[FRIAM] What if Trump Wins?
Pieter Steenekamp
pieters at randcontrols.co.za
Thu Oct 31 18:25:20 EDT 2024
Isn't bullying and being a good negotiator two different things? One could
be a bully and also a skilled negotiator, right?
I'm not an expert on Trump, so some of my assumptions may be off. For
example, I assume Trump had a successful run as a property developer in New
York. To achieve that, it seems reasonable that he would need to be
effective at, among other things, negotiating. Whether he achieved this by
being a bully or not, I can’t say.
Being a "nice guy" isn't necessarily a requirement for becoming a
successful world leader. Success as a world leader requires a long list of
skills, and I’m not arguing that Trump would perform better than Harris—I
genuinely don’t know. My point is simply that having a background in
managing complex property development projects likely involves successful
negotiations and skill in playing the game of chicken, both of which might
be valuable.
While being a bully could be a negative, it might belong on a different
line of that checklist.
On Thu, 31 Oct 2024 at 23:08, steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> Jochen Fromm sed:
>
> No, he is not a skilled negotiator at all.
>
> Some people mistake (conflate?) bullying for "negotiating".
>
> Musk is also a bully and I doubt anyone who has done business or tried to
> maintain personal relationships with him (e.g. his children and their
> mothers, etc) will not disagree. Trump's whole cohort/contingent are
> bullies of various stripes (Stone and Bannon and Miller, Graham, Jordan,
> MTG) as well. Effective bullies know how to defer to bigger bullies, to
> deal efficiently with anyone willing/able to stand up to them. They might
> do their smackdown alone if their victim is weak, but easily gang up with
> others to smack down stronger ones. Putin is clearly a bully's bully and
> Trumps other hero/buddies come in on the same ticket. I don't understand
> Xi or Modhi, since Trump doesn't gush over them like he does Putin and
> Orban and Kim Jong Un.
>
> The (informal) expansion of BRICS to include a bit of the Middle East may
> suggest more global stability that comes with dynamic balances (1
> superpower/coalition is either 1 too many or several too few?).
>
> There is the argument "yes, he's a bully/@$$H*L3 but he's OUR
> bully/A********) but that is perhaps the lamest argument ever? I've made
> that mistake myself before and I am totally over it.
>
> Re: the "great removal"... while the Nazi anti-Semite
> movement/action/horror is not an entirely wrong comparison, but we here
> have several major poorly thought-out but harsh purges in the recent
> history of the US. The Japanese-American Internment (there was a camp in
> Santa Fe where Solano Center is now) in the 40s, and the depression era of
> "Mexican Repatriation" which was somewhat indiscriminate about whether
> those "repatriated" were US Citizens (many were), or had family/roots in
> Mexico (many did not) or even spoke Spanish (many did not). I believe
> most of this was in southern CA, as an imagined way to reduce the stress on
> the job market and on goods, but like the Japanese Internment it was at
> root driven by racism, xenophobia and greed. Many merchant class families
> from both groups had their businesses taken over or bought out for pennies
> on the dollar by their former friends/neighbors quite eagerly. All you had
> to do was have the wrong surname and/or complexion and not enough resources
> to resist.
>
> Trump's "one day, one hour of extreme violence" and "I'll only be a
> dictator on day one" smack way too much of Krystalnacht for my taste...
>
> This is a myth, isn't it? He has no patience for long and complicated
> negotiations. He basically acts like a bully who demands loyalty, as James
> Comey reported. He is only good at lying and cheating and hiding that he
> cheated (which is the reason why he was convicted). Even the MAGA motto is
> a lie: instead of making America great he will ruin it. Like Captain Ahab
> in Moby Dick he will ruin everything on his quest for personal revenge.
>
> For example if he expels the Mexican immigrants, nobody will clean the
> houses of the superrich anymore. Or wash the dishes in hotels and
> restaurants. This dirty work is typically done by immigrants and people of
> color, all over the world.
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Pieter Steenekamp <pieters at randcontrols.co.za>
> <pieters at randcontrols.co.za>
> Date: 10/31/24 3:39 PM (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
> <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What if Trump Wins?
>
> The Case for Trump
>
> I'm not suggesting that Trump is a model leader; he has many moral
> shortcomings. And yes, if we view the U.S. President as the de facto leader
> of the West, it's fair to ask: Can’t we do better? I also won’t debate
> whether someone like Harris might make a better president. My point is
> this: If Trump is elected, might there be areas where his unique style
> could actually make him an effective leader?
>
> One thing Trump can do is negotiate. As a potential leader of the West,
> there are benefits he could bring in negotiating with adversaries,
> including BRICS countries. Let me explain using an analogy: the character
> James Dean played in Rebel Without a Cause. In a game of chicken, Dean's
> character pretended to be drunk, making his opponent believe he was
> reckless—eventually causing them to back down.
