UPDATE (10/11/24)
So, getting on to a week later and there have been roughly a billion analyses of the election. The pro-Trump people are rubbing it in it for all it’s worth, of course, and which of course they are very much entitled to do: they won. (We’ll see how long the good feelings last.) The anti-Trump crowd have been writing in all shapes and sizes, plenty in the Baird style, still impressively determined to deny reality, but also with some reasonable “we have to knock it off and listen to reality” takes. (We’ll see how long they remember.) In the former category, special mention must go to the clueless editor of The Guardian and the utterly retarded editor of Scientific American. Sort of in the latter category, but more a meta-commentary on the whole thing is the reliably smart and funny Marina Hyde.
There’s obviously no point in us trying to make sense here of all the wittery and nitwittery. But when they are our nitwits we feel some obligation to comment. Two have come to our attention.
First there is Public Policy academic, Jenna Price. We wrote on Price a couple years ago, when she was being an asshole in writing on England’s “behaviour tsar”, Tom Bennett. A couple days ago, Price wrote an opinion piece for The Canberra Times, titled,
Why Americans picked a felon and misogynist over a woman
Yes, the headline promises an Ostrich-like cluelessness but, to be clear, Price’s article is different. It is worse.
Price’s screed should be read in its entirely, but we’ll just excerpt the, um, best bit:
I called Mona Lena Krook, distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers University. Krook has been a lifelong researcher of women and politics. She firmly discards the argument, brought by a number of political analysts, that Americans voted based on cost-of-living issues. “It’s not economics, whatever they say in the media; this is gaslighting to hide or justify the sexism, racism, homophobia, etc … people support Trump not because he’s going to help them, but because they’re excited about who he’s going to hurt.”
You probably have to be a humanities academic to be this stupid.
Then, yesterday, Chris Zappone chimed in. Zappone is “Digital Foreign Editor” for the Sydney Morning Herald, and we wrote on Zappone last year, when he had an opinion piece arguing for the “regulation” of social media. In that article, Zappone was riffing off of Trump’s use of Twitter to win in 2016, and his piece was appalling: manipulative and special pleading and censorious nuttiness, from go to woe. So, it is no surprise that Zappone is hysterical over Musk’s Twittery buddying up to Trump.
Zappone’s opinion piece yesterday is titled,
The alarm over Elon Musk and national security has yet to sink in
This time, Zappone is less concerned with the censorship thing, although he slaps Musk a little for not censoring all the people Zappone would like censored. His main concern, however, is Musk being Putin’s puppet. So, yes, it would appear that Zappone is all ready for a second round of the Russiagate bullshit.
Musk is an asshole. He was an asshole before the election, he was an asshole during the election and he will be an asshole long after the election. He claims to have principles but these principles seem, at best, to be incredibly rubbery. So, yeah, Musk will have more power to do his self-serving asshole things, at least until, inevitably, he and Trump feud. But Zappone’s clueless McCarthyist bullshit is not helping anyone.
It far from clear what will now happen to the Left, or “Left”. There are some signs that some people are coming to some sense. But then there are people like Price and Zappone, who give promise that we’ll have the horror of Trump for many more years, if not decades.
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Yeah, I find that photo “triggering” as well. Deal with it.
It was a very depressing day, of course, and not only because I didn’t win as much money on the election as I had hoped. To witness millions of Americans vote for that demagogic gangster conman was horrifying. But, for anyone paying attention, it was not shocking.
I hadn’t intended to write on the election, and I won’t write much, but a couple things have prompted me to do so. Mostly Julia Baird.
Yesterday morning I sat down to watch the election coverage. I didn’t work hard, just flipping through the Australian TV channels, with the intention of mostly sitting with the ABC. While waiting for the early results to trickle in, the ABC panel was happily chatting, with their obviously pre-arranged backgrounding; it was notably shallow, if not too annoying. But then Jeremy Fernandez, the anchor guy, asked Julia Baird a straight and reasonable and obvious question, about criticisms Kamala Harris had received as a candidate. Baird did not bring up or address any of this criticism. Instead, Baird used the opportunity to deliver a long sermon on the unfairness of the criticism, of all the misogyny Harris had had to endure. Baird’s sermon was insane, and its insanity captured why Trump had a much too great a shot at winning, and it captures why this Trumping is not likely to end any time soon.
