Fwd: what other subject is there this morning

[David Eric Smith]

Sorry Friam.  I sent this before from the wrong address, and then I foolishly forwarded the bounce, which had been reformatted and partly chopped up.

This was what it looked like the firs time.

E

> I think what this all is about is the power of resentment.  
>
> I think the engine underneath the rejection of Hillary is that people look at her and see a face that they think believes itself better than them and that looks down on them.  For people who were already under the power of resentment, that sets it on fire and opens this thing that is weirdly borderline with hatred.  All the other stuff, news items or whatever, is just opportunistic window dressing that gets recruited after the fact as rationalization.  Nobody cares about emails.  If that hadn’t been available, it would have been something else.  What they care about is indulging in rage at being “disrespected”.
>
> I acknowledge the sophistication as well as the goodness of the Dalai Lama, and I defer to the willful positivity of the Buddhists who have been thinking about this systematicaly for nearly a thousand years, and I understand that they know things I don’t know.  But I also work with primatologists, of which anthropology is a sub-discipline.  The meanness of chimpanzees is probably retained from the recent ancestor, and it isn’t that far below the surface in humans.  Whatever it is about social status, that gets wrapped up in the phrases “looking up to” or “looking down on” is big in us like it is big in them.  Humans on some occasions have other layers of culture that put some checks on it, but that superstructure is not all that robust.  I am not compelled by the Dalai Lama’s interpretation (for which I am nonetheless grateful) that this is about the loss of feeling needed.  It is much meaner and more primitive than that; it is the resentment of feeling looked down on.  
>
> But now we have trouble.  Americans seem to have a kind of negligent optimism that the mechanisms of democracy will still be there as a path to backtrack from mistakes they didn’t escape before.  But the keys to everything have just been given to a strange hodge-podge of people, to none of whose members are the mechanisms of democracy anything particularly desirable.  They are merely obstacles to their own small and predatory ambitions.  I don’t take for granted that there will be mechanisms of backtracking the next time a calendary cycle rolls around.
>
> The motive power here is the power of resentment, at the bottom.  But mechanisms matter too, and individuals matter.  A few articles here and there seem to me to capture large chunks of this in a way that seems coherent and clarifying.
>
> There are architects like Newt Gingrich, as he is called out in the article from (2012) “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are the problem”.  There is a systematic effort on all fronts all the time to dismantle the institutions of democracy to capture spoils in a competition.  The method, for me, is best brought into clarity in the Malcolm Gladwell parable on David and Goliath, about the girls’ basketball team that won without particular skill by implementing the full-court press on every play of every game.  Gladwell dwells on this as an honorable strategy because it employs conditioning as the thing that can be bought with discpline when there isn’t native talent.  He comments, obliquely, that the teams of more skillful girls who were beaten in games were annoyed at being beaten by a full-court press.  He doesn’t develop this, but I think it matters.  For the skilled girls, they were in a _game_.  The point of winning was to be a reward for being good at the play of the game.  Their upset was that suddenly there was no game any more, there was no skill, there was no aesthetic to be aspired to or served.  Winning became its own currency separate from whatever art the game had been meant to enable.  The story has both sides, and there is credit due both where Malcolm calls it and where he bypasses it.  But the analogy to me here is what happens when winning is separated from the game’s having a purpose in doing something else, which one might call “bigger”.  In basketball, the bigger thing was the cultivation of an art.  In politics, it is the preservation of a society.
>
> We have seen the full-court press.  It is middle-American right-wing talk radio.  It is the constant campaign of hysteria, over everything, everywhere, all the time, that Paul Krugman notes over and over in his columns.  It is the congress’s commitment to demolish everything, to obstruct and to block everything.  Because there is nothing they are trying to build or to accomplish, there is no currency with which to negotiate with them. Where there are no values, there is no foundation for rules of play.  It is the district gerrymandering, and the voter disenfranchisement acts of closing polls and DMVs in southern states.  These things work.  Once a democracy is dismantled, the tools to oust the ones in power can only come from outside.  But where is “outside” when the keys to everything are handed over at the level of a country.
>
> There are those who aren’t “architects”, like Gingrich, but rather these skinny venomous little blonde women who come out of the woodwork to fill local roles, or minor con men like Paul Ryan, or various slimy and disgusting and yet dangerous things like Ted Cruz.
>
> I feel like these are the machery that channels the motive power of resentment and enables it to do things.  The machinery matters, but if the motive power of resentment were not there, the machinery would have nothing to drive it or flow through it.  Conversely, as long as the motive power is there, there are always architects and local operators who can come in and try their hand at machinery, and a kind of Darwinian dynamic will filter out the ones that succeed.
>
> Under the power of resentment, there is no choice so mean, or so stupid, or so self-defeating that people cannot be led to make it.  The ones who thought this was a good idea will plough themselves under as fast as they take down others, but there is no value in looking forward to that in vengeance.  Facts matter in the real world of cause and effect, but in the choice world of resentment, they are beside the point.  People under the power of resentment are unreachable in all those terms; they have shifted into a different space.
>
> Somehow that is what we have to deal with.  Any pleasure or luxury in analysis or speculation is no pleasure now.  There is just what options are left.  I do think that the mistake was, and will continue to be, not finding ways to stop the growth of resentment.  A line in one of the English-language translations of the Dao de Jing goes “The wise rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies.”  I won’t claim to understand what original Chinese political theorists intended this to mean, but I do think the failure to take seriously the need to stuff bellies (and the more subtle and perhaps honorable human needs for safety, fulfillment, and freedom from want) hasn’t been taken seriously enough, for decades now, by any of those who were comfortable.
>
> Now that all the keys are in the hands of the predators, we have fewer tools to work with than we had before.  It would have been good if the sense of urgency to stop the undermining and the feeding of resentment, which I think Bernie felt and tried to speak for though without a serious plan to deal with the complexity of the mess, had weighed on more people before.  But we are where we are now, and the question is what can hold off or reverse the coming active damage from here.
>
>
>
>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Thanks, Eric.   Great to hear from you today.

---

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Eric Smith <[hidden email]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 9, 2016 7:19:31 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: [FRIAM] Fwd: what other subject is there this morning

 

Sorry Friam.  I sent this before from the wrong address, and then I foolishly forwarded the bounce, which had been reformatted and partly chopped up.

This was what it looked like the firs time.

