True among white people over ~60 and/or in rural areas. Somewhat true but heavily diluted among white Americans between ~35 and 60 and in suburban areas. Even more diluted among under 30s. Over the last decade, I've worked with many Millennials and Zoomers who grew up in the South, the Upper Midwest, and even Brooklyn yet have almost no trace of a regional accent.
What fascinates me is that Black English (technical term: African-American Vernacular English; formerly "Ebonics") is largely uniform everywhere in the U.S.
Now there is something called TV English which is a dialect that tries to not offend anyone in the US which is likely what most people in Europe hear more than anything else. But not all that many people speak it day to day.
"TV English" aka "General American" is actually a real accent. Its natural turf is roughly the area around Kansas City and Omaha. Supposedly, it was chosen back in the early days of broadcast TV because it was an accent the rest of the country could consistently understand.
]]>The Chinese, correct. The Russians...don't be so sure.
If Trump gets reelected this year and/or the U.S. abandons Ukraine, Putin will take a run at Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 5-10 years. If the U.S. pulls out of NATO, he may not wait even that long.
Separately, an addendum to the Afghanistan discussion: decisively destroying the Taliban would've required the U.S. to invade the adjoining Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. A primary reason the U.S. "lost" in Afghanistan was because the Taliban could always scurry back over the border into Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state with a friendly intelligence service (the ISI) and tens of millions of Pushtun co-ethnics. As a result, the U.S. military ended up re-fighting the same campaign every year.
**The U.S. didn't lose the war; rather, it lost the peace. The U.S. successfully deposed the Taliban and conquered Afghanistan but, for a host of reasons, botched the occupation and nation-building. From a political will standpoint, U.S. public support inevitably evaporated after the raid the killed bin Laden. Americans think narratively, and with the main villain dead, the story was over.
]]>Roddenberry did Star Trek. Banks did The Culture.
What does 2023 Charlie Stross's earnest, optimistic-scenario, ideal sci-fi future for humanity look like? How does it work? What are the future humans in it like? And, for conflict, how does this civilization cope with an Outside Context Threat?
]]>I don't know about the UK, but in my experience here in the States, that describes the bulk of prose SF fandom in general. The LGBTQ SF/F fan community is distinct, generally younger, and more centered on TV, movies, comics, and explicitly LGBTQ prose.
I am not in love with this fandom. Not one little bit. In fact, if anything makes me give up on hosting a blog with comments, it'll be the tendency of this sort of commenter to drive everyone else away.
For marketing purposes, have you considered re-branding yourself as an author to aim primarily at the LGBTQ market?
]]>"Anarchic" is a reference to international relations theory, specifically structural realism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neorealism_(international_relations)
I used "Darwinist" in its colloquial, idiomatic sense as a shorthand for brutal "survival of the fittest" as laypeople understand it, not the technical meaning from biological theory that you describe.
The gist is that international relations doesn't work like individual human interactions within a society of norms and laws. There is no world government. There is no global social contract. There is no single, global actor with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. There's a constellation of treaties and international organizations that amount to handshake agreements. The UN is a toothless tiger by design; it can't compel the U.S.--or Russia or China--to behave.
In the absence of a world government, the strongest countries shape and enforce what system there is. Since 1991, that's been the U.S. acting as a hegemon. Had the Cold War somehow gone the other way, it'd be the Soviet Union. In the coming decades, it's either going to be China or, more likely, a return to the pre-World War I status quo of multiple, competing regional powers.
It means instead that war is unusual, both in nature and in human civilization.
To be blunt, bullshit. See: human history, Neolithic to present.
Being a pacifist, you want war to be unusual. It'd make for a lovely world if it was, but it's not.
To achieve meaningful change, we have to deal with human nature as it is, not the way we wish it was. Most people are not rational, utility-maximizing, pacifist auto-didacts. There will always be stupidity. There will always be envy and resentment. There will always be violence. There will always be sociopaths. Any viable concept of social and political reform has to account for these elements and figure out how to manage them.
]]>RE: the United States of America and its imperialism--if the U.S. ceased to exist tomorrow, what would take its place wouldn't be a new golden era of peace, love, and understanding for humanity. Russia, China, and the other larger powers would rush to fill the void. And, other than sleepingroutine and Elderly Cynic, are any of you really willing to say with a straight face that a Russian-led or Chinese-led global order would, from a human rights standpoint, be an improvement? As bad as the U.S. is, all the probable alternatives are worse.
International relations is anarchic and Darwinist. The strongest call the tune, and everyone else dances to it. There is no order or justice without violence, or at least the threat thereof, to enforce it. There is no civilization without compulsion.
