove Biden from office using the 25th amendment, so that Kamala could be the first woman president. (Maybe I just like the idea because I’m tickled by seeing how far Kamala can go without winning an election.)

If she loses, Biden will get a lot of blame for sabotaging her campaign, and this would be the perfect revenge.

Who do you think will win, Trump or Harris?

Awfully hard to say, because the best evidence is the polls and the polls are maximally uncertain. It’s like guessing the polling error, which is normally a fool’s errand. Still, one can reason through various sources of error:

a) Sample error won’t be much of a factor. We have lots of polls and we can average out their sample errors. We can’t entirely get rid of it, of course, but the real problem is that the polls we’re seeing don’t have enough variance. This suggests …

b) Herding. The polls are not really independent of each other. This means that averaging them won’t diversity away the errors they have in common, and a big one is …

c) Model error. The fundamental problem is that it is believed that the traditional sampling is just missing voters. It has certain missed Trump voters the past two cycles. So a lot of pollsters try to estimate what they can’t sample. They can be sophisticated about it but it’s ultimately a guess, and it seems that a lot of pollsters are reluctant to guess too far away from the NYT/Siena and other leading pollsters. However, this guess can be wrong about the electorate that will really show up and this will produce a bias against the true result. Currently, pollsters seem to be herding around and 50-50 outcome, which minimizes their chances of being seriously wrong unless there’s a blow out.

d) Latency. It is often stated that polls are not a prediction of the future but a snapshot of the present electorate. Not quite. It’s a snapshot of a recently past electorate. Polls take a number of days to complete. Sometimes they are held. For most polls we’re looking a delay of a couple of days. Poll aggregators, like RCP, reaching back weeks have big latency problems, given in composite picture of the race one or two weeks ago. Latency error means that polls may be too slow to respond to late breaking changes or late deciders.

How does this affect the current election? The biggest sources of polling error seem to be model error and latency error, and we’re not completely in the dark about them. We have some data points showing the effects of different models. In particular, the IA Selzer poll arand the IA Emerson poll released on the same day has D+3 and R+10, where the former does not even try to find missing Trump voters and other latter does. That’s a 13-point spread. Some of it could be sampling error, but these polls shows that model error could be a significant chunk of the polling error. There’s also a leaked internal IA poll from the Trump campaign which is R+5, suggesting that Trump may be underperforming the modeling by 3-5 point. That’s huge. If you give 3 points to Harris, she sweeps the swing states and cleans up with about 319 to 219 EVs. There are of course lots of complications with the IA Selzer polls, but it opens the possibility for significant model error in most posts (and they’re herdering around this, so not completely independent) and a major polling miss.

As for latency, the last week of the Trump campaign has been disastrous for non-online Latinos. The “floating island of garbage comment,” which Trump refused to condemn personally, appears to have liquidated the undecided Latino vote in Pennsylvania. Given how close in the polls PA is, it probably hands the commonwealth to Harris and her blue wall holds. If there’s a 3-5 point model error, as there are some signs for, she could end up sweeping the swing states or even start winning Red states.

Of course, model error could favor Trump. Polls are trying to account for low-propensity Trump voters (generally young and non-college educated men) but the problem is with low-propensity voters is that they don’t turn out. Maybe they did more when Trump was fresh and cool. The last week of campaigning with emptier and emptier rallies suggest he’s past his expiration date.

Final call: lean Harris with upside.

My gut impression, with very little in terms of analysis to back this up:

  • Comfortable victory in the popular vote for Harris, maybe 6-8% margin
  • Superficially large spread in EC votes in favour of Harris; like maybe in the 310s or 20s
  • Actual margins will still be very close with fewer than 200,000 votes being the difference across the swing states between a Harris victory and a Trump victory

My gut says the real money prediction markets have a 5-10 point bias in favor of Trump due to the nature of the demographics that participate in it. Given right now Poly, Kalshi, and PI average a 9-point spread on Trump winning, the race really does seem like an actual toss up. The fake-money markets feel much more neutral from a partisan perspective, and Manifold and Metaculus in fact average out to 50-50 right now, which reinforces my first sentence.

By toss up, I don't mean we'll end up with battleground state vote margins so thin that we're into recount and SCOTUS ruling territory. Rather, the unknowns are so great that you just can't do better than a coin toss. You can have four digit significant figures from complicated modeling and it won't matter none if you're forced to include an operation with one significant figure.

As such, I think it's mostly pointless to stake a strong claim on whether Trump or Harris wins. It's like claiming prescience when you call a literal coin toss. Sure, you can argue the shy Trump effect (or even shy Harris effect among women) screwing with polling, and whether there is under or over correction. But there is just no real way to know ahead of time if the median pollster is sampling correctly, because it's circular reasoning, right? You can only adjust your model after the real thing takes place, and you contrast the results with your forecast. Having a track record almost doesn't really matter because of how much the electorate realigns and changes or how people's propensity to respond changes. Everyone is running blind given how close the election is.

This is probably a useless sentence, but if Trump wins, people will attribute his victory to inflation, Biden's late decision to drop out / Harris's anointment without a competitive process, and racism/sexism/bigotry; if Harris wins, people will attribute abortion, Jan 6, and racism/sexism/bigotry.

...but if you held a gun to my head and made me bet on my life who I think will win, I say Harris. Abortion is just really an electoral loser. The sooner the GOP realizes it, the sooner it can be competitive again in elections.

There are certainly people I know who are fired up, but the majority I know are fed up. I know some people who moved from column B to column A because they believe Trump's survival in Pennsylvania was supernatural in origin.

I've talked to several people I know or suspect are moderate-to-conservative in politics who are apathetic because they don't think Trump is a good leader. Liberals and progressives seem more fired up, because of their dislike of Trump, and because of the abortion issue. In contradiction to what I see here and in right-wing spaces, I believe we're well past the point where Trump alienates his opponents more than he energizes his supporters.

Like someone at work said today, "No matter who you're voting for, I think we can all agree it'll be good to get tomorrow over with."

Harris. Pace @SSCReader’s comment I think that the power of the media to set the facts that everyone but the very-obsessive cares about is very high, and similarly their ability to set the emotional tone. I don’t believe they can get people to believe just anything, but I do think they can get a bad candidate elected against an unpopular candidate in the face of the fundamentals.

Likewise the blue apparatus around making sure their supports vote is much more powerful than the red one, and I would expect that to get them another few points.

Have we talked about the squirrel? Sigh. Let's talk about the squirrel:

Mark Longo, the owner of the Instagram-famous squirrel, Peanut, is mourning the loss of his beloved pet.

On Nov. 1, Longo took to Instagram to reveal Peanut had been euthanized, along with his pet raccoon named Fred, by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

...

Peanut the squirrel is an internet sensation. He's the beloved pet of digital creator Mark Longo, who would occasionally share Instagram videos of Peanut eating treats, jumping on his clothes and scurrying around his house as he does various tasks throughout the day.

...

In a joint statement, the DEC and the Chemung County Department of Health say they are "coordinating to ensure the protection of public health related to the illegal possession of wild animals that have the potential to carry the rabies virus."

The DEC also notes that it is illegal to keep young wildlife as pets since they are "not well suited for life in captivity. Plus, they may carry diseases that can be given to people."

...

"To test for rabies, both animals were euthanized," they said in a joint statement. "The animals are being tested for rabies and anyone who has been in contact with these animals is strongly encouraged to consult their physician."

This story has been making the rounds on my social media feeds, with commentary, countercommentary, memes, and political implications galore. A few people have wondered why the story resonates, given that it's just a squirrel. For me, it's because of how neatly it ties into other election conversations.

