The Harsh Couch - 2016.11.08 Apocalypse Eve

#1

Mugged by life and dragged backwards through the hedge of ill circumstance. - Gob's mighty mum.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://theharshcouch.com/thc/2016-11-08/
#2

Well, I didn’t expect that.

Hat tip to @automic for calling it a long time ago.

And now I, and many others, will eat our hats.

I’m not going to try to understand this for a while. In the face of so much cognitive dissonance, it will be too tempting to use my biases to make sense of it all.

#3

Yeah … I’m also planning not to try and make sense of it for a while. I’m thinking of just cutting off all media for a bit … I can’t bear to watch the glee over their forthcoming rampage through the institutions of Western civilisation.

Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie …

Perhaps more than that though is the emboldening of a bunch of mean, nasty, deplorable, immature fuckwits who think they made this happen. They didn’t, but they’ve poisoned every bloody well they’ve found along the road.

#4

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

H.L. Mencken - Baltimore Sun (26 July 1920)

#5

I was looking forward to getting a taco truck on my corner.

#6

I do think this is a good opportunity for the media to be held to account for not having a fucking clue what’s really happening.

I expect there will be a flurry of introspection thought pieces where journalists interpret the Trump victory entirely through the same biases that caused them to predict a Clinton victory.

#7

I was going to submit this without comment, but… some are saying things like Brexit and (get used to the term) The Trump Administration are symptomatic of a disenfranchised white middle class electorate - essentially joining the ranks of all the rest of the disenfranchised, I guess - and that this trend will inevitably continue to propagate through democracies such as our own

this may well be so - and I note there was mention of a search for possible solutions to seemingly inevitable problems as kind of the point to all this - but I cannot help but wonder how much of this disenfranchisement might be mitigated through a (proper) overhaul of the way our democracy actually works? and of course, if the idea was put the people in, say the form of a referendum, would we ever actually get the chance to pop the hood and give it a good and proper tune up?

#8

All the information sources I rely on and that inform my opinions told me Hillary would win.

I’m not about to embrace Trumpology.

But this is a good catalyst to re-think some of my certainties about the world rather than simply interpret the new reality through old biases.

Starting at perhaps the most perverse read of this - perhaps this is Marx’s predictions coming true? The age of the middle class capitalists has seen itself through that stage of history where industrial capital accumulates. Trump’s base is more “proletariat” than we’ve seen in recent times. Perhaps this is the rise of the proletariat, albeit headed by a populist inheritor of capitalist wealth? History playing itself out in a perverse version of Marx’s stages of industrial history?

Nah, that’s a bit silly.

#9

yes I think “new reality” is very much in play here…

I recently came across James Burke (I’ve linked below an interview where he talks about this stuff) who reckons we are in a transition period right now - going from a world in which all the culture is based around scarcity to one which is based around abundance

I cannot help but think of all these recent developments in such terms

not just phenomena such as obesity, where we are biologically dealing with going from scarcity to abundance, but things like these “Facebook bubbles” where there is just so much information out there - an abundance - that we are struggling with how to sort through it

-and the tools we are using to do that right now aren’t yet good enough

because the measures used to ascribe “value” to the information are still based on the old scarcity rules and we have yet to come up with new value systems with complexity that goes beyond “relevance” and “engagement” - and of course they are all still driven by the most powerful scarcity-based value system of them all: $$

I’m sure you’ve already read the analyses which look at how “The Media” has had its balls cut off by (mostly) Facebook - which may have just swung an election (remember the Occulus Rift guy? the Macedonian teens?) - and refuses to take any of the responsibility that “The Media” used to accept for itself, around these questions of power and influence…

are we transitioning? how many (more) institutions are maybe only years away from completely falling over to be replaced by something very few are even beginning to think about?

and how much do predictions this will be China’s Century factor into all this?

#10

btw it wasn’t ONLY me predicting this outcome, half a year ago…