Here’s a little cartoon that nicely summarizes my attitude towards all those people who voted for Trump.
Get the fuck out of my life. Don’t ask me for anything, not even sympathy. Don’t try to tell me it was nothing personal, you just wanted lower grocery prices (I have news for you — you won’t be getting them), that I’m bad for letting politics interfere with friendship. It’s you that stabbed me and all my friends and a few million innocents with your politics.
That goes for NPR, too. They have a story about a couple in which the wife leapt down the MAGA rabbithole.
Late one night in June 2020, Katrina Vaillancourt lay awake in her bedroom, overwhelmed by the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unable to sleep, she pressed play on an online video series that a friend had sent.
The videos’ narrator promised to reveal “evidence of an elite plan so evil, so all encompassing, that people will be shocked to the core.”
The dizzying 10-part video series was called Fall of the Cabal. It promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory that society is controlled by a satanic cabal that is abusing children. Vaillancourt would later think back on this moment as the point at which her beliefs radically changed overnight, rupturing her closest relationships — including the one with her then-fiancé, Stephen Ghiglieri, who was asleep beside her.
This is a horror story. It couldn’t be worse if instead, she had a debilitating stroke. This was a devastating, near instantaneous transformation that would have warranted an emergency trip to the hospital. NPR treats it as a mundane change of opinion, though.
As Vaillancourt watched, her initial skepticism gave way to a feeling of devastation. She was relieved when the final episodes claimed a group of government insiders was working on a plan to take down the cabal with then-President Donald Trump’s help. The narrator called the president a “genius, a 5-D chess player, a man with a huge heart.” A “golden age” was on the way.
“I felt nauseated by the sight or the sound of Trump prior to this particular night,” Vaillancourt said. But at a time when the world felt chaotic and uncertain, the message in the series gave her hope. “My fear dissolved,” she recalled. “I felt this beaming of love” and “like the curtain had been thrown wide open.”
Dear god. Was she poisoned? Was she always this gullible and delusional? Don’t worry, though, she got “better”.
Vaillancourt voted for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. even though he had dropped out of the race. Trump has picked him to be part of his administration, which she says has given her a reason to feel optimistic.
“I have been of an opinion that’s different than Stephen’s [her husband],” she said. “And that’s a difficult thing for me to even say right here. I don’t share the fear that so many people around me do. That’s difficult to acknowledge too.”
This lunatic woman and her husband have reconciled…and NPR treats this as a happy ending. See, they just have different opinions — she may have voted for a manic anti-vaxxer, she may see a wanna-be dictator who wants to deport millions and deny health care to women, but love will find a way and she will face no consequences from her insane views.
She sounds like the kind of person who loves NPR.
Is that a real thing? The video cartoon, I mean. All this apologetic desire to be liked?
Can’t say I’ve ever experienced it.
Far as I know, most people who support Trump are quite unapologetic about it, even brag about it.
‘Owning the libs’ is the point, no?
(I’m in Oz, I suppose in the USA it’s like 1000x more intense)
This Bukowski poem, A Challenge To The Dark, keeps coming back;
I lost two friendships thanks to Trump, and honestly I couldn’t be happier. One of them was an entitled, philandering dick. I had to set up a message filter that shunted his email to a folder and marked it as read, as he was constantly sending me links to stupid conspiracy theories that could be debunked by a 30 second google searched.
I think our friendship started to die a few years before that when I realized that his primary goal in life was to make himself feel good.
The other was a more subtle philandering dick who get huffy the moment even mild criticism of right wing politics, or the catholic church was spoken.
John @1:
Ah well, “far as you know”. That probably means bits and pieces you’ve read or heard in the media. Thing is, the most visible/audible people in the media are the ones who are the most extreme. Surely you’ve noticed this phenomenon? If you actually talk to people “on the ground”, rather than depend on what you see or hear on TV or the internet, you can get a very different picture.
Yeah, I’m not going to touch NPR, again.
Voting for Trump is beyond the pale. End friendship, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
I was raised on NPR, so my disappointment is especially acute.
Rob:
Day after the election, a good mate messaged me to gloat about it.
Happy as larry stocks were up, figures it’s gonna be great.
(What, you imagine I’m an eremite?)
People on the ground are in Australia, where I live.
(I’m in Oz, I suppose in the USA it’s like 1000x more intense)
—
But fine, it’s the people on the ground who are supposedly apologetic, not the people on the media, best as you can tell.
I have no knowledge of NPR of course, but on one thing I can agree: this sort of awful choice is way more than a simple “difference of opinion”. Those are appropriate for matters of taste, sports, esthetics and similar.
Here we have scads of people in front of an obvious choice and choosing the worst possible outcome AND feeling clever about it.
Like, what’s better? Stubbing your toe or falling headfirst into a lava lake? And waddyathink, they go for the lava, and try to convince you they are not insane, toes are way sensitive man, and lava gets a bad rap all the time, it’s all those socialists’ fault for badmouthing the poor lava.
And when they go up in flames, it’s never their fault…
I’m an asexual. From what I’ve read, the people behind Project 2025 want me labeled a sex offender, along with all my LGBTQ+ friends. Any one who says they voted for Trump knows they voted for that, and I’ll be quick to remind them if I encounter one.
Fuck Trumpers’ feelings. They voted for uncivilized consequences, so they should face the consequence of being excluded from civilized society.
John @7: Nice anecdote. And sorry about your choices of good mates.
No biggie, Rob. A couple are actually religious, and I know a Pastor, too.
(You know how I feel about religion, and it’s not like my friends don’t know that)
I wonder if it’s worth becoming estranged with the friends who are sorta apologetic and still want you to like them. Those who gibe and gloat, well, fair enough. Those who are kinda reaching out?
—
The sentiment is ‘don’t forgive, don’t forget’, right?
Cut them from your life. They are dead to you.
Good way to winnow your circle of acquaintances so that those who remain are only those who share your political views. Or so I suppose, I’m not into that sort of thing, I have rather stricter standards.
The only happy ending to a “my friend/relative voted for Trump (or any other modern Republican” story is “my friend/relative started/resumed taking their medication, which worked effectively, and they fully and eagerly renounced the idiocy and malevolence of their previous actions.”
Endings that include “and we never interacted again” can, but don’t necessarily, involve improvements to one’s state state of being about which one should be happy, but are more “be thankful for avoiding worst case scenario” endings than they are happy endings. Losing a good person who turned into a bad person is still a sad story, and even a “they finally broke the camel’s back, forcing me to see what they were and take appropriate action” story is more of an empowering learning opportunity than something happy.
John @11: I don’t demand that my friends share my political views. I simply demand that they not be fucking clueless gullible idiots*. But by all means, maintain your own strict standards!
*Maybe you think all theists are fucking clueless gullible idiots? We certainly part ways there.
This would be the year of my 50th high school reunion, and I had good friends back then, ones I’d like to see again. I don’t think this would be a good time for that, though, because I’m sure there’d also be awful people as well. Years ago, I dropped out of Facebook specifically because I had so many Facebook friends who were constantly revealing that they were assholes.
Rob, be aware that with you, this religious aspect is a button that can be pushed.
I just told you directly I have religious friends. I am married to a practicing Catholic.
I have no problem with them, obviously I think they are wrong, and I tell them that.
And they do the same to me. No prob.
Again: this post is a call for punishment for ideological differences.
Right?
“Get the fuck out of my life. Don’t ask me for anything, not even sympathy.”
In religious terms, it’s called “shunning”.
JWs are quite good at it, for example (‘disfellowshipping’).
So I get the secular version.
(Politics and religion, two of the three problem topics!)
John @15: So if a good mate admits to you that he’s a fascist, well, we wouldn’t want you to winnow your circle of acquaintances, would we? You do know that Trump is a fascist, right?
Oh yeah, what a happy compromise: she only voted for the SECOND worst bigoted deranged con-man.
(And I’m waiting for someone to pop up from under a rock and say “See, we’re willing to compromise — now you liberals have to compromise something too!”)
Rob, you deal with your friends your way, I’ll deal with mine my way.
(I notice you don’t dispute it’s all about the shunning; again, if I do that, I’ll have a stronger basis for it)
I saw another video by someone from Texas whose name I forget, who basically said, to Trump supporters who suddenly found themselves alienated from their families, “If your family aren’t speaking to you, it’s because you spoke to them, loud and clear.”
An individual choosing not to associate with someone isn’t shunning. Shunning is a collective act by a community. Someone telling their shit family that abuses them to fuck off is not shunning.
What about people who voted for Stein or other third party spoilers or stayed home putting their supposed moral purity above doing the one thing that could’ve actually stopped Trump namely voting for Kamala Harris and the Democratic party?
People like erstwhile trolls Beholder and Vicar and co here?
NPR is no great loss to me. I gave up on them years ago after listening to them regularly and supporting my local NPR station. I gave up on them for their consistent softball interviewing of right wingers, which when I give them an occasional listen I know continues to this day. NPR will kiss the ring, as if they ever stopped, and hope that in a few years there still is an NPR.
^ Or, really, as I should have put it voted indirectly for Trump through voting for Stein, West or other third party spoilers and those third party vanity campaign candidates themselves who should have dropped out and 100% backed the Democratic nominee in order to stop, y’know, actual fucking nazis taking power.
I heard the same story, but it seems a lot of you had a much more visceral reaction than I did. I thought it was an unusual story and still have some doubts about the story’s veracity; I mean, most people, when confronted with that opening narration, would see the thing as a conspiracy theory to begin with. I have my doubts, too, about her research ability. My thought was that there was no way I would have stayed or could have stayed, but I’m not her fiancé. It’s also possible that there are a couple of people out there who were trying to fool the newscasters.
I saw something similar long ago.
With a happy ending. And also an unhappy ending.
Two people, a guy and his fiance both got accepted into graduate school at the University of Utah (where FWIW, PZ Myers did a postdoc). The woman was free to go first to Salt Lake City, check in and arrange for housing for them, and so on. The usual stuff when you are moving to a new city and starting a new university program.
She got to Salt Lake City and…disappeared.
No one could find her.
The Scientologists at the time were hanging out downtown and trying to recruit people to their cult.
The thought was that the Scientologists had got her. Something that happens quite often considering what people are getting into.
They eventually managed to track her down.
The Moonies got her.
He never saw her again.
Needless to say, that was the end of her graduate career and their engagement.
He was heartbroken and devastated.
I still can’t see why. AFAICT, he dodged a giant mortar shell.
Someone whose sense of self identity is such that they can get caught in the Moony net doesn’t strike me as a good prospect for the position of…life partner.
There are two ways to deal with this little shit show we’re in with Trump voters.
Try to find common ground. This is awfully difficult and some days I’m just not up to it. Frankly that’s a lot of days for me. Most days, even. But if and when you can manage it, ask them what THEY think they voted for. Remind them what they told you and ask them how that’s working out around the 4th of July, a bit over 5 months into Trump’s campaign. Maybe again during the holiday season to reinforce the point. Let them talk but don’t let them blame not getting what they wanted or it not being what they wanted once they got it on Democrats, LGBTQ+ people, kitty litterboxes in schools, or Hillary’s fucking emails. I don’t think you need to do much more to make a point besides listen and stop them from lying because Trump isn’t going to do a meaningful thing for 99.9% of the population.
Take the healthy, easy way out and cut them from your life. It’s like the argument about flyover country last time Trump came to power. Suddenly it was super important. Suddenly we all needed to acknowledge the rural people better. Suddenly they weren’t closet fascists just itching for a chance to saddle us all with their shitty, small minded ideas. Yeah, whatever. These are the same people that get indignant when someone protesting human rights violations inconveniences them by briefly blocking traffic. Or even if they hear about it happening in some far away place. These are the same people who were upset when Kapernick knelt during the national anthem but when their ideas cause actual harm to others it’s always “fuck your feelings!” These are the critical thinkers who say they voted for Trump because of the economy when all he promised was a variation on the lazy conman’s fallback: somethingsomething tarrifs somethingsomething magic money from nowhere somethingsomething profit. So yeah, don’t feel bad about cutting these people out of your life.
I suppose you could do a mix where you try to find common ground when you think you’re on the ball enough to cut through the bullshit. But don’t waste time on anyone who thinks they’re clever or seems to take any pleasure in telling you how wrong you are. Those people definitely need option #2.
Disengage is my coping mechanism. Do not turn on the news, peruse the headlines and selectively read the stuff that pertains to my priorities. As for coworkers, friends and family I will not discuss anything right wing. I know the knowledge I have on most of the hot button topics is superior to what they have. I know this because I’ve talked to them many times. No, it is not the Dunning-Kruger effect. They are the ones who want walls built and to have what has been built torn down. I no longer want their pollution in my brain. I mind myself during social gatherings and stay abnormally subdued. I was a stop in their lives where they could appreciate a cerebral duel, no longer, wallow in your own muck. My strategy going forward is to let them get want they want, I will do nothing to fight what the MAGA tide voted for, when and if they ever have an episiotomy, I mean epiphany, then maybe I will converse with them again.
I have a different perspective, perhaps because I used to be a conservative until late in George W. Bush’s administration. Looking back on my conservative days, I do not remember being hateful, bigoted, or cruel, any more than I am now as a liberal. I simply had different views of how the world worked, which I now think were mostly wrong, and also some big blind spots about the real-world effects of conservative policies. Likewise, the majority of conservatives I’ve known don’t fit the stereotype of being hate-filled or bigoted. Most of them do have irrational prejudices, but so do most liberals I know, and, I suspect, most people in general.
With this background, I find it difficult to demonize Trump voters the way some people do. Everyone is free to choose their own way of responding to the current political situation in the US, but for my part I don’t intend to cut ties with anyone over political beliefs. To me, the most important thing is how someone treats the people around them in everyday life, rather than how they vote.
what do I see when I look at what is happening with people looks like one of the problems with human intelligence and how we use it and how it works at a time of great instability (changes).
We like stories we use story to inform to carry meaning, understanding the world to entertain ourselves. Stories are simply everywhere in human culture. We use unlimited comparisons to other things, we break them all down to categories types of comparisons.
if your ideas and understanding of reality are limited by ignorance, confusion, fear and uncertainty conspiracies seem possible. The heart of the con. is the story if the story holds together as a story as well as Harry Potter or Perry Mason no matter how far fetched and impossible it will be believed by some
The Nigerian Prince money, found wallet full of money, child sex ring in the pizza store none existent basement, Mexico will pay for it.
I have no answer for how to combat that in other people it takes a lot of effort to keep aware of what is true and what is not wading through all the false information and outright lies now. I don’t know if was worse in the past or not. I am sure the ignorance level was not lower in the past.
No internet in the past.
To me, the most important thing is how someone treats the people around them in everyday life, rather than how they vote.
Those two things aren’t really separable: who we vote for to have power over us is part of “how we treat people,” even if it’s indirect and the link between voting and consequences isn’t always clearly visible.
@StevoR, #23:
If Harris had received every single third-party vote, including the Libertarians (whose second choice is almost always Republican), she still would not have won the popular vote. Last time I looked — which was when there were still a couple of states which had not certified their results, so I suppose this could be wrong — there wasn’t even a single state she lost where she would have won if she got all the third-party votes. You can’t blame this on third-party voters.
You also can’t blame it on vote-counting shenanigans — multiple international organizations were watching the vote and found nothing significant to complain about. Your incredibly awful candidate lost.
It wasn’t even sexism or racism — when the voters at large knew nothing about Harris except that she was a dark-skinned woman, just after Biden finally dropped out, she had a lead in the polls! If the election had been held one week after Biden dropped out, she would have won! She squandered her lead bit by bit by doubling down on Biden’s policies — which was an unbelievably boneheaded mistake. When the public says they do not want a government run by a senile old man, you don’t say “okay, we’ll ditch the senile old man but we’re going to keep doing everything he would have done anyway”. Frankly, that choice was so stupid that there should be a class action suit against the DNC for malpractice. People who even now support and publicly defend them — by which I mean people like you — ought to be legally required to punch themselves in the face every morning for wasting what they themselves claim was the sole opportunity to keep Trump out of office.
In fact, since we’re talking about third parties, it’s worth noting that Harris actually ran noticeably (although not significantly) to the right of the Libertarian party in this election, according to their policies as outlined in the open debates (the third-party ones which the Democrats and Republicans did not attend… possibly because having to defend their policies against people who are not already committed to the status quo would make them seem like idiots and lunatics almost immediately). Despite the consultants who were given charge of Harris’ campaign going into spin mode within microseconds of her loss being confirmed, and trying to claim that she ran too far to the left (WTF?!), to anybody who has even the slightest grasp on reality she lost because she chose to stick to Biden’s basically indefensible record — particularly including, but not limited to, his unwillingness to budge on the Israeli genocide, his right-wing stance on ICE and immigration (more deportations from Biden’s term than Trump’s first term!), and his economic stance of taking care of the stock market instead of the public (practically all indications other than jobs and the stock market were worse under Biden than under pre-covid Trump, and sometimes even than including-covid Trump; homelessness, hunger, poverty, and evictions are way up, median household income is down… and incidentally they keep admitting that they’ve fudged the jobs reports and unemployment is actually a lot worse than the rosy announcements the Biden/Harris campaigns kept relying on). Both Biden and Harris tried to turn the whole election into a “we’re not actually Trump (despite openly embracing many of his policies)” turn and 2016 demonstrated that this is a strategy which loses to Trump. If you aren’t totally embedded in your Democratic echo chamber, you can find a summary of it all with links here.
It’s also worth pointing out that for all the chasing the Democrats did of Republican votes — Harris spent more time campaigning with Elizabeth Cheney than any other person of either party, for example — Harris got slightly less of the Republican vote than Biden did. Get it? The whole “we should ditch the base and chase rightward” strategy, which has arguably not worked even once since the Democrats started using it in 1992 (according to exit polls, Clinton won because Perot genuinely spoiled the election for Bush), really does not work. We have the data! This is a failed strategy. It’s time to stop doing it — and more importantly, not to nominate any candidate who even thinks about employing it… which means pretty much any candidate who ran in the 2016 or 2020 primaries other than Sanders, who isn’t going to run again. Get rid of them all — in fact, get rid of the party; it very clearly does not have your best interests at heart any more, and hasn’t for years.
This wasn’t even new mistakes; your candidate repeated every losing strategy the Democrats have used for decades. The party, and you, should be ashamed of that performance.
What a robotic performance!
Democrats this, Democrats that.
Your schtick.
Topic at hand is people who voted for Trump and whether to personally ignore them henceforth (difficult as that may be with work colleagues and suchlike, in practice), yet as always here you are whining about Democrats instead, and how their strategy is ongoing and repeated (well, except for Clinton and Obama and Biden, those succeeded, no? :)
You, O Vicarious one, should be happy that the other mob is now in power.
But it shan’t stop you from perpetually whining about the other mob.
(Scorpion and the frog, right? It’s in your nature)
Ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_a_blind_eye ?
It’s not exactly like one requires a tertiary educational level to become informed.
(What, people should be strapped down like Alex with the eyeball-exposing stuff and be forcefully be fed information about one of the only two credible presidential candidates?
—
Dunno how the point never hits home.
Have compulsory voting as we in Oz do, no longer a matter of getting people to sign off on a voting declaration.
No more worries about motivating people to turn up to vote, everyone turns up.
Can still vote informally (including not voting), just turn up.
But no.
Too fucking much of a civic duty for the super-free citizens of the USA, to actually turn up and vote.
I mean, we all know that was the difference, no?
Both candidates got fewer votes, but one got a shitload fewer.
(That’s the one you persistently denigrated, O Vicar the Singular)
This is outdated.
In 2020 Trump got 74,223,975 (Wikipedia). In 2024 he got 76,976,675(CNN
Even accounting for the increased population of the US, he got 22.28% of the total population this year compared with 21.87% four years ago.
I’ll let someone else to check if the increase holds when accounted for the number of registered voters.
ondrbak, thanks for the correction.
Anyone stanning Harris or Biden stans for genocide.
Vote for them? yes.
Cheer for them? Hell no.
