Hat speech
One of the most enduring symbols of the American liberty movement is the Gadsden Flag. Designed by Colonel Christopher Gadsden in 1775, it consists of a bold yellow field emblazoned with a coiled rattlesnake — which had been used as a symbol of the American colonies since the 1750s — and the legend "don’t tread on me." Though it was originally designed as the standard to be flown by Commodore Hopkins’ flagship in the brand-new continental navy, its striking design and powerful message made it popular with liberty-minded sorts, and it was frequently used in the revolutionary government, and has remained in use to this day among the people opposed to what that government has become.
I’m sure you’ll be startled to hear that it’s racist.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is reportedly investigating the issue surrounding the ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ snake logo after an African American employee of a federal agency complained they [sic] were racially harassed when a co-worker wore a cap showing the symbol.
The complainant said he found the cap racially offensive to African Americans because the flag was designed by Christopher Gadsden, who [sic] he described as a ‘slave trader & owner of slaves’.
Note carefully that even the strangely-plural snowflake whose crazy head was offended by this hat couldn’t find a way to describe the symbolism itself as racist, and had to fall back on the claim that it was originally designed by a slaveowner. One could hardly fail to notice that the entire United States government — from which our mysterious whiner is granted his livelihood — was itself created by a coterie largely of slaveowners, and yet our friend seems to have no trouble taking its orders, cashing its checks, and appealing to its executive agencies whenever he believes he should have the power to determine what other people wear without their consent. Not that clarity of thought appears to be his greatest attribute:
The complainant maintained the Gadsden Flag was a ‘historical indicator of white resentment against blacks stemming largely from the Tea Party’, according to a recent interim decision published by the Washington Post.
It’s not clear from this snippet whether he believes that the Gadsden Flag was created for the original Boston Tea Party or the modern political movement, but it also isn’t very important, since he’s equally wrong either way. If it historically indicated any kind of resentment, it could only be resentment of Americans for their British rulers, who routinely pressed Americans into service, seized the fruits of their labor, and placed onerous restrictions on their activities, who didn’t bother to get the consent of the Americans, and who punished them severely — including flogging, incarceration, and execution — for disobeying. I’m not precisely saying it’s an anti-slavery symbol, mind you, but the historical record does seem to incline in that direction.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s ruling was, in brief, "we dunno." After spending downright scads of our money investigating this lunatic claim, they couldn’t even be bothered to make a decision, preferring to write a long, somewhat-correct historical synopsis explicitly pointing out that the Gadsden Flag has literally never been used to express "racial sentiments," but that that doesn’t prove that it can’t be, and thus the government reserves the right to censor it.
In case you missed it: the EEOC has declared that the government reserves the right to silence any speech that cannot be positively proven not to be racist. After all, the First Amendment was written by a bunch of slaveowners, so getting rid of it is the right thing to do.
In Soviet Union, Hillary Clinton hacks you!
It’s sort of amusing in a world-might-get-blown-up kind of terrifying way to listen to the increasingly-unhinged Hillary Clinton blame all her problems on the Russians, complete with the unsupported claim that Donald Trump is in the Kremlin’s pocket, as though Donald Trump doesn’t have enough money to buy Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Medvedev, and Elvira Nabuillina, and still have enough left over to exhume the body of Nikita Khrushchev, invent a cure for death, and reanimate him. Here she is waxing poetic about how the DNC’s terrible network security, which allowed embarrassing documents to get out showing just how the Clinton camp rigged the primaries, is all the fault of Trump’s buddies in Moscow:
We know that Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC and we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be released and we know that Donald Trump has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin…
For Trump to both encourage that and to praise Putin despite what appears to be a deliberate effort to try to affect the election I think raises national security issues.
I find it charming that the same Hillary Clinton who claimed not even to know how to delete e-mails now professes to be such a unique computer genius that she can positively identify Russian Intelligence as the DNC hackers — a feat so far removed from possibility that one begins to suspect she’s making all this up. But what’s with that last part? The bit about Trump? Well, Hillary’s all worked up about this:
That’s right, fans of the weird: the Hillary Clinton campaign is becoming so desperate that they’ve been reduced to treating obvious jokes as serious political positions. I guess it must be disheartening to see how often they have to re-rig the same polls to continue establishing Clinton’s phantom lead.
It is nice, though, that even though Clinton’s oft-trumpeted claim to be the first woman nominated for president of the United States is false by well over a hundred years, she can still lay claim to being the first mad woman to be nominated for president of the United States.
Speaking of which
Your humble narrator was shocked — shocked! — to hear that yet another person who got in Hillary Clinton’s way has died in mysterious circumstances. Shawn Lucas was a political activist and supporter of Bernie Sanders who famously, gleefully served papers to the DNC Services Corp. accusing them, along with chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, of committing election fraud. Thanks to the KGB Wikileaks, we now know that this is true. A week after the Wikileaks dump, Lucas was dead.
