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erronis

erronis's Journal
erronis's Journal
November 4, 2024

What if Trump's campaign is cover for a slow-motion coup? Jan-Werner Mller - The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/04/trump-campaign-election-coup-cover-up
Even if Trump can’t really mobilize large numbers of people to the streets, just prolonging a sense of chaos might be enough

This is a very well-written and scary article.

Whatever happens next, one day historians will have to explain why a candidate who earlier this year had been presented as disciplined started to veer off into unrestrained racist rhetoric and dancing for 40 minutes to his own playlist. Was it age, as plenty of commentators have speculated? Was it a brilliant attempt to balance dehumanizing attacks on minorities with an effort to make himself look human?

A much more sinister explanation must be taken seriously. We still assume that we are witnessing two campaigns for the presidency. But what if we are witnessing one campaign and one slow-motion coup, whose organizers need to go through the motion of campaigning for the plan to work? Since winning at the ballot box does not matter, taking a break to listen to Pavarotti isn’t a problem; conversely, a festival of racism and conspiracy theories, as at Madison Square Garden, is not about convincing any undecided voter, but motivating committed Trumpists to go along with another coup attempt.

To be sure, this can also sound like conspiracy theory. The point is not prediction, but to call for preparedness. After all, there is an overwhelming number of reasons why, should Trump lose, he will once more try to take power anyway. His followers have long been primed to assume that evil Democrats will steal the election. The unchecked racism fits into a logic of far-right populism more generally: far-right populists claim that they, and they alone, represent what they call “the silent majority” or “the real people” (the very expression Trump used on January 6 to address his supporters).


November 4, 2024

Silent Epidemic: Loneliness a Serious Threat to Both Brain and Body

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/silent-epidemic-loneliness-serious-threat-both-brain-and-2024a1000k2y
(This is behind a registration/login page. I recommend Medscape for those that want a good overview of current health issues.)

In a world that is more connected than ever, a silent epidemic is taking its toll. Overall, 1 in 3 US adults report chronic loneliness — a condition so detrimental that it rivals smoking and obesity with respect to its negative effect on health and well-being. From anxiety and depression to life-threatening conditions like cardiovascular disease, stroke, and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, loneliness is more than an emotion — it’s a serious threat to both the brain and body.

In 2023, a US Surgeon General advisory raised the alarm about the national problem of loneliness and isolation, describing it as an epidemic.

“Given the significant health consequences of loneliness and isolation, we must prioritize building social connection in the same way we have prioritized other critical public health issues such as tobacco, obesity, and substance use disorders. Together, we can build a country that’s healthier, more resilient, less lonely, and more connected,” the report concluded.

But how, exactly, does chronic loneliness affect the physiology and function of the brain? What does the latest research reveal about the link between loneliness and neurologic and psychiatric illness, and what can clinicians do to address the issue?

Medscape Medical News spoke to multiple experts in the field to explore these issues.

Interviews with the specialists follow.

Also recommended:
Loneliness: Time for Medicine to Address This Risk Factor
November 4, 2024

The Loser Triad (video and text) Three Signs that Trump Has Lost -- Timothy Snyder

https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-loser-triad-video-and-text
(Click link to listen to audio.)

(Trying to fulfill my promise of translating all of my text posts into audio or video. This seemed like an important one to do before the election. Please think about it and share it. And vote!)

We have seen this show before. We know what Trump losing looks like.

Three Trumpian actions are predictable. We know them from the last election.

Last time around, when Trump lost, when Trump knew that he lost, he:

1. Claimed that he won (November)

2. Filed lawsuits (November-December)

3. Encouraged violence (January)


He did these three things because he lost. They comprise the loser triad.

Judging from past behavior, though, a repetition of the loser triad would signal that Trump believes that he has lost.

In 2024, though, the sequence will be different.

Allies of Trump have already filed dozens of lawsuits. Pro-Trump violence is likely to begin around election day rather than in January.

But the timing of Trump's claiming victory will likely be the same, shortly after the election but before the outcome has been confirmed.

To be clear, anything can happen. Either candidate can win. That is why we vote and count the votes. And that is exactly why we should not engage in behaviors like the loser triad. The loser triad indicates that a loser is trying to break the system.

