The Cycle of Civilization and the Twilight of Neoliberalism

I mean that’s fine and all, but you did spend parts of the primary praising Trump’s words on health care without looking at his actual proposals — same with many of your (ostensibly) left readers. This happened many times despite some of your readers (myself among them) telling you to wake the fuck up. Well hope you’re all ready for HHS Tom Price who has called for the privatization of Medicare. All those members of Congress called to “repeal and replace” Obamacare but never put up an alternative. Price did, and it takes aim at not just Obama’s legacy but LBJ’s as well.

Another nice essay, thanks. I myself began to think that in the U.S., things were starting to fall apart in the early 90’s. I remember there was a book and a TV series that came out during that time called “America What Went Wrong” where the authors visited places like the Rust Belt that were already in bad economic shape and interviewing the ordinary people there about their lives. I had an English girlfriend then whose reaction was to say that story was already over ten years old where she grew up in Yorkshire.

I was watching a NASA internet streamed astronomy conference a few months ago and the various speakers were extolling about all the exciting things that future space telescopes could tell us about the Cosmos. After they were though, a fairly well known scientist in the audience, stood up and said that this was all bullshit. She said that after the already funded WFIRST is launched in 2021, that there will be no more such projects in the lifetime of anyone in the room as the public will be much more concerned about surviving global warming and political upheaval than dreaming about the stars. There was complete silence in a the room of say a couple hundred people. There were no more questions or comments and then everyone filed out in silence. I wondered how many were thinking that the work that they spent years training for may not be possible in the middle term future for at least some of them.

@ Ian

You speak of free will; I question whether or not it exists in the western world.
All the evidence I see would point to no!
Free will means freedom from interference; which is not extant in today’s world in the west; all inclusive.
There are not many who are free from governmental influence…

And the party goes on — instead of working on better policies for the majority of Americans, their self-appointed defenders stay fixated on how awful Trump is. As Bill H. pointed out above, the president is not meant to be a ruler. And does not have the Constitutional authority to rule. Congress and the Supreme Court have abdicated their roles to the presidency. This is part of the twilight of neoliberalism, the pretense that none of it is political but all just technical efficiency. How can we be safe from terrorists if the president can’t run a secret government with the power to kill anyone anywhere as he sees fit? And the power to practice massive surveillance on us all?

The response of the realists is to say that better policies aren’t possible, because Americans are too stupid and evil to vote the right way. And voting the right way in 2016 was to vote for a candidate who proclaimed that better policies aren’t possible. I’m not smart enough to figure out how that’s supposed to produce better policies.

The elites wage full out indoctrination in the policies that benefit them. The defenders of the rest decline to articulate and lead towards policies that would benefit the entire society because such policies are unrealistic given the stupidity and evil of most Americans. The only thing you can do is be outraged about how evil the president is? I think we should do better.

In the near term, neoliberalism may live. I can imagine a scenario where Republicans leave the coasts and Nevada/Colorado alone, with the not-so-quiet deal that has been practiced for a decade, and concentrate on returning their Red States to 1840 conditions.

The would leave neoliberalism in NYC and California, finance + identity politics, and the attractions of the metropole may provide compensation for the local servant classes.

Make no mistake, these fucks want slaves. Best bet is criminalizing being a minority. and then using prison labor. Won’t be on SF tv, and what, the coastals are going to kill and die for blacks in Red America? Give me a break. They allowed the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans. This isn’t the Civil War or WW II generation.

Come to think about it, that’s just the old pattern. Although sharing the army and some justice system, the metropole and country (Paris, Edo/Tokyo) sometimes pretty much left each other alone, metropole providing finance, technology, and the larger expense of security, while the country slave areas send food and resources to the metropole, along with grateful underpaid refugees from slave states eagerly serving coffee and being sex workers for the enlightened and generous cosmopolitans.

Sounds like a plan. We’ll call it neoliberalism, as homage to the previous liberal white supremacist era.

IOW, we haven’t reached peak neoliberalism yet. Know it by slavery.

“When will the alt-left Heather slumber-party end, huh?”

Never. Because, unlike the alt-right and the right in general, the alt-left doesn’t actually do much of anything. Except talk. Endlessly.

