Donald Trump: Classic or Dud?

Is there a chapter on the face-eating Cthulhu faze? Because I would like to buy shares in your book.

You are not buying this stock because you have faith in its optimistic cash-flow forecasts; it has not bothered with cash-flow forecasts. You are buying this stock because you like Donald Trump and think that Tech Monopoly Censorship Threatens Free Speech. Cash flows, valuation, etc., are all irrelevant. It is just vibes.

It does feel a little bit like all of recent financial history has been leading up to this moment? Like, Donald Trump, sure; obviously part of the Donald Trump thing is “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.” Similarly, he can launch a company with no product, business plan or capital structure and the stock will double.

But also the SPAC boom has made it viable for pre-product, pre-revenue companies to go public at multibillion-dollar valuations if they can get enough hype. But also meme stocks have prepared everyone for the notion that the value of a stock is based on the fervor of its community of online fans, not its projected cash flows. But also the cryptocurrency boom seeded that notion, and paired it with libertarianism and resistance to tech-company dominance. But also the boom in non-fungible tokens further proved the idea that membership in an online community has a value that can be captured and financialized and traded and turned into a bubble.

...Doesn’t it feel like there has been a paradigm shift, a regime change? Doesn’t it feel like for the last 80 or so years there has been a dominant view of investing, a first-page-of-the-textbook given, that investments are worth the present value of their expected future cash flows? Doesn’t it feel like that world has ended and a new one has begun? I should go buy some Dogecoin.

perhaps i'm alone in this, but for the last several years i've had the notion that people are starting to act as if there really were no future, or at least if it the world we all grew up in is no longer the basis for the future. the 2016 election pointed toward that, as well as the rise of crypto, and it seems to be escalating.

again, maybe that's just me. and maybe i see it because that kind of thinking has rubbed off on me a bit. i see no real future for myself, not any kind of traditional one at least. i already feel my body ailing, i already see my friends and family getting sick and dying, more and more. i want to live my life now, while i can, rather than following the traditional consensus of "defer most of the joy of your life to the future, when you are retired". after the events of the last few years, to me that sounds a lot like "keep earning money for other people. when you are so tired and burned out and old that you no are no longer able to make money for other people, you can retire and travel a bit". and that does seem like a fucking joke, where i am the lifelong butt of the joke.

i guess that has little to do with trump, or anything else. i just wanted to register the thought, the feeling in the air, that the zeitgeist seems to be shifting toward "no future"

If by 'future' you mean a recognizable future which progresses logically from the perpetuation of systems that have underpinned the breadth of our lives thus far (and particularly systems which require some degree of constituent agreement about how they function in order to perpetuate as they have), then no. There probably is no future. It's just a slow, intentional, nihilistically hilaaaaaarious erosion of load-bearing walls with no thought given to what's gonna keep the ceiling from collapsing on us when we're done.

oh no! they may have totally inadvertently used some code that wasn't theirs without asking and now they have 30 days to stop that:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/22/22740354/trump-truth-social-network-spac-mastodon-license-software-freedom-conservancy

It's just a slow, intentional, nihilistically hilaaaaaarious erosion of load-bearing walls with no thought given to what's gonna keep the ceiling from collapsing on us when we're done.

wait, maybe this is the mypillow guy's angle? when you don't have anyone or anything else you can count on, nothing to protect you, nothing to sleep on - a pillow is handy

it's like the towel in Hitchhiker's Guide, only better

Doesn’t it feel like that world has ended and a new one has begun?

One of the old rules on Wall Street is that whenever conventional wisdom starts to wonder if the latest bubble actually means that we've entered a new world where the old rules don't apply, then the latest bubble is on the verge of bursting and it's time to get out.

perhaps i'm alone in this, but for the last several years i've had the notion that people are starting to act as if there really were no future, or at least if it the world we all grew up in is no longer the basis for the future. the 2016 election pointed toward that, as well as the rise of crypto, and it seems to be escalating.

again, maybe that's just me. and maybe i see it because that kind of thinking has rubbed off on me a bit. i see no real future for myself, not any kind of traditional one at least. i already feel my body ailing, i already see my friends and family getting sick and dying, more and more. i want to live my life now, while i can, rather than following the traditional consensus of "defer most of the joy of your life to the future, when you are retired". after the events of the last few years, to me that sounds a lot like "keep earning money for other people. when you are so tired and burned out and old that you no are no longer able to make money for other people, you can retire and travel a bit". and that does seem like a fucking joke, where i am the lifelong butt of the joke.