This time around, the three actions will likely come in the following sequence.

Trump, in the 2024 loser triad:

1. Files lawsuits (already happening, even before the election!)

2. Encourages violence (around election day, most likely)

3. Claims that he won (shortly after election day).

If Trump again claims too early that he won, this is not just a statement like any other. It is part of a plan to take power by a candidate who believes that he has lost an election -- a repeat of a behavior that we know very well.

If Trump claims victory, that is a good sign that Harris has won the election.

Thanks for reading Thinking about... Please share this post.

November 1, 2024

Rallies at Madison Square Garden -- Quotations from October 27th, 2024, and February 20th, 1939 -- Timothy Snyder

https://snyder.substack.com/p/rallies-at-madison-square-garden
(Posting text in entirety based on Dr. Snyder's request to share.)

The following are quotations from Donald Trump’s closing campaign rally last week and the Nazi rally of the American German Bund in 1939.

Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country

To attempt to thwart the will of nature by indiscriminately mixing the races of the world to produce some artificial standard human race is madness

'You know what? Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive.' As the first Samoan, Malaysian, low IQ, former California prosecutor ever to be elected president, it was just a groundswell of popular support and anyone who thinks otherwise is just a freak or a criminal.

There never has been and there can be no 'international' or 'interracial' culture

We carved watermelons together

Everyone knows she is a very low IQ individual

The Democrat party has forgotten about Americans. Rather than cater to Americans, they decided: 'You know what? It would just be easier to replace them with people who will be reliable voters'

I will stop the invasion of criminals coming into our country

They’re eating the pets up there

The United States is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer

And these Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.

The Gentile American worker is being sold down the river by international Jewish interests

But the fucking illegals, they get whatever they want, don’t they?

Jews have a hard time throwing that paper.

The Jew is most concerned with maintaining his stranglehold on the financial systems

They are indeed the enemy from within, but this is who we’re fighting.

They are now full-on to Marxism and socialism.

The menace of anti-national, God-hating Jewish-Bolshevism is deliberately minimized

Radical left Marxist rated even worse than crazy Bernie Sanders

The most sinister and corrupt forces on Earth

There’s only one person alive today that can fix all of it

If you like, see if you can tell which is which.

Once you have sorted it out, see if that makes anything better.

Donald Trump is working within a tradition, and he knows it.

Please share this post.

November 1, 2024

The Strongman Fantasy (text and audio) - And Dictatorship in Real Life -- Timothy Snyder

https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-strongman-fantasy-text-and-audio
(Click through for audio player.)

I wrote this in March, with the text as below, and am posting this recording now, in the hopes that it can be useful. Please share it. TS 1/11/2024

Quite a few Americans like the idea of strongman rule. Why not a dictator who will get things done?

I lived in eastern Europe when memories of communism were fresh. I have visited regions in Ukraine where Russia imposed its occupation regime. I have spent decades reading testimonies of people who lived under Nazi or Stalinist rule. I have seen death pits, some old, some freshly dug. And I have friends who have lived under authoritarian regimes, including political prisoners and survivors of torture. Some of the people I trusted most have been assassinated.

So I think that there is an answer to this question.

Strongman rule is a fantasy. Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman. He won't. In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance. The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing. We get abused and we get used to it.

Another pleasant illusion is that the strongman will unite the nation. But an aspiring dictator will always claim that some belong and others don't. He will define one group after another as the enemy. This might feel good, so long as you feel that you are on the right side of the line. But now fear is the essence of life. The politics of us-and-them, once begun, never ends.

We dream that a strongman will let us focus on America. But dictatorship opens our country to the worst the world has to offer. An American strongman will measure himself by the wealth and power of other dictators. He will befriend them and compete with them. From them he will learn new ways to oppress and to exploit his own people.

At least, the fantasy goes, the strongman will get things done. But dictatorial power today is not about achieving anything positive. It is about preventing anyone else from achieving anything. The strongman is really the weak man: his secret is that he makes everyone else weaker.

