Tags
american politics is the best reality show, effective altruism, not like other ideologies, ozy blog post
[See also: Don’t Panic, Think.]
I.
“Yes, that’s so,” said Sam. “And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like old Mr Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?”
“I wonder,’ said Frodo. “But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.”
“No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it – and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got – you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”
“No, they never end as tales,” said Frodo. “But the people in them come, and go when their part’s ended. Our part will end later – or sooner.”
“And then we can have some rest and some sleep,” said Sam. He laughed grimly. “And I mean just that, Mr. Frodo. I mean plain ordinary rest, and sleep, and waking up to a morning’s work in the garden. I’m afraid that’s all I’m hoping for all the time. All the big important plans are not for my sort. Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We’re in one, or course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: ‘Let’s hear about Frodo and the Ring!’ And they’ll say: ‘Yes, that’s one of my favourite stories. Frodo was very brave. wasn’t he, dad?’ ‘Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that’s saying a lot.'”
“It’s saying a lot too much,” said Frodo, and he laughed, a long clear laugh from his heart. Such a sound had not been heard in those places since Sauron came to Middle-earth. To Sam suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them. But Frodo did not heed them; he laughed again. “Why, Sam,” he said, “to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. ‘I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?'”
“Now, Mr. Frodo,” said Sam, “you shouldn’t make fun. I was serious.”
“So was I,’ said Frodo, ‘and so I am. We’re going on a bit too fast. You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point: ‘Shut the book now, dad; we don’t want to read any more.'”
“Maybe,” said Sam, “but I wouldn’t be one to say that. Things done and over and made into part of the great tales are different. Why, even Gollum might be good in a tale, better than he is to have by you, anyway. And he used to like tales himself once, by his own account. I wonder if he thinks he’s the hero or the villain?”
II.
I hold to certain values, those shared perhaps by the majority of my readership. I am a utilitarian, in the John Stuart Mill mode. I care as much about a stranger who lives in Africa or who has darker skin than mine as I do about a pasty-white stranger who lives in my hometown. I believe in science, in rationality, in the pursuit of truth. I support the rights of people to speak and think freely, to decide what to do with their own bodies, and to live their lives as they please without busybodies sticking their noses in. I value positive-sum interactions, as exemplified through the positive-sum interaction of trade. I desire the happiness and flourishing of all sentient beings.
Yesterday, the US people elected a president who is the repudiation of many of my most closely held values. A man with an ethnocentric view of the world, who leaves refugees to die and will not protect our allies unless they make it worth our while. A man with a poor understanding of scientific issues and an astonishing history of lying to the public. A man whose policies violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments. A rent-seeker who earned his money through his skill at manipulating state force in zero-sum games, and who views a good deal as one where you’re crushing your trade partner to the ground and grinding every last dollar you can from their corpse, as opposed to one in which all parties benefit. Far than contributing to the happiness and flourishing of all beings, he runs an uncomfortably high risk of eliminating humanity– and thus nearly all good or value in the universe.
But if you share my values, remember: we are still winning.
Between 1990 and 2010, nearly a billion people were taken out of extreme poverty; the aim of halving global poverty by 2015 was reached five years early. The global average lifespan has more than doubled in the past century, rising from 32 in 1900 to over 70 today. We have not had a great-power war in seventy years. Catholics and Protestants live next to each other peacefully in much of the globe, when for hundreds of years they enthusiastically murdered each other whenever they got the chance. It appears we will continue our streak of twenty-nine peaceful changes of leadership, something that was unimaginable for most of history. The people who are calling Trump a Nazi need not fear execution or imprisonment for insulting their leader.
Famine is going through its death throes. We have shown it is possible to win against Pestilence, and not merely reduce harm. War is at bay, although the tide may turn any minute. Perhaps soon we shall turn and gird ourselves to face the greatest enemy… after all, in strange aeons, even Death may die.
We eked out victories even in this election. Four more states have legalized marijuana, and the majority of US states have legalized medical marijuana. The condescending and whorephobic Proposition 60 failed. Massachusetts has banned the sale of animal products from animals without enough room to move around, even from out of state. Small victories, to be sure; in some places, we just hold the line; but we must be grateful for the good as well.
I do not mean to say that we will win. An atheist does not have that sort of comfort; there is no rule, no law, that says that good things have to happen. The world is a place of absolute and exceptionless neutrality. If you fall off a cliff, you die, regardless of whether it is good or just or right or narratively satisfying. Good men die screaming and evil men live till eighty, surrounded by friends and family, their bellies full and their hearts at ease.
In particular, in spite of our many victories, there is still the one great failure: the strength we have acquired that allows us to heal the sick and feed the hungry has also given us the ability to destroy ourselves, through climate change, environmental damage, nuclear war, or risks from newly invented technology. The most grave aspect of President Trump’s election is that, compared to Hillary, he increases the risk that we will destroy ourselves before we ever visit the stars.
And yet… the victories do not go away when we have a setback. The billion people who have been fed and clothed are still fed and clothed; the decades of life– precious exquisite tragic beautiful life– that have been lived were lived; the few people on a few small parts of the globe who tasted freedom still tasted it, and it is sweet.
III.
Make America Great Again.
An odd slogan, from my perspective.
One does wonder what on Earth Trump thought was great about America in the first place. If you don’t like that we’re a nation of immigrants, and you don’t like our freedoms, what is it you think made America great? Fireworks? Bald eagles? Tiny American flags?
America was founded with the statement that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This statement was written by a man who owned, assaulted, and raped human beings. I think this pretty much sums up America.
