Posted on 09/06/2020 7:18:58 PM PDT by poconopundit
True. Maybe in a few days I’ll report on Charlie Kirk’s analysis. It’s very good and I’m sure Freepers would love it.
Hood job
Lichtman’s hatred of President Trump is pathological. Very early in the Trump administration he published a book calling for Trump’s impeachment.
bump for later
Fear PP, you might need an editor? spellchecker?
However, do like your projection! A.L. is so full of
himself he waddles. And as for cheating, he is, after all,
more of a liberal than anything else so what should one expect?
OK, I wasn’t aware of that book. So he’s already known as a partisan. I guess the MSM money is lucrative for him.
He’s 74 years old, so he’s making one last run at the money before he retires.
Yes, I’ve got to do a better job of spotting errors. Well, at least the cost of my vanities is reasonable. A 50-Kbyte image even less text.
We had some good comments here. Plus I like the idea that the Free Republic puts a stake in the ground calling out the hypocrisy of the NYTimes, enemy of the people.
Being an industry analyst, I guess my fascination is with the model building itself.
And as I think of it, Lichtman is trying to shoehorn 13 questions into elections from 1860 to today — and that’s totally unrealistic.
Think how the country has changed since 1860. Women and Blacks gained the vote. The automobile and the shift from rural to suburban life. America became a global power. The internet circles the globe and social media/search engines have enormous influence as newspapers steadily decline.
As Liz mentioned, how do you take into account the dislike for people like Hillary Clinton or the obvious decline in brainpower of Sleepy Joe?
Each period in history — and each election — requires a readjustment of the variables and weights. Keeping the same model unchanged is foolish — though I must admit that I thought it could be done until just now :- )
While it's true that mankind in general at times operates in part by a set of natural physical and chemical and biochemical principles and a so called 'rational process,' he does it by varying degrees and his highest function - thought - and then the ability to fool himself into believing the many thoughts that blend into beliefs and sequential stories - are the capital T truth ... what you REALLY have is a species best characterized as predictable in some particulars but completely crazy (chaos) when it comes to the big picture - what he arrives at as the capital T truth and then clings to as if the rightness or wrongness of the verity of his story are the equivalent of life and death itself - we are simply wired that way, and we are wired to believe the story our wiring tells us.
(In truth, we are not the 'I' that is pointed to when we use the word 'I', but we believe we are. This is of course a deeper discussion, but the lunacy hinges on it, as does the suffering caused by the lunacy. Garden of Eden and all that :-))
Anyway - Darwin means we don't need to make sense as a primary characteristic, we only need to make ENOUGH sense to create the next generation.
In that way, mankind can be characterized, as a whole, as a random and chaotic mental patient who in very few key areas makes enough sense to navigate the ward long enough to get another mental patient pregnant.
His own very existence makes no sense, that is, the very scope within which he is to try to make sense is senseless. This is not to say there is not holiness in that empty realm of scope. But holiness doesn't necessarily translate into the proper use of that holiness.
I dare you to model/predict the goings on in THAT ward for more than a week or so.
We like to call it 'civilizational structural changes over time,'sometimes we call it 'progress' and maybe to the extent that the species fares better on some levels it's progress, but at the root the species is still insane. I say that with affection.
I think he does get slowly more rational and awake, but boy does he cause himself a lot of suffering and (unpredicatable because it's ultimately random chaos - stream of cognitive associations attached to as 'the truth') drama. I don't here specifically call out the left, which certainly belongs in their own ward for the safety of others - but the whole ball of wax - the species and history called mankind -> it is a free for all violent loony bin characterized by 97% madness and 2.9% percent rational processes where occasionally, slowly, but maybe more and more often, relative beauty and orderly form breaks out, like a hockey game at a brawl.
Model THAT!
After all these years, I’m experimenting with the conclusion that there is no ONE truth after all.
As modern physics has shown us, it can be a particle or a wave, depending on how it is measured or observed.
In other words, it depends on how it is measured or observed.
I think that this concept is very hard to accept, that two or more truths can be simultaneously correct.(Depending on how the particular thing or philosophy, or whatever is observed)
Consider the question of whether the administration achieves a major success in foreign/military affairs. This time around what he's really asking is does the public perceive the administration to have major success. He didn't need to add this unspoken qualifier before, but he does now, because thanks to the media there's such a gaping disconnect between actual reality and the reality being presented to the public--and unfortunately absorbed to a significant degree--that it has to be accounted for.
So IMO what the gamed model is really saying it is this: in normal times the reelection of Donald Trump would be a slam dunk, but these are not normal times...
For example, is there an anthropomorphized deity like Yahweh, Jesus or Krishna,or just the impersonal universal order of things?
Actually both might be true. Let that sink in for a while. :)
You are 100% correct. Lichtmann sold out for
And then he hanged himself.
Right there he is already wrong! TRUMP got IMPEACHED & was cruising to REELECTION until this stupid VIRUS PANDEMIC!!!
Maybe the New York Times has been so busy manufacturing lies in the last twenty years -- against Reagan and the Bushes - they never notices they were doing anything outrageoius. The hatred for a free republic is inbred.
The difference is that Trump is very clear about wanting to destroy the corrupt press and permanent State.
Winston Churchill made a comment that maybe parallels the fears at the Fake News today:
Maybe someday Mr. Lichtman or the an Editor of the New York Times will find your photo and feel the scorn of the millions of patriots who gave their last full measure to devotionn protect and defend this country... and all the good it signifies.
Then perhaps they will confess their sins before their Maker.