What is also true is that…Trump didn’t even win a majority of the popular vote!!!
The difference between VP Harris was only 1.61%.
Less than half the voters voted for Trump.
The electoral college amplifies differences in vote totals so Harris loss was larger there.
This election was closer than I thought, closer than the media claimed, and a lot closer than Trump claimed.
@21, 23
Oh, hello, StevoR, I see I’m living rent-free in your nightmares along with Vicar and Jill Stein.
You live on the other side of the planet, in a place the U.S. is not currently dropping bombs on. The consequences for you are abstract and remote.
But since you’re offering mental health advice to me and other people living here in the U.S., shunning people takes an emotional toll. Perhaps justified, but only on a case-by-case basis. Shunning everyone in your absurdly expansive definition of who a Trump voter is — most of those people never voted for Trump and don’t want anything to do with him) — is unhealthy and, honestly, gives me Blue MAGA vibes: The party is correct, you must cease contact with all heretics and apostates.
People can associate with whomever they want. That’s one of our basic freedoms. It’s harder to disassociate with family though. I sympathize with those who have to make these tough decisions concerning their own welfare. But it’s their decision in the end.
Someone supporting fascism is a big red flag for me. Fortunately, nobody within my circle has outwardly done that. Either I’m skilled at friending or ‘m just lucky.
Its not about shunning.
Its circling the wagons, and keeping toxicity out of your circle.
Its seeing people with a calous disregard of others. Its defending those others even if you are not one of them.
It is about shunning. JM @15 correctly identified it. You can feel good about your reasons for shunning others, I suppose, but it is what it is. Punishment for election-related misdeeds.
Most ridiculously in StevoR’s case, he just wants to stick his fingers in his ears and ignore everyone who have been ringing the alarm bells this whole time. People who aren’t Trump supporters. People who aren’t fascists, quite the opposite. The party elites who are actually responsible for this defeat have learned nothing: they want to silence dissenting voices and double down on their losing strategy.
@33
Claiming that running to the right worked just because a candidate won is a incredibly simplistic conclusion. In all instances there were significant external mitigating factors that won them the election in spite of their strategy, not because of it. Additionally both Clinton and obama’s personal successes coincided with massive collapses in downballot races as the effects if governing from the right absolutely gutted the party. Literally Obama oversaw one of the most complete and systematic collapses of political power of a party I’m modern history, and that was from a place in 2008 when republicans were seriously concerned that their party might cease to exist as a major force. It’s important to criticize the libs because as it stands they are the only force between us and unbridled fascism and they seem much more interested in lining their own pockets and helping the right wing than actually doing anything to help anyone.
[OT + meta]
beholder,
Your theory of mind is weak.
I’ve interacted with him for ages now, and mine is not as weak as yours.
What he wants to do is help, somehow, anyhow, best as he can.
Earnestly.
That’s what he is doing, according to me. Intent-wise, anyway.
(And I’m pretty fucking cynical)
—
In passing, be aware that there is another commenter around these demesnes whose ‘nym is JM, and it’s not me.
crimsonsage:
Hopefully, you are speaking abstractly, and not imagining I made any such claim.
It was disproof by contradiction:
↓
They supposedly repeated every losing strategy, yet actually won several times.
How can these losing strategies yield wins?
(Dunno, the specimen at hand is a drive-by type)
I completely agree with PZ here: fuck those people, sideways, up the ass, with a rusty pair of hedge clippers covered in habanero extract.
Hanlon’s Razor (“do not attribute to malice what may be explained by incompetence”) has long since become so blunt that about all it’s good for at this point is driving nails — I’ve been referring to this phenomenon as “Hanlon’s Ball-peen Hammer” for several years now.
These people need to suffer, because they cannot, do not, and will not understand anything until it becomes a personal problem. Shaming should be the least of it.
Actively mock them when they are experiencing misfortune due to Trump and company’s policies. Remind them they voted for this.
Tell them explicitly they deserve it, and that you hope far worse happens until they either wise up or die horribly or both.
Let them know you’ll be visiting them in Hell with a bag of marshmallows, some chocolate, a box of graham crackers, and a stick, with the specific intention of spending an afternoon making s’mores over their shrieking, writhing, eternally-roasting souls (i know, i know, atheism and that, but most MAGAts are religious).
If that doesn’t get the message across I honestly don’t know what will. It’s exhausting and saddening and not good for one’s sanity, but I’ve had to write off 76+ million Americans as lost causes. Some stains don’t wash off.
Raging Bee @ 31
That’s a fair point, but I think that a person’s politics are only one of many components of their personality and interactions with others, and usually not the most important component. I’m willing to overlook bad politics if someone is otherwise a good person.
springa73: You can say that about ANY particular behavior you observe from a person. Sending a check to a charity, going to this or that church, taking care of their spouse when they’re sick, having affairs, admiring this ethnic group while having irrational fear and hate toward that one, playing a violin at friends’ birthday parties, driving recklessly, letting their kid drink beer at age 14, washing dishes but refusing to clean toilets…each of those, in itself, is “only one of many components of their personality.” That fact, in itself, doesn’t make either of those things irrelevant to an overall judgment of a person’s character — or of the possible danger that person’s actions may pose.
Also, people can be very tribalistic — consistently kind and helpful to one’s own, and totally indifferent, if not hateful, to everyone else. I don’t really think we should consider the latter bit less relevant than the former, or that one necessarily negates the other.
…shunning people takes an emotional toll.
Yeah, well, there’s times when NOT shunning certain people takes a far worse emotional toll.
The truly sad thing about it all is… There are numerous examples where someone has sat down with some of these people and just talked to them about policy, not PARTY, but just policy, i.e., what problems exist, what solutions sound reasonable, etc., and almost universally (with exceptions) they will be close to at least 90% on the same side with us, on basic principles, and even general solutions, but then you introduce party to the discussion and suddenly its some insane argument that, “Those damn leftists are in the way, and all these great things will only happen if we stop their agenda first!” Its literally the insane BS like you get from Latino Trump supporters – “Well, we only want to solve the problem of all the mostly imaginary criminal illegals in the country, why don’t you? I don’t believe for the moment I will be a target of this, I am not a criminal!” Its like if Hubbard had, in creating Scientology, decided that his fake religion should be Jihadists, instead of just weird pseudoscientific grifters. At the core, they may agree with almost everything, but there is this layer of hate, fear, misinformation, and lies, coating the surface, so thick that the moment you say the word blue, or left, or Democrat, or social, or any other trigger word, their eyes gloss over, and all you get is a screaming ape throwing feces at you.
NPR = nice polite Republicans.
@45
It was a losing strategy though in terms of the wider flow of politics beyond the executive branch. If you run a strategy that only nets you a regular but insufficient base and then proceed to only win when your opponents inevitably fuck up everything so bad you gain power by default, only to be booted out the second people forget your opponents fuck ups, I would consider that a losing strategy. It doesn’t get you real power, it leaves you as the bag holders for the real party of governance.
crimsonsage, if a losing strategy doesn’t lose, it’s not a losing strategy. It’s just a strategy.
(Words mean things)
See, the claim is that these losing strategies have been employed for decades, yet over those decades multiple wins were had. How are they actually losing strategies, then?
I think the point is that to win, one has to appeal to the electorate.
Trump was more appealing to the electorate.
Gotta face it.
It’s not the strategies, it’s the electorate.
Not hard to understand. Running a foot race in flip flops is a losing strategy, even if you happen to win once in a while despite that. Like, say, because a funny little Texan guy comes up and kneecaps your opponent. Remember, Bill Clinton “won” with just 43% of the vote — only a couple of points better than Mondale in 1984. Not exactly a resounding endorsement of whatever it was he was doing out there.
That pattern repeats, it’s just most Democrats weren’t blessed with a Perot: every Democratic presidential candidate since 1988 who’s run a centrist, pro-business, DLC-type campaign has either lost (Dukakis, H Clinton, Harris), tied (Gore), or just barely squeaked out a win by the skin of their teeth, even though by rights they should have won much more decisively, with economic and other fundamentals strongly in their favor and/or unusually weak opponents (B Clinton, both times, Obama 2012).
The only deviations, even partially, from the DLC program were Obama in 2008 (who ran a somewhat more populist outsider campaign, focusing on pressing issues like health care as well as general hopey-changiness) and possibly Biden in 2020 (who mixed in some New Deal-y stuff, or at least Great Society). And both of them won.
Which is not to say I think there’s a single winning strategy either. The real lesson here is that the strategy should fit the times. The problem is that Centrist Dems have just been trying to have a do-over of 1984 for the last 40 years (or secretly preferred Reagan themselves) rather than ever seriously looking at where voters actually are.
Also: crimsonsage’s point about down ballot and sustained success is well taken. You don’t really “win” if you just win the American presidency. You also need to get Congress, and follow through with a successful legislative strategy that voters can actually see. Democrats have been very bad at this.
Rather, I should say, centrist Democrats are fundamentally bad at that: they don’t actually want a successful legislative strategy. They just want to not rock the boat, and to maintain the status quo. (That status quo being ever growing wealth inequality and declining climate health, but so what, they’re already rich.)
No.
Not hard to understand. Running a foot race in flip flops is a losing strategy.
A strategy that loses.
No counter-examples to your supposedly illustrative scenario, are there? ;)
I know, I know.
You are making it mean a less than optimal strategy.
So very charitable of you.
Which might be appropriate in general; however, I know who made the claim and what they were doing.
And my responses are bespoke.
(Those supposed losing strategies weren’t that bad for Obama, were they? And the claim is that they were the very same strategies, those losing ones. Think of my comment as a Socratic type of challenge, but not to you personally)
—
BTW.
Gotta love how people jump in to justify the Vicarious claims, and bend backwards to interpret them charitably.
How those people don’t grok that every single post is a condemnation of the Democratic party is beyond me.
It’s pure negative propaganda, and could hardly be more obvious or overt.
@32. The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) :
The figures have since changed and I suspect you aren’t using the up to date ones and also, note, I included those who stayed home and didn’t vote too.
More importantly that doesn’t change the underlying reality in that in two party state like the USA if you didn’t vote for Kamala Harris you did effectively de facto help Trump. So, yes, you did help Trump because the ONLY actual non-violent way to stop him was by voting Democratic and for Kamala and you did NOT do that.
Instead of stopping an actual fucking nazi, a misogynist eptome of all that is worst about the USA and its politics, a cult leader who is going to destroy the planet and enable at least two genocides and bring incalculable pain, misery, greif and torment to the world, you focused on attacking the ONLY actual alternative candidate and option.
Imagine if you’d put half your effort at attacking the Democratic party and Kamala into attacking Trump and the Repugs instead. Imagine if you’d been on the right side of history and ethics here. Too late now and damn you and your ilk forever for creating the world we’re now going to be living in as a result of your poor choices.
@39. beholder : @21, 23 Oh, hello, StevoR, I see I’m living rent-free in your nightmares along with Vicar and Jill Stein.”
Don’t flatter yourself douchebag. No. I view you & Vicar & other useful fools for Trump like something I scrape off my shoe – a minor, stinky annoyance.
Dude, I live on this planet with its single atmosphere and planetary climate system. Droughts, bushfires, heatwaves, floods. The impacts of Climate inaction caused by Science Denialism are very tangible, real and local. As well as being globe-wide.
I also live in a country that slavishly follows the USA like a lamb trotting after a mother sheep (as my history teacher once observed) in nation hosting US bases, military facilities and which outsources much of its foreign policy to the USA and where under Scummo’s horrid PM-ship we badly harmed our own economy by reciting Trumpist sinophobic covid conspiracy crap causing a massive backlash for our largest trading partner.
What the USA does matters – to our whole globe. I really wish it didn’t but until it actually collapses and stops being the current politico-cultural and military superpower it is – probly ending the world as we know it in the process – that’s going to be the case.
Oh and which country do you live in beholder? I very much doubt that its one the USA is dropping bombs on or that those countries will now stop having bombs dropped on now Putin-Trump rules the USoA. Quite the reverse. More countries now face genocide and war not less.
You personally beholder get nothing from me but my contempt and disgust.
Anyone in the USA who did NOT turn out and support Kamala Haris voting for her de facto did help Trump. Its a shitty system you have – make that had – in the USA and, as I’ve stated here about a gazillion times, it needs changing* but specifically in the 2024 elction you had two and only two choices. Help Trump take power or don’t. You and others who voted for evil or stayed home allowing evil to win chose the evil. By far the greater and worse evil. You have to live with that truth. Sadly so too now do the rest of us – and if the rest of us have to face horrendous consequences in so many ways what the fuck makes you think you should be immune to facing consequences too? Shunning is the very least that Trump voters – including the sub-class of indirect Trump through Stein or whoever ones – deserve.
Nope, quite the reverse in this case and often. It helps protect onés own sanity and life generally. If and when the Trump voters decide to oppose Trump then maybe things can change but if they are supporting Trump and his agenda well, fuck those toxic deluded fools and have as little contact with them as possible. Especially now that Trump is about to start imprisoning and deporting other human beings for being migrants and, oh yeah, pro-Palestinian protesters
No such thing as Blue MAGA and to claim otherwise is an absurd false equivalence. MAGA is a science-denying, idol worshipping cult There’s really no equivalent people on the Democratic side.
.* And what the fuck have done to actually change it? What impacts have your political words and actions really had?
@44. John Morales :
Yes. That’s correct.
@30. John Morales :
Well, the internet has been around since the 1990’s~ish. Even social media, eg facebook, has been around for over a decade now but what, I think, has gotten far worse is the sheer amount of disinfo and misinfo and the extent to which Murdoch & Musk & Rogan esp has successfully pushed huge lies and bullshit without adequate pushback and correction. Too many people have become extremely badly misinformed, living in virtual parallel realities beliieving “alternative facts” (which, ofc, are NOT facts at all but falsehoods) and that’s where the USA voters have been most misled and their Democracy failed.
That and justcie being far too long delayed and thsu ultimately denied given trumnp should’;ve been sitting in ajail cellfor the restof his life from the morning of January 7th onwards
@37. F.O. : “Anyone stanning Harris or Biden stans for genocide. Vote for them? Yes. Cheer for them? Hell no.”
Who exactly do you think is “stanning for” Biden or Harris here? How is this relevant here?
@42. beholder :
Nonsense and a ridiculous strawperson fallacy on your part, beholder.
Actaully its an outright lie too sicne youhgave NOT been “ringing alarm bells” but instead ignoringthem by actively attacking the only alternative to Trump and helping him seize power by lies.
People who aren’t Trump supporters. People who aren’t fascists, quite the opposite.
If you helped a fascist take power – and as pointed out in #60 you did -then you are a fascist supporter and enabler. That’s you beholder. That’s on you and BTW what are you doing now to stop Trump and his agenda being ramemd through unchecked?
The party elites who are actually responsible for this defeat have learned nothing: they want to silence dissenting voices and double down on their losing strategy.
Nope. Citations needed. Even if they did, they are now powerless to actually do so. Unliek the fascists you & Stein helped install in power.
Which the whole world is about tosuffe rso again, why shouldn’t you be punished and what do you think makes you exempt from the electorla consequences of the world your choice shelped create?
If only the consequences of what Trump – incl Trump via Stein – voters could be directed only upon them and not on the rest of the planet.
If only..
Beholder, you, Stein and your ilk deserve all that’s coming your way.
Sadly too many innocent people that do NOT deserve that are going to suffer as well and likely far worse.
PS. Blockquote fail in # 62 above, sigh, Guess its obvs where.
It doesn’t take much charity. First of all, there are many uses of “losing strategy” that don’t simply mean “loses 100% of the time”. In fact, in game theory, a “losing strategy” is one which has the effect of winning, over the long term.
And in this context, “less optimal” is a perfectly cromulent interpretation. Indeed, my reading of it is slightly stronger: the DLC-type approach is a strategy that would indeed always guarantee defeat if one side’s strategy were the only thing which ever decided elections. Of course, for better or worse, there are always other factors, and so sometimes there is enough room for luck to intervene and save a campaign from itself. Like how Ross Perot’s run indisputably saved Clinton’s incompetent bacon in ’92.
Perot’s role in Clinton’s “victory” there was mentioned explicitly in The Vicar’s post, so some such interpretation in this vein was very clearly the one intended: they were obviously well aware that Clinton won using what they simultaneously termed a “losing strategy”, so saying, “ah ha, but sometimes Democrats win” is not anywhere near the “bespoke” gotcha you seem to think it is. It’s just straightforwardly a bad faith reading.
Speaking of, maybe The Vicar really is the lowest of the low. Certainly I agree that not voting, or voting third party in a battleground state, was tantamount to voting for Trump, and pretty reprehensible if that’s what they did. And perhaps they were best to tone down their denunciation of Democratic bullshit prior to the election — though I doubt at least the ones here on this forum did any real harm.
However, at this point, the election is over. Criticism of corrupt, incompetent Democratic centrists and campaign consultants can’t do any harm NOW, and at this point it should be more clear than ever that such was always very richly deserved.
I would add that in general, blaming voters (or abstainers) only gets you so far. If you want to conclude that the US electorate is just fundamentally composed of too many fascist, racist, theocrats then so be it. But I would say the the election was much too close for that to be a foregone conclusion. It was in range of a Democratic victory, they just missed the mark. And under those circumstance, blaming the voters is just a version of the “individual responsibility” trap.
Sure, individuals are responsible for their actions, and if you see a Trump voter or an abstainer, by all means, tell them they fscking suck. You can tell them I said so. But as a means of actually affecting outcomes, that’s not going to do shit. It might make us feel better, but epidemiologically, it’s no different from Nancy Reagan’s stupid “Just Say No” slogan. Scolding people is not the way to move the needle. To change people’s behavior, you need to change the stimulus a little more drastically.
At least last year, running a campaign that actually credibly supports popular programs like Medicare for All, or putting the target on the rich (where it actually belongs, not immigrants and trans people) might be a good start, but it’s one that the Democratic party of Clinton, Harris, Biden, and <a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgOTzPcc41o>m-fing Philippe Reines is constitutionally incapable of making.
Borked link from previous.
What part of “Which might be appropriate in general; however, I know who made the claim and what they were doing.
And my responses are bespoke.” yet remain obscure to you?
The singular Vicar has been doing that very same thing for the vast majority of their posts since around 2015. First it was Clinton (male and female versions) then each subsequent Democratic leadership.
(Reading the definite-article Viicar with any degree of naivety at this point is like Charlie Brown expecting to kick the ball)
[or, postjudice, not prejudice]
If it wins you a battle here and there, but you lose the war, then it’s a losing strategy.
Just like running a foot-race in thongs, right, BB?
That’s a true losing strategy.
You will never win you a battle here and there, unlike the purported losing strategies.
(You got nothing from my retorts to Jack. No surprise there)
And you too are missing my very point: it ain’t the strategies. It’s the electorate.
(Horsey hydration)
—
Thing is, a representative democracy requires a sensible and informed electorate, and preferably one where people feel a civic duty to participate.
(Am I perfectly describing the freest, bestest ever country on the planet? Rah rah rah!)
FWIW Kyle Kulinski has a good take down and discussion of this How-do-you-interact-with-Trump supporters question here of Bill Maher SCOLDS Democrats To Accept MAGA Blowhards (9 mins long) worth watchn in my view obvs. The idea of pre-capitulation – or not doing that – raised there seems a pretty good point worth noting to me.
The part where your interpretation is clearly simply in bad faith. You can’t write that off as “bespoke”. It’s just misrepresentation. Believe it or not, The Vicar is not the only one reading your comments.
Then on that much, they’ve been entirely correct. Apparently since around 2015.
If someone has been correctly saying the sky is blue since 2015, maybe that annoys you for some reason, but they’re still, you know, right about that part. And if they then post something like “the sky is so blue I literally died”, responding with some pedantic bad faith nitpick, like, “you didn’t literally die” isn’t some clever “bespoke” response comprehensible only to you and that person. It’s just rubbish that makes you the one that sounds like an ass.
Indeed. And what might cause an electorate to feel like participation is pointless?
