Wednesday, June 08, 2016

This is what I wanted to say about Trump

Not surprisingly, Scott Aaronson says it better than me.

"Against those considerations, I recently realized that there’s an argument for speaking out, which goes as follows.  Suppose Trump actually wins (as of this writing, Predictwise still gives him a frighteningly-high 27% probability).  Suppose my family somehow survives whatever comes next, and one day my daughter Lily comes to me across the rubble of the post-thermonuclear hellscape and says, “daddy, in the Good Days, the days before the War of the Small-Hands Insult, the days when there was plentiful food and water and Internet, didn’t you have what used to be called a ‘blog’?  Then why didn’t you speak out on this blog, why didn’t you do whatever tiny amount you could to prevent this?”  So, alright, this post is my answer to her."

My answer to my future daughter is this: in the goal of not adding more noise, I won't write my own long thing; instead, I refer my (four) blog readers to Aaronson's post. It's so good - all of it, about why Trump is totally unqualified, why he's possibly Hitler but more likely "only" Putin or Pinochet and that's still not ok, why social media vindictiveness and life-destroying is counterproductive, why we need to understand why people are voting Trump instead of assuming they're just racist imbeciles, and about how we should probably do something to stop him but it's really unclear what will work. (I'm surprised the Black Mirror episode "The Waldo Moment" hasn't been referenced more often.)

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