Let them hate, so long as they fear

The Romans were hated by a lot of people in the ancient world.  This bothered the Romans not a bit.  Their attitude was spelled out in the post title, although the original latin has a certain je ne sais quois:  Oderint, dum metuant.

The Powers That Be in these United States seem to have forgotten that this is a dynamic, and that things done to instill fear can lead to hate.  Big Country hits this nail on the head looking at all the sanctions that the US PTB are piling on Russia:

Two is that #ourguys are purely fucking up by the numbers. Initially, the Russian Population was starting to protest against the war. Lots of Grannies, regular civvies, and yeah, Vlad had a crackdown on it, as he is wont to be. However, all this 'other stuff'... the cutting off of Paypal, Applepay, Goolagpay, services and well, just about any and all economic 'stuff' in Russia by OUR Oligarchs?

Yeah, that's not helping us... in fact it just goes to prove the point to the Russian People that Putin IS right and that they, the Russian People as a whole have been targeted by the dissolute and decadent west for elimination. Hell, it ain't a hard argument to make, and we're proving it by putting the hurt on the Russian People as a whole. The Russians as history has shown rally around The Rodina when shit like this happens. A nearly singlemindedness and even bloodthirsty willingness to protect The Motherland

No matter what the cost.

So this makes me nervous, 'cos instead of them blaming Putin, they're realizing, from their POV, he might be right and it's time to make US hurt as badly as we're making them hurt. And as far as I can tell, that'd be the Giant Flashbulb Option, as they really don't have a way of fucking up or fucking with the general Untied Staaz population.

So if our beef is with Vlad and the Oligarchs (their Oligarchs, not our Oligarchs) then why do the sanctions seem to be targeted at the Russian People?  Oh, and I still don't have a good explanation as to why Ukraine absolutely positively has to be a member of NATO.  Still waiting on that one.

Ya know, what comes to mind is the ancient Greek saying that those who the Gods would destroy first are turned mad.  About sums up the US PTB, right there.

And an anonymous commenter leaves a really concerning comment over at Big Country's place:

More or less right on the money. Couple that with the administration coming up with shit like sanctions on India because they won't sanction Russia. Now India are looking at what they can trade without using the USD. Good work retards.
Lot of Arab countries now talking about investing more in/with China too. Worth watching what the BRICS countries do, once the move away from trade in USD kicks in...

"Good work, retards" looks like it's fixin' the be an excellent epitaph for the US PTB once they destroy the dollar as the world's reserve currency and the US standard of living drops by 70%.

Ah, brings to mind the old days, working at Three Letter Security Agency back in the '80s.  We all agreed that if the balloon went up we'd just go out and sunbathe in the parking lot and wait for that last big flash bulb to go off.  Been a long time since I thought of that.  And so, a musical tribute to the last tanning session (stolen from Western Rifle Shooters):

Damn, I wish we had a smarter and less reckless Ruling Class.

"Peaceful" protests

Adam Smith famously said that there's a lot of ruin in a country - that it takes a long time to wreck a nation - but he didn't have Twitter.  Sadly, we do.  But history shows what it looks like as the wheels come off, and the Roman Republic was instructive to the Founding Fathers so it it well worth while to look at that slow motion car wreck.  After all, our wreck might be in fast forward (depeche mode) with the help from Twitter.

The Founders intentionally fragmented power, with three branches of Government presumed to be antagonistic to each other and jealous of their powers.  This structure was a result of looking at the structure of the Roman Republic where there was little effective power fragmentation - the Senate granted near supreme power to the Consuls, thinking that since they granted the powers, they were in the driver's seat.  So how'd that turn out for them?

Veni, vidi, vici.  I came, I saw, I conquered. 

- Julius Caesar, the last of the Consuls and the first of the Emperors

But by Caesar's time, the Republic was dead in all but name.  It died at a particular point, when what everyone agreed were sacred Roman political lines - never to be crossed - were crossed.

The Romans called these lines Mos Maiorum, which is fiendishly hard to translate but sort of means "the way things should be done."  Once those lines were crossed it was Open Field running which would only be settled by someone who knew how to score a touchdown without spiking the ball.

Julius Caesar could not not spike the ball, and so was assassinated.  His nephew and heir Octavian could score - repeatedly - without feeling the need to spike the ball and so became the first Emperor.  In between them, there was a lot of bloodletting in Rome.  Octavian learned from all of the violence of his early days growing up in the end of the Republic; he became Caesar Augustus because he figured out how to gather power to himself while keeping the appearance of not gathering power to himself.  That only worked for him because everyone was really, really tired of the violence and murder that had come before.

That came from the collapse of Mos Maiorem.  Once that was gone, it was anything goes.  The Strong do what they can, the Weak do what they must.  Marius (Julius Caesar's Father-In-Law) posted proscription lists - lists of his opponents who were declared Enemies Of The State and who could be killed on sight.  The killers got to keep the proscribed's possessions.  As you'd imagine, a lot of false accusations led to a lot of folks being added to the Proscription Lists.

Marius' mortal enemy Sulla took that rule and did one better on Marius' supporters.  Even Caesar himself went into hiding as a reign of terror seized the Roman elite by the throat.  Fortunately for Marius he was dead, but the streets of the Eternal City ran red with blood.  Sulla wrote his own ferocious epitaph: No friend has ever served me, and no enemy has ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.  Sulla was the Reckoning for Marius' supporters.

