Graphic Violence

Graphic from Many Gen Z Men Feel Left Behind. Some See Trump as an Answer, by Claire Caine Miller, NY Times, August 24, 2024.

Are Gen Z men pro Trump?  That seems to be the conclusion of a certain segment of media, perhaps exemplified, and amplified by the virality of the above graphic which appeared in the NY Times last month (and the accompanying article).  The discussions about the graphic that I've seen (e.g., a Breaking Points "debate" on the topic, to say nothing of various tweets (xeets?) about it) are eager to point out the tremendous distance between the purple dot on the left of the topmost line which represents the percentage gap between Gen Z women supporters of Kamala Harris and those of Donald Trump (i.e., Harris leads Trump among Gen Z women by 38%) and the green dot on the right-- namely the 13% lead according to the August NY Time Siena poll) that Trump has over Harris among Gen Z men.  In many of the discussions I've seen (including the NY Times articles on the topic), there does seem to be some elision of the fact that the poll is exclusively among voters in the 6 swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and that it took place after the Democratic National convention but before the widely watched debate between the candidates 2 weeks later. 

But before we get to the question at hand, can we talk about the graphic itself and the conclusions being drawn from it?  I will confess when I was originally confronted with the story I found myself too confused by the graphic to follow most of the conversations about it.  To my eyes, the most salient thing about it was not the rather typical extent to which the green dot floated to the right of the axis labeled "EVEN" for Gen Z men (about which the story screaming out to me is the exceptional rightness for Gen X-ers of both sexes aged 45 to 64), but rather the extraordinary extent to which which the purple Gen Z dot for women sits to the left.  Why then was the talk about Gen Z men?   Somehow, according to the prevailing narrative, the line represented a "Gender Gap", which according to the story was calculated as the sum of the 38% lead for Harris over Trump among Gen Z women and the 13% lead for Trump over Harris for Gen Z men or 51%.  But was this so meaningful as to warrant the discussion it got?  To me, it looked like nonsense.  We know that 38% more women support Harris than support Trump, but we don't know if Trump's support is the minimum of 0% or the maximum of 31% among Gen Z women that this number implies or somewhere in between.  Even if we knew the correct split between Trump and Harris among women, it would tell us nothing about where along the spectrum from the minimum split of 0% Harris-13% Trump to the maximum of  43%- 56% respectively that Gen Z Men's preferences fell.

The numbers appear to be related in the graphic, but that is strictly because in terms of their literal appearance they are connected by a solid line.  In fact, they have nothing to do with each other.  Does the calculation of the differences between them actually signify anything about a gender Gap? 

Fortunately we don't have to wonder.  The Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University has a helpful guide to what a Gender Gap actually is.  Contrary to the New York Times operative assumptions, it is not the magnitude of the difference between the preference of women for one candidate versus that of men for another.  Rather, it is the difference between men and women's preferences for the same leading (or winning) candidate in a race.  In that case, we do not have enough information from the graphic to determine the gap-- we would need to know who overall was leading in the poll, and then we would need to know the percentage of each gender supporting that candidate.   The difference between them is the Gender Gap.  This is simply not available from the data as presented in the NY Times Graphic.

The data that can be determined from the graphic according to the Rutgers Center are the Gen Z women's Vote (that 38% lead that Harris has over Trump for women) and the Gen Z men's Vote (the 13% lead that Trump has over Harris among that cohort according to the poll.).   Clearly it appears that Kamala Harris has an exceptionally strong lead among Gen Z women in the 6 swing states in which the poll was conducted.  It's less clear, given that the margin of error in these polls can be as high as 8%,  that Donald Trump has a lock on Gen Z men's votes.  

