Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 20:10 on 15 November 2022
Really, this is so much not a surprise. This is Trump we are talking about. He’s always been a legend in his own mind. Anything bad that happens is always someone else’s fault — never his.
Of course he chose to run. This is the most predictable story since the sun rising this morning.
Published at 19:35 on 9 November 2022
The beginning of the end of Trumpism, that is.
The dust has yet to fully settle on the midterm elections, but what we do know is that the standard shellacking of the in-party did not happen this time. Even Lindsey Graham has openly said so.
Already the knives are coming out for Trump in the GOP, with no shortage of suggestions that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (more later on what his victory in the Florida gubernatorial race says) would make a better standard-bearer for their party. (As unlikable as I find DeSantis, he’s still better than Trump.)
But here’s the thing: I have thought there would be such tipping points many times before, most recently after the failed coup attempt on January 6th. Every time, it did not happen. The GOP kissed and made up with Trump. Maybe this time is different, but I can’t get my hopes up.
Suppose for sake of argument, it actually is different this time. Then what?
First Trump is still Trump. He’s never had the emotional maturity to engage in honest self-assessment before, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that he has suddenly and for no explicable reason acquired this ability. Trump never thinks he is anything but the greatest ever. He never thinks anything is his fault.
If Trump doesn’t get the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, he will say it is because the whole process is rigged and it was unfairly stolen from him. Then he will run as an independent in all 50 states. His base of fanatical, sheep-like followers will vote for him and not the GOP.
Suppose that’s only 5 to 10 percent of the GOP. That’s still enough to doom them. DeSantis loses to whatever Democrat (hopefully not Biden, but more on that later) runs against him.
At that that point, the earliest the GOP can win back the White House is 2028. By then, Trump will either be dead or in the old folks’ home. For that matter, so will a significant chunk of his base, who leans to an older demographic. Those still alive will have the same short memory that most Americans have, and will have mostly forgotten about Trump.
As such, 2028 will be the first year the GOP can realistically hope to win back the White House. Even if they do, it will be with a more garden-variety conservative who does not pose such an existential threat to political democracy.
But, to reiterate, this only happens if the knives stay out for Trump. Also, GOP strategists have no doubt run just this scenario through their heads, and don’t much like the idea of waiting until 2028 to get the White House back. So the temptation to kiss and make up with Trump will be very real.
On the other hand, they just might go through with dumping Trump. Rage and the desire for revenge are very real things.
So yes, this might be the beginning of the end. But, to reiterate, I can’t get my hopes up.
Published at 07:29 on 7 November 2022
Establishment pundits are starting to acknowledge that the fact that the USA has a powerful, politically viable fascist party that is sympathetic to the cause of its fellow fascists in Russia could be Putin’s ace in the hole. This was always obvious, and I believe I mentioned it at one point, but I figured it deserved another short mention.
Published at 09:25 on 6 November 2022
Odds disfavor a military whose official history glorifies itself from being able to honestly assess how a legacy of intervention in the Western Hemisphere, including in Haiti itself, presents serious obstacles when it comes to being trusted by the Haitians.
Odds get even worse when it comes to political maneuvering in Congress that will end up pressuring the military, and political maneuvering in an electorate (which will end up pressuring Congress) that understands history even worse than those in Congress and the military do.
“Stabilize Haiti” is a vague mission with no clear endgame. Any invading US troops will be asked to perform missions whose goals are increasingly implausible over time. It will turn into a quagmire that builds upon the already significant distrust of the United States in the Western Hemisphere and adds to it.
This is mentioned because the chattering classes are already cranking up their propaganda mills in favor of ignoring Rule No. 1, which is as a result likely to be ignored.
Don’t set out to “stabilize Haiti.” Set out to, for example, secure the port from the gangs stopping it from being used to import food and other needed items. When you accomplish that, declare your mission has been accomplished, congratulate yourself, and get out.
Because, face it, odds favor both Rules Nos. 1 and 2 being ignored.
Published at 19:14 on 4 November 2022
So, we are getting the chaos and surprises I predicted earlier.
The predicted exodus of users hasn’t happened, though. What has happened is a bunch of advertisers putting their spending on pause and an (involuntary) exodus of employees. Or should I say the exodus hasn’t happened yet. It still might, if the user experience becomes as intolerable as the employee experience just has.
Regarding the latter, it is hard to imagine something more destructive and disruptive to a business than to suddenly lay off about half of your staff:
And at the same time Musk is doing this, he is driving his advertisers, his main source of revenue, away.
It is almost as if being wealthy and famous does not automatically make one an expert at everything. Imagine that.
Ironically, this might all end up being Elon Musk’s gift to the world, just not in the way Musk intended: if Musk destroys Twitter (and unless he corrects course, he just might), maybe something better will replace it.
Published at 19:43 on 2 November 2022
Biden’s speech was necessary. It wasn’t the speech I would give about the current situation, of course, but Biden is in a vastly different situation than I am in and his politics are not mine. That said, the basics were correct: the coming election is a choice between autocracy and democracy.
The question is: do enough Americans care enough about democracy? To paraphrase what I wrote in an earlier article, if we have a fascism-friendly public, then fascism becomes basically inevitable. I chose the term “fascism-friendly” deliberately; it is not necessary for the public to be majority fascist. All that is necessary is for enough of the public to be friendly to the idea of maybe giving fascism a little whirl and seeing how it goes.
Of course, the very concept that fascism can be given a little whirl is fatally flawed: once fascists get power, they don’t easily give it up. Then the regrets kick in, but it is too late.
