Harris vs Trump;

[swansont]

29 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

How can we be sure the mistakes aren't put there on purpose to make us re-read the article a few times, or that supposedly center-left MSN wants to also get the attention of Fuentes white nationalist supporters by mentioning a  break-in by a Jewish activist? 

Not sure we can. The fact that age and coherence evaporated from the news once Biden stepped aside (Trump being old and often incoherent), the narrative about crime (down significantly, but not reported as such) and the economy (by many measures quite good, and inflation lower than elsewhere) were choices driven by something other than the facts. 

I think “narrative” is the operative word here. You might expect it with pundits, but reporting is supposed to be objective. A lot of media became storytellers rather than reporters.

1 hour ago, zapatos said:

I don't know.

In 1900 very few people attended high school. Does that mean there is pretty much a statistical certainty those people were lazy/inept?

Yes, some of them undoubtedly were. Can you honestly say that there aren’t/weren’t inept and/or lazy people out there?

 

[zapatos]

2 hours ago, swansont said:

Yes, some of them undoubtedly were. Can you honestly say that there aren’t/weren’t inept and/or lazy people out there?

 

I acknowledge that lazy/inept people exist. I do not accept that we can generalize Trump voters as lazy/inept, which is where this line of discussion originated.

[npts2020]

9 hours ago, swansont said:

They matter here.

True, and they matter to me but it seems pretty obvious to me that the people here are a minority of those bothering to cast ballots in this most recent election.

[swansont]

10 minutes ago, zapatos said:

I acknowledge that lazy/inept people exist. I do not accept that we can generalize Trump voters as lazy/inept, which is where this line of discussion originated.

But this is moot; nobody has made this generalization. npts2020 made it clear they were not talking about all people, and you even mentioned “part of the electorate” 

2 minutes ago, npts2020 said:

True, and they matter to me but it seems pretty obvious to me that the people here are a minority of those bothering to cast ballots in this most recent election.

So? This discussion is happening here. If we discuss what someone did or did not do, we stick to facts

[npts2020]

9 hours ago, dimreepr said:

That's called victim blaming...

What makes you more deserviving of the facts of life?

Maybe but I haven't noticed much empathy on this forum for Trump supporters either.

I have not claimed to be more deserving than anyone of anything. What I would claim is to be better informed about most of the current political issues than the average person.

[zapatos]

6 minutes ago, swansont said:

But this is moot; nobody has made this generalization.

 

16 hours ago, npts2020 said:

I don't believe I have ever made any statements about "ALL people", especially in relation to how they think. The statement about being lazy/inept was a generalization (If you don't know, generalizations are necessary when making sociological statements about large groups of people) made to explain the apparent contradiction between what we all seem to agree being logical action and the actual action of voters in the recent electoral competition.

 

[npts2020]

6 hours ago, zapatos said:

A generalization is an inference based on the facts about a subset of the group. Do we actually have facts showing that part of the electorate is lazy/inept, thus rendering them unable to distinguish fact from fiction?

I am not sure where one would go to get such "facts". What I do know is that almost nobody I talk with knows much factually correct about any of the topics under discussion by the candidates.

36 minutes ago, zapatos said:

I acknowledge that lazy/inept people exist. I do not accept that we can generalize Trump voters as lazy/inept, which is where this line of discussion originated.

Don't think I claimed this was applicable only to Trump voters...

See above where the generalization comes from.

Edited Tuesday at 10:57 PM by npts2020
addition

[zapatos]

8 minutes ago, npts2020 said:

I am not sure where one would go to get such "facts".

How does one make a generalization about a population without having facts or examples from which to generalize? If you don't have any facts then the statement is simply bias.

13 minutes ago, npts2020 said:

Don't think I claimed this was applicable only to Trump voters...

Sorry, I didn't intend to imply that you did. But Trump voters were at least a subset of the voters you were referring to.

[npts2020]

7 minutes ago, zapatos said:

How does one make a generalization about a population without having facts or examples from which to generalize? If you don't have any facts then the statement is simply bias.

Ok, besides my personal experience, check this study out. 

from the article

"The study found the most conversant voters tend to fall into the 50-70 age group, with wealthy, educated white men over the age of 47 being the best informed. The least-informed voters were young, low-income minority women.

The average minority female voter age 47 or less with a below-median income had a 30% probability of knowing a typical news story. By contrast, the average white male voter age 48 or older with an above-median income had a 44% probability of knowing the same story."

[zapatos]

29 minutes ago, npts2020 said:

Ok, besides my personal experience, check this study out. 

from the article

"The study found the most conversant voters tend to fall into the 50-70 age group, with wealthy, educated white men over the age of 47 being the best informed. The least-informed voters were young, low-income minority women.

