The endless tunnel...

It's a bit odd, but my current health problems are contributing to the rebirth, or as I'm sure some would say after-birth, of this blog. It's easier to write a piece like this over the course of a day than it is to sit and do a bunch of memes. If the structure suffers a bit from the disjointed nature of my writing right now, so be it. I still feel the urge to produce something...anything...and right now this works for me. Enjoy. Or not. Whatever.

That we ended the Cold War without virtually exterminating each other is one of humanity's greatest triumphs, but that much of humanity still lives under the threat of nuclear weapons is one of its greatest failures.

Something came up today in a discussion of the old Cold War. 

'Tis said: "If a failsafe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe."

Well, the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction came up today, and I was wondering: If Mutually Assured Destruction fails, does it fail by failing to mutually assure destruction? Or does that policy fail by succeeding in assuring mutual destruction?

Frankly, I always thought that guaranteeing the end of civilization was no way to prevent the end of civilization, but maybe that's just me...

And before someone says "Well, it worked, didn't it?" I have to ask: did it?

We, as a world dominated by two massively armed superpowers, collectively stepped back from the precipice and said, "This is nuts!" but the fact that we could have gone over at any time but didn't in no way negates the fact that we should never have been dancing that close to the edge. But now we have a world where the major nuclear powers, while no longer facing each other and saying, "Grrrrr...", still possess massive nuclear arsenals, are in a position to easily provide, if not the weapons themselves or the necessary fissionable material, the technical experts and know-how to produce the damnable things.

(I am not talking just about the threat of the evil that nations may do in the name of expediency, but also the evils that anyone may do in the name of Nation or God or Prophet or profit.)

Overall, the Arms Race and the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction that spawned it did not contribute to the safety of the world, or ultimately that of the two superpowers whose mutual mistrust fueled it. As it happens, though we managed to avoid blowing ourselves up before one of the superpowers collapsed, there are so many remnants of the Cold War about to make nuclear war a threat that our children will yet have to live with.

People forget, or never knew, the terrible threat of nuclear war. I grew up in an age in which the threat was very real. I remember duck-and-cover drills in elementary school and government-printed pamphlets on fallout and bomb shelter design and signs indicating where the public shelters were. "Civil Defense" was not just a concept to us. But all of this gave one the impression that a nuclear attack might be no worse than a tornado, and the information we were given was, in many cases, woefully inaccurate. (Seriously..."duck-and-cover" as a defense against nuclear attack?) I am so greatly relieved that we never found out how inadequate our preparations were, and at the same time terrified that so many people around the world may yet live to discover the true scale of the dilemma.

Nor is the nuclear threat the only threat we (and by "we" I mean all of us) face; the Cold War has left us a legacy of chemical and biological weapons as well as the science needed to create them and the frightening simplicity of the technology to deliver them. And, once again, the know-how involved is a readily traded commodity.

Americans are so damned relieved to have shaken off the threat of a nuclear war that they are all too willing to ignore just how real a threat it remains to much of the world. Worse, they don't seem to recognize that we, as the superpower still standing, present a threat (whether it's merely a perceived threat or a genuine one) to the smaller nations of the world, nations that may or may not already have nuclear weapons themselves but may be scrambling to get them. If we think that it makes them respect us, maybe it does...but it also makes them fear us. And frightened people can act irrationally. And, as I have pointed out, nuclear war is the ultimate irrational act.

We find ourselves in a tunnel that indeed seems endless, and if we all managed to get of the Crazy Train in mid-tunnel well and good but we are still in the freakin' tunnel! Do I need to tell you to beware of that bright light ahead?

The Blues Viking

The opinions herein expressed are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.

"Say the secret word, and win a hundred dollars..."

The specter of religion is haunting me again. Well, 'tis the season...

Today's word is, "proselytize." Which the dictionary thingy on my computer defines thusly: 

"Convert or attempt to convert (someone) from one religion, belief, or opinion to another; advocate or promote (a belief or a course of action)."

I will never cease to be amazed by the number of people who think that their religion will make perfect, irrefutable sense to me if only they explain it clearly enough. Or perhaps slowly enough.

OK, one last time...

You may think that by flaunting my Atheism I'm disrespecting your religion. But while I freely admit, proudly, that I am an Atheist, I don't try to convert anyone to Atheism. I talk about it, certainly, and I make no apology for that, but I tend to avoid using my Atheism like a cudgel to beat you into submission and I do not proselytize. If I did, I would certainly be disrespecting your faith and you would probably find that annoying, to say the least.

Please recognize that I have enough respect for you to not try to convert you, and please have the same respect for me.

Yes, this is specifically aimed at a couple of people, and no it probably isn't you. (I've told them this was coming, so if I haven't told you that...) Not to any great degree, at least. But every time my life crashes someone thinks I need them to "save my soul," and it's getting tedious. Look to your own damn soul, people, and let me contemplate my own soul's nonexistence in peace.

If I'm to be expected to show some degree of respect for your faith, then please have some respect for my lack of same.

Oh, and by the way: Please don't try that old argument about how I should tolerate your proselytizing because it's what your religion requires: the Thugee used to strangle people because it was what their religion required, and I do seem to recall that the British were rather intolerant of it. In other words, that dog won't hunt. I'm not going to continue to put up with your proselytizing to my annoyance just because you say that this is what your God requires of you. I require a bit more respect from my friends.

Now, granted, I'm not going to mobilize the Indian Army against you: I don't actually have one, anyway. But I do have other resources...

The Blues Viking

The opinions herein expressed are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.

This is no time for anyone to rejoice.

I don't claim to be any kind of authority on what the Republican Party should do now. The problem is, neither is the Republican Party.

