2024 Election Thread

[deaddmwalking]

Maybe one of these bots will synthesize every disparate element that we've argued and present a grand-unified game that everyone of us will love! I think we're a few revolutions in actual AI from something like that happening, but perhaps it's not impossible.

[Koumei]

Probably the strongest evidence of morgan13 being a bot is that it gets called a bot and just keeps right on posting. It's an interesting addition to the Den though?

I think Ant made more sense and contributed more, but by the same token, there are some people (no longer on the Den) I think this bot is more coherent than.

[Thaluikhain]

Sometimes I wonder if it would be possible to train a bot solely using a single person's posts on a long running forum.

[Foxwarrior]

Given that bots like chatgpt are trained on every word ever written and are still blithering idiots, I think there's a couple orders of magnitude in the way.

However, nowadays you can show a giant fully trained bot examples of what you want and it can emulate the style... I guess nobody talks about Loras in the context of llms tho...

[PseudoStupidity]

The DNC had Bernie Sanders speak and he gave a fairly normal Sanders speech where he did things like call billionaires evil. The person who spoke immediately after him? Enormous piece of shit (and billionaire) JB Pritzker.

[phlapjackage]

The DNC had Bernie Sanders speak and he gave a fairly normal Sanders speech where he did things like call billionaires evil.

And then the NYT complained about Bernie doing this.
https://fair.org/home/sanders-conventio ... -policies/

[PseudoStupidity]

Harris accepted the nomination and is now officially the presidential candidate for the Democrats. During her speech she promised we will fight china, we will continue the genocide, we won't get universal healthcare, we will kill more people at the border (specifically that she will bring back that awful bipartisan border bill that breaks international law), and that her economic initiatives will all be idiotic bullshit that excludes the poorest people in the country.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

I think its time for updated speculations definitely prophetic predictions.

Harris is probably in line to win the Election.

Israel's endeavor to murder every civilian they can get their hands on including their own but especially Palestinian babies for some reason is still, or perhaps right now more than ever the deciding issue for the election.

It's just not deciding against Harris, for now.

Apparently there is polling suggesting there is perhaps up to a fucking extra 6 points in lead over Trump they COULD get by the even relatively mild position of an arms embargo on Israel. And god-for-fucking-bid the Democrats treat this election as the existential threat they constantly claim it is and sacrifice just one neo-con foreign policy no one likes on the alter of safely securing the win from Trump.

But their fuck you nothing, no change, full support forever, position is currently probably enough. It just relies on the enthusiasm from not having the doddering old corpse as a candidate distracting from the fact that they still have the same policies as the doddering old corpse everyone hated. Something liberals will have a hard time with understanding.

Like everything else in Democrat and liberal strategy it relies on everything remaining favorable to them forever.

It would be a pity if say something happened that brought the Genocidal warmonger support firmly back into the center of public attention, because THAT will be the fucking end of the Democrats for this election.

Something like I don't know, Israel getting what it keeps begging for and sparking a truly impactful retaliation, or by their goals, better yet a full scale all out war in the middle east.

I mean good thing Israel and its leaders are not doing everything they can to achieve that before the election. I mean, if they were it would be INSANELY RECKLESS AND STUPID for the liberals to not have already put that issue to bed and instead left it as a giant glowing weak spot on their own foreheads.

It would be a real problem if all these fuckers who keep saying at press conferences "I couldn't possible address a hypothetical" genuinely cannot address a dangerously likely hypothetical their allies keep telling them they want to happen and for which their own asses are on the line.

So yeah. You want to know who wins the next presidential election in the USA? Well. The decision is being made right now. By like maybe 2 guys, IN IRAN.

[MGuy]

I just want to also highlight the DNC debacle where the Dems were too scared to even let someone give a little Pro-Palestinian speech that was inoffensive to all sides during the whole thing while letting actual Republicans speak at their convention. If there was a time to start signaling a major breakaway that was the time. That was her coronation. This is while Israel is in the weakest position its ever been in. Its people were just tearing their country apart over the right to be able to rape Palestinians without consequence, their economy is in shambles, many of their people are fleeing, and some are saying it might not exist in a year at this rate. If they cared about Israel making it there is no reason to not start gearing up to shut down its operations right now.

Now some people might remember that some idiots seemed to think STOPPING genocide would cost Israel its existence and it turns out that actually doing a genocide is actually worse for Israel than not doing one. So in light of that, increasing tensions with other actors in that area, and pushing what could be allies into the hands of what will definitely be a competing economic bloc it seems kinda crazy that the course hasn't been corrected. Well, it turns out, that the people running this slowly sinking ship actually would prefer other places constantly be in conflict with America's 'enemies'.

