That’s getting a bit close to the “I say! These chap’s don’t fight fair!” reaction of the British in the Boer War.
Many warlike activities, such as the Germans deliberately breaching dykes in the Netherlands in WW2, fall outside the definition of a “battle”.
Incidentally, when calling what bin Laden did a crime:
Did he have a strategic objective?
Yes - getting the US out of Saudi Arabia.
What tactics did he employ?
Military - missile attack on Pentagon using civilian aircraft as cruise missile.
Economic - similar attack on WTC.
His rationale is similar to that of the IRA, who were free to raise funds in the US because they were bombing the UK, not the US. Very different treatment.
Personally I think it’s all manifestations of evil whether the perpetrators are in uniform or not. But seeking to argue that “attack us it’s a crime, attack someone else we don’t care about it’s freedom fighters*” seems also to me to be a morally flawed (to say the least) attitude.
*I don’t believe there is any special relationship between the US and the UK at official levels except in the matter of supplying land for bases and helping to pay for nukes.
Without wanting to go full-on “election reform” here, I will say that I think that election predictions and popularity polling are a pointless circus. Just debate, vote, count, and be done with it.
The problem I have with that is that it’s not just unlikely, but a terrible idea. If we were going through something like Rebrexit, with nation-wide changes of heart, maybe… But if we, for all intents and purposes, “steal” the election, then we’ve totally undermined a much more important 2018 campaign. Trump cannot amend the Constitution. He might ignore it, but America has proven somewhat resilient to that. If Democrats lose more seats in 2018, guess which party is free to change the Constitution free and clear? Hint, it ain’t the Greens. That’s the coming crisis. And here we are biting our nails and diverting our focus to a battle we already fucking lost. Donald Trump’s presidency is not the emergency we can avoid, a Republican supermajority is.
It’s pretty connected with reality. I don’t know how great Silver’s model actually is, but I have more confidence in it than I do in most of the other predictors. Still, there are a lot of known problems with it, the biggest one being (and Silver would tell you this too) that it is based on the ability of the past to predict the future. The past is a great predictor of the future until it isn’t.
I made the analogy to the weather for a reason. It turns out weather forecasts are super accurate. If you take all those days they say there is a 30% chance of rain and count how many it rained on, it’s almost exactly 30%. But people think weather forecasting is nonsense because they don’t know what a 30% chance of rain means.
What good is it, though? I don’t know. If you are sitting at a poker table it’s good to know the odds your hand wins even though that leaves the possibility that your opponent has the better hand. But unless you are betting on the election outcome (plenty of people do) then I guess that’s not a very relevant analogy. David Plouffe, Obama’s strategist who worked on the Clinton campaign was asked Clinton’s odds of winning and he said “100%”. Maybe if he had a better prediction methodology the Clinton campaign would have done a better job of reaching out to voters in key areas of rust belt states. Anyway, the question of how useful the output of the model is is entirely separate from how accurate the model is. There’s a difference between being wrong and being right about something no one cares about.
But anyone who tells you that without giving you their margin of error and returning to uncertainty is a pundit, not an expert. You should put close to zero value on their opinion, because an opinion is all that it is. Anyone who tells you they know the future is foolish or lying, and there’s a decent chance they are looking for your money.
Which is not mathematically distinguishable from “the probability stuff.”
Look, let’s put it this way: here’s a twenty-sided die. Would you take the bet that it comes up twenty? Or the bet that it comes up any number other than twenty? Of course you pick the latter, because the former is a sucker’s bet. If after we made the bet, I rolled a twenty… I had a one in twenty chance, after all (incidentally about what Trump had, IIRC). Does that invalidate the relevance of statistics and probability to the problem?
ETA: Trumps chances were six times the one in twenty figure. I don’t know why I said they were five percent.
Sure, but how do we evaluate 538’s predictive power? By looking at 2 or 3 elections (like recording 2 or 3 days’ worth of weather reports)? On what basis can we say the probabilities his model provides are accurate? Did we need to withhold judgment until he’s got another few (or five, or ten, or a hundred) more elections under his belt?
To me, this is like placing a bet that says, “I think there’s a 75% chance the Mariners will win the World Series in 2017.” When the Mariners don’t win the World Series in 2017 can I demand that you pay up? “Hey, I said there was a 25% chance they’d lose!”
I don’t know. I was glued to 538.com starting several months before the election, so the emphasis on probabilities didn’t bug me too much.
Sorry – no, I apologize if I wasn’t clear. The link I posted was a good one that I saw within the awful comments section. I wouldn’t wish the NYT comments section on my worst enemy.
Nah, I get what you’re saying. We can always get pedantic and say that the BBS isn’t a comment section so much as a message board (that just so happens to proxy as a comment section for BB articles) so we’d be safe here.
