politics Post Election Thread: Democracy Dies In Darkness And You Can Help

[Toxn]

1 hour ago, Sturgeon said:

 

No I mean, US politics are fucked up, but versus South African politics? C'mon...

 

It's hard to explain, but compare your current scandal with our Life Esidimeni horror show to get an idea of what I mean. Ours would kill by negligence, or through corruption, or because it was convenient and nobody was looking. Then they'd naively try to cover it up or shift blame.

 

Yours would kill for the same reasons and more, then clap themselves on the back in public about it before furiously bashing the other side for doing the same thing. And then, a few months later, forget completely that it ever happened at all. And get away with it.

 

Our slimiest, most spineless, most venal and corrupt pols should be in awe of yours. It will take them generations to reach that levels of grotesque debauchery.

[Sturgeon]

53 minutes ago, Toxn said:

 

It's hard to explain, but compare your current scandal with our Life Esidimeni horror show to get an idea of what I mean. Ours would kill by negligence, or through corruption, or because it was convenient and nobody was looking. Then they'd naively try to cover it up or shift blame.

 

Yours would kill for the same reasons and more, then clap themselves on the back in public about it before furiously bashing the other side for doing the same thing. And then, a few months later, forget completely that it ever happened at all. And get away with it.

 

Our slimiest, most spineless, most venal and corrupt pols should be in awe of yours. It will take them generations to reach that levels of grotesque debauchery.

 

I think that's pretty uncharitable to your politicians, and in that spirit of uncharity I'm going to change the subject to some other recent grotesque debauchery.

[Toxn]

8 hours ago, Sturgeon said:

 

I think that's pretty uncharitable to your politicians, and in that spirit of uncharity I'm going to change the subject to some other recent grotesque debauchery.

Your cheap shot could have been on topic as well, you know.

Google is your friend.

 

Edit: also, since you want to win this one (for some reason); all you really have to do is point out that my outsider understanding doesn't reflect your (superior) insider understanding. I've pretty well conceded that point in any case.

[Sturgeon]

19 minutes ago, Toxn said:

Your cheap shot could have been on topic as well, you know.

Google is your friend.

 

Edit: also, since you want to win this one (for some reason); all you really have to do is point out that my outsider understanding doesn't reflect your (superior) insider understanding. I've pretty well conceded that point in any case.

 

Hey hey hey hey hey, that works both ways. I really do not fully fathom the depravity of South African politics.

[Toxn]

17 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

 

Hey hey hey hey hey, that works both ways. I really do not fully fathom the depravity of South African politics.

Fair enough.

 

From the inside then; our politics are just sad and gross rather than depraved.

[Collimatrix]

9 hours ago, Toxn said:

 

It's hard to explain, but compare your current scandal with our Life Esidimeni horror show to get an idea of what I mean. Ours would kill by negligence, or through corruption, or because it was convenient and nobody was looking. Then they'd naively try to cover it up or shift blame.

 

Yours would kill for the same reasons and more, then clap themselves on the back in public about it before furiously bashing the other side for doing the same thing. And then, a few months later, forget completely that it ever happened at all. And get away with it.

 

Our slimiest, most spineless, most venal and corrupt pols should be in awe of yours. It will take them generations to reach that levels of grotesque debauchery.

 

 

I agree that the majority of the US population won't rise up in anger against this latest outrage, and that in a surprisingly short span it will be only vaguely remembered.  I disagree that this is due to American politics being filled with latter-day Julio-Claudians, although if you are correct I eagerly anticipate full political representation for horses.
 

Here's the deal; the US/Mexico border is fucked up.  It's not just fucked up, it's completely fucked up.  Trump is offering a solution, albeit a... somewhat harsh one.  His opponents are offering... nothing.  The Democrats haven't even cynically put forward an alternative bill that they don't really plan to pass.  They learned their lesson when Trump ended DACA.  Trump likes to highlight issues that are divisive for the Democrats.  If they say anything substantive they will be beaten black and bloody by their own base.  If they say nothing at all, they will be beaten by their own base, but less severely.

