Think back a few years.


Would you have believed that millions of people would deny the existence of an airborne infectious disease and prefer death to inoculation?


Would you have believed that religious fundamentalists would ever be in a position to take over the government and turn America into a religious fundamentalist autocracy like Iran?


Would you have believed that your friends, relatives, neighbours, and colleagues would be willingly seduced by half-truths, lies, and conspiracy theories?


It will be a miracle if America avoids another civil war. But if it happened, it wouldn't be a "war between the states" fought with armies like 1861-65. It would be more like Yugoslavia or Rwanda -- a bloody, violent, internecine conflict of rural vs. urban, pitting parents against their children and brother and sister against brother and sister, and white "christians" against everybody else. Even if that does not happen, we face at least another thirty years of political and social instability, civil unrest, and domestic terrorism.


Why thirty years? Because the youngest of most of these people are in the 45-50+ age group, and by then most of them will be elderly or dead. They will be amongst the last generation of Americans who will have mostly lived a monochrome, mono-ethnic, non-diverse existence, living apart from other cultures, ethnicities, religions, and ideas. They will not change because they see no need to change, and there are few people, if any, who are able to challenge their prejudices, ideas, and erroneous assumptions.


All of this pales in comparison to what is coming. Climate change threatens the existence of all life on this Earth. Rising temperatures and sea levels are only the start. People will migrate to survive, and Mother Nature does not care about silly lines that humans draw on maps. Extreme weather, disease, war, and famine will result. Humans will be forced to stop fighting and work together -- if humanity is to survive on this planet.


The next hundred years are going to be one wild ride.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/23/white-evangelicals-fear-atheists-democrats-would-strip-away-their-rights-why/

As the House has moved through the impeachment of President Trump, voices on the extreme right have been arguing that it’s the first shot in a coming “civil war.” According to conservative evangelical conspiracy theorist Rick Wiles, “The Democrats are forcing me to stockpile ammunition, food, water, and medical supplies to defend my family, home, and church.” In a speech before the Values Voter Summit, Trump similarly said that Democrats were coming for the rights of Christians, which he said he would resist if he stayed in office. Franklin Graham claims that “demonic forces” are pressing for the impeachment of someone that a significant proportion of evangelicals believe is God’s anointed president.

But do white evangelical Protestants actually believe that Democrats will strip them of their rights? And is it true that Democrats and atheists want to strip evangelicals of their rights? A new survey has some answers.

Our research found that white evangelical Protestants believe atheists and Democrats would strip away their rights

Political scientist Ryan Burge and I ran a non-probability sample survey from May 17-18 of 1,010 U.S. Protestants, conducted online through Qualtrics Panels and weighted to resemble the diversity of Protestants in the country. White evangelical Protestants made up 60 percent of our sample.

Of those white evangelical Protestants, we found that 60 percent believed that atheists would not allow them First Amendment rights and liberties. More specifically, we asked whether they believed atheists would prevent them from being able to “hold rallies, teach, speak freely, and run for public office.” Similarly, 58 percent believed “Democrats in Congress” would not allow them to exercise these liberties if they were in power. By contrast, 23 percent think “Republicans in Congress” would not respect their rights; those were primarily the views of a small contingent of white evangelical Democrats in the sample.

These are extraordinary proportions for a core question in democratic societies: Are citizens willing to extend rights to groups they dislike? If not, the political process can no longer fairly resolve disputes and the nation may turn to violence — just as far-right commentators and public officials are predicting.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 02/15/2022 09:53PM by anybody.

I don’t think so. Civil wars are bad for business. Too much wealth depends on businesses continuing to operate, even in rural America.

Also, climate change does not threaten the existence of all life on the planet. That’s just silly. There have been periods in the geologic past when CO2 levels were at 2,000 ppm, (we are just above 400 ppm now) and there were crocodiles in northern Alaska, and no ice anywhere on earth. The existence of life was not threatened.

What climate change might do is make it utterly impossible to sustain 8 billion humans on the planet. A collapse of technological civilization, and a population collapse to 4 billion or 1 billion or a third of a billion, is quite a disaster. There’s really no need to exaggerate the scope by claiming the existence of all life is threatened, but we hear that all the time. It must be the El Gato Effect.

It will affect all of us, and magnify all the problems we are dealing with now and make them much, much worse.

Perhaps you don't care if billions die and civilization ends, but I do.


And wealth nowadays is easily transferable. They can easily shift production from one country to another without much of a problem. It's done all the time.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/15/2022 10:25PM by anybody.

I was interpreting your sentence about the existence of all life being threatened to mean that all life would likely be destroyed if we don't do something about climate change. I suppose I came to that interpretation because other people have claimed exactly that - all life will be destroyed unless we change course.

So, if you meant all life will be threatened and some, perhaps a lot, will be destroyed, I agree with that.

>Perhaps you don't care if billions die and civilization ends, but I do.

I said that billions dying was already quite the disaster, no need to exaggerate it by saying all life is threatened. Not sure how you translated that into my not caring if billions die.

I agree with most of what you write--and not just because I think invoking respected names make me look wise. Or do I protest too much?


----------------------
> I don’t think so. Civil wars are bad for
> business. Too much wealth depends on businesses
> continuing to operate, even in rural America.

