A Lefty "American Redoubt" eh?
Cascadia
<https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/11/6_maps_that_show_what_us_would.html>
vs Redoubt <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Redoubt>
NM's neighbor and abusive ex-spouse, TX seceded from the US power grid
long ago (never joined) and this week may tell us what they learned from
*last year's lesson" in inter-dependency and preparation. Beto O'Rourke
had a very snarky response to Abbot's claim (and self-contradiction)
that he could guarantee that there would be no failures of the grid in
the future (just unpredicted load-shed-events). It was something about
TX being the greatest energy producing region in the world, but refusing
to spend the extra single-digit percentage to make it resilient to the
kinds of weather events that are becoming more common (climate change?!).
Of course, in my little libertarian-utopian sovereign nation of one I am
melting snow on my woodstove today because the measures *I* took against
sub-freezing weather in my wellhouse were insufficient up to and
including (apparently) triggering a failure in my 40 year old, now
deprecated GE breaker for the pump. I guess I'll be going to the
big-box store (cuz the little box doesn't have enough variety and Jeff
Bezos game never delivers sooner than next day) to buy a new subpanel as
well as breakers/wiring (all made in China I suspect, because I want the
*cheapest* viable option of course, I deserve it!) whilst grumbling
about "planned obsolescence", "Chinese junk" and "Goddam
Globalization". If I could just get George Soros to task one of his
space lasers (at low power) down my wellhouse and thaw everything out,
I'd be in techno-utopian fat-city, neh? Or I could just leave the
breaker out and instead splice in a lower-guage bit of wire and call it
a "fusable link". The wellhouse is far from my house and is
constructed of concrete block... so no big worries about fires?
On 2/4/22 10:02 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
As Omicron was ramping up Joy Reid said something along the lines of
“Is there a way to cut out a safe place to live these days [free from
all the anti-vaxxer crazies]?”
That resonated with me. I think that’s a plausible way how life could
be in ten years. Some municipalities & companies, maybe some states,
will appeal to individuals that value, well, reason, and others will
not. Then the exercise becomes one of which brands are in some sense
profitable. This will of course deepen polarization, but over the
course of several generations the unprofitable approaches will die a
desperate and lonely and death. Some of the woke brands won’t make
it, but neither will some of the reactionary brands. It is not
clear what will happen to the federal government during this time,
perhaps the kind of oscillation the author imagines. The trick will
be to insulate oneself from it until the political power of the
crazies is ground down by repeated failure and steadily decreasing
economic power.
*From:* Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Steve Smith
*Sent:* Friday, February 4, 2022 8:32 AM
*To:* friam@redfish.com
*Subject:* [FRIAM] Democracy in Name Only: endemic regime instability
Someone here is more likely than I to have actually read Ziblatt and
Levitsky's How Democracies Die
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Democracies_Die#:~:text=How%20Democracies%20Die%20is%20a,process%20to%20increase%20their%20power.>
A recent article (behind a subscribe-wall) included the following quote:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2022-01-20/americas-coming-age-instability
/America may no longer be safe for democracy, but it remains
inhospitable to autocracy./
/Rather than autocracy, the United States appears headed toward
endemic regime instability. /
/Such a scenario would be marked by frequent constitutional
crises, including contested or stolen elections and severe
conflict between presidents and Congress (such as impeachments and
executive efforts to bypass Congress), the judiciary (such as
efforts to purge or pack the courts), and state governments (such
as intense battles over voting rights and the administration of
elections). The United States would likely shift back and forth
between periods of dysfunctional democracy and periods of
competitive authoritarian rule during which incumbents abuse state
power, tolerate or encourage violent extremism, and tilt the
electoral playing field against their rivals./
I found this characterization of our plight very compelling, if also
very disturbing.
It seems as if we have "tumbled our gyros" but in a different mode
than the rhetoric about "Civil War" and "Descent into Autocracy" seem
to suggest. It also characterizes a lot of the aspiring/limping
democracies we know of in the world today up to and including extreme
examples such as Russia which fits the DINO (democracy in name only)
label pretty well.
This conception of the problem lead me to a very well written HS
student-essay by the same title: democracy-in-name-only
<https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/democracy-in-name-only-2020-01-02>.
Within this essay was a poignant quote:
In the words of Alexis de Tocqueville,
/“A new science of politics is needed for a new world. This,
however, is what we think of least; launched in the middle of
a rapid stream, we obstinately fix our eyes on the ruins which
may still be descried upon the shore we have left, while the
current sweeps us along, and drives us backward toward the gulf.”/
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