Ran Prieur

November 11.

2016-11-11T23:10:25Z

November 11. Taking a break from politics for music. Tuesday night I slipped in a YouTube link, but now I want to link to it explictly, because this classic punk song from 1982 is exactly how America feels to me right now: Fear - Let's Have A War. Related article: Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being.

I've been having some email conversations about the occult nature of Trump's win. (It would take several books to explain what "occult" even means.) So it's stunning, but not surprising, that the next celebrity to die was Leonard Cohen, because there's some weird, dark stuff around him. If you have a couple hours, it's covered in this crazy two-part podcast from last year, The Liminalist 31.5: The Guerrilla in the Room. My favorite Leonard Cohen song is Teachers.

Believe it or not, my main project over the last week was putting together music playlists. I've been wanting to merge the songs of my favorite band, Big Blood, with songs by other artists, especially my second favorite band, Hawkwind. Yesterday I finished the core list, 13 songs over 72 minutes, starting with folk and getting increasingly heavy. It's at the top of my favorite songs page.

November 9.

2016-11-09T21:50:44Z

November 9. After sleeping on it and hearing some reactions, I have a new story: Trump's victory is the 9/11 of the American left. The Tarot card for both events is The Tower, a sudden shocking catastrophe in which something that appears secure is brought down. Also both events were centered around New York City, and both events had a much milder precedent: the 1993 bombing, and Bush's victory over Al Gore.

In both 2000 and 2016 (and 1980) Republicans nominated a gunslinger, a candidate with great political instincts who inspired the base and didn't care about his own flaws. In both of those years (and 2004) Democrats nominated an uptight, awkward moderate who tried to avoid the appearance of having any flaws, but the result was that smaller flaws got magnified, voters were apathetic, and the Republican won. And in 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012, when Republicans nominated a dignified moderate, they lost. The only reason Bush Sr won in 1988 was that Dukakis was even more of a dweeb.

Remember in 2004 when Howard Dean lost the Democratic primaries after making that weird scream? Compare that to the ten thousand worse things Donald Trump has done in front of a microphone. My point is not that Trump is bad but that this is what a winning attitude looks like. Dean was loose and impulsive and raw in a way that general election voters actually like -- but Democratic primary voters fear it.

The American left has been on its back foot since the 1980's, and I'm not sure why. My guess is that in the decades before 1980, they were so successful working within the system that they lost the skill and confidence to work outside the system. You need that confidence to not be afraid to lose, and you need to be fearless before you can nominate and stand behind a flawed candidate.

This is a dark night of the soul for a lot of Americans, but it's also an opportunity for us to organize in new ways and reinvent ourselves politically. Last night I mentioned disassociating from society, but that allows us to reassociate in ways we might not have imagined.

November 8, late.

2016-11-08T20:41:08Z

November 8, late. Shit just got real. A few notes...

If you're unhappy about this, just disassociate. You're not a part of this nation, this culture, this planet, just some kind of alien visiting to observe and have a good time. This attitude is both a cause and an effect of social collapse. A comment from earlier today: "I kind of hope this is the last election, however it turns out."

I do not trust voters to say why they really voted for Trump, or even to know why. I think there's a lot going on subconsciously (see below).

I think everyone who voted for Trump would have voted for him anyway, even if James Comey hadn't resurrected the email scandal at the last minute. But the FBI director was clearly angling to be a close ally of President Trump, and I expect him to be important over the next few years.

On the left, the big winner is Bernie Sanders, who would have won a lot of the votes that Hillary couldn't win. When will the Democratic party stop being afraid of popular excitement? Is it too late?

If Trump wants to prove he can cut through red tape and get shit done, while making even liberals happy, he should start by abolishing daylight savings time. Seriously, why is it so hard to make such a simple change that everyone agrees with? If we can't even do that, how can we hope to make bigger changes?

If Hillary had won, I was going to mention conspiracy theories that Trump's whole plan was to throw the election to the Dems, or that he wanted to remain an outsider populist without having to prove anything, or that his whole candidacy was a distraction. We can throw those away now, as well as the idea that the oligarchy controls the whole thing.

But I have a new grand conspiracy theory (thanks to marijuana, which won big in this election). Did you ever get in a totally baffling conflict, and years later you looked back and discovered a subconscious level on which it all made sense? So there's an example of one single link where the subconscious mind is in control and the conscious mind is just along for the ride. What if these links can form networks? What if they form a global subconscious civilization that is secretly running everything? Never mind the Reptilians -- the enemy is within.

November 8.

2016-11-08T20:40:42Z

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. [New update: it was zero.] 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 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.