The American Collapse (of Civil Society (non-governmental institutions))

Y’know, I actually wonder if high chaos is an intended consequence here. I mean, SCOTUS judges aren’t dumb, at least I presume so. If there is an agenda behind these decisions, perhaps the chaos is part of an actual move to hear more cases and thus further define rights via court opinion.

Something something activist judges something.

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I wouldn’t be surprised at all either. Most Court judges are very smart, and Chief Justice Roberts is especially brilliant at writing a decision that may look mild on its face, but is actually a collateral attack if you look close enough. He’s playing the long-term game.

For example, he sided with the Liberal justices in upholding the constitutionality of the ACA, but while doing so, he attacked the Chevron Doctrine one of the bedrock principals of jurisprudence:

“Roberts has signaled a general movement away from Chevron and judicial deference to regulatory agencies. If courts do not defer to agencies, then it will be easier for those looking to overturn agency regulations to find a receptive ear in court. Industries looking to overturn future regulations will be sure to cite King v. Burwell in their briefs and argue that the issue they are contesting is of deep significance.”

https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/1013962481524281344

That’s a fairly short twitter thread, like 6 or 7 tweets long.

That guy used to be top 5 or so engineering talent at google. Least according to a few people I know who worked there. He does a lot of writing these days about a whole host of topics.

Anyway, he makes what I’d consider to be a really plausible prediction. If it goes down the way he says it may. The only moral thing to do may be to actively fight (like war) with the regime. Whether that means going abroad and enlisting or staying put and resisting.

Neither prospect fills me with excitement, but doing anything else would be like being neutral in the second world war. Kinda sucks that my two fallback countries don’t fill me with joy. Canada is attached to the states and has less people than California and Italy is about 50% fascist 50% unicorns and fairies already.

A third somewhat less drastic option:

Enough Liberals move to a purple or red state to turn it blue. Democrats regain control of government, vote to grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico.

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I mean ultimately if we still have political options to execute we should do what can be done first before people resort to using physically violent conflict. Esp as that won’t probably work out anytime soon, not enough cohesion and people debating over the enemy.

I guess the main thing is, I see arguments being laid on both sides accusing the other of essentially the same exact things. Note that I’m not trying to argue equivalency here. I’m just saying people on the left are advertising that the right is un-democratic, against freedom, and are a violent threat. Meanwhile all these right leaning guys out practicing with guns and living in rural areas tend to see anything on the left as anti-democracy, anti-freedom, and a violent threat to civil and just society. This is nothing new. It just makes me wonder whether the concerns of many of those who came up on that side of things can be leveraged.

Certainly if movements are out there to get people to locate in these historically red swing States and key districts, it would be good to try and convert the locals.

I think many of the more traditionally conservative people i have met or known are genuinely concerned about certain issues (even if they are not real or important) and are geuinely clueless about looking outside of their learned paradigm. Organized and focused attempts to poison pill these red areas need to maybe focus on doing the most to realign the “conservative by birth” crowd and multiply the voting pools greatly. Don’t come in as an invasion but a subversion. Train the locals in guerilla warfare. Find the locals who signal as conservative but secretly long for pride week in their home town.

Also if and or when there is “a collapse” many of these converts may be eager to leverage their stockpiles against a corrupt government.

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There is already a collapse of civil society in America. It’s not and if or when, it’s happened.

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It seems hyperbolic to say that the end times have come for sure. Have things collapsed in perticular areas, around specific issues? Sure. Has all hope of our country remaining solvent or livable without massive changes to the status quo? I think many would say no, and I myself don’t feel it has hit here yet.

A section of ones living room ceiling collapsing is a big problem, that probably deserves being addressed due to the likely underlying problem it shows. But a bit of work and time and the house can be restored even if never as perfect. But it’s not as bad as the entire second floor falling in, and it’s nothing like the whole house collapsing on itself.

We won’t see armed resistance movements until for major portions of America, life has changed dramatically. We need headlines like “police kill hundreds in riot” and “ICE enforces martial Law in CA, AZ, NM and Texas. Hundreds of citizens are now missing.” Sad but “patriots” don’t wake up for less than TEOTWAWKI level real shit.

They will assume that the ceiling can fall in a few places and eventually be convinced it isnt a sign of rot or damage. Just sweep away the debris and move on.