In fact, as John Sides notes at Good Authority, the conclusions reached at the NY Times based on its poll (and the Wall Street Journal as well as several other outlets eager to spin pleasing narratives) were contradicted by at least 2 other polls taken at the same time.  Both a YouGov.com and a Pew Research Center poll found that Gen Z men,  as much supporting data attests, actually lean toward Harris, with a much smaller gap between the genders than the NY Times Siena poll suggests.  Granted, these appear to be national polls and may not be indicative of the outcome we are in store for. But it is more in keeping with what we've learned about Gen Z in the past. I am skeptical of the enthusiasm that media outlets have about Gen Z men's susceptibility to conservative talking points.  I don't doubt a contingent of Gen Z cavemen lie in wait to succeed their neanderthal forebears on the culture war front.  I just have a bit more faith in the prevailing sense of the cohort. 

Appreciation Deficit Syndrome

It might surprise you to know (but shouldn't) that I don't have a YouTube channel.  So uninterested in having a channel am I that the only reason I know this is because it has thwarted me in the past when I have been most tempted to write a comment on a video.   My YouTube experience is that of an addict.  Most videos I quietly watch (frequently double speed if it's not music) and move on.  But every now and then, something moves or irritates or arouses me in a way that compels me to want to express myself, but merely attempting to like or dislike a comment on a video, let alone compose one, is something that requires a channel, which (for those of you not paying attention) I do not have.  As fiery as my passions can be, they have never been too fiery to perform the quid of creating a channel for the quo of commenting on or liking or hating a comment on a video.  But YouTube comments have a hold on the part of my soul that is YouTube addict.  In my daily YouTube excursions, I often find myself trying to get into the head of a person who having viewed the video I just watched is compelled to lift their fingers from their laps to record for the benefit of strangers for all time whatever flits through their brains.  I'm already ascribing more to the person than I could possibly know.  For all I know DaveinDubuque69 had been stewing about the video for a week before finally carving out the slice of time required to type: "I can't even." 

In defense of the proposition that the YouTube commentariat might not be collectively constructing the finest of human thought, has it escaped your attention that  there is a sameness to the preponderance of comments?  Given the predictability of so much of YouTube commentary, I've begun to suspect that it's a case of Pavlovian classical conditioning-- the stimulus is the moving image with sound, the response a limited number of stereotyped phrases:  "First." "Who's watching this in 2024?" "This is everything." "I am so here for this.". "Gentlemen of taste, we meet again." "Everything was so much better then."  I've noticed in the past year or two a couple of new categories.  The first seems to be provoked by vintage performance of female artists.  "Not a tattoo or a purple hair on her." And the ubiquitous "Underrated!"

For a while I've been logging every time I've come across "Underrated" by itself or in a phrase (usually "This is so underrated!" or "Criminally underrated!") in a YouTube comment.  In the past month I've seen the word used to describe the following (these are just the videos where I encountered the phrase spontaneously or where I remembered to check the comments):

Pixies' song Hey 

Pixie's song Here Comes your Man

Pixies Guitarist Joey Santiago ("must be the most underrated ever.")

Pixies Drummer Guitarist Bassist and Songwriters. (The comment got over 2000 likes and inspired the comment: "Most underrated comment") 

1959 sci-fi flick (and MST3K episode) Teenagers from Outer Space

The Netflix series Love and particularly Claudia O'Doherty (possibly true)

Gillian Jacobs

Bow Wow Wow (the song was Aphrodisiac)

Melissa Villaseñor on Stephen Colbert

New Mexico (the state)

We Both Reached for the Gun (from Chicago)

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Humphrey Bogart classics Petrified Forest, The Harder They Fall, The Caine Mutiny, The Desperate Hours, In.a Lonely Place

Swedish singer Robyn -- criminally 

Martin Short

Regina Spektor's I Cut Off My Hair 

"Listen do you smell something?" line from Ghostbusters

Goldfrapp 

Also observed in the course of gathering the above:

• Charlyne Yi's outfit for her impression of a turtle on Conan is "underappreciated". 
• Bad news for Jamie Farr: Teenagers think he is overrated.