Trump is just another vanity project where they can show you how smart they are and cast pearls of wisdom down upon the masses who are ignoring them. Oh sure, they fell for and helped along the narrative that brought us Trump but if we had listened to them earlier and taken their advice then we wouldn’t be in this predicament now so it’s all your fault anyway. They are still pondering the forest but, like Sonny Bono, they have run face first into the tree. But hey, climate change is going to kill us all and some people did find happiness amid the Great Depression and WWII so “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. I wonder what Bobby McFerrin is up to these days.

Btw, if you want to give yourself a laugh, go read the comment sections of Ian’s old posts after the mostly minor dust-ups involving the WTO protests or OWS or various police actions where he made the commonsense observation (paraphrasing) that violence was a normal and predictable reaction to oppression. Talk about pearl clutching! I though he was going to run out of fainting couches. These people won’t support the notion that the people who actually tried to do something even be allowed to defend themselves so you can’t expect them to get off their chaise lounges now.

When people like Ron Showalter and his ilk show up, I think, we should argue with them, but then I come to realize, people like Ron Showalter and his ilk, they’re the sorts who’ve profited out of making people miserable. Well, at least, I hope people like Ron Showalter and his ilk are profiting. It’d be rather ridiculous if he was here, screeching at the readership of Ian Welsh for free.

I mean no disrespect to Ron and his ilk. It’s very likely I’m among them. But Here is a handful of people with different experiences and expectations, bonded together by enjoyment of Ian’s blog.

And rather than bicker and snipe, I ask, in all good faith:

What, gentlemen and ladies, exactly, do we propose to do? Because the only thing that can happen here is…talk.

So let’s explore the options, being mindful of the legitimacy of perspective that is the underwriting principle upon which all freedom is based. It’s high time we live like honorable people.

It seems to me important to expose first principles and codify assumptions; something along the lines of…

“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

I was talking to Jon Larson about the election of Trump, and he offered what I think is a very interesting and plausible explanation for why people in small towns and rural areas disliked Clinton so intensely, and gave their vote to Trump. Now, you must understand that Larson is a true expert on Thorsten Veblen. He has presented papers at conferences on Veblen even though Larson is not in the academy. And, he served on the board that oversaw the restoration of the Veblen homestead near Nerstrand in rural Rice County, Minnesota, almost exactly 60 miles south of St. Paul.

Second, you need to understand that Larson believes the most important book Veblen wrote is not The Theory of the Leisure Class, nor The Theory of Business Enterprise, but The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Art. As Larson summarized the book, “real craftsmen often make things better than they need to be for the sheer love of building well.”

But there is more: from The Theory of the Leisure Class, we know that Veblen presented a class analysis that differed markedly from Marx’s in that members of both the Marxist proletariat, bourgeoisie, and capitalist class, could be producers, not Leisure Class predators. Especially for those engaged in industrial occupations – who by definition are producer class – the instinct of workmanship is very, very important. If you have ever noticed the difference between an auto repair shop that was filthy and disorderly, and one that was relatively clean and orderly (especially for racing teams, which are damn near like NASA white rooms), you have seen a reflection of the instinct of workmanship.

So, with that preface, Larson believes that most people small towns and rural areas have to deal with very concrete and specific problems every day. If you don’t fix a tractor or car correctly, it simply does not run. Immediate, measurable, tangible results. People who are accustomed to this as a way of life naturally dislike politicians and the news media, because politicians and the news media can be terribly, horribly, disastrously wrong – and nothing happens to them. There are no consequences for their being wrong. And Clinton was the penultimate specimen of the political type. While Trump could reasonably pass himself off as someone who actually gets things done: he’s built casinos and hotels and what not. It doesn’t matter if they all were successful projects or not, it’s just that these type of voters could relate to Trump on a level or in a way that they never could with Clinton.

Out here in rural New Mexico, it’s not that hard to figure out why 60% of the voters in my county voted for Trump and another 11% voted for Johnson, leaving the remainder to Clinton and Stein.

The Dems, for whom many rural New Mexicans once had great hopes, have done them wrong over and over and over again. It’s not because of racism or bigotry or any of those hot-button issues (though I’m sure that in some households it is, it’s just not a general thing) it is because Democrats as a political class have had a habit of making things more difficult than they need to be without providing any gain to the people they are affecting with their endless complexities.

Overregulation and social engineering are part of the rejection of Democrats and their policies. Plain cussedness and cowboy – fierce independence is part of it, too.

