A bunch of you mentioned that Bobo’s heavily heh-indeeded anti-Silver polemic came out about the same time as this, from a less serious right-wing source:
Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he’s made out to be.
It’s “Al Gore is fat” all over again. The openly crazy righties call people fat and gay, while establishment media chuckles along and says “I wouldn’t put it that way but he is a jerk and when you look closer at his analysis blah blah blah”. (Here’s a typical slightly more high-brow “Al Gore is fat” from a serious person.)
They do it with Paul Krugman too (e.g., here’s one of Charles Lane’s many attacks on Krugman).
I don’t know how much of this is coordinated. Some is — I’m pretty sure that Bobo coordinates with Daily Caller crowd — but a lot of the shared impulse here comes from the fact that establishment media shares the far-right’s hatred of numbers and science. Gore, Krugman, and Silver all rely on science and numbers in their arguments. The far-right hates it because the Bible (or the constitution or whatever), establishment media hates it because it threatens to supersede its proximity to power and insider cocktail parties.
JPL
The NYTimes has a nice editorial in support of the President. I know that’s not shocking but still nice to see. link
ranchandsyrup
That is the guy behind the unskew the polls site. He is just self promoting. He gives himself props and dick Morris. What a douche.
DCLaw1
Heh, indeed.
Shinobi
I guess it is more important to be on the right, than to actually be right.
beltane
I’ve seen the picture of the Unskewed Polls guy at Tboggs and he is just about the last person on this planet who should be making disparaging comments about anyone’s appearance. In fact, the American RW in general is just about the ugliest collection of human beings ever assembled. Remeber, these are the same people who think the fish-eyed Eddie Munster clone Paul Ryan is a stud.
Turgidson
@ranchandsyrup:
The fact that he cited Morris as a source of agreement and wisdom gives me great comfort. Now if he can just give a shout-out to, or receive one from Bill Kristol, I’ll be able to ignore all election news, utterly confident that Obama can’t possible lose.
ranchandsyrup
Here’s the disguised self reference:
unreal. He could have admitted it was his own site.
DCLaw1
@beltane: And Ann Coulter is “hot.”
quannlace
How can anyone give Dick Morris the time of day, let alone any serious consideration. Can someone please ask him, ‘When was the last time you were right on ANYTHING?’
Smiling Mortician
Agreed that the Villagers hate numbers because facts threaten their gig. But I think the Bible/Constitution justification for wingers’ hatred of numbers is actually more sophisticated (!) than reality. Wingers hate the numbers because the numbers say they’re wrong, and that’s just not OK. It really is that simple.
James E. Powell
establishment media hates [using numbers and science] because it threatens [to] supersede its proximity to power and insider cocktail parties.
The establishment media also hates using numbers, science, and experience because every single one of them wants us to believe “Assertion A” because he said it. Not because the evidence or reasoning shows it is true or likely to be true. Not for any reason other than because CNN, or NYT, or WaPo, or whichever corporate media company gave him air time or column inches and that means we are supposed to believe him, goddammit, and anybody who says otherwise is wearing pajamas in his mother’s basement!
James E. Powell
@Smiling Mortician:
Wingers hate the numbers because the numbers say they’re wrong, and that’s just not OK.
People who use numbers aren’t just wrong, they are evil and must be destroyed.
beltane
@DCLaw1: And Meat Loaf is the greatest rock star ever.
ranchandsyrup
@quannlace: Only his ties to clinton matter so Morris looks objective. Results are immaterial apparently. USA!
wrb
@beltane:
And Ann Coulter and Meat Loaf make an attractive couple.
