Nov 4, 2020
This Blue Wave Looks Like Low Tide On the Mediterranean
Promises, promises.
One of my favorite dullards bringing down the average of the once august Atlantic wrote as recently as November 3rd, 2020 on election day we should brace ourselves for an impending blue shift. I found myself skeptical, though open to being convinced.
That’s the point of the article, of course. Though it is unclear what convincing me of its veracity is supposed to accomplish. Those votes are cast. Alea iacta est, as a murdered fellow once said. No going back now. We rolled those dice, now we live with the outcome. It remains to be seen if we shall all hang together.
But “blue shift” as a political term is interesting. It conjures images of physics, where objects moving towards one can be classified as having a blue shift via the physicist’s arcane devices of observation. This gives the illusion the individual using the term “blue shift” knows a thing or two about physics. Personally, I know nothing about physics other than the understanding it was taught the same way in the USSR as it was taught in the USA.
This tells me politics has very little to do with physics.
Anecdotally, it also conjures images of how media outlets simply surgically altered Thomas Kuhn’s term paradigm change into paradigm shift. Some noticed, some didn’t. An innocent thing, misquoting a man often enough the misquote takes the day.
But moving away from objective facts and observation, we dive straight into the political realm. Here, where nothing means anything and words are no exception, it means more or less whatever one wishes it to. Recent usage refers to the idea election results will shift based on absentee and mail voting, which I am told have historically been on the Democratic Party’s side. This does explain their hysterically incoherent support of the Postal service, somewhat.
The idea all votes need to be counted is not only entirely valid as an idea but is a necessity for a democratic function to have any legitimacy. But projections regarding what these votes will be is where the validity falls through the bottom of the thing to splash on the hard ground below.
It remains unclear which direction these votes will move the needle. The idea all Republicans vote in person or all Democrats vote via mail is not quite right. Political behaviors don’t cluster that tightly. The Atlantic piece leaves me in suspense, since the only ammunition offered for the idea this blue shift will occur is the idea it is a nightmare scenario for the Trump campaign.
I don’t disagree it is, I just disagree something is necessarily real simply because people I don’t like would find it nightmarish.
It could occur, sure. But I don’t know penning an article of 1500 words on the subject is a great use of one’s time for anything but idle speculation destined for the dust bin. Or some dweeb writing a Medium article in two years about how wrong they got it. Something tells me if this prediction, of which the author makes absolutely clear is their opinion of the future, proves to be incorrect it won’t affect his bottom line one bit, though.
We don’t punish people who are wrong anymore. We promote them.
Our journalists have enjoyed around four years of consequence free impunity. Once viewed as relatively sagacious, literary folks, they have basically been shitting on our couches and telling us to set them on fire. Their predictions have been wrong, with some exceptions who are of course ridiculed as cranks, over and over again.
And yet, so long as they scream about social issues, their utter inability to grasp political issues at large is excused it seems. Pollsters, like 538, continue to update projections every day until the election, one assumes to encourage traffic to their sites. If one were in finance, where there are real consequences to getting a forecast wrong, one would have had to buy back their bid every single day and quickly go bust.
But for some people, there is nothing odd about a company that runs on and offers a service of forecasts and projections so regularly getting it wrong. Whether tomorrow or six months from now. We are just supposed to trust that they’re wicked smart, yo. Even when reality reveals they’re just confused nerds who constantly have to walk back their projections when reality comes knocking.
I just want someone to get a decent grasp on the American political system. These dudes don’t seem to have one, judging from their misjudgments.
The Blue Wave destined to sweep across statehouses and legislatures, sweeping away the Senate and dominating the House have not yet appeared. If they do not, then it is particularly obvious these forecasters are incompetent. Egypt would actually kill prophets and soothsayers whose predictions didn’t come to pass. I don’t advocate that, it seems a bit extreme. But one should shop elsewhere for them, all the same.
The whole thing reminds me of the time I spent in Italy, oddly enough. Concrete promises in our wonderfully naive press of a blue wave, whether in 2018 or 2020, conjure memories of sitting on the banks of the Mediterranean, wondering when the tide was going to go out.
The tide never goes out on the Mediterranean, there’s nowhere for it to go. At best, it drops an inch or two, not something one can really perceive. But perhaps that’s where the physicist’s device comes in handy again. One needs it to measure the difference between high and low tide. It just doesn’t seem particularly useful in politics.
The worst about this for me is I honestly wouldn’t mind a blue wave, or a blue shift, or whatever else political propagandists are interested in calling it. I’ve arranged the environment around me so I profit in either outcome. I profit more should one occur over the other, but I win either way. Besides, a blue victory would shut my Seattle neighbors up. They’ve become less and less tolerable lately, what with stroking their brand new guns and all, looking hungrily eastward towards Idaho.
It’s just interesting to me people would continue to trust journalists and pollsters after so many examples of them having missed the mark.
PS: I never reacted in any way to Trump’s mentions of a “red wave” with anything but amusement and am also astonished anyone takes his statements literally or seriously at all.