Mostly, people out here just want to be left alone. That’s not hard to understand at all, and it doesn’t need a deep sociological study to figure out. People out here by and large don’t have a lot of money, and they don’t have a lot of time to wrestle with the myriad social problems the Dems tend to focus on — with no economic/financial benefit to the people being subjected to all that focus. From their point of view, Dem “solutions” often make things worse.

This is ranch and farm country, so the issues are a little different than one finds in deteriorated manufacturing areas, but I think the attitude is similar. Dems have done nothing but make life more difficult for those trying the best they can to get by under increasingly difficult circumstances.

And that’s the neo liberal game plan. The Rs have the same game plan of course, and I think most of the folks out here know and understand that, but the mitigating factor is that they believe that the Rs will leave the locals alone, even say nice things about them from time to time, whereas the Dems will be constantly berating them, betraying them, and trying to change them into some ideal of “good citizens” instead of respecting who and what they are.

Trump tapped in to that frustration whereas Clinton dismissed it — though she knew it was there. You can be sure that Trump will do nothing that doesn’t benefit him first and foremost. He’s a conman and has no intention to follow through on whatever promises he might have made to lure and hook his marks. With him, the Deal is negotiated after the sale is closed.

But that aside, he knew and knows how to use people’s fears, desires and needs to get what he wants. For Clinton and the Dems, it’s a whole different ball game, worked from the premise of how they think the Little People should be, not how they are.



Ché Pasa: “The Dems, for whom many rural New Mexicans once had great hopes, have done them wrong over and over and over again. It’s not because of racism or bigotry or any of those hot-button issues (though I’m sure that in some households it is, it’s just not a general thing) it is because Democrats as a political class have had a habit of making things more difficult than they need to be ….’

You’re too kind to the Dems. It is a truth universally accepted that they’re the lesser evil. Yet if you actually go through the evidence of the last thirty years since the Cold War’s end, in the same way that only Nixon could go to China the Democratic administrations have been complicit in enabling the most criminal acts of domestic looting. A short list: –
[1] GATT – 4.5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs shipped off to China;
[2] Ending of Glass-Steagall;
[3] Promotion of mergers under William Perry, Clinton’s defense secretary, whereby the likes of Boeing was merged with Lockheed -Martin, and American preeminence in aviation, the central technology that originally enabled U.S.-led global leadership, was flushed down the toilet;
[4] The Obama administration’s active complicity with the banks in helping them ‘robosign’ — that is, actively forge — chain of title on 1.5 million or so American homes so the banks could fraudulently deprive that many American families of homes, while flushing 400 years of Anglo-American property law down the toilet;
[5] The Obama administration– and specifically Eric Holder and Tim Geithner — permitting the TBTF banks to directly launder the $2 trillion of drug cartel money that washes through the global economy annually. That’s why HSBC thought it could get away with it — all the big American banks were allowed to launder drug cartel money in the wake of the 2008 GFC. And where was the heroin coming from? Afghanistan, where there are two factions and the Taliban don’t permit opium poppy farming. Who does? Well —
https://www.globalresearch.ca/drug-war-american-troops-are-protecting-afghan-opium-u-s-occupation-leads-to-all-time-high-heroin-production/5358053

https://xkcd.com/2318/

One of the problems the left has is that it has no clue about what really needs to be solved. Let me take a loud case: nursing homes. When you look at Western Europe, we do worse than they do but most of the countries do badly. While China under-reports cases and does not report when it really started, the death toll is still smaller than the US. They don’t have many in Nursing Homes. While older populations get savage badly, this is not the whole reason.

Many of the problems that we solve aren’t the real ones: minority people in Nursing Homes are treated much worse than majority people in the “same” environment. Corbyn would have done badly – not as badly as Loonfest the PM did but bad enough – because he would keep people in Nursing Homes. You people need to change your attitude about what “left” means. Only then will you see real problems. The other problems need solving, however, the real problems have to be in the mix. That means data-driven solutions. I told people about the problem – and was not listen to. There are thousands of deaths because of it.

Jesus flag
consequential century
North Carolina dozen
Flagpole preaching
oppression God
Confederate ancestors enslaved
Ku Klux Klan a circle
White supremacist murdered parishioners
perpetrated
Lamposts Prufrock permanently Confederate immemorials
Dean imfaith
theological tenor.
Religious coalitions subsumed successful
ignored fetishized, trotted
amorphous interfaith prayer
Social Gospel consequential congressional
jeopardizing unemployment eliminating
interrupted deliberations environmental spiritual
potent religious spontaneous
abolitionist American Prophets

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/is-there-a-religious-left

vilipend Future wonders funeral
architectural tragedies comedies democracy
class consciousness
devastated epidemic
ravaged military brutal debilitated catastrophe.
murderous oligarchy
Millennia eternal plague
legacy lethal ruinous
Republic

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-athenian-plague-a-cautionary-tale-of-democracys-fragility

The world has no shortage of Cassandras. The claim, “No one could predicted . . .” is surely false, as everything that happens is predicted, much of it regularly and even by ostensibly establishment figures and responsible institutions.

