This is the danger the “make a scene” party fails to see. I’m meh on “civility,” but decorum/seemliness is good true north. It includes displays of shame and contrition, rituals of seeking/granting forgiveness etc. That’s what preserves default theoretical human at max definitionhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1351734706883072001 …
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Some people suspected the constant presence of the late Beau Biden in the narrative was more than a little staged. But there has been a core of sincere emotion there. The sense of this inauguration also being the first public mourning for 400k dead from Covid also feels real.
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I need to write something more careful about this “forgiveness” layer of the institutional OS. I wrote a version around block chains as a forgiveness technology a while back, but need to write something more general.https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/05/25/blockchains-never-forget/ …
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Stuff like this Arlington ceremony... they just didn’t seem meaningful when Trump did them. He seemed puzzled like a blind person at a silent movie. At some level he didn’t seem to get why people were doing somber ceremonies. I suspect he thought funerals are just extreme PC.
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There’s a sense of narrative claustrophobia being lifted. There’s a lot more room in the grand narrative for a spectrum of narratives that don’t need to all cohere. This pluralism is ironically what the trumpist narrative monoculture demonized as a monolith. Pure projection.
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It’s not that their story wasn’t being heard. They seemed to think it was the only one that had a right to be heard. When you’re used to a narrative monopoly, pluralism feels like censorship.
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Jeez he’s walking the last block jogging over to barriers to shake hands. The instinct for humanizing optics on display here is the polar opposite of trump’s instinct for imperial grandiosity. I can’t recall how Trump did it, but I would guess limo to the footsteps.
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Which is ironic, since Biden represents continuation of an imperial mode of US government but looks like Amtrak Joe, while Trump ran the show like a petty small town council but acted like an emperor
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Kamala Harris family is very Modern Family. They just need to add a gay couple in there to look like a nightmare to Hallmark channel.
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General thought: trad administrations are highly scaled systems with a necessary and meaningful distinction between backend and frontend. There is a minimum necessary theatricality to the front-end. It’s a UX metaphor. This reads as “fakeness” to libertarian-scale imaginations.
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Trump may have slapped his name on skyscrapers but fundamentally didn’t get scale and backends. He managed like a small wealth-management family office. His base wanted small-scale wysiwyg dynamics. National budgets managed like small family budgets etc. All UX, no backend.
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End of conversation
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