If the Democrats screw this up, which unfortunately is something they're good at, there's going to be a lot of reasons why, but I suspect that a major reason is this: everyone kinda knows there's a bunch of senile old farts in politics, quietly being shepherded around by staff and still able to go through routine political motions, and nobody wants to talk about it openly.

Except, of course, for the GOP.

The Pnictogen Wing has two dragons. It's like I've got my own dragon counterpart, and my sibling Frisk has theirs. There's Kel the Purple, whom (as I've said in the past) we think is both a smol derg and a sentient electron, and is apparently quite young in spirit, which is giving us some difficulties. Just how do you teach a little kid about the Shoah, for example? No kidding, that's one of our worries. Anyway, Kel is "my" dragon, whereas Frisk's dragon Orpiment or Pim seems quite a bit more mature. She feels herself to be bigger, but also much vaguely defined, largely because Frisk has been stubbornly resistant in the past to the mystical and the fantastical. Lately she's been feeling more centered and more comfortable with being at the front of the system, and (like Frisk) Pim has a keenness for human politics.

Thus it was Pim, in conjunction with Frisk, who last night came up with an argument for why you should vote for Joe Biden even if he's really senile or ailing or whatever's supposed to be wrong with him. (I've noticed that the people calling for him to step down have gotten very imprecise as to why, and inclined to be citing popularity polls instead.) Pim says it doesn't matter! There's a logical argument for sticking with Joe Biden that's completely irrelevant to his political belief or indeed his competence.

It runs like this. It's a consequence of the "collective oligarchist" principle we talked about yesterday, the observation that all major offices of any power in the United States come with an expectation they'll have an unseen, unelected staff managing things along with the actual office-holder. For the President of the United States, I imagine that this population of assistants and aides must be in the thousands at least, both official and unofficial. (I think we've all just kind of accepted that Presidents are gonna have some obscure best friends, Bebe Rebozo or Harlan Crow types, who are secretly party to every decision.)

So if Joe Biden is non compos mentis, that private army of helpers is running things, not Biden. Pim argues that it'd be folly to disrupt this delicate situation. It takes time for such an internal organization to congeal, and now they're fully assembled and doing a reasonable job of running things with Biden as figurehead. What happens if Trump's elected? All that delicate and functional machinery of government gets ripped up, and a new gang moves in. Even if the GOP were known for competent governance, it would take them time to build up their own "court" around Donald Trump's presence in the Oval Office. In practice that wouldn't matter. The Democrats are good at dull competence, and the GOP...isn't, and doesn't want to be.

I'm convinced, and I hope you are! If we're really facing a battle between competing senile guys, continuity makes more sense. The country needs some breathing space for dealing with this unprecedented situation. Switching to another senile guy isn't going to make things better that's for damn sure!

~Chara

I was reading an editorial about the current state of the LLM "artificial intelligence" tech fad (i.e. "same as always!" "that bad, huh?") and something snapped in our psyche when we saw the Nth mention of LLM "hallucinations". Tech weenies seem to have picked up the entrepreneurial habit of appropriating words from legitimate disciplines and slapping them onto their own shit, whether or not the words make sense in their new context. "Hallucinations", though, particularly exasperates me but, well, my older sibling experienced those. So the subject isn't so damn funny, even if AI programmers think it's cute.

The AI boosters refuse to acknowledge the obvious implication of their devices' "hallucinations": surely one of the hallmarks of intelligence is being able to tell apart correct and incorrect information, and yet their machines can't do that and nobody seems to care. Yet they promise "superintelligence" any day now! Maybe next year, and only if Trump gets elected President. (You know what sort of politics those AI guys pretend not to believe in.)

There's an idea I'm trying to put into better words, something about how "fascism" isn't really an ideology exactly, but more like an attractor for ideologies, or maybe a pit that ideologies fall into. There's some overall basic principles, like the so-called "Führerprinzip" or "leadership principle", that you can plainly see at work. But part of the fascist game is pretending not to be fascist. Nobody's outright declaring the equivalent of "Napoleon is always right!" these days, even if everyone acts on that assumption. Now, instead of some formally stated ideological principle of leadership, there's a kind of agglomeration and self-assembly of other explicitly stated principles that, taken as a whole, add up to a "Führerprinzip".

As a concrete example, I'll appeal to American Christian extremism, which deftly avoids an outright endorsement of autocracy by appealing to abstractions such as obedience, the absolute authority of God, and the strictly defined hierarchy of the nuclear family. It's hammered home again and again that disobedience or flouting God's representatives is sin, and sin is construed as bondage. Meanwhile total obedience to God is construed as freedom, and your dad is like the God of the household, so...there you go! Do everything your dad tells you without question and hey presto, you're "free" now. Of course you're "free" to disobey, but... 😬 ...I guess after that, the paterfamilias would feel himself "free" to take reprisal(s).

It's grotesque, it seems practically wide open in its commitment to authoritarianism, and yet there's just enough wiggle room in that farrago of hardcore-Christian rationalizations that they can claim, with a straight face, that they're not demanding unconditional obedience, oh no! They're just pointing out how important and "freeing" it is to be unconditionally obedient, with doublethinkful emphasis on "free": in this system, "freedom" both means "doing whatever you want" and "doing only what God wants", as necessary. None of these Christian fanatics will ever admit openly that they regard their precious President Trump as a proxy for God, demanding total obedience, but they'll act that way...as long as he's perceived as a winner, that is.

Surely there must be some language out there for abstract discussion of these...I dunno what you'd call them. Anti-principles? "Unspoken rules" has some of the flavor anyway, because the most important thing about these anti-principles is that you're practically prevented from acknowledging their existence, if you hold onto one of them. The reactionary and the fascist have no actual word for what they believe; they reject all the words that actually match, and often they evade the question altogether, pretending to be "nonpartisan" or "apolitical". Or they're "politically homeless", or they're simply "normal".

~Chara of Pnictogen