But obviously some of us see that maybe there’s major issues, and we don’t want the roof falling in. Some might worry the whole house is unsound. It might be. But it doesn’t have to get so bad the whole thing caves.

Even if some of advocate stuffing in this old Colonial and putting in a modern open-plan smart home in it’s place…

I think you might want to read the first post in this thread to understand what this thread is about and what I mean when I say “a collapse of civil society in America”.

The future incidents you outline about the armed uprising of civilians is an arbitrary event or test. The article linked to in the original post already listed many ways that America is already as fucked up as ICE locking people in camps or police killing hundreds in riots.

If you think that American society is still working as a civil society, it’s probably a privilege thing.

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The debate that shows up constantly with civil society is “Should We Shame Trump Voters?” I believe that we should because if the fear is that people were shamed will just become more radical…they are already there. It’s just a matter of how much the government will actually do to curb domestic terrorists.

I wondered maybe America is in this state because it’s very easy for Americans to be non-political as a position of privilege. When I asked older people “If you were my age, would you shame people of your own generation who voted for Nixon/Reagan/Bush knowing what seeds they planted?” The common response was that they’d support ideas like civil rights and anti-war, but not so much to hating one’s neighbor. Some people even told me “I was never political until 9/11.”

Did people give this much of a damn when Nixon scandals were happening? The protestors still existed but we’ve grown a much larger sense of nationalism from the decades of dirty Republican Infestation.

The biggest problem now with Millennials is that you have leftists, extreme center (I don’t want to think about politics, all politics are bad, I’ll say I’m liberal to justify shitting on them), or extreme right-wing. All of us are informed by the Internet but the intensity from our news output just has us over-stimulated to numbness or constant emotion.

You should also re-read the first post in this thread. “Civility” is a very different thing to civil society. The current debate about shaming Trump supporters or White House employees has nothing to do with endemic homelessness, etc.

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So removing the “Shame Trump Voters” aspect of my comment out, do you think part of the American Collapse comes from the privilege of being able to not interacting with politics? Is it because America is too big and regionally different to contain under a single government idea?

I absolutely cannot keep up with the different “factions”, and I do feel a lot of political and cultural apathy from that. It’s not just left/right, there are several completely different agendas out there and they’re almost all sound like they want to brainwash you with something vastly oversimplified. When everyone around seems to be screaming at the rafters, well, I feel a lot like I’m screaming at them… but I probably look just as crazy.

No, because the definition of “civil society” that was referenced in the original post is not about politics in that regard.

From wikipedia:

The point of this thread was to discuss the ways in that American society is indifferent to the suffering of its own people (including my own non-American indifference to school shootings) and how that is indicative of the a failing or collapsing of society.

The privilege of not worrying about politic is not a problem if, with that same privilege, you are helping create a society where everyone is cared for and people aren’t suffering needlessly. But in America that doesn’t seem to be the case either. It’s orthogonal to politics, not dependent on it. Or so it seems.

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That’s a fair point.

There’s levels of collapse. I’m admitting basically that we are past the collapse of decency and civility you’re talking about.

All that is left is to bring it back or ride the road to total societal collapse. Which is what I was talking about.

We can still fix our shitty country. It hasn’t gotten actually that much worse in the last few years that we can’t at least get back to where we were. Was it a good track? Not particularly.

How does that get fixed? If we can still vote ourselves out if it, have leaders who will fix the problems without requiring bloodshed, then we have hope. Yes things have broken down, but we aren’t done. Until all civility has gone, the revolution people were mentioning, what I was referring to, is not a sound or likely even justified option. That’s all I’m saying.

When we can no longer elect anyone but for a small cadre of shitlords, regardless of who is elected nothing changes, conditions only decline and decline band more people die, and our vote is meaningless… Then civility has totally collapsed and been trod over. Then it’s to the point of “vote from the rooftops”.

Again I get the loss of civility, and concede that the veneer of civility is been torn off. Yet most people are willing to keep going as if it’s just a new normal. So we yet have to solve things with the normal rules. Tho in light of how serious the stakes have become, it is time for us to start making strategic moves to solve this before it gets much worse.

There is nothing to keep up with. It’s not complicated.

Here are the factions.

Good faction: People who care about other human beings, even if those other human beings are not their friends or family. People who care about other human beings even if they have different genes, different preferences, come from a different place, have different beliefs, have a different gender, speak a different language, have a different history, etc. They care about the well being and happiness of other human beings no matter what. This is the good faction.

