***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[ryda421]

im sure meth will approve of ninja making jokes about someone's health

 

[elpablo21]

What's stopping Trump from going to Camp David though?

"Yea, Camp David is very rustic, it's nice, you'd like it. You know how long you'd like it? For about 30 minutes," Trump said

 

[EddieDoyers]

What's stopping Trump from going to Camp David though?

"Yea, Camp David is very rustic, it's nice, you'd like it. You know how long you'd like it? For about 30 minutes," Trump said

 

[EddieDoyers]

I know Camp David looks better than this state park

 

[frink85]

He's talking up Camp David like he was going on....

...vacation? [emoji]129300[/emoji]

 

[ninjahood]

Meth said he doesn't see those mentions.

Steve Harvey is not a member of NT, neither is anyone else in that gif. Furthermore, all we are doing are mocking public figures that cape for white supremacy. We are mocking them based on their actions, not their race.

if you can't write **** here, you think meth gonna accept da racoon workaround? oh ite.

can't even call Jay-z by his nickname here...ya better clean da pile of **** ya just did.

Welp, we will let Meth tell us where the line needs to be drawn, and we will have to respect that.

But we don't have to listen to a damb thing from you.

meh, this is why Trump won.

 

[RIP sleazyy]

bruh, i rode the train almost errday in the 90s and no one ever stuck me for my north face, bear coat, columbia jacket etc.

Walked the streets of DC for years, in and out of gogos, never got tested not one time. Shout out not lookin like food.

 

@blakehounsell: Trump: “I am a trader."

Freudian slip perhaps...?

He also said "were a very powerful company"

 

BlackSportsOnline‏Verified account @BSO 8m8 minutes ago


Steve Harvey Explains Why Black People Need to Respect Donald Trump http://bit.ly/2mEl8fm  via @StephenFlorivalpic.twitter.com/HUQe2jy3yo

 

Needs to be added to the squad

This lowkey the best thing I've seen all year, yelling at Screamin A being Captain trash panda [emoji]128553[/emoji][emoji]128553[/emoji][emoji]128514[/emoji]

for some reason i want to report ninja and see what meth has to say. but im not one to tattle. i miss the days this clown wasn't here

How have I not seen this before lmao

if you can't write **** here, you think meth gonna accept da racoon workaround? oh ite.


can't even call Jay-z by his nickname here...ya better clean da pile of **** ya just did.

alright bro great.  move along

ite imma make SURE he comes and cleans up since u wanna fix ur lips.

This the most transparent fake outrage I have ever seen in my life

 

[Based Jesus]

#ADayWithoutNinja

 

[rexanglorum]

I do feel the need to correct the record. The median Trump supporter makes more money than the median Sanders or Clinton supporter. Also most of Trump's votes in the general election were generic Republican votes and considering that the median Kasich and Rubio supporter made over six figures, they could indeed afford to shop at Nordstrom and vacation in Hawai'i.

While it is true that Clinton did have some supporters, who were high earning professionals, and Trump did attract the support of some very poor people who voted against their economic interests; On the whole, Republicans have more money and privilege than Democrats.

One of the reasons for Trump victory was his ability to paint all Clinton voters as globe hopping, trust fund having, downtown hipsters who were contemptuous of the working class. Let's not add to that manisfestly false narrative.

 

[ninjahood]

One of the reasons for Trump victory was his ability to paint all Clinton voters as globe hopping, trust fund having, downtown hipsters who were contemptuous of the working class. Let's not add to that manisfestly false narrative.

ship sailed along time ago, as seen in this thread.

 

[seandon23]

Y'all dudes really fall for the bait every time

 

[Nawzlew]

im sure meth will approve of ninja making jokes about someone's health

he supports a dude that openly mocked someone with a disability

no surprises at this point

 

[rexanglorum]

ship sailed along time ago, as seen in this thread.

At our best, we, the liberals of America, are about justice, justice, justice. We respect all people and their humanity and we want to help everyone who is disadvantaged, even if we disagree with their ideas.

At our worse, we fall back onto post secondary education having and passport owning identity politics.


