Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
> the Dems would have to admit that the government is often a
> behemoth of bureaucratic nonsense

It is? It is bureaucratic, certainly. Regulatory agencies --
bureaus, if you like -- are how policies get carried into action.
But I don't get the nonsense part. Certainly mistakes are made. And
the reason something works a certain way may not be obvious. Some
things may be downright stupid. But the same is true of all
collective human enterprises.
  

    
Thanks for sharing that about Sen. Rosen Angie. Now I don’t regret
the time I spent in Reno. I’m scrambling to get a tin roof
refurbished before the rain, and I’d be done, and on to the next
project if I’d skipped canvassing. I love Jackie Rosen ever since
she went after Louis DeJoy. 

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcNS1FmeHbM>
  

    
Yes, great news about Sen. Rosen. There are things to be learned
from how the Democrats have had significantly better outcomes at the
local levels (federal senators and representatives) than Harris/Walz
did nationwide.

Who's going to put the time and effort into learning them, though?
My head is just spinning with the post-election "I told you sos." I
mean, if this many people with the ability or inroads to have an
impact knew what it was going to take for Harris to win, why were
they waiting until after she lost to explain it?

Bernie Sanders has been in the Senate for two decades. What's he got
to show for it? I am tired of center-leftward activists and
intelligentsia mansplaining what the problems are, without following
that up with tangible potential solutions, and wading in to the muck
to try them out.
  

    

All that said, the most persuasive analyses I've read so far are not
about what Democrats should have done, but about how and where
people got their information. I'll post a couple excerpts below.

I remain torn about how much responsibility to put on voters as
individuals, vs. how much to put on the tiny group of ultra-wealthy
men who control social media combined with the politicians and
politicos who let them get away with that:


Heather Cox Richardson: "[Amanda] Marcotte [in Salon] recalled that
Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed
before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s
policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed
them.  An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who
were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to
vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats.
Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends
and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of
Media Matters put it: 'We have a country that is pickled in
right-wing misinformation and rage.'"

Jill Lepore, in her latest New Yorker article The Artificial State:

"The artificial state is not a shadow government. It’s not a
conspiracy. There’s nothing secret about it. The artificial state is
a digital-communications infrastructure used by political
strategists and private corporations to organize and automate
political discourse. It is the reduction of politics to the digital
manipulation of attention-mining algorithms, the trussing of
government by corporate-owned digital architecture, the diminishment
of citizenship to minutely message-tested online engagement. An
entire generation of Americans can no longer imagine any other
system and, wisely, have very little faith in this one. (According
to a Harvard poll from 2021, more than half of Americans between the
ages of eighteen and twenty-nine believe that American democracy
either is “in trouble” or has already “failed.”) Within the
artificial state, nearly every element of American democratic
life—civil society, representative government, a free press, free
expression, and faith in elections—is vulnerable to subversion. In
lieu of decision-making by democratic deliberation, the artificial
state offers prediction by calculation, the capture of the public
sphere by data-driven commerce, and the replacement of humans with
machines—drones in the place of the demos..."


"...The mainframe computer, the personal computer, the Internet,
data science, machine learning, and large language models have made
possible astounding advances in scientific research, communication,
education, public health, and a thousand other realms of human
endeavor. But their effects on political discourse, representative
democracy, and constitutional government have been, on the whole,
malign. Liberal democratic states make citizens; the artificial
state makes trolls."
  

    
>>> Democrats Lost Because of Their Bad Policies, Not Their Bad
Attitude

... let's don't automatically assume the problem was a bad
collective attitude or an inability to relate to people who
ultimately voted Republican. The alternative interpretation is that
Democrats became identified with bad policies that voters thought
were hurting them and the country. This is hardly a problem that is
exclusive to Democrats: Republicans will eternally pursue lower
taxes on the wealthy to the very ends of the earth despite all the
evidence that they don't work, aren't fair, and also aren't popular.
Indeed, Donald Trump shows every indication he wants to take his
party back to a cult of protectionism that Republicans finally
abandoned nearly 90 years ago, and if he does and that predictably
backfires on him, his party will pay the price as well.

During the two years (2021-2022) when Democrats held a governing
trifecta and could pretty much do as they pleased they pursued
policies that contributed to excessive inflation and to an explosion
in cross-border migrations, and on November 5 they paid the price
for that. On the inflation front, yes, I understand, supply-chain
disruptions had a lot to do with suddenly rising prices, and yes, I
get it, Democratic policymakers were trying to head off a possible
recession. But by enacting two big packages of new federal spending
(the first being focused on boosting consumer spending rapidly) on
strict party-line votes, Democrats inevitably owned the high
inflation rates that ensued which to this day are regarded bitterly
by low-to-middle income people, including young people starting off
careers and families. I'm not enough of an insider to know the
extent to which people in the Biden administration or the Congress
knowingly courted this economic and political danger. But I do know
it happened after a period of liberal elite fascination with 'modern
monetary theory,' which holds inflation fears associated with
reckless fiscal policy as mostly misguided. And it also happened at
a time when most of the people running the government never knew or
no longer remembered the political consequences of high inflation in
the 1970s (or more recently in other countries). They should have
known better or been more careful, and Kamala Harris and countless
other Democratic candidates in 2024 paid the price for that
mistake.<<<

<https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/democrats-lost-because-of-bad-policies
-not-bad-attitudes.html>
  

    
>>...so they chose fascism and untold suffering for their fellow
Americans and human being across the globe.

Which will bring down the cost of eggs in three, two...
  

    
As soon as President Trump gets the government out of the business
of killing chickens because of the bird flu hoax.
  

