“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.
Conversation
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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Yes, even though I’m not feeling this scenario in my gut, it’s now intellectually a clear possibility. The 800lb fascist-lite egregorilla will NOT be happy if the institutionalists buy themselves 4 more years by a razor thin margin that’s vulnerable to doubt-merchanting.
Quote Tweet
Everyone should be making plans to get out, because if Biden squeaks this out the backlash in four years is going to be a legit competent fascist. twitter.com/vgr/status/132…
Replying to
“Competent fascist” means media charmer who will pay lip-service to individualism. Don’t expect a Hitler-like figure. That’s for Germany. The “competent fascist” is a culturally specific archetype that you may not recognize till too late if you’re overindexed on foreign examples.
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A thought on the “popular majority” — the 50-52% of the country that is NOT part of the 800lb fascist-lite egregorilla.
Fortunately it’s not an egregore in its own right. It’s a loose dissensus of a hundred factions united only by their distaste for the 800lb FLE.
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Natural, un-prefixed liberalism, grounded in individual curiosity, openness to experience, exploratory spirit, and divergent thought, does not cohere into egregores well. The part that does is called “classical liberalism” and is indistinguishable from the 800lb FLE at this point
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So even though it *looks* like it has demographic mass to compete, it doesn’t. It lacks the “sticks bound together around an axe” strength of true fascism. 49 sticks bound around an AR-15 trump (heh!) 51 loose sticks. Let’s not pretend it’s all electoral college distortion.
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Back to razor-thin race in MI/WI/PA. I’m now basically at peace with either outcome as democratically legitimate. The difference is in the noise zone. Yes if Trump takes it, he’ll do so gracelessly threatening lawsuits all the way, but he does have the mandate of the 800lb FLE.
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Note that the 800lb FLE will not return the favor. Win or lose, it will basically regard the popular majority as an alien existential threat to the body politic that doesn’t have a right to exist and needs to be disenfranchised one way or the other.
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The purist-fascist core of the 800lb FLE (fascism lite egregorilla, portmanteau of egregore and gorilla for those joining late) will keep trying to lock down the electoral college system and courts, and continue to tighten its grip via vote suppression, gerrymandering etc.
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The more lightly attached shell around that kernel will continue to make excuses for the core, rationalize its posture via appeals to anti-communist scaremongering, downplay the fascism charge etc. None of this is surprising anymore.
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I’d like to edit an anthology of short stories titled “Egregorilla Games: Tales from the global cozyweb underground”
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Scenario planning inside baseball update. We’ve landed on the cusp of complex and chaotic. Everything that Transition Integrity Project war-gamed out will now be tested. Recall that they concluded anything short of a Biden landslide would be fraught. Here we are.
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Cynefin actually models these well
Clear: Biden clear landslide
Complicated: Trump clear landslide
Complex: Biden after crisis
Chaos: Trump after crisis
Disorder (center): Perma-unraveling
Show this thread
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If you haven’t been following this closely btw, the TIP itself (a mundane, nerdy exercise in the sort of wonky workshopping that goes on all the time) got coded as a wild Soros-funded deep state conspiracy to prepare the ground for an anti-Trump coup.
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Upside from this election so far:
1. I invented the word egregorilla and the term 800lb Fascist-Lite Egregorilla (800lb FLE for short)
2. Finally figured out how to use cynefin in a practically useful way. I grok the diff between exaptive constraints and no constraints now.
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I’ll admit now that I’ve used it meaningfully and substantially, I have a good deal more respect for Cynefin than before. Thing is richer than it looks at a casual glance. I was guilty of dismissing it too quickly as a lightweight, overwrought idea before.
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On a personal note I feel like I’ve truly matured a bit in the last 4 years. In 2016 it took me months of Trump-derangement syndrome to come to terms with the election outcome. This time, it took me 5 minutes to become genuinely okay with the remaining possible outcomes.
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And that’s the full range: from a relatively peaceful transition to either candidate or extended strife/chaos. I may face other psyche-management problems this time around, but difficulty accepting the truth-by-democracy isn’t going to be one of them.
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2016 was extra-hard largely due to being an immigrant who had endured 15 years of immigration ooga-booga believing pain was worth it to move to more liberal country. It was hard to accept that at least ideologically it was no more liberal than India, and possibly *less* liberal.
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Maturation is merely conditioning you believe makes you stronger 🤣
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Replying to @vgr
Is that maturity, or simply conditioning?
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Another maturity win: I cleared calendar of critical stuff and plunged fully into doomscroll. Politics is not in my top 5 interests, but I’m too old to pretend my interests are above the gravity pull of big political events. I’m not Elon Musk. I don’t have better things to do.
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One of the reasons I’m not an entrepreneur, despite having many necessary traits, is that I lack the ambition to work on things big enough to hold focus-lock through big news events like this. Good litmus test. If this can’t distract you from mission, you’re a true entrepreneur.
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But this is also the reason I can be a consultant: I’m distractible enough to pay more attention to the environment than I need to, so I can sell surplus situation awareness/orientation to clients who are so focused they pay less attention to the environment than they need to.
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Ah news. CNN just called Wisconsin for Biden and looks like Trump campaign is going to call for a recount. The margin seems to be ~20,000 votes so not surprising.
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Covid update: dead guy elected in North Dakota
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Commercial break sponsored by Boeing. No matter who wins you can count on the military industrial complex to continue building cool shit. And now for a limited time, free Nespresso coffee machine with every F-15EX.
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Our F-15EX has the advanced technologies to take on the missions of today and adapt to meet the missions of tomorrow.
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Aside: the commercial breaks are my favorite part of this livetweet thread.
Trump campaign claims to have filed lawsuit in Michigan to halt counting till it has access to observe.
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Another commercial break. Results in the remaining undecided states are brought to you by Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars
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Look at the detail the NexStar 6SE telescope can take of the planets. Great job, Juan Manuel González (@juan_manuel_gzz)! Who else owns a NexStar 6SE?
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While waiting for real movement, a pseudoevent update: Kanye conceded
I'm told he's a musical genius. I wouldn't know. But everything else about the guy strikes me as tedious and not very bright self-importance and I hope he slinks quietly off this stage
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Low-key sounds like Kanye to me
twitter.com/vgr/status/132…
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Wishful thinking here. It's more than guys declaring themselves cool. When a candidate tries to claim victory it has a small but real effect on trust in the process. To declare victory before all votes are counted is to undermine the future of the process.
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Low-key sounds like Kanye to me
twitter.com/vgr/status/132…
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Ugh. Making the sausage in a democracy can get real ugly. Who the hell are all these people? I thought it would be more orderly "observing" by a few campaign reps from each side. This is a mosh pit. twitter.com/JordanAckerMI/
This Tweet is unavailable.
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Trump campaign now has 3 legal filings going. 2 in PA, 1 in MI, plus a recount request in WI. Legal full-court press. Biden team seems to have burned veterans of 2000 Gore/Florida shitshow working on it, so looks evenly matched.
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