The King of America

It’s You, Bro. You’re the King of America. Quick Thoughts on the Trump Assassination Attempt and Other Things. Also Biden gave up the nomination as I was writing this.

Where I was when the Attempted Assassination Happened

I’m on Substack way too much, but surprisingly not during the assassination attempt.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a total information junky degenerate. I’m always doing other stuff at the same time. Think of Angelica’s mom from Rugrats. Which, we can all agree, is way worse.

I’m one of those people that’s constantly on the move, on calls, taking my phone in and out of my pocket like a gunslinger, shooting emails, or going on walks and listening to podcasts. It would probably be better if I wasn’t splitting my attention so much but… I lied. I am an information junkie.

Still, I could stand to not have access to the rest of humanity via the internet for a few hours a week. Last week, I announced my intention to unplug for a few hours. By the way, this need to let everyone know I’m logging off is also a sign that I am on here too much.

I took my son to the park and walked around, very proudly not using my cell phone at all. Hyperbole aside, I’m trying to squeeze in as much solo time with him as I can before his brother gets here in September. We’ve been having father son trips two or three times a week. This also gives my wife some much needed time to unwind as she doesn’t have the release valve of posting about buckets of Spahgetti on Substack like I do. Late pregnancy can be stressful.

Believe it or not, I also experience stress. Especially lately with trying to prepare for a long paternity leave. In addition to my full calendar, I’m having to do my least favorite thing, which is assemble Power Point decks of “Things to do for the Next Five Months.” If you’re in Projects, you need to continuously show how what you’re doing is creating some kind of positive return or the Corporate Scissor God will find you. If people work for you, you need to be extra on the ball with this stuff. My stress usually takes the form of dumb jokes that are only funny to me. Here are some of those images if you didn’t see.

Buckets of spaghetti should be a thing the same way we have buckets of chicken, right?

The park was a great relief. Quiet, which I needed. We did the playground first but he got bored quick. He likes to walk around and check stuff out, just like his old man. Holding hands, Dutch and I walked on a trail by a lake. I made sure to tell him about all the leaves and trees we saw, which he immediately associated with The Land Before Time.

“Twee Staw,” he said.

We found a blackberry bush so we stopped and ate some, which reminds me I also need to make him aware that “poisonous” exists as a concept.

These are the best days of my life. Full stop. Once he gets older and moves out, I will want these days back with desperation. I’ll spend a dry season waiting for my grandkids to show up and I’m putting money into savings today to help him get a head start on his life so I hopefully won’t have to wait too long for him to get married. You don’t get it until you have kids, but you love them so much it’s like a dagger in your heart. They connect you to the whole world. It’s this immediate, arresting thing.

I was appreciating all of that when he looked at me with the biggest, most beautiful smile, and said, “I poop!”

So I picked him up to carry him back to the Prius and change his diaper. He threw a tantrum because he loves the water, but was mostly over it by the time we had hoofed the half mile back to the car with him over my shoulder. He’s only two but already over three feet by a good margin, so it’s like I’m constantly wrestling with Frodo Baggins. I opened the trunk, laid out the diaper changing supplies and was in the middle of cleaning him up when some random guy announced.

“Someone shot Trump!”

I thought, Well, here is some other shit for me to think about.

Kids are also great because they don’t let you dwell on things.

So, here’s my best thinking on on assassination in general. Per usual this will have a long digression:

On January 8, 2011, I was delayed in going to a local Safeway in Tucson because I was looking for packing tape. I’d stayed up late reading the night before, dropped my kindle in a drowsy moment, and cracked the screen. Amazon was kind enough to replace it for me and gave me a return label. All I needed to do was put it in an box. I found a box right away. Except I couldn’t find the packing tape. Fifteen minutes later, the tape wound up being somewhere in the garage way up high. I got in the car to go to Safeway, turned on the radio, and a panicked voice announced that Gabby Gifford had been shot. She’d been holding an event right next to that same Safeway.

If not for the missing tape, I would have been right there.

You naturally wonder “why?” when something like this happens. You want evil to be this thing with edges that you can pick up and wholly remove from the world. If you could only get rid of x or y or z then everything would be perfect all the time. Don’t get me wrong, we should try to reduce evil as much as we can, but we shouldn’t forget that evil is… built in, shall we say. It doesn’t need you to make it. Evil can happen all on its own.

