Apparently, Putin loves to fuck with the West when it comes to his military plans. He always does things in such a way that it’s all very nebulous and up to interpretation until it isn’t.
So, when I heard that there were going to be paratrooper drops around Ukraine today and it was all a “drill” I took it at face value until something occurred to me — a likely first step of any invasion of Ukraine by Russia would be….large-scale paratrooper drops.
As such it’s at least possible that all those paratroopers are going to accidently on purpose fall not in Russian controlled territory but…whoopsie…inside Ukraine.
They would prep the way for a large scale invasion on Christmas Eve and away we go. I am still don’t believe any such thing is going to happen, but it is at least…possible.
I believe I’ve come up with a plan whereby I wrap up a final draft in 2022 and begin the process querying literary agents sometime during the fall querying season. It my understanding that there are two major times of the year to query — spring and fall.
Anyway, I still have a bum ankle for the time being and I hope to use how indisposed I am to speed the process of developing, reading and writing up considerably. At the moment, I have about three more weeks of not being able to go anywhere — then I have to start physical therapy.
That, at least, is the plan. Only time will tell how successful it is.
A lot of Traditionalists who loved Trump’s racist, misogynistic and autocratic policies but could not defend his tweets love Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. In fact, they want to “vote for him three or four times.” I look at this way — of all the would be autocrats America faces, DeSantis at least would be one of the most adept at normal governing.
He would definitely still be a fucking autocrat who would destroy America and probably tell ICE to murder me in cold blood at some point because I got drunk and called him a cocksucker, but at least he would only gradually become as corrupt as Putin. Every would-be successor to Trump is an autocrat in waiting who will force through some dramatic changes to the Constitution and force millions of center-Left people to leave the country.
Or we have a civil war, nuke ourselves into oblivion and may the best man win.
I really believe this 100% and if you think I’m being “hysterical” fuck you. FUCK YOU. By every metric America is an autocracy without an autocrat and once a Republican is president again, we’re going to be an autocracy. And maybe DeSantis, knowing how weak the center-Left is, won’t do something as ham-handed as change the Constitution, at least at first.
He might be POTUS for eight years, then become Speaker for as long as he likes, just like how Putin bounced back and forth between being Russia’s president and PM for the last 20 years until he finally change the Russian Constitution.
Anyway, the point remains — we’re either going to lose our democracy or have a civil war. It’s going to happen, whatever it is, around 2024 – 2025. Good luck.
I continue to be amazed by the Traditionalists in my life who either both sides everything into meaningless or just look at me and say, “That’s not going to happen” without any back up explanation.
This same person is also well known for recursive, caveman political thinking when it comes to voter rights which boils down to, “Shut up, it’s true because I say so,” like they’re my parent and I’m their moron child. They want to make it as hard to vote as possible without admitting the reason is they’re racist and don’t want POC to be able to vote because if they do, Republican policies are so unpopular they won’t win elections. (The idea that they might pull their head out of their ass and think up policies that might appeal to brown and black people apparently is too difficult for them.)
Part of all of this is the idea that democracy is bad. The idea that it’s “mob rule” and any time the will of the people is blocked, you can hide behind how the United States is a “constitutional republic” not a democracy. Well, if you think that, fuck you. Fuck you personally.
It’s shit like people hating on democracy that makes me believe we’re either going to have a civil war or turn into an autocracy. Again, if you think I’m being “hysterical” with my “doom shit” — fuck off and fuck you. While you have an ideology, I have cold hard facts to back up what I believe.
And I know I got Trump wrong the first time, but we won’t be so lucky the second time if he runs — and he is going to run. And if you don’t think he is — fuck you. He keeps telegraphing that he is going to run again and he’s popular enough with the mouth breathing hoards that he’s going to win, even without Steve K. Bannon’s “administrative coup.” And all those people who thought Trump is the past and they can vote “three times” for DeSantis will have to do some soul searching.
Of course, in the end, they’ll vote for Trump again because they’re Good Germans who can’t handle doing the right thing and gritting their teeth to save the “mob rule” of democracy.
And if you vote Republican, you’re signing my death warrant because I’m never shutting the fuck up. Even to the point that ICE murders me cold blood.
Several times the last few days, I have again noticed that Tik-Tok has an eerie tendency to pick up things that are rolling around in my mind. I struggle to see how they can push some of the thing they do without being able to read my mind in some way.
And, yet, it definitely comes across as crazy talk to suggest such a thing.
And the last thing I need is for people to think I’m any more crazy than they already do. It’s just very very weird. It seems as though if Tik-Tok was reading my mind it’s designed to push me things connected to my body or things that I think about really intently for a sharp moment.
It’s all very strange. And, yet, I guess I have to just write it off to co-incidence and repeated mistaken coloration.
This is how the Right Wing bullshit echo chamber works. People like Jesse Kelly and Jesse Watters rant about extreme things like “throne of skulls” and “kill shots” and, after a few weeks, such frothy rhetoric percolates its way down through the system to your angry, bonkers Uncle. Along the way, the hate is diluted, but it’s still there.
But I’ve noticed of late that the Jesses are really amping up the level of their bonkers advocacy of violence. I continue to read about Hitler’s rise to power and, needless to say, not great Bob.
