So, Amy Coney Barret has been confirmed to the Supreme Court. We knew this would happen, since the idea of the Democrats fighting the right is ludicrous.
There is now a 6-3 moderate conservative majority on the Court, and a 5-4 reactionary majority on the Court.
I do not expect Roe vs. Wade to survive, and I do expect the Court to be used to change laws in an attempt to give Republicans a permanent advantage, to enshrine further rights for the rich, and so on. One can expect civil liberties to be further gutted.
Citizen’s United was the red line “this is now an oligarchy” moment. This is the “rights? You have no rights” moment.
This is what the US conservative movement has been working towards for over 50 years. They have relentlessly had their eye on the prize. The court cases will now go forward, and precedents will fall like dominoes: do not be deceived, they have prepared for this moment and will use it.
If the election is close, the Court will also be used, as in 2000, to award the Presidency to the Republicans. Those who squeal about a possible coup forget that the US already had one in 2000, and that one mattered more: it set the precedent for many things, including that Democrats would just roll over.
Trump’s allies have spent the past year purging the civil service. They haven’t gotten very far, but if they have another four years, they will. By the time a Trump second term is done, the Republicans will have a permanent advantage. (Obama, when he took power, did not replace most of the Republican operatives that Bush had put in place.)
If Biden wins, on the other hand, unless he and the Senate attack the base of Republican power, he will only be an interregnum. If he rules as Obama term three, then all that happens is that the next Republican President is a more disciplined version of Trump. Back in February of 2010, I noted that Obama’s handling of the economy, his choice for plutocracy meant that the next Republican President would be a right wing populist. While one can argue Trump isn’t, and be right, it is what he ran as. A Biden plutocratic administration will ensure the same thing.
What is important about all this is not what happens, but as I noted in a recent interview, what you, the reader, will do. If Biden is elected, does that change what you do? If Trump is elected does that change what you do? If your answer is no to both, then the election doesn’t really matter, it’s weather.
If, on the other hand, you are looking at what amounts to political and economic climate change and you are making plans to avoid the bad things and take advantage of what you can, then you are preparing for the future.
There’s an old saying: “the race is not always to the swift, nor the fight to the strong, but that’s how you bet.”
It may be that America will turn around from its path of plutocracy, and, in fact, the next 10 to 12 years will determine if it does. But you are betting a great deal for yourself and your family if you do not plan and draw red lines: at what point will you leave, if you can? At what point will you start preparing, however you can, to live in a plutocratic theocratic America, knowing it may not happen but that the cost of not preparing is higher than the cost of preparations?
Everyone has to draw a line. You fight to save the ship from going down, but know when the emphasis of the fight turns from saving everyone, to saving those few you can.
Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
bruce wilder
There is a political outlook that countenances half-measures, going in the right direction but never far enough, acting with good intentions but without determination and conviction.
There are contexts in which such conduct makes sense: progress may be secured by a peace bought with temporary appeasement. The critical question is whether half-measures cost more than full measures.
We are in an epidemic in which the failure to act decisively and with full committment at the outset traded away permanently the ability to act effectively within the bounds of acceptable cost. Now we are in the aftermath: the economic cost has been increased and the virus has become endemic — the worst possible outcome.
The crisis of impending ecological collapse under the pressure of human population growth and economic activity growth leveraging massive use of fossil fuels. Lots of activists congratulate themselves on gestures, while never acknowledging the scale of restraint required — the delay while they display the virtue of good intentions multiplies the cost, presses us all into a corner where billions must die, either to save life from a mass extinction event or because life was not saved from a mas extinction event.
Thomas B Golladay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxpTOvihjkw&ab_channel=Dr.SteveTurley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opgtCKKzp9U&ab_channel=RedEaglePolitics
Trump has this in the bag. He may even make New York and California too close to call. But he will definitely carry the electoral college and win the popular vote.
Astrid
Speaking as someone who would very much like to escape and have even consider China if it comes to that…is escape really possible? As dysfunctional as it is, the US still has enough functional nuclear warheads to overkill the world’s population centers many times, an elite/populace that increasingly believe it’s entitled to do whatever whenever to whoever else (see what they do to retail clerks trying enforce mask rules), control of SWIFT, and a cast of pathetic allies enslaved to the same evilly insane global elite.
