Legiondude

The Handmaid's tale is the the God's not dead of feminist of literature.

Tweet for historical perspective on Florida 
 

Forwarding "We will fight until the last American" as the new NATO motto.

By that standard the world has been laughing at us for some time before Trump became president.

Speaking of 2nd Amendment, Cody Wilson finished his suit against the State Department for the right to publish the design plans for 3D printing or milling major components or complete sets of his open-source firearm designs under 1st Amendment protections
 

Speaking of 2nd Amendment, Cody Wilson finished his suit against the State Department for the right to publish the design plans for 3D printing or milling major components or complete sets of his open-source firearm designs under 1st Amendment protections
 

Speaking of 2nd Amendment, Cody Wilson finished his suit against the State Department for the right to publish the design plans for 3D printing or milling major components or complete sets of his open-source firearm designs under 1st Amendment protections
 

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:
 

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:
 

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:
 
 
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:
 
 
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.
 
 
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:
 
 
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

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.

Isn't that just the european media?

You know that saying about how Waterloo was won on the fields of Eton?  Subtly implying that everyone making decisions during the battle had been rubbing elbows since around the time their balls dropped? US politics are like that too, at least at a national level. It's mega-incest.
 
Barack Obama went to Harvard. George W. Bush went to Yale *and* Harvard.  Bill Clinton went to Yale. George H. W. Bush went to Yale. Trump went to the University of Pennsylvania, which is still an Ivy, but it's a clue that Trump maybe doesn't see himself as quite the same tribe as the rest of these people. 
 
Then there is the way he talks. I think you Brits have entire four year degree programs devoted to the study of the relationship between social class and regional accent. In the US it's a little simpler. Any sort of regional accent is gauche. Anyone who is anyone will usually try to mask their regional accent, or at the very least speak in a certain *way* about certain *things.*
 
This may seem stupid to seize upon, but it's very informative. People imitate the accents of their friends, that's how the things reproduce, after all. So if Trump still speaks with a low to middle class New York accent and with low to middle class New York mannerisms, that is a clue as to whom he considers his friends. Trump is not trying to fit in to Washington and make friends there.
 
Trump is an outsider, and previously you had two sorts of outsiders in US Federal politics.  You had the sellouts, who compromised in order to get traction, and ended up the same as anyone else.  Joe Scarborough wrote a pretty good book on the massive bureaucracy that has perfected the art of breaking and taming politicians, but there are many other accounts. That's basically the plot of Yes Minister. Every once in a while there would be a politician who proved insoluble to this process. They would be the Ron Pauls and suchlike. They stuck to their principles, and thus never achieved anything. Admirable, perhaps, but totally harmless to the machine. 
 
Trump is anything but harmless. It was recently announced that the Federal government slashed 24,000 jobs under Trump. That is simultaneously tiny and huge. For the president to win *at all* against the bureaucracy is a reversal of one hundred and thirty years of legal and informal precedent. Even if the material effects are small, people will notice. 
 
It's like the Japanese smashing the tsarist fleet at Tsiushima.  The actual immediate implications of Japan beating Russia in a war were modest, in a global sense. But all around the world people under the rule of European colonial administration suddenly realized that white men bleed too. 

My favourite Star Wars movie to have come out in the recent years is called Star Trek.

Reminds me of a point I saw regarding this incident brought up on one of the pro-gun subreddits. It was a comment made by a pro-gun user (who was recalling an argument they had with an anti-gunner) about the whole "good guy with a gun stops mass shootings" thing, and the definition of mass shootings is flexed in such a manner in the media that by the definition there's a significant amount of victims as the baseline. So incidents like in Oklahoma are just single actors stopping individual criminals, but as school shootings continue the "good guys with guns" will "forever" fail to protect the many children harmed in these incidents. Ergo, gun proliferation in the general population is useless for protecting people.

That is a fair and good question.

My model is that Trump is an insurgent, populist candidate.  His opposition is what could loosely be termed "the establishment," which consists more or less of the entire US government minus the military and some law enforcement.  There are exceptions here; there are plenty of anti-Trump officers in the military, although his popularity with the enlisted is near-universal.  There are probably also some anti-Trump law enforcement officers.  I can't imagine that many senior FBI members are fans, for example.  Trump's opposition also includes organizations that are not formally part of the US government, but work in concert with it so closely that they might as well be.  These are organizations such as all accredited institutions of higher learning, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), most of the press, any respectable publications such as scientific journals or magazines that people read to look smart, like The Economist, and the trendy and cool part of the tech industry (e.g. Google and Facebook), which has been in bed with spooks and worse for at least the past ten years.

