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Two Israeli embassy staff were shot dead late yesterday night as they were walking just outside the Capitol Jewish Museum. The Capitol Police have identified the suspect as one Elias Rodriguez of Chicago. Reportedly, Rodriguez shouted “Free Palestine” as he executed the couple, who were engaged to be married.
I have been meaning to write a “Civil War vibe-check” top-level post. My intuition was that the danger of such a nightmare scenario was receding, having peaked twice, with the mass-shooting at the Congressional baseball team practice game, and the George Floyd Riot/January Sixth Riot forming a stockbroker’s double blow-off top before a consistent decline in risk.
Recently multiple events have made me question this. The Zizian cult killings, the suicide bombing in Palm Springs over the weekend, and now this, make me feel like something is perhaps coming. Maybe not a full Syrian Civil War, but at least another Days of Rage similar to the period in the 1970s after the great wave broke and began to recede. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts.
I think Real™ Civil War is very unlikely from the civilian Left. Currently the Left's martial spirit, prowess, and capability are severely lacking. They have such little force projection that even terrorism would likely be kept within Democrat strongholds.
To be honest, they have very naive ideas of power. It’s just mind blowing to me just how often they think that simply saying things and goin* through channels is going to produce the changes they want. And I just don’t see anything that suggests they think that they need to do more than speak to the manger to get things done.
It's the 'many chiefs, one indian' problem in that they all want to be courageous thought leaders and someone else will do the work for them (namely, the state.) That's why the left wants to grant more power to the state, so that it has the power to enact their utopian experiments on their behalf. Heaven forbid they do any actual work!
It’s not even that. I’m thinking of people who are opposing Trump, protesting, or even members of Congress opposed and it’s a weird disconnect. It’s like they think verbal opposition is magic, or that legal letters by themselves change things. It’s a completely different mindset to what happens in almost any other area of life.
The people doing this never seem to care if anything is effective. They’ll say things like “im doing my part! I stood outside with a sign (on the sidewalk) for a couple of hours yesterday.” I’ll ask them if anything happened because of that and they’ll be disappointed that cars are driving past them and people are ignoring them etc. but it’s like the question of whether the needle is moving in a positive direction, or if something else might be more effective, or even what “success” actually looks like and it’s just me “being negative.” But, these are pretty normal things to ask about any project, especially in the business world. If you do something that has absolutely no effect on the thing you’re trying to change or fix, you just wasted your time. That’s how the world works in most domains, especially politics. It’s not just numbers of people and slogans, it’s about power, and if you don’t understand how to turn the levers of power you have access to, its not doing anything and you are wasting your time.
Whose life?
In their lives, this is exactly how it works. They don't live in a world of reality, they live in a world of procedure; they don't live in a world of action, they live in a world of discussion and abstraction. They can even play-fight their own organizations (public-sector unions being the best example of this, since it's government negotiating with itself).
They don't have to produce any actual work, or any measurable results; they're getting paid either way. That's how the levers of power work for these people, and they are experienced in working them. (This causes anxiety in the personnel who pride themselves on doing the actual work- performing well is actually a detriment to your job security.)
"Gaining power through manipulation of reality generating better outcomes" and "gaining power through manipulating the first group" are two very different things. The second group's power ultimately depends on the consent (manufactured or not) of the first group.
Trump, and the set of political undercurrents his movement represents, all represent a withdrawal of that consent. Some places- Western Europe, for instance- have atrophied so hard, and diluted the power of the second group so effectively, that the second group is unable to withdraw their consent. [Mass migration is instinctively encouraged by the first group for that reason.] The US is able to field a Trump specifically because it hasn't fully atrophied in that way.
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People who use power = bad Powerlessness = virtue.
It really is that simple. Progressivism is a massive navel-gazing operation in which people extol the virtues of powerlessness. Using power is something Icky Fascists do, and might hurt someone's feelings, so it has to be avoided at all costs. You see, if we take power away from the powerful, money from the wealthy, and beauty from the masses, and grant it all to the marginalized, everything will be better.
Like how taking away the farms from the whites worked in Zimbabwe, it's not that the new owners knew how to use the things they were given, but that it corrected a long-standing score, and that's what matters. Not the actually farming part. They want all the power but they don't want to govern. They want to control politics without participating in it. Very childish, very stupid. Very Theater Kid.
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