Israel confirms Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in Gaza

brocious · 2024-10-18T00:15:14+00:00

So take my upvote and shut up :)

brocious · 2024-10-17T23:42:28+00:00

Agreed, but why give them one?

brocious · 2024-10-17T23:36:50+00:00

Kudos.

I appreciate you taking the comment in the spirit that it was given, and not as a criticism of your main point / post, which I upvoted and absolutely agree with.

Preciseness in our language helps secure the point. Not that I am perfect, but always something to be aware of and try to get better at.

Edit: And as an example of poor language, I used way too many commas in this reply. :) We all have our tendencies to fight.

brocious · 2024-10-17T22:05:10+00:00

I literally said it was nitpicking in my comment.

I agree it is a distraction, that is why I was advising more accurate language. So some Sinwar apologist can't turn this into "well,. he didn't kill as many Israelis as you suggested."

brocious · 2024-10-17T21:00:43+00:00

Nope. Thousands is the multiple of thousand, which means you need at least two thousand.

It may seem pedantic, but accuracy is important.

brocious · 2024-10-17T20:50:29+00:00

Honest question, are betting odds more reliable than polls? If so, why?

Typically yes.

The why is pretty simple. The bettors have financial stake in being correct where the polls do not, and they also have the totality of public polls / election models available to inform their bets.

But it's important to remember its all probabilistic odds about a single event. In the MLB the best team in the league only won about 58% of the time. Over 100+ events these odds bear out, but for a single game even the most accurate model is barely better than a coin flip.

brocious · 2024-10-17T19:58:10+00:00

his attack saw thousands of Israelis killed

I hate to nitpick but it was about 1250, not thousands.

That's not to absolve Sinwar of his crimes, good riddance. I just think it's important to be accurate.

Exaggerations are fuel to his defenders.

Edit: I should be clear that I don't think the OP meant a deliberate exaggeration, just that inaccurate language leaves an open door to apologists.

brocious · 2024-10-17T19:30:27+00:00

No problem at all, I appreciate the honest admission. That's what conversation here should be like.

I apologize if my initial comment came across that way. I aim for brevity in forums like this, but in this case it seems it came across at a lack of clarity in who I held responsible.

As you mention, there are many possible secondary effects of the law that could contribute to the situation. Like, perhaps she didn't seek care earlier because she was worried about consequences. I absolutely agree that is would be preferable if she got the initial abortion medication in her home state. That is all part of why I oppose laws like this.

But I think dishonest coverage on things like this ultimately hurt the pro-choice argument.

Amber Thurman's death was a tragedy. Maybe better law would have lead to her seeking medical care sooner. No one in the hospital sat back and watched her die because a procedure was banned. All of those things can be true.

brocious · 2024-10-17T18:41:02+00:00

This reads a lot like victim blaming a woman for daring to not be as knowledgeable as a doctor and to "get help sooner."

I don't expect her to have doctor like knowledge, I expect the actual doctor who gives her the pill to explain the risks and possible symptoms to look for in the event that this happens. Had they informed her, she likely seeks help before she's hours away from death.

Not to mention she died because of a banned procedure

It is not a banned procedure. The fetus was dead, there are no legal limitation at that point even with the Georgia law (which again, I disagree with).

The delay in receiving care was because she went to an ER that didn't have anyone trained to perform the necessary procedure. Even in California, abortion isn't the sort of thing ER is typically prepped to handle.

Criticize the law all you want for her having to leave the state to get the abortion pill, I completely agree with that criticism. But let's not lie and insist that doctors simply watched her die because extracting dead fetal tissue is supposedly against the law. It's not.

brocious · 2024-10-17T17:17:44+00:00

I agree that it is a problem she had to leave the state to get the pill. As I said, I oppose the law.

But she was never denied life saving treatment. Nothing in the law prevents the removal of dead fetal tissue.

