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!