Calling the Economist anything resembling "leftist" is emblematic of the psychosis in the system. The Economist is what the Wall Street Journal was before Murdoch bought it: Focused on encouraging long term thinking, gains, and wisdom, while reporting on the short term trends. The Economist is the absolute embodiment of the old man and the kid joke from the Sopranos:
The investor: "Hey dad, let's run down this hill and fuck that cow!"
The Economist: "Be patient, son. Let's walk down this hill and fuck 'em all."
How though...there is no reasonable way anyone could look at the oil futures price and think it isn't being manipulated, which suggests maybe a lot of the market is equally fake.
Also SpaceX is getting ready to cheat SPY so the owners can basically use everyone's retirement funds as their exit liquidity.
All the AI companies seem like they are a massive bubble that they are also going to try to dump on the market in what I'm sure will be a similar scheme.
Then in politics we seem to be driving the US empire into the ground, while Trump steals billions. In just the last year Trump stole more than 10x Pelosi's entire net worth from her entire 40 year career in politics. The corruption coming from the white house is so extreme, it is probably more than all us politicians have stolen in all of us history combined. And what is absolutely insane is that a huge portion of the population seems to be in favor of it continuing this way.
We are speedrunning the end of the US empire, when it could've been a slow US decline that could've lasted the next 40 years which would've given us a chance to turn things around.
Please look up what fatalistic means. It doesn’t mean that one believes things are going badly. It means one believes that events are already predetermined and as a result it doesn’t matter what you do.
"Voters turn towards fascist leaders when democracy no longer serves workers, Kurz says. “New Deal” reforms during the Great Depression limited monopoly power and provided benefits to the vulnerable. According to Private Power and Democracy’s Decline, these reforms precipitated a “half-century of sustained innovations, rapid economic growth and stable income distribution”. Reagan-era reversals of those reforms led to what Kurz calls the “second Gilded Age”, when technological firms could accumulate monopoly power and wealth while most Americans, especially blue-collar workers without college degrees, saw their wages stagnate as the cost of living rose. It was this economic disenfranchisement, rather than cultural forces, that led to the rise of Maga, according to Kurz."
The MSM has been pushing hard for establishment Rs and most Ds, and tech oligarchs were sinking money in D areas like Zuckerberg in WI in 2020. (A "maga" election, per the articles comment)
I agree that tech oligarchy shouldn't be influencing politics so much, but i dont think this makes Dems or anyone else 'fascist' necessarily.
Based on the recent NYT poll, a lot of rank-and-file Democrats think Democratic politicians aren't anti-fascist enough. One can sort of see the logic of the politicians who are focusing, correctly, on keeping independents on board. But it is weak sauce nevertheless.
Call me a skeptic, but it's certainly odd all the errors always lean to one side. Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.
> What happened in 2024 isn’t something I’d have scripted, though. Basically, their new election model was literally broken, continuing to show Joe Biden virtually tied with Trump even after his disastrous debate. (Evidently because Morris’s design for it had been overcomplicated. These models are hard to design, by the way.)
> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.
What mainstream press outlet has moved leftwards? I can't think of any, and I certainly am interested in knowing which those might be. Inversely, cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward in the last 10 years.
> What’s an example that you believe highlights NYTimes moving rightward?
Look at their coverage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's response to a question about Taiwan versus Trump's response to a question about Taiwan. In the first case, their quote included all of the um's and other similar pauses in answering the question. In the second case, their quote of Trump cleaned up all of those artifacts. The end result is that it looks like AOC is flailing to come up with an answer while Trump has a clean, polished answer. But if you compare the actual audio clips of both answers, Trump's answer is the one that involves far more flailing to come up with a response.
There is a general pattern in the more subtle aspects of presentation and framing that generally excuse the behaviors of right-wing politicians compared to the same actions being done by a left-wing politician.
But also consider this article that was published after Trump’s, not even labeled “editorial” or “opinion”: “Trump’s Taiwan Gambit is Already a Gift to China” (https://archive.ph/lwBWD)
NYTimes constantly deletes parts of Trump's comments or outright rephrases them in an attempt to make him seem smarter, or at least, less insane. They rarely to never do that for other people.
>cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward
As the Overton window or activist left moves further left on issues like identity politics, crime and free speech (1619 Project era at NYT, staff revolts etc), steady coverage can appear "righter" by comparison without actually changing
Remember when Net Nuetrality was the priority of hackernews and slashdot and basically all people in tech. Now it's a "leftist policy". We live in crazy times.
Overton window has definitely shifted to the right. Beign a normal person who values science is now considered "leftist". Its nuts.
There's also a bloc that's been working to try to retroactively redefine what "Net Neutrality" means.
Instead of the usual stuff like "consumers have rights" or "ISP monopolies are bad" or "utilities should just provide the product and not spy and manipulate", they want it to mean something closer to "no online community can moderate itself."
And that's the charitable version. The worse version involves rank hypocrisy and selective enforcement, where large social "networks" must be "neutral" to literal nazis, while somehow it's also OK to permaban for insulting Dear Leader.
The set of people who are "basically all people in tech" has changed a lot since then for a variety of reasons; it's not surprising that any given political issue from a decade ago might not have the same resonance today.
Apparently it's "steady coverage" for CBS to be taken over by a culture warring op-ed writer who singlehandedly spikes investigative journalism if the Trump administration don't want to offer their comments on the story, and for WaPo op-eds writers to tweet that "we're now a conservative opinion section"...
Wait, so your argument is that people being against censorship or discrimination are now considered to be left wing? That's literally the overton window moving to the right, you're contradicting yourself!
