I’m going to rant/ramble and not try to make a neat argument this morning. I need sleep and coffee and it looks like I may be snowed in again and I want to get to the shop and make some wood chips before the roads are impassible.
The American justice system is in the process of hanging itself with a mechanism that it snuck in, in order to protect the powerful from – you got it – facing justice. [Read more…]
Lately, there has been a lot of discussion about the US’ slide into fascism, whether or not Trump is a fascist, etc. It’s interesting, because yes indeed the US is on the cusp of collapsing from a pseudo-democracy into an authoritarian empire, but it also conceals a deeper problem. Namely, that the US has always been more or less fascist. I.e.: “I was fascist, before fascism was even cool.”
The topic of self-defense in this ridiculously over-armed culture is a fraught one, with many contradictions. On one hand, there are the people who insist that “good guys with guns are needed to stop bad guys with guns” and on the other they implicitly assume that the police cannot be relied upon to be the “good guys” – thereby supporting the notion of armed vigilantism, e.g.: Bernie Goetz or (maybe) Kyle Rittenhouse, George Zimmerman, and many others.
My mind plays tricks on me: I originally started to write about how Kyle Rittenhouse is “the new Walter Mitty” except then I realized that I had the name wrong; what I meant was “Bernie Goetz.”
Anyone who’s done a fair bit of gaming will recognize the term “victory conditions.” They’re the way a game designer programatically defines what success is. Victory conditions can be simple, e.g.: “eliminate all hostile forces” or complex, “before turn 20, must have a unit under command control occupying any of the hexes between A-14 and A-20, inclusive.” When you do the thing that fulfills the conditions, you are a success.
It was a dark and stormy night in Okinawa, 1962; the seas were beaten into foam by the wind that howled across the island.
No, that’s not right. But it seemed like a better setting for “almost the end of the world.” And there was a storm, but it was a storm of toxic, invisible, lies. Lies were the fuel of the cold war; their target was the population of the whole planet, who were not trusted with anything close to the truth.
I’m referring, of course, to humans.
I know that’s a kind of selfish question. I’m one of the descendants of the people that the USA was pretty good to, and I’ve done well. Unlike lots of people, I don’t have a relative who has been blown up, lynched, driven into wage-slavery, beaten, arrested, etc. Maybe a feel a bit bad about that. I feel like every decent person should be thinking about how to destroy and rebuild this motherfucker before it kills us all.
The big lie of nationalism is that borders are necessary.