American’s origins lie in the genocide of one people and the enslavement of another. We created some very nice-sounding amendments protecting people’s freedoms, and promptly ignored all of them (except, to be fair, the Third). We are a nation of high ideals unfulfilled.
And yet… in the slowest, most switchbacky way possible, we are fulfilling them. We fought the Civil War to end slavery. We faced down dogs and firehoses for civil rights. We fought court cases to let Nazis march through Skokie, to let students protest war in schools, to grant poor people the right to a public defender, to protect women’s rights to use contraception.
Make America great again? No. America was never great, and is always great; we are not great, because of how we have failed, and we are always great, because for nearly two hundred and fifty years we have been trying to fail better.
I fear that Donald Trump does not hold to our ideals (so long cherished, so often betrayed) and, as such, is a traitor to the America I hold dear.
IV.
The normal way for moral issues to go is that they are very confusing, and you never know what side you should be on, and you’re powerless to do much of anything about it one way or the other anyway.
But there are some situations where that no longer holds, where moral issues become clear. Where the questions are more about strength, courage, the ability to put aside. The Holocaust, the AIDS crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Some people sheltered Jews from the Nazis at the risk of their own lives; others operated death camps. Some people took care of the dying at a time when they could do nothing and when they might have risked contracting the disease themselves, because it was wrong to allow people to die alone; others yell homophobic slurs at sick children. Some people risked nuclear war for the sake of national pride; Vasili Arkhipov saved us all.
I fear that Trump’s presidency will create a similar situation.
(Trump is an extraordinarily high-variance president. My range of possible outcomes for President Trump include everything from “better than Hillary Clinton would have been” to “human extinction via nuclear war.” I very much hope that he will turn out to be closer to the former than to the latter, and that in retrospect this entire blog post will seem unbearably melodramatic.)
The thing is that you can’t tell who’s going to rise above in a crisis like that. Oskar Schindler was a Nazi spy. C Everett Koop, who fought the Reagan administration to be able to educate the public about HIV, was a deeply conservative evangelical Christian who believed that gays were sinners. Larry Kramer, the founder of ACT UP, is a complete asshole who doesn’t even manage to come off well in his own roman a clef about the AIDS crisis which he wrote.
And at the same time… Ronald Reagan was, by all accounts, a kind-hearted and genuine man and loving father. He also let thousands of people die for his political gain. Being a nice person does not stop you from doing evil.
This scares me. I try to generally be a kind, thoughtful person who would never spy for Nazis, and it is terrifying that this is in no way a protective factor whatsoever.
I hope that if any person who reads this is put to the test, they will make the right choice.
V.
Take care of yourself. You cannot help anyone if you are depressed or burned out. You matter as much as anyone else does, and probably quite a lot more to yourself.
I have been seeing a lot of strategizing about how our plans should change given a Trump presidency. Right now, the most important thing is thoughtful, rational, non-hysterical discussion about how to reduce the downside risk of Trump’s presidency, including both personal and political actions. I don’t want to put down any firm ideas yet about what we should do– I feel we are very much still in a brainstorming stage– but I appreciate the discussion that has happened so far and encourage people– particularly subject-area experts– to discuss it more.
We are not powerless. We do not have to watch as horrible things happen to our country. If there is one thing I have learned it is that as a person in the developed world, with all the wealth and power that implies, I have tremendous opportunities to do good. We don’t know what the right thing to do is yet, but we will find it. There are things you can do.
Several people I know have chosen to withdraw from political engagement and refocus on their own friendships, communities, and cause areas. I think this is a fine and honorable course. Trump doesn’t change everything; the courses of action that were good on November 7th continue to be good on the 9th. In particular, I think having strong communities that are a good source of support is going to be really important for getting the best outcomes in a whole host of different tail-risk situations. If, for you, politics is stressful and not the right choice, please do not feel obligated to be involved.
V.
Despair is the enemy.
If we fail, everyone in the world will die, either slowly or all at once. If we succeed, a slow and asymptotic approach to utopia.
(Or a fast and sudden approach to utopia, for you FAI fans out there.)
We are, perhaps, more likely than not to fail. Our chances are, perhaps, worse today than they were when we woke up yesterday morning with Clinton in a comfortable lead.
But we must not despair. If we despair, we lose the chance we had.
Take comfort in the grim, exceptionless neutrality of the universe. It does not say that we must win. But it also does not say that we must lose.
Thing of Things 
“The most grave aspect of President Trump’s election is that, compared to Hillary, he increases the risk that we will destroy ourselves before we ever visit the stars.”
[citation needed]
You do realize that there isn’t actually “a button,” right? The President literally has no physical way of launching nukes. He can’t do it. He can “command” other people to do it, but those are human beings, not automata. If you think missileers will just launch because an old man is having a hissy fit, then you shouldn’t worry about who the president is.
The real threat of a Trump presidency is that he will use the punitive machinery of state to hurt the wrong people. The best defense against this is to dismantle the machinery. But most people are too eager to have “their” people controlling the machinery to punish the “right” people for this tactic to have a high chance of success.
Putting as much of one’s personal life outside the limit of government authority would also mitigate the damage a bad president (like, say Andrew Jackson) could do. Unfortunately, far too many people are certain that they need to be able to control the personal lives of other people (perhaps even certain that they are doing it for the greater good) for this to be likely.
