US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5797

On October 28 2016 23:34 Danglars wrote:

The word 'tasteless' is synonymous to racist in its modern usage. Be wise and accept the change. Mourn the loss of a strong word that, in the past, should prompt outrage. We even have a TeamLiquid thread racist for such acts as calling rioters scum.

As the country geared up for the third and final presidential debate last week, the fellows of the storied conservative Hoover Institution gathered in Palo Alto to present their research to the think tank's wealthy patrons.

Elsewhere in America, in the homestretch of perhaps the weirdest election the nation has ever experienced, things were getting tense, excited, even feverish. But the rooms at the Hoover retreat at Stanford University could have doubled as a funeral parlor, and the lectures as eulogies for a bygone era. Larry Diamond, a prominent political sociologist known to fellow scholars as “Mr. Democracy,” talked about the breakdown of the party system. Kori Schake, a National Security Council official in the George W. Bush administration and adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign, spoke about how the U.S. was endangering the international order it had itself created. Peter Berkowitz, a conservative political scientist and commentator, gave a talk about “the unraveling of civil society” in America.

“Obviously the party and the conservative movement are very troubled, and there will obviously be a crisis whether Trump wins or loses,” Berkowitz told me later. “What are the core conservative convictions going forward?”

“If he wins, he will for all intents and purposes reshape what it means to be a Republican,” said Schake when I called her. “We’re fumbling our way through, which I hope will lead us to consensus, but we’re nowhere near it now.”

This election, the conventional wisdom goes, has done tremendous damage to the American body politic, but nowhere is the damage as severe as it is inside the party that nominated the wrecking ball known as Donald Trump. Now the party of Ronald Reagan is being led by a man with no discernible ideological leanings, save for an affinity with some of history’s ugliest. In the face of mounting evidence that Hillary Clinton is set to dominate the electoral map on November 8, Republicans across the right side of the spectrum recognize there’s defeat coming. And behind the scenes, in conversations and closed-door venues—the Hoover gathering was not open to the public—the people who once considered themselves the heart, or at least the head, of the party have begun a very pessimistic reckoning.

As yet there seems to be no coherent vision for what kind of future November 9 brings for the Republican Party—or, for that matter, if there will even be a Republican Party they could support. “You’re assuming that ‘establishment Republicans’ are going to be Republicans anymore,” said Juleanna Glover, a GOP lobbyist and former staffer to then-Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri.

“The likelihood of the Republican Party surviving this, of there being another Republican president in the future, is small,” said one movement conservative who served in the Bush White House. “I don’t think the party survives.”

Far from the halls of the Hoover Institution and big Washington policy shops is a force they cannot control: the Trump campaign, a small collection of social-media gurus, Breitbart alumni, and Trump family members who have managed to capture the majority of Republican voters in the U.S., and who may use their new power to launch a media network, or take over as the new axis of the GOP, or both. And as the old establishment looks on in horror, the civil war in its ranks has already begun.

On October 29 2016 00:15 Liquid`Jinro wrote:


I know this is kinda cheap, so I'll try to pre-empt any outrage by saying that at the end of this post I defer to your better knowledge!
But first:


I just don't see how this qualifies...?

MAYBE under this definition??


I get what you are saying, and I see your point about using it as a way of making her somehow less American (seems like an absolutely insane thing to try to do to someone who lost 2 legs fighting for said country.... but idiots will be idiots I guess).

It really sounded like an ill-advised and incredibly tasteless joke to me to score cheap points, but honestly you have a point in that I'm not American so I will not argue any more on this topic.


It just really bothers me when acts get lumped together under one term, where on the one end of the spectrum I might just barely get mad were I exposed to it, while on the other I'd literally kill someone for doing it to me. It feels like the word loses its usefulness at that point (not specifically talking about racism here but I think there's a few words that have had this happen to them).

I wish there was more nuance...

On October 29 2016 00:25 LegalLord wrote:

I can do that, but I'll be rather simplistic and skim over a lot of the details that I don't think too many people care about. Sorry to anyone who thinks I'm oversimplifying.

