Why are we surprised by this turnout?
Nov. 10th, 2016 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteDo we blame this surprise on a "prestige" vote? On people being too mortified to speak their preference for Trump in public, and then going out and voting for him anyway? Or is there something else going on?
Last I checked, Hillary won the popular vote by a mere 200,000. That's about 0.3% of the total votes cast, and about 0.15% of the voting-eligible population. That's barely even a rounding error. (Also enough to throw Pennsylvania in the other direction. If that had happened, we would still be counting votes right now.)
That is very sobering. We can confidently say that for every four people in the country, one cared enough to vote for Trump, one cared enough to vote for HRC, and the other two couldn't be arsed to do either.
On the other hand, why would we expect anything else? This is how it's turned out - with only a slightly larger rounding error - for the past four elections, back to 1996 and 1992, when Ross Perot threw a gigantic wrench into the Republican works both times.
So really, this outcome is just another instance of a regular pattern. The real question is not "why didn't we see this coming", ... it's "why did we ever expect anything else?"
A "prestige" vote is too self-centered of a theory. It carries the tacit assumption that the media we (democrats, in my social circle) have been consuming is the only collective media feed in town. We didn't hear about these people through our channels, therefore they were silent? I think it's more likely that the channels have become more and more balkanized, inviting us to accept a more and more distorted view of what "the country" thinks.
"But how can that be?" you ask. "Everyone hated Trump, everywhere I looked! Especially the media!"
How often these days do you - how often does anyone - come across a piece of news because of the actions of a journalist, or the actions of a journalism-focused apparatus like the county newspaper that my father would spread across the table a few times a week? ... And how often do we come across it because it was handed to us in a Facebook feed, or a comment thread, or a tweet, or a text message, or an email, or a search engine that has been studiously trained to show us something it thinks we'll click on? (These channels are the very definition of selection bias.)
How often did we participate in this same distortion, by only passing along the articles we enjoyed reading, the memes we laughed at, the polls that encouraged us - or called us to action by making us angry at a monster?
How much of this election was given to us for the sake of ad impressions in web browsers? Including those following it internationally? It's not so hard to imagine that a full quarter of the population can spend most of their 'news-reading' time eagerly devouring scandalous editorial takedowns of a candidate they loathe, considering themselves well-informed for the effort, and then getting a rude surprise when the votes come rolling in... And no one had to be silent, or even feel particularly embarrassed, for it to happen.
We convinced ourselves the outcome was inevitable.
Did Kellyanne Conway single-handedly engineer the election, even though she managed Trump's campaign for only three months, and spent all of that time applying spin and damage control for the sake of Republican voters tempted to jump ship? Did Gary Johnson and Jill Stein spoil the election with their third-party antics, even though the Libertarian ticket appealed to angry Democrats and Republicans alike? Did FBI director James Comey derail the whole election with his letter, even though a much more damning scandal - the Access Hollywood recording - didn't take down Trump, despite being prominently discussed at the debates? Or would a better equivalent be the HRC email scandal and the Benghazi hearings, both of which boiled away for over a year, but accumulated an epic backlash?
We could speculate about how many minds these things changed. But we might also want to speculate on how many minds were willing to change in the first place, because in the end it all came down to a difference of less than a rounding error, and as usual, half the population didn't even care enough to vote at all. Meanwhile, we arranged our filter bubbles to make each of us into a champion, fighting on the righteous side against pure evil, and even amongst those of us who was ethical enough to try and only pass along things that were true (rather than the beneficial lies), we nevertheless only passed along the parts of the truth that bolstered our cause, and conveniently ignored the rest.
Face a real fact: Half of all voters voted for the other candidate, because they were convinced it was the better choice.
Call them stupid and they will call you corrupt, or vice-versa, and we all go around this carousel for another four years. Or just accept that party affiliation - and your family and social circle and workplace and church - forms an information bubble around you, and the best you can do is navigate it with some awareness, and hopefully some f*&% class as well. Remember: It's very, very easy for the people you vilify to tune you out. It's so easy you won't even notice them doing it. And if you're like most people, you won't even care. People want to feel like they are right - perhaps even more than they want to actually be right.
If we're surprised, it's ultimately our own fault. Time to open the filters back out again and see all the people we've painted as monsters and find some way to understand each other.
Last I checked, Hillary won the popular vote by a mere 200,000. That's about 0.3% of the total votes cast, and about 0.15% of the voting-eligible population. That's barely even a rounding error. (Also enough to throw Pennsylvania in the other direction. If that had happened, we would still be counting votes right now.)
