There’s the part where you say it, and there’s the part where you take it back.

There’s the part where you say it, and there’s the part where you take it back. (posted 14 December 2021, 12pm / revised 1pm)

Here's a post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 3 years ago, in 2021, on the World Wide Web.

Here’s the latest from the New York Times Opinion Section:

Shared Article from nytimes.com

Opinion | We’re Edging Closer to Civil War

I see too many uneasy parallels between what was happening nearly 200 years ago and what is happening now over abortion.

nytimes.com

. . . In Calhoun’s view, the states had the right to control and oppress Black bodies as they saw fit, regardless of any actions to the contrary on the federal level. States, he felt, should be able to choose whether or not they wanted slavery.

I see too many uneasy parallels between what was happening nearly 200 years ago and what is happening now. I see this country on the verge of another civil war, as the Calhounian impulse is reborn.

There are enormous, obvious differences, of course. The civil war I see is not the kind that would leave hundreds of thousands of young men dead in combat. That is not to say that we aren’t seeing spates of violence but rather that this new war will be fought in courts, statehouses and ballot boxes, rather than in the fields.

— Charles M. Blow, We’re Edging Closer to Civil War
New York Times, 12 December 2021.

The new civil war that Charles Blow sees is, that is to say, the kind that we call not a civil war at all.^[1]

^[1]Because it’s not the kind that has any warfare in it. Just a pile of DCCC direct-mail fundraisers overflowing a human postal box, forever.↩

1 reply to There’s the part where you say it, and there’s the part where you take it back.

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Rad Geek /# 1pm • 14 Dec 2021

Blow is nevertheless of course correct that Texas SB 8 is really bad, and that it would be really good if everything about it would be consumed by fire before sinking into the abyss without a trace. He wouldn’t be wrong either if he wanted to spend some time seriously worrying about relatively very low-probability, very high-cost outside risks from spiraling negative partisanship and political dysfunction slipping out of control (which is what the risk profile for a real civil war — the kind with some warfare in it — most likely is). It’s certainly true that all politics carries the constant overlay of civil violence; but that violence is mainly violence by the government directed against the people governed, not something to do with conflicts between the rival parties that aim to take over government and administer the violence for their own preferred ends. The drive to constant melodramatic exaggeration — for the transparent purpose of invoking apocalyptic war rhetoric over a brutal but really very ordinary sort of coalitional partisan politics, to call for more ordinary politics conducted through ordinary political means in ordinary political venues, but with even more desperation, rancor and uncharity, and perhaps with even more extreme political tactics — this drive to melodrama, I say, is not the very worst thing about electoral politics today. But it is one of the most needlessly and frustratingly ridiculous.

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1 reply to There’s the part where you say it, and there’s the part where you take it back. Follow replies to this article · TrackBack URI

Rad Geek /# 1pm • 14 Dec 2021

Blow is nevertheless of course correct that Texas SB 8 is really bad, and that it would be really good if everything about it would be consumed by fire before sinking into the abyss without a trace. He wouldn’t be wrong either if he wanted to spend some time seriously worrying about relatively very low-probability, very high-cost outside risks from spiraling negative partisanship and political dysfunction slipping out of control (which is what the risk profile for a real civil war — the kind with some warfare in it — most likely is). It’s certainly true that all politics carries the constant overlay of civil violence; but that violence is mainly violence by the government directed against the people governed, not something to do with conflicts between the rival parties that aim to take over government and administer the violence for their own preferred ends. The drive to constant melodramatic exaggeration — for the transparent purpose of invoking apocalyptic war rhetoric over a brutal but really very ordinary sort of coalitional partisan politics, to call for more ordinary politics conducted through ordinary political means in ordinary political venues, but with even more desperation, rancor and uncharity, and perhaps with even more extreme political tactics — this drive to melodrama, I say, is not the very worst thing about electoral politics today. But it is one of the most needlessly and frustratingly ridiculous.

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