We contacted Lucas’ employer on 4 August 2016 to ask whether there was any truth to the rumor. According to an individual with whom we spoke at that company, Shawn Lucas died on 2 August 2016. The audibly and understandably shaken employee stated that interest in the circumstances of Lucas’ death had prompted a number of phone calls and other queries, but the company had not yet ascertained any details about Lucas’ cause of death and were unable to confirm anything more than the fact he had passed away.
On 5 August 2016, the Washington D.C. Metro Police responded to our inquiry, confirming Lucas’ passing was "classified as a Death Report, pending the results of an autopsy."
As Snopes takes great pains to point out, this is nothing but another in a long, long series of coincidences that certainly should not be interpreted as a trail of bodies left behind by a maniac.
Winging it
It’s a pretty common trope for libertarians to point at the disasters left behind by the government and use that as some sort of example that perhaps — perhaps! — the government shouldn’t have been trusted to do these things. Often our friends in the wild world of statism will chastise us for that, though; the government meant well, you see, and had this really great plan, but some totally random, unforeseeable event happened that just messed it all up.
It is with tremendous glee, therefore, that I present to you the admission by the man who crafted the government’s regime change strategy for Syria that he knew nothing about Syria, couldn’t speak Arabic, and drank quite heavily when he was assigned the job.
[Douglas] Laux describes the moment he was given the assignment in the lone chapter in Left of Boom which focuses on Syria, wherein he admits having to "read up" and "learn" about the country:
"Then I stopped drinking, bought myself a cool cane with a cowboy boot on the top, rode a bike at the gym daily, and read up on Syria. I learned that the situation on the ground was extremely complex and reflected the ethnic and religious diversity of Syria itself."
This is the part where normally I would make some snide remark, but anything I could say would only detract from the grandeur of that passage. Read that over a few times and reflect on the fact that this man was hand-selected by the United States government to plan the overthrow of Syria. Then tell me you still think government planning is ever a good idea.
According to the New York Times, then CIA Director David Petraeus adopted some of Laux’s recommendations on arming "moderate" rebels. Ironically, Laux would later conclude of the jihadi rebels which came to dominate the war:
"there were no moderates."
It turns out that Douglas Laux concocted the plan to arm the "moderate" rebels because it sounded like a cool, effective strategy, but actually didn’t have any idea if there were any moderates to arm. Not that this stopped the CIA from arming any old jihadists it could find, which plan may not have ended as well as one could have hoped.
Oh well. There’s always Iran!
Do you really not believe Clinton is significantly leading Trump? Will you bet me even money that Trump will win? If so please name your price because I will buy up to ten grand of Hillary at even money.
I believe that Clinton is leading in the polls, and that, in very large part, this is because the polls were slanted to manufacture a Clinton lead. I believe this because the pollsters themselves have said so (in not so many words, of course).
Take Reuters. For most of the year, the Reuters presidental poll included a “neither” option, which their testing showed was a net negative for Trump (he lost 3 – 5% net support to neither). After the Republican convention, testing showed that “neither” had become a net negative for Clinton instead, at which point Reuters promptly removed it from the poll. That’s at least suspicious, yes?
Then consider that the most recent was of 899 Democrats and 753 Republicans. A poll containing 20% more Democrats than Republicans should probably be expected to show a solid Democrat win, yes? So let me flip the question around to you: do you really believe that substantially more Democrats than Republicans will vote this year? The primary data doesn’t suggest so.
No, I will not bet anything with you. I do not believe for a minute the elections are honest. I would not bet on anybody but the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland getting even one single recorded vote in the next North Korean election, either, but I’ll still go on record saying I believe the country contains at least one person who doesn’t like the party.
Ok so you think the polls are rigged. All of them I guess? So is there no reliable empirical data on who voters prefer?
And to answer your question, yeah I suspect more Democrats will turnout than Republicans. I could come with a bunch of stories to explain why but ultimately the past is the best predictor of the future, and they pretty much always turnout in bigger numbers.
Is primary turnout by party strongly correlated with actual turnout in the general? I checked 2000 and 96, the last two times the GOP turned out more voters in the primary, and Dem turnout in the general was higher in both cases.
Would you like to bet on this one? Or is that stat rigged as well?
Oh I just realized, if it’s rigged than it should be a lock for Clinton, right? Will you give me 50:1 odds if I pick Trump?
I appreciate the offer, but I’ll have to pass on defending a position I don’t hold and never expressed. You will search in vain for an instance of me claiming the election is “a lock for Clinton.”
My claims have been twofold:
1) The elections are not honest.
2) The polls are not honest.
Those claims I will defend. Strawman variations I will not.
Ok. But you think more Republicans will turn out than Democrats? After all, including more Dems than Repubs in the sample is evidence that the polls are rigged.
