Via The Daily Mail:
‘The entire National Guard has been deployed to the US Capitol after a woman was shot inside when President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the building and violently clashed with police in a bid to stop Joe Biden’s victory being certified. ‘
I’m not sure where we are at the moment, but I still think we get worse before it gets better on the level of laws, system and order. Here’s to hoping such depressive realism isn’t accurate. We’ve been heading towards many systems’ failure for a while.
Quote found here——Kraut, Richard. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
No this quote isn’t intended as directly predictive, but history sure can rhyme, even in the rather alien world of the Greeks (individual rights weren’t really a thing):
“The Peloponennisian War created the sorts of tension in Athens that would appear to support Thucydides’ analysis. Obligations to the community required greater sacrifice and presented a clearer conflict with the self-seeking “Homeric” pursuit of one’s status, power and pleasure. In political terms, people had to decide whether or not to plot against the democracy to bring off an Olgarchic coup. In moral terms they had to decide whether or not to ignore the demands of the community, summed up in the requirements of “justice,” in favor of their own honor, status, power, and in general their perceived interest. Plato was familiar with people who preferred self-interest over other-regarding obligation; his own relatives, Critias and Charmides, made these choices when they joined the Thirty Tyrants.
Arguments from natural philosophy did not restrain people like Critias and Charmides. Democritus argues unconvincingly that the requirements of justice and the demands of nature, as understood by Atomism, can be expected to coincide. Protogoras rejects the view that moral beliefs are true and well grounded only if they correspond to some reality independent of believers; admittedly they are matters of convention, but so are all other beliefs about the world. This line or argument removes any ground for preferring nature over convention, but at the same time seems to remove any rational ground for preferring one convention over another.”
From another angle:
Another angle: Right and left extremists, both potentially violent, and a much lower trust society is how we become a lot more like Europe. We’re well on our way. A more innocent, idealistic, more nationalistic and patriotic period in American life is likely not coming back. At least not in the same form, anyways.
After this event, I expect a pretty strong Federal response and crackdown, highly politicized and cut-off from much populist energy. Right away this will involve an authoritarian center-Left response (more surveillance, more technocracy, something like the Patriot Act), and then a more center-Right response once powers shift again and once such laws become part of the furniture. As mentioned, so much for lower security and higher trust.
For the past year, I’ve witnessed the same dynamics of extreme Left and Right occur in Seattle, with Antifa and various right wing groups fighting and play-fighting in the streets. That dynamic has now gone mainstream, and to the highest levels.