domain:savenshine.com
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15m ago
Still on Castles of Steel. It’s more tense than I expected, and for surprising reasons. Everyone going into the war expected Britannia to rule the waves. Everyone today knows that Britain did, in fact, keep control of the sea, and obviously went on to win the war. The tension comes from all the disasters along the way.
The child’s model of naval warfare starts with two piles of ships, which are dashed against each other until one side is out of hit points. Both British and German strategies were chosen according to sophisticated versions of such a model, which agreed that the British would dominate an open fight on account of having more ships. In theory, Germany would only accept lopsided fights against smaller elements of the British navy, relying on torpedoes and mines to level the playing field. The British, then, had a veto on any German naval operations so long as they could avoid throwing it away.
And by God, they tried their best. Poor training, executive meddling, insane deployment orders—the British continually courted disaster. They had a near-perfect intelligence advantage thanks to lucky recovery of German codes, but they repeatedly failed to actually use it. When they did manage to engage the enemy, their gunnery was generally unimpressive, and tactical errors kept them from dealing crippling damage. Meanwhile, Germany kept trying operations which should have been suicide. Everyone on both sides thought they’re trying heroic maneuvers and devious plans, and but they're really risking everything for minimal gain, often playing exactly into enemy hands. The net results were unbelievable quantities of metal, coal, and human lives sent up in flames.
So the book is tense. Everything has to end in stalemate or disaster, and the question is usually who made the fatal mistake this time. That doesn’t detract from the overall experience. I want to recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about the period. I also want to wave it in the face of anyone promoting an elaborate strategy for, well, anything. No plan survives contact with the enemy.
yofuckreddit
17m ago
This is the problem for me. I tried a fun little game recently with my OpenAI instance, in which I've still been careful about what I write. It still had a ton of personal information from our chat contexts and was able to do a decent job figuring out pressure points in my life.
If I can't have full opsec with a virtual therapist then it's as worthless to me as the judgemental lefty who will call the cops on me if I'm sad.
hydroacetylene
32m ago
IME homeless people give better advice more cheaply and less judgmentally than therapists.
hydroacetylene
34m ago
Uh, isn't the evidence that therapy- or at least forms of therapy- is genuinely helpful to people with actual mental health issues- or at least some subset thereof, eg PTSD- pretty ironclad?
quiet_NaN
35m ago
One thing to keep in mind is opsec.
Sometimes therapy sessions include pretty personal data.
With a regular meat-based therapist, all sorts of regulations are in place to limit how the data gathered in session can be used. Crucially, such data can sometimes not be compelled as evidence. The fact that the data is mostly in his head also makes automatic analysis more difficult.
Note that a medical professional can still call the cops on you for being a threat to yourself or others, which is likely out of the scope of current LLMs. Also note that certain faiths have a much stronger protection of data shared in confession than medical professionals both in law and professional ethics.
By contrast, assume that if you do not run your LLM locally, your conversations are stored permanently on a server without your control. From my understanding, the big AI companies do not try to facilitate anonymous payments and usage (e.g. suitable crypto-currencies and communication over TOR), as this would invite all kinds of abuse.
To keep your intimate conversations linked to your legal identity secure, at least the following would have to be true:
(a) The staff of the AI company does not read them.
(b) They don't train other AIs on them.
(c) They don't get hacked.
(d) They don't get a subpoena for e.g. 'all conversations mentioning cannibal ideation' by police.
Throwaway05
37m ago
Haha I am a physician but I am not Scott and disagree with him on a large amount of his medical opinions.
I think you make a very fair point about access, and I don't have a good counterargument but it is worth noting that people excessively overweight their ability to manage their own health (including health care professionals who have lots of training in knowing better).
I guess the best argument I have is that these days a lot of mental health problems are caused by socialization adjacent issues and solving that with an advanced form of the problem is unlikely to be an elegant solution.
Throwaway05
43m ago
Oh hey!
When you get a chance I would love to hear how things are going for you!
On to the matter at hand -
Please update my understanding of that particular suicide if it's incorrect, but what I'd heard is that the person was substituting human contact with the chatbot and his parents didn't catch the worsening social withdrawal because he was telling them he was talking to someone. My fear is not that chatbots will encourage people to do things, but that they won't catch and report warning signs, and serve as an inferior substitute for actual social contact. Not sure what the media presentation is since I'm relying on professional translation.