Where can I go to escape this? I don’t actually think China or Russia are strong enough, smart enough, and crazy enough to beat US back long enough to wait on the US to collapse on itself. Even if the US does quickly collapse in itself, what happens all the crazy it currently kinda sorta controls? This isn’t 1939, I can’t count on an ocean’s distance to gain me safety. That works for the current kill brown people for fun and profit type low level warfare, but not when the real crazy stuff starts.
I wrote in Green (in one of the states where Democrats successfully defeated their real, if totally pathetic and compromised, enemy), but I wish “Giant Astroid 2020: Get It F-ing Over With” was an option. With Climate Change and Human Nature, it’s not going to get better even if the political situation was somewhat better. Going away might not even prolong my life.
Willy
So maybe she doesn’t know much about what’s in the Constitution. But could she help create a law which makes God get his lazy ass down here to do something?
Ten Bears
The tyranny of a minority, imposed upon the majority.
There’s an Amendment for that.
The sound you don’t hear is me jackin’ a round into my well-oiled AR.
kråke
Ten,
The Russians are bad at everything but AKs and agitprop. No matter what happens in Russia, rivers of 7.62 flow. The Serbs prob make a better cheap AK now, but there is an endless supply of Russian ammo.
Plague Species
Yep, Nazi Germany was a nation of laws too. It was not an outlaw state. The Nazis used legal means to attain power and hold it to the very end. Lawyers are scum. It is an ignoble profession and the meme “a nation of laws” is an absurd and ludicrous defense of incivility.
Biden, even if he wins, will not have a chance to save Obamacare and the preexisting condition dimension of it. The Supreme Court will strike it down in a couple of weeks. There’s a reason Joe was chosen as the Dem nominee. He, as much as anyone, is a corporatist through and through. With Trump, the corporations, and the wealthy elite who own them, win. With Biden they win too. It’s a win-win.
But hey, vote. That’s the message. Voting is the solution. No doubt come November 20th, the media will begin their coverage of the 2024 election because, don’t you know, presidential election coverage has expanded to full time 24/7 in perpetuity. Politics, the black hole that it’s become, consumes and subsumes everything. Technology has aided greatly in this nauseating predicament.
Synoptocon
Should check out recently issued Executive Order 13957. Short form: creation of a new class of political appointments that may well be more challenging to clean out between administrations. Shorter form: adopting one of the worst aspects of the Canadian Federal civil service.
We now return you to the Golden Girls / Forgotten Weapons mashup.
Dan Lynch
Disagree with Ian’s belief that SCOTUS is important, though I share his overall gloomy outlook.
SCOTUS has never ended a war. Never ended a recession. Never raised the minimum wage. Never fixed economic inequality. Did not free the slaves. Did not free Eugene Debs. Will not free Julian Assange. In short, SCOTUS has never saved us and never will.
(Yes, the post-WWII SCOTUS did play a role in integrating schools, but like most post-WWII politics it was an anomaly, and today schools in the South are more segregated than they were before integration).
There is nothing stopping D’s from legislating reproductive rights. There is nothing stopping D’s from legislating a fix for campaign finance (i.e., give every adult a $1000 tax credit for political donations). There is nothing stopping D’s from taxing the oligarchs out of existence. And so on. Of course the D’s will do none of those things and so our situation will continue to deteriorate. But let’s be clear that the cause was not SCOTUS, and SCOTUS was never going to save us. The cause was a 2 party system where both parties are controlled by the business class so that there is no real choice and no real democracy.
GlassHammer
“If your answer is no to both, then the election doesn’t really matter, it’s weather.” – Ian
I think you should compare it to “sports” not “weather”, each election is equivalent to a game in the minds of most Americans. Also, we take “weather” seriously so it wouldn’t work as well in the analogy you created.
Feral Finster
1. Throughout its history, the SC usually hands down decisions that reflect whatever the elite consensus at that time is. The exception might be the SC decisions upholding the Second New Deal, but that was in response to FDR’s threat to pack the court, and represented a sort of truce.
Long story short, nobody of influence and authority really wants abortion outlawed, regardless what Team R politicians have to say in public. If fact, abortion is as close as one can get to canonical among the People Who Matter.
2. Even if Roe were overturned, this would be a political godsend for Team D, even as the issue would pass to the states. If a state like North Dakota, a state that makes Texas look like a hippie commune by comparison, could not pass a meaningless “Life Begins at Conception” referendum in an off-year election, then the pro life position is probably not that popular, politically.
Ché Pasa
I guess the R Gerontocracy can die now, having done their job for their paymasters.