Oh yeah, venerable institutions like the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and the like? Or maybe you mean the TV news organizations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, Nexstar, or Hearst? Or maybe cable news organizations like CNN or Fox News?
The narrative of the "liberal media" is so out of date it makes you look out of touch. The mainstream media is captured by billionaire interests and has been so for years now.
Why would a left-leaning press engineer errors predicting the victory of the left? Wouldn't this lull supporters of the Democrats into a false sense of security and enable Republican wins?
I think it's more of a systemic issue than top-down manipulation. Like, as a hypothetical, they're disregarding some people as being extremist when in reality they have reasonable, representative views. This produces biased results, and people who agree with the results share them because it supports their world view. The shares and new revenue reinforce the companies decision to produce biased reports, and the effect is politicians read these popular reports thinking they're accurate and make policy decisions around them, when in reality they're just a political wish-list.
its this really what we're left with, people sharing their skepticism? without any dint of rationale, just stories about how these obviously bad people did all this stuff that everyone knows.
I'm not going to defend Silver's predictions, but what was really refreshing about his work was some lovely diagrams, and real intent behind exposing his methodology. it was never 'trust me I'm the expert', but 'wow, this is hard and these are the problems and this is how I tried to deal with them'
Are you sure you aren’t experiencing selection bias? The article only mentions one modeling error (the one you quoted), so “all the errors” must be the ones you’ve noticed elsewhere.
> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.
What? Media in the USA has staggered to the right over the past ten years. The only reason it was called liberal before that was because one party used facts and data and the other preferred to rig the system against the common people. While Stephen Colbert made the joke "Reality has a well known liberal bias" it's joke only in that the conservative viewpoint today seems focused on imaginary problems and denying the existence of real ones.
It's always pretty depressing to go back and watch this or old Colbert Report episodes and realize how parts are incredibly "evergreen", sometimes you don't even need to change out the names.
He wouldn't have been in office in the first place had there been a higher emphasis on the popular vote in his first election.
He also would be less likely to be in office the second time had the judicial system of New York State respected the outcome of another democracy - a jury in a criminal trial - and sentenced said man to actual punishment instead of not sentencing him at all.
We don’t know what would have happened in a counterfactual scenario where the popular vote mattered in 2016. Campaigns spend their money trying to turn out voters to win the electoral college, because that’s what counts. That’s especially true of Republicans, whose voters are spread out across rural areas. The smallest PA city Harris visited the last week of the election was Scranton, which has 76,000. In the last week, Trump was in Lilitz PA, which has under 10,000 people. Butler PA has 13,500.
In 2024, Trump made a deliberate play for the popular vote, holding rallies in California and New York City. And there was a major swing in his direction in both states. E.g. Biden won California by 29 points. Harris won California by only 20 points. Trump also targeted immigrant communities in blue states. Biden won foreign born voters by 26 points. Trump won them by 1 point. That swing alone accounts for half the 2020-2024 swing.
It came out later that the internal polling available to both campaigns had Trump ahead the entire time. So he likely felt comfortable taking a risk and spending time in California and New York. But you’ll notice that he parked his surrogates in places like Pennsylvania the entire time. The popular vote has marketing value but it doesn’t count and nobody is trying to win it.
> We don’t know what would have happened in a counterfactual scenario where the popular vote mattered in 2016
You can’t brag about his popular vote for one election then disregard it for another. He lost if by a lot more in 2016 than he won it by in 2024. Both elections were decided by the electoral college and the popular votes we are comparing both happened in that context. 2.7% margin vs. 0.5% is a stark difference.
Republicans had the stones to call his victory margin “a mandate” yet they would never say Hillary Clinton had one. You’re playing funny with numbers here.
My post was responding to someone who expressed skepticism in U.S. elections. I wasn’t “bragging” about anything, I was pointing out that elections work. I mentioned the popular vote only to preempt a counterpoint from people who don’t like the EC.
Everyone understands the EC decides elections and you’re the only one talking about the popular vote. You explicitly stated that instead of the one that actually matters and is relevant in the other comment. And again, he barely won it.
Either way you can’t selectively use it in conversation and then dismiss it when others use it.
> and won the popular vote to go back into office.
By the smallest margin since 1968 (one of the smallest in history) with the aid of a rough economy he helped create but got no blame for and a terribly mismanaged Democratic primary/election.
>Whether he cares about democracy or not is irrelevant to the fact that democracy worked in electing him.
The US election system is not democratic at all. I'm not being flippant here. The electoral college + a winner-takes-all approach is a very odd, unique system that quite literally silences millions of voters per state every election because of a difference in votes that can be as low as 5 figures in some cases. That's absolutely insane and not democratic. Georgia was decided by ~11,000 votes in 2020 out of ~5,000,000 votes cast. 0.23% margin. That means ~2.5mill voting republicans functionally were not represented despite showing up and voting, because every single district is awarded to the winner of the state. Now apply this to any state you want with any party. This wildly changes the calculus for elections (creating flyover states) and voter turnout. Yes there can only be one winner, but in this system it's very hard to say "every vote counts" when candidates can win the popular vote by 2-3% and still lose.
This is why we are once again watching the country rip itself apart over redistricting. We are literally choosing who gets to be represented and who doesn't in a very literal, granular sense.
It's not as though the GOP is doing anything with congress other than forcing their unpopular values on everyone, paying for an absurdist ballroom and funding a paramilitary.
Oh, I guess they did start another unpopular war in the Middle East and drove up gas prices to help drag the economy down.
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