how do you think things will play out from the nightmare that is 2020 in the u.s.?

Question

and how would you LIKE things to play out?

the covid-19 pandemic. major social unrest due (initially) to systemic racism in law enforcement. a president (and cohorts) that seems intent on establishing an authoritarian dictatorship of some sort, while setting the stage to contest - or possibly prevent - the upcoming presidential election that he seems likely to lose.

shit seems ripe for something dramatic. what are your thoughts and desires about how this shit might play out? what will things look like in february 2021? what would you realistically want them to look like?

just looking for some discussion, really.

Comments

my imagination is not working so well atm, but what i keep thinking of, when i lift my head enough to take a longer view, is the scenario(s) described in *Desert*. i believe that is boring of me, but it's partly why the book has had such resonance, i think. it convincingly paints a picture that seems realistic based on predictions and events...

but that doesn't say much about what might be different next year (yeesh. 8 months from now). except, you know, more so.

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Nice, I was planning to ask this question myself today!

Answer 1

LAVA LAMP WRITINGS: there are indicia of modernity's end all about ...  COVID has distorted all institutional images ... it is as if ameriKa  is seeing its retroflections in a hall of circus mirrors ... history is being unlearned and science is providing no solace ... the WASP will use whatever institutional processes available to maintain history as he needs it to be ... the elements of change are more nihilistic than idealistic .... authoritarian centralization will be the vaccine of choice for most > it will be an untrialed vaccine and societal reaction to it could be less than desirable ... the 2020 election is a choice between a charlatan & a pawn of identity politics > whoever wins will rule without solutions ... the COVID is most likely endemic ...  no real medical break throughs for the masses can occur before 2022 ... ANY vaccine will be administered in a prioritized manner on an INDIVIDUAL basis causing whatever benefits to be outweighed by the unrest that will come from those still wanting ... the 2021 streets will soon be crowded with the unemployed, the homeless, the angry, the sick, the fearful, the militant and herded by the FORCES OF CONTROL... money will soon be a derivative  ...   the streets will be crowded & households more isolated ... the paradox of mass protest in a society beset with COVID demanded social distancing is looming larger & LARGER ... internet fabrication will  invert information and facts will be personal to the holder ... individual voices will get louder as they try & shout down one another ... 2021 will be a harbinger of a worse 2022

Comments

ok, you can take off your rose-colored glasses now.  :-)

/s

Answer 2

Political polls/Public opinions polls in the US is an industry more than anything else.  The pollsters aren't measuring peoples opinions, but producing them. There's a slight amount of pressure that pollsters put on people to give an answer about a set of political related questions. Question that the person may or may not give a shit about or even be aware of. Asking people their opinions on a set political related questions hasn't translated well into people voting the way the poll had suggested for the past 40 years or so. The results of political polls/public opinions are kinda like illusions. At best, they're for the media to try to gauge the effectiveness of their reporting and marketing.

I don't usually set out things or think much about what I would realistically want things to happen in the future personally. People have asked me similar things and usually I don't have an answer that accounts for more than a few days. US political related stuff I don't ponder much and when I do, i draw blanks. pew pew pew. It's not good for my mental health and I just have a huge sense of indifference to the whole she-bang in the US with the rona and politically anyways. Perhaps it's depression or I'm just too dang bourgeoi$ or i don't feel it has much to do with me personally.

I think it would be humorous to me if the president got reelected or didn't get reelected and refused to step down. Here are some minor things. I would like to see people stop insinuating nearly everything is white supremacy without a coherent explanation as to why. That's all I got. Maybe Covid-19 could be called Captain Trips instead. That'd be neat.

Comments

@funky: i feel that the major thing that was so "revolutionary" about reagan is he presented himself as a libertarian:

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Hospitals cancelled!

And yes, ronald reagan began the era of persecutory neoliberalism through the drug trade, the CIA were basically international drug dealers and nancy reagan went around moralizing about drug usage. That was basically what i was trying to say with the jesus comment, but the funny part is basically every president since reagan was very similarly in favor of a free-market economic policy. Since i was born the year that ronald reagam supposably tore down the iron curtain, i've personally found american ethics to be very strange and contradictory, rife with double think.