Trump's base consists of an extremely ad-hoc coalition of evangelicals, manufacturing-sector union workers, certain sectors of industry but not others, nationalists, anti-immigration hardliners (who substantially overlap with the union workers for obvious economic reasons), the NRA (although they're not exactly in love with him), and various ideological cranks.  Also, much was made of Trump's support among extremist racialists, but it's been pointed out before that those people are too rare to matter when it comes to counting votes.

Think tanks, libertarians and churches can go either way, no way to safely generalize.  However, Trump is extremely polarizing so there are relatively few people in the US who are entirely indifferent to his presidency.

Trump has very few friends in the government, his base of support lies almost entirely outside of it.  So he has to make frequent appeals to that base, and keep them excited and fired up otherwise his many enemies could dismantle his presidency.  He is, again, so polarizing, that if Trump were to lose power, the results would probably be extremely painful and humiliating for him.

Therefore, if Trump did anything to strongly alienate what little support he has in the government, I would be shocked and conclude he had lose his mind.  For example, if he tried to win over socially liberal opponents and bolster some of his libertarian-leaning base by de-funding and publicly humiliating the DEA for the years of awful and pernicious shit they've done, I will conclude that he's nuts.  It would make some people happy, but it does not fit into the model of a dispassionate and Machiavellian Trump that I entertain.  The Trump I envision always puts practical concerns before ideological ones; he simply has too many enemies to do otherwise.

If Trump were to concede on the border wall in any public way, I will conclude that he's mentally incompetent.  This is not the same thing as not building the wall, although at this point I think he will.  If Trump publicly says that, no, on second thought the wall is a stupid idea and he spoke to some economists at the Reason Institute and actually free trade and immigration is totally a good idea, he's fucking screwed up.  A lot of Republican politicians have tried to make peace in the past by publicly sacrificing some previously held principle (c.f. Dubya's "I'm a uniter, not a divider.")  Trump has so far not taken that bait, but if he does on the wall, I will have to conclude that everything he did heretofore was some sort of gigantic fluke.  If he gets politically outmaneuvered and is unable to build the wall because he can't secure funding, that's different.  If that happens, you'll know because he'll be screaming that the only reason there isn't a big, beautiful chunk of concrete standing proud above the Rio Grande is that the goddamn Democrats just couldn't get their act together.  That is the tactic he's using now, but the Democrats have proven so feckless that I don't think they can deny him his wall in the long run.

That's also why I disregard any piece that talks about how wrong Trump is on issue XYZ and he really needs to change his mind.  For starters, nearly the entire media hates Trump and will publish any fool thing that paints him in a negative light.  It's beyond parody at this point.  Second, that's exactly the sort of bait that previous Republicans became notorious for chomping down on.  Even if Trump actually is wrong on issue XYZ, he's maintaining the stance he has for a reason.  He can't afford to break up his coalition by suddenly changing course.  Even if an important part of his coalition really is wrong on issue XYZ (see DEA above).

Similarly, in the international arena, if Trump were to start talking about how the Saudis are horrible allies really, and frankly they deserve to lose all US support and weapons sales, and if that results in them all being dragged out into the street and messily murdered so much the better, and then if he were to actually withdraw US support, I would conclude that Trump was crazy.  If he were just to say it as a way to put pressure on the Saudis, and then squeeze them for something he wanted before going back to being friends, then that would be classic Trump.  Again, abandoning the Saudis would make some people happy, but the Saudis make themselves too useful to Trump to just abandon like that, odious though they are.  Particularly if you believe the rumors that MBS had his close relatives tortured, and then passed the juicy information about whom they were making campaign contributions to on to Trump.  I don't know if I endorse that particular theory, but I suspect something like that did happen.

Basically, if Trump were to do anything to attempt to win over detractors but at the expense of part of his base, I will become convinced he doesn't know what he's doing.  If he says one thing and then does something that seems completely at odds with what he said, then I am not convinced that it is a sign of incompetence necessarily.  Trump posturing just to put pressure on people I can buy.  That's smart, in a cutthroat sort of way, and Trump is definitely cutthroat.  Trump actively undermining his own support in any sort of attempt to appease or win over his opponents would genuinely surprise me.  That isn't going to work, and he should know better.

If Trump were to carelessly reveal what he actually believes in a way that alienated his base, I would consider that a mistake.  How grave a mistake would depend on the circumstances.

I have only a vague notion of what Trump actually believes or what his actual motivations are.  But let's suppose he's actually a snobbish elitist who views most of his supporters as ignorant mud-yokels.  Actually, I think it's pretty unlikely he thinks like that; he has trophy wives and gold-plated hair and everything.  He's so nouveau riche it's painful to look at, and he probably thinks of himself as a man of the people, just rich thanks to hard work, talent and some luck.  But for sake of argument.  If he were to publicly indicate that he actually holds his supporters in contempt, that would convince me that he'd either gone senile or just gotten astronomically lucky thus far.

