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Re:Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election on Friday February 19, 2021 @10:46PM (#26201336)
>Either people who get away with it undetected in the very short term are so good that they manage to suppress all evidence completely and it never comes out (which seems an implausible binodality in outcomes)

Why do you think that's implausible? What evidence of election fraud would you expect to be left behind that would be difficult to dispose of?

>is allowed to stand by corrupt institutions despite being widely decried.

By whom?

>If it were, you'd expect there to be examples of cases undetectable in the short-run but later discovered.

Why would that be expected? Many crimes are much harder to prove if the perpetrator is not caught in the act. Why would you not expect election fraud to be among them?

Re:Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election on Friday February 19, 2021 @07:42PM (#26200116)
If it is possible to carry out election rigging conspiracies in the US, then how can we be so confident that no such conspiracies were carried out by people that viciously hate the former president? Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries, and there is no magical means of preventing it here, then it's possible for them to get away with it here as well. They have courts and investigations and evidence in other countries as well, and that has seemingly not prevented election rigging there.
Re:Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election on Friday February 19, 2021 @07:42PM (#26200113)
>this time the people who believed the possible-but-highly-unlikely outcome, "Trump actually won", ended up donating lots of their money to the people who believed the much more simple and plausible scenario: "No, he didn't".

No, that's not what happened. People who believed the odds of the courts ruling in favor of Trump made the payout worth it gave their money to people who believed the odds of that not happening made the payout for that scenario worth it.

Of course, courts only have access to the evidence which is given to them by either side, so really we only know that the evidence Trump's legal team was able to get its hands on on short notice was not sufficient to convince the court to take the very significant step of overturning election results. We do not know who "actually" got more legitimate votes.

Re:Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election on Friday February 19, 2021 @07:38PM (#26200079)
Yes, and examples of evidence might include that some election facilities were administered by people with a seething hatred for one of the candidates, and election observers in some areas were prevented from being able to meaningfully monitor the election process. Of course there are many other potential forms of evidence, but those two right there would be enough to give anyone pretty good reason to believe there was election fraud, provided it happened outside of America, since election fraud can't take place in America.
Re:Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election on Friday February 19, 2021 @05:27PM (#26198850)
It's also kinda like how Al Capone might not have ordered the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, and we'll never really know for sure, but most people conclude that he probably did, even though no one could definitively prove it.

And also kinda like how Kim Jong Un might be the preferred candidate of 100% of North Koreans, and we'll never really know for sure, but most people conclude that he is almost certainly not.

Re:Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election on Friday February 19, 2021 @05:15PM (#26198726)
In a bench trial, the judge is supposed to weight the evidence presented, and issue various different degrees of relief based on whether it meets certain standards in totality. For a case where the plaintiff is asking the judge to overturn the result of an election, the judge would require a rather high standard of evidence.

I was talking about hard evidence specifically -- think a smoking gun with the suspect's fingerprints on it. According to what I have been lead to believe, if election fraud happened in the US, sufficient evidence of said fraud would be discovered and presented to American courts, though that is not the case in other countries.

Therefore if I have not been mislead, when a person considers whether there was election fraud in the US, they should only consider whether sufficient evidence has been presented to courts or to the media, not whether there exist other lesser forms of evidence.

Re:Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election on Friday February 19, 2021 @04:17PM (#26198139)
>No, they aren't

Have I been mislead? If it is possible to carry out election rigging conspiracies in the US, then how can we be so confident that no such conspiracies were carried out by people that viciously hate the former president? Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries, and there is no magical means of preventing it here, then it's possible for them to get away with it here as well. They have courts and investigations and evidence in other countries as well, and that has seemingly not prevented election rigging there.

Re:Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election on Friday February 19, 2021 @03:44PM (#26197824)
>But if the evidence is not available, then there is no good reason to believe it.

Based on this statement, I am guessing you are an American, and are therefore accustomed to all relevant hard evidence always being available. What you may not know is that in the rest of the world, sometimes some hard evidence is not available, so those people have adapted other mechanisms for forming beliefs about what is true. One such mechanism is the use of reason to draw inferences from other relevant facts.

For instance, in those countries, if a man who has professed a strong desire for wealth is tasked with guarding a large pile of money, and the money disappears, people in those countries will infer that the man likely took the money, even if no one saw him take it and the money is not later found in his possession.

