Rereading “What Happened”, the 2016 campaign postmortem by #HillaryClinton and am reminded once again of what could have been. Man, she would have made a great president.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-024-01845-7 Very interesting study providing evidence that the dynamics of neural populations, at least in the motor cortex, might be supported by mechanisms that are hard to volitionally change. They did this through clever application of brain-machine-interfaces (BMI), whereby subjects were shown a 2D representation of the neural state of their motor cortex. The subjects were unable to reproduce projections that violated the natural time course of their population activity.

Donald Trump’s America will not become a tech oligarchy
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/01/21/donald-trumps-america-will-not-become-a-tech-oligarchy
from The Economist. I’m not sure why they are so eager to jump on the ‘nothing to see here’ bandwagon. It’s not the share of the overall economy that matters, but rather that these tech billionaires have a direct line of communication to the White House, thereby able to push an agenda that out their interest for profit far above that of ordinary people.

@biorxiv_neursci interesting study on pre-activation of neural activity representing upcoming movement. It would be really interesting to see whether this can be seen on a single neuron level using eg NHP recordings. Would one find that the pre-activation happens in a sub-space that is initially orthogonal to the movement potent space, and that then rotates into this space, like what Churchland and others found.

@nic221.bsky.social If only they could also take over the tedious task of training our NHPs…

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1150769
This paper by Mongillo, Barak and Tsodyks is one of those that I keep coming back to. The authors show quite convincingly short term memories can be encoded through synaptic potentiation, and how a non-specific pulse of activity to the entire population serves to refresh the encoded memories. The debate is still ongoing whether this is how the brain actually encodes these short-term memories, or whether they are maintained by persistent neuronal firing. #neuroscience

2) The war in Gaza. Here, I would place the blame on President Biden's shoulders. He has done woefully little to convince anyone that he actually cares about Palestinian lives, and Harris, as his VP, and despite deviating from Biden in rhetoric, could not escape the fact that she is part of his administration. As a result, many potential Democratic voters stayed home, or voted 3rd party, or even voted for Trump as a protest. This despite the fact that Trump will be a disaster for Gaza.

https://newrepublic.com/article/188597/democrats-left-election-interest-groups I don't know I keep getting triggered by these 'No, this is why Democrats REALLY lost' arguments. I agree with much of what is being said here, but I think fundamentally the Democrats had two main issues. 1) The economy. Despite every objective measure to the contrary, the electorate was convinced that the economy is doing badly, and blamed the current administration for it, completely ignoring, or being unaware of, the many policies enacted to actually help people.

Matt Gaetz’s nomination to be attorney-general is an ill omen
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/11/14/matt-gaetzs-nomination-to-be-attorney-general-is-an-ill-omen
from The Economist. I’m kid of amazed that the Economist is acting all surprised as some of Trump’s cabinet pick, especially Matt Gaetz. Throughout his campaign Trump kept yammering about how he would go after those who criticise him using the full force of the justice department, so of course he would nominate someone who would absolutely carry out such orders.

@dedicto All good points, though in my opinion, any democrat who sat this one out, principles or not, bears responsibility for what happened. In a two party system, a protest vote, or a non-vote, is a vote for the winner. In addition, it’s baffling to me that the Biden administration, who for instance tried repeatedly to forgive the student debt of millions, only to be stopped and again in the courts, somehow don’t care about the working class and did nothing to improve people’s lives.

https://newrepublic.com/post/188197/trump-media-information-landscape-fox . This is a take I agree with it. The disastrous results of the #USElection2024 are the result of the relentless focus of the right wing media. I guess my question is, why do people tolerate this. Tribalism? Has the education system failed so badly that people lack the basic ability to do the most rudimentary checks on whether come claim is true or not? It’s not that there aren’t sources available. #NPR, for instance, though far from perfect, is free for all…

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/trump-normal-popular-vote/680578/ . This strikes me as almost naive. Yes, Trump was elected fair and square, but that doesn’t mean that he will be a normal president. Again, it’s like no one was paying attention to how he actually governed. And this time will be so much worse, with no ‘adults in the room’ and a clear blueprint via #Project2025@ for how to tear down the administratitive state and force his will upon the American people, and indeed the world.