Moving beyond that however, I think you underweight the value of therapy. DBT and CBT have excellent quality evidence at this point. The reason for those two specifically is likely two fold - they are "simpler" to perform, and because they are more standardized they are easier to research.
Also, good psychodynamics is not Freudian nonsense, it's mostly CBT with different language and some extra underlying terminology that is very helpful for managing less severe pathology. Again I tell you to read Nancy McWilliams haha.
At its absolute worse therapy is stuff like forcing social interaction, forcing introspection and so on. Some people can function well off of a manual, and some people can study medicine on their own. But nearly everyone does better with a tutor, and that's what therapy is.
A tutor is also more likely to catch warning signs because of (at this time) superior human heuristic generation and the ability to perform a physical and mental status exam.
Oopz
51m ago
bumped out pretty quickly
Okay you caught me. I also had the same experience. I just added it to my list to make it look as varied as possible.
What do you think of my little list anyway?
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
53m ago
I've mentioned this before, but I follow a few Replika subs and FB groups. These things are already being used for therapy. And while some people seem happy with their chatbot companions, a day doesn't go by when someone doesn't post, seriously distraught, that their AI girlfriend or boyfriend "cheated" on them, or didn't remember some important detail of their life, or behaved hurtfully. Some people really, genuinely think they are sentient and feeling, and some people are going to be really fucked up by relying on a chatbot for advice and human companionship.
Oopz
53m ago
I will need chat GPT to decipher this comment but much appreciated. Is your startup a solution to my problem? If so please give more details.
stuckinbathroom
58m ago
Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drums. Curtains.
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
You're neglecting the other dynamic among high-participation GOP voters (the ones most likely to turn out for the primary, as well as to volunteer, donate, etc.) - that of the "former partisan who took his institutional role and oath of office seriously" once installed, i.e. discovered a strange new respect for the status quo once he actually faced the prospect of having to implement his prior policies on a disapproving department he now ran. The formerly rock-ribbed conservative jurist who suddenly is desperate to find any way to avoid actually implementing the positions he enunciated before being put on the bench. The bright firebrand Jim Hacker getting sabotaged by suave Sir Humphrey Appleby and immediately caving.
There was, and remains, a desperate hunger for conservatives who can credibly signal they will actually do the things they campaign on instead of just getting absorbed into the DC liberal borg.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1hr ago
And that Shirley exception post is [...] a rebuttal of an argument I've never seen.
I saw this this week, and I thought of you.
Rather than stay at the hospital to wait for infection to set in, Farmer went home to wait, monitoring her temperature and her pain. On Aug. 4, she called her state senator, Bill White, and explained her situation to an aide.
He told her, "That’s not what the law was designed for. It’s designed to protect the woman’s life."
"It’s not protecting me. We have to wait for the heartbeat (to stop). There’s no chance for a baby; she’s not going to make it. It’s putting my life in danger. We have to wait for more complications. I’m 41, it’s not something I can recover from quickly. I could lose my uterus, there’s a lot of things that could happen," Farmer said she remembers telling him. "We just want to move on, we just want to grieve."
The aide told her he would reach out to Attorney General Eric Schmitt, and also connected her with Choices Medical Services, "which is basically an anti-abortion clinic" in Joplin, Farmer said. She never heard back about what Schmitt said.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
Well, it's finally happened. The Steelers have a team that is winning. This may seem like a strange thing to say about a team that hasn't had a losing season in 20 years and has made the playoffs 3 seasons out of the last 5, but in a city where anything short of a Super Bowl appearance is considered a disappointment, saying you have a "winning team" mid-season doesn't mean so much that the wins outnumber the losses as it means that the team looks like they may actually contend for a championship. To understand how we got here, though, we need to recap Steelers History.
1933–1968: The Dark Ages
The team technically existed, but they were perennial losers. In their first 35 years of existence they had one playoff appearance that resulted in a 21–0 loss. Art Rooney would later achieve mythical status as the league's saint and one of the last surviving patriarchs from the early days, but for most of his time running the team he was seen as incompetent and cheap. "Same Old Steelers" was a common refrain, and Rooney had a habit of trading all his draft picks and prospects for washed up vets. Their level of success was comparable to that of the modern-day Browns. This was not a celebrated team.
