Tag: Autocrats Never Lose

Why Would China Attack Taiwan Now?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m no expert about any of this, so all of this is very speculative. So take that into consideration when reading. This is more me just doing one of my compulsive scenarios than any sort of definitive explanation.

One minor point –the last few months I’ve been getting the occasional ping to this Webste from China. I always assumed it was people connected to Tik-Tok annoyed that I was suggesting the service could read people’s mind. But what if it was people with Chinese intelligence interested in the political state of the United States? If you are a regular reader of this site, you will know that I have painted a very dire future for the United States.

Another thing — I think we’re probably at just the very early stages of any point in time where China might strike Taiwan. It would make a lot more sense for them to wait until at some point after 2025 when America will either be Fortress America or in the middle of a civil war to do anything against their wayward sisters in the South China Sea.

And, yet, I suppose the case could be made that there’s a lot going on inside China at the moment that nobody knows about and, as such, the Chinese might attack now, rather than wait until it’s obvious the United States is falling apart. The only reason why I even have started talking about all of this is I’ve begun to hear a minor amount of chatter about troop movements in China near Taiwan. And August is essentially here as of this writing, so…bingo?

Also, I could see China thinking that Biden is so old and the United States so divided that it would be difficult for the US to have a comprehensive approach to any Sino-Taiwanese War. This particular situation would only get worse, of course if more regional conflicts went hot and an actual WW3 began.

Talk about throwing American domestic politics for a loop!

Anyway. I have no idea. But is interesting to think about.

The Guns Of August: Running The China Attacks Taiwan Scenario

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Let me be clear — I’m no expert on what’s going on between China and Taiwan these days, but I do love a good scenario. So, let’s run the scenario of what would happen if China went after Taiwan in August.

HT / The Sun

August, as you may know, sucks. So, it would make a lot of sense for China to start a war against Taiwan during the month. But the key thing to consider when approaching such a scenario is how the press would market it. If you have two major regional wars going on at the same time, it’s very easy to imagine that being marketed as “WW3” by the Western press.

That, until itself, would change the whole dynamic of the age. And, remember, the United States will face the existential choice of autocracy or civil war in late 2024, early 2025 so that would be another datapoint to consider if the two regional wars sparked an even broader conflict.

Think the Russian Empire during WW1, only this time it would be the United States being knocked out of commission by either turning into an America First autocracy or imploding into civil war.

And, what’s more, a Chinese attack on Taiwan would be a much bigger war than what’s happening between Russia and Ukraine at the moment. So, it’s possible that the DPRK might look at the attack on Taiwan as their last ever chance to do something against their brothers to the south. (This is extremely speculative on my part.)

Then, of course, there’s away Iran. They have already vowed to assassinate a few high profile leaders in the US. There could be a chain reaction whereby you have WW3 — Russia V. Ukraine, Iran V. the West, China V. Taiwan and the DPRK v. ROK.

Oh, and don’t forget! There’s always the risk that India and Pakistan would want to settle some scores along the way too.

And that, my friend, would be WW3, with all the combatants being forced to pick a side. Talk about a Great Reset! The whole post-WW2 world order would collapse and we would be going to the show. There would be no narrative and we would have no idea how things would end up until the end.

May you live in interesting times…

Is It Too Late For the Center-Left To Find Its Indignant Rage Against The MAGA New Right?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As I’ve often said, we’re past the Even Horizon when it comes to the existential choice of autocracy or civil war. And, in all honesty, that event probably actually happened some time ago. And not in 2016 when dingus Trump was elected — it probably happend the moment that Obama was re-elected.

Obama’s re-election tapped into something very visceral in the dark recesses of the American psyche and, lulz, here we are. Or, if you wanted to make things even more general — once the white percentage of the population reached a certain number other than 100%, we were fucking doomed.

Of late, there have been a few outbursts of liberal progressive rage against the rise of fascism in the United States. They have — to me at least — be very effective. Something about Jon Stewart flipping the fuck out over the dickhead nature of Senate Republicans has been very cathartic.

But. It’s probably too late.

We’ve given up. The forces that are tearing our democracy apart are just too powerful now. And in late 2024, early 2025 we’re going to be faced with the final choice — civil war or autocracy. And, as I keep saying, it’s not going to be a civil war started by Reds. At this point, that’s a very comical idea.

