…sometimes…you can side-eye the premise

In 2016, being a chaos candidate turned out to be a feature, not a bug, of American politics: Enough voters were tired of bland, establishment candidates and a system that didn’t improve their lives, and they put Mr. Trump over the top. The Trump team was so confident that these voters and the president were in sync that by the summer of 2020, one of his re-election campaign’s most oft-aired ads used those exact “bull in a china shop” words.

…I mean…sure…voters wanted to send a message…but mostly that message seemed to be “we don’t understand how any of this is supposed to work, either”

But if Mr. Trump ran before as the disrupter, don’t count on him doing so a third time in 2024. Voters don’t want chaos anymore. In my assessment of the dynamics of this election, what I see and hear is an electorate that seems to be craving stability in the economy, in their finances, at the border, in their schools and in the world. They want order, and they are open to people on the left and the right who are more likely to provide that, as we saw with the rejection of several chaos candidates in 2022, even as steady-as-she-goes incumbents sailed to re-election.

…none of which…even if it’s accurate…instills any particular belief in me that those people have a better understanding where the “how this shit works” bit is concerned

And though Mr. Trump may seem a poor fit for such a moment, with his endless drama and ugly remarks, much of his candidacy and message so far is aimed at arguing that he can restore a prepandemic order and a sense of security in an unstable world. And unlike 2020, there’s no guarantee most voters will see President Biden as the safer bet between the two men to bring order back to America — in no small part because Mr. Biden was elected to do so and hasn’t delivered.

…I mean…you need to pretty much explicitly reject damn near every aspect of reality in order to so much as take that proposition seriously…& somehow it still seems like saying things like “voting for that asshole is literally voting for putting the interests of oligarchs, plutocrats & despots over not only your own but the national interests of the united states” or “he only cares about leeching tax money out of the thing while staying out of jail & the people urging him on are actual nazis & useful idiots” must surely be an irresponsible exaggeration…it not being an actual police state or other dystopian riff the like of which is all too easily pointed at elsewhere in the world…& yet

After Mr. Biden’s election, the riots of Jan. 6, 2021, cemented Mr. Trump as an agent of chaos — a routine that had run its course with voters. By mid-January, Mr. Trump’s favorability had fallen to its lowest point since he was elected president in Gallup polling. Americans wanted pandemonium no more.

…I don’t know about you…but…I remember watching with increasing amounts of disbelief as…in the days (hell, weeks) running up to that mess…the fact that it was going to get messy seemed abundantly clear…like…the way that asshole in the gas mask with the hammer who tried to use a literal interpretation of the broken windows theory to escalate that george floyd protest into a riot that could be violently suppressed was clear as day if you didn’t screw your eyes closed, stick your fingers in your ears & scream “la, la, la – I can’t hear you” like a toddler…so…I dunno…if you ask me the ones that wanted pandemonium then didn’t stop wanting it…they just got high on their own supply & then had a comedown…because even they couldn’t believe the man didn’t bust down their door & drag their ass off to jail after the shit they pulled…they might all like to think they’re jack bauer…but somewhere deep down they know if jack bauer was real he’d fuck their shit up but good…so we all get to wade through “semantics”…or…more accurately…sophistry

Unfortunately for Mr. Biden — and for America — stability and unity did not arrive in the wake of his election. Our chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in late summer of 2021 raised serious questions for many Americans about the competence of our country’s leadership. (I don’t think it is a coincidence that Aug. 15, 2021, was the last day Mr. Biden’s job approval sat at or above 50 percent and was the day that the Taliban took control in Kabul.) And if American voters were forgiving about supply chain issues and shortages early in the Covid-19 pandemic, their patience had waned by 2022, when shelves across America looked suddenly bare in the wake of further disruptions like the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. Gas prices spiked, perceptions of crime as a problem jumped, and people’s sense of order and personal safety dropped.