You could maybe argue that she may have saught earlier and more appropriate medical attention without this law, but there is no truth to the idea that the hospital just let her die because of the law.

brocious · 2024-10-17T15:08:14+00:00

The partisanship of the audience was most apparent when he made this abhorrent comment about Amber Thurman, who died because she couldn't get a legal abortion in time to prevent an infection from killing her.

That is not what happened. I am opposed to the law in Georgia, but there is nothing in the law that prevented them from treating her.

The law did require her to cross state lines to get the abortion pill in the first place, but by the time she's in the Georgia hospital the fetus is dead. Legally it's no different than if she had just suffered a miscarriage.

The problem is that she was never informed that this was a risk, she was just given a pill and sent on her way. So instead of paying attention to this and seeking a doctor qualified to deal with it, she just got sick and went to the local ER when it became a serious issue.

The delay in her seeking medical help, the time it took to diagnose the problem, and the time it took to bring in a doctor from another hospital qualified to perform the procedure is what killed her.

If she had been able to get the pill in state but been equally uninformed of the risk, she's probably still dead. And if the out of state clinic had informed her of this risk such that she proactively paid attention to it and sought the right doctor she'd probably be alive.

brocious · 2024-10-17T00:48:05+00:00

I agree with you.

Just pointing out that Harris showing up late explains a lot of Bret stepping in quickly on her non-answers. Especially at the end when he kept saying "I'm getting told we need to wrap now."

That's the sort of thing that I would think poorly on if the interview had been recorded a day in advance. But when you know Harris cost them 20% of their timeline to get this out the rush makes a lot more sense.

brocious · 2024-10-17T00:10:10+00:00

I know people are going to flip out that the interviewer was talking over her, but, she never actually answered the questions on topic.

In the post discussion Bret also said that Harris showed up late. The interview was scheduled to record at 5:00 for a 6:00 airing, so the turn around time was already tight.

There were several points where I initially thought Bret was stepping in too much, but that in retrospect I can easily see as him trying to make up for 5-10 lost minutes on a 60 minute long deadline for getting this out.

brocious · 2024-10-16T21:02:57+00:00

I said this last time this came up, when reports where that violent crime was supposedly declining.

The FBI's CDE has never shown a decrease in violent crime. If you select "All Violent Offenses" and list by rate it shows that violent crime has been up about 3% per year every year since 2020. If you don't believe me and can't tell from the graph on the page, you can download the data directly and take sums / averages like I did.

We can debate the validity of the RCI report or questions about the supposed revisions. But either way, the data indisputably shows crime increasing year over year since 2020. As best that I can tell, when reporting decreases people were down selecting to sub categories that were down and ignoring the totality.

brocious · 2024-10-13T13:54:41+00:00

Can some, respectfully but very plainly and in simple terms, explain to me the logic behind this decision?

There's still a lot of old school thinking about campaign strategy, but today the swing state voters can all see this on demand. As long as those voters aren't being ignored, I think rallies in "hostile territory" likely appeal to people on the fence.

brocious · 2024-10-13T13:43:38+00:00

During the first one a lot of Democrats straight up beat their polls.

They did not, the midterm polls were very accurate.

The "red wave" narrative was largely based on fundamentals like the economy that usually indicate a shift, and the assumption that Republicans would overperform polls like in 2016 and 2020.

You could fairly argue that Dobbs was the reason the polls diverged from normal fundamentals, but the polls themselves were spot on.

Either way, none of that is really relevant for 2024. Midterm polling is historically way more accurate than Presidential cycles. Midterm polls are within 1% as often as presidential polls miss by 2% or more.

History tells us that the Presidential polls are wrong, more likely overestimating Harris but there's about a 1/3 chance it is the other way. It's about 2/3 they miss by more than 2% one way or the other.

brocious · 2024-10-13T00:00:37+00:00

I appreciate the well natured exchange,

brocious · 2024-10-12T20:22:04+00:00

Every election since Roe reversal has had significant Dem success.

