Letters to the Editor
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White woman voters betrayed Obama when it really mattered...
so much for the myth that white woman are different than thier counterparts. In NH a state in a region as segregated as any in the country white woman voters lacked the courage to break away from the coatails of thier spouses.
It is really not that much of a surprise when you give it some thought white woman in the pecking order of our country's lineup designed by their soulmates also have and continue to leverage the advantages of being privledged whites.
The very idea that a person like Obama who has deliberately avoided being the sterotype Black male that allegedly scares off good white folk could not convince white woman to break from thier gender alliances with a has been white candiate (defined by her husband and living in his shadows a carpetbagger from NY) is sad and a lethal mistake for white woman and our country.
White woman voters had a chance to make a difference yet instead they did what they have always done stayed in their place impotent when opportunity stared them in the face. No surprise these white voters lied to the pollsters and the media they had good role models..
-- Thr
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Wangsness
is right, I think: the media/press has always been a real mixed bag, no matter what age we were in. Indeed, the discussions of the press put me in mind of Plato's analysis in the dialogue The Sophist, where he has Socrates discussing what he calls the manipulators of images (you could actually translate the Greek as something like "image handlers")and how they distort the logos of reality for their personal benefit, covering over the appearing of the being of truth (thus the care you must take with them: they seem silly at first, but look at how they tame and subdue the great beast of public appetite, and lead the mob around by the nose). And then there is Cicero, with his distinctions between a true and false rhetoric (rhetoric having a positive function, being a witty account of the realities of the situation to persuade one's fellow citizens of the truth). I think the battle is always the same, and we are just shocked to find ourselves fighting it . . . again. Plato has Socrates say in the Republic that
"here, my dear Glaucon, is the highest danger we face in being human; and therefore the utmost care should be taken. Let each one of us leave every other kind of knowledge and seek and follow one thing only, if perhaps he may be able to learn and may find someone who will make him able to discern between good and evil, and so to choose always and everywhere the better life as he has opportunity. He should consider the bearing of all these things which have been mentioned severally and collectively upon moral excellence . . . he will then look at the nature of the soul, and from the consideration of all these qualities he will be able to determine which is the better and which is the worse; and so he will choose, giving the name of evil to the life which will make his soul more unjust, and good to the life which will make his soul more just; all else he will disregard."
Always we are facing this choice.
And bebop-o, I know I've only met you through these forums, but I hope you are ok. Take care, man.
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I love this theory!
Journalists corrupt the electoral process by preempting voter judgments with their own baseless and universally inaccurate prognostications. In this most recent case, they pushed Hillary out of the race by incorrectly forecasting that she would lose and be forced out of the race before she won and practically forced her opponents out of the race. Wait... Is there a lag effect at work here?
Remarkably well formulated. Never let it be said that you can't vent your spleen and eat it too.
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many NH white women voted for Obama
pretty sure
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@Mike Sulzer
I follow the first sentence, of course, but not the second part. Why is asking 2000 randomly selected people, even simultaneously, if it were possible, any different from asking them over three days (assuming, as we must be, that opinions have changed very little over that time).
That's reassuring, I can be understood at least 50% of the time.
Because it isn't assumed that opinions change very little over that time, it is assumed that a steady opinion plus jitter models the status at any particular moment. It is assumed that the actual samples of opinions at any given moment vary with a mixture of factors, that these factors have different underlying frequencies. Experience in election polling indicates that longer term results, lower frequency fluctuations, are usually more important. That need not be the case -- in fact, the backlash is diametrically opposed to that thinking, and was real. However, for general elections it is definitely true. It turns out that if you take the two "questions": Do you intend to vote in the election in November? (my simplified version of the likely voter filter, use the real one), and "If the election were held today, whom would you for?" and ask them all year during an election year, and then average the results of all of these, you will correctly pick the winner all the time (in presidential elections held since Gallup began polling).
There are some other details, like that the sample needs to be random with respect to time across the strata, etc., but that's the general principal.
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@Thrasher
Brace yourself. I see 18 posts coming down the pike accusing you of being a parody.
By the way, you were bragging the other day over how many posts your presence in a thread generated.
This unfortunately is nothing to brag about. The runner up is Golden-Boy. He too is so mired in identity politics (in his case Muslim-hating) that he's incapable of being dealt with rationally. This in turn leads to a succession of people beating their heads against the wall trying to get through to him and eventually giving up.
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But perhaps what Thrasher meant
was that a significant portion of white women acted in this way such as to influence the outcome (since clearly he could not mean that all white women did, which would be ridiculous, since obviously they didn't). At least that's what I thought when I read his post and felt a sinking feeling in my bones that he may be right. In my logic class I teach the students to operate by what logicians call the principle of charity: to interpret your interlocuter's point in the best light possible, thus facilitating real argument.