    


just a heads-up that i'm going to follow Larry's actions and do a scribble
on my posts here.

sometimes i post in a Devil's advocate way. sometimes i post in a musing
way, imagining what could happen, what i *might* think under some
circumstance. usually these are attempts at trying to expand my worldview
or comprehend what They, the Other, might be thinking or feeling as they
cast a vote or say a word  i disapprove of.

i'll try to hold off posting in that style here. The Well has changed, and
so should i.
  

    <scribbled by jonl Sat 9 Nov 24 16:05>
  

    
Not that anyone cares by now ..  but my world view of what happened
is :

Bad boy beats woke gal 

Bad boy played the media perfectly. 
Barrage of bullshit ... That got echoed by the media "bad boy said
bad thing". 

Toxic male appealed specially to young men of all races, black,
Hispanic -- all bad girls and some good girls 

Bad boy can fix it with the concept of a plan.  Preyed on fear and
doubt 

Woke woman recently ( 4 yrs, 4 months) making cautious entry into
politics.  Actual boring plans. No unrealistic promise. 

Played to the base of ten years ago.

(ps In my little county Dems are ageing out, few young people
joining)
  

    
I hate to say it, but if you haven’t seen Idiocracy, it’s time you
did. 

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy>
  

    
I’ve been thinking about my own misperceptions. I noticed while
canvassing in Reno, that there were lots more young voters than I’d
seen in previous cycles. I thought this boded well for the VP, but I
now realize the other side of the picture. 

I saw a huge number of households with one or more 20-30 year olds
living with someone old enough to be their parent or grandparent.
This was probably not where they had hoped to find themselves. I
know a guy who lives here in Sonoma County. He works at Costco. He
gets about $25 per hour. It’s nowhere near enough to get his own
place, so he lives with his mom. He voted for Trump.

There should have been signs in the Harris-Walz offices that said -

“It’s the Inequality, Stupid!” 

Wages and the cost of living seem to be unrelated.
  

    
My physical security pal Dev has a great 30 minute podcast on dealing
with the election now and in the future:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_91CDTCkNE>

Something many of you outside of #infosec don't see is how much time
we (in #infosec) try to be one of Mr. Rogers' "helpers".

Dev is a "helper leader", imho.

Also how to make a rather crazy banana bread old fashioned at the end.
WTF?
  

    
"It's the Inequality, Stupid!"

Yes - I agree that is the fundamental divide/issue/challange in this
country: The middle ands lower income groups having seen their share of the
national income/wealth pie steadily decline in the SA for over 50 years.
The Democratic Party has often participated in the policies that have
caused this increase in inequality, and certainly have not been outspoken
nor effective in reversing it.

The frustration and anger from this is catalyized by racism, misogyny, and
other bigotries. The authoritarian/feudalists don't need to propose real
effective policies, and the democratic/collectivists (that's me and others)
have not been effective in making the case for policies that will help.
  

    
Backing up a few posts to second “… if you haven’t seen Idiocracy,
it’s time you did.” 

A librarian recommended it to me a few months ago. She wasn’t wrong.


And, yes, “It’s the Inequality, Stupid!” should have been on every
campaign office’s walls, and possibly as their screensavers, as
well. 
  

    
If Sanders had beat Clinton in 2016, we would live in a different
world. When I was canvassing in a nice suburban tract in West Reno,
I was met at an open door by a 40ish white man carrying a mop, and a
60ish Indian woman who was directing him in his work. As soon as I
told her I was with the Democrats, she started ranting about her
“damn Democrat tenants” who had trashed the place and disappeared. 

She said “I lived in San Francisco 30 years ago, and I know from
Kamala. She slept with Willie Brown, a Married Man! No morals!”. I
started to say something about TFG, and she immediately said “I
don’t want to talk about Trump. I was with Bernie all the way!” She
was generally pissed at the whole Democratic Party.

Bernie and the other Labor/Social Democrats are the only faction of
the party that really speak to inequality regularly, and with a
consistent pro worker message. The US needs a Labor Party. That
message was ascendant in Obama’s third year(remember Occupy), and
that spoke directly to the concerns that the voters are upset about
now. Remember The Rent Is Too Damn High guy?

That missed opportunity is akin to if RFK Sr. had lived and won, or
if Gore had prevailed in the court. There is no component of
misogyny in my assessment. On the morning of the 2016 election, I
was driving over to the Jr. High to vote, and I passed a mother
walking with her young daughter. Made me so happy that we would
finally have a Ms. President. I cried. Still do when I think about
it. 
  

    
The Butthurt Left is a wholly owned subsidiary of the GOP
Disinfotainment Division, which is solely responsible for its
content.
  

    <scribbled by lperson Sun 10 Nov 24 09:19>
  

    
Yeah, best to 🤐 (zip it emoji)
  

    
<yesway> speaks for me.
  

    

Bill, do you think that platform would have succeeded if all other
things were equal? Honest question.
  

    
I think Bernie Sanders would have beat Trump in a general election.
  

    
Maybe with Sibelius as VP.
  

    
I'm starting to auger into a mild depression. I'm just so
disappointed in homo sapiens. I see these primates going around in
clothes and cars and using language and tools and I'm just not
buying it. The media keeps going on about its business like this is
all perfectly normal and it just bugs the hell out of me. At this
point I have zero confidence in anything they report. I'm
entertaining the suspicion that I'm trapped in The Truman Show. I
don't believe a word of much of anything. My feeling towards
humanity is somewhere between pity and contempt.

Present company excepted, of course. You guys rock.
  

    
When nothing is true, all is permitted. Scary, right?