…how do we know how it’s looking when we don’t know what we’re looking at?

It is commonly claimed that democracy can’t work unless you have journalism, and a free media at that. How are people to decide how to cast a vote if they don’t access independent, reliable information?

With the US election upon us, we may be about to find out.

…maybe it’s just me…but that’s an odd way to phrase it…either “we” don’t have it…because it’s not to be had…or it’s out there…but *that* we still doesn’t have it…so it hasn’t been in a position to act as the vital ingredient…so democracy…won’t have worked…ok…I can see a few ways to fill those out that arguably hold water…but…either “we” at the end doesn’t mean the same folks as “people”…or I’m not sure it makes sense…”if they don’t access independent, reliable information”…or just reliably partial information…how would those people be part of a “we” that finds out…anything, really?

Because, more than ever before, the people who decide the election will be those who are least engaged with professional news media – the kind of researched, fact-checked content that you are likely to find in the New York Times or, for that matter, the Guardian.

…stop sniggerinig…it’s not the guardian’s fault that they said that about the NYT…that’s just professional courtesy…&…it’s not the light…which is…a whole other thing

Marianna in Conspiracyland [BBC Sounds]

…so

Forty-three per cent of US citizens avoid the news, according to the latest Digital News Report – a worldwide survey of media use conducted by the Reuters Institute for Journalism at Oxford University.

Most of these people nevertheless encounter some news – not because of loyalty to a brand or because they actively seek out a preferred outlet, but because it comes at them, so to speak.

…the signal:noise ratio is presumably the part responsible for the manifestly insane fact that everything the man has done his whole life long but particularly the last ten or so years hasn’t set an altogether different set of un-presidented precedents…& that’s…concerning…but…hard to know who to yell at about?

And what comes for free is either partisanly motivated, or funded by advertising – which means heavy with content pitched to draw eyeballs – sensationalism and clickbait.

…no shortage of people involved you’d be forgiven for feeling like yelling at…or…depending on some generational stuff…yeeting into the sun?

It is the low news consumers on which the campaigning candidates are concentrating, and on which the result of the election depends.

…&…not to date myself…but back in douglas adams’ day…he was able to be pretty charming about the possible product of trying to segregate your arks into the people who mattered…& the telephone sanitation engineers…& deputy undersecretaries for the vice-president of customer relations & whatever else we like to think of as fat we could trim off to bring humanity down to a lean, optimal sort of a creature…spoiler alert…the cast-offs inherit the earth…so maybe we call them the meek?

But before I get to how things have changed since 2020, the facts I have already given mean that all the controversies, among the politically engaged, about whether mainstream media are “sanewashing” Trump, or whether or not outlets such as the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times publish editorial endorsements of a candidate, won’t affect the election result.

It is a debate of principal and morality, playing out among people who, overwhelmingly, have already made up their minds on how to vote. The citizens who will decide the election probably don’t even know about these controversies, and if they did they probably wouldn’t care.

The researchers at the Reuters Institute report that once disengaged from the news, people struggle to get back in, even if they want to.

…it’s a non-trivial exercise, if you ask me…which doubtless you’d know better than to do…which…would rather serve to underline the whole point, I suppose…in that…like these interminable posts of mine…the way certain names bob up in a dizzying array of contexts, most of which require contextualization to distinguish from one another into all the different strands & fibers & loose ends from which the whole cloth is ultimately rendered…over a span of decades in some instances…& mere days in others…all delivered as an unceasing torrent…even to people trying to pull that zen meditate-while-a-waterfall-falls-on-your-head trick…it’s not like it’s…altogether just…to…just say it’s a moral failing to take someone else’s word for it over working up from first principles to what you think about every little thing that’s going on…or going down

Benjamin Toff, the author of a book on news avoidance, writes: “It’s like trying to tune into the fourth episode season of Game of Thrones without knowing who these people are, or what difference any of this makes. For a lot of people, that’s their feeling about the news.”

