My depressing prophecy


I’ve been getting reassuring emails from my university to let me know that they have assembled a team to respond to the federal government shut down of NIH and NSF funded research. In case you hadn’t heard, they canceled review panels at NSF and suspended research at NIH. They made the uncertainty that has always haunted research funding far more shaky. This is a warning shot — they’re going to make everyone conscious of the fact that the Trump team, a collection of idiots with no qualifications in science to throttle any and all science they don’t like.

We already know what they don’t like. They’ve been signaling all along.

They don’t like climate science. They don’t like vaccines. They don’t like evolution. They don’t like human sexuality. If they have to shut down all of science to kill those subjects they don’t like, they will. The Republicans don’t care, they’re going to be smug and happy about destroying the institutions that have been built up since WWII, that enabled the post-war economic boom, that is the heart of our country’s health and safety, because they’ve weaponized the general public’s fear of change and progress to get elected. The science establishment is fragile and easily broken; we rely on chains of people training and building on prior work, and knocking out four years of research does more than cause a hiatus, it breaks a generation of progress, and you can’t get it back. It means scientists will move to countries with more reliable support.

But that’s not what worries me the most. They don’t like immigrants. Their solution is to put them in shackles, load them on busses and planes, and send them off to some other country that doesn’t want them either and is incapable of absorbing the sudden influx, and will turn them away, giving Trump an excuse to declare a trade war. Meanwhile, we have to do something with these people, and the solution in the works is to pay private prisons to house them in “detention centers”.

That’s a euphemism. The traditional name for them is concentration camps. The Trump White House wants to put 10-15 million people in camps, ideally prior to expelling them from the country, which they can’t realistically do. I have a pessimistic prediction to make.

We pack a few million malnourished people into cramped concentration camps, which is where the next great epidemic starts. We’ll have crippled the CDC and the NIH, so we can’t treat them; in addition the administration is ideologically opposed to sane medical treatment. They are treated with horse dewormer, or whatever quackery flits through the brain of Trump or RFK jr. The great dying begins.

The reasonable response to all the corpses piling up is to build ovens in our concentration camps. The circle is complete. We will have become Nazis in everything but the name. Don’t worry about that name, though, we have an alternative all ready to go. Four letters, two syllables, our contribution to the terminology of evil: MAGA. Don’t call them Nazis, when we can accurately call them MAGA. It’s the same thing.

This is my prophecy. It is what shall be within a few years. At the same time, the USA will begin the quest for Lebensraum, I mean, “national security”. Greenland and Canada are in our sights. The wars will begin, just as they did in the 1930s.

The world can find solace in the fact that this Reich begins their expansion by gutting science and technology, crippling ourselves at the onset and telling ourselves that god is with us. As a bonus, we will have swapped out our industrial and economic strength for useless AI and cryptocurrencies.

Sorry, world.

Comments

  1. David Heddle says

    My problems are in the noise compared to what, for example, immigrants are facing. But 10 minutes ago I approved time cards for students funded by my NSF grant, and I have no idea if they will be paid (I’m 99.9% sure they will, even if the uni has to pay them “at risk”) or if what I did was even legal (much less certain.).

  2. SchreiberBike says

    Yes. I’m sorry too. I’m a white cis male with a job and savings, so it probably won’t hit me directly, but the humanity around me and around the world will suffer. I love my country, like I love my family, warts and all, but I’m sorry for what we have done.

  3. stuffin says

    Take your pick about how the US of A will become pariah state. PZ choose one that makes tons of sense. However, Trump and his sycophants have so many other opportunities to use the government to force their will on us. The destruction of America is at hand, the only thing we don’t know is which government agency(s), or presidential decree, will be the main catalyst.

  4. Akira MacKenzie says

    Typical center-liberal commentator: “Oh, you’re over reacting! They’re too stupid to do any of this. The process and the Constitution will save us. It’s all bluster and bravado. Stop calling them Nazis, it makes us look hysterical…”

    It’s been like that since our first official fascist president, Reagan.

  5. John Watts says

    Your predictions are as good as any. I’ve been worried about what the proposed mass holding camps may degenerate into as well.