Regardless of the election, What’s Important for Generations to Come has been accomplished with the elevation of yet another Dominionist to the High Court, and there’s nothing the Dems or anyone else can do about it, right?
Ten Bears
I like your attitude Finster.
No, Che`, or actually Yes, there is something to be done about it.
Have to step over the line to do it.
StewartM
Ian, agreed with all you said. I took your words to heart years ago; and for me a Biden victory is important just as I think we’ll make more progress on CoVID and a temporary return to the ‘shitty normal’, which gives me enough time to make my move. I couldn’t just drop everything and move back then as I have people who depend on me.
The court options for the Dems are few. They include:
1) “Pack” the court (which as Tony Wikrent has pointed out, Republicans on the state levels have already done;
2) Limit the jurisdiction of the court, so that it can no longer rule on particular cases. Congress could say, pass a law upholding Roe vs Wade and then remove abortion cases from the courts’ jurisdiction, and likewise pass a law removing the ACA from the courts’ jurisdiction (as well as Medicare/Medicaid/SS, as Barrett refused to answer on the constitutionality of those programs too!)
3) Ignore court rulings; the courts have no enforcement agencies. That was done twice before, by Jackson and Lincoln.
None of these are ‘good’ options insofar as a stable constitutional system; the court-packing option is probably the least damaging. But Trump’s presidency has shown that both the original document and moreover the current interpretations of it (say, a President can’t be removed and indicted for alleged crimes committed *even while in office*) is deeply flawed insofar as preventing an autocratic takeover. The Dem establishment cry of “but our norms!” is comical; a robust constitutional system should expect bad people to gain power but should have strong restraints they cannot break; one shouldn’t expect them to adhere to ‘norms’. You’re right, movement conservatives have been plotting this takeover for more than 50 years (it all started with Brown v Board of Education , insofar as the courts) and those ‘freedom-loving’ conservatives always wanted to strengthen the executive. As I have tried to tell Bruce, the simple fact is that ideologically speaking, movement conservatives *don’t really believe in democracy* (as Mark Meadows recently let slip out).
Many libertarians also don’t believe in democracy and are fine with dictatorship. In fact, influenced by Rand and through her, Nietzsche, they see a ‘properly run’ dictatorship as a positive asset for promoting the ‘liberty’ of the capitalist ubermenschen class against the demands of the un-freedom-loving ”herd’ whose instincts have been corrupted by the ‘slave morality’ of religion. So if you have to rape women with dogs, give dissidents the ole’ genital shock therapy, and have a few tens of thousand here or there be whisked off the street to disappear into unmarked graves, isn’t that a small price to pay for ‘liberty’?
StewartM
Feral Finster
Long story short, nobody of influence and authority really wants abortion outlawed, regardless what Team R politicians have to say in public.
I think you’re wrong on that. Rich women will continue to fly out of the country for their abortions, upholding Roe v Wade is unimportant to them.
I think it’s more likely a Congress will then move to ban abortion from states. The goal is to have millions of more WHITE babies, poorly educated, to grow up into poor white adults who will beg and grovel for whatever shitty jobs they can get. That way we don’t need non-white immigrants, we can lower wages even more without importing people who also expect things like universal health care and hold more progressive positions and who might become voting citizens (immigrants *do* tend to hold more progressive positions than whites).
This should not be surprising, as it was the reason for anti-abortion laws (and the sodomy laws) coming about in the 19th century. The capitalist class wants more native babies.
js
Many people’s issues with leaving is they are neither young (under 35 let’s say) or old (62+ – that is minimum social security collection age). They aren’t rich and don’t have any extremely rare skills. So no country is super eager to use them as a worker as they are neither young nor with a super rare skills, and yet they can’t afford to not work as they aren’t rich nor with steady retirement income yet.
And worse they might have people that rely on them as well.
And even switching companies is high risk, as anyone who has nearly been crushed by doing so and the lack of safety net learns at a certain point, but might be the only real route out if they do transfers elsewhere. And that’s assuming they even have the ability to get such a job.
Chicago Clubs
>It may be that America will turn around from its path of plutocracy, and, in fact, the next 10 to 12 years will determine if it does.
Pronouncements like this always seem to ignore climate change and other downward trends like water scarcity, as though the world is in some kind of stasis and merely waiting for ideological shifts to occur. In 10 or 12 years the US will be in an even worse position to make some kind of shift away from plutocracy (the path it’s been on it’s entire existence), so I see very little reason to think it’ll happen.
