One Debacle After Another

I feel we are living through a spectacle, and it's important not to underestimate the power of stupidity. Keynes' timeless advice: "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent," I feel applies not just potential financial harms, but all harms, including physical.

That said, the rest of this post will be about the spectacle in a rather sanguine way, I will spend little to no time discussing the human impact of watching the wheels fall off the United States.

What is bad?

I won't provide a definitive answer. So let me bluster straight into - something is "bad" because it won't work. It won't accomplish what it set out to do.

I had friends over for dinner last night, and one of them was relating an anecdote about the general publics' ability to form beliefs without reference to facts. A plausible anecdote where somebody whose main concern is immigration is asked why they are concerned about immigration, they say it is too high, asked then how high they think it is, they say something between 20-30% then asked what they think immigration should be they say something like 1-2% and then the punchline is that net immigration is actually within their target range.

Net overseas migration for 2024-2025 was 306k and Australia's 2025 population was roughly 27.6 million which works out to 1.1% so my fact checking works out.

Now, it is bad to blame housing affordability, cost of living, unemployment rates etc. on immigration because cracking down on immigration won't work. Whereas there's an alternative that is potentially good in looking at the Australian tax code that will likely actually solve these issues blamed on immigration.

I fear this definition might be too detailed. Imagine a company that is run by a bunch of incompetent nepo babies. They employ a CFO who is actually good at their job, that CFO brings to the board a long list of issues the company faces. It would be bad for the board to fire the CFO for complaining, and it would be good for the company to promote the CFO to CEO and empower her to address the issues they've raised.

The Bipartisan Overanalyses of Donald J Trump

Trump was always going to be a bad president. One can go back to season 1 of "The Apprentice" and have sufficient data to determine the case. Trump showed up and took less interest in the contest than Jeff Probst does in Survivor. A pattern quickly emerges in the boardroom that Trump makes superficial decisions where basically whoever was that weeks leader for the losing team got fired.

It established a simple pattern of behaviour -  Take on responsibility and fail, get fired. 

I never watched enough of the Apprentice, (after the first season, I would only ever watch Meatloaf lose his shit at Garry Busy before dipping a soccer ball in paint and dropping it on a canvas in a season of "Celebrity Apprentice") to have any expertise. But there are things I can assume never happened - Trump never identified any real business talent, none of the winners ever went on to run or found exceptionally successful businesses, though some may have become celebrities in their own right, trading on their fame.

Survivor gave players a say in who outlasted who, contestants voted and the game quickly became about forming alliances and sub-alliances in the opening minutes of "tribes" forming, then attempting to win the immunity challenges and locate immunity tokens as leverage.

The Apprentice had Trump as the ultimate arbiter of who stayed and who was "fired" from the competition, so, and this is just a guess. The winning strategy was to avoid responsibility, scapegoat and perhaps even sabotage others and then try and win the final challenge.

So before Trump's first term, we had enough data to know that he would be a "bad" president. Even prior to the primaries.

The People are Worthy of Analysis

A thought that was so frustrating, that I may merely have imagined it happening, were people who, however they felt about Trump, assumed he was "tapping into something" to explain his success in the primaries and then at the polls.

The phrase "tap into something" implies, that the tapper is not at base, identical to the something they tap into. 

I do think it is fair to say that the Democratic Party, did not tap into something, which was the peri-Obama call for change. The Democratic Party did, has, and may well continue to act as an institution that would sooner perish than respond to the voter base with meaningful change.

Whereas, my feeling is, that Trump has been frustrated as a president with his inability to just do whatever he wants as and how it makes sense to him. In this sense, I think he is identical with his base that do not think he is a bad president.

With growing wealth inequality, unfolding climate catastrophy and social alienation, there are plenty of actual reasons to be frustrated with any status quo "steady as she goes" government agenda.

But I believe that frustration is compounded if you believe that the President is some kind of absolute monarch that could wave a hand and address these serious issues, but for some reason chooses not to.

That is a "naive" presumption of the office of president, or leader of any country. I feel there's plenty of evidence that voters in a country like Australia don't fathom that the central bank independently sets interest rates. As such, if you are frsutrated by rising interest rates on your debt, you can exacerbate such frustrations by believing that the government of the day could simply order that they be lower but chooses not to.

Obama was certainly guilty of "tapping into something" and I would say cynically employed slogans like "Hope" and "Change we can believe in" that implies radical reforms but really promise and commit to nothing.

What's more believable "radical" or "modest" change? What's the difference between "hope" and "victory"?

Trump on the other hand, did not tap into anything, he got up and rambled not because he has insight into a know-nothing uncle, but because he is a know-nothing uncle.

Historically, a presidential candidate is somebody who is incredibly indebted and beholden to their party, donors, family and media with one of the least important contributors to their success being the people.

They are incredibly compromised individuals who then must compromise.

It is true that the President of the United States has been for approaching a century, truly the most powerful person on earth, but it is naive to think that translates to "all powerful" and mature to understand that means "relatively powerful."

The worthwhile analyses, need to be directed into how much or little the electoral base understand the scope, function, role, powers and limits of government and its various offices. There is a lot to suggest that in a largely disengaged voting base, too many people appear to believe a head of state could do whatever they want, but chooses not to.

The Most Complicated Aspect of Trump

Is the circumstances by which the national broadcasting corporation (NBC) cast Donald Trump on "The Apprentice."

The production needed an intersection of traits - they needed someone who could pass as a successful businessman, who was not busy running a successful business. 

To finally mention Lebron James in this post, it is my experience that very few people ask questions like "why is a 41 year old billionaire still playing basketball?" a question that requires pausing for a moment and occupying a perspective that is not that of the 8.2 Billion plus people on Earth who do not have a billion US dollars in net assets. 

Similarly, why would somebody who is a billionaire host a TV gameshow? Parking a billion dollars in an ordinary savings account might conservatively earn a modest 3%, A billion is a thousand millions, so 3% is 30 million dollars a year, doing nothing whereas Trump earned roughly 15 million per season on the Apprentice.

Did NBC approach other famous Billionaire successful businessmen - Warren Buffet, George Soros, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Wozniak, Jeff Bezos, Steve Balmer and Trump just tested the best?

I am guessing not. Trump fit the very specific criteria of somebody rich with nothing better to do than host a gameshow. 

Giving us the single hardest piece of the Trump pie to analyse - Donald Trump, unsuccessful businessman was hired by NBC to play Donald Trump, successful businessman. Basically inviting confusion between actor and the role they played.

The Easiest thing to Analyse

Trump is stupid, people (have) laud(ed) his energy with respect to his age, his ability to fly from rally to rally and speak on his feet for hours.

Conversely, youtube Destiny has a standing challenge - find a single clip, from all the media that has been focused on Donald Trump for an entire decade and counting, where anyone would say "woah, that guy knows what he's talking about."

To be clear, I don't know what stupid is, but Trump doesn't come close to smart in terms of his ability to access relevant knowledge and make a cogent case for anything, ever. Even to the extent of making statements about his own intentions that have any predictive value. 

