And as it turns out -- and I didn't know this -- Nate Silver has done some serious sabermetrics in his time.
Republicans find cure for climate change: http://johnsvor.blogspot.com/2012/11/heckler-interrupts-romney-with-question.html
That's amazing! It always works. Doctor: I'm very sorry but you have testicular cancer. Patient: USA USA USA! Doctor: USA! Boss: After finding you masturbating in the bathroom, I have no choice but to fire you. Employee: USA USA USA Boss: USA! Girlfriend: Our child has Downs Syndrome. Boyfriend: USA USA USA Child: USA!
To be fair you'll find that at a Dem rally too. Maybe not as prevalent, but if you wanted to make a condescending highlight video it wouldn't be hard. There is an element in politics that is a bit cult like. Sometimes the most loyal followers are the least capable of critical thought. That's why it's important to maintain a level of independence because no side is purely good and no side is purely evil. But yeah ... facepalm!
People need to stop denying that Mitt Romney has momentum. In the past three weeks, his win probability has steadily gone from 38.9% to 19.1%. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/
There is no doubt you could find ignorant, partisan cultist at any event. It wouldn't even be hard. What I find fascinating is the way that the responses echo and regurgitate the talking points of the Romney campaign and, even more, the conservative media. You see those ideas circulating a lot in social media and conservative blogs and elsewhere online. The litany of Obama faults: He's taking away our freedom, he's a socialist, he gives people handouts, he has a shady past & associates with shady characters, he's dividing the country, he's weak, he makes America look weak, he apologizes for America, he's increasing the deficit, he's a Muslim. Yet when pressed for specifics, nobody can provide them. I imagine most voters formulate opinions based on impressions like that. Based on what seems true, what feels true to them -- not to mention what they want to be true based on whatever cognitive biases they're bringing to the table. It makes me wonder what a similar group from an Obama event might say. I could imagine things like: Romney is a rich fat cat? He has no compassion? He doesn't understand regular folks? I don't honestly know. I feel like most of the left's talking points about Romney center around essential truths (he believes in supply side economics, for example). What would dumbass ignorant lefties say about him? Oh, and the woman who comes on around 0:55 is clearly a plant played by Kristin Wig.
The Christchurch earthquake is a unique case study in this. Someone should write a book about it. The incumbent Mayor was in deep trouble thanks to dodgy business dealings where the council bailed out his property developer mates without valuations under urgency - losing the council millions of dollars. Way down in the polls. Then the Quake happened and he was all over national telly 'leading the recovery' Door knocking in poorer areas - all you heard was the TV narrative. People didn't even know about the dodgy dealings let alone care about it. Re-elected in a landslide. Of course we can laugh at the absurdity of the Republican worldview - but the system is actually encouraging this behaviour. Allegedly the system constraints protect the public from the government. But actually they provide worse than no protection because people believe they are protected at the very time they are being exploited. What the system designers got wrong is that they naively assumed that the media, in totality, would provide the best quality information. And what they never anticipated is that there would be a thing called mass media which would allow for mass indoctrination without need for coercion. So people happily vote against their own interests without realising it. I mean why do people with marginal income level care so much about the deficit?
Yeah - I am going to go against the grain on this. If you want high quality technical information, specialist blogs are miles better than what you'll get from a traditional journalist.
Top post. This is the case across much of old media in general. How is such an expensive production model sustainable when a guy with a laptop and a blog can outperform them? Which is of course precisely why 'serious' political reporting went Show Biz. That's where the market demand is.
See Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating & Murrah Bombing Aftermath. No one seemed to mind that a very large financial services company paid for all of his kids college following the adoption of that company to run the state retirement systems after his "leadership" during the bombing
Nate Silver may be a case in point here. Now that he has transitioned from specialist blogger to NY Times blogger, I no longer see anything close to the attention he used to pay to technical details, such as assessing the quality of online surveys, cellphone bias, etc. His blog entries on these topics were dry as dust and can only have attracted other specialists, but the scrutiny he gave those topics filtered out into his other discussion. Nowadays, his 538 blog entries are mostly just tracking the horse race. If there are systematic reasons why the polls are likely to be wrong in 2012, he hasn't been presenting them to us in a serious way. Even though this is arguably the most important topic of all, he may no longer be giving it much thought.
Since the race is settled otherwise, yes it is the most important topic. I suppose from Nate's perspective, he hasn't addressed the accuracy of the state polls because there's no reason to believe that they were not accurate. They were in 2000, they were in 2004, they were in 2008, and the people who claim they are not accurate in 2012 are hacks and clowns and frauds. Which I understand. But still, I'd like to see him take on that claim. There's the faintest of slight chances that something is there, and if not it's always instructive to see a good data analyst shred a bad argument.
The difference is that the extremists in the GOP are the tail that wags the whole dog. The Democratic party is most certainly not influenced by the far left, at least not right now.
I'm coming to the conclusion that the Romney big money advantage might not be such a big deal after all, because they have more money than they know what to do with. Yesterday we got 6 GOP mailings, 3 of them identical (no, we didn't get the neighbors' because they were stuck together, they were all addressed to us), which went straight in the trash. We have been muting/skipping over commercials for months now, and not answering the phone. It's just overkill, and we will never vote for Romney no matter how much money they piss away producing this crap. The fact that they are now buying ads in places like Minnesota (really?) reinforces my view that they can't figure out a productive use for all the money they have. If Adelson gave them another 100 million today, what would they do with it?