I am going to stand by my prediction that we won’t have a civil war. In fact, I grow more certain of that all the time. We may, however, have some civil unrest. That’s OK – we’re always going to have some of that, because Americans are violent and stupid, and our national identity depends on a form of violent, stupid, toxic individualism.
This is embarrassing but I’ve just got to rant a little bit about “conservatives” and conservative pride in their ignorance.
I make no attempt to conceal the fact that I am a moral nihilist. No, that does not mean I want the world to end in blood and fire – it just means that I am unconvinced by the arguments I’ve heard, so far, that it’s possible to establish a useful, shared, long-term, notion of “right” and “wrong” that is not just someone’s opinion. But my interest in the topic has led me to do a lot of reading because I think it would be nice – unfortunately, so far, I don’t buy it.
There’s a lot of talk going around about whether there’s going to be a civil war in the US. If you’re worried about that, let me adjust your fears, slightly. The situation is dangerous, and we should collectively respond by ruthlessly disempowering the republican party, then turning on the democrats and forcing them to split into progressives and centrists – and then controlling their agenda. That probably won’t happen, so let me just console you about the civil war.
Coronavirus can be thought of as a dry run for how well organized human civilization responds to a global natural disaster. I’m not counting WWI and WWII as “natural disasters” – in fact, they were more like dry runs, too; another chance for concerted and sensible human response to a crisis and another opportunity lost.
The US is now deploying its next-generation nuclear warheads. The ones that it must have designed and built while it was still under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty it withdrew from in 2019.
The last week’s “impeachment show” was a painful spectacle. Everyone betrayed everything; the only people who seemed to be truly self-aware were the horrible, sleazy, republicans and Donald Trump’s defenders. There was nothing to expect from them except the worst and, boy, did they deliver.
My dad once said that when you get into your mid/late 50s your friends start to drop around you, unless you’re one of the ones that drops.
I admit I enjoyed reading the article in The Daily Beast about what incompetent louts Donald Trump, Jr. and Jared Kushner are.
Since this is a sermon/rant, I am going to relax some of my rules of engagement and make some assertions that I think are reasonably supportable – but I may not bother supporting them. We can discuss them in comments if you want to challenge them. Otherwise it’s difficult to write without producing a great big bodge of anti-{skeptical trope} defences to head off pyrhhonian challenges.