    But, I have another concern. There are some states that may say, enough is enough. This is not who we are or what we intend to become. You can’t make us do x, y or z. We refuse to capitulate. Perhaps we’ll stop cooperating with the IRS. We send our money to DC but when we’re hurting you attach strings on our own money? You blackmail us? Let’s see how long your fascist fantasies can stand without the tax dollars of the Western states and New England. You think MAGA states like AL, MS, and LA have the means to operate without all those liberal dollars? Then what? Are you going to send the Army into the state capitals to enforce your outrageous demands? Are you going to arrest governors who stand in your way? Do that and there will be blood. I guarantee it.

  6. reflectory says

    If Trump is alive in 2028, there won’t be an election. Undoubtedly this will provoke violent demonstrations by everyone who is not a dyed-in-the-wool Trump cultist. And Trump has already set the stage to mobilize his MAGA morons to fight for him. The Jan. 6 pardons sent the message: fight for me, murder for me — your dear glorious leader — and you won’t face any consequences.

  7. raven says

    This halting of all government programs is blatantly illegal!!!

    It is impoundment or a line item veto or whatever you want to call it.
    The way our government is set up, congress controls the legislation and the spending.
    They pass the laws, set up the programs, and determine the funding.

    When the president just stops those programs, that is just a power grab.
    He doesn’t have the legal power to do that.

    Trump funding freeze a blatant violation of Constitution …

    ABC News – Breaking News, Latest News and Videos
    https://abcnews.go.com › Politics › story
    17 hours ago — The Constitution, federal law and court decisions make it clear: President Donald Trump’s order to pause federal funding is against the law, ..

    FFS, even I know this and my background isn’t in anything like constitutional law.

  8. raven says

    Once again, it is time to point out that science is the leading driver of our civilization and responsible for the USA’s leading (don’t laugh, it was true up until a week ago) position in the world.
    Attacking science is like attacking your own feet and hands. It is national self harm.

    https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.342.6160.817

    What’s So Special About Science (And How Much Should We Spend on It?)
    WILLIAM H. PRESS
    SCIENCE 15 Nov 2013

    Yet investments in basic research are variously estimated as ultimately returning between 20% and 60% per year (13).

    I suppose it is time once again to dust off an old study on how science is the main driver of our society.

    .1. US GDP per capital has increased about 9-fold in the last century.

    .2. 85% of this increase is explained by advances in science.

    Our lead in science Research and Development funding explains our lead in the world in terms of the world’s largest economy and…largest military. The military is well aware of the value of science and has a good incentive for spending money on research and development. Better weapons means fewer soldiers dying in battles.

    The world’s leading nations all spend relatively high levels of their GDP on science, about 3%.
    Spending on science is estimated to yield a ROI of 20-60%.

    If we stopped spending public money on science, in the short term nothing would happen.
    The payoffs from science can be short term but most are long term.
    In the long term, we would just fall further and further behind the rest of the world.

  9. raven says

    Trump wants an Israeli-style ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense …

    Yahoo https://www.yahoo.com › news › trump-wants-israeli-st…
    2 days ago — The “next generation” missile defense shield would protect the U.S. from ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles and other advanced …

    This is Trump’s latest dumb idea.

    A US Iron Dome missile defense system.
    Which will cost something like $2 trillion dollars. Which we don’t have.
    To defend the USA from all those missiles that keep landing on us and blowing up.
    In the last decade there have been zero such missile attacks.

    One defense expert called it the ramblings of a senile old man.

  10. Ted Lawry says

    I understand your logic PZ, but logical arguments are vulnerable to the problem of overlooked facts. It is much easier to not do something e.g. stop funding science, than it is to do something, e.g. lock up 10 million people, especially if those people, and others, fight back. I expect the mass roundups won’t happen, immigrants aren’t really that big of a problem, and their labor is needed. Smaller roundups may happen, but the push-back will be enormous. Trump is a lazy coward, and he doesn’t much care about immigrants really. He never built the wall. He just has to talk anti-immigrants to please his base.

