siiiiigh. Silver’s analysis showed Trump as more competitive than literally any other pundit not actively working for Mr. Trump. He was wrong, but he was a hell of a lot less wrong than basically everybody else.

When Silver gives Clinton a 71% chance of winning, what he means is that he ran 1000 simulations through his model and about 710 of those simulations resulted in a Clinton victory. But that also means 290 simulations resulted in a Clinton loss, which isn’t trivial. For reference, the probability of flipping a coin…

It’s especially fucking galling given that a whole bunch of writers on this network of sites repeatedly trashed Silver for predicting anything less than a Clinton blowout. Here’s Magary on this blog about six weeks ago:

Yeah. Silver was one of the only non-Right Wing voices saying that Trump had a chance in the final months of the election and these assholes still shit on him.

Came here to write the same thing. Silver harped endlessly in the run-up to the election that Clinton was spending too much time in states that were out of reach and not paying enough attention to the Midwest. The day of the election, he said that there were three equally likely possibilities: Clinton in a blowout,…

A ton! If the write up had focused on the Republican primary, it would have been close to accurate. Nate Silver was way off about Trump’s chances in the Republican primary. His problem there was he ignored the numbers and tried to play pundit. But in the general election, he did fine.

Silver takes the blame because he’s the mascot of the super-scientific secret-sauce predictions crowd, but him and the Upshot guys and the Princeton Election Consortium nerds and everyone else who convinced us the Democrats had this one in the bag all have to look in their mirrors every night for the rest of their…

He sprung to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew, like the down of a thistle:
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight‍—‌

Yes it is Jill Stein and her voters’ fault and not ALL YOUR RACIST, SCARED NEIGHBORS VOTING FOR DONALD

This is the Sistine Chapel of performative wokeness.

pretty huge oversight

Force Awakens was fine. It really was. John Boyega ruled, Daisy Ridley ruled, Oscar Isaac wasn’t in it enough but he was good in the parts he was in, Kylo Ren was weird and intimidating, seeing Han and Chewy and Leia again ruled, it had good lightsaber shit and good X-wing shit and good Millennium Falcon shit and it…

Kind of disappointed the article didn’t just read, “Don’t.”

Ultimately, we are the ones who decide what we will demand from the people we put into power. Which is why we will always get what we deserve.

One of my favorite responses to the absurdity of the situation: Now Is Not the Time to Criticize the Galaxy Note 7

It made a lot more sense once I read this:

Hey, there’s hardly any chance to respond perfectly in a constantly evolving situation. Barack Obama has long since acknowledged underestimating the threat of ISIS.

I am now 101% positive, without a single shadow of doubt, that Trump is filling his cabinet with people merely to troll not only the opposition, but the very people he’s hiring.

Never forget that Rick Perry knowingly executed an innocent man to win political capital during a reelection campaign.