MikeJ
@ranchandsyrup: When I read quotes like that I wonder if he’s going out of his way to make stupid predictions like Romney gets 359 EVs. The whole story is then, “Right wing website says R-359, left wing website says O-300, both sides do it, opinions differ, blah blah blah…”
becca
@beltane: I’ve always thought Ryan could do a perfect celebrity impersonation of the actor who plays the crazy gun-nut detective on Psych.
beltane
I find Paul Krugman attractive, far more so than any Republican I can think of. The way you can tell that Jon Huntsman has no future in the Republican party is that he’s a handsome guy and not some helmet-haired freak.
agrippa
What the GOP zealots are going to do if Obama wins? Go into the garden and eat worms?
or, pitch some other conniption fit?
I admit that I do not understand polling and polling numbers.
But, Silver seems, to me, to be serious and honest.
DCLaw1
Dick Morris does such a hilarious parody of Dick Morris.
Hal
Look at the unskewed electoral map. That slug has Romney with 40 states, including Oregon. Previously he had Romney winning Delaware. It’s such obvious bullshit it defies logic.
Chris
@James E. Powell:
Repeating what I said earlier – the media’s gig is also all about telling stories, and inconvenient facts and numbers tend to get in the way of their nice clean narratives. (The real world is generally too complex to fold neatly into a bedtime story anyway, which largely explains the MSM and its conservative counterparts’ inability to report well on it).
Amir Khalid
“Nate Silver looks like a little sissy, and he talks like a gurrrl.” Wow. I never knew that before. How can I trust anything that little sissy with the girly voice writes in his blog now? (Rolls eyes.)
@beltane:
But I thought Ted Nugent was the greatest rock star ever.
patrick II
Speaking of disdain for science and logic, Thursday Romney claimed Jeep was sending all of its jobs to China based on an article published at “The Examiner”. Here is one of the comments on the Jeep post:
link in case this seems too inane to be real.
ranchandsyrup
@MikeJ: Yeah it’s all under the “you can use statistics to prove anything so no stats matter” umbrella.
Fucking hell.
I’m headed to a halloween party with the family. Daughter is a bumble bee. So is wife. I’m a giant banana. I pitched my wingnut constitution costume idea to her and she put the kibosh on that one.
Have a good day everyone.
Boudica
@patrick II: CHE-ange? what the hell is that?
aimai
Lets admit: they hate us for our freedoms. They hate us for being scientific, for having sexy daughters, for being happy, for being happy to vote for Obama,–for every damned thing.
aimai
? Martin
Apparently I’m a stereotypical leftist as well. I look just like a younger George Clooney, and nothing like a young George Will.
Joel
You must grab him by his money… God that was the best/most uncomfortable “Borat” sketch ever.
El Cid
Unlike the exclusive team of big manly men who do all the Wall Street trading they worship, and developed all the tech they use to do their media
ass-kickingass-kissing and socializing-based ‘punditry’, and the tough-as-nails old soldiers (former veterans all) who dominate the Republican Party’s security establishment.Chris
@aimai:
Yes, they do. They really do.
Handy
Their side always gets nasty when they are losing.
Total admission they are scared of being waxed 11/6
Tripod
@Hal:
It makes sense if the goal is to delegitimize Obama’s second term.
El Cid
If the numbers support your aid and comfort to the needs of wealth and power, you cite the numbers, and discourage anyone else from citing any other numbers.
If the numbers don’t support your aid and comfort to the needs of wealth and power, denigrate the numbers, and the people using those numbers as somehow lesser beings.
patrick II
@Boudica:
“Cheange” is how you spell “change” in whatever world that guy lives in. Don’t let facts — or spelling — get in the way of a good theory.
geg6
@aimai:
This.
redshirt
What’s quadruply ironic is the kind of guy these wingnuts would dream of – broad shouldered, chiseled chin, popeye forearms – would be consigned to working for a pittance in one of their in-sourced sweatshops. A slave, or indentured servant at the least. If they got their way, of course.
