Education is key? As a country, we’re more highly educated now than ever before. Go ahead and make fun of Trump supporters. I do it too (at least to the ones I’m related to - Thanksgiving was fun). But realize that mostly what you are doing is strengthening their convictions and getting Trump a second (and maybe permanent) term.
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Well, there is the often-cited statistic that Trump supporters are statistically quite well-off financially. But the obvious rejoinder is that economic success need not correlate with intelligence and such.
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One doesn’t have to be a genius or have a quality education to make money in real estate, for example. Especially when one is staked with several million dollars at the start of one’s career.
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Yes, if you accept that anecdotal and therefore independently unverifiable evidence derived from a small carefully selected group is the best evidence.
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While I don’t want non-citizens voting - illegal or not, there needs to be hard proof before making such claims.
Illegals can’t normally register nor get on welfare or other federal programs (though they might be able to work the system with borrowed identities.) I haven’t seen any evidence that they have been able to register to vote - at least not in any significant numbers.
Immigrants have been the whipping boy of America for a long, long time. They are the scapegoats for everything - we would be ok if these damn immigrants didn’t come in and take what we worked hard for. But this attitude is not only wrong morally, but factually America is richer because of our immigrants.
I don’t think they are atypical of most Americans. Hillary voters may not believe this bit of trivia - but I am sure there is a lot of BS they do swallow.
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As a country we’re more highly credentialed now than ever before, which is a different thing from being highly educated. Which reminds me of another relevant book, “Dark Age Ahead” by the late great Jane Jacobs.
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You say as you post an opinion piece written by two people who makes claims such as the following:
- Voter ID laws are required to prevent voter fraud
- Obama appointed judges in a partisan effort to push ideals into law
- Voter ID laws are not racist, and the liberals claiming that “voter ID laws are racist” are just patronizing minorities
- Voter ID laws don’t suppress voters, because African-American voters are the fastest growing voting group in North Carolina
And more. Fortunately, these morons are behind paywalls on the few WSJ articles they have but the one video that I saw from the WSJ interviews Hans Von Spakosky who is clearly a partisan moron or a racist and likely both.
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If large numbers of Hillary supporters based their support on objectively false claims then they should be called out as well.
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A response from the person that collected the data that was used:
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No need. All that matters is that the false equivalency has been made and the impact of these morons has been diluted.
When running interference for idiots like this - a practice which is going to be a regular thing in the next few years - all that matters is to neutralize the effect.
So, all you need to say is ‘Well, there are probably some equally moronic Clinton supporters out there’. A hard statement to refute when you realize that well over 50 million people voted for Clinton - the back half of that curve is dumber than the average Clinton voter after all. So they exist, to be sure.
But now that their existence has been accepted, the profound impact of the posted clip has been neutralized (at least in the false equivalency brain). These people are morons, but hey, so are other people, so it’s a draw!
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Spoiler : He thought uninformed people shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Shortly afterward, 500 of them voted to have him executed.
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They may be partisan, or even wrong on the issue. But they at least have enough knowledge of the subject to present their position. I did not know the WSJ article was paywalled.
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Yeah, I have to agree.
We have greater access to information than ever before, that’s true; but that access is often neglected or even misused. (See 90% of the internet.)
If we were really so much ‘more enlightened than ever before,’ shows like Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader would not be a thing.
There has been an ongoing effort over the last century to make the masses more gullible and complacent, and it’s been largely successful.
Also, I should note that I’m not clicking on that vid; personally, I’ve had more than enough exposure to the willfully ignorant to last me for quite some time.
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I agree with her - which is why a nationwide recount is required
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Why bother? A post from the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal and a wholly unsubstantiated claim about sampling bias in order to pander to his known partisan bias and known bugaboo about voter inflation? That doesn’t need my help and I’m not Sisyphus.
