Month: July 2021

Second American Civil War Scenario 2: The Congressional Certification Crisis Of January 2025


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Of all the possible ways the United States may have a second civil war, one caused by MAGA Republicans in Congress balking at certifying a Democratic win in January 2025 seems the most logical.

The reason is, a number of things will come to a head. The entire Republican Party will be on the same page by that point — the Republican Party will exist, on every level, solely to serve the whims of Donald Trump. As such, if you are still a Republican — no matter where you may be in government — you will ignore any norm or break any law necessary to make Trump POTUS again.

This will happen with any Republican nominee, but let’s just say for the sake of argument that it’s orange ding-dong again. Really, given this cold hard fact, it’s very possible to imagine a situation where the United States grows extremely unstable the moment the polls close in November 2024. This will last until at least January 2025.

Every step of the process towards Congressional certification in January 2025 will be fraught with controversy, intrigue and uncertainty. If it begins to grow more and more apparent that Republicans simply will never allow a Biden win to be certified, one might begin to see Blue States make concrete moves towards some sort of secession.

The wild card on this issue is, of course, the U.S. Military.

The American military simply does not see itself as anything that could step in to keep the peace if America finally collapses at some point between November 2024 and January 2025. It thinks this way so absolutely as an institution that the case could be made it simply wouldn’t do anything at first if the country imploded because of a massive dispute over the certification of the vote in Congress.

Now, there is one way we could doge a civil war bullet and simply turn into an autocracy — Republicans throw the election into the House and Senate and because in the House each state delegation has one vote, Republicans win that way. This would give the media something to hang its hat on when it came it a need to explain to Blue States why they Need To Calm Down. The MSM argument would be that just like Gore lost in 2000 because of a Constitution fluke, Biden lost in 2024 because a rarely used part of the Constitution was invoked.

But it’s possible that Blue States will be so enraged by this point that even the best efforts of the MSM to calm everyone down won’t work. Trump — or some other MAGA autocrat — will be sworn in and the first thing he (or she) does is burn Blue States to the ground. We have a second, darker Reconstruction and thousands (millions) of Blue State people flee the country.

Before any MAGA person reading this spooges their pants at the idea that they will finally be rid of dem dar liberals and they will finally be “left alone,” I will note that if things have gotten this bad that WW3 will have happened, WMD will have been used and you — and everyone you love — could be dead.

But at least you wouldn’t have been canceled, right, cocksucker?

Anyway, “I need to calm down.” Orange man bad, yadda, yadda, yadda, fuck you, MAGA.

Second American Civil War Scenario 1: Cyber Ninjas Makes Us Do It


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

This scenario is actually two scenarios. In the first scenario — the more logical scenario — Cyber Ninjas “prove” Trump “won” the Arizona and this sets off a cascading series of events. Suddenly, the pressure on other MAGA state legislatures to have similar recounts grows exponentially. In this version of the scenario it’s not until around November 2022 that things come to a head and, as such, Republicans feel compelled to make Trump Speaker of the House when they inevitably flip the House.

Trump, being Trump, ignores all of his other duties in the job to push for the impeachment of Biden and Harris for Not Being Him. He gets that quickly enough and then once the impeachment process goes to the Senate, he goes transactional and there’s enough political violence in 2023 that Senate Democrats “do the right thing” and convict (or force the resignation of) Biden and Harris “for the good of the country.”

Trump becomes POTUS again and we’re right were we were. Trump picks someone like Mike Flynn to be his new Veep and we’re actually far worse than we were. In this version of the scenario the “civil war” happens either in 2022 or 2023 (should the Senate not convict.)

I will note that am notorious for giving Trump a lot more guile than he actually has. He’s actually so stupid, lazy — and unwilling to be directly responsible for knocking heads in pursuit of being an autocrat — that, lulz, he could very well become Speaker and still manage to fuck things up and simply be an asshole with no power other than an office title.