If there’s going to be a 2ACW, its going to be started by Blue States. Anyone who suggests otherwise (in general) is a total idiot who is too busy watching the shiny thin to notice what’s really going on.

I still think our fate is autocracy. It’s going to happen with a shrug. No one within the center-Left is going to put up any sort of fight. They’re all going to be too busy fleeing the country for the south of France to do any fighting.

They’re Going To Get Away With Everything

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Things are so depressing these days on the Trumplandia front, especially when it comes to January 6th. Much like how the Weimar Republic dealt with the rise of Nazism, there just isn’t the political will to do anything about the growth of fascist cancer.

At the moment, it appears as though American democracy will come to an end sometimes around 2025. Unless, of course, there’s a National Divorce and, as such, a Second American Civil War. And despite however much MAGA is foaming at the mouth to start a civil war — it won’t be them who do it. In the extremely unlikely event of a 2ACW, it will be Blues who start it.

There is no crime that Trump or his coterie of idiots can break that they will ever be held accountable for. And, given there is a deadline of Janaury 2025 to deal with, the judicial system is just too slow to ever get around to do anything even if it was so inclined.

So, that’s it. Barring something I just can’t predict, we’re going to become a MAGA New Right themed autocracy. It’s all happening in broad daylight with our eyes wide open. We just don’t have the political will to do anything about Trump.

And the reason is two fold.

One, autocracy is so popular that we’ve kind of just given up. Too many people want to believe the lies that Trump sells and so they are willful in their desire for Trump to come back and put the finishing touches on ending American democracy via Schedule F and other ideas.

Meanwhile, the American center-Left is extremely ineffectual, divided, misguided and old (most of the time) to do anything head on to address the rise of fascism.

Put those two things together and you have a massive historical clusterfuck that may lead to more people dying than the rise of the Nazis in Germany.

All Fascists Are Just Cowardly Crybaby Bullies At Heart

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Ok, here’s the thing. For all of our good natured fun at the expensive of malignant goober Sen. Josh Hawley, he is one decision away from being extremely close to being POTUS.

If Trump decides to pass over completely insane people like Mike Flynn, or people who would make him feel better like Ivanka, he could very well pick Hawley to be his veep.

If that happens, Hawley is all but assured to be America’s Putin. He’s young enough that 30 years from now — Speaker Hawley will continue to rule America with an iron fist, serving as the autocrat behind any number of puppet presidents. That’s the type of shenanigans that autocratic states tend to do. They fuck with their Constitutions so they can be in power forever, even though the Constitution says they can’t.

I will note, however, that I once read a biography of Sen. Huey Long that said right before he was murdered, he was a big old coward. I don’t remember exactly what he did, but in the process of being assassinated, he did not exactly acquit himself in a manly fashion.

The point is — lulz, nothing matters. We’re either going to become an autocracy, or we’re going to have a civil war. There is no middle ground. That’s it, those are are two choices. I suppose you might also say that there’s a third choice — military junta — but that’s extremely debatable.

We’re fucked. We’re totally, completely fucked. Get out while you still can. At this point, it’s really up to Trump who America’s Putin will turn out to be. I still think it’s at least possible weirdo Mike Flynn might be it. But I also know that Trump has expressed a lot of support for Hawley in the past as well.

It will be interesting to see who Trump picks to finish the job he started.

Gutfeld! — The Decline & Fall Of The American Republic In Humor

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Jesus H. Christ. If you want any indication of how fucked up America is right now, how we’re careening towards a “Fourth Turning,” look no further than the popularity of Fox News’ shitty “comedy” show “Gutfeld!”

Now, I’m not getting paid to write any of this so I’ve done no research other than that one time I was forced to watch some of the so-called comedy show when a conservative relative came to visit my house.

But what I saw of this shitty show was just dumb. It wasn’t funny. All the “jokes” were dad jokes that your MAGA uncle might tell at the Thanksgiving dinner table in an effort to troll his crunchy granola lesbian niece with blue hair and “they / them” pronouns.

And, yet, this show is popular. Apparently, really popular.

The fact that Reds are so absolutely desperate for humor that goes after “libtards” that they are making Gutfeld! a hit is very, very alarming. When Red and Blue can no longer even laugh at the same things, the country is on its last legs.

Get ready, though, when the US is an autocratic state, I’m going to wait for Gutfeld to replace Stephen Colbert.

