#Polling Aggregators

[originalleftist]

If you're wondering why polling averages are suddenly showing Trump winning despite all the bad news he's gotten lately- it might have something to do with this:

Basically, Republicans are ratfucking the polling averages by churning out huge numbers of partisan polls, and the polling aggregators/analysts like 538 aren't doing due diligence to compensate for it.

Now, what is the purpose of this?

Well, in the immediate-term, it creates a narrative that Trump is winning, boosting morale of his supporters while demoralizing support for Democrats and Harris.

Beyond that, if polling averages show that Trump is winning ahead of election day-which we can pretty much guarantee they will, because see above-then they will use that as "proof" of fraud if Democrats subsequently win.

Basically, they are engineering a pretext for their next coup attempt in front of us.

The only numbers that decide anything are actual votes. So ignore the polls, and VOTE.

[uboat53]

As of a week ago, FiveThirtyEight's polling averages included 19 polls that were conducted entirely in October. Of those 11 were from right-wing firms and news outlets, 7 were from non-ideological pollsters, and 1 was from a Brazilian pollster that's not well known. One of the right-wing pollsters included in that average, Quantus Insights, responded "you're welcome" on Twitter when a MAGA influencer celebrated the 538 polling average shifting to a slight Trump lead.

You may not have noticed, but tons of right-wing polls have come out in the last month or so, way more of them, in fact, than non-ideological polls, and they've got Trump performing significantly better than non-right-wing polls, Harris leads by about 1.7% in the average of non-ideological polls while Trump leads by 1% in the right-wing polls. We've actually seen this before, in 2022 when a huge raft of right-wing polls came out in October, just before the election, and showed GOP Senate and House candidates doing much better than other polling and, in fact, much better than they actually did when the votes were counted.

Now, poll aggregators like FiveThirtyEight will tell you that they're able to weight for the kind of thing and that it doesn't make a huge deal in their models, but that really depends on what you consider a "huge deal". FiveThirtyEight, for example, calculates that the right-wing polls shift their average by between 0.1% and 0.8%, almost entirely toward Republicans and, look, I get it, from a data perspective, you'd always rather have more data than less. Even if it's bad data, weighting and adjusting can allow you to still get some reasonable value out of it. From a statistical analysis perspective that's pretty much negligible, but most people reading these polling aggregators, even other journalists, aren't all that educated in statistical analysis.

Still, we have to acknowledge what it does at the most basic level. That 0.8% shift was in Pennsylvania where 538 currently has Trump ahead by 0.3%. In other words, without the flood of right-wing polls, they would instead have Harris ahead by 0.5%. And look, again, I get it, from a statistical point of view, both of those results are toss-ups, well within the margin of error, and you can't make any solid conclusions about the state of the race from either of those results except that we don't know who's going to win. But look at the media coverage.

Even reputable news outlets are writing stories about Trump being ahead in the swing states and right-wing news media is all but crowing it from the rooftops. Whether they like it or not, poll aggregators are now driving news coverage that completely ignores what their results actually mean.

The long-story-short here is that it appears likely that polling averages are being manipulated by a flood of right-wing polls that look far better for Trump than non-ideological polls do. Whether this is to drive favorable news coverage or to provide an excuse to later challenge unfavorable election results is unclear, but what is clear is that this isn't just data that's bad because someone did some shoddy work, it's deliberately bad and it's designed to throw off the aggregate data.

If that's not a good enough reason to question whether it should be part of the aggregate data and to question the results of aggregate data that includes it, I don't know what is.

Hat tip to The New Republic whose story I got most of this data from.

[corantus]

merch poll!!

been debating about what to do for my first merch run for a long time, and i think it's gotta be the lesbian bears. so i am hoping to sell stickers of these girls sometime this year

putting it to a vote, i'm trying to decide between a sticker sheet or selling stickers of each bear individually (with the option to buy all 4 as a bundle). which would you buy:

⬇️ in case u needed to remember how cute they are

[hug-your-face]

via @swatercolour here on Tumblr and also on [insta]

EDIT: I do not interpret "just managing" as "just suffering, just enduring, curling into a fetal position and waiting for it to be over." Managing is an active process.