Also if you believe the elections are “dishonest,” does that allow you to make any predictions that can be measured? Or is this more of a grit thing, a real intangible dishonesty?
Let me say this: I believe the polls and the elections are both more or less honest. I think the prediction markets which are offering Clinton as a 3:1 favorite seem about right to me (based on the polls). If you believe you have some extra information such that you’d like to bet with odds that differ significantly from those odds, I’m game to bet.
Your fixation on betting is a bit weird. No, I will not bet on a game I don’t believe will be played according to the stated rules. Why that is so strange to you I cannot say.
I have not made any “testable predictions,” no. That would be because this is not physics. Unless you’re aware of the fundamental particle of dishonesty that you’re assuming can be measured — which I propose that we name the politicon in the event that we do discover it — I don’t even understand why you’d expect there would be.
I think that, if there is any compelling reason to believe that 20% more Democrats than Republicans will vote in this election, I have not encountered it. As I already stated, the primary data doesn’t show any such variation.
Also worth noting is that you’ve consistently substituted “rigged” for my word “dishonest.” Surely you’re aware of the difference in connotation. Here’s what I am definitely not saying: the ghost of Paul Julius Reuter is an Illuminati Secret Master hiding behind the scenes and controlling all of world affairs. Your suggestion that pollsters are honest and that polls don’t produce biased results is also a lot less uncontroversial than you appear to believe.
Your threading doesn’t let me reply to specific comments past a certain depth I guess.
Betting on a game that won’t be played according to the stated rules isn’t weird at all — if you know how it will actually be played, those are the best games to bet on!
The reason I want to bet is because it’s a good way to test things. If you think your view of the world is more accurate than mine, it should lead you to more accurate predictions.
I’m not even sure what the physics stuff means. You can make testable predictions about stuff besides physics. Like this: I predict Clinton will win the election. I’ll bet you could figure out some way to test that!
I don’t know why you keep going back to the primary turnout. I asked before, do you believe it’s a predictor for the general? If so in what way? What does it tell us about this year’s general turnout?
Also l, !!!!!!!!!!!!, you originally used the word “rig” when talking about the polls. Apparently those are rigged but the elections are dishonest? What the !!!! kind of semantic bullshit is this?
Like you don’t believe that there are secret forces controlling the elections and the polls? Because that’s what your article reads like.
And here I’ll get semantic: of course polls are biased sometimes. Some pollsters are notoriously bad. Some of it is unintentional bias (sampling is hard and creating likely voter models even harder) and some of it is no doubt intentional. Which is the whole point of 538, to try and average a bunch of polls and track bias over time to correct it.
Which is why when the hilariously large number of polls all showing very large Clinton leads come out we can take some faith that probably Clinton didn’t “re-rig” them to establish a “phantom lead.”
When did I claim I know how the game will be played? All I said is that I *don’t* think the stated rules are for real. Can I prove to your exacting standards that this election will be falsified in any given fashion? Of course not. All I can do is point to an extensive set of prior elections — both in the United States and outside — that were “dishonest” in one way or another. Hence why I said “I do not believe the elections are honest” and not “I can prove that the elections are dishonest.”
I used the word “rig,” yes, in a fairly obvious, hamfisted joke — ironically, a joke about people taking jokes seriously as a desperate means of making people look bad. When I laid out my positions for you here in the comments all serious-like, I did not. And you want to carp at me about ignoring context? Okay then.
If you concede that “[s]ome pollsters are notoriously bad” and that polls are biased (both intentionally and unintentionally), then I fail to see why you’re angry with me for saying that they’re dishonest.
I don’t think there are secret forces controlling the polls, no. I think there are very obvious forces controlling them. For example, the Reuters poll (which I discussed previously) is controlled by Reuters. This is not a scandalous admission, I don’t think. Since you acknowledge that polls can be biased, and surely you don’t contest my assertion that the Reuters poll is run by Reuters, I fail to see what the issue is. I contest merely that the Reuters poll is biased toward returning the results the people who run it want to see.
I honestly couldn’t tell that you were joking when you said Clinton is rigging the polls which is my first comment was “Do you really not believe…?” because I was like maybe he’s joking.
Then in your “serious” explanation you compared US elections to N Korea. So you can see why, yeah, I thought you literally believe there is a cabal controlling both the polls and the elections.
I still think maybe you believe that? Like I have no idea what your world view is here. What’s rigged and what’s just dishonest? Are these a bunch of independent actors rigging/slanting/biasing polls to favor Clinton? Is the slanting intentional or not? Are they colluding with Clinton?
If it would please you, I’m happy to disclaim any implications I may have given that there is a shadowy cabal that controls all world affairs.
What percentage of world affairs do you think the cabal controls?
23% OBVIOUSLY