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If it’s Trump, dark age If it’s Biden, dark age served cold
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Thought for the week: “If it's chicken, chicken a la king. If it's fish, fish a la king. If it's turkey, fish a la king.” — Bender, on Iron Chef
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“Whoever wins” is a fun twitter search right now. Everybody is hedging expectations and trying to be antifragile 🤣
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An extremely new disease, Arizona Derangement Syndrome, ADS has taken hold. It’ll be done in a few days... unless it turns into Florida.
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Premature calls are really dangerous because you get loss aversion shock when it doesn’t actually work out. Last night AZ looked like it was so safe, Fox called it for Biden (in despair? Bracing for a shock?). Now it looks like the expected flip might be flipped. Flip-flop state.
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Commercial break: This portion of the livetweet brought to you by the Grand Canyon. Enjoy the greatest canyon in the world just hours from maricopa county where the fate of empires hangs in the balance an outbreak of Arizona Derangement Syndrome is underway.
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Replying to
CNN explains the AZ mystery: late mail/drop off in AZ is skewing republican because they’ve been doing it for longer etc. Unlike everywhere else where it’s tending strongly for Biden.
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Update soon it looks like. They might have to pause the count till tomorrow because open carry trumpies demonstrating for trump are creating a security situation in the parking lot making a shift change hard or something 🙄
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Okay looks like nothing more will move tonight. GA and AZ will both take overnight at least. GA just narrowed a bit more in favor of Biden. This is like watching Cthulhu colored* paint dry. I’m going to call it a night soon. * greenish grey
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CNN is doing a weird analysis where they’re acting like Biden has more of a chance because there’s more combinatorial pathways for him. This is ridiculous. You have to weight that pathways by likelihood. 3 unlikely stories for not represent 3x likelihood as 1 good story.
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I think I’ll wake up to AZ and GA being called for Trump by a whisker and NV going from safe to dicey for Biden like AZ did today, and it coming down to PA and a courtroom battle. 😬
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Maricopa is continuing the count despite the nazgul buzzing them
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Staff at the @maricopacounty Elections Department will continue our job, which is to administer elections in the second largest voting jurisdiction in the county. We will release results again tonight as planned. We thank the @mcsoaz for doing their job, so we can do ours.
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Calling it a night. Now for another chapter of The Hydrogen Sonata. First Trump term I read all of Pratchett. If he wins again I’m reading all of Iain M. Banks. If Biden wins I’ll have to get back to work since a slim shot at a non-sucky future will be briefly back in play.
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Good morning. I see nothing has changed. The universe is still expanding, entropy is still increasing, Trump still hates Edmond Dantes, and the race has narrowed everywhere. I guess the ooga booga will continue until morale improves.
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The market isn’t doing anything particularly interesting or intelligent that I can see. It’s such a delightfully mediocre superintelligence. Doesn’t even harbor a basilisk.
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Haven’t really been following senate or house either, but that’s doing what I thought it would. I had some hope of a more decisive rejection of Trump but never believed in a blue wave for congress, and am not sure I even was in favor of it. The party hasn’t earned it.
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So looks like a divided Congress by a very slim margin in both houses. Aka gridlock for a president who will be a lame duck on day 1. Which would suit either of them fine. Biden won’t try to be bold with a narrow mandate, Trump has no big ideas now that the courts are secured.
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Big picture: Monarch (emperor = potus): weaker First estate (clergy = media): weaker Second estate (nobility = congress): weaker Third estate (“commoners” = stock/home-owning wealthy): stronger Fourth estate (social media): stronger Fifth estate (under-the-API workers): weaker
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Commercial break: This part of the tweetstorm is sponsored by Sirius Cybernetics. In the grimdark future there will only be robots with Real People Personalities™ to look forward to.
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Thought: there are elections that change everything (1980, 2016) and ordinary elections that convince you nothing can ever change. There are false positives (2008, 2020) that you think will change everything but reinforce nothing-will-change-itis. And false negatives (1964?)
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In the US, only presidential elections seem to have global equilibrium shifting powers. Congress is important mainly for optimizing locally within a new region of attraction set by a narrative shifting president and locking in gains.
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Ok, must save lessons learned for later. Back to meditating on the hive-mind present-moment stream. Nothing continues to furiously happen in AZ, GA, NV, PA. I don’t think NC and AK are meaningfully in the decision matrix.
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Hot take: Contra take that Trump will stick around as a power center even if he loses, because he fueled a red wave to shape congress races... no. He’s done the job the party needed to shift the equilibrium and is too much chaos to keep around. He’ll be kicked to the curb.
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They’ll find some face-saving sidelined role for him and a different way to keep the activated new base engaged and enraged. He was the booster rocket. They’re in orbit now. He’s no longer needed and a serious liability for the exercise of actual political power.
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Again I’m not sure. His past TV appeal was based on camp. The audience was mostly laughing at him, not admiring him as he thought. His POTUS rhetorical style was based on whining and evasion and posturing which does not translate well to even Sean Hannity style commentary.
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Replying to @vgr
If he loses, he takes over OANN or Newsmax and immediately dethrones Fox as the leading cable news network.
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He likes to be the center of attention, not comment from the sidelines or merely own the media empire from the back room like Murdoch. Also note that a lot of his charisma is derived from being in office. It’s not clear to me his base will see him the same out of it.
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When people go out on top on their own terms, like star athletes who retire at the right time, many doors are open. I think people are underestimating the effects of even a narrow loss all around. He’ll milk the “unfair theft” shtick for a while but it’s not a career.
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I’m not writing him off. He’s more of a live player at 73 than I am at 47. Runs on pure bile which seems to act as an astonishing elixir of life for him. He’ll find some way to matter. It just won’t be the 2 obvious possibilities of offstage kingmaker in politics or media.
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True. The birther thing was a major kayfabe win. I’d expect something along those lines. Producer and booster of conspiracy theories. Maybe even documentaries like Al Gore.
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Replying to @vgr
His whole schtick previously was tweeting about Obama though. He can resume that with a much larger audience (cult) than he had
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If he wins with PA, it will be vindication of the value of technically correct and statsistically conservative strategy in a game with a long history. He bet on the boring play of rebuilding the Blue Wall that Trump breached in 2016. No fancy narrative. Just do the math right.
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