E


> I think what this all is about is the power of resentment. 
>
> I think the engine underneath the rejection of Hillary is that people look at her and see a face that they think believes itself better than them and that looks down on them.  For people who were already under the power of resentment, that sets it on fire and opens this thing that is weirdly borderline with hatred.  All the other stuff, news items or whatever, is just opportunistic window dressing that gets recruited after the fact as rationalization.  Nobody cares about emails.  If that hadn’t been available, it would have been something else.  What they care about is indulging in rage at being “disrespected”.
>
> I acknowledge the sophistication as well as the goodness of the Dalai Lama, and I defer to the willful positivity of the Buddhists who have been thinking about this systematicaly for nearly a thousand years, and I understand that they know things I don’t know.  But I also work with primatologists, of which anthropology is a sub-discipline.  The meanness of chimpanzees is probably retained from the recent ancestor, and it isn’t that far below the surface in humans.  Whatever it is about social status, that gets wrapped up in the phrases “looking up to” or “looking down on” is big in us like it is big in them.  Humans on some occasions have other layers of culture that put some checks on it, but that superstructure is not all that robust.  I am not compelled by the Dalai Lama’s interpretation (for which I am nonetheless grateful) that this is about the loss of feeling needed.  It is much meaner and more primitive than that; it is the resentment of feeling looked down on. 
>
> But now we have trouble.  Americans seem to have a kind of negligent optimism that the mechanisms of democracy will still be there as a path to backtrack from mistakes they didn’t escape before.  But the keys to everything have just been given to a strange hodge-podge of people, to none of whose members are the mechanisms of democracy anything particularly desirable.  They are merely obstacles to their own small and predatory ambitions.  I don’t take for granted that there will be mechanisms of backtracking the next time a calendary cycle rolls around.
>
> The motive power here is the power of resentment, at the bottom.  But mechanisms matter too, and individuals matter.  A few articles here and there seem to me to capture large chunks of this in a way that seems coherent and clarifying.
>
> There are architects like Newt Gingrich, as he is called out in the article from (2012) “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are the problem”.  There is a systematic effort on all fronts all the time to dismantle the institutions of democracy to capture spoils in a competition.  The method, for me, is best brought into clarity in the Malcolm Gladwell parable on David and Goliath, about the girls’ basketball team that won without particular skill by implementing the full-court press on every play of every game.  Gladwell dwells on this as an honorable strategy because it employs conditioning as the thing that can be bought with discpline when there isn’t native talent.  He comments, obliquely, that the teams of more skillful girls who were beaten in games were annoyed at being beaten by a full-court press.  He doesn’t develop this, but I think it matters.  For the skilled girls, they were in a _game_.  The point of winning was to be a reward for being good at the play of the game.  Their upset was that suddenly there was no game any more, there was no skill, there was no aesthetic to be aspired to or served.  Winning became its own currency separate from whatever art the game had been meant to enable.  The story has both sides, and there is credit due both where Malcolm calls it and where he bypasses it.  But the analogy to me here is what happens when winning is separated from the game’s having a purpose in doing something else, which one might call “bigger”.  In basketball, the bigger thing was the cultivation of an art.  In politics, it is the preservation of a society.
>
> We have seen the full-court press.  It is middle-American right-wing talk radio.  It is the constant campaign of hysteria, over everything, everywhere, all the time, that Paul Krugman notes over and over in his columns.  It is the congress’s commitment to demolish everything, to obstruct and to block everything.  Because there is nothing they are trying to build or to accomplish, there is no currency with which to negotiate with them. Where there are no values, there is no foundation for rules of play.  It is the district gerrymandering, and the voter disenfranchisement acts of closing polls and DMVs in southern states.  These things work.  Once a democracy is dismantled, the tools to oust the ones in power can only come from outside.  But where is “outside” when the keys to everything are handed over at the level of a country.
>
> There are those who aren’t “architects”, like Gingrich, but rather these skinny venomous little blonde women who come out of the woodwork to fill local roles, or minor con men like Paul Ryan, or various slimy and disgusting and yet dangerous things like Ted Cruz.
>
> I feel like these are the machery that channels the motive power of resentment and enables it to do things.  The machinery matters, but if the motive power of resentment were not there, the machinery would have nothing to drive it or flow through it.  Conversely, as long as the motive power is there, there are always architects and local operators who can come in and try their hand at machinery, and a kind of Darwinian dynamic will filter out the ones that succeed.
>
> Under the power of resentment, there is no choice so mean, or so stupid, or so self-defeating that people cannot be led to make it.  The ones who thought this was a good idea will plough themselves under as fast as they take down others, but there is no value in looking forward to that in vengeance.  Facts matter in the real world of cause and effect, but in the choice world of resentment, they are beside the point.  People under the power of resentment are unreachable in all those terms; they have shifted into a different space.
>
> Somehow that is what we have to deal with.  Any pleasure or luxury in analysis or speculation is no pleasure now.  There is just what options are left.  I do think that the mistake was, and will continue to be, not finding ways to stop the growth of resentment.  A line in one of the English-language translations of the Dao de Jing goes “The wise rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies.”  I won’t claim to understand what original Chinese political theorists intended this to mean, but I do think the failure to take seriously the need to stuff bellies (and the more subtle and perhaps honorable human needs for safety, fulfillment, and freedom from want) hasn’t been taken seriously enough, for decades now, by any of those who were comfortable.
>
> Now that all the keys are in the hands of the predators, we have fewer tools to work with than we had before.  It would have been good if the sense of urgency to stop the undermining and the feeding of resentment, which I think Bernie felt and tried to speak for though without a serious plan to deal with the complexity of the mess, had weighed on more people before.  But we are where we are now, and the question is what can hold off or reverse the coming active damage from here.
>
>
>
>


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Gary Schiltz-4]

If it's any consolation, I waded through your entire bounce-formatted post, it was that good.

On Wednesday, November 9, 2016, Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Sorry Friam.  I sent this before from the wrong address, and then I foolishly forwarded the bounce, which had been reformatted and partly chopped up.

This was what it looked like the firs time.

E


> I think what this all is about is the power of resentment.
>
> I think the engine underneath the rejection of Hillary is that people look at her and see a face that they think believes itself better than them and that looks down on them.  For people who were already under the power of resentment, that sets it on fire and opens this thing that is weirdly borderline with hatred.  All the other stuff, news items or whatever, is just opportunistic window dressing that gets recruited after the fact as rationalization.  Nobody cares about emails.  If that hadn’t been available, it would have been something else.  What they care about is indulging in rage at being “disrespected”.
>
> I acknowledge the sophistication as well as the goodness of the Dalai Lama, and I defer to the willful positivity of the Buddhists who have been thinking about this systematicaly for nearly a thousand years, and I understand that they know things I don’t know.  But I also work with primatologists, of which anthropology is a sub-discipline.  The meanness of chimpanzees is probably retained from the recent ancestor, and it isn’t that far below the surface in humans.  Whatever it is about social status, that gets wrapped up in the phrases “looking up to” or “looking down on” is big in us like it is big in them.  Humans on some occasions have other layers of culture that put some checks on it, but that superstructure is not all that robust.  I am not compelled by the Dalai Lama’s interpretation (for which I am nonetheless grateful) that this is about the loss of feeling needed.  It is much meaner and more primitive than that; it is the resentment of feeling looked down on.
>
> But now we have trouble.  Americans seem to have a kind of negligent optimism that the mechanisms of democracy will still be there as a path to backtrack from mistakes they didn’t escape before.  But the keys to everything have just been given to a strange hodge-podge of people, to none of whose members are the mechanisms of democracy anything particularly desirable.  They are merely obstacles to their own small and predatory ambitions.  I don’t take for granted that there will be mechanisms of backtracking the next time a calendary cycle rolls around.
>
> The motive power here is the power of resentment, at the bottom.  But mechanisms matter too, and individuals matter.  A few articles here and there seem to me to capture large chunks of this in a way that seems coherent and clarifying.
>
> There are architects like Newt Gingrich, as he is called out in the article from (2012) “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are the problem”.  There is a systematic effort on all fronts all the time to dismantle the institutions of democracy to capture spoils in a competition.  The method, for me, is best brought into clarity in the Malcolm Gladwell parable on David and Goliath, about the girls’ basketball team that won without particular skill by implementing the full-court press on every play of every game.  Gladwell dwells on this as an honorable strategy because it employs conditioning as the thing that can be bought with discpline when there isn’t native talent.  He comments, obliquely, that the teams of more skillful girls who were beaten in games were annoyed at being beaten by a full-court press.  He doesn’t develop this, but I think it matters.  For the skilled girls, they were in a _game_.  The point of winning was to be a reward for being good at the play of the game.  Their upset was that suddenly there was no game any more, there was no skill, there was no aesthetic to be aspired to or served.  Winning became its own currency separate from whatever art the game had been meant to enable.  The story has both sides, and there is credit due both where Malcolm calls it and where he bypasses it.  But the analogy to me here is what happens when winning is separated from the game’s having a purpose in doing something else, which one might call “bigger”.  In basketball, the bigger thing was the cultivation of an art.  In politics, it is the preservation of a society.
>
> We have seen the full-court press.  It is middle-American right-wing talk radio.  It is the constant campaign of hysteria, over everything, everywhere, all the time, that Paul Krugman notes over and over in his columns.  It is the congress’s commitment to demolish everything, to obstruct and to block everything.  Because there is nothing they are trying to build or to accomplish, there is no currency with which to negotiate with them. Where there are no values, there is no foundation for rules of play.  It is the district gerrymandering, and the voter disenfranchisement acts of closing polls and DMVs in southern states.  These things work.  Once a democracy is dismantled, the tools to oust the ones in power can only come from outside.  But where is “outside” when the keys to everything are handed over at the level of a country.
>
> There are those who aren’t “architects”, like Gingrich, but rather these skinny venomous little blonde women who come out of the woodwork to fill local roles, or minor con men like Paul Ryan, or various slimy and disgusting and yet dangerous things like Ted Cruz.
>
> I feel like these are the machery that channels the motive power of resentment and enables it to do things.  The machinery matters, but if the motive power of resentment were not there, the machinery would have nothing to drive it or flow through it.  Conversely, as long as the motive power is there, there are always architects and local operators who can come in and try their hand at machinery, and a kind of Darwinian dynamic will filter out the ones that succeed.
>
> Under the power of resentment, there is no choice so mean, or so stupid, or so self-defeating that people cannot be led to make it.  The ones who thought this was a good idea will plough themselves under as fast as they take down others, but there is no value in looking forward to that in vengeance.  Facts matter in the real world of cause and effect, but in the choice world of resentment, they are beside the point.  People under the power of resentment are unreachable in all those terms; they have shifted into a different space.
>
> Somehow that is what we have to deal with.  Any pleasure or luxury in analysis or speculation is no pleasure now.  There is just what options are left.  I do think that the mistake was, and will continue to be, not finding ways to stop the growth of resentment.  A line in one of the English-language translations of the Dao de Jing goes “The wise rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies.”  I won’t claim to understand what original Chinese political theorists intended this to mean, but I do think the failure to take seriously the need to stuff bellies (and the more subtle and perhaps honorable human needs for safety, fulfillment, and freedom from want) hasn’t been taken seriously enough, for decades now, by any of those who were comfortable.
>
> Now that all the keys are in the hands of the predators, we have fewer tools to work with than we had before.  It would have been good if the sense of urgency to stop the undermining and the feeding of resentment, which I think Bernie felt and tried to speak for though without a serious plan to deal with the complexity of the mess, had weighed on more people before.  But we are where we are now, and the question is what can hold off or reverse the coming active damage from here.
>
>
>
>