Re:Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election on Friday February 19, 2021 @03:27PM (#26197645)
My understanding is that people in those other countries have not been lead down such a path, even though they know that sometimes people get away with stealing elections in their countries. I believe they use reason and inference when judging what is real, because all relevant hard evidence is not always available to them.
Re:Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election on Friday February 19, 2021 @02:22PM (#26196900)
One theory I've heard is that the magical soil in the US would compel the riggers to confess and/or provide evidence of their guilt to the courts and to the general public, rather than lying and/or concealing that evidence. In the rest of the world, courts often are not provided with relevant evidence or confessions, and therefore rigging remains possible.
Re:Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election on Friday February 19, 2021 @01:43PM (#26196409)
>Or a participant in some sort of fantasy vote-rigging conspiracy.

This is even more relevant outside of the US. In the US vote rigging conspiracies are impossible for some inexplicable reason, perhaps related to magical soil, but outside of the US they are a real concern.

>The root of the problem is a lack of self control

So make it easier for people to control their own behavior, if you want to make a dent in the problem. Teach them how to be in good shape by actually making them do it as adolescents. Teenagers are already required to participate in gym class. Why don't we change gym class so that it actually does something for them?

>and putting things in scarier packaging will not solve that problem.

Do you think that the labeling on a package is irrelevant? Then why do companies spend so much money designing it? Why are they all bright flashy colors, rather than black, white, and grey?

>Why would we restrict our charity to this country?

Because this is where we live, and where our families live, and the quality of their lives is most dependent on what happens to the people here.

>Let's solve real problems, which mostly exist in other countries. Unrestricted access to soda and Twinkies is not a real problem.

70% of the country being overweight is a real problem.

>In addition, prohibition does not work.

I said nothing about prohibition. Having to ask the cashier to go get you your case of Pepsi is not the same as banning the sale of Pepsi.

How about locking the soda and sugary snacks away with the cigarettes, instead of having them in your face (and your children's faces) in the checkout aisle? How about putting warning labels on them like cigarette cartons instead of cartoon pictures designed to get the attention of children?

How about devoting multiple hours of every school day in high school to getting students into great shape, so they don't start off their adult lives overweight?

There are many, many things we could easily do, but the people who run our civilization do not want them to be done. Those same people are the ones that are gaining more and more power over the people, by the way, as a consequence of the concentration of wealth.

What water scarcity problem is currently causing problems for 70% of the country?

Is working for Walmart something you would aspire for your grandchildren to be doing as a career?
>If a dog is fat it's somebody else's fault, if a person is fat it's their fault.

I don't really care whom you blame, I care about the results. Our society could do much more to stop people from being fat and unhealthy, yet 70% of the country is overweight, and more people have chronic health problems than don't.

>How should I know how people's unborn children feel about a society which doesn't exist yet?

I'm not asking how the unborn children feel, I'm asking whether the existing people would want to be born into the civilization which they expect that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will inherit.

So, lots of bread and circuses. Are they healthy? Are their grandchildren and great-grandchildren going to inherit a civilization that they would want to be born in to?
Re:James Baldwin, Here and Elsewhere on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @11:09AM (#26002685)
I am not sure why you think the audience had tribal hostilities against him. These people were not klansmen, they were young British aristocrats whose parents were overseeing the deconstruction of an empire on the basis of the enlightened principles of the day. Baldwin was not criticizing them particularly, he was criticizing the crude upstarts from across the pond. I'm not aware of any good reason to believe they were not already rooting for Baldwin before the debate took place. But either way, these people knew very well that life was not nice for people that had been recently conquered or enslaved. He did not need to lure them into seeing that.

I believe the applause was entirely on the basis of the oratorical trouncing he gave to Buckley, who was the wrong person to be on that stage, and as a result of the fact that they were already sympathetic to his point of view. What impact would Baldwin's presentation have had on a group of British aristocrats 200 years earlier, who were making fortunes by financing slave ship voyages?

Would they have been convinced that the cruel behavior of some sheriff toward a black woman was evidence that treating Africans differently from Europeans was poisonous to their minds?

Re:James Baldwin, Here and Elsewhere on Monday February 01, 2021 @08:35PM (#25996534)
I saw that video somewhat recently. I believe what the audience probably learned is that Buckley was not terribly effective at debating in that format. I am not sure what they learned from Baldwin. I don't recall learning anything from him in that video.

I would be shocked if that was actually the first time they learned that being a member of a conquered or enslaved people was really not very nice in a variety of different ways. Maybe they did not know about some of the particular ways in which it is bad, but these are as you noted young members of the elite class in a rapidly decolonializing empire. I would expect them to know the ethical debate over imperialism like the back of their hand, and would expect them to generally be unfavorable toward it.

These people knew about the history of slavery, not just in Europe and the Americas, but about, for instance, slavery in the middle east, where, despite bringing in huge numbers of African slaves, there are virtually no descendants of African slaves today, due to the customary treatment of slaves there.

