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POTUS or bust: August 10, 2023 [1]

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Date: 2023-08-10  

The length of time between my first and second post is a worrying sign for my non-campaign, given the rapidly approaching deadlines for developing and coordinating a 50-state strategy for registering as a candidate, organizing a ground game, and generally having any involvement at all in the actual on-the-ground nature of practicing politics.

I am intrigued that my poll results on voting for the not-really-hypothetical 35-year-old candidate broke down to about 50/50 for or against. It certainly is a better result than I would have feared, though Internet polls are not known to reflect reality well at all.

Nevertheless, I shall concede no ground to the doldrums (from which the protagonist Milo is rescued by a watchdog in the first major scene of The Phantom Tollbooth) and press onward — shoot for the moon, and you may land among the stars.

I have spent a lot of my ‘free time’ over the last week engaged in the comments sections of Eschaton, a blog that has served as a treasured and necessary resource for me as I navigated intensely painful, unstable and complex mental health issues for around 15 years, rooted in the combination of an unbelievably quirky real name and an experience of child sexual abuse as a 2-year-old from a peer (which, for likely-to-be-obvious reasons, was never formally pursued as a legal matter).

It would be safe to conclude that being sexually traumatized at an age which people are famously said not to be able to have memories from has generally ‘done a number’ on my ability to relate to other human beings. I’m doing much better now, and am operating at full capacity as a single father following a divorce from a woman who now largely symbolizes my peer CSA experience and its effects on my life.

I had honestly put this idea of running for POTUS out of my mind following other personal developments, because not only family but the future step mother of my son can and must take priority, as well as my upcoming return to gainful employment. But then, I seem to have discovered another hidden lever of the human experience in America today — that there does seem to be an advantage to having one’s last name and first name be earlier in the alphabet — and I am at a loss. I cannot honestly say that I have peaked as a politician in the coming election.

Were recalls of governor available in my state of Florida, the question of my attempting to become a political shooting star would be a different matter altogether. But as Atrios would say, “Ah, well, nevertheless.”

Although running in a primary against an incumbent has had a troubled history in the Democratic party, there is little doubt that a cannily mounted campaign would provide a beneficial change in my life circumstances, and position me well in whatever political role I would be best suited to have in fighting the rising tide of fascism and armed terrorism that is becoming less and less evitable.

But enough self-interested blather. There is a point at which my actual substance as a politician must be discussed.

The foundational branding of myself as a political person, now and in the future, is as a John-Nash-meets-John-Fetterman — a math whiz who seems to have an issue with locating himself in the vastness of the cosmos*, but very clearly operates as an empathetic, judicious, and wise individual when he is not at his worst.

An old-school technical background** from Princeton University and a wide breath of intellectual interests serves as an initial basis for claiming to have some of the quality which Bertrand Russell described Wittgenstein as having as follows:

As a matter of frank declaiming of my potential to be ‘the real McCoy’ and/or ‘the genuine article’, I would focus on my interest in philosophy of mind giving me a truly well-developed intuition for the nature of knowledge work and automation in the face of the AI revolution, and on my background in early Russian literature and in particular the writing of those such as Alexander Pushkin, a fellow octoroon whose work revolutionized the Russian written word in a way that I would hope that my technically informed yet unusually graceful and seductive writing style might set a new standard for the English word on the pixelated screen. Something like Kierkegaard, which was my ex-wife’s academic special interest, but not sucking.)

On the CS front, I would also include a mention of my taking a class in cryptography my senior year for shits and giggles, which proved the most challenging course I have ever taken and been satisfied with my performance in. My professor, Boaz Barak, later helped in the, as far as I know, resiliently demonstrated proof of indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) which means, in short, that encryption always works until something nearly impossible to imagine has been invented. More bluntly: defense wins championships.

It is by this means that I can claim to defend or at least explain any particular choice of word or important decision that I make, because my fundamentals of communication are quite potent, though I will not disclose the details of my family tree at this time. My time as a delusional fool was not in vain — I was just too cryptic to be understood at the time. But now, I may be more grounded than almost anyone who has become unstuck in time since the introduction of the touchscreen mobile phone to The Consumer.

But enough about a braggart’s intellect. What of his policies?

On the first point, I must insist that Joe Biden’s performance of the art of a ‘median Democrat’ (as Josh Marshall, fellow Princeton alumnus and personal inspiration, put it) is, in fact, the most effective means of policy-making available for a straight white man etc. It is in the judicious use of power in pursuit of the common goal that in fact makes such a politician a viable moral option — quoting Pope John Paul II: “Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”

I should not have a central thesis of politicking. I should not be so jejune as to argue my own theory of politics that would inevitably be baffling Machiavellian egotism (whether as Machiavelli writing a guidebook on sociopathic leadership under duress, or as the recipient of that guidebook). I should believe in the power pattern of people power. And that’s all there is to it. My ability to perceive reality, given the power I am vested with, is the only true ‘unit of measurement’ that there can be in my political opinions and views.

In short: it is always infrastructure week.

But, as a matter of practice (or praxis), I do need to have at least one focal point from which my campaign begins.

And that issue is abortion.

I make two philosophical claims, both related to abortion:

1. Though I am not (yet) as knowledgeable of the text as I would like to be, I am a xenofeminist. “If nature is unjust, change nature!”

2. While other rights may also inform the issue of abortion, people have a right to not be pregnant.

I think these two claims can suffice to inflame passions and lead to discussions on which reasonable people can disagree, and real-life horse-trading such as would make Lawrence of Arabia weep can be efficiently, and perhaps at a later stage automatically, performed.

My platform and my political persona have been sketched out. It is enough for a gut-level judgment of the overwhelming majority of prospective Democratic primary voters to form a fairly distinctive view of me as a person, a politician, and as someone they might like to have a beer with. The majority of the ‘thinking work’ in analyzing me personally is done in having read this far. What is left is the real work of politics: the debates and discussions and rhetoric and sophistry that we all engage in, and that some people in the world must manage.

We are beautiful. We are doomed. Please consider volunteering for my campaign.

Let the record (which exists somewhere in the servers) show that this diary was composed, from start to finish, in approximately 70 minutes. I’ll skim it once before posting.

Oh, and for the record, Joe: I like my coffee black and white. Winky Face!

* — this is also intended as a sly reference to a particularly misogynistic joke in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, except that instead of the harpy wife, it is me who once lost his mind at the metaverse-like experience of a specific realization of my place in the universe.

** — I’m the C developer :staypuftmarshmallowman:

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/10/2186475/-POTUS-or-bust-August-10-2023

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