I would also mention the “Get a brain, morans” guy for another archetype. Also destined to be slaving away in some soul crushing meat packing plant.
beltane
@? Martin: Sucks to be you. I mean, nothing says testosterone oozing he-man like a young George Will.
dr. bloor
@patrick II:
“CHE-ange?”
xian
@patrick II: peance freance
Schlemizel
@patrick II:
that link should come with a warning – I read 6 comments there & lots 24 IQ points. I don’t have that many to spare on insanity like that!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
seriously? I would think Bobo looks on Tucker Carlson and his ilk with all the warmth of Margaret Dumont seeing Chico and Harpo come through the front door of her stately mansion with a harp and a mule.
I think you overstate the Village reaction to shit like this. I caught Michelle Cottle on MSNBC yesterday with Martin Bashir and IIRC Karen Finney, and the person who took the time to type this and hit submit could barely contain her weary amusement that they were talking about Sununu’s racist blather as if it mattered. Really, it was simply too tiresome for her.
arguingwithsignposts
I smell a spoof on that one @patrick II:
DPS
Is the implied thought just “faggy faggy fag fag,” or is it supposed to be “gays are given to effeminate wishful thinking untethered to reason and so Nate Silver is fooling himself because Democrats are a bunch of fags like him and he wants them to win”? Or is it that he’s not as smart as people think he is because he’s gay—is there some kind of right wing thing about gays seeming smarter than they really are? Or that liberals overestimate his value because everybody knows how much liberals love fags (and blahs, etc.)? I feel like there’s some important insight to be had here into the conservative mind here, but I can’t tell exactly what it is.
mdblanche
@agrippa: They’re going to hold their breath until they pass out. I say we let them.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
A lot of my co-workers are ex military and are moderately to strongly pro-GOP. The complaint that I hear from them the most is that deficit spending is out of control and we’ll all end up slaves of the heathen Red Chinese, who own all of our bonds. This is bunk of course but it hard to conclusively refute in a short conversation. So far no open conflicts because I think people are wary of me. Good.
SiubhanDuinne
@ranchandsyrup:
You know the rules. Pictures or it didn’t happen.
General Stuck
The right wing is full of Jethro’s hoping to gradgeeate 6th grade and become brane surgeons. They don’t have a clue about someone who has studied numbers and probabilities, past the number of fingers and toes they have.
Neither do I, but I do know that I don’t know. And Nate knows too, as he says it all the time, his are educated guesses, as much as anything. The only time I get annoyed at Silver is when he goes off too far toward the theoretical, though he usually qualifies his forward thinking as that, theoretical. As well as playing the Village headliner games.
But you don’t have to be a highly trained math whiz to know that the republicans and Romney have a steep hill to climb, at least this election, and the national polling is just about useless. At least as it is around an even split. These morons need to check out Gallup’s regional makeup for its daily tracking number, where Obama has solid leads in every region accept the south, that have already been conceded to the nutters.
They are in full smear mode, and after Obama is reelected, then it will get really bad.
Joel
Doug, I hate to go all long-form on you, but you should do yourself a favor and read Charles Peirce and his essay on belief systems. He was writing in response to his then contemporary wingnuts wailing over Charles Darwin, but the essay applies today. This was the groundwork for pragmatism as a term and philosophy. Key graf:
Liberty60
@Tripod:
I think this is it exactly.
They are hedging their bets now, so as to be able to claim usurpation once again.
Death Panel Truck
@General Stuck: IIRC, Jethro wanted to be a double-naught spy like James Bond. He told Jed about it, and Jed stopped whittling long enough to ask, “Lotta call for that, is there?”
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
@General Stuck:
I actually had a job where I had to compile, analyze and report on polling statistics. Okay, NPD did the polling but my name was on the reports. Anyway, one thing I know is that noise happens. It’s a fact of sampling that not only can random variation happen, it MUST happen. The MSM leaps on every isolated poll as establishing a trend. They have to because ‘let’s wait and see’ gains them nothing. So they make fools of themselves every time.
Rex Everything
Geez, Doug, did you install preposition-eating software or what?
hhex65
They do it with Paul Krugman ALSO (e.g., here’s one of Charles Lane’s many attacks on Krugman) too.