    Stopping funding of bio-med is much easier, but mainly the bio-. Cutting medical research will generate powerful pushback, billionaires die too. And big business needs research in physics and chemistry for new products and to keep up with the rest of the world. Trump is bark is worse than his bite. That is not very reassuring, since his bark is very bad indeed.

    I agree a 4 year hiatus in biology funding is plausible, and would have generational effects. Let’s do our best to make sure it doesn’t happen!

  11. says

    I have been discussing the tRUMP crime family syndicate attitudes and actions with members of our organization and we have come to one unavoidable conclusion:
    The tRUMPs, along with the other rtwingnut xtian terrorists, have firmly established an ‘anti-intellectual’ movement in this decaying country. Part of this is that the more ignorant they can keep their sheople, the more they can herd them in any direction they want. (over the cliff seems close at hand)
      If PZ, and the rest of us of a like mind, were to be examined by those in that movement, we would all be rounded up as heretics.
      Also, if you think about it, they are a movement in the excrement sense of the word.

  12. Dunc says

    The tRUMPs, along with the other rtwingnut xtian terrorists, have firmly established an ‘anti-intellectual’ movement in this decaying country.

    Isaac Asimov, Newsweek, 1980:

    There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

    Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 1963:

    Anti-intellectualism … has been present in some form and degree in most societies; in one it takes the form of the administering of hemlock, in another of town-and-gown riots, in another of censorship and regimentation, in still another of Congressional investigations.

  13. numerobis says

    reflectory:

    If Trump is alive in 2028, there won’t be an election

    Alive or not, there will 100% be an election and it definitely won’t be free and fair. Autocracies use elections to make sure the populace thinks that everyone else like the dictator. And US elections haven’t kept up with the increasing standards for what counts as “fair”, plus have gotten actually less fair in recent years.

  14. profpedant says

    I think that the US will walk the line between PZ’s anticipation and ‘increasing suckage’ for several months to several years….but at some point the indeterminacies of life in the US is going to crystalize into something quite unpleasant for far more people than anticipated that they would be badly affected by this election. And crystals are often brittle.

  15. profpedant says

    The “US is done” is only accurate in the sense that Germany, Japan, and Italy were ‘done’ in 1935. The assumption that there is a large nation in North America called “the United States” is pretty deeply embedded in the minds of North Americans and the world. Things are likely to become pretty bad (including bad for a number of people who believe they won’t be affected), and there will be changes that begat changes, but I fully expect that there will be a ‘nation’ called “the United States” a century from now – and it might (might) be a pretty nifty place to be a human being/living thing.

  16. says

    @19 profpedant wrote: Things are likely to become pretty bad
    I reply: I am agahst at your timid, foolish remark. In his first debacle, tRUMP was held directly responsible for at least 160,000 deaths due to his arrogant non-handling of covid. I’d say that’s an indicator of things becoming much more than ‘pretty bad’. (deadly sarcasm intended)

    @18 Akira MacKenzie wrote: In that case, it’s time to look elsewhere for a country.
    I reply: I wish you all the best. I feel a lot like that, too. But, finding a new home that will fit you is difficult. The wonderful woman who heads up http://all-hat-no-cattle.blogspot.com/ relocated to Costa Rica years ago. Her story is available if you scroll down a few pages.
    And, I keep hearing Martha and the Vandellas in my head: Nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide.

  17. says

    Let’s shut down research and then complain when the Chinese leave us in the dust!!

    (I have been watching with amusement how the pundits have shifted from “China is taking our jobs!” to “AI is taking our jobs!” and now “Chinese AI is taking our jobs!” Geezusfuckingchrist it’s capitalists that are deciding you are worthless, not Chinese …)

  18. says

    Yeah basically the USA is done.

    Perhaps it is to the long-term benefit of humanity that the US face-punches its empire.
    As Chou EnLai supposedly said when someone asked if the French revolution was good or not, “it is too early to say.”

  19. profpedant says

    shermanj – have you never heard of using understatement as a form of emphasis? Lurking inside my “timid foolish remark” are terrors every bit as bad as the worst in human history….and maybe worse than that. But, just as one avoids saying ‘bear’ in the woods, I am careful to put my energy into avoiding their happening instead of invoking them. If you think “oh, I’ve said ‘bear’ in the woods lost of times!” you are making the mistake of thinking that bad things cannot happen to you. (I’ll give you a glimpse of my nightmares – I know how to reinvent slavery in the US without having to overtly overturn the 13th Amendment….and it gets darker from there.

