2018 US Midterm Elections | OT |

[Himu]

Mandark:

Fun articles on LARP Civil War II: Electric Bugaloo

https://medium.com/@bjcampbell/the-surprisingly-solid-mathematical-case-of-the-tin-foil-hat-gun-prepper-15fce7d10437?source=linkShare-3570b9a6267e-1533257445

And

https://medium.com/@bjcampbell/game-theory-on-the-second-civil-war-7ac210a2ec3a?source=linkShare-3570b9a6267e-1533257534

[Mandark]

Those are a very strong argument for the importance of the humanities.

[Kara]

It's time for some civil war game theory.

[benjipwns]

From the first one...I'm going to leave aside that I have a huge problem with his math on the "hundred year flood" determining a 24% certainty of a flood within 30 years. Especially after he explained why people don't understand the concept behind "this is a hundred year geological event" stuff. But I'll grant that and move to his second point:

While we don’t have any good sources of data on how often zombies take over the world, we definitely have good sources of data on when the group of people on the piece of dirt we currently call the USA attempt to overthrow the ruling government. It’s happened twice since colonization. The first one, the American Revolution, succeeded. The second one, the Civil War, failed. But they are both qualifying events.

No, they aren't. Neither the rebelling colonies nor the Confederacy tried to overthrow the ruling government. Locally even, they were the ruling governments and far more so than today, especially the first one where it took weeks for the higher level ruling government to cross the ocean and vice versa. So his 37% chance of a "revolution" is closer to 0% by his stated standards.

[Mandark]

There has never been a civil war in a country that had an NBA franchise at the time.

QED.

[benjipwns]

In 2010, 8.5 million tourists visited Syria, accounting for 14% of their entire GDP. Eight years later, they have almost half a million dead citizens, and ten million more displaced into Europe. They didn’t see this coming, because if they did, they would have fled sooner. Nobody notices the signs of impending doom unless they’re looking carefully.

...

Pretend you’re someone with your eyes on the horizon. What would you be looking for, exactly? Increasing partisanship. Civil disorder. Coup rhetoric. A widening wealth gap. A further entrenching oligarchy. Dysfunctional governance. The rise of violent extremist ideologies such as Nazism and Communism. Violent street protests. People marching with masks and dressing like the Italian Blackshirts. Attempts at large scale political assassination. Any one of those might not necessarily be the canary in the coal mine, but all of them in aggregate might be alarming to someone with their eyes on the horizon. Someone with disproportionate faith in the state is naturally inclined to disregard these sorts of events as a cognitive bias, while someone with little faith in the state might take these signs to mean they should buy a few more boxes of ammunition.

well shit, i just found out i have disproportionate faith in the state

[benjipwns]

BJ Campbell
Conscientious objector to the culture war. I think a lot.

[Mandark]

*starts writing The Black Book of Autodidacticism*

[Himu]

Have you gotten to the zombies part yet

[benjipwns]

No class of person is more capable of riding out a situation like that than a well-provisioned zombie prepper. Various fixtures of zombie prepping include:

Food stockpiles

Access to clean (or cleanable) water

Shelter that exists away from the zombies (a.k.a. other citizens)

Subsistence agriculture

Medicinal supplies

A way to defend items 1–5. In modern terms, that means firearms. Rifles in particular.

Optional: Escape method. Sailboats rank highly on any objective list here.

Wrong, the last one is the most non-optional of all. Escape method that is, not necessarily sailboats.

Every time Rick stops, the shelter eventually gets overrun, unless he's granted a time skip ability. And even then, it just barely works out.

[benjipwns]

Also the water thing is now making me realize that has never come up in all 182 issues so far.

[Mandark]

Drinky's been saying for years that a lot of people like zombie apocalypse stuff cause it's a sublimation of their fantasies about shooting their neighbors.

[benjipwns]

Knowledge about how the zombie pandemic spreads seems essential too. That's why you need a black guy and an attractive woman around to die first so you can start piecing it together.

The Walking Dead manages to get around all of that by making it just "don't die." I'm not sure that guarantees anything though, especially in my zombie apocalypse game theory model.

[ToxicAdam]

Apocalypse fetishists are all the same. They use them as a coping mechanism to not think about their own mortality.

"We're all fucked" is a more comforting thought than "I'm fucked".

 

[Phoenix Dark]

Love this GOP attack ad

Hope they run an ad mentioning illegals voting in California.

How to proceed. If I simply laugh at the idea of illegal aliens voting anywhere, I spring a trap where you post articles about San Francisco allowing non-citizens to only vote in local school board elections. When I retort "ah ok so illegals can't really vote in elections" you'll say bubububu and point to this one example, that has no impact on midterms, presidents, or even 99% of local elections.

[benjipwns]

I guess I don't even understand what's wrong with letting residents vote.

Is the fear that they'll vote for something and then leave?

[shosta]

Is the fear that they'll vote for something and then leave?

You mean like what you're doing to the Democrats?

[Mandark]

Some of it (the anxiety about illegal voting by non-citizens) is believing that Dems are more dovish on immigration only so they can get votes.

Which in turn is a defense mechanism against having to consider undocumented immigrants as human.

