#prognostication

[thefugitivesaint]

Ellan Raskin (1928-1984), ''Probability - The Science of Chance'' by Arthur G. Razzell, 1967

[thegoodmorningman]

What's cooler than cool? Six More Weeks of Winter!!!

[unsolicited-opinions]

how long do you give it for the Free Palestine movement, as it stands right now, to self-implode?

I'm not going to make predictions about the Western "Free Palestine" movement, but I'll try to put it in some context.

How Long Until the Western "Free Palestine" Movement Implodes?

Pattern Recognition: Comrades Eat Comrades

Western leftist movements are uniquely good at destroying themselves from within. I don't mean in a vague "movements always change" kind of way. I mean they start off energized, decentralized, idealistic…and then flame out in spectacular fashion after turning on their own organizers for being insufficiently pure.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) collapsed in the 1970s when it split into warring factions…some of whom literally became terrorists.

Occupy Wall Street No hierarchy, no demands, no outcomes. Just a long, slow descent into incoherence as activists argued over process, language, identity, and whose trauma deserved the most microphone time.

The problem wasn't the cause.

It was the belief that moral clarity must always mean moral absolutism. Absolutism inevitably leads to internal purges. The only real suspense is how fast it happens. Ideological rigidity eventually leads to doom.

Say what you want about the political far right (and I do because they suck), but they do understand how to rally behind a single message and follow a demagogue without asking whether he centers each of their specific sub-groups and sub-interests.

We saw in the 2024 election how many leftist purists were willing to help sabotage an imperfect candidate generally aligned with their values...and help elect Trump.

Why? Because the candidate who agreed with 65%-70% of their positions was more offensive to them than someone who has openly expressed admiration for Hitler. (How's that been working out for you, leftist purists?) These parts of the far left have their heads firmly up their own pure asses. They can’t/won't see the forest for the trees.

They subvert the goals they claim to care about because they're too busy performing their purity and moral absolutism for each other and clout instead of trying to effect changes to policy.

An Aesthetic of Resistance

The Western "Free Palestine" movement, especially since October 7th, has exploded in scale and visibility.

While some people are genuinely driven by concern for Palestinian civilians, a whole lot of others are clearly in it for the aesthetic, the vibes, the social belonging, or the drama.

It's a chance to cosplay 1968 without reading anything published before 2010.

What the Western "Free Palestine" movement offers isn't a roadmap to peace, justice, or statehood. It offers an identity. It's a moral fashion statement. You wear the scarf, you learn the slogans, you change your bio, and…congratulations! You're part of something Righteous and you didn't have to sacrifice or even learn anything!

An aesthetic of resistance, however, is not a strategy. It doesn't change policy. It doesn't build power. It doesn't endure.

Worse, it doesn't tolerate any nuance. In a coalition built on branding, anyone who doesn't fit the brand becomes a threat.

It can't permit any introspection or growth, so while might grow in size, extremism, or tactics, it's intellectually sterile, and that can make it ineffective and/or brittle.

Pattern Recognition: Factions and Purges

Leftist movements which base their legitimacy on moral purity almost always eventually turn inward.

First they identify the oppressor, then then identify the collaborators, then they start purging anyone insufficiently zealous. Eventually, everyone's a collaborator.

That’s already happening.

Mainstream ceasefire activists have been smeared as traitors by more radical circles for not calling explicitly for the abolition of Israel. Members of groups like JVP or IfNotNow (who for years were considered the "edgy" left flank) are now sometimes labeled as gatekeepers, liberals, or even crypto-Zionists for refusing to call October 7 a legitimate form of resistance…and JVP and INN keep shifting with the overton window of their movement to greater degrees of extremism.

Arab and Palestinian organizers who speak about nonviolence, coexistence, or long-term political strategy are being pushed out of leadership roles and branded as traitors...by white cultural Christians who know far less about the matter than they do. If they suggest anything other than total victory for Hamas and the destruction of Israel "by any means necessary," they're branded a sellout or a Westernized Zionist. The movement increasingly rewards people who sound revolutionary...not people who organize effectively.

