About Trump’s Election

I mostly agree with Eric Weinstein about Trump. Weinstein recently tweeted his position:

I will say it simply. @realDonaldTrump and @JDVance have the opportunity to change everything. Everything depends on @realDonaldTrump’s use of this historic opportunity. This could restore America. Or tank it.

To say it my way, this is the highest *variance* presidency of my lifetime. As bad as Kamala was (and you know my position) she was probably lower variance. Lower variance and much lower mean.

This is potentially amazing because the sky is the limit. Given the chance, I will help anyone to use this mandate to make it the best presidency it can possibly be. But you can’t ask me to close my eyes to the risks. I’m just not that guy. Never was and never will be. This is incredibly dangerous as we are seated at the high stakes table now.

I don’t understand Americans who want Trump to fail. I think he is a brilliant man which I have always said. But he is also incredibly divisive. I think he truly loves his country and wants the best for it. He is also very dangerous and unpredictable. And he NEEDS that unpredictability to survive. He is very strong. And perhaps he needs to be dangerous. I could be persuaded that this is necessary.

He learned last time that you need an sea of people to govern. He won’t make that mistake again.

Am I optimistic? Yes. Very. Am I deeply deeply worried? Absolutely. Very."

Again in my language: stop focusing on the mean. If I absolutely had to say what I am feeling, with a gun to my head I might say this is high mean, high variance, negative skew, high kurtosis.

As a weather report: this is a low confidence forecast of an amazing spring day with a bit more than a slight chance of apocalypse.

I know “But Bruh, Are you MAGA?” No. This is why we have more than one moment of a distribution and not a simple binary. MAGA is a broad coalition that seats some people who I view as “unworkable”. I can’t personally endorse a movement that tolerates that element in order to win. But I get along with plenty of MAGA People. And generally they get me. Most of them like me, understand me from podcasting, and don’t need me wearing a hat.

Lastly, you have no idea how desperately I want this to work. And it could be amazing. I think that is likely but with very weak conviction. As above.

Here to help, This is more or less what I predicted. Nothing has changed. And word to the wise: Mind the time *before* the inauguration. Don’t take your eye off the ball prematurely.

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About Sasha Stone’s Podcast

This week, a friend introduced me to one of his favorite podcasts: "Sasha Stone's Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning."

I jumped right into Sasha' most current podcast, "The Mugshot Heard Round the World: Did the Democrats finally make a Trump voter?"" Sasha is intensely and creatively thoughtful and her non-partisan ideas will emotionally move for those of us who are not completely enraptured with one political tribe. Hence, the "Free Thinking" part of the title to her podcast.

Despite the paltry and insulting offerings to American voters year after year, the challenge is still to vote for the lesser of two evils, right? What is the lesser of two evils in 2024, at the point where the Democrats have repeatedly shat upon the rule of law, desperately embraced censorship and become louder cheerleaders for endless war than even the Republicans?

And will this be the year when black voters thoroughly reject the political party that has repeatedly taken them for granted, often in insulting ways? I'm speaking of the Democrats. I'm basing this question on several conversations I've recently had over the past month, but Sasha also sees a wider trend based on her own research.  And I don't think that most loyal democrats have the faintest inkling that these tectonic plates are dramatically shifting.

In this single episode, Sasha repeatedly challenged me, forcing me to reframe some of my long-held ideas. I immediately became a subscriber. I invite you to listen if you are looking to be challenged.

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Robert Malone’s Concerns About Imminent American Collapse

Robert Malone:

As I consider the evidence, I think we are observing more than just the mundane banality of evil. I think we are observing the consequences of the last gasps of Imperial Pax Americana play out in real time before our eyes. American imperialism is quite literally running out of gas, teetering on the edge, awaiting some push (from BRICS? From the CCP?) over the knife’s edge towards dollar-based fiat currency collapse and imperial decline such as the British empire saw during the 20th century.

Here is the thesis. The rise and fall of empires is not driven by failures of leaders, or the madness (or senility) of presidents, kings and emperors. The longevity and durability of empires are self limited by the accumulated weight and inefficiency of their own bureaucracies. And, in turn, these bureaucracies are the consequence of a million tiny cuts, each rationalized as being in the best interests of the empire and its citizens. The United States is dying under the weight of the administrative state, abetted by a lazy and corrupt two party political system which cares more for the preservation of its own privilege than for the Constitution and Nation-state that it ostensibly serves.

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Greg Lukianoff Recommends Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Masses”

I just spotted this review of The Revolt of the Masses by Greg Lukianoff." Greg's review has convinced me to order my own copy of The Revolt of the Masses.

Excerpts:

“The Revolt of the Public” explains that the shifts in media technologies that we believe accelerated American political polarization and played havoc with young people’s mental health were actually part of a much larger global transformation that Gurri calls “The Fifth Wave.” Essentially, the empowerment of vast multitudes of people to communicate directly with the world and with each other has genuinely transformed society. Unfortunately, in its current state, this media revolution has only been able to tear things down; institutions, ideas, and yes, even people (a.k.a. cancel culture). This idea is what Gurri calls “negation.”

. . . . Gurri shows how this manifested in the 2011 Arab Spring and how it has had ripple effects in Spain, Israel, and the American Occupy Wall Street movement. Gurri also argues that these movements generally were rich with targets: people, institutions, and ideas that needed to be torn down, but those same movements were often very hesitant to offer constructive solutions or realistic reforms. This hopeless point of view amounted to a kind of nihilism, according to Gurri—usually not the kind of nihilism of the philosophers, but a de facto nihilism in which nothing constructive is proposed to replace what needs to be torn down.

You can see this in American society in everything from “End the Fed,” to “abolish the police,” to cancel culture on both the right and the left, and to the absolute negation of all assumptions represented by the QAnon conspiracy.

One thing that must be said about the “crisis of authority” we find ourselves in due to the overwhelming power of negation is that very often what critics have discovered is that our existing “knowledge” was truly based on some pretty thin evidence, bad assumptions, and sometimes not much more than the pieties of some elites. Understanding the crisis of authority as only being wrongfully destructive of expertise is to miss that, frankly, we are often asking far too much of expertise and experts, and oversight itself has not been all that rigorous. Negation is indeed tearing things down that needed to be torn down; unfortunately, it seems to be taking everything else with it.

Continue ReadingGreg Lukianoff Recommends Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Masses”

Dozens of Things the Mainstream News Won’t Tell You About Ukraine

Fascinating thread by Glenn Greenwald. Many topics related to the situation in Ukraine, including Google's decision to take down Oliver Stone's documentary, which discusses the history of U.S. involvement in Ukraine (you can now view it on Rumble).

Many people on the political left would rather feed their brains with DNC-aligned "news." You'll know who they are, because they size up this complex conflict by walking around zombie-eyed uttering things like "Putin is worse than Hitler."  They are getting this "information" from "news" outlets parading out endless streams of retired military generals, all of them beating the war drums to crank up sagging ad revenue in the post-Trump era.  You would think that we would have learned some important and expensive lessons after our Iraq "weapons of mass destruction" post-mortem, but no.

Continue ReadingDozens of Things the Mainstream News Won’t Tell You About Ukraine