And i have no choice to continue to ride this beautiful roller coaster through the visceral screams and tortures of a million demons!

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reagan presented himself as a small-government conservative, which shares only the small gov part with libertarians. he was a hard core social conservative, which is where so much of his support came from. probably helped sow the seeds of the neo-con movement that followed.

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Heh that's interesting about your friend that got you into marxism turning into a Reaganite. There is a common theme of different types of marxists that turned into conservative in the 70s-80s. Eldridge Cleaver is one of the well known example I can think of atm that turned into a conservative later on in his life, but there are others.

The rise of the neoconservatives comes out of or branched off of of the "new democrats" that developed in the 80s-90s. The "new democrats" were influenced by Reagan and basically were socially centrist and economically conservative as they thought democrats at that time were out of touch. Clinton's election is a  notable example, but they existed in the senate prior to him. Like Gore and Biden were "new democrats"

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yep, the "new democrats" moved the party to the right, becoming much more "centrist" than had been the case (generally speaking, of course). some folks thought carter was the real beginning of that, but comparing carter to clinton speaks volumes.

i hate the fact that i even remember this shit. obviously i wasn't always anti-political. live and learn.

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racists were (and obviously still are) everywhere. think "dixiecrats."  johnson was democrat and a complete racist, even though much civil rights legislation was passed on his watch. nixon was a conservative republican on whose watch MANY legislative acts were passed that would be considered progressive today (epa, clean air/water, endangered species, expanded social services, etc). which doesn't mean he wasn't a megalomaniacal power monger. carter may have been a "wonderful and lovable person", and that's what all the republicans against trump are pointing to in biden.

nothing is binary.

it's all bullshit and it's bad for ya!  -gc

Answer 3

This is a tough one for me, because as I have a very, very strong aversion to predicting the future. But I'll lay out a few thoughts.

Not counting various dreams, I've lived through three or four end of the world scenarios so far. The first I remember was Y2K (lol). Some people freaked out super hard, probably because they were psychologically predisposed to that and the media coverage of it was super overblown because of course that's what the media does because money, but a lot of people just ignored it because it didn't have enough to do with their lives. The next was 9/11, not exactly end of the world but it seemed everybody in the US came up with some reason why they might be next (again, media, money, etc) and were making lots of plans for what if the terrorists blew up the nearby nuclear reactor and all that. Now, for all the problems of people misunderstanding a culture that isn't theirs, I thought the 2012 end of the world excitement was much more interesting. Nobody really *did* anything, but it wasn't really clear what you were *supposed* to do. I had a john who confessed to me that he had been hoping the aliens would finally come and reveal themselves and teach us to love each other. Late 2012 was very disappointing for him as you might guess, but I love this kind of end of the world, where no one's told what it will mean or what to do, so that it's a pocket that each person can put whatever they want into. In this sense, the end of the world is just like the future, but charged with high levels of messianic intensity.

The next thought is that our hopes and our fears are intimately linked. I see a lot of stuff about the fear of a civil war, and I suspect there's a hope there too. And vice-versa with the people who are outspokenly hoping for a civil war.

I'm investing my hope-fear energy elsewhere -- although that kind of scenario can certainly have anarchist implications, I see these as orders of magnitude smaller than the horrors and the consolidation of new states, so I am abstaining from feeding that particular beast. To be honest, I'm much more on a similar page with the john I mentioned above, though I imagine my aliens are probably different from his.

So to answer the question: I think things will be both weirder and more normal than anyone expects. Weirder and weirder in every sense, but also more normal -- not because there is anything but weirdness at the heart of existence, but because it is a weirdness so weird that it gives birth to prolonged periods of banality exactly when we would never expect it.

I have other thoughts that I'll save for the comment section.

Comments

No idea if it would pass a "fact check" but I remember reading or hearing that the Earth / our solar system travels on a long (thousands of years) cycle in and out of the plane of the galaxy -- and that right at late 2012 it crossed the plane.

Would not be at all surprised if Mayan astronomers accurately calculated something like that.