02-11-2020, 08:39 PM
(02-11-2020, 02:04 PM)Skabungus Wrote: There is a lot of stuff teetering. Just hanging there, waiting for a good breeze to push it over.
- Middle East and North Africa, now an vast wasteland. Rampant poverty and dislocation. Broken governments and government by murder gangs and non-state actors. The viable parties (Egypt, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia et al) suffer as well with rising debt, refugee problems and lock tight dictatorships. Israel grows in its boldness and the proposed one state solution is a powder keg both internally and with a host of non-state actors willing to act.
- Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Burma. Racial/religious/cultural tensions on the rise and if the past is any indication, issues in this region have the capability of going from 0 indicator to full blown crisis at light speed.
- North Korea
- The "Far East" China's issues seem to be compounding at an alarming rate. Many of its problems are of it's own creation (viral outbreaks reeducation camps for Muslims, the nine dash line, rampant spying exposed) and some brought on my the outside (Taiwan, push back on trade from the US, African states and India).
- Pacific island nations and the land down under are feeling the impact of climate change with island nations actually disappearing, fires and a rise is racial/nationalistic tensions.
- Europe and Great Britain seeing a rise in right-wing nationalism and a simultaneous drop in enthusiasm from left wing proponents. Russia looms larger and larger particularly for former East Bloc states all the while NATO dithers about.
- Africa. Africa is just fucked. Aside from Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia, the entire continent is composed of failed states, violent non-state actors, famine, disease and failed economies.
The only thing it doesn't have right now is the Corona Virus. Yet.
- The Americas are in a lot worse shape than we choose to recognize. Central America with its drug cartels, corrupt government, refugee problems and failed or failing states have a huge price tag attached whether white middle class Americans choose to recognize it or not. Chickens coming home to roost.
There is perfect storm material out there boiling around to create a crisis crescendo at any given moment. All of them COULD precipitate a major war, or collection of wars. All of them could spell huge economic pain with or without a major war. I will not sacrifice the goat and read the entrails but only say that it would not surprise me in the slightest should I rise tomorrow to hear the crisis crescendo(s) were upon us.
There are a few things I believe will figure prominently into the hindsight on this turning.
-- Rise of non-state actors and global affinity groups as key influences in the course of events.
-- Shrinking significance of the nation state in determining the course of events and eventual outcomes.
-- Increasing inability of the nation state model to function at all.
-- The pervasive impact of technology on human perception and reason.
When the shit goes down, I think it will be fast and furious. I somehow, against reason, feel it will be over as fast as it starts. Not a 15 year protracted engagement, but a few short and REALLY EXCITING TO THE POINT OF TERROR YEARS.
When the smoke clears I think a few things will be completely absent. Baby Boomer influence, the war over abortion and the age of technology will be among them. In their place I see clear, pragmatic, secular models that make the best of a bad situation for the most people possible. It wont be called socialism either. It will be called getting the job done.
People trying to protect a situation that has its origin before the Crisis will often find such untenable. The people with the most entrenched interests but the least competency for protecting them stand to lose the most. Economic equivalents of the gravy train for corrupt, amoral, unimaginative elites can derail.
Most people will put the survival of themselves and people like them above the rescue of effete interests. The enforcement of class privilege and monopoly power will be impossible. In some places the choice will be by vote; in some places the consequences will be coups, revolutions, and military debacles.
What wins in a Crisis Era is in the end principle (even if the Boom elite in America seems to have had no principle higher than selfish indulgence), pragmatism, and reason. Sentimentality, perversion, and cruelty fail. As the Christmas carol I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day from the American Civil War puts it:
"The wrong shall fail, the right prevail".
In America I expect the GOP to resort to dirty tricks to save their hold on power: intimidation, treachery, and outright fraud. Will such work? God help us if it does. The GOP has a shrinking coalition and a grossly-inadequate President.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.