>
> Trump has a history of employing similar tactics. For instance, when
> building in New York, he once proposed a design that violated height
> limits. When this was denied, he proposed a much uglier building that
> followed the code. Ultimately, he got approval to build his original
> design, with the height exemption he wanted. Whether or not he would have
> gone through with his threat is unclear, but he got what he wanted by
> throwing a calculated tantrum.
>
> In the same way, Trump's current claims about what he would do
> internationally could simply be part of his proven negotiation tactics.
> World leaders see him as “reckless” in the same way James Dean’s opponents
> did, making them reconsider their own moves.
>
> Ultimately, Trump may be an unconventional choice, but he is a skilled
> negotiator—one who could, in his own way, secure some advantageous outcomes
> for the West.
>
> On Thu, 31 Oct 2024 at 13:07, Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:
>
>> The newspapers, and any number of writers, do a good job spelling all
>> this out.
>>
>> I have this frustrated feeling that doing this misses the point that is
>> driving the dynamic.
>>
>> One of the good things that Paxton emphasizes about what drives fascist
>> movements from the ground up is the determined rejection of thought in
>> favor of feeling. Hannah Arendt goes on at length to get the same thing
>> across.
>>
>> I envision it (with some discomfort about misfits of the metaphor) as
>> being like a social counterpart to berserking, or (even less apt) elephants
>> going into musth. It’s not even “rage” per se, but something about as
>> destructive, only chosen.
>>
>> I see the various repubs that make communities with the dems, and speak
>> as if they hope this will “accomplish” some “change”. For the
>> Bannon-followers, I feel like I know exactly what this looks like. It is
>> the various subcategories of hated ones self-identifying, and sewing on
>> their sleeves a marker of “establishment characters”. Bannon preaches to
>> the mob: “You see; they’re scared! We have them on the run. If you’ll
>> just push a little harder we can corner them, and we’ll give them the
>> beating of their lives. Imagine how powerful you will feel. They’ll want
>> you to stop, and they won’t be faking it, but they won’t be able to make
>> you stop. Won’t that be the best feeling you ever had? You’ll be able to
>> feel, finally, that you actually exist.” (Bannon doesn’t put in the final
>> line; I put that in.)
>>
>>
>> I guess I don’t want to argue against the things people are trying to do
>> (Michael Luttig, various Cheneys, and whoever). The voting block that can
>> cause the calamity is certainly a coalition of non-identical groups. If we
>> think there are categories of Spontaneous Racists and Stimulated Racists
>> (to borrow a term from spectroscopy), the part of the voting bloc that is
>> made up of the spontaneous ones may not be all that large; maybe 20%? Not
>> as large as the evangelicals (35–40%?, with some overlap). There
>> presumably are some genuinely out-to-lunch types, and maybe one can imagine
>> that talking has some place with them, which could be enough to move the
>> margin of this winner-take-all event we are stuck with. And then the ones
>> that can think enough to be strategically greedy or hoarding, but not
>> circumspect enough to have every cared or understood how the society they
>> suck from actually functions. _Maybe_ talking could have some effect with
>> them.
>>
>>
>> I have thought, too, since some NYT article by a guy from Bucks county PA
>> going home, and thinking that the trump voters actively wanted “the trump
>> vibe; the meanness, bullying and name-calling, etc.” that this is an
>> expression of a certain component of nihilism.
>>
>> Whoever wrote the screenplay for Apocalypse Now was very good. Kurtz’s
>> line in one of the soliloquays:
>>
>> “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be completely free?
>> Free from the judgments of others; even of yourself?”
>>
>> There is a core of nihilism in that freedom. What would it feel like to
>> go punch somebody for no particular reason, except that I felt like it?
>> Burn whatever some people mean by “the bonds of human affection” that
>> “include us in humanity”. Yes, I sort of understand (and this probably is
>> important) that whoever I hit will now know he has to fear me, and he may
>> even dislike or hate me, and it may be irreversible. But if he can’t do
>> anything to me, why do I care? In fact, if he wants to and still can’t,
>> even better: that will give me that experience of power that I imagine must
>> be so nice to feel, but that if it is, I certainly don’t feel now.
>>
>> It’s not as simple a category as all that, because they are willing to do
>> this only if they believe they are members in the mob. Whether that’s
>> community or just a release from the requirements of either responsibility
>> or courage I can’t say.
>>
>>
>> But I do think that, in the U.S., a crucial conversion that Arendt
>> articulates, from a mere mass into a mob, has now been achieved, and the
>> mob is awake and self-aware as a mob. It took a sociopath to go charging
>> out across the minefield that normal people are too chicken to venture
>> into, to show how far out the actual shooting-boundary is, beyond where
>> they had drawn back before. But now that the boundary has been identified,
>> that’s public information, and the others don’t need to be sociopaths to
>> use it. It changes the problem, because there are a lot more of them than
>> of the true sociopaths.
