Ruinenlust The whole thing with the shutdown in the US is absurd. It perfectly embodies the fundamental operating principal of the Republicans as of late: it's better to have nothing at all than to have an imperfect thing. Better to shut the government down than to fund the wrong things in wrong amounts. Better to sabotage and subvert the system than to have the wheel of electoral fortune turn against you. Willingly throw the economy away by triggering a skunk fight over a damn wall in the desert. It's good that America has no seashores or airports, incidentally, otherwise the sacred wall might not be the best barrier in the 21st century.
You get so many problems in an institution when one of the groups involved is against the institution itself. For some reason, hobbling the ability of the government to operate properly is a laudable goal with the Republican base voters, which makes about as much sense as trying to ruin your house's furnace in the winter to bring spending down. Better to have no heat at all than to opt for insulation or for changing the system to something new. "Elect me to federal government; the feds are all corrupt and evil."
Personally I am half-gleeful when Trump's "ideas" and "plans" (I don't really think he's got a firm grip on those vocabulary words, but whatever.) colossally fail. I actually agree with one thing he says: let the shutdown go on for weeks or months. The longer it goes on, the more rank-and-file people will gradually start to see how ineffective and dumb he is, and how complicit the Republicans in the government are. We ("we" here meaning the voting population in the US) may need to burn our hands a bit in order to not touch the stove in the future. If this sucks so badly for so many people that our voting habits and political engagement change for the better in the future, perhaps this will not have been an unmitigated disaster. The true disaster to me would be if Trump's "preside"ency ends in 2021 or 2025 with half of the country still insisting that he's the best thing ever, because it would only let the alternate reality live on and spawn new people like him in the future.
I also, incidentally, think the Democrats may be riper than they realize for falling for a demagogue as well. Obviously the content of what is said and the prejudices would have to significantly realign, but it's entirely conceivable to me that Democrats are not so immune from swinging in a more leftist direction in order to combat the rise of the right wing.
The important thing to remember, though, is that it's all just faffing around. Few are looking candidly at the impending set of world-changing disasters that climate change is sure to bring, and even fewer are actually seriously planning for these things to happen. Right now, we all ought to be pushing pause on politics and normal debates, and instead should be treating climate change and the resilience of our infrastructure like the hugely important issue that it is. We'd all be better off if, instead of doing this nonsense with border walls and scandals, we had been all focused on moving out of floodplains, moving inland from the ocean, allowing areas of land to revert to forests, performing costly improvements on existing infrastructure, making hard decisions about where and in what numbers we ought to live in different places to best weather the all of the things that the 21st century can be reasonably expected to bring. Eventually, countries around the world will be faced with regular, massively inflated costs of maintaining working systems within their borders, as extreme weather events create cascades of economic, physical, and social problems around the world.
On mobile, so I do apologise as I don't have time to write out a proper response to this.
I sort of agree with most of this, esp. The idea that our govts and leaders are basically 'fiddling while Rome burns.'
To add to that, I'd also suggest that under the current neoliberal status quo, things have broadly 'worked' in developed countries for the last few decades. This has meant that govts have basically been able to cruise along doing not very much at all really aside from the occasional incramental changes.
Now we're seeing multiple problems emerge that can't be solved easily. I know I call them incompetent all the time, but honestly 10 or 20 years ago they'd have done alright. In the face of today's challenges however, they are shown up as hopelessly oit of touch and incompetent so they do what anyone does faced with a problem that they can't solve. They faff.
