i don't know if what's happening in the united states right now is a targeted purge or a structural coup, but i don't get the feeling that this is short term, and i'm not convinced it's going to be reversible.

america is shutting itself down. scrawl a note over the american flag on the moon: out of business.

i'm trying to think about when the last great collapse of liberalism was. i suppose it depends on how you define the current age: did we start in the renaissance? is that wave form what is coming to a close?

i think there's an argument that part of what created the middle ages was the technological development not in weaponry but in agriculture. it seems crude by today's standards. but, life required a lot of hard work, so there wasn't a lot of time to study. after all, antiquity is full of civilizations being slaughtered, and it just kept on. something else stepped in after the romans fell, and created a much deeper shift in how societies were organized. it wasn't until the technology became efficient enough to allow leisure that it did, and liberal thoughts could be once again entertained.

that's a bad precedent, for us. that process took a long time. but, i told you i just read that asimov text, right? i'm thinking more about inri067, spoke - my eulogy for the civil rights era and secular liberalism as we understand it.

what i'm searching for is a successor, but we're really at the end of this. we can't hand it back to a decayed europe, which in fact merely precedes us in corruption. china and russia and saudi arabia are empires. and, africa remains in disarray.

if there is hope, it is in south america, but it is absurd to suggest they could challenge america at any time in the near future. perhaps the better hope is that the people of the americas can co-operatively work to take back the government in the united states before it collapses.

if we're in a similar technological moment that produced the dark ages, it's not going to be because our lives are too labour-intensive, but because they are not labour intensive enough. some of us are perhaps likely to forget how to do anything at all, but i must push back against the standard dystopic view, as i think a subset of humans would take advantage of such freedom to become scholars and general patrons of the arts. the dark ages produced an aristocracy of management. the new illiberalism will no doubt be an aristocracy of knowledge.

and, freedom means different things to different people. so, the battle will remain the same: fight hierarchy wherever you see it.

but, what if the networks come down? if this witchcraft is destroyed?

see, i don't doubt this at all. it was pretty obvious.

but, there's an added complication that she probably doesn't remember the worst of it.

i always found crystal castles frustrating, in that it demonstrated some potential for abstraction but never really explored it. it was clear that the intent was always profit above everything else; you can hear the disinterest in the 'art'.

but, you'll note that there is an accusation, here, followed by charges and an investigation. that's how these things need to operate.

http://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/crystal-castles-songwriter-being-investigated-by-police-sex-crimes-unit

i want to repeat a point that i made several years ago about syria.

it's less that assad has to go, as an individual. it's more that syria needs a change in actual leadership - in military leadership. and, it's up to the russians, now, to ensure that this happens.

the russians know better than anybody else what it is to experience a serious existential crisis; they are certainly best positioned, of all the major powers, to understand the psychology of the assad regime. on one of the days i spent waiting for the isp, i read one of the foundation texts that i skipped as a child. it was the one where seldon was wrong. so, i have this psychohistory on my brain, and the recognition of it as psychobabble. but, if you leave the assad regime - the regime, not the figurehead - in place, it will necessarily retaliate, which means launching a counter-attack on the saudis.

the saudi regime needs to fall, but not like this - not at the cost of a major proxy war that will draw in the turks and who knows else - israel, america and maybe even china.

the russians, unfortunately, are relying on this regime. when i made those comments, and i realized even at the time that this responsibility is putin's, i did not realize the remaining extent of the cold war connections between the kremlin and the assad regime, nor how easy it would be to reactivate them. the russians, however, are not foreign to purges, not even in foreign countries.

the assad regime does, in fact, have to go to ensure a peace. the americans are right for the wrong reasons. but, it's not likely to.

i would be far more cautious about letting my friendly retrievers near wild otters, like that. they seem to think it's a game. but, the otters would drag the dog down, if they got the chance.

scaredy cat.

it's gotta be thinking that the otters are some kind of sea creature - that this is one multiheaded monster, rather than a collection of individual animals. and, that's a smart tactic. them otters are smart.

then, at the end, it's just all like "i could've taken it. i wasn't scared.".

yeah, but now go find a video of a polar bear ripping the heart out of a seal's chest and tell me how you feel about it.

climate change is bad news and everything.

but, bears are monsters.

why can't we have solidarity with something other than apex carnivores? and, why does this, of all things, generate empathy.

fucking humans.