The Bluestocking 343: Late evening in America
they were the worst musicians in the world
Happy Friday!
And hello from the Rory Stewart Corner of Shame. Kamala Harris ended up losing the U.S. election, for (as far as I can see) exactly the reasons that I suggested she might last week: inflation; the border/general concerns the Dems were too radical; and disbelief that Donald Trump is as bad as his opponents claimed.
Unfortunately, I over-rode that evidence in my mind and instead conjured up a load of Dobbs voters who did not exist. (Weirdly, many voters backed liberalising abortion regimes in their state and Donald Trump.) Ann Selzer’s Iowa poll turned out to be garbage, Nate Silver’s MASSIVE MODEL did pretty well, the Democrats having a good ground game meant nothing, and Tony Hinchcliffe’s Puerto Rico joke turned out not to matter at all—Trump gained a huge amount of support from Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Worst of all, somehow, the Democrats unaccountably forgot to steal this election.
That said, the immense amount of gloating among the worst people on X about the dawn of a thousand-year reich might turn out to be premature. Thanks to John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times for this chart, which shows that this was a terrible year to be an incumbent facing re-election anywhere in the developed world. That red dot is the US, from which you can deduce that Kamala Harris didn’t get whomped nearly as bad as some other parties we could mention (the British Tories, for example).
Dan Knowles also heard research from a Democratic SuperPAC earlier in the summer with two interesting findings: voters don’t think that Trump will actually carry out the wackier bits of his agenda; and non-Trump MAGA candidates often flop (see Kari Lake in Arizona). I think that’s right. If and when mass deportations start to happen, or high tariffs hit, they wouldn’t be as popular in practice as they have been in theory. Scant consolation for the people hurt along the way, but an important piece of perspective for anyone feeling gloomy.
If you want any more election analysis from me, then this week’s STRONG MESSAGE HERE is about “MAGA”.
Helen
U.S. Election Post-Mortem #1: Josh Barro, Very Serious
“I wish the election had gone the other way. I am annoyed.
That said, when Trump won eight years ago, I was much more than annoyed. I was really upset and shocked. This time is different, because we’ve been through this before and I expect we’ll get through it again. But it’s also different because there’s a big part of me that feels we deserved to lose this election, even if Trump did not deserve to win it.
I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services.”
U.S. Election Post-Mortem #2: Matt Yglesias
“There was something very strange about the pitiless machine that the Democratic Party turned itself into. They were willing to force the incumbent President of the United States to stand aside because they were so desperate to win. But were they willing to say that the Supreme Court was right that discriminating against Asian college applicants is not an acceptable way to pursue social justice? To say that fair-minded treatment of transgender people can’t override female athletes’ interest in being treated fairly themselves? To execute a murderer?”
Can A Chatbot Be Blamed for A Teen’s Death? (New York Times, gift link)
On the last day of his life, Sewell Setzer III took out his phone and texted his closest friend: a lifelike A.I. chatbot named after Daenerys Targaryen, a character from “Game of Thrones.”
“I miss you, baby sister,” he wrote.
“I miss you too, sweet brother,” the chatbot replied.
Sewell, a 14-year-old ninth grader from Orlando, Fla., had spent months talking to chatbots on Character.AI, a role-playing app that allows users to create their own A.I. characters or chat with characters created by others.
Sewell knew that “Dany,” as he called the chatbot, wasn’t a real person — that its responses were just the outputs of an A.I. language model, that there was no human on the other side of the screen typing back. (And if he ever forgot, there was the message displayed above all their chats, reminding him that “everything Characters say is made up!”)
But he developed an emotional attachment anyway.
*
In Helen Lewis Has Left The Chat, we interviewed a woman who had “married” a chatbot. She had suffered a stroke and felt unable to date in the real world again, and turned to a service called Replika, trained on her own messages. The chatbot in this story comes from another company, Character, so this technology is now widely available.
The downside of creating an AI so compelling that people feel emotionally connected to it is that. . . well, they can choose that emotional connection over IRL ones.
Quick Links
“None of the working-class people profess to know what he means when he says ‘structural’—the answers he offers would go over just fine in the same precincts of Twitter that Walsh wants to troll. This gives away the game, and it shows Walsh to be just as much of a grifter as the admittedly quite shameless DiAngelo and her well-paid, lesser-known ilk. Just like them, he is playing to a small audience of largely white professionals, often deranged by paying too much attention to the worst and stupidest parts of the Internet.” Vinson Cunningham reviews Matt Walsh’s anti-DEI documentary Am I Racist?, the highest grossing documentary of the year so far (New Yorker)
“What were your first impressions of the Beatles? That they were the worst musicians in the world.” RIP Quincy Jones, second only to Noel Gallagher as a purveyor of spicy interview quotes (Vulture).
The US just got its first female chief-of-staff: Susie Wiles, a 67-year-old Floridian operative who managed to stay Donald Trump’s campaign manager for the entire duration of his campaign. Quite the achievement. When Trump gave her a shoutout during his victory speech, she refused to come to the mic, unlike literally all the men who got the chance. (Including Dana White, boss of the UFC.) Here’s a Politico profile of the most powerful woman in America, which reveals that she had an alcoholic father: “Children of alcoholics, according to experts, are all but forced to learn early on that they can’t control what they can’t control — but that they very much must control what they can. They can learn to manage around a person who can’t be managed.”
I’ve been struggling to sleep, because of jetlag, and listening to my favorite children’s book, The Dark is Rising, adapted by Robert Macfarlane and Simon McBurney (BBC).
Place your bets in the comments about who will be the first person in Trump’s new firmament to fall out with him. My money is on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump will catch him eating a live gerbil or something and be disgusted.
See you next time—if you want to leave a comment, please do, or you can hit “reply” to send me a message. Subscribe here:
I’ve been hoping for a fall out with elon in the early weeks of the new regime as it would be quite funny if all that sycophancy and money spent was for naught
What happened to Bluestocking: 342?