>>
>>
>> I agree, we would like to first get through the next week without an
>> acute disaster. But the system organization has passed through a
>> re-arrangement by now. I would like to know what a program looks like to
>> reverse that, without having to go through the whole Hodgkin-Huxley circuit
>> of the society’s destroying itself before there is enough exhaustion to try
>> for a reset. Since, under the conditions that are likely by that time,
>> it’s not clear what kind of “reset” might even be available.
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> > On Oct 31, 2024, at 4:59 AM, Russ Abbott <russ.abbott at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > To help prevent such a disaster, let's do our best to help people
>> imagine what the world would look like if Trump wins.
>> >
>> > For example, Trump has said that one of his priorities would be to
>> throw off the occupying army of invading immigrants and criminals. Ask
>> people to think about how this occupying force is currently ruining
>> people's lives. I suspect that very few people have any experience of such
>> a noxious invading force. Most people find their lives relatively peaceful.
>> But if Trump begins to implement his plan to throw off this occupying
>> force, the streets would be full of armed deportation agents chasing down
>> the evil occupying forces. Gunfights would erupt between the deportation
>> agents and immigrants running for their lives. Many of us would be caught
>> in the crossfire--or holed up at home trying to avoid the bullets. Ask
>> people to imagine such a world and to compare it to the relatively peaceful
>> world we now occupy. Ask them if that is really what we want and if that is
>> what we will be voting for next Tuesday.
>> >
>> > -- Russ Abbott
>> > Professor Emeritus, Computer Science
>> > California State University, Los Angeles
>> >
>> >
>> > On Wed, Oct 30, 2024 at 11:48 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net>
>> wrote:
>> > Here in Europe most people are indeed worried that the candidate who is
>> a convicted felon and wears orange makeup will become president again. Have
>> his fans all forgotten he mainly played golf, praised dictators and created
>> tax cuts for the superrich? But there is also a bit of hope that a woman
>> will stop him this time.
>> >
>> > A hundred years ago there was already a group in America that hated
>> Blacks and immigrants. As Timothy Egan writes in his book "A Fever in the
>> Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who
>> Stopped Them" one of the Ku Klux Klan leaders was a charismatic charlatan
>> named D.C. Stephenson. He was eventually brought down by a woman, Madge
>> Oberholtzer, who would reveal his cruelties, and whose testimony stopped
>> the Klan. When Europe fell into darkness, America was able to stop the con
>> man. I hope it can do it again.
>> >
>> https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/558306/a-fever-in-the-heartland-by-timothy-egan/
>> >
>> > -J.
>> >
>> >
>> > -------- Original message --------
>> > From: Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
>> > Date: 10/30/24 10:54 PM (GMT+01:00)
>> > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
>> friam at redfish.com>
>> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Evolutionary transitions between egalitarian and
>> despotic societies
>> >
>> > Hi, Jochen,
>> >
>> > Not sarcastic. It was to show the exploratory nature of such models.
>> I do believe that the most mysterious feature of charisma is the behavior
>> of the charasmees. However this election turns out, almost half the
>> country is about to willingly offer up it's political autonomy to a
>> potential dictator. Whatever my faults, I try, try, TRY not to do
>> sarcasm. I do wonder if we could build models that explore under what
>> circumstances it is better for everybody to do SOMETHING then to take the
>> time to pool information and do the right thing.
>> >
>> > In general evolutionary history has no actual power to constrain our
>> present behavior. Our behavior is constrainted by present events and
>> present behavioral repertoire.
>> >
>> > Nick
>> >
>> > On Wed, Oct 30, 2024 at 2:37 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net>
>> wrote:
>> > In her book "The Social Instinct" Nichola Raihani mentions in chapter
>> 17 the article "An evolutionary model explaining the Neolithic transition
>> from egalitarianism to leadership and despotism" from Simon T. Powers as a
>> model how despotic regimes and dominance hierarchies have evolved in early
>> human societies.
>> > https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2014.1349
>> >
>> > It reminds me of our recent discussion triggered by Nick's (sarcastic?)
>> proposal to explain parts of the MAGA movement in terms of evolutionary
>> psychology. Simon T. Powers is an interdisciplinary researcher working at
>> the University of Sterling
>> > https://www.stir.ac.uk/people/2013555
>> >
>> > A more recent article from him about "Modelling transitions between
>> egalitarian, dynamic leader and absolutist power structures" can be found
>> here
>> > https://www.stir.ac.uk/research/hub/publication/2041639
>> >
>> > -J.
>> >
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>> > --
>> > Nicholas S. Thompson
>> > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
>> > Clark University
>> > nthompson at clarku.edu
>> > https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
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