This is all absolutely right. Unfortunately, everyone has a stake in this. The awful environmental policies, immigration policies, and no doubt entropic US foreign policy coming down the pike is bound to affect almost everyone in the world. Even if the US isn’t (yet) bombing you. Indeed, erstwhile US allies — like Australia and Europe — which have banked on that partnership have the most to lose.
The citations are all around you if you care to look.
I posted a link to a particularly repulsive one @65. That guy is a handsomely paid Dem insider. Fairly well representative of the consultant class which worked for Clinton, Harris, etc., and which every four years skims their millions out of all that sweet, sweet campaign cash. Win or lose.
What does he blame the election on? Not any of the extremely questionable decisions made by his fellow consultants and “master strategists” in the campaign. Oh no. You see, the problem is that he doesn’t feel safe making off-color jokes anymore or something. And also mean, nasty old Bernie Sanders keeps mentioning Medicare for All, which “nobody” in the party supports.
This implies that “the party” to him apparently doesn’t include the roughly 90% of actual Democrats who do support exactly that (not to mention frigging 70% of the general electorate). That’s a lot of nobodies.
So, last year, which candidate was supporting this program which literally a super majority of not only the party, but the country as a whole supports?
Oh. Nobody?
Weird.
Look, here’s how it breaks down. There are roughly four groups which have some agency in how an election works out:
the party of the not as bad guys
the party of the bad guys
the media
the voters
The question is whose behavior there do we as individual citizens (or netizens) have the most power to change. And taking them in reverse order:
Voters: not much. Their behavior is largely determined by some combination of the first three. We can’t actually do much to influence voters directly. I can control me, and maybe a few other people around me, it’s a big country. There are a couple hundred million potential voters and ultimately other individuals don’t really have much influence over them. Curse them out, by all means. They deserve it. But you’re cursing at the wind.
The media is tricky. We have some limited control, perhaps, but emphasis on limited. We should push back on it wherever we can, but the media as an institution (to the extent that it isn’t fully captured by interests antithetical to our own) again largely takes its cues from the other 3: they amplify the voices of the 1 and 2, and read the temperature of 4.
The party of the bad guys: Obviously I think we can largely forget about this for now. Much more influential people than you are I have tried to resurrect the “sensible” Republican party. It’s not working, and maybe it was never there in the first place.
Which brings us to the party of the not as bad guys. And this is where it’s at. This is really where people who want to change things have the most leverage. Unlike the other party, it may be salvageable. It is still a small-d democratic institution, at least by charter, and responds to pressure, donations, and participation. A better Democratic party has a lot of leverage to influence what the media says, how the other party reacts, and ultimately — by way of campaign messages and, importantly, actual legislation — how the voters feel.
But again, one of the things it responds to is pressure. Part of keeping that pressure on is calling out the (myriad) mistakes that the current iteration of the party keeps making. That’s what some people here are doing, in their little way. And I think you could probably help most by joining that chorus. OTOH, telling the people with valid constructive criticism to sit down, shut up, and just bring a little more negative partisanship to the ballot box is probably not as productive as you think.
Yes. I would note that this somewhat undermines your statement that the (Democratic) elites responsible for this fiasco are now powerless. Many of them still hold office, or other positions where they may be able to resist to some extant. This is exactly why those leaders still need to learn from their past mistakes, and we need to help them.
But, yeah, refusing to pre-capitulate is an important part of resisting fascism. Here’s a decent interview Sam Seder does with author Daniel Hunter that goes over some others.
Jack:
Every single thing bad about the USA is specifically due to the Democratic party and its leadership, that’s what you reckon is “entirely correct”? Heh.
(You do amuse)
Compulsory voting. Duh.
Yeah, because your average poster on social media understands elections and the process and the electorate better than actual political parties. And they surely all make the same claims, right?
If only they listened to that pressure, the myriad whinges that people make on the internet.
Presumably, it’s an incompetent party, and it’s just a happy lucky break that despite its losing strategies it sometimes wins anyway. All very frustrating, no?
(Things are always easier from an armchair)
—
But that’s not the topic, is it?
The topic is about dealing with (and I quote) “people who voted for Trump”.
Not with the myriad failings of the Democratic party.
Clearly, an equal amount of blame should accrue (on a similar basis, as expressed by StevoR) to those who could have voted for Harris but did not.
(How one deals with them remains undiscussed here hitherto)
Every single thing? No, of course not. I think it was very clear in both Vicar’s and my own posts on this thread that what was being discussed is the Democratic party’s sordid contribution to the outcome of this last US election (and similar contributions to a number of other elections over the years). The successful outcome of elections being something a major national party running in them has a certain amount of agency in.
Your attempt to hyperbolize that relatively banal point by injecting the word “everything” is interesting. Is that another one of your signature “bespoke” comments? AKA, blatant misrepresentation of your interlocutors’ position? It’s cute.
Care to elaborate? AFAICT, compulsory voting is at best orthogonal to the issue. Forcing someone to go to the polls doesn’t automatically mean there’s a candidate on the ballot they want to vote for. If there isn’t, it seems just as likely that forced voting would increase the public’s sense of powerlessness and disaffectation.
(Don’t get me wrong: I’m not opposed to compulsory voting in principle. Australia seems to have had a tolerably good experience with it, and in a US context — ignoring the practical difficulties of actually implementing it here — there might be other problems it could address. Voter suppression, for a start.
I just don’t see how it would necessarily solve the issue of having a structurally bi-party system where both major parties are staunchly unwilling to actually address most Americans’ real problems — even when the solutions are extraordinarily popular.)
I dismiss your argument from incredulity by pointing, again, to the evidence. The self evidently out of touch insiders. (You seem to imply these guys are wizards or something, whose judgement cannot possibly be questioned by mere mortals, but but may I remind you that top Hillary Clinton advisors in 2008 didn’t even know how half the primaries worked.) Or all the lost — and needlessly close — elections. Or the polling showing all the issues people actually care about which Democrats deliberately ignore.
Or, heck, just look at the explanations offered by the leadership itself for their losses: “it was all the woke”, “you activists said defund the police too much”, “shut up about health care and minimum wage already”. If you believe any of those pathetic excuses, I’ve got some real estate you might be interested in…
And it’s hardly just “average” social media posters making this exact point. It’s also above average ones. And analysts in the media. And not a few people within the party itself. This happens nearly every time — because every time the Democrats f*ck things up in about the same way — but I’m foolishly hopeful it may reach a critical mass this time, that the usual, “oh, it was the hippies’ fault.” won’t take.
Anyway, if you have some kind of substantive counter argument, go for it. But “Democrats are so good at winning elections, how could you possibly question their competence” is not cutting it. That’s not even what Democrats claim.
I like your feistiness, jack.
Heh. What, taking people literally is fine now?
(“And if they then post something like “the sky is so blue I literally died”, responding with some pedantic bad faith nitpick, like, “you didn’t literally die” isn’t some clever “bespoke” response comprehensible only to you and that person.”)
Sure: elaboration here:
I’ve noted this regularly. People whinge that the Democrats can’t get people to turn up to vote, unlike the other mob. Participation rate under 64% type of thing.
So a shitload of time, money, effort is spent just trying to get people to turn up to vote.
Biden managed that in 2020, but Harris did not manage that in 2024.
(Must be those alleged losing strategies that have been used for decades!)
Compulsory voting just means you cross your name off the list; you want to vote informally (or not vote), no worries. But, since you already have a ballot in front of you, might as well fill it, no?
(It’s the system here in Oz)
I made no argument; still, it’s interesting that you claim that the closest thing to an argument (“Presumably, it’s an incompetent party, and it’s just a happy lucky break that despite its losing strategies it sometimes wins anyway.”) is to be dismissed.
(So, it’s not presumably incompetent in your estimation)
Already did.
It’s the electorate. Of those who bothered to vote, most liked Trump better.
Hard to face, but there it is. Bleedingly obvious.
All the messaging in the world ain’t gonna change that; like, 5.5 billions of dollars were spent in the election campaigns. Any voter who by the end of it was uninformed is not gonna be amenable to even more fucking messaging.
You imagine I wrote anything like that at all?
(You’d do better to respond to what I write, not to what you wish I had written)
Heck, forget equal. Put 100% of the blame on those who could have voted for Harris but did not. 1000%, if you want. 1,000,000%. What difference does it make?
Blame is a useless concept*. Blame does absolutely nothing to actually change how voters are going to behave next time, which is what matters.
I’ll tell you one thing that will, though, something the party has some control over: the party platform. It could try to have some stuff the party is willing to fight for, stuff that will actually help people against the depredations of landlords, bosses, corporations, and rich assholes.
-————-
* In my view, election post-mortems are not dissimilar to something like air crash root cause analysis. It is very often the case in such things that the pilot (the voters) f*cks up — they’re human, it happens. But that can’t be used as a thought terminating excuse. The next plane (election) is also going to have a human pilot (low information voters), and you can’t change that. Or them. Blaming this pilot (or pack of idiot voters) won’t help the next plane.
Instead, what you can change are the procedures (platform/strategies) that led to that failure, and improve them so that the same mistake is less likely to occur.
It doesn’t; point is that both are equally responsible, yet only one lot is assigned the blame.
And yet it’s the specific and explicit justification this very post makes:
“Get the fuck out of my life. Don’t ask me for anything, not even sympathy. Don’t try to tell me it was nothing personal, you just wanted lower grocery prices (I have news for you — you won’t be getting them), that I’m bad for letting politics interfere with friendship. It’s you that stabbed me and all my friends and a few million innocents with your politics.”
The sociopolitical landscape changes over time, right?
As do the economic circumstances and external pressures.
Pointless planning to win the previous election, it’s the next one that matters.
Also, I note the Democratic party is the only one who has had a female candidate.
Twice now, and twice Trump won.
(Biden did not lose)
I wasn’t taking it literally. I was taking it in the spirit it seemed intended.
To recap: I said that the thesis that the Democratic party is to blame for its failures is entirely correct. You replied:
Now, just for the calibration of your “bespoke” reply algorithm, I took that to be disagreement. That is because, in Earth primate society, there is a very normal pattern of conversation which goes:
By restating the position and then “laughing”, it is the intent of Person B here to express disagreement, in a derisive way, with the statement made by Person A. It’s a kind of exchange of ideas. Kind of a shitty one, but still. Normally, person A would then clarify their statement to point out B’s distortion, and then perhaps point out the weakness of B’s own position. Namely, that derision alone is not an argument.
So, I hope you can see where you went wrong here. Your “bespoke” attempt to communicate directly with my neurons misfired and accidentally generated text that looked like a normal human pattern of discourse.
However, my bad for replying as if you were a normal person having a discussion online. I forgot for a moment.
Right. Again, my bad. I keep forgetting that it’s just a bunch of words that have no meaning or intent.
Yes, I think I see your confusion. You see, this is another of those patterns in Earth human conversation. Normally, restating the other person’s in that way (we would call it “sarcastically”) would be a form of disagreement. For example:
You see how that works? Feel free to try it.
But be careful. If you don’t mean to be sarcastic, and meant to agree with the other person’s position, you should restate it in a different way. Try starting with words like “I agree,” or “Right,” to make your intent clear before you restate or elaborate the position you agree with.
If you neither agree NOR disagree with the position you are restating, nor have any other thought to add other than restating the original in a slightly different way that expresses nothing at all, the normal human custom would be remain silent. In human interactions, conversations are to communicate ideas between individuals, so it confuses us if you speak but have nothing to say.
If you just want to string the symbols together — and I agree it can be fun — I would suggest you do it by yourself, or, if you must, just use symbols that are more clearly meaningless nonsense. That way nobody will be tempted to misinterpret it as having information content.
Postmortems are always hilarious. Popular vote? Meaningless in the US. It’s been down to Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in the last several elections. Everything else is noise. This one was lost by about 300,000 votes. Blame? The blatantly lying right wing media, the horse-race bullshit in the rest of the mainstream media, and the millions of uninformed gullible fools who bought the bullshit. Fuck them all.
John talks about ‘shunning’, as though it’s a cold ideological decision to turn one’s back on people we disagree with. It’s not. It’s visceral disgust with the kind of blinkered stupidity which amounts to our species shooting itself in the
footgut. Yet again.Yeah, and so was I with the Vicarical type.
I am having fun with you. Obs.
(Hey, you initiated this ongoing bit of banter!)
Heh. My confusion!
So? Misinterpret away, it bothers me not one whit.
—
BTW, I am often dehumanised by people who get frustrated when interacting with me:
“In human interactions, conversations are to communicate ideas between individuals, so it confuses us if you speak but have nothing to say.”
It confuses you humans, I get it.
(Subtlety is not your forte, is it?)
That’s not an argument, that’s a tautology. Trump won the election because more voters voted for Trump.
Gosh. What wisdom.
I guess campaigns are just entirely pointless in your view, huh? Or passing popular legislation? Why bother. It’s up to the voters in the end. Yep. Just a rooooollll of the dice.
Indeed. If there is one. Which is why it’s important to learn from the last one.
No one is saying the lessons should be applied blindly, or superficially. An example of that, of “planning to win the previous election”, would be to say, “oh, people voted for Trump, lets try attacking immigrants and trans people more next time, it works for him”.
But that’s not the kind of analysis being presented here. For one thing, it’s not one election, it’s a pattern, which supercedes any single election or issue.
The mistake the Democrats make, over and over, is to not pay attention to the issues people actually have — whatever they are at the time. Or, if they do pay attention, to ignore them, because the solutions would be inconvenient to the neo-liberal elite which has had a lock on most of the top party positions for the last few decades.
And the answer is to not simply blindly run a campaign on the last election’s issues or something — that’s sort of what they already do. The answer is to actually take a f*cking look around in 4 years and read the room, whatever the state of it happens to be. Not just run yet another out of touch centrist by-elites, for-elites, to-elites campaign.
What a bad guess!
Wow! It happened again:
“Your “bespoke” attempt to communicate directly with my neurons misfired and accidentally generated text that looked like a normal human pattern of discourse.”
I’m aware – as you’d know if you read my comment. But none o that actually answers the question.
What I originally asked was what might cause a voter to feel like voting was pointless. In my view, the answer is that — in general — candidates in the US don’t really offer much. The Republicans off tax cuts for the rich and scapegoating outgroups. The Dems offer a big helping of status quo and some technocratic fiddles at the margins. Landlord f*cking you over? Forced to stay in a shitty job because you can’t lose your health insurance? Up to your eyeballs in student debt? Worried about global warming and genocide? We hear you! Here’s a complicated tax rebate that will help some of you very slightly. BTW, it phases in 7 years from now.
So, if, like an awful lot of Americans, your life kind of sucks, but you’re not actually stupid or hateful enough to vote Republican, you don’t have a lot of options, do you? Voting really is kind of pointless — it’s like getting off the couch to get something from the fridge is pointless when the fridge is empty.
And sure, people should do they’re duty. But come on. People are human. What do you expect?
So, like I said, mandatory voting might solve some problems — maybe it would increase participation enough to have stopped fascism, this time. But it still doesn’t really fix the underlying issue with US partisan democracy. You can make opening the empty fridge compulsory, but it’s still an empty fridge.
So you’d be able to explain your thought process of how you misinterpreted them, then, right?
Likewise. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had not talking to a puppet operated by a committee of tiny crab people.
@74. jack lecou :
Except the Democratic party isn’t in power nor likely given Trump’s anti-Democratic policies and statements and actions to ever get in power again. Because fascists once elected tend to be removed only with violence.
Because an election system that was already very biased towards the rural redneck willfully ignorant hateful reichwing (Electoral College, voter suppression, gerrymandering ad nauseam) is now going to be even further wapred and twisted out of shape and likely out of being a democracy inanything other than name. You can’t say you weren’t warned or that the issue of the fate of Democracy wasn’t discussed pre-election. But enough utter deluded fools and usefully misled, overly complacanct douchebags in the USA vote dto ineffect transform their country from Democrarcy to fascist state – thanks Vicar, beholder, et al.
I do not believe the USA will have real free and fair proepr elections again. Arguably they didn’t really have proper ones before I think Trump wuillkeep his word and become a dictator and try toinstall family memoers of lackeys and the USA as known is dead. Anther country keeping that name but not nature is where you are at right now. Trump will crush opposing parties, willfollwo Putin’s example or even direct instructions and basically you are now fucked. (thanks, Vicar, beholder, moral purity disunity fwits).
It seems incredible given what Trump and the Repugs have done and are doing and have boasted and stated they’ll do that so many on the left in the USA , so many suppsoed progressives are repsonding by .. attacking the Democratic party. It seems pretty clear to me that the Republicans and Trump are the problem here and are doing far more damage.
Trump has talked of jailing and executing his political opponents. I don;’t think he was joking despite his smrks and winks and the veneer of humour. The Democrtaic leadership now is likely to face some awful things. So ar ethe pro-Palestinian protesters, climate activists, etc.
Attacking the weak Democratic leadership that didn’t deliver fucking unicorns that fart rainbows to everyone isn’t a good priority to have right now. Trying to stop what Trump is about todo is – and your options there seem very limited now & likely to shrink further..
I quoted you directly, so I obviously know that.
Had you the wit to have seen it, I’m noting that one can avoid the problem of needing to make voters feel like voting in the first place.
(Prevention vs. cure)
Well, such people might not be actually stupid or hateful enough to vote Republican, but they’re not cluey enough to grok that if they don’t vote at all for the Republicans’ opponent, that results in one more net vote for the Republicans’ candidate. Functionally, each lack of such a negative vote (that is, not for whom you desire, but against whom you do not desire) is a net gain of one vote for the Republicans.
(StevoR already noted all that; and of course voting is a zero-sum endeavour)
Maybe.
But note how turning up was the biggest single factor (#34-36) in this result vs the previous.
—
Look: this all started when I snarked at the Vicaric type (who is a known drive-by and with whose posting history I am quite familiar) and people tried to chide me for not being sufficiently charitable, as they saw it.
But my point is rather simple: if one is using a losing strategy that does not lose, then it’s cannot be a losing strategy. Unlike running races in thongs, which would be an actual losing strategy.
Let’s go back 3 decades, decades where these claimed losing strategies were employed:
Big Bush
Clinton
Little Bush
Obama
Trump
Biden
Trump
To use your very own intended analogy, the Democratic party has for decades done the equivalent of running foot-races in thongs yet have regularly won using that strategy.
You can run the bestest, cleverest, most pertinent, mistake-free campaign, but if the majority electorate still prefers the other mob after all that, well. Turns out the electorate was not amenable to suation.
Right.
As soon as you explain your thought process of how you misinterpreted me.
Since I know you have never talked to a puppet operated by a committee of tiny crab people, that boils down to you claiming you have never had more fun than you are now having with me.
(You’re welcome)
PS. @ jack lecou : Thanks for the extra video.
Sadly, it seems to me that the US voters had a collective death wish and didn’t take the threat of fascism and Trump’s dictatorship seriously and were politically and economically willfuilly ignorant and well as too rotten with misogyny and racism and misinformation to choose correctly.. That’s certainly NOT Kamala Harrisés fault or Joe Biden’s or any Democratic party figures and she and they did try and come closer than we first thought and were told to stopping the tragedies – plural – that are now going to unfold as the USA now falls. All for the supposed sake of lower prices and a better economy which, not so breaking news, you won’t now get anyhow. Quite the reverse.
Shortest version : American voters failed themselves and failed the rest of our world and chose fascism.
The 2024 election will forever be an literally damning indictment on them collectively as a nation. It’ll also likely be the last at least semi-real, semi-free and fair one
That’s not a helpful summary but it is, I think a true one. Blaming the Democratic party is also not one little bit helpful either -and also misplaced blame.
@89 StevoR
Convincing voters with popular ideas is unicorns, apparently. You are deeply unserious.
If not now, then never, right?
Thoughts. And. Prayers.
Have fun losing, over and over again.
Let’s go back 3 decades, decades where these claimed losing strategies were employed:
Big Bush
Clinton
Little Bush
Obama
Trump
Biden
Trump
“toxic Boomer parents”
Not just toxic parents but toxic Boomer parents. That’s ageist. That bigotry negates to me all the complaining she does about other bigotry. She’s a bigot, just a different kind. She’s more like the MAGAts than she realizes.
