#or no election results

[boyczar]

made a little guy of my little guy

[brainrotisseriechicken]

local gay weirdos are horrible at surprises, more at 8

managed to slip in this post a little after midnight whoops!!!! please forgive me a war criminal got elected

ignoring that happy valentines day, ash wednesday, election day, and my birthday!!! im a birthday boy!!!🎉

[segernatural]

sure it was a perfect storm of a pressure cooker but i promise destiel was about destiel

[isagrimorie]

Is anyone else reading the Press Releases from the Kamala Harris campaign.

I think people should!

source

source

[cleophantom]

To anyone who refuses to vote for Biden in the US elections because of what he's done in Palestine: I'd like to hear the plan to get America to stop aiding Israel in the event of a Trump victory you must have to act so belligerently confident in your stance.

[crowskullls]

Thinking about Minute’s insane morals and how he doesn’t have a single genuinely bad bone in his body. He gets confused when he’s betrayed, he begs for explanations when people are cruel. He would rather make amends than hold onto grudges. He forgives and forgets. He teams with the same guy (Wemmbu) that’s betrayed him countless of times, and still trusts him anyways. Even if a bit reluctant at first. Even if he knows he’ll still end up betrayed.

Like this guy has PROBLEMS. He so morally… Good. He can stoop down to other people’s level, he can play dirty, he can be intimidating. He doesn’t really let himself get walked all over. But he’d MUCH rather just hang out and have peace. He gets upset when people are negative because he’s just SO optimistic. He always has to see the Good side of things, even when it’s a horrendous situation.

Even when he has reasons to be angry and upset and spiteful, he still chooses to hold his head high and STICK to his morals. He’s Stubborn. He tries so hard to see Why people are evil and hurtful, but he can’t personally understand. He needs to be the hero. He needs to save others. Because who else is going to do it? Who else has the resources, the strength, the backbone, the reputation? He gives items out to people with no expectation for reimbursement. He’s always saving other server members, even his enemies, from tricky situations.

He tries hard to remain all mysterious and brooding. He tries to seem calm and collected. But he wears his heart on his sleeve. You can hear every emotion in his voice, in the glint in his eyes. The way his smile upturns when he finds something amusing, or how his eyebrows furrow when he’s trying to piece something together. He’s an incredibly emotional guy, and he’s not good at hiding it. He’s notoriously a bad liar. He gives himself away every time he opens his mouth. It’s WHY he’s so genuine, so easy to trust.

It’s easy to get under his skin, but he still holds his ground. Because he has to. Because the world is cruel and brutal, and everyone is out to get him. Killing is second nature on most SMPs, especially on Lifesteal. But he can defend himself. Most other people can’t. He’s paranoid, and watches events from the sidelines (even if it annoys other players.) He always has extra food and fireworks to give out. Despite covering himself in dark colors, and hiding from large groups, he’s still looking out for others. He’s still the beacon of hope people need. He’s so annoyingly optimistic and cheerful that it’s sickening to most. He refuses to let himself become bitter and pessimistic.

Anyways bro thinks he’s Batman.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

When prophecy fails, election polling edition

In Canto 20 of Inferno, Dante confronts a pit where the sinners have had their heads twisted around backwards; they trudge, naked and weeping, through puddles of cooling tears. Virgil informs him that these are the fortunetellers, who tried to look forwards in life and now must look backwards forever.

In a completely unrelated subject, how about those election pollsters, huh?

Writing for The American Prospect, historian Rick Perlstein takes a hard look at characteristic failure modes of election polling and ponders their meaning:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-09-25-polling-imperilment/

Apart from the pre-election polling chaos we're living through today, Perlstein's main inspiration is W Joseph Campbell 2024 University of California Press book, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in US Presidential Elections:

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/lost-in-a-gallup/paper

In Campbell's telling, US election polling follows a century-old pattern: pollsters discover a new technique that works spookily well..for a while. While the new polling technique works, the pollster is hailed a supernaturally insightful fortune-teller.

