In article <1113994237.051809.322
...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
rja.carne
...@excite.com <rja.carne
...@excite.com> wrote:
>William December Starr wrote:
>> In article <d43j3s01...@news4.newsguy.com>,
>> Keith Morrison <kei...@polarnet.ca> said:
>> > Googling didn't seem to help: I kept finding pages dedicated to
>> > showing how Canadian drug laws (and Ontario's alleged legalization
>> > of pot, which is news to me) will Destroy! America!, which is
>> > apparently a delicate hot-house flower whose survival for almost a
>> > quarter millennium must be a complete fluke. [James Nicoll]
>> > Well, to be fair they aren't *that* concerned about the pot.
>> > Decriminalized pot and gay marriage, that's what's supposed to be
>> > doom for America.
>> Let's hope so.
>For the sake of those of us in the rest of the world, I'm betting on
>creationism and anti-science bringing in the U.S.'s next Dark Age. If
>you count economics as science, the progress towards collapse is
>excellent. But I think it'll turn out to be not any one thing.
>Although the scenario of "The Day After Tomorrow" is also attractive.
>If a Kyoto 2 treaty could be agreed between other nations to aim their
>greenhouse gases at the U.S. until it variously drowned or shrivelled
>up and cried uncle... but the science doesn't work like that.
>Maybe if the rest of us fly over to China and everyone jumps up and
>down at once, we can pop Yellowstone? Better yet, we all jump up and
>down on La Palma first, and then we tell the survivors that Yellowstone
>can be next.
Call me an extremist but killing a few hundred million people
seems like the sort of method that might have unintended consequences
for the people responsible and for the nations immediately adjacent
to the nation in question. Calling for the death of one's opponents
is really more of a communist or mainstream Republican thing [1]. But
I repeat myself.
Also, although it isn't clear to me that this moment how this
will come to be, I predict that somehow, when the US realizes that it
is not _the_ Great Power (2) this will be blamed on the Jews. Wouldn't
it be nice to go a full century without a pogram in a Great Power? I
think so.
I am also not entirely enthusiastic about trashing the world's
climate (or the North's, anyway) to deal with a transient problem. In
few decades, the US won't be _the_ superpower anymore. In fact, it might
be a good idea to think about how to make sure whoever the great powers
are are not, how to put this nicely, as irritating to their neighbors
as the Great Powers of the 19th century were. Do you think a China with
20% of the world's economy will be as easy to get along with as the USA?
ObSF: HIS MAJESTY'S STARSHIP, which had as part of its background the
wacky hijinks an ascendent Greater India/Confederation of South East
Asia got up to, including a more carefree attitude about social
modification through the use of nuclear bombs on civilians than the
US has ever demonstrated.
James Nicoll
1: It would be a mistake to think just because Republicans like Vieira
are fond of quoting Stalin's "No man, no problem" that they are all ex-
Stalinists. I'm pretty sure most neo-cons with a crimson background are
actually former Trots. This isn't actually a good thing: Trotskyism is the
willfully metastasizing form of Communism, where as Stalinism was more of
an opportunistic infection.
2: Make that "if". Consider France. The US is relatively isolated,
with water on three sides and deserts on two more. It has a third of
a continent's resources and huge internal market. Even if it declined
relatively compared to the rest of the world there's absolutely no
reason that this needs to be an obvious fact to anyone in the USA.
--
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/
http://www.marryanamerican.ca
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
