The Lamentable Death Of The Long / Short Position

I'll be honest - I don't feel represented by Sanders, Trump or Clinton. I think they all represent the past and I cannot in any way identify with who they are and how they operate. I believe however that Trump is the least bad due to his (possible) disconnection from the narrow establishment, which I'll get into towards the end.

These days I feel that every time people hear an opinion they are not focusing on the statement but rather on where this statement lies on a political axis. They shift the point of what is being said you into a Left / Right pop-psychology battle.

For example I support Trump's victory over Clinton, but not for any of the reasons popularly associated with him. However, if you were to pin me down and ask me what is my impression of Trump using the the language and variants that are en vogue I would say something like the following:

I do not for a second think he is anything but a dangerous narcissist who could easily ride into the White House on a cavalcade of revenge. He appears to value loyalty and he hold grudges. He values family and power, which could indicate low public trust or genuine affection. He speaks like an 8 year old and often arrives on time in the middle of a sentence not knowing how he got there, and then bluffs his way out. He seems spiritually disinterested, compulsively avaricious and materialistic. Individuals like him can be very practical and effective managers, but they can also throw a mean tantrum. He is patriotic. He does not look or sound like an enlightened person.

There are two rays of hope. First, he is 40 years a builder by trade -psychologically he is used constructing rather than destroying. Second I think his nationalism and egotistical desire for legacy will probably motivate him to do well by the USA, but he is surrounded by a Republican clown car of political incompetents. We should be concerned.

So that's that. A patchwork of pop-psychological guesswork arrived at through a TV screen. These are honestly my opinions but I still support him and if you have a minute I will explain why I am comfortable holding these two positions.

I believe that Sanders, Clinton and Trump are old people under the fading spell of a binary form of thinking which is slowly killing our ability to debate issues without labeling people. I've heard Eric Weinstein liken this to mutual fund investing - long bets only, no hedges. Here all the questions are black and white. Are you for multiculturalism or against? Are you for immigration or against? Are you Left or are you Right?

Instead we should attempt to promote nuanced hedge-fund like discussions that contain the long / short positions of a relative value trade.

For example, I'm OK with limited, drip-fed immigration , but I'm against the liberal feminist expression of the "global family". In my view that is not driven by our society's best interest but instead by a rent-seeking elite who are creating a morality play around colonial white-guilt to further their interests. We are not ready for such an ideology and I think our society will either expel this future-myth or be engulfed by its consequences.

15 years ago many of us talked about the conspiracy of global government, where nations would be swept away - our cultures diluted into a milky corporate mono-culture. Terrible. Now we would march right towards it, smiling, because we have been sold a long only position. Either you're for asylum seekers or you're a racist. The long / short position has been removed. It's time to try and stop this. Now you may think it's insane but actually Trump has, in a odd and unexpected way, assisted in this goal. He has widened the Overton Window. What will come through it is anyone's guess.

​The removal of the long / short position is allow​ing​ the Kabuki theatre ​of the rent-seeking elite ​to continue. ​The wrinkled politicians on the rostrum are using inadequate terms​ and bad models. ​We barely listen but our generation is building on those bad models. We are ​becoming increasingly ​Balkanized​. We are ​unwilling to ​​decamp from the safety of our positions - even ​for a moment - even ​to allow for distortion when it is clearly proven to be there.

Some days ago I sent a link to a video to a friend of mine (

). It is a video discussing media bias notably in the two most highly regarded newspapers in the US - the Washington Post (political paper of record) and the New York Times (the Paper of Record). The presenter in the video is a Libertarian / small government YouTuber called Stefan Molyneux. He brands himself as a philosopher and lives off the donations of his viewers (of which there are many) and has an interest in many matters of media, politics and power. He holds extreme views on many issues and his style is not everyone's cup of tea, but the presentation is factual and supported by articles, statistics etc in the comments section below the video. It pertains to the Portman Murphy Counter-Propaganda bill and the conflicts of interest across the media spectrum but focused especially on the New York Times and the Washington Post. The link starts the video at the points of statistics and information (all well supported and documented in the comments section below the video) which I was most keen that he see. He responded:
​
"Very nervous about this guy Stefan Molyneux, he's talking with absolute certainty about quite complex issues...​ i really think this guy has a right wing agenda..."

