At the point when the polls opened there were two options and only two. Clinton’s policies were boilerplate Dem shifted a bit to the left vs. what we are now seeing unfolding. I understand wanting a further left candidate (I wanted Sanders), but the options were the centrist moderate, the fascist, or abdicating responsibility. Those people who abdicated from doing whatever it took to prevent the obvious fascist from taking power, even if it meant voting for someone they loathed, deserve nothing but contempt.
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All, I am saying is that if you recognise that you need the left to win then you need to do something other than continuing to blame them. Ask yourself “Why should I vote for a party who won’t offer me anything other than scraps from the table and abuses me if they lose, even if I did vote for them?” Try to come up with an answer that isn’t “they are the lesser of two evils.”
I ask that question because people may have a realistic choice between the Tories and Ukip at the next UK General Election. It feels like choosing between Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu.
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With Trump as its presumptive Republican nominee, the 2016 general election was the Democrats to lose. Most polls in early 2016 suggested that nominating Hillary Clinton would increase that risk. (Most polls in late 2016 also suggested that she would win though though, so whothefuckknows.) In Sanders, the Dems and their electorate had a chance at a clean break from their machined past.
After June, November 8th promised only one of two plausible outcomes. You voted for the one you wanted most (or disliked the least), maybe chalked it up as a battle lost, and then woke up the next day to keep fighting the good fight.
Those who preferred Clinton to win and could vote but didn’t are now realizing that the good fight just got a lot steeper thanks to their inaction.
If the Dems run another historically center-right candidate, I will be mad as fucking hell. If the Republicans run a candidate even worse, I will be madder than fucking hell.
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I agree with you. What I am saying is that Hillary needs to take some of the blame for losing instead of putting it all on the left, who may not be Democrats in the first place.
Better still, stop with the blame games and plan for 2018 with the knowledge that the Democrats need to appeal to people who may be to the left or right of the party and decide who is needed based on local views.
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At this point, if the two main political parties RUN CANDIDATES for the 2020 election, I’ll breathe a sigh of relief.
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If neither of them did, I would.
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Isn’t the more likely explanation in that case that there are no more free elections for which to run candidates?
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Clinton was a unique candidate with a history unlike anyone else in the field in so many ways that it’s not a great idea to use her for lessons for 2020. 2020 will be what it is based on who runs and how primary voters vote. I voted for Sanders, but more people voted for Clinton (election fraud conspiracy theories aside) so that’s who we got. I am not responsible for who’ll run, and I hope someone to the left runs and wins. I donated to Sanders but didn’t volunteer. Next time around I’ll volunteer as well. But I assume whoever is relatively centrist will win since in the US left wing ideas poll well, but crash and burn - usually in primaries, but if not, then in general elections.
There are a lot of lessons to learn from 2020, but they’re mostly that mass scale voter disenfranchisement is bad, Republicans really were the crypto-facists we always believed they were, drawn out primaries are bad (though we’ve always known that), and that it’s probably better to select a candidate who isn’t Hillary Clinton.
Because in some elections you have to vote against a legitimate threat to democracy, freedom, and basic human rights for all. If you are offered a choice between two options, one poor, and one unqualified evil and decide to do nothing, you are failing to take on evil and deserve nothing but scorn.
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Majors, so they wanted to be there. I managed to get through the day, but it was touch-and-go; I passed out in my office after the third lecture.
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You kids. Thinking there’ll be an election in 2020. Keep hope alive!
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By the way, a big chunk of my lecture (and the prep beforehand) stemmed from an error in the textbook. No, author of at least 3 statistics textbooks and member of a national committee on numeracy education, a pair of normal random variables are not automatically independent just because they are uncorrelated.
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Neither can I. I’m just asking that people stop playing the blame game and either come up with a plan that has a place for the socialists who felt alienated by Hillary, or offer nothing and just accept that they may choose not to support the Democrats as a result. I’d rather it be the first option.
I’m not asking that the Democrat candidates should pass a socialist purity test, as some people seem to think I am. I am asking for a candidate who recognises that they need the support of the left as well as the right of the party and can come up with a plan that offers something in return. “Vote for me or the evil candidate will win” really didn’t work this time, and now we’re stuck with kleptocrat Trump for four years.