Anyway, the point is — this is yet another metric that would lead me to believe we face the existential threat of autocracy or civil war in 2024 – 2025. And, just like with the rise of Hitler, all of this is happening in broad daylight. In fact, everything is aligning for us to slip peacefully into autocracy in 2025 and only the fact that people Jesse Kelly and Jesse Watters are two fucking cucksucking dipshits could the MAGA New Right self-own and we have a civil war instead.
As I keep saying — if Kelly and Watters would just fucking cool it, we will slip peacefully into autocracy and they will get everything they want without firing a shot. But they want violence for some weird reason. And as such, things will get existential and they could lose it all.
Of course a few million people could lose everything, too, by which I mean their lives when seized WMD are used during a needless, avoidable civil war. Ugh. Good luck
The chief reason why I feel we’re Weimar America is the people who should know better — political Traditionalists — will never make common cause against MAGA. So, in a sense, the die is cast. We’re fucked. There’s no turning back.
It was when political Traditionalists finally turned on Nixon that he lost the presidency. And, to date, there is absolutely no sign that Traditionalists will ever, finally turn their back on Trump and MAGA. If anything, even if they are inclined to stop supporting Trump for whatever reason, they are now even more attached the MAGA — despite growing signs that MAGA is real, honest-to-God fascism.
So, when the time comes in 2024 – 2025, Traditionalists will throw their lot with MAGA and it will really be nothing more than luck if we somehow manage to escape either a civil war or autocracy. I continue to struggle to figure out what could possibly prevent us from going one of those two routes.
From my Webstats I definitely get the sense that there is a core group of people — especially from the South — who seem to think a Second American Civil War would be SOOOO COOOL. If you think that, you’re a fucking fool. It would be horrific. Especially if you factor in how awash America is with WMD on military bases. Add to this how Red States would be likely to use WMD more than Blue States and things are likely to escalate quite quickly.
Throw in a race war and, lulz, that would be cool?
It’s tragic how poorly though any support for a Second American Civil War is. It’s little more than a political grunt. Anyway, the other option is autocracy, which I think is what is going to happen.
Traditionalists will be there, however, waiting with baited breath to follow MAGA down either path.
I generally believe that there will, in fact, be a Singularity at some point in the 21 Century. As such, how humanity’s future in space is depicted in fiction really needs an upgrade.
Two things seem very possible to me — most life in the universe is probably machine in nature and it’s very possible that we haven’t gotten contacted by aliens because they just don’t care. They’re dreaming a deep, eternal sleep in planet-size computers and fuck you.
As such, it’s growing more and more difficult to watch tripe like “Lost In Space” which using the traditional humans-in-space tropes of spaceships and aliens. Ugh. Why not do some updating? Like, instead of a spaceship, humans are just zapped from solar system to solar system.
You could do a whole franchise where humans have to interact with planet-sized machine minds. This grows even more interesting if you flipped the script and said the “Galactic Empire” is really just a bunch of planet-sized machine minds that talk to each other and occasionally take a biological intelligence like humanity under their wing.
Or, put another way, Hollywood really needs to be a tiny bit more creative when it comes to how it imagines humanity’s future in space. They’re so busy strip mining 60 year old IP that that they are really letting the audience down. But the only way this is going to get fixed is someone product a Matrix-level flip-the-scrip style movie, only set in space, or something.
And, then, it would have to be really, really popular.
So, I suppose nothing as fun-interesting as this will ever happen anytime soon.
I’m going to spend the next few weeks doing the reading and development that I did not get around to doing when I started this massive project. Each character, idea and place associated with the first novel now has its own document and I’m going to go through and write out something concrete about them.
This way, I will know what my canon is.
Another aspect of doing development is I can better understand, in concrete terms, what the motivation of the different characters is. Plot tends to spring from character and motivation and by locking down such basic things, the plot will flow a lot a better.
This is going to be a lot of work. But it will be worth it if it helps take the final product to the next level. I have invested a great deal in all of this and I need prove to myself — if nothing else — that I can get within shouting distance of something as good as what Gillian Flynn might write.
But what Flynn writes is so tight that Gone Girl-style writing is very aspirational for me. And, yet, I have to accept that it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever get anywhere near that.
I’m much more of a Stieg Larsson-type writer than I am Flynn. But I really believe in what I’m doing and things should move a lot faster once I get this basic development down.
Someone is going to get hurt, given the bloodthirsty embrace of violent rhetoric on the part of the Right. What’s worse, when it happens, the Right will got dark for a few days while they figure out their talking points.
Then they’ll pop back up and give us wane “thoughts and prayers” and say all their talk of “kill shots” can’t be used against them because the person who did it was OBVIOUSLY mentally ill. All the while, in private they will either be glad someone they hate politically got hurt or it will begin to sink in that we’re careening towards something akin to a civil war.
But after the initial shock wears off, they’ll go back to saying the same damn thing. I’m really beginning to think that the GQP is going to self-own in a massive way by resorting to violence to get what they want when we’re well on our way to them getting EVERYTHING they want when we slip peacefully into autocracy in 2024 when human tumor Steve Bannon’s “administrative coup” works.
This makes me so angry. It’s all so stupid. But this is a macro problem with no ready solution.
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