Harris seems poised to try to win on the momentum of being a different person than Biden but not actually breaking with Biden in any significant way. It is not surprising that the Dems and the Reps are largely aligned where foreign policy is concerned since to many voters (especially one vocal one here) even being current day backers of modern Hitler isn't a deal breaker but there's a cost to doing that when we can all see it. The media speaks as if Kamala is going to win but the polling numbers here in the real world still has the race as being very close. So why is she spending time doubling down on the immigration issue when her very coronation has shown that breaking away from the right is the correct move? Because polls show that "Immigration" is a big concern among Americans. She could be trying to unlock votes and skirt the immigration issue that the Dems will never have the lead on by being anti genocide. Of course while Kamala might 'seem' different from Biden to the uninitiated she's been working very hard to show she's just the same.

[Kaelik]

Counterpoint to the "two people on iran" theory,

Israel has moved on to ethnically cleansing the West Bank.

Good job democrats! Your total and complete support for Hitler has let Hitler know he can escalate!

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Counterpoint to the "two people on iran" theory,

Anyone who does anything that puts and keeps the story in the mainstream media really.

I'm not sure how much attention the mainstream media is paying to the wild escalation in Gaza lately. Did they even cover the high profile viral stuff like the guy with the birth certificate and the dead newborn twins Israel killed in a targeted assassination? Are they even covering the various IDF casualties and losses?

Still I say two guys in Iran, but two guys in Israel can just pretend that two guys in Iran did something and then they could do something the mainstream media acknowledges as "drawing the US into a wider war in the middle east" too.

In fact unlike the two guys in Iran the two guys in Israel are actively trying to do that.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Well. Speak of the devil?

The genociders are staging an invasion of the West bank now. For pre-emtive security reasons of course. Especially the hospitals of course. With bulldozers included of course.

[Kaelik]

Well. Speak of the devil?

The genociders are staging an invasion of the West bank now. For pre-emtive security reasons of course. Especially the hospitals of course. With bulldozers included of course.

I mean that was what I was referring to.

[MGuy]

I don't think there's been much reporting on the genocide at all really. I think the various news networks have proven unwilling to talk about the details. At best only entertaining that 'maybe' Israel is doing something bad. Given the attempt to block it out of the DNC it seems that this decision goes beyond just the news networks.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

The mainstream media has had their little moments of rebellion over this and have largely surrendered into compliance anyway. And they only had to fire/purge/arrest what? 3-5 Western journalists and begin work on an new Assange v2.0?

I don't know what the actual events will need to be, but I think the headline needs to be at least "War in the Middle East" if not "Israel launches Nuke" to break the wall of silence.

I'm unsure if "Israel suffers major defeat/damage" is good enough, and the way they spin Israel to not only always be just and moral but ALSO to always win everything and never suffer any casualties or any damage not even a bit even when at this point it is clear they aren't even limiting casualties at a sustainable rate and rockets ARE hitting military targets in the north routinely. I'm not sure THAT headline can happen without a total final crushing defeat.

But "War in the Middle East" the western media cannot resist that headline and fucking no way they resist "Iran, Nuked!", they will of course spin it positively, but the audience would not take it that way and Kamala would, very justly, get the blame.

edit: Mind you, when the NYT launches their article explaining how Israel surprise preemptive defense nuking Ankara AND Cairo is a good and moral thing DeadDM WILL be onboard.

[Thaluikhain]

The mainstream media has had their little moments of rebellion over this and have largely surrendered into compliance anyway.

And/or it's not newsworthy anymore.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

And/or it's not newsworthy anymore.

That is a worn out fake excuse used for people like DeadDM.

The news is the thing that is happening, it isn't worthy or not, its just fact, if you don't cover it you aren't a real news source.

Judging "worthiness" is a vague and unprovable subjective value that corporate media hawks can just arbitrarily claim is negative any time they feel like it.

As usual, if you believe that I have all these fucking bridges for sale, and they are SO worthy, trust me, also they are all in Gaza.

[Kaelik]

Yeah, it's pretty weird when like 30% of all news stories are about how Kamala Harris won't do interviews the media to pretend that an ongoing genocide just isn't important or novel enough to raise to the level of being worth writing about.

The media does not in fact try to cover whatever is most important, they decide what they think people should think is important.