So I'm using this post as a platform to make the reminder that "the power of the people is greater than the people in power," and we all are cordially invited to:

Take good care of ourselves. Mental, physical, emotional health. Hydrate. Move if we can, get outside if we can.

Keep up a routine. Remember quarantine and we all had to find a routine? This is the same.

Be intentional in our news consumption. Let's not stick our heads in the sand but let's not doomscroll either. Get an RSS aggregator. Subscribe to WTF Just Happened Today, Yoour Local Epidemiologist, Fix The News (for some inspiring hopeful news!). We'll check our feeds a few times a week, but no more than once a day.

Connect with friends and loved ones. Remind ourselves that while SOME people are horrible, for the most part people are awesome... if complicated. Share our fears but also our hopes. Eat together.

Now that we're keeping healthy, safe, sane, and hopeful... now we also fight. Quietly if we prefer, loudly if we prefer. But sustainably. I hate that I had to live through three rounds of this nonsense where a few people use half of us as tools to fuck over ALL of us, but here we are again. So let us take just one moment every week or so to...

Use 5calls to keep blowing up our reps phones. Tell them to either break ranks with the Orange Administration, or to stand up louder than just matching outfits and signs. Or to THANK them for standing up.

Use Vote411 to find elections before the midterms. A lot of villages, cities, townships etc have local elections that will affect where we live... and more importantly, the people in office there will affect things upwards too.

Use Ballotpedia to know exactly what's on our ballots ahead of time.

Protest, because it actually works.

Use Vote.org to make a plan to vote in the midterms. Make a plan that is immune to voter suppression tactics. Get our documents in order. Reach out to our friends to go to the polls as a group. Plan to livestream our visit, up until the point we have to turn our cameras off.

Make and share memes that promote hope, organizing, solidarity, and/or resistance.

Get involved with an action network like Indivisible, MoveOn, or Working Families Party.

Go to a local town hall meeting. Speak up.

Heck, start our own local activism networks, letter campaigns, call campaigns, or fundraisers with Action Network.

And we will remember our self-care. We will remind ourselves and each other that they want us scattered, focus is how we resist.

It IS coming back. Things ARE going to get worse. The world has become a place where a very few people are pulling levers and pushing buttons that are actively destroying much of what is good about living in a society where people care for each other.

Many others are in shock, sputtering "but can they do that?" MANY many others are waiting for someone to come save us.

But there are those who are actively, loudly, opposing.

And there are more people speaking up, acting up, every day. More people saying it's time to get scrappy. It's time to get into some good trouble. The shock is wearing off.

Yes, it's gonna get worse before it gets better (the long-term damage of the acts of the past momentum of all the damage that has been done will take that long to be felt -- but it WILL get better.

If WE will it.

[quillsword]

Looking at the Polls and Wishing I Weren't

I considered just dumping the blog below this one because it is from last week and I didn’t get around to posting it on time but it shows my work and how I decide what to review when I’m looking at polls. Aggregators like Real Clear Politics are useful because they’ve already hunted down all the wild polls, but averaging is just dumb. I will ignore the average. There are so few good enough polls…

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[seancurry1]

Remember, Thou Art Barnacle

A serenity prayer for election day.

Originally posted on my website.

The Ann Selzer Iowa poll, regarded as the gold standard in all of political polling, shows Harris is up +3 in a state that Trump won by +8 in 2016 and by +9 in 2020. 

And you are a barnacle. 

The election better markets have Trump up by +19 (as of noon EST, 11/5/24), and bettors don’t care if people are ashamed to admit who they’re voting for—they’re in it for the money and only the money.

And you are a barnacle. 

