commandar
I don’t like him at all, but he was articulate and not at all unhinged.
I get what you mean here, but it’s also what makes Vance and whatever else comes after Trump so dangerous: the bar has been lowered so far that people now view “able to form coherent sentences” as “not at all unhinged.”
The man stood there and repeated the bald faced lie about Haitian migrants’ legal status and then had a temper tantrum that the rules said he wasn’t supposed to be fact-checked.
The substance of what he was saying was absolutely unhinged. But the Overton window has shifted so far that, because his delivery was neatly packaged, it doesn’t look that bad compared to what we’ve gotten used to.
I’ve honestly ran out of ways to keep saying the two very basic points here
Repeating yourself does seem to be your priority here.
If you had actually read through the piece I linked instead of looking for something to immediately disagree with in the snippet I quoted, you’d see she linked to this story. The entire reason we’re hearing about this now is because Trump was briefed on the threat by US intelligence and Trump is literally incapable of not immediately repeating what he’s been told.
And if you took 20 seconds to Google after that, you’d find that the DNI has publicly confirmed that the briefing with Trump happened. Additionally, the same story has Anthony Blinken confirming that the US has been tracking Iranian threats against Trump as well as other past and current officials. It even links to multiple previous reports discussing an increased threat profile dating back months just like I said was the case.
My point is that Trump is not the only source and that there’s been corroboration from parties who really don’t care about making Trump look good. I’m not inclined to believe the story because Trump said it and, yes, Trump is absolutely a liar; I’m inclined to believe it because it’s been fairly widely reported well before Trump said anything at all.
My “misunderstanding” is having followed this story for more than a single headline.
Marcy Wheeler has written extensively about it for months now. She’s been at the center of the story to the extent that she was one of the journalists that (presumably Iran) attempted to leak hacked Trump campaign documents through. She’s very adamantly of the stance that there is a real threat because it’s been corroborated by multiple sources who don’t have any interest in propping up Trump.
I fear that, because of the polarization Trump has deliberately stoked, many lefties are doing the same thing that Trump’s MAGAts did with Russia: treat credible allegations that Iran is targeting him, both for hacking and assassination, as a hoax.
Regarding the hacking, as happened in 2016, it is not just the Intelligence Community (one, two) attributing the hack in real time. Both Microsoft and Google have described the operation. As I explained repeatedly regarding the 2016 Russian attack, big American tech companies have a similar kind of global reach as the NSA, and when someone uses their infrastructure to target someone, they have both the tools and an independent incentive to get the attribution right. There’s really no reason to doubt the attribution, from three of the entities with the best global reach in the world, that Iran targeted Trump’s campaign.
Regarding Iran’s attempt to assassinate Trump, there’s also no reason to doubt that. While the case against Asif Merchant, whom DOJ accused of trying to solicit a variety of operations targeting Trump, does rely on undercover FBI employees posing as wannabe hitmen, the underlying tip — from the guy Merchant allegedly asked for help recruiting a hit team — appears to be organic, just someone calling the cops. Plus, the effort bears certain resemblance to the effort to solicit assassins for John Bolton, arising from the same motive of revenge for the Qassem Soleimani killing.
Trump’s a blowhard. He’s absolutely going to use the story as a wedge. Don’t do his work for him by dismissing the possibility of what appear to be real threats out of hand.
I’m not saying we know the exact nature of what’s going on or that any threat is particularly immediate; what I am saying is that there’s enough information available from sources that aren’t affiliated with Trump that the possibility should be taken seriously.
Court documents do not identify any of the potential targets. But U.S. officials acknowledged in July that a threat on Donald Trump’s life from Iran prompted additional security in the days before a Pennsylvania rally in which Trump was injured by a shooter’s bullet. That July 13 shooting, carried out by a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man, was unrelated to the Iran threat and Merchant’s arrest has no connection to the Trump assassination attempt, a law enforcement official said.
This is a story that has been building for a few months. While I’m not particularly convinced that this specific threat was particularly credible, there’s been plenty of reporting that the Biden DOJ is taking this seriously.
It’s not really surprising to me that Iran would want Trump dead. I don’t think they were anywhere close to actually accomplishing that, but I can certainly believe they’d try.
Yes, Trump and the rest of the rightwing are going to blow it up into something bigger than what actually happened, but it’s important to understand the truth in the lie because the story is potentially consequential in the wider relationship between the US and Iran.
The DOJ announced the arrest of a man working on behalf of Iran attempting to recruit assassins a couple of weeks ago:
Oh, I don’t disagree at all.
Like I said, Nate’s definitely increasingly treaded into questionable territory in the past few years and I don’t have a sense for whether it’s impacted the model since I’ve honestly not been paying close attention to the horse race this cycle.
I was mostly pointing out that while the dude has almost always been a bad take generator, the 2016 model very arguably outperformed its contemporaries despite the popular view that they blew it. I wouldn’t be shocked if Nate’s sponsors and general ideological drift has impacted the model this cycle (*especially given Peter Thiel’s involvement), but I don’t have a strong sense for whether that’s the case either. I also wouldn’t be particularly surprised if he sufficiently separated the stats from the dumb ideas to produce a reasonable model either. I just don’t have enough info to have formed an opinion there.
That’s what makes this exceptionally stupid: ballots in Georgia are fully electronic.
You make your selections on a touchscreen voting machine. The machine records your selections. “Counting” is literally a matter of taking the output from the machine and telling a server to add up the totals.
The paper ballot is literally just a laser printer next to the machine that spits out a sheet of paper showing what the voter selected. The paper ballots are supposed to just be a backup in case there are problems with the machines.
A lot of other models were saying something ridiculous like Clinton had 95% chance to win or something. Nate Silver’s model seems better than others based on this, if anything.
The constant attacks on how 538’s model performed in 2016 says more about statistics literacy than it does about the model.
There is plenty to criticize Nate Silver for. Take your pick. Personally, the political nihilism that’s increasingly flirted with “anti-woke” sentiment is good enough for me. Some people might prefer taking issue with the degenerate gambling. The guy has pumped out plenty of really dumb hot takes over the years, so you have your options.
But his models, historically, have performed relatively well if you understand that they’re models and not absolute predictors.
We also have real world examples like Alabama passing a voter ID law and then almost immediately turning around and closing DMV offices in poor, black counties, making getting an ID even more difficult for at-risk communities:
Voter ID laws are very much about cloaking intentional disenfranchisement of legal citizens in a veil of preventing virtually non-existent voter fraud.