I have wondered for more than twenty-five years about the seemingly vast number of people determined not to heed the Cassandras among us. How can they be so impervious?

Whether you imagine the impervious as an extensive and passive public who have lost interest or a privileged and foppish elite indifferent to consequences (to others) it remains a fundamental mystery of our time.

The great complaint about Trump until recently from the useless Resistance that impeached him has been that he isn’t “normal”. I am not sure what that means. In many ways he is a mirror-image of Obama in orange-face. I suspect he makes it harder to ignore Cassandra. Trump makes it marginally harder to ignore the malevolent negligence of the political classes. If you did not already know how incompetent MSM or the Democratic Party had become, Russia,Russia,Russia was certainly instructive. And, if you did not get the message of contempt, they nominate Biden just so you can get further schooling: go ahead, elect a demented fabulist to replace an idiot reality teevee star, see how much change you get.

I suppose I am a fan of revolutions: I like reading about them, anticipating one. People always express surprise as change accelerates in a political revolution, but people are rarely really surprised that the system breaks down. The problems, the stressors are obvious, even if the effort to remedy problems seems misdirected or futile.

It is remarkably difficult to get people to see that what they are doing is not helping. Why?

The New Deal owed a lot to the precedents of Progressive reform. In many ways, the New Deal was FDR’s do-over of the two great depressions of the late 19th century (1871-77, 1893-96), followed by a do-over of Great War. The mentality and experience of the Populists and the Progressives fed the New Deal and the conduct of Foreign Policy. It helped that there was highly developed criticism of the economy and international relations in the era before the New Deal.

I am not sure if I would want people to learn much from neoliberalism. And, the great success of neoliberalism was its “TINA”: there has not been much real thought or criticism advanced outside the paradigm. It is a reason to be pessimistic.

“No one could have predicted….” is a riff on Bush II era hogwash regarding the attacks of 9/11/2001. Of course they were predicted, gamed out in detail within the administration and at the Pentagon. The regime ignored the predictions and the recommendations. There was even an episode of a television program that included a commercial airplane used as a weapon to crash into the World Trade Center. These things were well understood prior to the events, just as the current confluence of crises had been gamed and re-gamed prior to its appearance. Predictions and recommendations once again were ignored. This is how our governments work — or don’t as the case may be.

By now we should be used to it.

The strain this time is acute, and a lot that we took for granted for a long time is not coming back. But the neoliberal paradigm is still supreme though weakened. Who got the lion’s share of the various stimulus and relief measures? Same people and outfits who did after the crash of 2008. They profit no matter what. And they intend to keep it that way.

Meanwhile the rest of us are living on surplus — which is quickly running out — and you can best believe our betters have gamed out what happens when it’s all gone and what to do before it does. The current demonstrations and police response are prelude. As was the gilets jaunes and the gendarmes going at it in France.

Six months from now the world will have turned upside down once again.

The parallels with the Between the Wars era of the 20th century are not exact, but still, they’re chilling.

I doubt Trump has ever used the term neoliberalism in his life, let alone contemplated repudiating it. He throws stuff against the fridge to see if it will stick. It seemed to work in the campaign and before. He lost interest after he became President.

People have been and will continue to suffer from climate change and resource depletion. Late-stage neoliberalism is the escalation of the power of the wealthy in the face of the dawning realization of what’s ahead. Noblesse oblige is not possible, anymore. Not enough to go around.

It’s not planned other than the hoarding and storage of wealth and food like a squirrel hoards nuts. There will be no techno-havens of haves and hinterlands of have-nots. In the short-run, maybe some will attempt it, to their peril. Even globe-trotting has and will become passe, although I wonder if Russian, American, and Arab oligarchs are still flying all over the place in their private jets. Perhaps they don’t have to quarantine upon arrival in other countries.