;-P
Higgs Boson's Mate
“The far left…” Wingers (And, sadly, others.) use that phrase constantly. It’s as if there’s a left out there somewhere of which they approve. I tend to think that the approved left resides somewhere in East Virginia.
Chris
@General Stuck:
This is what drives me nuts with them. Look, I don’t care that you’re not a rocket scientist – most of us aren’t. All I care about is that you acknowledge that you’re not a rocket scientist, and when there’s rocket science to be discussed, take it for granted that the people who do that shit for a living probably know a lot more about it than you. And listen accordingly.
But they never do. They’re always running to their politically vetted alternate universe of pundits to tell them a story that won’t cause them to break down into tears at having their worldview challenged. Pollsters, climate scientists, evolutionary scientists, intelligence professionals, even the fucking generals in the Pentagon have to put up with those jackasses trying to backseat drive through every emergency when they don’t even have a learner’s permit.
Another Halocene Human
Why elections matter. (OT)
So, somebody posted to GOMI today in an earlier thread and I was tooling around and found this:
Economic inequality doesn’t just cause more crime. It also keeps crimes from being prosecuted.
Suck on that, Thomas Friedman.
General Stuck
@Death Panel Truck:
That Jethro. The world was but an all you can eat buffet of wonderment. And maybe a couple of chickens.
Hill Dweller
@RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist:
So they’re voting for a guy who wants to extend all the Bush tax cuts(the top policy cause of the deficit), add another 5 trillion dollar tax cut on top of that, and increase defense spending another 2 trillion, without paying for any of it.
If they were actually worried about the deficit, they wouldn’t be voting for Willard.
Nethead Jay
Got linked to an excellent animated clip about the larger issues at stake in this election: Why Obama Now. Check it out.
Chris
@RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist:
An ironic concern given that the Chinese haven’t been “red” in decades and that their current system of authoritarian capitalism looks pretty much exactly like what the Republican Party’s been trying to impose here for the last thirty years at least.
gex
@El Cid: This. Any source has liberal bias if it backs us up. The only unbiased sources are the ones that back them.
patrick II
@arguingwithsignposts:
You are probably right. I was reading those comments and they are all, or mostly, pretty crazy, and in that context that one seemed only slightly crazier. But read by itself, it’s just too far fetched to be real. I think.
Anoniminous
@General Stuck:
After September “national polling is just about useless” for the unalterable fact we don’t elect a President by popular vote but by states. Romney can win every ignorant peckerwood’s vote in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina and he’ll still only have 39 electoral votes. Once the popular vote in a state is 50% + 1 the rest are meaningless.
PreservedKillick
@Hill Dweller:
“We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem!”
Which sounds great, until you actually try to, you know, figure out what you are going to cut. Then it gets…interesting.
I especially love the ones who assume we’ll just cut medicare. OK, well, leaving aside all the money being used to support grandma/grandpa from that equation, the rest is going…where? To the states. Right? Is that better?
The problem is that the whole argument is nuanced. And these are *not* nuanced people. They think we can just leave the Bush tax cuts alone and make up the difference by cutting PBS and foreign aid and some other waste around the edges. They really believe this bullshit.
I seriously think most kindergartners have a better grasp of budgetmental reality.
nellcote
OTSeriously, what the fuck happened to cspan/bookteevee. Today we get an hour of Irving Krystal (I know…he’s still alive?) and an hour and a half of Ann Coulter pimping her new book on liberal racism. WTF?
Roger Moore
I think Nate Silver would probably compare it to the attitude of traditional sports beat reporters to modern statistical (sabermetric) analysts. The reporters are used to the idea that insiders sources are the only reliable way of figuring things out, and they have the personal relationships and job position to give those inside sources to the public. It’s a nice job for them. They hate it when an outsider comes along and suggests that there are other sources of knowledge that not only don’t depend on insiders, but are actually more accurate than the insiders are. It’s a major threat to their chokehold on the flow of information.