Unaccountable to the law and to voters, the dictator has no reason to consider anything beyond his own personal interests. In the twenty-first century, those are simple: dying in bed as a billionaire. To enrich himself and to stay out of prison, the strongman dismantles the justice system and replaces civil servants with loyalists.

The new bureaucrats will have no sense of accountability. Basic government functions will break down. Citizens who want access will learn to pay bribes. Bureaucrats in office thanks to patronage will be corrupt, and citizens will be desperate. Quickly the corruption becomes normal, even unquestioned.

As the fantasy of strongman rule fades into everyday dictatorship, people realize that they need things like water or schools or Social Security checks. Insofar as such goods are available under a dictatorship, they come with a moral as well as a financial price. When you go to a government office, you will be expected to declare your personal loyalty to the strongman.

If you have a complaint about these practices, too bad. Americans are litigious people, and many of us assume that we can go to the police or sue. But when you vote a strong man in, you vote out the rule of law. In court, only loyalism and wealth will matter. Americans who do not fear the police will learn to do so. Those who wear the uniform must either resign or become the enforcers of the whims of one man.
man walking upstairs

Everybody (except the dictator and his family and friends) gets poorer. The market system depends upon competition. Under a strongman, there will be no such thing. The strongman's clan will be favored by government. Our wealth inequality, bad enough already, will get worse. Anyone hoping for prosperity will have to seek the patronage of the official oligarchs. Running a small business will become impossible. As soon as you achieve any sort of success, someone who wants your business denounces you.

In the fantasy of the strongman, politics vanishes and all is clear and bright. In fact, a dreary politics penetrates everything. You can't run a business without the threat of denunciation. You can't get basic services without humiliation. You feel bad about yourself. You think about what you say, since it can be used against you later. What you do on the internet is recorded forever, and can land you in prison.

Public space closes down around you. You cannot escape to the bar or the bowling alley, since everything you say is monitored. The person on the next stool or in the next lane might not turn you in, but you have to assume they will. If you have a t-shirt or a bumper sticker with a message, someone will report you. Even if you just repeat the dictator's words, someone can lie about you and denounce you. And then, if you voted for the strongman, you will be confused. But you should not be. This is what you voted for.

...

Once this process begins, it is hard to stop. At the present stage of the strongman fantasy, people imagine an exciting experiment. If they don't like strongman rule, they think, they can just elect someone else the next time. This misses the point. If you help a strongman come to power, you are eliminating democracy. You burn that bridge behind you. The strongman fantasy dissolves, and real dictatorship remains.

Most likely you won’t be killed or be required to kill. But amid the dreariness of life under dictatorship is dark responsibility for others’ death. By the time the killing starts, you will know that it is not about unity, or the nation, or getting things done. The best Americans, betrayed by you when you cast your vote, will be murdered at the whim and for the wealth of a dictator. Your tragedy will be living long enough to understand this.
November 1, 2024

On Tyranny right now (audio) - The lessons of the moment -- Timothy Snyder

https://snyder.substack.com/p/on-tyranny-right-now-audio
(Click through to hear the audio.)

Given where we are just now, there have been quite a few questions about my book On Tyranny, and in particular about the first lesson, which is “Do Not Obey in Advance.” The violations of that lesson of the twentieth century have been so flagrant that they are, at least, serving as an education in how not to behave. In this setting I thought I would review some of the lessons in a little talk (half an hour or so) for subscribers, taking into account events of the past few weeks. Please share this lecture with anyone who will find it interesting or who needs to hear it!
October 31, 2024