Ian Welsh
I’m well aware of climate change, and every article doesn’t cover every angle. If that’s your thing, I’ll have an excerpt from a podcast that covers it.
Plague Species
Chief Justice John Roberts is a lying, corrupt scumbag. The Roberts’ Court is a Corporatist Court. Sheldon Whitehouse did an excellent job of laying that argument out and revealing the mechanism by which the Supreme Court is a tool, a weapon against the unwashed, by and for the wealthy elite.
The Roberts’ Court just ruled against Wisconsin extending the vote count deadline by six days so all mail-in votes could be counted. The justification for the Supreme Court’s decision was a Federalist defense — that it was a States’ Rights issue and therefore the Supreme Court involving itself would be federal intrusion..
https://www.weny.com/story/42819588/supreme-court-rejects-democratic-attempt-to-extend-wisconsin-mail-in-voting-deadline
Okay, fine, let’s roll with that Roberts you scumbag whore. Gonzales v. Oregon, by your logic, was also a States’ Rights issue and for you to be consistent, versus having an agenda you cloak with Federalism, applying your alleged Federalist ideology, you should have voted in favor of Oregon and determined the Supreme Court had no business federally intruding in a States’ Rights matter. Instead, Roberts, along with Scalia and Thomas, dissented. Thankfully, it was not the Roberts’ Court yet and Oregon prevailed.
Just wait, the same hypocritical inconsistency will be applied when the 2020 election is called by the Supreme Court. The Roberts’ Court will forget its Federalism and intrude upon States’ Rights to decide the 2020 election in favor of the PussyGrabber In Chief. Roberts’ will merely wave his Federalism and States’ Rights ideological cloak and say it’s not federally intrusive because the case concerned a decision by the state’s highest court versus a federal court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Oregon
Zachary Smith
I didn’t think the Powers That Be would risk forcing Barrett onto the Supreme Court, but obviously they understood far better than myself it was no risk at all. Between Biden being essentially a well behaved Republican in all but name, and Harris having no principles at all, their gambit to get a 6-3 Court was a safe one.
I’m in total agreement here, and feel they don’t need the increasingly erratic Trump to nail everything down. Another Bush/Gore uproar is quite unnecessary, so I say Trump is a goner.
Feral Finster
@Stewart M: I’m not talking about rich women getting abortions overseas.
I’m talking about what attitudes are considered acceptable in those circles.
1. Get a bunch of Team R politicians, donors and adjacent types alone in a room, and they don’t want to talk about wedge issues such as abortion or SSM. In fact, they really *don’t* want to discuss them, except to the extent that they have to pay lip service in public to get the rubes into the polls. If you bring up abortion, they will respond as if you had just audibly farted or brought up something embarrassing, such as a son’s arrest record.
They will talk about things that they actually care about, like tax cuts for themselves and their buddies or “Life Begins at Incorporation!”. They are quite passionate about such things, and they are not about to throw away hard-fought victories and the legitimacy of the court over a cause that only the little people care about.
2. Get a bunch of Team D politicians, donors, and adjacent types behind closed doors and you would be surprised how many of them will express racial sentiments that I never heard any of my redneck relatives say, ever. These same goodthink liberals will not, however, tolerate even the slightest questioning of Team D orthodoxy on abortion or SSM, and, unlike Team R bigwigs, they are quite passionate and vocal regarding such issues.
KT Chong
That Thomas B Golladay is delusional as well, going around shouting and yelling, “Trump is gonna win! He is gonna win the Black votes! #Blaexit and the Latino votes! He is gonna win California too! He is gonna win in a landslide!”
Those Trump cultists are having a meltdown all over the Internet, spamming every forums and websites, as they are having a mental breakdown.
Trump might still win this election, but he will definitely lose California.
Feral Finster
To put it another way – Team R has been playing “Charlie Brown – Lucy – Football” with SoCons going back at least to the days of Bush 1.0. That’s thirty years of “so close but not quite! Just one more election, one more justice and maybe you’ll get it this time!”
Meanwhile, the SC gave us Obergefell and June Medical Services, to name a few decisions.
If repealing Roe or SSM were something that the elites had actually wanted or cared about, if the elites really had a pro-natalist policy, they would have done it by now.
