https://twitter.com/LeavittAlone/status/1333072994147688450
I was talking with a relatively wealthy lib friend who lives in DC, and I mentioned the arecibo telescope demolition. His response was basically "it's kind of sad, but now that the old/unsafe one is demolished, that should clear the way for building a newer/better one soon." I had no response, it was just a baffling take. This is someone who should know better, but because everything is still working pretty well for him personally, collapse is still an abstract and hypothetical idea. And this is someone far, far less out of touch than any of the decision-makers in government.
For the record, I think there's no way in hell that it ever gets rebuilt, although notably China completed a similar but much larger telescope in 2016.
Edit: imagine thinking that we'll spend 100's of millions on infrastructure, in Puerto Rico, for scientific research. Baffling.
Yeah, these people don't realize that things have been closing and nothing has replaced them for decades now.
And this right here is why SO MANY rural Americans are either non political or libertarian. They (rightfully in this case) see the government apparatus as nothing but a money collecting tool for the rich.
And something that I don’t have any clue how to explain to well off middle classers or PMC
how to explain to well off middle classers or PMC
You don't. You let the contradictions of Capital beat their ass off of their comfortably high horse of "economic stability" back into the working class, and they'll wake up to reality. Doing otherwise is like asking a wall of bricks to crumble.
There's nothing worse than a comfortably well off boogie-ass lib who acts like they mean well then goes mask off when their cushy-ass material conditions are threatened. MLK calls them the white moderates or something along those lines.
But I doubt many of the people I know like this will have that. The district I teach is either a generational wealth out or is too full of PMC to ever really fall. And WHENA those conditions are threatened they always tend to go more populist right then left. We even have studies proving that.
And that there is the best flowerbed where fascism grows like weeds.
Insert Rosa quote about people burning down the country before allowing socialism tot die hold here
Restating that for the vast majority of working people today their material relations to government are quite literally it being only an obstruction or nuisance. The cause-effect cycle between political participation and material benefit to their daily lives is completely severed.
A huge barrier to organizing is that people inherently do not trust the concept of government helping people. They can't conceive of it because they've been trained not to expect it.
I don't think most Leftists understand that, and it shows with shit like police abolition/defunding. People are on our side on a lot of radical proposals, but they don't trust us, the Left specifically, because they can't distinguish us from weird wonk nerd Democrats. Obviously the Democrats stir discontent, but we also fall for their bait every time.
Yup, it really boils down to the fact that the neoliberal ideological social engineering project was wildly successful beyond the most optimistic dreams of the likes of Friedman and Hayek. It has successfully produces the homo economicus to the point that ideology is so internalized that the mere concept of state or collective action to mitigate exploitation or mass death has been rendered literally unthinkable.
This applies even to most Leftists. Nobody can conceive of arguments outside of "we're the good people, you're a sinner if you don't listen to us, and oh yeah, the problem with the government is that we aren't in charge". There's never any talk of actually rebuilding institutions or what it takes. The plan always boils down to securing the bag for administrators, media figures, and bureaucrats.
My metropolitan-suburban sprawl is pretty much entirely dependent on the military-industrial complex. My employer in particular is the endless defense budget money tree except laundered and mystified through "private" enterprise and subsidization. What isn't identical to this arrangement in the local economic structure is directly dependent on the military and thousands of personnel who live and spend in the region.
The local political atmosphere is shaped, uh, accordingly.
So the question isn't "will America collapse?" It's "where has it already?"
This sort of thing is what really struck me when I listened to Patrick Wyman's podcasts about the Roman Empire. Patrick has a PhD in history and while he's never explicitly said so, he seems to be all about historical materialism. But he points how "collapse" in the empire unfolded slowly over many decades if not centuries and was very uneven in where it happened. When the legions pulled out of Britain it was pretty devastating. But in North Africa, things may have even gotten better or at least were about the same as the empire collapsed. And these two local "collapses" happened like decades apart. The point being collapse is never uniform and differently part of a society are impacted in different ways and to different degrees.
I mean hookworm has returned to the South (a disease of extreme poverty) which they had thought had been eradicated in US for a long time
Children playing feet away from open pools of raw sewage; drinking water pumped beside cracked pipes of untreated waste; human faeces flushed back into kitchen sinks and bathtubs whenever the rains come; people testing positive for hookworm, an intestinal parasite that thrives on extreme poverty.