Especially when yesterday he got spanked by the mods for derailing a topic in the opposite manner. And that derailment shows his double standards here: i.e. liberals are always biased and engage in systematic lies in order to serve their partisan agendas by showing people like him in the worst light possible, but he refuses to be equally skeptical of unsubstantiated claims of manipulations of the truth when it comes from his partisan side.
At this point, I’m just going to make up Bingo cards for distribution.
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Yes, but I think that critical thinking is lacking.
I had read – perhaps here on BB – that many people (and this panel is a great example) believe that THEY have access to the source of truth and the OTHER side is being duped by untruthful sources. I see this being more true than ever. There’s a subset of Republicans who think Alex Jones is speaking the truth and those paying attention to Anderson Cooper are stupid sheep who have been duped. And vice versa.
I have some friends who are idiots, and some who are very bright. And there are plenty of bright friends who sincerely believe that if I just tuned into the truth, I’d be a republican. It’s almost like those who are trying to convert someone to Christianity – can’t you see The Bible is the one true source? Please see that - then you’ll be a Christian!
What is missing is critical thinking about policy. Instead of considering what party’s policies best align with ones core values, people jump to the conclusion they want (i.e. I think I should be a republican because guns, or I think I should be a democrat because of gay rights) and then back themselves up with the source that plays up the side they like and tears the other side to bits.
On top of that, there’s a big difference between reading shit on facebook and taking it as truth (no, Aunt Joanne, the pope did not endorse Trump – and here’s a few links that’ll debunk that for you)
See above.
Yes. I suppose you could find people who might say crazy things about Trump. I’d hope they’d have “proof” of whatever outlandish things. It’s like when someone spends the entire day “on the street” interviewing regular Americans about basic knowledge. They could be out there all day – and sooner or later they’ll find someone who doesn’t know that Canada is to our north. That guy will end up part of the bit that is televised.
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Oh bullshit. We are more literate and numerate than any time in our country’s short history. People have a better understanding of scientific principles, of law, medicine, and most other subjects than ever.
The problem is that the entire country is divided and we aren’t talking to each other. The woman in this video is your neighbor - get to know her. Lend her a hand if she needs help and she’ll help you when you need help.
Or go on snarking from your Aeron chair. I’m sure that will fix things.
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O those Wacky Liberal Californians.
It’s nice that all of California has been demonized. I really feel we’re all in it together and when I’m out and I see everyone - black, white, asian, hispanic… all just doing stuff, getting along… There’s signs in korean, in spanish, in english, in fucking ethiopian.
You know why said people (along with myself) don’t want to live in the south? Because we are demonized. So we hang out together because there’s a lot more acceptance of ‘you can live your life how you want to live it as long as it doesn’t physically harm me’ as our fucking “founding fathers” implied with that whole life liberty pursuit of happiness thing.
Sigh.
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They apparently did not have enough knowledge of the subject to account for measurement errors in small datasets, which seems like a pretty rookie statistical mistake.
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The problem with that Judicial Watch analysis is that the number of people who claim to have been non-citizen voters (38/32,800 in 2008, 13/55,400 in 2010) are so small that they make up around 0.1% of the sample: a tiny sample size to base conclusions of massive voter fraud on.
When you look at the data more closely, interesting things happen to those “non-citizen voters”:
Importantly, the group with the lowest likelihood of classification errors consists of those who reported being non-citizens in both 2010 and 2012. In this set, 0 percent of respondents cast valid votes. That is, among the 85 respondents who reported being non-citizens in 2010 and non-citizens in 2012, there are 0 valid voters for 2010.
[…]
This problem arises because the survey was not designed to sample non-citizens, and the non-citizen category in the citizenship question is included for completeness and to identify those respondents who might be non-citizens. We expect that most of that group are in fact non-citizens (85 of 105), but the very low level of misclassification of citizens, who comprise 97.4 percent of the sample, means that we expect that 19 “non-citizen” respondents (16.5 percent of all reported non-citizens) are citizens who are misclassified. And, those misclassified people can readily account for the observed vote among those who reported that they are non-citizens.
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