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.
Conversation
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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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.
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“Attuned to aesthetics” is one of my strongest negative indicators for political office. I really, really don’t trust the judgment of strong aesthetes
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Kanye also more aligned with future trends given he's black, neuroatypical and highly attuned to aesthetics. twitter.com/vgr/status/132…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Replying to @vgr
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
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Fox News has also called Michigan for Biden which is reassuring. They’re not doubt-merchanting this.
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Nate Silver and the Fusheruans are still in doghouse as far as I’m concerned. Polling needs serious reform. There’s far too much preference falsification. The “shy” trump voters turned out to be real after all. Props to Trafalgar even if Trump loses politico.com/amp/news/magaz
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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.
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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.
Replying to
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.
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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.
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North Carolina not so much. Likely to stay red.
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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.
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Winning without PA is key I think, since it seems the most vulnerable to frivolous legal challenges succeeding.
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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?
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Commercial break.
Этот сегмент живого твита спонсируется Владимиром Путиным.
Пейте больше водки!
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This is very niche but I don’t care.
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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?
Show this thread
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Goddamn Pennsylvania
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The electoral college creates an interesting faux-discretization of a single scenario into many. Remember we’re now navigating a variety of scenarios and futures all within cone of Biden winning popular vote, which I think is already certain. It’s like aliasing pixelation.
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An odd shtick nobody else could pull of with a straight face is Trump trying to halt counting where it would favor him and drive it to resolution where he’s behind. He really has no sense of the spirit of a competition.
Atlanta commissioner doing a presser on scanner process.
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Quite a process this dude is describing.
- invalidated ballots are tossed (missing/mismatched signature)
- open, flatten feed ballot through scanner twice
- if computer flags an uncertainty, human review panel infers voter intent to count
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Gotta say these people are heroes in the same sense as firefighters, healthcare workers. It’s thankless, low-paid, low-glamour frustrating work with a lot of angry people waiting to yell at you no matter what. This is why I believe in democracy. We invest thankless labor into it.
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Things tend to be valuable in proportion to the amount of thankless grinding labor it takes to make them work. In a way this would be an argument against online voting. The labor is a feature.
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Blockchain people get this and don’t get this. This is literal proof of work. If you designed an online version you should design in an expensive counting process. Elections *should* be costly to run.
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If Trump loses, there will be a clear test of the popular remote diagnosis that he is a narcissistic psycho with no soul.
If he grows a beard to process, he has a soul.
If he doesn’t, he doesn’t.
I don’t make the rules. The beard test is bipartisan and global.
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Replying to @vgr
You can't shame someone who doesn't have a conscience. They should teach the basics of sociopathy and malignant narcissism in high school so fewer people fail to recognize the signs.
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Litigiousness goes with trumpcore aesthetic like PB&J. Though US as a whole has a rep for litigiousness, it is not a randomly distributed trait. I think it’s a Jacksonian-America trait. The language points to a subculture:
“So sue me”
“See you in court”
“It’s perfectly legal”
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Perhaps the clearest example of it is sovereign citizen conspiracy theories, ideas that income tax is illegal, etc. My theory is that these are self-soothing tales of agency poor white males began telling themselves in the 1830s after getting a taste of power under Jackson.
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You grasp at legalistic notions of agency when you’re admitted into society under the letter of the law but not the spirit. When you’re granted frustrating access to the nominal power but denied access to the inner rings. Trump has that same feeling at a fractally higher level.
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Basically, starting in 1830s a *national* class emerged in the US whose identity was built around suing richer whites and punching down at still-disenfranchised blacks and browns. A superset of poor-white post-civil war southerner.
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In case you’re not familiar with this line of argument it’s the one Walter Russell Mead has been developing for decades
pmachala.people.amherst.edu/Current%20Poli
hudson.org/research/13258
hudson.org/research/13010
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Sling down no doomscroll tv 😩
Also gotta reread this thing
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Before Sling crashed, token Republican on CNN was arguing that the biggest outcome is rejection of far left. I kinda agree. If it had been Bernie on the ballot with AOC cheerleading, Trump would likely have won in a landslide. This is a major bourgeoisie warning shot across bows.
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While I’m sympathetic to some far-left policy priorities, Bernieverse vastly underestimates how much bourgeois middle values stability, even if short of law-and-order dogwhistles.
This is the 800lb fascist-lite egregorilla++ we’re talking about. It includes Biden’s core.
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Even in countries that are not paranoid about communism, it takes a lot of oppression of a lot more people over a long time to truly activate a far-left movement. I grew up near the Maoist Naxalite belt in India. The cartoon antifa Fox agonizes about is a cute joke by comparison.
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CNN back up, yay! Doomscroll tv continues.
GIF
read image description
ALT
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Wow, Trump’s lead in GA narrowed from 370k last night midnight to ~30k now.
95% reporting. This is gonna be really close.
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Several people have brought up minimum wage as proof of far left policy support.
No it’s support for more money for yourself when you make very little.
I can’t think of a litmus test policy that would reliably gauge sympathy level for real socialism. Which I think is really low
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Don’t agree with this, but linking it in to think about more in my later lessons learned analysis
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Replying to @ArchivesBoy and @vgr
The left right spectrum isn’t the issue. People jump all over for the right candidate. Messaging is the problem.
Run a candidate that rejects establishment dems, supports a minimum standard of living, and acknowledges problems with big gov—they’ll do fine.
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This too. Don’t agree but interesting to think about. I think imagination *is* among the concerns to cater to. People vote for an overall emergent story, not a spectrum-auction bundle of policies.
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Replying to @Stephen_Corwin @ArchivesBoy and @vgr
Also, cater to people concerns, not their imaginations.
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