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[mainiac]

To be fair so was literally everyone else at the time.

Not literally.  Wendell Wilkie for example.

[RedKing]

Hitler was also anti smoking. you can be terrible and still be right about things or be a good person who holds bad beliefs. the things are not mutually exclusive.

True...but who makes the decision whether to regard someone as "good, with bad spots" or "bad, with good spots"?
To put it bluntly, Churchill was a massive douchebag. The only reason that he's remembered as a hero is that he was the wrong guy at the right time.

To be fair so was literally everyone else at the time.

Not literally.  Wendell Wilkie for example.

Even a number of other MPs and ministers were appalled by Churchill's views. This is a guy who publicly stated he wanted to see Gandhi tied up at the front gate to Delhi and trampled to death by an elephant.

[Playergamer]

Hitler was also anti smoking. you can be terrible and still be right about things or be a good person who holds bad beliefs. the things are not mutually exclusive.

True...but who makes the decision whether to regard someone as "good, with bad spots" or "bad, with good spots"?
To put it bluntly, Churchill was a massive douchebag. The only reason that he's remembered as a hero is that he was the wrong guy at the right time.

To be fair so was literally everyone else at the time.

Not literally.  Wendell Wilkie for example.

Even a number of other MPs and ministers were appalled by Churchill's views. This is a guy who publicly stated he wanted to see Gandhi tied up at the front gate to Delhi and trampled to death by an elephant.

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”

“And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

“There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races … A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas…”

-Abraham Lincoln

Imagine if your "wrong person" was Chamberlain. The world would be a helluva lot different.

Plus, Gandhi was a racist ass too, if you don't mind me looking past his deification.

[mainiac]

The comment about everyone being racist back then made me think about a movie my brother showed me a few weeks back:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Chinatown
Which was a very surprising to watch because it was black and white and it not only avoided racist stereotypes but also turned the stereotypes around for comedic effect.  So I looked up the movie on IMDB and it turned out the lead character was played by Keye Luke who near the end of his career playing the mystical old Chinese shop keeper in Gremlins.  So this guy started his career in the late 1930s by being cast in a role that was specifically trying to subvert stereotypes and make people think.  And he finished his career in the 1980s being cast as a stereotype that played off racist tropes.

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”

Lincoln was covering his ass because he was under pressure from the right.  Churchill wasn't.

[RedKing]

To be fair, Lincoln preceded Churchill by about, what...60 years?

As I said, he was the wrong guy (a pusillanimous, stubborn ass who didn't give a fuck about civility and thought everyone and everything was a potential threat) at the right time (a massive war that constituted an existential threat to England). Had he been in any other time period, he would have been considered one of the worst Prime Ministers in British history, if indeed he would have even been electable.

I'm not just talking his racism, I'm talking about the prison camps that he supported using to fight the Boers, the Mau Mau, the Indians, even the Irish. He ruled Brittania with an iron fist. He deliberately refused to send food aid to Bengal in 1943 when a famine struck, and blamed the Indians (who were fighting and dying for the British Empire at that time) for "breeding like rabbits". He saw Communist menaces behind every corner, and argued that the Japanese should be allowed a free hand in Manchuria in the 1930s, because of Stalin and Mao. He praised Mussolini up till 1937. He publicly sided with Franco in the Spanish Civil War, even though Britain remained officially neutral.

If Hitler had gone east first instead of west, I think he'd have had Churchill at his side.

[smjjames]

Uh, Hitler DID go east first, he invaded Poland before he attacked France.

[RedKing]

Uh, Hitler DID go east first, he invaded Poland before he attacked France.

DOH. I honestly can't believe I overlooked that. Anyways, you know what I mean -- attacked the Soviets instead of France and the Low Countries.
And Britain's tepid response to the fall of Poland kinda supports that. Neither France nor Britain were really willing to seriously commit to fighting, as long as Germany focused on the parts of Europe they didn't care about.



EDIT: Anyways, as this is the Ameripol thread and not the "WWII Europe" thread....we finally have new polls out!

The Augusta Chronicle (SC) has a poll out today for the GOP field:

Trump 36.3%
Cruz 19.6%
Rubio 14.6%
Bush 10.9%
Kasich 8.7%
Undecided 5.2%
Carson 4.7%


Now I'm not so sure Carson hangs on until the vote. When you're losing to "Undecided", it's time to hang it up.

[Bauglir]

Undecided is a great man, though. There's no shame in being beaten by the best.

[RedKing]

I've gotta question these crosstabs though. According to their own info, there were only 8 black voters in their sample (which seems legit -- it's SC; finding black Republicans is like looking for Jewish Nazis). But then in the crosstabs, they show Carson with only 3.1% of the black vote, which is mathematically impossible. If only one of the eight chose Carson, he'd have 12.5%.

In fact, all the stats for black voters (and "other", which also had 8 listed) should be simple percentile divisors of 8 (12.5, 25, 37.5, 50, 62.5, 75, 87.5, 100). Instead, they're all over the place, as if it was a much larger sample size.

EDIT: Also, there's a poll I hadn't seen listed before, that I found from 538, that shows Nevada as a virtual tie between Clinton and Sanders.

[smjjames]

Seems like Carson is banking on SC: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/ben-carson-reassessing-campaign-219191  So, he'll probably try to go all the way to SC. Or maybe he'll just stubbornly keep going as long as he has funding.

Also, that poll is only the first one since NH, so, there would need to be a whole bunch more to get a clearer picture.

[mainiac]

I dont know how they arrived at that model but I can speculate.

Suppose you have 8 black republicans.  Suppose 5 of those 8 are males over the age of 55 with annual income over $120k  Suppose your sample includes zero black republican women under the age of 40.

Now you know that black republican women under the age of 40 do exist in South Carolina.  There aren't many of them but they do exist.  So you would try to create a model to predict their views.  You would create a model that estimates the propensity of being a Carson voter from various demographics.  Race, Gender, Age, etc.  And then you would use that model to guess what black republican women under the age of 40 would look like as voters if you could find any.  Then you would use census data and exit polls, which tells you how many black republican women there are, to guess how many will cast votes.

[RedKing]

So they're using weighting based on...fuck if I know, to turn Carson's zero black votes into 3.1%? Because conceivably, some black woman out there might possibly vote for Ben Carson, even if accidentally?

Seems totes legit.

[Frumple]

Hey, it's a politically funded excavation trip to uranus. That counts for something, if unfortunately not nasa funding.

[RedKing]

politically funded excavation trip to uranus

I am so stealing that phrase.

[Egan_BW]

Undecided is a great man, though. There's no shame in being beaten by the best.

Spoiler: relevent XKCD, if you strech a bit (click to show/hide)