The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Empire Strikes Out Some thoughts on the end of ages Radio Far Side History, that unsentimental undertaker, has buried every empire that swaggered across the stage believing itself permanent. The corpses differ in costume, but the causes of death are tediously predictable. Empires rot internally long before their enemies bother to tap the door. The United States, that once-boisterous experiment in liberty, now lies half-conscious, slurring patriotic slogans while the monitors flatline one by one. Mouldy academic types identify five reliable symptoms of imperial demise: fiscal ruin, political cannibalism, military overstretch, economic decomposition, and cultural rot. Let us examine the American specimen before the embalmers arrive, shall we? First off, empires collapse when the ledger stops lying for them. Rome shaved its coinage like a drunk barber; the Byzantines watered the gold; the British mortgaged the furniture. The United States has refined the art: it spends money it ...

  Lords of the Fall John Michael Greer It’s been nine months now since I set aside the other preoccupations of this blog and launched a project I’d had in mind for many years—a discussion of the political and economic subtext underlying Richard Wagner’s vast operatic cycle  The Nibelung’s Ring . All things considered, nine months ago was a propitious time for such a venture, as Donald Trump’s bombastic baritone and Kamala Harris’s fingernails-on-blackboard soprano rang out over a bellowing chorus of media pundits and election officials, while billionaires George Soros and Elon Musk frantically conducted competing orchestras of braying donkeys and trumpeting elephants. The only possible word for the cacophony that resulted is “Wagnerian.” If anything, the volume’s just going to keep rising as we move to the next scene. I don’t expect things to get quieter any time soon. Nonetheless, the discussion of Wagner’s ideas finished up two weeks ago, and it’s time to move on to other th...

  And YET... Who's A Doomer Now, HUH?   We never wanted to be right. Doom reigns. Over a decade ago I started following the subreddit r/collapse. I came across it, I think, while doing some research on climate change for my job at the time. The term doomers had yet to be absorbed into the online discourse. The links on r/collapse— research and news about climate change, disease, politics, finance, war —weren’t sending me to the outer reaches of the internet or to conspiracy sites. This was a surprise. They were sending me to mainstream news sites, academic and scientific journals. I was shocked by this alternative view of how everything was going. I was even more shocked that the sources were reputable and that I’d missed most of this. I was informed. I could hold court on our incremental but steady PROGRESS. How had I missed this? Probably it wasn’t true. Not true   true . Not if I’d missed it. Clever me. Ok, I was working on climate change at the time so I obviously kne...