Santa Barbara, Calif. on October 31, 2019

I’ve shifted to a good-news / bad-news stance towards the Trump victory. 

The good news is that Harris’s defeat discredited Clinton-Obama neoliberalism as the Democratic party’s dominant center.  Harris ran a good campaign with corporate Bidenism and it failed.  Trump ran a bad campaign opposing that and it succeeded.  Center-Dems will fight (e.g. for the “abundance agenda”) but this loss was their loss and they lost big.

 

This gives the left a massive opportunity to theorize and build a better Bernieism across race and class. This would be a new model democratic socialism, one that would not downplay the civil rights gains of the past 80 years, including trans rights.  (The widespread freakout about the means to trans equality and racial equality is an underanalyzed driver of the Trump victory.) But this is America, so this new New Left will be called something horrible like “pocketbook populism” (Robert Kuttner’s term, who’s been writing accurately about this for decades (e.g. this 2014 critique of Obama).  In 2024, anti-corporate Democrats often ran ahead of Harris in Trump districts and often won.

 

The bad news is that Trump is the most regressive slayer of neoliberalism I can imagine. If the majority wanted to reduce inflation and make things fairer for the working class, they did it in the worst possible way.  

 

His (small) majority voted for oligarchic capitalism that will make the price of eggs go up, and houses go up, and insurance go up, and medical costs go up. They voted for deregulation that will make Big Egg get bigger and make monopoly pricing easier. They voted for an openly racist version of cheap eggs and ham, the most openly racist since Alabama Governor George Wallace’s campaign in 1968. They voted for the most misogynist version: white women voted 53-47 for Trump after he took their reproductive rights away and lost a civil suit over sexual assault. They voted for his spectacle of coercion and force, for the dictionary definition of an authoritarian personality.  Left rebuilding starts in a deep cultural and psychological hole.

 

The big question here is why does economic anger pushes people to the cultural right? This has happened all over the world: Hungary and Poland, Brazil and Argentina, India and the Philippines. The U.S. is a standout in this rear guard. The cultural win against “woke” will push the U.S. further behind in the sectors most beloved by Trump’s base, like manufacturing. Speaking of which, the U.S. is behind China in green tech and under Trump will never catch up. If status-quo economics is your problem, why solve it with the cultural right? 

 

People are right to focus on our messed-up information ecosystem. But the explanation I’ll start exploring for this rightward shift is education. Racist anti-neoliberalism seems to work less on a common type of thinking person. Same goes for economically incoherent plutocratic anti-neoliberalism. 

 

By “thinking” I mean people who gather a decent amount of information—and know how much they have.  They use that information.  “Thinking people” assume that information should shape their conclusions and actively use information to shape them. These people are comfortable going back and forth between evidence and argument to check the fit. They actively respond to misfits between facts and claims. They see changing their claims to fit new evidence as good rather than weak.  Also, they think about how they think about politics, family dynamics, their jobs, and other things. 

 

Obviously everyone thinks. But there is huge range in how well people think, even in one person over time.  Thinking is hard.  Thinking takes time, as the political activist and thinker Freddie Payne used to say.  Thinking is easily rushed by the pressures of everyday life.  Thinking is also burdened or impaired by limits in training, comfort with various kinds of data, etc.  My experience, including forty years as a college teacher, is that everyone is smart but that they often do not think.  Or they often don’t think well.   

 

I don’t know how to put this politely.  It feels elitist and obnoxious even to bring this up. But a teacher’s job is to evaluate the quality of thinking every day.  Ironically, society gets very upset when we don’t do this, invoking grade inflation or social promotion). 

 

Also, “anti-intellectualism in American life” has long bullied educators out of being able to talk about bad thinking as a public problem.  Nixon and Agnew, Reagan and Bush were good at this.  But Trump is the Bully King.  In spite of this generations-long propaganda campaign, we do need to be able to talk about the power of ignorance in American life—and in that of other countries.

 

So onward: Universities obviously aren’t the only sites of systematic thought. Social movements think, sports fans think, auto mechanics and farmers think.  However, thinking is taught, cultivated, coached, corrected, and enforced systematically by universities.  

 

Three aspects  of university thinking are especially important, in part because they’re not always easy to find elsewhere. 

 

One is thinking about thinking, or meta-reflection.  Is my thinking suited to this problem? How is my thinking going? How can I tell how well it’s going? Do I need to change my method? Do I need to start over with different data? Can I stop thinking now, or do I need to keep going? 

 

A second aspect is the relation between thinking and feeling.  Universities uphold a standard of disinterestedness, however difficult or theoretically unattainable that is. The student or researcher is not allowed to let their convictions control their inquiry or conclusions.  If you’re a left-wing political scientist, you’re not allowed to let your anger at Trump’s win push you to conclude that all Trump voters are economically illiterate racists—or shape your study to that premise.  If you’re a white Christian, you’re not allowed to let your indignation at local news coverage of undocumented immigrants push you to conclude that  American identity is under existential attack—and bake that into your survey or teaching. 

 

A century of research has shown how our emotions do shape our thinking and that there’s no clean opposition between reason and emotion. And yet universities teach ways of managing the continuous interaction so research is more rather than less accurate about the reality outside our heads. 

