The Gaming Den

FrankTrollman wrote:But right now, she's still massively ahead. And the biggest danger to that is the media not understanding what it means to get 60% of the vote in fucking New Hampshire means and spend the next ten days singing a dirge about the death of her campaign. If the public is inundated with a media narrative that she is in a tailspin and her campaign is covered in loser funk, she might actually start to lose races she's set up to win. So right now her people have to flood the damn airways with "actually, Clinton is doing fine" stories. Doesn't matter how contrived they are, they just have to break up the relentless wardrums of "Clinton in Trouble" stories so she doesn't get bumrushed out the door by a self fulfilling media narrative of defeat.

This is really the heart of it. Frank doesn't actually care whether Clinton is winning or not (I mean, she obviously is, not least because the media is actually and has been actually, doing exactly the same thing Frank is doing right now for the entire campaign, calling Sanders dead in the water and trying to create this exact same self fulfilling narrative) he only cares about saying she is.

We could all teleport into some alternate universe where all the black people in Carolina get all their news from actual campaign staff, instead of the TV, and they see that Bernie Sanders did a great job hiring competent staff that showed he cares even about the issues even before "Bernie Sanders Doesn't Care About Black People" became a talking point, and then Bernie could go even in Carolina, and Frank would still have to tell us all about how this was obvious and expected because of some reason (carolina let's independents be democrats and vote in the primaries on like, 2 seconds notice or something) and is still the precursor to an inevitable Clinton victory.

I mean, don't get me wrong, that absolutely won't happen, Bernie will absolutely lose, and Clinton will absolutely win. But even if all that wasn't true, Frank would still be contractually obligated to say it was true to make it become true.

I still really don't get the "Bernie doesn't have the black vote" thing. When BLM activists talked to Hillary, she basically said they had to fix shit themselves before she'd help, and when BLM activists hijacked Bernie's actual speech, he let them have their say, and then got up and changed tack to actually addressed the concerns of BLM.

Basically, the only explanation for Hillary "Fix Your Own House" Clinton having the black vote more than Bernie "Yes, And Here's What I Will Do About It" Sanders, is that people aren't hearing the shit that's actually going on, they're just making decisions based on shit like Bill Clinton having an office in Harlem for a while and Hillary being buds with wealthy black democrats.

I'm not saying that's not what is totally happening, I'm more just... exasperated that people make decisions like that.

Prak wrote:I still really don't get the "Bernie doesn't have the black vote" thing. When BLM activists talked to Hillary, she basically said they had to fix shit themselves before she'd help, and when BLM activists hijacked Bernie's actual speech, he let them have their say, and then got up and changed tack to actually addressed the concerns of BLM.

Basically, the only explanation for Hillary "Fix Your Own House" Clinton having the black vote more than Bernie "Yes, And Here's What I Will Do About It" Sanders, is that people aren't hearing the shit that's actually going on, they're just making decisions based on shit like Bill Clinton having an office in Harlem for a while and Hillary being buds with wealthy black democrats.

I'm not saying that's not what is totally happening, I'm more just... exasperated that people make decisions like that.

This just in, elections not really about positions, really about popularity and established image. News at 11

I will say, Hillary Clinton is not terrible for black people, she's probably not going to do much, but what she does do will be positive.

Bernie, may want to do a lot, but he probably won't be able to do much at all, so no matter how good it is, Republican Obstructionism and Federalism are going to destroy most anything he has on his platform.

BLM is a relatively small, mostly youth-based, activist group. It actually speaks more heavily to the campus-affiliated left - the people already behind Bernie by huge margins - than it does to the mass of mostly middle and lower class black voters who don't get their news from blogs and twitter.

Clinton has a long history of connection with black voters through the various traditional outlets - local media, churches, state level politicians - that still matter very heavily. She has a history of connection to the very large and important black population of New York City through her time as a Senator.

Also, Clinton has, for much the same reasons, a much stronger presence with non-black minorities, most critically Hispanics, than Sanders does. The US Hispanic population is actually larger than the Black one (though less members both can and do vote) and there are considerably more Hispanics in both Nevada and South Carolina than there were in Iowa or New Hampshire.

Pulling the Delegats > Votes thing seems like a recipe for disaster. I don't really see how putting that out there, ESPECIALLY so early, is a good thing. Like at all. It seems better if they'd just let the campaign run it's course, let it be close, and then let Bernie lose via mysterious delegates instead of having the idea floating around that people are going to get short changed by 'the man'. Yea it's true but it seems bad for voter turnout to actually put it OUT there.