The OTHER scenario in this situation would be that Cyber Ninjas “prove” Trump “won” and instead of waiting for other MAGA states to follow suit, just “winning” the single state of Arizona is enough to cause other MAGA state legislatures to demand the Biden Administration be “nullified” (somehow.) These Nullification Conventions quickly become Secession Conventions — at least in states like Texas and the lily white, small states of the Mountain and Plains areas.

A number of old CSA states would also (hope) to follow suit, but because of race these efforts either fail or start a race war of some sort.

The only reason why I think the latter version of this scenario might happen is Trump has become such a totem for white rage that if you combine this with the glorification of political violence found in the Right these days, you have a recipe for some major strategic miscalculations on the part of MAGA “thought leaders.”

If this latter Cyber Ninjas civil war option happened, all it would do is destroy the country for no damn reason. Or, hopefully, it would be a tragedy that would destroy MAGA for a very specific reason: they’re fucking cocksuckers.

Of the available potential Second American Civil War scenarios, a Cyber Ninjas induced one seems the most dubious because it relies upon MAGA being willing to actually risk their own destruction now, instead of a few years from now after they’ve marinated in their hate a bit longer.

But, who knows. I’m always wrong and no one listens to me, anyway.

The Real ‘Great Reset’ Would Be A Second American Civil War


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m vaguely aware that floating around in the bullshit world of MAGA is the idea of a “Great Reset.” It’s some sort of kooky idea that the Evil Deep State is working to establish the New World Order through some sort of Great Reset. Or some sort of bullshit. I’m not sufficiently interested in the idea to do a simple Google search to find how close I am to be right.

But it’s pretty clear that the real Great Reset would be a Second American Civil War. I’ve written a great deal about the historical determinism that is rushing us towards a civil war. The issue is — if the United States buckled for some reason, this would cause the entire post-WW2 Pax America to collapse as well. As such, talk about a Great Reset. World War 3 would break out and there really would be a Great Reset with no discernable endgame.

WMD of all sorts, shapes and sizes would start whizzing around the globe and as many as, say, 1 billion people could die. For what? Conservatives in the US are afraid a tone deaf racial comment they make may be recorded, go viral and they’re “canceled.”

And this doesn’t even begin to address how the DPRK could very well kick the United States while it’s down by nuking us because they can.

Anyway, I just don’t think MAGA realizes how their abstract need to “own the libs” via political violence is just a horrific idea.

Taylor Swift Will Never Be A Movie Star


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Taylor Swift is one of the best entertainers of her generation. She has millions of rabid fans who analyze and debate her every statement and action. Swift has all that and will likely have it for the rest of her life. But there’s one thing she will never have: a movie career.

The reason for this is simple — Swift is never going to do a sex scene and she’s never going to show any T&A. Never. Never. Even in this post-#MeToo era that we live in where mainstream Hollywood movies seem more interested in screeching about lesbian sex positions than entertaining an audience, someone as drop dead gorgeous as Swift would inevitably have to drop trou to get the type of movie role she might want to start a serious Hollywood career.

Given what most of her fan base is made up of — liberal white girls and women — the idea that she would do something as out of character as do a sex scene in a movie to further her Hollywood career is just not applicable for Swift. I’m not saying this is a bad thing — you do you, Tay-Tay — but Swift definitely seems like the type of ambitious young woman who would otherwise have at least a chance of having a serious Hollywood career.

The only out for Swift on this front is when she is in her 40s and she’s had a 20 year residency in Vegas and even the youngest members of her fanbase are in their 30s, she probably could get away with a traditional Hollywood sex scene. Her fan base will be so jaded by this point that they, at last, won’t care. And Swift herself will be old enough that she will want to prove she’s still got the goods.

As an aside, I will note that Swift is in the exact middle of pop culture. She is the center of pop culture. She never went through any kind of wild, crazy period in her career where she came out as bi and dated a woman or a rapper or whatever. The thing about her music career that I have noticed is she apparently has decided to do exclusively fan service from here on out. She’s never going to challenge her fans, or change, or mature or anything. Another thing about Swift is she’s hot but not sexy. She’s about the most chaste pop star out there. She never, ever has ever had an accidently on purpose nip slip or flashed a bit of butt crack on Instagram.