Mainstream pollsters have admitted to weighting their polls heavily in favor of Trump, to ensure they don’t end up with egg on their face like they did in 2016 and 2020 again. International whales are taking out huge bets in favor of Trump, swinging the markets, and right wing think tanks are flooding the zone with bullshit polls to artificially inflate Trump’s odds in the aggregate. And even if the popular vote is overwhelmingly for Harris, Trump’s team is already laying the narrative groundwork to support a Stop the Steal campaign that, by the time you read this, will likely already have started. 

All of that is true. 

And you are still a barnacle. 

You are not piloting the ship. You are not the captain of the ship. You are not laying out the potential courses the ship could take, you are not deciding which course the ship will take, you are not scouting ahead. 

You aren’t even a paying, ticket-holding passenger on the ship. You are a barnacle on the hull, deep underwater, and unfortunately, there isn’t really anything you can individually do to affect where this ship goes. Sorry! 

This isn’t an invitation to check out, or become apathetic, or (heaven forbid) embrace doomerism. Quite the opposite: this is a reminder of who you actually are in this entire scenario, of the power you do not have, and of the power you definitely do. 

After the 2016 election, some small part of myself was convinced I could change the outcome if I just posted hard enough. If I fought enough of my friends on Facebook, texted angrily, and tweeted from enough protests and rallies, somehow Trump would no longer be President-elect. 

All it did was, literally, give me a rash. I got so angry for so long that my skin started to break out in hives. A doctor friend more-than-half seriously prescribed that I “get the fuck off Facebook” until my skin returned to normal. Trump was still President-elect, the next 8 years happened the way they did, and here we are today. 

You’re going to hear a lot today: polls are tightening! Votes still aren’t in from this critical precinct! If these trends hold, then we can expect to know something by such-and-such a time! The race is as tight as can be! White supremacists are threatening violence to avenge a dead squirrel! 

(The squirrel thing is 100% real, and my god, I really wish I was joking.) 

Remember, through all of it, that you are not the captain of the ship. You are a barnacle on its hull, and there is very little you can personally do to change it at this point. You’ve already done all you can do—or maybe you haven’t, but even then, you’ve already done all you’re going to do. 

And as you stress, and consider how inebriated you’re going to get, and decide on which web pages you’ll be refreshing every thirty seconds, and stress out some more, remember too that Donald Trump hasn’t ever won the popular vote in his entire miserable life. He only won the electoral college, a racist system explicitly designed to empower slaveholders in southern states, one time, and ever since then, he has lost every election he’s declared for. 

More people did vote for the woman candidate the last time one ran for President, and more people have voted for the candidate of color than their opponent every single time a person of color has run for President on a major party ticket. 

And women have already made up a larger share of early voting than men in this, the first general election post-Dobbs, than ever before in American history. (53% women to 44% men.) 

So as you stress and consider your inebriates and say to yourself, “How can it possibly be this close?!” for the umpteenth time today, remember too that Donald Trump is a fascistic, deeply unpopular person (let alone President) backed by an even more deeply weird party, and that almost the entirety of your experience of this election is being filtered through the lens of a national, for-profit media that doesn’t care who wins, so long as you keep watching. 

Remember, you are not the captain of the ship, you are not the helmsman, you are not the map-maker. 

You are a barnacle. 

Vote for Harris, vote Democrat in your local and state races, and trust your other barnacles.

If you like this, consider signing up for my newsletter to get more writing from me right in your inbox the second it posts: sean-curry.com/signup

[wilwheaton]

Two of the nonpartisan pollsters have Harris up by 5 points, while the two pollsters that have a partisan sponsor show her up by 3 points. Keep an eye on polls by partisan pollsters or done for partisan sponsors. In 2022, they consistently proved more favorable than nonpartisan ones to Republicans, as Republicans tried hard to maintain the “red wave” narrative. Same thing is happening this year, as Republicans will invest significant resources to game the polling aggregates. I wouldn’t sweat it beyond being aware of it. There are some who think that progressives will relax if they think Harris has it in the bag. Is having Harris +3 less motivating than +5? I don’t buy it. I think people love a winning team, and the bigger the lead, the more motivated we’ll be to finish strong. But ultimately, it is what it is. Harris is doing great. Let’s win big.