 

The emptiness, the lack of long-term memory that you identify is part and parcel of being an anti-Trump politician today.  Those poor bastards sure do talk a lot, but they don't really do anything.  Trump has successfully traumatized all politicians who are not part of his agenda into metaphorically assuming the fetal position and drinking the pain away.  Or perhaps they do that literally.  They do complain a lot, but nobody cares about the complaints of politicians because politicians aren't people and when their feelings get hurt it's funny.  Seriously, supposed anti-Trump leaders are really that feckless.  Their latest master plan is to harass Trump Administration employees in restaurants.  That'll teach 'em!  Trump is surely finished this time!

On the order of tens of millions of migrants cross the US/Mexico border every year.  I say "on the order of" because the thing about undocumented immigration is that it's undocumented, so the error bars here are pretty big and nobody has a crystal-clear view of what's going on.  Remember when your country was having all those refugees from Zimbabwe, who largely ended up stuck in camps because there wasn't much else to do with them?  Now, imagine that half of the population of Zimbabwe crosses your border every year.  Some of them stay, some of them go back.  Some come in seasonally.  The situation is largely driven by economics.

As you might imagine, a completely unregulated, mass-scale enterprise like this leads to a free-market, Libertarian paradise.  It includes all the traditional paradisaical elements of gangsters who prey on immigrants, mysterious mass graves, child prostitution, and weapons smuggling networks that somehow extend to Islamist groups in Europe.  I'm not usually one to say that a situation is so morally outrageous that something must be done, but holy shit, they should probably do something about all this.

Note that the article on the mysterious graves also notes that children were put in detention camps.  Trump is sorta-kinda telling the truth when he says that putting children in cages was the previous administration's policy.  It's just that whenever there was a large pulse of migrants, previous administrations would blink because they feared the bad optics of putting children in cages.  Trump doesn't give a fuck, and ordered full steam ahead.  Or, more likely, immigration hardliner Stephen Miller told them to go full steam ahead.  You may wish to imagine that he swirled a twelve year old Grand Vin de Chateau Latour around a gilt human skull while he did this, but like I said before, I think the Trump Administration folks largely see themselves as men of the people, so it was more likely a mid-grade California prosecco.

Trump's gamble has largely paid off.  Americans are angry about children being separated from their families at the border, but more of them blame the parents than blame the Federal government.  Again, we see that Trump's divide and conquer strategy succeeding generally.

[Toxn]

10 minutes ago, Collimatrix said:

 

 

I agree that the majority of the US population won't rise up in anger against this latest outrage, and that in a surprisingly short span it will be only vaguely remembered.  I disagree that this is due to American politics being filled with latter-day Julio-Claudians, although if you are correct I eagerly anticipate full political representation for horses.
 

Here's the deal; the US/Mexico border is fucked up.  It's not just fucked up, it's completely fucked up.  Trump is offering a solution, albeit a... somewhat harsh one.  His opponents are offering... nothing.  The Democrats haven't even cynically put forward an alternative bill that they don't really plan to pass.  They learned their lesson when Trump ended DACA.  Trump likes to highlight issues that are divisive for the Democrats.  If they say anything substantive they will be beaten black and bloody by their own base.  If they say nothing at all, they will be beaten by their own base, but less severely.

 

The emptiness, the lack of long-term memory that you identify is part and parcel of being an anti-Trump politician today.  Those poor bastards sure do talk a lot, but they don't really do anything.  Trump has successfully traumatized all politicians who are not part of his agenda into metaphorically assuming the fetal position and drinking the pain away.  Or perhaps they do that literally.  They do complain a lot, but nobody cares about the complaints of politicians because politicians aren't people and when their feelings get hurt it's funny.  Seriously, supposed anti-Trump leaders are really that feckless.  Their latest master plan is to harass Trump Administration employees in restaurants.  That'll teach 'em!  Trump is surely finished this time!

On the order of tens of millions of migrants cross the US/Mexico border every year.  I say "on the order of" because the thing about undocumented immigration is that it's undocumented, so the error bars here are pretty big and nobody has a crystal-clear view of what's going on.  Remember when your country was having all those refugees from Zimbabwe, who largely ended up stuck in camps because there wasn't much else to do with them?  Now, imagine that half of the population of Zimbabwe crosses your border every year.  Some of them stay, some of them go back.  Some come in seasonally.  The situation is largely driven by economics.

