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Notes -
Trump just tweeted "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
I know that Belisarius thinks I'm a far-leftist (lol), but I think that a fair reading my post history will show that I am what I present myself as, more or less a classical liberal who hates both the left and the right.
I've spent a lot of time and energy both online and offline defending Trump and Trumpism from the often hysterically-phrased accusation that it is fascist, a huge threat, etc. I feel a bit like an idiot now, to be frank. I still hate the woke and am somewhat glad that Trumpism rose up to halt the woke's authoritarian tendencies... but lord, more and more I wish that it had been almost anything other than Trumpism doing it. The argument that Trumpism is fundamentally a classical liberal force is becoming more and more absurd almost by the hour, in my opinion.
Accelerationists (the three or four actual ones for whom it's not just a funny pretense) must be rubbing their hands raw with glee right now. Things are moving very fast.
As much as I appreciate some of what Trumpism is doing to upend stale norms and wokism, at this point I, and probably many other centrists are starting to think "shit, maybe the hysterical libs had a point about these people". And if politics is making me start to side even slightly with literal Redditors, you know that things are bad and crazy.
My biggest mistake, I think, was to extremely overestimate libs and the left. I really thought they would manage to blunt Trumpism's worst impulses and there would be a sort of stalemate like there was during Trump's first term. But libs and the left seem to be missing. Turns out that there is no deep state waiting with sharp fangs and CIA assassins to stop the orange man as soon as he tries to actually do anything that hurts the Blob. Instead, there are only old tired bureaucrats and the occasional protester wearing a pussy hat.
Whoops. Well, so much for that. I was wrong. And this shit is starting to be a bit genuinely alarming. I think I am, actually, getting tired of "winning". I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals, not by a rage-filled vengeful gaggle of right-wing revolutionaries.
Revolutions are cool. They have happened in every country. Many countries are better after the fact. I would rather America have one now, when White people are in charge, than in 100 years when White people are ~20% of the population. And who made a better product: Steve Job’s at Apple with his monarchical approach, or the bureaucratic IBM / BlackBerry / Xerox? Jobs was, well, rage-filled and vengeful.
Revolutions are very much not cool. They might be necessary, they may be beneficial in the long run (though they definitely aren't always), but they are still brutal affairs where a lot of blood gets spilled. They should be avoided unless absolutely necessary, much like drastic surgery.
Drastic surgery is always better than the alternative.
Even the kind of butchery they used to do before anesthesia and sterilization was recognized as better than doing nothing and waiting to die.
Drastic surgery is not always better than the alternative.
Plenty of people out there have been made worse off from unnecessary surgeries.
Awhile back I was having some back issues. Saw a surgeon who leveled with me that he could justify surgery, but he could do it for just about anyone my age, almost everyone's got some disc abnormalities that will show on an MRI. He told me that the outcomes from surgery would almost certainly be worse than non-surgical options. And so I went the non-surgical route and don't have back issues any longer.
Can you pop into the next Wellness Wednesday thread and talk about your route?
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