READING TIME: 4 minutes
SUMMARY: Even the Yuletide season hasn’t slowed the news. The woulda shoulda coulda posts covered here include the Moron Doctrine, ICE violent antics, Timothy Snyder on resistance, and the music of aging.
KEY TERMS: Editor’s Floor, the Moron Doctrine, ICE Agents, Rachel Maddow, Due Process, Aging, Timothy Snyder, Democracy, Social Media, the Monroe Doctrine, China, Taiwan, Russia
COMMENTS: There’s lots going on — feature not a bug — and Timothy Snyder says focus on what you can and do what you can. What are you focused on from the past couple of weeks?
- Heard on Rachel Maddow
- The Soundtrack of Aging
- Timothy Snyder on Resistance
- The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: The Moron Doctrine
- Image Attribution
Following are the woulda, coulda, shoulda posted in the past week or so. There’s lots here and densely packed. Rest assured that these have been cherry picked for their importance and, perhaps, lack of reporting in other forums.
One of the most important ways of resisting is being accurately informed. This is an attempt to cast that information net wide.
Heard on Rachel Maddow
Do Guilty People Get Due Process?
Do guilty people get due process? I don’t know. That’s a real ass scratcher, right? You can tell the authoritarians from the pro-democracy folks by whose fingers stink of shit! None of us who believe in liberal democracy actually have such a question. Holy mother of dogs get this:
Jamie Raskin just said that a Republican member of the House asked him on the House floor whether he was advocating for guilty people to receive due process.
How is this possible? Without due process, we are all undocumented immigrant gang members ripe for deportation.
ICE Protests
Daily I scour the news sites on the world wide web both the mainstream legacy for-profit media and the liberal hoping to make enough to stay in business upstart media sites. None of them report on the daily protests against ICE that are happening around the country.
Thank goodness for Rachel Maddow who begins her only show of the week with a segment on the protests. I was heartened to hear that people are identifying the hotels ICE agents are staying at and then showing up at night to blare their horns, play loud music, ring bells, bang on pots and pans until the wee hours of the morning sometimes as late as three AM or even dawn. That’s happening around the country. The sound that was played was as deafening as it was glorious.
Fuck ICE agents. Those people need to be ostracized for the rest of their lives or until they go through some kind of restorative justice program and atone for the damage they’re done.
The Soundtrack of Aging
Who knew aging came with its own soundtrack? For the past year or so, I’ve been treated to a continuous concert of creaking vertebrae in my neck as parts that didn’t previously rub together now do. There is a harmony built by the quite grunts of effort to stand up or shift weight and the solos of wincing pain from parts that have suffered a lifetime of overwork and abuse when called upon to do what is normal.
Timothy Snyder on Resistance
Tim Snyder appeared on a Rachel Maddow podcast dated 13 December called, We the People: A Conversation with Rachel Maddow and Timothy Snyder. It was excellent and proactive as always. Snyder said several things I thought worth bringing to our collective attention:
On Democracy
Democracy means rule by the people, but it only works if the people want to rule. This is me riffing off of that idea: Our American experience suggests that the indifferent uninvolved uninformed voter doesn’t particularly want to rule, and neither does MAGA. Just like the Republican Congress is all too happy — judge them by their deeds — to cede ruling the country to the Executive Branch, MAGA is all too happy to let themselves be ruled by an authoritarian autocrat.
If we’re going to save our democracy and strengthen it, we have to convince We the People to rule.
On Social Media
Snyder thinks that we are too removed from the physical world by occupying ourselves with our social media. It feels like we are accomplishing something by liking, sharing, and commenting on various social media posts.
Instead, we should be using social media to organize ourselves in the real world.
On His Worst Fear
He fears that the Republican Party will succeed in breaking the country apart. He isn’t so worried about Trump et al implementing a fascist government coast to coast, but he is worried that the either the federal government will devolve into warring agencies or into actual different countries.
Again, this is me riffing off of him. It occurs to me that it is Putin and Xi’s wet dream for the US to divide into three or four smaller countries. If Putin is actively trying to end the hegemony of NATO over Europe and by extension over Russia by removing US participation as a member and as a liberal democracy, then getting the US to really destroy itself by groups of states seceding from the union and going their own way would really turn the world order on its head.
The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: The Moron Doctrine
Trump’s paper on his nineteenth century approach to foreign policy dubbed the Trump Corollary tot he Monroe Doctrine or as many are calling it, the Moron Doctrine. Everybody is calling it that. Some very good people are calling it the Moron Doctrine.
Now You Know Why Venezuela
This infographic from the Visual Capitalist shows Venezuela having the largest oil reserves of any country in the world. Obviously, Trump is in the pocket of the fossil fuels industry, so he is financially motivated to maintain the fossil fuel status quo and exploit the remaining reserves to their utmost financial profit.
This image was found on the Visual Capitalist website. It is licensed for sale.
Trump thinks that by getting a defacto agreement from Putin and Xi that he gets — he can’t distinguish between himself and the US government — all of the natural resources of the Americas while ceding the countries of Asia to China and Europe to Putin that he’s made some kind of jenius move netting him billions.
China and Asia
If you need any evidence that Asia and Europe are on their own without help from the US, you need look no further than China’s continued bullying of Taiwan. Trump is not going to come to Taiwan’s aide no more than he will do any more than “guarantee” Ukraine’s security. He will stammer and stall to allow China and Russia to establish their positions until they have made their conquests.
Just look at China’s latest military games around Taiwan. Taiwan is a dead country walking just waiting for China to invade.
Image Attribution
This image was found on Mojo Database using a Creative Commons licensed search.
The Psy of Life 
I have a vague recollection of somebody saying that the problem with democracy is that ruling is too hard for ordinary people. Of course it is, if you can get the ordinary people to believe that.
There is a brand of breakfast cereal known by it’s musical sound that has taken up residence in my knees.
What Trump’s Moronrow Doctrine proposes is the recolonization of the world by the USA, Russia, and China. It is not clear what is to become of India which has just replaced Japan as the 4th largest economy, except that the US wouldn’t have to give a dam.
As for the illusion of action by reaction on social media, see paragraph 1.
The breakup of the United States, or it’s equivalent in the devolution of the Federal State has been a theme in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction for a long time. In those scenarios, it is usually accompanied by the rest of any world order also falling apart. Both Russia and China depend economically on export markets. Of the two, Russia is in the worse position because it’s exports are extractive rather than manufactured products. A breaking up of the US might not be great news for them. Xi, is likely to know that. Putin is not. His is a grudge fight.
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