…&…it helps to have a decent crop of people’s word to take for that stuff…or a crop of decent people’s word, even

Traditionally, the journalistic mission has included making the important understandable, seeking to engage the disengaged. But while this still forms part of the rhetoric of the profession, the truth is that most serious news organisations publishing political news are not serving the politically disengaged.

…&…maybe…there’s some dropping of that ball going on

Instead, with so much advertising having disappeared from media outlets to online platforms, the path to financial sustainability for serious journalism outlets lies in trying to get people who already read the news to spend more time with the outlet, and to convert them into paying subscribers.

…but…I’m not sure it’s altogether fair to say it’s the “serious journalism outlets” that are the onboarding point for the idiot ball we seem to be inadvertantly swapping it out for

This is essential to survival, for serious media. Yet also represents a failure of the journalistic mission.

…gordian knot…solomon & the bifurcated baby…the same solution can cut both ways…it’s practically a zen koan at this point

It is true that democracy and journalism grew up together, and that each strengthens the other, but they are not as indivisible as the journalism profession suggests. Ancient Greece had democracy (though not for slaves) but no journalism. Al Jazeera provides journalism, but has its headquarters in non-democratic Qatar.

And, in today’s western democracies, we now have political journalism that risks no longer being mass media, but elite media.

…it’s something of a redundant statement that journalism lying behind a paywall is not exactly fodder for the masses…& in digital format they won’t even see it wrapped around fish & chips the next day…& all online content is already a de facto instance of media available only to a subset we probably would file under elite if we grade on a global curve…despite which it’s hardly a uniquely first world problem

https://rsf.org/en/more-100-journalists-victims-russian-crimes-during-two-years-covering-war-ukraine

[…that’s reporters without borders…like msf is doctors without borders…blame the french if the letters seem wrong]

And then on top of that, playing to the mass, we have content. All kinds of content, much of it partisan, distorted and sometimes straight-out lies.

…& appearences strongly suggest that it’s the straight-out distortions & cumulatively partisan lies that are better at passing through the semi-permeable membrane of aversive ignorance

It is fashionable to blame all our current societal ills on social media. Blocking access to social media for the young is now bipartisan – if ill-defined – policy in Australia. It is, after all, so much easier as a response to the mental health crises among the young than tackling the climate change crisis, which makes depression and anxiety almost inevitable.

Likewise, traditional news media outlets tend to blame social media for the spread of misinformation and the undermining of quality journalism.

But that is only partly right.

US election answers the question: how do you spend a billion dollars? [Guardian]

…speaking for myself…I have some follow up questions about all the millions that might add up to billions that get spent trying to buy it that aren’t part of the campaigns on account of then it would be harder to get away with saying you’re not trying to buy the pot so nobody gets to see your hole card…but…we all know I have some funny ideas…so…probably best to let that part alone?

Surveys in Australia and the USA have shown that mainstream news media was in a crisis of trust from at least the 1970s, long before the internet, let alone Facebook and TikTok. It was therefore in rotten shape to respond to the challenges of the means of publication being in many more hands.

Meanwhile, a recent research paper published in Nature suggests, based on a survey, that fake news and misinformation is not as influential as we may think.

…maybe if I were a journalist I’d feel some relief about the part where that would seem to get me personally off the hook…but…awkwardly…I’m not one of those…so…who does that leave holding the bag for the part where folks should “just plain know better”?

The survey showed that most people have low exposure to false and inflammatory content, and they tend to distrust it. However a narrow, partisan fringe seeks it out, believing content that confirms already hard-set views.

…no offense, there, ms relieved-journalist-lady…but…bald statements of obvious veracity don’t seem to be gaining any traction with my quandry about the bag holding…& I don’t want to ruin the surprise but I’m pretty sure there’s a buck in the bag…possibly even “the buck”

This suggests that political partisanship drives consumption of misinformation at least as much as the other way round.

…dduuuudde…you’re doin’ it again

There are a few bright spots in all this. The Reuters Digital News Media survey shows that countries that have strong investment in public service media – such as the public broadcasters of the BBC in Britain and the ABC in Australia – have much higher rates of engagement with news and more political engagement.

