Tom Grey on May 21, 2019 at 1:10 pm at 1:10 pm said:

… @DNW Many intelligent, capitalist successful liberals want people to make the same good decisions that they made; and want those people to have the good market results no matter what the decisions were.
That’s part of their idea of Freedom — whatever is chosen, you still get middle class American comfort.”

Yeah, I’ll give that some thought.

I am sure that you are right insofar as some significant number of progressive-minded persons in the upper economic echelons have in fact competently maneuvered their way around the mixed economy and made big gains; demonstrating thereby some significant level of competency. And some have even prospered in the free market and in non-financial areas, not just in licensed and regulated monopolies with restricted entree.

And I have read enough progressive literature to know that their mentality [not those snowflake on campus, but the moral theorists on Z-Net] is such that they look upon moral hazard reasoning and cause and effect/consequence moralizing as atavistic … “Karmic” some of the class at times refer to it. After all, if you are judged as “not morally deserving of” your own talents in the first place, how under that scheme of moral assumptions could you deserve the superior outcome you get? On that view, we are all just social effects, and the only common reality that exists across the spectrum of “sentient entities” is held to be the experiences of pain and envy.

So the moral equation on their part is not “effort and just reward” but “suffering and it’s alleviation”: not through the overcoming of it through the building of virtue and strength [fascism] but through the social management and redistribution of organic and emotional satisfactions.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/les-murray-is-australia/
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@DNW Many intelligent, capitalist successful liberals want people to make the same good decisions that they made; and want those people to have the good market results no matter what the decisions were.

That’s part of their idea of Freedom — whatever is chosen, you still get middle class American comfort.

On a personal level, they are not so dysfunctional, but their worldview is false in significant ways, crazy ways. And they are both nihilist and arrogant in claiming “moral superiority”, AKA “virtue signaling”.

The superiority part of moral superiority is more key, but signaling is also significant.

I wrote about that here.

And if an election is that close, then pollsters should say so. Instead, they were all predicting a Hillary victory.

One of the many problems is that doing state polls sort of falls by the wayside as the election draws near, and state polls are often the most telling.

I’m convinced that much of the current framing of moral questions in progressive terms, is a result of taking people who are seriously dysfunctional and mentally troubled as having merely “another perspective”.

In fact it’s not too difficult to find progressive literature which elevates their well-know tendency to express emotional and other psychological problems, to a kind of engine of progress as they see it.

They are crazy and obnoxious sure, but on their biologically malfunctioning and thus distorted view of what it means to be alive.”crazy” and even “nihilistic” are “good”

They don’t need a set of barbells and a jog on the beach, or psychological counseling. “You need to care more, listen more, accommodate more” and enable, and make sure that the environment you operate in, adjusts to them.

If someone has a better explanation for much, not all of, but much of modern progressivism than its being a politicized expression of dysfunctional but motivated and highly social and dependent types, they are free to offer it.

We already tried the tack of strictly deducing progressive values and desiderata from some some indubitable axioms, and saw that that got us nowhere; and that progressives themselves had never – so far as we were able to discover – gotten to be progressives by that method.

So if it’s not logic, what remains but their own axiom that “the personal is the political”?

And if you are a functionally effed up individual, what might we expect your social demands on others to look like.

Re: a university dispute involving a pro-life student group which has been covered a bit on the Internet. A progressive voices its opinion …

https://twitter.com/Aandtheuniverse/status/1120493089590775810

The quality of trolls is reaching rock bottom, flattening out you might say. “Peak stupid” is approaching, but asymptotic. So they will continue as they have.

Hillary did beat Trump — in the national vote. Which is what they were polling. (And most of the polls were not off by a large margin — they weren’t predicting she would win by a lot by the time voting occurred. They never claim to be accurate to the last percent.)

Most elections, most of the time, are more or less correctly predicted.

This Australian result is actually a wildcard, but you’d be pressed to find many more. If you’re reaching back to Dewey/Truman, then you’ve a shortage of decent recent examples.

Brexit was predicted Remain, but the actual result was inside the margin of error. That’s what a margin of error is — the bounds within which a result might fall.

What there have been recently is not a lot of polls being wrong, but a whole pile of important elections decided on a knife-edge.

Doesn’t seem to be working, though.

True, I believe. But that’s not really the point. People on the left are quite highly committed because of radicalization and hate inducing campaigns. It is the mushy middle, casually interested, low information voter that is motivated by overestimated support shown in skewed polls.

There is almost a herd instinct, for lack of a better word, causing people who aren’t thinking too hard to go with the winner or the consensus. This is why “climate change” theory is always being trumpeted as the overwhelming consensus.

“… pollsters’ reputations are damaged by faulty polls that fail to accurately predict the outcome.”

If Rasmussen continually gets it wrong, then yes they will damage their rep. because polling is the only thing they do. If an NBC/Wall Street Journal/Gallup poll gets it wrong I don’t think it matters much. NBC will claim Gallup is responsible for a high caliber of methodology, when in fact NBC is probably controlling some of that. Gallup will swear by their methodology, blame NBC’s questions, and/or claim some kind of fluke.

“… as the election draws closer I think they are quite motivated to get it right.”

My recollection is that we are now frequently seeing big swings in the polling in the last 48 hours. It is true that we are seeing an increased use “October surprises” or “11th hour surprises” by campaigns. But I believe that polls are also changing from dishonest methods to more honest methods in the last 48 hours, so that they can claim accuracy in the post game analysis.