CPAC Is Hungary Like The Orban

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about America’s drift into autocratic fascism is it’s all happening in broad daylight. It’s not like the American Right is hiding its infatuation with people like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. In fact, CPAC, one of the major organizations for fucking American cocksucker fascists keeps wanting to have a mass fuck session with him, it appears.

Viktor Orbán

In short, people like CPAC are very vocal in how much they want the United States to turn into a Hungary-style autocratic state. As I understand it, Hungary’s style of authoritarianism is bad, but not Russia bad. It’s essentially a one party state but, on the surface at least, it’s a functioning democracy. But it’s an “illiberal” democracy.

The exact term is “managed democracy.”

So, back to the United States. There are two major things to consider going forward as the United States drifts into autocracy. One is, because of the natural ebb and flow of what’s left of our democracy, it’s inevitable that a fascist Republican will become president again and that will be that — Trump, or someone like Trump, will enact the “Schedule F” idea and purge 50,000 civil servants.

These civil servants will be replaced with MAGA toadies and we will find ourselves with an actual Deep State — in this case, a MAGA Deep State. The very idea of a “Deep State” comes from Middle Eastern countries with a history of autocracy that can’t get anything done when the autocrat is toppled because of the “Deep State” that is still loyal to the autocrat. It’s this Schedule F bullshit that will be the thing that causes the average person to notice a change in their relationship to the Federal government.

For fucking MAGA cocksuckers, they will get a boner from this change in practical administration of the “administrative state” until, of course, things get personal and they have to figure out how to get their drunk relative out of an ICE camp because they call President DeSantis a fucking cocksucker. (That would be me, by the way.)

Matt Schlapp, head of CPAC

The other thing to consider is America isn’t Hungary. America is very diverse in a variety of ways that Hungary isn’t. As such, it’s pretty easy to imagine once CPAC gets that white Christian ethno state they want so bad that things are going to get A LOT more severely autocratic than just Hungary. Especially in the South, there will be a natural inclination on the part of autocratic state governments to go after African Americans.

Once the connection between the governed and the government doesn’t exist anymore, then some pretty dark shit can start to happen. I still believe that there is a real chance that, in the end, MAGA will result in more deaths that the Nazis.

Let that sink in. And those of us who survive are going to be left wondering how it happened to a nation like the USA, just like they do now with Germany. Good luck. Get out if you can.

My Hot Take On Why America Is So Fucked Up Right Now

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

America, we have a problem. With the news of Trump’s “Schedule F” concept where he is going to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants and replace them with his fascist cronies, I find myself dwelling a lot more on the implications of how fucked up America is right now.

But how did we get this way in the first place?

A number of different things are rushing to an endgame around 2025. The “Fourth Turning” if you believe in such stuff. (I don’t, the authors of that pseudoscience book were just lucky.)

But if you really think back when everything started to change in the United States, something about the general last few years of the Obama Administration drove the Right completely batshit insane. They’re all a bunch of fucking racists and I think they assumed, at first, that Obama being elected at all was something of a lark that they could forgive.

When he was re-elected, however, it sank into their racist cocksucker minds that not only was America Changing, but they had at last lost the soft power culture wars. As such, a lot of Traditionalists — the bedrock of any stable democracy — decided to become Good Germans in Waiting. They no longer believe in democracy and actively want white Christian minority rule, damn the consequences.

But wait, there’s more.

Another thing that happened starting around 2012 was smartphone ownership probably reached a critical mass to the point that one might say both that we experienced a “Petite Singularity” and the “Modern World” as we know it officially began.

And, last of all, there was a generational shift starting around 2012. A lot of young people took it for granted that being gay was a good thing and adopted the basics of what the Right would come to call “the woke cancel culture mob” mentality.

A lot of good has come from the generational shift in perception — #MeToo being among them — but there have also been a great deal of excesses that have led to Reds getting Redder and Blues getting Bluer. America is tearing itself apart and either we become all Red (Trumplandia) or we have a “National Divorce” with Blues serving the papers….and have a civil war.

Anyway, what’s going on is Reds are so enraged by the soft power of Blues that they conflate that power with the real hard power of passing laws. At least two things are at the very forefront of my Traditionalist relatives’ minds — an abstract fear of being “canceled” for being conservative and the idea that the Left literally wants to turn everyone gay.

They won’t shut the fuck up about either one of these two things. It’s really grown rather ridiculous.