…you know you are

But that doesn’t apply to the USA, where public broadcasting is tiny.

…well…that’s just fucking great…thanks for that…speaking of thanks, though…without the sarcasm…if you didn’t click through when @butcherbakertoiletrymaker offered a free pass to it through apple news…I’m not sure it made me feel any better about any of this but I’m thankful that stuff like this does make it out into the wild

…so…anyway

Solutions? I don’t have any easy answers, and the problems are fast-moving targets. By the time of the next US election, many citizens may be consuming news written by artificial intelligence. If we are lucky, or if governments have been smart with their regulatory responses, the robots will be aggregating reliable sources.

But we have been neither smart nor lucky so far.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/03/can-democracy-work-without-journalism-in-the-us-we-may-be-about-to-find-out

…fuck’s sake, lady…way to bring the doom…if we do as well at dealing with that shit before next time as we did dealing with all the social media…& just generally overloading & undersubscribing in media res…the picture you’re painting could be medically inadvisable for me to look at…like I didn’t have enough to worry about?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/31/concerned-about-your-data-use-here-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-an-average-day-of-emails-whatsapps-and-more

…just…lay off wouldja…it’s fucking sunday…fer chris’sakes…& why does that suddenly sound like it’s meant to evoke the plural of crisis?

In 2001 I interviewed the late Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel. He was in Cambridge to attend the opening of a new library that he and his wife, Betty, had endowed. We met in the university library – the central library of the university – and had an agreeable chat about the history of the tech industry and the role that he had played in it. As ever, he was wearing a tacky digital watch that served as a cue for a party trick he used to play on people. He would ask them what they thought it had cost, and most people would suggest a trivial sum – $10, say. Nope, he’d reply. The actual cost was $15m: because that was what it had cost Intel to get into – and out of – the market for digital watches. And one of the lessons he learned from that was that his company should stay away from selling consumer goods.

…there’s…another way to play that not-as-cheap-as-it-looks gag…you can drop a couple of grand on a casio that looks like the classic $20 version…which may or may not have been the sort of digital watches douglas adams had in mind when he invoked those in a preface or two…but…doesn’t really disprove the principle the principal of this interview gave his name to

Moore was world famous because of an observation he had made in the early days of the semiconductor industry that Intel once dominated. He had noticed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit (or chip) had been doubling every year since 1965, and this was likely to continue for several decades. Inevitably, this became known as “Moore’s law”, as if it were a law of physics rather than just an empirical observation and an extrapolation into the future.

…any resemblance to “double or quits” is entirely in your head…or mine…I am reliably assured?

But although Moore’s “law” was bound to run out of steam eventually, it shaped an entire industry and – more importantly – changed the way we thought about computing. In particular, it fostered a hubristic mindset: confidence that if a problem could be solved by computing, if today’s machines weren’t powerful enough, Moore’s law guaranteed that it would be soluble really soon.

As the ancient Greeks knew only too well, after hubris comes nemesis. In the computing world it came in the computational needs of machine learning, which were orders of magnitude greater than those of more conventional serial processing – computing in sequence, one thing at a time (albeit at astonishing speeds). In one of those happy accidents, there was a part of the computer industry – gaming, which needed processors that could do several calculations simultaneously, or “in parallel” – to ensure that fast-changing scenes could be rendered realistically. And one particular company, Nvidia, was a prominent caterer to this esoteric requirement by providing what became known as graphics processing units (GPUs).

…I don’t think this one mentions it…but…speaking of intel & nvidia one after the other

At some point, Jensen Huang, a smart cookie who is the founder and chief executive of Nvidia, realised that his company had the technology that the burgeoning new field of machine learning (afterwards rebranded AI) needed, and he pivoted his entire company to focus on it. The rest, as they say, is history. Irrational exuberance about AI took over the tech industry, fuelling a gold rush in which Huang was the premier supplier of picks and shovels, and his company is now the second most valuable corporation on the planet, just behind Apple.