 

Third, universities expose students and instructors to multiple methods.  Engineering students are usually required to take a literature or history course where they learn hermeneutics—how the interpretation of language has procedures and methods that they can apply.  Whether or not students align with the content of particular courses, a graduate from a US college or university knows that cultural and social knowledge is a practice with its own methods and bodies of learning, and not brainwashing that can be contrasted with the quantitative methodologies of the sciences.  I don’t know where else one learns qualitative methods. This learning is a huge advantage in evaluating cultural or historical issues like calls for reparations for slavery or the ethics of taxing capital gains at a lower rate than wages.

 

To someone with cultural expertise, nearly all Republican efforts to stigmatize critical race theory, trans rights, and other historical or civil rights issues depend on a lack of cultural knowledge and basic competence with the disciplines.  Their arguments sounded wrong, or dumb, or driven by an angry vendetta.  Exposure to the underlying issues, like the relation of critical race theory to “critical legal studies” forty years ago, offers the college goer some immunity from false statements about them.  One might still vote for De Santis or Trump or support the hostile takeover of New College, Florida, but not so much on the false ground that CRT is a novel reverse racism against white people. 

 

Okay, that’s the short brief on university learning.  What does university learning do to voting patterns? 

 

There’s this long-term trend.

SOURCE: John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times

 

Republicans lost the overall college vote during Bush II’s administration and have never gotten it back. 

Why then? A defining feature of his administration was its fabricated lie about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction and the cover-up of related measures, like bulk data collection on US resident. It was alienating, day after day, to watch the falsification of evidence and the nonstop deception.  

Bush II’s second feature, as he settled in, was to strut his policy illiteracy and tie it to success.

He promoted Social Security privatization like this:

Bush often appears with an “expert” who supports his Social Security plan—some adviser, professor or smarty-pants whom the president likes to use as a foil to contrast with his own academic record. “I’m a C-student,” Bush said proudly in Louisville . . .“He’s the PhD. He’s the adviser.  I’m the president. What does that tell you?” (Cited in Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance, 117-18). 

Well, it told a lot of people that Bush didn’t care enough about the truth not to destroy Iraq.

 

 Which brings us to Trump, who as a liar and shit-talker is the Greatest of All Time.  

 

The evidence we do have suggests that voters who answer basic questions incorrectly skewed away from Harris and towards Trump.

SOURCE: Clifford Young, Sarah Feldman, and Bernard Mendez, Ipsos

 

The smallest point swing is 29, for the stock market question.  The other gaps are in the range of 80-90 points.  There’s an awkward correlation: if you get the wrong answer, you’re more likely to vote for Trump.

 

The same October Ipsos poll linked error on one salient issue to Republican preferences on other issues. The result is the same. 

 

SOURCE: see above.

 

Right answers line up with Harris; wrong answers line up with Trump.  

 

The effect isn’t specific to a particular policy area. There’s not just a policy gap but a knowledge gap between Trump and Harris voters, with Trump voters having less knowledge or wrong knowledge. 

 

Other things being equal, a Trump voter is likely to be wrong about policy facts and therefore likely wrong about the future effects of their candidate’s views.  

 

The Trump win also means that the less informed now rule the more informed through the incoming Trump administration. Voiding California’s net zero laws, or a state’s offshore drilling restrictions, or its banking regulations, or rules against use of local police for migration enforcement, you name it-- the low information voter has in effect decided for everyone. 

 

I am not calling Trump voters generally deluded or dumb.  But as I mentioned, I taught for 40 years. And when I said, “you didn’t do the reading,” I was not saying “you’re not smart enough for my class.” When I said, “that’s not really what this author is saying,” I did not mean, “why are you more stupid than Priti over here?”   What I meant was, you didn’t learn the material so you’re not doing a good job of thinking about it.  That’s literally what I meant. 

 

The data we have suggests Trump voters were less likely to have done the reading or the problem sets—or to have thought about them.

 

The person who thinks carefully about the Trumpian gulf between fantasy and reality doesn’t have to have gone to university. But such is the relation to thinking that universities systematically teach and also insist upon.  A B.A. is a wager: it increases the odds of thinking through an issue in a way that confronts and works through one’s feelings, especially negative feelings of anger and resentment of the kind that drives the Trump crusade.

 

With this orientation towards thinking, a voter will, I believe, have a harder time convincing themselves that Trump, who they can see is a flaming plutocratic racist with overt hostility to women who reject sexual harassment, and who is the textbook definition of the authoritarian personality, was going to deliver prosperity to the honest working class. That’s how I read those graphs.

 

Whatever the New Left for 2030 is going to be, it will have to reinstall real education as the basis for democratized policy on climate, inequality, and everything else.  This means some kind of higher education for absolutely everyone, no questions asked, no preconditions about mind or motive, and entirely debt free.

 

Mullet Key, Fla. on November 18, 2018

BRITAIN DECLARES CREATIVE INDUSTRIES A KEY SECTOR; PAYS ITS CREATIVE WORKERS  £12,500 PER YEAR

 

‘A report commissioned by the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS), found that visual artists had a median annual income of £12,500, with 80% of the 1,200 creatives surveyed saying their earnings were “unstable”, or “very unstable”.

‘The situation was even more stark for women, who earned 40% less than men, while disabled artists took home a median of £3,750. Those artists who worked second and third jobs, such as teaching, earned an average of £17,500, far below the UK-wide average income of just over £37,000.

