What if they run again with Trump in 2024? — ssu

I seriously doubt he will have the energy in 4 years, but I imagine it would be a sequel to the circus we just survived.

Kanyé is going to run again in 2024. A Trump/Kanye ticket could be fun...

Either way, I don't see how the GOP can afford to keep Trump in any kind of serious play. He is and always has been a constant liability and source of stress/controversy. Now that he is no longer the president, they have less reason to part their cheeks. I suppose it might depend on how Trump's voters feel about things in a few years time...

Anecdotally, when I visited Texas, I noted two waitresses openly discussing their encounters with angels, and I don't mean the metaphorical kind.

Anecdotally, when I visited Texas, I noted two waitresses openly discussing their encounters with angels, and I don't mean the metaphorical kind. — Baden

I bet the casanovas who tried that line are laughing their asses off right now.

"Hello ladies, ever lain with an angel of the Lord? :wink:"

Why din' I think of that?? :cry:

Republican officials tried to convince Pennsylvania Trump supporters to cast illegal ballots after Election Day, report says

You could only pass for a leprachaun. Which I hear works too. ;)

What if they run again with Trump in 2024? — ssu

The establishment would probably want Trump to go away and as for the voters, I dunno really. They may drop him like they did Roy Moore in Alabama. Ideally Trump would still hold on to a good chunk of the GOP base but not all of it, fracturing it's unity in the next election.

:lol:



The GOP strategy from the start has been to accuse the other side of election fraud while trying to cheat their way to victory.

Gaslight, Obstruct, Project. The Republican motto.

Real feels (still provisional).

Also, what an utter surprise that utter fucking trash runs in the Harris bloodline.

Now is the moment for the American people to begin plotting a viable third party for 2024, to finally oust the two parties that have been ruining the country for decades. But it won't happen, because Americans are as dumb as they come...keep doing the same thing and wonder why everything sucks, idiots.

But it won't happen, because Americans are as dumb as they come...keep doing the same thing and wonder why everything sucks, idiots. — Merkwurdichliebe

Great movie. Don't think it was ever released in US

I expected to cringe but that actually make me smile and chuckle a little.

Just woke up to Biden taking the lead in PA and the presidency and now I can sleep for the first time in 4 years. — Mr Bee

You should keep sleeping, you do not want to see what's coming. :scream:

The notion of an emergent 3rd party in the US is something of a pipe dream I'm afraid. Strategically, the way forward is the expropriation of the democratic party appartus from under their own cowardly and oblivious noses. With the exception of the pathetic labour protection vote in California - pushed by a concerted corporate campaign with millions at its disposal - progressive politics under the democratic flag in fact had a pretty good time this week, at local and state levels. This article details things pretty well:

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/downballot-socialist-elected-election-day-dsa

The notion of an emergent 3rd party in the US is something of a pipe dream I'm afraid. — StreetlightX

Absolutely, I agree.

But, there needs to be a vote of no confidence in the current system, and that begins by not voting for the very parties that comprise it. The only real effective solution, for obvious reasons, seems to be something new and truly oppositional, not some rehash of the same old...Hardly likely though.

the way forward is the expropriation of the democratic party appartus from under their own cowardly and oblivious noses. — StreetlightX

By who? definitely not from within. That seems like even more of a pipe dream.

progressive politics under the democratic flag in fact had a pretty good time this week, at local and state levels. — StreetlightX

I am only talking about the most obvious solution for reforming the highest levels. And if the state and local levels are of concern, a third party could easily carry forth a progressive agenda as well as the dems.

The solution is so simple, yet impossible : America needs to dump the two parties, definitely at the higher levels, and probably at the mid and lower levels in order to really make it stick.

I think the "permanent campaign mode" is one of the bigger problems - along with unlimited money. Read recently there are laws/restrictions on this in Europe - perhaps others here can comment - but in the US, by now the next campaign starts the day after inauguration day (or sooner?) - and the bid for 2024 is perhaps already underway. This seems to me to favor those that can afford such a thing.