Jewish allies to their movement, even the extremely anti-Zionist ones, are walking on eggshells. Support is conditional. They're expected to show up, shut up, and definitely not talk about antisemitism unless they want to be accused of derailing and supporting genocide. The number of Jews who've been publicly smeared or privately frozen out by movements they supported is growing fast, and most of them aren't saying anything. They just walk away. I don't know what their numbers are, but I've spoken with a handful like this. In each case, it was the privately unrestrained antisemitism which broke the spell and helped them realize what was happening.

Internal discourse policing is relentless. Want to talk about the complexity of Hamas's role in Palestinian suffering? You're platforming Zionist narratives. Want to discuss how sexual violence on October 7 has been minimized? That's "white feminism." Want to clarify that Jewish self-determination doesn’t inherently mean colonialism? You've committed the cardinal sin of nuance and must be purged.

None of this is new. It’s the same bullshit which took down SDS, tore apart the anti-Iraq war movement, and gutted Occupy from the inside. When your movement decides internal deviation is a bigger threat than external opposition, it stops building anything and just chases ideological purity.

Social Media May Accelerate the Cannibalism

In the past, movements have sometimes eaten themselves slowly. SDS took years. The anti-globalization movement unraveled over the better part of a decade. 

That was all before social media. Now what used to take five years can happen in five weeks.

Every far left movement now has an online wing and an IRL wing. The online wing is where purity spirals metastasize because virality rewards outrage, not organization.

Calling someone a colonial apologist gets more engagement than helping to register voters.

But Engagement ≠ Change.

So what does that mean for the Free Palestine movement? It might just undergo a slow, chaotic unraveling. Callouts, splintering, people walking away in frustration or disgust because they're too tired of it to say much about it as they just…stop showing up.

"Free Palestine" means..?

One of the biggest warning signs here is that no one consistently agrees on what the endgame is. We know that to Hamas it means the end of Israel, but it's much more vague for many "Free Palestine" activists. It can mean:

End the occupation of the West Bank!

Ceasefire!

One-state solution!

Two-state solution!

Third intifada, globalized!

Dismantle the state of Israel!

Ask 10 of them, get 12 answers. In normal movements, that's no big deal, because people are allowed to disagree. In this movement, though, disagreement is treated like betrayal.

If you say you support a two-state solution, you're a filthy Zionist.

If you mention Hamas's role in civilian suffering, you're a genocide denier.

If you're Jewish and support Palestinian rights (that describes most Jews), you'd better not talk about antisemitism lest you be accused of centering yourself, weaponizing antisemitism/trauma, and supporting genocide.

And if you try to discuss actual policy? That's imperialist behavior!

This isn't just ideological incoherence, it's a refusal to tolerate difference...which can make organizing unsustainable.

So will it implode soon?

I very much doubt it.

Will it unravel soon? 

Almost certainly not. The slogans, at the very least, will stick around and the hashtags aren't going anywhere because they've become identity signifiers.

A lot of the disinformation fed to Gen Z has been sticky and I'm concerned what the US will be like when they reach the peak of their political power.

There will always be a core of people pushing for Palestinian liberation (whatever that means to them), and some of them will have good intentions and/or good strategy. Some of today's antizionist zealots will eventually come around and start hearing Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.

The count of antizionist social media accounts and posts will continue to be high - much higher than the number of actual belly buttons in the movement IRL, due to bots and agents controlled by those seeking to destabilize the West. Those probably won't go away any time soon and are likely to get much more sophisticated, effective, and difficult to screen out...because AI.

But as a mass movement? As a unifying force with real impact on politics? Something which puts people on streets in huge numbers? I'm less sure about that. From here, it looks like it's already fraying around the edges. The internal fights, the factionalism, the paranoia about bad-faith actors, the purity tests, the bizarre rituals of performance...that looks to me like the start of a collapse by attrition.

What if it just hangs out in the ideological natural reservoir of academia?

It's already been absorbed into academic discourse and nonprofit branding, right? It may just live there in a natural reservoir while continuing to do nothing material to improve Palestinian lives.

I'm not sure if/how it can be dislodged from academia. I can't support Trump's methods, but the absence of ideological diversity is both alarming and predictable.

From graduate admissions to peer-reviewed publishing, career advancement in the humanities often depends not on the originality or rigor of an argument, but on how well it aligns with prevailing orthodoxies. Scholars are trained to cite the right theorists, frame questions within accepted ideological paradigms, and signal moral allegiance to dominant narratives, particularly around identity, power, and oppression.

