USA leads the way
And why you can't beat bookmakers
If it wasn’t already, the Gaza conflict has certainly now settled into an infinite war of blind hatred that won’t end until somebody loses. Permanently.
Since nobody is willing to police Israel’s out-of-control behaviour, and since they seem eager to be labelled a Pariah State for the remainder of all our lifetimes and then some, they will indeed continue their genocide until all Palestinians are evicted from the region, dead or alive. The sick irony is palpable.
However, if you’re an American who didn’t vote for Harris because she, like Biden, facilitated the genocide, I’m afraid you have failed to acknowledge that Trump is worse in that regard alone. He admires “strong leaders” like Putin and Netanyahu. Seriously, what do you think is going to happen?
Thus, your steadfast principle to not “support genocide”, admirable as it may be, has backfired. But don’t take it from me:
This is the problem with emotions: they override sober decisions that would, at the end of the day, both be better for you and more just and empathetic. (Suggested reading: Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy, particularly the last third).
We are somewhat aware of our tendency to make emotional but irrational decisions, as demonstrated by the existence of ethics boards that preemptively set up rules for who receives organ transplants, curtains in front of auditioning musicians (to nullify patriarchy), and the utilitarian principle of QALY-minded governing of entire nations — bizarrely abandoned during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that’s a rant for another day.
The recent US election was, once again, a choice between the lesser of two evils, an inescapable reality of the two-party system trap USA fell into two centuries ago. There is no game-theoretical way out of that hole without changing the rules of the game, so get to it already.
YouTube: “Top 10 Ways to Unrig the System” | Robert Reich
Trump: Dismissable at a glance
Those who don’t exactly appreciate him but still see him as the lesser of two evils are so plainly wrong that much of the outside world is left reeling, trying to make sense of it.
Along with 96% of Danes, I’m in the Never-Trump camp, so it was not a close call for me. This is regardless of the fact that Harris offered no solid leadership or solutions, was sorely lacking on countless fronts, and ultimately just offered more of the same dead-end policies leading to ruin — she’s still the no-brainer choice. Against Trump, it’s a no bar to clear.
But, it seems like a lot of people would rather burn down the house and just get it all over with than continue along a dead-end path. I fear they will be getting their wish.
Non-stop nonsense
What perplexes me is that I still hear people discussing the latest crazy thing he’s said as if it’s anything but meaningless noise.
Listen: He’s a bullshitter. Pardon the expletive, but it’s a technical term, and the distinction is important.
A bullshitter isn’t a liar. They don’t bother to concoct a believable story to try to fool you. They drown you in shit. I’m not even kidding. It’s an actual strategy, taken right from Goebbels’ playbook.
“Flood the zone with shit.” - Steve Bannon
The entire playbook has been pulped and remade into flyers imprinted with the latest propaganda. To win the game, they broke the rules.
It takes ten times the effort to refute a lie than to utter it. If the liar is permitted to continue ad nauseam, eventually you become overwhelmed and subdued, losing your will to live, your life spark snuffed out. You drown. In shit.
The body temperature of a chicken
Also, if you repeat a lie enough times, people start believing it. This is the entire point of propaganda, still utilised throughout the entire world to some degree or another (Denmark included). It’s the very basis of branding, literally necessary for conspicuous consumption. Those aren’t manly Marlboro’s; they are Cancer Stix™.
As hardwired human fallibility is what makes us susceptible to it, this strategy will keep creeping back into our lives unless we preempt it. The best defence against advertising politics media bias propaganda is pre-bunking people in an attempt to inoculate them against disinformation, but as our educational, governmental and journalistic institutions fail us more and more, we are becoming increasingly vulnerable to mis- and disinformation. One can make a very fair case that Trump won thanks to the now-dominant right-wing media more than happy to play as dirty as it takes.
With the online landscape sufficiently enshittified in the pursuit of capitalistic goals, it turns out that good information doesn’t float; it sinks to the bottom. The rapidly growing amount of AI sludge and the incoming ocean of deepfakes will soon make this so much worse that it alone threatens to make the internet worse than worthless.
Words cannot describe how serious this issue alone is for mental health, politics, and the fate of nations. We are moving too slowly to solve it. Once again, it all comes back to human nature and the capitalistic trap we have fallen into, devolving us all into unhappy materialists walking off the cliff into a volcano, like zombie lemmings. (At least for us weirdos; other cultures might differ).