  20. says

    This is similar to the lines of my own thought. The point of the deportation threats isn’t to actually deport people. It’s to create a threat to ensure that people don’t complain about their working conditions.
    “You don’t like how you’re treated? How about if we put you into a work camp, paying you cents on the dollar, until we eventually kick you out of the country anyway? Yeah, so shut up and do as you’re told.”

  21. Akira MacKenzie says

    @ 20

    Yeah, I know. I an angry man can dream there is an advanced nation that isn’t in danger of becoming a fascist craphole.

  22. raven says

    As I said above in #7, the president doesn’t have the power to refuse to spend money allocated by congress for various programs.

    There is an explicit law that states this.
    “Since 1974, a federal law known as the Impoundment Control Act has prohibited the executive branch from spending less than the amount of money that Congress appropriates for a given program or purpose.”

    What Trump is doing here is throwing a huge amount of crap against the wall and seeing what sticks.
    He has already rescinded his executive order since two judges ruled against him and some Democratic politicians found their spines and ovaries and called him on it.

    The Atlantic today:

    The Constitution gives Congress the so-called power of the purse—that is, the House and the Senate decide how much money the government spends and where it goes. Since 1974, a federal law known as the Impoundment Control Act has prohibited the executive branch from spending less than the amount of money that Congress appropriates for a given program or purpose. During Trump’s first term, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the administration had violated that law by holding up aid to Ukraine—a move that became central to Trump’s 2019 impeachment.

  23. Bekenstein Bound says

    Once again, it is time to point out that science is the leading driver of our civilization and responsible for the USA’s leading (don’t laugh, it was true up until a week ago) position in the world.

    Respectfully disagree. The US’s leading position in the world arose largely or entirely from it being by far the largest industrialized nation to emerge from WWII with its manufacturing capacity largely intact. That of course helped it lavish on R&D, which in turn helped it to keep its lead, but that isn’t where the lead came from to begin with. As for why it emerged from WWII in such an advantageous position, that was an accident of geography: the physical remoteness of the Americas from all the other combatants, combined with all of the states in the Americas ending up on the same side. There was also an element of luck, in that no one on the Axis side launched a “reverse D-Day” to invade the Americas. The US’s large (at the time) domestic oil production and reserves likely contributed too. The big Old World oil reserves are in a) Norway (rugged and defensible and Allied) and b) the Middle East (which thus ended up being where most of the Nazi fighting occurred that didn’t occur in Europe proper, but they never did manage to secure a reliable supply from there).

    The guys in charge in the US tacitly acknowledge all of this through their geostrategic activities, in which the two most consistent predictors of US military involvement are a) the Monroe Doctrine (keep the rest of the Americas allied to the US, by force if need be) and b) the petro-dollar system (corner the world oil market by keeping the Middle East divided against itself and maintaining friendly satrapies there like Saudi Arabia and Israel, while trusting Norway to be a safe pair of hands). The major reason for the seemingly irrational hatred for and perpetual sanctions against Cuba is that it is a perennial thorn in the Monroe Doctrine paw, tiny though it is. The only major US military actions post-WWII that aren’t explained by the above are the Korean War and ‘Nam. What does explain those is an extension of the Monroe Doctrine that can be stated colloquially as “Oh, and the Pacific Ocean? That’s ours, too.” Making Hawaii a state is also all about that, as it’s location smack dab in the center of the Pacific makes it extremely strategically valuable for control of that basin. Dominance of the Atlantic by allies is assumed as a consequence of NATO existing, but the Pacific would otherwise be a wild card. Ensuring unilateral US dominance of the Pacific combines with NATO control of the North Atlantic to assure against a D-Day type invasion of the US.

