Read on Twitter
there was never really any doubt this would happen https://twitter.com/ariehkovler/status/1300557025391374338
a lot of appeals for dems to do more about riots are framed in terms of pragmatism -- do you want to win or be right, etc. but its really hard to see much pragmatism in it. it feels more like the habit of managing things with stagemanship i mentioned here https://aelkus.github.io/glitch/2020/03/13/narrative.html
sister souljah was a pseudo-event even in 1992, an obscure rapper that became far more prominent due to clinton's mention of her than she otherwise would have
the riots themselves wouldn't be impacted by trying to create a pseudo imitation of a pseudo event, we're talking about this because we've implicitly accepted that no one in charge -- from the president to local politicians in the cities burning -- is capable of rectifying them
so this then becomes about upbraiding radical chic academics, journalists, and posters (mainly 'discursive' figures) who either express support for looting/rioting or do the good ol 'I don't approve of what happened but you have to understand how it started' business
in that idea that it would change the narrative surrounding the riots to make the public less likely to associate the democrats with them or turn to trump out of safety. which already starts to get very slippery
the moment you start to use the word 'narrative' you drift away from the supposedly hard-headed world of political realism into the hall of mirrors of spin doctoring
to back up a bit: a militant looting a store in a dem-run city is indifferent to pleas that it harms another dem's chance of being elected. he responds by saying "ah yes, like having a dem in charge here really made a difference. move over and let me get this 27-inch monitor"
there is a journalist that attracts a stream of abuse from american netto-uyoku for tweeting something supportive of our militant (now lugging the 27-inch monitor down the street and struggling heroically to avoid cracking the screen despite being intoxicated and high)
should *they* care about whether or not this harms biden's chance of being elected? if you assume they ought to be an auxiliary of a political campaign, maybe. but that raises more questions than it resolves, doesn't it? and in either case they are about to lock their account
because their tweet "it is white privilege to shame the people in the struggle for wanting G-Sync compatible 2560x1440p 144 HZ refresh QHD when Cyberpunk 2077 drops in November" has attracted intense blowback from both right-wing trolls and gaming obsessives
the former angry about the woke theologizing, the latter incensed that the reporter is disregarding the clear cost-efficiency of 1080p and encouraging the pernicious myth (according to them anyway) that 1440p is clearly superior. OK, so much for that then I suppose.
So if *neither* of these actors is willing to modify their behavior to help Biden get elected, where does this leave us? Well, Biden could -- every time there is a riot, which might be quite often -- do what we expect out of a presidential candidate.
condemn violence, say that looting and rioting is not acceptable under any circumstances, call for calm, suggest legitimate grievances be answered, and then segue to putting the onus on his opponent and such.
this isn't enough, clearly. so then we get into proposals for things that, again, "shift the narrative." Go to Kenosha, do photo-ops, give speeches, and such. There is a problem. If all of this is just about symbolism, then people that hyper-focus on structure/content mismatches
inevitably do that again. point to choices of words used, and then go back to what attracts the most interest inevitably here on twitter: complaining about journalists, narratives, and insincerity/bad faith.
and there's also another problem when we talk about "shifting the narrative." after all, aren't people that call on people to alter *what kind of narratives they use* themselves contributing to narrative? https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1300565218691559430
meanwhile all of this -- which is now almost entirely about the feedback loop between different kinds of discursive actors -- is getting very detached from actual electoral politics.
and here we see, despite a very chaotic summer of protests, riots, rising crime, and various civil disturbances, very little quantitative movement between Trump vs. Biden
It's certainly possible this could change. But so far all of this speculation about
* whether it could change
* what Biden (and other people) need to do to prevent it
has mostly taken place in an empirical vacuum. There is no new information to support or falsify opinions.
* whether it could change
* what Biden (and other people) need to do to prevent it
has mostly taken place in an empirical vacuum. There is no new information to support or falsify opinions.
Additionally, as I've repeatedly stated, the proposed actions being argued over are almost exclusively discursive. X actor must condemn this, Y actor must support that. We must change the narrative! Which, again, plays to the biases of people that mostly play with words
and like dissecting narratives. Meanwhile, in some other mid-sized city in America not too long in the future, there will be another widely publicized killing. Predictably, the city will be deluged with protestors, rioters, and the usual crew of
civil war pre-enactors re-enacting an second American civil war that exists only in their imaginations while simultaneously trying to will it into being. And then the same cycle restarts. Because discourse doesn't stop bullets or put out flames.
What does? Well, try to first answer Tanner's question -- give a practical answer, something that could be done *tomorrow*. Then identify a group of actors capable of responsively and competently executing it https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1300050886585200643
I think you will find, depressingly, that you can only do *one* of these two tasks at most. Which is why what happens in the election isn't everything. Suppose Biden wins and takes office surrounded by a wasteland of a country. That is totally possible even if
he isn't as electorally hurt by the riots as people fear he could be. They aren't, in any event, exactly calibrated to the American electoral process. Probably more to things like being isolated and at home for months and degenerating psychologically as country goes on brink.
We are, in our own way, losing it to. We are at home and watching all of this play out on screens, less and less sure about our understanding of an outside world we have to treat as hostile and minimize contact with.
Migrating to a virtual world and losing contact with the physical. And under these conditions its easy to lose track of what is pragmatic -- how would we know, anyway? https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1300565218691559430
none of us can be wrong, because we are arguing mostly over sparse at best "data" https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1300578099357274113
meanwhile, the "real" world outside that is sustaining our virtual playground, the hardware that the simulator is running on, is degenerating.
Even if you assume that the hardware vendor is telling you the truth about Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), its not an exact prediction, obviously.
Since all of this began in March we have been stretching the country's various support systems beyond reasonable limits. https://aelkus.github.io/void/2020/06/01/opening.html
We do not know exactly when and how failure occurs, we only have a vague sense that what we are doing is not prudent and is raising our risk. We do not have a viable way out of it that we can foresee.
This sort of thing https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1300575458468204544 is a game we can all play, for various valid and invalid reasons, but it is also increasingly the only game that is really possible indoors.
But over time the game itself will start to become even glitchier and non-functional as usual, because the underlying hardware it is running on is actually in very poor shape and getting worse.
This thread is, like anything else that you see here, just another move in the game, from another longtime player (I have been here since 2007). https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1300562178169241601
Done for the usual reasons people make such moves -- persuasion, catharsis, thinking out loud, therapy, vanity, and amusement.