MGuy wrote:Pulling the Delegats > Votes thing seems like a recipe for disaster. I don't really see how putting that out there, ESPECIALLY, so early is a good thing. Like at all. It seems better if they'd just let the campaign run it's course, let it be close, and then let Bernie lose via mysterious delegates instead of having the idea floating around that people are going to get short changed by 'the man'. Yea it's true but it seems bad for voter turnout to actually put it OUT there.

Well, the idea is to make Sanders' voters feel disenfranchised so they stay home, turning Clinton's victory into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The second part of that brilliant master plan is "baby please come back I promise I won't hit you no more."

Yes, Democrats flirting with voter apathy as a weapon really is completely fucking stupid. Clinton probably is the most electable candidate, but that is absolutely not true if getting her there requires beating a little shy of half the party with the establishment's dick.

So when Hillary wins the nomination, how many people will go "Fuck it, I wanted Bernie, not [another part of the establishment/a woman/more of the same the Dems have been giving us]" and just not vote?

Low voter turnout has traditionally worked against Democrats, because Republicans always have their crazy base (and gerrymandered the districts such that Democrats need more votes in the first place) so even without the Republicans doing their best at the state-level to disenfranchise* black and poor people, they don't want too many just throwing their hands in the air because they don't get their wish and deciding that "A Democrat who isn't Sanders" is exactly the same as whichever crazy asshole the GOP settles on or even fucking Trump.

*[Insert joke here about people who don't know what the word means]

Prak wrote:I still really don't get the "Bernie doesn't have the black vote" thing.

Well, Clinton polls stupidly high numbers with minorities of all kinds. From the standpoint of whether Bernie has the black vote, there's nothing to get. She is up, he is down, the end.

Now as to why Hillary is ahead of Sanders with African Americans, we're all just sort of talking out of our asses here. But here are some possible answers:

• Even in New Hampshire, Clinton leads with voters who want to continue with the policies of Obama. African Americans support Barack Obama is about 90%. Sanders' relentless rhetorical distancing himself from the president is probably not good electoral strategy among voters who have an overwhelmingly positive view of the first black president.
• Before Barack Obama was literally the first black president, people called Bill Clinton "the first black president." They called him that because of his strong ties to African American institutions. And remember, 1992 was a three way race where no one got 51% of the vote, but Bill Clinton still carried 83% of the African American vote.
• Hillary Clinton has spent the last several decades working closely with black people in the United States and abroad both on specific issues and general movement building. Remember, when Nelson fucking Mandela was dying, he invited her to his house because they were friends. Apartheid ended on Bill Clinton's watch, and the Clintons were instrumental in applying diplomatic pressure from the United States to help end a regime that was literally trying to breed a violent racist dog to hunt black people with.

Sanders very much supports a lot of things that would be good for African Americans. But the reality is that he is from Vermont and has had very little opportunity to build coalitions with groups that have a lot of black people in them. Remember that Sanders and Clinton voted the same 93.1% of the time, and that while there's all this broad debate about revolution versus incrementalism, energizing the young vs alienating the old, and other tactical stuff, there is very little daylight between the candidates on substantive issues. There's very little policy reason to jump horse from one to the other. Both candidates enjoy positive popularity among Democrats and for good reason.

So really you should be asking the question the other way around. The black vote already supports Hillary Clinton as a continuation of institutions they support and have supported for decades. What part of Sanders' rhetoric do you think should make African Americans abandon a politician who is married to a president they supported by over 80% and a high cabinet member of a president they supported by over 90%? And before you answer that, remember that Hillary Clinton also has rhetoric. It was Hillary, not Bernie, that first brought up the Flint Water Crisis in this campaign. It's not enough to point out that Bernie Sanders said good things, you'd need to find things Bernie Sanders said that were better enough than what Hillary Clinton said to get African Americans to change their support.

-Username17

A strike against the Bern is that Sander's base of young voters are the most unreliable fucks on voting day. Having them as your base is like the worst base.

Apparently Clinton has a big push to get a crap-ton of $1 donations from people. I'm assuming she is doing this both to

• Get her number of individual donors up and
• Get her average donation amount down.

I don't know how much she's actually being hindered by the notion of getting "money from wall street", but she seems to be trying to change the numbers to take that talking point away from Sanders.

Robby wrote:I don't know how much she's actually being hindered by the notion of getting "money from wall street", but she seems to be trying to change the numbers to take that talking point away from Sanders.

