So Trump is back. After being uncertain for several weeks, yesterday I decided that Kamala Harris would win and that it would not actually be that close. The best result, I thought, would be if Kamala Harris won the presidency easily, but lost Michigan due to the Muslim vote, and this served as a wakeup call about the Middle East but also about the complete disdain for their Muslim citizens that Western countries typically exhibit. Well, Michigan isn’t in yet, but it looks like the worst possible result.
As for personal impacts, there aren’t many unless he withdraws funding to all my clients (not impossible) but other than that what I’m dreading most is the seizure of attention. For the four years of his first term and a good length of time before and after my attention, and the world’s, was fixed, it was impossible to look away. Usually it was a grim farce, sometimes it was horror. Now it feels like there will be more horror.
The climate is fucked, which means the world is fucked and humanity is fucked.
The Middle East is fucked. I think we can say goodbye to any idea of Palestine for several generations. The other side would have kept the status quo, deadly as it is.
The poor, the starving, the desperate, were already fucked, now they’re more fucked.
The billionaires are not fucked, but they certainly wouldn’t have been had the other side won either.
America is fucked, and the West generally. We should have learned Chinese instead of being such loyal English speakers.
Part of it was Biden and the Democratic machine.
I think it was inflation. I really noticed it this time when I was in London, when even though I could afford the things I wanted, I felt poor. There’s no point having high employment if people feel straitened. Inflation has brought down government after government in this year of elections.
More than inflation, I think it was poverty of vision. In the UK Labour scraped through despite this poverty by promising a return to boredom at a time when boredom was craved. I suppose Biden did the same in the US in 2020. But all that they offered their electorate – and this is even true in Pakistan with its shoddy politics – was an invitation to be grateful for not electing the other guy.