…ok…being charitable…I guess you could argue that it’s representative of a lot of readers that they frame things that way…but…having led off talking about mango unchained as a fucking chaos agent…not even acknowledging in passing that the whole “chaotic withdrawal” of it all was foisted on everybody by jowls’r’us & his cataclysmic clown car caucus as part of a broad spectrum attempt to set enough shit on fire to be able to sell the idea that things weren’t shit as a direct result of their efforts to…turn things to shit…let’s just say it breaks my suspension of disbelief when it comes to the premise of your piece…because I don’t really see the difference in the means, methods or targets of his campaigning this time around…it all still relies on inoculating enough of the voters in the specific places he needs thumbs on scales against reality by maintaining (& as required upping) the dosage in terms of the window-dressing narrative required to keep them in dopamine & talking points that let them shut down conversation to their satisfaction & leave them feeling smug instead of played like a down home fiddle…or is that just my echo chamber talking?

Americans had voted to put the adults back in charge and began to wonder if the control room was simply empty.

…ladies & gentlemen…I feel I owe you all a sort of compound apology…you see…I am morbidly fascinated by the abuse of language & meaning involved in the ways we keep up a state of affairs where “the conversation” is several removes from the underlying reality…& how that has people arguing that black is in fact the most becoming shade of white on a regular basis…to wild applause, no less…but…it’s an insult to your intelligence…quite possibly in many of the ways a pipe upside the head is an insult to your grey matter…& I basically spend most of these racking up flights of shots of that sort of thing…with a couple more of the same as chasers…&…I mostly assume it goes without saying…but I’m feeling particularly insulted this morning…so I’m going to just say it to be clear…I don’t think any of you are that stupid…or have that much trouble remembering things that happened not even that long ago when you stop to think about it…so I don’t feel like I need to spell it out at this kind of length every time…not least since I’m busily demonstrating how that’s kinda tedious…but…the last thing I’m implying is that your intelligence is ripe for insults…when your eyes roll & you do that thing that’s sort of like if a snort were a sigh…if we call that a laugh…I’m laughing with you rather than at you…& hoping the same might be said in reverse…well…most days…kinda falling at the “laugh” fence today, though…which is an issue if my other option is to just start crying

Even today, inflation and the high cost of living remain acute concerns facing American voters and are why Democrats have lost their trust on issues like the economy. Whereas Democrats during the Trump presidency held a double-digit advantage on the question of whom Americans trusted more to handle immigration, that, too, has been lost as the situation worsens and images of thousands of migrants at the southern border continue to pile up. And it isn’t just the Republican Party; Mr. Trump holds sizable advantages over Mr. Biden on whom voters trust more to handle these key issues. Even on the question of who is best to improve the tone of politics in America, Mr. Biden’s lead over Mr. Trump was a mere six points.

…I mean…I get it…as has been mentioned in the last few days…particularly by @bryanlsplinter & @bluedogcollar…there’s the lies, damn lies & statistics of the whole polling business…but…”the question of who is best to improve the tone of politics in America”…really? …we’re swallowing that that’s a fucking question? …have we foregone enough conclusions at that point to ring the forsaken bell?

Whatever advantage Mr. Biden held over Mr. Trump on the issue of who would be more likely to bring about order, stability and calm, it has surely been erased at this point. Indeed, many voters have begun to look back longingly at the Trump era. While, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, voters said by a 30-point margin that Mr. Biden’s policies have hurt them personally more than helped, by a 12-point margin, the same voters were more likely to say that Mr. Trump’s policies helped them.

Today Americans are exhausted. Two-thirds of them told the Pew Research Center that’s how they feel — outpacing emotions like “angry” and certainly “hopeful.” Asked to describe politics today in their own words, “messy” and “chaos” sat alongside “divisive” and “corrupt” atop the list of replies. I believe this is a key explanation for why candidates like Herschel Walker and Kari Lake, who seemed like wild cards, fared so poorly in the 2022 midterms, especially relative to other, more conventional or staid politicians, often in the same states.

