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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s tempting to cast Reagan as B-grade celeb POTUS like Trump but don’t forget he was a serious politician who was CA governor.
I can respect that path. Kanye though has too much A-grade celeb hubris to go up a real learning curve, and like Trump, is uninterested in doing so.
My top 3 criteria for a politician:
- Has at least my level of integrity
- Willing to learn the work of governance
- Is not an aesthete
Note that Trump is an aesthete too, like Kanye. It’s just that his aesthetic is Central Asian Dictator Golden Toilet chic.
This is why I’m flipping the bozobit on the political process and going ancap. These 3 traits are going to be election-loser traits for the foreseeable future.
Note: merely having a strong aesthetic is not the same as being as aesthete.
Being an aesthete means your primary world view is an aesthetic one. You want to see/create beauty on your terms.
It’s the essence of authoritarian charisma.
Integrity + strong aesthetic is needed for broad charismatic appeals to flip the fickle ones else you have Carter like puritanism which does not lead to viable candidacy
What polling needs is neither Bayesian nor Fisherian pure paradigms but something that adds an anthropological narrative front end to the modeling. Stuff like “shy trump voter” needs to be teased out early and weighted right. Preference falsification rates need to be modeled.
Turned on TV. CNN appears to have decided this is kinda over except for the lawsuits, and is now in reflective mood. Anderson Cooper is now talking to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin about lessons learned.
CNN played Biden’s afternoon statement. A sort of pre-victory pre-speech. Very presidential and soothing/calming in a 2015 sense that seems almost retro now, but he doesn’t seem zombie-like. The confidence-boost of winning so far and outperforming Hillary at least shows.
Did not expect Georgia to be in play this long. It’s 50-48% for Trump right now. But Biden’s getting 70% of the late vote count from the suburbs right now. He needs 67% of the 180k left to be counted to win.
An exact 270 via AZ+NV would kinda be appropriate and an accurate mandate, but yes as an unabashed partisan, much as I dislike the electoral college, I’d like a cushion for a deeper defense of the legal drama.
The mix of urban+mail-in has created Jurassic World ending level drama. Joe Biden (played by T-Rex) is in overmatched standoff with Trump (played by Indominus). Will chaotic-neutral energy of electoral system (played by Mossasurus) rear up from water at last minute to eat Trump?