Also, who wants to bet the credits of the next Spider-Verse film roll over Pavtir leading all the Spider-Men in a Bollywood dance number?

A basic Kontextmaschine rule of thumb for predicting the future is expect a straight-line projection of no trend to hold for more than 7 years

schizoel:

dixie-khanate-official:

thehauntingofjulia:

MST3K - Bride of the Monster, 1993

Psychic

remember

Gonna be awkward when it turns out the best tactics against military AI exploit the inhibitions that prevent it from doing war crimes

Idly mentally running through mental future scenarios, as I always am, hit on an interesting one, it’s probably good enough for a paperback novel (really, a Bollywood movie) but anyone with actual knowledge chip in to say how far off I am:

as global warming continues, some year the Himalayas have a heat wave which appreciably shrinks mountaintop glaciers. The weight of the ice had been calculated into the tectonic stasis of the underlying Eurasian-Indian plate convergence fault, and its removal provokes many quakes. Combined with mountain slopes inundated with meltwater, a series of massive, apocalyptic mudslides push into the Gangetic Plain. Though they don’t reach the Ganges river itself, the already hugely swollen Ghaghara, a Ganges tributary, clouds with soil; the combined high flow and sediment deposition where the river slows result in the river radically changing course. Effects downstream (heh) of this cause massive disruption in Bangladesh, the state collapses, and anarchy rules, the resulting instability is then somehow exported next door to India.

Thoughts?

So, I think I have my bearings again post-election.

• In the culture arena, the 2010s-born commanding heights snot-left is shattered and turns on each other, Twitter as on-sides platform being disrupted is a big part
• They might be able to wring some backup there from DC, maybe 2 or 3 years from corporate America before they read the writing on the wall
• The Dems’ midterm Win! leaves them more or less where they were, getting a 51st senate seat gives them committee majorities so stuff comes to the floor quicker & easier, by itself the Senate confirms judges and like the GOP under Trump they do that singlemindedly, getting nearly as many in as Trump, albeit with the very best seats no longer open for filling
• The legislative uppity Dems either settle in for more service to the oldsters or mount an insurgency that either just gets slapped down or gets a few token wins to mask being slapped down
• The GOP in Congress is the same unstable mess it was, just now an unstably infighting one
• In particular they won’t manage to get out of the Dems’ way as they fight amongst themselves, and will give them things to unite against
• Biden pushes some economic stuff which fair, Reagan–Trump kept moving right even under Clinton and at least hardly left under Obama
• DeSantis displaces Trump before the primaries start
• The Supremes start to dismantle workplace/civil rights/(overlap) law
• Russia’s pullback from Ukrainian territory just conserves lives and materiel as it switches focus to “break NATO”. It at least chips it. Putin’s cultivated a militant “civil society” that pushes right as third parties, it gets a bit out of his control but the CIA can’t well build them up to take over
• States are firmly red or blue, and the blue ones get used as the best vehicle for liberalism just like the red ones. This makes life a bit insufferable with the cultural tide holding 3-5 years longer there, the bond market gets them in the end tho

I’ll come back to this tomorrow

Me: you know, I’m starting go get a sense we’re in for a *psychedelic* comeback in the next decade

Also Me: oh?

Me: Yeah, the Oregon shamanic lodges initiative, this microdosing stuff – it would just be odd for it to stop there.

Also Me: Hm

Me: In the 90s there was ecstasy, and I guess shrooms and acid were _around_, then it was mail-order “research chemicals”, but nothing that really *broke through*, you know

Also Me: so how does this track with your observation that country-raised Taylor Swift closely tracks the zeitgeist to put into her work?

Me: holy SHIT, the psychedelic album is gonna be AMAZING

Abortion and youth transition according to how blue your state and the bluer ones will take people in from the red states, but while declaring you’ll solve [national issue] from your state wins votes, actually spending real resources for out-of-staters doesn’t, and the Supremes nix their legal noncooperation.

Adult transition’ll let the UK go first and see how it goes.

The black/brown alliance won’t hold – you see Hispanics going Republican, you see what’s happening even where they stay Democrats in LA. Blacks’ll still broadly be a lower-middle class aiming at middle-middle stratum, those who made being Black their thing will see diminished returns.

In general, D constituencies will turn on each other, Rs won’t.

I kinda hope the COVID lingerers finally make enough noise the Dems have to publicly slap them down, it’ll be a good chance to put the degreed science professionals in their place as subject experts and agents properly subordinate to politician deciders who specialize in legitimacy and power-balancing, and set limits on the metastatic Clintonian “feel your pain” stuff.

Poly will keep going but as it mainstreams there will be poly bros and they’ll pretty much be what you’d expect.

In other areas where everyone accepts the ‘60s won, drugs are normalized. You know none of them are criminalized anymore in Oregon already?

The generation of teens after Zoomers snap back to independence in time for Gen X rising to power to see themselves in them.

Rs get relatively less churchy, Ds more, though this is all relative to a general decline.

