The last time we checked in on Nate Silver, the top-flight baseball analyst turned bottom-feeding partisan shill (appropriate for a guy who started out in politics as a Daily Kos diarist) was launching a crusade against Strategic Vision so lacking in integrity or even basic mathematical sense that it left many of us wondering whose payroll he’s on.
The sad part is, though, that his analysis is so bad, it would honestly surprise me if anyone were actually paying for this. Take this attempted broadside from Sunday. It’s full of so much bad math and so little critical thinking that I lack the time tonight to address it all. Here are the highlights, though.
The first objective claim he makes about the Strategic Vision poll in question, after his rambling anecdotal sideshow, is that the results are underdispersed. This claim is entirely unsupported in the most literal sense, in that he neither demonstrates what kind of distribution the data should have followed, nor does he show that the actual variance of the data contradicts that predicted distribution. The technical term for this is ‘hand waving,’ however when our professor waves his hands we at least can check the textbook for confirmation. Silver’s just making this up as he goes along, though.
From there we get some more anecdotal rambling, in which a Democrat politican’s words are recorded with the same kind of blind, unquestioning support that a Hitler Youth would have recorded Der Führer’s own speeches. After all that, we get what is supposed to be a smoking gun: A different poll with different results.
However it’s not surprising that Cannaday’s poll has different results. It is conducted with a different pool of students (high school seniors in his district, not students from all high school grades all across the state). The samples were not random (special education students were picked out, according to Silver). The survey environment was different (students were questioned in a school environment with authority figures present, rather than asked at home by strangers over a telephone).
No amount of special pleading can make the two surveys comparable, especially given the menacing glares of teachers ensuring the students try on the tests, and the teachers themselves under political pressure from a state officeholder.
And again, Nate Silver knows this. Different methodologies testing different pools, with samples drawn using different methods, will produce different results. He chooses to disregard this in order to shill for his Democrat superiors.
I sure hope he’s getting paid, because his integrity was surely worth at least a combo meal at Carl’s Jr, with large fries.
The Democrat coalition may be fracturing more visibly along abortion lines in the Obamacare debate, but that’s not the only popcorn-friendly battle going on right now. ‘Minority’ groups are going after Net Neutrality now, and nobody is sparing the ‘race card.’
The leaders of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, National Organization of Black Elected Legislative Women, The National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials, and the National Association of Black County Officials wrote a letter to David Honig of the Broadband Opportunity Coalition praising the group for its position against Net Neutrality. The BOC is a group focused on getting high-quality Internet access available to more Americans, and the BOC has not lined up in favor of the Google-Obama Net Neutrality scam. That is why the above groups support of the BOC, because the plan will harm the very expansion of Internet capacity and deployment that the group was formed to promote.
So naturally, pro-Net Neutrality groups came out and gave reasoned responses… no sorry, I don’t know what came over me. That’s not what happened at all. These Democrat-dominated groups were accused of being bought shills for telecommuncations firms!
Ready the popcorn. These ‘black’ groups have called that a racist accusation. Apparently it is racist and ‘paternalistic’ to say that they are incapable of having opinions of their own, but are merely puppets of some corporate masters. I suppose the telecommuncations firms are ‘white’ in Democrat-speak. But regardless, Multichannel News describes some good fun for us on the right to watch:
Some fans of network neutrality countered that the groups were under the influence of cable and telco operators, leading to some heated exchanges, calls for apologies, and charges of racism and paternalism.
“In publicly attacking several of the nation’s leading civil rights organizations, one organization recently published a statement that minorities – blacks, Hispanics and even Asians’ are supporting points of view that hurt the people they claim to represent. Other organizations have regularly peddled these and other offensive claims to the news media and public via Web posting,” wrote the officials.
They branded the attackers digital elites who wanted high-speed broadband for their personal enjoyment. “Many feel that these organizations are pushing a regulatory perspective that would regressively shift the costs of bandwidth onto middle- and low-income consumers,” they said. “We urge you to ignore the destructive racial rhetoric peddled by elite digital organizations…”
The ‘black’ groups got two things right, though: First, it is the Internet firms that are rich and powerful here, not the telecommuncations firms. Second, the technologists pushing the Obama-Google Single Payer Internet plans really do want their intensive, high-bandwidth, low-latency Internet use subsidized by everyone else, including the urban poor.
Opposing Net Neutrality is the bipartisan, mainstream position. The only people who support it are big Internet firms, freeloaders downloading movies and video games from the Pirate Bay, and socialists who want to nationalize the Internet.
Listen to Carly Fiorina yourself, if you don’t believe my repeated posts describing how wrong a candidate she is for this party at this moment of conservative mobilization. Is this the time to nominate a candidate who wants to sign a globowarmo treaty with China? Who wants to withhold water from California farmers? Who can say, without gagging, the words “Regulation can play a very important role in bringing about change?” Who blames under regulation for the financial crisis?
Don’t take me at my word. Listen to her. Does she sound like someone who will take this country somewhere different from where Barbara Boxer wants to take us?