The average minority female voter age 47 or less with a below-median income had a 30% probability of knowing a typical news story. By contrast, the average white male voter age 48 or older with an above-median income had a 44% probability of knowing the same story."

While that article goes a long way toward showing how well voters are informed of politics news it doesn't provide a lot of information regarding why they are not better informed. We know old, rich white guys know more than poor black women but surely that could be due to who is more likely to have a subscription to the New York Times and the time to spend reading articles at night. One thing they did find was that: 

Quote

Very few people believe fake news.

That sounds to me like generally people are reasonably good at sorting through the clutter. It doesn't feel to me like we yet have evidence that any voter set is generally lazy/inept.

[npts2020]

19 minutes ago, zapatos said:

It doesn't feel to me like we yet have evidence that any voter set is generally lazy/inept.

When the highest rated demographic in the study has substantially less than a 50-50 chance of knowing about common news stories, I would find it highly surprising if those same people were any better informed about relevant issues.

[zapatos]

7 minutes ago, npts2020 said:

When the highest rated demographic in the study has substantially less than a 50-50 chance of knowing about common news stories, I would find it highly surprising if those same people were any better informed about relevant issues.

You being surprised is not evidence those people are lazy/inept.

[iNow]

On 11/11/2024 at 6:03 PM, iNow said:

For all the handwringing around democrats being too woke or caring too much about transgendered kids etc, 538 said today on a podcast that Harris performed better than any other incumbent party has performed in other elections around the globe. The message being that, while other variables were at play, anti incumbency in the face of an inflationary economy is the primary forcing agent explaining the outcome we saw. 

5 hours ago, Luc Turpin said:

A global trend involving inflation and incumbents.

Could Harris have done anything to buck the trend or was it unavoidable?

“This has been a banner year for elections; nearly half of the population of the world has gone to the polls in 2024 in a rare aligning of the calendar. The temperature of the world has been taken. And with a few notable exceptions, and to the extent that those elections were free and fair, the result has been largely the same: Virtually every party that was the incumbent at the time that inflation started to heat up around the world has lost.” 

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-11-06-globally-predictable-result-election-inflation-trump/

 

Thanks for the link 

[npts2020]

11 minutes ago, zapatos said:

You being surprised is not evidence those people are lazy/inept.

Believe whatever you like but I have not seen a single shred of evidence that contradicts anything I have written, whereas I have explained why I view a plurality of the electorate as being inept/lazy.

[zapatos]

4 minutes ago, npts2020 said:

I have explained why I view a plurality of the electorate as being inept/lazy.

You have. However you provided no evidence of people being inept/lazy, only evidence of some level of being uninformed.

Uninformed does not equal inept/lazy.

[LaurieAG]

10 hours ago, zapatos said:

Is that fact or wishful thinking?

In Australia no Federal government has had control of the House of Reps and the Senate at the same time for over 20 years.

[swansont]

3 hours ago, zapatos said:

 

 

Quote

I don't believe I have ever made any statements about "ALL people",

FTFY (emphasis-wise)

4 minutes ago, LaurieAG said:

In Australia no Federal government has had control of the House of Reps and the Senate at the same time for over 20 years.

This is relevant to the discussion…how?

[LaurieAG]

8 hours ago, swansont said:

Lazy and inept people exist...

LOL, That's really funny, before the election you were being racist if you called someone lazy because that is supposed to be a racist trope. But you are just showing how 'rule by law' operates, you have one set of rules for 'us' and another for 'them'.

Edited yesterday at 02:51 AM by LaurieAG

[swansont]

1 minute ago, LaurieAG said:

LOL, That's really funny, before the election you were being racist if you called someone lazy because that is supposed to be a racist trope

Calling a group of people lazy based on race/ethnicity is racist. Insisting that no people are lazy is just cluelessness.

[zapatos]

25 minutes ago, swansont said:

FTFY (emphasis-wise)

No, you fixed it for yourself so that you would not be shown to be wrong. 

Edited yesterday at 03:00 AM by zapatos

[LaurieAG]

35 minutes ago, swansont said:

Calling a group of people lazy based on race/ethnicity is racist. Insisting that no people are lazy is just cluelessness.

You've never worked in the public service have you?

1 hour ago, swansont said:

FTFY (emphasis-wise)

This is relevant to the discussion…how?

Obviously the American people didn't choose to restrict the new administration by only allowing it to control one of the two houses.

[swansont]

8 hours ago, LaurieAG said:

You've never worked in the public service have you?

Only about 30 years.

9 hours ago, zapatos said:

No, you fixed it for yourself so that you would not be shown to be wrong. 