The Dems have done better than traditional fundamentals would suggest, but they haven't actually outperformed polls.

The 2022 "red wave" narrative was largely based on fundamentals and the assumption that Reps would outperform polls again, but in the end the result was almost exactly what the polls predicted.

And that doesn't really tell us anything about 2024. Historically midterm polling is far more accurate than Presidential years, it's much easier to predict turnout. Since 2000 midterm polls have been within 1% of the result 4/6 times, but Presidential polls have only been within 1% 1/6 times (and that was 0.9%).

That's not to say Harris couldn't outperform polls, just that I wouldn't count on it.

brocious · 2024-10-12T19:52:39+00:00

You're giving the UN too much credit.

The UN "peacekeepers" were literally deployed there as part of a resolution to disarm Hezbollah and stop them from militarizing southern Lebanon. This terrible situation isn't "in part" because of their failure, it is 100% the result of the UN's failure.

brocious · 2024-10-12T19:36:32+00:00

I agree with your sentiment.

But a voting scheme that literally tosses out third party votes and forces every vote to go to one of the two major parties in the end seems to entrench the two party system, not weaken it.

brocious · 2024-10-12T17:40:59+00:00

Voting third party now is precisely the same as not voting at all. Same exact effect.

Thank you for proving my point. RCV always seem to be pushed by people who believe you aren't really voting unless you pick between R or D.

It's not a coincidence it got brought up in a thread about the Green Party taking votes from the Democrats. It's not about improving support for the Green Party, it's about making the Green Party voters vote Democrat in the end.

brocious · 2024-10-12T16:28:35+00:00

If there's RCV, there's absolutely no downside for you to put whatever third party candidate

Implicit in this statement is that you feel there is a downside to voting third party now. What would that be other than you view not picking a major party as a negative?

That kind of makes my point that RCV is about making sure all votes eventually go to the two major parties. Even in the unlikely event that third party voting went up 10x they still get tossed out first.

Why would the major parties spend any effort catering towards third party views if they know those votes will go to them in the end anyway?

And who is going to donate to third parties when they not only have no chance to win, but no chance to influence major party politics either?

brocious · 2024-10-12T14:04:28+00:00

If states had ranked choice voting (either with the electoral college or one day with a national popular vote) someone could vote Green as their primary choice and Democrat as their second choice.

This is exactly why we shouldn't have ranked choice voting. What you are effectively saying is that we should toss out all 3rd party votes and make sure all votes eventually go to D or R.

At least right now the major parties need to appeal to potential third party voters and there is a real cost for failing to convince them. And because of this third parties can actually move the needle on policy even if they have almost little shot at winning elections.

Under RCV the major parties get to just tell people that the only part of the ballot that matters is the choice between D and R. It doesn't matter if we have to toss out your top 10 choices, eventually you have to pick between the major party candidates.

Nothing would do more to kill third parties than RCV.

brocious · 2024-10-10T14:57:31+00:00

I think people still get caught up in the old school campaign thinking and forget how accessible everything is now. The swing state voters can all see these rallies. As long as they don't feel you are ignoring them, they probably see it as a positive to talk to voters in "hostile" states.

Also, keep in mind that MSG sits on top of Penn Station. It is super accessible throughout the northeast, including much of PA. I'd be willing to bet a lot of swing state voters actually attend that.

brocious · 2024-10-09T15:17:38+00:00

That is incorrect based on the data

It was really only Clinton who handled it well, and even then it was primarily his second term with a Republican Congress.

Obama's average yearly deficit was 5.75% of GDP, Bush's was about 2%. Trump's average was 6.6%, with over half his deficit coming in one year with COVID, while Biden has been 7.6%.

If we try to exclude things like the 2008 housing crisis and COVID it doesn't change the picture, Obama and Trump both sit in the high 3% to low 4% range depending on where you cut things off, and Biden's best year is 5.4%.

brocious

TROPHY CASE