That is very sobering. We can confidently say that for every four people in the country, one cared enough to vote for Trump, one cared enough to vote for HRC, and the other two couldn't be arsed to do either.
On the other hand, why would we expect anything else? This is how it's turned out - with only a slightly larger rounding error - for the past four elections, back to 1996 and 1992, when Ross Perot threw a gigantic wrench into the Republican works both times.
So really, this outcome is just another instance of a regular pattern. The real question is not "why didn't we see this coming", ... it's "why did we ever expect anything else?"
A "prestige" vote is too self-centered of a theory. It carries the tacit assumption that the media we (democrats, in my social circle) have been consuming is the only collective media feed in town. We didn't hear about these people through our channels, therefore they were silent? I think it's more likely that the channels have become more and more balkanized, inviting us to accept a more and more distorted view of what "the country" thinks.
"But how can that be?" you ask. "Everyone hated Trump, everywhere I looked! Especially the media!"
How often these days do you - how often does anyone - come across a piece of news because of the actions of a journalist, or the actions of a journalism-focused apparatus like the county newspaper that my father would spread across the table a few times a week? ... And how often do we come across it because it was handed to us in a Facebook feed, or a comment thread, or a tweet, or a text message, or an email, or a search engine that has been studiously trained to show us something it thinks we'll click on? (These channels are the very definition of selection bias.)
How often did we participate in this same distortion, by only passing along the articles we enjoyed reading, the memes we laughed at, the polls that encouraged us - or called us to action by making us angry at a monster?
How much of this election was given to us for the sake of ad impressions in web browsers? Including those following it internationally? It's not so hard to imagine that a full quarter of the population can spend most of their 'news-reading' time eagerly devouring scandalous editorial takedowns of a candidate they loathe, considering themselves well-informed for the effort, and then getting a rude surprise when the votes come rolling in... And no one had to be silent, or even feel particularly embarrassed, for it to happen.
We convinced ourselves the outcome was inevitable.
Did Kellyanne Conway single-handedly engineer the election, even though she managed Trump's campaign for only three months, and spent all of that time applying spin and damage control for the sake of Republican voters tempted to jump ship? Did Gary Johnson and Jill Stein spoil the election with their third-party antics, even though the Libertarian ticket appealed to angry Democrats and Republicans alike? Did FBI director James Comey derail the whole election with his letter, even though a much more damning scandal - the Access Hollywood recording - didn't take down Trump, despite being prominently discussed at the debates? Or would a better equivalent be the HRC email scandal and the Benghazi hearings, both of which boiled away for over a year, but accumulated an epic backlash?
We could speculate about how many minds these things changed. But we might also want to speculate on how many minds were willing to change in the first place, because in the end it all came down to a difference of less than a rounding error, and as usual, half the population didn't even care enough to vote at all. Meanwhile, we arranged our filter bubbles to make each of us into a champion, fighting on the righteous side against pure evil, and even amongst those of us who was ethical enough to try and only pass along things that were true (rather than the beneficial lies), we nevertheless only passed along the parts of the truth that bolstered our cause, and conveniently ignored the rest.
Face a real fact: Half of all voters voted for the other candidate, because they were convinced it was the better choice.
Call them stupid and they will call you corrupt, or vice-versa, and we all go around this carousel for another four years. Or just accept that party affiliation - and your family and social circle and workplace and church - forms an information bubble around you, and the best you can do is navigate it with some awareness, and hopefully some f*&% class as well. Remember: It's very, very easy for the people you vilify to tune you out. It's so easy you won't even notice them doing it. And if you're like most people, you won't even care. People want to feel like they are right - perhaps even more than they want to actually be right.
If we're surprised, it's ultimately our own fault. Time to open the filters back out again and see all the people we've painted as monsters and find some way to understand each other.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-11-10 10:30 pm (UTC)Bing had an election coverage page, where it published among the other things a selection of 3 polls (I'm not sure if they did the selection or piched it from Huffington Post). In the last few days the polls started leaning Trump-wise. Every time when two out of three polls would predict Trump, one of them got replaced by another poll that predicted Clinton. This happened multiple times. Near the end _all_ 3 of the original polls predicted Trump but they were replaced with the ones that predicted Clinton.