An Impossible thing to Analyse and it's workaround

Trump is likely some kind of narcissist. There are good reasons for good rules that make it impossible to formally diagnose Trump with narcissism, anti-social pd, sociopathy or whatever. It's politically unworkable, too easily weaponised and we'd just bring about a world where all political candidates had qualified psychologists willing to testify that they are definitely narcissists and also that they definitely aren't narcissists.

I'm persuaded it should remain the case, that only a candidate who submits themselves to treatment and obtains a diagnosis that they then disclose is the way to determine whether a candidate is a narcissist.

But we can use the diagnostic criteria from the DSM-IV in particular and DSM-V and then see how good it is at predicting Trumps behaviour.

It's pretty good. And this I think has become a lazy shorthand, for professionals who do know better, as more or less just saying that Trump is a narcissist.

I feel that's the way to bet. It is for example, the simplest explanation as to why Trump spent a whole news cycle denying that he called Apple CEO Tim Cook "Tim Apple" claiming that he called him "TimCookofApple" and it offers the simplest explanation as to why a visual display of Hurricane Dorian was altered with a Sharpie to look like it would impact the state of Alabama, rather than Trump simply admit he made a mistake by including Alabama in a tweet.

It also simply explains and predicts why in 2020-present Trump cannot concede that he lost the 2020 election, and bullshit raids continue.

Trump Rules

These are rules that at a minimum must be followed to work in or for the Trump administration and are accurate enough to suggest pushing further is overanalysis:

1. Trump is never wrong
2. Trump never fails
3. Trump never loses
4. Trump is never at fault

However, it is important to note that these rules refer to the officially stated position, they cannot withstand any kind of empirical enquiry. 

I have partial sympathy for those who hitched their wagon to the Trump machine in his first term and before. As late as 2016, it was likely a mistake of mediocrity to successfully identify that Trump was an idiot, but to feel you would be valued as a puppet master, a royal vizeir, that you could use the Trump phenomenon that was ultimately vacuous, to inhabit it with your own agenda. 

We saw this from a range of actors that had their moments on the stage - the sinister like Steve Bannon and warhawk John Bolton, to the more benign like Anthony Scaramucci and General John Kelly. 

It transpires that of the first term staff, the one who clocked the above rules earliest and most prominently was Steven Miller, a willingness to go along with whatever bullshit stupidity Trump came up with.

By 2020, let alone 2024 there is no grace for betting on this loser. A vote for Kamala carried with it the chance that the next 4 years would be modestly bad, far better odds than re-electing a proven loser.

The above rules, I cannot overemphasize are pretty much exactly how you need to construct an organization to guarantee catastrophic failure. Let me do a quick substitution to make them applicable across all of time and space:

1. A loser is never wrong.
2. A loser never fails.
3. A loser never loses.
4. A loser is never at fault.

These rules can now be used to identify a losing bet. Contemporary academics looking at martial strategy and philosophy may have converged and coalesced around well articulated concepts like "mindset" but there are antecedents going back to Socratic dialogues, particularly where Socrates asks Euthyphro "would God command us to not do wrong actions because they are wrong, or would wrong actions be wrong because God commands us to not do them?"

I find this is better explained by example. You think God (or Trump) is good, God appears to you and commands you to have sex with minors. Many cannot appreciate this dilemma. Probably the best option for a believer is to declare "God would never do that, what a ridiculous scenario, you are ridiculous. This is ridiculous, no further questions."

But if you have the mature capacity to entertain such a scenario, you are presented with a dilemma. Either you go with God's change in mood, in which case there is no reason anything is bad or good, there's no arguing why one should or should not have sex with minors, we just do whatever God wishes because God is powerful. (postmodernism) 

Or you would have to say "God can't command that..." because, goodness and badness are determined independent of God's preferences, God becomes falliable, and so even if you reject the scenario as impossible, you are tacitly admitting that God is not the arbiter but himself, beholden to a morality that exists outside and independent of his will.

Getting back to Trump, and in particular the organisation that is the US state, you can apply the rules to say that job losses, rising cost of living, increasing trade deficits, contracting share market, widespread loss of health care access etc. somehow constitute a "golden age" but alas, eventually the real world effects of impoverishing a nation and diminishing its standing in the world will catch up to you.

I think its already caught up

The spectacle we are living through, is an endgame, possibly an epilogue. 

January was basically Ur-fascist Gish gallop. Gish gallop is a debate tactic where instead of arguing a strong case, you spew out hundreds of shitty weak arguments making it impossible for your opponent to address and rebut the sheer volume of fallacious claims.

eg. Instead of saying "Because capital punishment has never historically delivered a deterrence or cost benefits is not to say that it cannot become a cost effective deterrent to violent crime." you say "Saudiarabiakillsdrugdealersandtraffickersandnowtheyhavenodrugsalsopeoplechoosenottobehomosexualortranswhensuchlifestylechoicesarepunishablebydeaththedrugsusedinlethalinjectioncostjustafewdollarsandchinashootspeoplesotheirdeathpenaltyisevencheapernobodyexecutedbythestatehaseverproovedtheydidntcommitthecrimeforwhichtheyvebeensentancedandthebiblecommandsustokillunbelieversandnotsufferwitchestolivebyallowingwitchestoliveandpracticetheirdarkartsevengoodwitchesareguiltyofrapebyconcoctinglovepotionsthatifbydefinitiontheymakesomeonefallinlovewithsomeonetheywouldnothaveotherwisethenitsrapeandrapewouldendtomorrowifpunishedbydeathpollsshow99.99percentofthegeneralpublicsupportcapitalpunishmentandfmriscansindicatethatevenbabiesasyoungassixmonthsoldsupportcapitalpunishment."

That's gishgallop, and abducting the Venezualan President, threatening to annex Greenland, inaugurating a "Board of Peace", threatening tarriffs, making staff changes in DHS, even the release of the Melania documentary are all gishgallop for an administration that is underwater due to its complete systemic incompetence. Incompetence that stem from the loser-rules. 

The outcomes for many, I'm sure are already tragic. Individuals beyond those killed by ICE no doubt have already suffered immensely, with numerous Trump insiders already having been jailed, bankrupted etc before the second term even began.

There is however a massive educational opportunity to be missed - which is to put into living memory the knowledge that narcissists simply cannot perform. 

I don't believe in moral progress, but I do feel that in the latter half of the 20th century, Fascism was completely unviable because there were too many people that knew the result of the experiment. It likely made a comeback because too many 20th century people died off, and as per Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism, its a very naive, very intuitive doctrine that likely will keep being reinvented.

Similarly, I meet successful business people that have learned to spot narcissism and avoid it. But it is a very inefficient process where each person basically needs to be scammed or burned once by a narcissist to learn that talk is cheap and grow leery of confidence. 

Here we have this well publicised example, falling apart on the world stage. It is my hope that we produce a generation of people who have learned to recognize what successful business people eventually learn to spot the hard way: Narcissists do not perform.

Fallout on the TV: Small Big Worlds

The Good

It's something to watch. And I wouldn't want to understate this. Fallout is most definitely a show. It has characters, those characters have motivation, things happen and action is joined up mostly by "therefore" and "but" not "and then" making it a succession of scenes. Nor is there any arbitrary mystery box or sexual tension to maintain interest. 