KT Chong
All the anti-abortion activists or “pro-lifers” have misunderstood Roe v. Wade. They think the 1973 landmark case somehow “legalized” abortion. It actually did not. If the new Republican-super-majority Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) overturns Roe v. Wade, they will regret it.
Before the Roe v. Wade decision, every individual states made up their own laws and policies on abortion. Some states completely banned abortion. Other states allowed it up until very late in the pregnancy. What the Roe v. Wade decision actually did was it set a federal, unified standard for abortion for ALL states. The unified standard is split into three trimesters:
1. During the FIRST trimester of a pregnancy, the WOMAN decides for herself if she wants to abort or keep the baby.
2. During the SECOND trimester, the individual STATE decides if the woman can abort or must keep the baby. Every state could make its own laws and policies on second-trimester abortion. Blue/Democratic/Liberal states allow second-trimester abortions. Red/Republican/Conservative states have banned them.
3. During the THIRD trimester, the FEDERAL government decides. And — surprise, surprise — the federal government’s official policy and stance is to BAN all third-trimester abortion. No woman is legally allowed to have abortion during the last trimester inside the US. No state is legally allow to permit it. Because the federal standard is to ban third-trimester abortions.
So, Roe v. Wade set a unified standard for when women, states, and the federal government can decide on abortions for the first, second, and third trimesters.
Now, let say the new Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. That means abortion decisions and laws will be kicked back to individual states. Individual states will, again, set their own laws and policies on abortion for all three trimesters. The interesting dilemma for conservatives will then become: if Roe v. Wade is overturned, do you think blue states like California or New York will ban abortions entirely? …or, do you think blue states will use the opportunity to EXPAND and EXTEND abortion access for women—by permitting abortion all the way into the third trimester, (which currently is NOT legally permitted under the Roe v. Wade decision and federal standard.)
When the Supreme Court made the Roe v. Wade decision back in 1973, the medical technology for abortion was still backward and primitive. In the 1970s, abortion procedures performed during the last trimester were very dangerous for women, which was a reason why it was banned in the third trimester. However: even though third-trimester abortions have been banned in the US since the 1970s, they are still legally permitted in many other countries. Since 1973, other countries have continued to advance, develop and improve on the medical technology for third-trimester abortion. Nowadays, with new medical procedures that are available overseas, third-trimester abortions are actually quite safe. YET third-trimester abortions are continued to be banned in the US due to the Roe v. Wade restriction, which has locked the US abortion law to the 1970s medical standard.
So, I can assure you: as soon as Roe v. Wade is overturned, blue states will quickly adopt those advanced third-trimester abortion procedures from overseas—and expand and extend abortion permission to the third trimester. What will conservatives and all the so-called pro-lifers (who are also anti-maskers) do then? Cry and whine and demand and bully blue states into implement red-state laws on prohibiting abortions? I can’t wait.
Mark Pontin
Feral Finster wrote: “Get a bunch of Team R politicians, donors and adjacent types alone in a room, and they don’t want to talk about wedge issues such as abortion or SSM … They will talk about things that they actually care about, like tax cuts for themselves and their buddies or “Life Begins at Incorporation!”. They are quite passionate about such things, and they are not about to throw away hard-fought victories and the legitimacy of the court over a cause that only the little people care about.”
Quite. Everyone remember Steven Miller and the nativist faction of the Trump administration persuading Trump to ban H-1B visas earlier this year? To refresh memories —
‘Trump Suspends Visas Allowing Hundreds of Thousands of Foreigners to Work in the U.S.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/us/politics/trump-h1b-work-visas.html
It was only a matter of days before all the Owners — from Big Tech on one side to the Koch machine on the other — said, ‘We’re Not Having That.” And lo, the H-1B ban was not. That’s how it works.
Chicago Clubs
>I’m well aware of climate change
I know you are, man, just makes the line thud even harder for me. As far as I can tell it’s pretty much the biggest angle going.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/27/sleeping-giant-arctic-methane-deposits-starting-to-release-scientists-find
js
California is polling 2 Biden votes for every 1 Trump vote, and that a state that voted Sanders in the primary. So Trump might even STEAL the election but not by stealing California, it would have to be state(s) that’s actually close enough to steal.
Ten Bears
I’d listen to a podcast on climate change.
It may not be brave but it’s a brand new world.
Mark Pontin
Astrid wrote: “As dysfunctional as it is, the US still has enough functional nuclear warheads to overkill the world’s population centers many times ….”