A couple days ago, we were talking about an article on SlateStarCodex and I disputed Scott's framing where he felt the need to say that Democrats can be authoritarian too, even if it's not the normal definition. No, I say, Democrats want arbitrary and petty control over the smallest aspects of your life, things you can't even imagine that someone would care about. In this case, a man had a squirrel living inside his house rather than outside his house. Squirrels, you may be aware, are common animals. Rodents, in general, frequently cohabitate with humans both as pets and pests. For some, it seems only natural that the government has a compelling interest in making sure you have a Squirrel License with proper proof of squirrel maintenance. Failing to license your squirrel is proof positive of outright irresponsibility - what kind of miscreant doesn't even file their squirrel paperwork? For others, this is a great example of how under no circumstances will the government ever leave you alone, even if it's on something as small and irrelevant as whether you're sheltering squirrels under your floorboards. These petty, useless authoritarians are willing to show up without warning, sit you outside your house, and kill your pets because you didn't file for a squirrel license.

When I was young and naturally rebellious, I was a libertarian on strong pro-freedom grounds. As a young professional, I made my peace with the bureaucracy and thought this was an important part of being an adult. As I've aged, my libertarian streak has returned as I've realized just how much I despise our governments.

It's one of the biggest libertarian "viral moments" I can remember. Not only is it terribly authoritarian, it's a ridiculous inversion of priorities and waste of resources. We can start talking about euthanizing squirrels over "rabies" concerns after the government has successfully euthanized every rat in NYC. And treating a squirrel as some kind of dangerous exotic pet makes zero sense. There's a long American tradition of owning pet squirrels; Warren Harding had one named Pete living with him in the Whitehouse. This whole thing is just quintessentially un-American.

There were so many other ways to address the issue available, and they availed themselves of none but the most direct and violent one.

If there's a violation of the law, send the guy a notice to appear or otherwise drag him into court unless he gets paperwork in order. I understand the government can't 'ignore' a well-documented violation of the law but we'd expect them to use the lightest hand possible when enforcing said law unless there was some massive public interest at stake.

To make an absurd comparison, its like burning down the Branch Davidian compound rather than arresting David Koresh while he's out on a jog.

The government regularly ignores well-documented violations of the law, particularly where those violations are non-violent (e.g. speeding, immigration, drugs). Given that the government doesn't have the ability to enforce all the laws all the time, it makes sense to deliberately ignore inconsequential violations and focus on consequential ones.

Given that the government doesn't have the ability to enforce all the laws all the time, it makes sense to deliberately ignore inconsequential violations and focus on consequential ones.

No, this isn't how it works. Given that the government doesn't have the ability to enforce all the laws all the time, it makes sense to deliberately ignore violations which will take a lot of time and resources to remedy and focus instead on easy ones. This is why we get anarcho-tyranny - people trying to get away with laziness and justifying it with moneyball-esque "efficiency" metrics.

It "makes sense" from the government's perspective to do what you're describing. It "makes sense" from society's perspective to do what I'm describing.

At the risk of being tedious, what would make even more sense is to just not make laws about things that you're actually willing to ignore the vast majority of the time. Perhaps Squirrel Law isn't actually something that needs to be on the books at all.

I completely agree. Laws ultimately rest on the threat of violence and there should be as few of them as possible.

Unfortunately "society" has little oversight over how government actually functions on a day to day basis, as things are currently constituted. I wish it were different, but I feel that it's important to recognize where incentives and structures pull actual day-to-day functions away from their idealized/theorized function.

I'll clarify that in this case "well-documented" means "the guy was literally an influencer and published his videos to millions upon millions of views."

So in a sense, this is like if some person kept posting videos of themselves speeding at 10 mph over the limit and posting them for all to see. If the state ignores that they're almost condoning the behavior.

Driving safely while going 10mph over the speed limit is a behavior the state should condone.

Fine, 15, 20, I'm just saying, if somebody is consistently flouting the law to thousands of viewers, it isn't surprising the state is going to get involved.

The judgment call is making sure the intervention is proportional, I guess.

If you can drive safely at 10mph over the speed limit, then the bastards posted too low a limit. (Uncontested freeways are arguably an exception - although the Germans have demonstrated that German drivers driving German cars don’t need speed limits)

And yet the ATF is not breaking into the houses of children with glock switches.

I think it says a lot about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the PMC in general and the Democratic party in particular that armed insurrection, and the burning of minority nieghborhoods can be dismissed as "inconsequential" or "the cost of doing buisiness" while possession of an unlicensed rodent is somehow a bridge to far.

To make an absurd comparison, its like burning down the Branch Davidian compound rather than arresting David Koresh while he's out on a jog.

I think the true absurditity is that this is not a particularly absurd comparison, this is just Democrats and the deep-state playing to type.

Speaking of playing to type, the director of enforcement for the Department of Environmental Conservation who ordered the hit is apparently named Karen Przyklek.

Karen Przyklek

It's a squirrel. If it was beaver there may have been some mercy in her soul.

He deserved to have his feral disease ridden animals taken because he is a degenerate pornstar and vain social media publicity seeker. This non story is total brain melting slop.

I'm sure every animal department has stupid policies where they needlessly kill tame housebroken foxes and let feral pitbulls continue to eat toddlers: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/

  • -23

Even if the owner murders babies I don't see how that justifies killing the squirrel. Seems like an unrelated issue.

Animals are property.

So what is the reasoning behind infringing on this guy's property, then?

Probably that the animals spread disease and rabies and are more likely to bite their owners and have to be put down sooner or later anyway. Not sure though, the justification might begin with the negation that he was the right to own this specific property.

the animals spread disease and rabies

Source? Evidently the state does not know that, they killed it to test it for rabies in the first place.

So should we burn down murderers' houses? What's the point of destroying property as punishment for a "crime" (which in this case is not actually a crime and which no one has been convicted of yet)?

The squirrel bit a guy I think. If a murderer built a house that tries to punch your balls every time you walked by I'd probably want to demolish it.

The squirrel only bit the guy after they entered the house and tried to take the squirrel, which should have never happened to begin with.

The squirrel bit a guy who was trying to take the squirrel away. If there was a car that could punch your balls when you tried to steal it, a lot of people would probably want one.

it apparently bit an officer when they were in the process of seizing it. The same as incarcerating someone for resisting arrest without any other charge raised.

If the cops show up to my house for some stupid reason and want me to go sit in the squad car while they do whatever, and I thrash and kick and headbutt one of them like a BLM protester then yes, I do think it is fine to punish me for that, even if the original reason they were there didn't pan out. If you're more libertarian and completely disagree that the state and its agents should have some good faith wiggle room for mistakes or best practices that fine, but there's no sense in us spending 8 comments to reach that impasse.

More comments

This guy says law enforcement spent five hours ransacking his property. And destroyed some of it such as his pet squirrel. That's the problem here. The anarchotyranny of a government with no time or resources to deal with shoplifting and car break ins, but apparently lots of law enforcement resources to crack down on unregistered squirrel owners.

Your link suggests sarcasm, though this showed up in my filter feed.

This comment is bad. It contains no insight, analysis, information, or content except the fact that you evidently don't like the guy and don't care about dead squirrels and wanted to express it in a belligerent fashion. You could have just not commented on a story you don't care about, or you could have put some minimal effort into explaining why you don't think it's a story worthy of discussion (though generally we take a dim view of telling other posters what they should or shouldn't be talking about, since obviously plenty of people did think it was worth discussing), or you could have added some content (like details, with links, about this individual and why you think he's unworthy of sympathy and therefore no one should care about his squirrel). Instead you just decided to uncork and spew. We do not like it when people do this. You have a history of doing this. Stop it.

A plain reading of my comment is clearly that this policy is eminently reasonable, these things happen frequently and are mundane, and this story's notoriety is unrelated to its merit, but the man involved is flooding social media for personal gain. That's not enough analysis for a reply to a thread?

I think he is making an argument. It's a bad argument in my view, but it's an argument accompanied by some sort of reasoning. Not going to win a quality contribution award, but not in violation of the rules either IMO. He is inviting a discussion and responding.

