Ran Prieur

November 8.

2016-11-08T20:40:55Z

November 8. Here's an updated Chance That Your Vote Will Decide the Election. In New Hampshire, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania your chance is at least as good as 1 in 2 million. And you might be surprised at your results on the ISideWith.com quiz. I just took it and got 99% Jill Stein, 78% Gary Johnson, 73% Hillary Clinton, and 22% Donald Trump.

November 7.

2016-11-07T19:30:01Z

November 7. So readers have sent me some arguments that that Hillary is dangerous: 1) She's a dutiful agent of American foreign policy which has been dangerous since the Indians named George Washington "Town Destroyer". 2) Her hard-fighting personality, and her desire to prove she's strong, might make her less likely to back down from conflicts, specifically the conflict with Russia over Syria. 3) She would continue the neoliberal agenda, which is dangerous because it's a dead end.

The third argument is related to the only reason I can see that Trump might be better: a fast crash is less destructive than a slow crash, because after a fast crash, all the people who know how to rebuild a complex system are still around.

And the second argument is interesting because if it were the other way around, if the Republican wanted to be tough on Russia while the Democrat wanted to be soft on Russia, everyone would still be supporting the same candidate, but they would be rationalizing it with the completely opposite argument. (And if the role of the intellect is to justify choices that we make for emotional reasons, then what are the emotional reasons?)

Have you heard that George R.R. Martin is stumping for Hillary? That makes me wonder which Game of Thrones characters are most like the two candidates. People are going to compare Hillary to Cersei Lannister, but I think she's a lot more like Cersei's father Tywin Lannister, while Trump is obviously Joffrey. If this world were a TV show, I would totally be cheering for Trump because it would make a much better story. Of course that's why he's doing so well, because in American culture, politics and entertainment are one.

Who should you vote for? This 2008 pdf article calculates the probability that your vote will make a difference, and even in a swing state it's only around one in ten million. If your state is not near the middle of this snake chart, I believe in voting as personal therapy. Whatever direction you want to go with your day-to-day identity and decision making, your vote for president is an opportunity to be that kind of person. But I do believe in trying to influence the system in local races. If you vote every year for stuff like city council and school board, there's a pretty good chance that your one vote will eventually do something. The problem is that you have to go out of your way to research stuff that's not covered on Facebook.

My prediction is that Hillary will win, she'll be an unpopular one-termer, and the political and economic systems will continue to muddle along. The real action is on the level of psychology, and it will continue to bubble up in new ways other than electoral politics. If there's any political movement that can get us through this, it's the Pirate Party, which is already taking over Iceland.

November 4. Continuing on the election, maybe I've misunderstood the mass consciousness. I was thinking that Hillary is the most bland and safe candidate possible, while Trump is a ball of lightning, the most obviously flawed and scandalous candidate ever to lead a major party ticket. Why is he now within a polling error of being president? Ordinary Americans aren't going to bed hungry -- by medieval standards of material wealth, they're living like kings. But they're bored, depressed, starving for "meaning" (a word with hidden depths). People are voting for Trump because they feel suffocated by society and they want to fuck shit up.

This makes sense to me. When Trump promises to "turn Washington upside down," I can feel liberating excitement. But my head overrules my gut. I'm not going to be like that guy who is so afraid of being alone that he marries the first woman who hits on him. I'm not supporting Biff from Back To The Future 2, just because he's the first chaos candidate who happened to come along.

We're in the age of chaos now. I used to think collapse would happen for technical reasons, and those do play a role, but when I look around I see it happening for psychological reasons. Sarah Perry has a new post, A Bad Carver, that explains in detail how technology has made us miserable by breaking up our world into functions and components that no longer fit together. So we have enough food, but the process of feeding ourselves is no longer part of an integrated whole like it was for our ancestors.

Nobody knows how to fix this, but the popular urge to do something about it is only going to get stronger. So I'm thinking, let Hillary kick the can down the road another four years, and we'll have a whole new crop of chaos candidates, some of whom might be curious and competent and able to build consensus for smart radical changes.

But here's what I don't understand. People keep describing Hillary as "scary" and "dangerous". Are they projecting? Because from where I'm standing she's a boring status-quo candidate firmly allied to global interests that demand stability. I'd like to see a step-by-step, cause-and-effect argument, based on accepted facts, for how Hillary will create more danger than your average president.

The only thing I can see is that I'm being too optimistic about future chaos candidates, and if we wait another four years, we'll get someone worse. Trump is channeling the same kind of mass-consciousness uprising as Hitler, but Hitler was a serious utopian ideologue, while Trump just wants to party with Berlusconi and Putin. He might be too lazy and incompetent to do any catastrophic damage, and in the long term he'll serve stability by setting a bad example of what happens when voters go off script.

November 2.

2016-11-02T14:40:42Z

November 2. This election is getting bizarre. As scandals go, Hillary Clinton's email thing is chicken feed, and it does not begin to explain Trump's surge in the polls over the last week. It's like those people were going to vote for Trump all along and as the election gets closer they'll take a smaller and smaller excuse. And why has Trump fallen in the polls when he's been most in the public eye, right after the conventions and debates? He's like that thing you do that you hate and you always promise yourself you'll never do it again, but then as it fades in your memory it becomes more and more attractive.

I'm not endorsing Hillary. She's a political dinosaur, a predictable synthesis of 1970's liberalism and 1990's neoliberalism, and she's on the wrong side of my favorite issues: unconditional basic income, drug legalization, copyright reform, and retooling the economy for zero growth. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is a crazy hybrid of 1950's conservatism and a 2050 post-crash warlord, and he's on the wrong side of everything except metapolitics.

I see Trump as a correction, bringing together two things that have grown too far apart. On the one hand is how our civilization really works, a vast and inhuman network that is best managed by competent and dispassionate technocrats. On the other hand is the show, the public perception of how it works, that it's all about the personalities of human "leaders", like the tribal leaders of our ancestral memory, and if your life sucks then we just need someone strong and decisive to straighten those folks out.

I appreciate Trump as a performer, and I agree with his instinct that the political show has become a farce and deserves to be played like a farce. But if he actually becomes president, people will learn in the most painful way that their primal view of politics is bullshit, that you can't fix your computer by getting the most confident person to smack it with a hammer.

Trump is not even a good businessman -- he has less money than if he had just put his dad's money in an average investment fund. His positions and his personality are completely authoritarian, and I would expect him to make so many more things illegal that people I know would go to prison. He's an enemy of the poor and I would expect economic desperation to create more crime, which would be used to justify more brutal central control. Ironically his own supporters would be worst off, while blue state liberals could soften the federal trainwreck with adjustments at the state level.

Another irony: Hillary Clinton's most extreme position is her hostility to transparency, her belief that ordinary people shouldn't know how the government really works. If you live by keeping people stupid, you die by keeping people stupid.