Thanks for posting that, it had slipped my mind, despite the fact that I read all the books in sequence last year - which is a lot of words, and my memory is really not what it was!
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The media certainly makes it look like half the country is out of its mind. The political parties make it look like a 50/50 split.
Opinion polls typically put it at 70% in favor of taxing the rich, gun control, single payer healthcare… and now, public health measures to control the virus.
But having 30% of america dragging down the majority with superstition and bigotry, doesn’t make for a good narrative, so every trick in the book is used to fluff it up to seem like half.
Who wants this? The 1%.
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Pretty much the highest acheivement of Jean Chretien was to use (gasp) international law to keep us out of that spiralling shitshow. Of course our local conservatives went ballistic - though strangely when they took power a few years later they had little stomach for ‘correcting’ that decision (once all the happy clappy WMD/providing democracy and freedom bullshit became obvious for what it was to even a Conservative).
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The US has now been shifted into the same place in my mind as Honduras or South Africa. I like them, they are geographically and culturally wonderful, but I have little desire to expose myself to the risk inherent in a visit to any of them any time soon.
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Not likely. Mexico (which I dearly love) is fucked. AMLO is being just as obtuse as Tramp.
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Meh, I was just roughing it from the 2016 popular vote results.
To be more specific, 46.1% of this country were out of their fucking minds in 2016.
Hopefully your numbers are correct, and roughly only 30% are dragging us down, but they’re doing a fantastic job of it by all accounts. The real question is whether or not it matters if it’s 30% or 50% if they’re so successful at ruining things for everyone else…
That was 46.1% of registered voters who bothered to vote or were allowed to vote without suppression. Tramp won by about 77k votes in 3 counties. Blame them. Or he won with a rigged system, as he claimed it was. He should have refused victory. Oh, the humanity!
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If someone takes a dump in the bathtub, someone else shits in the kitchen sink, and the whole house smells of it, any visitor to the house is going to think that the whole house is full of shit.
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The British government has come up with the idea of travel corridors, by which British people will be able to travel to Johnny Foreigner countries for holidays, and come back without quarantine. Nobody, however, has bothered to ask the countries in question if they’re okay with the plan.
So Brits being Brits. No change there.
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Whereby you answer your own question.
Having read Fall; or, Dodge in Hell several times now, that passage resonates more and more. I didn’t quite love Fall but I appreciate what Stephenson offers up for our consideration. The hilarity (if one cares to call it that) of the Ameristan chapters includes one of its warlords having hemorrhoid issues. The metaphors are not lost on me.
The first bits of this book:
… involve the cratering of continental Europe as it descends into the Dark Ages. To crib from Stevenson’s prose, thanks to the frostbitten Hibernian shepherds in the hinterlands [of Ireland], literacy is kept alive like a pilot light awaiting its next deployment.
My hat is off to those funny ol’ bookish monks with laughably odd tonsures and ink-stained fingers, guys who managed to save some portion of our written language, scattered in the damp countryside, living in drafty huts (later in monasteries sacked by vikings). I am no fan of the innumerable injustices perpetrated by the Catholic Church [et al.], but I admit I am fond of literacy, and treasure my own. For their part in saving that at least, I am grateful.
Thomas Cahill’s pretty accessible and does his part to make history interesting, lively, and–in a few spots–transcendent. The center of How the Irish Saved Civilization has pictures, including color plates of illuminated manuscripts. Not that anyone here on the bbs needs pictures in their history books, but it gives us a clue about the tone of the book.
Perhaps good reading during the pandemic? Like, as some of us see our patch of the planet hurtling toward its own Dark Age, Round Two?
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This is going to be the name for my Blue Man Group cover band.
ETA: happy birthday cake day @frauenfelder and @Mindysan33
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“The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down” was a real song; it had lyrics and everything. Was #2 on radio’s Hit Parade in 1937. Here’s a silly version by Shep Fields: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbp9WXQjZy8
YouTube also has versions by Eddy Duchin and Russ Morgan. Arrangers seem to have had great fun with the song.
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I’m not permitted to take vacations longer than two weeks at a time.
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“Fun”? Sir, this is New Zealand.
I wouldn’t say the modern Republicans have an industrialised grievance complex; it’s more like an industrialised persecution complex.
It would certainly explain the all too public examples of wilful refusal to accept other groups’ decisions and points of view.
[excess editorialising expunged]
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At this rate, it’s not just Mexico that will pay to build a wall around the U.S…
Is anyone tired of all the winning yet?
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if only “fall” had actually been about that, and not just a single chapter and some hand waving. he discarded every interesting contemporary social issue he brought up to instead write a high fantasy larp rendition of the book of genesis.
i still can’t believe i bothered to read it till the end.
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