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Eric Smith writes:

 

“Facts matter in the real world of cause and effect, but in the choice world of resentment, they are beside the point.  People under the power of resentment are unreachable in all those terms; they have shifted into a different space.

Somehow that is what we have to deal with.  Any pleasure or luxury in analysis or speculation is no pleasure now.  There is just what options are left.  I do think that the mistake was, and will continue to be, not finding ways to stop the growth of resentment.  A line in one of the English-language translations of the Dao de Jing goes “The wise rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies.”  I won’t claim to understand what original Chinese political theorists intended this to mean, but I do think the failure to take seriously the need to stuff bellies (and the more subtle and perhaps honorable human needs for safety, fulfillment, and freedom from want) hasn’t been taken seriously enough, for decades now, by any of those who were comfortable.”

 

Can we conclude that filling bellies will stop the growth of resentment?  I don’t know about that.  The economy is in relatively good shape right now.  The unemployment rate has been at or below 5% for a year and jobs have been added to the workforce month after month.    The participation rate is about 62.4% which is just about where it has been for 50 years on average.  However, the mean incomes in the large population blue states are higher than in rust belt states, but the cost of living is really much higher in those blue states too. 

 

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz
Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2016 8:37 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: what other subject is there this morning

 

If it's any consolation, I waded through your entire bounce-formatted post, it was that good.

On Wednesday, November 9, 2016, Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Sorry Friam.  I sent this before from the wrong address, and then I foolishly forwarded the bounce, which had been reformatted and partly chopped up.

This was what it looked like the firs time.

E


> I think what this all is about is the power of resentment.
>
> I think the engine underneath the rejection of Hillary is that people look at her and see a face that they think believes itself better than them and that looks down on them.  For people who were already under the power of resentment, that sets it on fire and opens this thing that is weirdly borderline with hatred.  All the other stuff, news items or whatever, is just opportunistic window dressing that gets recruited after the fact as rationalization.  Nobody cares about emails.  If that hadn’t been available, it would have been something else.  What they care about is indulging in rage at being “disrespected”.
>
> I acknowledge the sophistication as well as the goodness of the Dalai Lama, and I defer to the willful positivity of the Buddhists who have been thinking about this systematicaly for nearly a thousand years, and I understand that they know things I don’t know.  But I also work with primatologists, of which anthropology is a sub-discipline.  The meanness of chimpanzees is probably retained from the recent ancestor, and it isn’t that far below the surface in humans.  Whatever it is about social status, that gets wrapped up in the phrases “looking up to” or “looking down on” is big in us like it is big in them.  Humans on some occasions have other layers of culture that put some checks on it, but that superstructure is not all that robust.  I am not compelled by the Dalai Lama’s interpretation (for which I am nonetheless grateful) that this is about the loss of feeling needed.  It is much meaner and more primitive than that; it is the resentment of feeling looked down on.
>
> But now we have trouble.  Americans seem to have a kind of negligent optimism that the mechanisms of democracy will still be there as a path to backtrack from mistakes they didn’t escape before.  But the keys to everything have just been given to a strange hodge-podge of people, to none of whose members are the mechanisms of democracy anything particularly desirable.  They are merely obstacles to their own small and predatory ambitions.  I don’t take for granted that there will be mechanisms of backtracking the next time a calendary cycle rolls around.
>
> The motive power here is the power of resentment, at the bottom.  But mechanisms matter too, and individuals matter.  A few articles here and there seem to me to capture large chunks of this in a way that seems coherent and clarifying.
>
> There are architects like Newt Gingrich, as he is called out in the article from (2012) “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are the problem”.  There is a systematic effort on all fronts all the time to dismantle the institutions of democracy to capture spoils in a competition.  The method, for me, is best brought into clarity in the Malcolm Gladwell parable on David and Goliath, about the girls’ basketball team that won without particular skill by implementing the full-court press on every play of every game.  Gladwell dwells on this as an honorable strategy because it employs conditioning as the thing that can be bought with discpline when there isn’t native talent.  He comments, obliquely, that the teams of more skillful girls who were beaten in games were annoyed at being beaten by a full-court press.  He doesn’t develop this, but I think it matters.  For the skilled girls, they were in a _game_.  The point of winning was to be a reward for being good at the play of the game.  Their upset was that suddenly there was no game any more, there was no skill, there was no aesthetic to be aspired to or served.  Winning became its own currency separate from whatever art the game had been meant to enable.  The story has both sides, and there is credit due both where Malcolm calls it and where he bypasses it.  But the analogy to me here is what happens when winning is separated from the game’s having a purpose in doing something else, which one might call “bigger”.  In basketball, the bigger thing was the cultivation of an art.  In politics, it is the preservation of a society.
>
> We have seen the full-court press.  It is middle-American right-wing talk radio.  It is the constant campaign of hysteria, over everything, everywhere, all the time, that Paul Krugman notes over and over in his columns.  It is the congress’s commitment to demolish everything, to obstruct and to block everything.  Because there is nothing they are trying to build or to accomplish, there is no currency with which to negotiate with them. Where there are no values, there is no foundation for rules of play.  It is the district gerrymandering, and the voter disenfranchisement acts of closing polls and DMVs in southern states.  These things work.  Once a democracy is dismantled, the tools to oust the ones in power can only come from outside.  But where is “outside” when the keys to everything are handed over at the level of a country.
>
> There are those who aren’t “architects”, like Gingrich, but rather these skinny venomous little blonde women who come out of the woodwork to fill local roles, or minor con men like Paul Ryan, or various slimy and disgusting and yet dangerous things like Ted Cruz.
>
> I feel like these are the machery that channels the motive power of resentment and enables it to do things.  The machinery matters, but if the motive power of resentment were not there, the machinery would have nothing to drive it or flow through it.  Conversely, as long as the motive power is there, there are always architects and local operators who can come in and try their hand at machinery, and a kind of Darwinian dynamic will filter out the ones that succeed.
>
> Under the power of resentment, there is no choice so mean, or so stupid, or so self-defeating that people cannot be led to make it.  The ones who thought this was a good idea will plough themselves under as fast as they take down others, but there is no value in looking forward to that in vengeance.  Facts matter in the real world of cause and effect, but in the choice world of resentment, they are beside the point.  People under the power of resentment are unreachable in all those terms; they have shifted into a different space.
>
> Somehow that is what we have to deal with.  Any pleasure or luxury in analysis or speculation is no pleasure now.  There is just what options are left.  I do think that the mistake was, and will continue to be, not finding ways to stop the growth of resentment.  A line in one of the English-language translations of the Dao de Jing goes “The wise rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies.”  I won’t claim to understand what original Chinese political theorists intended this to mean, but I do think the failure to take seriously the need to stuff bellies (and the more subtle and perhaps honorable human needs for safety, fulfillment, and freedom from want) hasn’t been taken seriously enough, for decades now, by any of those who were comfortable.
>
> Now that all the keys are in the hands of the predators, we have fewer tools to work with than we had before.  It would have been good if the sense of urgency to stop the undermining and the feeding of resentment, which I think Bernie felt and tried to speak for though without a serious plan to deal with the complexity of the mess, had weighed on more people before.  But we are where we are now, and the question is what can hold off or reverse the coming active damage from here.
>
>
>
>