Published at 18:15 on 30 October 2022
It looks like — unless the Right tries some hanky-panky — Bolsonaro is on his way out. Regarding the possibility of that hanky-panky, Biden wasted absolutely no time when it came to congratulating the winner. That sends a signal that any hypothetical coup government would probably have a rocky time ahead of it when it comes to relations with the USA.
All of which means that, despite their faults, it really matters that both Biden is and soon Lula will be in office instead of their fashy predecessors.
But it’s also worrying: Lula’s margin of victory wasn’t really that great: in a contest between a social democrat and a fascist, the fascist almost won. Likewise, it is far from certain that the Democrats will hold on to either the House or the Senate, despite how prominent election deniers are in today’s GOP.
Published at 20:21 on 4 October 2022
Maybe, but probably not.
Maybe because he’s somewhat nuts. He did stupidly try to annex all of Ukraine, of course, and that went even worse than most analysts (including yours truly) thought it would (and we didn’t think it would go well).
Probably not because it would have severe downsides for Russia. You think Russia is badly isolated now? Just wait until Putin makes enemies of China and India with a nuclear first strike. The latter would be breaking a huge taboo.
More than likely, both countries have already privately warned Putin not to do that. Also more than likely, the USA is encouraging them to (again, privately, behind the scenes). It is, therefore, unlikely Putin is totally insulated from reality on this, like he apparently was while making his decision to launch a full-scale invasion.
With every day that passes, news stories come in of impressive territory regains on Ukraine’s part, in territory that Putin just “annexed” and now proclaims to be “Russian.” Ukraine has even attacked Crimea, which Russia “annexed” some years ago. So far, no nukes have been launched. That’s probably because Putin is bluffing.
Published at 09:56 on 25 September 2022
It’s a desperate act. Putin is doing it because he has suffered big losses on the battlefield, and he’s a stubborn old man who cannot admit defeat.
Odds disfavour it succeeding. The mobilized troops will have even less training than the already ill-prepared and ill-trained ones Putin has had to work with so far. They will have even lower morale. They will be working with stocks of materiel that have been damaged and depleted by six months of fighting. Unlike Ukraine, Russia does not have a bunch of powerful, well-equipped allies shoveling new materiel its way.
It is not popular at home, and this is probably significant. One of the reasons the Vietnam War started going badly for the USA was the level of conscription it eventually prompted, and the domestic opposition that conscription provoked. Nothing prompts interest in an issue like self-interest.
The war could still go on for an unpleasantly long time. Russia is a dictatorship, and can resist popular pressure in ways that the USA could not in the Vietnam Era (and the Vietnam War lasted for a painfully long time). That said, odds still favour Russia slinking out of Ukraine in defeat sooner or later. It’s just that it may well be later rather than sooner, and later might mean a significant amount of time.
Published at 07:44 on 13 September 2022
Not quite as small as a candy bar phone, but pretty small nonetheless. About as small as I’d want to use for looking at web sites and reviewing emails. Small enough to make previewing PDF’s quite painful. (Thankfully the latter is not as important as small size to me.) That is, of course, one of the reasons I got it.
Sadly, “masses” are 5/6 “asses,” so overall small phones do not sell well, and as such the “mini” phones are being phased out by Apple. Now, even the regular-sized iPhones are smaller than most Android devices, but I’m glad I got the opportunity to minimize size, and glad that I waited for the iPhone 14 so that I could get a 13 mini at a discounted price.
It literally took hours to complete this task, which was not easy or simple. Part of this, I think, is that my iCloud account is something of a mess, as a result of being one of the earliest such accounts (I got its predecessor about 20 years ago, when I purchased my first Mac.) As such, it has been grandfathered from a mac.com account to a Mobile Me account to an iCloud account, and apparently there has been some accumulated cruft along the way.
I now have two Apple accounts, one named with my full original email address, and one named with just the username part of that address. The accounts are subtly connected in various ways I still do not fully comprehend. Everything I do is as a result something of a pain, made all the worse by how some of the prompts and diagnostics on iCloud.com are not very clear. For example, when it wanted a non-iCloud email address out of me for account recovery purposes, it simply asked me for an “email address,” no further explanation. So of course I entered my iCloud address, which had a “problem” and was rejected. Neither prompt nor error message mentioned the requirement that the address be external.
While this is not an iPhone problem per se, it is still an Apple problem, and integration with Macs and iCloud is supposed to be a selling point of iOS devices and Apple products in general.
A lot of its user interface is so dead-on identical (or nearly so) to what Android does that it’s positively uncanny. At the same time, one is continually running into things that are strangely different, to the extent that I’ve had to do a number of web searches on how to do things.
This feature is “Guided Access” and is buried under the “Accessibility” settings. It is a big deal for me, and is one of the reasons I got an iPhone. I could not put my Android phone in a shirt pocket with the headset connected and walk around the house doing chores while talking, because the touch screen would get randomly triggered, activating features like randomly putting the caller on hold, muting me, or hanging up. Actually, the touch screen itself seems a tad less sensitive, which might reduce the need to do this, but I still would not want a smartphone without this feature.
For some reason they shipped the phone and the accessories (sold separately) that I ordered in two separate packages. The packages moved across Canada in tandem, leaving from the same address and arriving in Vancouver in the same day. So I was expecting the FedEx guy to have two packages when he knocked on my door. He only had one. He mentioned a rendezvous in an hour to collect more packages, and sure enough, I got to say “Hi!” to him again soon enough.
On the plus side, the order got to me yesterday (the 12th). Its estimated arrival date was the 16th. This is the first time since the pandemic that I have had an order arrive earlier than first estimated.