The more power you give a government, the more damage it can do. And yet, nobody seems to think that decreasing the power of government is ever a good idea. People who think they are worried about AI x-risk have zero compunction about giving greater and greater actual, lethal, unaccountable authority to the human biological intelligences that right now are patrolling our streets with guns. Technocracy is a lie. It always has been, from Lysenko through McNamara to today. Nobody is smart enough to rule, nobody is moral enough to rule, but people keep wanting rulers — and believing that somehow this ruler will be different. They won’t be. They can’t be. and yet anarchism won’t work. Libertarianism won’t work. Nihilism is pointless. Nobody who wants power should be allowed to have it. The only solution is to keep rulers as powerless as possible. To keep them in office for a short time, and put them there unexpectedly so they can’t plan to grow their power. Selection of lawmakers and enforcers by lottery. Aleatocracy.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Loss of a very important failsafe does, in fact, increase the risk of nuclear war. So does Trump’s poor diplomacy skills, which increase the risk of a first strike by someone else.
Furthermore, Trump also has bad policies on other global catastrophic risks, such as climate change.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I would suggest that the state of any particular missileer’s romantic life would have a larger risk than the holder of the Leather Chair of the Oval Office. If such a thing is quantifiable. If it is not…
There has never been a nuclear first strike on the United States, no matter how angry, petty or chimp-like the person standing behind the Great Seal has been. Interestingly enough the person who came closest to having that happen was a guy who was just totes dreamy. I mean we’re talking Harper-level awesome.
I have also never seen any scenario in which climate change is an existential risk. Catastrophic in the sense of very, very expensive yes. Not in the sense of “we will lost the capability for space travel.”
Trump will be bad enough. You don’t need to pretend he’s a boogeyman.
LikeLike
If we burn all available fossil fuels and Antarctica melts too much, sea level rise (in combination with more extreme weather events) could make it practically impossible to do overseas trade by repeatedly destroying ports. In that scenario, sea levels would continue to go up for the next thousand years. This would cause the collapse of any global sort of civilization.
LikeLiked by 1 person
When US airstrikes hit Syrian Army forces fighting ISIS, Trump expressed outrage. Hillary didn’t. During her tenure she pushed for bombing Libya and Syria, antagonizing the Russians to a tremendous degree for zero geostrategic or humanitarian gain. She joked that Putin doesn’t have a soul. She goes well beyond being a bad diplomat to being genuinely dangerous. You have to understand that Russia is much more dangerous now than it was during the late stages of the Cold War. Russians used to like Americans – now they overwhelmingly don’t. The Soviet Union’s leaders were cautious to a fault – Putin is daring.
Electing Trump is stepping back from a precipice America seems blissfully unaware of. However dangerous you think Trump was, Hillary was a much bigger threat.
This analysis depends on putting a lot of importance on the Russians. This is more than warranted. When the Soviet Union fell Russia did not become less dangerous. It became more dangerous. It still has the massive nuclear arsenal, but now it is less secure and much much angrier.
LikeLike
There *is* a line of command, but the military personnel face court martial if they disobey.
Hopefully there are Stanislav Petrovs out there, but it seems somewhat concerning at any rate.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Chelsea Manning is a person who exists.
LikeLike
I’m not sure that a woman rotting in prison for disobeying orders is a good example
LikeLiked by 4 people
Thank you for writing this.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Very well written. Thank you.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Beautiful, and so, so important. This put me in a much better place mentally. I think I will be rereading it often over the next few days.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Listen to Jeff Daniels on his TV series. This is why we’re failing. And under the last 8 years we’ve failed further. 53% of blacks voted for trump. These are the people who understood what happened. Yet you deny, and denigrate them. Trump is not a savior. He’s a mess too. But good heaven’s. Let’s try something else. Take a breath. Let’s see what happens here and protest as necessary. But not on feelings. Not on bias. . The corruption of the establishment and Clinton in particular,, was awful. Glad she’s gone. Truly gone. My bet is Donald will call out the liars and quickly. Dem’s or R’s, the corruption is total. The media took you over. Stop it now. Be a part of this solution.
LikeLike
…are you sure you’re not missing a decimal point?
LikeLiked by 4 people
I’d be very interested if that statistic were true! The CNN exit polls say otherwise; what’s your source?
LikeLike
“Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist–slack they may be–these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry ‘I can no more.’ I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
I vote sincere. This one really felt very heartfelt, and persuasive to boot.
It’s possible that the author used the extensive Tolkien quote to fill out the essay without risking a ‘tell’, but in context it still felt appropriate. And while it does brush up (very lightly) against Godwin’s Law, it avoided anything like a direct ‘Trump is a fascist’ accusation and instead characterizes Trump as ‘high-variance’; that’s exactly what I’d expect for someone writing against Trump from an oppositional but rationalist(-adjacent?) perspective.
LikeLiked by 11 people
“a slow and asymptomatic approach to utopia”
I think the word you intended to use was “asymptotic”. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
No, they definitely meant asymptomatic. No utopia-induced fever, coughing, diarrhea, or sudden death here! 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
This last bit sent chills down my back.
Thank you, Ozy, for capturing what I’ve been feeling all day. Thank you the realist, rationalist pieces of hope and optimism for the future that you have included in the piece.
I didn’t cry when Trump was elected, but I am tearing up a bit at this.
Thank you.
Today was a really hard day, and you have made it bearable.
LikeLiked by 2 people
If you earnestly believe that Trump is an existential risk and Clinton was not (or was a lesser one), as most of this circle seems to, then I implore you: remember in 2020 how Clinton failed, because yes, Clinton failed. She failed to convince a sufficient portion of the American people that she would be the correct choice. Remember how she failed so that you will not make her mistakes. I suspect that if you really dig into the reasons Clinton failed, you will be less sad because your belief that we got the worse path will be challenged. But I also suspect that I am being insufficiently charitable by assuming you would come to this conclusion if you did more critical research on her.
