The game theory checks out, I'd say. I think this model would imply that if Democrats slander Trump more, it actually makes the costly signal more revealing of being a conservative type, perversely increasing support for Trump (if Trump's popularity rises when he is slandered more, you could test that empirically to support the model). But then, that could be a good thing for Democrats because it means Republicans are wasting more resources on this peacock-feather signal. In the meantime, though, this has costs for everyone if American leadership goes to hell because more Republicans are attracted to Donald Trump—a country locked in a dangerous game-theoretic trap. I wonder where it ends up.
An extremely interesting, and no doubt largely very accurate, take on the Trump phenomenon. It's a shame such a small percentage of the human race can not be as objective as you about such things, but simply latches on to something for not-understood and instinctive/emotional reasons. That must cause a lot of subconscious anguish in various quarters, quite apart from the cost of divided families etc. People who are, say, atheists who wouldn't be caught dead supporting the policies and attitudes of the Democrats, but squirm under the pro-evangelical noises; people who perhaps don't like Elon Musk but want to be on the Trump side. (Musk is of course a significant and complex player in this game, and the simple-minded seem to want to stick an "oligarch" label on him and just disapprove and make cynical comments about him making money, as if he needed to, and as if any actual evidence of saving, shall we say, misdirected taxpayer dollars, was not openly shared with the press. And as if he weren't the most important optimistic visionary the planet has had for a long time.) It could be a bit worrying longer-term, in that first America needs to be concerned if the Democrats stick their heads in the sand and disappear down an ultimately futile woke rabbit hole, seeming like useless candidates for ever leading a strong and intelligent opposition with a view to winning an election, and second, it's always dangerous to have a personality cult - there would be no point in the Republicans falling to bits if Trump were to die, although at least this time there seems to be a mixed but reasonable team around him to guide things forward anyway. It was an old curse, wasn't it, "May you live in interesting times."!
Thanks Graham. I was just kidding about my own objectivity. I should learn to be more obvious with my sarcasm.
I have mixed feelings about Musk. I don't care about his money and I appreciate his (sort of) defense of free speech on Twitter, etc. I don't think DOGE will meaningfully impact gov spending, but that's only because most gov spending is untouchable by DOGE (e.g., social security).
I do care that Musk blatantly lied about being good at a video game for internet clout, then publicly trashed the guy who pointed this out to everyone (Charlie has a nice discussion of this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ui4h0J1mIQ ). That may seem trivial, but IMO lying about something like that without any prompting is indicative of serious ego/narcissism. Nobody cares whether Musk was good at the game. He just made up this fake story about him playing it for... internet clout? Very strange. Also, his treatment of substack (and other minor competitors) on Twitter was and is extremely petty.
Okay. He's got good reason for ego, though, being extremely intelligent and successful, so that wouldn't be misplaced regard for himself. I expect him to be complicated, and I'll cut him some slack for having been seriously abused as a child by his father. Very few people who go through that end up having their drives and instincts integrated at a high level, but the suffering reverberates throughout their life. Look at Marilyn Monroe, as one fascinating example among many. I appreciate you have your own past complications, shall we say, and I am just grateful I was never subject to any of that, in a relatively normal family background. Not that I'm claiming it didn't take me over half a century to figure out some aspects of my own psychology that I hadn't appreciated needed integrating and maturing. And I'm afraid I'm still nowhere near sage or guru, and I'm certainly not worth as much to the world as Elon Musk is, faults and imperfections notwithstanding. Meanwhile I'll just sit here glorying in my virtue-signalling humility!! You may start a fan club for me, but I'll modestly disavow it!
"Okay. He's got good reason for ego, though, being extremely intelligent and successful, so that wouldn't be misplaced regard for himself."
I know! That's why it's so weird and unnecessary for him to lie about a video game, then publicly trash the person who pointed out that he clearly lied. There's just no reason for it. If anyone should be secure enough to not lie about their accomplishments, it's Elon Musk. But he does it anyways.
I have no problem being judgmental and virtue-signally about liars. I hate lies and liars. If that makes me a virtue-signaler I don't really care. It's not like I can choose to not have an instinctual disdain for people who have no regard for the truth.