Which path are we going to take? I honestly don’t know. All I know is the next few years will be very, very historic and bumpy. And I also know you probably need a passport.

Democracy Is America’s Birthright

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

This talking point within the Right Wing echo chamber — that the United States is a “constitutional republic” — enrages me because it’s simply an effort to negate any debate about how MAGA wants to end American democracy. It seems to me that MAGA New Right conservatives are so intent on making us believe we’re not a democracy because then all the rest of their racist, fascist bullshit fits behind it quite well.

Now, some context.

Yes, under the most technical of definitions, the United States is, in fact a “constitutional republic,” but that definition misses a very important element of American history — Americans believe we’re a democracy and, as such, when we strive to make a “more perfect Union,” we strive to make our democracy stronger.

Once you are able to establish in people’s minds that “democracy is mob rule” and all that fucking fascist bullshit, then it’s easy to justify white minority rule. I mean, isn’t that what the whole debate about what our form of government is, is all about?

MAGA wants white minority rule by using the least democratic elements of an overall democratic document — the Constitution. MAGA hates voting because they want fascist, autocratic rule. And, of course, despite this being quite obvious, most MAGA people get QUITE upset whenever you point out how fucking racist they are.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) gestures toward a crowd of supporters of President Donald Trump gathered outside the U.S. Capitol to protest the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral college victory Jan. 6, 2021 at the US Capitol in Washington, DC. Some demonstrators later breached security and stormed the Capitol. (Francis Chung/E&E News and Politico via AP Images)

I think a lot — maybe too much — about the origins of MAGA fascism in the United States and all I can come up with is racism. The decline in white babies — the so-called “Birth Dearth” — is the origin of all the troubles we have. And either you don’t mind that this is happening, or it’s the demographic end times and you want white minority rule.

The ultimate irony of all of this bullshit flung off by MAGA fascists is once we really are not a democracy anymore, they’re such fucking crybabies that they’ll be the first to freak out when the autocrat shoots a loved one in the back of the head using ICE for calling him a cocksucker drunk at a bar. Or the moment their 15-year-old granddaughter can’t get an abortion after getting raped THEN, THEN suddenly they will whine about the Good Old Days when we were a democracy.

That’s because the only red line that MAGA Republicans have is the personal. They are so busy burning everything to the ground because they had the “woke cancel culture mob” that wants to ruin their life “just for being conservative” that they don’t notice that overall everyone is served by us living in a Western democracy — even them.

But, I hate to tell you folks, we’re fucking doomed. This is it. Either we have a civil war or we implode into a fascist, autocratic state. If we’re lucky, we’ll look like Turkey or Hungary. If we’re not, we’ll be a lot more like Russia or Nazi Germany.

Get out while you still can.

So, What Will Be August 2022’s Catastrophe?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So, here we are again. Just about to reach the nadir of the year when all the Blue Checks go to Martha’s Vineyard and prepare for Burning Man where they do butt stuff with an anonymous Plebe while on shrooms.

Inevitably, of course, fate strikes and Something Big happens, usually at some point in August. My favorite blog post of all time is about this very thing. Anyway, what might be the thing or things that force all the Blue Checks back to the office to write up a think piece about What It All Means?

Well, the most obvious Bad Thing that might happen this August would be one of any number of Really Old But Powerful People might croak. It’s a testament to how close we are to the so-called “Fourth Turning” that there are many, many old people in powerful positions across the globe. I mean, I can name three people off the top of my head — Queen Elizabeth II, Joe Biden and ugh, Donald Trump — who’s passing would shake the world to its foundations to varying degree.

Other possible clusterfucks for August to feature might be some sort of COVID or MonkeyPox mutation that suddenly made a shitty situation an Oh My God Situation. Another clusterfuck that might happen could be some sort of major terrorist attack — apparently, Iran has already said it wants to get some revenge against the West by taking out a few notable people.

Then, of course, there is the perennial favorite of the DPRK. It could test a H-bomb or shoot off an ICBM missile again that scares the shit out of Americans. Or, they could just go tits up altogether and the the US would have to deal with two major regional wars — Ukraine and Korea.

Anyway, maybe this time we’ll get through August without Something Bad happening? Hopefully? Maybe all the bad juju of August will swirl the drain until November when Republican fascists gain power of the House again and start impeaching everyone they can possibly think of.