[FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

Wed Nov 11 20:05:45 EST 2020

[image: image.png]

<echarles at american.edu>

On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 8:03 PM Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>
wrote:

> About time to look this up...
> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/origin-bleeding-heart-liberal
>
> Before the 20th century, the phrase “bleeding heart” was popular in the
> religious-tinged oratory of 19th century America. Throughout the 1860s, it
> comes up often in poetry, essays, and political speeches, as an expression
> of empathy and emotion. “I come to you with a bleeding heart, honest and
> sincere motives, desiring to give you some plain thoughts,” said one
> politician in an 1862 speech. The phrase comes from the religious image of
> Christ’s wounded heart, which symbolizes his compassion and love. It was a
> common enough phrase that London has a “Bleeding Heart Yard” (featured
> prominently in the Dickens novel Little Dorrit) which is named after a
> long-gone sign, once displayed at a local pub, that showed the Sacred Heart.
>
> By the 1930s, though, the phrase had fallen out of common use and Pegler,
> who one politician called a “soul-sick, mud-wallowing gutter scum
> columnist,” recruited it into a new context, as a political insult. He was
> a master of this art.... Pegler first used “bleeding heart” in a column
> castigating liberals in Washington for their focus on “a bill to provide
> penalties for lynchings.” Pegler wasn’t for lynchings, per se, but he
> argued that they were no longer a problem the federal government should
> solve: there had only been eight lynchings in 1937, he wrote, and “it is
> obvious that the evil is being cured by local processes.” The bill, he
> thought, was being “used as a political bait in crowded northern Negro
> centers.” And here was his conclusion, emphasis ours:
>
>
> “I question the humanitarianism of any professional or semi-pro bleeding
> heart who clamors that not a single person must be allowed to hunger but
> would stall the entire legislative program in a fight to ham through a law
> intended, at the most optimistic figure, to save fourteen lives a year.”
>
>
> <echarles at american.edu>
>
> .... “Bleeding heart” was revived in a political context in 1954, by
> another infamous right-winger, Joe McCarthy, who called Edward R. Murrow
> one of the “extreme Left Wing bleeding-heart elements of television and
> radio.” It wasn’t until the 1960s that it really started to come into
> common use, though... By the end of the decade, Ronald Reagan, then newly
> elected governor of California, had picked it up as a way to describe his
> political trajectory. “I was quite the bleeding-heart liberal once,” he
> told Newsweek. By 1970, he was known as a “former ‘bleeding heart’
> Democrat.”
>
> After that, the phrase was fully ensconced in political short-hand and
> quickly claimed by liberals as a positive trait.
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 7:49 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
> wrote:
>
>> People like Barr and Pompeo are happy to exploit the consequences of
>> Trump’s financial desperation for their authoritarian agenda.
>> Authoritarianism is not an uncommon personality trait – they would find
>> support in the population.  Trump just wants to be the winner, but at any
>> cost.   At some level it is just ridiculous.   But he sees ruin on the
>> horizon and his family sees ruin on the horizon.   With the people around
>> him, it is a dangerous situation.  Hopefully Biden has deep allies in
>> government from his long career and isn’t just bluffing with his current
>> sense of calm.
>>
>>
>>
>> To resist a plausible scenario like you lay out, enough people need to
>> wake up and plan how to stop them.   They would have to admit that norms
>> have collapsed and their countrymen had just gone insane.   It is stupid to
>> be goaded into open violence, but if things really went off the rails, I
>> think it is naive to believe violence could be completely avoided.
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *David Eric Smith
>> *Sent:* Wednesday, November 11, 2020 3:11 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
>> friam at redfish.com>
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump
>>
>>
>>
>> So at some point, too, though, there are actual facts and things and
>> events in the world, which aren’t just cut from the fabric of human
