At the moment, now, in late 2023, I’m not prepared to predict that all of my hysterical doom shit might actually happen starting in late 2024, early 2025. It’s just not easy to comprehend that the greatest nation in the world might collapse into civil war / revolution because malignant ding-dong Trump goes full tyrant.
The only reason why I think it’s possible is the Republican Party has so radicalized that any additional pressure on our political system might be enough for the whole thing to come crashing down. We’re dealing with macro demographic and political trends that definitely SEEM to all be heading towards some sort of climax in late 2024, early 2025.
But it could that, just like in 2020, we manage to punt our problems down the road another four years and all my dire predictions will look rather silly. And that’s the outcome I want. It’s not like I *want* the United States to turn into a MAGA-themed autocracy or have a revolution / civil war.
All I can say is, wait and see. Everything is still up in the air and could go either way.
Now, let me be clear — I’m not advocating anything. I’m just musing about how bad things might get under a second Trump Administration and what might be the reaction.
The key thing to remember is how difficult it is to rile Americans up. It was only because of a series of things going wrong at the same time that there was so much upheaval in the late 60s and early 70s. And even then the moment the Draft ended, most (white) people calmed down and just wanted to boogie on the dance floor.
And, yet, at the core of the Trump problem is he loves to piss all over anything sacred. He can’t help himself. The moment he realizes something is special or protected in the minds of a group, the first thing he does is go out of his way to hurt the feelings of that very group.
So, it’s well within the realm of possibility that Trump in a second term would literally “lock her up.” He could literally arrest not just Hillary Clinton, but any number of other well respected Blues. And he would do it in the most ham-handed, gross way that would cause Blues to grow enraged. And all off this would be happening in the context of him sending in the U.S. Military to Blue areas of the country by invoking the Insurrection Act.
But I’m still not 100% sure that would be enough for any sort of General Strike. It could be that rather than doing anything about Trump, so many smug Twitter liberals will leave the country that we Poors will be left to fend for ourselves. It could be that Trump will somehow manage to fall just below the level of tyranny that would cause national direct action against his rule.
Yet, as I said, Trump has a knack for shitting on anything a group holds sacred. So if Trump goes full tyrant and his toadies start to act on his fascist, autocratic tendencies in a way that is difficult for Blues — and even some Reds — to process, we’re going to the show.
It is at least possible that some Trump’s tyranny could result in some unpreceded events to happen. And, yet, if Trump was somehow deposed, that would just lead to Red States wanting to leave the Union.
I don’t know what to tell you. Things might get really bumpy 2025.
A lot of people lose sight of what’s going on with Fox News. The so-called “news” channel is popular specifically because of all the lying it does. It’s popular because it gives its audience what it wants.
In fact, their biggest crisis of late has come with they told the truth — that Trump lost Arizona. It was when they called Arizona for Biden that people started to flee them for NewsMax and ONANN.
As such, that’s a far bigger issue than you might think. This means there is a huge portion of the electorate that doesn’t want the truth — they want MAGA lies fed to them on a regular basis and if they don’t get those lies, they will go somewhere that will give them to them.
So, I dunno what to tell you. There’s just not much we can do about any of this. All the macro conditions continue to be there for Something Bad to happen in the United States starting in late 2024, early 2025. But I can’t predict the future.
I have got to get outside my comfort zone and actually consume other people’s content. As such, I’m going to force myself to watch both Rebel Moon and Carol over the holiday season. I’ve started both and both look really good.
It’s just I find it difficult to focus on anything that I didn’t have a hand in creating. It’s difficult for me to passively consume someone else’s creation. I want to futz with the story or characters or whatever until they fit MY vision.
But the only way I can make my own creations better is to expose myself to other people’s dreams. I can’t just write and read things that I’ve created. That will do no one any good.
It’s just difficult, sometimes. Ok, maybe all the time. But I’m not going to live forever. I need to expose myself to art other than my own.
I have totally reworked the beginning of the third draft of this novel and now I’m going through and editing it so it makes sense. In general, the story is really good. And, yet, because I’m doing all of this in a creative vacuum…I just don’t know.
I honestly just don’t know.
Some of the story is a bit…edgy…and I just don’t know what that most important of audience categories — women — will think of what I’ve come up with. But there comes a point when you just do the best with what you have. I just don’t have a “reader” to give me any guidance, so all I can do is move forward and try to finish the novel.
It definitely seems as though the novel will now fit the ~100,000 word sweetspot. Or if it’s longer, it will be longer in a manageable way. It shouldn’t be anymore than. I’m estimating the novel will now be no longer than 120,000-ish words the way things are going.
And all of this continues to make me want to do a backup plan. I have three solid back up scifi novels. If I do ever break down and write them, I will be sure to have them single (male) POV and be no more than 100,000 words.
Anyway. I’m looking forward to finally — finally — getting into the part of the novel that I’ve already written. Things should move far, far faster once I’m actually writing the third draft of the novel and not just spinning my wheeling at the very beginning of the novel trying to figure out relationships.
The thing they don’t tell you about living in South Korea is there is something of a time limit. But the time limit is different for everyone and you can reach it without any notice. This is definitely what happened to me.
But as 2024 rolls around, I find myself thinking of my first journey to South Korea in the summer of 2004. Living in Asia totally, totally changed my life and world view. There is a before and after, especially once the whole ROKon Magazine catastrophe took place.
The issue is that ROKon Magazine kind of kneecapped me on an emotional basis because once I got home, a combination of grief and not knowing what I wanted to do with my life put me in neutral for about a decade. I had ambition but no motivation.