Trump's Lawless Crash (video) - Tim Snyder

https://snyder.substack.com/p/trumps-lawless-crash-video

Transcript:
we've got a problem there too, because if you're in a very loose regime where favorites are played, where people have inside information, where the president and the vice president's friends have all kinds of advantages, then the stock market itself starts to lose credibility. A few people make a lot of money. Everybody else loses money.
But then after a while, the stock market itself crashes because it's no longer reliable. People no longer believe that in general it's being played fairly. And investors take their money elsewhere, which they can do. So whether we're talking about your benefits, whether we're talking about business, whether we're talking about banks, whether we're talking about the stock market,
the The Vance Trump platform of getting rid of the rule of law and replacing it by personal rule is going to be very bad for the economy. I think this is a connection which is worth making and that we ought to be making. Of course, personal rule is bad in itself,
but one thing which I think we're not paying enough attention to is how it's inconsistent with American prosperity and how it will bring about I think almost certainly, pretty much predictably, a series of economic crises which will leave us all much worse off than we were before. All of us except the few buddies, right?
All of us except the few billionaires. All of us except the few oligarchs who happen to be close to Trump for some personal reason. But I think for pretty much everybody else in this American economy, for these reasons, replacing the rule of law, getting rid of the rules of the game, is going to be worse.
Much, much worse. Thanks for paying attention. This is Tim Snyder. I'm a historian. It's the 24th of October, 2024. I'm in Chicago.


October 31, 2024

Digby: Not Going Back

https://digbysblog.net/2024/10/31/not-going-back/

Don't usually post with just xitter contents, but these are worth a watch.


October 31, 2024

Buzz Aldrin Picks Trump: A Presidential Endorsement With Gravity --- Not The Onion!

https://scitechdaily.com/buzz-aldrin-picks-trump-a-presidential-endorsement-with-gravity/

Hard to believe this is real. I suspect overwhelming lapdog love of someone like Musk may have affected this old man's mind.

Brigadier General Buzz Aldrin, one of the most celebrated astronauts in history and a seminal figure in the U.S. space program, endorses Donald J. Trump for President of the United States.

Aldrin, who made history alongside Neil Armstrong in 1969 as one of the first two people to walk on the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission, has continued to influence the field of space exploration well into his post-NASA career. His contributions to space travel include piloting the Gemini 12 spacecraft and playing a key role in developing astronaut training and spacecraft docking techniques.

A passionate advocate for space science and exploration, Aldrin believes in pushing the boundaries of human achievement and supports leadership that aligns with these values. He provides the following statement:
....
October 31, 2024

Meet the founder of a 100,000-strong Facebook group driving change in scientific integrity in Vietnam

https://retractionwatch.com/2024/10/31/meet-the-founder-of-a-100000-strong-facebook-group-driving-change-in-scientific-integrity-in-vietnam/

Retraction Watch has become a very strong and good voice in the fight against fraud in the scientific publishing community.

Retraction Watch readers may have noticed an uptick of items in the RW Daily and Weekend Reads about scientific integrity issues in Vietnam over the past year. Many of those items had their genesis, and were circulated, on a Facebook group that now has close to 100,000 members — and was recently removed temporarily by Facebook. We asked Van Tu Duong, a researcher at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, USA, who founded the group, to tell us more about the history of the effort. This email interview has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.

Tell us about this history of the group. Why did you find it, and when?

The group was founded on September 1, 2020, in response to a series of investigative articles published by Thanh Nien, a leading Vietnamese newspaper. These articles revealed deceptive practices at Ton Duc Thang University (TDTU) and Duy Tan University (DTU), where foreign authors were paid substantial sums to falsely affiliate with these institutions in their scientific publications. This scheme, which persisted for over a decade, allowed TDTU and DTU to artificially boost their research output and rankings, often surpassing Vietnam’s most prestigious universities.

The revelations sparked significant debate among scientists, university leaders, and the public. However, Thanh Nien faced backlash for allegedly attempting to discredit institutions that many viewed as sources of national pride due to their high international rankings. As a scientist invested in the Vietnamese academic community, I felt compelled to seek the truth, as neither side presented well-substantiated arguments. By analyzing prolific authors affiliated with TDTU and DTU, I discovered a network of hyper-prolific foreign authors publishing extensively with varying affiliations and topics, some of whom appeared on The Retraction Watch Leaderboard.

I contributed an article to Thanh Nien, sharing data that illustrated the extent of this fraudulent activity. I referred to these authors as “foreign invaders in science,” highlighting their role in undermining scientific integrity. Recognizing the need for collective action, I sought support from the Vietnamese scientific community to investigate and expose this network. The group was formed on the day my article was published, initially named “Fighting Foreign Invaders in Science.” However, we later renamed it to reflect our broader focus on scientific integrity.

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