Current Events
A bland, generic name for a thread about things that are anything but.
Date: November 27, 2016
Categories: Random craziness
Friday, 26 April 2024
Life, the universe, pies, hot-pink bunnies, world domination, and everything
A bland, generic name for a thread about things that are anything but.
Date: November 27, 2016
Categories: Random craziness
Current Events is open for business.
Just throwing this out there for curiosity: what happens if signs of voter fraud in the voting procedure were to be rediscovered in a re-count? Is there a re-vote?
((This is why Austria hasn’t had a president for …a while now.))
Bookgirl:
I’m sorry I haven’t had time to research a definitive answer. Offhand, I’d have said that because each state has its own laws for conducting elections, a nationwide recount would be unlikely. But now that the CIA report on Russian interference has come to light, I’d say “we do whatever the Supreme Court tells us to do and hope people don’t take to the streets.”
The Chicago kidnapping/torture has got me pretty bummed and thoughtful. My heart really aches for the victim, of course, but for the four suspects as well. But I’m also disturbed at the “mob vengeance” attitude that I’ve been seeing a lot of around the internet. “Let ’em rot,” “I want to see them dead,” “They should be tortured and killed on TV, just like they tortured that guy,” sentiments like that. Rejoicing in death. No hint of “love thy neighbor”, because they aren’t seen as neighbors–as humans–but as monsters, as evil villains, as “them”. This is precisely the attitude that drove the four of them to do what they did, and it’s being reflected and amplified even more. I’m reminded of a passage from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Strength to Love: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
I feel like things are approaching the edge of an enormous cliff. The racial tensions, the political tensions, Russia’s military escalation, the growing power of corporations, the impending environmental catastrophes, the fruition of moral and epistemological collapse. I’m sure a lot of people in a lot of centuries have felt this way, but I can’t compare firsthand our current time to those times. All I know is that things don’t look good right now.
What Piggy said.
Piggy,
It’s not your imagination, and it’s not just run-of-the-mill angst. Things are changing rapidly on many scales, and suddenly a lot of possible near futures appear distinctly threatening. As someone who grew up during the Cold War era of school duck-and-cover drills (but can’t quite remember the Cuban Missile Crisis), I don’t think I’ve ever sensed such a widespread feeling of foreboding in the United States. Sorry I can’t provide more reassurance; we’ll just have to muddle through.
Been reading Mark Danner’s book on the war on terror, Spiral. The subtitle is “Trapped in the Forever War” and that’s a decent summary of his argument. It’s an amazingly empathetic book in the sense that it strives to understand the motivations of all sides even while cataloging so many atrocities born from incompetence and fear.
I’ve just finished the first part, which covers the Bush administration. The second part is moving to the Obama administration, which I think I’ll find harder to read. Partly because it can’t help but focus on the failures and hypocrisies of the only president I’ve ever voted for, and partly because the book was written before our current president was elected, and so might conclude on a more hopeful note than seems warranted by the time and place in which I’m reading it.