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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Nick Thompson]

Friends,

 

Not since the Cuban Missile crisis have I been so frightened.  Just because we were out of range, we in California thought that we could see how truly dangerous the situation was.  We lived in Berkeley at that time, and we drove across the day to Golden Gate Park to try and get ourselves to think about something else.  It was a gorgeous October afternoon, as gorgeous as the morning of 911 was in the east.  Sunny, mild, without a trace of the dank fog that usually shrouds that  park.    The rest of the country seemed to be in denial.  We sat in the sun and watched the kids play on the grass.  We thought, This could be our last. 

 

Nick

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz
Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2016 8:37 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: what other subject is there this morning

 

If it's any consolation, I waded through your entire bounce-formatted post, it was that good.

On Wednesday, November 9, 2016, Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Sorry Friam.  I sent this before from the wrong address, and then I foolishly forwarded the bounce, which had been reformatted and partly chopped up.

This was what it looked like the firs time.

E

> I think what this all is about is the power of resentment.
>
> I think the engine underneath the rejection of Hillary is that people look at her and see a face that they think believes itself better than them and that looks down on them.  For people who were already under the power of resentment, that sets it on fire and opens this thing that is weirdly borderline with hatred.  All the other stuff, news items or whatever, is just opportunistic window dressing that gets recruited after the fact as rationalization.  Nobody cares about emails.  If that hadn’t been available, it would have been something else.  What they care about is indulging in rage at being “disrespected”.
>
> I acknowledge the sophistication as well as the goodness of the Dalai Lama, and I defer to the willful positivity of the Buddhists who have been thinking about this systematicaly for nearly a thousand years, and I understand that they know things I don’t know.  But I also work with primatologists, of which anthropology is a sub-discipline.  The meanness of chimpanzees is probably retained from the recent ancestor, and it isn’t that far below the surface in humans.  Whatever it is about social status, that gets wrapped up in the phrases “looking up to” or “looking down on” is big in us like it is big in them.  Humans on some occasions have other layers of culture that put some checks on it, but that superstructure is not all that robust.  I am not compelled by the Dalai Lama’s interpretation (for which I am nonetheless grateful) that this is about the loss of feeling needed.  It is much meaner and more primitive than that; it is the resentment of feeling looked down on.
>
> But now we have trouble.  Americans seem to have a kind of negligent optimism that the mechanisms of democracy will still be there as a path to backtrack from mistakes they didn’t escape before.  But the keys to everything have just been given to a strange hodge-podge of people, to none of whose members are the mechanisms of democracy anything particularly desirable.  They are merely obstacles to their own small and predatory ambitions.  I don’t take for granted that there will be mechanisms of backtracking the next time a calendary cycle rolls around.
>
> The motive power here is the power of resentment, at the bottom.  But mechanisms matter too, and individuals matter.  A few articles here and there seem to me to capture large chunks of this in a way that seems coherent and clarifying.
>
> There are architects like Newt Gingrich, as he is called out in the article from (2012) “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are the problem”.  There is a systematic effort on all fronts all the time to dismantle the institutions of democracy to capture spoils in a competition.  The method, for me, is best brought into clarity in the Malcolm Gladwell parable on David and Goliath, about the girls’ basketball team that won without particular skill by implementing the full-court press on every play of every game.  Gladwell dwells on this as an honorable strategy because it employs conditioning as the thing that can be bought with discpline when there isn’t native talent.  He comments, obliquely, that the teams of more skillful girls who were beaten in games were annoyed at being beaten by a full-court press.  He doesn’t develop this, but I think it matters.  For the skilled girls, they were in a _game_.  The point of winning was to be a reward for being good at the play of the game.  Their upset was that suddenly there was no game any more, there was no skill, there was no aesthetic to be aspired to or served.  Winning became its own currency separate from whatever art the game had been meant to enable.  The story has both sides, and there is credit due both where Malcolm calls it and where he bypasses it.  But the analogy to me here is what happens when winning is separated from the game’s having a purpose in doing something else, which one might call “bigger”.  In basketball, the bigger thing was the cultivation of an art.  In politics, it is the preservation of a society.
>
> We have seen the full-court press.  It is middle-American right-wing talk radio.  It is the constant campaign of hysteria, over everything, everywhere, all the time, that Paul Krugman notes over and over in his columns.  It is the congress’s commitment to demolish everything, to obstruct and to block everything.  Because there is nothing they are trying to build or to accomplish, there is no currency with which to negotiate with them. Where there are no values, there is no foundation for rules of play.  It is the district gerrymandering, and the voter disenfranchisement acts of closing polls and DMVs in southern states.  These things work.  Once a democracy is dismantled, the tools to oust the ones in power can only come from outside.  But where is “outside” when the keys to everything are handed over at the level of a country.
>
> There are those who aren’t “architects”, like Gingrich, but rather these skinny venomous little blonde women who come out of the woodwork to fill local roles, or minor con men like Paul Ryan, or various slimy and disgusting and yet dangerous things like Ted Cruz.
>
> I feel like these are the machery that channels the motive power of resentment and enables it to do things.  The machinery matters, but if the motive power of resentment were not there, the machinery would have nothing to drive it or flow through it.  Conversely, as long as the motive power is there, there are always architects and local operators who can come in and try their hand at machinery, and a kind of Darwinian dynamic will filter out the ones that succeed.
>
> Under the power of resentment, there is no choice so mean, or so stupid, or so self-defeating that people cannot be led to make it.  The ones who thought this was a good idea will plough themselves under as fast as they take down others, but there is no value in looking forward to that in vengeance.  Facts matter in the real world of cause and effect, but in the choice world of resentment, they are beside the point.  People under the power of resentment are unreachable in all those terms; they have shifted into a different space.
>
> Somehow that is what we have to deal with.  Any pleasure or luxury in analysis or speculation is no pleasure now.  There is just what options are left.  I do think that the mistake was, and will continue to be, not finding ways to stop the growth of resentment.  A line in one of the English-language translations of the Dao de Jing goes “The wise rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies.”  I won’t claim to understand what original Chinese political theorists intended this to mean, but I do think the failure to take seriously the need to stuff bellies (and the more subtle and perhaps honorable human needs for safety, fulfillment, and freedom from want) hasn’t been taken seriously enough, for decades now, by any of those who were comfortable.
>
> Now that all the keys are in the hands of the predators, we have fewer tools to work with than we had before.  It would have been good if the sense of urgency to stop the undermining and the feeding of resentment, which I think Bernie felt and tried to speak for though without a serious plan to deal with the complexity of the mess, had weighed on more people before.  But we are where we are now, and the question is what can hold off or reverse the coming active damage from here.
>
>
>
>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Robert Gehorsam]

Eric -

I’m a lurker on this group from the East Coast.  I think you have written an essential truth here.   Would you (or anyone else here) object to my sharing this (just a copy/paste of the content, no names) to another private group I participate in?  People  on it are really struggling to make sense of things this morning, and this might help ground them.