She's being hurt by it quite a bit. Fundamentally, the banksters did not go to jail, and that's a big problem. Republicans aren't harmed by it as much, because Republicans live in a world of cognitive dissonance. I mean seriously, they are suggesting that the way to sweep away the corruption that has been keeping the little man down is to lower the upper tier tax brackets and reduce taxation on big financial industry profits. That sounds like I'm being unfair, but Rubio's tax plan is literally to eliminate Capital Gains Tax altogether. But for Democrats there's a political price to be paid because Democratic voters may not be all that well read on the subject, but they won't be fooled by outright "down is up" psychobabble. They are looking for someone to blame, and will accept only vaguely credible stories. Pinning Hillary with the "she gets money from Wall Street" creates a vaguely credible story that she is somehow part of the root problem whose manifestation is that the banksters destroyed millions of lives and trillions of dollars and none of them went to jail.

Bernie Sanders' thing about how "If it's too big to fail, it's too big to exist" isn't true, but it's a great story. Further, his underlying point that the big financial institutions should be chopped up into pieces is entirely defensible. Too big to fail actually applies to any institution that is necessary, which goes all the way down to privately owned power plants and hospitals. The reality is that most public service institutions are "too big to fail." That's why we have FDIC, to make it so that even small community banks cannot fail. The thing where big financial institutions were making bets that were not explicitly insured by the government backed only by the logic that the government not intervening on their behalf would crash the economy into the sun was super fucked up. But it's not clear that dividing the financial institutions into smaller overleveraged pieces would have solved that particular issue. Chopping up the financial institutions gives them less individual influence over the Federal Reserve and stuff, and is likely something worth pursuing, but not because it meaningfully addresses the Too Big To Fail issue.

Anyway, Hillary's wonky multi-pronged regulatory approach to Wall Street by limiting the levels of allowed leverage outlined here is actually more relevant to stopping a repeat of the Great Recession than Bernie's plans to cut up the banks and limit banker graft outlined here. Both are reasonable plans, but Hillary's is probably more relevant but Bernie's is way more accessible to the common man. It's not even close. When Hillary babbles on about risk fees and shadow banking, it's pretty easy for a BernieBro to say "You're just part of the machine!" and stop listening.

Clinton has a pretty detailed and pretty good set of financial regulations in her platform. But she doesn't have a catchy catch phrase for them, and she's really getting hurt in the "yelling match" portion of taking the mantle of a Wall Street Reformer. And a Democrat needs to take on the mantle of a Wall Street Reformer. It's not optional, because the banksters did not go to jail and people are mad as hell.

-Username17

Hillary Clinton appears to have won by a modest but statistically significant margin in Nevada. So now that we've done a state that, for all its eccentricities, looks demographically a lot like the rest of the country, we got the rather unsurprising result: the candidate with the massive institutional advantage has a massive institutional advantage. Hillary Clinton's years of coalition building have given here a large and well-built coalition. The Sanders campaign does well by bringing up some important and popular issues and promising puppies and rainbows, but the fact is that the Democratic Party is bigger and deeper than that.

The Republican side in South Carolina doesn't end until much later because reasons, so we won't know how it's going for several hours. However, South Carolina is a winner-take-almost-all state, so practically speaking we're probably looking at Trump getting something stupid like 44 out of 50 of the state's delegates unless there's a huge upset and Cruz ends up with more than the 3 delegates you get for coming first in the congressional district with Liberty University in it (the 3 state RNC delegates will obviously go to whoever the establishment decides to back at convention time). The exact vote tallies matter a lot, but only insofar as they create a media narrative. It's going to be a "huge win" for Trump almost certainly, but the field still has to be winnowed down to a three man race, which means that Carson and two other people have to drop out eventually. Who comes in third and fourth and fifth won't actually change the delegate count in any way, but it may have a big impact on who the establishment tries to rally behind moving forward.

The early exist polls for the Republican side are nothing short of horrifying. Nearly three quarters of the Republican primary voters say they support an obviously unconstitutional, deeply immoral, and laughably unenforceable religious test for entrance into the country. That that was even a question to be asked is madness, and for it have super majority support among that group of voters is beyond the pale. But that basically gets to a fundamental truth about the Republican Party: people are Republicans because they are wrong about something and it's very important to them. On every issue, from gold buggism to racism to to women's rights to environmental inaction, the Republican Party provides a safe haven for people who are wrong. While the world is full of issues with no right or wrong answers, it is equally full of questions where there is an answer that can be given which is morally or factually right or wrong. And the Republican Party seeks out those questions and gives tacit or overt support to people whose answer is wrong.