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Yeah, but you don’t live here. @JemmieDuffs and I are both here but not as citizens. It’s a distinctly uncomfortable feeling, even as people who are in a progressive city in a progressive state, and not being directly targetted by Trump.
The cow retweeted something on twitter recently…
The thing is, Clinton’s platform actually was progressive. People just didn’t believe it coming from her - and I can understand why.
Of course, not voting for her has ushered in Trump, who meant every word of what he said.
Lesser of two evils sucks, but the primary (rigged or not) is your chance to get the good candidate. In the general you have to be sensible. People who decided that they couldn’t support Clinton were de facto saying they were okay with Trump’s policies, because they wouldn’t do the one thing they needed to do to stop them. That’s definitely on them.
Yes, Clinton should have put more effort in to convince them, but how much convincing should they have needed?
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There was a Parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, who is credited with these quotes:
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.
Now, I know Burke was not English, but he did serve in London as an MP.
Also, I remember something about a world-famous Englishman had his re-entry visa rescinded by a US Attorney General in September 1952? He’d apparently been in the U.S. for forty years until then. When he had his portrait taken by Avedon he joked about having it as a passport photo:
I guess for some to trivialize your and my fears of instant deportation can be a sport, or abstract away the arduousness of cleaning house and uprooting, knowing it’ll NEVER happen to them 'cos bwhaha they’re not immigrants, for the sake of bickering or conflating the apathetic with the left (I can’t see President Jill Stein or President Gary Johnson issuing these kinds of executive orders, but a Truman administration Atty-Gnl telling a Hollywood pioneer he can’t go home was out of left field in my view), but it makes my blood boil, then curdle.
I’m proud many Americans went to airports today to exercise their right to free speech.
Merely as a tidbit of trivia and, ahem, non sequitur, I share what my son told me he learned in his History class. Resemblance to any present and real persons is completely coincidental:
An idiot in Athenian democracy was someone who was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private—as opposed to public—affairs. Idiocy was the natural state of ignorance into which all persons were born and its opposite, citizenship, was effected through formalized education. In Athenian democracy, idiots were born and citizens were made through education (although citizenship was also largely hereditary). “Idiot” originally referred to “layman, person lacking professional skill”, “person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning”. Declining to take part in public life, such as democratic government of the polis (city state), was considered dishonorable. “Idiots” were seen as having bad judgment in public and political matters.
I can’t be an idiot by those terms, because I voted in the October 2015 election. I drove 430km round-trip to do so.because I care about my country and its government.
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Sounds interesting and surprising, can you elaborate?
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Sure; I think the following example works (it isn’t the one I showed the students yesterday, which is trickier). Let X be a standard normal random variable, flip a fair coin independently of the outcome of X, and let W=+/-1 depending on whether the coin is heads or tails. Let Y=WX. Then it is easy to verify that Y is also a standard normal, the covariance of X and Y is E(XY)=E(XWX)=E(X^2)E(W)=0 so they are uncorrelated, but P(X>17 & Y>17)=P(X>17 & W=1)=P(X>17)(1/2) =/= P(X>17)^2=P(X>17)P(Y>17), so X and Y are not independent.
The interesting question is why anyone believes the false fact that uncorrelated normals are independent. The answer is that this is true if the two random variables have a jointly normal bivariate distribution. In the result in the textbook from which I was quoting the two variables are in fact jointly normal, but it is far from obvious, and the author made no effort either to mention it or refer to the correct result; he explicity stated the false fact.
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Could you start a wrath thread about this? I don’t think this is a great thread to point fingers at other people for finding blame in an election you couldn’t vote in for a nation you’re not located in. I think it’s a worthy topic, but I just don’t think this is the place for it.
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Trump’s executive order is affecting people in Britain and across Europe. There is an MP who’s a dual Iranian / UK national now banned from US travel, a postgraduate student in Costa Rica prevented from transiting through USA on her way back to Glasgow, one of our Olympic athletes of Somali birth whose four children are currently in the USA. Trump is just manifestly incompetent. Today is a bit fucked. The only good thing seems to be that the courts in the USA are striking down the executive order left right and centre.
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