Wednesday’s Forum
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FILED UNDER: Open Forum
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David Axelrod made the point succinctly, that Democrats are fighting to preserve the 20th century, Republicans are pushing us back toward the 19th century, and neither party has a vision of the 21st century. Oversimplified, obviously, but not wrong. Democrats and Republicans are both parties of status quo ante, with different time-frames for their antes.
Dystopianism (is that an ‘ism’?) doesn’t help, this notion that we are all doomed, whether because of climate change or war or disease, take your pick. But of course we’re not all doomed. Climate change will not end human life or even American life. It won’t be good, but it won’t be the End Times. Demographic collapse will be a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. (See: Japan.) AI will most likely not ‘change everything’ it will be an interesting challenge, but not the end of the world.
When I wrote Gone I got lumped in with Hunger Games and Divergent et al, but my series was never dystopian. Gone was anthropology and politics, a story of power and corruption. The three book spin-off was more dystopian but in the end was a subversion of dystopia, almost a parody of dystopia. Dystopia is popular in YA lit and in games and movies and TV because it’s dramatic and easy to write or shoot. Meaning no offense to the writers of zombie apocalypses, but they aren’t a heavy lift creatively. What’s really hard to create are utopias because utopias are, by their nature, dull as fuck. There’s just not enough gunfire in a proper utopia.
I’ve tried to do it, tried to think of how to write a fictional utopia. I’ve never come close to a solution, and neither has anyone else, because fiction is about conflict and in a utopia there’s no conflict. Star Trek came close. It imagined an earth free of want and poverty where everyone lived their best lives. So in order to have story, Kirk and Picard et al left utopian earth to kill aliens in space. Killing aliens/zombies/Nazis is fun. Sitting in a lotus position in your Zen garden composing haikus on the beauty of orchids is inconceivably dull. Humans did not evolve to be happy, we evolved to survive deadly contests against bacteria and leopards and Russians. We are not, and never will be, Houyhnhnms, we are and will remain Yahoos.
We are asking too much of politicians or writers to paint a convincing picture of a utopia because homo sapiens don’t really want utopia, can’t really imagine a utopia, and are not fit for utopia. I’ve written a dark, satirical novel titled The CEO of Hell – not yet published – and one of the conceits is that people who make it Heaven often take package tours to Hell because they’d rather watch people being impaled than endure another angelic hymn.
Maybe a candidate should talk honestly about a future of just muddling through. “I have a vision of a future with some ups and some downs, some advances and some retreats, all of which we will cope with as well as we can, in order to make an America that is not perhaps great, but OK.” MAOKA. Make America OK Again.
Here is one of the comparisons I have seen of Trumpism to Maoism, specifically the disastrous “Cultural Revolution:”
“Drew Pavlou substack”
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The piece is a lot longer than my excerpts, but it’s an easy read, enlightening. Follow the link.
@charontwo:
More from the piece linked in the above post:
Just got back from NYC where we attended a family wedding. Lots of random comments:
– Forgot how massive New York is. Downtown Houston with all its skyscrapers would fit in just Midtown alone.
– This is not to NYC alone but just a couple of decades ago people complained loudly about second hand smoke and passed laws mitigating it. I’m so over second hand pot smoke.
– NYC is amazingly easy to get around. The MTA app is great. Integrating walk, buses, and subways to get from one place to another is genius. Tap to pay on subways, buses is fast and easy.
– If they could ever solve the graffiti problem. It creates the look of unnecessary urban blight.
– When I was 5 (1959), we moved from Cleveland to NY. I remember flying into La Guardia on a prop plane and passing real close to the Empire State building. That doesn’t happen today, of course.
– Urban people are fit from walking miles and miles a day. Up and down stairs.
– Never felt unsafe.
– I watched all the workers, laborers, servers, etc. and wondered where they live and how they could afford it.
– My adult children wanted to see it all. At my age, I was content to sit in Bryant Park, drink a coffee, and people watch.
It was well worth the cost. We enjoyed our long weekend.
Trump’s use of pardon power seems strange. Why pardon Blagojevich? He was a routine big city Chicago Democrat who was convicted of crimes typical of Illinois governors. I’m ok with commuting his sentence, but why the pardon? More recent pardons of corrupt officials who were Republicans also make little sense. The people of their home states were not clamoring for this. In one case it is reported that the offender’s mother gave a million to some Trump fund raiser. Only a million, Don that’s chump change. Doesn’t make sense.
@Slugger: My first reaction to every pardon is to wonder what’s in it for Trump, seeing he never does anything for free. He probably sees himself in corrupt politicians – if he had been governor of Illinois and had a senate seat to fill he certainly would have “sold” it to the highest bidder. After the 2020 election it was rumored that Rudy was selling pardons, and earlier this year, Boris Epshtyn was asking for a fee to put wannabe administration officials on Trump’s radar. So you have an inherently corrupt guy who has surrounded himself with other corrupt guys (and grifters and sycophants) with the ability to dispense favors, who is always going to ask, “What’s in it for me?”