Good, now factor in the magnitude, directionality & consequentiality (honestly more like an equation, magnitude + directionality = consequentiality (subjectively-speaking)) of lies and you’ll be on decent footing to resolve what you’ve been grappling with
Hi Brett, putting aside the issue of the 2020 election (which I believe there's significant evidence that it was stolen), and putting aside claims of objectivity (we are all wildly subjective in our approaches even if the goal is to get as close to objectivity as possible), I think there are basically two groups of core Trump supporters: (1) far-right economic and white nationalist populists and (2) cult-of-personality types. The latter is based upon his charisma and irreverence so his scandals don't matter to them, the former is based on the hollowing out of the white middle class over the past number of decades (which continues to get worse), seeing it as a protest vote against the system and the RINOs, so his scandals also don't matter to them. I agree with you that the evangelical right accepting a lying, cheating, twice-divorced, formerly-abortion-loving Trump as their standard bearer signals the death knell of the social conservative moment, and I also believe that Trump has and continues to throw his supporters under the bus for personal financial gain (and for other reasons)...
"putting aside claims of objectivity (we are all wildly subjective in our approaches even if the goal is to get as close to objectivity as possible)"
I was being facetious about my own objectivity.
If you have evidence of coordinated, widespread voter fraud I'd be happy to take a look at it. There's a reason that even so many Republicans refused to go along with that particular lie. Trump had been claiming the election would be stolen for ~6 months before the election, and doing so with precisely the same amount of evidence he had after the election (zero). He did what he could to stay in office, and some people were corrupt or gullible enough to go along with it.
Hi Brett, sure. The argument for 2020 voter fraud is multi-faceted, circumstantial and there isn't a smoking gun, but I will point to the following:
- Trump won every bellwether county except one. The bellwether counties are those that historically predicted who would win the election. From 1980 to 2016, 19 counties voted for the winner of the presidential election every single time. The most impressive of those was Valencia County, New Mexico, which voted for the victor in every presidential election from 1952 to 2016. But in 2020, 18 of these 19 “bellwether counties” voted for Donald Trump. Just one — Clallam County, Washington — voted for Joe Biden. Trump won Florida by 3.5% versus having won it by a razor thin margin in 2016, as an example.
- But then deep in the night multiple critical swing states stopped counting results for a period of about four hours. At hearings on 2020 election irregularities in Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, many GOP poll observers testified about being harassed, blocked, or even removed from the counting facilities, and many witnessed irregular and suspicious activities. There was a claim of a burst water pipe at a ballot processing site in Georgia’s Fulton County, where Republican election observers had to leave the site while Democrat vote counters stayed behind and boarded up the windows - it later turned out that there was no broken water pipe.
- According to this now defunct but solid “elections irregularity” website (https://archive.ph/HKHPI) , Biden received nearly 12 million more votes than President Obama did in 2008, yet he had fewer votes than Obama in 70.7% of counties (2,228 out of 3,152). Additionally Republican House candidates won 27 out of the 27 races that were considered “toss-ups” by the New York Times, and it is extremely rare for an incumbent president to win seats in the house and lose re-election. No presidential incumbent in the past 100 years has increased his vote and lost re-election. No incumbent that has won over 75% of the primary vote (Trump received 94%) has ever lost re-election. Ben Turner, a fraud analyst also found that there was an average 2-3% shift for Biden in counties that used Dominion electronic voting software. There are more details here: https://archive.ph/lnQf4. There was also massive irregularities with mail-in voting.
Putting together this unusual data, along with ubiquitous nationwide vote-by-mail institutionalized under the pretext of COVID, standardized ballot harvesting, and unusual electronic voting machine activity, and I think the picture points pretty convincingly to massive election fraud.
"From 1980 to 2016, 19 counties voted for the winner of the presidential election every single time."
There are 3,200+ counties in the United States. Voting for the winner is a coin flip. You are likely to get 8 coin flips right in a row 1/256 times. With 3,200 counties, 19 getting 8 presidents right is mostly statistical noise. Meaningless.
"many GOP poll observers testified about being harassed, blocked, or even removed from the counting facilities, and many witnessed irregular and suspicious activities."
How many? Are the testimonies compiled anywhere? How many of them testified in the multiple court cases about the issue? Everyone has a camera in their pocket. Do we have video evidence of this forced removal or suspicious activity? Links would be great, I'm genuinely interested in where this evidence is compiled.
"Biden received nearly 12 million more votes than President Obama did in 2008, yet he had fewer votes than Obama in 70.7% of counties (2,228 out of 3,152)."
This election was more polarized by big vs. little counties (rural vs. urban) than Obama's was, so a few large counties that were overwhelmingly pro-Biden explains this.
"I think the picture points pretty convincingly to massive election fraud."
In a country of 300+ million, there is no hard evidence of a widespread conspiracy to commit voter fraud. Respectfully, I believe you are being taken in by bad statistics and anecdotes.
