US Politics 2016: Delay the Electoral College Vote?

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

2 hours ago, Squab said:

yet you ignored him and dismissed it because it didn't confirm your bias. That is what an echo chamber is. It more than proves my point. it shows that even when people you would usually agree with say something outside the narrative, it gets ignored.

That's not what you said. You said no one in your echo chamber saw it coming. Moore is clearly in our echo chamber. I agree that he was mostly ignored. To be honest, I pretty much lost interest in his stuff post Bowling for Columbine. Didn't see his Trump flick.

[Squab]

Just now, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

That's not what you said. You said no one in your echo chamber saw it coming. Moore is clearly in our echo chamber. I agree that he was mostly ignored. To be honest, I pretty much lost interest in his stuff Post Bowling for Columbine. Didn't see his Trump flick.

so he's not in your echo chamber then? if we're splitting hairs.

[mcbigski]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

The honest answer from the Republican party to that question should be, 'we never really believed that those emails were much of an issue but we've got very, very good at making anything a Democrat does into a huge deal. Point for us.'

Get back to me when the right have accepted the result of the 2008 election.

The right accepted the results of the 2008 election to a much greater degree than the left accepted the results of 2000 or 2004.  I don't think anyone went around saying BHO wasn't elected POTUS.

1 hour ago, Squab said:

an NBC poll?

Do people still believe these? Arent they just propaganda?

Is that the Dan Rather network or the Brian Williams one?

As is often the case, Instapundit nailed it today:

Quote

It’s funny to hear members of the press, which covered up affairs by JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton — and, more recently, John Edwards — because it wanted to help Democrats win, suddenly going on about “post-truth America” now that it’s no longer able to do that sort of thing.

 

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

Just now, Squab said:

so he's not in your echo chamber then? if we're splitting hairs.

I consider myself Liberal, so yes, I would say he's in my echo chamber. You would consider him Liberal, no? I'm just saying that I haven't found him to be terribly compelling of late. 

[Inigima]

NBC is a bog standard network television network. Attacking them as fringe partisans is absurd.

[Reny of Storms End]

1 hour ago, Squab said:

an NBC poll?

Do people still believe these? Arent they just propaganda?

This seems an awful lot like saying national polls are propaganda. Did you mean something else? Only NBC is propaganda?

[Impmk2]

6 minutes ago, Squab said:

no. that is not what is being said.

This whole argument started because polling data was disputed. Not echo chambers. Not what people who they interviewed predicted. You said:

1 hour ago, Squab said:

an NBC poll?

Do people still believe these? Arent they just propaganda?

So give us some solid examples of NBCs polling being systemically biased. Not some massive goalpost shift. Because their recent and easily verifiable election polling looks solid.

[Reny of Storms End]

5 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

The right accepted the results of the 2008 election to a much greater degree than the left accepted the results of 2000 or 2004.  I don't think anyone went around saying BHO wasn't elected POTUS.

Is that the Dan Rather network or the Brian Williams one?

As is often the case, Instapundit nailed it today:

 

Remember when the President-elect tweeted we should march on Washington because Romney had won the popular vote (before the polls even closed out West I believe), and the EC was stealing the election and giving it to President Obama? 

 

 

[The Anti-Targ]

26 minutes ago, Impmk2 said:

Fox fucking news had Clinton +4 in their last poll at the election. Identical to NBCs polling. I guess they're biased towards Clinton too. 

Well, the national polls did actually get it right. Clinton +4 is a bit higher than her winning margin, but it was still a + in the column of the NPV winner. In fact I guess you would say that the state polling was right in the vast majority of states. So the performance of the polling was not as atrociously bad as what people say. And in those states that went to Trump that people didn't expect, Clinton was polling within the MoE.

So I think you can still trust polls about as much as in the past. People just have to know how to interpret them and factor in the error that is integral to polling. Don't assume a poll showing a +4 margin is a sure thing, because it's a long way from a sure thing. And given the closeness of the margins in those states that handed the ECV to Trump, with the way margin of error works you'd say that the polls were statistically accurate measurements.

[Squab]

4 minutes ago, Reny of Storms End said:

Remember when the President-elect tweeted we should march on Washington because Romney had won the popular vote (before the polls even closed out West I believe), and the EC was stealing the election and giving it to President Obama? 

lol - didn't he end up taking advantage of that

[OldGimletEye]

Just now, Squab said:

NBC: Clinton 99% chance of winning

If you had quoted a right wing media source, that would be more believable as they would be less willing to paint their own people as crazy.

You want to know why you didn't see Trump winning? its cause you think NBC isn't biased.

Okay, I think it’s extremely important here, at this juncture, to kind of like do this by the numbers.

The reason is that now that Obama is on his way out of the White House, it’s time now for Republicans to claim that they never had a birther conspiracy problem. It’s time now for Republicans to claim that it wasn’t the case that an extremely nutty idea became to be believed by a great number of them and that the screwball idea wasn’t exploited by Republican or Conservative politicians, to include our favorite Orange One.

It’s time now, evidently, for Republicans to collectively shrug their shoulders and say, “birther conspiracies? It wasn’t us man!”

So, let’s begin:

1. The poll you cite wasn’t the work of NBC. It was the work of Sam Wang. Wang is a Neurosurgeon by profession. As far as I know, Wang doesn’t work for NBC.

So your claim here that “NBC: Clinton 99% of winning” is factually not correct because it wasn’t NBC that made the prediction.

2. People like Wang and Silver build predictive models. These kind of models are more complex than doing polling. So the potential for error in these kind of predictive models is more likely, than say getting a poll wrong.