As for whether Jefferson's ideals are a sham, clearly they are to some degree. Maybe the people who signed that document believed all men are created equal, and believed that applied also to their slaves, but if they did believe that, they clearly did not see much of a problem with ignoring their inalienable rights. This contradiction has been discussed since before the ink was dry, and is quite well known. They were not laying out a carefully reasoned philosophical treatise, they were trying to rally their own side in a political debate.

An ignorant person could believe that American ideals mean that American society was built for all Americans equally, but the audience members were not ignorant people. So I don't know, you tell me what you think they learned, and why you think they gave a standing ovation.

Re:James Baldwin, Here and Elsewhere on Monday February 01, 2021 @04:49PM (#25994489)
Jefferson wrote that while owning slaves, so I'm not really sure why that quote would give anyone the impression that American culture was built for blacks.
Re:James Baldwin, Here and Elsewhere on Monday February 01, 2021 @04:03PM (#25993913)
>It is not a question of 'special effort' it is more of the question of why descendants of slaves were not viewed as part of the civilization, why there was such push against integration.

Well, why would you expect anything else?

If on the one hand they view the descendants of the slaves as being inherently inferior, then certainly they are not going to view them as part of their civilization or want them to integrate. This is an easy thing to think, given they had recently ruled over their ancestors.

If on the other hand they believe the other group is fundamentally equal to them, and only in a temporarily inferior position due to circumstances neither group controlled, consider that the dominant group had just used their power over the other group to brutally exploit them. They have only to ask themselves how they'd behave if someone had done that to them to think that it may not be in their interest to let the other group in to the club where its members will have some power over them.

That is where the "special effort" comes in to play. The dominant group must first be convinced that their former slaves are not fundamentally inferior to them. Then on top of that, they have to be convinced that, even though they treated their own group preferentially to the detriment of the other group, the other group will not treat itself preferentially to the dominant group's detriment, or at least not badly enough to outweigh other concerns (or perhaps that they deserve such treatment).

In regard to South America and the Caribbean, while Europeans ruled those areas, they did not really colonize them in the same way that they colonized the US. European involvement in South America and the Caribbean was mostly limited to wealthy plantation owners, whereas the southern US had significant numbers of people not personally involved with slavery.

Re:James Baldwin, Here and Elsewhere on Monday February 01, 2021 @10:44AM (#25989621)
>he mesmerises the audience by telling them what it's like to grow up black in America not even knowing you're black, until one day, as a young child, you catch yourself in the mirror and realise you aren't the person your culture is built for. You actually don't exist, because there is no space in your culture's stories for you.

This seems like a pretty obvious and unsurprising consequence of descending from people that were only brought into that civilization to provide slave labor. How many civilizations have made special effort to reshape their culture for the benefit of the descendants of their slaves? I think anyone that appears "mesmerized" by hearing that probably has not thought very much about the topic, or is putting on a show.

Of course there are specific individuals that are focused on one or the other, but there are also specific individuals who span both concerns. Significant examples include the secretary of health and human services and the surgeon general, among other high level administrators, who ultimately decide who will be managing both problems.

If said leadership wanted people that would take the clear and simple steps needed to solve the obesity crisis to be in charge of that problem, then the obesity crisis would have been solved. The obesity crisis has not been solved, so we can only conclude that the leadership does not want the right people to be involved. Yet presumably we should also believe that said leadership has our best interests in mind now that there's a new virus going around, when they have already irrefutably demonstrated that they don't?

Thank you for illustrating my point.
>Obesity alone means ~40% of the population of the US

And that is in large part thanks to the government and its public health experts, who we are now, I guess, supposed to believe have our interests in mind, even though, by letting 40% of the population become obese, when there are plain and simple steps they could have taken to prevent it, they have irrefutably demonstrated they do not actually care about the health of the population.

Public health experts, in the US and other western countries, deserve no credibility due to their handling of the obesity crisis. There are clear and obvious steps that governments could take to end obesity, but public health experts have failed to even make an effort to make them happen. Instead they have sat by and watched millions upon millions of people become obese, which is vastly more harmful to the average person's health than the coronavirus.

I do not even think an argument can be made that their failure is due to incompetence.

Of course they work if people obey them. That's not the point.
>Long term side effects like after the polio vaccine in the 70s always occur IMMEDIATELY after vaccination.

Have there been any long term double blind studies (e.g. 20+ years) to actually verify that this is the case? Or is this all based on the current models of how vaccines and their components behave in the body and what effects they have?

You are assuming that the 34 million with diabetes are in the workforce. Based on the age distributions of people with diabetes, most are probably retired or disabled.
And I bet you think the public health experts that sat by and watched 70m Americans get obese are just the people we should turn to now, don't you?