To be clear, Harris, like very many female politicians, has had to put up with some very sexist and very nasty bullshit. And the abuse of Harris was probably worse than the very bad norm. There is a woman-hating aspect to the MAGA-bro crowd that is utterly repugnant. But Harris is still a candidate, she must be open to criticism as a candidate, Fernandez asked a reasonable question about that criticism, and Baird responded by making it clear she didn’t give a shit about any of that criticism.
Harris was a very bad candidate. Anyone with an ounce of sense or an attention span greater than that of a goldfish knew she was a very bad candidate. How did the Democrats end up with such a bad candidate? Biden fucked up, twice: first by reneging on his promise and running for a second term; then, by refusing to relinquish the nomination until the Democrat powerbrokers blasted him out. Then, the Democrat powerbrokers fucked up, by anointing Harris before anyone had a chance to object. Just as in 2016, the Democrat powerbrokers railroaded the party into choosing probably the only candidate who was not capable of beating Trump.
Baird needn’t have gone into all of this but she needed to say something. She needed to indicate something about reality, that there were plenty of valid reasons to be less than thrilled about voting for Harris. But the knowledge classes, as Rundle refers to them, do not have a strong hold on reality.
Trump is a loathsome and very dangerous man, and there is a strong temptation to begin and end the analysis there. But we cannot. Millions of Americans voted for this loathsome and very dangerous man. Twice. Why? Because they were all deluded by “misinformation” or whatever? Keep telling yourself that. See where it gets us. It didn’t work in 2016 or 2024 but there’s always hope for 2028.
Rightly or wrongly, a hell of a lot of Americans – and not only Americans – feel disenfranchised. Of course Trump sells that disenfranchisement, that bitterness, and of course he is selling pure snake oil. But it doesn’t explain why people are buying it.
The knowledge classes will not step far enough out of their comfy world to consider that there may be some legitimacy to people’s complaints. Particularly from young men, who, in droves, feel as if they have been thoroughly sold out and have turned to rat-bait poisonous alternatives such as Musk and Peterson and Trump and Tate and so on. This is not to excuse them. But if you want people to stop following assholes, if you want them to stop voting for assholes, then you had better figure out why they are doing so. And it ain’t just social media misinformation.
I lurk on an education list populated by genuinely smart people. Just prior to the election, the list had a brief non-ed exchange about the election. One person wrote,
The mistake I see in the Biden/Harris strategy was based on the modernist belief that facts speak for themselves, that reality eventually must prevail. They have not understood the postmodernist reality we are living in, one in which reality is created by consensus, not imposed from outside. …
The person went on, briefly listing some of the corruption of language, and thus of the perception of reality, engaged in by the Trump gang. All important and valid. But.
There is a lot one could write in response, and the person is of course not totally wrong. But it seems to me that the first and the obvious reply is: which side originally came up with post modernism? If you need a hint, it wasn’t the MAGA crowd.
Neither side has a monopoly on deceit or delusion. There is little sign that anyone is interested in addressing this on the MAGA side. We can and must address it on ours.
It seems that there is a lot of talk of (some) symptoms but not causes.
Talk of symptoms is better than flat denial. It’s a start.
But in the fast stream of 24hr news, I wonder how much talk will be swept away before it has a chance to dive deep enough to find a cause and be heard.
Um, all of it? They didn’t learn in 2016. Can’t see why they’d learn now.
Apart from talking about why people are voting for Trump, it’s worth considering why so many people who voted for Biden (or perhaps even Clinton) did not vote for Harris. Why was turnout lower in Philadelphia and Detroit?