…pretty sure nvidia recently took intel’s spot on a stock index or two…just sayin’

In 2018 Huang started brooding on the rate at which the computational power of GPUs was increasing. He noted that Nvidia GPUs were “25 times faster than five years ago” whereas Moore’s law would have expected only a tenfold increase. GPU performance was more than tripling every two years, significantly more than Moore would have estimated.

Inevitably, this empirical observation has now become “Huang’s law”. The comparison with Moore’s law is misleading, though, because Moore was referring just to chips – CPUs – whereas Nvidia GPUs are dense clusters of numerous components with associated software which makes them more like miniature supercomputers.

If, as seems likely, GPUs do become the basic building blocks of next-generation computers, then Huang’s prediction of another exponential acceleration in computing power – Moore’s law on steroids – will fuel a new wave of hubristic conviction that there is nothing that cannot be done with technology.

…it’s…still an opinion piece

Except of course the things that are really worth doing if humans are to survive into the next millennium.

…hell…at this point I’d take surviving into the middle of next week to be honest

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make complacent.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/02/better-faster-stronger-tech-titans-obsession-with-turbocharged-computer-power-could-be-our-downfall

…so…the gods *don’t* wish to destroy me?

Leopards Are Telling You That They Will Eat YOUR Face [NYT]

…can I get that in writing?

They’re Giving Scammers All Their Money. The Kids Can’t Stop Them. [NYT]

…because…in terms of precedent if nothing else…some bets are bigger than others

“Republicans are clearly strategically putting polling into the information environment to try to create perceptions that Trump is stronger,” said Joshua Dyck, who directs the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. “Their incentive is not necessarily to get the answer right.”

Last week, the right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong shared a survey with his 1.1 million followers on X. The forecast from a new polling company suggested, without sharing its methodology, that the former president would take 74.3 percent of the national vote — a landslide unprecedented in American history.

“Trump is absolutely going to win,” Mr. Cheong wrote. “The data shows it.”In the final stretch of the campaign in 2020, Republican-aligned pollsters released 15 presidential election polls of swing states. In the same period this year, they have released 37, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight. Of those 37, all but seven had Mr. Trump in the lead.

That increase comes as the volume of nonpartisan polls — such as those commissioned by major news organizations — have dropped significantly, though they still make up a majority of the polls released. Of the nonpartisan surveys released in the final weeks of this year’s campaign, roughly half showed a lead for Mr. Trump.

And that is counting only polls that are explicitly designated as politically aligned by FiveThirtyEight, which sets a high bar for defining partisan polls. There have been additional polls conducted by firms with a history of favoring Republicans or with a public record of pro-Republican rhetoric that have not been designated as partisan by any of the aggregators.

Other factors have also fueled the perception of Mr. Trump’s strength. Betting platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi that allow people to place bets on election outcomes have seen a spike in Mr. Trump’s favor over the past month — one that that does not track with the overall state of the race as captured by reputable polling firms.

That surge appears to have been pushed almost entirely by a very small number of high-value bets from just four accounts linked to a French national. Those accounts have collectively placed $30 million on a Trump victory this month.

Mr. Trump and his allies, including Elon Musk, have nonetheless promoted the betting markets — although they are opaque, largely unregulated and not a scientific way to gauge public polls. Mr. Trump cited Polymarket in a recent speech, saying, “I don’t know what the hell it means, but it means we’re doing pretty well.”

…beg to differ

That has not stopped these polls from shaping the broader narrative in the race’s final stretch. The averages on the popular aggregation site RealClearPolitics, in particular, are widely cited on social media.

Unlike its competitors, RealClearPolitics does not filter out low-quality polls, incorporating results from pollsters with a poor track record that other aggregators reject. It also does not weight its averages. One of its pages displays a map of the electoral college with a winner projected for each state, even those the site currently deems to be tossups.

That “no tossups” map currently shows Mr. Trump winning every swing state except Michigan and Wisconsin.

