The only article about “electability” you need to read

Normally, my brain shuts down when some political pundit uses the word “electability” — I know what’s coming. That’s what media people say when they’re about to start babbling about who is in the lead in a horserace to avoid having to discuss the substance of their policies. Policy is hard, but regurgitating poll results is easy, and if there’s anything we know for certain it’s that the talking heads on the TV are mostly idiots. Maggie Koerth nails it, though, announcing that You’ll Never Know Which Candidate Is Electable.

Political scientists study electability, but electability ain’t no science. Instead, researchers say, it’s basically a layer of ex post facto rationalization that we slather over a stack of psychological biases, media influence and self-fulfilling poll prophecies. It’s not bullshit, exactly; some people really are more likely to be elected than others. But the reasons behind it, and the ability to make assumptions based on it, well …

“[Electability] is this vague, floppy concept,” said Nichole Bauer, a professor of political communication at Louisiana State University. “We don’t know who is electable until someone is elected.”

Please, could someone tell this to Chris Cilliza or Chuck Todd, just to name two among many who need to be punched in the face and sent back to school and told to learn something before they start trying to influence the electorate?

How I will respond if you insult my cooking

I need to memorize this speech, just in case.


Damn ye! Let Neptune strike ye dead Winslow! HAAARK!

Hark Triton, hark! Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til’ ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more — only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin’ tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet, bursting ye — a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now and nothing for the harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself — forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea, for any stuff for part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea!

Come to think of it, that is a generally useful response to any complaint. A student tries to tell me my exam was too hard…”Damn ye! Let Neptune strike ye dead Amanda! HAAARK!” etc.

The Lighthouse is such a great movie — it, and Willem Dafoe, were robbed in the Academy Award nominations. They ought to swap out that boring, self-indulgent, overlong piece of mobster dreck, The Irishman, and replace it with this. It’s a disgrace that Dafoe has never won the award.

Oh…Goop Lab is on Netflix

I’m not even tempted to watch a single second of it, but I can tell I’m going to be entertained by the people who suffer through it to criticize it.

Although I can see where I might find it good if I need an anger rush, although the state of the country is doing that for me right now.

You know, Netflix raised their prices last spring to “allow the company to invest in more original content”. If this is their idea of quality content, I’ll unsubscribe at the next price increase.

US & UK are in a race to the bottom!

The US takes the lead, for now, because the UK just had to do something right. The American huckster and religious fraud, Franklin Graham, was booked to tour the UK with at least 7 planned venues. Now, though, every single venue has cancelled him, citing his anti-LGBT+ fanaticism and hate as the reason. Thumbs up for the UK!

As you might guess, Graham is now having a hissy fit, and as many American loons do, is threatening to sue.

A spokesperson told right-wing Christian outlet CBN: “Since the original venues have broken our legal contract with them, we are pursuing appropriate actions based on grounds of religious discrimination and freedom of speech.

“The Gospel always faces opposition, so we will prayerfully and boldly continue to press forward so that the Good News of God’s love and forgiveness will be proclaimed in all of the cities we have planned to visit.”

This is a guy who has preached that the gays are the enemy and should be kicked out of schools and churches, so I think God’s love is a lie. He also seems to agree that we should be selective in who we allow into our institutions, which rather defeats his case.

I think he is welcome to run his crusade with a UK tour of church basements, prayerfully.

Is this how an innocent man responds?

I already wrote about the data-faking scandal with Jonathan Pruitt, but the one thing I was missing was any explanation from Pruitt himself. Science just covered the matter, and got a statement from him.

At first, he was in the fray tweeting—but no longer. “There are so many voices and they are so loud and diverse, there’s no way to address it.” Instead, he says he’s focusing on his fieldwork, setting insect traps across the South Pacific before and after cyclones hit to learn how different species are affected by these tremendous storms. Last year, he reported on work in which he collected data on spiders before and after a U.S. hurricane. It’s one of the papers now being scrutinized.

That’s right, there are more papers under investigation, and he’s collecting more data that will have to be carefully scrutinized. What he ought to be doing, if he’s innocent, is working to validate his previous work, not flying off to the South Pacific. His career is in dire peril, and he knows it. Instead, he seems to have resigned himself to being caught and his future is bleak.

Pruitt says he has no expectations that he will be able to continue in behavioral ecology, saying he knows he has lost the trust of his colleagues about his data. But these cyclone data will be useful no matter what happens, he says. “If I’m on fire and my longevity is [short], I will bequeath them to another researcher.” He is concerned, however, that as each retraction happens, even innocuous mistakes in his data or experiments will be cause for more retractions. It’s a worry that Dingemanse shares. Such careful inspection of data will often turn up something, no matter how well collected and compiled, he says. “If you looked at my data [this way], you might also come up with causes for concern,” Dingemanse says.

