there was once a national movement to eliminate Chinese restaurants, using innovative legal methods to drive them out. Chinese restaurants were objectionable for 2 reasons. First, they threatened white women, who were subject to seduction by Chinese men, through intrinsic female weakness, or employment of nefarious techniques such as opium addiction. In addition, Chinese restaurants competed with “American” restaurants, thus threatening the livelihoods of white owners, cooks and servers; unions were the driving force behind the movement.
Tag: politics
Automating Populism
Here’s how quickly populism can be automated:
- Trump or Bannon picks an issue: the narrower and more inflammatory the better. Make the vote a yes or no.
- Trump asks his supporters to tell him what they want.
- His supporters download the app to their smartphones and vote.
- A little programming and marketing magic radically improves the number of Trump supporters using the app and reduces spammers/non-supporters attempting to skew the vote down to a trickle.
- Millions of Trump supporters download the app and vote.
- Once the decision is in, the app makes it easy to call or spam message to the user’s Congressional representatives. Millions of calls roll in.
- A bill that codifies that issue is fast tracked in Congress. Massive pressure via the app and the White House gets it passed quickly.
- Connecting action and results quickly generates buzz. Repeat. This time with 10 m downloads.
- The app evolves. The pressure from the network increases. It consumes the Republican party.
Trump Dirt
It should be trivial to find dirt on Trump. This is very plausible. Then why was the oppo research so incompetent? You have a guy with decades of mafia activity, probably the most of anyone who ever ran for office, and you can’t find it? More fuel for my thesis that the Democrats suck at fighting.
So, okay.
Let’s say that you’re Trump. You’ve spent your entire career in the vaguely mobbed-up world of New York real estate developers, and after being forcibly ejected from that by a series of bankruptcies, you enter the even more mobbed-up world of international financing for hotels intended for Saudi princelings and Russian oligarchs in countries with a lot of natural-resource wealth.
No one will lend you money through normal channels because, again, whenever anyone lends you money you piss it all away on gold toilets and giant shit-fights with subcontractors, so you have to rely on things like Bayrock Group, headquartered in Trump tower, which developers describe as just a weird giant money pipeline from Kazakhstan and Russia to New York. And in the midst of all of this, you decide that you’re just going to stop paying taxes, not pay your contractors, and basically act like a sexual-harassing parody of a 1970s boss.
It’s not that Trump can’t stand up to an investigation of his Russia ties, although that will produce an embarrassment of minor revelations immediately — Felix Sater, for instance, who’s a minor Russian mafioso who provided financing for Trump projects in the 1990s. It’s that Trump can’t stand up to literally any investigation whatsoever. Turn over literally any rock in Trump’s life, and you’ll find a weird squirming nest of maggots underneath it.
There might be not much to the Russia story: the worst of it might be that Roger Stone was scheduling document dumps with Wikileaks. (He has already strongly implied that he was doing this.) But if you start pulling on any loose thread in that sweater, the entire thing is going to come unraveled and a giant pile of borderline criminality is going to come spilling out.
I would be surprised if even Trump has a strict accounting of where all the bodies he’s buried in his career are. Which means that he has to prevent an investigation of Russia ties whether or not he’s guilty.
The leakiest administration
The constant flow of embarrassing information paints a fractious and incompetent White House, an unstable and immature Commander-in-Chief, and near-daily blunders both diplomatic and domestic. And beyond the daily embarrassment, the persistent leaks reveal ongoing counterintelligence investigations. The hull is taking on water, and yesterday the Administration sacrificed its first crewmember in a desperate maneuver to stay afloat.
excellent, this couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of idiots.
Fuck Cheeto Hitler
Astroturfing by Authoritarians
someone needs to do the obvious follow up in the us, with all the sock puppet accounts here:
If these estimates are correct, a large proportion of government web site comments, and ~0.6% social media posts on commercial sites, are fabricated by the government. The posts are not randomly distributed but, as we show in Figure 2, are highly focused and directed, all with specific intent and content.
Union corruption costs trillions
with all the discussion of conflicts of interest in the Trump cabinet, it strikes me that the most glaring conflict in the public sector is ignored: The CoI between state and local politicians elected with the support of public sector unions who then participate in compensation negotiations for the members of those unions. Here the temptation of the politicians to buy the support of the unions with public money is overwhelming. The impact of this is potentially trillions when public pension liabilities are included
Trump Batman Effect
So based on these 2 strategies, we are in for 4 years of sham Trump victories which look really convincing on a first glance. Every couple of weeks, until it gets boring, another company is going to say Trump convinced them to keep jobs in the United States. The total number of jobs saved this way will never be more than a tiny fraction of the jobs that could be saved by (eg) good economic policy, but nobody knows anything about economic policy and Trump will make sure everybody hears about Ford keeping jobs in the US. Every one of these victories will actively make the world worse, in the sense that these big companies will get taxpayer subsidies or favors they can call in later to distort government priorities, but nobody’s going to notice these either.
Elite Overproduction
law schools overproduce lawyers, which causes a glut of people wanting to enter politics.
I’ve just read 5 of Peter Turchin’s books: Historical Dynamics, War & Peace & War, Secular Cycles, Ultra Society, and Ages of Discord. I did this because I love careful big picture thinking, and Turchin is one of the few who does this now on the big question of historical cycles of conflict and empire. While historians today tend to dislike this sort of analysis, Turchin defies them, in part because he’s officially a biologist. Turchin collects much data to show that this is a robust pattern, even if there are many deviations. For example, in Europe, 33 of 43 frontier situations gave rise to big empires, yet only 4 of 57 of non-frontier situations did. “Secular cycles” vary in duration from 1 to 4 centuries; Western Europe saw 8 cycles in 22 centuries, while China saw 8 cycles in 21 centuries. During the low instability part of each cycle, instability shows a rough “alternating generations” 50 year cycle of conflict. Just as science fiction is often (usually?) an allegory about issues today, I suspect that historians who blame a particular fault for the fall of the Roman Empire tend to pick faults that they also want to warn against in their own era. Similarly, my main complain about Turchin is that he attributes falling cohesion mainly to increased inequality – an “overproduction” of elites who face “increased competition”. Yes, inequality is much talked about among elites today, but the (less-forager-like) ancients were less focused on it.
peter turchin’s theory of elite overproduction causing instability rings true. lots of people are pursuing dubious degrees, and then fail to find the kind of employment they imagined they would, while being saddled with debt. many of them would be far better off not going to college and learning a trade instead. the vilification of trades has led to skill gaps, and “send everyone to college” is one of the worst ideas in the context of this overproduction.
Trump, Political Innovator
The next US president, Donald Trump, seems to be a textbook political innovator. During a period when his party was quite up for grabs with many contenders, he worked his crowds, taking a wide range of vague positions that varied over time, and often stepped over taboo lines. In the process, he surprised everyone by discovering a new coalition that others had not tried to represent, a group that likes him more for this representation than his personal features.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 