The whole thing ws wild to me because I used to run a Twitter blog for an anthropomorphic squirrel character for a board game IP I was developing. Crazy squirrel memes were my bread and butter, but not enough bread or butter to see the game to market.

Anyway all these memes popped up on my substack feed and I felt like I had truly missed my moment.

A conservative Substacker (John Carter Warlord of Mars) who I take with much salt, pointed out that aside from the real tragedy of euthanizing peoples' pets (this has happened before) is that this type of government action reveals the depths to which safety-ism will take us while simultaneously whistling past the graveyard of Big Problems. The border is a mess, but there's always time to activate half of a town's civil resources, kick down their door, harass their wife and kill their pets because...something, something rabies. (Squirrels don't get rabies and if they do they don't pass them to humans--research from the game dev, 'natch).

It's unfortunate this happened and even more unfortunate it happened now because it's a case egregious enough that most should note it as over-reach. Instead it's, "just those crazy conservative screwballs taking things too far again." RIP Peanut. #NeverForget

While raiding the house might have been dumb, and tbh probably was, I’m pretty sure that the euthanasia was due to some kind of standard policy for animals that bite an officer, and this is a facially reasonable policy that probably shouldn’t apply to squirrels but nobody drafting it considered that the animal biting an officer would one day be a squirrel.

Then why the raccoon? There was also a case where something similar happened to lady with alpacas (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/geronimo-post-mortem-results-alpaca-b1916386.html granted in the UK...but basically the same mindset). I also think that there are many cases where officers are bitten by dogs and cats where the animals are not euthanized. The problem is that the policy of euthanasia is running cover for the deliberate mishandling of the animals. It looks and smells like Molochian malice to this homo.

Edit: I suppose you may choose not to euthanize a registered pet who's up-to-date on their shots. So maybe the law is enforced judiciously.

There’s probably a specific carve-out for licensed and registered pets with documented vaccines, if there’s any exclusions at all. I would actually expect that a huge majority of dogs which bite police officers in the process of serving a warrant are shot on-site, and nobody cares very much because they’re dangerous ill trained dogs owned by criminals. People who license and register their pets and keep documentation of rabies vaccines, as a rule, don’t have police in their business.

I think this case is more of an exception due to the victim being oddly sympathetic than to the state being abnormally vicious.

and nobody cares very much because they’re dangerous ill trained dogs owned by criminals.

Dogs who bite people who attack their owners are well-trained dogs.

And people do care, at least to the extent that they make fun of the police, when the police shoot a chihuahua because they were "in fear for their life".

While raiding the house might have been dumb Kind glossing over the important part. Why rip apart hus house for hours? Why grill his wife over her immigration status (especially in ny)?

This seems personal and very heavy handed, and should be investigated.

Why try to hand wave it away?

I wouldn't take that bet, because these rules are written with coons, rats, bats, sacks of ferrets, angry geese, and other troublemakers in mind. The weird cases are heavily overrepresented in scenarios where you end up saying "today didn't go at all well, we'd better make a department policy about purse-carried mongooses"

I suspect that a large majority of officer-biting animals are dogs, and so squirrels are a weird edge case of something common enough to have a policy over.

Yeah. You don't get weird new policies added for dog-bites-man stories, even when it might be a good idea. But you get a horngry weasel down your pants one time and suddenly you're in an OSHA brief.

It’s interesting to consider the motivations and incentives of the state employees here. I doubt the people who wrote the laws and procedures would act similarly, so what went wrong? Some possibilities —

  • The state hires people to euthanize animals. This may inadvertently select for people who enjoy euthanizing animals. The state should take steps to ensure that those they hire to commit necessary evils aren’t searching for evil thrills.

  • The state hires people to euthanize animals. Normal people do not like euthanizing animals. The state should ensure that they aren’t hiring morally-stunted people for the “do we kill the animal” job.

  • The owners make money on OnlyFans and also by recording their pets. They make decent money. The employee in charge of euthanizing animals makes less money and in a decidedly less fun way. Killing the owner’s pet is a way to piss off the owner, and the employee may be pissed at the owner because he makes more money more easily. The State should ensure that petty employees can’t take out their grievances on the subject of complaints. I actually think this is a huge part of all sorts of police and bureaucratic misconduct. Rapper has a nice car from rapping about drugs -> I’m going to piss him off because I hate him. State employees are humans and humans act on grievances all the time.

An addition:

The government hires people to do various jobs. Government jobs do not tend to pay as well as similar jobs in the private sector, but are known to have better work/life balance, better job security, and great retirement benefits. Thus, government jobs tend to select for a more ... relaxed ... type of person than the private sector.

One of the functions of government workers, especially in animal control functions, is to respond to public complaints. This involves a lot of work and disruptions to normal in-office routines, and thus is disfavored by the type of people who tend to take government jobs. However, because public anger is one of the few things that can get government workers in real trouble, such complaints must be visibly and aggressively addressed. On the other hand, the person being complained about has nothing to offer the government workers.

Therefore, when the state agency got multiple anonymous complaints about P'Nut, they were incentivized to take serious action to (1) demonstrate that they took the public complaint seriously, (2) generate as little additional work on their end as possible, and (3) avoid receiving any further complaints on this subject. They had no incentive whatsoever to give a damn about P'Nut or his owner, and likely negatively predisposed towards them because they're the reason there was a complaint in the first place.

Easiest way to solve the problem is to find some pretext to seize and dispose of the subject of the complaint - P'Nut.

In case you didn't mistype that, please please please don't tell me how an animal sanctuary makes money on onlyfans.

Fun fact: Onlyfans wasn't originally intended to be a porn site, but rather something like Patreon where any sort of content creator can set up shop and get fans to send them money for content. They just didn't ban porn, so much like the fabled no-witch-hunts-ever utopia, it's got seven zillion pornstars and three principled civil libertarians (and an animal shelter, apparently).

I actually didn't know that, thanks. Always thought the name was just cutesy to make banking easier.

I'm very familiar with my three principled libertarian friends on the site though: Mr. Hands, Mr. Feet, and Mr. 14-really-is-prime

First link about this I clicked on reddit was commenting on the size the owners appendage...which he displays prominently on his TikTok (along with the squirrel)

As far as I can tell without subscribing, his OnlyFans is pretty vanilla gay4pay-themed male focus shots, and more credible in that sense than a lot of stuff directly marketed as bisexual. The pet focus is mostly made on Instagram/TikTok/YouTube, although he does have (a lot) of pretty distinctive animal-themed tattoos and there's some really thirsty shots in Instagram/TikTok stuff.

I think part of the furor is because it’s an abstracted cartoon version of other more serious government outrages. It’s George Floyd and the Waco siege in miniature.

I'm going to add a second comment that's different and much more spicy.

For a while now, I've had this growing knot in my guts whenever these types of things happen and the bad guys end up being women. I hate the knot because my brain says it's stupid to think women are somehow to blame for the increased pressure to root out anyone who's doing something wrong somewhere. But the knot keeps growing. I can't resolve the conundrum.

With Peanut, a lady in Texas presumably sent the complaint to a lady in New York who sent the city services to take the squirrel out back and shoot it. Clearly that's just a coincidence...right? Or is there something darker in here. Like....is the Karen meme deserved and legitimate? Why did that lady at the Harris rally scream about Palestine at a baby? What's with all the, "I'm speaking," moments? Do the ladies have more power and authority than they can handle?

I don't consider myself a woman-hater. Hell, once upon a time I considered myself a feminist. Is it just my imagination or has something in our national psyche gone and unleashed the worst aspects of womanhood upon the land? The puritanical hunt for all that is good and fun in life can't just be a female thing. Can it? Or is it that safety-ism causes men to operate in a different, more narrow theater (ex. geopolitics) leaving women to police the margins (ex. protesting pussy-grabbin' presidents and yelling at babies)? I really don't want to become a Trad Chad who wants to put the ladies back into some parochial 17th century box. But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?