LikeLiked by 1 person
So… Clinton is an existential risk because she failed to become president?
There’s not much she can do *now* to threaten the world, so I suspect that you are using a rather different definition of existential risk than the typical one.
Also, I think this is heroic responsibility, rather than existential risk per se.
LikeLike
Wrong cause and effect. The same things that make me think Clinton is an existential risk caused her to fail to become president; I recommend that you research those things and avoid replicating them in future candidates, whether you agree that they made her an existential risk or not.
LikeLike
What, being bad at campaigning? That doesn’t seem to apply. Failing to appeal to the working class? Unless you’re an extremely hardcore leftist I don’t think the latter applies, and if so then why the fuck do you think Trump is better?
LikeLike
John, how exactly is Clinton supposed to *still* be an existential risk now that she has failed to become president? You are using the present tense when you talk about Clinton being an existential risk, so this implies that you still consider her to be a risk.
As for the rest, if you’re arguing that Clinton is an existential risk, then it’s really *your* burden to do research and elaborate as to why you think she is, not mine.
LikeLike
YES! Clinton was an existential risk because she failed to be president and lost to Trump.
When the elite fails to rule responsibly, the rabble rises up to rule even more irresponsibly. It happens every goddamn time.
Nominating Clinton was an absolutely epic fuckup and the entire Democratic Party needs to realize how badly they fucked up and NOT DO IT AGAIN. She lost to a populist demagogue. Her only primary rival was another populist demagogue.
Obama spent 8 years failing to dismantle Bush’s imperial presidency and now IT BELONGS TO TRUMP.
All of this could have been avoided if the democrats and the left had ben better. It would not have mattered what the right did or wanted to do. They would have lost, they would have never had the chance if not for the epic failures of the other side.
Don’t blame the republicans. Don’t even think of them as humans with agency. Think of them as a force of nature. Think of them as an earthquake. And be angry at the fools who built the houses that were shook to pieces.
DO BETTER.
LikeLike
What do you think the Democrats should have done better? I’m curious what you mean because I’m mostly seeing this sentiment from people who think the Democrats should have gone in a more Bernie Sanders direction, but I suspect that’s not what you mean.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@tcheasdfjkl
Obama should have dismantled Bush’s war on terror policies. He should have disengaged from the wars in the Middle East much more decisively and completely. He should have dismantled warrantless wiretapping. He should have shut down Guantanamo. He should have shut down the drone war. He should not have involved us in wars in Libya and Yemen.
The Democratic Party should have nominated someone else. Elizabeth Warren would have been good, even though I disagree with her on almost everything. She’s not a populist demagogue, and she’s got integrity.
The media should not have given Trump so much attention, thinking arrogantly each time that their angry denouncement’s could finally finish him off. It only ever made him stronger.
Hillary should never have said “deplorables”. She should never have posted that idiotic Pepe explainer. The SPLC should not have called Ayan and Majid bigots. The left should not have based their entire case against Trump on the idea that he was the candidate of racism and sexism and bigotry. That’s over. That’s not going to work anymore. Nobody believes it now, even if it’s true.
They shouldn’t have tried to character-assassinate Romney.
They should have passed a good version of Obamacare when they had the chance, instead of ramming through a horribly flawed kludge at the last second.
They should have passed the revenue neutral carbon tax in Washington. What the actual fuck.
They should not have used Title IX to ram feminist pseudo-legislation down the throat of every college in America from the executive branch.
Leftist protesters should not have gotten caught on camera so many times bullying people, beating them up, stealing phones, pushing and shoving, throwing piss, blocking doorways, screaming, having meltdowns and temper tantrums.
They shouldn’t have gone after Time Hunt. They shouldn’t have gone after Matt Taylor.
They shouldn’t have said 1000 times that people oppose Hillary because misogyny.
They should have been less arrogant. They should have been less hateful. They should have listened.
LikeLike
Lawrence, that’s again the heroic responsibility thing from HPMoR.
But the argument here, as John stated, was:
I seem to have misread and interpreted it as saying that Clinton was *still* an existential risk today; John gracefully corrected me on this.
So in order to argue that Clinton was an existential risk, you’d have to show that the ways she screwed up by losing would also make her screw up *once in Washington*. I am pretty skeptical of this, since Clinton has an extensive political background such that she probably wouldn’t order a nuclear strike just for the lolz.
I agree that Clinton was decidedly suboptimal. But evaluating the existential risk of electing her is a different question than whether she would have been a bad electee.
LikeLiked by 1 person
No one is ever going to be able to do a nuclear strike ‘just because’. There are too many people involved for even a crazy president to be able to do that. The real threat is a mutual escalation where both sides severely misperceive each other.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@silver and ivory
Ah, yes I agree completely that Trump is more of an existential risk! The primary risk factor from Clinton is that she continues to increase the risk that Trump or Trump-like candidates will win. So a fortiori Trump is the bigger risk!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Specifics?
LikeLike
Hey, I’m not going to be able to persuade you, I’m not going to try to persuade you, that us being in charge is a good thing. That’s not how talking works.
But, like, I know a lot of other reps, and none of us are anything but proud of the triumphs you list in the first paragraph of part 2. Yay increased life span! Screw the Horsemen!