[agrajag]

Are you responding to Cindi or Assimilate

let's just say Cindi has been.... Assimilated

[shosta]

It's not really unusual or unreasonable for citizens to have access to rights that others don't, like non-citizens, or citizens with felonies, or people who are married to citizens and have kids that are citizens, or citizens who live in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, or... actually your honor, I'd like this post to be stricken from the record...

[agrajag]

It's not really unusual or unreasonable for citizens to have access to rights that others don't, like non-citizens, or citizens with felonies, or people who are married to citizens and have kids that are citizens, or citizens who live in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, or... actually your honor, I'd like this post to be stricken from the record...

don't think PD was saying he wants illegal aliens to have voting rights, so I am not sure what this is about.

[shosta]

Reading Benji's and Mandark's posts I thought that was there the conversation was now

[agrajag]

Reading Benji and Mandark posts

 

spoiler (click to show/hide)

my b dawg, I missed the context of your post, I'll see myself out

[close]

[Mandark]

I was mostly commenting on how common "fraudulent voting by illegals!!!" is as a talking point, especially compared to the scale of the actual problem as PD pointed out.

[Phoenix Dark]

Not to mention the fact that fraudulent/illegal voting happens at such a low (as in super fucking low) level that the only reason to hand wring over it is to...you know, incite racists and dumb people.

[agrajag]

OK I take my apology back, fuck off Shosta ya racist

[Mandark]

Not to mention the fact that fraudulent/illegal voting happens at such a low (as in super fucking low) level that the only reason to hand wring over it is to...you know, incite racists and dumb people.

Yup, slots right into the same role as ACORN, the New Black Panther Party, etc. Works both generally to reinforce paranoia about those people and specifically as the pretext for restrictive voting rules.

[Kara]

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/amp/Rent-control-foes-hire-California-NAACP-leader-13144448.php

[Mandark]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/clippers/2014/04/28/donald-sterling-clippers-naacp-alice-huffman/8411441/

Some pretty interesting quotes from her when the Donald Sterling scandal broke, given that news.

[Trent Dole]

House is almost definitely flipping, senate mayyyybe.

[Mandark]

Feels like there's still a decent chance the GOP holds the House even while they lose the aggregate vote by 5 million or whatever.

[Phoenix Dark]

Nah, don't see it. 60+ districts are more competitive than the PA and OH ones that garnered so much attention. I think dems take at least 30 seats but wouldn't be surprised if it's closer to 40. Just swamping the Cali GOP seats and winning the newly created (and favorable) PA seats gets democrats pretty damn close to the majority.

On the flip side, I don't think democrats can take the senate unless something drastic happens. They basically have to run the table perfectly to get it done. It's looking like democrats could win 3 seats and lose 2-3.

[benjipwns]

I noticed lots of people pointing out that Trump's approval net has again hit near a low as some kind of sign for the midterms: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_approval-6179.html

But even stranger was I clicked on direction of country and discovered that it hasn't been lower than this since the summer of 2009, after that the prior lowest under Obama was -13, it's -10 now, and the high under Trump was -35 in October 2017 and it's been dropping since: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/direction_of_country-902.html

That's goofy. I wonder if polling samples have just skewed massively increasingly, mostly due to who is answering them.

I noticed in that 2014 GAF thread I dug up, that I was pointing out to all the people wondering how the landslide happened to blindside them that the Independent numbers were leaning all GOP for most of the year and that lots of the topline of polls were basically just demographic shifts in weighting. And 2016 had a similar heavier lean in Trump/Other's favor with I's versus the topline. I don't think I had the discussion here or on GAF, but I do remember having a discussion elsewhere where someone was like "well, I's are just R's who don't want to say it" that that might be the case but weighting the campaign polls, especially using registration data or exit polls of prior cycles, doesn't "adjust" for this problem, nor does it account for the fact that if someone has to declare/register with a party AND then votes for a party plus when they just come out of voting they aren't necessarily going to say "Independent" still. That perhaps "Independents" in the campaign polls are underweighted as some of that group solidifies into D and R by election day.

I'm not exactly sure how you would fix it, I do remember Nate I think pointing out that lots of people assumed the high polling showing R's abandoning Trump and leaning Hillary would hold, when they went home in the end or didn't vote/voted third party/etc. rather than actually jumping to Hillary in significant numbers.

Anyway, I'm rambling but you expect that. I just thought the Direction of Country one was interesting as I assume that thing hasn't been positive for more than a few weeks since probably 2000. It seemed like it was usually always -25-30 under both Bush/Obama.

[benjipwns]

And to dig up something older in this thread, I actually don't understand the Felon thing more than the non-citizen thing, from an assuming good faith of others type of POV.

If felons are such a large and lockstep proportion of your voter base that they are altering elections in a negative way, especially to the rule of law, you probably have larger issues in your society than felons voting.

[shosta]

Could society be wrong?

No, it's the lawbreakers that are wrong. They're lawbreakers!

[Yeti]

I got a write in ballot but it doesn't have anything cool to vote on, just a bunch of judges and a School Board Member. These candidates are so minor I'm having trouble finding anything online about what their views beyond anything generic. Ballots should come with cheat sheets on candidates views.

