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U.S. Politics: Dining on Doritos with Derrida and Donald


lokisnow

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This thread is interminably boring and useless when the discussion is dominated by how much you hate nazis, how much Trump supporters are nazis, etc.

14 minutes ago, Altherion said:

Think about how polls work: they ask on the order of 1000 people, extrapolate the results to of order 100 million people and usually get it right to within a few percent. Here you have effectively a poll which asks  of order 100 million people and extrapolates to around 200 million. There are a few systematic effects one must consider (e.g. the fraction of young people voting is typically lower than that of old people), but many of these work in opposite directions and it would be very, very surprising if there is a large overall deviation.

Um, what?  This is absolute nonsense, and only has me wondering how in the hell do you think about how polls work?

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1 hour ago, Triskjavikson said:

That's a good point, but it's not like he wouldn't make the same "you're accusing 1/4 of the country of being bigots, and that could never be possible" argument.  

Such an argument usually relies on the fallacy that the only harmful racists are literal hood-wearing, cross-burning Klansmen (they probably also think the only kind of "real" sexual assault involves some violent knife-wielding rapist ambushing women in the woods or parking garages).

There aren't 60 million Klansmen in the US. But are there sixty million Americans who think black people are more threatening and more criminal, deserving of death for mouthing off to or running from a cop? Are there sixty million Americans who think Latin Americans are lazy drug dealers (but also willing to work for peanuts to pick fruit in the hot sun all day), or who think LGBTQ people are subhuman? Are there sixty million people threatened or anxious by the pending loss of their majority ethnic status (like they are dimly aware in their reptile brain parts that it's not fun to be a minority?). Fuck yes there are sixty million of these motherfuckers.

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3 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

The fact that this is the counterargument you're going with, the example of a conspiracy theory like opinion, that is at best a hyperbolic carciature of any opinion stated here, is pretty telling.  

I'd be interested to see if @ThinkerX has an answer to the question I asked imntheoost you quoted.

Haven't seen any of the posters here conducting vigilante assaults on pizza joints expecting to bust up pedophile rings operating under the grace of the opposing party .

Look in the mirror.

He who hunts monsters risks becoming one himself.  I see multiple posters here - those bitterly condemning 'fence sitters' - as starting that transformation. 

You might not care for it, but something on the order of 25-35% of the US populace holds views strongly at odds with yours about race, economics, and the role of government.    Despite these differences, there are items large and small where agreement or compromise is possible.  Ignoring these openings and focusing on a purely confrontational strategy is foolish in the extreme.  Pursue it, and the result is catastrophe - for everybody. 

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27 minutes ago, DMC said:

Um, what?  This is absolute nonsense, and only has me wondering how in the hell do you think about how polls work?

As I said, they poll a small number of people (of order 1000) and extrapolate up to a large one (of order 100 million for Presidential elections) by weighting the results to account for systematic differences between the small sample that the measured and the large one that they're trying to understand.

46 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Yeah I don't know what the hell polls have to do with the 2016 election, but sure.

If you want to estimate the total percentage of Trump supporters among all citizens (not just voters), you can think of the election as a poll with a very large and diverse measured sample.

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1 hour ago, Triskjavikson said:

That's a good point, but it's not like he wouldn't make the same "you're accusing 1/4 of the country of being bigots, and that could never be possible" argument.  

I'm inclined to give a reasonable % of 2016 Trump voters the benefit of the doubt. I don't think the same consideration should be given in 2018 though.

One have to be living under a rock to think that race relations haven't got worse in the USA in the last year and a bit, and that racists groups haven't felt emboldened by Trump administration rhetoric in a way that seems unprecedented even among post civil rights Republican administrations. If you are genuinely not a racists and you support the Trump administration for other policies and achievements, I think you must be a pretty rare bird. Maybe you will inflexibly vote Republican because of other social issues, like abortion and gun control, which don't directly tie to race. But there is something passively racist about shoving race to one side in your voting decision-making process and voting for the racists. I guess everyone has to put the cons of any candidate to one side and vote for them for the pros that they perceive the  candidate brings with them. I just think there should be some deal-breakers on the cons side that outweigh everything in the pro column. Perhaps it's not that there aren't any deal-breaker cons, it's just that the deal breaker cons are not generally agreed among the majority of voters. For some people, being a woman, or gay, or not white, or not Christian is a deal-breaker. For others, being racist, or homophobic, or misogynistic is a deal-breaker. For yet other people none of these things are deal-breakers.

