[FRIAM] Medical treatments for some or for all

[David Eric Smith]

So Marcus,

Your response is interesting.  What I was thinking of as the inflammation was BLM, or the fact that the Georgia organizers were able to get enough voters out to get all three of Biden, Warnock, and Ossof into office, which even with their same heroic efforts over years I don’t think they could have done without trump’s help.  

I hadn’t thought of the people you mention, whom Thomas Edsall nicely terms “trump’s cult of animosity” as the inflammatory response.  But as I think of them I am not sure where to put them.  There’s no excusing the crazy or the motive for it, but there is some kind of meta-narrative in which, if the country had not made living in lower-population regions such a dead-end for so many decades, more varied people might have stayed there, the sorting might not have been so strong, and in addition to better conditions overall, maybe the legitimate part of the fear of being flattened and then left behind by the country overall (put aside all the racist/nationalist stuff, which is in populations too but is a separate thing to talk about), and maybe contributes to the inflammation, could have been less as you say.


In the interval between this email and the last, I thought of a fun article title that I won’t do anything with, because I am too lazy to learn the specific knowledge to write something worthwhile:

Fascist Quorum Sensing

(For those who don’t do this for a living, the reference is to the phenomenon in bacteria like Anthrax (B. anthracis), which will multiply inside a victim for many generations with no real chemical activity besides a normal parasitic metabolism, but will secrete signaling chemicals.  When those chemicals hit a threshold concentration because the population has multiplied enough, which the bacteria all know because they all have the same genome, they switch state, turn on the chemical attack machinery, and dissolve the victim on a timescale far too short for any inflammatory or immune response to do much about them.)

Google does not show anyone as having used it yet, even though it is a no-brainer.

The idea being to say something productive about the abruptness of it all.  

From Gingrich and Norquist up through end-2020, the right thought its best strategy was to do the usual dissembling and dogwhistling, just at higher intensity.  Something has switched and they think this —specifically — is the time to make a run for it and to parade the fascism instead.  

While the strategic-games crowd (and military people etc.) will say they have long written about shifting modes, the idea that there can be an unplanned component at the popular level akin to quorum sensing might have something to be said of it.

Even on the question of whether trump mattered, I can see a sort of SFI angle on it, with the idea of “slow timescale variables” that Jessica Flack makes central to the rubric that for a while (perhaps still) she was calling “construction dynamics”.  The idea that a sort of order-parameter stuck thing can smooth out fluctuations and make an inference problem easier and more stable, or a transition in domains more likely.  Here the fast variables would have been the Lindsay Graham characters, who flutter like day-traders among all possible positions, trying to guess from minute to minute what is safe.  Those guys would not have put Steven Miller’s face on TV, because they would have judged that he was too ugly to use.

Enter trump, whose 2024 motto can be “The Worse, The Better”, who said “I can make ugly work.”  But it didn’t change the system state in a few months, or even in a year.  The flutterers took years of reassurance, and a couple of election cycles, before they switched from the lysogenic to the lytic phase.  Without trump as a slow variable, would the flutterers have continued to flutter a while longer?  Can one say anything about that that has any scientific worth, and isn’t just firing off buzzwords?

Eric


> On Aug 20, 2021, at 7:53 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
> 
> Eric writes:
>  
> “I have wondered whether trump in the presidency was like an adjuvant in a vaccine.  Just having the antigen leaves room for highly variable responses, because if you don’t manage the inflammatory response that initiates the immune response, you have only a weak control system.  Trump was so awful in so many dimensions that he triggers inflammation in those who would have remained asleep under Clinton.”
>  
> The mask protests like this one..
>  
> https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2021/08/19/mask-wars-unrest-flores-pkg-dlt-vpx.cnn <https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2021/08/19/mask-wars-unrest-flores-pkg-dlt-vpx.cnn>
>  
> ..strike me as something that M. Night Shyamalan could not even invent.   Say the guy at 1:40.
> I should be thinking of these folks as my fellow citizens?   Really?
>  
> Is it just me or is maybe the “inflammation” getting a little out of control?  For example,
> the other day I was driving down a narrow part of the road in my residential area and pulled off to the side to let a car pass that was coming the other way.   He (white middle-aged man) was not signaling, but as soon as I spent five seconds off the side to let him pass he started screaming at me and waving his fist out the car window.   Apparently I had dared to block his driveway.   Is it really that hard for some people to get through their day?
>  
> It increasingly seems to me that maybe there is just all this crazy just below the surface, and all that can be done is to keep the inflammation down.
>  
> Marcus
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
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