Is it right? No. Is it moral? No. Is it fair? No. Is it just? No. It just is.
Inevitably, someone will rule. Someone will dominate. The only questions are who and how.
]]>To Greg Tingey: including from NATO, which promised no expansion into eastern Europe.
What you lot can't understand is that Russia is justifiably afraid of the VASTLY more powerful and aggressive USA hegemony (of which NATO is the relevant agent in this context). What I am afraid of is that the USA/NATO warmongers don't realise that Russia has its back to the wall and will retaliate violently if pushed any further.
Your priors are several years out of date.
At this point, NATO is a mostly paper alliance. The U.S. doesn't give a shit about Europe anymore. The bulk of the American public cares even less. The U.S. wouldn't go to war with Russia over the Baltics--which are NATO members--much less over Ukraine.
Current U.S. involvement in Ukraine is a mixture of standard-issue, petty greed and a peripheral hobby-horse of a dwindling number of Cold War-era holdovers, mostly at the State Department. The political leadership doesn't care. The Pentagon doesn't care. The U.S. beef with Russia centers on cyberwarfare and, in the longer-term, control of the Arctic. Ukraine is a sideshow.
What's going on in Ukraine is a slow-motion rerun of the Russo-Georgian War in 2008, and, likewise, its endgame will be similar. Ukraine will get its ass kicked, Russia will dominate and take what it wants, and the U.S. will wag its finger in the media but otherwise do nothing.
]]>Speaking from experience, it's less that than it is that you can't talk the lemmings out of running off the cliff. Until I worked in business consulting and government, I couldn't grasp how relentlessly powerful groupthink is. It's not that sociopaths are just that common and just that charismatic; it's that the herd mentality is just that intractable.
It doesn't matter how undeniable the facts are, how thorough your research is, or how rational your analysis is. You can lay it out for them step by step, walk them through it carefully, and have an answer for every question. If it doesn't align with the groupthink, it simply doesn't matter. And these are the professionals! The educated, the intelligent, the 110+ IQ crowd! The leaders!
I've come to realize that groupthink--and hubris--are inherent traits of our species impervious to reason and self-awareness. Instinctive. Hard-wired. Meaningfully curbing them can only occur in exceptional cases at the margin.
]]>It depends. Primarily on to what extent and in what manner the U.S. military fragments. Much also hinges on who is President at the onset of hostilities, which party they belong to, and the security of the nuclear arsenal.
My nightmare scenario is: domestic terrorist group + fascist sympathizers in the Air Force and/or Navy + loose nukes = nuclear version of the Oklahoma City bombing.
The Republicans, the craziest of whom talk ceaselessly about "ACW2" (American Civil War 2,) are going to get a big demographic surprise if a civil war kicks off. I don't think they realize exactly how badly U.S. demographics are against them.
Don't get your hopes up. A couple of generations after immigrating, Hispanics--the bloc upon which the Democrats' supposedly inevitable demographic triumph depends--assimilate into the white community and vote similarly. That said, how they would react and which side they would take in a second Civil War is an open question.
]]>..and the result was the Civil War. Via protracted large-scale conflict, the previously dominant caste--white Anglo Southern slaveowners--was violently subordinated to and replaced by the new dominant caste--white Anglophone northeastern industrialists. The caste hierarchy was reshuffled but not broken.
In a formal caste hierarchy, as the U.S. was until the 1960s, the circles don't need to overlap as the top caste dictates the terms of society through the threat of force. Everyone dances to their tune or faces the consequences. As you said, people have been living in multiethnic messes since the Bronze Age, but those messes haven't been multicultural democracies; they've typically been hierarchies--formal or informal--in which a dominant demographic group runs the show. Latins (and those they assimilated to their language and culture) ran the Roman Empire, and so on.
While the American caste hierarchy has persisted informally (i.e. systemic racism) since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, the ostensible goal--at least in the long-term--has been multicultural ''democracy''. Part of the point of multicultural democracy is that the constituent cultures aren't subordinated into a hierarchy with one dominating and assimilating the others. Rather, the cultures coexist in peaceful, relatively egalitarian interchange based on shared, overlapping values and norms. That is, rather than one culture enforcing its norms on everyone else, coexistence is driven by mutually agreed upon beliefs. The circles overlap, or at least overlap enough.
In the U.S. today, the trend is in the opposite direction. The circles are overlapping less and less. The conditions that make multicultural democracy viable are deteriorating. Value systems are diverging, not converging. Even the historically dominant demographic group--white Anglophones--has fractured and fragmented. So, we have neither egalitarian multiculturalism based on overlapping values nor assimilation to the ways and norms of a dominant group.