…so…if I throw some numbers in…& they “can’t lie”…then we’re in sherlock holmes’ favorite destination…& the truth…however improbable…remains that which is not impossible but sure as shit looks like it should be?

Influential accounts have been sharing screenshots of RealClearPolitics’ scarlet-dominated Electoral College map, often paired with images of the Polymarket betting average, which currently shows Mr. Trump with a 65 percent chance of winning.

Two weeks ago, Elon Musk shared the map with his 202 million followers on X, writing that the “trend will continue” and that Democrats are losing. Early voting data, a fickle predictive metric, has also been cited by Trump supporters as further evidence of his impending triumph.

“It’s full spectrum dominance — it’s everywhere you look. You can’t avoid it. It feels good, it looks good, it sounds good,” said Vish Burra, the executive secretary of the New York Young Republican Club.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, is among those who believe Republican-aligned pollsters are “flooding the zone” in order to shift the polling averages and deflate Democrats’ enthusiasm. “It doesn’t have to be by a lot,” he said. “Just enough to turn the map red.”

…I don’t want to be glib at this point…but…this is a quote…possibly not verbatim…from a lady talking about GOP confidence before the chickens are counted…it goes something like…”if you were familiar with really anything at all about the way women’s bodies work you wouldn’t call an upbeat level of anticipatory enthusiasm your red wave”…so…that’s not me being glib?

…now…a lady who used to go by “A.G.”…rather than “Dr Allison Gill”…for hatch act reasons…but those weren’t enough to stop her getting “constructively dismissed” by the previous administration…so she doesn’t have to do that these days…& that leads me to believe that the orange boi is…not unaware…that she used to like to talk about a need for people to vote against him “in numbers too big to manipulate”

“We need to make it TOO BIG TO RIG,” Mr. Trump posted on social media on Tuesday, an exhortation that some say underscores the real strategy: to make a loss seem mathematically impossible.

…apparently…those were polysyllables too big for the targets he’s after manipulating…short words that rhyme & scan the same way as “lock her up”…give or take that one extra syllable you’re jamming in there…that’s what “works”

“That’s my main concern,” said Adam Carlson, a data analyst and former Democratic pollster who has been tracking the partisan polls. “People will believe what they want to believe on both sides, but only on one side does that have the chance to lead to pervasive election denial.”

…well, that’s just great…way to turn the best case scenario into a recipe for disaster

Others on the left believe that even the polling averages are skewed in Mr. Trump’s favor and that Ms. Harris is actually poised for a surprise landslide, in much the same way that Democrats over-performed expectations in the midterms.

Why the Right Thinks Trump Is Running Away With the Race [NYT via archive.ph]

…so…even if you can have it both ways

We don’t yet know whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will prevail in Tuesday’s contest – but when we do, it won’t feel hard to explain [Guardian]

…it’s not like that makes all other things equal

‘Will anything change?’: six women react to Saoirse Ronan’s viral comment [Guardian]

[…if that one passed you by…it went about like this]

@hersport

Saoirse Ronan Just Said What Every Woman Feels 👏🏼 During a recent Graham Norton episode, self-defence became the topic of conversation. Saoirse Ronan magnificently cut through the humour to highlight the harsh reality women face daily. When Eddie Redmayne mentioned using a smartphone to defend oneself, Paul Mescal joked, “Who’s actually going to think about that?”—prompting laughs from the men on stage. Ronan tried to jump in, and you can see her saying it was actually a good idea, but after being spoken over twice, she made it clear. “That’s what girls have to think about all the time.” The conversation might be a light-hearted joke for some but it is the everyday reality for EVERY woman. Let’s just look at the facts. • Half of all women feel unsafe walking alone in their own neighbourhoods after dark. For men? Just one in seven. • In busy public places, one in two women feel uneasy alone at night. Only one in five men feel the same. • Four in five women feel vulnerable walking alone in a park after dark, compared to just two in five men. • Two-thirds of young women (16-34) experience harassment each year, with almost half dealing with catcalls or unwanted sexual remarks. • Over half of all women are afraid of being physically attacked while out running—compared to 28% of men. Thank you for speaking up Saoirse 👏🏼 🇮🇪 🎥: Graham Norton Show

♬ original sound – Her Sport

…so

Trump may become president again – but he’s already a useful idiot to the mega rich [Guardian]

…same as it ever was?