i guess that has little to do with trump, or anything else. i just wanted to register the thought, the feeling in the air, that the zeitgeist seems to be shifting toward "no future"

Agree with all of this 100%. I feel like younger people are giving up on "the system," and I see that as an unequivocally good thing. Maybe they'll manage to wrest a better world from the brittle claws of my parents' generation (and my generation). As for me, I'm glad I never had kids, and I'm mostly living my life as a vulture, picking away at the carcass of a failing society for the 20-30 years I've got left.

Yeah KM I know exactly what you mean. I don't think there's "no future" exactly but I do know the world is going to look radically different by the time my kids are my age. It might not be *entirely* a bad thing. I mean this current generation of teens feels so much different to my generation already; I've met so many young people who are already radicalized by the events of the last few years and I am guessing a lot of these people are going to be in political power soon. I was taught from a young age to value money and "hard work" above all else which in the world of Tether and NFTs and Gamestop feels like a cruel joke. Like imagine explaining to a class of 3rd graders that you have to work for money to buy things but also that there are like 3 people who own as much as half the country combined. Can you imagine being born in say, 2003, and watching the older generation lose their fucking minds over Donald Trump? How do you trust your elders after that? How do you trust the American system?

It does at least have *something* to do with Trump imo because his primary appeal to Republican voters was not the racism or even the cruelty but rather that he appeared to have successfully avoided the gravity of reality. dude was dumb as bricks but still managed to make a lot of money for himself, fuck a bunch of models, commit unlimited amounts of crime, and do and say whatever he wanted. To me that's Trumpism to the core. It's nothing but an escape from reality. They want to live in a world where America is always #1, where their way of life continues forever, where climate change isn't real, where every crime Trump committed was imagined by the "fake news", where Trump won in a landslide, where Covid is some cooked up scheme by globalists to destroy the good guys for whatever reason, etc. etc., and since we are at the point where these people would literally rather DIE than face reality (see r/HermanCainAward) it seems like the entire American worldview which has coddled these beliefs for so long can only collapse, which I guess can go one of two ways. I try to be optimistic but I can totally see why that's so difficult right now.

guys don't worry, rome didn't fall in a day.

Naming his planned network PRAVDA Social is pretty funny. Trump 2024: TRUMP HARDER

Is all that methane good for global warming?

What a fucking little pig...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-jr-is-hawking-shockingly-tacky-alex-baldwin-kills-people-t-shirts

…

I knew when conservatives started railing against "political correctness" that it was only a short step to "I can just be an unmitigated fucking asshole with no repercussions." And here we are.

Conservatism is just a "Calvin peeing on..." meme these days

This piece from yesterday is of interest in that regard

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/evangelical-trump-christians-politics/620469/

You live by the sword, you die by the sword.

When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized.

There were church leaders warning about this back during the rise of Falwell and the Moral Majority.

And yet . . .

It's also rich that Peter Wehner wrote that article, as he's certainly helped contribute to the culture of White Evangelical Nationalism. Someone ought to tell him that if you make your bed and also shit in it, you can't wring your hands about your little oopsy-poopsy.

“Nearly everyone tells me there is at the very least a small group in nearly every evangelical church complaining and agitating against teaching or policies that aren’t sufficiently conservative or anti-woke,” a pastor and prominent figure within the evangelical world told me. (Like others with whom I spoke about this topic, he requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.) “It’s everywhere.”

good article so far, but had to lol a bit at this.

it's been everywhere for at least 30 years dude!!!

this is interesting, though, and something i haven't thought about:

“What we’re seeing is massive discipleship failure caused by massive catechesis failure,” James Ernest, the vice president and editor in chief at Eerdmans, a publisher of religious books, told me. Ernest was one of several figures I spoke with who pointed to catechism, the process of instructing and informing people through teaching, as the source of the problem. “The evangelical Church in the U.S. over the last five decades has failed to form its adherents into disciples. So there is a great hollowness. All that was needed to cause the implosion that we have seen was a sufficiently provocative stimulus. And that stimulus came.”

i've never really thought about catechism because it was never present in any evangelical context that i knew of. the pastor and the assistant pastor (aka "the music guy" who led the band through so many endless power ballads as people were saved) had degrees from some theological place, but in general, the vibe was "if you are an expert, you are an expert" everywhere else. it does seem like abandoning theological coherence and just leaving it to everybody to come up with their own ideas would soon lead to...the average republican?