In 1932, the Raleigh News and Observer was so impressed with polling by The Literary Digest that they proposed replacing elections with Digest's poll. The Digest's innovation was sending out 20,000,000 postcards advertising subscriptions and asking about presidential preferences. This worked perfectly for three elections – 1924, 1928, and 1932. But in 1936, the Digest blew it, calling the election for Alf Landon over FDR.

The Digest was dethroned, and new soothsayers were appointed: George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossler, who replaced the Digest's high-volume polling with a new kind of poll, one that sought out a representative slice of the population (as Perlstein says, this seems "so obvious in retrospect, you wonder how nobody thought of it before").

Representative polling worked so well that, three elections later, the pollsters declared that they could predict the election so well from early on that there was no reason to keep polling voters. They'd just declare the winner after the early polls were in and take the rest of the election off.

That was in 1948 – you know, 1948, the "Dewey Defeats Truman" election?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman

If this sounds familiar, perhaps you – like Perlstein – are reminded of the 2016 election, where Fivethirtyeight and Nate Silver called the election for Hillary Clinton, and we took them at their word because they'd developed a new, incredibly accurate polling technique that had aced the previous two elections.

Silver's innovation? Aggregating state polls, weighting them by accuracy, and then producing a kind of meta-poll that combined their conclusions.

When Silver's prophecy failed in 2016, he offered the same excuse that Gallup gave in 1948: when voters are truly undecided, you can't predict how they'll vote, because they don't know how they'll vote.

Which, you know, okay, sure, that's right. But if you know that the election can't be called, if you know that undecided voters are feeding noise into the system whenever you poll them, then why report the polls at all? If all the polling fluctuation is undecided voters flopping around, not making up their mind, then the fact that candidate X is up 5 points with undecided means nothing.

As the finance industry disclaimer has it, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." But, as Perlstein says, "past performance is all a pollster has to go on." When Nate Silver weights his model in favor of a given poll, it's based on that poll's historical accuracy, not its future accuracy, because its future accuracy can't be determined until it's in the past. Like Dante's fortune-tellers, pollsters have to look backwards even as they march forwards.

Of course, it doesn't help that in some cases, Silver was just bad at assessing polls for accuracy, like when he put polls from the far-right "shock pollster" Trafalgar Group into the highly reliable bucket. Since 2016, Trafalgar has specialized in releasing garbage polls that announce that MAGA weirdos are way ahead, and because they always say that, they were far more accurate than the Clinton-predicting competition in 2016 when they proclaimed that Trump had it in the bag. For Silver, this warranted an "A-" on reliability, and that is partially to blame for how bad Silver's 2020 predictions were, when Republicans got pasted, but Trafalgar continued to predict a Democratic wipeout. Silver's methodology has a huge flaw: because Trafalgar's prediction history began in 2016, that single data-point made them look pretty darned reliable, even though their method was to just keep saying the same thing, over and over:

https://www.ettingermentum.news/p/the-art-of-losing-a-fivethirtyeight

Pollsters who get lucky with a temporarily reliable methodology inevitably get cocky and start cutting corners. After all, polling is expensive, so discontinuing the polls once you think you have an answer is a way to increase the enterprise's profitability. But, of course, pollsters can only make money so long as they're somewhat reliable, which leads to a whole subindustry of excuse-making when this cost-cutting bites them in the ass. In 1948, George Gallup blamed his failures on the audience, who failed to grasp the "difference between forecasting an election and picking the winner of a horse race." In 2016, Silver declared that he'd been right because he'd given Trump at 28.6% chance of winning.

This isn't an entirely worthless excuse. If you predict that Clinton's victory is 71.4% in the bag, you are saying that Trump might win. But pollsters want to eat their cake and have it, too: when they're right, they trumpet their predictive accuracy, without any of the caveats they are so insistent upon when they blow it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jDlo7YfUxc

There's always some excuse when it comes to the polls: in 1952, George Gallup called the election a tossup, but it went for Eisenhower in a landslide. He took out a full-page NYT ad, trumpeting that he was right, actually, because he wasn't accounting for undecided voters.