[1] So did the U.S.S.R. So today does China and India — though the latter probably doesn’t have the delivery systems ready to hit the U.S. — and so for that matter does the Russian Federation.
The Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal and its giant bioweapons program didn’t help the Soviet state to survive. The South African apartheid regime built nuclear weapons and they didn’t help it survive. And the U.S. nuclear arsenal won’t help the U.S. as the world ceases to use the dollar as the global reserve currency over the next twenty years.
[2] Yeah, factions in U.S. policy-making are stupid enough to think the threat of first-use of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield is viable. But mostly it’s talk, driven by the MIC wanting the profits from building such systems, and the pols and the bureaucrats wanting the graft.
Overall, your chances of the world going up in nuclear war because of, say, India and Pakistan *inadvertently* getting it — Pakistan’s early warning systems are set for hair-trigger ‘launch on warning’ and aren’t particularly advanced — or China and India getting into it — forex, as climate change hits and one of them geoengineers or encroaches on water in a way that hurts the other — are far, far, far higher.
[3] Astrid wrote: “Where can I go to escape this? I don’t actually think China or Russia are strong enough, smart enough, and crazy enough to beat US back long enough ….”
They probably are, though. Because the U.S. has already been beaten back. The slow collapse is just a matter of time, though it’s not going to be pleasant for much of the U.S. population. But then it isn’t now, is it?
[4] Really, the threat of Weather Wars about a decade or two out is bigger.
Or for that matter bioweapons release — in this century, biotechnology is going to be what IT was in the last and really interesting things will be done with bioweapons, which also have the advantage of being really hard to attribute and therefore to deter. In fact ….
Astrid wrote: “I wish “Giant Astroid 2020: Get It F-ing Over With” was an option.”
Learn enough crazy biotech skillz and maybe *you* personally can be the ‘Giant Astroid’ that ends it all.
Mark Pontin
Chicago Cubs wrote: “As far as I can tell it’s pretty much the biggest angle going.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/27/sleeping-giant-arctic-methane-deposits-starting-to-release-scientists-find ”
And then there’s that threat right up in our faces now, though we’re still in denial.
nihil obstet
A major obstacle to saving the country is that we don’t have a vision of what we want in place of this obviously illegitimate government. The Supreme Court has been a bunch of political hacks rather than an independent judiciary ever since Marbury vs. Madison, so why continue the ongoing fight over putting another judge who agrees with us on our chosen issues? The necessity of outlawing segregation and setting the one-man one-vote standard along with the expansion of non-discrimination standards set us up to seek court rulings rather than democratic governance. That’s always going to be a losing game in a capitalist society.
I don’t think that in ten to twelve years we can figure out what we want to do other than “more and better rulers”. And that’s not going to happen.
Hugh
Life begins at conception religiously is a relatively recent concept. It wasn’t until, if memory serves, 1869 that the Catholic church changed its doctrine to the fetus having a soul (being ensouled) from conception. Various Protestant groups joined in later.
Medically, the trimester system makes a certain kind of sense. It has to do with viability. Fetal lung development is the determiner. Fetuses born at the end of the second trimester, 24-25 weeks, have an OK to good chance of survival. At 23 weeks or less, the fetus’s chances of survival decreases to zero at 20 weeks.
For most of the last 3,000 years, the first breath marked not only birth but the entrance of the soul (the spiritus or spirit meant breath) into the body. I doubt that anti-abortion groups know either the history or the science, or care. But it makes a difference. Women are not walking uteruses and should not be treated as such. And absolute rights given to the fetus ignore events like miscarriages and stillbirths. Rather than private, they become legal events with potential criminal consequences.
As for SCOTUS, it has had a 9-0 corporatist majority for decades. I agree with StewartM about ways to change the Court and its scope. I think the original court had one chief justice and four associate justices. Its numbers are not set in stone.
Astrid
USSR in collapse was in considerably better shape than the US will be. People could continue to live in their previously state owned apartments, they had connections to family and their local community, they could scrap by.
They didn’t have the eye popping abundance of guns and electronic surveillance. Most Americans, even upper middle class ones, are considerably closer to the brink than the average citizenry of USSR. And Russia got very lucky with Putin. I think the US already exhausted it’s luck with FDR and 2020 was a clear demonstration that the elite won’t let us luck out again.