I did not edit any content. If you want to selectively ignore it, oh well.

There’s also what you said (“part of the electorate”) and you acknowledged that lazy/inept people exist, so it seems to me that’s settled and the only issue is how many there are.

[dimreepr]

19 hours ago, swansont said:

If they voted for Trump how are they victims? People have agency. They voted for someone, or chose not to vote. If they were inadequately informed, that’s a choice, too. 

If they're inept that would be a clumsy choice at best; the statistical significance is amplified by the number of people that aren't allowed to vote, for whatever reason...

 

14 hours ago, npts2020 said:

Maybe but I haven't noticed much empathy on this forum for Trump supporters either.

I have not claimed to be more deserving than anyone of anything. What I would claim is to be better informed about most of the current political issues than the average person.

Basically what you're displaying is called piety... 

[MSC]

22 hours ago, CharonY said:

I am a bit wary to blame the specific post-COVID situation on everything, as many traditional parties were already losing ground before. However, major events (record asylum claims and then COVID) have accelerated things. What I am missing a bit is how the erosion of traditional information pipelines has contributed and more importantly, what it means going forward. Most papers I have seen in that regard are ultra-focused (understandably) but discussions on e.g. social media on education and politics are (in my biased opinion) too muted, relative to their impact. This is especially worrying as the pace of the change seems to outpace the speed of research on the matter.

Wanted to address this last night but was really tired, which I expect to be for the next four years. 

As for the information pipelines; it's less than they have become eroded but have been hijacked and also multiplied exponentially over the years, not just of new pipelines but reservoirs and filters of varying levels of pollution. Information does the rounds through this clusterfuck of piping and bad faith hijackers, that would make any plumber quit working on fixing that project and bring it all down and start from scratch. 

Take any given subject, calculate how many true things can possibly be said about that subject and compare that to how many untrue things you could say about it. Lies and falsehoods are insidious not in that sometimes they can be told rather convincingly told, but falsehoods outnumber truth and facts. Truth and facts are limited by the reality that is, whether lies and falsehoods are limited by human imagination. Not to mention that the most insidious kind of lies are the ones that twist and bend truth and facts, turning them against those ideals at times. 

We also need to recognize our own place in this information system as filters and reservoirs in our own right. Sorry to stretch the metaphor so much but the pipeline is really more like a web built by a bunch of spiders high on acid at this point. Everyone has a megaphone, so all we hear is white noise and are in a near constant state of information overload. Add in AI bots and info generators and it's going to get even worse. 

The Internet itself is, at this point Jung's collective consciousness technologically enabled, it is a grand repository of all human knowledge, true, but that is just a small part of what it really is. It's the digital mental imprint of our species, the good, the bad and the ugly. 

I don't mean to sound so dour or dramatic. This is just what comes to mind when I think about your question independent of this election bs. 

17 hours ago, zapatos said:

I acknowledge that lazy/inept people exist. I do not accept that we can generalize Trump voters as lazy/inept, which is where this line of discussion originated.

I do hate to admit it but I agree with Zap here. I work with Trump supporters, working class people are not lazy and they aren't bad people either. We need to be more mindful of the power of cult influence that makes it's followers, dangerous but also victims. They have good reasons for lashing out, they are just brainwashed into picking the wrong people to lash out at. 

The real problem are the snake heads that fuel it all through lies, truth warping, bullying and manipulation. Usually for profit, power and/or. The Nick Fuentes and Donald Trumps of the world. Look at Trump's own upbringing. Clearly his father learned from his Sith master well, because that's the sort of dynamic I see in Trump's upbringing and in the MAGA cult and you can see it in scientology. The biggest liars, backstabbers, bullies, brutes and manipulators are what rises to the top and competition does not stop at foe but spills over into competing with your own camp in a constant game of one up on whoever you can trample on to climb up. 

The problem isn't that these people are lazy, far from it. They are criminally and immorally sophisticated and should not be underestimated. The result of this election make that clear as day and it's as clear as day who is running the show, the mega rich. It's always money fought for and money rules. In a hyper capitalistic monopoly economy, the only true economic power is buying power and the richest men in the world got behind Donald Trump and Donald Trump still has a day of reckoning coming, either due to health problems or JD Vance or some other evil entity to completely take over and use every opportunity Trump gave them to solidify and iron grip on everything. 

[TheVat]

To Americans (after reading of Trump's choice for head of Homeland Security):   Lock up your dogs!

One hopes Noem's unruly pets policy will not be extended to our bipedal citizens.

Regarding Trump's choice for Secy of Defense:  We warned you Trump voters what his next administration would look like.