When the DNC documents turned up on WikiLeaks, the Clinton supporters attacked WikiLeaks for publishing this information. Somehow it didn't occur to them that the right thing to do for documentation of your evil deeds not to turn up on WikiLeaks is to avoid doing the evil deeds. No, instead they attack anyone who had blown the cover and disclosed the evil. The same goes for Comey, it's his job to be impartial, but as soon as he acts slightly impartial rather than full-partisan, he gets attacked.
And even right here you say that the Clinton's e-mail scandal had blown over a year ago. Nope, it will blow over when she is judged and put to prison (and maybe gets out on parole in a couple of years). The best way not to get caught is not to do the bad things, rather than to cover them up.
It's also interesting to note that no matter how hard the Clinton team tried, they couldn't find anything "damning" on Trump at all. At all, period. Nothing. Zip. No, a private talk about pussies doesn't count as such at all, and especially so in the context of the Clinton names.
no subject
Date: 2016-11-10 11:14 pm (UTC)I disagree with you about the wikileaks deal. That is something I lay squarely at the feet of would-be journalists. Wikileaks acquired and published an information dump from a source that it had absolutely no way of authenticating, and also absolutely no way of verifying whether it had been tampered with. This is very, very different from a journalist verifying their source and then pledging to protect it by keeping the source anonymous. And yet, the modern media ignored that difference, and eagerly went rummaging around in it, no-questions-asked, because it represented something that lots of eager filter-feeders would click on, delivering lots of advertiser dollars. In other words, it was definitely something attention-getting, but it was not news-reporting.
And in the end, the best evidence anyone has in favor of the information being accurate, is this: There was nothing scandalous in it.
Your characterization of James Comey appears to be based on your personal bias, and your predictions about the so-called email "scandal" are equally biased. The hearings are done. There is no trial to be had. The court of public opinion is not the court of law. If it were one-and-the same, Trump would be in prison right alongside Hillary.
Remember the fact I stated above: Half of all voters voted for the other candidate. Calm down and get your head on straight.
no subject
Date: 2016-11-11 12:55 am (UTC)> There was nothing scandalous in it.
Um, leaving alone all their inter-personal relations with Sanders (whom Clinton apparently blackmailed but I'm not sure that anyone else should care unless Sanders files a complaint), how about breaking the campaign financing laws? Clinton is proclaiming that she is all against the special interests financing in the campaigns and yet what she practices is the opposite of what she preaches. Well, not exactly: she preaches against the _legal_ campaign contributions but obviously the illegal ones are fine with her as long as she does it and not the opponent.
> The hearings are done.
Nope, the hearings are not done. The AG hadn't even started an investigation yet. The case hadn't even been properly investigated, let alone brought into the court of law. It would have been shushed altogether if not for the work of a volunteer organization.
> your predictions about the so-called email "scandal" are equally biased.
Well, let's try to be objective.
(1) Were there people imprisoned for mishandling the classified material? The answer is yes. In fact, just recently there was a case when a guy went to prison for bringing his classified work home from work (he brought a lot of it, so his intentions could be argued either way). But he is not the only one. Do you agree that there are laws about this? Clinton willingly bypassed the security protocols and placed the massive amounts of classified information on the improperly secured computer systems. Do you agree about this? According to the FBI, at least 5 foreign entities had stolen this misplaced information. Do you see it as an issue?
(2) There are standards for the retainment of information. There is the Sarbanes-Oaxley act set by the government for this purpose that causes much headache to the executives and the IT departments. Do you think the government officials should be exempt from this requirement? These standards include an explicit prohibition for the use of the non-official e-mail account for the business communication, to hide the communication from the official record. Do you think the government officials should be exempt from this requirement? Do you think that Clinton didn't use this private server for the official communication, despite the published evidence to the contrary?
What would be your objective conclusion? Should she at least be properly investigated?
(reached the comment length limit, to be continued)
no subject
Date: 2016-11-11 07:25 am (UTC)Your "trying to be objective" paragraphs contain a great number of distortions that I am not interested in going through with you, because you're clearly a grownup who can do your own fact-checking. That you bothered to assemble so many distortions in one place tells me something else: You are doing exactly what I described above. Combing your filter bubble for only what reinforces your feelings, and then passing that construct along. Welcome to the club: There are already millions, and millions, of members.
I'm going to assume you are asking your question seriously, and not rhetorically.