…fuck it…maybe there’s even some truth to the part where the federalist fabulists actually are trying to flip the script to suggest that biden is the vote for scary chaos & marge-et-lard-o is the calm waters of safe harbor in the eye of their storm…& maybe there’s a way to read this damn piece that doesn’t scream of irresponsible levels of enabling of hyperbolic hypocrisy…but…I’m not seeing it, tbh…which is a problem…hopefully just a minor one for you…that can be cured by a twirl of a scroll-wheel or a flick of a finger…but…I had at least another fifteen or more things I frankly expected to get to before I got through the bit with the tunes & made a concerted effort to back away from the keyboard & get to doing something constructive with my day…& I can’t get past this one article now I’m thinking about it again

The 2024 election will not be fought along the conventional axis of left and right or even change and more of the same. Voters very much want change; they have made that clear with the absolutely abominable ratings they give our leadership in poll after poll. But instead of clamoring for someone to blow everything up, they are crying out for someone to put things back in order. Voters wanted this from Mr. Biden and clearly feel he didn’t deliver, which is why Mr. Trump currently leads by notable margins across most of the key swing states.

If this election is between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump and is fought on chaos versus stability, even with all of the drama constantly swirling around the former president, don’t assume most voters will consider a second Trump term to be the riskier bet.

How Trump Is Running Differently This Time [NYT]

…a “belle image” it fucking ain’t…& that’s before you so much as get to the unsightly spectacle I’m making of myself along the way…so…fuck it…let’s talk about how…if you want to play let’s pretend…maybe we could pretend we get to hear what…say…simone de beauvoir might have made of the misbegotten misogynist maga man-o-sphere & its joe rogans & steve bannons & alex joneses & elon musks stinking up the joint

It is impossible to know where Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking would have gone had she been spared the cold, the hunger and the fear of living in Nazi occupied Paris. What we do know is that in coming face to face with forces of injustice beyond her control, the questions of evil and the other took on new urgency. Beauvoir speaks of the war as creating an existential rupture in time. She speaks of herself as having undergone a conversion. She can no longer afford the luxury of focusing on her own happiness and pleasure. The question of evil becomes a pressing concern. One cannot refuse to take a stand. One is either a collaborator or not. In writing The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir takes her stand. She identifies herself as an existentialist and identifies existentialism as the philosophy of our (her) times because it is the only philosophy that takes the question of evil seriously. It is the only philosophy prepared to counter Dostoevsky’s claim that without God everything is permissible. That we are alone in the world and that we exist without guarantees, are not, however, the only truths of the human condition. There is also the truth of our freedom and this truth, as detailed in The Ethics of Ambiguity, entails a logic of reciprocity and responsibility that contests the terrors of a world ruled only by the authority of power.

The Ethics of Ambiguity, published in 1947, reconsiders the idea of invulnerable freedom advanced in Pyrrhus and Cinéas. Dropping the distinction between the inner and outer domains of freedom and deploying a unique understanding of consciousness as an intentional activity, Beauvoir now argues that I can be alienated from my freedom. Similar to She Came To Stay, which bears the imprint of Hegel’s account of the fight to the death that sets the stage for the master-slave dialectic, and Pyrrhus and Cinéas, which works through the Cartesian implications of our existential situation, The Ethics of Ambiguity redeploys concepts of canonical philosophical figures. Here Beauvoir takes up the phenomenologies of Husserl and Hegel to provide an analysis of intersubjectivity that accepts the singularity of the existing individual without allowing that singularity to justify an epistemological solipsism, an existential isolationism or an ethical egoism. The Hegel drawn on here is the Hegel who resolves the inequalities of the master-slave relationship through the justice of mutual recognition. The Husserl appealed to is the Husserl who introduced Beauvoir to the thesis of intentionality.

…it’s like brunhilde pomsel said…& she should fucking know

Those people nowadays who say they would have stood up against the Nazis – I believe they are sincere in meaning that, but believe me, most of them wouldn’t have.

