Still looking for the point
The dangers of quibbling about proper nautical terminology while the ship sinks
As promised, here is the exciting conclusion. If you’re just coming in, see part 1 first or else this will make even less sense than usual.
It’s all cancer
Mr. Goldberg makes the potentially valid point that just because two diseases have superficially similar symptoms, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are the same or even similar diseases. I generally accept this argument. Bats and birds have arrived at the same solution to flight: significantly modified front limbs and a flapping motion. But they arrived at this solution via very different paths, and the details of the implementation are very different; for example, increasing surface area with feathers growing from the skin vs. stretching skin membranes between elongated bones. Just because they have superficial similarities, doesn’t mean that they are anything alike in their natures.
And there’s a reason why we say deprecatingly “you’re treating the symptom, not the disease”. The idea being that amateurs try to fix whatever the disease is causing; professionals try to fix whatever is causing the disease. To the extent that this is true, I agree with Mr. Goldberg: ideally, we shouldn’t focus on the outward symptoms of societal decay (a somnambulant leader, economic stagnation, social instability, increasing “deaths of despair”), and instead should address the reason why this is all happening.
But when a patient is bleeding out through a severed leg, it doesn’t much matter if the amputation happened via IED explosion, train wheel, or samurai sword. You slap a tourniquet on it and then keep going with the MARCH algorithm.
And yes, the situation in the US is that dire.
Oh, and by the way—Sir Niall accurately diagnosed the underlying cause in both cases. It is, as previously stated, widespread demoralization caused by a loss of faith in a corrupt and hypocritical elite that no longer represents the best interests of the population.
To continue the medical metaphor: once we get the patient to an oncologist, we can worry about what kind of cancer it is and how best to treat it. But first, we need to agree that what we’re dealing with is cancer—as opposed to diabetes, a broken bone, or COVID (just kidding, you probably wouldn’t know it if you had COVID). Because whether we’re talking about Marxism-Leninism or the Demican-Republicrat Uniparty, it’s all cancer.
“Soviet” doesn’t mean “doomed”
Finally, Mr. Goldberg vigorously objected to what he perceived to be a defeatist attitude on the part of Sir Niall. Not only is the US not doomed, said he, but in fact we were seeing signs of improvement in certain key indicators.
Sir Niall immediately countered that he never claimed that the US was doomed; in fact, his purpose in writing the original essay was to persuade, rather than bemoan. To persuade enough people that we have a problem and that they should do something about it; to alter our current trajectory and avoid reaching the same end as the USSR did before us.
I’ll take his position a step further. Yes, we are seeing improvements in some areas; yes, there is cause for cautious optimism. But why? It is precisely because the US had the benefit of a true wake-up call that exposed the corruption, cynicism, and hypocrisy of its would-be rulers. What happened during COVID—what was done to us during COVID—primed our immune systems and inoculated us against the waves of bullshit that followed. Or at least, some of us.
To the extent that things are improving, they are doing so because people are waking up to the existence of the problem. However, there’s still a long way to go, and the odds of backsliding are significant. To declare victory now would be grossly premature.
Disingenuous argumentation
While it made for good theater and an intelligent-sounding essay, Mr. Goldberg’s counter-argument fall far short. To continue the movie references from the previous post, I offer this visual of his arguments trying to strike down Sir Niall’s essay:
But seriously. Sir Niall, in his essay, said “hey, there are a lot of parallels between the US today and the USSR in the late 80s”. This was not intended to assert that the US is literally the same as the USSR: a multiethnic empire-state run by a single party that nominally espouses Marxism-Leninism. Of course not! And if Mr. Goldberg had valid counters, he certainly did not take this opportunity to produce them; instead, he wasted time tilting at obvious windmills.
Why does this matter?
Because while we did have a mass awakening over the past 4.5 or so years, it wasn’t universal. Too many are still asleep, still willing to do whatever they’re told without question. And our adversaries haven’t stopped—they’re still at it, still working toward the destruction of this great country.
Please allow me to draw a few more parallels.
A national divorce
Not unlike the national trauma of COVID, the USSR had a series of national shocks after retreating from Afghanistan and the shameful disaster—and even more shameful coverup—of Chernobyl. Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika might have reformed the USSR, given time, and restored it around its core member republics (not its conquered territories). It’s questionable whether the reforms could ever have gone far enough to redeem the USSR from the wretched source of human misery it had devolved into, but that’s another topic. Either way, Russia’s Yeltsin, Ukraine’s Kravchuk, and Belarus’ Shushkevich preferred to rule over their own shards of the former superpower, rather than subordinate themselves to a central Soviet authority. So they killed the USSR and dismembered its corpse.
There are no serious secession movements in the US right now, although it’s perhaps notable that states as far apart as California and Texas are both in the conversation. But it’s not impossible. 160-odd years ago, the US fought a war to prevent secession. After the recent gutting of the US Armed Forces, do we still have a military that could—or would—fight to keep the nation together?
The other superpower
Just like the USSR in the 80s, we are in a Cold War against a peer adversary. This adversary is technically advanced, economically robust, and above all, patient. Our national leaders, on the other hand, live in perpetual political ADHD, driven by news and election cycles. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except all our Adderall was manufactured by the country we’re at (cold) war with, and they’ve switched their production to fentanyl instead.
To be clear: we might lose Cold War II, just like the USSR lost Cold War I. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Read “We’re All Soviets Now”. Don’t vote for scumbags and hypocrites. Get involved in your local politics. It would be great if we didn’t need a government, but we sort of do… at least for now.
And it also wouldn’t hurt to have a gun or two.