What? No. I’ve got a pile of data I’m sorting through right now, and I’d happily let anyone look at it. It’s just tables of counts of spider species in various locations, but I’ve got a paper trail — all the on-site notes for each site — and the numbers are honestly recorded. I have no fear that it can be misinterpreted.

Also, the colleagues who made this discovery have a vested interest in not seeing causes for concern, since they’ve had to retract published work. It has cost them to report the problems. You know they tested the heck out of the data set before making that difficult decision.

Also, there’s this little tell.

Simmons has spent the past 3 days poring over the 11 papers Pruitt has written for his journal, going back to a data repository now mandated by his journal and others to check raw data. Yet he laments that the initial hashtag—#Pruittgate—is too damming and thinks “we need to, as much as we can, avoid a witch hunt.”

Jeez. The “witch hunt” accusation has become as predictable and useless as the “-gate” suffix.

It’s not a conspiracy, it’s incompetence

We still don’t know the full results of the Iowa caucus.

Make all the excuses you want. I’m happy to agree that this result wasn’t planned, it wasn’t the result of interference by the Russians or Pete Buttigieg, there’s no evil mastermind somewhere chortling while stroking his white cat. It’s a fuck-up, pure and simple. The Iowa Democrats bungled everything.

They relied on an archaic mechanism to determine a ‘winner’ — it was so creaky and antiquated that you could predict confusion and flubbed results, yet they persist in sticking with it. Why? Because that’s the way they’ve always done it, and no one has the bones to insist on modernizing it.

It produced humiliating results. Individual caucuses don’t rely on reporting just the numbers, they have to put the results in rank order — so when there’s a tie, they can’t just accept it, they have to flip a coin to make a decision. A coin flip that gets onto the internet and makes the whole process look ridiculous.

Sometimes, worse than ridiculous.

Their only attempt to modernize was to use an app…an app that wasn’t adequately tested, and that people didn’t know how to use.

Shadow’s app seems to fit that definition. Reports suggest that the app was engineered in just the past two months. According to cybersecurity consultants and academics interviewed by the Times, the app was not tested at statewide scale or vetted by the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency. And even if the app was working just fine, reports suggest the roll out of the tool was bungled, to the point where those tasked with reporting via the app weren’t trained to know how to use it.

This is what the Democrats always do. They fuck it up. Best intentions in the world, but total bumblefuckery when it comes to execution. Bush v. Gore, anyone? For that matter, how did W get a second term after he screwed everything up? Because the Republicans are evil, but they’ve got the focus and determination and ideological fanaticism to plow ahead while the Democrats are still trying to puzzle out how to count votes. Also, because the Democrats don’t know what kind of party they are — they’re still spinning in circles trying to claim that centrist middle ground, while the electorate is standing way to the left, yelling at them to come this way.

Oh, except when the Democrats decide to change the debate rules to allow a billionaire to buy his way into the limelight. If that doesn’t tell you how they operate, I don’t know what does. It’s all about money, not principle.

That also explains why establishment Democrats are so hostile to Bernie Sanders. He’s going to shake up their blundering, failed system.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Republican party must be destroyed, because it’s a malignant blight on democracy. But now this current debacle convinces me that the Democratic party must also be destroyed or radically transformed, because it’s a neoliberal nothingburger populated with incompetent chucklefucks who only care about the status quo…which isn’t working.

I love Elizabeth Warren as a brilliant, hardworking wonk, but I am so fed up with the Democrats that I’ve decided that, in the Minnesota primary, I’ll be voting for Bernie. It’s the only way to break the cycle of failure.

My biggest concern is that we could have a motivated electorate that turns out in droves on election day next November to boot out the boob at the top, but it won’t matter, because the Democrats will fumble the ball at the last moment. It’s not the Republican coup that should make us worry, it’s that the Democrats will botch it all and accidentally hand it all to the forces of evil.

Total wreck here

Our cat has reached new heights of obnoxious behavior. She is not the kind of cat who curls contentedly at the foot of the bed and lets us all sleep peacefully — no, she goes into bouts of antic behavior, rooting about, jumping on things, deciding to rearrange our closets. So she’s not allowed in the bedroom. Her new discovery is that she can get our attention at all hours of the night by scratching at our door and hurling herself at it, effectively pounding on it to wake us up. All night long. I would start to fall asleep and then … scratch, scratch, pound, pound, and I’d yell at her to make her go away, and then she’d start up again as soon as I began to drift off to sleep.

Today I am bleary-eyed and crankier than usual, barely able to think straight. Fortunately, today is an exam day so I don’t need to think or speak much, but this evil psycho cat is going to drive me mad.

