OT: Shocking news

What is shocking to me about this election is how many people, highly paid experts, journalists, researchers, managers, were so wrong. Over a billion dollars wrong. Tens of millions of votes wrong.

Just as so much "science" is wrong.

Imagine the bunglers and back-stabbers of the Clinton team, who were brutally wrong, who confidentally expected over 300 electoral votes, who were sure that Pensylvania and Florida and Wisconsin were in the bag, managing the economy and government and military of the USA.

Wrongness the the true hallmark of our times.

Polling data isn't science. Most of the Trump voters were too ashamed to admit that they were going to vote for a misogynistic demagogue.

You mean like electing the wrong President?

Looks like he is already reneging on his election promises...

I wonder if this anecdote foreshadows the future...

In 1967 there was a nasty civil war in Biafra/Nigeria. One of the perps, General Yakubu "Jack" Dan-Yumma Gowon, later came to the University of Warwick, where he was a godsend to the political science department :)

There's a board game called "Diplomacy" where you can make mutual assistance pacts with the other players in order to try to gain world dominance. There is nothing in the rules which prevents reneging on such pacts; that makes the game interesting.

My cousin used to play Diplomacy with Gowon, and Gowon, despite his demonstrable real-world experience, always lost heavily.

Why? Because the other players completely distrusted Gowan's ability to keep to his word, so they would never enter any pact with him.

Apparently Trump has already said that it doesn't matter what he said during the campaign, because he won.

People are not doing deals with Boris Johnson because he is a proven liar - and they say that to his face.

That often affects the polls for persons and parties with extremist views. Also, I don't understand why it matters that "experts were so wrong". For elections, only the result matters, not the predictions.

Over here, politicians operate in different modes. Campaign mode (pre-election) and operating mode are completely different. In campaign mode they promise lots of things, later they just say the opposite. In our case they can easily cover that up because there is never one party in the government so there is always a compromise. However, it is my belief they would even do that when they would have full control.

Our prime minister is known to make promises all the time, that he can easily know he never will be able to fulfill, then later he just apologizes and moves on making more promises. It appears to be completely wired in his mind that political promises are only to win elections and do not matter afterwards.

And John Larkin is the man of the moment.

Nate Silver did point out that he was assessing probabilities. While a vict ory for Clinton did look more probable than one for Trump the odds were no better than 2:1 and that in his sports predictions those sort of odds left the predicted winner losing once in roughly three events.

After the event it's easy to claim that the odds were wrong, and Brexit doe s suggest an explanation. Some commentators drew attention to the Brexit mi sprediction before the election. UK and US working-class politics are wildl y different, but both groups are facing a lot of unemployment, and are cons equently susceptible to anti-immigrant lies.

It sometimes takes a while for us (them? not really sure anymore) to figure out we've been had, but it isn't like we always just shrug our shoulders and chalk campaign promises up to "pillow talk."

Politicians can and do fall on the swords of their broken promises. Americans can be a very fickle bunch.

Yeah, the odds were off because even what you might call the "limousine Conservatives", whose ideology is one of free markets, fiscal restraint, and smaller government, were detached from just how White Pride the Conservative base really was.

My impression is that much of the base doesn't care so much about those Ivy League Cato Institute academic notions - they simply went along with them because it was the best cover story at the time. They like jobs and whiteness, and would be perfectly content with whatever political philosophy could make it happen, even, ah, some fashion of Socialist one.

Our current prime minister is sometimes reminded that during campaign he promised to lower taxes by 1000 euro for every working person, something that of course never materialized.

But that did not keep him from making more promises about things that are not even under his control...

Yes, and one of the biggest failings was of the "limousine Conservatives" (or in the case of sociopath ghouls like Peter Thiel, "Spaceship Conservatives") to recognize why DT had a shot at winning where McCain and Romney lost.

Even as a liberal, McCain and Romney were certainly to my mind more appealing people than Donald Trump, with a more appealing message, by a longshot. I likely wouldn't have been particularly happy with Mitt or McCain as POTUS, but in some sense I'd rationalize it to myself as "Okay, these are very much in the similar vein as the guys I've seen before, we can probably work together."