The first post-debate polls look good for Harris

New challenge: every Friday between now and your state’s registration deadline, go to vote.gov and double check that you haven’t been purged by republican fuckery.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

When prophecy fails, election polling edition

In Canto 20 of Inferno, Dante confronts a pit where the sinners have had their heads twisted around backwards; they trudge, naked and weeping, through puddles of cooling tears. Virgil informs him that these are the fortunetellers, who tried to look forwards in life and now must look backwards forever.

In a completely unrelated subject, how about those election pollsters, huh?

Writing for The American Prospect, historian Rick Perlstein takes a hard look at characteristic failure modes of election polling and ponders their meaning:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-09-25-polling-imperilment/

Apart from the pre-election polling chaos we're living through today, Perlstein's main inspiration is W Joseph Campbell 2024 University of California Press book, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in US Presidential Elections:

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/lost-in-a-gallup/paper

In Campbell's telling, US election polling follows a century-old pattern: pollsters discover a new technique that works spookily well..for a while. While the new polling technique works, the pollster is hailed a supernaturally insightful fortune-teller.

In 1932, the Raleigh News and Observer was so impressed with polling by The Literary Digest that they proposed replacing elections with Digest's poll. The Digest's innovation was sending out 20,000,000 postcards advertising subscriptions and asking about presidential preferences. This worked perfectly for three elections – 1924, 1928, and 1932. But in 1936, the Digest blew it, calling the election for Alf Landon over FDR.

The Digest was dethroned, and new soothsayers were appointed: George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossler, who replaced the Digest's high-volume polling with a new kind of poll, one that sought out a representative slice of the population (as Perlstein says, this seems "so obvious in retrospect, you wonder how nobody thought of it before").

Representative polling worked so well that, three elections later, the pollsters declared that they could predict the election so well from early on that there was no reason to keep polling voters. They'd just declare the winner after the early polls were in and take the rest of the election off.

That was in 1948 – you know, 1948, the "Dewey Defeats Truman" election?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman

If this sounds familiar, perhaps you – like Perlstein – are reminded of the 2016 election, where Fivethirtyeight and Nate Silver called the election for Hillary Clinton, and we took them at their word because they'd developed a new, incredibly accurate polling technique that had aced the previous two elections.

Silver's innovation? Aggregating state polls, weighting them by accuracy, and then producing a kind of meta-poll that combined their conclusions.

When Silver's prophecy failed in 2016, he offered the same excuse that Gallup gave in 1948: when voters are truly undecided, you can't predict how they'll vote, because they don't know how they'll vote.

Which, you know, okay, sure, that's right. But if you know that the election can't be called, if you know that undecided voters are feeding noise into the system whenever you poll them, then why report the polls at all? If all the polling fluctuation is undecided voters flopping around, not making up their mind, then the fact that candidate X is up 5 points with undecided means nothing.

As the finance industry disclaimer has it, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." But, as Perlstein says, "past performance is all a pollster has to go on." When Nate Silver weights his model in favor of a given poll, it's based on that poll's historical accuracy, not its future accuracy, because its future accuracy can't be determined until it's in the past. Like Dante's fortune-tellers, pollsters have to look backwards even as they march forwards.