Here is my response back:

"To be honest I don't share your feeling of nervousness. Nobody has all the answers. Identifying heavily with either side is likely to increase the binary trap for others who might engage with you for opinion, which is precisely what the Fox News / CNN / NYT desire, and it is all that any self-respecting elite rent-seeker would want also.

It's largely irrelevant that Mr Molyneux is the presenter of these facts. I could easily have scraped the sources in the comments section below his video and sent the stats and articles in an email with my own opinions - the facts about the papers and the Bill would remain and you would never have known. But I'm too busy to duplicate it and videos are faster for you to watch.

I feel like you are reluctant to absorb fairly banal facts about a media presentation because I said that I supported Trump (without the time to qualify why) and the speaker in the video is not up your street. You have perceived a right wing [read "complete bastard"] agenda but what I'm trying to say is that it is entirely possible (given the evidence) that you have been fed complete and total bullshit about this man. Just that. Nothing else. If that is possible, then it also possible that you could be mistaken, not because of logical errors or your heart being in the wrong place, but just because the system of media is outputting misinformation on a scale we might not properly comprehend."

My friend then went on to say:
"This guy however is cherry picking the Washington Post and New York Times which are probably the two best publications in America and have done probably the most Pulitzer Prize investigative reporting including Watergate and actually broken open huge stores of national interest.."

Which I responded:
"Best publications in America? That sounds nuts to me but OK... you kinda laid out the point. They do still hold (held?) enormous trust in the eyes of most people. But the days of Woodward & Bernstein are gone man! If they were tabloid rags? No issue. Those papers don't claim to be balanced - they pick a dog in the fight and feed it.

After the vote the NYT published a letter apologizing for its low journalistic standards during the election campaign . This is not controversial and not limited to these papers. It is every major media outlet (bar Fox which we know & expect to be partisan) and is unprecedented partisanship regardless of the candidate. It most certainly went against Trump which most certainly helped to color people's vision of his politics and his character.

If the reporting were different it is possible, even probable, that you would have a different view of Trump, isn't it? They could easily have presented him differently just by showing the clips and chuckling at the end... "What a whack job eh? Hu hu hu.. Now let's go to Susan for the weather.." Instead they demonized and that is what you and I saw. I actually don't give a shit either way, but it should be obvious that the reporting is abysmal - they've actually admitted it. It is an unparalleled journalistic fail. The presentation of the polls likewise (inadvertently or not) lied to people.

Jeff Bezos owns the W.Post and has a €600M contract with the CIA. This is very problematic for every independent watchdog cited in the video. Again this is not Left vs Right - it really isn't. It's about government power, binary mechanisms of truth and how consensus is formed. They do not disclose Bezos conflict of interest in the column inches of the agenda-setting paper. They are pedaling yellow journalism and most people do not know it.

(Btw steemit.com is a blockchain blog offering BitCoin-type payments for upvoting of good (truthful?) articles. It's offering some hope for a future model of independently funded journalism.)

​The Counter Propaganda bill is aiming to bring this yellow journalism under state control. If that happens in the US we are quite fucked. This is Soviet shit with the technology and cash to pull it off for a long time. I liked Obama and although he hired a cabinet picked by CitGroup and utterly failed to deliver, I still think he is a decent person. But if he signs this bill into law I will have lost all respect for him.

I have learned a lot from reading / watching Chomsky, Nader & others for 10/15 years. He has unique insights. In his day he broadened the schema of acceptable debate by bringing arguments to previously uninhabited positions, especially regarding the underbelly of US foreign policy and the Manufacture of Consent, which is again the theme of what I am talking about.