I guess I’m trying to say that we are perhaps in disagreement about how to get there (I blame competing maps), but Prosperity City remains the destination. Your team is out of power for now, but the guys in power aren’t orks or demons. We are trying, in our own way, to make things better.
You get a rematch in 2 years! Good luck.
LikeLiked by 5 people
If Trump were to suddenly become a moderate, reasonable Republican president – even one with distressingly right-wing views on women and minorities, as such presidents tend to have – his supporters would be the ones writing bitter blog posts about the loss of everything they wanted from the election. He wasn’t elected to follow a different map to the same city, he was elected to set fire to the bus.
LikeLike
O My Guy I Would Persuade Your Hat Off! I Would Say So Many Great Words And You Would Change Your Mind!
But, like, my social beepy thingy is doing its beepy thingy.
Like, I’m here for the ITT game. It is this cool parlor game that is happening in this house.
Then, Plot Twist! My host is having a funeral. It is for a guy that I didn’t like, and my hands have all this red stuff. They seem super upset.
So I’m saying that “It is ok, he is only sleeping.” That handles my Bro Code’s rules of “Be Comforting To Sad People”, and “Don’t go into people’s houses and harsh their buzz.”
But you are asking me to be like “Let’s talk about the specs on his replacement, and also by implication can you help me put garlic in this guy’s mouth and bury him down by the crossroads.”
And I feel like that would be a party foul.
Elsetime, elsewhere (maybe in a thread that is about fighting about politics?), I’ll say why we think the new bus route is going to be amazing. I can see why you might be doubting that! Our new guy has a clown hat, and he’s a drinker, and he likes shoot his gun out the window while screaming “Murica!”
But give him a chance! The bus won’t catch fire. We can make it up that embankment, and through that forest.
It’ll be fine.
This is fine.
LikeLiked by 1 person
As the blog owner, I am perfectly fine with people arguing that Donald Trump has positive expected value.
LikeLike
Thanks Ozy! Also, thanks for that link. It is great.
So, Trump-wise. The positive-expected value / burn the bus down metaphor seems to be mostly nuclear war, yeah?
Well, it seems to me that Trump makes mushroom clouds less likely, not more.
The core is in that link, where the author points out that Trump wants the USA to be just a country, not some kind of super country that meddles everywhere. Dudley, not Harry.
I feel like this is reasonable, and is actually the main reason I got excited about the Donald. Our old policy relied a lot on having the narrator on our side, but the Death Eaters are totes real and I’m mostly with you on JK Rowling being asleep at the switch.
Ol’ Vlad has always seemed a bit confused about the West’s exact jump/no jump points. When the Ukraine turned over, was that us at his doorstep, beating the drums of war? Or was it just his client mucking around, an excuse to kick some trash and get his folks riled up? Who could even say? Our rhetoric was hopelessly confused.
And he tested this. I dunno what his prestige class is, but his base levels are in mobster, and he has the innate understanding that if you let someone stop paying protection your racket is done. The end result of the “everyone everywhere is precious to me, guy!” school of talk wasn’t that he backs off from everyone, it was that he took Crimea, put up his fists and winced. Then we backed off.
Similarly, his boy in Syria is in trubs. There is this uprising going on. We are backing the rebs. Or are we? Who can even know? Obama talks red lines, but he doesn’t mean them . Or does he? Putin Putin’d, as he’s gonna do, wincing.
So if Clinton got power and decided to back up the rebels (she has always been a bit hawkish, I don’t think it is a stretch), what then? That seems like an actual nuclear risk. Maybe he backs down. Maybe she does, but I wouldn’t want to face Clinton or Putin in a chicken game. I think I’d end up in a ditch or in a wreck, because they don’t play.
But instead we got Trump, and I think it is super clear that this is way less risky.
Trump is a mobster too. Putin knows that Trump doesn’t put any juice behind the idea that we have some kind of magic obligation to protect every human. Trump has talked about (he spent a hundred large to yell at NYC about) the fact that we are running our racket wrong. We are paying to protect other people. How crazy is that?
The terms of our alliance are that we protect Sweden et al, and in exchange they protect us? For serious? From who? Who can possibly understand what a country that makes crazy arrangements like this might do? Think of Egypt and Israel, where we pay BOTH SIDES every year. What on earth is going on there?
If you are in an intersection, and you are predictable, then you probably won’t be in an accident. My Dad told me that, and he’s been right so far.
Trump is talking about changing this around, working it more like the usual deal. To some buds we’ll extend the offer that if they pay us for our bases and stuff then we defend them. If they don’t, fine.
Putin can grok this. It is how he operates himself. Trumpmerica’s interests are the places where it has bases, and the people who are paying it to look out for them . Not Syrian rebels. Not McCain’s “We are all georgians now” stuff. Just another mob and its X territories.
Even beyond the ideological similarities, Trump and Putin are generally warm towards one another, while Putin/Clinton is a bit chilly.
I’m not literally saying that there is a bromance there, but:
1: I expect that under Trump the Syrian rebels will be understood to not be a US interest.
2: Trump will probably work with Putin to kill a bunch of ISIS guys.
3: Trump will probably recognize Crimea as part of Russia, with a fig leaf of “it seceded in order to be part of the mother country” kind of deal.
So that’s pretty much my pitch. I think that after a few years of running your isolationist model you won’t even want the interventionist one back. But if there’s remorse, you can have it all back again for the low low cost of one election.
It comes with a No-Nuke guarantee, but I’m not sure how you’d collect.
LikeLike
Sounds like you have a great opportunity to beat the markets. Good luck!