What I'm weighing it up against, as I struggle through episodes of season 2. Is whether it is better than a watchable show like Prison Break. 

Fanservice

At some time now relatively early in the history of Fallout, Bethesda acquired the Fallout IP from Interplay in a distressed sale. Bethesda, probably best known for creating the Elderscrolls DnD based RPGs then created Fallout 3 and 4, '76 and possibly newer titles. I have not played any games in the Fallout franchise since Fallout: New Vegas which was made using Bethesda's engines and many assets from Fallout 3, by the creative team that did Fallout 1 & 2, as in the original team.

The most pronounced difference in vibes, between Bethesda's creative teams and the original creative team is fanservice. 

This carries through to the show, and my overwhelming impression of the show, is that the story beats are built around introducing stuff from the video games that I feel I am supposed to be excited by. 

Recognizable IP, appears to be the Sugar, Salt and Fat of the Fallout TV show.

However, it is done in a clumsy way, even with an impressive budget, the fallout world doesn't really work. For example, Bethesda has been obsessed since acquisition with the Brotherhood of Steel and Power Armor, much like fans, and Bethesda has been very happy to service them.

Where the original creative team always kept the Brotherhood a small faction, Bethesda has almost always centered them, appeasing the fans insatiable desire to know more. 

As such, a competent way to get fans excited would have been to write a first season where the finale revealed a single Knight in power armour intervining in the climactic confrontation. Bethesda and other production companies responsible for this series, created a deuteragonist who like the fans, rushes into a suit of power armour. 

This means, the Fallout TV world, suits of power armour occur more frequently than giant cockroaches, and season 2 introduces the rad scorpion. 

It is like if Spielberg had taken the approach to Jaws of "it's all about the shark, the shark is in every frame to ensure we don't reveal the boat too soon."

Cosplaying

Good as Walton Goggins is, he is not as good as Baby Billy in the righteous gemstones. His character some goul called Hank is easily the best character but fairly trite. He plays the guy who is really cool in every scene and is a super badass with almost every scene he is in involving him killing everyone while being really cool and looking really cool and getting off cool lines like the scene where he kills this surfer by shooting him through the digestive track of a shark in a bullet time sequence where the bullet he fires goes in slow motion through the shark into the surf pipeline, shattering the bong and blowing the surfer dude's head off but not before Goggins can say "surf's up."

That's not a scene in the actual series, but it may as well be, and they can have it for season 3 if it doesn't already crop up somewhere, somehow in season 2.

All the characters in the Vault are cosplaying as naive and stupid 50s people with forced smiles and positivity while being totally out of touch with reality and chewing through the playlist of 50s pop songs by Billy Holiday, Perry Como etc.

The knights are cosplaying as larpers who somehow graduate into frat bros. 

The point being, that sadly, every character feels like a caricature that could have been written by me and my idiot friends when we were 15 in the 90's playing the original fallout games.

The last episode I watched, was basically a plagiarism of Adventure Time episode "Business Time" where they thaw out a bunch of business men and motivate them using arbitrary corporate esteem.

It's All Very Stupid, but not wonderfully Stupid

For me, none of the jokes land. What gives me the impression that the showrunners prioritise fanservice, are all the stupid scenes. Mr House is introduced in season 2 in a sequence where he sits alone at a bar and picks a fight with some construction worker heavies. It's civilized enough for them to step outside before fighting before Mr House, a character from the New Vegas game whose motivation was to live forever and control everything, invites a big bruiser to punch him in the mouth, taking incredible and unneccessary risk.

He then opens the trunk of his car to reveal what he claims is 31 million dollars in cash, that he will give to a construction worker if he agrees to let Mr House fit an experimental device to his neck. The whole scene is very stupid.

Another scene involves some drug dealers that have a bunch of zombies in cages. The protagonist gets the drop on them and demands they release the zombies. They do, then she demands they release all of them, and the guys initially are reluctant to release the feral zombies, then are like 'oh well she's pointing a gun at us' release the feral zombies who kill them in a way that is probably worse than being shot.

Another scene has important characters meeting, and two bros in power armour start playing with a plasma grenade. This connects to an earlier scene where the secondary protagonist told guys not to play with plasma grenades.

It might be clearer to understand the stupidity of this scene with some simple substitution. Imagine there is a meeting of generals of the army to plot a conspiracy, and all the troops under their command are standing around watching. Then while the generals are negotiating an alliance, two random soldiers take out a grenade, one pulls the pin out of the grenade and they both start giggling. 

In a scene after this scene that does not bode well for season 2, the secondary antagonist is challenged to fight club by an MMA fighter cameoing. He tries to turn down the challenge, then has to look at his leader who gives him a meaningful nod, from which a fan of the show might infer that they are telepathically communicating "it's alright, we both know you are secretly the best MMA fighter ever, even though you don't look it."

Anyway, the fight club fight happens, and its pretty stupid in and of itself, because the MMA fighter has total dominance over the fight and almost immediately has the 2nd protagonist beaten into submission, but then introduces a knife to the fight that could be used to kill the MMA fighter even though clearly there's no way for the smaller weaker protagonist to dominate him physically.

But that's not the stupid part, the stupid part is that the fight club is being overseen by the four generals on an elevated dias. I believe the showbiz term is "business" referring to what an actor does in a scene, like shuffle a deck of cards or water a plant so they look natural and aren't just standing around. Done badly, or stupidly, this might result in having a scientist pour blue liquid from a full test tube into an empty one, then pour that same liquid back into the now empty test tube and repeat until the scene is done. 

The camera keeps cutting to the generals and we see that one smokes a cigar, another points or waves a hand, the one that is the boss of the secondary protagonist gives meaningful looks, and whatever, there's four but the two that are memorably stupid are meaningful look general and smoke a cigar general.

This is the stupidity that permeates the show. It is not stupid like "Inside Man" was stupid were a friend of a kidnapped woman travels from the UK to the US to meet with a man on death row to get help in locating her missing friend and the help is to go to the missing woman's house and wait until either she returns or somebody who knows about her kidnapping returns. It's plot, characters, everything was stupid. 

Fallout is stupid in terms of making the depth of field paper thin, giving everything despite the production values that cosplay fanservice feel. Like direction is "okay in this scene everybody stands around this guy in the circle and cheers and you all say 'yes' repeatedly for a slo-mo shot so everybody watching can see that you extras have been directed to stand around wave your arms in the air and mindlessly repeat the chant 'yes'"

It's very interesting to me, that a production with CGI to digitally remove an actors nose seamlessly for every scene, and have beautiful looking costumes including practical effect power armour, can still come together like a public broadcast show where you put a fern between two plastic outdoor chairs in the hope that the audience won't find the production so bare boned.

Protagonist for a Reason

In the David Mitchell dromedy Ludwig which is a well written show, there's an episode where he goes out looking for three coincidences, claiming three shortens the odds so significantly that "coincidence" becomes less plausible. It appears to derive from Ian Fleming and his Bond novel "Goldfinger" one is an event, two is coincidence, three is enemy-action.

