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Things to look forward to tomorrow - Breakfast burrito - 50% reduction in scenario planning complexity for us futurists - Grand narratives are back. Dark age! - Can think long-term again - Great Weirding officially over, and into the Permaweird - Anthropocene Whiskey Sour
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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.
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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.
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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 take
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Well already seems clear it won’t be the blowout repudiation of Trumpism that beating Hoover’s 1932 margin of defeat (59-472). So my most favored outcome is already off the table. Dammit this was the one record I wanted Trump to own.
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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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Replying to
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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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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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 position
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A very raw and revealing Politico rant. "TUESDAY WAS AN ABJECT DISASTER for Democrats in Washington. The infighting will be bloody -- as it should be."
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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.
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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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“When people show you who they are believe them the second time” — Maya Angelou 2.0 😆 They’re not stupid, the Democratic mechanism is still the most legitimate one we have. You can’t force liberalism on an illiberal, thinking population. They’ve chosen who they are.
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The one consolation of this democratically revealed social truth is that it confers natural immunity against a left incarnation of Trump walking through the opening created by Bernie+AOC. Stalin-lite will be held at bay by the paranoid fever dreams of the Hitler-lite.
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This means, absent oxymoronic emergence of moderate political charisma (been there, done that with Obama, but a repeat is psychohistorically implausible now) the only counter to extremist charisma trying to woo a fascism-lite-leaning middle from both sides, lies outside politics.
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Commercial break. This segment of the doomscroll 2020 livetweet is brought to you by my frenemies at Politics is not the answer. Start up, cash in, sell out, bro down. And hire me for consulting after you get Product-Market Fit and land a series A.
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In light of recent events, I’m going to recode Obama’s 2 victories as a triumph of appeal of monarchical cult-of-personality charisma over fascism-lite. Obama got coded as “one of the good blacks” Blackish virtue signal so long as no real change to illiberalism called for.
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Both coding voting for Obama as “proof I’m not racist” and coding voting for Trump as “defense against radical left antifa communists” are rationalizations of thinly denied basic dispositions. And you can’t blame disinformation/media bubbles either. This is who the country is.
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If you’re comfortable with this 800lb egregorilla in the room, you’re fine. There are three possible natural reactions for those who are not fine with it: turn institutionalist-statist (impersonal state institutions as the , turn Straussian (noble-lie programmer) or Third Way.
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I believe 2010s have demonstrated 3 truths: - democracy works (screw Thiel) - Straussianism doesn’t work (people aren’t that dumb, you can’t fool all the people all the time, you’re not saintly enough to lie nobly, there are no good emperors) - Industrial institutions are dead
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So your real political choices are: - Accept your new 800lb fascist-lite egregorilla overload - invent better institutions - invent a third way to be elite that’s neither Straussian nor institutionalist - score a mansion; aka secure a tiny personal zone of political agency
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Yeah this is a major faultline. Mercenary in the policy sheets, missionary in the charismatic streets basically.
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Replying to @vgr
There's a big gulf now between actual policies people vote for and who wins elections (e.g. minimum wage + Trump in FL), which tells me that charisma/personality and connecting to an audience is key.
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