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PoliGAF 2015 |OT| Keep Calm and Diablos On

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C

CygnusXS

will gain confidence one day
I do find it interesting that George W gets handwaived away as an individual failure, as if he didn't have an entire cabinet of Republicans and conservative ideology helping him do everything that led to him being considered so toxic.
 
N

NeoXChaos

Member
CygnusXS said:
I do find it interesting that George W gets handwaived away as an individual failure, as if he didn't have an entire cabinet of Republicans and conservative ideology helping him do everything that led to him being considered so toxic.
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Which is the reason why they have been parading Reagan since 2009. They never mention W and his father hardly anymore. W himself admitted he was not going to be involved in his brother's campaign. I don't even think he would even speak at the 2016 Convention if his brother ended up winning the nomination. You'd probably see some pre-recorded video. Face it, one was beat by a charismatic Teflon adulterer(no offense to Clinton) who even after losing the House, Senate and impeachment rode a wave to a 62% approval rating leaving the economy at its best in decades. The other left the party in shambles engulfed in two controversial wars leaving another charismatic individual to clean up behind him. The Bushes have left their party at both periods worse than when they took over in their respective eras.
 
R

Retromelon

Member
B-Dubs said:
He's probably the biggest voice in the party at this point. They have no living legends left like the Dems do. Obama could end the democratic primary tomorrow if he wanted. I still remember when Ted Kennedy endorsed Obama, that was basically the day he beat Hillary. There aren't many politicians left right now with that sort of power, it's basically Obama and Bill Clinton (if Hillary wasn't running). Conservatives don't have anyone with that level of gravitas, even Limbaugh couldn't put an end to the GOP primary. His endorsement would be helpful, but not enough that anyone would go looking for it.
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Hw and bob dole are living legends to me
 
C

CygnusXS

will gain confidence one day
NeoXChaos said:
Which is the reason why they have been parading Reagan since 2009. They never mention W and his father hardly anymore. W himself admitted he was not going to be involved in his brother's campaign. I don't even think he would even speak at the 2016 Convention if his brother ended up winning the nomination. You'd probably see some pre-recorded video. Face it, one was beat by a charismatic Teflon adulterer(no offense to Clinton) who even after losing the House, Senate and impeachment rode a wave to a 62% approval rating leaving the economy at its best in decades. The other left the party in shambles engulfed in two controversial wars leaving another charismatic individual to clean up behind him. The Bushes have left their party at both periods worse than when they took over in their respective eras.
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Sure, I'm just saying that the Bush's sure are convenient scapegoats.
 
J

JesseEwiak

Member
CygnusXS said:
I do find it interesting that George W gets handwaived away as an individual failure, as if he didn't have an entire cabinet of Republicans and conservative ideology helping him do everything that led to him being considered so toxic.
Click to expand...

I always like to remind conservatives that like to toss away W as some liberal that he had an approval rating of around 70-75% of conservatives as he left office. 'Cause he got his 27% from somewhere at the end.
 
S

speculawyer

Member
CygnusXS said:
I do find it interesting that George W gets handwaived away as an individual failure, as if he didn't have an entire cabinet of Republicans and conservative ideology helping him do everything that led to him being considered so toxic.
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Well, I suspect that a lot of people put heavy blame on Darth Cheney. With good reason.
 
I

IronicallyTwisted

Banned
HylianTom said:
He pretty much forwards my theory: if Jeb's the nominee, many conservatives who have "had enough from the GOPe" will either sit at home or go third-party, thus swinging the election to Hillary. They're well past the point where they've had it with allegedly "moderate" Republicans. Enough of the base is ready to watch the party burn down to the ground, and if it means losing the White House again (and the high court, though fewer realize it), then so be it.

We're going to see the House and Senate GOP cave on Planned Parenthood funding (which the Democrats will gloat about), and then another general budget battle where they're cave and fund government operations (which Democrats will gloat about), and the conservative base will be even further enraged.

Losing the Senate in 2014 might've felt like shit at the time, but given the incredibly unreasonable expectations that this shellacking rekindled within the GOP base, it looks more and more like it would be a blessing for 2016.
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The GOP has moved to the right but the moderate wing is, and almost always has been, in control. Its only lost control twice - with Goldwater and Reagan. Both Bushes, Romney, McCain and Nixon were from the moderate wing of the GOP. Limbaugh opposed both McCain and Romney and they still won the nomination. The problem is primary voters are disproportionately right wing because they are more politically active and because of geography.