Polling is ultimately a form of empiricism-washing. The pollster may be counting up poll responses, but that doesn't make the prediction any less qualitative. Sure, the pollster counts responses, but who they ask, and what they do with those responses, is purely subjective. They're making guesses (or wishes) about which people are likely to vote, and what it means when someone tells you they're undecided. This is at least as much an ideological project as it is a scientific one:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-09-23-polling-whiplash/

But for all that polling is ideological, it's a very thin ideology. When it comes to serious political deliberation, questions like "who is likely to vote" and "what does 'undecided' mean" are a lot less important than, "what are the candidates promising to do?" and "what are the candidates likely to do?"

But – as Perlstein writes – the only kind of election journalism that is consistently, adequately funded is poll coverage. As a 1949 critic put it, this isn't the "pulse of democracy," it's "its baby talk."

Today, Tor Books publishes VIGILANT, a new, free LITTLE BROTHER story about creepy surveillance in distance education. It follows SPILL, another new, free LITTLE BROTHER novella about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/26/dewey-beats-truman/#past-performance-is-no-guarantee-of-future-results

[dykegirlfriend]

voters proving that there is still hope that us together as a country will always fight back and we will never let far rightist wings to overtake has got to be my favourite thing about 2024 elections

[bpdnchill]

Guys, we fucking did it!

The fight is not over, but by the gods this is a sweet, sweet moment.

[darkwood-sleddog]

once again i am asking tumblr to hold public polls for users to vote on potential changes. imagine if you were the 'respect our users opinion website'. like that could be us but apparently not.

[leasawayer]

Currently crying because my country did not put the fascist in power, but even better , the left win !!!

The final results are still not in, but the left win !!! We won!!

In the last weeks, there was so many racist aggressions and violence juste because they fought they would win.

If they had win, my mother would have been forbidden to access some profession, it would have been so terrifying. We still have a long way to go but we won ??? Every sondage gave us looser, the media spent the entire campaign lying about the left program, and yet we won !!! The left have the must seat in parliament !!!

I ve been crying for 25 minutes. Like I know there is a LOT of work but WE WON! The left won !!!

My mother is safe, I am safe, my family, my friends we are safe for at least 3 more years. We are safe, we will be safe for 3 more years.

I have no one to celebrate it, because I am overseas so I just needed to tell it somewhere : The left have won, we are safe !!

[that-was-a-bit-stupid-of-you]

okay okay but plan b. what if we kill modi

[megpricephotography]

Beach Boy! Barney, jumping for joy during a trip to the beach in July of 2012.

[identitty-dickruption]

I do also want to extend my condolences to the people of Aotearoa tonight. from one devastated country to another — I hope it gets better for all of us, and I hope we are able to return to a time of justice despite these election results. I’m sorry to everyone who feels like their political systems and their country are failing them. I think it’ll be okay in the end, but don’t forget to take the time to mourn

[castielsprostate]

before i go to bed (read fanfic until 2am) i do want to level and say that today? today could've been MUCH worse. alt-right parties made massive gains, yes, and nazism is alive and well apparently, but the left is still there and is still a majority in a lot of countries. we will not stop, we will not back down. this fight is a draw, but the war will be won in favour of human rights and the planet.

to everyone that voted from the 6th until today: good fucking job! YOU are what keeps this world turning. YOU are the backbone of a functioning, accepting, society. YOU did your part. get some rest, get a little treat, and realise that you did good.

we WILL get through this. we WILL make this place better for our children, our grandchildren, and everything else that is yet to come. fuck the nazis, fuck the alt-right.

let's keep going 💪 despair is so easy, and hope is so incredibly hard. BUT DO WE LOVE TO STAY HARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[theredandwhitequeen]

Congratulations to my French Followers who defeated the fascists again in the election. I hope you have a wonderful night and a good Monday.