Now whip your head around to LOTR, I don't like LOTR largely because it is so boring. Something JRR did not do poorly though, was coincidence. Frodo is the main character because he is a relative of Bilbo who was the main character of the Hobit because effectively Odin set him up to be the main character as a bit of mischief. Odin does so again in LOTR. The hobbits go to the Prancing Pony where they meet Strider, who turns out to be someone central to the geopolitics of Middle-Earth. This is non-arbitrary however. Gandalf sets up Frodo to meet a king in disguise, he's like "go to the Prancing Pony and ask for Strider" so it isn't a coincidence at all. The fellowship of the ring is a deliberate conspiracy.

Bringing us back to the Fallout TV series. Walton Goggins is a movie star famous for Westerns who happens to be married to and have a daughter with the evil corporation executive. Fallout writers are following the CW's Arrow formula of mixing pre-and-post action via flashbacks between zombie Goggins and actor Goggins, so we know from the opening sequence Goggins was outside a bunker when the bombs went off and was last seen trying to rush his daughter via horse to some kind of safety as a camera zooms out to show multiple nuclear warheads detonating over Los Angeles. 

We know Goggins becomes an immortal zombie that has been alive for 200+ years, that he believes his wife and daughter to be alive somewhere and his motivation is finding them, although he's become really really cool over 200+ years and says things like "Sting to meet you!" before shoving a grenade into the mouth of a gigantic scorpion and kicking it away before it explodes, or "Time to drop some turds in the punchbowl" before shoving a grenade down a raiders shirt back before kicking him and his buddy into a drained swimming pool before they explode.

Also Goggins was a military veteran that once fought in power army for the USMC in Alaska and witnessed maybe the prototype Deathclaw before the nuclear winter, before going back to being a movie star with mad cowboy skills.

So in the past, Goggins was proximate to everything through his military service and then marrying someone who put him in touch with all the evil corporate conspirators.

Then there's the main character who enters the wasteland because she was daughter of the overseer of a set of 3 vaults, and she applied to marry someone from the neighbouring vault as part of a tri-annual trade arrangement between vaults. By happenstance season 1s morally ambiguous protagonist has managed to invade the vault the trade is with and has a bunch of desperate raiders impersonate people who  have been living underground for 200 years, in order to abduct her father because he is needed for a code to unlock the series McGuffin. 

These events already exceed the three coincidences - the raiders infiltrate a vault using a key from the protagonists mother who left the vault is one, they are there in time for a tri-annual trade and after everyone in the neighbouring vault had already gone crazy and killed themselves makes 2, the third is that the antagonist is a contemporary of the overseer both having in the past been in possession of the McGuffin.

All those event lead to the protagonist going out into the world, where she stumbles upon the McGuffin at the same time the secondary protagonist and Goggins stumble upon the McGuffin. Yes the McGuffin unites them, but it is largely coincidental that in a vast post-apocalyptic world, three (two really as at season 2) people who basically are connected to everyone who is anyone for 200 years keep bumping into each other.

Cliched dialogue would be "President Nixon, small world." When moviestar soldier Elvis Presley runs into Richard Nixon 200 years after a nuclear apocalypse and then we flashback to when Elvis was married to Oppenheimer who had quit academia and military service to work for IBM.

The problem being, this is not a small story, but one at least as large as California and Nevada. Yet two people know all the players and their lives happen to coincide. Goggins is not playing the part of Odin either, he happens to be sought out as a bounty hunter to collect the reward on the McGuffin, but not before he says this cool thing about "anyone who says one last job is planning to die" and kills everyone because he's so cool, in his very first scene as a cowboy zombie.

This is coincidental. I would also assert that there are writing solutions to get around needing a once-every-three years or three-times-a-year (I am not sure) trading window between two vaults, for one of those vaults to have gone crazy and murdered themselves in order to be infiltrated by outsiders in order to kidnap a guy with the key to the McGuffin. 

Particularly in season 2, which is largely set in Nevada, great effort has been taken to pretty much recreate locations from Fallout: New Vegas at almost 1:1 scale. I suspect in the development of the game actual Nevada topography was used, so the locations were already there needing just a few CGI assets. Creating the impression of a large world populated by all sorts. 

Yet season 2 has the problem of coincidently an extra with lines from the first series "Chicken fucker" who already happened upon another character by coincidence in season 1 sparing him from committing suicide, has him travel an incredible distance to Nevada Las Vegas by foot from Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles California in order to go on a date with a particular robot he is in love with, in order to be kidnapped and experimented on by the overseer.

What I assume is happening are focus groups, where certain extras test well from season 1 so they are recycled into season 2. Giving us the appearance of a really big world with only 12 people in it. 

In comedy series Detroiters there's an episode where the security guard is robbed, so he sets up an elaborate plan to catch the robber and unmask him which succeeds. When he unmasks the criminal, the security guard remarks "I knew it! Some guy I've never seen before." 

Detroiters is deliberately insane, yet this punchline is much realer than all the converging and diverging A plots, B plots, C plots and D plots of Fallout. In all the games, I've played, this is never a problem because they are RPGs the protagonist always plays a mercenary and vagabond that gets drawn into plots much bigger than themselves. In TV and film, it doesn't work, because you have three, maybe four protagonists all individually piecing together a grand plot I don't really care about.

Compare it to Mad Max franchise, where Mad Max travels the wasteland and meets various warlords. Each a microcosm, with their own particular problem - Biker gang harassment in Mad Max, siege of petrol plant in The Road Warrior, control of Methane production in Mad Max 3:Beyond the Thunderdome, and human trafficking in Mad Max: Fury Road. 

I'm going to compare Fallout favorably to both Prison Break and Apple Tvs Invasion, even though they all make the same TV mistake regarding these big small worlds. Had Prison Break been but one season, it would be quite watchable television for the archives. The first season works because everything makes sense and builds to a satisfying climax with real stakes. The second season falls off a cliff, even though there's something to work with in that despite the prison break being successful the ensemble cast are fugitives. 

Unfortunately, there are characters lazily written out of the show because I assume they got bigger and better opportunities. There are characters kept in the show despite making no sense (like a pedophile) no doubt because they tested well with audiences. There are characters that become more or less entirely redundant but cannot be written out of the show. There are characters that are given stuff to do even though it makes no sense, like prison guards, even though all the action now is outside the prison.

Invasion was the same thing, the premise of the first season is a global alien invasion, all the ensemble class are located around the world and their individual responses to the invasion converge into a satisfying climax. Season 2 then begins and most of the characters from the ensemble cast have nothing to do and no motivation, yet the show goes on and they are still in it.

Fallout does better, but this aspect is still bad. Season 1 concludes with a twist that causes the protagonist to question who is good and who is evil, discovering that her father the overseer actually committed an act of genocide that included killing her own mother in order to bring his kids back into the vault he was in charge of. He flees and is pursued into Season 2.

In season 2, we get some familiarity like a sequel where the journey to track down the father continues. But the father is given stuff to do, and that doesn't make sense. Why was he running a vault if he could have been in an entirely different bunker running a more important project he was in charge of?