One can’t be sure, but perhaps making an alliance with Liz Cheney and all the other supporters / accomplices of the military-prison-industrial complex didn’t go down well in urban centres with large black populations…
Thanks, SRK. I doubt that having the likes of Cheney around helped, but my guess is that it was laregely irrelevant. Still, the election was hardly Reagan v Mondale, so maybe enough of these stupid little bits was enough to have swung it.
Musk, Peterson, and Tate in one line that’s rich.
‘Knowledge class’? Since when left have a monopoly on knowledge? This isn’t a ‘knowledge class’; it is a class of ‘luxury beliefs’ and ‘virtue signalers’.
Trump is not the best candidate, but some in the world might be more frustrated by the government of Anthony Albanese with foreign minister Penelope Wong along with other characters regulating what people can talk about and hear. In the UK there is also a bunch of obnoxious liars in power with some characters much more frustrating and more damaging than Trump.
Trump survived two assassination attempts in the last half a year. ‘Knowledge fucking class’.
Now let’s go to the facts; the only four years Putin didn’t attack his neighbours were four years of Trump. The only person who managed to achieve peace agreements in the Middle East since 1996 is Trump.
Not too shabby especially compared to the last four years. As for the personal qualities of Trump, they aren’t too different from many other presidents on either the left or right sides of the spectrum. Clinton paid out-of-court settlements became a president and then lied to the whole nation and he is still a darling of the left. This election is the revenge of the ‘garbage’ and ‘deplorable’ so fucking deal with it.
Don’t be ridiculous.
I am seeing many more ridiculous things around 😉 I, also, don’t Trump is your biggest problem.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/video/2024/nov/07/albanese-government-announces-new-minimum-age-limit-of-16-for-social-media-platforms-video
The quickest way that many people justify their support for a politician with obvious flaws is to say “well, the other guy does it too”. Sure, there are other politicians who lie and cheat, but it can be fairly said that Trump is in a completely different class, and this opinion can be backed up with solid analysis. We can talk all we want about how the modern world may be different philosophically, but the authoritative tendencies and populist appeals follow a well-trod path in history, and people fall for the same old stuff. We have to hope that when he is inaugurated, it is not January, 1933.
As for the oft-quoted statements that there were no wars started during his first term and that the times were better for the average citizen, international affairs and the economy are affected by factors that go far beyond a single leader. It is not clear to me that Putin might not have invaded Ukraine or that Hamas might not have made its murderous attack in 2019.; what would the US have done then? Was the statesmanship of leaders better in 1932-1936 when there were no wars in Europe than in 1936-1940?
Thanks, Ed.
This is a message from Australia:
“We have businesses squeezed out from the North of the city and moving to Jewish suburbs, families moving to Melbourne as their business could not tolerate anti-Semitic bullying in Sydney. Even though the community is trying to support each other, the hate is spreading like a grass fire.”
Still think that Trump is your biggest problem?
For fuck’s sake, Mike.
I’ve made absolutely clear that I regard a lot of this pro-Palestinian bullshit as straight anti-semitism, and you know I have. But you expect me to take some from-God-knows-where message of God-knows-what-veracity as gospel truth, and then extrapolate from that to go along with your sucking Trump’s cock? Forget it.
And your video is deleted. I have plenty of time for Bill Maher, but I hate argument-by-video, and you know it.
I know you hate anti-semitism. Even for a split second, I didn’t think differently! The point I am trying to make is that many people trying to portray Trump as some sort of absolute evil while there are plenty of things much worse than Trump are around them. However, it is definitely in fashion to hate Trump. In Britain, we have a government that lies every single day blatantly lies. Well obviously all of them hate Trump. It is a strong virtue signal to hate Trump. Trump isn’t absolute evil, Trump is a litmus paper showing that chemical reactions in American society have become way too toxic. Instead of discussing why it happened people discuss Trump. Trump won the popular vote, the Senate and Congress. Those who even remotely suggest that more than 50% of the American public are racists and idiots should look in the mirror! Democrats and every self-righteous person around can continue to discuss Trump but it isn’t constructive. They had four years to turn things around and after years they still lost to the same guy!!!
