Republicans have been cheating uneducated working people for years by foisting off ridiculously distorted alternate realities. These moronic dupes have been swaggering and boasting about how smart they are for 28 years as they gave their duplicitous leaders carte blanche to steal all the money and drive the country to ruin. With only 19 days left in the idiot hegemony, you have one last chance to get back at these cretins. Take their money!
If you read my post Monday (I've got your margin of error right here!), you know it's all about probability. The true likelihood that Obama will be the next President is not the same as the projected split in the popular vote or even the electoral vote. I told you where to look to find different kinds of probabilistic predictions of the election. I made a perfunctory comparison of InTrade's futures market for event outcomes with FiveThirtyEight's heavyweight Monte Carlo methodology to show that different predictive techniques can differ in their assessments of what the odds are, but that they support each other in raising confidence that when a candidate is well ahead in the polls, it means he's really ahead, and that he's more likely to win. The only question that remains before making a wager is exactly what that likelihood is.
If nothing else, I wanted to put the lie to the absurd notion of the "statistical dead heat". When I heard that term on Republican-leaning news media, I went ballistic. I started jumping up and down, screaming about right-wing sycophants pandering to the illegitimate, power-mad usurpers who have ruined this country. I had to do something to put things right. I doubt if I've made any real difference, but I feel a whole lot better, and that's what a diary is all about. The comments showed me that people can "get" ideas that are out of their normal comfort zone as long the premise is framed in terms that they can relate to.
OK. Enough of this dancing around. It's time to put these ideas to use! We're going to take sucker bets from delusional Republican dead-enders and seize their money along with their power. I said this in the previous post, but the comments conveyed the notion that I was joking. I am not.
I've already got a sucker bet down resulting from a discussion of Monday's post with someone I was telling about it barely an hour after I posted it. No kidding. I explained the whole premise of the overwhelming probability of an Obama win to a gun-toting, survivalist crank I know, and he still made a $100, even-money bet with me. I didn't propose the wager, thinking that his making such a foolish bet would be unlikely after hearing my reasoning. He astounded me by telling me that he had bet against Obama with someone else for a $100, at even money, in January, and that he would take more action of the same sort if offered!
My breath stopped and my heart began to pound at the prospect of such easy pickings. As I deftly extracted the C-note I carry in my wallet for such serendipitous exigencies, I coolly posited, "Well, my friend Ben Franklin here says you're full of shit." Sucker bets, especially those where the sucker knows he is at a disadvantage, can be more easily made by exhibiting a little petulance.
Suckers are always full of bravado. Those who prey on the suckers are machine-like in their calculating sang froid. Emotion is anathema to serious gambling; it can only assist your competitor. The bet was on, and still at even money despite the preceding discussion of probability. As most math-avoiders do, my friend stopped listening when I started talking numbers and thereby discounted my premise. His ears perked up only when I challenged his manhood by taunting him with money. He wasn't betting with his brain, but his penis.
There is one caveat about this bet. My adversary explained that he was only asserting that Obama would not take the oath of office on the appointed day in January next year. He offered to let me rescind my wager after I heard his reasoning. It seems that he is convinced that Obama will win the election if it is held, but that Bush will most likely declare marshal law and suspend the election to remain in power as long as possible. Barring that abomination, he envisions a coup of some sort or the assassination of the President-elect. If any scenario plays out other than Obama's being sworn in on schedule, he wins. Bush's overthrowing the Constitution, McCain's rigging the vote in enough states to win, another Supreme Court hijacking as in 2000 and even Joe Biden's being sworn in instead of the martyred Barack all amount to the same thing. I lose.
His apocalyptic world view makes him think that the nation as a whole is as crazy as he is. He's ready to board up the windows and retreat to his bunker with guns, ammunition, food and water while angry mobs of disenfranchised people of color run rampant through his upper-middle class suburb. This purely emotional reaction colors his every thought. He's so afraid of democracy that he thinks it will bring chaos.
I was a bit taken aback by these hysterical predictions, but I kept my nerve. The bet stands. I didn't go into detail about my premise that even if we don't dismiss his fears of a power grab and civil unrest, it's still a lot more likely that Obama will be sworn in than that he will not. Hence, an even-money bet against Obama is still a sucker bet. His fears gave me pause, but I'm not living in terror as he is. I'm keeping my eye on the ball, and as Dr. King said, on the prize. And, I'm placing as many bets as I can on Obama at better odds than my research indicates reflects the situation. This beats the hell out of playing craps with loaded dice (the other guy's) on a blanket on the barracks floor in 1970.
Lest we forget what this thread is about, let's have another poll to assess the level of acumen about the probability of events actually occurring. On Monday, I was appalled to see that less than 90% of you are willing to put wishful thinking aside, or just be serious, and say what you really think is going to happen in this election. Please, please, please! Tell me what you think is really going to happen! Be serious for once, you effete corps of impudent snobs. (Young people: What Republican came up with that epithet? Whom was he deriding?)
I can't stress this enough. For God's sake, get your head out of your ass and let go of the notion that Ron Paul, Ralph Nader or Mickey Mouse can be elected President of the United States this year or any year. It's not going to happen. Show me that you are thinking seriously. There are a lot of crazy options listed. Do you think any of these things will happen? Gimme a break! You're breaking my balls here!
One more thing today. I'm not from anywhere on the east coast. I was born in New Mexico, grew up and was educated in California, and have lived in Washington (the state, not the city in the District of Columbia, you east-coast twerps) for more than two decades. If I've become a doily-sniffing, quiche-eating salon liberal, I've still got a little of the grit one gets from living in a federal housing project as a boy and serving as an enlisted man in the military in time of war.