So, this year I am going to write something short, daily, about what is going on. I have to write it, you don’t have to read it. If you DO read it, feel free to tell me how wrong I am (and hopefully why). They’ll be short and (I hope) to the point. Re: the debacle thing. The English writer Sara Maitland once wrote about the “pending ecological debacle”, 20ish years ago (1). The expression has stuck with me ever since; it’s a debacle because it was foreseen, warned about and was avoidable. Well, it’s no longer really “pending” is it? (2).
The Big Easy – New Orleans, Las Vegas and “random” massacres
At time of writing, 15 people were killed – and scores injured – in New Orleans when an army vet (Muslim, ISIS flag etc) drove a truck into crowds and then had a firefight with police (he lost). It seems he did not act alone. Meanwhile, another army vet (they served at the same base, but this hardly means they knew each other, or co-ordinated their efforts – we shall see), filled a cybertruck with gasoline cannisters and fireworks and immolated himself outside a Trump HQ in Las Vegas. Shambolic terrorism more than stochastic terrorism, and nobody else besides the driver died.
Is anyone surprised by any of this?
What is to be done? What can the righteous (cough, cough) do, if the foundations be destroyed? No idea. Seems fundamentally broken, doesn’t it?
Random observations
- these sorts of attacks against “soft targets” are to be expected, and are not confined to “the West” (USA, Germany etc). China has seen a marked upsurge. (see AP story from November – A surge in mass attacks has killed dozens in China in recent months). And this from November 12).
- as counter-measures are taken (but there is a limit to the numbers of bollards you can put around places – defensive architecture only takes you so far) the methods of would-be attackers will evolve too.
- we will see more of this, as people who had expectations realise that Trump and Musk (and “trumpomuskovia,” see here} is not in fact going to Make America Great Again. The country is awash with guns (especially since COVID – Americans bought almost 60 million guns during the pandemic), anxiety, hate, despair. There is no support to speak of (physical health, mental health etc) for the many people damaged by the poverty draft, who fought in the Global War on Terror – (reminder, terror won). And as per the Weatherman slogan, the GWOT ‘brought the war back home’ (3). Blowback indeed….
- there will be a very typical shouting match between those who want to flag the dangers of a bunch of vets with skills, kit and possibly undiagnosed/treated PTSD and those who want to ‘own the libs’ or change the subject pointing out that “the VAST majority of vets, PTSD or otherwise, don’t perpetrate massacres and it’s typical of libtards who’ve never stood a post etc etc” – you can write the rest…
- the state-corporate security nexus will demand more powers, and more money, and get at least one of those. The overlap between Silicon Valley and the military will become more explicit, harder to disguise (at some point, the effort to disguise it will become too onerous, unnecessary etc)
- sociologists will invent words that mean post-industrial disease (that’s a Dire Straits reference, btw). i.e. we will be awash with explanations, anaemic anomic Durkheim updates, long-form essays etc.
Further reading
Cory Doctorow’s 2019 novella Radicaliz
Footnotes
(1) This is the passage, from a 2004 essay by Maitland.
(2) There’s a short story that appeared more than once in Reader’s Digest, that bracingly right-wing publication, in the late 1970s/early 1980s, of a kid who is allowed to drive the 18 wheeler but is under instructions to wake his boss before they get to the downhill after the plateau. The kid leaves it too late, and has burnt the brakes out. The rest of the story is the driver, now woken, trying to keep them alive without killing other people. I can’t find it online, but anyway, it stuck with me; there is a time to slam on the brakes, and if you do it wrong, you’re cooked.
(3) Aime Cesaire pointed to tactics deployed in the colonies being applied back in the metropole, to contain and constrain potentially troublesome populations. He would not be surprised. See also the notion of “blowback”.
marchudson.net 
You can guarantee that this will be another thing that dominates the news cycle and takes attention away from climate change and other important issues- i felt this way about the non-stop reporting of the poor girl in woking. How much does this kind of coverage stoke up division at a time when we need to be closely knit together to respond effectively.
Don’t know about the Woking thing? But yes, media’s role is to distract, and the economics of it these day seems to rely on clicks, which relies on algorithmic extremifying (sorry, ugly phrase!). Civil society simply not strong enough to shape narratives, help people gain/maintain situational awareness. Not that it ever was, but one does get the feeling things are accelerating (in the wrong directions) since say the 1980s, which is as far back as I go. But in the 1980s ppl like Neil Postman were saying we were hopelessly distracted (Amusing ourselves to death) – see also Brian Fawcett. Sigh….