Generational Dynamics World View

[pbrower2a]

(06-14-2021, 10:09 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(06-13-2021, 05:01 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 13-Jun-2021 World View: Committing Treason

It was the Democrats who "committed treason" by claiming for four years that Trump's victory was illegitimate.  It was the Democrats who lied to the Fisa court.  It was Democrats who perpetrated the Russia hoax.  It was the Democrats who perpetrated the Ukraine hoax.  It was the Democrats who flooded the country with 80 million blank ballots and hacked Dominion voting machines, and used them to rig the 2020 election.  And it's the Democrats who have engineered a Stalinist censorship regime with no purpose except to censor conservative voices, including 75 million hated Trump voters.

My God John.  Get some other sources, if this is what you actually believe.  Going down your list:

• No one thinks 2016 was illegitimate, just incredibly stupid.  
  
• The FISA, not Fisa, court issue is what exactly?  Pleadings are Top Secret by law, so what you think you know is worthless.  
  
• The supposed hoaxes are well documented.  That they were demagogued makes that no less true.
  
• And please, get help on the phony ballots and rigged voting machine issue which is firmly in far-distant la-la-land.  There is not only no evidence to support it, there is vast evidence to oppose it -- surprising given it's hard to prove a negative.
  
• And last but not least, how are conservative voices being censored when entire news organizations exist to do nothing but blast-out even the most bizarre conservative rantings?
  

You might think about stepping away from all this for a while and getting a life.

I concur with this. I live in Michigan, and I have cause to believe that someone hacked the Democrats' voter-outreach program and had us contacting Republicans to get out their vote. We cannot determine who did it. The Michigan Democratic party did change things so that although political allies such as unions and ethnic-advocacy groups can use our data, they cannot alter our. That beat-the-cheat practice helped us in 2018. COVID-19 stopped our usual outreach in 2020. 2022? It's back to normal. 

I have a simple explanation of the difference between 2016 and 2020. All that really changed between 2016 and 2020 was a generational replacement in the electorate due to death and debility. We know that voters over 55 are the bulk of people who leave the electorate due to death. 

As an illustration, here is how COVID-19 kills based upon age:



Respiratory infections that children slough off with ease are much more dangerous to older people. Respiratory infections are often the stab-in-the-back killer for people already weakened by diabetes, HIV/AIDS, cancer, strokes, congestive heart disease, mental deterioration, and organ failure. Pneumonia is a common killer on death certificates. My experience has been that every respiratory bug out there has hit me harder every time, and if I don't die of some sudden trauma I can predict that my death certificate will have 'pneumonia' on it among other causes.

In my case I know the causes of death of my parents and grandparents. I'm not quite sure of what killed my maternal grandmother, but she had cancer at one time... otherwise I know. 

paternal grandfather, age 86 -- congestive heart failure, had colon cancer. 
paternal grandmother, age 67 -- complications of diabetes that set in in childhood. 
paternal grandfather, 82 -- uremic poisoning. He had gout, and so do I. 
maternal grandmother, 82 -- I will need to check the public record at the county seat. 
father, 84 -- capillary damage related perhaps to late-onset diabetes. He enjoyed his beer and ice cream and did not give them up early enough.
mother, 83 -- Parkinsonism. 

My father and grandfather both had early stages of colon cancer, so I get colon screens. I will soon be on some antidepressants that preclude alcohol (I still have three "greenies" to go and a bottle of wine, and I chose those for sentimental reasons as my last drinks; my brother makes mead as a hobby and I might want a sample of it). I found ice cream rather easy to give up. 

So much for the personal.  


Now let's look at overall death rates. 


 

Death rates rise from adolescence, but they remain low and nearly static from about 20 to 40. Then they rise, and the curve rises rapidly starting around 50. Before age 40, the vast majority of deaths are sudden deaths from trauma. After age 40, bad habits start killing people. The peak age for death for men seems to be about 87, and for women about 91. After those ages, death rates continue to rise, but the number of people still around to die of any causes whatsoever falls rapidly. 

Voting age is 18 to... whatever, but it is obvious enough that although new voters are typically under 50, voters are departing from the electorate in increasing numbers from then. If voters over 55 predictably die off and are about 5% more R than D (this is true for the Silent, Boomers, and early-wave X) and voters under 40 are about 20% more D than R, then this alone suggests about a 1.6% shift from 2016 to 2020 from R to D. 

It is easy to see 2020 as a freakish year in political life in America due to COVID-19, and the effects of COVID-19 upon the vote are unclear. But note well: there was much less electioneering of the traditional press-the-flesh type. The Trump campaign was more willing to take chances with mass rallies, but states generally accommodated the reality of COVID-19 by ensuring that people could vote more easily by absentee ballot or by mail. 

Democrats would like to believe that they won in 2020 because Donald Trump was a failure as President, but the close election suggests that voting totals indicate that demographics made the difference between 2016 and 2020. 

A shift of 1.6% of the vote from R to D would have been enough to swing Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin from Trump victories to Trump losses, and such would have been enough to make Joe Biden President. A crude use of this stat would have suggested that Florida would go against him... but Trump actually gained in Florida with respect to the national average. The shift in votes happened elsewhere, and he lost Arizona, Georgia, and NE-02 instead, so that is practically a wash.  

It's all demographics, and that is what happens when the COVID-19 plague reduces the election to demographics while people do not really change their minds. The minds available for deciding how to vote were somewhat different in 2020 from what they were in 2016. That was the slight, sibtle difference. 

Yes, David, conservative ideas are not getting censored under the Biden Administration, although people involved in the Putsch of January 6 can expect legal consequences including convictions, jail terms, fines, probation, and the loss of the right to vote. Oh, yes -- they are on the no-fly list for having committed an act of political violence, so that might mess up some careers that require one to fly. I guess that means that they aren't going to get to visit Alaska or Hawaii.  Any groups that coordinated the Putsch night be subjected to RICO prosecutions whose results I cannot yet predict. That will have little effect upon the electorate as it involves few people. Proud Boys? They just landed on the Canadian list of groups banned for terrorism along with such charming people as al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, ISIS/Daeth, Tamil Tigers, Shining Path, and Aum Shinrikyo. So if you want to travel between Michigan and New England or upstate New York, you can no longer take the shortcut through southern Ontario or take a side trip to Toronto. You are stuck with Toledo, Cleveland, and Erie instead.  

Some people still want an abortion ban, few restrictions on guns and ammunition, young-earth creationism as the sole explanation of prehistory, prohibitions of same-sex and interracial marriage, and a return to the economic ways of the Gilded Age or at least its last hurrah of the 1920's. Such people skew old, and one demographic reality can ruin any entity that relies upon an elderly clientele not a captive audience due to age: the aging of its clientele into the "good night" about which the poet Dylan Thomas warned us. 

Then again, people don't listen to the music of Lawrence Welk as they used to.