Or let's suppose that Trump really is a white nationalist.  Again, I'm having difficulty reconciling that idea with what I've seen, but for sake of argument.  If he were to publicly disclose this, it would make a very small part of his base overjoyed and the majority of them disgusted.  Pumping up a tiny portion of your base at the expense of the greater portion is just stupid politics.  So if Trump has any wildly unpopular opinions that would drive away voters, he'll keep them private.

That's what it would take.  I would be looking for a large, unforced error that cost Trump his political base.  If he says things that sound idiotic, that doesn't necessarily mean he's an idiot.  He could be posturing to make his opponents spend money they don't have to, like he did in 2016 when he held rallies in states he had no hope of winning, but did anyway to get the Hillary campaign to waste more money on their safe states because her campaign and events were more expensive than his.  If Trump says something that seems at odds with his previous stances, again, it's not necessarily a fuck-up.  I think we can say in retrospect that his tweets about being willing to continue DACA were a ploy, and a very successful one at that.  The ploy did make his base anxious, but only the most drama-prone actually split with him over it.  As Trump took no concrete actions to actually reverse his position, the vast majority of his base were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and where rewarded by the conspicuous public humiliations that the Democrats suffered from the ploy.  If Trump says something that is only dubiously in English and doesn't make any logical or semantic sense, that doesn't necessarily mean he's an idiot or that he's had a stroke.  I mean, it could be, but it will be a while before we know because Trump says complete nonsense every once in a while.  I am convinced that he does this for the sheer joy of watching people go ballistic on Twitter.  If I could make thousands of people lose their shit just by typing "covfefe" with my thumbs, I can't imagine it's a vice I would or could resist.

Reminds me of a point I saw regarding this incident brought up on one of the pro-gun subreddits. It was a comment made by a pro-gun user (who was recalling an argument they had with an anti-gunner) about the whole "good guy with a gun stops mass shootings" thing, and the definition of mass shootings is flexed in such a manner in the media that by the definition there's a significant amount of victims as the baseline. So incidents like in Oklahoma are just single actors stopping individual criminals, but as school shootings continue the "good guys with guns" will "forever" fail to protect the many children harmed in these incidents. Ergo, gun proliferation in the general population is useless for protecting people.

Two things spring to mind on reading this:
 
1)  There is a cogent and internally coherent argument to be made that a falling unemployment rate isn't necessarily a good thing.  Low unemployment rates per se are not always an indicator of optimal economic health.  They might indicate that a lot of people are stuck in jobs that aren't the most productive ones possible, and future businesses might have a harder time getting going because there is no pool of available workers to draw on.  That's assuming things are on the up and up; the numbers could be gamed in a number of ways, like adjusting the number of people who are considered to be "looking" for jobs, or by placing people in economically meaningless make-work jobs.  However, this does need to be balanced against the fact that employment has substantial pro-social externalities.  The optimal employment rate for keeping everyone sane and happy is probably a lot higher than the optimal employment rate for best economic growth.

2)  I don't fucking care lol.  The economics spokesman under Obama tried to claim that the recession wasn't as bad as it looked by trying to pass off the first derivative of the unemployment rate vs. time as the unemployment rate.  Trump drumming up buzz based on ambiguous economic indicators that are at least actually true is peanuts compared to the bullshit that Obama would spout that everyone was supposed to just accept.  The establishment is a pack of murderous liars and thieves, and they've proven their incompetence over decades.  If they're bitching and moaning that Trump is going to burn everything to the ground, then fucking good.  They're in closer proximity to Trump than I am, they'll catch on fire first.
 

Apparently the guy had tried jumping the fence at the White House last year, so his guns were seized by Illinois police
 
His dad asked them back nicely and promised he wouldn't let his son get em, and apparently....let him have em anyways

Apparently the guy had tried jumping the fence at the White House last year, so his guns were seized by Illinois police
 
His dad asked them back nicely and promised he wouldn't let his son get em, and apparently....let him have em anyways

I've been thinking this lately as well.

It's AIs all the way down!

In case you come across anyone pointing out former SCOTUS Justice Stevens is a Republican and appointed by one, hand them this chart
 
 

In case you come across anyone pointing out former SCOTUS Justice Stevens is a Republican and appointed by one, hand them this chart
 
 

When students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas return to class after spring break next week, they'll be required to carry clear backpacks.
The move is meant to ramp up security measures after last month's deadly shooting in Parkland, Florida, and a series of breaches since.
"Clear backpacks are the only backpacks that will be permitted on campus," said Broward County School Superintendent Robert Runcie said in a letter sent to parents.
The district will provide the bags for free, he said.  In addition to the new backpack policy, students and school staff will be required to wear IDs at all times while on campus.
 
 
The irony is deafening.