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I don’t think “kill fewer people” is splitting hairs. I think it’s gross to leverage Palestine for political points but only against Democrats.

Arkansas?

Bezos is rich and we enshrine that in a lot of ways in the US, but it’s irrelevant to someone like Putin, who’s demonstrated time and time again his willingness to kill billionaires. The reality here is that Bezos is just a person and he can be a coward, and still command media empire. And right now there’s a lot for him to be afraid of.

Unfortunately the election isn't about whether or not the USA stops supporting Israel. There is no vote for that.

It's about whether or not you want USA to be doing what it's doing right now under control of people who will dialog with you about it (Democrats) vs. people who are just waiting for a chance to annihilate you entirely so you'll shut up and they can get more real estate (Republicans).

I think we might actually agree more than you imagine - I also think Harris is doing pretty damn amazing right now, and I also think it looks good for her.

I'm not suggesting the forecasts for things like the amendments were correct, they definitely missed, and hard. I'm saying they were wrong because they took in a lot of clearly biased inputs.

There were other polls that actually had a lot of this data in them, and showed a clear lean in the odds post-Roe. However, these polls were being weighted by aggregators against stuff like Rasmussen, and Trafalgar, which are absolute trash. The forecasters were applying weights they themselves invented to these polls and including the trash data, meaning it was trash data AND it was deliberately turned into something that biased the sample set towards a middle average.

What I'm saying is that cutting that chaff out of the results, and then being realistic about what a "+2 margin" means (it's actually pretty good) results in a wholly different picture than the aggregators are giving us. One where Harris is more or less the clear pick.

Anyway, having said all that - it really, really does come down to turnout on this one. Trump's base doesn't really falter, and it's around 65m votes every time. That can get flooded out but not without people showing up.

The (independent) polls were generally good in 2022, it was the polls with a bias and the big aggregators who totally missed. Several of the aggregators who ignore clearly biased polls called a few races, like Fetterman, with high accuracy.

This time around they show Harris with a 0.5-2pt margin in PA, MI, WI, and NV. Trump with that same margin in NC, GA, AZ. I think that means that Harris is favored for the EC, but that we need turnout.

Consider this: given two options,

• 10 polls with no bias, weighted by only past performance
• 20 polls, half biased, weighted by an arbitrary secondary metric to remove bias (which only trends the data towards an average)

Which do you suppose would be more reliable?

I’m not sure if this is the explanation, but Republicans weren’t discouraged from early voting this year. In prior years, they were, and so there’s been a big boom of Republican votes at the last minute.

According to exit polls, these numbers are return voters, which would suggest there will be no last minute Republican vote surge this year.

Could be copium, obvs, but getting psyched up by early votes has been a real disappointment for me in every election.

I think in a lot of cases this is just a big rabbit hole for anyone who wants to fix it or prove it even happened.

• The best option is to start over and start canvassing again from scratch.
• Proving and then holding someone accountable can’t be automated in a trustworthy way, so you’d have to invent that process and then run everyone through them.

Both of those are just expensive, in both time and money terms. I think it’s got to be damage control, and then maybe some attempt to round people up and find the fraud after the election?

But the bottom line is that it’s the PAC that shoulders the entire cost, for now, and the Trump campaign just has to eat the damage for now. These aren’t federal crimes or really even actual crimes, so any eventual outcome is most likely to just be lawsuits or legal threats against supposed fraudsters?

Are you familiar with toxoplasmosis? The disease that mutates into different forms so a bunch of different animals can host it and pass it along.

This is a long article but it's really good, it's worth a read and it predicted a lot of the discourse of the last decade: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/

The sort of gist of it is this: the more grey area / ambiguity in a topic, the more we pop our own identity into our stance on it. And so if that thing is controversy, we argue about it so much more if there's room to self-insert our identity in that grey area. It spreads and spreads to a bunch of different hosts. It becomes a meme via argument by infecting a bunch of hosts to pass it along.

And that's Monk.

Pretty early on, it was very clear that they had no actual understanding of the topics they were talking about. I tried in their first few weeks to engage with them and so did others. Only to find nothing there. No opinions, and all counter-arguments were clearly copy & pasted off of Wikipedia. Things like "we have X amount of members in Maine".

Please.

Eventually they stopped trying to engage altogether, and instead moved into a deliberate pattern of line-toeing retorts. None in good faith. But, more importantly, never with enough substance to interrupt the ensuing argument, while simultaneously always enough comment traffic to perpetuate the thread.

Monk is a memetic toxoplasmosis source vector. Through pure ineptitude or irony, I think they've accidentally turned more people against third parties than for them, but maybe that isn't their goal.

Even now there's an undercurrent of "I don't think I even disagree with them". Well, how could you? They haven't said anything worth disagreeing with, have they? What have they said, though? Not much. Nothing recognizable as an opinion in defense of the third party articles. Often, just enough to establish a veneer of plausible deniability.

It's a sophisticated form of trolling and it's recognizable to anyone with a long history of community management online. There are some people who never seem to be directly at fault for things, yet every single time you remove them, the temperature goes down.

You don't need to actually build a case against these people to know that the equation is simple: when they're around, everyone is angry. When they aren't, people get along better.

Anyway, my point is this: you can tell who is contributing in good faith and who isn't, because they will attempt to say what's on their mind. It might be the worst take you've ever heard in your life, but it has a concretion to it. Monk has no concrete substance, they simply like to stir the pot.

I disagree that it’s “goddamn sad” when people get mad about others refusing to mitigate harm through votes, and cause irreparable damage instead. Loads of people have been using votes as a way to mitigate harm for decades now. They don’t have the luxury to do otherwise. What makes you so special? Why are you above reproach?

I think it makes sense to be mad about that. It’s awful to see a chance to prevent harm and refuse to. I won’t pretend it’s okay just because you think you can chunk up my post to dunk on select blurbs from it.

I do think they can make a better effort in their posts. I think you can, too.

Thanks for linking something actionable!

Also: it’s wild how many brands are just outsourced to these folks. It’s got to all be the same waffles, right? But I know the price difference between some of these brands is a stark one.