Here's a theory for you - blame cultural marxism....

... Okay, I'm intentionally being a bit obnoxious, obviously, but let me try to make a case here.

Here's one view: women have a lot of power, and women have always had a lot of power. In many cases, that power has looked somewhat different than the power that men have wielded. That's fine and normal. And in a healthy, functional society, gender roles and ideals and responsibilities evolve that take the natural human tendencies of both men and women into account and help temper reliably occurring problems in both men and women to keep their worst impulses in check and help them wield their various kinds of power responsibly, stably and pro-socially. All of this is the ideal, anyway.

But then, enter enlightenment ideals about legibility, equality, and combine them with post-enlightenment ideals about oppressor-oppressed dynamics. Now, the fact that lots of ways women wield power is illegible means it is invisible in political discussions. And an insistence on a sort of a priori equality between men and women means that even accepting that men and women might wield power in different ways is seen a suspect, like it's just a justification for women not having more legible power. And finally, an insistence on seeing things through an oppressor-oppressed binary means that even the basic idea that women might routinely and predictably behave in ways that hurt people, and those ways of being might need to be tempered, is no longer basic wisdom, but rather just one more way to keep women down.

That combination of world views arguably has a tendency of infantilizing women and stripping them of any real agency and responsibility, which over in reality ends up being a giant problem if they actually DO have a bunch of agency and power that actually needs to be kept in check sometimes for the good of broader society.

Anyway, that's one theory, anyway... something like that.

So...a traditional perspective like, "Rooster rule the yard and hens rule the roost." would dial this back? I suppose I could see it.

For a while now, I've had this growing knot in my guts whenever these types of things happen and the bad guys end up being women. I hate the knot because my brain says it's stupid to think women are somehow to blame for the increased pressure to root out anyone who's doing something wrong somewhere. But the knot keeps growing. I can't resolve the conundrum.

As just so theories go "women tend to eschew direct physical conflict in favor of other, less risky forms of social combat" isn't one I'd be particularly afraid to lose money on.

I feel no guilt in admitting that violence crime is a burden mostly-males impose on society, one that it can "unleash" through unwise policy. Unless women are a higher evolved being they'll have their means of wreaking havoc that we shouldn't encourage.

With Peanut, a lady in Texas presumably sent the complaint to a lady in New York who sent the city services to take the squirrel out back and shoot it. Clearly that's just a coincidence...right? Or is there something darker in here. Like....is the Karen meme deserved and legitimate?

My day job involves handling a lot of regulatory compliance matters and fighting administrative accusations not entirely dissimilar to the P'Nut saga. In my experience while women appear to be slightly overrepresented among the public complainants that I ultimately find out about (which is a small minority of all complaints - my state regards the identities of complainants to public agencies as privileged), there's no particular trend when it comes to which bureaucrats are particularly censorious and which are more lenient. The culture of the particular district office or subunit appears to matter a lot more.

This makes sense. Most of these types of offices have a culture, often driven by one or two people, and that makes the overall consistency seem...inconsistent. Thanks for talking me off the gender-critical ledge.

I mean, it may well be that women over all are more likely to be nosy busybodies, or to go drunk with petty power. The old stereotypes of the gossiping shrew and harridan didn't come from nowhere, just like the male stereotypes of the sex-obsessed brute and violent thug didn't come from nowhere. But I don't know if the effect translates to the modern day, or if so how big it is.

But I don't know if the effect translates to the modern day, or if so how big it is.

Polls not only show this effect exists, but translates to a roughly 30 percentage point lead among young women.

The biggest mistake of modernity is that we don't treat the gossiping shrew/harridan with the same seriousness as the sex-obsessed brutes and violent thugs. In an age of equality they're both as destructive, but it's only the latter we deal with.

I would appreciate any links you have to hand on this; I'm trying to keep a better library of supporting evidence for my beliefs.

And if it is an effect that is somehow historically out of proportion, what's the solution. Back in the day we built pyres, but that was barbaric, I'm sure all will agree. I guess forcing people to wipe their socials is our best analog.

With Peanut, a lady in Texas presumably sent the complaint to a lady in New York who sent the city services to take the squirrel out back and shoot it. Clearly that's just a coincidence...right?

No, it's probably not a coincidence. Ignoring petty complaints, that's a Boys' Club thing. The Boys' Club decides it's not worth the time and ignore it. Sometimes the Boys Club decides to ignore the casting couch. Sometimes it decides to ignore women who complain about too many ice cubes. Sometimes The Boys Club isn't a Boys' Club at all and is instead a restaurants wait staff full of Non-Boys.

You guys talk about a decrease in state capacity. How's'a'bout the capacity to investigate and euthanize wild pets in an orderly and timely fashion? Didn't think of that one, did ya? I would have guessed that the NY Department of Environmental Conservation would just ignore complaints from out of state. It's what I would do. Where did you learn it was a lady from Texas sent a complaint? I just see "anonymous" complaints. Why not a neighbor?

If my neighbor in the next apartment kept weird wild life pets I'd probably ignore it. If they posted cute videos online I'd ignore it. If those pets did things like cause minor problems for my dog I'd be less inclined to ignore it. If that happened more than once I'd probably report it after speaking with them*. This seems possible. If you want to collect wild life without consideration of your neighbors, then live somewhere you can do that.

A lot of people seem fine critiquing this event. Not a lot of defenders. Biden hasn't denounced all garbage squirrels. Maybe he should though, because they are crafty assholes that empty bird feeders.

Why did that lady at the Harris rally scream about Palestine at a baby?

Young woman lost sight of herself and actions at a political event. Her political ally recognizes the malfeasance and polices her behavior. That's a learning experience for most.

A lot of people seem fine critiquing this event. Including one in the video. Not a lot of defenders. We can all make mistakes. Ping me if we see her again.

Like....is the Karen meme deserved and legitimate?

Probably. People's wills can be overbearing and annoying. I wanted to attribute a defense of 'Karen' as a social policing agent to a Freddie deBoer article, but all I can find at the moment is this regarding Covid.

Meanwhile we live among a Praetorian guard of busybodies who want everyone to know that the rest of us aren’t taking Covid seriously enough. These are people who are existentially similar to the “Karen,” 2020’s favorite archetype, except that they’re used to calling other people Karens. But they are precisely that figure of clueless white deference to authority that self-nominates as the world’s hall monitor. And while they want you to mask up and vaccinate and obey other rules, what’s much more important to them than regulating your behavior is that they let you know that you don’t feel the right way about Covid.

Which reads like a truncated version of Planet of Cops. Which is not a defense of Karen.

There's a some Defense of Karen thinking out there. This one is kinda one. as an important (if elevated) part of society. We have a need for Karen. Some business interests want to stop Karen, but they are powerless. Karen keeps the trains running on time. Except for the times where the train isn't on time and she inconveniences the line of people behind her by not shutting up about it. Then she makes me late.

I don't consider myself a woman-hater. Hell, once upon a time I considered myself a feminist. Is it just my imagination or has something in our national psyche gone and unleashed the worst aspects of womanhood upon the land?

Are you particularly sympathetic to gender critical view? Smarmy, scolding Karen might be annoying, but men do a violence and rape. I don't think making men an outgroup is necessary to denounce or police murder and rape. I'm not saying you can't or should not police Karen's gross excess. The culture even still allows and, sometimes, encourages this. If the conditions are right.

I have sympathy for the view that detests the feminization of society. Not all of it is bad. I'm glad not every dispute is concluded with a rock to the head. I would like to work towards something... healthier and more easily appreciated. I wouldn't make women your outgroup, though. Go find you a nice girl that doesn't like yelling at babies or killing squirrels. And there's always Sam Hyde's sage advice.

Go find you a nice girl that doesn't like yelling at babies or killing squirrels.

My wife and 2nd daughter were aghast that this happened.