I watched some of Jared Loughner’s YouTube channel before it was taken down. He was the shooter in the Gabby Giffords case, if you don’t recognize the name. As best I can figure, his ”reason” for shooting Gabby Giffords was some schizophrenic thoughts he had about grammar. People tried to dress it up after that, but it was something about plurality, and the government, and it didn’t make much sense. It all struck me as convoluted excuse-making. He’d started with the desire to kill and worked backwards to figure out something that would make it okay.

My guess is that we’ll find the same with this shooter. Some kid, pushing away the love of his parents, looking for some way to be important and relevant in the world. Building his own made up little reality around himself. Then he steals one of his father’s guns and goes out and tries to write his name in the headlines with someone else’s blood.

The zeitgeist of our present moment can be summed up as a large group of people loudly declaring that they have the exact the right amount of mental illness to not be fully responsible for their own actions, but also not enough mental illness that you can reasonably take away their right to make decisions for themselves. I call this the Goldilocks Zone of Accountability, where you are both free to act and free of the burden that comes along with the consequences of your actions.

Like most things, there’s some truth to this.

Some. Like grain of sand or kernel of rice levels of “some.”

I’ve known lots of crazy people. Most of them don’t want to hurt anybody. They mostly want to be left alone and I’m happy to find some context that’s safe for them and everyone else and leave them alone there. I’ve also met crazy people who hurt someone because they truly believed they were morally obliged to do so. And then lots of people happy for an excuse. My frustration is that it all gets lumped together as one thing. This guy chose this.

I wish that dumb kid was alive. I wish someone had thought to knock his lights out when he was wandering around with a ladder and a rifle. Mostly for his parents’ sake because it’s what I’d want for my kid in that situation. It would be a better future if some overworked, stressed out, prison psychologist was able to help him see why you can’t go around shooting people because you don’t like them. And it’s a better world if his parents can come see him in prison, however dreary and depressing it might seem.

My feeling on politicians in general remains that I try to like everyone as a person, but really think we need to start evaluating their performance based on measurable things. I don’t want a speech. I want a chart showing a number going up or down. I hear this phrase all the time that drives me up a wall “customer of the government.” Jon Stewart, who I loved when I was a kid, never stops using it. “The government needs to serve its customers.” No, I am not a customer of the government. I am its owner and its sole purpose for being, along with every other citizen. I don’t need to vote for someone as a substitute father figure. I want them to behave as responsible administrators of public resources. However, some credit is definitely due to Trump in this situation.

I don’t deny I got a primal thrill to see President Trump standing up with blood on his face, raising his hand in the air. The man is a fighter and a showman in his bones. When I finally watched the clip I noticed the first thing he actually paused for was to get his shoes. Presentation was the first thing on his mind. I think that helps people contextualize a lot of his other behaviors. For good and ill, the guy doesn’t understanding losing. That day, that trait matched the moment perfectly.

This has given people a lot of anxiety about the election and Biden. The Democrats have tied their own noose here in a lot of ways, due primarily to a total inability to reign in the fringe elements of their party. There’s a group of Democrats who have ceded everything people from fifteen years ago would have called “a normal basic element of life” as “far right wing” and that’s been a cancer to the party. Biden should have declined the nomination for a second term and barring that I don’t really know what else he could have done after that point. (UPDATE: okay, so he just announced he’s dropping out. This feels like a desperate “catch a falling knife” type of situation as I don’t know who is in the stable of candidates that isn’t less popular than Biden but my gut has the sense it’s Newsom even though I think the rules say it has to be Harris. Going to continue on as if this hadn’t happened for the fun of seeing how this plays out) They’ll try lots of things now, but my guess is they won’t be effective.

There’s a fringe on the Republican side, of course, but less effective in recent years as since they tend to be more effectively challenged by the institutions. Still, power is shifting all around and the future looks interesting. My hope is for creative destruction. A lot our institutions are fake. A lot of the hope you get sold is bullshit. Let them collide with each other, and what’s left will be what is strong. We will benefit.