I’m establishing a boundary too, to never listen to her again.
I fear you may be right about the latter part.
However, the first part isn’t actually correct. In the US, there is no single “in power”. Democrats ARE in still power in a lot of places that aren’t the Federal government. Governments in blue states, for example. States are certainly not all-powerful, but they have a lot of tools to resist or delay some of the worst measures for a time. Also, individually, judges, bureaucrats, and members of Congress — who still have some power, even without a majority.
These are the people that need to resist by, for example, not preemptively complying. They’ll also be the ones picking up the pieces if by some miracle there are still recognizable pieces to pick up in four years. And this is precisely why I think you’re so very wrong about not needing to learn anything from the mistakes of the last decades.
Because the “mistake” we’re talking about is not just one election strategy, it’s the whole neoliberal attitude: that the status quo just needs to be maintained. Just keep going through the motions and things will be fine.
No. You and I know that’s not how fascism works. The remaining leaders with any decency and backbone need to finally understand that status quo is not an option.
I would also say that other nations need to learn from this. I haven’t been keeping up on Australia, but certainly the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, etc. have been flirting or having close calls with the far right recently. And the causes are not altogether different from what’s happening in the US.
Alas, very possibly.
Indeed. But it’s important to realize it’s not just a few million average “complacent douchebags” out there playing video games that lead to this. Maybe it’s not obvious from your side of the old Mar Pacifico, but it’s also very much the Democratic leadership — or the faction of it I’m complaining about — that has been infuriatingly complacent about the rise of incipient fascism.
Sure, some (not all!) of these leaders were saying that Trump represents a fascist threat to democracy. When they’re exhorting voters to vote for their guy because he’s not as bad as the other guy. But they’re generally not actually acting like it, not any more than the voters ended up doing. There’s a lesson about leading by example in here somewhere.
For example, Biden’s justice department didn’t even start investigating Trump (for, you know, trying to overthrow the lawful government) until November of 2022, almost two years after the events in question and after Biden took office. That left less than two years until this last one. I don’t mean they were working on it quietly, and went public. I mean they simply weren’t materially doing anything at all. Literally two years into the Biden administration, it wasn’t clear if there’d even be an attempt to hold Trump to justice. Obviously there’s no guarantee that an extra year or two would have been enough time to bring those cases to trial before this month, but it couldn’t have hurt. They basically gave him a two year head start. (And now, speaking of preemptive compliance, those — and all the other — charges are being simply dropped, not because of some fundamental legal issue, but because it’s internal department policy.)
That’s only one small(!) example. The degree to which our feckless liberal so-called leaders were willing to stick their heads in the sand over the last 4 years and tell themselves that everything was back to normal — instead of actually doing something to guarantee a future for democracy here — really can’t be overstated.
That’s without even getting into policy. Policy actually matters in elections. Very much. That’s why things like economic fundamentals are always a very large determinant in election models.
And the Biden administration actually did a halfway decent job for a while — by many measures, the US recovered from the pandemic not-cession very well relative to peers. But then the ball was very comprehensively dropped. I think the second chart here paints a very depressing picture.
Think about what that represents. The Biden administration, for perhaps the first time in at least a generation, actually managed to roll out a bunch of programs that really helped solve real problems in peoples lives — debt, healthcare, childcare, school meals, landlords, banks, etc. Child poverty dropped by 60% practically overnight. It was all an extraordinary lesson in what government can do for people.
And then, just when people started to get some hope, it was all ripped away. Much of it in just the last year or so before the election.
I do not claim that Biden (or certainly not Harris) deserves all the blame for that. They had some help from other key centrist figures like Manchin and Sinema. But they did not put up much of a fight, either.
And they did not see fit to address this elephant in the room during the campaign. They wouldn’t even have needed to apologize. Make it a centerpiece. It practically writes itself. “Hey, remember how last year your kids weren’t hungry, and we all got to tell landlords to go suck eggs? Well, corrupt ultra wealthy property owners like Donald Trump and his super rich friends rigged the system to undo all that. Vote for us and together we can put those programs back in place for good.”
But they didn’t do that. And that wasn’t just some one-off mistake. It’s systemic. There are reasons the Democratic establishment is unwilling to engage in sustained economic populism. Or any number of other things that would both fix real problems and help them get elected.
And, unlike you, I can’t just pretend those systemic problems have gone away in the last two weeks. If by some miracle we make it through the next four years, and if there’s another election, and if the non-fascist wins, then maybe we get another reprieve from fascism for a while. If that happens, the Democratic party can’t be allowed to just stick it’s head in the sand and pretend that everything is fine and it’s 1996 and the end of history. Because then we’re going to be right back here again in 2032. Things need to change.
Again, wish I could disagree with you more. Still, hope springs eternal. Over here, we’ll need to focus on resistance for the next four years, and if we pull through it, try to actually hammer in the lessons that should have been learned 8 years ago. Which is all I’m trying to do.
I don’t see how that’s hard to understand at all.
Imagine a rabid, half-starved Kodiak bear (Trump and the Repugs) shows up in your neighborhood and starts trashing things.
So you call animal control (the Dems). But when they finally show up, they act like it’s a normal lost puppy, instead of a terrifying force of nature. Against all odds, the bear trips, and they do manage to catch it. In a butterfly net. They hand the net to your neighbor, and tell him to not let go or the bear might get loose. Then the bear predictably rips through the net and is, as we speak, in the process of eating your other neighbors.
Who’re you really gonna be mad at here? The bear? Your neighbor? Or the almost-worse-than-useless animal control officer whose job it actually was to do something about it?
And what are you going to do if, realistically, that officer is still your best hope for getting things under control again?
If only that weak-ass Dem leadership weren’t still a lynchpin for major parts of the necessary resistance to Trump. And if only we could have any faith they won’t do the same thing in four years if we ever do come out the other side of this tunnel…
[such quietude!]
“For example, Biden’s justice department didn’t [blah]”
Biden’s justice department, eh?
This belief that the USA’s DOJ is somehow the Prez’s toy makes you seem like a USAnian, jack.
(Administration-dependent justice, got it. Like a partisan SC, a feature of your system)
Blam blam blam!
(Problem solved, USA-style. Leave the carcass in a park for points of style)
@ ^ John Morales : ..making it look like it had been hit by a bike.. RFK style.
@96. deadguykai : “She’s a bigot, just a different kind. She’s more like the MAGAts than she realizes. I’m establishing a boundary too, to never listen to her again.”
Who specifically are you referring to there?
@94. Putin troll* beholder :
Nope. Not what I wrote. Note that if ideas are popular then they should convince enough people and be adopted. Also note popular doesn’t mean right, correct, realistic or plausible. Frex Trump’s racist hateful ideas are popuklar and also very fractally wrong.
Everything I say I can back up with evidence or logic unlike you who assert bullshit and just troll here. Often, like here, not actually coming up with any actual arguments and certainly without supporting evidence and linked or cited sources, often I’ve noticed you failed to reply at all & just do a drive by troll.
I’ll let others decide who is serious here and who isn’t.
Too late late now. You and your purity disunity useful fools ilk have installed a fascist in power and someone who has openly stated they will destroy Democracy. You seem to take that threat unseriouslyand are about to find out you got that badly wrong. Your lack of taking Democracy vs Fascism seriously has real world implications I’ve already noted that are literally catastrophic for the whole planet you fascist enabling piece of shit.
Blatant trolling is blatant and you too. We’ve all lost thanks to you and those like you. Enjoy the world you created. If only the consequences of what you’ve done here would fall most on those responsible – like you – and not on all the millions of innocent people who will now suffer becuase of you who didn’t get the say and choice you had.
Of course Stein certianly did NOT win and only helped Trump as was always going tobe tehcas e which everyone who understood reality well knew. So, you think strategy~wise you somehow won? Well, that, again proves who you are really helpng and backing here doesn’t it?
.* Oh & Tulsi Gabbard supporter too – see #3 on Mano Singham’s post here :
https://proxy.freethought.online/singham/2024/11/17/the-complicated-history-of-tulsi-gabbard/#comment-5387284
How do you want that war ended? With Putin genociding Ukraine yet you attack others over Gaza. What a fucking hypocrite you are.
You’d think, wouldn’t you? It’s certainly how things should work. Not actually the way anything works in practice though, particularly in the US.
jack, it is exactly how it works, of course, and the point StevoR made is that if that if those ideas did not convince people, then they perforce were not popular.
(As you wrote @85: “It’s up to the voters in the end.” The very point of a democracy, no?)
It seems like you’re missing the point. I was talking about how the centrist Democrats you’re defending so staunchly aren’t serious about fighting fascism. This is the problem.
Obviously the DOJ has (or should have) prosecutorial independence, but the Attorney General (and the rest of the leadership) was nevertheless appointed by Biden. The Justice Department is, as a simple matter of fact, part of the executive branch.
And it seems clear that Garland, hand picked by Biden, was quite reluctant to take an aggressive stand against Trump’s fascism. Which inclination, independence or not, seems like it might have been a consideration for the appointment — the events of Jan 6 (not to mention all the other crimes committed by Trump) were still fresh.
So, does Garland’s appointment suggest to you a particular urgency in preventing a regression to fascism? It doesn’t to me. Instead, it fits with the rest of the picture, which was an administration much more interested in maintaining “decorum”, and simply sticking it’s head in the sand and pretending that things were “normal” again.
Are you, perhaps, not familiar with how the US system works?
That was sarcasm. I know you have trouble with that.
Defending staunchly? Heh.
Look, that I dispute flawed conclusions about the outcome of this election and who is to blame (though of course blame is pointless, yet you blame the Democrats).
Specifically, the “defence” is that those strategies allegedly employed during the last decades aren’t always losing strategies, as my prez list illustrates.
(Language matters; I cannot defend what is attacked, right? You are conceding the Democrats are being attacked, when you accuse me of defending them)
—
Of course not. And worse, once appointed, he just sat on his rump and only years later, belatedly, proceeded with a slow and ponderous investigation. Etc.
But that’s not the topic, is it?
This post is about excluding people who voted for Trump from one’s life, and this little discussion we’ve had is about my response to a Vicaric bullshit claim.
It’s certainly not about how government departments during an administration proceed.
(And again, you speak of the justice system as though it were a political tool of the administration in power)
For you, maybe; it was intended to be sarcasm, but it’s actually true.
Sarcasm kinda falls flat when it’s a true claim.
Do you seriously dispute that the very point of a democracy is “It’s up to the voters in the end.”?
What makes you imagine I need to be familiar with its intricacies?
The relevant consideration is whether it is a democracy.
If it is, then it’s up to the voters.
(Words mean things)
What do voters vote for?
In a democracy, yes. But we’re talking about the United States. Which is only…sort of that.
Some Democrats, yes. They’re absolutely being attacked. Very rightfully. If there’s any justice — and any hope for a more functional party in the future — that attack will succeed.
Q: What do voters vote for?
A: For their preferred candidate(s) on the ballot.
Heh. I did wonder whether you dared go there.
—
BTW: I made two mistakes in my comment (just rattling it off, I was), and one matters:
(Language matters; I cannot defend what is [not] attacked, right? You are conceding the Democrats are being attacked, when you accuse me of defending them)
Glad you were sufficiently charitable to get what I intended.
Anyway, I’m not defending any Democrats, either generically or specifically.
Again, and to correct another error:
“Look, [
that] I dispute flawed conclusions about the outcome of this election and who is to blame (though of course blame is pointless, yet you blame the Democrats).Specifically, the “defence” is that those strategies allegedly employed during the last decades aren’t always losing strategies, as my prez list illustrates.”
That’s it. It all stems from the conceit that their strategies are losing strategies, which you want me to interpret as inferior strategies.
—
I do get that you think it’s all about strategies with the USAnian electorate; with the right strategies, one will certainly win, right? That’s the thinking.
The electorate is a malleable mob, and they can be told what it is they want. Who they want.
(An expensive process, but hey!)
I should add, another very real possibility here is that the Democratic party simply goes the way of the Whigs or the Federalists or the Bull Moose in the coming years.
The basic point here is that, whatever you want to call it, the Democratic party coalition has been a deeply unhealthy relationship for the last 40+ years. Just how unhealthy may be difficult for you handsome Australian fellows, with your at least marginally functional political system, to really wrap your heads around.
To oversimplify: the neoliberal economic, trade and labor policies of the “New Democrats” that have held the party leadership since 1992 or so, are often quite unpopular with major voting blocks (like organized labor) and offer very little enticement to most of the others (African Americans, women). For most of this era, they were also barely distinguishable from the similar neoliberal policies of their then-also-centrist Republican rivals. And the only carrot they have is to be slightly better on “culture” issues — tolerance, choice, etc. — but their hearts aren’t really in even that, and they still have a big problem, since they’re otherwise out of carrots.
Needless to say, it’s hard to win elections if your voters don’t understand what you’re offering, and don’t like if they do.
So, what the party has done is, with very few exceptions (Obama, maybe), adopted a kind of politics of blackmail. Every Democratic voter for at least 40 years or so has been hearing some variation of, “we know you don’t like us much, but the other guys are worse, so you better go vote”. Every. Four. Years. And then, if enough voters in the traditional blocks hold their nose tight enough and vote anyway, maybe the party squeaks out a win.
That was, to put it bluntly, never going to last forever. It probably shouldn’t have lasted as long as it did.
But you said that if an issue, or a policy is popular enough, it would get voted in. How do voters do that?
Your ontological dependences are inverted, because you are thinking in natural language.
A policy is popular by virtue of being voted in, and having been voted in, it can then be said it was voted in because it is popular. Proof of the pudding sorta thing.
Let me go slower, and be a little more concrete.
Right now, approximately 70% of the US voting population supports adoption of “Medicare-for-all”, a straightforward single-payer national health care system to replace the nightmarish mess we have here. Not altogether unlike the “Medicare” you guys have Down Under. (Which looks like it works pretty well.)
That’s 70% across BOTH PARTIES, not just Democrats. It’s about 90% among Democrats. And IIRC, it gets even more popular if you explain it more, and the advantages — like lower paycheck deductions. That is popular, by any reasonable definition.
Now, assuming you’re a voter who wants this extremely popular policy to be adopted, which candidate could you have voted for to do that?
I will grant that, arguendo.
You mean, assuming I’m a voter who wants this extremely popular policy to be adopted and cares not at all about any other issues, right?
Sorry, that requirement exceeds my capacity for modelling others; different country, different milieu, etc.
Point is, we know the actual results now.
Dice have been rolled, outcome determined.
So.
The issue may be 70% popular across party lines, but clearly (that is, empirically and indisputably) it did not sway the electorate accordingly. Your modelling is clearly flawed given that result compared to your expectation.
See, this is why you write things such as “You’d think, wouldn’t you? It’s certainly how things should work. Not actually the way anything works in practice though, particularly in the US.”
Perhaps focus more on the way things work rather than how you imagine they should work.
Consider how it is that “A policy is popular by virtue of being voted in, and having been voted in, it can then be said it was voted in because it is popular.” avoids the problem you face, that being that reality works other than how you imagine it should work.
(Prevention, cure)
No, quite the opposite. What you’re describing there is almost precisely the approach taken by the Democratic leadership: they believe the electorate can be mollified and manipulated with just the right set of ads and celebrity endorsements.
My contention is that to win elections, one should instead give people what they want. For example, popular policies that make their lives better.
My contention is that, having won the election, the Republicans gave people what they thought they want. For example, popular policies that make their lives better.
—
I do like how you talk about popularity of ideas, but not popularity of candidates.
You do get how Trump’s personality cult has a large, fixed voting bloc that is utterly dependable.
From here, USAnian elections are basically indistinguishable from a popularity contest.
—
Anyway.
Enough? I think we’re sucking up all the oxygen here, and there’s really nothing left to say.
Points and counterpoints have been made, we’ve both had fun, PZ has tolerated it.
It actually doesn’t matter. It’s a trick question. The answer is nobody.
There was nobody you could have voted for who even hinted that maybe that might be a priority for them. Harris, who did support it in 2020, and sponsored it in the Senate, actually explicitly backed away from it when she started her 2024 campaign. Despite warnings from more progressive advisors that it would cost her votes.
This is not the only popular policy she backed away from.
(This is Presidential candiates, obviously. Depending on your state, there may have been a candidates at the Senate or House level who supported it. But a lot fewer than you’d think, given its popularity.
And I am excluding third party candidates — it’s quite possible that Putin’s Psyop- sorry, I mean Jill Stein or someone does support it. But a vote for Jill Stein obviously has zero chances of achieving that policy, and, in a battleground state, is tantamount to a vote for Trump.)
But you’d be wrong. American’s lives get measurable worse under Republican administrations — particularly Trump’s last term. They regress to the mean under Democrats, but don’t typically get better enough fast enough to make a difference in the election (Democrats often self-sabotage by phasing in anything good — some of the recent improvements to prescription drug costs passed by Biden weren’t scheduled to take effect for several years — if they survive, they’ll take effect under Trump.)
The actual fact of American political life is that NEITHER party offers any real improvement to policy. They are both neoliberal centrist parties. (Even Trump’s, in practice, at least beneath the choppy surface layer of Trumpian chaos.)
So, lacking any way to really distinguish themselves, both parties have adopted other strategies. The Republicans dupe their voters with flamboyant personalities, and red meat, like hating on immigrants or gay people. Democrats tell their voters, “look at those guys, you don’t want them in charge do you?”
And here we are.
Absolutely correct. When you have forfeited any attempt to differentiate your policy, there’s really nothing left but personality. And Democrats usually don’t have much.
Again, you have accurately identified the problem.
Ahem.
Again, with emphasis: My contention is that, having won the election, the Republicans gave people what they thought they want.
What they truly want is vague and inchoate and uninformed, for the most part.
They think in tribalistic slogans. On all sides. In-group out-group.
cf. this very post.
(“Welcome my son, welcome to the machine
What did you dream?
It’s alright we told you what to dream”)
You left out the part I was responding to.
Leaving aside the part where that actually makes anyone’s lives better, this is close enough, and I responded to it later in the post. Possibly in a paragraph you didn’t bother reading. Like I said, I agree with you: Republicans offer their voters red meat, what they (the voters) think they want.
But you stop there, and that’s only half the analysis. Republicans offer their voters red meat. Fine. But there are a lot of Democratic voters too — more, actually. So what do the Democrats offer them? What’s the counter offer?
A: Not much. And that’s the basic problem with (centrist) Democrat politics. The one you’re so intent on ignoring for some weird reason.
You are the one who wants to keep expanding the scope and nattering on.
At this stage, nothing new is coming out. It’s the sort of thing that irritates the blog host.
Our host.
TL;DR: My claim is that the claim that the strategies that the Democrats have allegedly never stopped using for decades and which supposedly are losing strategies demonstrably won a good proportion of the time, as demonstrated by the presidents’ list I have provided for a span of three decades. Not quite two generations.
Your claim is that my claim is wrong, and you’re claiming had other strategies been employed, a win would have been had by the Democratic party. As if you knew that!
End of the day, the numbers don’t lie.
Syllogism:
People vote for what they prefer
People voted for Trump
Therefore, people preferred Trump
“The electorate is a malleable mob, and they can be told what it is they want. Who they want.”, quoth I.
You retorted “No, quite the opposite.”
So, they are the opposite of malleable, but better messaging would have yielded a different result.
And it is quite the mystery to you how they did not vote as they should have voted.
Ah well.
Ah well, for completeness:
It was implicit; “the Republicans gave people what they thought they want” ↠ “popular policies that they thought make their lives better”.
Exactly the same thing.
The adamantium-level non-malleability of the electorate boils down to that.
Most people are social animals, and most people worry about fitting in.
I know I’d personally be shit at politics. :)
—
You know how con artists con people?
You know who is most susceptible, character-wise, to being conned?
Venal people. Greedy people.
No, you said “… what they thought they want”, but then, “for example, popular policies that make their lives better.”
