Signifyin(g)Monkey

I can already see cleavages in Gen Z and onward in response to applying trans identities to spheres beyond gender. The response to the case of Rachel Dolezal and the idea of being ‘trans-racial’ was quite revealing, for example.

There’s no indication there will be one—in fact the outlook appears favorable right now. However, by its own nature, no one ever sees a downturn coming, and it will have been close to four years since the last contraction. The longer we go without one, the more we’re simply burdened by the weight of sheer historical probability.

I’ve decided that these rulings are actually more likely to be a boon for Trump than not. I haven’t looked into the actual letter of the law, so they might be the right decision from a purely legal perspective. But politically they’re going to help boost grassroots turnout and fundraising for him, at least for now. I believe the Georgia case might be a different story, though, depending on what comes out about what he did. (these cases don’t reveal anything we didn’t already know). And regardless I think the election will ultimately turn on other things. I’m crossing my fingers that we’ll avoid a recession next year and that Biden can broker some kind of peace deal in the Israel/Gaza conflict. That will be more consequential than any of this IMO. Also, one last minor point: fuck Trump.

I think audience capture is also a big factor, on top of this. A lot of them realized they could make a lot more money and grow a much larger following by taking their traditional left-wing audience and tweaking their rhetoric slightly so as to draw sections of the alt-right into it. I think there are even some cases in which they aren’t even aware that they’ve been captured this way. (Taibbi, for example, strikes me as an instance of this. His books, which aren’t quite as focused on producing ‘red meat’ for his audience, are actually still quite insightful; his Substack, on the other hand, is in large part just outrage porn for what he takes to be his fanbase)

Interesting article on the widening contingent of former leftists who have slid rightward in strange, non-uniform ways during the Trump and post-Trump years. It’s a trend I’ve watched with some interest, and this is really the only piece I’ve read that seems to truly cover all the angles of its development: Losing the Plot: The “Leftists” Who Turn Right INTHESETIMES.COM What do we make of former friends who fell down the rabbit hole of the Right?

One reason Im not sure I like what’s going on here, as dangerous as I think Trump is. I can easily imagine smart authoritarians like they have in Eastern Europe coming to power and using this precedent to disqualify their most popular opponents. Then again, that might happen anyway, precedent or no precedent. So who knows.

Welcome to America the dysfunctional, going strong since 1776. I find it’s always easier to understand this issue when you think about the urban/rural divide. When you consider what life is like for someone living in a rural area, especially a farmer or frontiersman with a lot of land, gun ownership isn’t as crazy as it seems than when you have a ton of people packed into a dense urban area. (They’re especially useful for creating your own food supply via hunting when the general store is a bazillion miles away, for example.) The American frontier and its agrarian milieu is what largely shaped our early and most fundamental political institutions, and we have so much land that a lot of people still live in rural areas with dispersed populations. So it’s not entirely incomprehensible that we still have gun ownership rights written into our constitution, and are divided on whether they should stay there. If we survive for long enough, and become urbanized and dense enough, I think we may get to the point where we eventually repeal or at least neuter the Second Amendment. Until then I’m hoping we can at least uphold a localist status quo—where rural and urban jurisdictions are given leeway to set their own gun control policies—in the face of a conservative Supreme Court and a legislative system that grows more rurally-biased every election cycle.

Interest rates are falling, essentially, and the market expects them to fall further.—I.e., the end of the jihad. Long version: We talk as if the Fed sets interest rates, but in reality it controls only certain kinds of interest rates. The prevailing rate(s) of interest on the debt markets (and by extension, the overall supply of money, to a large degree) is set endogenously, by internal market forces that the Fed is trying to influence. As the most liquid debt market in the world, treasuries are the most reliable benchmark of these conditions, so falling yields indicates falling rates across the overall economy, and as one of the longest-termed forms of debt, 10-year treasuries gauge expectations for what rates (and as an extension inflation) will be in the medium-term future. (Nothing really tells you what the long term will be—but as Keynes said, you and I will be dead anyway)

The Big Data aspect of the issue is interesting. Gerrymandering has always been a problem, but when it wasn’t augmented by modern analytics it was tolerable enough that everyone could prioritize fighting other forms of corruption. The 2010 Tea Party takeover was the first to apply Big Data to the process, and turned it into the biggest threat to democracy outside of Donald Trump. Just wait until AI enters the equation. If not properly checked I wouldn’t put Orbanian ‘47% of the vote nets you 75% of Congress’ outcomes out of the realm of possibility.

The true evil lies in NFL commentators who won’t call a Chiefs game without f*cking mentioning her and cutting to footage of her watching her boyfriend prance around the field. I’m seriously triggered by it now.

Lawfare’s analysis of Smith’s brief makes some interesting points. He seems to be hinting that Trump’s actions after losing the election are even worse than we think. So bad that even a stacked court can’t cook up a reasonable excuse for them. Which is kinda scary, given what we already know.

And after that ubiquitous mixed reality devices rendering 3d data annotations pulled off the cloud. The world might go to shit in the next few decades…but we’re gonna get to play with some cool gadgets on the way down.