The "conservatives stay home" theory is silly - Romney and McCain lost primarily because the republican party has been hemorrhaging educated voters since the Bush I campaign in 1988. Remember in the time of Reagan the GOP tended to be younger and more educated than the Democratic party, but Bill Clinton reversed it by pulling the Democratic party more to the centre (or to the right, depending on who you ask).
 
P

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
Trump on Fox and Friends this morning, so I guess they buried the hatchet.

As for Jeb, I'm absolutely stunned he is going the warhawk route right now. What a huge mistake.
 
Y

Y2Kev

TLG Fan Caretaker Est. 2009
Well that will be an immediate test to see if there is any remnant of Colbert's old character left, lol!
 
H

HylianTom

Banned
IronicallyTwisted said:
The GOP has moved to the right but the moderate wing is, and almost always has been, in control. Its only lost control twice - with Goldwater and Reagan. Both Bushes, Romney, McCain and Nixon were from the moderate wing of the GOP. Limbaugh opposed both McCain and Romney and they still won the nomination. The problem is primary voters are disproportionately right wing because they are more politically active and because of geography.

The "conservatives stay home" theory is silly - Romney and McCain lost primarily because the republican party has been hemorrhaging educated voters since the Bush I campaign in 1988. Remember in the time of Reagan the GOP tended to be younger and more educated than the Democratic party, but Bill Clinton reversed it by pulling the Democratic party more to the centre (or to the right, depending on who you ask).
Click to expand...

I don't think conservatives will stay home en masse.. just that, in this game of margins (especially given the daunting math the GOP faces), enough of them will do so. Shave 1 or 2% off, and the nominee is toast.
 
R

RDreamer

Member
CygnusXS said:
I do find it interesting that George W gets handwaived away as an individual failure, as if he didn't have an entire cabinet of Republicans and conservative ideology helping him do everything that led to him being considered so toxic.
Click to expand...

Jeb has that same cabinet!

SmmMXmZ.jpg
 
D

Dalthien

Member
NeoXChaos said:
WELP x2
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The presidential numbers from this Reuters/Ipsos poll (PDF Link) are staggering. The poll is Aug 6-10, all taken after the debate. It was the most watched primary debate ever, but it seems that all that coverage isn't helping to improve the image of this Republican field at all.

Primary numbers:

Trump - 24
Bush - 12
Rubio - 8
Huckabee - 8
Carson - 8
Walker - 7
Fiorina - 6
Cruz - 5


Presidential numbers:

Clinton - 41
Bush - 29

Clinton - 44
Walker - 24

Clinton - 42
Christie - 25

Clinton - 44
Carson - 24

Clinton - 41
Cruz - 27

Clinton - 41
Rubio - 28

Clinton - 43
Trump - 29

At this point, Trump holds up just as well as any of the other candidates in the general election.
 
C

Coriolanus

Banned
Dalthien said:
The presidential numbers from this Reuters/Ipsos poll (PDF Link) are staggering. The poll is Aug 6-10, all taken after the debate. It was the most watched primary debate ever, but it seems that all that coverage isn't helping to improve the image of this Republican field at all.
Click to expand...

The data on independents makes me sad.
 
R

RustyNails

Member
Coriolanus said:
The data on independents makes me sad.
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I want to see Independent ID shift from 2008 and 2012 elections compared to this year. Did a few independents found their way back to Democratic party? Did more Republicans abandon ship? Numbers, as the bard said, there in lies the rump.
 
D

Diablos

Member
Ignatz Mouse said:
Walker is still my biggest concern. I'm so glad he didn't get any bounce out of the debate.
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He's really dopey. He reminds me of Dubya but perhaps with a bit more restraint. Still a big dope and I don't think that will translate well to a national audience, case in point the first debate...
 
I

ItWasMeantToBe19

Banned
We are in the seventh year of a significant dismantling of our own military, in almost inverse proportion to the threats that are multiplying.

And I assure you: the day that I become president will be the day that we turn this around, and begin rebuilding the armed forces of the United States.

A winning strategy against the Islamic State, or against any threat to ourselves and our friends, depends ultimately on the military strength that underwrites American influence.
Click to expand...

#FiscalConservativelol

https://jeb2016.com/new-video-addressing-the-threat-of-radical-islamic-terrorism/?lang=en
 
C

Coriolanus

Banned
What baffles me most about the independent stats is how 57% of them didn't give a single fuck about the republican debate.

Like, if you're an independent, how the fuck don't you care? You're the dudes that might actually vote for either party, and more than half of you flat-out say you're fresh outta fucks to give? And that's with Trump running, ffs. How high would that damn stat be without him?