Given the historical record, the probable result isn't your heterarchy or some sort of peaceful, post-structural anarchy; it's the reassertion of hierarchy dominated by a particular group. The question then is which group will dominate and what values and norms they will impose. TL;DR: who will rule?
]]>Picture a Venn diagram, specifically the area where the circles overlap each other. When I say "common culture", I'm referring to the parts of the constituent subcultures that overlap--the beliefs and values they share in common. Each subculture may express those things in distinct ways, but underneath it all they are fundamentally the same.
My point with regard to the contemporary U.S. is that area of overlapping belief has shrunk to the point to the point that several of the circles in Venn diagram don't overlap anymore at all.
]]>That’s if we’d get one at all.
America is Balkanizing. There is no common culture anymore, and the value systems of the successor subcultures don’t overlap enough to coexist amicably. Indeed, several of those value systems are mutually exclusive.
Civic nationalism is collapsing. Without an external enemy to unify the populace against, it’s too weak, too abstract to hold the culture together on its own. Moreover, as numerous critical theory scholars have pointed out, it only really worked within the boundaries of the dominant demographic group. Tribalism has won out.
Historically, multicultural societies—including the U.S.—have been caste hierarchies dominated by a particular culture group with all other constituent cultures subordinated beneath it. For multicultural democracy to work, those cultures must a) share enough values to agree, at least at a broad level, how society should work, and b) be converging with each other, not diverging away from each other. The contemporary U.S. doesn’t meet either of those conditions and meets them even less with each passing day.
What holds America together at this point is inertia—military, economic, infrastructural. The practical benefits of staying together outweigh the ideological and cultural benefits of breaking up. But, when the parties to the marriage despise each other so much, how much longer can it last?
Realistically, America is going to revert to a de facto caste system; it’s just a question of which political faction—the reactionary right or the social justice left—is going to dictate that system’s terms. (And make no mistake, the left will have to suppress the right-wing to implement and sustain the culture they want. Conservative whites aren’t going to be persuaded, buy in, or simply go away. The right doesn’t face that conundrum since suppression is part of their ideology anyway.) Either way, once that happens, it becomes a matter of which side tries to break away first.
]]>It's not a chimera. It is more of an "inside the Beltway" thing, though, and it's playing out within the party apparatus and the adjacent movement entities moreso than amongst the elected members.
The other dimension you're ignoring is the culture war, specifically the rift between older, establishment liberalism (i.e. individual freedom, 2nd/3rd-wave feminism, ideal of a post-racial "colorblind" society, etc.) and the younger, activist progressivism (i.e. collective rights, queer theory/gender deconstruction, racial justice/reparations, etc.).
The "moderates" will win because THEY are the heart of the Democratic Party. And so are the so called "Social Justice Warriors". That's the point of a Big Tent political party. You don't have to agree on every little thing to get the job done.
Moderates and progressives have been a fair-weather alliance since the 2020 primaries to defeat Trump and roll back his more egregious policies. But, the two factions do not like each other and their interests and goals only overlap up to a point.
As AOC herself put it, in a sane system, she and Joe Biden wouldn't be in the same party.
]]>...until it comes time to raise taxes to pay for it.
Americans say they want social democracy as long as somebody else has to pay for it. And soaking the rich isn't enough; the volume is in the upper-middle class. That means convincing the suburban, three-car garage, McMansion crowd to downscale their lifestyles to something analogous to what their grandparents had circa 1960. Not happening.
Personally, I think it's a tradeoff worth making, but I'm very much in the minority.
]]>A new right-wing party would emerge built around the GOP's reactionary base. My guess is that the remaining Reaganites who comprise the current GOP establishment would defect to the Democrats' moderate wing. Several of the Cheneyite Neocons have already done this.
The more important matter in the next few years is who wins the civil war within the Democratic party: the moderates or the social justice faction. The SJs have the passion, the youth, and the megaphone, but the moderates have the money, the institutional memory, and the bulk of the voters. The SJs grossly overestimate the size of their bloc and, to put it politely, lack crossover appeal. The moderates can win swing voters the SJs tend to alienate, but the moderates are boring and fail to capture the media's attention. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders's social democratic movement has mostly evaporated with its remains absorbed into the SJ faction, and their economic issues have taken a backseat to the SJs' culture war efforts.
If the moderates win, the status quo more or less continues. If the progressives win, the question is then becomes whether the moderates defect to the GOP, try to join with what remains of the center-right and form a centrist party, or become disillusioned and stop voting, leaving U.S. politics to an era of reactionaries vs. progressives with nothing in-between.
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