This is a myth, isn't it? He has no patience for long and complicated
negotiations. He basically acts like a bully who demands loyalty, as James
Comey reported. He is only good at lying and cheating and hiding that he
cheated (which is the reason why he was convicted). Even the MAGA motto is a
lie: instead of making America great he will ruin it. Like Captain Ahab in Moby
Dick he will ruin everything on his quest for personal revenge.
For example if he expels the Mexican immigrants, nobody will clean the
houses of the superrich anymore. Or wash the dishes in hotels and restaurants.
This dirty work is typically done by immigrants and people of color, all over
the world.
-J.
-------- Original message --------
From: Pieter Steenekamp <[email protected]>
<mailto:[email protected]>
Date: 10/31/24 3:39 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]>
<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What if Trump Wins?
The Case for Trump
I'm not suggesting that Trump is a model leader; he has many moral
shortcomings. And yes, if we view the U.S. President as the de facto leader of
the West, it's fair to ask: Can’t we do better? I also won’t debate whether
someone like Harris might make a better president. My point is this: If Trump
is elected, might there be areas where his unique style could actually make him
an effective leader?
One thing Trump can do is negotiate. As a potential leader of the West,
there are benefits he could bring in negotiating with adversaries, including
BRICS countries. Let me explain using an analogy: the character James Dean
played in Rebel Without a Cause. In a game of chicken, Dean's character
pretended to be drunk, making his opponent believe he was reckless—eventually
causing them to back down.
Trump has a history of employing similar tactics. For instance, when
building in New York, he once proposed a design that violated height limits.
When this was denied, he proposed a much uglier building that followed the
code. Ultimately, he got approval to build his original design, with the height
exemption he wanted. Whether or not he would have gone through with his threat
is unclear, but he got what he wanted by throwing a calculated tantrum.
In the same way, Trump's current claims about what he would do
internationally could simply be part of his proven negotiation tactics. World
leaders see him as “reckless” in the same way James Dean’s opponents did,
making them reconsider their own moves.
Ultimately, Trump may be an unconventional choice, but he is a skilled
negotiator—one who could, in his own way, secure some advantageous outcomes for
the West.
On Thu, 31 Oct 2024 at 13:07, Santafe <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
The newspapers, and any number of writers, do a good job spelling all
this out.
I have this frustrated feeling that doing this misses the point that is
driving the dynamic.
One of the good things that Paxton emphasizes about what drives fascist
movements from the ground up is the determined rejection of thought in favor of
feeling. Hannah Arendt goes on at length to get the same thing across.
I envision it (with some discomfort about misfits of the metaphor) as
being like a social counterpart to berserking, or (even less apt) elephants
going into musth. It’s not even “rage” per se, but something about as
destructive, only chosen.
I see the various repubs that make communities with the dems, and speak
as if they hope this will “accomplish” some “change”. For the
Bannon-followers, I feel like I know exactly what this looks like. It is the
various subcategories of hated ones self-identifying, and sewing on their
sleeves a marker of “establishment characters”. Bannon preaches to the mob:
“You see; they’re scared! We have them on the run. If you’ll just push a
little harder we can corner them, and we’ll give them the beating of their
lives. Imagine how powerful you will feel. They’ll want you to stop, and they
won’t be faking it, but they won’t be able to make you stop. Won’t that be the
best feeling you ever had? You’ll be able to feel, finally, that you actually
exist.” (Bannon doesn’t put in the final line; I put that in.)
I guess I don’t want to argue against the things people are trying to
do (Michael Luttig, various Cheneys, and whoever). The voting block that can
cause the calamity is certainly a coalition of non-identical groups. If we
think there are categories of Spontaneous Racists and Stimulated Racists (to
borrow a term from spectroscopy), the part of the voting bloc that is made up
of the spontaneous ones may not be all that large; maybe 20%? Not as large as
the evangelicals (35–40%?, with some overlap). There presumably are some
genuinely out-to-lunch types, and maybe one can imagine that talking has some
place with them, which could be enough to move the margin of this
winner-take-all event we are stuck with. And then the ones that can think
enough to be strategically greedy or hoarding, but not circumspect enough to
have every cared or understood how the society they suck from actually
functions. _Maybe_ talking could have some effect with them.
I have thought, too, since some NYT article by a guy from Bucks county
PA going home, and thinking that the trump voters actively wanted “the trump
vibe; the meanness, bullying and name-calling, etc.” that this is an expression
of a certain component of nihilism.
Whoever wrote the screenplay for Apocalypse Now was very good. Kurtz’s
line in one of the soliloquays:
“Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be completely free?
Free from the judgments of others; even of yourself?”
There is a core of nihilism in that freedom. What would it feel like
to go punch somebody for no particular reason, except that I felt like it?