I think the "permanent campaign mode" is one of the bigger problems - along with unlimited money. Read recently there are laws/restrictions on this in Europe - perhaps others here can comment - but in the US, by now the next campaign starts the day after inauguration day (or sooner?) - and the bid for 2024 is perhaps already underway. This seems to me to favor those that can afford such a thing. — Kevin

I would say those are the problems, along with others, like the fact that the American people are not truly represented by either party. Of course all these problems are interrelated and are integral components to a deeply embedded system. I see only two realistic strategies, either 1) to overtake the system from within by whatever means possible and make changes via the already existing mechanisms, which means dumping the two, or 2) complete state revolution.

I think the "permanent campaign mode" is one of the bigger problems - along with unlimited money. Read recently there are laws/restrictions on this in Europe - perhaps others here can comment - but in the US, by now the next campaign starts the day after inauguration day (or sooner?) - and the bid for 2024 is perhaps already underway. This seems to me to favor those that can afford such a thing. — Kevin

Interestingly enough, since 2016, money has become less important. Because it is now so easy to reach an audience, it seems like the new currency has become attention rather than money.

What are the chances of Alaska flipping? And why hasn't NC been called? The summary I saw has 70,000 votes in favour of Trump and less than 50,000 outstanding ballots.

What are the chances of Alaska flipping? And why hasn't NC been called? The summary I saw has 70,000 votes in favour of Trump and less than 50,000 outstanding ballots. — Benkei

Ballots can arrive in NC until Nov. 12. There are about 130k ballots which could theoretically be on their way, though it is almost certainly much fewer.

I'd like to take a moment to comment on Benford's law as applied to the election. Of the proposed evidence circulating to indicate election fraud this "seems to be" the best, if true, in that it is not anecdotal.

I should note, that in a large dataset it it's easy to cherry pick lot's of patterns and seem to "prove" something. Absent an actual statistician doing a proper analysis of the whole dataset, with criticism from other statisticians, one should not put any stock in random graphs on the internet. That is to say, it's completely uncertain if there even is any statistical evidence of this kind at the moment. I.e. such graphs seem like good evidence but maybe nothing.

However, even if there are deviations from Benford's law, it's good "evidence" only in these that it's relevant to look at, it is not evidence in the sense of offering definitive proof. A real statistical analysis may conclude the particular conditions of this particular election should not be expected to conform to Brenfords law.

Elections have lot's of variation in voter distribution and how votes are counted, and it is easy to contrive election models that won't follow Brenford's law. For instance, you could run an election by dividing people into groups of 2, and if they report a 0 if they vote differently, a 1 for both voting candidate A and a 2 for both voting candidate B, then these are all collected into a single list. Obviously, the numbers in this list would not follow a Brenford distribution from 1 to 9, as the list will only include 0, 1, and 3. Now, we may assume it will at least follow something analogous such as there being more 0's than 1's and 2's, more ties than consensus for one candidate, but this is also obviously easy to contrive a situation where this wouldn't hold, such as the election being a landslide for one candidate or then, even in a close nearly 50-50 race that supporters are extremely regional and paired regionally, in which case we expect very little ties and to mostly see 1 and 2 in our list.

We may think from this that "well, we can at least know what kind of distribution of digits to expect form what kind of election result", but this doesn't work because we don't know the election result ahead of time! The whole point of the election is that we need to run the election know what the result of an election is going to be. Therefore, we cannot simply compare the statistical distributions of digits or other data that appear in the election and compare it to our expected election result, because that's what we don't know! No mathematical theorem is possible along these lines. The best that can be done is to make an estimate based on polling, but this is far from some sort of mathematical proof. Furthermore, polling methods are calibrated against actual election results and so fraud over time will simply calibrate polling methods to take into account the fraud and therefore simply confirm a fraudulent election rather than provide a tool of election fraud.

To make matters worse, there is also no theorem that if a numerical statistical expectation actually does hold for one candidate in one election that it therefore must, whatever it is, hold for other candidates. If there was such a theorem, then it would be helpful in the event that one candidate deviated in statistical distribution of counts from the other candidates. The obvious such model difference relevant to the 2020 elections is a large quantity of mail-in ballots for one candidate than another. If the post office groups these ballots into the same or similar quantities (i.e. they are grouped into stacks and boxes of exact or similar quantity of ballots) and delivers them with some pattern (1 or 5 or 10 boxes at a time), this can radically change the numerical distribution of digits and other statistical effects. Obviously, do not read this to mean the post office does such a thing, only that there's potential for significant differences with statistics of in-person voting.