Thanks.

Robert

> On Nov 9, 2016, at 9:19 AM, Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Sorry Friam.  I sent this before from the wrong address, and then I foolishly forwarded the bounce, which had been reformatted and partly chopped up.
>
> This was what it looked like the firs time.
>
> E
>
>
>> I think what this all is about is the power of resentment.  
>>
>> I think the engine underneath the rejection of Hillary is that people look at her and see a face that they think believes itself better than them and that looks down on them.  For people who were already under the power of resentment, that sets it on fire and opens this thing that is weirdly borderline with hatred.  All the other stuff, news items or whatever, is just opportunistic window dressing that gets recruited after the fact as rationalization.  Nobody cares about emails.  If that hadn’t been available, it would have been something else.  What they care about is indulging in rage at being “disrespected”.
>>
>> I acknowledge the sophistication as well as the goodness of the Dalai Lama, and I defer to the willful positivity of the Buddhists who have been thinking about this systematicaly for nearly a thousand years, and I understand that they know things I don’t know.  But I also work with primatologists, of which anthropology is a sub-discipline.  The meanness of chimpanzees is probably retained from the recent ancestor, and it isn’t that far below the surface in humans.  Whatever it is about social status, that gets wrapped up in the phrases “looking up to” or “looking down on” is big in us like it is big in them.  Humans on some occasions have other layers of culture that put some checks on it, but that superstructure is not all that robust.  I am not compelled by the Dalai Lama’s interpretation (for which I am nonetheless grateful) that this is about the loss of feeling needed.  It is much meaner and more primitive than that; it is the resentment of feeling looked down on.  
>>
>> But now we have trouble.  Americans seem to have a kind of negligent optimism that the mechanisms of democracy will still be there as a path to backtrack from mistakes they didn’t escape before.  But the keys to everything have just been given to a strange hodge-podge of people, to none of whose members are the mechanisms of democracy anything particularly desirable.  They are merely obstacles to their own small and predatory ambitions.  I don’t take for granted that there will be mechanisms of backtracking the next time a calendary cycle rolls around.
>>
>> The motive power here is the power of resentment, at the bottom.  But mechanisms matter too, and individuals matter.  A few articles here and there seem to me to capture large chunks of this in a way that seems coherent and clarifying.
>>
>> There are architects like Newt Gingrich, as he is called out in the article from (2012) “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are the problem”.  There is a systematic effort on all fronts all the time to dismantle the institutions of democracy to capture spoils in a competition.  The method, for me, is best brought into clarity in the Malcolm Gladwell parable on David and Goliath, about the girls’ basketball team that won without particular skill by implementing the full-court press on every play of every game.  Gladwell dwells on this as an honorable strategy because it employs conditioning as the thing that can be bought with discpline when there isn’t native talent.  He comments, obliquely, that the teams of more skillful girls who were beaten in games were annoyed at being beaten by a full-court press.  He doesn’t develop this, but I think it matters.  For the skilled girls, they were in a _game_.  The point of winning was to be a reward for being good at the play of the game.  Their upset was that suddenly there was no game any more, there was no skill, there was no aesthetic to be aspired to or served.  Winning became its own currency separate from whatever art the game had been meant to enable.  The story has both sides, and there is credit due both where Malcolm calls it and where he bypasses it.  But the analogy to me here is what happens when winning is separated from the game’s having a purpose in doing something else, which one might call “bigger”.  In basketball, the bigger thing was the cultivation of an art.  In politics, it is the preservation of a society.
>>
>> We have seen the full-court press.  It is middle-American right-wing talk radio.  It is the constant campaign of hysteria, over everything, everywhere, all the time, that Paul Krugman notes over and over in his columns.  It is the congress’s commitment to demolish everything, to obstruct and to block everything.  Because there is nothing they are trying to build or to accomplish, there is no currency with which to negotiate with them. Where there are no values, there is no foundation for rules of play.  It is the district gerrymandering, and the voter disenfranchisement acts of closing polls and DMVs in southern states.  These things work.  Once a democracy is dismantled, the tools to oust the ones in power can only come from outside.  But where is “outside” when the keys to everything are handed over at the level of a country.
>>
>> There are those who aren’t “architects”, like Gingrich, but rather these skinny venomous little blonde women who come out of the woodwork to fill local roles, or minor con men like Paul Ryan, or various slimy and disgusting and yet dangerous things like Ted Cruz.
>>
>> I feel like these are the machery that channels the motive power of resentment and enables it to do things.  The machinery matters, but if the motive power of resentment were not there, the machinery would have nothing to drive it or flow through it.  Conversely, as long as the motive power is there, there are always architects and local operators who can come in and try their hand at machinery, and a kind of Darwinian dynamic will filter out the ones that succeed.
>>
>> Under the power of resentment, there is no choice so mean, or so stupid, or so self-defeating that people cannot be led to make it.  The ones who thought this was a good idea will plough themselves under as fast as they take down others, but there is no value in looking forward to that in vengeance.  Facts matter in the real world of cause and effect, but in the choice world of resentment, they are beside the point.  People under the power of resentment are unreachable in all those terms; they have shifted into a different space.
>>
>> Somehow that is what we have to deal with.  Any pleasure or luxury in analysis or speculation is no pleasure now.  There is just what options are left.  I do think that the mistake was, and will continue to be, not finding ways to stop the growth of resentment.  A line in one of the English-language translations of the Dao de Jing goes “The wise rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies.”  I won’t claim to understand what original Chinese political theorists intended this to mean, but I do think the failure to take seriously the need to stuff bellies (and the more subtle and perhaps honorable human needs for safety, fulfillment, and freedom from want) hasn’t been taken seriously enough, for decades now, by any of those who were comfortable.
>>
>> Now that all the keys are in the hands of the predators, we have fewer tools to work with than we had before.  It would have been good if the sense of urgency to stop the undermining and the feeding of resentment, which I think Bernie felt and tried to speak for though without a serious plan to deal with the complexity of the mess, had weighed on more people before.  But we are where we are now, and the question is what can hold off or reverse the coming active damage from here.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Owen Densmore]

It's clearly class warfare. Best if we all meet several folks outside of our close knit community and meet some of "the rest of us".

Trump said it well: “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,”

OTOH, I'm tempted to prod us to start a new blog: "We Told You So" where, for example, when unemployment goes up from the current level, we write about it, with good background discussion. Maybe this would be Nick's thread-to-conversation app!

   -- Owen

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[Gillian Densmore]

@Nick Thompson 

You are a speaker of sanity and truth!

Feels as if I walked into a Sci Fi convention!  Someone wake me up when we leave the 80's!

Can I just call it for what this is, at least in book: Pasty white folks that think Trump will let them re-live nastaulgia?

On Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 9:27 AM, Robert Gehorsam <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric -

I’m a lurker on this group from the East Coast.  I think you have written an essential truth here.   Would you (or anyone else here) object to my sharing this (just a copy/paste of the content, no names) to another private group I participate in?  People  on it are really struggling to make sense of things this morning, and this might help ground them.

Thanks.

