American Exceptionalism, Baby!

If you’re a US citizen, resist.

Easier said than done. There’s no clear point of leverage for people to lean into. The cops are ruthless. The liberal opposition is toothless and lame. People don’t really trust one another. There’s a strong attitude of “I’m just going to keep my head down until it blows over”. But we’re not even really in a crisis per-say, just yet. Trump’s a fucking menace, but the economy is strong and we’re not currently at the peak of a pandemic and there’s no hurricane about to decimate a random corner of the Gulf/Atlantic Coast.

I suspect we’ll see more points of galvanized opposition when the winds change. But for now, looks like Americans are going to lay back and think of England.

Hard to get an unbiased answer on a question of subjective experience.

I’ve seen a new vim and vigor in my local Houston PD’s crusade to ruin the lives of homeless people. I have to assume folks in ethnic and religious minority neighborhoods, LGBTQ communities, and anyone easily designated as “Woke” are have it particularly hard right now.

But if you’re just some white-cheeked, white-collar, middle-class schlub, things haven’t meaningfully changed.

They should ask again when we’re in the grip of a Bird Flu epidemic or another Tech Sector crash. But for now, life drags on in America not all that much different than under the last regime.

You’re thinking about this like it’s just a single uniform endless pasture of gray-green moss. But you have to recognize all the moss is competing for space and resources.

So you’ve got 40M years of different kinds of mosses all developing novel evolutionary strategies as they try to one up one another. Just a rainforest of mosses, with an uncountable variation of shapes and colors and compositions.

Moss bushes. Moss trees. Hanging mosses. Floating mosses. Dense spongey moss. Brilliantly colored moss. Poisoned moss. Cannibal moss. Stinging moss. Velvety moss. Venus Fly Moss. Moss of a thousand different color variants.

And every few hundred years, you get a new moss meta strategy for being the best kind of moss that pushes all the other moss out. Played across 40M years, it’s this big squirling fractual of warring moss tribes, until finally another organism figures out the optimal play on all moss and then it’s over as fast as it started.