LikeLike
@Walter
I really appreciate your effort to comfort others that you explain here:
Your consideracy here speaks well to your character, and I very much appreciate that you made an effort to reassure the worried.
While I don’t know about Trump himself, I concur that it will *probably* be fine, and thank you again.
LikeLike
Re: Allies making it worthwhile.
I’m one of those allies and I think it’s a great idea.
The NATO agreement was written up when all of Europe was bombed flat and America was insanely rich by comparison so the deal was “The US will protect you essentially for free as long as you don’t go communist” No other deal was really possible at the time, and even this probably wouldn’t have worked without the Marshall plan to help out.
It’s 70 years down the line and we’re really not desperately poor anymore, maybe it’s time to stop free-riding on the back of America?
My particular country has startet work on amending our constitution so that we can sign a cheque and get US Marines permanently stationed over here on our dime without it being defined as an invasion. I suspect this is exactly the kind of deal that Trump wants and it will get us a better defence on the cheap (compared to building our own marine corps from scratch) while also paying our way. This is known as a win-win.
LikeLiked by 6 people
I think that Clinton was most likely going to be a far worse president than you believe and would in fact discriminate more against certain groups (like Obama did as well). So the claim that Trump is bad because doesn’t believe in the ideals of equality seems silly. It’s more that he doesn’t believe in your definition of equality.
Furthermore, Trump is most likely going to be less worse than you think. There are checks & balances, but more importantly, the Republican party is very divided and is surely going to fight internally a lot. The Republican party is not run by a dictator and the inherent consequence is that if they win state power, the conflicts will move to the party.
LikeLike
The Republican Party hardly seems so divided when you look at actual currently serving politicians rather than former ones or writers — seems to me the Reupblicans in actual power have largely rolled over for Trump, for fear of getting voted out.
Even if that weren’t the case Trump would still be plenty dangerous. The biggest danger from Trump isn’t some terrible deliberate policy that he’ll get Congress to pass. It’s the constant screwups we can expect from someone who’s not competent to run the executive branch.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Tea Party experience shows the power of populism. It’s going to be hard for Republicans from districts that have strong pro-Trump constituencies to say no to him without losing their jobs next election.
Best case scenario is Trump doesn’t care about the details and lets other people handle them.
LikeLike
Re: “oh noes Trump is going to push the big red button and nuke us all”, we don’t know what he’ll be like in that sphere. We do know what Hillary would be like, from her time in the State Department: she’s hawkish, she was perfectly happy with the bombing of Libya (which I think was reprehensible act and has not made Libya a better place in the aftermath of its civil war) and she presented herself as the strongwoman who would stand up to Putin vis-a-vis Trump who was his lap-dog.
Had she been elected, do we expect her to row back on all that and be conciliatory about “When I said all that, Vladimir, ’twas only in jest”? She was more likely to escalate matters because of her attitudes and belief that she is absolutely right because she is smart and experienced and doing God’s work. Trump may, strangely enough, be more likely to be led by advisors and staff wanting to cool things down.
LikeLike
I’m curious about what you mean by this – can you explain?
LikeLike
Obama has issued guidance (‘Dear Colleague’) that colleges have to show that they comply with one of the three ‘prongs’ for their athletics programs to show that they act in accordance with Title IX. The weakest of these is ‘Accommodating the interest and ability of underrepresented sex.’
Obama also issued guidance for sexual assault under Title IX. It is clear that men are underrepresented in the number of sexual assault cases brought. It is also clear that on many colleges, sexual assault education assumes that only women are victims. So a gender neutral administration would have similar provisions for athletics (where women are underrepresented) as for sexual assault (where men are). The latter can be done by requiring colleges to offer equal sexual education for men and offering services proportional to the number of men that self-report being victimized on surveys.
However, none of this was part of the guidance of sexual assault, which shows a huge double standard. One disparity is assumed to be discrimination, another is assumed to be ‘normal.’ This difference in assumptions is itself discrimination.
LikeLike
*stands up and claps*
Great inspiring speech. The “Four Horsemen vs. Cthulhu” metaphor looks a bit odd, but I guess actually becoming Cthulhu isn’t the worst fate for humanity…
LikeLike
Something that I found heartening: Trump is in a worse political position than Obama was in 2008– Obama had a bigger majority in the Senate, and he wasn’t at odds with his party in the way that Trump is. Obama only managed to win three major political victories: the stimulus, Obamacare, and gay marriage.
Of course, Trump could still do a lot of damage by gutting public services with executive orders, differential enforcement of laws, and basic executive incompetence, but it’s quite possible that we could limit a lot of the worst downside risks from him that don’t involve nuclear weapons by using a lot of the same tactics the Republicans used against Obama.
LikeLike
And it was Obama who led the way with “if the President can’t get his way otherwise, he can use executive orders”. I just read a “New York Times” article that – pre-election – was forecasting what “President Hillary’s” first 100 days in power would be like, and they were assuming she’d ram through what she wanted with executive orders. And no wondering if hey, is this a good idea to give such powers to the president? No – if the Republicans wouldn’t play nice, Hillary could just force them to lump it via executive order.
The thing to remember, when setting such precedents, is that if you expand powers like that you are ensuring that your enemies can use them also because it is not a law of nature that Our Party will be in power forever and ever, amen.
I hope all the people cheering on the undemocratic (and possibly unconstitutional) use of executive orders to enforce the president’s will when it was their guy doing it enjoy watching President Trump doing the same. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Here’s the thing:
“we woke up yesterday morning with Clinton in a comfortable lead.”
