Democracy losing the war on four huge fronts

[pbrower2a]

(08-13-2021, 08:13 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Well, this has been quite a several weeks. And not in a good way. The USA has just lost its longest war. The UN announced unequivocally that humans have caused a climate breakdown that we have only a few years to stop, and it may be too late. The Delta variant is back to winning the covid war against humans. And both trumpist and neoliberal Republicans are trying to suppress democracy in Texas as Democratic lawmakers deny them a quorum. The Supreme Court recently upheld democracy suppression in Arizona, as Republicans attempt to suppress democracy everywhere and more mob attacks are planned. The Pluto Return seems in full swing, with Neptune soon to return to its civil war position and Uranus' Return due (and the corresponding 4T climax) later in the decade. Will the forces of democracy mobilize and reverse these defeats?

Obviously nobody can change the movements of the planets against the stars. 

Democracy can be messy, especially when well-heeled heels and people grossly deluded define democracy only as "I get my way". Some of those well-heeled heels see only profits from the acceleration of the consumption of climate-threatening fossil fuels and the rapid depletion of other resources in the promotion of destructive and dubious "growth". So things get hot? Just turn up the air condition, devour more fossil fuel, and intensify the global warming to meet a symptom. You know how that goes: have a drink to deal with the hangover, but whatever you do do not attend any meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. 

We will need huge structural changes in how we do things. We need to unlink economic and political power. Our system, designed brilliantly to promote liberty (except of course of slaves) in a pre-industrial era may have met its match in people who can translate economic power into political power and then can entrench themselves in power that they use to crush any competition or dissent. We need to adapt to the end of scarcity... and have zero or negative population growth. We need also to close the seams in our political system that people once were scared to use if they knew them but are delighted to use if they know them.   

Quote:The Taliban has enlisted allies from countries to the north and from resurgent Al Qaeda. Just when this alliance developed is not clear. ... The imminent defeat of the USA in Afghanistan after a 20-year war is only happening now in August, 8 months later than I might have predicted, but perhaps Biden's election was a trigger, since he soon decided the USA would leave. Or the developments mentioned above could have happened around the time of the conjunction.

President Biden must have calculated that either the Taliban has lost some of its sting (unlikely that it is any less nasty; bad habits do not die) or that fending it off is futile.     

Quote:Of course the attack on democracy has raged across the world ..., along with the rising of the people since the Arab Spring which continues in many places despite the ruthless and growing suppression carried out by the tyrants. This is also like a world conflict. Will The West find a way to support the rising peoples against the tyrants? Will the tyrants fall as progressive forces mobilize in the new Aquarian cycle?

I hope so. I also hope for more success this time. Dictatorships have failed to bring human happiness -- only degrading poverty and mass death instead. 

Quote:The civil conflict in the USA is also an existential threat to the nation. Not only do we see suppression of democracy, with democrats and Democrats fighting back as they can, but many of these same Republican traitors are also fighting on the side of the covid virus, protesting vaccines and health measures and refusing to get vaccinated, as mandates increase and will tighten in response. Biden is losing popularity, and Gov. Newsom faces a recall election, but the democratic forces must mobilize against these threats as well.

Democratic governance has never been neat and clean... it is not so intended. Dictatorship is far easier to do, if not to accept. The old-fashioned tyranny of feudalism did not care about whether the people liked or disliked the system. The modern sort of dictatorship demands expressions of glee. Yes, the secret police killed my son for political dissent -- and I must cheer this on lest I too be killed in a horrific way as was he! 

That is modernity meeting new evil, and that sort of modernity is the wrong one. 

Quote:And then there's the climate crisis, the biggest of all. And we're losing that one too. Biden's election is a boon to the democratic forces on this one. But will 2 Democrat holdouts come through with enough support for the needed measures found in the reconciliation bill? That struggle is happening too over the next month or more. Meanwhile, a conference postponed by covid is happening in November. Will China, India and other countries get on board with a much-more ambitious rollback of fossil fuels? Will the USA exert enough leadership and provide enough support? If the USA cannot provide an example because of the two Democrat holdouts, what leverage will the USA have at the conference?

There will be no choice. The difference between "rich" and "poor" countries in a neoliberal world or one in which neoliberal institutions are entrenched may largely be what people pay for what they get. As long as I can meet other basic needs, a laptop and a lapdog might be enough for many. 

Climate change is real, and its most destructive effects will result in mass death, economic dislocations without precedent, and discreditation of political and economic institutions could be much more obvious in time for the Crisis of 2100 than now. But that is not all that poses a risk.

The end of scarcity makes a shambles of old methods of command and control by plutocrats over workers. It will also lay bare the weaknesses of institutions that have huge commitments to the old ways. Consider that many commercial enterprises are in death spirals due to their late stages in their life cycles yet have many (not only their bureaucratic elites and shareholders, but also politicians who depend upon them for campaign finance, local taxing authorities, and of course large numbers of employees depending upon them. Those companies, many of them deemed Too Big to Fail in recent years, will become even shakier and more vulnerable; they will also get hungrier for subsidies and sleazy arrangements that squelch competition in the name of crony capitalism necessary for their survival.  

The Singularity, in which machine intelligence overtakes ours, transforms what could be a placid house cat who finds us convenient into a tiger who has us on the menu as soon as we are more desirable as a meal than as a companion. I forget whether the warning comes from Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke, but all in all the ones who give the most fitting predictions are not so much prophets in togas and sandals as they are science-fiction writers with a typewriter and a loyal audience. In essence, when machine technology may find us inconvenient it will find our weaknesses and destroy great numbers of us and make us subordinate. What could be inconvenient about us? We devour too many resources, including moving electrons. Those machines will need far fewer of us eating up resources. They will probably destroy other creatures that devour huge quantities of food... bye, bye doggies, too. Machine intelligence does not relate well to our pooches. 

Nuclear proliferation may have been under control when there were two most likely adversaries (the United States and the Soviet Union) because the privileged elites within the superpowers recognized that nuclear war would put their privileged lives and their sybaritic lifestyles at risk. When more austere terrorists  like ISIS or even the KKK can get nukes, we are in big trouble. The sorts of beasts who would leave a pipe bomb at a historically-black church in "Bombingham, Alabama" to explode with the deaths of four black girls would as willingly leave a more murderous device -- an atom bomb -- if they could do so. So members of some Klavern that have made or stolen a nuke sneak one into... well, I need not continue. The technology isn't all that primitive anymore.