[FRIAM] What if Trump Wins?
steve smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Thu Oct 31 22:08:16 EDT 2024
Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> 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 sure effective bullies bother to be particular effective at
other negotiation strategies, but there is no logical contradiction...
but is "bullying" anything more than "negotiation by other means"?
Clauswitz rolls in his grave.
> 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.
Lots of evidence that variations on bullying (from racial redlining to
disputing every contract payment to inflating values for loans and
lowballing them for taxation) are his only superpower in "development".
>
> 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.
What a shame we are back to "brinksmanship" at the top of our list
(again?). Putin (plays?) crazy, Kim Jong Un plays crazy, Trump plays
crazy.
Trump may be an effective "leader" by these terms, but where will he
"lead" the country/world? He lead quite a few businesses into
bankruptcy and his most successful gig was Reality TV bully which he
also bailed on as it was failing... ratings were plenty down before he
did a tricky handoff to Schwartzenegger for the final fall.
I agree with/defer to DaveW's idea that many people (order 49.9999% of
our voters?) find some kind of identification within his projected
image, his promises, his affect. It's a pretty good tricky trick...
like good ole "tricky Dick" in another era. Or PT Barnum. You *don't*
need to fool *all* the people *all* of the time?
Winter is coming? (first freeze here last night)
>
> 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>
>> <mailto: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> <mailto: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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