Don’t think we’ll get to hatcheries yet but we will lay the foundations in confronting a world where attempts to raise the birth rate are woefully insufficient even as existing attempts to accommodate society and economy to familyhood are undermined as increasingly sus redistributions of resources and priority to social segments that aren’t even that favored, powerful, or politically decisive

kontextmaschine:

The new abortion rights spokesmen: Dudes, dads, and plumbers

by deconstitutionalizing abortion, Dobbs has returned it to the world of electoral politics where women’s rights matter less than men’s votes, and to the extent the political culture reflexes to preserve abortion access it will do so by becoming less feminist and more bro-y

Much like how when after this Court eviscerates racial civil rights constitutional law, it will retrospectively be taken as “training wheels” for groups that were only then entering positions from which they would later act to assert their interests through regular politics

vintagegeekculture:

David Gerrold called it.

Calling it, blue states are gonna try to resist requests from red states related to enforcing trans/abortion stuff, Biden not doing enough to force them into line’s going to be one of the Republicans’ articles of impeachment

apricops:

God this moment in time and history (in the US) is so weird. It feels like nothing is happening. It feels like exactly what people were afraid of since the 2016 election: the response to Trump was to put America in a sort of stasis. A freeze. But all these big obvious conflicts and serious problems are going on, so we’re just sort of stuck here, aware of everything but increasingly unable to make sense of anything. Like there’s nothing left to do but cross our fingers and wait.

Except waiting sucks, because the next big obvious thing on the horizon is midterm elections. And the Biden presidency so far has been such a void. Such a vacuum.

And you know, the interesting thing about Covid is that for a few months we had a glimpse of what the federal government could look like. For the first time in my and many people’s lives, the federal government actually improved people’s material conditions in response to Covid. Then Covid kept happening and the spigot was turned off because of course it was. And now we’re approaching the midterms where it is very likely that the Republican Party will make gains because the Biden presidency has been such a stuttering heap of nothingness.

Seriously, what’s next? What possibly comes after this?

Mainstream Democrats still pushing for reenacting the ‘90s (Clinton lost trifecta after 2 years) but also focused on freezing out the ultras, leading them to act out in some way that makes them Republicans’ problem to deal with, let them lose their agenda to doing the purges and come back in when people grow weary?

I mean, they rub their stink over the concept of protecting children from the intergenerational transmission of sexual culture and ultimately discredit it in a way that’s basically the ‘80s run backwards yet again leaves them entering the subsequent decade as stereotypes of cranky obsolescence for the purpose of rejecting, there’s that

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Was friends with a girl on Facebook and vaguely surprised she was that normie given who she was in college, she just announced she’s moving cause her boyfriend got a faculty position… with their other girlfriend, so fair

@soulvomit said: to be fair, that’s normie now

Yeah it’s weird that simultaneously with people being “O! Woe! A wave of reactionary social repression!” we’re just quietly normalizing polygamy. Like, we chased the Mormons into the desert with an army over this once! Now it’s not even getting the attention “open marriage” did in the 70s.

Polygamy will, of course, be the ultimate synthesis of attempts to counter the thesis of promiscuity with the antithesis of monogamy

Culture wars over plural marriage will prove fairly cozy relative to the trans ones

Mark my words, before the decade is out, the Vengabus will appear in an ad campaign

Calling it: there’s eventually going to be an Atlantic cover article about cancel culture winddown and the cover is going to be an iOS-style dialog box asking “Undo Cancel?”

Another trend for the next wave will be however legalized sports betting culture shakes out.

Even in forward-thinking trans-heavy tumblr circles in 2010 things were framed in terms that would be seen as regressively “transmed” today — transition as treatment for diagnosed gender dysphoria with an expectation of at least top if not bottom surgery as an end state. Or otherwise trying to legitimate it by historical example, reference to “third sex” traditions…

That no longer seems the in thing and if pressed I’m not sure anyone would think to fall back to that now. But in most other ways, America is never even going to approach where 2010s tumblr was.

TERF stuff might catch on a bit more bit really as a flavoring of “protect our daughters”, not understood as feminism-as-modern-middle-class-mainstream stuff like in the UK

I don’t think any state that’s instituted it will reverse on birth certificate gender marker changes but that might not become universal

Under-18 stuff will be a patchwork by state and in some states yes that will include an expectation to go through puberty with natal hormones. The different way this forms queer youth culture and how they later mix together across state lines will be a curiosity

America will never even approach where tumblr was in the 2010s. To the extent there are high schools where five girls in a homeroom announced they were transitioning and were accommodated, that is not a stable equilibrium.

The way the proto-TERF radfems undermined the last wave in the 80s was attacking funding - insurance “elective” classifications, public spending, welfare programs & prison &tc.

Probably won’t push so far back this time but insurance always wants to chisel on a non-ideological basis. There’s an aah… transing clinic down the street, a year or two old, will that be a viable specialty long-term? (And to the extent it’s powered instead by missionary zeal… well, morale is a tricky mistress.)