…sorry…didn’t mean to interrupt

The Ethics of Ambiguity opens with an account of intentionality which designates the meaning-disclosing and meaning-desiring activities of consciousness as both insistent and ambiguous—insistent in that they are spontaneous and unstoppable; ambiguous in that they preclude any possibility of self-unification or closure. Beauvoir describes the intentionality of consciousness as operating in two ways. First, there is the activity of wanting to disclose the meaning of being. Second, there is the activity of bringing meaning to the world. In the first mode of activity consciousness expresses its freedom to discover meaning. In the second, it uses its freedom to articulate meaning and give meaning to the world. Beauvoir identifies each of these intentionalities with a mood: the first with the mood of joy, the second with the dual moods of hope and domination. Whether the second moment of intentionality becomes the ground of projects of liberation or exploitation depends on whether the mood of hope or domination prevails.

Describing consciousness as ambiguous, Beauvoir identifies our ambiguity with the idea of failure. We can never fulfill our passion for meaning in either of its intentional expressions; that is, we will never succeed in fully revealing the meaning of the world, and never become God, the author of the meaning of the world. These truths of intentionality set the criteria of Beauvoir’s ethics. Finding that ethical systems and absolutes, insofar as they claim to give final answers to our ethical dilemmas and authoritarian justifications for our actions, offer dangerous consolations for our failure to be the absolute source of the world’s meaning or being, Beauvoir rejects these systems of absolutes in favor of ethical projects that acknowledge our limits and recognize the future as open. From this perspective, her ethics of ambiguity might be characterized as an ethics of existential hope.

Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity is a secularism that rejects the ideas of God and Humanity. Their apparent differences conceal a common core: both claim to have identified an absolute source and justification for our beliefs and actions. They allow us to evade responsibility for creating the conditions of our existence and to flee the anxieties of ambiguity. Whether it is called the age of the Messiah or the classless society, these appeals to a utopian destiny encourage us to think in terms of ends which justify means. They invite us to sacrifice the present for the future. They are the stuff of inquisitions, imperialisms, gulags and Auschwitz. Privileging the future over the present they pervert our relationship to time, each other and ourselves. Insisting that the future is undecided and that its form will be shaped by our present decisions, Beauvoir argues that it is only by insisting on the dignity of today’s human beings that the dignity of those to come can be secured.

Beauvoir rejects the familiar charge against secularism made famous by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: “If God is dead everything is permitted”. As she sees it, without God to pardon us for our “sins” we are totally and inexcusably responsible for our actions. Dostoevsky was mistaken. The problem of secularism is not that of license, it is the problem of the “we”. Can separate individuals be bound to each other? Can they forge laws binding for all? The Ethics of Ambiguity insists that they can. It does this by arguing that evil resides in the denial of freedom (mine and others), that we are responsible for ensuring the existence of the conditions of freedom (the material conditions of a minimal standard of living and the political conditions of uncensored discourse and association), and that I can neither affirm nor live my freedom without also affirming the freedom of others.

…ok…so…horses for courses & all…there’s a chance I’m just making it worse…but…from my perspective this isn’t falling down the rabbit hole in a doom-spiral feedback loop…this is the kind of mental scaffolding I find helps me clamber back out of the well without lassie fetching help…so…if you’ll indulge me…or at least not prevent me…I’ll try to get at least my head above ground before I call it quits for today

Beauvoir’s argument for ethical freedom begins by noting a fundamental fact of the human condition. We begin our lives as children who are dependent on others and embedded in a world already endowed with meaning. We are born into the condition that Beauvoir calls the “serious world”. This is a world of ready made values and established authorities. This is a world where obedience is demanded. For children, this world is not alienating for they are too young to assume the responsibilities of freedom. As children who create imaginary worlds, we are in effect learning the lessons of freedom—that we are creators of the meaning and value of the world. Free to play, children develop their creative capacities and their ability to confer meaning to the world without, however, being held accountable for the worlds they bring into being. Considering these two dimensions of children’s lives, their imaginative freedom and their freedom from responsibility, Beauvoir determines that the child lives a metaphysically privileged existence. Children, she says, experience the joys but not the anxieties of freedom. Beauvoir also, however, describes children as mystified. By this she means that they believe that the foundations of the world are secure and that their place in the world is naturally given and unchangeable. Beauvoir marks adolescence as the end of this idyllic era. It is the time of moral decision. Emerging into the world of adults, we are now called upon to renounce the serious world, to reject the mystification of childhood, and to take responsibility for our choices.