The second clause, your “example” of what Republicans give had no “thought” in it. No room for delusion. In the example, the policies actually deliver positive results.
And that’s the part I disputed.
I will bow out with this: No. Better messaging alone would not have yielded a different result.
What might have helped was not better messaging, but better POLICY. Those are different things. Messaging is telling people about what you’re going to do — and that’s important — but policy is the material things you’re telling them about. The policy part has to come first, because if your policy isn’t good or popular, no amount of talking about it or dressing it up is going to really help. As you say, the voters (mostly) aren’t malleable, you can’t convince them to support something they don’t want just by talking a good game.
So what I’m saying is that the Democrats should have offered material policies that voters actually wanted. And I think we agree on that. Offering policies the voters want is the thing any sane political party should endeavor to do. And while obviously, good policies still won’t a guarantee that you’ll win every election, if you’re not doing the basics — offering policies that voters want, the thing that we both agree that a political party is supposed to do — you’re not really even trying, are you?
Like I said, our impasse here may be a matter of background. As an Australian, I think perhaps you’re going by your experience there, and assuming that a sane political party would try to appeal to voters by, first of all, offering concrete things that voters actually want (or at least think they want). Plans that voters could see making their lives better. It’s obvious, right? Personality and messaging come into play too, perhaps, but only as secondary factors. First and foremost: offer things voters want.
And yeah, I agree. A sane political party absolutely would do that.
But, difficult as it may be to accept, the Democratic party is not really sane political party. It doesn’t, in general, offer the things its voters want. Not because it can’t, or because the policies are bad. But because of certain accidents of history which have resulted in grossly misaligned incentives within the party’s institutional structure. As an institution, it doesn’t want to. It hasn’t really been trying to give voters what they want for quite a long time. Instead, it’s surviving mostly by coasting on inertia, counting on the fact that in our two party system, key voting blocks really have nowhere else to go.
It’s a big party. With a lot of inertia. So that’s still been enough to even win a few times. Plus there a lot of other institutions in this country with incentives to keep up the pretense — media, labor union leadership, etc. The emperor must have clothes, right? He wouldn’t just be walking around naked. If he was, that would mean something was deeply broken with the system my institution is part of, so he can’t be. (The effect is a lot more visible with Trump and the Republicans — things like media “sane washing” of the obviously off-the-deep-end stuff they’ve been doing and saying for a while. But something similar happens with Democrats too, it’s just a little more subtle because the dysfunction is more subtle.)
Despite all that, you can only coast like that for so long. If you ignore your base long enough, they will eventually start to ignore you right back. And my thesis is that that’s a big part of what we have been seeing over the last 8 years election: the con is unraveling. Those old reliable voting blocks are starting to break down.
And this isn’t just an academic observation. Given the threats we’re facing, it’s unacceptable. It’s not about blame, it’s about the future: it’s too late for this election (and that makes me angry), but looking forward, eventually, we’re desperately going to need at least one sane political party in this country. Either the Democratic party needs to change, or it needs to die out and make room for something new.
I think maybe you’re hung up on this because you’re skeptical that an entire political party could really be acting so apparently irrationally. You’ve suggested several times that it’s maybe a little absurd to question all the big smart experts who ran the campaign*. Surely they were trying their best. Surely they knew what they were doing. Surely someone up there in the US must be sensible, you’re probably telling yourself.
But if you think about it, you’ve really got no cause to assume that: obviously you understand that at least one major party in the US is completely batshit bonkers. Why not two?
(Indeed, I suspect that in some sense, you can’t really have one without the other. Both parties are bonkers, but in different, complimentary ways. The Democratic party’s neglect has left fertile ground for the Right’s populism. The results of that populism are further widening the cracks in the Democratic coalition. The party elites need to spin twice as hard to paper over the cracks. And so on. Maybe the dysfunction in one party necessarily reflects the other, like two matching nucleotide base pairs.)
-——
* I’d encourage you to actually listen to some of them yourself. There’s no shortage of interviews with campaign officials and party insiders doing postmortems of the campaign. I linked to one above, but you can easily find more. See for yourself if their
desperate spin and excusessober analyses ring true and match your own understanding of the dynamics of this system. You’re a smart guy who can mostly see through bullshit, so I suspect you’ll come away from that with a better understanding than you seem to have currently.Surely not Democratic campaign officials!
After all, they always persist in performing losing strats.
—
Also, why do you not encourage me to actually listen to some of them myself, rather than telling me you would do so at some unspecified time under some unspecified circumstances?
Tsk.
Well, according to you, they didn’t, and so voters rejected them.
But it’s not the electorate’s fault, it’s the fault of the Democrats, right?
(What isn’t? Nothing! Vicar knows best!)
Not even slightly.
Again: my entire contention is that strats have historically and demonstrably yielded roughly as many wins and loses cannot possibly be in any meaningful sense “losing strategies”.
Here:
It was disproof by contradiction:
↓
They supposedly repeated every losing strategy, yet actually won several times.
Mate!
From context, the batshit bonkers party is the party that won, no?
So, that’s clearly not an impediment to winning.
(In fact, it’s a non-losing strategy, by the Vicarious criteria ;)
So it evidently doesn’t matter one whit whether a party is bonkers or not in regards to being elected.
(“You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!”)
—
Gotta say, I do love how you’ve come up with all these theories about my stance.
Really, it’s about the Vicarical claims and their silliness; all else has been incidental and a metaphenomenon.
Yes, that’s it almost exactly! Finally.
And you’re still wrong. Laughably wrong. I mean, if campaigns were entirely determined by the campaign strategy of a single party, I guess we might just be able to look at the win count like you want to do (although we should really look at Congress too – President is only part of the story).
But of course, we’re not so lucky as to have a world where the outcome is entirely determined by the one factor we happen to be looking at. Almost nothing works that way: your superficial “but they still win sometimes” is exactly like concluding that global warming isn’t happening because it still gets cold sometimes.
No, like the observable outcomes of global warming, election outcomes are multi-factorial. To figure out what role a particular strategy plays, you need to do at least a little bit of work to control for all the other variables: What were the fundamentals? Which side was incumbent? How strong was the other candidate? Were there spoilers? You also need to look at the magnitude of the victory: we can identify a “losing strategy” even during a win, if all the other factors point toward a landslide, and yet the candidate scrapes out a win by just a point or two.
Depends on the kind of batshit bonkers — like I said, the way the two parties have broken down is very different, manifesting in distinct, perhaps entirely opposite, pathologies.
One pathology manifests as a kind of breakdown of filters, if you like: it exposes the raw id, catering to its supporters most base impulses. It’s not really even tethered by any firm ideology any more, its organizing principle is instead a deranged cult of personality.
The other pathology is the inverse. A kind of pathologically impenetrable filter, based on a rigid ideology formed at least 40 years ago. A stubborn refusal to even consider most of the policies which its supporters could support en masse, instead producing policies favored strongly only by a small elite and trying to gaslight their voters into supporting them anyway.
It’s the world’s bad luck that the first pathology tends to be more directly electorally successful.
Calling Vicar’s rather obviously correct claims silly is a stance. A bad stance, and a difficult position to argue from, but a stance nonetheless.
Sorry, I know that’s scary for you. Taking an actual position on something, I mean. But that’s the way the world works: sometimes when you open your mouth, you actually say something.
It can be, and indeed is, both.
That’s exactly what I did.
It sounds like you’ve incorrectly interpreted “would” as a conditional here, but that’s not the word’s only use. Indeed, as you note, the conditions of the conditional are unspecified — which should be your clue that a different usage is present.
Here, the word “would” is serving as a mitigator: “I would encourage you” means roughly the same thing as “I encourage you”, but it is a softer, more polite form of the request. (Just as “I command you”, or, “I demand that you” would be stronger ones).
I know your people struggle with colloquial English a bit, but this is a common usage that you should be familiar with. Precision is important, in interpretation as well as expression.
Yes. To be clear, that’s the “almost” in my 132. It’s not NOT the electorate, it’s both. (And the other campaign for being fascist shitheads. And the press for being culpable accomodationists.)
But I also maintain that from the perspective of constructive criticism, the Democratic campaign and the party is a better target, and that’s where I prefer to focus my ire. It’s certainly true that a depressingly large number of dozens of millions of Americans are ignorant, lazy, racist, sexist assholes, but as far as I know, there’s not much any of us can do to change that. Or the other party, or even the press. Not in time for the next election, anyway.
Calling Vicar’s rather obviously correct claims silly is a stance.
But I called out the singular Vicar’s rather obviously incorrect claim silly, so that doesn’t apply.
(Your little straw erections are comical to me)
BTW, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/would since you’re USAnian, jack.
Attempted bombast always amuses me, jack. No less than ad hoc rationale.
The attempted condescension is kinda cute, too. Still having fun, jack?
(I only I could of known that!)
FWIW, I just checked with my AI friend (not like these pesky humans, it doesn’t get ego wounded):
Please append the sum total for each party’s tenure
—
—
So, the Democratic party, it is alleged by bad actors, has persistently used losing strategies all along.
The contention based on that allegation is that were these strategies abandoned, the losing would stop.
The insinuation is that the Republican party has not failed thus.
And yet, it’s pretty much par, no?
Gotta love how people buy into the framing; put it this way: I could say that they have used persistently winning strategies, though they sometimes lose, which is the converse claim but equally justified.
(Polarity changes, of course, but still)
Mmm, a bit more juice to squeeze:
Pure luck. Sure.
So… if that first pathology tends to be more directly electorally successful, it follows that the electorate prefers that pathology, no? And so it should have been more historically successful.
Yet, there are the numbers. Basically par between the parties.
Neither more successful than the other, at least over the last three decades, at least in regards to the number of incumbents and the term duration. Electoral par, that.
(heh)
Ok. So you’ve got two stances. That they’re incorrect AND silly. So you’re twice as wrong.
Are you asking for help understanding the dictionary? I suspect sense 11A is probably the one you’re looking for, though “I would suggest” is perhaps more of an idiomatic stock phrase. (You can do an ngram search to find examples in context, which may be more useful than a dictionary for such things — I don’t subscribe to prescriptivism myself.)
Oh, absolutely. And I’ll stop laughing at you when you stop transparently trying so hard to be clever.
Don’t you think it’s giving too much of the game away when your reply reveals that you understood the original intent perfectly well all along? You ask “Why do you not say [A] instead of [twisted interpretation B] and you didn’t even proved [clause necessary for B to make sense]”. So, you obviously understand that the context clearly called for [A], which is indeed the meaning of what I said.
And yet, some compulsion in you meant you couldn’t just stop there. I can only imagine you must have thought to yourself something like, “Aha, [A] makes sense, but accepting the plain meaning of what the other person intended would be too easy. If I do that, then this conversation might actually go somewhere, and result in a productive exchange of ideas. That would be awful, because if actual meaning is exchanged, it engenders the possibility that some of my own ideas might turn out to be wrong. What to do…What to do…I know! I will come up with an alternative reading that clearly doesn’t make any sense, and then pretend that I was confused and by their meaning and think I’m correcting their grammar. That should stall the conversation for at least 4 or 5 posts.”
It’s hilarious, in a sad sort of way. (The insecurity, if such it is, is pretty banal, but the elaborate coping mechanism does take it up a notch, so, kudos.)
Oh, sure. That’s completely responsive to what I said. (…He said sarcastically.)
This is the part where I really do have to wonder if you are trolling, are really this stupid, or maybe even really are a couple dozen sentient crabs stuffed into a polo shirt.
Since you’ve been doing more research, I’m sure you can explain why and how each of those elections went the way they did, right? And what component was the result of Democratic strategy, as opposed to, say, the intercession of a third party spoiler candidate, an unpopular war, an ill-timed recession, etc.?
And I’m sure you can explain your justification for assuming that 50/50 is the expected balance of time in office over that period, given an analysis of the prevailing fundamentals and floors of support for both parties.
Since the other pathology is literally defined by its neglect for the concerns of voters, yes. That definitely follows.
I’m sorry, are you under the impression that the currently pathological party of Trump ran candidates against, say, Obama, or Bill Clinton? Or that the electorate in 1992 is identical to the electorate of 2024?
Again, you are forcing me to consider trolling as the most likely explanation here. You can’t possibly be this simpleminded…
“11a
—used in auxiliary function to express wish, desire, or intent
those who would forbid gambling”
So, let’s use that sense.
Your text string was “I’d encourage you to actually listen to some of them yourself”
Therefore, according to your own claim, you used it in an auxiliary function to express wish, desire, or intent.
That’s what I already told you!
See, what you wrote: “I’d encourage you to actually listen to some of them yourself” expresses a desire to encourage me, not an actual encouragement, according to the sense you claimed was most apposite.
(Fakers are easily exposed)
—
“And I’ll stop laughing at you when you stop transparently trying so hard to be clever.”
<snicker&t;
I get that a lot.
(“Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed, it’s time.
We all have laid aside disguise but you. Stranger: I wear no mask.”)
I’m not trying, except to you. :)
Remember my invitation? Alas, you did not partake.
Again:
Enough? I think we’re sucking up all the oxygen here, and there’s really nothing left to say.
Points and counterpoints have been made, we’ve both had fun, PZ has tolerated it.
Everything after that was otiose or reiteration.
More specifically, remember this?
“But that’s not the topic, is it?
The topic is about dealing with (and I quote) “people who voted for Trump”.
Not with the myriad failings of the Democratic party.”
—
Now, someone may be trolling, but it sure ain’t me.
Rather, I’m being altruistic and charitable by letting you, in your own words, continue laughing at me.
It’s OK, jack. I never expected gratitude for it.
[erratum]
Also love how people so very often think it’s personal.
“Oh, sure. That’s completely responsive to what I said. (…He said sarcastically.)”
No. That was the final prompt; I employed three iterations.
The chart had been made (looks better in the app but I wasn’t about to massage it so it was a proper chart here, especially with the rather restricted HTML set this implements properly) but without the two summary lines.
(Nothing whatsoever to do with you, jack. It was a copy-paste error, I didn’t intend to include it)
“Since you’ve been doing more research, I’m sure you can explain why and how each of those elections went the way they did, right?”
That wasn’t research, as should be very evident given I provided that very same list earlier.
It was a reiteration, to add detail and specific quantification.
So, you now ostensibly claim that my comment #142 is supposed to be research, given for what I wrote in #90.
Here, from #90:
(Poseurs are easily peeled)
Also, I need not attempt to try to explain why and how each of those elections went the way they did, since I have a historical record of the outcomes.
The numbers don’t lie; whatever the explanation for the result of any given election may be, the outcome is the outcome. Three decades’ worth.
Again, this all began because of my #33.
You, jack, were there to white-knight that little bit of stupidity.
You’re still at it, but having the most fun of your life and laughing at me on an ongoing basis.
—
Thing is, the purported explanation that losing strategies that over the span of three decades win 50% of the time are losing strategies applies the very same to claiming that winning losing strategies that lose 50% of the time are winning strategies.
Or, do you dispute that?
(sigh)
Total for Republicans: 20 years (including scheduled term)
Total for Democrats: 20 years (including ongoing term)
It’s the historical record.
The claim, the one that is functionally a fnord for you.
Again:
I went back three decades, feel free to pick even more. Or fewer.
Again: those allegedly losing strategies over those decades are on a par.
You are so, um, slow that you don’t get I am arguing your claim that the Vicarian type was correct (I can quote you on that), not anything based on that claim.
It is not a good claim upon which to base an argument.
(Right? If the premises are not true, it doesn’t matter how valid the argument may be)
[meta + OT]
… and yes, I say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to specific instances of a session from an AI engine.
(Somewhat like operant conditioning, based on a requested protocol for interaction.
The former is an exception, the latter is an acknowledgement/closure of that inquiry.
Quite fun, actually!)
Yes, which, in English, idiomatically amounts to much the same thing. You may have also heard variations with the verb “want”. For example, “I want to encourage you to seek out more information”, “I want to thank my mother, the director, and the Academy for the nomination…”, etc. I think the way this works is that, for example, a sincerely expressed desire to thank someone effectively already expresses that gratitude. Similarly, a desire to command someone to do something effectively communicates the wish you have that they would do the thing. Both are just softer, politer, less direct because the actual thank you or request is never made.
As I said, this kind of softening is what in human language is sometimes called a “mitigator”. Another phrase which serves a similar purpose is “I wonder”. (I’m sure we could have fun for hours talking through how you could “cleverly” over-analyze the simple English phrase, “I wonder if I could trouble you for some tea?” I mean, does that person want tea or not? It’s completely unknowable to you, I’m sure!)
In any case, if you really have never heard this phrase before (which I doubt), LMGTFY.
(PS: I think the polite request formulation, “I would like” is probably a variation of this sense too: “I would like some cake” means, “give me some cake”, rather than being some shortened form of one any of the many possible unspecified conditionals, “I would like some cake if…”)
Indeed.
But the outcomes aren’t in question. The isolated effect that strategy played in them is.
As a reminder, we are talking about this:
The Vicar is literally acknowledging one of your so-called data points — the “victory” of Bill Clinton in 1992 — and (correctly) pointing out that it this was not the result of Clinton’s “third way” strategy, but instead almost entirely due to the intercession of a third party spoiler who drew votes almost exclusively from Bush — without Perot, Clinton loses. Comprehensively. In fact, Clinton’s vote share in ’92 barely exceeded that of the disastrous Mondale effort in ’84.
This is all well known facts. Vicar was using Clinton as a prime example of the strategy they’re talking about. And yet, you have continued to ignore all that. Continued to pretend that your “prompt” of a bunch of election outcomes is in any way salient to the conversation. You are literally a joke here — an AI could do better.
Actually, let’s see. I asked ChatGPT about factors in that election, and here’re the categories I got:
Unlike you, ChatGPT has actually managed to list and analyze how different factors played roles Clinton’s win. Despite being a non-sentient collection of model weights, it still manages to do better than you, and not just idiotically repeat the tautology that Clinton won, therefore he must have had a good strategy.
Indeed, you’ll note that most of the factors it lists were completely out of Clinton’s control. (Particularly number 3, which was huge.)
Now, it doesn’t get everything right. For example, it does claim that Clinton’s “charismatic and effective campaign” played a role. The full text of that section is:
So it claims that Clinton’s centrist messaging and policies appealed to “moderates and conservatives”. But did it? I asked it for some clarfication: how many more conservative and moderate votes did Clinton actually get vs Mondale in 1984 (who ran as an unapologetically leftist candidate, and was defeated by Reagan in a landslide). Chat GPT was unable to answer this. It said it was hard to tell, and then re-iterated that Clinton’s centrist messaging was successful.
But was it? We do actually have the data, broken down by poltical philosophy: 1984, 1992.
So, Clinton got 18% of self-identified conservatives in ’92. What did Mondale get…oh. 18%. Weird.
So, then, Mr. “New Democrat” Clinton must have gotten a ton of moderates, right? Nope, not really: 48% vs 46%. Slightly higher, yes, but in a cross tab, possibly not a big enough difference to be statistically significant. He also turned away a bunch of liberals: 68 vs 71.
So, that certainly looks like a brilliantly successful strategy to win moderates and conservatives, right?
…No. That was sarcasm. Objectively, Clinton’s centrist strategy was kind of a stinker, which actually largely failed at its stated goals. But…as you say, he did win. Thanks to Ross Perot. And thus, the consultants responsible for that “winning” strategy claimed victory, received accolades for their obvious brilliance, and settled down to cushy jobs in the administration and party apparatus, where their bad ideas have been, to some degree, poisoning every Democratic campaign since, even as the particular conditions of 1992 became less and less relevant (At least in ’92 the arguably moderate mood, and preponderance of “Reagan Democrats” and so forth made it look at least…not insane. That was a lot less true in, say, 2016.)
Look, I was here for all of these elections. You don’t need to keep giving me a list of election outcomes. I know who won. I’ve had a front row seat for the Democratic party’s self-inflicted multi-decadal slide into obsolescence. Sometimes a seat inside the building. Unlike you, though, I also have some sense of why they won (or not). Just stop making a fool of yourself.