‘Christian Zimmermann, the CEO of DACS, said the situation was so challenging for visual artists trying to sustain a career in the UK that many would have to leave the country in order to carry on. . . .’

‘“It’s very tempting to lay the blame at the feet of AI,” said Thomas, “but I think it is the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s like we’ve been playing a game of KerPlunk where you keep taking out different bits of funding and see how little you can sustain a career with.”

‘The artist Larry Achiampong, who had a break-out year in 2022 with his Wayfinder solo show, said the fees artists receive have plummeted.

‘“The compensation for the work that we do tends to be the last thing that’s brought up by institutions,” said Achiampong. “There are all kinds of excuses that are produced, I do the maths and find that I often end up out of pocket.”

‘The British-Ghanaian artist was offered £350 to participate in a group exhibition that would tour four institutions. “I have sympathy for organisations in terms of the funding cuts, but it doesn’t excuse the treatment of artists and their pay as an afterthought,” he added. . . .’

‘“Ten years from now, as a parent of two, I can’t go on like this, something has to give,” he said. “I’ve realistically looked at making money in other areas, like gaming, because if I carry on this way I’ll be packing up in five years.”’

 

SOURCE: Lanre Bakare, The Guardian

UC SANTA CRUZ HAD A STRUCTURAL DEFICIT, SO MANAGERS HIRED MORE MANAGERS

 

 

SOURCE: Santa Cruz Faculty Association calculations

 

BOSTON UNIVERSITY SUSPENDS ADMISSIONS TO HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCE PH.D. PROGRAMS

 

‘The university didn’t announce this in a news release and has not fully explained the move. In an email obtained by Inside Higher Ed on condition of anonymity, the heads of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), in which all the affected programs are located, pointed to increased costs associated with the union contract that graduate student workers won after their historic, nearly seven-month strikeended in October. 

 

‘According to an undated post on the university’s website, the programs not accepting Ph.D. students for next academic year are American and New England studies, anthropology, classical studies, English, history, history of art and architecture, linguistics, philosophy, political science, religion, Romance studies, and sociology. . . .’

 

‘The deans also suggested that the larger university (which last reported an over $3.1 billion endowment) is leaving the college largely on its own to pay the higher tab. “The provost’s office has agreed to fund the increased costs this fiscal year, including students funded on external grants,” the deans wrote. “Beyond this year, CAS must work within our existing budget to fund this transition in our doctoral programs.”

 

‘The deans said, “It would be financially unsustainable to move forward with the cohort sizes discussed earlier this fall,” so the college is halting admissions “for all non-grant-funded doctoral programs” next academic year and reducing “cohort sizes of grant-funded programs.” This, they said, “will ensure that we have the financial resources available to honor the five-year funding commitments we have made to our currently enrolled doctoral students.”’

 

SOURCE: Ryan Quinn, Inside Higher Ed

 

 

THE SHAME OF US MATERNAL MORTALITY—AND THE NEVERENDING RELEVANCE OF RACE

 

SOURCE: Commonwealth Fund via Adam Tooze, Chartbook 335

 

DEPARTMENT OF FAIR AND BALANCED: NEW FCC CHAIR IS A FAN OF ELON MUSK, NOT DIVERSITY INITIATIVES

‘Brendan Carr, the incoming chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, plans to challenge big technology and broadcast companies over their content choices and kill diversity and inclusion initiatives at the agency that oversees the nation’s telecom, internet and media industries.’

‘Late Sunday, shortly after President-elect Donald Trump announced his pick of Carr to lead the agency, the 45-year-old attorney launched into a tweet-storm that included calls for the FCC to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans,” a likely reference to attempts by social media sites like Facebook to limit content deemed offensive.

‘Carr also re-posted a video that’s popular in conservative media channels of Argentine President Javier Milei ripping the names of government agencies off a white board while saying “afuera,” which means “out” in English. . . .’

‘Although Carr opposes so-called net neutrality regulations that require broadband providers to treat all internet traffic the same, he’s suggested that online platforms should be subject to neutrality obligations for posts they might otherwise take down for violating standards. . . .’

‘In his chapter in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Carr suggests the agency limit the scope of Section 230 so that it only protects the decision of a platform to leave content on its site; Under his interpretation, a site wouldn’t be automatically immune from lawsuits over content that’s taken down.

‘He also called for applying broadband transparency disclosures to platforms like Google, Facebook and YouTube that manipulate search results, ban or suspend user accounts and demonetize content creators “without any apparent consistency.”

‘Broadcasters are also likely to enter Carr’s crosshairs. After NBC featured a cameo by Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live just before the election, Carr accused the network of attempting to flout agency rules and not giving Trump equal airtime. NBC ran a free Trump ad the next day.’

SOURCE: Kelcee Griffis, Bloomberg

FEAR AND RING-KISSING IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA

‘When MSNBC’s morning hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski announced to their viewers last week that they had paid a visit to Donald Trump at his Florida resort of Mar-a-Lago they must have suspected there would be a reaction.

‘The married co-hosts on the liberal news network made hay for years lambasting Trump, especially in the run-up to the presidential election. Now, in the wake of his victory, they told their viewers they were seeking to reset communications with the man they had warned only a few weeks ago was set to bring fascism to America.