These are the findings of a new study into endemic tropical diseases, not in places usually associated with them in the developing world of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, but in a corner of the richest nation on earth: Alabama.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-lowndes-county-alabama-water-waste-treatment-poverty
These people are already in collapse
That's really depressing and makes me even more pissed off at the smug libs who look down on these people.
I am a staunch 1453 partisan. And it's weirdly tragic that when the Ottomans finally showed up to kick down the doors of the last bastion of Rome they were met by a paltry few soldiers and Constantine himself. Allegedly he lead the small force he had remaining directly in to the mouth of the advancing Janissaries and died there.
that's a great fucking story. The last emperor of Rome, his empire that was one of the greatest civilizations to ever exist shrunk to little more than the city of Constantinople, and he himself the namesake of the man that made that city great, the namesake of one the greatest emperors of that great empire, dies in a pointless fight over its ruined remains and the legacy of ghosts.
Even with the "fall" of the Western half of the empire, I'd argue that, in a way, it still survived even after 395. The kingdoms of the Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Alans, and Franks all, largely, followed Roman Christianity, wrote Roman-style legal documents, and the ruling class of those "barbarian" kingdoms adopted Latin as a court language. Ethnically, the Western Roman armies had already Germanized heavily before 395, so replacing overall rule with the new "barbarians" probably wouldn't have been noticed much by the common people, if at all. Honestly, if we define "Roman civilization" as its laws, customs, and religions, then I'd argue that Justinian did more damage to Roman civilization than he "saved" by invading them from 533 to 554.
There is also the possibility that things get connected that aren't really part of the collapse as such. Rome got their asses handed to them in Parthia, lost tens of thousands of soldiers, Crassus and control over Armenia as well as causing devestating civil wars due to the power vacuum left by Marius Crassus and Caesar. And this was almost 200 years before the Roman Empire would peak, so it would be hard to connect to the collapse.
Maybe they should just move to where the jobs are. Maybe go back to school and learn how to code.
The China method, but without robust free public transit for migratory workers and the education costs you money instead of being paid for it.
Yeah this is how I combat the "but crime rates have dropped since the 90s, neoliberalism has provided rising standards of living" argument you hear. Basically every neoliberal policy boils down to focusing all of the oppression and poverty onto the fringe populations so the white majority can float off of it.
Kansas was the Republican project made flesh and it turned the state into a hellhole.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/kansas-provides-compelling-evidence-of-failure-of-supply-side-tax-cuts
"In 2012 and 2013, at the urging of Governor Sam Brownback, lawmakers cut the top rate of the state’s income tax by almost 30 percent and the tax rate on certain business profits to zero. Under “supply-side” economic theory, these deep tax cuts should have acted — as Brownback then predicted — like “a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy,” stimulating strong growth in economic output, job creation, and new business formation. But in reality, Kansas underperformed most neighboring states and the nation on all of those measures after the tax cuts. For example:
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Kansas’ 4.2 percent private-sector job growth from December 2012 (the month before the tax cuts took effect) to May 2017 (the month before they were repealed) was lower than all of its neighbors except Oklahoma and less than half of the 9.4 percent job growth in the United States.
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Likewise, the number of Kansas residents reporting income on their federal tax returns from a partnership or “S corporation” (two of the main types of businesses that the tax cuts exempted from income tax) grew by 4.1 percent between 2012 and 2015, well below the 5.4 percent growth for the United States and below all of Kansas’ neighbors except Missouri.
Moreover, Kansas revenues plunged, leading to cuts to education and other vital services and downgrades in the state’s bond rating. On June 6, 2017, the legislature terminated what Brownback had termed a “real live experiment” in supply-side tax policy, repealing the business profits exemption and moving income tax rates back toward where they had started."
I wonder how many conservatives in government fail to see that all the ideas and theory behind conservatism in this country are a lie and that conservatism's primary reason for existing is to funnel as much money to the rich as possible? Like, I kinda get the the middle class people who are tricked by it because they believe their interests are tied up with the economy and big business (and they are, in the short term). But did Sam Brownback honestly believe that supply-side economics would do anything good for his state?
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in fairness the people there sure are proud they gave john brown to the world
I don't know what state you're in, but here the state gov only cares about low taxes, and the local gov only cares about personally profiting off of zoning changes and "development" plans. (There are no insider trading rules for real estate, after all)
the state gov only cares about low taxes
Federal government isn't much different. Notice how raising taxes - even just on the very wealthiest Americans - is completely out of the question for the Democratic party. So when the GOP is in power they slash taxes and when the Dems get control they refuse to even raise taxes back to what they were previously because a) they think they'll lose middle class whites and b) their donors don't like it.