Robert

> On Nov 9, 2016, at 9:19 AM, Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Sorry Friam.  I sent this before from the wrong address, and then I foolishly forwarded the bounce, which had been reformatted and partly chopped up.
>
> This was what it looked like the firs time.
>
> E
>
>
>> I think what this all is about is the power of resentment.
>>
>> I think the engine underneath the rejection of Hillary is that people look at her and see a face that they think believes itself better than them and that looks down on them.  For people who were already under the power of resentment, that sets it on fire and opens this thing that is weirdly borderline with hatred.  All the other stuff, news items or whatever, is just opportunistic window dressing that gets recruited after the fact as rationalization.  Nobody cares about emails.  If that hadn’t been available, it would have been something else.  What they care about is indulging in rage at being “disrespected”.
>>
>> I acknowledge the sophistication as well as the goodness of the Dalai Lama, and I defer to the willful positivity of the Buddhists who have been thinking about this systematicaly for nearly a thousand years, and I understand that they know things I don’t know.  But I also work with primatologists, of which anthropology is a sub-discipline.  The meanness of chimpanzees is probably retained from the recent ancestor, and it isn’t that far below the surface in humans.  Whatever it is about social status, that gets wrapped up in the phrases “looking up to” or “looking down on” is big in us like it is big in them.  Humans on some occasions have other layers of culture that put some checks on it, but that superstructure is not all that robust.  I am not compelled by the Dalai Lama’s interpretation (for which I am nonetheless grateful) that this is about the loss of feeling needed.  It is much meaner and more primitive than that; it is the resentment of feeling looked down on.
>>
>> But now we have trouble.  Americans seem to have a kind of negligent optimism that the mechanisms of democracy will still be there as a path to backtrack from mistakes they didn’t escape before.  But the keys to everything have just been given to a strange hodge-podge of people, to none of whose members are the mechanisms of democracy anything particularly desirable.  They are merely obstacles to their own small and predatory ambitions.  I don’t take for granted that there will be mechanisms of backtracking the next time a calendary cycle rolls around.
>>
>> The motive power here is the power of resentment, at the bottom.  But mechanisms matter too, and individuals matter.  A few articles here and there seem to me to capture large chunks of this in a way that seems coherent and clarifying.
>>
>> There are architects like Newt Gingrich, as he is called out in the article from (2012) “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are the problem”.  There is a systematic effort on all fronts all the time to dismantle the institutions of democracy to capture spoils in a competition.  The method, for me, is best brought into clarity in the Malcolm Gladwell parable on David and Goliath, about the girls’ basketball team that won without particular skill by implementing the full-court press on every play of every game.  Gladwell dwells on this as an honorable strategy because it employs conditioning as the thing that can be bought with discpline when there isn’t native talent.  He comments, obliquely, that the teams of more skillful girls who were beaten in games were annoyed at being beaten by a full-court press.  He doesn’t develop this, but I think it matters.  For the skilled girls, they were in a _game_.  The point of winning was to be a reward for being good at the play of the game.  Their upset was that suddenly there was no game any more, there was no skill, there was no aesthetic to be aspired to or served.  Winning became its own currency separate from whatever art the game had been meant to enable.  The story has both sides, and there is credit due both where Malcolm calls it and where he bypasses it.  But the analogy to me here is what happens when winning is separated from the game’s having a purpose in doing something else, which one might call “bigger”.  In basketball, the bigger thing was the cultivation of an art.  In politics, it is the preservation of a society.
>>
>> We have seen the full-court press.  It is middle-American right-wing talk radio.  It is the constant campaign of hysteria, over everything, everywhere, all the time, that Paul Krugman notes over and over in his columns.  It is the congress’s commitment to demolish everything, to obstruct and to block everything.  Because there is nothing they are trying to build or to accomplish, there is no currency with which to negotiate with them. Where there are no values, there is no foundation for rules of play.  It is the district gerrymandering, and the voter disenfranchisement acts of closing polls and DMVs in southern states.  These things work.  Once a democracy is dismantled, the tools to oust the ones in power can only come from outside.  But where is “outside” when the keys to everything are handed over at the level of a country.
>>
>> There are those who aren’t “architects”, like Gingrich, but rather these skinny venomous little blonde women who come out of the woodwork to fill local roles, or minor con men like Paul Ryan, or various slimy and disgusting and yet dangerous things like Ted Cruz.
>>
>> I feel like these are the machery that channels the motive power of resentment and enables it to do things.  The machinery matters, but if the motive power of resentment were not there, the machinery would have nothing to drive it or flow through it.  Conversely, as long as the motive power is there, there are always architects and local operators who can come in and try their hand at machinery, and a kind of Darwinian dynamic will filter out the ones that succeed.
>>
>> Under the power of resentment, there is no choice so mean, or so stupid, or so self-defeating that people cannot be led to make it.  The ones who thought this was a good idea will plough themselves under as fast as they take down others, but there is no value in looking forward to that in vengeance.  Facts matter in the real world of cause and effect, but in the choice world of resentment, they are beside the point.  People under the power of resentment are unreachable in all those terms; they have shifted into a different space.
>>
>> Somehow that is what we have to deal with.  Any pleasure or luxury in analysis or speculation is no pleasure now.  There is just what options are left.  I do think that the mistake was, and will continue to be, not finding ways to stop the growth of resentment.  A line in one of the English-language translations of the Dao de Jing goes “The wise rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies.”  I won’t claim to understand what original Chinese political theorists intended this to mean, but I do think the failure to take seriously the need to stuff bellies (and the more subtle and perhaps honorable human needs for safety, fulfillment, and freedom from want) hasn’t been taken seriously enough, for decades now, by any of those who were comfortable.
>>
>> Now that all the keys are in the hands of the predators, we have fewer tools to work with than we had before.  It would have been good if the sense of urgency to stop the undermining and the feeding of resentment, which I think Bernie felt and tried to speak for though without a serious plan to deal with the complexity of the mess, had weighed on more people before.  But we are where we are now, and the question is what can hold off or reverse the coming active damage from here.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove


============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Owen Densmore]

Great post Eric, thank you.

At first I was tempted to say "Democracy Sucks", but then I got to thinking that possibly it is an unstable equilibrium? 

Indeed, many claim that only 20% of the voters control the vote because 40% are dyed in the wool Democrats or Republicans. I.e. a very small part of the community actually control the whole.

The "Euro-cracy" was blamed for the Brexit, having much the superiority complex you mention. But then, might it be a better form of community decision making than overwhelming democracy .. voting on everything?

It is as you mention the *institutions of democracy* that matter, and I hope they survive.

There is a systematic effort on all fronts all the time to dismantle the institutions of democracy to capture spoils in a competition.

   -- Owen

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

<<Trump said it well: “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer>>

 

Boy are they in for a surprise.

 

Marcus

 

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[Owen Densmore]

Interesting that HRC seems likely to win the popular vote. Now what does THAT say about democracy?

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[Tom Johnson]

"Interesting that HRC seems likely to win the popular vote. "

Simply that the Electoral College is, today, a screwy concept.  And remember, this happened in 2000 when the Republicans also prevailed.  I doubt a majority of Congress has the cajones to get rid of the EC.

TJ

On Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 10:42 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

Interesting that HRC seems likely to win the popular vote. Now what does THAT say about democracy?

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============================================================
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[gepr]

I think it might be a testament to the idea that cities are hubs of innovation ... or at least progress.  It's still populism, but perhaps not driven by resentment and being left behind, maybe more driven by what we _want_ to achieve.

The intereresting topic of Texas came up at the election party last night.  Texas, by all rights should be blue based on the large populations in Houston, DFW, Austin, etc.  I haven't (but might) try to run the numbers and compare to places like PA or MI.  What leads urban voters toward progressivism and rural voters toward regressivism?  Is that even a coherent question?  Why would Texas urbanites lean more Republican than Californian urbanites?

On 11/09/2016 09:42 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
> Interesting that HRC seems likely to win the popular vote. Now what does THAT say about democracy?

--
␦glen?

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[Edward Angel]

Even if Congress were willing to get rid of the EC, the constitutional amendment could never get enough states to pass it. 