"Underrated" is an outside-the-box adjective for something you like.  Taken at face value it's an objective datum about a thing-- an assertion that the ratings for it are low, which assumes that there are ratings about it, the amplitude of which can be evaluated.  Moreover, there is a judgment about the amplitude; to wit that it is excessively low.  Interestingly enough, there are indeed ratings that can be applied to YouTube videos.  Having watched a video, anyone (even those of us without channels) can take an extra step and register either a Like or a Dislike.  Could "underrated" refer to the ratio of Likes to Dislikes?  Maybe once, but Dislike counts are no longer public information on YouTube videos,  yet if anything the characterization of a video or its subject as underrated has mushroomed in recent years.  Could it sometimes refer to the ratio of likes to views-- an indication that the commenter considers, given the number of views, that not enough viewers have hit the Like button?   Perhaps, but in my unscientific evaluation of this possibility with the videos whose views and likes I noted above, there does not appear to be any great consistency-- the ratios range from 0.06% to 7.54%.   It also can't be a reliable datum because whereas individuals can rack up dozens of views, they are only allowed one like per video (per sock puppet account).  I certainly don't "Like" every video I come across that I "like".  Furthermore, plenty of enterprises exist out there that will sell content creators jacked up Like counts for a price. 

All of this is a bit beside the point if my suspicion about the popularity of "underrated" is correct, namely that it stands in as an objective sounding rationale for an imprimatur that the user is intending to confer upon a favorite video or its subject matter.  If the comment has any basis in numerical data, perhaps it's an assertion that a video does not have enough views-- single or repeat.  I can't help but feel that the word does a lot of work for the commenter-- elevating their own appreciation to a precious status in contrast to the expected derelict neglect of a work of art by the unwashed masses. *

There's an unintentional backhanded quality to the word, however.  Marina Diaminidis-- formerly of Marina and the Diamonds, lately of Marina-- was puzzled by how frequently "underrated" is used by her fans to describe her, saying "How big do you want me to be?

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* I suppose for the sake of thoroughness, I shouldn't rule out the possibility that the frequency with which I encounter the adjective "underrated" is a function of my taste for actually underrated things. 

Cry If I Want To

Although I hated Kamala Harris’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, I still hold out faint hope that it’s a strategy to get her elected, which I still support as the best of the 2 possible outcomes.  I hold out hope that freed of Biden and in office (thanks to the support of those she was wooing via her speech along with the shit eaters and nose holders) she will be freer to be non-Bidenish. Nevertheless, I went from being a hopeful supporter before the convention to a bit of a shit eater thanks to the DNC.  So you might ask, what is my resistance to the Green Party?  Third party voters do not even expect their candidates to win.  Talk about a low bar.  In other words, we are all rolling over, all of us who still participate in electoral politics when you’d think given the level of misery there might be some concerted or even chaotic move to take it back. As an example of possibility in the UK there is talk of replacing the House of Lords with a People's House of randomly selected citizens a la sortition. 

But back to American reality in late summer 2024, I’m not saying the Green Party is actually worse than either of the parties of the duopoly, just that it objectively does not have power. I think the Green party is for leftists who truly do not think it matters who is in power in this system, whereas leftists who vote for Dems truly think it matters who is in power.  It’s a fucked up system that needs to go because on balance it causes harm.  In my opinion it’s because the people in power cause harm and that’s why I’m more concerned with who those people are.  (And who are these people who are so hell-bent on maintaining a broken status quo at all costs in spite of popular and electoral desire?)

I remember in April 2020 in particular I was thinking that if the left could get its shit together and come together into a rival electoral force it would be a good thing.  I think in retrospect that would have been the time.  If it worked, Joe Biden would probably have lost to Donald Trump probably because of the 3rd party, but the 2024 primary would not have been a sham and might have actually been interesting.

But in practice, I can’t get past thinking a left unified into a new contentious third party means Republicans win every election going forward.  It feels like it would consist of existing 3rd party (legacy duopoly castoffs) plus new duopoly castoffs mostly from the dem party meaning from smallest to largest there would be this left 3rd party with barely 20% of voters, Demoncraps with about 32% and GOP with less than 48%.  I.e., diminished Dems, the same GOP, meaning GOP lock in every election, in spite of the majority of voters being to the left of the spectrum.