So there are basically two major "schools" of thought in statistics/probability: the frequentists and the Bayesians.

The frequentist interpretation of "probabilities" is pretty much what you intuitively think of as probabilities: the odds of getting the result when you repeat the experiment a lot. This is the classic, and more deeply rooted, interpretation of probability, but it has quite a lot of limits on what you can actually do with it.

The Bayesian interpretation(s) are interpretations that try to very quickly make predictions based on a small amount of prior data, and often to predict the chances of events that can happen only once. This is the more "modern" branch of statistics and it's gained a lot of steam because it does work, even if it does have the problem of giving terrible results if your prior information isn't very good. But the interpretation of what probabilities themselves are is very different, and in this case the most appropriate definition is a Bayesian one: a state of knowledge, or more appropriately in this case, a degree of belief. And while those simulations are helpful, they are just that: simulations. The actual event only happens once.

Nate Silver is very Bayesian in his analysis. No problem with that but the technical difference is important to note because it just tells us that it's not random chance whether or not Trump wins - it's just how confident, based on the 538 assumptions, the model is that Trump will win the election.

On October 29 2016 00:29 Plansix wrote:

This is a good post. I’m in the middle of something right now and I’ll respond on lunch. But US politics has a specific tactic called Dog Whistle racism that is often used to court racist/pander to racist. And the defense of that tactic is often that it was just an ignorant or idiotic statement, but they didn’t mean to be racist.

On October 29 2016 00:01 farvacola wrote:

Both Dan HH's post and this one should be required reading on the topic of international connotations of racism.

On October 29 2016 00:29 Plansix wrote:

This is a good post. I’m in the middle of something right now and I’ll respond on lunch. But US politics has a specific tactic called Dog Whistle racism that is often used to court racist/pander to racist. And the defense of that tactic is often that it was just an ignorant or idiotic statement, but they didn’t mean to be racist.

On October 29 2016 00:42 oneofthem wrote:
and no one can confidently claim a lack of racism in some way even beyond implicit bias, because of the historical development of various concepts.

On October 29 2016 00:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:

That's quite fascinating, thanks. I had no idea

On October 29 2016 00:37 xM(Z wrote:

Dan HH's lied through his teeth.
the fuckers here hate gipsies with a passion(mostly the old generation but they're the teachers to the new generation when the parents are at work). calling someone a SJW for calling out a gipsy slanderer is ironically, the correct usage here.

On October 29 2016 00:37 Liquid`Jinro wrote:

Hm, I see, yeah I've heard it referred to a bunch of times, somehow expected it to be more --- insidious? I guess is the word. Well, if it is a repeated thing that happens, then it's easier for me to see the merit.

EDIT: Also @LegalLord, interesting post. Sorry for making your nightmare of waking up to a bunch of discussions about racism come true

On October 29 2016 00:48 oneofthem wrote:

well he is also wrong if he wants to say that a frequentist model (purely poll based) would have trump closer. the bayesian priors in 538's structural model give trump a fighting chance, but it's basically just a guess informed by history and some political science.

On October 29 2016 00:51 LegalLord wrote:

The point is that you can't really even be frequentist effectively since this is a one-time event, and that saying that "Trump has an 18% chance" isn't true in the sense that people think of probabilities - the interpretation of "what a probability is" is more Bayesian in nature, and of course according to whatever model 538 uses. In the real world, if the election were to be re-run 100 times (e.g. let's say you got 100 ballots at the polling station) then chances are the result would be the same each time.

On October 29 2016 00:42 farvacola wrote:

Your disagreement with his ancillary contention actually proves the main point of his post, but yes, I'm sure there is controversy in Romania as to the treatment of gypsies as a suspect class in popular conversations.

On October 29 2016 00:51 LegalLord wrote:

The point is that you can't really even be frequentist effectively since this is a one-time event, and that saying that "Trump has an 18% chance" isn't true in the sense that people think of probabilities - the interpretation of "what a probability is" is more Bayesian in nature, and of course according to whatever model 538 uses. In the real world, if the election were to be re-run 100 times (e.g. let's say you got 100 ballots at the polling station) then chances are the result would be the same each time.