Bad faction: People who care only about themselves. Maybe they have friends and family they might also care about. Maybe they also care about people from their own “tribe.” That means they may care about people who share the same skin color, beliefs, nationality, language, etc. Some care more than others, but members of the bad faction all have in common that they do not care about the happiness and well being of humans that are too different from themselves.

Some members of the bad faction are openly hostile towards people that are different from themselves and wish harm upon them. Some simply want nothing to do with people too different from themselves and don’t care if they are harmed or not. Either way, members of this faction make their personal selfish desires and ideologies a greater priority than the well being of society and humanity as a whole. They even support policies that are objectively bad for themselves when those policies will help society as a whole, often because those policies will help people they do not care for.

That’s it. That is what is going on. Pick a side and don’t pick the bad one. Also, refusing to pick a side is the same as picking the bad one.

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Yeap.

it so happens that literally anyone on the “Republican” side is on the bad side. 100%. No exceptions. The “Libertarian” and “Green” sides are both also effectively the bad side.

There are also bad people on the “Democrat” side. But it’s literally the only “side” you can work with.

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I talked to my mom tonight a little bit about politics. She saw that I went to a rally about ending the separation of immigrant families and for ending ICE, and we talked about it. She said she was proud that I got involved, and that she wishes she could care, but that having a nuanced opinion was difficult and she didn’t have the energy to do research.

In our brief dinner, she suggested one or two really bad ideas to solve this problem, including the US annexing Mexico and Central America. I was quickly able to explain to her why this was bad, and she understood that. She was also confused about the state of Puerto Rico as a colony, and why they weren’t allowed independence or to be a State.

This is something that we need to deal with if we want to rebuild what is left of America. People have fatigue, apathy, and ignorance. My mom is not stupid. But she stopped caring about history beyond what she was taught in a 1960’s-70’s US high school (in NY, so not as bad as possible) and what she sees in documentaries and TV shows. I believe my mom’s level of knowledge and engagement is likely average to most citizens in this country.

I think this is what we have to fight in order to make change. Not everyone will always care, but many people could care if we could fight past their apathy and fatigue.

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My point above is that you don’t need a nuanced opinion. All you need are eyeballs and a heart. You see people having their children taken away from them. You don’t need to know any history to know that is wrong and whoever doing it is evil. You see Puerto Rico being destroyed by a hurricane and nobody helping them properly. You don’t need to know anything about history to know that people in power refusing to help them are evil. It’s that simple.

That really should be true, but everyone gets so hung up about money and why it is our problem to ignore that things like:

  1. Central American countries being unstable and crime-ridden
  2. Puerto Rico having terrible infrastructure and the lack of representation to ensure it has properly allocated resources

that they don’t realize that those things were caused/affected by us in the first place.

And beyond that, many people struggle. Someone like my mom is worried about her paycheck, having enough money to cover her expenses, and saving for her retirement. Our entire economy functions such that she is so fatigued from life that she can’t imagine what she or the government could do to help others. It is true that everyone needs to be on the side of helping others, but so many are so fatigued that they hear about far away problems and think “How could I affect that? Why should my government affect that? My government won’t even help me, shouldn’t I be voting for something that helps my tax burden and gives me access to more assistance?” And this is when they start to want to vote for someone who will lower their taxes and help them get a better job. Of course, this candidate doesn’t actually exist, and is merely the lie they tell themselves.

Most people are already on the side of human compassion. You show them a video of a cop violently assaulting an immigrant detainee and they know it’s wrong. They realize that violence isn’t the solution. The group that wants Mexicans beaten up on is a vocal minority. However, these people who know it is wrong are too fatigued to get engaged or bother learning about what causes it. They are also stuck in a world where “it’s illegal to come over undocumented” and that they can’t get past this. They wonder why it is so bad in other countries that people need to come over here, that what could we possibly do to help, how providing relief “Is ideal, but how do we manage to afford to do all of that?”

They can’t realize that most of the solutions are actually simple. Their ignorance of alternate lifestyles means they assume a shitton of things. And they choose not to learn or engage more, because life as it exists now is tiring.

We need to break past that fatigue and apathy to show people that there is direct action they can take that will stop the things they see that seem bad.

There is also another entire conversation I could start about the media, but that post will be even way more too long than this one.