I really wish the left would commandeer the Dem party (and/or the GOP)   Overwhelm it with killer ideas and power and vitality.  Take AIPAC money and burn it.  Alienate the crypto-nazis and paleos and neo-libs and cons and attract the rabble rousers.  Seems less pie in the sky.  So the 20% moves into the 32% party, alienates 15% or so existing dem voters but attracts another 20-25% from among the non-voters and keeps Dems who will vote for Blue no matter who who will find a way to live with replacing the Senate with a Citizens Chamber selected by lot, executing a plan to accelerate EV infrastructure, enacting single payer healthcare, etc. if it means Blue on the electoral map.

Some might object, "They won't let the left near the reins of power."  But if we commandeer the party, they becomes us, right?  When I read the Best and the Brightest last year I was struck by how similar to third way democrats the Kennedy wing of the dem party was, but for 30 years prior it was Keynesian.  Eisenhower is the GOP analog for the Rooseveltian Era that Clinton was for Reaganite GOP in the neo-lib Era.  I mean, parties can change their focus.  They can be commandeered.

As Kamala Harris' acceptance speech demonstrated, it’s still Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s (and their donors’) party.  It’s Biden and Obama and the Clinton’s party.  But they are old and dying and the world that brought them to power is dying too.  (It’s a zombie apparently but it is flailing to maintain hegemony.  Hence all that talk of NATO and Hamas and Immigration and play by the rules economics)  That’s my punchy uneducated feeling.  My theory is a commandeered Dem party moves to the left.  I think Dem victories are good for the left.  It’s Dem losses that move Dem’s to the right.

This I know-- punishing the Dem party for Joe Biden's egregiously senile support of Israel's genocide by voting for the Green Party is about as likely to move the needle on the issue as writing in Norman Finkelstein.  If it makes you feel good, who am I to interfere?  But if you want your vote to contribute to an end to Israel's atrocity, you might not be thinking it through if you expend your vote on the Green Party.  If Kamala Harris loses because of it, it's worse than futile.  It's self-defeating.  In the meantime, Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden, but until she wins, she is working for him so don't expect her to repudiate his anachronistic support of Israel before she sees him retreating in the rear view mirror.

In a way thinking about sortition is what clarified this for me.  Electoral politics are a sham.  They are not fixable.  They are designed to keep the elite the elite.  But the evil genius of those that electoral politics serve is that they implicate those that they allow to vote in their own exploitation by forcing them to choose the marginally lesser of evils (evils being self-selected careerists from our elite institutions) to govern themselves.  The governing will always be within the bounds of what the elite deems acceptable.  It’s only become more obvious since the end of history, the age of forever wars,  the financial meltdown, big tech and pandemics  as Congress, the judiciary and the executive behave however they please in spite of clear indications that what they please does not please the electorate.  (Hence arms and military funding being sent to Israel in spite of their making possible the Gazan genocide, hence no single payer healthcare, hence no free education or debt forgiveness, hence the budget for social spending being strapped because it’s dependent on the strapped class and not at all on the owner class, etc.).  In other words, electoral politics is what it is.  We have to make the best of it until we can get rid of it.  To my mind, more parties is not making the best of it because only 1 of 2 parties will win. 

The ultimate goal is sortition.  That’s what we really need to work on.  But in the meantime, we’ll each have different ideas about how best to live with this rigged system because whatever we do will never be enough to get us what we want.  If like me you think not all outcomes are equal under this extremely bad system you try to shoot for the best or least bad outcome.