As you might imagine, a completely unregulated, mass-scale enterprise like this leads to a free-market, Libertarian paradise.  It includes all the traditional paradisaical elements of gangsters who prey on immigrants, mysterious mass graves, child prostitution, and weapons smuggling networks that somehow extend to Islamist groups in Europe.  I'm not usually one to say that a situation is so morally outrageous that something must be done, but holy shit, they should probably do something about all this.

Note that the article on the mysterious graves also notes that children were put in detention camps.  Trump is sorta-kinda telling the truth when he says that putting children in cages was the previous administration's policy.  It's just that whenever there was a large pulse of migrants, previous administrations would blink because they feared the bad optics of putting children in cages.  Trump doesn't give a fuck, and ordered full steam ahead.  Or, more likely, immigration hardliner Stephen Miller told them to go full steam ahead.  You may wish to imagine that he swirled a twelve year old Grand Vin de Chateau Latour around a gilt human skull while he did this, but like I said before, I think the Trump Administration folks largely see themselves as men of the people, so it was more likely a mid-grade California prosecco.

Trump's gamble has largely paid off.  Americans are angry about children being separated from their families at the border, but more of them blame the parents than blame the Federal government.  Again, we see that Trump's divide and conquer strategy succeeding generally.

 

Thanks for the detailed response.

 

When I talk about my impression of your politics being fucked up, I should clarify that I'm not referring to Trump so much as the entire damn edifice. And this includes previous and, in all probability, future governments.

 

People forget that the sick-fuck emperors didn't get to run the enpire by lottery, or spring from the ground fully formed. They were just the end products of a system. And, because I pick my examples carefully, I should emphasise that it's not even that the entire system doesn't work in terms of the raw mechanics of governance and power. But holy shit the people involved were repulsive.

 

As for our undocumented immigrants, they make up between 2 and 10% of our population. So we have our own problems on that front. 

[Mogensthegreat]

On 6/24/2018 at 3:16 AM, Toxn said:

Pretty easily.

 

The outside view is that you guys are in the Tiberius-Nero phase. Place the pol of your choice anywhere along that continuum.

 

Our Glorious Donald is clearly Julius Caesar. He may not be a military leader, but a populist breaking all the rules, scaring the shit out of the legislative assembly, and getting to do whatever he wants by bypassing that legislative assembly, who are all the while powerless because there's an entire new generation of politicians backing him on the rise? Cmon.  

 

Edit: If Trump is assassinated, likely considering the arms prowess of the opposition, I expect Stephen Miller or somebody to re-enact the funeral oratory scene from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

[Toxn]

6 minutes ago, Mogensthegreat said:

 

Our Glorious Donald is clearly Julius Caesar. He may not be a military leader, but a populist breaking all the rules, scaring the shit out of the legislative assembly, and getting to do whatever he wants by bypassing that legislative assembly, who are all the while powerless because there's an entire new generation of politicians backing him on the rise? Cmon.  

But then who is Pompey?

And where is the Rubicon?

 

If you're promising me a civil war I'm going to ask for videos.

 

Edit: got my Roman history mixed up.

[Mogensthegreat]

6 minutes ago, Toxn said:

But then who are the rest of the triumvirate?

And where is the Rubicon?

 

If you're promising me a civil war I'm going to ask for videos.

 

The Triumvirate consists of the Donald as both Caesar and Crassus (the populist and the moneybags), with Mad Dog Mattis (or maybe like Paul Ryan) as Pompey (the soldier/the establishment member). The Rubicon is the Rio Grande.

 

I will try to get videos of the Civil War. 

 

Edit: considering almost the entire gun-owning populous of the U.S. would fall on the Trump side of the Civil War, (and probably a good bit of the Army too), it might be too short for me to travel to combat zones for videos.

[Mogensthegreat]

Not directly related to Trump, but political and about fake news and this is the best thread for it:

 

[Collimatrix]

9 hours ago, Mogensthegreat said:

 

The Triumvirate consists of the Donald as both Caesar and Crassus (the populist and the moneybags), with Mad Dog Mattis (or maybe like Paul Ryan) as Pompey (the soldier/the establishment member). The Rubicon is the Rio Grande.

 

I will try to get videos of the Civil War. 

 

Edit: considering almost the entire gun-owning populous of the U.S. would fall on the Trump side of the Civil War, (and probably a good bit of the Army too), it might be too short for me to travel to combat zones for videos.

