Fez

South Africa's election results have finalized: https://results.elections.org.za/dashboards/npe/ The ANC fell all the way to 40.2% (from 57.5% in 2019, their prior lowest showing) and winning 159 of the 400 seats in the national assembly. Almost all the difference is from former President Jacob Zuma's new MK party siphoning support (58 seats), rather than the existing opposition parties doing better. The ANC will need to form a coalition for the first time, but it's an open question who they'll do it with. Hopefully not with Zuma, who is a very Trump-like figure (fortunately there's a lot of bad blood between Zuma and ANC leaders). He's even already called the election rigged and demanded a do-over. But my understanding is there's also bad blood between the ANC and the other two main opposition parties, the DA (centrist, but often seen as the Whites party; 87 seats) and the EKK (far-left, to the point of wanting to nationalize mines and seize White-owned property; 39 seats). Also, ANC+EKK is actually not quite a majority, so they'd need a minor party or two to join in as well. Most investors seem (based on The Economist article I read) to be trying to wish into existence an ANC+DA coalition. But I don't know how likely that is. I guess theoretically, the ANC could try skipping all three of those parties and work just with the minor ones. There's 14 other parties with a total of 57 seats, so there may be some crazy combo that could get worked out; though its a real tight margin. Especially since I imagine far-right parties like the PA with their 9 seats would be excluded. Whatever happens, it'll need to be quick. South Africa's constitution requires the assembly to vote for who will be President in 14 days.

Pollsters and analysts who rely on polls claiming that polling isn't broken. Color me shocked.

Polling response rates get worse every year. They haven't been random samples in a long time and pollster weighting is the only thing stopping them from being completely silly. But pollster weighting can be both flawed on its own if the wrong assumptions are made and be insufficient even if it's the right assumptions but the samples are skewed are in ways they didn't account for. I believe we've finally hit that tipping point. Which is why we see things like some pollsters expecting unprecedented surges in unlikely voters showing up, since that's required for Trump to be a slight favorite like they think he should be.

He hasn't, but I do think response bias has finally reached levels that makes most polling basically worthless. For instance, most polls are showing Trump straight-up winning the 18-29 age cohort; sometimes by pretty large margins. And while it's true that there is an unfortunately large cohort of right-wing young men with youtube brainrot (e.g., fans of Andrew Tate) and also true that a lot of young people are mad at Biden, the idea that a majority of them would straight up vote for Trump goes against basically everything we know about the generation overall. However, the idea that almost none 18-29 participate in polling, and the tiny handful who do are much more likely to be MAGAs proud of their assholery that throw off the results, seems reasonable.

The Mandela Effect gets caught up in conspiracy theories all the time. But I think it really only applies to false memories about innocuous things. The Berenstein vs. Berenstain Bears have already been mentioned. Two other really common ones are: 1) Believing that Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia logo in its branding (it never did), and 2) Believing that the girl that the Bond villain Jaws meets in Moonraker had braces (she doesn't)

Seems very likely that the ANC lost their majority. I'm no expert on South African politics, but it seems that total gridlock will be the result. The ANC had gotten pretty corrupt, but this isn't a Poland scenario where every other party has an incentive to band together despite their ideological differences. But at the same time, it seems like a coalition between the ANC and any of the three major opposition parties would be very shaky. There's bad blood between each of them and the ANC and I think each would prefer to be in the opposition. I've seen some suggestions that if the ANC falls below 45% that's probably the cutoff for an internal leadership challenge as well; which would further complicate any coalition making.

You don't think the lack of Biden on the ballot will dampen Democratic turnout in the state? Sherrod Brown has a slim chance of winning as is; he definitely won't if even a slim % of Biden voters stay home because they don't know they can write him in.

I have 20/20 vision in my left eye but pretty poor vision (i forget the exact number) in my right eye. So in my glasses, the left lens is just plain glass (or plastic, or whatever glasses are made of these days) and the right lens has the prescription lens. Meaning theoretically I could get a prescription monocle. I actually briefly looked into it. Mostly as a joke, but maybe something I'd wear from time to time. At the time, I found a couple companies in the UK that made them. But the price didn't seem worth it when most days I would definitely end up wearing glasses instead.