Our next solution is to confine her to the kitchen at night, keeping her 10 or 15 feet away from our bedroom door, so she’ll really have to figure out how to make a ruckus loud enough to be heard. I anticipate that we’ll be awakened by the sound of crashing glassware. Or that she’ll figure out how to use a butcher knife.

I don’t care anymore. I welcome the sleep of oblivion.

Hey, why do people freak out at the sight of spiders, but get all melty goo-goo eyes at the sight of a kitty? Those responses ought to be reversed.

I was just sent a link to this extraordinarily appropriate song.

Take me back to giant spider mountain,
Where the zombie goblins, are toiling in the sun,
Take me back to giant spider mountain,
And let me join the zombies when I’m done,
When I’m done, when I’m done,
Let me join the zombies when I’m done,
When I’m done, when I’m done,
Let me join the zombies when I’m done

I’m already there!

Sex workers are humans, too

This guy, Eustachio Gallese, is a piece of work. He’s a convicted spousal abuser and violent murderer. Fortunately, he was taken off the streets; unfortunately, that was after Chantal Deschênes was killed.

In 1997, Gallese was convicted for conjugal violence. Seven years later, Gallese murdered his 32-year-old partner, Chantal Deschênes, beating her first with a hammer and then repeatedly stabbing her.

He was sentenced in 2006 to life in prison with no chance of parole for 15 years, and deemed at high risk of committing violence against a partner a year later.

But, at some point, that risk evaluation was revised to moderate and in 2016 — five years before he was due for parole — Gallese was allowed supervised outings.

This is the point where the story gets worse, if you can imagine that. The parole board decided he had “needs” that needed to be met.

He had sexual needs, his caseworker told the board. But because Gallese wasn’t deemed ready to have relationships with a woman, buying sexual services was the solution to satisfying his “sexual needs.”

It’s a solution that blatantly disregards the fact that buying sexual services is a criminal offence, as is operating a brothel.

But, more tragically, the order was approved with cruel disregard for the unsuspecting women on whom Gallese was set loose.

Hey, pay attention to the telling line, “because Gallese wasn’t deemed ready to have relationships with a woman, buying sexual services was the solution”. Because I guess sex workers don’t count as women? If I were on that board, I would have authorized buying him a fleshlight (NSFW!), a bucket of lube, and a pile of magazines, but I would not have decided that a man who wasn’t ready to deal with women, and who had brutally murdered a woman, should have access to a sex worker, unless, maybe, it was a robot sex worker. But that’s what they approved: they turned him loose on a woman who was a sex worker and the results were horrendous.

On Jan. 23 this year, Gallese turned himself in to Quebec City police and pointed them to the hotel room where they found the body of 22-year-old Marylène Lévesque. He’s since been charged with murder.

Lévesque had defensive wounds and had been stabbed, according to Le Journal de Quebec. The newspaper also reported that Lévesque had worked in a massage parlour and that Gallese was a regular customer, and had bought her gifts including a television for Christmas.

But both the Montreal Gazette and Le Soleil reported that Gallese had been banned from the brothel because he had been violent with several others who worked there.

Not only did he have a history of prior convictions, but he had a more recent history of violence at a local brothel, none of which affected the board’s decision to let him visit a sex worker. Who was incidentally a woman. Because they unconsciously dehumanized sex workers.

Sex work should be decriminalized if for no other reason than that these people are people who deserve all the protections and rights granted to other citizens.

Also, the people who authorized this release need to be fired, at the very least. Christ. Dead at 22 because a bureaucrat thought she was disposable, and had fewer rights than a convicted murderer.

Worldcon contemplates the abominable

I guess it’s that time when the venue for Worldcon is considered, and there are currently two candidate sites. One of them is … Saudi Arabia? Yikes. This is not a criticism of Muslim science fiction writers — I’m a fan of Saladin Ahmed, for instance — but the country has some major problems.

…Local laws require men and women to dress modestly covering shoulders and knees in public, avoiding tight-fitting clothing or clothes with profane language or images. It is not mandatory for female travellers to wear the traditional robe or abaaya. Information on important laws and etiquette around dress codes is available to visitors on the Visit Saudi website.

Forget about cosplay, then? But there’s worse:

…Homosexual or extra-marital sexual relations, including adultery, are illegal and can be subject to severe penalties. It’s also illegal to be transgender. Transgender people travelling to Saudi Arabia are likely to face significant difficulties and risks if this is discovered by the authorities. See our information and advice page for the LGBT community before you travel.

Shouldn’t that be instantly disqualifying? The only people who would be pleased at that choice would be the rabid puppies fans, who would find Saudi-style oppression perfectly copacetic.

The alternative choice is Chicago, in the US. That makes it tough to argue that we should avoid repressive puritanical governments. So far, though, the US is clearly to the left of Saudi Arabia.