“there’s almost no way they could deny Bernie the nomination

Of course, they would. After all, that’s how Biden became the presumptive nominee. Nobody in our ruling classes has any interest in real change. And as Stirling said, first you need to know what needs changing, where the problems are. For that, we need a vision of the kind of society we want. My view is that our solemn duty to each other is provide each of us with the basics for a good and meaningful life. Warehousing the old and sick in nursing homes where they can be forgotten has nothing good or meaningful about it. It’s something we can all understand, and that’s key. With a vision of what we want we can decide for ourselves what fits and what doesn’t. As in real caregiving, yes. Billionaires, no.

Krake wrote: “Most of North American social memory and ordinary thinking is frontier-survivalist, and was even as the thoroughly Enclosed era of the New Deal was ascendant. I think it is genuinely difficult for most people to think about futurity without resorting to the survivalist posture. That’s why it’s so much more tempting to see present-to-future scenarios as ones of conflict, though the primary mode for a generation and a half has been triage and neglect. ”

Well-articulated, and you’re at least partly right about all this.

Not incidentally, I’ve been noticing that you and I foresee a broadly similar scenario for the next few decades (absent a titanic climate disaster like Siberia’s permafrost melting away, leading to massive methane release, in which case all bets are off). With the difference being that the scenario fills you with horror and you’ve described it as techno-fascism because ….

Krake: “If you don’t live in Columbia, the Northeast, the Toronto metropole or the Chicago megacomplex, accept now that you are plainly hosed.”

You left out the SF Bay Area out of that collection of elite localities (and maybe a big earthquake or tsunami takes that permanently down, though I doubt it). But, sure, it’s possible that the rest of the country becomes the domain of the Brutals.

But I don’t think that necessarily has to be the case. I went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh to interview some folks a few years back. I had only a superficial fly-in, fly-out view of the place, but nevertheless I was pleasantly surprised by how well Pittsburgh — Pittsburgh, for fuck’s sake! — had done in moving beyond its industrial rust-belt origins to become a functioning 21st century post-industrial city.

So maybe there’ll be a space for local city-states to build something in the next iteration of whatever the country formerly known as the U.S.A. becomes. Yes, some emergent, profoundly disruptive technologies are intensive in terms of physical capital, like quantum computation; only technocratic elites will exploit that. The biogenetic technologies mostly are relatively cheap to do, on the other hand, requiring just knowledge, mostly. Local communities of ordinary people could do those, if they applied themselves

What needs to vanish are the giant, federal super-states where all wealth is continually sucked in by predatory imperial capitals: super-states like the U.S.A., the E.U., the former U.S.S.R., and so forth. Maybe China works for the Chinese. But even in countries only of the scale of the U.K. and France, for instance, too much wealth gets sucked up by London and Paris, respectively.

In a world where the U.S. federal superstate ceases to exist or at least to dominate, of course, the current elite in Columbia ceases to matter so much. Because what genuine technocracy does D.C. have? Only the MIC. So there’s a currently-existing elite there that wants things to stay as they are. Which brings us to ….

Krake: “The elites do not need bodies once automation and escape to near orbit are realized. They don’t need as many bodies as they did 6 months ago. And they will continue to need fewer and fewer, until a critical threshold is reached, and the ‘revolt of the rich’ becomes something else, something permanent.”

The exterminist scenario, huh? Well, maybe. But, firstly, in a collapsing empire you have intra-elite competition, as we’re witnessing now. There are different elites. Financial ones need a U.S. state somewhat like the one that exists now; technocratic elites, somewhat less so.

Then, too, escape to near-orbit and the kind of automation are less achievable in the near-term than you may think.

Permanent escape to near orbit certainly isn’t possible for elites in the next couple of decades at least — and probably never for the current ones. Unreconstructed human physiologies simply can’t endure null gravity and radiation in space for extended periods of over a year.

Hypothetically, you could tow an asteroid into Earth-orbit and hollow it out for the shielding its exterior rock would provide, then put a spin on it to provide artificial gravity. Longer-term, you could also redesign human beings from scratch to be homo astronauticus, and there are people at NASA, Harvard, and elsewhere who’ve been working out how to do that for decades.

But these are big projects and even if executed they won’t personally help the likes of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. Bezos knows this, by the way. Musk, on the other hand talks mostly nonsense; it’s not clear to me if it’s simply PR hype and he knows better, or if he’s just ignorant — and it may be the latter. He’s not a real technologist; he did *two days* in a physics graduate program at Stanford, then dropped out, and made his money as one of the Paypal Mafia, like Peter Thiel.

