True, but all the same, busting out a Gun of the Week entry within a day or two of several recent events would have been in questionable taste at best. I'd like to think I'm not completely tone-deaf.

My country is at a crossroads in so many ways this year. I used to insist I was mostly apolitical, but that's feeling more and more like a cop-out as the civilized world circles the drain.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Good point.

>
>My country is at a crossroads in so many ways this year. I used to
>insist I was mostly apolitical, but that's feeling more and more like
>a cop-out as the civilized world circles the drain.
>

I'm not especially political myself. I just think one political party in my country is attempting to get a monopoly on stupid, and I'm very anti-stupid.

I sometimes think that what we see as circling the drain is just a case of a slight instability in our orbit. The current options are to kick the thrusters to max and dive right into that gravity well, or work on stabilizing the orbit. It probably comes as no surprise to anybody that I like option two.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

It's very easy to be apolitical when the status quo is tolerably acceptable.

... okay, that came out a lot nastier than I intended it.

As someone who is deeply, fiercely, political... I have to acknowledge the fact that politics is ennobling, but it is also incredibly ugly. It requires making enormous compromises on questions of deep moral significance and then selling those moral compromises as a positive good, because they're better than the alternatives and also the best you could get. It requires taking half-a-loaf policy solutions with turds buried in them and presenting them as the greatest things since sliced bread. It's emotionally exhausting; it shatters friendships and families. It forces you into coalitions with people you find repugnant but without whom you cannot achieve anything at all. It requires accepting what Max Weber called the "slow boring of hard boards," of needing to spend your whole life nibbling around the edges in the hope (not even the certainty, merely the hope) that those who follow after you will get an actual bite at the apple.

This is particularly exacerbated in a specifically American context, because our national mythology sells our most significant political achievements as a history of glittering triumphs by noble statesmen over the forces of evil, and our consumer culture encourages people to view their exercise of the franchise as an act of personal validation rather than as a civic responsibility. Neither of those things are true (or at least, they're not true in the way they're usually presented), and when people find out they aren't true they have a tendency to take their ball and go home.

This is going to turn off a lot of people. A lot of people. But, well... politics is how we as a society come together to decide how we're going to govern ourselves as a people. We're not fully atomized individuals; we exist as members of the common mass of humanity, and no matter how ugly politics is, it is still the avenue by which we uplift ourselves. That's a noble endeavor.

-Merc
Keep Rat

That happens to you a lot.

Less flippantly, it's fine. I'm well aware, and more acutely conscious as I get older (if you follow the distinction), that I have been and will continue to be a beneficiary of a really quite astonishing depth and breadth of cultural bias; that I am not personally noble enough to dispense with the benefit of that bias strictly on the acknowledged principle that it is unjust of me to keep riding it; and that there will probably be a reckoning for all that one of these days. It's the growing knowledge, as a historian, of how deep and wide that bias is, and how far back it goes—and with it, the growing certainty that that reckoning is inevitable—that makes me less able to keep convincing myself, as I have for many years, that however shit it looks, things are probably going to work out.

As such, the remark is fair comment. Too true to refute, however unkind.

(At least I have the good grace to recognize that it's awkward. My mother is one of those people who flare up in towering indignation at any suggestion that any part of any advantage we might enjoy in life could possibly be unearned. We routinely have extremely bitter arguments these days about which side, exactly, constitutes the band of craven, vicious malcontents who are ruining the country. 'Cause we're both sure somebody is.)

As I noted on Twitter the other day, being an American moderate these days is agony, but Christ, at least I'm not English.

Hmm. This went a bunch of places I never wanted to go on these boards, but you know what, the hell with it. As Hunter S. Thompson used to say, the hog is in the tunnel now.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Ironically, you're getting the version of me that's self-aware of that tendency and has taken steps to try and walk it back. It's why I type those long screeds; that's me thinking "If I type one sentence I'll sound like a dick; I need to qualify and contain things."

Ten, fifteen years ago I'd just type the one sentence and move on.