Clinton never had a comfortable lead. That was a false datum.
Our epistemic situation is worse than Rumsfeld (may he find a glass of icewater) said, because in addition to his categories we have the “falsely known knowns.” If we can’t predict how 160MM people are going to vote a day before it happens, how are we supposed to formulate a plan to regulate the actions of 320MM people over the course of years?
Humility is good.
We need to organize, but not just to put members of Team Ozy back in power. We need to organize not just to limit the damage the Other Team can do, but also the damage that we can do in our false beliefs.
LikeLike
538 was right, and she did win the popular vote; this result was well within the confidence interval of genuine experts.
I would not be writing a post like this about Mike Pence. I don’t like Mike Pence. He would cause concrete harm to people I care about. But he’s fairly low-variance: I understand what kind of awful Mike Pence is. Trump is very, very high-variance. I don’t know what he’s going to do. This is scary.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Oh good lord, of course it’s scary.
Thirty-six years ago we actually believed that the world was going to end in nuclear fire. We had lots of gatherings with huggings and alcohol and grass and crying and we engaged in the rituals of the time. You would of course find them laughable, but back then the idea of the sacred feminine was a big part of our community. We said goodbye to ourselves and the Earth and to each other. It is impossible to overstate how genuinely terrified we were, how absolutely certain we were that WWIII would happen. And the certainty never really faded, it’s just that the world didn’t end and one day I realized I was worried about other things. Admittedly, those things involved a whole new way in which the world was going to end (GRID/AIDS). Yeah, pretty much fuck the ’80s.
The point is, people love you. And the people that love you are closer to you than the people that hate you. And for a while at least we can still find places with people who don’t want to hurt us.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Compliments on your post, it’s the most levelheaded response I’ve seen yet.
It’s curious to see a populist right-wing man win, and not very hopeful, it seems to me.
Though, can you explain why he is high-variance? Populists are usually predictable: they do what the majority, either in numbers or in power or in noise, wants. So long as it is in their own interest as well. And, what trips most people up in their predictions: without regard for taboo, decency, common sense and long-term consequences. And in Trumps case, the law, so long as he can get away with breaking it. So as long as you take those out of the equation, he should make a lot more sense.
LikeLike
*coughs awkwardly*
*shuffles feet*
I had a measured response too!
Um, I don’t know if Ozy minds me mentioning my own relevant blog posts on their blog?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh goody, more stuff to read for me, then.
LikeLike
Someone might actually read one of my posts! Someone who isn’t me!
And they’re excited about it!
Wait, unless that was sarcasm?
o.O
LikeLike
The most grave aspect of President Trump’s election is that, compared to Hillary, he increases the risk that we will destroy ourselves before we ever visit the stars.
And this is the sort of hysteria I’m seeing all over the place that makes me think, in some ways, the left wants Trump to be the Monster Under The Bed. In the same way that the patronising articles dissected his putative support as being small town poor whites who were flailing around unable to understand how globalisation was the greatest thing since sliced bread (because they lost their good jobs) and needed a boogeyman figure to blame so they lashed out at immigrants/minorities, a certain segment of the left – in order to assuage their insecurities and fears – needs a simple, storybook monster they can point at and blame. It was the racist sexist transphobic homophobic xenophobic basket of deplorables what done it!
No, it was a whole section of “the people I care about as much as I care about a stranger in Africa” (which means not at all; you don’t know any random stranger in Africa, so your feelings are attentuated vague benevolence with no heft to them – throw a few pennies for the black babies in the mission box! but don’t have to live beside them, see and hear and smell and touch them and put up with their awkward angles and sharp edges and try to find some way of sharing a space) who voted for someone who was a kick in the pants to the finger-waggers and the “I love real billionaires” candidate who made them the punch-line of a joke for rich white men to laugh at as she shilled for donations; who thought he did share something of their values (I don’t think so, I think he cares for his own concerns and only ran on a message he thought would resonate with a lot of people); who are fed up to the back teeth of the whole rotten mess of “Buggin’s turn” and “Tweedledum out, Tweedledee in” that the party grandees on both sides arrange; people who are suffering and who are being pilloried for that suffering.
It’s not just “white working-class rural and small-town men” who are to blame. If the white guys in the Rust Belt are not getting jobs because the plants have all shut down and manufacturing has moved overseas, neither are the white working class women getting jobs. Or the black/minority men and women. Or the gays (because not every LGBT person lives in a big coastal city, some of them live in small towns and need employment there too). If the plant ain’t hiring, it ain’t hiring anybody, not just white men.
But the line being peddled was “this is resentful white bigots who are jealous that blacks and gays are finally getting their fair share”.
And now we see the result.
I don’t think the apocalypse is going to happen; I don’t think Trump is going to be a good president, but there have been mediocre and even bad presidents before this and America has survived. I don’t think this means, as some of the more overblown weeping and wailing has it, that now armed thugs will be running round the streets murdering Muslims and gays and non-whites and women because they’ve been emboldened by his victory. I think it’ll be business pretty much as usual, to be frank; there will be some conservative victories, some progressive setbacks, and some compromises – just like with every administration.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t think the apocalypse is going to happen either, but a 0.1% increase in the risk of nuclear war– due to an unqualified and rash president– is extremely worrisome, as is an increase in the (tiny) risk of disastrous tail effects from global warming.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Firstly: great essay. Probably the best I’ve read on the election. I will now totally ruin the compliment by nitpicking:
“Make America Great Again.
An odd slogan, from my perspective.