Worthless promises by a morally bankrupt person
Trump uttered thirty thousand public lies during his last presidency. 78% of his public statements were factually incorrect.
As an utter imbecile who knows nothing and understands even less, Trump doesn’t even know himself when he is lying. I’m not even sure he qualifies for the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s more a failure of character. But that’s not even the problem. The problem is his voters don’t care.
But I should be careful and heed my own advice. It’s a mistake to try to analyse people with malignant personality disorders as if they were normal human beings. Especially those intent on exploiting you. If you know one, run. Trump’s prosecutors dropped the ball and the consequences will be felt by all.
Trump’s non-stop nonsensical noise is why it’s hard to figure out what flavour of wannabe dictator one should classify him as. As a bullshitter, he’s not even trying to make sense. But even having that discussion is losing the war by wasting valuable time and resources, as it distracts from the problem itself: his continued existence in the public sphere and the fact that half the nation is bamboozled by him.
He’s just a mess with no rhyme or reason other than unbridled, delusional narcissism and greed, extenuated by a laundry list of other deplorable personality traits, devoid of human virtue beyond, possibly, once tossing a half-eaten Big Mac to a starving dog.
He’s a populist who craves being loved, feared and admired. He doesn’t care who he’s speaking to or what is coming out of his mouth as long as it wins him power and influence. He’d happily flip to the Left if that worked better. No governing principles or morals are guiding him; he’s empty inside. I shudder to think of what childhood trauma he must have suffered to end up like this.
All of this was blatantly obvious many years ago, so nothing has changed. In this way, he is predictable and scarily easy to take advantage of, and Putin will continue playing him like a fiddle.
His reelection did not surprise me in the slightest. To me, it was obvious. I could also lean against the bookmaker’s odds, pegging him at 61% to win the last time I checked pre-election.
Bookmakers are smarter than you
Bookmakers’ most important job is to get the odds right, or they go extinct. Thanks to their inbuilt advantage of charging a fee to accept your wager (AKA juice, or vigorish), thriving bookmakers aren’t examples of survivorship bias, unlike the 1% of hedge funds that can show what appears to be a consistent trading edge over a couple decades.
Their thriving is also a testament to our foolishness. Many people don’t really grasp how bookmaking works. They think they do, but they don’t. They intuit the wrong conclusion and forego activating the thinking brain, so driven by their emotions that even when the common-sense truth is staring them in the face, they double down on their misconceptions, often leading to disaster and ruin. Cognitive dissonance. I’m a broken record on that one. (It’s a bit deeper than that, as evidenced by all of humanity being fundamentally clueless at probabilistic reasoning until Pascal invented an entire mathematical branch to solve it in 1654).
It’s a damn shame, because — besides going broke — they are missing a golden opportunity to improve their understanding of the world.
Approaching reality
A strong bookmaker sets the odds so that both sides are a losing proposition, juice included — eg. giving 1.98 odds on both sides of a 50/50 coin flip. If people pile onto one side of the bet, so be it. The bookie knows the true odds and sticks by them. Their coffers are basically unlimited, and you’re free to bet as much as you want against them.
They can take it. They want it. They love it.
Because correctly estimating the true odds on all the bets they offer is so hard, most bookies function by arbitrage, hedging their bets so that they can’t lose. To accomplish this, when too much money is bet on one side for their liking, they lower that side’s odds and raise the other, tempting people to place money there instead. Ideally, they end up in a situation where they’re indifferent as to who wins.
Professional betters tend to learn the hard way that they should shy away from unflinching, world-dominating bookmakers that are a bit too good at nailing the true odds — and ballsy enough to stick by them, refusing to offer profitable bets on the under-appreciated side just to lower their variance.
Instead, whenever an arbitrage bookie starts hedging so much that they offer profitable bets on the unpopular side of a bet appears, professional betters (including other bookmakers) pound on it until its odds are recalibrated back towards the true odds. How they know when to do that is perhaps a story for another day.
A self-correcting truth-seeking mechanism
Effectively, bookmakers outsource the fine-tuning of the odds to the wisdom of crowds — which doesn’t exactly refer to how groups make better decisions the bigger they are (on the contrary!), but rather the domain of making very good estimates.
For a bookie, it’s good enough for them to spitball the odds in the original offering, keep the betting limits low, and then let public opinion calibrate them as quickly as possible. As money begins piling evenly on both sides they can be more confident in the crowd’s estimate and can lower the juice (up the odds) if they want to attract more action from people.
To summarise: as a bookie, sticking to the true odds is the most profitable, but also the hardest. To guard against their own uncertainty about the true odds, as well as against the Risk of Ruin, they can choose to just aim to get an even amount of money placed on both sides, profiting solely from the juice. In the latter case, it doesn’t even matter if the odds are accurate or not; they profit regardless.
The entire system functions as a self-correcting mechanism that ensures bookmakers make a small but sure profit. In the long run, they, and a very few astute professional gamblers, all make a very good living — offa you.
Therefore — and here we get to my point — when you see a side pegged at 61% to win in a massive betting market, you can safely assume it isn’t an underdog to win (ie below 50%). If it were inaccurate enough to beat the spread, someone would have bet on the other side before it verged so far from the true odds.
If you believe the 61% favourite is actually the underdog, it’s basically your opinion against all the pros and vast corporations guided by true expertise, oceans of data (right down to what the weather will be at each polling location), AI-guided finetuning, the wisdom of crowds and empirical proof that they know what they’re doing. I wouldn’t bet on it.
Tragically, after people hear this round-about explanation of why their opinion is bound to be wrong many of them make the reflexive comment that “but experts are wrong all the time, like when Hillary lost in 2016 despite being a huge favourite at the bookmakers”, usually prompting a lecture from me on how dice work. I’ll spare you here.
Take advantage of expertise
Bookmakers such as insurers thus function as the canary in the coal mine for the world at large. One does well to pay attention to people whose survival depends on them respecting the true probabilities of things, AKA reality.
I’ve mentioned insurers before when it comes to respecting their estimates of the effects of climate change, but it really is one of those common-sense things people tend to bungle until they go broke disrespecting reality — for example, when they keep rebuilding homes in the path of hurricanes while complaining that insurance is becoming unaffordable.
So, do yourself a favour and pay attention to bookmakers, insurers, and people like Nate Silver, because their estimates are almost certainly better than yours. But also remember that they must have Skin in the Game for you to have good reason to trust them, so when technocrats don’t let their children get high on their own supply, look at what they do and not what they say.
The key takeaway here is my strong recommendation to respect expert opinion, even when it seems or feels wrong – which usually happens because you don’t like it (on top of not understanding it). Perhaps especially when it feels wrong. To do so, embrace some humility and apply common sense. (Anti-vaxxers, this is where you should really listen up before you hurt yourselves).
Cognitive biases such as wishful thinking, narrative fallacy, optimism bias and cognitive dissonance are all psychological mechanisms that (probably) evolved for one thing — survival on the savannah — but downright malfunction in a lot of modern-day situations.
And by the way, fun fact: Intelligent people are just as susceptible to these cognitive biases as anyone else — in fact, their intelligence just makes them better at finding angles to defend their misunderstandings.
If nothing else, reflect upon this nugget of wisdom, for it explains a lot about why everyone (else) is crazy:
Being wrong feels exactly like being right.
Ignore liars
Similarly, when you know for a fact that the sender of information is a habitual liar with a long history of deception, take it into account. I mean, duh.
Since Trump spews so much garbage and cannot be trusted, you might as well ignore everything he says. There is no point in analysing it, even when it sounds scary. Really. Life is too short. In Denmark, the best he would get would be a few coins tossed to him in pity as he rambles on a street corner somewhere.
He own base want his lies to be true so badly that they disregard overwhelming evidence to the contrary. (There’s them unreliable emotions again.) What can one say? The reasons Trump can become the president of the USA but wouldn’t be trusted to run a McDonalds in Denmark are many, but one of them is that most Americans are materialists at heart, and Trump, therefore, reflects the soul of the nation.
The laundry list of problems is beyond the scope of this post, but ultimately, in my opinion Trump is a symptom of poor cultural values.
A popular reason for his win is the cost of living crisis, which I am extremely sympathetic to, but I urge you guys to eat the rich instead of voting a felon into power whose only certain accomplishment over the next four years will be to make rich people richer at everyone else’s expense.
This was all entirely predictable, really; incumbents always lose post-inflation. Nobody pays much attention to politics in America; you can’t expect them to be sensible about it once every few years. Oh well.
“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” - Plato
Honestly, I can barely blame Americans for being so fed up with what’s on offer on the opposing side that they hold their nose and vote for chaos. Trump might do something right purely by accident or be hangry enough to not pick up the next time a dictator calls for support.
The Democratic Party is long overdue for a complete rebirth. They missed their chance at value-driven leadership when they sabotaged Bernie Sanders’ campaign just to hold onto power a tiny bit longer, disappointing literally everyone. If there’s any silver lining to Trump’s victory at all, it’s that the Dems of the Clinton era have at long last been relegated to the dung heap of history where they belong, and whatever we see next will be a phoenix rising from the ashes, the politics of a new generation.
Unfortunately, the next four woefully misgoverned years will serve to accelerate the impending collapse of modern industrial civilisation, beginning with financial & commercial collapse and a rapid and drastic lowering of living standards so large we’ll struggle to avoid societal collapse. This is a very scary time in a hopelessly polarised nation founded on violence, brimming with guns and extremely low on social cohesion. The movie Civil War (2024) is unnerving not for its fake violence but for how frighteningly plausible the story is.
My two American brothers fled the US after Trump was elected the first time, and I’m afraid it’s time for my sister and her family to follow suit. Longterm, the USA will be doing very well compared to a world falling apart, with ample space and resources, protected geographically and with the remnants of the world’s mightiest military. It’s the descent into the next equilibrium that will be painful, scary, and dangerous given the current state of affairs there.
We’re at the breaking point
What is most shocking to me is that so many Americans see Trump and like what they see. It’s the revering of all his deplorable character traits that really blows your mind.
We have really gone off the deep end here. This is a new level of low, an abandonment of basic human decency. The norm violations are so egregious that one can’t believe what one is witnessing.
This is people wanting to win so badly that they’ll excuse anything, do anything.
When one, f.ex., points out he is verifiably lying and deceiving, they typically reply, “Yeah, so what?” and launch into some kind of whataboutism. Suggesting we deal with their complaints about the Left in due course falls on deaf ears. To be fair, the failure of the Left to do exactly that is their fundamental blunder. They are also lost, just in a different way.
Still, if you choose to celebrate ignorence and live in the La-La Land of Alternative Facts — proudly, no less — there is no way to talk to you, reason with you, connect with you, or compromise with you. In the end, it becomes difficult to sympathise with you and tempting to stop caring about you. This choice is, ultimately, on you. I get that it feels good to stick it to the arrogant college-educated elites, but I’m not sure you’re winning the way you think you are.
US politics of today aren’t the traditional, everlasting conflict of people with opposing moral values, such as the issue of the sanctity of a fetus vs. a woman’s human being’s right to choose. The presidential debates are beyond farcical. Where are the adults? Audience included: how are these the best candidates you can put forward? How are you not openly mocking them both?
It has devolved into a disagreement about reality itself, a celebration of intellectual laziness, and sheer tribalism. It’s a breakdown of communication and understanding so extreme that it can only end badly.
I don’t know how to move forward from that, and that’s a problem because when talking ends, violence begins.
As I’ve mentioned before, without a shared reality, we have nothing. We live in increasingly separate worlds, and the bookmakers are showing a Calexit to be more and more likely.
A great deal of Trump voters are obviously decent people, victims of circumstance and brainwashing. But despite their understandable qualms about Harris, this was not a remotely close call. Adopting the appropriate balance of “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they are doing” and applying an appropriate amount of culpability to bamboozled people is a tricky one.
In personal relationships, one must set boundaries, but in politics, walking away from the table is not an option.
How did we get here?
For my part, I desperately reread Jonathan Haidt’s excellent The Righteous Mind, wherein he, via Moral Foundations Theory, describes why the right enjoys an in-built advantage when it comes to politics (it’s easier to pander to their emotions) and why they vote as they do (they value the moral values of Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity over Care/Compassion; the Left vice versa).
His study on victimless crimes exposes the irrationality of people’s moral opinions: how they are merely instinctive value judgements based on our mammalian brains, evolved by nature and moulded by culture, often leading to decisions that lead to objectively worse outcomes.
Trump’s strategy — entirely accidental, it’s just who he is — is to disregard rational thought entirely and speak directly to primitive animal instinct in people. Selfishness, greediness, tribalism, short-termism, survival. Shoot all the perceived threats first, and you won’t have to answer any questions later.
To proudly get behind a verified bullshitter, you have to check a number of pathetic boxes, including being practically devoid of humility, intellectual honesty and any willingness to have a reasonable conversation or debate. You have to be blind to the empirical fact that selfish behaviour is effective on the individual level, but cooperation and altruism are effective on the group selection level. You must fundamentally disagree that we are all in this together. “Life is a power struggle, don’t you see?” You have to abandon human virtues, embrace our vices, and fully give in to the Dark Side. Again: the Left has a lot of reckoning to do also.
Looking for answers
Nations based on materialistic dog-eat-dog individualism self-implode, as we are witnessing, while socialist nations — a word Americans don’t even understand anymore — thrive, as we see in Scandinavia. To me, the problem seems very cultural.
Personally, I look for deeper explanations by studying people’s behaviour via behavioural science, psychology, sociology, Darwinism, and neuroscience, each of them going one step deeper in explaining why we behave as we do.
Other books relevant to the topic of USA’s descent that I highly recommend:
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Timothy Snyder) (PDF)
Post-Truth (Lee McIntyre)
Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America (John Michael Greer); succulent prose, superb audiobook narration
I’m no expert
I’ll gladly admit it: I’m no political expert. I don’t care for politics, and my naive opinions are neither deep nor original, so I should probably refrain from making more of a fool of myself. There’s more than enough commentary to go around, f.ex. Chris Hedges, Sam Harris and Sam Kriss (strong language), the last two delivering some well-deserved scathing criticism of the Harris campaign.
This isn’t meant to be a political blog. And the world has much more serious problems, believe it or not (Read Part 1 of 5: Denial). It was just hard to let this mini-collapse go unremarked upon.
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a sultan. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish proverb
Since Trump and his cronies are not just utterly unqualified to lead the nation but so obviously intend to carve it up and hold a dumpster firesale, and since his puppeteers don’t exactly have the nation’s best interests at heart either, the only question is how much damage they will do before they’re out of office again. It’s never looked so grim, but I guess we’ve been saying that about USA for a while now, haven’t we…
But I’m calling it
I’m afraid this is, most likely, it. This will be broadly recognised as the beginning of The End for the US Empire. Thinkers saw it coming, of course.
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Carl Sagan, 1995)
Trump will go down in history as The. Worst. US. President. Ever. (Wanna bet?)
I don’t believe he is an evil fascist at heart. I do think that he will contribute significantly to hasten the descent of USA and quite possibly pave the way for some form of a modern version of fascism.
If it’s any consolation, The End was coming either way. Trump’s just putting his big fat foot on the accelerator.
PS. Reflecting upon why I wrote this blog is interesting. What am I doing? I’m appealing to my in-group but alienating others. I’m venting my frustrations, but to what avail? I’m practising putting thoughts down on paper a screen, and that’s good, at least.
Ultimately, I think I’m exploring the conflicting experience of being a highly rational personality type certain that the very notion of free will is logically incoherent Nonsense, but also being confined to my own emotional, ignorant, fallible, biased and irrational meat prison of limited insight, understanding, and emotional self-regulation abilities, as vulnerable to fruitless moral outrage as anyone. Exploring this inescapable incompatability will probably be an underlying theme of this blog.
Finally: If you’re a Trump fan and remain subscribed, I appreciate you for bearing with me.
To support my free blog, please like or share it. Thank you.
I very much appreciate your writing and ideas. They resonate with many of the insights I’ve arrived at, in my own intellectual “descent(?)” during these past years.
I sympathize with your postscript……Keep writing. There are connections being made through these forums. There are minds being opened (how many? Enough? In time?)
Whatever. Nobody really knows what the hell is going on, anyways……keep writing.
I think that the vote for Trump is quite obviously a subconscious desire to watch the system burn. The fact that the best America had on offer were those two candidates and that Kamala lost to Trump says a lot. They are manifestations of a culture and civilization in steep decline, but more than that - Trump, in my opinion, was an incredibly successful psyop. He was a controlled opposition put there to act as the strongman that patriots would get behind to go to war with Iran or whatever boogeyman overseas. This election cycle was probably the most successful in making people believe their vote matters. It put nearly the entire country fully to sleep, everyone focusing on Trump, while the true enemies stayed hidden at the Fed Reserve and BIS. The hypnosis has allowed the military-industrial complex to continue its globalization games of resource grabs, USD hegemony, and government overthrow. Kamala isn't perceived as strong enough to play those bullshit games, so they let the Zionist Trump win.