>> impression and attitude.
>>
>>
>>
>> Suppose the following; as I was walking thisPM, after finally watching
>> the Van Jones TED that Glen circulated, it seemed quite believable to me.
>>
>>
>>
>> 1. Suppose what Van sketches is actually the plan.  Trump plans to
>> instigate a constitutional crisis.  I think he is capable of planning to
>> that degree of complexity and on that time horizon.  And I have no reason
>> in the world not to think Bill Barr would be down with the lark, and could
>> advise him on the law to do it.  I’m not sure Pompeo has the same
>> background, but in character I expect he would think it is a great idea.
>>
>>
>>
>> 2. Then we wind up in congress.  He doesn’t have a huge margin; there are
>> only 26 republican representatives (or whatever the name is for them).  So
>> he really needs them all.  That’s what the last four years has been for.
>> Figure out who has any other levers besides greed of fear, and get them
>> out.  Keep Graham and Cruz and all the rest like them, who are amoral and
>> predatory, and Collins and her ilk who can be terrorized.
>>
>>
>>
>> 3. Suppose people decide to object, and want to take to the streets.
>> Really a terrible time to have Esper running DOD.  He wouldn’t sic the US
>> armed forces on them.  So find some quasi-fascist brigadier general who
>> thinks might is not merely right, but Everything.  Of course, you have to
>> goad people and try to provoke them, so that the lower-downs in the
>> military will be willing to take orders, not because they think the orders
>> are moral, but because they feel threatened and are trying to protect
>> themselves and each other.  That’s always how you co-opt soldiers.
>>
>>
>>
>> I look at the footage of old civil rights protestors, singing, dancing,
>> and clapping while being herded into paddy wagons, after generations of
>> abuse, and I cannot imagine a large cross-section of Americans today with
>> the discipline to do the same if provoked.  So goading a few people into
>> violence, and then using that to excuse a military lockdown, doesn’t seem
>> out of reach.
>>
>>
>>
>> Does anyone, anywhere, think the thing to make this unrealistic would be
>> trump’s getting cold feet or having qualms?  If so, then I think that
>> person is on the wrong side of a factual evaluation that has nothing to do
>> with values or character.  One of the two positions is right.
>>
>>
>>
>> The rest is really a calculation.  How degraded are the other needed
>> actors, and how wide is the margin of error for the ones who would try it?
>> There people could have opinions deriving from their own characters or
>> their beliefs in the characters of others, which I can easily see
>> disagreeing.  It also may not have a deterministic answer, but boil down to
>> accidents of circumstance.  So the disagreement could reasonably reflect
>> this too.
>>
>>
>>
>> Dunno.  If you can read enough news to know that S. Korea exists, how can
>> your intelligence lead you to believe either that trump and co have done
>> this well, or that if they haven’t it’s no big deal?  That to me does not
>> seem to be a question about ideology.
>>
>>
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Nov 11, 2020, at 5:50 PM, Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> Marcus,
>>
>> Do you have close friend or family member with strong character and high
>> intelligence that is also a Trump voter? My brother-in-law is a submarine
>> captain. It was helpful to have a 3-hour call with him last night.
>>
>> I come away with the idea that his mental model is not opposed to
>> mine...it's more of a dual to mine on which future Action can be defined :-)
>>
>>
>>
>> -Stephen
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 11:35 AM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Roger writes:
>>
>>
>>
>> < These people weren't voting for rascism, misogyny, narcissism,
>> authoritarianism, xenophobia, gimp shaming, science denialism, or all that
>> other baggage, they were overlooking it for reasons. >
>>
>>
>>
>> Many of those that could not work due to COVID restrictions are often in
>> battleground or red states.   That’s the only way I can possibly begin to
>> rationalize the 71 million.  To me, overlooking those things is
>> unacceptable.   It’s not useful to exercise any empathy for them.   They
>> made a deal with the devil.   It should have been a win by 50 million, not
>> 5 million.
>>
>>
>>
>> Marcus
>>
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