[Thaluikhain]

Well, I meant that Israel doing today what it did yesterday and will do tomorrow stopped being new and exciting, but, in retrospect, yeah, was being a bit naive there. People are having posts containing images of watermelons banned on social media (because a watermelon may or may not be a symbol of Palestine, apparently), so, yeah.

[Kaelik]

A dumb Israel Palestine thing, to blast back to 2011 or whenever we last talked about bitcoin, was that Binance seized all the crypto currency owned by palestinians and just gave it to Israel because Israel told them to.

I don't exactly understand how this happened, but like, lol, lmao, thank god our government proof libertarian dream currency allows us total freedom to somehow they can still just take your damn bitcoins!

[Kaelik]

Kamala Harris interview, when asked if she would continue to genocide 4 million Palestinians said "yes. Correct. All Palestinians must die and I will never waver from this position."

[PseudoStupidity]

It's brat to do a genocide the same way an 80+ year old does.

[Koumei]

So I heard that, recently, the DNC have been fucking things up and pissing their lead away, in a way that only they can. No further information was given because they quickly moved onto the jokes, and I understand that, but more info would be great. What's the specific thing that is burning their lead? Is it too much to hope that it's their shitty policies and history, and people going "Oh hey yeah, they're supporting terrible things like a genocide"? Is it just that a number moved the wrong direction?

(Obviously this was all before the current debate where Trump was particularly unhinged, but I don't know how much impact the actual debates have.)

[PseudoStupidity]

The Democrats did not have a lead to burn. When Kamala got the nomination the Democrats were behind, and now the polling is either tied or slightly in the Democrats favor. It should obviously be massively in the Democrats favor given who their opponents are, but given the Democrats have shitty policies and history (and Kamala herself has shitty policies and history) they have a hard time making a case for why you should vote for them. They make a very good case for why you shouldn't vote for Trump, though. The debate last night was basically the same thing, Kamala pointed out how bad Trump was, and Trump waffled between insane defenses of various things (policy positions, Jan 6th people, his rallies) and talking about how badly things are going for people in the country right now.

Kamala made virtually no case for any of her policy positions and promised more of the same. My guess is that's what the person you were talking with was referring to, or maybe the gains the Democrats were making in the polls stopped? The debate might help the Democrats a bit, but they also don't really matter. Trump and Kamala were both energetic during the debate so I doubt it'll move the needle much. The reason the last debate was so important was Biden keeling over and dying on stage, but both candidates (unfortunately) survived this debate.

[deaddmwalking]

On August 28th, the poll tracker at 538 had Harris up by 3.6% nationally (47.2 to 43.6). Today Harris is up 2.7% (47.0 to 44.3).

The aggregate polls that showed Harris up 3.6% were taken while Kennedy was still in the race. It's not really clear what percentage of his voters are switching to Harris versus Trump versus another 3rd party candidate.

There are some specific polls, like the New York Times/Sienna College taken 9/3-9/6 that showed Trump with a 2% lead. Their prior poll that ended July 24th had Harris up +1%*.

*Actually it had Trump up +1, but they have several versions and one had Harris up +1, depending on which candidates are included and whether it is registered or likely voters.

While the polls have been generally steady (the variance is well within the declared margin of error), people get fixed on the top-line numbers. Polls, even good ones, can be wrong. Sometimes polls taken prior to an election consistently miss. For example, polls of the 2020 election had Biden up in Pennsylvania by 4.7%. Biden's actual margin of victory was 1.17%. Harris' current polling lead in PA is 0.60%. If polls are wrong this cycle to the same degree as they were in 2020, well, that would be bad for the Democrats.

There's no real reason to believe that polls will be wrong in the same direction or by the same amount. This election is likely going to be very close and every vote (at least in a handful of states) will really matter. Margins in house races and Senate races even in states that are non-competitive may also come down to a small number of votes.

This is likely to be a close election. There's a chance of a blow-out basically if one side doesn't show up to the polls as much as they're expected to. One reason people don't show up is they think that there vote doesn't matter, and that their preferred candidate is guaranteed to win - or that they can safely protest both major candidates with a protest vote for a candidate that will not win.

The polling aggregates are influenced by recent polls. It happens that a number of Republican funded polls that consistently find Republicans doing better than they actually do are currently influencing the top-line numbers. While it's a pretty likely bet that Harris will win the popular vote, her share in non-competitive states like California and New York will be part of that. Biden won California by 30% in 2020 while winning the popular vote 51.3% to Trump's 46.9%.

Thus, it's pretty clear that Harris has to win by about 4% to win in the electoral college. A polling aggregate showing more than 5% would be a very positive sign, but it could also be misleading because of the variance.