 

1 hour ago, Mogensthegreat said:

Not directly related to Trump, but political and about fake news and this is the best thread for it:

 

 

 

Your posting is bad and your hyperlink is broken, please improve.

[Mogensthegreat]

1 hour ago, Collimatrix said:

 

 

 

Your posting is bad and your hyperlink is broken, please improve.

 

gitting gud now

[Ramlaen]

And the Supreme Court upholds Trump’s travel ban on countries identified as threats during the Obama administration.

[ShamefurDispray]

On 6/19/2018 at 10:13 PM, Ramlaen said:

Schumer doesn't actually give a fuck about kids being separated from their parents.

 

 

What do you mean law makers should do their jobs and make laws?

[Ramlaen]

Nice.

 

 

[Belesarius]

Unintended consequences of trade wars.

 

http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/26/news/companies/steel-tariffs-job-losses/index.html

[Mogensthegreat]

hahaha

 

https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/26/politics/donald-trump-mcmaster-speech/index.html

 

(CNN)President Donald Trump jetted to South Carolina on Monday night to rally support for Gov. Henry McMaster, who faces a runoff fight today. The President, as he so often does, spoke for an hour mostly about himself, his enemies, his friends and his thoughts on everything from Jimmy Fallon to Arnold Schwarzenegger and back. And oh yeah, he supports McMaster.

I went through the transcript from Monday night's speech and highlighted the 55 most newsworthy, cringe-inducing and just plain odd lines. They're below.

 

1. "They said, 'Sir, would you mind going back? Would you mind if we didn't stop?' I said, 'There's no way. We cannot stop,' right?"

The weather above South Carolina wasn't great, forcing the Trump plane to circle for the better part of an hour before landing. Also: "There's no way. We cannot stop" is a decent slogan for the Trump presidency. And away we go!

 

4. "We got Pennsylvania and we got Florida. We started off that night: 'Donald Trump has won the state of Florida,' right? And they go, 'Whoa, whoa, they just lost Florida.'"

The 2016 election ended 595 days ago.

 

counting the days since the election

 

7. "Now, you know we have a lot of fake news back there, these fakers."

The amazing thing about Trump's attack on the media here (and often) is the contradiction that sits at the center of it: He wants to attack the media as fake but then also get credit for the number of journalists who cover him.

 

9. "So please get your asses out tomorrow and vote."

Real quote from the President of the United States.

 

yeah, because the Donald does not play by your rules, fake news. refer to #7

 

10. "I don't care. I don't care. And I like her. She was another one right from the beginning. She didn't talk about other people, right?"

What's important here is that a) Trump doesn't care and b) He liked Arrington, the state legislator who beat Sanford, because she liked him first. Trump is purely transactional. Say nice things about him, he will say nice things about you. Attack him and he will attack you. It's that simple.

 

mhm

 

21. "Sometimes you have to toot your own horn because nobody else is going to do it."

Donald Trump, explained in 16 words.

 

 

43. "The Democrats want to protect illegals coming into this country, some of whom are not good, some of whom cause lots of problems in the worst possible way, they want to protect illegals coming into the country, much more so than they want to protect you, and that's not where we're coming from, OK?"

This feels like an oversimplification. Also, on a serious note: Trump is saying that Democrats care more about illegals than people in that room. It's "us" vs. "them." Always.

 

Yeah, because you do.

 

44. "Hey look. I got a bad hand, I got the job, and trade deals were bad. I mean, how bad were trade deals?"

Trump's most natural stance is an aggrieved victim. He sees his victimhood in absolutely everything.

 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

 

45. "So, Canada, 'Oh, Canada,' I love their national anthem, 'Oh, Canada,' I like ours better, however."

Donald Trump's definitive ranking of national anthems:

1. US

2. Canada

 

What, you don't? Oh yeah, because you're gonna move to Canada.

 

48. "And by the way, I have these stupid teleprompters, you don't mind that I haven't used them all night, do you? Every once in a while -- every once in a while I look at it, I mean, it's so boring, we don't want it."

I do not mind. Not at all.

 

yeah, because the Donald does not play by your rules, fake news. refer to #9

 

49. "No, I, you know, I'm looking, I keep looking, I just see things, and just -- they're true, but they're not quite as exciting."

Trump is talking about what is written on his teleprompter -- and, in so doing, revealing his true entertainer nature. He wants to hear the cheers of the crowd. Badly.