The funny thing is that it’s much less of a threat to traditional reporters than they think. The new analysis is only good for some kinds of information; insider information is still useful for a lot of the reporter’s job. And the analysis isn’t nearly as complex as the analysts make it out to be. They spend a lot of time tweaking their models to get the last little bit of precision, but the basic ideas are fairly easy to understand. What it really means is that the reporters who are willing to learn the new methods are going to have a big advantage over the old school kind.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
From the twitter
PreservedKillick
@Anoniminous:
No, it’s entirely useful if you want to build a case for fake momentum.
It won’t help you actually, you know, win the presidency though.
Roger Moore
@beltane:
That and nobody on the right seems to have a man crush on him. If you can’t get a homoerotic rise out of the right wing, you have no future as a Republican presidential candidate.
PreservedKillick
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
And I bet that vote totals hit records.
You try to disenfranchise a group of people based on race and they figure it out, and you fail at your attempt to steal their vote, they are going to vote.
Quite probably against you.
beltane
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: There’s a report on DKos of long lines in Miami Beach and another Democratic-leaning area of Dade County though not quite a 5 hour wait. Another diary complained that in westen Florida the power was mysteriously cut off in a predominantly African-American polling place. The Republicans will only cease with their bullshit when they are forced to pay a price for it.
General Stuck
@Chris:
This is where the wingnut base, at least, departs from thinking logically about politics, especially elections. It is hard and uncomfortable to try and put yourself in their shoes. The only thing they covet is political power, because that is the only drug that can soothe their restless and constant fears about everything. And presidential power is the big syringe for that goal.
The entirety of their mental resources, meager as they be, are concentrated like a laser beam for the event that can bring them that victory, and its precious sense of control. And it should never be underestimated.
They don’t care about anything else, and are willing to get really bizarre if they think it will help them win. They know they have the perennial advantage with white skin in the white majority party, at least for the time being. But they are very good at casting their individual wills aside and subjugate their egos to win elections.
Mostly cause they have to, due to proposing nothing that will help average people, and hiding what they are for that would actually harm average people. They have to juggle all sorts of competing and contradicting memes lies and turn themselves into hungry animals, even more than they usually are.
The payoff for them then, when they do get power, is just relax and enjoy the Shock and Awe of it all. Their white voter base will then shrink for a few years, then be ready to be lied to all over again.
Raven
GO DAWGS!!!!!!!
gex
@PreservedKillick: Got into a debate with a “former Democrat” who called himself a fiscal conservative. The context was that he said religious right has taken over the GOP to which I said the GOP invited them in.
Yet he made the point that he used to be a Democrat, sometimes votes GOP for fiscal responsibility, and wants to take no credit for the culture war crap. His main sticking point was cutting social spending.
When asked for specifics, he said “everything needs to be looked at.” No matter how much I pressed him for details he had nothing other than “social spending” and “everything needs to be looked at.”
They just know it’s all wasteful. They know nothing else about it. I ended up pointing out that the people who talk like him are the people who invited the Southern Strategy and the Christian Coalition that he was so upset about and that maybe they were full of shit about social spending too.
It’s so maddening. They don’t look into anything. They don’t know anything. They just have talking points installed and they repeat them over and over. They’re right, they just can’t say why.
Calouste
The Village is all about who you know, not what you know. People who are about what you know, like Krugman and Silver are an existential threat to them.
PeakVT
@nellcote: Controversy attracts eyeballs?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@nellcote: Twas ever thus. I remember when Eric Alterman came out with “What Liberal Media?” (I believe was the title). I was watching their schedule to see when/if they would have him on, they finally did, once, and they paired it with a year old Coulter talk for ‘balance’. I used to really enjoy BookTV, but the right wing bias is completely out of control.
