“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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“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.pic.twitter.com/HZePAv0Sna
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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
@nils_gilman 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.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1323030163802660864 …
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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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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 Dakotahttps://www.cnn.com/2020/11/04/politics/north-dakota-candidate-died-covid-wins-election-trnd/index.html …
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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.https://twitter.com/BoeingDefense/status/1323321728378957824 …
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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.https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/election-results-and-news-11-04-20/h_114cb9154af91ea8436b34d2a11a61ba …
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Another commercial break. Results in the remaining undecided states are brought to you by Jupiter, Saturn, and Marshttps://twitter.com/Celestron/status/1324079467678060547 …
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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 stagehttps://twitter.com/platformpapi/status/1324083288361717760 …
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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.https://twitter.com/platformpapi/status/1324083288361717760 …
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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.https://twitter.com/JordanAckerMI/status/1324072809283420160 …
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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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