    Trump, of course, threatens to unravel all of these layers of protection (particularly, NATO), and thus is the unwitting (of necessity, since witless) instrument of the destruction of US hegemony. Putin may be evil but he isn’t all that stupid; even I have to admit that Trump was an excellent choice of weapon. Fat lot of good it will do Russia, though. Russia can’t manage unruly little Ukraine, let alone make a serious bid for world hegemon, in anything like its present condition (which is only getting worse with each passing hour as it pisses away more blood, treasure, and ally goodwill tilting at Ukrainian windmills). And China can’t capitalize on the impending implosion of Russia and of US hegemony beyond the Americas with its economy in the state that it’s in right now; the regime there will be lucky to avoid riding tumbrels in the next couple of decades. Already they’re throwing their “belt and road” imperialistic ambitions under the bus to focus more on domestic issues, post-COVID. The next world hegemon will be none of the three, I suspect. The two likeliest options are a) the center of economic and political power in the Americas shifts, most likely to Brazil as a large, resource-rich industrialized country with a large population, and the new American hegemon makes a credible bid to go planetary, or b) once the US can no longer maintain its ceaseless meddling in the Middle East, the states there organize into some kind of neo-caliphate. A new New World power center will have many of the advantages the US had coming out of World War II, including the exact same defensible geographic position and large resource base; a neo-caliphate will be sitting astride a key trade nexus and if it allies with southeast Europe (Greece, Turkey) and with Pakistan it could be in a militarily strategic position as well. Naval control of the Indian Ocean, a Mediterranean port, and control of land route bottlenecks like the isthmus Istanbul sits on would be key geostrategic concerns for them. The site has a solid pedigree as a viable place for an empire to take root: the Ottoman, Persian, and Byzantine empires, and ancient Mesopotamia, all organized in roughly the same area and exploited those same land and sea bottlenecks for security and for trade. The world’s oldest known city is located in the region (Ur, in Iraq), and the world’s oldest known neolithic-style megalithic stone monuments (Göbekli Tepe, in Turkey) too.

    Sadly for us FTBers, these developments would likely signal a resurgence in Abrahamic religions. Brazil (and much of Central and South America) is heavily Catholic, and any neo-Ottoman-Empire is a sure bet to be devoutly Muslim. Neither is likely to be quite as secular in outlook as the present day EU, and the latter is also unlikely to be on friendly terms with it.

    The world in 2100, if it isn’t in ashes, will likely have major power centers in the Americas, the Middle East, and possibly western Europe, which may have expanded at the expense of Russia. China will probably revert to its historical mean by becoming isolationist again while it licks its wounds, aside maybe from snarfing up Siberia first. (The new regime there after the revolution will have plenty of use for the gulags there, no doubt, and as it thaws it will become arable and its mineral wealth more accessible. The volcanic Kamchatka Peninsula likely has untapped riches buried just under the icy surface, in particular.) Control of the North Sea will also be a major geostrategic concern at that time. The Americas might become divided, with a Canada-Europe-Japan alliance built from the tattered remnants of NATO controlling North America, the north Pacific, the north Atlantic, and the Arctic Ocean, or vying for the latter with whatever claims Russia or China might still try to make on it, but South America having gone its own way or even allying with more former Global South colonies in Africa. In that scenario Australia and New Zealand could tip either way: ethnoculturally they will probably tilt toward Japan/Canada/EU but geographically they’ll be susceptible to the South American power. If there’s neo-Ottomans, they’ll pose a threat on Australia’s western flank that it will want naval power, or navally powerful allies, to defend against. Australia is likely to ally with the most credible power to offer such a defense, and to take New Zealand with it when it does. It likely depends on who inherits the US’s Pacific allies/bases, particularly Hawaii, Korea, and Taiwan. Thing is, these are likely divided. South Korea will probably ally with whoever Japan does, and China will probably annex Taiwan just as soon as the US can’t credibly protect it anymore. Hawaii will be up for grabs by, or even a bone of contention between, both the South American power and Canada.