1969–1971: Transition
Art Rooney cedes day-to-day operations of the team to his son, Dan, who immediately begins the only true rebuild in the team's history. Bill Austin is out at head coach and Chuck Noll is in. The rest of the team is slowly transitioned out in favor of new blood; the only pre-Noll players to have any serious roll in the team's future success were linebacker Andy Russell and center Ray Mansfield (Rocky Bleier was drafted in 1968 but didn't play much his rookie year and spent two years out of the league during which he was seriously injured in Vietnam, so I don't really count him as pre-Noll). 1970 saw the addition of Terry Bradshaw and Mel Blount. 1971 added Jack Ham, Dwight White, Ernie Holmes, and Mike Wagner. The team still sucked, but things were looking up.
1972–1979: The Steel Curtain Era
In 1972, the Steelers had their first winning season in a decade and made their first playoff appearance since 1947, where they slugged it out with the Raiders and lost the lead late. When it looked like all hope was lost, rookie Franco Harris missed his blocking assignment and ended up in perfect position to catch a deflected pass on a last-ditch play that had completely blown up, scoring a touchdown and handing the team their first playoff win ever. They would go on to win 4 Super Bowls in 6 years and cement themselves as the first dynasty of the modern NFL.
1980–1991: The Lost Years
Following a Super Bowl victory in January, hopes were high for the 1980 season. The team would end up finishing 9–7 and missing the playoffs for the first time since 1971. The following decade would see them win a couple division titles and even make a conference championship game, but the players from the dynasty era were beginning to retire, and they didn't do a great job of replacing them (the most notable blunder being passing on Dan Marino in 1983). Center Mike Webster, the last remaining player to win a Super Bowl with the team, would leave following the disastrous 1988 season. By this point the team was rudderless, and while they made the playoffs in 1989 due to a miraculous QB performance, it was from Bubby Brister. By 1991 the team seemed to have a good young core, but Noll knew he wasn't the man to lead them anymore.
1992–1996: Blitzburgh
Bill Cowher took over and immediately decided that offense didn't matter. Most defense-oriented coaches take a "ground and pound" approach but this usually assumes they have a good running back. The Steelers never had a true bell cow for most of that time but somehow managed to put up decent offensive numbers with Neil O'Donnell at QB, Yancey Thigpen as top WR, and RB by committee. The defense was consistently stifling. 1992 and 1993 were marked by routing playoff losses against good teams. In 1994 they should have gone to the Super Bowl but blew the AFC Championship game against an inferior Chargers team. In 1995 they would make the Super Bowl, but they were clearly outclassed by Dallas, O'Donnell's inexplicable interceptions notwithstanding. In 1996 they would change things up a bit by letting the Jets overpay O'Donnell and trading for Jerome Bettis (giving them a dynamite ground attack), but they'd end up getting blown out by New England during the mostly-forgotten Bledsoe era.
1997–2003: Kordell Stewart
Kordell Stewart was a second round pick in the 1995 draft whose athleticism allowed him to play as a QB/WR/RB/TE/KR/PR, giving him the nickname "Slash". Heading into 1997 without a quarterback, the decision was made to give Stewart the starting job. This was a bold move at the time, as it was before Michael Vick and Steve McNair legitimized the dual-threat quarterback. He led the team to the AFC Championship game his first season as starter, but he was mishandled by OCs who treated him like a pocket passer, and would be subject to repeated benching, booing, and rumors that he was gay. In 2001 he finally got an OC who knew what to do with him, and they returned to the playoffs and the AFC Championship, but a slow start in 2002 led to him being benched for the final time in favor of Tommy Maddox. Maddox was a feel-good comeback story of a guy who worked his way back into the league after playing arena football and being XFL MVP, and he led the team back to the playoffs, but the wheels came off in 2003, when they finished 6–10. They snatched up Ben Roethlisberger when he was unexpectedly available the following spring.
2004–2011: The Classic Ben Era
Ben was supposed spend a year learning from Tommy Maddox and Charlie Batch and ease into the lineup. Then Batch had surgery in August and was out for the season. Then, in the second game of the season, Maddox would blow out his elbow, forcing the rookie into the game. He'd lead the team to a 15–1 record and another AFC Championship game appearance that year, and win the Super Bowl the following season in what was supposed to be the Colts' year. They started 2006 with a hangover and finished the season 8–8, at which point Cowher bowed out. Mike Tomlin was then hired and took the team straight to the playoffs, then to another Super Bowl Championship. Following another disappointing hangoverish season, the team was back in the Super Bowl, though they lost this time. After losing in the first round of the playoffs to a Tebow-led Broncos team the following season, it was clear that an era had ended. Hines Ward, Troy Polomalu, Ryan Clark, and Ike Taylor were all past their prime, but a new crop of youngsters was on the way.
