Bad news is good news?
The technical logical problem with the “let it get bad enough that the sheep grow canines” idea isn’t that the sheep won’t grow canines for a long time. That’s just the practical problem, and the history of Germany, Russia, Iran, … suggest it is a real big one.
The logical problem is the same fallacy the Creationists like to use: evolution doesn’t answer this question (well, not until you read the part where it does) therefore YHWH created the universe 6000 years ago. The neocons are imploding, therefore the Democrats are going to win. There are many third ways, many of them quite ugly.
If Democrats keep doing the Republican-Lite thing, the other options include the grownups reclaiming the Republican party or a third party emerging. Or, particularly if people catch on to exactly how easy it is to steal an election when you own the computerized ballot boxes, we could end up with a revolution (a real one with destruction of political order and infrastructure, resulting in the ascendancy of violent extremists and thus many bad things, not a liberation of an already well-functioning political order and infrastructure from outside interference, like we had in 1776) or a USSR-type collapse.
I will not be entirely surprised if we go the way of the USSR before 2015, for the same reasons: massive corruption and arrogant ideology unchecked by effective political opposition, resulting in military overreach, economic collapse, and a complete rejection of the national mythology. I think we can, and probably will, pull it together, but by “probably” I mean “better than 50/50 chance” not “almost certainly.”
It isn’t always darkest before the dawn. Sometimes it is darkest before the clowns eat your brain.
January 13th, 2006 at 6:41 pm
The big question looming before us is just how bad is the impending ecological disaster going to get by, say, 2015. With these incompetents in office, the US is wasting all it’s resources on retrograde projects like the Iraq War (to put it in the most friendly light–personally, I’m fine with “pointless slaughter of brown skinned innocents”). Meanwhile the polar ice thins, the Greenland Ice Sheet slips, the world resources of petroleum spin into the endless energy sink that is China, who also finances our absurd policies. When the US truely comes up against real, long term, economic hard times, what will be the effect on our politics then? It’s not a pretty thought.