This would be like Spielberg agreeing to do Jaws 2, and having an opening sequence where Jaws' son discovers his exploded father or mother's carcass and retreats from feeding on drunken night swimming beachgoers and decides instead to finally phone up Pablo Escobar and inform him he is going to get to work on narcotics trafficking for the Medellin cartel.

We know from Goggin's flashbacks that the overseer father is an underling. We know from developments in late Season 1 and early Season 2 that the overseer was cryo-frozen in vault 31 and revived to live out his days overseeing an experiment conducted on vault 33 like his colleagues Betty and eye-patch lady. It is disrupted by the raiders, and even though presumably he was intended to live and die underground, he then goes to an abandoned facility and promotes himself into being in charge of a wholly different project.

Which means his wife initially shacked up with someone incredibly central and important, learned too much, became disillusioned and left with her children, where she appears to have shacked up with someone else incredibly central and important, causing an important location to be destroyed - which becomes the origin story of another of the three main characters, when then via pure coincidence winds up drawn into the same pursuit of the McGuffin.

I feel this is where paying actors to have speaking roles on prestige television collides with large fantasy worlds, such that people travel hundreds of miles and bump into the same travelling salesmen, the same nefarious supervillains, people who were part of a sacred order turn up in the darndest places as an icecream maker or a cobbler and so on.

The End Result

Is spending $153 million dollars to make me feel like I'm watching some larpers on a fallout themed cruise. I think its a candidate for a better result being achievable by spending less money, though I do not know if restraining the budget causes restraints in writing. Certainly a low budget in season one might inspire the showrunner to say "we'll tease power armour in a first episode flashback, then only show it in the finale." 

The other thing is that the Franchise IP is very 90s. A weird thing happened in the 90s which was a recession in the late 80s and instead of producing ultra-processed pop culture, record labels and TV production took small bets on independent/alternative art, facilitating the sale of this to the mainstream. 

Some of the acts and IP that made it big in the 90s and endured, transformed after Y2K. Notably in bands we have acts like Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Greenday that have two distinct eras, and overlapping but distinct fanbases. Greenday were big in the 90s with Dookie and Nimrod where they were a punk powerhouse with walking baselines, then release American Idiot post GW Bush in the 2000s and add a synth and become kind of new romantic or something, RHCP were frenetic rock-rap-funk act from late 80s to 90s peaking with Blood Sugar Sex Magick, then got a second wind and a very very different vibe with the release of Californication. 

Fallout had a large and devoted fanbase that came from games 1&2 in the franchise, a decade later and Bethesda released Fallout 3 and created a new generation of fans that were drawn to the very Bethesda feel. I'm sure there's some substantial overlap, but for me, the end result is a mess of a show that is watchable but I'm not sure it has 3 seasons in it before it becomes stupid crazy.

By the midpoint of Season 2, a character sits down at a piano, and then for no real reason at all it goes into a fantasy sequence where he's playing saloon style piano and extras are doing a choreographed dance number, all as a weird simulacrum of the retrofuturistic vibe that is iconic in the Fallout series, but serves no real purpose. When the camera goes back to non-fantasy ratio, it is revealed that he is using one finger to incompetently tap out "Mary had a little lamb" and all we have learned is that the character kind of wishes everyone was really into the event he was throwing.

It is one of the more on-the-nose examples of the vibe that permeates the whole show, which is just strange and kind of interesting, but in an autopsy kind of interest, not a compelling show kind of interest.

It may be one of the best adaptation of a video game IP ever made, but that is a tallest pygmy trophy. I also think Amazon are probably just not very good at producing television.

6 Underground Fallacy

I'm proposing a fallacy that probably already exists and has a far less obscure name. Just it's 2026 and I have been a long time reflecting on the enormously destructive hot air that entered our atmosphere in the past 10 years.

I named it for a line, a single line of lyrical content in trip-hop act Sneaker Pimps' single "6 Underground" that possibly isn't even styled that way:

"Don't think 'cause I understand, I care."

Though the delivery set to the music makes this sublime lyric much easier to parse in terms of emphasis and importance, here's my attempt to put that into written word:

"Don't think'-cause-I understaaaand .... I caaaaaare."

Now, the informal fallacy, such as it is, is going to wind up being twofold, because with a little rearranging of the lyrics, we can completely lose the meter of the backing track but get:

"Don't think because I don't care, I don't understand."

So the first fold has a warning of fallacious inference Because A do not conclude B. 

And the second fold works backwards as a warning to not infer because not B, do not dismiss A. 

First fold

So a vegan is walking along the street and they see someone sitting at a cafe drinking tea and eating a crumpet.

"Sir! Sir!" they say with some urgency. The man eating the crumpet quickly chews and swallows his last bite.

"Can I help you young...?" The man says.

"I notice you have honey on your crumpet, are you aware that honey is made by bees?"

"...yessssssss?"

"A single bee produces less than a teaspoon of honey in its entire life, it's an animal product, insect exploitation!"

"Yeah, so..."

"So multiple bees worked themselves to death to produce the honey on that crumpet."

"I said 'so' sir."

"Whaaaaaa..."

My example is cartoonish, and I want to say on the record that vegans can be both rad and super tedious. The only thing all vegans all have in common is that they try to avoid eating beef.

In the first fold of this fallacy, one actor assumes that the dissemination of information will lead to some behavioural change, possibly some moral chafing. 

Instead, the very information they have found compelling enough to put at the centre of their identity, they discover has little to no impact on a stranger. Like, the stranger...doesn't...really...care.

And lest I paint myself as someone who is like "fuck the bees" because in writing this scenario, I at least am aware of the commonly held belief that a bee produces miniscule amounts of honey from their lifetime industry, my brain apportions my concern to think in terms of things like the worker bees conscious capacity for suffering, and wonders about other things like "how long does a worker bee live?" (google says 5-7 weeks).

Overwhelmingly, though I probably share the majority intuition - cruelty to social mammal species - I care a lot, cruelty to reptiles that routinely eat each other's young - I care a little, cruelty to insects - don't pull wings off flies and shit, but otherwise I don't give a fuck, cruelty to microbes - I'm not sure cruelty to microbes is even possible.

In the past 10 years, which strictly speaking would be from 2016 which probably is when it went loco bananas but may go back to 2014 or sooner, the 6 underground fallacy such that I assert it exists has grown in potential utility, though because I'm only asserting it now in 2026 that utility may already be on the decline.

To go all "realtalk" which was probably last a popular expression in 2014, a social phenomena emerged in the following behaviour - somebody wrote a something, an op-ed that was basically a meme and it would share a recent and wholly plausible and even shocking finding from a recent legitimate study like "60% of women by age 15 have experienced sexual harassment" this could be shared on then-popular social media like facebook, now presumably everyone 1) understands, then perhaps online, or offline someone might have an exchange like the following:

1. Q: (innocent) "How old is your sister?"
2. A: (non-innocent) "Old enough."

At which a participant or bystander to the exchange might attempt to enforce 2) care.

