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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.