It'll be a disaster for Sherrod Brown if this ends up happening. And a serious fuck-up by Democrats when scheduling the convention to not recognize that Republicans would pull this kind of thing. In past elections, when this issue came up it would've stopped both parties' nominee from being on the ballot so Republicans had to fix it. But this time, the RNC is early enough that Trump's in the clear. I suspect that Democrats will end up doing the official paperwork of nominating Biden a few weeks before the convention to side-step the issue. I hope they do anyway. They'd be very dumb to put all their faith in a lawsuit since there was nothing secret or hidden about Ohio's deadline. They chose to ignore it assuming that the state legislature would step in.

I know LV screens (the good ones historically anyway) are self-reported. But there's simply not that much turnover from election-to-election, so if you're finding so much turnover there's a problem somewhere. Likely in that the sample isn't actually representative. And what I saw (admittedly posted elsewhere, so maybe they were lying) was that respondents' recalled 2020 vote was: Biden: 42% Trump: 32% Did not vote: 34%

It is entirely unrealistic to think that level of ticket splitting could still happen in 2024. Especially a Trump/Senate Democrats split (which the NYT found) instead of a Third Party or Blank/Senate Democrat split. And if we're talking about the NYT poll specifically, their "likely voter model" has 20% of their voters either not voted in the last two midterms, not voted in the last general election, or never voted before. Which, by any reasonable definition, would not make them "likely" voters. Meanwhile, 34% (!) of their registered voters didn't vote in 2020; which also seems very unrealistic. To me, these numbers reinforce that NYT simply isn't getting representative samples without getting dangerously funky in their methodologies.

A couple phrases I've seen from people who saw the movie: "It's leftwing Fountainhead mixed with Metropolis" and "It's Bladerunner meets Julius Caesar" I so want this movie to be great. If it's not, it'll at least be a glorious mess. But greatness would be really cool for cinema.

There's a high risk no matter what, but I think there's less chance of real danger than 2020. The Electoral Count Reform Act closed most of the potential loopholes that Trump could try exploiting. There's no risk of the DOJ or military under Biden getting involved. And SCOTUS has made clear that they're perfectly happy to kneecap everything Biden wants to do but won't overturn actual election results. Though if Biden wins by only 1 state, no matter the margin, I do think there's a chance things go badly simply because there will be such concentrated effort to mess up the process.

Polling is broken, ignore it. Not to say its guaranteed that Biden is doing better than the polls. But the polls themselves have become worthless. The response rates have become too low, so the samples truly aren't random anymore. Which means that the pollsters have developed ever more complex weighting and modeling systems to try to fix their non-random samples. And these systems have become so key to the final results that they either completely control whatever the poll result might be (I saw it pointed out that one pollster, I think it was Morning Consult, that has had every single of their national poll this year being within a 1 point range) OR they get completely thrown off by an anomalous result (a single black woman saying she'd vote for Trump will move the entire final result multiple points). Either way, the polls are no longer representative of the country. And they don't reflect any of the actions that any politician or political operative is making. For instance, the NYT found Trump +6 in Arizona (and +9 with third party candidates). But the recent news is that the McConnell's PAC is writing off Kari Lake in the Arizona Senate Race as a lost cause already. If Trump was really up 6 or more in Arizona, there's no way Lake would be dead in the water already. Likewise, if Trump was headed towards a blowout win, which is what the NYT is suggesting, why would all his surrogates the past couple weeks starting parroting the line about potentially not accepting the election results? That's what you do when you're worried you might lose, not when the election is looking like a victory lap. Again, this is not to say Biden is safe, he's certainly not. But the polls are not a helpful tool anymore.

Yep. I don't think Biden is making foreign policy decisions based on optics, or even based on polling. If he was, he never would've undertaken the Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021; which is the original issue that sank his approval ratings. Messaging actions, like the various executive orders trying to forgive student loans, are based on polling I'm pretty sure. But that's it.

