To paraphrase the Beatles “they get high with a little help from their friends”

This sounds a lot like conversations with my folks.

Half of America seems to think so. And whether we like it or not, we live in a pluralistic society.

What would you say are the big three priorities for either side?

I’d be really careful with these polls. The one from Zeteo has fewer than 400 respondents per state, has statistical error ranges of ± 5% and they don’t really share their methodology. Those results are pretty different than most I’ve seen, which makes me think this is sort of like Rasmussen, which is a pollster in the technical sense but tends to show Republicans doing 10 to 15% than reality, and that’s when they have thousands of respondents. The other one is an online poll which should immediately raise red flags, by a pollster who gets fairly low marks from 538, a polling aggregator which has proven itself over the years.

I’d also argue the stats on the second one seem a little cherry picked/misleading. Nate Silver put it quite well, “It’s true that the notion of a ceasefire is possible. But this is a bit like asking people whether they prefer war or peace; the support erodes once you start to dictate terms… By an overwhelming 64-13 majority, Americans support a ceasefire in Gaza. But by a 44-28 plurality, Americans oppose a ceasefire if Hamas ‘does not release its remaining hostages to Israel’, according to the same poll” It’s a little odd to have such a high percentage of folks saying Gaza is the top priority for them when it generally polls at one of the lowest issues (15th out of 16 polled in the spring)

(Public reporting indicates Hamas has refused release of all hostages as part of a ceasefire without some pretty unrealistic counter offers, e.g., full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.)

Oh, are you not voting or voting for trump? Because that’d make what you’re saying true.

I wonder what compromises we’d be willing to make with the right…

Admittedly, 538 was pretty good about showing their work after. While individual events suffer from the unfalsifiability issue, 538 when Silver was around, did pretty good “how did we do for individual races/states” and compared their given odds to the actual results.

Silver made a prediction. That’s the deliverable.

I see what you’re not getting! You are confusing giving the odds with making a prediction and those are very different.

Let’s go back to the coin flips, maybe it’ll make things more clear.

I or Silver might point out there’s a 75% chance anything besides two heads in a row happening (which is accurate.) If, as will happen 1/4 times, two heads in a row does happen, does that somehow mean the odds I gave were wrong?

Same with Silver and the 2016 election.

You’re conflating things.

Your model itself can be wrong, absolutely.

But for the person above to say Silver got something wrong because a lower probability event happened is a little silly. It’d be like flipping a coin heads side up twice in a row and saying you’ve disproved statistics because heads twice in a row should only happen 1/4 times.

I think the “oh, fuck, that was an invitation!” moment several minutes/hours after the fact is one of the most universal moments.

“Hey! Do you want to watch division 7 soccer? They have a woman on the team!”

Hardly inspirational to girls everywhere. Whereas whenever I’ve caught the Canadian women’s soccer team, it’s usually at a pretty full arena with lots of girls teams there stoked to watch. I would never take that away from them.

But it does kind of diminish the women’s sports.

Consider say, the 100 meter sprint. The winning women’s times at the Olympics were all so far behind the men that literally none of the winning times would have even qualified to be at the Olympics! (Mens min qualifying time is under 10 seconds, Alfred won gold at 10.72 seconds, Jefferson took bronze at 10.92.) At the other end of the scale, for the 10,000 meter race, the last placing male ran it in just over 29 minutes which was 5 seconds faster than the Olympic women’s record for the same distance and was a full minute and a half faster than the gold winning woman.

Similarly for a lot of team sports you’d be relegating teams with women on them to a much lower league because at the top of the table, raw physical strength plays a role.

Splitting up by sex means we can watch and appreciate the best women play their sport at the highest level and celebrate them. Or almost every Olympic sport would just be guy guy guy.

“Learn? From our moments of failure? I think you overestimate our audience!”

Ehhhhhh, I don’t really buy these arguments.

If sweatshops had hit the Zeitgeist or social media with half the fervor of Palestine (except for the couple of weeks after another factory collapse/fire) we’d see some change.

This nonsense of “I’m too poor to buy ethical” while non ethical nonsense but stupidly priced shit isn’t just common but is shown as aspirational? It just doesn’t fly.

Which is more conscious of being lambasted on social media, the US government or say, businesses whose entire business model revolves around cool young people?

As one friend put it, “capitalism is still the best way of matching human desires with products, we just don’t give a damn how those products are made.”

http://www.worldvision.ca/stories/child-protection/child-labour-facts-and-how-to-help

I get that Palestine is trendy but most of us are super complicit in a much larger abuse.

The key difference as far as I can tell is that one would require us to make individual sacrifices while the other involves complicated geopolitics and requires zero personal effort to feel like we are “helping.” Plus, the latter is trendy whereas admitting and talking about how we are morally culpable in one of the worst human rights abuses ever, well, that’s just a buzzkill.

Are we talking about the kids who make our clothes, mine the minerals for our phones or harvest the cocoa for our Halloween candy?

Anything that makes housing affordable would also remove a significant amount of wealth from the elderly, who outvote and (I think) out donate other demographic groups.

Pretty hard thing to do politically.

I dunno, I think especially in older generations, the earnest conversation is something to be avoided at all costs. For my dad, that’s just how he was raised and I think his worst nightmare would be talking about feelings or something.

So take that and then put a hobby/passion that clearly means a lot to your folks and yeah, those can really combine in unfortunate ways.

Personally, when we’re not talking politics (my parents’ version of sports) I will sometimes throw more serious or interesting questions at mom (as said, dad hates that so I don’t push) and sometimes get interesting answers. It’s effort and mostly a one way street but I try to remember they’re not from a super healthy emotional era and even if they might at times be open to it, it does not come naturally to them (or me if I’m being honest.)

Don’t know if that early morning ramble helps but I hope it does.

Poll showing Harris winning: c/politics needs this!

Pot showing Harris behind anywhere: get this fascist garbage out of c/politics!