To admit the supremacy of facts is to murder the grift.
The Biden administration exists to assert that the empire can work, if only it is competently administered. This is a false statement -- the Oil Empire absolutely cannot work in this century of angry weather, in the time of the death of ice -- and in its way and to its degree it is a grift of its own.
The fact-driven response -- that the absolute, utter, before all things else, goal is to minimise the overall global number of COVID-19 replication events to the smallest possible number before it finds worse and worser parts of its possibility space to occupy -- cannot be advanced. Once one fact becomes supreme, "what about this other fact over here?" becomes impossible to avoid. Then it becomes impossible to maintain the delicate pretence of American unity; it becomes impossible to pretend capitalism works. It becomes impossible to tolerate the anti-vax mask of dominionist evangelicals. The "feels before facts" Reaganite re-imagining of the United States comes apart. The vast, dreary jobs of created food security in our time has to happen; doing something about mammonism has to happen. To the extent that it's different, doing something about the dominionist evangelicals has to happen.
The democratic policy since Reagan has been to fight a rear guard action and pray for deliverance from the demographic shift. This is obvious; this is why ICE functions to perform ethnic cleansing and there are respectable republican voices calling for an end to all immigration. This is why the generational focus on removing democracy at the state level.
(this is why Joe can't shut down the kids-in-camps; ICE is a non-negotiable, touch-this-and-civil-war, component of the dominionist agenda.)
Some new policy needs to be attempted; the plague makes is really obvious, but it was true before.
"The vast, dreary jobs of created food security in our time has to happen; doing something about mammonism has to happen. To the extent that it's different, doing something about the dominionist evangelicals has to happen."
It only has to happen IF the US and similar nations are to survive and prosper. There is no reason to believe that must be the case. History is littered with cultures that collapsed because they couldn't change.
To my eyes, it does not look like change is coming, although one can hope that it does come, and extremely rapidly. But if it doesn't then there could be an extended period of collapse until the new, more sustainable cultures/nations assert themselves. The transition doesn't have to be easy either, possibly filled with war.
_Why are we still in the situation we are?… _
To admit the supremacy of facts is to murder the grift.
The Biden administration exists to assert that the empire can work, if only it is competently administered. This is a false statement -- the Oil Empire absolutely cannot work in this century of angry weather, in the time of the death of ice -- and in its way and to its degree it is a grift of its own.
The fact-driven response -- that the absolute, utter, before all things else, goal is to minimise the overall global number of COVID-19 replication events to the smallest possible number before it finds worse and worser parts of its possibility space to occupy -- cannot be advanced. Once one fact becomes supreme, "what about this other fact over here?" becomes impossible to avoid. Then it becomes impossible to maintain the delicate pretence of American unity; it becomes impossible to pretend capitalism works. It becomes impossible to tolerate the anti-vax mask of dominionist evangelicals. The "feels before facts" Reaganite re-imagining of the United States comes apart. The vast, dreary jobs of created food security in our time has to happen; doing something about mammonism has to happen. To the extent that it's different, doing something about the dominionist evangelicals has to happen.
The democratic policy since Reagan has been to fight a rear guard action and pray for deliverance from the demographic shift. This is obvious; this is why ICE functions to perform ethnic cleansing and there are respectable republican voices calling for an end to all immigration. This is why the generational focus on removing democracy at the state level.
(this is why Joe can't shut down the kids-in-camps; ICE is a non-negotiable, touch-this-and-civil-war, component of the dominionist agenda.)
Some new policy needs to be attempted; the plague makes is really obvious, but it was true before.
"The vast, dreary jobs of created food security in our time has to happen; doing something about mammonism has to happen. To the extent that it's different, doing something about the dominionist evangelicals has to happen."
It only has to happen IF the US and similar nations are to survive and prosper. There is no reason to believe that must be the case. History is littered with cultures that collapsed because they couldn't change.
To my eyes, it does not look like change is coming, although one can hope that it does come, and extremely rapidly. But if it doesn't then there could be an extended period of collapse until the new, more sustainable cultures/nations assert themselves. The transition doesn't have to be easy either, possibly filled with war.