? Martin
@PreservedKillick:
Last night I was talking to my son and he asked about the spending/revenue problem. I told him to just forget all about the entitlement programs as they’re mostly paid by other dollars. Let’s just take military spending, as he knows Romney wants to increase. The current Defense budget works out to about $2,000 per person per year in this country. That’s about $7,000 per worker or about $8,000 per family of 4, so however you want to add it up, that’s the annual income tax bill we need to get per household.
At minimum wage, we would need to tax those workers at an effective rate of just under 50%, just to pay for Defense spending. Not marginal rate – we’d need a full $7K of their $14,700 annual paycheck.
At median wage for full time workers, we would need to tax them at an effective rate of 18%. Again, not marginal. With no deductions, that taxpayer today only pays $4,000. We’d need to raise middle class rates 70% for them to just cover the Defense budget. Throw in deductions and they don’t come anywhere near paying for Defense.
And if we’re overlooking corporate taxes, all corporate taxes in 2010 amounted to only ⅓ of the Defense budget. So if we applied 100% of their revenue to Defense, we’d still need to raise taxes on the middle class to just pay for Defense.
So, no, it’s entirely a revenue problem if nobody is willing to cut Defense.
max
@beltane: @DCLaw1: And Meat Loaf is the greatest rock star ever.
This has been a great election for people I didn’t have much use for in the first place proving that I was right not to have much use for them.
It’s “Al Gore is fat” all over again.
Silver is perfectly good guy with a slightly strange haircut. End of problem. This guy looks like he lives in the back of the Twinkie delivery truck.
How the fuck would you know? Did you administer an IQ test while he was asleep or something?
max
[‘Really?’]
nellcote
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
They used to be mostly niche history books and I learned interesting things but now they seem to have turned it over to the Conservative Book Club. It makes me sad and pissed off. I remember that Alterman book episode. It was on at 2 in the morning here.
Mr Zip
@agrippa: Sadly, the most likely thing to happen after Obama wins is one of them will blow up a federal building somewhere.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@nellcote: I wasn’t sure because I’ve just gotten out of the habit of even looking, but i was gonna say, they hardly even do history anymore.
bago
@Joel: a hell of a longwinded way of saying heuristic.
grandpa john
@PreservedKillick:
That has got to be somewhere in the list of top ten stupidist comments of all time.
if you are out of work, got no money coming in, can ‘t even afford food,shelter, or clothing, then you have a revenue problem
BGinCHI
I had a beer with Nate Silver one night at the California Clipper, which is a great bar in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood. Was waiting for some friends and he came in and sat down (this was right around the time of the last Prez election) and I was like, fuck, it’s Nate Silver. So I told him I liked his site and we chatted about politics and baseball then I went and hung out with my peeps.
He’s a dorky, unpretentious, whip-smart guy who went to the U of C and knows a lot about stats. And he talks about stats. There really isn’t any way to derail what he does except for playing schoolyard bully.
Hey GOP pundit dicks. I’ll go three rounds with any of you. Name the time and place. Come on, I’m only a little old English Professor.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
Remind them about what party did the last President belong to that balanced the budget, and how Gore was mocked for wanting to put surpluses from the social security trust fund into a lock box. But when Bush the Lesser got in in 2000, we had Hearings where the GOP invited Greenspan in to advocate tax cuts in case the Government paid off all the National debt and then starting buying private assets. Seriously, this actually happened.
gnomedad
Why would anyone spend reputation capital dissing someone with Nate Silver’s track record less than two weeks before the likelihood of being proved objectively and unmistakably wrong? I don’t get it.
PreservedKillick
@grandpa john:
It absolutely is, particularly when it is coupled with some noise about various irrelevant examples of government waste.
If someone thinks we have a spending problem, identify the spending you will cut. It’s as simple as that. If you can do so, and the math adds up, you are serious. And you will also talk about what taxes you will need to raise.
One of our political parties is actually having that dialog.
One is spewing bullshit.
If you want to believe in fairy tails, go with the bullshit spewers.