@vampiress That is fascinating. I love programming detective stories like this :)

@DejahEntendu I also read Planetfall years ago and I’ve meaning to get to the other books in the series. I loved the first one and remember it being different than other books dealing with similar themes. Time to read more of her books. Thanks for the recommendation.

Five charts show how Trump won the election
https://www.economist.com/interactive/graphic-detail/2024/11/07/five-charts-show-how-trump-won-the-election
from The Economist. I find it interesting that this and other post-mortems completely ignores plain old misogyny and racism as explanations for how the democrats lost. Yes, concerns about the economy are valid but 1) these seem to not go beyond ‘eggs were much cheaper under Trump’ and 2) in what universe would any sane person believe that Trump would be any better? Virtual very economist agrees he will be a disaster.

I have now voted in nine presidential elections, four of which didn’t go the way I wanted. None left me feeling as bleak as Donald Trump’s win Tuesday, a horror-movie sequel that I did not request and will now spend the next four years and change watching.

Since I woke up a little after 6 a.m. Wednesday and saw the news I’d begun to dread while doomscrolling election results following Tuesday’s 15.5-hour shift as a poll worker, the first draft of my reaction has been grief–not because anybody died, but for the less-chaotic future we threw away.

This was not like 2016, when I could understand people making a high-leverage bet on a candidate who seemed to owe nothing to the existing political structure and campaigned against somebody at the apex of it. It was not like 2020, when Trump’s unfitness for the job should have been apparent but his willingness to strangle democracy had not been made far more obvious by his post-election campaign of election denial.

This time, American voters who should have known the toxic cocktail of a Trump presidency seem to have memory-holed the lies, cruelty, bigotry, corruption and incompetence as well as the crimes of Jan. 6, 2021. Instead they elevated whitewashed recollections of Trump’s first term, even the 2020 part of it, plus anger over inflation and immigration, to say with their votes “another round!”

Inflation alone may have overdetermined this. That’s been an anvil of an anchor for incumbent parties around the world–even if Trump’s concepts of a plan for import tariffs would make this problem worse here.

Nothing else seems to have mattered. Not the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision leading to forced-birth state laws that have resulted in the deaths of women suffering complications of pregnancy, not the Court granting an un-American level of legal immunity to presidents that Trump will almost certainly abuse, not Trump’s incoherent ranting on stages and at the debate, not the Harris campaign’s record-breaking fundraising or extraordinary field effort, not the Trump campaign’s chaos and indiscipline, not polls that once again revealed themselves as inaccurate instruments.

I want to be able to tell my 14-year-old kid–who as a six-year-old correctly summed up Trump as “he tells lies and says mean things”–that being a jerk doesn’t pay off, that hard work gets results, and that the truth ultimately prevails. That’s harder now that we’re sending a convicted felon back to the White House.

Do not read this as a slight of Kamala Harris. She answered the most difficult call to the bullpen I can imagine in an American election–one that Joe Biden could have made easier in multiple ways, like saying last year that he’d serve only one term–then went out and threw strikes. I don’t see many ways that she could have run a better campaign in that compressed, 107-day timeline. I think she would have been a fine president, and I regret nothing about my vote for her.

But more than enough American voters chose otherwise in a free and fair election, and that is what counts. Harris will not be the one standing in front of the Capitol on Jan. 20 and pledging to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”; instead, it will be the man who has done more to make a mockery of that commitment than any other president in the history of the United States.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/11/07/the-worst/

#2024Election #ballot #DonaldTrump #election #Jan6 #JoeBiden #Kamala #KamalaHarris #Trump #vote #voting

@Faithslayer202 And how, exactly is Trump better for any of those groups?

It’s a bit rich to say that an administration who enacted the greatest industrial economic policy in a generation which invested heavily in good paying blue collar jobs “don’t care about the working class”, #inflationreductionact #uspolitics #elections

Oh America, what have you done?

My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine this morning. This was Putin's victory

#uspol #ukraine

Latin Wordle 307 4/6

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