It feels like that's coming here.  It no longer feels like there is a common "us" that both sides recognize.  That's new in American politics.  It's like a line has been crossed; the Mos Maiorum of the early days are held now in contempt.  It's Winner Takes All; The Strong do what they can, the Weak do what they must.  If you get lumped in with The Weak then it sucks to be you.

And so record numbers of Americans find themselves as first time gun owners this year.  Millions of new gun owners - although it must be said that those are rookie numbers.  They'll be higher come the election.  It's a Bad Moon Rising, and no matter who wins the election that's going to accelerate.

Because Mos Maiorum is dead.  The losers in 2016 refused to accept the results of the voter's choice, and that looks fair to repeat when Donald Trump wins by an even bigger margin this coming November.  What is to be done, when rioting in the streets is the New Normal?

What was done in Rome?  Alas, we can read about this in the writings of Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (in the Agricola): 

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

The Romans didn't screw around.

The Democrats aren't screwing around, either.  If you look at Portland, or Seattle, or Baltimore, or St. Louis - all you can think of is they've made it a desert and the Media is calling it "peaceful protest".  The American public looks on, and many realize this.

So where does this go, come November?  Donald Trump will win without doubt; the Republicans will also retake Congress (remember, 29 Democrats in House districts won by Trump voted to impeach; we shall see how that plays out in the election).

I've written before about Game Theory, a branch of mathematics that tells us much about human behavior.  In particular, Tit-For-Tat is a strategy where you play the opponent's last play against you.  If they cooperate with you, you cooperate with them.  If they oppose you, you oppose them.  Like I said, there are Mathematical proofs that show that this leads to a stable outcome.

That's not what we have today.  What we have is the Democratic Party and the professional Civil Service, and the Media and the Universities doing everything they can think of to overthrow the last election.  But respecting the election results is the Mos Maiorum of the American Republic.  That's gone.

And so Tit-For-Tat (and Cornelius Sulla) says there's a different way.  It's the Reckoning.

This is perhaps a better sense of how half the country is looking on the riots, from the same film:

A third of the country no longer wants Mos Maiorum - the way things have been done - rather, they want The Reckoning.  Another third of the country has already abandoned Mos Maiorum, grasping at any straw - including "peaceful" riots - to get rid of OrangeManBad.  The other third has yet to realize that come the Proscriptions, they will have to choose a side.

If you ever wondered how the Roman Republic turned into the Roman Empire, just open the newspaper.  It seems like the bloodletting has started; if so, it will not end until we have a later day Caesar Augustus who can end the bloodshed.

This Train Wreck would be known to the Founding Fathers, although they might have taken some satisfaction that they got two and a half centuries before the wreck of their plan.  But Twitter has pushed everything into fast forward.  The French call that depeche mode, which brings to mind the greatest cover of American Past ever recorded:

God save this Republic.

Slouching towards Civil War 2.0

It's long been said that Republicans think that Democrats are stupid, while Democrats think that Republicans are evil.  So what happens when you combine stupid with evil?

Act the first: The Stupid, it burns!

Dugas works as a retail security manager, so he went back into the mall to look at surveillance footage of the parking lot. 

At 12:40 p.m., a car parked next to his SUV. Four women got out. Two of them peered into his vehicle — where there was a red "Make America Great Again" hat on the console.

The women went into a store, reappeared seven minutes later and got into their car. But a minute later, the driver and front passenger got out again.

There's a special type of stupid in slashing someone's tire because they have a MAGA hat on their dashboard.  It's a double dose of stupid when it's in a place where there's pretty ubiquitous surveillance. Nick Dugas worked for Mall security and so he had access to the camera footage, but any customer who was victim of a crime would have had Mall Security's full cooperation.  The perp was going to get caught, and caught easily.  Over a MAGA hat and a hair trigger temper.

Like I said, stupid.  But there's more.

Act the second: Evil is as evil does.

Dugas saw this kid sleeping on his belly and the 6-foot-6 man bent down to help him. He fed him, gained his confidence, and learned the truth. 

Bland wrote, "The boy began to talk. His mom took off when he was 2. He lived with his dad. But he had run away a week ago. He told him why. 

"Dugas listened in silence. He had grown up in Portland, Oregon, with attentive parents and a big sister in a nice house. They had taken family vacations and camped every summer. While he might not have had everything he wanted, he had everything he needed.
"Sitting at the table, the boy had inched up his shirt to show Dugas his back. There were lash marks, 63 of them, where he had been hit with a broken car antenna." 

Dugas took the kid in. This required filing paperwork, getting cleared by the state as a foster parent, and getting permission from the father to take the kid in. Dugas and eventually adopted him. Last June was his first Father's Day as a father.

That was the man who was seen as so evil (for having a MAGA hat) that someone slashed his tire.

This is the sort of story that makes me wonder if this Republic can survive.  Democrats have seen Republicans as evil for a long time, but now they're acting stupidly.  Violently and stupidly.  And that is perhaps causing Republicans - who have long seen Democrats as stupid - to now see them as evil as well.

The middle ground of shared "we're all in this together" that has been a core of political life in this Republic as long as I can remember is fraying.  Once those bonds snap, it will get very ugly.  Plausibly you could make the argument that we're already in a shooting war, although I don't think that I'd go that far.

Not yet.  But going into next year's election campaign we can expect things to get worse, not better.

But it doesn't matter whether you're a good citizen or a good neighbor.  Not if you have a MAGA hat on your dashboard.  This will not end well.