American democracy is uniquely undemocratic.  A paragon of undemocraticity. (?)  In a parliamentary or representative democracy in which the government’s makeup is determined by the makeup of the vote, it’s at least possible to form coalitions.  In the duopoly that’s impossible (except within one or the other of the two parties).  It’s designed to be us versus them.  Everything else is noise.  The best we can get to an idea of a fix for it is rank choice voting in which you can still be implicated in how things are run if your formerly unspoken second choice gets the majority on a second round.  Your second choice won!  And it’s your fault for confessing it was your second choice! But as we don’t have rank choice voting we are especially at the mercy of the two parties.  They don’t have to pander to the fringe if they don’t want to.  GOP is unusual because its politics are so fringe it has to collect the odious fragments to win so it has a higher pandering quotient and more cohesion and solidarity.  Very fuckin weird system.  It’s unusually bad and undemocratic.  The nerve of saying it’s the best democracy in the world as Kamala Harris said in her speech. We have to stop pretending this is actually democracy.  It can’t be when winner (the plurality yet) takes all and losers get nothing.

Never Swat a Fly

Marjorie White and Frank Albertson as D-6 and RT-42 perform Never Swat a Fly from the sci-fi musical Just Imagine (1930). (Music by Ray Henderson; Lyrics by Buddy G. DeSylva and Lew Brown)

For a flavor of the movie which involves an excursion to Mars in 1980, here's a montage set to another fine number from the musical, The Drinking Song:

Conventional Folly

I'm of two minds about Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the close of the Democratic National Convention last night.  On the one hand, I am genuinely impressed with how she has risen to the occasion in the 4 or 5 weeks since Joe Biden stepped aside from the campaign and threw his endorsement  for his replacement behind his Vice President.  I don't think it can be a huge revelation that I did not know she had it in her.  It’s now clear to me she has it in her.  

On the other hand, what is the it that she has in her?  I'll admit, my optimism about the difference that she would make as President has not been perfectly cautious.  My hopes had been involuntarily raised.  In that spirit, I am taking it for granted that there may be divergences from the current admin that she might have to sit on until she is sitting in the Oval Office.  But if you take her speech at face value, there was a lot in it to dislike.  Too much to dislike to really leave a lot of room for any reveling in what there was to like.  I think she was effective in making a case for herself versus Trump from the perspective of “Trump’s a dangerous nut who will make your life worse and I’m not.”  But I was turned off by a few things (and I’m not even talking about the rest of the night/convention with its absence of a Palestinian and the presence of Republicans and military wackadoodles like Leon Panetta and that sheriff from Michigan).  

But just in Harris’s speech, I hated the formulation of economic policies around the middle class and opportunity and affordability.  I mean maybe my ears have been un-tuned from that kind of talk—I don’t hear it as sweet music for the masses, I hear it as fuck you if you’re not in the middle class or if you don’t have what it takes to be.  I’ll grant she’s trying to sing to people who get horny when you talk about that stuff including our punditry and too much of our Pavlovian electorate, but to me it sounds like garbage. The domestic stuff wasn’t all bad, it was just not good enough.  The international part of the speech just sucked pretty much from one end to the other.  Why are we still talking about NATO in 2024?  Even my CNN-watching wife said she threw Gazans under the bus with her comments about Israel.  That’s pretty bad.  But the rest of it sucked too.  I hated it.  Nevertheless, again you could argue she’s not performing for me.  

The thing is she thinks she’s got me.  She thinks “The left will hate this (including the snub of the Palestinians) but they’ll eat shit.  They always do.  The AIPAC wing?  Middle-America Independents?  Suburban Republican women unhappy with Trump?  They won’t eat shit, but the left will.”  Therefore, only the left are fed shit.  Our palate for it is not appreciated, it is taken for granted.  Meanwhile, even in 2024 after all we've been through, extreme care is taken to see that not a molecule of shit pollutes the feast laid out for the small but loud asshole wing of the Democratic Party.

I would have forgiven the pandering to straw dolts (is anybody who matters really impressed by that military and immigration bullshit?) if they had let the Palestinian speak. It was a calculated fuck you really.   A performative fuck you performed for the benefit of assholes.  The thing is if they had let the woman speak (Ruwa Romman, the first Palestinian elected to the Georgia house who is on the record pro-Kamala and whose speech was perfectly palatable to all but the most sicko Zionist) it would have given a boost to the people they needed to boost.  Instead it’s now a problem that they have to either fix or let fester. As Sam Seder put it last night, finding room for a 2 minute speech “would have cost them nothing” and made a huge difference. It was a mistake.  Plain and simple.  They fucked up and made a bad choice.

