US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5595

On October 16 2016 03:25 TheYango wrote:
It's still pretty hard for the political institutions themselves to be taken over by a demagogue. It's just the Republican Party isn't a core political institution and has been pretty dysfunctional for quite some time now.

On October 16 2016 03:09 IgnE wrote:


because orthogonality sheds no light on the hierarchy of those groupings, which itself is historically contingent. the more generalized the study the less predictive power it offers because it lacks sufficient granularity, while the more particular the study the less it tells you about the future because of its very particularity. you are always going to be looking backward because you are inherently limited by the arbitrary selection of presently relevant polling questions.

so is that a yes? you do think that if this hypothetical study of yours was conducted in 2012 it would have been able to shed some light on the shifts in the political parties in 2016?

i dont really understand what you mean saying trump is relatively well understood already. are you saying he's understood presently or that he has been understood since the primaries and that it's puzzling why very few commentators took him seriously 14 months ago?

edit: if you contend that a properly conducted hypothetical survey conducted in 2012 would have predicted the rise of trump i would assert that such a properly conducted study was impossible. my point here is that the bounds of the imaginary in 2012 positively precluded such a study from ever taking place, or at the least, if it had taken place, it would have been ignored by most everyone as fantastic because of the fact that it existed outside the common imaginary, or the "realm of possibility".

On October 16 2016 03:35 Nyxisto wrote:


Well it's one of the two parties in the country. And given the fact that Trump is a sexually predatory clown who has run his whole campaign on twitter, the media denounces him, his own party disowns him, every intellectual denounces him and he's still polling only 7-10% behind his opponent, that really fucking scares me actually.

On October 16 2016 03:37 zlefin wrote:

orthogonality is less about hierarchy, than about compatibility. you cite limits of things, but those are general limits of research, not reasons to not do research.

It might've shed a tiny amount of light; the amount of knowledge needed to understand things well is vast, and this would only be one small piece of the much larger body of knowledge which exists and which people use.
This is one interesting question, but only one, of a great many things.

By somewhat well understood, I mean some parts of his rise and positions are continuations of things that have been going on for some time in the republican party. I'm talking about presently, not about since the primaries.


It feels like you were viewing what I was discussing as a much grander and more accurate thing than I was viewing it as.

After a week of repeated allegations that Donald Trump sexually assaulted women at various stages of his life, top Republican donors and even some rank-and-file lawmakers are urging the party to fully cordon itself off from its presidential nominee.

Trump did himself no favors with this crowd this week: disparaging his accusers’ physical appearance, launching tirades against the press corps, and giving a more full throated endorsement of the notion that the election was rigged against him.

Watching from afar, a number of top Republican donors were aghast. One very high ranking Wall Street donor said that pressure on the RNC to cut ties with Trump “is intense.” As for the RNC’s chairman, Reince Priebus, the donor warned that “his re-elect [as chair] was on the line by holding firm” to Trump.

Trump has put top Republicans in a Hobbesian bind, forced to choose between alienating the vast number of voters devoted to the real estate mogul and the elite wing of the party that finds him repulsive. So far, they have largely sought a middle ground, denouncing the candidate at times while never fully severing their ties. But as the election nears and the limit of Trump’s political abilities and appeal become clearer, walking that line has grown much harder.

One Republican National Committee member told The Huffington Post that he advised congressional candidates to avoid an event featuring Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, out of fear that they’d be hounded by the press over the nominee’s sexual assault allegations. Other party officials have told HuffPost that fundraising for down-ballot races has been hit hard by antipathy to Trump’s presence on the ticket.

Mark DeMoss, a fundraiser for Mitt Romney in 2012, is one of the donors sitting out this cycle. He acknowledged that it was “perhaps” unfair to congressional candidates embroiled in their own specific elections. But his distaste for the top of the ticket determined everything else.

“I’m very distraught about it,” he said. “I just think it’s the most shallow, petty, immature presidential race of my lifetime. I’m 54… I’m not sure how we got here and I’m not sure where we go from here, either.”

DeMoss, the head of a major Christian public relations firm, said he would be more inclined to give to the RNC if it formally broke with Trump. “But I wouldn’t give a dollar to the RNC if it was a joint funding project with the Trump campaign,” he said.