I guess Biden’s trying to float some compromise on border policy in return for more aid? Good luck with that.

They probably don’t to fight Hamas, but I’ll bet the realpolitik calculus is that promises of aid by the West are needed to prevent the Israelis from being gobbled up by regional foes. The Jewish state isn’t exactly surrounded by trusty comrades. Organizations like Hezbollah in countries like Lebanon might be more adventurous in their military aggressions against Israel if they didn’t think they’d have to take on the US and friends in addition to the IDF. Or so the thinking of the military establishment goes.

The best cases.

People’s employment prospects and incomes *have* largely improved, though—the increased credit card borrowing is actually a sign that their ‘home balance sheet’ is better than it was a decade a go, when they were too debt-strapped to borrow. What they are grumpy about is inflation. If that continues to recede, or we see sectoral, productivity-related deflation (as opposed to deflation due to an economic slowdown) I think you’ll find approval of the economy tick up just in time for the election. You can’t really gaslight people in the other direction, either. There have been people in the GOP crying ‘recession!’ for the past year and we still have low unemployment, healthy levels of production, and even a little bit of industrial re-shoring. If prices come down on top of all that and makes everyone less grumpy, Trump can keep crying ‘recession!’, but no one’s going to be listening.

Unfortunately, it’s a fact that many of the biggest instances of labor’s power rising relative to capital have come in the aftermath of catastrophes that drastically reduced the worker population. We arguably wouldn’t have had the industrial revolution and the replacement of feudal serfdom with wage labor without the Black Death drastically shrinking the supply of workers in Europe and giving the nascent industrial bourgeoisie the leverage they needed to demand payment for their services. (and effectively bankrupting the nobility through the attendant inflation) Similarly, a lot of the post-WWII concessions to labor that built the modern middle class of the West were the result of the huge labor shortages caused by the war. (plus the threat of communism and a few other things) It’s kind of grisly, but hey if huge masses of working folk are going to die the least they could get out of it is some bargaining power.

He’s intellectually feeble enough to believe that he’ll be able to do whatever the hell he wants, and the Supreme Court will ultimately protect him from any legal consequences, regardless of what the law says. And the court is more or less intellectually craven enough to do so.

Party of Free speech…

I’ve found, in having gotten very drunk with hardcore evangelicals on several occasions, that beneath their means-to-an-end support for Israelis for purposes of the end-times gospel, there often lurks a big reservoir of good, old-fashioned, visceral anti-semitism, too, as TUFKAK alluded to. And then on the progressive left I find the inverse, where beneath the visceral dislike for Israel, there’s actually a soft spot for Jews as a historically oppressed minority. Like I always say, one of the most impressive things about the Jews is that they are one of the few groups that manage to attract both the hatred and the support of both the right and the left…at the same time. As someone who’s never been religious and never had a dog in the fight, I appreciate them for that. They are uniters, not dividers.

He’s also one of the clearest illustrations of the ‘audience capture’ phenomenon you can find outside of Glenn Greenwald.

So—hope porn of tonight’s election results, or doom porn of all the polls showing Biden trailing Trump? Which kink better tracks what’s likely to happen on election night 2024?

Less the alt-right specifically and more the ‘Paranoid Style’. That is what the algorithm will generally gravitate towards, as that ultimately tends to generate the most clicks. My hunch is that a certain escalation of extremity is naturally occurring, but it’s less about the length of the targeted time-span of the major social media platforms than about the cumulative effect of the addictive properties of the algorithm(s) on the psychology of society. They are designed to exploit the mechanisms of addiction, and it is widely known that addicts develop a tolerance to the dopamine hit that they get from their drugs of choice that requires them to seek out bigger and stronger doses of them. The behavioral effects of these systems on large populations are compounding, as well, so even if a small percentage of society becomes more and more deranged by this phenomenon, it can have big society-wide effects. I kind of view it as a kind of waste heat generated by the entropy of a large system of psychological manipulation. A lot of the ideology of Silicon Valley IMO revolves around the denial of this entropy’s existence—the tech titans think that, with the proper tweaks, they can create a informational perpetual motion machine. But in the end it’s not possible. There’s a reason tech’s biggest and most powerful data centers are located next to large bodies of water that are used to cool the server farms. That’s why many argue it can be fixed via tweaks to the algorithm, but as I’ve said before, I think the only way to fix it is to change the business model of Silicon Valley and Big Tech to something other than ‘we’ll give you service X for free, in exchange for all your personal data, and the right to sell it to advertisers ‘. This will become exponentially more important as AI becomes more and more integral to the economy.

Mass Mobilization can be a sly way to solve mass unemployment…but it’s not such a good deal when the mobilized population is already employed. Or, god forbid, experiencing once-in-a-generation labor shortages.

Polling still puts negative views of the economy at over 50%, though. Inflation really makes people grumpy. Well, that and the fact that things are so politically polarized that 48% of the population will always tell pollsters the economy is good/bad depending on whether their preferred party is in power. Who knows what the numbers look like if you could take partisanship out of the equation. (PSA for fellow economists: you can’t)