 

is that a bad thing to you? oh yeah, because your candidate can only get cheers by talking about how much she's a woman and not a lizard

 

54. "We're going to win at space."

What, exactly, would this entail?

 

WINNING!

 

55. "By the way, Henry, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, Air Force, right, Air Force, and what are we going to do? Space Force. People love that."

SPACE FORCE. People love that. You know what? Let's end on that!

 

The Space Marines are coming, people.

[Sturgeon]

[Sturgeon]

Tired of arguing with racist ol' Uncle Bob? You might be a white supremacist!

 

[Collimatrix]

2 hours ago, Sturgeon said:

Tired of arguing with racist ol' Uncle Bob? You might be a white supremacist!

 

 

Abraham Maslow's later work was really weird.
 

---

 

We briefly discussed this interview on the Discord server before, and I think I did a poor job¹ of explaining why this interview reveals so much.  So I will try again.

What makes this piece interesting is not the interviewer.  In fact, the interviewer is so bad at their job that I want to reach through time and space and (attempt to) beat the stupid out of them.  I mean, look at some of this shit:
 

Quote

Lesley Stahl: Facebook has admitted that the Russians spent $100,000 -- at least $100,000 -- on ads to influence the U.S. campaign. Does that bother you?

Brad Parscale: Yeah, I would not want a foreign entity to meddle in our election; you know, a government. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't want that; I'm American.

But the question is: did the Trump campaign collude with the Russians -- and as the digital director, was Parscale involved?

Brad Parscale: I think it's a joke. Like, at least for my part in it.

Lesley Stahl: Very few people think it's a joke.

Brad Parscale: I think it's a joke when they involve myself. 'Cause I know my own activities, and I know the activities of this campaign. I was there. It's just a farce.

Lesley Stahl: It's a farce that you colluded with the Russians?

Brad Parscale: Yeah. It's just a joke.

What about what happened on Twitter? Which was flooded with pro-Trump tweets generated by robots, or bots.

Lesley Stahl: Did you have a hand in generating these bots --

Brad Parscale: I had nothing to do with bots. I don't think bots work.

Lesley Stahl: You were called the king of the bots.

What possible point is there to asking these questions?  Either Brad Parscale was part of a massive criminal conspiracy with the Russians to undermine the American electoral system, in which case he would say exactly what he said above, or he wasn't, in which case he would say exactly what he said above.  What possible purpose could this serve?  I want to know what is wrong with this person.  Brian Blessed wants to know too.

 

Ignore all the parts of the interview that are about this shit.  It's obviously pointless.

Fortunately, the fact that the interviewer was too unprofessional to avoid wasting everyone's time with idiocy did not prevent Brad Parscale from stating what he came to the interview to say:
 

Quote

Brad Parscale: I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win. Twitter is how he talked to the people. Facebook was going to be how he won.

Lesley Stahl: And Facebook IS how he won.

Brad Parscale: I think so.  I think Donald Trump won, but I think Facebook was the method -- it was the highway in which his car drove on.

Lesley Stahl: And these were ads on Facebook?

Brad Parscale: Facebook, we did 'em on Twitter, Google search, other platforms. Facebook was the 500-pound gorilla, 80 percent of the budget kind of thing.

OK, you got that?  Facebook was the centerpiece of Trump's campaign and eventual victory.  It's all about Facebook.  That's what the Brad-man is here to say.  You understand that message?

OK, now ignore that part too.  This is obviously misdirection by the Trump campaign.  Social media services come and go.  By their nature, they tend towards natural monopoly, so only one is really dominant in a given region of the world at any particular time.  But Facebook sits atop a throne made of the bones of Myspace, Friendster, and a bunch of other dead services.  In time, some new upstart will add Facebook's place and add its bones to their regal seat.  There is nothing particularly magical about Facebook.  They have risen and they will eventually fall.

 

Furthermore, there are signs that their inevitable decline will occur sooner rather than later.  The fact that their founder got dragged before the US congress and forced to explain technology to a bunch of senile muppets is one such sign.  Getting the Democrats to commit hard to a theater of war that is already losing relevance would be a very Trump move.