This is not to say that every member of the Democratic Party is right about every single thing. There are Democrats who are racist or homophobic or believe that vaccines are a conspiracy by big pharma to give children autism or some fucking thing. But by and large the party does not support these things. Democrats who believe that we should get rid of all paper money and replace it with gold coins are considered heretics on that issue, while Republicans with similar delusions are simply encouraged. You get branded a heretic in the Republican Party by acknowledging true things. Saying out loud that raising taxes lowers the deficit or that 9/11 happened while George W Bush was president gets you booed on stage at a Republican debate. Even though those are simple facts that are very obviously true.

And this is why the Republican side of the primary is such a clusterfuck, while the Democratic side is relatively congenial as these things go. Clinton and Sanders voted together 93.1% of the time when they were in the senate together. Both of them broadly support the same bucket of ideas, because all of the Democratic ideals are broadly sensible and both Hillary and Bernie are pretty sensible people. There are differences of opinion and differences in style and differences in tactical approach, but neither one of them is on the wrong side of history on much of anything. But on the Republican side, it's all over the place because they are all fucking wrong about everything. And while there are a pretty finite number of ways to be right, the number of ways to be wrong is literally infinite.

To pull an example on a thing you could be wrong about: Carrier Strike Groups. A Carrier Strike Group is a carrier plus the cruisers, frigates, destroyers, and aircraft that allow it to function. A CSG has over seven thousand people in it and costs over six million dollars per day to operate. It is a city made of war, able to travel around the world to fight another country on the seas or in the air in their own homes and win. A CSG is the most ridiculous display of awesome military power the world has ever seen and the United States has ten of them. There is a wide array of potentially reasonable answers for what to do with the fucking things: they could be maintained, mothballed, decommissioned, or modernized. But nowhere in that list of potential reasonable ideas is "build more of them." Kasich wants to build five more of them. Cruz wants to build two. Rubio wants to build some number that is at least two and possibly much higher than that. But the bottom line here is that if you think it is reasonable to build additional CSGs at the cost of ~$10Billion a piece, you are not part of the reality based community, and the specific number you want to build is nothing but a frosted rose on the cake of stupidity you have already baked. That this is even a debate that is being had is insane. But because it's insane, the candidates are all over the map on it. Everyone is talking from the perspective of being completely fucking wrong, so there's no tidal forces of sanity and reason to get back to any sensible compromise.

-Username17

Jeb! is out!
I did not expect it to happen quite so early, but he must be glad not to have to go on humiliating himself.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Jeb! is out!
I did not expect it to happen quite so early, but he must be glad not to have to go on humiliating himself.

Three to one he gets back in after a while.

FrankTrollman wrote: To pull an example on a thing you could be wrong about: Carrier Strike Groups. A Carrier Strike Group is a carrier plus the cruisers, frigates, destroyers, and aircraft that allow it to function. A CSG has over seven thousand people in it and costs over six million dollars per day to operate. It is a city made of war, able to travel around the world to fight another country on the seas or in the air in their own homes and win. A CSG is the most ridiculous display of awesome military power the world has ever seen and the United States has ten of them. There is a wide array of potentially reasonable answers for what to do with the fucking things: they could be maintained, mothballed, decommissioned, or modernized. But nowhere in that list of potential reasonable ideas is "build more of them." Kasich wants to build five more of them. Cruz wants to build two. Rubio wants to build some number that is at least two and possibly much higher than that. But the bottom line here is that if you think it is reasonable to build additional CSGs at the cost of ~$10Billion a piece, you are not part of the reality based community, and the specific number you want to build is nothing but a frosted rose on the cake of stupidity you have already baked. That this is even a debate that is being had is insane. But because it's insane, the candidates are all over the map on it. Everyone is talking from the perspective of being completely fucking wrong, so there's no tidal forces of sanity and reason to get back to any sensible compromise.

-Username17

That really depends on if you have a good use for them. If you do, then they're not too expensive. It's just, if you do, you're probably going to war with too many different countries at once.

Jeb's departure is actually fairly significant. If, as seems likely, most of his support breaks to Rubio that might be enough to allow Rubio to seriously challenge Trump in several of the Super Tuesday states - especially since it appears he will take a very narrow but media significant second place over Cruz in SC.

Assuming Rubio avoids further impressions of a malfunctioning robot, I wouldn't be surprised if he managed to win a reasonable number of the Super-Tuesday states: Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont, and Virginia are all probably fairly favorable. If Cruz gets blanked (which is not impossible) then Rubio really could challenge Trump down the stretch - he'd have to overcome a huge deficit but many of the later voting states are more favorable to a more (seemingly) moderate candidate.