Agh! Why are you sermonising to me? Read my fucking post.
Trump is not “absolute evil” and there are plenty of other evils around. But Trump is nonetheless a loathsome and very dangerous thug. You are letting your justified loathing of the Trump haters blind you to how appalling Trump is.
Here, you are simply making a fool of yourself. Stop it. And if you don’t stop it, and continue with your boring diatribing, I’ll start deleting. I’ve got enough people pissing me off right now without dealing with smart people wallowing in pointless idiocy.
You aren’t the only one on this thread. Also if what I am saying is reinforcing what you have said that doesn’t mean that I am sermonising to you. Also if you want to be a censor so read several of your posts.
Ed was right, you were wrong. Watch your step.
I’ve had enough. It’s my fucking private blog, which I work hard on. I allow very wide latitude for people to say things here, including you, but I do not have to tolerate bullshit that pisses me off and I do not have to tolerate snide allusions to me being a censor. Your comments on this thread have been thoroughly idiotic: poorly thought out and self-indulgent whataboutism, and I’ve had enough.
Behave, or fuck off.
Ed Barbeau:
I might be able to answer your question if the moderator on this blog allows me. I will risk writing it down even if the moderator is going to delete it. Although the moderator has decided that you are right and I am wrong I still think that your post is pretty much a salad of everything without any reasonable substance. I don’t know if you are unaware of events or just conveniently ignoring what doesn’t suit your narrative hence I will take it slowly.
So what Romans have ever done for us apart from…
Let’s start with the international situation.
1) Assassination of Soleimani who was single-handedly responsible for the murders of thousands of Syrian rebels.
2) Tearing down the nuclear deal with Iran
3) Slightly later Abrahamic peace accords between Israel and major Middle Eastern countries
4) First-ever and the only meeting between the incumbent USA president and North Korean dictator. It didn’t lead to peace but it was an immense try.
5) Trump was the president who shamed Europe for supporting Putin by paying for his army machine and was the president who applied sanctions to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Long before the second Ukraine war.
6) The Trump administration reviewed plans to invest in Ukraine but those were dismissed due to very high corruption levels in Ukraine. That obviously doesn’t mean or in any way justify Putin’s brazen attack that by the way started in 2014 when the president was … Barack Obama.
I can support all these points (facts) with links, but all of this is obvious and Google will immediately help.
Now let’s go economic situation:
1) Probably the most deregulating administration in years.
2) Lowest inflation in years
3) Lowest energy prices in years
4) Some of the biggest tax reforms in years.
I might easily continue forward to the political situation in Germany’s Weimar Republic which was marked by political turmoil, and economic hardship (hyperinflation). In short, everything that set the stage for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
Hence, I conclude that you either couldn’t express yourself properly or you are simply wrong despite what the moderator says.
“The moderator”
Your comment, for once, is acceptable, except for the snarky “the moderator” bullshit. Ed can respond if he wishes. I won’t get involved. But I’ll say it again: watch your step.
You previously lost all reason and politeness on this thread, were simply taunting and grandstanding. It was incredibly rude, incredibly boring and incredibly pointless. The main point wasn’t that (I thought) Ed was right. The main point was that Ed was being polite and considered, and you were being neither.
You still seem to have no idea what a shithead you were being, and that I have every right to be pissed off with your shitheadedness. You have not given a hint of an apology, which I, and Ed, are certainly owed.
I’ll let it pass. But I have a hair trigger right now for you, or anyone, being a shithead. This includes any more shit about “censor” or “the moderator”.
“which side originally came up with post modernism?”
Well, Trump was a pioneer in the application of Conway’s Theory of Alternate facts.
Click to access Trump-Riemann-Hypothesis.pdf
Very funny!
Marty, I managed to be “incredibly rude, incredibly boring and incredibly pointless”.
That is an achievement!
Indeed it was.
“people support Trump not because he’s going to help them, but because they’re excited about who he’s going to hurt.”