But I've also learned a lot from listening to the voices on the right and from those who do not identify with any wing, but instead see politics as a psychological play - the adult / societal drama of paternal (Right) and maternal (Left) relationships. The Right can bring up facts that are completely off-limits to the Left for various reasons (moral, aesthetic etc). Currently, the Left's biggest failure is it's inability to address immigration and the threat of Islam without losing their shit, because ceding ground on either point spells disaster for their narrative in it's current form. They also failed us in the 2008. That was their moment and they had no practical ideas on how to move forward or counter financial power."

It's basically impossible to comment on the contents of his character beyond some guesswork like I did at the start. Everything - every single thing - you or I know about him came through an editors hands and a two dimensional screen from across the Atlantic Ocean. I think it is hilarious the level of hysteria that has been created.

I'd like to round off this article by attending to some comments I received from friends of mine (in Ireland) about Trump. I hope they don't mind me using them but to be honest you could find people everywhere making similar remarks.

1. ​"​Also the guy is clearly racist..."
   OK. So let's imagine you did know Trump and he lived in Harolds X and you said this about him publicly. You'd want some pretty robust evidence right? I mean that is toxic shit - you would tarnish his reputation, endanger his career, his social circle may ostracize him, his wife might leave him and his kids would view him differently.
   I don't think he is racist. I think he has referred to trends in racial groups that are statistically supported in very offensive ways, but I have yet to see racism as defined by:
   a) he treats individual members of a racial group badly because of trends he (rightly or wrongly) attributes to all members of that group
   b) he bases his decisions regards a group on erroneous information or anecdotal evidence rather than facts
   I'm sorry if this sound annoying or pedantic. This is important. I could go into this more - actually spent a long time doing this on FB page last night - but the question is can you deliver the required evidence that clearly states that he is a racist? It cannot be based on innuendo or "ah ye just fuckin know like...." I mean actual quotes with footage or audio of him saying something that proves without doubt he is racist. I have not heard this but would love to be proved wrong! I fear this will be a slippery fish if we don't stick to the definitions. This term is still very radioactive and people are slinging it around like silly putty.

2. ​"​​​I think the media had it in for Trump more than any other candidate in history because he is the worst candidate that has every ran for the presidency..."
   ​Jesus man - really?! Is he really worse than George W Bush? That's a big call. ​GWB won a second term after invading Afghanistan & Iraq without cause and in spite of the largest global anti-war demonstration in the history of planet Earth and long after the WMD lie had been discovered. He whipped the world into a frenzy about an Axis of Evil. He was exposed as a war criminal, a liar, a mass murdering sitting President and he was a FUCKING RETARD surrounded by satanic level madmen. Surely that makes him a worse person and a worse candidate by a long stretch no? Oh and I just read that immigration reform was one of his stated goals. Still we didn't see the media demonize him on anything close to Trump's treatment. Few laughs along the way at the gaffes and back he came. Nowhere near. Are you even mildly suspicious of Trump's treatment in the media yet?

3. ​​"I don't think he's fit to be a human being..." ​
   ​​OK... that's ​actually pretty ​​funny​ :-)​ ​

4. ​​"I think he is an egotistical pig who cares about no one and nothing but his own interests.
   ​I think he cares about his kids

I look forward to engaging with people who care about debate and are keen to listen passionately to both sides of the political axis. I believe listening here means more than looking through stats in order to find the one piece of evidence that might contradict your opponents viewpoint. No. I mean abandon the fear of the slippery slope. Just because you concede one step to your interlocutor on the Right does not mean you need to don the jackboots and goose-step your way to 1939. Live a little. Don't let the heckles of "racism" or "right winger" or "commie" put you off. Ever. Explore those ideas and see what you agree with. This is not a football team you support until you die. These are political ideas and you can absolutely pick and choose. More than that - you can also change your mind later if facts, reason and evidence change as they always will.