‘“Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different,’ Brzezinski told Morning Joe viewers on Monday. “That starts with not only talking about Donald Trump but also talking with him.”

‘Their reward? An online barn-burning by their critics online and a fall in viewer numbers for a show – and a network – already struggling in a rapidly declining US cable news sector. The following morning, broadcast viewing figures for the network plummeted 38%, according to Nielsen Media Research. . . .”

‘According to Puck News, the couple’s visit to Trump’s tropical paradise was because Scarborough was said to be “petrified” that the president-elect’s Department of Justice would go after him. “That’s what this was about,” a source told the news site about the motive. “It has nothing to do with ratings or Comcast. It’s all about fear of retribution and investigation.”

‘“It was about access and power,” said Jeff Jarvis, a media writer. “But this visit didn’t do anything for access, and they didn’t come back with anything journalistic. They were willing to throw the reputation of the show, their reputations and the reputation of the network over for their own personal fears” . . .’

‘The Washington Post lost 250,000 subscribers after it declined to make a presidential endorsement. Bezos defended the decision, triggering suspicion that Amazon’s role as a defense industry data cloud contractor had played a part. But since Trump won, Lewis has not changed tack and a longstanding and widely respected political editor at the paper was reportedly removed from his job last week. . . .’

‘“You’re trying to pursue readers you’ll never have and in the process pissing off the readers you do have,” Jarvis, the media writer, said of outlets playing it safe on Trump. “That’s the paradox – mass media still believes in the mass media. The challenge for journalism now is for people to feel heard and a separation from the power structures of politics and money.” . . .’

‘The only network firmly in a good place appears to be rightwing Fox News, which dominated 24-hour news broadcasting through the election cycle and seems confident of its identity as America returns to life under a Trump presidency.

‘“The press is going to find itself in an existential battle for its own integrity if it does not decide to confront and challenge Trump top to bottom. There’s no way a truly free press can be neutral about lies and broken civic norms and survive,” said Jim Sleeper, author and retired lecturer in political science at Yale University.

“If the populace has decided to trade in its freedom and rights for stability and security that authoritarians always promise, then the press has to make a choice and decide that honest journalists are dissidents.”’

SOURCE: Edward Helmore, The Guardian 

IT'S NOT A RIGHTWARD SHIFT, IT'S AN ANTI-NEOLIBERAL POPULIST SHIFT

SOURCE: Data for Progress, July 2024, via Eric London

St. Petersburg, Fla.,November 18, 2018

The post-mortem tsunami will never drown the fact that the Democrats ran a textbook centrist campaign and lost nonetheless. 

I'd have liked a left-wing campaign attacking corporate price-gouging and militarism and Big Egg and Big Finance--the kind of campaign Democrats have refused to run since McGovern lost to Nixon in 1972. 

But when I ask myself, did you really think most Americans would vote for a woman--a Black woman--for president, I have to say well no I didn't really. My prize for one-sentence explanations goes to Keith Boykin.  (And don't settle for my screenshots.)

Yes, for sure, Trump surfed the waves of cultural resentment, to put it politely. But I'd like to add a second sentence.  

This sentence is prompted by the fact that we still have to explain why a factor like mass comfort with white patriarchy can override policy.  This idea that feelings now rule reason in public life has become an orthodoxy of our time (e.g., William Davies' Nervous States).  It fits with the sense that everyone's brain has become one with the slop of social media.  By why does it rule, or seem to?

What we're seeing isn't actually a generic shift from thought to feeling. So my second sentence is that factors like racism and misogyny are strengthened by a systematic war on knowledge. It's one that Trump inherits from Republicans going back to McCarthyism 75 years ago, but had taken to a new level.

Democracy was on the ballot in 2024 .Relatedly, thinking was also on the ballot.  With Trump nominating the co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment as Secretary of Education and a vaccine-denier to the top of Health and Human Services, knowledge workers in universities, design studios, farming communities, wherever, will need to fight this knowledge war and not the last ones.

Here’s Trump-stage strategy in action. In the week before the election, the Guardian reporter Michael Safi went to Lancaster Pennsylvania to see how politically divided communities were doing, and he wound up in an art gallery. He met the owner, whom he calls Alice.

 

“She wore this bold floral blazer and had wild grey curly hair. She called everyone babe.”

“’Alright, babe.’”

“The art that she was exhibiting was modern and alternative. I thought I had a pretty good sense of her politics. And I was wrong.

“’Can I ask you a question? Who will you be voting for?’

“’Oh, Trump. Absolutely. Because he's a businessman and our country needs an astute brain that he has.

“’He did a great job when he was with us for four years. He got us out of a lot of agreements that were old. They were sapping us as taxpayers and they were not in our best interest anymore.’”

Safi wants to keep the conversation going.  Under Trump Rules for knowledge, that means you accept without question what the Trump voter says.

“’You run an art space and a dance studio. And do you find that you're surrounded by people who believe the things you believe? Or is that kind of in contrast to what others believe?’”

‘”So funny. Yeah, I think they're really shocked when they find out that I'm a Republican.’”

“’I'm a bit shocked to be honest.’”

“’Because a lot of them were Democrats’ [Alice replies] and very liberal and very open-minded. Kamala's really never been voted in. She was sort of whisked in with no votes. No one was really in her favor. Nobody really could make sense of what she was saying.’”