You pass your dissertation defense if your committee LIKES YOUR VIEWS. If your dissertation shows excellent scholarship which disputes their preferred narrative, you've wasted years and tens of thousands of dollars...and there are already more degreed scholars than faculty positions in these disciplines. So they're highly motivated to conform.

So dissent is pathologized instead of being debated. The result isn’t a community seeking truth, but a faculty enforcing consensus. Challenging the orthodoxy ends friendships and careers.

That's how you end up with an entire Middle Eastern Studies department which only knows and only teaches one narrative. It's not just a political problem, it's an intellectual ans social problem.

(On a personal level, this makes me very sad. When I was an undergrad in the 90s, I learned so much from the disagreements between professors I respected. I also admired the civility and intellectual honesty they offered each other.)

So...it seems like academia is going to be an ideological natural reservoir for the movement until that's addressed somehow without resorting to fascist tactics.

Maybe it'll splinter out into competing groups with varying flavors and intensities of dogmatism.

There are groups and individuals within the movement who think Amnesty International is a Zionist PSYOP.

There are self-styled anarchists and communists who want violence. They want chaos. When these people chant "by any means necessary," I have no problem believing they're willing to resort to domestic political violence to globalize the intifada.

Maybe some violent factions will splinter off like the Weather Underground splintered from SDS.

The revolutionary left has been recycling these dynamics for over a century.

The rhetoric tends to be more lasting than the movements which use it, because movements built on purity or aesthetics rarely build lasting institutions or effect meaningful positive change.

The Party Dynamics

Forget "Free Palestine" for a moment and look at the bigger picture.

It may be hard to believe right now because the Free Palestine people are so loud, but most Congressional Democrats continue to support Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Party leadership has repeatedly affirmed this position, and recent bipartisan resolutions backing Israel's legitimacy passed overwhelmingly, with only a small group of "progressive" dissenters. While a vocal minority on the far left calls for conditions on aid and proposes condemnations of Israel, they don't represent today's Democratic party. Voting records, public statements, and primary outcomes all show that the Democratic caucus remains broadly pro-Israel, even as internal debates have grown louder.

But:

Since Clinton, Democrats have largely hugged the center, while polarization on the Right exploded...culminating in the MAGA takeover of the GOP.

Now the Left has its own hardliners, people whose politics are less democratic and more dogmatic. That's the very vocal minority. That's AOC/Tlaib/Omar.

...and they're driving moderates away from their party.

Trump didn’t surge in 2024 because Americans suddenly loved him. A lot of voters were running from a Democratic Party they see as increasingly dysfunctional and in which the loudest voices are often the most extreme.

The Democratic party's base keeps pulling left, but the candidates the "progressive" wing would nominate for a general election wouldn't do well.

AOC polls better than you might expect and may be beloved in Brooklyn or Berkeley, but she's still deep underwater nationally. If Kamala Harris was successfully cast as "too far left," AOC would be radioactive anywhere but the coasts. AOC may well take Schumer's senate seat in New York, but in a national election she'd likely crash and burn.

The far left isn't going to win the White House or a congressional majority any time soon because it alienates allies and energizes opponents...but a takeover of the Democratic party seems possible. Maybe not likely, but possible.

If you think that's silly, please note that nobody thought Trump would hijack the GOP and remake it in his image so quickly...until he did.

If you oppose the rising political power of the antizionist movement, get involved in Democratic party politics and help move them in more practical, policy-focused directions.

Final answer?

I'm less concerned about how/when the Free Palestine movement will end than I am about how many good people will be hurt by it before it does.

[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

[tamburnbindery]

Sketching out a border for quote illumination. Today we'll be contemplating the orb.

[abelmvada]

Prognostication

[jhsharman]

"Oh, Yes, I Am the Great Predictor"

I am working out the spatial relations with this one, as too I guess the staff member in charge of filling in the indicia copy. The aquarium is apart from the tv, even though within the story –

– they are together. Also we have a longer cabinet now and more scattered magazines on it, but those were already within the story.

Oh, and earlier there was a story where Jughead knocked a bout of esp out of Archie by striking him with a baseball bat. This revision proceeds in all reprints, even as that story is no longer printed along with this one. They probably should just revert.:

[corvidsofthedeep]

No Context Crow #325: Prognosticating Crow

By Cori Lee Marvin.