David Brin: Today’s culture war is really the Civil War, part III

Published on July 19th, 2012

Tagged: culture war, David Brin, Election 2012, Occupy Wall Street

Somewhat turgid, overblown and self-righteous, an article by Sara Robinson on AlterNet nevertheless takes a look at the present Culture War that’s tearing America apart and calls it what it is. What I have long realized that it is. Nothing less than Phase Three of the American Civil War.

In fact, I would couch things slightly less radically than Robinson does in: “Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America: America didn’t used to be run like an old Southern slave plantation, but we’re headed that way now. How did that happen?”

Nevertheless, let’s be plain, her essential point about the divide between two styles of American aristocracy, one represented by Gates and Buffett and the other by those wanting an old fashioned feudalism to return, is the core conflict tearing the United States apart at present.

Moreover, this phase of the Civil War must end the way the others did – by the blue Union being awakened, roused perhaps by polemical exaggerations like Robinson’s.

Into realizing What Fox has accomplished – what southern yellow papers did at the command of slave-holding elites in 1860 – destroying any hope of negotiation.

All that is left is for Blue America to win. Simply – and for the sake of freedom and progress and the Great Experiment – win.

Like what you’re reading? Share it on your wall or tweet it to spread the word, and like us on Facebook for more updates!

Some (mostly) science miscellany

A fascinating breakthrough in producing graphene transistors. Will this result in computers based on graphene rather than silicon chips?
University of Granada researchers have developed an “artificial cerebellum” that controls a robotic arm with human-like precision.
The University of Nottingham has begun the search for a new class of injectable materials that will stimulate stem cells to regenerate damaged tissue in degenerative and age-related disorders of the bone, muscle and heart. This is part of a huge new development in rediscovering the regenerative capability most mammals appear to have abandoned millions of years ago.
For more see Juan Enriquez’s TED talk…
The first artificial molecules whose chirality (handedness) can be rapidly switched from a right-handed to a left-handed orientation with a beam of terahertz light has been developed by a multi-institutional team including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). This development holds potentially important possibilities for uses of terahertz technologies across a wide range of fields, including reduced energy use.