One of the chief problems with their forecast models, given our electoral system, is collecting reliable state level data. That proves to be more difficult than collecting national level data. That’s one reason why people like Wang and Silver got it wrong. If the presidential vote had been based on the popular vote, though, then Wang’s and Sliver’s models would have gotten it right.

3. Me personally, I always took Wang’s probability predictions with a grain of salt with the 99% probability predictions. It seemed way too high. Silver’s model seemed much more reasonable here.

4. It’s not like the NBC poll, in question here, was the only poll showing that significant numbers of Republicans and Conservatives believed in birther nonsense. Others have too.

Here are few others:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/05/the-outlandish-conspiracy-theories-many-of-donald-trumps-supporters-believe/

Quote

A large majority of Trump's coalition is suspicious of Obama's origins. Among respondents who chose Trump over Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, 40 percent said it was "definitely true" that "President Obama is hiding important information about his background and early life," according to Wednesday's poll, conducted at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. Another 37 percent said the claim was possibly true.

https://www.scribd.com/document/120815791/Fairleigh-Dickinson-poll-on-conspiracy-theories

https://www.scribd.com/document/120815791/Fairleigh-Dickinson-poll-on-conspiracy-theories

http://view2.fdu.edu/publicmind/2016/160504/

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/157167-poll-plurality-of-republicans-say-obama-born-outside-us

5. Republicans and Conservatives have an extremely bad habit of dismissing empirical evidence they don’t like. And isnt’ just with polling data either. If they don’t like the employment numbers coming out, they claim a conspiracy. If inflation data, doesn’t jive with their view, they claim a conspiracy there too.

 

[Altherion]

13 hours ago, mormont said:

Anyone who says stuff like this, doesn't know a thing about academia. Two academics can take three different sides on any question.

Academia is, after the press, just another source of inconvenient truths to be mown down by the right in the relentless pursuit of ideology.

I have spent half of my life either studying or working in academia. You are not wrong about disagreement within practically any discipline, but this does not preclude academia as whole from effectively taking a side. In the US, conservative academics are outnumbered by a significant margin (I've seen claims from as low as 3:1 to as high as 5:1, but there's no doubt that they're outnumbered). Worse, the leadership also suffers from this discrepancy as do the various parasitic structures which have grown up around federal rule enforcement. There are plenty of people there who disagree and plenty who want nothing to do with this, but these attitudes will not save them if either the government or the anti-intellectuals decide that they've had enough.

[Squab]

11 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Republicans and Conservatives have an extremely bad habit of dismissing empirical evidence they don’t like. And isnt’ just with polling data either. If they don’t like the employment numbers coming out, they claim a conspiracy. If inflation data, doesn’t jive with their view, they claim a conspiracy there too.

Just like with the whole Russian influence in the election. I see your point.

[OldGimletEye]

Just now, Squab said:

Just like with the whole Russian influence in the election. I see your point.

So you are saying that is made up stuff?

Nice try, but no it isn't.

1. Does anybody dispute the Russians hacked into various organizations email or IT systems?

2. Does anybody dispute that information seems to have gotten released mainly against Democrats?

2. Maybe you don't agree with the CIA's assessment and that's fine. I'm not sure myself what to quite make of it. But, you know, it's not like their assessment can just be ignored, until we find out more.

Keep graspin for straws.

[Squab]

2 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

So you are saying that is made up stuff?

Nice try, but no it isn't.

1. Does anybody dispute the Russians hacked into various organizations email or IT systems?

2. Does anybody dispute that information seems to have gotten released mainly against Democrats?

2. Maybe you don't agree with the CIA's assessment and that's fine. I'm not sure myself what to quite make of it. But, you know, it's not like their assessment can just be ignored, until we find out more.

Keep graspin for straws.

you're right. its a conspiracy that confirms your bias based on what someone has said.  Above is circumstantial, not conclusive.

[OldGimletEye]

Just now, Squab said:

you're right. its a conspiracy that confirms your bias based on what someone has said.  Above is circumstantial, not conclusive.

Huh? What on god's green earth are you talking about?

How does this rebut, what I said?

[snake]

Breaking news.

NBC is reporting that "anonymous" US intelligence officials are now confident that Vladimir Putin was directly involved in the hacking and thus directly involved in getting his man, Donald J. Trump(who may or may not be a Russian agent) elected.

The Obama WH is also accusing Trump of standing idly by while the Russians hacked Hillary Clinton.  Apparently they feel Trump knew more than they or anyone else did and did nothing to stop the hacks. 

The CIA apparently uncovered the nefarious plot by going through Trump's garbage and found some post-it notes with damning, but indiscernible, scribbles.  President Obama has vowed to retaliate by bombing Somalia. 

Link to NBC

Link to NYPost

[Ormond]

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

 

1. The poll you cite wasn’t the work of NBC. It was the work of Sam Wang. Wang is a Neurosurgeon by profession. As far as I know, Wang doesn’t work for NBC.

 

Thank you for your post. It was very well done.

However, I feel compelled to point out that Sam Wang is a neuroscientist with a Ph.D., not a neurosurgeon with an M.D. He does research on the function of the cerebellum, particularly in autism, but does not perform surgery on anyone. 

[Reny of Storms End]

 

1 hour ago, Squab said:

Just like with the whole Russian influence in the election. I see your point.

Just like those biased NBC polls. 

[Inigima]

Not sure where this Somalia stuff is coming from or if that part was a joke, but I just read the same article on NBC. Really disturbing.

I would never say this if I were in a position of power, for fear of provoking an armed conflict,  but surely this is an act of war?