    As for the festering sore that used to be the USA, it may persist as an isolationist state, or with a much-reduced regional hegemony mainly in the Caribbean (except for Cuba), or even collapse into an outright failed state, which means eventually being butchered for parts by new New World powers, or absorbed into one of them. It could plausibly end up with New England absorbed into Atlantic Canada, the PNW joining with BC to become a Pacific Canada region, Mexico absorbing many of the southern states (including what’s left of Florida, and Mar-a-Lago; an ironic fate for the latter to be sure) and dominating the Caribbean to make a Spanish-Catholic regional bloc, and a Portugese-Catholic imperium centered in Brazil bordering on it somewhere in and around Central America and using it as a buffer state against Canada if these have become rivals. The “flyover states”, the cesspit that used to be called the District of Columbia, and the middle Atlantic states have less certain fates in such a scenario. Climate change is likely to be unkind to them, so they won’t still be a breadbasket. Useless and full of fractious Christian nationalists, the Middle West is likely to be the new Middle East, a perennial source of strife and terrorists widely regarded as a hellhole. The surrounding states will see little value and much cost in trying to absorb or control them so will instead defend against them: expect a fairly fortified border both north and south, with the land between in abject poverty in conditions likely to resemble what we stereotypically associate with Africa now, and a climate to match. The Atlantic states are the exception: expected to remain wet (but hurricane-prone and overtaken by increasingly-tropical jungles) they will probably be absorbed into the adjoining national blocs, or become a string of small states whose major export is tourism of some stripe. Picture string of Monaco-like gambling destinations and banking havens up and down the eastern seaboard, south of the best fishing grounds (north of that boundary expect an expanded Atlantic Canada, with New York eclipsing Halifax as its major Atlantic trading port).

    That’s all, of course, somewhat speculative, but it’s based on a fairly simple model with two primary assumptions, aside from the collapse of American, Russian, and Chinese hegemony (which no longer looks like an assumption now but simply like “the future”). Assumption 1 is the geostrategic stuff outlined above, regarding defensible positions and trade nexus sites and such. Assumption 2 is that when the organizations and alliances imposed by the three aforementioned hegemons are out of the picture all of the “strange bedfellow” alliances will fall apart and new alliances will emerge largely among ethnoculturally similar populations in each region. Thus, the Catholic Spanish/Portugese states of Central and South America, along with Mexico, may form a bloc, or two blocs according to Spanish vs. Portugese, or may end up allied with Canada and Europe and some of the US’s wreckage vs. non-European ethnocultural states; nonChinese Southeast Asian states will likely cleave to one another (and North Korea will cleave to China, collapse outright, or be reabsorbed with difficulty into the Korean fold); the Islamic states in the Middle East and east to Turkey and west to Pakistan, plus north Africa, will likely form into a single bloc or into two divided on Shia/Sunni lines, with a messy end in store for Israel most likely; and so forth. (But the primary Sunni state in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia, which will be devastated by the triple collapse of a) its oil supply, fast depleting; b) oil demand; and c) what passes for its climate, which will go from unbearably hot to lethally hot, already being on the verge to judge by how common heat-related deaths are during the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Resource poor and with an unlivable, to say nothing of unfarmable, climate, it will collapse into poverty and irrelevance and most of its population will be displaced or die, leaving it as it once was before the oil, an empty wasteland of wandering Bedouins and suchlike. So most likely there won’t be an organized Sunni bloc, just a Shia one.)

    So, to summarize: 1. geostrategic concerns and 2. a reversion to the mean of allying with ethnocultural relatives will likely shape the world to emerge in the latter half of the 21st century, if it isn’t instead 1. radioactive fallout and 2. nuclear winter.

  24. springa73 says

    I think profpedant makes a good point – having a disastrously bad government didn’t finish off Germany or Japan or Italy in the mid-20th century, and it’s not likely to finish off the USA either. The USA has actually been a nation for a century longer than Germany or Italy, despite its reputation as a young nation.

  25. StevoR says

    @30. Bekenstein Bound : I think your scenarios there are under-estimating how catastrophic Global Overheating is going to be quite likely making many tropical and sub-tropical places uninhabitable notably at least large parts of Brazil & Southwest Asia.

    Frex here :

    https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/10/climate-change-could-make-some-areas-of-earth-uninhabitable-by-2500/

    Which, okay, is saying by 2500 but I fear it will be happening much quicker than that. Quite possibly in our lifetimes.