2012–2017: The Killer Bs
Ben, Brown, and Bell. This is the point where the team seemed to go off the rails. Steelers Football was traditionally smashmouth, 3 yards and a cloud of Bus, all-defense, and played by stand-up guys you could admire. Now it was high octane, left lane hammer down offense and questionable defense played by guys with huge egos and questionable character. They'd have a string of playoff appearances between 2014 and 2017, but it would result in few wins, and only one AFC Championship game appearance. It was largely considered a disappointment, but this is the last time the Steelers were supposed to be good. From here on out we'll take it year by year.
2018: Days of Our Steelers. Bell decides to hold out for the entire season to avoid playing on the franchise tag. The Steelers had made him a long-term offer, but he though the should be the highest paid running back in the league, and draw a double salary since he was also used quite a bit in the passing game. The holdout ended up wrecking his career. Toward the end of the season, Antonio Brown began exhibiting the bizarre behavior he's since become famous for when he was benched after getting into an argument with Ben. Meanwhile, the team had squandered a good start by blowing close games. Luckily, Ben showed veteran leadership by blaming everyone else on the team for poor play. They missed the playoffs due to a tiebreaker.
2019: Ben gets injured in Week 2 and everyone writes off the season. Mason Rudolph makes an admirable showing before he, too, is injured, and replaced by some guy named Duck Hodges who does good for a week before displaying why he was unemployed 2 weeks prior. Mason can't get it together and the season implodes.
2020: The Steelers get off to a hot start that absolutely nobody expects to last. They fade down the stretch and lose to Cleveland in embarrassing fashion in the first round of the playoffs.
2021: Ben decides he's too old to bend down and get under center and insists on playing out of shotgun while sitting on a stool in the backfield. the rest of the team is either too young to know what they're doing or too old to be able to do it anymore, and while they're able to get a few good wins and beat bad teams, they get smoked by anyone who's actually good. They sneak into the playoffs, but Mahomes and Company boat race them in the wild card round.
2022: The Steelers are rebuilding, but the Rooneys will never admit it. They pick up Mitch Trubisky to replace Ben in the short term and draft Kenny Pickett in the first round. After winning the first game in bizarre fashion, Trubisky is terrible and is benched in favor of Pickett, who performs better but not that much better. Still, bad Steeler football is better than most other teams when they're good, and they probably make the playoffs if Pickett isn't concussed and Trubisky doesn't throw numerous interceptions against the Tyler Huntley-led Ravens.
2023: Kenny Pickett is the starter going into the season. The entire year revolves around the Matt Canada controversy. Pickett and the offense play poorly overall but they still have a good record. The mantra is that if they had merely average quarterback production they'd be able to compete. Then Canada is fired, Pickett has a good game, and then is promptly injured. Trubisky plays horribly and is benched for Mason again, who plays well enough to convince some people that he's the solution and if only he'd been given a chance. Kenny Pickett recovers but they keep Mason in and he mopes about it. They make the playoffs and get smoked by the Bills, just as everyone expected they would.
That brings us to this year, when Justin Fields starts and gives us the average quarterback play that we've craved for so long. Some people think he earned the starting job and shouldn't be pulled whenever Russ is healthy. Then Russ comes in after six weeks and plays better than any quarterback since Ben. Mike Tomlin admits that the ability to make such bold moves is why he's highly compensated.
whenhaveiever
1hr ago
I'm not sure if this counts as modern, but have you seen Robert Duvall's The Apostle from 1997 focusing on Southern Pentecostal Christianity?
For all that the lead character is flawed, he is portrayed as actually believing what he claims to believe, and apparently a lot of the side characters are "played" by normal people Duvall met while traveling in the South researching the film.
The plot rhymes with Blues Brothers in a few places, except that the Christianity of the Blues Brothers is a joke played for laughs while the Christianity of The Apostle is played straight.
Shikoku in particular should also satisfy @jeroboam. I'd hazard a guess that it's probably the main Japanese island that sees least tourists. In terms of places to see, there's quite a bit; perhaps visiting a handful out of the 88 temples on the Shikoku pilgrimage route might appeal. There's also Dogo Onsen, the oldest operating onsen in Japan, and Kochi Castle, an actually non-tourist-trap Japanese castle - many of the extant structures were rebuilt last in the 1700s and it is considered one of the last twelve original castles in Japan with an intact main keep. Much more authentic than the ever-so-famous Osaka Castle, I'd say.