"Don't joke about that. There's a 60% chance your sister has been sexually harassed by now!" or something.

 Now, carefully, I don't want to bismirch the non-innocent responder in suggesting that they do not care about the issue of sexual harassment of in particular, minors. It is however likely, that they care less than the person who calls them out.

The 6 underground fallacy holds, because information and knowledge simply does not oblige someone to care. There is possibly a larger fallacy at play that suggests people optimise for morality, in some form of "begging the question" which for clarity, as a fallacy means you forcibly insert your conclusion into the premises of your argument.

1. Premise: To care about something is not to make jokes about it.
2. Premise: "A" made jokes about something.
3. Conclusion: "A" does not care about it.

Premise 1 is worthy of rejection. Clearly people make jokes about things they care about all the time. But this example has already also demonstrated the second-fold and so is a good segue.

Second Fold

"tohm, tohm!" I turn around. "I was just talking to Nathan, he is going to ask Chris out!"

"You think I like Chris?"

"No, Nathan is a man, Chris is a man. Nathan is inviting Chris to enable eachother's sin."

"Yeah, so?"

"Aren't you aware of what the book of Leviticus says?" 

In this example, we get the second fold. The unnamed speaker, assumes that because I don't care that Nathan is into dudes and if Chris is too, and specifically this Nathan dude then there might be some dude-on-dude action, then I must not understand what a book purporting to contain the revealed design of the creator of the universe has to say on the matter.

In the previous section, under the "realtalk" example of the serious issue of sexual harassment of female presenting minors, I wrote the "call out" response as citing the 60% statistic. Which again, it's a reasonable inference that the speaker by citing the relevant statistic to emphasize the careitude has inferred that the joke-maker must not understand that female minors do get sexually harassed to better than-even odds otherwise they would not make such jokes.

I do not deny that heinous people exist, in particular misogynistic men and boys of a violent disposition and/or possessing of dark triad traits. At no point in my life did I reach the previous conclusion via disillusionment, I never had the illusion from earliest memories of red faced blustering bearded alcoholic men and the fear they induced that I have, that men could be assumed to be generally good.

Learning that men I was frightened of, men I despised, men that I was both frightened of and despised were capable of heinous things only made sense of the fear I felt unbidden. That the scary-red-faced-bearded men that instilled fear in me to my knowledge never did anything heinous possibly disillusioned me of any sense I was a good judge of character.

What I would point out here, as the basis of the 6 underground fallacy, is that moral optimisation may be admirable but fundamentally unmanageable. 

The Silky sifaka is a type of Madagascan lemur that is critically endangered with an estimated fewer than 1,000 left in the wild. Prior to 3 minutes ago, I was unaware of the silky sifaka's existence, but now that you and I know the 6 underground fallacy demands we care. 

And this caring can't happen in isolation, because we also think we know that 60% of women by age 15 have experienced sexual harassment. 

You and I would agree both the prevalence with which women receive unwanted sexual attention and the fact that we are undergoing a mass extinction event is bad. But the 6 underground fallacy I assert says that it is wrong to presume moral failing when somebody doesn't care, or doesn't seem to care, or doesn't care as much as you do.

The 6 underground fallacy I feel generates the satirical perfection of Patrick Bateman's "Sri Lanka" speech in American Psycho's film adaptation, where we get demonstrated understanding of world problems of the 1980s without any caring, even Christian Bale's performance captures that Bateman himself is not interested in what he is saying, as a psychopath Bateman is likely incapable of caring, but framing the world as knowledge = obligation rather than knowledge = overwhelm and existential angst, is I would suggest, psychotic.

Not Dunning Kruger

If two people disagree, Occams razor I think would say the simplest explanation is that both parties have different information. Next to that, we go up in simple explanations to one party has considered more information than the other party, as the origin of the dispute.

Invoking theology is a useful pull for this point from the big data set of arguments that have been going on since long before Christianity. Maybe longer than history, we don't know. 

I say it is useful because it can give us a bit of a hierarchy in the above example of the second-fold 6 underground fallacy:

1. tohm doesn't care about Nathan and Chris' same sex attraction therefore tohm must not understand what is "bad" about same sex attraction.

2. The fallacy has already been committed, because tohm does vaguely understand that some line in Leveticus claims man on man action is a sin.

3. But the committer of the fallacy hasn't considered why scripture should be regarded as an authority on anything beyond what the scripture says.

And we could keep going, but frankly, my knowing about the historiography of the bible's authorship and composition is in my view a biproduct of living in a world where people still take it seriously albeit in an unserious/unscholarly way. My feeling is there are sufficient arguments to be understood to be highly sceptical of any revealed theism, long before you need to open the cover of any holy book. (things not worth doing are not worth doing well).

But to a degree, this can apply to numerous applications of the 6 underground fallacy where someone thinks others should care because of a deficit of understanding.

Consider a child who needs to impress upon their parents that they had a bad dream. The child may be confronted by their parents lack of concern over the possibility of monsters in the closet or whatever. The child hasn't considered that the parents have a life time of observational data to know that the supernatural, pretty much doesn't exist, that they maintain a household for the child to live in by attending jobs that have brutal hours compared to the child's, along with a bunch of domestic labour that eats into their leisure time such that the parents don't care about the details of the child's bad dream and their perceived mortal dangers, only getting back to sleep or having some time in which to be adults and not parents.

They (the parents) are likely far more concerned by the valuation and division of domestic labour between them, than the possibility that their child's dream portends an actual attack by a supernatural monster that manifests either in the built in robes or under the bed with the condition of darkness. 

The parents actually "don't care" by the child's perception of their parents lack of distress and poor performative reassurance at 3am on a week night, because they better understand the situation than the child is capable of doing.

As such, I guess this post is imploring you reader to understand that "caring" is a conclusion leapt to, by underplaying how difficult it is to actually attain knowledge - which is a justified true belief, adjudicated by predictive power.

What that last sentence means via example is: You know you have $20 when you can pay for something worth $20 - having $20 predicts the transaction, justifying your belief in having $20 as true. (Quite often, I forget about some direct debit payment, resulting in my card being declined. Sometimes I suspected my balance was low, other times I had an unjustified false belief, and didn't know I didn't have the money.)

TA Adult vs Parent/Child Ego states

Long forgotten by the passage of time for most people, but in the year 2000 Bill Clinton's presidential term came to an end and his VP Al Gore was the Democratic parties candidate to contest the 2000 election against upset candidate George W Bush son of Clinton's 1-term predecessor George HW Bush. 

The election was close, dead close, and there were shenanigans I am not confident I can relate with any accuracy that made the election come down to Florida as decisive. It was called prematurely for Bush on a TV network, and others repeated the projection like blind mules hoping not to get scooped. Gore made a concession speech, but then someone suggested Florida might all be premature he unprecedentedly took-backsied his concession. 

A recount ensued and eventually the US Supreme Court ruled on it in a split decision and one of the opinions said:

On December 9, the U.S. Supreme Court suspended the manual recount, in progress for only several hours, on the grounds that irreparable harm could befall Bush, according to a concurring opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia.