  26. John Morales says

    springa73, it’s rather silly to claim nation-states (countries) don’t exist until they’ve declared independence.

    There’s an apposite adage: “In Europe, a hundred miles is a long way; in America, a hundred years is a long time”

  27. John Morales says

    Something to think about here – this video linked on the Infinite thread

    What video about what topic by what source?
    Why you think it’s worth thinking about is opaque, as is your claim.

    (Very many shitty bullshit clickbait videos there, and if one points that out, apparently that’s quibbling)

  28. John Morales says

    Which, okay, is saying by 2500 but I fear it will be happening much quicker than that. Quite possibly in our lifetimes.

    Hey, I had some JWs (Jehovah’s Witnesses) visit me the other day.

    I gave them chapter and verse about their imminent End of Times, and mocked their (no-longer existent) Watchtower, and told them they were wasting their lives worrying about their supposed afterlife.

    (Can you imagine? I can be, well, forthright)

    Anyway, your fears are unwarranted. Planet is biggish.

  29. HidariMak says

    There are two options which could halt the kakiography. One is the growing descent among some of those Trump chumps as they lose employment, and/or their childrens’ schools, and/or their healthcare, and/or seeing grocery prices rise drastically, and/or seeing more family and friends die because they have to cut back on their prescriptions, among many other problems which don’t only affect people they don’t know. It was only the minority of those at Jonestown who wanted to drink the Flavor-ade. So they won’t all be on the same side in America’s upcoming civil war.
    The other option? That the overweight 80 year old who favours a diet of junk food and doesn’t believe in exercise happens to suffer a massive heart attack or stroke in the next four years. With so many of the cultists being extremely credulous and eager to believe whatever conspiracy theory they come across, an elderly fat stupid slob suffering the natural effects of their choices removing him from action, would only be due to a deep state conspiracy by those baby eating demonic Democrats. And the longer that Trump can put off this inevitability, the more dissent there will be among his fanbase about whether things are getting better or worse, and the fewer of them will want to start another civil war.
    In either case, America has a potential civil war as being a bright side to your future. I’ll stay up here in Canada until you guys can sort it all out.

  30. KG says

    springa73, it’s rather silly to claim nation-states (countries) don’t exist until they’ve declared independence. – John Morales@34

    The very definition of a “state” requires that – even if not wholly independent – it has a government which has jurisdiction over the whole area. The 13 colonies had nothing of the kind. Nor did Germany pre-1871 or Italy pre-1866.

    However, I think profpedant and springa73 are being over-optimistic about the USA’s prospects (although they may not be significantly worse than that of any other existing state). Germany, Italy and Japan were all at the mercy of the WW2 victors, and could have been absorbed or divided up if the victors had so chosen (which they did to a degree in the case of Germany, the reunification of which was by no means inevitable); as the allies certainly would have been in the unlikely event of the Axis winning the war. In the case of currently existing states, there is a high probability of nuclear war as climate and environmental disruption makes the scramble for resources intensify, and the need of fascist rulers to find scapegoats increase.

  31. KG says

    In other fascism-related news, the Geman Bundestag has narrowly rejected an attempt to fundamentally change migration law (in a way which I think would have been in violation of Germany’s obligations under international law) – although it seems very likely such a change will happen after this month’s elections. The law was backed by all the significant opposition parties (opposed only by the ruling SPD/Green minority coalition), but I think some individuals in the “centre-right” CDU-CSU rebelled, blocking it for now. The attempt was controversial within that party because the very possibility of passing the law depended on the votes of the neo-fascist AfD, breaking a taboo against collaboration with them. I note that the supposedly “left populist” BSW of Sarah Wagenknecht voted for the law, and so with the AfD, as did the neoliberal FPD – so that taboo is dead. The attempt by the CDU-CSU leader Friedrich Merz, to reclaim support from the AfD by trying to pass the law will almost certainly fail – it will simply increase the salience of the immigration issue and boost the AfD’s support. It’s only too likely Merz will, after the elections, and contrary to what he now claims, get into bed with the fascists – and I’d expect Wagenknecht’s “red-browns” to offer at least tacit support.

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