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]> 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]> 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]> 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/
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]>
> Date: 10/30/24 10:54 PM (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
<[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]> 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
>
> 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
>
> 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
>
> -J.
>
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> --
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
> Clark University
> [email protected]
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
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