Alternatively, the interview reveals just how incompetent Hillary Clinton's Facebook team was:
 

Quote

Brad Parscale: Yeah. So Facebook now lets you get to places and places possibly that you would never go with TV ads. Now, I can find, you know, 15 people in the Florida Panhandle that I would never buy a TV commercial for. And, we took opportunities that I think the other side didn't.

 

Lesley Stahl: Like what?

 

Brad Parscale: Well, we had our-- their staff embedded inside our offices.

 

Lesley Stahl: What?

 

Brad Parscale: Yeah, Facebook employees would show up for work every day in our offices.

 

Lesley Stahl: Whoa, wait a minute. Facebook employees showed up at the Trump headquarters --

 

Brad Parscale: Google employees, and Twitter employees.

 

Lesley Stahl: They were embedded in your campaign?

 

Brad Parscale: I mean, like, they were there multiple days a week, three, four days a week, two days week, five days a week --

 

Lesley Stahl: What were they doing inside? I mean --

 

Brad Parscale: Helping teach us how to use their platform. I wanna get --

 

Lesley Stahl: Helping him get elected?

 

Brad Parscale: I asked each one of them by email, I wanna know every, single secret button, click, technology you have. "I wanna know everything you would tell Hillary's campaign plus some. And I want your people here to teach me how to use it."

 

Lesley Stahl: Inside?

 

Brad Parscale: Yeah, I want 'em sittin' right next to us --

 

Lesley Stahl: How do you know they weren't Trojan Horses?

 

Brad Parscale: 'Cause I'd ask 'em to be Republicans, and I'd -- we'd talk to 'em.

 

Lesley Stahl: Oh, you only wanted Republicans?

 

Brad Parscale: I wanted people who support Donald Trump from their companies.

 

Lesley Stahl: And that's what you got?

 

Brad Parscale: Yeah. They already have divisions set up that way.

 

Lesley Stahl: What do you mean?

 

Brad Parscale: They already have groups of people in their political divisions that are Republican and Democrat.

 

Lesley Stahl: You're kidding?

 

Brad Parscale: Yeah, they're businesses, they are publicly traded companies with stock price.

 

Lesley Stahl: Did Hillary's campaign have someone embedded --

 

Brad Parscale: I had heard that they didn't accept any of their offers.

 

Lesley Stahl: So you're saying Facebook and the others offered an embed, and they said no.

 

Brad Parscale: That's what I've heard.

 

People in the Clinton campaign confirmed that the offer was made and turned down. 

 

It's entirely possible that the Trump campaign is baiting the Democrats into committing more resources to a theater of war where his side is so effortlessly superior that they would just be wasting their money.  But honestly telling people what his strategy was is so obviously bait that it can't be wise to take the idea that Trump won mainly as a result of Facebook literally.

 

No, what's really interesting about this interview is that it shows how technology will change politics:

 

Quote

And indeed, both campaigns used Facebook's technology extensively to reach out to potential voters. Parscale said the Trump campaign used the technology to microtarget on a scale never seen before -- and to customize their ads for individual voters.

 

Brad Parscale: We were making hundreds of thousands of 'em.

 

Lesley Stahl: You make 100,000 ads.

 

Brad Parscale: Programmatically. In one day. In one day.

 

Lesley Stahl: So 100,000 different ads every day?

 

Brad Parscale: Average day 50-60 thousands ads.

 

This was all automated.

 

Brad Parscale: Changing language, words, colors, changing things because certain people like a green button better than a blue button. Some people like the word "donate" or "contribute."

 

Lesley Stahl: So how would you know ... let's say I like a green button. How do you know I'd only like a green button?

 

Brad Parscale: Because I'd give you the red, blue buttons, you never click on 'em.

 

Parscale showed us how they tested: by sending out multiple versions of the same ad with only subtle differences.

 

Brad Parscale: Here we have an American flag, here we have a face of Hillary. Different colors, the blues, different messages above.

 

Lesley Stahl: So you'd send two identical ads with different colors?

 

Brad Parscale: Maybe thousands.

 

Lesley Stahl: You'd send THOUSAND of ads with different colors?

 

Brad Parscale: Different colors. What it is is: what can make people react? What catches their attention? Remember, there's so much noise on your phone. You know, or on your desktop. What is it that makes it go: Poof! "I'm gonna stop and look."

 

To get people to stop and look, he crafted different messages for different people -- so that you only got ads about the issues you cared about most. He showed us three ads that looked alike.