Instead they chose to pander to a certain type of  Dem.  While they told those opposed to the genocide in Gaza to go to hell for a bit, the people they didn’t want to tell to go to hell are idiots who have to be told not to go to hell or else they’ll fucking do it.  I can’t help but think about a Matt Karp study of 2020 that basically confirms that they’re not wrong in a way.  The ficklest elements of the dem electorate have a thick stupid streak that responds to triggers, and yet they are needed in order for Dems to win.

Non sequitur alert: While thinking about this, my brother thirteen who has been looking for work for over a year sent me this infographic about candidates for employment:

I didn't see the point of comparing two lists nearly identical but for the ordering,  but my brother thirteen said that he discerned a decided shift away from autonomy and leadership skills in 2018 and toward obedience.  Probably requires experience with the job market in 2024 to pick up on that, but I see how he got that.  I do think a parallel can be drawn between that list and the menu of stuff at the DNC last night-- the showcase night.  The stuff that doesn't concern you except abstractly-- maintenance of American global dominance at any cost; mitigation of the fact that very poor people from the parts of the world our way of living is making uninhabitable are at our borders clamoring to do any shit work we have for them in order to live here-- we’re not really trying to sell you on, but by making it the centerpiece of our convention we are trying to emphasize that since it is the preoccupation of your government we want you to feel that we will be capable of continuing to carry it out better than the other guy.  And my point is, just as shifts in emphases on our resumes indicate our own acquiescence to losses of power in the workplace, the bar for our political support of a mainstream candidate / party might be getting lower and lower.

20 Books

I have become aware of a challenge on social media to post the covers of "20 books that have influenced your life" with no comment-- just the covers.  I'm not on social media, so I will present them here.  And I'm too lazy to figure out how to screenprint 20 covers and manageably arrange them in a post, so I'll just give title and author for most.  I might as well have not even bothered, right?  I needed a topic anyway, so be that as it may:

Chicken Soup and Rice - Maurice Sendak

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N - Leo Rosten

Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton

The House of Blue Leaves - John Guare

Blues People - Leroi Jones (better known as Imamu Amiri Baraka)

