Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
>the possibility that Trump will be President again

It's a nonzero probability, but incalculably remote, in my judgment.


Yes, certainly, if he were returned to office, it would be EOL for
consensual self government. But as daunting a prospect as that is,
my assessment is that there's no shot longer.

This is not 2016, and we need to get over our PTSD about it. It was
indeed a severe trauma, but I have no confidence in dire predictions
that it might be repeated. 

I'm a hope fiend, and Simon Rosenberg is my dealer. He's one of a
handful of analysts who called the last three general elections in
defiance of the conventional wisdom, the polls, and the consensus
media. I encourage the anxious (the media replays of J6 amplify the
brainstem's default response to perceived threats) to consult his
wisdom; it is sage. 

That doesn't mean the MAGA minions won't stage a full stack nutty
when he loses (by three touchdowns or more in the popular), and we
certainly should brace ourselves for an orgy of stochastic
vandalism. But the union will stand.
  

    

Trump is the America-sized version of oligarchic ethnonationalism
generally.  They're not going away; they ate all the actual
"conservatism" in the world and they have replaced it.  If Trump
died of old age tomorrow, the American right won't recover their
senses and suddenly search for Dwight Eisenhower.  They're gonna
continue to take their cues from Viktor Orban.
  

    

They're a cultural movement financed by oligarchs.  I'm surprised
that ethnonationals in power don't govern better, actually.  In
Turin, all the grand culture heroes are ethnonationals.  They're
armed insurrectionist zealots who are like, "Make Italy great again,
we're all really, intensely Italian, we must lace on our Roman
helmets and die for the fatherland!" while the reaction of the
general Italian population, who were ruled by the Austrians and Pope
and so forth, was "What the hell are you dangerous cranks even
talking about?  Italy's just a peninsula, it's not even a country!"

But due to their patriotic nationalism, and also their resentment of
the foreigners, they united Italy, and Italy became a nation.  They
somehow governed themselves, and though the "Greatness" never quite
arrived,  things genuinely improved, sort of.  Except in the South
of Italy, but nothing ever improves in the south of Italy.
  

    
The British escaped disgusting cosmopolitan-globalization and they
took-back-control, and they went  straight into decline.  They're a
corrupt backwater.  Nobody admires them, they're not considered the
Mother of Parliaments any more, they're not planetary trendsetters,
as they once were  Their soft-power went away;   British pop music
bands are irrelevant, there's no British cinema, British fashions, 
architecture, literature, those all used to be super-interesting to
watch.  Now that level of vitality is too much to ask from them.   

I don't want to pick on the fine people of Alabama, but it's like
going to Huntsville, Birmingham and Montgomery and demanding that
they should out-do Paris, Berlin and Dubai.  That's unfair to them
in their abiding Alabama-ness.  They chose that existential
condition, the British.  They still choose it.  They're stubbornly
patriotic about it.  They know that it's not the way-forward now,
but they're trying to see-it-through.  

And maybe they will.  There were other historical periods where the
British were very inward-looking and nobody else cared much about
them.  They're in one of those periods now.  It's not novel or
peculiar.  It's long-lasting, it's how modern life is for them.
  

    
I'd like to be more interested in the British, and I do try, because
I was quite the Anglophile during much of my lifespan,  but they're
just too boring.  They've been Brexiting ever since 2013.  That's
not any kind of dazzling polycrisis, they're gonna be Brexiting all
year this year, too. It'll be more slow-motion politcal-and-econmic
train crash, trending downward toward, I dunno, oligarch-privatized
rusty bus-crash.  The same general thing, over and over, only
they're feebler about it and it feels worse.  

It's tedious even to talk about it.  One feels the vague urge to
apologize for even bringing them up as a subject for discussion.
  

    
In the USA, apparently half the citizens want a fascist dictatorship
with a lunatic ex-game show host as dictator. The other half want to
keep "democracy," whatever that might mean to them. Not that it's
ever really been a democracy, with decisions by informed consensus
of all the citizens. 

Democracy doesn't scale very well, most people aren't that
well-informed, and most don't want to participate all that much. But
they're good with voting to elect set of political actors to mediate
their will. They like to have freedom within reason, and the whole
country leans progressive in its thinking - but a minority of
so-called "conservatives" heavily game the system to take power
where they can, and they're pulling many of the levers at the
moment. 

They're just interested in having power, they're not going to do
anything interesting with it. They don't commit much time to the act
of governing. They like to spend time snarking on social media and
grifting their constituents.
  