 

Brad Parscale: It's pretty much the identical design. Positive coloring. Different message.

 

Lesley Stahl: This is one is tax, this one is childcare, this one is energy.

 

Brad Parscale: They were all targeted to different users of whatever platform, in this case it was Facebook.

 

Sent out to different people. And it could be each other's next-door neighbors…all in Ohio.

 

Lesley Stahl: This one person at 11 Elm Street gets this one and 13 Elm Street gets that one.

 

Brad Parscale: Yup, yup.

 

The Trump campaign used, and is using (Trump never stopped campaigning) the power of the eldritch outer god of Evolution.  If you know anything about Evolution and all its manifold horrors, this should scare you.  But it did not scare the interviewer, as they possess that singular trait that keeps mind-shattering cosmic horror at bay: fucking ignorance.
 

Quote

Parscale took some heat for taking microtargeting too far because he hired Cambridge Analytica. It's a company that uses so-called psychographics that microtarget ads based on personality. For instance, an extrovert would get one kind of message, a neurotic person another. It's controversial because of its Orwellian overtones.

 

After Trump won, Cambridge Analytica said it was key to the victory. But Parscale insists he never used psychographics. He said it doesn't work.

 

Lesley Stahl: So you didn't use it because you didn't think it really worked, as opposed to you didn't use it because you thought it was wrong that it was manipulative or sinister, or something like that.

 

Brad Parscale: No, I don't believe it's sinister.

 

Lesley Stahl: No. OK, you just don't think it works.

 

Brad Parscale: No, I just don't think it works.

 

This interviewer thinks that Brad Parscale might have used black magic mind control, and this prospect is clearly disturbing to her because she is worried that evil men might connive to mind-rape people into voting for Trump.  This is about the worst possible crime that this interviewer can imagine anyone committing.  In fact, what Brad Parscale admitted to is far worse and the interviewer is too fucking inbred to notice.

If psychographics, theoretically speaking, weren't a pile of horseshit and it were possible to mind-rape Facebook users into doing the bidding of an evil overlord, then at least the depravity Facebook users would be subjected to would be limited by the imagination of the evil overlord.  Evolution is, by definition, not teleological.  There is no design behind it.  It just oozes by trial and error into every nook and cranny of the possible.  The possible is a much larger set of unspeakable cosmic horror than the merely imaginable.  The human mind came up with the works of the Marquis de Sade.  Evolution came up with parasitoid wasps.

 

Unchained, self-modifying optimization routines will do awful things that their human minders would never think of.  Read this account of a coder who accidentally created a racist AI that affirmed local bigotry in a language the coder wasn't even fully literate in.  That is the horror of adaptation.  Evolution isn't malicious.  It's much, much worse.

 

This is just the start.  In the long term, the human race is doomed to being manipulated by smart ad-bots into doing nonsensical, debasing things.  Not even cynicism will protect us, no more than the potent insecticide nicotine protects the tobacco plant against tobacco hornworms.  Evolution is going to torture us all for no reason forever and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.  I don't blame Brad Parscale, just so we're clear, but I would like the record to state that Trump was one of the first to enlist the aid of the outer gods in order to secure a political victory.  Self-refining ads will be much, much worse than psychographics, because eventually trial and error will evolve something like psychographics that actually works.  Human attention is up for grabs, and inevitably it will be captured by self-refining artificial intelligence.  AI will figure out how to make ads that are more attention-grabbing and more addictive than gambling and pornography.  If you want a vision of the future, imagine a small orange robot hand grabbing a human pussy - forever.

 

Of course, everyone knew that robots would kill humanity, or worse, eventually.  But a direct revelation on the exact methods they will use is a rare treat.

 

But I realize that not everyone is a connoisseur of robo-eschatology.  So I have saved my explanation of the most exciting disclosure from this interview for last:

 

Quote

Brad Parscale: It said "Donald Trump is thinking about running for president. We need a website in two days." So I wrote back, I said, "Yeah, I'll do it for $1,500."

 

Lesley Stahl: $1,500?

 

Brad Parscale: Yeah. And by the end, it was $94 million.

 

$94 million is what his company was paid. Much of it was spent on things like buying ads.  Parscale learned very fast on the job, with the help of the Republican National Committee. They had amassed a giant database to identify the issues people cared about, and predict how nearly 200 million Americans would vote.