Inter Ice Age 4 - Kobo Abe

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

Canapé-Vert - Pierre Marcelin and Philippe Thoby-Marcelin

Language in Thought and Action - S.I. Hayakawa

With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker - Victor Bockris

No More Police - Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie

Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich

Orientalism - Edward Said

The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein

Democracy in Chains - Nancy MacLean

Pictures at a Revolution - Mark Harris

The End of the Road - John Barth

~~~~~

I feel like I'm leaving something out.

Car Talk

In the 70's Ron Popeil invented Mr Microphone, a wireless transmitter shaped like a microphone that would play your voice over any FM receiver in your vicinity, such as the radio in your hi fi system, effectively turning it into an amp for your voice.  As the ubiquitous advertisement demonstrated, with this device, your car's radio set to FM could become a public address system, enhancing your own ability to be a public nuisance behind the wheel.  To a pubescent aspirant driver, the possibilities for enhancing the communication experience of driving seemed endless.  Imagine possessing the ability to let the other guy you were supposed to be watching out for know pre-emptively how you felt about him.  Of course any experienced driver can immediately spot the flaw in this line of thinking-- driving is the one socially interactive activity in which those who value their life can be grateful that communication is kept to the barest of minimums.

To this purpose, various methods and accessories have been devised to convey just the amount of information necessary for any interaction behind the wheel.  From the beginning, a convention of hand signals extended out the driver's rolled down window have been used to communicate one's intention to other drivers. As automobiles became more common, communication features were added to the design of cars militating against the need for drivers to risk their limbs for the cause of safety.  Turn signals on the front, rear, and now side mirrors of cars were added to convey one's intention to obstruct or impede the flow of traffic in order to exit the straightaway.*   Flashing "hazard" lights in the front and rear (aka "flashers") could be engaged to draw attention to a sudden need to reduce speed or to be temporarily stopped. Honking horns were added as an automotive way to express one's disapproval of the asses who forget to use turn signals or flashers.  

To these voluntary instruments of communication, a couple of automatic signals could be added.  First, whenever the driver steps on the brake pedal,  bright red brake lights at the rear of the car intensify as an automatic message to the driver of the following vehicle to apply their own brakes (thus initiating a chain of calls and responses that extends the length of the trail of cars behind the car that initiated the round of Telephone).† Second, placing the car in reverse engages a set of non-colored lights that unambiguously indicate to those approaching from behind the reverse direction of the car.   Trucks and some recent passenger car models accompany the lights with a sequence of warning tones or of short punctuated beeps of the horn.  The automatic nature of these brake and reverse gear signals might have an analog in human communication of such involuntary physical responses as a flushed color to signal embarrassment,  dilated pupils to indicate attraction or a yawn to convey, "You're boring me."  

Before the feature was added to passenger cars, some drivers supplied the reverse beeps on their own by means of staccato taps on the horn.  In short, the horn is the feature most commonly resorted to for voluntary communication, and reflective of this is the variety of messages that a horn can convey.  Along with the two already discussed, the sounding of a horn can mean:

• "I'm backing up!"
• "You're getting on my nerves!"
• Closely related to the above: "Move!" or "Get out of my way!"  (A shorter tap is a way of adding an unspoken "Please" to the request.)
• To forestall a collision: "I'm here!"
• As a designated driver on an outing, to avoid getting out of the car when pulling up to the curb to pick up a friend: "I've arrived!"  If  the friend takes too long to emerge: "Come on! Let's go!"
• When spotting a friend or acquaintance in the wild: "Hi! It's me!"

As to the last meaning, I don't know how common it is, but in my family there's a tradition of giving the horn 2 short blasts when driving away after a visit as a way of saying, "Goodbye!  Thanks for everything!"   As my daughter has observed, this makes a friendly toot of the horn the "Aloha" of the language of cars.  It should also be noted that some drivers use the horn as though it were a hyperspace button on a video game or a disintegration ray should they find themselves behind someone stopped  for perfectly legitimate reasons such as yielding the right of way to pedestrians.  The message seems to be "Be gone!"  Such rudeness is frequently met with a blast from the offended offender to the effect of "How do you like it!"  To all of the above, it can be added that a contextless honk of the horn can be interpreted as a general, "Hey! Pay attention!"

There is a quieter alternative to many of the horn's denotations, to wit: the flash of high beams.  While the sound of a horn can be varied to convey the emotion or urgency behind a message, there is not much you can do to add paralinguistic touches to the utterances of a high beam flash.  Nevertheless, a single flash can convey a fairly wide range of meanings.  Starting with the horn overlaps:

• "In case you didn't notice me, I'm here."
• "Coming through.  You're in the passing lane and I want to pass you"  (Rude, maybe, but better than a horn at high speeds that are probably exceeding the speed limit)
• "After you. I insist."
• "Permission to cut in front of me granted."
• "Your high beams are on."
• "You need to turn on your headlights."

Most drivers through experience know the range of meaning of a high beam flash though they might have to flip through the possible alternatives in their mind to arrive at the likelihood that the flash was directed at them and what their expected response should be.  When no context can be ascertained, making the flash of an oncoming car seem random, it's a good bet that the meaning is a camaraderly "Watch out!  Speed trap ahead!"

When it comes to automotive communication, context is everything.  And when one's meaning is in doubt, one can always resort to classic hand gestures to provide emphasis and clarification.

~~~~~~

* Turn signals have for years been designed to automatically turn off on making the turn.  When they don't,  they raise expectations, rather like a stray eyelash causing a person sitting in a bar to wink involuntarily at strangers.

† Brakes can also be tapped to convey two voluntary meanings:  1) I'm slowing down and you should too; and 2) You're following too close.  No matter how the latter is intended, it's hard not to receive it as an aggression