Might as well label the bastards "apathetics" and poll them in a different category.
 
P

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
I've heard zero people complaining that our military is too small. Zero. I don't understand this campaign strategy at all. How in the world is this supposed to bring in independent voters that they need to win a general election?
 
H

HylianTom

Banned
Watched four seasons of VEEP over the past four days. Fantastic show!
(Loved the Season 4 cliffhanger)

If I'm writing this campaign like a TV show, I think I know what Trump's January surprise would be. He'd arrange a Connie Chung moment with a sympathetic reporter. The GOP's primary voters would go absolutely wild for it.
 
D

dramatis

Member
I'm reading about the Effective Altruism Global conference on Vox. That is, the idea that philanthropy and charity is not really effective despite how much we give, so using modern tools (tech, etc.) to help us determine how to better allocate our charity would make us more 'effective'.

Oh my god.
In the beginning, EA was mostly about fighting global poverty. Now it's becoming more and more about funding computer science research to forestall an artificial intelligence–provoked apocalypse. At the risk of overgeneralizing, the computer science majors have convinced each other that the best way to save the world is to do computer science research. Compared to that, multiple attendees said, global poverty is a "rounding error."
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EA Global was dominated by talk of existential risks, or X-risks. The idea is that human extinction is far, far worse than anything that could happen to real, living humans today.

To hear effective altruists explain it, it comes down to simple math. About 108 billion people have lived to date, but if humanity lasts another 50 million years, and current trends hold, the total number of humans who will ever live is more like 3 quadrillion. Humans living during or before 2015 would thus make up only 0.0036 percent of all humans ever.

The numbers get even bigger when you consider — as X-risk advocates are wont to do — the possibility of interstellar travel. Nick Bostrom — the Oxford philosopher who popularized the concept of existential risk — estimates that about 10^54 human life-years (or 10^52 lives of 100 years each) could be in our future if we both master travel between solar systems and figure out how to emulate human brains in computers.

Even if we give this 10^54 estimate "a mere 1% chance of being correct," Bostrom writes, "we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives."

Put another way: The number of future humans who will never exist if humans go extinct is so great that reducing the risk of extinction by 0.00000000000000001 percent can be expected to save 100 billion more lives than, say, preventing the genocide of 1 billion people. That argues, in the judgment of Bostrom and others, for prioritizing efforts to prevent human extinction above other endeavors. This is what X-risk obsessives mean when they claim ending world poverty would be a "rounding error."
Click to expand...
I had a laugh caught in my throat. I suppose over-intelligence wrecks the brain's ability to reason for some things.
 
N

NYCmetsfan

Banned
dramatis said:
I'm reading about the Effective Altruism Global conference on Vox. That is, the idea that philanthropy and charity is not really effective despite how much we give, so using modern tools (tech, etc.) to help us determine how to better allocate our charity would make us more 'effective'.

Oh my god.


I had a laugh caught in my throat. I suppose over-intelligence wrecks the brain's ability to reason for some things.
Click to expand...
Screw people!
 
P

Poodlestrike

Banned
dramatis said:
I'm reading about the Effective Altruism Global conference on Vox. That is, the idea that philanthropy and charity is not really effective despite how much we give, so using modern tools (tech, etc.) to help us determine how to better allocate our charity would make us more 'effective'.

Oh my god.


I had a laugh caught in my throat. I suppose over-intelligence wrecks the brain's ability to reason for some things.
Click to expand...

The math is certainly interesting.

They're kind of ignoring the long-term repercussions of doing stuff like ending world poverty, tho.
 
F

FyreWulff

Member
Plinko said:
I've heard zero people complaining that our military is too small. Zero. I don't understand this campaign strategy at all. How in the world is this supposed to bring in independent voters that they need to win a general election?
Click to expand...

Military-industrial complex yo

We could shave off the equivalent of another country's military budget and still have like a bajillion times the combined military budget of the rest of the world

But you keep people thinking cutting the military in any way is 'harming it' or 'weakened' and you keep them at the current funding level instead of sanity. Party of small government wants to keep pumping money into the largest welfare program in the US
 
L

lednerg

Member
Diablos said:
I'm sorry but this is the absolute worst first guest he could ask for. I don't want this.
Click to expand...