>Less flippantly, it's fine. I'm well aware, and more acutely
>conscious as I get older (if you follow the distinction), that I have
>been and will continue to be a beneficiary of a really quite
>astonishing depth and breadth of cultural bias; that I am not
>personally noble enough to dispense with the benefit of that bias
>strictly on the acknowledged principle that it is unjust of me to keep
>riding it; and that there will probably be a reckoning for all that
>one of these days. It's the growing knowledge, as a historian, of
>how deep and wide that bias is, and how far back it goes—and
>with it, the growing certainty that that reckoning is
>inevitable—that makes me less able to keep convincing myself, as I
>have for many years, that however shit it looks, things are probably
>going to work out.

You really bent over backwards to avoid typing the word "privilege" anywhere in that paragraph, my fine friend. :)

I sort of envy your formal training as a historian. I am a well-read layman, but I've been gifted by circumstance with three close friends with PHDs in history and a number of other friends with greater or lesser amounts of expertise in the field. As I myself grow older, I come to realize that most of what I know, or think I know, about history I didn't learn from books; I learned from smart people teaching me ways of reading and interpreting those books. I rather wish I'd gotten to sit in more classrooms with more professors and get more of that.

>As I noted on Twitter the other day, being an American moderate these
>days is agony,

In many ways, what we're experiencing now is a return to norms as they functioned historically in the US and as they work in many other western nations.

A lot of people are nostalgic for the pre-realignment postwar political structure in the US, which I loosely define as 1945-1980, although there's an argument for 1945-1994. You see a fair amount of "You used to be able to vote for the person, not the party" handwringing. And that's fine, but that period is highly anomalous in American history; the New Deal coalition was always massively unstable for the Democrats, as were the stitched-together constituencies of the Republican Party. It was inevitable that everything would shake back into its 19th and early 20th century norms of two strongly oppositional parties eventually.

(Really, the roots of our political weirdness go all the way back to the Civil War, not just WWII, but I'd have to write like two thousand words to even begin to do that topic the justice it deserves; it's weighty and fraught for us Americans.)

>but Christ, at least I'm not English.

Oh, dear lord, the UK. I know more about that ongoing meltdown than I want to. It's both tragedy AND farce at the same time.

Over on Team Tragedy... the UK leaving the EU might actually be a huge violation of the Good Friday Accords. Yeah, I know, right? The GFA has a lot of clauses that are predicated on Northern Ireland being able to freely access both the EU and the Republic of Ireland. If the UK hauls Northern Ireland out of the EU, that will necessitate the establishment of a robust customs and immigration regime along the Northern Ireland/ROI border. I'm sure everyone on both sides of that line will be a-ok with travel checkpoints staffed by armed guards, right guys?

And on the "farce" side of the ledger; the Leader of the Opposition in the British Parliament is usually defined as the leader of the largest party not in government. But Parliament doesn't really formally recognize political parties as such in a modern sense; it recognizes groups of MPs and who they choose to lead them.

So there's a colorable argument that as of now, the official opposition and the leader thereof should not be the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn; it should be the Scottish National Party and Angus Robertson. Because Angus Robertson can, right at this moment, rustle up more MPs willing to vote for him to form a government than Jeremy Corbyn can! The largest coherent bloc of MPs in Westminster right now who aren't the Tories are fifty or so Scottish nationalists, who must be feeling pretty goddamn smug with themselves right about now.

>Hmm. This went a bunch of places I never wanted to go on these
>boards, but you know what, the hell with it. As Hunter S. Thompson
>used to say, the hog is in the tunnel now.

Imma leave this here before I head to bed. :)

-Merc
Keep Rat

Funnily enough, that's mostly because in that context, it just seemed ungrammatical. Privilege (both white and male) is certainly in the picture in a big way, but the way I read the situation, it's an effect of the cultural bias I was talking about, which is itself the cause. Maybe that's splitting hairs. Anyway, I wasn't setting out to Avoid Saying It simply for the sake of not saying it, at least not consciously. It was pretty plainly implied.