    
If the far-right manipulators do manage to take full control of the
country, or most of it, government will decline, the country will
fall into disarray, the money will continue to flow into the coffers
of oligarchs and, having little money left to spend, ordinary
citizens will struggle to put bread on the table. Many will die,
spending their last moments watching "Love Island," "Bachelor in
Paradise," and "Top Chef" - their flat screens will be the last of
their possessions, their only source of warmth.

The flow of money into a middle class that was the backbone of a
vibrant economy will be stilled, the economy will fall apart, the
flow of money to the oligarchs will collapse. Over time, the USA
will be increasingly anarchic, more like a banana republic than a
great nation leading the world. God knows what will happen with the
nukes... if Trump wins this next election, he and his pal Putin will
together control most of the world's nuclear arsenal.  Clear-headed
Americans already suspect that Trump is in Putin's pocket, in which
case this means Putin will hold all the nukes. At least he seems to
realize that deploying them is counterproductive - quick
incineration of the planet isn't on the agenda. However slow
incineration is almost assured if they continue ignoring the climate
crisis, hoping that it will simply stop. Or that we'll engineer our
way out of it. Or that it was just some narrative scientists were
pushing to raise money for their dubious research fantasies.
  

    
I hope (which is not quite the same as optimism) that people,
especially younger people, show up to vote despite objections to
Biden's bland oratory, age and support of Israel's actions. 
Sometimes it's good to remember that defense often wins
championships.

In Europe the rise of right wing populism has been on the rise for
some time. I was part of a EU-funded study on the rise of populism
in central Europe, that ended not long before Putin invaded Ukraine.
I wonder if that conflict has caused some shift in either direction.

On the plus side, I read recently that South America is the
continent currently that has the most popular enthusiasm for
democratic government. 

In an earlier comment Bruce said that the world feels overcrowded. 
It definitely is.  Large-scale cooperation is the only way forward. 
What are the odds? 
  

    



John Ohno writes:


With regard to <100>, I have certainly heard people speak of social media in
the same way they speak of cocaine or methamphetamine: as an experience that
is enormously exciting, compelling, and stressful due to sheer intensity,
habit-forming if you let it be, and liable to encourage you to make some very
stupid decisions with a whole lot of unjustified confidence. It's telling
that accelerationism is most popular among extremely-online consumers of
uppers -- but world culture is increasingly a culture of coffee-drinkers if
not amphetamine-users, which makes it very fertile ground for ideas whose
only real merit is "they make a number go up". Culture and technology is, at
scale, often downstream of diet -- and the modern global diet is the new
year's day hangover energy drink black coffee and greasy breakfast sandwich.

Regarding <70>, the idea that LLMs would be used to prop up cult-of-
personality dictatorships is unconvincing on the grounds that a much better
technology for this purpose, the expert system, was fairly well-established
in the 80s & was not used for this purpose. An expert system can perform
reasoning yet have its axioms set in such a way that it will never emit an
ideologically-incorrect response (and indeed, the US government developed
expert systems to simulate ideologies back in the 60s); LLMs, on the other
hand, have a whole class of problems stemming from the need for a training
corpus so large as to be impossible to quality-check (let alone ensure the
exclusion of counter-revolutionary material). Now, powerful people make
technical decisions based on hype all the time, including situations when any
competent advisor would point out that they would regret it -- lots of this
is happening around LLM and GAN technology right now -- but North Korea has
survived two successions when most similarly politically centralized
countries collapse before the first one, so they may well be smart enough to
avoid this.
  

    
Biden't bland oratory?
  

    
>half the citizens want a fascist dictatorship

Nowhere near that. It's an extinction burst. They can see the end of
the demographic runway from here. 

>If Trump died of old age tomorrow, the American right won't recover
their senses and suddenly search for Dwight Eisenhower

No, but they will die off. That's why they're so frantic; they *are*
being replaced. Only 51% of Zoomers in the US are melanin deficient.
  

    
<103> contains a broken link - translation of special characters in
the url. It's the Wikipedia link for Branislav Nusic. (There are
special characters in the surname that don't work on the WELL.) The
link appears to work without the special characters:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branislav_Nusic>

Thanks to Shebar Windstone for pointing this out.
  

    
> bland oratory
Many perceive it as such.  I'm sort of middling about it.  Good
content, not a great delivery. If his oratory was at Obama's level
it wouldn't even be a contest.  Public speaking still matters a
great deal.

The demographic change is undeniable, but younger voters tend to not
show up or vote for third party.  And the red states have the
mistakenly architected electoral college in their favor.  But with
the GOP going for the throat of women, minorities, LGBQT and all
other vulnerable groups (in their usual chickeshit way) they had all
better show up this time.