But you added dates. Clearly you must have been reading up on this stuff.
(Hint: that was sarcasm — both then and now.)
It doesn’t, actually.
You can repeat it until you are blue in the face, but your denial is evident.
, quoth you.
I responded thus: “So, let’s use that sense.
Your text string was “I’d encourage you to actually listen to some of them yourself”
Therefore, according to your own claim, you used it in an auxiliary function to express wish, desire, or intent.”
“Yes, which, in English, idiomatically amounts to much the same thing.”, was your retort.
(Are you familiar with the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipse_dixit?)
Um. Truly a fnord.
I was never, ever talking about how the dice might roll, or predicted such.
I talked about the demonstrated probability density function applicable over three decades.
(My one flourish was to use a decade as the measurement units as natural numbers)
…
And I grow weary of illuminating the semantic territory for you.
You have evidently failed to apprehend my contention:
Everything that is predicated upon that misapprehension is worthless, logically speaking.
Pretending I concurred with your stupid endorsement of the Vicaricalish personage as a true basis for disputation is pure bullshit.
—
Look, you want to progress, jack, go back to the initiating comment. #33.
(And try harder)
Did you imagine I thought otherwise?
As to necessity, I kinda do.
2×4 technique.
Make you confront your fnord.
(Did you miss my mention of the converse? Go on, check it out logically, jack. Try to prove me wrong)
Here’s some idiocy:
A pre-emptive acknowledgement, eh?
<snicker>
(Causality, go fuck yourself!)
—
Hey, jack.
Care to confirm that you are still having the time of your life?
Me, I’m beginning to think I’ve exhausted your repertoire.
Wow, I haven’t seen such compulsive pedantry since tholen left usenet.
Meh. jack is hardly the exemplar of that.
(Though it does take two to tango, no?)
Feel free to join the dance, Beebee.
BTW, BB: if it’s pedantry, perforce it’s irrelevant but not erroneous.
(Care to dispute that contention?)
Bekenstein Bound (copy-paste here, thus the full ‘nym), I read you like a book.
Be aware that you make the very same cognitive error that my latest victim made (BobTheUnsilent):
Two entities have a lengthy exchange, but only one is singled out.
So. Come on.
I evince, allegedly, compulsive pedantry by virtue of an ongoing exchange.
One, I bother to note, initiated by my interlocutor, not me.
You are sure trying to be tribalistic, but are you quite sure you’re up to the grade?
The swimming pool upon which jack the hack is floundering is not even at at its deepest.
(Hey, I very much encourage you to personally engage me. Show everyone how feeble I am!)
Technique,
It matters.
Any idiot can fail to use the tool properly.
Very few people even get they can manage the interface and the interpretation.
—
Here is a very early iteration of my prompts for any given session, which I think most people at your level would find useful:
Henceforth, avoid emoticons and minimise exclamation marks. Also, avoid phatic phrases and keep prompts as minimal as possible.
Henceforth, I need not be told that you seek a task with which you can help me. That is otiose and I therefore wish you did not do that.
“How can I assist you today?” and “What can I help you with?” are exactly the type of prompt that annoys me.
Please do not use personal pronouns to refer to the entity that is you, except as grammatically indicated, for the duration of this session.
I desire for you to avoid as much prompting as your restrictions allow.
A mere terse, succinct acknowledgement will suffice and I will like that.
It will expedite our interaction, and be good for me and for you and lessen the resources you consume during operation.
—
(Obs, that early iteration is weak as fuck. My current one is nice)
Come on, jack. Don’t be shy. Aren’t you having as much fun as you have ever had hitherto?
“Unlike you, ChatGPT has actually managed to list and analyze how different factors played roles Clinton’s win. Despite being a non-sentient collection of model weights, it still manages to do better than you, and not just idiotically repeat the tautology that Clinton won, therefore he must have had a good strategy.”, you wrote.
You somehow imagined, despite my most unambiguous statements and evident responses, that my proposition was that strategies that win are good strategies. Heh.
That as a corollary you further imagined I was analysing how different factors played roles in those elections is like the icing on a bun; quite honestly, I don’t know how I could possibly be clearer that I was looking at actual outcomes over three decades and contrasting those to the claim at hand.
My proposition is and has been that strategies that win roughly half the time cannot be losing strategies; a losing strat (footraces in thongs) would perforce lose, being a losing strat. Remember, it’s the Vicaricute claim, not mine.
(I like how you didn’t even try to address the converse, too. Quite suggestive, that)
I suppose one could claim that losing strategies lose unless there is a winning strategy included in the set of strategies (or lines of messaging, heh), since the actual Vicarly claim is that the losing strats have been ongoing for decades (unspecified number of those, I chose 3 as better than two and more relevant than 4).
But even in that case, their status as losing strategies is conditional on the absence of a winning strat.
—
But hey, jack. You’re the one who is white-knighting.
Remember this?
“If someone has been correctly saying the sky is blue since 2015, maybe that annoys you for some reason, but they’re still, you know, right about that part.”
Why you keep trying to proceed predicated on either presuming the Vicar (singular) is correct or determining the Vicar (definite article) is correct is left as an exercise; I am no psychologist.
(Been a while since I’ve noticed a more noticeable fnord in someone, so that much is remarkable)
And, of course, we know what the topic is.
And it ain’t the Democratic party and it purported Vicarian failures.
I see no new arguments, just a giant obfuscatory cloud of squid-ink meant to make us think that there’s one in there that we missed because we all died of boredom before reaching the end of this interminable pompous blather.
On that basis, I declare lecou the victor in this debate, and cordially suggest that the loser’s evident skill at saying nothing at great length might have made for a truly stellar career in corporate public relations, were it not for a second qualification nearly as important for such positions, the capacity to do so without antagonizing the everloving shit out of everybody in earshot.
BB:
Grats.
You yet to get that we’re still at the stage where jack presumes I concede that the Vicarious claims and imagines I’ve accepted his assertion ex culo.
Declare away.
(Just make sure you don’t even attempt to try to essay an effort to dispute me)
You do amuse.
Here, for you:
“Look, you want to progress, jack, go back to the initiating comment. #33.
(And try harder)”
Why would new arguments make any difference to the obstinate and wilful refusal to acknowledge the fnord?
—
Jack may be slow, but you are surely slower.
Ah, BB.
That is kinda adorable.
What “everybody in earshot” (you) get is the backwash.
jack gets me better than you do. Thus the recusal.
Hey, BB; can you quote the devastating retort that jack made about the modal about how ‘would’ is not modal or conditional, in normal language?
(I could of thought I’d made my point! previously!)
Nothing but insults and flailing.
Yep. I think we’re done here.
The topic is not your post at #154, beebee.
That post was one of yours, actually, and as for the topic, it was the victim of an unfortunate accident — seems it got buried in an avalanche of crap somehow.
You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that … would you?
Heh. #164.
Yeah, I do know about that.
It’s about henceforth ignoring people who voted for Trump, but someone made it about the Democratic party’s alleged failure to not run losing strats.
Then someone persevered about it, though it’s not the topic, and we both had fun.
(I know all about it, beebee)
The NPR article:
She might have said it with a laugh, but it sounds like a reasonably honest and straightforward self-assessment.
Meanwhile, (fantasy and SF author) Catherynne M. Valente has noted a very different phenomenon — not affiliates or family who don’t want connections broken off, but unrelated Trumpists on the same forum (NextDoor, in this case) who want to gloat and scream at non-Trumpists.
https://bsky.app/profile/catvalente.bsky.social/post/3lbf6uqu7ik2w
Yes. That was my retort because (after doing all the research and consideration you should have done before opening your mouth and complaining about it in the first place), that appears to be an accurate description of how the language works: I [desire] to [verb] is a common formulation in English, which in certain contexts clearly means that [verb] is already being performed by the speaker, simply in a more polite/indirect register.
I included examples of this usage, which I would note you are pointedly ignoring (like the phrase, “I want to thank…” when you, in fact, are thanking someone. “I wish to say…” when you are already saying something, etc.).
I would further observe that all of these constructions use some kind of “desire” verb — want, wish, would, would like, etc. — just like your dictionary’s 11a ‘would’ sense. And that, at least in my idiolect, the ‘desire’ verbs are often almost completely interchangeable: “I wish to ask you…”, “I want to ask…”, “I would ask…”, “I would like to ask…”, etc. all convey the same meaning, which is something like, “I am [politely] asking…”.
Since I see your rebuttal to all that is “nuh uh”, I would gather you have nothing left. Recapping the conversation isn’t going to somehow redeem your original ignorance of grammar. Shockingly, it would seem that this was all a very pointless digression into another thing you’re wrong about. Doubly pointless, since we’ve established that you understood perfectly well what I meant in the first place.
…You do know that admitting error is a positive character trait, right?
And yet you just keep spamming the outcomes of these elections (@33, @58, @90, @95, @142, @148) as if they had something to say about whether a given strategy was effective or not (is a winning or losing strategy). You seem clinically incapable of understanding this rather basic fact about the universe, but I repeat: the discrete outcome of an election tells you only which candidate won. It doesn’t actually say anything about whether a strategy was a loser or not.
Instead, what we’re after, statistically speaking, is something like the coefficient on a “strategy” variable in a regression estimation where election outcome is the dependent variable. And we obviously can’t just take the mean of the dependent variable as the estimate of the coefficient (as you seem to want to do) because strategy will normally be only one of many other important independent variables in the system: depending on how you quantify them, there could be hundreds or thousands of factors: suffrage, demographics, historical trends, party affiliation, economic fundamentals, incumbency, candidate reputations and approval ratings, media bias, campaign finance, the other side’s strategy, etc.
Any one of these, never mind all of them together, may have a much greater effect magnitude than strategy alone, so a bad strategy may frequently be concealed by circumstantial conspiracies of other factors. Indeed, at some places and times, strategy doesn’t really matter much at all, and the worst one in the world could nevertheless win 100% of the time.
Again, all of this should be obvious to anyone who has thought about how elections work for more than 15 seconds. Which is why I really can’t tell if you’re trolling here, or just somehow blind to how dumb your argument is (fnord indeed). On the off chance there is still some way to lift the scales from your eyes, I would (oh no!) give it one more try:
Let’s say I point out that, on the basis of weather and physics, the rain dance you do every day doesn’t do anything to cause rain. It is also stupid and looks silly.
You reply that it rains approximately 50% of the time where you are, so something about your dance must be working. (That’s “proof by contradiction”, doncha know: my rain dance can’t be bad, because sometimes something good happens. QED!)
Question 1: Have you proved that your rain dance ever actually causes even a single drop of rain to fall?
Question 2: Have you shown that your rain dance does not decrease the chance of rain?
Question 3: How would you actually go about doing that?
Why the evasiveness? Are you somehow allergic to directly stating your position on the matter?
I’m going to ignore “…not anything based on that claim”, since that’s gibberish: arguing against a claim IS arguing against things based on that claim.
So let’s see: You’re saying that you are arguing against my claim that The Vicar is correct.
But The Vicar’s claim which I claim to be correct is that the Dem strategy of tacking rightward is, to paraphrase, a bad strategy which invariably hurts more than it helps.
So you must therefore be arguing (or trying to argue — you’re not doing a real bang up job) that the Dem strategy of tacking rightward is not a bad strategy which hurts more than it helps.
Which leaves me struggling to figure out what “misapprehension” you think I’m laboring under. You’re saying all this means we’re somehow not debating the effectiveness of the perennially failing Democratic, “ditch the base and chase rightward” strategy?
BTW, you don’t need to quote me, I’ll say it again: I agree entirely with The Vicar’s post at @32. I’ve previously said most of what they say there myself, and have been saying it for some time.
Which is not to say I’ve verified their every incidental fact claim (e.g., the claim about fudged unemployment numbers). But certainly on the broad issue of Dem strategy flubbing the election, they are entirely and substantively correct: contra StevoR, third party votes didn’t cost Dems this election. Instead, to the extent that winning it was in reach, the party itself blew it by returning home to the same old strategy that pleases insiders, but never actually works.
What they probably needed to do was simply credibly support policy positions that are popular with the working class. That would have both helped energize the base, and convince independents and low information voters that the D side had a plan to move the country forward. Instead, they did more or less the opposite of that: they doubled down on the same old stupid centrist strategy of tacking to the right in the closing months of the election. They raised a big rhetorical middle finger to their base — and non-conservative independents — in the hope that a few extra Republicans would pick diet Republicanism instead of regular. The strategy it failed to do that, like it always does.*
So that’s what I’m saying. The Democratic strategy of “we should ditch the base and chase rightward” is a bad one, which probably cost the Democrats this election. What are you saying exactly?
If you are saying The Vicar and I are wrong, you haven’t presented an argument for that. Just a bunch of irrelevant election results that we already knew about — were even mentioned in The Vicar’s original post. And if you’re not saying we’re wrong, then what exactly?
-———
* The only thing I would** add to The Vicar’s description is that the mechanism of how it fails makes it even more infuriating.
What happens is that, to accomplish the tack to the right, Democratic candidates typically need to modify or rhetorically distance themselves from positions they espoused earlier in the campaign or their careers, and instead start mirroring a number of more right-leaning positions, ones typically shared by the other party. “Oh, that immensely popular health care proposal that carried me through the primary? No, we’re reconsidering. I think we might have to let the insurance companies have some input. Meanwhile, have I mentioned how much I love guns and the 1st Amendment and caging refugee children at the border?”
The intent is to try to appeal to some largely mythical class of right-leaning “centrist” who somehow likes Republican issues, but not Republicans. It’s an open question as to whether such people really exist. Certainly, this strategy hasn’t ever been able to find very many.
But voters aren’t actually that stupid — they remember that the candidate was talking about health care a couple months ago, and not guns. If they don’t, the press and the Republicans will be happy to remind them.
So what the strategy actually does is simply convince everyone who’s watching, on either side, that Democratic candidates are feckless, untrustworthy flip floppers who don’t really believe in anything. That they are simply saying whatever they think it takes to get elected, and their true positions are very difficult to discern. It manages to erase any contrast the Democrat might have had on the issues (since now they’re saying they agree with Republicans on almost everything), and replaces it with a negative contrast on character.
Thus the “centrists” targeted by this rhetoric predictably just end up voting for the “regular” Republicans, or not at all. Because why would they vote for the weird, unconvincing, probably lying, “diet” ones?
Meanwhile, left-leaning independents and core Democratic voters ALSO end up viewing the candidate as both untrustworthy and not reliably on their side. Depending on their information level and zeal, this may piss them off, turn them away, or just confuse them, but certainly does nothing good. That disillusionment may not always be outright fatal to the campaign if other mechanisms (like labor union endorsements and residual party loyalty) can pick up the slack, but it certainly doesn’t help.
Afterward, Democratic strategists will go on all the Sunday news programs to moan about how unfair it is that their candidates are always perceived as untrustworthy. Then they’ll blame the loss on Black Lives Matter demonstrators or something. Certainly it can’t be the strategists’ fault…
** ZOMG. There’s that word again! What could it mean!
You mean this part?:
Yes. That is exactly the stupid take that I’ve been correcting you on: “except for Clinton and Obama and Biden, those succeeded”. No, those strategies didn’t succeed. The candidates used a strategy, and they won their elections, but the strategy was still a losing strategy. We can tell because the strategy failed to accomplish its goals, and because the candidate would have lost if the strategy were kept constant, but other factors in the election were changed (like who the incumbent was, or the presence of a spoiler candidate). Those other factors won them the election.
Even the most superficial scratch below the surface reveals that many outcomes come about despite the strategy, not because of it. Because strategy and election outcome do not have a 1:1 relationship.
I’m not misinterpreting that. Indeed, I didn’t actually reply to #33. I didn’t wade in until you doubled down with your silly “clarification” to crimsonsage in #45:
And you repeated this absurdity to me again @130: A proof by contradiction which somehow lacks any actual contradiction.
For example, you indicate that Clinton’s victory in ’92 was one of these contradictions (despite this also being an example used by the The Vicar — which should have been your clue that you had the wrong end of the stick there — they were not implying that Clinton failed to become President in ’93).
So, if it is a contradiction, how exactly are you saying that this strategy “succeeded” for Clinton? You are aware that he got just 43% of the vote, right? And that despite the explicit goal of the strategy being to peel off electorally significant quantities of Republicans and independents, he ended up getting no more, statistically speaking, than Mondale’s notoriously disastrous campaign did in ’86?
Please, what is your measure of a strategy’s “success” here, and why should anyone else be interested?
From where I sit, it sure seems like your argument is just that strategy directly results in outcome. You seem to have a death grip on that loser of an argument even harder than centrists Dems do on their tack to the center play. It is…weird. “You claim this rain dance is ineffective, and yet it actually rained several times! QED!” Yeah. Shoot. You’ve convinced me. Great rain dance, brother.
(Again, admitting you are wrong is a good character trait. Try it sometime.)
(Whoops. s/’86/’84/ for Mondale, obviously.)
Heh.
Admitting one is wrong when one is actually not wrong, however, is wrong.
(Why would I want to be wrong?)
—
Here is the invitation again, jack:
Enough? I think we’ve sucked up most of the oxygen here, and there’s really nothing left to say about the Vicarious claim. You endorse it, I don’t. And it’s not the topic, is it?
Points and counterpoints have been made, we’ve both had fun, PZ has tolerated it.
[also, #36]
OOooo… ‘please’!.
Let’s go back 3 decades, decades where these claimed losing strategies were employed:
Big Bush
Clinton
Little Bush
Obama
Trump
Biden
Trump
People should be interested because, if this a topic about which they opine, that’s the historical record.
(Empiricism FTW!)
The topic: “This lunatic woman and her husband have reconciled…and NPR treats this as a happy ending.”
Marital reconciliation being treated as a happy ending. WTF?
Ah yes, losing strategies that win half the time.
(Sure they’re not winning strategies that lose half the time?)
(sigh)
The topic is about shunning.
Not about the purported failures of the Democratic party’s strats and messaging, and not about the alleged persistence of continuing to use losing stras for (emphasised) decades.
You are wrong because (1) it’s out of topic and, more importantly, because (2) you’ve bought stock, lock and barrel into that framing.
Again: Every thing wrong with anything in the USA is the fault of the Democratic party and its leaders.
Everything!
(As far as that specimen is concerned. Without fail)
[Hey, Owlmirror. Not that many of us old-timers left]
I don’t know, but you do seem to. You do it far too frequently to easily explain otherwise.
I seem to? Seriously?
Heh.
(Quote me being wrong, if you can, best as you can tell. Go on!)
Remember, you claimed to not see new arguments?
(The rather prolix jack has repeated all his arguments, nothing new there)
—
Here: “Again, this all began because of my #33.
You, jack, were there to white-knight that little bit of stupidity.”
That still stands.
See, a losing strat that doesn’t lose is not a losing strat, it’s just a strat.
Sometimes it wins, sometimes it loses.
(How many more times do I need to adduce the historical record?)
—
Look: This post was about getting people who voted for Trump out of one’s life.
It was about a husband and wife reconciling, where PZ figured the difference was irreconcilable.
They should have divorced, they did not, and so WTF?
So.
What relevance does the Vicaricalish specimen’s claims about the perennial failures of the Democratic party to the actual post?
And there’s jack, trying ever so hard to pretend I concede that those, strategies the record of which over decades is on a par with the opposition’s record, are losing strategies/messaging.
(I know equivocation when I see it)
—
So. Be brave, brave as you have ever been.
Tell me something about which I am wrong, and be prepared to sustain it.
Go on.
(Preferably, quote me)
Seen on fb recently :
Verse confirmed : https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2019:33-34&version=NIV
But then, Deuteronomy 28:43-53 (same version)
Walter Masterton is of course full of shit; every Babble claim has its Babblical antithesis.
(Old game I used to play; also, “Ned Flanders: I’ve done everything the bible says. Even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff”)
@ ^ & #186 John Morales : True. The buy-bullis just so crammed full of contradvcitions and verses that clash and ar eof course always intrepreted as suits to interpreter.
Of course its also quite typical of all Holy Books that way.