I don't think I'm particularly sympathetic to a gender-critical view. I know a lot of women. I don't view women as out-group, that's maybe, sort of the problem? Because it seems the evidence is mounting that there may actually be an out-group, largely composed of some type of woman that can't be identified or encircled; something like Vance's cat-ladies but not quite. I think it's closer to something revealed as an epistemic preference to always automatically believe the worst, caused by the flattening of society vis-a-vis the Internet. Similar to how you can't tell if a terrible opinion is a naive adolescent or stoned octogenarian.

You guys talk about a decrease in state capacity. How's'a'bout the capacity to investigate and euthanize wild pets in an orderly and timely fashion? Didn't think of that one, did ya?

Since we obliterated Posse Comatitus even the forestry guys have flash-bang grenades, heavy machine guns and tanks. The state capacity can be summarized as: We can ignore it or atomize it, which do you want?

Where did you learn it was a lady from Texas sent a complaint?

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/texas-woman-monica-keasler-reported-peanut-the-squirrel-to-dec-claims-surface/ar-AA1tuR8j

Example link. All alleged. Apparently she deleted her Interweb accounts so who knows. It would be very interesting to have the state-run agency that acted on the anonymous tip not leave us in the dark, but privacy for some if not for others, I guess. I would absolutely agree that a state receiving an anonymous tip from outside the state would ignore it, that is my prior. At the same time, who would know? That's kind of the point of anonymous tips. What leads people to think it was the woman in Texas is hearsay that she was bragging about it on Facebook. That doesn't really change the situation tough: a government department acted on an anonymous tip from...wherever...and took someone's unlicensed an unregistered pet (the pet was allegedly in the process of being registered). One can easily see how this is raw meat for Libertarian types, but Leftists would also be historically appalled by this + it's cute animals!!

Here's an interesting update regarding the alleged reporter of the mis-housed animal.

https://www.dexerto.com/tiktok/woman-speaks-out-after-being-wrongly-blamed-for-peanut-the-squirrels-death-2971538/

It would be interesting to know who the people are hounding this unaffiliated innocent, but I'd suspect the boy's club you mention are mostly happy to let their wives do the chiding.

And maybe that's all it is. Men know they can leave the small stuff to the ladies to clean up and the Internet simply opened the door to every level-one nudnik to run rampant.

My wife and 2nd daughter were aghast that this happened.

Cheers, then not all is lost. I wasn't trying to cast you into inceldom. Vaguely recognizing like shapes. Maybe that's uncharitable.

Jumbles, rumbles, and rambling:

Because it seems the evidence is mounting that there may actually be an out-group, largely composed of some type of woman that can't be identified or encircled; something like Vance's cat-ladies but not quite.

People make such identifications, but I agree it's difficult to land on any particular one. AWFL exists. I'm not sure it's accurate, because I don't know if white or liberal is necessary to yell-at-baby or badger an authority to Do The Right Thing. White women are the acceptable target of the day. There's a brand of white trash that's not really afraid to pull any lever, other than cops, to settle a grievance or perceived slight. Narcissists. The internet loves that one. Black women have a stereotype around around the kind of self-interested, righteous grievance balloon.

The lower class offender looks more like narcissism to me, whereas the higher class offender has more sophisticated (cultural, political) justifications for (what I consider) bad behavior. Perhaps that's the tie in to race. So, uh, are we just talking about intelligence? How are the Asian women doing out there compared to white women?

There's been an absolute increase in the number of jerks and a lot of jerk behavior gets covered in America by culture warring. Women more likely to utilize authority for little reason other than it's something to do-- or easily convinced it's The Right Thing to Do? Probably, yeah. Women more likely to yell at baby? Probably that too, but maybe because a man has more experience thinking of consequences when it comes to other people's kids. At least compared to pretty girls.

The prototypical Karen is the bored busybody. Karen adopts and uses the HOA as an extension of herself. Because. Type A Karen. If that is related to yelling at babies at a political event I'm not sure how. Maybe it boils down to 100 years ago the yell-at-baby girl would have had a husband drag her off before she could embarrass herself in front of the entire nation?

Don't get hysterical, darling. Protesting is uncouth.

And maybe that's all it is. Men know they can leave the small stuff to the ladies to clean up and the Internet simply opened the door to every level-one nudnik to run rampant.

A lower trust society, they say. If we want a more polite society we will need women to enforce it. Tying all this together feels like it is doing too much. But that could be my lack of imagination.

There's been an absolute increase in the number of jerks and a lot of jerk behavior gets covered in America by culture warring.

Hear! Hear!

it's stupid to think women are somehow to blame

I'm assuming you're a man.

Female hypoagency is baked hard into your evolutionary biology. This is your instinct of "do whatever gets you laid" doing the talking, and in an era where men and women are, in fact, equal on most fields (that were for the past 100,000+ years dominated by men) it's simply maladaptive. And a woman who can't or won't perform the productive parts of that role is no woman, and it's a mistake of men to consider them as worthy of any special social status whatsoever. The biological principle of "women [and children] first" falls apart when those women in aggregate can refuse to bear children (or fail to put the interests of the nation's children above their own self-interests and aesthetic preferences).

In an age of automation (and slavery) driven equality, women and men ought to be equal parts human doing and human being- the fact that women are both and men are neither is a clear indication that our current methods and measures of "equality" need some re-evaluation.

But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?

If you assume that the average man and the average women are just as inherently anti-social/destructive as the other (a fundamental assumption for my worldview), you need to tailor-make the way you deal with those things to suit their biological specializations. If a woman's speech is just as destructive as a man's violence, the speech needs to be regulated in the same measure as the violence, or you're just giving too much power to women and their particular version of anti-sociality eventually starts to dominate.

The current folly of liberalism was believing that legal equality would lead to objective equality, where what actually happened is that by removing the societal safeguards from the gender that has had 100,000+ years to specialize in manipulating men to do things on their behalf, they [predictably] unleashed that machinery upon society. People get confused about "well, then why didn't gynosupremacy have massive negative effects earlier?" but fail to recognize that this is a 1920s problem that we got to punt on for 50 years because the post-WW2 economic boom gave so many advantages to male social power that women would actually end up on the losing end for a while, but naturally they wouldn't last.

I really don't want to become a Trad Chad who wants to put the ladies back into some parochial 17th century box.

We already recognize strict legal equality in the face of women as a stepping-stone to strict objective equality, and women in aggregate recognize the concept of intersectionality and equity. They're correct in that these are things that should happen; where they're incorrect is that if it was applied fairly it would be almost exclusively at the cost of their current social license to be destructive. And, as these same women are quick to point out, loss of that privilege will feel like oppression (but, of course, isn't).

The problem I have is that, if this is done improperly, you catch the "transgender" women and men in the blast radius (i.e. the women and men who don't need rules restraining a latent gynosupremacist/androsupremacist attitude they didn't have in the first place). They tend to be the most productive/least disruptive people society has and the cost of this change might not be worth what it costs them.

I have some ideas for the way this might work, but the trick is implementing them in a way contradictory to instinct, are not feasible while men are still in socioeconomic oversupply, and are just as easy to conveniently leave pointed at men (just like how we use paper-bag tests to determine which criminals to prosecute now). (Of course, these measures wouldn't be needed if women were all of a sudden in socioeconomic oversupply -> in less of a position to demand men conform to them; this is why, ironically, that gynosupremacists being able to exclusively choose to bear saintly girls and not toxic boys would eventually end up diluting their current power over time.)

I’m not surprised in the least. I’m not sure if it’s evolutionary psychology, but I tend to find that women have perfected the game of weaponizing the system against other people. In this case, it’s animal laws, but it could be technical violations of any rules to force other people to give them what they want. I’ve always somewhat assumed that it goes down to avenues of actual power. Men have access to physical strength, technical knowledge, and the actual levers of power. Women have limited access perhaps to the levers o& power. Not as much as people think, because they are rarely the main decision makers on projects, in business, or in government. So the best way for the median woman to get her way is to basically get a man to wield actual power for her.