A large part of Trump’s campaign was to deport illegal immigrants, and I bet many people supported him exactly because they were excited for this to happen. So, I’d say that she’s right, at least on the racism point.
Nonsense. There was plenty of hatred in Trump’s campaign, no doubt. It cannot possibly explain how well he did, over so many demographics.
I feel very sorry for my brother living in Canada and my aunty living in Connecticut, and I know you have an American background too Marty. However, the USA kind of deserves Trump. He’s the kind of incompetent fascist that the US has forced upon so many nations in South and Central America, South East Asia, Africa and the Middle East. While one may argue whether or not Trump is personally ideologically a fascist or a narcist riding a fascist movement, for anyone who understands fascism (I suggest anyone research Umberto Eco’s definition as well as others if you’re in doubt).
He’s already appointing people to tear down government institutions, and to implement tariffs for a net importer, whose economy is based on being a net importer so that dollars are floating around the world as the global currency, is insane. It is a flat sales tax on those who can least afford it.
The idea of rounding up 11 million undocumented immigrants is scary if you take a minute to consider the logistics of that, and how it inevitably leads to millions concentrated in camps especially designed for that. It is also a terrible move for the economy to get rid of everyone who does the jobs that citizens do not want to do.
However, his policies towards Climate Change could hasten our doom, and I fear for the Ukrainian and Palestinian people even though the alternative was happy to support genocide against Palestine and was more interested in supporting Ukraine just enough to stay in the fight, not have decisive victories to end the invasion.
I do not think it is misogyny that led to this. It is always the case that liberal “elites” fight more vigorously against leftist politics than fascist politics and we always see fascism take charge when capitalism fails. The centre-right democrats that represent the corporate interests fight against the left, so there are no reforms to improve the lives of ordinary people, but tip their lids to “socially progressive” policies that just irritate people who feel left behind. All the while they tell the struggling working class that this is as good as it gets, which opens the door for the fascist demigod to come in and tell you that “only I can fix this”. Of course, as evidenced by his last term, he does nothing for the working class, but at least they feel “heard”.
I also feel like a lot of people feel talked down to by people who have the audacity to be experts in areas that most people are not. As a teacher, it feels that the global reaction to a lot of ignoramus types is a joy as people who are capable of some political/economic/historical analysis are distraught at the possibilities. It reminds me of low students laughing at how silly a maths teacher is “because I’ll never need this in my life”.
Putting RFK in charge of health and medicine could cost many lives.
Finally, I find the US system bizarre. Firstly, having a modern “democracy” without preferential voting locks out a lot of people and stymies the opportunity for minor parties to grow. Secondly, the fact that prosecutions just stop against someone who is president, and the fact that he can unilaterally pardon anyone he wants is just weird. Is he a king? Now the Supreme Court has made that even worse by ruling that no act in office can be deemed illegal!
The fact the only superpower in the world has a leader like this and has threatened to invade international courts if they attempt to indict any of its citizens is not great for the world. My only hope is accelerationist. Hopefully, Europe will pull away from the US and focus more on an EU military to support Ukraine. Trump’s promise to allow Israel to just annex all of Palestine might lead to global sanctions on Israel to end the apartheid and grant the right of return to all refugees, leading to a sustainable one-state solution, and the recalcitrance of a Trump presidency and continued Putin leadership of Russia could see global interest rise for a better international body that is free from allow these two empires to run roughshod over the rest of us with their veto.
It is a grim time, but at least it may lead to global elites waking up and resetting economic focus to making everyone’s life better.
Thanks, Matthew. It certainly is a crazy country. I’ve had in my mind to write a post about leaving America, and Trump brought it back to me. Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow.
I have to say, I have mixed feelings about Trump’s nutty cabinet picks. Some of the craziness of the US is in the institutions, so watching these institutions being shaken up doesn’t totally displease me. I also don’t think all the appointments are totally nuts. Maybe 80% nuts? The one I’m enjoying is Gaetz, for the pure perversity of it. The Republican senators won’t want to go against Trump, but the guy is, rightly, loathed.