Sri Lanka yesterday may be the US tomorrow

Over time I have noticed that political developments in the US show a pattern that is similar to that of Sri Lanka in the way that democratic norms get eroded, except that there is a lag of a decade or two. Sri Lanka has been a democracy since it obtained independence in 1948 but it has periodically come under great strain as various leaders and parties tried to undermine the institutions of democracy in order to obtain short-term political gain. Undermining the independence of the judiciary and the media and using the instruments of state power to the advantage of the party in power have all been features that I saw in Sri Lanka back in the day and I see in the US now.
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The sorry state of the Republican party and conservative media

The fact that the Republican party leadership put QAnon Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on the House education committee tells you all you need to know about how craven they have become. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has issued a mealy-mouthed statement about their decision not to do anything. It appears that she received a standing ovation from the Republican caucus. The Republican party leadership was willing to strip former Iowa congressman Steve King from all his committee positions for his hateful statements but is not willing to do the same for Greene although she is even crazier than he is, as hard as that is to believe. It should be noted that she has not publicly recanted her statements, instead choosing to tout her support from Trump. Her and her party’s defense is that she made them before she was elected to Congress.
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These tough guys turn out to be such snowflakes

One of the features of the insurrection of January 6th was the tough talk of the people invaded the Capitol building with weapons in what seemed, at least on the part of some, to be an effort to take congresspeople hostage. But as soon as they were arrested, they started to whine about how they have been so misunderstood and that they were not armed insurrectionists who planned to take over the government and prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president but were merely ordinary people only doing only what the president wanted them to do.
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Some MAGAlanders are angry at Trump’s seeming betrayal

Trump’s short speech where he seemed to suddenly condemn the riots that he himself instigated is believed to be so as to avoid criminal prosecution. But that statement has outraged some of his followers who were absolutely livid at what they saw as a betrayal.

On social media channels and chatrooms like Parler and 4chan, where far-right Trumpists have gravitated as other social media sites have increasingly shut out the president, there were complaints of betrayal.

Trump claimed on Thursday that he was “outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem” of the Capitol siege that he had incited, and said those who “broke the law will pay” – comments that perhaps reflected concern over mounting legal and political hazard rather than a newfound sense of contrition and integrity.

Nevertheless they prompted an outpouring of anger, grief and denial from his hardline acolytes. “A punch in the gut,” said one. “A stab in the back,” another railed. From a third: “I feel like puking.”

A widely shared screengrab summed up the sentiment: “He says it’s going to be wild and when it gets wild he calls it a heinous attack and middle-fingers to his supporters he told to be there.”

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The looming vaccine challenge

Now that vaccines for covid-19 are on the horizon, the next challenge will be to get enough people to take it. It seems that roughly 60% is the minimum number of people who should have immunity to the disease for herd immunity to take effect. Since the vaccines are about 90% effective, that means about 70% of the population needs to get it to achieve herd immunity. But getting to that number is not going to be easy. Surveys suggest that for various reasons, about 30% of Americans are what is called ‘vaccine hesitant’ and likely will not take it. That means that we will barely make the required threshold even if everyone who is not opposed to vaccines gets it. The 30% is greater than the hardcore anti-vaxxers who oppose giving vaccines to their children.
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Are we in danger of creating a loony singularity?

I read this report that the QAnon people and the antivaxxers are finding common cause, as a result of QAnon advocates targeting the anti-vaxxer social media pages to gain a wider audience.

QAnon rhetoric has been seeping into anti-vax pages all over social media in recent months. Devoted adherents of the conspiracy theory have weathered tech giants’ sweeping crackdowns by infiltrating other communities that exist on the platforms, then poisoning them with disinformation. This has transformed the large ecosystem of anti-vax communities online into radicalization pipelines for QAnon.

“The purpose of vaccination is to literally slaughter the population and dumb everyone down and render them helpless,” Larry Cook, the creator of “Stop Mandatory Vaccination,” warned in his final Facebook Live video. “It is a global plan to literally enslave every human on the planet.”

Over Cook’s right shoulder was an image of the American flag atop the QAnon slogan, #WWG1WGA. Over his left was the letter Q, decorated in stars and stripes. Comments poured in from viewers thanking him for “awakening” them to the “truth.”

So now we have two groups that are immune to science and reason seeming to come together. What happens if other groups that also have crackpot beliefs, such as those who think that it was massive fraud in the election that caused Trump’s loss, climate change deniers, and those who are awaiting the second coming of Jesus and hoping for a war in the Middle East to fulfill that prophecy, also join forces with them?

Will that result in some kind of critical loony mass that tears apart the fabric of reality and creates a loony singularity that sucks in everything and everyone?

Are the monoliths part of a marketing scheme?

The appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of the triangular steel monoliths that began in one site in Utah and spread to other places and initially seemed like it was people just having fun has taken a slightly darker turn in California where another one had been erected on top of a mountain.

A group of young men claiming to be Christians have posted a video of themselves tearing down a mysterious monolith that had appeared atop a California mountain and replacing it with a cross.

The monolith had been built near the town of Atascadero and sparked huge interest after the appearance of a similar silvery metal-faced monolith that had been discovered in the deserts of Utah.
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Four theories to try and explain Trump’s behavior

I have been trying to think about what the possible motivations could be for Trump’s bizarre behavior in continuing his futile quest to remain in office and have come up with four possibilities, presented here in no particular order.

1. The scorched Earth theory

This theory says that Trump knows he has lost and must leave the White House and what he wants to do, out of sheer spite, is make life as hard as possible for the new administration by refusing to allow the transition team the normal access to information, firing people left and right, filing lawsuits and raging against the integrity of the elections to sow doubt among his supporters as to the legitimacy of the Biden presidency, and possibly even bombing Iran.

The idea is not unlike that during wars when the retreating population burns their crops and homes so that the invading armies cannot use them. In this case, he wants to leave an administration in a shambles. Even if it results in the pandemic raging out of control and needlessly causing excess deaths in the order of tens of thousands, he does not care if he can gloat from the sidelines that things have gone to hell since he left.

He must be smarting from the fact that the stock market has gone up since the election despite his warnings that a Biden win would tank it, and that new vaccines seem to be appearing by the. day. He of course thinks that the vaccine companies conspired to not release this news until after the election because they too are working against him
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When you won’t even appear on Tucker Carlson’s show, then you’ve got nothing

MAGAland has a new star. A lawyer named Sidney Powell has achieved her 15 minutes of fame as Rudy Giuliani’s sidekick, mouthing even more insane conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen from Trump without providing a shred of evidence. She alleges that somehow the Venezuelan government (yes!) and George Soros (of course!) were behind a plot that managed to co-opt vast swathes of people from the local to the national to the international level to plan and execute a massive fraud that stole an election that Trump rightfully won. Need I mention that she is also a QAnon supporter and is considered one of the ‘heroes’ of the movement? Are you surprised?
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What happened to the women voters?

Before the election, there was widespread expectations that Trump had lost support among women, especially suburban women, and the elderly. As far as the women’s vote is concerned, that prediction does not seem to have been borne out

Before the election, Trump was widely mocked for the sort of desperate, tone-deaf comments he made in that Michigan speech, while polls predicted the president’s support among female voters would crater in a fatal blow to his and his party’s election hopes. But those predictions were mostly wrong. According to exit polls, Trump did one point better with women as a whole than in 2016, five points better with both black and Hispanic women, and three points better with white women. In a year with record voter turnout, those gains weren’t enough to match Joe Biden’s numbers, but the president can console himself with the fact that, come January, he will have helped put a record number of Republican women to work in the halls of Congress.
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