Folks will sometimes be at their best and sometimes be at their worse but when people feel needlessly confronted, we are more likely to be at our worse. When you and other Trump supporters call everyone else a ****, a snowflake, a cry baby and you mock them for having gone to college or for being gay or for not making a lot of money or for being on public assistance or for being genuinely concerned that they or their loved ones will be separated as a result of Trump becoming President, you are creating a hostile atmosphere.

It's like the "Malice at the Palace," none of the fans should have thrown stuff at the Pacers players but after Ron Artest charged the stands, it makes it hard not to shower Reggie Miller and his teammates with beer and popcorn on their way out the tunnel.

 

[$tatus $ymbol]

Why am I just seeing that tappin **** gif

 

[trueprada]

 

[flyeed]

Lmfao

 

[flyeed]

[thread="509493"][/thread]
[thread="509493"] [/thread]
[thread="509493"] [/thread]

Trump is a funny dude. Son can't take a no so he maneuvers an obvious yes question right after

 

[ksteezy]

Wait, he's 33 and was a sophomore in HS during 9/11?

Hmm I'm 34 and I was a freshman in college...

 

[AEA18]

was not hear when wire tapping news came out, can someone tell me if ninjarat was a up in arms about it?

He just started posting in here again. Dudes shouldn't have summoned him.

Thread was great when he wasn't posting!

 

[rolaholic]

@spectatorindex:
GERMANY: Foreign ministry official calls Trump 'small and pathetic' for his behaviour with Angela Merkel at the White House

Love the choice of the word "small"

 

[dragicon]

anybody have any idea how many vacation days trump has taken so far? He's down in florida today again.

 

[moe fab]

I wish I was a snowflake...then I could experience some of that privilege [emoji]128169[/emoji]

 

[RustyShackleford]

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...looks-lot-obama-s-n735171?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma

Donald Trump promised during the campaign to implement a "secret plan" to defeat ISIS, including a pledge to "bomb the hell out of" the terror group in Iraq and Syria.

Now, the Pentagon has given him a secret plan, but it turns out to be a little more than an "intensification" of the same slow and steady approach that Trump derided under the Obama administration, two senior officials who have reviewed the document told NBC News.

The plan calls for continued bombing; beefing up support and assistance to local forces to retake its Iraqi stronghold Mosul and ultimately the ISIS capital of Raqqa in Syria; drying up ISIS's sources of income; and stabilizing the areas retaken from ISIS, the officials say.

Oh how nice for the Pentagon to confirm Obama is a reasonable man for the 75576537505726205278965652908579857th time.

 

[RustyShackleford]

anybody have any idea how many vacation days trump has taken so far? He's down in florida today again.

Famb, being president is a part time job for him.

 

[ninjahood]

was not hear when wire tapping news came out, can someone tell me if ninjarat was a up in arms about it?

He just started posting in here again. Dudes shouldn't have summoned him.

where's your 538 copy & paste jobs?

this is what ya ****** wanted though, couldn't keep da lips sealed bout me.

speaking of 538...

There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble
Groupthink produced a failure of the “wisdom of crowds” and an underestimate of Trump’s chances.

By Nate Silver

Filed under The Real Story Of 2016


This is the ninth article in a series that reviews news coverage of the 2016 general election, explores how Donald Trump won and why his chances were underrated by most of the American media.


Last summer, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in what bettors, financial markets and the London-based media regarded as a colossal upset. Reporters and pundits were quick to blame the polls for the unexpected result. But the polls had been fine, more or less: In the closing days of the Brexit campaign, they’d shown an almost-even race, and Leave’s narrow victory (by a margin just under 4 percentage points) was about as consistent with them as it was with anything else. The failure was not so much with the polls but with the people who were analyzing them.

The U.S. presidential election, as I’ve argued, was something of a similar case. No, the polls didn’t show a toss-up, as they had in Brexit. But the reporting was much more certain of Clinton’s chances than it should have been based on the polls. Much of The New York Times’s coverage, for instance, implied that Clinton’s odds were close to 100 percent. In an article on Oct. 17 — more than three weeks before Election Day — they portrayed the race as being effectively over, the only question being whether Clinton should seek a landslide or instead assist down-ballot Democrats:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is planning its most ambitious push yet into traditionally right-leaning states, a new offensive aimed at extending her growing advantage over Donald J. Trump while bolstering down-ballot candidates in what party leaders increasingly suggest could be a sweeping victory for Democrats at every level. […]