She’s training bra music and will spend the rest of her life producing some variation of that theme.

Let’s Address The Quentin Tarantino Comment About Chevy Chase Verses Bill Murray Movies


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Quentin, I love you bro, but this time you’re full of shit. The reason why his statement that Chevy Chase movies are better than Bill Murray is personal to me is I remember when the movies in question came out. For someone who is so attune to the nuances of storytelling, Tarantino is strangely totally wrong on this issue.

What’s worse, his very bad hot take on this subject is gist for Chads who want to get all worked up about how Cancel Culture is depriving us of a good Star Wars franchise or some such. The idea that Chase movies are better than Murray movies because Chase’s characters are “allowed” not to redeem themselves by the end of the movie is nothing more than horseshit. The whole point of a good movie, generally, is there is some redemption or change on the part of the protagonist. Something has to change.

There’s just no excuse for such a bad hot take on Tarantino’s part. Also, in general, Murray movies are just better, period. I mean, Chase’s career was very scattershot in quality, while Murray has, over the years, been in classic movie after classic movie.

Why Tarantino would make such a weird, erroneous observation about the two men’s careers is very curious. The weakest Murray movie between 1980 and 2000 is far, far better than Chase’s strongest movie between when he left SNL to when his movie career fizzled out in the late 80s. I mean, when it comes to cultural relevance the first Fletch movie is probably all Chase has. I think there may have been a Chase movie or two in the 70s that was pretty good, but they’ve faded into the historical shadows.

Edit: I totally forgot the Vacation movies that Chase did. Which, I think, tells us how bad, in real terms, they were.

Anyway, lulz.

So, Could The United States Really Have A Civil War?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The problem with gaming out the idea that the United States could have a civil war is there remain way too many variables that are unknown. It definitely feels like we’re on the cusp of either civil war or autocracy, but I just don’t know. No fate but what we make, as they say, so it’s at least possible that we’re just going to continue to drift into something akin to a “lite touch” autocracy.

Such an autocracy will happen gradually and so not change the life of the average person in the United States that a lot of people won’t even admit that we’ve stopped being a democracy, period. This denial would continue for a while until concrete autocratic things happened that would impossible to rationalize out of existence. By that point, of course, it would be way too late. A lot of good meaning conservatives would become Good Germans who would only care about the sudden restrictions in their personal freedoms when, well, it became personal. Otherwise, lulz and fuck you, lib.

But let’s go back to the idea of an actual civil war in the United States.

The thing that a lot of Blue Check Liberals are oblivious to is Trump is still a very viable political figure for the MAGA base. As such, Trump could literally be in prison and still win not just the Republican nomination, but the presidency. It is this surreal situation that causes me to think, again, that the United States is an autocracy without an autocrat. What’s more, even if you somehow magically took Trump out of the picture, there are literally a dozen would-be autocrats waiting in the shadows to finish the job Trump started.

For there to be an actual civil war, America’s otherwise inevitable transition to autocracy would have to be bungled somehow. This would have to happen to the point that states began to leave the Union. And, as of right now, this secession crisis could be provoked either sooner by Red States who want to form Trumplandia after Cyber Ninjas “prove” Trump “won” Arizona or later by Blue States in 2025 after a MAGA Congress nullifies Biden’s re-election.

The idea that there would be a popular revolt on the part of MAGA is an example of the movement sucking its own cock. For that to happen, a lot of MAGA people who are in it just to own the libs would have to be willing to risk their lives in the real world. And, as we have seen from those involved in the January 6th insurrection — they just ain’t up to that particular task.