Trump pardons reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley over bank fraud and tax evasion
@Slugger: nobody here in Chicagoland really cares what has happened to Rod. He’s trashed his reputation, pissed off everyone, and was mouldering in a cell long enough that we don’t care what Trump does with him. Blago is already an ex-parrot. We’ve already gotten sufficient entertainment out of him.
The best result from the whole circus was the comment made by Blago’s first lawyer, said in exasperation upon his departure from representing Blago: “I don’t insist that my clients take my advice. I do, however, want them to at least listen to it!”
@Michael Reynolds:
I don’t know, man. “MAGA” sounds pretty utopian to me.
Maybe not necessarily a convincing picture of a utopia – if you’re intellectually honest, that is – but the intellectually lazy and/or dishonest are lapping it up.
ETA: It just occurred to me that MAGA is quintessentially utopian. It refers back to when the US was a “good place” (eutopia), but also to no place at all (outopia) because no one ever bothers to specify when exactly the US was supposedly great.
@Michael Reynolds:
Pleasant times make for soporific history.
So, yeah, I want to live during a time that will put the most ardent devotees of history to sleep.
…when exactly the US was supposedly great.
My momma used to tell me that it was a great day when I was born.
It was years later when I heard B.B. King sing this song.
To my quip yesterday that the chief nazi having achieved the new Edsel, also looks determined to bring forth the new N-1, this is the N-1.
TL;DR, it was the Soviet heavy lift rocket intended to carry cosmonauts to the Moon. It suffered four catastrophic losses out of four launch attempts (a perfect record!)
@charontwo: “Raped and pillaged” is what corrupt Republicans do when they ruin lives with mass layoffs, Trumpflation tariffs, and massive healthcare cuts — claiming We The People must suffer to save money — only to a push a Big Ugly Bill of $4 trillion deficits and giveaways to billionaire parasites like Trump and Musk.
@Mister Bluster:
Hunter must be feeling a real chump for having paid what he owed!
@Michael Reynolds:
Competent “muddling through” is dull as well. And as hard to believe as utopia. That’s why Biden’s simple, good governance didn’t win him higher approval ratings or carry the day in 2024.
It is far too easy for politicians to tell the people that today teeters on the edge of dystopia and they can have everything they want – only ups and advances, no downs and retreats – if the people only give the politicians more power.
Who needs a giggle?
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/taco-wall-street-mocks-trump-with-4-letter-code-to-call-bets-against-him/
Trump Always Chickens Out.
Re history, I’m currently reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It begins decades before WWII, detailing the discoveries about radioactivity and atomic structure that led to fission and eventually the bomb.
About 95% is about the physics and the lives of the scientists involved, the remaining 5% is what was going on in the world at the time.
It’s all very interesting, not soporific at all. However, absent the war, that is if a large swath of Europe had not gone insane and there had been no world war, it would remain very interesting.
It’s worth noting this was an extraordinary period in physics, when a whole new field was opened and so little was known that discoveries and advances came fast and furious. These days physics seems stuck, desperate for explanations that continue to elude everyone, while technological advances are legion. And a great deal of the latter is a simple consequence of ever more powerful chips in ever smaller form factors.
This is an interesting take on Kristi Noem:
http://www.salon.com/2025/05/23/kristi-noems-proud-maga-bimbo-act-builds-on-the-legacy-of-sarah-palin/
@becca:
Widely believed, which explains the current complacency in the financial markets, stocks, bonds, currency. But what if that is not entirely true? Perhaps dude does sincerely believe what is described here:
@charontwo:
Bear in mind he is influenced by Peter Navarro, who is an crackpot economist with weird ideas.
@drj:
I guess it comes down to whether you think it can be a real utopia if it’s a dystopia for others.
@Kathy:
May you live in interesting times?
@Scott F.:
Muddling through is only dull if you don’t think about how bad it can be sans muddling.
@Michael Reynolds:
You do know “interesting times” is a curse, right?
Musk is working up his set of Potemkin Teslas using teleoperation to try to pretend that FSD in fact works.
I wonder whether he realizes how much IP liability he’s opening himself up to? There’s been a LOT of activity in the teleoperation field and Elon may discover he’s getting slammed with multiple patent infringement suits.
@Kathy: IIRC, when one of them exploded, it was the largest non-nuclear, man-made explosion in history (at the time).
@Mike in Arlington:
I was going to look up when fuel-air explosives were first deployed, but then I realized an N-1 vs launch pad is, essentially, a fuel-air explosion.
Trump say he’s looking into pardoning the men involved in the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot. He thinks they were railroaded.
@becca:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/28/trump-wall-street-acronym-tariffs-00372814
Trump laments size of ‘much too big’ airplane gifted by Qatar
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/28/trump-qatar-plane-gift-boeing
Beautiful. Simply beautiful. The man is a national treasure. We should get our top phrenologists at the CDC on the case to discover why he is so amazing.