Of course, it doesn't help that in some cases, Silver was just bad at assessing polls for accuracy, like when he put polls from the far-right "shock pollster" Trafalgar Group into the highly reliable bucket. Since 2016, Trafalgar has specialized in releasing garbage polls that announce that MAGA weirdos are way ahead, and because they always say that, they were far more accurate than the Clinton-predicting competition in 2016 when they proclaimed that Trump had it in the bag. For Silver, this warranted an "A-" on reliability, and that is partially to blame for how bad Silver's 2020 predictions were, when Republicans got pasted, but Trafalgar continued to predict a Democratic wipeout. Silver's methodology has a huge flaw: because Trafalgar's prediction history began in 2016, that single data-point made them look pretty darned reliable, even though their method was to just keep saying the same thing, over and over:

https://www.ettingermentum.news/p/the-art-of-losing-a-fivethirtyeight

Pollsters who get lucky with a temporarily reliable methodology inevitably get cocky and start cutting corners. After all, polling is expensive, so discontinuing the polls once you think you have an answer is a way to increase the enterprise's profitability. But, of course, pollsters can only make money so long as they're somewhat reliable, which leads to a whole subindustry of excuse-making when this cost-cutting bites them in the ass. In 1948, George Gallup blamed his failures on the audience, who failed to grasp the "difference between forecasting an election and picking the winner of a horse race." In 2016, Silver declared that he'd been right because he'd given Trump at 28.6% chance of winning.

This isn't an entirely worthless excuse. If you predict that Clinton's victory is 71.4% in the bag, you are saying that Trump might win. But pollsters want to eat their cake and have it, too: when they're right, they trumpet their predictive accuracy, without any of the caveats they are so insistent upon when they blow it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jDlo7YfUxc

There's always some excuse when it comes to the polls: in 1952, George Gallup called the election a tossup, but it went for Eisenhower in a landslide. He took out a full-page NYT ad, trumpeting that he was right, actually, because he wasn't accounting for undecided voters.

Polling is ultimately a form of empiricism-washing. The pollster may be counting up poll responses, but that doesn't make the prediction any less qualitative. Sure, the pollster counts responses, but who they ask, and what they do with those responses, is purely subjective. They're making guesses (or wishes) about which people are likely to vote, and what it means when someone tells you they're undecided. This is at least as much an ideological project as it is a scientific one:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-09-23-polling-whiplash/

But for all that polling is ideological, it's a very thin ideology. When it comes to serious political deliberation, questions like "who is likely to vote" and "what does 'undecided' mean" are a lot less important than, "what are the candidates promising to do?" and "what are the candidates likely to do?"

But – as Perlstein writes – the only kind of election journalism that is consistently, adequately funded is poll coverage. As a 1949 critic put it, this isn't the "pulse of democracy," it's "its baby talk."

Today, Tor Books publishes VIGILANT, a new, free LITTLE BROTHER story about creepy surveillance in distance education. It follows SPILL, another new, free LITTLE BROTHER novella about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/26/dewey-beats-truman/#past-performance-is-no-guarantee-of-future-results

[allthecanadianpolitics]

I hate all these polls that are out there telling people how they should vote to keep the cons out. None of them take any stock into how more rural ridings have historically voted and apply aggregate data to places that aren't being polled. My riding has always been NDP heavy right after the cons and all these stupid polls are telling people to vote liberal. THAT is going to split the vote. Historic trends tell a better story than some stupid poll.

