The People Will Only Stand for So Much
To the author of the meme here:
The guillotine was invented about 80 years after Louis XIV, associated with Versailles in late 17th and early 18th Century; it’s known as the instrument that beheaded Louis XVI and Marie Antionette in the French Revolution in 1789.
Having said that, the point here is a good one. People–any people–will put up with only so much indifference to their suffering before they’ll take action.
Now, a “revolution” today can only be nonviolent. Those in positions of power have at their disposal such incredibly powerful martial technologies that violent assaults are impossible.
Former labor secretary Robert Reich notes at left that Trump’s firing of the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics comes right out of the playbook of all tyrants.
Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s OpEd in the NY Times by David Brooks:
As a percentage, there are very few people on this planet who view Earth as “one big group project,” but these folks are, in the main, members of the more than 200,000 groups whose purpose is environmental and social justice.
We really do have a weird phenomenon at work here in the United States.
When my wife and I brought kids into this world in the 1990s, it seemed a reasonable thing to do. But that was before:
If the future looks like the past, it’s very clear that our legacy for generations to come will feature overwhelming amounts of authoritarianism, greed, ignorance, racism, environmental collapse, perhaps along with nuclear conflagration.
To be fair, the SCOTUS didn’t rule that the president is “above the law”; they ruled that the president can’t be prosecuted for something he did as an “official act.”
Part of the beauty of the societies of Scandinavia and most of the rest of the developed world is their understanding of the fact that a well educated populace tends to commit very few crimes. Sweden, for example, is closing some of its prisons because they don’t have a sufficient number of inmates to justify keeping them open.
Many of us can remember the early days of renewable energy, and our concern that resources like solar and wind were intermittent. Could such energy sources offer value even though they are not “baseload?”