‘”Do you find it easy to talk about politics these days, like with people around you, neighbors, friends?”

“’So I was raised never to talk about religion and never to talk about politics because you won't make everyone happy. But this election is so important, I cannot shut up. I talk to the cash register people at the store.’”

Fine, but why does Alice like Trump? Safi doesn't ask.  He might tried to get into the head of an art-loving Trump voter with,  “what agreements were old and not in our best interest? The nuclear treaty with Iran? The Paris climate accords?  A trade agreement? What was wrong with them?”

Or, “when you say money, what money did they cost us?”

Or on the great job he did: “did his tax cuts help your gallery?” "Did you like his COVID-19 response?" “Was there something else you liked?” 

 Any of these questions go unasked. So Alice doesn't have to explain herself--or hear herself explaining any of this. We don't gain any knowledge about her thinking.  We don't get to see her think.

I've heard countless hours of Safi on Guardian podcasts and he's very good at getting into people's motives and ideas. He seems to sense that quizzing even this very friendly Trump voter will sour or end the conversation.  

He's probably right. In Trumpian knowledge culture, the act of asking for information identifies the asker as educated or pro-education or pro the kinds of evidence and argument that education inclines people to expect. And that defaults to elitist and insulting.  

To ask, “what agreements” is you implying the Trump voter might wrong. In Trump’s culture, this sounds like a request for expertise that is a put-down of regular people. 

As a result, even the nicest Trump voters have a kind of standing impunity from criticism. 

I've had a similar experience many times. I'm surprised by my own inhibition. 

How does this happen? My sense of the source is that it's not only the degradation of public education over the last two generations, but also Trump's national bullying of all questioners as elitists.  

This is a new stage of what we used to call "anti-intellectualism in American life." Trump has intensified the work Ronald Reagan began sixty years ago to convince voters that if an informed person asks you to explain, it suggests that you might be wrong, which in turn implies you might be stupid, but it fact they're stupid. They’re the one who’s wrong.  And you are right.

This is the psychological trap-door through which anti-authoritarian forces have fallen.  In Part 2 I'll discuss the Democratic contribution.  Then it's on to discussing how knowledge affected voting in the 2024 election.  Finally, I'll outline Trump's four innovation in knowledge destruction and  offer ideas for defeating Trumpism.

November 20, 2015, Lincoln Cathedral  

 

Is AI Plateauing? 

“If this were just a few hedged anonymous reports about “less improvement,” I honestly wouldn’t give it too much credence. But traditional funders and boosters like Marc Andreessen are also saying the models are reaching a “ceiling,” and now one of the great proponents of the scaling hypothesis (the idea that AI capabilities scale with how big they are and the amount of data they’re fed) is agreeing. Ilya Sutskever was always the quiet scientific brains behind OpenAI, not Sam Altman, so what he recently told Reuters should be given significant weight:

‘Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of AI labs Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and OpenAI, told Reuters recently that results from scaling up pre-training—the phase of training an AI model that uses a vast amount of unlabeled data to understand language patterns and structures—have plateaued.’

“[Though it’s bad that AI cost increases exponentially], I think people focusing on price or the domain-specificity of improvements are missing the even bigger picture about this new supposed scaling law. For what I’m noticing is that the field of AI research appears to be reverting to what the mostly-stuck AI of the 70s, 80s, and 90s relied on: search.

 

“I don’t mean searching the web, rather, I mean examples like when this summer Google DeepMind released their state-of-the-art math AI able to handle mathematical Olympiad problems. It's a hybrid, very different than a leading generalist LLM. How does it work? It just considers a huge number of possibilities.

‘When presented with a problem, AlphaProof generates solution candidates and then proves or disproves them by searching over possible proof steps…. The training loop was also applied during the contest, reinforcing proofs of self-generated variations of the contest problems until a full solution could be found.’

“This sort of move makes sense, because search was the main advantage for AIs against humans for a very long time . . .”

 

“Continued improvements are going to happen, but if the post-GPT-4 gains in AI came mainly from adding first better prompts (chain-of-thought prompting) and now more recently the addition of search to the process (either over many potential outputs or over the model’s parameters itself) this is different than actually constructing baseline-smarter artificial neural networks. It indicates to me a return to the 70s, 80s, and 90s in AI.”

 

SOURCE: Eric Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective

 

EPISTEMIC COLLAPSE

 

"I do think there is an information story to be told here, but I also think, and I promise I'll address it, but I also think that people who vote for Trump, many of them often understand themselves to be voting for his spirit and not for specifics, right? And they are voting for the spirit of resentment, they are voting for the spirit of sort of anti-establishment thinking, they are voting for the spirit of having somebody punish their enemies, right? And that spirit, that vibe of Trumpist dominance, gratification and like fun resentment, right?

 

“That is an emotional register that can contain a ton of contradictions, right? So you can be pro-abortion rights, at least in your state, and be pro-Trump at the same time, because it is perfectly possible to favor abortion access for you and also fucking hate a lot of other people and want to see them punished, right? And that is, I think, a continuous theme you see in Trump supporters.

 

“If you ask them about Trump policies, often they will say, well, I don't support that, but they do support the animating feature behind those policies, the sort of spirit of sadistic, jeering, fuck you. That's what they really like, they enjoy the anger. But I do also think, to your point, that there's an information ecosystem problem, right?