I wanted to either go back to Asia or move to somewhere like New York City, but I just did not have the emotional strength to pull it off. So, I did nothing. Now, of course, I have both ambition and motivation when it comes to the novel I’m working on.
The problem is, of course, that if I should blow up with my DJ (novel money) and suddenly have the resources to get married and have kids…I will be about 20 years late relative to my peers. And all my female peers would be in their 50s and, as such, unable to have kids.
Everything would be far more complicated than I thought, even if I finally achieved the success by living up to the “potential” that the late Annie Shapiro told me I had all those years ago.
I still want to return to Asia, though. And, yet, if I did sell my first novel and had the means to return to Asia in some capacity, even that context would be different. My time in South Korea was sooooo long ago that only a few Koreans might remember who I am. (Which, given how crazy I was in South Korea, is probably a good thing.)
It’s all very muddled because in my mind, I’m 20 years younger but I’m now reminded on a daily basis that I definitely am NOT that young anymore. At least I’m alive and (reasonably) healthy.
The thing that so many well-meaning Traditionalist miss about their dreams of deporting several million undocumented people from the US is if you build out that much infrastructure you can use it for OTHER people as well.
That is the crux of how delusional so many conservative Traditionalists are. They live in a la-la land where only brown people they don’t like will be put in concentration camps and deported. They are willfully ignorant of how gays, Jews, the mentally ill and “liberals” will ALSO be put in these camps simply because the means to do so will exist.
And that will be the moment when the “Good Americans” will have to make a decision, at last, as to if they have *any* Red Line when it comes to Trump. I hope I’m wrong about all of this. I really do. I hope everyone gets to laugh at me for my “hysterical doom shit” when Biden wins re-election and, lulz, Trump just drifts into historical obscurity.
But…oh boy. It definitely SEEMS as though late 2024, early 2025 is IT. Some really fucking disturbing things may happen on a macro scale that we simply have never seen before.
Star Wars holds a special place in Western Culture and, yet, the whole thing is so fucked up because of bad storytelling on the part of Disney that it’s time to do a hard reboot.
You go back to the beginning and fix all these organic problems with the Star Wars saga that have been rationalized out of existence over the years. You actually give the saga some thought.
To fit the expectations of the audience, you would have to start from the very beginning and reboot The Phantom Menace. Now, of course, all of this would cause the fan base to scream bloody murder, but it has to be done for the long-term life of the franchse.
So, you spend about a year thinking up how you can make the new Star Wars universe actually make sense and entertain people as much as possible. Once that’s done, you go through the entirety of the franchise and reboot ALL the movies, even Episode 4, 5 and 6.
But you would have to be methodical and logical about such a dramatic move. Otherwise, you’re just going to piss everyone off and waste a lot of money. But the issue is — too much of modern pop culture is coasting off of what was done several generations ago.
We need to reboot pop culture to give new generations new lore.
I have a great idea for a movie, but, alas, I’m too old and too fixated on my first novel to get around to try to write its screenplay. The story goes like this — it’s 10,000 years ago and a bunch of humans are struggling to survive.
A very fey guy who isn’t strong enough to go on the hunt — but has a family to feed — comes up to the leader of the tribe, begging for food. The leader of the tribe scoffs at him and says why do you deserve any food, you didn’t do anything to help.
So this scrawny little guy proposes that in exchange for a good story, he and his family get some food. So, our Hero proceeds to tell a tale about a young woman who pretends to be a man so she can go on the hunt. The movie shows the tale as imagined by the storyteller on the screen, interspersed with him telling the story.
At the midpoint of the movie, our Storytelling Hero makes some sort of goof in the story because he’s never been on the hunt. He has to invoke the gods to keep the story going. Maybe have him make up a One True God on the fly or something.
The story continues. At the end of the third act, something happens to interrupt the story telling and it seems as though All Is Lost for our Hero and his attempt to get food for his family.
The third act begins when him going back to his starving family. He has to tell them there will be no food for the time being. He gets into a fight with his wife who says she should have listened to her mother and never had sex with him.
Then a surprise happens — the leader of the tribe again wants to hear the story. He’s so excited, he wants to know what happens next. So, again, our Hero storyteller continues to tell the story of the young woman who pretends to be a man to go on the hunt.
At the climax of the story, she is somehow saved in a due ex machina kind of situation, and the tribal leaders roar their approval because this is the first time anyone has every done such a trite ending. The joke is, everyone thinks this otherwise hackney ending is so original because it’s the first time anyone has thought it up.
The rest of the movie deals with the surreal situation that our Hero is involved in. He gives his wife and child some food, and then goes into the darkness of the cave to also give his male lover some food, too.
I don’t know what to tell you when it comes to people like Matt Walsh. They now seem to think that embracing fascism is the best way to “own the libs.” They talk a good talk about being fascist and wanting a civil war if they don’t get what they want but…I dunno. Actually putting all their bonkers words into action in the real world is kind of risky.
The key thing is people like Walsh stake out the most extreme position possible then double and triple down when they get any pushback because they think they’re “owning the libs” by doing so.
But all of this obscures the fact that there really is a crisis of masculinity in America. It’s just too bad that we, as a nation, can’t have a serious non-insane discussion about how to help young (white) men get better income and to not feel threatened by both the browning of America and women having more economic, sexual and political agency.
We can’t have that type of discussion because people like Walsh’s grift is based on tapping into the rage of young (white) men. If we actually tried to help young (white) men live in a new, changing world, then, welp, they wouldn’t have as much power, now would they.
It all goes back to how the greatest nation in the world may destroy itself over fucking “vibes.”
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