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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.
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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
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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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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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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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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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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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One of them is a supreme court filing to basically take over from the PA supreme court... procedural crap but the eleventh-hour Barrett confirmation will make a difference here.
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Just because I’ve made my peace with all outcomes btw doesn’t mean I think they’re the same. If Florida endgame has gone differently in 2000, we might have been way ahead on climate action and possibly avoided Iraq war. 9/11, Katrina, and GFC would likely still have happened.
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One reason I’m livetweeting this election is I want to have an appropriately emotion-charged strong personal memory of it. Which is possible thanks to Twitter. If this is a big historical fork, I want to remember it well.
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Axios argues that win or lose the strong performance means Trump will retain control of the GOP and perhaps tease a rerun in 2024 if he loses. Well, the battered wife is choosing to stay in abusive marriage. No surprise there.
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Possibly future: Biden wins but never finds his feet. Trump runs and wins again in 2024 at age 78 and rules a full 2 terms. Kanye win in 2032 and rules till 2040. And in the meantime millennial and zoomer social media celebs fight for 2040+ as planet cooks. This is not a blip.
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We’re in an indefinite future of the amateurization of politics. Career politicians with at least a bit of a nerdy interest in governance and policy (even Nixon) are giving way to Idiocracy parade. Get used to it. There’s no “normal” in the future. Just a churning of the weird.
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Reminds me of the state of Tamil Nadu in India which elected a string of assclown filmstars to office for decades. I have nothing against actors turning to politics btw so long as they take it seriously as a different skill/job, not just another role to play.
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I think Kanye would be an even bigger disaster than Trump since he’s smarter, more successful, and more messianically sure of himself. Like a nuttier black Reagan. Kim Kardashian as Nancy kinda fits the picture too.
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Well CNN appears to be calling Michigan for Biden. We appear close to electing the Defendent in the legal battle that will drown out Covid news and discipline for weeks, probably leading to a solid third wave death count.
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