Burn whatever some people mean by “the bonds of human affection” that “include
us in humanity”. Yes, I sort of understand (and this probably is important)
that whoever I hit will now know he has to fear me, and he may even dislike or
hate me, and it may be irreversible. But if he can’t do anything to me, why do
I care? In fact, if he wants to and still can’t, even better: that will give
me that experience of power that I imagine must be so nice to feel, but that if
it is, I certainly don’t feel now.
It’s not as simple a category as all that, because they are willing to
do this only if they believe they are members in the mob. Whether that’s
community or just a release from the requirements of either responsibility or
courage I can’t say.
But I do think that, in the U.S., a crucial conversion that Arendt
articulates, from a mere mass into a mob, has now been achieved, and the mob is
awake and self-aware as a mob. It took a sociopath to go charging out across
the minefield that normal people are too chicken to venture into, to show how
far out the actual shooting-boundary is, beyond where they had drawn back
before. But now that the boundary has been identified, that’s public
information, and the others don’t need to be sociopaths to use it. It changes
the problem, because there are a lot more of them than of the true sociopaths.
I agree, we would like to first get through the next week without an
acute disaster. But the system organization has passed through a
re-arrangement by now. I would like to know what a program looks like to
reverse that, without having to go through the whole Hodgkin-Huxley circuit of
the society’s destroying itself before there is enough exhaustion to try for a
reset. Since, under the conditions that are likely by that time, it’s not
clear what kind of “reset” might even be available.
Eric
> On Oct 31, 2024, at 4:59 AM, Russ Abbott <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
> To help prevent such a disaster, let's do our best to help people
imagine what the world would look like if Trump wins.
>
> For example, Trump has said that one of his priorities would be to
throw off the occupying army of invading immigrants and criminals. Ask people to
think about how this occupying force is currently ruining people's lives. I
suspect that very few people have any experience of such a noxious invading force.
Most people find their lives relatively peaceful. But if Trump begins to implement
his plan to throw off this occupying force, the streets would be full of armed
deportation agents chasing down the evil occupying forces. Gunfights would erupt
between the deportation agents and immigrants running for their lives. Many of us
would be caught in the crossfire--or holed up at home trying to avoid the bullets.
Ask people to imagine such a world and to compare it to the relatively peaceful
world we now occupy. Ask them if that is really what we want and if that is what
we will be voting for next Tuesday.
>
> -- Russ Abbott
> Professor Emeritus, Computer Science
> California State University, Los Angeles
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 30, 2024 at 11:48 PM Jochen Fromm <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> Here in Europe most people are indeed worried that the candidate who
is a convicted felon and wears orange makeup will become president again. Have his
fans all forgotten he mainly played golf, praised dictators and created tax cuts
for the superrich? But there is also a bit of hope that a woman will stop him this
time.
>
> A hundred years ago there was already a group in America that hated Blacks and
immigrants. As Timothy Egan writes in his book "A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux
Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them" one of the Ku Klux
Klan leaders was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson. He was eventually brought
down by a woman, Madge Oberholtzer, who would reveal his cruelties, and whose testimony
stopped the Klan. When Europe fell into darkness, America was able to stop the con man. I
hope it can do it again.
>
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/558306/a-fever-in-the-heartland-by-timothy-egan/
<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/558306/a-fever-in-the-heartland-by-timothy-egan/>
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
> Date: 10/30/24 10:54 PM (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Evolutionary transitions between egalitarian and
despotic societies
>
> Hi, Jochen,
>
> Not sarcastic. It was to show the exploratory nature of such
models. I do believe that the most mysterious feature of charisma is the
behavior of the charasmees. However this election turns out, almost half the
country is about to willingly offer up it's political autonomy to a potential
dictator. Whatever my faults, I try, try, TRY not to do sarcasm. I do wonder if
we could build models that explore under what circumstances it is better for
everybody to do SOMETHING then to take the time to pool information and do the
right thing.
>
> In general evolutionary history has no actual power to constrain our
present behavior. Our behavior is constrainted by present events and present
behavioral repertoire.
>
> Nick
>
> On Wed, Oct 30, 2024 at 2:37 PM Jochen Fromm <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> In her book "The Social Instinct" Nichola Raihani mentions in chapter 17 the
article "An evolutionary model explaining the Neolithic transition from egalitarianism to
leadership and despotism" from Simon T. Powers as a model how despotic regimes and dominance
hierarchies have evolved in early human societies.
> https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2014.1349
<https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2014.1349>
>
> It reminds me of our recent discussion triggered by Nick's
(sarcastic?) proposal to explain parts of the MAGA movement in terms of
evolutionary psychology. Simon T. Powers is an interdisciplinary researcher
working at the University of Sterling
> https://www.stir.ac.uk/people/2013555
<https://www.stir.ac.uk/people/2013555>
>
> A more recent article from him about "Modelling transitions between
egalitarian, dynamic leader and absolutist power structures" can be found here
> https://www.stir.ac.uk/research/hub/publication/2041639
<https://www.stir.ac.uk/research/hub/publication/2041639>
>