(Not to send this conversation off into a US election debate per se,
but it is a main event of 2024.)
  

    
>younger voters tend to not show up

Look again. Not in the last three general elections, and not in the
specials since Dobbs. They are a significant bloc now, and they're
acting like it.
  

    
I hope you are right but I make no assumptions.  And this Gaza
problem is a big one.
  

    
>this Gaza problem is a big one

I think it won't be in November, whereas abortion, guns, and climate
will still loom large for the women and children silos.

I'm making no assumptions, either, but Dem overperformance in actual
elections is the only reliably predictive data we have to evaluate.
Women are on fire and the kids are all right. Dems are shooting
threes at will while the GOP shits the bed on every play.

We still have a lot of lifting to do, of course; the basic blocking
and tackling of political campaigning. But we have hella money,
burgeoning enthusiasm, and a track record that suggests lifting
won't be an obstacle. Handwringing is off brand.

We took our eye off the ball in 2016, got complacent (believing the
polls; never again), and let the butthurt left pick the flyshit out
of the pepper re: Clinton. Those are not going to be issues this
cycle. Nor will foreign policy. 
  

    
(Sorry for the digression. We now return to our regularly scheduled
polycrisis, already in progress.)
  

    
In a normal year, U.S. politics might have more limited relevance to
global scale, but if the forces that have taken over the Republican
party here have their way, there will clearly be global
repercussions.
  

    
I think John is raising some very valid points about the ability to
inspire and the lack of support from younger voters who are turned
off by the US stance on the Gaza war. It also seems clear from other
comments that the blind spot that was evident in the 2016 election
is still there. 
  

    
>the lack of support from younger voters

The only indicator of which is media-commissioned polls. And as we
have seen, the figures for specific silos are crosstabs from polls
with already problematic MOEs. When a crosstab has only a hundred or
so respondents, the MOE is 15 points either way. Polls create their
own weather systems, but it rarely rains as predicted.

The predictive evidence is in actual elections. And it's very
encouraging.

Who is actually panicking right now? It isn't the Democrats.
  

    
News media are reporting poll numbers as if they were news. Consider
this recent report: "A quarter of Americans believe FBI instigated
Jan. 6, Post-UMD poll finds More than 3 in 10 Republicans have
adopted the falsehood that the FBI conspired to cause the Capitol
riot"
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/01/04/fbi-conspiracy-jan-6-attack
-misinformation/>

The actual poll, of course, found no such thing. The poll was based
on  1,024 interviews that were completed, including 965
self-administered over the internet and 59 administered by
professional interviewers over landline or cellular phone. What the
poll tells us is that apparenlty 24% of that particular 1,024
respondents believe that the FBI conspired to cause the Capitol
riot. The poll had weighting procedures etc. that would supposedly
produce a result that suggests what 330+ *million* Americans of
significant diversity believe. I don't think so - but there's no
good way to test the proposition that the poll is "scientific" and
"accurate," other than polling all Americans and comparing the
result. 

Polls have uses, I'm sure. But they are *not news* - and should not
be reported as "fact."
  

    
>they are *not news* - and should not be reported as "fact."

Nor should they prompt anxiety, which is their *sole purpose*. Shake
it off.

>1,024 interviews 

Haphazard metholodogy notwithstanding, when you drill down into the
crosstabs, you're down to double digits. Reporting "20% of [women,
youth, African Americans, veterans, whatever] believe [consensus
narrative} you're really looking at anywhere from 5% to 35% once you
adjust for MOE. You get better data throwing darts blindfolded.

>Polls have uses

Internal surveys commissioned by campaigns have much higher sample
sizes, much lower MOEs, and are designed to produce actionable
intelligence on popular sentiment, not lurid headlines calculated to
beguile the unwary.
  

    
>A quarter of Americans believe FBI instigated Jan. 6, Post-UMD poll

And Maureen Down rehearses that same horsehit claim uncritically in
her 1/6 column. Shameless.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/06/opinion/trump-biden-election.html?unlocked_
article_code=1.ME0.oSM6.zNXQfWXDpe67&smid=fb-share
  

    
Jon, I believe U.S. politics are always relevant on a global scale.

World politics are no longer as essentially bipolar as they were
during the Cold War, but our economic, diplomatic and military
power, as well as geographic spread (via territories, military
bases) still put us in a pole position. 
  

    
Point taken! I published that because, in the past, I've been
accused of being too US-centric.