I've been really put off by something recently - the rising level of vitriol around the Trump white house and republican congress.
I keep thinking about a book I read a while back that said nuclear weaponry moved us in to a post total war state. Since WWII, the preferred war method (with a couple of exceptions) is to go into a place and dampen as much momentum as possible. As the dominant military power, the US has used this strategy extensively to keep any real rival from forming.
I think as technology and the anonymous internet expand, the cost of this disruptive warfare decreases. It's much easier to sow decent when you don't have to recruit an army, you just have to code one.
This is why I find the violent liberal rhetoric so alarming. Regardless of where it comes from, the result is still the same as the Trump rhetoric - to sow divisiveness. That's the big objective, that's the threat to national security, to get us at each other's throats so we slow down and others can catch up.
I don't think Putin really cared if Clinton or Trump won - both had been turned to demons in the eyes of the other party and both would serve to help further divide the nation.
This is a rant, so I don't have any solutions. I just wanted to say that all the hate makes me sad.
A few things: (1) Democrats form a circular firing squad whenever things go wrong. If you were not politically active in 2004, 2016 comes as a real shock. If you campaigned and volunteered for John Kerry, 2016 is drearily familiar. Ain't nobody getting elected this year, ain't no amount of liberal self-vitriol going to change laws one iota. Let the poison out. In 2004, Barack Obama was a senatorial candidate who gave the DNC keynote. In 2016, the DNC keynote was Elizabeth Warren. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. (2) Since the end of WWII, the preferred war method is soft power, the exemplars being the Marshall Plan, the Export Import Bank, the World Trade Organization and so on. The trouble with nuclear weapons is you can never use them. They aren't weapons so much as extensions of policy, and their power is in possessing them, not deploying them. Soft power, on the other hand, allows for a great deal of global influence without firing a shot. (3) The intelligence community disagrees about your assessment of Putin's preferences. this is not a controversial conclusion. I've noticed an alarming trend amongst all this "fake news" - people of conscience and intelligence assuming that if a subject is controversial, the truth of the matter is unknowable. This is not the case. Anthropocentric global warming is changing the climate, medicaid is insurance not charity, Russia meddled in the election to damage the credibility of Hillary Clinton and the goal of disinformation campaigns is to create exactly this sort of uncertainty. I'd much rather people at gay pride marches attack each others' Stars of David in 2017 than in 2018. By 2018 I expect we'll have our shit together.I didn’t notice it at the time, though I was in the room, and the C-SPAN video of the hearing doesn’t capture it, but Democrats told me that there was, at this point, a minor commotion on the dais. King had just revealed that the classified version of the report had concluded “that historically Russians have supported Republicans.”
"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."