Posts by Bart Janssen
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Just a thought, given left leaning ideology is quite strongly correlated with youth perhaps it might be a smart idea to present a candidate to those slightly younger people who isn't 70!
And yes I know you have to be 35+ and it takes a while to build up political credit but 70?!?!
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
And you know this how?
Because word analysis of comments made during interviews show massive gender bias against women.
Yes it's correlation. Such word analyses have proven to be pretty damn reliable.
But by all means keep looking for more complex answers that ignore the deep sexism that exists.
Oh and asking for impossible experiments is a boring argument tactic.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Neil,
It was going to be difficult for the Democrats regardless who fronted them.
and
There was a complex entanglement of race and class.
Nope sorry you're both overthinking this. There is a real temptation to look for a complex explanation, but all the pre- and post- vote analysis is pretty clear.
Most people had no clue about any real policy - it barely registered on any of the voter decision analysis.
People had a huge fixation on Hillary Clinton's gender it was enormously high in all the terminology used by people to discuss their voting choices.Short answer is, Americans, particularly those democrats who chose not to vote, were making the choice to not elect a woman.
Yes there was a layer of bias by the MSM by focusing on "those e-mails" but in the end it looks like the vote was against a woman. And that sexism coloured every story about her and the election.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to B Jones,
nastiness
Yeah no problem with the ban - sadly many of these people believe there is no harm in spreading lies and nonsense whereas real people are both invalidated/dismissed and directly harmed.
But man I still have to agree with John Oliver - Fuck 2016.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Russell Brown,
Hi folks. I’ve banned Ally Cat. Ridiculous 9/11 conspiracists are just a waste of everyone’s time.
aw – so much more fun than considering the real world where sexist democrats hated women so much they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton even in the face of the prospect of Trump becoming president.
Oh and fucking earthquakes
geez I could use some insane looniness as a break
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Ally Cat,
I know I’m going to be dissed as a Conspiracy Theorist for this!
Yes you are - and rightly so.
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Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip, in reply to Rob Stowell,
I think it’s instructive to flip from seeing this in terms of knowledge and information, to seeing it in terms of emotion and emotional satisfaction.
Yeah I am kinda saying that. Essentially what we are seeing is that many (most) people vote based on emotion - they then find facts that support that emotion and reject facts that refute that emotion.
But I'm also saying that given that state, democracy does not work. Democracy relies on people actually looking at and understanding the facts before they make their choice and what we are seeing is that people don't actually behave that way.
I'm not saying whether people are wrong or right to behave that way but given the observation that they do then you'd have to accept that a political system that assumed they behave differently won't work as intended.
What the Chinese have said is that because people behave that way they'll reject democracy as an option.
Personally what I'd prefer is that we keep democracy but teach people, in something like a civics course in school, why they need to approach their voting choices more slowly/thoroughly/thoughfully. They remain free to vote however they wish but become less likely to vote based on emotion first and data second.
Or you can just appoint me dictator for life, I promise to be benevolent :).
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Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip, in reply to Russell Brown,
Trump represents, in the words of one writer, everything they were taught to fear about democracy
It's kind of hard to argue with them, Brexit, Trump and even here we've seen the failure of democracy. The idea that the population can make good choices relies on them being informed and willing to make the effort to understand the implications of their choices - it's pretty clear the public are not informed and really don't care.
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I was wrong
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Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Last week Huffington Post had Clinton at 98% probability of a win, 538 has had Clinton over 60% probability from day one and their numbers have been massaged in favour of Trump.
You're right of course there is always a chance of a Trump win - hey I bought a lotto ticket yesterday - but for Trump to win he needs to overturn the polling in a whole sequence of states - it is just really unlikely and has been for over a month.
Hence the story should not have been "who will win?"
But should have been "what will President Clinton's policies mean for the US and NZ?"