[Phoenix Dark]

Nah, don't see it. 60+ districts are more competitive than the PA and OH ones that garnered so much attention. I think dems take at least 30 seats but wouldn't be surprised if it's closer to 40. Just swamping the Cali GOP seats and winning the newly created (and favorable) PA seats gets democrats pretty damn close to the majority.

On the flip side, I don't think democrats can take the senate unless something drastic happens. They basically have to run the table perfectly to get it done. It's looking like democrats could win 3 seats and lose 2-3.

The GOP are essentially guaranteed to lose two (NV and AZ). The Dems aren't guaranteed to lose any. The incumbent is probably favored in each individual race.

Two trains of thought. I read an article last month that detailed how an excess of internal or publicly commissioned polls from one ideology/party suggests that side is confident in winning elections; basically if your side is losing, you don't share your polls. We seen a lot of House race polls showing various democrats looking good. On the flip side there is very little senate polling on either side. We have no idea what's happening in the Indiana race for instance. My gut tells me Donnely loses, I just don't see how he lasts given Trump's popularity in Indiana and the rural votes available to sink him. I think he loses breh.

And I think Nelson loses in Florida. The little polling we have shows Rick Scott doing well. Given the demographics at play...I think dems lose there. That's two seats lost.

[shosta]

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueMidterm2018/comments/9egzip/i_just_gave_10k_to_the_blue_wave/

I'm lucky enough to work in tech, and for a company that's done well. There's no better investment for my kids' future right now than to fight back against the corrupt and hateful GOP, intent on giving themselves more money. I'm not rich as some would define it--but I am in all the ways that matter, and let me tell you: We rich people don't need any more money. What we need is to be a part of a nation of justice, peace, and freedom.

So I liquidated a chunk of my stock and gave about $1,200 to nine Democratic candidates. And I'm not done volunteering or helping to organize. The Blue Wave is real, friends, and I want you to know that I'm with you 100%. Let's do this.

[Trent Dole]

You know what else is real?

[shosta]

[Great Rumbler]

I hate that comic because the anthropomorphic duck isn't labeled making it impossible for me to know what he represents.

[agrajag]

Why'd they make Ted Cruz look like Hitler 

[seagrams hotsauce]

'Beto No Pork' is fantastic 

[benjipwns]

are we sure Ted Cruz isn't trying to lose this race?

https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1043278255740973058

[benjipwns]

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/22/beto-orourkes-lazy-air-drumming-suggests-low-energy-performer/

welp, nevermind, race over

[Nintex]

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/22/beto-orourkes-lazy-air-drumming-suggests-low-energy-performer/

welp, nevermind, race over

Even a small dog, with only minimal human assistance, more credibly approximates this classic Phil Collins fill from “In The Air Tonight” than O’Rourke manages on “Baba O’Riley.”

Ted Cruz eats BOOGERS on live television.

He can't hug his wife without elbowing her in the face. I don't expect Ted's Air Drum skills to be uh, all that good either.

[shosta]

I hate that comic because the anthropomorphic duck isn't labeled making it impossible for me to know what he represents.

Do you not see the bowtie? It's ben shapiro.

[team filler]

it's the milkshake variety of duck 

[agrajag]

Ben Shapiro doesn't wear bowties, that's Tucker Carlson, MORON

[Joe Molotov]

Can't till y'all fuck this up a second time.

Who, America? We've fucked up way more than one other time.

[Kara]

The other day I got an unsolicited text message from a campaigner that said: [Democratic Party politician] is running to represent [my state senate district number] in the state senate, where he'll fight for [redacted], small businesses, and workers' rights.

All I could do was the Jim Halpert stare at the camera thing.

[team filler]

the only team that let's me down more than my raidahs is the democratic party

[benjipwns]

[politician] is running to represent [my state senate district number] in the state senate, where he'll fight for [redacted], small businesses, and workers' rights.

Anyone who will fight for [redacted] is someone I'll gladly vote for early and often.

[team filler]

[agrajag]

Gillum has my vote just on the weed issue alone

 

[TVC15]

Does “Special Rights for LGBT” mean that he supports the right for LGBT people to not be bludgeoned by sticks and rocks?

[shosta]

Anyone who will fight for [redacted] is someone I'll gladly vote for early and often.

voter fraud confirmed, sean hannity was right

[team filler]

Does “Special Rights for LGBT” mean that he supports the right for LGBT people to not be bludgeoned by sticks and rocks?

yes, they'll kill you much more humanely from now on 

[TVC15]

Does “Special Rights for LGBT” mean that he supports the right for LGBT people to not be bludgeoned by sticks and rocks?

yes, they'll kill you much more humanely from now on 

I can’t complain about Abortion On Demand either. Think of how fewer problem Boreans there’d be if we had that.

[Kara]

[politician] is running to represent [my state senate district number] in the state senate, where he'll fight for [redacted], small businesses, and workers' rights.

Anyone who will fight for [redacted] is someone I'll gladly vote for early and often.

It was veterans. I redacted it because I wanted to highlight the contrast between people who (per capita) infringe on the rights of workers the most and worker rights.