Here, however, I think your implicit faith in human rationality deludes you. In 1909 Norman Angell, a respected intellectual, wrote a book called The Great Illusion. His argument was that the countries of Europe shared so many economic interests that a major war was inconceivable. Sadly for him, the book was republished several times before August 1913 left him with egg on his face.

Angell made the mistake of assuming people do what is in their rational interests. That may be true when times are good, but that's about all one can hope for. In fact, we live in a time of unusual irrationality, irrationality that has already done great damage to the US and global economies. I'm not convinced the US will experience a civil war, but that optimism is based on my judgment of the degree of American emotionalism rather than any confidence that people are rational.


---------------
> . . . It must be the El Gato Effect.

I say these things in the name of Albert Einstein, Michio Kaku, Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Fig Newton, Amen.

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night,
God said, "Let Newton be," and all was light.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/16/2022 01:27AM by anybody.

Kant created a massive system on this around the core ”rationality” as the norm for moral and what was good. But it was begging for the question at the end.

What is rational and what is good?

Kant superimposed Enlightenment rationality on Christian teleology. Christianity had portrayed humans as irrational beings in an irrational world who would be redeemed through the sacrifice of God and then ushered into a heavenly existence.

Kant replaced God with a historical geist, or direction, according to which reason would lead a paradisiacal world of peace and democracy. Meanwhile Marx saw a dialectic leading, through those rational enough to understand the historical process, to a world of universal material wellbeing. What is evident in retrospect is that the secularists rejected God but could not bear to abandon the millennial eschatology.

Only Hobbes and Nietzsche were willing to take the rejection of Christianity to its logical conclusion. In the former's words, life may ultimately be "nasty, brutish and short." In the latter's, few people have the courage to stare into that logical abyss.

What I had in mind when I said (implied?) business interests would do their damnedest to tamp down an attempt at a civil war is that businesses have been coming down on the "liberal" side of a lot of culture war issues.

Several years ago anti-LGBTQ laws in North Carolina and other states (Indiana?) got some serious push-back from major corporations. Recently, CNN and Coca Cola, two serious corporate heavyweights in Georgia, expressed great displeasure at the proposed voting law changes.

A lot of corporations, not the least of which Fox, are supportive of vaccine mandates.

In short, corporations are giving most culture wars a wide berth, or they outright support the so-called liberal side.


To tie this back to RFM, I am extremely confident that LDS Inc will come down hard on any attempt at civil insurrection. Can't be risking that stock portfolio.


All my lifetime, and before, there have been people who start shooting the place up, sure that that is all it would take to provoke a race war. They have always been wrong.

I think they are still wrong. I wouldn't be surprised at all if some people don't end up getting shot and killed. I just don't see it spreading to widespread national involvement. Too many people (and too many corporations) have too much at stake.

I guess we shall see in the next decade or so. I am (just barely) old enough to remember McCarthyism, and clearly remember the Cuban Missle Crisis, and Oklahoma City, 9/11, and 1/6 and assorted lesser attempts, foreign and domestic, at insurrection. So far, no civil collapse.

Maybe it was all that wheat in mom's basement that prevented it.

Western world Christians have the benefit to say in secular time that this place is temporary and that we need to work because the human fell. For secular people this is all we have. We have to look at it as a garden from two perspectives. Both groups have two issues. The first do not care and make out of it what they belief are their blessing. The secular is a hedonist and must maximize life because this is all there is. Many materialist people I know say that people must experience life before life is soon over, it is later than you think. But I have a hard time thinking that people last thoughts in life are the regret they never went to Disneyland.

With the amount of obesity in the US, will it be like Jerry Springer writ large?

Post-empire America still won't be a failed state. It will just be a lot more third worldish.

Yup. America is too fat and lazy to have a civil war.

+1 :)

The war is on Twitter.

Not only that, but who would they be fighting for? Their corporate overlords? Guys who you can't pay enough to do manual labor are going to do one of the toughest jobs on Earth?

Predictions tend to disappoint, much to the chagrin of people hoping for the worst.

Or the best.

"Yeah, well, history is gonna change." – Marty McFly

You have two twist it this way. Democracy and rights plus liberties for the masses are not the norm in human history. Delusion and extremism is the tribe mentality that modern civilisation thought for one specific time in history were possible to override through education, extended health care and so on.

The american problem is that the rights are culturally ancient to its nature and wrapped in a old world-package by sectarian people that fleed from the King and the mighty state. Here in Europe we had mass movements. America had awakenings and individual rights that always stand over society and the institutions.

There are benefits in the american view I hope I will be able to explain in further posts. It has benefited me.

The US isn’t going to have a civil war. The military isn’t going to split into separate factions that fight each other. The country is experiencing corporate fascism which can be corrected without a shooting war.

An extreme fear of religion is also a mental illness.

Paranoia will destroy ya!

Rumors of War have been greatly exaggerated.
Although the rumblings in the East have been chest thumping.
Don’t listen to the same war mongers who sold us the false pretexts for every other war.

We live in an ironic age

We are in a scientific renaissance and it’s a miracle nobody has hit the big red, ‘Checkmate” button in 75yrs!

on the verge of seeing back in space time billions of years, since before our sun was formed

Is Mass Delusion Dark Matter?
Religious Extremism Dark Energy?

Paging Michio Kaku!