Just so you know where my bias lays, I’m pro tech. That’s the best dial we have for “More goodness.” You can put me in the Marcus Andressen camp. People having more money to do more stuff to solve more problems makes everybody’s life better. And I’m pro kids. Whatever helps kids have good lives, protects kids, I’m there. Whenever I’ve actually done something in my life and not just “blogged” about it, it’s because a kid was involved. Even the other stuff I’m really big on, like due process, impartiality, etc are downstream of those two. My loyalty to any party is even further downstream from that. I usually encourage people to look at their own interests in the same way. Don’t let someone screw you over or make you feel bad for wanting the things you care about to move forward.

I’ve never hated Trump and have often found myself in the camp of people who sigh and say “yes, he did something like that but nothing at all like how you’re describing it and it’s not necessarily out of precedent with other presidents, although I wish none of them did it.” You can not like the guy and admit “no new foreign wars” was a nice thing. My guess is he’s taking this one home. I’m not rubbing that in anyone’s face. It’s just my best guess. He might also be able to bring about the only realistic end to war in Ukraine that we’re likely to ever see. I don’t like that Putin invaded, but I’m not wiling to see every last Ukrainian dead over it, either. I don’t know what any other off ramp looks like that for that thing.

Here’s hoping all of this serves as a wake up call to the Democrats. We should all want two functional parties to balance each other out. If you lose and the other guy wins, be the most admirable opponent possible. I’m not holding my breath, though.

The King of America

I had the idea for a character called “The King of America” from two places as best I can recall. I saw a man at an Arby’s once almost get into a fight over a perceived slight on his personal honor. He used some flowery language while taking off his shirt to throw down. He was fearless, even against a larger opponent.

I remember thinking, “Damn, you don’t ever want to insult the Chevalier of the Arby’s Parking Lot.”

I tend to be pretty easy going, brush off insults without a lot of fuss, and always worry that drift too far into the direction of “not caring at all.” Like, if someone yells at me I don’t shrink away or prepare for battle. My internal thought is usually less “I feel bad” or “I’m mad” and more “wow, this person has no emotional self-control.”

Still, I admire someone a bit if they’re willing to throw down the gauntlet at a lowly Arby’s, whereas my rule tends to be “Make sure a judge would think what you’re doing is awesome.” Which hasn’t happened yet.

The other inspiration was when I became aware of the modern Monarchist movement, which I guess I had kind of heard of before but forgotten about.

So I started to put those two things together and wondered what the King of America would even be like. It made me think of Paul Bunyan and a lesser known figure called Strap Buckner who is such a good wrestler that he kicks the Devil’s ass by tying his tail to a cloud. Surely, any proper King of America, upholding the ideals of the nation, would use his power to force people to be free. He would decree that all citizens have to take up the responsibility of self-governance. He would organize them such that they would continuously be forced to organize themselves. Then he, being infinitely wise, would just want to be some guy and child out because being a king is the worst anti-luxury possible if you think about it right because none of your time is your own.

So I did what all kings of the past have done, and just decided to start calling myself the King of America and hoped everyone else would go along with it. I mean, that’s where all kings come from, right? If I’m not, why do they ask me who the President should be every four years? Why are there armed guards waiting to come to my house the moment I pick up a phone? How come I have electricity delivered to me through copper wires and hot water through copper pipes, that I so nobly share with the rest of the nation? You may notice by these definitions that you are also the King of America.

These are healthy myths. Much healthier I than “I have literally no control over my life, and my one tendency that is a bit autistic means that I’m not accountable for anything.” I can be, wait for it, kind of annoying. Okay. Am I just supposed to never talk to anyone again? That’s who I am as a person. I am kind of annoying. It’s probably better for people to think “Yes, I am the King of the United States. I was born when a bolt of lightning struck the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July, and some say it was the same bolt of lightning that struck Ben Franklin’s kite. You may refer to me as His Purple Mountain Majesty. Everything going right or wrong in this country is my personal responsibility.”

