In the section about Dennis Blair’s remarks, he moved too quickly for me to capture it effectively, but I think this article of his from yesterday basically includes that portion of the speech.

Awesome use of CoverItLive. Really love that tool.

I’ll never get over the grim appeal of declinism and doomsday talk. “Revelations 2.0” is right.

Then again, as Dmitry Orlov pointed out at his Long Now lecture last Friday, societies *do* sometimes collapse. How do you tell when it’s not just doomsday talk, & things are actually, uh, really really bad?

Damn. You mean all that dystopian science fiction I read in the 70s and 80s turned out to be right on? I hate that.

I really do think that there’s a powerful religious element to Hedges’s thinking — because the U.S. has morally failed, they must practically fail, they ought to practically fail, and if you as an individual are in any way complicit in trying to prop that failure up, then you ought to fail as well, and cannot help but do so. It’s a last judgment + last days of Rome scenario. And me, I just don’t see a powerful connection between moral failure and practical failure, nor do I think that it is just and right that this is so. Hedges is an “avoid the things of this world” Christian, and I’m just too Weberian/Lutheran/Catholic to buy any of it.