For completeness, we can easily generate a theorem that even if we prove some epxected numerical statistical distribution of an election given how votes are counted, it is trivial that it is possible to commit election fraud while respecting this distribution. Simply inverting all of the votes of Candidate A with candidate B will have the exact same statistical result. Of course, there maybe other significant problems with such a fraud strategy in that it will completely invert regions strongly supporting one candidate with astronomically high implausibility, even with all the limitations of polling science, nevertheless we know there can exist no theorem that reliably identifies election fraud based on digit distribution in itself.

Unfortunately, simply being able to contrive situations that violate some intuitive statistical expectation, doesn't mean the US election is such a situation that would deviate from Brenford's law or some analogous numerical pattern. It just means a lot of analytical work would be required to evaluate either way.

Bringing us to this terrible paper, "Benford’s Law and the Detection of Election Fraud", published in Cambridge Political Analysis, claiming Benford type analysis can simply be ignored in the case of elections; that this is a valid "inference" in their language.

On first reading I was completely shocked real mathematician's that actually exist could actually write such a paper, but as far as I can tell the authors are not mathematicians of any kind but social scientists, which the mathematical community has already prove are mathematically illiterate and nearly a majority of their statistical claims are erroneous (there's actually a paper about this). So, all is as it should be.

The mistakes the paper makes is first of all confounding the power of Brenfords law to detect election fraud if it exist with the the appearance of a Brenford law violation indicating election fraud. That competent fraudsters can potentially defeat Brenford's law is not the same as incompetent fraudsters being revealed by Brenford law violations.

Their "simulation" is simply a joke, which I can explain in more detail if that's the case.

What's great about shitty paper's is that they often conclude with "this paper is complete garbage and we haven't proven anyways anyways" since to get into academics one often either has enough competence to hedge one's bets and have the intuition that it's a good idea to, following a series of strong statements, admit maybe one has established absolutely nothing so that if one's called out by a comptetent analysis one can say "yep, that's why I said more research and analysis is needed at the end of the paper", or then is so weak intellectually that, even if the authors are convinced by their conclusion, that some advisor forces them to put in reasonable language that indicates they've accomplished nothing.

These passages are often comically obtuse, presumably due to an attempt to maintain some level of self-respect and hold the double belief of doing both good work and completely meaningless work at the same time.

In this case, the paper literally concludes:

Thus, even if there are those who reject the inference drawn from our analysis—that Benford’s Law is irrelevant to assessing an election’s conformity with good democratic practice and that effort should be directed elsewhere in the search for forensic indicators—we cannot escape the conclusion that any future development of that Law’s application to elections must necessarily identify likely intervening variables with their impact on digit distributions adjusted in a theoretically proscribed way. — shitty paper

Now is the moment for the American people to begin plotting a viable third party for 2024, to finally oust the two parties that have been ruining the country for decades. But it won't happen, because Americans are as dumb as they come...keep doing the same thing and wonder why everything sucks, idiots. — Merkwurdichliebe

The duopoly has found the perfect formula:

1) Nominate Presidential candidates "Bad" and "Even Worse"
2) A third party on the ballot will automatically mean that the "Even Worse" will win, and hence Americans won't dare to vote the third party or will be accused to be the reason why candidate "Even Worse" won.
3) Depict the House of Representatives and the Senate being meaningless and focus on the Presidency.
4) And of course, portray the "primary elections" as the way how people can influence the "democratic process" of choosing the President and not by creating new political parties, which would then battle the duopoly.
5) Discourage grass roots movements that would start competing at the municipal / city / state level with the duopoly.

Duopoly rules the US.

Stephen Colbert will have to find a new line of work, presumably. — StreetlightX

Even Stephen Colbert can't laugh at Trump anymore after his last press conference — Stephen Colbert Reacts to Trump's Thursday Election Presser (NowThis News, 3m:3s youtube, Nov 2020)

Cnn just called it in favour of Biden.

The New York Times also. I guess Breitbart will call it next. :razz:

It's done.

Fox are in too.