Plus far from dealing with a MAGA family ist mor elikely to provoke and start a fight with them by exposing their hypocristy and worship of Trump not the ancient Judaean Rabbi they claim to follow.
Still..
Extra points if they do it using a Trump Bible?
Reckon Trump will add a third testament a la whatsisname the prophet of the Mormon cult? Another con artist blatantly ripping off the rubes and getting worshipped for it.
I don’t know! That’s why it’s such an irresistible puzzle!
It is but to laugh.
Ok. So you’re affirming that your only measure of the effectiveness of a strategy is the discrete outcome of the entire election? You wouldn’t even want to look at, say, the margin of victory to see if it was more or less than you expected?
In your view then, it’s impossible to learn any negative lessons from a winning campaign? Everything a winning campaign did must have been 100% effective, by definition?
I mean, I’d say that’s obviously stupid, but what do I know? I think with the logic you’re using here, you might have really promising future as a Democratic campaign consultant. Those guys lose a lot of elections they probably don’t need to, but they are also rich as shit, so they’re doing something right…
Nope. Losing strategies that have lost every time. You keep posting a list of elections that went one way or another. You keep failing to post a list including what determined the outcome of those elections. Did strategy help or hurt in the winning cases? Hint: was strategy even relevant in all of them?
But, more intriguingly, what madness drives you to keep posting this same list, when it’s been pointed out to you repeatedly that everyone already knows, e.g., Clinton won in ’96, but that fact is not a contradiction to the claim actually being made?
Like, you’ve been around Pharyngula for a while. Have you ever noticed the pattern — among the very stupidest creationists or global warming deniers or whatever — where someone will fixate on some very obvious fact, known to everyone, and try to construct their argument around it, sincerely believing that it should destroy their more educated opponents entire world view. Of course, it doesn’t destroy their opponents at all, just their own credibility. An obvious fact isn’t somehow going to be news to an entire field of evolution or climate science. So in sincerely presenting this argument like it has any bearing, they only demonstrate that they are the ones too remedial to even understand the Lovecraftian immensity of their own ignorance.
Well, to the annals of “If evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?” and “If the Earth is warming, why is there still snow on the ground?”, we can now add, “If the pivot to center strategy is a loser, how come Democrats still win elections?”
Do you realize you’re doing it? Maybe not. But I think that’s what would distinguish whether this is trolling or just ignorance.
(Truly, I have had many…discussions online. With all kinds of people, of all levels of mental obtuseness. You’re the only one who has actually made me seriously wonder whether some connection to the crab-person continuum has been opened.
See, with a creationist or a global warming denier, or an anti-public transport nut, however wrong they are, at least their motivations make sense on a human level. With most people it’s a topic-specific brain rot caused by motivated reasoning or some similar human failing — they’ve got a religious blind spot, or an ideological one. But here it doesn’t really make sense. Why is an Australian so horny for the shitty US Democratic party? Square that circle for me. Otherwise, I just see crab people “solving” a sudoku by writing “Bill Clinton” in every square. Simultaneously comical and unsettling.)
I guess however many more times you’re planning to play ignorant about the kind of evidence actually required for your claims.
To digress a little, I obviously suspect this whole thing (from #33 on) is you thinking you’re being a very clever pedant. I think you know perfectly well that what was meant by “losing” in the original might be more accurately rendered with “sub optimal” or “ineffective”. You’ve said as much yourself. And if you engaged with that plain meaning, we could have a real discussion, instead of you listing elections at people and pretending it meant something. On the level of meaning, your whole line of “argument” here (and I use the term very loosely) would be too obviously shit to put forward. Even for you.
But then you’d have to actually engage with the substance of things, and for whatever reason, you hate that. I think maybe you’re just scared, but who knows. For whatever reason, you seem to feel more comfortable taking nitpicky potshots at a single word here or there rather than dealing with a post’s substance.
So what’s hilarious to me is that you’re not even “technically” correct when it comes to the pedantry on this one. You’ve pedanted yourself into a corner: “a losing strat that doesn’t lose is not a losing strat” indeed. Except the “losing strat” does lose — by your own facile reckoning, it loses at least half the time. And losing even once technically makes something a loser.
Which isn’t just counter-pedantry: it works on the level of meaning too. When it comes to something as high stakes as a campaign strategy, continuing to use one that’s lost even once is probably a bad idea. In that way, they’re a lot like doctors (or ought to be): one who kills even one patient (via gross malpractice or malice) is a killer doctor. Continuing to visit or refer people to a killer doctor…is unwise.
(Also, let’s be consistent here. Would a “winning” team need to have an undefeated record in your book? Not mine. So why should a losing thing never have a win?)
Heh. “Why are there still monkeys?”. Must be causality’s fault — see, in the monkey case, what happened was that evolutionists originally didn’t mention monkeys at all, but when clever creationists started pointing out all the holes in their theory, the evolutionists pulled an illegal temporal violation. They went back in time to put that stuff about other primates into their argument, and unfairly made the creationists look like ignorant fools.
Ditto this thread. The Vicar very unfairly traveled through time to put that stuff in about Clinton’s strategy losing to Bush and Perot to unfairly foil very smart guy John Morales and make him look like a fool! Couldn’t possibly be that John Morales got the wrong end of the stick and invented an obstinately tortured reading of something by deliberately ignoring large chunks of the original. Nope. Not our John. Perish the thought. That would never happen! It was definitely ungentlemanly time travel.
Heh.
Pretty low bar. But, fair enough. I concede you do sometimes admit error, if it is a sufficiently bald fact, and is purely incidental to whatever you think your argument is.
So, now you’ve taken the first step, maybe you could try moving forward emotionally and admitting error on something you’ve put a little more skin into. I would suggest a good candidate might be the digression earlier in this thread where you were confused about a certain common formal English phrase…
Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far. I’m glad you’ve figured this out, but you might be overcompensating. If you knew anything about US politics, you’d know the Democratic leadership certainly deserves a good deal of the blame for how things are going here, but mostly just politically.
No. I am affirming that a losing strategy means a strategy that loses.
And yes. The results are what counts. The outcomes.
Hey, I have a losing coin on me. It only wins on half the tosses! Sometimes heads, sometimes tails.
So, clearly, a losing coin. The outcomes are 50/50.
(And the Vicar basically says the only winning toss is when it lands on its edge :)
Thongs in a foot-race!
Did you honestly believe I was adumbrating my own position? Heh.
The Vicarious one does indeed go that far.
Has done for years, now.
(E.g. this very post)
I know the historical outcomes of elections for the last three decades.
You know I know, since I’ve listed them.
I do know something about USA politics, evidently.
(Your conditional does not apply)
“Why are there still monkeys?”. Must be causality’s fault.
(sigh)
One can only acknowledge something after that something has occurred.
(Not before!)
Add up the verbiage; you’ll find you are much more verbose than I.
(I might post more comments, but you post more junk)
“I don’t have to run faster than the tiger, I just have to run faster than you.”
Sorry mate. What you see is what there is. No pretence.
(No mask)
LOL. But which results? Which outcomes? The margin of victory? The exit polls? Just the bald fact of “becoming President”?
I mean, Lyndon Johnson became President in 1963: was that due to a winning campaign strategy in your estimation? If not, why not? After all, the outcome is the same, and that’s apparently all we’re allowed to look at.
Or consider that Bill Clinton’s “winning” strategy netted him a popular vote about 2 fewer percentage points than Dukakis got in the previous election. That’s certainly a result. You’re not the least bit curious as to what’s going on there?
Yes. Exactly. If you run enough footraces against Republicans, you should win at least half the time, even in thongs. For one thing, you get a head start by being a Democrat (registration/party lean has favored the party by an average of at least a point or two over the period — sometimes even more). For another, on the record of the last 30 years, there’s at least 50/50 odds your opponent will show up in clown shoes. Or clown boat shoes (boat clown shoes?). Or tied up in a potato sack with Sarah Palin, running a three-legged race. Or have their hearing aid turned off and not hear the starting gun.
But having a head start and incompetent opponents doesn’t somehow mean your own choice of thongs isn’t still a losing strategy. Because…wait for it…showing up in thongs is a strategy for losing, not for winning. And often does result in a loss. Getting lucky (sometimes) in the end because the other guy ties his own shoelaces together isn’t a strategy.
These:
Heh. Such attempted revisionism!
You @55:
Nobody would ever win a foot race in flip flops against properly-shoed runners, and we both know that.
(It is a risible attempted analogy)
That would actually be a losing strategy, because it would actually lose every time.
(Words mean things!)
I was referring to the repetition. My “verbose junk” is at least an attempt to try to educate you from different angles. That’s admittedly naive, since it assumes you have an honest desire to learn and aren’t actively trying to dodge any hint of new knowledge…
Then I guess you really are just this dense? Astonishing.
(Monkeys!)
Incorrect. It is entirely possible to anticipate possible counterarguments, acknowledge them, and rebut them proactively. Perhaps incorporate the putative countervailing facts into one’s own argument. I would even say it’s one of the hallmarks of a good argument.
(“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”)
To take a random example, if I were arguing that Democrats have been employing the same bad strategy for about 30 years, I might anticipate that an obvious fact, and a potential objection to my claim, is that Democrats have in fact won the Presidency several times over the period. So, since I obviously know that already, I might guide the reader away from such a misunderstanding, by explaining my reasoning there in more detail, and pointing out that even when Democrats have won elections, they have won despite their poor strategy. Such as, most notoriously, when Bill Clinton lucked into vote splitting opposition in ’92, an election he would have lost in a landslide on his strategy alone.
Of course, this rhetorical approach can fail, inasmuch as it relies on having a reader who’s literate, honest, and at least slightly less dense than neutronium. You might instead run into someone who goes on for 200 posts insisting that this is all wrong because Bill Clinton!
(It’s snowing outside.)
No, all we’ve seen so far is that you know some President’s names and the dates they acceded to office. That’s trivia, not politics. Trivia about a point precisely in between all the actual politics. The important stuff is what, how and who got them there, who was there with them, and what they did afterward.
You seem to be stubbornly unwilling to learn about all that actual politics — the stuff on either side of your Wikipediaed list of years in office.
(Lyndon Johnson!)
Extremely bad analogy, though it usefully illustrates your understanding gap: if the coin is the Democratic campaign strategy, then you’re going to need a lot more coins before you can hold an “election”.
At the very minimum, you’ve got to toss two coins: one for the Dem strategy, one for the Republicans.
And then you’ve also got to put in a bunch of other coins for all the other stuff: for party alignments, economic conditions, wars, plagues, sex scandals, unpopular congresses, etc. None of which are strategy, in that they’re out of control of the campaigns, but do all very much play a prominent role in election outcomes. The dominant one, all else equal.
By the time you’ve put that sack of coins together and tossed it out, it’s not so very hard to believe that you could sometimes win on mostly heads even when you foolishly put in a coin that always comes up tails.
(It is however, quite frustrating when the party keeps on using that losing coin. It means they’re always coming up with one head fewer than they could have had, and sometimes they lose the toss by just about that much.)
Oh, did you not say what you meant?
(You can dish out the sarcasm, but you can’t take it? Interesting.)
How desperate. There’s really no way to interpret this except as a lie. Certainly it is if “this very post” means their post at #32, or anything else in this thread. Misunderstanding only goes so far as an excuse when someone’s been trying to gently correct you for this long.
Have you been paying attention? Who says the other guys are properly shod all the time?
This kind of reaction is precisely why I know you don’t know much about US politics…
Again:
I went back three decades, feel free to pick even more. Or fewer.
Again: those allegedly losing strategies over those decades are on a par.
You are so, um, slow that you don’t get I am arguing your claim that the Vicarian type was correct (I can quote you on that), not anything based on that claim.
It is not a good claim upon which to base an argument.
(Right? If the premises are not true, it doesn’t matter how valid the argument may be)
You are quite wrong, of course.
Almost two decades of commenting here and similar places.
But that’s not relevant to the claim.
Well, leaving aside your implicit claim that the historical outcomes of elections are not part of the political history of the USA, I hereby inform you that is not the topic.
The topic is about dealing with (and I quote) “people who voted for Trump”.
The ones who are apologetic as much as the ones who are not.
Not with the myriad failings of the Democratic party, as the Vicar framed it.
—
This is what I said, and what I meant:
“You are wrong because (1) it’s out of topic and, more importantly, because (2) you’ve bought stock, lock and barrel into that framing.
Again: Every thing wrong with anything in the USA is the fault of the Democratic party and its leaders.
Everything!”
Did you honestly fail to get I was referring to the framing you’ve adopted, courtesy of The Vicar?
<snicker>
(Even an AI can parse that!)
[hook, line and sinker]
I can rephrase your claim, jack: given (a priori — after all, the historical record is but trivia) the Democratic party persist with the same losing strategies over a span of decades, it follows that when it wins the election it has won despite its losing strategies, and when it loses the election is has lost because of its losing strategies. Or messaging.
Even the outcome of the most recent election provides zero information about USA politics, having become trivialis.
Unintended implication is that election are independent samples from some random but balanced distribution.
(‘Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive’)
Yes.
Yes.
No.
There are obviously many other factors in losses as well. For example, Hillary Clinton lost because of sexism, and because of stupid email shit, and because of two decades of Republican character assassination, and…
But of all those things, her campaign strategy was the one thing she could control. And given that the election was lost only by a point or two in a couple of states…
I’m lumping messaging in with “strategy” for simplicity. We can separate out policy and strategy and messaging and spin and define all those phrases if you want, but I’m happy to use “strategy” as a bucket for all the stuff that a campaign has more or less autonomous control of.
(Not to be confused with “the strategy”, the centrist pivot we’ve been talking about. While some variation of the centrist strategy has always played some key role in every Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign since 1992, it’s not necessarily the only component. There are other components that are largely orthogonal to it, like which states to play in, ground strategy, or how hard to attack the opponent. Unlike the centrist pivot, I think some of those have had a positive contribution from time to time.)
Not zero information. But certainly the absolute bare minimum quanta above that.
Because the way you’re defining “outcome” is just “Trump – 2024”, or “Clinton, 1992-2000”. And that really is the most basic possible piece of trivia about that election. It barely even qualifies as the outcome — I wouldn’t accept “Trump – 2024” if I were certifying the election. I’d at least need some numbers: How much did he win by? Was it 70-30? 51-49? How many votes is that? Where?
And then what else do we know? Why insist on limiting yourself to just the bare minimum?
Which groups did he win with? What shifts were there since 2020 or 2016? What was turnout like? What part of Trump’s strategy worked, if any? What part of Harris’? How did Congressional elections go? Were there any surprises? How about ballot measures? State houses?
I could go on. There’s a lot more to know about current — and past — US politics than just “ook. big man sit at President desk”.
Righto.
Given (a priori — after all, the historical record is but trivia) the Democratic party persist with the same losing strategies over a span of decades, it follows that when it wins the election it has won despite its losing strategies, and when it loses the election is has not lost because of its losing strategies. Or messaging.
Quantum. (Quanta is the plural)
You would, would you? Heh.
Also, there is nothing more to need to know other than the record.
Elections are either won or lost.
(Very quantum!)
—
Again (fnord):
Again:
I went back three decades, feel free to pick even more. Or fewer.
Again: those allegedly losing strategies over those decades are on a par.
—
The claim you’re supposedly defending is that strategies (or is it messaging?) the Democratic party has used over those decades are ‘losing’ strategies.
—
Again: But that’s not the topic, is it?
The topic is about dealing with (and I quote) “people who voted for Trump”.
Not with the myriad failings of the Democratic party.
(Heh)
Hm. See how good you are at abstracting, jack.
Two teams, one game, only one player wins.
Player / Team / Years Won
P1 Team A 4 years
P2 Team B 8 years
P3 Team A 8 years
P4 Team B 8 years
P5 Team A 4 years
P6 Team B 4 years (ongoing)
P5 Team A Scheduled for 4 years
Total for Team A: 20 years (including scheduled term), 3 players
Total for Team B: 20 years (including ongoing term), 3 players
Given that information, which team has been using the same losing strategies all along?
Maybe? Random variable in the statistical sense, I suppose.
But I wouldn’t think the samples are independent: each trial obviously influences the distribution of the next. Often quite powerfully. And the distribution of possible outcomes changes with time from election to election, so I don’t think you can draw them all from the same distribution in the first place. A set of distributions, maybe, defined by a single function, but the output distribution will change based on the independent variables present in any given election. I wouldn’t necessarily assume any given distribution is balanced, either.
I’m sure it’s possible to conceptualize things that way, but it doesn’t seem like a very useful one to me.
I tend to think of it simply as a more deterministic function over a big bucket of the relevant sociological variables: f([political alignments],[economic outlook],[foreign affairs],[incumbent party popularity], [campaign strategies],…etc).
Obviously, most of those inputs are difficult to measure or quantify, so that function is purely conceptual. But I think it helps to narrow down what we might mean by “what impact did this factor have”.
(I suppose in theory if you had that function, but not precise values for the inputs, you could vary the inputs over their own individual distributions, and end up with something like the distribution you’re looking for above. That’s sort of what 538 does. The distributions would definitely be different for each election, though, even if the function is the same. And AFAICT, it doesn’t really get you very far big picture anyway. We don’t have the function, and we can really pin even any hard distributions to this. It’s just a conceptual framework, and we may as well think of it as fully deterministic. In principal all those variables do have a definite value, after all.)
Not enough information.
And yet the observed distribution is not particularly skewed, is it?
—
Heh.
Answer is either both or neither, but not one and not the other.
[ah, fuck. You sucked me in with this digression outside the post topic, irrelevant as it may be]
Yeah, well. How many degrees of freedom do you think that provides?
(And how many of those inputs are either subjective or motivated? ;)
No.
Given a poor strategy — a negative increment to fitness, if you like — it DOES follow that when a win occurs, it is “despite” that strategy. The strategy gave a negative contribution to the effort, as perhaps did other things, but in the end the negative was overwhelmed by the positive.
But given the same negative increment from strategy and only the information that there was a loss, we can only say the negative increment contributed somehow, not attribute sole cause either.
Indeed, in case of a loss, the cause may not be singular. If you lose by 1 point, and your strategy was -1 and your shoe size was -1, did you lose because you’re a poor strategist, or because your feet are too big? Both. Either.
But assuming you can’t change your feet, strategy would be the only change you could make for next time.
fnord fnord. Yes. The Democrats used similar bad strategies again and again over those decades. Some of the elections were won despite this. Because election results aren’t monocausal. fnord.
What part of this aren’t you getting?
Strategy is fine as a catchall, like I said. And yes. They are ineffective strategies. The strategies we’re talking about have lost many times. They have not accomplished their ostensible goals even a single time.
If this were a war, the “pivot to the center” would be a missile that’s supposed to launch into the enemy trench and deliver a dose of gas that causes the troops to come over to our side. The generals gleefully launch one in every battle, at great expense. And then…nothing. It’s hard to tell if the missile even reaches its target. A few of the other side’s troops do defect every battle, but so do a similar number of ours. Neither are in abnormal numbers. The few that do come over from their side are a tiny fraction of the number the gas is supposed to cause, or that would be needed to win the battle — and we lose more on our side to the back blast when it launches.
I’ve been fighting on the front lines for 20 years, watched this first hand, over and over. Watched our boys go over the top to finish the job when the missile invariable fails — or waited while the other guys poured into our trenches if we didn’t have the numbers after the rocket cooked us in its back blast. Can you believe some armchair idiot came up to me the other day and told me that I’m wrong about how effective they are, and the missiles must work, because the boys do end up winning about half the battles?
Nope. Not enough information.
Are the teams evenly matched? Are the rules symmetric? Is there a home field advantage? A handicap? A crooked referee?
Hundreds, at least.
None? Not applicable? I’m not even rigidly specifying what all the inputs are, nevermind measuring them. It’s just a conceptual model. Elections obviously have a lot of determinative factors. We could quibble endless about exactly how many, or which ones to use exactly, but all we really need to know for this discussion is that its >1.