The game theory checks out, I'd say. I think this model would imply that if Democrats slander Trump more, it actually makes the costly signal more revealing of being a conservative type, perversely increasing support for Trump (if Trump's popularity rises when he is slandered more, you could test that empirically to support the model). But then, that could be a good thing for Democrats because it means Republicans are wasting more resources on this peacock-feather signal. In the meantime, though, this has costs for everyone if American leadership goes to hell because more Republicans are attracted to Donald Trump—a country locked in a dangerous game-theoretic trap. I wonder where it ends up.
An extremely interesting, and no doubt largely very accurate, take on the Trump phenomenon. It's a shame such a small percentage of the human race can not be as objective as you about such things, but simply latches on to something for not-understood and instinctive/emotional reasons. That must cause a lot of subconscious anguish in various quarters, quite apart from the cost of divided families etc. People who are, say, atheists who wouldn't be caught dead supporting the policies and attitudes of the Democrats, but squirm under the pro-evangelical noises; people who perhaps don't like Elon Musk but want to be on the Trump side. (Musk is of course a significant and complex player in this game, and the simple-minded seem to want to stick an "oligarch" label on him and just disapprove and make cynical comments about him making money, as if he needed to, and as if any actual evidence of saving, shall we say, misdirected taxpayer dollars, was not openly shared with the press. And as if he weren't the most important optimistic visionary the planet has had for a long time.) It could be a bit worrying longer-term, in that first America needs to be concerned if the Democrats stick their heads in the sand and disappear down an ultimately futile woke rabbit hole, seeming like useless candidates for ever leading a strong and intelligent opposition with a view to winning an election, and second, it's always dangerous to have a personality cult - there would be no point in the Republicans falling to bits if Trump were to die, although at least this time there seems to be a mixed but reasonable team around him to guide things forward anyway. It was an old curse, wasn't it, "May you live in interesting times."!
Thanks Graham. I was just kidding about my own objectivity. I should learn to be more obvious with my sarcasm.
I have mixed feelings about Musk. I don't care about his money and I appreciate his (sort of) defense of free speech on Twitter, etc. I don't think DOGE will meaningfully impact gov spending, but that's only because most gov spending is untouchable by DOGE (e.g., social security).
I do care that Musk blatantly lied about being good at a video game for internet clout, then publicly trashed the guy who pointed this out to everyone (Charlie has a nice discussion of this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ui4h0J1mIQ ). That may seem trivial, but IMO lying about something like that without any prompting is indicative of serious ego/narcissism. Nobody cares whether Musk was good at the game. He just made up this fake story about him playing it for... internet clout? Very strange. Also, his treatment of substack (and other minor competitors) on Twitter was and is extremely petty.
Okay. He's got good reason for ego, though, being extremely intelligent and successful, so that wouldn't be misplaced regard for himself. I expect him to be complicated, and I'll cut him some slack for having been seriously abused as a child by his father. Very few people who go through that end up having their drives and instincts integrated at a high level, but the suffering reverberates throughout their life. Look at Marilyn Monroe, as one fascinating example among many. I appreciate you have your own past complications, shall we say, and I am just grateful I was never subject to any of that, in a relatively normal family background. Not that I'm claiming it didn't take me over half a century to figure out some aspects of my own psychology that I hadn't appreciated needed integrating and maturing. And I'm afraid I'm still nowhere near sage or guru, and I'm certainly not worth as much to the world as Elon Musk is, faults and imperfections notwithstanding. Meanwhile I'll just sit here glorying in my virtue-signalling humility!! You may start a fan club for me, but I'll modestly disavow it!
"Okay. He's got good reason for ego, though, being extremely intelligent and successful, so that wouldn't be misplaced regard for himself."
I know! That's why it's so weird and unnecessary for him to lie about a video game, then publicly trash the person who pointed out that he clearly lied. There's just no reason for it. If anyone should be secure enough to not lie about their accomplishments, it's Elon Musk. But he does it anyways.
I have no problem being judgmental and virtue-signally about liars. I hate lies and liars. If that makes me a virtue-signaler I don't really care. It's not like I can choose to not have an instinctual disdain for people who have no regard for the truth.
Good, now factor in the magnitude, directionality & consequentiality (honestly more like an equation, magnitude + directionality = consequentiality (subjectively-speaking)) of lies and you’ll be on decent footing to resolve what you’ve been grappling with
Hi Brett, putting aside the issue of the 2020 election (which I believe there's significant evidence that it was stolen), and putting aside claims of objectivity (we are all wildly subjective in our approaches even if the goal is to get as close to objectivity as possible), I think there are basically two groups of core Trump supporters: (1) far-right economic and white nationalist populists and (2) cult-of-personality types. The latter is based upon his charisma and irreverence so his scandals don't matter to them, the former is based on the hollowing out of the white middle class over the past number of decades (which continues to get worse), seeing it as a protest vote against the system and the RINOs, so his scandals also don't matter to them. I agree with you that the evangelical right accepting a lying, cheating, twice-divorced, formerly-abortion-loving Trump as their standard bearer signals the death knell of the social conservative moment, and I also believe that Trump has and continues to throw his supporters under the bus for personal financial gain (and for other reasons)...