The RNC, for its part, has already begun diverting resources to down-ballot races. This week, they transferred $4.5 million to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and $1.85 million to the National Republican Congressional Committee. But officials say they did so with the acquiescence of the Trump campaign and they continue to argue that there is no strategic rationale for abandoning the party’s nominee.

On October 16 2016 03:53 IgnE wrote:


regarding the narrow claim that orthogonality is less about compatibility than hierarchy, how are you to judge compatibility without hierarchy? with a set of arbitrarily selected "issues" compatibility will be determined almost solely through hierachy. is a pro-life, keynesian lgbt supporter going to be republican or democrat? at both the individual
and population levels that hierarchy is going to change through time

Executions in Florida and the fate of prisoners on death row will remain on hold after a resounding ruling on Friday from the state’s highest court that the death penalty there is unconstitutional.

Capital punishment has been in limbo in the state since a US supreme court decision in January 2016 that Florida’s system was unconstitutional because judges had the final say on the death sentence, whereas that power should be held by juries.

Now Florida’s supreme court has ruled that a fix that lawmakers attempted in the spring is also unconstitutional.

The Florida justices ruled that death sentences cannot be handed down by a jury deciding in the majority, which was the essence of state lawmakers’ spring fix – the jury must agree unanimously.

The legislature’s rewriting of the law in May to allow juries to award the death penalty on the basis of a 10-to-2 decision was ruled unconstitutional by the state’s court.

Experts declared the decision a major blow to Florida’s death penalty and a further weakening of America’s fraying ties to the principle of capital punishment.

“I’m happy. This is an important ruling. My first reaction is relief that it’s going to require a unanimous decision from a jury to make the ultimate determination of whether or not someone should die,” said Rob Smith, director of the Fair Punishment Project at Harvard law school.

The legislature will now be forced back to the drawing board if it wants to rewrite the law again and keep the death penalty going in Florida.

It is believed lawmakers will not go into a session where this can happen until next spring, meaning that death sentences, and probably also executions, will continue to be on hold, Smith said.

On October 16 2016 04:04 zlefin wrote:

i'm not sure I'm using the term hierarchy in the same way that you're using it. it feels like we may be using it differently; I'm thinking about hierarchy in terms of leadership positions and command structure. how are you using it?

On October 16 2016 04:30 IgnE wrote:


im saying that issues have orthogonality and hierarchy in their relations to each other. one issue has a particular correlation to another but it is also more or less important than the other when deciding whom to vote for. both hierarchy and orthogonality are historically dependent. lgbt rights is an obvious example of an issue that has descended in the hierarchy of issues for most people (the existence of milo yiannopoulos is testament to that). people on the religious right may still be opposed to gay rights and yet they might also still vote for milo because lgbt issues are less important overall. lgbt rights may also be mostly orthogonal to whether one supports free trade. and yet the importance of free trade relative to lgbt issues will vary throughout time.

so when you conduct a study like the one you are talking about you can just ignore the hierarchy or the orthogonality at the population levels but it won't tell you anything about the future. your original post suggested that by mapping the political topography you could try and find limits on the space that a political party could cover. im arguing that the very best you could hope for was finding out what it does cover, similar to a poll. what you wouldn't discover is some deep universal relation between the "issues" as you decided them at the time.

it seems premature to assume it owuld have no predictive power before doing any research at all.
there's plenty of existing political gradients that are used for various purposes.
there clearly exists some sort of limit to how much ground a party can cover, if you have a better proposal or initial hypothesis to investigate, what is it?

It might've shed a tiny amount of light; the amount of knowledge needed to understand things well is vast, and this would only be one small piece of the much larger body of knowledge which exists and which people use.
This is one interesting question, but only one, of a great many things.

On October 16 2016 06:09 Dan HH wrote:
https://twitter.com/SheriffClarke/status/787314656641712128

A sheriff inciting unrest? Now we've seen it all this election cycle

On October 16 2016 06:23 ticklishmusic wrote:
let us know if there's actually anything interesting in those speeches, will you