The most dangerous thing about all this talk of some sort of modern American civil war is under the right conditions it could take on a life of its own and have an air of inevitability to it. When the historical moment comes, states — be they Blue or Red — may begin to leave the Union simply because everyone has come to expect that it’s going to happen.

But the two sides are definitely hardening in their political positions. Only time will tell if they make the cognitive leap to actual organized political violence.

Goddamn It, The United States Is A Fucking Liberal Democracy


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Just recently, I’ve encountered people who objected to calling the United States a “liberal democracy” for no other reason than they didn’t like the word “liberal.” It didn’t matter the context, it didn’t matter the meaning of the phrase, all that mattered was they hated liberals so fucking much that they could not distinguish between someone being a political liberal and the United States have a “liberal” form of government.

This is enraged me.

For most of my adult political life, I would casually mention in conversation that the United States was “liberal democracy” and it didn’t even register to anyone that it was something to object to. But, just in the last few years, not only are their people who hate the term “liberal” so much that they are stopped cold by any use of it, there are people who object to the idea that the United States is a democracy at all.

Neither one of these developments is a good sign for our, well, liberal democracy. The people who object to calling the United States a “democracy” are people who are tired of anti-MAGA people (like me) ranting about what a threat to our democracy Trump and his MAGA movement are. As such, by objecting to calling the United States a democracy in the first place, they hope to smugly nullify the argument.

“We’re not even a democracy!” they want to say, so they can move on to enjoying their huge plutocrat tax cut or young hack MAGA judges on the Federal bench. They also use this “we’re not a democracy” line of thought to rationalize out of existence the severe crisis the United State is in currently when it comes to MAGA’s efforts to limit voting as much as possible.

Now, the last time this type of “the United States is a republic not a democracy” bullshit was used was right before WW2. America First people who wanted to keep the United States out of a war that people hoped would make the world “safe for democracy” said, “Lulz, the United States isn’t a democracy.”

I take all this bullshit over the United States being — or not being — a “liberal democracy” as yet another sign that we’re careening towards an existential choice of autocracy or civil war. There’s going to come a point where when people like me are ranting about how we’re an autocracy and fucking cocksucker MAGA people will sip their Bud Light and say, “Boy, we never were a democracy. And I’d advise you to be quiet, ICE might hear you.”

The other option is, of course, that the only way to clear the air on this issue is to, well, fight a civil war over it. And if the Good Guys (that means, people like me) win that dumb war, then we can go back to everyone taking it for granted that the United States is, in fact, a “liberal democracy.”

The ‘Impossible’ Scenario, Redux


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

For about a decade now, I’ve weighed in my mind whenever I’m bored the conditions of what I’ve come to think of as the “impossible” scenario because it’s impossible to solve using the conditions of the scenario.

The scenario goes something like this — if extraterrestrials moved a huge number of humans to a new solar system, how would you organize the government of your new world? The reason why it’s impossible to solve is the earth, on a political basis, is actually several civilizations. If you factor in all competing goals and objectives of all the different types of countries in the world — and give them equal weight — it’s impossible to think up any way to have a “human government” on a planetary scale.

Just the United States would make it impossible to have a truly “human government” on the scale of an entire planet. The United States is so divided at the moment that half the electorate would probably rather end humanity, period, than risk any abridgement of their gun rights. I wish I was kidding.

I may have recently come up with a solution to this seemingly impossible scenario — either you have a global government that uses nations as little more than administrative districts or you do away with nation-states altogether and base your entire culture and system of government on the United States. I pick the United States not just because, duh, I’m American, but also the traditional concept of the United States is it’s an idea and not blood and soil.

As such, if humanity had aliens breathing down its neck to pick a uniform form of government, the United Sates is big enough population wise and based on an idea to the point that you could, in a sense, make all of humanity Americans. I’m not saying this would go over great with 95% of the world’s population, but if you were desperate, really desperate to unite all of humanity under one form of government on a global scale, you could do worse than basing your new new world’s culture and government on the United State’s.

Neither one of the solutions I’ve come up with fixes all of the problems of the scenario, but they come close enough to make me feel pretty good.