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Nov 9, 2016, at 10:47 AM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

"Interesting that HRC seems likely to win the popular vote. "

Simply that the Electoral College is, today, a screwy concept.  And remember, this happened in 2000 when the Republicans also prevailed.  I doubt a majority of Congress has the cajones to get rid of the EC.

TJ

On Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 10:42 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

Interesting that HRC seems likely to win the popular vote. Now what does THAT say about democracy?

<Snap.11.09.16-10.40.04.jpg>

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[Steve Smith]

Eric -

I did the same wade, reading it out loud to a compatriot and only found the cleaner version when I tried to print it just now.

I appreciate the acute insight and well crafted description of the situation at hand your missive here presents.

I am on my way to Ojo Caliente to soak out some of the Cortisol buildup from the last few days/weeks, but I'm really glad to have read this before I did. 

Among other things, it lowered some of MY resentments.

Thanks,

 - Steve

On 11/9/16 8:37 AM, Gary Schiltz wrote:

If it's any consolation, I waded through your entire bounce-formatted post, it was that good.

On Wednesday, November 9, 2016, Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Sorry Friam.  I sent this before from the wrong address, and then I foolishly forwarded the bounce, which had been reformatted and partly chopped up.

This was what it looked like the firs time.

E


> I think what this all is about is the power of resentment.
>
> I think the engine underneath the rejection of Hillary is that people look at her and see a face that they think believes itself better than them and that looks down on them.  For people who were already under the power of resentment, that sets it on fire and opens this thing that is weirdly borderline with hatred.  All the other stuff, news items or whatever, is just opportunistic window dressing that gets recruited after the fact as rationalization.  Nobody cares about emails.  If that hadn’t been available, it would have been something else.  What they care about is indulging in rage at being “disrespected”.
>
> I acknowledge the sophistication as well as the goodness of the Dalai Lama, and I defer to the willful positivity of the Buddhists who have been thinking about this systematicaly for nearly a thousand years, and I understand that they know things I don’t know.  But I also work with primatologists, of which anthropology is a sub-discipline.  The meanness of chimpanzees is probably retained from the recent ancestor, and it isn’t that far below the surface in humans.  Whatever it is about social status, that gets wrapped up in the phrases “looking up to” or “looking down on” is big in us like it is big in them.  Humans on some occasions have other layers of culture that put some checks on it, but that superstructure is not all that robust.  I am not compelled by the Dalai Lama’s interpretation (for which I am nonetheless grateful) that this is about the loss of feeling needed.  It is much meaner and more primitive than that; it is the resentment of feeling looked down on.
>
> But now we have trouble.  Americans seem to have a kind of negligent optimism that the mechanisms of democracy will still be there as a path to backtrack from mistakes they didn’t escape before.  But the keys to everything have just been given to a strange hodge-podge of people, to none of whose members are the mechanisms of democracy anything particularly desirable.  They are merely obstacles to their own small and predatory ambitions.  I don’t take for granted that there will be mechanisms of backtracking the next time a calendary cycle rolls around.
>
> The motive power here is the power of resentment, at the bottom.  But mechanisms matter too, and individuals matter.  A few articles here and there seem to me to capture large chunks of this in a way that seems coherent and clarifying.
>
> There are architects like Newt Gingrich, as he is called out in the article from (2012) “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are the problem”.  There is a systematic effort on all fronts all the time to dismantle the institutions of democracy to capture spoils in a competition.  The method, for me, is best brought into clarity in the Malcolm Gladwell parable on David and Goliath, about the girls’ basketball team that won without particular skill by implementing the full-court press on every play of every game.  Gladwell dwells on this as an honorable strategy because it employs conditioning as the thing that can be bought with discpline when there isn’t native talent.  He comments, obliquely, that the teams of more skillful girls who were beaten in games were annoyed at being beaten by a full-court press.  He doesn’t develop this, but I think it matters.  For the skilled girls, they were in a _game_.  The point of winning was to be a reward for being good at the play of the game.  Their upset was that suddenly there was no game any more, there was no skill, there was no aesthetic to be aspired to or served.  Winning became its own currency separate from whatever art the game had been meant to enable.  The story has both sides, and there is credit due both where Malcolm calls it and where he bypasses it.  But the analogy to me here is what happens when winning is separated from the game’s having a purpose in doing something else, which one might call “bigger”.  In basketball, the bigger thing was the cultivation of an art.  In politics, it is the preservation of a society.
>
> We have seen the full-court press.  It is middle-American right-wing talk radio.  It is the constant campaign of hysteria, over everything, everywhere, all the time, that Paul Krugman notes over and over in his columns.  It is the congress’s commitment to demolish everything, to obstruct and to block everything.  Because there is nothing they are trying to build or to accomplish, there is no currency with which to negotiate with them. Where there are no values, there is no foundation for rules of play.  It is the district gerrymandering, and the voter disenfranchisement acts of closing polls and DMVs in southern states.  These things work.  Once a democracy is dismantled, the tools to oust the ones in power can only come from outside.  But where is “outside” when the keys to everything are handed over at the level of a country.
>
> There are those who aren’t “architects”, like Gingrich, but rather these skinny venomous little blonde women who come out of the woodwork to fill local roles, or minor con men like Paul Ryan, or various slimy and disgusting and yet dangerous things like Ted Cruz.
>
> I feel like these are the machery that channels the motive power of resentment and enables it to do things.  The machinery matters, but if the motive power of resentment were not there, the machinery would have nothing to drive it or flow through it.  Conversely, as long as the motive power is there, there are always architects and local operators who can come in and try their hand at machinery, and a kind of Darwinian dynamic will filter out the ones that succeed.
>
> Under the power of resentment, there is no choice so mean, or so stupid, or so self-defeating that people cannot be led to make it.  The ones who thought this was a good idea will plough themselves under as fast as they take down others, but there is no value in looking forward to that in vengeance.  Facts matter in the real world of cause and effect, but in the choice world of resentment, they are beside the point.  People under the power of resentment are unreachable in all those terms; they have shifted into a different space.
>
> Somehow that is what we have to deal with.  Any pleasure or luxury in analysis or speculation is no pleasure now.  There is just what options are left.  I do think that the mistake was, and will continue to be, not finding ways to stop the growth of resentment.  A line in one of the English-language translations of the Dao de Jing goes “The wise rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies.”  I won’t claim to understand what original Chinese political theorists intended this to mean, but I do think the failure to take seriously the need to stuff bellies (and the more subtle and perhaps honorable human needs for safety, fulfillment, and freedom from want) hasn’t been taken seriously enough, for decades now, by any of those who were comfortable.
>
> Now that all the keys are in the hands of the predators, we have fewer tools to work with than we had before.  It would have been good if the sense of urgency to stop the undermining and the feeding of resentment, which I think Bernie felt and tried to speak for though without a serious plan to deal with the complexity of the mess, had weighed on more people before.  But we are where we are now, and the question is what can hold off or reverse the coming active damage from here.
>
>
>
>


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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[David Eric Smith]

This is the right question, Marcus, and I don’t know.