My efforts to cease blogging have once again been thwarted by my long-winded nature, and once again I've written something that's just a bit too long for a meme. So it's another blog post for me. For you, too.

(A bit of background, if you need it: The Republican Party's attempt to hold the entire government hostage hasn't worked. In fact, it has failed dismally. The Republicans are looking for anyone other than themselves to blame, while the democrats are gloating. I can't speak for the Republicans, but the Democrats shouldn't be lighting the fireworks just yet.)

A friend posted a cartoon today on Facebook; a cartoon of a donkey serving an elephant that elephant's own ass on a platter. The symbolism was obvious, and I don't especially object to it; after all, that's pretty much what happened. (Actually, I thought that the cartoon was quite clever.) But the cartoon isn't what I wanted to talk about.

What I want to talk about is a comment that was made on that post. More precisely, I want to talk about an attitude that I see quite often now among people on the left, an attitude that I don't think serves either the Left or the nation. And at the same time I want to make an observation or two about the Right.

Along with the cartoon, there were a few "comments." And among said comments was this:

"I hope we can repost this after the 2014 elections. I hope the republicans get crushed to the point that they completely dissolve."

I responded, but I felt that my response needed a bit of clarification. So here we go. This is my (expanded) response:

Actually, I don't hope for that at all.

I've said that I hope that the Tea Party continues to boil until they float away in a cloud of their own steam, but that's just hot air on my part. In truth, I think that the US is best served whenever reasonable voices of dissent are fully given their forum, and fully participate in the government. Unfortunately, the Republican party of late has abandoned reason and instead has chosen to govern by forcing the government to deal with one manufactured crisis after another, reason be damned.

The thing is, this strategy hasn't worked (not this time, anyway). I'm sure that the Republicans thought that the Democrats would cave in like they've repeatedly done in the past, but this time they were buoyed by a President that finally said, "This far, and no further" and lent them the resolve they needed. I'm sure that the Republicans expected to win this conflict. I'm sure that the Democrats' failure to meet Republican demands sent the GOP reeling in disarray. And that's where they now find themselves.

(Please remember, this is a "card carrying" Liberal talking here. I really feel that the Republican Party, in all of the policies that led to this mess, was entirely wrong, but that isn't the point. The nation is far better served by a government of and by both Liberals and Conservatives. If a certain degree of mutual antagonism has evolved with the system, if not actually built into the system, then we also require a certain degree of cooperation to make it work. And while I see the Republicans as having been the more obstructionist of the two major parties, I can't hold the Democrats entirely blameless.)

The Republican Party's stance (and in particular the stance of the Tea Party Republicans), which started out to be over Obama's health care laws but morphed into something unrecognizable and formless as it became clear that the Republicans weren't going to get their way on health care, has cost this nation dearly. The phrase, "the full faith and credit of the United States" means far less today. But along with that, it has cost the Republican Party just as dearly. The approval ratings of the Republican Party are lower now than they have ever been. This debacle has put the Democratic Party within reach of controlling both the Senate and the House. (I don't think that's all that likely, but one more mess like this and that could change.)

But the worst thing about all this is the likelihood that they're going to try it again in a few months, when this "temporary" agreement to fund the government and suspend the debt limit expires. I can only hope that the Republican party abandons this costly and ineffective uber-confrontational practice, and sees that reasonable discourse is a far better way to achieve their ends.

But I don't think I'll hold my breath.

The Blues Viking
The opinions herein expressed are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.


Oh, by the way, here's the cartoon in question:



EDITED on 10/19/13 because one damn sentence was bugging the hell out of me.

"It is not in the stars to hold our destiny..."

No politics tonight, no call to action, no liberal rants. Instead, a question: To what extent do we control our destiny, and to what extent does our destiny control us?

As you may have noticed, I don't blog much anymore. There are several reasons for this, none of which I am going to go into now. I prefer to do memes these days; if nothing else, they encourage brevity. But of late my memes have gotten longer, and this one just plain got away from me; my brevity has deserted me. So rather than edit the shit out of this piece, I decided to dust off the old blog. I suppose that in the future I'll continue to post memes to Facebook and occasionally post something to this blog, as the mood strikes me.  

We tend to use words like destiny and fate to excuse ourselves for the things we do that we are driven to do by our baser natures. When the consequences of acting on these natures would otherwise overwhelm our conscience, we tend to claim that such things would have happened anyway, that they are the result of forces beyond our power to control and we cannot be held responsible for them.

This is, of course, bullshit. We invoke such nonexistent "powers" to avoid taking responsibility for the consequences of whatever we felt we had to do to achieve an end, an end that we then claim as our destiny to achieve, regardless of means.

The truth, the truth that we so often deny, is that there are no "forces beyond our control" acting to create the harm that may result from our actions. Or rather, it is we ourselves that constitute a force beyond our control. And that's the problem; we do not control our actions because we have created the concepts of fate and destiny to excuse ourselves. In other words, we have no control because we refuse to take the responsibility for controlling ourselves.

If we are to wrest control back from whatever unseen nonentity to which we have surrendered it, we have to first admit to ourselves that we are solely responsible for our actions, that we are beings of free will and we ourselves must bear the blame, and make whatever restitution may be necessary, for any consequences that may arise from the things we do.

Fate and destiny, if they indeed exist, will happen whether we want them to or not. I have seen no evidence that anyone knows them in advance, and when people talk about them it tends to be as an excuse for doing something that is necessary to achieve their desire, hang the consequences, and whether they admit that desire or not.

Perhaps it is such desires from which we truly need to free ourselves. Perhaps the best way to avoid doing harm with our headlong rush toward this "destiny" thing would be to control, if not conquer, whatever desire is driving us. Perhaps we should let fate and destiny look after themselves; they will, in any case. 

The Blues Viking

The opinions herein expressed are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.