Puritanical rule enforcement is a part of that. It’s a way to create new offenses women can use to shame people into giving them what they want.

As a great sage wrote:

It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.

That character was wrong about the one example we see. I don't think the book portrays any woman meeting that description. Or any man, for that matter -- Parsons is completely orthodox but not bigoted about it, and O'Brien is fully aware of the party's duplicity. Syme (the Newspeak writer) is excited about the party but is aware of what he's doing, and get sent to Miniluv presumably as a result (or just as a result of talking about it)

But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?

Punish people who scream at babies, regardless of their sex.

I really don't want to become a Trad Chad who wants to put the ladies back into some parochial 17th century box. But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?

Why not? Maybe the 17th century got it right and the 20th got it wrong. Perhaps female participation in public life really does everything the anti-suffragists (many of whom were women themselves) said it would. I believe that "longhouse" is a real phenomenon, a failure mode of societies lacking enough masculine energy. Perfectly encapsulated: https://x.com/PopBase/status/1852801265425854866

I believe the 19th amendment was a mistake. Most expansions of suffrage have been. Can't be fixed without a societal reformation, and these reformations usually involve coups, wars, and collapse. The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and bloodshed return!

The line actually uses "slaughter", not "bloodshed".

"To test for rabies, both animals were euthanized,"

That's bullshit, and the government should be held to a higher standard of honesty.

There's no indication that those animals were suffering (never mind suffering to such an extent that death is the only release), so they were killed to test for rabies.

It's not like killing animals is even that bad. The government is just in the habit of lying to deflect responsibility and make itself look good.

Stranger yet, best as we can tell, there is no such thing as squirrel to human rabies transmission. That's just not a thing.

I read most of this thread and still having trouble understanding what's going on. In what sense did the democrats do this?

Only in the extremely broad vibes sense, in which overly intrusive bureaucracy micromanaging your life "for your own good" is generally associated with the left, and is routinely denounced by the right. Also it happened in the state of New York, which has a Democrat-dominated government at present (governor plus supermajorities in both houses of the legislature).

On Prognostication

Over the past several weeks, I've become increasingly irritated by discussions, both here and elsewhere, involving election predictions. While I agree that speculation can be fun, I think too many people try to read too much into the day-to-day ups and downs of the election cycle. While I agree with Nate Silver on a lot of things, there's something I find inherently off-putting about his schtick. I read The Signal and the Noise around the time it hit the bestseller lists and had an addendum about the 2012 election. One of the themes of the book is that the so-called experts who make predictions on television don't base their predictions on rational evidence and don't face any consequences when their predictions fail. No in-studio commentator on The NFL Today is losing his job solely because he picked too many losers.

Around this time, I became interested in probabilities, and I was regularly hitting up a friend who had majored in math and was pursuing a doctorate in economics at Ohio State. At one point he told me "Probability is interesting, but when it comes down to it, the only thing it's good for is gambling. We say there's a 50/50 chance of drawing a black ball from an urn when we know that the urn has 50 black balls and 50 white balls. When we talk about probabilities in the real world, it's like talking about the chances of drawing a black ball from an urn we don't know the size of." When discussing cards or dice, we're discussing random events based on repeatable starting conditions. When discussing elections, we're discussing a non-random event that will only happen once.

Beyond that, though, the broader question is: What's the point of all of this? This isn't a football game where scoring points confers an obvious advantage. If Trump is up by 5 points in June or Harris is up by 5 points in July, it has absolutely no effect on the actual election. My irritation with this started a couple weeks ago when someone posted here about Trump having large odds of winning on some betting site. I mean, okay, but who cares? What am I supposed to do with this information? I guess it's marginally useful if I'm thinking of putting a little money on the line, but I'm not much of a gambler, and the poster wasn't sharing this information to spark discussion on good betting opportunities. I pretty much lost it, though, last weekend, when news of the Selzer poll showing Harris winning Iowa hit and had everyone speculating whether Ms. Selzer was a canary in a coal mine or hopelessly off. Again, who cares? Selzer's prediction may be correct, or it may be incorrect, but it has no bearing on the actual election. Harris doesn't get any extra votes because Selzer shows her doing better than ABC or whoever. Trump doesn't get any extra votes because of his odds on PredictIt.

I will admit that polling is useful to campaigns trying to allocate resources and determine what works and what doesn't. But they have their own internal polling for that. But unless you're actively employed by a campaign, there's nothing you can do with this information. As much as arguing about politics in general may be an exercise in futility, there's at least some chance you can influence someone else's position. Arguing about who's going to win the election doesn't even go this far, since no one is arguing that you should vote based on polling averages. The only utility I see in any of this is entertainment for the small subset of people who find politics entertaining. Which brings me back to my original criticism of Silver: The reason these professional prognosticators don't get called out on their inaccuracies is because their employers understand that their predictions are ultimately meaningless. Terry Bradshaw may predict the Browns to beat the Bengals, but at a certain time we'll know the winner and if the Bengals win the sun will rise the next morning and his being wrong about it will have no effect on anything.

For the record, a think Harris will probably win, but my prediction is low-confidence and isn't based on anything that's happened since campaign season started. In 2016, a lot of people in swing states voted for Trump because he was an unknown quantity and they preferred taking a chance with him rather than Clinton. In 2020, a certain percentage of these people regretted their decision and voted for Biden. I haven't seen anything in the past four years that suggests that any of these people are moving back to Trump. Electorally, the Republicans haven't shown anything, despite the fact that the first half of the Biden presidency wasn't exactly a cakewalk. But that's just my opinion. I don't know what you're supposed to do with it. You can disagree with it, and you may have a point, but after tomorrow what I think and what you think won't matter. The votes will be counted, a winner declared, and Dr. Oz's midterm performance won't matter, and my being wrong about it won't have an effect on anything.

I mean, one-off near 50-50 gambles are just objectively quite difficult to evaluate properly. So unless you screw up in an obvious fashion, there are very few good ways to call someone out to begin with.

Ironically, Nate had a good article very recently on at least one way: a particular pollster, Redfield & Wilston, had released a poll about the seven "battleground states", and ALL results are within a 1% margin of each other. It's easy to show that this is statistically speaking pretty much impossible to happen given the base variance from the low-ish number of people they've polled. So they have to have fucked up somehow, and Nate can even explain the most likely technique, called herding, and how it is working. Also ironically, it's mostly used to avoid reputational damage, since it works by pooling results from different sources to avoid extreme results that naturally arise from base variance, but which are then called out as wrong afterwards.

The point of estimating the election winner is that the election can be quite impactful (for regulator policies, culture war stuff, gambling like you mentioned, etc). If e.g. you work in a financial institution and you prefer one candidate over the other, knowing whether they have a 90% chance of winning or a 50-50 chance can make a huge difference. It's also a good chance to test Bayesian reasoning capabilities, as there's a correct answer at the end that you can check your work against (and the work of those you follow).

You're correct that most prognosticating won't have a material impact on the result, but that's a non-sequitur since that's not what people are trying to do when they're predicting who will win.

No one is changing internal policies based on polling predictions on who is going to win the next election. Even if Candidate X is posing sweeping regulatory changes to your particular industry, you're not going to start changing your policies because Candidate X is favored to win. You're not even going to start changing your policies after Candidate X wins. You're going to start changing your policies when the new regulations are actually enacted, because a lot can happen between proposals and final legislation.

If new regulations are coming down the pipe, they can make certain products or even entire sectors less desirable. The issue is that this can be priced-in by competitors long before the regulations actually hit, which can hurt the ability of slow-movers to reposition. If you think e.g. oil companies were going to get hit by a bunch of new environmental regulations, institutions might want to offload their stakes before their competitors to get the best price. A good real-world example of this is what happened to ESG funds. They used to be a hot thing during peak woke, but the industry really started backing off once Republicans started making a stink. I'm not sure how much actual regulation happened, as just the threat of it was enough to strangle the baby in the cradle.