Models exist. To a guy like Trump who knows the "human interface to the world" (Scott Adams), what to do in a particular situation is as true and correct as a martial artist's muscle memory in combat.
Emerson has a passage that speaks to the irrational side of human nature:
They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age. With such an ignorant and deceivable majority, States would soon run to ruin, but that there are limitations, beyond which the folly and ambition of governors cannot go. Things have their laws, as well as men; and things refuse to be trifled with.
Property will be protected. Corn will not grow, unless it is planted and manured; but the farmer will not plant or hoe it, unless the chances are a hundred to one, that he will cut and harvest it.
Under any forms, persons and property must and will have their just sway. They exert their power, as steadily as matter its attraction.
So Trump's reign is that flood tide where the forces of Chaos are swept aside to enable farmers, honest bankers, and the solid oak natural forces of civil society to regain some control -- albeit temporary control -- over the free republic.
Except that as humans, we are in fact made of the universe, so in that sense, 'truth is what truth is'. But what exactly that is in relation to anything else, truthfully, can not be said truthfully.
In the end you realize thoughts are just maps to get us to the corner farm store to buy milk, or in the older days, kill a mastodon, for survival. The absolute can not be found in thought. But you CAN build a better widget making machine with thought. It's just not really real.
I know the old Zen masters understood this. They realized there is no need for it to be really real. What gets you to the store to buy milk doesn't have to be the truth. In fact you don't want it to be the capital T Truth -> because THEN the best you can ever have is some thought from a human mind.
Better to connect to something else. THAT can only be done outside of time, causation, conditioning, right, wrong, truth, false. Because in the end, there is no such thing as actually true or actually false.
THAT is the land of God, or Enlightenment. To go THERE, you have to put down all opinions, all knowledge, anything you 'know' or understand, you have to put down everything. When there is nothing that you know, there is something there, though to call it 'something' is a lie, but there aren't words.
I know the old Zen masters understood it. They codified it (orally and in some ways in writing - although it can't actually be codified or 'understood') -> I believe the early Christians understood it, sought to communicate it, knew there weren't words, but gave it their best shot.
It's surprising to me that a literal interpreter of the Bible can in one sentence say God is greater than we can understand, and still think He can be expressed in words. At BEST many of the lies of the mind can be removed, clearing the path. I think the early Christian written history was the least worst thing they could come up with to approach it. Zen masters knew it couldn't be approached intentionally.
So 'Eternal' means 'no time' -> not endless time. This is why 'Heaven is already in and around you' -> you (royal you) just don't know it. It's not the grasping of something, it's actually the opposite.
So I think the key is that WITHIN the scope of the subject of thinking and logic, things can be true, but that scope itself is not cradled in a thing like itself.
In the end the closest thing you can say is 'A is A' and even then you've lied, but it's less of a lie than anything else you can say. Almost. In the oral history, before a student becomes a master, a Zen student answers a certain koan ... not correctly, because there is no correct, but in a way that demonstrates to the master that 'he gets it'. "Getting It" is not true or false, right or wrong. It's just 'getting it'.
What you 'get' is not some thing, in fact you get no thing. There, all words turn into circles, but they remain amusing :-)
In the meantime, we still have to get to the corner store to buy milk, we just don't have to believe it's true. Believing it is true is the BIGGEST wall between man and God. But for communication purposes we can say 'it is true that if you take the 2nd left instead of the 3rd and continue driving, that is the 'wrong way' to get to the corner store. Or if someone says 'the 2nd left is the wrong way' you can say, for communication sake 'that is the truth.' But always it's understood to not be the capital T Truth.
To SOME extent the left (the arrogant high IQ ones) make the mistake of wandering only partially into this territory - one foot in 'something' and one foot in 'no thing and the is-ness that's still there.' If you do that, you will die very soon, hence they can, with a straight face, actually buy into their own moonbattery and talk about it so convincingly because they believe it as to get the lemmings that follow them to run at the cliff with them.
They should thank us, they know not that we save them from certain destruction!
Yeah agreed ... and ...
"States would soon run to ruin, but that there are limitations, beyond which the folly and ambition of governors cannot go."
Just this morning I had the related but not related directly discussion with neighbors across the street (not entirely irrational democrats, but of course one was stricken with TDS as we talked, even though I never went in for any kill) ... they opened with 'in our democracy ... this and that is not working.' When will democrats just accept that we are not a democracy and it's for a VERY important point ... so that we run into the Constitution long before we have to learn by running into Nature's wall ... which is more like a wall of propellers or blender blades.
Oh democrats, those furry little darlings :-)
But I take your point, the madness can be to some extent characterized, and Trump has it well characterized and hence can interface with it. I think you've spoken to this before ... that's it's likely simply from years of two things: That he interacted closely with the workin' people on his job sites (as well as elites), but he identified more and hence cared more about the workin' people, thinks of himself as one who just made a ton of money at it, and the second thing is that since he like them and identified with them, he came to know what they were like. In that sense his ability to interface with them is more a function of the simple good human being he is than genius. I'm not saying he's the classically good human being ... but he IS what Ayn Rand was talking about in Fountainhead when Rourke was chillin' on some hillside looking out over one of his developments and he had a really short interaction with the kid that would have changed the kid's life for the better. He's got a good IQ but he had to care about those people to come to know them so well. It's a tougher version of caring than the cuddly dems can understand so they just think he's a dick, which he is, but that's not all he is. (Dick in the sense of Team America.)
Well happy fall to ya.
Interesting...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.