? Martin
@RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist:
Social Security owns ⅓ of our bonds. Another ⅓ is owned by US individuals and companies. The last ⅓ is owned by foreign governments. We’re mostly just loaning the money to our future, senior selves.
The Fed owns about $2T of our debt. China about $1T. Japan about $1T. UK about $300B. Apple Computer almost $100B. So, China is about 10x as scary as Apple.
PreservedKillick
The right response to this one is “do you shop at WalMart?”
Keith G
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I needed that laugh.
Linda
Fixed it for you. The truth is, qualifiable predictions can be measured and proved or disproved. THAT’S what pisses them off. The cratering of Iraq, for instance, meant that a lot of pundits looked stupid in a way that was impossible to explain away, because it happened too fast, and people remembered what the pundits said too clearly. In the same way, we can measure the performance of the U.S. economy against Great Britain, which went all in for austerity. Pundits in D.C. are not used to having the accountability of Mike and Mike on ESPN, whose game predictions can be held accountable as soon as the game is over. The village is not used to that.
Roger Moore
@? Martin:
Which explains Republican interest in behaving as if dipping into the Social Security trust fund is the same as bankrupting it. They want to default on the part of the debt we owe to ourselves so we won’t have to raise taxes on rich people to pay ourselves back.
Sm*t Cl*de
I’ve seen the picture of the Unskewed Polls guy at Tboggs and he is just about the last person on this planet who should be making disparaging comments about anyone’s appearance.
It makes sense that he should equate ‘masculinity’ with ‘obesity’.
Tyro
The fact that the comments in Dean Chambers’ article are uniformally hostile restores my faith in humanity just a little bit.
Democrat Partisan Asshole
@patrick II: Couldn’t let this go by without comment. That is the most obvious presentation of schizophrenia I’ve ever seen.
ETA: Wow, fuck blockquote. Word Press is more borked than usual tonight.
Democrat Partisan Asshole
@gex: Good friend of mine is a psych professor. She thinks that we crossed a line with television screen size – and is doing research to prove the theory – that has made brainwashing/neural programming/whatever you want to call it inevitable for those who are watching the giant screen. The idea being simply that the content is much harder to ignore, and that we’ll give it more creedence. I think she might be on to something.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Doubt he has a Facebook group like Nate’s of female fans saying “There is a 97.3 percent chance that Nate Silver is Totally My Boyfriend.”
Nate’s a nerd with groupies.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Doubt he has a Facebook group like Nate’s of female fans saying “There is a 97.3 percent chance that Nate Silver is Totally My Boyfriend.”
Nate’s a nerd with groupies.
Xecky Gilchrist
@? Martin: China is about 10x as scary as Apple.
But their advertising is nowhere near so smug and annoying.
ranchandsyrup
@SiubhanDuinne: Here you go, sister. pics
1badbaba3
@ranchandsyrup: Now, that’s a banana.
pseudonymous in nc
Shorter John Cassidy: statistics is hard, and my gut is rumbling.
Seriously, I know that probability requires a certain amount of mental effort to challenge a lot of baked-in human mis-intuition (Vegas casinos wouldn’t be able to comp your drinks otherwise) but if you have statistical data in the form of polls, you can’t treat that data — as so many political narrative reporters do — as some kind of fucking augury. If you want to tell stories without them being subject to analysis, buy a chicken in Ohio and read its entrails.
When somebody says “75/25? Well, I make Obama/Romney a 50/50 at best”, the only response required is “show your working.”
pseudonymous in nc
@gnomedad:
Because people are tuning out the bloviators on the bus? There has been an utter paucity of bona fide journalism during this campaign. You simply cannot conceive of something like the NYT’s long piece on the family finances of Wen Jiabao — which is very good stuff — being written about a presidential candidate.
As Calouste says, making a case that the narratives of momentum and confidence and whatever are just false poses an existential threat to campaign reporters.
Metrosexual Manichean Monster DougJ
@Rex Everything:
Thanks, I corrected some stuff.