We could have had an NDP MP back in 2015 of people hadn't voted liberal. But noooooo we've been stuck with a conservative for YEARS because of people trusting polls more than anything else.

~~~~

[contemplatingoutlander]

FiveThirtyEight is gone. Its legacy will endure.

Nate Silver’s website suffered because of Trump and changes in political news coverage.

Opinion | Perry Bacon, Jr. | March 7, 2025

FiveThirtyEight became famous for its “forecasts” from founder Nate Silver. But the website (where I worked from 2017 to 2021) was trying to do much more than predict presidential election results. FiveThirtyEight was an attempt to improve and reimagine journalism. I think it succeeded — even though the website is now defunct. ABC News, which owned FiveThirtyEight, this week laid off the site’s 15 remaining staffers. The network had already made drastic cutbacks two years ago, with Silver himself departing back then. We are in the midst of staff reductions throughout the journalism industry. That said, ABC News is not a newspaper in a declining city in the Midwest. If the network wanted to keep the site going, it could have. This decision probably wasn’t just about money. [...] Political journalism has changed in ways that have made FiveThirtyEight less essential. Silver started the website during the 2008 presidential campaign. (There are 538 votes in the electoral college.) He correctly saw a flaw in American political coverage. Journalism professors and many within the news industry had for years argued that political news was too focused on the “horse race” (who was going to win the next election) instead of policy issues. What Silver argued was that horse-race coverage, while extensive, was often quite bad. It was overly fixated on a single poll or arguing that a candidate appeared to be surging after delivering a strong speech, without any other evidence. Averaging polls, scrutinizing demographics and voting histories of states — that all seems obvious now. It wasn’t 17 years ago. [emphasis added]

I will miss FiveThirtyEight. It was always a reliable source of aggregate polling data. It also provided a lot of background information about the potential bias and reliability of individual polls.

R.I.P. FiveThirtyEight March 7, 2008 - March 5, 2025

_________________ Collage sources (before edits, starting in center, then moving top left to right clockwise, ending bottom left): 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07

[See more excerpts from the column under the cut]

In 2010, the New York Times hired Silver and starting hosting FiveThirtyEight on its website. A few years later, ESPN hired him to create a FiveThirtyEight that would cover not only politics but also sports, science and other topics with statisticians and more traditional journalists working in a combined newsroom. The site grew in size and influence. And other news organizations started borrowing its methods, averaging polls and producing statistical models to analyze elections. [...] The site often had political scientists and scholars write pieces. Fact-checking was extensive, adding to the site’s reliability and reputation. But I knew FiveThirtyEight was in trouble when I saw not only stories similar to ours published in the Times and The Washington Post but also those larger organizations poaching our staffers. Another factor that made the website less relevant was Trump. He made politics more about tweets, firings and other drama that the data can’t really capture. [...] But for me, FiveThirtyEight staffers and its devoted fans, the site was about much more than election predictions and even Silver. It was an alternative, higher form of journalism. It was also a lovable community of nerds, wonks and junkies. Our readers were Democratic-leaning, but they weren’t people watching MSNBC just to hear how terrible Republicans are. They wanted us to tell them if a Democratic politician was going to lose. They loved that every article seemed to involve the writer examining election results down to the county level and producing three charts to support their thesis. Silver now has one of the most popular political Substack newsletters; former managing editor Micah Cohen is now politics editor for Apple News; reporter Anna Maria Barry-Jester has moved on to cover public health for ProPublica. But from my vantage point, FiveThirtyEight is everywhere in more subtle ways. The amount of charts and data in stories about politics in particular is much larger than it was two decades ago. The chief political analyst at the New York Times is a data whiz named Nate (Cohn) who joined the paper essentially as Silver’s replacement. If you tell someone about a poll, they will often ask whether other surveys show the same result. There is still too much horse-race coverage. I hate when I see polls of the 2028 Democratic primary. Can we wait a minute? But FiveThirtyEight made that coverage smarter and more rigorous — creating a legacy that will endure.

[cottoncandylesbo]

i love voting in polls but not reblogging them. you'll get the census data but buddy you're fucked if you think im going to turn my blog into a data collection aggregate.

[janmisali]

(inspired by ur 2025 update) are you gonna do a youtube video aggregating some of ur tumblr polls?

(ok obviously not but it might make for a funny shitpost/"i'm not dead" video)

I've said "some things are just posts" before but this is the "some things are just posts" video suggestion

[sgiandubh]