Automation, also, has limitations. In the near-term, yes, it can enable killer drone swarms. It won’t achieve true self-driving vehicles outside the context of smart cities configured for those vehicles.

Obama staged a coup against Sanders at a point where with Super Tuesday Sanders was going to consolidate his position as the frontrunner, and therefore become the presumptive nominee. South Carolina was hyped because it looked good for Biden but was irrelevant in the great scheme of things because it would be about the last state in the country to go Democratic in the general. So ditch the other candidates, hype South Carolina and voilà you get the demented corporatist guy who was running third or maybe fourth. Yep, nothing to see here. Move along.

Gnokgnoh,

Sorry, but no one denied Bernie the nomination. This was not planned, and the Democratic Party was as astonished as anyone.

Thanks for the laugh this morning!

Personally, I think that if we could be so lucky that Sloppy Joe, that beaten down old political whore horse, collapsed splay-legged and our rulers still denied Bernie the nomination the youth in this country would burn this place down, and for good reason IMO, because Bernie is the only candidate who offers them a path to a future rather than a sentence in neo-liberal hell.

Biden’s handlers keep pumping him up full of drugs for the important interviews and then he is a stumbling idiot for a few days. After they had him jacked up and gave us peak Biden for the last debate with Bernie, we didn’t see Sloppy Joe for damn near a week, or maybe longer, and when he came back it looked like they had the old whore painted-up to conceal a black eye. They keep juicing him and they very well could blow something. There’s a lot of brittle hoses to his engine.

I’d love to see that corrupt bastard keel over during one of his campaign conferences, collapse face first on the table so that our rulers would be denied the opportunity to stick a hand up his ass and puppet that sorry bastard along to the election. He’s done enough damage to this country, though he’s been too doped up to know it, and in particular the blacks, the youth, and the working class as a whole. His policies have killed and damaged plenty all over the world. He’s used his power to damage millions of people in the world, easily. And when I watch the tapes of his carnival barking in Congress while he sold out this country to the powerful, what appalls me the most about him as a person is that he’s gotten so much personal enjoyment out of doing it.

Z

>Thanks for the laugh this morning!

He believes that all – all – Democrats are complete and utter fools. Everything else follows.

Enough with the Sanders crap.

Sanders is a sell-out; period. As soon as Tulsi finally quit [19 March] and publicly committed political seppuku in order to retire her massive campaign debts, Sander’s job was done [05 April]. Sanders had wanted to throw the towel in earlier, but was convinced to hold on longer so the DNC could put a stake thru Gabbard’s heart.

Sanders has, in two campaigns ensured that Al-From’s DNCers remained in total control of the Democratic Party apparatus. And he was perfect for the job, he cleared the political solar system[D] of any young “meteor” who could appear and harness the seething unrest that 40 years of the D’s autocratic gilded age [sans mercantilism] produced.

The deniers are out there, they can’t bring themselves to own-up to who Bernie was and is…even if he did it a 3rd time they’d still fall for his shtick. I had supported Tulsi, the day they made her commit ritual suicide through disembowelment I dropped my support for her. And yet through two separate betrayals, both motivated by “thirty pieces of silver”, Bernie retains his admirers, because, Bernie’s fan club can’t admit they have been had…a con man’s dream if there ever was one.

@ krake —

So you’re speaking not always specifically, but impressionistically, as befits an internet thread’s length requirements. That’s fine. I recalled your more detailed graf from last week. “The US has been prepared, sometimes quite meticulously, for a soft balkanization ….” That seemed on the money.

Krake: “I will model a model and sometimes miss on the simple device of explaining that this is how I think the parties in question see the world.”

I figured maybe so. But I can’t know for sure till you say that, right?

I have to confess. I’m in one your the un-hosed territories on the left coast and have access to those on the right coast through work and family. And though I’ve lived here for decades as a resident alien, I’m anyway not an American precisely because I always thought the chickens could come home to roost (and partly just because listening to white Americans and what they believed often just irritated me).

For quite a few years, too, the U.S.S.R. and its collapse has been of interest to me. Whenever I’ve raised the possibility of the U.S.A. collapsing similarly, Americans have almost always looked at me like I was nuts. I’ve been right about some other things at this point, so I’m not too surprised about seeing history elsewhere recapitulating itself here. I’m not that happy about being stuck here while things are kicking off, though.