Is Donald Trump going mad? It depends how you define the word. But since he’s hoping to be elected US president on Tuesday, it would be handy to know. Democrats describe him as “weird” and “unhinged”. His rival, Kamala Harris, raised the “M” question again last week. “This is someone who is “unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power,” she warned.

Harris, to her credit, was being relatively polite, though goodness knows why, given the way he disses and demeans her. So let’s pose the question in more colloquial, idiomatic terms. Has stark raving Trump finally lost his marbles? Are there bats in the belfry? If he’s off his rocker, not playing with a full deck and away with the fairies, the world and the voters have a right to know.

…if we even can know such an un-knowable thing

Harris’s assessment is obviously not an objective medical diagnosis of mental disorder. It’s a normal person’s reaction to the abnormal things Trump says and does. Crazy-strange campaign speeches by him and his supporters, notably at Madison Square Garden last weekend – a gathering akin to a Nazi Nuremberg rally – are reviving the debate about his sanity that began during his first term.

In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, published in 2017, a group of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals raised numerous red flags. One contributor suggested he was clearly off his chump: “Trump is now the most powerful head of state in the world, and one of the most impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganised, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving.”

That professional opinion, made seven years ago, still rings true. Yet is the madness of “King” Trump, like the madness of King George (whose tyrannical rule Trump seeks to emulate), getting worse?

…gee…I dunno…however could we tell?

Trump stumbles, mispronounces words, forgets where he is and loses his train of thought. Just like Joe Biden, in fact. But Biden is merely old. Trump is nuts.

Trump has refused to take credible mental acuity tests or release his medical records. Last month, more than 230 healthcare specialists urged him to be more transparent. “As we all age, we lose sharpness and revert to base instincts,” they noted. “We are seeing that from Trump as he uses his rallies… to crudely lash out.”

It may go back to childhood. One theory is that Trump, bullied and bullier, was driven up the wall by maternal love denied. Another theory is that he suffers from “disinhibition”. This is when people become less restrained, the older they get.

But the Atlantic journalist McKay Coppins, who interviewed Trump 10 years ago, says he’s always been this way. His “depthless vanity, his brittle ego, his tragic craving for elite approval” haven’t changed one bit, Coppins wrote.

…depthless…that’s…a good word for it

Narcissism, hedonism, obsession, a need to provoke, scare, shock and scandalise, and chronic, paranoid feelings of victimhood are all indicators of worsening mental imbalance, if not early-onset imbecility. Recent Trump lunacies include claims that flies are buzzing round his head for “suspicious” reasons, North Korea is trying to kill him, the 6 January riot was a “lovefest”, pet-eating migrants are akin to Hannibal Lecter, and that God saved him in the assassination attempt on his life.

If Trump were to go mad on his own time, no problem. Unfortunately, by publicly projecting and displaying mental dysfunction daily on a national stage, he is driving America nuts, too – fans and foes alike. He brings out the worst in everyone, right and left. It could be termed national derangement syndrome (NDS).

…spare me from another fucking derangement syndrome prognosis

This collective madness, akin to mass hysteria, is all-consuming and universally destructive. Like much that happens in America, it reverberates around the globe. Trump’s fascistic Mad Hatter world is also the world of sicko revanchist dictators like Russia’s Putin, Europe’s far-right ultra-nationalist fruitcases, Iran’s manic mullahs and off-their-heads Israeli génocidaires.