I remember this because Michael Moore who use to be popular, wrote in a book somewhere his interpretation of what Scalia had said which was "the recount should be stopped because if it turned out that Bush was not president, this would hurt his chances of being president." 

SCOTUS is now well and truly stacked, and as a result, lacks legitimacy as an institution, I would interpret Scalia's opinion more charitably as "the recount could cause irreperable harm by giving credence to the idea that US elections were not free and fair and that the country was stolen." However, it doesn't make much sense to me, and Scalia may have intended this and was simply wrong, as a recount could only serve to make clear who was president, so in effect Moore's interpretation holds, and regarding the 2020 election, SCOTUS in the spirit of Scalia could have cited the irreparable harm the could befall Biden to compell Trump to stop all the stop the steal bullshit and concede that a President that was always unpopular as an incumbent may plausibly have just lost an election via that unpopularity.

This is all to say that my lived experience of the 6 underground fallacy is in parent-child ego transaction, terminology from the transactional analysis (TA) theory of psychology. Scalia under Moore's interpretation was parentally saying "Give baby Bush an icecream because he'll go waah-waah" and may as well have been saying "Give the Republicans a president or else they'll go waah-waah" and the 6 underground fallacy is generally employed to imply a party is responsible for the emotional state of a third party.

The detail of whether the invoker of a 6 underground fallacy is coming from parent or child ego state is irrelevant to me. I can imagine both, the danger of the 6 underground fallacy is its potential to have the recipient respond from a parent or child ego state. 

Clapping back, for example is a fairly childish response, as is doubling down. Alternately conceding the fallacious conclusion that caring needs must follow understanding, is a very paternalistic response. TA games often involve movements not just between parent and child ego states, but roles of victim, abuser and rescuer. 

My favorite feature of TA though, is the simple heuristic by which virtually all games can be defeated (more so than 'won') and that rule is: whoever adopts an adult ego state first, defeats the game.

Probably in its essential form, the 6 underground fallacy plays out in the following way:

1. Parent to Child: I told you that upsets me, so why did you do it?
2. Adult: I understand that it upsets you, but I won't take responsibility for your emotional state. I'll respect how you choose to handle your emotions, but I'll make my own choices.

Another, terser, blunter way of stating (2) is "don't think 'cause I understand, I care."

The Fallacy fallacy

From what I've written in this post, some people may feel anxious that what I'm advocating for is complete unaccountability for behaviour. I am not, which is why sadly, any discussion of fallacies practicly obliges the invocation of the fallacy fallacy.

If an argument is fallacious, all it means is that a reasonable person cannot accept the conclusion. Matt Dillahunty, professional magician and atheist debater uses a gumball analogy that I like.

If there's a glass jar filled with gumballs (or jellybeans, or m&ms or whatever) and you assert that the number of gumballs is even, and I say "I don't believe you" and then you assert that I must then believe that the number of gumballs is odd, I respond "I don't believe that either."

There is plenty of caring that follows quite directly from understanding - if you tell me the kitchen is on fire, I will care and rush to assist. If you tell me that humans exploit insect labour for taste based pleasure, my evaluation of the care factor is wholly different.

Where I struggle the most, is with the autonomy I extend to other people in making decisions such as whether to avoid or confront concepts really, that emotionally they struggle with. 

I personally believe that "Confrontation over time can make things better, avoidance, makes things worse."

I have a young relative who has irrational fears (phobias) of insects. They are a child, so to me it is more appropriate to actually deny them agency where I wouldn't an adult stranger, and test the limits to which they can confront these debilitating phobias. At the moment, they are scared of pretty much all insects including bugs that are in almost all cases, harmless, we don't have cockroaches that can get in ears and break eardrums or centipedes or the bombardier beetle (which I'm not even sure is dangerous to humans). It also includes all spiders, even harmless ones like the daddy-longlegs and relatively harmless ones like the huntsman.

To allow a child to persist into adolescence with such phobias seems far more uncaring than attempting to confront those phobias through respectful confrontation, which can be as simple as role modelling calm.

Moving away from children, if someone chooses to avoid rather than confront their triggers, it is hard for me to respect that behaviour, but intellectually at least, I respect the right to do so. I do not feel it is my job to force confrontations. 

Where I struggle most is that society simply can't function by even aspiring to be triggerless. For one, emotional states can be a zero sum game, where the request isn't "don't upset me" but functionally "you be upset so I don't have to be" and for two; greater society needs to be insensitive. In parenting terms this is expressed as "prepare the child for the road not the road for the child" or "you can pave the world or you can make sandals" for adults. 

Public spaces, third spaces, social gatherings need to be accessible and free. 

I like Dr Grande's usage of a car alarm as an analogy - A car alarm that is too sensitive is as useless as a car alarm that is too insensitive. It needs to be calibrated. 

In this sense, both sensitivity and insensitivity need to be respected. The masters of this calibration act are canis familiaris who (human inflicted trauma aside) can discern intent. They know when their tale is stepped on by accident, and when a human kicks them out of malice, and those two things rarely happen in conjunction with eye-contact. They can discern intent from the toes to the knees. 

It seems to me, that people likely have a disadvantage on account of our greater cognitive abilities, our larger vocabularies, that we can confuse ourselves through the stories we tell ourselves and frankly, while I know my emotional intelligence/competence is low, I am not impressed in general by others and suspect that many are disadvantaged by stories and stereotypes that suggest they have some natural advantage in emotional intelligence and empathizing. 

Perhaps a simple example is dinner parties, I understand that some people have weird dietary preferances based often, on the podcasts they listen to, and I also understand that some people have anaphalactic allergic reactions and religious/philosophical beliefs that restrict their diets. I do not care about the former preferences that I do understand, and I do care about the latter restrictions that I also understand.

Furthermore, sorry vegans, but I was once at a party where I quipped "No meat, that's offensive" and my friend pointed out "some people find displaying animal carcasses offensive" when my quip didn't land with that crowd. I better understand the perspective of some vegans and vegetarians, and my quip remains a quip because I personally am not offended by an absence of meat and as such I remain uncaring as to whether animal carcasses are displayed for consumption or not. I do not care if some people have arrived at a world view where they find the displaying of animal carcasses offensive.

Fundamentally, I feel as I've described it the 6 underground fallacy is a sound one. We cannot reasonably arrive at a conclusion that understanding obliges one to care. Furthermore, I dislike the 6 underground fallacy because it is either totalitarian or condescending or both simultaneously. 

Probably the only loose end, which I shall leave loose until I can be persuaded to care, is that the 6 underground fallacy did a lot of damage over the last decade. I think it did, but you are free to both not understand my thoughts on that, nor care.

 

Venezualepstein

 My mentor introduced me to a concept called "the parking lot" and it is probably by now a business training cliche for how to have more effective meetings. You may also know it as a "bike rack" the more eco-friendly urban planning adored alternative.

It's function is simple - whenever somebody interjects a "whattabout"-ism into a meeting, you write it up in a corner of the white-board or create a virtual post-it-note on the shared screen, and that interjection is now "parked" so it will not be forgotten, and the only person with authority to remove it from the bike rack/parking lot is the person who interjected it.