The idea that the average white evangelical over the last 30 years would have renounced the political elements of their agenda had only they been better instructed in Christ's teachings is total and complete fucking bullshit made up by some evangelical numbnuts who apparently doesn't like realizing what side he's been on the last 30 years.

This isn't directed at you Karl so sorry if it seemed that way. Reacting to the quote.

i'm not sure that's what he said, though! or at least, not the claim that better instruction would have led to renouncing political elements.

i see it more as just making a connection between the empty theology ("great hollowness") and the willingness of white evangelicals, more than any other religious group, to go waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out there on conspiracy theories and anti-masking and shit like that

xp!

He's making a pretty direct comparison. The two paragraphs preceding your quoted paragraph are referencing the politicization of evangelicals. I don't see how Christ's teachings change that politicization - it's a feature, not a bug.

sure, but there are many ways to be politicized. the direction that evangelicals have gone isn't predetermined by those teachings. it would be amazing if all of a sudden evangelicals were focused on the jesus of the gospels and suddenly understood that they were supposed to have compassion for those they disagreed with, and also that they weren't supposed to be figuring out how to get more money all of the time, for example

I'm mildly curious as to what these anti-woke activist would say when asked to define what 'woke' means to them

Focusing on (or even mentioning) racial issues, because "I don't see color" afaik.

Sermons are short. Only some churchgoers attend adult-education classes, and even fewer attend Bible study and small groups. Cable news, however, is always on. “So if people are getting one kind of catechesis for half an hour per week,” Jacobs asked, “and another for dozens of hours per week, which one do you think will win out?”

I thought this was key. My parents do this with CNN and MSNBC. Their friends/relatives are 24/7 Fox, if they haven't moved on to the hard stuff like OANN.

yeah, basically CRT, woke, etc boils down to any discussion of race whatsoever.

Old people leave the TV on all the time, it seems. My parents still don't have cable!

I don't even have parents.

I don't even own a parent

i don't even have an alibi, TRUMP! full circle

I’m so grateful that my parents listen to classical music 24/7 and not news or cable.

Don't they watch The Price is Right anymore? What the hell is wrong with these boomers

just make sure they're not listening to wagner 24/7, that's a warning sign

Everyone always does that whole thing but whatever, having a house without TV or cable TV is actually good and I don't give a fuck if that makes me some sort of snooty asshole. TV sucks. Period.

He’s heard of many congregants leaving their church because it didn’t match their politics, he told me, but has never once heard of someone changing their politics because it didn’t match their church’s teaching. He often tells his congregation that if the Bible doesn’t challenge your politics at least occasionally, you’re not really paying attention to the Hebrew scriptures or the New Testament. The reality, however, is that a lot of people, especially in this era, will leave a church if their political views are ever challenged, even around the edges.

HENLEY: Well, yeah.

100%

xp to table

<3

this is gold pic.twitter.com/PY9mDTBNeg

— MeidasTouch.com (@MeidasTouch) October 31, 2021

(which was at this game - he announced that he was invited but they refuted that: he called and asked them : https://sports.yahoo.com/mlb-refutes-trump-claim-they-invited-him-to-world-series-200004450.html )

Trump on Waukesha: The good news is he hated Trump pic.twitter.com/hE800i5Gvb

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 24, 2021

used to be disgusted by that stuff but turns out this is how the entire American right thinks

Little Rocket Man --> Little Rifle Man

Trump having a photo of Kim Jong-un on his wall is so painfully on brand https://t.co/Fcvh1maspa

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 24, 2021

http://screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/injustice-league-hall-of-doom.jpg

MELANIA NFT

Melania Trump is getting in on the latest crypto craze -- NFTs.

The former first lady announced that she is selling an NFT, or a non-fungible token, titled "Melania's Vision" -- her first public endeavor since leaving office almost one year ago. https://t.co/Sg2ypIH7nw

— CNN (@CNN) December 16, 2021

Wow, she's like Mother Teresa reincarnate

Feels like a rare misstep - the rubes and marks who buy Trump shit are a different group than the rubes and marks who buy NFTs.