That escalated quickly

[Wildeblood]

My night went from, "Get out of it, you thieving little bastard!" to, "I've got a knife, and I'm going to stab you if I catch you," to, "Right, who wants to get fucking glassed?" (because I didn't really have a knife, I actually had an empty gin bottle) to, "Aww, cute."

The first two times were, in fact, a thieving bastard, but it turned out the third and fourth were false alarms. Bandicoots are so cute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quenda

[Cholmondely]

You confused a thug with this?



What on earth was in that bottle you emptied? I want some! Gin never had that effect on me.

[Cholmondely]

I just started playing today (well, a bit yesterday, badly, and then more today, less badly).

I'm presuming that this is you, Arquebus:

The best books for the end of the world

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve always been fascinated by how societies and civilizations respond to crisis. We’ve seen since 2020 just how complex and fraught those responses can be.

I'm not so interested in where you fall on the political spectrum. But I'd be fascinated on your views on the current situation.

[arquebus]

It is, yes!

The current situation in the U.S. is terrible, and likely to get worse. However, I tend to focus more on the broader scale of things, though I generally don't bring it up around other people in this country since they might take it as callousness.

In a hundred years, none of this is going to matter. Heck, it probably won't matter in fifty. The kinds of radical changes that are occurring right now aren't likely to last beyond a single administration and I'm not convinced we're dealing with an "end of American democracy" situation here.

I'm also not a fan of superpowers, and that includes the one I live in. The U.S. has, for over 100 years, been the economic center of the globe, for better or worse. Financial misfires here caused the Great Depression, and the Great Recession. Because of all the insane volatility of American foreign policy right now, other countries are moving away from reliance on U.S. political, military and economic presence to maintain their own security. (This happened after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, as well. Canadians lament the loss of the U.S. as an economic partner, but that's happened before!) I think that this is ultimately a good thing. The U.S. should not be the black hole center; that gives it too much power. (The same is true for China, which is expanding its influence, and will be a major beneficiary of Western volatility. So there are certainly downsides. My concern isn't about China as such, but about China as superpower.)

People talk all the time about the dangerous of believing in American exceptionalism. But I think there's a kind of American exceptionalism that is just as dangerous but that even its detractors seem to hold: the idea that the "fall" of the United States is somehow more apocalyptically serious than anything else in the world. People in this country like to tie their pride in it to how big, powerful and rich it is, and so any hint of a loss in that size, power and wealth seems catastrophic. I hold the opposite view. A smaller, weaker, less wealthy U.S. is probably a good thing in the long term - a term counted in decades and centuries, not weeks and years.

[arquebus]

I'm also a lot more sanguine than most about the impact American volatility will have in places like Ukraine, Israel and other areas where the assumption has been that American diplomacy is the only way forward. I'm glad that it looks like Europe is preparing to fill the void in Ukraine, in the event that the U.S. abrogates its agreements there. And while the situation in Israel and Gaza is significantly more complicated, not having the U.S. able to jam its thumb onto the scales would be a welcome change.