So say you are cussing out your husband for coming home drunk, and he is all like "whattabout that time you slept with one of your students?" that goes into the parking lot, to be dealt with, at some time, and when your husband is satisfied by the issue of sleeping with a past student, he can take it off the list of things to discuss. Now, back to how he is coming home drunk.

The DOJs bungling, incompetent non-compliance with their legal obligation to release the Epstein files is what was under discussion. The bill passed the House and Senate with bi-partisan support and the President didn't veto it. The deadline came and went and the DOJ made a partial release with both possible errors in relation to redactions - they both failed to redact information that they were meant to redact, and redacted information without explanation or justification that they were explicitly not to redact.

I am neither journalist, nor historian, nor scholar - the timeline is well documented on Wikipedia, prior to the Military abduction of Maduro and his wife from Venezuela, here is how I would have bet:

Trump was almost certainly in the Epstein files, we've already seen enough, though based on the released emails that mentioned Trump by the house oversight committee, I didn't expect anything more. I think Trump possesses (if nothing else) the basic competence of not placing himself in a position of responsibility, as was most public with his speech delivered prior to the January 6th Capital Riot/Insurrection in 2020. He spoke at length about fighting to avoid having the country stolen and injected a final "peacefully" qualifier. 

So I would have bet that what would come out was a lot of correspondence about Trump, and perhaps by Trump and photos with Epstein and Trump that would strain credulity based on what information about Trump's character is a matter of public record, that he didn't have sex with an underage sex-trafficked girl, but nothing concrete.

But now, Maduro was captured, and this dramatic event should, tactically and strategically speaking, have gone straight to the parking lot/bike rack. Press corp. questions about Maduro's capture and arrest should have been framed as "Given the DOJ's non-compliance with their legal obligation to release the Epstein files by December 19th 2025, what confidence can the public have that Maduro will be competently arraigned, charged, prosecuted and convicted?" and "Was this operation in Venezuala a desperate attempt to generate a smoke screen for what is now reported to be 2 million overdue Epstein files?"

Because now, based on how successful this Venezuala bullshit has been as a smokescreen, and furthermore the "Greenland" hypothetical that is obsessing the UKs press cycle, that is also bullshit (by which Rory Stewart explains the bullshit here) I would now bet the following:

Trump's depiction in the Epstein files is at least as bad as Andrew Windsor's (the former UK Royal) I would bet at this point, that the DOJ will not get around to releasing files that contain mentions of Trump until there is a change of government.

Yo Democrats

It is my opinion that Trump has been routinely overestimated, and overanalysed. 

Trump can be defensively summed up as "the loser's president" he is a loser, for losers. 

His success at winning the oval office, particularly in 2024 I assert will prove to be directly correlated to the creation of losers. For this, and the state of the world we live in, where effectively, the US is spiralling, the Democratic Party bares its fair share of blame in being an ineffective opposition. The nomination of Hilary Clinton as the 2016 candidate, particularly by the superdelegates, such as those in the largest state of California, who declared for Clinton long before the state held its primaries, communicated to me a myopic self-interest of the institution, and particularly in both the figures of Trump and Sanders, the Democrats in particular ignored a growing public sentiment demanding real change.

Change to what? It is probably best summarized as "neo-liberalism" or the "return to profits" of the Reagan-Thatcher years in the 80s that ended the post-war period and effectively social mobility and the middle class, albeit the existing middle class have to endure a long, slow, painful death.

I am tentatively persuaded that a more descriptive name than "neo-liberalism" for the cluster of economic paradigms broadly shared by the international business environment is "Asset management capitalism" the result of which is growing wealth inequality whereby the wealthiest are eating not only the middle class, but eachother to consolidate wealth and exacerbate inequality.

My feeling is, that for me it has always been a red-flag regarding identity politics, that it was embraced by left-wing political parties around the world, despite being niche, unpopular and most importantly despite, in the neo-liberal era, most left-wing political parties around the world having abandoned the working class.

In brief, I noticed that left-wing parties, including the Democrats, couldn't get shit done on climate change, a minimum-wage, housing affordability, education, poverty eradication etc. etc. shit that would help anyone outside the wealthiest 20% in wealthy countries, but largely performative taxing social rituals carried out by private citizens were embraced.

I appreciate that in the absence of campaign finance reform, being a left-wing party that stands for tackling the pressing distribution problem that faces wealthy nations, is difficult. But avoiding this challenge will simply allow more and more losers to be produced by the economy, and losers think "it's gotta be the shoes" losers think the way to prove you are strong is to pick fights all the time. Losers think both apologies and forgiveness are signs of weakness etc. etc.

A brief word on disqualifying the opinions of Celebrating Venezualans

Around the world Venezualans are celebrating the tentative deposing of Maduro, who seems by all accounts an utter pendejo to put it mildly. 

I don't give a shit. The Mexica peoples, better known in the Anglosphere as "Aztecs" were nasty and unpopular. As such, many indigenous groups such as the Confederacy of Tlaxcala, Tetzcoco, Totonacapan, Huejotzingo, Zaachila, Purépecha Empire, Otomi, Chalco, Xochimilco, Mixquic and Iztapalapa allied with the Spanish conquistadors and likely celebrated the downfall of the Aztec Triple-Alliance.

Now, I tend to agree, that colonialism is not all bad. Unfortunately for whatever can be said for colonialism, it is a violent and brutal process historically destroying not just people, but culture and heritage. World heritage. 

It was likely nice to end the Aztec practices of capturing slaves for ritual human sacrifice. Alas, becoming a Spanish territory is no picnic either.

Cortes vs the Mexica and his cousin Pizarro vs the Inca are the two big ones as far as conquest of the Americas go, but Venezuala, Columbia, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Belize, El Salvador, Bolivia, Ecuador, Panama, Cuba, The Caribbean etc. would all share similar stories with the exception of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. 

Furthermore, Columbus for which Columbia is named, was an objectively awful person by pretty much anybodies standard. There was nothing more devestating he did though, to American Indians everywhere than simply making contact and bringing European diseases to the Americas.

With this history in mind, I had thought that if anybody would take a pandemic seriously, it would be the Mexicans, and if any Mexicans would take a pandemic really seriously, it would be the indigenous scene who reminisce and tell it like it is when it comes to the impact of colonialism...

But no, expectations and intuitions were thwarted. The indigenous circles I was in denied the existence of Covid. Refused to believe in it, yet believed in contradictory conspiracy theories like lab-leaks and plandemics. Refused and avoided vaccinations. I met multiple people who lost one-or-both parents to Covid and still stubbornly clung to denial.

From the perspective of history, and with all due respect to those Venezualans that have been personally effected by the reign of Maduro, the Venezualans now caught up in the moment of Maduro's kidnapping and arrest, they are participating in a long held tradition of conquest, a tradition of fascist narratives and naivete:

Maximilian von Heune: The Nazis are just a gang of stupid hooligans, but they do serve a purpose. Let them get rid of the Communists. Later we'll be able to control them.

Brian Roberts: But who exactly is we?

Maximilian von Heune: Germany, of course.