> Can we conclude that filling bellies will stop the growth of resentment?  I don’t know about that.  The economy is in relatively good shape right now.  The unemployment rate has been at or below 5% for a year and jobs have been added to the workforce month after month.    The participation rate is about 62.4% which is just about where it has been for 50 years on average.  However, the mean incomes in the large population blue states are higher than in rust belt states, but the cost of living is really much higher in those blue states too.  
>  
>  
> From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz
> Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2016 8:37 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: what other subject is there this morning
>  
> If it's any consolation, I waded through your entire bounce-formatted post, it was that good.
>
> On Wednesday, November 9, 2016, Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Sorry Friam.  I sent this before from the wrong address, and then I foolishly forwarded the bounce, which had been reformatted and partly chopped up.
>
> This was what it looked like the firs time.
>
> E
>
>
> > I think what this all is about is the power of resentment.
> >
> > I think the engine underneath the rejection of Hillary is that people look at her and see a face that they think believes itself better than them and that looks down on them.  For people who were already under the power of resentment, that sets it on fire and opens this thing that is weirdly borderline with hatred.  All the other stuff, news items or whatever, is just opportunistic window dressing that gets recruited after the fact as rationalization.  Nobody cares about emails.  If that hadn’t been available, it would have been something else.  What they care about is indulging in rage at being “disrespected”.
> >
> > I acknowledge the sophistication as well as the goodness of the Dalai Lama, and I defer to the willful positivity of the Buddhists who have been thinking about this systematicaly for nearly a thousand years, and I understand that they know things I don’t know.  But I also work with primatologists, of which anthropology is a sub-discipline.  The meanness of chimpanzees is probably retained from the recent ancestor, and it isn’t that far below the surface in humans.  Whatever it is about social status, that gets wrapped up in the phrases “looking up to” or “looking down on” is big in us like it is big in them.  Humans on some occasions have other layers of culture that put some checks on it, but that superstructure is not all that robust.  I am not compelled by the Dalai Lama’s interpretation (for which I am nonetheless grateful) that this is about the loss of feeling needed.  It is much meaner and more primitive than that; it is the resentment of feeling looked down on.
> >
> > But now we have trouble.  Americans seem to have a kind of negligent optimism that the mechanisms of democracy will still be there as a path to backtrack from mistakes they didn’t escape before.  But the keys to everything have just been given to a strange hodge-podge of people, to none of whose members are the mechanisms of democracy anything particularly desirable.  They are merely obstacles to their own small and predatory ambitions.  I don’t take for granted that there will be mechanisms of backtracking the next time a calendary cycle rolls around.
> >
> > The motive power here is the power of resentment, at the bottom.  But mechanisms matter too, and individuals matter.  A few articles here and there seem to me to capture large chunks of this in a way that seems coherent and clarifying.
> >
> > There are architects like Newt Gingrich, as he is called out in the article from (2012) “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are the problem”.  There is a systematic effort on all fronts all the time to dismantle the institutions of democracy to capture spoils in a competition.  The method, for me, is best brought into clarity in the Malcolm Gladwell parable on David and Goliath, about the girls’ basketball team that won without particular skill by implementing the full-court press on every play of every game.  Gladwell dwells on this as an honorable strategy because it employs conditioning as the thing that can be bought with discpline when there isn’t native talent.  He comments, obliquely, that the teams of more skillful girls who were beaten in games were annoyed at being beaten by a full-court press.  He doesn’t develop this, but I think it matters.  For the skilled girls, they were in a _game_.  The point of winning was to be a reward for being good at the play of the game.  Their upset was that suddenly there was no game any more, there was no skill, there was no aesthetic to be aspired to or served.  Winning became its own currency separate from whatever art the game had been meant to enable.  The story has both sides, and there is credit due both where Malcolm calls it and where he bypasses it.  But the analogy to me here is what happens when winning is separated from the game’s having a purpose in doing something else, which one might call “bigger”.  In basketball, the bigger thing was the cultivation of an art.  In politics, it is the preservation of a society.
> >
> > We have seen the full-court press.  It is middle-American right-wing talk radio.  It is the constant campaign of hysteria, over everything, everywhere, all the time, that Paul Krugman notes over and over in his columns.  It is the congress’s commitment to demolish everything, to obstruct and to block everything.  Because there is nothing they are trying to build or to accomplish, there is no currency with which to negotiate with them. Where there are no values, there is no foundation for rules of play.  It is the district gerrymandering, and the voter disenfranchisement acts of closing polls and DMVs in southern states.  These things work.  Once a democracy is dismantled, the tools to oust the ones in power can only come from outside.  But where is “outside” when the keys to everything are handed over at the level of a country.
> >
> > There are those who aren’t “architects”, like Gingrich, but rather these skinny venomous little blonde women who come out of the woodwork to fill local roles, or minor con men like Paul Ryan, or various slimy and disgusting and yet dangerous things like Ted Cruz.
> >
> > I feel like these are the machery that channels the motive power of resentment and enables it to do things.  The machinery matters, but if the motive power of resentment were not there, the machinery would have nothing to drive it or flow through it.  Conversely, as long as the motive power is there, there are always architects and local operators who can come in and try their hand at machinery, and a kind of Darwinian dynamic will filter out the ones that succeed.
> >
> > Under the power of resentment, there is no choice so mean, or so stupid, or so self-defeating that people cannot be led to make it.  The ones who thought this was a good idea will plough themselves under as fast as they take down others, but there is no value in looking forward to that in vengeance.  Facts matter in the real world of cause and effect, but in the choice world of resentment, they are beside the point.  People under the power of resentment are unreachable in all those terms; they have shifted into a different space.
> >
> > Somehow that is what we have to deal with.  Any pleasure or luxury in analysis or speculation is no pleasure now.  There is just what options are left.  I do think that the mistake was, and will continue to be, not finding ways to stop the growth of resentment.  A line in one of the English-language translations of the Dao de Jing goes “The wise rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies.”  I won’t claim to understand what original Chinese political theorists intended this to mean, but I do think the failure to take seriously the need to stuff bellies (and the more subtle and perhaps honorable human needs for safety, fulfillment, and freedom from want) hasn’t been taken seriously enough, for decades now, by any of those who were comfortable.
> >
> > Now that all the keys are in the hands of the predators, we have fewer tools to work with than we had before.  It would have been good if the sense of urgency to stop the undermining and the feeding of resentment, which I think Bernie felt and tried to speak for though without a serious plan to deal with the complexity of the mess, had weighed on more people before.  But we are where we are now, and the question is what can hold off or reverse the coming active damage from here.
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[gepr]

It can't be a coincidence that it's always the Democrats that win the popular vote but lose the electoral vote.

On 11/09/2016 09:47 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:
> Simply that the Electoral College is, today, a screwy concept.  And remember, this happened in 2000 when the Republicans also prevailed.  I doubt a majority of Congress has the cajones to get rid of the EC.

--
␦glen?

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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Eric> This is the right question, Marcus, and I don’t know.

I have met, or briefly worked with, a number of people who I think would have no idea what Gladwell is talking about in his parable on David and Goliath.   I guess I should be thankful I have not met more.  To this set of people, there is no concept of cultivating art or preserving society.   There is nothing "bigger" unless they hear it in their Sunday sermon.   (This kind of thing is just doublespeak for rich kids in liberal arts schools who waste their parents' tuition dollars when they should be studying for their accounting exam, after all.)   I don't think it has anything to do with privilege, it is something one gets from early mentors (I could name them) who could be of any socioeconomic level.   It seems to me to be a core building block of personality, perhaps even some hardwired or epigenetic part.  

Marcus

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

I don't agree with this, but it is a related argument.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/stop-shaming-trump-supporters


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[Marcus G. Daniels]

What isn't possible at this point?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/09/trump-win-california-secede-calexit-silicon-valley?CMP=edit_2221

Silicon Valley investors call for California to secede from the US after Trump win

www.theguardian.com

Hyperloop co-founder said he would fund ‘Calexit’ campaign for Democratic state to become its own nation as tech industry has been at odds with Trump

---

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Edward Angel <[hidden email]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 9, 2016 11:31:28 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] what other subject is there this morning

 

Even if Congress were willing to get rid of the EC, the constitutional amendment could never get enough states to pass it. 

Ed

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Nov 9, 2016, at 10:47 AM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

"Interesting that HRC seems likely to win the popular vote. "

Simply that the Electoral College is, today, a screwy concept.  And remember, this happened in 2000 when the Republicans also prevailed.  I doubt a majority of Congress has the cajones to get rid of the EC.

TJ

On Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 10:42 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

Interesting that HRC seems likely to win the popular vote. Now what does THAT say about democracy?

<Snap.11.09.16-10.40.04.jpg>

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove