Got Paranoia? Barton Gellman's Nightmare

Via Robert Graham. 

So yesterday was the day of Barton Gellman's nightmare 3 November scenario in The Atlantic ("The Election That Could Break America"), for the series of developments that will lead to a worse crisis than you've successfully imagined:

• Biden wins the election, but not in anything like a landslide, thanks in part to the suppression of Black and youthful votes, and, crucially, not so the networks can call on the night of 3 November itself, as the in-person votes get counted and the vast number of mail-in ballots take longer—perhaps Trump is actually well ahead in the count as we're going to bed, in a case of the "red mirage" reflecting the difference in the way Democrats and Republicans are voting in the pandemic;
• Trump refuses to concede when the election is called, claiming vast fraud in the mail-in vote, as he's been preparing to do in speech after speech since 2016;
• an army of Republican lawyers slows the count down to glacier speed, contesting every postmark and signature, and around the most contested states disorder spreads, beginning with 2000-stye "Brooks Brothers riots" and devolving into competing demonstrations with fistfights at the margin;
• Trump declares an emergency, and DHS forces take custody of the uncounted ballots;
• by 35 days after the election, on 8 December, when states are required to submit their lists of electors, certain Republican state legislatures where Biden is now ahead in the still unfinished count, under cover of the suspicion of fraud spread by Trump forces over the past four years, move to name their own sets of Trump-loyal electors, as nothing in the Constitution prevents them from doing (the tradition of naming the electors on the basis of the state's popular vote is one of those norms we haven't been able to stop Trump from breaking, enshrined in most state laws, but in this horror movie, the legislatures can overcome that)—think Texas, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, but also North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania;

The Problem with Paranoia

Silly dustups with people from our side spreading the claim that Trump stole $2.8 million from veterans' organizations, or, more realistically, raised the money for veterans' organizations and kept it for himself, which I agree would come to the same thing. Including the extremely estimable David Atkins, who put it in the Washington Monthly:

 it should still leave us speechless that only a few days ago the President of the United States was held liable by judge of defrauding veterans to the tune of millions of dollars via a fake charity he used for vainglorious personal and campaign expenses....

Only that's just not what happened.

that's not quite what he did. His campaign gave vet orgs money that he claimed was from the Foundation. https://t.co/ctXg5JMmFF the portrait and other stuff were funded by Other People's Money, but not vets'.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) November 11, 2019

It was money that he raised ostensibly for vets, but didn't use for them.

— David Atkins (@DavidOAtkins) November 11, 2019

For the Record: Channel Your Paranoia

Not waving but drowning, via Dr. Sophie Hay.

I went to a lot of political meetings in my youth, which is as I've noted somewhere one reason I can never truly get behind Bernie (every meeting had one, barking a bit, a few years older than the rest of us and deeply convinced of his rightness, never entertaining an idea he hadn't already had, dismissive of the hippies and shouting down the women), and it came to be a personal signature thing I would do to tell the others to "channel your paranoia"—limit the range of things you're going to be panicky about to those you've got a plan for, not that you're accepting the other awfulnesses, but you're not going to look as if you're desperate and drowning.

Nobody really paid any attention, usually. But while I'm up, I want to post a little experimentation I've been doing on the Twitter on the tone with which one talks about Trump, meant in the first place to sound less "hysterical" without minimizing the horror of what's going on:

#EmperorTrump https://t.co/DsqNSqlQc8

— Collusion Delusion (@Yastreblyansky) March 31, 2019

Nevertheless the harm he can do while failing is immense, to children https://t.co/ensN2ySpEp https://t.co/QAr48vdfVr, environment https://t.co/EWVbGzTwiJ, farmers https://t.co/khE3cscimK really appalling

— Collusion Delusion (@Yastreblyansky) March 31, 2019

Got paranoia? San Bernardino edition

Moses and the Messengers from Canaan. Giovanni Lanfranco, 1621-24, Getty Center via Wikimedia Commons.

Last night's post (wound up while I was trying to watch President Obama and cook a family meal—yeah, we eat late, like Spaniards—at the same time) was meant to be about Jonah Goldberg, not the San Bernardino incident, and I don't feel happy with it, though it has scored a pretty substantial audience by my pathetic standards, as a matter of fact. I feel it wasn't funny, as Suzan noted in comments; I think because you can't make it funny and about Goldberg; you can't make it not about San Bernardino, because that's too large and Goldberg is too small.

On the other hand, Goldberg's prose is waddling around in the context of a real journalistic question about what happened on Friday. Whatever preconceptions you bring to it, it doesn't make any sense; it's composed of two halves that don't fit together.

Got paranoia? Update

Toilet in Tobermory, Ontario, via Dima's Corner.

I haven't wanted to dive into this toilet for quite a long time, because it's really not my subject, but I happened to notice a silly falsehood from Mark Rumold for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, at Professor Cole's place:

Reports today in the New York Times and ProPublica confirm what EFF’s Jewel v. NSA lawsuit has claimed since 2008—that the NSA and AT&T have collaborated to build a domestic surveillance infrastructure, resulting in unconstitutional seizure and search of of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Americans’ Internet communications.

Well, no, they don't confirm that at all. Yes, the tight relationship between NSA and AT&T seems to be demonstrated, but as the Times introduction to the documents makes clear,

The curious case of the busted bunker busters

Bowling Bombs. From Freaking News.

One of the more arcane bits of controversy arising from last week's visit from Binyamin Netanyahu to Washington is the question of whether anything happened on the issue of the so-called bunker buster bombs made in America (Lockheed) for which Netanyahu yearns, as something that could be used to blow up Iran's underground nuclear facilities, should he find it necessary to do that.

It started for me at one or another digital hangout where a mildly paranoid participant was frantically informing people that Obama had decided to equip Netanyahu with all the bombs [jump]

Is America really Pakistan?

While our president was going around last May making nice about all those Arab revolutionaries bringing their governments down, guess what the Pentagon was up to? According to closely reasoned and evidenced reporting from Nick Turse at TomDispatch,

[a]s state security forces across the region cracked down on democratic dissent, the Pentagon also repeatedly dispatched American troops on training missions to allied militaries there.  During more than 40 such operations with names like Eager Lion and Friendship Two that sometimes lasted for weeks or months at a time, they taught Middle Eastern security forces the finer points of counterinsurgency, small unit tactics, intelligence gathering, and information operations -- skills crucial to defeating popular uprisings...

Now, what exactly is up with that? Should we be applying our standard left-paranoid analysis to this? I.e., (1) the interests of our ruling class, the 1% if you like, are aligned with those of the familiar dictators Ben Ali and Mubarak and so on; (2) the U.S. government, as the "management committee of the bourgeoisie" or agency for carrying out ruling class interests, inevitably opposes the democratic revolutions; and (3) Obama does his job of expressing the natural pro-revolutionary sentiments of the 99% to distract us from what is really happening.

But I'd like to sketch out an alternative way of looking at it that might be a little less boring and a little smarter, and still "of the left"--and indeed the seeds of a whole bigfat theory of democracy and power.

Benevolent dictator Wotan figures it out: God can't give people free will, they have to take it. But won't that make trouble for the government? Hey, kid, why do you think they call it Götterdämmerung?