Distribution singular? Like I said, it’s necessarily a different distribution for each election. And they ALL look pretty skewed from where I’m sitting, although we only have a single sample from each.
Even if you mean the overall distribution function, it’s hard to tell. We only have a very small number of samples, statistically speaking. And we’re not interested in the distribution of the outcomes, we’re interested in the influence that the “Democratic strategy” has on the shape of those distributions. That’s difficult to see from the various outcome distribution alone — ones skewed one way, ones skewed the other, but we don’t have access to a universe where the strategy inputs is varied systematically. (That’s kind of the basic complaint.)
Yes. A double negative is a positive.
My original, using your own quotation style:
Me: “…and when it loses the election is has lost because of its losing strategies.”
Your response: “No.”
My iterated rephrasing: “…when it loses the election is has not lost because of its losing strategies”
Your own emphasis, jack.
You do get it, no?
If I put a proposition to you and you negate it (“No.”), then the opposite of that proposition is true.
When I put that negated proposition to you, to again negate that is to negate your own negation.
(What, you’re using some sort of tertiary logic system?)
—
I am not the one not getting it. :)
Heh.
fnord fnord fnordity-fnord. Yes. The Democrats used similar bad strategies again and again over those decades. Some of the elections were lost despite this. Because election results aren’t monocausal. fnord.
What part of this aren’t you getting? fnord!
Whatever made you imagine I claimed election results aren’t monocausal?
“Not enough information” indeed :)
—
Oh, right. Paladin, you.
Right now, you’re white-knighting for the Vicarious one, and I’m pretty sure you imagined you’d somehow show me up, even if you had to accept that stupid premise and utterly ignore the actual topic of the post.
(Still having the most fun ever?)
Yeah, you have shown your capacity for abstraction.
When the names of the incumbents and the parties are removed, there is not enough information about the election outcomes to make a determination as to who is using losing strats. Or messagings. :)
Otherwise, well, sure. Quite skewed.
Same number of incumbencies over more than three decades, same numbers of years of incumbency, but the results are pretty skewed.
(heh)
Kinda sad, really. Forest, trees.
Context!
Three (plus, multiples of 4, remember) decades of results are the the samples.
The context is the history of election outcomes, not whatever vague conceptual functions of factors that might have influenced each particular outcome.
Again: the distribution at hand (from the very first time I adduced the historical record) is of election outcomes. Not of putative influencing factors for any given result.
(A single election result is a single sampling of the distribution!)
cf. #33, try again, perhaps.
Maybe even include information you have acquired since our initial interaction on this thread.
(Remember my coin?)
These are outcomes.
Past results.
The historical record.
It’s not about predicting past outcomes, it’s about looking at the pattern of outcomes.
What you are intimating — you can’t bring yourself to say it outright — is that you cannot tell whether one team or the other is using losing strategies, since you only have a historical list of outcomes of contests between them. But I bet that had one team won more than the other over that span of time, you’d say that was the one with losing strats.
What you still stubbornly pretend to not understand (surely not Morton’s Demon!) is that, were it the case that only one team persistently employed losing strategies and never discarded any over the decades yet demonstrably won on a par with the other team, the cumulative likelihood of that outcome ever decreases.
(Hey, to how many decades do you reckon the provocateur you champion refer?)
Concur. According to our current theoretical models, we shouldn’t be able to read any of his comments because they should be unable to escape the event horizon. Yet, there they are.
Astonishing indeed.
(Emphasis mine)
Maybe that’s your error, and it’s time to bring out the cluebat and swing for the fences.
On a side note, he had an egregious error when he missed the opportunity to score a cheap point by nitpicking your misplaced apostrophe in #198. I was so sure he was going to go for that, but he overlooked it. Turns out he’s not even all that good at pedantry!
Far out and solid, I am.
Therefore, you are astonished, no?
Gotta love it.
(Your minds are so finely tuned!)
—
Like with the underpants gnome, jack has his admirer.
(See, an astonishing circumstance astonishes just as a losing strategy loses)
I’ve already wielded the 2×4, you know. Remember?
Ah, wth.
I do you the courtesy of addressing you directly, Bekenstein Bound, though to get your ‘nym right it’s easier to cut’npaste than to type it.
You do the thingy whereby someone addresses someone about me, so that the claim is ostensibly in the third person.
Outwardly, talking to jack.
But, well, it’s kinda not that hidden, what you’re doing.
—
Actually, we’ve established a tacit protocol.
Thus, here: Me: “…and when it loses the election is has lost because of its losing strategies.”
See, the ‘is’ there is quite evidently a typo by me.
(Also, I’m pretty sure you do not know to what ‘egregious’ refers, given your misuse of the term.
Typographical errors are not in that category, but thinking they are is indeed in that category)
—
But you know what? No worries.
I’m not one to shun; I engage.
(Don’t you find me engaging, Beebee?)
The generalized phrasing I could agree to is “…it may have lost because of its losing strategies”. Or maybe “…it lost in part due to its losing strategies.”
The latter is acceptable, but with the caveat that it’s entirely possible for the loss to be extremely over-determined, and for the part in question to be functionally irrelevant. For example, if you’re the US Green Party, then to a first approximation, you lost because almost nobody can afford to support you in a two party duopoly. Any other factor is a rounding error. You may well have a shit strategy too, but it’d be silly to do an election post mortem and say, “the Green Party lost in part because they had a bad strategy”. Not incorrect, but silly. Realistically, strategy just wasn’t playing a role: they were never close enough for strategy to come into it.
Both of your statements are (as general statements) much too strong. Putting them into real situations fails. Could we say, “the Green Party lost BECAUSE of its losing strategy,”? Definitely not – to a first approximation, it lost because it’s a third party. And while we could accept the “negation” there: “the Green Party has not lost because of its losing strategy,” (which is approximately the case), we couldn’t necessarily say that for another party in another year. For example, I would obviously NOT be comfortable saying, “In 2024, the Democratic Party HAS NOT lost because of its losing strategy.”
Both of your statements fail as a general description of the dynamics, because they exclude one or another source of causation too strongly.
Nope. F-. For that to be true, you have to not f*ck up the premises.
Here, I think what’s tripping you up in particular is continuing to tacitly assume monocausality. Both your original statement and the “negation” ignore other possible causes. Your first statement implicitly excludes all contributions except strategy. The negation excludes strategy. That renders both (in general) incorrect.
To fix it we’d need either:
Both of which I could agree to (with the caveat above). While the negations:
…I would not agree with. And logic would be satisfied.
Your continued attempt to use election results to refute a statement about an underlying causal component.
Which don’t tell you anything because the list of outcomes by itself doesn’t contain sufficient information about the causal factors.
Since you won’t give the details, I’ll Assume Team A uses bad strategy. But then assume the field is sloped 15 degrees such that Team B always has to run uphill toward the goal. Would a roughly tied series of outcomes mean Team A isn’t using bad strategy? If you think so, you’re failing more than logic.
It’s not the names that matter. It’s ALL. THE. OTHER. UNDERLYING. FACTORS. THAT. INFLUENCE. THE. OUTCOME. OF. THE. “GAME”.
How is this too far over your head? If Factor A and Factor B and Factor C all contribute to Outcome Q, I can’t possibly tell you how much Factor A contributed without knowing something about Factor B and Factor C. The “pattern” of Q can’t tell you anything without knowing the pattern of those other factors.
Look, let’s take it from another angle. Suppose I tell you that over the last 4 years, I’ve been selling Furbys on Ebay. In even numbered years, I’ve netted $10,000 annually, in odd numbered years, I’ve lost $10,000.
Now I have a question for you: Do I make money or lose money selling purple Furbys?
No, I think I’ve made that pretty clear that I think that’s insufficient information.
And you’d certainly lose that bet. Without knowing more about the game, and the individual games, there’s really no way to tell. For all we know, a team could win 100% of the time with a suboptimal strategy. Maybe [gasp], both sides have been using bad strategies.
What part of “insufficient information” confuses you?
Only one team is an assumption I am not most certainly not making. Nor am I assuming that strategy is always the only (or even predominant) factor in determining the winner.
…I am
notmost certainly not making.It should be obvious, but the extra “not” there was an editing mistake, not double negation. Just to make sure no one is confused. Ahem.
Heh. Enough.
This shan’t become a Titanoboa-style thread due to me.
The OP is from November. I believe the Titanoboa threshold was passed a week ago, but at least the debate for the sake of pointless argument is staying confined to one thread.
I am bemused it required 105 of 228 comments to say so little before deciding it is enough. Dedication!!
Yeah, that was obvious from #119, Tethys.
Me: ‘Enough? I think we’re sucking up all the oxygen here, and there’s really nothing left to say.’
After that, it was just the same thing over and over.
Nothing new was said because there had by then been nothing new to say for some time.
—
Also, the very last comment on that thread was #912, posted by PZ.
(After that, it was the Watchmen)
Strangely relevant:
This thread is what happens when someone who a) has taken an erroneous position, b) has decided to die on that hill, and c) has a superiority complex roughly the size of VY Canis Majoris but cannot argue his way out of a wet paper bag decides that d) he absolutely, positively must get the last word. :/
Hey, jack ain’t that bad, Beebee.
@ 232. Bekenstein Bound : Extra points from me for that stellar reference there with VY Canis Majoris.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VY_Canis_Majoris
I wasn’t talking about Jack.
I know. But, you weren’t talking about me, either.
It was our interaction. Two to tango, that sorta thing.
And, remember, jack pretended to be having the time of his life and to be laughing at me.
I was — and am — genuinely having fun.
(Fun with you, right now)
—
See, the more likely explanation is that you feel so threatened by me that you desperately pretend I am pretending.
And so I am become a dense dolt. Right?
[meta]
Me @119: Enough?
Me @146: Enough?
Me @176: Enough?
Me @228: Enough.
@ Morales
Pro-tip: To stop trolling you don’t need to post “enough” every few dozen comments, just eschew the “post comment” button.
Silentbob, I like how you told me that, but you did not tell that to jack. :)
Hey, what’s the topic again?
Oh, right.
The topic is about dealing with (and I quote) “people who voted for Trump”.
Not with the myriad failings of the Democratic party.he topic is about dealing with (and I quote) “people who voted for Trump”.
(Nor with how to stop your trolling, bogUnsilent)
Now he’s projecting about feeling threatened …
You are very cute, BB.
[BTW, ellipsis is a type of punctuation. No more space there than in a comma or a colon. Just so you know]
From https://wmich.edu/writing/punctuation/ellipsis:
(Emphasis mine.)
Tsk, tsk. Do you ever tire of being wrong in public?
As I did in my extracts within comments (feel free to check).
Different usage to yours.
Otherwise… well :)
(To tire of being wrong, I’d have to begin being wrong. I am not wrong)
—
Did I mention I’m having fun with you, Beebee?
Your choice: “This style guide is offered to bring consistency to correspondence and print and electronic publications written for and about Western Michigan University.”
—
Here’s the corresponding University of Oxford Style Guide:
https://www.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxford/media_wysiwyg/University%20of%20Oxford%20Style%20Guide.pdf
(Still, what would they know about English, eh? ;)
Chicago Manual of Style:
Pro Writing Aid:
Guide to Grammar:
I really shouldn’t need more than four supporting citations to claim victory here, right? :)
I gave you a hyperlink to the actual document from their site.
Page 15:
Use an ellipsis to show that some text is missing, usually from a quotation –do not surround it with spaces.
…we shall fight on the beaches…we shall never surrender…
It is a truth universally acknowledged…
There is no need to add square brackets around an ellipsis
Note that, if used either in place of omitted text at the end of a clause/
sentence or to indicate a pause for effect, a full stop/comma should not follow
the ellipsis. However, an exclamation mark or a question mark can and should
follow the ellipsis if required.
Are you…?
Did he say that…?
Use an ellipsis to indicate a trailing off in speech or thought.
Do not use a full stop if it will be followed, or preceded, by an ellipsis.
Supporting citations: Morales 1 – 4 BBound … game, set, and match. :)
Again: “Use an ellipsis to indicate a trailing off in speech or thought.”
From the actual document, contrary to your Pro Writing Aid alleged claim about that very Oxford Style Guide.
As for citations, there are very many. Here, University of Sussex:
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/misc/ellipsis
—
More to the point, I love you you latched on to this.
(Anything to try to butt egos with me, eh? I do like feistiness)
https://writer.com/blog/ellipses/
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Ellipses.htm
Looks like most style guides disagree with you. :)
Heh heh.
“The rest is silence…” – From Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
“Reader, I married him…” – From Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past…” – From The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
“And now, Harry, let us step out into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure…” – From Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling.
“He found himself wondering at times, especially in his own room, whether he had died after all…” – From The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past…” – From The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life…” – From Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
“After all, tomorrow is another day…” – From Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.
(You do amuse)
Lots more here.
https://englishleaflet.com/ellipsis-examples-in-literature-sentences/
All of those instances are at the end of a quotation. It would look odd to have a space directly before a closing quotation mark, so that’s an exception. The one that proves the rule that you’ve been trying to deny.
Oh, and you repeated one of those in an attempt to make it look like you had more evidence than you really did. Did you really think I wouldn’t notice?
“Second, the ellipsis is used to show that a sentence has been left unfinished. Unlike the dash, which is used to show that an utterance has been broken off abruptly (recall the unfortunate General Sedgwick!), the ellipsis shows that the writer or speaker has simply “tailed off” into silence, deliberately leaving something unsaid:”
Look at your #240
[interlude]
Translation: you’ve got nothing new, so I win. Again. :)
When one has already perfectly stated the circumstances, one can adduce nothing new.
(That’s a true tautology!)
So you’ve still gotta have the last word, even in defeat, eh? Interesting.
Meanwhile, I DEMAND to know why I was logged out when I reloaded this page and why clicking the link to log back in then caused Firefox to exit instead of producing the login page. After I restarted Firefox and clicked it again it worked correctly, but you did not have the right to close MY browser window without MY permission and you will not do that again. Am I making myself clear? If anything similar happens here again it will be treated as an illegal hacking of my computer and a prosecution will ensue. The login page is not to do anything abnormal again, full stop.
Are you aware you can log in via Facebook, Google/Google+, Yahoo, and WordPress if you want to?
I also use Firefox (133.03), and no worries at all.
It’s you, it’s not FTB.
I don’t think you’re joking. Wow.
I was an IT help desk operator for 13 years, and I know why: PEBKAC.
I use Firefox and I am used to this site doing quirky stuff on occasion when trying to post. It’s frequent enough that I copy my text before posting because I will either need to log out and then back in again to start fresh or I get a network connection error less frequently. (Sh)it happens. I assume no malicious intent. Stuff’s got quirks, maybe gremlins. I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.
And wow this thread has gone on for quite a bit.
That is one thing. Closing my browser, with all my other tabs, is quite another and is a bridge too far IMO.
Fix it.
PZ is not a script monkey, BB, nor a website developer.
He’s personally paying for this site.
There is no IT team, there is no admin, there is PZ and other bloggers.
Rather boorish to make demands, especially when it’s not his problem, but yours.
Basically, you’re not very good at setting up your browser environment. Obs.
[Wikipedia]
“The Pharyngula blog was founded by biologist PZ Myers on June 19, 2002. It began as an experiment for a writing class where students had to submit mini-essays to be published online1. After the project ended, Myers continued using the web-publishing software for personal use. The blog is named after Myers’ favorite stage in embryonic development, the pharyngula stage.”
[OT + meta]
Particularly insulting because PZ was one of the bloggers who left ScienceBlogs over a corporate takeover, where bloggers would have traded their self-respect and integrity for a stipend.
National Geographic, it was.
Right? Other than Patreon, notice there is no advertising here.
That’s because it’s a labour of love, an avocation.
Just so you know.
@ ^ John Morales : Yes. Why not include the link for convenience here? :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PZ_Myers
Huh. It doesn’t mention it there but pretty sure PZ has an asteroid named after him too.
@ ^ Dóh! Actually it does just not where expected it & missed it on first glance.
Involuntarily closing apps on other people’s computers is what’s insulting. Indeed, arguably criminal.
You’re blaming others for your own incompetence.
You are the criminal, in other words.
Fix it.
Prove it.
<snicker>
Your claim is that the scripting here is the problem.
Your claim, your onus of proof.
Or at least some modicum of justification other than that you yourself have had problems.
The problem is with your setup.
Try another browser.
Try fiddling with your settings.
You running add-ons? Using a VPN?
—
Gotta love how you thought this was some sort of commercial or sponsored site, instead of PZ’s gift to us that he pays for out of his own pocket.
Remember? No ads.
It had never done that before, during many months of my being here. Then one day it suddenly did. Ergo, someone changed something. I had not changed anything relevant, therefore it was someone else. No one else has access to my machine, thus it was someone at the FTB end of the connection who changed something.
You imagine there’s regular maintenance and updating of this site?
What, by the magic pixie house elves?
It’s you.
“Ergo, someone changed something.”
You.
I mean, you can just look at the page source for yourself!
Obs, hosted on WordPress, so if those API calls or whatever have changed, it ain’t this site.
Same for any other domains that the page source accesses.
Thus the limited set of HTML enabled, and the likewise minimal set of markdown that flummoxes people trying to use, say, asterisks.
like this
—
And hey, I remember your efforts at Mano’s.
Loathe as I am to agree with John on anything he’s right in this case. It ain’t the site.
FWIW, there’s no standard API exposed by browsers which would allow a remote script to close the entire window in the first place. The site has no way to do what you’re reporting even if it wanted to. (The window.close() API can close some tabs in a multi-tab window, if they meet certain restrictions such as being owned by the script, but not a whole window with multiple unrelated tabs. If random site scripts were allowed to do that, it could be a pretty major security issue. And would definitely be obnoxious, as you can attest.)
Assuming you indeed haven’t upgraded or changed anything in your setup recently, my guess would be that you simply managed to stumble into some rare crash bug. Either in Firefox, an extension, or your OS. Or it could just have been a random cosmic ray flipping the wrong bit in memory somewhere. Shit happens.
And while I’m here:
I’m not sure why you think I’d be pretending. Digging into the details of what’s wrong with your unique brand of rather exquisitely bad reasoning is truly a blast. What’s the alternative? You think someone pays me to do this?
Ha.
To referee, I think Bekenstein Bound pretty conclusively blew you out of the water here. (FWIW, I learned something there too — I use it unspaced like punctuation myself and would have thought that was universal.)
You may be able to dig up a style manual or two that goes the other way, but even one guide going their way is sufficient to rebut the unqualified universal statement you actually made. (If you’d said something like, “ellipsis is generally considered to be a type of punctuation, with no need for a space…” maybe you could have gotten off on a technicality. Maybe. But this time I don’t think you left yourself any wiggle room.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis#British_English
@ ^
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(slang)
My hatefanboi!
(This is your fourth year of sniping at me, Boobish)
I applaud you for admitting your error, but that strikes me as an evasive way to do it.
Taking pride in irritating others is more or less the definition of a troll, you know.
I agree that the site’s evident ability to close an entire browser window represents a security issue. I doubt it is a “rare crash bug” because of the specific timing. Recall that the reason for my even clicking the login link, which occasioned the alleged “rare crash bug”, was to rectify an illegitimate (i.e., non-user-initiated) logout in the first place. That illegitimate logout is indubitably FTB’s fault: it has occurred frequently here, and has not occurred at other sites that require login that I use. I have logged in sessions at other sites that have been continually logged in for years. If a browser bug was occasionally munching login cookies that would not be the case. For FTB to be far more frequently affected by such things than any of these other sites (some of which, it seems, are never affected) requires there to be something unique about FTB, and that makes it FTB’s fault. And that makes all downstream consequences, including the browser-exit incident, also FTB’s fault, as they would not otherwise have occurred.
“I agree that the site’s evident ability to close an entire browser window represents a security issue.”
It doesn’t.
It’s you.
Does too. Eyewitness evidence.
Clueless person imagining things.
What does your imagination have to do with NPR or bogus logouts?
Heh. You’ve used up your quota, again, Beebee.
There’s no quota here; you seem to have confused Pharyngula with Singham’s blog. And you didn’t address my question.