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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on Red Dynamite. Going through King Lear.
I finished reading Kurt Schlichter's American Apocalypse, about a second American Civil War, written pretty recently, so it doesn't feel ridiculously out of touch with current events. He's a red-team author, so naturally the book has the red team side be the good guys and win the war. It repeats the style from his previous book The Attack of being written from the perspective of a post-event author doing interviews with a series of participants in the event in a variety of different positions, so it's effectively a series of moderately connected short stories. I found it an engaging and enjoyable read, and much more fleshed-out with regard to how things actually progress and escalate than most other new civil war stories.
The way things escalate towards a hot war seems to paint the Blue side as maximally bad and the Red side as only as bad as they are forced to be. I enjoy reading that, but it does feel a bit improbable I suppose. It doesn't soft-petal how nasty such a war would be likely to be too much - it includes such things a double-digit millions of innocent Americans dying due to starvation and disease from collapse of food and healthcare logistics and both blue and red militias and guerillas treating civilians who oppose them poorly. It ends with a red "Special Security Force" department which confiscates all of the possessions of blue-teamers who were too influential, sometimes locks them into "reeducation camps" and forbids them from ever having an important job again until they earn a "rehabilitation certificate". It seems to take the position that, yeah, there isn't traditional American free expression anymore, but what else are you going to do when the Blues take advantage of that to weaponize every institution, seize power, and horribly abuse ordinary Americans. Not exactly something I'd care to endorse now, but maybe in a world where the events portrayed in the book actually did happen.
I do notice that it doesn't pay attention to a number of aspects of what I think would actually happen if there was ever actually a new Civil War. Not much detail about what actual Mexican Cartels and other large organized gangs would do in such a situation, besides a one-liner about how Mexican Cartels took over Arizona in that world. Or Islamic militants or other religious issues for that matter. Not much about race either - I don't think there's anywhere near as much racism in Red ideology as the Blues would have you believe, but there isn't none, and wars tend to enable the craziest people to really let their crazy flag fly. I suppose it's a bit much to expect to cover that stuff in a book that's supposed to be red meat to the actual Red Team.
I've also been trying to read Scott Horton's Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. It's basically okay, but rather long and repetitive so far in my opinion. I'd like to read like like 50-100 pages or so of a steelman of how American diplomacy backed Russia into a corner, in their opinion at least, but I'm not sure I care to slog through ::checks listing:: 2,316 pages of it. Wow, didn't realize it was quite that long. Maybe I probably won't actually finish that one after all.
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