I think Biden is straight up a good president. Whether that's from his own personal merits or because he simply has good advisors around him, I can't say. But that doesn't matter; most of the job is being good at delegating anyway. Biden's been dealt a tough set of cards: the aftermath of COVID, rampant inflation, a truly insane opposition party, etc. And in spite of that he has been the consequential liberal President since LBJ (and like LBJ he has a foreign policy problem threatening to overshadow his massive domestic achievements; though at least tens of thousands of Americans aren't dying in it). IMO he's in the upper third of US presidents already (though that's not too hard, there's been a lot of terrible and/or forgettable ones), and if he wins re-election he probably ends up in the top 10.

I would also like to call attention to this story from last week: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-24/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-minister-says-he-would-vote-for-trump-biden-strategy-hurts-israel/0000018f-104e-d70d-a58f-d9ffb9d20000 It's paywalled. But basically, one of Israel's cabinet ministers said that, if he were able, he'd vote for Trump this November because Biden is stopping Israel from freely operating in Rafah and Trump wouldn't. So any successful "sending a message" effort will really just make things worse.

It probably does hurt Biden some. But it would likely hurt him worse to come out against the crackdowns. Lots of pro-Israel suburbanites out there, and they vote at much higher rates than young people. Though on the other hand, they vote Democratic at lower rates. Electorally, Biden doesn't have any great options here. This is a wedge issue for Democrats.

But the President can pardon whoever carried out the order, so it's all gravy. The logical conclusion of this argument, which hopefully SCOTUS realizes, is that it would allow Biden to become a literal dictator if he wanted; since he's the one who currently has the official duties of the president.

No, it basically is. Israel is far more integrated into the global economy than South Africa was, and the global economy is far more inter-connected than it had been. Every major company either invests in Israel, sells products to them, accepts investments from Israel, and/or directly employs Israelis (The US chamber of commerce estimates that 2,500 US companies have Israeli employees). It'd be an enormous effort, potentially impossible, to create fund that definitely excluded all those companies. And, if the fund did exist, it'd certainly entirely be composed of small-cap companies. Small-cap index funds significantly underperform the broader market and this one would do even worse since it'd be leaving out the companies that have become successful enough to participate in multinational operations. And were the endowment to purposefully reduce its market returns to that extent, it'd violate the terms that most endowment gifts have; in other words, donors could break their endowment agreements and clawback their gifts if they wanted. So, no, this is not a step any university would ever take. Maybe they could be convinced to stop investment in weapons manufacturers (and maybe even in funds that include them), maybe. But that'd be a major scaleback from the student demands.

Sure. Except that falls into the "impossible" category. The student demand goes beyond stopping direct investment in Israel/Israeli companies (which the University doesn't do anyway— except building a student center in Tel Aviv that the protesters also want cancelled) and is instead that Columbia University not invest in any company that does any business with Israel or even any index fund that includes those companies. Which means they don't want the endowment fund to be invested in the stock market at all; something the university will never do.

Setting aside the merits or concerns about the protests, my main issue is that protesting on campus is basically pointless and just wastes people's time. The student demands are either impossible for the universities for achieve or doable but wouldn't have any impact on Israel. They'd be much more impactful protesting at congresspersons' townhall events and outside their district offices. Or, in the case of the NYC-based students, protesting outside the mayor's office or city council; since the NYC government has much larger economic ties to Israel than any university. The only thing you achieve protesting on campus is smug self-satisfaction. And potentially intimidate Jewish students.

I don't think its 2 huge games. I'm pretty sure it's one huge game (described as being even bigger than BG3) and one smaller game. Sort of like how Rockstar worked on Max Payne 3 and GTA V at the same time.

There was an article about this last summer: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/04/trump-criminal-cases-prison-secret-service/ And, as of then at least, the consensus was that no one had a plan in place yet to handle it. However, just because there are logistical challenges, doesn't mean it would be impossible for Trump to be incarcerated. He would absolutely never be anywhere near a prison gen pop though.

Right, they will. My point is just that they need a Speaker simply for the actual mechanics of passing a bill. Which might be impossible if they ditch Johnson before then.