The maneuvering speaks to the unexpected tension facing Mrs. Clinton as she hurtles toward what aides increasingly believe will be a decisive victory — a pleasant problem, for certain, but one that has nonetheless scrambled the campaign’s strategy weeks before Election Day: Should Mrs. Clinton maximize her own margin, aiming to flip as many red states as possible to run up an electoral landslide, or prioritize the party’s congressional fortunes, redirecting funds and energy down the ballot?
This is not to say the election was a toss-up in mid-October, which was one of the high-water marks of the campaign for Clinton. But while a Trump win was unlikely, it should hardly have been unthinkable. 1 And yet the Times, famous for its “to be sure” equivocations, 2 wasn’t even contemplating the possibility of a Trump victory. 3

It’s hard to reread this coverage without recalling Sean Trende’s essay on “unthinkability bias,” which he wrote in the wake of the Brexit vote. Just as was the case in the U.S. presidential election, voting on the referendum had split strongly along class, education and regional lines, with voters outside of London and without advanced degrees being much more likely to vote to leave the EU. The reporters covering the Brexit campaign, on the other hand, were disproportionately well-educated and principally based in London. They tended to read ambiguous signs — anything from polls to the musings of taxi drivers — as portending a Remain win, and many of them never really processed the idea that Britain could vote to leave the EU until it actually happened.

So did journalists in Washington and London make the apocryphal Pauline Kael mistake, refusing to believe that Trump or Brexit could win because nobody they knew was voting for them? That’s not quite what Trende was arguing. Instead, it’s that political experts 4 aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself until and unless there’s very compelling evidence for the contrary position. Social media, especially Twitter, can amplify the groupthink further. It can be an echo chamber.

I recently reread James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds” which, despite its name, spends as much time contemplating the shortcomings of such wisdom as it does celebrating its successes. Surowiecki argues 5 that crowds usually make good predictions when they satisfy these four conditions:

Diversity of opinion. “Each person should have private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.”
Independence. “People’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.”
Decentralization. “People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.”
Aggregation. “Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.”
Political journalism scores highly on the fourth condition, aggregation. While Surowiecki usually has something like a financial or betting market in mind when he refers to “aggregation,” the broader idea is that there’s some way for individuals to exchange their opinions instead of keeping them to themselves. And my gosh, do political journalists have a lot of ways to share their opinions with one another, whether through their columns, at major events such as the political conventions or, especially, through Twitter.

But those other three conditions? Political journalism fails miserably along those dimensions.

Diversity of opinion? For starters, American newsrooms are not very diverse along racial or gender lines, and it’s not clear the situation is improving much. 6 And in a country where educational attainment is an increasingly important predictor of cultural and political behavior, some 92 percent of journalists have college degrees. A degree didn’t used to be a de facto prerequisite 7 for a reporting job; just 70 percent of journalists had college degrees in 1982 and only 58 percent did in 1971.

The political diversity of journalists is not very strong, either. As of 2013, only 7 percent of them identified as Republicans (although only 28 percent called themselves Democrats with the majority saying they were independents). And although it’s not a perfect approximation — in most newsrooms, the people who issue endorsements are not the same as the ones who do reporting — there’s reason to think that the industry was particularly out of sync with Trump. Of the major newspapers that endorsed either Clinton or Trump, only 3 percent (2 of 59) endorsed Trump. By comparison, 46 percent of newspapers to endorse either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney endorsed Romney in 2012. Furthermore, as the media has become less representative of right-of-center views — and as conservatives have rebelled against the political establishment — there’s been an increasing and perhaps self-reinforcing cleavage between conservative news and opinion outlets such as Breitbart and the rest of the media.

Although it’s harder to measure, I’d also argue that there’s a lack of diversity when it comes to skill sets and methods of thinking in political journalism. Publications such as Buzzfeed or (the now defunct) Gawker.com get a lot of shade from traditional journalists when they do things that challenge conventional journalistic paradigms. But a lot of traditional journalistic practices are done by rote or out of habit, such as routinely granting anonymity to staffers to discuss campaign strategy even when there isn’t much journalistic merit in it. Meanwhile, speaking from personal experience, I’ve found the reception of “data journalists” by traditional journalists to be unfriendly, although there have been exceptions.