And finally the Conservative base didn't really want those guys, for what I would say is exactly that reason. "Working together" was a nice concept to pay lip service to, but it was never something that was particularly on the table.

When Conservatives say regarding DT "We want an outsider President not beholden to the establishment" what I hear is "We want a President so repulsive that none of the bad guys even want to deal with him."

And, when as has been posted here so many times, that you guys believe you're in a fight to the death against "wimps" and "degenerates", that makes it easier to "win."

For my part, I did prefer the devils that I knew to the devil that I don't, I'll admit it ("devil" is used as a figure of speech here, btw.) If Romney had won in 2012, I think it's rather unlikely there would be guys roaring around my city waving Confederate flags and Romney banners, shouting racial slurs out the window, as if the Republican party had just won Desert Storm.

That's definitely the devil that I don't know, and an America I don't understand.

Actually they were not wrong, they were delusionally over optimistic. Clint on won everywhere the polls came in comfortably above the MOE, say 4-5% ran ge or more. Then she just happened to lose everywhere the polls fell within the MOE. The major failing of the DNC was selecting a candidate that was p redicted to have polling this close when they had others with predicted pol ling well above Clinton, even O'Malley would have done better.

Well that's the thing, and getting these f_ck-ups out of government is a go od thing.

It's the era of leadership fraud, and it's not just the public sector, the private sector has been operating this way for 40 years now! Society is in deep trouble when it gets cornered into relying on politicians to do anythi ng- they are the most worthless do-nothing bunch of scum to be found anywhe re. Now that we're down to the wire on taking real action on CO2 pollution, it's over for mankind, by the time it REALLY becomes obvious to the idiots , we will have tripped into the point of no return, and this will be coming up shortly.

Of course you don't understand it. That was my point. Hardly anybody understands it, but that doesn't inhibit them from trying to control it.

You know jack shit about conservatives.

There's a difference?

We need a back-to-basics, old-time-morality, MicroEconomics 101 approach to managing society. Anything past that smashes in to the wrongness, the inability to understand causality in complex chaotic systems. Experts keep pushing on the wrong nodes and getting unexpected results.

Which lies are they, that there has been an excess of 250,000 net migration into the UK for the past few years, the official figures issued in May 2016 were 330,000?

UK employment is at an all time high, but UK wages aren't. In respect of wages I think you'll find the same is true your side of the pond.

Politics is all lies, the ones told on one side are no different to the other. The only time there is an accusation of a lie and subsequent abuse is where they have lost, not only the election but also the argument.

The election was swung by individuals who voted for Barack Obama last time, and voted for Donald Trump this time.

You seem so upset. I'm sorry I touched such a sensitive topic for you.

You don't seem to recognize that this is a red herring to the actual issue, and in fact sort of proves my point: US elections for the past 25 years or so have often been decided by what is a finally _trivial_ number of voters in "swing states."

I can't speak to the reasons for why a bunch of perpetually undecided Florida and Ohio voters do what they do - they may not even understand themselves. What I'm speaking to is the ~45 million voters who vote for Conservative candidates every single election, be it Reagan, Romney, McCain, Trump, or the Grand Pubah of Zanzibar, so long as they have the color red on their logo, and from all indications turned out in larger than expected numbers to support this guy than the previous two.

But why this time and not last? Certainly Barack Obama was every bit as pro-abortion as Hillary Clinton.

Oh, and DT has stated he never once asked God for forgiveness, either.

Can you imagine guys in lifted trucks flying Confederate flags driving around celebrating with Mitt Romney flags hanging from their windows as if they personally won Desert Storm?

Hmm.

Do you? Are you the only one, or are there others? Where can I discover this secret knowledge of which all the other intelligent people in the world are unable to comprehended?

This is bordering on some fashion of Rosicrucian/Gnostic esotericism type of explanation, John.