 

“Like this information ecosystem is dog shit. It is impossible to get reliable information. The media has lost its credibility, but it's also just lost its monopoly on the audiences.

 

“People don't trust the most credible sources to be telling them the truth, but they're also not really listening to those sources anymore. So they're listening to a lot of fucking --d“

 

“Podcasts.”

 

“A lot of goddamn podcasters”

 

“Fuck them. I hate those guys.”

 

“They're listening to podcasters. They're watching influencers who do front-facing videos on TikTok and Instagram reels. They're getting a lot of information sort of ambiently from what they see posted by their connections or what their friends who saw something posted online say to them over burgers.

 

There's this ambient disinformation and a corrosion of the information environment and the reliability of information that has led to, I think, a really profound epistemic collapse that is completely impervious to the style of politics that involves facts and policy mattering.”

 

SOURCE: Moira In Bed With The Right Podcast: Episode 42 Nov 19, 2024

 

 SOURCE: KAL, The Economist, November 14, 2024

UNIVERSITIES DOING TRUMP’S WORK FOR HIM

 

“The contradiction between liberalism’s substantive ends and its formal means is not a new problem. One could argue—I would—that virtually every historical moment of substantive liberal triumph has been made possible by social movements that imposed themselves from below, often over the protest of liberal policymakers and thinkers, registering their objection to the means despite their abstract support for the ends. Universal adult suffrage, the welfare state, equal protection under law—such is the story of each of these.

 

“In our time, there are entrenched institutional liberal forces, not only in formal politics but in the universities, the press, the legal system, the nonprofit sector, and even the corporate world, that intone the threat Trumpism poses to democracy and the rule of law, yet work every day to defeat their own internal left-wing challengers: student protests, labor struggles, “woke excesses.” When they raid encampments (student or unhoused) or bust unions, they do Trump’s work for him, remaking Americans in authoritarian ways. The phenomenon that Trump represents can only be defeated when liberal institutionalists cease trying to quash the insurgent left in the name of protecting democracy, and instead look to it as an ally and a source of strength. This is not because the ideas of the left already represent a suppressed silent majority—a fantastical, self-flattering delusion—but because it is only the left that has a coherent vision to offer against the ideas of the right.”

 

SOURCE: Gabriel Winant, Dissent (November 7, 2024)

 

 

IT’S THE RACE AND CLASS COMBINATION, STUPID

 

"There are countless polls that show Americans want things that are anathema to the Republican Party and especially to Trump’s agenda. At least 65 percent of Americans believe that the federal government has a “responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care.” More than 50 percent insist that “government aid to the poor does more good than harm.” Nearly 80 percent believe that Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way. Polling by Pew also shows that most Americans believe that the government should do more to help “the needy even if it means going deeper into debt.” Nearly 70 percent of Americans are concerned about the costs of child care, and thus nearly 80 percent support some kind of government-subsidized, affordable-child-care initiative. And overwhelming majorities agree that the U.S. is enveloped in an ongoing housing crisis. More than 60 percent of voters agreed with the statement “Housing is a basic necessity, and the private market is unable to address many Americans’ affordability concerns.” In hurricane-wrecked and Republican-controlled Florida, a recent survey found that a whopping 90 percent of residents believe that climate change is real and 58 percent believe that it’s human-caused. Nearly 70 percent of them want the state and federal governments to do more to address it.

 

"Despite the widespread desires of ordinary Americans for the government to play more of a role in improving their quality of life, Trump and the Republican Party reject these calls for greater public spending and services to help those in need of it. But the Democratic Party has also been reluctant to cast itself as the party for greater government intervention to help with health care, housing, and child care. For more than a generation, the Democratic Party has envisioned itself as jettisoning its reputation as the party of social welfare, most dramatically exemplified by the War on Poverty and the Great Society initiatives, the signature legislation of the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Harris has made some modest proposals like expanding the child tax credit and providing grants for potential first-time homeowners, but none is nearly enough to offset the economic malaise that ordinary people are experiencing right now. It is almost as if the Democrats believed that the sharp personal contrast between the candidates — a white supremacist Trump against a Black South Asian daughter of immigrants — was significant enough to outweigh substantive mention of any other details of why their party should prevail.

 

"In her unprecedented run for office, Harris has almost completely retreated from the more progressive positions she took during the heated primary in 2020 and the bolder proposals that the Biden-Harris campaign eventually adopted. These promises, designed to convince the millions of young people protesting in the streets to cast their votes for the Democratic ticket, included increasing the minimum wage, paid family leave, subsidized child care, canceling student debt, and other big government expenditures, some of which were realized in the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act signed by Biden in 2021. The Democrats won in 2020 with 81 million votes, the most in American history.

 

"But in this election, even though ambitious government proposals are still popular with wide swaths of the electorate, Harris has returned to a political message that emphasizes the supremacy of capital, marginalizes the role of the state and public expenditure, and has legitimized Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric on the border and wherever Black and brown bodies need to be surveilled and policed. She has deftly avoided any mention of the 2020 protests that are the reason she was selected as Biden’s running mate in the first place. The simultaneous eruption of protest in response to the murder of George Floyd and the unfolding human tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic raised the demands not only for police reform but also for the state to play a greater role in helping suffering people. Since her ascension to the top of the ticket, Harris and the Democratic National Committee have excised the influence of the Black Lives Matter social movement that suffused the party’s 2020 political platform and its emphasis on countering racism, police brutality, and inequality. It has been airbrushed from history. Indeed, in the Harris and Walz 80-page platform, the words “racism,” “inequality,” “diversity,” and “police brutality” are nowhere to be found.

