Friday, June 22, 2018

What Cannot Continue, Won't.

h/t Irish



(This embiggens.)



Well, just spitballin', but if nothing happens, you don't have enough ammunition or hard-minded friends for what's going to follow, inevitably, whether it's soon or later.
 
And I don't care who you are or where you are, it means a lot of people in this country are going to die, from unnatural causes. 

"When you make peaceful change impossible, you make violent change inevitable." - John F. Kennedy


7 comments:

Badger said...

Need embiggening enabled for first graphic.
Love the 2nd. ;)

Aesop said...

Hence the caption. At full size, it bleeds off my blog, and there's no way to fix that without re-formatting everything.
Click on it, and it gets original-sized.

Badger said...

No worries, went to Irish & got it full size.

Anonymous said...

Never underestimate the ability of the system to kick the can down the road. And, by the system, I mean the entire society of the U.S.

As long as it is possible to avoid action, humans have the same attributes in relationship to the dynamics (or lack thereof) of inertia. For every person (and specifically men) who expresses that they have "had it up to here" on the intertubes, I am willing to bet that there is at least 10 (and I think that number is exponentially low) who get up every day, got to work, come home, and enjoy their families. They simply do not have the time or want to take the time to engage in online pep rallies.

That same demographic will not be encouraging trouble of any kind, and will consistently approve of any actions that will be the most expedient in time and effectiveness of restoring the status quo. They work, they have families, they do not want war (even if war wants them), and are willing to compromise (not what they would call their decision) regarding Constitutional principles of the Republic since they could not articulate them if you asked.

Examine the reality that even during the War for Independence, there was not monolithic
support for the war. And, in those days, there was a shared culture with shared cultural assumptions...things like "yes, that is a man, not a "xeman".

I posit that, as I have mentioned before, that the most probable course of action will be what it has been. The "ship of state" will not be destroyed by an explosion, but will continue to corrode and rust out.

G Russell said...

Thank you for that. I am not alone I'm my thinking it seems.

Aesop said...

Continued inertia is simply not possible.

The decision to do nothing is still a decision, from which flow further decisions, and each spinning wheel turns cogs thrice removed it knows not of.

Those who happily sit and suck their thumbs their entire life may not be troubled as the ship of state rusts out, but the ocean does, and is notoriously unforgiving of slovenly upkeep.

This slow coup is really the last warning before catastrophe, headed one way or the other. If the Dark State (they're not "deep" in any sense) thinks there's nothing stopping them, then nothing will, until they get pushback. We passed the limit of civility both ways in 2016 on the Give-A-Fuck meter of society, and the next warning shot isn't liable to be metaphorical.

And there's also a shit-ton of the people you describe as inert, who are in reality just shy of a rolling boil. Like popcorn kernels, they may just sit there, with seemingly nothing able to get them to alter their status, until one by one, they begin to go off. And before you realize you've blown past the point of no return, they all explode, tomorrow doesn't look anything like yesterday, and you can't get them to go back to what they were.

Either way, this isn't the explosion, but it's probably the last chance you're going to get to turn this reaction around short of one.

Beyond this point, there be dragons. And according to the lore of old, they like both fire, and the taste of human flesh.

Go read some old newspapers, and tell me what Lebanon looked like before it exploded, or the former Yugoslavia.
In both places, people sagely counseled that there was "nothing new under the sun", and that things would blow over and return to normalcy.

Ask them how they feel about things now. If they're still alive to ask.

Nobody sane did nor would have predicted the first world war, or Barbarossa, or Pearl Harbor, the invasion of South Korea, the Tonkin Gulf incident, the implosion of the Soviet Union, or 9/11. We have blundered and snoozed our way into most of the greatest conflagrations in our history, and so has everyone else.

Remember this:
War is a slut; it'll f**k anything.
Including people who aren't interested.

Anonymous said...

OK. Cold Anger, just short of a boil.
But, like that popcorn, I am Not going off by myself. As soon as 'poping starts, yeah, OK.