Independence? This is just as much of a problem. Crowds can be wise when people do a lot of thinking for themselves before coming together to exchange their views. But since at least the days of “The Boys on the Bus,” political journalism has suffered from a pack mentality. Events such as conventions and debates literally gather thousands of journalists together in the same room; attend one of these events, and you can almost smell the conventional wisdom being manufactured in real time. (Consider how a consensus formed that Romney won the first debate in 2012 when it had barely even started, for instance.) Social media — Twitter in particular — can amplify these information cascades, with a single tweet receiving hundreds of thousands of impressions and shaping the way entire issues are framed. As a result, it can be largely arbitrary which storylines gain traction and which ones don’t. What seems like a multiplicity of perspectives might just be one or two, duplicated many times over.

Decentralization? Surowiecki writes about the benefit of local knowledge, but the political news industry has become increasingly consolidated in Washington and New York as local newspapers have suffered from a decade-long contraction. That doesn’t necessarily mean local reporters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Ohio should have picked up Trumpian vibrations on the ground in contradiction to the polls. But as we’ve argued, national reporters often flew into these states with pre-baked narratives — for instance, that they were “decreasingly representative of contemporary America” — and fit the facts to suit them, neglecting their importance to the Electoral College. A more geographically decentralized reporting pool might have asked more questions about why Clinton wasn’t campaigning in Wisconsin, for instance, or why it wasn’t more of a problem for her that she was struggling in polls of traditional bellwethers such as Ohio and Iowa. If local newspapers had been healthier economically, they might also have commissioned more high-quality state polls; the lack of good polling was a problem in Michigan and Wisconsin especially.

There was once a notion that whatever challenges the internet created for journalism’s business model, it might at least lead readers to a more geographically and philosophically diverse array of perspectives. But it’s not clear that’s happening, either. Instead, based on data from the news aggregation site Memeorandum, the top news sources (such as the Times, The Washington Post and Politico) have earned progressively more influence over the past decade:


The share of total exposure 8 for the top five news sources 9 climbed from roughly 25 percent a decade ago to around 35 percent last year, and has spiked to above 40 percent so far in 2017. While not a perfect measure 10 , this is one sign the digital age hasn’t necessarily democratized the news media. Instead, the most notable difference in Memeorandum sources between 2007 and 2017 is the decline of independent blogs; many of the most popular ones from the late ’aughts either folded or (like FiveThirtyEight) were bought by larger news organizations. Thus, blogs and local newspapers — two of the better checks on Northeast Corridor conventional wisdom run amok — have both had less of a say in the conversation.

All things considered, then, the conditions of political journalism are poor for crowd wisdom and ripe for groupthink. So … what to do about it, then?

Initiatives to increase decentralization would help, although they won’t necessarily be easy. Increased subscription revenues at newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post is an encouraging sign for journalism, but a revival of local and regional newspapers — or a more sustainable business model for independent blogs — would do more to reduce groupthink in the industry.

Likewise, improving diversity is liable to be a challenge, especially because the sort of diversity that Surowiecki is concerned with will require making improvements on multiple fronts (demographic diversity, political diversity, diversity of skill sets). Still, the research Surowiecki cites is emphatic that there are diminishing returns to having too many of the same types of people in small groups or organizations. Teams that consist entirely of high-IQ people may underperform groups that contain a mix of high-IQ and medium-IQ participants, for example, because the high-IQ people are likely to have redundant strengths and similar blind spots.

That leaves independence. In some ways the best hope for a short-term fix might come from an attitudinal adjustment: Journalists should recalibrate themselves to be more skeptical of the consensus of their peers. That’s because a position that seems to have deep backing from the evidence may really just be a reflection from the echo chamber. You should be looking toward how much evidence there is for a particular position as opposed to how many people hold that position: Having 20 independent pieces of evidence that mostly point in the same direction might indeed reflect a powerful consensus, while having 20 like-minded people citing the same warmed-over evidence is much less powerful. Obviously this can be taken too far and in most fields, it’s foolish (and annoying) to constantly doubt the market or consensus view. But in a case like politics where the conventional wisdom can congeal so quickly — and yet has so often been wrong — a certain amount of contrarianism can go a long way.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-really-was-a-liberal-media-bubble/amp/