Implications - Climate action is now purely up to businesses - Avocado politics is the future. Wherever you see the phrase “climate refugee” read “climate war” - 100% of political agency for liberalism will come from control of tech. Like guild navigators. Spice!
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The long arc story for the last 20 years has been urban vs rural. Every passing year, city-state future looks more real.
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Underlines why Covid is so huge. In one sense it explodes the geopolitical foundation of urban political power. OTOH thatvoower itself is demographic not location-based. it is unclear what it will mean if the urban world floods out into the hinterland like a dam bursting.
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Biden’s randomly making a statement. Sounds confident and doughty. Rallying the troops saying he feels on track to win this.pic.twitter.com/lkPu6Udh8a
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Weirdly hypernormal. This is unfolding similarly to every election night I’ve stayed up tracking since 2000. Yet feels completely different.
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Since this is a livetweet of the election I must capture this inevitable inflammatory tweet. Now *this* is different from every other election.pic.twitter.com/Q9HLFDycCu
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Arizona is possibly going to make it off my crap list. I’ve enjoyed all my visits to the state and it’s certainly good for astronomy.
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So looks like in Michigan and Pennsylvania the disproportionate early voting by democrats might cause a sharp shift in a few hours. They’re currently lagging on counting those. So double blue latency: cities and mail-in. Question is if it will be enough.
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Van Jones on CNN just made basically the same point I did a few hours ago, so I guess this is now a basic normie takehttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1323814941040635904?s=21 …
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But just in case you think nothing is different: storefronts all over big cities are boarded up and prepared for riots, several friends have left the country, and others are prepping go bags. Belief it’s not the same is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Naive to pretend all is normal.
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There’s serious mechanism-complexity related uncertainty but still looks like Trump has more combinatorial pathways than Biden despite Arizona flip.
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Remember in 2016 Trump won 304 electoral votes. That’s 34 votes Biden has to reclaim from somewhere. Looks like 11 in the bag so far, 23 more to go. Residual structural bias favors Biden (cities/mail-in) but Trump has more scenarios.
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Both pre-election polling and exit polling are psycho-WMDs. Produces months of pseudoevent news.
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CNN tldrs state of play succinctly: Down to: PA, WI, MI. Whoever wins 2/3 wins.
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Le sigh this is getting close enough, I’m thinking it might end up in the courts like in 2000 even without shenanigans. The Florida recount took a month to sort out and this will be much uglier.
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Commercial break. Check out the
@yak_collective for all your dark age consulting needs.pic.twitter.com/22MwIAimmZShow this thread -
Another big difference: highest turnout in a century. Likely around 65% which would be the highest since 1908. So even if the map and outcome remain the same as 2016, it’s not the same. It’s more of the same. By about 5% more turnouthttps://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/03/historic-united-states-voter-turnout-2020-election-behind-other-democracies-global/ …
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Alright I think I’ll turn in soon. I think I’ll be waking up to the following scenarios in order of likelihood: - Legal wrangle in PA - Trump win - Biden win - Cthulhucene
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Ok: actual last tweet for the night. Trump is on droning about play by play in states. I’ll catch up tomorrow if he lobbed any grenades. Looks like prop 22 might pass in CA Now to read a chapter of Iain M. Banks’ Hydrogen Sonata before shuteye.
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Ok no real movement huh. Glad I went to bed. Time for coffee and burrito. Here on out it will be intermittent updates only in response to actual movement.
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Glad Prop 22 passed. The gig economy is too important to be run by regressive CA labor politics. I distrust big corporation less on this. If a 7/8 supermajority clause and corporate moneybags are required to defend against stuff like AB5, so be it.
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Also glad the Dems kinda got an ass-kicking outside of the undecided potus race. The party machine on senate/house was way too smug and self-satisfied assuming a strong positionhttps://twitter.com/auerbachkeller/status/1324004355629031425?s=21 …
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I had a single issue of interest: getting Trump out. That’s still up in the air. Everything else though, yeah... necessary institutional reform. Florida should be a sharp warning for people supporting a far left push. It’s bad ideology and losing political strategy in the US.
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When an institution is this sclerotic only charismatic power can renew it. Unfortunately of the two people with any charisma, one is an old caricature leftie out of Seinfeld and the other is a young firebrand leftie blinded by moral self-certainty riding a thirst-trap premium.
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I do appreciate the decade-long spotlight Bernie and AOC have maintained on the powder-keg issue of inequality but ceding broad political-moral authority to them while trying to maintain structural integrity under moderate leadership is a one-time, sharply time-limited option.
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If Biden wins, they’ve got 4 years to find a better equilibrium. If he loses, it’s game over now. Tactical skill at navigating the peculiarities of US politics can substitute for a vacuum of ideas only for so long. Either moderates come up with real ideas now, or the D’s splinter
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AOC is to the
#Occupy descended left as Ted Cruz is to tea party politics. The interesting diff is that the tea party created an opening for a kind of populist hijacking by Trump. I don’t see that happening on the left. The US just doesn’t like true left populism.Show this thread -
To her credit, much as I dislike her politics, AOC seems to have higher integrity relative to Cruz, but more idealistic fervor. Absent Trumpist entryism, Cruz could legit have won 2016. But I somehow think AOC can’t ride her twitch-stream to the WH without going more moderate.
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Even without the results, the fact that it’s this close in the middle of a disastrous pandemic and with such an extreme cartoon villain as incumbent means the Great American People have spoken and showed who they are on average: mildly alt-lite fascism-curious crypto monarchists.
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I am dismayed by that basic revealed preference of course, but it is what it is, and a democratic truth. Even Biden’s likely popular vote margin (win or lose) won’t repudiate it. The US has always been a fascism-lite country but is now open about it. Glad that’s been cleared up.
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I do still believe in democracy despite funhouse mirror distortions of electoral politics. So if this is the honest reflection of what the US is as a country, I can live with it so long as it stays lite/mild, and the ideological margins I prefer can be kept secure in urban cores.
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