Americans' approval of Trump rose from 7% to 45% after his meeting with the Ukrainian president.

Let's see what the Europeans will do to Ukraine after the support tweets

NATO is nothing without America, This is the reality.

Dear Approval Anon,

I have no idea of your sources - you should be so kind and come back with substantial evidence, since I was not able to find anything remotely related to what you are so gleefully writing.

[Source: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/]

I know the troubles (the 2024 bitter Silver vs. Morris pollster feud comes to mind) Project 538 has been through lately. I am merely using this as a very recent poll aggregator, and it is nowhere near the illogical, tragically idiotic 'Americans' approval of Trump rose from 7% to 45% after his meeting with the Ukrainian president' you so confidently seem to tout.

On which planet would a recently elected POTUS start his mandate with 7% approval rate? You do the math, you answer this - to yourself, because you'd understand I am not really interested by your flimsy justifications.

But let's break it down a bit, shall we, and follow the latest 10 day-trend, for the sake of fine tuning - same source as above:

I see extreme polarization. I see self-cannibalization of polls, depending on their Red/Blue funding. I see a slightly unfocused domestic context, in which emotions are not settled yet - and how could they be, since lack of predictability seems to be in fashion?

I could go on and delve into it. I am not going to. I am just leaving these figures here, as a testimony of your tremendous liberty with facts. By the way, your champion is not doing so badly overall (pretty stable even, at the moment), so you did not need to lie like a 5 year-old. You're not helping him and make a fool of yourself, in the process.

However, allow this European to answer your insinuating assertions. Thank you for the concern, I think we'll be just fine. You are perhaps informed that, along with a long standing Common Foreign and Security Policy, the EU has a fully operative Common Security and Defense Policy. Both are solidly enshrined in our Treaties and both had very tangible results, already.

I doubt you closely followed the results of last Sunday's London summit. On that particular occasion, the EU has been joined by other non-EU, NATO members, such as the UK, Norway and Turkey, along NATO and the EU Commission's Chairpersons. What we will collectively do in order to help Ukraine is exactly what we collectively did during the COVID-19 health crisis: pooling our resources in order to achieve a common goal. Some will perhaps send troops. Others will probably help with their infrastructure. All will pitch in and fund the defensive support mechanisms. It is in the making. It is going forward, like it or not. I will not further speculate.

I also think you are exceedingly naive to think NATO would not survive without America. It might morph, it might limit its geographical scope or redraw its security goals and means of action, or it might very well be replaced by some other alliance of like-minded countries. It happened before. It will happen again. While it would be regrettable, it would not be unheard of, nor fatal. But ask yourself if isolation is the right path for your country, many of us know and deeply love, when faced with a complex counterpart (I hesitate using a stronger vocabulary, given the recent evolutions), such as Russia. How is this going to agree with USA's Manifest Destiny foreign policy doctrine and its long self-perceived exceptionalism is yet another complex issue I do not have the will to further discuss.

I will simply say this: your view is biased by your own, news' consumer focused perception of Time. You think everything will happen right now, as we speak, because your habitual media outlet told you so. I will probably disappoint you, but diplomatic time is running much, much slower than your perception shaped by endless breaking news moments would ever comprehend.

And remember, Anon: your reality might not be my, or hers, or his, or their reality. The world did not start with Columbus. It will not end now, because of a tantrum on a couch.

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

that's funny because this southerner, though he covered some of the very things you mention in the same speech, ALSO said this about what the South was up to

But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew." Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

So it sounds like though this guy, the Vice President of the Confederacy, thought there were many issues at play, but this was the main one.

You know what's interesting too is that you might say, well, he's a politician, this is propaganda, he is misdirecting, but isn't it telling that if he is misdirecting, the misdirection he thinks is most useful to his audience is to say something like this? Doesn't that speak to the values of his society in an ominous way?

And listen, this is not a zero sum game. We can acknowledge this and acknowledge that the North was evil in many ways and war is terrible and so on and so on but though in an academic setting in good faith we can weigh all these competing causes and consider their relative weight, I have to say I have very little patience for this obfuscating what was and had long been recognized as the fundamental dividing line between North and South going back at least to 1787.

[tanoraqui]

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