US Politics: Help Me Vladimir!!! Xi Wants Me to Lose!!!

[Martell Spy]

So much winning.

Trump Says 80,000-100,000 Americans Will Die, Calls That a ‘Success’

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-says-80-90000-americans-will-die-calls-that-a-success?ref=home

Quote

 

 “That’s one of the reasons we’re successful, if you call losing 80 or 90 thousand people successful,” Trump said in a Fox News town hall at the Lincoln Memorial.

“I used to say 65,000,” the president added, “and now I’m saying 80 or 90 and it goes up and it goes up rapidly, but it’s still going to be, no matter how you look at it, at the lower end of the plane if we did the shutdown.” He later added: “We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people. That’s a horrible thing.”

 

 

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

So much winning.

I am definitely tired of all the winning. Do you think he'll stop if we tell him that he's won so much, we're all tired of it?

[Fragile Bird]

I heard a town in Oklahoma issued an ordinance requiring face masks out in public, or maybe just in shops, and people wearing masks got so much abuse up to and including being threatened with a gun, that the town backed off and cancelled the ordinance.

Are the bookies in Las Vegas open and taking bets on coronavirus cases?

[DMC]

12 minutes ago, The Great Unwashed said:

Do you think he'll stop if we tell him that he's won so much, we're all tired of it?

Are you talking about Trump or Tom Brady?

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, DMC said:

Are you talking about Trump or Tom Brady?

Definitely Brady.

[Maithanet]

So I had a general question for people who know more about polling that me like @Fez and @DMC

I know that the polling error of 2016 was somewhat overstated, that Clinton's average national polling lead was ~ 4 points at election time, and she won the popular vote by 2 points, so that's a pretty reasonable result.  The polling miss in a few specific states like WI and MI was worse, but nothing crazy.  I'm nonetheless sure that pollsters are working hard to avoid a similar miss in 2020.  Do you know of anything specific that they are doing on that front?  Have you seen any articles that talk about what the proper percentage of white working class voters to assume will turn out in 2020 compared to what pollsters were assuming in 2016 and what actually turned out in 2016?   

[Fez]

Feel free to draw your own conclusions about whether Biden's campaign already knew this when he made the request.

OTOH, just the statement was enough to get Reade to issue yet another statement, this time saying that the request was about general discomfort and didn't include anything about the alleged sexual assault. Which doesn't mean it didn't happen, but it does further confuse the issue for a lot of people I think. So either way, I guess it was good politics on the part of Biden.

[Martell Spy]

22 minutes ago, The Great Unwashed said:

I am definitely tired of all the winning. Do you think he'll stop if we tell him that he's won so much, we're all tired of it?

I don't think he ever let what anyone wanted stop him from doing anything. It sounds like he is about to go campaign and insure the winning continues one handshake at a time.

[Fez]

1 minute ago, Maithanet said:

So I had a general question for people who know more about polling that me like @Fez and @DMC

I know that the polling error of 2016 was somewhat overstated, that Clinton's average national polling lead was ~ 4 points at election time, and she won the popular vote by 2 points, so that's a pretty reasonable result.  The polling miss in a few specific states like WI and MI was worse, but nothing crazy.  I'm nonetheless sure that pollsters are working hard to avoid a similar miss in 2020.  Do you know of anything specific that they are doing on that front?  Have you seen any articles that talk about what the proper percentage of white working class voters to assume will turn out in 2020 compared to what pollsters were assuming in 2016 and what actually turned out in 2016?   

I don't haven't seen anything specific about improvements pollsters are doing. Though I have seen continued shaming by experts of some polling outfits that are continuing to not do any weighting by education, which is one the easiest ways to have a big miss. I remember even in 2016, when there were guady PA polls showing Clinton at +10 or more, it was pointed out that those polls had way, way more respondents with college degrees than the state overall. So that may still an issue this time around.

One potential pitfall this time around that Nate Cohn keeps going on about is an issue with gender response rates. He thinks a lot of polls are, for whatever reason, getting too many older women and younger men. And, because of the gender gap, this causes Biden's numbers to look too good among senior citizens and not good enough among younger voters. Although, their topline numbers look about the same as the polls he hasn't called out, so I don't know if it makes a difference.

[sologdin]

Quote

So much winning.

Trump Says 80,000-100,000 Americans Will Die, Calls That a ‘Success’

can we imagine trump in defoe's london? maybe defoe did:

Quote

It was about the 10th of September that my curiosity led, or rather drove, me to go and see this pit again, when there had been near 400 people buried in it; and I was not content to see it in the day-time, as I had done before, for then there would have been nothing to have been seen but the loose earth; for all the bodies that were thrown in were immediately covered with earth by those they called the buriers, which at other times were called bearers; but I resolved to go in the night and see some of them thrown in.