Why Conspiracy Theories Generally Are Very Dubious


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Because we live in such uncertain times, a lot of people get a lot of comfort from conspiracy theories. The idea that there is this or that conspiracy that is “really” running the world gives order to an otherwise pretty fucking up situation.

And, yet, big conspiracies don’t hold up. Now, let me be very specific about what I’m talking about — conspiracies that are a secret and are really controlling the world around us. There have been a number of actual conspiracies over the years — the one organized by Islamic extremists to cause the 9/11 attacks being one of them — but that was a specific quasi-military conspiracy that we all know about now.

I’m talking more about the type of conspiracy that 9/11 “truthers” believe in — that a still secret, massive conspiracy was really behind the 9/11 attacks. It’s conspiracies like that which are just bullshit. So, there have been plenty of subtle conspiracy-like events over the years — must of them done by the CIA, natch — but, again, they’re well known now (at least in certain circles) and aren’t on-going.

We decide what is real and what is an illusion.

The biggest obstacle to any major conspiracy working — and staying secret — is people are generally dumb. Any actual massive conspiracy to control the world would either fall apart or be discovered or both.

Most real conspiracies that are going on around us are actually known about and people just lulz them. This sometimes leads people who maybe are already not all that stable to freak out and lose their minds. And, also, a lot of things one might see as “conspiracies” are more simply a lot of powerful people know each other and have a vested interest in this or that thing happening — or not happening.

So, when people like Trump, who is a very lazy would-be autocrat — wants to do something stupid and tyrannical and they don’t get their way, they think there’s some sort of secret cabal Deep State that is standing in their way. What they refuse to admit is they could very well get exactly what they want –an autocracy — if they were willing to do the hard work of being an autocrat. They would have to knock some heads and risk a popular revolt. But Trump, specifically is very lazy and stupid and so he feels stymied by the “Deep State.”

Additionally, there is the occasional small-scale conspiracy that does happen but even then, they always are exposed.

One of the arguments for there NOT being a Kennedy assassination conspiracy is it’s generations later and we still have no proof that one existed. If one had happened, someone, somewhere would have been sloppy, or had a deathbed confession — with proof — and we would all know what “really” happened.

This type of argument could also be used for even bigger supposed conspiracies. It’s difficult to imagine that governments around the world would be able to keep First Contact with aliens a secret. Of course, occasionally, some random scientist or military person who is really old starts to blab about this very thing…but without any proof. It’s just really, really, hard to keep a huge secret in any government forever.

So, yes, there probably are a few conspiracies floating around the world, but I seriously doubt there all that powerful in the lives of the average person in any concrete manner. There are plenty of Powers That Be that have constructed a “reality” that they have a vested interest in maintaining, but that’s just human existence.

I Need To Study ‘Mare Of Easttown’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Even though the first episode of this limited series opens with a very lazy “heroine wakes up” trope, the first episode of “Mare of Easttown” is very inspirational because it’s very character driven. The two novels that I have added to this series have a different dynamic than the last two novels in the series and, as such, I have to lean into the characters.

But there’s a problem — I have a very narrow, passive method of content consumption. So I have to go outside my comfort zone and watch a series that makes me uncomfortable in how dark it is. Thankfully, I can buy the series episode by episode so I can push through it without becoming too upset.

And, yet, I really need to do this. Mare of Easttown is very character driven in the context of the plot and the series’ setting of tone is very engaging. And the two additional novels I’ve come up with would gain a lot from me studying both character and tone development.

Or, to put it another way — for the time being, I have huge holes in my outlines and the only way I can think of to fill those holes is to put scenes in that help with character development.

Also, the two additional novels are not as obviously in the thriller genre. The issues at the center of their plots are more slow burn frustrations than running around in any type of thriller manner.

Anyway, I have set this evening as when I’m going to start writing again. I’m back from my writer’s retreat and it’s time to get this show on the road.