And I don’t think the Soviet military officers class got quite as decadent and incompetent as the US military of today. I’ve seen DoD up close and the rot is very real. It’s not about personal corruption per se (thought the revolving doors in the MIC are clear enough, especially at senior levels.) I have met very few with the ability to think clearly, about anything, anymore. (Ditto my supposed cream of crop PMC cohort). Enlisted is better, but still so isolated from any kind of reality.
And USSR leadership had no illusion that it had the right to do whatever it wants to the rest of the world. USA today is not rational, is not able to self correct, and seems perfectly willing to take the rest of the world down in its death throes. They seem to think they can inflict an event to properly cull the useless eaters, then emerge from their underground bunkers or New Zealand to enslave the rest.
Bioengineering is hardly necessary. Climate change, resource degradation, and the consequences of having 8 or 10 billion people on a planet that can’t sustainably support 1 billion are sufficient. Asteroids would just be a mercifully quick end compared to the likely alternatives.
Willy
“more and better rulers”
There doesn’t seem to be much of a science of evil, written for the good. Yeah, maybe this sounds like it could be an Austin Powers tagline or something, but it’s true. As it is, evil is even more poorly understood than is the “science” of economics. Pretty soft stuff. Plus nobody good seems to want to pay an Evilology PhD.
Religious explanations for evil are all convolutedly backwards reflections of the times they were written in. Philosophers have rarely gone into much realistic causal depth, though some have offered practical survival strategies for the good which seem timeless. Historians are like astronomers, tasked to observe and document while leaving the analysis to some astrophysicist equivalent. So we have psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science… but these seem well behind the times, not to mention having less respect than the economic “sciences”. They usually pay less too.
With ever increasing population and technologies you’d think we’d better get a solid handle on understanding how to spot and prevent evil.
Where does evil really come from and how does it spread? What role does binary thinking have to do with spreading it? At what degree do mental defenses become pathological? Why is there a sucker born every minute? Why do so-called geniuses like Chris Langan or James Woods completely miss the mark?
As for getting “more and better rulers’ quickly, I’d demand comprehensive psychological and intelligence testing as well as background checks. Seems to work for pro sports, where even after all that, if you screw up badly, you can get cut from the team pretty quick.
Willy
Can anybody provide a brief synopsis about how conservatism captured “the kooks”?
Buzzard
Leaving the country is increasingly attractive to me, but the question then becomes where to migrate TO? How many free countries remain in the world?
Canada? More freedom than the US, and a comparable standard of living. But too vulnerable.
Europe? Also largely free and democratic, but there’s been an uptick in reactionary leadership recently, and it’s too dependent on hostile countries (like Russia) for certain vital resources.
Australia? Similar to Canada in many ways, and that includes its vulnerability to a foreign power (China).
New Zealand? Nice and isolated, high standard of living, but good luck getting in.
Some third-world countries have reasonable appeal, but almost none of them have a democratic tradition, and their economies, even the stronger ones (Argentina, South Africa) are still very fragile.
There really aren’t too many options for the American who wants to bolt for freedom.
Buzzard
Willy — the following Seneca quote is a good starting point:
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”
Mark Pontin
Willy: ‘Can anybody provide a brief synopsis about how conservatism captured “the kooks”?’
Koch.
In brief.
Seriously. The guy has engaged in a full-out, planned project to re-engineer American society for slightly more than fifty years
kråke
Mark,
Americans have always been amenable to docility training.
Plague Species
It’s more nuanced than that. It’s a matter of degree and yes, until there is a revolution, which won’t be forthcoming by the way, degree does still matter, especially on the margins where an increasing number of unwashed perilously reside.
https://www.acslaw.org/issue_brief/briefs-landing/a-right-wing-rout-what-the-roberts-five-decisions-tell-us-about-the-integrity-of-todays-supreme-court/
Stormcrow
Astrid wrote
Never underestimate the destructive power of a bow shock.
Or it’s potential for surprise.
The exogenous shock that triggered the Western Roman Collapse was the rise and westward migration of the Hunnish Empire.
But the agent of that collapse was the bow shock that preceded it geographically. Dozens of tribal polities that took the third of the choices the Huns presented to them: join, fight, or flee.
The Adrianople disaster was the result of Roman failure to negotiate the consequences when one of the groups on the leading edge of this mass flight showed up on the Danube, attempting to gain tribal asylum. Rome could have played that one better and thus could have avoided that particular disaster. But sooner or later they were going to screw up. And only 150 years after the 3rd Century Crisis, they no longer had the reserve capacity to rebound from an Adrianople-scale military catastrophe.