Cruz is relatively strong in a bunch of proportional delegates states. So while coming in third in SC is a problem for his image and his delegate math looks bad, he still is quite likely to have enough delegates to play convention kingmaker if he holds on. No way he isn't staying in at least through Super Tuesday.

Rubiobot got the media friendly 2nd place he needed and Bush dropped out. A dream scenario for Rubio, considering that he was trying to get the media to accept another 3rd place finish as a win. He's certainly going to tell donors that he can unite the 60% "not Trump" vote, and that is going to send a lot of dark money his way.

But can he? I'm pretty sure the answer is "no" at least in the short term. Cruz's brand of nihilism seems to get over twenty percent, and Rubio, Kasich, and Bush together didn't get half the non-Cruz votes in South Carolina. And Kasich has pledged to stay in the race until March 15th and the valuable Northern Marianas Republican Caucus that is still anyone's ballgame.

What really matters of course is what everyone's ceiling is. Cruz looks to have a ceiling of about 25%. When Carson finally stops pretending to be a presidential candidate and we have a final decision of whether the establishment candidate is Rubio or Kasich, we'll have a much clearer picture. If Trump ceilings at 45% or more, he'll get enough delegates to be the nominee. If he ceilings at 35%, then Rubio (or perhaps Kasich) can probably get enough delegates in late states to win with RNC support. If his ceiling is somewhere in between those numbers, we're looking at a brokered convention and people having to listen to the insane demands of Ted Cruz.

On the Democratic side, things are way calmer. Hillary was the heavy favorite and she's still the heavy favorite. It doesn't take any deeper reading of the situation - Bernie outspent her in Nevada by quite a bit to try to move the dial and she still won by more than 5%. Next up is South Carolina where she is going to win by double digits. It's going to be several news cycles before the Hillary camp has to spin any real bad news. Clinton and Sanders are already saying nice things about each other and there will be a much more united party than you saw in 2008.

-Username17

Maxus wrote:

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Jeb! is out!
I did not expect it to happen quite so early, but he must be glad not to have to go on humiliating himself.

Three to one he gets back in after a while.

I'd take that bet. We need a den currency to gamble and pay with other than cashy monies though since I don't wanna take your money.

Anywho, Jeb! is O-U-T, out! I thought against reason that he was going to become the establishment nominee, but he was struggling before and quitting has got to make that much worse.

Now, the x-factor that I don't think we've talked about yet is Bloomberg. If he decides to run as Independent as he is suggesting, how does that shake out?

Bloomberg blurs more between Democrat and Republican than even Trump. I think if Trump or Cruz managed to capture the Republican nomination then Bloomberg would be an attractive establishment choice under Independent ironically. I'd say that people might even believe that an Independent populist candidate could unite the bipartisan houses... I think they'd be wrong, but I could see people believing it.

erik wrote:

Maxus wrote:

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Jeb! is out!
I did not expect it to happen quite so early, but he must be glad not to have to go on humiliating himself.

Three to one he gets back in after a while.

I'd take that bet. We need a den currency to gamble and pay with other than cashy monies though since I don't wanna take your money.

I suppose this being the Den, we'd bet game ideas or book/video game recommendations...

Maxus wrote:I suppose this being the Den, we'd bet game ideas or book/video game recommendations...

Words worth of material or reviews, I think.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:

Maxus wrote:I suppose this being the Den, we'd bet game ideas or book/video game recommendations...

Words worth of material or reviews, I think.

Wow, you two are certainly taking the high road. I was expecting something along the lines of "the loser of this bet must suck X barrels of cocks".

erik wrote:
I'd take that bet. We need a den currency to gamble and pay with other than cashy monies though since I don't wanna take your money.

I suggest mailing each other bags of gummy dicks from dicksbymail.com.

hyzmarca wrote: That really depends on if you have a good use for them. If you do, then they're not too expensive. It's just, if you do, you're probably going to war with too many different countries at once.

There is basically no possible scenario in which the US needs more than ten of them. Like, even in the most extreme case of going to war with literally everyone, ten is enough for the things that you want a carrier group for. There'd be things to use them for if you had more, but there are more cost-effective ways of doing those things. In a hypothetical alternate universe where there were more other carrier groups in the world that might change, but it's not true here.

Admittedly, one could plausibly support building more advanced carriers and keeping the old ones in service for a while, because keeping extras in service is cheaper and may compare favorably with building airbases where you need them. But setting a long-term target for carrier groups in service above ten is pretty much nonsense.

Also, what the US actually has a use for more of at sea is assorted light units for anti-piracy and patrols.