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15 minutes ago, Altherion said:

As I said, they poll a small number of people (of order 1000) and extrapolate up to a large one (of order 100 million for Presidential elections) by weighting the results to account for systematic differences between the small sample that the measured and the large one that they're trying to understand.

Yeah man, I'm saying your post was nonsensical in terms of, first, the extrapolation of a random sampling of ~1000 likely voters is to the ~135 million adults that vote in a presidential cycle - so, not 100 million.  That's just rounding, so whatever, but then you say - "Here you have effectively a poll which asks  of order 100 million people and extrapolates to around 200 million."  It's entirely unclear what this means.  Then to top it off, you mention a few "systematic effects" for no apparent reason and have a grand finale with "many of these work in opposite directions and it would be very, very surprising if there is a large overall deviation."  Opposite direction to what?  You haven't even established what direction these effects are supposed to have in the first place.  Then, it apparently would be very surprising if there was a large deviation to....something, I suppose. 

The post gives no indication of what exactly you're referring to, or, like I said, utter nonsense.  You're just throwing out "extrapolation" and "systematic differences" without specifying - at all - what the hell you're talking about.  Which in my experience usually means you don't really know what the hell you're talking about.  And there's absolutely no reason to repeatedly say "of order."  You can just say the 1000 sample is extrapolated to the 135 likely million voters.

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32 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

Look in the mirror.

He who hunts monsters risks becoming one himself.  I see multiple posters here - those bitterly condemning 'fence sitters' - as starting that transformation. 

You might not care for it, but something on the order of 25-35% of the US populace holds views strongly at odds with yours about race, economics, and the role of government.    Despite these differences, there are items large and small where agreement or compromise is possible.  Ignoring these openings and focusing on a purely confrontational strategy is foolish in the extreme.  Pursue it, and the result is catastrophe - for everybody. 

So what conspiracy, exactly, are members of this board peddling? 

Or if you really can't or don't want to answer that, how about some examples of where agreement or compromise is possible?

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His Grace's latest twitter spasm.  Monday nights now.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/08/trump-claims-former-apprentice-executive-producer-told-no-tapes-exist-racist-omarosa-alleged/

Quote

.@MarkBurnettTV called to say that there are NO TAPES of the Apprentice where I used such a terrible and disgusting word as attributed by Wacky and Deranged Omarosa. I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have. She made it up. Look at her MANY recent quotes saying....

Check the wording of that first tweet.  He's not saying "I never said that stuff" He's saying, "the guy who would have the evidence, told me there's no evidence."  Doesn't this imply that there was such material to be recorded?  Or, to a lesser extent, that the tapes did exist but now they don't?  Like "I got rid of the tapes Mr President"?  You know how he is.

"Whacky and Deranged Omarosa".  He fucking knew this person for years.  I totally get that sometimes you interview someone and thy look great but you get them on the job and it's a disaster.  He literally interacted with this person. For. Years. Before bringing her to the Whitehouse.

And of course this perfectly fits his M.O. of praising the shit out of someone who's in his camp and slagging the shit out of someone who's become disloyal.

 

 

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1 hour ago, larrytheimp said:

So what conspiracy, exactly, are members of this board peddling? 

Or if you really can't or don't want to answer that, how about some examples of where agreement or compromise is possible?

Well, maybe instead of killing all the non white people in a massive genocide we can re-establish slavery.

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9 hours ago, Squab said:

Nazis and ethnic cleansing is abhorrent and should be fought at every opportunity. Luckily we have our betters to decide what ideas we can and can't hear, thank you overlords. And I know that censorship will make these ideas go away and it wont spill over into other ideas or thoughts or be used as a tool to oppress. Given that we are talking about the public sphere, how do we censor what is said over the kitchen table? or even what people think?

Well for one, you act as if the left is the only one one with a free speech problem. But the fact of the matter is the right has a free speech problem. Just consider all the Trump supporters that believed that Trump should be able to control the press. So this isn't just a left wing problem, like many righties try to claim.

Believe it or not, I'm a pretty strong free speech person. And I'm certainly not in favor of putting monitors in everyone's home to monitor what they say.

And yet, in principle, I do favor banning public speech that advocates genocide, ethnic cleansing, or Nazism as none of those things advance any legitimate point of view in a liberal democracy. Of course the devil in banning those things will be in the details. My support for banning those things would turn upon how the rules were written to ban them. I personally would prefer the rules or rule to be fairly narrow i scope, leaving plenty of room for mainstream conservative opinion and even a lot of room for fringe right wing opinion.

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