"putting aside claims of objectivity (we are all wildly subjective in our approaches even if the goal is to get as close to objectivity as possible)"
I was being facetious about my own objectivity.
If you have evidence of coordinated, widespread voter fraud I'd be happy to take a look at it. There's a reason that even so many Republicans refused to go along with that particular lie. Trump had been claiming the election would be stolen for ~6 months before the election, and doing so with precisely the same amount of evidence he had after the election (zero). He did what he could to stay in office, and some people were corrupt or gullible enough to go along with it.
Hi Brett, sure. The argument for 2020 voter fraud is multi-faceted, circumstantial and there isn't a smoking gun, but I will point to the following:
- Trump won every bellwether county except one. The bellwether counties are those that historically predicted who would win the election. From 1980 to 2016, 19 counties voted for the winner of the presidential election every single time. The most impressive of those was Valencia County, New Mexico, which voted for the victor in every presidential election from 1952 to 2016. But in 2020, 18 of these 19 “bellwether counties” voted for Donald Trump. Just one — Clallam County, Washington — voted for Joe Biden. Trump won Florida by 3.5% versus having won it by a razor thin margin in 2016, as an example.
- But then deep in the night multiple critical swing states stopped counting results for a period of about four hours. At hearings on 2020 election irregularities in Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, many GOP poll observers testified about being harassed, blocked, or even removed from the counting facilities, and many witnessed irregular and suspicious activities. There was a claim of a burst water pipe at a ballot processing site in Georgia’s Fulton County, where Republican election observers had to leave the site while Democrat vote counters stayed behind and boarded up the windows - it later turned out that there was no broken water pipe.
- After a long delay, votes in these critical states started up again, but the results were entirely different from what came previously. This came to be known as the infamous hockey stick graph: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F58643a21-5749-4a98-b14b-bd4f12661fe6_1142x536.jpeg
- According to this now defunct but solid “elections irregularity” website (https://archive.ph/HKHPI) , Biden received nearly 12 million more votes than President Obama did in 2008, yet he had fewer votes than Obama in 70.7% of counties (2,228 out of 3,152). Additionally Republican House candidates won 27 out of the 27 races that were considered “toss-ups” by the New York Times, and it is extremely rare for an incumbent president to win seats in the house and lose re-election. No presidential incumbent in the past 100 years has increased his vote and lost re-election. No incumbent that has won over 75% of the primary vote (Trump received 94%) has ever lost re-election. Ben Turner, a fraud analyst also found that there was an average 2-3% shift for Biden in counties that used Dominion electronic voting software. There are more details here: https://archive.ph/lnQf4. There was also massive irregularities with mail-in voting.
Putting together this unusual data, along with ubiquitous nationwide vote-by-mail institutionalized under the pretext of COVID, standardized ballot harvesting, and unusual electronic voting machine activity, and I think the picture points pretty convincingly to massive election fraud.
"From 1980 to 2016, 19 counties voted for the winner of the presidential election every single time."
There are 3,200+ counties in the United States. Voting for the winner is a coin flip. You are likely to get 8 coin flips right in a row 1/256 times. With 3,200 counties, 19 getting 8 presidents right is mostly statistical noise. Meaningless.
"many GOP poll observers testified about being harassed, blocked, or even removed from the counting facilities, and many witnessed irregular and suspicious activities."
How many? Are the testimonies compiled anywhere? How many of them testified in the multiple court cases about the issue? Everyone has a camera in their pocket. Do we have video evidence of this forced removal or suspicious activity? Links would be great, I'm genuinely interested in where this evidence is compiled.
"Biden received nearly 12 million more votes than President Obama did in 2008, yet he had fewer votes than Obama in 70.7% of counties (2,228 out of 3,152)."
This election was more polarized by big vs. little counties (rural vs. urban) than Obama's was, so a few large counties that were overwhelmingly pro-Biden explains this.
"I think the picture points pretty convincingly to massive election fraud."
In a country of 300+ million, there is no hard evidence of a widespread conspiracy to commit voter fraud. Respectfully, I believe you are being taken in by bad statistics and anecdotes.