Bleep
2hr ago
who wouldn't have Trump's ability to make unforced errors
Desantis's entire campaign which burned through hundreds of millions of dollars was a train of unforced errors from horrible staff picks to position picks
basic interaction with Trump supporters should make clear they thought Desantis was a fraud like so many other Republicans, especially ones with neocon tendencies who claim their idol is George HW Bush
De Santis was not working to achieve these things prior to the rise of Trump in 2016. He fell in line behind Trump after Trump was already ascendant. If the Blues can successfully destroy Trump, I am not confident he will not simply tack back to the center. He is efficient and effective, but not reliable.
Blues have made destruction of Trump an overriding priority, and therefore a legible proxy for their control. Reds, it seems to me, correctly perceive defense against such destruction as a Schelling point to coordinate around. We believe that our own party has been grifting us for decades, and we are attempting to weed out the grifters, to align the party with our values in fact rather than only in appearance. Part of that is rejecting the sort of "compromises" that have been used for decades to sell those values out. A good way to avoid those compromises with our enemies is to force them to compromise with us instead. Trump is excellent at accomplishing this, and the "never Trump" movement has successfully removed a large proportion of these people from our party.
If Trump had lost the primary, the argument would be that "Trumpism" had clearly failed, and that it was time for "moderation" and "reconciliation" and for the Republican Party to "regain its sanity". In other words, total capitulation to the Blue consensus. We know this because this was the argument for why it was a mistake for the Republican party to support Trump in 2024. And if it had worked, the argument would have smoothly transitioned to "The republican party is still tainted by the shadow of Trump, and all his supporters/policy goals/constituency must be purged". And once this was accomplished, in another few years all the articles about how the current Republican candidate was actually Hitler would start back up, and Cthulhu would continue swimming left. We need our leadership to reject the authority of Blue Tribe in total. We need them to ignore and delegitimize the media and the knowledge production apparatus generally. We need them to break the bureaucracy. They can't do that if they're convinced that fighting is doomed and "compromise" with Blues is the only path forward.
Tanista
2hr ago
Where it gets complicated is that at least some of these things could theoretically be achieved by other Republicans like DeSantis who wouldn't have Trump's ability to make unforced errors (with an idiot-savant ability to tell how much his party is willing to tolerate).
And yet, Trump blew them all out in the primary.
Despite the rivers of ink spilled on the topic, we still don’t have a robust theory of what makes him appealing to voters.
He literally just ran a campaign wherein he successfully appealed to voters. Have you tried looking at his actual appeals to voters, and what voters say they found persuasive about them?
The single biggest failure of Western Democracies that sticks out like a sore thumb is their complete inability to control immigration.
What about the wars? What about cost disease? What about culture war? What about Institutional trust and social cohesion?
This all seems quite straightforward to me, and I'm at a loss where the confusion is coming from. Blue Tribe achieved a high degree of social and political dominance. They became The System. They then failed to deliver appreciable progress, and their failed efforts burned institutional trust and social cohesion. Because of that loss, the public is now rebelling against them en-masse.
I wanted to vote against the dominant foreign policy consensus, typified by endless, pointless foreign wars. Trump seems like the best candidate available to do that.
I wanted to vote against the dominant economic consensus, typified by offshoring and free trade, the service economy and the decline of industrialization. Trump seems like at least one of the best candidates possible to do that.
I wanted to vote against the dominant social consensus, and particularly against the repeated and coordinated attempts at forcing epistemic closure on the part of major political, media and corporate institutions. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against rule by an unelected, unresponsive and uncontrollable federal bureaucracy. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against crime and unaccountable political violence. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against entrenched corruption on the part of government officials. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against censorship and propaganda coordination between the government and major media corporations. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against the disastrous educational policies that have been shambling forward like a zombie for the last fifty years or so. Again, Trump.
None of this even seems to require "multicausal" explanations. I want to break the social and political dominance of Blue Tribe. All of these are just expressions of that dominance, and the insulation from consequence or accountability that has resulted from that dominance. And sure, there's a lot of Trump voters who probably wouldn't describe their view in the way I have above: they'd say something like "everything's gone to shit" or "I don't trust the democrats or the media" or something along those lines. Tomato, tomahto.