There was a strict order to prevent people coming to those pits, and that was only to prevent infection. But after some time that order was more necessary, for people that were infected and near their end, and delirious also, would run to those pits, wrapt in blankets or rugs, and throw themselves in, and, as they said, bury themselves.

a great victory.

[Fragile Bird]

30 minutes ago, sologdin said:

can we imagine trump in defoe's london? maybe defoe did:

a great victory.

Yes....but...

Quote

But the blame can’t only be laid on contemporary writers. Some of the confusion also comes from reliance on writers of the time. Daniel Defoe’s drama Journal of a Plague Year, for example, lists a number of plague pits. But Defoe was a child at the time of the 1665 event, and though he billed his book as being a victim’s eyewitness account, it is now generally considered to be a work of historical fiction.

There's a great tv series called Digging for Britain, that visits archeological digs all over Britain (and occasionally overseas or under water) that had a segment on the plague pit uncovered with the building of the new Crossrail Underground line. There was a writer who had claimed the lines curved all over London because the builders were avoiding plague pits, but it turns out that they actually curve because they tried to build under public lands wherever possible because of a law that required the rail company to purchase all the private lands the trains went under. They feared the tunnels would collapse. This is a great article I found about the plague pits and other burial grounds and the building of the Underground.

http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160906-plague-pits-the-london-underground-and-crossrail

Lol, sorry for the non-political post!

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, Fez said:

I don't haven't seen anything specific about improvements pollsters are doing. Though I have seen continued shaming by experts of some polling outfits that are continuing to not do any weighting by education, which is one the easiest ways to have a big miss. I remember even in 2016, when there were guady PA polls showing Clinton at +10 or more, it was pointed out that those polls had way, way more respondents with college degrees than the state overall. So that may still an issue this time around.

One potential pitfall this time around that Nate Cohn keeps going on about is an issue with gender response rates. He thinks a lot of polls are, for whatever reason, getting too many older women and younger men. And, because of the gender gap, this causes Biden's numbers to look too good among senior citizens and not good enough among younger voters. Although, their topline numbers look about the same as the polls he hasn't called out, so I don't know if it makes a difference.

2016 also had a problem with people giving socially desirable results. I didn't think that would be an issue in 2020, but it will likely be again because of the virus. 

The man embarrasses his voters so much. It would be nice if they learned they're in an abusive relationship. 

[Zorral]

Here's a recent article about Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year.

As commented, he didn't live through the London plague he is dramatizing. His uncle lived through London, Defoe said, and he had his uncle's memories.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/apr/28/a-journal-of-the-plague-year-by-daniel-defoe-is-our-reading-group-book-for-may

The illustrations to the article are splendid.

What he writes about though, is also written about by Pepys in his Diary -- and Pepys was definitely there -- though he sent his wife out to the country for her safety.

[Guest]

Has anyone posted this yet? Apologies if so.

Leaked WH docs estimate 3,000 deaths/day, 225,000 new cases/day by June. (NYT limited clicks)

Quote

As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from the coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.

The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.

We're proper fucked.

[Freshwater Spartan]

3 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

I heard a town in Oklahoma issued an ordinance requiring face masks out in public, or maybe just in shops, and people wearing masks got so much abuse up to and including being threatened with a gun, that the town backed off and cancelled the ordinance.

Are the bookies in Las Vegas open and taking bets on coronavirus cases?

Got a link to a legitimate news source? Sounds like a crazy story and I'd hate spread Russian propaganda.

[Kalbear]

17 minutes ago, The Great Unwashed said:

Has anyone posted this yet? Apologies if so.

Leaked WH docs estimate 3,000 deaths/day, 225,000 new cases/day by June. (NYT limited clicks)

We're proper fucked.

In retrospect, the US policy to simply let lots of people suffer and die so that affluent people could not be inconvenienced should not have been much of a surprise. It is a distillation of generic US policy across the board. We'll soon be getting thinkpieces about how the people who are dying probably deserved it in some way (obese, diabetics, etc) and how this is actually a good thing, because they weren't particularly productive. 

[Week]

3 minutes ago, Freshwater Spartan said:

Got a link to a legitimate news source? Sounds like a crazy story and I'd hate spread Russian propaganda.

Lmgtfy

https://time.com/5831351/threats-oklahoma-face-masks-stillwater-coronavirus/

[Freshwater Spartan]

2 minutes ago, Week said:

Lmgtfy

https://time.com/5831351/threats-oklahoma-face-masks-stillwater-coronavirus/

Unreal. Thought for sure the story was fake. Thanks for the update.

[Week]

2 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

We'll soon be getting thinkpieces about how the people who are dying probably deserved it in some way (obese, diabetics, etc) and how this is actually a good thing, because they weren't particularly productive. 

Social security: Solvent again! 

/joke

[Guest]

17 minutes ago, Freshwater Spartan said:

Got a link to a legitimate news source? Sounds like a crazy story and I'd hate spread Russian propaganda.

This is a true story. I used to live in the city where it happened.

Link