ndawg

Oh shit, Eisenhower, lol

Everyone knows that Eisenhauer warned us about the military industrial complex. What most don't know is that later on that night, he drunkenly coined the term "military intelligence industrial infrastructure," which oddly enough never stuck.

He sounds like he's suffered from a stroke or something, slurring his words.

She's obviously got actual feelings and a conscience... which makes her support of the POTUS even less excusable. Trump is a narcissistic psychotic shitbag. There's no hope or possibility of redemption for people like that. They don't have consciences, they don't feel remorse, so your only hope is to marginalize them and keep them out of positions of power. For Sanders to have gotten in this deep with Trump required her to compartmentalize and rationalize an incredible amount of evil and harm. She's exactly the kind of person that is a key ingredient to actually putting assholes like Trump into power. She took her sense of humanity and stuffed it in a dark corner of her mind so that she could be a willing tool of a despot.

Again, though, why hasn't Trump fired Sessions. I mean, I can see the dubious legality raising furrowed brows, but we're way past the point where Trump gets to make up his own rules and everyone else gets to rationalize it.

This is cringey. The OP is so bad at spewing anti-lib propaganda that I kind of feel bad for his ineptitude.

I totally thought it was real until this sentence: I realized there was no way they're actually letting the QBs take hits. Of course, I didn't yet know if it was Burton making shit up, or a parody...

Remember that we're only evaluating the models against one single prediction (the election itself). Because we now know that the election was very close, we also know that either candidate probably had a reasonably strong chance at winning. That means that for the 98% model to be accurate, voter turnout on election day would have had to have been an astoundingly improbable statistical aberration -- as in, likely tens or hundreds of thousands of voters would have had to have behaved differently than the data would have suggested. On the other hand, the prediction of a 75% chance of victory is also a prediction of a fairly close race. So, 538's model was more consistent with the results, by far. As far as when that transition would occur, I'm not sure that can be known. We'd need to be training these statistical models against far more predictions. My only point here is that not all the predictions were off base, and the talking point that all the predictions were wrong is a lie. 538 didn't predict that Hillary would win, they predicted she had a 75% chance at winning.

Can you set aside your biases in order to consider this objectively? I believe you completely misunderstood the analogy.

Your bias directly caused you to misunderstand the substance of my post. It might be the case that Trump had a 99% chance of winning. Or a 1% chance of winning. What matters is that the outcome cannot disprove any statistical prediction, but we can assess the extent to which the outcome and the prediction jive with one another. Guess what? Winning with a 25% of victory is extremely unsurprising.

I suppose if I argue that the 1980 Soviet hockey team was objectively better than ours, and that our victory was actually a miracle, I'm just a butthurt commie or something.

I believe Fivethirtyeight made an electoral vote prediction. Either way, it doesn't matter. @slorch either lacks the understanding of probability needed to recognize my point, or else he's so biased towards the narrative that liberals still aren't over Hillary losing that he flat out won't recognize it.

Huh? That's an absurd conclusion to leap to, isn't it? I'm talking about the soundness of a prediction that has to account for a high amount of variability. Imagine someone just won the lottery. If someone else predicted, before the ticket was purchased, that the person playing the lottery was extremely unlikely to win it, they would have also made a sound prediction.

I believe fivethirtyeight.com predicted that HRC had about a 75% chance of winning. Based on how close the electoral race was, and HRC winning the popular vote, the actual outcome suggests their prediction was accurate. I can't believe how many people I've had to explain that to over the last year and a half. Now, I do recall that some news outlet predicted HRC had a 98% chance of winning. That was some bullshit. Anyways, carry on...

It is like an ocean of stupid, and I fear the rational among us will all die of exhaustion trying to boil it.

I about lost my mind 30 seconds in to it. Holy shit, it's that bad.

As I said, after thinking about it more, simply labeling people who are not verified and are likely to be non-Americans might strike a better balance. I think there's a pretty reasonable case for at least a discussion on regulation. Social media is a brand new medium, and there are vulnerability vectors here that can't be addressed. It's understandable to believe that the truth can ultimately win on its own merit, without intervention. That idealism is a powerful comfort for those who'd prefer the simplicity of a hard-line, absolutist stance, but to me it doesn't seem realistic.

Right, if someone wants to post anonymously, there is no problem. Also, if they don't claim to be Americans, no big deal. The problem here is paying people to pretend to be someone on the other side of the world's metaphorical neighbor. I'm imagining that anyone who pretends to be a citizen of our country but probably isn't (based on IP or VPN usage) could be labelled or distinguished with a warning that they may not be who they say they are. Verifying obviously removes the doubt.

Just spitballing here, but here's how I would start. If someone chooses to associate a personal identity with a social media account, they should be required to either: 1. Verify their identity 2. Use the site from a US based IP (no VPNs allowed) 3. Label their account as parody This is just me taking about five minutes to think about it, though.

I can only answer that question with a question, @Aphelion: in what way would GDPR style regulations encroach on our first amendment rights?

No, I was wrong for declaring your assessment of the claim absurd on the basis of it not being actually "advanced." But whether it's advanced or not advanced has no bearing on the relative importance of Russia's propaganda efforts, and the influence of US based media companies. So, there's no contradiction, just a mistake on my part. You're still advancing a line of thinking that is complete horseshit.

So? Your position hinges on the notion that Putin's methods are less advanced than has been characterized (I'll get to that in a second), and therefore we should be more worried about American news organizations, who employ a far much more effective PR campaign on the American people than the Kremlin. Number one, it's preposterous to suggest that we should calibrate our estimation of the severity of a threat by how "advanced" it appears. Second, the "advanced" part about what Russia is doing is using analytics to target and tailor propaganda. This is actually quite significant, and I regret that my response didn't highlight this. And yes, of course American media could target Americans too, but they'd either have to start legally collected massive amounts of data they don't presently possess, or they'd have to illegally use data that someone else collected. And until ABC starts actually promoting political messages to specific people in key electoral districts, it really isn't going to matter to this discussion. Probably wouldn't hurt to think through what you're saying.

I didn't infer "car ads," I simply plucked them out as an example of how broad the stroke of that brush you're painting lies with really is. And if you really understood PR and Noam Chomsky, you'll understand how critical your repeated error really was. Your assessment of the present claim is ridiculous. There's nothing notably "advanced" about what Putin is doing. In fact, it's all pretty basic. The magic that makes it all work is a combination of politicians maintaining plausible deniability, Fox News blasting propaganda out to their devoted audience, the Trump administration repeatedly and pathologically lying, and fundamentally broken education system. Indeed, I can also argue that Fox News, an American media company, is a necessary part of what's making Putin's utterly obvious campaign succeed out in the open. You're attempting to drive a wedge in the discussion by implying that our focus on Russia's attacks comes at the expense of cleaning up our own house. You're flat out wrong there, too, champ.

Me, I'm at my day job working from home, and I'm here to procrastinate.

Side note, I wonder sometimes if OCD actually serves a purpose for humanity. The higher functioning ones are often people who just cannot let things go and seem to have this endless supply of energy to fight injustice. We sort of need that, I think. (I'm not suggesting Hugo specifically is OCD or anything, your comment just provoked that thought)