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world – to hijack the title of Stanley Kramer’s 1963 comedy classic – but it’s no laughing matter. It may be about to get madder still.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/02/donald-trump-is-a-superspreader-for-a-craziness-that-has-split-america-in-two

…no shit, sherlock

Have you heard that Donald Trump is unraveling? His use of profanity has become increasingly casual, in rallies that stretch almost twice as long as they did in the past. His references to Vice President Kamala Harris have gone from dismissive to vicious. He has left us with more information about the golfer Arnold Palmer than most of us really needed. And then there is the uptick in his tic of designating everything as superlatively unprecedented. “Groceries, food, has gone up at levels that nobody’s ever seen before,” and “We had the greatest economy in the history of the world. We had never done anything like it,” etc.
[…]
The evidence lies in what linguists have termed extravagance. As Martin Haspelmath has explained it, extravagance is the linguistic effort not simply to be understood but to be noticed. Haspelmath says this effort drives much of human communication and the way language changes over time. He notes that “speakers not only want to be clear or ‘expressive,’ sometimes they also want their utterance to be imaginative and vivid — they want to be little ‘extravagant poets’ in order to be noticed, at least occasionally.”
[…]
Extravagance can also involve putting a label on things that used to be left to context — like the expression “I just can’t even” for a very particular kind of weariness and frustration. Or the relay procession, underway since Early Middle English, of words meaning “very,” with each new one starting as a more attention-grabbing version of what preceded. First was “truly,” followed by “very” itself, then “really” and “actually.” More slangy entrants like “hella,” “mad” and “straight up” have continued the relay below the Standard English radar. All that is extravagance, too.

Everything we’re seeing more of in Trump — the cussing, the going on too long almost as if seeking a better high, the exaggerating, the recreational name-calling, the references to genitals — makes sense as someone turning up the volume to keep himself entertained. His audiences have remained loyal, so it’s not them he’s worried about; this is about what’s in his own head.
[…]
There’s been a lot of talk about whether Trump’s disinhibition, which my colleague Ezra Klein so aptly analyzed, is proof that Trump is losing it. I think he’s just making the most of the duckling-imprinted fidelity of his MAGA base, turning up the heat – thumbing his nose at conventional standards of deportment – because conventions are boring.
[…]
Trump seeks the presidency not to serve the people, a job he clearly finds onerous and unengaging, but to serve, in various ways, himself. Extravagance is exactly what we would expect in the language and actions of such a person, especially with the passage of time.

People close to 80 are never who they were at 45, but the difference between Trump then and Trump now strikes me as pretty ordinary. Some of my friends have convinced themselves that Trump is so obviously diminished that if he is elected, before very long the 25th Amendment would have to be invoked, and the country would be left in the hands of JD Vance, someone who is at least a self-disciplined adult with a modicum of civic spirit.

I’m not seeing it. My fear is that Trump in office would be perfectly and horrifically sane and more or less stay that way for his whole term. What many see of late as crazy is just him champing at the bit to get into office so that he can use it for his mentally maleficent ends.

Linguistics and the Myth of Trump’s Unraveling [NYT via archive.ph]

…we…all have our demons?

Tucker Carlson, the former CNN and Fox News political chat host, has said he was “physically mauled” by a demon a year and a half ago, in an assault that he says left him bleeding and with scars from “claw marks”.
[…]
Asked if he was referring to journalism, Carlson responded: “No, in my bed at night. I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and mauled, physically mauled.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/01/tucker-carlson-demon-attack

…&…a succubus is…tucker to a T-is-for-testosterone in terms of staying on-brand

Unusual cases of succubus: A cultural phenomenon manifesting as part of psychopathology [National Library of Medicine]

…but…in terms of nightmares some guys might be sleeping on…I…rather like this one?