The Hunnish Empire wasn’t actually the agent of the Western Roman Collapse. In fact, the rump of the Western Roman Empire outlived it. The Hunnish Empire had shattered like crockery dropped onto concrete immediately after Attila’s unexpected death. But by that time, the 75 year long extended bow shock that preceeded the Hunnish Empire had already ripped the Western Roman Empire to shreds and tatters, and it’s formal termination was only a matter of time.
Our bow shock is going to be the Climate Wars.
Those will cross the boundary from limited to total war PDQ, because they will be existential wars and all the combatants will understand this. So you can expect to see them go nuclear and/or biological very very quickly. But bio weapons, anthrax excepted, don’t render the territory that’s the actual war aim unfit for habitation, while nukes do.
But since that’s what we run into before the climate change really begins to thin populations in double digit percentages by itself, most of us are going to be dead from nuke and/or bio strikes and their direct consequences long before we ever get a chance to die from the direct effects of AGW.
Olivier
Ian, there is an important difference between 2000 and 2020: this time around Biden, not Trump, is the candidate of the establishment and oligarchy. See, e.g., his de facto endorsement by the Chamber of Commerce.
Chicago Clubs
>Where does evil really come from and how does it spread?
I don’t think these are hard questions. Where does it come from? Selfishness, viewing people as means to your own ends rather than ends in themselves. I have yet to come across a more convincing definition. As for how it spreads: because it pays.
Willy
The hard part is convincing others about just who and what are evil. Religion fails, communism fails, capitalism fails… to restrain it for long. Evil is adaptable because it doesn’t care. It pretends and skillfully convinces that it’s our new best religious, communist, capitalist… friend, and then proceeds to ruin them all for its own pleasure. There’s probably a science behind that.
StewartM
Feral Finster,
What I am saying is that there was an economic rationale for anti-abortion laws and also sodomy laws that were passed in the 19th century, when the birthrate started to fall in the US. Prohibiting abortion and contraceptives plus making any form of non-procreative sex illegal (even masturbation) was an attempt to keep the native birthrate up.
So, if there was an economic rationale back then, the same would hold true now. Natives groveling for a job, any job, from Daddy Warbucks are preferred over immigrants, as the latter may come ‘contaminated’ with dangerous ideas like universal healthcare (and your country doesn’t have to be particularly rich to have that) whereas our poor whites can be told that ‘NO OTHER OR BETTER WAY IS EVEN POSSIBLE” and that in the Netherlands they have death panels.
StewartM
KT Chong
Abortion is legal even in the third trimester, if the health or life of the mother is at risk. Too-many anti-abortion activists who rant about third-trimester abortions obscure that fact, it’s being done to save the mother.
StewartM
Buzzard
The question to me is not “is this better than the US is or can be?” but “is this country better than the US likely WILL be”.
Insofar as freedom is concerned, there’s de jure freedom and de facto freedom. When I quoted from a Russian a few weeks ago who claimed that Russians were freer than Americans, I think he was referring to that difference.
Externalities are important. A great choice would be Taiwan–great health care, robust democracy, great infrastructure, good cost of living, efficient government, etc–but one has to consider China and the ever-present threat of invasion. Many of my Taiwanese friends are deluded (as are some Americans) that Biden is pro-China and Trump is anti-China, but I tell them that Biden is the safer bet. And not based upon policy differences, just pure profit: if Xi was to dangle a juicy $500 million hotel deal in Beijing to Trump, he’d sell Taiwan out in a heartbeat. Just ask the Kurds.
BlizzardOfOzzz
StewartM, wonder at your examples …
Yes, it’s a worry, all those dirty immigrants from … the Netherlands. (I guess you didn’t want to mention Mexico for some reason, huh.)
So … Biden is pro-China and takes bribes from them; Trump is anti-China, but he might take a bribe from them and become even more pro-China than Biden? I’m detecting a touch of motivated reasoning there.
different clue
@Willy,
Here is the closest you will get to a “formalized science of evilology”.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ponerology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponerology
http://www.systemsthinker.com/interests/ponerology/
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_ponerology01.htm
C
At what point ever has legislative action not been an option. Throughout history there have been moments where either party had the votes to actually enact law galvanizing an hot topic of the times.
My feeling is that both sides are equally happy with the status quo! If it weren’t for manufactured crisis needed their astute leadership we might actually find that we fair quite well without all the fuss.
Nothing will change!