When Colbert was announced as the next Late Show host, the right went apeshit saying that it was Letterman/CBS's way of going after the right.
"CBS has just declared war on the heartland of America," Limbaugh fumed. "No longer is comedy going to be a covert assault on traditional American values, conservatism. Now it's just wide out in the open. What this hire means is a redefinition of what is funny, and a redefinition of what is comedy. They're blowing up the 11:30 format... they hired a partisan, so-called comedian, to run a comedy show." [HuffPo]​

I'm thinking this may be their way of trying to smooth things over with the half of the country who is likely skittish towards Colbert. There's no way they won't tune in, so Colbert will get to prove to them that he can be even-handed with a conservative politician. It's also a helluva get, no matter how you slice it. Oh, and George Clooney will be his actual "first guest", with Jeb following.
 
C

Coriolanus

Banned
While that is certainly a theory, why would one hire Colbert and expect him to not be some form of Colbert?

I mean, it's not like the dude didn't show how massive his balls were during the W correspondents dinner. If he did that to a sitting prez, i fail to see why he'd even remotely entertain the notion of going easy on Jebbo.
 
F

Fragamemnon

Member
dramatis said:
I'm reading about the Effective Altruism Global conference on Vox. .
Click to expand...

It was insane reading about a group of very intelligent people buy into a spinoff of the Carter Catastrophe concept and then obsessing over hypothetical expected value (EV) instead of actually doing the work of trying to figure out what the best EV is for philanthropy based on some of their own group's real world work. Wouldn't you focus on looking at the actual data members of your group have compiled and start making data-driven decisions backed on that?

On that note, is there any part of Silicon Valley/SF technolibertarian thought that isn't awful? Even if you get past the uniform misogyny and ageism of the movement, you're left with these ideas that don't actually benefit people and allocate resources very poorly.
 
I

InsaneZero

Member
dramatis said:
I'm reading about the Effective Altruism Global conference on Vox. That is, the idea that philanthropy and charity is not really effective despite how much we give, so using modern tools (tech, etc.) to help us determine how to better allocate our charity would make us more 'effective'.

Oh my god.


I had a laugh caught in my throat. I suppose over-intelligence wrecks the brain's ability to reason for some things.
Click to expand...

"The one thing I don't like about our own AI is that it's almost too good."
 
P

PhoenixDark

Banned
Coriolanus said:
While that is certainly a theory, why would one hire Colbert and expect him to not be some form of Colbert?

I mean, it's not like the dude didn't show how massive his balls were during the W correspondents dinner. If he did that to a sitting prez, i fail to see why he'd even remotely entertain the notion of going easy on Jebbo.
Click to expand...

He's not a journalist, nor does he pretend to be. He might ask a couple "tough" questions but it won't go far beyond what Letterman and others do.

Jon Stewart was never funny and constantly exposed his lack of decent debating skills against decent conservative guests.
 
S

speculawyer

Member
Plinko said:
I've heard zero people complaining that our military is too small. Zero. I don't understand this campaign strategy at all. How in the world is this supposed to bring in independent voters that they need to win a general election?
Click to expand...
It is not. This is to win primary voters.

These guys are creating a massive amount of material to be used against them later. A Bush growing the military? So who are we invading now?
 
P

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
speculawyer said:
It is not. This is to win primary voters.

These guys are creating a massive amount of material to be used against them later. A Bush growing the military? So who are we invading now?
Click to expand...

And that's exactly the point. He is destroying his chances.
 
P

PantherLotus

Professional Schmuck
Jeb going superhawk and saying we need to grow the military is interesting in respect to Obama vs. Romney debate smackdown on ship counts. That (and the rise and awareness of drones) just completely ruins the argument for more troops.

Would love to hear the calculus on Jeb's team, except we all know it's Wolfowitz.
 
P

Poodlestrike

Banned
PantherLotus said:
Jeb going superhawk and saying we need to grow the military is interesting in respect to Obama vs. Romney debate smackdown on ship counts. That (and the rise and awareness of drones) just completely ruins the argument for more troops.

Would love to hear the calculus on Jeb's team, except we all know it's Wolfowitz.
Click to expand...

Can't speak to the calculus, but the current status quo isn't gonna last forever; at some point, we will see symmetrical warfare again, and drones aren't so hot at that.

I mean, we definitely don't need more people right now, but... I dunno.
 
R

RustyNails

Member
Poodlestrike said:
Can't speak to the calculus, but the current status quo isn't gonna last forever; at some point, we will see symmetrical warfare again, and drones aren't so hot at that.

I mean, we definitely don't need more people right now, but... I dunno.
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Im pretty sure war has changed. There are no more nation states that will go toe to toe with us unless they want to get bulldozed by America's mighty dick like Baathist Iraq. No matter how much the Republicans want to bomb Iran, we will never face off with them. What we will be seeing a lot of is ISIS styled insurgency if a war does break out.
 
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