If you're wondering why the other half of voters are not as upset about Clinton's emails as you are, well, all you need to do is look at the mirror-image of that question, the one that I've seen asked incredulously - even rhetorically - all the time in my own social circle:
Why aren't the other half of voters more upset about Trump's multiple bankruptcies, his absolutely reprehensible statements about women, his total lack of foreign policy knowledge, his total lack of humility, his utterly inane promises about building a border wall across the entire southern portion of the United States, his refusal to release his tax returns followed by his false claims about being "unable" to followed by his not actually releasing them at all despite claiming he would, and his ridiculous tax plan that threatens to balloon the deficit to massive levels while also - coincidentally - lining his own pockets, and so on, and so on...?
Followed by rampant speculation, like, "are they just idiots?" "Are they racists, and xenophobes?" "Are they low-information voters?" Et cetera.
You need to understand that this is exactly what the other half has been doing with regard to your candidate when they look at him, and rather than being "unable to find anything damning", the list is actually quite long and diverse. You can go down that whole list item-by-item if you like, finding some reason to ignore - for example - the fact that he is a racist, on record making a plethora of racist statements, on record being sued for racial discrimination. (And the fact that he threw money at the lawsuit to make it go away is immaterial.) ... But you still won't be absorbing the basic lesson here: You are guilty of the same filtering as everyone else. You are not above it. You are not a champion of truth; you are selectively building - and passing around - the narrative that lets you feel like one.
There is a whole smorgasbord of stuff to loathe about Trump. It goes on for pages, and decades. Did you really just vote for a guy who is due in court for fraud three weeks after his election? Yes, you did. If you are interested in "the scientific theology", why don't you investigate that first? Tell me how that changes your outlook.
Yeah, I voted for Hillary. Yeah, I'm pissed about the email scandal. I've also patiently done a lot of reading about it, and decided that it has been blown way the hell out of proportion. It was already out of proportion even before the attorney general investigated it, and when she dropped it, I was fine with that. Yet, here you are. You are one of the people continuing to blow it out of proportion. I'm sure you feel the same way about my above identification of Trump as a racist. Sure, it bothers you, but it doesn't bother you enough to actually vote differently. Sure, a bunch of priests are pedophiles, but that doesn't convince anyone to stop being Catholic. See what I'm getting at?
no subject
Date: 2016-11-12 02:48 am (UTC)Not sure if you're aware of it but Loretta Lynch is finally getting fired.
> Why aren't the other half of voters more upset about Trump's multiple bankruptcies, ...
Because none of these are CRIMES. Everyone can make their own opinions about whether they bode well for presidency according to their preferences. Half of this list aren't actually facts, they are your opinions (also apparently largely based not on the direct observations but on the prejudiced re-telling and villification by Trump's opponents). But what Clinton has done are crimes. Outright crimes. A criminal must not be a president. A criminal must be punished.
> the list is actually quite long and diverse.
I've seen this list. Nothing on it is "damning". Nothing. It's basically a collection of prejudiced bullshit. None of the supposed Trump's actions on the list are even wrong, let alone "damining". The only person this list is damning for is its author.
> But you still won't be absorbing the basic lesson here: You are guilty of the same filtering as everyone else. You are not above it. You are not a champion of truth; you are selectively building - and passing around - the narrative that lets you feel like one.
Everyone is building a narrative but there are different gradations of how far these narratives are away from reality.
> Did you really just vote for a guy who is due in court for fraud three weeks after his election?
I've read on it and I don't see any fraud. Some morons decided that if they didn't become real estate moguls from a short course, it must be a fraud. I see a frivolous lawsuit. How stupid and disgusting can these people be? Hey, it gets even funnier: I've recently read about a case where a bunch of law graduates who went there to make the big bucks after graduation but couldn't get these big bucks, have brought a lawsuit against their university for fraud. Every single university can be sued for fraught, and for really big bucks, not like Trump's peanuts.
> identification of Trump as a racist. Sure, it bothers you, but it doesn't bother you enough to actually vote differently.
Nope, it doesn't, for multiple reasons. First of all, this label has been attached to him though pretty weird logical manipulations: "if he says that the illegal immigrants are criminals, this means that he says that all the Mexicans are criminals!". Don't you see that it's the person who applies this kind of logic is the racist one? Because this logic makes the assumption that all the Mexicans are illegal immigrants. That's a very offensive assumption made by someone who has a deep prejudice against the Mexicans. Since you seem to agree with that assumption, you must be racist, not Trump.
The same goes about equating all the immigrants with the illegal immigrants. I'm a _legal_ immigrant and I find such equations quite offensive. The presence of the illegal immigrants had made my immigration process more complicated, and I have a strong dislike for them. And yes, I've met a few of them , and in my direct experience they do tend to be crooked.