One does wonder what on Earth Trump thought was great about America in the first place. If you don’t like that we’re a nation of immigrants, and you don’t like our freedoms, what is it you think made America great?”
I think this is unfair. Isn’t the “make America great again” thing a tacit nod to the post-war era, when America was, well, winning at everything? Baby boom, affordable cars, lots of new gadgets, manufacturing jobs, rock and roll? That’s exactly the image I’d go for if I was trying to speak to people who feel disenfranchised by progress. I mean, turn on Happy Days and you can even pretend everyone around at the time was white, which I’m sure appeals to plenty of his supporters.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t know much about the period (not my country, for a start) and I’m sure there was plenty of horror lurking behind the facade (a particularly pertinent one here being the Cold War, of course), but I think it’s legitimate as an image, at least, when someone talks about making America “great again”.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yes, it’s certainly the image that Trump is appealing to.
I *think* that it’s mostly rhetoric. Ozy likely knows that Trump is appealing to a certain naive white vision of the post-WWII era, but they wanted to draw attention to what they think made America great: its immigrants and its freedoms. Instead of the prosperous respectable dream of white picket fences and a suburban household with 2.6 children and a housewife, Ozy seems to be implying, the vision of America that makes their heart sing is the America of immigrants and freedom. They are thus appealing to the civic American nationalism in the hearts of their countrymen.
Having thus repudiated Trump and his normative ethnic definition of America, Ozy then goes on to elaborate as to what they think America’s greatness is: its constant drive for greatness even in its failure.
Is this a fair evaluation, Ozy? 😉
LikeLike
Ozy, can we excerpt this for Solstice?
LikeLike
Absolutely! I am very flattered. 🙂
LikeLike
Regarding people’s reactions about what to do in the wake of this election, I see lots of leftists in my social media feeds insisting that now is the time to get more extreme… dump wimpy centrist liberalism in favor of radical socialism, reject peaceful protest and get violent, insist on ever more stringent standards of safe spaces for the marginalized. Given that some say the rise of Trump is due to a reaction to political correctness (see Reason: http://reason.com/blog/2016/11/09/trump-won-because-leftist-political-corr ) it concerns me that some in the left want to double down on it.
LikeLike
Electoral victories, much like acts of terrorist violence and other engrossing national news stories, is an opportunity for everyone with a pet cause to explain why it is the product of their personal pet cause. Lefties want to drop wimpy centrist liberalism in favor of radical socialism. Reason doesn’t like political correctness. Freddie DeBoer, bless his heart, wants to end political correctness via dropping wimpy centrist liberalism in favor of radical socialism. Other people are attributing it to voter suppression, insufficient reaching out to blacks and Latinos, too much reaching out to blacks and Latinos, too little respect for working-class white people, too much respect for working-class white people, misogyny, the lack of charisma of Hillary Clinton, and so on and so forth. Probably there is a person this very second writing a hot take about how Trump’s victory was caused by the fluoridation of the water supply.
My thoughts are as follows:
(1) We simply do not have enough evidence yet to know what the cause of Trump’s victory is.
(2) The election was close enough that her defeat in the general election shouldn’t necessarily cause us to change our beliefs.
(3) I think one of the most important things is making sure that Trump-like candidates don’t win in the Republican primaries, which is not something that Democrats have much influence over one way or the other.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I’m confused about the (seemingly taken as given?) assertion that unemployment used to be so great back in the day and now it’s crap because all our jobs got sent overseas. I mean, look at this graph:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
There doesn’t seem to be a major difference there between pre-globalization (e.g. pre-NAFTA in 1994) and post-globalization. The average from the start of data up to 1993 is 5.75%, and the average from 1994 to present is 5.94%.
Am I missing something? I know that there are issues relating to how precisely to define “unemployment”, but I’m not up on the details there. There are a whole lot of swings up and down over short periods of time, are these bubbles forming and collapsing, or from other effects?
LikeLike
The main thing that concerns me re: Trump and nuclear war is not that he’ll actually launch a nuke, but that he’ll make foreign leaders worry that he might.
The rule for nuclear deterrence is very simple: Make everybody believe that you will (a) absolutely always strike back, but (b) absolutely never strike first.
Trump sometimes makes very cavalier comments about the US using nuclear weapons. If those comments continue into his actual presidency, particularly if they occur during any sensitive diplomatic situations that might arise over the next few years, that might make other countries worry about our commitment to part B, and give them an incentive to strike first. This is particularly worrisome for less-stable nuclear countries like North Korea, who come to the table already skittish.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have a not-entirely-unserious theory that Trump will actually go back on half his campaign rhetoric and be a pretty moderate and reasonable president. Heck, he might secretly wind up as downright progressive.
This is because I still hold a non-zero-confidence hypothesis that Trump was running his entire presidential campaign solely to drum up publicity for his next reality-TV venture or whatever, and he was more astonished than anyone to learn that he is actually going to be president now (as evidence, several of his campaign people described his reaction to the election results as “sombre,” and maybe I’m just imagining things but I honestly think he’s looked very uncomfortable in many of his appearances since the election. He’s certainly more subdued and using way less violent language, though of course that’s a very low bar to clear, and it’s only been like 2 days).
It’s probably way too uncharitable (or too charitable?) to say that I believe Donald Trump is exactly the sort of person who might run a presidential campaign exactly like that one just as a publicity stunt.
LikeLiked by 2 people
He has voiced his dissatisfaction with politics for decades, so it is highly unlikely that he has no political agenda.
However, it is quite possible that he was greatly exaggerated his agenda in typical ”reality TV” style.
LikeLike