Yep - in the late imperial period, Senators and other rich folks in Rome were all focused on how they could personally cash in on circumstances around them, rather than try and stem the tide of collapse.
Remember when all those Senators were told a pandemic was coming, and rather than warn anyone about it they sold off all their stocks to make a quick buck?
Do states become medieval fiefdoms ruled over by a baron?
Oh boy, time to start speaking Anglish while playing my hurdy gurdy wearing a flax tunic in my wattle and daub house
Because I can't afford to go get a degree in medieval studies I read a book, an introductory text to medieval history/anthropology, called A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344 by Judith Bennett. I read the book because I'm interested in history and medievalism, but I also find myself endlessly fascinated with how ordinary premodern people lived. I can't imagine living in a time before modern medicine, air conditioning, super markets, etc. I recognize that many, probably billions of people living today don't have access to these things, but that's a failure in distribution and therefore a terrible tragedy that makes me angry to think about, whereas in premodern times none of these things existed.
But one thing I found fascinating about this book is that there is one way, and precisely one way, that I find the life of Cecilia Penifader, who lived through one of the worst famines in the history of England and the Black Death, to be enviable: the sense of community. It really throws into sharp relief what socialists mean when they talk about capitalist alienation/isolation when I barely know my neighbors who I've lived next to for years meanwhile I'm reading about a woman who died almost seven hundred years ago who lived in a village with 150-200 fellow peasant laborers who regularly attended feasts and dances and festivals attended by basically everyone she ever knew.
My grandfather, who was born in the early twentieth century, talked a lot about the small farming community he grew up in. Like Cecilia Penifader's village it was about 200 people, though more spread out thanks to land distribution schemes and advancements in agriculture. But to hear him talk about it it was a pretty tight-knit community. Maybe not on the same level as Brigstock in the fourteenth century, but more than anything I've ever known. And today that farming community is a ghost town. A few older people, pretty poor people still live there. The surrounding countryside that used to be dotted by small family farms and their 120 acres have been consolidated into what are, in effect, corporate farms. They're still family owned, technically, and many by families who have been in the region for many years, however those families have become corporations with farming equipment costing millions of dollars used to farm tens of thousands of acres.
You weren't speaking Anglish already? Fiend ye be, loath unto eow
There are so many cool Chinese warlord eras to pick from. First off - read Sun Tzu. he invented fighting and he's the best at fighting.
It's like some guys in Ravenna in 400 sitting around saying their art is better than ever, occasionally wondering why there's nothing coming from Hadrian's Wall anymore?
I mean it really is. I like to correct people and say the Roman Empire didn't so much as "collapse" as change. Central "Roman" utility receded from the periphery and eventually the Italian core itself. What was once the "Roman Empire" in Western Europe didn't collapse or vanish to be replaced by a new order, but rather ceased to be what it had once been and became something fundamentally different.
Real dialectics hours up in here
This is why I always get into arguments with Roman-weeabos who claim that the Roman empire lasted for a thousand years or w/e. I pretty much consider the split into four empires the end, but by the time Justinian comes around it's functionally so different from the Italian based empire, hardly seems like continuity.
No empire collapses twice, for it is not the same empire, and it is not the same collapse
I've been saying this for years, it's why I find it unfathomable that these privileged fuckers whine about being "radicalized by the housing collapse" or covid or whatever bullshit affects the middle class who live their entire lives in denial
The "crisis" like conditions of Covid aren't that different from normal for a lot of places in America. Educated people who live on the coast/big cities often don't realize that for poor and working Americans, especially in rural areas, failing infrastructure, barren store shelves, hopelessness, and economic stagnation have been the norm for 10-20 years
Are rural blue lives matter people then like abandoned children desperate for daddy to return? Or misconstrue the terrorism the police unleash on inner cities as an abusive father that is at least present?
For those looking to explain why cops are bad to people who are rural and getting indoctrinated: compare them to ATF or BLM (bureau of land management). Often these people grew up and know the cops around them, they're friends, the ATF and BLM agents are just random dudes unfairly coming in and enforcing laws that unfairly, there's no slack or anything. This is what it's like in cities, every cop is this unknown govt agent who is probably going to fuck you over