Nowadays, when I'm called on facets of my worldview that are shaped (consciously or otherwise) by the background hum of privilege, I find myself wanting to react like that quintessential thespian Michael Biehn in The Terminator: "I didn't build the fucking thing!" Not a fully enlightened approach, I grant you, but it's the first thing that happens. At least I'm thinking about it. :/

>>As I noted on Twitter the other day, being an American moderate these
>>days is agony,
>
>In many ways, what we're experiencing now is a return to norms as they
>functioned historically in the US and as they work in many other
>western nations.

"This is not a democracy! I have a gun, so I'm in charge! Many governments around the world function on this principle! And some of them last for months!"
- Gordon Freeman, Freeman's Mind (paraphrased from memory)

>It was inevitable that everything would shake back
>into its 19th and early 20th century norms of two strongly
>oppositional parties eventually.

Well, sure, but it would be nice if at least one of them wasn't evil. I'm just saying. You can talk the big talk about the ennobling mechanisms of consensus and compromise, but 99% of these people are just ratfuckers and I'm sick of even knowing about them, much less being governed by them. I wouldn't piss on either of the presumptive major-party candidates this year if they were on fire. Emotionally, I had a better summer the year I had cancer than I'm having watching this garbage fire burn.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

You think that's bad? Here in Scotland, the Remain vote won by two or three times what the national Leave vote margin was.

Argleblargle... <tilt signs in eyes>

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

Eh, I'll say for that.

It's made it a lot easier to pay attention to politics.

I _try_ to pay attention but for the last 15-20 years it's been hard to distinguish one 40ish white guy with nice hair from another in appearance, much less politics. It might be why Boris Johnson has made such a name for himself - at least he was recognisable.

I'm not saying Corbyn's better performing but at least he's identifiable and there's no chance of him being confused with May (Theresa, not James). There's actually some small degree of interest. Trainwrecks always draw attention I guess.

I really hope there's an election before this wears off. It's like being back in the 80s. (Which is an odd-thought. Remake-Ghostbusters, sure. Remake Thatcher vs. Kinnock?)

Scotland is in a bit of bind, isn't it? Like, I expect Nicola Sturgeon is currently planning on when to demand another independence vote, which is a lot more complex of a question it was two years ago.

Inasmuch as my opinion matters as an American whose closest link to Scotland is a possible tenuous connection about four hundred years ago, I was firmly opposed to that independence referendum. It seemed to me to be based on a mixture of lies and wishful thinking; the SNP was all "It'll be great, we'll still be members of the EU and we'll still use the pound and we can even outsource our national defense and diplomacy to Westminster! Oil money! Utopia on the Firth of Forth!" while Brussels and Westminster, two very important pieces of that plan, were saying "Most of those things will not happen, and the parts that might will happen slowly."

And I'm not sure a lot of that has really changed. Getting into the EU might still be really hard, but then again it might not be. But what won't change is that you guys would be a postage stamp of a nation (no offense) whose biggest trading partner is the rest of the formerly-UK, whose economy is overly dependent on the extraction industry.

And so the question becomes, what causes less pain? Gritting your teeth and sticking with the union even as it melts down? Or going it alone and needing to establish a robust customs and immigration regime across your southern border that's really going to fuck up a lot of lives? Oh, and needing to build a defense and foreign affairs apparatus from scratch.

And that's just the empirical side of it. The emotional side, from the outside looking in, might be very much "Fuck you, England, we out. Hey Northern Ireland, you want in on this sweet sweet secession action?" without regard for the consequences, merely because this is, from the perspective of the Scottish electorate, the final straw.

On the upside, Holyrood is at least a functional seat of government right now. That's more than can be said for Westminster.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Nah, that would be doing it backward. What they need to do is kick England and Wales out of the UK and then stay in the EU with what's left.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Maybe, maybe not, considering that the last UK general election last year almost completely wiped out every other party north of the border, with record-shattering swings to the SNP all over the place. It was a little better (but not by much) in the last couple of Scottish elections, giving the SNP a solid enough majority to form an actual SNP government. All because the London parties finally PO'd enough people up here.

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

That's a good idea and one I'll keep in mind, though I must confess I haven't been shooting in ages; bits of my nervous system have been acting up in ways that wouldn't make for a relaxing time at the range for most of the summer so far. :/

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.