 

"[I]n this race, Trump is setting the terms, and this time he has shed the patina of economic populism that once defined him and is leaning even more heavily into conspiracy ramblings and outrageous bigotry. Harris, lacking sufficient pressure from the left, has largely abandoned gestures or appeals to the working class and instead touts endorsements from current and former Republicans, including war criminal Dick Cheney. Focused on appealing to middle-of-the-road and undecided voters, Harris has now been left to scramble to bolster support among core Democratic bases, including Black men. Weeks away from the election, Harris promised up to $20,000 in forgivable loans for Black entrepreneurs, an initiative to tackle sickle cell disease, more regulatory protections for cryptocurrency investors, and the creation of new opportunities for Black men to participate in the emerging cannabis industry. It reeks more of desperation than as part of a coherent plan to mobilize voters."

 

SOURCE, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Hammer and Hope (Fall 2024).

 

THEFT OF ENJOYMENT

 

“Nationalism thus presents a privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field. The national Cause is ultimately nothing but the way subjects of a given ethnic community organize their enjoyment through national myths. What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing. We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment; s/he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the peculiar way it organizes its enjoyment: precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to it—the smell of their food, their ‘noisy’ songs and dances, their strange manners, their attitude to work (in the racist perspective, the ‘other’ is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labour; and it is quite amusing to note the ease with which one passes from reproaching the other with a refusal to work, to reproaching him for the theft of work). The basic paradox is that our Thing is conceived as something inaccessible to the other, and at the same time threatened by it; this is also the case with castration, which, according to Freud, is experienced as something that ‘really cannot happen’, but we are nonetheless horrified by its prospect. The ground of incompatibility between different ethnic subject positions is thus not exclusively the different structure of their symbolic identifications. What categorically resists universalization is rather the particular structure of their relationship towards enjoyment:

 

‘Why does the Other remain Other? What is the cause for our hatred of him, for our hatred of him in his very being? It is hatred of the enjoyment in the Other. This would be the most general formula of the modern racism we are witnessing today: a hatred of the particular way the Other enjoys. . .The question of tolerance or intolerance is not at all concerned with the subject of science and its human rights. It is located on the level of tolerance or intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other, the Other as he who essentially steals my own enjoyment. We know, of course, that the fundamental status of the object is to be always already snatched away by the Other. It is precisely this theft of enjoyment that we write down in shorthand as minus-Phi, the matheme of castration. The problem is apparently unsolvable as the Other is the Other in my interior. The root of racism is thus hatred of my own enjoyment. There is no other enjoyment but my own. If the Other is in me, occupying the place of extimacy, then the hatred is also my own.’ (Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Extimité)

 

“What we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us: the lack (‘castration’) is original; enjoyment constitutes itself as ‘stolen’, or, to quote Hegel’s precise formulation from his Science of Logic, it ‘only comes to be through being left behind. Yugoslavia today is a case-study of such a paradox, in which we are witness to a detailed network of ‘decantations’ and ‘thefts’ of enjoyment.’”

 

SOURCE: Slavoj Žižek, New Left Review (Sept/Oct 1990)

 

November 13, 2015, Beirut from Crown Plaza, 6:26am

 (NEVER) ENOUGH

 

“Mr. Trump’s voters are granted a level of care and coddling that defies credulity and that is afforded to no other voting bloc. Many of them believe the most ludicrous things: babies being aborted after birth and children going to school as one gender and returning home surgically altered as another gender even though these things simply do not happen. Time and again, we hear the wild lies these voters believe and we act as if they are sharing the same reality as ours, as if they are making informed decisions about legitimate issues. We act as if they get to dictate the terms of political engagement on a foundation of fevered mendacity.

 

“We must refuse to participate in a mass delusion. We must refuse to accept that the ignorance on display is a congenital condition rather than a choice. All of us should refuse to pretend that any of this is normal and that these voters are just woefully misunderstood and that if only the Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently. While they are numerous, that does not make them right.

 

“These are adults, so let us treat them like adults. Let us acknowledge that they want to believe nonsense and conjecture. They want to believe anything that affirms their worldview. They want to celebrate a leader who allows them to nurture their basest beliefs about others. The biggest challenge of our lifetime will be figuring out how to combat the American willingness to embrace flagrant misinformation and bigotry. …

 

“Absolutely anything is possible, and we must acknowledge this, not out of surrender, but as a means of readying ourselves for the impossible fights ahead.”

 

SOURCE: Roxane Gay, New York Times

 

MOGULS EXCITED TO USE TRUMP TO FURTHER CONSOLIDATE MEDIA OWNERSHIP, LAY OFF WORKERS          

 

“Trump is suing CBS News, accusing 60 Minutes of editing an interview with Kamala Harris in a way that flattered the vice-president. He also said his debate with Harris, which many observers judged her to have won, had been ‘rigged’ by CBS. ‘They ought to take away their licence for the way they did that,’ he said. 