Knowing if there's a 50% chance or a 90% chance that these things will happen absolutely makes a big difference. I was at a gathering of many of the chief risk officers of big financial institutions, and the election was easily the most-discussed topic in terms of worrying potential outcomes.

I was considering writing a post on this exact topic, but I refrained, because I wasn't sure how to press my vague discontent into a substantive thesis.

I'll be happy when we can go back to weekly threads that don't contain the term "prediction market". I've always found the LW/SSC fascination with monetary betting to be somewhat crass. (I'd be inclined to speculate that "make all your beliefs pay rent" is only a few steps away from "make all people pay rent".)

It's sometimes claimed that intelligence just is pattern matching. So, trying to successfully predict a major one-off event like a presidential election could then be seen as the ultimate IQ test, the ultimate test of one's ability to reason in an uncontrolled and data-scarce environment. And I can see why that would be an intriguing challenge to take on. But pattern matching has its limits, and ultimately it just feels obvious to me that there's not much that can be said in terms of election forecasting besides "well, we'll see when we see".

While I agree with Nate Silver on a lot of things, there's something I find inherently off-putting about his schtick. I read The Signal and the Noise around the time it hit the bestseller lists and had an addendum about the 2012 election. One of the themes of the book is that the so-called experts who make predictions on television don't base their predictions on rational evidence and don't face any consequences when their predictions fail. No in-studio commentator on The NFL Today is losing his job solely because he picked too many losers.

And that's why you listen to Nate Silver and super-forecasters who have a public track record of being better than the average when it comes to their predictions, often markedly so.

I'd say the state of affairs is better than it could be, given that Nate has modest internet celebrity status. Making good models and publicizing them has some payoff.

At one point he told me "Probability is interesting, but when it comes down to it, the only thing it's good for is gambling. We say there's a 50/50 chance of drawing a black ball from an urn when we know that the urn has 50 black balls and 50 white balls. When we talk about probabilities in the real world, it's like talking about the chances of drawing a black ball from an urn we don't know the size of." When discussing cards or dice, we're discussing random events based on repeatable starting conditions. When discussing elections, we're discussing a non-random event that will only happen once.

Downstream, I was mustering a defense of Bayesian reasoning, but you don't have to be anywhere near as formal to address this. We are lucky enough to be in a universe that doesn't exist in perfect uncertainty, things that have happened inform what will happen, and some humans are somehow able to do better than random at answering unresolved questions, with better modeling, be it explicit or intuition based. You can notice them, or pay attention to the gestalt impression of a crowd squeezing wisdom from attempts to win either Reputation Points or actual money out of their competition.

Knowing the odds has some utility, and should be of some use. You wouldn't throw up your hands if some rando used the argument your friend used to claim that Randomly Picked American X had 50% odds of winning the presidential election. If you were sensible and he was willing to put money where his mouth is, you'd take said bet and make your money back expecting to win that bet several million times per loss.

Odds convey information, or at least expectation. The sheer complexity of the universe and the vast sampling space is, thankfully, not as much of an impediment as it seems. I'd expect so, after all we evolved in it and had to understand our world and other actors better than a rock.

"Probability is interesting, but when it comes down to it, the only thing it's good for is gambling"

I mean, yeah. But on a fundamental level, just about every decision we make is a gamble of some sort. Any significant choice in life is boils down to a decision to expend some amount of time/money/energy with the hope of reaping some reward. Any information that helps you make these decisions more clearly is therefore extremely useful.

I didn't mean to suggest I was doubting that. But I can't conceive of how any election prediction would have any effect on anything I do, in any circumstance.

Probability and stats have always been my favourite parts of mathematics and I have zero interest in gambling (I went to Vegas once, lost $50, won $30, and felt vaguely annoyed and bored and went to drink cocktails in the hotel pool and haven’t gambled since).

The reason is simply that I think intelligence basically just is predictive ability. This operates at different levels, of course. A smart goalkeeper will be able to guess which way a penalty-taker will shoot, and a smart driver will predict that the car ahead will change lanes suddenly. By contrast, a smart lawyer might give you advice on how to avoid getting sued and a smart accountant on how to avoid paying as much tax. A smart scientist may identify a novel experimental technique for testing a theorem. A smart philosopher might give advice which if followed will reliably allow you to live a more virtuous or contented life. In all these cases, we’re identifying the threads of cause and effect and making claims about how one informs the other.

This is why when I hear people say LLMs are “just next token predictors” it doesn’t tell us much about their psychological capacities, because we’re next token predictors too (or more exactly: prediction error minimisers). That’s not an uncontroversial claim, of course, but it’s also not an outrageous one in the context of contemporary cognitive science; the predictive coding/free energy frameworks of people like Andy Clark and Karl Friston are rapidly becoming the consensus or at least plurality view on questions of ur-principles of cognition.

But why should we care about predicting the US election specifically? I think because it’s a big meaty complex problem that is amenable to insights from a variety of different methods and life experiences. Sure we can take the Nate Silver approach and read daily polls and build models, but you can also glean insights from just talking to people at the bar or from sampling the vibe in your niche industry or from developing your world-historical theories or a million other methods. Nate Silver will probably beat you on average, but it’s not crazy to think that for a general election these kinds of interactions and experiences might give you a useful insight. That makes election punditry an unusually inclusive form of prognostication — you can debate it with your mom or your Uber driver or your babysitter. In that sense, it’s a very American sideshow to the very American event.

What's the point of all of this? This isn't a football game where scoring points confers an obvious advantage. If Trump is up by 5 points in June or Harris is up by 5 points in July, it has absolutely no effect on the actual election.

No, it's a referendum on whose tribe is larger, better organized, and has seized the moral high-ground of the culture. Pumping up your own supporters through exhortation (we're winning - one more great surge of effort, comrades, and we shall triumph!) or demoralizing the enemy through propaganda (your puny candidate is weak and is failing! Abandon hope and don't waste your efforts and resources in what is obviously a doomed cause!) are valid tactics.

It's an election, though, not a bloody melee. In a melee you want your side to believe you've got the enemy grossly outnumbered and so there's definitely no need for any of Us to break and rout before we force Them to. In an election you want your side to believe you're tied with the enemy and so there's definitely a need for Us to get our lazy butts off the couches rather than either conceding to Them or letting our overconfidence cause an upset.

Hopefully we're just doing the exhortation thing because our psychology evolved through far less history with elections than with bloody melees (100s of years vs 100s of millennia?), not because we've had a few slightly-bloody melees recently and we want to be prepared for when they get much bloodier.

It's an election, though, not a bloody melee.

Elections are, in no small part, symbolic melees. We do things memetically and through balloting as a slightly-more-symbolic version of the "stand on opposing hill-tops outside of spear range and ineffectually chuck things at each other while yelling to establish bravery and dominance" paradigm that prevailed throughout most of human history, and a much-more-symbolic version of the "line up in two opposing phalanxes and grind against each other until someone breaks and runs away" that got more common in Europe during recorded history.

Either way they're still contests with dominance and submission on the line; we've just decided to accept proxy battles for the real thing.

Hopefully we're just doing the exhortation thing because our psychology evolved through far less history with elections than with bloody melees (100s of years vs 100s of millennia?)

Exactly.

The way I've heard it is that an election is a simulated civil war. Both teams show up, you count up the members, assume the larger side would win, then everybody accepts the results and goes home because actually fighting the war would involve lots of unnecessary death and destruction.

Problem #1: Because of median voter theorem, both sides converge to political positions that are almost equally appealing to the center, meaning each side is only winning elections by a few percentage points of the population. This makes it much more likely that the losing side could win the war than e.g. a 30%-70% split, and makes the incentive for the loser to flip the table much larger.

