I was in two minds about whether to live tweet this but now I’m really glad I did. I’ll have the best technically possible prosthetic memory possible. And maybe I’ll be able to port it to the pensieve whenever iOS releases it.
Conversation
The raw nature of a livetweet thread makes it suitable for playback. I think once I compile and blog this (which I plan to) I’ll be able to relive this by reviewing. Those of you followed along live and know me well enough may be able to use it the same way.
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Jake Tapper: we’re pretty sure where this is going not just because Biden’s ahead in all 4 states but because with one exception Trump’s promised legal challenges are frivolous or even preposterous (rough quote)
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They’re now talking about how Trump is mad his legal team (Giuliani, Bondi) isn’t “effective” and demanding more effective “killer” lawyers.
Tapper wonders out loud whether Trump has considered that that’s because there’s no real case, not because his lawyers suck.
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The one non-frivolous case I think Tapper is referring to is the Pennsylvania vote segregation procedural thing which apparently is a rounding error in terms of votes affected. Alito just sorta threw them a bone in that.
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GOP legal eagle Ben Ginsberg came on and made the point that a real all-star legal team cane out to bat for GWB in 2000 (including current scotus justices Kavanaugh and Barrett apparently) but nobody is coming out to bat for Trump. Ben says it’s because there’s no there there.
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Dana Bash points out that tTrump’s legal team is not just second rate but that a lot of good GOP lawyers like Ben himself simply dislike Trump and don’t want to fight for him anyway. Interesting if true. How much do you have to suck to not get even lawyers to take your money?
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Ah so electoral college vote is match play but popular vote is stroke play. twitter.com/muskjames/stat
This Tweet is unavailable.
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This damp squib legal full-court press is possibly the farce to 2000’s Florida tragedy.
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This is now a golf thread. The best part of this story is the name of Trump’s opponent: Ted Virtue.
Cannot make this shit up.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @kellydigges and @vgr
This is my favorite Trump golf story. independent.co.uk/news/world/ame
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Replying to
The geographic segregation of voting patterns is utterly remarkable. What is it about cities that makes people reliably Democrat past a critical size/density? And to what extent is coastal blueness explained by greater urbanization (almost entirely I suspect)
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Waiting for Bidenot to come out an speak. In the meantime,...
Commercial break: this portion of the live tweet is brought to you by Covid19, the world’s favorite pandemic.
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Bidenot speaketh! He seems tired.
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He’s basically giving the victory speech and Covid and stuff without explicitly claiming victory.
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Aaaand update from the White House is that Mark Meadows has Covid 🙄
This is a damn telenovella. Expect a long-lost twin to appear and someone to get amnesia
125k cases today. Fatalities are under some control due to better treatment knowledge but a surge will still kill night.
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CNN speculating that the campaign war room might have been a superspreader event
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Screenshot for the highlights reel: TV screen showing simultaneous Covid and election data, with Covid data helpfully coded red-scale. The Trump virus.
Biden said cases could cross 200k/day in the next surge. Hold on to your ventilators. Winter’s gonna be rough.
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Okay calling it a night. I’m guessing the networks will call it sometime tomorrow and Biden will do an actual victory speech and Trump will tweet “see you in court.” I’ll be able to end this interminable counting-for-Godot thread. We will then start a transition hell thread.
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Back to the hydrogen sonata. What are the Gzlit really up to?
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Day for of Counting for Godot. The news headlines are Cauchy converging on a Biden victory projection via Zeno’s paradox. Wish I’d taken screenshots.
CNN is currently on “Biden nears victory.”
Fox is on “America (still) waits.”
NYT is on “Biden edges closer to victory.”
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* Day four
Trumps Twitter feed right now is a flood of RTs of sketchy allegations of ballot fraud, plus a bunch of flagged tweets. He really thinks there’s a way out via some loophole. I suspect he’s applying intuitions from tax or real estate law which have way more loopholes.
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Strikes me there are two kinds of games:
1. games designed by idealists to make cheating hard
2. games designed by self-dealing elites to make cheating easy
He’s used to type 2 and elections are type 1. It takes a lot long-term more work (eg gerrymandering) to cheat in type 1
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Thing about electoral processes is that it’s not hard to cheat but it’s very hard to hide that you’re cheating. You have to resort to something blatant that people will spot to have a sufficiently big effect.
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I suspect all the minor attack surfaces from Florida 2000 (hanging chads era) have been closed off but there’s probably a bunch of new ones. But at best there’d be opportunistic/reactive room to cheat at the margins. Florida worked because it was one state and a ~500 vote margin.
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Trump’s got a fairly common personality trait (assuming everyone is cheating if you can’t see what they’re doing), coupled with an uncommon one (using that as justification to cheat wildly yourself). I know tons of people with the first trait, but very few with the second.
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Most suspicious types merely end up as angry, depressed cynics, not as cheats themselves. It’s heartening that the median person in a reasonably prosperous society is in fact NOT a cheat. The average cheating level is raised to cynicism inducing levels by fat tail of big cheats.
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Having hair-trigger cheater-detection brain wiring is not surprising. All apes probably have that hard-wired. Recall behavioral economics results that biases often disappear when a problem is framed in cheater-detection terms. In scarcity-shaped ape societies, cheating is endemic
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But in a more prosperous society, runaway cheater-detection cognitions turns into an autoimmune disease because it triggers reactionary cheating as in Trump. And since everybody is NOT cheating and the exceptions are NOT worth policing, they enjoy huge success.
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And so they conclude all huge successes are from cheating, like their own. The zero-sum mercantilist mindset is so deep-rooted they literally can’t see the most common way to be a huge success in low-scarcity environments, which is actually doing something non-zero-sum.
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Putting a pin in this topic for potential future analysis. I lost interest in this stuff 10 years ago, but it’s gotten important enough again, if I can get interested again I’ll think it through.
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Okay CNN has called it.
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Though the front page still shows a *new* counting-for-godot headline. You have to click through to see the call.
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The NYT is reporting that AP and TV networks have called it 🙄
News that other news outlets are now sure there will be news. How much more meta can this get?
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All but Fox have called it
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This is a very smol and cute availability cascade
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Santorum is putting up a rather sad defense on CNN. It’s like speaker-for-the-dead. Bunch of disingenuous rationalizations but they’re humoring him.
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Fox calls it too. Trump is now the loneliest man on the planet. I imagine even Rudy is looking for a good moment to slink away.
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Obama must be the happiest guy on the planet now. This is *deep* redemption that his veep was the one to end what was effectively an “undo-Obama” 4-year-run of pure resentment.
Undo/redo. Makes me think hard right will be auto-saving their own revert point here. Dueling forks.
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Fox coverage now is Bret Baier and Chris Wallace, the known reasonable moderates Trump is known to hate. They read out a WH press release verbatim but are otherwise firmly reinforcing that this is a solid call.
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Screenshot for the memory book
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