One reason Parscale thinks President Trump won is because of an issue the RNC database honed in on that he says the Clinton campaign missed:

 

Lesley Stahl: Infrastructure.

 

Brad Parscale: Infrastructure. It was voters in the rust belt that cared about their roads being rebuilt, their highways, their bridges. They felt like the world was crumbling. So I started making ads that would show the bridge crumbling. You know, that's microtargeting them. Because I can find the 1,500 people in one town that care about infrastructure. Now, that might be a voter that normally votes Democrat.

 

While he tried to persuade Democrats to vote for Mr. Trump -- the campaign was accused, in a Businessweek article, of trying to suppress the vote of "idealistic white liberals, young women and African Americans," a charge he denies.

 

Lesley Stahl: Did I ever mention that I took a double dose of stupid pills this morning?

 

Brad Parscale: I will tolerate your aggressive waste of everyone's time because I am a gentleman with really outstanding facial hair.  Also, I have already earned my place in Valhalla, and no nonsense you concoct now will revoke that.

 

Lesley Stahl: Are you sure?  I mean, I am about to say some really stupid shit that is a complete waste of time.

 

Brad Parscale: Yes.
 

Lesley Stahl: (Does so)

 

Brad Parscale: Yeah. First of all, I -- it's not very hard to figure out. Pennsylvania, Ohio, you know. I mean, the same -- I think we've had the same swing states for decades.

 

Parscale told us the Russian plotline is pushed by liberals who think they lost because he cheated. The irony, he says, is that it wasn't a foreign entity helping the campaign, but left-leaning American companies like Twitter, Google, and above all Facebook.

 

Brad Parscale: These social platforms are all invented by very liberal people on the West and East Coast, and we figure out how to use it to push conservative values. I don't think they ever thought that would happen. I would say the number one thing that people come up to me is, like, "I just never thought Republicans would be the ones to figure out how to use all this."

 

Lesley Stahl: So a liberal invents all this stuff and a conservative in the Middle-West figures out how to use it?

 

Brad Parscale: And I think we used it better than anyone ever had in history.

 

The part bolded above is why it doesn't matter if Facebook explodes tomorrow.  Facebook, Google, the Kroger family of supermarkets; all of them work the same way.  If a service is free, the user is the product.  Services that have created mass databases of personal information have been around for years.  A combination of social networking services and automation are making it possible for political campaigns to take advantage of these databases in ways that they could not previously.  It is now possible for a political campaign to efficiently attack weaknesses in an opponent's coalition that were too obscure and diffuse to attack before.  The traditional political coalitions will not survive this development.

The ability to make targeted campaigns to small, dispersed swing demographics puts long-tail candidates on a much more even playing field with more traditional candidates.  It has already been pointed out several times here that Trump's campaign in 2016-present wasn't so different from Ross Perot's in 1992.  But Trump had, among other advantages, the technologically-assisted ability to get his small hands into crevices that others could not take advantage of.  He has enjoyed several other advantages, like the ability to just shrug off manufactured outrage, to electrify crowds with postmodern Charlie Sheen mantras, and twenty four years for Bill Clinton to lose his edge.  However, this technologically-enabled micro-targeting should be more interesting than these other advantages because it's an advantage that someone who isn't Trump could use.

In short, it's a fulfillment of the prophecy laid out in this surprisingly good Newsweek article from ten years ago.  I have no idea what happened to that author, by the way.  They seem to have been able to write coherent articles, and yet they still worked for Newsweek.  Presumably the management had them executed.

 

 

 

 

 

¹. i.e. everyone else made a subpar effort at comprehending my brilliance

[Toxn]

As someone trained extensively in the dark arts (ie: evolutionary theory), the above holds no terror for me.

 

There are reasons why life didn't end the second parasitoid wasps evolved (awful though they are), and these will hold true for evolutionary algorithm-generated ads as well. More than that, all human-implemented evolutionary algorithms suffer from issues that the real thing doesn't, and I expect these to work against the aipocalypse as well.

[Ramlaen]

And Trump gets a second supreme court judge, replacing Kennedy is going to be huge in the long term.

[T___A]

If the dems were smart they would've accepted Gorsuch and filibuster whoever Trump nominates this time around. 

[Ramlaen]