 

“While Trump has previously lost defamation lawsuits against media outlets including CNN and The New York Times, the threats are costly and time-consuming for media organisations that are already under financial pressure.

 

“The chair of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates US radio and TV, said in October that it ‘does not revoke licences for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage’ . . . .  

 

“Trump has announced plans to ‘shatter the leftwing censorship regime,’ blaming ‘depraved corporate news media’ for ‘conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people.’ …

 

“But Trump has pledged to bring the FCC, an independent regulatory agency, ‘back under presidential authority, as the constitution demands’— a misreading of the law, according to media scholars. ‘What he wants is to weaponise the FCC,’ Kaplan said.  . . . 

Yet despite the concerns over what the incoming administration might mean for journalism and few hopes of the same sort of ‘Trump bump’ in audiences that was seen during his last administration, there is a sense of cautious optimism that dealmaking can return to the sector.

 

David Zaslav, chief executive of CNN owner Warner Bros Discovery, told analysts last week that Trump’s return would offer ‘an opportunity for consolidation.’

 

His comments landed with a thud with journalists at CNN, who are bracing for job losses and 

cost cuts in the coming months. But on Wall Street, Warner’s struggling stock price has risen 8.6 per cent.

 

“’It is reasonable to assume a pro-consolidation regulatory climate,’ wrote Rich Greenfield, analyst at LightShed Partners. ‘We would expect great urgency to pursue M&A.’”

 

SOURCE: Daniel Thomas, et al., Financial Times

 

THE PROBLEM WASN’T “DEFUND THE POLICE”

 

Doug Henwood: “Now, there's been a war on progressive prosecutors. Some of them lost, not all of them lost in the most recent round of elections. What about that?

 

“How much effect do they have? And are they a disappearing breed?”

 

Alex Vitaly: “Well, they're not a disappearing breed. We still have several and some of them are very popular and have won re-election like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. I always have felt that there are profound limits to the progressive prosecutor movement, which was largely driven by folks in the defense bar, you know, lawyers trying to remake the legal system, and thinking that that would be sufficient to dial back mass criminalization.

 

“And I think what that movement lacked was a strong basis in communities that experience high levels of crime and disorder relative to other areas, and that just pursuing a strategy of reduced incarceration doesn't address the profound insecurities that a lot of these communities experience. And this made that whole movement really vulnerable to backlash, because the infrastructure of public safety in the communities was not enhanced by this movement. With some exceptions, including Krasner, who's gone out and raised millions of dollars to put into actual communities, to make communities safer, and of course, he has enjoyed, as a result, the highest level of kind of electoral support. . . . .

 

“We always knew that one of the weaknesses of the three-word phrase ‘defund the police’ is that it only captured the kind of negative aspects of the argument, as if it were sort of a punishment of police, rather than the positive aspects of the argument, which were to take those resources that we spend on policing and put them into community-based safety strategies to create flourishing neighborhoods. We need to go back to that original concept of divest from the criminal legal system, invest in communities.

 

“When we do that and we have a chance to explain it to people, there's actually very high levels of support for that. Things like getting police out of schools and bringing in counselors and after school programs, creating community-based mental health crisis response teams instead of sending police. It turns out that hundreds of cities are actually investing in these alternatives to policing, but what they're not doing is actually dialing back policing.”

 

SOURCE: Doug Henwood and Alex Vitaly, Background Briefing November 14, 2024

 

IT’S THE VOTER ERROR, STUPID

 

SOURCE: Christopher Hale, Twitter

 

DARK PROMISE: SCHOOL'S OUT, FOREVER

 

“For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. ‘Liberal democracy,’ he says, ‘offers moral constraints without problem-solving’ — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while ‘populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.’ Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: ‘Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.’

 

“Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for their own singular will. Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban vowed to restore a simpler, more orderly past, in which men were men and in charge. What they delivered was permission to abandon societal inhibitions, to amplify the grievances of one’s own group and heap hate on assorted others, particularly on groups that cannot speak up for themselves. Magyar calls this ‘morally unconstrained collective egoism.’

 

“Trump and his supporters have shown tremendous hostility to civic institutions — the judiciary, the media, universities, many nonprofits, some religious groups — that seek to define and enforce our obligations to one another. Autocrats such as Orban and Putin reject that deliberative process, claiming for themselves the exclusive right to define those obligations. If those two leaders, and Trump’s own first term, are any indication, he will likely begin by getting rid of experts, regulators and other civil servants he sees as superfluous, eliminating jobs that he thinks simply shouldn’t exist. Expect asylum officers to be high on that list.

 

“A major target outside of government will be universities. In Hungary, the Central European University, a pioneering research and educational institution (and Magyar’s academic home), was forced into exile. To understand what can happen to public universities in the United States, look at Florida, where the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis has effectively turned the state university system into a highly policed arm of his government. The MAGA movement’s attack on private universities has been underway for some time; most recently it drove the congressional hearings on antisemitism, in the wake of which half a dozen college presidents no longer have their jobs. Watch for moves to strip private universities of federal funding and tax breaks. Under this kind of financial pressure, even the largest and wealthiest universities will cut jobs and shutter departments; smaller liberal arts colleges will go out of business.”

 

SOURCE: Masha Gessen, New York Times

 

IT’S NOT THE POLICY

 

 

SOURCE: Keith Boykin, Twitter