[FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

Thu Nov 12 00:50:14 EST 2020

Eric quoted:

After that, the phrase was fully ensconced in political short-hand and quickly claimed by liberals as a positive trait.

Really.  I have always used it as a term of [self] mockery for a kind of low-cost left-wing concern for the disadvantaged.  Whenever I use the word, I always hear bill Clinton saying, “ Ah Fail yoor pa-ayn.”

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2020 7:03 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Biden beats Trump

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.”

.... “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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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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