Problem #2: When democracy was first implemented, the franchise was limited to white landowning men. Each expansion of the franchise to people who make for worse soldiers and workers (women, blacks, etc.) has represented a decoupling between the number of voters on each side and that side's actual military and productive capacity, meaning it is no longer at all obvious that the smaller side would lose a civil war. As the sides specialize to appeal to different demographics, the incentive for the party of white men to realize that they are getting screwed for no good reason and start shooting is, again, greatly increased.

(The elites know this, which is why they spend so much time and effort preventing white men from developing class consciousness.)

Well, you want your side to believe it is close and while you are winning if you don’t do something we’ll lose. People like a winner so gives them good feelings there but you don’t want complacency.

I think it has some use if you’re in a position to be doing long term planning either because the campaign is promising things that will help or harm your group, or because the change in regulations promised will affect a business project. If Trump is going to end a subsidy for solar panels then maybe the fact that he’s way up in the polling would change how you do business. Or maybe you’re trans and worried about your rights in your home state. Or you’re gay and looking to adopt. There are some people who for various reasons need to plan based on who wins in 2024.

For the vast majority of people, the winner of any election will only affect you on the margins. It’s just human history. Unless a regime was specifically looking to harm a group of people, for the most part, life goes on with very little change. If you woke up tomorrow and you were under a Maoist dictatorship, unless you owned a big corporation or challenged the regime in some way, you could live very comfortably. The basics of life don’t change that much. There will still be jobs, schools, sporting events, and people will still get drunk on weekends.

On a related note, but different domain, I saw these two threads this morning (...maybe NOAA's advertising budget has been kicked into gear because they have some bureaucratic fight going on...). To the extent that people have some form of equities at risk, accurate probabilistic models can help people properly allocate their assets/risk... and may even allow some folks to make a boatload of money in trying to allocate appropriately at a high level of abstraction. I recall listening to a podcast with a guy who made literal billions of dollars by making huge bets on insurance markets in one of the hurricane seasons not long after Katrina (I can't remember his name off the top of my head now, but IIRC, it was someone who people would plausibly recognize). He did so by trying to have the most accurate weather prediction possible.

Political outcomes feel a bit less directly-related to outcomes than the much more direct hurricane-to-damage relation, because "probability of president" probably needs to be mixed with "probability of Congress" and "conditional probabilities of those results ending up with the gov't taking Action A". Right now, there is still debate on whether we can do any part of that chain, which makes it difficult to intuitively feel a connection.

Yeah, I think I'll go strongly the other direction on this.

"Terry Bradshaw may predict the Browns to beat the Bengals, but at a certain time we'll know the winner and if the Bengals win the sun will rise the next morning and his being wrong about it will have no effect on anything."

The problem is, this isn't true at all. It's not true in football, it's not true politics, it's not true across many dimensions of life. And the world we live in is worse off for it.

Terry Bradshaw is one guy out of many many people giving opinions, I wouldn't say that his opinion alone is the basis that people's futures ride on, but when Brandon Staley goes for it on 4th down, and Terry Bradshaw says that he's the reason the Chargers lost (everytime that happens, a guys livelihood is on the line), when the Rams lose a game and Terry Bradshaw says the Jared Goff is the reason why they lost (a guys livelihood is on the line). (I don't know if Bradshaw actually had those particular take, I made them up as example, though I do remember various talking heads making them, just not which particular talking head).

Every little statement like this affects public perception, and public perception affects reality. We humans are highly susceptible to group think.

The presumption is that that the guy on TV knows what he's talking about, knows the factors that goes into whether the Browns have what it takes to beat the Bengals [1], I agree that for the most part no one really cares, I'm saying that we should, if in reality, these guys are actually just full of shit constantly. That's actually extremely useful information.

This obviously applies to politics as well, no matter what happens on Tues, the Wednesday morning QBs will come out, it's extremely useful to understand that most of them are full of shit.

[1] Somewhat hilariously, these picks typically aren't even against the spread, to the degree that these guys can't even figure out to just pick the obvious favorites... truly wasting all of our time.

Terry Bradshaw is one guy out of many many people giving opinions, I wouldn't say that his opinion alone is the basis that people's futures ride on, but when Brandon Staley goes for it on 4th down, and Terry Bradshaw says that he's the reason the Chargers lost (everytime that happens, a guys livelihood is on the line), when the Rams lose a game and Terry Bradshaw says the Jared Goff is the reason why they lost (a guys livelihood is on the line).

I don't see what this has to do with anything I said. I'm talking about predictions, not post-mortem analysis.

The ability to make falsifiable predictions is how we know we understand things about the world we live in.

Not understanding the world we live in has real consequences.

I’m arguing for more discourse around predictions, in response to your argument for less discourse around predictions.

I suspect we agree that the discourse could be much better than it actually is.

TLDR, I actually like Nate Silver’s schtick quite a bit, and wish we had more people trying to do it across more areas of interest.

Btw: Many countries ban polling before an election:

https://archive.is/9P5VO

My view on predictions of political races is the opposite--I think they are great and useful--precisely because I don't really care about politics but I do care about polls (and statistics in general). Predictions of political races are a way to test the poll's methodology.

For example, Gallup is but one of many companies whose business is to poll US adults on various questions of interest--say, what percent of US adults identify as LGBT. That's a reasonably interesting question, judging by The Motte's interest in the subject. Also, businesses may want to know how big the group is, if they are considering catering to it.

So the Gallup's poll says that 7.1% of US Adults identify as some flavor of LGBT. But how well does that reflect reality? Gallup provides a snippet of their survey method at the end--surveyed over 12,000 adults by phone (70% cell, 30% landline)--and they give that standard phrase familiar to anyone who took an introductory Statistics course:

For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±1 percentage point at the 95% confidence level.

So they are saying that their result is likely within one percentage point of reality... except that this nice quantitative statement only accounts for sampling variability, and doesn't even try to estimate the systematic bias of their methods.

For example, for many decades now there has been a huge drop in the proportion of people who pick up their phone when a rando calls them. Two decades ago, when I was teaching intro stats and Gallup still published their non-response rate, it was a measly 5%. Now? It's so bad that most respectable polling companies have dropped randomized calling altogether, and they have switched to recruiting people into panels--like, recruit 100,000 US adults who will have your company's phone number in their caller ID, and so would be more likely to pick up the phone. Then the response rate goes up to like 20%-30%.

But how representative are those panels? Why should you trust that they produce polls that are anywhere close to reality? The one great way to test it is if there is a census coming up, and the poll tries to predict the outcome of that census. Well, that's what an election is--a census of the voters.

To be clear, I'm not trying to suggest that polling is useless, or that it shouldn't be done. I just don't think we should put to much stock into polls insofar as they concern the average voter.

One reason polling and prediction markets pre-election are interesting is that you can see reactions to the politics being preformed before our eyes. When Trump does the McDonald's thing the context of whether this hurt or helped him in the polls is actually very interesting and says something about the American voter. When dems drop Biden and put up Kamala the trajectory of the polls is interesting. Who 'won' the debate does appear to have an answer and the poll swing shows it.

I also think it's important to remember the lesson Scott tried to drive home here, that absolutely no one heeded: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/07/tuesday-shouldnt-change-the-narrative/

Back in 2016, I believe Scott was right, and yet, immediately EVERYONE's narrative shifted to "Trump beat Hilary because of <whatever reason: racism, sexism, Trump was better then her, people liked him, people disliked her, etc>". I think Scott's lesson is probably right here as well, but already no one is acting that way. On this very thread, we have many people saying Harris's win is inevitable because leftists control institutions, or Trump's win is inevitable because Harris is less likable or more stupid than Biden or Hilary ever were. Once one of them wins tomorrow, everyone will be frantically updating their priors accordingly, in order to make their world make sense. But should they really, or are they just overfitting to noise?

Oh man, thanks for finding that link! It's what I was thinking about but couldn't find in this comment a couple days ago.


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