Arguably Trump himself doesn’t go far enough here. We didn’t even get a wall last time.
Trump had many failures last time. But given the record of how his last administration went, it's hard for me to grasp an argument that the problem was Trump, and not the entrenched elites working to foil and destroy him from the second the 2016 election ended. This goes well beyond immigration, into a whole variety of very serious illegalities and norm violations taken in an effort to end or at least stonewall his presidency and to protect his opponents.
A lot of people support Trump because they want to fight back against a system they perceive to be deeply pernicious and entirely insulated from accountability. They want that system removed, because its continued existence forecloses their ability to hope for a better future.
HaroldWilson
2hr ago
I'm pretty sure they've been saying the same things forever, especially Matt. I also find his analysis a little hard to take seriously because like almost everybody his analysis of why the Democrats lost seems suspiciously to align with the direction he would want to take the party in anyway. Isn't just a bit too easy that all of the ways he thinks the Democrats can start winning again involve them hewing more closely to his preferred policy positions and modes of governing? It's not much of a criticism since literally everybody does this on all flanks of the party (Freddie de Boer is especially egregious about this), but it does make it a little hollow.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2hr ago
I just can’t get excited for AI therapy because honestly, unless you have literally nobody in your life to talk through things with, there’s no value to therapy. I just don’t see people with long-standing issues get better because they had therapy. In fact, some people have therapy for multiple years without ever getting to the point of not needing therapy anymore.
I’m very much of the Stoic/CBT/Jordan Peterson school of therapy. Over focus on feelings and overthinking problems not only does not work, but quite often makes your original issues much worse. The key to getting better (barring something organically wrong with your brain — and that’s fairly rare) is to get out of your own head and get into taking productive actions to make your life better. Feeling bad about yourself is much better treated by becoming a better person than by sitting around trying to convince yourself that just because you haven’t ever done anything useful doesn’t mean that you’re useless. Get out there and start building, fixing or cleaning things. You’ll get over feeling worthless because you’ll know you did something useful.
doglatine
2hr ago
For what it’s worth I’ve been really impressed with Ezra Klein, Pod Save America, Matthew Yglesias, and others in the wake of the election. Lots of pretty brutal criticism of stupid things that the Democratic Party has been doing, and quite sophisticated analysis of voting patterns etc.. I get the feeling that a lot of these people wanted to speak up more loudly sooner, but it was only once progressives were properly on the back foot that they felt empowered to do so. I hope this is a general trend for the left going forward, and that they’re able to become a big-tent intellectual hothouse of a movement again.
I also expect there are big blind spots I'm missing like how to transfer "notes" from online sessions to an IRL therapist,
Have the Therapist-LLM write post-interview notes like a psychiatrist would. You could even come up with a code to signal a red-flag status to the IRL therapist in a way that would be invisible to the patient reading their own note. (e.g. it being written in italics or all-caps could mean that the red-flag detector was triggered during this session)
Trump isn't campaigning, conventionally. He's performing kingship. And people love their king.
When Trump visited the hurricane Helene devastation, he didn't say 'when I am elected my administration will release x gazillion dollars for flood relief'. No, his message was that he was already moving assets into place to help them. His strongest retainer was solving communications in the region and he had other vassals sending relief. Royals reassure their people.
Trump's pitch can be summed up as 'if only the tsar knew- put me on my rightful throne, because I'm the tsar who knows'. That's what the McDonald's shift was about, was empathizing with the commoners. He's got a claim on legitimacy from the 2020 stolen election that at the very least isn't any more spurious than descent from Amaterasu or Woden. And people know, intuitively on a pre-rational level, that the gods of the land are angry when the rightful king is usurped from his throne, and they know that the harvest will be poor and the weather bad and the kingdom's enemies stronger because of it. Joe Biden was not making a gaffe when he referred to the 'great MAGA king'.
Trump is a larger than life character playing a role in a storybook that's written in every human mind. There's the kingdom, torn asunder by turmoil(border chaos and inflation) and with foreign conflict(Gaza and Ukraine), ruled by usurpers(democrats) with the rightful prince(Trump), exiled and persecuted(felony convictions), supported by a handful of loyal barons(republican governors), and the viziers(Musk and RFK) who defect to him when it is clear that all is not well. And people listen to and believe in stories. Not economic analyses and statistics. If you want relentless popularity, treat math as a four letter word and imply a story.
More options
Context Copy link