@charontwo:
I move we make Taco the official felon rapist nickname.
On other things, it seems spambots are the new trolls. I’m fine with that. The former are far less harmful and usually make sense.
Greg Abbott plans to sign the bill requiring all Texas public schools to display the Ten Commandments in each classroom.
@Kathy: Pet nicknames make the speaker look childish. Case in point, Trump. Obscure ones make the speaker indecipherable as well.
@charontwo:
Taco, taco, taco…
@Kathy: I still like Donny Two Dolls, but I might accept Taco Don.
@CSK: According to the left-wing playbook, next you’re supposed to talk about making Satanism equivalent to Christianity. Then you’re supposed to be surprised when Christians vote against you.
@Fortune:
You’re back at this again, nerd?
@Fortune:
Huh?
@Joe:
Well, nine years ago Trump did claim to love the taco bowls served in the Trump Grill, along with loving Hispanics in general.
http://www.x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/728297587418247168
@Beth: I comment more than you. I had a three-day weekend.
@Fortune: It’s not clear to me from your comment. Do you favor requiring that the 10 Commandments be posted in public school classrooms? I’d be interested in a discussion with someone who thinks that’s a good idea, even (especially?) since I don’t, though it doesn’t really seem like you’re looking to have that discussion.
@Roger: I was commenting on a left-wing pattern, like the recent comments about Hegseth’s prayer services. They’ll say something about how Christianity isn’t the only religion, and how a Muslim should try to do something similar, then how a Satanist should. I don’t think the left realizes how automatically they jump from Christianity to Satanism.
As for the bill, I don’t think it violates the First Amendment so I have no complaints.
@CSK:
I insist any public display of the ten commandments should include annotations on which ones El Taco has pissed on.
@Kathy:
“All of ’em, Katie!”, to quote Sarah Palin.
@Fortune:
Forty-five years ago the Supreme Court held in Stone v. Graham that a similar Kentucky statute violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Given our current Supreme Court’s willingness to overrule precedents they don’t like without regard to stare decisis, I won’t predict what will happen when this case works its way through the courts but under current law it’s clearly unconstitutional. Is there a reason you think Stone v. Graham was wrong? Even if it was wrong, what’s the pedagogical justification for, not just teaching the 10 Commandments as part of a unit on the history of laws, but requiring every student in every school to be confronted every day with the commandment to have no other gods before me? Apparently you don’t like bringing other religions into the discussion, but would you have no complaints if every classroom was required to have a sign saying that there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet?
@Roger:
How about teaching the real history of divine creation, where the god Atum masturbated himself into existence before creating the universe?
@CSK: Would these be displayed I the original Hebrew?
Judaism clearly has 10 commandments because people have 10 fingers. People in the Simpsons only have 8 fingers. Which two commandments should be dropped in Springfield?
ETA: does the Buddhist 8-fold path suggest that Indian people had only 8 fingers?
@Roger: Given the prevalence of Christianity in our culture, I think we really should have every high school student learning about Roman Palestine, Jewish revolts, and the place that Christianity, as a messianic Jewish cult about a doomed messiah, has in that context.
Special attention should be paid to previous religious precedents that were grafted onto Jesus — rising from the dead, etc. — and the anti-colonialism. And a comparison to other messianic cults, both contemporary to Jesus and in recent history (Koresh should have a place of honor, particularly in the Texas version of this curriculum)
Bonus points for working in Greco-Buddhism, the Apocrophia, and John Prine’s “Jesus, the missing years”
@Fortune:
Way to go sparky. You really got me there. Sick burn, weirdo.
Meh! I’m Fortune! I had a three day weekend! I’m on the co-op board! Meh!
What a dork.
When I made my comment at the start of this thread about Trump’s puzzling pardons, I did not know that he commuted the sentence of a prominent murderer.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-commutes-federal-life-sentence-205100465.html
What’s the point here? Imagine if Obama had done this.
@Roger:
Do you consider a flippant failure to acknowledge the prompt an automatic 0?
@Gustopher: Moses was raised as an Egyptian royal so it’s unlikely he could speak or read Hebrew. It must have been incredibly awkward for him.
Are the 10 commandments in Exodus 20 or Exodus 34?
Here is the Wikipedia page that displays the colorful 10 Commandment numbering chart that I can barely read on the McClellan video.
Taco tantrum alert
The court of international trade, a federal US court, blocked El Taco’s tariffs.
Sorry, no link handy on the phone.
Hahahaha…..Elon Musk is leaving his post in the government after ruining everyone’s lives, fucking up the government, and tanking his own businesses.
Couldn’t have happened to a more evil person. He got out over his ski’s.
Now he’ll just get the “silent” government contracts.
@Kathy:..
Here’s a link via the BBC.
US trade court blocks Trump’s sweeping tariffs
I think that I posted a link once from my iPhone.
I couldn’t remember how I did it and gave up a second attempt.
@Mister Bluster:
Thanks.
I would try to post a link here on the phone only if it were a literal life and death matter.