I do feel responsible for this country. I felt responsible when that dumbass kid shot Trump and I felt responsible when that dumbass kid died. I feel responsible when grown adults talk about Biden and Trump like school kids talking about whose dad would win in a fight. I feel responsible when Trump says something untoward. I feel responsible when Biden proposes something really dumb like taxing unrealized gains, which would literally destroy all start-up companies. I mean, if I know that as literally some guy, he has to have an economist who for sure knows that, right?

If we had a boring and better news ecosystem, that you really had to trust because of the way it worked, then the rhetoric on these things wouldn’t reach the energetic levels necessary to excite one psychopath. When I was young, the bullshit newspapers had headlines about “Bat Boy” and alien invasions, and were obviously fake, and everyone thought that was terrible. We had no idea we lived in a utopia. Candidates wouldn’t feel compelled to excite crowd with these statements if there was some actually reliable system people could use. All the news would just be true, or fake and fun like Bat Boy, and all the people would behave honestly because it was in their own selfish best interest. Violations would be low enough for nobody to get bent out of shape over them. And I haven’t actually built the damn thing yet and made it popular so it’s my fault.

Is that megalomaniacal to put myself at the center of all human action that way? Hey, I’m the fucking King of America. And so are you.

If we had really boring but awesome political funding mechanisms, politicians could act more like project managers pushing around resources to make efficient state agencies and then this kid would have had a bunch of meds given to him by a social worker. Scott Alexander recently had a post which I thought was a bit cyclical but correct about how hard it is to overcome the obstacles to take genuinely mentally ill people off the street. And he’s right. But it’s because the mechanisms in our society, like assessing the truth as a group, have broken. Those are the things we use to fix other things. You want to help homeless people with mental illness get off the streets? Fix the news.

I don’t call myself the King of America, even as a joke, because I feel like you owe something to me. I need to get this damn thing out of my head and into the world somehow because I owe it to you.

MORE BAD HEADLINES

Headlines like these are why people don’t trust the news. I’ve heard some people I respect defend these, and I get there’s a steel man position about not wanting to have to retract something later. But to all of that I say “Get fucking real. The word ‘apparent’ exists.”

If you watched that clip for thirty seconds, at bare minimum you could say there was “An Apparent Assassination Attempt.”

I don’t know what to call this kind of mass group action. Well, I do. I call it “Extelligence.” I am a restrained person. My guess is there’s a sort of group suspicion game going on. Nobody has to meet in a dark room wearing red robes. Almost everyone in the traditional print media leans liberal. Everyone in the traditional print media knows everyone in the traditional print media leans liberal. And everyone knows everyone knows, etc.

I think if you talked to any of these people in isolation, they’d be decent, honest, hard-working stiffs doing their best. And if you could put them in a really good FMRI that doesn’t exist yet and read there mind at the moment after the first bullet flew, I bet all of them had a deep guttural response of, “I’m not going to be the first one to write a headline that will help Donald Trump.”

It’s professional and social suicide.

And probably if you spoke with all of them, they’d all agree this is a problem that is causing people to lose trust in the news but that there’s nothing to be done. And also in their case, now that they’ve had time to think, it wasn’t actually that reason at all but it was for everybody else. That’s just how people think.

Enter a Trust Assembly.

First thing that happens is that all of these Headlines get Replaced. People are already building things that do this. Look at this, and tell me it isn’t a big piece of the puzzle for what I’ve been talking about for the last two years. This tool was built to show you how the news can be made more misleading, but didn’t touch on the critical fact: the news is already filtered for you in this manner. What you need, critically, is an anti-propaganda filter. You don’t need spin. You need unspun.

What if at the moment that headline got written, the first thought that went through the head of every journalist wasn’t “I’m not going to be the first one to write a headline that will help Donald Trump” but was instead “I can’t let my Trust Score go down, that’s how I make a living.”

We could fix all of this simply by creating the right sorts of reviews and games of suspicion. Whether one of my emails, comments, or he just figured it out from first principles, I think Elon already understands what the roadmap needs to be.

<div class="substack-post-embed"><p lang="en">He’s going to build it first.

Come on substack, I know you want to leapfrog X.</p><p> - Some Guy</p><a data-comment-link href="https://substack.com/@extelligence/note/c-62672557">Read on Substack</a></div><script async src="https://substack.com/embedjs/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>