In the whirl of events in which we are all immersed these days, thanks to media, social or not, I’ve been trying to sort signals out from noise. I have boiled this commotion down to four talking points to help muster my own thoughts. I offer them here without further ado.
- Until the financial crisis in 2008, the US was the superpower. That phase is over. This turn of events will be traumatic for the US and dangerous to us all. See hegemony.
- Within the US, a majority of the diminishing white majority has declared demographic war on the rest of the population, which can no longer be categorized in terms of black or white. See majority minority. This conflict is accelerating the decline of US power, soft but perhaps even hard.
- Capitalism, increasingly based on fictitious capital, has rushed forward from the 2008 financial crisis into a new bubble of imaginary values. When, sooner or later, this bubble bursts there will be unimaginable chaos, trumping the issues of US decline and its internal civil war.
- Once the weapons existed, nuclear war, intentional or accidental, become possible. There are reasons to believe that it is now probable. Carbon-driven climate change pales against the threat atomic weapons pose to the planet. See GCR.