A late October national poll from USA Today/Suffolk University found that women resoundingly back Harris over Trump, 53% to 36%, a “mirror image” of men’s support for Trump over Harris, 53% to 37%. A September poll from Quinnipiac University similarly found a 26-point gender gap. An unknown – but certainly sizable – number of women are seeing this gender gap in their own relationships.
[…]
Harris needs women to turn out on Tuesday, especially those who might take a page from the TikTokers’ playbook and vote differently from the men in their lives. But those posts come from mostly young, liberal women who feel safe publicly disagreeing on candidates. In recent days, Democratic groups have made overtures to Republican women, or women who project conservatism to their friends and family but quietly harbor doubts about Trump.
[…]
“Women often give deference to the presumed expertise of their husbands on politics, and then the men reinforce that presumption and express their intensity and so-called greater expertise,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. “We try to reinforce to women that you have your own way of doing things, your own point of view, you focus on what’s good for the whole family. Then we emphasize that the vote is private.”

That’s a sentiment echoed in a new ad, narrated by Julia Roberts, from the progressive evangelical organization Vote Common Good. In the ad, a woman whose husband appears to be a Trump supporter enters the voting booth to cast her ballot for Harris. “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know,” Roberts says in the voiceover.
[…]
On a campaign stop in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Michelle Obama told swing state voters: “If you are a woman who lives in a household of men that don’t listen to you or value your opinion, just remember that your vote is a private matter.” Liz Cheney, a never-Trump Republican who campaigned alongside Harris in Detroit last week, reminded Republican women that there is no official way to look up how someone voted: “You can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody, and there will be millions of Republicans who do that on November 5.”

The Lincoln Project, a moderate political action committee, also released a bluntly titled ad, Secret, where two Trump-supporting men assume their wives also back their candidate. However, when the couples get to the polls, one of the women mouths “Kamala” to the other, and after an affirmative nod, both fill in their ballots for the Democrat.

…cue incoherent diatribes that struggle not to say “you don’t get to decide – I’m the man”

This messaging is stoking anger among conservative personalities, who say it is sexist and retrograde to assume women only vote for Trump to appease their husbands. They also, paradoxically, say this messaging is undermining traditional family values. Charlie Kirk, who last year said the “radical left” was being “run by childless young ladies” on antidepressants, called the ads “the embodiment of the downfall of the American family” on Megyn Kelly’s podcast.

…that charlie…is a right charlie…in several senses…imagine if you tried to put literally all women off men for life just based on your own exceptional example…not unique, mind…just…exceptional

The Fox News host Jesse Watters said that if he found out his wife had secretly voted for Harris, “that’s the same thing as having an affair … it violates the sanctity of our marriage”. This, despite the fact that Watters had an affair with his current wife while still married to his first wife.

…jesus fuckin’ wept

In the final stretch, these complex – and often secretive – relationship dynamics are affecting Democrats’ ground game, said Kelly Dittmar, director of research and scholar at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. “You see it in public women’s bathrooms or places where women can be directly appealed to without the barrier of the man in their life. There are stickers or signs that say, ‘Remember, your vote is private’,” she said.

Nancy Hirschmann, a political scientist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, added that canvassers for Harris were trained to avoid outing wives who may be registered Democrats to their Republican husbands: “If a man answers the door who’s clearly in favor of Trump, you don’t ask for the woman by name, you ask if there are other voters in the house you can speak to.”

…that’s some real superbowl sunday DV stats vibe you’re putting down, nancy

It is too early to tell if Republican-coded women may in fact turn out to be secret Harris voters. But back on TikTok, women vocally share their 2024 picks, even if they go against their partner’s choice – or an ex-partner’s choice.

Jamisen Casey, a 21-year-old student who goes to school in California but is registered to vote in her home state of Tennessee, took part in the trend, with a twist. “My absentee ballot on its way home to cancel out my ex boyfriend’s vote,” Casey wrote in the caption of a video showing her dancing with the envelope while We Both Reached for the Gun from the musical Chicago plays.

“It’s really hard to know that there are men out there who want to vote against reproductive rights, even though they shouldn’t have a say in it at all,” Casey, who voted for Harris, said. She doesn’t think she could date someone who doesn’t share her views again. “As a political science major, I made a decision that I don’t want to put myself in that position.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/01/women-canceling-out-men-votes-trump-harris

…bet ms casey “access[es] independent, reliable information”, too

…just sayin’