Second, I want all sides to be treated by the same criteria. Do you agree that the BLM are racist? If you consider Trump racist, you definitely must consider BLM racist too. Clinton supported BLM, so she supported racism by the bucket. Yes, KKK expressed their support for Trump but Trump disavowed them, unlike Clinton.
By the way, do you have any issues with Madonna's objectification of women? It's kind of strange that I don't see any loud complaints in the press. And since Clinton didn't disclaim nor chastise Madonna, she could be held accountable for this objectification too.
Third, the pretty much same argument as you make about the Catholics: if we go into the absolutes, everyone is racist. Everyone prefers their own family, clan and so on. It's normal. The real question is about the degree of it, what amount is OK and what amount is too much?
no subject
Date: 2016-11-12 04:11 am (UTC)Your criteria for choosing what's important to you is, "is it a crime", huh? Well, sorry, but careless handling of email is not a crime. So now it's time for you to reframe your argument into some other form that still maintains your An Hero status.
Also, your "all sides be treated by the same criteria" demand is a little too close to the "teach the controversy" shtick that creationists have been using to try and crowbar Genesis into science classrooms. Your understanding took a tumble right out of the starting block, by equating Black Lives Matter to the KKK. They are two very, very different movements. You might wanna go track down a black person and ask them to explain it to you.
If you have the guts to approach one.
no subject
Date: 2016-11-15 03:35 am (UTC)Violating the law of the record keeping is a crime. OK, maybe people didn't go to prison for this but ask the companies who have been fined.
Obstructing the justice is a crime. You can start with asking Martha Stewart.
So how come that you want the special exceptions made for Clinton?
> your "all sides be treated by the same criteria" demand is a little too close to the "teach the controversy"
How come that the socialists always demand equality when they're losing but not when they're winning?
> They are two very, very different movements.
Of course they are. KKK was born to protect the population from the criminals when the Yankee occupants not only dropped the police protection but encouraged the attacks. The order has been restored long since then and the purpose had disappeared, but at the start the KKK served a noble goal. BLM was born to protect the criminals. It has no noble goals. It's pure evil.
> You might wanna go track down a black person and ask them to explain it to you.
Any decent black person would disclaim BLM.
no subject
Date: 2016-11-15 03:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-15 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-16 02:58 am (UTC)I'm sure he thinks that my banning him is a sign of "intolerance". But I see it more like removing a dog with rabies from a public park.
no subject
Date: 2016-11-11 12:55 am (UTC)> The court of public opinion is not the court of law.
That's exactly my point. Clinton deserves to be brought to the court of law. But her cronies wouldn't let that to happen. It's the job for the public opinion to defeat the cronies and bring the case to the court of law, and then let the law decide fairly. Otherwise we'll soon get the same situation that currently exists in Russia. Putin didn't become a bloody communist dictator in one day (and he probably isn't quite to that level yet but he is getting close), he started with shielding his cronies from the law and with with the use of the corrupt judges to defeat his opponents. All this was accompanied by the pro-democracy public seeing him as "he is our good guy, he is only doing it temporarily for the greater benefit of all".
Note that on some of the "horrible things" ascribed to Trump, his business was brought to the court of law, judged and paid the fine (the infractions were minor, so the fine was minor too). Now that the process is finished, we can really let these infractions stay in the past. Shouldn't we use the same standard for Clinton?
> Half of all voters voted for the other candidate. Calm down and get your head on straight.
Hey, I am calm. Trump wasn't even my favorite candidate to start with. I want to look at the things objectively. I.e. when I say "there is (or isn't) anything scandalous", I'm happy to explain _why_ I think it so, unroll it down to the basic pre-suppositions and discuss whether they are valid and reasonable. But I would like the opponent to do the same rather than rely on the religious dogmas accepted without the conscious examination. Unfortunately, I see a lot of blind religious faith with people breaking down when their dogmas are examined and challenged. Now, everything that talks about the rights and wrongs is a religion, there is no way to get around it, but in this context I'm interested in the scientific theology, not the blind restatements of the dogmas.
no subject
Date: 2016-11-11 07:30 am (UTC)Please tell me you're not one of those people who comes to every new conversation with a set of things that you know are false but you say anyway because there's a chance the other person can't tell. That's very annoying.
no subject
Date: 2016-11-12 02:03 am (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47XG_r0gUF8
no subject
Date: 2016-11-12 03:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-15 08:48 pm (UTC)