How can you look at the U.S. in the current moment and not see it hurtling towards civil war? The most motivated group in the country is the huge, heavily-armed, bloodthirsty trump personality cult, with huge support in the federal government, the states, and the military. Either they lose next year and start a war or they win and start executing people..
None of this is true, though. The US has none of the economic, social, demographic, or political conditions usually associated with countries that break out into civil war, and this whole framing takes things which are true but unremarkable (conservatives are more likely to own guns) and turns them into febrile paranoia (there is an organized armed force surrounding Trump). Trump is likely to soon go to prison, and in the event he does I think Biden wins re-election pretty convincingly. There is no die-hard MAGA coup movement, only a few political opportunists who latched onto Trump to get elected or re-elected, who will disavow him the instant the tide turns.
For a real coup (to say nothing of a civil war) you need to capture at least some group of elites sufficiently that them will risk imprisonment, death, and/or exile if they fail. There is no faction like that in government—manipulative ratfuckers, sure, but you need to do more than ratfucking for it to count as a coup.
what conditions do we need, though? Our last Civil War wasn’t in the middle of economic collapse, and had the kind of escalating political violence in the decades before (we’re missing a Bleeding Kansas, but there’s been mainstream conservative threats of civil war since 2008)
The US civil war happened at a time when regional political interests had divided the country into clear geographic halves, with high levels of buy in by elites on both sides, in a fight about the basic political economy of the country. It’s a situation not at all analogous to contemporary political polarization.
Again, the risk the US faces is democratic backsliding like Hungary or Turkey, not a sudden outbreak of civil war.
What the top scenario really misses is that Trump is not in power - either he wins the election, at which point he…won, so he becomes president, democracy as normal. Or he loses, and while obviously claims its stolen he is pretty much impotent to do anything about it, he is just a dude ranting. The unique danger of the last election was that Trump lost but was still President. So, if he wins again, lasts out his four year term, then runs again in 2028 and loses, then you do have a possible crisis scenario - nothing like a civil war imo, but at least the kind of event that has that 1% chance of slipping that way. But that is a contingent and distant set of circumstances, its not now.
This seems like a great time for anon to offer some betting odds.
What odds are you willing to offer on “no, Trump is not going to prison soon”?
I have no information on that and would take whatever the nearest moderately-relevant real-money market said if I cared about the question. For “the US has a violent internal conflict with more than 100 killed before 2025” I will offer 999 to your 1.
Those are…
Given wording that loose and given both recent US history and the historical baseline, I really should take the other side of that.
Do I think it’s gonna happen? No.
Do I think it’s gonna not happen at 1:999?
1:999 against outright civil war before 2025 seems reasonable. But I can think of at least one scenario in which 100 people die. Trump looses the 2024 election, his followers attempt a repeat of Jan 6 2020, but the Democrats decide they’re not fucking around this time and the capitol police shoot them all dead. I’d probably take the against on that at 1:99, but I dunno about 1:999.
i always like flipping through the batman black and white anthologies because sometimes you’ll get absolutely gorgeous works of art that showcase the true potential of the form and sometimes it’s like. hmm looks like you forgot to color that in, bud
did not expect to read this one so fast! Spoilers up through Arc 3, including the interlude! This is my liveblog + post arc thoughts and theories! You can find the liveblog in chronological order here, if you’re interested! I’m assuming that those reading this have already read Pale/already read past this point and are aware of the necessary CWs.
Taylor Swift is a lesbian so the silly article about her lyrics is fine. There's a reason why she's always "dating" those super ugly British guys who need a fame boost. Because let's be honest about it: a giant portion of her fanbase is made up of county music listeners and her career would be INSTANTLY over if she came out. She's smart enough to stay closeted until she's no longer successful. Then she can finally come out and use the attention for another career resurgence. Girlies who want validation and representation from kWeEr artists can stay mad and support irrelevant flops who never make an actual dent in the music industry. There's a massive difference between random TikTok-reliant fads and THE Taylor Swift who's been a commercial juggernaut for nearly 17 years now. So I'd say she's doing great frolicking around as a str8 womynx with her NDA'd beards, racking up millions of dollars in her bank accounts while happily eating hot model (and I mean actually classy models, no plastic abominations and/or "influencers") kitty cat in her mansions.
this is so funny. I’d ask you to marry me so we could drive each other to ruin but your use of the word kweer and otherwise palpable disdain for actual homos makes me your suspect you’re a huge cunt. godspeed you poor bastard.
out of curiosity how do y'all think this anon is doing right now
I need everyone to see this picture from the 4th article.
Independant of that, though, it is interesting to see how the headline evolved ftom “he joked that his wife threatened to divorce him” to “his wife threatened to divorce him” to “his wife almost divorced him”. I mean, we all know how the mechanism at play works, but this is an unusually clear illustration of it.
It’s apparently that time of the season to reopen the Russian psyop discourse yet again. In this case I was struck by one particular point as especially goofy:
No No, we’re not seeing a resurgence in radical thought due to the increasingly exposed contradictions of capitalist hegemony
Except that none of the accounts I saw that were subsequently identified as such were actually saying anything particularly radical. It was very much by the numbers funnyman doomer “both sides are exactly the same” shit. It wasn’t like bellygangstaboo et al were frothing at the mouth to get people into mutual aid, civil disobedience, or even political violence. There’s nothing particularly radical about being for all intents and purposes apolitical.
It’s also interesting to observe people in every one of these debates clutching their pearls and crying out “how dare you impugn the honor of these real authentic black people?!” This is the internet, and people are, in fact, allowed to lie on it. Even if we accept for sake of argument that the thing about Russian plants is totally fake, we still don’t actually know the race (or other demographic features) of 95% of the people we interact with on here.
I guess the best marks are generally the ones who get mortally offended when someone suggests they’re being conned.
Though I guess now I think about it there’s a specific cleverness there from a psyop’s perspective. No one wants to admit they fell for a con, but they especially don’t want to admit they fell for someone basically putting on blackface. It makes it substantially more socially costly to admit that one was wrong to trust the account, and thus makes people more likely to reflexively defend that trust.
Obviously it’s a high risk play if it’s a personal account that could get back to you and cause you real consequences (say, with the whole race-faking thing with hivliving, because I never can turn down an opportunity to quote the phrase “gentrifying cannibalism”), but if you’re just making sock puppet accounts for political purposes for your job, it seems pretty insightful.
why did we ever stop the flower crown edit trend? it was so pure? why does cringe-culture ruin everything fun? there is literally nothing bad about putting flower crowns on photos of people, they’re just flowers
It was the serial killer fandoms fault
Look if you just give up on memes because hannibal fandom got hold of them than you didn’t deserve the memes in the first place.
No, no. They mean real serial killers. A bunch of blogs made flower crown edits of dylan roof and the Columbine killers.
"Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself. And your way leads past yourself and your seven devils. You will be a heretic to yourself and a witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and a villain. You must wish to consume yourself in your own flame: how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes?"
Anonymous