All of us pass through the age of adolescence; not all of us take up its ethical demands. The fact of our initial dependency and obedience to the serious world has moral implications because it predisposes us to the temptations of bad faith, strategies by which we deny our existential freedom and our moral responsibility. It sets our desire in the direction of a nostalgia for those lost Halcyon days. Looking to return to the security of that metaphysically privileged time, some of us evade the responsibilities of freedom by choosing to remain children, that is, we submit to the authority of others and live in the serious world.

…the serious world…it’s a place with serious problems…& serious threats…& seriously short on time where addressing some of those goes…&…it is not a great fit for seriously un-serious people…kind of by definition one might argue…

Beauvoir portrays the complexity of the ways that we either avoid or accept the responsibilities of freedom through the figures of the sub-man, the serious man, the nihilist, the adventurer, the passionate man, the critical thinker and the artist-writer. These figures are imaginary, but also historical in the sense that they are lived, and so, disclosed in the actions of human beings. The point of delineating these human types is several fold. It is a way of distinguishing between two kinds of unethical positions. One position, portrayed in the portraits of the sub-man and the serious man, is to refuse to recognize the experience of freedom. The other position, depicted in the pictures of the nihilist, the adventurer and the maniacally passionate man, is to misread the meanings of freedom. The ethical person, as portrayed by Beauvoir, is driven by passion. Unlike the egoistic, maniacal passion of the tyrant, however, the ethical passion of the artist-writer is defined by its generosity—specifically the generosity of recognizing the other’s singularity and protecting the other in their difference from becoming an object of another’s will.

In describing the different ways that freedom is evaded or misused, Beauvoir distinguishes ontological from ethical freedom. She shows us that acknowledging our freedom is a necessary but not sufficient condition for ethical action. To meet the conditions of the ethical, freedom must be used properly. It must, according to Beauvoir, embrace the ties that bind me to others and take up the appeal—an act whereby I call on others, in their freedom, to join me in bringing certain values, projects, and conditions into being. Artists and writers embody the ethical ideal in several respects. Their work expresses the subjective passion that grounds the ethical life. They describe the ways that the material and political complexities of our situations can either alienate us from our freedom or open us to it. By envisioning the future as open and contingent, artists and writers challenge the mystifications that validate sacrificing the present for the future. They establish the essential relationship between my freedom and the freedom of others.

The Ethics of Ambiguity does not avoid the question of violence. Determining that violence is sometimes necessary, Beauvoir uses the example of a young Nazi soldier to argue that to liberate the oppressed we may have to destroy their oppressors. However, she distances herself from the argument of Pyrrhus and Cinéas; now she identifies violence as an assault on the other’s freedom (however misused) and as such this violence marks our failure to respect the “we” of our humanity. Thus, The Ethics of Ambiguity provides an analysis of our existential-ethical situation that joins a hard-headed realism (violence is an unavoidable fact of our condition) with demanding requirements. It is unique, however, in aligning this realism and these requirements with the passion of generosity and a mood of joy.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/

…anyway…it’s that time again…already…&…predictably enough…this ain’t ready…so…let’s just say I’m pretty sure simone would have had some choice & not at all ambiguous words for some people around about now…& that you might very well be better off reading the ones she had back when over the thin gruel in the usual daily digest the headlines will afford…either way…I’m sorry…& I get why you probably feel like shooting the messenger